Jim Klopman: Balance is Power

Transcript

[0:00:28] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Jim Klopman, author of Balance is Power. How do you become a peak performer? Some people say you need to lift weights, other say you need to focus on nutrition. While those are important, Jim believes that your balance system is the most powerful and often the most neglected way of getting in peak performance shape. In this episode, we talk about how balance is your sixth sense and why it’s so important to continually retrain it. Not just to improve your wellbeing but also to prevent life threatening injuries. If you are a human being who works on a computer, you don’t want to miss this episode. Now, here is our conversation with Jim Klopman. Jim, I want to talk about your personal story and how Balance is Power, ultimately came to be before you wrote it. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in balance?

[0:01:44] Jim Klopman: Yeah, it’s like three different versions of that but I’ll go in terms of – it all started out when I was born type of thing but the real genesis for the balance aspect of it. I’ve been an athlete, I don’t know if my whole life, I’ve never really I guess gone to the levels I thought I should have because I wrestled with ADD and dyslexia which turns out I discovered just in the last – just as I was starting this business. A lot of it is because of brain damage I have. I’ve had this fascination with sport and balance my whole life, I lettered in five different sports in high school.

[0:02:28] Charlie Hoehn: Which ones?

[0:02:29] Jim Klopman: They were lacrosse, alpine skiing, soccer, baseball and football. Having done that and just always love to ski and do things that was sort of – engage my balance system completely. I think I’ve always had a fascination but when I was 50 years old, I skied one day with the famous Stein Erikson who was really the founder of sort of the slope style, fun, stylish skiing and he was also one of the greatest racers in the world, he was 75 at the time and I was 50 and you know, asking him, just the two of us. My wife gave it to me as a gift, you know, people say “wasn’t that expensive?”, I was like, “I’ve spent three hours with lawyers that were more expensive” but it was a wonderful day and I asked him how he skied well into his 70’s like he was. He said, well he skies every day and that’s one advantage he has that nobody else really does have. We talked some about agility and balance and gymnastic work that he used to do when he was younger and he still does now. I came away from that day going, “Well I want to ski well into my 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. How do I do this?” and it wasn’t fitness because I wasn’t as fit at 50 as I was when I was 30. I mean, the fitness space has gotten so scientific and so good at keeping people fit, it’s remarkable in terms of diet, you know, I have low body fat, high muscle ratio, whatever that may be. It wasn’t that and I thought, “maybe there’s this degradation in skills” but you know, the more you think about that, that’s kind of a not true because actually, the more times you do something, the better you get. What were the components that were missing that were causing people to not ski as well and what was the component in other sports? Why would a golfer skill start to degrade in his 40’s?Why would a baseball player skills start to degrade in his 30’s? It just didn’t make sense to me. I thought, “well maybe it’s balance” and I went out into the market place and there wasn’t any balance training worth a damn on the marketplace. I developed some of my own and my skiing got remarkably better and then I tried it on other athletes and they became more agile and coordinated. I thought “well, this is the missing link” and I went down the rabbit hole from then and sort of discovered, invented and created a lot of things since then and things that in terms of what we discovered, I don’t think are really being explored at all in the scientific space at all.

[0:05:04] Charlie Hoehn: Wow. That’s amazing. You mentioned you had brain damage that caused ADD and dyslexia, did that happen very early on in life?

[0:05:14] Jim Klopman: I don’t know, when you look at the brain scan, I had a brain scan done by Daniel Amen who some of the medical community thinks he’s a quack, I don’t think he is, he’s got like seven, eight clinics throughout the United States, he’s written like 15 books, he does all these shows on Educational TV. If he was a quack, he wouldn’t be succeeding to the level that he’s succeeding for the prices he charges and insurance now will cover some of his work but the days I spoke to him, they weren’t. He’s the advisor for the NFL Football Player’s Association. I guess after 40 years of trying to figure out what’s wrong with me in terms of some of these issues I deal with and I’ve been exposed to some of the best in the world. I advised a large organization of mental health practitioners. I was exposed to the best of the best and nothing was working so finally decided to – I guess what my mom always told me to do was I got my head examined. It came back and showed me scans of my brain where I had the brain – a lifelong professional football player. In terms of the damage, I had recognized some of the places, car wrecks, ski falls, fights, those areas I recognized but there was damage in the back of my head on my cerebellum that I didn’t recognize how that happened. I assumed since I had a lot of behaviors since I was a child is something must have happened to me when I was younger. I think, it was a rough and tumble family, I was a rough and tumble kid and maybe I got – I don’t really believe it was my parents. I don’t think my parents said anything to me, it might have been siblings or other kids in the neighborhood, whatever the case may be. That area that they pointed out was, they said “there was a lot of damage to your cerebellum, that’s your center of balance, you need to balance train” and I had already started my business by then. I said, “I don’t need to balance train, I balance train all day long” and they said, “no, you need to balance train.” Finally I just acquiesce and said “okay fine”, because they weren’t understanding where I was coming from. But to me, it tied up a lot of loose ends, I had a fascination for it, why I found like my brain and my psychological and mental capabilities became more integrated, more better when I balance trained and it was all because I guess I was subconsciously figured out I had the neuroplastically repair that area and reassign those skills to someplace else.

[0:07:45] Charlie Hoehn: That’s fascinating. The reason I asked is because I’ve read that a lot of athletes have ADD and dyslexia and it’s why they gravitate to the physical realm in athletics because it either is something that makes them feel strong or it lessens those symptoms for them?

