You think you have five senses. I'm not even going to listen because I can't remember what the hell they are. But maybe you have a sixth sense and I don't mean ESP that if you don't master and develop and practice could really impact your life in a very, very negative way. And we're going to find out more about that on today's episode of the movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting from the feet first because those are your foundation.
We're going to break through the mythology that propaganda and often the outright lies that people have told you about what it takes to run, walk, hike, dance, play, work out, do yoga, whatever it is you like to do, more enjoyably and more effortlessly. I'm Stephen Smashing from zero shoes.com, your host for the movement, movement podcast, where look our goal you may know is to make natural movement the obvious, better, healthy choice the way natural food currently is. And we need your help for that, which is why we like to say we're creating a movement movement and we would like you to be part of that. In fact, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe.
You know how to do that. Go to jointhemovementmovement.com. You'll find all the places you can interact with us on YouTube, on iTunes, on Google Play, wherever it is and make sure you share and review. And if you're on YouTube hit the bell, etc.
If you're on YouTube, by the way, my apologies for not having shaved today. And you know how it goes. So anyway, why don't we jump in. I'm trying to think of the same thing.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop them to me via email, send an email to move at jointhemovementmovement.com. And let's do this, shall we? So first of all, I want to say hello and welcome to your friend Jim Klopman. Jim, hello, dude.
Hey, man. When did you go to radio school? I never went to radio school, but I did when I was living in Manhattan, which was from 83 to 93. I did make a good amount of money doing voice over stuff.
I'll show you the entire recording session that I did that made me $15,000 one year. Ready? Here we go. Ready.
I'll do the entire session right now. Fire. Yeah, that was it. I was doing a radio commercial for the Army, and what they used to do is they would get actors to do the radio commercials.
And if the radio ones went well, then they would bring in actual people from the military to do the TV commercials. So there was times where I was doing stand up comedy for a living. There's times where I'd get some gig and I'd hear the set up for the commercials. Wait for it.
Wait for it. Fire. That's me. And everyone would go, yeah, right.
That was me. Nice. I don't know if you can hear the gig. The voice over world, you can make a lot of money doing a very small amount of work.
Five guys who do most of it, and they have a pretty cushy gig. But enough about that. So Jim, why don't you tell human beings where you're from and what you do, and then we're going to give people a movement to do based on that conversation? Yeah, I'm based in Park City, Utah now.
And what I do is I develop methods and systems and patents and equipment to improve athletic balance and athletic balance is something far beyond what you get at physical therapy. Most balanced training stops at physical therapy a little bit beyond, but we take you all the way up to the surface of the lay level. And we find that there's a direct correlation to balance, athletic performance, coordination, and agility. And we're pretty convinced now that as you improve your balance, you'll also improve your vision as well.
So let me back up and to say for people who are listening or watching that while you use the word athletic repeatedly, that doesn't mean this is for athletes far from it. Would you have to ask that point? Yeah, so another way of saying it's dynamic balance. So it's movement.
You know, the world is built for people who have not so good balance because the American disabilities act, everything's flat, everything's perfectly staged. So the world is set up for people who need canes and walkers, and we end up being stuck in that place as humans. And so the fact is you do go outside to challenge yourself whether on the slope of tennis courts, running, running, going up and down trails. All those areas have higher needs of balance that we don't recognize that we don't have.
So let me start with, since I like to give people a movement to do you and I talked about this right before we got started, do you want to have people walk people through or you want me to do it? So the core balance challenge is a balance challenge in an athletic position. So if you go to your physical therapist or the doctor, they have you stand and kick one leg in front and you have a straight leg that's on the ground and one leg pointed out in front. And basically that's teaching you how to balance on your heel with a straight knee, a position you're never in in real life.
Actually, it's a position you're just before you fall on your ass. So we like to change that up and say that first of all, I'll just dovetail into what you do. The big toe is the core of all balance on the foot. So you have to engage the big toe.
So we have you stand on one foot. So let's just actually walk people through it. So keep in mind some people are not in place where they can actually do this. So be it.
You'll get the hint. So you can do next to that. You just stand on, let's say you're left foot. Some people wear a car.
Well, don't do it in your car. You can't look if you open the sunroofer. Exactly. You're left foot and then you bend your knees, your weight is over your big toe.
I'm going to do it. You stick your ass out a little bit. I got a bend out. Wait, I got a girl change this.
Okay. All right. I'm doing it. And then you just balance and have that other leg behind it.
So it's not in front or to the side. It's actually behind it. So you're in a deep, nice athletic position. Yeah.
And you just go back to your right leg as I just bent my knee. Right. He holds behind me. Right.
And you're actually behind you too. Yeah. Off the ground foot, the knees behind you as well. Okay.
