065. The Trauma Doesn’t Retire: FDNY’s Rob Cefoli on Healing After the Job [Part 1]

Retired FDNY Captain Rob Cefoli spent 20 years on the job—and now he’s reshaping how firefighters recover, rebuild, and stay resilient. In this episode, Rob dives into:

• His journey with PTSD and finding TRE (Trauma Release Exercises)
• Running the FDNY Health & Fitness Unit
• Why TRE is now part of academy training
• Creating Fyr Tribe for firefighter mental health
• Helping retirees heal from years of service

This one’s raw, real, and packed with actionable tools for every firefighter, from rookies to retirees.

Transcript

TJ: All right, so you're, you're heading out to Colorado with Joe, and you were mentioning that you got people on the, on the study

Rob: yeah. Yeah. So what, yeah, we're trying to set up this, this pilot study, but there's not a lot of research in what, uh, in TRE in our community and, and in North America it's really been around the world more. So we determine that we just have to get more eff efficacy of that and more, um, just, just people to testify to it, right.

Uh, that are, that are us not, uh, coming from out of the country or something. That was done 10 years ago. You know, Tre's been around, it's been around for decades. Dr. Belli, uh, you know, he's from Cleveland. He started nineties doing, uh, crisis work overseas and, you know, I think he's, his upbringing was more diverse, his neighborhood.

So he got into like global type of work and, you know, helping humanitarian, uh, aid type type of projects and crisis intervention, that type, that's his background. And he noticed the tremoring of people in intense situations and, you know, places that are getting bombed and different, different areas of people that we don't, we can't really relate to that, but we have our own our own issues, right?

So that's where this TRE or trauma release exercise kind of came up with where he can, we can facilitate this mechanism in our own bodies to help down-regulate our systems and release tension from trauma and stress and ongoing, uh, issues in the world, right? So we, we take on a lot of stress, uh, as first responders.

We, we see intense situations at times. We see a lot of chronic, uh, you know, ailments. We see a lot of death. We see a lot of suicide. We see a lot of, a lot of things, right? And, and obviously in our community we see a lot of our own suffering and our own drug use and coping mechanisms. And eventually now we've seen a lot of people taking their own lives, which hopefully we can help to divert back into a tool, a tool-based method where we have a lot of things available instead of that last resort,

TJ: So you've come up with a handful of buzzwords, like right off the gate, we just started the podcast, and I guarantee you right now, there's people listening going, who the hell is this dude? Like, what does he talk about? What's, what's trauma release exercises? Why do I care? So let's take a step back and give me the intro.

Gimme the Rob intro for our community, because I have a feeling that's going to change a few perspectives and it's going to give you that authority that I feel that we need when it comes to this sort of stuff.

Rob: Well, alright, we'll back up a little bit about, uh, two decades or so, right where I started. Uh, Rob Se Foley. Uh, I'm recently retired, uh, about six weeks out of the FDNY. I'm a captain. Was a captain. I was also the director of health and fitness, uh, for the department for the last four years. Started up with the health and fitness unit as lieutenant.

Took over as captain, uh, was company commander. So, you know, I have some experience there. I've trained over 4,000 of our probationary firefighters throughout the years, uh, multiple classes. Uh, I had to deal with a lot of things there. Like we had a, a probationary firefighter passed away. Unfortunately, a lot of the politics that go along with that training academies.

Um, and my, I started in Brooklyn as a firefighter. Uh, I'm the first one in, in my family, uh, in the FDNY. My father was a carpenter. My mom was a lunch lady. So basically a blue collar upbringing. Uh, nothing really crazy, uh, traumatic or anything like that in my life. But just, I know my dad had some stuff going on and I recently, throughout this whole process, you know, I was able to connect more with him on that and then kind of identify where, um, there was some shortcomings, I guess, from that relationship into my life.

And now that I'm a father. Uh, this thing's passed down, but the career was, um, was awesome. I, I loved, I loved working. Started in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, engine 2 34, very, uh, busy area. I was, uh, dev valedictorian of my probe class. So I was able to choose where I got assigned out of probationary firefighter school.

Um, that was one of my first goals, uh, coming in. 'cause I knew I didn't have any family in the job. I didn't really, I wouldn't know where to go. And just through the process of hard work and that, that one goal of, Hey, if I want my choice again, you could be the fitness award winner too. But I think my run at the time wasn't as great, even though now, like I look back and I could have been a lot better.

