Podcast Episode #11: Training With Inertia

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. This is your weekly free audio exposure to cutting edge fitness, diet and wellness news. Hey, whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, this podcast is going to present you with the latest exercise and nutrition content from the nation's top experts. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, certified nutritionist and exercise, diet and wellness guru. Each week I'm going to be bringing you cutting edge fitness, nutrition and wellness advice. Stay tuned for this Week's podcast from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Hey podcast listeners. Welcome to podcast episode number 11 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com in this podcast, which may be just a little bit shorter than previous podcasts because I'm up and Penticton Canada, racing in Ironman Canada, we're going to be going over a listener question of the week. We'll be reviewing some of the new content@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and we'll be interviewing Steve Davison from Impulse Power Systems on how we can get benefits for both general fitness and sports specific fitness by training with inertia. So stay tuned to this podcast episode number 11 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. New content@BenGreenfieldFitness.com not a whole lot to talk about today, but I just really quickly wanted to alert you to a brand new core workout. Remember, when we're training the core, we want to think about our musculature in more complete terms than just that six packs that we can see on the front of our bodies. You want to think about a muscular belt that surrounds your entire body and you want to be able to stabilize your back muscles with that supportive belt. And the new complete core workout that I've posted on the website shows you exactly how to do that with a series of exercises. So check out that brand new video. Try to incorporate this core workout in your routine about once a week and you will see some rock solid results in your midsection. So that's the new content this week@BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Listener Q&A. Alright, we have Brad from the UK and Brad says I have no problem taking supplements but they are just so expensive that I can't afford to take all of the ones I would like to. Which two or three supplements would you recommend as the top supplements for someone who is undergoing beginner level workouts? Well, in Brad's situation what I would not recommend are the supplements that are designed to vastly enhance sports performance or give you that extra 5 to 10% edge that you might need. And those would be some of the supplements that I talked about last week, like the Cortagen VO2 or the creatine or the coenzyme Q10 or some of those that are going to with no doubt improve your health and performance. But when you're talking about just wanting to pick, the top two supplements that you should take may not be the top two that you would choose from the list of supplements that I talked about in the last podcast and that you can review at podcast number 10@bengreenfieldfitness.com or just by reading through the show notes for that podcast episode. One supplement in particular was called Enerprime, and this is a multivitamin superfood that is designed to enhance the immune system and give your body the equivalent of eating about 10 salads when you take these capsules in you in the morning when you wake up or at night before you go to bed. And this supplement in particular would be one that I would recommend to take. If you have to choose the top supplement, it's called Impax Enterprime. It's a multivitamin superfood blend. The other supplement that I talked about in last week's episode that I would highly recommend because our bodies can't actually produce this is an omega 3 fatty acid. You can get it from a fish oil source, like a Carlson's fish oil. You can also get it from a vegetarian source, for example flaxseed oil. And the supplement that I recommended last week was called nrefa. And you can also read about that in the show notes for podcast episode number 10. So if I had to recommend two supplements to someone who was just beginning exercise who perhaps wasn't tearing their body up all that much, much didn't need to enhance sports performance to a large degree. I would say a multivitamin and a fish oil or a source of omega 3 fatty acids. So I hope that answers your question, Brad. Remember, if you have a question, you can post a comment@BenGreenfieldFitness.com or you can send me an email at BenRinkOfitness.com. All right, the moment you've all been waiting for the interview. And on this week's podcast I have Brad Davison, who is with Impulse Power Systems. You can visit their website, which is highly informative and which is going to provide you with a lot of extra information on top of what you hear in this interview@imulsepower.com. that's all one word, I, M, P, U, L, S, E. And there are videos and workouts and things of that nature that describe how to use the concept of inertia when you are training. And Brad will talk a little bit more about inertia and impulse and what these two physics terms actually mean and how they're utilized in his general fitness and sports specific training systems. And this is all based on an actual exercise device that you can utilize or that you may have come across at your local gym or physical therapy institute and want to know a little bit more about. So listening to this interview from Brad Davison of Impulse Power Systems. And I again am in Penticton, Canada right now, and the only place where I had an Internet connection to interview Brad was at a coffee shop. And so you'll hear some of the hustle and bustle in the background. You'll hear cars driving by. So hopefully that's not too distracting. And let's go ahead and move on to the interview. This is Ben Greenfield with BenGreenfieldFitness.com and today I'm going to interview a gentleman who knows quite a bit about a rather unique fitness system called Impulse Power. This guy's name is Steve Davison. And I'm just going to start off with asking Steve to tell us a little bit about himself and what the Impulse Power system actually is. So Steve, go ahead.

