BenGreenfield-ZHealth.mp3

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Welcome to the Ben greenfieldfitness.com podcast.

This is Ben. And if the intro to this podcast sounds just a little bit different than usual, it's because I am off to Vietnam this week and so Brock and I are not doing our studio recording as usual, and instead I'm bringing you a couple special episodes this week. Today's episode is with Dr. Eric Cobb from Z Health. And I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Z Health in the show. Notes to this episode, which you can grab over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com but it is a very cool and cutting edge way to strengthen your nervous system.

And Dr. Eric and I are going.

To be talking all about how to make your nervous system unstoppable, considering that your nervous system is responsible for just about everything that goes on in your body. And when making your nervous system stronger, you're going to be able to enhance the ability of your muscles and your brain to communicate with lightning speed. This is a pretty important podcast to listen to if you're trying to eliminate.

Pain or improve performance.

So stay tuned. And and just one quick special announcement before we hop into this interview with Eric Cobb from Z Health. And that would be that for those of you who were not able to attend my Become Superhuman Live event that happened in March of this year, I've made all of the videos, the audios, the slides, the takeaway notes, everything available to you, and I'm going to put a link to that right at the bottom of the show notes for this episode with Dr. Eric. And that's going to be over@bengreenfieldfitness.com so check it out and let's jump into this interview about Z Health and making your nervous system unstoppable.

Enjoy.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here, and a few weeks ago I was at a conference with a bunch of other health professionals and fitness nerds like me, and somebody asked me if I was familiar with the concept of Z Health. And I said, well, actually, no, I'm not too familiar with that. What is it? And they said, oh, you got to get the people from Z Health on a podcast to talk about how this stuff can be used to retrain your brain and help you eliminate pain, improve performance, and do all these cool kind of tiny tweaks to specifically the nervous system. So I went and checked out their website and kind of looked into it and it's cool stuff. So I got the founder and the CEO on a call and he's with us today. His name is Dr. Eric Cobb. And he, like I mentioned, he's the founder and CEO of this performance solutions company called Z Health. And he himself is a chiropractic physician, he's an author, he's a trainer, and he consults with weekend warriors to professional athletes for kind of this combination of both rehab and also performance enhancement. So we're going to do today is tell you about what Z Health is. And I know they've also got some, you know, some stuff for those of you who are out there who are personal trainers, who are kind of helping other people, they have some certification programs as well. So we're just going to get into all that today. And Eric, I wanted to thank you for coming on the call.

Well, thank you very much for the invitation. I'm looking forward to chatting with you.

So let's just, I guess start right in with the elephant in the room. What is Z Health?

Well, this is funny because this is one of the questions we get asked all the time. People hear about us, they hear about this brain based fitness thing and you know, it's a little bit tough to summarize, but I'm going to tell you, I'm going to answer this from two perspectives. I'm going to answer from our business side and then really from the system side, which is what most people are interested in. So our company, Z Health Performance, we're primarily an education company. We train personal trainers, physical therapists, physicians all over the world. We have certification programs, et cetera. But the business side is to educate them in the system. And the system is really a collection of tools and techniques that we've developed, researched over the last really decade and a half. And it all revolves around looking at brain function, how the nervous system controls the body and as you said in the intro, kind of utilizing small exercises, little tweaks here and there to make massive changes in pain, range of motion, flexibility, strength, performance. So it's in our minds, it's a leading edge system because really everything, if you follow the science at all, everything in medicine, everything in therapy, sports, performance, we're all starting to look at the nervous system in a lot more depth. And that's really what we've been specializing in for, as I said, over decades.

Gotcha. So let's delve into some of the concepts behind Z Health. How is it any different than going in and just hooking up with a personal trainer at the gym and going through some basic movement patterns or just doing a typical strength workout or rehab workout?

