[Transcript] – The Man I Call “Scraper”: Snowboard Shredding, Fascia Fluffing, Protective Chakra Energy Balls & Much More With Scott Dolly.

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Transcripts

Podcast from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2017/06/how-scraping-works-and-much-more-with-scott-dolly/

[00:00] Introduction/BiOpt

[02:00] Organifi Green Juice

[04:54] About Scott Dolly

[08:28] How The Scraping Tools Work

[14:17] How The Scraping Tools Move The Fascia

[20:47] Why Red Marks Appear When Scraping

[23:53] How Scott Learned To Do Scraping

[27:03] Close Kinetic Chain Movements

[31:02] Close Chain and Open Chain Exercises

[35:03] Quick Commercial Break/Marc Pro

[36:41] MVMT Watches

[38:04] Mind Pump Media

[39:46] Ben and Scott in a Resort Experience

[41:54] Scott And His Energy Work

[51:21] Where To Learn Qigong Healing

[56:32] Sound Healing and Singing Bowls

[1:11:15] End of Podcast

Ben:  Howdy, howdy, hi!  That's how we talk in Washington State.  I swear, if you've ever been here, that's exactly how we talk.  Hey, it's Ben Greenfield and in today's show you're going to hear an interview with this dude I call “The Scraper”.  This cat showed up at my doorstep a few months ago, and we went shredding on the snowboard, we did a buncha fascia fluffing, we made protective chakra energy balls, we went off the deep end.  You're going to really dig this dude.

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In this episode of The Ben Greenfield Fitness Show:

“And is way, way healthier because you're also loading weight close chain, you're loading your spine.  Now you get bone mineral density, you get endocrine system response, you get proprioceptive feedback, eph/ epherin signaling.  If you're looking at your training, open chain to close chain, most of your training should be close chain.”  “I've got some meditative quartz crystal singing bowls, which are used in meditation and chakra turning.  And I was at this event where I took 'em to, and this lady just came up to me and she said, I didn't know who she was, she said, ‘Young man do you know how strong of an empath you are?'”

Ben:  Hey, folks.  What's up?  It's Ben Greenfield, and I have to admit that I've met a lot of interesting characters and crazy cats in my life, and my podcast’s guest on today's episode is absolutely no exception.  His name is Scott Dolly, but I am, for the purposes of this podcast episode, going to call him “The Scraper”.  I don't know if he's open to that idea, but perhaps we'll find out later.

Anyways though, I first met Scott in Costa Rica.  We were at a digital detox, hot yoga, and adventure getaway retreat called Runga, R-U-N-G-A, Runga.  And that's the same event at which I hung out with Eric, who's also a previous podcast guests who appeared on the “How To Cure Yourself Of Cancer” episode in which he described how he cured himself of stage four cancer using a whole bunch of fringe modality.  He's a fantastic source of knowledge.  So I spent a lot of time with him in Costa Rica at this Runga event.  I also spent a lot of time another former podcast guest who originally introduced me to Scott, Joe DiStefano, Spartan racing big wig who I interviewed in the episode about travel proofing your immune system, underground body weight workouts, and a whole lot more.  So I'll put a link, if you want to listen to those other two episodes, up over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/thescraper.  That's bengreenfieldfitness.com/thescraper.

So anyway, speaking of this gentleman, Scott, a few months after Runga in Costa Rica, Scott pulled up to my house in Spokane, Washington, which he flew up to from his place down south, and he pulled up in a big black SUV jam-packed with snowboarding equipment and a bag full of all these strange body adjusting and almost like scraping tools, and the ensuing weekend was like this geek fest of biomechanics, and physiology, and him fixing my fascia, and all this like woo-woo chakra, energy work, and amazing meals that we ate together, and a whole lot more.  And in today's episode, we're going to take a deep dive into the huge body of knowledge that Scott has, especially when it comes to fixing your body.  This guy is high in demand when it comes to all things fascia.  So Scott, welcome to the show, man.

Scott:  Thanks, man.  Had my eye on your show for a while and just following you as another kind of person out there cutting the way here for all of us.  And it's cool to be on here, man.  Thanks for having me.

Ben:  Yeah.  No worries.  And by the way folks, Scott has a master's degree in athletic training, he's a certified strength conditioning specialist, he's an instrument assisted soft tissue mobilization specialist, and he's also, for the past 11 years, a certified Reiki master.  But it's that instrument assisted soft tissue mobilization specialist piece that I wanted to jump into right away, Scott.  Because when we first met at Runga in Costa Rica, you took out this briefcase full of medieval-esque torture tools and you proceeded to scrape me.  And I'm curious if we could start right there.  What exactly do you do with these tools?  How they work?

Scott:  It's a great place to start.  When you look at healing the body and all of the modalities that we've gotten ourself into here in the United States and around the world, the fascia has been just, I mean completely overlooked.  It's like even in cadaver lab when you're in school, you just pull the adipose tissue out of the way, cut the fascia out of the way, and you're like, “Look!  The biceps.”  So what we're realizing these days out on the cutting edge of how to align the body, how to heal the body, how to increase nerve conduction velocity, how to restore movement is if your fascia is bound up, then you're not going to move correctly.  It's that simple.  So when you are trying to get into healing a specific injury, or a certain pathology, or just, my knee hurts, say for example, after five mile runs, I don't know what I did, it's just tracking a little off the whole time.  And most of the time, it's just like these fascial adhesions that are something stuck to something else, so now the gate hinge doesn't hinge correctly and now you have chronic knee pain.  So it's pretty amazing what you can do with this set of tools that just kind of get you some purchase, gets you some connection with the micro adhesions or major adhesions that are in the fascia, muscle to muscle, muscle group to muscle group, or intramuscular adhesions that are just having a toll on our bodies.

Ben:  If could interrupt real quickly.  Like when you say intramuscular adhesions, a couple of things come to mind. First of all you showed me this video, actually when you were working on me, we were like we like sitting in Costa Rica, like looking out over the city, way up high on that yoga retreat mountaintop we were at, and you pulled out your laptop as you were, I think you were working on my back or my shoulder, and you showed me this video, it was like a five minute video, and I'll link to it in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/thescraper, and it was called “The Fuzz Speech”, and it had to do with these adhesions.  So why'd you show me that video?  Like what is it about that video that kind of outlines what you're saying?

Scott:  If you tell people what's fascia, some of us that are in the game, it's like we know.  With these other people, it's like, “What is fascia?”  So what Dr. Gil Hedley has done, and that video is from 2005 or something, I mean he's been doing it, is it really shows…

Ben:  Wait.  What's his name?

Scott:  Dr. Gil Hedley, I believe it is.

Ben:  Gil Hedley, okay.

Scott:  Yeah.  It shows people, like if you sit in a color for three hours and you get out, every person on this planet will stretch.  Why?  Why do you feel like you need to go, “Oh my goodness.  I just sat for three hours.”  It's the human condition of all of this sticky white viscous, it's fluid and it becomes hardened material in our body, collagen-based, fluid-based that literally makes us, or actually makes us.  It's mostly collagen-based.  It's extremely strong.  We can talk about some research today where they've researched the tropocollagens that make the collagen are actually five times stronger than steel.  So we're really walking around five times stronger than steel if we were just to train right, move right, open ourselves up to letting ourselves be as strong as we can be.  We're walking around in machines, Ben, and we're not training them right, we're not healing 'em right.

Ben:  What you call it?  Tropocollagen?

