The Hidden Cause of Chronic Pain Most People Miss

00:00 The Fitness Secret Behind Chronic Pain

Sue Hitzmann: You can eat right and exercise all you want and still have chronic pain So there's something missing in the industry and that's the dirty little secret of fitness if you've got pain in joints Your problem is a fascia problem. It's not a muscle problem It's kind of like, you know a fire alarm going off when your toaster is on fire and you took the batteries out of the fire Alarm you wake up in the morning and you are stiff as a dried-out sponge left out overnight on your kitchen sink

00:26 Welcome to Regeneration Effect

Dr. Yi Song: Hi, welcome to another episode of Regeneration Effect We're so glad to have Sue Hitzmann here as our guest. She is the founder of the MELT Method and has the New York Times bestseller MELT Method. So we're going to have her talk about what MELT Method is and how it can help you with your health and longevity. Sue, welcome to the show.

Sue Hitzmann: Thank you so much for having me.

00:55 How Pain Led to Fascia Research

Dr. Yi Song: Thank you. Yeah, so can you give us a little bit background about how you get into MELT Method and then how you discovered this method is very good for fascia release, for pain relief?

Sue Hitzmann: Sure, I mean, my MELT actually spawned out of my private practice back in the late 90s. This was actually after I had gotten myself into pain myself. I had been in the fitness industry my whole life and I kind of bought into the idea that if you ate right and you exercised, you were gonna lead this healthy act of life and went on to study collegiately, exercise science. And after a decade into the industry of neuromuscular therapy, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the human body. And I woke up one day and the bottom of my foot hurt me. First diagnosis was plantar fasciitis. Turned into this body-wide ache and fatigue. I couldn't shake, and it just had wrecked me. So I started going to doctors. And it went from everything from I'm depressed to it might be lupus and we want to run more tests. But that first diagnosis was really stuck with me, plantar fasciitis, what is inflamed fascia? There's no exercise for that. I didn't really think of fascia the way that I do now. So I kind of veered out of the fitness industry into trying to discover who was working on fascia and how does that relate to pain and our overall stability. And I found this emerging field of neuroscience and fascial research that was uncovering fascia's role in pain. I started studying with a lot of the researchers and scientists and just started getting very involved with it. And what I found was that there was a lot of science, but not a lot of application. So unless you're going to go see a therapist all the time to work on your fascia, that sounds like a lot of time and a lot of money that people don't have. I was working on my clients doing these light touch therapeutic techniques and a client said if you could just invent a way for me to do to myself what to do with your magic hands, I'd stay out of your office. So I started experimenting with different tools and came up with this idea of creating a soft roller, a soft round tool. It started out as PVC piping wrapped in bubble wrap wrapped in a yoga blanket and a yoga mat and I duct taped it together. Started to apply these light touch therapeutic techniques that I had learned from cranial sacral therapy and I decompressed my own neck. I knew I did it. I started sharing it with my clients and this one woman who had suffered with chronic migraines in TMJ found herself out of my office for two or three weeks at a time, just adopting a self-care practice of touch and tension compression techniques. And I just thought, God, there's something here. Can I continue to teach this to people? So in 2004, I started taking these techniques and brought them into the fitness industry, trying to bridge the gap between fitness and therapy and had people really gravitate toward it. So today, MELT is a very widespread global movement of educators who teach people how to rehydrate fascia, educate people on what fascia is, and to roll in pains, roll in longevity, and then using soft tools like rollers and balls. And now we have this fascia hydrator, which is based in vibration and frequency that you can actually rejuvenate and rehydrate the fascial tissues and support your overall wellbeing, your balance, your stability, and ultimately your aging process.

04:13 Why Joint Pain Is Often Fascia

Dr. Yi Song: Do you think most people they have pain and inflammation also because their fascia is not hydrated enough?

Sue Hitzmann: Yeah, actually, it's the root cause of it. I think that's the thing is we think of pain and we're like, oh, it's a nervous system, But pain is just your brain's way of informing you that something's not right in your body. And so it's a message. It's just a message that your body is a signal. And I always say the way that we deal with that kind of pain is that we go after the pain points. So if your neck hurts you, either you're going to find a blunt object and jam it into your neck or you're going to take an Advil to mask the pain symptom. But the thing is that's kind of like, you know, a fire alarm going off when your toaster's on fire and you took the batteries out of the fire alarm but the toaster's still on fire. So you're treating the sound and the cause and the symptom but not the cause. And what we're understanding about fascia is that it's the environment that every nerve, blood vessel organ muscle bone lives in. And so when fascia loses its supportive qualities, if it loses its fluid perfusion, it causes the sensory nervous system to react. And so now your sensory system sends messages to the brain about what's going on. Your brain's got to decode that message and sends you a signal. And again, it depends upon how we deal with it to treat it. But I would say that fascist the missing link to most pain points that people deal with, especially space, pain, like neck space, low back space, your joints, if you've if you've got pain in joints, your problem is a fascia problem. It's not a muscle problem.

Dr. Yi Song: Oh, you said if you get pain in joints, yeah, it's a fascia

Sue Hitzmann: problem. It's a fascia problem around every joint is mostly fascia. There's no, when we say tendons crossover, well, a tendon is also fascia, but encased is also fascia. So actually around every joint is fascia. So fascia, when it becomes inflamed, that's low grade inflammation. It's not like inflammation, when you cut yourself and you have that's good inflammation temporary. But when you get into this place of low grade inflammation, your body is just kind of working against itself, because literally, if the environment's not stable, every other system reacts. So our joints, usually, if you, if you have pain,

06:34 Morning Stiffness and Pre-Pain Signals

Sue Hitzmann: usually joint pain is the first sign of it. And I should actually go back. joint pain isn't usually the first sign that your fascia needs your help. Even if you don't have pain. If you sit for long periods of time and you get up and you feel like you've aged 40 years because your joints don't work as well when you get up as when you sat down, or you wake up in the morning and you are stiff as a dried out sponge left out overnight on your kitchen sink. That's your fascia talking to you. So you don't even need to have pain to actually get the pre pain signals that your fascia needs So if you feel stiff all the time, if you're not really performing like you used to in any aspect of your life, fascia's probably playing one of the leading roles. And if you don't do anything about that stiff, achy feel that you have over time, one or more joints starts to talk to you, and you start feeling like, wow, this joint is really bothering me. And again, if you do what most people do, you either sit there and push on the joint itself. what you're not realizing is that fascial tissue around the body is kind of causing a strain in the joint that you're feeling. So unless you really understand how to adjust the whole body, when you have a isolated area of pain, you probably will make temporary changes, but you'll never get to the root cause of why that pain persists. And I think fascia delivers a little bit more of that global self care treatment than most physical therapy or or basic movement practices do.

