Dr. Ray Waters on Physical Therapy, Athlete Performance, and Preventing Pain

Welcome to the Authority Formula Podcast, the show that helps you grow your business, attract new opportunities, and leave your competition behind. I'm George Wright III, your host, partnering with Valiant CEO Magazine to bring you the world's top entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and experts. Let's dive into the strategies they use to dominate their markets and become the authority in their field. All right, welcome back to George Wright III. And we're going to get down into some peak performance today. I'm really excited to have Dr. Ray Waters in the house. How are you doing, Ray? Doing great, doing great. Really excited to be here, George. Can I call you Ray? You can. I would love for you to call me Ray. You're an expert at what you do. I'm going to give some background here, and you guys are going to be pretty excited because we're going to be covering everything from professional athletes and athletic athletes. Let's give a little intro here. So Dr. Ray Waters, a world-class orthopedic physical therapist, and I'm going to talk about a lot of different things today, but he's helping people move better, reduce pain, specializes in treatment for both performance and rehab, and he's got some specialties we're going to talk about, but he's had experience treating Division I athletes, weekend warriors, desk workers, and even post-surgical patients in a lot of different things, and he's got a lot of experience. He's very good at teaching, educating. He loves one-on-one. And he works a lot with overhead athletes, which we were talking about before the podcast, which is, you know, especially like baseball players and people that throw, but it extends to a lot of different sports. So you have a really amazing background. And I was just amazed by how knowledgeable you are of everything. So maybe you could start by just giving everybody a little bit of a background. What inspired you to kind of get into and start your business, which is prevent and restore physical therapy? How did you get into that whole arena? Right. Thanks for such a glowing welcome. But, you know, we'll get right into it, man. So, you know, I've been fortunate. I've been very fortunate to kind of know what I want to do for a living. And that being said, you know, from a young age of an adolescent, I was into health and wellness and performance training. and strength and conditioning. I've always been to science and healthcare. And I kind of let that guide me a little bit, but to give you the honest answer, man, physical therapy is powerful. It's really, really powerful. And it's really rewarding to be able to help someone and be able to like be that beacon of a different alternative modality to get someone out of pain, right? To be vulnerable for just a second with you, if I may, you know, it hits close to home. My mother, you know, had had several injuries. And I was at that awkward age where I shouldn't leave me to stay at home alone because we burned the house down. Right. So, you know, she would take me to her PT appointments. And it was then I was like, oh, this is cool. This guy's running out of a gym. He has bands and a trampoline. Like, does he play for a living? This is nuts. And then I didn't, I don't think I realized how much schooling went into that. But long story short, my mother had some, you know, some substance abuse issues, right, that the PT really helped her with. And to me, that was so powerful to see that that was almost a hand reaching out to my mother to kind of help her wean off some of those bad habits and take control of her life and not need that alternative modality of, you know, the overprescription of opioids and narcotics and muscle relaxers and drugs and this and that. And you go to the doctor, you get passed around to this and that. So I wanted to kind of that in a nutshell narrowed it down to what me want to become a physical therapist and i never wanted to be able to prescribe medication i love prescribing movement patterns and strength and conditioning and stability work so uh that's how i became a pt i love it because if you think about it and people that those are vulnerable moments right you've got an injury your post-surgery or maybe you're just dealing with pain and that pain affects everything in your life and you're saying and this is why i wanted to really have this conversation with you today is you have a passion for it. It's not just a lot of people go into it, you know, because of the prestige or the money or whatever else you've got a passion for it. It came from a real life story of struggling through some things with your mom. And you saw not just you got excited about it because I could imagine any kid going into a physical therapy gym and with the bands and everything has some fun, but you, you saw some dramatic results and you didn't just have a passion for it. Like you went deep down the rabbit hole. Like you have, you have some amazing certifications. Maybe just real quick help me to understand so that our listeners know your background, these certifications that you have so I understand what it is that you've gone down and learned and trained and studied around. Right, sure. So, you know, education-wise, you know, undergrad, PD school, etc., right? And what some of the certifications are, are the little extra stuff right so like the the cscs is the strength and conditioning specialist right uh so what that allows me to do is i'm actually not just a regular physical therapist i'm a strength and conditioning coach as well so i don't practice like as a coach per se i do a lot of personal training and training my clients uh but but but like having the the knowledge