But what I know now, if I knew that, I probably would've been, but I just wasn't as fast as I sh I could have been at the time. That wasn't on the table for me. But, uh, the valedictorian I was very good at, uh, in school. Um, I went to an engineering high school, so, so all those things kind of play a part in the whole transition of where we're at today, where I got the ability to go to the firehouse that I wanted.

Um, but that also led to an event in 2008 that really shaped my, my, my life. Um, and that was a line of duty death that I was involved in in January. Uh, it was just the six, 16th, 17th anniversary of that. So through this whole process, it was, um, that was like the crux of it. That that incident that I was involved in, uh, was a highrise fire.

It was a wind-driven fire. And we were not the first unit on scene, but we were in charged of the secondhand line. Uh, and the way we operate in New York, it's, it's, uh, used, used to be two hand lines down a hallway, two and a halfs two fight a, like a wind impact or a fire. Um, but those t were kind of changing where door control came into the picture and, you know, make other interventions, whether it be different high-rise nozzles or blankets coming out the window to, to stop the, the wind.

Things like that came after the fact, but. Uh, we wound up getting, uh, down to the fire department after many may, uh, uh, Maydays being given guys running outta air, guys getting burned. 'cause when the wind kind of blew in on, on us, it was just, uh, uh, a big cluster fuck, you know, as you would say. Right. Um, so accountability was big.

Um, I just remember being, uh, held back a little bit from operating 'cause there was so much confusion that we couldn't get to our position, which was taking over the first hand line at the time. And when we got down to the apartment door, I wound up being one of the first members there. Uh, we were able, we came upon, uh, Lieutenant John Martinson and.

He was, uh, supplying on his back inside the fire department. A very surreal situation for me was able to work with another firefighter to try the removal process where we had one, had one of the feet. Um, I wound up going in the apartment and just kind of realizing, and probably for the first time, it was about three and a half years in my career, but there was nobody in the fire department at the time that I went in there.

And that was one of the craziest things as a firefighter, because there's usually like tons of guys trying to get in, tons of guys on the stairs, tons of people just, we just throw a lot of people at, especially in New York, we have a lot of resources here. So you're just getting a lot of bodies, uh, involved.

And I just kind of took a quick cursory peek around that apartment and I, I knew where the fire was coming from and it went from complete darkness and high heat to I could see now. And I have this guy down and somebody's gotta do something here. Right. And I was a young firefighter, so it was like, oh, that's me.

Like, I gotta do something. I gotta, you know, like that. The training kick in, just like crawling down the hallway into the heat was like, okay, just stay on the hand line. And you'll get to the end and that's where you gotta go. And that's all you really gotta do. Right? Keep it really simple. Meanwhile, you got guys bailing out and, you know, standing up in the hallway and everybody's crashing, losing helmets.

It's just, it was a mess. It was about 70 feet of travel from the stairwell down the hallway into the apartment. Had to make a U-turn, another 20 feet, make another right. And that's the fire room. So you have wind blowing it all the way down, you know, guys are all over the place. And it was one of the, probably the most intense things ever in my life at that point.

Nevermind fires. So you just kind of revert to your training and you know, we had, uh, the mayday, uh, I was able to give one, not the best one. I mean, it's recorded and I look back and you always second guess each other, like, oh, I should have said this, I should have said that, or I should have did these things.

But we were able to get him outta the apartment. We were able to, um, I was able to find that hand line, kind of protect the members trying to extricate, uh, Lieutenant John Martinson, Johnny Ice guy. And, um. You know, we're operating, we're trying to get to that fire room. Can't do it. We had to back out, close the door, reset, go back in with fresh guys.

You know, at this point I'm pretty much spent, and it was, it was like very, it's a long situation, but it was a very short situation in my brain. It was like the waiting to go operate versus how fast that happened. Where, oh my God, this guy's here. Oh my God. Like, we gotta get mayday. Oh, we gotta get him outta here.

Where's the water? We gotta pack the guys. We gotta get outta his apartment. Um, you know, my friend, uh, Joe is, uh, came in the room, uh, after we got him out. He's like, he looks at me and my eyeballs were like this in my, in my mask. Just like I'm pulling a shut off, trying to get it down into a hallway with no water, like the hottest I've ever felt.

And I'm like literally in the flow path. So I'm not even thinking clearly, like where actually if I just move like three feet, I probably would've been able to set up. Get some guys in and, and we can move the line, but everybody's extricating a member. Nobody's pushing a, helping push a line 70 feet in the hallway to a u-turn around a door block. So we wound up having, we wound up put the fire out and everything, and I just went home that morning and they put us on medical leave right away. 'cause you know, he passed away and I drank a bottle of vodka with my, one of my, what are my friends? You know, and like, just watch the news and just was like, shellshocked, like, what just happened, you know?