Scott:  It's a tropocollagen.

Ben:  And what is that?

Scott:  So when you get into like the matrix of what our tissue is made up of, three main components jump out, collagen, reticulin, and elastin.  Collagen is about 75% or more of what makes us us, then there's different types, we don't need this to turn into a physiological lecture, but collagen is the stuff that makes us.  So within collagen, you can just keep diving down the rabbit hole.  Then there's microstructures that make collagen called tropocollagens.  When you stress a tropocollagen or a collagen, you could stretch it out lengthwise, and that's called a tensile kind of stretch, or you could shear straight across, and that's a shearing stress.  If you stress tensile collagen, it's five times stronger than steel.  If you go shearing force across it, it ruptures a lot easier.  So our total capacity to generate force or absorb force has a lot to do cellularly with tensile and shearing forces of the tropocollagens within the collagen that makes us.  Real world example for people who couldn't really necessarily follow that is your ACL rupturing because you planted to cut right just running and your knee slid forwards.  It sheared across the femur, the tibia shared forwards on the femur and now you ruptured your ACL.

Ben:  Right.

Scott:  That's a shearing force across it.  Whereas, if you were going to keep everything aligned, five times stronger than steel, baby.  You've got parkour people, you've got American Ninja Warrior, Spartan athletes.  Right now athletes are really really breaking the mold of what we thought people could do, and I promise we're just getting started.

Ben:  Wow.  Okay.  So the scraping tools, these are all manner of different sizes.  They're like butter knives and freakin' little hand held things that you put in between your fingers. When it comes to this tropocollagen stuff that's stronger than steel, how do those little tools even make any difference when it comes to moving my fascia around to get it kind of aligned or oriented in the way that you would like for it to be if you're correcting a muscular imbalance, or say, shoulders too far back or too far forward, or something like that.

Scott:  Awesome question.  So for the people that are familiar with foam rolling or mobility ball stuff, K. Star, Kelly Starrett.  Anyone who hasn't you know bought “The Supple Leopard” and just geeked out on it, please do.  It's a great starting place.  It kind of gets into surface area ratio.  I could roll on this foam roller and then I got this six inch in diameter thing rolling across my fascia.  As an n of 1, one-person research for yourselves, go roll a foam roller, stretch your hip flexors out, say a deep lunge stretch or a calf stretch, roll on a foam roller for five minutes on your hip flexors and then retest that.  I bet you you're going to have more length.  So that's all the way across all the quadriceps.  If we get into what you really did there, vastus intermedius, vastus medialis, vastus lateralis, you just kind of got them unstuck from each other…

Ben:  And that actually works?  The reason I'm interrupting you, dude, is because I had this guy on my show a couple of months ago who does this form of training called ELDOA, and he was very adamant on the show that foam rolling does absolutely nothing because the connective tissue is just too dense and too hard for foam roller to even make any kind of a difference.  And you seem to be saying something different.  So does the foam roller, in your opinion, have you actually observed it to cause any type of mechanical shift in this tropocollagen or this fascia?

Scott:  Without a doubt.  Oh man, I'm somewhere like 40,000 plus clients in my career from around the world, internationally, nationally, plus just the 70 people I treat a week out in my place in Winchester, Virginia.  It's measurable and objective.  There's actually research out right now, I believe you've quoted the research on some of your shows, where they're actually like, “Yes, this does affect the actual fascia-collagen nature.”  You can affect your collagen just by stretching.  So, it gets the amount too big of a tangent here, I'll tie it back in, but there's elastic changes and plastic changes within our musculoskeletal system and our fascia.  So stress-strain curve, if you just warm up for a game and you're a little looser, you have made an elastic change to your tissue property.  “I'm warm for the game.”  I cool down after the game, my hamstrings aren't any longer.  But if I stretch long enough, not to even use anything, if I stretch long enough, I can create a plasticity change, and now I actually have an inch more of muscle tissue length.

The ELDOA method, one, I support it.  Anybody listening to this, check ELDOA method out.  It's awesome.  I think the young man you have on your show, he just hasn't really had enough life experience to see scar tissue, man.  I mean I'm working with a lady right now that has full blown adhesive capsulitis of the shoulder, frozen shoulder, where the fibroblasts have just become hyperactive, and they are just laying down collagen.  Fibroblasts are the name of the cells that make collagen, and they're just laying down collagen like their life depends on it.  They've gotten a hyperactive state, they're building collagen faster than we can stretch it out, and we're battling that right now.  So when you get dense scar tissue stuff, what this young man is saying, he is just awesome, dude.  I listened to that podcast.  He just needs a little more experience with some hardcore adhesion stuff.

If you have scar tissue formation and it is dense and hard, will a foam roller affect that?  I would agree with him, probably not.  You don't have the surface area to pressure ratio needed.  Now give me a surgical stainless steel tool with a beveled edge specifically designed to floss the trough between vastus lateralis and IT band, or to get in and around the articulations of your malleolus on your ankle to help get the talus unstuck so you can get to full dorsiflexion.  Let me push in you with that tool and talk about how much force can I generate, how can I wedge this tool in here to open stuff up, and I break apart scar tissue and affect collagen all day every day.  It's a no-brainer.

Ben:  And these tools, these are originally called Graston tools, right?

Scott:  So the whole history of that, if we want to go like way back in the day and give a shout out, we would go to like Roman times.  They would actually bathe the athletes and competitors and then scrape their skin, preparing them for battle.  Now next to that, we have gua sha, which came out of China, which is scraping of the skin.  They have a lot of Eastern methodology and concepts to that about what it's doing to your chi, your meridians, your flow, but you're also getting some superficial tissue stuff going on.  And then in 1987-ish, David Graston, he was an engineer here in America, and he had patella tendonitis or something.  He was rolling a Number Two pencil on his suprapatellar tendon, and it actually started making it feel better.  Long story short, he talked to some medical colleagues, said, “Is there anything here?”  He came up with Graston tools.  So a lot of the times people will say, “Oh, you're getting Graston technique.”  Well in 1987, you were getting Graston technique.

Nowadays there's Graston, HawkGrips, Adhesion Breakers, K Tools, which is connect tools, out of I think United Kingdom or something is where K Tools are out of, connect tools, the Fibroblaster, Eric Cressey.  There's a bunch of tool makers in the game, Graston is just another tool maker in the game.  I align with HawkGrips.  One, I'm a scientist.  It really has been just scraping something on the skin.  A butter knife is a butter knife.  These are $600 dollar butter knives specifically built for fascia.  Maybe it does a little bit better job.  So the weight of the tool, the bevel of the edge, how it fits in my hands, it really is just the more familiar you get with it, the more you can tell a good tool for a good tool.  I love HawkGrips.  But to speak about it, if there's a Graston practitioner near you, go see them.  The tools work.

Ben:  Yeah.  Now the skin the skin turns all red.  Like there's almost like a red rash, and you'll see this a lot of time like on Instagram.  People who have worked with a scraper, who have done Graston, or have used these Hawk tools that you're talking about, you get work done and the skin turns really red.  And you, when you worked on me, you were using that, I think the way that you described it as a way to get clues about areas of the body that actually needed work.  Like you'd scrape and you'd be like, “You see that red mark, like that right there, that area needs work 'cause it has a red mark on it.”  Can you explain how that works?  Like why the red mark appears and then how that gives you clues as to where to work?

