#539 Restoring Hyper Wellness with Cryotherapy and Saunas
with Steve Welch
Steve Welch
We have trained people to invest in their education. We’ve trained people to invest in their homes. We’ve trained people to invest in their retirement. Yet the single most important thing to all of us, we really haven’t trained people how to invest in their health. Everybody’s different. I think that’s one of the areas that the world’s kind of gotten out of whack on health care, where a one size fits all just is not the right answer. Once you’re sick, I think we have the best health care system on the market, nothing’s even close. But, we don’t really have a systems that’s set up to help people stay healthy for longer.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Steve, thank you so much for joining the show.
Steve Welch
Hey, Wendy, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your history and how you got into the health system.
Steve Welch
I’m a little intimidated to be on the show because you tend to have some pretty badass doctors on the show and I am not a doctor. I am a geeky engineer by training. I started a company when I was pretty young called Motos. We made the backend systems that were used to manufacture biological drugs. Didn’t know any better as a 23 year old, so bootstrapped that sold when I was 30 to Parker. 30’s too young to kind of goof off. I certainly spent a decent amount of time goofing off, don’t get me wrong, but, I started doing adjunct professor work at, at University of Penn back when Penn was really trying to figure out how to create an entrepreneurial minor to across collaboration where you had engineering students, business students, philosophy students, whatever it may be coming together to start businesses. Pretty quickly realized never was going to make it as a professor, just way too theoretical.
95% of the kids were just checking a box, which just drove me insane. And, those that were passionate about their business and starting an idea. I actually love working with them. There’s nothing more exciting than a young entrepreneur that’s got an idea, got a vision for where the world’s going to go. So I got together with a couple of other guys, David Bogspan, Mike Levinson. We started a company called Dreamit and the idea behind Dreamit was they gave entrepreneurs a vision. A small amount of money. So we’re writing relatively small checks, but a lot of focus and to try to figure out whether that idea was viable or not. It started truly for altruistic reasons, but about two years into it, the capitalist took over as we realized we’re on something really unique. We are really helping these companies get off the ground. So fast forward to today I think dreamit turned out 400 companies. At one point was the second most active healthcare investor in the country. And Restore, which hopefully we’ll talk a little bit about today, Restore was really born out of an understanding that the market was going a different–the consumer, I should say, was going a different place in the market. The traditional healthcare system was going in one direction, but the consumers were saying, “Wait, wait, wait, that’s not exactly where I want to go.” My partner and I saw a need in the marketplace and did a lot of AB testing, building out a lot of different models. And then finally found one that we thought was really compelling to the consumer that we thought most importantly was going to change people’s lives, which is really what we’re focused on.
Dr Wendy Myers
Yeah. So tell us what Restore is. What is the marketplace or is it a place where you can go to experience different health modalities?
Steve Welch
Yeah, We have 230 locations and I think about 40 states across the country or so. Hopefully there’s one near most of your listeners. They are really the antithesis of a doctor’s office. They’re fun. They’re educational. They’re social. Um, and they’re designed to help people deal within proactively invest in their health. And I think that’s the reality in this country. We have trained people to invest in their education, I’d argue 100% the right thing to do. We should be investing in our education. We’ve trained people to invest in their homes. We’ve trained people to invest in their retirement. Yet the single most important thing to all of us, historically, we really haven’t trained people how to invest in their health. And Restore is that place where you can go and invest in your health. We can help you get on a journey. We understand everybody is different. It’s customized. I think that’s one of the areas that the world’s kind of gotten out of whack on health care. We’re A one-size-fits-all just is not the right answer, and I think the consumer knows that. And once you’re sick, I think we have the best healthcare system on the market. Nothing’s even close. But we don’t really have a system that’s set up to help people stay healthy for longer. And really, what we’re trying to provide to consumers is the tools to stay healthy for longer.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. And so when you go to a Restore, what do you call it?
Steve Welch
We call it a studio. Yeah. We don’t want to call it a doctor’s office. It’s a studio.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. So when you go to a Restore studio, what kinds of modalities can people find there for their health?
Steve Welch
Yeah. So you’ll see everything from heat therapy and cold therapy. So cryotherapy in the sense of cold. Sauna is in the sense of heat, um, hydration therapy, which is IVs, with different components in those. Compression therapy and then we do have some things that are really focused on skin health, um, and then light therapy as well. We talked about the nine elements of hyper wellness. Hyper wellness for us is the consistent and passionate pursuit of your own health. That we have, nine elements of that. A lot of them happen outside the studio. So, what we’re trying to do is empower people with the tools that they can use in a studio that is easy to come into, very accessible, very consumer friendly.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay. Fantastic. And so talk to us about those, those nine elements, or pillars of health, uh, that people need to be tending to.
