Garrett Salpeter - The NeuFit Framework: Nervous System First, Tissue Second

Hey friends, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness and wellness industry podcast for over five years and running. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the honor of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. If you like the show, we'd love it if you took three minutes of your day to leave us a nice supporter review wherever you consume your podcast. If you're interested in staying up to date with the future of fitness, go to futurofitness.co to subscribe and get weekly summaries dropped into your inbox. Now onto the show. One theme keeps coming up: the right technology can make or break your business. That's why I'm thrilled to introduce our new presenting sponsor, Perfect Gym. Perfect Gym isn't just another gym management system. They are part of the Sport Alliance Group, Europe's leading fitness software company that has officially entered the US market. Now, I've seen this movie before, but here's the difference. They've opened up a U.S. headquarters in Boston because they understand that the American market deserves dedicated, localized support. After digging into the platform, one benefit especially stood out. They are simplifying the nightmare that keeps business owners up at night migrations. These guys were able to migrate one mega client with more than 250 locations in six different countries in just 20 days between two payment runs, no disrupting operations, no member loss, one seamless operation that simply works. Now, if you have ever switched platforms, you know how terrifying that process can be and how truly impressive that feat is. At a high level, here's their secret sauce. They give the power back to the operator. Instead of forcing you into their closed ecosystem, their Perfect Gym Marketplace connects with over 120 integration partners. So want to use your own app? Your preferred payment processor? ClassPass for booking? No problem. Whether you're running a single studio or managing a multi-location enterprise, Perfect Gym was built from the ground up for multi-club operations. They've invested a ton into this platform, and now they're bringing that European engineering excellence to America. The migration experts have arrived. Check out perfectgym.com where enterprise level sophistication meets operator freedom. The Future of Fitness Podcast is proudly brought to you by eGim. In an industry full of noise, with more features, more screens, more promises, eGim is focused on something far more meaningful. Progress that counts. EGM is a global fitness technology leader, building the infrastructure behind real results. Their open ecosystem connects smart strength equipment, AI-powered software, and data-driven services to turn fitness into measurable, repeatable progress for members, trainers, operators, and communities. Now what really excites me is how EGM brings its ecosystem together with Wellpast, their corporate wellness platform. By combining their strength equipment with AI-powered software and their corporate wellness platform Wellpast, they're leading the shift to proactive, preventative health. Isn't that what we all want? That's why we're here. The result? Members feel more confident and motivated, trainers have better tools to support people, operators see stronger retention and growth, and employers benefit from healthier, more engaged teams. This isn't innovation for show. It's progress you can see, measure, and repeat. To learn more, please visit eGym.com. All right, here we go. Garrett Salpeter. Welcome to the Future of Fitness. How are we doing, my friend?

Thank you. It's good to good to be here in the future.

Yeah, yeah. We're in the f well, we we aren't in the future. We just were, but that was in the past. So now we're in the now we're in the future. Anyway, that's my little joke when we start these intros sometimes. But uh man, it's I I'm I've got to know you over the last year and uh really excited for to geek out a little bit on neuroscience today and you know what you guys are doing at Newfit, you know, for a little bit of background, you've uh how when did you start this company? Was it 10 years ago?

Well, it was you know certainly a lot of lead up in creating and launching a medical device and all that. We officially launched the device at the end of 2017. Uh is you know, about a little over eight years is the time we're having this conversation.

Yeah. Okay, great. Well, I mean you've done a lot of things, man. I mean, you're you're a practitioner first and foremost. Um, you know, a neuroscience is your is your thing, which we'll everyone will figure out in the next 45 minutes. Um podcast host, author, educator, uh, entrepreneur. Uh you check a lot of boxes. And you know, for just for full disclosure too, like I used I use the newbie device. Um, uh, your friend here who lives in Whitefish. Brad Rowe. Yes, Brad. Yeah. Yeah. He uh he hooked me up, he gave me a session, and I've been trying to recover from what I believe is a slight Achilles tear from last ski season. And you know, within a session, I walked away there like a day or two later, very sore. Like my calf, my Achilles, very sore. Like I felt like I had done a thousand step-ups. But within a week or two after that, it was almost not noticeable anymore. Like the bump I had, a couple things. So, whatever it is, I'm sure you'll get into why that makes sense to you as a practitioner. But um, I'm a believer. Let's put it that way. It was, it was uh, I'm not easy to get on board with things. I'm very skeptical. Um, so anyway, I'm gonna shut up for a little bit. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got into this, how NewFit started, how the newbie started, kind of your um your overall thesis on on neuroscience, and and we'll take it from there.

