Richard Jacobs: Hello. This is Richard Jacobs with the future tech and future tech health podcast. And I have Shawn Faver. He writes a blog called saveyourself.com and he helps people with looking at their posture and various other modalities to help them, live a better life and feel better. So Shawn, thanks for coming.

Shawn Faver: Thanks for having me, Rich.

Richard Jacobs: And just for listeners, I was just telling Shawn offline that a month or so ago I saw his bio and he mentioned something called the egoscue method, postural alignment systems. I went and I got it done and it helps that I feel a lot better. So maybe we’ll talk about that as part of the modalities.

Shawn Faver: Excellent.

Richard Jacobs: Well Shawn, tell me what’s been your health journey? Because usually people that work in a particular area it’s because they struggled with problems themselves.

Shawn Faver: Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, I had a really hard time deciding what I wanted to do with my life and I was in college and I was thinking about a couple of different things. I decided it was going to be nursing and so I went all at the top of my class. Went and volunteered at some hospitals for a time and I quickly noticed that the hospitals were mostly in the business of managing chronic problems and not necessarily solving them. And so I canceled going to nursing school. I became a personal trainer, I reregistered at a different college. I went to UT for kinesiology and I just went, got in right away, learn as much as I could. As soon as I graduated, I sought additional certifications and I’m a yoga teacher and I was learning a lot about how the body worked. I was noticing what works for people that were in pain and what didn’t, and I was ready for a move. I got into posture therapy at the clinic that you went here in Austin and I learned a whole lot there. And I would say overall my goal for my career is to just learn as much as I can so that I can offer help to basically anyone in any situation. Right now, I spend most of my time as a full-time PE coach at a private school here in Austin that allows me to study the posture of the children and I’ve learned a lot of amazing things through that as well.

Richard Jacobs: You’re looking at children so, at what age are you seeing problems and their posture and what’s the consequence for them?

Shawn Faver: So some of the kids will have straight like neck pain, back pain, ISS, a group of about 150 students between the ages of seven and thirteen and 69% of them had really forward heads. 67% of them were standing forward on their toes, they will put the weight of their upper body straight into their back and as much time as they do sitting all their hamstrings are shortened. So that’ll change their pelvic position. A lot of them are already heavily favoring one side and a lot of them can do like basic mobility work.

Richard Jacobs: These kids are seven years old?

Shawn Faver: Yeah. Seven years old. Think about it. When we were kids, we had time to go outside. We didn’t have tablets, computers. So these kids are doing eight hours a day sitting from infancy. So they’re basically growing with shortened hamstrings, misposition pelvises, all kinds of stuff like that. But the cool thing about it is, and I noticed this in my research is that the posture of younger children is easier to manage and changes more quickly. So overall, in my intervention group, I had about 120 students in the intervention group. We did a five-minute posture intervention at the beginning of PE class three times a week for two months and 63% of the students improved in a very noticeable way just in that amount of time.

Richard Jacobs: Wow. So five minutes per day?

Shawn Faver: Most of them five minutes. Three times a week. So not even every day. I like to think of the body like a plant, it’ll struggle. You pour some water on it, it’ll come right back.

Richard Jacobs: Well, could this be integrated into traditional schooling? If you’re running a school, Elementary School. Is there some kind of protocol you could have the kids do to counteract some or all of the sitting all day?

Shawn Faver: Fighting the sitting all day would take a lot of effort and I think that’s more resources than most schools have to offer. One of my favorite men on the planet, Dr. Kelly started out who’s based in San Francisco. I got to meet him last year. He runs an organization called Stand up Kids and they provide standing desks to schools, public schools who need standing desks and they have come up with some amazing results across the board. They’re noticing and standing classrooms that teachers are getting 12% more engagement across the board. So that’s seven more useful minutes of class time every hour.

That allows the kids, the kids are happier. They’re more able to learn because a lot of kids today their knowledge retention is tied to the way they’re moving. So if they’re learning and they’re not moving, they’re not learning.

Richard Jacobs: I bet you people would think you’ll be more disruptive to have the kids that sit there quietly.

