Garrett Salpeter: [00:00:04] There can be pain when there's no damage. There can also be damage without pain. So it's not a 1 to 1 correlation. We often think-- part of why I like to talk about this is is that it can be empowering to patients because a lot of times they think, "Oh, this hurts, it's broken. I'm going to need this brace or this surgery or have to take these anti-inflammatories forever." But there's more to it. There's more to the story.  

There's a famous orthopedic surgeon named James Andrews, and he said, "If you want to do surgery, get an MRI or something like that. Because you'll almost always be able to find something to justify doing surgery."

Luke Storey: [00:00:42] Oh, man, you guys are in for a treat today. You know I'm all about solving problems as fast as possible with the least amount of effort. And this show is about just that. This is Episode 458-- The Future of Fitness: electrical stimulation and neuro physical therapy with NeuFit's Garrett Salpeter. You will find the show notes, links, and written transcripts for this bad boy at lukestorey.com/garrett.

Our guest, Garrett, is an engineer and a neuroscientist, and he started his company, NeuFit, back in 2009 and has not looked back since. And I got to say, Garrett's not only super bright and inventive, he's also just the sweetest dude and someone with whom I really enjoyed talking. And as you're about to find out, I am obsessed with this device he created called the Neubie. And that's why I had to get him on the mic to spread the good word. And I have a pretty strong feeling that you'll be glad I did.  

Here's a little sample of some of the cool stuff we riff on. How Garrett created the NeuFit technology direct current therapy, and how it differs from a TENS unit; why we each experience pain differently; how the nervous system both causes and prevents pain; the true risks and benefits of diagnostics like MRI and X-ray; his invention, the Neubie, and how it alleviates pain and heals underlying injuries; the magic of the NeuFit method and book; using different frequencies for different body parts; how the Neubie foot bath balances the parasympathetic nervous system; how their rehab application differs from their fitness protocol; how athletes use the Neubie for peak performance, and finally, how the Neubie grows muscles without weights. It's pretty wild stuff.  

If you're someone who's dealing with any of the following challenges, I highly recommend you give this one a full attention listen. Plantar fasciitis, ankle sprain, shin splints, knee ligament injury, hamstring strain, pulled groin, strain quad or hip flexor, back pain, neck pain, rotator cuff injury, shoulder impingement, tennis elbow, carpal tunnel, arthritis, swelling and lymphedema, recovery from orthopedic surgery and just about anything you can imagine in these categories of pain and injury.  

So as you can see, we cover a lot in this episode. Now, I'll put this link in the show notes on the podcast app as well. But for people who want a Neubie at home like me, or if you're a pro practitioner that wants to integrate this into your practice, here is a deal for you. NeuFit is offering $1,000 off a Neubie for Life Stylist's listeners. To find out all the info on this, or maybe even find a practitioner in your area if you're in the US, the link for both is neu.fit/luke. That's N-E-U.F-I-T/luke.  

All right, that's enough out of me. Let's open the show to the guy you really need to hear from, Dr. Garrett Saltpeter. Enjoy the show and share it with a friend in need of some support. So Garrett, you're known as the health engineer. What does that mean?

Garrett Salpeter: [00:03:47] Well, I was fortunate enough to find a way to take my academic training and engineering and funnel it into an area that I'm super passionate about and that I love. So my training is both in engineering and neuroscience and I think this is a great way to blend those.

Luke Storey: [00:04:04] Oh, that's interesting, because that's exactly what you did with your NeuFit technology because it's based on the nervous system, which we're going to learn about, hence the neurology. But then also you've got to understand engineering to put this together and not electrocute someone, basically. I guess I want to start at the journey of how did you first create this?  
I'm always interested in, like that show, How It's Made, I think it's called or something. I love that. So you're in school studying engineering or you get out. At what point did you start to hire someone to actually build you a device? What was the initial test unit you had or prototype?

Garrett Salpeter: [00:04:45] Well, the initial catalyst was really an experience I had back when I was playing ice hockey in college where I had some torn ligaments. I was told I would need surgery and I was going to be out for three or four months. And I met a doctor who was doing functional neurology and using an older version at the time, but using direct current.  

And he was the first one to show me that the nervous system is important. The neurological response to injury and trauma oftentimes delays, or impairs, or blocks the healing process or slows it down and just leads to poor outcomes overall. That how the nervous system can be guarding, protecting, inhibiting, shutting down muscles in the area, in some ways that could mean it's just cutting off the blood flow and impairing the body's ability to send the nutrients and raw materials there to rebuild, for example.  

So learning that and then seeing firsthand the power of direct current and how creating a direct electric field in this electric field gradient can help to orient and accelerate the cells that control healing and regeneration of bone and muscle, connective tissue and nerves. For me, it was the connective tissue in my ligaments. But I saw that the-- going through that experience, my ligaments healed on their own in two and a half weeks. I avoided surgery altogether and for me it was this amazing experience for two reasons.

The first is that I was able to avoid surgery and play hockey again sooner, so it was wonderful in that regard. But even more meaningful now is that because I was a physics major at the time, pre engineering, set to go to graduate school for engineering, for me to find a treatment paradigm or approach that made sense from first principles, looking at it from an engineering scientific perspective, that to me was the biggest aha moment, the most wonderful discovery experience.  

And going through that, I just felt called to share this work with as many people as I could. And so I came here to Austin about 15 years ago for graduate school in engineering. And while I was here, I was really passionate about this work and ended up working with the chiropractor for the University of Texas football team. And he had a private practice in town here.  

So I got 150 square feet in his office and started using older versions of direct current. And we're working with him and treating people for various injuries and in the beginning it was mostly athletes like me helping them heal faster. But we started getting these really wonderful outcomes and it was growing. And I kept seeing over those first six, seven, eight years, kept seeing things I wanted the technology to be able to do, ways that I wanted to make it better.  

And so my engineering mind was going in the background. Because I was passionate about the work, I ended up going back to graduate school in neuroscience too. But throughout all this, looking at it as an engineer was-- had some challenges because I had a lot of learning to do, but also was a real blessing. And it allowed me to look at problems related to health and musculoskeletal issues, I think, in a unique and effective way. But also helped me see opportunities to make these breakthroughs in technology.  

And so eventually, after those seven or eight years, finally I just said, you know what, I don't think anyone else is going to do this. I need to do it myself. So then I got some more sophisticated electrical engineers, started prototyping. At the time, I'm glad I didn't know quite how long and how expensive and how challenging the process was going to be, because I may not have done it.

Luke Storey: [00:08:22] Oh, God. I can only imagine.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:08:24] But I'm so grateful that I did. And now it's been five years since we got the FDA clearance and launched the Neubie.

Luke Storey: [00:08:33] Oh, only that long. I guess that's around the time I met you the first time. I think it would have been probably at Paleo f(x) or the Bulletproof conference or something.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:08:42] Probably the 2018 Bulletproof.

Luke Storey: [00:08:43] Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that was it. So that's interesting. So you're pretty new on the scene in terms of what you're doing with this company now.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:08:52] Yeah. Yeah. So we just crossed over five years and it's very cool to see that we've been able to certify a few thousand physical therapists, chiropractors, athletic trainers, and other professionals.

Luke Storey: [00:09:03] Yeah. I was looking at your site today actually, doing my homework, and it says that NeuFit is used by 250 practices/clinics, 1,000 certified practitioners, six universities and 13 pro sports teams. Now that's pretty badass in five years.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:09:21] That's right. Well, we got to update the numbers. It's over 2,000 certified pract-- I don't know what the exact number is. But yeah, I mean, the first major League Baseball team to work with it was the Washington Nationals. And they got it. So they were the first team. They got one in early 2019, just before the season started.  

They ended up getting a second one during that season because the players were fighting over it. Their general manager wanted to get treated and the players were using it. So he said, "You know what, let's get another one." And so they ended up going on and winning the World Series that year.

Luke Storey: [00:09:53] Oh, no way.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:09:54] And so I got to--

Luke Storey: [00:09:55] I know nothing about sports. I wouldn't even know that. You could make up a fake baseball team and I wouldn't know. But they won. That's pretty badass.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:10:02] It was cool. And then one of the players on that team who contributed in a major way in the World Series, a guy named Anthony Rendon. And so he very graciously wrote an endorsement or a blurb for my book. And he talks about how he had back pain that would cause him to miss games many seasons. And it was coming back on towards the end of the regular season. And in his first session, his athletic trainer, who's a wonderful guy, he came and spent a day or two with us here in Austin, learned everything and was just fabulous, a real leader in the sports medicine space.  

And so he did the mapping process and found where he had some of that neurological guarding protection from fatigue, from trauma, from bad habits, from the rigors of a long baseball season. And in one session, he noticed significant relief in his back. And so he started using it every day for just like two or three minutes to warm up, prime his muscles, activate before games, and he was able to play through.  

When he was afraid he was going to be missing games, he was able to play through the playoffs, the World Series. He felt great. He hit a home run in Game Seven. He hit a couple during the World Series and helped them win. And it was this wonderful thing. So I got to connect with-- he really is a wonderful guy too. I got to connect with him and some of the other players and staff and everything. It's been fun how it goes in all these different directions. You don't necessarily anticipate.

Luke Storey: [00:11:24] Yeah, I love it. I love it. It's it's fun for me as a fan of all of these brands and people that I interview it's really cool for me, especially when I see someone at the inception of launching a company or some wacky biohacking device and I have them on the podcast or they're on other podcasts, and then I see them start to scale and awareness. And then an athlete gets a hold of it or a celebrity or something, next thing you know, it's like, they're in the game. It's really cool. So congratulations.  

Back to the inception. I'm always curious when somebody-- when I meet someone and they have a very sophisticated, elegant technology like you have here, I mean, I have this thing here in the house. Alyson and I are obsessed with it now that we have one. It's beautifully designed. Everything works perfectly. It's just a really great piece of equipment.  

And what I'm always curious about was, was there a stage when one of the engineers you hired was building it in his garage and it was real crude and ugly and didn't have the functionality and the sophistication that this has? Were there a number of different versions of it before this.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:12:29] Part of why and how I was able to get the product launched was a series of wonderful serendipities, which I think is a sign that somehow I was on the right path. And so we had a client, a patient in our office who owns real estate and leased some of it to an engineering firm here in Austin. So we started working with them and I went to their office and they were doing all these sophisticated, I don't know, some of it is probably confidential, like military.  

They were doing this thing where it could detect different molecules, different sense in the air, like 200 of them. And they could tell you if there were any explosives around, but it could detect other-- so for them, when I showed them this, they were like, oh, yeah, it's fairly easy compared to some of the other stuff that they're doing. So yeah, the first one was looked like a little chipboard and then it was run by a computer with wires going to it just to make sure we could get the signal out of it.  

So there was no case. User interface was just a couple of buttons on a computer screen. So it was that. And then there was a process of trying to find an enclosure and get the plastic pieces and the industrial design and stuff like that. So it's definitely iterative. Not necessarily in a garage because with an FDA product, there's a lot of guidelines for how you have to do things.

Luke Storey: [00:13:49] Yeah. If you run electricity through people's bodies, you probably can't just wing it, you know?

Garrett Salpeter: [00:13:55] That's right. That's right. There's a lot of procedures, design and verification and validation. But it's a team effort. I mean, electrical, mechanical, industrial design, people who have real expertise and user experience. Then there's a really fascinating process of actually putting it in front of users and saying like, "Okay, can you figure out how to use this? What feedback do you have? Is any of this clunky or not intuitive or difficult to understand?" And so you make some iterative changes like that too.

Luke Storey: [00:14:23] Cool. Cool. I guess tell us about the-- define direct current therapy.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:14:29] So direct current means that the electric field or the flow of electrons is going in one direction. And the contrast to that is alternating current. So there's this historical battle between Edison and Westinghouse, and Tesla is involved this battle of should we use alternating current or direct current in our electrical grid? And alternating current went out for a variety of reasons there.  

But in our bodies, we exist on direct current. And there's a couple of ways to think about it. One image or a way to think about it is to think of a highway. So if you're on a highway, you have a northbound lane and you have a southbound lane and cars don't travel south in the northbound lane or vice versa. So they're only going in one direction, in the appropriate direction on that pathway.  

And just like that, we have pathways in our body from the brain down to the body where the brain transmits signals to turn on or off, or up or down, regulate muscles and organs and different tissues in the body. And then we have pathways that go from the body up to the spinal cord into the brain to report what's going on. And those are direct current pathways. And so just conceptually, there's some value proposition there, I think for using direct current, but where it really comes into play is two effects.  

One being more structural and one being more functional. Structurally, I mentioned this a little bit when I talked about this doctor who was doing functional neurology using direct current, about how the direct current electric field gradient has been shown in a variety of animal models to help orient and accelerate the function of osteoblasts, myoblasts, fibroblasts.  

And what that means is those are cells that control the healing and regeneration of bone, muscle, connective tissue, these different tissues or different structures that can be damaged that would need to heal or regenerate, nerves also. We're doing some really cool work with neuropathy patients and seeing some regeneration of nerves. So we believe there's an effect there working to quantify the outcomes there.  

