"The Sports Medicine's Approach to Anti-aging Medicine" by Dr James Stoxen DC Seventh Annual Thailand Anti-aging Congress in Bangkok, Thailand 2015

"The Sports Medicine's Approach to Anti-aging Medicine" by Dr James Stoxen DC giving his groundbreaking keynote presentation at the Seventh Annual Thailand Anti-aging and Aesthetics Medicine Congress in Bangkok, Thailand on September 4th, 2015.

First of all I'd like to talk about sports medicine and anti-aging medicine. Dr Bob Goldman started the Academy of anti-aging Medicine actually started the National Academy of Sports Medicine which has approximately 80,000 worldwide. He spun off the Academy of anti-aging Medicine seeing the need for those athletes and individuals who are baby boomers desiring to extend their abilities to perform at maximum capacity and maximum efficiency without accelerated aging of the body in the systems.

So it was through our involvement in Muscle and Fitness Magazine as advisory board together and also one late night telephone call from dr. Goldman and requesting my services that I actually became acquainted with Academy of anti-aging Medicine.

 My first lecture was at the 2004 World Congress of Anti-aging Medicine where I addressed a very large audience with approximately four thousand doctors and scientists in the room the size of a football field. It was very daunting but yet it was very exciting nonetheless. Since then it's been a very exciting journey for me and I'm very happy to be here I would like to share the most advanced information about sports medicine biomechanics and the relationship to human performance, the recycling of energy, impact absorption and how the body maintains openings and tunnels for the safe passage of blood vessels and nerves.

I'm going to clarify for use on the mysteries and misconceptions that are producing some painful misunderstandings of human mechanics.

This is a picture of Usain Bolt. He is an inspiration to us all. He is a human spring. He is a very stiff and efficient, fast, quick human spring. He recently broke the world record and won the world championship in Beijing.

 There is obviously there's a big difference between Usain Bolt and patients who are aged. However how do we make that connection between how we train athletes and how we maximize performance and the other side of the spectrum generative joint disease inability to walk without accelerate aging.

We can learn a lot from sports medicine. In fact sports medicine actually been ahead of or sports training has been ahead of Medicine. In fact top US athletes and trainers at opposite doctors a lot of valuable lessons and actually embarrassed as many times over the decades.

In fact Joe Weider and Arnold Schwartzenegger promoting bodybuilding and weight training is a form of exercise to decelerate aging.   Back then doctors said it would enlarge our heart, make women look bulky and manly and cause aging and it's not good for the body.

For ten to fifteen years doctors like myself, Dr Goldman, Joe Weider, Arnold Schwarzenegger's and the old-timers promoted bodybuilding and exercise is a form of anti-aging and improving health. Eventually slowly but surely the medical community came around to the fact that this is actually a good thing. So in the beginning, not everybody has been along for the ride. In fact it took about two decades to actually convince the medical community that exercise is healthy for the body through lifting weights.

So here we have degenerated joint disease. Now I find it amazing when a patient comes to me and they have a one millimeter left in their hip joint and they say can you save me from sip surgery. I say “Why is that?” “Its because my surgeon is recommending eventual surgery and I don't want that!”

What are they saying? “Well he said he can see only one millimeter left on the left hip and the right hip is fine. When you asked them what was the cause of the accelerated degenerative aging of the hip on that side, what did they say?” “They said well it's just aging and Im just getting old”

The hip on the left has a thicker joint cartilage that the one on the right and they're both the same age!” Then the light bulb goes on in that head of the patient they said that you know what you're right!” So you know obviously they're looking back at what the doctor said they said something's wrong with his theory of why the one hip has had accelerated aging because that doesn't make any sense.

If you're going to say that the cause of the degeneration of your hip on one side is just from getting old and they've seen this lecture online then you're obviously going to be embarrassed.