Scott:  I'm actually excited about describing this part on your show just because of the reach you've created on your show.  You know how most things work in this world where we'll build in a certain direction, and then maybe we're a little wrong, and then we have this massive swing in the other direction.  We're like, “Okay, you threw the baby out with the bath water people.”  Gua sha purposely tries to like make your skin red, form a bunch of these dots and stuff, and that's a little, the goal of the treatment is not to make the skin red.  The goal of the treatment is not to bruise people, and that is what's like creating this big swing and stuff.  However, if there is an accumulation of petechiae, which if I punch you and I rupture blood vessels, that's a bruise that's a contusion.

If I'm doing advanced manual therapy, or I-Stim, and I'm releasing capillaries from fascial restriction and I'm getting these little red dots of histamine and blood flow from a restricted capillary that busted, that is totally fine.  As those layers of petechiae start to build, now really you can just do too much in one session because the person's lymphatic system isn't going to drain all of the work you've just done right from that.  Like I've had deconditioned patients and I've had NFL athletes.  A deconditioned patient maybe sits around, smokes cigarettes, they may take a week to heal.  You're still looking at their skin like, “Wow, you still have stuff on your skin.”  I was working with a professional golfer one time who was taking vasodilators before he worked out, pre-workout supplements, just training at a high level.  Two days later, you couldn't even tell I worked on the guy.  I mean his system just rolled through it.

So in that, you get people that are just watching something, and then they take the tools, and you just hear this [scraping sound], and they're literally just scraping the crap out of somebody, just beating their skin, and then it gives the rest of us kind of like this, “Ooooh,” kind of bad name.  Like sometimes I don't like when people post pictures where I've got a lot of release out of them because of the controversy.  I'm always learning, I'm a humble student, but I've been doing this a long time.  I'll create more of a skin reaction or more of a release than typically is taught because I'm now going to hold the hand of that tissue with proper movement mechanics, ice therapy afterwards, or heat therapy afterwards, and I'm going to walk it back to health.  So you can be more aggressive with the tools, but you're responsible now as a clinician.  If you do everything X, Y, and Z afterwards, you can do more advanced I-Stim where you're really battling some stuff.  Like try to fix adhesive capsulitis, frozen shoulder, a really, really good case of it without putting a couple marks on the person's skin.  Good luck, man.  You know what, I'm saying?  Like sometimes it's okay to bruise people as long as your head's right about it, about what you're doing with it.

Ben:  Right.  How'd you learn all this in the first place?  When you discovered these tools, did you start doing work on yourself?  Is there like some kind of like a certification process for this kind of stuff?  Or how's that work?

Scott:  Yeah.  Again, great question.  Within the powers that be, you can get Graston certified.  HawkGrips just made a course.  I wrote my own course about three years ago.  I had my own course.  I was fortunate.  I kind of came out of school, like you said in the introduction, I've been practicing a lot of hands-on stuff for a lot of years, ended up working in a clinic where there was hands-on practitioners, they had some Graston tools.  Got my hands wet just learning from other practitioners.  And then I got the opportunity to work with Dr. Jim Matchett.  I regard him as one of the most advanced manual therapists that I've ever worked with.  He's Graston certified, he's [0:24:29] ______ certified, that's actually another company that I mentioned there on the list, and he has every active release technique certification that there is.  Upper extremity, lower extremity, nerve flossing, spinal, in master level.  He was the chiropractor for the Washington Redskins for a year or two.  I mean the dude is just a solid, he's an athletic trainer and chiropractor.

So you can go take a course for a weekend, even somebody taking my course is just there for a week, I had the opportunity to work alongside this guy for three years, Ben.  So I really understudied under somebody that had 20 plus years of experience for three years.  And then just like, I hope, I have interns all the time, I always want my in terms to outdo me.  That's how we evolve as people.  So as the young buck learning from him, I was now able to take new concepts, like me and you just sit around and talk about, apply it to the 20 years and just wealth of experience this guy had, and now I'm out here writing my own courses, kind of doing my thing.  But it was really him, every lecture I do, I reference him 'cause he really did teach me and guide me for about three years on how to do stuff.

Ben:  Yeah. Some of the most talented like body work practitioners that I've worked with, and you kind of fall into that category as somebody who has worked on my body and just seems to just know it inside and out within just like the few hours that you worked on me in Costa Rica and then up here in Washington.  Almost everybody seems to have worked with some kind of like a mentor or an expert, like they've been an apprentice.  It goes a far, far longer way, in my opinion, than studying a book in a university setting, like I actually having that person, that Obi Wan Kenobi that you study under.  And this guy sounds amazing.  I wish he lived next door to me.  I wish you lived next door to me, dude.  I'd have you over every day to do all this body work because after you left, after the few hours of work that we did, I mean I felt amazing.  And that's not to say that other people, like that ELDOA guy we mentioned, he came to my house for the weekend and showed me a bunch of tricks that were just amazing.  And then I had another girl come to my house and show me how to do these core foundation exercises.  And again, game changer.  But I think that getting together with a body work practitioner and picking up some of these tips and tricks, I mean if you're listening in and you like to use your body or you're feeling beat up, it's one of the best things you can do.

Now Scott, one of the things that you told me when you were working on me was that you talked about closed kinetic chain exercises.  And you also, one of the first things that you had me do when you worked on me was you just had me walk.  You're were watching me walk, looking at my gait.  What were you looking for and then what did you mean when you told me I needed to do these close kinetic chain movements?

Scott:  So when you look at, it's one of the things, I did my master's thesis on the functional movement screen.  People can look that up.  We, as medical practitioners, PTs, chiros, orthopedic surgeons, you learn an orthopedic clinical exam for musculoskeletal pathology.  I can test this tendon, this ligament, this structure, and we can find out specifically what's going on blah, blah-blah, blah, blah.  It serves its role, but really as we advance, we're running into its limitations, which are single joint approach treatment, which I won't get on that soapbox of how we need to just stop treating single joint approach stuff.  When you watch somebody walk, once you start to develop this Thomas Myers anatomy training kind of mind and you start looking at a global movement pattern, if you remember, after I got done watching you, I looked down at your ankles and I was like, “Yeah, I can help with that ankle also.”  ‘Cause I could see how the hip was moving, how it was affecting the ankle collapse, and how the shoulder was then affected by the pelvis, I'm looking at the whole thing so that when we now take this fascial alignment, and I might have to get in specifically on your shoulder, rhomboid, periscapular area, coracobrachialis, pec minor, get some tension off the interior tip of that scapula, working it around, floss the rotator cuff, try to get the serratus firing little bit better, if I don't get the hips under, if I don't go work on your iliopsoas, rectus femuris, if I don't go unlock the front of your hip so I can get your glutes to tip so you can get to a good spinal neutral, I cannot, this is a fact, you cannot get the shoulder into for neutral appropriate position if the hips are not also in line.

So when I'm watching you move, I'm looking for total fascial kinetic chain of alignment, or mild alignment, or dysfunction.  When you look at just how we've evolved, you gotta love us, we're humans, we like to do stuff, sometimes it's not always the right stuff, hopefully we drop it off eventually.  The Gold's Gym bodybuilding movement was great.  There's a simplicity of strength training, Ben.  Pick heavy shit up, set it down, you will build muscle.  But now what happens if we start strength training isolated muscles?  Like I'm going to do preacher curls to make my biceps bigger.

Ben:  I love those, by the way, preacher curls.

Scott:  Yeah, man.  Veins pumping on the biceps.  Gotta look good.

Ben:  All day long, baby.