and bandwidth to not only treat from a rehab perspective what traditional rehab is doing you know your your three tests at 10 to 12 to 15 uh neuromuscular control and endurance and working on stability really with the goal of being out of pain what performance training is and that certification allows you to to push down the loop forward once it gets you out of pain at a higher level we work on explosiveness working on strength development working on power that stuff that insurance doesn't pay for that stuff that is upper echelon in the sense that in traditional model that's not one-on-one like I practice here at prevent and restore it is um your insurance is going to go from uh and I've had this happen before, which is really sad. A patient goes from, I'm in a lot of pain to I'm feeling a little better, but I'm not there yet. Well, guess what? You're not in enough pain to warrant more PT. So you're done. You're cooked because, well, I can't return to tennis or baseball, but you said you're out of enough pain for insurance to pay for. So that's why I got out of that big market, along with a lot of other reasons I can go into if I need to, but, but, uh, to, but that's huge on the certifications because what you're saying, and this is, I think a core element, look, I, I tore my right bicep a while back. I've had some shoulder injuries and things. I know what it's like. And, you know, having someone like yourself that comes from a background of having had, you know, injury experience and things like this, that helps having the certification, but then the application of it, right. Strength and conditioning and things like that, not just like a rehab. So I think that's good. Did you, when you started your business, cause we have a lot of entrepreneurs and, uh, you know, business owners here, uh, was it a little more than you thought it was going to be? You had this passion you wanted to run into and now you got to build a business, right? Was this, this was maybe more than you thought you signed up for, or is it, uh, what are some of the challenges that you've had to kind of overcome as you started to build your business? Right. Uh, that is a great question. That's a question that's, you know, it keeps us off at night at some times you, you started thinking like, what is it? And there's been nights where I'm like, what am I doing? I went from being a PT to doing this like that, right? So I think the biggest surprise for me was the amount of time and energy, the amount of energy you spend on doing things that don't drive revenue immediately per se. But like, to me, it's the perspective of, have you read the book E-Myth Revisited? It's a very popular book. Awesome book. I love that to the core. If any of the listeners here today have not read it, please read that book. It offers a lot of great perspective but I think the most surprising thing and you as a business owner and a lot of the other uh listeners today could could appreciate this that like um you really have to have the perspective to be three different people in in a sense like you're the technician I'm a PT I'm a clinician I already know how to do that that's to me that's the easy part in the sense but but how do you have the the the do you have the capacity to set aside time each week to be the manager to look in the past, to look at what has worked, what has not worked, more importantly, were your forecasts and predictions correct? Were these trends working? And then the entrepreneur in the future of looking in front of you of things you want to try, markets you want to tap into, doctors in my case, and surgeons I want to connect with and talk to, baseball coaches I want to talk to, gyms I want to get in contact with. That's the creative of entrepreneur forward thinking, then you got to be organized with the numbers and the real, the business nitty gritty behind you. And then, you know, you got to be the technician and do the job, right? Like, because if you're not going to be a PT, no matter how good you are at crunching numbers, you got to deliver. It's the reason why a lot of businesses fail, right? They get into it for their passion. They don't realize the heavy lifting or they get distracted by the heavy lifting. And so they're not successful. So, you know, of course you want to be working with a business and a therapist that successful So I curious And one of the reasons why I wanted to really interview you and get some content from you is because you adopted this one approach And so I curious before we go down into some specialization which I think a lot of our listeners can benefit from I want to ask you why you chose to go down that route because even if you have a passion for it and you start a business, a lot of people, they get into it and think, all right, what's the quickest road to make some money, pay off my debts and things like this? And you chose a one-on-one approach versus just business. And when I say that, I'm saying your time would be better spent high volume. So give me some of your thoughts on that and why you chose that given your profession. Right. I could talk till, you know, Saturday afternoon about this answer. There's really so much to discuss, but I'll keep it short. I think the main reason is patient care. Patient care is meant to be best served in a one-on-one capacity. To tell you a quick story, if I may, I'll tell you about one of the worst days of my corporate career before I really made the leap. and uh there was a day where i i was seeing a patient uh in three patients in an hour not one right three one with a reverse total shoulder arthroplasty which is they basically put a new shoulder in one with the anterior cervical disc fusion where they they fuse your vertebrae together top to