Great. Really good question. I'm going to Start off with just a couple of very significant differentiators, and then we can kind of work our way back. One of the big things that we train all of our professionals to do, and this is based off looking at how the brain works and really kind of how it is designed to work in the real world. In addition to doing basic movement pattern typical exercises that you might see anywhere else, we're also very big on looking at the total integration process. And what I mean by that is when you're going through your life going through a standard exercise program, very few people give any consideration to the fact that their visual system, their eyes, how their eyes are functioning, whether they can see clearly, how their peripheral vision is functioning, et cetera. They give very little credence to how impactful that is on their life, on their workout, on their training and their results. So in addition, as I said to everything else, we look at the visual system a great deal. We assess it, we have exercises and drills to train it. We also spend a lot of time looking at what's called the vestibular system. Most people know of that as their inner ear. So the inner balance part of the brain, and most of your posture. And this is one of the things that we get into a lot. Because if you go through a typical movement pattern assessment or standard workout, most people that are in this business will talk a lot about posture. But posture is really tough to fix consciously. You can work on it, but as soon as you forget about it, it tends to go back to the way it was.

You mean doing a movement screen or something like that?

Exactly. And so when you look at posture, it's really supposed to be controlled reflexively. And a lot of it is controlled by what happens in your inner ear. So in addition to looking at the eyes, we look at the inner ear, we assess it, we have drills for it, and then finally we get down into looking at, as most people would say, basic movement patterns. But whenever we look at them, we look at them very systematically and very much in depth. Because there's some other reflexive things that occur in the nervous system that if you're having a problem, literally in a single joint, maybe in your foot or your knee or whatever, it can absolutely alter all of your movements. And so we do a very systematic, again, assessment and training for each joint and all the ranges of motion. So we try and take, as I said, all this kind of complicated, integrative stuff that happens in the brain and break it out into bits and pieces that anyone can learn.

So give me some examples I'm curious about how you would, you know, if I, let's say I walk into your facility or I go and see somebody who's, who's certified as a Z Health certified trainer, what is it in terms of the type of testing that you're going to do on me first? And then I also want to ask you about some of the training protocols. But let's first start with testing. Can you give me examples? I mean, is it like when you go to the get fit for eyeglasses and you're looking at an eye chart on the wall or what exactly are you doing?

That's a great question. Again, obviously all of our assessments, like any really good assessment, starts with a history. So we're going to spend quite a bit of time talking about what's happened to you in the past, what you're trying to achieve. Because one of the things that I strongly believe based off looking at the nervous system for a long time, is that we have to know what your goals are. Because every training program, whether it's to get out of pain or improve body composition, whatever really has to be individualized and that comes from knowing you. So we're going to do a good history once we've done that. Our basic assessments, we have a number of different screens. If you see a Z health practitioner, I guarantee you they're going to have you walk quite a lot. Because we do a lot of basic gait assessment, number one. Because if you understand neurology, seeing how people move through the real world is incredibly important. I actually consider it one of the most important screens that we do. And so we have kind of a systematic process of looking at what's going on. The feet, the ankles, the knees, the hips, the back. Plus there is a lot of information you can gather about basic neurology, basic neural function from gait. So we're going to do that then based on history, depending on what we found in the gait process, we will do some basic visual assessments. We have a nine test battery that we perform. And it goes way beyond looking at an eye chart on the wall, although we might have you do that. But we look at how your eyes move in a variety of ways. There are things called saccades. There's where your eyes are moving back and forth. We'll evaluate how well you see close and then far, how well your eyes move in a coordinated fashion. And one of the things that we'll be doing within the midst of all that is we'll also be doing other movement screens to see how Your eye function is impacting on movement screens. So there's a combination of things there. And then once we've done that, we do some reflexive testing for the inner ear. And there's a number of different tests that you can do there that are really simple to perform. If you go see a Z Health trainer, you don't have to expect a room full of crazy expensive equipment. A lot of my background comes from working with law enforcement and military. And so I, I tell everyone that everything I do is what I call field expedient. You need very few tools and you can do it anywhere. And so the assessments, as I said, they're not technologically based. They're just based off looking at how the body's functioning. So gait, some eye testing, some inner ear testing. And then if you're an athlete, we may be looking at something more specific for programming in the gym or out on the field, because we also do a lot of sports work in terms of teaching sprint technique and things like that.