Scott:  All day long, baby.  If you think about your scapula and I contract my bicep, a lot of people don't know that one of the attachment of the bicep actually hooks to the scapula.  Coracobrachialis also.  If I don't retract my rhomboids first to hold my scapula back, when I contract my bicep, it works in both directions.  It doesn't just pull my forearm to me, it also pulls my humerus forwards, sometimes all the way out of the front of my shoulder joint.  So if we isolate the bicep all the way around on a preacher curl so that we isolate it, does it build bigger biceps?  Yes.  Does it do a good job making them stronger?  Yes.  Does it support total function and upper extremity kinetic chain movement?  No.

Ben:  Yeah.  ‘Cause you pull your humerus forward.  That's why you, when we were working in Costa Rica, one of the first things you had me do when you were evaluating my shoulder was you had me do a pullup.  I think I just grabbed the bookshelf inside of your little condo there to do the pullup.  And what you were looking for was what contracted first.  I think you were looking to see whether the forearms and the biceps move first, or whether like the upper back and the scapula move first just to see what was actually firing, or if it was actually firing in the correct sequence.  So those are the kind of things that you look for.  And then in terms of like close kinetic chain exercises, what's example of something that you would, like an issue you'd see and then an exercise that you'd prescribe based on that issue, like something common that you see?

Scott:  So the preacher curl is an example of an open kinetic chain exercise.  The distal part of the limb is moving first.  So the distal moves on the proximal, and I just kind of gave that because listeners can follow bicep curls and understand it.  One of the biggest ones is we were taught for years as medical practitioners doing rehab that if someone just had their ACL reconstructed, you do short arc quads.  Short arc quads are where you sit, put your knee over a bolster, anybody who had meniscus tear, something out there, they've probably done these, and you just fire the quads and straighten the knee.  Fire quads and straighten the knee.  That is an open kinetic chain exercise.  So the the definition, like if we're going to pull out the medical Webster and say what is the definition of open chain, close chain, open chain is the distal segment of the limb moves on a fixed proximal, the close kinetic chain is that the distal part is fixed and the proximal moves on it.  Now what does that mean?  That means that another big word here, arthokinematics, there's no really way to dumb that down.  It's just called arthrokinematics.  That is how the joint surfaces move in approximation to one another via open chain or close chain.  Here's the important: it's opposite.  So if I stand here and I swing my leg forwards, or if I just pick my hip flexors up and then straighten my knee out, there is a way the tibia moves on the femur, which is everything's moving forwards.  Now if I fix the tibia and I sit back into a squat, the femur moves on the tibia.

So the joint arthokinematics are reversed and it is way, way healthier because you're also loading weight close chain, you're loading your spine.  Now you get bone mineral density, you get endocrine system response, you get proprioceptive feedback, epherin signaling.  If you're looking at your training, open chain to close chain, most of your training should be close chain.  The Hammer Strength machines, any time you sit down and a machine is holding and balancing the weight and you use your big muscles to just move the weight the machine is holding, you are becoming more dysfunctional.  You might look gorgeous, you might become ripped and be sponsored model.  I will be doing your rehab at some point.  I promise.

Ben:  Yeah.  That's like the leg extension machine, one of the best ways to get injured at the gym.  You can hit the same VMO, or interquad muscles, or those quad muscles in general, I mean even something as simple as a close kinetic chain exercise, like the way I like to think about it is a closed exercise, your feet are like touching the floor, touching a surface, and an open exercise, they're open, they're a lot of times not in contact with anything.  And an example of an alternative exercise that I've done is, when I've rehabed my knee from certain injuries, is instead of doing a seated leg extension machine, you're just standing on one leg and then the other leg has like an elastic band, or a cable, or whatever attached to it, and you're just doing extension of the leg, as you keep the quadriceps contracted, forward and back.  So you're having to have a balance on one leg, extend and contract, the other leg, and then you switch the bands to the ankle of the opposite limb and you do cable kick forwards or elastic band kick forwards with that leg.  And all of a sudden, you turn on a whole variety of new muscles.  Your core is working, your balance muscles are working, your quads feel like they're on fire, and you get all of the same type of muscular activation as you do with something like a leg extension machine, but far more with none of that issue that's created when you're just locked into the joints of the actual machine, which a lot of times don't move at the same way that your body moves.

Scott:  You got it, brother.  You got it.  [0:34:52] ______.

Ben:  I'm a smart cookie, Scott.  I learn fast.

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Ben:  Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to tell you about this form of electrical muscle stimulation that especially, in my opinion, for recovery blows anything else out there out of the friggin' water because it uses what's called a dynamic decaying waveform instead of the square state wave form that a lot of these other electrical muscle stimulation devices use.  This means that it grabs your muscle in a very therapeutic way, recruiting slow twitch all the way up to fast twitch muscle.  You can use it for performance, and you can use it for recovery, and you can use a for massage.  I like to use it for injuries especially, because it helps my injuries heal way faster.  I just slap the electrodes around an area that's been injured or that is sore, turn this thing on for 20 minutes, and within 20 twenty minutes, I'm totally pain free.  It works like gangbusters.  It's called a MarcPro, M-A-R-C Pro.  Over a hundred different pro teams in the US alone use this thing, and it's well worth it.  They've got one called the MarcPro Professional I believe is what it's called.  But it's basically like their amped up version.  The MarcPro Plus, that one is the only major recovery product that's FDA cleared for pain relief.  The MarcPro Plus is what is called.  That's the one I recommend.  That's the one I have.  Anyways, so the way that you get it is you go to marcpro.com, that's MARCpro.com, and you use promo code Ben to get a 5% discount.  5%.

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Ben:  Hey, you guys.  What's up?  I have said this before on the show, I kind of get sick of fitness, and health, and nutrition podcasts.  I don't listen to that many of them.  I listen to the freakin' TED Radio Hour and other podcasts that have to do with finances like Planet Money, and spirituality like sermons, but there is one fitness podcast that actually I listen to quite a bit, and it's actually quite good.  It is hosted by three guys who I actually really appreciate in terms of just like their honesty, their clarity, their straightforwardness, their raw real personalities.  These guys are called the Mind Pump guys.  At least that's what I call them.  Their podcast is called “The Mind Pump Podcast”.  Raw fitness truth.  You should check it out.  They had an episode with this cat named Paul Chek.  You could find all their episodes on iTunes or on their website mindpumpmedia.com.  And one episode that I think you should take a listen to, this is actually a cat that I'm going to have on my podcast, hopefully pretty soon, but their show with him is one that I really think you should listen into, it's pretty mind blowing, it's this guy named Paul Chek.  Paul Chek, C-H-E-K.  He's one of the first guys who I ever followed in the fitness industry as far as like using his book like a bible.  They call it “Paul Chek: The Holistic Gangster”.  Check it out mindpumpmedia.com or go to iTunes, and it is episode #517.  So check these guys out.  You're going to love their show.

I want to delve into some other things though that you surprised me on when you came and visited me up here in Washington.  Like we spent a ton of time out at Mt. Spokane.  I remember that one day where it was just like magic.  Do you remember that?  When powder was coming down?

Scott:  It was epic.  Even like day two was up there with me, you were like, “Bro, you had to bring some good juju with you 'cause I live next to this resort and this is pristine.”

Ben:  And nobody was there.

Scott:  Oh, man.