So its about time we learn something new that provides a better explanation for why we actually have the degenerative changes and accelerated 

The current standard of care is actually behind the times in my area of medicine. What we have here is a situation where the doctor has determined that the patients arch can not support the body weight so they prescribe a brace to put under the arch to shore up the weak arch. 

What we are actually doing is we're actually starting the whole process of aging very quickly instead of regressing the aging process. I am suggesting we move in the opposite direction. What do I mean by that? 

The fact is that progressive aging starts by shoring up the arch of the foot. This is because later we need another brace we call the cane. Then we move to a four prong Walker and then we move to a wheelchair until we are actually bed ridden. So all along way in our life we are constantly supporting the body, thinking that it's not capable of supporting itself until it can’t support itself and we are bedridden.

If you ask people who are bedridden, How did you feel when you were forty years old? Chances are they're actually more active than you are and so if you think that you're going to escape being bedridden where age you are mistaken!

So, it's about time that we start to learn different ways to regress aging and actually go backwards. Maybe we can learn something new from our athletes friends to help us. 

Here's a sample of how the medical world just seems to be confused by this miracle of sport. This Ethiopian athlete Abebe Bikila won two gold medals and broke all the world records in 1960 and 1964 in the Olympic Games. In fact, he was the only athlete in the world today that won two gold medals in the Olympic games for the marathon race.

What's interesting about this is that Abebe Bikila was actually from ethiopia he was offered footwear to wear by the shoe companies to run in the race but they didn't fit well his feet so he tossed aside and ran the entire course barefoot. Whats even more remarkable is that the race was in Rome and he ran barefoot the entire race on the cobblestones.

He beat the other athletes and won the gold medal and then he subsequently trained barefoot for all the races.   Just before 1964 Olympic Games he got acute appendicitis only six weeks prior to the race, recovered from the surgery in time to run in the race and actually won. He won by such a margin that after the race he was doing calisthenics waiting for the other athletes to come in.

So there a lot of misconceptions Id like to clear up for you. 

First of all, understanding the fundamentals of biomechanics starts with two key elements:

1. How does the body engineered
2. How is it modulate or door control the tension on the mechanism?

Here is an example of an athlete by the name of Bob Beamon. He performed one of the most remarkable feats of sport that we've ever seen in the history of mankind. In its day it was probably one of the most amazing feats of sport in the last hundred years. 

Here he breaks the world record which stood for another 20 years which was the long jump record. As he takes off everybody watches the run and they watch the takeoff and the jump.  Its an incredible feats of athleticism and spring mechanics. 

What i'm looking at is the way he walks while he is walking away from the pit. Now look at how the body spring. He doesn't even touch the ground with his heels. The heels don't even touch the ground. Look how he springs off the forefoot. Look at the incredible spring of the body.

This is another athlete which you might recognize on the right that's Dr Stoxen. In his infinite craziness, he is running barefoot on the concrete street with another athlete by the name of Christian Medina. Mr Medina had bilateral knee pain. I told them when I'm done with you you're going to run barefoot on the street with me. He looked at me like I was crazy and I said you are a Taekwondo national champion right? You do Taekwondo barefooted. You don't wear shoes when you do those fancy moves. He said, No! Absolutely not! “I said well you're going to be running barefoot with me and there he is.

So now you're looking at when babies are born they can run barefoot just fine with their pristine springs until you think it's a bad idea to put shoes on their feet which is the beginning of the aging process of their perfect mechanical springs. By putting shoes on them and tell them not to do this and that you restrict their natural movement or free play in the backyard with no shoes.

When I talk to the Shriners Hospital committee for crippled children chief of staff Dr Miller, he said that children should be running barefoot as much as possible in the backyard in free play as it moves the body in all different directions. It is developing the natural mechanism of the foot.

Lets look at the models of human mechanics that try to explain or study human movement.

The first one was developed by scientist Borelli in 168. That was three hundred and forty years ago! It was called the inverted pendulum model.