And in, in our department, we, we go right to counseling and you know, I remember talking to a therapist and you know, you don't know, you don't know what's what I'm talking about. You have no, no idea what I just went through. I don't even know what I just went through, you know? So we, we get two weeks and then we come back to work and I write everything.

You know, you go to the funerals and you, you know, you, you hear the wife and you hear, you know, like the little kids and stuff like that. And you got all the bagpipes and you got the whole, everybody's lined up and it's like the whole thing, right? And that's, you know, overwhelming. Right, and then it, then it passes and then you go back to kinda work.

And then a few months later, I realized I was having some issues. I was having just, uh, you know, on personal level just drinking was outta control. Um, looking back at the time doesn't seem that bad, right? Like we can all, we can all agree that we don't think it's that bad until we look in the, the mirror and say, you know what, maybe we shouldn't be blacking out and maybe we shouldn't have these, uh, these, these memories coming out where you're crawling around your apartment and you're punching holes in walls and you're just reliving things like it, it was what it was like I, at the time, it's not PTSD yet now it's, it is like you went through this traumatic situation.

You have all these emotions that you don't know what to do with or you can't access anymore. And it's like, you're just like shocked. And I remember yelling at guys in the firehouse, like, you're just, you can't be joking anymore. It's just not a, this is a very serious, it's just, you know, it's completely opposite of how we, we came in, is like.

That's, it's not, it's not what we were like, but like we joke, we bust balls. We, we go, we go to work, we drill. It's, it's a fun environment. That's why we do this job. And it started turning into like, I was getting mad all the time and I had a lot of this anger and then I, I lived with a lot of guilt 'cause I felt that I could have saved him somehow, you know?

And that's personal guilt. And that, that stayed with me for years, like a, a long time, probably five years I would say. Um, I, I got married in 2010. I was divorced in 2013, so probably from 2008, 2013. So about five years, you know, and I think it had a lot to do with it. Now they look back, um, I think on both sides of that, you know, you have that, but a lot of guys go through divorces 'cause you're not able to really access yourself after like, some of these events or some, or a long career of chronic stress and chronic issues.

Or if you're deployed overseas or mil military or police or EMS. You, you're getting pulled apart. You, you, to do our job, you have to be in like that sympathetic state, right? Like you have to be in that fight or flight. You have to be ready to rock. Be very aware. Supervi, hypervigilant. And what happens to our bodies is that you just lose the other side of that.

So we come home now and it's just, you're disconnected, you're not present. You, you're, you're cold, you're sarcastic. You, you might drink a little, you might do some other stuff, you know, just to get by you, right? You might go introverted and just completely disconnected from people. You might be super A type and just go ball.

Also, I'm gonna go run a, I'm gonna do marathon training because you need to fill these, you gotta find out what you're feeling. It's very hard to access after a while. And then you bury it like everybody else, you know? We just bury it and bury it. You laugh because you know it's true. It's the same. I always speak regular talk.

So this is how I interpret everything. And it's just that you don't realize what you're like. Or, or how good you can feel until something happens where you go, holy shit. Like, I'm still carrying a lot of this stuff. So fast forward now in my career, I get promoted, I go, um, to, um, an engine company, a truck company.

I'm getting promoted again and I have, I'm having some issues with, um, with my, my daughter, uh, was in my first marriage and she's now 13. Love, lovely girl sweetheart. And we were just having scheduling issues and all these conflicts and, and, um, it was very stressful. So I, I was looking for a way to handle a schedule, the work schedule.

And one of my, my friends who I was doing CPA training with, he's a captain, he was taking over the fitness shooting at the time. He's like, Hey, why don't you come up and help me? Got a great background. I've been a trainer for over 20 years, since I was 22, so 22, 23 years. I've been personal training and, and coaching and doing boot camps and stuff on my own.

And I said, you know what, um, how's, you know, if it's a set, set schedule, it would really help me out at home. And also would help my, my guys in the firehouse because I'm like a burden almost in my eyes. I probably wasn't, but it was my own anxiety about I needed to switch this. I, I couldn't work that tour, you know, the scheduling with my kid, what am I picking up?

When am I dropping off? All that, all that other stuff that we all kind of discount, um, as, as parents, really that's another stress, right? It's another chronic, it was chronic years of this. I'm still going through it now, obviously, you know, you never really get out of it. But, um, that got me into the finish unit.

So it was like a, a problem I had personally and it was kind of just a happenstance that I was able to go up and start working up there. And, and that was where I kind of found myself a little bit more. I was stabilized at home. I was doing some good work. I was giving back, I was training young kids and a guy gave me like a little bit of boost of energy.