[0:08:09] Jim Klopman: I agree with you, I see a lot of extreme athletes out here in Utah and I can tell you, every single one of them has ADD, I mean, it goes without saying. Personally, from my standpoint, there’s, ADD can come from brain damage or ADD doesn’t have to come from brain damage. It’s still not a clearly defined diagnosis and it does not clearly define what the causes are. But, I will say this. For me, my whole life I have a highly over active mind and the only time my mind goes to peace before the balance training when I was fully engaging my whole neurology. When I was flying down the mountain on the edge of death at 60 miles an hour, riding a motorcycle at a hundred miles an hour, driving a car to 120 miles an hour. Those points, when I was at those limits of every sense in my body had to be keyed up, loaded and working, my brain would be quiet. I think that there is a real sense of peace that comes with that and there’s a residual effect afterwards. After you do it. We find that this is what happens when you balance train, you cannot – when we take you to the maximum balance limits, if you’ve engaged your conscious mind, you’ll lose your balance. We see it, we try not to complement clients, threw up on the line, they’re doing well and we go, “hey, you’re doing really well”, within three to five seconds after that, they’ll lose their balance.

[0:09:42] Charlie Hoehn: Snaps them out of it, yeah.

[0:09:44] Jim Klopman: Conscious minds engage.

[0:09:46] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I’m so glad to be having this conversation Jim because one of my favorite videos ever is a video done by the New York Times on a guy named Slowmo, have you ever heard of this?

[0:10:00] Jim Klopman: Yeah.

[0:10:02] Charlie Hoehn: He’s an old guy, I believe in Santa Monica or no, maybe Venice beach but all he does is roller blade all day and he’s famous there because he stands on…

[0:10:13] Jim Klopman: I have seen this guy, yes.

[0:10:14] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, he stands on one leg and a lot of people just assume that he’s kind of an eccentric character and I suppose he is but he is a former doctor who studied the benefits of balance and yeah, he roller blades on one foot and he talks about how balancing, whether you’re surfing or any type of sport where you’re balancing for a long period of time has a similar affect in the brain as meditation. When you said that it quiets your brain and doing these activities, it confirms a lot of what he says in that video which is just a really fun and interesting video all the same. I’m curious, what is balance training, what does that mean? Is it a slack line, is it other things, is it a bunch of things?

[0:11:10] Jim Klopman: Well we do a bunch of things. You know it’s interesting when you make the comment about one foot, all balance is human balance is on one foot or the other. Every sport you play is you’re transitioning weight from one foot or the other or on your one foot or the other. The only sport that this is not true is weightlifting where they try to keep weight evenly situated between two feet. We focused on one foot balancing. I invented the slack bow which is a frame that holds the slack line, it’s infinitely controllable so we can have level one, two, three on it and then we have a little plate we put on the line called the slack plate and the purpose of that is to give a flatter platforms for the foot to be on but also we found that – this is totally the opposite of what you think, it’s counter intuitive. That a rope is easier to stand on than a one inch line, it’s easier to stand on a two inch line. In our three and a half inch plate makes it that much more difficult to stand on the line. We don’t walk on the line. Slack line to walk in the line and my hats off to them, they’re incredible athletes and they have incredible balance but the reason we don’t’ walk on the line is there is no sport really where one foot’s directly in front of the other in a parallel line. They’re generally right next to each other. Then on the line, we do other things such as we neuro stimulate and have you do other challenges with other systems and it’s interesting. Like I said before, just a conscious thought will make you lose your balance. We take people on the line but we progress people, as soon as you walk in the door, we’re evaluating you and we have an evaluation process. If you come in and we don’t think you're ready for the line, we have floor work that we do and then I have another product called the slack lock and I’ll send one to you to play with which is a step before the slack line and then we do a lot of work on balance boards. We do a lot of work on movement and balance. We do it basically in slow motions, it’s the same thing as high speed but because it’s slow motion, it’s causing you to learn how to balance better. We do that movement work because we find a lot of people have locked up parts of their body through other fitness exercises or whatever behaviors they have. To truly have balance you have to be fluid and, well fluid, it’s the best word, if you see a great balance athlete like Gretzky or Jordan or Seth Curry, one of the ways you describe these guys is they were very fluid, well it’s because the whole body is engaged in the process. They’re not muscled up so badly in the upper shoulders that they can’t move that part of the body, all this things kind of move fluidly, you think Roger Federer when he hits the tennis ball. It’s that type of thing that we work on. People think, it’s just balance, it’s not, it’s balance and then it’s movement patterns that we look for and then we have ways of changing the body’s fluidity, not through instructions because let me tell you, when you say to somebody, “hey, your shoulders are too tight, loosen up.” That doesn’t work you know? We take them through movement patterns and one day they go, “OH my shoulders have just loosened up”, we go “yeah.” We’re letting the body make those decisions, we’re not trying to get to conscious mind involved in that. That’s basically what it looks like and what we think our skillset is other than the things that I just talked about, we’re talking before about protecting space. I spend money on patenting products, I’m spending money on patenting processes all that stuff but the other thing we think is a real skill on our part is evaluating your balance when you come in, we’ve created our own index for that. Secondarily, evaluating where you are when you’re ready to advance to the next level. If I took you and pushed you too far, you’re going to do something frightening and fall and we’ve never really – we have had one person fall. We’d had no injuries at all so we know how to progress you up through the training levels and the reason I’m pointing this out is if you go to lift weights and get stronger, you have to keep going to heavier and heavier weights, you just can’t be doing the same thing over and over again. We progress you up through this levels of difficulty and can evaluate where you are and know when it’s time to move.

[0:15:41] Charlie Hoehn: That’s great. I know the value of this service, I’m looking at slackbow.com and all your products. I think this is great. Personally, I love to slack line, I just got into it, I don’t know, several months ago and I do it in my back yard because I agree with you, I think balance is enormously important and I know that if I don’t counteract some of the activity I have at work which is primarily sitting in front of a computer then my body’s slowly going to degrade, so does my mind. I also use a rip stick, you know, those skateboards that independently swivel? Yeah. Those are a blast too. I know that, and you probably know the statistics on this but I believe that the biggest cost for elderly care or for senior citizens is false, am I right in saying that?

