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Chapter 6
352 Plays6 months ago
Thunder and Lightning! Dr. Val goes to the bullpen once more and brings in body movement wizard David Thunder. He’s here to asses Dave’s body but he ends up blowing his mind instead!
Go to DThunder.com to learn more about how David unlocks human potential and reawakens our natural healing abilities.
You can book a call with David at https://dthunder.com/drval
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Transcript
Introduction to David Thunder and His Work
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, listener. I hope this message finds you well. This week, Dr. Val has another guest for us, the aforementioned and very impressive David Thunder. And yes, that's his real name. He is a very charming British wizard, and during this episode he blew my mind wide open. I hope he'll do the same for
What is 'Thunder, Lightning, and the Doc'?
00:00:20
Speaker
you. It's Thunder, Lightning, and the Dock in Chapter 6 of Dr. Val Saves Dave.
David Thunder's Journey and Expertise
00:00:30
Speaker
Hey everybody, have you heard the news? Dave's coming 50 and he's got the blues. He's out of shape and this is true. He needs help, he has no clue. He grabs his phone and she can't quit. Dr. Val will do her trick. She'll be tough, there's no free pass. Come on Dave, get off your ass. Dr. Val, can you save Dave? He's quite alive.
00:01:01
Speaker
Oh do you think he will cave? Listen in, he's back in school!
How Do Biomechanics and the Nervous System Affect Movement?
00:01:10
Speaker
It's his funny buddy's Dr. Val's rules! It's his funny buddy's Dr. Val's rules!
00:01:15
Speaker
Welcome back, everybody. I'm still here, which means Dr. Val has been saving Dave, technically. And this is another exciting chapter this week because we have a guest. This is our second ever guest. Dr. Val has continued to scour the globe to find people that can help me on my journey here. And she's found another legend in her life from overseas. Doc, why don't you tell us who our guest is today? Tell everybody about our guest.
00:01:42
Speaker
Absolutely. So David Thunder is a legend. I heard about him and how his nickname was the Wizard because he can do the impossible and he does the impossible for people every day. And I had the opportunity to meet him and work with him. And I was just blown away by the quality of his work, by what he could do, by what he could accomplish, the skills that he has. So David Thunder is a movement specialist from the United Kingdom. He has worked with
00:02:12
Speaker
royalty, he's worked with professional athletes, he's worked with dancers, and he's worked with people who are just average and ordinary and got them extraordinary results in terms of their healing, in terms of their movement, in terms of their performance. So David is an absolute expert in blowing your mind with respect to just your biomechanics. Your biomechanics can tell you so much about your body and can accelerate your performance.
00:02:38
Speaker
And one of the things that
How Can Early Life Conditions Impact Health?
00:02:40
Speaker
I loved about David is we've had some conversations where he said to me, most people don't even know what they're capable of. And he helps people take their health, take their fitness, take their movement and performance to levels that they never even thought they could achieve.
00:02:57
Speaker
He's an incredible human being, a loving father, loving husband, incredible warm-hearted man who also has the best voice in the entire world and happens to look like Superman. So, eye candy for those of you women and gay men who are watching on YouTube. You're welcome. Follow that intro.
00:03:26
Speaker
And just one very slight correction in that introduction. Thank you very much, by the way. But we still haven't got married yet. So it's just a point of contention in the house. We have three beautiful daughters, but yeah, they haven't quite got round to the marriage piece, but it's on the to-do list, but yes. Thank you for that intro. Because I think the line that really resonated for me is,
00:03:54
Speaker
exploring what people are capable of when they don't realize what they're capable of.
Developing a Fitness Plan with Biomechanics
00:04:00
Speaker
I love helping encourage people to dream beyond where they think their limits are.
00:04:05
Speaker
Absolutely and so Dave I know one of the places that we are at or that you're at right now we spoke last week and you were kind of saying okay the easy part is over you know I've done the food part I've done the nutrition part we've set that foundation we've started that healing process and there's a lot that we've accomplished but now we've got to take it to the next level now we've got to get the exercise component really into alignment
00:04:30
Speaker
And with respect to nutrition, there's only so much nutrition can do if your body's biomechanics are out of alignment. So David, I know you have a process that you like to work with with respect to the people that you work with to help in terms of the performance and taking them to that next level. What are some things that you look for with respect to the people that you work with?
00:04:59
Speaker
Okay, so I think biomechanics is an interesting piece because when you look at biomechanics, what you're really looking at is actually a reflection of how the nervous system is interpreting the body. So what that means is that your movement is controlled by your central nervous system. So when you watch someone walk, for example, the gait can tell you a lot of things about how the body is interpreting
00:05:25
Speaker
where it is in that moment. You can use it as a way of creating a baseline or a gauge of where someone is at. You can use it as a part of how you map to get someone to their outcome. I've got some questions for Dave in a minute. One of the key pieces I look for before I start working with someone is effectively
00:05:53
Speaker
to gauge in their nervous system, specifically on their autonomic nervous system, which is their fight or flight system or their
What Role Does Visualization Play in Motor Skills?
00:06:00
Speaker
rest and digest and repair. So what you want to look, first of all is
00:06:09
Speaker
where is someone on that scale? Do they have the ability to go fight or flight and then go rest and repair? Do they have their restitution processes in place? Because if you start to push with training, if you say, well, I want to run a marathon, I want to get ripped and put muscle on, but there's no ability to have restitution, you need to
00:06:28
Speaker
to rebuild that
The Importance of the Big Toe and Barefoot Running
00:06:30
Speaker
into the nervous system. You need to teach them how to effectively have that off switch. That's the first thing I look for is a safety mechanism because it doesn't matter what training you stack on that. If the system has no restitution processes in place, no ability to repair, you're not going to be sustainable. For me, a classic example of that is January 1st.
00:06:53
Speaker
A large percentage of the population on January 1st will wake up and decide to be a better being. And they will make goals, New Year's resolutions, and you'll find that there's a huge surge in people enrolling into gyms in January. And then by kind of end of February, mid-March, most of those people aren't there anymore.
00:07:15
Speaker
One of the reasons for that is that they have set their intensity too high and not factored in the recovery piece. They've either got injured or they're just not feeling good or their energy is crashing because what they're doing isn't sustainable
Personalized Fitness Strategies and Neural Patterns
00:07:30
Speaker
on their system because they don't have that repair piece in place.
00:07:34
Speaker
With someone like Dave, my questions would be really just orientated around understanding first of what his objectives are and then where his baseline is right now so he can create the reality, the map of where he is, and then apply the right tools to get in there, which may not be starting with actual physical movement or training the biomechanics. It will really depend on what comes up. Well, first of all, let me jump here then and reassure you, David, I am a champion wrestler.