bottom and uh another patient who was a workers comp patient and the poor fellow you know broke his ankle and they didn't send a translator and i don't speak spanish and i'm like so each one of these patients deserves one-on-one you send me two post-op patients right two post-op patients who i could spend a whole hour on each of those working on their neck or working on this this gentleman's shoulder to get his range of motion back and now i'm like delora i don't even know how to talk talk like i can't communicate like and and that was so frustrating and i will never forget again to to to go back to that emoth revisit if you remember that book one of my favorite parts that spoke out to me is the the entrepreneurial like seizure where you just like you kind of short circuit and once that happens that was my seizure in in a sense right I but like I I could never go back to how I was prior to that and I went to management I was like hey I'm not I'm not really proud of what I just did I wasn't set up for success I couldn't deliver to my patience and I know I can deliver. I know I can, but I wasn't, I wasn't set up to, I physically couldn't. And that ate me up, man. And, and that's what made you decide to make the move. Like, I'm curious about that. And then I want to make a couple of comments about what you said. What made you decide to just make the move? Was it that experience or had you been pre-thinking about that for a while? I had been thinking about it for a while, man. And it's funny because I never saw myself in PT school as owning my own practice. I never saw myself as being the businessman. I I just wanted to treat patients, man. I enjoy this so much. I cannot express to you how awesome of a rewarding of a job it is. But what made me change, to be honest, was that never doing good enough and the company always wanted more out of you and more out of you and more out of you. And to be honest, to tell you another quick little story, at this said corporate job, on my three-year anniversary, George, I was gifted with my manager at the time, threw three bags of gas station almonds at me. One for each year, I guess. So if I stick around for five years, maybe get your shoes. You know what I mean? So to me, I'm like, oh, got it. Here's your passion. You're not getting rewarded. You're not doing the job you really feel like you should be doing and the clients need, right? So we're not even going to talk about a raise here. You're throwing food at me. Like what? I come to work every day. I've never missed a day of work in three years, and you're going to throw food at me. Well, the key is most people, though, this is – you're describing a lot of people, even when they own their business sometimes, that are just on this treadmill, and they're not willing to do it. So why I feel like it's so appropriate to point this out to our listening audience is a lot of people recognize that they're not being fulfilled. They recognize they're not doing their best job. They're not unleashing their real potential, but they don't make the decision to do it, which, by the way, like you said, is way outside your comfort zone. And it's always the best life you have is always outside your comfort zone. So your best ability to treat, to be, you know, the best you could be for clients is not going to be something you thought about and was comfortable about, but you did it anyway. right well at the end of the day the biggest mover was when i'm sitting in the car like dreading going to work and i'm thinking you know what the real shame of this is when i was 15 years old with my mom i decided i want to become a pt and then i became a pt i did all this training i had the the idyllic you know the the the carrot in front of my face i'm chasing and i get the top of the mountain the proverbial like top i made it i got my degree i'm ready to roll and i'm like it kind of sucks like and then it turned out what you envisioned no then it turned into me like i i really truly felt george that some of them you know our listeners here today can probably appreciate and relate to this that uh the fear of resenting what you do for a living was around the corner and i knew that if i didn't make a change i would end up uh you know not liking or or god forbid you know despising something i thought i wanted to do with my life and then And that turned into, you know, I was afforded an opportunity for some mentorship and to work in private practice. And I kind of got away from that corporate world. And I started learning the ways and how to actually do this private practice world. And I was like, oh, I can do this. I am worth this. I can make people better, more quickly and get results. And I can make money doing it. I love it because this is a great lesson, guys. Listen to, you know, success leaves clues. And, you know, you didn't have to know what you were going to do or where you're going to do, but you knew you had to do something. And I think you just described what a lot of people, even that own their own businesses, are dealing with, and that is that they know that they're not doing what they need to do. They're not going the direction they need to go, and it's going to start to stack up, and they're going to start to build in. That's why it's a cause of a lot of depression, anxiety, stress, and things. So I want to pivot now because I know we don't have a ton of time, and I have a bunch of stuff for you I want to ask you. But I want to pivot into something else along the lines of what I asked just a minute ago. So Alex Hermosi talks a lot about scale the unscalable. Most businesses start and they think, well, I got to do it this way because there's no way I could continue to work one-on-one. But the ultimate goal of supplying