The Crackin' Backs Podcast

Revolutionize Your Game: Dr. Gary Gray's 3D Mapping Secrets!

• Dr. Terry Weyman and Dr. Spencer Baron

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Welcome to another exciting episode of the Crackin' Backs Podcast! This week, we have the honor of hosting Dr. Gary Gray, a pioneer in the field of movement science and the founder of the Gray Institute. Known as the "Father of Function," Dr. Gray has revolutionized athletic training and rehabilitation with his innovative Applied Functional Science (AFS) methodology.

In this episode, Dr. Gray will share how he uses cutting-edge 3D mapping technology to assist faulty joints, helping athletes avoid injuries and enhance performance. We will delve into how AFS differs from traditional training methods and highlight a compelling success story showcasing its profound impact on athletes at all levels.

Dr. Gray's expertise extends to working with NFL, NBA, and MLB players and their training staff to identify and correct weak links before they lead to serious injuries. We'll discuss the differences between off-season and in-season training preparations, offering insights into how these strategies vary to optimize performance and prevent injuries.

Achilles injuries are a recurring issue in football, and Dr. Gray will explain why these injuries are so prevalent. He'll also detail how training has evolved at professional, collegiate, and high school levels to address and prevent such injuries.

The introduction of NIL money has significantly altered the landscape of college athletics. Dr. Gray will share his observations on how this change has impacted athlete preparation and performance, highlighting the pros and cons he has witnessed.

Finally, for parents and trainers working with young athletes, Dr. Gray will outline key principles of functional training essential for long-term athletic development and injury prevention. He'll provide practical movement patterns that everyone should incorporate into their daily routines.

Join us for an insightful and transformative discussion with Dr. Gary Gray and discover how his groundbreaking work in movement science can help athletes at all levels achieve peak performance while staying injury-free.

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Dr. Spencer Baron:

Welcome to the cracking backs podcast today, we have a special guest Dr Gary Gray, who has revolutionized the field of Movement Science with applied functional science. Dr gray will reveal how he uses groundbreaking 3d mapping to help athletes avoid injuries and boost performance, from working with NFL, NBA, MLB players to identifying weak links and fixing them before they become serious injuries. Dr Gray's insights are game changers. We'll dive into the differences between off season and on season training and tackle the prevalence of Achilles injuries in football and explore the impact of n i l money on college athletics, plus discover key functional training principles that you can start using personally today. Don't miss out. This is a transformational episode. Dr Gary Gray, welcome to our wonderful fun show. Thank you for being on you come with some tremendous accolades, and we'll get to those in just a moment. But how are you doing today? Doing

Dr. Gary Gray:

great and just excited to be able to share with you all and so thanks for having me, and I look forward to it.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Wow. Super good. So let's start by asking you, we understand you've pretty much revolutionized the field of Movement Science with your applied functional science program.

Dr. Gary Gray:

Can you explain that

Dr. Spencer Baron:

what AFS, how AFS differs from traditional training, and share some of the success stories and highlights, some of the impacts?

Dr. Gary Gray:

That's a toughy, because it's been an evolution of 50 years and been surrounded by, you know, some of the best movement practitioners in the world. And it literally got started back when I got out of school as a therapist and realized I knew nothing, in fact, less than nothing. And I remember going home the first night after my practice crying because I let, I let. Well, how many other patients I saw I let them down. But I was fortunate enough to have a budget that the previous therapist left that was going to buy a $40,000 piece of isokinetic equipment that I intuitively, back in the 70s, didn't think was functional. I couldn't explain it, but just didn't I just didn't see anybody just making their knee go back and forth. And so I thought, well, if I could convince him to give me $40,000 of continuing education money. And he did. It was great. So it's very, very difficult to spend $40,000 in continuing education. So of course, I went to a lot of physical therapy meetings. I went to a lot of Podiatry meetings. I went to a lot of chiropractic meetings. Back then, you really couldn't get in unless you're a chiropractor, but I just lied. So I just put Dr Neary gray chiropractor, even though I barely got out of school. Same thing with the podiatrists. Same thing with you know, and it was a blessing, because I quickly realized what I don't know, but then I realized that everybody kind of was looking at things segmented the foot. People knew a lot about the foot, but they didn't know much about the hip, and most of my patients had a hip and a foot, and people that kind of describe how good they were with low back pain, they didn't even know what the foot was doing or the knee was doing. And so I kind of even back then thought, man, it'd be kind of fun to connect the dots. So we obviously came up with a number of seminars. One of them is called chain reaction. And as a result, we came up with what we call the science of applied functional science. And all it is, really, it's a result of me having a lot of hypothesis that were 100% wrong. So, you know, you give it a shot, and you know, I don't think anybody died because of it, maybe, but I just realized I was way off base, and so I we finally decided I'm only going to follow science. I'm not bright enough to have my own theories and hypothesis just I'm not bright enough. So we developed the concept of applied functional science, and what it is, it's the physical sciences, which is the physics of it all. The world we live in, gravity, ground reaction, force, mass, momentum, because that's how what drives the body. Obviously, the biological sciences, what we all learn in school, you know, the neuromuscular, skeletal system, the biomechanics, the physiology of it all, how the body really works. It's driven by that. And then, of course, behavioral science. It's driven by what's in our heart, what's in our head, how people communicate with us. And so we realized those are the three main sciences that drive somebody to move or not to move. And so we said, well, let's go see if we can dig into all of those sciences and find out what's out there, and let's just go from there. And so that's all we. Been doing for the literally, the last 50 years, is trying to follow the truth and take the truth and then turn it into a strategy. So the truth is, the body moves in three planes of motion. The strategy therefore should be, probably should do most things in three planes of motion, and then the technique looks a lot like moving the body in three planes of motion. So it's, it's been a it's still a journey. We're still not even close to really understanding the miracle of the human body. But that, in a nutshell, is kind of, you know what we've done that I think was a little different than what most people have done.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Fantastic. Now, you came highly recommended to interview by a big fan of yours at the Detroit Lions, and you were just there recently educating the athletic trainers and the support University, the support staff. So you know, the NFL is three weeks away from the upcoming season, and there are significant changes in training and and you're seeing all this, what, what still needs to be done to better prepare the athletes for for what they're about to experience over the next several months.