Steve Welch
The human body evolved over a long period of time in a very different environment than it’s in today. I mean, our ancestors were trying to survive hunting stuff on the grains of Africa. Everything about your life was different than sitting, I’m sitting underneath fluorescent lights, sitting all day long. What we’re trying to do is stimulate the body’s natural defenses. The things that you haven’t had and I should say things that you’ve had for a very long period of time from an evolutionary standpoint. Making sure you go through the stressors of life. Making sure you do things to stretch that body. Doing things to make sure you’re hydrated. You go through contrast therapy. I mean, the reality is right now we sit in air conditioning all the time. It’s perfect temperature. It feels great. But that’s not how we evolved. We evolved to kind of– have some heartaches and pains in our lives. So we’re really trying to help use the body’s natural defenses. And a lot of our clients, They start to see, and I think most people by the time, certainly by the time they hit 40, they start to have aches and pains they didn’t have when they were younger. They start to have inflammation in different ways. We’re trying to help people get the tools to overcome those headwinds they’re going to face. The reality is the longer you move and continue to do things you love in life. The healthier you’re going to be, the longer you’re going to live. So we’re really trying to empower people with the ability to keep doing the things they love doing longer in life.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So what made you make these health changes yourself? Tell us about your own health journey and why you kind of decided to make some changes in your health.
Steve Welch
Yeah, I read your background and your father’s kind of health challenges really stimulated you. You certainly were involved in health before that, but that really kind of sent you over the edge, if you will, and became really passionate and engaged. Mine’s a little bit similar too, which my father, who if you were to look at when he was 68-69 years old, looked like a pillar of health. He looked great. He was number seven. A couple of years earlier, he was number seven in seniors tennis. He played tennis every day of his life. He went through a process where he called me one summer in August. He’s like, “Steve, I’m just getting old. I’m playing tennis one day a week or a couple days a week and I’m getting tired even when I do that.” He called me a couple of weeks later and said, “I can’t, I can’t play singles tennis anymore. I’m having to play doubles all the time.” Another month later he called and said, “I’m getting winded going, walking across the house.” So he went to the cardiologist one time they said “Jack this is what it’s like. You’re getting old. You just can’t play tennis everyday. You’re now 69 years old.” Okay, but so he went home and it just got worse. He went back a second time and it wasn’t until the third time he went back and he said “I am not leaving here until you tell me what’s wrong, babe. This is not normal. This is not just getting old.” Two days later, he had quintuple bypass surgery and had 90% blockage and I think 4 out of 5 arteries. In hindsight, the fact that he was in such good shape has probably saved him. But so what happened to him was… He did almost everything right in life, right, except for one really important factor, which is he ate like sh*t his entire life. He drank six diet Dr. Peppers a day, he ate McDonald’s constantly, and yes, he exercised an enormous amount. But the reality is, you can’t have one part of your health journey fail so miserably and not have an impact. And I think that’ll be up to– I actually had, I looked very healthy when I was 39-40. but I built a couple businesses, I ate McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts. I drank soda all the time and you would have looked at me and you just said, I look very healthy. However, I had high blood pressure and I had an HbA1c that had me pre-diabetic and similar to him, healthy and a terrible diet. Today, I’m a pescatarian, I eat extraordinarily healthy, I never eat fried foods, and if you look today, and there’s a lot of reasons for this, not just one, but 10 or 7 years ago, I was deficient in a lot of things, I’m no longer deficient in anything, and I honestly, I have more energy than I did when I was in my late 30s and my late 40s.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think people don’t realize the results they can get when they start making these changes and much more. So, looking at the consequences if you don’t make these kinds of changes in your health Because someone in their 70s, like my father, died when he was 68. It’s way too young. People really can have amazing health into their 100s. They really can have a really high quality of life. But you do have to kind of do certain modalities, and I think it’s not enough just to eat right. I do a lot of different therapies and modalities to kind of like tap into, or like biohacking and tap into optimizing our body’s health, reducing stress and detoxification with infrared saunas which I talk about a lot on this podcast is so important. So getting back to biohacking and doing things to improve our health. Talk to us about each modality at Restore and what kind of benefits that people can hope to achieve with doing each of those modalities.
