Work Hard Play Hard Podcast – Resolve Mysterious Pain in Your Back, Hips, & Knees with This Little Known Secret

Christine was recently featured on the Work Hard Play Hard Podcast with Rob Murgatroyd discussing a solution for pain in the back, hips, and knees by releasing tension in the iliacus muscle using the Hip Hook.

Show Notes:

This show is all about fulfillment—which means feeling good. But if you have any sort of back or hip pain, then you know that feeling good is not easy. Enter Christine Koth, a physical therapist and best-selling author of “Tight Hip, Twisted Core.” She’s created a product called the Hip Hookthat gets access to the iliacus muscle and relieves a bunch of back and hip problems. She saw a problem and she solved it, and the result is transformative if you have hip or back pain. You’re going to get a ton out of this interview with Christine Koth.

Listen Here.

Full Transcript:

Rob Murgatroyd 0:00

Welcome to another episode of the Work Hard Play Hard podcast. My name is Rob Murgatroyd. And each week on this podcast, I talk to some of the most fascinating people on the planet in all areas of life, from mindset to fitness to spirituality, and, of course, business. Look, I believe you deserve success in all the areas of your life, not only business. But before we get into today’s show, you may want to join us on our next Work Hard Play Hard experience. This year, we’re going to be going to Mykonos and Marrakesh. In these experiences, I have hand selected a group of high performing business people who are seeking more balance connection, and they want to celebrate their wins as a reward for the hard work that they put in. If you want someone to curate once in a lifetime experiences and force you to play more, rush over to workhardplayhardexperience.com. Fill out an application so we can jump on a discovery call to see if this is a good fit for you. And remember, excuses are over. It’s time to live.

Christine Koth 1:15

Happy muscles don’t hurt. So if you go in and you lie on the Hip Hook and you don’t feel much, then that muscle is happy. If it feels really intense when you lie on the Hip Hook, then that muscle is not happy and needs your attention. When I talk about prolonged pressure, we’re talking about resolving muscle tension that is not relaxing when you’re relaxed. So when you lay down on your back and you’re in your bed, there’s absolutely no muscle in your body that should be working. The whole point of laying down, right, is to give everything a break. I don’t have any background in this but all the things that I’ve learned along the way have really satisfied my quench for knowledge and learning new things.

Rob Murgatroyd 1:59

Hey, everybody, welcome to the Work Hard Play Hard show. Today on the show is Christine Koth. Okay. This show is all about fulfillment, right? Which means feeling good. But if you have any sort of back or hip pain or anything like that, then you know what I’m talking about. Feeling good is not easy when you’re in pain. So in this episode, you’re going to hear an interview that I did with Christine Koth. Christine is a physical therapist, and the best selling author of the book Tight Hip Twisted Core. Now the reason I wanted her on the show is twofold. First, she created a product called the Hip Hook — the Hip Hook that gets access to a muscle called the iliacus. Now it doesn’t matter, I could barely spell it — doesn’t matter what the iliacus is. What matters is that the iliacus is inside of your pelvis. And really, really difficult to get to. You’re not going to get to it yourself and the physical therapist who is unaware of how to get to it is going to have trouble. So she created this Hip Hook, and the reason why you want to go after this iliacus is because it’s responsible for a ton of back and hip problems. So because it’s so difficult to get to, she came up with an idea. She said, What if I were to create this hook that you can lie on and it hooks into this iliacus? Now, I gotta tell you, I’ve been using this Hip Hook, it’s just coming out now the time this airs, it should be just out. It is transformative if you have hip or back pain. Now I also wanted her on the show because she’s an entrepreneur. She saw a problem that needed a solution and she went straight after solving it. She created the Hip Hook. So please enjoy this episode with Christine Koth.

Christine, welcome to the show.

Christine Koth 4:11

Thank you, I’m glad to be here.