Dr. Gary Gray:

Well, I'm always encouraged, and, of course, I learned a ton when I have the privilege of, you know, spending time with an NFL team and NBA team, soccer team doesn't matter. I just, I'm just always thankful I can get to hang out with them, because I learned so much. And it's amazing when you get old like me, how much you can learn just by looking around and seeing what people are doing. You know, I don't have to have somebody explain it to me, because I probably won't understand it, but when I see it in motion, you know, that's pretty cool. One of the things that some teams have, and certainly the Lions have, is a continuity. The right hand knows what the left hand is doing all the time. The strength coach appreciates what the chiropractor is doing. The chiropractor understands the athletic trainer. The athletic trainer understands the Medical Group. And when they meet, they meet together on the on behalf of the athlete. And that's huge, because we could, we could have try to be doing all the right things. But if there's a mixed message sent to these kids, they get confused. They don't know, how do you want me to warm up? How do you want me to approach that injury? How do you want me to really recover? How do you want me to go about, you know, being as healthy as I possibly can? So there's a, you know, I just, and, you know, it yourself, you've been in it. That's, that's a different world, you know, and there's a lot of pressure, and you're dealing with, you know, kids that are making a lot of money, and there's a lot of things on the line, and so teams are looking for, you know, like, like, Karen. They're looking for the best of the best. And she's, she's awesome, you know, this, that's the other big blessing of being able to go, you just meet people like Karen, you know, and go out. This is, this is really exciting. So we, you know, we Doug, and I, my son, have the privilege of going and, you know, hanging out with some teams and and, like I said, we learn so much, but then hopefully we can help them with the language of communication and give them a little more science behind so here's how we would warm up, here's how we do prep work, here's what we probably would do for a cool down and for recovery. Here's what we would do for speed and reaction. Here's and again, it's not hey, do our way and forget your way. If you follow science, they complement each other beautifully. So I don't think I've ever gone to a professional team and said I wouldn't do that. You know, it's like, Whoa. That's really, I didn't never thought about that. But then we might tweak it. We might, we might change it just a pinch. So I'm always, I'm always impressed. And like I said, just recently, we were with the lions. And just what I was even more impressed with is we were with them, like couple months earlier, and they gave us the privilege of sharing with them for two straight days, which is quite a privilege, because they don't have to two extra days, as you know, that's, that's, you know, they work there, you know, 90 hours a week, and and when they have a day or two off where you just want but they are very kind and, and a lot of times, we'll share things and we don't know how well they'll be applied. And that's a big thing where we went up there just a few weeks ago, and it was amazed how they applied this. Their medical director, the guy that puts it all together. Brent Fisher, is a genius. I mean, he's been in the he's been in the game for years, but here's what, he's a genius at uplifting everybody on his team and basically letting them be a vital part of the entire process. And you don't see that a lot of places this, was a and that's what kind of brought joy to Doug. And I is like, wow. You know, we we basically taught them, basically our warm up called 3d maps. And then the day we were there, they 90 guys got on the field and they did the 3d match. So they had already implemented that. And we're going, Wow, that's, that's big time, but it's a. The best practitioners are open and don't mind being challenged. In fact, they like to be challenged, and at the end of the day, they're able to put their ego aside and say, I'm going to do the best for the athlete, as opposed to not been doing this for 20 years. I don't care what you say. So it was, it was really a pleasure for us to be able to hang out with with Alliance. You

Dr. Spencer Baron:

know, as I'd like to emphasize, some of the most key points that you had made was something that my close friend at the Baltimore Ravens. He's the chiropractor out there, and he says to others, you know, you need to be able to play well together in the sandbox. That's his thing. He would say that all the time. And what Dr Terry and I have experienced over the years is we love working with our allied healthcare professionals for that one purpose, and that is to make the athlete better. And I hear you say that you obviously play well in the sandbox together with others. Is there a particular approach when you are listening to you're you're almost you're exempt, you're consulting for the examination process of what a athletic trainer or the medical director of a team has or is sharing is a problem or what they currently do. How do you approach that whole evaluation and management part when you want to give them advice?

Dr. Gary Gray:

Well, that's, again, the beauty of being kind of what I get to do and being old is by the time I see an athlete here, or by the time I get to go to a team and see what they're doing, I have a pretty good idea what they're doing or what has been done. So an athlete that would come here to gray Institute usually has seen a number of people, not only inside the team, but outside the team and and therefore, I get the huge advantage of finding out what didn't work, that's a big start. And then our whole goal is to look at, of course, the chain reaction of the body. And again, the chiropractic profession knew this hundreds of years ago. I mean, you guys were way ahead of the game, and how everything's connected and how everything's driven by a neurological system and a skeletal system and a muscular system all at the same time. And the dramatic effect you can have just on creating more thoracic mobility or unlocking, you know, the lumbosacral facet. And so when, when we go, the first thing we kind of want to know is okay, if I have this problem, if I have a list Frank problem, if I have an ankle sprain, if I have a ACL, if I have a labral tear, or I don't want to have a labral tear, the first thing we'll do without putting them on the spot is, so what's your approach? I know we went to one team, and it was a professional football team, and the athletic trainer was just a sweetheart, but he didn't tell the rest of the people that we're going to be there for the whole day. And so they thought they were going to have the day off. And rightly so, they weren't happy when all of a sudden they see these, you know, clowns standing there and going, Hey, we can spend the day with you. And I kind of had to get their attention really quick. So the one Scotland at me most one, the one that could probably drive me in the ground, was their strength coach. Super nice guy, but rightly so. He wanted to spend time with his family. And if I had a choice between listening to me jibber jabber or go spend time with my family, it's family, you know, 100% of the time. So I just basically asked, of course. I said, you know, your charge of the strength and conditioning program of all these vastly, yeah, are you also in charge of creating an environment where you can limit the labor tears in their hip? Kind of dead silence? And I'll go, I'll answer that for you, yes, prevention and performance are the same thing. There's there. They're no different. So let me ask you a quick question, what causes a label terror, just dead silence? And I said, Give me 15 minutes, because I know that particular team had like seven label tears that year. That's lot of lost money. That's a lot of lost kids, you know. And that's, that's, you know. So the lot of times I have to, and maybe this is where I got the nickname an asshole, but a lot of times I have to get somebody's attention by asking a question that I already know they don't know, which is not fair. I don't like to be asked questions that people go, Gary's not going to get this one. But just and hopefully in kindness, say, I'm here to help you. Help people. That's it. You know, we're all we're all in the same sandbox. And so the challenge sometimes is to say, okay, you know, if you're trying to prevent ACL tears, number one, what causes an ACL tear? If you. Have an ankle sprain. What are the different approaches to there when you have low back problem? What? What are the top 10 things you're looking at to see what's causing the low back we have a saying, 100% of low back pain isn't caused by the low back. You know, it's a crossroads of the body. So we'll, we'll try to ask some key questions without being too much of a butt hole. But sometimes we get people get the impression that we're kind of slamming their back against the wall, and we're not, because we're just there to help. You know, we're, I'm too old to try to impress anybody, so we're just, we're just trying to help. So like I said, for us, though, it's a joy, because every time we get out and get to teach. We learn so much more.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Two questions for you, you mentioned something about 3d maps. Could you kind of briefly explain what that is in question number two is, you know, if you could share with us what exactly was causing the laboral tears, or what were you aware of that may have been causing the seven laboral tears in a season that's pretty wicked.

