Z-Health

It’s not always as simple as lift more or run longer. Oh, wait, I know. We’ll do some intervals...

No! Performance breakthroughs aren’t that simple.

That is where the Z-Health 9S Athletic Development Model comes in. 

Introducing the 9S Certification Series

(The 9Ses stand for Strength, Sustenance, Skill, Suppleness, Stamina, Structure, Spirit, Style, and Speed)

If you are looking for mainstream teachings, you have come to the wrong place.

Strength & Suppleness

Strength and Suppleness are two ends of a continuum – and completely intertwined. To develop one – without adversely affecting the other – is both an art and a science. And, it requires continual re-assessment.

• Fast twitch, slow twitch. Muscle fiber types don’t play as important of a role in strength development as you might think.
• The greater the load, the greater the learning. To force a change you must provide the right amount of stress.
• Being supple is more about ligaments than it is about muscles. Strong ligaments mean a flexible and supple body.
• You can’t have one without the other. Strength requires suppleness and suppleness requires strength. Training them synergistically is key to optimal performance.
• How to achieve hypertrophy using low reps and low intensity exercises. The days of high volume training so your clients can have biceps that would make Arnold jealous are a thing of the past.
• Being freakishly strong and lightning quick are not mutually exclusive. 
• Don’t need to have a ton of weights or weightlifting equipment. This isn’t about teaching form.
• Strength at end range of motion prevents injuries and lets you and your clients get up out of awkward positions.
• The surprising secret to knowing when enough is enough: sensory integration-based assessments. “Stop before you hit the point of failure” has just become a whole lot more precise.
• How is it that your client who hasn’t exercised in a week can be overtrained? Not only is it possible, but it’s likely in our 24x7 culture. Learn to identify overtraining in your clients.
• Hard strength-training sessions that won’t give your clients that day-two “I overdid it” feeling. It’s time to learn the recovery secrets elite athletes use.

Sustenance & Spirit

Sustenance is more than good nutrition – it’s about providing what is necessary for life. It’s about providing, encouraging, and supporting. Spirit is a natural extension of Sustenance, because unless you have the spirit / motivation / persistence to provide proper sustenance, you will not be able to live your optimal life.

• Pain does not equal injury, and hunger does not equal harm. Learn the education and application principles that lead to life-long nutritional health.
• Why the little-discussed relationship between chronic sleep deprivation and obesity can be halting your clients weight loss efforts.
• The 8 rapport-building principles that will have your clients following your dietary and programming recommendations like they never have before.
• The two primary appetite control mechanisms, and they aren’t what you think.
• The overhyped nutrition premise that doesn’t matter for 95% of your clients.
• Understanding the 5 W’s approach to eating means your clients will never look at sitting down for a meal the same way ever again.
• The single thread that runs through our lifestyle diseases: cardiovascular disease, endocrine disorders, cancer, chronic joint and musculoskeletal pain, and obesity. What it is and what to do about it.
• The high energy costs of creating change create ambivalence in your clients. How to break through the ambivalence and accelerate results.
• How to get your clients to argue for the change they want.
• Why eating is literally as addictive as drugs, and how to break that neurocircuitry.
• The supplementation approach that is vital for every athlete. Eating habits and food quality means we can no longer rely on meeting our nutritional needs solely through diet anymore.
• Why the $30 billion food marketing machine is a poor substitute for Mom in determining the dinner menu. How to break the cycle.

Speed

Developing elite-level speed is a skill that goes far beyond increasing stride length and buying the most high-tech gear. By focusing on precise technique, improved on-field decision making, and elite visual skills, we provide you and your athletes new tools to become faster – instantly.

• Not even great athletes perform well under pressure. Learn the secrets that let the pros make it look so easy.
• The principles of carryover that explain why Bo Jackson never became a great baseball player.
• In most high-stakes arenas the difference between winning and losing is fractions of a second. Learn how to slow down time.
• How you can significantly shortcut the 10,000 hour rule by the careful addition of these two elements.
• The 3D nature of movement requires 3D movement analysis skills. Learn a little-known 3D movement analysis technique.
• What is the limiting factor in speed development? It’s probably not what you think.
• The 18 – yes, 18 – visual performance evaluations you need to be doing with every athlete. 
• It’s not good enough to be strong. You have to be the right kind of strong for the task at hand. Learn the 6 facets of strength.
• How Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is dictating your behavior on the field.
• Why the CHAOS theory of training isn’t chaotic at all. How to use the CHAOS theory to create useful training progressions for yourself and your clients.
• Why when you limit your training to just working with speed constants you are only fighting half the battle. The little known secret of speed variables will send you sailing past your competition.
• Going too fast is just as dangerous as going too slow. At the end of the day, faster is not necessarily better – only better is better.
• How applying the principles from the OODA loop, a military strategy theory, will allow you to speed up the game and leave your opponents playing catch-up.
• In the age of smartphones, videotaping your client’s performance is smart business. How to use video analysis software for faster performance breakthroughs.
• Go home with a Speed Camp template that will boost your bottom line.

