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 59: Why Pelvic Floor Therapy Fails Many Women and What Works
Most people hear “do more Kegels” and brace for disappointment. We go deeper, showing how only a fraction of bladder control is voluntary and why the autonomic nervous system quietly drives continence, urgency and pelvic pain. With Dr. Nigel Brayer, a chiropractor and rehab specialist who built the Ironclad System after his wife’s postpartum struggle, we unpack a kinder, smarter roadmap that shifts focus from isolated muscles to full-body regulation.
We start with the overlooked 70%: autonomic control. You’ll learn a simple vagus-nerve technique using the triangular fossa of the ear, plus breathing cues that lift the diaphragm and reduce downward pressure on the bladder. We separate “stress” into three clear lanes—physical structure and fascia, nutritional-chemical-hormonal inputs, and mental-emotional load—so you can pick a realistic starting point. From there, we dig into everyday triggers hiding in plain sight: caffeine’s stimulatory hit, carbonation’s lining irritation and tannins in tea and red wine that can sensitize tissue. A protein-and-healthy-fat-forward plate with low simple carbs supports tissue repair and steadier nerves without the inflammatory sugar swings.
Then we bring it all together with practical training. The “squaggle” combines a supported wide squat, a gentle pelvic contraction and a slow exhale to coordinate breath, fascia and pelvic floor reflexes. This isn’t gym heroics; it’s teaching your nervous system a calmer default. We also explore posture and fascial lines that link rib cage, diaphragm and pelvis, and why tracking your symptoms weekly reveals progress that’s easy to miss day to day. Whether you’re dealing with leaks after childbirth, urge incontinence that seems “in your head,” or persistent pelvic discomfort, this conversation offers evidence-informed steps that respect how the body really works.
If this resonated, follow the show, share it with someone who needs hope, and leave a review telling us which change you’re trying first. Your lifestyle is your medicine—let’s make it work for you.
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're going to hear practical advice and effective strategies to ultimately add health span to your lifespan. My name is Ed Padget. I'm an osteopath and exercise physiologist with a special interest in longevity. Now today's guest is Dr. Nigel Brenner. Now he's a leader in the field of women's pelvic health and creator of the ironclad system. He's a chiropractor and rehabilitation specialist who spent the last 15 years helping women who've been told to do just more kegels and help them get real lasting results instead. See, Nigel's approach goes way beyond the pelvic floor. He looks at the whole system, the breathing, the spine mechanics, the nervous system, tone, lifestyle habits, diet, and nutrition. So he helps them rebuild pelvic strength and function from the ground up. He calls the system the ironclad system. And it's helped literally hundreds of women overcome issues like incontinence, prolapse, and chronic pelvic pain. And this is often after years of frustration with traditional care. So today he's actually going to share what works and why pelvic problems are so often misunderstood and how women can take control back over their bodies. Now, to me, this conversation was so interesting because of his whole body approach. It fits very nicely into the lifestyle medicine approach. So I'm hoping you're going to take a lot away from this. He shares some great insights into nutrition, some great insights into the nervous system, and also a really nice exercise, which I think anyone with some sort of pelvic dysfunction should be doing. So have a listen and I hope you enjoy this episode. So, Dr.
SPEAKER_00:Brer, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Ed. I appreciate being here and I look forward to a nice conversation.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this as well because this is such an important conversation to have. And I realize the irony of two men talking about pelvic floor, and we can talk about male pelvic floor and female pelvic floor, but mainly it's going to be about female pelvic floor. And so I want to give our listeners a just a little bit of a foundation of why you are talking about this subject. So what's your background and how did you get to be here today?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. Well, Ed, the as you know, is life takes you through all sorts of different twists and turns. So if somebody would have told me 20 years ago this is what I'd be doing, I would say they were not being truthful. But um a long story short is I would have to say that I followed a whole bunch of little crumbs. Um my great passion is I'm curious and I like to solve problems. And I didn't, this isn't my dreaming altruistic view to resolve uh incontinence in women, but it was really a self-preservation, to be honest. Um, how I kind of got started in this several years ago is my wife, after our last child, who's now eight, um, she started having incontinence. And um again, I'm talking about it very curtly and quickly, but I didn't know about her incontinence till almost eight or nine months after um it happened and started. Um, which of course helped me understand that even you know, intimate, close relationships is the stigma and the embarrassment of incontinence runs very deep. So, you know, strangers talking to strangers is certainly um, you know, there's a stigma and and a challenge, but even close relationships have that challenge. And so that was the case with my wife and I is she had a lot of judgment, self-judgment in particular about you know, not being able to be continent. And then after many tears and much conversation, she finally shared that she was having um issues holding her bladder. Um and so, you know, being a doctor and and a spouse, I'm like, all right, well, let's let's go see our OBGYN and let's get it figured out and problem solved, and we move along to the next step, right, of life. Um, and of course, she did that, and they looked at the anatomy and physiology and the exam and said, hey, there's nothing wrong physically. I'm not sure why you have this problem, but it's very common. So let's go ahead and send you to physical therapy and have some pelvic floor therapy done, which is the common first step management. And of course, she did that for about six or eight weeks, and she had modest improvement, maybe 