EP 166 WTH?!? Embracing the Movement of Life with Dan Metcalfe

Foreign. Welcome back, everybody. Dr. Greg Eckle. This is what the health. Our topic today is how movement is critical for longevity. I've got Dan Metcalf on today. What for? You are in for a treat. He has gone from athlete to showbiz to injuries to Olympic program head coach, Hollywood expert to the stars lead actor in Lord Andrew Lloyd Weber shows acting opposite of Will Frell and Robert Duvall, professional sports training gym creator, 60 up balance system creator. And that is the one that I really want to talk to Dan about and, and I want to share with you. So, Dan, welcome aboard.

Thanks, Dr. Greg, it's a pleasure to be here.

You know, we met at a medical conference for longevity themed and you were working out on this board and I believe it's called 60 up. And I'm wondering how you got, how you got the idea to create that thing.

Yeah, it was a great question. It's a fact. I actually love talking about it because it came from a higher force than me. And let me explain. You may have heard of a gentleman by the name of Bob Eubanks. Yes. Bob Eubanks did the Newlywed Game, the rose pray for 38 years. And people don't know he actually bought the Beatles to America. He was the first one that brought them out to California and produced their shows. But I owned a sports performance training center which was professional athletes or any athletes that wanted to go professional or people that felt like a professional athlete because movement and, and the ability to get up and go is, it's not limited to any sector. It's related to every human. So Bob's son was training with me there and he had been falling a lot of times. And so we're driving home from a meeting that I've been to with Bob and when he tried to get out of the chair at the end of the day, he couldn't get out. He was like trying to lift himself up. And then he did what I called the old person shuffle, which is you're shuffling along, hunched over, looking at the ground, scared of every step. So we're driving home in the car and I said to Bob, what are you doing for working out? Because I didn't know how to address that. He was actually looking really unhealthy and actually in a dangerous position, leaning forward. He says, I go to physical therapy three times a week. I said, well, what do they do? He goes, well, I put a ball against the wall. I do 10 squats, I do 20 bicep curls, I do 15 minutes on the bike. And they massage Me for half an hour. And my exact words, exact words were, oh, so they're helping you die comfortably. And Bob goes, what do you mean? I said, well, you're better than that. You can do more than that. They're doing the minimum to make you feel that you're doing better now. Dr. Greg, my gym was set up for movement. It wasn't set up to athletes to come and lift and get strong. It's like, how do we take what you need from your physical ability into your sports to be a higher performer? And it's like all of us in everyday life. I know you love skiing and getting out on the slopes. What could you do to strengthen your body to have a better time and more endurance on the slopes? You can have more fun. So I said to Bob, let me train you. So I did what any great trainer would do. You got balance problems. Let's strengthen your legs. Let's strengthen your hip flexors. Let's strengthen your core. You're going to be solid. You're going to walk better. Two minutes after training Bob, I realized I was 100% wrong when I tried to have him going through those little athlete ladders where you do step, step, step, step, or in, out, in, out, or sideways going through. He couldn't do it. He couldn't lift his feet off the ground. I said, okay, let's take a step backwards, put your hands on the wall, and let's just start lifting the legs and getting that, you know, movement. Strengthen your hip flexors. As soon as his hands touched the wall, his legs were pistons. Hang on a minute. The problem is not the body. The problem is elsewhere. And I realized it was the neurological connection from the brain to the body that completely changed and had weakened. I call it fraying the wires, right? Because he was moving less. And we know fear with our sympathetic system causes flight fright or freeze, right? So, sorry, fight, flight or freeze. And what was happening because he was scared of falling, his system now wasn't running from the brain to react. It was like, what's going to happen? And we're free. So the body wasn' free to move. So I'll jump forward in this because I could go on about this story because it's beautiful what happened. But I started looking back at how babies learn to walk and think about it. They're on their back, they roll over, they crawl, they try to stand the buttons in the air. They don't have the physical ability to stand up because their muscular strength isn't there, right? Then they finally stand, they get up, and then they fall and they fall. What's happening is the brain is figuring out where the pressure points to put me in this upright position and keep me stationary, just stable. Then eventually they get that we all go, yeah, they're standing. Then they take their first step and fall. Then they get to the point where they can move. All that's happening is the brain through the cerebellum, the neurons. And we know we have roughly 86 billion neurons that are created through the brain, of which about 80% sit in the cerebellum or above the cerebellum, down through our spinal cord. So obviously, it's got to be for relating to the body. So I started training Bob, going back and doing things that we. He did naturally, that he learned as a baby, because neurons have memory. They want to be able to do the same thing. And in three weeks, Bob went from shuffling and falling and scared to wake up in the morning not knowing what the day ahead bought him. In three weeks, at 79 years of age, he was six miles an hour on a treadmill, running up and down stairs, back out, playing golf, driving a car again because he couldn't get in and out of the car properly. And the greatest effect, though, was he woke up excited for what the day was, and he started getting back on tv, getting on stage. He does a great show with backstage with the Beatles, and that's how it all came about. But it was never created to have a product. It was created just to help Bob recovery. But then I've been able to train people like Shirley MacLaine and other celebrities and stroke survivors and tens of thousands of people now that use our system. And it came about because it solves a problem rather than claiming to do something to make your life easier to live with the problem.