Now the inverted pendulum model says that we throw a straight leg out straight away and then we use the back leg to push the mass over the straight leg. So essentially we put our like straight and then use the back leg essentially to push the mass over the straight leg a pole vaulting system. We push our body mass over that straight leg.

Then there is this spring-mass model. The spring-mass model was developed by Harvard scientists in 1989. The published research came out in 1989 and around 1990.

Then you have my model called integrated spring mass model which is more advanced than the Harvard model.

A three of these models we are going to go over thoroughly but as quickly as possible.

As you can see this first model uses levers and rockers and theorizes that we use levers and the entire limb is a leverage series. So, the body with this model we push the body forward during walking.

Now they couldn't really explain very well running very well with this model. They really did not model it as a stiff lever but said it gives little. It’s a compliant lever. What I can see is that they don’t seem like they really understood it totally. He seemed a bit confused in his research the way he presented the model one way with walking then changed his mind when he tried to explain running mechanics.

Now they give out the Borelli award each year to the top biomechanics scientist in the world so his input was very important. We need to look at it in more detail to see if it actually is true.

The second model called the spring-mass model was developed by Harvard University scientists. They came out with a new model that they thought explain human movement walking and running better. It says that the legs are linear springs. This was a simple mathematical model they can use it for doing calculations.

They claimed this model was better at understating the bouncing gait such as a

running, hopping gait. They theorized this spring-mass model says that we have linear springs which were the legs and that the whole leg was a linear spring.

 If it was that simple all we would look like giant slinkies. Obviously the legs are not linear springs. They are variable resistance springs because we have foot knee and hip joints with long limbs. So it's not as simple as the spring mass model would suggest however for that time it was advancement.

A simple lever- A simple machine consisting of a bar that pivots on a fixed support, or fulcrum, and is used to transmit torque. A force applied by pushing down on one end of the lever results in a force pushing up at the other end.

It seems logical that the foot is a lever with the Achilles pushing the mass over the straight leg, doesn't it? It could make sense that we push our body forward however you're going to find out it is not.

A Spring is Defined in classic physics as a device that stores potential energy, specifically elastic potential energy, by straining the bonds between the atoms of an elastic material. 

A classic spring is one that deforms its physical shape and stores energy within that deformation process. It eventually reforms back to its exact original shape releasing the energy.

So if this is the shape of the human foot, with every impact its deforming its shape storing energy within the deformation process then reforming to its exact original shape releasing the energy is the definition of a spring.

It is very important for us to learn about another study of biomechanics between the spring-mass model and the inverted pendulum model. The difference between the inverted pendulum and the spring mass model comes in how they describe what happens during the translation of the mass across the lower limb. If you put a sensor on the hip on the side and you look at videotape from the side you see that the sensor drops. This could not be true according to the inverted pendulum model as the sensor would rise. 

So the inverted pendulum model doesn't seem to be accurate.

The spring-mass model actually does make sense loading energy like a spring so we can say that's more accurate.

However, the spring-mass model has its flaws as I mentioned. The legs are not linear springs. They are variable resistant springs.

Second of all it only models the hip, knee and ankle. So what about the human foot? The human foot has 33 individual joints so when you impact the ground it spreads the force of that impact across these 33 joints making the impact less severe overtime. When we walk we hit the ground with these collisions called walking. We actually engage this human foot to deform its physical shape, store energy during the deformation process then release back to its exact original shape and that would be the definition of a spring.

So, the foot is actually a spring but it is not modeled at all in the spring-mass model. 

But if we compare the spring-mass model and the inverted pendulum we can see after three hundred and twenty-five years of research that the spring mass model seems to be more advanced, yet we have these fundamental issues with both models being able to completely explain the functions of the human body accurately.

 

When I was 24 years old I became a doctor. The very first day I walked into my office the greatest athlete in the world, the greatest power lifter in the world Ed Coan walked in my office. This was literally the first day I got into practice! Is there a God? I wanted to do sports medicine doctor and the very first day I walk into practice the greatest weightlifter of all time walks in my office.