Like I was able to put my own stamp on a lot of things that we were looking at in the department, like all our. Uh, programs for recovery, uh, that we added in all the new equipment that was able to get up to our training facility. Different, uh, types of workout structure, interviewing guys, bringing new guys up, diversifying our team, um, you know, working with the chiefs, working with initiatives, working with legal team, working with, uh, the medical office on our guys and what's missing in, in our department.

Like we don't have any fitness standards here. We have medicals, but, you know, we have guys that are really overweight and they were like, what are we doing with these people? So I'm like, we need programming. We need scanning of InBody scans, we need nutrition. We had no education in our probationary fire school on any of this stuff.

So we, we kind of put that all together. Uh, had some great guys we worked with, uh, and a few of them helped me out personally, which, um, led to the Fire Tribe and led to where we're at now. Um, you know, we were looking at pre and post Covid where we had a lot of changes in the classes, so that was like a weird situation.

We had that big shutdown, that huge. You know, are we gonna go on leave without pay? Are they gonna force this thing on us? You know, everybody that kind of got the covid shot initially got it. And everybody else was like, all right, I'm good. And then they, then they mandated. And that, that was a huge stir up.

And you're looking at finances, you're looking at, you know, that whole situation was crazy. You just worry about every single person around you. Did they have covid? Do I have covid? Am I gonna kill somebody? Am I gonna get, you know, the first couple days of that wearing gowns and masks and people are dying every, every, every day, every day.

People are dying in the city and you're going to dead bodies and dead bodies and sick people, and you're like, fuck, I'm gonna go home and give it to my kids. I'm changing outside my side door, dropping my clothes off, and like throwing 'em in the hot water. We didn't know anything, but we had to go to work anyway.

So I think that was a huge societal trauma. Plus first responders, right? So there's a lot of things that happened over time for me personally that I noticed that affected a lot of the larger population. And also just me, me as a, in my family. And from that, we saw a lot of these kids coming back when they opened the academy up with, uh, like high stress levels, like real issues with breath work and breathing.

Can't stay on air, can't multitask, um, freaking out, right? I can't manage themselves. They're living so outside their bodies, they can't even like, figure out how to just maintain their composure. And now you're not even, you know, in a far situation, you're in a training academy, you're, you're working out or you're, you're doing a course or you're doing a a, a evolution and you're going bananas.

And we're like, what the, what is going on here? We're like, we have a code red system where we, you know, if we, we, somebody's really messed up, we, we stop 'em. They go to EMS and if they gotta get transported, like a transport, very good, very safe system we have in our academy. It's like no nonsense. Like we don't wanna mess up.

We've already had people die. Most, most of our, most of every first final in the academy. There's usually, that's there, usually that for like rdo, myel and, and all these other things. There might be incidents at training 'cause of overuse or overdoing it. We, we were like, no nonsense. Like injury reduction was huge.

Safety was huge. Like, I don't care. You feel like crap. You are going on the bus. Am I don't, you can't explain it out. 'cause if I, you can't answer my questions. You, if you're looking like all types of ways I, something might be wrong. I'm not taking responsibility for that. Let's get you checked out and if something does come up on the EMS side, they've taken your right to the hospital.

That's our, that's our procedures from a few years back. And in 21 we had, uh, Vinnie Malvo, he was a EMT originally. Great guy. Super fit. Um, and he wound up passing away from Rhabdo and that was a big issue with, uh, the genetics, um, sickle cell trait. And we, and that was kind of a, a weird time 'cause we're looking at the shots, we're looking at issues guys are having now.

After that, then we're looking at a death, then we're looking at probationary firefighters getting rhabdo all the time, like every class from, whereas in 18, 19 it was nothing about that. So it kind of messes you up a little bit there. But you have to be super vigilant. You know, our guys had to be on top of their game a little bit more and it was very, very stressful.

'cause the last, every workout, I'm like, is somebody gonna drop dead? Is somebody gonna drop dead? And it's like, for real. Like I, that was my number one concern, was somebody dying again. And, you know, I had, we had to go to his funeral. We were his honor guard. You know, he didn't have a company. Yet. So it was his squad, it was Probie school instructors.

And, and we went to, to take care of the family and, you know, had to talk to his dad. And, you know, it, it was, it was a terrible time. Like I, I, I broke down to his dad and like, I couldn't get outta the conversation. I had someone, an EMT had to come and pull me away 'cause I just, it was so, I was so upset because it happened under our watch.