[0:16:41] Jim Klopman: Yeah, the numbers are, here are the things that are mind-blowing about that number. The numbers are mind-blowing to me and why this is not some sort of national – I have no idea, I feel like a lone wolf in the woods, just been screaming for seven years now and nobody’s hearing me. Let me scream again. Just was sort of work through all the numbers and then you can ask questions. Over the age of 65 is the number one cause of accidental death and accidental injury. Now, it’s not considered a disease by the NIH, it’s considered an accident. Here’s the problem with that number, it’s a pretty bad number but in terms of, it’s not as many deaths from falls as there is from cancer or heart disease, it’s close to that of like strokes. It’s a pretty low number. Here’s a crazy thing about that number though. It has nearly doubled in the last 15 years, it’s not going down, it’s going up. Diseases or other diseases are pretty much going down because better medical care and better fitness and better diet and all this things but no, deaths from falls and injuries over the age 65 have nearly doubled in 15 years. It becomes a huge problem and nobody’s addressing it, well the federal government’s kind of addressing it, they say falls are 30 billion dollar a year expense to us and they’ve got 30 million dollar study that they’re doing which I think is kind of comical, the study is based on “we’re going to study people where 75 years old who have bad balance and seeing if we can help them.” That’s kind of like going to smokers when they have lung cancer and going “hey, we want to talk to you about helping you with your smoking problem.” No, it’s too late by then. You know, it’s something you need to be working on earlier and one of the things that we have in the book or not one, one of the most important things I think we have in the book is we have the four main causes of why people are losing their balance and then why this is sort of unseen disease and it only pops up after you’ve become injured. Let me give you a couple of other numbers and then ask me your questions. If you’re over the age of 45 and you go to the emergency room, there’s a 50% chance you're there for a fall, that’s a huge medical cost in the emergency room space. Half the people over the age of 45 are there for falls and by the way, there’s the people who are just injured bad enough to have to go to the emergency room, there’s a whole another kind of people who have sprained ankles, dinged up knees and they don’t go see the doctor for a week or two afterwards. We’re all about concussions nowadays right? We’re thinking about little Joey playing football and little Sally playing soccer and we think that’s where it all starts. Yeah, in the athletic arena, there’s a huge amount of problems with concussions and things like the TBI’s that happen to the head but the number one cause of concussions in the United States are falls. We don’t even acknowledge that this problem is out there, it’s the number one cause of industrial death. Are falls. Guess what, everyone just call it an accident, to me, it’s a balance lost disease and there’s a clear reason why that balance is being lost and then the worst part about it is it doesn’t take anything difficult to restore that balance, it’s ridiculously easy to restore it and it happens in a very short period of time.

[0:19:55] Charlie Hoehn: How short of a period of time?

[0:19:57] Jim Klopman: Well here’s the thing, I don’t know if you believe in God, I’ve never been a big God person but the more time I spend around the human body, I’m like, “this didn’t happen by accident.” If I was to teach you a new skill like how to hit a tennis ball, it will take several hours before you even get halfway decent right? Or hit on a consistent basis. If I was to try to improve your strength by 10%, that would take weeks maybe months. We have people come in and they get better so quickly, it’s like magic. It’s like how they get better that quickly or somebody will leave station one and come back and begin session two better than when they left session one and in the beginning I go, “have you been at home practicing?” No, It’s the body starts upping this system again and it’s a software system. We’re talking about a neurological software system and we’re just reengaging it and it turns back on and it wants to turn back on, it feels good to the body to have it turned back on. It just seems to come on automatically. We have – I had an older skier, the guy was like 64 at the time. I trained him twice, he skis with a group of people, experts out here, he came at me and said “I got a real problem,” he said, “they’re waiting on me and they’re getting ready to throw me out of the group and one of the skiers in this group, son is one of the best skiers, racers in the world.” I said “okay.” We trained him twice, he came back after skiing with those guys one day, he skied with them Thursdays and Saturdays, he came back in on Friday, he accuse me of hypnotizing him. That’s after two sessions. Two sessions, I said, “what do you mean?” He goes, “you know I told you that the group was waiting on me?” I go “yeah”, he says, “I’m waiting on them now. I’m beating them all down to the lift and I’m waiting on them.” That to me, we get those results all the time and it’s like magic. Anyways, that’s how quick it can happen, you’ll notice, if you’re an athlete, you’ll notice a result within two to three sessions.

[0:21:58] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, that’s amazing. Jim, tell us, what is in the book, I mean, everybody’s listening I’m sure, sold on the idea that hey, balance is a big thing, it’s important. In the book, do you lay out, which is obviously an understatement? In the book, do you lay out exercises for them to do? Do you give prescriptive things for actions for them to take or what?

[0:22:25] Jim Klopman: Yeah, I kind of go through a little bit of the how important balance is and why you should pay attention to it. We go through the four main causes of the loss of balance in the modern world, why we’re losing balance, why it’s an unseen problem until you get hurt and then we go through the each of the individual movements and different sports and why balance, improve balance positively affects each of those different movements, like four or five. Then we go through a series of here’s how you evaluate and we start at a very low level because you know, I’ll watch you walk in my facility, I can tell right away, he’s this, he’s that, numbers tell people’s balance, it’s how they move but I can’t do that over books. We start over at the very basic level of evaluation and then we have three different levels of balance training from there. Pretty much using equipment you can find around the house, I do mention my equipment, one guy in amazon accused me of the whole book’s just to sell my equipment and it was just a bunch of shit because I don’t – I mention my equipment but I also recommend others to do the same thing.

[0:23:41] Charlie Hoehn: Right, you’re always going to get those people who are sensitive.

