An Insight into Active Release Techniques
An Interview with Michael Leahy DC CSSP
Joseph: Right Mike let’s begin by you just telling us all about yourself.
Mike: Well I actually come from an engineering type background and I flew fighters in the air force and for the airlines. Then I decided to go to chiropractic school and I really developed a kind of applied engineering way of looking at healthcare and biomechanics. If you really get into the anatomy, and if you understand structures, modulus of elasticity, stress strain, all those kinds of things, everything comes together. So I really headed into that when I graduated as a chiropractor. And that has led me to where I am today. We teach a lot of seminars now throughout various parts of the world and we have about 13,000 ART providers now. I also help companies save money on their healthcare costs.
Joseph: Very good, very good. And you’ve also had quite an athletic background as well.
Mike: Well, I am a pretend athlete. I’ve played basketball & ran track and field in college and when I got out of college, I played national level volleyball for a number of years. Our best finish was actually 12th in the U.S. And then I switched to triathlons – I’ve done 39 IRONMAN races and play a little golf on the side. So, I’m not fantastic at any one of them, but I like them all.
Joseph: Sounds like myself! Ok, tell us more about the conditions that you think ART is really effective with.
Mike: I get that question a lot, ‘What kind of conditions is ART used for?’ And normally, people expect an answer like, carpal tunnel syndrome, whiplash, knee pain, back pain and those are all true. But what happens is the list gets so long, that you wonder, how can that be? I think a better way to think about it is, what types of tissues do we work on with ART? That’s muscle, ligament, fascia, tendon, nerve and because of those things, the joints. So if it involves a muscle, a joint or a nerve, or all those connective tissues, it’s probably going to be helped by ART, so ART ends up being really effective a lot of things.
Joseph: Now tell us about the process or the theory behind it.
Mike: In principle, it’s extremely simple. You shorten a tissue, you apply a manual tension on it, and then you lengthen the tissue by having the patient move the body. As the tissue lengthens, you manipulate it, you look for places that are stuck, or that are gritty and fibrous and have an adhesion. And you work those loose as you go. So in theory, it’s extremely simple. I would like to say it is simple, it just is not easy. Practically speaking, it takes a person a couple of years to develop the ‘touch’ – the skills to be able to do it really well. Although, you can get fairly good at it after 4 or 5 days, then the real work starts, in getting better and better. But the theory is pretty simple really.
Joseph: Cool. Now what is the difference or advantages ART has over other soft tissue methods, for instance, remedial message, Rolfing, etc.
Mike: The major difference is two things: One is that you are using active motion while you manipulate the tissues. That’s the patent of ART. We have an international patent on ART and the reason for the patent is so that people have to be competent in order to do it. This protects the public, so they get really good care. I think the second difference though is how in-depth and specific it is. Although the concept is really simple, you have to spend months, if not years, learning all the little detail and specifically how to work each individual muscle, for example, every muscle has a different trick in how to work it. They all react differently. The touch feels different. And you just have to learn all those. So, I don’t know of any other technique or system that goes to quite such a detail or effort to be that specific, for every different structure.
Joseph: Now lets talk about the importance of good soft tissue treatment for athletes. I know your specialty, where you’ve created quite a niche, is with the IRONMAN, probably because that is a passion of yours. So, tell us about the importance of ART for say, an endurance athlete and also for my main passion, the importance for speed and power, for acceleration…
Mike: 100 meter runners are fun to work with because it’s full on. There are very few variables. How well you drink during the race has no bearing on your time. It is a 100% effort of the whole body. So if anything’s wrong, you’re going to run a slower time. When you start fixing things, you really dial an athlete in. Three world’s records in 100 meters have been set using ART right before the race and most 100 meter runners, since Donovan Bailey, use ART. If you go to a world cup track and field, most of the athletes use ART. And more importantly most of the successful ones use ART. The reason for track and field, especially with shorter speed distances, is that if any little thing is off – a muscle won’t contract as well as it should, or a muscle won’t stretch as fast as it should, it’s going to kill your performance. So, it’s easy to find success by fixing all those.
In the endurance athlete, it’s a little different as there are a lot of factors involved. If you do not drink right or enough, you’re not going to have a good day. If you don’t take in the right calories, you’re not going to have a good day. If the wind blows real hard, you’re going to be slower. So you can’t equate ART to a time. You can’t say ART helped someone to a world record, like you can in 100 meters. But what it does do, and it is the reason that the best triathletes in the world use ART, is that it makes it easier to move. So if it’s easier to move and you can run at an 8 minute mile pace but it’s easier to do it, you’re not getting as tired. And that’s what we look for with the endurance athlete - you want to do the same thing with less energy.
