Phil Wharton: Peace Through Strength

Learn to love your body through strength and flexibility

September 13, 2011

Phil Wharton wants to help you learn to love your body.

With a month to go before the 2002 London Marathon, Khalid Khannouchi was walking with a hitch. A recurring hamstring strain had flared up as Khannouchi prepared for a much-hyped showdown with Paul Tergat and Haile Gebrselassie. Yet on race day, Khannouchi won London in a then world record of 2:05:38.

Not long before the 2008 Olympic trials, Lopez Lomong had a sprained ankle and a pulled hamstring. Yet at the trials, Lomong made the 1500m team, which led to his memorable turn as the American flag bearer in Beijing's opening ceremonies.

Last summer, University of Oregon runner Matthew Centrowitz was hobbled by stress fractures. Yet this June he won the NCAA and USATF 1500m titles and a bronze medal at the World Championships.

The common thread in these abrupt turnarounds is Phil Wharton. For the last two decades, Wharton and his father, Jim, have worked on seemingly half the leading names in running. They've also worked with Broadway dancers and FBI agents, New York Times columnists and Washington lawyers. They've done so with the zeal of missionaries and the convincing competence of maestros.

It's easy to call Wharton a "therapist," but hard to feel that the word captures what he does. In a 90-minute session, you're likely to hear about fascial release, energy fields, organic nutrition, workplace ergonomics, rope-assisted stretching, joint integrity, arch rebuilding, emotional pain cycles, postural re-education, the dangers of texting, "glutes in hibernation" and more. Jay Johnson, who last summer brought Wharton to a Nike camp for 20 of the nation's top high school runners, says, "You can't put Phil into a good category or box. You definitely want this guy on your bus, but on the conventional seating chart, there's no obvious place for him."

Maybe a more accurate word is "healer." Dick Patrick, the former running reporter for USA Today who initially referred Khannouchi to the Whartons, says, "Phil has the ability to 'see' with his hands. By poking around with his fingers, he not only can tell you what is wrong with your body, he can tell you why things went wrong." Bystanders often have a near lusting to be the one strapped to the massage table.

For Wharton, what happens after a session is what's most important. Says Patrick, "Then he gives you a program to treat the cause as well to address the immediate problem." Then this mop-topped 44-year-old with a 2:23 marathon PR shows you that the work has just begun if you want to be a healthy runner in modern America.


Wharton's work can't be separated from his biography. As a high-schooler, first in West Virginia and then in Florida, he was well above average, with bests of 1:58 for 800m, 4:22 for 1600m and 9:36 for 3,200m. But starting in high school, and then as a junior college student in Florida, he suffered one injury after another. By the time he transferred to the University of Florida to finish his degree, he had been diagnosed with scoliosis, a lateral curvature of the spine.

Jim, the elder Wharton, was trained as an architectural engineer. He had also started studying exercise physiology when his son's scoliosis arose. Convinced that there was a structural element to Phil's inability to run without injury, he researched what his son could do to get healthy again. That led the Whartons to consulting and studying with a Floridian named Aaron Mattes.

Mattes is a therapist who created a flexibility method known as Active Isolated Stretching (AIS). The technique is based on the theory that working one muscle group (for example, the biceps) allows the opposing muscle group (in this case, the triceps) to relax, and while it's relaxed to be lengthened. That's the "isolated" part. The "active" part stems from stretches being dynamic, rather than static. Also in contrast to traditional static stretching, where you'll be told to hold a stretch for 30 to 60 seconds, in AIS each stretch takes only a couple seconds and is repeated 10 or so times. Static stretching, Mattes says, decreases blood flow within the muscles you're trying to stretch and sets off a protective reflex.

AIS is often called "rope stretching," although not all AIS stretches (e.g., for the neck or lower back) involve guiding the movement with a rope. More important for AIS proponents, thinking of the stretching solely in terms of a rope can encourage improper technique. You can lie on your back, wrap a rope under your right foot and pull the foot of your straightened leg toward the ceiling. And you'll certainly feel something in your hamstrings when you do that. But, Mattes would caution, you're not allowing the hamstrings to relax and lengthen. Instead, if you use your quads to move your foot toward the ceiling, the opposing hamstrings can relax. Mattes would then have you gently pull the rope at the end of your two-second stretch to help lengthen the muscle and release the surrounding fascia a little more.

Mattes' ideas made sense to Jim Wharton's engineer mind. For the next year and a half, Phil spent three hours a day on AIS and related strengthening exercises. He also switched his educational focus from journalism to "all things therapy," he says. A college friend, Anthony Nesty, was a swimmer from Suriname who beat Matt Biondi for the 1988 Olympic 100m butterfly title. He saw Wharton's gradual improvement from AIS, and Wharton introduced him to Mattes and started traveling with him to competitions. Jim Wharton also started working with top athletes, such as University of Florida alum Dennis Mitchell, a sprinter who was part of the American 400m relay team that won gold at the 1992 Olympics.