[0:23:46] Jim Klopman: Yeah, that’s a nice way to…

[0:23:49] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:23:51] Jim Klopman: Anyway, we do have something prescriptive and then we have, when you buy the book, we give you links to videos that you can go access online that take that same information and give it to you in a more audio visual format if you didn’t pick it up from reading it.

[0:24:54] Charlie Hoehn: Jim, I want to run a question by you, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this because you have extensive background in this field. When I think of balancing activities, I literally think these are some of the most enjoyable, fun activities to do as an individual right? Doing slack lining is intensely pleasurable once you get enough of the hang of it that you can do it for hours and hours. Same with the rip stick, it’s a blast once you figure it out and surfing. Here’s where I’m going with this. If a problem in our country with elderly people happen to be that they couldn’t use their arm strength to pull themselves up, maybe one approach to solving that problem would be okay, well we got to start a gym and build some products where they’re doing pull ups and hanging and doing monkey bars. Now, some people might go to that but I see a ton of people going to rock climbing gyms where it’s fun, where it can be done in a group, where it’s not about the benefit of you need to solve this problem of your arm strength is weak but come here to enjoy yourself. What I’m curious about is, why isn’t there a slack lining gym so to speak or why isn’t there a place where you can go or are there? Is it trapeze type things or am I missing something there?

[0:26:31] Jim Klopman: I think the climbing gym’s part of it, you’re seeing more play like gyms, you’re seeing acre yoga. We’ve been trying to push the whole – maybe I should have renamed, not use the word balance, use it fun, whatever it is, One of the problems that we have, your question has got so much loaded in it in terms of answer but I’ll start here. Nobody ever says we need to spend more time in the office right? Because, you’re living in this world in the office that’s a perfectly flat floors, perfectly vertical walls, looking at soul sucking square screens, it’s sort of absorb you in this frontal vision and take away your peripheral vision. Yet, everybody goes and does what to have fun? They go challenge their balance. They ski, they snowboard, they ride motorcycles, go to amusement parks, they walk in nature, they run, they play tennis, they play golf, they do rip sticks, they walk on slack lines. Everything you do to sort of reintegrate your brain and make yourself feel better is you go do a balance challenge of some sort. If you don’t’ think of balance challenge isn’t fun, take a one year old child and turn them upside down and turn them right side up, they’re laughing their ass off, they love…

[0:27:47] Charlie Hoehn: Or spin them in a circle and throw their balance off.

[0:27:50] Jim Klopman: Exactly, they love that. We all love that, we all want to have our balance and that’s what we do for fun. But you see, the world we created, this cityscapes and this modern buildings at homes and so forth, everything’s perfectly flat and rectal linear and there’s nothing flat or rectal linear in nature anywhere. Everything in nature is fractal and uneven.

[0:28:11] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:28:12] Jim Klopman: That’s where we feel integrated and alive and we have psychic and physical death when we’re in each other’s spaces. You go out and do that, that’s what you’re doing. Now, the second component of that is we think fitness is going to a gym and this is, it maybe sounds tangential to what we do but it’s not. When you go into a gym and you lift a barbell above your head, first of all, half of those things, you're sitting on your ass lifting something. You're just never in a natural positions, never in my life am I sitting or lying down and lifting 400 pounds off my chest, I have no idea why a bench press is so important, to combine. Because when is a guy lying on his back lifting 400 pounds off his chest. Never.

[0:28:53] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:28:54] Jim Klopman: Never. You go into the gym and you do what’s called bilateral movements, you’re moving both arms at the same time and the same direction. Never in sport anywhere at any time are you lifting both arms in the same direction at the same time. No sport except for weightlifting, ever. Why? Why do you do that? Well here’s the problem, why is that a problem? Everything in life is what it’s called, it’s a lateral contralateral. We’re moving our left leg with our right hand, our right leg with our left hand or we’re hitting, throwing, pitching, balancing, any of those things, we’re doing what’s called ipsilateral, we’re crossing the center line, every time we move across in a center line, every natural movement crossing the center line and when you’re in a gym, you don’t do any of that. We have really powerful physical demonstrations, we don’t show people online and we don’t give this away in videos but you come into our gym and we’ll show you something, we’ll show you how an bilateral movement will reduce your coordination and actually weaken your mind and we’ll show you an ipsilateral movement how suddenly your coordination gets better and you’re thinking gets better. These components, when you go into the gym are debilitating. Now, for older people, this is the craziest thing ever. I think one of things is we can change our spaces. They have shown something like walking on cobblestones barefoot for older people improve their balance. It’s a balance challenge. Here’s the other crazy thing and this I love more than anything is that, if somebody has Parkinson’s, this is a – a trainer discovered this, he took some people from an old folk’s home and took them to a boxing gym and had him just start hitting a heavy bag, not for power, just to have that motion, that cross in the center line motion. People hadn’t spoken for two years started talking. People on wheelchairs stood up, it’s like the virtual cure to Parkinson’s or symptoms of Parkinson’s is to start boxing motions. They don’t know why, now all the academics are involved and they’re coming up with all their brainy ideas but I think it’s simply as crossing the center line. We’ve worked with people who have autoimmune diseases like MS and they come in and I mean, I have one woman come in hanging on her husband, she couldn’t even walk and we had her walking and moving within I guess six sessions like she hadn’t had in years and she goes to physical therapists all the time because we were doing crossing the centerline work and then we were engaging this crossing centerline work with the balance. To your point, yeah, plays really important but crossing that centerline and balancing at the same time is massively important. Next time you’re on your slack line, notice how your hands and legs are crossing your center line. When you’re on a rip stick, that motion’s all crossed in the center line, the way you’re just moving side to side, you’re wiggling to one side, your arms are going to the other, it’s all that kind of movement, that stuff makes you feel great and that’s the kind of stuff that will protect you from falling. Now, I’m going to answer one more part of the question is we lose the balance like I said before, we live in this flat environment, we look at this screens, we wear, I don’t care if it’s Nike or Reebok or Under Armor, they’re all bad. These shoes are miserable for our back.

