Easy Way To Fix Chronic Pain at Its Source

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance span. Things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting-edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Here’s something that you probably haven’t heard. The place that hurts on your body is often not the same place that broke down. My guest today has spent more than 2 decades proving that.

Nick Urban [00:01:06]:
David Starbucks Smith is an exercise therapist trained under Pete Egoscue, and he’s rebuilt the bodies of NFL, ATP, and WTA athletes by ignoring the pain and hunting that imbalance that caused it. His case is simple: a body out of alignment moves less, and moving less is what ages you. David, welcome to the show.

David Starbucks Smith [00:01:33]:
Thank you. It is awesome to be here.

Nick Urban [00:01:35]:
When someone walks into your studio for the first time, before they’ve even said a word to you about what it is that’s hurting on their body, what is their body already telling you?

David Starbucks Smith [00:01:48]:
Fantastic question, because you can discern so much from just looking at someone’s body right off the bat. Most people walk in when they, when I had a clinic, I don’t have one anymore. I’ve worked with people online now, but it doesn’t matter where you see them. As soon as they walk in, you can immediately tell where they hurt based on their posture, based on their gait mechanics. And if you can’t tell right away, you’ll know very quickly, just with a few questions, Or just by watching them do a few moves, bend over to touch their toes, put their hands behind their head, pull their elbows back. You know, posture is a snapshot of function. And so when we’re looking at someone, when I’m looking at someone’s body, I’m immediately looking to see where they’re just misaligned enough that it’s creating stress on a muscle or a joint or a bone or throughout the whole system somewhere. So a great question because most people think that you have to, you say, oh, it hurts right here, and you point to a spot.

David Starbucks Smith [00:02:50]:
Well, that’s That’s great. We need to know that. But really, what we’re looking at is the whole body as a unit because it’s talking to us from the second you walk in the door and the whole time along.

Nick Urban [00:03:01]:
So, we are recording this virtually. So, this is not going to be the easiest task for you. And, I’m also currently standing on a walking treadmill, so that will throw things off even further. If I was to walk into your clinic when you were seeing people in person, perhaps because you do this virtually now, you can still do this. What would you, where would your eyes go on my body? What would the imbalances that you’re seeing right now indicate to you?

David Starbucks Smith [00:03:28]:
Sure. Well, I can only see your upper body, but right off the bat, I see one shoulder that’s higher, the right shoulder higher. I see your muscles more defined on one side of your neck. I see your head tilted just slightly to one side, and I see a rotation, a twist. So, just from your upper body, I can tell that there’s a shoulder blade disparity. There is a muscle tension disparity that goes all the way down your spine. I can tell that one hip is also misaligned because anytime a shoulder is rotated or a scap is misaligned, a scap, that’s a shoulder blade, is misaligned, then we know that there’s a hip misaligned and there’s an imbalance between the right side of the body and the left side of the body, which travels all the way down to the feet. So, chances are I would expect to see one foot more turned out with you compared to the other or one foot sitting more in front of the other compared

Nick Urban [00:04:20]:
Mm-hmm.

David Starbucks Smith [00:04:20]:
compared to the opposite foot. And, that’s going to tell us again that there is more stress and pressure on one side of your body, one ankle, one knee, one hip, one side of your spine compared to the other. And, all you need to do is look at one part of the body to determine that there’s imbalance everywhere.

Nick Urban [00:04:36]:
Yeah. So, I had an ankle injury in rugby a long time ago and I did some rehab work for it specifically. And, I started realizing as I was doing it that once you mess up Any part of the body, especially somewhere on the ground where you’re pushing with a lot of force, that dysfunction goes up the body and throws other things out of balance, which then goes back down the body and throws more things out of balance. And so it seems like it’s very hard to navigate effectively. And also your assessment is made more complicated by the fact that the treadmill underneath the desk is not perfectly aligned. It’s off to the side a little bit. Same with the camera on top of the computer. But yes, I can look in my own video and see a lot of the same things.

David Starbucks Smith [00:05:19]:
Yeah. And you really bring up a good point because the site of the pain is not always the cause of the pain, right? And you kind of open with that, which is you hurt your ankle in rugby and now the rest of your body is compensating. It compensates for the imbalance, the dysfunction of the ankle and the pain. So now you’re not on that, it was your left foot?

Nick Urban [00:05:43]:
Yeah, left ankle.

David Starbucks Smith [00:05:46]:
So, as you’re trying to walk with an ankle that is now compromised, now that ankle, that same side knee, that hip, they’re not able to function fully as well. And, the body has this brilliant mechanism. The brain will shut down muscles around an injury so that you don’t use it to protect it. So now, you’ve got muscles that are turned on or off, certain muscles on to compensate, other muscles off to relax so that they can heal and so they can start to get better without overstraining. And that’s what you’re seeing with your body in any injuries, that you see compensation. Something else takes over for the pain, for the function of the opposite side, or even the same side. But eventually, you do that long enough and you will develop pain in some place. So if it’s your left ankle, Chances are you could develop pain in your right hip or your right knee or even one side of your back.

David Starbucks Smith [00:06:43]:
And the problem is that most people don’t treat the whole body. So if you came to me or you came to someone for back pain, they would not necessarily look automatically at your ankle to know that the problem was the ankle dysfunction mechanics that threw your body out of alignment, compensated, and now your back hurts. And, it might just take going after your back, but you might have to restore full function to that foot and ankle as well in order to ultimately solve the imbalance that created the pain.

Nick Urban [00:07:15]:
Let’s explore that because your method is, as you’re mentioning, about the pain isn’t necessarily where the problem originates. And, that’s the opposite of a lot of the way that modern medicine works. How did you make the case to someone who’s about to get an MRI on a particular body part that hurts?

David Starbucks Smith [00:07:37]:
My first answer is no such thing as, no, let me back up. Knowledge is always good. So if you’re going to get an MRI on a part that hurts, great. There’s no downside to knowledge. However, when you get an MRI and the MRI is looking right at that piece and part, it’s not detecting the overall body imbalance that created the stress on that piece and part. So unless you were tackled by a 300-pound lineman, fell off your bike or had some kind of traumatic injury, then we know that the MRI isn’t telling you the why, it’s just telling you the what. But the why might have to be addressed if you ultimately want to solve the pain long-term or the imbalance that’s creating it. Because you might be able to solve the MRI, whatever the MRI shows, let’s say it shows a bulging or herniated disc and you go and get surgery and they remove part of the disc, great, but the imbalance still exists.