Dr. Gary Gray:

Yeah, no, I'd be happy to Well, first of all, 3d maps is really a culmination of 50 years of work. I wish we'd have been bright enough to come up with it 50 years ago, but we weren't, and a lot of that was stimulated about 20 years ago, when we had the opportunity for one full year to train our US Navy SEALs, we were honored with the contract, and they basically said, the way we're training now isn't getting it done. We're not getting back into deployment fast enough where you know these Knick Knack injuries are, are really beating our kids up. And so they basically allowed us to put a proposal together and and first of all, see how they train. And so my cut, my thought process is okay, what they're doing is not bad, but it has nothing to do with what they're going to do in Afghanistan. Okay? So, I mean, it's got to be specific to what these kids need to be able to do. And so at that time, if you were to ask me, Do we need a global movement examination, do we need something like 3d maps, I would have said no, because if what the way I would approach things, if you came to me and said, Hey, I throw a ball, well I'm going to look at the biomechanics of the load and explode of throwing the ball and decelerating. If you come to me and say, I got an elbow problem with pickleball, I'm going to look at your hips, I'm gonna look at your feet, I'm gonna look at your thoracic spine to see who's pissing off the elbow. And so I would look at what we call specific transformational zones. Somebody had problem walking or running. Got it. I know the biomechanics are walking and running, and so I would quickly go right to the specific activity evaluation. And so if you looked at me do that, you'd go, Well, that looks a lot like you're looking at a volleyball. You know, overhead hitter. Yep, exactly. The problem with the seals is, when I ask the seals, so what do they go, yes. And they go, okay, I get it. They go, you do everything, yeah. And when do you do it? We don't know. And so basically we had to step back and go, Wait a minute. Is there a way to mobilize as many joints in the body in all three planes of motion, which means six directions in a chain reaction, functional way that, literally, in less than one minute, I could biomechanically and scientifically say to you, we have mobilized and every joint we have actually turned on, every muscle we have activated, every proprioceptor, and That was our goal. And there are other tests out there already. The tests that we kind of familiar with that are quote, unquote, global human movement test, but they didn't make sense to us. You know, getting on floors and pointing like a pointer dog, or trying to clash your hands behind your head. I'm not sure what that has to do with a labor tear. We just we looked at some of that stuff, and we go, okay, we go, okay, we don't want to be critical. But, you know, I love the people who came up with them. They're actually, they're actually my heroes, but I would be more than happy to argue with them that it's, it's not what you want to do. So we spent a great deal of time saying, What's the criteria of our movement examination? It's got to be purely functional. It's got to be upright, it's got to be three dimensional. It's got to be gravity driven. It's got to incorporate massive momentum. It's got to be a chain reaction. It's got to facilitate a neuromuscular skeletal response. It's got to have the positive behavioral drivers we want. And so we thought, well, that's going to be kind of tough. And then we realized there's 66 motions we have to take a peek at. We thought, Okay, so first thing we did was, when they're saying we looked at our two main competitors and see how many of the 66 motions they were covering and one was covering five and the other one was covering six. We thought, all we need is seven, you know, so, and we got real blessed. It was kind of the eureka moment here, where we come up with six movements. That facilitate the maximum range mobility and stability of 66 joints, 66 motions in the level in 11 vital joints of the body, which is six movements, which I think is going to revolutionize how people now, we already see our soccer team using three to match. Obviously, the lions are using it. There's, there's probably 10 professional teams that I know of indie maps. We have a saying the test is the exercise. And exercise the test. So if you want to test somebody's ability to jump, you might just want to test jumping. Okay? And then if you want to train jumping, you probably should do a lot of things that look and smell like jumping, get the subtalar joint moving better the mid tarsal joint, you know, stimulating knee where you want it. Get the hip, get the thoracic spine involved, get the pelvis moving in all three planes of motion so I can load and explode and take advantage of what the body should do. And so when we came up with 3d maps, we actually had our PE teachers come in, and we had this really sweet lady. And soon as we started going through it. She said, Well, shouldn't this be the warm up for everything we do in PE brilliant, and then, shouldn't this be the training the shrimp? This be the foundational training? And we said, you're way ahead of us. We had one group that actually we beat in the proposal for the US Navy SEALs. So it was kind of neat that they still kind of liked us, that got a hold of us. And their innovation team basically said, We believe you've come up with the holy grail of human movement. And I said, Man, if I could just convince the number of people that they'd be pretty cool. And but we have, we've actually come up with so three maps is an opportunity to look at the success of your patient. I come to you with back pain. You take a look at me and say, Man, I'm going to go after l5, s1, on the right. I'm going to work a little bit your thoracic spine. I'm going to work a little bit on that opposite side, hip. So you actually see me move. I feel how I move. I get my chiropractic treatment. I get off the table. I move better. Okay, guess what? We all win. You know, it goes from kind of subjective to quite objective. So that's, that's 3d maps in a nutshell. Of course, we have a certification on it. It's our best selling certification because most of us were just never taught how to evaluate the entire body.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

We would like to thank Stark roast for making the best organic coffee and supporting our efforts to keep you healthy and happy. Click on the link to start enjoying your fresh roast. Today is 3d maps, something that is your like. Six movements. Are they determined by what you observe? Is it something that everybody should do, or is it specific to certain sports or certain ages, or what have you

Dr. Gary Gray:

very good that's a great question. It is the, what I would call the generic movement pattern for every human being that's upright. Now we have a 3d match for on ground function too. But if you if somebody comes to us and said, I just want to get better at dancing, walking, throwing, lifting, working in the garden, walking with my wife, playing fetch with my dog, we'll always start with 3d maps, because that'll immediately give us indication where their success is, but potentially where we're going to have to go in order to create the right chain reaction to take the abnormal stress off, let's say the back or the labrum, for example, or the telephone joint or the shoulder. And so it's, it's been the go to Now, the neat thing is, within the certification, you learn, you learn the top 20 tweaks. So you actually say, Now, once you're able to do this, if they are a golfer, okay, this is what you're going to do next. Okay? If they are a sprinter, you're going to do this next. If they are a pole vaulter, you're going to do this next. If they just want to work in the garden you're going to do this next. But if you have a really good understanding of how every joint the body's working and how it's coordinated together, it's a huge, huge start to everything we do. Plus, it's like I said, it's not only the best assessment, I believe, but I think it's one of the best foundational training techniques there are before you

Dr. Spencer Baron:

get into the the labor tear issue i You've aroused my curiosity, and it's your program is. It's probably a proprietary, you know, geniusly thought out approach. But could you just give us a little idea of what your basic movement pattern might be like, that you would suggest, or that you don't have to tell me all six. I mean, I just curious as to what

Dr. Gary Gray:

that would look like. Well, if you, if you don't laugh, I'll show you all six. Reason, it's not that I do them that bad, because I do them every morning and every night, so I'm pretty good at it. But I have my Zoom clothes on right now. My zoom clothes are. White shirt and kind of a boring thing, but I have shorts on, so that doesn't offend you or offend you know our group here,

Dr. Terry Weyman:

at least you have shorts.