We, it wasn't our fault. It, it wasn't nothing, it was normal SOPs, everything was fine. Investigation was, was we, we used our courses validated, so everything was like to the tee. It's just that he had this issue and his body couldn't compensate for that. So I had some instructors that had some hard times with that.

And we noticed a lot of these, a lot of these things happening. 21, 22, 23 election stuff. Now, social media stuff, you have, everybody's getting up and up and up, right? So not only we gotta worry about our job. Our families and our finances. Now we gotta worry about in the city, uh, looting and riots and, you know, um, rhabdo and now we have people dying everywhere, guys with pulmonary issues and heart issues and blood clots dropping dead in firehouses.

Am I next? That's like, so, you know, this whole timeline has just gotten worse and worse and worse in my eyes. And I think that we're not, we're not addressing that enough where we can't just go talk about it, right? Because if I go talk about anything that's happened in my life, it's just gonna resonate deeper.

It's gonna bring up those feelings again. It's gonna make me feel a certain way. And it's what's what happens in the body and what I've learned in the last year and a half, two years, is that the body doesn't forget. So it traps it, right? So when I was in, you know, ebbs field house on the 14th floor and I saw him.

On the ground. My body went into a response. I didn't think that, so my cog from here down was affected. My thought process, my cognitive was, was that was like, all right, uh, what's, what's the procedure for this now? What's procedure? But my body was going nuts and I didn't realize it 'cause I didn't understand what it actually does to the body.

And over time, everything that we deal with just tightens you and gets more tension built up. And you like an anxious feelings and, and anxiety and stress is felt. It's not thought and any, like my wife has, uh, some, some issues with anxiety and it's a feeling. So it's a body thing. So when we're looking at where we get our remedy, it's like, it's not cognitive stuff if you still have it in the body, if that makes sense.

That's how I interpret it anyway. And this is, I think why we're on the right track here with us because we do a lot of things from the body. We start with the body. We're physical trainers, number one, we work out, we exercise. So that helps us with some alleviation of stress, right? Helps regulate our bodies.

Then we, we include nutrition, right? So better things in, better stuff out, right? So I put really bad food in. I'm gonna feel terrible, I'm just gonna have a bad mindset. Depressed, like all these levels get all whacked up in your brain 'cause you're putting all these chemicals in. So we gotta look at that, right?

So we have to make sure we're doing the things that we can do and use the tools that are available to make ourselves feel better so then we can be better for our, our families first and our careers and our, our teammates, our, our units. Second in, in my opinion. 'cause if you're not good at home, you go to work, you're gonna be miserable, right?

The guy that comes in and he's just like, like I would go to work and my, my ex-wife would text me and I'm just like, oh man. Like, and then all 24 hours, I'm just like, it's in here and I'm trying to like drill and I'm trying to focus and be sharp and I'm like, I got this thing in my head, like constantly, right?

So I think we all have these things and we're not always at a hundred percent so. We, uh, we're doing some classes in 2023. We're doing a spring class, and I go up and my back is completely, completely direct, complete. I'm, I'm so incapacitated that I can't put my, uh, socks on without holding on something. Yeah, I can't. I'll lay on the floor. My kids jump on me. I'm like, get off. I'm like, yelling at them, get off me, because they're like, it's just like I can't move. I'm like locked up. My whole lower half is just like, really just compressing. I just felt like a vice and it was, I thought it was like a bad deadlift day followed by like a, a multiple alarm.

Now you wear on the mask, like you, when you wear that mask, it's like, all right, you know, my shoulder's starting to hurt like couple hours in. You're like, man, this thing is like draining on my neck and the helmet and like just it all compresses you right, you spine. So it's like, get outta that thing.

You're like, oh Jesus. I don't care how fit you're wearing. That shit sucks. And all like 20 years ago. So the straps are like, you know, string bikini straps. We don't have a nice padded MSA masks. We have like these old Scott

TJ: Bro, the MSA ones might be padded, but you add like an extra 5,000 pounds to those things,

Rob: Right. So like the grass is always greener. Right. You know, but you know, it just drags on you. So I'm like, maybe it's that. And, and it was a few months. It was like a February job and, and I think the class started in March or April. So for a couple months I'm like, I'll be tough it out. I'll go back to the academy, I'll be able to regulate a little bit more.

You know, back and forth was, was working because like the firehouse seemed to get the running and the nights at 19 years and 20 years seemed to like catch up very quickly. Whereas I used to be able to snap back quick, but like, man, not sleeping. Then coming home to your, your babies and like going back to work.

