Blending Neurology With S&C To Create Monsters & Reduce Pain w/ Dan Fichter (SSOF Ep. 51)

James de Lacey2:30

So I know you mentioned about the sight thing. I must have been on one of your podcasts or something. I'm thinking now, like of all the athletes that I've worked with through team sports and things, there weren't many if in fact I can't even recall. Like for example, that wear glasses. The top performers seem don't seem to wear glasses or don't have to wear contacts. They have vision already. Is that something that you've noticed? I guess that having good vision obviously can help lead to that performance.

Dan Fichter2:58

From a 20/20 standpoint, I'd say I don't have enough research to be able to tell you that. But I can tell you from the ability to converge your eyes or diverge your eyes and what's on the periphery and how that might affect your movement, I think that's a huge caveat in training.

How well your eyes converge to the tip of your nose or the bridge of your nose says a lot about how well you can move or what your posture actually is displaying at that given time. Because your eyes are setting the horizon and your feet are going to be kind of like the outward expression of your eyes, right?

So people don't understand the link between your eyes and your feet. We're so biomechanically driven that we get into these situations where it's not a biomechanical issue, it's a neurological issue, right? So my good friend Chris Korfist spends a lot of time training the feet, and we've been talking a lot lately about the neurological influence of the foot and what that has on the brain to the eyes to the pelvis and what your posture looks like.

James de Lacey4:24

Korfist's work was a big influence on I guess my sprint training during, well, when coaching professional rugby. So I want to use all his stuff in the framework. He's got some great stuff. But let me start. Do you call them eye-sades or cades?

Dan Fichter4:24

Sades, I call them.

James de Lacey4:24

Do people call them cades?

Dan Fichter4:24

Absolutely. I don't know, it just felt like that, so I just thought I'd...

James de Lacey4:24

Great.

Dan Fichter4:24

I think a lot of what you see on the internet in terms of people doing all kinds of different eye exercises, I think it starts with two basic premises: can your eyes converge and can they diverge, right?

So the guy out of Cincinnati, Dr. Clark I think his name is, he does a lot of work with concussion stuff and he's finding out that how well you can sense your periphery and what you can see on the periphery. And I think in Z Health they call it ambient vision, right? So what you can see when you're not really looking at it, right? Okay. Can help protect you against concussion.

But in my world, it will help reduce the threat of the ground reaction forces, right? So now we're taking two systems. We're taking a system that Matt Wallden created called posturology off of Dr. Brio, Bernard Brio's work, who was a neurosurgeon, and then you're taking Sean Sherman's Square One System of the brain's perceived threat of ground reaction forces, and we're combining these two.

And they always answer the same questions of what's the threat level that the brain perceives and how am I going to move around that threat or how am I going to move cleanly through that without a threat, right? So the best way we can move is by reducing threat, not just getting stronger or not just trying to run faster. If we simply reduce the threat of those ground reaction forces, crazy things happen.

So for me, I've taken a lot of the stuff that I've done with altitude drops. I call it collision training, and we have an article coming out on collision training. A good friend of mine is spearheading the writing of it. He's brilliant. He works for a professional team. I probably can't say his name.

But when you talk about the body hitting the ground all the time and how the brain is going to perceive that, it answers a lot of questions and what some of your pain might be or your movement dysfunctions might be. And it's been a great ride going after those strategies.

James de Lacey6:58

Okay, so you're saying you can train your ability to essentially see the periphery through these eye-sades. So how would you go about doing that?

Dan Fichter6:58

So early on in training, people knew that your periphery would close down as you get fatigued, right? So it's just the brain's ability to say, listen, I'm tired. I have to focus on what's important right in front of me, right?

So a lot of people early on in training said if my periphery shuts down, I know I'm trained enough. It's time to start recovering, right? So I have seen people utilize bunny ears in their training, and I'm holding up two fingers by my ears, to see, can you see this coming in? If you can't see it and you could see it before you started training, you might have reached a certain amount of fatigue, right?

So that was one way to auto-regulate your training. How many sets am I doing? Well, when your periphery starts to shut down, you'll know it was enough, right? So people always want to know how many sets, how many this, how many that. So I know DB Hammer used to do that back in the day. What is your periphery telling you? And that's going to tell you what your nervous system is actually doing at the time. So that's one part of it.

