370: RYAN DEGALE- More Golf, Less Pain. Can You Fix Your Back?

0:00:04 – Jeff Pelizzaro
The 18STRONG Podcast, episode Number 270 with Ryan DeGale from Golf Body. Thanks out guys. Welcome back to the 18STRONG Podcast, where we’re here to help you build a stronger game, because we believe every golfer deserves to play better, longer, and this episode with Ryan DeGale from Golf Body is exactly about that Playing golf for as long as you possibly can. Ryan is the owner and founder of Golf Body down in Miami and he is an orthopedic spine specialist. His background is in strength and conditioning, but over the past 17 years has really become an expert in the spine, especially working with golfers. So I like to think of this as being a bit of a master class for especially those golfers that are out there, like yourself, possibly like myself, that have struggled with some back pain in the past and finding ways to really help yourself to eliminate your back pain and really to give you a more optimal and optimistic outlook on what the possibilities are for you to play pain free golf in the future. Ryan is an expert at really breaking down the anatomy and the physiology of what’s going on between the fascia, the muscle, the ligaments. He’s got a great Instagram channel where he really dives in and shows different exercises for these different types of exercises and for spine health in general. So you’re really going to enjoy this episode with Ryan DeGale.

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Ryan DeGale, welcome to the 18strong podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man, this will be fun. We’ve had a couple of conversations, we’ve tried to do this before and had a couple of technical difficulties, so this is going to be fun to finally dig in and get to chat a little bit more. I think that this is going to be a masterclass on the back, which is what a lot of our golfers need. I think I’ve learned myself, even as a physical therapist, just watching a lot of your content, your Instagram and just kind of learning about what you do. I’ve learned a ton, and so today, what I would love to do is make this very practical for the golfers listening on, what are some of the things that they can do, how can they understand Maybe they’re back a little bit better and the things that they need to do to help prepare themselves. So, first of all, welcome back to the show.

0:03:08 – Ryan Degale
Yeah, awesome, so it’s good to get it in. Got a little bit of practice before, so looking forward to digging deeper into it and maybe just touch on a few subjects that maybe we didn’t touch before. Maybe there’s some things I left out, that I could do better this time.

0:03:21 – Jeff Pelizzaro
No, all good man, yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about your history, though, because you start out in the strength training world, but you are a spine specialist and you’ve gone deep and you’ve learned from some of the best in the world regarding spinal health, and now you especially work with a lot of golfers too. So this is a perfect lineup for what our people need.

0:03:43 – Ryan Degale
Yeah, so I’ve been a strength coach for 17 years. I’ve been orthopedic specialist for 12. I felt like you know if you can make the biggest difference? You know I wanted to. I love niche, right, I’m very nerdy with that kind of stuff and I kind of got put onto this, this kind of Givolié rabbit bowl where it just literally just never ends. These courses are so awesome and so practical and so useful that you can retake the same course, even the most basic ones, 30 times and learn something new every time.

The you know G was a former orthopedic surgeon who studied anatomy. You know, he was tired of cadaver so just became a surgeon so he could study living anatomy, because living anatomy is living, is different than you know with like formaldehyde and all of the dead body stuff you know. So. And then he developed a series of an entire program, not just the algohm method, to prevent surgeries. And his, from his words as a surgeon, he says that 3% of all back surgeries are necessary.

And so you know, you know it depends, right? So we’ll say like maybe non-contact, like disperneations, or you could have like I don’t want to get too technical, but maybe this shifting forward or backwards. They call it a retrolyzed thesis or a spondylized thesis, and you know there’s a lot of things that we can do for ourselves where we can. You know it’s a self-responsibility thing. And he says favorite quote is you are your own best therapist, and so I really love that, and so that’s pretty much what I teach. I basically teach people to not be codependent so we can get them strong and fit in those bombs. Yeah.

0:05:09 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Love it, love it. So when you say that and when Guy says that you know 3% of back issues are, you know, really necessarily need surgery, what are some of the things that you see people going in for where you’re just like man if I had, if I was able to get my hands on this person. What are some of the diagnoses or what are some of the issues that people go in for that really you feel like man if I only had some time with them.