Rob Murgatroyd 4:15

I am super freaking excited that you’re here. Because this show is called Work Hard, Play Hard and it is all about fulfillments. And to enjoy fulfillments you got to feel good. And you have created an ingenious product that can help people who are suffering from back pain, hip pain and some other related symptoms which we’re going to get into. So I’m really excited that you’re going to bet you’re here because seven out of 10 Americans right now are suffering from some sort of back related pain. So with that intro, welcome officially to the show. All right, before we get into what you created, I’d like to turn the clock back and take you back to growing up in the Midwest, great people, I was just in Wisconsin, actually, last week for the first time, a lot of farms…

Christine Koth 5:13

Lots of farms.

Rob Murgatroyd 5:14

A lot of farms. And we all have, you know, moments that shape our life. And one of those moments for you was a letter that you wrote to your dad to quit smoking. In what ways did his reaction to that letter shape what you’re doing professionally today?

Christine Koth 5:37

Well, it was really interesting, because when you’re young, you’re naive. I’ve always been an extremely optimistic person, you know, rainbows and unicorns and all of that. When I was a young child, I just thought that the world was a beautiful place, and that people were all great people, including my parents. So I thought if people are armed with the correct information, they’ll make the right choice. And in this particular situation, I have learned in sixth grade, all about the dangers of smoking and drugs and alcohol. And empowered with that knowledge, I brought it home to my dad, thinking if I gave him this information, he would have the knowledge he needs to be able to make the right choice and choose to stop smoking. So, enthusiastically I brought this information back to him and he kindly said, “Well, thank you for sharing this with me, but no, thank you, I’m not gonna quit smoking.” And it was like, you know, complete cognitive dissonance. I was like, “What?” You have this information, and you’re not going to use it, and you’re going to choose to do something that’s going to harm you. And ultimately, it killed him. He ultimately died from that. And so, it really set me on this path of really seeking to try to understand: number one, how the body works, and how I can choose to do something, it’d be different than the way that my dad was choosing to live his life, but also really trying to study how I can motivate people to take care of themselves, you know, because I wasn’t able to motivate my father. So it’s like, well, what does it take to give people the right tools and the right inspiration to want to make those life changes? So, being super curious about the body and about learning the psychology of human beings was really initiated from that moment.

Rob Murgatroyd 7:46

Yeah, for sure. It was a defining moment. You know, my dad also smoked three packs of lucky strikes a day from, my God, when he was 16 years old. And he said the same thing your dad did, “I’m gonna die of something.” But I don’t think he — he obviously, eventually wound up dying of a smoking related situation. But, like yours, there was no, there was no talking to him. And it was a different time. And it was a different place. And people today are taking much more responsibility for their health. And so when I see things like what we’re about to get into with what you created, I hesitate — I hesitate to call it a hack, because it’s — it’s way beyond a hack. But it is such an efficient way of solving an issue. So let’s dig into that and if we fast forward a bit, you decided to become a physical therapist, and you notice that there was a direct link to tightness in the hip flexor. A lot of people familiar with what a hip flexor is. And that tightness in the hip flexor actually winds up or potentially can wind up causing pain in lots of places all over the body. And you got really good at releasing tension in a muscle that’s called the iliacus. And I’m sure we’re gonna get into that as well, which is inside of the hip, and not easy to reach. Alright, so with that, can you take me back to the first moment that somebody said, “Wow, you worked on my iliacus” — they probably didn’t say that, but — “You worked on my iliacus and I feel amazing.” Take me back to when you made that first link.

