The Truth About Chronic Pain and the 4 Levers that Resolve It
Why pain persists, why traditional treatments fail, and the simple four-lever system that actually restores the human body.
I remember standing in my living room back in New Jersey.
I was in the second grade and my “Ranger Rick” magazine had just come in the mail. I was flipping through the pages when I felt an unusual sensation behind my eyes.
It felt like someone was pulling on the muscles behind my eyes.
Over the next few hours, the unusual sensation turned into tremendous pain.
It crippled me.
I was forced to retreat to my room, turn off all the lights and pray that the pain might pass.
The pain grew and grew and grew until finally, my body had enough and I began vomiting in the bathroom.
This, as it turned out, was the only way to make the pain stop.
Over the next fifteen years of my life, every few months, that ominous tug would appear and I would immediately know that my day was effectively over.
If I could catch it early enough and fall asleep, that seemed to work too.
But once the pain had crossed a certain threshold, it was like a runaway train. Nothing was stopping it.
In 2013, I was just starting my first job out of college. I was in Phoenix, Arizona as a Strength and Conditioning Coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
We were about halfway through Spring Training, which for us Strength Coaches, was the most grueling part of the year, when I felt that all-too-familiar tug behind my eyes.
My heart sank.
I knew what this meant.
I was just starting this new job. I was trying to make a good impression and I didn’t want to be the guy that had to go home because his head hurt.
Desperately, I walked into our medical office to see if they had anything that might help.
“Do you guys have anything for a Migraine?” I asked.
“Yea!” one of our medical guys replied, “We have Andrew!”
I was not in the mood for games. I was looking for medicine, not some wise-cracks.
Andrew was our medical director and our resident genius. He was known around the Diamondbacks facility for how smart he was. It was not unusual for him to perform, what appeared to be magic tricks, with the players.
I remember once, a player came in with lock-jaw. I had never seen that before. His mouth was stuck in the wide-open position. He looked like he was about to take the first bite of a massive cheeseburger.
I don’t know what Andrew did, but a few minutes later, the player was good as new.
If anyone had some sort of medical trick up their sleeve for this headache, it was Andrew.
“Give me five minutes,” Andrew said with a slight chuckle.
Five minutes later, Andrew walked into the weight room where I was waiting and told me to climb up on the massage table.
He started performing a battery of tests.
I had no idea what he was doing.
After a few minutes, he had me lay on my left side in the fetal position and lift my right knee in the air.
“At some point, I’m going to press this knee down,” he started, “Don’t let me push it down.”
I was confused but willing to try anything.
Suddenly, Andrew jolted my knee down towards the ground and I reflexively shot it back up.
“There,” he finished, “Stand up and see how you feel.”
“That’s it?” I thought, “He didn’t even touch my head.”
But as my feet hit the floor, I felt it.
It wasn’t instant. Rather it was like someone was turning the volume knob down. My migraine was retreating.
To say I was in shock would be a massive understatement.
This was utter disbelief.
In that moment, I had flashbacks to all the puzzled specialists I had been to as a kid who would simply say things like, “drink more water” or “stay out of the sun.”
For a decade and a half, these migraines were just a part of my life. Woven into the fabric of my day-to-day existence.
And in a moment, a light sprang up at the end of the tunnel.
There might be a future without these headaches.
“What the hell did you just do to me?!” I asked Andrew, “You have to explain it to me.”
He paused for a moment.
“Ahhh, it’s pretty complicated,” he replied.
“You don’t understand how big of a deal this is,” I started, “You MUST explain this to me.”
He stopped and his eyes turned upwards. Clearly he was trying to formulate what to say.
Then he looked back at me and said, “It’s just too complicated.”
In that very moment, my life changed forever. I became absolutely committed to finding out the science behind this magic.
Clearly there was some science out there that traditional medicine was not aware of and I made it my life’s mission to find it.
The Four Levers of Chronic Pain
After years in professional sports and years more in the clinic, I’ve come to one conclusion:
There are only four levers in the human body that truly matter when it comes to chronic pain.
If you don’t pull all four, pain is inevitable.
If you do pull all four, pain becomes optional.
Lever 1: Posture & Breathing
This is the foundation. The most fundamental movement pattern we have. You take 22,000 breaths every single day — more than any other muscular action except the beating of your heart.
If your breathing mechanics are off, your posture will fail. If your posture fails, every other movement in your life is built on a faulty structure.
This lever is about:
Stacking your ribs on top of your pelvis
Demonstrating good respiratory mechanics
Maintaining that alignment during life, work, sport, stress, and movement
This is your core. If this doesn’t function well, nothing else will.
Lever 2: Strength
If posture and breathing are the core, then strength is your ability to hold that core together under pressure.