You just do actually, I mean, you do a 30 seconds to the minute on each side. It has a massive ability to clear your brain, reset your brain and get out of that chatty conscious brain and take it on your subconscious brain. Can we do the advanced one right now? Sure.
Close your eyes. No, we never close our eyes. Oh, really? I love you.
I love you. But what you close your eyes, what you're doing is you've just played it in my hands beautifully. So how come? Well, first of all, you train yourself to be a well-balanced blind person.
Hey, there are some blind people. Listen, you are some people. But blind people, they take their visual cortex. They'll take their visual cortex and they'll change the application of visual cortex.
So the sentence. So what happens when you close your eyes? We probably, we see there's probably five different systems that involve your balance system. One's they don't even talk about in science yet.
Eyes, vestibular, tongue, which is pretty well researched. Palm of the hands, you are a mapping system. You have a position in your brain, you have a brain of every position your body can be in. Your vestibular system, the 100,000, 200,000 sensors on the bottom of your feet, the muscles on the bottom of your feet.
All these are separate systems that are all engaged in the balance system. Why guys earth would you take one system? Yeah, it shut it off. Yeah.
So you can think you're isolating the other system. When in fact, when we teach people to balance, we improve their eyesight dramatically. They see better, they better feel the awareness. They can shoot the basketball better, they can hit the golf ball better, they can put better, all because the balance system is engaged along with the eyes.
What's missing is that when you look at the eyes and you see my hand, that's only 5% of the data that's going into your eyes. 95% of the data is going through subconscious mind. Now there's a large chunk of it that goes to faces. So if I destroyed your visual cortex and you all use all this black, you don't see my hand at all.
You go, oh, that's a happy face. That's a sad face. The same token, if you had destroyed visual cortex, you could walk down a hallway with obstacles, even though all you saw was black, because your visual cortex is destroyed. And those research, the proof is so our point is huge amount of data comes in through the eyes and we think showing off the eyes is something that helps to balance and it doesn't.
I'm not suggesting that it helps at all. In fact, let me back up a little bit. It actually hurts to close your eyes. Well, it hurts to close your eyes.
Well, of course, but let me, but two things. First things first, let me back up to the intro that I gave for this, which was the idea that we could arguably say that balance is like a sixth sense. People do not pay attention to. They don't develop.
They often lose it for reasons that we'll no doubt get into. So yeah, so that sort of thing. And let me back up also about what you said during the intro. So I would normally at this point, well, not normally, I would hold up a copy of your book if I had it with me, but it's not the office.
So I just want to say right now, a lot of what we're going to talk about is in your book, I don't know why you're laughing. Come on. Well, I don't have a copy of the book myself. Perfect.
So tell people what the name is. The name of the book is balances power. Yes. So that's one of our core products called the Slack Lock, which is sold through zero shoes.
Balance training advice. We'll talk about this. But I hold that up like it says balance equals power. Right.
We're the title of your book. Everything that closing your eyes is good for your balance clearly as soon as you close them. You know, for most people I'll help breaks loose. It's not good for training your balance.
Oh, yeah. I get to tell you a funny story about that. There was a situation recently I won't mention why because I don't want to because and anyway, they have me stand on one leg and then put my eyes and then two minutes later said, I guess you can stop now. So that's totally fine.
And then they put you through a workout and then have you come back and do the balance drill again, where the idea is after you've done this workout your balance is improved, and it's similar to when you've seen people with the hologram watches or any other somewhere else where yeah, once you do it once the next time you're usually going to be better regardless of what happens. Right. do respond to balance training. Yeah, so we see that too, which is not always a great business model because we can't hook them in for years worth of training like they do it.
Good. Well, look, I say that for a couple of minutes. Look, I'm not a big, it's chiropractic treatment. I have a good friend who hates chiropractors, right?
Right. So chiropractors when I say it, but unless you can demonstrate that you can make people graduate from what you're doing, then, you know, I'm trying to, if you about what you're doing, right? Right. So it comes down to, first of all, there's anybody says they know everything about the balances and doesn't know what they're talking about.
It's one of the most highly researched parts of the nervous system. It's 40,000 neuroscientists in the world, and they still haven't figured this shit out. They just recently found out that information you get from the bottom of your feet doesn't even go to your brain. It goes to brain tissue and your lower spine.
Oh, interesting. It's getting there and it goes back down. If you look at the whole balance system and you look at the data flows, the data flows are generally closer to the processing center. So the best of your systems where, right next to the huge processing center, right?
So you got a lot of data from the bottom of your feet. So rather than spending all the time going up to your brain with the data and then back down again, they have a special mini computer that's like in between your brain and your feet to do the work for it. I have so many punch lines in my head right now without the computer in my brain and my feet. I'm not going to.
