An Innovative Approach to Healing Chronic Pain and Trauma with Active Fascia Release with Julia Blackwell

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:00:03 Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today’s episode. As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Hi there and welcome. It’s Doctor Jessica Drummond, founder of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. Today I have a really fun and I think important podcast for you. Today you are going to meet Julia Blackwell. She has developed and I guess spread the word about a fascial mobility technique or set of tools that will not be unfamiliar to the rehab and fitness professionals in our community, but I think we’re going to take it to a very specific and important level, both physically and emotionally.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:01:38 So let’s dive into this conversation. You will love hearing Julia’s personal story, and then I’ll meet you on the other side, where we can talk about how you can take this information. Day one start to utilize it in your practice. I’ll see you on the other side of our conversation. Welcome, Julia, to the Integrative Women’s Health podcast. I’m so thrilled to meet you and have this conversation about fascia. I think fascia is one of the most underappreciated parts of our anatomy. So welcome and tell our audience, our community, a little bit more about why you became so interested in facial health.

Julia Blackwell 00:02:26 Yeah. Thanks, Jessica. I’m so excited to be here. Well, technically, I’ve had a lifelong journey of my fascination with anatomy and healing. I was almost a £10 baby, and in the process of being born, I got stuck. So when the doctor attempted to pull me out, he ended up stretching and tearing most of the nerves in my right shoulder. So while I did have a big nerve re graph when I was about four months old, I was still left with tons of tension, limited mobility, and just a feeling of being just limited and uncomfortable in my body.

Julia Blackwell 00:03:04 And they essentially sent me home after that surgery and wished me the best of luck. And that was it. So I did grow up going through, let’s call it the standard Western medicine run around where I did some occupational therapy. I went to doctors appointments, I did lots of checkups, and really try just about any modality that was available to me in the 90s, and nothing made any kind of a lasting impact. Most people told me that this condition would never get any better. If anything, it’s going to get worse so that I should prepare for that. And I really didn’t think there was any other answer. So I grew up feeling very disconnected from my arm, feeling like I couldn’t do a lot of things and lived in a pretty limited box. I didn’t like to try new things. I didn’t like anyone to know that I had a problem, so I thought the easiest solution was to avoid any situation where this injury and this limitation might be noticed. But I was always fascinated with the body and wanted to learn more.

Julia Blackwell 00:04:17 I still tried any modality that came my direction. I still bought any tool and device that I thought might work. I went to school for exercise physiology and truthfully, even with that degree, barely learned anything about fascia. And I moved out to Boulder in 2010, and I want to say within six months or so of being there, I happened to meet this lady who did a very specific type of fascia release. And again, I’d I’d heard of it, but knew so little about it and was interested because it had been my interest for a lifetime, but really didn’t expect much out of it. I essentially told this lady, hey, give it your best shot.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:05:04 Yeah. And did you have symptoms in the arm or like lack of function. What were you specifically struggling with.

Julia Blackwell 00:05:10 Yeah I had a lot of chronic tension. My elbow was perpetually bent. My fist was mostly closed. I really struggled with any overhead movement. It was very uncomfortable. But it was also a strength element. I had about maybe 30 to 40% strength on my right, as opposed to my left.

Julia Blackwell 00:05:32 I had taught myself, for the most part, not to use my right, because everyone told me that there was nothing I could do about it. So I went and started working with this fascist specific work, and it completely blew my mind and changed my life. So Within three months of doing fascist specific work, I saw more results with regaining muscle firing ability, with relief of tension with processing. A lot of emotions I found were stored in that side of my body. I found more relief in three months than I had of a lifetime of anything else that I had tried. And truly, to this day, I still love to try new things. Nothing has made such a lasting impact on my arm as fascia work. So I, of course became obsessed with this thing. I thought, wow, if it can make a significant dent and significant progress in something that was supposed to be completely irrevocable, what could this do for all of the people that think they have chronic pain, or they think they can’t do anything in a certain realm of activity anymore, and it’s just been incredible.