Ben:  To paint a picture for you guys listening in, I live about 20 minutes from the base of Mount Spokane, which is this great little mountain you can come to in Washington to snowboard or ski at, and there's, Scott could back this up, you get to a chairlift there, and you're on the chairlift within like a minute.  The lines are absolutely nothing.  We were even there I think close to like New Years or something like that, and it was still just nothing in terms of traffic.  And there was this one day where it was just dumping powder, and you and I, I think we went up and down the mountain a good dozen times on this epic run that just destroying our quads, speaking of quads, every single time down.  And it was literally just like surfing through powder.  It was like we were weightless.  It was pretty cool stuff.

Scott:  Yeah, man.  I've waited, being an east coast snowboarder, everyone else there's got to feel a little love for me there, man, I've waited so long to have that kind of experience where you're just again, and again, and again of just like three-foot, fresh track powder, wispy dry, oh, man.  It was one of the coolest snowboarding experiences I've ever had man.  And it's so cool to be with you and be, that resort is just special.  It's like, so just, I don't think there's a high speed quad on it, which just really gives you this like tucked-back-in-the-mountains-of-Washington kind of feeling.  I'm a country boy, man.  That is right up my alley.

Ben:  There were a few times where we got separated when we were up on the mountain.  And there was this guy that you rode up with on the chairlift, you were telling me this story, 'cause I want to get in like some of your Reiki and your energy work, and I think the way you described it to me is like he was nervous or something like that, and you somehow helped him out with like your energy or your chakra.  I don't remember exactly how you described it, but do you remember the story?

Scott:  Oh, yes.  I mean it really just is, think about any of us.  So you lecture and educate people on light sensitivity, and you're like, I came to your house and you're like, I remember the one time, it was so awesome.  I was like, you had to go somewhere, and I was still there doing work, and I'm like, “Hey, I can't find a cable.  Can you kick your WiFi on?”  And you're like, “Well I could, but I don't really like to leave it on for a long time because it's bad for the dogs.” (laughs)

Ben:  Right.  Exactly.

Scott:  I was like, “I love how this is true and really you keep it.”  So for people that haven't been to your house, Ben has 30-foot cables coming out of the wall in every bedroom so that you could hook your laptop…

Ben:  There's no signals.  You got to plug into the wall.  We do AirBnB sometimes in our house too.  Same thing.  It annoys people, but, yeah.  I mean it has an effect on plants, it has an effect on animals, has an effect on people.  I mean we don't need to delve into that right now, but yeah, that's why I'm careful with it.

Scott:  That is an unseen, you can't see it, frequency that's out there through just a lot of knowing, and feeling, and getting in line, and educating, it's real.  I mean it's like gravity.  It's like it's not debatable guys, it's out there.  So when you get into energy work, there's a lot of right out the gate, red flag, standoffishness, woo-woo, whale sounds people that are out there, and I don't even associate with 'em.  Like it is so rare, it's made me smile that I'm going to be on your show with such exposure and actually talk about energy work 'cause it's not something I talk about a lot just because I get tired of defending it.  But it's real.  I've practicing for like 11 years.  When you look at meditative energy, when you look at bio physics, when you look at frequencies that are around us, they affect us, we are part of them every day.  An example would be say you feel fine and you walk into a room, and suddenly the room is pushing on you more than you're pushing on the room.  You know what I'm talking about?  Like you're just like, “I just felt weird when I walked in there.”  Everybody can relate to that.  Well, what is that?  What do you feel weird for?  What is your unease?  So some of us who's practiced, say, a healing touch, which is what Reiki means, or they've practiced how to help calm other people's energy fields down, some of us kind of can identify what's going on with that and can help calm the energies and frequencies of those around us.

Ben:  Yeah.  It's interesting, this whole concept of everybody having their own, I guess, their own specific amount of life force or energy that they express, and some people being stronger in that than others.  Like there are some people that are true healers and I think a big part of it is that they not just possess the ability to, say, take a butter knife and scrape fascia, like you do, but also they can direct their energies in a very similar to something like Reiki, when they're working on someone.  And it's actually something kind of cool have been doing with my children because we're going through, there's this guy named Robert Peng and he has this really good book called The Master Key, and it's all about Qi Gong, or qigong, how he uses it, how he manipulates his energy to help others.  But then he has a series of videos and I've been bringing my kids through these videos in the morning where we'll do things like create an energy ball, or put our fingers in the shape of almost like a sword and create an energy blade, and I bring my kids through just like about two to five minutes of shaking.  So you shake your whole body, like up and down up and down, and that kind of activates a lot of that energy, a lot of that qi, you get a lot of nitric oxide flowing as well.  So it's good for that.

And I'll take them through this video, and my kids will face each other, and they're twins, so perhaps their energies align a little bit better, but they'll face each other after these exercises, and I'll put a link to the video that we use in the show notes if you guys want to check it out, but they'll like, River will push towards Terran, with Terran's hands not touching River's, and Terran will feel his hands getting pushed backwards.  And then Terran will reverse the energy and push River's hands away, and then they'll make like this giant ball of energy and move their hands apart, and together.  And it's so cool to see these two little nine year old boys playing with invisible energy and actually feeling it coming out their fingertips.  And I think you're right that some people, depending on how connected they are to nature, and their own bodies, and invisible energy, I don't know, this sounds really woo-woo to a lot of people, but this is some pretty sick [censored].  Basically they can manipulate their energy and their life force, their qi, with just these simple movements.  And I think that you, and I want talk a little more about even like this protective bubble that you made when we are at the lodge, but you can basically project this onto other people to calm them down.  That's what you're saying?

Scott:  Yeah.  I'm 36.  I got into kind of transcendental meditation, been practicing yoga since I was 19.  I think I was 20 or 21, I got some meditative quartz crystal singing bowls which are used for meditation and chakra tuning.  And I was at this event where I took 'em to, and this lady just came up to me and she said, I didn't know who she was, she said, “Young man, do you know how strong of an empath you are?”  I went, “No, what's an empath?”  and that lady, her name was Christine Southworth, she then became my Reiki master and I studied under her also for three years.  So for me, Reiki's like three levels of, you practice, you feel, you go through stuff, just like you're talking about, and then you just practice.  How can I use my energy to actually calm other people?  And qigong healing, I've been practicing qigong healing for a long time also, and again I don't, my ego doesn't need attention for it.  People would just say like, “Wow, your hands get really hot when you're working on me.”  I'm like, “Yeah, yeah.  I just do this a lot.”  I just got to brush it off.  I've worked in multi-disciplinary places when they're like, “You know what?  I like these other guys, but I just feel better when you work on me.”  And it's like, I just say, “Okay.  Yeah, that's cool.  I'm glad I can help.”  But it's 'cause I'm really doing a lot more than just working on your shoulder.  It's like emotional pain not connected to what's going on, suddenly your shoulder hurts more.

And there's a whole hierarchy of how to heal somebody that isn't just this mechanistic way that we kind of go about just trying to be so robotical, here in the US specifically with trying to heal something.  It's an organic approach, man.  So, yeah, you learn how to do distance healing, you learn how to, some of us is that have dealt with any sort of anxiety or stuff, I loved your question when you ask about how can we use that stuff to decrease anxiety, kind of ease some tension, and you look at like, you track your delta waves when you're sleeping.  Well let me tell you, if you don't know how to calm your energy field down, you're not going to get to parasympathetic sleep recovery.  You're not going in there.  Your body is not going to hit that frequency so that you can actually rest and heal yourself.