But it's obviously the software system. So you're not using it and we'll have people come in and let's say they train at a level. They leave our session at a level two. We'll come back to next session and be at a level four.
And so the system's like firing back up and we've unplugged it and plugged it back in the wall again and it starts coming back. And of course, different athletes have different levels of progression. But it's truly mind blowing how quick it regenerates and comes back. Let me back up again.
And I think you know this story, but I'm not sure that you do. I have a personal interest in this and it's one of the reasons I've been very excited about what we're doing is zero shoes and the reports we get from people who wear these shoes and what they're because it was a little over four years ago. My dad who was 80, little 80 and a half at the time and he had always just been in big big shoes and he had never even gotten a balance. And he tripped on ledge in a hallway in a business that was maybe half an inch, half an inch and fell down and broke his head and dead two weeks later.
And so yeah, it was, I'll tell you it was crazy. Like he was, I got a call that he had done this. He's in the hospital, had a hip replacement. I talked to him two days after that.
He was totally fine, ready to sue the people who had the thing in the hallway. And then, and then three days later, I got a call from the hospital. So your dad just coded, you better get out here. We just paddled him back and maybe four or five days later, that was the end.
Yeah, well, it's oftentimes a broken hip is it is a death now, but it usually takes longer. But the numbers are staggering. So if you're over the age of 45 and you go to the emergency room, there's over 50% chance through there for fall. Oh, really?
Over half of all emergency room visits over the age of 45 or for falls. And those are just the ones that are bad enough that need an ear to remain in order. Over the age of 65, it's the number one cause of accidental death over age 65, it's the number one cause of accidental injury. And the interesting thing is where that's from all these other diseases are going down as medicine and drugs get better.
And the deaths from these falls are going up. So you think with the ADA rules and the fitness programs and all the healthy things we're doing that these number falls, it's per 100,000. It's just not a close number continues to go up. So it's not a huge number.
So it's the deaths are about the number of those, let's say of strokes, but it's still preventable. Oh my God, like hugely preventable. And it's the number one cause of industrial injury, number one cause of industrial death. So it's just massive.
And what people also don't realize is mind blowing fact is it's the number one cause of concussions. So it's not Johnny on the soccer field or baseball field or football field. It's people falling. So if falls are a $30 billion dollar your problem and concussions are a $60 to $90 billion dollar your problem.
So you're talking over $100 billion a year that's costing us because of falls that are totally and easily preventable. So before we talk about the prevention, why obviously I have theories about some of the causes in general and increase, but I don't want to say it. Let me hear what you think. Well, I think there's several we have four lists in the book.
Here they are. One, I'll start with you. Shoes. So I love about me.
Talk about me. So first of all, the shoes today, we have an elevated heel. We could rename our company Big Toe Balance because we just think the big toes are huge components to any balance challenge. So when you look at the running shoes nowadays, which most people don't run in, you have your toes virtually off the ground and they say a four millimeter lifts a flat shoe, but it's from four to 12 millimeters up.
Yeah. Built it. And the second part of it is the foam in the shoe inoculates your foot from all sensation. When we balance train somebody, they will come in a lot of times with the elastic shoes onto the first trip, first visit and they'll say, can I keep my shoes on?
We say, yeah, sure, keep them on. And like, mmm, because we're taking them to their maximum balance. About a minute or two minutes in they go, my feet are really hurting. Why am I feet hurting?
Yeah. And what's happening is because we've taken the balance and with that foot is going, I got to go and bob in this and I can't. What's going on? And it's trying to push through that foam to get involved and we say, okay, take off your shoes and then we put them on their flat board with no shoes on, no socks too, because that's another level of friction we don't want in there.
And they're like, that's amazing. Within five seconds, foot pain goes away. So number one causes issues. Number two is I'll go through the four.
Number two is what we're doing now. So I just gave you a discussion on the peripheral vision. As I'm engaging you here, I'm doing what's called peripheral denial. I'm shutting off the system around.
And the more I do that, the more I damage my balance system. The third thing is bifocals or trans-these lenses that are multi-vision. So if I have lenses that are readers on the bottom or bifocals on the bottom, I'm cutting off the data that's coming in from the bottom. There's a huge amount of data that comes in from the bottom of the eyes.
And these come in through your rides, not the cones in your eyes, and they don't need vision correction. Well, I want to pause on that one as a guy who typically wears progressives. I'm not wearing them right now. Right.
So which, I mean, if I don't wear them, I can't function because I can't, because I got progressives, because basically like computer screen distance, I'm totally fine. Anything closer, anything further. I'm screwed. So talking about that.
Sure. Yeah. And you don't have to have any closer vision. Oh, yeah, not taking off of that.
