Show notes
On this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Dr. Shannon Leggett, PT, DPT to talk about how to infuse yoga principles into physical therapy practice. Dr. Legget is a manually-based orthopedic physical therapist with 21 years of experience. I understand the complex nature of pain and the necessity to use a comprehensive, individualized treatment approach. In this episode, we discuss: Shannon's journey to becoming a yoga teacher How to infuse the principles of yoga, not just the moves or poses, into PT practice Cases studies in applying yoga principles in PT The importance of breathwork How to be more present through yoga And much more! Resources: Shannon's Instagram Shannon's LinkedIn Restorative Yoga A big thank you to Net Health for sponsoring this episode! Learn more about Net Health Therapy for Private Practice here. More About Dr. Leggett: I am a manually-based orthopedic physical therapist with 21 years of experience. I understand the complex nature of pain and the necessity to use a comprehensive, individualized treatment approach. I perform a thorough evaluation looking at movement, strength, flexibility and balance, as well as lifestyle. I believe that how we live influences our ability to heal. I combine my extensive background of treating musculoskeletal injuries with my training in mind-body techniques to formulate a holistic plan of care Subscribe to Healthy, Wealthy & Smart: Website: https://podcast.healthywealthysmart.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/healthy-wealthy-smart/id532717264 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ELmKwE4mSZXBB8TiQvp73 SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/healthywealthysmart Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/healthy-wealthy-smart iHeart Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-healthy-wealthy-smart-27628927 Read the full transcript here: Speaker 1 (00:07): Welcome to the healthy, wealthy, and smart podcast. Each week we interview the best and brightest in physical therapy, wellness, and entrepreneurship. We give you cutting edge information. You need to live your best life. Healthy, wealthy, and smart. The information in this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and should not be used as personalized medical advice. And now here's your host, Dr. Karen Litzy. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I am your host parents in today's episode is brought to you by Speaker 2 (00:41): Net health. So net health now has net health therapy for private practice. This is a cloud-based all-in-one EMR solution for managing your practice. It handles scheduling documentation, billing, reporting needs. Plus lots more in one super easy to use package. And right now net health is offering a special deal for healthy, wealthy, and smart listeners. If you complete a demo with the net health team, you'll get a hundred dollars towards lunch for your staff. Visit net health.com/see to get started, and you'll also get access to free resources for PTs like eBooks on demand, webinars, and business tools. Once again, that's net health.com/l I T Z Y my last name now onto today's episode, we are going to be talking about how you can infuse yoga into your orthopedic physical therapy practice. And this is more than just infusing some yoga moves, but really infusing the background and philosophy of yoga into your physical therapy practice and to help us navigate that I'm really happy to have on the program, Dr. Speaker 2 (01:53): Shannon Leggett, she is an orthopedic, a manual physical therapy with 20 years of experience. She understands the complex nature of pain and the necessity to use a comprehensive individualized treatment approach. She performs thorough evaluations, looking at movements, strength, flexibility, and balance, as well as lifestyle. Shannon believes that how we live influences our ability to heal. So she has been able to successfully combine her extensive background of treating musculoskeletal injuries with their training and mind body techniques to formulate a holistic plan of care. And in this episode, we talk about just that, how to infuse yoga into your regular physical therapy treatments. And like I said, it goes beyond just some yoga poses and stretches, but really infusing the background and the philosophy of yoga in with your patient in with your patient treatments, but also with infusing your whole philosophy of physical therapy and how you work with your patients. So a big thanks to Shannon and everyone Speaker 3 (03:00): Enjoyed today's episode. Hey, Shannon, welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to have you on. Thanks, Ken. I'm really happy to be here. So today we're going to talk about how you have been able to infuse yoga and not just yoga the movements, but yoga, the principles into your physical therapy practice. And just for the listeners, I actually took one of Shannon's yoga classes online and it was wonderful. So thank you for having me joining. Yeah, it was great. So before we get into how you do this within your orthopedic physical therapy practice, I would love for you to let the listeners know how you yourself came into the practice of