I love that. You know, it was challenging. You. You ran Kitty and I through some drills on the, you know, show floor, and I saw the immediate value for. We deal a lot with folks struggling with neurodegeneration. And that component, that shuffle step. The scare is there because falls are real, and those can end lives. And so, really, the way that your board works and why I wanted to bring you on and share your invention and your technique and your training and just your light, because you're a shiny, bright soul out there spreading love in the world, which I. Which. It's contagious. So thank you. You know, movement is crucial for longevity. It's also very important to reverse neurodegeneration. And, you know, if we. If we couch this in Today in a discussion around longevity right there, I mean, you open Bob Eubank's life back up, you know what happens? Folks get contracted and stuck. He's able to drive again, he's back out on the stage, he's teaching. What do you think? You know, kind of moving this over discovery to the kind of the best mobility, balance, success. Like what do you mean by that statement?

Well, I'm going to share a video with you in a minute. But when I look at balance, I don't agree with a lot of the balance tests that we do because they're set up to fail rather than set. So for example, stand on one leg and can you hold your balance for, you know, 10 seconds on one leg? That's great if you're a flamingo. But we're made to move. So we're training static balance. With static balance means we're not going anywhere. So I had to create this program, which was fortunate. Having been a head coach on the Olympic program, having been a professional ballet dancer, being a professional athlete and then a coach, I understood so many areas of the body and how it works. So for me it wasn't about finding your center and holding it still. Balance training is not about stationary. Balance training is. As I'm moving, how quickly can I recognize through the brain feeling that I'm beginning to go off balance and correct it before we're even conscious that we're actually going? So for longevity, balance is critical. And let me just play this video for you from a doctor that I is going to explain a little bit more with proof, scientific and research proof. Here we go.

There's this incredible growth force in all of us that keeps moving us towards what we can be. And you just see it in an infant. It's an amazing thing to watch because it's so raw and naked in an infant. Right, let's get to the balance point. The first step is to pull herself up on the side of the table and let go. She's trying to figure out how do I keep my body in this three dimensional plane and be balanced with gravity. And now every time she does that, her brain is learning. If you're trying to 60 up, don't give up. If it's difficult, hang in there. Because every time you try, it's changing your brain, it's helping you master that particular ability. So when I feel I don't have this balance, when I don't trust myself that I'm going to be intimidated to engage people, my life is going to shrink and shrink and shrink. And so pretty soon I'm living out of this space. And we see that so many people become isolated because they don't feel safe leaving their house. So building that balance, building the strengths in these muscles that hold us, can have an incredible psychological benefit. Because now a person's going to get their life back. They're going to recover their life. They've lost it for whatever reason because they haven't paid attention to these things. But now they can get their life back, they can recover it, and they can start enjoying a quality of life that they thought was never going to be possible.

