Why have you never heard about this before?

Why does there seem to be a miracle all of a sudden after 200 years of medical improvements?

The answer isn’t simple, nor do I have THE answer — but here is my best assessment.

The final topic to lead you on your way in this journey! And one that will surely inspire some hate if you or your profession gets referenced below.

This is going to be a bit longer…but I promise it will make sense at the end.

What is modern medicine good at?

If you went to the doctor today with a painful low back, here is what will occur:

-A few quick tests to determine if imaging is necessary

-A few quick questions on what activities you are doing and what brings on the pain

-A recommendation to cease said activities until the pain resolves. A recommendation to take some pain killers or anti-inflammatories until the pain subsides. A referral to Physical Therapy. A pamphlet on some exercises that can be done in the meantime. Perhaps some suggestions on back support braces.

-A purposeful withholding of referral to imaging (unless it’s just an X-ray) to mitigate costs.

How do I know this? I’ve been TOLD this story by my clients 100 times. I’ve experienced this first hand enough times to stop going to the doctor for these things.

The current western medical framework is really good at helping you if you are actively bleeding, broken or experiencing a defined illness. Let’s forget about the costs/insurance/BS associated with that. The single variable of treatment is quite good.

But what about those in-betweeners? The “it hurts…but im not bleeding” kind of thing?

What about the “it hurts…but the MRI shows my connective tissue is fine”?

That’s where they are absolutely terrible, 0/10, complete waste of time.

If I get in a car accident and need lifesaving interventions, please whisk me to the hospital asap. I won’t be waving crystals over it or trying to do some squats to stem the bleeding. Sew me up, set my bones, hook me up to the IV.

If I played one-too-many-games of basketball and my knee is achy…

Yea, the doctor isn’t going to get you very far.

A Brief History of Exercise

Exercise really wasn’t a thing until maybe 50 years ago. And even then, there were substantial misconceptions about exercise — it stunts the growth of youth, it makes women manly, it is bad for your joints, muscles make you slow. Many of these persist today.

Maybe 20 years ago, exercise as a pastime really started to take off. Things like yoga, Zumba, Pilates, Powerlifting, CrossFit — these things all started to gain traction as enjoyable activities with health benefits.

Maybe 5 to 10 years ago exercise EXPLODED and more people have gym memberships than ever before. More people are hiking, playing weekend rec ball, doing Spartan races, joining kickball and pickleball leagues, cycling up and down the coast than ever before.

In 1988, these people were called psychopaths and adrenaline junkies. In 2022, they are simply “Jan and Mike from accounting.” These activities are incredibly ordinary for people living in major metropolitan areas.

So back in 1967 there weren’t that many knees to fix. There weren’t many weekend warriors. The primary sufferers of back and knee pain were probably people working in factories, construction and manual labor. Pair that with an increasing rate of obesity (placing additional system stress on the human body), increasingly sedentary lives focused on virtual/remote/internet type activities and things like knee and hip replacements have exploded as well.

The Culture of Gains

Stimulating muscles is painful. Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) is painful.

Thus, NO PAIN NO GAIN.

The wimps quit. The masochists get jacked.

Per the above, this has become an ordinary mantra of ordinary Jan and Mike in accounting as well.

But, also per the above, Jan and Mike now have crippling knee pain and aren’t really sure if they are meant to “tough it out” or to see a knee replacement specialist.

Culturally we aren’t really sure if we “give in” to the pain or persist onwards in the name of gains.

Given the overall addictive nature of exercise, fear of losing gains and a general misunderstanding of how human performance works and you can easily get stuck into a feedback loop where everything hurts all the time and you simply accept it as normal.

The Role of Physical Therapy

But what about physical Therapy? Surely they must know what’s going on? Surely they must be making a dent?

This is going to bristle some folks out there. So let me first start with a compliment to PTs:

Y’all are doing the Lord’s work in terms of helping people who often don’t adhere to their protocols, are generally not paid amazingly, work long hours and whose job can be very physical. You have seen an influx of the above paired with some level of general apathy towards progress and patience. Also, those that serve in the trenches decade after decade truly DO make an impact and help people get on with their lives, recover from surgery and live higher quality of lives.

But there is a problem:

The paradigm of PT is geared towards recovery from damage to complete ordinary things. That is, sitting without pain, walking, going to the bathroom, getting out of your car…ordinary things.

The Spartan races, CrossFit WODs, 5x week Orange Theory and Century Races are emphatically extraordinary. PT is pretty terrible at making substantial improvements on people who are persistently asking MORE of their bodies than their body can handle — with these people often employing a “no pain no gain” mindset from above. It is poorly equipped to build a reservoir of strength and conditioning to survive these activities on a long term basis. PT is geared towards restoring baseline NOT improving performance.

Thus we are often relying on PT as a tool for things that aren’t best solved with PT. It is using a hammer to drive in a screw (when you more specifically need a screwdriver).

This is a Historical Advancement, Not an Exercise Advancement

Almost nothing in the Pain Free space promoted by the Kneesovertoesguy and the Athletic Truth Group is truly new.

There are many things that can be traced back to a practitioner or athlete from 100 years ago! ONE HUNDRED YEARS.

Ben Patrick had the audacity to do something very simple — go to the ends of the earth to find the clues and strategies that led to success. He eschewed the dogma. Didn’t enroll in medical school. Didn’t read the text books. He went straight to the SUCCESS stories from history. And from that, everything was born.

You won’t find Stefan Holm in the textbooks. You won’t find Kadur Ziani in the medical literature. You won’t find Bob Gadja referred to in Strength and Conditioning Journals. You won’t hear about Tom Platz’s ability to both squat a house and have end range flexibility. You won’t hear about Michael Jordan’s supreme ankle ability. These nuggets of wisdom simply never made it to the discussion platform of modern fitness.

But Ben found them. He is still uncovering clues day after day.

And from that the ATG was born of the idea that RESULTS were the only important metric. Measureable, quantifiable, repeatable, scalable and improvable RESULTS.

I can tell you with 10,000% confidence that RESULTS is what people have been seeing under my care, training and supervision. Every single one of them.

So, that brings us to the point of this whole newsletter — sharing these results, these stories, these strategies so that we can all level up together.

Thank you for enduring a long one! I am excited to share this with you and take you on your own pain free journey.