Hi, I’m Dr. Eric Cobb with Z-Health Performance.
Whether you are a client of a Z-Health trainer, whether you’ve purchased some of our products or all of our products, or you are a health and fitness professional and you are new to this whole thing there’s some really common questions that we’ve seen come up over the last decade and a half.
Number one, why am I doing these weird drills? Number two, really, my eyes, my inner ear can affect my foot or back or whatever we are working on? Number three, I’ve never seen this before, and number four, this seems too simple to work?
The great news is that there is a simple answer for all these things and that’s what we cover the next five videos so let’s get started.
Over the next five videos we’re going to take a very fast look at how you can get the most out of your training using Z-Health. I don’t care what you do, if you run triathlons, if you workout in the gym, if you are seeing a therapist because you have pain, it doesn’t matter.
The Z-Health approach offers you a lot of different options and just like when you get a new phone you sometimes have to have a few instructions to know how it works understanding Z-Health from that perspective will make everything that you do more effective.
We’re going to start off with a brief test because I need you to identify what kind of a person you are. After working with several thousand professionals, doctors, therapists, and trainers and through them hundreds of thousands of clients, plus thousands of clients I’ve worked with individually, what we’ve figured out is that most people come to any kind of provider for one of four reasons, all right?
The first reason, generally, that people will work with a professional is pain, all right?
The second reason that we see particularly in a training setting is people come in for what we call body composition change, now that may mean you want to lose weight, you want to gain weight, you want to get muscular, whatever so just changing the way you look.
Number three, we have people coming in because they want performance enhancement, meaning an athlete will show up saying, “Hey, I want to be faster, I want to be more flexible.”
Last but not least, we see a lot of people now coming in looking for injury prevention. This is often someone who will come in and say, “Hey, you know, I’m getting older and I’m afraid of running around with my grandkids or whatever, I want to make sure that I’m able to stay active for a long time.”
People will also come in and say, “Hey, I don’t want to lose my mental faculties, whatever.” We classify all of that as injury prevention.
If you’re taking this little quiz I want you to identify for yourself, out of these four priorities, which one is the highest for you? Is it body composition, is it performance, injury prevention, or do you have pain issues that you are trying to address?
Why I start everyone here is it’s really important to understand that if you get overly fixated on one of these things you’ll miss the most important point, all right?
The most important point is, how do I fix all four of these? Ultimately, the way that we’re going to have you think about fixing these four issues comes back to basically moving better than you currently move.
One of my quotes I always use in our courses is, “The body you currently have is the body that you’ve earned through the way that you move.” Now I say that kind of tongue and cheek because if you were walking down the street one-day and got hit by a car, that wasn’t your fault.
In general I tell people the way that you move is not your fault, if you were never taught that posture matters, that your eyes govern a lot of what goes on with your balance.
Most of us we learn to move by default and unfortunately what happens as people move through their daily lives, if they don’t have high movement quality, eventually things start to break down.
Whenever we work with our professionals we go, “Listen, regardless of the person who comes in to see you, if they have a pain issue, if they want to change how their body looks, if they want to perform better as an athlete, or perform better as a businessperson, or perform better as a mom, or if they are trying to prevent injury as they go through their daily life, their activities as they get older eventually it all comes back to moving better than you currently move.”
With that in mind, Z-Health is built on that basic premise which then begs the question, “Well, how is movement controlled in the human body?”
If I understand that better movement is the ultimate goal to achieve the things that I want, if better movement is important to achieving the things that you want, doesn’t it make sense that we would then look at the body globally to go how is movement controlled?
Hopefully, you know that the brain is in charge of everything in a human body, so if you think this through what it means is if you come to me with pain I want to look at how you move, once I understand how you move I then need to look at the control systems for how you move and get an idea of what’s not functioning well and work on fixing that. As we fix the controller, ultimately, the body begins to perform at a higher level.
For us, in Z-Health, our primary focus is going to be looking at your nervous system because your brain, and it’s control mechanisms, the spinal cord, the peripheral nerves, all the other things that go into the nervous system, are the overall controllers of how you move through the world and how you move through the world, as I said, has created the body that you currently have as well as the issues that you are currently trying to address.
Your first step in getting the most out of Z-Health is to recognize that our number one goal is changing how you currently move to a more efficient, more powerful body and a better movement system and we are going to do that by targeting the controller, which is your nervous system.
Now that we’ve talked about better movement as a key to reaching your goals, in video number two we are going to talk about your brain, your nervous system and how they control movement.