Dr. Yi Song: So even 20 more than 20 years ago, when you were doing your body work for your clients, were you mostly focusing on fascia treatment?

Sue Hitzmann: Yeah, when I first started again, I was in the fitness industry. So personal training and you know, movement based exercise. And then I got into neuromuscular therapy, which is really about putting somebody in the right angle, the right position with the right amount of pressure, you can activate deep stabilization aspects of the body, what they call sensory motor pathways, which can then help stabilize regions like your shoulder girdle, your pelvic girdle, things like that. But after I got myself into pain at the ripe old age of 28 years old, I was crawling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I literally could not stand on my own two feet, my foot hurts so bad. And that that was a tipping point for me that is I understood fascia, I started to share that information with my clients. And that was really where everything started to change for how I was explaining health and wellbeing. That you can eat right and exercise all you want and still have chronic pain. So there's something missing in the industry and that's the dirty little secret of fitness. So for the past 25 years, I've been sharing what I've learned about fascia. I become a founding member of the Fascial Research Society. I've presented on stages explaining complicated science in very simple ways so that people kind of get it so that it's not so elusive. Because that's the problem with fascia. It's a global tissue. It's the collagen under your skin that stabilizes everything. And it's everywhere. It's in your brain. It's in your eyes. It's everywhere in your body. And as a global network, it is the biological fabric that stabilizes you and actually gives you your shape. But for it being everywhere, we know very little about it.

09:52 Fascia, Vagus Nerve, and Stress

Dr. Yi Song: Right, right. So do you think also fascia has something to do with vagus nerve as well? Because they say vagus nerve also spread all the way to many different parts of the body, but it's mostly on the surface as well.

Sue Hitzmann: Yes, and the vagus nerve, you know, I mean, now you're talking about one of the very primary cranial nerves that branches from your brain down into your gut. And so it actually has an inherent link to gut stability, like when you have a gut instinct or you're getting a bad feeling in your gut about something. That's your vagus nerve kind of high wiring and alerting you that something in your field is a little off. And fascia will definitely play a role with the nervous system. Actually the nervous system and your fascial system co-evolved from the earliest onsets of your being. So it's actually inherently linked to the autonomic aspects of regulation. Fascia plays a leading role and how your autonomic nervous system functions. So for a lot of us, we're just really stressed out, right? So even if I go back to that conversation we were having before, if your joints are full of stuck stress and you either pop an Advil or you ignore it, and you're taking the batteries out of your fire alarm instead of treating the cause, the thing about fascia is that if it stays in an unstable state for a long period of time, you get symptoms that seem completely unrelated to how you feel when you move. So all of a sudden, you're gaining weight for no reason. You are agitated all the time. You kind of feel a little unstable. And you kind of start feeling exhausted, like around two o'clock in the afternoon, you're going for your third cup of coffee for the afternoon. But at night, when you try to wind down, you can't wind down. And then you're not falling asleep or staying asleep. And then you're waking up with a backlog of this accumulative stress in the fascial system, which is now bogging down your autonomic nervous system, which regulates your lymphatic system. And now you have an increased chance for disease, sickness, illness. So again, I think the missing piece in anatomy and biology is that we love cutting things up and putting it into parts. The only system that puts it all back together is fascia. So as you start to really understand the cellular components of fascia, what fibroblasts are what these cells do to proliferate tissues in your body, mend you, heal you, you realize that fascia is playing, again, a leading role in your rest and repair system. And the lymphatic system is also a piece of that too. So if fascia is not functioning well, you probably have a higher chance to feel ill, to not have a good immune system, and to ultimately, you know, accelerate your aging process.

12:39 Daily Fascia Care and MELT

Dr. Yi Song: So in the MELT Method, do you recommend people doing certain fascia release every day for 10 minutes or something like that?

Sue Hitzmann: That's a good question. So first of all, I don't really think fascia releases. Facial release is a term. And I actually think fascia rehydrates. So in MELT, we actually have different tools and different techniques. And what I really encourage people to do is to go into the doorway where we take in the amount of information from the outside world, which is with your hands and feet physically, right? We touch everything to get ourselves places we've got to get on our feet to get there in the first place. So your hands and feet are like sensory portals. So treating your hands and your feet is probably the number one missing thing in our understanding of how the nervous system signals information through the body. And one of the doorways into the fascial net is your hands feet. So I would tell anybody, yeah, I would MELT your hands or your feet, take you about three, four minutes a day. It's great to do before you go for a run, you'll always have better ground reaction force, better timing, better stability, better control. We also use these soft tools like the soft roller. And we have something called the four Rs protocol, reconnect, rebalance, rehydrate and release. So reconnect techniques are assessment techniques, we basically get people to evaluate what stress feels like in fascia, like what's it really into my body, rebalance the nervous system through breathwork entrainment and activating differentiated motion like isolated movements in the body. And then the rehydrate techniques, tension and compression techniques to either cause tension on a myofascial meridian or compress through glide shear and rinse like working fluid into a sponge. These gentle compression intention techniques and then release techniques or decompression for the neck and low back. And each sequence from the MELT Method book takes about 10 minutes. And once you kind of understand the process of it, you might actually spend more like 20 minutes doing a MELT map that's specific for your body. But even if all you did was stimulate your hands, your feet, and some pressure along the spine for about five to 10 minutes a day, you would enhance your proprioception, your body's reception, your sensory reception, and your general sense of balance faster than probably anything else will. They're the areas that we never treat. So they're the, again, missing pieces. Like, when was the last time you had somebody really massage your spine and your pelvis and treat your hands and feet in a day? Probably never. But if you did, you'd find that your neck pain and your low back pain would significantly decrease in about 14 days. That's what we find in our pilot studies, our research paper that we have for low back pain. Just four weeks of treating your hands, your feet and rebalancing makes a difference in neck and low back pain.