And so there's that structural component. There's also a functional component. I think this is what we're really better known for because the physical therapists, the chiropractors, the other professionals that use this with their patients, what they often find is that 90% or more of patients notice tangible progress in their first visit. They notice that it creates these wild moments for patients, which is great for them because it makes  the patients want to continue to come in and complete their plan of care or refer their friends and family, and colleagues, or whatever it might be.

And so they like that. But what's happening there, if someone comes in with shoulder pain and they can't raise their arm past about here and then in one session, their arm is up overhead, that is obviously in 10 minutes of actual work on the machine, their ligament is not healing. It's not going back together. So there's no real structural change there. What's happening is a functional change.  

What's happening is that because the brain is oriented towards survival and protection, their brain was limiting movement there as a protective mechanism. And there's value in those protective mechanisms. But oftentimes they're set too conservatively because of bad habits, because of injuries. Use it or lose it is a very real thing. And so those habits contribute to this.  
But the cool thing that we're able to do with this direct current is, in these cases, scan around on the body, do this mapping process where instead of alternating current, where the signal is going back and forth, positive negative, positive negative, it's going to be causing muscle contractions, especially agonist antagonist co contractions like if your biceps and triceps were fighting against each other. Like if you were driving your car hitting the throttle and the brake pedal at the same time, resisting your own movements.

With direct current, we're able to bypass certainly that agonist antagonist co contraction. We're able to bypass actually a lot of the contraction overall and send a lot more neurological sensory input into the body, into the nervous system. So that allows us to do this mapping process so we can send these neurological signals to find where the nervous system is guarding, protecting, shutting down those muscles, where there's a hypersensitivity associated with pain.  

And once we find those, we're able to send these neurological inputs to make these functional changes very quickly. So the name for this would be neuromuscular reeducation, re-educating or teaching the nervous system to function in a new way. And so like I said, over 90% of patients notice progress in their first session because of these neurological changes.  

So the direct current allows us to communicate more powerfully and more precisely with the nervous system. And that often leads to these wow moments or these early progress. But if there's tissue damage, it also, the direct current that influence there, can help with the healing and some of the longer term tissue as well.  

And then one interesting thing very closely related that often comes up is people say, "Well, is there any risk? Are you setting someone up for problems if you're affecting these protective mechanisms or something like that?" And that's a very good question because we have these protective mechanisms for a reason. I mentioned our brain is oriented towards survival.  

Number one priority is to make sure we live to see tomorrow and our brains are willing to sacrifice intellectual ability, our ability to do math or have executive function, are willing to sacrifice our ability to throw a baseball, or jump high, or run fast because our brains don't want us to exert too much energy, don't want us to move, to stretch too far, or run too fast. It creates too much tension. We don't want to tear our tendons off our bones, or risk of injury, or risk that we might deplete ourselves of energy if there's a famine tomorrow. Very deep survival-based parts of the brain.  

And so the survival and protection there of the brain-- so interesting thing about this is that with those protective mechanisms, if there is real damage, like I mentioned this case where someone comes in with shoulder pain and they can only lift to here, 45 degrees or something, and then they're lifting up all the way overhead, in that case, there may have been some tissue damage, but there the limitation was more that functional response, that neurological response to injury and trauma.  

And then in the case where, you know what, it actually is more of a structural issue, it's less about the functional response, that's important, but it is more about the structure is compromised and there's a problem here. In those cases, we'll do that treatment and they may only gain five degrees of range of motion or something like that. So we're not just overriding or hijacking anything.  

What we're doing is presenting that input and allowing the brain to recalibrate what an appropriate level really is. So there's almost a diagnostic component to it. You can tell by working with someone how much of their issue really is a structural problem, how much of it is more of a functional problem. And of course clinicians have to use their judgment.

We don't want to be reckless. If you need to get imaging done or if there's like a serious tear or something's fractured, use your clinical judgment and be responsible in those cases, of course. But this quasi-diagnostic value of telling how structural or how functional the issue is is something that a lot of practitioners really like and use.

Luke Storey: [00:21:54] It's also fascinating as the patient or client to do that mapping and hopefully before we're done, if we have time, we can show the mapping here with the device. People that are watching on the video, you'll see we actually have the thing here because it lives right there in the hallway. I mean, I haven't gotten into the deep therapy with it yet, which we'll talk about, but it is a great cheat for me if my lower back hurts, which is unfortunately 90% of my life five minutes on this and it's gone.  

I haven't permanently healed it yet, but we'll talk about the training. But when I first met you at these conferences, one of the things that I thought was so fascinating was, I had to ask you, okay, well, my shoulder hurts up here, my rotator cuff, maybe I think you call it or whatever this is up here. Deltoid. No, it's like on the deltoid. And so I'd be like, "Yeah, it hurts right there." And then you would do the mapping with the little wet sponge thing, and you would find that the hot spot, the part that really got activated was like on my back, on my scapula or something.  

And it's connected to that and it's related to that, but it's actually the pain is coming from somewhere else or the root of it. I don't know how to explain it right. You can. But as someone who's having the mapping done, that's really fascinating because it seems like very often where you're experiencing the pain is not actually where the dysfunction or the injury even is. Could you explain that? Why is our body getting signals in the wrong place, is what it seems like.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:23:23] This is one of--

Luke Storey: [00:23:23] If it's not my deltoid that hurt, then why does it hurt there if it's this other thing?

Garrett Salpeter: [00:23:28] This is one of the reasons that I really advocate for doing this mapping process, because patients go through that experience and like you said, you get on there and it's like, whoa, you can just really feel. You get that  visceral sensation like, yes, there's something there. I know we're not guessing, we're not poking and prying. There's really something going on there. So there's a lot of value in that from that patient experience perspective.  

But also from a clinicians perspective, it allows one to really find, get closer to the root cause of what's really going on so you can help people in a more meaningful way. And so I think a lot of people listening probably have heard of the concept of referred pain. Yeah, that's something that could be going on here. But there's also this concept of, if the ankles or the hips are not working or are not as mobile or coordinated or strong, proficient as they need to be, a lot of times that causes issues in the knees, for example.  

And that's because the mechanics are going to be off. The feet, for example, I like to think of them as like a megaphone where they amplify. So megaphone would amplify sound, feet amplify movement. So if your foot pronates or supinates, if it rotates two degrees, that might lead to four or five degrees of rotation of the tibia, seven, eight, nine degrees at the femur. So it's this magnified rotation going up the leg.  

And so the mechanics of the feet can have a profound effect on creating these torsions or malalignments, misalignments, imbalances in the knee, for example, there. So when we're going through this process here, we're finding those areas in your shoulder. We found some issues in some of the rotator cuff muscles and some of the stabilizers and movers of the scapula or the shoulder blade. And so there's a few different things going on there.  

But one of the things that I like to or one of the metaphors or images that I like to use is that if you're working at a restaurant and you do one shift and you're supposed to be able to go home, but someone else doesn't show up and you have to stay and work their shift, you're going to be feeling fatigued or you're going to be experiencing the pain as the person who's there working the second shift. But the problem is the person who didn't show up. That the root cause there is not the painful person, it's actually the person who didn't show up.  

So if a muscle isn't doing their job, sometimes another one is going to have to work double time, work that double shift. And in so doing, it will be bracing, holding on, tugging, and pulling on certain areas that can create misalignments that over time can lead to problems or by creating tension, can reduce blood flow, can create hypersensitivity. Something called C fibers can be can be activated and can get issues there.  
So being able to go upstream and figure out what's not working in the first place, I think is very valuable. And anyone with clinical experience would probably agree with that. Where I think we're adding something is a way to identify those areas, going through this mapping process to really identify where that guarding, that inhibition, where those hypersensitivities are, that lead to issues with movement.  

But also even hypersensitivities and perception of threat in the nervous system that lead to chronic pain, even pain that lingers long after an injury has healed and being able to help those people because chronic pain can be debilitating.

Luke Storey: [00:26:52] I'm well aware of that. I've had a lot of it in my life. I have a good life. I'm really healthy. But I would say pain is like one of the things. That's why when I found your technology, I was like, I got to-- this has to be in my life. But I like what you're saying here because I think that we often take a very mechanistic view of the body. We have a problem with our knee, we think, oh, I need to fix the knee. Rather than viewing the body as a whole system that wants to work with us, that wants to be in cooperation.  

And understanding these compensation patterns I think is really helpful. And then of course, being able to run the diagnostics and actually get feedback from the body in the way that you've created. But this is something that took me a long time to start to understand that the lower back pain I had for 20 years turns out is very likely caused by a lack of mobility in my hip. And so the hip has got to move, but it doesn't want to move because it's protecting itself.  

So it goes to the sacrum and it's like, cool. We'll take range of motion from that so you can move about the world and it feels like back pain, but it's really a hip thing. And this is years and years of working with all kinds of different great healers and different modalities and just piecing together the clues and the mystery of like, why does my goddamn back hurt every day. But I think it's so powerful to be able to identify the root cause. I mean, even the diagnostic, even if we're not even talking about the therapy part of it, it's just to figure out what's wrong.  

All right, y'all. We thrived right on through 2022, perhaps the weirdest year to date. And after the end of year, work obligations and holiday family fun, it's easy to start the New Year stressed, worn out and lacking motivation, which is definitely not the way we want to start the new year. So if you're feeling like you need a holiday from the holidays, I have a perfect solution.

Do yourself a favor and start taking Magnesium Breakthrough every night before you go to bed. I do this daily and I don't plan on stopping ever. Why is that? Well, because stress depletes your magnesium levels, and magnesium is critical for getting deep and restorative sleep. And the reason Magnesium Breakthrough is so effective is that it's the only organic full spectrum magnesium supplement that includes seven unique forms of magnesium, all in each pill.  

And trust me, when you get all seven critical forms of magnesium, that's when the magic happens. Pretty much every function in your body gets upgraded from your sleep to your brain, from stress to pain, and even inflammation. And even better, by making Magnesium Breakthrough part of your daily routine, you're going to wake up fully rested, recharged and ready to crush all of your New Year's resolutions.  

So for an exclusive offer for Life Stylist's listeners, go to magbreakthrough.com/luke. And in addition to the 10% discount you'll get by using the promo code LUKE10, you will unlock a special gift with purchase for a limited time only. So again, go to magbreakthrough,com/luke and get your gift.  

I want to ask you one thing. I don't know you that well, but we've hung out a few times and you seem like a really caring and heart-centered guy. You just really have a warm sense about you. And so you've got a business, and I'm sure you guys hopefully are doing well after five years and you're growing and all that. You're probably making a couple of bucks. But I'm curious, how good does it feel for you to know the ripple effect of how many people out there you're alleviating pain for or helping heal?  

If you have a couple thousand practitioners and they have dozens of patients each, I mean, the ripple effect of that is thousands and thousands of people are having a better quality of life because you went to engineering school and learned what you did and put together this machine. I mean, do you think about that?

Garrett Salpeter: [00:30:54] I do. And honestly, it's one of those things where being in any business, especially starting a business, I think there's a lot of challenges along the way. And you need or at least I have needed some extra motivation to push through adversity, to get through the difficult times. And that really is the fuel. It's like, "Hey, look, you know what, if we keep creating these amazing experiences for people like this and providing this sort of relief and improvements, I believe things are going to work out in the end." I just got an email actually this weekend from-- I don't remember what day it is right now, but this--

Luke Storey: [00:31:35] Monday, I guess. It feels like it's already Wednesday. It's a long day today.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:31:42] From a physical therapist in rural, Ohio. And she told me actually two amazing success stories with the Neubie. One was with a young woman, a high school athlete. So she's got some kids that play in the high school teams and so treats their teammates. One is a senior in high school who had a Division 1 basketball scholarship. And then this summer, just a few months ago, got diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is a neurological neurodegenerative disease, essentially, that impaired function in her left leg.

And so they didn't know if she was ever going to play basketball again. They said, look, you may recover, but it's probably going to take a year. And all this stuff, she's concerned like, "Well, am I going to get to play in high school? Am I going to get to play in college? Am I going to be able to have quality of life again? Where am I going to land in all this?"  

And so this physical therapist actually sent me a-- she said, "Hey, I want to I want to show you this video that we did." So this girl went through treatment with this physical therapist, wonderful practitioner named Jackie. And Jackie worked with her. And in about two and one half months had her back to 100%. She went out and played in a high school basketball game, and everyone there knew the story. She was having to walk around with support and everything. And so they saw her out and they gave her a standing ovation when she walked out on the court. I mean, it's just this amazing thing.  

And then there was another, one of her son's football teammates who had a sprained ankle, was supposed to be out for four or five weeks. Got back in one week, didn't miss a game, and was able to go out and play in the state playoffs. And there's so many of them. But see, every time I hear one of those, it's like jet fuel. It fuels up the tank to keep going and to keep doing this work.

Luke Storey: [00:33:24] Yeah, I figured that. I don't know why that just came to mind. I mean, I experience that a lot too doing this thing that I never did before seven years ago. And I just invented my own niche of a career. And like any career, it has its challenges. But then you get an email from someone that's like, "Oh my God, that one episode changed my life," or "I sent it to my mom and then she did the thing and now she's okay." And there's so many of them over the years.  