You do single vision. If you go in and they'll all take off. You need both, right? Because you need both, right?
Because you're in Walmart. I got to see where I'm going. I got to read the labels. I understand that.
But if you're doing anything athletically and we'll take people who come in, they'll go, they'll have their dual vision glasses on and take them off. And suddenly they're bouncing better than this. I can't see. And I go, I can't see because that's not the data we're looking for.
I don't give a shit about that data that you say I can see. Listen, if you take somebody who has macular degeneration. And this is particularly the young person who has some sort of African name is these macular generation, which is a central part of the vision gets clouded or disappears. Right.
And you put in front of them a cup, a glass and a plate, and you say what position is a cup and they go, I don't know, what position is a plate in, I don't know. They can't tell you and they go grab the cup, grab the plate, grab the glass. Two different systems in play there? Interesting.
That's the system we want. That's the system we work with. So when we work with that system, we have tons of different methods of training that system. And it's different than what anybody else is doing.
I don't even want to talk about it here because it's just what we consider to be a system. But learning how to use that system improves the athletic ability of the individual improves your balance. So back to this periphery thing. So you have peripheral denial because of this, you have the glasses that take it away, you have the shoes.
And finally, the third thing, the fourth thing is that we talked about here is you're moving about in modern spaces and constantly degrading situations. So we say that we need a walker like we have zero to 100 scales. You need a walker with it or can it level 20. The world is built for level 20.
So you've degraded your system to level 20. So it's just like you're never going to learn how to lift 100 pounds if you lift 5 pounds every day. Right. So you're lifting 5 pounds every day with your balance system.
You come along and you stumble. I'll let your dad. Right. And we don't stop.
This is interesting. We don't stop people from falling. We cause you to catch your balance, lose your balance, catch your balance. So when you hit the ground, there's no velocity.
It's people that bad balance go. Yeah. They topple like a 2x4. Very high velocity.
So this system, this world we live on with flat floors, perfectly perpendicular walls. I mean, we have this level system built in. So we are totally detuned. So then one day we come along and we get a level 30 or 40 balance challenge.
And we're should I look and you can be totally healthy. I've had really healthy people come in and say, yeah, I've had that fall and they look healthy and they're fit, but they don't have a good balance. Right. So the fourth problem is the world we live in.
And going back to the crazy numbers I was telling you about before it might relate to your dad. Amongst those falls for people over the age of 65, you know what the number one cause is for those falls? I'm trying to guess. I'm guessing it has nothing to do with whether you're tall enough to get on that ride.
No, I don't know. Can I get on that pony? No, it's a curb. Oh, interesting.
So here's the deal. When you see a step, every step by every building code in every city in this country has to be exact can't be an eighth or a sixteenth of an inch off. It has to be exactly the same. But we see curbs all the time, but there are always different heights.
And there are different heights within the same street. So it's something that will cause you if you don't have this vision working and you don't have good balance, you'll catch a toe. I'm going to have that. That's interesting.
I'm just from having flashbacks to when I was in Nepal, this was 30 years ago. And have you been there? So they'll wait a lot of Nepali houses are built. They'll start with a room, then they need to add on another room and they put it wherever they can and then they build whatever they need to build to get from one room to the other.
They're rarely at the same level. They build a third and a fourth. It's like a weird three dimensional maze where none of the stairs match. None of the heights are the same to get from one room to the other.
It's totally crazy. And you really, it really is. It's like a very cool entertaining game that you're playing 24-7 just to get around. So if you go, I used to enforce the answer in this little town right next to what I'm trying to remember, the houses are 16-70s.
And you go in there, every doorframe, like this, every wall is like this, every floor. So here's the thing I don't understand is that you look at Google and we're spending so much money trying to make their offices interesting. And they got rounds for yours here and triangles there and cushy things here. We'll also go like this.
And floors are dead straight. Now to me, I understand you got to have again for ADA, you got to have flat floors for those who are wheeled stairs, walkers and canes. Why the fuck not have like this? Yeah, yeah.
And then you got to have a couple of stones. Yeah. Things that go like this, things that go like this, none of that. And I just don't understand, I don't know, I just don't get why we get so stuck into this.
Well, then here's the other thing that happens is when you're in this area and you're in these perfectly, when we talk about this a lot in the book, you're in these perfectly perpendicular places in your office. Nobody ever has ever ever said, we need to spend more time in the office. True. What do you do on weekends?
You leave the office, you ski hike run, trail run, sprint, play hockey, play tennis, play golf. Everything you're doing is what? Challenging your balance. Writing your motorcycle.
