42. Beyond Stretching and Exercises: How the Nervous System Impacts Pain, Movement & Your Child's Development with Taylor Kruse

I am so excited to share this conversation with you 🎙️

I sat down with Taylor Kruse, co-founder of Kruse Elite and a strength and mobility coach specializing in applied neurology, and honestly, this episode opened my eyes in ways I wasn't expecting, even as a physical therapist myself.

We break down why so many pain and movement issues actually start in the nervous system, not the muscle or joint we tend to blame. Taylor walks me through the difference between "inputs" (the sensory information your brain takes in through vision, touch, and the vestibular system) and "outputs" (the movement, posture, or pain you actually experience), and why changing the input is often the fastest way to change the output. I share one of my favorite examples from my own practice 👶, why a "torticollis" diagnosis is sometimes actually a vision issue in disguise, and we get into why the vestibular system plays such a huge role in muscle tone, gait, and posture in kids.

If you have ever felt like you were just told to "stretch it out" or "give it time" without anyone explaining the why behind your child's movement pattern, this one is for you 💛 And if you're a healthcare or movement professional who has sensed there's more going on than the textbook explains, I think you're really going to love this.

In this episode, you'll learn: 📝
- What applied neurology and applied kinesiology actually mean, explained in plain language
- The difference between sensory "inputs" and movement "outputs" and why it matters
- Why the vestibular (inner ear) system can directly affect muscle tone, posture, and gait
- A real example from my own caseload of how a vision issue can be misdiagnosed as torticollis
- Why fast, dramatic results from nervous system work aren't a "hack," they're a sign the brain feels safer
- How applied neurology can apply to pediatric populations, and what that looks like in practice
- How to evaluate whether a provider is qualified in this space, and where the field is headed

Connect with Taylor Kruse: 🔗
📸 Instagram: @kruseelite 
🎧 Podcast: The KRUSE ELITE Podcast
📚 Courses: Neuro Foundations and The Neuro Dojo (https://www.kruseelite.com/)

Connect with me: 💛
🌐 Website: milestonesandmotherhood.com
📸 Instagram: @milestones.and.motherhood and @more.than.milestones
✍️ Substack: https://substack.com/@morethanmilestones
🍼 Tummy Time Masterclass: https://milestonesandmotherhood.com/tummy-time
🛍️ Amazon storefront: https://a.co/d/03ucPZbo
✉️ For sponsorship or guest inquiries: podcast@milestonesandmotherhood.com

If you loved this episode: ⭐
Please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a parent or provider who needs to hear it 🙏 New episodes of More Than Milestones drop every other Tuesday!

Transcript

KC Rickerd (00:00)
 Hello and welcome back to another episode of More Than Milestones. I am in a new space for the first time, which is so exciting. And I'm also here and so excited to be joined by Taylor Kruse, who is the co-founder of Kruse Elite. And he's a movement professional specializing in the nervous system. And we're really going to break down movement and applied kinesiology 101. Because this, I've been following you for a while.

This has honestly a lot of what you share has opened my eyes up as a physical therapist in ways I wasn't quite anticipating. So I'm really excited to dig into this and kind of hit it from both avenues, but also in a way that parents and anybody that could benefit from this information will understand. So thank you so much for being here. Yeah, for sure. And if you wanted to just give us a little bit like who who are you? What what started this all for you and your wife? Kind of like the background.

Taylor (00:40)
 Thank you. It's good to finally meet you.

