All right. Today, we’re going to be talking about something that I’m incredibly passionate about. This is the presentation I did for the Consumer Health Summit group a couple of weeks ago. I worked on this presentation for almost a year because it was…I wanted to do really well like I wanted it to be awesome. I wanted to give them a lot of information. As I said, I like to put on my futurist hat occasionally to look at where the health and fitness performance landscape is going.
For whatever reason because I’ve been around this stuff my whole life and fascinated by it, I’ve had a pretty good idea of like this is probably going to hit. It’s going to be really interesting to people. It’s going to be pretty big whether it works or not. Hopefully, you enjoy this.
I’m going to start a little bit differently because I’m basically combining 2 different presentations, because that one was really slanted for that particular group. This is actually going to be more for the Z-Health audience.
I’m going to just start off by telling you a couple of my heroes because I believe that everyone needs heroes. If there’s no heroes then there’s really no progress in the world. You got to go, “I want to be that guy.” We kept talking about yesterday Lebron or whatever. Michael Jordan. Give me some heroes, someone that actually made a difference in your life, like I want to be that guy, that gal. Godzilla. Fantastic. Ingemar Stenmark. Wow. I have not heard that name in forever. Say it again.
Male: Ingemar Stenmark.
Dr. Cobb: Does anyone know who he is?
Male: Probably the greatest Giant Slalom skier ever in the world.
Dr. Cobb: I have not heard that name in like 15 years, interesting.
Male: Danny Way.
Dr. Cobb: Okay, awesome. Skateboarder.
Female: Dorothy Hamill.
Dr. Cobb: Dorothy Hamill. I haven’t heard that in a while either. For whatever reason, it doesn’t shock me that you said Dorothy Hamill. Yeah, heroes. Yeah?
Male: Marcus Lutrell.
Dr. Cobb: Marcus Lutrell, beautiful. Lone Survivor, if you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, Marcus, unbelievable survivor, SEAL. If you get the chance to support that movie, please go watch it. See it even if it freaks you out. Some of the money goes to Wounded Warrior Project and Lone Survivor Foundation. What’s that? Great Gama, Indian clubs and wrestler. Who else?
Female: Maya Angelou.
Dr. Cobb: Who?
Female: Maya Angelou.
Dr. Cobb: Maya Angelou, who just passed away last week, an amazing woman. Some really cool stuff about her. I was actually going to read some quotes from at the end of the day maybe. Other heroes?
Male: Peter LoCascio.
Dr. Cobb: Who?
Male: Peter LoCascio.
Dr. Cobb: That is your?
Male: My father.
Dr. Cobb: Awesome. Yep?
Female: Martha Graham.
Dr. Cobb: Martha Graham, dancer, wonderful, amazing dancer. Anybody else? Who?
Female: Pele.
Dr. Cobb: Pele. Nice. You guys are like a seasoned crowd. Not hearing a lot of like recent athletes. Cool. What’s that?
Male: Ronaldo.
Dr. Cobb: Ronaldo, Cristiano. Yeah, Portugal. You got to be that guy. Here’s why I say this. I’m always fascinated by how the arch of someone’s life is often determined by who they idolize, who they look at when they’re a child. I had 3 primary heroes. My dad was one, not because my dad was the greatest most wonderful father ever by any stretch of the imagination, but my dad … One of the worst beatings I ever got from my dad which they’re very few and they weren’t in a mean way … I don’t mind. It was because my brother and I hadn’t done our chores. I remember distinctly when I was 9 years old. My dad was like, “Guys, I hate to do this but I’m going to have to do this because you have to learn something.” What’s that? This is going to hurt? No.
“What you need to learn is that I may never teach you to like work, but I will teach by God to work.” One of the most telling moments in my life. Stuck in my head forever. He told me to work and he exemplified work, hard, hard work. My dad was a self-made millionaire who grew up barely graduated high school. Marks timber for a paper company for about 16 years, ran moonshine in a dry country in the Deep South. This is my family.
One day, went out, with friends to go bowling and have dinner and he had enough money to go bowling and had to borrow money to pay for dinner. He literally was one of those classic guys who was so proud that he said that’s never going to happen to me again. He had read Dale Carnegie and all this other stuff. He went home and he wrote down, “I’m going to make a million dollars by X date or whatever.” He stuck it in his wallet and he read it everyday, and he went on to build like a 65-person hydraulic equipment business to build stuff for the oil rigs, and then a construction company and all this other stuff, which is really amazing to watch in the distance because he was gone all the time.
Like I said, amazingly hard worker, first hero. Second one, a fictional hero. How many of you guys ever read the book Dune? Classic, fantastic, right? Frank Herbert book. Amazing book. When I was 11, I read this book and the main guy in the book like the hero, I was like, “I want to be that guy.” Your heroes don’t have to live on TV. They can live in your brain. They can live in your imagination.
Oh, yeah. The steel suits, yeah. Paul was his name. It was really weird reading about him because they talked about all this training he did. There was this moment whenever he was doing what they call the deep training and he was like learning to move one muscle, in his foot or his hand and I’m like, “Yes.” Imagine having that level of control. He spoke dozens of languages and he we was brilliant in all these things. I was like, “I want to be that guy. I want to be awesome at everything.”
Then I’m 11-whatever years old and I’m going, “Is that possible?” Then my parents actually very cool in a lot of ways, bought me for my 11th or 12th birthday. I can’t remember which it was, but they bought me a coffee table book of Leonardo da Vinci’s work. He became my hero, Leonardo da Vinci, not the Ninja Turtle but the real guy. How many of you guys are familiar with him? What do you know about him?
Jack of all trades, but really was he a jack of all trades or was he like a world class performer in all trades? Think about this guy. Probably, one of the best intellects in the history of the world. He was an artist and I’m like, “I got to be an artist.” I learned to draw by copying his works. He was a painter. He still is one of the most famous painters of all time.
Whenever I was about 28, 29 years old, I was incredibly fed up with the medical system in the United States. I sold my practice and I said I’m going to Italy. I moved to Italy. I lived about 10 minutes from Vinci which is where he was from, and I would go every other weekend to his hometown and I would go in these little museums. If you don’t know all this stuff about him like he designed helicopters, scuba gear like hundreds of years before it was even possible to have the technology to make it. A lot of his designs work. In the couple of the museums there, they’ve actually built life-sized models and you can watch stuff that this guy designed, sitting in a grove, an olive grove. They actually still have his hometown like his house.
I’m like, “I got to go to this guy’s house.” I got to figure out…When you drive up into an orchard, an olive grove and it’s about 20 minutes outside this really small town. It’s up on the top of the hill and you pull up there. The house basically is about the size of this stage. I’m like one of the greatest minds in history of the world started here. It was an example to me that we’re capable of so much more, and I started thinking about what are people capable of from the time I was 10, 11, and 12 years old. Can I write amazing music? Can I sing? Can I play different instruments? Can I speak multiple languages? Can I be an amazing athlete and can I do it all at the same time?
Because most people would tell you that that level of expertise can only be achieved … You can only achieve in so many levels at one … I’m like, “I don’t believe that.” Why would we intentionally limit ourselves? Give yourself permission to be awesome. That was my mindset my whole life.
I ran into a lot of difficulties whenever I was really young, because as I started going into my educational curriculum what I found was I was a good student. It was very easy for me to get good grades, but I was a horrible student because I hate being told there’s only way to accomplish something. How many of you guys had that in math? Right? Like when you need to show your work. No, I don’t. If I have my own way of getting to the answer, then let me.
Now, obviously, I’m not a mathematician because, at some point, you have to learn the rules. You have to learn the rules so you can break them like an artist, right? You can become a mathematics artist. I have friends that are that way. My best friend growing up was a literal genius like literal, 1600 SAT guy when the SAT was still 1600 points. What was really funny about him was he’s also brilliant with literature and language.