Then to the studies of posturology and Wallden, and he was talking about, everybody talks about the psychotic movement of the eyes, the ability to stop on an eye object, ricochet off that object and get to another object and track it. But the root of that is convergence, in being able to converge to the tip of your nose, to the bridge of your nose. And most people can't.

We're talking about cranial nerves three and four, which in the brain stem house huge benefits to flexion in your body, right? So global flexion can be increased by just your eyes converging, right?

But then there's the whole thing is, if you are not, if you do not have binocular vision, you probably shouldn't be doing convergence exercises until you see someone who can check your eyes out and see if you are binocular, to see if you are seeing what you need to be seeing with both eyes. So there's a lot to it, but I would say the fundamental basis is how well you converge, because if you can converge, you have more of an opportunity to diverge.

James de Lacey9:29

Okay. As the example of that, the exercises you showed in one of your sades was that the thumbs like this, looking up and down and then side to side with the fingers?

Dan Fichter9:29

So that is a simple eye psychotic movement, right? So that's a, we call these a horizontal cade or vertical cade or diagonal cade, all great stuff. But I'm talking even back it up even further of just being able to do what they call a pencil...

Push-up, right? Is just being able to track your finger to the tip of your nose and make your eyes converge. And you'll see an eye, a weak eye dart out, then we're going to start focusing on that eye's ability to converge. And what people don't understand is that matches the pattern of your feet.

So you could quickly tell if somebody has a problem biomechanically from the foot up, or they have a brain stem issue from the brain stem down which is causing the foot issue, right?

James de Lacey10:33

Okay, yeah, it gets thick pretty quick. Yeah, I can see that already. We're on the very basic level one. I'm still trying to think now how you have progressed this through.

So you're starting with the convergence with the eye, and then if that's okay you might look to do some of this ricocheting of the eye side to side with your fingers up and down. And when would you do this and what are the outcomes you're trying to get out of doing something like that?

Dan Fichter10:58

Okay, so it depends if you're trying to change the way somebody moves, are you trying to get somebody out of pain, are you trying to just see what their nervous system likes. So I'll give you an example. Before we practice and before we play and I want to stimulate the nervous system, I'm going to give it something that it's really good at, that it likes. And you can simply tell that by doing a simple toe touch.

You could do a toe touch, you can stand up, touch your toes, you can do some type of eye movement, some type of saccadic eye movement and do a retest. If you're better, your nervous system is absolutely not viewing that as a threat. Matter of fact, it probably helped you a little bit. So I do this. This is what I tell people: hold your arm up like this and rotate your arm down just like this, and just see where it goes to, how much internal rotation you have, and what it feels like.

So then do a simple horizontal saccade. So you're going to take your thumbs, hold them up, you're going to flick your eyes from one thumb to the other thumb, make sure you can clearly see it before you flick off of it. Good, good and good. Now check your internal rotation, see if it got better, worse, or stayed the same. What do you got? What do you think? You'll be able to know.

James de Lacey12:21

A little further. Yeah, a little further.

Dan Fichter12:21

Okay, here's how you can tell. Let's do, okay, let's do a horizontal, or let's do a vertical one. That was horizontal. Let's do vertical. So you're going to be a little bit, move the other one up a little bit. Yeah, and you'll know right away when you retest because if you had pain before it'll be back.

James de Lacey12:21

Oh yeah, that's fair that. They as well, that's even better.

Dan Fichter12:21

Okay, so now we'll go one more. Let's go diagonal where you're right in front of your nose to up and right.

James de Lacey12:52

In front of my nose and then up and, yeah.

Dan Fichter12:52

So put it right up by your nose and then go up to the right. Yeah, you go. Don't move your head. Awesome, do an internal rotation test.

James de Lacey12:52

That one's not so good. Feels like it's back to other.

Dan Fichter12:52

Yeah, there you go. So now you shifted through three. There's probably five or six that we could give you. One of those is going to create a really positive response like you thought the first one was like, "Oh, that's great," but the second one was even better. That's what you are doing pre-activity.

I say why wouldn't I? If that stimulated you and you felt good, let's do it. So that's one way in a warmup to potentiate something. We do it with lifting weights all the time with a jump or whatever we might do. I'm using the nervous system a little bit.

From a pain standpoint, gets a little bit more complex of what side of your brain is responsible for what visual field, and then how your PMRF is responsible for the pain ipsilaterally on the body. So when you're talking about pain in the eyes, little bit different in terms of how you might do an isometric hold one way or another.

