Mischelle Miller is a personal trainer and injury prevention specialist who uses muscle testing and neuro drills to get people out of pain in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Yesterday she sat down with me for Episode 1035 of the Tom Rowland Podcast, a conversation about how the brain runs the body, how she healed a broken femur in ten weeks at 57, and why the way you talk about an injury might decide how fast it heals.
Watch or listen now: YouTube · Audio episode. You can also press play in the video player above.
Muscle testing is a way of checking how the brain is controlling a muscle. Mischelle typically has a person hold an arm out and presses down on it while they say something true, like their own name, then something false, and the arm gives way on the false statement even when the person tries to resist. She uses the same test to find the trigger in the body that is connected to someone's pain, clears it, and retests until the muscle holds. She works with people in person and virtually, and on the show she describes sessions with clients in Australia, Hong Kong and Swaziland.
A neuro drill is a short exercise designed to wake up the brain so the body moves and feels better. Mischelle often combines tasks, like walking while staring at a fixed spot and naming words that start with a hard letter such as X or Q, which she calls dual tasking the brain. She has people hum afterward because humming activates the vagus nerve, which she says moves the body into the rest-and-digest state where healing happens. In the episode she runs a drill on me live, and we retest my neck mobility right after.
Mischelle slipped on her driveway while carrying her dog and broke her femur at 57, and surgeons repaired it with a rod and seven screws. Her doctor told her she would resume normal activity in a year, but she decided she would heal in ten weeks, kept that goal to herself apart from an argument with her twin brother, and did her own rehab without physical therapy. When a screw that was backing out was removed around the ten-week mark, a stress test showed the bone had fully formed around the rod. The full story, including what her surgeon told her afterward, is in the episode.
Mischelle says it does not work on people who firmly believe it will not work. In her experience, someone can be unsure and still respond, but a person who has decided it is nonsense will not respond to anything she tests. She has seen that resistance more often in adults and some college athletes than in high school kids, and when it happens she simply moves on to the next person who wants help.
The video that took off on her Instagram shows a technique from Reflexive Performance Reset, or RPR, a method developed by Cal Dietz and Chris Korfist. The idea is that the diaphragm is connected to the hamstrings, so working the tissue under the ribs can change how far someone can reach toward their toes. In the video, athletes test their toe touch, work the area around the diaphragm, and retest, and most of them reach noticeably farther. Mischelle is clear that she learned it from their course and gives them the credit.
Mischelle shares her work on Instagram at @neurobasedtraining, which is her primary platform. She can also be reached by email at trainwithmischelle@gmail.com about in-person or virtual sessions.
I started following Mischelle on Instagram when she had around 6,000 followers, and I kept watching her videos. I have always been interested in how the mind and the body are connected. When my kids were little, I carried an ache in my back for a long time, and it eventually went away without me doing anything other than changing the way I thought about it. I wanted to understand what Mischelle is doing, whether we can actually heal ourselves faster, and whether any of it carries over to fishing, guiding or any other kind of performance. She explains it better than I can, and she brings a lot of stories with her.
Mischelle stayed home with her five kids for sixteen years before she went back to training. People kept showing up with injuries she could not fix, and she kept taking courses until the neurology side clicked for her. A high school football program brought her in, and over three seasons she worked on four or five players a day alongside the athletic trainer. That team won state three years in a row, and one mom recently told her they did it with a single injury. She gave the players one rule about telling her the truth, and I think that rule explains a lot about how she got good. It is worth hearing her tell it.
I came into this one with a tight neck and shoulders that do not reach as far as I would like. Mischelle had me try a simple pointing drill that I could not do on the first few tries, then had me hum. My neck turned noticeably farther afterward. The shoulder reach was a different story, and how she handled that is one of the more honest moments in the conversation. You will want to try the drill yourself, and it is much easier to follow on video than in writing.
See it for yourself: scroll back up and press play in the YouTube player, or listen to the full episode here.
Mischelle does not need to know much about an injury before she starts, but she likes to hear people describe it, because she pays close attention to the words they use. She told me about a college football player who kept coming back with a hamstring and kept repeating that hamstrings take eight weeks to heal, and about a woman who said she always got migraines in certain situations. Her answer to both of them changed how I think about the things I say about my own body. She also has a specific way she phrases her own recovery, and it is in the present tense for a reason. You have to hear her explain it.
This part hit close to home. My senior year of high school I had a great wrestling season, went to state, and did not wrestle well. It took me twenty or twenty-five years to understand that lesson, and now I think it is one of the best I have ever learned. Mischelle ran track and went to state herself, and she has a theory about why athletes come apart on the biggest day. She also told the story of a football player who said he was afraid of getting hurt right before he got hurt. Hearing her connect fear, the nervous system and injury is worth your time.
Mischelle posted consistently for a long time before anything happened. When the RPR video took off and Cal Dietz responded to it, she invited people to message her, and then she personally answered thousands of messages from her treadmill, typing and pasting until Instagram decided she was a bot and shut her down for a day. The questions that came in were about sciatica, Achilles problems and everything in between. What she told those people, and what she has seen from clients around the world since, is in the episode.
Yesterday's conversation with Mischelle gave me a lot to think about. She is confident without being arrogant, and she does not spend any energy on critics. Her line about doubt is one I keep coming back to: if you think something works, or you think it does not work, you are correct.
I am not going to pretend I understand every piece of what she does. I do know my neck moved better after a few minutes of pointing my fingers and humming, and I know a lot of people are living with pain that the usual approaches have not fixed. If that is you, I think this episode is worth an hour.
Press play: watch in the YouTube player at the top of this page, or listen to the audio episode.
Mischelle Miller · Dan Fichter · Cal Dietz · Chris Korfist · Douglas Heel · Dr. Joe Dispenza · Reflexive Performance Reset (RPR) · Z-Health · Be Activated · Stop Chasing Pain · Winona State University
Mischelle Miller is a personal trainer and injury prevention specialist based in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She grew up in Fredonia, Wisconsin, studied exercise science, and was a sprinter and hurdler in college as well as an All-American in cross country, and a long jump record she set in 1985 still stands. After sixteen years at home raising five children, she returned to training about eleven years ago and built her approach from RPR, Z-Health, Be Activated, lymphatic activation and neurology coursework. She has worked with high school, college and all-star football teams, and today sees clients in person and virtually through her Instagram, @neurobasedtraining.
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