the best service for a client required that. So you decided to stay hyper-focused on doing these personalized one-on-one deals even though it may not be scalable. And I think what happens is in time, people start to recognize your authority and your expertise and you get paid more and then you can go to that point. So you did stay focused on that and you went one level deeper into some specialization with athletes. And, you know, you talk about, I mentioned in the intro, like overhead athletes. Could you drill down a little bit into that and why you chose that and, you know, what it is that you feel so passionate about when it comes to athletes and high performance? Right. So, I mean, why I feel passionate about that stems from my teenage years when I was. I couldn't put a ball down. I was always dribbling a basketball or playing baseball, swinging a tennis racket or going golfing. Like I love sports. I'm a huge sports buff. Go Dawgs. College football season is about to start. Anyways, so that being said, I when I got into treating patients, I I found that I really enjoyed treating that that that's, you know, athletic population because they're motivated. They take what you say seriously. They have skin in the game. They're hyper focused on getting back to where they want to be. And that resonates through them, that resonates through me. And it's so much fun to treat baseball in particular. That was my first passion. My first love was the Atlanta Braves. So, you know, being in East Cobb, Marietta, this is a lot of people may or may not realize this. It's the biggest hotbed in the country for Little League Baseball. So I see an opportunity in that market. And I love rehabbing shoulders. That's kind of one of my favorite things to rehab. and treating rotational athletes and overhead athletes is very different than treating a regular person for neck or low back pain, right? Yeah, and I was surprised to hear that there's such a prevalence of shoulder injury in athletes, especially baseball players. Why do you think that is? And help me, because of your background, help me to understand why there is so much of an issue with that. Um, if I didn't go with one answer, I think it would be that the shoulder is just not designed to load and throw overhead. It's not was designed to be down here below we can move we have the most degrees of freedom to move right but we're talking about loading and throwing some overhead. head. And I was talking to a doctor at Wellstar and one of my good friends, Dr. Will Bird. He is the physical therapist for the Colorado Rockies He an awesome guy I had the same conversation with him as I had with Dr Steenledge at Wellstar a few weeks ago And we were talking you know talking shop about shoulders And the big thing is like I said the overhead component softball pitchers don get hurt nearly that much These softball players I see are your third base and your catchers who are throwing overhead. Throwing and loading your arm down here is much safer. But in baseball, we're only throwing overhead. It's a capacity issue where these kids don't get any arrests or asked to train and play ball year round god forbid you're undersized and then you don't have a joint capsule developed and you're throwing as hard as you can getting by on just uh your weak rotator cuff right because you're you're 14 and you don't have the endurance to to to load your shoulder and sustain that and then you have a 60 70 uh count pitch count and then god forbid you're the best pitcher on the team is probably also when he's not pitching he's a catcher because he has a cannon. So they're just overworked and they don't have a lot of times, they don't have the mechanics and the control of their shoulder blade and the endurance really. Well, and so you have, you obviously have a specialty in this and I think it's like anything else, you know, if you're out there in the marketplace, there's, you know, generalists and then there's specialists. And, you know, you've talked a lot about the idea that there are preventative, there's therapeutic, and then there's peak performance and strength and conditioning aspects to all that, right? Do you deal with all of that? Is that something that you take a comprehensive approach to things, or what is your majority of your time spent on? I definitely take a comprehensive approach. That's why I coined the name prevent and restore, meaning pre-injury, prevent, restore, post-injury, if you will. So are you working with athletes? You're helping athletes to prevent the injury? Oh, 100%. I write a ton of strength and conditioning programs. I help write the programs for a high school rowing club near me here in Atlanta. I write programs for all my baseball players and pitchers. I've written my own performance program for a return to throwing program when I have to shut a kid down for not throwing for a UCL or a shoulder injury. So, you know, where do I spend most of my time? In a perfect world, I'd balance that out. But I probably spend most of my time in the rehab and the restorative part of it. I do offer a lot of functional movement screenings I do at workshops at local gyms and yoga studios and clubs, et cetera. I try to get out in the corporate world and do workshops about preventative techniques for my desk workers and the people who sit at a computer all day and the significant rise of neck pain since COVID, not because of COVID, but because we're sitting on our chair all the time, right? Yeah, I actually want to get into that. But before I ask you that question, And I want to just kind of highlight what you just said, because look, athletes, professional athletes or even collegiate athletes or even young athletes that want to do that. If they're serious about