Well, Ben, thank you for calling and thank you for giving me an opportunity to share the art that I've been working on for about 30 years. I'm, I guess you'd say I'm a trained industrial designer, if anybody knows what that is, and a trained human factors engineer, if anybody knows what that is. But I really haven't practiced those two arts in quite a long time. I discovered inertial exercise, which is the art that Impulse Power is about about 30 years ago. And I was a corporate guy designing scanners for grocery stores. So when you go to the grocery store and they scan your groceries, I'm one of the guys that developed that. But in the course of that kind of work, I stumbled upon a man who had the idea that everything that people do on planet earth that is 98% of it is gravity free. And having done some work with NASA when I was in college, I just kind of thought that was an interesting thing for this gentleman to say. His name was Bill McLeod. He was the director of biomechanics and research for the Houston Clinic in Columbus, Georgia. And I don't know, I went to look at what he said, made some arguments, and he convinced me he was right. We formed a company, myself and he and Tom McGault and another guy named Ron Payton. And we wanted to discover how we could design exercise devices which would complement this philosophy that everything is gravity free. We would then patent these things and then get some money, and just for the fun of it, we'd do something else. And when I discovered, and we were all corporate guys, everybody had a job somewhere else doing something else. When I built the first inertial exercise trainer, we couldn't get anybody to buy into it. It was just like, wow, what's that? That's kind of weird. And I thought, this is the most important thing I've ever done in my life. So I quit my job and formed this company. And I've been promoting this technology ever since then.

Okay, now, what is the inertial exercise trainer? I mean, what was the idea behind that? And if a listener were to just close their eyes and picture what this might look like or how it would. Would work practically for them, what exactly is it?

Well, the actual device that we're manufacturing now, there's several ways you can do inertial exercise, but the concept is that you're going to accelerate a mass, and there's no friction at all. And then when you store the energy into this mass that you accelerate, all of a sudden the energy is reversed, and you have to absorb the energy that you created. So it's reciprocal accelerating mass without gravity, and then decelerating mass without gravity.

Okay, so when someone's actually accelerating and decelerating that mass, how is the actual system, or how is the apparatus that they're accelerating and decelerating that mass on set up? I mean, how would someone actually hold.

We've got a sled with a very, very slippery bearings on a very, very slippery track that's connected to a rope that's made out of a proprietary alloy plastic. But it's an alloy. It does not stretch. And the rope goes through a series of pulleys. And when you start pulling on the rope, the mass accelerates down the track. There is no resistance except the mass of the weight. There's a sled. The mass of the weight on the sled is the only resistance there is. That is inertia. That's why we call it inertial exercise. The company is called impulse because an impulse is a force that causes a mass to change its direction or its velocity. So impulse inertial exercise training is about teaching people how to accelerate. And then, of course, in Pure Newtonian physics. There's no such thing as decelerating. You're either accelerating in direction A or you're accelerating in direction B. So we teach you how to accelerate from A to B and then how to accelerate from B to A. In sports terms, that would be accelerating and then decelerating. So we teach both. Each rep, we teach both.

And who could benefit from actually training with this type of system?

Everybody on the planet.

Okay.

We have a history. We started out in the therapy industry where we did all of our clinical research and clinical trial. Most of the research papers that have been conducted on inertial exercise had been done in the physical therapy and rehabilitation environment. And where was I going with that? So we have seen our product very actively used in everything from the hospice situation where you teach some person who's going to be dead in the very near future how to maintain operating their wheelchair, to last year, Curt Schilling winning the World Series. To us, it's all neuromuscular education.

Right, Right. So we're talking primarily about probably combination of rehabilitation and sports specific fitness is what it sounds like.

Well, we started in rehab thing, but what the product actually does for the human body is it trains your neural system to be more attuned in how to control your body. So it's not really rehab because the term rehab means you get back to a state that you were before. We take you way past the state that you were before.