And it really does help you keep going when things get difficult and stressful because money can't do that. You know what I'm saying? You can't justify a really shitty stressful day because, oh, I doubled my revenue today. Who cares? Doesn't make the day suck any less. Might make your life a little easier on the back end, but not in the moment. So thank you for sharing that. For those listening that might be familiar with-- what is it called? I had it written down here. Oh, TENS. A TENS unit or e-stim. Is what you're doing here any different than that?

Garrett Salpeter: [00:34:25] That is probably the most common question that we get or the most common belief that people have when they see this. They'll be like, "Oh, I see electrodes on the skin. That must be a TENS unit. Oh, my physical therapy office, or my chiropractor, my athletic training room, they have that already." And now maybe some of them do, but generally, no. Generally they have TENS units, traditional electrical stimulation.  

And they're all under the same umbrella because they're applying electrical currents to the body. But there are some major differences. The biggest one being this distinction that we already talked about between alternating current and direct current. So that the TENS device, most of what's out there is alternating current.  

And there's an interesting reason for that. And that is that direct current, the benefits have been known for decades. So the Soviets, in the heyday of the Soviet sports, their era, when they were trying to win gold medals to prove that communism was the best system and try to assert their dominance through athletics, they discovered some really--

Luke Storey: [00:35:24] We're doing that in this country now without the sports. Sorry. Carry on. I digress.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:35:31] So they found all these wonderful benefits of direct current some of which we've already talked about here. And yet they came against this problem where when they got high enough levels into the body to have these therapeutic effects, it would burn the skin of their athletes or whoever their patients, whoever they're working on. And so because of that, we essentially threw out the baby with the bathwater. And direct current has fallen out of favor for decades.  

And so part of the special sauce here is that we've found a way to get direct current into the body but without burning the skin. So we get these structural and functional benefits of direct current, yet with the comfort of alternating current. And so there's some electrical sophistication to that in terms of the waveform and the way it's engineered, but it's essentially reducing the resistance that could lead to heat dissipation and therefore burning and things like that.  

And then also there's some other unique parameters about this that, for example, the shape of the waveform is engineered to mimic the way that charges transfer across neurological membranes. And there are certain qualities like the pulse width, so it's a pulse direct current. And that's a balancing act between having enough stimulation that you'll get to the sensory nerves, but not so much that it becomes intolerable, or uncomfortable, or creates some of these other challenges.  

So there's a lot that goes into it. It's a very interesting exercise to come up with the perfect-- no, not the perfect waveform, but to optimize all these competing variables.

Luke Storey: [00:37:08] Well, that's interesting because I have a little $200 handheld TENS thing I bought. I mean, it was probably eight, nine years ago. I've had this thing forever. I can't believe it still works. You charge it with the USB and it's got a couple of little electrode sticker things I got at an airport or something, and it feels good. Put on your neck or something that's sore. I mean, I don't think it has any real lasting therapeutic value, but for being on an airplane with the sore back or something, I find it useful and I use it here and there.

But you can't turn it up very high because it becomes so painful and so uncomfortable. Whereas with this thing, I mean, sometimes I'll turn it up way higher than I think I can tolerate and without even really warming up, because I think that's how you're probably supposed to do this. You gradually go up until you tolerate. Sometimes I'll just like crank it and see what happens. And there's a little shock initially, and then I'm able to settle into it and it actually feels good at a really high setting, which is really interesting.  

And maybe I'm just a freak. Alyson doesn't share that. When she does it, she goes very slow and not quite as high. But it feels to me like getting a massage combined with acupuncture or something. Or like electroacupuncture where it's like it stings a little bit,  but it's a good sting, if that makes sense. So maybe that has something to do with that, the waveform that you're delivering with that DC current. You could crank that shit is what I'm saying, and it still actually feels good and therapeutic.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:38:44] Yeah. There's a few components to that. One is alternating current, as that signal goes back and forth, sometimes you get those co contractions we talked about. You'll get protective contractions, which has these functional effects, but you actually get a sympathetic nervous system, a fight or flight response in the body. And with the direct current signal of the Neubie, we actually see the opposite. We see an increase in parasympathetic function.  

If you turn it up, that difference may go away because it'll be like a workout if you're turning it up to those levels that you're talking about. It'll be like a workout where you get some sympathetic nervous system activity in order to mobilize energy and meet the immediate challenge. And then you shift into the rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system and recover afterwards.

But there is a difference in the amount of sympathetic activation you'll get at the same level of current if you compare alternating current and direct current. And one of the things that I did as part of the process here is take the Neubie, take a Russian stim or a TENS unit, a traditional alternating current device, and we did something where we would match them. So it's the same amount of current coming out.  

So 50 milliamps of current coming out of the Neubie, 50 milliamps of current coming out of this traditional electrical stimulation device. I put one on one arm, one on the other arm, and with the alternating current device, I turn it up that level and I was just locked. I couldn't move. I tried, I tried, I tried. I just could not push through it.  

With the Neubie, it feels just as intense because just as much energy is being delivered. But I'm able to move through it. And so that speaks to a couple of things. It speaks to less of those agonist antagonists, those fighting each other types of contractions. It speaks to less protection overall, and it speaks to more of that signal going into that neurological input, less to muscle output, more to neurological input. Some of that quality that we talked about.  

And that's something that we can actually change. We can get more or less muscle contraction or relaxation, but there, it's actually more in the relaxation side of the spectrum. And so when you turn it up and you feel like, well, that's intense and it feels like it's making you tighten up, it's actually telling you to relax and it's you fighting against it. But as you breathe through it, as you move through it, you're able to relax through it. And that's part of the process of down-regulating those protective patterns or those protective reactions.

Luke Storey: [00:41:14] Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. I just love the way it feels when it's cranked up. It's like getting a good massage, but it doesn't require anyone else there.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:41:22] And one other point on that. So TENS sometimes is referred to as electronic aspirin. It'll create some of these sensory signals that block or mask the pain, but when you take it off, the pain will come back typically shortly thereafter. Because you're not necessarily having any of this re-education effect to make any more lasting changes, whereas this tends to create-- it's not like one session and anything is cured by any means, but benefits do tend to be more lasting.

Luke Storey: [00:41:53] Got it. And while we're talking about pain, I mean, not emotional pain, but physical pain, what is it? We glossed over that assuming everyone knows, but I'm curious about the mechanism of experiencing pain. I mean, I get, obviously, nature designed us so that if we put our hand in a fire, we go, ow, take it out of the fire, so we don't burn our hand off.  

But what's actually happening with pain and chronic pain and why do we seem to also experience it differently as individuals? Pain isn't the same to every person. We have different thresholds for pain, bothers some of us more than others, etc. So maybe a break down of some of your perspective on pain in general.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:42:37] Pain is a fascinating subject. And I was actually thinking about it when you were talking earlier about the holistic approach to dealing with injury, about how your back issue is really stemming from the hips, or how movement in the feet can actually create these rotational forces all the way up the spine into the shoulders and affect the neck, or different things like that. So when you're talking about pain, we really have to look even more holistically.  

We have to broaden this even more. Because for pain, we're going to have to go into something called the biopsychosocial model, taking into account biology in the body and also psychology and social aspects because they all contribute to pain. So pain is a signal created by the brain. It's a response to perceived threat. So that can be a real or imagined threat, but it's a response to perceived threat. And it's the brain's way of saying, "We need to make a change."  

In some cases, if someone hits you or if I were to whack you with a hockey stick in the leg or something like that, then it's pretty obvious that there was some damage, some trauma to that area. And your brain is creating pain there as a signal to tell you to use the other leg or stay off that leg so that you give your body a chance to heal, you don't risk injuring it worse. There's a 1 to 1 correlation.  

But then there are cases where people have chronic pain long after the original injury has healed. And you have to wonder, well, why is that? The brain is still perceiving that there's some threat there. It could be because of poor movement patterns and the way that you're loading or using that area of the body. It could be because of some of these other issues that are going on.  

So the biopsychosocial model of pain tells us that perceived threats to the system can be tissue-based, biological, but they can also be psychological and social. And so let's say I'm working in a business and I have a conversation with my boss, and my boss scolds me and tells me that I missed the deadline. I fucked up. I messed up the presentation.

Luke Storey: [00:44:44] You can swear on this show.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:44:47] And I'm thinking I'm at risk of losing my job. Well, guess what? There's a deep survival instinct that kicks in, and my brain starts to think, "Oh, shit. If I lose my job, I may not be able to afford rent or food." And there actually is, at a deep psychological level, a survival risk associated with that. I'm afraid of losing my job muscle that my brain can make hurt if it wants to create that signal of pain.  

And so anyone listening to this, if you do experience pain, hopefully you're not experiencing pain right now in this moment, but if you do experience pain, oftentimes it probably is. And I would be willing to bet that when you do, it likely is always in the same place. So it may ebb and flow, but when it comes on, it's likely to be in the same place.  

Because a lot of the reasons that we experience pain are these things that "should not hurt". Like issues professionally with your job, or an argument with your spouse, or you ate a food that you had an inflammatory reaction to, or didn't sleep as well the night before or whatever it might be. So the brain, if it's going to create one of these signals of pain, it's going to-- it doesn't want to invest the energy and resources to build a whole new pain pathway.  

It's going to use a well-rehearsed existing pain pathway. And that's why it's going to tend to reuse that same one. And that's why sometimes if you pay attention to your pain and your symptoms, it'll hurt worse if you're under a deadline or something like that. It'll feel better after a great night of sleep or when you're on vacation or something like that, when your stress levels are reduced during that period of time. So there's a lot that goes into pain.  

One of the things that is really important and one of the avenues by which we're able to help people is that pain is a response to perceived threat. And that perceived threat is oftentimes somewhere in the body. Even if it's a psychological trauma, there is a physical correlate. There's this great field of physiological psychology about how the body affects the brain and the brain affects the body. It's two-way street.  

And so if I'm in a hunched forward position and my body language is expressing that I'm sad, it's really difficult for me to feel happy. You could tell me great news and I'd be like, hooray, but I can't really feel happy in the body because--

Luke Storey: [00:47:11] Yeah. Sure. This is fascinating. I love where you're going with this.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:47:14] And so the experience lives in the body somewhere. And even if Brandon, who was behind the camera here, if he threw a glass jar at me, I would have this stereotypical reaction. I would reflexively lift my arms up to protect my face and my organs, my more vulnerable areas. But if something is coming at me metaphorically, I'll actually do a little bit of that same thing. I may not lift my arms all the way up here, but I'll have some tightening in the front of my body. I'll have that same sort of protective mechanism.  

And so these patterns of protection still exist in the body, even if nothing is coming at us physically. And scanning around and going through that mapping process, we can identify where those patterns are being held in the body and help to work through. So there are some interesting psychological correlates, but there also is a very strong connection there with the experience of pain, and that's part of how we're able to help people with chronic pain.  

And one other point that you touched on that I think is really a wonderful topic to discuss, is why pain is different for so many people or so different across people's experience. And part of that is because pain has been shown, looking at functional MRI, looking at images of the brain, there's at least 12 brain areas that have been identified that are associated with pain.  

And so for some people it's more the emotional area and they might feel sad. For some it might be more of the areas that look into the future and they might feel a stronger sense of worry of, "Oh, my gosh, am I going to be able to do that activity, or play with my kids, or am I going to be-- is it going to be like this forever?" Some people that project more to the future, some people that have different types of experiences based on those brain areas.  

If you have 12 different areas, mathematically, you can have, I don't know, thousands or millions of different permutations of that. It's like if you go to Chipotle, there might be 15 ingredients, but if you did every comb-- there could be a billion combinations of those 15 ingredients.

Luke Storey: [00:49:22] Wow. That's interesting. There's a couple of things that I want to touch on. One is, you're so right about the relationship between physiology and your emotional state. And I watched this video years ago, it was a TV show, and it was talking about body language and basically the power of the body over the mind. And they did these exercises where they had people going into a job interview and they would take on this confident pose where they were like, aaaah, like a lion and roaring and all this stuff.  

And then they go in the job interview and be super confident and crush it. And then they'd have people cow down and shrink  as you were, and they'd have the opposite effect. And so I saw that show and I started doing that before I give talks. I still do that just from that one show because it freaking works. I go on stage and I'm much more open and less self-conscious and just more confident and it freaking works.  

Contrarily, as you were talking, I just remembered this morning, I had a rough start on the day today. And I was in the backyard and I started to feel sorry for myself and just have a f my life moment, which is totally irrational because my life is great. That's how I was feeling. And I covered my eyes like this and put my hand forward. And I was just literally feeling sorry for myself, just like, fuck this day, I hate this.  

And I caught myself doing that, thank God. And then I stopped and just changed my physical posture and sat up and started just taking some breaths and appreciating the sun. And I was able to turn it around. But if I wasn't aware of that, I mean, it could have really colored my day. And that shiftiness that I was experiencing early on could have persisted just because the physiology was dictating being in a victimized mindset, or a frustrated, hopeless frame of mind.  