00:08:04
Speaker
I'm a world-class wrestler. You wouldn't believe how many days in a row I could rest for. I mean, just outstanding. So as far as that goes, just relax, brother, because I am here to rest.
00:08:18
Speaker
Here's one myth that I want to just dispel. The myth around resting is that just because you're resting, that doesn't actually mean that your nervous system has gone out of fight or flight and into rest and repair. You could be resting, but internally, your dimmer switch on the control is still tending towards fight or flight, and that could have been normalized. After when you are assessing someone, you go through
00:08:45
Speaker
their history and you would look maybe at say their childhood and so for example one of the key things I see in childhood in that first seven years where really a lot of the thermostats of the autonomic nervous system is set is if you grew up in a house where there wasn't full safety maybe there was domestic violence or there was there was a threat that was sort of low grade your nervous system may be chronically lit meaning that
00:09:13
Speaker
that dimmer switch isn't able to go fully into repair. So we would need to understand all those kind of metrics because you could be resting and sleeping and whatever, and actually your nervous system isn't able to go fully into those processes. So we would have to understand that because it's not actually just a passive process, that kind of off switch that could also be some kind of mobility drills, that could be some breath work, that could be doing a number of different things that would lean you into that.
00:09:41
Speaker
or it might be doing the work to uncover why your nervous system was chronically lit. For example, if you grew up in an environment that wasn't particularly safe as a child, you may learn to be hypervigilant. That hypervigilance would have served you because it means you will always be alert to things that are about to happen, so you can preemptively action that. That may still be running from childhood.
00:10:11
Speaker
So unless that's acknowledged and then renegotiated, upgraded, but acknowledged first so you don't throw the baby out with the bath water, you may not be able to turn that switch down because it may have just moved in so much that it's in adaptation. And adaptation is the process where something has just moved in and the body's just accepted it and normalized it so it's not trying to resolve it. And you can assess that by watching somebody walk.
00:10:37
Speaker
Paulie. Yeah, no, not fully. He's like, oh, your dad didn't hug you. I see your childhood issues. Yeah. That's extraordinary. Mess, mess, mess. Oh my gosh. Never getting over it. Look at the way that guy's laying on the couch. Boy, oh boy. His uncle must have beat him.
00:11:03
Speaker
It is interesting when you see motor patterns because often you can watch someone walk as an adult and you will see certain patterns that have been frozen in time that haven't developed properly. I guess a good example is someone I saw a few years ago and I met this person on a telehealth call. Within a few seconds of meeting, I just paused and said, okay, I'm just going to stop you there. What happened when you're about six or seven?
00:11:33
Speaker
because you still move like six or seven year old. And he like, this guy was deeply offended. And I said, well, it was clearly on your right side. And just being, because we didn't have very long on the call, it was like, were you ever labeled as like clumsy or disorganized or dyspactic at school? And he said, well, yes, I wasn't allowed to do sport because I was too clumsy and blah, blah, blah. He couldn't think of any event until I kind of asked more refining questions. And then what we uncovered was,
00:12:03
Speaker
he had had an appendix, an acute appendix flare up, and he'd been rushed in for emergency surgery, and they hadn't done a nice laparoscopic surgery. They'd gone in, like, and they'd sort of fished around, and there was infection in the gut, and he had this huge scar, and that scar had tethered to some of the surrounding muscular tissues, including parts of the psoas tendon, so he couldn't fully extend his hip.
00:12:30
Speaker
And as a result, that was never acknowledged, that piece, because the obvious piece was to save his life with the potential burst appendix.
00:12:41
Speaker
But that left him with some restriction in his hip, which the body just normalized very quickly. But because of that, he could never write his center of gravity. And he stopped doing sport because he felt like he was being shamed and ended up with a lot of labels and complexes. So his nervous system got fixed in time at that point. So a lot of what we had to do was kind of repattern his nervous system going all the way back through his childhood.
00:13:08
Speaker
Wow, here I was thinking you were going to say do some pushups and set up some healthy breakfast. And now I'm so curious though, because you know, like I know what you've been through, but you know, you've got then your
How to Achieve Long-term Fitness Success?
00:13:20
Speaker
years as a golf pro getting hit by lightning and then the years as a comedian, like what has that done to your central nervous system? I'm terrified to walk in front of you.
00:13:32
Speaker
This is welcome to Dr. Val Shames-Dave. Yeah, I don't want to know what I've forgotten. There's a reason I blocked it all out. Okay, well, David, just for a starting point, then for us, you should know we started January 14th on my new lifestyle of changing diet, changing everything. So I have lost 13 pounds.
00:13:57
Speaker
since January 14th just through diet. And so now I'm feeling much better. I'm feeling that it's obviously time for me to start training. So I'm not even entirely sure. The goal is to be as fit as I can by 50. And again, as we've documented, I should have started earlier.
00:14:14
Speaker
uh but but let's not live in the past so at least until you see me walk and then you can figure out what happened in my past that may be procrastinate but so this is gonna be good look at how much she's smiling she can't wait to see you pick me apart
00:14:31
Speaker
So I guess for everyone listening, though, who won't be able to walk in front of you, et cetera, what metrics, because I know this is constantly changing, how would you define somebody being as fit as they could? If I say something as blanket as I want to be as fit as I can by 50, I mean, I assume that means there's flexibility, there's strength, there's stamina. I mean, how many different categories do you measure fitness in these days?
00:15:01
Speaker
play with a lot of different categories. We could talk about things like your ability to get in and out of the floor, your mobility, grip strength, your cardiovascular health, your overall musculature, this, that, and the other. But I would start at a level above that, because we've got this target of 50. And that's great. What happens after that happens when you're 51 or 52 or when you're 90. So the way I've always worked, we spend quite a bit of time just
00:15:30
Speaker
getting under the skin of like, why are you doing that? Being fit at 50 is nice, but where's the kind of fuel underneath that? What's the identity that you're becoming by being fit at 50? What does that mean to you? So just trying to ignite that flame of really understanding what that means to you and what that would look like. And from there, we may just say that, well, actually, it's just general markers of fitness. That's what really excites me. Or you may be,
00:15:56
Speaker
I don't know it's something specific that like you know I always wanted to run a marathon or I always wanted to be on like Ninja Warrior or whatever it is and depending on what comes out from that would depend on kind of like what how we skew those markers there's always general markers we can talk about but I like to kind of attach it specifically to the individual so as an example for me and I know you have a daughter
00:16:22
Speaker
It was just over a year and a half ago, I was sat on a train. I'd actually gone for a Japanese head spa where she cuts my hair, but she does this sort of head massage for half an hour. She really doesn't do a good job with a haircut, but what she does is this incredible head spa. I was completely blissed out, and I had to get a train back into central London. And I sat on the train, and this guy walks past me.
