Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine
“Your Life Style Is Your Medicine” is a podcast that focuses on how a person's lifestyle can be the key to health and happiness. Routed in the principles of lifestyle medicine, Ed Paget, osteopath, and exercise scientist, interviews area-specific experts on how lifestyle impacts well-being, focusing on purpose, physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and stress, which could lead to a longer, happier life. Edward now runs immersive lifestyle medicine retreats, with the purpose of helping others take back control of their lives to live longer and healthier.
Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine
Episode 28: The Algorithm for Healing: Assess-Move-Reassess with Vinny Crispino
Have you ever found yourself battling chronic pain and felt that none of the traditional pain management models worked for you?
Then join us in our latest podcast episode, where we sit down with innovative thought leader Vinny Crispino, founder of the Pain Academy. Vinnie shares his riveting story of resilience, from being an aspiring Olympic to suffering a crippling spinal fracture that sent him down a path of self-discovery and healing.
In our candid conversation, we dive deep into the mind-body connection and its profound influence on healing. We also dissect mindset's crucial role in managing pain and how Vinny learned to see pain as an ally rather than an enemy.
We explore how Vinnie's revolutionary online program, powered by AI, is paving the way in the world of pain management. Ditching the one-size-fits-all approach, his program is uniquely geared to adapt exercises based on individual input.
Unlike conventional methods, the program focuses on awareness, movement, and reassessment, aiming to recalibrate the nervous system. A perfect blend of relaxation, strengthening, and dynamic full-body motion, the program is all about personalization, thanks to its adaptive algorithm.
Want to unravel the secrets of healing through movement and understand the breakthrough potential of AI in fitness? Then this episode is a must-listen for you.
Embark on a journey towards better health and wellness with Vinny and us.
Follow Vinny Crispino
Website: www.painacademy.net
Instagram: @painacademy
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email: ed@edpaget.com
Welcome to the your Lifestyle is your Medicine podcast, where we do deep dives into topics of mind, body and spirit. Through these conversations, you'll hear practical advice and effective strategies to improve your health and ultimately add healthspan to your lifespan. I'm Ed Padgett. I'm an osteopath and exercise physiologist with a special interest in longevity. Today, my guest is Vinnie Crespino, founder of the Pain Academy. He's a corrective exercise specialist who helps people get out of pain with movement.
Speaker 1:Today we talk about his journey from being an Olympic hopeful athlete to, unfortunately, having a spinal fracture. How he spent years in rehab, not getting anywhere, until he was actually found by someone who taught him how to move his body correctly and get his mindset in the right place. He actually has an interesting phrase. He says that the same exercises that weren't helping him were the same exercises that helped him once he changed his mindset.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about how he's developed an online program that actually interacts with clients, depending on the feedback they give them. It depends on which exercise the program actually gives them. So it's an algorithm that's powered by AI that interacts with the client. So each person who joins this program gets their own specialist experience. And we're going to talk about how the traditional pain management model of physiotherapy and chiropractic, and some extent osteopathy, doesn't seem to have this adaptive nature it's more prescriptive and how this AI model of adapting exercises to the feedback that it's given can actually really help people get out of pain free faster and more permanently. So, vinny, welcome to the show, thanks for having me here, no problems. So I want to get right into it to start with, and I'd love you to explain to me and to the audience what is a corrective exercise specialist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great place to start. So corrective specialist is somebody who identifies needs in the body and corrects those. So a lot of people are running into restricted movement. Whether it be limited movement, whether it be muscle still stiff or tight, maybe there's muscular imbalance, there's painful movement, joints just aren't moving as well as they used to. This is where a corrective exercise specialist comes in, looks at what's going on with the body and comes up and devises a plan on how to correct these issues that are presenting themselves and, for most people, basically robbing the quality of life.
Speaker 1:So how would they be correcting these deficiencies of movement?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a spectrum of which we can correct deficiencies. It's all about intensity. On one end of the spectrum we have relaxing the body we're talking about calming down down, regulating the nervous system, trying to bring a sense of calm or ease back to the state of movement. And on the other side of that spectrum of intensity we've got a higher stimulus like strength, really putting work in and fortifying the integrity of the tissue. So, on this spectrum of intensity, this is where corrective exercise tries to meet people where they're at.
