In a world of pain? when life gives you lemons, learn to juggle
Melbourne / Australia
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Melbourne / Australia 〰️
BodyGuide founder, Matthew Green.
TL;DR: Physical therapist turned digital-health start-up founder Matthew Green thinks your body is amazing—and he wants you to understand how incredible it is too.
So what? He built BodyGuide, a suite of tools designed to help you navigate the circus of physical pain.
“Juggling was life,” says Matthew Green, physical therapist, honorary research fellow, author, and founder of Australian health-tech company BodyGuide.
“A friend taught me to juggle with lemons when I was 17… that led to handstands and bicycle tricks—and got me interested in human potential.”
Circus arts gave Matt an “immediate impression” of the limitations of traditional physical therapy in its view of the body. “We are capable of incredible things,” he says, “but as soon as we’re sore we default to conservatism.”
The big top carrot
Matt studied myotherapy at RMIT University “I had no idea what myotherapy was when I applied. I knew it was something to do with massage, but that was about it.”
“Classes finished at 1pm and studying meant I could quit my job at the local pub, which meant I could spend more time juggling—that was the big carrot.”
The lecturer overseeing the course admissions interview could tell Matt didn’t understand what he was applying for, and his application was rejected. However, after another student withdrew from their studies Matt was offered a place—“it was a real sliding doors moment,” he recalls.
Juggling on a bicycle followed by a handstand, the occasional ‘lemon,’ and not knowing quite what you’re signing up for is, oddly enough, an apt metaphor for starting a business—and after graduating Matt co-founded one of Australia’s first online-only physical therapy clinics. His unique approach reached patients around the world.
“My background in circus arts gave me confidence that ‘rehab,’ didn’t haven’t to be a boring word,” says Matt.
“We were always tinkering with technology in the clinic. When we first opened, we set up a big screen on the wall, and ran multiple webcams around a ‘gym space’ so people could see themselves live from multiple angles.
We would draw on the screen while patients were moving—tracing lines where we wanted knees to go and replaying recordings in slow motion to show patients’ compensation patterns. We found the tech so transformative we were convinced every clinic would have it in a matter of months.
That was 14 years ago, and it’s still rare to find,” says Matt—but the reach and efficiency that digital technologies enabled stuck.
“My background in circus arts gave me confidence that ‘rehab,’ didn’t haven’t to be a boring word,” says Matt.
Send in the clowns—the problem of pain
After exiting the clinic, Matt continued practicing myotherapy, but experience had convinced him that appointment-based care was a “clunky, dysfunctional way to deliver information.”
“Take an analogy like cooking, or learning a language,” he says. “You’d never just cook once a week, then once a week later, then when you make something that tastes ok, stop cooking for six months,” says Matt. “It’s the same with languages—you’d never try to learn Spanish for 30 minutes once a week for a few weeks and expect an outcome.”
Developing knowledge of our bodies’ functional movement is arguably “easier than both learning a language or becoming a great cook,” says Matt “but most of us have never been taught about our bodies, so it can be really scary when we’re in pain.”
“We have no idea where to start. Even when we’re motivated to act, we don’t have great options. We can Google what might be happening, or we can fork out $100.00 for a 45 minute appointment with no guarantees. There isn’t really a middle ground.
Appointments can be full of information overload, in an unfamiliar environment, with a near-stranger describing movements to repeat. They’re a challenging place for patients to learn about and build their body literacy. This inevitably leads to people forgetting exercises and losing confidence.”
“Take this video for example,” says Matt, “incredibly complex to describe in person, incredibly easy to show through animation and video. Which is to say, people often find it surprising how capable they are when they have the right tools at their disposal.”
The limited range of options available drove Matt to found an alternative—BodyGuide, a suite of tools that exist “to help people build positive relationships with their bodies, specifically people that have struggled with pain.”