20, 30 percent. Um so we went back and and we had a long discussion with her her OBGUIN, and she said, Well, hey, there's not a bunch of great options, but there's some medications we can try. Um, and if that doesn't work, there's some surgery and there's Botox. Um, so none of them are are foolproof um solutions, but but we're in the natural health world as a family and as a practice. And after many discussions, we're like, these are not viable options. And at that time, she was in her early 40s. And so the question becomes is this is not a lifelong solution. So that kind of stirred up in me that this is just not acceptable. Um, I've been in the natural health care world, I've been a chiropractor, functional medicine, acupunctures for um pushing on 30 years here soon. Um, and something just wasn't adding up. So, in our my frustration, I started researching. Um, and that research kind of helped me to first understand, and all all doctors and you know, therapists, we all learn the same anatomy and physiology. So it's not like a chiropractor learns different anatomy than a urologist. We're all learning the same stuff. Um, but as I researched and looked deeper, um, what really shocked me and and is really the the platform of what I discovered was was was the innervation of the sphincter of the bladder. And so for those of probably know this, is the bladder is like a balloon, and then you have you know the the uh the uter that exits, which is like a straw in the balloon, and then you have valves which are called sphincters. Males have one right near where the balloon and the straw meet, and one at the end, and women is kind of all together in one shorter area. But when I looked into the nerve supply, which is called innervation, I found that only 30% of the nerve supply of that valve is what's called consciously controlled. And so for those of us listening, it's like your bicep muscle is 100% controlled. If I want to lift my arm, I consciously move it, there's no questions asked. So when I stop the flow of urine of going to the bathroom, I'm only controlling 30% of that valve function. So the question that I had as I read and researched was well, what's the other 70%? And that seemed valid once that you know you asked the question. And I looked deeper, and of course, that other 70% is autonomically controlled. And what of course that means is it's unconsciously controlled valve. So the question becomes is well, what's influencing my general tone that's affecting my bladder? It's subconscious autonomic, and of the autonomic, it's made up of the sympathetic, which is the fight-flight part of the nervous system, and the parasympathetic. So they thought, well, we have to influence the 70% instead of just looking into the physical 30%. And that's kind of what started my journey of discovering hey, is we have to find a way to address the autonomic nervous system, which now opens the door to a big can of worms, which, you know, Ed, you're probably familiar with this. Is we're talking about whole body health right now. We're talking about inflammation, we're talking about stress management, we're talking about, you know, blood pressure, all these things that are autonomically controlled are also affecting whether there's continence or the bladder function or not. So that's kind of like how it came about.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, that's that's such an interesting journey because you started by describing, you know, your wife's symptoms. And I'm sure many people listening to this would be relating to that. It's like, okay, uh, either either themselves or their partner has a problem after childbirth. And then you really nicely explained why it's more common in women than men, and that's to do with men having two sphincters and and women having uh more one. And after child's birth, uh, it's more common just to do with uh the changes in in tissues there. But once they go and see a specialist who gives them the all clear from an anatomical point of view, like your wife was, sure, and then they do the exercises and they don't get better, then that's where I think most women just give up.
SPEAKER_00:Agreed. And so my observation is, and I don't encourage TV watching, but for research, it's fine, is if you watch television commercials, you'll notice that a huge number are drug commercials and adult diaper commercials. So clearly it's a problem because those of you selling, you know, those people selling things have noticed, is they know that there's not a good bridge between the problem and the solution. So that's where more diapers come into play. So there's this huge gap of people, and my wife would have been a perfect example had I not kind of been led on this path, that you just deal with it. And you think about it, she was 40 something at the time. You think of 40 or 50 years of just dealing with it, but then you also add in the other factors is is tissues are changing as we age, tissues are changing with hormones, men and women. So the problem has to become worse. And and to me, as a natural physician, that's just not acceptable. All right, that doesn't fall within my um my paradigm of how the body works.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, a hundred percent. And if we can change something sooner rather than later, like you said, the body is always going to be changing hormones, muscle tone, and so on and so on. So if we if we get people when they're younger to do this, then the results are gonna be even better as they get older. Um, but let's talk about uh an exercise that's pretty common. Most people would have heard of this. It's called the Kegel exercise. Now, from my understanding, from what you just told me, we've got this um was it 20% or 30% control? 30%, yeah. Okay. So when we're doing a kegel, we're firing those nerves from our brain, they're going down to the bladder, uh, to the sphincters, and they're uh they're tensing the the sphincters in the pelvic floor. But then we're not doing anything with that remaining percentage, the the autonomic nervous system. So tell us about kegels, uh, maybe explain what they are, and then um, and then say, well, or then you can tell us, are they going to be effective or are they gonna be can they be improved upon?