Speaker 2:If you're a high level athlete and all you're doing is put and work in, a corrective exercise is going to come in and say, okay, let's down, regulate the body, let's calm things down and make sure that the right things are moving when it comes time to move. If you're somebody who is always in a state of relaxation and we never are really giving the body a lot of high energy stimulus to respond to, we're probably going to notice that the tissue is really not that strong, it's not that durable, it's weak and it's very prone to injury. So again, we used a corrective exercise intensity spectrum and we say, all right, can we give this person, this human being, more stimulus so their tissue can adapt to it. So it's all about really understanding, on the spectrum of things, where people are and giving them exercises as tools to correct whatever problem that they're experiencing.
Speaker 1:I love it. It's like that bespoke tailored exercise prescription is, in my mind, what's missing in a lot of other therapies. With that in mind, let's say someone is used to physical therapy or physiotherapy and they've sprained an ankle or something like that and the physiotherapist says, well, for a lateral ankle sprain, here's the six-week physiotherapy course. What's the difference between, like that type of exercise prescription and what you do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's always a place for physio, right? If you have an acute injury, like there's an impact, you twist and sprain an ankle, probably doing a protocol that focuses acutely on that ankle is a really good idea, because there is immediate acute trauma to that area. Where my works tends to separate is well, what happens when that doesn't work. And for most people most people don't really deal with injuries like that. It would be great if everybody did, but most people kind of just ice it. They just kind of take time off and they never actually do the rehab or the protocol work to restore functionality to the joint. And so what happens over days, weeks, months and years is these past injuries really start to affect our capacity to move. If you go to sprain an ankle without any training or coaching, without any knowledge of biomechanics, you are going to implore this brilliant mechanism of compensation. You're going to immediately alter the way that you move to reduce the pain that you're experiencing. This is how most people survive and get through life is we alter the way that we move to experience as minimal pain as possible.
Speaker 2:Where my work separates from what a physio is is I'll come in and we're going to look at the entire body. How have you, as a human being, altered the way that you've been moving, based on past injuries, current injuries, your lifestyles, hobbies, routines and activities? How are all of these things shaping your capacity to move? And let's start getting back to the basics.
Speaker 2:If somebody comes to me with an ankle injury that is just not healing past the recommended duration of which these things usually heal, then I investigate what are we missing? What is not happening in the way that this person is moving that's allowing them to heal? Their movement patterns have essentially eroded so much to where they're now creating damage faster than their body's ability to heal it. So somebody will bring an acute injury to me and I will rarely pay attention to the site and pain. I want to take a step back and look at how are the shoulders moving? What is the capacity of the spine to move? How is the pelvis moving? I don't really treat the injured area, I treat the entire human movement system that somebody brings to me. And that is where the big differentiation comes between PT, maybe a Cairo or physio, and my work. There's no zooming in with the work that I do. It's all about taking a step back, zooming out, looking at the entire body as its whole, and how do we devise a system that gets you to just move more optimally?
Speaker 1:I love it. When I first went to Osteopathy School, we were taught that and there's the phrase, an elegant phrase, that we were told was the legacy of compensation. That was the idea of this lifetime of ankle sprains, hip sprain, back tweaks, tight hips and then suddenly the person develops headaches. While that's the legacy of compensation manifesting in the headaches.
Speaker 2:I always think that there's always freak accidents. We're never in 100% control. Maybe you do just step in a weird angle and sprain an ankle, but I always go back to what was the state of movement. Was that just one step? The tip of the iceberg? Was that the final straw that broke the camel's back? And most of the times, whenever there is a history of an acute I'm sorry, whenever there is an acute injury, there's always a whole host of movement dysfunction that existed long before this acute injury. So maybe we can play the game and go focus on the area. But if we never deal with the system that most likely created the instability in the ankle that led to the sprain, it just happens again and again and again. And these are the things that just, they just plague us, man. They plague us.