So we know movement is critical. It's actually the wrong video. I meant to play another video that was. I was going to finish with that one. There's another one that, that I'll play now that I know that it's up there. That's great planning. But we know that movement is critical to the function of the brain. The brain is movement and the movement is brain. We know with the chemicals that are released as we exercise, whether we're looking at the dopamine, the serotonin, the bdnf, when we start looking at different chemicals that are released that will actually create new brain cells. We know with the hippocampus, it used to be at the age of 30, your hippocampus, which is your memory, it's your ability to be able to think, it's taking in information, it's also the ability to again, be creative as well, that begins to diminish every year by 1%. So we used to think, now with testing, we know with movement, with exercise, it's critical that through getting to it, and we're talking about a level two exercise, so where your heart beats up a little bit, you can still talk while you're walking. But doing that 20 to 30 minutes, three to four times a week, can actually reverse the shrinkage and actually grow your hippocampus. So into your 90s, 100. If you're exercising the hippocampus, which creates new brain cells and neurons, which are neurons, will continue to grow, and that's critical for getting out and living.

I love it. And it truly, truly is that proprioception and that connection, the spinal, thalamic tracts, etcetera, for coordination, our place in space training that you've developed is really crucial. You know, just even in seeing the baby walking. I mean, who doesn't like to see a baby learning how to walk? But it did make me think of five patients, not that they're babies, but that they could really use this, this training. So I'm really excited to get it in on our communities, our online communities and share this component. You know, talk about, you know, with your wide variety of athleticism and coaching, how, what's some coaching you can give folks that maybe are struggling with their balance and, or their proprioception and maybe are experiencing some neurodegeneration. It doesn't look very, it looks a little bleak for, for folks sometimes. How do you coach people through that? On not to give up.

Okay, well, beautiful. I love talking about this and I wish we had two hours. I've coached a lot of professional athletes. I've put over 400 kids into Division 1 schools on scholarships. I've got, I had 39 players, some have retired now that went on to professional athletes. And the difference between a great amateur and a lower level pro is decision making. It's not skill, it's not talent. Decision making because when you get into a high pressure position, can you make the right decision for the success of the team? Now, when you think about it, all the experience we've got going through life, we tend to forget and say, okay, well, I'm getting older. This one thing I don't like. My mother's a doctor, my grandfather's a gp. But often when things are going wrong, doctors will say it's because you're getting older. And I'm 100% sure that's not the reason. We signed a social contract when we were born to accept that age is declined. And so if we make the wrong decision and accept it, we're going to decline. So let me give you a few things that I would do with training. First off, every challenge is a success story waiting to happen. There's a lot of people out there that don't have the character that you will have. And I'm talking to your viewers now, your patients, that if you step up and show your greatest character, you will actually become an inspiration to others because you are a success story. That can happen. Now, if we take this back a little bit and what people don't know, in 2018, I was out on a bike ride. I used to race the Ironman and do a bunch of other stuff and a metal pole came down on my head at 22 miles an hour. That wasn't 22, I think I flew at 22 miles an hour. It was a much slower speed, but I was knocked out immediately. I was frozen in the air. I got video camera of it. I hit the ground already unconscious, broke my coccyx, back of the head, Hit so hard that hit the cerebellum and my helmet broke open. I was unconscious for minutes. I didn't even know what happened for about an hour and a half afterwards until I had the fireman coming to my house and banging on the door and trying to wake me up. And suddenly I woke out of the stupor. But I had to learn to talk again. I had to learn to function. I had to learn to sit upright. I had really hard time walking and my balance was gone. Not a lot of people were helping me, but I knew I'm a success story, no different than anybody else out there is. So there's a couple of things I looked at, and this is maybe the greatest gift I can give without getting deeper into it. My brain was badly damaged and I had to fix because nobody else was going to fix me. So I started looking at the power of the brain, the power of the heart, the power of the body. We have a life force which is our heart. We have a power force which is our brain. If we get the oxygen coming from our life force, because oxygen is the most important thing in our whole life. If we get that going around, the brain now can function. If I don't have the oxygen, we're all. Everything's dying. But love is critical. Whatever we give love to will flourish. Think about it. In any relationship anybody has, it could be with your car. If you don't keep it clean and love it, it won't function for you. Your wife, your husband, your girlfriend, your children, grandpa, whatever it is, if you give love and it doesn't give it back, it doesn't matter how hard you try, it will never flourish. And if someone's loving you and you don't give that love back, it won't flourish. You'll actually reject it. And eventually it will move away. So I started looking at the videos on YouTube where they take the seeds, they put them in the pot. Same soil, same earth, same sunlight, same watering. On one it said love and one it said the H word that I don't like saying anymore. I don't want it in my system. And what happened was the one that you gave love to, the flower flourished. The one that you didn't demised, it died exactly the same. But the energy, the frequencies were given off. So I decided every morning to wake up and. Let me ask you a question. Tell me. I know you love skiing. What else do you love?