It's so true. As you hunched over, I was like, "Oh, I actually did that this morning." But thankfully, I caught myself, and pulled my head out of my ass and continued on being grateful for my best life.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:51:26] Awesome that you caught that. And part of the neuroscience of that is that our brains are constantly monitoring our environment, essentially trying to  look for threats to survival. And so our brains process tens of millions of bits of information per second. Only a few of those will bubble up into conscious awareness. So there's so much happening beneath the level of conscious awareness.  
But I think we have to remember that when we talk about the brain constantly monitoring the environment, that of course includes the external environment, what we see, smell, taste, hear, touch. It also includes our internal environment. And so that means temperature and balances of PH balance, carbon dioxide levels, all these different things. And of course the position that we're in. So that is a powerful signal to the brain to give it information about the environment and what's going on. And these different positions are very different signals that do influence activity in the brain.

Luke Storey: [00:52:30] Yeah. I mean, think about I haven't done a yoga class in a while, but I did practice yoga pretty consistently for a number of years and I was always amazed, especially Kundalini yoga. I was always amazed how in 90 minutes I could be a completely different person. I could be having whatever kind of morning, walk in, spend 90 minutes moving the body in various ways, and come out and be like, "Oh, my God, I'm going to have the most awesome day ever." That always tripped me out.  

And it was so reliable. it's just crazy. Just back in the day, these mystics figured out that, well, if you point two fingers that way, and then breathe this way, and put your knee over here, it changes the way you feel emotionally and it changes your mental perception of your reality. It's just incredible.  

The other thing that I thought was really interesting that you touched on was-- you didn't use this, but I'm just going to couch it this way is, we can have emotional PTSD where we were hurt emotionally a number of years ago and then we're carrying that and it's not yet fully healed. And then something similar happens to us today and the day we're in, and subconsciously without our being aware of it at all, it reminds us of that thing that happened before.  

And now we're reacting in a way that's totally not appropriate to the thing that's actually happening. A common phrase people use now is being triggered. You're being triggered by something. And I never thought about physical pain behaving in the same way. So what you were describing, I almost see as a physical PTSD. All these years ago, I hurt my ankle, it's totally fine, it's totally healed, but the body still remembers what had happened. And it's behaving as if it is injured.  

Is that kind of what you were saying with that, the way the body holds on to pain even though it's not actually real anymore? It's almost like a phantom pain of some physical PTSD or something.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:54:26] I think that there's definitely a component to that. I think there is a very logical avenue here by which some of this body-based work can help with psychological issues like that. And that's something that I have seen glimpses of in our work over the years and I'm fascinated by and would really like to explore and do some more formal research on. But I think there's a component to that. There's also a lot of different layers to that.  

So for example, if you have an old ankle injury and it still hurts, sometimes that's because of incomplete rehabilitation. You may have good strength and muscle output, but you may not be getting as much of the sensory input up to your brain from that area. And so if your brain can't see where that foot and ankle is in space, can't see it as clearly, it's going to try to clamp down and limit movement and try to get you to use that area less.  

And one tool for doing that, of course, is creating a signal of pain. And so a really instructive thought exercise here is to think about-- so proprioception is the the word that describes how the brain sees the body in space. And so imagine if we were in this room here and there were a surveillance camera. Your brain was like a surveillance camera looking at you moving around in this room.  

So here we've got these Ottomans, we've got this table, a couple of cameras, and some lights set up and everything. And so if you're walking around in this room with your eyes open, that's a clear surveillance camera. You can see everything. And so you can walk with ease around even navigating some of these complex obstacles here.  

But if you close your eyes, it's like shutting down that surveillance camera. You can't see as clearly where you are in space. All of a sudden now your movements are going to be a lot more guarded because you're going to be afraid of like, am I going to trip over this Ottoman? Am I going to run over and damage that expensive camera? Am I going to kick this table with my shins or something like that?  

And so since you can't see as clearly where you are, you can't predict as accurately what you may run into or what threats, what issues you may encounter, you're going to restrict your movement there. And so sometimes it has to do with a limitation on communication in that area. A good term for that is sensory motor amnesia. So it's like the brain forgets or it doesn't get much information. And so to some degree forgets where that area of the body is or what it's fully capable of doing.  

So there's a lot of different components to that, the physiological psychology and then just that activating that two-way street of communication. And sometimes you need a barrage of energy from a device like this or from good effective movement or manual-based techniques or different things in that barrage of input to remind the brain like, hey, this is here. Hey, you can use this, it's safe, it's okay, less threatening. We can open our eyes and see where we are in this room or whatever the metaphor is.

Luke Storey: [00:57:26] So a lot of this is about turning on the communication through the whole body system so the brain is communicating effectively with the body and the nervous system.

Garrett Salpeter: [00:57:37] Exactly.

Luke Storey: [00:57:38] Yeah. Okay, cool. We all know the phrase let there be light, right? Well, I agree. Light can be a potent life-supporting energy. Not to mention, it allows us the convenience of turning nighttime into daytime on demand. But unfortunately, light can also suck in terms of the negative effects on our health. For example, most indoor lighting flickers, which can be an issue for our neurological system.  

Now you can't see this flicker with the naked eye, but if you shoot a short slow-mo video of your light fixtures or bulbs on your phone, you can see how bad the flicker rate is with many light sources. Try it right now and you'll likely be shocked by what you see. Plus, modern lighting commonly emits a spike in blue light which can disrupt sleep quality.  

And lastly, some bulbs also emit tons of toxic EMF, which is, of course, no bueno. So that's the bad news. Womp, womp. But the good news is that I found the perfect solution to all of these issues. It's the blue light-blocking lighting collection from Bon Charge. Their bulbs remove the blue and even green spectrum and provide balanced light for better eye health and sleep. And they also happen to be flicker-free and very low EMF.  

Plus, they now offer full spectrum bulbs with three settings that you can manually change from day to night so you can mimic visible sunlight and regulate your circadian rhythm all with zero Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. So Bon Charge is just killing the game in blue light blocking lighting, reading lights, lamps, and even night lights. To get your lighting in order, here's what you do. Go to boncharge/lifestylist and use the coupon code LIFESTYLIST to save 15%. That's B-O-N C-H-A-R-G-E, boncharge/lifestylist.  

We were talking about the diagnostic capacity of NeuFit and that you can do the scanning. Are there risks or alternative benefits to other diagnostics like X-rays and MRIs? I know often when someone has an injury, they go get an MRI. Are there things that does for you that this can't do? I've heard negative things about obviously, getting X-rays or getting exposed to radiation.  

Some people say that when you get an MRI, the fluid they put into you is solid deuterium. That's not good for you. There's a lot of people that are against those diagnostics, but they have their place. What's your take on just figuring out what the problem is in those methods or what you've come up with?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:00:08] So there certainly is diagnostic value in X-rays, in MRIs, in other imaging, and there's times when it's necessary. There's times where a bone is broken and there's a risk that it may not heal. And so you need to put in a rod, a pin, a screw, etc. And thank goodness we have skilled orthopedic surgeons for those cases. There's times where you need MRIs to image soft tissues and identify that they are fully torn and you do need to repair them or things like that.  

However, there is, I think, an overreliance on those. There's a famous orthopedic surgeon named James Andrews, and so he's one of the top two or three orthopedic surgeons that a lot of the athletes will go to. So the superstar athletes, the baseball pitchers, when they need Tommy John or NFL receivers, if they have an ACL tear, need an ACL reconstruction, he's one of the top two or three guys that people will go to. Big a name in that field.  

And he became frustrated with the over-reliance on imaging. He was saying to his physician colleagues, "Hey, let's use more of our skills of diagnostics and discernment and physical evaluation, and let's trust our own knowledge more." And so he also thought that the over-reliance on imaging was leading to more surgeries, unnecessary surgeries.

And so he commissioned a small study where he took 30 Major League Baseball pitchers, guys who were actively pitching, who maybe had minor pain or something, but generally weren't experiencing any symptoms, and they were able to go out and pitch and earn hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. And he looked at their throwing shoulders on an MRI. And in 25 out of the 30, they found damage that was bad enough to justify surgery and yet none of them were experiencing any pain.  

And so this is another piece of evidence that allows us to draw this disconnect damage from pain. We talked about how there can be pain when there's no damage. There can also be damage without pain. So it's not a 1 to 1 correlation we often think. Part of why I like to talk about this is is that it can be empowering to patients because a lot of times they think, "Oh, this hurts, it's broken. I'm going to need this brace, or this surgery, or have to take these anti-inflammatories forever." But there's more to it.  

There's more to the story. And so in this case, there was a New York Times article where he talked, he said, "If you want to do surgery, get an MRI or something like that. Because you'll almost always be able to find something to justify doing surgery." But that may not actually be a problem for that person.  

There's other studies that show that something like 50% of people in their 50s who don't have back pain, 50% of them have disc bulges or herniation or things that will show up on an MRI that you'd think could justify at the extreme end surgery or you think would be causing pain, yet these people are not in pain.  

And so I do think that there is-- I would agree with Dr. Andrews that there is an over-reliance on imaging, and that's part of why going through this process, I think, does have some helpful diagnostic ability, like we talked about. Where you can see if someone is making significant improvements and they're lasting, that tells us that it's more of a functional issue. And yes, there may be structural damage and you want to be responsible and give it a chance to heal, but the structural part is not necessarily the biggest problem.  

Whereas if you don't see as much of a functional change, that can tell you that, hey, there probably is more significant damage here. Maybe if we haven't already, let's refer out for some imaging. And maybe it's a surgical case or maybe it's just something where there is damage, we want to keep treating it. We just need to adjust our expectations to know that's going to take longer because there is more healing that needs to happen.

Luke Storey: [01:04:14] Yeah, that's very interesting. It reminds me of many years ago, I mean, this is probably 20 years ago or something. I had first started to have this lower back pain and I went to-- I don't know what type of physician, but whoever checks you out and got an MRI. And I had a couple of disks that were-- I don't know, they were compressed or something. And so they wanted to fuse my spine, basically. And thank God at the time I didn't elect to do that, but I remember them telling me, "Well, what you have isn't that bad. We see people all the time that have much worse disks, but they experience no pain."  

And I remember thinking, "What the hell?" They're like, "Yours isn't bad, but we can fix it." And I was like, "Well, what? This makes no sense." I think that was part of the reason I didn't do it. But it speaks to that, this strange phenomenon wherein people just experience pain so uniquely, every person. You can have someone who has a super shitty MRI and no pain and someone that has a pretty good one and has a lot of pain. So I think that that's a really good example of that.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:05:22] There's a funny adjacent, closely related topic here where in terms of the difference of how people experience pain, people who think that they have a high pain tolerance oftentimes are the most sensitive and don't have a high pain tolerance because they're the ones who are more aware of feeling pain. And so they think, "Oh, I can feel this pain and I can endure it." Whereas the people who really have a high pain tolerance are the ones that are less sensitive and experience less pain overall.  

The people who you could hit them and they're like, "Oh, that doesn't really hurt as much." So it's this interesting way where we fool ourselves or we get fooled a little bit by our own perception there. So when someone comes in to get on the machine, for example, they're like, "Oh, you can probably turn it up high. I have a high pain tolerance," it's a funny thing where they're actually not often able to go as high because we get fooled essentially by that perspective.

Luke Storey: [01:06:18] That's funny. Wow. All right. Well, I guess people are probably listening to this going, wow, this sounds cool. I have pain. I want it diagnosed. I want to learn how to treat it. And you have all these practitioners out there. I'm curious what the percentage of people that are home users like me-- I mean, these things are not cheap, but for someone like me that's experiencing a lot of pain, I don't really care. I want to just get whatever works and I'm willing to do what I got to do to make that happen.  

What percentage of people do you have that are just private users like me versus practitioners? So I want to give people a sense of how easy it's going to be or difficult for them to actually start to experience this technology and to use it for themselves.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:07:04] It's probably close to an example of the 80/20 principle, where 80, probably a little more, percent of the devices that are out in the world are used in clinics, or in a professional setting, or with pro sports teams or universities or stuff like that. Probably a little bit over 80%. So somewhere between 10 and 20% are used by people at home. And that's people like yourself who are either biohacking or health enthusiasts and are interested in putting in the time or have a real pain point where this can help you.  

And sometimes with the body and movement, especially, there is an ongoing requirement for doing it every day. It's not like you can brush your teeth once and it's like, oh yeah, I'm good for the next year or something like that. It's same thing with movement. With movement, we have requirements. use it or lose really applies and it applies even more strongly as we get older. It applies even more strongly if there's any sort of neurodegenerative or different types of conditions like that.  

And so there is some movement requirement that you need every day, just some baseline minimum to maintain your health, vitality, and ability of your body. And so this can help you achieve that, can help you manage pain and stay more comfortable on an ongoing basis. Most commonly, we've seen it used by elite athletes, several professional athletes.

