Most movement professionals are taught to treat the body like a machine. You’re gonna strengthen this, you’re gonna loosen this, you’re gonna release this, you’re gonna tighten this. The problem is that most solutions like that are what I would call hardware solutions. And in fact, when we look at most pain and performance issues in the human body, they are software problems. And software problems mean neurological problems.
Now, as a Z Health practitioner, what we try to get people to do is adopt a new model or new map of how to assess and train the human body. And the model that we teach is called the 8-Levels model. This is kind of the system within the Z Health system, and it actually underlies all applied neuroscience.
So here’s how it basically works. We look at the body and we remind ourselves of the three things that the human nervous system does first. Number one, it takes in information. Number two, it integrates and decides what that information means and what to do about it. That happens up here in the brain. And then three, it creates an output, a motor output.
So basically what I’m saying is that. If you have knee pain or if you have a client that cannot do a good shoulder internal rotation. In both cases, we’re typically talking about the last stage, the output, which means that brain-based practitioners have to be really, really good at assessing what comes before the inputs and what’s happening within the brain.
And so the system that underlies all that, we call the 8-Levels model. The 8-Levels model works like this. When we look at the human body and we say, how do we take in information? Well, we have what are called receptors. Receptors are little nerve endings spread throughout the body. Could be in your eyes, could be in your inner ear, could be in your skin, could be in your fascia, it could be in your tendons. It doesn’t matter. And those receptors are gonna take in information from the environment.
Now, the path by which the receptors send information to the brain, then goes into the peripheral nerves. So our 8-Levels model begins at receptors and then goes into the peripheral nerves. The peripheral nerves then feed into our main spinal cord.
The spinal cord then sends information up into the brainstem and the cerebellum, which are two kind of incredibly important structures in the back and middle of the brain. And then from there we go into what’s called the thalamus. The thalamus actually takes information in and decides what information, and then forward onto the CEO, which is going to be the cortex.
Now your cortex is your brain, and that’s got the lobes that most people have heard of, the frontal lobe, the parietal, the temporal occipital. And there’s a fifth one we’d like to throw in called the insular lobe. So our 8-Levels model is complex and I get that, but it is the fastest, most efficient way that we’ve ever found to teach people who are movement professionals to look at human bodies in a different way.
The way we kind of describe it is it’s like a, like a business. If my CEO needs to make great decisions about movement, it’s gonna be completely dependent upon data it is receiving from its employees. So we have receptors. Receptors are kind of your interns, right? They’re the ones that are out there, they’re working, they’re trying to get good data, and then they send information through the peripheral nerves and the spinal cord.
Those are gonna be like your middle management. Your middle management is then gonna communicate with your executive team, which is gonna be your brainstem and your cerebellum and your thalamus, and then eventually that gets to the CEO, which is your cortex. Obviously, if we think about this from a business perspective, the CEO is gonna be completely dependent at some level on all the work that’s being done by the receptors, by the managers, by the executive team, in order to make good decisions. So if you have a client and they have knee pain, or they have a movement limitation, or they’re an athlete and they have a performance problem, ultimately we have to look at this from this kind of software perspective and say, okay, within this person, what could be going wrong and where?
Once you understand this then you begin to understand why neuro based or brain-based practitioners have to do really extensive assessments. I get asked all the time, Hey doc, uh, I’ve got this person with this. What should I test? And my usual answer is, well, everything. Receptors are all over the body, which means that I have to test your light touch and your vibration and your cold, and I have to make sure that the peripheral nerves are functioning and I have to make sure that your deep tendon reflexes and every other stuff from your spinal cord are functioning. Then I have to look at your cerebellum and the different parts of it and your brainstem and the different parts of it.
So it sounds complex, but once you understand the schematic, once you understand the map, all of a sudden you can make this enormous jump professionally where you stop thinking about, huh, knee pain must be the quads. To understanding, huh? Knee pain could be their eyes, could be their inner ear, could be something in their frontal lobe. Could be something in the spinal cord, could be their femoral nerve.
Ultimately, what we’re always trying to get across to people is that pain seems simple on the surface. Performance issues seem kind of simple on the surface when you look at the body as a machine. But remember that’s trying to fix a software problem using hardware tools in that almost never works, particularly in the long term for real people in real world settings.
So if you wanna learn more about the 8-Levels model, I’m doing a free masterclass here very soon. You can check the comment, the pinned comment to get the link. You can click on that link register. We are gonna be talking about this for a long time, giving you a lot more detailed information about what kind of testing you need to do, and then what you do with the information you get from the testing.
If you are a movement professional, you’re a doctor, a therapist, or a coach, a business owner, gym owner, you’re interested in blending modern neuroscience into what you’re already great at. Also, you can click on the email there email us. We would love to chat with you. All right. Hope you enjoyed this and it’s got you thinking, because remember, we often need better thinking models whenever we wanna make progress in life. And the 8-Levels model really is the foundation of, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of client interactions every year that are incredibly successful. So, think about it.