He went to Harvey Mudd to study astrophysics. At that time, it was between MIT and Harvey Mudd. Harvey Mudd gave him a full ride. He comes to study astrophysics. Eighteen-year-old kid, I’m calling him on the phone because I was so mad at the educational system by the time I got out of high school. I’m like, “You know what? I don’t even know if I’m going to go to college. This is ridiculous.”
I’m in Oregon. I call him up on the phone. I’m like, “Hey, man. How is it going?” He’s like, “There’s some really smart people here.” I’m like, “Really, dude?” He’s like, “Ah, these people know stuff.” I am. He went on to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics and a Ph.D. in literature and became a literature professor, really interesting guy. He knew math like he was an artist with math. I’m not that guy and I didn’t really want to be that guy.
What I ran into, like I said, was over the course of my life people kept saying this is how the world works when it was evident that that was not the only way the world worked. That makes sense to you? When I got into the body profession this is what I started to see. I saw that we had all these different forms of intervention. We had chiropractic and osteopathy, and physical therapy. We had sports medicine. We had all this different stuff, but it seemed to me that my entire life was made up of people that fell through the cracks in between all those professions.
How many of you guys feel that way? How often have you had the, “Hey, you’re my last hope. I’ve seen everybody.” For whatever reason … I was laughing in my head like, “Really, how many people have you seen?” I’m like, “That’s a lot of people if you’ve seen everybody.” They’re like, “I’ve seen 15, 16 doctors. I’ve been to these therapists. I’ve done this, I’ve done this. I’ve had these things and nothing has worked.” To me, I just considered them crack fallers.
I’ll talk about some of the statistics around all this. A lot of people in our world, a lot more people fall through cracks than even the science or research points at right now because in order to make ourselves feel good and I talk about myself in this too because I’m just as human as everyone else. Whenever I was a young guy in practice when people didn’t come back, my brain from a survival perspective so that I would feel good about myself assume they didn’t come back because I had helped them.
Think about that. There used to be a lot of research bias that way too like they would actually determine the long term outcomes of physical therapy, chiropracty, etc. by “did people come back.” That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard when you stop and think about it. Like I said, to me, when I look at the big wide world out there, what I see are millions and, in fact, billions of people that are slipping through cracks between professions. That’s really what I want to talk to you about.
I’m going to show you a picture. This is actually one of my favorite clients of all time in a strange way. This young lady who is pregnant there in that picture her named was Brendan, or is Brendan. I was teaching in Boston and she was referred in by one of the trainers there. She came in and I was sitting in the middle of a gym waiting for her to come to fill out a paperwork etc. I look up as this girl opens the door. It was one of those like I don’t know if she can make it over here like. kind of stumbly, very, very cautious walk. She was, I don’t know, quite young. She was 5 or 6 years younger than that picture.
She got over and sat, eased down into the chair and we started having a conversation. She had gotten extremely ill, was placed in a hospital, put on IV antibiotics. There are certain antibiotics that killed the vestibular system like it can destroy it completely. The antibiotics destroyed her vestibular system. While she didn’t die from the infection, she couldn’t stand up either. She went through 2 years before I met her of intensive vestibular rehabilitation in, again, one of the best like … I don’t know why everyone always goes to the best. I’ve never been anyone who is like, “I was at kind of a mediocre rehabilitation center. They were just average.” No one ever says that. “I was at the best place.”
She was at the best neuro rehab place, whatever, in Boston for 2 years like regular. She was there 4, 5 days a week and then they finally were like, “You have reached maximal progress. This is it. This is what you got.” She could not walk like if she were to walk into the door here and see that like just different lines in front of her, she could fall over. Like any kind of visual confusion. She couldn’t drive. She could almost not leave her house. Obviously, an incredibly disabling little adventure she had been through.
I saw her 5 times over I think it was about 12 months like a few trips to Boston. I did, honestly with her, what I taught you guys the last few days and maybe like 4 other girls. That’s all. It was interesting because it’s stuff like she’s been going through vestibular rehabilitation. Do they understand that the VOR is important? Yes, but it was the fact was they applied a protocol to her and did not individualize it to her, and it didn’t work for her because they didn’t test it like rehab, high performance. Does that make sense?
Five visits over 12 months. She sent this note because we lost track of her and she sent this note. I know you probably can’t read it up on the screen, but it’s a really simple note. It says, “Hey, Dr. Cobb,” or Eric or whatever, “This is Brendan from Boston. I saw you about 2 years ago. I don’t know if you even remember me, but I made you a gift.” She sent us a gift. It was this really cool like manzanita stick with an abalone shell because she had been at the beach in California and at Yosemite. She got the stick from Yosemite. She got the abalone shell from the beach and she made us a little mural from that, and she sent it. She basically said, “My husband has gotten a job in Alaska. I have a new adventure in my life.”
It was really cool because over the progression that year, she could walk outside. She started riding her bike. She started driving again then she could get on a plane and go see her family. Then they moved to Alaska and then that picture, actually, she wound up getting pregnant, I think, last year. Like 5 times. She sends us notes every 6 months and just says, “Hey, this is what’s going on in my life.” Simple stuff.
Those are the people that I believe we are supposed to be helping. In fact, that’s most people. She was an extreme example but she is a living example of, I think, what we typically see. Let me give you an idea of where we are right now in the life. This is the shape of the talk. Where are we now? Where are we going? What does that mean? And action items. You guys ready? Some numbers to remember. These are some of my favorite numbers ever. I’ll go through these with you.
Medicine, 21, 2, 8, 12, 55. Exercise, 17, 63, 20. Nutrition, 72, 28, 30. Now, write now those numbers probably don’t mean anything to you but they will shortly. What we’re going to do is we’re going to start with medicine, all right? Who is good with numbers here? Like we’re trainers. Rachel is like, “I got this.” Here’s what these numbers represent. If you don’t want to make a bunch of notes, we’ll give you this PowerPoint. If you don’t want to write everything, we’ll just make sure you guys have it.
We’re going to start with medicine and I want to tell what these numbers represent. You’re ready? All right, here we go. Here’s what these numbers represent. If you are a typical American and we’re talking about people around the world that don’t have access to healthcare but if you’re a typical American, you don’t have a doctor on Speed Dial, you’re not rich, whatever. If you get sick and you call your doctor’s office, the average wait time from the time you call to getting an appointment is 21 days.
I’m sick. We’ll see you in 3 weeks. Twenty-one days to get an appointment. On average, when you walk in the door you’ll spend 2 hours in the office. The average appointment visit is 2 hours. Of that 2 hours, you’ll spend 8 minutes with the doctor. Now, here’s where it gets really exciting. In those 8 minutes, the doctor will interrupt you on average every 12-15 seconds. “Tell me what’s wrong.” “Well, I’ve got this thing on my-” “Okay.” Every 12 seconds, you will be interrupted during that 8-minute conversation. If you are sick, meaning you have cardiovascular disease, diabetes, a chronic health condition you’ll spend on average 1.6 hours with a physician per year.
Now, before I go any further, I’m going to ask this question again. How many of you have children? A lot of you have children. How many of you have seen children? Everyone has seen children. Excellent, okay. Now, you realize that children need to know stuff. Correct? Imagine as a parent if you woke up tomorrow morning and someone walked up and said, “You know what? You got 1.6 hours to prepare your child for the year. You have to cover everything, how to stay safe, how to stay healthy, what foods to eat, how to exercise.”
How many of you would go, “Awesome, I got it?” I’ll give him an outline, 1.6 hours. Understand this really clearly. The medical system is not a health system. Now, here’s what’s even more exciting. After all of this, the diagnostic accuracy is that. Standard first visit diagnostic accuracy in medical practice is 55%. I get sick. It takes me 3 weeks to get in there. I spent 2 hours sitting around going, “I have other things to do. I’m going to bill you for my time.” You spend 8 minutes being interrupted every 12 seconds by a physician. You may see him 1.6 hours, but if we end it right there the likelihood of them getting it right, 55%. That’s the current state of the art.