Dr. Gary Gray:

So the fun thing is, once people do it, in fact, we were with a group yesterday, and they're a manufacturer of equipment, and they had six guys in there, and we basically told them, kind of the foundation of 3d maps. And they did it. And they go, Well, this is obvious. This is a no brainer. This makes sense. I did it. And we'd say, Yes, that's the whole point. A functional movement screen should be functional. And what we did is we went through a litmus test of what's functional and said it has to hold water and all those 18 different points. And one of the common things is, if my back moves, it just doesn't move because it's decides to move. My back moves because my arm just moved, or my eyes looked at something, or I took a step, so my back just doesn't say I'm going to do this. The back reacts to everything we do. So the three main drivers in the human body are your feet, your hands and your eyes. That's the thing that moves us. We're driven to go somewhere. We're driven to do something with our hands, and we're driven to look at something. So knowing those are the drivers, those are the drivers we use for 3d maps. So you want me just kind of do a quick I'd love to, yeah, so can't giggle too much. All right, all right, so I'll try to get here. I hope they don't want me to demonstrate something, because I I got that's not too bad. Yeah, it

Dr. Spencer Baron:

looks great. It looks like we're from Florida. That's great.

Dr. Gary Gray:

So one of the, one of the interesting things is, if you do an assessment of the human body, it's a no brainer that you better assess all six motions of the hip. This is the power source, and so if I don't look at all six motions of the hip. I'm gonna I'm gonna say that you haven't looked at the foot, I will tell you haven't looked at the neck, and I know you haven't looked at the shoulder, because all that goes through the hip and is generated by a lot of the hip load. And so our first thing was, well, how do we create all six motions in three planes of motion? And it's crazy enough, you'll see how easy this is. And again, that's just why it's embarrassing. It took us 50 years to come up with it, but if I just simply do a lunch, step forward. Don't even have to call lunch and come back. My left hip just went through extension, pretty good. Except is it maximal extension? No. So now I'm going to use another drive. I'm gonna use my hands take it up and back. Now, my left hip just went through more extension. Maximal extension. Not quite yet. Okay. Now I'm gonna just look up. Look at my left hip just went through extension again. Now what I'll do is combine those three I'll just do here, and look up and boom, I use all my hip flexor up, because my heel comes off the ground. So immediately I know I have, I've identified your ability to extend your hip in an upright position. And then I go, but that's just part of the story. I want to know how much flexion you have. And so now it becomes almost too easy. Where now I go? Well, if a forward lunge is going to give me extension, a backward lunge is going to give me flexion. So I do a posterior lunge. I get a little flexion here. That's one driver of the foot. Take my hands and go down and back. Oh. Now look how much flexion I have, a ton of flexion. And then just look my eyes go through my legs. So all I'm going to do is do a posterior lunge here. Reach down, and if you look at my right hip, I can't go any more flexion because my thighs against my chest, so I've used up all the flexion of my hip. Frontal plane motions just again become obvious. If I want to see abduction of my hip, okay, it's not laying on the table abducting my hip. It's functional abduction where I step away. So I'm doing this, what we call a same side, lateral lunge, the rights, going right. Okay, that's one way to get abduction on my left hip. The other way to do it is just take my hands here and go the opposite way. If I go here, I'm getting a deduction. If I go here, I'm getting abduction. So all I'm going to do is have you do this and let your head go with you. So now I'm getting maximal abduction of that hip. And because I I know it, because I see the lateral border of the foot come up and so, okay, I like that. I know how you deal with that. How about a deduction? It now becomes giggling, because it's so easy. Well, if that gives me abduction, I bet you that gives me a deduction. Okay, if that gives me a deduction, I bet you that gives me a deduction. So basically, I go here, and I can see your ability to EDUC your hip. So I'm going, Okay, I'm pretty happy the two most important motions of the hip, functionally that I've missed for years is to transfer spine. And I need to know how well I can externally rotate, and I need to know how well I can internally rotate. And you. See, I just used what we call a rotational lunge to do that. I rotate it out. My hip opened up. I'm externally rotated. Come back home, add my hands. Externally rotate it. Put those together. Look around the thing. I've maximally externally rotated my hip, because all of a sudden now I see my heel slip in the transfer spine. So I've used it up. I know for this old guy, Gary, I know what motions he has. And then the last one, which is the most important, because it's how we load in gate, it's how we load when throwing, it's how we load in golf, is internal rotation. So now I'm going to do, instead of doing a same side launch, I'm going to do an opposite side rotation launch. And if you look at my left hip again. That's really internally rotating, and then you already know I'm going to take the hands further, and you already know I'm going to take the eyes further, to the point where that foot's going to just literally slide. And so I've used up all six motions of the hip joint. So now we go, okay, we're happy with that, but we still had 10 other joints. We still had the foot, ankle complex, mid tarsal joint. We still had the knees. We still had the lumbar spine, thoracic spine, cervical spine. We still had the shoulders and elbows. And so we go, Wait a minute. Let's analyze what we just did. So we went to this. We call this an anterior chain, simply because, would you mind if I took my coat off, please. I just I look dorky enough with you if you see the anterior chain. And I get here and I slow it down, I have full hip extension, full knee extension and full ankle dose flexion. I have full lumbar extension, thoracic cervical extension, full shoulder flexion. So we go, Oh, those are we'll mark those off. Well, those are 11 motions, 11 joints and motions in this agile plane, going forward. Now when you go backwards, guess what? It's just the opposite. And so now we're going to get our we're going to get our hip flexion, our knee flexion, and our ankle, plantar flexion, but now I'm getting lumbar flexion, thoracic flexion, cervical flexion. And I get my hands, instead of going to flexion, I get my hands to go in extension. And so we go, Okay, we're on to something here. And so when we went here, I really need to know this medial hip. When we talk about we talk about the label tear, I need to know how well I handle abduction, and how well my knee handles abduction, and how well my foot handles what we call inversion. And so I need to know how that's all put together. Is there something on my foot that's going to cause my labral tear? Is there something in my opposite side hip, which I believe is many times the cause of labor tear that's going to cause a label tear over here. And so when we looked at those six motions, we had all those. And then the opposite was there. And then, so we go, Well, so far it's looking good. Let's see the transfers plane. And so now I have external rotation here, external rotation of my knee, basically external rotation of my foot, or abduction of my foot, or what we call tell canuli version, I have rotation of all three spine groups, and I have horizontal abduction, horizontal abduction and cervical rotation. So when we went to our little chart with those 66 motions, we had all 66 which we immediately go, that's better than five, that's better than six. It's kind of like having a headache. We're suspect of a brain tumor. And somebody says, Well, you need a brain scan. And I go, Okay, that's good, but they go, by the way, our brain scan only gets 5% of the brain and I'm going, well, that's just not good enough. And so that's kind of what I believe are our competitors. Our competitors started with a bunch of movements and then try to put them together. We started with the truth in the science, and let that drive us to how to do that so that that kind of in a nutshell, three maps. Actually, I'll show you. I don't know if you can see this on our wall. We have kind of unplugged this year, and I don't want to lose you, but on our wall over here, we actually have 3d maps. Here is that there's that the nice thing is, is now, is the foundation of, oh, we can teach you now a million different exercises, which is kind of fun. I just I talked to a gentleman who, a couple days ago, who was was talking about doing a thing on Los Angeles where he's going to just get a bunch of kids excited about movement. And he said, I'm thinking I'm going to use jumping jacks. I said, Well, how quick do you get bored with jumping jacks? I said, I get bored within about the first three seconds. I said, if you're going to do a jumping jack, and I said to you, can you do another jumping jack? What would you do? And can you do another jumping jack? What would you do? And he goes, I said, I said, How many different jumping jacks Do you think? You know? He goes, Well, maybe three or four. And I go, that's pretty good. I said, How about if I send you a video? On how I can teach you in less than 40 minutes, 1.4 million jumping jacks. And he said, What? And I said, Yep, I can take a basic jumping jack and tweak it and basically prove to you that you know and can articulate so in other words, I could call you guys up. I could call you Dr Spencer, Dr Terry, Dave, go up and say, we're going to do this particular jumping jack, sagittal plane, feet out of sync, transfers, playing, hands in sync, cervical spine rotation going to anterior, and you'd immediately, boom, I got it. And kids love that. They like the variation because it looks like hip hop and things. So we use the power of tweakology or variability to say, now we've got 3d maps. How do I make this smell more like I want it to smell? I'm a golf whacko, so I'll give you a little golf. How easy this is. So if you just look at the basic six movements of 3d maps, it doesn't look like golf to me yet. Okay, it's the foundational movements, but it doesn't smell like golf. But if I say, Now, wait a minute, my right hip and golf in my back swing, my back swing transformation zone has to flex, have to add up, and has to have huge internal rotation. And I'll go I know how to get that. I can actually get that by taking my left foot and doing an opposite side rotation launch. So I would do this to guarantee that I'm looking at all three of those motions, so you're not hiding something from a golfer. So I take the golfer through D maps and this, but then the hands got to be dry, driving the hip too, so it would look like this. So if you saw me warm up, and you see a lot of the PGA players, now use this we saw me warm up like this, or if you saw me warm up like this, or if you saw me warm up like that, or if you saw me warm up like that, by mechanically, I'm forcing every joint your body to go a little further than what it has to do in the golf swing so you can hide something from me. So if your left mid tarsal joints causing your low back pain, we'll find it about that quick. We'll track and we'll hunt that baby down. So the beautiful thing is, with the power to ecology, we now can do 3d maps for jumping, 3d maps for running. We have, actually, you name the activity we got, 3d maps work

