From Pain to Performance: The Nervous System & Better Movement with Tom Swales

Physiotherapist Tom Swales on pain, tight muscles, breathing and training for longevity

TL;DR

• Your nervous system is a brake, not an accelerator. When your body feels safe, it lets you move more. When it doesn't, it tightens things up to protect you.
• That "tight" hamstring or hip flexor often isn't short. It's usually guarding a weak or unstable area somewhere else, so strengthening the opposite side can loosen it faster than stretching.
• Breathing comes first. If you can't breathe into your belly, everything you build on top of it is shaky.
• Leave the gym feeling better than when you walked in. That's how you stay consistent for decades, not weeks.

Introduction

A few weeks before I recorded this episode, I had a podiatrist on the show, and we trained together afterwards. He showed me things I'd completely overlooked, even after nearly 20 years of personal training. It got me asking a simple question: why isn't there one way of looking at the body that pulls it all together?

Then Tom Swales came along.

Tom is a registered physiotherapist in Canada, a certified athletic trainer, a strength coach and the creator of the Advanced Movement Therapist (AMT) system. But the way he describes himself is simpler. He's an educator. Every patient who walks into his clinic is treated like a student of their own body, because, as he puts it, people will only stick to a plan when they understand why they're doing it.

Tom almost failed neurology at university and swore he'd never touch it again. He was a sports guy, a movement guy. But after a hundred-odd courses and certifications, he kept hitting the same wall: some things worked for some people and not for others. Neurology turned out to be the missing link.

In this conversation, we get into why pain often isn't where the problem is, what's really going on with "tight" muscles, the handful of movements Tom would give everyone on the planet, and how to train so you're still moving well in your last decade.

A quick note: this is general education, not medical advice. If you're dealing with pain or an injury, work with a qualified professional.

Lesson 1: Your nervous system is a brake, not an accelerator

Insight: Tom's big shift was realising that, in his words, "the nervous system controls everything". Its primary job is simple: don't die, look for safety and avoid harm. When something doesn't feel safe, it puts the brakes on. That can show up as tightness, weakness or pain, even when nothing is structurally wrong.

He shared an example from working with strongman Mitchell Hooper, who came in with tightness and overload all down his right side. Structurally, nothing was damaged. But his left eye wasn't converging properly, and he couldn't balance on his left leg. His nervous system was effectively ignoring his left side, so under fatigue he'd shift onto the right. Tom gave him some very low-level work: eye exercises to the left, neck positioning, legs up the wall and rolling. The next day, Tom says, he texted to say he'd hit a pain-free 800-pound back squat for four reps.

The point isn't that eye drills make you stronger. It's that the problem wasn't where the pain was.

Action: Next time something feels tight or cranky, don't just poke at the sore spot. Ask what else might be going on: how you're breathing, how you're balancing, how you've been sitting or moving all week.

Outcome: You start treating pain as information instead of damage, which takes a lot of the fear out of it.

Lesson 2: Your hamstrings probably aren't tight

Insight: This was the part I wanted to unpack for my own clients, because so many of them sit at a desk all day and swear their hamstrings are tight.

Tom's take is that stretching doesn't really change the length of a muscle. It improves your tolerance to the stretch, because your nervous system learns to relax into that position. Unless there's been real trauma and scar tissue, that tight hamstring is usually just tone. Often it's there because the spine isn't well stabilised, so the brain switches on the hamstrings and hip flexors to protect it.

Think about what you've been doing all day. If you've been sitting, you've been stretching your glutes and hamstrings for hours. If you've been slouching, you've been stretching your lower back. So when you stand up and everything feels tight, the answer usually isn't more stretching. It's doing the opposite.

"Please stop stretching your hip flexors," Tom said. "They are not tight, but your glutes are weak, your deep hip rotators are weak, your lower abdominals are weak." Strengthen around the hips, check again, and the hip flexors often feel looser without anyone touching them.

Action: Pick the position you spend the most time in and do the opposite. If you sit all day, try glute bridges or short-range holds of 30 to 60 seconds. If you're hunched over a laptop, reach your arms behind you with your palms turned out, or work the muscles across your upper back.

Outcome: Tightness eases because your nervous system finally gets the strength and control it's been asking for.

Lesson 3: Breathing is the first movement

Insight: When I asked Tom which ten exercises he'd give every person on the planet, his first answer wasn't an exercise most people would think of. It was breathing.

Breathing is the first movement we ever make. Watch a newborn and you'll see their belly expand in every direction. Many adults lose that and breathe up into their neck and shoulders instead. Tom pointed out that we take around 24,000 breaths a day. If each one is a little shrug, you're doing 24,000 shrugs, and then you wonder why your neck and traps are tight.

Chest breathing also keeps your body in a more stressed state, which makes it harder to recover, digest and sleep well. And if you can't breathe into your diaphragm, Tom says, you can't stabilise your spine properly. Everything you build on top of that is "dysfunction on top of dysfunction".

Action: Lie on your back with one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Breathe in through your nose and let your belly and sides rise before your chest does. Practise for a few minutes a day, then try it in your training positions.

Outcome: You downregulate faster, recover better and give your spine a stable base for every other movement.

Lesson 4: Get back on the ground

Insight: For anyone new to training, Tom's advice is refreshingly simple. Start where you are. If you walk, walk a little longer. And spend more time on the floor.

He suggests sitting on the floor for a whole TV show without getting up. Change positions whenever you get uncomfortable: cross-legged, a shin box, side-sitting, lying on your stomach. Without a chair doing the work, your core has to switch on, your hips have to open, and you have to breathe and stay upright. People are often surprised at how much looser their back and hips feel afterwards.