Yeah, sure, sure,

sure. So my name is Taylor Kruse and I'm a movement professional that specializes in working with the nervous system, basically. So everything that we do, as far as movement goes, we really view it through a neurocentric lens. Yeah, as you mentioned, our business is Kruse Elite. I co-founded that with my wife, Alicia Kruse, who was supposed to be here with us today, but parent duty has her doing other things, unfortunately. But we started our business back

together around 2014 is when we kind of came together and finally called it something. Before that, we were personal trainers that were kind of working independently on our own. since about the time of 2014, we just started this very relentless continued education journey, mainly because of frustration. A lot of the things that we were doing just weren't

providing the results that we thought our clients could get and that just pushed us to keep learning and you know fast forward to today after lots of continued education and we still continue to learn we really settled in a place where the nervous system and understanding applied neuroscience just gave us a whole new lens to view movement through and allowed us to finally get the results that we wanted for our clients and that our clients deserved from

dealing with pain issues to just improving movement as a whole. So everything we're doing is just kind of viewing it as, or viewing it through this lens that allows us to really work with the brain, which is where movement comes from. And it's where pain comes from too. And a lot of the people that are working with us are dealing with pain limitations. So for us, applied neuroscience was really

the paradigm shift that then allowed us to start not only using the tools that we had gained over the years before learning neuroscience, we can use those more accurately now, a little bit better, but we've gained a lot of really unique tools just through this whole journey.

KC Rickerd (03:03)
 I love it, I love it. I think, especially right now, there is such a huge place for that because even as a healthcare professional, I feel like we know that everything's connected, right? But in actual application, in treating patients, it can be so easy to kind of just revert back to what you know from the textbook or what you've always done. And I think so many people are so tired of not.

understanding the root of their pain or the root of their limitations or the root of their discomfort. So I feel like the bridging of all of this is just, it's so fascinating to me and it's so cool to see so many people with so many different backgrounds really kind of tying things together, you know? So let's break it down first with like, what is the most basic definition of applied kinesiology or applied neuroscience? Like, what does that mean?

Taylor (03:57)
 Sure, so when we break this down for people, basically I explain it as applying a stimulus on purpose, repetitively to activate a desired pathway or brain area with the intent of changing output. So for our listeners and people who are kind of new to the language, I can kind of give a few definitions to help you understand that. So the first one is output.

What is an output? Basically, you can think about the output as the goal. So, as a movement professional myself, most of my goals are movement-based, right? So I'm helping people improve the quality of their movement and hopefully decrease pain so that they can produce higher quality movement. So the output is the goal and inputs are essentially the

made up of the stimulus that we might be applying or delivering to the nervous system and brain. So the idea is this, movement really is, or I should say the quality of movement is really based on the quality of the input. And we have lots of different types of sensory systems that allow us to take in input from the world. So for example, your eyeballs, right? Your visual system.

is one of the ways that you take in a lot of sensory input from the outside world that then helps you move because it's helping visual input helps you understand your environment. We also have the senses that people are pretty much familiar with. We've got taste, we've got sound, Things like that, tactile sensations. So anything that touches the skin, you're able to feel that a certain way because of sensory receptors that live in your skin.

And so when we understand all the different sensory systems that our brain and nervous system have, and there's a lot more, we can start to really understand how to work with those things with the goal of improving the accuracy of it. All right? It's the accuracy that really matters and the quality of the input. So we've got different ways to do that. Working with lots of different systems in the body.

with the intent of changing output because anytime you change input, there will be a difference in output if you know how to ask the brain and the body to show you what it is through some kind of assessment, which is what we're very fanatical about is assessing the outcome of everything that we're doing. So to kind of go back to the definition, we are applying a stimulus, which is generally some kind of tool or exercise.

that is honing in on a specific sensory system. And perhaps it is a sensory system that is, let's say, underperforming. And so we're doing something to try to get it to perform better. And in the process of that, if we want to go deeper, we might be looking at specific pathways. We might be looking at specific brain structures for specific reasons. That gets a lot nerdier. But

The idea is by applying the stimulus, we know we can get a change in output. And the neat thing about this kind of applied neuro work is that you can get super targeted so that you can essentially aim at anything you want. So movement outputs could be squatting. It could be helping somebody with ankle mobility. It could be helping somebody walk better, run better, balance on one leg better. But interestingly, because

all these outputs are generally things that are motor-based. You could also consider things like speech as an output, singing as an output. Technically, you could consider breathing as an output or even blood pressure. So there's so many different things that kind of fall under that umbrella of output-based. When we understand our sensory systems better, we can aim at creating higher quality outputs

pretty much no matter what they are.