15:34 Reflexology, Hands, and Feet

Dr. Yi Song: So do you think the fascia, the MELT Method also has something overlapping with reflexology?

Sue Hitzmann: Yes. Yes, definitely. And so reflexology, you know, I think that for me, ancient science and arts that are more from that I think we have sorely taken away in the Western world. We're like so far away from it that it's almost like we've forgotten that literally 1500 years well before anybody in the Western world was coming up with things. Like they had it going on. That entire world is so much more homogenous to how the body works because every part of your hand relates to an organ. Exactly. You know? And so yes, I've taken concepts from a lot of ancient work, from reflexology, pressure point techniques, positional release therapies, and infused them into a self-care practice so that people can do it at home. Because you're never going to replace a reflexologist. If you get a well-seasoned reflexologist, it can be life-changing in a single session. That's my experience of it. But it's finding them. It's finding somebody great, having the time, having the money to consistently come back to somebody. I think that this is the world where we'll make the excuse as to why we can't because time and money prohibit us from helping ourselves. And I just call bullshit on that.

Dr. Yi Song: So your MELT Method training, do you mostly train practitioners or do you train general public too?

Sue Hitzmann: It's both actually. A lot of people who come to the MELT instructor trainings are just there to really refine their own practice, but they quickly realize how much they are wanting to share it with their community, and they start teaching it. But most of our instructors range from group exercise, instructors, Pilates, yoga practitioners, all the way on out to massage therapists who wanna give their clients homework and not be their mothers, where they're just having to always come back to them every single week, and you're just working on the same thing over and over again. People who really want to make change with their clients will incorporate MELT into their practice so that their clients adopted as a practice so that they come back a little bit better each time and they can continue transforming a body. So it really kind of ranges. We have a lot of people who do reflexology, acupuncture, medical doctors have come to take the course. So it just really depends. I think the beauty about our instructors is that they're all very passionate, caring human beings who, you know, have hope for humanity and want to help people thrive. And that's kind of been, I think what's most incredible for me is that they're out there transforming lives all around the world, teaching the method to great success in groups. And I think that's amazing.

18:31 MELT On Demand and Self-Care

Dr. Yi Song: Do you think for MELT Method for the general public, it should be something that we can incorporate into our daily life? And then maybe you can have some instructional videos just like your book, but your book is very comprehensive.

Sue Hitzmann: Yeah, yeah. So we have something called MELT On Demand and it is a streaming platform. There's over 900 videos in the categories of pain, performance, and lifestyle. So what I always tell people is there's not one MELT map for something. So if you had back pain, I wouldn't be like, this is the MELT map that will fix your back pain. This is just not how it works. But there might be a collection of videos that will bring you through the most common issues that cause back pain, give you protocols to try, and over the course of seven to 10 videos, your back pain starts to dissipate and you start to refine your techniques in every video. So we have a lot of collections on MELT on demand in pain, shoulder pain, back pain, neck pain. We also have performance, MELT for pickle ball, for tennis, for golf. So if you're looking, you know, you think your swing's not so great, you're starting to feel that repetitive stress in your wrist or your low back, there's protocols for that. And then lifestyle are people who are kind of like the average Joe, they might be a desk jockey, They just sit all day or they have a job where they're doing something very repetitive. Maybe they're like, you know, on a line working with some sort of a conveyor belt or whatever it is. Those create massive dysfunctions in the body. So we have videos for that. And our teachers also teach on the platform. We have live classes every week so people can always engage that way. So I think that my whole hope when we created MELT On Demand was to give people so many videos that you're just never bored to not learn something new and to keep refining the skill of self care because the one thing I know about people, they're not so great with self care.

Dr. Yi Song: No. So is your MELT on demand a membership access? Yeah, so our MELT on demand, I think it's 15 bucks a month for unlimited videos

Sue Hitzmann: and live classes. And yeah, it's behind a paywall, but for people who really are like, I don't have $15 a month to care for myself, I would beg to differ. If that's the case, we need to talk. But we also on YouTube, you can go to YouTube and type in MELT Method and find dozens and dozens of videos. I mean, there's got to be 100, 200 videos just on YouTube that you could get through and learn a lot of the principles of the four Rs protocol, some of the basic fundamental sequences of the method. There's even videos up there, kind of like a do it yourself getting started series for people who don't have the product, you can actually learn a lot of the MELT Method protocols, the four hours fundamentals, just using a rolled up towel. And you could definitely get yourself started that way. So there's, you know, my, I don't never want something like money or time to be the prohibitive constructs of why somebody wouldn't want to try something that's so easy to do, effective and simple, like why wouldn't you at least give it a whirl, especially if it doesn't cost you any time and only takes you about 10 minutes in a day? If you don't have that, I have a problem with that.

Dr. Yi Song: You know? Exactly, and also even for like the roller for the foot or for the hand, you can just sit at the desk and do the roller on the foot, right?

Sue Hitzmann: Exactly, like you could use the hand and foot therapy balls anywhere. You could be, I mean, sometimes when I'm just in a long car ride or I'm on an airplane ride where I'm a passenger, I'll MELT my hands while I'm in a car. And that always alleviates a lot of the neck tension. I'm also the annoying person on an airplane when they want everybody to have their seat belts on where I am standing in the aisle, melting my feet on an airplane. But yeah, you can do it anywhere. And again, you can do it before you were to do any type of activity. It's always a great thing because it helps the nervous system accept where the periphery is. It reduces on those, especially if you're doing lateral movement like pickleball or tennis, it's a great way to boost stability in the hips because your nervous system has better timing when your hands and feet are open for reception. But it's also a great thing to do first thing in the morning like while you're making coffee, oftentimes I will MELT my feet while I make coffee or brush my teeth, I'll kind of combine them. So anywhere you have a healthy habit or something relatively consistent like you're making tea or coffee in the morning, that would be the best time to incorporate your MELT practice in just a few minutes.

