I'm a Z-Health sceptic. I can't help it. Sorry. (UPDATE: I was a...)

I read about near magical transformations and effects it has with rehabbing injuries, improving performance and ignored it all for the last couple of years but the chatter and buzz has gotten too strong.

I succumbed, I broke down, I ordered the Z-Health Mega Package and...

this is the story of what I found.

Z-Health, the foundations of fitness?
We spend a lot of time training the muscular and cardiovascular systems but most of us neglect to train our nervous system.

Your nervous system governs and runs you, your entire being. Think of it as a computer operating system. And just like a computer, over time, your body and nervous system builds up junk in the form of injury and poor movement patterns (think sitting all day, and how much it hurts to stand up afterwards), it starts to run slower and crashes every so often. The stated aim of Z-Health is to reboot your system so to speak and start off with a fresh install, and in most cases, a new and improved OS. Is anything giving away the fact that at the time of writing this Apple has just released Mac OS 10.6 and Microsoft has unleashed Windows 7 onto the world?

Ahem, back to Z-Health...Z-Health makes a simple claim. Improve the function of your nervous system and you'll improve everything else by default.

How does Z-Health do this?
Z-Health breaks itself down into several phases, the R, I and S Phase.

R Phase is the "Rehab" phase. The first question I asked myself was what am I rehabbing? After a few weeks of study and practice my opinion is its not a replacement for injury rehab specialists, physios, sports doctors, etc...but a way of "rehabbing" poor and inefficient movement patterns. The word rehab has a lot of other connotations so I prefer to think of it as "reprogramming"

I Phase is the "Integration" phase. The way I see it is moving from studying movement in isolation, I-Phase is about progressing on from isolation to more complex movement that mimics real life. Basically the same movements from R-Phase are made more complex.

S-Phase seems to have no name so I'm guessing its "Sports" Phase. The emphasis is on training to move like an athlete. Interesting concept which I'll be exploring in the future.

The LKB Sponsored Z-Health / Kettlebell Workshop review
As with most things you get to learna lot faster from working in person with experts over a DVD or book. With that in mind we invited mc schraefel - kettlebell bad ass, Z-Health expert and all round fitness geek to run a workshop showing how Z-Health integrates with one of my favourite things; kettlebells.

It refined a lot of the core techniques; toe pulls, ankle tilts - which seem overly simple, and with the refinement actually felt the techniques mobilising the target areas.

Bone rhythm was a simple concept to understand - refining body mechanics - but was harder to grasp. More practice needed, but can see applications for training and life in general.

Lots of theory. A nice refresher on physiology and anatomy!

Overall we got a great overview on a huge system, which is good news as we're working on organising a three day Z-Health workshop for 2010!
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Find out more about Z-Health here