I actually became so well connected with him and help him many times to break world records in weightlifting. So the powerlifting organizations asked me to come to work as a doctor behind the stage with other athletes at the competitions. Then they invited me to come to the former Soviet Union in 1987 as a doctor for the United States team.

At the time, I was researching why the Russians were destroying us in weight-lifting and other sports so I connected with a scientist by the name of Michael Yessis. Michael was translating the Soviet sports technique journals into English and distributing them to scientists across the United States and Europe. It was called the Soviet Sports Review. I ordered all the reviews from 1966 to 1986 noticing I kept seeing the same name repeated over and over again Yuri Verhkoshansky.

He was the doctor, professor and scientist who developed the shock method of training. It was eventually named plyometrics and it was brought to the United States in 1971 by athlete named Fred Wilt.

If you read any journal or any book on sports, sports training the word plyometrics is on the first page. Its a form of training that is different from lever based training or resistance training because it involves impacts or specialized jumping. Athletes do box jumping, depth jumps and jumping drills etc

This is a picture I took at the National Institute of Physical Culture and Sports Science which is a specialized school in Moscow USSR. This was taken in 1989. I directed the first sports medicine course in the former Soviet Union at the national institute and he was one of the lead lecturers

This is where we have some major differences in theory presenting problems with what the science of medicines says and what the whole sports world thinks is logical for training.

The doctor is saying we should protect the feet with elaborate sophisticated packaging called footwear and and don't take up so many impacts as they are bad for us. We should do elliptical training. It's better for our joints.

On the other side athletes and coaches say plyometrics is the answer to developing the maximum ability to absorb impacts elasticity as well as the best way to improve human performance and efficiency.

The question is….. Who is right?

These are some of the first videos that I took at Verkhoshanskys center of athletes doing plyometric drills. As you can see they are doing a lot of hopping, jumping, skipping and bounding. It doesn’t look very high tech like our gyms but they're actually accomplishing more than we do with these high tech training devices

So felt something was missing so I developed the integrated spring mass model. It says that vibration or impacts are monitored through this integrated spring that incorporates the foot as a spring suspension system.

If you look at the foot what you're going to find is that the foot is actually arch mechanism that is suspended from above by springy tendons called the tibialis posterior, tibialis anterior, peroneus longus and peroneus brevis.

When I was in college I took abnormal psychology at Arizona State University and passed it. That allowed me to have some time off because I did not have to take the course at the post grad university while I was studying to be a doctor. So it allowed me to apply for a job as the teachers assistant in human cadaver dissection. It was interesting to me the doctors were so interested in the Achilles, quads and glutes and didn't find the tibialis posterior supportive suspension system muscles to be very interesting. During study the passed them over just to know the origin and insertion as these muscle actions were too complicated

So for the exams the attitude was “we don't have to worry about this” We just need to learn about the spine. Unfortunately they made huge mistakes by disregarding those muscles which form the foundation for the integrated spring. The integrated spring-mass models states that the body actually protects itself with a spring.

 We see the lever system says that you push the body across the ground.

The spring-mass model says that you spring the body off the ground. However it cant spring off the ground without the correct model of the human foot as the spring suspension system.

You can see from this video here when you look at how the foot impacts the ground you can see you can see the medial side of the foot where they tendon actually sticks out from the skin. That's the tibialis posterior the most important tendon to actually spring the mass back from the impact of walking and running.

So obviously it's very important to develop that tendon. So that we can make sure that we are able to spring back the mass of the force of the impact we know the spring mass model works when its integrated with the modeling of the foot as a spring suspension system. That is why the integrated spring-mass model is the ONLY acceptable model of the three.