Speaker 1:They do, they do and they keep coming back. So you actually work with people online and you have a system, a pain academy. Right, you have a system of helping people. I wanna talk about that in detail later, but firstly I wanna know how you went from I'm not sure where you were, but Vinny being Vinny at the end of teenage years to Vinny being 35 and running the pain academy and helping people all over the world. How did that come about?
Speaker 2:Yes, I'll give you a quick backstory. So I was always terrible at sports, but I was a great swimmer. I was always really confident and confident in the water. I think it was just my natural chosen sport. I was really good at it. I set over 30 Colorado state records, eight time all-American, 16 national titles.
Speaker 2:Swimming was my calling and ever since I was a kid I had dreams of going to the Olympics. Well, the Olympics that I had my eyes set on was the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. But I got injured. I broke my back in a surfing accident and that dream just got washed away. The moment that that impact happened it was just all over. So I went from a high caliber athlete, feeling very young, strong, capable, never really having to think about movement. I could just perform. My coaches never cared about quality of motion. They just wanted me to get to the other end of the pool as fast as possible and back. That was the game that we were playing. So I had a whole upbringing of performance, but nothing was on quality.
Speaker 2:When I broke my back, my entire world changed in literally the drop of a hat. In a moment I went from being a strong, capable, young man to just functionally disabled. I couldn't do anything. It was a life-changing injury. What followed after breaking my back was probably like most people's stories when you are in pain, what do you do? Well, you first go to the hospital. You get a diagnosis, you consider treatment options. You explore as many of those treatment options as possible, trying to avoid surgery. They're really big, invasive stuff and this is where my origin story started. I didn't know anything that I was doing. Again, this was really my first injury that I was faced with, so I did the PT, I went to the physios, I sought out the best chiropractors I could, I went to massage therapists, acupuncturists, I went to energy workers. I mean, I was pulling out all the stops in the book, trying to find something that helped.
Speaker 2:This was probably four or five years after breaking my back. So it's a T12 fracture, significant nerve damage, multiple herniations. I was a mess. The force of the impact when my lower back hit a rock created a 21-degree lateral curvature of the spine, so it was just an immediate nerve damage tension response. Four years later, my fractures healed, my herniations healed and I still couldn't move. I was getting worse, pain was worse, my threshold was getting lower, my quality of life was terrible and I was doing all the things that I was supposed to be doing. Nothing was working and it wasn't until this universal opening moment.
Speaker 2:I was in a grocery store, I was reaching for a gallon of milk and I could barely stand. I mean, I'm talking when I say functionally disabled. I couldn't enter a room without first immediate pain. I was immediately scanning where can I go to sit down if I need to? Where can I lay down on the ground? I spent most of my life just on the ground staring at the ceiling. So I was not in a great state and I remember grocery shopping. I was reaching for a gallon of milk and I dropped the milk because I couldn't hold myself up and balance the milk jug.
Speaker 2:Things were really bad. And this gentleman approached me in this grocery store and he's like hey, I would love to help you out with your left leg. I'm like leg and fella, you have no idea what you're talking about. I broke my back. Please, I don't want to go through this. And he's like no, no, I'm not asking for money. He hands me a business card and he's like I want you to come see me. I didn't care, I wasn't interested. I mean. This is after years of failed therapy. I threw the business card somewhere in my car and just went on with my life.
Speaker 2:I really hit the end of the road with therapy in terms of paying people to try to help me solve my problems. So I did what I thought the next best thing was was I went back to school. I went on to become a personal trainer. I figured that I'm the only person who cares as much as I do. I've got to learn what I need to know, because this never-ending appointment, the revolving business, it just never stopped. There was no end in sight. I was racking up massive amounts of credit card debt and still no better than when I was shortly after breaking my back.
Speaker 2:So I put myself through school, became a personal trainer to local gym and I had a really big passion for working with others in pain. I was literally the crippled guy hobbling around the gym unable to re-rack weights, and one of the gym members. He saw me struggling and he knew I was a passionate guy. He could see how much I wanted to help people. But you can't really hide movement dysfunctions like the ones that I had and he comes up to me and he hands me a business card. It was the same. The guy who's on the business card was the same one who met me at the grocery store and I said, okay, I can't ignore this any longer. I give this guy a call. I set up a free appointment. I drive painfully 45 minutes away to go see him and With the first session he didn't touch me, he just guided me.