Dr. Yi Song: And then in traditional ancient culture, people tend to soak their feet at night with hot water. And then actually nowadays we can also use some herbal formula or Epsom salt. Oh yeah. Then on Amazon, you can also buy these kind of foot massagers that you can soak your feet and then they start massaging the bottom of the Isn't that fantastic? So do you think that also is similar to doing the...

Sue Hitzmann: Yeah, I think that doing all of those things helps the nervous system. It just quiets the stress. I mean, you put your feet in warm water, it's just so soothing, right? I mean, it's just so relaxing. I think we need more of that. I just think there's a lot of people who wouldn't even go that far to buy a foot massager, buy something that they're going to use it a few times, and then it kind of like gets set aside on a shelf, and we never use it again. And we only just take it out when we really are tired or whatever. And I think having something that's very accessible, something you can carry with you, something you can just drop on the floor and put your feet on it at any given point in the day to help your nervous system receive signaling through these regions of your feet. Because just like your hands, every region of your foot relates to body parts. The center of your foot has a lot to do with the abdominal structures, your diaphragm, right? The top of your foot, your forefoot, is a lot about your eyes, ears, head, neck, and jaw. So these areas create neural signaling. And the cool thing about the balls is that things like position point pressing, it's more like reflexology, where you're going after very specific points of the foot, mobilizing the joints. That's what this is compared to reflexology. We're using straight up myofascial meridians and touch points where there's primary joints, So all of the MP joints are into your feet. Or the MC joints, metacarpals, like you're kind of mobilizing those knuckles to create the neural signaling. But I think that anything that makes you quiet down and calm down is going to be good for our nervous systems today.

25:31 Breathwork and the 3D Breath

Sue Hitzmann: And one of the big elements of Maltz is also breath work.

Dr. Yi Song: Right.

Sue Hitzmann: I read your book a little bit. It says you need to do the 3D breath breakdown. Breath breakdown, yeah. And that's an interesting thing is breathing. You know, when we breathe, the diaphragm moves three-dimensionally. Ideally, I say that, like, as if that's happening. And for a lot of us, it isn't. Right? The way that we sit, trauma, stress, literally we inhibit the three-dimensional expansion of the diaphragm. And that doesn't sound like a big deal if you don't understand kinetic energy and physiology. But when the diaphragm contracts, that creates gut motility. It moves organs. That's going to then signal the pelvic diaphragm and create neural signaling down to your feet. Well, if your diaphragm doesn't work, you lose that connection. And this is what happens as we age, is that our breath becomes more shallow, it decreases circulation, it decreases mobility. It actually creates sacroiliac hypermobility. The SI joint gets loose, and now you have an increase of the stress response. So to get the three dimensionality back to the diaphragm, we break down the breath into three dimensions, front to back, side to side, and then length. And then there's something called the 3D breath, which is actually focusing on the core reflex that happens when we exhale, which most people don't know anything about. But the core reflex is an involuntary aspect of your breath that functions very subtly. We don't really feel the contraction of our core reflex. But with every exhale, there's a tone change between the muscle fibers and the fascial fibers that invest the deep abdomen and so it's kind of like a conversation between the diaphragms between the pelvic and respiratory Diaphragm and the thoracic diaphragm is kind of like this back-and-forth swing That's creating a rhythm through the body and when our rhythm gets dysfunctional again We don't know that it happens. But then over time what you're complaining about is either neck pain, low back pain, those are two pain points that tend to happen when the diaphragm doesn't move. Sleep problems, exhaustion, fatigue, all of these things can probably, I could point a root cause to diaphragmatic resistance, a diaphragm that doesn't have its full range of volume.

Dr. Yi Song: So when you were developing the MELT Method with the breathing technique, Were you already doing meditation or yoga type of pranayama? That's how you got this idea about the breathing?

Sue Hitzmann: You know, the breath work came from meditation, a little bit of yoga. But most, most than anything was when I was introduced to Lian Chaitao, who is a neuromuscular therapist. And he was he has all of these amazing books. and one of them was really about breath, about breathing, and understanding reversed breathing patterns and things like that. So more from a science level, I learned about it. But then there's great educators like Diane Lee, she would talk about the core in this more three-dimensional way. And Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, all of these were, I think, very extremely influential to me in my 20s, when I was trying to understand physiology. And of course, my background was in exercise science. So it was the same thing. It's incredible that we have over 50 reflexes in the human body. We have all these autonomic things that are happening, digestion, all this other stuff. The only autonomic aspect of our body that we can very consciously and very quickly take over is breath. And it's the one thing keeping us alive. You stop breathing for too long, that's it, my friends, shows over. But it's incredible that the one thing that actually keeps us alive, we have conscious agency over. Whereas most of the things like digestion, normal breathing, we don't really think about it. But it's happening for us all the time. You know, the secretion from your eyes, your nose, your mouth, we don't do that. I'm not sitting here thinking, I've got to salivate more. I do not, right? It's just, my body does it for me. But again, the fact that we can take over breath and don't do it more often as a technique of slowing us down and doing breath work and trainment, I think that's another thing that has been around for thousands of years. It's written in thousands of books. And yet, people don't know anything about it. It's not even, it's just not in people's understanding. and you know, you say, just take a breath. When like, where that saying come from is because we know what is it? What does that do when you finally just go? It calms you down. Well, we should do that more often. I think it's a missing piece for people's well being is to just stop thinking and feel your way through things and breathe.

Dr. Yi Song: So what I found out in my own practice, a lot of people, they feel anxious, and then they do not know how to do the abdominal breathing. So even though I was teaching them how to do it, they still couldn't do it because they were so used to doing the chest breathing. So even though I tell them, oh, bring your diaphragm down, expand your abdomen, they just can't do it. So what I think is in your mouth methods, the 3D breathing, you really need very detailed instruction for most people to do it correctly.