Shawn Faver: Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of teachers and admins fear that would make the classroom out of control. But what we’re noticing more and more over time, and it’s bleeding over into other subjects and speakers that kids need to move. Our new psychology director at my school. She started off the year with a presentation about taking a one-minute movement break the beginning of your class and the benefits that that’s going to have. And I’ve been pushing for that since I started working there. So I’m pretty excited about that.

Richard Jacobs: If every teacher, when they start the class, they had kids stand even for like the first two minutes and then at the end stand for a minute before they go. Do you think that would make an impact?

Shawn Faver: I think it would. Yeah. And you know, think about it, if they spend just two minutes every class, that’s an extra probably 16, 20 minutes a day. And a lot of people feel like, well I’m not a yoga teacher or I’m not a trainer. Like I don’t know how to tell them to move, but it’s just like, standing up in the air and wave your arms, wiggle your fingers, do something. Sit on the floor for a minute, get back up.

Richard Jacobs: What do you think is going to be the consequence of seven-year-olds, eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds with back pain and neck pain and all that head’s forward? I mean by the time they get to be adults, are they screwed? What do you think’s the pass to them?

Shawn Faver: Honestly it doesn’t look too good. I’ll say. I think that businesses like people like you and me are going to be extremely busy trying to help the people of the world who are waking up to how important their posture is and how it changes the way their body works. That’s one of the reasons I’m excited about being in school because I have an opportunity to teach the kids how important that is because it’s so overlooked. People think, oh my posture is just something that I have or I just got it from my mom. But it’s really not like that. And it changes constantly based on what you’re doing. So I think there’s going to be an eventual push to incorporate this in a school program in P programs. And well be triaging the people that are really suffering and trying to educate people who aren’t suffering yet. Because once you have it as a practice, it’s really easy to manage. It’s really quite simple, but it’s something that’s just totally off most people’s radar, even healthcare professionals.

Richard Jacobs: So what can people notice in themselves? How can they maybe do a quick diagnosis of himself and what could they do to help themselves at least or start to help themselves?

Shawn Faver: I think, well, it’s pretty easy to notice a postural dysfunction. So I’ll start by just giving you like a baseline. So, everyone has 260 bones and about 650 muscles. All those muscles and bones have a particular job. If one side of your body is overpowering the other, that’s a dysfunction. So if you’re just standing for a few minutes, you can take note of how you’re standing and you’ll probably notice that you’re standing predominantly on one side of your body. Do a little bit more investigating. You’ll probably realize that that side of your body is tighter and less flexible and other side’s more flexible. And so if that progress to a certain point, that’s when you’re going to start to have pain and discomfort and by doing things that trap your body in a symmetrical position and force it to work from that. And that’s really the essence of posture therapy. I like to say the body is like water and it’s always filling the cup that you give it. So if you can give it the right cup, you’re going to be in really good shape. If Your Cup is a computer chair with a big fat wallet under one side of your butt then you’re not going to live a very symmetrical life.

Richard Jacobs: Hmm. When people come to you, what are the problems that they report most frequently? What’s bugging them?

Shawn Faver: I see tons of people with lower back pain that’s like, are super common. Lots of people with neck pain, shoulder problems, and that can show up as a couple of different variations. But invariably those things are happening because their hips aren’t working right. A lot of time. It’s the glute muscles. I can do a quick test for, have someone lay on their back and lift their hip to ask them what they feel the most and it tells me if their glutes are working or not really. A lot of times they just got to lay down and concentrate for a few minutes and squeeze their butt. There’s a teacher at my school named Gina and she has pretty ongoing back problems. Before I met her, she used to have to be out for weeks at a time and she’ll come grab me in the morning sometimes when her back bulbs go out and we’ll go squeeze the pillow squeeze her butt do a couple of things and she’s good to go for the rest of the day. I saw her getting a massage at the beginning of a faculty meeting the other week and I was like, Gina is your back okay right now? And she’s like, yeah, it’s just hurting a little bit today. I was like, okay, do you know, did you squeeze your butt today? And she was like, my God, did I, I closed my door. I laid on the floor, I squeezed my butt. And there is no better feeling in the world than that. And that’s a quote. And on the flip side, I mean, I’ve seen some people suffering immensely. One of my good friends, a tennis coach for basically his whole life. How did dysfunctional hips of the muscles in one of his hips weren’t doing the work that they should. Right. So he would experience very minor back problems, ankle problems for years. And I wasn’t very trained at that point when I knew him and I was just like, it seems like something bad’s going to happen to you if you don’t figure that out pretty soon. And then fast forward four more years he developed a 13 millimeter and a six-millimeter herniation in his back from the stress on his spine and the space that those herniations made pulled on his hip flexor. So he lost the ability to walk. He had to quit his job, moved back across the country, live at his parent’s house, and we would talk on the phone and do therapy over the phone. I couldn’t even see him most of the time. Like every other night for a couple of months. And He canceled back surgery. He was going to get a laminectomy and returned to being a tennis coach. He’s a tennis coach out in Washington. He’s been doing it for a year and a half again. No pain medication, no surgery or anything.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. It just seems like modern medicine, they just want to chop you up and take things out and choose things and they don’t even talk about the underlying potential problems. Here’s a muscle relaxer or here is surgery. Why do you think that the essentially addressed, why aren’t these simple things addressed?