00:16:50
Speaker
I didn't even notice him because I was so blissed out. He turns around and he puts his face right next to mine. He said, use the F word. He said, you're an Fing C word and a pedophile and I'm going to smash your teeth in. I looked around like, who's he talking to? Then it became very apparent it was me. Whatever it was, took an instant and disliked me. He didn't know the guy never met him.
00:17:15
Speaker
And he then started to scream and shout and then roll the whole carriages, telling them that I was a pedophile and that he was going to kill me. And so I tried verbal reasoning. This made him worse. And he was clearly, clearly unbalanced psychologically. He was crazy. So there was no verbal reasoning. There wasn't anywhere to move to or exit to on the train. So I just sat there.
00:17:38
Speaker
And I observed very closely just to see whether he stepped in close enough where I would have to actually take some kind of physical action. But he never quite did, but there was a threat. And that went on for 10 minutes, which doesn't sound like a long time, but I can tell you when someone's screaming and shouting, that's a long time. And he left the train. And afterwards, it just stayed with me. I was very calm, but it stayed with me. And the thought that came to me was, I'm the father of three girls. What would have happened
00:18:07
Speaker
had he stepped into that zone where I'd have had to react. Because I've never really been in a fight. It's not really particularly in my nature. I work in a healing profession where we look after health, we try and heal people and not hurt them. But in that moment, something awoke in me of like, okay, actually, it's slightly irresponsible for me to not know the answer to how I would handle myself in a situation.
00:18:35
Speaker
And I've always had a love of boxing and I've always sort of had a thought about stepping into the ring. I just never done it. So the age of 45, again, with Dr Val's help, I got myself shredded, got myself down to 12% body fat, trained like a professional for nine months and had a white color boxing match.
00:18:52
Speaker
But it was very attached to the identity and the outcome of what I wanted to be. And it was not just about, boxing was just a vehicle, but behind that was wanting to be the sentinel for my family and even got it as my identity on the wall. Like being there for my family, being able to stand up, being an example for them, being a role model.
00:19:13
Speaker
like lots of things that lay it on and also just something that had a passion that I could continue to train and to enhance and develop that would.
00:19:23
Speaker
take me forward. So it had real juice for me. So by the time the actual event of the boxing was happened, like it was conditioned into my nervous system. And as a result, I've got myself very, very fit. So when it came to being fit at 50, I just want to make sure that that had enough fuel in it to really get you to being fit at 50 to get you into the action that needs to be taken.
00:19:45
Speaker
and also be sustainable beyond that point. So almost like burning in a new identity. Yeah, as we joked with Mark von Miser was talking about all these goals. I said, I just want to get out of a chair without making noises.
00:20:01
Speaker
I think we're good. I'm creaking and stuff. So I can tell you just in the shift that's happened through Dr. Val's help already is that, you know, a few months ago when we started this, you know, I was feeling old and, you know, a longer life was like, you know, everything just sort of ached, knees were aching, things were aching. And it was like, I don't even know how much more of this I want.
00:20:21
Speaker
But as I'm losing the weight and as I'm starting to feel better, I'm certainly more open to, oh, actually, I could live a lot longer than I than I felt like a few months ago. And so now, you know, it's a great point you bring up of, you know, the 50 was just it was an attainable landmark. It's like this is coming up.
00:20:39
Speaker
And for me, what it's really done is means I don't get a mulligan. It's a golfer term. Like there's no do over on this one. You know, however, January, somebody says, Oh, I'm going to start working out. And then the next January, they say this one, I don't get to stop. I don't get to push off because I've only got the one shot at this. So that's sort of lit the fire where we go from here.
00:20:59
Speaker
Man, I'm open to that concept and that thinking. How do I want to be at 90? That's a great question. 60, 70, 80, all of these are great numbers to be looking for. The quest now is to sort of undo the damage, the self-inflicted damage through absolute irresponsibility and ignorance.
00:21:21
Speaker
that I've done. I mean, just living like a ditch pig, a glutton, just an absolute 25 years of glutton. I'm a stand-up comic. I don't know if you know what the stand-up comedy world is like, David, but it's not the healthiest arena. I know a little bit, not the personal experience. It's an island of misfit toys. Nobody's really pushing anybody to be their healthiest.
00:21:44
Speaker
So we're going to change the whole landscape here. But yeah, so where do we start? What can we do in a half hour or whatever we've got? Okay, great. So just to tidy up that first piece, just to acknowledge that, I'm just going to give you a first real action from this, and it would be my advice to anybody, is that really having that vision for yourself and then spending the time to condition that is really key.
00:22:14
Speaker
So, ingraining that new identity of who you want to be, dreaming a little bigger than getting out the chair and not making noises, like going, what does real fitness look like? And really starting to craft that vision for yourself is something that
00:22:27
Speaker
I work with an amazing performance coach and she always says, it's not a one-time band camp thing. If you want to burn that identity into your nervous system so it moves in and it's sustainable, it's something you need to condition. I have little reminders on my wall. I have little things like the boxing glove and little trophies and things around that that just remind me.
00:22:50
Speaker
to keep doing that and why I'm doing that, I've written it down, I've conditioned that piece. And it's really key because when you're pushing for fitness or unraveling yourself or if pain comes up, which often it does as the body adapts as you're trying to change things or unravel things, you want to have that beacon that you're heading towards, you want that to be clear and focused.
00:23:14
Speaker
because the brain is much better motivated with a towards strategy than an away from strategy. Like, I don't want to make sounds when I get out of the chair. That doesn't have any fuel. But if you say, like, I want to be an elite athlete that gets in and out the floor, I want to be able to do muscle up on the rings, I want to do whatever it is, that towards strategy is really, really key for the brain in terms of the motivation. So, yeah, I would continue to burn that into your piece.
00:23:41
Speaker
what we can do in this sort of half hour is we can just start to like create like a map of where you are so we can give you your first start point because I think a lot of people who go to the gym in January have very good intentions and they may well be connected to that vision of themselves.
00:24:01
Speaker
but the strategy might not be the right start place for them. So one of the things that I find happens, David, is you're the same age in your head your whole life, right? You're always just one until you're none. And so what's happened already is I'll go back to the gym for the first time in a while, and I have a memory of what I could do.
00:24:19
Speaker
and that's all my brain's focusing on. So I put on the old weights, you put it on right where you go, whoa, ouch, this body. That was a 27-year-old who lifted this weight. I'm 49 now. So I guess the first thing would be is how do you push yourself while still protecting yourself from injury when you're getting started? I think you raise an amazing point there. And I gently call that perception versus reality.
00:24:48
Speaker
So people often present to me, and they will describe themselves as an athlete, and I'm looking at their body, looking at how they've moved into my office, and I go, ha, ha, ha. So when did you do all those things? Oh, when I was a teenager, and you're in your 50s now, okay. But you're an athlete, okay. And the last time you trained was 30 years ago. Okay, but you still have that identity of that person that did those things.