Oh, playing guitar, live music, great food.

Okay. How many times have you ever said, I love my brain?

Oh, I love my brain. I actually, I have said it a few times, but probably not enough.

How many times you said I love my heart?

Quite a bit actually.

Good. How many times you said I love.

My body more and more, which is.

Fantastic because most people don't. Self love is not selfish. Self love is honoring the gift, a miracle that you are now taking this forward. I wake up every morning, I close my eyes, I put my hand on my head and I go, I love my brain. I love my brain. It wants to get better. My body wants to get better. So when I gave it love, and consciously, because the brain can only go off of what we feed it, the brain doesn't know the difference between reality and fiction. Because we have a dream, we wake up. I think that new bike sim I'm looking around with, oh, it was dream. Until we tell it, it doesn't know. So by giving it love, it began to flourish. I became smarter. I became obsessed with understanding the power of the brain and then the connection to the body because I had to heal my body. And that's how I came up with the notion that we are born to heal, we're made to heal. The messaging that we get would determine the effect. So I'll often say to my brain, you know, right, Dan, get out the way. Brain, go to work. I believe in myself, believe in your power. I'm a success story waiting to happen. The miracle is within. If I allow it, it's waiting to be unleashed. Now within that, of course you've got to do protocols. You can't sit there and just say heal. But we know in sports if 80 to 90% of performance is mental, how much of our healing and how much of our success in life is mental because we're in the game of life. So my tip to people in here is one, don't hope for the best. I hope you have a great day, doctor. I hope you go out on the slopes tomorrow and have the greatest runs ever because I'm not in control of that. But if I'm doing it, I believe I'll have a great day. I hope I have a great day. Is leaving it up to somebody else. I believe changes the messaging and that will give us more positive, aggressive steps to successful. So again, love your brain, love your body. If I've got a bad knee, I love it. I love my bad knee. Not because it's bad, but because it's a success story. And if I give it love, it wants to get better now that relationship will flourish rather than chastising it which would destroy it.

Oh, truly, truly beautiful. That is a component that we've brought into our procedures. Dan is really emphasizing that the brain does not know the difference between reality and what you're thinking about. So by envisioning your future self healed. So I love that. I love my brain, I love my body, I love my heart. Those are really awesome affirmations to really. Well, one, you've said love three times. You've increased love in the world. But two, it actually gets that reciprocal nation nice, you know, relationship back and going in the right direction. So envisioning the. The healed part, the brain and body want to do that. They. They have that ability. That answer is within. So I totally echo that. And I'll even pull out the pom pom. We even get a pom pom moment for that one.

Thank you. I didn't know about the pom pomo. That's awesome.

Yes.