When we model the body as a spring the we can actually employ some of these laws of physics that scientists use that doctors don't. Its interesting to me that the human body is

an object that interacts with the earth. Because its on earth it actually has to abide by the laws of physics. So we might want to use those laws of physics to try to understand how we absorb impacts.

Hookes law of physics states as we increase amount of deformation or depression of the spring we increase the energy it will give back. This depends on an important variable of each spring which is its spring stiffness.

You say… What do you mean by spring stiffness? Is it like a stiffness as a tight spring or compliance like a loose spring.

We can have maximum depth loading by having more compliance but a stiffer spring can actually spring off more weight so the potential energy of springs are dependent on the stiffness.

Now on the right we have a more compliant spring. If we use the same amount of mass the spring on the right is more compliant the spring on the left is more stiff. It doesn't depress as easily with the same mass.

What Japanese researchers found out when they put a diagnostic ultrasound on the calf area to see what really happened when we step and transition the mass across the lower limb during walking, they found out that we transmit the mass across the foot and leg, the muscles of the calf actually came to a near isometric length. That means they didn't change their length much when they contracted. The muscles stayed the same length almost throughout the entire passing of the weight or mass across the limb.

How is that possible if the foot is a lever and we push the body forward. It doesn't make any sense.

If the muscle stays the same length throughout the entire transmitting of the weight across the body then where is the actual energy coming from its coming from?

The stretching of the tendons!

So essentially what the human body does when we walk around is bounde the mass off of a giant pogo stick. It's really not a lever system.

When you think about it if you just jump from foot to foot and stop, then jump from foot to foot, as soon as make it across the room you're gonna be exhausted!

But if you run you could run 26 miles which is twenty six thousand of those impacts and still you can make it without being exhausted

So how's that possible?

Its because when we jump, stop, jump, stop, using the body pushing it across as a lever each time we jump but when we run we load energy in with muscle contraction using a lot of energy.

When we run we load it in and out using the spring of the tendon snap. So that's how we can better understand the misunderstandings of human mechanics.

There is also this interplay of lever vs spring movements to be able to better understand the cause of chronic fatigue and chronic pain.

What is interesting is that doctors see patients when there are already broken down. So if we are a giant spring mechanism, what if the spring mechanism breaks down and drops and locks into a lever system? If all we see with our patients is broken down levers then we may think lever mechanics is normal. I studied biomechanics at the track!

So the treatment for a mechanism assumed to move via levers is a treatment that can actually ONLY restore the human body to a perfect lever.   However it is actually a spring so the treatment approaches that came out of the era which we referred to the body as a series of levers can only get the body to a maximum medical improvement of a perfect lever.

What good is that going to do when we are a torsion spring? In other words if you don't look at the body as a giant spring mechanism in understand how it works you can ever restore the body to maximum medical improvement.

So this is how we maintain our body through life without damage o degeneration. It is the simplest definition of anti-aging or progressive prevention.

This is called elastic deformity.

Elastic deformity happens when the body part or the entire spring deforms its physical shape, stores energy during the deformation process, then returns back to its exact original shape and releases energy. That is the exact physics definition.

Now plastic deformity is when it changes its physical shape but does not reform back to its original shape. It deforms only slightly with millions of impacts like we see with degenerative disc disease or deforms instantly like herniated disc would.

The degenerative process of a bunion would be a plastic deformity. A disc that would degenerate, a knee that degenerates or the degeneration of the hip socket would be a plastic deformity.

We take about 10,000 steps per day multiplied by 365 days a year that's 3.6 million collisions with you have with the earth in one year. That's 3.6 million collisions that we have with the earth per year which on your thirthieth birthday adds up to a wopping one hundred-plus million collisions we have with the earth!

In your lifetime it is estimated that you will have 270 million collision with the earth.

Do you think that an engineer would find it practical to design the human body is a giant lever mechanism? Levers cannot recycle energy and not but they cannot open up spaces and tunnels for nerves and blood vessels to pass safely. That is called the disc and thoracic outlet tunnel.