Christine Koth 9:31

Surprisingly, this very first link happened right out of college. I’ve been practicing physical therapy for over 20 years. And you know, as this motivated, Type A, excited, just graduated PT school, got my first job, really trying to do the best job I could with each of my clients. I ended up having this wonderful woman come in to my office. She was a school teacher and she also loved to run as a hobby. She was doing marathons and loved long distance running. And she came in to see me with kneecap pain, patellofemoral pain, right in the front of her knee. And I was being a good girl and like looking at her entire body and looking at her posture, and I noticed that there was a rotation in the way that she was standing. So I got her on the table and was poking around, trying to figure out why she was rotated in her hip. And maybe that was related to why she was having knee pain. And one of the techniques that I had learned from one of my mentors that I was lucky enough to have right out of school was to look for the psoas — to really examine whether the psoas was tight. Now the psoas is one of the hip flexor muscles, and that is deeper in your abdomen. So if you were to draw a line from the front of your hip bone, to your belly button, the psoas would be halfway in between there and about maybe an inch or two in maybe, probably two inches deep into your body. So with my novice hands, I’m digging around looking for this psoas muscle. And I was a little nervous digging into somebody’s abdomen, right. But then, I started moving a little bit closer to the bone towards the outside of the body. And I noticed that right inside the pelvic bone, there was this other tight muscle. And I was like, “Ooh, what is that?” I looked it up in my anatomy book. “Oh, that’s the iliacus!” Okay, well, I feel more comfortable touching that muscle. It’s not so deep. So I went and put my prolonged pressure using my fingers. And then the client, my patient, was just like, “Wow, that’s so tight! I never knew that muscle was even there.” She was just thrilled that I had found something that no one else had found. And lo and behold, once I put pressure on that muscle, and it released, she could lie flat on the table, which she was unable to do before. She got up, her pelvis was no longer rotated, she was able to do a squat without knee pain, and then subsequently went on a run without any pain. So I was like, “Ooh, I am pretty good!” You know, being a little novice PT, I was pretty impressed with myself. So that really started the trajectory of me looking at that muscle and how it was impacting nearly everyone that came into my office from that point forward. And that’s how I started to develop and really understand this pattern of how this muscle and tension in this muscle impacts the rest of the body.

Rob Murgatroyd 12:39

You know, I was listening to Howard Stern interview with Alec Baldwin, I guess, maybe last month, and he was late for the show. And Howard said, “Why are you late? What’s more important” — he was joking with him, you know — “What’s more important than me?” And he said, “I had to get my iliacus worked on.” And Howard Stern says, “What the hell is an iliacus?” And he explained it to him. He said, “I have to go three times a week. It’s the only thing that solves my back issues. I’ve got somebody that works on that.” And then I saw your product, which we’re going to talk about in a bit that was targeted specifically towards that muscle. And I said, “This is interesting.” So this is the, you know, whenever I hear something, two times, I always pay attention, because I feel like it’s a whisper from the universe. So I looked into it more. And then that’s how we wound up connecting. But I want to ask you, about the pressure that you put on the iliacus, so for people that don’t understand you make some beautiful distinctions. And, I will talk about when I record the intro, for this episode, I’ll talk about your book “Tight Hip, Twisted Core” which is excellent. And I’ve been reading it in prep for this — this interview. And you talk about the difference between everybody just calling everything tight, you know, my muscles are tight. That’s really not the case. There’s a lot of other words that are associated with that. But the question I have for you is the iliacus — I would assume becomes shortened as you’re doing different activities, sitting, running, etc. and that shortening creates pain. Well, you probably can stretch out your hip flexors, you could probably stretch out your psoas you could probably go to somebody maybe to even kind of dig into the iliacus. But the goal is really to lengthen that iliacus, I would suspect, and my question is when you talk about putting pressure in the example that you just gave on somebody’s iliacus, can you explain exactly why holding a painful point for a few minutes or so will help it release and maybe even describe what a release is like what’s happening there?