Skill & Style

Athletes who succeed in multiple sports recognize the patterns across sports and learn to apply existing patterns and rules from sport to sport. You’ll learn how to quickly recognize these patterns – and know what to do with them. Plus, what rules you can break to make them your own. 

• How the OODA loop, a military strategy theory, will allow you to predict the game with more accuracy and leave your opponents wondering how you knew what they were going to do next.
• How learning sports will make you smarter and better able to problem-solve OFF the field.
• Streamline your clients’ skill-building process by using a new concept in high-level sports research – motor primitives.
• How Ichiro’s batting style is relevant to the athletic skill development of every athlete.
• Banish the phrase, “I’m not familiar with that sport” from your vocabulary with high speed motor learning.
• Cut the 10,000 hour rule by 50-60% and see rapid, deep results in every client with pattern recognition.
• You know those people that can instantly memorize an un-memorizable list? It’s because they have a system. That same system will let you learn a new sport in record time.
• Be the guy (or gal) on the field that sees what is going to happen before it happens. We’ll demystify group sport tactics so your opponents will hate you.
• Don’t have the ideal body type for your sport? No worries. Close enough really is good enough when you know how to individualize sport biomechanics. 
• Perfect practice makes perfect. Learn the basics of: Soccer, American Football, Baseball, Tennis, Volleyball, Golf, Basketball, Hockey & Field Hockey, Combat Sports, plus an Endurance Sports Sampler.

Stamina

There is something special about the endurance athlete – they have and physical and mental toughness that lets them keep going when others would have long given up. Or, do they? Stamina, like all of the other 9S attributes, is multi-dimensional and is trainable.

• Mental toughness. Without it, you become a weeping puddle around mile 7 (or 17). Learn the tips and tricks ultra-marathoners use to keep going well past when their body asked them to stop.
• Muscular Endurance vs. Aerobic Endurance. How to identify your weak link – and what to do about it.
• Visual stamina. It’s more than just the muscular and aerobic endurance – if your brain can’t process the visual information, the rest of you will stop processing optimally as well.
• No pain, no gain. How to walk the edge of training to develop the toughness endurance sports require.
• Eating for an endurance event is a skill all to itself. How, what, and when to eat before, during, and after an endurance event so you don’t bonk.
• In, out, in, out, in out…  How advanced respiratory training methods will keep you fresh longer.
• Do just the right thing, at just the right time, with just the right amount of energy. How to optimize your movement mechanics for the ultimate in efficiency.
• Aerobic, anaerobic, ATP, glycolysis, lactic acid. From alphabet soup to simple – finally, energy systems development made easy.
• It doesn’t matter if it’s one rep or ten thousand, specificity still matters. Learn how to create the optimal training protocol for the world of multi-hour – and multi-day – events.
• The nervous system fatigues – just like the rest of the body. How to identify the signs of neural fatigue, and what you can do about it. 

Structure

Structure – it's what we were born with. For as good as the nervous system is, you still can't take a 5'10" athlete and turn them into an NBA center – but you can make the most of what each of your athletes is born with. What matters and what doesn't? And what to do when their structure is broken.

• Out of the textbook and into the training session – anatomy, neuroanatomy, physiology, and kinesiology for the real world.
• Wolff’s Law and Davis’ Law tells us that that the body remodels along the lines of force. But, what actually happens during the structural remodeling process? Find out.
• Learn when and why it’s time to move past the mechanoreceptors.
• The brain: the final frontier. Whether it’s the prefrontal cortex, occipital lobe, motor cortex, homunculus, or parietal lobe, for the best client results you need to know what it is, why it matters, and how it all works together. Learn what matters – and what doesn’t.
• The 3 “osis”: kyphosis, lordosis, and scoliosis. Learn acute and chronic protocols for abnormal spine curvature.
• It happened again – a client walked in with another sports injury. We’ll go past the medical-ese and put it into plain language so you can talk to you client about it in a language they understand. Plus, you’ll know exactly what to do about it.
• Been dying to really get into the neurology of Z? Here is your chance; we’ll dig in – deep.
• Arches vs. Angles – part II. What matters and what doesn’t.
• Complex doesn’t begin to describe the interactions in the body, and it’s not some computer system we can just take apart. We’ll take a deep dive into the neuromyoskeletal rehabilitation process.
• “If you aren’t assessing, you’re guessing.” Learn little-discussed injury assessment protocols that will get your athlete back on the field faster.