The entire body is a giant torsion spring look at the spine and the whole body is like a towel that you twist like this and then when you let go it returns back to its original shape releasing energy .

If I put my foot forward and one back as in taking a simple walking step if I I just let go of my leg tension and lift my foot the natural spring of the torsion spring springs my opposite leg and body forward creating the next step without the help of muscle contraction automatically for me

When we tell athletes to run we tell them to relax as much as possible. Do you know why? Its because muscle contraction is slow in comparison to tendon snap. So the muscle contraction actually gets in the way of speed.

When we look at speed from this sense of elasticity we see that elastic energy is much stronger than what I can develop with muscles. So by using muscles can actually hit with less force and speed than if we use more spring. By using more spring of the tendons and totally relaxing muscles we can actually have more efficient movement and much quicker movement.

So plastic deformity happens when we exceed yield strength and then ultimate strength and failure strength. The tissue will snap if it reaches the limit and that would model what happens with a herniated disc.

It can also explain the damage to the cartilage when it tears. The compressive forces caused damage to the human body. Compressive forces are caused by abnormal movement patterns with internal compressive force.

If we relax the body we have less internal compressive force. That is why meditation, yoga and other forms of treatment that promote relaxation improve arthritis and other painful conditions.

Sherrington did some research in 1806 on whether posture was maintained with reflexes or was it a learned behavior. Whjat he found was that by cutting the connection between the brain and the cerebral cortex and checking posture he said that posture was maintained. So even though the connection was cut that means that posture is actually developed by reflex.

If I lean my body to the right why does my head stay perpendicular to the earth? If I leave my body to left why does my head stay perpendicular to earth? If I lean back, why does my head maintain its perpendicular position with the earth?

Its because the semicircular canals in your skull control head posture and maintain this posture with the head perpendicular to earths gravity.

They are like three carpenters levels, well 6 of them six of them that judge head position relative to gravities pull. On both both sides, they have 30,000 hairs inside them

There is a gelatinous material inside those semi circular canals and inside there are hairs that have connection with nerves that can tell the brain exactly where your body is in space the acceleration the body and how we are moving.

So it gives the brain the position of the head so what it can do is make split second changes in muscle contractions of the neck and body to actually right the head to the perpendicular position relative to gravity regardless of any mistake you make in body position or the angle of your leg or trunk during walking.

It corrects or creates the compensations for the abnormal stressful position in relationship to gravity. So if you actually lay your foot down with the leg on an angle in relationship to gravity your nervous system will have to make the split second muscle contraction to right your body to perpendicular.  

That's all done through reflex automatically for you. So what happened here is that you can actually sabotage the human spring tension by with abnormal walking, sitting, standing or running mechanics. This can happen in your activities of daily living sitting at the desk or when you walk during the course of a normal days activities.

During walking if you are landing in positions that are outside of perpendicular to earth what happens as these sensory systems pick up the abnormal strain from the poor walking technique, relay that message to the brain and the brain decides whether it likes the position based upon the amount of strain that is felt by the stretch strain receptors of the nervous system.

The receptors of the body called spindle cells and Golgi tendon reflex organs.  

This stiffens or compresses the spring via protective reflex  

This is not the same as spring stiffness. Spring stiffness is a normal change in stiffness that makes the bodies spring stiffer. When the bodies hit the ground with like a super ball.  

When the body actually drops down lower to absorb the impact is called spring compliance.   The difference between spring compliance is that spring compliance gives us more protection from the impacts and the other one, spring stiffness, gives you more efficiency

Top coaches are looking for something in between that provides the maximum protection from impacts yet the most efficient movement break the world record

 There is all levels of spring stiffness

• There is body stiffness.
• Torsional spring stiffness
• leg stiffness
• Verticals stiffness
• and even the cells of your body have stiffness

We in anti-aging reference skin elasticity which can be thought of as spring stiffness too! When you're speaking of cellular elasticity your stick this is speaking of this the face and how it's sagging over the years due to a loss of cellular spring stiffness.