doing something, then there's this whole idea that, you know, our whole our whole economy and our whole globe right now, it's always about just treatments and treatments and treatments rather than preventative, which is almost an investment in your time and your talent. Right. And your asset. And if you're not preventing, you know, it's obviously. far less expensive to prevent than to treat. And, and obviously, you know, creates more long time longevity in that. So I love that you say you do that. But you mentioned, and you just top, you just hit that topic of desk as well. So I, you know, we can kind of circle back to athletes as well because I know that's a really, really amazing specialty you have, but look, a lot of our listeners are professionals and most professionals like athletes that don't think ahead of time, they don't think about all the stress they're causing their body and you know their back and they're sitting all the time i mean man i'll go 12 hour days sometimes what what do you have to say sort of in that whole arena of desk workers because i know you're pretty passionate about that as well right no super passionate about that uh i i want to backtrack and extrapolate one thing about what you just said about preventative techniques and and it's super underserved man and and i think honestly uh a lot of times insurance doesn't pay for preventative care and it's that simple we don't make money unless we're treating you and whenever we're treating you for an injury or a patient care it can be a patient lost right so so that that's why i work in this private practice and it's not insurance based it it's all one-on-one private and i can see the whole person before injury post-injury so i think that's super important the desk athlete, if you will. And by the way, Ray, I want to say you just hit a really point that I want to make sure people don't, they don't, they don't go past. And that is that a lot of times our focus goes where things are covered, but we don't look at the long-term consequences of that. In other words, investing in your health, investing in our podcast, your health, your wealth, your lifestyle, your focus, preventative, daily rituals, things like that. You don't think about it because we're so focused on the present and the past. We're not focused on the future. But if you think about the future, you would certainly invest in preventative things for your health. Getting up and moving every few minutes and maybe getting on a foam roller or doing some soft tissue work or exercising and moving. So go forward on desk workers. Tell me about your thoughts there. Right. So it's interesting how I got, pardon me, George. It's interesting how I got wrapped up in having a passionate interest for that. After COVID and during COVID, specifically much after COVID, when we went and got locked down and everyone, you know, most people didn't have great ergonomic setups at work. They were forced to work from home and now they're working. I've heard horror stories of people working on a bar stool in the kitchen counter or they're sitting and they're so full like a shrimp leaning over their laptop all day and do that for eight hours a day and see how your neck and your back feels right so the the the prevalence of neck pain and i'm i can't make this up the the amount of neck pain i saw pre-covid to after covet is significant and it's not because of a virus it's because the you know the mechanics of sitting down if you were to look at a skeleton you cannot tell me that that thing's not designed to move yeah and then we sit on our bum for eight ten twelve hours a day on a computer And then we wait until something is really bothering us to go get seen and go to the doctor. You know what I mean? So that's kind of how I got into working with a lot of desk workers. I do corporate workshops and try to get people to show them preventative strategies that they can do at their desk and take little micro breaks and work on mobility and whatnot. Yeah, well, let's talk about that for a second because I think a lot of people are like, look, man, I'm on a computer all day. It's my job. It's what I got to do. If there's whether they're we'll talk a minute about if they're starting to sense some pain, but whether they are or aren't your body's being affected. So what are some strategies and things that professionals can do to just make sure they're maintaining their health when they're sitting at a computer, they're on a phone every day, you know, whatever it is, what are some things they can do? Um, some of the, the, so if you think about neck pain, right, there's, there's three. And again, I'm going to try to be, take a broad stroke and not get too granular with it, but there's three components. If I think about it, there's the thoracic spine, which is the middle of the back and how well that moves is there's the deep neck flexor of how well the neck can, can hold your head up and their shoulder blade and shoulder girdle strength, those big three buckets, if you will. Um, if you have mobility, endurance and strength in those three buckets, your neck and back are healthy. What happens is gravity pushes us down. We're sitting, and you can't see me from this angle, but if you're around your back, that changes the gravity of the position of the head. And then we're putting for every inch to head guys, listen, listen to this for a second. For every inch, the head is positioned forward in front of your shoulders. That's about 10 to 12 pounds of pressure on your disc and your neck, right? So if you're sitting with bad posture, with that roundish, you know, rounded shoulder posture, and the head hangs forward and the jaw comes down, we're just loading the neck muscles, upper trap and asplenius