David Starbucks Smith [00:08:34]:
So even if you don’t have back pain anymore, it’s going to show up somewhere else in a hip, the other side of the back, or even that same part eventually.

Nick Urban [00:08:43]:
Because most people listening in are not going to have an ankle injury caused by rugby, which then translates into all the different dysfunctions and imbalances that you just pointed out on me. So how common are imbalances and accordingly the compensations that arise from the imbalances?

David Starbucks Smith [00:09:06]:
Well, the answer to that is as common as humans are. 80% of every human, of all humans on the planet will undergo back pain at some point in their lives. I’d say probably, that’s the statistic. I’d say probably like 90 to 95%. And anytime you have pain in your body that’s not caused by a traumatic injury, there is an imbalance. Period. Full stop. That’s what it’s about.

David Starbucks Smith [00:09:34]:
What causes pain is not the herniated disc, it’s not the torn rotator cuff, it’s not the Achilles tendonitis, it’s not the diagnosis of your pain. What causes the pain is the misalignment that created the irritation, the inflammation, the pain eventually. So we think of pain as being the problem, but really pain is just the symptom. It’s just the last stop on the train. The first stop started with an imbalance somewhere in the body that cascaded into compensation, overstress, wear and tear, and eventually pain. So, you got to back up the train if you want to address the real part of the injury and the real reason for it.

Nick Urban [00:10:14]:
So, for these, there’s the 2 different classes. You have the acute injury where you fall off a bike, you whatever. And then, you also have the other kind, the more chronic issues that arise and get worse over time and the acute injury where you fall off the bike or you fall down and hurt your knee or something like that. That’s not necessarily going to be subject to the same. It’s not a sign of imbalances the same way that the chronic issue is.

David Starbucks Smith [00:10:44]:
Well, you’d be surprised. And I say that because we are walking accidents waiting to happen. And what I mean by that is, let’s say that your right shoulder is rotated forward, the joint is out of position, the arm bone is rotated inward, which you can do if you just rotate your palm down towards your body or on the desk, you’ll notice that your whole arm rotates inward. Most people, or many people, are walking around with that exact condition where their shoulder is rounded forward, the arm bone is rotated in, and Now, take that same arm and fall on it. And now you’re more predisposed to injury because the arm is less, might be less mobile, right? And able to withstand the injury. It’s out of position and out of a line. So now when you fall, you’re knocking one part of the shoulder joint rather than it being able to absorb the force completely throughout the joint. So you’re hitting one spot rather than Every spot in the shoulder.

David Starbucks Smith [00:11:49]:
So, you can see now that some muscles would also be more predisposed to getting strained, stretched, torn in that position, in that condition. So, one way I like to think of it is kids, right? Little kids, they’re generally perfectly aligned. They’re made of rubber, right? And, they fall and they get back up and they keep going. As we age, but really not just age, it’s really about as we fall out of position and alignment, We become more predisposed to injury because we lose mobility and we lose the ability to absorb the forces that come with a fall. So your question was perfect in the sense that, you know, does it just matter for, you know, it doesn’t, does alignment matter if we just fall and we hurt ourselves? The answer is sometimes no. Sometimes there’s just too much stress on a joint that it can’t handle. But the other answer is yes, absolutely. There is, when the alignment is off, you are more predisposed to injury as well, no matter what you do or how you fall.

Nick Urban [00:12:49]:
Yeah. And like when you fall, you can have any number of injuries and perhaps the injury that you do sustain, the one that shows up is the one, the part of the body that is more susceptible due to imbalances and compensations.

David Starbucks Smith [00:13:04]:
That’s right. That’s right. And this is what we noticed in the football players. When the football player goes on the field with major imbalances from past injuries or from weightlifting techniques or imbalances, when they go on the field and they predispose, we can already tell if one knee is pointing out compared to the other, or one foot is turned out compared to the other, or one shoulder is way out of alignment compared to the other, or there’s a shoulder blade that’s out of position. We can generally tell where the body is already stressed. going onto the field. And, most people think that the cause of the pain was something they did, right? They got tackled, they were playing tennis and they bent for a ball, but the problem really is the imbalanced body going onto the field rather than the actual sport itself. And, don’t get me wrong, of course, we get hurt in sports, right? We get tackled, people, athletes get tackled, they get hurt.

David Starbucks Smith [00:14:02]:
That’s a part of sports that some are just absolutely unavoidable.

Nick Urban [00:14:06]:
Yeah.

David Starbucks Smith [00:14:07]:
But those are the things you can’t control. What you can control is the body going onto the field. Balance that first, and you have a better chance of staying away from injury.

Nick Urban [00:14:15]:
Speaking of tennis, you were a pro tennis player before you did any of this. 2 decades and 3 books later, what would you tell that version of you that was just starting to figure out the body?

David Starbucks Smith [00:14:29]:
Oh man, stretch a lot more. Balance out my body before going on the court more, take better care in recovery. The thing about being young and being an athlete is that you go, go, go, right? You’re constantly training, you’re constantly going, and too often you just keep pushing rather than step back, let your body heal, let it recover. And so, I would’ve taken more time to recover. I would’ve taken much more time to let my body kind of balance and relax and heal before pushing it over and over and over again. That’s maybe the biggest thing I would’ve done. I would also change my mental game a lot. I think any athlete will tell you that most sports are, at a certain level, they’re about 90 to 95% mental and about 5% physical.

David Starbucks Smith [00:15:23]:
And I say that because everyone is so talented these days in these sports that how do you distinguish? And you’ll see in tennis and in every sport that what distinguishes someone ultimately is how they handle the mental challenge of pressure and stress and the repetitive nature of training and traveling and all the things. So mentally, there’s a huge strain, and I think it’s what really kind of separates the good from the great. So I would focus more on that as well.

Nick Urban [00:15:56]:
Given the context of this conversation, I’m surprised you didn’t speak more specifically about addressing imbalances and compensation patterns. When you say stretching, what does that look like to you?

David Starbucks Smith [00:16:08]:
Yeah, imbalances and compensation patterns for sure. If I had that knowledge then, my gosh, I would have implemented immediately because I lived with back pain. I mean, I literally had back pain throughout my entire college career and the first year in the pros where I couldn’t run a lap around a track without locking up and spasming. I mean, I remember my freshman year in college, I remember the coach said, all right, let’s go let’s go do a lap around the track. The track stadium was right next to the tennis courts at UC Berkeley. So, we literally walked out our courts and then got right on the track, start jogging. And, I got not even a quarter of a lap around the track when my back locked up, spasmed, and dropped me to the ground.