[0:32:00] Charlie Hoehn: They’re cast. They’re a cast for your feet.

[0:32:02] Jim Klopman: Exactly, yeah. Perfectly described and you’ve got a 100,000, 200,000 receptors on the bottom of your feet. You are supposed to drive data.

[0:32:09] Charlie Hoehn: That’s the most receptors on the body except for your lips.

[0:32:12] Jim Klopman: Right, exactly and so there’s this data and by the way, I don’t know if you know that the data now goes to brain tissue in your lower spine. It doesn’t even go to your brain. It’s manipulated there and then shot back down to the legs in terms of movement. Next you have your big toe, your big toe is there for a reason. All these shoes have turned up front parts maybe they are a rocker for running but nobody runs in their running shoes. They’re standing around all the time, so the most important part of my foot is off the ground. The big toe is a big toe for a reason because it’s supposed to be doing most of the work. You look at all these old people who have neuropathy in their feet and they are wearing three inch thick rubber soled cast like you call it. Well the nerves in your feet are like, come one man, we want to get involved and you’re just deadening the nerves by not letting them get involved. We have clients that come in and then have their thick shoes and they go, “well you know should I train with my shoes on or what?” I’m like, “come on” because we always get the same results. Keep them on. Literary a minute or two minutes in they go, “Wow my foot, it really hurts!” and I go, “Yeah because here’s the deal. We are taking your maximum balance limit. Your foot has 25% of the bones and muscles in your body and it wants to get engaged in helping you and it’s working its ass off to help you and it has no effect so it just keeps working and grinding and working and grinding and now it’s tired”. Take off the shoes, 30 seconds later they go, “My foot feels much better” and so, you live in Austin, you know all these really bright guys at Book in a Box, I mean they are brilliant people and if I ask anybody, ask all of your brilliant friends, “Hey man, why do you have heels on your shoes?” nobody can answer that question. There’s no reason.

[0:33:53] Charlie Hoehn: I know.

[0:33:53] Jim Klopman: The heel is raised off the ground but every person in the world wears heels. Well in this country wears heels on their shoes or running shoes that hide their heels in their design. You are anywhere from 10, eight to 15 – 16 millimeters off the ground with a heel that is hidden in the shoe. Anyways, you know I get all excited about this stuff, it pisses me off.

[0:34:11] Charlie Hoehn: Oh I’m right with you and I get pissed off as well. So I feel a kindred spirit with you on this topic because I have been saying it now. I’ve been drinking the same cool aid but it’s not cool aid. It’s the truth right? So I have been preaching the same thing for I think four years after I started getting into – I watched a documentary called The Grounded and it totally reversed my – Well it didn’t reversed anything I mean I just had never given as much thought about the importance of being connected to the earth with your bare feet until after I saw that and after I read the book Earthing. And they are discovering all these other benefits to doing that which is the earth actually recirculates the blood. When your blood clumps together, they’ve looked at what happens once you reconnect with the earth for certain periods of time and unsticks it. So there’s all these bizarre hidden health benefits that are going on when you start reincorporating this stuff back into your life. The challenges going against the enormous cultural lifestyles that we fall into primarily due to work. I know the answers are, “Look just reincorporate this back into your life” but what have been the things that you’ve seen, the simple shifts into people’s lives, into your client’s lives, your reader’s lives that they’ve made that have allowed them to stick with reincorporating balance into their life and these types of movements, what has been the highest compliance rate that you’ve seen?

[0:35:56] Jim Klopman: Well, I’d say on client’s work like this we have clients that come in we see once and we never see again. A lot of times, those are the know it all guys between 40, 35, 50 let’s say and the problem with them is that they’re still operating in their 20 year brain with a 50 year old body and then I kick their ass and then that really blows their mind. I am 64 years old.

[0:36:23] Charlie Hoehn: So you physically fight all of them with an ego.

[0:36:27] Jim Klopman: Right, I mean basically they just want somebody to tell them they’re good and then that’s it and they’re not. We have the sort of in the same class, the transformational group. They have nice man tits and big guns, they’re a little confused by the whole process too and that they don’t understand, you know, “I’ve worked so hard to look so good, why am I not operating good?” and it’s because it’s not you building muscles. We build better muscle. Everybody else is real simple, once you get engaged in what we do in balance, you can’t get it out of your head. Every client says “I think about it all the time. I am standing in the kitchen, I am thinking about it. I’m in the bathroom, I am thinking about it.” I have a lot of clients who say, “Oh yeah, I brush my teeth with one foot”. I always tell all of them, “Well that’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life because there’s more deaths and falls in the bathroom than any other place in the house”. But you know, find a place with less hard pointy surfaces I suggest if you’re going to do your balance training but the point is, once it’s in your head, we teach people how to walk, right? It surprises my ass you see people come in, kids they do massive heel slams. Now when you land, you’re hitting with twice your body weight. So I weigh 170 pounds, that’s 340 pounds every time my heel slams in the ground. Well that heel slams into the ankle joint, the ankle joint slams into the lower legs, slams in the knee, slams in the hip and we do a thing which I think is a lot of fun. We just tell you to pinch off your ears as tight as you can and walk and you hear “thump-thump-thump” that’s your bone slamming all the way up through your body. You’re a dynamic spring. You are not a bunch of sticks of bones. If you turn around and you land and we teach people how to do it and it took me up to six months to change my gate but we teach you how to land on your forefoot to position your body so landing on your forefoot works. You can’t use that same roll, ass tucked under shoulders back to land on your forefoot. You have to change your body position because I say to people, “Why the hell do you go workout for two hours? Play tennis for two hours? Work with me for an hour, go to the gym for another hour, you do all that stuff to be an athlete and then the rest of the day you walk around like a nudge”. You look at really great athletes. You watch Seth Curry when he walks, he walks like an athlete. You see a great athlete walking and then you go, “That’s a good athlete” and I watch everybody walk and I can tell you when someone is a good athlete or not a good athlete just by how they move their body and how they land. My point too is if you’re going to be an athlete, be an athlete 24 hours or 16 hours a day, all the time you’re awake. We do the same thing with vision. We do a massive amount of training with vision because we find that if you know how to use your vision properly, it improves your athletic ability dramatically. I contend that the best athletes out there have the best field vision. Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Steph Curry, all these incredible passers and movers and shooters are great highly coordinated people but they also for some reason end up being the best passers and the people with the best field vision and to me, they are directly correlated. We take people through balance challenges and then we teach them how to use their vision differently and suddenly they get considerably better. And they look at me and go “that’s amazing” because we didn’t tell them to change anything physically, we just trained them how to use their eyes differently.