You can go to an art museum and challenge your balance because nowhere or not museum other than the frames is a straight line. You feel great Sunday night, you go to work and you get debilitated for a whole week. Don't go, don't go, don't go, don't go. You feel like crap on Friday?
You got to go back out and recover again by balance challenges. So it's a horribly debilitating environment. Apple knows it. So Apple knows I got this box in front of me, right?
It's totally rectangular. But look at Apple's screensavers. What are they all of? Totally fractal nature.
Mountains, trees, all sorts of nature type things. And even their little pink line that goes around drawing lines, nothing is squared. Nothing is straight. That's so cute that you think that's an Apple thing.
Those are screensavers from DOS computers and then Windows computers. There's a whole lot of those wacky little things. The thing about screens for me, maybe it goes back to your peripheral, was it peripheral blindness? What was the phrase?
Yeah, it's peripheral denial. So have you ever heard of Amblyopia? No. Little kids that are wandering eye.
Oh, yeah, yeah. So what happens is that I, it's not that the eye is getting plenty of data. It's a weak muscle thing. Right.
But you have to put a patch over the strong eye to make the weak eye start to work. You don't do it before age eight. It's incorrectable. Not because the eye can't see.
It's because the brain has said I've had enough of this and it's off. So when you have now, and I've spoken to optometrist now who say they see it. They're coming in like this all day long and they tested kid and their peripheral vision test is nothing like, oh, is this only right here? They go, this kid's got peripheral vision denial.
So because he is starting to shut off that part of his brain. My thing to peripheral vision denial is, and I've been, I've said this since, when I got my first computer in 1983, is it's difficult for me to deal with computers because I just don't think in a 14 inch or something. I don't think in one thing, I don't think in one thing, my officers piles of stuff in a very specific way. I know where anything is.
That three dimensional model is so difficult for me. It's funny. There's certain kinds of activities that I can't even do in my regular office. So I'm in our conference room right now.
If I'm doing editing, it's easier for me to do it here than it is in my office. And I had an office at one point where it wasn't working for me because the ceiling was too low, like hypersensitive to where something is around me. So if you look at it this way, and we have a presentation we did on this for management consultant years ago, is it go to some corporate office setup and who has the big window view? Right.
So it's always the top people, the CEOs, the top. And what do they do when they have some deep thought to do? When you see photos of any CEO of the other, he's sitting on his desk like this? Yeah.
Looking at his big view because that is what that does too. And as we've talked about this in terms of athletics, being in the zone, when you have that big view and I'm pulling in as much data as I can, your brain, your conscious brain shuts off. Everybody's in the audience right now. If you just turn to wherever you are and don't look at one spot for twice, everything you possibly can, you won't have any conscious thought at all.
It's fine. I just had a flashback. I was with some people, a bunch of marketing things that we were doing. We were in a restaurant and we were sitting in a corner booth and I'm working on a problem and I said, wait, wait, I can't do this.
I have to get out of the booth to do it because the ceiling was like the restaurant was like 15 foot ceilings. I had to get more space around my head. Yeah. And so you're sensitive to it.
Every person in every job in this country that's in those spaces is a total shutdown. So it's really fascinating. I'm also thinking it's like the amount of work that I've done sitting in a hot tub late at night, the first of this company we live in a house, we're running a house at a hot tub. I would just spend hours every night just sitting out there because that's how I can get my best thinking.
Right. Right. Yeah. So I want to back up, but this is the thing I say often in these podcasts.
Why you? How the hell did this happen? How did you get into this? Who are you?
What are you doing here? Well, it's been really a myth of, it's a myth of synthesis, whatever type of project. So when I was 50, I spent a day skiing with nine Erickson, just he and I, and he was 74 and I asked him, how do you ski so well? I could ski better than he could at that age, but still I didn't.
That takes anyone in comparison, but it was amazing. And we just had most fun. I'm more fun talking with him than skiing. But he said, first of all, he called me Jimmy, which was interesting because my own people called me Jimmy and I was like eight years old.
But he said, Jimmy, he said, I ski every day. Okay. I can't do that. So I asked him about some of his gymnastic work and he said, yeah, I used to do gymnastics when I raced and he said, I still do some of it.
I think it's interesting that we see a lot of athletes age out who have great physiques and great muscles because fitness has gotten so great. And of course you can buy really good vision. So they're not using. I thought you could say you could buy really good muscles.
You could buy. Well, you can that too. So like why was an athlete aging out? I thought maybe it's a balance system.
So I matched around. I looked for all sorts of balance challenges in the industry and there was nothing in the fitness industry that was a challenge. I discovered slacklining. When I got on the slackline, walking didn't make sense to me because putting one foot in the front of the other is nothing that you do athletically.