And then overtime was through, is through the roof out here. 'cause the staffing is so low, so constantly working, constantly working, then go into the academy and constantly working. So I was never really off. Like my days in between were not what they used to be. So I feel like that also added to it, and I just felt horrible.

So one of my lieutenants, Adrian Kaman, who's a co-founder of Fire Tribe and, and Anthony Simonini, another lieutenant from the City five truck. We, uh, we came back, they were my, my lieutenants, I was the captain. We had our guys, we had our team for the, the spring class. And we started talking about what we're seeing in the academy and, and heart rate recovery and how can we do more breath work with these kids and our functional skills course, a fully encapsulated course that they were having trouble with.

So how can we help them just, just manage their bodies better? They're having a problem in that regard, not, not the physical conditioning. 'cause again, they're, they, we were an older class and as we age this list, it gets older and older, more outta shape, more older, more sedentary, and now they're coming to be fire firefighters.

It's, it's, it's a hard thing. We just have a new test out, so that's good. We'll have younger, a younger pool, but somebody at 35 years old coming into the academy is gonna have a hard time no matter what. But we saw like that bigger picture of like, just the whole group was a mess. And what went on. So I'm like, probably everybody's just completely fucked from Covid, the whole city. And they, they're part of that now. They're coming into this high stress environment. They've never been in paramilitary, which is already hard enough. So now you're already dysregulated and, and, and I can see that trauma playing a part in how they operate and what they're resiliency is. So it was very low.

So we have to get that out of 'em. So we started to go down this road. Um, in the process, we're looking for certifications for our guys. Uh, Adrian is, uh, my guy for any kind of physical help. Like, hey, man, like he cups, he does massage. He knows the body better. Myofascial chains really like self-educated.

He's got a huge backstory on his, uh, his early career. Uh, he had a major injury, um, that he was almost put out of the job when he was a. Probationary firefighter. So he built himself back. His knowledge level help. I'm like, dude, just put every cup you have on me. Right? I'll, I'll do whatever you tell me because I just wanna feel a little bit better, right?

I just wanna feel better. And I think most people, most responders know, they kind of feel like shit sometimes. Not all the time, but just wanna feel a little better. Maybe be a little bit better at home. Um, not be farming all the time. Right? I, after a while we become our job. That's, that's normal. We get that.

Let's get some tools that can help us. Right? So he starts showing me TRE and I'm like, I don't get it. But, uh, we'll do, we'll do like a little bit after working out, you know, he was helping me with my workout, scaling everything down, get, getting things turned on again, like my glutes were off this side. I got atrophy and this muscle, all these things.

And I'm like, dude, you're much smarter than me. Right? Uh, so thank you so much for being a part of this team. I'm at your becking call, do whatever you want. He's like, all right, wanna come? We're gonna do his TRE. It's gonna help release intention, you know, make you feel a little better. So we did about a week or so, 10 minutes a day after a workout, something like that.

And I was starting to feel like some release, like moving easier. Uh, I was able to squat again. It squat with weight, right? I couldn't even squat to a box, dude. Like, that was where I was

TJ: That bad.

Rob: Yeah, I'm, I'm quitting the fitness unit. Bad.

TJ: Wow.

Rob: I can't run this, I can't do this anymore. And I'm thinking, I'm like, maybe it's just too much going with both company and academy and constantly on call.

Like, you're not off. Like I used to leave the firehouse. I show up three days later, you know, and that's it. Now it was like, I'm getting emails at home, getting calls in the car, I'm getting, you know, texts and. Everything was just constant, constant, constant. Maybe that probably helped, helped, didn't help me, but it's what I was dealing with at the time.

So it is a tough position and I think doing both, um, and not just dedicating one. The other was, was I could handle it, but it did took a toll on my body. It really did. It started to really like just tighten me up. So we had some relief with TRE, didn't understand it, practiced it for a little bit. We're like, all right, let's look at a certification for our guys.

It seems to be a good recovery tool, like for the body. So we did, we, we introduced foam roll, and we introduced, um, breath work, diaphragmic breathing. We do yoga in the classes. We do a lot of things that like we get made fun of for, but we understand like those are principles that you need to incorporate over your life for longevity, right?

Again, we wanna retire healthy, happy, and for a long time, our average, I think our average lifespan is like seven to 10 years after retirement. Like so, you know. I'd rather live longer than that and collect, you know, and earn, earn my pension and collect it for a long time for my family and be with them more.

Um, I don't want to have a career that's short, shortened because of injury and also don't want, didn't want to like leave and then just, that's it for me. You know? So I think you have to incorporate a lot of tools. And this was another tool. We, we saw that, hey, it's, it's a, it's making me feel different on the surface, like in my body.