And then the other way is being able to exercise your eyes because you do have extraocular muscles. For exercising hamstrings and quads and calves, why wouldn't I do my eyes?

James de Lacey14:25

Before getting back to the podcast, I want to let you know there's a link down in the description for the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground Community. You can get all the help you need for your combat sports training. You get every single Sweet Science of Fighting training program, online course, and you get access to a range of coaches within the private Discord community. So go check that out and back to the podcast.

Do the eye bodybuilding program, hypertrophy of the eyes.

Dan Fichter14:25

That's good.

James de Lacey14:25

I'm going to throw a little injury case study on you then. Obviously there's still general stuff. So my wife, she's a professional Olympic weightlifter, and during the Olympic qualification for the last Olympics she ended up, she had a knee problem. She got patellar tendinopathy down on the knee and then ended up getting a lower back injury because of, well we assume because of that.

So fast forward I guess maybe a year or so down the road and she's getting back, preparing for, I guess the last part of, I think it was the Commonwealth run or another Olympic run, one of them. And it's like the back injury has almost turned to I'm going to turn the nervous system down to the point where she's too scared to get under heavy weights.

She used to be fearless getting under anything heavy. She just drop straight under in a clean, for example. Now she'll get to a heavier weight and she'll get to the top and then she'll just get lifted because she just can't get it in her head to get under. Because it's almost like she's scared of that potential pain even though it's kind of healed. Is there something that can be done, for example with this I guess this neurology stuff, that can be done?

Dan Fichter15:53

And I know. So I would take a look at, so her back pain, was it focused on one area, was it right in the middle, was it both sides?

James de Lacey15:53

I think both sides. It was mainly in the bottom, a bottom position.

Dan Fichter15:53

Bottom position of the squat when she catches it?

To me, if she had knee pain and she got that resolved, so now the brain can't recognize that knee pain that's there, it's going to force it to go someplace else. It's almost like if you take water and I pour it out on my counter, it's going to go downhill and then it's going to find a crack and it's going to go right in the crack. That's exactly what the pain messages do. It's going to find the chink in the armor and it's going right to it.

So all that therapy did for her was force it to her back. And then once it's in the back, it's a bigger picture for the brain to say we're not doing this, we're not going down in that position because I'm going to make it hurt, you're going to be afraid to do that now.

So we've got to get into situations where we make sure that the compensatory pattern that ended up in the knee is completely not there anymore. And that leaves a neurological map to it. It's not just relieve the pain and that's gone. It's not gone, it's not being felt by the brain, but that certainly doesn't mean your body's not adjusting to it. So yeah, that would probably have a lot of neurological implications.

And your eyes could be the gateway to fixing that. Your vestibular system could be, because sometimes your vestibular system says, "You know what, if you start to move up and down quickly I know that it hurt my knee last time, so I'm going to dull your extensor strength a little bit from your vestibular system to make you say we can't fly that fast anymore because it's not safe."

James de Lacey17:47

That's just based on some stuff I listen to you. I was like, is there something, like I was thinking there must be something that can be done to almost turn the brakes off again. It's almost like there's brakes have been put on from the injury.

Dan Fichter18:16

You can turn the brakes off, but there's always a cost something. I tell this story all the time. I work with an athlete, I won't tell you the school, but they wanted him to play. He had a hamstring injury. "He's got to play in this game, it's a big game. I don't care if he plays the rest of the year, he's got to play in this game."

So we did a whole bunch of neurological tricks, we might call it. He was plenty able to play, hit GPS scores that he's never hit before in the game. So the next day coach calls me and he goes, "That was the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen. He played blah blah blah." I go, "Is he at practice yet today?" They're like, "No, we haven't started." I go, "He won't be able to practice today because he hit a level that he's never hit before and he wasn't prepared to hit it. He hasn't trained."

It's like hitting a, like Charlie Francis used to say, you run a world record time, you're shot for the next 10 days minimum. Yeah. When you change somebody or alter somebody's nervous system that fast, you have to give them time to catch up to that. And sometimes that's the bad part about neurology, is you change

It that fast, your body has to be prepared for it. But in your wife's case, I think it's definitely a neurological block.

