The Z-Health Curriculum is really designed for health and fitness professionals across a broad spectrum.
The people that do the best with the material that we provide are seekers. They are people who are deeply committed to changing their client’s lives.
If you’re working with a client in pain, you’re trying to improve performance, prevent injury, whatever it is that your client is asking of you, the thing that I always want you to remember is that everything that you’ve ever felt, seen, experienced, or will in your entire life actually comes down to brain function.
But I want you to consider it at a deeper level to go, “Okay, if my client comes in, and they’re having problems with squatting,” your first thought should be, they have a brain problem.
When someone has shoulder pain, your first thought should be, maybe they have a brain problem or something within the nervous system.
Well, what if I have these anatomical problems, I have a labral issue or I have arthritis? I’m going to ask you, for now, as you go through this series, let’s think neurology first, because neurology offers you the answers in many, many of the cases that you’ve actually struggled with.
Our feeding pattern, bottom to top, back to front. What this tells is you is that your sensory information, your sensory systems must be incredibly healthy and incredibly active in order to have a healthy movement system.
When you look at how most people think about teaching a squat, teaching a pull-up, teaching an athlete how to hit a baseball, most of us are very focused on the motor output portion, but your motor outputs are built off high-level sensory input coming in from all the other systems of the body.
That simple differentiation right there is really the beginning if you’re interested in being an excellent brain-based practitioner.
Sensory input, making sure that our sensory systems are fully active is incredibly important if I’m going to make people move better. Put really simply, the way that the human nervous system is built, it does three things: receives input, integrates/interprets that input, and decides to create a motor output based off that total picture.
If I look at someone with a shoulder problem, the first thing that I wonder is, do they have an input problem, do they have an interpretation/integration decision problem, or do they have a motor output problem?
Now, how this really plays out in the real world is that you can improve flexibility, you can improve movement, you can improve strength, you can improve pain, very often, by dealing with issues that seem far, far away for what they’re actually complaining about.
Ultimately, we understand that if we get overly focused on improving output without having a clear picture, clear window of how to improve input in cortical processing, we’re going to continually run into those people that we are unable to help. Those are the ones that, again, that’s that splinter in your mind that’s always keeping you up at night like, “Why are they not making progress?”
Again, we call this the threat bucket. Now, what I love about this is that if you are a movement coach and your job is to either improve how people move or help them get out of pain, either one, this matters incredibly. This is an incredibly and useful concept and useful tool to help you understand that there are multiple ways to actually change your client’s experience of their daily life by decreasing threat levels, often in unexpected ways.
Influencing brain activity interpretation/integration decision making through changing of input should be the primary target for pain relief. Please remember that the amount of pain you’re experiencing has no relationship to the amount of injury. Pain does not equal injury, and injury does not have to equal pain.
There are typically five reasons that people walk through the door and pay you hard-earned money, and as a coach, you need to have competencies, I believe, within each of these arenas. Whenever you’re trying to create a change, particularly an extraordinary change of some kind for your client, that your client’s brain is in charge, not you.
If you understand change does happen at the speed of the nervous system, and you understand how to do good assessments and reassessments within a session through all the different threat areas in the body, you can actually, over time, create an incredibly personalized, individualized program to help everyone that walks in your door because a lot of times, when people first hear about this information, they’re thinking through their threat bucket.
It’s hard to understand or even explain or believe that a vision drill can change movement, that if a vestibular drill can change movement, that breathing can have a tremendous impact on pain, et cetera.
We know more about the brain in the last 15 to 20 years than we have known in the entire course of human history because of new technology.
Our curriculum is designed to take emergent research and show you how to apply it in a very practical way with the end goal of helping 100% of the people that entrust themselves to you.