Shawn Faver: I think that’s a really complicated issue and some of it has to do with money. If you have a problem that can be easily fixed cheaply. Certain businesses aren’t really interested in offering that to you, but if they can prescribe you a drug that’s going to make them some money every month as long as you live, I mean, that’s more ideal for them. I think also the Western medicine ideology has evolved from a place of if you have a problem, it’s a specific disease and there’s a specific drug that you can take to help with that. And that may not be the case in every situation. A lot of times that might come from a deficiency, something you’re not getting enough of or in the case of posture, a lot of times its movement that people aren’t getting enough of. And that’s something that doctors aren’t really trained on when they go to medical school. So I mean, they’ll tell you to exercise more, they’ll give you muscle relaxers for your back, but they don’t really see from the same perspective that that has an underlying cause that you can go straight to make a really positive change.

Richard Jacobs: Hmm. Okay. What are some of the common things that people come to you for help with like lower back pain? I mean, where do you think this is coming from? Just from sitting too much?

Shawn Faver: Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, your body is very intelligent and it’s going to be adapting to anything you use it for on a regular basis. And for a lot of people that waking up in the morning and sitting down and drinking coffee and then sitting down in your car and sitting down at work and then going maybe to the gym, sitting down on some exercise machines and then going home and sitting on a couch before you lay in a bed. And so the body becomes really good at sitting and then we needed to do something else. You’re going to run into problems because it’s adapted for that specifically. So posture therapy reminds the body of its intended function and it allows the body to do use differently for some time. And the cumulative effect of doing it every day will change the way it’s working, expose it to more novel stimulus and allow it to adapt to something you need it to adapt to. Because it’s not smart enough to determine is this a good adaptation or a bad adaptation? It’s just going to try to support you in whatever you’re doing. So that makes sense.

Richard Jacobs: Hey, your body’s trying to support you. Whatever you’re having to do.

Shawn Faver: Exactly. So like a real easy one that’ll cause a pretty can cause pretty serious dysfunction. If you sit on a really large wallet all of the time, one side of your hip is going to be higher up and the muscle, especially the QL muscle and your erector muscles are going to be tighter on the side where your wallet is because they’re flexing and contracting to help that hip stay up. And then when you stand up, that’s still happening. And then when you walk, your body has to deal with an encounter that difference in your back.       And then that difference in your back is going to make it harder for your glute to work on that side. And then your hamstring has to work and then your body develops this whole new way of walking that will cause enough inflammation to give you a back injury eventually.

Richard Jacobs: I’ve seen some people, older people that are literally like bent in half walking in, literally their head is like looking at the ground. They’re bent in half. How do you think that happens to some people?

