As I waited for my flight home, I sat in the airport with my mind completely blown. I spoke to my wife to tell her about my amazing experience and she asked why I sounded so different. I didn’t think I was any different, but even my staff said they knew something had changed when I spoke with them earlier in the day. Now, a month removed from the certification, I know what it was. I finally had a system to test and fix all the physical issues I had ever seen, and man, it feels fucking amazing. As I waited for my plane, my mind raced at all the issues I had seen over the years and how I could have possibly helped so many people with what I now knew. I needed a subject to test this new found knowledge on. Naturally, the person I know with more issues than anyone got my first text.
My text to Dave said, “I learned some life changing shit this weekend. I got certified in this technique that explains pretty much every lifting injury You and I have had. If you have time this week I’d like to try it with you and see what u think. I’m obviously just learning how to apply it all but I feel like if there would be someone good to try on, you are the person, as you have tried everything for your body to feel better. Let me know.” I received back “sounds good to me — test tomorrow.” The best part is that Dave didn’t even ask what it was or what I was going to do to him, he just said, let’s do it tomorrow. After a few texts back and forth, we set up a time on Wednesday for him to come by The Spot Athletics. Dave was the perfect subject because he has used a lot of MAT (Muscle Activation Therapy), ART, and every other form of alternative treatment known to man. This gave me a great baseline for which to test my new found system up against. He has numerous issues from a replaced hip to torn muscles to a shoulder that needs replaced. All these issues have manifested in what can only be described as, “Dave’s seizure squat.” For those that don’t know, Dave famously shakes uncontrollably any time around 600 or more pounds are on his back. He has done this for as long as I have known him. It’s scary to watch and even scarier if you are spotting him. I know every therapist in the world has tried to fix “the shake” by using their various methods, but no one has ever changed it. I have had a suspicion about why he shakes for a while but had no way to test my theory or to change what I thought the issue was. Until now, that is. Wednesday came and Dave showed up for his first experience with what I now know to be the most amazing system for creating changes in the body that I have ever seen. He asked a few questions and I told him about the system that I got certified in. I told him it was created by a cool ass South African surfer dude named Douglas Heel. Douglas has a background in a lot of alternative medicine but basically what he did was take the good stuff, threw away the bullshit, simplified it, and put it into an amazing system. Every certification that I have seen, in the alphabet soup of systems, overcomplicates things with theory and under delivers with results. What I love about Douglas’s system is that he explains it in 5 seconds, “the body needs to breathe and move to be happy”, and it delivers the most amazing results I have ever seen. He has been perfecting the system for over 15 years and although it’s popular in Europe and Africa, not too many people are using it in the US.
At the end of our experiment, Dave was beat the hell up, bruised in places, and said he was going to have to go home and take a nap cause he was exhausted from the pain. I asked him if he was planning on training that night and he said he had dynamic squats. He was also excited because, for the first time in a long time, he had hit a 10-pound PR in the squat just four days before I saw him. I told him to see how he felt when he trained that night and to call me and let me know. Quite frankly I didn’t know what would happen from using this system with Dave. I just knew that when he came in I would rate him a 3 out of 10 as far as functioning the way he should. When he left, I felt I had gotten him to a 10 and wanted to see how his body functioned when it was fully awake. The problem was that I didn’t know if he would still be a 10 when he trained later that night. So I gave him some self wake up drills to do before training, just to make sure things were awake. Dave called me about 9 PM that night and started with, “holy fucking shit.” Honestly I didn’t know if it was a bad or a good holy shit. He then followed it up by saying if he died on his way home he would die the happiest man on earth. He proceeded to tell me that he had done a 90-pound PR over his 10-pound PR from four days ago. I was really confused because a) that was impossible, and b) he had told me he had dynamic squats. I asked him to repeat what he said and instead he went on to tell me that with 700 pounds on his back he didn’t shake one bit. At this point I just thought he was fucking with me. So I asked what he really did. That is when he stated in no uncertain terms that he was 100% serious. So of coarse I asked for the video, because—although I trust Dave with my life—I couldn’t believe he didn’t shake with 700 pounds on his back. Then our next question was how long can this last. He came to see me the following Wednesday and held about 75% of where we had gotten the previous week. The crazy thing was that he had set PR’s in lifts both of his heavy days before he came to see me and still held up that well. He left at a 10 and I told him not to push too hard because he was doing things that he had not done in over 10 years. His shoulders, wrists, hips, knees and back were all feeling amazing. So he didn’t listen to me and decided to squat with heavy bands for the first time in years. This unraveled our work, took him back to his level 3 and put his body back into a coma. Normally I would have not liked this but it gave us a chance to really learn how to use the system better. We started using the number scale, which tells me how well he will perform and how likely he is to have an injury, to adjust his workouts. This has been invaluable with Dave and all my own clients as well. Now I give him limits for his training and when he is a 10, he can set 90-pound PRs and when he is an 8, he is only allowed to set 30-pound PRs. Obviously, that isn’t exactly how we use it, but it has proved to be helpful in knowing how hard he can push his training. My next question was, “is this a freak thing with Dave?” Well, after working with the system for only a month we have two clients at The Spot Athletics who have cancelled surgeries. Not because we told them to, but because they are having zero pain. One was a shoulder issue and the other was a hip issue. The hip issue is a female physical therapist with a torn labrum. She has been doing her best to rehab her hip and so have we, but it has been so painful she had surgery scheduled in two months. She also loves to lift and hasn’t been able to squat in several months. After only 45 minutes of waking her body up, she got up and had no hip pain. I told her to see how it felt over the next few days. Two weeks later she squatted 235 pounds, an all time PR, with no hip pain. She texted me the next day and said, “Yep, no hip pain. Cancelled surgery.”
