Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Bergen County
Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Ep # 168 - Brain-Based Fitness, Made Simple
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Ever felt like your body fights you the harder you train? We sat down with coach Dave Degenhardt of Fenomenal Fitness to unpack why the nervous system calls the shots on strength, mobility, and pain—and how tiny changes to inputs like vision, breathing, and tempo can unlock big gains in minutes. If your squat flares your knees or your back tightens the second you push, this conversation reframes the problem and offers a repeatable way to fix it.
Dave explains the core of brain-based training: assess a simple movement or strength check, apply a precise neural drill, then reassess immediately. Keep what helps, drop what hinders. We dig into why the eyes guide the spine, how the vestibular system shapes balance and rotation, and why the brain prioritizes safety over performance until you prove it can trust you. Real stories bring it home—from a five-rep vision drill restoring a long-lost toe touch to glute med imbalances improving with targeted foot mobility. We also talk about dosage, injury risk, and how smarter inputs beat harder outputs when consistency matters.
You’ll hear Dave’s journey from engineering and IT to hands-on training, deep study with Z-Health, and a practice now serving post-rehab clients and golfers who want longevity and distance without pain. He shares how virtual sessions work, why group classes can still feel personalized with self-assessment, and the exact first step he takes with new clients: a detailed, two-to-three-hour assessment that maps history, eyes, balance, breath, and movement to build the right plan. If you’re a golfer losing yards, a runner battling an angry IT band, or a lifter tired of setbacks, you’ll leave with clear, actionable ideas to test today.
If this resonates, follow and share the show, leave a quick rating, and send this episode to a friend who needs a smarter way to train. Your feedback helps us bring more conversations that keep you healthy, strong, and on the field.
Fenomenal Fitness
Dave Degenhardt
(908) 403-0186
fenomenalfitness.com
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Doug Drohan.
Doug Drohan:Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Bergen Neighbors uh media groups podcast called Good Neighbor Podcast. We're coming to you live from Bergen County. Um today, you know, it's actually a great uh kind of segue with an icy, snowy, cold winter to have someone who's a personal trainer but works things a little bit differently than uh than we may have uh traditionally thought of personal fitness and and personal training. So I'd love to welcome Dave, Dave Degenhardt. He is the owner Fenomenal Fitness with an F based in Franken Lakes, New Jersey. Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, so you know, brain-based approach to fitness. I um, you know, we always hear about mind over matter and uh visualizing your end goals and thinking about um, you know, certainly in sports and and you know, even in fitness, like think about the body that you want to do or focus, you know, your your mind on the rep and and the exercise that you're going through. But I don't think that's what you're talking about when it comes to brain-based approach. So tell us a little bit about what that means.
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah, I sometimes tell people it's personal training with a twist, and that I understand the brain and nervous system and how to target them with precision to help people with the changes that they want. Just like if you're doing uh exercise and you're doing back and biceps, when my clients are doing training, I'm actually thinking about different areas of their brain that we're targeting. It could be frontal low brain stem and those different areas, and it can get very uh detailed um from side to side and things like that to help them with either pain or performance and many other things.
Doug Drohan:Okay, okay. So you're teaching somebody uh how to do a proper squat, or maybe it's a compound exercise like a squat curl or squat curl press. What are you teaching them about their brain? Or you know, what are they thinking differently than okay, keep my you know, knees behind my toes and things like that? Like what is the uh actual client thinking of?
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah, all the standard training that we do, um, from squats, the bench press, pull-ups, all those things are still gonna be part of the strength training portion of doing brain-based training. However, what we want to recognize is that individually people respond differently to exercises.
Doug Drohan:Right.
Dave Degenhardt:So sometimes people are actually doing squats and it's making them worse. And so the way that we want to address that is maybe doing something that's different for how they're actually what they are focusing on during the exercise. So sometimes where their eyes are looking, how they're breathing, uh the speed of the exercise. So you can change the speed. There's all these different variables that can challenge them, that can target different areas of their brain so that it actually makes the exercise respond better for them. So sometimes people will do a squat and they're say they have knee pain, their knee hurts more, and we don't want that to happen. So we're looking for ways uh to make exercises actually work better for them. And what the client's thinking of is not necessarily always the brain targets per se, um, but understanding that this is either making me better or worse of the same, and knowing that is very important for owning uh the individualized portion of brain-based training.