Step right up to the BodyGuide universe
Since its inception in 2019, boosted by Australian startup accelerator Startmate, BodyGuide has continued to grow and evolve. It has users in more than 50 countries and corporate customers across aged care, construction, legal services, manufacturing, retail and shipping. Its flagship program, The Body Course, has been validated by research with La Trobe University in not only decreasing pain, but also decreasing patients’ reliance on medication and increasing their body confidence.
“We have the BodyGuide app—which creates area-specific education and exercise programs for individuals. We have the book—I’m Sick of Being Sore, for anyone that wants to dig into the cultural side of pain and movement, and we have BodyGuide employer programs.”
“On the far end of the BodyGuide spectrum I lead an intensive 1:1 program, which is a hybrid of digital and in-person therapy,” says Matt, who sees these programs as an important way to stay connected to individuals’ experience of pain, and his craft as a myotherapist.
From 1:1 to 1:many—scaling physical therapy
When he reflects on the stories of BodyGuide users it’s Angelica—a woman in the United States of America who couldn’t afford physical therapy—who comes to mind.
“Her story stands out for exposing the lack of health equity abroad. It’s personally special to me because an idea I had in my clinic in Port Melbourne was able to reach 15,000km around the world and impact someone’s life meaningfully.”
While BodyGuide enables patients to develop their own ‘body literacy,’ through his experience of growing the business, Matt has developed his own understanding—and disproved some of his assumptions—about health, pain, and movement.
“If I look at my experience, from clinic, to tech, and now to a hybrid, I think the lessons really come back to the idea that health is a behavioural change problem—not just an information problem. Behavioural change requires motivation, knowledge, confidence and action—roughly in that order.”
Developing body literacy—like learning a language, or cooking
“Body literacy isn’t knowing what a physio or myotherapist knows,” says Matt “but it is having the confidence to navigate our body and feel in control of the process.”
“It’s accumulating the skills and confidence to manage the majority of aches and pains, and every now and then being able to reach out to a professional when we can’t quite solve it.”
As for how to become more body literate, a guiding principle that runs through every BodyGuide product and service offers a clue to follow—put simply, that “tension is intelligent.”
“Every time you’ve ever experienced tension in your body it’s because your incredible brain, which has evolved over two million years, has chosen to ‘tighten’ that area,” says Matt, and yet “we have this multi billion dollar pain relief industry fixated on removing tension—rub, stretch, medicate—without ever bothering to work out why the brain is choosing to tighten a particular area.”
BodyGuide creates a space that enables patients, clients, and users to understand why they may be experiencing pain—and to inspire awe in the functioning of the human body, just as Matt discovered awe in human potential through his foray into circus arts. “BodyGuide exists to say ‘hey, bodies aren’t rocket science—yours is actually pretty great, let’s get to work.”
The ringmaster in digital health
In the future, Matt sees technology increasing the “personal connection between therapists, quality information, and clients—be they individuals, or workplaces seeking a better solution for their employees.”
“We use tech for reach and scale at BodyGuide,” he says, “but at the end of the day people don’t care about tech. They care about people, especially in healthcare.”
Matt draws a contrast between body literacy and the growth in mental health understanding, with how in-person and digital treatments alike such as Calm and BetterHelp have evolved since the first Mental Health Awareness Week in 1985. He believes “we’re really just at the start of the change,” in body literacy, our understanding of pain, and the opportunities that digital health technologies can create for patients.
It’s a paradigm shift his work is firmly at the forefront of—“I see BodyGuide becoming the household name in physical health,” Matt says.
The grand finale
In the middle of juggling a business, an honorary research fellowship, partnerships, and clients around the world, what does Matt want you to know?
“Your body is amazing, sore or not,” he says “we’ve just never been taught much about our bodies, so we’re quick to assume the worst, which saps our motivation to take action.”
“The more we learn, the more we realise how amazing we are. Turning down the pain will let you turn up the focus on the people and things that really matter to you…so it’s worth a crack.”
BodyGuide’s application for individuals and enterprises, as well as Matt’s book “I’m Sick of Being Sore,” are available at BodyGuide.com.au