So, as you mentioned, Eric, our company is called NewFit, and that's because we're trying to put front and center what it is that we believe in and what it is that we do. So it's spelled NEU for neurological, and we're we're focusing on neurological fitness, which is because I believe that when the nervous system is healthy and dynamic and resilient, we're able to recover faster from injury, to perform at our best, to be metabolically and hormonally and psychologically healthy and able to achieve all of the things that we may wish to achieve. So we're definitely looking at this through the lens of neuroscience. And it's interesting because that is a little bit counterintuitive for something like your Achilles injury or for you know people that we work with who are also athletes that have acute injuries or surgeries, where the traditional model is so focused on the tissue that's been damaged or strained or broken or surgically repaired, and there's very little generally focus. Some of this is changing now, but there's generally very little focus on the neurological response to injury. And I got so interested in this in part because of an experience I had back when I was playing college ice hockey in New England. You know, I grew up in Chicago as a hockey player. It was a big part of my identity. I loved it. That's what got me interested in physiology and the human body and all these different things that we like to talk about when we're geeking out about exercise science. And I also had a lot of experiences along the way where I was very disappointed with traditional physical therapy, traditional orthopedic medicine. And in contrast to those experiences, I had another experiences, uh, another experience towards the end of my time in college where I had some torn ligaments from playing hockey. I was told I'd probably need surgery, and I ended up meeting a guy who's a chiropractor doing functional neurology, and he was the first one to teach me about the importance of the nervous system, the neurological response to injury, and how that does or does not support effective healing. And he also used on me a version of direct current, which is this special form of electrical current that's a lot different from the tens units, the so-called Russian STEM, these other modalities that are out there. So most people listening have probably used electrical stimulation in an athletic training room or physical therapy or chiropractic office, and it's usually alternating current, usually a tens unit, often just passive. You're sitting there with STEM and ice or STEM and heat, that sort of thing. So this was a lot different. I was using this direct current, and I saw firsthand how this combination of direct current along with these principles and techniques grounded in neuroscience, saw first hand how that helped me heal, recover from an injury, avoid surgery. Was I was happy and relieved as a hockey player, but as a pre-engineering student, physics major, someone who was really interested in understanding things scientifically from first principles, looking through that lens, this experience was just an amazing eureka moment. And that really set me off on this path. And so I ended up working for many years under other practitioners. Like I came to Austin for graduate school in engineering at the University of Texas, ended up doing additional schooling in neuroscience as well. And as I was here, I was working under first was the guy who was the chiropractor for the UT Longhorns football team. I started treating people using older versions of electrical stimulation and continued to see some of the benefits and get more and more interested in in neuroscience and applying some of these techniques and daily practice. And I kept seeing ways to improve the technology and finally, you know, through a whole series of events, came to conclude that although I didn't set out to start a medical device company, that really was the thing that I had you know, eight or nine years into this journey, it became clear to me that that was really the path forward. So that was when when NewFit, the brand and the company was born. And I I I'm kind of glad I didn't know how expensive and how long and difficult it would be to actually create a medical device out of the gate, because I half jokingly say I may not have done it, but I of course ended up doing that. And and Newfit has been our platform for sharing these combinations of neuroscience principles, treatment principles, and frameworks along with direct current, so that we can capture the benefits of applying this technology, the benefits on the nervous system, on neurological function, and on tissue healing and some of the body's underlying physiological processes.

Amazing. Maybe explain this to me like I'm, you know, 10 years old. But why is your approach to overall not just injury prevention or injury healing, right? But also like the whole system overall of health and wellness. Like why is your approach through neuroscience contrarian to what most people or most practitioners or most operators are kind of believe in?