[0:39:45] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so could you walk us through one of your vision exercises?

[0:39:49] Jim Klopman: I like to keep those confidential. The point is, you have to engage your peripheral vision and what it is, is you get 90% of the data that goes into your brain, goes into your peripheral vision and this is subconscious non-acknowledge business. They have not ever clearly came up with we know of a little bit of a research that we keep confidential but there is no clear method of testing your peripheral vision because the current methods are to have you utilize your conscious mind to declare where you are in your peripheral vision. The data comes in to your brain, if you look at the numbers rods and cones, you actually have about 17,000 more power, 17,000 times more data coming in to your subconscious rods than you do through your direct vision cone that are used to look at color, shape and all kinds of things that go in your conscious mind. So my movement patterns are based on how well I can take the data from this peripheral vision and put it into that subconscious activation of the body. That’s why Wayne Gretzky could pass and aces. I just knew where everything was and it was a sense. It’s never a, “I know it’s there” it’s a sense of it’s there and that’s why he could pass a 190 degrees off his back and have a perfect pass with the guy who is following behind him and we practice that. We take people through training on that and that’s part of what I didn’t want to share. That’s all.

[0:41:23] Charlie Hoehn: Right and just a note from listeners before the podcast, Jim and I were talking about how in the fitness space especially information can be grabbed onto, taken and modified just ever so slightly for another and then it gets effectively taken and without all the research and documentation ever been done for and we’ve seen that personally online. So I understand the hesitation in sharing.

[0:41:59] Jim Klopman: Some of it is difficult to describe as well. I mean it’s inherently with balance challenge because there is such risk with it. If you misinterpret it you’d end up not doing the right thing or getting hurt.

[0:42:13] Charlie Hoehn: Right, yeah. I’ve noticed I’m 31 now and I’ve noticed for the first time that I’ve seen a slight degradation in my night vision I think. I used to be able to see a little bit better at night and I was speaking to a friend of mine who’s an Iron Man Triathlete and he’s like, “You just got to exercise more” he’s like, “The more I exercise, the more I see improvement in my night vision” and in getting that back and obviously nutrition plays a role in it but that was his prescription.

[0:42:49] Jim Klopman: Here’s another thing and his perspective is interesting but as an Iron Man it means that he is spending more time outdoors. When you look at a screen and this is in the book, you’re focused on the screen and you start to have what I call peripheral vision denial and that is a turn on my created and I’m going to explain it to you why I think it’s so important. I don’t know if you know amblyopia but that’s the wondering eye that young kids will get. The way they cure amblyopia is they put a patch over the good eye and force the wandering eye to work. The wandering eye can see fine. It just doesn’t have the muscular track with the other eye so there’s a mist. One eye is tracking off to left or to the right and the other eye is tracking where it’s supposed to be. The problem with amblyopia is that if you do not get that correction in place by around age eight you lose the vision in that eye. But here’s the thing, you don’t lose the data collection of the vision in that eye. That eye can still continue to work as an eye, it’s the part of the brain that processes the data shuts down. It just shuts down. So what I worry about with peripheral vision denial is we’re looking at these screens and we’re not actively engaging our peripheral vision. Now I’m trained to do it and I do it all the time and again, we have a physical demonstration where we show you. You actually lose coordination when you’re looking at a point as oppose to using your peripheral vision and when you start to use it less and less and less, then it starts to go to sleep so to speak like these kids with amblyopia. Now I’ll give you a couple of examples. I am six foot one. I am not a giant but I’m relatively tall and these tiny three floor hotels, I am embarrassed to say I was on the elevator, I was coming downstairs and they’re just little hotel elevators with little single doors on them. The door opens, I’m right there on the threshold, there’s a man about, five-five, five-six in front of me looking down at his phone and he walks into me. How is it that his peripheral vision is that bad that I’m a physical threat to him? I am looming over him and he walks into me and you see this all the time. There was a video online the other day of a woman who’s 65 years old walking down the street and there’s one of those doors that flip up from the sidewalk that have steps that go down under a restaurant or something. The door is up, so it’s a three foot high door that is up, she walks into it and flips right over down into the hole. In the book, there is a photo and you may have seen this, I licensed this photo of a young man sitting on a boat looking at his phone. He’s on a little tiny sailboat looking on his phone and this huge whale is breaching next to the boat and never lifts his head, still engaged on his phone. So the systems being set off so when I listen to you talk about your peripheral vision, there’s things you can do. Just by saying, “Hey peripheral vision is not seeing. It’s acknowledging”. I am looking at my screen now. I don’t see anything to my left and right per say but I am acknowledging that there is a much bigger space there and my screen is really just part of a larger painting that I am looking at and we’re getting away from that and so when you say your peripheral vision is degrading, it’s not your peripheral vision that’s degrading so much. It’s your processing of your peripheral vision that is degrading and it can be re-established very easily.