Doug Drohan:Got it. So there was a guy whose um classes I took when I used to have to get my CEUs like at the um these conferences in Manhattan. His name is Paul Czech, uh C-H-E-K, the Czech Institute. Yeah, have you heard of him?
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah, I'm familiar with that.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, so you know, he used to talk about like if your client is complaining about back pain, the issue may not be in their back. It could be look at their eyes, look at how their heads tilted, look at, you know, he talked about the totem pole of how everything, like the old saying, you're you know, your knee bones connected to your eye bone, and how you know something maybe it's the way your feet, like how you're standing, is affecting your back. It's not necessarily your back itself, it's the holistic chain of your entire body that affects uh you know how you feel, and also to your point, how effective the exercises are, because if your body's blocking something, then it's gonna find that path of least resistance and maybe put the load on a part of your body that's not meant to have that load. So is that like so if your client um I mean, if somebody, you know, a lot of times your personal trainer, somebody's coming to you because they want to get in shape or they want to lose weight, right? It's one of two things primarily. I want to build muscle or I want to lose weight. Um, how do you convince them that this brain-based approach is actually you know better for them because a lot of people want a quick fix?
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah, oftentimes it's about education up front to teach them the importance of things, like actually the visual system, actually. Every client that I've ever seen over the last 10 years that has back pain has vision issues that are driving their back pain because the eyes tell the spine what to do.
Doug Drohan:Yeah.
Dave Degenhardt:So the education up front is very important to get people to understand that we're gonna be doing things differently than you would do in a standard training setting because we're gonna be training your eyes. We might train sense of smell, we're gonna train hearing. These are all skills that live in the brain, but they also live in areas of the brain that control movements. So getting them to understand that and actually really the thing that drives that is them feeling the changes because when you do different exercises and drills, there's an immediate response to the exercise or drill. So if I did um a vision drill with a group of 10 people, four of them it might make them better, four the same, and two or worse. And understanding that changes how you approach utilizing that exercise, and then I educate them on how often we're gonna do that exercise, why we're gonna utilize this for what, and and making those changes. Now, um, body composition changes such as weight loss and building muscle are definitely primary things that people come to a personal trainer for. Um, they also come for motivation, so keeping someone motivated by keeping them healthy and injury free and not getting hurt because the statistically over 42% of people get injured in the gym every year.
Doug Drohan:Oh, yeah.
Dave Degenhardt:Going to the gym to get healthier and then they get hurt, and then what happens is they're no longer in the gym. And we see this obviously with the January uh people coming back into January, and you know, the statistics showing by January 18th, like 80% of these new people are already gone out of the gym. And part of that is people not understanding like how frequent they should go, how hard they should go, what exercises are good for them, all of these different things. So helping them with that dosage is critical. Um, and that's gonna keep you motivated. Now, another big piece of brain-based training is understanding that rehab is actually a portion of it, so and injury prevention as well. Um, so a lot of people that come to me actually um have done other things before and it hasn't worked, yeah. So they're a little more open to brain-based training because they're looking for something that's gonna actually make them better, whether they've had pain or or or weren't able to stick with it, or all these other things. I'm gonna give them some different ideas that are hopefully gonna help them stick to it.