Sue Hitzmann: Yeah, that's it. It's just asking somebody to breathe in your belly, which isn't the 3D breath breakdown. The 3D breath breakdown is actually if you put one hand on your chest and one hand on your abdomen, and I asked you to take a breath in, the first thing you wanna notice is where does the breath go? And just like how you're saying is that most people can breathe. Most people go to the chest. And actually when they inhale, their belly goes up and in, and actually an expansive breath when you inhale, the diaphragm expands and it moves the organs downward.

Dr. Yi Song: That's not what's happening with most people, right? So, slowing them down and saying,

Sue Hitzmann: I want you to slow down your breath so much that you actually can't decipher the difference between your chest rising or your belly rising. It's in equal timing, the breath comes into both chambers and your back body moves backwards. So when we breathe in, those are two dimensions, from a front to a back body, And then you put your hands on the sides of your rib and try to breathe width. And then breathe length from your collarbone to your pubic bone. And just doing that creates such an intrinsic interruption in your brain stem's connection to your diaphragm. Because 28,000 times a day, your brain stems with signaling your diaphragm to contract, you're not thinking of it. But if you take over breath, you're taking the brain stem out of the contraction, and you're putting it to your frontal cortex. So once I'm thinking about that breath, it's like an interruption, it's like a hiccup. It just suddenly, the brain's like, whoa. And then you just stop doing it and you go back to your natural breathing and it really triggers a pretty massive effect. What I also find though with a lot of people when they do breath work in trainment is I'm asking them to take a whopping nine breaths. So three breaths in three directions. By the third breath in the first place, I will guarantee 80% of the room, their mind is not even in the room anymore. Their brain is somewhere else. We're not in the present moment. And I always say to people, that's what I learned about meditation, is that's the game of meditation, is that while you're just trying to focus on your breathing, that sounds so simple, but in three or four breaths, your mind has wandered and shattered into the monkey mind of I don't even know what it's talking about. I could be thinking about things that happened a year ago and I'm still mad about, who knows? But that's just it. Because as soon as you catch that you're thinking, you perceive it, the thought arises, you experience it and then you let it subside and you go back to the breath. And that calms the mind, especially for people who are anxious, more than breathing into the chest or breathing into the belly or whatever, is just noticing your thoughts, experience them, see them, and then let them pass, consciously go, thank you, and move on and go back to breathing. That's very powerful because it helps us control our thoughts and we become bigger than our thoughts. And I think that that's also very transformative to people who are in pain, anxious or depressed, is that they feel a lack of control. If we can regain control through breathing, I think that's a great doorway into the whole process.

34:08 Injury Recovery Without Overworking Pain

Dr. Yi Song: So then when people do extreme exercises like CrossFit or those trainings, then they injure themselves. So right after the acute injury, how do you recommend them incorporating the MELT Method?

Sue Hitzmann: That's a really great question. So we take what we call the indirect before direct approach. So if you, let's say you strained your calf, you ran wrong, your calf locked out, the last thing I would tell you to do is roll on your calf. It would be the last area we would work on instead because if you have an acute trauma, you have local inflammation. And in some ways, that's a good thing because the inflammatory effect is your body trying to heal itself. So don't make an interruption in that. Okay, you wanna put heat on it or ice or whatever else is like the thing that you like to do fair enough. But I would first do a rebalance sequence. I would maybe do inner and back by gliding and shearing. I might do a foot treatment. And then the next day, see how my calf felt. I might do that same process. I might add a lower body length and low back release sequence. So kind of going indirectly with tension to the calf. And then by the third or fourth day, maybe I would then go closer to the calf. But it's always based on severity. Why you got injured? Like did you actually fall and you know, you play football and you got hit by somebody, right? Or was it just what I call sudden chronic pain? Like you did the same run you've done 4,000 times over the course of the year. but this time your calf went, right? Did you do it? Did you roll it? Did you roll it? No, I was just running and all of a sudden I felt it. That's what I call sudden chronic pain. It's a cumulative stress and fascia yielding poor reception through the tendon and structures. And that causes a lot of the strains that we feel in our regular routines.

Dr. Yi Song: If this episode has been valuable for you in any way, please leave a review or a comment. It really helps more people to find more reliable, research-backed information in the space that's occupied with a lot of noise.

Sue Hitzmann: So the nice thing about MELT, right after any type of surgical procedures, is that it gets your nervous system back into finding the rest of the joints, and then again, slowly working towards scars and then working on scars after they've healed, reduces that tackiness that happens in scar tissue because with scars, it's almost like the collagen over development increases more we tend to create more healing than we need. That's why people get keloid scars or thick scars and the tissue tends to pucker and things like that so we can have much better surgical procedures that allow us to recover better and more efficiently so that when our natural healing You can't really rush a scar from healing or a surgical procedure from healing, but your return back to the sport, to the movement, to whatever your daily life is, is oftentimes much better when you add and incorporate facial techniques into the practice.

37:21 Athletes, Surgery, and Performance

Dr. Yi Song: So then do you teach professional athletes?

Sue Hitzmann: We do. Okay. Yeah, I've worked with a lot of professional athletes and they're kind of a rare breed of a human. They're so precision oriented. And so when they get injured, it's kind of like a tiny gasket being out of whack in a Ferrari. It's like it really throws off the whole system. So getting them back out on the field is very important that you understand their dynamics of their sport and then stabilize them in their sport, if you will. So if I had a baseball player, you're you're going to see like a picture, very different right and left arms. But despite that, you want to make sure that the nervous system has a good center of gravity. So hand treatments, foot treatments are always great. But when an athlete gets injured, there's a lot of specificity that goes into getting them back out on the field faster without re-injuring them.

Dr. Yi Song: Right. And then most times, their team physicians just give them steroid injection to mask the inflammation. And then- Lidocaine, then they go to surgery. Oh yeah.