So when you walk into places, as a feeler, man, like in the lodge, like I'm just on.  Like it was packed, your kids were a little tired, we were trying to find a place to go, there was this unease, we sat down at the table, and anyone who again walked into a room like that, you can relate to the situation and then maybe just by chance eventually, the group chemistry happens within your own little table, suddenly now you're part of the group and you don't feel like every eye's on you, awkward, standoffishness.  Well some of us that practice Reiki, or healing, or energy work, we can expedite that process so that by the time you went to the bathroom and came back, you came back to this cool little bubble, me and your kids sitting there, talking.  They were calm, they were, just a little extra intention and kind of some weaving on my part, and now we're kind of our own little unit as part of the group not getting beat by all these energies around us.

Ben:  Now what does that mean exactly when you say you like drew a bubble?  Like do you just envision?  Because I've messed around with these qigong videos where you learn how to create a bubble of energy and kind of like manipulate like this ball of energy back and forth.  Are you saying that you just make that ball bigger and put you and the people around you inside of it?

Scott:  Yes.  Have you seen Alex Grey's work?  The artist?

Ben:  No.  Who's that?

Scott:  I mean Google it if you got him up.  He's just this really cool artist that draws physiological structures, like skeletons, muscles, sitting in a full lotus position with all the chakras blaring, this cool multi-dimensional looking stuff in the background with, say, the artery system there plus all the meridians.  So he's just this real cool artist that depicts the conversation you and I are talking about in arts.  If you just look at some of his drawings, that's definitely some of the ways my mind works when I'm weaving energy around people.  If I'm in a room and somebody's, it could be a large room, it could be 50 yards of a room or the other end of a football field, I can usually tell you how that person's feeling even if they're like 75 yards away.  It's just practice, man.  It's just like you said, some of us might be a little better at it than others, but I really, every person could do it.  I practice it every single day.  Like you said, just start practicing.

Ben:  When you say you practice it, what do you mean?  ‘Cause that's what I want to ask about.  One thing I like to make sure that I do on the show is give people practical recommendations if they want to get deep dive into the stuff.  So you talked about how you're a qigong healer, you talk about how you practice this stuff.  Can you describe like what it means that you practice it, and then also, if people wanted, if people are thinking, “Hey, I want to learn more about qigong healing,” or, “I want to work with a qigong healer,” where do you even find out how to start down this road?

Scott:  I'll get to the first part about practicing.  The second part about how to start down the road is a little sad, it's becoming a lost art.  But one is just practicing self-awareness.  One is just waking up, checking in, being aware that there's much more than just you for the way that you're feeling right now.  And then a great example is one of our new instructors, like you talked about the bounce thing, one of the things that I do is just bounce on my toes a lot.  I'll be on my floor at evolution working with a patient, and I'm going to start hopping up and down on my toes, and I'm just talking while I'm hopping.  But one of our new instructors one day went up to my girlfriend Julie and said, “Hey, what is what is Scott doing?  Like I see him, why does he always hop on his toes.”  And I had explained it to Julie, she had practiced with me, and Julie said it's something about qigong.  He's like pulling energy up from the Earth, and that's called your bubbling well.  And you're pulling energy up from your bubbling well.   The instructor's awesome.  She's like, “Well if Scott's doing it, I'm going to start doing it.”  You'll just see her hopping up on her toes.  I just love it 'cause she's just that in.  She feels stuff and she's just like, “Well, if Scott's doing it, I'm going to hop on my toes too.”

A simple thing like that is just to stand, sit back on your heels, tip your pelvis, and if you just, just like you said, in your mind's eye, if you just envisioned I'm pulling energy up from the Earth through the heels of my feet, I'm pulling it up through my body, into my belly, which is where I can actually hold my chi, and I've just create this nice little warm ball there.  Notice I said warm.  So not only can you visualize it.  You could feel it.  Like sit and play with, you and I talked about Wim Hof.  I practiced Wim Hof stuff, I practiced my own inner fire, I've done kundalini Breath of Fire stuff, that's actually where Wim Hof got a lot of his stuff from is he's a practiced yogi.  I mean learned sanskrit so he could learn like real, real yoga.  And then now he's taking a lot of his kundalini Breath of Fire stuff and just blowing science's mind with it, man.  Like how does this dude do this?  Well he's practiced the stuff you and I are talking about right now.

Ben:  Yeah.  You grow a beard, and you go climb Mount Kilimanjaro in your bare feet, and people start listening to you right?

Scott:  Right.

Ben:  Yeah.  He's been on this podcast a few times.  “Yeah, man!  You have a beard, man!  You love the world, man!  You do the breath and then you go in the fire, man!  Then you go in the cold!”  He's an intense dude.  We might actually climb, he reached out to me a few weeks ago, we might climb Mount Kilimanjaro barefoot in February.  I've done all of his techniques and I've got his whole program and everything, it actually is, it does work.  It gets a little, like he's pretty over the top.  I love him.  He's pretty over the top and some of his stuff, I think is a little bit overhyped, and sometimes I get tired of everybody talking about how they're doing the Wim Hof protocol, when really all it is just like, I tell people it's pretty much just like breathing and getting in cold shit.  But it actually, it does work and it's a perfect example of how you could take this stuff, this breath work that allows you to move energy around your body, and then take it into the streets and actually apply it.

You were talking about how you help people who are nervous or you draw a protective bubble around you and your loved ones when you're in like a big stressful crowd.  But then also just like freakin' jumping in cold water, it helps with that.  Or walking around barefoot and not actually feeling snow through your feet when you're walking barefoot in the snow.  Or even being able to, like my kids have been doing, affect each other's energy and even do healing energy work on others without actually touching them.  It's very cool stuff.  And it relates to something else I wanted to be sure that I ask you about, Scott, and that is your work with sound, 'cause you're also into like sound bowls and healing frequencies.  And by the way, for those of you listening in, I mean this is what I like about Scott.  I'll put a link to his website if you just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/thescraper.  But the dude, well you run, what do you run?  Like a five minute mile?

Scott:  Last year, I tested a 4:40 mile.

Ben:  Yeah.  So 4:40 mile.  And you power lift as well, right?

Scott:  Yeah.  We have and when you look at training paradigms, like you and I are getting into the little bit of the woo-woo stuff right now, but I train NFL athletes, pro Spartan athletes, I'm a jiujitsu competitor myself, I work with black belts that are ranked on the top team in the world.  We train hard.  I just had a guy doing a seven 775 pound yoke carry in my facility the other day.  We do full-on clean and jerk, snatch.  I have a mother of three, 40 years old that just deadlift a 320 pounds last week.

Ben:  Yeah.  So just you guys know, Scott, when he came to my house, he had walked in after a day of snowboarding and I was in my gym deadlifting when he walked in and I walked away from a relatively light bar for a deadlift, it was 225 that I was doing reps with.  And Scott, after a day of snowboarding, walked up, front racked it, and started banging out front squats with 225.  And so he's a big old tattooed athlete doing this stuff.  He's not some woo-woo, skinny, kale juice sipping yogi who's telling you about sound healing and frequencies.  So that all being said Scott, you are into sound bowls and hearing frequencies.  So tell me more about that and what you do with that.