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So a couple things is anybody, we're all humans, we can imagine you're going to the bathroom, and then you stop going to the bathroom. You just decide, you know, your kid walks in, or you know, you get interrupted, you stop. That would be your conscious control of the sphincter. You're stopping the flow of urine. And what's happening is so use the analogy of a balloon with a straw in the area that you blow, you've just squeezed the straw together. You squeeze the straw that stopped the bladder from emptying. There it is. Okay. Now, by exercising that control would be almost like doing a, you know, uh squeezing your fist together. That's going to improve tone and strength. That's true. But what it's doing is we're simplifying the bladder as a tube, a straw, and a valve. That is a piece of it, yes, but that's only a small piece. We also now have muscles in that area. You've got the levator ani, and you have several other pelvic floor muscles. And when it comes to women in particular, but those have been traumatized and stretched and changed. They've either too loose, which creates an issue, or they're too tight and scarred, which creates an issue. So what happens with the the cagle is it's only addressing one of the, I'll say five to ten components that are affecting the function of urine. Okay. So the pelvic floor function, and again, that was my wife's scenario, is they said, hey, you have trigger points in there, which are areas of muscle tension from stress or trauma or whatever it might have been. They worked out those. And of course, that's an uncomfortable and you know, um, invasive procedure. Um, and that still was only influencing that small component that's there. So I encourage all people, you know, next time you go to the bathroom, which we'll all do several times today, is practice stopping and starting. The more you control that component, um, is it going to resolve everything? No, but it's a step in starting to become aware because awareness is the first step with any sort of these health challenges. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, 100%. So she went through your we'll take your wife's example, but I sure this is a generic example for most women. Sure. She went through the therapy, they they gave her the exercises, they also helped with some of the tissue tension with trigger points, so on. And she didn't get any better. So then your doctor said, Well, there's some drugs you can take, and then some surgery. Nothing is really sort of 100%. Sure. What are those drugs and what are those surgeries?
SPEAKER_00:So the most notable are going to be beta blockers. Um, so beta blockers are a group of drugs that affect, which interestingly enough, they affect this the beta adrenergic receptor, which is a sympathetic nervous system receptor. So this is just a little aha moment that I had that I want to share, is is the medication world said, hey, if we affect the sympathetic nervous system, because the bat the beta adrenergic receptor is also used to regulate blood pressure. And so by relaxing the tone of the blood vessel, okay, relaxing the what's called the sympathetic tone, that reduces blood pressure, which again, there's other issues with that, but that's that's what it's for. But they found that using that medication has an impact on the bladder. So they kind of stumbled upon like, hey, the the sympathetic nervous system has a component of this. Now, the challenge with those medications is long-term use has been showing uh increased dementia risk. So so I improve my bladder function, I increase my dementia risk by multiple percentages. That doesn't seem a good trade-off. And then then the next one would be Botox, which Botox, for those of those familiar, a lot of people get it for wrinkles and their skin for aesthetics. But what it is, it's a neurotoxin. So what you're doing is the idea that the tissues are tight and tense, and there's two types of incontinence there's stress incontinence, and then there's urge incontinence. And urge incontinence has been more correlated with neurologic dysfunction. So they're saying, hey, is if we temporarily paralyze the nerves to these systems, then we're paralyzing the 70%. So let's go back to the 70% autonomic, 30% conscious, then the 30% should be enough to support you from leaking. So we're literally paralyzing some nerves. And again, you do it enough times in and it'll be permanent, but you do it a few times, it's more temporary. Um, and then finally, what's called a urethral sling. So what that would be is imagine the balloon and you imagine the ureter, this the straw coming out, you you surgically put a sling underneath that urethra as almost like a lift. Think of it like a little sling lifting up on that tiny little um tube to try to take some tension and pressure off of it. So again, if these were solutions that were like, hey, we've got a 99% solution, let's have at it. Then the risks and benefits are are clear. But most of these are you know, 50-50 or you know, five and five. So those are some big risks and some big um big challenges for for modest, if any, improvement. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I just want to unpack that Botox one a little bit more because that sounds very you know, from that from a lay person or I call myself a layperson in this area. Like you have a problem with you mentioned two types of incontinence, stressing continence and urge incontinence. Maybe you can define those before I ask the question.
SPEAKER_00:So stress is kind of like it says now, stress is a much bigger term, but from the medical um um identification, it's something physically is going on in that area. So that could be scar tissue, that could be loss of elasticity of tissue from hormones, stretch from childbirth, scar tissue, something physical that we've identified. Urge incontinence is more to do with neurology. So, so kind of the the differentiator people can imagine is I have to go to the bathroom, I get my pants half down, and I'm starting to leak. The anticipation of going to the bathroom cause you to go to the bathroom. That's more a neurologic, brain-based process. The stress would be is I have to go to the bathroom and I start leaking, but I can't hold it. That would be more physical. Now, we like to break things down to make it easy to talk about, but it's not one or the other. My experience is everything is both, right? And so the treatment, we like to break it down into those two categories so we can say, Oh, this is stress, physical therapy will take care of it, problem solved. Um, this is neurologic, we're going to look into these neurologic effects, that'll solve it. But of course, that's very myopic because they're both together and neurologic is the primary component.