KC Rickerd (08:17)
 I love it. Okay, I wanna maybe just give an example that might kind of like help that make sense for people. like, for example, if you're listening to this, from say like a physical therapy standpoint, then I'll pass this to you. like, Let's say someone's got low back pain and maybe hamstrings are related.

And this is not all a PT is gonna do, but I'm gonna say from a very like broad, maybe as a PT, I'm gonna stretch the hamstrings. Maybe I'm gonna do some gentle mobilizations. what?

is an example of how using applied kinesiology or applied neuroscience in that lens, what would you approach differently? Just so that people that are really navigating this, like let's say someone listening is really in PT, this is what that might look like, that kind of pulls in a little bit more of the whole body, the holistic approach.

Taylor (09:10)
 Yeah, sure.

So we're still doing targeted work, like you mentioned, in terms of like mobilization, right? So I'd be looking at specific joints and, you know, mobilizing specific joints because we're a big fan of that kind of proprioceptive work. But the main thing that kind of differentiates our thinking model is that we wouldn't stop there. We would do a lot of work, say, from the neck up, which means we'd be applying stimulus to, let's say,

the visual or vestibular system. So your example of like bilateral hamstring issues, tight hamstrings, let's say, that can often be related to like an inner ear issue, a vestibular issue, because your hamstrings are essentially anti-gravity muscles or they help you stay upright against gravity. So posturally, they're very important. And we know that the vestibular system, your inner ear,

is your main descending postural control. So if you want to improve posture or you want to affect muscle tone, like in the hamstrings, you would want to consider the vestibular system. And so we would have a whole battery of exercises and assessments that we could go through, because you'd want to test this person's inner ear and figure out if they had any struggles there with some of the vestibular reflexes. You don't necessarily need to have like a broken reflex for

the concept to make sense because you can still take advantage of a system even if it's working optimally, you can still take advantage of it and train it and get some kind of improvement in performance or decreases in symptoms. But basically, for that example, I might be thinking the vestibular system because I know if I can do some stuff with the inner ear, I'm likely going to change the muscle tone.

of the extensor group.

KC Rickerd (11:12)
 my god I want to nerd out with you so bad but I'm gonna try and keep it like like so here's here's where I feel like a big piece of this that is so interesting to me and that I see mostly on social media in like resistance to this from other health care professionals or resistance to really pulling things in that really come from a different lens than we're used to say in my mind that that all makes

Complete sense right like even from a Even from an backed up view I guess you could say if You think about the fact that if your vestibular system is giving you wonky input Let's say and you're kind of crouching down even unknowingly to bring yourself closer to the ground like I see that in kids all the time that Crouched gate the vestibular system is pulling in there. Why I guess question one is do you do you get pushback?

on this entire concept? And or how do you kind of approach that? Because I feel like the next wave of truly making a difference for people as movement and healthcare professionals is being able to take the pieces from all over, not just your textbook, not just what you learned in school. Like truly seeing a patient and pulling in what makes sense, even if it's not the most rigorously evidence-based...

Medicine ever in the entire world, you know, so what what is what is has been your experience with that?

Taylor (12:39)
 Well, there's not necessarily pushback because we're sort of at a place where people just don't even know this exists. Like we're still there. People are starting to talk about the nervous system. People are getting excited about that for sure. But the idea of making very specific connections from let's say the inner ear to a group of muscles and improving posture.