Julia Blackwell 00:06:46 So I opened a practice. It’s been 11 years ago and have been helping people ever since, and it’s been a really fun journey.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:06:56 That’s great. So many of the people in our audience are women’s health and wellness professionals. We have a lot of physical and occupational therapists, massage therapists, other manual therapists, fitness professionals in our community. So they’ve heard of fascia, but I bet very few of them are sort of really thinking about it on a day to day level. So let’s talk a little bit about the physiology of fascia. How do you think of fascia as you’re working with people? Are you really kind of thinking about like where it lies between the skin and the muscle? Are you thinking about the innovation through the fascia? Are you thinking about, you know, the circulatory system running through the fascia? How are you thinking about it when you’re doing manual fascial work or helping people mobilize their own fascia?

Julia Blackwell 00:07:47 Yeah. Great question. So I’ll start with just a broad overview of what fascia is.

Julia Blackwell 00:07:53 So it’s an elaborate connective tissue system that encases and weaves through every single cell in our body. So one of my favorite analogies is to think of it like plastic wrap. It wraps around every single muscle fiber pull, every muscle, every muscle group, every tendon, ligament, bone, blood vessel, organ, nerve. It’s this huge three dimensional plastic wrap suit that we have on the inside. And so because fascia wraps around everything in our body, it therefore influences the position and function of everything in our body. So it’s going to affect things like our detoxing ability. Because our lymphatic system lives in our superficial fascia. It’s going to affect our breathing mechanics, our hormones. We also have a water, a specific water within our fascial fibers called the extracellular matrix. And, you know, depending on how hydrated you are, the average person is somewhere between 55 and 72% water, right? Most of that water is actually stored and contained within our fascial system. So that water is what brings nutrients to cells.

Julia Blackwell 00:09:06 It’s what carries out waste. It’s what hydrates our tissue. It’s what allows for shock absorption and protection from impact, really, the list goes on. The more we learn about fascia, the more we realize what roles it’s truly playing in the body. For a really long time, when they were dissecting cadavers, they would be like, what? What is all this webbing and all of this stuff in the way from seeing the muscle and from seeing the nerve, and they would cut it out and throw it in the trash. And so only in the last 50 years or so are we starting to discover, wait a minute, all of this wrapping is actually doing a lot in the body. So we kind of have to deconstruct some of the original things that we learned in school, where we learn things piece by piece, like, here’s the skeletal system. Oh, this muscle does this one function, this ligament does this one movement. That’s not really how the body works because of this wrapping that’s communicating with itself even outside of the nervous system.

Julia Blackwell 00:10:08 And so I really have to look holistically at the body to go back to your original question, which is, okay, if one area of the body has become dehydrated or restricted in any way, kind of like a crumpled up ball of plastic wrap, that’s going to change the function and position of almost everything in the body, there’s no way we can look at one part of the body and say, oh, this is just a problem with your knee. This is just a problem with your shoulder. So I’m always working with the whole and what’s going to actually restore balance and full movement in the body, which unfortunately we live in a very symptom focus culture. And that’s why a lot of pain and even mobility problems aren’t being resolved long term is no one’s really looking at the whole picture, even past the joint above and below. So I work a lot with, again, not just how to create that change in the fascia, which we can dive into too, but where because where is just as important.

Julia Blackwell 00:11:16 And a lot of times, honestly, probably 95% of the time it’s not where you’re feeling pain. So that’s that’s the majority of what I’m doing with people. If that answers your question.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:11:27 Yeah. So if we use your arm as an example. So you were not moving it, you know, like 70% less than the other side. Thus it’s by definition going to be less hydrated, less range of motion. And all the planes, you know, kind of in a three dimensional plane. And so thus you could also have symptoms up into the opposite jaw or down into the opposite hip or down into the same side hip. And so when you do an assessment of someone who has, whether it’s chronic pelvic pain, chronic headaches, like how do you start, where would you take that into consideration? Because I think, again, most of the physical therapists and occupational therapists and other practitioners listening kind of understand that, but it’s like, oh, we have 30 minutes. Like where do we start to be able to assess fascia?