So can I imagine that you're a little bit of a tech nerd type of 10-year-old who knows something about computers? So if you know something about computers, and this will make sense. So when a a computer is similar to the human body in the sense that there's both hardware and software. So in hardware for you know from the computer, there's the memory, the video chip, the screen, the keyboard, and then the software is the programming that actually sends the information around and controls everything so that you get the images on the screen, you get to hear the sounds of us talking and uh etc. And similarly in the body, we have the hardware. We have our bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, discs, etc. And then we also have the software, which is the nervous system, it's the command system of the body that tells all of those structures what to do, when to be active, when to reduce their activity, how to coordinate. And the interesting thing is that from that perspective, because the nervous system is the control system of the body, it seems to me almost intuitive, almost uh a bit of a no-brainer to think that that should be the target of interventions. Because it is is sort of the farthest you can go upstream or or get, you know, or the deepest towards the root, if you're looking for the root cause. And the paradigm that exists in physical medicine or generally in medicine is just is just different. So as intuitive as that may sound or feel, a lot of times the approach is really the opposite because we're so enamored with tissues, because we, you know, some of the biggest breakthroughs are x-rays and mri's and understanding of anatomy. And so we're so focused generally, you know, as as as a as an industry, so focused on the tissues and structures or the hardware and and less so on the software, in part because we can't see it as much. In part because a lot of neuroscience some is still you know very mysterious in some of the some of the inner workings and all that. But but even some of the basics that we now know in the last decade or two were still really unknown and and difficult to know. And so there's there's a little bit of a trend. I I like to think we're contributing to this in some way, a little bit of a a trend now in looking more and more at neuroscience. You know, of course, Huberman's podcast is uh is a big boost for that. And there's other parts, uh other reasons contributing to to this, but a lot of it really is that paradigm where we're just so focused on the things we can see, the tissues, the structures. Of course, yes, they have to heal. You know, if someone has a partial tear in their Achilles like you, Eric, or someone else is dealing with, you know, a herniated disc in their back or a separated shoulder, which is a strain or a partial tear of the AC ligament in the shoulder, yes, the tissue has to heal. And a a big part of the breakthrough that we're talking about here is that that healing can be dramatically more efficient and effective, or dramatically less efficient and effective, and take a lot longer, depending on how the body responds neurologically, because what often happens by default is the nervous system braces and guards and restricts movement in and around an injured tissue as a protective mechanism. And there's some benefit to that if that tissue is going to be attacked, you know, at the next moment, but it's counterproductive if, for example, that tension creates pressure that limits blood flow and reduces the body's ability to just bring the nutrients and the raw materials, the inflammatory cells, that orchestrate and guide and perform the underlying healing processes. So, in many ways, managing that neurological response to injury is a very important piece of the overall recovery process. And we've seen that really prioritizing that can help people recover, you know, 10, 20, 50, 60 percent faster than the norms, the established norms from a variety of injuries and surgeries. And it's not that anything miraculous is being introduced. The the human body has these miraculous processes. We're just just getting rid of the impediments that otherwise delay healing. So I think the the biggest part of the answer is a shift in paradigm between that hardware and software and and sort of which lens one is looking through.

So this certain this is starting to make sense. And I I guess we can use my own little case study of n equals one, um, being me and my my calf Achilles. So I I was pulling um I used to trail run a lot, and I would probably usually if I if I got to mile three or four, there was a good chance this one muscle on the back of my calf would pull. And that's actually the same that's the same Achilles that you know felt an injury last year. Now, when I got the treatment with Brad, um the thing that happened was like that area of that muscle that used to pull was super sore. It's like it hadn't been worked out in a long time. And I felt like that muscle or that thing just needed to like get worked and then break down and kind of like give up for a second to let everything else flow. Does that make sense through through your lens?

Yeah, so this is really interesting. There's there's a few reasons why a muscle like that, and this is this is a common experience that that people have, where you're running in some certain area spasms or fatigues or hurts over time. And so oftentimes the traditional approach looking at this hardware-based model is, oh, that that calf is tight on one side, let's roll it out and help it loosen up without without really attempting to understand why the heck is it tightening up in the first place. And so there often is a situation where the muscle you're feeling is tightening is actually doing its job. It's attempting to protect you and keep you safe. It's actually, it's not not as it's not misbehaving, quite the opposite. It's actually trying to be a good employee and work double duty to to take on the load of someone else who isn't carrying their own weight. And so it could be something like, you know, some other muscle isn't working as well to stabilize the foot and ankle with each step that you take. And so that that calf muscle or that other muscle of the lower leg is is bracing and guarding, working overtime. And that's why it's so tight, because it's holding on for dear life, trying to protect you against injury, right? You know, our brains don't don't ever say, hey, let's waste extra energy engaging this muscle. Our brains are quite the opposite. They want to conserve energy as much as possible in case there's a famine the next day. So we want to figure out what isn't working properly in the first place that's causing that muscle that's tightening to have to tighten to protect you and overwork. So part of it is is going upstream and figuring out what really is the root cause, what isn't working in the first place. And then when you when you do that, oftentimes the without even working on the the quote unquote tight muscle itself, oftentimes it will let go because you've gotten rid of the reason why it's holding on and bracing. And then in terms of the Achilles, you know, it's really interesting what you described. This is something that that we also see very frequently where someone will have, whether it's a partial tear in the Achilles or a strain and some other tissue, you know, in one treatment, they're actually they're actually moving a lot better. Like someone has an AC separation, they can only lift their arm up a little bit from their side because it's just stuck or sharp pain. And then 10 minutes later they're lifting their arm up overhead and it's like, what happened? You know, in 10 minutes you didn't heal a ligament. What happened is the all the neurological bracing and shutting down of muscles and all those protective patterns, you were able to work through that. You were changing function because the structure was already there, was already good enough to get in that range of motion. It was just the brain restricting and holding you back there. And so, in terms of your Achilles, it was when it was feeling better, you had you well, you had the the muscle soreness there. There's a a separate separate topic is that of all the areas that we work, the calves tend to get the most sore, and there's perhaps a few theories as to why that is, but I I don't want us to sidetrack. So there you're you had muscle soreness, but it was I imagine it was delayed onset muscle soreness. Like you do a hard workout, your muscles get sore, it was that sort of thing, right?