James de Lacey19:37

For sure, for sure. And obviously you mentioned there's a trade-off, but potentially you could do it in a way where you don't have that trade-off where you're not literally maxing out. Obviously every time you remove that block, you gradually work your way up, and hence therapy and hence training, you structure it, you gradually increase.

Dan Fichter19:37

Right. You do the same thing with your nervous system.

James de Lacey19:37

No, that makes sense. And I wanted to dive into as well the idea of infinity walks, because I think anyone who looks at infinity walks, infinity runs, the stuff that you guys and Cal and Corpus have put out there, you look at it and you go, "What the hell is this?" This looks such a dumb thing to do. But when you guys go into it, it makes a lot of sense. Do you maybe just dive into what actually infinity walking is and what you're trying to achieve out of it?

Dan Fichter20:06

Yeah, so it's a multi-sensorial stimulation, right? So you're stimulating eyes, vestibular system, the natural gate modalities. Then you're also dual tasking. And if you notice what Cal does with his goat walks, or goat runs, whatever he does, he's actually asking athletes to add some—to talk about something. So now there's a dual task, right?

So all these things challenge the nervous system, but they also allow you to evaluate from a neurological standpoint how robust your system is. So they use it in stroke patients. They use it in teaching patterning for people who've gone into strokes. And because there's that automatic gate, when you start to walk and you start to move and your left arm goes forward while your right leg goes forward, that natural cross crawl is hemispheric communication, right, which is huge in motor learning. It's huge in teaching somebody any new skill, right?

So there is a lot of research now on coordination and cognition. So motor coordination helping cognition. And all this is—infinity walk explained—that's why she used it. It's why Deborah Sunbeck created it. It was used to help teach. I used to help it with my son in his reading. He would infinity walk and read at the same time.

So it's not just a motor skill development, it's a cognition thing, and it's a hemispheric thing for the brain because that corpus callosum, both sides of the brain, are working to wire together through it.

James de Lacey21:42

Is the best way to maybe just explain to the listeners how the infinity walk works and looks?

Dan Fichter21:42

Yep. So, oh nice. If anyone's listening on Spotify, make sure you check out the video on YouTube and Spotify. So I just drew, there's a cone here, a cone here. You walk in an infinity pattern, because it's challenging to the brain, and it crosses over. You'll be looking right eye, left eye, right eye. Head's got to turn, mobile hips.

So as you weave in and out of these infinity patterns and you have a stable object that you're staring at, you now are working on neck mobility, you are working on automatic weight shift from right to left, you are working on coordination. There's so many different multi-sensory things going on that it's a huge stimulation for the brain.

So an infinity walk or a goat walk, the way Cal—you can be as creative as you want to be. If you watched Cal do it and how he's evolved it, it started with you're walking and you're looking at one object to he's taking another object and going around his back while he's walking the infinity path. Now it's like a triangle as well. And then he's jogging backwards. And then we're adding in some of Bose's stuff, where we're putting things on the floor that you step on, so now there's a stiffness component in the tensile strength, right?

So there's just so many different things that you can add to it. And then they're being chased, or you name it. You can be as creative as you want to be. And that's where Cal's taken it, is really creative with it. But the lady who actually created it lives probably about 10 miles from me here in Rochester, New York, Deborah Sunbeck. And she worked with a lot of emotionally challenged kids, a lot of geriatrics that were recovering from emotional trauma, learning disabilities.

So it's been fantastic to wean through that research, but then try to pull it over into the world of performance and see how it works. It's great. It's really great.

James de Lacey24:03

Is this something you would use within, say, a warm-up to basically boost the nervous system kind of thing? Or what are the other applications that you would use it?

Dan Fichter24:03

So when our football team, give you an example, we would train twice a week during the season. One of those days of the week we are doing some type of infinity pattern in our circuit of training. So if we have an acceleration station, if we have a medicine ball station, we have an infinity station where they're doing some type of infinity pattern.

We also did it before some of our individual work. Let's say you're doing individual work, rugby, and you're focused on catching, passing, running, whatever it might be in the sport of rugby. Doing something infinity before you do that would give you a better chance to have both hemispheres of your brain ready to learn that motor skill.

James de Lacey25:06

Okay, so in the context of skill acquisition, within combat sports, striking, grappling, or weightlifting, you could do that beforehand before you learn a new skill?

Dan Fichter25:06

100%. 100%. It's like priming. It's like priming your brain to learn.