Shawn Faver: It’s just a continuation of their dysfunction, right. So lots of people that you don’t notice as much when they’re younger or standing on their toes. So over time gravity drags those people down forward. And for them, they may not even realize how severe it is because it’s so gradual for them. And then you got grandma halfway bent over, grandma gets a really short walker because that’s where her hands usually hang. And then, I said bodies like a body like water, you give it a cup, you give it too short of a walker, you’re absolutely going to stay bent over cause you’re pushing in a bent-over position all the time when you’re walking. So I mean some people unfortunately in old age that are that dysfunctional are not going to return to a position where they’re completely thriving. But it might be as simple as getting grandma walker that’s a foot and a half taller. And she may or she may not, it’s kind of tough to say generally at that point in someone’s life. But I mean, I’ve seen them prove and I’ve seen them, I’d improve.

Richard Jacobs: Well you see people like that, right? Like literally bends in half.

Shawn Faver: Oh yeah, definitely. And it really hurts my heart. Driving around town or being out in public and seeing people living like that. I remember I was at Walmart one time and I saw this old man trying to get out his receipt to show the lady that he wasn’t stealing anything, but he was so bent over, he literally couldn’t stand up tall enough to look at this woman and she was like, oh no, it’s fine. You can just go. And he was trying his hardest and just the simple act of showing someone a receipt was causing this guy immense amount of suffering. And if he had encountered a different way of thinking, 5, 10, 15 years ago, that probably would never be a problem for him. He could have done something as simple as standing against a wall for three to five minutes a day.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. What do you see people think about? What’d you known in about posture? Do you think that they just encounter is as getting older?

Shawn Faver: It varies a lot. So in the environment, I’m in, I’m not really in a position where I’m dealing with people who are skeptical. But when I used to work at the clinic that would happen a lot. And I mean, there are people who are suffering immensely. They notice a change instantly. They’re completely sold. They love it. There are people who are suffering and they just want their suffering to be over. They’re coming from a perspective of western medicine. They’re like, my pills didn’t work. My surgery didn’t work. What can you make me do to make me better right now? And the answer is you have to work on it and take control of your body. And they don’t want to hear that. And then there are some people who were skeptical that noticed the difference and then they’re sold on it or, or not. I mean the kids I was working with didn’t have a choice. They were a captive audience. But I did get some amazing feedback for some of them. Some of them were like, I feel like I could run a hundred miles after we did our posture exercises or they’d be like, I feel like it really helps my body be ready for anything. But then there were a couple of kids who were like, I think this is a waste of time. So it can really vary, but the method actually, we’ll ask you about whether you heard or what kind of discomfort you’re in. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter because a therapist should be looking at the position of the bones and how the muscles are manipulating them and working on that change. And if you can get a person a little bit closer to that body blueprint, you can pretty much be certain that their body is going to behave better, the inflammation is going to be reduced, and whatever problems they have going on are going to be improved.

Richard Jacobs: What do you think a traditional physical therapy does? Do you have people say, oh, isn’t this just physical therapy and don’t you need this just after you hurt yourself or you get surgery?

Shawn Faver: Yeah, there’s a lot of physical therapists who didn’t really learn beyond whatever they learned in physical therapy school. And I mean, their business is basically run on insurance. So they get a referral from a doctor with a diagnostic code. Say it’s for your shoulder because your shoulder hurts and you’re going to do shoulder exercises and that’s all that’s covered in your insurance. Right? And that’s the only thing that physical therapists can do. But that problem with your shoulder may actually be coming from tilting your pelvis. And if they never look at that they might be able to make your shoulder feel a little bit better, but that problem is going to come right back. And now some physical therapists have started to figure this out and they do a wonderful job with people. But your average physical therapists would probably be a little abrasive running into an ideology like this if they haven’t really taken time to absorb it.

Richard Jacobs: It can just cause it’s alien to them and that’s not the way they make money. And that’s not how the world runs.

Shawn Faver: Yeah. For one, it would be hard for them to restructure their business in a way that serves the body like this. And two, it’s just not what they learned. It’s like you’re looking for the biggest thing that’s going wrong in the body. But when you’re a physical therapist, you already have a very small lens because that’s symptom-based treatment. Right? So in the essence of posture therapy, you’re trying to figure out what the biggest underlying problem is. You can fix it, but in physical therapy you just like, oh yeah, your knee hurts, we’re going to work on your knee, even though knees are usually a hip problem.