Speaker 2:He told me to lay down on the ground in certain positions, breathe a certain way, do this with my foot, do this with my shoulder. We didn't really talk about my story. He didn't really care about the history that I had been through. He didn't really care to learn about my back. He just saw the current state of dysfunction and met me there After about an hour, hour and a half. He told me to stand up. By the way, I thought this was a complete waste of time. We didn't really do anything. I stood up and I just started to cry. It was no miracle. I wasn't pain-free, but I was 5% better, 10% better.
Speaker 2:For somebody to not do a very invasive procedure or a very aggressive adjustment, for no expensive machines or fancy equipment, to just lay there and learn how to kind of renavigate basic movement patterns, I felt better, man. It was the first time that I felt like I had hope again. I don't know what this world of training was, but I was in. I was all in. From that moment, I was both relieved and angry. Why does the world not know about this? It was so damn simple. I just had to do really simple movements that were so gentle. I had to learn how to reconnect with my nervous system, calm down this fight-flight-freeze response that I was experiencing, and there was a change. I was hopeful and I was angry that the world didn't know about this. I made it my mission to get this information to as many people's hands and homes as possible, and that's when Pain Academy started. I devoted my entire life to this very gentle, simple, yet highly effective way to train the human movement system.
Speaker 1:It sounds a little bit like Feldenkrais or Hanna-Symatics.
Speaker 2:Similar fields, dream family, but much more simple and much more simple.
Speaker 1:Story. The therapies you listed at the beginning were all passive therapies for you, so a practitioner is doing something to you and then I was like, okay, sometimes that all works. I'm an osteopath. It's a passive therapy, but when you do, when the patient does the movements, it changes something hugely in the dynamic of the relationship between the practitioner and the patient, but also in your ability to help yourself. It sounds like that's part of it for you as well. It was like you were empowered because it was you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that I was the missing piece and I didn't know that. And in that moment, why everything else failed made perfect sense. It's not that those things were wrong or bad, they were missing my involvement. I kept thinking that the checks I was writing to the experts was just that's what you do, right? You just pay somebody a lot of money and their expertise is going to fix it, and they did a lot of work on me. But what an hour or two is worth of work a week does not offset the other 160 plus hours. I was the missing piece because I wasn't doing the things, nor did I know the things to do outside of my appointments that would actually reinforce and create a change. And this was my first experience of an external, as you put it, the passive somebody doing something to you. I call it an external stimulus. It can be helpful, but nothing is as powerful as an internal stimulus resolving an internal issue. I was missing my own involvement.
Speaker 1:It was beautifully put. And also when I was looking at the Penn Academy. You talk about mindset and sort of the mindset for healing. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:How many hours do you have?
Speaker 1:Maybe the Coles notes version.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is when I was in the middle of this new therapy right, I was learning the tools. I feel like I was starting to learn the missing physical pieces to put myself back together. I remember my mentor at the time. I came in just really frustrated. I was three or six months into this process. Why aren't I healed yet? And the conversation he had with me was what do you mean? Why are you putting a timeline on your healing? And I said well, I should be able to be at this certain point at this time. And he replied who do you think you are? We're not on your timeline, we're on your body's timeline. So if you're not willing to be patient, I can't help you.
Speaker 2:And I got really frustrated and I had a really intense emotional reaction. And this person said that you're not ready to heal yet. Until you're ready to deal with the emotionality of this and your mindset, there is nothing I can do for you. And here I am as a young man thinking my mindset what are you talking about? My back was broken. I remember seeing my broken mangled back on an x-ray, thinking no, that's physical. I never once thought that, the way I was thinking, my relationship to pain, my relationship to intensity had anything to do with why I wasn't getting better your mindset, how you coach yourself, how you parent yourself, how you navigate flare-ups and ups and downs, the emotionality that that triggers within you. You can have all of the physical tools in the world, like I was starting to acquire, but if you don't have your mind right and you're just in a very highly reactive state, how far can we really go with healing? We can only go so far. It took me the longest time to realize that I was sabotaging my healing process at every sign. I was just doing the things just to check them off the box, to say I did them. My relationship with myself that was the worst relationship I was ever in when I was healing was the one with myself. It took a lot of therapy, it took a lot of meditation for me to really understand that pain is not the problem.