It's something that we're starting, you're hearing more about this kind of thing in our industries, but there's not that much pushback because people haven't even had an experience to understand what we're talking about. But what's interesting about this, think if there is pushback at all, it's because they have seen, let's say like some of my content on social media, which leaves out a ton of context obviously because,

30 second videos on Instagram aren't gonna teach you the whole story with applied neuroscience, but one of the things that this work is known for is getting very exciting, very fast results. And it's shocking to people when you apply the right stimulus and then you know how to assess whether or not it did what you wanted to. And the immediate result can be a person's pain is gone,

They're standing taller, they're walking better, they're balancing better, and this happens in a matter of seconds. So it's not like we're gonna apply a stimulus and wait 12 weeks to see what it's doing. The way that we work allows us to use immediate feedback, forms of assessment. So that's what we're constantly doing. So we might test a person's vestibular system in some way, and we might connect that to their history, maybe.

posturally or with other health issues and then we might watch them walk and their gait cycle again posturally sort of gives us different insights and clues into what might be going on and then through our neuro assessments we're able to kind of hone in on what areas might need the work or the activation. Then we go and activate them and everything changes immediately which is why I'm in this work because it's after

KC Rickerd (14:59)
 Yeah.

Taylor (15:01)
 15, 16 years of doing this, it is still as exciting today as it was on day one. And that's sometimes where the pushback can come from because people mostly have never seen that kind of result before. I think the general population is more used to getting their prescription written for them for physical therapy and maybe they go do.

KC Rickerd (15:18)
 Mm.

Taylor (15:27)
 know, X amount of weeks or months with PT and they're given exercises and they hope that those exercises are going to do what you need them to do. And then there's, you know, all the other things that people don't talk about, but there's the compliance and, you know, the motivation and they've got to continue to do the work. Applied neuro is really unique in the fact that you can discover what

the result is gonna be right away because the nervous system's giving you clues as long as you're assessing. And that helps a person's compliance because you do usually have to go and practice what we're giving people, even though you get immediate results in the moment. Weird things happen. Sometimes results are permanent and I can't explain why, really.

KC Rickerd (16:05)
 Mm.

Taylor (16:16)
 And other times it's more realistic that you find a stimulus, you apply it, it does what you want it to do, and now the person's job is to go and practice. Just like any other form of training, you need that frequency and that load and that intensity to turn what is a good result in the moment into something more long term.

KC Rickerd (16:25)
 Mm.

it. And where, who, is there, there's gotta be, like a founder, like who is the first person that was like this, this is the ticket and and that you found say 15 years ago when you first started this.

Taylor (16:53)
 me, my education started through another education company called Z-Health, which does all neurocentric types of work to teach movement professionals how to essentially view any goal that you have through a brain-based lens and train it. But I think a lot of what is out there now under this kind of umbrella of applied neuroscience,

is coming from functional neurology, which is a degree that you can pursue, that takes you more in a clinical direction. So there is a founder, so to speak, of functional neurology. His name is Dr. Carrick. there's a lot of people who have had influences on the industry, I think. But yeah, for me, it started with Z-Health.

we call what we're doing applied neuroscience because we're not doing functional neurology because we're not doctors of functional neurology. Yeah.

KC Rickerd (18:00)
 Mm, I love that.

So, as a comparison or even aligning with traditional therapies, like if there is one thing that someone listening, let's say they've been struggling with pain or they've been struggling with something just not feeling right, something dysfunctional in their movement or even their child's movement, how would you explain how applied neurology can intersect with more traditional therapies and or...

you know, kind of work with it. How does it align in that way?

Taylor (18:30)
 Sure,

so most traditional therapies or forms of exercise are working on the output. Remember, we talked about inputs and we talked about outputs. Inputs are, that's the information that our sensory systems are taking in, and the output is the movement goal. The thing, again, that kind of differentiates this work from some of the more traditional approaches out there is that most of the traditional approaches are output-based. So for example,

If you are having a difficult time squatting, some of those traditional approaches will say, well, let's use squatting to try to improve squatting. That would be using an output to try to improve an output. And that sometimes works, but it's generally a slower process. And sometimes there's a lot missing from it because sometimes the reason a person can't squat has nothing to do with all the...

common things that you hear, like maybe it's hip mobility, maybe it's ankle mobility. There can be other things going on with the brain and nervous system and how they're perceiving the squat. So rather than approaching it as we're gonna try to improve an output with an output, we approach it through inputs. Because most of the things that allow us to produce high quality movement are completely reflexive. Right, and so there's.