SPEAKER_01:So Okay, so the solution that that Botox is proposing is to say, well, it's neurologic only, which we just established it probably isn't, and we're going to uh sort of well temporarily paralyze but eventually kill these nerves that supply the sphincters and the bladder, even though they might have the stressing consonants which actually needs better tone, more tone, and uh more control. So this is always end badly for people. Have you seen it ever work?
SPEAKER_00:I've never seen it work, but I guess we have to look a little deeper. Is and and I'm not criticizing, but I'm just saying is when there's no good options, people start to do anything and they hope it sticks, right? And so I've been in patient care for a long time, and and I believe Ed, you have been too. So when you don't know what to do, you try to you use your toolbox to do what you think you can do and hope it works. Well, I think all medical professions are the same. Now, I I don't believe in the the ideology that medication is the only option. There's thousands of other options, but if you only know medication, you're gonna use what's in your toolbox. And I think that's the biggest downfall, is because this is not a medication lack problem. Medication might have a tool, but it's not a solution in this. So Botox is just one of those perfect examples of saying, hey, it's neurologically, it's an impactor. What do we know that affects nerves? Well, Botox affects the nerves, neuron affects the nerves, beta blockers affect the nerves. Let's try them and see what happens.
SPEAKER_01:So I'm with you. I'm with you. And that that analogy you give is you know, the the clinicians want to help. I mean, that's why they get into what they what they do. And um, and if they only know certain ways of helping, then that might be the way they they help, but it might not be the best. thing in for the patient. Interestingly, I had a uh a lady on here, she was a uh Canadian trained medical doctor and she was frustrated and the only way she could help a person in her medical practice that came in in pain was with the ear um ear syringe. The only thing she could do everything else was a prescription wait and see prescription wait and see so she actually got into medical accounts similar to you and that she changed her whole her whole path because she wanted to be more effective in the moment. Person aside but um okay so we I think we've established that the traditional approaches are not all encompassing and some of them may not be that effective at all. So what are they missing and where else could or should we be looking in the human body for answers?
SPEAKER_00:So I like to answer this type of question with kind of a story. So most people who experience incontinence can usually relate to some life event that was kind of the impetus for the change. So I'll use my wife's example it was childbirth okay um it's easy for us to say childbirth caused incontinence but that's not that's not correct. Childbirth was the impetus that switched the balance to where the the bladder wasn't functioning properly. So again most people with this condition and we can also take it from broader perspective most conditions we all have we can usually say it started when it started this it started that and we know this it didn't start there that's where the symptoms began and that's where you became aware so so so where does this go from here is we have to look at the whole system and this is going to sound cliche but the autonomic nervous system is like a huge mainframe computer storing every single thought action emotion that we've ever experienced and I call this the sympathetic tone. So you and I are a product of all of our beliefs our traumas physical mental emotional and that's affecting our general tone of every cell tissue and system and organ of our body including our bladder okay so influencing the autonomic nervous system doesn't mean we have 30 years of Freudian psychology analysis because none of us have time for that right but we have to start setting new patterns and pathways to affect the autonomic nervous system and most importantly turn from a sympathetic dominance and the and again we know this the number one cause of death in most first world nations is heart disease. And heart disease is not a heart problem it's a sympathetic dominance problem. It's a our bodies in a constant state of fight or flight for decades and the blood vessels of the heart and the heart are usually the first ones to go. Well in the in the bladder world is the autonomic nervous system is one of the first things to go in terms of a woman's health but they don't make the correlation my bladder's my bladder problem my blood pressure and my blood sugar are another problem. Well they're all part of the same problem and so the key to I guess making changes is to start to influence the autonomic nervous system.
SPEAKER_01:And most that starts with I start with what's called a type of vagal nerve stimulation a neurofunctional retraining which is just a$20 word for starting to become conscientious and starting to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system and what that does is that starts to change the tone of not only the bladder and the valve and the sphincter but it also affects the blood vessels, the heart hormones, cortisol, thyroid hormone, the whole works does that make sense 100% yeah how can um someone do that at home or is it a sort of a a protocol that you have that you've developed or is that is there many ways of uh increasing the vagal tone sure so like the protocol I developed is specifically for the bladder and the outcomes and the tracking and that's what gets the good success.