James de Lacey25:35

Okay. Okay. Is there also a pain-reducing component to it as well?

Dan Fichter25:35

Absolutely. Yep, there absolutely is. Because if your pain is being caused by your vestibular system, you're utilizing your VOR. If your pain is being caused by your eye's ability to not converge, one eye is converging as you rotate around, then the other eye is converging. So it's almost like a one-shot-fits-all. You're creating all the sensory stimulation that you can get. One of those things is going to help you with your pain, at least reduce it for sure, right?

Then you'd have to peel it back to find out what sensory input created the most dramatic change, and that's where you might want to focus the rest of your therapy. But the infinity walk is a great way to figure out.

James de Lacey26:09

Yeah. Absolutely. Would that be, coming back to the case study I mentioned with my wife, so would that be something then that you could use to prime the nervous system before doing something like heavy cleans and to almost take the brakes off in a sense? One of those neurological tricks?

Dan Fichter26:39

It absolutely could. Yep, it absolutely could. And if you find it, if you find it's a vestibular issue, then we're tilting our head or we're doing something more to stimulate a more specific area or canal in the vestibular system to give you the motor output you're looking for, which is for her being able to drop without fear.

James de Lacey27:05

Are you able to share of the other neurological tricks that you use with your hamstring guy, or is that secret sauce?

Dan Fichter27:05

It's not secret sauce. It's again, it's a combination of a lot of different people's work that I think—and the great part about this is, like I said, with Sean Sherman, Square One. Have you heard of that system before?

James de Lacey27:05

No, I haven't.

Dan Fichter27:05

Okay, you got to research that. Sean has really, he's taken his therapy and he's put gate behind it. That's the driving force, is gates. Because a lot of things that we do on a therapy table, you get up and you walk around and it disappears, because you have to wire it through gate if you want anything to improve performance, right?

So Sean's system does that and it addresses that. It addresses all the sensory systems. Then the other one was Matt Bay's posturology and IPN. So his posturology class talks about the foot, the eyes, and the jaw, and how they all interact to form your posture and what compensatory patterns you may have developed because of faulty eyes or faulty feet.

So if you have a varus foot on one side and a valgus on the other side, you might be creating some type of torsion in your hip. You might be expressing it in your shoulders. So if you don't fix the eyes, the feet, and the jaw, you're probably not going to find much success in any of the biomechanical avenues that you are taking. Or you're going to get some type of fix, it's not going to last.

James de Lacey28:44

I guess that's similar to static—well, I mean, static stretching. You don't get that change in the actual structural change in the muscle. But I guess it's a similar concept, right? You get that temporary release.

Dan Fichter28:44

Correct. But it's not staying, correct. Because again, because tone of the muscle is set by the brain, which is ultimately set by the brain stem. So yeah, stretching's great. But we should be more worried about our global tone of our musculature. Are we too flexor dominant? Are we too extensor dominant? And what is that saying about our brain and how it's wired, right?

So it goes deeper than just saying I got to stretch a muscle. Sometimes stretching will work, and people don't understand why. Because there's a lot of research that says stretching doesn't work. But then there's some people go, "When I stretch, I feel good." It's only because you're addressing the part of the brain that is in dysfunction and you're giving it a little bit of a proprioceptive idea of, "This is what I want," I just can't change it at the brain stem level, right? So, but to go—

Back to tricks that I use: one of the best systems out there that nobody ever talks about is called Total Motion Release, created by a guy named Tom Dalonzo-Baker. He realized what I finally realized in neurology, that is if I start moving my right arm, it is controlled by my left cortex that initiates that movement. But as I move that right arm and I get that signal from my left brain to my right arm, I also reflexively fire down to my PMRF, my erectors on this side, to keep me from falling over and to keep me stable.

So this is all reflexive in nature, driven by the left cortex, but the voluntary component is controlled by the left cortex in movement. So what he was doing was, okay, if I have pain on my left shoulder and I start moving my right arm, why does this feel better over here? And he comes up with a lot of different theories, and I'm not saying his theory is right or wrong, but I think I have an answer that helps me understand from a neurological standpoint.

It's because within that reflexive firing, there's also pain inhibitory fibers. So when I start moving that right arm, my pain inhibitory fibers are firing down this side of my body. Maybe that's why your left arm feels better when you do that. So moving the other side of your body to create the change you want on the unmovable side.