Everyone with me on that? Okay. Now, understand. This is not to bash medicine because I’m going to bash everybody. I’m telling you where we currently are. Like I said, this is State of the Union. Here’s what is interesting to me. Because the time that doctors are able to spend with patients is dropping and dropping, and dropping, these are some of the new rules in medicine. This is stuff that’s actually being taught to residents, medical school and residents.
Number 1: Don’t tell patients your name. Why would you not want someone to know your name? What’s that? In case you screw up, okay. Yeah. Oh, it’s interesting. You guys are also in accountability. They could still track you down though. The main reason you don’t tell them your name is so they don’t talk to you. It’s de-personalized. I don’t know who you are. Why would I ask you a question? I don’t even know your name.
Number 2: Don’t sit down. If you sit down, what happens? We might actually talk, right? How many of guys have seen a doctor recently? You walk in they don’t even look at you. “Hey, how are you doing?” and they stand at their standup desk and they don’t … Oh, number 3. Sorry. I forgot about this one. If their family member is in the room, don’t interact with them. Why? Because what are family members going to do? They’re going to ask more questions.
Number 4: Make decisions based on scanning the electronic records and the electronic data. This is really important because rather than discussing it with a patient, you just go, “You know what? This is what your tests say. This is the standard protocol. This is what you need.” Saves time. Saves you having to answer questions.
Number 5, bizarre to me, don’t touch them. Physical exam takes too long. What? This is where we’ve gotten to the point where we are so reliant on technology and blood work, etc. that the art of physical exam has gone away, and touching people apparently takes too much time. These are some of the new rules and I found that incredible fascinating when I started reading about this.
Hopefully, number 1, that gives you a little bit more insight into why people want to see you, and why probably as opposed to everything that you were ever taught or ever considered … It’s been so interesting to me being in the … Especially training profession for like 15 or 17 years now. Trainers are front line providers whether they want to be or not because the entire culture has made them be that.
You hear all these people like, “Ah, you’re a trainer. You can’t talk to people about pain.” Well, you’re not talking to them. Who’s going to? Seriously. Now, this is not to step off your bounds or create liability, or anything, but I’m saying this is the current State of the Union. This is where people are at.
All right, now, here’s where it gets even more scary. These are statistics about memory and this is actually from medical research. As soon as you give people information like a doctor is talking to a patient and they’re like, “Hey, this is what you have,” they forget immediately between 40 and 80% of what is said to them.
Interesting enough, one of the studies I was looking at to prepare for this talk, they said, “And generally, if they remember anything, what they remember, half of it is wrong. The stuff that they do remember they usually don’t remember the most important thing.” They may hear something like you have colon cancer and osteopenia, and something else. They’ll go home and someone will say, “So what’s wrong with you?” They go, “I think my bones are thinning.” You missed the cancer? Like they will literally forget the most important diagnosis.
I did a little graph for you. Imagine this. I’m sick. I have cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or something else. I have 96 minutes per year that I will see my doctor. I will forget 80% of what they say immediately, 50% of what I remember will be incorrect, which means by the end of the year I have 9.6 minutes of relevant information to keep me healthy and whole.
We started this talk with where you get 1.6 hours with your children. I have now reduced it to less than 10 minutes. You have 10 minutes to prepare your child for the year. Does this seem strange to anybody else? Seriously. Does it like strike you as “That explains a lot?” Hopefully, it does. Now, whenever I was doing this presentation, there were a bunch of doctors in the room and they’re like, kind of. Everyone was like, we’re so busy. We don’t have time. You can’t not have time. It is not okay. We have to figure that out.
This is medicine. I said I’m going to pick on medicine and I could apply the same stuff to osteopathy, chiropracty, and physical therapy. Now, some of the hands-on profession spend a little bit more time, but on average it’s still way lower than you would think. I’m going to get into why some of this stuff is important as far as third party payers, etc. in a minute.
Now, let’s talk about exercise. This is stuff that I started you guys off with. You will already be familiar with this because you’ve been in Essentials. In almost research studies around exercise, this is what we see. We have 3 groups of people and the groups of people are called Super, Normo, and Non. Basically, what that means is if I test anything in a group people and I have them do the same workout program, I’m going to have the top set who are the super freaks. How many of you guys have friends, family, whatever? Super freaks, right? Whatever they do like they breathe hard, poof. “What did you do for your pecs?” “I took 2 extra breaths.” Bang! Right? Just there, that guy.
Do you guys know who Adrian Peterson is? Yes or no? Adrian Peterson is a running back in NFL. He rehabilitated himself after a severe ACL. He did the ACL repair. The next year, he came back and was a beast. I actually was reading an interview with him not too long ago and he’s like, “I have to admit like I got awesome genetics.” He’s like, “My aunts and uncles still have 6 packs.” I’m like, “That’s funny dude.”
There are people that seem to, no matter what we do to them they just go, “Ha-ha. I’m better than you.” They just get awesome responses. This is across the board in a robot capacity, in power generation, in hypertrophy. We have those people and those are the people that are on the covers of all the magazines. Those are the ones that everyone goes, “I want to be that guy.” When we read about that guy, we go, “How does that guy train?” You go, “I’m going to do that guy’s training session.” No, you’re not. You’re not going to survive that guy’s training session.
My question is, what about everyone else? About 63% of people are Normo-Responders and Normo-Responders are people that get a little bit better. Remember when I said yesterday that we have an entire profession that says there’s only 1 system involved in movement, the proprioceptor system. I gave you that little mathematical equation. If you only can improve someone 5% proprioceptively, that’s those people. They’re only going to get so good.
Then we have these people, the Non-Responders. Now, this freaks people out when these research studies started coming out. Basically, one of the first studies was a big one done in Finland, 272 people, a 16 or 17-week training program. Actually, it was combined strength and cardio program. 272 people, that’s a lot of people. They then followed them for 17 weeks. At the end of the study, about 20% at the bottom not only did not progress at all they actually got weaker and their cardiovascular fitness decreased.
Now, I actually have another slide here. This is from a recent strength training study. All right, 16 weeks of training 3 hours a week, 48 hours of training time. That’s a total time investment. I actually put the numbers in here and I just an arbitrary starting point. Think about your Super-Responders. Over 48 hours of training time, they go from a 200-pound bench press to a 316-pound bench press. How many of you would like that like? “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, I am awesome.”
Then you’ve got the Normo-Responders. For 48 hours of work, they went from 200 to 234 pounds. They would be like, “Eh, okay. I’m making a little progress. Yeah, this is hard. My motivation lasts for another 12 months, I’ll beat 250 pounds. Maybe.” Then you’ve got these guys down here who are like, “I want a refund.” After the end of 16 weeks of training, they are like, “I started the 200 pounds and I’m at 184. What did you do to me?”
This is, again, the State of the Union. In fact, most of the people that are the Super-Responders, we don’t train because they’re like, “Nah, don’t really need it. I’ll do a couple push-ups.” Who do we train? Who comes to us? Normals and nons and in fact, probably, more nons than anyone else, right? The people that you’ve been training for 3 years and they’re like, I’m eventually … It’s like it’s going to kick in one day.
We have a really broken fitness system because right now what’s happening is … Let me go about through nutrition then I’ll get into what’s happening. Now, in nutrition research we see virtually the same thing. I give somebody some vitamin B or you give them some creatine, or you give them whatever. In almost every study, what you’re going to see is about 65% of people get some kind of measurable response and everyone else is like, eh, nothing.
How many of you are like you know you’re like a nutritional Non-Responders a lot of times? You’ve tried supplements. You’ve tried vitamins. You’re like I got nothing. That’s really hard because I always tell people it’s super hard to sell prevention, because it’s super hard to prove. It’s really, really hard to prove prevention like, “Really? I’m taking these vitamins. How do I know they’re working?” “You’re still alive.” I’m going to blame it on the vitamins, right? That’s how I prove it.