Julia Blackwell 00:12:21 I usually start simply by looking at someone’s standing posture.

Julia Blackwell 00:12:26 You can see a lot of facial tension based on does someone have forward head. Do they have a trunk rotation? Do they have a pelvic rotation? Are they favoring one side over the other because we tend to lean towards the side of dysfunction. Right. And we can start to unpack all of these things. You know, all of your fascia is connected, right? It’s one uninterrupted, interconnected system that functions as a unit. However, there are certain chains. If anyone out there is familiar with Thomas Meyer’s research on anatomy trains, there are certain strips of fascia that are more interconnected than others. So it’s kind of like if you pulled on one end, this whole series of bones and muscles would move. It’s really fascinating. It’s like it all goes the same direction, like the grain of wood. So you can see a lot of trains that might be problematic based on someone’s posture. I love having people walk around a little bit to just to see if there’s anything that changes once movement and more gravity is required.

Julia Blackwell 00:13:29 but I’ve also just discovered over the years, through all of the research and training I’ve done, that there are pain patterns that most people fall into not everyone. Because we’re all unique. We all have our own set of movements we do, and life experiences that affect the way our body functions. But there are certainly patterns that repeat over and over. So anyone with lower back pain, the quads and adductors are the top two places I go because they are what are overworked and too tight from too much sitting. The adductors affect pelvic position probably more than anything in the lower body, so I will follow some of the more primary patterns that I see time and time again. Before I go on a really deep dive to uncover everything. We’ll just see how far we can get based on the primary areas that affect it the most.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:14:25 Yeah, the most common kind of pattern recognition. And so what are some of the facial mobility tools that you use? Like what is the how.

Julia Blackwell 00:14:36 I’ve learned over the years, the most effective way to quickly change and re pattern fascia is with a combination of compression, which most of all of us are familiar with, but then adding an active movement.

Julia Blackwell 00:14:51 So, so many of the modalities that we’re familiar with or we’re exposed to are very passive. And it’s not to say passive treatments don’t work. This is just the combination that seems to have the quickest and most lasting change. And that’s what was so impactful for me personally. I realized almost everything I did for my arm was, you know, I laid on 100 tables for someone else to stretch me or put a heat pack on, or essentially try to change my body for me. And it wasn’t until I started engaging this arm again through movement and trying to access certain ranges of motion, that things started changing in my brain. It started to give me access to things I didn’t have access before. So it’s really important to combine those two. So when I’m working at my practice in Golden, Colorado, I’ll compress fascia mostly with my feet, which my clients lovingly refer to as being stepped on. But it’s more complicated than that.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:15:54 Sure, sure.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:15:55 I understand what you’re saying. So they might be on a table.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:15:59 You’re applying some compression around the floor. Let’s say we’re doing like you said, the, you know, the anterior quads, the quads, the inner thighs, and someone has lower back pain, so they might be on their stomach and you’re compressing that way or you so that they can bend their knee. Is that what we’re talking about? Something like that.

Julia Blackwell 00:16:17 So when I compress the quads, someone’s in a seated position on the floor, and then they’re going to be doing internal external rotation through with the feet and the femurs okay.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:16:29 So sitting with their legs extended. And then you’re trying to like bring some mobility into that whole leg. Okay. Got it.

Julia Blackwell 00:16:38 There’s a couple different techniques I use for the quads and the hip flexors, but trying to restore that movement, I’m sure we’ve all heard like movement is medicine. We’ve heard that so many times, but it really is so accurate where we have to move our body in order to tell the brain that it’s safe to access certain ranges of motion again, that it’s okay to interrupt whatever pattern we might be in, because most of the time when we’re in pain or we injure something, the first thing people tell us to do is arrested.