Luke Storey: [01:08:32] And that would be me, obviously.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:08:34] That's right. That's right. So they have their own because they use it to recover. They use it to get in training sessions during the season when it's difficult to get in the weight room and you have to manage all these different loads, and stresses, and challenges between games, and practices, and travel, and late nights, and bad food, and dehydration to be able to get in these very targeted, quick strength stimulus workouts to maintain the strength during the season when it typically starts to die off and decrease during the season, for example.

And then to prime and activate the muscles before games so you're less likely to get hurt and you can perform better. And to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system to do our master reset or vagus nerve stimulation protocol to help recover on the airplane, or between back-to-back games, or just when you're feeling rundown during the season, all those types of things.  

And then there's another big use case with people recovering from surgery or trying to restore function after neurodegenerative diseases or neurological injuries like stroke, spinal cord injury, M.S, things like that. Because these are situations where you ultimately want to be doing therapy every day and it can be more time and cost effective to have a device at home than maybe to go to a clinic or something like that.  

But there is a network of clinicians that we talked about, and so I certainly would recommend, I think it's the best case scenario if you can find a physical therapist, find a chiropractor, find another professional in your area who's using this. And we have a landing page at neu.fit/luke. N-E-U.F-I-T/luke. So if people are interested they can look up, find a provider in your area. Hopefully, there will be one somewhere nearby.

Luke Storey: [01:10:13] I was going to mention that. Yeah. So it's www N-E-U.F-I-T/luke. And I also got word before we started that you guys are giving $1,000 off for the Neubie for people that want to get them. So thank you for that. I love it when guests come on and they're going to talk about their stuff, they give a little hook up to the audience.  

For me with this kind of thing-- and I mean, you got to understand, for most of my adult life, there was no way any of the things that I have now would be attainable to me in any way, just because I was waiting tables and a musician and  just hand to mouth. Eating organic food was as much as I could spend on my health at some point. And even not that or in the early years.  

But the way I look at it, with some things, it was this way with the hyperbaric chamber that I have downstairs. It was like, I think 22,000. It's a lot of freaking money for me too. But I priced out. I wanted to work on my cognition. I priced out going and doing individual sessions. When I went and got a brain scan with Dr. Amon. He said, you need to do 100 hyperbaric sessions to fix your brain. And he seemed to know what he was talking about.  

So I priced it out. It was like $250 a pop plus gas, parking, the time to drive there, all that. And it actually made sense to just finance the chamber for me. But that's because I had something that I really wanted to work on. And in this case here, I also have some physical things that I really want to work on. And I went and saw you guys at the NeuFit headquarters here in Austin, which I was so stoked to learn you were here close by.  

And Alyson and I went in and it's like, cool, I'll go pay for some training with one of your guys and it was great, but I'm not going to do that three times a week. Even if I had the money, I don't have the time, but if it's here, I can do it. So I think for some people like that, it makes sense. But I was looking on your site and some of the things that practitioners are using this technology for, I mean, I did an edited list here, but these are things that I hear from listeners of the show.  

Hey, do you know anything like how do you fix this? How do you fix that? Plantar fasciitis, ankle sprain, shin splints, knee alignment injury, which I think is something that Alyson has a little bit of, pulled groin, strain quad or hip flexor, obviously back and neck pain, rotator cuff injury, shoulder impingement, tennis elbow, carpal tunnel, arthritis, swelling, recovery from orthopedic surgery.  

Those are the things that I figured it would work for because I'm getting relief from the pain associated with those type of things. But then, and you alluded to this a few minutes ago, then there are applications for more serious neurological issues like spinal cord injury, TBIs, traumatic brain injuries, and as you mentioned, M.S. What are the practitioners doing with those more serious neurological issues? What protocols do they use to get someone back in the game?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:13:09] With those patients, I mean, it's a similar process in that you're putting the pads on, applying that direct current, combining it with movement. If they can't move on their own, then the therapist might be lifting their leg or their arm for them or assisting them in rolling over or crawling or supporting themselves. So it's maybe regressed movements, but it looks similar.  

The cool breakthrough there is that with patients who need to heal from neurological injury or neurodegenerative diseases, there, what we're really after is neuroplasticity. And neuroplasticity is this wonderful term that gets thrown around, essentially describes--

Luke Storey: [01:13:50] When people are talking about microdosing.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:13:53] Yeah. Right?

Luke Storey: [01:13:54] You hear that word a lot these days.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:13:56] So another different part of the same concept. So neuroplasticity describes how our nervous system adapts to the environment. So it's like why you and I, growing up in the US, we may speak English or Spanish, and a child who grows up in China would speak Mandarin. Because they've adapted to learning the language that they're hearing all the time as we do here.  

And so part of neuroplasticity is you essentially need enough input to convince the brain that these pathways, these muscles, these tissues are important, we're going to be using these, and it is worth investing the energy and resources to build up and then maintain those for the long haul. And it takes-- for a patient recovering from a stroke or trying to restore function they lost because of M.S, it takes a level of commitment and training typically that is on par with a professional athlete.  

It's hours a day of focused therapy, not just for a day or a week, but for weeks and weeks, for months and months and months to accumulate hundreds of thousands of high-quality repetitions. And then with the recovery in between, because you need to be able to eat and digest and assimilate the food and have the raw materials to rebuild, you need to be sleeping well at night because deep sleep is when we rebuild structures of the body. Rem sleep is when we remodel the nervous system and assimilate or integrate what we've learned during the day.

And so you need to have stimulation. You need to have an effective session, effective recovery, effective session, effective recovery. And you have to repeat that ad nauseam, for months and months and months, in order to create these changes. And so what the Neubie allows us to do is take that physical therapy session and supercharge it so that you're essentially getting the benefits of doing hundreds or thousands of movements in the time that you're doing dozens of movements, because you're getting that barrage of that direct current, that sensory neurological input.  

So there's still a critical mass of work that you need to accomplish in order to achieve these goals. We're just helping people get there faster. And so what might normally take three years maybe is 18 to 24 months. It's still a long time. It's not like, hey, you're done in a few sessions. It's not like a sprained ankle or some of those other more orthopedic, more common things that we see.  

But it is still a huge value proposition to be able to have a much more significant effect or be able to get the same effect in half or two- thirds of the time or whatever it might be. It certainly varies per person, but that's the value proposition there with those neurological patients, is to tap into that power of neuroplasticity.

Luke Storey: [01:16:41] That's cool. I mean, if you think about the improvement in quality of life when someone's dealing with something that's that dramatic, I mean, oh, I got a sore elbow or a bad back, I mean, you can just mask it and forget about it. But when you're dealing with something like M.S or a spinal cord injury, a small improvement is a huge improvement in your quality of life. So that's pretty huge. That's very cool.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:17:05] And we've seen certainly a lot of those cases where those small improvements make huge improvements. We've also seen some huge improvements. In my book, for example, I tell a story of a woman who has M.S, and she over time just had this decline, decline, decline where she had some chronic pain, she lost function, she became wheelchair-bound. She had to give up her driver's license. She was working at a school, couldn't work anymore, had to have a caregiver at home. Well, she came down. She actually lives in Wisconsin.  

She came down to spend a week with us in Austin, started making some progress. She was able to bend down. She was able to reduce her spasms enough to where she could bend down to tie her own shoe for the first time in a couple of years. And then she had enough strength to lift her leg, to straighten her leg, extend her knee while sitting in her wheelchair for the first time in a while there, and started having this-- saw progress.  

So she got she took a machine home, worked with one of our physical therapists remotely to create a program, and she continued with that, and over time she got out of her wheelchair, started walking again, she got her driver's license back. She actually went back and started volunteering at the school where she used to teach. She got rid of her caregiver at home and just regained her autonomy. I mean, this amazing story, it didn't happen overnight. It took 18 months of work.  

And because she still has this autoimmune condition and this neurodegenerative threat, she still does it. But she was doing four or five days a week worth of work, treating herself like an athlete for a long enough period of time that she accumulated all these benefits. And you look back at where she was 18 months prior, and it's just a transformation.

Luke Storey: [01:18:45] Wow. That's cool. Do you foresee at any time in the future of your product development coming out with something that's more of a home user model that's less expensive and perhaps doesn't have some of the deeper therapeutic value, but just a pocket model Neubie or something that's still useful for people that's a little more attainable if somebody did just have like a carpal tunnel or a minor sprain or something like that?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:19:12] So we're certainly always looking for ways to innovate methodology technology. And that is one of the things on our list. As we sit here today, we don't necessarily have a timeline of exactly when something like that would be out, but it's in the works. And excuse me, get another sip of water here.

Luke Storey: [01:19:30] Well, I got you talking a lot. I got a million questions. You're going to get worn out eventually.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:19:35] Got to. There we. The spring water, though, is amazing.

Luke Storey: [01:19:38] It's good. Shout out to Alive Water. If you're in Austin or California, and I think they have it in Miami now.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:19:44] Oh, nice.

Luke Storey: [01:19:44] Yeah. Great. Spring water delivered to your doorstep. Yeah. It's amazing. You guys could get it in your office, man. It's the same price as freaking Mountain Valley, people. I mean, that's more expensive than tap water, but in terms of bottled water delivered to your house, it's amazing.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:20:01] We're off line. We got to talk. I know you've done some episodes on this, I'm sure. I can just listen to it on the way back home. But difference between-- we use reverse osmosis filter and we got some other, trying to be diligent about having good quality water, but you know what I'm talking about.

Luke Storey: [01:20:14] Yeah. Well, at least you're doing that. On that point, it's a short answer, our water I think is good because it's clean. You just got to re-minimalize it and spruce it up a little bit with some restructuring and you basically can reconstitute it so that it's like spring water. I'm a purist. So if I can, I'm going to drink the real deal. But I have an AquaTru RO system down there.  

And when I don't have this water, that's what we drink. And we were drinking that for a year and a half before we moved into the house. So it's all good, man. As long as your water doesn't have fluoride, a bunch of crap in it, you're winning. I always remind myself there's many people on the planet that don't even have clean, potable or-- what do they call it? Potable? Potable water?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:20:53] Yeah

Luke Storey: [01:20:53] It's spelled potable. I'm just going to call it potable. What's up with this foot bath? You turned me on to this parasympathetic hack. I did it one night. No, no, no. No. There's two things I want to ask you. I'm confused. One is the foot baths that I have not done yet, but I have my little foot bath over there ready to do it. I printed out the instructions today, but you taught me this other parasympathetic deal that you said really brought your HRV scores up at night. Could you describe, I don't know, those applications which are just for general wellness and just tuning your nervous system?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:21:29] Yeah, absolutely. Oh, just to finish the thought on the personal use device there where, I just want to make sure I mentioned it before I needed to get some water for my throat there, but definitely something that's in the pipeline. I mean, probably a couple of years away and now having been through the development cycle and knowing how long this truly takes, but definitely something is in the work.  

And like you doing this podcast and wanted to get this wonderful message out to more people, we want to be able to touch, to impact the lives of more people. And so that's certainly something that's on the radar there. So in terms of this parasympathetic activation, there's a protocol that we call the master reset. And so it's our version of a vagus nerve stimulation. I'm sure most people listening know vagus nerve parasympathetic nervous system.  

Essentially, if it's not clear to anybody, it's essentially the rest and digest side of the nervous system where the feed and breed side which counteracts the fight or flight, the sympathetic stress nervous system side of the nervous system. And those are essentially antagonistic. This fight or flight speeds up heart rate, increases blood pressure to mobilize energy to rise to meet an immediate challenge. Sends blood out to the muscles.  

Whereas the opposite, that feed and breed or rest and digest, sends blood away from the muscles of the periphery, sends blood more into the organs so we can better digest food, eliminate waste, fuel the reproductive organs. So feed and breed. And it also slows down the heart rate, reduces blood pressure, and has a calming effect. So we need to spend enough time in that rest and digest state in order to recover from exercise, to recover from the stressors of a day, the stresses and challenges of life.  

And so many of the issues the health issues that we experience are a direct result of spending too much time in that fight or flight state. So issues with high blood pressure, issues with digestion, elimination. A lot of people have GI issues or constipation. Infertility is something that is affected by that because too much time in fight or flight means less resources to those long term growth and repair projects like reproduction.

Luke Storey: [01:23:43] Oh, that's interesting.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:23:44] Yeah. So growth and repair of our own tissues and our organs and things like that, we need to spend enough time in that rest and digest state. And so if you do a guided breathing, a structured breathing meditation type practice, that has been shown to increase your heart rate variability. So heart rate variability is a measure of the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system.  

Many people listening, I'm sure, know what that means. But basically what heart rate variability is, is these subtle increases and decreases in your heart rate with different phases of the breath. And it's basically saying, how well am I keeping up with the stresses and challenges of life? If I'm doing well, I have enough bandwidth to respond to subtle changes in my environment, like changes in air pressure as I breathe in and out. And so I'll make these subtle adjustments in my heart rate.  

Whereas if I'm overwhelmed with all the shit going on out here, I don't really have the bandwidth to respond to those more subtle cues. And so heart rate variability, we actually want more variability because, generally speaking, more of that means that we're doing a better job of keeping up with the stresses and challenges, spending enough time in the rest and digest state. So heart rate variability is a very good metric for health, for resilience, etc.