[0:46:16] Charlie Hoehn: So Jim, what would you recommend? If our listeners could only take one thing away from this that they should start reincorporating back into their life this week, what would you tell them to do?

[0:46:31] Jim Klopman: Only one thing that I would say, start to go move in nature. Get away from the cityscapes. Get to the parks, get off of trails and flat surfaces. Go engage fractal services. We did a long podcast with marathon runners and one guy said, “If I run on the road, I run much faster than if I run on a dirt road” a smooth dirt road. He said just that little bit of balance change causes me to slow down. Just getting out of that space and then the other is crossing the center line. And the one balance thing that I tell everybody on these podcasts to do is you have to get into a half, think of it as you’re in a stride. A lot of balance training has you on one foot with the other leg kicked in front. Well that’s a totally unnatural position. In fact that’s a position you’re going to be in just before you fall and then secondarily, people will have you balance train with your eyes closed. That’s just teaching you to be a well-balanced blind person as far as I’m concerned. If you have that sensory ability put it to use but what I say is get on one foot, kick the other foot back, bend your knee, get a nice athletic position and just try to stand like that for a minute or two minutes. Now that becomes easy, put a bath towel down stacked or folded four times or put two bath towels stacked so you are two or three inches off the ground on an unstable surface and do that same thing and do that on each side. And then other is if your interest is to really lift weights, get on one foot put a kettle bell down six inches in front of that one foot of 15 pound or 10 pound kettle bell pick it up and put it down six inches in front of that. Stand up, go down, pick it up. Put six inches out in front of you from there, bend down, pick it up and you’ll find at some point bending down doesn’t work. You have to squat down to get it and as you squat to go get that kettle bell and add that weight. Which is an unbalanced weight because you’re putting out one side on the other, it’s a hell of a balance challenge.

[0:48:40] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. Love it. So what is the rest of this year look like for you? And by the way, I can understand the frustration in society catching up to where you see the problem is. It’s super obvious once you’ve taken the red pill I guess at least seen the benefits that come from it but to most people it isn’t. So what does the rest of the year look like for you in terms of serving your clients or either are you working on any new products or are you pushing your message out further? Where is it going for you?

[0:49:20] Jim Klopman: There’s a couple of things. You bring out a good point. I don’t know if you know, well I mean we all know their names, we don’t really remember what they said but the philosopher Schopenhauer said that all truth passes in three stages. First is ridicule, second is violently opposed and third is accepted as being self-evident. So the problem for a developer often times is to wait. We’re still using keyboards that were designed to make you type as slow as possible. When a hundred years ago the Dvorak keyboard was invented that help you improve 20% and we still haven’t gotten off of that. So you just hope that your product is not bad but where we’re going now is even though I have been working on developing all of these for several years, we have a pipeline of products that we’re holding back that we get some degree of funding. Where to a certain extent in a proof of concept mode still, I dropped off a device, who will remain confidential. But a pretty large national organization that trains athletes for international competition in the Olympics. Interestingly enough, these types of organizations want to protect all types of competitive advantages. I ask them if I could have a few athletes just to do a before and after but they said, “Oh we’re too busy. We can’t do that” blah-blah-blah but meanwhile, I have seven people for an hour and 20 minutes listening to me and playing around with the equipment. And I heard one speak to one at the top guys, “So what kind of study are you going to do on this?” so that’s going to happen and then we have some other places we’re going to try to go and build proof of concept and then I’m doing podcast. My website I don’t like per say but you know I am just trying to drive information of the website and it’s just really trying to sell the world and communicates the world that this hidden lost that you don’t know about is affecting you psychologically. Performance wise in a sport, physically and we are just trying to find the right space to go to. We’ve had phenomenal success with golf and I’ve only tried it with three golfers and I’ve stopped because it is not enough. It’s too easy to emulate and then the value is so phenomenal that now I’m going to hold it as a secret until I can figure out how to somehow monetize it. So it’s just kind of that where does it go to have a thing, is there a balance gym in every state or do I get to go to the Dallas Mavericks and train them and upscale their performance of their players? But 15% in terms of coordination and agility which equates literary doubling the asset value of what they pay their players. The right thing is going to show up and I have people, more and more people stepping up to help me and make this thing work but it is a conundrum as how to get there.

[0:52:10] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, do you have any models that you’re trying to emulate in terms of fitness leaders who’ve brought new movements to light?

[0:52:19] Jim Klopman: Not really because I think fitness to a large extent is not like that of the tech world. The tech world really succeeds when you can marry two technologies together. You know, a phone and a computer, a computer and a TV or that type of thing and when you are coming in totally at a left field and you are telling the world, “By the way lifting weights isn’t that smart” or “By the way you can hit a thousand golf balls and think you’re going to get better but you’re never going to get any better until you improve your balance”. It’s just we’re in the state of Steve Jobs going to Hewlett Packard going, “Hey, I have this great idea. Let’s put computers on everybody’s desk” and Hewlett Packard says, “You’re crazy” and then he leaves there and he even goes out and tries to raise money for it and people tell him he’s crazy and then he says, “Well hell I’ll just build it in my garage” and at some point in time, someone joined in and brought him money and help and support. But yeah, I don’t see any model, any place else in the fitness industry that fits this. I could go to and you see some people showing up in this space now. Infomercials, that’s not really delivering what we have to offer is delivering a small part of it and my problem with infomercials is more times than not, it’s the producers of infomercials that make a fortune. You are easily knocked off and you don’t go forward. We start at a kick starter space. Because a few that we’ve spoken to in the kick starter space who’ve done something similar or types of products will say, “Why are you screwing around trying to get all your money in and get things going for kick starter? All of your competitors who have money just jump out there in front of you” so it’s a delicate balance between getting your idea out but you have to get it out with force and power. If you dribble, you’re going to get your ass kicked. You just can’t dribble it out and so it’s a delicate balance. And I may have gotten too far by making the book. Now I may have made a mistake but I am creating the book now. I’ve created the book out of frustration. I just got tired of not being heard. I just want to put a stake in the ground for my children more than anything else so they’d go, “Yeah, he was the guy who wrote the first book, the series book on all of these things” but it wasn’t me. Scott McCredie is the one that wrote an incredible book about balance ten years ago. I met with Scott, he got no traction on that. Of course he wasn’t building methods and tools to increase your balance. He wasn’t giving you the reasons why balance is lost. It’s sort of an esoteric that would journey through the world of balance and I thought it was fascinating. I’m a little bit of a geek about that stuff so.