Doug Drohan:So, would you say more then your clients are a little bit older, a little bit more um experienced and having gone through different things and the aches and pains. Um, I used to joke when I was a trainer that uh I should have a referral uh business with a with a uh physical fit um sorry, a uh a PT practice because inevitably my clients are gonna be in you know some kind of pain or get hurt, which I wasn't saying much about my, you know, the way I taught. But actually, you know, the the thing is is that I you know a lot of traditional weight training and I think the thought process, we're going back 20 years, was that it was calories in, calories out. And if I'm working with you two, three days a week and you're not losing weight, it's not my fault, it's your fault. Because I don't know what you're doing the other four days of the week or the other five days of the week. I'm not a nutritionist, you know, you must not be doing it properly because when you're with me, we're working hard, so it must be your fault. Um and you know, as as we've learned, and as obviously what you you incorporate is that it's not a one size fits all. And I think as you get older and you've been through injuries and aches and pains, uh, you are looking for a fitness program that can kind of keep you, as you say, keep you on the field, you know. Uh the worst thing is dealing with injuries. Like every time I seem to start working out, um something else comes up. And it's always my right side, by the way. So I know there's something going on. It's either my right hip, my right knee, my right shoulder, my right forearm. Uh, you know, so I'm probably looking a different way. But the point is, is that I, you know, staying on the field is is key. And when you get into your 30s, 40s, and 50s, um it's frustrating that you know being injured. So you're finding then that your your process is keeping people uh healthier, but at the same time, it's effective in reaching their fitness goals.
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah. Um, when you start to understand how the the brain really primarily is focused on survival versus performance, uh start to understand that the brain is there protecting you. So oftentimes when when you know people have injuries or pain or tightness or discomfort with their training, it's usually because the nervous system is a little bit pushing back on you to slow down.
Intro/Close:Right.
Dave Degenhardt:Or maybe maybe these things that you're doing aren't aren't the things that you should be doing. There's lots of different things and ways to think about that, you know. Um, and showing people along the way that these things are assessing well really drives consistency and commitment from the client as well, because it's they know that it's helping them, right?
Speaker 3:Right.
Dave Degenhardt:A lot of times in training and therapy, people are left guessing, is this helping me? And even myself as a personal trainer, when I didn't know the assessment process, I was sitting back saying, I hope this is helping them. I think it's helping them. These exercises should be good. And when I was, you know, first in the training field, similar to you, every client that I had had some sort of pain complaint. Now, it could be just like one movement, they would say, This hurts my knee, or one movement that hurts your shoulder, or they just had some ongoing pain. And yes, referring to physical therapy is necessary sometimes, but also they're looking at you as a movement professional to help them have ways to deal with that pain. And yeah, you know, I had some post-rehab work where I was actually someone that physical therapists were supposed to refer patients to me when they ran out of insurance at the time. So these people are coming in where they're gonna still be in a mixed bag of potentially having pain and things like that, right? Post-surgery, post-rehab, stuff like that. And with the post-rehab protocol, I would have six exercises that were indicated, meaning they're supposed to do after a knee replacement, after a knee uh surgery, what have you, and five they are contra-indicated, meaning you're not supposed to do these.
Speaker 3:Right.
Dave Degenhardt:Out of the six that were indicated, four of them they'd say this hurts. So now you're left there wondering, like, well, what's going on? And then I went to take these neurocourses and we're focusing on different things than I ever did with strength training, specific joint mobility things for your feet and fingers and neck and other things that were kind of prior to that things I need to think about vision drills, inner ear drills for your vestibular system, different breathing drills, all these different things that were new to me. And I was bringing it back, trying them with my clients, and now they were they were actually getting better. You know, they're actually responding better to some of the exercises that were making them worse before. And just knowing that they were actually moving better, that's changed me from, in my opinion, being someone that was just like a trainer that knew the muscles, the biomechanics, all of that stuff, right, to a coach where I could actually coach them how to move better versus just kind of counting reps of exercises, right? Right, right. When someone comes in with a complaint like you, where you say it's all right sided pain, that already gives me a ton of information from a brain perspective because the the right side of your brainstem is supposed to inhibit pain on the right side. So now I'm thinking, all right, what's going on with your right cortex and right brainstem? And that's what I would assess in my initial assessment if that's what you came in wanting to fix or wanting to help help with.
Doug Drohan:So, how did you get into this business? Like, did you um you did you go to college and to study exercise science or uh anatomy, or how you know what's been your path to to where you went from?