Now pathological spring stiffness is different. What do you mean stiffness is pathological. It means that there is a pathological stiffness is when we have over control of the tension of the human spring that is constant and causing damaging compressive forces on the human spring.

So what happens to cause pathological stiffness is that the brain actually takes control of the level of tension of your spring and ratchets down the spring mechanism to prevent your ability to absorb impacts, recycle energy and preserve the spaces for the safe passage of the blood vessels and nerves.

That is what we experience when we have chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and nerve pressure with a herniated disc or thoracic outlet syndrome that does not improve with the approach you are using to reverse it.

On a performance level it can affect your ability to run without injury

During running you run with three times your body weight at impact. So if you weigh 200 pounds are hitting the ground at six hundred pounds of impact force.

So if the sensors of the body pick up abnormal movement related to the position of the limb relative to gravity or some internal compression caused by mental tension or avbnormal movement of any kind the message is relayed to the brain.

The brain decides if ive launched my body on top of the pogo or used some more stressful form and technique.

For instance doctors still stick the heel toe advice of walking. That is so outdated and wrong because there's no spring in the heel. Just look at the anatomy. When you talk about running barefoot I mean if you want to check it out to see if heel toe walking is a good way to walk do it barefoot and you'll be in the hospital for a day with a fracture of your heel.

Barefoot runners do not run heel toe. They run on the forefoot.

When you wear shoes you can get away with heel toe running because the shoe allows you to get away with bad form and technique.

So I decided to run barefoot because I wanted to see if I had good technique. I wanted to remove all pathological tension from my springs

Say for instance we are running barefoot grass and I'd say let's run barefoot on the concrete what happens is that you will get stressed out I won't. I've done it before so I will use my mind relax my body for maximum impact compliance but some good stiffness. I want to run faster.

Due to fear of injury, you may tighten up because running barefoot on concrete makes you really nervous. So the nervousness and mental tension tightens you up, ratcheting down the spring. Now there is no room for the absorption the impact and then you take the impact on your joints. So one day you have a stress fracture of the second toe, go to your doctor who tells you that barefoot running is bad for you.

I talked to my doctor and he said its bad. Put on some rubber shoes to protect you

Now what happens when the pathological stiffness set in is that the level of stiffness cannot be modified or controlled. It stays the same stiffness depending on how strong the brains protective reflex is. Because it's the dominant reflex is taking control of your body.

If it happened when you're 20 years old and you get these abnormal movement patterns with the combination of the compression from the pathologic tension on the spring you cant get out of chronic pain and accelerated aging as you keep stimulating these receptor sites to ratchet down the tension on the spring.  

This is the best explanation that we have right now for degenerative joint disease and degeneration of the of the structures.

1. abnormal movement patterns
2. mental stress
3. form and technique breaks
4. coactivation

 Coactivation is when you see somebody put their foot forward and the full body weight is on the foot yet their toes are still off the ground. Its hard to believe that they can keep their toes off the ground.

You see it what happens is that when you lift the weight with the bicep the tricep is automatically relaxed. This is called reciprocal inhibition. As you can conract hem at the same time it just causes compression and no joint motion.

Your leg becomes like a giant pirate peg and doesn't bounce. You have no spring. You take the impacts into this loaded mechanism that just banks and twists and bangs and twists with every movement.

The nervous system is over modulating the spring tension. It is the bodys sensory system consisting of the muscle spindle cells and the golgi tendon reflex organs that sense the abnormal tension and reflex the message to the brain. These cells have 10 – 12 springy filaments that have nerves wrapped around them that can gauge the tension, change this mechanical stimulation to electrical stimulation and relay this information to the brain for processing.

These strain receptors (spindles and golgi) are interwoven between the muscles. Each muscle has a certain number sensors. So the calf muscle has five hundred some-odd spindle cells.