yoga. Well, it's actually kind of a funny story. I was probably in my mid thirties, which I'm not going to tell you how long ago that was. I'm not dating myself here, but I ended a relationship and I think as so many women do, it's like you either cut or dye your hair or you try something new. Okay. Speaker 3 (04:06): So trying to rock the pixie cut back then, like, I couldn't do anything with my hair. So I, I walked into my first yoga class of the New York health and racquet club on first Avenue on the upper East side. I know it, and there I was. And now that I know yoga, it was an Iyengar class, which is very alignment based very slow, very methodical holding poses. And I remember waking up the next day and being so incredibly sore and like a muscles. I mean, basically I should know what the muscles are, but like, Oh my God, that's what those feel like when you use them for long periods of time and the physical practice that, that sensation, that feeling kind of kept me going back for more. And then as time went on, I started to recognize the mental aspects of the practice that whatever I was walking into the yoga studio with or holding onto was kind of magically disappeared at the end of the class. Speaker 3 (05:13): And I am an anxiety sufferer, which I only have come to understand and realize what that was. And till like in a, within the last 10 years and yoga then became a very strong coping strategy for me. I found being connected to my body and connected to my person and putting an hour of self-care aside for me was absolutely essential. So it's definitely become one of my go-to tools to kind of handle the day in and day out stress of living, working in, in New York city. So I would think, especially now, during the times, yeah, hands down now it is. And I, and I was home for a couple of months, like everybody else. And it was, I was on my mat every single day. And then decided while I was home, I was like, well, why not see who else wants to practice? Speaker 3 (06:14): But yeah, so I, it has always been in the last like 12, 15 years, very much part of my life on a personal standpoint, it has led me to travel. I've met great people, I've taken amazing classes and explored studios in different forms. But it wasn't until probably within the last five or six years that I started to connect some dots professionally, right? Like how, how could this fit into what I do professionally? I, in terms of like a stretching standpoint, a strength building standpoint, yoga is amazing, but what about the body, the mind body connection. And I started to notice trends with a lot of my female patients I've been treating in Midtown for most of my career. And women would be walking into the clinic with your like standard orthopedic injuries, shoulder impingement, low back pain, and their response to an injury that would not necessarily be anything like, okay, just the pain was off the charts and difficult to get under control and not necessarily responding to what you would consider standard practice and you start to talk to them and they have fertility. Speaker 3 (07:38): They've had fertility issues. They've had gastrointestinal issues. They're working full time. They are full time moms too, trying to be the best they can be in both realms and self-care is last. They don't sleep well, they don't eat well. And I realized that the stress component was driving their inability to heal or meaning their ability to, you know, kind of get back to what they enjoyed. And I just was said to myself, well, how can I as a clinician kind of break into that stress cycle, how can I maybe help them Crump, you know, calm down some of their chronic systemic inflammation, how can we help them with negative thought patterns and, and whatnot. And that's not something that we traditionally are taught in physical therapy school and it, and is it my scope of practice and kind of going back and forth. Speaker 3 (08:38): So I started taking some continuing ed classes in the yoga world, and I've done some work with a clinical psychologist in Boston who treats her anxiety and depression patients with, with yoga and bodywork techniques. And, and she's a ton of research as to how mindfulness begins in the body that studies have shown that, that kind of short circuits, that stress response in your brain. So that kind of led me in that direction. And then I walked into my restorative yoga training, which I had never really taken, but it intrigued me. And because I just kind of felt intuitively that it was going to be the, like the last, not the last piece, because there's never a last piece, but a piece of the puzzle that I was missing. And it basically is how we can go from our sympathetic or fight or flight part of our nervous system into our rest and digest our parasympathetic sympathetic nervous system and how much our nervous system can drive, how we feel. Speaker 3 (09:41): And so often we have patients with chronic neck pain, chronic low back pain, like the massage, they feel better for an hour. It comes back and just this idea of chronic tension versus chronic tightness. And what restorative training does is it brings you into yoga shapes, but they're basically supported with props and