Steve Welch
Wendy, I think you hit on something that’s really important just to kind of diverge a little bit, which is 60’s too late. It’s great. you should make changes. I’m not suggesting that if you’re 60, you should make changes, but if you make those same changes decades earlier, you get the benefit. It’s kind of like the compounded interest of money. If you invest when you’re young, that compounds over time, you get the benefit of it later in life. And I think health is the same way. Unfortunately, as a society, we haven’t done a really good job of educating people on that. And people tend to think, you won’t believe the amount of times I hear how, “Oh, when I retire, I’m going to start exercising more.” Yeah, great. That’s awesome. But that’s too late. it’s too late to have a long-term impact. For us the different modalities that we built with our therapies, the one that we started with and the one that I probably use the most today is cryotherapy. So, I have lower back pain… I’m very active. I kiteboard, I surf. Those are my passions in life. Those two things are also pretty hard on the body. And every now and then I will treat my lower back pain. And for me, cryotherapy is amazing. It reduces inflammation, it takes the pain off, and allows me to continue to do the things I love to do. What we’ve learned over the years at Restore really is quite different from a lot of the people in the spaces, we are doing clinical studies. We have one white paper that was just published, peer-reviewed. Papers just published, we have a couple more that show cryotherapy actually reduces your inflammation biomarkers, not just when you do it, but actually if you have a long cycle after you’ve done it a couple of times there’s a lasting impact on that. So the reduction of those biomarkers or the inflammation, really has an impact. What happens still, many people, especially as they get older, is you start to have these headwinds. You get injured more easily, you get tired more easily and you start this negative feedback loop, which is all the same. Well, I’m tired, So I’m not going to play soccer two days a week. I can only do it once a week. And you get in this negative feedback loop and you get more risk of injury and things like that. So what we do is we give you a lot of the tools to again, get back out there and get back faster, continue to move, cryotherapy, give me an example, saunas, you guys, you talk about saunas enough on this show, I certainly won’t go into that, but I think the data on saunas is undeniable. Which we call heat therapy, and then there’s more to some than just heat therapy for sure, but hyperbaric oxygen therapy, I think the data on that is becoming more compelling by the day, if you have somebody in your family that’s got early Alzheimer’s. If you have dementia in your genes, and a lot of us do, myself included, I think the data is really compelling on hyperbarics, and oxygen therapy.
Every single metabolic process in your body requires oxygen. You know, and the more oxygen you get in those processes, the better off you’re going to be. And then there’s hydration, not surprising. You know, besides oxygen, water’s kind of the next thing. Your body is a high percentage of water. Your muscles, your brain are like 75% water. And making sure those have the proper hydration is important. But for us, IVs also allow you to deliver the next one, which is nutrients. And certainly nutrients are in a lot of different ways people get nutrients, but the reality is as you get older, your digestive system changes and your absorption rates change. And just like taking a multivitamin when you’re eight years old, you’re going to get a pretty different absorption than when you’re 78 years old. So, hydration is one we have, and is a big portion of what we try to help people with. I’m somebody that, you know, I do biomarker testing. The reason I’m not deficient is because I look at what I’m deficient in and I try to add those back into my diet, but I also add them back in IV. And I’ll tell you. I have four kids and I never got sick because of it when I was younger. And I had kids, and kids are a petri dish, and they bring home every disease. I used to, in my 30s, I would get sick pretty consistently. The kids would bring home something. Now, as soon as I feel, hey, something’s not quite right, I go get a high dose vitamin C. I get hydrated, and I have hardly been, other than I got COVID once, I don’t think I’ve been sick in the last, you know, decade or very, very few times, I should say. I think it’s because I’ve been proactive when I start doing things. There’s other things that are in there, elements that you don’t do in a Restore location, things like movement. And I would argue, you know, the most important thing to see if somebody’s going to age well is movement. You gotta keep moving. You gotta keep moving the body. Our bodies were engineered to be moved. And then last is community. It is pretty compelling data that shows you need community in life, you need connection in life. And that, where that matters is. You need those relationships, but I talk a lot about this, which I think it’s having people in your life that share common interests and data. For example, if you’re around smokers and you have friends who are smokers, you’re going to smoke. If you have friends that exercise, you’re more likely to exercise. So finding people that share those common values and health being one of those really important ones is really important. One of the interesting things in our studios is they are communities and people tend to go there to find other people that are passionate about the things that they do.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah and I love that you can go to a Restore and you can find other people that are interested in their health and getting healthier. It’s very important to surround yourself with people, like minded people like that. And also I think there’s a lot of things that I would love for my audience to be doing at home and have the equipment every day, like doing an infrared sauna. And doing other things, but it’s just not, it’s not feasible for a lot of people.