Nick Urban [00:16:50]:
Wow.

David Starbucks Smith [00:16:50]:
And, I remember just being there on the ground for about 30 seconds having trouble breathing because the back spasm was so intense. Finally, it let go, I could breathe again, and I got up and like any jock, not Rhodes Scholar, I got up and I started running all over again. And, a couple seconds later, the spasm hit me again. So, that was kind of a typical training day for me in college. Back pain, just struggled with it. So, yeah, I mean, the back pain is what drove me ultimately to find Pete Egoscue to get into alignment and posture and to help people for the last 26 years with acute and chronic pain. It’s I know what pain is like. I know how miserable it is.

David Starbucks Smith [00:17:38]:
It keeps you from doing the things you love with the people you love. It keeps you from your athletic goals and dreams. And eventually, it can keep you from living the long, happy life you want to live because as we move less, we live less.

Nick Urban [00:17:52]:
So, when you were actually going about designing that hypothetical stretching routine for that version of yourself, the younger version of yourself, Would you have just followed some generic stretching routine you found online or some yoga program? How would you have actually gone about architecting that?

David Starbucks Smith [00:18:10]:
Well, I’ll tell you what I did, and then I’ll tell you what I would do. So, I went to the doctors, the physical therapists, the trainers, and they all told me the same thing, which is stretch my hamstrings and strengthen my abs. But, I could palm the ground and I could do 1,000 sit-ups without pain. So, I knew that my hamstrings and my abs were not the problem. And, that was the scary part is that, and the frustrating part because I said, I just want to know why my back hurts. And, nobody seemed to know why. They were throwing cookie-cutter exercises and plans for me that everyone with back pain got.

Nick Urban [00:18:43]:
Yeah.

David Starbucks Smith [00:18:43]:
And, it helped some people but it didn’t help a lot of people. And, I wrote this book called Align, Feel, Heal and did a lot of research about chronic pain along the way. And, there are over 50 million people walking around with chronic pain.

Nick Urban [00:18:56]:
Hmm.

David Starbucks Smith [00:18:56]:
On a given year, 15 million people. So, you know, the Western medical model is wonderful. It does so much for us. It saves lives every single day. And like a fishing net that gets a lot of fish and a lot of different species, and you can drag it through the water and capture a lot of things, like the Western medical model helps so many things, but that fishing net has holes in it and some things fall through the holes. And these, the people with chronic pain, their symptom, their problem has fallen through the hole in the net. And so, I have great sympathy and compassion for people who have been dealing with pain, not just because of the statistics, but because I was in it myself for a long time. And, there’s a really frustrating aspect to that.

Nick Urban [00:19:37]:
Hmm.

David Starbucks Smith [00:19:37]:
So, to answer the other part of the question, which I think was what would I do about it now, I would definitely get a more specific routine. I’d go to a personal trainer, I’d go to a physical therapist who or someone like a posture therapist, or someone who had more knowledge in looking at the body as a whole. Because I think I’m a big believer in adding people to your health team that are unique and different. Because you have your doctors, you have your physical therapists, and they’re wonderful and they’re awesome, and you need them. And you should add, or could add, an acupuncturist, a sports psychologist or psychotherapist. You could add yoga. You could add massage and stretching and mobility and all the things, right? So, I would go out and I would look for more things. I would find someone who could help me kind of address my whole body rather than just my hamstrings and abs.

Nick Urban [00:20:40]:
Okay. Since there’s so many people with pain and assume that a large percentage of it is caused by imbalances and Compensation patterns, as we keep going back to. Are there any things they can do at home to figure out if this is an actual issue for them, or perhaps it’s something else?

David Starbucks Smith [00:21:02]:
Yes. Look in the mirror. First thing I would do is I’d take my clothes off or throw on some shorts and a t-shirt and stand in front of the mirror. And if you want to know if your pain has anything to do with your posture, the mirror is going to give you a huge clue. So, the first thing you do is you look at, you understand where your pain is. Let’s just say it’s in your back and you have chronic back pain. Well, first, as you look in the mirror, is one shoulder lower than the other? Is one shoulder sitting forward of the other?

Nick Urban [00:21:36]:
Mm-hmm.

David Starbucks Smith [00:21:37]:
Is one hand sitting lower than the other? When you look at yourself in the mirror and you look at your hands, do you see the backs of your hands in the mirror or looking at your thumb and your forefinger? And does each hand look different from the other? So, right off the bat, we’re looking for imbalances. We’re looking for postural misalignments, but these misalignments indicate tension imbalances in the spine. You can go further than that. You can look down at your feet. Is one foot sitting in front of the other? Is one foot turned out more than the other? Close your eyes. As you stand there, notice if your weight is towards your toes or towards your heels. That’s indicating an imbalance between the front and back sides of the body. Notice if your weight is on the insides of your feet or the outsides, and are they different from one foot to the other? You might be on the inside of one foot, on the outside of the other.

David Starbucks Smith [00:22:31]:
And then notice, are you standing heavier on one foot than the other? Is there more pressure in the ground? Is there more pressure on the ground on one foot compared to the other? Because just that alone would tell you that you’re overloading one side, 90% of the time, the side that you overload is the side that hurts first. It’s kind of like going into a gym, grabbing a weight, a 10-pound weight on one arm and a 5-pound weight on the other, lifting, doing bicep curls. And, when it came time to stretch or when it came time to do something else that’s difficult or demanding, guess which arm is going to hurt first? The one that’s been doing more work.

Nick Urban [00:23:07]:
Yeah.

David Starbucks Smith [00:23:08]:
Right? And, it’s fatigued and overstrained and overstressed. So, that’s why you check your feet, Is one foot turned out more than the other? Is more pressure in one foot? And so on. So, I think the first thing you can do is look at your posture in the mirror to determine if it has anything to do, or your alignment has anything to do with your chronic pain. I would start with that.

Nick Urban [00:23:27]:
A lot of the injuries and the pain are not coming from a lack of strength as we’re often told they are. What happens if you continue going about your normal strength training or other exercise routine on top of it?

David Starbucks Smith [00:23:41]:
You said, and I’m going to repeat this, that a lot of injuries aren’t caused by a lack of strength, and I couldn’t agree more. Injuries are not necessarily a sign that the area is weak, which is how we generally treat it. In the Western medical world, if you have a shoulder injury, you go and you strengthen the muscles of your shoulder. If you have a back injury, you strengthen the muscles of your back. I can tell you that there’s flawed logic with this way that we treat injuries because it doesn’t necessarily mean that the area is weak. But what it does mean is it means that the area is imbalanced in the sense that all the muscles that attach to that shoulder or to your spine should be under balanced and equal tension to absorb the forces that go through that area. So, the shoulder should be in a neutral position. The arm bone should be sitting neutral, shoulder joint, clavicle, the shoulder blade, the thoracic spine.