[0:55:00] Charlie Hoehn: Sure, well you know back no more than a few decades ago organic food was a hippie fringe thing that no one knew about. There’s also you said the philosopher’s quote. There’s also a quote in Silicon Valley which is “Too early means wrong” so yeah, it really is a matter of timing and riding the wave until it breaks. So I certainly hope that you don’t lose heart and while it is frustrating and also I hope it remains motivating for you for a long time. And knowing that you’ll collect followers along the way and I am curious Jim if you were going to write a follow up book to balance this power, what would that be?

[0:55:49] Jim Klopman: Well it would be fitness book of a different sort. I think we could actually do and I would once we’ve engaged those markets on different levels but I could write a book on golf, baseball or football.

[0:56:06] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, one for each niche.

[0:56:08] Jim Klopman: Yeah and I think I firmly believe I could go into an equinox gym and rewrite all their equipment. You know that’s not enough money. I think all that equipment is just in the wrong place doing the wrong things and the business model beauty of these gyms are that they’re hugely – well not even hugely, they’re capital intensive. Once you place all your equipment, you only need four or five people to be there as hundreds of people are running around like rats lifting this up. Moving that up and down and there’s no real variable cost in terms of the amount of people there and that’s why these bicycle centers, these what do you call it when you ride the stationary bike?

[0:57:01] Charlie Hoehn: Yes, cycling?

[0:57:03] Jim Klopman: Spinning places do so well like Soul Cycle. Soul Cycle has a 120 people with one instructor up there with a mike and a big screen well that’s a beautiful model right there. Those blacks pay for themselves in a couple of months and I just pay for one guy and have a big screen and you rock it out. Man that’s a fortune. Our business is that way. You come in, we could run small classes but we couldn’t run classes of 30 to 40. You can’t have different people of different skill levels going through different balance challenges without watching them and observing and looking for points of safety. I could throw you in a bike and you can just spin away all day long.

[0:57:46] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I mean yoga is a similar model. Unfortunately especially a lot of women are getting better at balance now. So that’s a good thing.

[0:57:55] Jim Klopman: Right, it is and you look at yoga though, the guys that originally brought yoga in the United States didn’t make anywhere near the money they probably should have.

[0:58:04] Charlie Hoehn: No, yeah.

[0:58:06] Jim Klopman: Joseph Pilates trained two guys. I used to have one of his guys work on me a 100 years ago in New York but he trained basically I think two people and I don’t even think his heirs made money from the Pilates name. That was totally absconded by the whole world so you don’t want to be that and I’ve always not wanted to be the yoga Pilates person. I didn’t want to go to my grave not making it and then my children going 20 years from now everybody is doing this and recreated it. So it’s not going to happen to us I don’t think the way we’re going.

[0:58:38] Charlie Hoehn: What is a parting piece of advice you have for authors? I mean your experience with this book has been pretty unique I think. I wrote one of my books out of frustration too of saying the same thing and everybody else getting terrible advice and no one was saying what was actually correct. So what would you tell other authors who are thinking about writing a book?

[0:59:01] Jim Klopman: Well this is not a shameless plug, this is to God’s honest truth. I work with Book in a Box. Zach Obront, he’s a remarkable human being and I don’t say that often and there’s not a lot of them in this world but it’s a first quality company. I spoke to him early on in their life cycle. We had some difficulties. I had no difficulties with Zach but one of the people that I was hooked up to and they realigned and reset their company and came back and said, “We’re going to do this right” and they’re remarkable. They judge people well, they judge what they have to say well and they produce a great product and the value is phenomenal. I still don’t know how they create that kind of value for the prices you pay and if you’ve got a book and there’s a much better way to do it that way than not and I have like I said bad ADD and dyslexia. So I was probably the worst client for them to work with but they had patience with me and I certainly would never –

[1:00:02] Charlie Hoehn: I can tell you right now you are not.

[1:00:05] Jim Klopman: Okay but they have ways of – I just think they’re a remarkable group of people. So if you’re going to write a book, unless you’re a writer going in alone is ridiculous and that’s my advice. The second bit of advice I give everybody is like I said, if you get knocked down just get up again. What is that Chinese or Japanese expression, down seven up eight so.

[1:00:29] Charlie Hoehn: And you’ll get knocked down less if you improve your balance of course.

[1:00:36] Jim Klopman: That was well played, I love that.

[1:00:38] Charlie Hoehn: Thank you, I’ve got to tie it all together. Well thanks for saying that about Book in a Box. I’ll definitely will relay that to the team of course and Jim, how can our listeners connect with you and follow you in your journey?

[1:00:51] Jim Klopman: Well everything, social media on the internet, Slackbow is me. People are welcome to write me at Jim@slackbow and then we have a phone number on the website if people want to call. We’re available anywhere and everywhere and we like to help anyway we possibly can so we’d love to hear from you.

[1:01:12] Charlie Hoehn: Phenomenal. Well I love this conversation so thanks so much for being on the show Jim and best of luck to you.

[1:01:20] Jim Klopman: Thank you, I appreciate it. Thanks.

[1:01:26] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Jim Klopman for being on the show. You can buy his book, Balance is Power on Amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.