Steve Welch
We’re not all LeBron James. LeBron James has all of the house.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you know, and you, we need these things. People need to be doing infrared saunas. The data is so compelling. There was a study done in Finland where they had a 40% reduction in all cause mortality. From using just a regular sauna, not even an infrared sauna, which you have more toxins, more productive sweat from doing an infrared sauna. And so it’s just really compelling if dad’s doing a sauna five days a week, but even three days a week has a 25% reduction in all cause mortality. Those are huge numbers! 25 years of study that was done. And so just sauna alone and not to mention, doing oxygen therapy, our mitochondria that makes our body’s energy run on oxygen. That’s the main fuel that they need. So I think doing oxygen therapy is so key and there’s so many different components that people need for their health to optimize their health, especially if they feel like they’re behind the eight ball, like maybe they haven’t had the best diet or haven’t taken care of themselves or spent The majority of their lives really abusing their bodies, you can play some catch up with instituting some of these therapies on a regular basis.
Steve Welch
Yeah, absolutely. What’s nice about restoring, one of the reasons I think we have been successful is you feel better, you come in feeling one way, you leave feeling better. And I, that creates this feedback loop that’s needed. Human beings are pretty terrible at making decisions today. They’re going to affect them 20 years from now. They’re actually really good at making decisions today that are going to affect them today. And I think one of the reasons we’ve been so successful as a business is you do cryotherapy, you feel it. All right, well, that works. Therefore, I’m going to come back and do that again. And I’m going to; it gets them in the right mindset. It gets them the best of their health. One of the challenges for a lot of people is when you start exercising for the first time if you have not exercised for a decade, and you start exercising, it’s pretty painful early on. It’s really tough. Helping people overcome those early aches and pains really can help keep them on that path, which is so important because health is not one thing. It’s not one thing for an individual. It’s certainly not one thing for society. It is all of these things. It’s a movement. It’s continuing to make sure we eat, and nutrition, and oxygen, and all of these things have to work together.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, absolutely. So, if someone’s looking to start their health journey, maybe they haven’t tried any of these therapies before, where can people begin?
Steve Welch
First of all, I’d go to www.restore.com. I hope there’s a Restore near you. And if there’s not, we have a book coming out in about a month called “Restore,” and it’s not just about the studios. In fact, there’s a significant portion of those things you can do in your home, things you should be doing in your home, that are biohacks, if you will, to improve your health. But I think it all starts with what your goal is. And I think this is the problem people often face, and it’s not just in health, but in a lot of things when they’re trying to make changes in their life, they struggle with getting started. Once you get started, once you get on a plan, it actually gets quite easy, but it’s that first step that’s almost always the hardest for people. I think one thing we do really well at the studios is help people understand that they want to improve their health. What can they do, and help get them there? Great. What are you trying to accomplish and then build a plan with them from there? That plan exists in the studio for sure, but there are many things that are far outside the studio.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So, what are some of the latest improvements or innovations in the health and wellness realm? Is there anything new that you’re considering cutting-edge at Restore? New things that you’re going to be introducing soon?
Steve Welch
Behind the wall. Right now, there are actually people going through a clinical trial for two different new products that we’re looking at. We keep those under wraps until they’re ready to go until we have results back. The area that I think…
Dr. Wendy Myers
Oh, you can tell me.
Steve Welch
No, it’s just you and I, right? Yeah, nobody will hear it. We’ve partnered with Oura. Are you familiar with the Oura? One of the outlets is REST. The reality is, rest is pretty darn critical. In fact, the CEO of Oura describes what rest gives and says, “What if I could give you a drug? If you could take a pill to do all these things.” And the answer is, “Oh yeah, that pill? Sleep more, sleep better.”
