Are you struggling with self-care, feeling blocked from progress, and in need of a powerful reset?
Midlife is often when we tend to take our own needs for granted. But there's no better time than now to invest in yourself - and Deanna Hansen can help you do just that!
In this episode of The Hormone Prescription Podcast, Deanna reveals her secrets on how to unlock your body's full potential through Fluid Isometrics and Block Therapy - a revolutionary practice that combines therapy, exercise, and meditation into one. Hear Deanna explain the importance of the fascia system, and learn how to melt away adhesions, scar tissue, and more so you can get back on track to unlocking your fullest potential!
In this episode, you'll learn:
- How Fluid Isometrics and Block Therapy works
- The importance of the fascia system
- How to melt away adhesions and scar tissue
- Ways to awaken cells blocked from blood and oxygen
- Tips on how to reset your body for maximum success
Don't miss out on this opportunity – tune in now as Deanna Hansen shows you the missing link in your self-care journey. Let's get you feeling your best, and take back control of your health!
(00:00): Ralph Waldo Emerson said, don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams. In this episode, we're gonna cover a topic that relates exactly to this. If you are being pushed by your problems, listen up. But also, if you're being led by your dreams for health, that allows you to go there and do that. Stay tuned.
(00:23): So the big question is, how do women over 40 like us keep weight off, have great energy, balance our hormones and our moods, feel sexy and confident, and master midlife? If you're like most of us, you are not getting the answers you need and remain confused and pretty hopeless to ever feel like yourself Again. As an ob gyn, I had to discover for myself the truth about what creates a rock solid metabolism, lasting weight loss, and supercharged energy after 40, in order to lose a hundred pounds and fix my fatigue, now I'm on a mission. This podcast is designed to share the natural tools you need for impactful results and to give you clarity on the answers to your midlife metabolism challenges. Join me for tangible, natural strategies to crush the hormone imbalances you are facing and help you get unstuck from the sidelines of life. My name is Dr. Kyrin Dunston. Welcome to the Hormone Prescription Podcast.
(01:16): Hi everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Hormone Prescription with Dr. Kyrin. Thank you so much for joining me today. I think you're really gonna love my guest today. I know I say that, but I just do have the best guess on my podcast. I have to say they're super passionate, articulate, and they care so much about people and they've just leaned into the problems of women's health over 40 and found some extraordinary answers. And my guest today is no different. So I hope that you will help me welcome, Deanna. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about her and then we will get started. I first wanna start by saying, you know, I try to tie everything into hormones and this episode's no different. We're gonna tie what we're gonna talk about, which is fascia into hormones. And I know some of you're scratching your heads and going, how is that possible?
(02:11): And this isn't something I learned in my fellowship training even. It's something that I've learned by working with various practitioners over the years. But if your musculoskeletal system is wonky and almost all of us have wonky musculoskeletal systems, which includes fracture because of something, we deal with 24 7, 365, which is, I know you're thinking stress. It's not gravity, y'all, it's gravity. So gravity is constantly pulling on our tissues. And if we have maladaptive of moving and posturing in the world, which a lot of us do that are habitual, it can cause problems with your hormones and everything else. So we're going to jump into that. She also has a very spiritual Ben, which I love and that's important for hormones too. So we're gonna talk about this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson and just all things fascia and healing. So I'll tell you a little bit about Deanna, then we'll get started.
(03:09): So Deanna Hansen is the founder of Fluid Isometrics and Block Therapy, which is a body work practice that is therapy, exercise, and meditation all in one. She is the author of two books. One is Fascia Decompression, the Missing Link in Self Care. And this totally is the missing link in almost everyone's self care cuz no one's addressing it. And another book called Unblock Your Body, how Fascia Decompression is the Missing Link in Healing. So she's a retired athletic therapist after 25 years. It's kind of like a physiotherapist or physical therapist in the state. She's from Canada and she worked with the general population and just started seeing the same problems, right? Chronic pain, acute injuries, back pain, migraines, all the things when you think of when you think of physical therapy or physiotherapist. And she really leaned into the questions and it comes down to fascia, which a lot of people aren't talking about.
(04:12): So fascia is not just kind of something that hangs your muscles on your bones, it really surrounds every cell. We're gonna talk about that. But what you don't know about fascia could really cause misery for you. And we don't want that. We want you to have hormonal prosperity, physical prosperity, life prosperity. So that is everything about Deanna and welcome Deanna to the podcast. Thank you so much. I am so excited to be here sharing with your, with your people. So I'm excited to talk about this topic. I first learned about the issue of the musculoskeletal system being involved with metabolic functional disturbances, actually from a chiropractor in Atlanta who was pretty astute. This was not covered in my fellowship training in antiaging, metabolic, and functional medicine. And really he said, well, you know, if there's skeletal misalignment, muscular fascial, it can distort the blood vessels, the nerves, everything.
(05:16): And then nothing functions well including your hormones. So this is a part of having great hormone function and great everything function in the body. So I'm excited to talk to you because I don't think that the majority of people are aware of this and they pretty much totally neglect it. So how did you come to be an expert in this field? I know you had 25 years as an athletic trainer and healer, so can you talk about your journey to developing the programs and tools that you've developed for people to address these fascial musculoskeletal issues? Absolutely.
(05:56): So I'm 53 years old now and when I was 30 years old, I had already been five years into my athletic therapy practice and I always focused on deep tissue work. So using my hands, diving into people's bodies. And by now I've spent well over 60,000 hours working on other people's fascia or my own to really understand this incredible unique system. And what it really comes down to is the understanding of how to put the space back into the body through fascia decompression. So this started for me at the age of 30 when I had made some pretty significant changes in my life and started having severe anxiety attacks around this. At the time I was 50 pounds overweight, I was struggling with anxiety, depression, chronic pain. And even though I had a successful practice, my own personal life was in absolute chaos. So it made some big changes.