Dr. Spencer Baron:

absolutely fascinating. A good buddy of mine, Rick slate, as the strength is the strength and conditioning coach for the Las Vegas Raiders. And about 2025, years ago, he said that, he said to me, one of the best movements to warm up were multi directional lunges. Now, mind you, that was a long time ago. What you did was just flavored it up. And I'm watching you do these multi directional lunges with a lot of lot of jazz to it, and I it just added a another dimension. I think that's absolutely fantastic. Yeah,

Dr. Gary Gray:

actually, it's funny when, again, when I got out of school 50 years ago, I knew how dumb I was, but I did know this. I do. I remember a great, my great kinesiology teacher saying, the body moves as one, okay, the joint, bones and muscles don't just decide I'm going to do something, and we're three dimensional. And so I thought, Well, that makes sense. So if I'm going to lift the weight, I'm not just going to lift it straight up, I'm gonna lift it forward and back to the right and to the left and rotate right and rotate the left. We would call that a shoulder matrix. And we started 50 years ago. That is called the lunge matrix. So we're kind of like a shotgun approach, which, in reality, works pretty good, because I'm not going to miss anything. So we came up with matrixes, 3d matrixes for just about everything. In fact, I always tease, but there's some truth to it. I told my I taught my kids how to pee in three planes of motion. Anybody, anybody can feel the sagittal plane, you know. But if you can be in the front on transfers plane, now you're doing something pretty good. So we we matricize Everything.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Fortunately, there's nobody on either side of them when you're teaching. So are you going to provide like a team with, you know, the early the season protocols, and then maybe reevaluate deep into the season, because they're pretty worn out. Is your approach going to change considerably, or, you know, markedly, or even a small bit? Yeah,

Dr. Gary Gray:

well, what's what's difficult with a football teams, you got a lot of kids out there, and the other thing is, they all react to the game different. They all play different positions. They all play a different time, and we all recover differently. And so the real question is, what's best for that tight end to actually gradually get better through the season? What's interesting is what might be best for him? Them is not going to be the best for your quarterback or your middle linebacker. And so when you take a look at the different positions in football, we actually, with 3d maps, will actually exaggerate the positions. Let's say a wide receiver will exaggerate 3d maps with one hand reaches, because that's what they're going to have to do when they get out there and we're going to reach for a ball. And so what we encourage the teams to do is to don't make one size fits all, literally, if, again, if I if it's done right, this is what I think I should be able to walk into their strength room and within 10 minutes tell you whatever position they play where, kind of, traditionally, is everybody's kind of going through this. You know, the workouts up on the slate board, and, you know, you're gonna do your dead lifts and you're gonna do your squats and you're gonna do your, you know, bench presses, and everybody's gonna do the same thing, which just intuitively, doesn't make sense, because the quarterbacks I work with, I don't do the same thing as the guy I just worked with last week in offensive lineman, you know, they have different demands to their body. So I also believe different bodies react to recovery different and so we try to teach. We hopefully do a good job teaching. Here's how we begin to individualize it. Even though you got about 80 guys, there's there's a way to do that. But here's then what you need to look for to actually make sure that exactly what you said, and we see it. We don't see that downward trend mid season, because ideally, the teams that are tough, they just snarl up. They snarl up and they snarl up. Get better. So we believe, if we understand exactly what the proprioceptors are doing and how the body truly recovers, we believe we can inhibit that. I don't think we could stop it, but we can inhibit that the trauma of a whole season, and the trauma of the fatigue and the trauma of lack of recovery. And so our goal is to give them multiple tools and multiple tweaks to say, when you see this, you want to go this way. When you see that go this way, when you have that player playing that position, you're going to do more of this. And again, it's intuitive. They go, Oh, this makes sense, you know? The middle linebacker goes, Well, great. This makes more sense to me, because you're having me do middle linebacker stuff, you know. And the quarterback goes, you know, we've, we've had a number of quarterbacks in here, and one of the best things we can do for them is say, Guess what? You're not going to strength room anymore. We're going to develop your own strength program to actually move and throw a ball. You get paid to complete passes, okay? So you don't get paid to bench press, and so we kind of go from there. So it's like I said, we have so much more to learn. The body's a miracle, but that's what kind of excites me. At 70 years old, I get to still learn a lot of stuff.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