The other thing is what Cathy brought up, about 30% of the time, a really nice placebo response. I don’t know what that older guy was taking, but I’m going to try some. Maybe they’re that good, but the likelihood is as soon as it touches you feel better. That’s your brain. Medicine, therapy, exercise, whatever. Can everyone understand that what I’m showing you is that the gap like the cracks are way wider than we think? People are falling through not small cracks but huge ones all over the map.
Now, here’s what’s happening the big wide world and this is why I’m talking about this with you guys. Right now, science is trying to be very precise to label people as Non-Responders and they’re doing it really, really quickly. I talked about this on day 1. I find it incredibly frustrating and incredibly insulting to go, “Oh, yeah. They’re a genetic Non-Responder, a genetic Non-Responder to exercise.”
We are so far from being able to make that determination, but that’s what they’re trying to do. This has been written in the New York Times. It’s showing up … The UK right now is really big on it. I don’t know why but they’re talking about it all over the UK. People are literally going and getting a genetic test to go, “I think I’m that guy.” “I think I’m that girl.” “I think I am a genetic non-responder to exercise.” If we’re not careful, children will be DNA tested and they will be told what? “You know what? You’re doomed to be weak and fat. There’s nothing that you can do.”
Now, people that are really in the know about genetics are going, “No, no, it doesn’t work that way.” The big wide world is hearing about all this, so we have to realize that it’s coming. Yeah. Well, if there’s money involved, right? Now, here’s the thing that I want you to understand and this goes into the MED, the stuff that we’ve already talked about. The point that we’ve always made in Z-Health is that everyone responds. Just a lot of time they don’t respond the way we want them to.
Earlier, we said we have high performance rehab drills. Every drill that we’ve done so far you should be okay with. Moving your head and eyes, and stuff shouldn’t break you, but some people it does. It doesn’t mean that you’re genetically broken, but it does mean that a basic protocol plan or whatever is not going to work for you because it may require you to do things that are not good for you. You guys with me so far?
Let’s give another example. We talked a little bit about strength training. I’m going to give you the example of my Olympic lifter with a wrist issue. Think about all the people on gyms across the country that may simply be a Non-Responder because they have a lousy hand and wrist mobility. Every single thing that they do in a gym requires them to do what? Use their hands. Even if they’re like in an old school Nautilus Gym and they’re doing leg presses, what are they doing? They’re still gripping the handles so they have something to push against.
Is it possible that something that seemingly innocuous may turn you from a Super-Responder to a Non-Responder? My contention is yes. We have to be able to identify those people. These are a couple slides of things you’ve already heard, but there’s no such thing as a miss, only unintended targets. Whenever I give someone an exercise, if it makes them weaker, is it the exercise’s fault or is it my fault? It’s my fault for not assessing them. Does everyone understand that?
If I give you drills exercise, drugs, nutrients, whatever that make you worse, that is an unintended consequence, unintended target. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t effective. Does everyone understand that? It did something. It just didn’t do what you want.
Whenever I was talking to this group at CHS, I actually spent some time on the minimal effective dose. Is everyone comfortable with this idea that we have to find the right dose of the right drug at the right time, for the right person for it to really have the effect? Is exercise a drug? Is movement a drug? Yes. Is eye movement? Everything we’ve talked about, you can actually frame it from that perspective and go, “I need to find the right dose for you. I got to find the right medicine. I got to find the right dose.”
This is super important. Now, here’s what’s really cool. I’ve given you current State of the Union, and some of you right now I can see it in your faces like there’s some consternation like, “Wow. We have some big issues” and we do. We don’t have just some big issues. We got huge issues.
Right now, the projection is that by 2025, 75 or 80% of the United States population will be obese, not overweight, obese. That is an enormous number of people. I’m not a big political guy and I don’t get into, oh, it’s going to cause our healthcare but it’s going to be a problem. If there is not a huge change or huge movement and right now, medicine is ill equipped and untrained to do it.
Think about this. If there was a movement that said, “You know what? Doctors have to begin spending 45 minutes to an hour with every patient to actually assess them, to teach them.” Because a doctor actually originally was supposed to be what? A teacher, an educator.
If we force that, what would happen? Our entire world will ground to a halt. We already are lacking in primary care physicians already. That’s one of the reasons that they were trying to work so hard. Understand. Like I said, I’m not bashing any profession or because all the doctors that I know and I know hundreds of them, are to a man and woman fantastic human beings. They care deeply about what they’re doing. This is not in accusation against any individual. It is “Here’s where we are.”
We have to get people, beginning to understand more and more about the minimum effective dose, not just in medicine but in everything. This is where we’re going. The way that I phrase this, I’m going to tell you another little story about me, not because it’s cool but because it’s something that was said to me.
You can see that picture right there? I don’t know if you can see what that is, but that’s a leg kicking open a door. When I was about 20 years old, I don’t know, 20, 21, something like that. I was living in Portland, Oregon. I was in college and a young lady was renting a room from me for the summer in my apartment. She was getting married at the end of the summer. She was renting a room. I was already asleep and she came home at 1:00 in the morning from her fiancée’s houses.
She comes into my bedroom door. She goes dit, dit, dit, dit, dit. I’m like, “Yeah. What?” She’s like, “I got some guys following me home, I think.” All right, so I get up, go outside, walk around, look out the windows. Go outside. Check around the house or the apartment. I’m like, “I think everything is fine. I don’t see anybody.” I go back to bed. I go back in. I go to bed. About 5 minutes later, I’m dead asleep because I had been training hard that day, I hear boom! Someone kicks my front door.
First kick wakes me up. I’m like boof. Second kick because I had big heavy fire door on. By the time the second kick rolls around, I roll out of my bed. I’ve been doing some stick training or later that day. I grabbed a stick and start running at my hallway. I had this really, really long skinny apartment. It’s like a bowling alley, the hallway. I start running up the hallway. I get to the front door entry way on the third kick the door slams open. Three guys come in and we’re in like a little apartment hallway. It’s about 10 feet long, and it’s enclosed on both sides. There’s me and them and a stick and they left.
It worked out in an extremely fast and violent way, but here’s why I tell you the story. I’m there. I’m just like shaking. Huge adrenaline dump afterwards. Go back to my room because I can’t close the door. I can’t lock it. Slam something in front of it because I’m like, I don’t know if they’re coming back. One of them wasn’t. I knew that. I don’t know if the other ones were going to get something out of their car.
I slam something in front of the door, run by to my room, load a handgun, go back and I was sitting there just vibrating, sweating. Call the cops. Cops show up. Sitting there trying to breathe, trying to breathe calm things down and they come in like, “Put the gun away.” Fine, whatever.
I still remember this vividly like one of the cops is looking at the door and he’s like, “Yep. It looks like someone kicked it.” Yeah, but here’s the telling part, I’m sitting there and I’m freaked out trying to calm down and one of the cops looks at me and he goes, “So who did you piss off?” I went, “What do you mean?” He says like, “Well, you must have done something.” I went, no, and I tell him stories like come on, man. Seriously? There are like 3000 cops in Portland. No one is kicking their doors in tonight. He turns around and leaves. In my head, I was like, “Wow.”
What I wrote up there is that. Statistics only matter when it’s not happening to you. It’s a million and one odds. If it’s you, it’s one to one. I didn’t do anything to deserve that one. There’s other stuff in my life. Okay. That’s all on me, I get it. That one, nothing to do with me. He assumed a lot of stuff about me, about my life, about everything.
The reason I tell that story is that you right now are the only number really that matters to you. That’s true across the board for your clients as well. No one wants to be a statistic. Correct? Like, “Ah, man. I was the one in a million.” Now, if it was a lottery. Cool. If most of the stuff that we hear odds about, not cool. I don’t want to be that person. Do you want your family members to be a statistic? Do you want your clients to be a statistic?