Joseph: I would also suggest the effect on stride length – with more flexibility, the stride length increases. So if it is over 10,000 steps and you have even a 2 cm increase in stride length, I am not going to do the math but that equates a lot of distance.
Mike: That’s usually what happens in an endurance runner, is that his cadence will stay the same, after you fix him. But the stride 3, 4, 6 inches longer, that’s huge on time.
Joseph: Yes, massive. What can the everyday person take from ART?
Mike: Personally, I think, that the biggest reason people stop their exercise program or drop out of whatever sport they’re into is because of soft tissue problems. Your knee hurts, your shoulder hurts, or your back hurts and you can’t do your workouts anymore, it is not fun so you stop. And I think that’s the biggest advantage of using ART for the everyday person. Because now you can keep up your exercise program and have fun doing it because it won’t hurt anymore. Second to that is that we all know people that lose jobs because of carpal tunnel or something similar and they don’t have to. So we’ve done a program now in the US with 114 companies who have saved $527 million in 3 years in healthcare costs by using ART on site. But personally, what I think is even more important than that, is that the employees were not working in pain. And in a lot of cases, they didn’t lose their job, because of that physical problem. That’s huge.
Joseph: Now, I know the answer to this but for my readers is there a way you can substitute ART with things like foam rollers, tennis balls etc. that will that work for people?
Mike: Yes it all works for people. And I think people should try to do all those things. I mean it is not ART. It will not be of the same benefit, as ART will. So, if you have an adhesion between 2 muscles, you’re not going to break it up by using any of those things, but you can with ART. Now that’s not to say you won’t be better for using those things, you just won’t break that adhesion.
Joseph: OK we have talked about ART for speed & endurance now give us your take on the importance of ART for strength.
Mike: I’ll give you an example. I started working with US Olympic weight lifting team, many years ago and we were treating every member of the resident team at the Olympic training center. And what happened was we treated them 1 or 4 times a week, so they were in very regularly. As they get given long workouts that got harder and harder, they would start to break down and have problems. Well when we came in we fixed them right away, so they never became problems. So what the coach did is he just increased the workload.
Joseph: Sounds exactly like what I would do ha!
Mike: So now they worked even harder and longer. So their strength started to improve dramatically and for the 1st time in 30 years, the US started winning international medals in weightlifting. And one of the big reasons why (obviously the athletes did their job) was ART. Now technically if you take a muscle that has an adhesion problem and you release the adhesion you get a very dramatic strength gain. Not one that you can have just because you have a good day. You can see 20 -30% strength gain in a muscle, sometimes 80% if it’s a really bad problem. Even with minor problems that aren’t a matter of pain (e.g. the athlete doesn’t even know he has it), you fix the problem and you will get a 7-10% strength gain within 15-20 minutes. That’s normal. Also what is important especially for a speed or power athlete is the antagonist side. Anytime a muscle is contracting, another muscle has to be lengthened or stretched. What is important here is the modulus of elasticity, which is the rate of ‘stretchiness’ in the muscle. So what you’ll get is an athlete who can run at a 12 second 100 meter pace all day long and never think anything’s wrong. You pump it up to a 10 second 100 meter pace and he blows out a hamstring. The reason is the hamstring wouldn’t stretch fast enough. So doing a slow stretch, he can bring his knee to his nose, but then he still blows it out - why does that happen? It is because of that lack of quickness of the stretch that he just couldn’t do it. Fix that with ART, now it’ll stretch very quickly.
Joseph: Ok, the funniest experience you’ve had or funniest in terms of using ART.
Mike: Funniest? Probably the funniest one was working with one of the 100 meters sprinters when he wasn’t a world record holder yet. When he started working out on the first day, I watched the warm up and I could see what was wrong so I fixed 2 muscles. Then they went to the next part of the workout, which was in the blocks, and they were doing starts. In his first one, he took 2 steps, stumbled and fell on his face, all because the mechanics were so different. His leg went so much farther back, the timing was off and it threw him completely off. It was pretty embarrassing for him, but… funny for everyone else. He then set a world record so…
Joseph: Lastly any current books you’re reading that you would recommend.
Mike: You’ve stumped me. I tend not to read novels and fiction and things like that. I read physics and anatomy books and so probably, the most important are a collection of four anatomy books. I know I didn’t really answer your question but I don’t think any one anatomy book is enough; none of them are good enough. It takes four to make a complete anatomy book. So I would probably say that. And actually, with books…my favorite books now are language.
Joseph: Oh..
Mike: I’m trying to learn more Japanese, Italian and Arabic. And Australian. (Laughs)
Joseph: And Australian, yeah mate. Awesome and thank you for your time.