If you do a structured breathing or meditative practice, you'll see heart rate variability increase. If you do that in combination with putting the pads on the base of the skull and the balls of the feet like we do for the master reset, you'll see that increase in heart rate variability of times two, times three, times four, times five, much more significant. Because we're getting stimulation of these very neurologically rich areas, getting stimulation of the vagus nerve directly.  

The feet are so neurologically rich. There's this whole discipline of foot reflexology. And I don't necessarily-- now that I hear myself saying it, I'm curious to look into it and see how well validated it may or may not be scientifically, But there's these theories of how parts of the foot are reflexively connected to the rest of the body and things like that. And I know that there are strong connections between the foot and certain areas of the body.  

So the medial part of the foot has a reflexive connection to the psoas muscle. Middle part, quads. Outside part of the arch of the foot is connected to the glute medius. There's connections between the calcaneus, the heel bone, and the hamstrings. So if you mobilize those areas of the foot, you'll see improvements in activation or range of motion of some of these other muscles in the hips and legs, for example.

Luke Storey: [01:26:09] That's wild.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:26:10] There are a lot.

Luke Storey: [01:26:13] It's also true. If I rub my wife's feet, she will fall asleep in like 10 minutes.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:26:17] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:26:18] Knocks her on her ass. It be like 8:00, we're watching TV, I'm like, I want to rub her feet because it's nice for both of us. And then I'm like, "No, she'll fall asleep," literally every time.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:26:28] So there's something to it there for sure. So we stimulate those areas and we see, as measured by sophisticated heart rate variability measurement tools, see significant increases in heart rate variability there. And so that essentially is telling us that the body is shifting from that stress fight or flight state into that parasympathetic rest and digest, repair and recover state.  

And that's a good thing to be doing on a regular basis. So spending more time in that state. So some really good health benefits for growth, and repair, and regeneration, healing pain, also for sleep. So I also have one of these at home and my favorite time to do that is before bed. If you're in a physical therapy clinic, you can do it at the end of your session. You can't necessarily bring it home and do it before bed.  

But doing it at all is certainly better than none. And then timing can make a little bit of difference. But when I saw, with my Oura Ring, my heart rate variability scores just jump up dramatically when I did it several nights in a row, it seemed like there was some cumulative benefit. It took me to see really significant changes in my heart rate variability. I went from 60 millisecond average to over-- I didn't see much movement the first eight or nine days, but days 10, 11, 12, 13, I went 100 milliseconds, 120, 140. I got to these numbers that I didn't even know the scale went that high.

Luke Storey: [01:27:47] My average is around 50. I don't think it's ever-- I mean, even when I look at different points in the night, it's never over 70 probably. That's crazy.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:27:58] Let's try that with you. We'll start doing that before bed.

Luke Storey: [01:28:00] When you told me about it, I did it one night, but then I got paranoid because I've been really having terrible tinnitus lately and those electrodes going on the back of my neck and I was like, I don't know if it's going to make my hearing get wackier or not. What do you think about that? I mentioned it briefly when you walked in. We didn't really have time to get into.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:28:20] That's right. I want to do a little bit of work on you and see if we can help that. So we don't-- I mean, it's one of the things like we're not FDA cleared to treat tinnitus. We're not making claims about it or whatever. But we have seen cases where people have it and we do some work on the neck, particularly the parts of the neck around and beneath the jaw where the cranial nerves pass through.  

And we've seen people report improvements there. We've seen people report improvements in other aspects of hearing or things like that. We also do some stimulation on the vestibular nerve, which it's the vestibular cochlear nerve, shared nerve between hearing and the vestibular system. And so there's some things that we've done where we've seen benefits for people, and I think it's worth trying.  

It's essentially a form of neuromuscular re-education. It's stimulating the nerves that are reporting that ringing sound or causing you to experience that. If it's happening at different parts in the brain and we may or may not be able to do it but--

Luke Storey: [01:29:20] If you can fix that, I will name my firstborn child after you, sir.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:29:24] I hope it's a boy.

Luke Storey: [01:29:26] Yeah. Right. Sorry, young girl Garrett. Yeah. It's becoming really problematic. Well, that's good to know, because now when I do, I'm usually pretty nonchalant about the experimentation I do. I'm going to put freaking PEMF on my head, whatever. I probably push the envelope a little bit out of the realm of safety, but it's how I'm wired. And I also like to be able to report to people like, "Hey, I took it too far. Don't do that." I'm willing to take one for the team. But yeah, I got real nervous about the ringing. So that's good to know.  

I'm going to take a moment here to share an incredible resource with you. It's called Quantum Upgrade. Every unit of matter contains quantum energy, and so do our cells. Every person has a quantum energy field and constantly interacts with other quantum energy fields. Quantum energy is so important that the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was specifically about quantum entanglement.  

Let me explain here how Quantum Upgrade uses this energy to powerfully enhance our well-being. Through many years of research, Quantum Upgrade has developed one of the world's most potent sources of usable quantum energy. When you sign up for their service, Quantum Upgrade associates your home, your phone, your business, your pet, or even your car with this energy source.  

And you all know by now what an EMF mitigation fanatic I am. That's because EMF frequencies are incoherent and dramatically stress the human body. Well, Quantum Upgrade counters this problem by harmonizing the EMF to make them no longer toxic to your body. This is why I love the service on my car. My car fatigue has dramatically improved. I mean, it very obviously works.  

But apart from the EMF benefits, Quantum Upgrade also enhances your vitality in many other ways, which are shown in the studies on their website. So if you want an affordable way to deal with EMF and experience the vitality you deserve, check out quantumupgrade.io and get a 15 day free trial using the code. LUKE15. Again, that's quantumupgrade.io.  

Speaking of PEMF, do you know any practitioners that are using NeuFit in conjunction with PEMF, like the pulse centers, that really powerful one or anything? Is there any synergy between them that you've observed?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:31:48] We have a few. Off the top of my head I can think of two or three clinics that are using both. There may be more also. It's interesting because there's there's a fair bit of overlap, certainly some differences, but there's overlap because PEMF is essentially a magnetic field being introduced to the body, whereas this is an electric field.

But electricity and magnetism interact in such a way that both an electric field and a magnetic field will cause charges electrical charges to move. That's just basic physics. And there's a lot of similarities. So if you have that pulse centers or something and you feel it pulsing, click, click, click, click, five times a second or something, if you turn this to a frequency of five per second and you put it on, it'll feel similar.

Luke Storey: [01:32:35] Oh, right. Right.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:32:36] This is going to be more specific. And so it's, I think more about neurological function that's going to be more general and I think more about blood flow energy to the area, more effects on inflammatory conditions or things like that. So I think it's like a Venn diagram. There's some overlap, there are some differences, but they certainly can play well together.  

And I mean, I like it. I think where the overlap is, though, is that there's different ways to get to the same place. And that biggest difference probably is that more general. The magnetic field is just going to go everywhere in the path, whereas this is going to be a little more specific.

Luke Storey: [01:33:16] Yeah, that makes sense. And then what about the foot bath? And on the note of the foot bath, before I had the Neubie, I was using it a lot over at the ARX headquarters on Sundays. We all, Mike, and the guys. They let a few of us in to use their machines and stuff like, oh, friends and family Sunday workout. And I've been pretty consistent with it. So I like to use it over there.  

The other day I was over there and I asked him, I was like, "What's up with the foot bath thing? And how do you do it?" And he was explaining it to me and he goes, "No, bro, what it is, the real shit is you do a bath, bath, the full body. And I have a really big tub here." And so maybe that's off label. I don't know if you can speak to that, but he's like, "No, you put the electrodes in there the same way you do the foot bath, but your whole body gets buzzed."  

And I was like, "That sounds cool, but I want to check with Garrett before I go off the rails with that." Because electricity and water obviously typically don't mix, but we're dealing with, I'm sure, a shielded or gated DC current. It's a little different than throwing a hairdryer in your bathtub.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:34:16] So yes, it is different because we're putting the electrodes in the water. Be sure you do not put the device itself in the water. That could be problematic.

Luke Storey: [01:34:28] Expensive too.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:34:29] So yes. Yes. You don't want to do that.

Luke Storey: [01:34:30] Avoid warranty.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:34:31] Yeah. Right. Right. So when we're putting the electrodes in the water-- so the foot bath, we typically would have one of the pads on your body and then the other one is going to be a conductive carbon silicone electrode just floating in the water. And there what'll happen is that instead of just being being more concentrated at the electrode, the currents are going to disperse more throughout the water.  

So with the feet in hands, that's valuable because they're so neurologically rich. There's so many mechanical receptors, so many sensors and nerve pathways there. And if you disperse the current throughout the water, you're able to stimulate more of them. And so that tends to be beneficial to get that barrage of input spread throughout these very neurologically rich areas. They have huge representations in the brain and just a really target rich area here to stimulate.  

So if you had pads in the bathtub, it would be the same thing, where if you had some pads down by your feet and others up at your waist or up by your shoulder or something like that, the current is going to be dispersed throughout there. So you can spread it out a little more. It'll be less concentrated at the feet probably, and just more spread, more dispersed throughout the whole body.  

And so you may you may feel in different places. It may be more or less sensitive at certain places because of where the current is going to be spread and less concentrated and things like that. But definitely something you can do especially if you have a device at home.

Luke Storey: [01:35:59] I'm doing it.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:36:00] But just be careful not to get the device wet.

Luke Storey: [01:36:02] Yeah, yeah. Clearly. Now with the foot bath, you're putting in the little rubber disc into the water and then you're putting one of the sticky electrodes on your skin outside of the water, right?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:36:13] You can do it that way. You also could just have-- if you had two buckets of water, you could have one floating in one and one in the other, and then it would go up one leg and down the other.

Luke Storey: [01:36:23] Oh, okay, so a red in one and a black in and the other, a positive and a negative.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:36:28] Could do that. We typically have-- so a lot of times we do this with neuropathy patients. And we'll have one pad on the body up along the spine where the nerves are exiting the spinal cord so that we're getting stimulation along that entire nerve pathway because you're creating that electric field gradient along the entire nerve pathway, which we believe will influence that healing to happen there to repair, rebuild.  

Whether it be the myelin sheath or axon collateral sprouting or different things like that, some healing and regeneration. So there's there's value in doing it that way. But essentially, yeah, you need to you need to close the electrical circuits. You need to have two points of contact. So typically one up on the body and then the other with that electrode floating in the water.

Luke Storey: [01:37:15] And how do you get two points of contact if you're putting it in a whole bathtub?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:37:19] So that, you want to make sure--

Luke Storey: [01:37:20] Because your body is in there so there's no dry part of your body to stick it on.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:37:23] Right. So one way to do it is to have your shoulders out and then put sticky pads on your traps. And then have the other ones, the rubber conductive ones floating down by your feet.

Luke Storey: [01:37:39] Got it. Would you have one negative and one positive on your body and one negative and one positive in the water?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:37:45] If you did that, then the charges would probably move between those and between these. You want to have both positive at one end, both negative at the other end. So the gradient is longitudinally from head to toe.

Luke Storey: [01:37:58] Got it. Cool. I'm doing it. That sounds fun. Now that I've heard it from the man himself, that as long as I do it right, I'm safe. I think that sounds really cool. Now, we've been talking mostly about the application as it has to do with rehabilitation and injury, healing and things like that. But there's also a massive fitness component of this. So I wanted to just cover that for the fitness enthusiasts out here.  

One thing you did when you came over the other day was we did the bicep workout with no weights using the training mode on here. And I have no weights in my hands. We put the electrodes on my biceps and then I'm doing curls with zero weight and it's like I have 60 pounds on my hand or whatever. Just insane. And you told me, you were like, "You're probably going to be sore tomorrow."  

And I'm like, "I don't know, I do curls all the time. I'm never sore." Sore as hell the next day or the day after, whenever it was. So I think that was really interesting. So how, I guess, are athletes using this modality for peak performance and fitness?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:39:06] One of the things that we talked about a little bit was how we can preferentially contract or relax muscles here. And on the therapeutic side, we most commonly are doing more of the relax where we're bypassing contraction, sending a lot more of that sensory neurological input. However, we can shift some of the settings as part of what's in one of our patents, and part of the special sauce here is that we can shift some of the settings to create more muscle contraction and increase recruitment.  

So you can actually get the benefits of weightlifting, for example. So if you were just doing a bicep curl with with no weight in your arm at all, moving just the weight of your forearm and your hand is not much. You could do this all day and not feel-- you could do hundreds of these and not feel a ton of fatigue. You might not be sore, probably not get a ton of effect or depletion or breakdown of muscle or anything like that.  

But if you have a weight in your hand, the difference is that to move that weight, it forces you to recruit more muscle fibers, to create more tension, to create enough force to overcome the force of gravity on that weight. And what we're doing at those settings when we did your arm workout is we're actually using the Neubie, using that signal, to increase recruitment.  

So you're getting a lot of the benefit, you're getting a lot of the muscle recruitment, and a lot of the benefits as if you were lifting heavy weights, but without having to lift those weights and not put as much strain on your joints, not have as much risk of injury.  