Richard Jacobs: What’s People’s response when you tell them that a knee may really be a hip problem and the shoulder may be a back problem. They get surprised or, yeah, that makes sense.

Shawn Faver: I get pretty varied responses. When I was at the posture therapy clinic, I mean when I was learning that for the first time I was like, wow, are you serious? But then six, nine months later I’m using that with great effect and I’m seeing it in practice and it’s quite real. Right now, I mean, as I said, the kids are a captive audience. The people I work on at the investment firm and my boss’s investors, they all just want to feel better or want to be their best self. So if I tell them something is going on with their body, they generally just accept whatever I have to say. I’m really fortunate in that way. But if I was working at the clinic still they have to do a fair amount of convincing because a lot of people come in, they’re wanting to hear a specific thing and if you’re not telling it to them, it’s going to be difficult.

Richard Jacobs: I guess you probably noticed that constantly when you walk around and go out and about. So like Starbucks or something, I see people walking with one foot is out. So they’re kind of like walking like a duck on one side. I see people’s shoulders up on one side or down on another side. I see their heels ones and worn away in a pattern.

Shawn Faver: And every single one of those things is representative of dysfunction that’s going on in that person’s body. And it may not be bothering them now. It may not be bothering them for five or 10 years, but when their body gets deep enough into that adaptation, it will cause some serious problems. And I see that all the time. Especially like the moms that take their babies in strollers on my way to work because I have to drive through Terry town. I see the same one every day with her right hip, super high up. Looking down to the right at her phone. Her left shoulder is really high. Every day it’s the same.

Richard Jacobs: Dysfunction in action. Yeah.

Shawn Faver: Yeah and people like that they don’t, they’re probably not going to run into egoscue or Feldon Christ or the Alexander method. So it’ll just be completely off their radar until there was suffering in there actively looking for a solution.

Richard Jacobs: Oh, you mentioned the southern grace and the Alexander method. I’ve heard of these. Like how do they compare to egoscue or they just different or better or is it better to do like all of them together?

Shawn Faver: I think they’re all kind of similar. They all come from the same place. I mean if you talk to any individual representative of one of those methods, they’re going to tell you they’re the best one. But I think they all have a really similar concept to offer. I haven’t been personally trained in Feldon Christ to the Alexander method, but I’ve talked to people who have done both and they say it’s really similar. It’s a little bit different.

Richard Jacobs: You try to incorporate from all three in your therapy or are you focused on egoscue, what’s your methodology?

Shawn Faver: I mean my work is based heavily on what egoscue came from. But I’ve also been working independently now for a couple of years. So I’ve had a chance to kind of fine-tune my own tots and put a few movements that I think are important into what I do. So I would say it’s a little bit different now. I don’t know if it’s completely my own thing. It’s still a lot of egoscue. But one of the things that I wanted to move on from when I worked at the clinic was there for very specific about how they do their first appointment, how they sell therapy to people, how they encourage people to do their therapy. And when I had a chance to just work on my own as a therapist in a chiropractor’s clinic, I had the leeway to do it however I wanted to do. And I still saw a lot of success and I found ways that were more efficient or easier for the person that was just easier for everybody based on the way the therapy is delivered.

Richard Jacobs: So what is the first session with you consist of like what does the person do and what do you do?

Shawn Faver: It depends on how the person approaches me. So if they reach out to me and it’s not someone I can see in person, I’ll just ask him to tell me about what’s going on and send me for pictures themselves. And then I can fashion a series of exercises that’ll go in on the problems that I see and based on their information. And then depending on how big of a problem it is, I might have a Skype appointment with them or I literally take them through each exercise because it can be really based on precision. Right. If your pelvis is a centimeter high on one side and you needed to come down you’re going to have to be pretty precise and the way you’re moving to achieve that. If it’s someone I see in person, I use a software called posture mobile to take pictures of them, drop some little dots on it, show them what I see, and then I’ll take them through a list of exercises that I put together for them. And then I will send them a document so that they can continue to do it on their own. Because the biggest idea is that they take responsibility for their problem, which is their body and fix it. And then the continued interest on the client’s part and their continued practice and their enhanced ability to feel what’s going on in their body help me really hone in on exactly what’s going on. If it’s not obvious that the outright and then the person gets better. Sometimes it just takes one appointment. I had a woman I saw a couple of months ago, she had been in terrible, horrible pain for like 20 years. Apparently she would come home from work and just like cry on her bed for a couple of hours a day. She was taking like 32 Advil. 32 Advil every day for years. And I worked on her for about 45 minutes and we strained out her spine a bit, leveled her pelvis and she got up, she said she was pain-free for the first time in two decades and I checked in with her wife a few weeks later. She said that she hadn’t been taking any Advil, but I’m assuming that she’s just doing great now because I haven’t heard from them again. Sometimes that’s all it takes. It’s just to show the person what they need to do with their body and then they can just get better.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah that’s amazing. That’s really cool. So what do you see as the future of your work? You want to put out different courses or like what do you want to do?