What we’re coming to as a culture is that last slide. I believe that our culture is slowly going to be taught that statistics don’t matter as much. It’s going to become more about us. I’m going to show you why that’s coming, but let me give you a classic example. This is just a little case study which is about a medication called Nortriptyline. Do you guys know what Nortriptyline is? It’s an anti-depressant. If you read this, 3 women, same height, weight, age and racial background are depressed and they go to the doctor.
Everyone got that? Remember that. Height, weight, age and ethnicity. They all go to the doctor. They’re all prescribed 100 mg of nortriptyline. With me? Here’s what happens. Just a little bit later you go back, you do some blood work on those 3 women, same height, same age, weight, race and what you find in their blood stream is this. You’ve got 1 woman who’s had a really bad reaction. She got super depressed and suicidal or vomiting or whatever. If you do blood work on her you may find 95 mg Nortriptyline in her blood stream.
Then you’ve got this one right here, it’s like, “Ah, I notice nothing, still depressed, still don’t feel good.” Do blood work on her she’s got 5 mg Nortriptyline in her blood stream. This one over here is like, “Ah, you know what this seems to be working” she’s got about 50.
Now, why? What’s that? Minimal effective dose. This one right here has almost no enzymes in her liver to detoxify the pathways for that medication. Rather than having her liver do what it’s supposed to do and go, “You know what? This is partially poison, we need to get this out of you so that you have the appropriate amount in your blood stream” she gets overdosed. This one right here, what about her? She’s got massive amounts of detoxification enzymes. It gets in there and her liver is like, “No, this doesn’t belong here” and it just wipes it out. This one right here is average, a normal responder.
Does everyone get this? This is every drug. This is every exercise. This is everything just like this. Now, what’s coming and this is the section where I said it’s coming. I’m going to talk about some cool stuff and like I said I’ll start wrapping this into why I think this is so important for you to know in this profession.
This year in 2014, January was the announcement of the first $1000 genome, all right. Now are you guys familiar with the Human Genome Project? Right? Kind of like proprioception? Like I’ve heard that word, Human Genome Project, yes, what is that about? It’s about human genome, yeah.
The Human Genome Project actually the concept really was presented in 1984. It got funding in 1990. The original funding for the first human genome like mapping 1 was $3 billion. It started in 1990 and I believe that it completed in 2000 … I can’t remember, 2004? Nope. Actually it was 2003, 2004 because by the time we got to getting one genome mapped the cost of mapping it had dropped to about a quarter million dollars.
Ten years ago to get your genome sequenced you’d have to pony up a quarter mill and they’d do all this kind of cool stuff. As of January of this year it now cost actually less than $1000 to do human genome. It costs about $967 which is crazy.
Now the problem is Illumina Systems are the people that built the sequencers so it’s an array of sequencers. They can do 5 genomes a day, 5 genomes a day at a cost of $1000 each. You’re going, “All right, that’s quite a lot of money” until you learn that the setup cost 100 million. If you want to put one in your gym go for it, but right now they got them in MIT, they got them at UCLA, Stanford I think has one. Like Illumina was planning to sell 9 arrays this year but as a result of those 9 arrays by the end of 2014 we’re going to go from having just a few thousand genome sequenced to probably over 100,000.
There’s actually a guy who was raising the government to do the first sequence. He was not involved in the Human Genome Project. He went off to do his own thing from a privatized perspective. They now have this equipment as well. They are sequencing not only genomes but they’re sequencing like Joe comes to see me, they go, “All right, we’re going to do your genome and your microbiome.” They’re taking all the gut bacteria and sequencing that at the same time.
Here’s what’s going to happen with all this stuff. This is going to make it in the news. It’s going to happen over the next 2 or 3 years. People are going to start saying, “Hey, if you do my DNA testing can you be more specific about what I need?” Because that’s what they’re going to be hearing. Right now we actually do know some stuff. This is mainly being applied right now in cancer research and cancer treatment.
There are certain genes that if you have them you need way less chemotherapy. That’s a great amazing thing to know, amazing thing to know but this is going to boil down. It’s going to start showing up more and more and more and people are going to start to say, “Before you give me medicine, could you do a little DNA test to make sure that I’ll respond to it” which I think is amazing. I think it’s awesome that it’s coming but genes are not the end answer which I’m getting to.
Now, there are some other tech that’s going to be super disruptive, not just to medicine but to personal training and everything else, nutrition if you’re a nutritionist, etc. Let me talk about these.
How many guys are familiar with 3D printing? You guys heard of this before? What does a 3D printer do? It’s one the most beautiful named things ever. It prints 3D stuff. They’re making printers that can make things. This is a picture of what? A mandible, right? That’s actually a mandible that was printed on a printer and implanted on someone. They just recently printed an organ.
Because these printers you can put any base level material in them and then put in the schematics and they go, “I’ll print it.” It’s been in the news. People are printing guns and printing … I was actually talking to a guy who has a worldwide vision for improving housing around the world. They are working on 3D printing houses. Yeah, I mean the technology that’s emerging is unbelievable. It’s crazy.
Imagine this and I’m telling you, we’ve got physical therapists and personal trainers in here, in the next 5 years, some of your clients are going to walk in and will go, “You know what? I’m having some foot pain. I’m going to go down to the foot shoe store because they’ve got this really cool 3D printer thing and I stand on this disk and it actually measures my foot and then they print me a shoe lift or an orthotic right there.” It’s coming. Or they’re going to say they’re going to 3D print braces, they’re going to 3D print cast. All this stuff is coming.
Understand the perception that people are going to have of that. What is the perception going to be? It is a fix because why? Because it’s for me. It’s taking my stuff. It is going to be made exactly for me to my specifications. This is not years away. This is not 15, 20 years, this is within the next 4, 5 years easily. Their supplements are going to come to them that way.
The nutritionists right now, again, I’m speaking to some of them about this and actually, after I did this talk one of them walked up to me and was like, “I have a great friend, this computer guy, we called him after your talk” literally as soon as my talk was done. We said, “Go buy a 3D printer and start figuring out how we’re going to 3D print supplements for people meaning they’ll be able to go, “Here’s your blood work. Here’s this. Here’s that. You need 50 grams of folic acid.” 50 grams? You don’t need 50 grams of folate. You may need it. Whatever their nutrients are and in the printer you’ll be able to dial that in and it will make the supplement for them and it can even put their name on it and say “At 2 am” wake up in the middle of the night and take it. This is all coming.
You’re going to get pharmaceuticals with your name on them and with the time of day you’re supposed to take them. All this stuff is emerging.
Now, this thing right here is unbelievable. How many of you guys remember Star Trek? There are a few Trekkies. Okay, so what was the Tricorder? It was a diagnostic tool, right? Bones would run this thing over you and it would go, “This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. You’ve got that alien parasite eating through you” or whatever.
How many of you guys ever heard of the X Prize? X Prize Foundation? Do you know what that is? It was started by a guy named Peter Diamandis, Peter who we’ve done some classes with, he’s an interesting guy. Peter started the X Prize because basically he wanted to fund private space flight. Makes sense? He started a contest. He got $120 million worth of research done for a $10 million prize. It’s a brilliant concept. He basically goes, “If you win, you get 10 million bucks.”
People pour millions and millions of dollars into these things of their own money because they want to be the group that wins. There are 27 groups around the world right now I believe that have accepted the Tricorder X Prize. I believe this is a 5 or $10 million prize. It uses smart phone technology and basically the goal is to have a smart phone that can take your blood that you can do a saliva sample and has access to massive medical databases and it will basically diagnose you, tell you what drugs to take and function as your personal physician.
The reason that they want this? Anyone know? The continent of Africa. The continent of Africa. There are hundreds upon hundreds of millions of smartphones in Africa. They want to use the phones of doctors because they don’t have enough doctors. There will actually be more people online, more devices online in the next 10 years than there are people in the population. They’re going to completely bypass traditional medicine in a couple of different areas in the world simply by using this. They will have a working model of this by the end of the year. The first test models are due I think in the next 6 months.