00:25:17
Speaker
Right. Let's just test that. Let's just make sure that you're still in that same body. So the way we do that is, and there's a number of ways we do that, but is through a movement screen.
00:25:34
Speaker
So you get the reality of how the body's moving. Gate is one of those you can watch someone walk, and then you can put people through sort of different biomechanical lenses. You can test their nervous system by getting to move fast, testing different coordination drills. And really what you're looking at is where the nervous system is right now, because that will give us the reality of where we are. And depending on where we are,
00:25:56
Speaker
will need to kind of work on effectively your weak links, your blind spots. But here's something I've never said to any adult in my life, but would you like to see me walk?
00:26:14
Speaker
I've never been nervous walking before. I think I'm a fine walker. I've always gotten for me to be okay. I can aim. I get around corners for the most part. I've only broken the toe a few times. And usually that's because the foot of the bed is hiding under a blanket or something. But for the most part, I get around walls and corners.
00:26:34
Speaker
Which toes have you broken? Both pinky toes on the outside more than once, and I'm always amazed. It's like the job site, how many days since there's been an accident, I have to reset it to zero every time I clock my toe on something. And I do say, I go, how many years? How many years will I have to be alive before I learn how much room I need to get around without catching the toes on the corner of the wall or whatever it is? But that's usually because I'm distracted.
00:27:02
Speaker
Okay, let's just have a little look at your game. We haven't really dug into any of your history, but let's just have a look and see without kind of like biasing. So we're just, we're effectively like, look, we know something about lightning, but let's just like look. Okay, we've set a camera up, so I'll go ahead and dock you left to relay the directions. And you can let me know, David, if you need me to change the angle a little bit to see. Yeah, we can just drop it down so we can like, do we have some naked feet?
00:27:29
Speaker
Oh no. Naked feet and I'll drop that down, that angle down. Hold on. Yeah, usually my dad joke is I'll say like, let's get you naked from the ankles down. This is turning into a different show already, isn't it?
00:27:53
Speaker
All right, so we're doing this in two parts. This is the camera angle. We can see the feet and then we'll do it with the, then drop it, move it up and look at the upper body. So just, if you walk as far as you can, Dave, and then turn around. Walk as far as you can and then turn around. So with Gate, we're looking at a number of things. Keep going. Keep going. Just a few times, a few times. Do it a few times. We're looking at...
00:28:16
Speaker
primarily where the movement comes from. We're like, what's driving it? What muscle groups are online? And we're looking at a few things. So what we see here is some lovely wide feet and yeah, some interesting movement patterns. So let's get the camera. Okay.
00:28:34
Speaker
our medical disclaimer. Welcome to Dr. Val Saves Dave, where a naturopathic doctor and a comedian team up together to tickle your funny bone and maybe even teach you a thing or two about health. But hey, before you go down the rabbit hole of kale smoothies and laughter yoga, a quick reminder, we're not your doctor. We might have the prescription for a good joke, but when it comes to your health, consult the pros. So laugh and learn, but keep that stethoscope handy, just in case.
00:29:05
Speaker
Okay, I've missed all the comments during the walking. Which is for the best. I just said it was interesting with a big grin on my face. I heard something about, yeah, really interesting. Yeah, time to get ready to write a letter to my parents.
00:29:28
Speaker
Alright, so for those of you listening, I walked back and forth several times on camera so that David could see me walking with my bare-legged from the knee down for those who are interested in the details. Now David's gonna make me sad.
00:29:45
Speaker
I'm going to make you sad. You weren't walking at particularly fast pace, so we'd normally test you at a little bit more intensity, but just as a quick throwaway, just initial assessment, when you were landing on your very nice wide feet, I'm a big fan of wide feet, having particularly wide feet myself, which are also hairy, like I could have been an extra in Lord of the Rings. So when I watch you walk,
00:30:10
Speaker
You walk with what I would describe as a varus, and I always remember that varus is in too much air under the big toe. So you're landing on the outside of these big wide feet of yours. So it means that you're not utilizing the big toe in the first metatarsal effectively. So it's the first sort of thing we would look for because when you look at foot function,
00:30:31
Speaker
you just look at the shape of the foot like the big toe in the first metatarsal or four times thicker and wider than the rest of the metatarsals so that's where you would want the primary weight bearing to go through that spread between the fifth so we have a compensation there we don't know why just yet
00:30:46
Speaker
Then we would look kind of more globally at where the movement is firing from, like what is this sort of muscular sequence as you move. So we look at that through, predominantly, gluteal control. We look at your butt. And we do that because the butt is the strongest muscle in the body. And when you strike the ground, land heel-toe,
00:31:09
Speaker
the gluteal five first. And if that's got a nice, healthy relationship, then the sequencing, then you should have a nice control through the hamstring, through the lower back, all the way kind of cross-laturally through to the opposite shoulder, movements cross-lateral. So you're always looking between the right leg and the left shoulder and vice versa.
00:31:29
Speaker
And what we saw is that the way you initiated your movement wasn't from your posterior chain, it wasn't from your butt, it was predominantly from your hip flexor, so you had sort of an anterior controlled gait. And you also had some accessory shoulder movements in, so rather than
00:31:46
Speaker
using the extensor system and driving back through your arms, we got some compensatory movement. The body likes rhythm, and you get your rhythm a little bit from your shoulders. That's not quite the correct way, and your head then was sat in front of you rather than stacked and nicely organized over the spine. One of the things we look for is, what is your relationship with gravity?
00:32:08
Speaker
because gravity is one of our biggest adversaries. And if we don't have a good relationship with gravity as we age, the structure is loaded inappropriately and that accelerates the process of wear. So, yeah, there's some things we would want to improve in terms of your activation and the control and the sequencing. Then we also look at the differences in your stride length left to right, and we could see some imbalances.
00:32:30
Speaker
that actually weren't consistent as you walked, you changed them very slightly. So we'd have to look into more detail as to what's going on, but it looked like there was an imbalance through the pelvis, which would create the potential of sort of like a torsional pattern as you move through the base of the lower back. So put some undue strain there. Other things we could see just from this sort of very quick snapshot is the transmission of force between the upper and lower body. So we talked about that sort of compensation from the shoulder, but really what we want to see is
00:33:00
Speaker
like a nice rhythm between the upper and lower body. So it means that the force going through the lower body to the pelvis is being transmitted through to the opposite shoulder. So that tells us a lot about not just core strength, but what I would term dynamic core, the ability to translate that force through. And that wasn't quite where it needs to be. And it's partly because of that anterior drive through the front of the hips and through the shoulders. That means you didn't really connect left to right. And that's,
00:33:27
Speaker
That's the secret of power when it comes to sort of something like boxing or any rotational event. You want to be able to kind of link those chains through. So the ground reaction force from the foot comes all the way up through to the opposite shoulder. So if you're doing an action like throwing or lifting overhead, all that power is able to be translated through the body. Well, I could do better. Could I try again? No, I'm competitive. Like, well, no, I could take better strides than that. I wasn't even concentrating.
