Today’s episode features neurology expert and personal trainer, Scott Robinson. Scott is an Applied Movement Neurology (AMN) master practitioner and the creator of AMN Neuro-Flexibility. He has worked successfully with all levels of neurological complexity in his time training and coaching a wide variety of clients. Scott is a specialist in dealing with a variety of neurological issues, such as weakness, pain, compensations, range of motion and trauma to the emotional systems, amongst many others. Scott is a former athlete in Taekwondo and has more than 20 years of experience in Applied Movement Neurology. Scott also runs the Instagram account @the.brain.guy and is a presenter and practitioner at integrated vitality retreats.
The nervous system is always an important and popular topic in the world of not only athletic performance, but human performance and development in general. Our emotions and subconscious state, as well as our bioelectric network are all substantial players in how we train and recover, as well as stay healthy in the process. Good coaches know these elements intuitively, but we are now starting to be able to point out the science and ideas behind it all. Today’s show takes a step back from sets, reps and exercises, and looks at these higher-order influences on athletic performance from a perspective of the brain and nervous system.
On the show, Scott talks about inhibitive factors of the nervous system, as well as the important leap in looking from athletes only in a chemical perspective, and to a bioelectric perspective, which has implications running into things like fascial performance and therapeutic modalities. He also gets into the role of emotions and beliefs and their impact on training, as well as methods that can be used to help clear these inhibiting factors. Finally, we get into an awesome talk on the critical factors by which learning can take place in a session, and how this impacts our entry point into the workout itself, drawing a lot of parallels with my prior show with Rafe Kelley. This show starts great, and just gets better as we go along, and has tons of gems throughout that are truly game-changing for any coach or athlete.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.Key Points
- Scott’s background as a distance runner and martial artist, as well as how he got into neurology and brain-science and its connection with athletics
- Elements that hold the nervous system back from producing the strength it is capable of (bioelectric dysfunction, nociception, etc.)
- How Scott looks at a client from a bioelectric perspective
- How foam rollers really work in regards to the body, the nervous system and performance
- The role of emotions in training and how emotion plays a role in adapting to exercise
- The use of emotional freedom technique to help clear limbic trauma that is inhibiting performance on the sporting field
- Why the “Haka” is so powerful for the All-Blacks, but also an unfair advantage in regards of it’s emotional impact on the other team
- Ways that we can allow our brain to learn better, particularly in context of physical activity
- The role of attention and novelty in athlete learning
- How to use novelty in warm-up games to stimulate and drive urgency and attention and drive better learning
“Bioelectricity underpins everything in the nervous system… I work with that bioelectricity and anywhere in the body there is dysfunction or pain or weakness, or anything that’s not quite right, you’ll find that there will be an altered bioelectric charge”
“Medical science tends to look at the body almost from a chemical perspective”
“The extracellular matrix is kind of like the body’s wi-fi network”
“One of the biggest things I see in terms of change, is we clear the brain map (out of a pain based response)”
“Athletes are much better at compensating around nociception than regular people, but it’s really impacting on the body”
“You might not jump as far or as high if the nervous system perceives a threat”
“When you get weakness (in a muscle test) I’ll check and see if there’s an altered bioelectric charge at that point (you can contact the point of the body and check for a threat response – reduced range of motion)”
“DC (Direct Current) means voltage, and voltage, as far as the body is concerned, is the capacity to do work”
“Fascia is electrical, communication in fascia is 3-4 times faster than the communication that comes down through the musculature”
“If you roll really fast, you can activate certain mechanoreceptors in the tissue, and you are just going to tighten it up. If you roll slowly, and roll towards the muscle-tendon junction, what you’ll find is with movement, you can normalize the signal coming from the GTO’s (which tells the muscle what tension level is appropriate under load)”
“You can actually tighten the muscle spindles up (and reduce ROM) by rolling on them (directly; as opposed to muscle-tendon junction)”
“If you are going to throw athletes onto foam rollers, it’s important to understand what you are trying to achieve”
“The limbic system is one of the most influential and connected systems in your body. If you want to be strong and you want to be a beast, you need to heal your trauma first”
“Dysfunction would often return (after soft-tissue work) because I wasn’t clearing what was deepest (emotional trauma)”
“We are designed to run forever; if you impact a bone along its optimal axis you can basically impact a bone infinitely… if you overload it and impact that bone incorrectly, you can impact that bone to the point of failure in less than 2000 impacts”
“If you make a (self-affirming) statement that is congruous with the subconscious mind, then you will experience an increase in strength… self-belief”
“Emotions are a fuel source that drive energy”
“Our brain exerts a huge metabolic demand over the body; around 20%”
“The way the brain has evolved is to increase our chances of survival, including shutting itself down”
“The brain needs oxygen, glucose, and activation to survive…. It can increase its survival chances just by switching off”
“If you can get your brain to really pay attention to something, then you are going to start to learn”
“If you can drive focused attention towards movement, then you increase learning capabilities”
“When the brain is paying attention (due to novel stimuli) then you can start to introduce the coaching cues that you want”
“What you need for adaptive neuroplasticity is three things: attention, urgency and alertness”
“If you play the same game over and over again, you are not going to pay the same amount of attention”
“Anything you can do that drives attention urgency and alertness is going to make that body receptive and able to change itself in neuro-plastic ways”
Show Notes
The Haka has been a powerful emotional and psychological leverage against opposing teams since its inception in 1888. This video highlights some teams defenses against this traditional war-dance.
About Scott Robinson
AMN Teaching Faculty member, Master Practitioner & Coach, as well as; Mentor to AMN Practitioners.
Scott is the creator of AMN Neuro Flexibility & has worked successfully with all levels of neurologic complexity. Scott’s approach is to first assess & then bring each individual’s nervous system towards a state of balance. If resolution of a complex neurologic or pain presentation is the objective, then achieving this (homeostatic) balance is often key. Where Movement is the primary objective, then achieving this balance within the body prior commencing a training program gives the individual’s body every chance of progressing towards their movement or functional goals, as opposed to progressing towards injury, which is often the case when training with pre-exisiting imbalances in the nervous system. Scott’s knowledge & skill set means that he is capable of transforming a person with a nervous system of a degraded output, into a person who is capable of achieving advanced callisthenics strength, flexibility and skills.
As an AMN master practitioner, Scott is a specialist in dealing with: movement compensations, muscle weakness, muscle control, range of motion & sensation, historic injury & surgical compensations, pain complaints, all manner of musculoskeletal dysfunction, trauma to the emotional system, respiratory, gastrointestinal & immune systemic issues, circadian biological function & sleep disturbances, disturbances to the balance system, the emotional motor system, stiffness or dysfunction to myofascial & other connective tissues, post concussion syndrome, stroke, Hay fever, TMJ dysfunction, coordination, posture & memory. All of the above, along with many other issues, can all potentially be normalised. This is all achieved via a utilisation of the entire AMN system, from assessment to calibration of the brain & the nervous system.
A former elite athlete in Taekwondo & athletics, a personal trainer of more than 20 years experience & a master practitioner with knowledge of the entirety of the AMN system along with being both a teacher and a mentor within the AMN education. Scott is ideally placed to help you get your body, your movement capabilities or your skillset as a practitioner, to where it needs to be.
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