Think about that. Think about your clients 5 years from now being able to be at home and go, “Hey, my blood sugar after I ate that apple was 117.” What does that mean? Is that crazy? The reason I’m doing this talk for you is this is not the next millennium. This is coming in the next few years. If your business is not thinking forward, if you’re not planning to lead the charge on personalization, to know that it’s coming, to actually have plans in place to go as this technology emerges, “Here’s how we’re going to use it in our business” you’re going to be left behind by people who understand it better, full stop.
How many of you are doing movement analysis utilizing video and things with your clients? If you’re not, learn how. There’s an app you can put on your iPhone. It costs $4.99. It does more than a $250,000 unit did 15 years ago. There are so many ways to start seeming really technologically advanced and you need to be using them because people will go, “That’s what I want.” I want to know how this works on me for me.” Okay?
The last one I want to talk about as far as Disruptive Technologies IBM’s Watson. How many of you guys have heard of Watson? What did Watson do? What did he get famous for? Watson is a supercomputer by the way. What did he do? Jeopardy. Watson won Jeopardy. They took the 2 best Jeopardy players of all time and were like, “All right, we’re going to challenge this computer.” To train Watson they said, “We’re going to give Watson general knowledge of” what was it? I forget exactly how they phrased it but it’s hilariously phrased.
It’s basically, “We’re going to give him a basic understanding of all general human knowledge.” That’s literally how they supposedly trained Watson. He won Jeopardy. He beat these guys. Well, Watson is now in medical school. Guess what they’re doing. They believe that in the next … He’s all ready working with MD Anderson, cancer centers and a couple of others though cancer is the big focus right now.
Basically Watson is a supercomputer that can learn. It’s hard to teach him. You’ve got to figure out how he learns but right now they’re getting the medical thing figured out. What they believe is in the next 2 years Watson will be a platform that can be rented. Basically hospitals around the world can go, “I need 12 minutes on Watson.” They plug in all these patients with all these problems and all these labs and statistics and they go, “Watson, what’s wrong with them?” Eventually, doctors in their offices will be able to access Watson from their smartphone.
Why? Why? What was the diagnostic accuracy that I said we get right now? 55%. They believe that Watson, because he’ll have no emotion, no bias and access to all medical knowledge of mankind will be able to go, “Have you considered these things?” Very fascinating to me.
If you are not capable of talking about this level of personalization it’s going to cost you. We have some friends that talk about the personal training industry. They say, “You know what, we think the personal training industry on the whole is dying.” I can make a case that technology will be incredibly disruptive to the personal training industry. There are a couple of franchises out there right now by the way if you don’t know about them that have no people in them. There’s a desk attendant.
The franchise, you walk in, they go, “Hey, welcome to whatever it is. Here’s your jump drive.” The jump drive you plug it into the machines, the machines test you. At the end of it the machines give you your work out. You get done. Every time you come in, you pick up your jump drive and go machine to machine, you plug it in it tells you what exercises to do, how many reps to do and there’s no quality or anything about it, but it does all that stuff. Then what it does is all that is uploaded to a cloud based system so at the end of the month you get a report showing you how much weight you lifted. I lifted 17 tons this month. People what? They love it because they’re like, “Look what I just did and I didn’t have to talk to anybody.”
It’s horrible. I mean seriously at a base level it’s horrible from my perspective because it’s removing from it the stuff that we can provide. I do want you to realize that those kind of things are coming. We need to be awesome at making ourselves indispensable. The reason that I say that this whole personal training industry idea is dying I go, “That’s fine because Z-Health is not personal training. It’s a new profession.”
Z-Health is a crack filler. Does that make sense? Where people are falling through in personal training, where people are falling through in medicine, people are falling through in therapy or chiropractic that’s what we’re awesome at. Nothing that I’ve seen so far in technology replaces what we do.
Now, 20 years from now maybe we’ll have some amazing tools that will allow us to do it better but you make yourself indispensable by being better than everyone. Can I say that anymore clearly? Yes or no? Be better.
All right. There is my 10 year forecast. It’s not going to be 5. I don’t think it’s going to disseminate that quickly but I can almost guarantee you 10 years from now personalization of medicine, nutrition, exercise will be the expectation not the exception. People are going to go, “Is this for me? Is this designed for me? Will this make me better?” If you start that now, if you become that person you have a decade to prep. You have a decade to lead this charge. Ultimately, ethically it’s where we need to be going anyway.
What does this mean for us? The question I asked at this summit that I did was this really simple one, “What would happen to your business and your life if you made it your purpose to turn yourself and everyone you meet into a super responder?” How’s that as a challenge? But that’s been my life’s challenge. I want to take people who are broken and make them super.
The reason that we do all this cool neuro stuff like work with brains, work with eyes, work with the vestibular system is I’m constantly trying to seek out broken bits and pieces of human physiology to go, “If we fix this, if we combine these things together, will that make a non-responder a super responder?” Sometimes does it? The answer is yes. I’m a walking talking example. Arthrokinetic reflex boy right here.
Remember I told you about my early horrible posture etc. I told you I was really small even though I trained really hard. When I finally began figuring out the neural deficits that I was experiencing in fixing them my strength training results skyrocketed. I gained like almost 40 lbs in 9 months. That was really cool for me. I went from being this little letch and I went ah. And I made that sound, “Ah.”
How can we turn people into Super-Responders? Well, the whole Z-Health thing is about doing that. Think that through, like I said, what would your business and life be like if that was the goal? That was clearly stated to everyone that you worked with and everyone that you meet. I’m not interested in making you just a little bit in better shape or a little bit leaner, I want all of my clients to be awesome.
How many referrals would you get? I mean seriously. What’s so weird to me is I meet so many people in these industries and they don’t realize that they are training their business cards. Whoever walks through your door and then walks out they’re representative of your work. Are they awesome? Do people look at them and go, “I want to be that guy.” Make heroes out of your clients. If you figure out how to do that your business will never suffer. Your business will grow and grow and grow and then you’ll have to hire other people to make more heroes. I think that would be a cool world to live in.
Here’s what I’d say are the 2 elements of super-response. Number one, we have to personalize everything. You need to start considering this for yourself, in your exercise programs, your nutrition, you need to consider it for your families. Personalized MED thought processes around everything. How many times in a day do you need vision drills? I don’t know. You may need 3 times a day. You may need 8 times a day. You may need it for 45 seconds. You may need it for 3 seconds. We’ve got to figure that out. If I give you the wrong dosage, guess what, it might break you.
So we’ve got to figure that stuff out but then also highly incredibly important is this idea of behavior change. The thing I want you to consider, if you’re going to really take on this challenge of, “Hey, I’m going to make Super-Responders out of everybody including me” super-response starts with behaviors. It has to.
How many of you realize that 30 to 40% of your clients if you did this, and you could even try this just as a test. Come in on Monday morning and go, “Joe, guess what. I have found the coolest supplement ever. Now, here’s the deal with it. I’m going to give you the supplement. You have to take it precisely at 10:02 in the morning. If you take it at 10:02 in the morning for the next 6 months you will have the body of your dreams. You will lose all the excess weight, whatever, you’ll be lean, you’ll be ripped, you’ll gain 100% strength.” Do you know that probably 30 to 40% of your clients won’t do it? Couldn’t do it, like couldn’t make it happen. Literally this, click, can’t do it. Can’t do it at 10:02. Is that strange to you?
Some of you are like, “No, that’s me. My life is busy. It’s chaotic.” I’m not picking on them. I’m saying that we can have the very best stuff to give people but if we don’t start by changing their behavior so that they can enact the very best stuff it doesn’t matter at all.