Speaker 2:When you have a story like mine, where you have a certain life path and then an injury violently knocks you off of that path, you can't help but think about the injury as the bad guy, the enemy. It's the injuries reason why my life sucks. My pain, I hate my pain, I hate my body. Those are the foundations of the psychology. When you're exposed to chronic pain, when you make pain the enemy, what do we do? We go to eliminate the enemy. We go to look for drugs. We try to numb it, we try to escape it, we try to suppress it, we try to avoid it, we try to push it all down because we think that pain is the problem. This is where mindset comes in. It's how it's our relationship with pain. Pain is just a sensation. It's not good or bad. We can't put morality on it. The moment we do, the moment we run into the problems. I'll give you a really good example.
Speaker 2:In my program I teach really gentle, simple exercises. This is the start. We can't do anything complicated. Before we do anything specific, we have to master the basics. Let's say, somebody has back pain or hip pain. They do one of my movements.
Speaker 2:Pain shows up with this movement. What then? What is the conversation that you have in your mind? What is the dialogue between you and the sensation?
Speaker 2:Most people will get angry.
Speaker 2:They'll feel a limitation. They'll feel the reason, the thing that has robbed them of the quality of their life. They'll tense up, they'll lose a little bit of their breath and they'll, like grimace and clench and flinch their way through a movement that's us fighting and combating pain. Well, what if we were to learn how to work with it? What if we were to learn how to work with when pain shows up before doing anything? Can we take a moment to find our breath? Can we create a little bit of space between us and the sensation that we're feeling and learn how to work with it differently, not aggressively, not the no pain, no gain. Let's not fight and barrel our way through it, but can we actually allow it to be there and calm down the nervous system and then show our body that movement can actually be safe and it can be comfortable? These are the missing skill sets that I just didn't have, which is why the exercises that didn't work for me are the same exercises that worked for me once I got it on my right.
Speaker 1:That's brilliant. The exercises that didn't work for you, the same exercises that worked for you, and the difference was the mindset. I feel like I've been working as a clinician for 20 years and it's like I don't want to ever blame the patient, but the way the osteopathy is set up and the way physio and chiro are set up is this very sort of one-way interaction between the therapist, who knows everything, and the patient, who knows nothing, and we give advice. But it's taken me a long time to come to this sort of place that you're at as well. That when someone says, when I do that movement it's painful, and I used to say, well, don't do that movement.
Speaker 1:Well, now there's so much to be learned about how we approach that movement and being thankful for the pain. This is where I've got to. The pain is a sensation. Like you said, there's no good nor bad. It's telling us something. What is it telling us? Why is it telling us it and how do we use that information for the betterment of movement in the future? And it's the mindset, it's how we interpret the signals from our body and then use that to our benefit. You summarized it way better than I did, so thank you.
Speaker 2:It's what it is, and the irony is that the moment you stop reacting to pain and caring about it, that's really when the bigger, deeper changes can start to happen. But the more you fight it and the more you wish it wasn't there and you resist it, and the more you're afraid of it it just gets worse and worse, a lot worse.
Speaker 1:And maybe I'll share this before in the podcast, but I'm just going to share a little bit of my background. Here is I was actually pain free as a triathlete and I went to see a chiropractor for sports tune up to become better at my sports and he did that extra. I never had one before and he noted that on the extra had a spondylolythesis, which is a slippage of one vertebrae, on the other could have been an old break actually in the back, and he was like, oh man, that's bad. And those were his words exactly. And then he points that other things on my x-ray. He says you know, you're a smart kid, what does, what does that look like to you? And I was like, well, that looks like a problem, that looks like a problem. And he gave me the technical language around those things so small nodes and facet, a trip and things like that and I didn't have any back pain. And then a month later I started getting back pain and then my mind was like, well, hang on. He said that I broke my back and maybe this thing is slipping and so on.