Dr. Wendy Myers
Oh, sleep. That minor thing called sleep. So, we partner with them all over clinical trials that are running through that. So you can see not just how these therapies affect sleep and that’s important, but also heart rate, irritability, resting heart rate. And again, what we’re able to show is multiple therapies. It’s not just one therapy, it’s the multiple therapies used in conjunction together that really drive results. We’re also very data-driven as an organization, and I think what’ll be interesting is a decade from now, I think we’ll have more compelling data and certainly, Apple’s going to have more data than everybody and Google as well. But, I think what we’ll have is that data that’s really tied to individual therapies and with the understanding of what the people were trying to accomplish. So, a lot of our studios have an InBody machine if they are in a weight management program. We’ve managed it for us. You’ll notice I didn’t call it weight loss. The reality is, I think the GLP-1s, they have a place in society. They’re bringing a lot of value, but there is some downside to them, which is you can burn muscle mass. Burning fat, especially visceral fat, is good. You want to reduce that. But you absolutely do not want to reduce muscle.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Or that pesky thing with your stomach getting paralyzed. Let’s not mention that.
Steve Welch
So, one of our head scientists, has one of our favorite quotes: “Muscles are the longevity drug.” And I think that is so true. Our weight management program looks at not just weight loss, but also muscle gain. Weekly, you’re with a nurse practitioner who talks you through, “Hey, these are things you can do with your diet and exercise.” We’re measuring not just weight; we’re measuring body composition. So, body fat and where that body fat is. Obviously, you and I both know visceral fat, the fat around the organs, is very different than fat in other parts of the body. We’re also measuring muscle mass to ensure that a person is not only losing weight, which often is a very good thing, but they are also adding muscle, or at least not losing muscle in that process. And again, we now have clinical data that shows that we’re achieving pretty amazing results for the client. It is not one thing; it’s a good example again. The idea of going and getting a shot to solve any problem is probably not a great answer. It can be a part of it for sure, but it’s how you can put those things in conjunction with other tools that are in the toolkit.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and I love the thought of going to a Restore center and stacking all these things like doing your infrared sauna, detoxing, and activating your parasympathetic nervous system, relaxing, and then going in and doing the cryo, getting totally relaxed, and then getting some oxygen. I don’t know how many you can do in a day, but it’s just great that you can go to one place and do all of these different things. So, do you have a membership, or do you sign up for each one individually? How does it work exactly?
Steve Welch
Yeah, we are membership-based. People usually come; they buy a membership because again, I will tell you most of these things doing it one time is not going to have a huge impact. Doing a sauna one time, great. That shouldn’t discourage that, but you’re not going to change the outcome of your life by going and doing a sauna one time. So again, for us, hyper wellness is that consistency, very specific; we’re consistent. You have to be committed to these things and passionately pursue them to maximize your health. That requires you to commit time. One of the biggest challenges for people is, especially during the mid-parts of life when your health starts to decline, that these are also the years when you probably have the worst demands at work and to family. So, it gets really hard to commit that time. I think one of the things that the membership actually does is it makes you say to yourself, “Hey, you know what? I’m committed to doing this. This is important to me. I’m making this investment and because of that, I’m going to continue and I’m going to get on this wellness plan that I work with my wellness rep at the studio to guide me down my journey.” So, it is membership-based, but anyone’s welcome. One of the most fun parts is I often go and just sit in studios in different places and just the conversations that I have with people. We’re very open. There are some private rooms if you choose, but a lot of what we do is out in the open, very different than a doctor’s office. It is amazing how people share their own experiences. This works for them, this doesn’t work for them. “Hey, I’m getting an AD. Why are you getting an AD?” And you get that dialogue of clients and they learn from each other, which is just such a nice thing in the community.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and it just really resonates with everything that I talk about with everything I recommend that people do. You offer that at Restore. Which is just so fantastic because, like I said, I think people have limited resources and, you know, even just the sauna alone, just going there for that is so worth it. I mean, I used to pay like $50 a session to go to an infrared sauna or more. That was like 15 years ago. But I think it’s just great that there are. It’s a franchise?
Steve Welch
We have corporate studios, but we’re also a franchise model. And you hit on something that was really important to Jim and me from the start, which was to really make it more accessible. Cryotherapy, when we started, was $85 a session and there are too few people in this world who could afford that. So, we drove that down. It’s under, you know, if you’re a member, it could be almost as low as $10 a day, but you call it in the $30 range. Manhattan’s a little bit different. It’s the same thing with saunas . Hyperbarics, almost every hospital in this country has a hyperbaric chamber. It’s not unique. However, the cost, even with insurance, is pretty significant. We’ve really tried to bring that cost down to make it way more accessible to consumers.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Those are like $200 a pop. Typically, some places charge $200 per session just to do the hyperbaric oxygen. And all these are so important. Not only are there a lot of super health-conscious people going there, but if you have a chronic illness and are not making any progress with your conventional doctor and are not seeing improvements or meeting your health goals, you need to consider going to a place like Restore to essentially restore your health and add some therapies. These are research-proven therapies that can dramatically help you improve your health status and meet your health goals.