These are the things that our nervous system has its own unique wiring for that we don't have to invest conscious energy into. It just happens, like stability or balance or what our blood pressure is doing while we're actually squatting, right? You don't really think about that. No one says, how's your blood pressure while you squat? They're more like, how are your ankles? Do you feel restricted at your ankles? So,

The unique thing about the work that we do is all of the inputs that we're able to approach through different tools and different exercises actually affect the reflexive parts of the movement equation. So that means you could take somebody that isn't squatting very well, they're struggling with squatting, and you could do some of that vestibular work we talked about, or even an exercise for the visual system, or

possibly some kind of sensory stimulus on the skin of a certain type, and you can get immediate changes in reflexive muscle tone, let's say, which then might give someone the freedom to squat better. So that's really the main difference is that instead of going after only the output with the output, we're addressing all these other systems with the intention of changing the reflexive parts.

which go a really long way for helping people to move better, but also to help them reduce pain if that's part of the goal.

KC Rickerd (21:25)
 It's so interesting because as you're explaining that

One thing I keep thinking about, I harp on this all the time on Instagram when I'm sharing specifically about torticollis with parents because one of the biggest things that I've experienced is you have to look at vision when it comes to tort. I have had many children where they come with a diagnosis of torticollis and within 10 minutes, I'm like, they don't have torticollis, they have a visual cut. They're literally tilting their head so that they can see what they need to see. But I could treat that torticollis all day long and nothing

is going to change because that's not the route. And I think so many people will be really interested in this conversation because I think we've really shifted more, honestly, as a society, towards finding the route. Like, don't just give me a medicine. Don't just give me an exercise. Don't just give me whatever. Like, help me figure out why this is happening. And it just... I don't... This... It's so cool to me because this feels like the next wave of healthcare professionals

Taylor (21:58)
 Yeah.

KC Rickerd (22:26)
 really like almost earning back the credit that we're due. And I don't know if that makes sense, but it's like, you know, for so long, it's like people kind of are like, I don't know. I don't know if I'm explaining what I'm trying to say, but this like, like lights a spark in me because it feels exciting to be able to use our knowledge.

to show people that one, it doesn't have to be that way forever. They don't have to be in pain forever. They don't have to be uncomfortable. They don't have to be spending years in therapies and seeing chiropractors and doing all the things and not getting true results. And it's really exciting to see this taking shape. But, okay, so one other big conversation that.

always comes up with anything that is not straight out of a textbook or super evidence-based is talking about the pillars of evidence-based medicine and having the conversation for people to really understand that, research is important, but it takes time, sometimes a lot of time, especially depending on the population, for the research to catch up to what we are anecdotally seeing, which you've obviously been seeing for a long time. So what does the actual research say about applied kinesiology?

Taylor (23:36)
 So, well applied kinesis, I guess that's different from what we're saying applied. Yeah, that's right. Well there's a lot of research on it coming from that functional neurology world, right? But everything that I'm teaching, and I teach health and movement professionals, that's my primary job now, because we have online courses and stuff where we teach all this. And it's all basic, so here's the thing. I'm not,

KC Rickerd (23:42)
 Or yeah, sorry, go ahead.

So.

Taylor (24:06)
 teaching anything new, right? This is all basic neuroscience that always existed. It's just that nobody, like generally speaking, when you look at the population stuff, nobody knew you could use it for this. So the neuroscience that I'm teaching is the same neuroscience that somebody might learn in a textbook when they go to college, if they pursue a degree that takes them in that direction.

It's all the same stuff because it's based on anatomy. In the anatomy, we have a good understanding for. We're still discovering, but generally speaking, we have a good understanding for the anatomy. And so, we have physical therapists and physios and doctors and stuff in our programs, and sometimes these conversations come up and they're very excited and interested because it's a lot of the neuroanatomy that they've already learned something about.