and all these muscles in the back of our neck. And these muscles are being estranged and yanked out, much less the pressure we're putting on our disc and our joints, right? So, I mean, it's funny. I do this in clinic. Just simple posture because you think about it. You're just thinking, well, I'm stressed. I got a lot of work. No, yeah. You're physically loading your body. You're physically, yeah, it's crazy. People don't realize that. I do this all the time in clinics. Every single patient I eval for neck pain, I ask what they do for a living, and a lot of them work on a computer. I have them hold a dumbbell, and I have them hold a five-pound dumbbell right here, given they don't have any shoulder issues. I have them hold a five-pound dumbbell right next to their side, and then I have them hold it out here. So you feel the difference? What is that? It feels heavier, right? It's still five pounds. That's just physics. That's called a moment arm or a lever arm. The farther away something is in front of you, the heavier it is. So that five pounds is really 24, 28 pounds out here. That head, if you have a good posture or position on top of your shoulders, is virtually weightless. Your head out here is 60 pounds. And so what you doing when you on a computer you doing just imagine doing an eight bicep curl just holding a bicep curl Tim I can give you a 15 dumbbell It could be lightweight That not that heavy You could do 100 reps of that hold it for eight hours So your suggestions would be like what? Get up, move around, micro breaks, things like that? My suggestions would first and foremost start with go see a professional and have them put their hands on you and see how things are moving so they give you their expert advice. But the biggest thing, man, I'm a huge advocate of foam rollers. You can do so much stuff with a foam roller, working in thoracic extension where you lay. And don't just roll the back, but you're pivoting over it, getting mobility in the thoracic spine. And then you can roll your lats, et cetera, out. And then working on the deep neck flexors of the neck, it's a little bit more grain load that we can probably get into over a podcast. But your neck endurance is really important too. I don't think much about that. That's a really good point because I'll consistently go to the gym, and I'll use a foam roller. this is the first thing i do is like kind of round my back and roll out my lats and back and then roll my glutes and hip flexors right because i sit a lot and it makes a huge difference and i still have that because i'm sitting a lot but you don't think about um you don't really think about neck and you don't think about it all and not until it's too late right and if you think about it it's funny right because what your neck what is your neck it's it's it's it's you know it's no different it's a It's muscles, it's joints, it's tendons, it's ligaments, it's nerves. If you can train a shoulder or you train a low back or an ankle, why can't you train your neck? But no one trains their neck because no one knows how to do it and take care of themselves with the preventative strategies, right? So then what do you do? You wait until it's bothering you, and then you don't do anything, right? So then you wait six weeks, eight weeks, ten weeks, two months, and you're like, man, I have a bad headache and maybe some tingling in my arm. I should go to the doctor now. You know, it's funny you say that because I do think that people, I don't know if it's just our culture right now, but they chalk it up to stress. And they don't realize because they just think I have a lot of stress. That's why my neck is tight. My back is sore and I have headaches. But there's a lot of physical reasons that can be happening. So let's assume somebody is listening right now and they got, you know, they got headaches, back pain. They know they're sitting a lot, but they're struggling with some pain. Or maybe it is somebody struggling with an injury. What's the first step they should take towards getting back to doing what they love? You know, it's tough to answer that question and not give a negligent answer without giving professional advice without evaluating a patient. But in the bird's eye, the 10,000 feet view is going to be work on mobility, work on your thoracic spine range of motion. I can't tell you how important that is because the thoracic spine and not to get too doctor speak with it, it's just the middle of the back, guys. Your neck, the middle of the back, and the low back. The middle of the back is the only part of the spine that's connected to the ribs. So think about it. Your neck moves a lot. Your low back moves a lot. You don't ever move in the middle of your back. So my biggest advice for whether it's your rotational, unilateral athlete, overhead athlete, runner, one of my biggest things I treat, I address this with every single patient I see, I'm not kidding, is thoracic spine mobility. Can you move through the middle of your back? If you cannot, it's simple physics, guys. And a lot of us are entrepreneurs. We're business owners. We all understand what? Money, right? So I use this analogy all the time with my patients. Think about forces in the body like money. If you go out and buy lunch with your wife or your friends, or if you go buy groceries at here in Georgia, we have Kroger or Publix. You spend that $100. It still exists. It goes from your account to their account. It still exists. Money just moves, right? It goes from over here to over here. It still exists. Same thing with the body, right? The stress we put on it. If one part of your body can't accept and attenuate the forces you're putting on it, then that's going to somewhere else. And that other part of the