Steve Welch
When Jim and I started, interestingly, we thought the market was going to be the semi-professional athlete, the person really focused on athletic performance. It turns out that’s pretty small. The majority of people are ordinary individuals struggling with loss of energy that happens as they age and has aches and pains, and many have chronic conditions. The reality is, like rheumatoid arthritis, for example. Obviously, we have a number of biological drugs out there that help with rheumatoid arthritis. They’re expensive, very expensive. And there is concern about whether these drugs work. What happens when I’m on them for 40 years? Versus cold therapy, which is tried and true. Some of the oldest known texts of man talked about cryotherapy. The Hippocratic School of Medicine, around 1000 BC, discussed cold therapy. These things are proven over long periods of time and again, they stimulate the body’s natural defenses as opposed to introducing something foreign, which is what many other drugs, certainly small molecule drugs on the market, do.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and then also, many professional athletes use all these different modalities for quick recovery, to reduce stress, and all the physical stresses they have on their body. But like I said, these things are great for recovery. For me, I had a weightlifting injury because I’m such an athlete, and I was just lifting weights and hurt my shoulder. It’s been a chronic injury for a long time, almost two decades. I went and did cryotherapy and it didn’t hurt for three weeks. It had been hurting everyday for months, really, until I went to do cryotherapy. I didn’t love my two minutes in the cryotherapy session; it’s kind of excruciating, but I didn’t have any pain for three weeks. I couldn’t believe the amount of inflammation that was dramatically reduced in my body in two minutes, and it had three weeks of lasting effects. I was very impressed by that.
Steve Welch
It’s remarkable. To this day, I’m amazed when I go and my back hurts, and I’m like, “Alright, that solves the problem. Thank you.” And I agree with you, by the way, I don’t like colds, but if it gets rid of pain, I will take the cold any day of the week.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, that two minutes of pain is better than chronic pain for weeks.
Steve Welch
It’ll be three minutes if you go to a Restore location. Three minutes.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, great. I just went in for two minutes. I think they offered, they said you could do two or three minutes. You can go as short as you want.
Steve Welch
Sorry. We won’t make you go three. Don’t worry about that. But if you want to go two, you can go two.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think that was like, it was just starting at one of the first places in LA that had cryotherapy. So maybe they didn’t have their protocols down. But what are some of the other things, like what kinds of IV therapy, and things that you offer there at Restore?
Steve Welch
Yeah, for IV, it’s mainly different ingredients, and again, this is where everybody is different. I think the other thing that people should do is get a baseline as early in life as they can. That baseline should be everything from micronutrient levels to your basic blood panel and metabolic panel. You should have wearables so that you understand where you are. I use a product called RunKeeper, and I can go back and look at how fast I was running 17 years ago. It’s just amazing to have that data to see how things change over time. I think the advantage of getting the baseline is, later in life, you can determine if there was really a problem. A lot of things, maybe you’re, it’s been there for a long time, it’s not an issue. Getting the baseline when you’re younger really helps prepare you when you do start to have problems and start to age. So, we do a lot of blood testing as an area of our business we’re really focusing on expanding. We think there’s more and more of those tests that are getting out there. They’re getting lower cost, much more effective and much broader, and then being able to help clients understand what’s going on inside their body.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think it’s great to get blood markers and biomarkers and kind of get your baseline and see what you’re doing is working and kind of do all that testing. It’s great. So what kinds of testing are you doing? Because I know for a lot of people there are certain things they want to test that’s not covered by their insurance or their doctor doesn’t see a medical reason for it, but they still want to test that. No guys want to test their testosterone and even young guys, I think there’s an epidemic of people with low testosterone levels because of all the estrogenic chemicals in our environment, the plastics and the pesticides, etc, and the stress that our bodies are under. I think there’s a major problem with testosterone levels, which a lot of the modalities that you offer at Restore can help tremendously with raising testosterone and balancing people’s hormones in general.