Scott:  So when you look at the human energy field, if we just want to go down that path of study, the chakras are kind of aligned in this C, D, you can tune, I didn't want to geek out too much, they’re just a thing that you can tune the human body's energy field like you can tune a guitar.  It's one of the ways the singing bowls were actually kind of developed was just to sit and to do, if you practice meditation, if you don't practice meditation, sit and “ohm” if you actually can just have a space to “Ooooohmmmm” and feel where you feel that, then go the “Eeeeeeeeeee” and see where you feel that, you will feel different vowel sounds, kind of different places in your body.  And if you can actually train yourself to have different notes, you will feel different notes resonating in different areas in your body.  So a full set of singing bowls are actually for the seven notes of the scale, and if you have a chakra off, your energy flow can be off, and you need to balance that.

Ben:  How do you learn how to use singing bowls?

Scott:  That was something that came out of like 20 years of practicing yoga and practicing meditation, and that was one of the things, when my Reiki master walked up to me and just said, “Young man, do you know how much of an empath you are,” I guess there was just an innate kind of a predisposition, gift, whatever.  I'm a feeler, man.  I can just feel things.  And the first time I was around a singing bowl, like man, they just speak to me.  So I had a full set of singing bowls before I ever knew what healing was just because they spoke to me, I felt them.  And then there's books out there that you can read, there's books on chakras where they actually talk about the different energies associated with each chakra.  Notice when you look at, and we know Western medicine was “what is the physiological cascade of why butterflies in your stomach happen”.  Well, your second chakra is also your emotional processor.  So we can say, “Well, no.  It's this chemical cascade, or it's this neurotransmitter cascade that ends up making your belly feel like this.”  Or we can also talk about your second chakras dealing with some energy that you feel emotionally uneasy about, and now you feel it warble, which is the butterflies in your stomach.

Ben:  Interesting.  It's so cool.  And you we're talking about how qigong in this concept is kind of a lost art and how it's sad that you have difficulty hunting down ways to learn this kind of stuff.  But do you have resources that I could point people towards?  I'll be honest, Scott.  This is kind of selfish question 'cause I'm also heavily pursuing being able to master my own energy in life force a little bit better, being able to master some of these lost qigong arts, and I'm eating enough information all over the place about it, but do you have any tried and true resources you could point me and the audience towards when it comes to learning more about this and marrying it with all the hardcore training that we're doing?

Scott:  I think there's a place in New York City.  It's one of them that, the name of it's not going to come to mind, but this actual, this monk was on Stan Lee's Superhumans.  If anyone's familiar with this, it was like humans that showed just this really cool ability that isn't supposed to be human, and he's a monk that actually started his own school in New York and they did the one-inch punch.  So we're talking about healing, but now we're going to talk about power production with it.  So everyone knows the Bruce Lee one-inch punch, all that stuff.  Well, they had a woman who does crash test dummy testing on this show, and I'm going to mess these numbers all up so I'm just going to use arbitrary numbers here.  But let's say the Newtons of force in an average 30 mile an hour car wreck is just, for arbitrary sake, say 2 Newtons, and that's what she's seen on her 15 years of crash test dummy research where they have the actual force measures on the crash test dummies when the car hits.  Well they took one of those super, super slow mo cameras and they watched this monk do a one inch punch into a dummy and measure the force, and he hit like 3.7 on a one-inch punch in.  It was like 1.7 Newtons more than a 30 mile an hour car crash.

Ben:  Holy cow.  And are you saying you can go to New York and learn from this guy?

Scott:  Yes.

Ben:  Really?

Scott:  I think it was Discovery Channel had the Stan Lee's Superhumans kind of thing on it, so again, I'm kind of not doing it justice here other than to say it was on the show, I'm sure you can look it up.

Ben:  I'm going to look him up.  I'm going to New York in July, well I'm doing the Pennsylvania Spartan Race, and then I'm flying over to New York to interview Tom Brady's trainer, and I'll look up this dude while I'm over there.  That's really interesting.

Scott:  The cool part about one of the super slow mo video was if you just looked at traditional bis, tris, chest, back, a one-inch punch isn't just straightening your tricep.  You watch this monk, just like we just talked about bouncing and pulling energy up through your heels, you watch this whole ripple effect from this monks feet all the way, like wave undulating through his core out to his fist, wham!  And that's the one-inch punch.

Ben:  Interesting.  And this guy lives in New York City?

Scott:  Well that was on the show, if I'm remembering correctly, he's in New York City.

Ben:  Okay.  If anybody's listening in, you got a connection to this cat, let me know.  ‘Cause I'll go interview him and I'd love to learn a little bit more about how to train like he does.  And don't get me wrong, my kids are in jiu-jitsu every week, I'm all about putting hands on barbells, getting strong, rolling, actually learning how to take a punch.  I've done boxing lessons myself.  I don't want you guys to think that you can't completely neglect just pure physical muscular training.  I think when combined with some of these things that we're talking about. Scott. like sound frequencies. and healing bowls, and learning how to master your qi and your energy, I mean that's why I'm teaching my kids a lot of this stuff because I want them to be strong, resilient, young human beings who have a real appreciation for nature, a real appreciation for caring for their brains and amplifying their cognitive performance, making their bodies better, and making their minds better, but then also enhancing their spirit, their life force, their energy.  And so that I think is what goes into being the ultimate human is to optimize mind, body, and spirit, and have a mastery over all these things.  And dude, you're a good example of somebody who's doing that yourself, so I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us.

Scott:  I'm the same way, Ben.  It's like when you look at this human body, I want to run, jump, climb.  I shoot guns tactically, I bow hunt.  You and I just kind of went down this rabbit hole of Eastern thought and medicine, but it's how I actually became more of a Western practitioner is if you break your humerus is in half and it's sticking out of your arm, you might need some plates and screws in that.  You might need to go do some triceps extensions or some bicep curls to get that muscle back.  So it's where a lot of people go wrong in the camps and the gang wars that happened today of all of something, none of something else.  Training with free weights, close kinetic chain exercises.  There's no way around it.  You're not going to become a six minute marathoner if you don't go run.  You can't sit and meditate your way into that.  It's just what it is.

One of the other things about my story I would like to feature is, you just talked about I run a 4:40 mile, yadda, yadda.  I've had seven orthopedic, man.  It's where a lot of, you ask me how did I learn all this stuff.  I'm not going to stop moving.  I have dislocated my left knee, the femur drag my medial meniscus off of the bone when it dislocated.  So it torn my ACL, I don't have a medial meniscus in my left knee.  Two knee surgeries on my left knee, I've completely ruptured my left Achilles tendon.  You can palpate it.  It's complete rupture.  There's fiber wire in it.  You can touch.  I dislocated my shoulder, fractured my clavicle, I have two disc bulges in my low back, I have disc bulges in my neck, I almost cut my thumb off one time.  I mean I have been rugged on my body.

And if you come train with me, at 36 years old with this list of orthopedic surgeries that I have, it's like, “Dude, how do you keep on?”  I'm like, “Man, the stuff that I'm talking about works.”  It works.  Think about if you had cancer.  If you got a cut on your skin and you're laying on your deathbed dying of cancer, I bet you that wound on your skin starts to heal some.  I bet you it may even heal before you die of cancer.  Your body is constantly trying to heal itself.  Help it.  Support it.  Stop hijacking the system with all of this like big pharma shit and actually just support its movement support, its life force energy, put good food in your body, get rest, and it is amazing, the healing that is just right here in us that we're just stifling.