So let me go a little bit deeper if I can, please. We know because of the discovery and the discovery of neuroplasticity happened hundreds of years ago, a few hundred years ago, but it hasn't really been widely accepted into the world as a mainstay. Right. Slowly, as we learn more about the brain. So, you know, 15 years ago, people still thought the brain was fixed. So because of neuroplasticity, we know that the synapses and the way that what wires together, fires together. Right. As it goes in. The problem is we've been bought up with a general understanding. If I go to the doctor and I say, my knees hurting because I don't get an older, I go, no, no, I played soccer last night. I twisted my knee. I'm here to get better. My age is not the determining factor.

Right.

But we've also ingrained our thought process. So we know the synapses have a certain way, the weight. So we hear something, it automatically takes its channel to the way we're going to react. So we're in a bad mood and we're driving down the road and someone cuts us off. We don't think about. We're already raging, and our sympathetic system is now stressed and going into the whole process of anger. We haven't even thought about it. That's the way we've wired ourselves. So now I look at it this way. Imagine you've got this beautiful big field with a white picket fence around it, and you've got the tall grass, and you can see the mountaintop just through the tall grass. You say, you know, I want to walk across that field and I want to See that mountaintop? So you start walking, but you can't see where you go. But you know I've got my sense going on. And I walk across, and as I get to the white fence, I look up and there's no mountain. And you've realized you've gone the wrong way. So you walk back to the beginning and you tread down that grass again. And then you look up, I see it. You start walking. You try and start a new path, but you begin to veer off onto the same path. Now you walk back again. You go, hang on a minute. Now I've got this path. That's. That's my track. Even though I don't want to go there. It's the easy way. And suddenly other people start walking on that same track. They're sending in the same message. Now that grass is pushed down, and where you want to go isn't where you're actually going because your feet are following the safety or the comfort that exploring new. So now to change the way we think, we not only have to try and find the new path and venture, but we have to put a stop sign up to stop ourselves and other people walking. And when someone begins to walk on that path, say, stop, I'm not letting you on that path. We're going off now to do that within our own brain and our own way of thinking once we're conscious. I don't believe in myself anymore. I don't believe that becomes your habit. And what you practice doesn't make perfect, what you practice makes permanent. So now I have to recognize I'm sending the wrong message and it will continue to come up. And you say, no, stop. I believe in myself. I believe in myself. I believe I'll heal. I believe I'll heal. Now the neurons and the way they're firing and the neurological messaging becomes positive for yourself and also affects those around you, because those that keep pushing the wrong buttons have the stop sign and say, I'm no longer listening to you because you don't serve my purpose of reaching the top of the mountain. And I really feel that as we push through there and begin to change the way we think and I go back to professionals, it's decision making and what we're willing to sacrifice for our goal, our aim, our dream, we can overcome more than any. Any external experience will go against our own belief in ourselves. It's.

It's a crucial, crucial component for healing. And really, thank you for sharing that coaching moment with us, because that was. That's a really. You. You all please rewind that and watch it over and over again. Because that, that's the programming that we need to be doing for ourselves. Yeah.

And it's possible and that's why it's hard to do it in a, you know, 15 minute talk. Now I want to play you this other video if I can. I found the right. Because this goes on to about longevity.

Perfect.

Which is I know what we're talking about today. And then I hope if I get to come back, I can actually get into specifics of our board training and how we do that. So let me go into here. I believe it's this one. Okay, here we go.

2010, in the Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging, a very interesting study was done. They looked at 1300 women who were over the age of 60. And they wanted to see did balance and gait speed have anything to do with the mortality their lifespan. And after they controlled for everything else, you know what they found? That those people that had good balance as tested by the parameters they tested, they had them standing in tandem or tapping their feet. Some similar exercises that you do on the 60 up. Those people that had good balance, that had balance at five seconds, they lived seven to eight years longer than those that did not. Now that's amazing. And that's a scientific data we have. We're not just talking about this. There's some, there's an evidence, there's evidence based practice here. Right. In terms of what's going on. The reality is, is if I don't have good balance, the world becomes a very dangerous place for me. So the one thing you can do to live longer, take care of yourself.