00:33:57
Speaker
You look like you were walking relaxed, and so what we're seeing there is just like where your default settings are. Sure. No, it's fascinating to me what you're saying, because obviously I never even thought about how my big toe is involved. I mean, I've got a big hockey butt from lots of skating, so I just assumed that butt was working. I didn't realize that it was going for a ride. I assume I have a bit of a hunch because I've been carrying a belly.
00:34:20
Speaker
or a bit of a belly, which I assume has been pulling things down, pulling my posture down a little bit towards the front, or tightening up the hip flexors, but maybe it goes the other way around. Maybe the tight hip flexors have caused a stoop, or how's all that work? Let's go back to something like looking at a muscle that's tight. So you can say, well, this muscle is tight. And there's another sort of big myth, I would say, is like, the muscle is tight. Well, let's loosen that up.
00:34:51
Speaker
Let's loosen that up, shall we? So let's go for a massage and pound it like a piece of steak and then it'll be soft and it's now loose. But actually what is controlling that hip flexor is your brain, your cerebellum predominantly. So what we want to look and just see is why is that muscle being held in that range of motion? What evidence has the brain had to hold it there?
00:35:16
Speaker
something in isolation like that appendix example I gave you was something in isolation or is it it's a compensation from other things maybe it's missing motion in the ankle from an old ankle sprain you've forgotten about or maybe like the the psoas muscle the hip flexor is often involved with trauma patterns that we were talking about or touched on earlier where people default towards that kind of fetal position or the startle response so we would need to sort of do a sort of deeper uncover as to why that
00:35:46
Speaker
was held in that way and then give you tools to give the brain evidence to reset those levels. And that's not necessarily through stretching. That might actually be, it might just be the training your feet, like getting that big toe with its ability to extend and working on like the three rockers in the foot, which are the big toe, the ankle, and the calcaneus, the heel, getting those effectively. That might be the missing piece that then allows the brain to go, oh, do you know what?
00:36:15
Speaker
here and then we just teach you the skills that have transference to give the brain evidence and we do that enough that we start to tap into the laws of neuroplasticity. Amazing. Neuroplasticity is a really interesting one because we don't know how long these movement patterns have been here. Just watching me move just for a few seconds, I would suggest there's some things that have moved in for a long time. Neuroplasticity is
00:36:43
Speaker
the ability of the brain to change itself with time. And if you're doing something over and over again at a certain level of intensity and a consistency, the brain creates a pathway and it's like creating a pathway in the snow and it gets wider and wider and then eventually that becomes your default. So without thinking on it, you're on this pathway.
00:37:03
Speaker
But suddenly, if someone like me points out that actually you should have been going in that direction, we need to create a pathway. And we need to create a pathway that is eventually wider than this pathway. So when you're tired and you've forgotten what your name is, you're still on the new pathway. Whereas if that pathway is narrower and not well established, you're going to just default to where you go to.
00:37:26
Speaker
So I have to, it never occurred to me when we started this that I would have to do some toe training. My big toe has been holding me back. I mean, I knew it. I've been yelling at these toes for years. I'm so curious though, because of your golf, right? Like you golf and you successfully, professionally. In spite of my toes. Yes.
00:37:49
Speaker
And you have your own golf training school, right? Well, I've helped people learn how to golf, yes. I went to university on a golf scholarship. I've been a Scratch golfer for 20-some years. I still play to Scratch. And so I do have... I think Doc Chuck is that I do have some motor control.
00:38:10
Speaker
I do have some ability to use this body effectively. But how effective is it? And then after you do the changes in the neuroplasticity, how much better improvement would you get with your golf game? Because we had a conversation before where you're like, hey, once I reach a certain point, I'm technically in a senior's range and I still want to be keeping my golf swings and speed up to a certain amount. I mean, what can we accomplish? How much can we do?
00:38:38
Speaker
if we actually have that movement corrected. And David, you could, I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement here. There will be a lot of room for improvement in terms of just restoring some what I would call neural blind spots to you, increasing what's called interception, your awareness of where you are in self. Because like these things, it's like I pointed out new information to you.
00:39:06
Speaker
It's something that you weren't fully aware of. No, nevermind fully. I dropped the English. You don't have to be polite here. You have no idea what you're talking about.
00:39:23
Speaker
That's right. I walked pretty good for a guy who's had his head up his ass for the last time. Sorry, arse. Head up my arse. Is that more comfortable for you? Head up your arse, yes. But you still have the ability to play scratch golf. So that's fantastic. But at the same time, you're pretty keen when you get out of a chair. So it's great that you've still got those motor patterns there. But it's pretty predictive with the movement patterns you get. If you apply more time to that,
00:39:53
Speaker
your relationship to gravity is going to decrease, your speed of firing of your nervous system is going to decrease and you will eventually run out of what I would call a buffer, your ability to compensate for some of those ineffective patterns.
00:40:07
Speaker
So how, this is a blanket question just that you can jump in. To what age do you think people can continue to get stronger? I know a senior tour, Val brought up a point about senior tour and Phil Mickelson has worked on making sure he can hit the ball the same length or if not a little longer into his fifties. But traditionally on the senior tour, they started to fall off after 55 as they get closer to, they just can't perform or hit it as far by 60. But I don't know, I've never heard anyone speak like you.
00:40:36
Speaker
uh regarding body and whatnot do you have a different belief as far as how long and how old people can it sounds like you're challenging age and belief through the mindset i am challenging age and belief on this piece because i've worked with a lot of professional athletes elite athletes and i'm surprised just how many of them have like these big neural blind spots where you're able to kind of up level their performance when they're already kind of at the peak of the game just by
00:41:06
Speaker
kind of reconnecting and we kind of patterning some of these these neural blind spots. So I couldn't give you an age as to when you can improve your strength. But what I know is you can always improve your neural age, whatever age you are. And that will
00:41:25
Speaker
kind of keep your motor skills to a high level, that will increase your coordination, your ability to function, your awareness of where you are in space. And there's certain key markers that you would be looking at to do that. But if you do it from a neurocentric approach, and you combine that with controlling inflammation, like valors, if you combine that with some of the other clever technologies that are out there in terms of like maintaining your wellness,
00:41:49
Speaker
There's lots of things you can do, so I would never say, well, the limit is 55 or 65 or whatever it is, because I genuinely, I've been doing what I do for 34, 35 years, I forget now how old I am, but I've never found the limits of what humans are capable of.