SPEAKER_00:But yeah we can stimulate our vagal tone one of the key areas is right in our ear right here that's uh called the triangular fossa we can all feel that in our ears that is a a branch of the vagus nerve which comes along our carotid arteries and branches up. That's also a very important acupuncture point called Shin Men. But what you can do is simply take your thumb and index and start pinching it not so it's extremely painful but so you have a little bit of pressure and pain and then simply air in the nose and air out the mouth. So what you're doing is the analogy would be is we can all find our funny bone, you know our ulnar nerve right on our elbow. If you want to start probing around here you can light up your finger pretty easily right you can find the nerve and you can make your finger tingle. Well this is what's called a motor nerve a motor nerve runs things this is a sensory nerve which feels things. So when I stimulate this nerve I'm feeling my finger because that's what its job is is feeling this is a motor nerve and one of its primary jobs is to control other parts. So you're actually stimulating that connection and you're giving a stimulant for that nerve. And what's happening is that starts to affect the vagus nerve wanders throughout the whole body mostly and through the abdomen and it's influencing the general tone. So that's a simple first step but like anything is we do it once and we're like I don't feel any different well these are consistencies. As we do it consistently that starts to affect the general tone and as you breathe breathing creates what's called mindfulness which means simply is instead of letting the racket of life consume and your thoughts are like this spinning wheel that never stops and your body is reacting to that spinning wheel now you're simply taking your attention and putting it in one spot and what happens is that spinning wheel in your head is affecting the spinning cells in our body that are reacting to it. So we take our body and consistently bring it down into a healing relaxing tone. So a lot of people think that eastern medicine is we hum and and we sing on a hilltop but it's really not that esoteric. It's really practical is if we don't bring ourselves down from the rabbed up state then things start flying apart. And that's what most of us experience in our health life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah that's what I do like about eastern uh medicine practices is that they're very practical. Uh they're slower generally and they take a bit more time but their results can ultimately be more powerful than uh Western medicine. Actually I've just got a quick story about the vagal the vagal nerve just for my listeners here. So that vagal nerve the inside of the ear is supplied by the vagal nerve and it's it's a weird sensory component to a motor nerve and it's the only place that I think it's the only place that the um vagal nerve actually comes out to the to the surface. And one day my daughter she was about five years old she had her ears pierced or five or six something like that. And the um the lady who did it said gave us some antiseptic spray to spray on the the thing to make sure it wasn't getting infected. Anyway my wife uh she don't she didn't line up the nozzle correctly and she sprayed this spray directly into my daughter's ear and it was cold it was a it was during the winter. So that cold stimulated the vagus nerve uh so fast that she passed out and so you can actually not that pressing on it slowly with your hands is going to make you pass out but the vagus nerve relaxes the body so much that she got a complete blood uh loss from her brain because it all pulled in her legs and she passed out and as soon as she lay down she was fine she came back around but yeah it can happen. Yeah it's profound isn't it it's amazing okay so so what we were talking about there was the tone within the body and ways to reset that but also the stress of every day is going to be um a factor there so do you have any other ways that people that you you coach people to cope with stress apart from the vagal tone and um maybe more mindful methods sure so stress can kind of be this elusive term right everyone throws it around it's so I like to break stress down into three components is when people think of stress they think okay relationship money work job whatever it is it's in their mind but stress is a little bit more you know definable so there's physical stressors there's the frame the body the physicality the posture the neurology the orthopedics how everything fits together from a structural standpoint and the analogy I like to use for this is you know imagine you had a backpack that you were all born with a little backpack and every year somebody puts in a five pound weight and next year another five pounds and another so after you know 20 30 years you got 50 60 100 pounds and you don't even know you have it but you're carrying around this physical um vacuum of energy that sucks up energy that your body can use somewhere else that's how it relates to the spine whether it be a scholiotic problem whether it be um a low back issue whether it be postural and the upper back issue all those things those influence us and they affect us day to day then we have nutritional chemical hormonal stressors so what we consume every day food wise what we're exposed to what we're breathing what our habits are the the EMFs in our house the the air fresheners we plug in all these things are affecting and they're creating an energy suck that our body has to deal with most notably our liver right and then we have our mental and emotional stressors so I find it practical if we break the stressors into three components physical nutritional chemical hormonal and mental and emotional then people can say okay do I have to address everything at one time and of course that's overwhelming for all of us.