Dave Degenhardt:Uh wasn't exactly how I would have pictured it per se. I actually went to Lehigh University Great School for engineering, studying industrial engineering. But uh I was good at math and science. They told me to become an engineer when I was young in high school, so I kind of were like, You get any job you want, you do engineering. So I thought, all right, that sounds good. I'll do engineering and figure it out after that. And I kind of just never really figured it out at that point. There was nothing like there was other, you know, friends of mine that were more passionate about engineering that were taking those classes. I I just wasn't a passion of mine, so kind of fell into the IT world for 10 years, and I pretty much hit a wall where I was at a point where I was like, I don't really want to wake up and do this anymore, right?
Doug Drohan:Yeah, okay.
Dave Degenhardt:So I was always into sports, I had three knee surgeries from 12 to 16 years old. I had sciatic pain in my 20s, um, some anxiety and depression stuff around the job and career at that point. So I think I was just in a mode where I wanted to understand more about what was going on myself, and then also I wanted something fulfilling where I knew I was helping others. That was what I knew. And being in the sport fitness, I loved exercise. I thought it was a chance I was willing to take. I didn't know if I was gonna really like it or not when I did it. Um, but I was hopeful that it would be something that I'd want to wake up in the morning doing. And then as I got into it, like I said, realizing um, you know, I could help people in pain, help people with things that they weren't able to figure out and give them options that they weren't getting elsewhere, especially the brain-based stuff. It really kind of opened my world up for how I was going to utilize this stuff and help people.
Doug Drohan:So you did you like go to like you get certified by like NASM or ACSM? Or how did you like what was your next step when you said, you know what, I want to understand my body and maybe get into this field?
Dave Degenhardt:So I went to uh focused personal training institute. It's like kind of like a vocational school for personal trainers. I didn't want to study out of a book for a weekend to take a test and call myself a personal trainer. I wanted some hands-on experience. Okay, and I did realize that I missed learning at that point too, right? So um being at being working for years, I wasn't learning as much. And I had done some education at NYU for project management and like that. It reinvigorated me a little bit, but it wasn't the learning I was looking for. So personal training institute, they had a master's program, they called it, which was an extra three months where you focused on these special populations, which was injuries, Parkinson's, MS, cardiac rehab, all that stuff. Okay, very great education. Their whole shtick was after two or three, after coming to our six-month program, you're gonna have the experience with a trainer that's been in the field for two to three years. And when I got a job at a gym, that was definitely true, versus people that had just taken a test out of the book. So I passed their, I did their coursework. I also took the NSCA exam just to have like another known uh entity test. Most of the students did take another test.
Doug Drohan:Okay.
Dave Degenhardt:I chose NSCA. They were more in the sports kind of area.
Doug Drohan:Strength and conditioning, yeah.
Dave Degenhardt:Strength and conditioning. So I was thinking that a little bit different to have that as well.
Doug Drohan:And where where was the first school located? Where was where are they located?
Dave Degenhardt:They were in that was in Manhattan, in New York City.
Doug Drohan:Oh, really?
Dave Degenhardt:Okay, yeah, yeah. Great school, they're still going. Uh I went that was over 10 years ago when I went there. Um, so then I did, I was working at uh Robert Wood Johnson Fitness and Wellness in uh Scotch Plains, New Jersey. That gym was affiliated with the hospital system, so we're RWJ, it's now RWJ St. Barnabas uh fitness and wellness. There's like I at the time there's nine of those gyms in New Jersey. So there's a Hackensack Fitness and Wellness, there's a bunch of different ones. Um, so I worked there and they had physical therapy on site, they had an Olympic-sized pool, and because of it being filled with the hospital, the median age there was was 55, I would say. There's some younger people there, but that was where I got started. Um, that's where I started to do the post-rehab program, which was with a physical therapist. That was another six-month program um called medical exercise specialist.
Doug Drohan:Okay.