It just helped me feel a little bit more at ease. So Adrian, uh, tre's weird 'cause you have providers that teach it and we were like, we're not gonna get anybody. We're gonna get the guy who made it. You know? So we, we reached out to Dr. David Elli, uh, like I said, uh, earlier, before we started recording, he's, uh, originally from Ohio and he worked in the nineties and early two thousands all over the world, uh, in like crisis intervention and humanitarian work.

So his, his background's a diverse background. He has a doctorate from, and, but he's basically self, his, his whole experience level has made him the expert. So he's worked all over the world, uh, in a lot of bad areas, worse than where you live in today. And he saw this mechanism come out of people under stress and he developed trauma release exercise as a method to help the body to release tension, uh, due to trauma and stress.

So, so like, let's get him in. So let's, we're gotta go right to the source. 'cause again, New York firefighters, we really, I don't wanna have a lot of fluff. I just wanna know what I need to know. I want to learn it. I wanna be able to, now how do we get this to our members? 'cause we source some good, good value in it.

And then with the research that we, we, we were pulling not a lot of it, but it was promising that, hey, this is a body method. Hey, this might be something we can incorporate with our other modalities that could support it so you feel good and then you can be better. Right? That was the general idea.

TJ: So you're avoiding drugs, alcohol, and you're also complimenting the typical talk therapy that we're all used to, right?

Rob: Yeah. And it, and it just seems to be that those are the things, right, that are available. It just seems that that's the going rate. You gotta go talk about it, but then you can't get an appointment or you gotta take a drug. Like you gotta get a prescription 'cause you're depressed. But if you take that, you can't be a full duty firefighter either.

Most places in our place, you can't. So if you get put on any kind of medication like that, uh, you can be light duty. You're not gonna be on the truck, you're not gonna be in the engine. And that's gonna be another depressing situation unless it's by choice. Right? Or unless it's a need that your family needs and need to be on a set schedule or something like that, where it's not so chaotic, right?

So. Yeah, we, we were like, this is probably something good. We were able to get in touch with Dr. Belli. He was very excited to work with us. He's done a lot of military, he's done a lot of, uh, groups around the world. Uh, he's in, he's actually back in the States now. We just spoke to him. He's, he was in Oman.

He's doing TRE Arabia now. So he's in, like, he speaks Arabic. He speaks multiple languages. Really cool guy. He's, he's like a, he has a lot of, uh, theology background too. So it's like a spiritual side to it. Plus the physical side has a lot to do with the myofascial chain system in your body. Uh, and where we hold tension, so like when you foam roll, you get like trigger point.

A lot of those interventions that we do in TRE, a lot of that has to do with it. So we, we incorporate in our workshops that we created, so we, we started with the training. Uh, six of us got trained as global TRE providers. And with that we had other firefighters, all different ages, light duty, full duty, come in, volunteer, so we can work on 'em with Dr.

Pelli so he could certify us to say, Hey, you guys got this. Technique, you know how to teach it, you know, you understand it. So we did a three day intensive with him at the fire academy and the people that came were probably the first, well like, oh my God, these people are having crazy reactions to this stuff.

Like, everybody's tremoring, everybody, there's not one person who didn't. Tremor two is like their reaction. Afterwards we took, we took videos and they were like just blown away at how they felt. And I was like, okay, this is interesting. You know, we were all looking at each other like, is is it really everybody or is it like, you know, this is gonna, this is like, nobody hates it.

So it was, 'cause it's a weird, it's a weird thing. Everybody says it's weird and then they say, well, I feel a little better or I feel a lot better. And I think that as we explored it more, we were able to connect with that mechanism further. And then we were able to really experiment and like do different interventions, different warmups.

There's a, there's a series of TRE warmups that get you to prime your body and that helps you to. Get into that tremor mechanism to, uh, have a session. Uh, whereas if you didn't do that initially, you probably could connect to it, uh, in your body. So we have to get in our bodies first. We have to kind of connect to it, and then we can engage that mechanism.

And as we go down to today, it's like, it's really like easy to get into a tremor. You could just, and it's never the same. It's always a different, like, it's always a different thing. Like if I foam roll, I know I can go through my body in the same, go to my calves, go to my hamstrings, my glute, and I kind of feel the same.

I feel more where my attention spots are. Like they'll get eased up if I foam roll and they'll get tightened up in the morning when I wake up. But every tremor session is completely unique and the way he explained it, I know you have a question about that if you wanna ask it, but

TJ: Yeah. Well now I'm curious as to what a traditional, like what, what would a session include, and if you can run us through the quick warmup and what the session entails. Joey talked about it a little bit on his episode here, but I also want to get your take on it.