Think about an athlete getting bumped in a game. If they cannot keep their stack intact, they collapse. Strength is the muscular armor that preserves alignment under load, speed, impact, and fatigue.
This lever is not about bodybuilding. It’s about structural integrity.
Lever 3: Energy Production
This lever answers a different question entirely:
Can you maintain good mechanics long enough?
This includes:
Cardiovascular conditioning
Metabolic Health
Sleep
Cellular Health
Nutrition
Recovery
Maybe you can stay pain-free in the morning, but can you stay pain-free throughout the entire day, the entire week, the entire season?
Without this lever, your mechanics will fail simply because your system runs out of energy to sustain them.
Lever 4: Central Nervous System Control
This is our secret sauce.
This is the Saint Bartholomew lever.
When the brain enters fight-or-flight, it creates stiffness in the body that overrides every other lever. The nervous system locks the joints, clamps the muscles, and restricts movement until it perceives the threat is gone.
The threat can be:
Something physical
Something emotional
A memory
Stress
Your personality
Pure imagination
The human neocortex allows us to activate fight-or-flight with thought alone. A Type A personality can put themselves into chronic sympathetic activation simply by the way they think.
Until the nervous system is calmed, your body will not grant permission for healing.
It’s the emergency brake on the entire system.
Why These Four Levers Matter
When I worked in the NBA, I watched elite athletes come in every day and pull all four levers — constantly, intentionally, systematically.
They did:
Corrective work
Breathwork and postural restoration
Strength training
Conditioning
Recovery work
Nutrition
Mental performance training
Stress management
They had access to chefs, psychologists, manual therapists, sleep specialists, and recovery technologies.
Of course they did.
They were tuning a multi-million-dollar machine.
And it showed.
When an NBA player walked in with back pain, I could usually resolve it in minutes.
But when I opened my clinic and began working with the general population, what took me three minutes with an NBA player now took me three months.
Not because the NBA guys were more “athletic” — but because they were tuned across all four levers.
The average person was not.
How the Average Person Actually Trains
The average person pulls one lever and expects all four to change.
They take random advice from:
Friends
Social media
YouTube
Influencers
Trainers who barely understand anatomy
Then they piece together a patchwork routine.
Meanwhile, even many “qualified” professionals are not studying, not reading, not learning. Most are simply clocking in and out.
The old military quote says it perfectly:
“Out of every one-hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior and he will bring the others back.”
I think just about every industry shakes out this way.
In health and fitness, out of every 100 professionals, 10 of them, you don’t even know how they got their certification.
80 of them are just going through the motions. Clocking in at 9 and out at 5 and not thinking about you until they see you again.
9 of them mean well and make a good effort.
But one of them lives and breathes this stuff. They go home and it’s all they can think about. They read books. They go to courses. They ask questions. They are on a quest for the truth. For the answers.
The odds that the random influencer you have found on YouTube is actually “the one warrior” is highly unlikely. It’s just as unlikely that they are one of the nine. This means that just about everyone is getting terrible information about training.
What Levers are You Pulling?
In addition, just about everyone who comes in here tells me they are doing the same workout. Most men are ONLY pulling the strength lever. They go to the gym and hit some combination of bench, squat, deadlift, etc. and they go home. They barely sweat, they never touch conditioning and they are certainly not doing breathwork, postural restoration or mental work. Women are much of the same.
Most women who I see are doing some combination of Barre, Yoga, Pilates. Again, mainly pulling just one lever.
Why Chronic Pain Becomes a Mystery
Chronic pain is so mysterious because the doctors and therapists tasked with solving it are not looking at the body this way.
Which is RIDICULOUS because this is how the body works and we all know it.
A Physical Therapist dealing with a patient with shoulder pain and only doing shoulder strengthening exercises is a complete disrespect to the human body and the patient in front of them.
Where This Leads
Athletes sit on the far right side of the spectrum — high-functioning across all four levers.
The average person sits on the far left — undertrained, under-fueled, under-recovered, and neurologically overstressed.
Put simply:
If you don’t intentionally train all four levers, chronic pain is only a matter of time.
If you do train them all, you return to the way the body is meant to operate.
With a body functioning at such a high level across all four levers, what are the chances of you still being in pain?
This process effectively reduces the likelihood of you remaining in pain to nearly zero.
And that is the entire mission of Saint Bartholomew.
Bringing the four levers back to the people.
Pulling the whole system toward healing — the way it was always designed to work.
Read This Next:
Bartholomew’s Secret: Some of the greatest minds in human history have left us clues hinting at this great secret. Learn the secret for yourself.
Further Reading:
If you want to see how this framework is actually applied, I’ve documented it in my book. I’ll send you a complimentary copy here.