KC Rickerd (24:39)
 Mm-hmm.

Taylor (25:03)
 but they had no idea you could apply anything to it. So once people get to a point where they've arrived and kind of understand that, it's no longer like, there's no longer a question. Is this material based off of something real or not? is this, do we need more research to understand it? I think where maybe it lacks,

KC Rickerd (25:07)
 Totally.

Taylor (25:33)
 And I don't know if this will ever change because here's the thing, each person's different, right? Each person has their own unique brain and nervous system, which means that each person is always gonna respond differently. Not everybody responds equally to the same stimulus. And that is always going to be the most important piece here because I don't know how effective the research will ever get because of that.

but we can still maybe get clues from research that working with the vestibular system is a good idea because we know that it's like our compass that helps us understand which way is up and which way we're going. But beyond that, it's kind of like, well, personally, like for me, I don't even need to know any more than that because I know that each person's going to respond differently. So now it's my job to understand how to assess them.

what I can kind of tease out of their history and watching them move. And then most importantly, what is the outcome to everything that we're doing? Because that's what matters the most. That's why we're fanatically assessing what we're doing. So yeah, it's important for people to know that everything I'm teaching is not new, but the application of it is. Because historically people learn this stuff in a textbook.

and they never understand that you could use it to apply it to very basic movement or even apply it to reduce pain. And that's where things get really cool because pain is a construct of brain function. So again, by using those inputs, we can change output. The output is pain, right? And so this work is very effective for dealing with pain issues too.

KC Rickerd (27:08)
 Yeah.

That's so cool. And I think just for anyone listening, one of the biggest things that is so important to understand about evidence-based medicine and the three pillars of it is that those pillars are there for a reason. And they include, yes, the research, absolutely. But they also include the expertise of the provider that you're going to, which is where all of this anecdotal experience really comes in, because you're seeing in real time.

the changes in your patients and with the application of this, but also what are a patient's goals and what are their hopes in this, right? So understanding that it's not just about the research, especially when it comes to things that might seem a little bit more foreign to you than other things, but there, I just, it's so, there's so much value. It's so exciting. So I guess.

My big question is, what's the biggest myth that you would love to debunk when it comes to applied kinesiology or applied neurology for a lay person and for a professional?

Taylor (28:19)
 Sure, yeah, so again, this comes from people seeing it for the first time, like through short form content, because there's so much left out. But remember how I said that results can come immediately. I mean, pain can go away, pain can go from, you know, a nine to a zero instantly. A restricted squat can be fixed instantly, and this stuff happens very commonly. So when people see that, they kind of throw up the red flag.

A lot of times the term like hack gets thrown around, like you're just doing nervous system hacks. I hear that a lot. And then people don't even know that I would look down on the word hack and they ask me all the time every day in my DMs, hey, do you have any hacks for fixing my ankle mobility or do you have any hacks for neck pain? And so I guess the thing to debunk is that none of what we're doing is a hack.

KC Rickerd (29:03)
 Yeah.

Taylor (29:12)
 but people tend to view it that way when they see it for the first time because they've never seen anything work quickly before. And so they just assume, well, if pain went away so quickly, but you didn't necessarily do anything mechanically speaking, then how could it have done anything that's real and therefore it's a hack and sometimes people will say nervous system tricks, stuff like that. And I always tell people it's only a hack.

KC Rickerd (29:18)
 Mm.

Mm.

Taylor (29:40)
 or a nervous system trick if you don't know what to do next. And that's really what differentiates our understanding here for the nervous system is that once we get a result like that, we know what to do next, right? And that's when we start this process where we're re-educating people how to move better and decreasing their pain. And essentially, the simple way to view what we're doing is we are professional threat reducers. We're using

these inputs by improving the quality of them to make a person's brain and nervous system feel safer about what it wants to do. And whenever you can instill safety on the brain and nervous system, you will see improvements in movement instantaneously, and you will see that the brain will not only grant you better movement, but it'll grant you less pain, because pain is a constructive brain function. So,

Yeah, it's not hacks, it's not nervous system tricks, especially when you know why you're doing it, what you're targeting, and again, what to do next.