00:42:09
Speaker
if they're willing to put in the work, if they have the right mindset, if they're connected to the goal and they do the work. I've seen it. I've seen him do the impossible. We've worked with patients together. And Mark von Meuser shared his story. And Mark von Meuser did what everybody would have considered to be impossible. The healing that I've seen David get with patients that I've shared with him is phenomenal. It's next level.
00:42:41
Speaker
Okay, well, I mean, I'm in.
00:42:45
Speaker
I don't know what to do where we start, but it seems like saying my goals were to do certain numbers of push-ups seems like a pretty silly thing to say right now. I want to do 20 push-ups in a minute. Like, what an idiot I must be in the face of you to say that. So, yeah. I was just going to say I'd like to create a new neural pathway where my hips move better this afternoon. Like, if I can just think my way into a better body,
00:43:12
Speaker
then that sounds way better than actually going to the gym. You still have to do the work. Part of that is actually thinking your way to it is a really interesting piece because there's lots of studies that show that if you visualize something and the skill of how you visualize it, if you visualize it well and correctly,
00:43:37
Speaker
your brain will create the same motor pathways than if you'd actually practiced. So lots of studies were showing things like shooting baskets, where they had one group which practiced a certain amount every day and they improved by a certain amount. And there was one group that didn't do anything, and there was one group that just visualized shooting the baskets. And they improved similarly, not quite as much, but similarly to the people who were practicing every day.
00:44:03
Speaker
and the same with like piano playing you can improve your piano playing just by visualizing you can you can do that with any skill but you do need to couple it with the actual work and there's a number of reasons for that but it's not just about ingraining the motor pathways but it's also about the sort of the ligamentous and tenderness adaptation that occurs as you start to load your body differently so if we suddenly started straightened you up got all your activation correct
00:44:28
Speaker
you'd probably be in pain within a few days if we did that all of a sudden, because your body isn't used to loading like that. And it's not just the muscles that aren't used to loading like that. Good muscles actually have a relatively good blood supply, so they're pretty quick turnaround. What's slightly grumpier and slower to train is tendons and ligaments. But if you condition them in the right way, they're your superpower, because actually that's what really holds you together and gives you the strength to age well into your 90s.
00:44:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is fascinating. I know from the golf training I did have back in 99, pre-lightning, I was in the Team Canada camp and we spoke lots about visualization and you play the course in your head, of course not, but I'd never really applied that to my ligaments or my tendons or having a talk with them about, come on, you.
00:45:20
Speaker
Let's get a little stronger. I just assumed it's like swimming. If you want to swim, you can read all about it, but you've got to get in the water at some point and not drown. That's right. When you talk about building this new platform or be more erect, you do that with a combination of headset and specific exercises that are targeting these things, or how does one change appropriately so that it sticks?
00:45:50
Speaker
We have a marker which I affectionately call Base Camp. Base Camp is where you're sequencing correctly through gate. You'd walk and everything is firing at the right time. Everything is open to the range. You've got an appropriate stride length and speed. You can hit certain markers like a squat or there's certain things that your body can do. Depending on where you are, depends on how long it takes to get to Base Camp.
00:46:25
Speaker
You're in pretty good shape actually because most people will come to me with pain. I've done most of my work because people will find me after they've tried most things and they haven't been able to shift the back pain they've had for 30 years. I will then go and play detective. My role is really as a detective where I was looking at what is missing.
00:46:50
Speaker
Like what hasn't been found? I can give you a very good example of like a well-known 5,000-meter sprinter who kept having pain on his left inner thigh, which meant he couldn't run past a certain point. And he'd had scans, he'd had treatment on it, he'd strengthened it, stretched it, and they just couldn't resolve it. But when I looked, I was the first person to make him take his sock off. And what we saw on his big toe
00:47:19
Speaker
was the nail was growing erratically and I asked him about it and he said well when I was four I had an ingrown toenail and they sort of botched the operation so he gets this sort of just chronic low grade pain on his big toe and then on his opposite shoulder
00:47:34
Speaker
he had fallen as a child and like torn part of the pectoral muscle on a little kind of like spiky thing. And so there was a scar tissue there. And what would happen under intensity is very subtle, but his right shoulder would curl up his left, his left big toe would go into that various position. And if you actually just feel that for yourself, if you just stand up for a second and you just lift up your left big toe and then bring your right shoulder in, what happens is your hip will deviate to the left
00:48:05
Speaker
You left hip, why left hip? If you're then running like that, the muscle that has to decelerate, that is the adductor muscle.
00:48:13
Speaker
So it was just the compensation from two very, very old injuries that had never been fully rehabbed. And the brain will keep running a protective mechanism on anything that's injured unless it's had enough evidence of safety. It will still kind of keep that kind of altered movement pattern around there where it can shorten the range or turn down the speed of firing or the power to an area. So it's under neural control.
00:48:43
Speaker
and it will do that forever until you go into that room in the cerebellum where those settings are held and give it enough evidence that it's now safe. Really, all I did with him was work on the activation around the shoulder and around the big toe to give it safety. I didn't really work on the leg at all and his body recalibrated itself. You're just searching for what's missing. With you, we will just create a map of what's missing and just make sure that you've got your baseline in pace,
00:49:12
Speaker
And we do that for a number of reasons. First of all, biomechanical efficiency, and also because if your joints are held in any position that is not optimal, it also contributes to firing to that fight-or-flight system. So it helps kind of, well, it limits your ability to go into full repair. So you want that kind of biomechanical efficiency on a neurological level to help repair. And once we've got those things set, we can then really start to,
00:49:40
Speaker
go through the gears of, okay, great, you want to train for a marathon or you want to train on the gymnastic rings or you want to train to step into a boxing ring. You always do that factory reset where you clear out all the old patterns. The word I like to use is transference, that neurological transference. Everything that you do, the brain is able to recognize. This is back to the gym example of like, okay, let's just go straight to the gym and start training.
00:50:09
Speaker
What you do in the gym may be, first of all, above your threshold to recover, and also that movement that you're doing may not have the right transference to changing you to an optimal movement pattern. You see a lot of people training in the gym, and they're firing all the wrong muscles. They're getting very strong, but they're looking less and less like a human and more like
00:50:30
Speaker
a different species because of how they train. So here's a good, what I think is a good question, or at least here's a question I'd love to know the answer to then. If I were too ignorant as I am right now, go to the gym this afternoon because now I'm all fired up and like, oh yeah, but I don't understand all my issues or how far from base camp or where I'm different, would I just be cementing my problems or challenges or locking in because I'd be using my
00:50:57
Speaker
you know old or my traditional neuro pathways not knowing so my big toes would be sit still in the car while I'm doing squats and my glutes would be taking the holiday while I'm doing leg extensions. You'd be continuing to condition those imbalances.
