How to Train Without Pain (Back, Shoulders, Mobility & Strength) | Dr. John Rusin

Andy Galpin (0:00)

The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play and life.

Welcome to Perform.

I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist of human performance. Today, I'm talking with Dr. John Rusin. John is a physical therapist and world expert in pain and performance. In this conversation, you're gonna learn a tremendous amount about how to stay out of and return from chronic pain. We're talking about back, neck, shoulder, knee, and all of those nagging areas that just won't seem to go away. John's career over the last several decades has focused on specifically that question. How do we make sure we're using things like your warm up, corrective exercises, soft tissue, and foam rolling tools to make real, measurable, and significant changes? So regardless of whether you are someone who is in a lot of pain or not, there are so many useful tools in this conversation that I think everyone's going to enjoy it. So with that being said, please enjoy today's conversation with Dr. John Rusin. Dr. John Rusin, you're finally here.

John Rusin (1:09)

Finally here. Glad to be here. Thanks so much.

Andy Galpin (1:12)

You have done such a good job in my opinion of blending these fields of performance and physical therapy.

I've not always saw, I personally with the field of physical therapy, that's your academic degree. Your doctorate is in that side. But you moved in this direction. I'm wondering right out the gates here, can you just share with me, how did that get into your brain? Why did you start developing this model that has this combination of being out of pain, being out of injury, moving well, but at the same time trying to perform at your best? How did that come about?

John Rusin (1:47)

As cliché as it sounds, I grew up as an athlete myself. And I lived in a household that was very unique because I had my mom who had a PhD and she worked at Damon College in Buffalo, New York, where I'm from. And my dad also had a doctorate and he had a doctorate in education. He was the athletic director of 27 schools in the Western New York area.

And that's the house that I lived in, Dr. and Dr. Rusin. And I played sports growing up and I took that to a college level. And after I was done with my collegiate baseball career, I took a job as a strength and conditioning coach. Division one, it was my epitome of everything. And very clearly, I knew that I needed to chase some more academics because I had been good in school. And I didn't know what I wanted to do because I was already in the weight room. I was already working with high-performance athletes. That was my forever job. And I got introduced to this topic, which was new at the time, doctorate of physical therapy. And I had no idea what physical therapy school was going to be, but all I knew is that I had a scholarship, and I could do that while continuing to coach. And I ended up two semesters later, enrolled in a DPT program. And within about three months, I realized that chasing the clinical realm for my entire life's work was not going to be doing what I was going to do.

And I ended up making the choice that I was going to take that academic credential, I was going to take my degree, I was going to take that license, and I was going to do the insane thing, which was to leave the clinical side of things, actually never entering the clinical side of things, and going right back to where I started, which was sports performance. And out of 74 graduated class of my class, I was the only one that didn't take a physical therapy job.

That's how I started into that. I was the ugly duckling. I was the person that went in and did a totally different side of things on physical therapy, moving back into performance. But one thing that I did learn is that I had a whole new level of understanding of how to rebuild a human body in pain. And I knew very well that that was going to best serve my athletes and my clients later on in my career.

Andy Galpin (3:55)

If I had to guess, Charlie Weingroth would probably be the first guy who I came across who has a physical therapy degrees, comes from that. But was a strength conditioning coach, a performance coach, was doing that stuff a long time ago. And I really feel like, we'll call it a decade, maybe 15 years ago, this wave started coming in where the difference between that side of the equation and strength coaches started to merge for people that have not been in the academic setting.