KC Rickerd (30:46)
 Yeah, two more quick questions and then we'll wrap it up. One, how or have you seen this applied to pediatrics yet? And in like your specific work I'm saying, and how do you see it benefiting or kind of going in that direction? Because I've been right on the cusp of signing up for many of your things and then like something pops up, but I'm like, I really, really feel like there's value there. But pediatrics is so much less of a traditional

like being able to pull in very specific instructions or you know really really targeting certain aspects of squatting that sort of thing like you kind of have to be a little bit more creative but have you seen not more creative i didn't mean like that but have you seen this translate into pediatrics

Taylor (31:31)
 What would the age group be generally?

KC Rickerd (31:34)
 Well, so I work birth to 21. My specialty is zero to three, but then I do, see up until 21. So there are definitely like straight ortho kids that I work with, but a lot of it, I would almost feel more, so much of pediatrics is neurology, honestly, like so much of what we're doing. So I feel like there is room for this. just, I'm so curious if you've experienced that at all, if you've seen anyone implementing this beyond like,

primitive reflex integration I would say is the one thing that feels kind of close.

Taylor (32:06)
 Yes, for sure,

for sure. Yeah, so it has a place for sure. know, a lot of it comes down to the actual therapist, I think, in what their model is. So if you're a therapist that actually has time to work with the child, you're gonna get follow-up from the child, then absolutely, right? If you have the time to go after it,

KC Rickerd (32:21)
 Mm.

Taylor (32:36)
 because this work takes time and it's very difficult in a sense that you have to put your time in to learn how to, for example, go through these different evaluations that tell you what to do. So if that's not an obstacle, then there's a huge opportunity for people like yourself who are doing that type of work.

KC Rickerd (32:49)
 Mm.

Taylor (33:05)
 The age then becomes part of this, right? And people are having success with this work, but again, it comes down to details. if we're talking about one to, let's say, five years old or something, the approach is gonna be somewhat different where you still can go after applied neuro, but you're gonna be doing a lot more.

Call it like gross movement versus like really targeted stuff, but you also are gonna lean on some of the more passive stimuli Because it's going to be more challenging to teach that age group how to do something very very precise and the work that we do is super precise because when we apply a stimulus we generally have a pathway in mind and a brain structure in mind and so and so it's not We're not throwing all the darts at the you know at the dartboard

with movement, we have a very specific goal in mind and we have to be able to produce a movement or apply a stimulus in a certain way to achieve that goal. So you might lean on some of the more passive stimulus where some of the sensory types of things that we teach could be super useful. And then you as the practitioner can also help kind of guide movement. And so it just, when you're talking about age group, you use the word creativity.

KC Rickerd (33:58)
 Yeah.

Taylor (34:27)
 I think, that's typically what matters here, is cause you have to use your creativity to be able to deliver it to that specific age. So, yeah, huge opportunity though for the work, and then as children get older and they can handle more types of isolated stimuli and isolated types of movement, it gets even more productive, right? Because you can do things in a more targeted way.

A lot of the work that we're doing is based off of what is more known in the literature as hemisphericity or hemisphere dominance, where we're going through neuro-evaluations to figure out, does this person need more activation in their right cortex or their right brain stem or their left cerebellum? And you're figuring out what structure...

might be underperforming and then what tools do we have to go after that structure or any given pathways that might be of interest. And so it's a very asymmetrical way to work versus more traditionally, you know, how our culture around movement has been. It's like everything you do on the right side of your body, you should do on the left because we're supposed to be balanced. And that's kind of a big myth too. Human beings are not symmetric and it's not even normal.

KC Rickerd (35:42)
 Mm-hmm.