(06:50): And as a result of those changes, I started having really severe anxiety attacks. And this one anxiety attack in particular was the seat of everything to come because in that moment I thought I was gonna die. I was literally frozen in fear and I couldn't find my breath. I intuitively dove my hand into my abdomen, let out a gasp, which connected me to the moment. But I also connected to pain, which I didn't even recognize I had deep within because I hated this part of my body. I had a lot of shame there. That was where I carried the majority of my weight. So as I'm intuitively moving my hand around that tissue, I also recognized it was full of scar tissue even though I didn't have any injury or surgery in that space. So this gave me a number of aha understandings as to why when I'm coming home from a five mile run dripping wet with sweat, my belly would still feel cold.
(07:41): So after that first night of about 30, 45 minutes of of working on myself, I felt really calm. Woke up the next day, still felt really calm, which was very unusual for me that night, after working on patients all day, I came back, I did a similar thing to see what was happening. And after another session of me doing that, when I stood up, I felt taller and I went and I looked at myself in the mirror and I literally began to cry. My belly was flatter than it had looked in years. And I did the work I was doing at times 400 sit ups a day, aerobics, tibo, dieting. All of the things that I was trained as an athletic therapist to do to get a fit looking body actually took me in the opposite direction. So to have within two days of just doing this literally at my fingertips, it became what I started to do every day when I came home from work.
(08:28): So after two weeks, my chronic low back pain was going away and I started having all of these other changes happening to me. So I started working on my patients in a similar way and I was having incredible results with them. Shortly after that I started attracting therapists to learn my technique, which I actually call fluid isometrics. The technique I teach therapists to do on patients. But it was my real passion, sorry. Yeah, it was my real passion to teach people self care. So I did try initially teaching people how to use their hands on their own body, but there's a lot of limiting factors to that. So about 12 years ago, that was when block therapy came to be.
(09:05): Okay, great. So what kinds of things were you seeing people for? What kinds of maladies were they having that you were gathering this information about the procedures that you've now created, the processes, what kinds of problems were they having? And if you wanna share some stories about patients, that would be.
(09:27): Great. Initially it was the typical things that people would be seeing me for, like chronic low back pain, neck pain, migraines, those kinds of things, athletic injuries as well. And because I switched how I started approaching things with people, they were sharing with me these additional benefits they were receiving. So for example, if I was working for somebody with, with back pain and I was working in their abdomen, then they were sharing with me that they were having digestive issue improvements or absolutely anything there, their blood pressure was going down. It became this holistic approach and understanding as a result of the work that I was doing. In fact, there was a gentleman that shared that he had erectile dysfunction and as a result of working in that space, his sexual function was improving. So it, it started out as me basically treating for the typical things that I was treating and then patient sharing along the way.
(10:21): All of these other things that were happening as a result of that. And it's grown from there over the last 22 years. For me personally, I've completely changed my entire cellular structure. All the issues that I've ever had are are what? What's actually interesting is all the issues that I used to have are so far in the past that now I'm starting to experience 22 years later continuing positive changes that I continue to share with my community. So we have a gentleman in our community that has Parkinson's and he shared that this is the most impactful thing that he's ever done to help manage his neurological symptoms. We have people with fibromyalgia, with MS. People are here to control their size and shape. Right now I'm currently going through a 90 day trauma program. I had a two day trauma summit where I had 12 speakers and I've now put this into a process to teach people how to pull trauma up and out of the body. And we're having absolutely phenomenal results with this. So it's really anything and everything from anti-aging to chronic pain control, acute injury management disease, it cleans and heal and feeds, feeds the cells in the body.
(11:30): Okay, so let's back up a little bit because I think most people know what fascia is, but I know there's some people who don't and I always like to include everybody. So can you talk about what is fascia? What are the components of the musculoskeletal system? What does it do and why, what you experience might work? How does it function?
(11:52): I think I have a bit of a unique understanding of the fascia system. I did go to the world's first fascia conference that was held in har at Harvard in 2007. And I recognized at the time I was coming at the body from a different perspective. So the way that I see the fascia, it's the cell membrane of each and every cell interconnected through this fascist system. So I, I've heard anywhere from, we have 30 to a hundred trillion cells in the body. So each cell is literally connected through this system and the fascia is here to create stability but also mobility in the body. And it's the communication system between every single cell. So whether we're talking about bone nerves, blood vessels, muscles, fascia, IVAs, every single cell in the body and it's totally interconnected and really I see the issue is fascia decompression.
(12:40): So over our lifetime, under the force of gravity, it's constantly compressing us, pulling us down and we're dominant on one side. So we don't just compress linearly, we wind down over time and as the fascia is here to protect us and keep us upright, as we start tipping off balance, the fascia will grip and adhere to surrounding tissues and then all the way to the bone with a force up to 2000 pounds per square inch to create this stability within the body. However, that stability is also what creates the adhesions that block blood and oxygen flow to and from cells and create the aging process that we today experience as as normal. Even though in my view it isn't something that has to happen, it really is all about keeping the cells in their correct position and cells will migrate away from proper alignment under those negative forces over time. And again, that's what creates pain, aging and disease. And it really comes down to one of our foundational pieces which is proper diaphragmatic breathing. Do you want me to dive into this a little bit? Cuz this is a pretty fascinating part.
(13:45): Well hold on, we'll get to that cuz that is fascinating. But you know, as you're talking about the fascia, you know, connecting all the cells. So I remember back to medical school when we did anatomy lab and we had to dissect a cadaver. And I do think that most people have this concept of fascia, if they