body doesn't have the resume to accept that demand that you're putting on it. And that's why I think mobility is the easiest thing we can all work on and train safely. I wouldn't give advice for people to go start strengthening their neck without having a professional show them how to do that because it's a little bit more dangerous. But we can all, you're not going to hurt yourself, guys. Go foam roll, please. Yeah, no, I love it because it's one of the reasons why I had mentioned to you I wanted to have you on the podcast is because we talk a lot and most people are focused on, you know, more mindset now used to be no mindset, but mind, money and business. We got that. But the body, the body, which is literally your vehicle for all of that, your body will affect your mindset. It will affect your stress. If you don't have health, you don't have wealth. Correct. So I think that the whole purpose, which I think is mission accomplished on this, is that awareness is the first thing. If you're not thinking about the fact of your, what your posture is, what you're doing, that awareness is the key. Prevention is also the next step that most people don't do. Right. So I love that you commented on that. Then you have rehab, but I also think that peak, uh, you know, strength training and, and elite level stuff. I know you have so much. We talked before about details and courses that you're doing and products that you're doing for both the professional athlete and the professional CEO and high level executive. What's the best way for people to be able to get in touch with you and connect with you? What's the easiest way for them to do that? The easiest way to do that is through my website. I have landing pages right there where you can visit my website at www.preventandrestorept.com. You will see like a landing page. You click, you fill it out, type your name, email address, phone number. I will get an update and call you within 24 hours or less usually. So that's probably the best way. I do run a lot of ads on Google and Facebook, but if you see one, smash the like button, share it. Yeah, for sure. What I'll do is I'll put in the show notes your website and your social media handle so everybody has that. Because listen, I don't care where you're at, even if you're not in Georgia, you got to connect with Ray. Dr. Ray Waters, I mean, he's got the specialization in a lot of really important athletic areas, but I think there are pieces of information that you can apply to every area of your life and business. And so I'm really glad we had you on. I wish we had more time, but I'll tell you, we might have to have you back on a couple specialty topics because you and I have talked about some other things as well. And we sort of touched on this idea of business. And so I like to combine those things. So we'll have to talk a little bit about that. But before we take off, are there any thoughts, tips, strategies, recommendations you have for individuals, whether it's someone struggling with an injury or people that are dealing with pain. Just any final thoughts that you might have. Go get help. Go get help, guys. Your body's trying to tell you something. By the time you feel your hamstring kind of cramping because you've been sitting all day, it's honestly a little too late because that's the ischemic effect of the tissue not getting oxygen from us sitting down all day. By the time you feel that, you're already sitting too long. by the time you feel that tightness in your calf and i just evaluated a patient yesterday who had uh this tight calf episodic tight calf pain for for six weeks and then she really strained her calf and that was her body telling her hey something's not right something's not balanced something's not moving right is it the knee is the ankles the hip go see your local pt if uh in and have them check you out because a professional breaking down how you move is unlike anything else You don't know how you move, George. I don't know how I move. I still go see a PT quarterly at least, right? And sometimes I go see a chiropractor, right? I go see people to help me analyze how I'm moving because I'm a movement expert. I help people move better for a living. But at the end of the day, guys, you don't know how you move. You think you know how you move. You don't know how you move. Go get seen and go get some expert opinion and professional guidance on that. I love that you said that because so many times as entrepreneurs, business owners, executives, high performance individuals, we are willing to invest in our wealth. We're willing to invest in our business, but investing in your health is important. And we also talk about coaches and mentors and, you know, trainers in our business and in our life. But that's because they can see things you can't see. So the same goes with your physique, your fitness, your mindset, and your business. So I appreciate it, man. I'm so glad I had you here today. And listen, if this is your first time listening, I want you to do me a favor, not only subscribe to the podcast, but share this episode. The awareness of what we are doing as professionals and executives and high performers is going to help people. So I want you to share this episode. I'm going to put a bunch of things in the show notes. And remember, I say this at the end of all of our podcasts, but it's never too late. No matter where you're at, whether you're paying, no pain, whether you're in your business, you're growing, you're not. it's never too late to start creating the life that you're meant to live and you've got to take action you got to do something about it so thanks for being with us today once again this is george wright third with dr ray waters and we will uh talk to you again soon