Dave Degenhardt:And still at that point, I was a little frustrated with kind of the protocol-based approach where I was still seeing these issues with those indications and contraindications, like I said. Right. So I was looking for more education. There were some trainers at the gym that I was working at that were doing this neuro stuff. And one of the trainers had become friendly with, and he said, You should go check this out. I think you'd love it. So I go for a weekend course, it was a three-day course with this company called Z Health Performance. And the three-day course they called their elevator pitch because they said we can't get this across like in 30 seconds, right?
Doug Drohan:So right, right, right.
Dave Degenhardt:Okay, but that course changed my life because it was talking about how everything you've experienced in your life is due to your brain function. It was talking about how important like gate was with pain. So, going back to some of your comments before about not just being a local issue, right? How pain is 100% of the time an output of the brain, it's never, it's not a just a local tissue issue. Um, and just some very enlightening things that were were changing how I looked at everything. And I pretty much knew within the first day of that course that I was gonna be committing to taking all their coursework. So their curriculum was, I think, like 13 courses. It took me over six years to do all of their coursework, and then they have a thing that's called the master practitioner program. Last time I heard the stats on it, there was over 12,000 students that have taken at least one course globally, and there was under 100 master practitioners globally, so I'm one of them. Um so you know it's in I'm in some pretty good company of some pretty elite coaches, and their whole um program was designed to to get the top 1% of professionals in the like performance and pain relief world. That's their goal. Um, so with experience, just have been dealing with clients with things like Parkinson's, MS, post-rehab, coming out from surgeries, all sorts of clients with different pain. So a lot of clients do come to me with unresolved pain issues. Um, and then also on the performance side of it, I work with a lot of golfers. So that's kind of been my focus from a marketing perspective, it's growing the golf side of it. Um, and I have some some group programs for golfers, and I work with individual golfers to help them play better golf with less pain for longevity.
Doug Drohan:Right. I mean, it's and so how long have you been, how long has phenomenal fitness been around?
Dave Degenhardt:So I started Phenomenal Fitness at the same time that I was working at Robert Wood Johnson Fitness and Wellness. I was doing that in the morning and then going to the gym in the later morning afternoon. Uh over a decade uh with phenomenal fitness.
Doug Drohan:Wow. So what have you seen in the in the decade that you've grown as a business owner? Like what have you what have you evolved into, or what have you seen like as a business owner? Like what's chain? Obviously, you went through COVID. Um, you know, you have to compete with Instagram and I guess TikTok and all these uh exercises people can get on their computers and their phones and do it at home. Um, you know, P90X Beach Body isn't really around anymore. That was a big thing when I was a trainer in the early 2000s. I actually interviewed with them out in Santa Monica. That was interesting. Uh as a marketer in a marketing role. Um, but uh like what have you seen over these last 10 years from a business perspective, uh, and how have you evolved or or kind of flexed along with it?
Dave Degenhardt:So, first and foremost, I would say the biggest thing that happened out of COVID was um I actually took all my clients on Zoom because of gym physically, the gym that I was renting space at at a time in Cramford, New Jersey, close. So, what I realized was I'm doing vision training, I'm doing joint mobility training, strength training, um, doing inner ear training for a balance system, breathing work, other things like that. And this is very coachable online. Like we're doing it as I mean, there's a little bit of loss of me having hands on stuff, but there's other sensory work that we can do from a brain based perspective with them having a brush or other things like that that were helpful, but it was very coachable online because. I was spending probably 90 to 95% of the time with my clients in the back corner of the gym teaching them stuff and coaching them how to move there. Occasionally we use equipment and things like that for the strength training, but it wasn't a huge loss from our perspective of getting them the results that they wanted.
Doug Drohan:Okay.