Speaker 1:And I went in this negative spiral and it was all to do with my mental state and eventually I saw an osteopath who I said, oh, here's my x-ray. I got it from a chiropractor and you know, I've got all this stuff and say, same as you, he's like as your mentor, he's sort of got it. He's like, yeah, I'm not really interested in that, so tell me what you need to do next week. And I was like I need to compete in the triathlon. He's like, yeah, sure, no problems. And he helped me. And then the next thing I know I'm doing osteopathy. It was literally like that.
Speaker 1:And now when I have a back pain which does happen if flares up occasionally, if I do something stupid, I have one. When we all had to do those quarantines right, so I'm in quarantine for two weeks and I'm in this house that's not my house. I noticed that these big rocks outside and I was like, right, I'll do these dead list with these rocks, asymmetrical sort of weights. And I just messed up, it slipped or something, and I tweaked my back and I was like, oh, two weeks of quarantine and back pain. Then I was like, okay, what are we going to learn from this? And it was a really educational experience, working through the pain, working through the movements and then applying the mind knowledge to myself to get me out of pain, and it was only three or four days. In the end it wasn't a problem at all. But it was that mindset piece. And would you like to add any more to the mindset?
Speaker 2:This is for the listeners. If you're hearing this conversation right now and you're thinking, no, my mindset, it has nothing to do with it. Yes, it does, and that's not like I want you to use your initial knee jerk, defensive reaction as an opportunity to figure out what stones have we not interned here, because I, too had the same reaction. I thought it was all woo, woo, woo. There's no way I can think my way out of back pain. I almost internalize it like somebody was just saying that my pains in my head and it is because that's where we process pain, though you know our nerves can't be in pain.
Speaker 2:They just tell her information and it's what our brain makes of the pain, so we can't fully experience pain. In the body. It's a central nervous system. It's a brand's job to decode and decipher all of these incoming signals and give us information. So it is in your head and it's in your body. It's in both. And if you are just hammering away, looking for physical tools and exercises and you just aren't getting anywhere, I want you to take a moment and pause, reflect on maybe what you haven't looked at yet, which is your own relationship to your body and your pain, and if you don't know what that means and how to even build a path to to being able to answer that, this is starts. We've got to take a look at your mindset.
Speaker 1:Perfect. So how do you lay this out into an online course? Do you interact with the clients themselves or sit down through videos? How does it? How does the layout look?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I have very minimal interaction. I do host weekly live workshops just for the people who probably, like me, just want to show up and learn more and more and really get a lot of that hands on hand holding approach. But everything is is autonomous, so I need to teach you what to do and I need to teach you how to navigate and listen to your body, and we can't fix a problem that we don't understand. So analysis if we are not assessing, we're guessing. Step one of my program is I run people through eight really simple to do at home movement assessments. We are not trying to diagnose, we are trying to observe objectively what happens to your body when you bend forward. What does it look like when you walk? How do you squat? How do you stand on the other leg? Can you stand on the other leg? Does one hip rotate? How does the other hip rotate? So we're talking about very basic, general, simple movement patterns.
Speaker 2:Once we have the framework of how capable of a mover you are, I then, over the next eight weeks, expose people to a variety of routines, corrective exercise routines with different intentions. Some have a high focus on hip mobility, some have a high focus on shoulder mobility. Some get the hips in the shoulders to communicate and work better together, right? So each routine is a little different and what the user and the member goes through is they try a movement routine and then we come back to the tests. Is walking easier? Does bending forward feel better? Are you more capable squatting? Are you more stable standing on one leg versus the other? So we are collecting real world data here Assess, move, reassess, and you're feeding the program this information.
Speaker 2:By the end of this first eight weeks of rediscovering basic movement, what we're really doing is training you how to firstly be aware of your body, then how to show up and do basic movements every day and then have a pulse on. Was that better for me? Am I better, worse or the same? So this process of awareness, move and reassessment that starts to fine tune and recalibrate our nervous system, to give us better information real time.