Rob: Yeah. So I, the way I understand it and the way I've been kind of trying to explain it to people in layman's terms is that, think about charging a battery, right? So you're, you're warming up, uh, and connecting and grounding yourself to your, to your body, right? So when we do the warmups work from the bottom up, there's se there's seven series in traditional TRE.

Uh, we've kind of played around with first responder ones, like guys that are more, uh, in shape, might need higher stimulus, things like that. Like, can you do a post workout? Can you do it here and there? But basically just a simple set of exercises, starting with ankle rolls and cal raises all the way up hip extensions, uh, all the way up your body to charge your muscles and connect.

So if I'm gonna ankle roll my feet, all I want to think about is what I feel on my feet, where my toes are, how my ankles feel. Do I feel like maybe the bottom of my plantar is tight? Like, that's what we're explaining to people because the first exercise, everybody's like, what's going on? What are we doing here?

And we have to bring them back very slowly into their body. One step at a time. So you're feeling each section, then the catchphrase. So what is my, what does my left calf feel like? What does my right calf feel like? You know what, what's the intensity level we use RPE, so it's like a seven outta 10 we wanna reach, so everybody's on their own.

So if it takes me three reps to get a seven where're, like, oh my god, it's starting to really burn. Versus somebody who's in like a marathon. I get to paraphrase all day because I, I do a ton of running. Maybe you need 20 reps. Everybody's different, but it's a seven. So, 'cause we want to charge it, but we don't wanna exhaust it.

TJ: Mm-hmm.

Rob: And you move up the chain, uh, quadriceps, uh, hip flexors, uh, posterior chain. And then we, we do like, we finish with a bri, uh, a bridge on the ground. And then we're in a position of rest, which is like a diamond shape. So you're on the ground for most session. After your warmups, and then there are interventions you do while you're tremoring.

So once you bring the tremor up out of the body, which is basically from the adductors, we use our adductors to stimulate a tremor with an isometric hole. You are, you're connecting to that mechanism. Once you've got it, you can manipulate your body around to try to transfer that tremor around the body.

And what we found as firefighters, that most of our attention is locked in our hips, in our pelvic region, our uh, region. And for us, we have a, like a 50 50 foot rope that we sit on in our right hip. And all our backs are jerked up. Like, because you're sitting like this in the rig and you're carrying this extra weight on, on one side, so your, your gate's a little outta whack.

Everything tightens up. So, uh, you know, we have like the belt. So everything's tight around here anyway, so I think that has a lot to do with what we see in our bodies. So a lot of our firefighters, they'll shake, but they won't get it past their hips. Like it won't travel past. So we look at like, the path of least resistance.

So when it hits resistance, it's gonna kind of stay there and, and tremor and try to relax that area. So then that layer is kind of lifted. So we're packing like an onion events, uh, worry, uh, stress arguments, and it's just compacting, right? Think about that. Just layer on, layer on layer. This mechanism from the inside out is gonna help to kind of shake out the, the shit you see to shake out the shit really.

So layer by layer and then all, sometimes you'll have like a, a huge like release like I had, so when I was training with Dr. Belli, you know, I'll leave from the front. I'll be the first guy on the ground with him. I'm no, I'm no, uh, pussy. I'm gonna shake the shit outta me, right? And I'm gonna, I want, I want as much.

And again, you can't think that, that now, it's not no session's, better or worse, it's just what your body needs at the time. But when I was going through the training, I'm like, I'm gonna really shake today, like I'm really gonna get it. You're like,

TJ: shake the most out of everyone.

Rob: yes.

TJ: gonna show them that I can shake.

Rob: that's, that's what we do. Like I'll show these guys I'm wanna do better, I'm gonna do better than everyone.

But it's not like that. Your body knows what it needs at the time. So for a few months I was getting relatively minor tremors. I was getting it in my legs and my hips, and a lot of people experienced this, especially when they first start TRE. They're not gonna be fully connected in their body or relaxed enough to let it happen. Very important.

TJ: So it's gotta come from within,

Rob: yeah. Well, we control chaos, We are control force. The first thing we do with every single, I'm telling you right now, tj, every single person goes. You know, I was trying to, I was trying to, or I started to feel it, and then I, I, I was gonna, and then it stopped. I'm like, no, you are getting in the way.

It's what's happening. You're trying to figure out how do I tremor better or worse, or stop it because it's, it's weird because I, it's not my, it's not you controlling it,