Dr. Eric Cobb’s Z-Health: Essentials of Elite Performance

I take a lot of courses to further my knowledge. From clinical nutrition, to manual therapy, and more. Over the last 6-7 years, I’ve taken 46-47 courses, or seminars, or conferences, etc. At first when I started attending these, they were big “mind-blowers”, and there was so much that I learned, and was able to implement with clients. But the more courses I took, the less I learned, because about 95-100% of the content I already knew. So at this point, the best I can hope for is a course from where I can pull one golden nugget to use with clients. I no longer expect “mind-blowers.”

So imagine my surprise and delight when on July 28-July 30, 2017, I took a course called “Z-Health: Essentials of Elite Performance.” I would label that one as a “mind-blower” without hesitation.

Original source: here.

What is it about? It’s very hard to put into words, but if I had to sum it up, it would be about the neurology of strength training, and the neurology of pain.

There were lots of cool demonstrations, as well as the neurological explanations behind them.

In this article, I’ll outline some of the coolest golden nuggets that I learned in Dr. Eric Cobb’s Z-Health: Essentials of Elite Performance course.

Oh, and if you want to take this course, the Z-Health team was kind enough to give me a coupon code to give out to whoever wants to attend that course that would give them $550 off the price. So if you want to attend the course yourself, email me, and I’ll give you the code.

Anyways, on to a summary of what I had learned in the Z-Health Essentials course:

• 20/20 vision is not perfect vision. 20/20 vision is average vision. It means that you can see at 20 feet what other people can see at 20 feet. 20/70 vision means that you can see at 20 feet what other people can see at 70 feet.

• If 2 eyes have different vision, the good eye be favoured. That will produce compensations, like a neck tilt, or rotation. In this case, stretches, mobilizations and corrective exercises by themselves won’t be enough to correct postural imbalances. You need to balance vision between eyes in this case to correct muscular imbalances.

• The brain’s primary job is to decrease perceived threat. If you have poor vision, from an evolutionary perspective, that’s threatening. So your body may give you knee pain, or ankle pain, or some other pain to decrease the amount that you walk, to decrease threat. Sometimes improving vision and balance decreases pain, without any changes to the structure of any joints. Of course, the instructor, Dr. Eric Cobb gave us a bunch of vision tests to identify what’s going on with the eyes. And vision is much more than just the Snellen chart that the optometrist gives you. If you want me to test your vision in a much more holistic and comprehensive way, you can fill out this questionnaire to see if you qualify.

• The brain keeps us alive through pattern recognition. In other words, predictability. The more predictable a movement, and the outcome of the movement, the cleaner it is, and the more pain-free it is.

• If blood pressure is different between the right and the left arm, it doesn’t indicate high blood pressure. Rather, that’s a malfunctioning brain stem. So both sides should be tested, but that rarely happens. Unfortunately, the end result is lots of people taking medications that they shouldn’t be.

• Whenever doing range of motion testing, there should be one test with the eyes open, and another test with the eyes closed. If there’s a difference between the two, it means that poor vision may be causing poor range of motion. In this case, stretching won’t help much. Improving vision will.

• One of the best insights into the function of the nervous system is gait assessment (an evaluation of how a person walks). A rudimentary gait assessment looks at 4 things:

  • Head movement during walking

  • Differences in arm swing between right and left. Does one swing harder? Does one arm go further back than another?

  • Differences in internal rotation between arms. As the person is walking away from you, can you see more of the palm of one hand than another?

  • Rotation of feet. Is one foot internally or externally rotated?

• There is a neural hierarchy. This is a hierarchy of the quality of information that the nervous system receives:

  • Visual: visual input overrides everything else

  • Vestibular input: this is input from the inner ear. It gives you information about balance

  • Proprioceptive input: this is input from the sensors in the periphery (like arms and legs)

• Ideally, all 3 systems (visual, vestibular and proprioceptive) send the same information. That’s called “sensory matching.” But much of the time, the information being sent is conflicting. The visual system may be sending one piece of information and the vestibular may be sending another. That’s called a “sensory mismatch.” An example is motion sickness. Your eyes tell you that you’re steady, but the movement of the ship below you tells you that you’re moving. The result: dizziness and/or nausea.

  • That’s just one example, but there are many others.

• The cerebellum is the part of the brain that stops unwanted movements. If tests of the cerebellum show that it’s not working as well as it should be, part of the approach to correct that is through complex, non-linear movements.

• In my article on pain, I discussed how pain actually has very little relationship to actual damage in the body. For instance, two thirds of the population has a bulging disc. But doesn’t know. Half of people over 65 have arthritis. But most of them don’t know about it. Over 30% of the population has a torn meniscus (cartilage in the knee), and has no idea they have it. And yet others with these conditions have so much pain that they require surgery. You would think that you can predict the degree of pain that someone is feeling by looking at an x-ray, MRI or ultrasound of the affected area, and seeing the amount of damage in that area. But that’s not the case.

• Athleticism isn’t something that you either have, or don’t have. The folks at Z-Health reverse engineered how the best athletes move, and broke it down into 6 components that are teachable. So whether you’re formally an athlete, or not, you can become more fluid, efficient with your movement, and agile.

This is just a small slice of what I learned at Dr. Eric Cobb’s “Z-Health Essentials of Elite Performance” seminar. But if you’d like to attend the seminar yourself, email me, and I’ll get you a discount code, or if you’d like me to do an assessment on you, and recommendations based on the results of the assessment, you can see if you qualify by filling out this form.