Chronic Pain’s Muscle Connection (EP 93)
I sat down with muscular therapist Julie Donnelly to talk about why your x-rays look perfect, your doctor shrugs, and your body still hurts like hell, and spoiler alert, your muscles have been the problem child this whole time. If you’ve been told it is just aging, arthritis, or “learn to live with it,” this conversation might be the first time any adult in the room actually talks about what your muscles are doing to your joints, nerves, and sanity.
Julie has been hunting down chronic pain for almost four decades, and she is not buying the lazy “nothing’s wrong” answer when your scans look fine but you can barely stand up straight. She walks me through how tight muscles pull on joints like someone yanking your hair, why sitting wrecks your lower back, and how she stumbled into this whole thing by accidentally knocking out a woman’s three-week headache on a cruise ship. We also get into her Jules Stroke method, why she ditched traditional sliding-oil massage, and how she ended up treating everyone from bodybuilders and marathoners to symphony musicians and regular office chair warriors.
We talk practical stuff too: why your iliacus and other hip flexors might be the real jerks behind your low back pain, how plantar fasciitis is usually a lower leg muscle tantrum, and why rolling a tennis ball under your foot is basically massaging the wrong part of the problem. Julie lays out how her books Treat Yourself to Pain-Free Living and The 15-Minute Back Pain Solution teach you to chase pain back to the actual source, and she explains how she coaches people over Zoom around the world to fix this stuff themselves.
Chapters
- 00:18 Welcome to the Unhealthy Podcast
- 00:52 Meet Julie Donnelly, Muscle Therapist
- 07:16 The Journey to Muscular Therapy
- 12:04 Discovering the Pain Relief Method
- 19:46 Building a Career After the Cruise
- 24:34 Learning from an Osteopath
- 27:38 Developing the Jules Stroh Method
- 36:33 The 15-Minute Back Pain Solution
- 41:26 Treating Athletes and Musicians
- 47:03 Understanding Muscular Pain Sources
- 52:00 Embracing the Journey of Healing
Guest: Julie Donnelly
- Flexible Athlete Website: https://www.flexibleathlete.com/
- Julstro Method: https://julstromethod.com
- The 15 Minute Backup Pain Solution (book): https://amzn.to/4uaZ0dP
- Treat Yourself to Pain Free Living (book): https://amzn.to/4ewMJMv
- TED Talk – “The Pain Question No One Is Asking”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSrxURd8ZJk
Companies / Vendors / Products Mentioned
- Swedish Institute (of Allied Health, NYC): https://swedishinstitute.edu
- The Perfect Ball – Deep Muscle Massage Ball: https://julstromethod.com/product/perfect-ball-deep-muscle-massage/
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- License Date: January 3rd, 2026
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=== About the Unhealthy Podcast
Hosted by Marvin Bee (Uncle Marv), the Unhealthy Podcast dives into real conversations about health, wellness, and everyday habits that impact how we live, work, and age. From nutrition myths to stress management and tech-life balance, Uncle Marv brings humor, insight, and honesty to every episode.
- Visit our website: https://www.unhealthypodcast.com/
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Julie Donnelly, BS, LMT, is an internationally recognized chronic pain specialist and the creator of the Julstro Method of Osteopathic Muscular Therapy. For more than three decades she has focused on the muscular side of pain, helping people around the world get relief from low back pain, hip pain, sciatica, headaches, plantar fasciitis, and a long list of other “nothing shows on the x-ray” problems that usually get blamed on age or arthritis.
She is the principal therapist behind Flexible Athlete and JulieDonnelly.com, where she works with everyone from endurance athletes and bodybuilders to office workers and musicians, combining deep muscle work, myofascial release, and targeted self-treatment techniques. Julie is the author of Treat Yourself to Pain-Free Living and The 15-Minute Back Pain Solution, and she teaches her methods worldwide through in-office sessions, live clinics, books, videos, and Zoom consultations.