Speaker 2:At the end of these eight weeks, the program is then going to basically help you choose which are the most effective routines based on your input, and from there launches a 44 week program that caters to the functions, movements, exercises and positions that we now know your body best response to, and it follows a very traditional structure of progressive overload, so basic first getting the body to relax, then we start to lengthen tight muscles, then we start to strengthen muscles and then we move into dynamic full body motion. So it is like a complete foundational movement program to get you from confused, not knowing why things are the way they are, to back to reconnecting with your body and then onto a weekly structure that makes sense, based on what helps you move and feel your best. It is my brainchild. I poured all of my attention, energy and love into this and it's a it's a pretty incredible program.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks incredible as well and, having you know I have online programs as well and the amount of work it takes to do something like that. But I can see if you've gone through this sort of test, test, exercise, retest, and then there's like an algorithm where people can follow it down into different pathways. That's a huge amount of work you put in there.
Speaker 2:It's a huge amount of work and this is my life's work, because it's the algorithm that's missing from traditional protocols, right? So remember, I'm the guy with the broken back who was given the broken back protocols and it didn't work. And when they didn't work, there was no. Okay, well, let's go figure this out. It was like, oh well, we did what the protocol said to do, so we can't help you. We don't know what else to do. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Movement therapies and modalities are missing this. If, then, model, if this works, then we do this. If this doesn't work, then we need to hit the drawing board and do this. So it's missing that creative exploration. And the beautiful part about this is you don't need an expert for that. You are the expert. Like you were that missing piece. You're the only one hardwired to your nervous system. You're the only person in the world who can feel what it feels like to be you. If we can tap into your nervous system, your sensory feedback system, and the algorithm uses your information that you're in tune to to then spider web into a complete program, it's got a pretty damn high chance of being successful. As opposed to following what a textbook protocol says that does not really take you into consideration.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally, and I think that's one of the problems we have in measuring our success when it comes to things like back pain is that, for example, in surgery, when we want to know how good our surgeons are, there is a. For heart surgery there is an expected outcome for certain risk criteria. So person of certain age, certain sex, with certain problem has this chance of survival. Now, if the surgeon doesn't get that chance of survival, it's probably the surgeon, not the patient, right, and that's how they evaluate how good surgeons are in heart surgery. But when you take something like back pain and we say, ok, well, someone's got back pain, they're this old, they're this sex and so on here is the protocol it's probably going to fail because it's not taking in everything into consideration. And when you've come along and you've got an algorithm response to their inputs, that you're right. That is what is missing from traditional therapy and I really like the way you've mapped that out and outlined it.
Speaker 2:You know, it's been probably a million dollars of investment up until this point to get this algorithm right, and one of the best things that I did was hire people who have no idea what I do these developers, these coders because they have to build this. So we have to speak the language of a computer, which is, if then, conditioning model. When you get into the world of movement science, that is highly nonlinear and it's all over the place multifactorial. You really have to get clear on what are the questions we're asking people and how can we build a logic system based off of this. So most of my work was pushed forward light years by these developers who were asking me questions that I don't think a lot of movement guys get asked, because it really forces you to look at what do I actually know here and what kind of system can we build that's reliable, outside of bias, outside of anecdotal, but one that works for large populations?
Speaker 1:So let's talk about what it works for. Do you have a demographic that it seems to do best for, like neck pain, back pain, shoulder pain, is it, or is it any kind of pain?
Speaker 2:The great question there is no demographic. It is for human beings who are struggling with movement, because why somebody has neck pain could be an entirely different reason why their twin has the same kind of neck pain. So there's no you joining the program and okay. If you've got neck pain, you're here. Or if you've got back pain, you do here. It's we are looking at the movement capacity of your to understand why you're having the experience you're having. So it's not demographic based. We've got kids who are just in their adolescence recently diagnosed with scoliosis, upwards of people in their 70s and 80s doing this program.
Speaker 2:The core principle that this is built on is basic human movement. Ankle should be able to do a minimal level of movement, same with the knees, same with the hips, same with the pelvis and spine and shoulders. This system is geared to restore those minimal ranges of motion, so we can just significantly reduce compensation and furthermore, aside from demographics, this is something that we teach people to do every single day. So that's why it works across a wide range of demographics, because this is about movement graphics, not demographics. And if we can focus on the movement differences and make those more normalized, it's it's why we've had over 4000 successful cases of success with the movement program. No two people are the same. Everybody's doing the same program, but no two people go through it the same way because, again, the program adapts to you. So that's why it's not demographic based, it's you based.