Everyone in health care is in the behavior change business. Now, here’s what I would love to see happen. I am so tired of people going, “Do this, you’ll have the body of your dreams in 6 weeks.” Everything in the health and fitness world is about results first. Here’s what we’re going to give you, I’m telling you in the next 10 years people are going to recognize that that no longer works. What they’re going to say is, “Tell me about your coaching program. How are you going to walk me down the garden path? How are you going to show me how to do this?”
My recommendation is begin considering this idea that you promise coaching behavior change first because deep inside all of your clients know that they’re horrible at changing their habits. They already know that. Wouldn’t it be cool to go, “Here’s how we’re going to make you more fit. For the first 3 months we don’t keep track of anything other than you showing up. We celebrate you showing up. [Inaudible 01:04:30] expectation, it’s a celebration because you have done something profound. You have made a new choice. We don’t even start thinking about results for however long.”
If you remember this little phrase I think it will help you tremendously, “Behavior first. It is exponentially harder to do something than nothing.” I love that thought. It is so hard to change. It is exponentially harder to change. If we give people guidance and coaching to change something we’re setting the stage for them to become Super-Responders.
Now, with that in mind, I want you to write down one name, it’s not in the PowerPoint so write this down. One of my favorite guys and I talk about him in my blog regularly his name is James Clear, C-L-E-A-R. James is one of the very best bloggers right now on habit and behavior change. He’s synthesizing the work of Charles Duhigg and Kelly McGonigal and all these kind of habit behavior change people who are so great. His writing is clear. It’s concise. It’s easily digestible.
One of the things that I love about him is he’s very, very clear on this whole idea that when we’re helping people change their habits we help them change by telling them what to pay attention to. Most of your clients would have no idea to celebrate showing up for a workout unless you tell them. If you’re a behavior change person you go, “You know what? You’ve accomplished the most important task, you got here.” Everyone wants to come and go, “What are my numbers?” “Your numbers are awesome because you got here.”
Now, if you want to be elite, we have to progress beyond that but that’s the starting point across the board. Number 2, after we’ve coached their behavior and their attention then we start to personalize the stuff. Now, here’s the big thing I want you to take away from this. I’ve been talking about DNA sequencing and human genome, etc. One of my favorite quotes come from one of the guys that was deeply involved, actually one of the founders of the Human Genome Project, and he says, “DNA is not” anyone know the finish? Destiny. DNA is not destiny.
There are a lot of people out there that say that your genes probably account for 12 to 17% of who you’re ever going to become. Institute for Functional Medicine which is a big international group that deals a lot with nutrition etc. they’ve got a great program coming out next month I believe and it’s on … Actually one of the guys that founded the field of epigenetics.
Do you guys know what epigenetics is? What is it? Okay. Interesting. Yeah, that’s probably the easiest way to explain it. The environmental aspects of what your DNA produces. It’s simple. You may have the DNA for diabetes but if you make great lifestyle choices it never turns on. Epigenetics is a beautifully cool field because it basically says you have way more control over who you’ll eventually become than a lot of people would like for you to think.
Whenever I think about Super-Responders, Normo-Responders, Non-Responders what do I hear in my head? DNA is not destiny. 12 to 17% everything else is choice. I love that idea. Keep that in mind as we go forward.
Here we go. Action Items. Practical Takeaways. If you have your self or family members have health issues find doctors or therapists or trainers who will personalize everything for them. For yourself if you want to be better, you need a coach that thinks this way. I’m always fascinated by the fact that so many health and fitness coaches never get someone to train them. You would look at all of your own clients and go, “You are so bad you can’t possibly train yourself.”
We all know that about ourselves. We probably are good, we have decent body awareness, etc., but if we’re not coaching ourselves with a video camera … Do we still use those John, video cameras? Phones. If you don’t coach yourself with your phone or some kind of video recording device the likelihood of you screwing stuff up is really high because when you’re in it you don’t feel it, right? Your own nutrition, your own training program, is someone evaluating your eyes? Are you getting coaching? If not, consider it. You need it to be personalized for you.
Number 2, whatever size business you have you need to stay abreast of emerging research. Now, there’s a lot of different ways to do that. If you stay involved with us, that’s what I do for a living. I look at what’s coming and I go, “Here’s a cool app, try using it.” I am in communication with probably 16 different quantified self groups that are making apps for posture, to work on strength training, to work on everything. I’m constantly buying these things and talking to developers and going, “Could you do this with it? Could it do this?” You need to stay, like I said, aware these thing are coming. If you want to do stuff to set your business apart, utilize it.
The idea that someone would come to you, “Okay, you’re a typical trainer” you go, “No, no, no. We’re going to use your phone. We’re going to look at every single lift that you do so we make sure it’s awesome.” Some people go, “Wow, this person really knows what they’re doing.” There’s tons of different things that are coming.
Number 3 build real coaching into your sales models. However you’re doing your business I would love to see you emphasize the coaching aspect of it because guess what, even though it’s not generally culturally known yet intuitively people know that not everything works for everyone. They know it. How many of your clients have failed exercise programs and failed diets before? All of them. What do they intuitively know? If it’s not different, if it doesn’t change, it’s not going to work.
I think there is a huge potential to differentiate yourself in any industry right now by going, “Our entire focus on building a personalized program that encompasses everything about you, how you see, how you hear, how you balance, how you eat, how you think.” Build that into your models. Whenever you start talking about coaching this is also super important, the behavior first model, think about behavior first results second.
These last 2 I think are just really … These are things that I want to see happen and our business is built on these. Z-Health is built on emphasizing the hope of real, lasting permanent change when things are designed for you. That’s our whole business in a nutshell.
Finally, I’m really big on what? Self reliance. I want people to learn more. This takes me back to the beginning where I said I’m really interested in heroes. I’m really interested in making people aspire to new things. When you embrace that concept it requires greater self reliance. It doesn’t mean that you don’t coach them but it does mean that you have an expectation of them that is higher, that is more. Unfortunately I think our world is not accepting of that.
All right. Questions? I’ll come back to that. Is that thought provoking at least? Okay. One more slide because I want you to actually think about this. I’m going to put it up here and I’ll just talk you through it.
I put this slide together because this was a conversation we had in the office the other day. One of the things that happen sometimes, people that work or especially if we have master trainers that are in the course for us, depending on their money background sometimes I hear them talking to other people about Z-Health and like, “It’s pretty expensive.” Expense is relative. Does everyone understand that? If you come from a background of no money, any money seems expensive. I get that.
I wanted to actually put this up here because I want you to even just after 2 days of essentials, I want you to grasp a couple of things. What you see up here is number 1 the average cost of … Actually, this isn’t even average cost of the schooling, this is how much money you come out owing. Does everyone understand that? Most doctors when they get out of medical school depending if they go to a private school or whatever they come out owing about $175 to $250, 000. I’ve got 190 up there, but you wake up every morning out of school going, “I owe a quarter mill.” It’s a second mortgage.
To become just a general practitioner you’ve got 4 years of undergrad. You have 4 years of med school and then you have a 3 year residency so usually minimal investment for most guys to actually get out into practice is somewhere around 11 years depending on your specialty. You may be 16 years from the time you hit undergrad before you actually start getting paid. Most guys in residency get paid around 50 for 80 hour weeks.
Chiropractic, the average chiropractor right now leaves school with about $150,000, $120 to $150,000 in student loans and chiropractic has a … Again, you can cut this out if we need to, but they lead the nation in unpaid student loans for medical providers. Defaulting on them.
Physical therapy, physical therapy is the one spot that you can save some money if you go to a state school or whatever. What’s that? That’s changing as well. Right now, this is the actual average debt of a physical therapist leaving school. That’s usually for either a masters or a DPT. These are your educational time involvements or investments whatever.