Sue Hitzmann: And actually that's probably one of the most disheartening things when you're under contract and you're a professional athlete. If you get injured and you do the MRI and they identify the injury, you have to have the surgery. Like if it's a surgical procedure, you have a meniscus that got torn, they want it repaired because while you're out, the repair, they have a belief is gonna be better long term for the performance of their sport. But I have to differ on that. A lot of times, some of these surgeries that they're doing, I'm like, you know, if we just stabilize the knee, tape it, stabilize your hip and do some hip activation, we could take the strain away from the knee for the whole season, and then when you're in the off season, really work to stabilize the knee, and it probably would go away. they don't have that mindset. No, they don't. They're very, get them out on the field as fast as they can, which is why a lot of professional athletes lose their careers because of that chronic, repetitive injury coming back over and over again.

Dr. Yi Song: But I think some of them now,

Sue Hitzmann: they actually stand on their own feet to choose what they want to do. Some do, some, but again, I think that the physical therapist in those worlds really work a very specific way. They have their protocols. And look, I mean, to condition a person to become a professional athlete, that is a science. And we have the science now. We know how to train somebody into better performance, but there's also a lot of abuse in steroids, in using now peptides are like huge. And they're not cheating for their performance, but sometimes we take things that actually make us feel stronger than our bodies really can yield the demand of that strength. So it's almost like they push themselves so hard that they get injured. So it's the actual mindset and this like drive to always be better, always be stronger, that actually causes the damage because, you know, again, our bodies do have limitations. While some people go, we have no limits except our mind. Well, we might have a little bit of limitations. Like if your kid is five feet tall and he says, I want to be a pro basketball player, might be a little bit of a limitation in actually ever getting to the professional league. Now I'm saying that it's not impossible, but they're probably going to be beat out by the six foot 10 guys 100% of the time. So we do have limitations in physical ability. We can train ourselves into high performance. And if we have the right mindset and we have the right consistent training, I think we can do that for much longer instead of an athlete's lifespan being very short. I think we can extend it probably by a decade. And you see that now happening in a lot of our athletes, our Olympians are in their 40s winning world records. And I think that that's really hopeful.

Dr. Yi Song: So then in MELT Method practitioners, Are there physical therapists working with professional athletes, like in professional teams?

Sue Hitzmann: There's some. Most of our instructors who are working with athletes are working at the high school and collegiate level. Because there is this, I think that the more instructors that we get are really keen on the idea that the younger we are, and we talked about this earlier, the younger you understand how to keep your body stable and mobile at the same time, because you can't be efficiently mobile if you're inefficiently stable. If we incorporate fascia and we incorporate the idea of sensory motor control into performance in our youth, I think that the collegiate level and the professional level will only just become even more competitive and better and longer lasting. But I think we really have to work more with the youth. And I think we've had probably a harder time getting into professional sports teams because even their recovery performance needs to be hard. Like they love gadgets, they use Theragons, they use leg compressions, right? Big things, big results, or big sensations. but most of it isn't working. Like that's not really what's making a better runner. Actually, if you look statistically at the running speeds, we haven't really as a human race gotten all that much faster. Like we've gotten a few seconds faster on sprints, which might sound colossal, but really it just isn't. We're not beating a marathon by 25 minutes compared to what we were before. It just isn't happening. but there's a gauge of a few minutes. So I don't think that there's any gadget that will help somebody with that. I think that it really is about what your body tolerance is, and we talked about that too, like happiness. Your mindset is very important. Your relationships are very important. Your sleep is probably one of the most important elements of your well-being, sleeping with an eye mask, sleeping in a dark, climate-controlled room. So these are very important ways to stay healthy. Sipping water frequently, eating water-filled foods, this is also very good for your fascia and your immune system. We don't drink enough water, we don't drink consistently enough. Those are things that slow us down too.

44:19 Hydration and Fascia as a Sponge

Dr. Yi Song: Okay, so for the fascia to absorb more water, you need to drink a lot of water before you do the MELT Method?

Sue Hitzmann: No, but you should sip water before you, we always recommend that you drink about eight fluid ounces of water, even six, but it's afterwards. That the thing about working, you know, if you think of fascia like a sponge, a lot of us have a dried out sponge. So if you ever have a dried out sponge left out overnight on your kitchen sink, you don't just throw water on it and use it, you start to squeeze and pump the sponge. And so that's what fascia needs. It needs tension and compression in local regions, where you kind of work the fluid back into the sponge. And then once the sponge has more moisture in it, it's actually more ready to absorb water. So just like a moist sponge absorbs water faster and more efficiently than a dried out sponge, that's what we're doing is we're sort of priming the sponge. So after you MELT, drinking more water more consistently through the day, your body will actually use it. So if you're one of those people that says, well, if I drink more, I just pee more, That's kind of your sign that your system is not absorbing the water. It's just going right through you literally. So we have to break down water molecules just like any molecule in the body. And the first place it gets transported to is the extracellular matrix. And then it goes into your cells. It doesn't just poof get into your cells. It's got to drive itself through the matrix first. So the water molecule is really important. And the water that we drink is called H2O. but it gets converted into something called H3O2, which is the gel-like substance of fascia that works with these proteins and creates kind of more like a snotty, sinewy kind of a fluid that holds more gel-like performance. And that's how collagen can distort and retract very quickly. So again, for a lot of us, our sponge is just dried out. So sipping water more frequently, Drinking a little bit of water before you MELT, drinking more water after, and then staying more consistent with water intake really helps fascia stay more hydrated overall.

Dr. Yi Song: And also, should people drink more electrolyte after?

Sue Hitzmann: Sure. I mean, electrolytes are great. Anything with like resveratrol is awesome for blood flow exchange. Anything like that, I think, are great add-ons to keep blood flow moving. And that doesn't directly influence the hydration levels of fascia, but it will boost circulation. They definitely have a lot of research on that type of, that type of kind of ingestible, something like that, that you can drink.

Dr. Yi Song: So do you take a resveratrol regularly after you MELT?