You know, Gary, you brought up a good point. And with your experience in the NFL, what advice you want to give to going all the way back from to d1 and then even take a step further back into high school, you know? So we have different bodies, and with n i l money now come in, you know the pressure on these high school kids, you know, to make millions of dollars in in college and then to go into the pros, but their bodies are different. They're younger and all that. So what advice can you give the high school athlete, the d1 athlete, before they to even make it to the next level?

Dr. Gary Gray:

Yeah, and now you're bringing up a sad, story, because just with everything that's happening, there's so much pressure on these kids, you know, high school kid that might be able to throw the ball good. Dad's thinking scholarship. Now he's thinking, you know, money while in college. Now he's thinking, you know, I get to sit in the stands and they'll show me, because my son's out on the football field and NFL quarterback, and that's a recipe for disaster. You said it best in the NFL, most of these kids have similar abilities. They're already fast, they're really snarly. They're quick. In high school, like you said, Terry, everybody's these kids are so different. You got a kid that's 16 that really has a body of a 13 year old. You got one that's 16 has a body of an 18 year old. They all move different. And so how do you approach that? And we call it movement literacy, because we're not taught movement literacy. We'll actually teach movement literacies to some of the highest level athletes in the world in here, and it's amazing how much they're missing in the building blocks of movement. It's kind of like if I if you're in first grade, and I hand you Moby Dick the book and say, do a book report. Hopefully you look at me and go, what's a book report? Well, you read the book and you'll report on it. They open up. Now, what are these? Well, those are, those are letters, oh, okay, what's that? When they're all put together lots of work, well, then what's that with the period at the end of it? That's a sentence. Well, that's how we're that's how we're dealing with a lot of kids now we're throwing them out there on the soccer field at eight. Five, we're trying to make them this person, you know, at age 12, and they don't have basic, fundamental movement patterns that they're successful at, because we believe once you do that, then you gradually build upon your success. And every kid's going to progress at a different rate. I hope they do, because we're all different, you know, and so that's a challenge, but it's not that big of a challenge. In other words, a lot of times I'll have a college strength coach as well. I can't, you know, treat all my kids individually. And I kind of look at them and said, Yeah, you can. Not only can you you need to. And the same thing you talk about Little League baseball team, you know, are we going to do all the exact same things? So these kids, no, they're going to be at all different levels. And my goal is to uplift the success that they have, not to discourage them by what maybe the other kid can do. And the ultimate goal is, when you're 70, I want you to be healthy. You know, not a lot of us are going to make it to the NFL. Not a lot of us are going to make to the NBA. But you know, if good Lord allows you to live for a while, you just simply want to be, you know, healthy, you want to be able to move. It's all about movement. And so the approach, I believe, has to be starting with the ABC building blocks of movement, and progressing based on success, realizing that every kid's different, and using the power of encouragement, in other words, their successes in order to motivate them to actually do better.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Gary, you Dr Terry and I experienced this with patients. Often the youth athlete that the parent has them practicing Monday through Friday, and suddenly they're in tournaments on Saturday and Sunday, and we're seeing adult styled injuries in these children, and it completely disables them for future success. What do you what do you have to say about that? Because our listeners, you know, need some some perspective. Yeah,

Dr. Gary Gray:

first of all, you have to kind of get into the head of the parent. You got to understand where they're coming from. And that's, that's kind of human nature. Hey, somebody told me my kid was pretty good, and so he's going to practice five days a week, and he's going to be in all these select tournaments, and you know, he's going to be one of the best in the world. And so, yeah, okay, I understand where you're coming from, Dave, but we have to kind of back them up and say, Here's how the human body is put together, and here's just a tissue response. And if I take this tissue and I rip it a little bit, five days straight, and then I rip it a lot when they're in a tournament. We're working a little harder. There's a good chance that you're going to destroy the tissue, and there's a very good chance you're going to destroy your kid. That has to be presented very tactfully, but it has to be straightforward. And say, some of the best athletes now that we're seeing they, they do a good job cross train. Now cross training isn't cross training, so they do a great job of, if I, if I am a thrower, doing other things that will compliment throwing, that don't put the same amount of stress on my body as throwing. We do this with a lot of sports you come with, like an overuse of tennis. We'll give you a progression of movement literacy, where you'll now get your hips to do more of the work, and we'll give you exercise to do that actually make you better in tennis. But you're not doing the tennis stroke, so you're not just beating that up. One of the cool things with the seals is, of course, they're their plane to fame is I can do 500 push ups and so. But when I was out there working with them, and the bullets were going over our head, they didn't get up in this position. They all get up in different positions. So we taught them what we called the push up matrix, hands and x, right hand forward, left hand forward, wide, narrow, fingered in, fingered out, same way, same thing we do with our feet, with our squats. It basically said, if you want to do your push ups, just do me a favor every 10 push up change, change the reaction to your shoulder. And that dramatically reduced a lot of the shoulder injuries, just from a common sense, we got to change the stress. So we tell the parents, we don't want your kid to go home and, you know, do computer games and put their feet up and say, Well, I'm getting my body to rest. We want them to be active. We want them to actively get better so they can be the best they can in high school and in college and potentially in the pros. But we now know there's a better way to do that, by distributing the stress across the entire body and across different activities in order to facilitate the desired outcome.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

That was beautiful. And we talked about the hip. We talked about the Shiller. Just now last year, I'm not the football guy. That's Dr Spencer. I'm more of an extreme sports guy, but I as a non football guy. I saw somebody Achilles tendons, you know, last year. The year before. What's your answer to that one?