Yep, yep.

And so then when that and that's because you were working these muscles in a very intense manner, that's part of how we get results, get changes so quickly, is you're getting the equivalent of the input, the amount of multiple sessions worth of work all in one session. So you can have some soreness, and you know, we have to you do this responsibly so we don't overload somebody. And then once the soreness fade faded, you had better function and your muscles were better able to disperse the load. And so the Achilles was feeling better. And so part of why part of why it's feeling better is there's there's sort of a few parts to this, you know, there's one metaphor that I sometimes like, which is looking at the metaphor of a car and shock absorbers, where if your shock absorbers are working well, they absorb a lot of force as you go over bumps in the road, and less of that force reaches the chassis in the body of the car and you know, in order to cause damage, right? So it protects a lot of that. So your muscles generally act as shock absorbers. Specifically when it comes to biomechanics, a lot of the the basic premise of biomechanics is that it's important to disperse load across tissues, across fascial slings, across joint surfaces, and to do it in a way where the force vectors are appropriately aligned to the tissues. So with your Achilles, for example, if your foot and ankle were unstable, instead of you know plantar endorsiflexing or kind of pumping your foot back and forth, perhaps it was twisting in and out, and there was a little bit more torsion force on the Achilles, you know, not knowing exactly, I I can't be sure, but that's one you know fairly common mechanism of injury here. And so by stabilizing the right muscle and getting a more clean and consistent loading pattern, the load is better dispersed through your Achilles and you're less, you're aggravating it less with each step. So that's perhaps one of the mechanisms to explain why in one session you were able to change function enough in a way that even though a tear in the Achilles isn't going to heal in one session, the function is changed enough so that you're dispersing the load better so that it feels a lot better and you can do more without pain.

Awesome. Yeah. You know, it definitely this couldn't have got done with a lacrosse ball and stretching, right? This was this was a whole nother level of experience. And I probably should back up too and say that like this isn't something that you uh, you know, are just doing one off. Like there's four hundred clinics that use this uh in Newbie with, you know, over I think four thousand practitioners and facilities total. I mean that this is you're you're pretty widespread. And um I think one of the most popular uh case studies for you is is Sakura Barkley, right, of the Philadelphia Eagles. You help them rehab from ACL. So it's like and I I urge people to go to your website because you have case studies galore. I've looked through a lot of them and you know different injuries, different use cases, even neurogenerative diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, things like that, right? So I mean maybe give us some idea of like the scope of how you guys have applied this across the last eight or nine years.