Steve Welch
I think the food supply is a major issue. There’s no question about it. I think it manifests itself in so many different ways inside our body that we just don’t see. I grew up a little before the generation began, I was at the beginning of everything being processed, but our parents, there was no such thing as healthy food. There was just food. Like that’s, food was for the most part healthy. But by the time we came around, I was born in 76, almost everything was starting to be processed at that point. So we just grew up. And I think that’s why you’re seeing the rates of cancer go up. You’re seeing the body just was not engineered to have this much processed food and we don’t get the nutrients that we need. So yeah, we’re 100% aligned on that. And I think the good news is I think people are aware of it for the first time, and people are investing. The health food market is a real market now where people are investing in their health. I think that’s been a huge benefit to society. So we’re moving in the right direction as, you know, knowledge is power. And I think people now understand things at a level they didn’t even just a couple of decades ago. We do a lot of things. If you go back and look at survey data on healthcare, what’s really interesting is 20 years ago, if you asked open-ended questions about healthcare, the consumer would say, doctor, hospital, pharmaceutical. Those are the three. If you had a word cloud, if you will, those are the three things that pop up above everything else. About a decade ago, you started to see things slip into that word cloud, like nutrition and exercise and preventative medicine. And again, this is where we saw the market was moving in a different direction than the traditional system. Because of the traditional system, again, I’ve got to make sure I stress this. I think our system is amazing once you’re sick, but there’s almost nothing in that system that says, “Here’s how to make sure you eat healthy.” I mean, there are very few doctors out there that even think about that on a daily basis. I think the good news is now, again, consumers have more information. There are places like Restore where we’re popping up where you really have, you can get that information and focus on what matters. What’s going to keep you healthy as opposed to what’s going to help you when you’re sick.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. Yeah. And I love doctors. I don’t mean to, I think I do a lot of doctor bashing on my show and I don’t mean to just, just so you doctors out there know, I love emergency medicine. That’s where I want to go if I get into a car wreck, but some of the chronic illness management really is wanting. There are a lot of issues with chronic illness and management of chronic disease. That definitely needs looking at again.
Steve Welch
Well, it’s easier. It’s easier just to say to somebody, take a pill and it’s easier for that person to take a pill.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. A lot of people want that. You know?
Steve Welch
So, but I think the challenge is, alright, well, that is one option. And by the way, that option is really easy to test. I mean, again, I think the pharmaceutical industry has done an amazing job of showing a double-blind study. And double-blind studies have a lot of advantages to them because you can do a double-blind study on almost any pill, I should say, or any injection. It’s impossible to do a double-blind study on cryotherapy, for example. And because of that, the industry has viewed studies that don’t use the double-blind standard as less valuable. And I think that’s one of the challenges society has to overcome as a right. Yes, this is one form of the way we’re going to test, but there are other things we can look at here to make sure that there’s evidence that these things work. I’ll be the first to say, I think in health and wellness, there’s tons of BS. There’s tons out there that are not backed by science. One of the things we have focused so much on as an organization is being truth-tellers. Hey, there may not be evidence for this. This doesn’t mean don’t do it by the way, okay? Because I think absence of evidence does not mean that something doesn’t work. But what we’re trying to do is also then add that evidence over time as we get more people to use these products and services.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. Yes. Well, what’s next for Restore Hyper Wellness?
Steve Welch
So what do you guys have on the horizon? That’s what everybody’s asking these days. So, we’re really focused on what we were calling performance medicine. And for us, this is getting a much deeper understanding of the client, deeper in the blood work, on the wearables, and on the embody so that we can really see how a client is moving forward at number one, setting their goals. “Hey, here’s what I’m trying to accomplish” and then track their ability to meet those goals over time and see the outcomes and see, you know, I think that is the area wellness has really failed in is being able to show people the change of outcomes. And I think people feel it. So I think that’s important, don’t be wrong, but I do think there is this thing, “Hey, I’ll take aura, which I think very highly of like, you know, I’ve done things where I’ve changed my daily schedule that has clearly impacted my sleeping. To the positive.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What have you done? Tell us.