David Starbucks Smith [00:24:40]:
If all of those things are in a good position, and by good position I mean that just like a 3-year-old kid, the ear stacks over the shoulder, there’s a natural S-curve to the spine, the arm bone is sitting neutral so that the hands are, you only see this thumb and the forefinger as you’re looking at someone from the front view. The neutral alignment indicates neutral and even tension, which as I said absorbs the forces better.

Nick Urban [00:25:05]:
If someone is, if they have these compensation patterns and imbalances and they go about continuing their exercise routine, say their strength training routine, what happens?

David Starbucks Smith [00:25:16]:
So what happens is that you end up strengthening an imbalance. The short answer is you end up strengthening the imbalances that you went in with. Our bodies will run to our strongest points under demand. So let’s say I’ve got an imbalance in my shoulders where one shoulder is lower than the other. One pec is more developed, one side of my abdominals are more developed. And now, I’m going in, I’m doing bench press, and I’m doing crunches and sit-ups and things like that. All I’m doing at that point, if I’m not addressing the imbalance, is I’m strengthening the imbalance, which is further predisposing us to injury. Does that answer the question?

Nick Urban [00:25:51]:
Yeah. So, the issue with that is over time, we’re becoming more likely to sustain an injury there. But then also, beyond just the increased injury risk, We’re also going to be making it harder to shift and to correct the imbalance.

David Starbucks Smith [00:26:07]:
Yeah, that’s right. And, and we were talking about before about the idea that if something is in pain or injured, it’s weak. And that is not the case most of the time. Muscles will turn on or off, but they’re not necessarily weak. They might test weaker. But they’ll test weaker because they’re out of, the joint that they attach to is out of alignment and out of position. Fix the alignment, fix the position, and all of a sudden, magically, the strength is back. And we didn’t have to lift a single weight or do a strength exercise to do it.

David Starbucks Smith [00:26:42]:
So I think there’s a big misunderstanding and a misconception in the world of pain that if it hurts, it’s weak. I’m here to tell you that after 26 years of working with people in pain, that is not Not always the case. In fact, I would say it’s very rarely the case, but that’s how we treat it. Now, it doesn’t mean that that kind of therapy can’t work. It can, but it works more because it turns the muscle back on. But if it doesn’t address the position of the joint that created the weakness, it will go back to where it was because we have habits and patterns that pull our body out of alignment. We have a muscle memory. As soon as we go back to our lives and we start doing all the things that we were doing, pulls us back out of whack and the muscles go right back to where they were and the joints go right back to where they were.

Nick Urban [00:27:30]:
Related to that, everyone’s been told to sit up or stand up straight. And you say that it often does not work. Why does consciously fixing your posture never actually stick?

David Starbucks Smith [00:27:45]:
Because 30 seconds after you start thinking about it, you’re thinking about something else, you’re back to work or you’re back talking someone, or you’re back doing your thing, and you lose that focus. Posture isn’t about standing up straight. Posture isn’t about sucking your stomach in or tucking your butt in. It’s not about pulling your head back or pulling your shoulders back. All of those would be compensating moves that are not helpful in the long term for a multitude of reasons. Posture is about how you stack up and your ability to move through your day and do all the things that you want to do, without pain. And you don’t have to be perfect to do it. You just have to be good enough.

David Starbucks Smith [00:28:29]:
I use this with clients. I have them grab a piece of paper and draw a line right through the middle of the paper, a horizontal line right through the middle. And below the line, I put pain. And down below pain, I put not good posture. Okay? And then above the line, far above the line, I put pain-free. And perfect posture. Now, so you have this line and you have space in between perfect posture and bad posture. As long as your posture is good enough, it just has to be over that line.

David Starbucks Smith [00:29:05]:
It just has to get to the line. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough to be out of pain. And that’s what you’re looking for. You’re not looking to be a kid again. That’s not realistic. But you are looking to be a little better than where you are now. And that’s very easy to do because muscles move bones.

David Starbucks Smith [00:29:23]:
And when you activate the right muscles to move the right bones, you align very quickly and you don’t have to consciously think about it all day long, which nobody really wants to do. Right.

Nick Urban [00:29:33]:
So what is the approach then to actually effectively change posture if it’s not just remember to stand up or sit up straighter?

David Starbucks Smith [00:29:42]:
Well, one would be to consult a professional. Consult a professional who does this for a living. 2 would be to grab a great book that one, Pete Egoski, wrote called Pain Free. I’ve got several books out there, Align, Feel, Heal, and Ageless Painless Tennis, and now Back Pain Solutions for Seniors, that all have exercises in it that will help you address your postural imbalances and just align your body, balance your body so that you don’t have to think about Personal trainers are getting really good at this these days, where a lot of them, and if you’re going to go to a personal trainer in your gym, ask if they have some posture background. That is another way to do it. So, there are a lot of options out there. Massage therapists are good. I would just go to whoever sounds interesting and fun and ask them about if they have a posture background.

David Starbucks Smith [00:30:38]:
But the best people to do it are generally posture specialists, and they’re There are some out there. You just can look them up there. I’m sure they’re in your area, wherever you are.

Nick Urban [00:30:46]:
Is the reason that you don’t recommend any particular blanket exercise, generic universal exercises, because people have different issues that are preventing them from having ideal posture?

David Starbucks Smith [00:30:59]:
I think if I was going to recommend a generic exercise for everyone, it would be something along the lines of yoga. But not everybody likes yoga, not everybody does well with yoga. And so, I hesitate for that very reason is that everybody is different and everybody is different. And depending on your age, your flexibility, your time, your pain level, and your pain history, I think everyone needs to kind of find their own way and find their own path of what feels good to them. You don’t have to jump in a yoga class. Go online and look up some exercises for stretching. And, say if you want to stretch your back, just look up stretch exercises for your back. If you want something more personalized though, then definitely find a professional who can personalize it for you.

David Starbucks Smith [00:31:54]:
And, I do highly recommend that. And, that’s the way I work with people all around the world virtually now because I don’t have a clinic and it works just, Pull you up and take a look. And that’s, it’s a, it’s a good way to do it.