Shawn Faver: Right now I’m really focusing on learning how to master children and really understand their body. And I spend a lot of time reading. I want to become like a true expert of anatomy in the body. But in the future when I’m done with the school, I’ll come work full time at my friends and mentors, investment pharmacist’s wellness director. And he’s a pretty notable guy. His name’s Ari Rastegar. He just published an article today and yesterday in Forbes. He’s a big real estate investor. So my future, I think we’ll be pretty intertwined with him. He’s almost just as passionate about health and posture as I am. We’re both in the same cutting edge anti-aging program. We both eat according to our owl cat food sensitivity tests. And right now as I’m coming in here part-time and working out as employees, we’re working on developing like a really cutting edge wellness program for his employees because as this business grows, we’re going to have more and more people here to take care of.

Richard Jacobs: How many people are you happen to take care of their stuff?

Shawn Faver: I think right now we just have about 10 employees. So I just come like once a week for a couple of hours and meet with everybody. And then I also act as like a fitness and health consult. Like if they want help, finding something that needs to work better for them and their diet or their fitness or whatever. But I think, Ari and I have some pretty big plans for the future. I’m trying to put more stuff on my blog. It’s hard because I work so much, I’m so busy. But really, you know, I just have so much to do right now and so much to look forward to. I’m just kind of letting it play out.

Richard Jacobs: Any last recommendations for parents that are concerned about their children, their children complaining of pain? Are there looking like they’re interested?

Shawn Faver: Yeah. So if you notice you’re twisted up, my first go-to is to stand on a wall with your palms facing out for a couple of minutes. If you noticed that it’s really hard to stand on that wall, do it every day for a while. If you’re a parent, you noticed that your kid’s had a super forward. See if you can get them some lightweight prism glasses, glasses that have a little it’s like a when’s that turns their sight at a right angle down so then they can look at their iPad or whatever they’re doing without putting their head all the way down. And the third thing would be to transition yourself and your children into wide flat shoes. So many people are wearing shoe-shaped shoes and that the toe part of your foot should really be the widest part of your foot. And if you give yourself more and more and more support on your feet, your feet are going to give you less and less and less support until you basically have to walk around with pillows on your feet just to be comfortable. But if you’re wearing flat wide shoes, your feet will be strong. Your ankles have an opportunity to be healthy and it’s going to make you a healthier, happier person overall. And my favorite brand of shoes called Xero, Xero with an x just released this month, a child-size of a very wide flat shoe called the prio. Very excited about that.

Richard Jacobs: I got a pair of Xero Shoes. I spoke to the owner recently and they’re pretty cool. I like them too.

Shawn Faver: Yeah, they’re great. I only wear zero shoes. That’s pretty much it. Actually. Ari just got me some Yeezy boosts this week for when I’m at the office. But just between you and me, I don’t really care for them. They’re not very functional. They’re just expensive.

Richard Jacobs: Right on. All right, well very good Shawn. What’s the best way for people to get in touch?

Shawn Faver: If you want to get in touch with me, the best way to find me would be my website faveryourself.com. I try to put a blog article up there like once a month or so, but if my email’s on there, so if you want some help or you want some additional information, you can reach out to me there and I’ll get back to you.

Richard Jacobs: All right. That’s great. Well, Shawn, thanks for coming to the podcast.

Shawn Faver: Thank you so much for having me, rich.