RECENT:
The Reason for the Letters — JL's Technique That Is Fixing Dave
My text to Dave said, “I learned some life changing shit this weekend. I got certified in this technique that explains pretty much every lifting injury You and I have had. If you have time this week I’d like to try it with you and see what u think. I’m obviously just learning how to apply it all but I feel like if there would be someone good to try on, you are the person, as you have tried everything for your body to feel better. Let me know.” I received back “sounds good to me — test tomorrow.” The best part is that Dave didn’t even ask what it was or what I was going to do to him, he just said, let’s do it tomorrow. After a few texts back and forth, we set up a time on Wednesday for him to come by The Spot Athletics. Dave was the perfect subject because he has used a lot of MAT (Muscle Activation Therapy), ART, and every other form of alternative treatment known to man. This gave me a great baseline for which to test my new found system up against. He has numerous issues from a replaced hip to torn muscles to a shoulder that needs replaced. All these issues have manifested in what can only be described as, “Dave’s seizure squat.” For those that don’t know, Dave famously shakes uncontrollably any time around 600 or more pounds are on his back. He has done this for as long as I have known him. It’s scary to watch and even scarier if you are spotting him. I know every therapist in the world has tried to fix “the shake” by using their various methods, but no one has ever changed it. I have had a suspicion about why he shakes for a while but had no way to test my theory or to change what I thought the issue was. Until now, that is. Wednesday came and Dave showed up for his first experience with what I now know to be the most amazing system for creating changes in the body that I have ever seen. He asked a few questions and I told him about the system that I got certified in. I told him it was created by a cool ass South African surfer dude named Douglas Heel. Douglas has a background in a lot of alternative medicine but basically what he did was take the good stuff, threw away the bullshit, simplified it, and put it into an amazing system. Every certification that I have seen, in the alphabet soup of systems, overcomplicates things with theory and under delivers with results. What I love about Douglas’s system is that he explains it in 5 seconds, “the body needs to breathe and move to be happy”, and it delivers the most amazing results I have ever seen. He has been perfecting the system for over 15 years and although it’s popular in Europe and Africa, not too many people are using it in the US.
RECENT:
The JL Letters — Passages 1 and 2
At the end of our experiment, Dave was beat the hell up, bruised in places, and said he was going to have to go home and take a nap cause he was exhausted from the pain. I asked him if he was planning on training that night and he said he had dynamic squats. He was also excited because, for the first time in a long time, he had hit a 10-pound PR in the squat just four days before I saw him. I told him to see how he felt when he trained that night and to call me and let me know. Quite frankly I didn’t know what would happen from using this system with Dave. I just knew that when he came in I would rate him a 3 out of 10 as far as functioning the way he should. When he left, I felt I had gotten him to a 10 and wanted to see how his body functioned when it was fully awake. The problem was that I didn’t know if he would still be a 10 when he trained later that night. So I gave him some self wake up drills to do before training, just to make sure things were awake. Dave called me about 9 PM that night and started with, “holy fucking shit.” Honestly I didn’t know if it was a bad or a good holy shit. He then followed it up by saying if he died on his way home he would die the happiest man on earth. He proceeded to tell me that he had done a 90-pound PR over his 10-pound PR from four days ago. I was really confused because a) that was impossible, and b) he had told me he had dynamic squats. I asked him to repeat what he said and instead he went on to tell me that with 700 pounds on his back he didn’t shake one bit. At this point I just thought he was fucking with me. So I asked what he really did. That is when he stated in no uncertain terms that he was 100% serious. So of coarse I asked for the video, because—although I trust Dave with my life—I couldn’t believe he didn’t shake with 700 pounds on his back. Then our next question was how long can this last. He came to see me the following Wednesday and held about 75% of where we had gotten the previous week. The crazy thing was that he had set PR’s in lifts both of his heavy days before he came to see me and still held up that well. He left at a 10 and I told him not to push too hard because he was doing things that he had not done in over 10 years. His shoulders, wrists, hips, knees and back were all feeling amazing. So he didn’t listen to me and decided to squat with heavy bands for the first time in years. This unraveled our work, took him back to his level 3 and put his body back into a coma. Normally I would have not liked this but it gave us a chance to really learn how to use the system better. We started using the number scale, which tells me how well he will perform and how likely he is to have an injury, to adjust his workouts. This has been invaluable with Dave and all my own clients as well. Now I give him limits for his training and when he is a 10, he can set 90-pound PRs and when he is an 8, he is only allowed to set 30-pound PRs. Obviously, that isn’t exactly how we use it, but it has proved to be helpful in knowing how hard he can push his training. My next question was, “is this a freak thing with Dave?” Well, after working with the system for only a month we have two clients at The Spot Athletics who have cancelled surgeries. Not because we told them to, but because they are having zero pain. One was a shoulder issue and the other was a hip issue. The hip issue is a female physical therapist with a torn labrum. She has been doing her best to rehab her hip and so have we, but it has been so painful she had surgery scheduled in two months. She also loves to lift and hasn’t been able to squat in several months. After only 45 minutes of waking her body up, she got up and had no hip pain. I told her to see how it felt over the next few days. Two weeks later she squatted 235 pounds, an all time PR, with no hip pain. She texted me the next day and said, “Yep, no hip pain. Cancelled surgery.”