There is a wide breadth of applications. As you said, there's you know athletes like Saquon Barkley with after surgery, you know, acute injury, and then there's also chronic pain patients. And as you said, Eric, neurodegenerative patients. And you know, sometimes people hear that and they're like, what is this? Are you trying to be everything to everybody? And I would say that in these cases, there is a common thread, and the common thread is the nervous system and how important the nervous system is for recovery from injury and surgery and chronic pain, and of course, you know, neurological injuries or neurodegenerative conditions. The approach and the frameworks can be a little bit different, but with the power of direct current and some of the techniques of the New Fit method, we're able to really make an impact in those areas. So, yeah, you know, you mentioned Saquon Barkley, the running back, who many listeners at least will know his name, if not more of his story. And one interesting part of his story is a few years ago, he tore his ACL early in the season. There's a great Amazon documentary that came out about him, and it talks about the depths of despair after he had his injury, and he was going through a difficult time with the New York Giants and renegotiating his contract. And we got connected with him about five months into his recovery process after ACL reconstruction surgery. And it was interesting because at that point he was still pretty stalled, still having some pain, some stiffness, kind of frustrated with where he was in the process. And it's again because of the more hardware-based traditional paradigm versus really working on the nervous system. And so, so he actually graciously did a video for us talking about his experience. And in that video, he talks about how in his first session with the newbie device, so newbie's neurobioelectric stimulator is our direct current product that we've been talking about. So we did with him this mapping process where we scan around on the body with one of the electrodes to find where the nervous system is guarding and bracing to create tension or shutting down and creating weakness or where there's hypersensitivity that leads to pain. We scanned around and we found a couple places on him and stimulated those areas. And then he goes on to talk about how after that first session, he felt his quad turn back on for the first time since before surgery. It was like being in a dark room and turning the lights on. It changed the whole trajectory of his recovery because he was finally able to activate. Remember, the muscles are the hardware, but they're controlled by the software. They do what the nervous system signals, the electrical signals, tell them to do. So by restoring that signal, it all of a sudden changed the whole trajectory of his recovery. He had this lower extremity functional scale score. He was only at 23 out of 50 at that, you know, between five and six month mark when we started working together. Over the next seven weeks, he went from 23 out of 50 to 49 out of 50. And it was, you know, this amazing increase in that rate of progress. And he goes on, he talks about in the video how he goes on to use the machine for ongoing activation to make sure his muscles are good and dialed in. His nervous system is primed before he goes out to play in NFL games. And of course, he's gone on to have you know that record setting year and help the Eagles win the Super Bowl. And it's you know, it's it's helped him a lot. So that's been really cool. You know, also, you know, in terms of some of the examples that are better known, you know, of course, people listening to this likely know Joe Rogan. He lives here in Austin, where we're based, so he he talked on his podcast at length about his experience coming into Newfit, and he talked about how he had this back and sciatic pain that he had for months, and he just kept trying, he was he was trying different things and nothing was working. And finally, in in a couple weeks of doing regular Newfit treatments, his pain was gone, his mobility was better, and it was the same thing. We were able to find where things weren't working properly neurologically, where the signals were not telling his muscles to work to support and stabilize his spine as he went through different movements in lifting, in martial arts practice, in in shooting his bow and arrow, which is a lot of rotation and torque, and getting the muscles working, they were you know, it was like bringing the shock absorbers back online, going back to some of that metaphor there. So that was you know a fairly chronic and difficult condition or or circumstance that that we're able to help him through. And then, you know, kind of going over to more of the neurological side, I uh in my in my book, The Newfit Method, and the introduction, I tell the story of a woman named Amy who 25 years before she came into Newfit, she was riding a horse, she was in her early trees, she was thrown off a horse, broke her spine in a few places, and was paralyzed from the waist down. So she she had adapted to life. She's a great person, very inspiring, high-energy, wonderful person, and had adapted to living life without the use of her legs. She's in a wheelchair, she drives a car with hand controls, adaptive controls. She's you know, very productive member, contributing to society and to her family. And uh, you know, people have kind of written off that after the first year or two, the window sort of closes in order to make any real progress. And yet we started working with her using the newbie device 25 years after that injury. And initially we started getting a little bit of sensation, a little bit of a little bit, you know, at one twitch that was like, oh, hey, maybe there's something here in that leg, in that foot. And then we continued to work with her because we saw some of those early signs that there might be something here worth exploring. And so we actually were stimulating her legs below the level of injury and started first before really getting sensory or motor. We started getting autonomic function, you know, some sweating, changes in blood flow and temperature and things like that, and then some sensory and then some motor. And then we started taking her through the patterns of learning to walk again, the patterns we all go through as children, of rolling and then crawling, and then she started walking with a with a walker. And there's this amazing story where her family was gathering for Christmas, and you know, many of them had not seen her in in over a year. And so she arranged it to where you know it was 20 to 30 members of her family were in the in this private room in a restaurant, and they arranged it so she came in last. And there's this amazing image of her walking in in a walker, and everyone in there is like, My God, what is this?

Hell yeah.

It's like seeing seeing you know Jesus walk on water or something like that. It's this amazing kind of thing. And so there's there's you know some really wonderful stories of um you know a woman with MS getting out of a wheelchair also and being able to get her driver's license back and getting rid of the need for full-time caregivers at home. And then there's a study that we did, which we may or may not want to get into, but you know, a study on diabetic neuropathy patients, and that was a really cool, really cool study. Actually, should we should we go into that for a moment?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's cover it, man. I think it's it's I mean, maybe describe what diabetic neuropathy is for people who don't know. I'm actually strangely educated on that. I don't know why.