Nick Urban [00:32:06]:
Yeah. When I say exercise, you mentioned yoga and yoga is, as far as I’m aware, all the forms that I know, usually multiple poses and then you rotate through them. And so that’s not just like one particular exercise. It’s, I guess you’re just going to be getting a broad exposure to a bunch of different ones. For a similar reason, do you advocate changing postures often throughout the day? And by postures in this case, I mean, Sitting, standing, kneeling, just the different positions that you’re putting your body in and holding it in.

David Starbucks Smith [00:32:38]:
Yeah. Our bodies are designed to move. We’re designed to bend, twist, turn, reach, do all the things that a body is designed to do. And when we don’t move enough, we start to weaken. We start to lose that function. We are use-it-or-lose-it beings. So, if we’re not using it, we are losing it. The brain figures out that if it’s, you’re not using a certain part, just like if you had a cast on your arm, the muscle shrinks, the bone shrinks, because the brain says, we don’t need it, we’re not using it.

David Starbucks Smith [00:33:13]:
So, it starts to wither away. So, the best thing that we can all do as people for longevity, especially, is to move as much as we can in as many ways as we can, which is why I don’t necessarily recommend one particular exercise. In fact, you might know about the Harvard study that recently came out, which showed That longevity was more about, was less about the actual exercise you did and more about the variety of exercises you did. So, not just if you’re a runner or a cyclist or a swimmer, but are you doing running, cycling, swimming, basketball, tennis, pickleball, gardening, hiking? Are you, what’s the variety of activities you’re incorporating into your week? or into your life, that’s what keeps us functional. That’s what keeps us balanced. And that’s what stimulates all the muscles and bones and joints to stay healthy and happy.

Nick Urban [00:34:12]:
So, I think that’s great. And for people that if they can get as many hobbies that have them in different postures naturally, the better. At the same time, a lot of us are stuck behind desks or computers doing computer work a lot of the day, myself included. I have a standing, seated, sitting desk, like what I’m currently using. I also replaced my chair with a Swiss ball and I have a chair also, but I sit on this sometimes. What do you think about that? And are there any other tips you have for people who are working?

David Starbucks Smith [00:34:48]:
I think you’re doing it right. I think the more variety you can add to the way you sit and/or stand and move again, it’s all about motion. So, if you can move a little bit during the day, that goes a long way. You don’t have to be moving all day long. There’s a myth that I want to dispel, and that is that sitting is bad for you. I’m going to clip that right now because we sit for long periods of time. This is our society. This is our culture.

David Starbucks Smith [00:35:19]:
This is our world that we live in. We wake up and we sit at a table and eat breakfast. We get in a car and we sit in the car to go to work, and then we sit at work at our desks, and then we get off work, and then we go to the gym and we sit on a bike, and then we come back and we sit and watch TV and sit at a table for dinner. So, sitting is part of our lives, and we can make it the devil if we want. I don’t think it is. I think the devil is not moving enough. Now, you might say I’m splitting hairs, but not really. I think you can sit as long as you want to sit, as long as you activate the opposite muscles.

David Starbucks Smith [00:35:58]:
You put your body, you give your body enough stimulus throughout your day, or at some point in your day, to counterbalance the stimulus your body gets of sitting. Now, this is where it gets unique for every person, because someone, you, might require 15 minutes of motion a day. 30. Maybe you get up and you walk for 15 minutes a couple of times a day, and that’s enough for you. Maybe you go to the gym and you work out. Maybe you play tennis. Maybe you hike. Whatever it is that you do, you have to determine, is it enough? And you’ll know, because if you’re in pain, or if you’re aching, if you’re stiff all day, then you’re not getting enough motion, and sitting is winning.

David Starbucks Smith [00:36:42]:
But if you’re feeling good, if you’re feeling, if you have energy, vitality, If you’re not feeling stiff all day long, if you’re not in pain and you sit, then whatever you’re doing is enough, at least for now, most likely. So, you need to answer the question and the listeners need to answer the question for themselves, what’s enough for my body? And only you can answer that. But I will tell you that you don’t need to move all day for it to work. You just need to move enough. And that might be, 15 minutes, an hour, 2 hours. It just depends on the body, depends on the person. I personally always subscribe to, I know that the 10,000 steps is just a number, but the reason I like the number is it gives me a number to hit, and I know what it means in terms of movement for me. If I’m on my feet and doing 10,000 steps a day, I know I have moved at least enough to maintain motion and function in my hips, and knees, and legs, and ankles.

David Starbucks Smith [00:37:41]:
Now, it’s not enough for me just to walk if I want to go play tennis. If I just walk for a month and I go play tennis, I will be stiff the next day. So, I know that walking is not enough to maintain my body through playing tennis, through an intense session of tennis without being stiff and sore the next day. So again, depends on what you want to do, depends on your body.

Nick Urban [00:38:05]:
And, I assume that also changes over time and with fitness level, perhaps when you’re just starting out and you’re whatever age, you aren’t going to be able to do as much movement and your body wants less movement. But then as you become acclimated to it, I guess progressive overload in a way, then all of a sudden, like your body’s threshold baseline requirements go up.

David Starbucks Smith [00:38:26]:
Well, Nick, we’re going to have an argument here because you said, as we get older, We get more stiff. All right. And I’m going to say that, yes, that is the common thing, but I don’t think age is the problem. I think the lack of motion is the problem. I think that you can be pain-free at any age, as long as you move enough and as long as you’re balanced enough. Age gets a bad rap, and we expect to get more frail, more weak. We expect to lose muscle mass as we age, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Nick Urban [00:39:06]:
No.

David Starbucks Smith [00:39:06]:
We know for a fact, you know for a fact, that you can gain muscle and strength and bone density at just about any age. All it takes is the right stimulus and the right amount of motion. Our bodies adapt to the stimulus we give it. Along those lines, I have a great story. I was playing tennis not long ago with a kid. He was 24. I’m And, we sat down on the changeover just to talk and get some water. And, he says, all right, you got to tell me, how is it possible that you’re moving that well at 53? And, he said, how can I move that well when I’m 53? I said, okay, so you got 30 years to work with here, right? Just about.

Nick Urban [00:39:51]:
Yeah.

David Starbucks Smith [00:39:51]:
I said, the best answer I have for you is keep moving. Don’t stop moving. Most people, once they turn a certain age or they get into work, they start working for a living, they have kids. I mean, it’s understandable, right? It’s not a knock on our lifestyles. What it is, is the reality that at a certain point, we stop moving as much and we start moving less. And as we talked about earlier, since we are move-it-or-lose-it systems and move-it-or-lose-it beings, If we’re not moving it, we are losing it. That’s what happens. Now, we correspond that to age.