So I'm a swimmer. How would something like this help me?

Well, several things that you need in swimming. One, you need to maintain your line. If you're swimming like a wet noodle, then for every 50 meters you're thinking you're swimming straight, you're going 55 meters. So if your opponent is somebody that swims straight and you swim like a wet noodle, they don't have to swim as hard to still get to the other end faster than you. The other thing in swimming is that if you know how to control your muscle tone and especially in your core. I don't know if you've studied any of Bill Boomer's total immersion stuff or Milton Elm's, but you know, there's drills that you practice your muscle tone for your core and that makes it easier for the water to slip by you. Then in the swimming action itself. And impulse will help both of those things. And in swimming itself, typically, if you're doing a lot of swimming in the past have done a lot of laps and a lot of laps and a lot of laps. Now I don't know in doing that what you're using is a slow twitch type of muscle. So you're in an aerobic conditioning kind of utility. Inertial exercise has nothing to do with aerobics. It's all anaerobic. So if you use inertial exercise, you're actually going to be burning fast twitch fiber rather than slow twitch fiber. And using inertial exercise, you can develop a certain degree, different degrees of anaerobic endurance. So if it's not a terribly, really long, long swim, you can maintain your body warmth for longer than you would if you just did the gazillions of laps. So in swimming in general, we're talking about teaching somebody how to maintain their line better, their core density better, or their core tension better, and then keeping their muscles warmer longer. Then for the long distance swimmer, after you've hit the wall and you go into the aerobic area of swimming, one of the things this product really does is help muscles learn about synergy. So in swimming, the most important, or I should say bones, learning about synergy, one of the most important bones for the swimmer is the scapula. If he really doesn't know how to get his serratus anterior and his rhomboids and all those things to keep it sliding properly, especially after long use, something's going to get torn, you're going to get a rotator cuff tear, slap, lesion, just, you know, all the weird things that long distance swimmers have in their shoulder girdle occur because of misoperation of the shoulder after they become fatigued. And impulse can train the body in how to stay stabilized in using the staff. And let me tell you, kind of a neat thing. I worked with Milton Elm for several years developing a stabilization program for the scapula for the Olympic level swimmer. And I took that product, that concept over to a friend of mine, Phil Donnelly, in Westchester, Pennsylvania, and that became the core stabilization program for the last five World Series winning pitchers. In baseball, the same program we designed for swimmers became exactly what the professional pitcher needed. And now that program is all over professional baseball.

Well, you know, it seems like with a lot of cutting edge sport enhancing techniques, they often eventually kind of trickle down to the general population who then has a way to utilize this system, you know, in their gym, in their living room, wherever the case may be. Now, how can someone actually utilize one of the impulse power training systems, say at home or at their local gym? I mean, are these available yet?

Yes, we say, well, in the gym situation where impulse is typically found now is in the elite training center. So it could be Jay Schrader's place in Phoenix, or it could be Dan Pickter's place in Rochester, Larry Mail's place down in Boca Raton. That's typically where you see us. And so if you ask about the famous people that use this, it would be the elite athlete that goes to that kind of coach. That kind of coach also deals with the individual that's not a professional athlete, but is a very competitive individual. And they're willing to spend the kind of money that an expensive coach like that, you know, would demand. But that individual is then buying a machine for their home and then regularly going back to the coach to see, am I doing everything like I'm supposed to be doing it? That has trickled down to not a large amount of sales, but a lot of people that have friends that are doing this. And so then they call us and say, well, can we get one? And we go, yeah, but you're going to have to follow the program. And you know, we tell them the honest scoop of it is this is going to require some rethinking on your part and it's not an inexpensive product. But yes, the average person is more and more buying this product and adapting the technology to their lifestyle and their training at home.

Okay, when you talk about the system, when you talk about the program, walk me through what like a typical workout would actually be on one of these impulse systems.