Gotcha. So in terms of your focus on the nervous system, you know, the ears, the eyes, and all this stuff, why is that so important? And why do you focus primarily on that with your Z Health system?

I'm going to try and take a long story and really shortcut it. One of the reasons that we're so insistent that that should be part of really every healthcare and fitness professional's toolbox is that the deeper you look into neuroscience, you have to realize that the brain is there for a couple different reasons. And the number one thing that your brain's in charge of is keeping you alive. We always say survival is priority one. If you then look at that and you ask yourself the question, well, how does the brain keep me alive? Well, it keeps you alive first of all by observing your environment. And so when you think about that, it's obviously the eyes that give you the greatest ability to observe your current environment and make good choices. And so I noticed over the years of working on my own body, working with clients, that as vision deteriorated, movement deteriorated. And this is very easy to see. Watch someone that maybe moves fairly well, they get a little bit older, they spend more time at their desk, their eyes begin to go. Now they get bifocals. And if you start, if you watch people for a living, if you watch people move for a living, unless they're doing something really dramatic, every time their visual system loses capacity, you begin to see their movement system suffer. And so this is one of the things I noticed years ago and really a lot of our focus on the visual and vestibular components grew out of my own frustration that there were clients that I could do stretch and strengthen stuff forever, and yes, they would have some minor improvement, but I was never seeing the real significant changes that I was looking for. And so, as I said, a lot of it was just bred out of necessity. And then as I began learning more about it and really delving into the neurology, it became much more clear to me that really we talk about, we call the governing systems in the brain and the visual system really is governing system number one, vestibular is number two, and then your movement system is number three. And so realistically I tell people, most of us were trained in the health and fitness industry. If we have an education in this, we really were trained backwards. We started with movement, when in reality it's the system, it's the third system in the hierarchy.

Got it. Do you think that some of the reasons that the nervous system is so important could be related also or could affect the way that we feel or we perform after, for example, a day of staring at the computer or a day of work where a lot of our senses are fried in a way, but the body is still able to go in complete emotion?

Yes, absolutely. And that's actually a very, very observant point because let's talk about it a little bit biomechanically at first. If you take someone, you set them in front of a computer and this is very observable. If you're listening to this, watch people at work tomorrow. People come in from work and let's say they actually have a relatively healthy lifestyle. They come in in the morning, maybe they slept well, they're feeling pretty good, they sit at their desk, posture's going to probably be semi okay by noon, by one, by two, as the stress of the day is increasing, their fatigue level is increasing. And they've been staring at this screen, you know, at 40 inches or whatever, all day. You'll slowly see their head begin to creep forward further and further and further and they begin adjusting their vision by adjusting their posture. So by the end of the day, you have, you've really, you know, as you were mentioning, you've kind of been hyper fixated in one spot for a really long time. And that has consequences throughout the body. So yes, you can, you can get up from your desk and you can go out and try and work out and do all these other things, but the fatigue that occurs in the visual system or in the inner ear or wherever else we're Talking about is absolutely going to have an effect, number one, on your energy levels, and then number two, have a huge effect on how you move when you do eventually get to your training. And so I tell people, if you. It's one of the problems that you run into is that as you fatigue your other senses, as you were saying, it actually decreases the quality of your movement, which decreases the quality of the results that you get from your other training.

Gotcha. So I'm curious about exercises here. I know that you have, and I don't necessarily want you to give away the farm because I know you guys sell, for example, like your Quick Start dvd. And for people listening, I'll put a link to some of the Z Health stuff in the show notes. But you've got what you call high payoff exercises that you've found to benefit the majority of people. Can you tell me about maybe just one or two of the high payoff exercises that help somebody to kind of train their nervous system in the way that you describe?