 Almost everyone has the same amount per the function of each muscle.

The over modulation occurs when there's a dysfunction in the movement pattern. Movement patterns that strain these receptors send a message to the brain that there's abnormal strain. The brain then create this control on the tension and subsequent compressive force that causes the accelerated aging of the body.

Here is a picture of what happens when inflammation infests an area. The inflammation stimulates nociceptors to reflex the abnormal chemistry and pressure in the body to the brain for processing. This creates another neuromotor reflex to the brain that leads to pathological stiffness.

 This happens mostly with over pronation of the foot. How would we ease the strain on the sensors in this case. If we analyze the gait we see that the foot over rolls into a position where it causes the strain and inflammation that leads to a compressive disorder in the body, aging and a risk for an acute plastic deformity.

What we can do quickly is put the shoe on the foot and has a solid counter support to act not like a support but a guide to keep the foot within the safe range

Back 25 years a go to do a gait study with a movie it would cost $25,000 - $50,000 to set up. Now you can get an inexpensive hand held high definition camera for $300 and hook it up to your Mac and do gait studies in your office

The treatment begins with an effective approach to release the pathologic tension on the spring mechanism. You can use hands-on treatment like I do.

Here is a quick adjustment.

So what happens is that the spring actually locks up by this pathological reflex turns into a lever and then it banks and twists with a lifetime of 270 million impacts and you wonder where degenerative joint disease comes from.

Your spring suspension system loses strength each year you age. Strengthening the spring involves strengthening of these muscles in the spring suspension system of the foot. We all walk straight We need to walk in different patterns, remove that footwear and strengthen the foot and different angles.

That is where the muscles come from that maintain the spring of the body from the side of the foot. So retraining walking means no heel landing, a neutral landing or an accelerated landing throwing your mass on top of the Pogo Stick.

Put a spring in your step. Allow the body to spring instead of banging and twisting.

This is a beautiful video of a lady that I love watching her run. Here she's throwing the weight on her pogo stick and she says shes throwing the mass on the forefoot. I like to talk about the position of the full stack of bones as a spring and not throwing the mass on a single body part like an area of the foot.

Nevertheless she is spring landing not heel landing.

We can and should improve springs strength for increased capacity for sping stiffness

The best way to do this is with plyometrics drills.

Here is an example of some running drills where you lean forward so that you're going into a controlled fall state running in zig zag and circular patterns to stimulate the development the tibialis posterior the peroneal muscles that actually suspended the foor in a spring suspension system from above.

So these are the running drugs that are done by all athletes. I presented these drills at the World Congress of Sports and Exercise Science in Malaysia. All the doctors wanted copies of them. They're all online.

These are double leg drills. 

This is Andrei Arlovski, the UFC world heavyweight champ who's actually going to be fighting for a world title very soon, I hope. He's my client for ten years. He does these spring drills.

These are single leg plyometric drills which are more difficult because you're putting the full body weight on one leg and its means that it's double impact force through the spring. Your spring must be very strong and have plenty of room to put the impact of two legs into one.

These are much more difficult and exhausting.

What was found through research analysis is that the second and third place athletes actually had more spring stiffness than Usain Bolt. He was just taller with a longer stride length and that's why he won the World Record. You might say that the second and third place athletes were better trained than Bolt

That means Bolt actually can run faster than he is right now. We will see what he can do.

I would like to thank you all for inviting me and I hope you enjoyed my lecture.

Please feel free to connect with me on any social media or email like Facebook to answer questions. Thank you very much for inviting me!

Dr Stoxen would like to thank Dr Niyada Tharncharoen, Dr Patana Teng-umnuay, Dr Bob Goldman MD, PhD, DO FAASP, Dr Ron Klatz and Dr Jakkriss Bhumsawasdi, B.Sc., MD. MPH for inviting me to deliver the keynote presentation for this prestigious conference.