Ben:  When I first did the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show for about the first five years, it was all pure training.  It was all lifting, it was all endurance training, it was all mitochondrial density, and then I began to shift into some of the biohacks, like cognitive performance, everything from like photobiomodulation, to TDCS, to electro stim, and also, at the same time, it started to merge into a lot more kind of advanced recovery techniques or anti-aging techniques that went above and beyond just like limiting blood sugar, or using a foam roller.  We're talking about things like dry needling, some of the things that we talked about today, using things like pau d'arco bark tea, and fringe essential oils, and things like that.  And now, it's kind of beginning to delve into this whole spiritual and energetic aspect in.  And sometimes I think people who are a first time listener will hear an episode like this and they're, “Okay.  Well this is all good and well, but tell me about the best deadlift form.”  And what I'd encourage you to do if you're listening in is you have to go listen to other episodes, you have to go listen to things to understand that I've covered the full spectrum, and the kind of stuff that Scott and I talk about today, while it might seem fringe, this stuff really is just as important as the physical training, just as important as the mental training, just as important as the crazy biohacks.  So definitely take some of this stuff to heart and access some of the resources that we have.  I'll put 'em over bengreenfieldfitness.com/thescraper, bengreenfieldfitness.com/thescraper.

And then also, Scott, and myself, and Joe DiStefano who introduced me to Scott, whole bunch of other cool people, Eric, the guy who I had on the show who talked about curing himself of cancer who's a really great resource on like ketosis and different types of techniques for mitochondrial health, we're all going to be in Panama this winter at this event called Runga, R-U-N-G-A, and I'll put more information about that in the show notes as well because I believe you can still get into that.  It goes like December 8th  through the 21st, so you can just kind of like show up at any point during that timeframe that you want to just hang out for as many days as you want.  I'm definitely going to be there for at least a good week of that time.  So come meet Scott there, along with me if you'd like to.  And then you can also just head over to Scott's website 'cause he, which city are you based out of, Scott?  What's the main city?

Scott:  Winchester, Virginia.  We're about an hour and a half out of Washington DC.

Ben:  Yeah.  Cool.  So if you're near there, you can definitely go see him.  Otherwise, just come down to freaking Panama and hang out with us for a good time down there.  Anyways, go ahead, Scott.

Scott:  Runga's really just this unplug, you have people like myself, Ben, and Ben and I really did go down the rabbit hole here with some extra thought because him and I have studied, Ben has a master's degree also.  Day to day, guys, I treat people on, I have a whole gym membership where I program strength training and movement all day long.  My clients and patients that are on my schedule are all physical rehabilitation, movement stuff.  So the day to day work is just this physical stuff that everyone is interested in, I use HawkGrips tools on every patient all day long, getting the fascia aligned because we're at a deficit here, guys.  It's not like, “Well, let me decide to get my life back on track.”  It's like we're 30 years in tightening up, of just like “you have to start living differently if you're going to kind of actualize your full potential and how good you can feel”.  And there are some of us, myself and Ben, out there that are really trying to live that example.  It's why I just make the reference of all my injuries.  It's like I still move pretty well for stuff that would other people, would shut 'em down forever because of the stuff Ben and I are talking about.  And that's what Runga is about for the whole week or two weeks is like heal, learn how to live, connect with some of these cutting edge brains that are out here trying to evolve us a little bit forwards.  And Joe DiStefano has just done a knockout job assembling a team of professionals and then making this event what it is.  I'm proud to be part of it.

Ben:  Word.  Yup.  100% on the same page as you.  So if you're bored this December and you want to come down to Panama, do it.  Anyway, Scott, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing the stuff with us.  And everybody else, if you're listening in, go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/thescraper to access all the show notes and also leave any questions for Scott or me.  We'll jump in, we'll reply to your questions, and do the best we can to point you in the right direction.  So until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Scott Dolly signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com.  Have a healthy week.

 

 

I've met a lot of interesting characters and crazy cats in my life.

Scott Dolly, AKA “The Scraper” (at least, that's what I call him) is no exception.

I first met Scott in Costa Rica at a digital detox, hot yoga retreat and adventure getaway called “Runga”. Yep, that's the same event at which I hung out with Eric, the guy I interviewed in the episode “How To Cure Yourself Of Cancer: An Epic Interview With A Man Who Defied Conventional Medicine & Cured Himself Of Prostate Cancer.” and the same event founded by my buddy and Spartan racing bigwig Joe DiStefano, who I interviewed in the episode “Digital Detoxing, Travel-Proofing Your Immune System, Underground Body Weight Workouts & More With Joe DiStefano.

A few months after Runga, Scott pulled up to my house in Spokane, WA in a big black SUV jam-packed with snowboarding equipment and a bag full of strange body adjusting and “scraping” tools. Our ensuing weekend together was a geekfest of biomechanics, physiology, fascia fixing, woo-woo chakra energy work and much more, and in today's episode, we take a deep dive into all that and much more.

So who is Scott, exactly?

Scott Dolly MS, ATC, CSCS  is the owner/CEO and founder of Evolution Human Performance and Rehabilitation. He is a manual therapy and IASTM specialist who utilizes biomechanical movement analysis to locate imbalances and dysfunctions in the human body. Scott is a national and international speaker and educator in the field of sports medicine; and he has authored courses on I.A.S.T.M. and Advanced Training Science. Scott also serves as the Peak Performance columnist for Martial Arts Illustrated Magazine in the UK, through which his work reaches over a half million people worldwide. Scott has over 15 years’ experience studying and working with the human body and he works with thousands of clients every year. He resides in Winchester, Virginia.

His credentials and certifications include:

-Master’s Degree in Athletic Training: Shenandoah University
-Undergraduate work in Biology and Physics: Shepherd University
-Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist: National Strength and Conditioning Association
-Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization Specialist
-Reiki Master: 11 years

During our discussion, you'll discover:

-The truth about whether foam rolling really works, and why Scott is a big fan of “butter knives” for your fascia…[14:45]

-Why Scott said I needed to do more “closed kinetic chain exercises” when he analyzed my gait…[26:40]

-How Scott helped a nervous guy on the chair lift using “distance healing” and Qi Gong…[41:30]

-Scott's work in sound bowls and healing frequencies, and how he aligns that with being able to run a 4:40 mile, train NFL athletes and deadlift nearly 700 pounds…[46:30 & 56:30]

-The protective “bubble” Scott drew around us inside the mountain lodge when we were snowboarding…[46:20]

-Scott's experience with the one-inch-punch by a Shaolin monk…[59:50]

-And much more…

Resources from this episode:

“Gil Hedley: Fascia & Stretching: The Fuzz Speech”

Graston & Scraping tools on Amazon

Robert Peng: The Master Key Video Series

The artist Alex Grey

Singing bowls on Amazon

The one-inch punch

Show Sponsors:

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-Runga 2017: Dec 8-21, 2017 (you get to choose how long to stay!). RUNGA is a once a year retreat, currently hosted in December. RUNGA is designed to facilitate a dramatic shift in attendee's current outlook, lifestyle choices, self efficacy, motivation, love, even spirituality. The retreat spans 8-days and centers around fostering heightened awareness, presence, and connection with others through a mandatory “Digital Detox” – or no cell phones, computers, and other technology. Yoga is offered twice per day, everyday. There is also an off-site adventure ranging from hiking volcanoes to white water rafting or zip lining. World-class spa treatments are available and 100% of the food are suitable for vegetarian, vegan, paleo, gluten-free, or ketogenic dieters. They are also delicious.  Click here to sign up. Use code BEN (or let them know I sent you) to get VIP treatment and a free gift valued at $100!

 

 

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