Julia Blackwell 00:17:09 Stop moving. But it’s actually the opposite of what we need to do most times. So I’ll be moving. Having that person move themselves as far in a direction as they can. Sometimes there’s reaching, there’s twisting, there’s a lot of dynamic movement involved. But I also teach people how to do essentially the same thing with tools like foam rollers and lacrosse balls, tools that you probably already have in your house. You just may not fully know the power of what they can do. So for the quads, if we’ll stick with that example, you know you’re laying in a plank position, your thighs are on the roller, and most of us are taught to just kind of roll up and down with the grain of the muscle. Now that will create a little bit of heat in the muscle. So it could still be beneficial as a warm up for your workout, but you’re not going to be able to affect those deeper layers of fascia. Fascia is not a sausage casing around your muscles, right? It is.

Julia Blackwell 00:18:07 Layer on, layer on layer on layer. So instead of rolling, you find a spot that feels tight. Saw a little bit intense, although I do suggest keeping the intensity at a seven at the ceiling. There’s really no need to have something so intense that your nervous system starts freaking out.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:18:28 I think that’s an important point, because one of the other things you’re trying to do is retrain, rewire the nervous system to feel safe in that new position.

Julia Blackwell 00:18:37 Yes, you’re so right. That’s exactly right. So yeah, make sure you know if it’s too intense, you can always wrap your roller in a yoga mat. You could put a pillow between whatever you’re working on and your roller until you feel more comfortable, or that tissue loosens a little bit. But once you have that spot on your quads, you would bend your heels back so your knees are bending, kind of like you’re doing a hamstring curl. So you may bend and straighten your knees a few times. And then when your knees are bent back at 90 degrees, I’ll also rock my heels side to side.

Julia Blackwell 00:19:10 So now we’re cross fibers in a lot of those, both muscle and fascial fibers in a way that you’re not ever going to get if you simply roll up and down. And there’s actually a specialized cell within our fascia called a fascia site that only gets activated through shearing or some type of cross fibrin. and once that cell is activated, it starts the production of hyaluronic acid, which is essentially like full body grease and padding for our body and our joints. So without any type of dynamic movement where we’re getting that cross fibrin in, we’re not going to be able to as effectively hydrate the body. So I’m all about compression and active movement in whatever is the most safe, but also the most dynamic way possible.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:19:55 Yeah, I love that. I can see the rehab professionals and the movement professionals like really getting excited about this, because it’s very specific in terms of how to get those really sticky parts moving in a way that keeps the client very actively engaged. So I think you’re doing three things at the same time.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:20:16 One, you’re mobilizing fascia and hydrating the fascia, but two, you’re rebuilding strength and ranges that they didn’t have access to before. And three, you’re rebuilding safety in ranges that they didn’t have before. So I’m thinking of one of my friends about two and a half years ago, broke her wrist and it was a pretty bad injury, and it was a very traumatic injury. So it was kind of a lot of fear around things and fear of falling and just fear of how fragile we can be at a certain age. And so she was stuck at a certain range of recovery, and it was about a year in, and her surgeon was like, oh, you know, this is basically what you’re going to get. Like, you know, it’s fine, go live your life. And she’s like, no, like, I’m not done. I want to be able to like open a jar and hold a pan myself. So I had her go on all fours and begin to really and I can’t, you know, kind of show you here.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:21:14 But her arm was straight. We were in all fours and she started moving her elbow, moving her scapula with the safety of her hand being in closed chain. So you have a limitation of how far it’s going to go. And I could imagine that. Then you could activate facial healing by putting some, you know, either manual pressure on the wrist or something where you added some compression to get like a little more at a cellular level. So that could help it accelerate even more in terms of that local hydration. Talk a little bit about when you get that more local movement and hydration. What does that do to the nervous and circulatory systems and lymph?