SPEAKER_00:So I'll simply say let's pick one let's start so again I'm a chiropractor by training initially so let's look at the frame let's look at the spine let's look at the nervous system let's enhance and remove restrictions from that to take the first step. It's not the answer to all things but it's a first step right and then as people start to feel more energy and less fatigue and more clarity then we can look into okay well let's broach let's start with food. So I like to start with food because that happens multiple times a day. So let's just look at what's what you're consuming. Let's start a food journal write down how what you eat and drink. Don't even change it just write it down and and like like breathing and awareness and mindfulness writing food down makes us mindful of how food influences how we feel and we don't even have to try to do it just the act of doing it leads to you understanding just like the act of you practicing reading learns how to become a proficient reader, right? It just happens. And so and then the next step is is as you become aware of that then we start looking into the bigger darker hole and I call that one our mind. So is you know between our ears in my opinion is is the solution to all of our health problems. I'm just not quite there yet but but looking at how our mind influences our physicality and we can all experience that too right is you're upset how do you feel you're upset how's your communications with others it tends to add to the upsetness right you know your ideas is is the world inherently bad or is it inherently good that definition changes how you deal with everything. What's your resentments what's your anger is what pisses you off the most all these things are influencing our health so so when it comes to any sort of condition we look in well what are those those three facets and let's start with the simple one first and then that builds on to the next and what it also helps people do it is they start to understand that this is a process of becoming versus how we've been led to believe is there's a savior who's going to save us. And what's the savior? Well it's pharmacology we're waiting for the newest research to show the newest drug that's going to save us from ourselves well that's just a skewed way of thinking and unfortunately that leads to more disease and and more you know um solutions that are outside of ourselves. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah I like the way you broke that down into three areas because stress is hard to define for some people and and it means different things to different people. And this is something I find in my practice where people say okay um you know my my headache or my back pain or whatever it's got better but it's uh it sort of got worse last week and I say okay were you stressed and I go no it's fine. And I say okay did you sleep badly yeah did you have a busy day at work yeah did you drink water no okay so to me the sleep the busy day and drinking water are stresses but to that person they would just thought maybe financial stress or partner stress or something like that. And it really helps to define stress to to clients and patients when we're talking about it because we we don't want them to assume that we're talking about the same thing. And the way you broke it down is is is brilliant. Okay so we've gone from looking at the the nervous system from the inside, looking at the stress in those three different ways and so now we want to talk I well I want to talk a little bit more about a couple of those things. You mentioned nutrition being a stress and I know that you uh talk about some the three beverages for example that we can talk about that no one seems to know is related to the bladder. So let's look at nutrition as being a stressor and you know I've set you up for this but maybe you can talk about those three beverages.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah let's talk beverages first and then we can maybe branch into the nutrition here in a second. But so if if you look at the big picture is the nervous system is always monitoring and adapting and changing. So when we put in anything into that system that influences it has to have an impact. Okay so we'll just talk about caffeine simply as the first step. Caffeine's a stimulant so if you have a system that's not that efficient and I have children so here's a good example if you give your kid a red lollipop at seven in the evening you know that your night has just been ruined. You know any parent can it can attest to that you put in a neurotoxin at seven at night that child is not going to sleep. Now as an adult we've built in some buffer mechanisms so that we can tamper our responses but a child doesn't have them you see them right away well caffeine is a stimulant so you're stimulating the nervous system that's already not functional. So it only makes sense that it's going to affect how it works, right? And then you look at things like fizzy water or bubble water that's a big thing where I live is people like to drink that. But you're changing the pH you're irritating blood vessel and GI linings that affects tissue it affects bladder linings. So if you I've simplified the bladder as a balloon but it's a balloon but it also has a complex endothelial lining which is the lining from the inside. So that lining can be influenced by the chemicals the toxins or even the pH of the gases like the CO2 which would be in fizzy water. So that's going to influence it. So now back to the bigger question is once we start paying attention then these things become self-evident. So let me kind of expand on that and I love this analogy because we can all relate is Ed if I came to you and I said Ed I'm broke I don't have a dime to my name can you help me figure out how to manage my finances and Ed's going to ask me he's gonna say okay Nigel where are you spending your money and I'm gonna say well I don't know and of course you're gonna say well let's just start paying attention for the next week write down every dollar you spend and let's sit down next week and talk about it. And I'm gonna write down every nickel I spend and then you and I are going to sit down and you're gonna look at this in one second you're gonna say all right Nigel you're you're buying a nine dollar cup of coffee every single morning said why don't we start saving you nine bucks a day by why don't you have that cup of coffee at home for two or three cents, right? So the act of just paying attention you don't have to be a doctor to figure this out you're just starting to ask some pertinent questions and be curious about yourself. You start eating food and you notice oh my gosh at one o'clock I tend to have the worst time with my bladder control. Now is it the food you ate at lunchtime maybe is it the stress that happens with your 11 o'clock meeting with your boss maybe so these are all things that kind of I would say emerge when you start to pay attention. And so my system isn't so that it's magical is it's starting to bring things to the forefront that you're unconscious to and those are the same things that have been brewing long before the problem ever existed because we talked about the sympathetic tone right and so in my wife's case childbirth was the impetus that brought it to the surface but it came deeper how she manages all the stressors of motherhood of life of work and all those things played a role in it and that's kind of where the solution lied is taking those steps and then it becomes self-evident for what to do.