Now, I put Z-Health in here. If you did every single course that we ever did including the Master Trainer Program that’s about what it cost. Now if you look at the time investment it’s a little different. 820 hours though is equal to about 2 masters degrees if you actually looked at semester hours etc. It will take you about 2 years in most cases to go all the way through our training program but it’s not a 3-day certification. It’s not a 3-day, “Hey, I’m now your personal trainer” thank goodness right? That has ruined the industry but that’s okay because there’s a cool aspect to that I’m going to get to in a second.
Here’s what has fascinated me. I can come out of school owing $190,000 and basically my per average per visit change is about 104 bucks. It depends on how many people you see an hour but most of the average salary pre tax for GP in the United States is $165,000 a year. It’s going to take a long time to pay this stuff back.
Chiropractic you can see this, physical therapy that. Z-Health master trainers, I asked Kathy about this, this is what our master trainer is often charged for first visits, anywhere from about 75 bucks up to we have a couple that charge $300 to $350 per session depending on where they work. One of our trainers he was in Piccadilly Circus or Piccadilly something in UK and he was making unbelievable amounts of money. His per visit charge was amazing and people were paying it because he was giving them results.
Those are 3 things. Then I actually put this one up here. How many of you love being told what to do? Like love it, you wake up every morning going, “Please, tell me what to do?” If you do, Z-Health is not for you, okay? I’m going to be really clear on that. I am a very … I’m an individualist. Politically my leanings are toward anarchy but what I’ll tell you is we have intentionally chosen in Z-Health to stay in the personal training industry for a very distinct reason. I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t like being told how much I can charge. I don’t like being told that if you want to be profitable you can spend 8 minutes with somebody.
If I feel ethically I need an hour I want to be able to be reimbursed for that hour. I don’t want you to tell me what’s appropriate for a patient or client. You can’t sit in an office somewhere else and tell me what I can and can’t do, not okay. We have stayed in this industry, the personal training industry is awesome because it’s incredibly non-regulated. It’s also a problem because it’s incredibly non-regulated. It’s a balance.
We have been approached multiple times by major insurance providers to go, “Hey, would you like for Z-Health to be covered under insurance?” We actually got a really interesting call. I won’t say the name of the company. It’s probably the second or third largest insurance company in the United States. I don’t know if it’s the CEO or vice president or something is a Z-Health client and absolutely in love with the system, no way. We have no interest in it. We don’t want that. Why? Because I want you to be able to do what’s right whatever that is based on what you are seeing with your clients.
Like I said, I want to put this up here and be very clear about what it is that we do and what it is that we offer. If you complete our educational curriculum you are in amazingly perfect place to help all those people falling through the cracks. Take you all the way back to the start of the talk, Brendon, you’re going to have a lifetime full of people to help because they’re out there and they’re looking for the help.
Does this promote any other questions or comments, thoughts? Is it useful to actually look at it from that kind of comparison? Yeah.
Male: As far as, I actually wrote that down, insurance, if you’re doing something with somebody in one of these things, visual, vestibular breakdown, do they have any ground to … I mean I heard the story from one of your master trainers, you got someone being in the parking lot like full fledge breakdown for 2 hours. I mean can that come back and bite you?
Dr. Cobb: We have never had a single case since the company started, never. In general, I have very low liability concerns. The things that we do, the say that we say constantly, never moving the pain, you’re doing it to yourself that’s one of the reasons we teach everything actively. There’s a lot of stuff that we do, there are versions and chiropractors and physical therapy that are hands on that I think are horrible ideas. Nerve gliding someone else, I think that’s a terrible idea but we teach people to do everything to themselves so we go, “You’re in control.”
When people have stuff like that it just comes down to good communication skills more than anything else. There’s another hand, yeah?
Male: I basically work in a commercial gym and I personally struggle because a lot of the other trainers are better at selling their, after this weekend, their BS to other people. I would just really struggle. I’d have all this knowledge. Even if I went through all the course how will I get started just bringing more and more people in?
Male: That’s a beautiful question. If you’re a business owner or whatever you have 2 problems. You have to be awesome at what you want to be awesome at and you have to be awesome at other stuff. I will give you my honest opinion. You’re here in this class, be awesome at this and hire other people to be awesome at the other things. Find someone that understands marketing that understands business. We have tons of experience at this point how to set up your websites, who to refer you to, what kind of stuff to write, how to talk to people. We can serve as a great platform to go, “This is how to talk to your clients” so use this as an example and then figure out how to trade or whatever to get other people to do the stuff that you’re not good at.
I am horrible at selling and money. People all the time ask me they’re like, “How much do your stuff cost?” I’m like, “No idea.” They don’t give me money. They don’t tell me how much stuff cost because I’m just not good at presenting it. What I can do though is I can inspire people, I can teach people, I can tell you a lot of stuff, cool stuff about brains. If you give yourself permission to be really good at the things that are going to generate results and interest that will set you in really good stead and then you can surround yourself with people to help you with other things.
Male: If most of these technologies are based on DNA and you just said that genes account only for 17% that means that all the other percentage, 80% plus, is the brain? That’s us.
Dr. Cobb: That’s us. That’s our stuff to control. That’s our decisions.
Male: We will never be replaced.
Dr. Cobb: That is my opinion. What I love about emerging … I love tech. I love emerging technology because I think there’s so many opportunities to improve what we do and more importantly to prove what we do. I don’t want you to be afraid of the emerging technology. The only reason to be afraid of it is if you don’t know that it’s coming and you don’t know what people are going to think because of it. Okay. Who else had their hand up? Yeah?
Female: Actually it’s not really a question, more of something that I think about a lot that I would like thoughts on from anybody actually. Right now, I don’t think I mentioned this when I introduced myself but I work as a teacher. I work at a low income high needs school where all my students it’s like 90 something percent, free or reduced lunch, and these people falling through the cracks is my entire school. Not only with education but the same thing you’re talking about. I see people that just when it comes to fitness and health related things they don’t have the money to do all this stuff and they don’t have the access to it. They don’t even have the inclination to go look for somebody to do it.
I always think about it a lot. How can you reach those people that can’t pay you $75 an hour?
Dr. Cobb: Sure. Here’s what we always suggest too in our other certifications. You should have 2 businesses. If you’re going to have a business you need 2. You need a business that pays the bills and you need to have a business that gives and that’s how we’ve always approached it. Make enough money. Find the people that can pay you so that you can make enough money to then give to people that don’t have money. I don’t really find it that challenging. Schools are amazing places to go give, to start programs, to get people interested.
At this conference that we’re speaking at Dr. Mark Hyman, do you guys know who he is? He’s on the Today’s Show whatever. He’s really getting popular, 10 New York Times bestsellers etc. We sat next to each other for 2 days. He’s actually a super cool guy. I’m not a celebrity person at all, I’m just not but he’s actually a really cool guy.
We were having this conversation around diet because that’s his big thing and he’s talking about a special that he just did recently. He went to the worst food area in the United States statistically and he actually found a family and he spent time with them and he taught them how to cook. They didn’t know how to cook. He actually bought food for them, showed them how to shop, spent time with them, showed them how to cook and that’s what we’re talking about.
That’s the hardest part about all this. Everyone wants these big general social programs. Every major event in human history started with one person going, “Things should be different.” Like I said, from that perspective make your money, help other people, and if you really want to start something different go start it. You have to be the person or find someone to do it.
Male: I’m kind of master of the obvious, teaching somebody how to cook, there’s so much, we’re inundated with so much information around the world and technology. You could look at a smartphone and say it could take the Tricoder or you can spend 5 hours on Facebook and your posture can go to hell. I mean –
Dr. Cobb: It goes both ways. It always goes both ways.
Male: It’s obvious to maybe 90% of this room, 100% of this room, stand up straight, do this, do that, but for people that sit like this, because I’m one of them, I’m master of the obvious.
Dr. Cobb: That’s what we spend a lot of time doing. Like I said, the most important thing is that you start to inspire people out of it. You start to give them reasons and rationales so it really comes down to communication and having something for them to shoot for. Cool?
All right, thank you so much for listening to that.