So I I did not know much about it until being sort of uh being presented with the opportunity to do this study, and I learned that diabetic neuropathy or that that neuropathy is far more widespread than I ever imagined. One in ten people in in the United States alone, so that's over 30 million people, have a form of neuropathy. The most common, not the only, but the most common is diabetic neuropathy. And what that has to do with, of course, diabetes is a condition in which there's the inability to control blood sugar. So blood sugar rises in the or sugar rises in the blood, and that is damaging to blood vessels. Blood sugar is is you know essentially toxic or damaging to the microvasculature, and so blood vessels get damaged as and it happens first in the hands and feet typically, because the one, the very small vasculature there, the the capillaries there are and because the blood kind of pools there and spends more time there because of gravity. So typically happens in the hands and feet first, and there's damage to blood vessels, so there's not there's an impaired ability to bring blood to fuel or to you know to bring nutrients to the nerves, and so the nerves begin to atrophy and die off, and so neuropathy is nerve pathology, which just means you know damage or dysfunction to the nerve. So diabetic neuropathy is this sort of atrophy of the nerves, and when you have atrophy or damage to the nerves, you get a reduction in what the nerves do. So that means reduced sensation from the feet, right? If you don't have the nerves reporting sensation from the feet, you can't tell where your foot is in space, you can't tell the type of surface you're on. That's problematic, of course, for balance and increases the risk of falling because balance is not the ability to steadily keep one's balance, but it's the ability to sense when one is slightly off balance and make the adjustment in response to that sensation, make the adjustment in time to reset one's position or balance before falling. So balance is this constant state of shifting in response to those sensory changes. So if we lose that sensory input, you don't get you don't get that signal, you can't make the adjustment in order to reset one's balance. There's also deficits in strength and motor output, right? Nerves send the signals to turn the muscles on, as we talked about. There's also often pain associated with it. And some of that is interesting because pain is a response to a perceived threat in the body. And so if there's tissue damage, it makes sense that pain is the brain's way of saying, hey, don't load or use this area because you could hurt it worse. However, there's also cases where pain continues on even after tissue is healed, this chronic pain. And pain is very interesting. We've learned a lot more about it in the last couple of decades in neuroscience. And it's an active signal created by the brain and it's predictive. So one thing that the one reason the brain creates that signal of pain is if it can't sense where a part of the body is in space, it's concerned that it can't predict when that part of the body might run into something or or get hurt or get hit. And so it'll actually cause pain as one way of preventing you from moving that area. So when there's reduced signal from that area neurologically, that can be one potential influence that either reinforces or contributes to or increases the sensation of pain. So there's a few different mechanisms here. All that to say, you know, to lay the foundation for neuropathy. So the standard of care, even though it's 30 plus million people in this country alone, the standard of care is just about symptom management, pain management. But there's no real institution-wide belief that you can help these patients meaningfully restore function or heal. And on that background, we did this study that is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is it's looking at neuropathy. Two is it's the first study in humans to compare head-to-head alternating current versus direct current. So we had 150 patients, 75 of them got traditional alternating current, so it's a traditional tens unit, and then half got the direct current of the newbie device. And the group that got the tens unit, they did see some reduction in pain. We don't necessarily know how long it lasted, because we only tested and you know intervened, you know, or treated and then measured over six weeks. TENS tends to be more of a temporary blocking and masking of signals. So with the direct current, we got at least as much, if not more, reduction in pain. And then that's where there are some similarities, but that's where the similarities stop because when you look at sensation and function, you got little to no change with the alternating current, but significant improvements with direct current. And objectively, measuring the measuring the EMG, which is the amount of electrical activity in the nerves, measuring the nerve conduction velocity, which is how fast signals are moving in the nerves. We saw little to no change with the TENS unit, significant positive changes with the newbie. So in just six weeks, there's actual regenerative, uh, regenerative and restorative changes happening within the nerves that are helping to improve function, improve sensation, and increase literally the amount of electrical activity inside the nerve. So you know that some of that tissue is healing or rebuilding or that capacity is somehow increasing again in just two sessions a week for six weeks. So it's happening very quickly. And you know, all this was very exciting. And part of why it was so interesting to us is yes, you know, because of the state that we just talked about related to neuropathy, and also because a lot of what I had known about the potential benefits of direct current and you know, from the scientific literature, outside of you know, anecdotal experience and such, a lot of the scientific literature was in rabbits, in mice, and not so much in humans. So to be able to compare head-to-head alternating in direct current in humans was a big breakthrough in our clinical understanding as well.

Awesome. Awesome, man. Yeah, it's it's it's refreshing to hear that, you know, especially I think people within our industry are very frustrated with healthcare and the limitations of it. And you're right, like it's you know, I've probably said this dozens, if not hundreds, of times, but we're in our healthcare is sick care, right? We're not focused on getting people to optimal performance in their lives. We just want to deal with it and kind of get them out the door, right? Like get them somewhat comfortable or more comfortable than they were previously and get them out the door. One of the things I'm hoping you can explain to me, and maybe you could explain it to husky 10-year-old Eric who won the eighth grade science award. True story, I did. Difference between DC and like a typical tens unit that I would have gotten in college in the training room when my shoulders all effed up, right? Like give us some the the concrete differences between those things and why it's such an important thing to point out.