Sue Hitzmann: I do. Actually, it's one of the products that I've just in this last year, I found this company that they have figured out how to sort of create, they say that they're creating nature, which is interesting, because you can't control nature, and trying to create just the right amount where you actually have resveratrol being absorbable by the body. That's the problem with a lot of the substances that we take, any pills that they say something out of bottle, but you might not absorb them. So if they're not bioavailable, you're just spending your money on something that sounds great, but your body's really not using it. And I found this one company, they're called Vinia, and they have new products where they've basically put resveratrol in everything, tea, coffee, chews, stuff you could put in your water. And they all have the same amount, and it's bioavailable. And so after you take it for about four to six weeks, you definitely feel like, I feel like I can run more easily. I feel like my heart rate stays a little bit more balanced. So like little things I've noticed. And I would say that the only thing that I've changed in my diet is something like adding something like resveratrol to it.

Dr. Yi Song: How do you know what type of resveratrol is more bioavailable?

Sue Hitzmann: That's it, it's who is making the product. And so again, like this one company that actually has some, like actually doing double-blind placebo and really looking at type two diabetes and reducing type two diabetes through blood flow control. And some of their research is just kind of powerful where I get a little bit more hopeful when I actually see somebody actually doing research. So their research is showing that their product is more bioavailable than most products that are out there. Because again, getting it into your body is the hard part.

Dr. Yi Song: So do they synthesize their resveratrol or are they extracted from the?

Sue Hitzmann: They're extracting it.

Dr. Yi Song: From the grapes.

Sue Hitzmann: Yeah, and I think that that's it is that they figured out a way to bio harvest so that they're doing it in a controlled setting and doing it not from the natural. This is the first time I heard about it. I'm gonna send you the, you and I will have a ball chatting about this. They're one of my newer products that I've like played around with. I mean, I'm always finding different things that I'm like, that's an interesting product. And I feel like I'm the guinea pig before I were to talk about anything, you know?

Dr. Yi Song: But you know David Sinclair, right? He's the one who started the Resveratrol. And he said he takes Resveratrol every day that equals drinking 750 glasses of wine or something. to a huge amount. So... I don't, I can't say that that's how much these little pill,

Sue Hitzmann: like whatever this amount is, but it's less than a gram of what you're taking in any of their doses. They're all exactly the same. And the nice thing about resveratrol is that you could take a whole bunch of it with no negative side effects.

Dr. Yi Song: Right, right. So that it's like, but do you need that much?

Sue Hitzmann: Like... And then if you take that much,

Dr. Yi Song: how much can your body absorb?

Sue Hitzmann: That's what I mean. I don't really know. I doubt it's absorbing half of what you're already taking. That's the point is like even your supplements you take, 80% of what you've taken probably isn't absorbed. That's why sometimes your pee is like bright yellow. You've peed it out. You've peed out $14 in one sit on the toilet. So I think that's a little bit disturbing when you realize, God, I just spent all my money and it's in the toilet, literally. So that again is an absorption problem. it might not be the pill problem, it might be how your body absorbs what you're taking. So it could be both, it could be crappy products, but it could also be that you're taking too much, or your body's unable to absorb it. So I think that's the question is, you know, how we take, how we take a supplement, why we take a supplement, who's given us our supplements, what supplements are we taking? There's a lot to think about with supplementation.

Dr. Yi Song: So where is this company that's making it?

Sue Hitzmann: They're in Israel.

Dr. Yi Song: Oh, okay.

Sue Hitzmann: They are an Israeli based company. And the woman, Dr. Yoki, she has been doing this. She actually started the company, but she has been doing it for something like 30 years, coming up with this formula that they have. And yeah, I mean, I will send you some information on this. It's like pretty outrageous what they're doing with their research. And they've had numerous studies now published.

Dr. Yi Song: Okay, so you just buy it online from?

Sue Hitzmann: Yeah, I'll send you a link like to what I've discovered with them. I'm gonna try to do a podcast actually with the doctor who developed all of this. and one of their, I don't know what they are, maybe one of their guys who does marketing, they really have their brand messaging where it's really easy to understand what they're talking about. But the science that's behind it is pretty profound.

Dr. Yi Song: All right, so now we have another supplement that maybe we can incorporate into milk.

Sue Hitzmann: Exactly, exactly. That's also something that we love to do.

52:47 Fascia Hydrator Pilot Study

Sue Hitzmann: We just did a pilot study on the fascia hydrator, And we brought 150 people through using the fascia hydrator for two months. And we'd meet once a week. And then I would give them different because we're asking them actually to do something every day with this device. And at the end of eight weeks, we had results that to me were like kind of a little mind blowing, like people boosted their sleep. I actually don't have it on right now, but an aura ring and the aura ring. you can see your deep and REM sleep and boosting deep and REM sleep by just treating your tissue in this way. We had people lose inches and that's just inflammation. It's just low grade inflammation in the superficial tissue. People slept better, they ate better, they felt like their digestion was better, movement was better. So in again, easy ways to measure changes, is we had both subjective and objective measurements. And just again, across the board, we had efficacy showing like, gosh, yeah, you can really make changes in just that few minutes a day of doing something.

53:56 Lipedema, Lymphedema, and Lymph Flow

Sue Hitzmann: Now I want to do something for lipedema and lymphedema because I feel like those are two demographics that are underserved, that science is not coming up to where they need it to be. There's no supplements or pills that are really going to fix these issues. And doctors don't really have much to offer them. So I think, I wonder if we could do something like low frequency and get that superficial lymphatic moving and just treating that superficial layer, could that make a difference? So we're going to see if we can get a study going later this year.

Dr. Yi Song: I think some people I've seen who have lipedema, they are a little bit genetic too. Yeah. Some people.

Sue Hitzmann: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, there's definitely a genetic strain for that specifically. And they always had signs of it. But then once you hit puberty, that's usually where it like really rages itself on. And I think that the fatigue of the lymph ducts also, there's something like some people, it's like they're not functioning. Some people don't have them. You know, like there's all sorts of research now looking at bodies and saying, God, you know, like they actually, you know, where you should have like thousands of like lymph nodes in certain areas they've got four. Like, why is that? I don't know, right? What is that? Is that a genetic mutation or what is it?

Dr. Yi Song: But of course, if you have the predisposition, if you act early, start moving the fascia, moving the circulation, then you will not develop. But most people, they don't do much and then until when they're in their 70s, 80s, they have so much swelling.