David Starbucks Smith [00:40:29]:
We say, well, as we age, we get weaker and we move less and we have less energy. Well, no, that’s not actually how it works. How it works is that we’ve been moving less now for years and our body has gotten used to moving less. So, we now can only move a certain amount unless we start retraining our body, as you perfectly stated. As you retrain it, as you give it the stimulus, it will adapt and respond.

Nick Urban [00:40:56]:
David, in your newest book, you make a claim that goes beyond posture. You say that the body can’t tell the difference between emotional stress and physical stress. And that’s a big leap for someone who’s focused mainly on joints and movement. Take me there.

David Starbucks Smith [00:41:11]:
I had a neighbor call me several months ago. She is the host of a nationally syndicated television show. And she said, David, I threw out my back. And I said, okay, come on over. She says, well, I can’t. I can’t even move. So I said, okay, I’m coming to you. So I walk over, I knock on the door, she opens the door, she’s bent over, she’s in pain.

David Starbucks Smith [00:41:35]:
I said, oh my gosh, you are in pain. You don’t look good. So I put her down on her back with her legs up at 90 degrees. It’s an exercise we call static back. And if you’re listening out there, I implore you, I invite you To take a look at that. Just look it up online. Static back, on your back, legs up 90 degrees. I put her in this exercise and the first question I asked her was, what is going on in your life right now? What’s the stress in your life? And she said, oh my gosh, I’m getting sued by a former employee for wrongful termination.

David Starbucks Smith [00:42:08]:
It’s all BS and it’s not going to win, but, And then she started talking about about all the things that were stressing her out around that. But what if he wins and I lose my business? What are my employees going to do if they don’t have jobs? What’s going to happen if I can’t put food on the table for my 6-year-old daughter? And she went down this cascade of worry and fear. And we know that worry and fear and anger and stress, they actually have chemical responses on our bodies. So the fear put her in fight or flight, And fight or flight means that her muscles are more tense, her breathing, she’s breathing more rapidly, her heart rate was increased, and she had a cascade of stress hormones like cortisone or cortisol going through her body and adrenaline. Now, cortisol is a catabolic hormone. It’s a catabolic chemical, meaning it breaks down tissue, which is why if you go, you have back pain or knee pain, you go get a cortisol injection for your knee or your back to decrease the inflammation, they will only do 3 of them Maximum a year, because any more than that, and they know, they meaning doctors, know that it will break down the tissue and do more harm than good. So imagine all these stress hormones running through our bodies constantly, fight or flight all day long, or often enough where our bodies can’t recover and get a break. That is catabolic chemical running through our body.

David Starbucks Smith [00:43:39]:
For more than it needs to, more than it should. It’s breaking down tissue. It’s predisposing us more to injury. So to answer your question, how do you bridge the gap between the physical and mental and emotional? Well, every single emotion we have is coded by a chemical in the body, a hormone or a neurotransmitter that impacts every single cell, tissue, and organ, muscle, and joint in our bodies. So if we live in fear, our cells react to that constantly, and our cells literally live in fear. If we live in stress, our guts, our immune systems, they are stressed constantly. So when we now develop strategies to get out of that fight or flight, when we meditate, when we breathe, when we change the thoughts that are going on in our head, And we start to shift that stress response into the parasympathetic, which is the rest, relax, digest, and heal mode. Now we are in a spot where we can think more clearly.

David Starbucks Smith [00:44:47]:
We can be more creative. We can be more present with those around us, and we can heal much better.

Nick Urban [00:44:55]:
Is it important or helpful to pair this type of posture work? And I’m just posture work, these corrective exercises with something that is downregulating, something that puts you more in the parasympathetic so that the body learns almost like craniosacral therapy, that it’s actually safe to accept this new change because otherwise the body is going to feel threatened by a new change. It doesn’t want to adapt and expend the energy and the resources to adapt if it doesn’t need to. So would something like that make a difference, a positive difference?

David Starbucks Smith [00:45:27]:
Absolutely. Breathing, As you go through any exercise, if the more you can breathe deeply in through your nose, out through your nose, or in through your nose, out through your mouth, the more you can breathe, the more you’re telling your brain that you are safe, your body that it can relax, your muscles that can let go, and you’re fostering a state of being that is now rested, relaxed, safe, and present.

Nick Urban [00:45:54]:
Conversely, this makes me think that if you’re in pain, you’re going through movements, exercises, you’re pushing yourself, that might do the opposite. It might tell your body that, you know what, this isn’t safe, and the body might mount more of a detrimental response to the stimulus.

David Starbucks Smith [00:46:10]:
Yeah. Our bodies can only handle so much stress in the form of physical demand. So, I just read about a guy who benched over 700 pounds. I mean, this is, we’re talking world record. I mean, that’s insane. You or I try and bench 700 pounds, we would literally break in half. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know about you.

David Starbucks Smith [00:46:30]:
I would break in half. Maybe you can do it. And so, our bodies can only withstand a certain amount of stress physically, and it can only withstand a certain amount of stress mentally and emotionally. And, when we overload any part of stress, whether it’s physical, emotional, whether it’s viral, whether it’s postural, whatever form the stress comes in, if it’s too much, our bodies will react and we will, there will be a consequence one way or another, whether it’s just having less fun in life, whether it’s getting sick and depressing our immune systems, whether it’s getting injured or hurt, tearing a muscle, injuring a joint, whatever it is, there’s a consequence to too much stress, which is why it really behooves us to be aware of the stress that we’re putting on our bodies and our minds. every single day and on a continual basis. You know, we can handle a lot of stress, but we just don’t want to have to handle it long-term. As you know, from longevity, long-term stress, I should say long-term overstress is counterintuitive and counterproductive to living longer lives.

Nick Urban [00:47:36]:
What are some of the most common myths, misconceptions, and mistakes you see people making?

David Starbucks Smith [00:47:46]:
In regards to what?

Nick Urban [00:47:49]:
Posture, movement, balance, all of the, everything under the umbrella of what we’re discussing here today.