Dave Degenhardt:So that was big because what that did was it also opened me up to understand I could be training someone in Europe, I could be training someone in California. Um through some of the networking that I've done, I have clients in Wisconsin, in California, in Florida, in Colorado. Yeah. And you know, I have clients that are in person in the gym that you see physically with me in right now, but I also have been able to help people all over the place, which has been amazing. That's great. And then the social media aspect is always the biggest challenge, I would say. Like um being able to market a service that most people have never heard of is the biggest challenge for me. So getting in front of people, demoing what I do, networking, doing podcasts like this are honestly seem to be more effective until you can really grow a huge, a big enough following on a social media platform. And it takes a lot of stamina and endurance and knowledge. It's like another full-time job doing the social media portion of it. And I have at times laid into that deeply where I've posted every every day for nine months to a year, and sometimes you kind of run out of steam, and you it's the feasible famine thing. So it has been that that's been the biggest challenge, I would say, from my growth perspective is the social media aspect of it, but haven't given up on it yet.
Doug Drohan:Still working on it, and uh yeah, I realize I realize you're a you're a lefty, so I see you're a lefty golf swing, unless you're like Phil Mickelson and you're a righty, but you just swing left like a hockey player. But um yeah, no, that's interesting. I mean, I you know there's a book off to share with you. It's called Fix Your Body, Fix Your Swing, um, about you know, fitness and being a better golfer. And so much of golf, I play golf, it's uh it's so much of you know flexibility. And if you're in pain, you can't get a full turn or you can't move your hips, your game is gonna suffer. Um I think you know, one of the biggest things with dry, you know, with golfers as they age is you lose distance, uh, you know, because strength and more flexibility, I'd say, than strength. Um and it's just a matter again staying on the field. But yeah, I I don't remember then the author of the book, but it's called Fix Your Body, Fix Your Swing, and it's uh an interesting read from uh from both perspectives if you're a golfer and a personal trainer. So I noticed um, you know, you you offer group training. So how do you how do you do group training when um you know when everybody's so personalized in terms of their abilities?
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah, and I think that's like teaching the assessment process is critical for that because if I have 10 golfers in a group class and we're doing a vision drill, if they know how to do the assessment and reassessment, they can assess it themselves to understand that drill made me tighter, that drill made me weaker. Um, so it's it's coachable in a in a group setting where it's still individualized because I'm also teaching them if this makes you worse, this is how you utilize this, right? So yeah, um, and it it's it's crazy because we'll do you know these things for mobility and flexibility for golfers where they're checking their trunk rotation and these things that like you would do stretches for years and not get the same result after doing like five reps of a vision drill. It's it's actually like I have to remind myself about how big of a deal that is because I've seen it so many times that it's become normal for me, but for like the person experiencing it's it's sometimes crazy. Like, you know, I we I was on a trip with my buddies, and I was showing them some of the vision stuff. And the one guy said, I haven't touched my toes in like 20 years. He's like, Show me that drill you're showing my other buddy. And I showed him he touched his toes after doing five reps of vision drilling. He like lost his mind. It was like, I haven't been able to do that for so long, right? And again, that goes back to the protection with the nervous system. If your nervous system and brain feel safer, it will grant you this, right? Because yeah, your brain governs strength, mobility, the muscles are not smart enough to create tightness on their own without a nervous system and brain. So getting to the governing system and understanding how to target the brain can make huge changes for golfers and things like that. And yeah, oftentimes we'll do things with assessments with a vision where I'm checking to see if make sure both of your eyes are seeing the golf ball. All right, and without the awareness of checking that, you're not gonna know that. And yeah, a train coach isn't gonna show you that, a standard personal trainer isn't gonna show you that. So I feel positioned to help people with these things that I'm knowledgeable about that are critical for performance and pain.