From there, Tom loves crawling: hands and knees, bear crawls, crab walks, side crawls, any kind of ground flow. Every athlete he works with does some form of crawling in every training block. It challenges your core, grip, shoulders and hips, and it restores the cross-body pattern you use for walking and running. As he puts it, "if somebody's walking weird, get them to crawl", and you'll often see why.

Ground work also tackles one of the biggest fears as we get older: falling. If you never go down to the ground, you won't know how to manage yourself if you end up there.

Action: Tonight, swap the couch for the floor for one show. Then add two or three minutes of crawling to your next warm-up.

Outcome: You rebuild your relationship with the ground, which improves your mobility now and your confidence later in life.

Lesson 5: The simple movements that matter most

Insight: After breathing and ground work, Tom's list stays basic:

• Single-leg balance. Can you stand on one leg for 10 seconds with your eyes closed? If not, running and walking are asking a lot of you, because running loads your leg with two to four times your bodyweight.
• Squatting and hinging. We all have to sit down, get up and pick things up.
• Pushing. Push-ups build the strength to catch yourself if you fall.
• Hanging and climbing. Hanging works your grip, stabilises your shoulders and decompresses your spine.
• Carrying. Deadlifts are functional, Tom says, but carries are practical, because the point of picking something up is usually to move it somewhere.
• Jumping. Start with small jumps on the spot, landing and sticking each one, before you jump onto anything.

He calls climbing, crawling and carrying "the three C's". Kids do all three without anyone teaching them, and Tom leaned on them to rebuild his own body after a stint in hospital.

Action: Check your single-leg balance on each side today, eyes open and then closed. Then build your next session around two or three of the movements above rather than the latest trend.

Outcome: You build the foundation that speed, power and skill sit on, so the harder stuff stops breaking you.

Lesson 6: Leave a few in the tank

Insight: The biggest myth Tom sees is that you need to leave the gym as "a big puddle mess". Crushing yourself might feel like you've earned it, but if every workout hurts, your nervous system will find every reason not to come back tomorrow.

He told me about a professional kickboxer whose mindset was that he hadn't trained properly unless he was bleeding, broken and suffering. Tom had him log a simple daily readiness score covering sleep hours, sleep quality, stress, energy and how much more he felt he could take, alongside his blood pressure and heart rate. High scores meant go hard. Low scores meant shadow boxing, mobility or recovery. He could then train every day and go into his fight peaked instead of cooked.

The same applies to the rest of us. Most of us are training for longevity, not elite performance, and we don't have the coaches, nutritionists and physios an Olympian has. I learned this the hard way myself. I broke myself doing CrossFit and spent years undoing it. These days a big CrossFit-style workout is my game day about once a month, and the rest is practice.

Action: Before your next session, rate your sleep, stress and energy out of 10. If they're low, make it a lighter day and push the hard session to tomorrow.

Outcome: You stay consistent, avoid digging yourself into a hole and build far more volume over a year.

Lesson 7: Build the pieces before the skill

Insight: Social media is full of back bridges, muscle-ups and pistol squats. What it doesn't show is the year or more of work it took to get there. Tom has seen plenty of bicep tears from people kipping into muscle-ups before they could do one strict pull-up.

There's a physiological reason to be patient. Tom explained that muscles adapt in roughly six to eight weeks, but tendons, ligaments and joints can take six to nine months to catch up, because they have less blood supply and denser collagen. That's often why people plateau. His advice is to stay at that weight, keep refining the pattern and let the structure catch up. Then the jumps come.

And as you get more experienced, the biggest predictor of a new injury, in Tom's view, is a lack of self-awareness. Injuries rarely come out of nowhere. They build from repetitive habits, like being right-handed and rotating one way all day. That's why he created his SAM scan (self-awareness movement scan), a quick top-down check of balance, neck, shoulders, toe touch, rotation and squat that athletes use before training. It takes a few minutes to scan and a few more to correct anything that feels off.

Action: Pick three quick checks, such as a toe touch, a rotation to each side and single-leg balance. Do them before each session. If one side feels different, spend a couple of minutes on that before you load up.

Outcome: Small niggles get sorted before they become big problems, and you get to keep playing the game for longer.

Quick wins

• Watch one TV show from the floor tonight.
• Practise belly breathing for two minutes before bed.
• Test your single-leg balance with your eyes closed.
• If you sit all day, do glute bridges before you reach for a stretch.
• Rate your sleep, stress and energy before training, and adjust the session to match.

Closing insight

What I loved most about this conversation is how simple Tom's answers were. Breathe properly. Get on the ground. Balance, squat, hinge, push, hang, carry and jump. Do the opposite of what you do all day. None of it is sexy, and that's exactly why most people skip it.

The thread running through all of it is safety. When your nervous system feels safe, it takes the brakes off, and you get more movement, more strength and more energy. When it doesn't, no amount of stretching or grinding will force it.

As Tom said, there's no finish line. "The goal is how long can you keep playing the game." For me, longevity isn't about how many years you live. It's about being able to run, jump and move well right up until the end. Build the pieces, be patient with your tendons, and leave the gym feeling better than when you walked in.

Connect with Tom

Find the Advanced Movement Therapist certification, the SAM scan and Tom's courses at AMT Certified. He also has a free masterclass, 8 Neurohacks for Rapid Client Results, which is designed for coaches and clinicians but is well worth a look for anyone. You can follow him on Instagram and YouTube.

Listen to the full episode

If this got you thinking, the full conversation is well worth your time. You'll find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube, or press play at the top of this page.

Related episodes: Strong Feet, Strong Life with Podiatrist Thien Trinh and Barefoot Shoes and Foot Strength with Helen Halkias