And you can see why I wanted to leave with that one. Because we get used to the idea and then the other one finishes up with the experience of what we're doing. But again, we have the circle of life. And I call that, you know, we're born, we begin to, you know, develop, we then grow, we then thrive, we then begin to face adversity or challenges, we then decline and then we expire. That's the circle of life. But I truly believe the circle of our neurological system at a cellular level is very different. The circle can continue to go around as long as we continue to learn and gain knowledge. So we know from a cellular level, clinically proven cells are meant to function fully, I'm not saying at the highest level, but function fully to live for 122 years. That's the data that's come out. Why are we expiring too early? Mindset inflammation, poor lifestyle, lack of discipline, giving up, wanting, seeking comfort, over seeking comfort around challenges. There's nothing stopping setting goals, not excited anymore, but that's there. So I look at it as we're kind of born, then we develop and as a baby we develop. So we're looking at our cells are now engaging and seeing what's going to happen. And with good nutrition and care and love, we begin to thrive. We grow. Then we get to the point where we're now at the exciting set of thrive and we've got the excitement going on. Then we begin to hit the challenges and this is where our mindset has gone. This is who I am. And again, the social contract I talked about all the time now says we're going to decline. When we decline, what have we got over all those years? We've got knowledge, we've got experience, we've got proof of success against struggles. So then we have to change our mindset to our mind reset. Then as we begin to decline, we go, hang on a minute, here's my mind reset. Now I'll take the knowledge I've learned. Now I'm going to go back to rethinking, we're going to go back to development, we're going to go back to growth, we'll go back into thriving and that can continue to go on and on provided we keep the right mindset and jumping back in with what Dr. Berger said, it's incredible. When we move and take care of ourselves and this is what 60 up does, we go back to the basics. How did we learn in the first place to strengthen the foundation, to make sure that we can thrive and flourish through our movement and not be limited because of our thought of age or our physical decline. And when you take care of the foundation, that building stands strong and can withstand any storm that comes in pretty much.

I love it. I love it. I am excited for more conversations and more demos with the balance training for right now. Do you have any take home messages, actionable steps or anything that our listeners and viewers can implement on?

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say again, this is some of the training that we do on the board, but I know you don't have the board yet and when I come back on we do some. I'll actually do something you can follow along with at home or you can do without the board to get the idea of what we're doing. But I would say to have the best success day after day physically. I have a protocol that is about to be released when you wake up in the morning, set your alarm five minutes early and stretch in bed for five minutes before you wake up. But before you do that, have a bottle of water next to your bed and take a sip of water. Keep it next to your bed. You may have been asleep anywhere from 4 to 10 hours and you are dehydrated. It means the brain's not functioning or your organs aren't functioning properly. 3% dehydration at a professional level can mean 20% less performance. So wake up, get your water, stretch for five minutes, and during that five minutes of stretching, actually practice neurological feeling. That means I'm like, I'm going to feel my toes, I'm going to imagine a train traveling from my brain down to my toes and then coming back up from my toes to my brain. That means to send the message down and see it going means I'm waking the neurons, I'm actually carrying it through. After you've done five minutes of stretching, get up, walk around. Obviously you're probably gonna go to the bathroom and clean your teeth and other stuff. And if you can fit it in, do 20 minutes of walking at least four days a week as the sun comes up, because we know the sunlight in your eyes is critical again to creating the harmony that your body needs. So wake up. Water by the side of your bed, stretch for five minutes in bed, and I'll release videos. So you guys, hopefully next time I come back on, I'll be able to share a video of how to stretch and then, you know, start the day great with a great messaging. I believe I'll have a great day and I'm 100% confident you'll never have a worst day starting that way.

Ah, I'm right there with you, everybody. If you enjoyed the show and you got something out of it, go out there, give us that five star review, share us with your friends and family and write down what are you going to take action on. We had some really awesome suggestions on today's show. Dan Metcalf, thank you so much. 60 up. We're going to put the links down below. There is much more to come, everybody, with Dan. He's a powerhouse and he has a lot of knowledge to share with us. So again, thank you, Dan.

Thank you so much and love to everybody.