it's a guided meditation and breath work. And as you move through the shape or state in the shape, you can flip the switch that vagus nerve stimulator, vagus nerve, and move into that rest and digest part of the nervous system. And I mean, in theory, like, okay, great. But four days of training and I always have neck pain, always. And I just attributed to everything we do. And that role was that from holidays and, you know, that's stressful time, but the month of December, yeah. Within four days, my neck pain was gone. Speaker 3 (10:52): It was incredible to me, how much of that pain was actually chronic tension and not necessarily this orthopedic tightness. So it was a kind of an aha moment for me in terms of what patients might carry. And I have used the teaching, the methodology in my treatment sessions, patients don't necessarily understand clients don't necessarily understand that they hold habitual tension. And so much of us, like when we say like, Oh, we have to relax. Like we sit down on the couch and drink a glass of wine and, you know, watch eight hours of Netflix. We're like, we're totally just chilling. But yet, like are holding our belly. Like our shoulders are up here, like clenching our jaw. Like we don't even know because we're relaxing. And part of, part of the restorative yoga is understanding where those patterns are. You get to know your body. Like for me, I'm a draw puncher, I'm a shoulder up late year. And, and, and once you understand that you kinda like kinda, I do like some check-ins during the day, like where are my shoulders? Where's my jaw. And taking a deep breath and kind of like letting that go. Speaker 4 (12:11): Yeah. As, as you say, this I'm unclenching my jaw a little bit. I'm a jock ledger also. So as you say this, I'm like, relax, the jaw, drop the shoulders. I am the same way. Well, it's, it's pretty amazing because it sounds like for you, and this happens, I've heard this over and over again, that it's this sort of personal experience. You have that aha moment. And then you say to yourself, well, I'm a clinician I'm trying to help people. So what can I do to improve my understanding as a clinician to help my patients? So you go, you take restorative yoga training, and then you are able to infuse that into your therapy sessions. And we were joking a bit before we went on the air. And Shannon said, well, it's not like I'm having someone who just had a labral tear, do a shoulder stand. Like that's not what it means to do, like yoga and PT. So when people think of yoga and infusing yoga into PT, I bet a lot of people think, Oh, you must do a lot of downward dogs and a lot of shoulder stands, but can you explain for a little bit more about what, what that means in, in your PT practice? Speaker 3 (13:26): Absolutely. I, if somebody comes in at, like, I was thinking a case, a case study, let's do I have a frozen shoulder? And how much of that again, tension versus tightness, how much of that tightness is being driven by the nervous system? So I'm, I always ask about stress levels. What's going on at home at work. You know, things that people do to, to, to maybe calm down or relax. And I might say, Hey, we're going to have a little bit of an experiment today. Okay. I am gonna prop you. We, I pull off of the blankets and the pillows and I'll put them in a very gentle chest opener because oftentimes you're doing a ton of stretching with a frozen shoulder or a lot of soft tissue work. If there's a level or component to stress or anxiety to that, that cranking is just going to cause your, your nervous system just clamp down and, and, and they're going to, you're going to get the exact opposite of it. Speaker 4 (14:32): Yeah, absolutely. And even like, we know if you're cranking on an arm and the, those first three to six months. No good, no good, no good. Not, not good for the patient, not good for the shoulder, Speaker 3 (14:46): Not at all. So I might spend a couple of sessions with a patient props, kind of guiding their nervous system into letting go. Typically the, you know, shoulders are rounded, pecks are tight, upper traps. So if I can kind of guide them into relaxing, letting go, I typically find a little bit more space. They're a little more trusting of me to like, maybe move them. Maybe I can modulate their pain a little bit. So they will be a little bit more, or a little less fearful of movement themselves because it's a big deal I'm to us are in pain and they don't want to move. They don't want to go in any direction that that is going to maybe reproduce their symptoms. Speaker 4 (15:35): Of course. Yeah. And, and so much goes into that sort of bucket when you're talking about pain. So there's so much that can fill that up. You know, we look at things through a bio-psycho-social lens, you know, you're asking about sleep and stress and all that goes into this, this sort of bucket. And then it gets to the point where the nervous system senses danger. And it's like, okay, that's it. We're gonna it's time. You know, the brain makes that decision. It's dangerous enough pain, right? Yep. Speaker 3 (16:06): We're going to fight, we're going to flight or we…
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