00:51:13
Speaker
But also at the same time, you're better to do something than nothing. So don't let, or I don't know where my foundation is, stop you from doing something because it's still more useful to be strong and to be fit, even if you're not moving optimally, because you can always clean that up.
00:51:32
Speaker
With golf though, if someone's got a bad swing, I don't want them going to the range and really locking in that bad swing. I want them doing drills or specifically to reroute the path of the golf club. In this case, when we talk about getting to base camp, because now I'm in, now I want to see what base camp is. Now I want to know where it is. I want to know the route there.
00:51:52
Speaker
Is this a situation where you go, here's a specific stretch, here's a specific exercise? How does one, you know, because I'm assuming it's not just go do some lat pull downs or how long can I do plank? Like it's not just core, even though core I'm sure is an issue. So it is a very, very simple process. So normally what you would do is you would gather a lot of information about someone, you'd go through the medical history, have a look and just see, are they on any medication?
00:52:21
Speaker
steal their capacity to recover because you can't push someone if they've got a chronic lung problem or that you have to kind of like understand where they're at or if they're going through a gut cleanse protocol and they're having die off and that in that moment they don't have the restitution processes because the body is prioritizing resources somewhere else. So you want to see where someone is at first of all and if they're at a place where you know great we can stop then you want to map
00:52:49
Speaker
And you want to just look at where someone is. So we looked at your gate very briefly. Then you'd look at other markers and understand their history. And you'd say, do you know what? Here's my diagnosis of what hierarchically I think is going to make the biggest difference to you. And you would start to plug what's missing.
00:53:06
Speaker
And that was going to be a slightly different map for everyone. There's going to be commonalities in everyone. Like we talked about the big toe, like my seven-year-old, if she was here right now, she would say the big toe is the most important joint in the human body. And she's right, because it's the most proprioceptive joint that feeds the somatosensory system, which tells you where you are in space.
00:53:25
Speaker
How is it possible no one's ever talked to me about the big toe my whole life? I've been around athletics, I've played a lot of hockey, I've been to gym, I've had personal trainers, no one has ever mentioned the big toe to me before. Do you know what, I'm going to just go back through history because it's something that has been forgotten and it was Mr. John F. Kennedy who has an amazing example with this. So John F. Kennedy had chronic back pain. Do you know the story? No.
00:53:51
Speaker
Okay, John F. Kennedy had chronic back pain, and I guess one of the theories, I don't know if it's accurate or not, as to why he wasn't able to dodge the second bullet, because the first bullet didn't kill him, was that he had a back brace on. Anyway, lots of people looked at his back through time, and no one really made any difference to it. And it wasn't until someone called Janet Chevelle, who's very well known,
00:54:16
Speaker
watched him walk, looked at his foot type and said, you know what, you put your weight through your second metatarsal and not your first metatarsal. It's something called Morton's foot. And he said, because of that, you have compensatory movements, which basically means that your lower back is always under pressure. So what she did was she just put this tiny little piece of cotton wool under his first metatarsal so now the brain could see where to put the weight.
00:54:41
Speaker
And his back pain started to get much better. And it was to the point where he appointed her physician of the White House. So a very well-documented story that's totally been forgotten. And Janet Javelle authorized the study, and I forget all the numbers, but she basically looked at the population, like there was several thousand people.
00:55:02
Speaker
And she looked at people who had back pain versus people who didn't have back pain. And what she looked for is she looked for the percentage of people who had this foot type. And what she found was the people had back pain, nearly 80% of them had this foot type, this Morton's foot. Whereas only 20% of the general populace had it. So it was hugely significant that this one piece, but it's a study that has never been repeated because it was so compelling and it's been forgotten in time.
00:55:29
Speaker
This is why I work with the wizard. This is where you go for the greatness. You're living up to your intro, David. I'll just say that. You really delivered all the promise here. One of the things I commented on at the start was your white foot.
00:55:45
Speaker
Like as a child, I used to dream of shoes that were square. If you draw a square like this, this is kind of my foot shape here. It's a square piece of paper and shoes don't fit as like a wide toe box. In general, like the shoe industry, like we could get lost on this rabbit hole. But what will happen is the shoe industry will compress the toe box. So now your weight will go through the middle of your foot. So now you're blinding your major proprioceptive, your major
00:56:12
Speaker
joint of balance that feeds back to the brain. And then we go into other pieces of footwear, like the shoes are very thick, they have like arch supports, which now like are taking away from the natural function of the foot and trying to do the job for the foot. So our feet have got pretty stupid at the time. Yeah, I didn't want to say anything.
00:56:33
Speaker
I got down feet. You've noticed my feet are wide, but yes, I've always been particular in the footwear I wear in order to accommodate a wider foot. I can't wear Italian shoes, for example. They always have those narrow toes. Most dress shoes you have to get where the lace part actually is two pieces separate that tie up as opposed to one where it points and squeezes the toes.
00:56:58
Speaker
So how does someone exercise their toes? Are there exercises you do then to retrain? Yeah, there's a ton of exercises. I've been at the gym. I've never seen the toe machine. There's something I learned a long time ago when I kind of...
00:57:14
Speaker
relearn how to use my feet because like my feet were pretty much ruined from footwear and also I was given orthotics as a child to kind of support my arch, which actually made my feet very weak. So I had to kind of relearn how feet function. In fact, I did my dissertation on this, like how to reprogram the feet. So we do an exercise, which is affectionately called Toga, which I learned from Lee Saxby a number of years ago. And it's basically where you
00:57:45
Speaker
you get naked from the ankles down and you press your big toe down and you lift your other toes up. It's a challenge. I don't even know how to do that. When we were first in class doing it, he showed it to us and I tried to do it and I thought, no, this is a joke. No one can do that. And I looked around and half the class were doing half couldn't. I looked at my sort of my airy white feet going, come on.
00:58:13
Speaker
Then there's another one where you sort of bend the big toe underneath and then you stretch it out the other way. And it was like, it was agonizing when I first did it. And for some people it wasn't, children, it's not. So. I can't spread my toes individually. I know my partner can, she can do it, but I can't, can you spread, do you have control of your individual toes? You could probably use your toes like you use your hands. Like you could probably write, paint things.
00:58:41
Speaker
But it makes sense with your toes and your feet. They're the only thing that contact the ground when you move. So your relationship and the ability to absorb force, that's a good starting point. Let's have a look and just see how they're functioning.
00:58:56
Speaker
Because if there's something missing in the feet, it will be compensated for higher up. So for people listening to this, should they just start walking barefoot more? Certainly. I'm sure right now everybody who's not in a car or on a tremor right now is already putting their big toe down into the ground and trying to lift their other toe up.
00:59:12
Speaker
What I will say, though, is that what they should do is contact you directly because you individualize everything and everybody's on a different journey. Everything we do is very bespoke, depending on where you're at. But I just wanted to touch on that piece because there was a book that was written by a wonderful human called Chris McDougall who wrote Born to Run. Oh, I read that book.
