What is Z-Health
Z-Health®, created by Dr. Eric Cobb,is a high tech, cutting-edge exercise system designed expressly for retraining your nervous system. Z-Health offers you an ultra-fast approach to getting out of pain, optimizing your health, and maximizing your athletic performance.
What Does Z-Health Look Like?
People say it looks like a lot of things — from yoga to martial arts to dance to stretching and every other named system under the sun. We don’t consider this unusual because the body can only move in so many ways. What makes Z-Health different from so many other systems is not the exercises so much as how you perform them. The depth and specificity of Z-Health makes it very different from many other approaches to mobility. Plus, the actual training techniques of Z-Health and its focus on the neural components of the process – make it extremely fast and effective.
What makes Z-Health different from other training systems?
It is simple, Z-Health puts the athlete, and his or her unique neurology (brain), at the center of its training. When you understand modern neuroscience one thing becomes abundantly clear: a stacked one-size-fits-all, pyramid approach to fitness is inappropriate. As we teach in ourR-Phase course, a new client may not need to work on their “stabilizer muscles” but instead their brain may need activation from something less obvious such as sprints. This is why we put the client at the center of our9S model
Why does Z-Health focus primarily on neuroscience?
The nervous system manages your entire body. If you need to make changes in pain, range of motion, strength, coordination, speed, agility, or any other physical attribute, the fastest path to getting there is to adjust your nervous system.
- It is the governing system of the body. In other words, it runs the whole show.
- It is the most plastic system of the body. Research has proven that the nervous system can continue to learn and adapt at ANY age, which means you can improve your body at ANY point in your life by focusing on the nervous system.
- It is the fastest system of the body. Your nerves communicate throughout the body at lightning-fast speed. What is wonderful about this is if you impact the nervous system correctly, you can make nearly instantaneous changes in the body
All day every day we are communicating with our nervous system. Company cofounder Kathy Mauck likes to say that the nervous system is your guardian that is always on duty.
Z-Health targets the nervous system in many different ways:
- Visual Skills Training
- Unique Balance Challenges
- Precise Mobility Work
- Non-Traditional Strength Training Exercises
- Sensory Integration Drills
- And many, many more
One thing that all of these approaches have in common is a persistent focus on novelty. Modern neuroscience tells us that the brain learns best when there is something new to learn. By varying the stimulus (which can be as dramatic as an entirely new movement or as subtle as a change in lighting) you get the nervous system’s attention. This allows us to use every training session as a “neural reeducation experience” leading to not only better movement, but more interesting and powerful training sessions.
Who is Z-Health best for?
Health & Fitness Professionalslooking for a toolkit that gives them nearly unlimited options to finding a solution for their clients. Whether it be eliminating pain, changing body composition, increasing strength or performance, Z-Health’s neurological approach will truly make you a distinguished authority figure in your industry.
General Publiclooking to get out of pain, change body composition, or increase strength and performance. Since our focus is on the nervous system it doesn’t matter if you’re a 75-year-old man, a 15-year-old highschool athlete, a gym rat, or a weekend warrior. All of us have the same potential for tapping into our best performance, ever, when we focus on the nervous system. What we normally tell people who are new to Z is to give us 10 days of consistent effort. Whether you are an athlete or an office worker, we guarantee that you will see changes in how well you move and how you feel!
I have heard of people getting results in just minutes, is this really possible?
When you target the nervous system correctly it is not only possible but expected. Strength coach Pavel Tsatsouline is famous for saying: “Your muscles are already capable of lifting a car. They just don’t know it yet.” If you know what to do, you can create dramatic, near instantaneous changes in the body by showing people how to take off their neural brakes. The nervous system is an integrated web that runs throughout the body and operates at astonishing speed. This means if I can ask the body the right question through a specific exercise to elicit the positive change I’m looking for, I’ll see a result immediately. After all, it only takes one movement to get into pain, doesn’t it makes sense that one movement could get you OUT of pain?
Can you give examples of what you've done with various professional athletes?
At a recent NSCA conference, two of our Master Trainers worked with a female competitor in the conference-wide vertical jump competition. After two visual drills about 30 seconds of work she added 4 inches to her vertical and subsequently won the competition. These drastic results may not be guaranteed, but we see them often enough that we aren’t surprised by them anymore. When working with anaerobic athletes (athletes who play football, soccer, basketball, fighting, etc.), immediate improvement in power and strength are very attainable. As for endurance athletes, we recently helped a worldclass middle distance runner shave nearly a full minute off her 5k time in two weeks of training. (We had her doing only 1 exercise 3x’s a day so it qualifies for the 3 minute rule!)
She subsequently made the US World CrossCountry team and placed very highly in international competition. While we could go on and on with similar results, the truth is, we expect these types of changes every time we work with someone especially if they are new to this form of training.
Z-Health is such a powerful and productive system that whenever Dr. Cobb or a Z-Health Certified Trainer works with you whether you’re a pro athlete or a weekend warrior we expect these types of results in performance or pain relief beginning in the first session. However, our favorite stories come from people who have never had any professional training in Z-Health. They’ve simply purchased our products, put in the time and had amazing results.