Absolutely. Now, I have a variety of these, and what I'll start off talking about are just basic joint mobility drills. Because one of the things that we really focus on in terms of movement is, is going, okay, you know, whenever you look in the brain and you look at movement, how does movement work and where does that information occur and et cetera. And so one of the things that's very intriguing about studying movement neurologically is that the areas of your body that have the most joints have a really strong impact on how your brain then builds its movement maps or maps of the world. And so if you look at the body, what you see is that you got a lot of joints in your feet, you have a lot of joints in your spine, you have a lot of joints in your hands. A lot of our high payoff exercises are very specific mobility exercises where we look at the foot and go, okay, what are the different joints there? And how can we do exercises that mobilize them? Because when we mobilize them, that's going to send signals up to the brain and hopefully clarify for your brain how to make the muscles and tendons and everything else work better. So in terms of basic stuff to get started, we do a lot of foot mobilizations, we do a lot of hand and wrist exercises, and then we do a lot of spinal exercises. Now, that doesn't mean all the other joints aren't important, but in terms of very high payoffs for getting people moving better most quickly, those are things that we found now where all these you Know where the name high payoff comes from is that we've kept records or worked with at this point. I think we were looking at this the other day, around 23,000 personal clients, plus all the classes that I've taught and certified people. So we have hundreds of thousands of people that have been exposed to this material. And the vast majority of our new clients all wind up with similar. You know, in the beginning we see feet, hands, spine. So that's why we call them high payoff drills. They're things we start almost everybody with.

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Now, as far as like elite athletes, are there kind of different drills, higher end drills that you'd use with someone who's going after like really serious enhancement?

Interestingly enough? Well, there's two answers to that. Yes and no. Almost all of our elite athletes that we work with, we still do the basic evaluations and drills that I'm talking about because we still find problems with them sometimes. I will say though, that for the most part, whenever I work with an elite level athlete, I do spend a lot of time looking at the eyes and the inner ear because so often these guys are quite finely tuned and they already move quite well. And so if they're already doing good mobility work, they're stretching appropriately for their sport, their strength training, as they should. There may be less stuff for me to do in the movement arena, in the body, and I have to spend more time looking at, as I said, what's going on with their eyes and inner ears. I just had a guy recently, he's a top league soccer player in Europe who was having knee pain and we wound up actually working not on his knee, but on his inner ear to fix his knee pain. And so that's kind of an example of stuff that I wind up doing with maybe someone's operating at a slightly higher level.

Gotcha. So in terms of this kind of brain based training, is there anything that goes along with it from like a nutritional standpoint as well, or do you primarily focus on the exercises for like the ears and the eyes and the nervous system?

That's a very intuitively good question. The reason I say that's a great good question is because whenever we teach basic stuff about the brain, we say, you know, your brain needs two things. The first thing it needs is good fuel. And so really from a brain based fitness perspective, nutrition is an integral part of helping people. So, you know, and I'm going to try and connect dots here for a second because Ben, you mentioned earlier, let's say you know you said, can the brain kind of be fried or senses be fried by the end of a workday before you go for your workout? That's really a question about fuel supply and about nutrition. And the answer obviously is yes. So we actually have a certification program that we teach professionals on food and nutrition because ultimately it is very tough to retrain a brain to function more appropriately for the long term if you're not also handling the basics of good nutrition. Now, I will say we were mentioning this idea of fuel. You need not only good nutrition, you also need good oxygen supply. So we also spend a lot of time teaching breathing exercises to all of our clients. Nothing that takes hours and hours a day, but good basic breathing practices can make a huge difference in making sure your brain's able to change and I guess gain benefit from all the other stuff that you're doing.

Gotcha. That's actually something that came up during a recent conference that I had here in Spokane. Was Nora Good Goudis was presenting on brain inflammation. And one of the things she touched on was breathing. And she actually mentioned how a lot of people think that it's all about oxygenating the brain. And I don't know if you've heard about this, but she talked about how a big, big issue instead is what's called hypercapnia, where people breathe deeply enough, but then they don't exhale in the way that they're supposed to. And so they get this buildup of carbon dioxide that actually causes a lot of this stuff like brain fog and brain inflammation.