Sue Hitzmann: Oh yeah, it's terrible. I mean, I've worked with people in their 20s and 30s and it's a little heartbreaking because people think that they're fat and they've been picked on, but really it's a problem in the, again, it's an immune issue also, their autoimmune system isn't firing, right? So yeah, I just think that there's not enough subtle body energy work that's done for this demographic. And if you go too deep, if you push too hard, it can make matters worse, it can cause a lot of pain unnecessarily, and you don't really get any results. So we've really found that breathwork and training is really important for those kind of demographics, but also just light touch therapeutic intervention. You know, fascia is a subtle body energy in the system. So just like I had said, like when you think of chi, I dare I say that the fascia might actually be the chi system. Yes.

Dr. Yi Song: Okay, that's great information.

Sue Hitzmann: We can keep talking to help more people. That's it. I think if we can help people do their own thing, I think that's the most important thing we can do.

Dr. Yi Song: Yeah, because a lot of those people, like they were put on diuretic, but that's not gonna solve the problem.

Sue Hitzmann: Oh my God, yeah, like then you end up getting like stage four kidney disease and things like that. All of a sudden you're like, wow, my kidneys are wrecked.

Dr. Yi Song: Why?

Sue Hitzmann: Well, because I took a diuretic every day for the past 30 years. It's like, why would a doctor do that? And I also think that when you talk about, you know, medicine, And we have medical practice because doctors are practicing on people. So I think we really believe that there's this big science that's done. And yes, I mean, you know, like we do double blind placebo studies on anything that's going to go through, they have to go through trial and everything. But there's still groups that they're working with. It's a very closed chain when you understand how research is done. You're picking a particular demographic to sway the study mostly to a side. Like you're trying to prove something as being, you know, applicable and being working properly. So I'm not saying that there's a scam that's going on out there. There's like a conspiracy theory, but not all medicine is for all people with the same issue. So that's why a lot of times medicine works for one person and doesn't work for somebody else. You have to be careful. Doctors are more than happy to keep you on a statin for the rest of your life. But-

Dr. Yi Song: Which is really bad.

Sue Hitzmann: Really bad. I mean, cholesterol, I mean, like that-

Dr. Yi Song: We need cholesterol.

Sue Hitzmann: Yeah, we need the cholesterol. Like you wanna know why my mom probably has bipolar issues is probably because- So she's taking statin. Well, not anymore. I mean, I took her off of those a long time ago. And the hilarity was that her A1C and everything are in the normal range. Normal. And so it's a little bit of a mind blow. Like after two years she hasn't been on it and she's like, sometimes she'll run borderline and I'm like, whatever, you know. Her ratio is great. Her LDL might be a little bit high but. There's where people getting older actually it's normal to have a little bit higher cholesterol

Dr. Yi Song: which is good for your brain.

Sue Hitzmann: Exactly, that's what I mean. Actually there's, I have read research that has stated that there is actually no research study. There's no valid research showing that just high LDL has anything to do with heart disease.

Dr. Yi Song: But if you have high total cholesterol, that is a sign of inflammation. Because your body actually releases cholesterol when you have oxidative stress in your blood vessel. Exactly, exactly.

Sue Hitzmann: But that's it, it's like, why do you have a high oxidative stress in your blood vessels? Like, there's the problem. Is that we're going after a symptom once again, but if you MELT, if you hydrate your tissue, you take care of your lymphatic system, you make sure that your blood flow is optimal.

Dr. Yi Song: This is what saves us. And even that, let's say, if you get into 50s, you have some elevated cholesterol, then you can actually take natural ingredients to lower that instead of taking the statin. That's it. Because statin is the isolated ingredient from the whole food, from the fungus, that is they discover the statin drug. But then if you take the fermented red yeast rice, which actually can lower cholesterol very effectively. Yeah. Yeah. Why not just do that? Exactly. Why don't we do this?

Sue Hitzmann: Just like, why do you need to take

Dr. Yi Song: panculary instead of doing mouth? Exactly. Exactly. Because we want a quick fix.

00:14 Painkillers, Addiction, and Safer Recovery

Sue Hitzmann: We want a quick fix. My mother, we were just in the doctor's office yesterday when we were getting that x-ray of her knee. And my mom, you know, I said, they said, did you take anything for the pain? And I said, I gave her three Advil, which are, it's like a, I don't know what it's called. It's like it has acetaminophen and ibuprofen in it. So it takes away some of the pain and reduces the inflammation. And they said, well, how do you feel? And she's like, actually a little bit better. I'm like, great, so it's working. And then two seconds later, she goes, well, can you give me something stronger? And the doctor looks at me and then I look at my mom and I was like, no. Like, why would you want anything? She's just like, and I go, if you want to zone out that bad, you got to like say like, that's your mind playing tricks on you. Half the people that take painkillers do not need a painkiller. But once you start taking painkillers, it can kill you. My husband died of an accidental overdose of taking painkillers and it had fentanyl in it.

Dr. Yi Song: Oh, and he didn't know that? Oh.

Sue Hitzmann: Yeah.

Dr. Yi Song: But where did he get that?

Sue Hitzmann: Exactly. There's the question. Where did he get that? I don't know is the answer. But he wasn't doing MELT. Well, you know, he did MELT, but he just kind of lost himself through whatever he was doing. And yeah, and died of an accidental overdose. And it was fentanyl. And I think that's happening more and more. So if you're taking a painkiller, I think you have to be awfully careful on where you get it, on how much you're taking. And yeah, fentanyl can kill you. And I think that's a problem. You're taking opiates that can kill you. It can create addiction worse than anything because it damages your own opiate receptors. So you want to come off of it. And the problem is you come off of it and you're in more pain. You have so much pain. It's worse. It's worse than when you were on it. And the doctors don't tell you that. And that's how people get stuck. So, MELT unsticks you too. That's the point. I unstick my system through hydration.

Dr. Yi Song: Okay, so I think we've already talked so much about MELT and we're ready to MELT, right?

Sue Hitzmann: Exactly. We're so ready to get up off this chair.

Dr. Yi Song: Okay.