SPEAKER_01:So caffeine uh and um in coffee the bubble water and I've heard you talk about in the past about the tannins in tea and red wine affecting the mucus linings a little bit as well. Tell us about that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah so all of those things influence the sensitivity or lack thereof of linings and of course the bladder the um urethra they're all lined with that same tissue as or similar tissue as your GI tract so that's a very first simple step. And let's talk about nutrition in a in a broader sense then because you mentioned we'll we'll start with beverages then move on to nutrition what general advice do you give people uh for around nutrition and um incontinence sure so the simple part of it is is I like to look at the um the percentages of a cell so if you break down any cell in our body is we're gonna find that we're made up of primarily fat and protein right and there's very little um glucose involved except for energy right so when we think about how do I heal a body we want to look at how do I give the body building blocks to heal and how do I remove things that don't heal or just give it raw energy that it doesn't necessarily need. So from a from a nutritional standpoint I I encourage people and I don't like to label things because people tend to take them off big tangents but I tend towards what's called a paleo type diet paleo would be primarily protein healthy fats and extremely low amounts of simple carbohydrates. And and the reasoning behind that not only personally that's the way I consume food but that falls in line with you're giving the body the tools in the building blocks protein and fat and you're giving it the the call the spark plugs the enzymatic reactors like the B vitamins and vitamins and such and minerals to build but you're really leaving out the things that just give it raw energy that it doesn't need which is going to tax the system via insulin. So that would be the carbs the simple sugars which again is the major cause of chronic inflammation Blood vessel issues and and as such.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Thank you for sharing. So I'm just going to summarize again. We've moved on from the nervous system to the stresses to one of the stresses being nutrition. And I think that brings us nicely to the body you mentioned about that's always a nice place to start. Is the structure aligned and so on? So from an exercise point of view, do you do uh do you recommend kegels or do you recommend something else that people can try?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So I developed an exercise, I call it the squaggle. Um, it's really a combination between a low squat and a kegel. And then it also uses what's called the vasopressive technique, which I'll explain in a second. So so we talked about this earlier. Is you go to the bathroom, you stop the stream flow of urine. That is a kegel, essentially. Okay. It's a little piece of the problem, not the whole. Now we want to look at what's influencing the area of the bladder. Why did they decide that a urethral sling might even be an option? Well, you have tension, you have scar tissue, or you have lack of tone of the perineum, which is the part right underneath your um lower part of your body. So, what I do is a squago where I have people put their hands on a countertop, pending their flexibility and age and whatever else, and squat as low as can be comfortable with your legs wide. Okay. As you squat, you're gonna start to feel the inner thighs, the adductor muscles stretch. You're gonna feel underneath your genitalia start to stretch. That's the perineum. And you're gonna hold that stretch while you breathe out, which we'll talk about in a second. And then you do a cagle at the same time. So you're squeezing as though you're stopping the flow of urine while you're stretching the perineum, and you're breathing out at the same time, and you're holding that for two to three seconds. So let's break down what's happening. As I breathe out, the diaphragm is lifting as it pushes the air out of your lungs, it's drawing up the inner organs, the small intestine, large intestine. What that's doing is it's drawing pressure off the bladder. Okay, that's called vasopressive, where it's literally pulling up. Then you're squatting down, so you're opening up the perineum while you're drawing up on the bladder. So there's several mechanisms going on, but as you go along consistently, you're stretching through the base, you're pulling up on the perineum with the cagle, and then you're pulling up using the diaphragm to take that organ pressure off. And like anything, is I'm right-handed. If I shoot a basketball with my left hand, I'm all, you know, wiggly, right? Because I don't have that good neural connection. So at first it's going to feel awkward and weird, and you're going to think, but as you do that consistently, just like with your right hand, you've done it more. So those nerve patterns are more ingrained, then it starts to ingrain that process. And what you're doing is you're addressing really all the factors that are physically affecting that bladder all at the same time. Now you're still missing the 70%, but that's you know where other components of the process go. But you're really hitting all factors that influence that bladder. And in one simple practice, when done consistently, is extremely effective.
SPEAKER_01:And so are you you're squatting down as you breathe out, and then you you straighten your legs to come back up in between each, like that's a rep, so to speak?
SPEAKER_00:Yep. So that would be a rep. And I have people do that 10 times. So you're dropping, and again, is there's knee problems, there's ankle problems. So it's you really want to widen your stance as much as you can to feel the stretch, but you don't want to get stuck there or have some orthopedic issue that keeps you from coming back up. So, you know, good judgment's important here. And so you hold that for two to three seconds, then you take a deep breath in, you let off the cagle and come up. And you drop it down again, kegle, stretch, breathe out, hold it for three, come up. Ten repetitions would be one set for that day.
SPEAKER_01:And you mentioned something really interesting there, that's that vasopressive movement with the diaphragm moving up and the and the well, we can call it the pelvic diaphragm moving up as well. And so do you look at people's breathing patterns as part of the ironclad system as well?
SPEAKER_00:So, in terms of an assessment, we don't assess the breathing pattern, but in terms of the protocol, we're absolutely breathing pattern focused. Because let's go back to the sympathetic, parasympathetic. In sympathetic mode, the fight-flight mode mode, we breathe shallow and we pant, right? That causes restriction. So just the act of being aware of our breathing is essentially helping us to start to not only relax the lung diaphragm, the pneumatic diaphragm, but we're also becoming aware of how our breathing and how our body work together. So, in terms of, you know, if a patient's consulting with me or doing my protocol, is I'm not breaking it down so that they have to have to academically think about this because there's so many moving parts. The practicality is breathing affects the physiology. We're going to be concentrating on our breathing while we perform these techniques.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, that's so interesting. I I talk to I uh work with people with scoliosis and I have a breathing sort of routine that I use. And one of my great mentors, a guy called Gary Gray in the US, he's always talked about if you can get a person to do the thing you want them to do without thinking about the thing they want to do, it's better than actually having them consciously do it. And I think that's brilliant. So it's like, okay, we're gonna get you breathing, and that breathing is gonna have all these different changes throughout the body. It's gonna automatically get your uh hopefully get the two diaphragms in sync and so on, but you don't need to think about it too much, then that's the best outcome.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the mind can be a great uh adverse determinant, right?