Christine Koth 14:58

Yeah, absolutely. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about, because like you said, there’s so many ways that we use these words tight. And, you know, there’s not really a lot of clarity around that. So, when you think about a muscle, a muscle is designed to contract and then relax. And what can happen is for various reasons — that I talk about in my book — that a muscle can choose to contract and stay contracted. And it can be the entire muscle that chooses to stay contracted, it can be a portion of the muscle that stays contracted. And this is what we call a muscle knot. And we’ve all experienced this where someone comes up behind you and grabs your shoulders, and you’re like, “Ah!” there’s a tight knot and your shoulders and your upper trapezius muscle up in your top of your shoulder, that’s a very common place that people develop knots. And that’s what that means is there’s a section of the muscle that is holding a contraction and not relaxing, even when you’re not using it. So this is different than being tight in a way where you don’t have the full range of motion, when we do a stretch. Say we’re stretching our hamstring muscles by touching our hands to the ground, touching our toes and standing. You may not be able to touch your toes because your hamstring is not lengthening enough. But then if you stand back up, or you go to lie down, your hamstring may completely relax. And that means that that has no muscle knots or isn’t holding tension. So there’s two different kind of “tight” definitions there. When I talk about prolonged pressure, we’re talking about resolving muscle tension that is not relaxing when you’re relaxed. So when you lay down in your back and you’re in your bed, there’s absolutely no muscle in your body that should be working. That’s the whole point of laying down, right, is to give everything a break. And if you lie down and there’s still muscle tension, that means that that muscle tension exists when you’re walking, when you’re sitting when you’re driving to work when you’re going for a jog. Anything that you’re doing that muscle is holding tension. And this type of tension is what responds well to prolonged pressure. Prolonged pressure means putting pressure on the muscle and holding that for 30 to 90 seconds. If you do it for less, it’s not effective. If you’re just rubbing it and it’s not effective, you really need to put that prolonged pressure on the muscle and it works on a neurological level, meaning that pressure sends a signal to your brain over the period of that 30 to 90 seconds, that says okay, you can relax, you can change this pattern that you’ve developed, which is holding tension when you don’t need to. And it’s that neurological connection, and that reset that is what produces the results that we’re looking for.

Rob Murgatroyd 17:57

Okay, so I know it does do that. But do you know why it does that? So why would prolong pressure trigger the brain to say release?

Christine Koth 18:08

You know, there’s a bunch of different kind of, well, we can them neurological hacks using the hack word that that trick the brain into changing its pattern or thinking something is okay. So one of those, for example, is if you are trying to lengthen your hamstring muscle and get it to stretch — if you contract the opposite muscle which would be your quad that basically tells the hamstring muscle to relax. So if you contract the antagonist muscle, that is a way to trick the brain. And prolong pressure also just works that way. It’s just a way of the brain saying, “Okay, I’m going to let this relax.” There’s also some things that happen locally as well. So when you have muscle tension or muscle knots in the body, there’s a buildup of minerals. When minerals like calcium are responsible for causing contraction in the muscle and, when you put pressure on it, it increases the circulation there and helps clean out some of those excess minerals and toxins that have built up in that area, which also helps that muscle locally to release this tension.

Rob Murgatroyd 19:25

Okay, got it. You created this device called the Hip Hook, which is this magnificent torture device that I don’t know what else — I’m going to give you my experience with it here live, which I think will be good feedback for you anyway. I lied on top of it. And the moment I lied on top of it. I was like, “Oh my god, what is this? This hurts but it hurts so good. I don’t want to let…” It was this weird mix of get off of me, but don’t get off of me. I don’t know how else to explain it. Then following your instructions in your video, you basically say hang out, let it sit there for a minute, your body will start to adapt. And it was very, very quick, like 20 seconds quick. And I went, “Oh,” I went from torture to feeling nothing. Then, you have a little handle on this baby. And the handle is designed — that’s the hook part. The handle is designed for you to sort of like reach around in multiple ways, if you don’t have a lot of shoulder range of motion, and press it. And when you press it, it hooks into the inside of the ilium or the pelvis or the hip and it hits that iliacus muscle. And then I start to feel that torture thing again. This is grueling. And I can literally feel my body going into like, like starting to sweat. Like when you get pain, and it’s like somebody’s pushing on it. But it doesn’t last long, it’s pretty quick, and you can feel it start to release. Your desire is to do exactly what we talked about earlier, which is to not stay on it, and to get off it. But you’re not going to affect the change if you do that. So I put a little timer on my iPhone, and I just went for, you know, I’m an overachiever. So I went through the 90 seconds and got up and I was like, “Whoa, I feel different.” I started walking and I was walking different. It felt like more range of motion in my gait, which is the only way I know how to describe it. So for people that — because you’re going to have people that are going to be ordering this for sure. And then want this to serve as a resource for the people, you know, to introduce it, but also for the people when they get it to have some tactical things that they can do with it. So one of the things that I’m aware of that one of the questions that I have is when you are going into the iliacus, you’re also hitting the psoas, which I believe is probably inevitable because they’re so closely tied that there’s even an area called the iliopsoas where they where they meet together. Or is the goal of this for you to specifically go after the iliacus? Or is it for you to also hit the psoas and the iliacus?