David Starbucks Smith [00:47:57]:
Yeah. I think one of the biggest mistakes I see people every single day doing is they go in the gym and they repeat the same machines, the same exercises, the same weights, that they are good at doing, and they’re building up imbalances in the body. I think the gym is a great place to be as long as you keep the exercises varied, as long as you try and balance the body as much as you can, and as long as you stay away from the mirror muscles, meaning the muscles we’d like to flex in the mirror. And as guys, our biceps, our pecs, our abs, When we develop certain sets of muscles, overly develop them, we can develop them to the detriment of the other counterbalancing muscles. So, if the pecs get too short and too tight from doing 1,000 push-ups every day, they will pull the shoulder and the upper back out of alignment eventually and the arm bone. And now, you’re dealing with potential stress on the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, and even the spine and definitely your neck. So, So, I think the biggest mistake I see people make is going to the gym and doing the wrong things or doing poor form with exercises that they’re using. And, I tell people that I work with, if you don’t know what to do at the gym, which most people don’t, and that’s totally fine, you get some help, you enlist a trainer, even if it’s for a short time, to show you a variety of exercises, or you go online and you do an online fitness program that has a variety of exercises.

David Starbucks Smith [00:49:31]:
In other words, get a coach. If you get a coach, then it makes life a lot easier. You can create much more balance and you have someone watching you do the exercises and checking your form along the way to make sure that you’re not doing more harm than good.

Nick Urban [00:49:46]:
Are you a fan of some of the tools that people use around training, whether it’s foam rollers, it’s stretching bands, it’s say orthotics in their shoes, all that kind of stuff?

David Starbucks Smith [00:49:57]:
I am a fan of everything that helps you. Foam rollers, Swiss balls, all great stuff. Gives your body variety, can stretch you out, can activate muscles that you weren’t activating before, can put you in positions that are great for you oftentimes. Orthotics are a little bit of a different animal. I’m not opposed to them at all. I think they can be, there’s a time and a place for them where they can be really, really helpful. I think, though, that eventually you want your foot doing the work. Orthotics are great at stabilizing your foot.

David Starbucks Smith [00:50:34]:
They’re great at stabilizing your ankle, your knee, your hip, and they can be helpful in curing or helping your plantar fasciitis, your Achilles tendonitis, even your knee pain or your back pain. However, now you’re dependent on something external to you in order to feel good. In order to go about your day. My personal belief is that the more you can strengthen and train your muscles to do the job of stabilizing and working for you in a balanced way, the better off you’ll be and the easier it’ll be on your pocket because orthotics get expensive over time. And again, I think the biggest problem is the expense, but also just the dependency that we develop from being in orthotics, or braces or things that are external to our own bodies doing its own stabilizing and creating its own balance and strength. So, if you have to wear orthotics for a while, awesome, do it. Absolutely, especially if you need to get out of pain. And, along the way, start working your muscles in the right way, start balancing your body in the right way so that eventually, hopefully, you won’t need them.

Nick Urban [00:51:42]:
So, you mentioned making the body eventually use its own stabilization Does that mean that you prefer people to eventually progress when they’re able to from, say, machines onto free weights?

David Starbucks Smith [00:51:58]:
I think that using the variety of machines and free weights are all good. I think the nice thing about free weights can be that you use more muscles to stabilize and work, meaning more of your entire body as you’re strengthening rather than just isolating one part. You’re still isolating parts with free weights, but you’re doing a little more stability and stabilization with some of the other parts. So, is one better than the other? If I had to choose, I would say free weights. However, nothing wrong with machines. I think they’re great. And I think that, again, the key is variety.

Nick Urban [00:52:35]:
Hmm.

David Starbucks Smith [00:52:36]:
And I think the other, to go back to weightlifting, as you said, what are the mistakes I see people make? I think that when you go into a gym, go in and do a whole body workout every time. Don’t just strengthen the abs and the bis and the tris. Don’t just go in and do leg day. Go in and do legs, glutes, back, stomach, shoulders, all the things, because our bodies are designed to work as a unit. And, if we’re just working on some muscles alone, All we’re doing is we’re training the brain to make that area of our brain bigger, to make those muscles bigger, but we’re not necessarily making them more functional and integrated with the rest of the body. And, I think really integration is one of the major keys to longevity.

Nick Urban [00:53:25]:
Well, some people will, I’m sure they’ve told you that their body was not designed properly and that their bad hip or bad back are just genetics. You have a comeback for that. What is it?

David Starbucks Smith [00:53:41]:
Well, I have to tell that through a story. And the story is that a woman came to me limping on one ankle. She was using crutches. One ankle hurt. She had done something to the ligaments. And I said, well, what’s wrong? And she said, well, I hurt my ankle and I can’t walk. I said, okay. So, I said, what do you think the problem is? And she says, well, my dad has tennis elbow.

David Starbucks Smith [00:54:11]:
And like you, I stopped and I had to think about that for a second. I said, okay. And then it hit me that what she meant was that because her dad had tennis elbow, it meant he had weak ligaments. And that meant that he passed those weak ligaments onto her, Which is why her ankle was such a mess. So, I had her ditch the crutches, walk across the room limp, and as she turned around, I said, okay, now put your hands behind your head, pull your elbows way back, and walk like that and tell me if your ankle feels any better. And, she puts her hands behind her head, pulls her elbows way back, and starts to walk. And, she looks at me and she goes, what the heck did you do? I don’t have any And, I said, well, I guess we just cured your DNA. And, all we did is we changed the alignment of her spine, which changed the alignment of her hip, which changed the alignment of her ankle, and she felt better.

David Starbucks Smith [00:55:07]:
But, the point was, and the question I asked her is I said, well, if it was really genetics, then I guess your other ankle you got from your mom.

Nick Urban [00:55:17]:
Right.

David Starbucks Smith [00:55:18]:
The good side is from your other parent. So, I think genetics is rarely a cause of pain. It does play a role in certain posture types for sure, but that doesn’t mean that it automatically, you have to automatically follow your parents with their degenerative hips and hip replacements and back pain and things. That does not have to happen. That’s a matter of imbalances over time that are solvable and fixable.

Nick Urban [00:55:47]:
Help me understand why there’s a discrepancy between the way seemingly the rest of the world does things, like why you go in with an injury, they do an MRI, they say, okay, we need to fix this part of the body and this like alternative methodology. Why, why are they at odds with each other? And why, if this is so effective, why hasn’t it been adopted more widely? Yeah.

David Starbucks Smith [00:56:13]:
I don’t think they’re at odds with each other. I think that they work hand in hand. I think the problem is that most people don’t work both sides of it. So you might need to go in there and fix the disc. I’ve worked with plenty of people in my time who ended up getting surgery, and it was the absolute best option for them and the fastest way out of pain, because at that point it was too broken To solve any other way. So, there is absolutely a time and a place for surgery. I think the important thing is to go back and solve the reason why it happened. It meaning the herniated disc, the torn meniscus, the torn rotator cuff, the degenerative hip, the degenerative knee.

