Injury prevention, recovery, and performance optimization for every decade | Kyler Brown, D.C.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of a subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com/subscribe. My guest this week is Dr. Kyler Brown. Kyler is a sports rehab chiropractor who specializes in sports injury pre and post-surgical rehabilitation and bridging the gap from rehab to performance. He is the co-founder, along with myself, of 10 Squared, an Austin-based private member training program focused on building and maintaining exceptional muscle capacities for the marginal decade. Originally, this was a conversation that we recorded just for the 10 Squared audience, but once it got out there and we saw how much the clients there appreciated it, we decided to repurpose it as a podcast for all of you. In this episode, we discuss the principles behind injury prevention, recovery and performance optimization, including how small movement dynamics can lead to chronic issues, discuss a framework for assessing and treating individuals, heightening the importance of understanding from between movement patterns, functional asymmetries and personalized rehab approaches. Talk about some specific case studies, including Kyler's work with professional athletes and others to demonstrate the benefits of individualized strategies. The role of fear in movement and rehabilitation and how overcoming mental barriers is just as crucial as physical recovery. Actionable strategies for you to assess your own movement patterns and implement proactive training techniques to build strength and longevity. Now in addition to this conversation, Kyler also filmed a short series of videos in the gym, demonstrating exercises for common issues like lower back, neck, shoulder and knee pain. These are designed to help you put some of these concepts from today's episode into action. The videos are only available to subscribers and can be found on the show notes page for this episode. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Kyler Brown.
Kyler, wonderful to have you.

**Kyler Brown** (2:58)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Peter Attia** (3:00)
I want to kind of give folks a little bit of a sense of what you and I came up with a few years ago in the throes of my recovery from shoulder surgery and why that gave us this idea to take two things that seemed quite unrelated at the time, my recovery from an injury coupled with this idea that I'd been marinating around this idea of a centenarian decathlon in a marginal decade and why we decided to kind of put the best ideas or the themes of these together. So how does that sound?

**Kyler Brown** (3:29)
Sounds great.

**Peter Attia** (3:30)
All right, so let's see. You and I met four years ago. As soon as I moved to Austin, I don't even remember what we worked on because I think it was just like preventative stuff.

**Kyler Brown** (3:39)
You really wanted me to come over, I think, initially just doing some DNS stuff, like some routine maintenance things. And somewhere around the second or third visit, I was like, what's going on with the shoulder? And that kicked off this whole conversation because in my world, this idea of just doing one technique or providing one service isn't really a complete approach.

**Peter Attia** (3:57)
That's right, you're right. We were probably a couple months in maybe, and it was clear that I was nursing this bad shoulder.
And I knew what was going on because I had torn the labrum before, the diagnosis I remember was actually made in 2009 I had my first arthrogram in 2009, for folks listening who don't know what that is. An arthrogram is an MRI where prior to you going in the scanner, the radiologist takes a needle about yay long, like four inches long, shoots the needle into the capsule and injects contrast, so that it really allows the MRI to show the labrum and how much it's detached from the glenoid fossa. And so it was patently clear that time I had a torn labrum. It was significantly torn, but not as torn as it would be 13 years later. But I had largely avoided surgery by doing as much as I could to strengthen the rotator cuff. And frankly, I was afraid to have surgery. That was the bottom line, is I didn't want to trade one problem for another, meaning I didn't want to trade pain and instability for immobility. And I saw that as the trade-off. Folks listening probably recall that I had a podcast, I did a sit-down discussion with Alton, who is the amazing surgeon, Alton Barron, who ultimately did the repair. But what I was most impressed by in that experience, which turned out to be wildly positive, was that immediately you and Alton started working as a team. And maybe you could talk a little bit about what you guys decided to do in the six, I think it was eight weeks we knew prior to surgery. We scheduled it such that you could do something before then. What was that discussion like?