Julia Blackwell 00:21:59 To throw another analogy at everyone, I often talk about fascia a bit like a vacuum seal bag. So even though it’s multiple layers, right, if you stuff all your muscles, your blood vessels, your nerves, your lymph system in a vacuum sealed bag and the air is slowly being sucked out of it, which happens for many reasons, right? It could be injury.

Julia Blackwell 00:22:24 It could be stress. Actually, stress is a really big one. Really. Any type of trauma, whether it be physical or emotional. So physical meaning like a car accident or some type of an impact injury. Inflammation is very sensitive to inflammation, but probably more than anything like repetitive movement or lack of movement is a big one. But any of these things that can cause it will slowly suck the air out of the vacuum seal bag. And so, as you can imagine, it’s like wearing clothes that are a million times too small. Your muscles aren’t going to have the same range of motion. Your lymph system is going to have multiple kinks in the hose. Blood flow is going to have a tough time getting to areas, especially like the hands and the feet. If you have tingling or numbness in the hands when you sleep, like not enough blood flow is getting out there, right? There’s got to be some type of restriction in the pecs and up in the shoulder girdle. The lats usually are a big one too.

Julia Blackwell 00:23:19 But as we compress and start to mobilize and move that fascia. It’s bringing in this wealth of fluid, right? It’s blood flow. It’s lymph. It’s the extracellular fluid that’s within our fascia. And that just gives everything the space to function at its optimal level again.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:23:39 So we talked about having some emotion attached to obviously being born with this injury in your arm and then kind of being afraid to use it and not wanting to participate in other things that other kids are doing. Talk about how that emotional release was accessed and how it felt for you as a part of your recovery.

Julia Blackwell 00:24:01 No one really told me anything about emotions being stored in the body, or if I had heard it at one point, I probably dismissed it because, you know, I grew up as very much a science nerd and didn’t realize that there’s just as much science to support the emotional side of things. It just didn’t have that access. So the first time I experienced one, I was having the SEM on the side of my neck worked on and it was so gentle.

Julia Blackwell 00:24:31 It didn’t hurt at all and I just started sobbing. I could not stop all of these tears coming out of my face and I, like most of us, do. I was like, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m apologizing for it. And someone had to explain it to me like, oh, this is what happens when emotions get stuck. Essentially stagnation in the body, right? If everything in my right side was sucked really tight in a vacuum sealed bag, everything starts moving with the release, including energy. So once that broke the damn, I found that I had quite a few. Every once in a while. I still have one and it really, truly can be anywhere in the body. I’ve heard many people talk about how emotions tend to be stored in the hips, but I’ve seen people have releases everywhere in the ribs with the neck. I started sobbing once when my bicep got worked on. You know, I really don’t think the body is so organized that it’s like we’re going to send all of this trauma to.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:25:33 All the emotion to the hip. Yeah. No, I totally agree. Yeah.

Julia Blackwell 00:25:38 But I found that with each passing emotional release, I’ve heard from both family and friends that my personality started to change. I became much more outgoing. I actually started hiking and mountaineering and which requires a little bit of rock climbing. I started climbing all of the tallest peaks in Colorado. I actually just finished all 58 last year. And yeah, and I really came out of my shell. I wasn’t as afraid to do things. I felt more confident in my body because for the long time and I’m sure other people can relate to this, it sort of feels like your body has betrayed you and you’ve been sentenced to this terrible outcome, and you don’t have a great relationship with either that part of your body or maybe your body in general. And so I found that moving that energy and releasing the emotions, I became a lot more accepting of my body. I felt much more comfortable in it and overall more confident in how I could move through life.