So you're just never within that position. So I started doing some one foot work and I was ridiculously fast as a skier at 50. Well, age 51, I was faster. So I'm like, wow, something's happened here.
So long story short, I engaged to local university, the engineering department, designed a frame for me. We built the frame, we patented the frame, I built the protocol that we patented to I'm stunned by. And we tested it on different athletes. Was this for the slackbow?
Yeah. Okay. So basically just to describe it here, I'll let you describe it here. I'll let you describe it here.
I've been on one so I know, but I will let you describe that for me. It's basically a two-inch line adjustable frame. It's like a slackline. But what makes it different for us is it's infinitely controllable.
And we have what's called a slack plate. So I'm going to pause and do a Jim to English translation. So what's the slackbow? It's a suspension system for a slackline.
So basically it's portable. It's just imagine, actually if you imagine a bow and arrow and you take the wooden part and bow and put that on the ground. So the string is parallel to the ground. That's the gist of it.
The string is the slackline. The bow is the thing that holds it and gives it whatever tension you need. And the plate you're talking about is just a piece of wood, essentially, that's about what a foot by three inches roughly. Yeah, a foot by three and a half.
Yeah. That's pretty good. I was guessing that it fits on top of the slackline. So rather than just having the webbing that you're standing on, you have this block that you can stand on as well.
Yeah. Great job. Because we determined that all athletic balances on one foot or the other. You're either transitioning to one foot or the other or you're on one foot or the other.
So this whole thing of balancing with both feet, and we do some two foot balance, but on specific type equipment. But a lot of times, not a lot of times, but all balance and athletic movements on one foot or the other. Right. So anyways, I got it back to my story.
So then I tried it. There's no real test of coordination. There's the five, ten, five in the NFL and this vertical leap, which I say is a fairly good measure of coordination. So we did a vertical leap test on just only like 10, 12 athletes, and we had to do sessions of the patented 12-minute routine.
And every athlete except for one, increased the vertical leap by over 10%. No changes, anything else. And also what I found fascinating is when you watch some pre-intervention, they jumped into their test. And then when you watch them after they did the 10 sessions, their kinetic chain and fluidity was just totally different.
They were just graceful. They were ballet-like when they went up and touched. The one guy that didn't do it, he was 5'11", he had a 37-inch vertical begin with the 41. So he increased by 8%.
But he was insanely good to begin with it. Which was also a valuable test because here was somebody who had insanely good balance and vertical leap and we improved it. And what we did was that when your balance improves, your whole kinetic chain improves. And it took me years to figure this out.
But what I determined was it's a very simple premise. If you define the balance system as an autonomic system, which is not clearly defined as such. An autonomic system is supposed to be a system that the human body or human has that's automatic and protective. So first of all, following hurts.
So I'm pretty sure that stopping following, we don't think about it, is protective. So it takes something like hitting a golf ball. You can't swing any harder than what your balance system allows because you'll fall over. Now if you're under the age of 12, you can do it because kids are the age of 12 all because they're still engaging in defining the balance system.
If you're drunk, you can do it. Right? Because you shut the balance system off. You should have detuned it.
But you cannot swing so hard that you'll fall here. Yeah. So this is true. It's true if you were running and cutting a long distance runners.
It's true if any of the movement is going to not run any faster than your balance system allows. You're going to love this. I think you will. So when I teach people, I will find out maybe more on the other side.
So one of the reasons we get along. One of the things that I do when I teach people how to run naturally, not going to be barefoot. But I usually do a barefoot. We'll be out in the park somewhere.
And it's not about running per se because I'm not a fan of teaching someone to run on grass. That's like taking the paddock from your shoe and just taking it around. And you don't know what the hell's under there anyway. But what I have to do, I go pretend you're a kid.
Watch what kids do when they're goofing around and playing. So keep your arms by your sides. Don't try to use your arms. And basically just lean your head until you're about to fall over.
And just do the barest thing that you can to keep yourself from falling under face. And just keep moving your head in these wacky different directions. Let your head guide you. And it takes people a while so you can see that they're constantly just on the edge of falling but not losing yourself.
And then they start having so much fun. That's a great goofy thing to do. You're letting yourself fall and catching and fall and catching. It's a blast.
Well, in all balance challenges are fun. I don't, I recently stopped training anybody under the age of 15 years old. Because they come in and have too damn much fun. Nobody's listening to me.
You know, I got specific protocols. They're supposed to be doing. Kids are screwing around. I can't stop.
They won't listen to me because they're having so much fun. So I need somebody just a little more serious. You know, my wife Janet's much better handling that kind of stuff. I can't do it.
But anyways, yeah, that's a good thing to do. And you know that leaning to the side. There's a famous basketball player. Kyrie Irving had a video of him warming up.