And so for people who are recovering from injury, for people who lack the mobility to get into certain positions, or for whom it wouldn't be safe to load up with traditional resistance exercise, or for athletes who are at certain points in the season where they need some strength stimulus to maintain, but they don't necessarily want to load up with a heavy bar and do squats and deadlifts or things like that, there's applications here where you can do this.  

In one of our first peer-reviewed, published journal articles talks about how or shows that you actually get a similar effect in muscle from using the Neubie like we did with no weight compared to using 75 or 80% of your one rep max. So a weight that you could do eight to 10 times, for example.

Luke Storey: [01:41:19] That's crazy, dude.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:41:21] You get a similar effect there.

Luke Storey: [01:41:22] So that's what's really cool about that. And I think you touched on this was there's, I think less or maybe no risk of injuring yourself from moving outside of your range of motion. And that's why I like the X3 Bar, I have that in the backyard, the ARX machine. I like these things where you can really push yourself in terms of resistance training, but it's almost impossible to injure yourself or bust a joint because you're in the range of motion and you can't really move out of that.  

Is that the case here where it's much safer? But if you crank this thing way up in training mode, I mean, you could get where you can barely move, but it's not like you're going to snap a tendon or something, right?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:42:07] Exactly. So it's safer in that regard. But there's tradeoffs to everything in life. And here, with great power comes great responsibility. Good quote from Spider-Man. So here, we only did two minutes worth of curls, maybe we did 50 movements or something like that. Whatever the number was, we did about two minutes worth of just you bending and straightening your arm.  

And I said, even though you're not going to feel fatigued now, and even though it you may not feel like you did that much, in two days, you're probably going to be sore. And you were, so that, with great power comes great responsibility, we don't want to make you debilitating sore for a whole week. And so we want to choose an effective dose. And so with exercise, it's like medicine. You choose the exercise, which is like choosing the medicine.  

Then you choose the dose and the timing. And here we want to make sure that we start with that, just two or three minutes in the beginning, see how you respond, see how sore you get, make sure you recover effectively from that. Make sure you treat it like a workout. So you're hydrating and getting enough amino acids in so you can rebuild. You're getting enough sleep, all those sorts of things, limiting alcohol, because that can be problematic.

Luke Storey: [01:43:23] I'm good on a couple of those. I got great sleep, I got my key on aminos.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:43:28] There you go.

Luke Storey: [01:43:28] And I haven't had a drink in 25 years, sir.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:43:30] There you go. Very good.

Luke Storey: [01:43:31] So I can just go nuts, in other words.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:43:33] So maybe now you can go from two minutes to three minutes.

Luke Storey: [01:43:36] Yeah. Yeah. Right, right, right.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:43:37] I mean the positive side of that is you can get all you need for your arms, your biceps and triceps in two or three minutes worth of work. You can do this, a really quick, efficient workout for strength and hypertrophy, And the second study, we looked over the course of a whole training cycle and saw a similar muscle growth over either six or eight weeks. Similar muscle growth compared to using the Neubie with no weight compared to, again, 75 or 80% of one rep max traditional resistance exercise.  

So you can get that done in just a few minutes per body area, which is the plus side, the time efficiency and the safety. And then the other side there's that point, you want to be careful not to overdo it, because it is a very powerful tool. It needs to be respected.

Luke Storey: [01:44:21] Yeah. Amen. Thank you for that. I've literally never met anyone in my life who doesn't like a little sex from time to time. In fact, some folks like it a lot of the time. The thing is that for men, their physical readiness is an important part of making this happen. Remember the last time you were at the gas station and you saw on the counter those horribly branded erection pills? Did you ever take a second to see what's actually in those products? They are terrible for you, just super toxic.  

And the same goes for most of the medication on the market that claims to help men in the bed. But who wants a four-hour erection, nasty side effects, heart problems and a possible trip to the hospital to get rid of that thing? Well, luckily for me and maybe some of the men listening, I recently found this really cool product called Joymode that fills this gap.  

It's a performance booster, much like a pre workout, but for sex. It's really cool. Joymode's gig is that they make natural and science-backed sexual wellness supplements for men. Their sexual performance booster is designed to support erection quality, and firmness, and the sex drive. It contains clinically supported doses of L-Citrulline, Nitrosigine, Yohimbine, and vitamin C. To get yourself primed with the old Joymode, all you do is tear up in the hatchet and mix it with a glass of water, just like your favorite electrolytes.

And about 45 minutes later, it's going to be magic time. You'll notice better blood flow, better erection quality and firmness, and increased sexual energy and drive. I've actually taken this product myself many times, and frankly, I was shocked that it actually worked and provided zero side effects. Do you gentlemen want to spice things up in the bedroom and boost your sexual performance? And do you want to do it naturally without those nasty prescription drugs?  

Well, we've got a special offer for Life Stylist's listeners right here. Go to usejoymode.com/luke and enter the code LUKE at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's usejoymode.com/luke.  

I do want to do a little demo for the people that are watching on video and for those that are not watching on video and you're just listening to this, you can go to lukestorey/garrett, G-A-R-R-E-T-T, and we're going to put all the things we talked about in those show notes. And there for you listening, you'll also find a link to the video.  

So if you are listening to this whole audio and you want to see a little of this action, you can go to those show notes and find it. But I thought it'd be cool to do a little of the scanning, the diagnostic. I mean, we won't be able to do as much as we would in a real training session with you or another practitioner. But people can get the idea of what we're talking about. Because I know if I was listening to this, I would be annoyed because I would want to see it. What's the freaking thing look like? How does it work? So maybe you want to do that.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:47:19] Yeah, for sure.

Luke Storey: [01:47:19] Okay, cool. Within the last couple of minutes we have. Oh, and also, let's give a shout-out to your book here on my camera, which is called The NeuFit Method. And thank you for bringing that over. So hopefully my editors catch that shot and you do have some really good endorsements here on the back. Terry Walhs, Dave Astbury, a couple of heavy hitters there. Thank you for bringing that. And for people obviously that want to learn more, I'm assuming everything you just talked about is in here at even greater depth, right?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:47:48] Yeah, absolutely. It talks about some of these really powerful principles of neuroscience and then how to apply those in daily practice for sports injuries, for recovering from surgery, chronic pain, some of these neurological injuries or diseases, and then fitness and optimization and how to track and monitor the health of the nervous system over time too.

Luke Storey: [01:48:07] Oh, cool. And I saw this on your site. People can get it there, too, right?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:48:11] Yeah, for sure.

Luke Storey: [01:48:12] Okay, cool. All right. Rad.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:48:15] All right. So remember we want to have an electrical circuit, which means we want to have two points of contact. So can I maybe put this on your low back again just to get it out of the way? In there. All right.

Luke Storey: [01:48:28] Right. So that's our point of contact. And then you're scanning is going to be done with the little wet sponge.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:48:34] That's right. That's right.

Luke Storey: [01:48:35] Does that act as a ground, the one you put on my back?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:48:40] Exactly. This electrode is for ground. You need to have a positive negative. When we were doing your back, for example, we were scanning around on your back. So now if we're looking at your arm, I'm going to do this process, same thing, where I'm going to turn it up to a-- we'll call it a nice medium level so that four or five out of 10 not uncomfortable at all, just like we did the last time we were together here.

Luke Storey: [01:49:01] I'm feeling that out on my lower back. I'm feeling both. Yeah. Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:49:06] So 1 to 10, how would you rate that if you had to put a number on that right there?

Luke Storey: [01:49:08] 6 to 7.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:49:10] All right. I'm going to back off a little bit. So six would be like a little hint of where it's a little bit uncomfortable.

Luke Storey: [01:49:14] Barely. Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:49:15] Okay. Let me back off until no discomfort there. So I backed off a few points.

Luke Storey: [01:49:18] No discomfort there.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:49:19] We're down to, what would you call it?

Luke Storey: [01:49:22] Five. Four or five. Yeah

Garrett Salpeter: [01:49:22] Okay. That's where we want to be. So now what we're going to do is we're going to scan over your body like this. So if you're not watching, I'm dragging this electrode over Luke's forearm here. And there's essentially three things that we're looking for. So one is just like this where it's buzzing, not uncomfortable at all. That's just you're getting the sensation of the signal here.  

And what that's essentially saying is your brain is seeing that and saying, "Oh, that's just Luke being Luke. Nothing to worry about. There's some stimulation happening, but it's within our safety window. Nothing to be alarmed about." We may go over an area like we may go here where we see a contraction. See if that makes your muscle contract a little bit.

Luke Storey: [01:50:07] Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:50:07] If you weren't holding on here, maybe the arm would bend a little bit. Oh, yeah. It made you supinate your forearm a little bit when your biceps start to contract. So if we see contraction, we go over a motor point where the nerve is closer to the skin. It may contract, but what we want to distinguish here or what we want to do is try to distinguish is that just contraction or is that actually uncomfortable. So I want to ask you that question. Is that just contraction or is it actually uncomfortable?

Luke Storey: [01:50:32] Just a contraction.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:50:33] Okay. So what we want to do then is scan around and look for the third possibility here. So we had some buzzing, not uncomfortable, had some contraction, not uncomfortable. We want to look around and see if there's any spots where it is alarming, where we scan over an area and either because you're guarding and protecting there, or your brain is trying to limit output there, or it's hypersensitive and has some of these perceptions of threat that would lead to chronic pain potentially.  

If we stimulate any of those areas, your brain is going to see that and say, "Oh, shit," that's either new because that's more signal than we've seen from there recently, or we're stimulating an area where there's that protection or hypersensitivity. So if we stimulate any of those areas, your brain is going to see that and that perception effect is going to trigger pain like we talked about earlier.  

So it's going to be-- it'll feel like a trigger point or something like that. But where it's actually uncomfortable or alarming or threatening, we want to look around and find one of those spots. So we'll scan around and see if we find any of those here.

Luke Storey: [01:51:35] Right there. Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:51:37] So it's contracting, but is it actually uncomfortable also? Basically, by the body language it seemed like it may have been.

Luke Storey: [01:51:42] A little bit. Yeah. I mean, definitely just contracted in a pronounced way.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:51:46] Okay. So if it was like a four or five, did it go up at all in that?

Luke Storey: [01:51:50] Yeah. To like a seven probably. Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:51:53] Okay. So that's the most so far.

Luke Storey: [01:51:55] Ow. Oh, right there. Now that is, ah

Garrett Salpeter: [01:51:59] Okay. So that lateral tricep.

Luke Storey: [01:52:01] Oh, boy.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:52:02] Where did that get to?

Luke Storey: [01:52:05] Nine. Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:52:06] Okay. So that is--

Luke Storey: [01:52:08] See, that's so interesting because you go up and down the whole arm with your electrode there. Like you said, you notice it, but it's not uncomfortable. You get there and it's like, oh, that really hurts.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:52:18] So that's a little bit of that--

Luke Storey: [01:52:19] Pins and needles.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:52:19] A little bit that brachioradialis. A little bit of the lateral tricep, potentially.

Luke Storey: [01:52:23] A little bit of Apple track pad for way too many years to me

Garrett Salpeter: [01:52:27] Do you have any issues in your elbow?

Luke Storey: [01:52:29] I have had some tennis elbow stuff going on there. I did some PRP on it years ago that improved it a lot. So it's not chronic now, but it comes and goes. Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:52:39] Okay. So let's find that. Right there.

Luke Storey: [01:52:42] Right there.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:52:42] All right.

Luke Storey: [01:52:42] Holy crap.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:52:43] So we we found that. Now let me grab this pad from--

Luke Storey: [01:52:47] I wish I could give everyone listening the opportunity to feel what it felt like. It's hard to describe.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:52:54] All right.

Luke Storey: [01:52:55] So now he's put in the actual-- what do you call this?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:53:00] Electrode or pad.

Luke Storey: [01:53:01] He's put in the electrode, the sticky one now, on that exact spot.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:53:05] So let me just see if we're on the right spot there. Is that the right spot?

Luke Storey: [01:53:10] Yeah. That hurts. Okay.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:53:12] Okay. So we're on that area. So of course, if we're doing a full evaluation like we did the first time, we could scan your whole torso, your whole upper body, your whole body. But just for demonstration purposes, we found that spot. Let me just compare it real quick, what's going to be more uncomfortable between that combination there and this one here?

Luke Storey: [01:53:33] The first one for sure.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:53:34] Okay. All right.

Luke Storey: [01:53:36] Did you put this sticky electrode on the exact spot where I was feeling the most reaction?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:53:42] Exactly. Yeah. So what we're going to do here for the treatment, we'll do a little miniature, little quick demo with the treatment here. I'm turning it down as we place this pad here.

Luke Storey: [01:53:54] Thank you for that. I've learned that the hard way a few times.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:53:57] Yeah. Right. So now I want to turn it up here for the treatment. I want to go outside your comfort zone. I want to elicit that same response where it feels uncomfortable, because sometimes in life, we have to be outside our comfort zone in order to make change, to cause adaptation. But it's not excruciating. It's not a 10 out of 10. So tell me when we're at a seven or eight where it's productively uncomfortable, where we're essentially eliciting that same type of reaction that we had when we were scanning.