Julia Blackwell 00:26:47 And honestly, that alone was probably enough to change my life. But it was nice to also get mobility and strength back.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:26:55 Absolutely. I mean, it’s great to have the whole package. Well, and that makes a lot of sense because part of what kind of stuck the emotions to that was that sense that you weren’t fully safe in your body, that your body was kind of fragile in some way. So I do think as rehab and fitness professionals, we see this a lot. We see people, whether it’s after an injury or after an illness. There’s a sense of like, what did I do wrong? I think we have a lot of internalized ableism around this that what did I do wrong? You know, why can’t I fix it on my own? And I see a lot of grief. And, like you said, a little bit of fear, grief and fear, both in equal measure and sadness and anger. So ideally, obviously, people would come and work with you in your practice and have you lovingly step on them.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:27:55 But if someone does not live in Colorado, I think there’s also some empowerment to being able to access these tools and work through that at their own pace. Is there any way that you help people do that?

Julia Blackwell 00:28:09 Yes, I do have an online video library called Roller Remedy that gives you really like head to toe techniques that you can use your rollers, your lacrosse balls, your kind of soft Pilates balls, all of the ways that you can start unwinding your own fascia. And honestly, I think there’s a lot of significance to doing it yourself. There is a time and place where we need a practitioner. Sometimes it’s even just for like the emotional support side of it. But when you do a lot of these things on your own, even with a foam roller, that’s creating more safety because you don’t have to create any safety with someone else or be scared that they might push you too far, you can have full control over how much pressure and how much you want to do. I also I’m just curious.

Julia Blackwell 00:28:57 By nature. I love discovering things about my own body because since helping my arm, I’ve a normal, active person. I’ve had plenty of aches and pains. I’ve had bouts of knee pain and low back pain and neck pain, and I’ve gotten rid of all of them in a matter of days, or maybe a week or two by doing this type of fascia release on my own. Like with rollers and things. So I don’t think it’s really mandatory that you have someone do it. Although if I can add more compression right when we’re in person, but that might be a great place for people to start if they’re curious on how to do it on their own. It’s a bit of a choose your own adventure and find out what your body really feels like, what your body responds to, what feels really good, all of that.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:29:44 One last question before we wrap up. So for people that have more of a hypermobility picture genetically something like Editas or on that spectrum, what’s your perspective on that? How do you use these tools for people with hypermobility? Because of course, they also sort of sometimes have tension and trying to hold the package together, if you will.

Julia Blackwell 00:30:08 Yeah. You know, I’ve worked with quite a few people with Mobility and allergy stand loss. And interestingly, it only helps. Fascia has a finite amount of space, and when it’s all healthy and mobile, it’s mostly about the hydration element. And so you’re not really going to overstretch your fascia. So we’re not creating way more space than there should be in an area. So I do find that with all of those hypermobility people, it doesn’t seem to put them even in a further hypermobile state or feel like they’re overstretched in any way. But I would definitely recommend that they do strength training, and that’s not my area of expertise, but anyone who can show them how to retrain their body to only use the correct range of motion, that seems to be one of the biggest helps for hypermobility. But yeah, you can definitely do fascia release, and without overstretching.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:31:10 Is not exacerbated. Yeah. And I think it’s sometimes really helpful because when the joints are hypermobile, I think there’s maybe a deeper conversation to be had when the vascular system is hypermobile.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:31:24 But even still, like you said, you’re mobilizing the fascia to the normal range, where sometimes people that have hypermobile joints are overstretching at the joints, and so they’re tense at the area of the muscle.

Julia Blackwell 00:31:40 Right. You know, I use the term fascia release because people inherently know what I’m talking about. But really, more than anything, we’re rehydrating or re texturizing and we’re repatriating when you do this type of fascia release. So maybe we can even remove the stigma of like release means we’re creating this really intense amount of space. Like that’s not really what we’re doing. A lot of times it’s just the re texturizing or the re patterning that needs the most attention, right?