Right. That's really good information as well. We're in all of our breathing training, the primary focus is exhalation based breath training for that very reason. There's a lot of good information about this out there. Now, probably if people are interested in reading more, one of the systems I would recommend that they check out is called Buteyko Breathing, which was a Russian breathing method. It's actually been researched for asthma in the United States. And their primary focus is really on reduced breathing and exhalation based breathing. For the reasons that you're mentioning.

How did you spell that?

Buteyko is B U T E Y.

K O U T E Y K O. I'll put a link to that in the show. Notes for people. I wanted to ask you about pain too, Eric, because obviously it sounds like by using a system like Z Health or by paying attention to their eyes, to their ears and to their brain, people can enhance performance. But you've also got a lot of information on your website about pain management, how does this tie into pain?

The fact is, most people actually find us because of pain first, not performance. And it ties in really beautifully. Well, because when you really begin researching pain, what you'll find out immediately is that pain, and this is kind of, kind of that old cliche, but pain really does live in the brain. And that's not to tell people that pain's all in their head, but it really is. Pain is actually a really useful tool that's used by the brain when it's appropriate. Unfortunately, most people, because of poor movement and a lot of other stuff that occurs in life, the way that our brain uses and manages pain can often get really messed up. And so whenever you start to think about pain, there's a growing consensus in the neuroscience field that pain's kind of a complicated deal. There's not one little spot in your brain that lights up when your knee hurts and another spot that lights up when your foot hurts. It's much more complex than that. In fact, when people are having what's called a pain event, that's the sciency sounding term when they have a pain event. If we're doing. Taking a picture of their brain, what you see right now we're looking at seven different areas of the brain can typically become quite active. And these different areas really are responsible for different stuff. Some areas that are involved in emotions and in planning, memories become involved in it. And so what's very curious about pain is that we've all been kind of taught that whenever something hurts, it means that something's broken, right? Because as a kid, we fall down, we scrape our knee, and we kind of get this automatic association that, oh, look, I'm hurting and I'm injured. So those are the same thing. Well, they're not the same thing at all. Not neurologically. And so what we've started to figure out is that when people are coming to us, particularly with recurrent, irritating pain, you know, it's. It's the typical people come to you and they say, hey, I've got a bad shoulder. I've had a bad shoulder for 20 years. What they usually mean when they say that is, hey, I've had this shoulder, that the pain comes and goes. And if you question them about it, they'll usually say, yeah, every time I get stressed out, my neck hurts. So when you hear things like that, you start to realize that it's not just about muscle tension, but there are multiple factors going on in there. And so when you approach pain from this perspective of saying, hey, there can be a visual component to pain, there can be an inner ear component, there can be a movement component. It gives you a lot of different avenues to figure out how to address it most quickly.

Gotcha. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit too about how somebody would actually use Z Health. Like you have a certification program for trainers, right? And is that, is that mostly, is it doctors or is it personal trainers or what kind of people use that?

The majority of our people in the United States are personal trainers. We also teach in Europe and there we have about a 50, 50 split between personal trainers, physical therapists and physicians. But in the US it's primarily personal trainers.

And this is just basically kind of like an online certification program that somebody could do.

Actually in our case, no, because we're pretty detailed about how everything's done done. So we have, we follow kind of a university model. We have an introductory course to let people learn about who we are. And then we have four different levels of really core curriculum education. And the way that those are set up is people can, when they begin the courses, we send them a bunch of study material and DVDs and then we also have live training events because as I said, we want to do hands on work with everyone that we certify to make sure that they know how to apply all the assessments and tools correctly.

Okay, all right, gotcha. And then what if you are just the average person kind of coming off the street? Is there a way that you can utilize this system or do you just need to find like a trainer who's been certified as a Z Health trainer or whatnot?

Absolutely not. We have. And this is one of the things that we're really making big strides in this year is getting the information into the. It's a kind of general health enthusiasts hands. The three day course that I talked about is the introductory course. It's called Essentials of Elite Performance and it's actually designed to be applicable for both professionals and consumers. And that's the course that we really recommend people either get on DVD to understand how the system works or actually attend a live training because those are fantastic opportunities to learn how to fine tune your own body. And then all of the products that we sell can be used by anyone. We are actually in the process of also releasing some new direct to consumer products specifically for vision training and inner ear training and then some as well as some kind of unique strength training stuff. And so those are rapidly becoming available this year.