0:05:34 – Ryan Degale
A few millimeters of space or the disverteation at L5S1, you know they when they have symptoms like very heavy symptoms. But you know everything with the tissues in the body there’s really not that much room. So if you create a little bit of lubrication and a little bit of space in the right area and able to, you know, restructure the pelvis, create a little more flexibility, the ribcage, and so they’re able to play golf, because you know when you most players, after they hit a golf shot, that’s when they have back pain. So you need space to decelerate the golf club. You don’t get to the top and you drop in pain. It’s mostly after the ball and so just kind of reconditioning things. You know it’s.

It’s difficult because you know, you know the the medical industry is really governed by insurance these days where you have to code. A lot of the programs are coded, you know, and it’s difficult for the doctors and therapists where they’re kind of at the mercy of the insurance companies of how to treat and this stuff. And so why a lot of people have better um with private practice or cash. Not everybody can afford it. But you know I’m trying to bring small awareness to that and you know it does not have to be fancy, it just has to be right and it has to be consistent.

0:06:39 – Jeff Pelizzaro
And what would you say is kind of the primary driver of that pain. That is most typical. Obviously, there’s a lot of different things that can go on with the back, but you’ve got these golfers you said a lot of times. You see that they have pain as they’re finishing their swing, they’re getting through contact. What are the typical structures, what are the typical issues that are causing that? Or, and you know, back wise, hip wise, shoulder wise, and what are some of the things that you feel like most guys or girls could prevent this if they had a little bit more knowledge of what they needed to do.

0:07:09 – Ryan Degale
I think, just really a specific warm up. Because you know, like, if you look at professional sports, you see, like you know Steph Curry, he’s, you know, doing some drills on the basketball court. You see, you know, when I’m writing a program for somebody who does this game for a living, you know they’re at the gym 30 to 45 minutes prepping the tissues, getting their nervous system activated. You know, warming up the ligaments correctly and doing all these kind of things in the lower back that are specific to what golfers need. You know, maybe a few pelvic till, some spinal translations, some rolling on, roll this mind, because everybody’s so afraid of fletching. But you know, fletching we have to in sport. You know that there is a lot of our flexor chain being used and so we need to prep the body in that way where everybody’s afraid of doing extensions and flexing. But you know we have to train it in a controlled environment so that we can go out there and not have to think about it. And with the Aldo method it’s basically a French acronym for creating space in a joint segment and so you know, you can use your own body way to decompress your spine in different segments of the spine after your rounds, which is fundamental, and then you go to sleep and then the tissues will heal at that length and you’ll be able to slowly but surely rehydrate this, the body. If you give it enough the great environment, with the right tools, it can regenerate.

I’ve seen it, you know. I’ve seen it in imaging studies, working with people with severe scoliosis when they were basically given a ticket of paying for the rest of their life. It’s just a management system. There’s no cures, it’s just a management system. How can I manage? You know the way I feel every day with the two of us, the tools I have, and I think that gives people a lot more empowerment than just being the sort of victim thing which is unfortunate, with the surgeries, pills and injections. And you know it’s destroyed a lot of lives and that’s really the truth.

0:08:52 – Jeff Pelizzaro
So I’m sure that a lot of people listening, myself included, are thinking man, this is very refreshing to hear that you know it’s not a death sentence when you start to have back pain in your 30s or 40s or 50s. And I think a lot of people just kind of assume that either I’m on my way to getting surgery at some point down the line, or I’m going to have to give up golf, or I’m going to have to start to restrict some of my activities.

0:09:17 – Ryan Degale
We are not giving out golf for our Never right, that’s it.

0:09:20 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Forever. You play it until you keep swinging forever. But so, regarding like the looking at the X-rays, the MRIs, the films, so you’ve actually seen changes in the disc space and the different tissues after going through some of this maintenance stuff.

0:09:38 – Ryan Degale
Yeah with my clients, and G puts up slides with a lot