And he did that leaning to the side. And he's truly one of the most athletic people in the NBA. That leaning to the side looked like he was doing it with CGI. It was incredible.
Wow. How far over he was. So yeah, that kind of stuff is good. All that's good to challenge your balance.
And the only problem we have is when you lean to the left, you end up putting the weight on the outside of your foot. And there's nothing functionally balanced wise on the outside of your foot. That is true. Here's a question.
Keep doing it, Steve, because I know it makes you feel good. Well, yeah, I just do this a little bit. It's all I care about. Let me ask you this while I scratch my eye.
So what's your take? And I'm not surprisingly having an opinion about this. But I'm going to ask you as if I don't. What's your take on the whole trend in the fitness world about instability training, doing things while you're on a BOSU ball or on a stability ball or on a… Well, some of the things you're seeing now, they're using my methods that I've developed years ago.
But I had a website recently asking to write an article because somebody just written an article reviewing all the unstable surface training research that was out there. Which proves unequivocally that unstable surface training doesn't work. Right. And I've looked at all this research and the protocol is stuck on every one of them.
There's one bit of research that was just done in Spain a year ago that used my methods that proves it does work. So to the extent that you're able slash, willing slash, whatever, define somehow a difference between what they're doing and what one of your methods might be. Well, one of the things they're doing is they don't allow progressions. What do you mean?
That's like, hey, Steve, we're going to prove that lifting weights is going to make you stronger. Okay. So I'm going to give you the protocol. Here's five pounds, lift it three times a day for the next six weeks and we'll come back and test it.
Got it. Versus increasing the weight every time. Yeah. Secondly, what happens is, are you testing at the end?
So there's a real tendency in the… Look, it's called strength and conditioning. And I'll tell you a story about why it should be renamed strength conditioning and control. So everything with balance and you see all these people doing this balance work and lifting weights at the same time. Right.
It's like, why not brush your teeth and comb your hair at the same time? It just doesn't make sense to do them both at the same time. Either build strength or improve your balance system. And it is the core of all athletic movement, but it gets just a motorcom of attention.
It only gets three minutes a day. Weightlifting, movement patterns, skill building patterns, those are all more important than building up to balance system. And what we say, and we're working on a device now to measure your athletic balance, is you know how good your balance is? You don't, you know how good your heart rate is all the other things.
So I come back to that's one reason why. And then what you're seeing too is like the video of Alvin Kamaro, they buy our equipment down there and he's standing on a medicine ball. And he's catching sticks, the heck of sticks, which are good things to do. We do it differently.
We don't put people in medicine balls, even though Alvin Kamaro is doing it right, he's engaging the front floor of his feet. Most people like this on a medicine ball. Like that. The legs are bowed.
Again, outside of foot nothing happens here. Secondly, when you look at the bus people and they try to bounce and they basically try to put their feet on the outside and squeeze in rather standing on top of using their feet. Exactly. And the great thing, and I complimented the guy, he and I, he and I, he and I, he and I, he came back in the back door and I just came back in the back door and I just never remember his name.
But if you look at the video that I went viral about with Kamara, he's got the area clear. There's nothing for him to fall and break his neck on. Secondly, oh, I mean, there was strength and conditioning coach at one of the other just peed all over this guy for doing it. And oh, it's dangerous.
Oh, how does it affect you on a football field? Oh, you know, all these criticisms. I think the most important thing we know in our science is our progression. He's been training with me for six years.
He's progressed to that. If you put something on a mess and bowl that hasn't been progressed to it, it'll fall and break their neck. So there is that kind of unstable surface training. Now there's other unstable surface training that we call earthquake equipment.
And this is, I've gone to the biggest, fanciest medical balance training centers in the world, in the country, excuse me. And they have these plates that are moved by servos underneath you, right? They're going like this. So it's an earthquake.
Yeah, miniature version of a mechanical bulb. Right, but my balance challenges, I'm standing on a piece of something flat right now and it's solid, but I'm still moving to challenge. So if I get on an unstable surface that's generated by me, it's that same thing and it's exacerbated 100%. We take offers through their movement patterns on solid ground and then we put them on an unstable, our own designed unstable surface and they find all the floors and the coffee's right off the bat.
And I say to them, it's minuscule when you're on solid ground. It's magnified when you're on the unstable surface. But when you get back to the earthquake machines, I don't know where that stuff's coming from. I suck it.
Going back to your vision thing, I have, it's in the book, I have pictures of, I have a lot of brain damage in the back of my head. So my cerebellum has a lot of brain damage. And I probably, there's nobody in my age in this country as balanced. What other does that do?