SPEAKER_01:It can be, it's huge. And we always taught in osteopathy that you've got these internal slings of fascia. Um one of the slings I find fascinating goes from the heart up into the to the neck, right? So the neck is actually sort of um not dangling, but it's it's it's attached up into the middle, middle part of your neck. And then where the heart sits uh on the diaphragm, there's um a connection that comes from the front of the diaphragm down through the uh middle part of the abdomen, the urachus, and down into the bladder. And one of the connections that that we were always taught to explore was if their neck posture or the posture in general, but mainly the neck is forward, it takes tension off that internal sling and puts pressure on the bladder. And you can correct the neck to help the bladder. I thought that was a really cool connection.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And actually, just on a side tangent is myofunctional therapy kind of addresses that specifically, is those fascial tones affect every component of your life experience, how your face develops, how your um emotional state develops. It can even be shown to how it influences and creates, you know, like criminalized behavior based upon just the ability to aerate and how it affects the brain development. It's just fascinating and pretty awesome. You know, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:The fascia is certainly one of those sort of last frontiers, I think, of anatomy that people haven't really studied uh to date because you know they've always just removed the fascia to get to the organ or the muscle underneath. Okay. Agreed. Let's let's bring it together. I I don't know whether we've discussed everything about the ironclad system, but I want you to let us know what else is in there, what other things you would be looking at that maybe we haven't discussed so far.
SPEAKER_00:So, my experience is let's just take our whole discussion. If somebody's curious and interested, they can discover everything that I've discovered. But uh my experience in patient care is, especially in this you know, electronic world, information is absolutely everywhere. It's not because they don't have information, it's just you don't know what to do with it and you don't have time to figure it out. So I think the biggest thing about my program is not only is it tried and trued and it works, is I took and I put it into a package that's simple, easy, and then I found a couple of reasons people don't get things addressed, especially when it comes to the bladder issues, is uncomfortable conversations because nobody likes to talk about it, and there's you know many reasons for that, is they're embarrassed, even as like my wife. Second, there's not good options, and this the third is time, because hey, who has time to go to a doctor's offices and try this and it doesn't work that well and try this and this and this, and then the third, the fourth is money. So I wanted to put it together, say, okay, how do we address all of those barriers where you can do things that are effective at home? You can make it simple enough that it's not like, okay, I'm dedicating eight hours a day for the next month. Well, nobody has time for that, so you're destined to fail already, and then put it in a trackable form that says, hey, you know, this is where you started. Because I don't know about you, but when when I've had challenges in my life, you look back to yesterday and you don't feel a whole lot different. So you're like, oh, it just doesn't work. But if you look back a month, you're like, wow. And so that's why tracking is so important, because then you can look back and you can say, wow, I was here, now I'm here, and I'm not perfect, but I can see the progress. And what that does is that encourages us to continue on a path instead of throw it away because we didn't get to where we wanted in in a week or two. So I guess that's the thing is to take all of these different techniques and and these different, I'll say, neurological insights, put it into something that's very simple, trackable, and then that by design gets the results. And that's kind of, I guess, what I'm excited about.
SPEAKER_01:And if a person was to learn more about you or work with you, do you have like um an entry-level program or some information they can have prior to joining the whole system?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So this first the simp the system is actually super simple. Um you know, go on my website, drnigelbrayer as it sounds.com. Um, there we have a lot of free stuff on there. We talk about a lot of the things we discuss. There's other podcasts that I've been on. That there's a lot of value in learning that. But then as the system itself is it's really inexpensive. It's$47. Um, you get the download. You know, I live in the US, most medical doctor visits are a couple hundred dollars. So for a quarter of the price of any doctor visit, you have really the years of of um research and trial and error that we've put together. And the matter is is just starting and taking simple steps. And I've tried to make it so simple because again, I've I've been at this long enough to know what are the barriers, how do we address those barriers so that people get the results? Because the life change is is pretty pretty profound.
SPEAKER_01:So, yeah, okay. So I think you know, you your access to your system is at a very reasonable price. And like you said, there's lots of free resources as well for people to get to know, know like, and trust you as well, which is important. So thank you. Absolutely yeah, thank you very much for sharing that, and thank you for sharing everything you did today on this podcast.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, Ed I. I so appreciate the opportunity and I hope your uh listeners get some benefit.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks for joining me in my conversation with Dr. Nigel Brayer. Uh hopefully you really got some actual insights from this, and maybe you don't necessarily fit exactly what he's talking about, but I'm sure you know someone who does. So feel free to share my podcast with a friend who you think can benefit from this. And if you ever want my help with something, you can actually contact me directly via email, ed at edpaget.com. Also, you can go to my website at edpaget.com, and there you're gonna learn a little bit more about how I can help you make your lifestyle your medicine.