I'll give you an example. I do this all the time with people. If you turn sideways just like this and you show me shoulder flexion on your right arm, is that as far as you go? Okay, show me on your left arm. Now, nope, stay the same way, stay the same. Yeah, I just want to see it. I want to see the difference. Okay, which one feels better, your left or right?

James de Lacey31:53

My left.

Dan Fichter31:53

Your left feels better, okay. So in normal therapy they say your left feels better, so let's get on our right side and move it all around and it's going to feel better, or it's going to get more range of motion. In his philosophy, it's like if your left is good, let's stay on the left and do this for me. I want you to bring it all the way back.

I want you to bounce it as far back as you can get it, and then bring it all the way back down. Bring it all the way back down, and then do that again, and do that four or five times and really try to increase the range of motion on your left.

And you'll be looking at it and going, "Man, looks like it's going a little further," and then you're looking at me going, "Well, that's already good, I didn't have to do that." So if you do one more of those, all right, and now all I want you to do is bring your right arm back to where you thought you could bring it before.

James de Lacey32:47

Yeah, it's way back.

Dan Fichter32:47

It's way further, right? So we didn't do anything. We didn't do anything on your right side to make it go further. All we did was affect the PMRF on that side, and boom, you got a change in performance.

James de Lacey33:14

Does a cross-education effect, similar concept?

Dan Fichter33:14

That's part of what they use to explain it. But it's more of a brain thing in my world, because it handles pain, range of motion, strength, anything. I was at a clinic one time and we had a bunch of bald guys with goatees sitting in the front row, and I said, "I bet you I can put 20 pounds on your shoulder press in five minutes." "That's, you can't do that."

Okay, so I had the guy press, I don't know what it was, I think at that point he had a 100-pound dumbbell, press it up over his head, grab his left arm, press it up over his head. He couldn't do it. So he could go 100 here, and he couldn't get 100 past there. So then we dropped the weight to 80, he did three reps on his right, rested, three reps on his right, rested, three reps on his right, rested, gave him the 100-pound dumbbell. Went right up.

James de Lacey34:12

Damn.

Dan Fichter34:12

And he's like, "How does that work?" That's what it is. That's it. It's that fast. When it happens that fast, that's neurology.

James de Lacey34:12

It's funny. I like how you describe like 80% of American college coaches with with one go and bald.

Dan Fichter34:12

Yeah, that's okay. It's a, I wouldn't tell that to them to their faces because they're all a lot bigger than that.

James de Lacey34:45

Fair. Now I love these ideas of these all these neurological tricks, and I know another one you've been playing around with. I'm going to join you, I'm going to join your maybe Bishop soon, I think, as well. But one of them you have is these ISO drops or iso-plate drops, catching plates, catching barbells, all sorts of stuff. Can maybe dive into what you're training with that?

Dan Fichter35:07

That's our collision stuff. So we catch stuff, we stop stuff all the time. When you catch a falling load, every muscle turns on in your body proportionately. When you play sports and you hit something or you're running and your foot hits the ground, the entire body turns on. When it turns on in proportion, like different proportions, that's how you get hurt.

So if you want to train correctly, stop a falling load. Everything turns on proportionally, and you have to turn it on. All the safety mechanisms shut off because you're afraid if I drop this thing, I'm going to kill myself. So you have all those defense mechanisms have to come to light. Boom, to stop something.

So we drop and catch everything, and then we do it from a speed standpoint. So if I'm dropping and catching a pen or a dollar bill, I have to be able to contract, relax, contract again. That's high-velocity movement. So the theory behind that is I am training, if I took a five-pound weight and I'm holding it here and I drop it three feet and I stop it, it no longer weighs five pounds when I stop it. It weighs whatever gravity was pulling it down at, 9.8 meters per second squared, 32 feet per second, and I stop it, then I re-accelerate it.

So I'm training high velocity. So I'm training high load when I stop it, high velocity when I bring it back up, and then I can do that over and over for high volume. So I've just cracked the code: high velocity, high load, and high volume.

James de Lacey36:14

Interesting. So I guess that would be a similar concept to like the oscillatory isometrics kind of?

Dan Fichter36:42

Not so much. Oscillatory isometrics to me, and again, if you hear me and Cal talk about oscillating isometrics, we both use them, we describe them a little bit differently. Mine is get down into an isometric position, and then can you in that position go beyond that position and come right back to that position as quickly as possible? So there's that oscillatory effect, but you're already under load. So you're already in a low squat, you're already in a split squat, you're already in a deep position, but you're just dropping in, rebounding out of a stretch position.