Steve Welch
I don’t, I put my phone away much earlier. My phone goes away, my phone goes away at five o’clock when I get home or whenever I get home. Unfortunately now it’s not five, but it should be five because I don’t have the phone when I’m with the family. I think it’s actually, I think the phone is incredibly disruptive to society, although it’s created a lot of good. So I put the phone away and then once the kids go to bed, I take it out and then, but I will put it away again probably about nine o’clock and then try to go to bed by 10:30. And for me, that is a huge difference. If I read on my phone until the time I go to bed, my latency, the amount of time it takes me to go to sleep, is at least a half hour, often much more, versus 10-15 minutes when I stop using the phone. And I, again, I did the test. I saw that in the data. It was the data, I knew it right away, by the way. But it was seeing it that allowed me to reinforce that it made me keep doing that. It made the habit become habitual, I should say.
Dr. Wendy Myers
The Oura Ring is so key. And I have software that I use called Chi Fractal Software that’s very, very complex and very accurate. Testing before and after of things I do as well with the Oura Ring is an amazing tool. I think for the majority of people, they can be using to track what they’re doing and the evidence, you know, the proof is in the pudding, that evidence helps people make changes. And so you were also saying, well, what’s next for hyper wellness? Before I interrupted you .
Steve Welch
No, no, no. I took us off on a tangent. My mistake. So, it is getting that deeper relationship with a client, and understanding, giving them the tools to see how to change. I think the things we’re doing in the studio right now have a huge impact on people’s lives.
It’s making, it’s trying to bring that more to life and getting it deeper, testing is a big part of where we’re making investments as an organization. So we can continue to build out studios. Our goal is. Really for any studio, for people to look back and say when a Restore location was in a community, that community was healthier. And because of that, people want us in our community because we’ll drive down and we’ll actually make it a better community, a healthier community. I think when we see that in our franchise owners, we have amazing owners. They do so many of the same. There are a lot of franchises out there. There are a lot of ways you can invest your time, energy, and money. What I think is unique about a Restore location is you really see the impact on your community. You see every day you’re changing people’s lives and that is very rewarding in so many of our communities. Our owners, our franchisees, that’s what gets them up every day. That’s why they’re excited to go to work every day because they see the impact they’re having on their clients’ lives. And there are not many businesses out there that you can do that. You can’t do that in self-storage. You can’t do that in vending machines.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So, yeah, those are the high dollar. They’ll make a lot of money with self-storage and vending machines. But for sure. laundromats.
Steve Welch
There are a lot of ways to make money in this world. I think what I’ve been proud of in my own career is I’ve always picked out areas that I was passionate about. And I thought that brought value to society above and beyond just the financial return. So another company I had was a company called Kindertown, which is 100% focused on education. So, my wife and I, from a philanthropic standpoint, the only thing we invest in is actually education. Because I think that’s the root cause of all the bad in the world, I’d argue, is education. The root cause of all the good is actually good education. So we’re very focused on that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Oh, that’s fantastic. That’s great. Yeah. And so anyone listening, all you health nuts out there that are looking for perhaps going deeper into your hobby, you can get a Restore franchise. And because you guys are franchising and that’s a great, great, great way to go full-time into your hobby like I did over 10 years ago.
Steve Welch
Awesome. Well, please check out www.Restore.com and if you’re interested in these therapies, Jim and I wrote a book that I think is excellent. I’ll sell and promote shamelessly here. It’s out in May. You can pre-order it on Amazon. It’s called “Restore” and we hope you pick it up and enjoy it. It’s a quick read. It’s indexed. If you have a specific area you’re like, “Hey, you know, I don’t want to read 300 pages.” So, but I’m really concerned because I have rheumatoid arthritis. You can go and see all the sections that talk about rheumatoid arthritis, what’s working. So we really tried to make it more aware that reading books cover to cover is getting more and more rare in this world. So we tried to make it as easy as possible for somebody to pick up and really get value out of. So, it’s on Amazon “Restore” and I think the release date is mid-May.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, fantastic. Well, everyone, thanks so much for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast and Steve, thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, I just love what you’re doing. I love that you have 230 wellness centers that people can go to, to experience these healing modalities that people might otherwise not have access to in a really affordable way. So I just love that you’re doing this. So thank you so much for coming on and telling us about it.
Steve Welch
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. And everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks for tuning in every week to the Myers Detox Podcast. I look forward to many more shows. We just hit show number 530; we’ve been doing this for over 10 years. So I really appreciate you guys tuning in. Tune in every week. I’ve got so many amazing shows for you coming up in the next actually just next couple of months recording a lot of really interesting shows. So keep tuning in. I have a lot of new things coming out for you guys soon. So thanks for tuning in and I’ll talk to you guys next week.
Disclaimer:
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