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because I I use these terms and it may, you know, may not may go in one ear and out the other, just kind of fly it, fly over people's heads. So I definitely definitely worth defining those. So alternating current means that it alternates in direction. So it goes back and forth, positive, negative, positive, negative, positive, negative. That would be like if you have a a highway, you know, a northbound highway, it's like you have cars going north, but then they turn around and go south. They're going the you know, and that that is if you're talking about neurological pathways, that is different because we do have our nervous systems run on direct current. We send signals in one pathway from the brain down to the body, and then in one pathway from the body back up to the brain. There's different tracks in the spinal cord, different different highways here. And so direct current means that it's flowing in one direction. And just for the sake of understanding, electric fields are sort of like like what gravity is on mass and weight. Electric fields are uh that same sort of thing, that same sort of influence on electric charge. If you have a hill and you put a ball on top of the hill, it's gonna roll down under the influence of gravity. If you have an electrical charge, a positive charge, it's gonna roll downhill or flow towards a negative electrode. And the amount of voltage is like the steepness of the hill. And the amount of current is you know essentially how many, how many charges there are that would be flowing down that hill. So there's there's some metaphors that can help it understand. And so alternating current would be like going down and then flipping and going the other way and going down and then up and down, you know, kind of going back and forth. Whereas direct current's only flowing in one direction. So all that to lay a little bit of a foundation. There's also an interesting history here where there's several benefits. And I just talked about in this study how we saw benefits of direct current. There's you know a lot of other ways that we see it in terms of this experience with you know the impact on nervous system function and your Achilles, Eric, or the ability to turn on Saquon Barkley's quad or whatever it might be. So the way that it interacts with the nervous system, the way it influences the underlying processes of tissue healing, all of these are important. And many of these benefits were known back in the 1960s, 1970s. The Soviets did a lot of this in their sports science program, a lot of this initial work. And yet there was always a problem, a fairly important problem, where when you turn the direct current up to a high enough level to make a difference in the body to have this therapeutic effect, it would literally sting and burn the skin. And so you'd have positive charges building up around the negative electrode and vice versa, and that charge go up creates resistance. And so if you try to pump more signal through there, through that resistance, it dissipates heat, which can lead to burning. And so that's why, because of that limitation, there was sort of this case of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak, where direct current fell out of favor, and in its place came all of these alternating current devices, the tens units, quote unquote Russian STEM, even though the Russians used different, many different types of current. What we call the sort of brand name of Russian STEM is an alternating current, interferential, all these other things. Those came to fill that void because you could get them into the body without any of the stinging or burning. And then we found over the years that we're actually pretty limited in what we can do with those. And that's why, you know, for example, insurance companies stopped covering electrical stimulation treatments or dramatically reduced the reimbursement amount for those, because we've generally seen that there's some significant limitations on what you can accomplish with those, and that's where our efforts to bring back direct current have been a big, you know, again, paradigm shift within that electrical category of technology.

So basically what you guys have done is taken something that's powerful but had a little bit of a issue, aka burning skin, right? Not a not a good effect of the desired uh application. So you've you've kind of, if I'm reading this right, you you've found a way to work around that, where it's it's not actually taking care of, you know, it's not it's not having an effect on the actual skin. It's getting through to it doing what's is that right? Am I repeating that correctly?

Yeah, exactly. It can get get through that you know resistance of the skin, it can get down into the body where it can have the types of effects that we desire to.

Yeah. Very cool, man. So I guess when I look at this from a business perspective, you know, people who listen to this podcast tend to lean a little bit more into like industry folk, right? When I mean that as like fitness, health, wellness, people who are maybe operators or practitioners or executives or investors within the space. There's a lot of people who are just interested in stuff listening to. But when you look at the business application, I think it's uh fairly obvious, right, for clinicians, physical therapy, sports rehab. Um, if you look at kind of the maybe the operator realm of, let's say, gyms, health clubs, um, things like that, is there opportunities there for them as far as like maybe partnering with clinicians or getting one of these in-house? Like, do you need a ton of education to do this? Do you have to be, you know, have some initials after your name in order to run one of these? Like, walk me through where the opportunities are here.