David Starbucks Smith [00:56:57]:
Whatever you are getting surgery for, you want to ultimately get at the cause no matter what. And the cause is not the knee, or the hip, or the spine, The cause is whatever the imbalance that created the misalignment, that created the overcompression on that part, or caused the part to stop functioning correctly. And that ultimately led to excessive wear and tear, which led to pain and degeneration, and eventually surgery. So, I think that it all goes hand in hand. I just think that we need to have more awareness of when to do which, because right now, We’re taught to run to the doctor, run to the physical therapist. Nothing wrong with that. Just know that there are also other alternatives out there beyond just the doctor and the Western medical model. Again, they’re doing great, amazing, wonderful things.

David Starbucks Smith [00:57:52]:
I wouldn’t change it. But what people don’t realize is that doctors don’t have all the answers, as they will tell you themselves. They don’t have all the answers. So, if you go to them looking for all the answers, you might get them, but you might be disappointed. And this is what 50+ million people do every year, is they’re not getting the answers they need, not because there isn’t a competent, amazing Western medical model with great doctors and physicians, but because it takes a wheel of health practitioners, a variety of health practitioners, to create a complete wellness program or complete wellness protocol that calls for sometimes exercises over surgery or massage over surgery or acupuncture over surgery or whatever it is.

Nick Urban [00:58:41]:
You’ve certainly heard the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Prevention just isn’t sexy. People want the shiny thing that resolves the issue once they have it, ideally as fast as possible. If you were to work on the prevention side of things and you were to instill some wisdom, to propagate some wisdom in schools, how would you, or what would you say so that people are more accepting of this idea and fixing the issues before they become something more serious would be the first line of defense?

David Starbucks Smith [00:59:15]:
I think the first point I would make is to don’t stop moving. Make sure that you are always mindful that your body needs motion and it needs a variety of motion and stimulus. The next thing I would say is, along with motion, pick exercises, pick things that are fun that you will do a lot of, and pick exercises that ask your body to do a variety of movements. So, I’m fortunate because tennis was chosen as one of the best sports that added, I think, up to 7 to 9 years on your life. And part of the reason for that over running, which was a year to year and a half, this is Harvard talking, not me. I think the reason is because it’s a variety. Tennis offers a variety of motion and movement. You bend, you twist, you turn, you reach, you lunge, you use your ankles, knees, hips, shoulders in a full range of motion constantly.

David Starbucks Smith [01:00:14]:
It’s 3-dimensional movement. movement. You’re also using your brain, your eyes to focus. So you’re coordinating your mental and your physical self. I think that the whole stimulus of something like tennis is great. So I would tell students and kids, I would say, pick exercises that are fun, pick exercises that offer variety, do a variety of things throughout your life. And if you could do something like soccer, like tennis, like pickleball, like yoga, like dancing, ballet. There are things that really stimulate the body in wonderful, unique ways that, as I said, are unique from other sports.

David Starbucks Smith [01:00:59]:
And, there’s no bad sport. There’s no such thing as bad motion, but there are sports and there are activities that provide more for our muscles, more for our joints, more for our body, compared to others as a whole. And I would say, you know, the more, the more you can do that, the better.

Nick Urban [01:01:18]:
I want to reconcile something. You keep, you keep saying keep moving. Like that’s a really important through line of a lot of this, including with choosing exercises and activities and sports and things that you enjoy doing that are active. So, if you are advocating that, but then you also mentioned that so many people out in the world today, virtually every human, unless they’ve worked with you perhaps, has some degree of imbalances and compensation patterns. Aren’t they going to be just driving those deeper each time they do these activities and therefore like increasing their risk of injury and perhaps the amount of time it will take to correct these?

David Starbucks Smith [01:01:58]:
Not necessarily. No, because our, remember our bodies adapt to the stimulus we give it. So if you are getting injured while you’re doing whatever activity you’re doing, then yes, you need to find someone who can help you balance your And align your body a little better. But assuming that’s not the case, the more variety of activity you do, the more muscles that will fall into balance as a result. So, I think that if you’re getting injured doing any activity, you don’t necessarily want to, well, you want to stop the activity temporarily for sure until you heal, but you want to then solve the reason for the injury, which is always the body. I should say the imbalanced body going into the activity. It’s rarely the activity, almost never the activity itself, unless you got tackled by a 300-pound lineman, which we see, or you fell off your bike or whatever it is that was a traumatic force, a traumatic blow that absolutely was too much stress on your joint or muscle to Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:03:03]:
Well, David, if people want to connect with you, to work with you, to grab any of your books, where do you want to send them?

David Starbucks Smith [01:03:10]:
I would send them for books, go to amazon.com. You can also go to, just, I have all my books are on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. Also, go to my website, davidstarbucksmyth.com. My email, davidstarbucksmyth@gmail.com. I think that anytime, if you, you know, I do a lot of coaching, executive coaching, leadership coaching. I also still work with people in pain every day. And so I think the important thing though is if you’re having trouble, if you’re, you know, really struggling with pain, then feel free to reach out anytime. I’m happy to help.

David Starbucks Smith [01:03:51]:
And if I can’t, I’ll happily point you to someone who might be able to. As I said, as you pointed out, I started working with Pete Egoscue. There are Egoscue clinics around the country as well and practitioners. So, if I can’t help you, I’m confident that many of those clinics and practitioners can.

Nick Urban [01:04:11]:
Perfect. Well, I will put a link to everything you mentioned in the shownotes for this episode. And, any final words? You’ve given us plenty of things to look into to test ourselves, even some at-home diagnostics to see how many of these issues that you’ve brought up apply to us. Where do you want to leave listeners who have made it this far?

David Starbucks Smith [01:04:34]:
I would leave everyone with the thought of when we have, when we’re healthy, we have a million dreams. When we’re sick or in pain, we only have one. So take care of the instrument you’ve been given as best you possibly can, because This is our vehicle for doing all the things we love for as long as we possibly can. Take care of it, treat it with respect and love, and continue to balance your body with variety as much as you can. And then last thing, enjoy. That’s what we’re here to do.

Nick Urban [01:05:08]:
Perfect. Well, David, I’ve enjoyed having you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining me. And to all you tuning in, thank you for sharing your time, your attention, With us today. And until next time, be an outlier. Thanks for tuning in to High Performance Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes, and resources mentioned at outlier.com.

Nick Urban [01:05:45]:
Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.