138- The Future of Core Stability

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Hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. This week we have a special interview with Dr. Scott Bertrand. He is the inventor of the All Core 360. So if you are into core stability rehab or active care in your practice, you're gonna wanna listen to this one. It's a really unique piece of technology that I had the opportunity to sit, experience, ride on and learn about just a couple weeks back at at five Labs which is one of the premier orthopedic research facilities in the Southeast. And I knew I had to have Scott on to talk a little bit about this really interesting piece of equipment. Also, if you wanna learn more about it, I'll post links down below or just shoot me a message. Jeffevidencebasedchiropractor.com and I'll happily hook you up with somebody from their team to kind of talk further about it. So before we get started, I will say a few words about rock tape. Rock tape is revolutionizing the soft tissue world again with new rock blades Mohawk. Featuring three tools in one, a surgical stainless steel hand polish tool and two attachments silicon sleeve and an ABS comb Mohawk unlock never before seen treatment protocols to reduce pain, improve mobility and address issues like nerve glide and neuropathy. They're 175 bucks and you can learn more and see all the educational courses@rocktape.com Mohawk and without further ado, here is Dr. Scott Bertrand.

Well, well, my particular history was I had, like many folks that we deal with, I had my own spinal cord injury. I had an accident on skydiving with 101st Airborne where I fractured my low back L5S1. Nothing horrible. I wasn't paralyzed but certainly impacted. I went through the normal stabilization phase and then went on into the rehabilitation phase. It was in the rehabilitation phase I realized where we were lacking a lot of the way we currently treat. All the movements were isotonic. All of them put pressure on the disc and all of them were just brutally painful. Trying to recover from that, I realized it really wasn't working for me. I had to quit that therapy due to pain. At the end of the day the therapist says I'm non compliant, which I was, couldn't be farther from being non compliant. I wanted better as well as anybody did. But I had to quit because it wasn't really working for me. Fast forward 20 years, roughly 15, 20 years now. I'm graduating from chiropractic school. I'm finishing up my senior year. I'm at my. At a swimming pool. I do a dive off the high dive, and I hit somebody in the pool, and I break my neck. So this was a little more significant injury. I was not paralyzed, but it was highly uncomfortable. And Honestly, Jeff, it's 15 years later, I go through the stabilization process, I walk into the rehabilitation facility, and the equipment's exactly the same, the plan's exactly the same, and the pain and the therapy was exactly the same. And that's when I realized the way we're doing it now may not be the best approach. And that was kind of the stimulus that got me moving forward on the Allcor360.

It's so crazy to think that in 15, 20 years, 30 years onward, a lot. Exactly as you said, a lot of the strategies and tactics from a rehab perspective, have stayed static. And with that, what was the biggest roadblock or what did you see as the biggest challenge, or what kind of spurred your idea as far as saying, hey, there's gotta be a better way to do this?

Well, I appreciate that's a great question. What I did was I kind of looked at what the core, the functionality, the survival value of the core, and how we can replicate that in our training and rehabilitation. Going through that process, I'm realizing, here's what we're doing. We're taking a core that's really designed to maintain a perfect posture, pretty much isometrically. And the way we train that is we do these isotonic movements. Flipping, flopping, bending, and twisting, all of which were quite uncomfortable. And the other thing that screamed at me was we were taking a core that has 360 degrees of functional potentiality, which is a miracle. And then we're picking two or three degrees to challenge it, and somehow feeling that that might be adequate. The other thing I want to point out that I find is the most important thing about this equipment now is the contemporary approach to the therapy using weights and isotonic movements. What I found doing that was we couldn't balance the challenge from right to left and front to back and side to side. That was the difficulty, I realized. We went to the crunch machine and maybe did 80 pounds on the crunch machine for 100 times, and then over to the deadlift and did 120 pounds, and somehow thought that that was going to create some equal balance core and in reality, as a chiropractor, I think we all know that half of the problems we treat in chiropractic is unbalanced in the core. So I realized that what the body's design is to do is move through space against gravity. The only resistance we need is the weight of our body. So if you took that challenge, how do I use the weight of my body, the isotonic movements that create all the uneven weight bearing on the disk that needs to go isometric. We need to challenge the full 360 degrees of the core potentiality in 10 minutes. Those were the challenges that were difficult to come up with. But that is how the all core 360 became.

Yeah. And I'm gonna post a link in the show notes as well for anybody listening to really check out visually what the All Core looks like, because the design of it really harps on exactly the items that you talked about. It sort of has a gyroscope style, so to speak, and you can probably explain it a lot more elegantly than myself, but the way that it interacts with the body and works throughout, no pun intended, 360 degrees. Utilizing the body weight is something that I found supremely impressive. And as you started to work through that, for the docs that are clicking over and seeing it and saying, wow, I've never seen anything like this before, talk a little bit about the process of how you came up with the design and maybe some of the major refinements along the way, because it certainly is unique.