Speaker 1:Now, I work in this world, you work in this world. I don't know if anyone else has got a program like this. Do you think you're the only one?
Speaker 2:My ego wants to say yes, For the time there might be someone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's gotta be somebody out there, but with knowing what I know on the back end and the amount of time and money and resources that we put into building this non-linear algorithm, I don't know. And if so, I just haven't come across it yet. Most programs, even like the influencer stuff, the mainstream things, they just seem to be more like exercise libraries, where here's this information do it if it works, cool. If it doesn't work, we don't know what to tell you. That seems to be the dominant majority of programs out there. So this interactive, customizable, tailored solution based on what helps you move and feel your best, I haven't seen it.
Speaker 1:I haven't seen it either. I mean, I'll be fair as to say, but my programs involve me doing the algorithm, yeah. So someone's moving through and they say, oh, this isn't quite working. I say, well, no problems, you've got this group of exercises here, do those for a little bit, then come back and do these ones, and I still have to lead that process. But to have that automatically done, that's really smart, well done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. You know there's a computer in there, in that brain of yours, there's conditions that you're looking out for and there's things that you're listening for. That then give you what the next step in the process is, and all I've done is I've taken the time to remove the manual labor from that and I've trained a machine to think the same way that I do, to make the same educated guesses and decisions that I make, and that's what guides people.
Speaker 2:So you know, going back to that first session, that I had this five to 10% difference, I realized why this wasn't a well-known thing is because it takes manual labor for this kind of education information and that's not scalable and it's extremely expensive. So I wanted to scale this process. I wanted to break it down into the most simplest form and allow people to not be geographically tied to me, to not be financially tied to me, where they could just pay a very reasonable price and just have access to this for the rest of their life. This was my vision years ago is to get this information out there and I didn't want it to be the Vinnie Show. I didn't want to sit through appointments for the rest of my life and actually waste people's money, because the decisions I was making that can be trained in a program. So let's go give people the access to the information. And it was a painful, you know. It was a really hard transition to make very hard, yes, but you've done it.
Speaker 1:And I noticed that on your website your name isn't even mentioned. It's the Pain Academy, but it's not the Vinnie Show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I'm a little shy, so I just didn't really want the attention focused to be on me and for years I hid behind the before and afters. You know we've got hundreds and hundreds of phenomenal success stories and for years people had no idea the guy behind this. I never once did face the camera because I didn't want to make it about me. I wanted to make it about the people and the change and the power that this has. I also, you know, not everybody's into the long hair and neck tattoos, so you got to be mindful about that too.
Speaker 2:So, I wanted to make it about a business that can help, not about me.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. So how can people find out more about the business that can help?
Speaker 2:Best way to do it is going to our website at painacademynet, so wwwpainacademynet. There's a lot of information on there and a lot of the information I put out is on our social, on Instagram, and that's just at Pain Academy, pretty simple.
Speaker 1:Vinny, this has been an absolute pleasure and I think what you've done is fantastic and I'm hoping that people listen to this. If they're in pain and they want to experience something that's not out there, out of the traditional model, that they come to you and they check out painacademynet.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I hope so. If we get one person's life improved with this, this is a massive success.
Speaker 1:That's it. That's a win right there. Yeah, thank you for having me on today, no problem. Thanks for coming, vinny.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining me in my conversation with Vinny. If you've enjoyed listening to and learning from this podcast, please leave a comment, and you can also leave a comment with a suggestion for a future podcast guest that you would like me to feature. In addition, on Apple, you can leave a five-star review as well as a comment. Now, if you want my direct help, please send me an email edpagetcom or visit my website edpagetcom Also my website. I have a newsletter that you can sign up to. I don't send you many emails once a week, maybe once every two weeks, but the emails are about lifestyle medicine and about how you can make small changes in your lifestyle that can make big changes in your longevity and your health span. Last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in lifestyle medicine Shameless.