We've got two. One, I don't like canned program and we've got two canned programs. So that's like. I know I'm contradicting myself there, but it's very difficult for somebody that really doesn't have an eye for training athletes, work with athletes that hasn't worked with athletes. So they just don't know what to do. So we devised a program where you don't have to know what to do. If you do this entire 25 minute lookout and you buy into our philosophy while you're doing it, you'll just straighten yourself out in two weeks. And that program we call our stabilization program, that was the core program, came out of our swimming working with men, because a lot of swimmers just don't have coaches around. So we wanted to come up with a program where the swimmer just does this and they buy into the philosophy, which I'll tell you about in a second, then they just stay better and they did. The same thing happened with professional default issues. A lot of times, you know, they just can't have an elite trainer right there because they're on the road so much. So that's where we came up with a stabilization program, which is 64 exercises that you do while you follow our philosophy, which we call star, which is stance and posture, targeting activation and release. And when you get a machine, there's a manual that tells you all about how to do all those things correctly. And if you'll do the STAR philosophy properly with the prescribed exercises, pretty much it doesn't matter what your sport is, you will be better at it.

Okay, so these programs or these workouts that you do on the impulse system, about how long do they actually take?

Well, they can take. We have an anaerobic endurance program which is a 10 minute program and it pretty much saps all your energy. Well, you can't go past 10 minutes because it pretty much takes all your energy out of you. We've got a stabilization program which takes when you are coordinated and working well. It will take 25 minutes to do when you initially start it. Inertial exercise is all about training coordination. So the less coordinated you are, the longer it takes you to do something. So when you first start that program, it might take you 40 minutes to finish the entire program inside of about four exercise sessions, which would be a Monday, Wednesday or Friday and the next Monday. So the next Wednesday after that you'd be down in a 25 minute time range. Learning curve with impulse training is very, very quick for most people.

Now where can people find more information about impulse training systems?

Of course you can Google impulse training systems and there'll be a bunch of stuff show up. You can come to our website, which is www.unulsepower.com. and I don't know, there's some things that are interesting to some people and some things that are boring to others. So it's a pretty big website. You can surf around to get a lot of information. If you'll go to a section on our website which talks about books and literature, it can tell you where you can get books that will have whole chapters and things like that about inertial exercise. Most of those books though are, you know, in a chapter. You can't say a lot other than this is a great thing and we've got these kind of great results and stuff like that. But you really need to experience the technology to understand what it's going to do for you.

Well, Steve, I want to thank you for your time. I'm going to try and post some more information up on the blog@BenGreenfieldFitness.com about impulse training systems. I'll include a link to your website so that the listeners can go find out more. It sounds like especially useful for or the audience I would find this especially useful would be people that are using quite a bit of what we seem to come up a lot was like shoulder type of sports, shoulder rotation type of sports. So I'm sure that we might get a lot of people who are interested in how to make themselves stronger and train from a more intelligent perspective, maybe using some of these inertial concepts. So any final thoughts for us? Steve?

Well, it's funny that you mentioned the shoulder. The biggest thing that I think the most important joint in the body is the knee. Half of our training is about teaching the knee how to be stable with the hip and the ankle. Most shoulder injuries are because they don't have a stable leg, not because there's something wrong with the shoulder. So I just thought I'd throw that caveat in.

Okay. Okay.

You're training the whole body in other words. That's right.

Right. So you don't just have to use the impulse training system to target one specific area. That's good to know.

In fact, anything whether you're a golfer, Tiger Woods, BJ Singh, anybody like that. There are. They are our clients. It's the whole body that does the skill, not just one component.

Okay. Okay. Well that is impulsepower.com Steve Davison and we're going to look forward to getting some more information about this up on the show notes for the blog. So make sure you visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com to find out more. Steve, thank you for your time and we'll stay in touch. I'll talk to you later.

Okay?

All right. All right, you too Steve. Bye bye. So that's all the content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com Like I said, I will be racing I Ironman Canada this weekend. If you want to track that race you can go to ironmanlive.com My race number is 192. You can click on Athlete Tracker and find out what's going on there. Next week I will be bringing you more cutting edge content. I will be podcasting from Warsaw, Poland next weekend. So again we might not have the best audio clarity but I will try and make it as good as possible. Remember to go to the website, leave a comment. Check out the new forum@BenGreenfieldFitness.com forum remember you can always send me an email BenGreenfieldFitness.com until next time. This is Ben Greenfield from Penticton, Canada over and out. Sa.