Well, again, those are great questions, and I'll be honest with you. I've been working on the device for now going on close to 30 years. There's been a lot of iterations in it. We've made a lot of improvements. Originally, when we started the challenge, we were working with able bodied individuals who had musculoskeletal spinal type injuries. As we realize its capacity to be able to move into a spinal cord injury space for paralyzed people, the wounded warriors, amputees. And we had to kind of change and modify the machine to be able to accommodate all those people and all those different spaces. But currently the machine can really accommodate. What we say in the clinic now is if you can get to the.

Clinic, we can treat you specifically. I know in the golf world this has been a huge one, which makes complete sense. You think about people swinging the golf clubs and how their core plays a role with that. But talk bit about the sports performance aspects and just what you've seen and some of the relationships that you guys.

Have built when we moved into performance enhancement, what we realized was a lot of sports are driven by the core. And what we're really trying to do is transfer the energy that we develop in the legs up through the hips and up through a super stiff core out into the shoulders and arms. So the reality of it is we need a super stiff core to transfer that kinetic energy up into the shoulders. So in an athletic performance model, here's the way we look at this. The stiffer the core is, and you go to Stuart McGill and all the research on the core, the stiffer the core is, the stronger and more powerful the core is. So we want to train that stiffness, and we do that isometrically on the all core 360. But when you talk to athletes, I liken it to, like, a banjo string. A really, really tight banjo string takes more effort to pull it back when you release it. It generates more power when you release it. So. So the tighter your core is, the more power you're going to generate when you rotate your hips, the more power you're going to generate when you rotate your shoulders. Because literally, almost like an Archer's bow, you're pulling back a very, very stiff piece of tissue. When you let it go, it's going to snap. And when you look at athletes and in the performance enhancement level, when I throw a baseball, Jeff, I throw a baseball muscularly. When a professional pitcher throws a baseball, he's taking his body out to the maximum range of motion and, and stretched every ligament, tendon, and practically bone to get that snap and that whip to bring them forward. The speed in that release is determined by core stiffness, and that's what we've been able to train on the All Core360. Having said that, Jeff, I want to share with a lot of people, and this is anecdotal, that we've made some incredible corrections with some young scoliosis patients that is absolutely thrilling. All of us in chiropractic see these scoliosis patients. We have made some significant progress in those young people's lives. And even doing that with one of them, keeping them out of those braces and those rods and those horrible surgeries that are so ineffective. Being able to do that is probably one of the most rewarding things we've been able to accomplish.

Yeah. You shared a picture with me a little while back when we met regarding a patient, and it was pretty astounding. And I think it goes to where there's just so much emerging literature. As you said, hey, it's anecdotal you're still trying to learn more. We all are. And I think that's important to keep in mind because for years and years the tools haven't been up to where I think we'd all love them to be. And with a lot of docs I'm going to kind of switch gears a little bit. I know there's a bunch of docs that listen that are heavily vested in kind of the CrossFit scene and really maybe adding into a clinic gym hybrid.

Type model by implementing all that in the same practice with your clinic and your exercise. That hybrid having everything available in a one stop location, it's the ideal scenario for a patient to have. We all wanted one stop shop. Unfortunately we're going all over town. We didn't even know that our chiropractor may have had all that available.

Yeah, that's powerful. And going hand in hand with that as we kind of come to a close. What's your vision like? Where's all corps going today and tomorrow? What's your vision and what's your hopes and what's kind of some message that you'd love to get out to the docs and where can they learn more most importantly?

Well you know they can come to our website, the WW Alcorp 360 website. We're generating a lot of information. There's a lot of new information in this space. We're trying to gather that information and get that out there. The mission, the goal, the big picture. I really, really feel very, very strongly that we can, this is probably optimistic but that we can change the world with this. We really can make a difference. We matter what it's doing in the spinal cord injury space, what it's doing in the spinal cord and musculoskeletal space, what's doing in performance enhancement. We've been doing things for so long. I'd like to see people walking around with T shirts that say the sit up and the crunch is extinct like the dinosaurs. It was never good for us. We didn't have any options. We now do have an option. So since it has such a wide range, chiropractors and healthcare providers, unfortunately most of us are stuck after the event. We're always repairing trauma. We would really like them not to have been hurt initially. A best doc is someone that none of their patients are ever injured. They've been set up to take care of this frame the best way they can. So what I see in the all core world, prevention is going to be huge. I would much rather be preventing injury than repairing injuries. And I think we step in there, we can make a big difference.

No doubt about it. I've wrote on it, I've seen it, I wrote on it. Personally I can attest to the fact that it is unique in the space. It does some things that nothing else does. And if you're a doc listening that either does rehab in your office. Interested in adding that on? If you don't do it, you definitely want to check out the All Core360 Scott, thanks for taking the time coming on and telling us a little bit more about it.

My pleasure Jeff. I enjoy it quite a bit.

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