Okay, got it. I'll put a link to all this stuff in the show notes. So if you're a trainer listening in, you want to get a Z Health certification, you can check that out. And also I'll put a link to some of their training products for the general population. Eric, I also want to ask you if somebody were going to go out and do something right now to. And I'm going to put you on the spot here to make their nervous system stronger, and they don't have access to a bunch of fancy equipment, or maybe they don't have a train or something like that. What is something that someone could do? It could be nutrition, it could be exercise, whatever. But in terms of, like, the biggest win for somebody, what do you think that they could do to make their nervous system stronger?

Great. Okay, we're going to. I'm going to give you several different things that we can. That people could just consider starting with. Number one thing I would recommend is beginning to engage in somewhere around five, five to eight minutes per day of really dedicated or deliberate breathing practices. Now, I'm going to tell you the exercise I start almost all my clients with. It's really simple. First of all, do you mind if I describe the exercise? Is that easy enough?

Yeah, go for it.

Okay, so you have. Wherever you are, you can either sit up on a chair, lay down, doesn't matter. You can put one hand on your stomach, one hand on your chest. Now, the rule here is you're going to be breathing in through your nose. You can be breathing out through your mouth. And as you breathe in through the nose, you want to make sure that it's not your chest that's moving first, but rather your stomach. So you're going to try and relax your stomach. Take a breath in through the nose for about two seconds, and then you're going to be breathing out through your mouth for six to eight seconds. The only real challenge here is we're going to have you keep your lips kind of tightly together as you breathe out. We're going to really focus on the exhale. So you breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth, two in, six to eight seconds, out. And the goal that I tell all of my new clients to start with is I want you to try and do 10 breaths four times a day. There are probably 500 or so named breathing systems in the world, and virtually all of them focus. The way that they improve breathing is by getting you to focus on it. So it's just kind of conscious attention. As small as the investment of time is just starting to fuel the brain with better breathing practices. Is huge. So that's the number one thing I would get people to start with. The second thing I would then recommend if you've been listening to this podcast, if you have any idea about trying to add in some level of anti inflammatory processes to your diet, maybe that's maybe you know you're gluten sensitive, maybe from a supplementation perspective, you know that you do well with maybe high dose vitamin C or using some kind of herbal like turmeric. But adding in an intentional anti inflammatory process to your diet or supplementation would be part two. So breathing, dealing with inflammation. And then the third thing I would recommend once again just to automatically or very quickly begin strengthening the nervous system would be to start working on your visual system. And I'm going to give you a couple of very simple things to do if you would at your computer, get one of your alarm systems set up, whether it's on your computer or whatever. And every really Ideally about every 20 minutes you want to take a visual hygiene break. So what that means is very simple. You're either going to cover your eyes, close them and try and just let them relax for 30 to 45 seconds and try and make it really dark in there. Alternatively, get up, walk outside and really work hard to look off into the distance. As simple as these things may sound, they can actually begin to have a pretty profound impact on your ability to relax. Number one, breathe better. And as I said, when we start dealing with the fuel supply, that's just going to feed over into having more energy to begin devoting to the rest of your day. So those are some simple things that you can get started with.

Awesome. You made me feel good there because I do all three of those. I do breathing exercises three times a day. I go outside on my back porch every hour of sitting and do basically jumping jacks while I look at the sun. And then I do a lot of turmeric and a lot of ginger and garlic and stuff like that. So cool. You made me feel good. I'm doing something right. Well man, a lot of cool stuff here. The certification looks great so I'll put a link to that on the show. Notes. It's called Z Health for those of you who didn't get a chance to write that down. And his name is Dr. Eric and it's Cobb, right? Yeah, Cobb. C O C o B B. Dr. Eric Cobb. So check out their stuff. I'll have links over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Eric, thanks for coming on the call today.

Thank you very much. I enjoyed talking with you.