James de Lacey37:15

Yeah, because I think your version, as you mentioned, is that rebound, whereas I think Cal's or other people's versions is that constant oscillating.

Dan Fichter37:15

Yep, and both will describe it as oscillating, but my oscillation would be it's under tension already and now I'm just going in between it.

James de Lacey37:15

Okay. Do both those methods of doing it, they have similar outcomes?

Dan Fichter37:15

Yes. Yep, do both. I guess both those methods of doing it, they have similar outcomes. Yeah, we started goofing around with the bands a little bit, and Cal and I were doing that a lot too. And that's a fantastic result too, is utilizing those bands for the oscillatory work.

James de Lacey37:49

So within your training philosophy then, does, or where does traditional strength training fit, or does it fit at all?

Dan Fichter38:21

It's a modality. I mean, it's something I use, but I don't spend an awful lot of time on. So Chris Korfist would say he doesn't squat at all. I squat. I might not do a down and up squat. I might do a reactive squat. I might do an oscillatory squat. I might do a squat with your feet slightly staggered so the brain recognizes the gait pattern, and then I might squat in that position.

So I don't go as far as saying I don't squat, but we use a ton of different modalities within the squat pattern. So I do believe there's fundamental things. There is a sit-to-stand pattern and there's a human gait pattern. You have to be doing one of those.

James de Lacey38:55

Okay. And would you also say bench press, deadlift, just general powerlifting movements, you would do similar things you do with a squat then with those movements too if you're going to do those?

Dan Fichter38:55

Yeah, no question. And the reason I do a lot of bench pressing is because the kids love it and they like to get strong. And I'm going to be honest with you, getting kids strong, and I'm not trying to be arrogant or anything, it's fairly easy. And when you utilize all these different methods, you get strong really fast. It's awesome.

But again, if you're not doing it correctly, like you're just learning how to bench press, you're not dropping and catching, you're not oscillating, you're not turning on and turning off at velocity, then I don't think it's very transferable to something that you might see on the diamond, on the football field, on the pitch, whatever. It just doesn't transfer.

James de Lacey39:55

Okay. And if someone wants to, where would someone start if they listen to this now? Now, okay, I want to incorporate some of those within my training. What is like the bare-bones basic, square one, you would start someone out? I mean, I'm assuming you probably assess a lot of them with different things.

Dan Fichter40:20

I think you can't go wrong with isometrics, extreme isometrics. From a therapy standpoint, from a performance standpoint, from a getting strong fast standpoint, I don't think there's anything better than extreme isometrics.

James de Lacey40:20

Bit that for the listeners?

Dan Fichter40:20

So let's just take a lunge, for example. Getting down into the deepest position lunge you could, which the Russians would call an extreme position, and holding that position without any movement at all except for you're pulling yourself extremely, extremely slow into the ground but you're really not moving. So the intent to move is there, which is different than regular isometrics.

Regular isometrics, you're usually pushing against—I'm not a big believer in that. We want to pull ourselves into position, whether it be the bench press, squat, lunge, whatever it might be. We want to pull ourselves into position, if that makes sense.

James de Lacey40:57

I remember reading, I think, Joel Smith that you wrote that in a—it might have been in a Speed Strength book—but the idea of, so for example, that split squat, holding that long extreme isometric split squat position, there's obviously you can just hold it there. You can just sit in that position, which might be for general tendon health, you could do that. But I remember reading or watching or something, but almost trying to pull your feet together and pulling yourself down into that position. You want to hold that tension. Is that how you—

Dan Fichter41:25

And Jay Schroeder coined it as extreme slow. So everybody said it was extreme isos, but in reality it was extreme slows going down. So there's movement, so slow you can't see the movement, but your brain knows it's moving. And you have to fire fast twitch to move it that slow. I want you to think about that for a minute. You have to fire your fast twitch because there's so much intent on moving that slow that you have to fire fast twitch. That's the part that people don't get. It's crazy. It's crazy, and it works.

So I'd start there, and then I'd get on our Patreon. And we go through exactly the way we train and how we do it and the reasoning behind it and how we add the neurology behind it. I think this month I'm talking about—I got to go in there in a couple days and talk about the vestibular system. What little things do we do that helps us manage our vestibular system while we're training, before we train, or whatever.