In the fitness realm, one thing that we have heard enough times now that it certainly bubbles up in my mind is how gyms and personal trainers often will either lose clients when they're injured, or you know, they kind of lose that continuity. People get injured and then they might not come back for a while, or they don't ever come back. And there's some trainers that do a lot more corrective exercise and have a little bit of a therapeutic bend to what they're doing as well, which I think you know that it can do a lot of good there. And there there are now you know many facilities that have brought on typically either an athletic trainer or physical therapist or chiropractor or someone like that, so they can they can have in-house some of these services that when people are in pain, they can go there, they can they can resolve it quickly, stay in the mix, stay in the facility. So it's a lot stickier when you can help someone meet an immediate problem. You know, it's a lot oftentimes a lot easier to get people in the door if you're used to attract new clientele or to be able to just meet an immediate need for someone like that. It's like the the whole reason why painkillers sell better than vitamins. It's the kind of reactive meet, you know, fix an immediate pain versus something that's proactive that's more preventative and future oriented, where you may not necessarily see or feel the benefit, at least not for a while. It's like in more like an insurance policy where you're protecting for the future. So being able to have that, there is, you know, the our current product is a is a medical device such that it would either have to be used either by a licensed professional or under the supervision of one. So if there's a medical director in the facility, someone with a personal training or massage background can be trained to use it, just would have to be under the supervision. So there's some you know, nuances that can vary a little bit by state or by profession, and you know, some of those details, of course. But it's something that that is a in many cases a valuable addition into the mix there in the overall suite of offerings. And then there's also some really cool fitness applications. Once people are better, once they've met certain recovery milestones, whether it's in in gyms or in physical therapy clinics, chiropractic practices, we we often hear about people wanting to continue on and use the newbie because we can use it for mobility. You can preferentially teach muscles to contract or relax. You can increase motor control in new ranges of motion. So you can accelerate the process of if someone's working on various flexibility or mobility or movement goals, accelerate their the process and their training. You can help build muscle. We did one study at the University of South Florida, actually, two one looking at the acute effects and one looking at muscle growth over a full eight week training cycle. We saw that you can use the newbie like digital weight and just to set The stage here, if you think about think about if you're just bending your arm, like doing bicep curls without any weight in your hand, you're only contracting a few motor units and muscle fibers, right? A small percentage. If you put a moderate weight in your hand, you contract a little bit more, you engage a little more of those motor units. If you have a heavier weight, you contract, you engage even more, you activate even more. And you can have the same effect putting the newbie pads on that muscle, turning it up to certain settings. You can get as much muscle recruitment as if you're lifting some of those heavier weights, but without as much load or strain on the joints. So it can make it more time efficient. It can make it more effective, it can make it safer to get that type of muscle building effect for well-trained individuals, even professional bodybuilders. You can activate and train, you know, you can work on biceps or calves or the lateral quad sweep on that vasus lateralis or different tissues. You can sort of spot load areas to get growth in certain areas that might be underactive. So there's a lot of use cases also in the in the fitness realm, which at least that's sort of touching on, at least scratching the surface and introducing some of those too.

Yeah. Well, you know, five years ago, man, uh, you know, I would say there's definitely some applications, but looking where we are now in 2026, and this is something I cover so often, is like we're seeing the convergence of the medical and fitness communities in numerous ways. You know, a lot of like a lot of health clubs and gyms have medical directors. They have an in-house MD because they're starting to look at longevity opportunities, right? So uh needles break the skin, or they want to have a physical therapist. I think of like uh Dr. Ryan Green at Monarch Athletic Clubs, right? Where it's got the whole host. You walk in for one amount of month, you get unlimited personal training, physical therapy. You know, if you want HRT, if you want peptides, like this is all stuff that you can get in one place now. And I'm starting to see like this is really the direction that we're going, where if we want one, you know, a kind of a one-stop shop and preventative health and health optimization, which I would prefer as the term we're looking for here, is like how do we not just get people out of sickness, but how do we optimize everyone's health? Right. So they they they're just living their best lives. I think this is a really cool tool for people to look at. Well one last question I always ask here, Garrett, is what do you need help with? So if people are listening to this and they want to reach out to you, is there any specific topics that you'd like to hear from people about?

Well, one thing I would mention that you said there is optimization. I totally agree with you. You know, health optimization. We're we're not just reacting to sickness anymore. We're trying to proactively focus on longevity and and be more vibrant and vital and healthy and fit so that we can enjoy life longer. And for many of the reasons we described, focusing on the nervous system is part of that because it controls our our organs, right? Heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, elimination, reproductive function. You know, if our body still thinks that we have the capability of ri to reproducing, it's gonna keep us healthier for for a longer period of time, right? And you know, evolution is is a big part of that lens. So that is a you know, I think a great statement there. Just wanted to pay you back on that. And then I you know, appreciate the the question in terms of in terms of help. I think for us, we're of course working on on innovating methods and technology and all that. And I at the same time, I feel just so confident and passionate and my conviction is as strong as ever about how much the newbie and the new fit method can help people. And so so if anyone listening to this is interested in bringing this into their own practice, we'd love to talk with you. Or you know someone in the physical therapy, physical medicine, chiropractic, adjacent medical wellness space who you think might be a fit, we'd love to to meet them and and talk to them about how this may work in their business because we are all about sharing the newbie, teaching people how to implement this and and really making change from from inside the system, helping provide practitioners the tools and frameworks that can can help them be more effective so we can all get better together.

Awesome, man. And you got a podcast too. Drop that one. What's the name of the podcast and where can people find that?

Yes, the New Fit Undercurrent. A little play on words there with the current. And then on social media, where our business page is NewFitRFP on Instagram and Facebook, RFP for Rehab Fitness Performance. And I've got a personal one, just my first and last name, Garrett.solpeter. Would love to love to see you on there, fellow future travelers, future of fitness.

Well, Garrett, this is awesome, man. And uh thank you for what you're developed. You know, like I said, it's already helped me pass one injury, and uh, I hope we'll we'll find out by the end of ski season. But uh yeah, I just appreciate it. It it's made a difference in my life, and I know you're making differences in many people's lives. So keep up the great work, man. Ladies and gentlemen, Garrett Salvadir.

Thank you very much.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This was your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Menace. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me, simply go to the futurofitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.