Dr. Gary Gray:

Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because that's still, it's what's I have a theory. So this isn't, we're not doing applied functional science now, okay, and I just got done telling you be careful my theories, because I've been 100% wrong. So the good news is there's about five or six high end players in the NBA and NFL that have torn their Achilles that I've gotten an opportunity to see afterwards. And the thing I'll always do is say, can you walk me through the three weeks part of that? Any calf soreness and hip soreness. Any change of treatment, anything different, any different schedule, sleep in a different bed, anything you can think of. And then, before you go out on the field, show me how you warmed up. Show me what you did to actually get your foot and your ankle and your subtalar joint, your mid tarsal joints activated. We know the calf. The Achilles works in all three planes of motion. It decelerates calcaneal inversion, decelerates internal rotation of the leg, literally decelerates ankle dorsiflexion, and then it actually creates inversion of the heel, and then creates a locking up mechanism and an external rotation. In fact, the Achilles, the soleus itself is the main knee extensor in the body. A lot of therapists have a heart attack when I tell them that, they go, Wait, am I throws a quad? Well, if you're laying on a table and you use your quad wheel, but if you're walking and running playing football, the soleus is the main knee extensor in the body. The other two are the posterior tib and coronavirus longest. So our body works as a group of friends. And when I actually go on, this is the cool thing. Now, go on YouTube and actually slow down those Achilles tears that I saw. Probably the most dramatic thing that hits me is there's not a lot of stress going on at that time. Go on and look at crew cousins. He was just barely stepping back. He put 10 times more stress on his Achilles to play before, but boom, it popped. It went. And so you go, Whoa, a timeout. And, and I believe those injuries are a result of the lack of proprioceptive input into all the friends, because the French, soon as they sense that, that eccentric lengthening, they should say, I got you. And they protect each other. But if you don't train them right, if you don't like, for instance, we have a thing called and then the wise it is wonderfully and they love it. Before they were spending maybe three or four minutes on their feet. Now they spend about 15 minutes mobilizing their feet, pretty important, because it's the thing that gets you run around on and you know that's most of the guys have it, and it's really kind of differentiator. And so we'll go, Hey, let me see what you do to get your hip and your foot to talk to each other. Get your foot and your thoracic spine to talk to each other. Let me see how you create mobility with the combination of dorsiflexion, plantar flexion, inversion, Evers and AB and adduction and the mid torso joint locking and unlocking. And so far, we really haven't come across a team that was doing it right according to biomechanics, and so we'll show them. Here's how we would do you've got to use the same drivers that you're going to have out on the field, and you got to guarantee me you're going through all three planes of motion. And you got to guarantee me the hips in different positions. Because a lot of times, if you see some of these injuries, like a Durant injury or a Coby injury, all of a sudden they're taking a step back and the hips out of the picture. So the butt is at a disadvantage, and now the Achilles is looking up going, where'd my best friend go? And so I believe we have to biomechanically activate those muscles and those proprioceptors to facilitate the deceleration at motion so it's not isolated onto like in this case, the Achilles tendon. I wrote an article, actually, 45 years ago. It was called the Achilles Hill, and it was basically, if you just follow the biomechanics, the hip and the Achilles are the best friends, and they synergistically do everything exactly the same. And so, but if one of them lets the other guy down, we're going to have a problem. And so understanding, a lot of times, if somebody says, Well, I'm going to, I want to really create mobility to this particular muscle, the very first question I'm going to ask them is, so what does that muscle do? And of course, you guys know, we know what it does on the table. There's no resemblance to what it does, you know, on the floor. And so if you're activating the foot and everything on a table, and you expect it to do what you want to do in the floor, you there's big gap process here. In other words, there's a gap and in the scientific strategy. And so we would rather reproduce as much as we can that's going to happen out on the field in a controlled. Environment, and so when he gets out there, their body goes, been there, done that? No big deal.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Well, I think a lot of pickleball players need to learn this, because there's more Achilles tears now in us as older folks than before. So even you can apply a lot of your principles to them as well.

Dr. Gary Gray:

We're actually doing a webinar on Pickleball injuries, probably in the next month, probably the month. And again, you have to appreciate where sole people are coming from. Okay, yeah, we may have a job, we may be sitting we may be at home, we may be doing lawn work, but now I get to go play pickleball, and you get in your car and, you know, it's pretty exciting, you get to play pickleball. What's beautiful about pickleball is there's a quick learning curve. And some of us, people like myself, that are uncoordinated, we pick up on Pickleball pretty quick. Okay, it's like, slap, slap, slap, and especially double somebody else makes us look good. So the question is, the time, the time you get out of the car and the time you want to play pickleball. How much is that? I only want 10 seconds. Okay, I just want to get out there and play. But I understand that. Well, would you give us a minute? What do you mean? Would you give us a minute to do our best to make sure that Achilles is ready to play pickleball? And so far, we haven't seen a pickleball injury in Achilles tear. We've seen a zillion of them, as you said, as you said, as you said, we have not yet had somebody come in and go, Yeah, I did a three dimensional stretch to my Achilles before I played pickleball, mostly because they don't know, you know. So,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

no, that's great. All right, where are Gary? We are coming close to the end of our program when we have a one of our favorite parts, called the rapid fire questions for you. There's five of them, and you got to be quick on your feet, which I'm sure you are, and you can, you know, there, we try to spend as little time on the answer, but we end up elaborating on it. And if you're ready

Dr. Gary Gray:

questions you want quick answers to. We

Dr. Spencer Baron:

would prefer that, but they end up, we end up taking I

Dr. Gary Gray:

get teased, and I can turn any really good 10 second answer into a four hour, you know, exposition, so I'll do my best.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

That's all right, I've heard, I've heard the same thing for myself, but here we go. Question. Question number one, name your favorite hip warm up in your best Donald Duck voice.

Dr. Gary Gray:

Oh,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

you gotta

Dr. Gary Gray:

you got a little scouting report there? So so my Okay, I'll take you through it. Okay, yeah, first of all, do you know how to tell a good duck from a bad duck. Okay, a good duck, you can hear all the letters of the alphabet, so the duck that's even on TV look too monotone, but you can't get it. So just for fun, I got, I gotta, I gotta. Can you give me 10 seconds, because this will make more sense. All right, yes, yes.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Oh my god. What did we create? A monster? That's fantastic. This

Dr. Terry Weyman:

is, like, fucking awesome,

Unknown:

yeah,

Dr. Terry Weyman:

if he comes back with a duck outfit,

Unknown:

okay with shit? Oh, Julie up,

Dr. Gary Gray:

if you can hear that, but then here's how you really differentiate ducks ability. Can they do their whole scale? Do, Re, Mi, faci, la, ti, do? That's like asking a lot out of the duck, right? It. This is one of my joys, just doing videos for people. And he's been, he's been my buddy for actually, he's 50 years old, patient, basically make this just out of the kindness of our hearts. So he's been, he's some kind. He's kind of my alter ego. He will say things that I'm not necessarily will say. So, all right,

Dr. Terry Weyman:

well, we want to hear his version of your best hip, warm

Dr. Spencer Baron:

up. Hip. Warm Up. Hip, warm up. Yeah.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

But your duck has to do it, yeah?