But if I close my eyes and I stand on one foot, it's scary how bad it is. Yeah, yeah. It's funny, I've never looked for videos about professional bull riders on mechanical bulls, but I would be willing to bet that they're not a whole lot better than people who just hang out on mechanical bulls because there's no doubt that they're getting a whole lot of information about just some natural thing that you start to figure out from being on an actor. We see two different types of bouncers, foot based bounce that comes from the ground and then it's balanced.
So if you're a mountain biker, horseback rider, we train horseback riders and they're balanced and proves dramatically and then the horse says, oh, I'm feeling more comfortable because they don't want to hurt the person on the back because they get in trouble. So they'll move quickly and gracefully and better because the person on the back is better balanced. But that's ass balanced. This took me a while to figure out too.
I bought a couple of unit cycles. I was going to learn how to ride a unit cycle. If I get on the unit cycle, it took me two years to figure out the unit cycle is ass balanced. So how well can I sit on my ass and not have much pressure on my feet?
Now when I ride my mountain bike, pedal bounce. I'm going around turns and my pedal, but bull riders got ass balanced. Horseback riders got ass balanced. Mountain biker, I mean, the cyclist says ass balanced.
So there's different balances in the balance. How old were you when you wanted to learn to ride the unit cycle? 64. Okay.
Our realtor, actually our commercial realtor. He rides the unit cycle all over the place. Yeah. Doing it since he was in, I don't know how long he's been doing it, but let's just say his children have a very hard time with the fact that's what he does.
Yeah, it looks good. Yeah, once you get it, it's good. I just have one. So funny because actually boy, one of my first, I don't know how to describe this.
I learned a moonwalk from a guy who's a very famous bass player. We were at Bush Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia together. He and his brothers were in a band. I was doing magic comedy things.
Anyway, he taught me to moonwalk. I taught him to do a standing back flip. Then a whole bunch of us all about unicycles. And the thing that's so funny about 90% relaxation, it's 90% just sinking.
Because I ride a recumbent bike. Because I've been doing that for Jesus 30 years. And when I put people on a recumbent, they're all freaking out. I go, look, I'm just going to push you.
You don't do anything. You just hang out and just sit and do nothing. Don't pedal. Just learn to come to Slil Hill.
Just relax. And eventually figure that out. But it's obviously a very different thing on your feet. Yep.
Absolutely. So, so, so, so, if somebody, what you're pointing to, which I think is really interesting, is two pieces of the puzzle. One is that there isn't an awareness of, let's call balance our sixth sense. There isn't this awareness that this is an actual thing that is important independent of this instability training stuff, which I agree is just silly.
And then there isn't yet, and I know that where I'm going, this is something that you're trying to do. There isn't yet a program that has been not developed, obviously, but caught on to give people something that they can do where it is a progressive program where they experience the combination of satisfaction of progressing and the and demonstrable benefits thereof. And I find this kind of amazing because I'm remembering, in the last couple of years, I've been in various hospitals for a career or whatever. And almost every one of them, actually, not even hospitals, doctors offices as well, where almost every one of them has a flyer from the hospital about some balancing for the elderly.
And when I look into the program, there's no there there to it. Well, there's two things that go on there. We, again, I like to focus on the athletic balance. So we have our equipment being used at the University of Michigan and I met with them last week.
And they said, well, OK, but can you give us a set of gradations? And so you're level one through nine. And we gave them that. And so that's part of what's missing.
But what's also missing is that we don't realize our balance is bad, so it's a cue. So we fall on. So we have a golfer, let's say, who comes in. And he's an eight-handi-camp.
I look at his balance. I go, do you know your balance could be improved? Yes. And I said, if I improve your balance, we believe that although we're handicapped by 40%, I go, no.
Right. So we've improved balance. Yeah, let me highlight that. So for whatever reason, people by and large, and perhaps probably people who are listening or watching this, by and large, don't have the frame of reference to conclude or believe.
Right. Balance may be the fundamental problem underlying many of the other issues they're dealing with. Right. So it's just an disconnect.
So we've had golfers that come in. We've improved their handicapped by 40% within eight to 10 hours. And they come back and you go, how's it going? Oh, I was at six.
Now I'm at three. Oh, great. Cool. The bounce framework.
Well, no. I bought a new driver. I got a new coach. Well, I'm a vine.
I go, aloney. That's just not true. You've been on a plateau for five years. You come and spend time with us now.
It changes. And so this is incredible distance. And secondly, there's a huge distance because nobody wants to admit I have been busting my ass for seven years to lower my handicapped. And you're telling me I just did this eight hours.
And I've lowered my handicapped? Right. No. I'm an American.
Nothing comes easy to me. I work hard. I buy a better game. I hire the best coach.
That's how it works. Don't tell me it's that easy. And so I had this problem all the time. So again, we come back to here's the thing.