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:10 It’s not even so much that you’re actually stretching the fascia or the muscle in a way that’s sustained. Correct. You’re sort of like creating space, creating hydration, creating mobility between the layers of the fascia, but not like overstretching it so that you have this like loose bit of chicken fascia, you know, like exactly.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:33 Yes.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:33 Okay.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:34 Yeah. And I think it’s important to visualize like, you know, in our a lot of our facial training, we think about like the fascia you peel off the chicken breast. Right. Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:43 Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:44 And that’s I think a useful analogy in that you can sort of feel it peel off the muscle. But then it’s like we just taken off and throw it away. This chicken’s already dead. So it’s different when you have living fascia because you’re not like ripping it off the muscle. You’re just like I think those terms are hydration Texturizing mobility. knot like overstretching this extra piece of fascia. So you have all this fascia, like hanging out in your body.

Julia Blackwell 00:33:14 I don’t really like the term stretching at all because that’s the that’s definitely not what we’re doing here. But yeah that’s great chicken fascia I love.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:23 It so much.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:25 Excellent. Well this has been really helpful. These are techniques that I like because they’re so empowering. So if our audience or their clients want to learn more about how they can utilize some of the stuff, even just, you know, after workouts, pre-workout, like just if the mild aches and pains and then for addressing those deeper.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:48 Just this morning, I was working with a client who has a post-viral illness and she’s like, oh, you know, I just have a sticky place in my digestion. And we were talking about fascial release with like a more squishy Pilates ball to the rib cage. So things like that, that I think there’s a fear there when someone’s had an illness and then they lose that trust in their body. So where can we find out more about you and your work?

Julia Blackwell 00:34:17 Yeah. If you go to Movement by julia.com, I actually have a free three day video series called Unlock Your Hips that will give you three 15 minute long videos that you can do to more greatly understand the specific type of foam rolling that I’m talking about. And that was probably the easiest way to get going just to experience the difference for yourself.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:34:43 Yeah, I love that. Well, thank you so much for being here with us and sharing your personal story and inspiration and these techniques. I think they really are going to help a lot of people.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:34:55 Thank you. Thanks so much, Jessica.

Julia Blackwell 00:34:56 It was great to be here.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:35:01 I don’t know about you, but I loved that conversation, and I cannot wait to go downstairs and dig out my foam roller and my Pilates ball and my lacrosse balls and find those areas of stuck fascia. But the most important thing that I want you to take from this is really that emotional release piece. And if you’ve not already listened to our episode with Richmond Heath physical therapist in Australia talking about traumatic release exercise, I think this is a very untapped and so important piece of creating safety for our clients who have been injured, who have had illnesses. One of the biggest challenges for people living with chronic pain, chronic injury, chronic illness is their lack of feeling safety in their body. And a lot of that comes from external and internalised ableism. This sense that in the wellness community, if we have done everything right, your body should be perfect and that’s just not true. There are many, many reasons why people don’t fully heal, and sometimes they are emotional.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:36:12 Sometimes they are physical, sometimes they just yet haven’t accessed the right tools like Julia. They haven’t access the right strategy. They haven’t had the opportunity for safe emotional release at their own pace so we can help people get more and more functional while we are supporting the fact that, look, this is not their fault. Life is messy. They might have done everything right, done all the strength training. You know, Julia’s been on hundreds of people’s therapy mats. They went to therapy, they went to OT, they went to all the doctor’s appointments. And they still are not fully well. So I strongly encourage you to go access her tools, learn them, collaborate with her, help your clients learn them through her and your Work, but you have the unique opportunity to be the place that safe space where people can release emotions that are stored physically without having to dig up exactly why, where they’re coming from, what they mean, just allowing them to move and be heard and be seen and be safe and be comfortable.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:37:27 And people can do that at home if they don’t feel comfortable doing it with you through those exercises, through this kind of facial release strategy. And I think this is one of the most important gifts we can give to our clients with chronic injury or illness, because there’s always an emotional component. Always. And the more people are able to freely address the emotional component safely with you, the more quickly they’re going to feel more free, the more quickly they’re going to be able to get out in the world and do things and trust that they are going to be okay, and if they’re not that they’ll be okay. They’ll have the tools to recover. Life is messy. Your job is to hold people’s hand through that and to give them the tools to make it messy, but then better. Have a great week. I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:38:51 Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.