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Your duck has to do. The hip. Warm

Unknown:

up. Okay. Wow.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

It doesn't even sound like it's coming out of you, that it's completely

Dr. Gary Gray:

they don't know, they don't match up, do they? No, not

Dr. Spencer Baron:

at all. That is the best part of it. I gotta tell you, we've done over 170 shows, and I've we've done a rapid fire question. This is the first time we I don't know. I don't know. I don't even want to go to the other boring, really scary question number two, if

Dr. Terry Weyman:

you should wait, we should have him do all four the dollar.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Oh, my God, that was great. If you had a superpower, what would it be and why?

Dr. Gary Gray:

If I had a superpower, it would be the ability to understand the needs of my friends. Oh, I realized throughout my life I have not had that sensitivity and something I'm working on, and if somebody said I'm going to give you the superpower. I would say, just give me let me know when my friends need me, give me the sensitivity and get me off my lazy butt to go do something for him. Wow, wow. That's fantastic, man.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Well, that is a that's, that's, that's great. Question number three, what do you want to be remembered for?

Dr. Gary Gray:

That's a toughie. Well, the good news is, after a while, you're not remembered, you know. So you know, you go for, you know, somebody says, Do you remember what your great grandpa's middle name was? Okay, he's probably, he's probably an amazing guy, but haven't quite remembered him, and so if it's kind of like that, you know what you want him to say when you're you know when you're doing, like a little memorial service or something. And I think the biggest thing I would like is, I went to a funeral once, and I didn't know who the lady was. I was just going because somebody else knew her, and I just wanted to support them. But I heard a lot about this lady. Never met her before. The lady had passed away, and what was amazing is what they said at her funeral was identical to things I had ever heard. So what she was authentically in real life is what people wanted to express at a funeral. We always embellish a little bit in the funeral, but they couldn't embellish enough for her. In other words, they said, you know, here's her strengths, here's her weakness, here's what she did, here's how she loved life. I'm thinking that's that might be the definition of success. You know, if somebody thinks of me now and so I and I hope, part of it is the passion that I have for people, hopefully for giving back, for loving on others. But again, that's why I need that superpower, because I'm not that good at that. And just loving the Lord and trying to bring a little piece of heaven down to the people I get to hang out with probably be kind of what I like to be remembered for. That's fantastic.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

I got two more questions for you, hip mobility or or thoracic spine mobility, which is the most neglected area, in your opinion,

Dr. Gary Gray:

thoracic spine. I can, I can go on YouTube or go on, you know, going, and they'll talk. Now, I'm talking about three dimensional hip mobility and three dimensional thoracic mobility. But I think the most underrated part of the body is what you guys are great at, and that's what thoracic swine. I think soon as that baby gets gunked up, and I don't have type one and type two motion, I think it creates havoc with the back. I think creates havoc with the neck. I think it inhibits the hips. I think it shuts down the feet. We've been blessed to have people come in here. We'll use an NFL quarterback for an example. He came in here a couple years ago, and he says, This might sound goofy, but when I when I throw my pass, let's say 20 or 30 yards on a rope hard, my shoulder doesn't hurt. Says, but if I have to get it over the linebacker, if I have to go back a little bit and toss over, it hurts. And so I said, Okay, show me that again. He says, I can throw the ball 40. Yards on a line, and no problem says, but if I have to just loft, even a 20 yard loft, to get it out there, it hurts. Well, he just told us the problem. He just, I always, I always claim, if you, if you know how to position and people take somebody through D maps, the patient will tell you the problem. So here's the difference. When I go here, I'm rotated to the right in the thoracic spine. And if I don't have any limitation Other than that, I can load and explode. So my right hip will load, my thoracic spine will load, my core will load, and I can snap the ball. But if I do this and now, in order to get it up, I gotta go down. So immediately you go, Wait a minute. Rotated right laterally. Flex Right. Right. Looks like right, which we call a type two motion. He's got to be limited. So took the shirt off. Not only was he limited in his his thoracic spine defaulted to the other way. So it was real easy use techniques I learned from chiropractors and said, Hey, we're going to mobilize that sucker, and we're going to teach you now how to use it. The problem is not a problem, but we don't know what causes it, and so it has to be a toothbrush exercise. What I mean by that? I had to say, Hey, listen, you go to sleep and wake up tomorrow. You may have that same limitation where you can't rotate right and laterally flex right. It's because the thoracic spine can do many stuff. It'll default into the path of least resistance. So I said, just like you brush your teeth. You know, I'd like to give you a toothpaste and toothbrush that would last you a year. I can't, you know, I just don't want to talk to you after a day or two if you're not going to brush your teeth, they said. But so you're gonna have to make this part of your deal your routine, and so you take care of your shoulder. So I think, I think we have a pretty good understanding of the hips, the power of the hips, three dimensionality of the hips. I don't think we have a really good understanding. We call it tridoxical movement, extension with type one type two motion, flexion with type one, type two motion. I It's rare you could come in here with just a big toe problem. You won't get out of here unless I look at your thoracic spine. It's be impossible.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Thank you for that question number five and the final one, best way to motivate an athlete who is pretty much lazy or having an off day,

Dr. Gary Gray:

humor and success just and try to appreciate where they're coming from. You know, that's that's easier said than done. You know, if you know the kid pretty well. You can get them out of the funk. Okay, let's say I'm dealing with some athletes that I don't know very well, and I just don't think they're motivated. Okay, the question I got to ask myself is, what have I done to fail the environment that doesn't allow them to be motivated? I found in 99.9% of the cases, it's my fault. And so what I quickly find is I gotta change an activity, I gotta change a tone, I gotta change a sequence. I gotta change something where I can look the kid right in the eye and go, I am proud of you. You tell some of you proud of them based on success. Guess what? Attitude goes away and there's a new party. So I think it's all about engaging the person. So I'm listening to them very well. Because I think a lot of times, I even get pissy and lazy if I don't think somebody's listening to me very well. And so I become that lazy athlete and then empowering them with the ability to know I can do this. This is something you prove to me I can do, and then encouraging them you just did it. I'm proud of you. Let's do some more those three E's. It's rare that we can't get somebody out of the funk.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Dr Gary Gray, this has been an exceptional podcast. I really appreciate your advice, and it's very inspiring, and it makes so much sense, and there's such clarity that it makes me want to hear more. So I have some ideas for you that sounds good. Put you out there.

Dr. Gary Gray:

I've done a few podcasts before, but your flow and you know how you put everything together. I just thought were just really spot on. So thank you so much.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Oh, thank you.

Unknown:

Thank you.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

We have fun. Thank you. Yes,

Dr. Terry Weyman:

thank you. And have a blessed day, buddy.

Dr. Gary Gray:

Thank you. Appreciate that. You too.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Thank you for listening to today's episode of The cracking backs podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you follow us on Instagram at cracking backs podcast, catch new episodes every Monday. See you next time you.