Christine Koth 22:41

Well, you described it perfectly what someone would experience. The first thing when you first were lying upon it and you were experiencing that excruciating pain — that was addressing your psoas. When you first lay directly on it, the tip is going straight up into your body and is pressing directly on your psoas. You know, this tip is designed to be like a human being’s thumb, so if you are going into your massage therapist or your physical therapist, and they were releasing your psoas or your iliacus. This is designed to replicate that. So when you go in initially, like I said, you’re addressing the psoas. So I instruct people to give that some time because we want that muscle to have his chance to reduce its tension. These two muscles, the iliacus and the psoas are actually two separate muscles. They do join together and attach at the same place. But neurologically, they’re completely different. The nerves that go to psoas are different than the nerves that go to the iliacus. So we need to stop grouping them together — I think this is one of the problems of why the iliacus isn’t really addressed in the first place. Secondly, when you push on the handle like you described, then you’re really pinning that iliacus muscle between the tip of this amazing tool and your pelvic bone. And that’s where you’re getting at the iliacus. So you really are addressing both and both are extremely important to address. As you may have noticed, there’s a lot of people talking about the psoas and the psoas is absolutely important, you know, and this tool addresses the psoas. But if you address just that without addressing the iliacus you’re missing this hidden piece, and that’s what this tool really provides — is the ability to address both. The psoas won’t relax if the iliacus is still tight.

Rob Murgatroyd 24:43

Right and I have a ton of — not a ton — I have a few psoas things I did. One of the things I do for the listeners of the show is we do worldwide events where we get a lot of entrepreneurs listen to the show, and we go to different experiences for three, four days around the world. And one of them we did domestically was we went to Tom Brady’s trainer in Boston, and we shut down TB12 and we had his trainers train us. And one of the things they did was they introduced us to the psoas. And you know, we dug deep and all of us were just crying. But after that, I was like, wow, I never realized how important the psoas muscle here is. So I’ve, I’ve purchased a few contraptions to help me with it. But here’s the thing, when I use them, it definitely helps. And it lasts for maybe a day or two. But after that, I’m pretty hooked on it. It’s not something that I feel, you know, like, just do this once a week, and then you can go to once a month, and then just as needed. Like it’s an almost an everyday thing. That’s not the case with the Hip Hook. What I’ve noticed with the Hip Hook and using it, is that number one, now when I lie on it, I 70% of the time lying on it have no pain before I before I hook it, unless I know I did something crazy, like training really hard at the gym, or whatever. And number two, I’m noticing that it’s lasting, the correction is lasting longer. And that was one if maybe you could speak to that a bit?

Christine Koth 26:26

Yeah. This is the beauty of the Hip Hook. I mean, I am so glad that all the other tools — people have been experimenting with all these other tools, because it’s really set the stage for people understanding that they’re achieving temporary relief. It’s close, but it’s not quite there because it’s not addressing iliacus. Like I mentioned, those two are connected in that if one is tight and the other is not, then other one’s gonna get tight. You know, so so this is the beauty of the Hip Hook. And my experience too when I was creating these prototypes and testing them out — I actually would have to wait for a good couple weeks, before I could even test out the new prototype, because my iliacus and my psoas we’re so relaxed after using a previous