Doug Drohan:Nice, nice. Yeah, and we were talking before we went um started recording about your video with IT bands, and I think most runners and a lot of people in fitness suffer from a tight IT band, and we don't have to get into the anatomy of it, but it most people know you know, it kind of runs down the outside of your leg from your hip down, maybe to your knee. And a lot of you know, popularity and self-myofascial release was with uh, you know, with foam rollers and now these uh I don't, you know, I call them physio guns, I forget what you call it, but you know, those massage guns. Um you you you show this different type of stretch, which I'm gonna have to try next time. I'm suffering from that. For years I had problems with my gluteus medius, like it was incredible how painful. And I think it was when I was teaching a lot of classes that did a lot of plyometrics, and I I would dig my knuckle in there, I would take a foam roll, I would do you know, these like um pigeon pose stretches that were, you know, but nothing seemed it sometimes. It aggravated it. I couldn't, it the only way it stopped was I stopped teaching classes and my uh body went down, and then my you know, I don't have that pain anymore. But it was it was chronic, and I could never seem to find the stretch that would alleviate it. Um, so this is pretty cool. Uh I will direct everybody, it's phenomenal fitness f e n o m e n a l fitness. All right, on Facebook, it's phenomenal fitness l c on Instagram, it's the same thing. Just type in phenomenal fitness and online. I guess it's phenomenalfitness.com, right? Yeah. Um so yeah, so Dave, tell how do people get in touch with you? Where are you located? Like, how does it how does it work? Uh they get like a free assessment or a free consultation over the phone. Like, what's the process?
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah, usually I do like a free like 20 to 30 minute uh introductory just to get to know each other, see if it's a good fit, and then we'll we'll book an actual like assessment. It's two to three hours to go through.
Doug Drohan:Oh wow.
Dave Degenhardt:Actually assessing their brain, uh going through their full history and teaching them a little neural 101 because what we're doing here is different. So they you know, people need to know like if they're coming in for knee pain, why I'm gonna assess their odds. Yeah, it's different, right? So yeah, um, and then they can make a decision if that's something they want to pursue. And usually that's my goal is to show them the value in that assessment so they can make a proper decision at that point. Yeah, um, they can reach me through uh I'm I'm on out of social media, I'm probably on Instagram the most, so direct messaging on there is good. Um my email address is Dave at Fenomenal Fitness with the as you said with F.com. Um and my phone number I can give to you as well. Yeah if you want. Yep. We'll have that at the bottom of the channel. Uh 908-403-0186. And interestingly enough, the glute medius, I would say I've tested the glute media strength with probably over 500 people, if if not a thousand. Oh, yeah. And I would say that over 95% of people have one glute media that is weaker than the other. And I would say 90 over 95% of those people have been able to make their glute media stronger immediately with a foot mobility drill.
Doug Drohan:Wow. Um, and I guess you could probably guess what side I was uh dealing with.
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah. So it's it's fun to show people like how it works and feel it, right? Like you can talk about the neuroscience and the neurology and the brain and the brain targets till people are blue in the face. But when you show them that they're getting stronger instantly, that their range of motion is changing, that they're feeling better, that they're moving better, there that's when people start to pay attention to this stuff. So I do recommend coming, uh reaching out and doing the demo type thing because that's where that's where the rubber meets the road to the stuff.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, yeah. And of course, they see you one time and they're fixed and they never have to come back.
Speaker 3:I wish I had no, no, of course, yeah.
Doug Drohan:No, it's a it's a lifestyle change, you know. Yeah, and that's probably why you have the discovery call initially, because uh people have to understand that it's a commitment, they want to feel better. Um, and I guess it's more about feeling better than it is about looking better. It's um, you know, the field of dreams line of build it and they will come, right? You know, once you start feeling better, then you'll be able to exercise more, I guess, efficiently, and then you'll start to look better.
Dave Degenhardt:Yeah, so it all adds up. It's uh, you know, like the quick fix usually reverts, as you probably know. Yeah. We see that with biggest losers' statistics, right? It's like oh yeah, yeah, they gain over 90% of them gain the weight or more back, and it's yeah, it's more about trying to you know coach people a better way to do these things at the end of the day.
Doug Drohan:Yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. Well, Dave, thanks so much, man. You can tell uh, you know, I'm totally into this uh topic, and it was great learning about what you do after you know, come back and and talk about it, you know, maybe another topic related to this. So uh just stay with me. We're gonna have uh Chuck take us out, and you and I will be right back. Awesome.
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