Taylor (35:51)
 to be symmetric, it's just that when the deficits get too large, they can then cause different issues. So by going through the assessments, we're sort of trying to figure out where is an underperforming system, where is an imbalance, and then we're constructing a strategy through these different inputs to go after that. And so that kind of targeted work can be more challenging because it's not a bilateral approach. But if you take the time to learn,

KC Rickerd (36:17)
 Mm.

Taylor (36:19)
 how to go after it and what you can do and then you use your creativity to deliver it to children, it can be amazing.

KC Rickerd (36:28)
 Yeah, I love it. So how can people find a provider with that expertise? Is there a specific thing that they can look for? Is there specific certifications they can look for? If someone's listening to this and they're like, all right, I want to try this.

Taylor (36:43)
 honestly, it's kind of a gray area at the moment. mean, this is not something that is universally understood right now. mean, this is very new. People have been practicing this stuff, but as far as the general population starting to see what's possible, it is still quite new. So if you're taking a clinical direction, right, for whatever reason,

KC Rickerd (36:52)
 Mm.

Taylor (37:10)
 which might be a good idea for some people depending on what they need, then you would wanna go like functional neurology as your direction, right? You can find a functional neurologist, very different. A good functional neurologist is very different from other more traditional neurologists. They're actually looking at function, right? So if they're looking at movement and they're using neurology to change that movement, just like what I described.

KC Rickerd (37:31)
 Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Taylor (37:38)
 So you

go functional neurology if you want clinical. And then if you're not necessarily needing clinical, then you wanna look for a health and movement coach that is trained in some form of applied neurology. And we have now professionals that have gone through our courses and there are other companies out there that are also teaching applied neurology.

So I think that with a little bit of motivation and work, you can track down a good coach. But like anything else, especially now because we have the internet and we are constantly exposed to new things and there's so much information to learn now, the skillsets that people have now are super diverse, right? So there's, which is a good thing, but it sometimes makes it harder to find somebody.

KC Rickerd (38:29)
 Mm.

Taylor (38:35)
 because you're not sure what you should be looking for in terms of their title. Like for me, I'm a personal trainer, but people that I teach would laugh if I told them that. They're like, you're a personal trainer? Like they think of something completely different, right? When they hear personal trainer versus me who's, you know, doing all this neuro stuff. So yeah, so it's a little bit of a gray area in our industry as far as like the titles and things, but if you're looking...

KC Rickerd (38:35)
 Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah.

Taylor (39:04)
 for somebody out there, just see if they kind of market themselves as nervous, doing something with the nervous system and applied neuro.

KC Rickerd (39:12)
 Super cool. OK, so can you tell us one more time, where can people find you if they're interested in learning more, if they're interested in potentially looking at what you have to offer working with you? Where can people find you? And we'll link everything in the episode notes as well.

Taylor (39:25)
 cool. Yeah, so if people want to follow along,

I'm most active on like Instagram and YouTube, especially Instagram, you know, posting over there almost daily. So that's @kruseelite. And yeah, you can check out some of the short form content that we have. And then I have longer form tutorials and education over on our YouTube channel. Beyond that, I spend most of my time teaching health and movement professionals with our online neuro courses. So if you want to learn

everything that we do. We have two online courses. One is called Neurofoundations. The other one is called the NeuroDojo. And it's kind of designed as a curriculum to kind of take you from what we consider the foundational tools and understanding all the way into some very, very heavy applied neurology that would be probably considered more like post-doctorate type of neurology work. It's really, really deep and extensive. And before anyone, like if you're

If you think that's interesting but you're not quite sure yet and you want to learn more, head over to my podcast, which is the Kruse Elite podcast, because I'm very active over there with two to three episodes a month, and we go super deep into a lot of these topics.

KC Rickerd (40:38)
 I love it. this is so exciting and I cannot wait to connect further But thank you so much for being here and we will see you guys next time on another episode of more than milestones

Taylor (40:47)
 Thanks for having me.