Ed Harrold Life With Breath Podcast · Discover Living Your "Life With Breath" Applying "Breath AS Medicine"

30 Years In The Exercise & Fitness Business - The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly With Greg Mack

·1 hr·3 clips

Greg argues that labels like spondylolisthesis and osteoarthritis can trap patients in a disease identity.

1. Ed Harrold’s Life With Breath Expert Series features Greg Mack on exercise, breathing, and sports medicine practice. 2. Greg Mack is presented as a sports medicine expert, and Ed says he met him at a MedFit convention in Southern California before COVID. 3. The episode asks how Greg uses exercise as a medicinal intervention across medical and fitness settings. 4. Greg traces his background to the Navy’s nuclear engineering program, the Naval Engineering School, Power School, and Nuclear Power School. 5. He says Navy diver training taught him physiology, especially cardiopulmonary and cardiorespiratory physiology. 6. Greg says he moved into the exercise field in 1986 or 1987 after finishing his Navy tour. 7. He worked at a Nautilus Franchise Center and then attended the second annual personal training summit in Washington, D.C. 8. Greg says ACE and IDEA were originally connected before Peter and Kathy Davis split the organizations apart. 9. He describes reading, workshops, and continuing education as the way he built his practice around exercise as a medicinal intervention. 10. Greg says his original business plan was called Physicians Fitness, and he still operates that practice. 11. He argues that the medical and exercise worlds needed to communicate, and he cites research presented by Dr. Bensky on emerging baby boomers wanting coordinated care. 12. Greg says the biggest barriers have been language differences, scope of practice, ego, turf protectionism, and insurance versus private-pay structures. 13. He says he tried to bring exercise into medical delivery by working in chiropractic clinics, outpatient PT clinics, hospital settings, private studios, and franchise gyms. 14. Greg frames his clients as people with sensations they do not like, including tightness, soreness, stiffness, discomfort, and pain. 15. He says the word pain elevates the status of a sensation, while many people simply want the sensation removed so they can move with ease. 16. Greg says MRI studies show people can have lumbar structural disease without symptoms and symptoms without visible organic disease. 17. He says diagnosis belongs with medical providers, while he collaborates by sampling motor output, motor control, and movement patterns. 18. Greg explains that his process examines eye, motor, laryngeal, pelvic floor, and cardiorespiratory systems together. 19. The conversation stays practical and detailed, with Ed pressing Greg on breathing, rib mechanics, vagal response, strength, and flexibility. 20. Listeners who like exercise physiology, breathing mechanics, and clinic-to-gym coordination will get the most from it, while people wanting light banter may skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded breath-and-movement conversation that turns mechanics into practical instruction.

Greg Mack's background as an active person gives the conversation its center, and the strongest passages keep returning to breath, mechanics, and the body as one connected system.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a grounded look at breath, movement, and how a sports medicine expert thinks through the body as a system.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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