00:59:35
Speaker
Yeah. So what happened with that is that he basically applied that if you're barefoot, you're going to run 300 mile ultra marathons. And this is the best way to, a lot of people threw away their shoes or went into barefoot shoes. And people were eulogizing about this and felt amazing. And then six months later, we had the highest rate of forefoot fractures in shoe history. Really? So does that mean the barefoot's wrong? No, it doesn't.
01:00:06
Speaker
It meant that most people, like going to the gym in January, went too hard too fast and didn't allow the adaptation that needed to take place or build the schedule. They had been running heel to toe and they all shifted to running on the balls of their feet, but their ankles weren't strong enough, their feet weren't strong enough. Yeah, their ankles, their ligaments, their tendons, and the bone. That takes adaptation like tissues.
01:00:29
Speaker
Change with load, but there's a there's a threshold every day of how much you can do that. So if you're going to transition to sort of more of a barefoot lifestyle, learn the skill of it first of all because it is a skill and do it incrementally.
01:00:44
Speaker
OK, so keep your shoes on for now, people. I'm sorry. I misled all of you. You can take him off and have a little try, but just don't push him to pain. Like a very good example, there is a heavyweight boxer who was heavyweight champion in the world. He retired.
01:01:01
Speaker
and decided to make a comeback. He started training in barefoot shoes. I watched some of his training sessions and I was like, he wasn't under my cap. I watched and I was like, I could see that his feet were overloaded from being barefoot too much because he was in his mid-30s and was training as an athlete straight into barefoot. Midway through the fight in the fifth round, he ruptured his Achilles tendon.
01:01:24
Speaker
It was horrible to watch because he carried on fighting, he didn't stop like he was fighting on one leg for about another five rounds. But it was very predictive that something was going to happen because he'd rushed that adaption. It's absolutely the right thing to do, but seek out knowledge of how to do that.
01:01:47
Speaker
Like if you've ever read the book, atomic habits, atomic habits is a great book. I really love it in terms of like sustainable change when you're doing anything. Like if you try and change everything all at once, it's not sustainable because the brain just can't handle it. It's the same with the body. But if you make a, just a incremental change and apply that with time where you end up with very, very different. So yeah.
01:02:16
Speaker
I'm overwhelmed. I didn't expect all this, obviously. Fascinating. Everyone listening should reach out to David Thunder directly because I don't even know how to explain to people what just happened. Go back to my mates.
01:02:31
Speaker
I had to put it in your jargon and they'll be like, oh yes, what'd you learn? I'd be like, I don't know, man, my toes are not good enough. My butt has gotten lazy. My right shoulder seemed to compensate for my left. I'll call to action after this Dave is what we'll do is we'll, you know, get on a call.
01:02:49
Speaker
We'll map it out properly. We'll take your full history and we'll break it down into what your, literally your next steps are and give you some things to do that manage that adaption every day. So how from given for, for the sake of this podcast, we have an end zone of July 14th, but for the sake of my life, obviously now I'm fired up to go for a lot longer. But how long in your experience does it take people from the subway system to get to base camp?
01:03:16
Speaker
I mean, I know it's individual, but is it the kind of thing that takes a month, six months? There are things you can add on to Basecamp, but to get to like properly to Basecamp, you're talking about the laws of... back to the laws of neuroplasticity. So that pathway in the snow that we were talking about. Neuroplasticity is an area of science that we're still learning about because of functional MRI scans, we can map the brain and movement. And so it's a really expanding area of our knowledge.
01:03:45
Speaker
But to burn a new habit into the nervous system takes anywhere from six weeks up to three months. And I tend to shoot for about three months just to kind of have it really ingrained. Like I don't like just to have it, oh, we're doing it now. I like to have it so it's moved in.
01:04:03
Speaker
And then you take some of those elements into your next phase, so you're always conditioning your body. The nervous system has a use it and improve it function. It also has a use it and lose it function. So you want to just keep in touch with some of the foundational pieces and then progress them through time. OK, so for our audience, we could circle back in May, and I could walk for you again. You could walk for me again, and we can have a look and see whether your butt's during the party.
01:04:34
Speaker
Oh, yeah, it's bringing all the boys to the yard. Let's see if we're getting some buzz action. OK, David, well, I'll look forward to connect with you. I know you have to go and thank you so much for your time for joining us. My pleasure. This has been mind-blowing. And for those people who I know everybody's going to want to get a hold of you, what is the best way for them to contact you? I think right now it's through email. So reception at dthunder.com, we'll get there.
01:05:03
Speaker
And we have a beautiful team that will look after you. And we have various different ways where we can support someone, where we can just point them to where their start point is, all the way up to holding them through that one-to-one coaching. So we have different ways of supporting anybody. But understanding where your start point is is one of the biggest gifts you can ever give yourself. And I would say we all have our blind spots.
01:05:29
Speaker
like whether it's in business, right? You get an amazing business coach, like Mark is an amazing, I'm usually an amazing business coach, like finding someone that can see the things you can't and have knowledge in the areas that you can't to guide you with a strategy. So you're sustainable. So it's not just about getting six pack abs and doing 100 pushups, whatever it is, right? It's about building habits and disciplines and consistency that increase your quality of life
01:05:58
Speaker
and do that for the long term because most people expect your quality of life to deteriorate with time. But in order to answer your question earlier about what age do you start to deteriorate, I think that's a choice. I think with a lot of this work, you can get hold of that quality of life curve and really stretch it for the time you're here. And I don't know that
01:06:19
Speaker
What I teach makes anyone live longer. I'm not sure that I can categorically say that. But what I know is that what I can help them with is giving quality into the life that they have. Yeah, brilliant. Well, you certainly gave quality to the podcast today. Thank you so much. That's awesome. We're practicing segues.
01:06:45
Speaker
We'll reach out to you and get you on the calendar and we'll go from there, okay? Brilliant. Thanks, David, so much. Thank you. Thanks, Doc, for bringing David into the podcast. My gosh, that was... Thunder and lightning. That's what we've got. Yeah, I don't know, man. I'm never going to look at my toes the same way. I know that much.
01:07:07
Speaker
Wow, okay, so I don't know what we'll do next week to follow that up, but hopefully we'll be able to circle back. And in addition to whatever else happens on this journey, I'll also try to learn how to walk like a proper person. And bring your butt to the party, great. Bring my butt to the party, yeah. Have a great weekend, everybody, and we'll catch you next time. Keep your toes in front of you. And we'll talk to you soon.
01:07:39
Speaker
Can you save Dave? Do you think that he'll behave? Or do you think he will cave? Listen in! He's back in school! It's his funny buddy's Dr. Val's rules!