James de Lacey42:22

And that's what people generally ask when we do these podcasts is what is it look like. And I'm like, all right, come on in, find out what it looks like. This is how we do it.

Dan Fichter42:48

And it works for us. I'm not saying it's the perfect training system, but it certainly works for us. And we've had a lot of great people influence that work, which is awesome.

James de Lacey42:48

How long would you hold that extreme slow?

Dan Fichter43:18

If I was just starting, I'd go 10 seconds on, 10 seconds off, 10 times, because people don't understand what pulling slow is. So they think they're in an extreme position, they're really not. And then we'll get into holding it for 20 seconds, 30 seconds, one minute, three minutes, five minutes, you name it, we'll hold it. But I'm not holding it until someone can show me the right position they can get into, and then are they recruiting the right muscles while they're doing it, which I have to walk around and check.

Are you recruiting your hamstring on the front leg, pulling it forward? Because that's where isometric becomes movement to the brain. Because if your brain is initiating the movement and you're at the end range of motion, it'll fill in the blanks in between. The human eye sees no movement. The brain thinks it's going really fast. It's crazy.

James de Lacey43:49

Some of the stuff you're mentioning here, I'm just trying to process it all as you say it. It's—yeah, it's a lot, and I'm sure it's a lot for the people listening too.

Dan Fichter43:49

And I try to tell people we've been around so many different systems that when you hear somebody say something in a system that clicks from the system I learned before—Jay Schroeder, he would always say that when you get into these extreme position, your brain knows the start and it knows the end, and it will fill in what it needs to fill in in the middle. Everything else in the middle is minutia, he used to say. But the starting point and the ending point are the important parts.

And then you hear a guy like Frans Bosch say the reason why we hold our arms up over our head when we're doing something submaximally is because you get a natural co-contraction of the spine, which is what you want when you're running fast. So the brain actually believes, because there's co-contractions, that you're going fast. You're really not, you're just working technically. So there's ways to trick the brain into using its reflexive power to complete a task that you don't have to do under high speeds. It's crazy.

James de Lacey45:18

I was actually lucky enough to learn a lot of the Bosch stuff firsthand from John Pryor. Correct. Brilliant. The Game Changer Conference was awesome, and I got to be the demo dummy and do it all wrong, of course, which is good because then I could figure out, okay, this is what it feels like to do it right.

Dan Fichter45:52

Well, that part of that is failing, is understanding how to do something by failing at doing it. And John would always say to me, you put a hip block exercise out there and everybody puts it on the internet and nobody's doing it right. Yeah. It's interesting. John's a great dude, great dude.

James de Lacey45:52

No, that was eye-opening stuff there. And that paired with a lot of Schroeder stuff, because they're so similar. They just name different things, but they do almost the same things.

Dan Fichter46:16

We almost all got together and talked. I've had tons of conversations with John. Chris has had a few. But they're very close, and it's great because they both got there different ways, but they're at the same point. That's when you know systems are good, when it's the same endpoint. You're like, how'd you get there? Well, I got there utilizing brain stuff.

I know Bosch doesn't talk much about neurology and the brain stuff, but he's doing things that are affecting the brain in how it displays force or how it absorbs force. So yeah, it's great stuff to see, to connect the dots.

James de Lacey46:40

For sure, for sure. And I think I've asked you pretty much everything on this podcast, Dan. Do you want to maybe let everyone know where they can find you and follow what you're doing?

Dan Fichter47:11

wanetfast.org. You can get on there, tells you the history about our company. And I think I mentioned some of the great people I've got an opportunity to learn from and I continue to learn from.

I always direct people to three different systems: posturology with Matt Blewshar-Sherman, Square One, and Tom DeLonzo-Baker's Total Motion Release. It fits the bill for all of my neurological things that I've thought about but wasn't smart enough to create, because these guys are certainly at the top of their game. And I don't even think of the three I just mentioned, I don't even think all of them know each other. So they didn't talk to each other about things, they've just come about it the way they've come about it, which is awesome.

James de Lacey47:40

Nice. Now I'll see if I can pop some of those links in the description. I'll check your Instagram and website there too. But thanks for coming on, Dan, appreciate it.

Dan Fichter48:08

Oh, you bet, you bet. It was a pleasure, it was a pleasure.