Luke Storey: [01:54:25] Yeah. Yeah, right there is pretty intense, but tolerable.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:54:30] Okay. It feels like it's getting in that painful area there?

Luke Storey: [01:54:32] It is. And the interesting thing is when you're doing the scan, because it's going over, there's contrast between the areas that aren't very reactive and then you hit that spot. It's like sudden impact. But when you have the electrodes on here and then you're dialing up the intensity, I find I'm able to surrender into it and allow it to be more intense. Does that make sense?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:54:53] Yeah, totally. And that's a good thing.

Luke Storey: [01:54:56] Because there's no contrast. The whole thing is just, dzzzz, now. It's not chill and then, ah, not chill.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:55:04] Yeah. That's less of shock and surprise because you have it on there more consistently. So that allows us to go higher on the machine and it allows us to have this adaptation process. Let's actually have you do a few, just flex and extend. Do a few circles of the elbow there. Let me just get these wires down here. What we're going to do here is we're stimulating the areas where we found that hypersensitivity, that greater, more reactivity, sense of protection, whatever it was there. And we're stimulating that area.  

And also having you try to move through it. We're having to move for a couple of reasons. One is that if there's any deficit in activity of those muscles, you're going to learn to start incorporating them into your movement patterns again. So we can accelerate that process of neuromuscular re-education. Another thing that we're going to do is through moving, especially moving your joints, you're creating a lot of other neurological input to your brain.  

And so it allows your brain to more clearly see that area, increase that sense of proprioception, reduce the perception of threat in that area, and that allows you to reduce the perception of threat associated with the signal from the machine where initially you had that really elevated perception of that you were fighting against it. It's uncomfortable. It's painful.  

As you downregulate that, and movement helps you do that, as you downregulate that, you're actually reducing the perception of threat in that area, which is going to mean you're going to be holding less tension there, or less inhibition. Sometimes we think about, in order to get stronger, we have to hit down on the throttle harder of the car or build a bigger engine. Sometimes we just have to take our other foot off the brake so we can use the muscle or use the power that's already there.  

So disinhibition is like taking your foot off the brake or turning off the governor that's limiting the force output there. And so this allows us to do to change those neurological patterns.

Luke Storey: [01:56:54] That makes perfect sense. You know what I just realized today too? That the way you spell it, the N-E-U-B-I-E, it's like neurology. I never got that.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:57:04] Yeah. Yeah. Neuro bio electral--

Luke Storey: [01:57:06] I was like, "Why didn't he just spell it N-E-W? And then I was like, "Oh, right." Neurobiology. So cool.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:57:13] So now that you've adapted to it, based on your body language, it seems like it's easier to handle it.

Luke Storey: [01:57:17] It's totally chill now.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:57:17] So let's go up just one more time and repeat that process. No, man, it's still painful.

Luke Storey: [01:57:23] Oh, yeah. That'll get your attention.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:57:25] All right, good. So we went up four points on here. So four volts, about four milliamps of current we increased there.

Luke Storey: [01:57:31] So what I'm likely feeling here is some inflammation that could be a gradient of tendinitis or something.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:57:41] So it can be some of that. I mean what you're really feeling here, I think we have to go back to those basics of what you're feeling is pain, and pain is always in our brains. If someone says pain is in your head, you can say, "Yeah, it is for me and for everybody else." So you're experiencing that as a response to perceived threat because of the load that we're placing on this area of the body. And so we need to teach you to start accepting that, to allow more function, more length, more strength, etc, in that area.  

And so if there's a lack in that length, or strength, or function, that could lead to some of those tendonitis symptoms or the tennis elbow epicondylitis, whatever it is, type of symptoms. But what you're feeling here is most likely a brain response to the perceived threat of loading these muscles here and trying to challenge the function of these areas.

Luke Storey: [01:58:31] Got it. Feels good. I mean, I don't know if-- am I psycho that I think it feels good or do other people have that experience too? Because when I put on Alyson, she's like, "Ah, too much." I don't think she perceives it to be pleasurable.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:58:44] Well, there's differences, I mean--

Luke Storey: [01:58:47] It's like getting a massage.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:58:48] Yeah. It's like you talked about the differences in how people experience pain, but really the difference in how people experience sensation overall. So we'll turn that down there. Some people like massage, some people like being touched. Some people don't really like being touched. And that can have to do with all sorts of different associations, experiences, things going on, whatever. But the nice thing about this is that there's a power dial and so you can be up in the 30s or 40s, and Alyson might be in the teens or 20s. And both can get what you need.

Luke Storey: [01:59:21] That's what's cool. The way this is designed, you have two channels. Each channel obviously has two to it, so there's four total for those watching. But you could be doing a therapy session or a workout with another person and you each have your own independent whole situation going on, which is cool. It's actually a fun couples thing. Looking forward to doing it more with her.

Garrett Salpeter: [01:59:41] Yeah. My wife and I, we do that at home.

Luke Storey: [01:59:43] You do?

Garrett Salpeter: [01:59:43] Do some couples training, for sure. Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:59:46] That's cool. That's like always looking for more interesting novel ways to spend time with one another. Sometimes it's like the days when we just end up watching TV and I'm always like, "This is such a waste of doing something together. We can be doing something more fun."

Garrett Salpeter: [02:00:00] Yeah. And if you can do something that you like doing anyway, if you like working out or something, to be able to share that together is a good way to bond.

Luke Storey: [02:00:07] Totally cool. Well, I'm glad we got to do that little demo. And I hope people were able to see the video because--

Garrett Salpeter: [02:00:14] How does your elbow feel right now?

Luke Storey: [02:00:15] It feels awesome actually. I was going to say that when you pulled the electrodes off. It feels like I got a massage. I mean, that's how I always describe this type of therapy. Yeah, it's just like everything's looser and you can feel blood flow in there. It feels like there's a concentration of energy. Warm. Yeah, more fluid. It's just so cool. Dude, you created something so awesome.  

Thank you for doing it. Thank you for coming by to share it with me and all the listeners tuning into this. I don't know. I just never seemed to get sick of discovering cool stuff like this. And the fun part for me, and I'm so blessed to be able to actually meet the people behind it. And then broadcast your discoveries out to the world.

Garrett Salpeter: [02:01:01] I appreciate it. I mean, to be able to come on this podcast with all the great topics you've covered, and great guests you've had, and be able to share our message is just really wonderful. So I'm grateful to you and the work that you're doing and love being here. And glad you're in Austin now too.

Luke Storey: [02:01:16] Thanks, brother. Me too. Everyone cool is here. I was so stoked. I was driving down-- are you guys on Bee Caves Road?

Garrett Salpeter: [02:01:22] 360. Right around 360?

Luke Storey: [02:01:23] Yes. I was driving and I was like, "There's a NeuFit." And Alyson and I came in there. I mean, I met you here, but I didn't put it together that your corporate spot was here. And for people in Austin too, they can come train at your main location too.

Garrett Salpeter: [02:01:37] Yeah. We have, currently, five physical therapists and five trainers, so we're working with people, neurological injuries, sports injuries, people who want to work on fitness or elite athletic performance. We use it as, certainly a way to serve people in the community. Also teaching facilities will have clinicians, people coming in from around the country to learn and observe. We use it to test new protocols and try to work and innovate. So we're doing some cool stuff there and working with people for a wide variety of challenges, injuries, all sorts of stuff.

Luke Storey: [02:02:14] It's a cool spot. I was surprised to find that it was-- there's so much gym equipment in there. I mean, it's essentially like a gym that has incorporated this technology, which I wasn't expecting. There's people in there working out with this thing attached to them. It's pretty cool.

Garrett Salpeter: [02:02:29] And it's cool because people will be doing physical therapy and then they look across and they see people working out. It's aspirational too. It's like, "Hey, I can do that."

Luke Storey: [02:02:37] Right. You have someone that's got an injury or this, needs real help. And then there's a pro athlete across the way from them just crushing it. That could be really sad or inspiring depending on the mindset you have.

Garrett Salpeter: [02:02:50] True.

Luke Storey: [02:02:50] Who have been three teachers that have influenced your life that you'd like to share with us before we go.

Garrett Salpeter: [02:02:55] That is such a good question. So I think about it in terms of categories. One jumps out at me as a teacher who first showed me the power of physiological psychology like we talked about here today, and how body position can inform your psychology, all these different things. And also taught me-- was the role model that comes out to me when I think about how I want to be in the world.  

So it's a man in his 70s named Jaimen McMillan, who has a discipline called Spatial Dynamics. And he's still, at age 70 plus powerful, strong, flexible, moves with grace, has a wonderful presence. And I went through his certification program. So I was with him multiple times a year for several years back, 10, 15 years ago. It was over a period of a few years.  

So it was a long time ago. But he is, to me, a bright, shining light example of what it is to live your highest values and truths over a long period of time. And just the accumulated wisdom, the way that he showed up in the world, the way that he taught other people in his certification program was just such a good role model for me. And the material around physiological psychology and movement therapy influenced me a lot. So he's one that jumps out

My first mentor around that same time that really showed me the functional neurology is a guy named Dr. John Pietila. Has a system called NeuroTarget. He was the first one to really show me the power of applying neuroscience into daily practice and how it can affect outcomes and really show me, open up my mind to the possibility of what a nervous system first approach can do.

And then teachers-wise, I think another category-- so I've got how I show up in the world. That one jumps out. A lot of the neuroscience and work that I do, I think about some of the spiritual life business stuff. I think two jump out there. I've learned through books. David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man. That book jumps out because it helped me early on in my career understand that as a man, the masculine part of me is really fulfilled by creating impact and influence in the world and having that sense of direction out there is what really energizes me and that's okay.  

And that my then girlfriend, now wife is motivated, the feminine part of her is energized and enlivened by different sorts of things. By the flow of energy and love in relationships and things like that. Also Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus also in the relationship.

Luke Storey: [02:05:39] Oh, it's so good.

Garrett Salpeter: [02:05:39] Yeah. That's John Gray.

Luke Storey: [02:05:41] Yeah. I've interviewed John Gray a number of times. I learned some-- I use his stuff all the time. This house, and the piece you feel here, he's partly responsible for that.

Garrett Salpeter: [02:05:51] Yeah. So those have really helped in fact.

Luke Storey: [02:05:53] Both of those. Yeah. David Deida, he doesn't do podcasts. I tried to get him back in the day, and I think it even says on his website like, "We don't do interviews, don't even try." But one of his protégé, John Wineland, who just moved here to Austin, actually, he's been on a few times with that same model. Really useful. Really, it's cool that you mentioned both those. They've impacted me a lot as well.

Garrett Salpeter: [02:06:17] Awesome. And then on the topic of relationships, I mean, just in that same category, I think my wife and our marriage has been a great teacher for me and there, learning the value of different attributes and different perspectives. Sometimes she and I will look at things differently. She works in the business with us. She's our chief operating officer. So in business and at home, we'll look at things differently.  

And sometimes that creates tension because I'll think, "Why don't you see it this way or how can you--" But learning, I'll say, to grow through conflict that, just some conflict, some tension. I don't necessarily mean fighting conflict, but learning to go through that. And then learning the value of different perspectives about how looking at things through different lenses, using different attributes, having logic and emotion, having big picture and more detail-oriented, having that more complete perspective, allows us to really be a team and arrive at better conclusions and decisions together and help guide each other.

So I learned a lot there too. So those are the ones that jump out at me. I've had a lot of wonderful mentors and teachers along the way in school, through books, in workshops. I've learned a lot from the people that we work with, the practitioners that have these devices. We collaborate and find ways together to take this to even new levels and help even more people. So there's a lot of them, but those are the first ones that jump out.

Luke Storey: [02:07:47] Thanks, I appreciate it. You far exceeded the three that I requested. So a lot of people, they'll get to one and they're like, "I don't know. I can't think of any more." And then others are like, "Oh, there's too many." I appreciate that, man. I appreciate that. And yeah, I'm excited to share what you do with the world. So thank you so much for coming by today.

Garrett Salpeter: [02:08:02] Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Luke Storey: [02:08:08] Okay, my attentive, curious, open-minded, and intelligent friends. That concludes another information storm on the Life Stylist. I'm your grateful host Luke Storey from lukestorey.com, and I am just ecstatic that you decided to spend your time with me today. I mean, you could have been anywhere, but you weren't. You were here with us. And for that, I love each and every one of you.  

And I'm never one to disappoint, so our next week's show is sure to be a listener favorite. We've talked a lot about breathwork over the years, yet somehow I've yet to do a show solely devoted to this life-changing practice, and I am thrilled to finally get it done. So set your dial for Episode 459, next week. It's called The Power of Breathwork for Energy, Sleep, Healing, and Spiritual Awakening with Othership's Robbie Bent. It's going to be a good one.  

And remember, if you were intrigued by Garrett's NeuFit system or technology, make sure to check out neu.fit/luke. That's N-E-U.F-I-T/luke, where you can find a local practitioner or even get one for yourself if you happen to be a physical therapist or just a health nut like me. By using that code, you'll save yourself $1,000 off a Neubie. All right, you guys, I'll see you next week with Robbie Bent.

‍