Z-Health Vision Training Movement for Professionals Masterclass w/Dr. Eric Cobb
This morning I attended a two-hour masterclass called "Vision Training for Movement Professionals," taught by Dr. Eric Cobb of Z-Health, and I took a TON of notes. If you've never heard of his work before, you should immediately buy one of his programs. Today's masterclass was a more in-depth look on the eye drills that I already use in my coaching program. A little background on him first... I've had 3 personal trainers who were certified in Z-Health and the impact of this brain-based approach was noticeable in my workouts so that's why I try to promote him as much as possible. Dr. Cobb's work has reached millions. His story is the reason I trust this material. He was a national-level junior tennis competitor, and he did vision training as a kid, the old-school kind with a tennis ball swinging on a string. Forty-five years later he has thirty years in neurology and a certification program that runs over 800 hours. Dr. Eric Cobb is a Neuroanatomy Professional whose his client work is all brain-based. He consults clients ranging from weekend athletes to international competitors in a wide range of sports. He's a life-long martial artist and combatives trainer who provides consulting and hands-on training to military and law enforcement communities. As a grown adult, he can now explain what that ball on a string was really doing when we was training as a kid.
So much of this class connects to what I see on my table every day as a Las Vegas massage therapist. Most of my training is mechanical and soft tissue-based, which is fine as far as that goes, and yet it's limited if that's all you understand about a body. That was Dr. Cobb's opening point. He said,
The visual system is one of the least talked about and least understood pieces of foundational knowledge in movement work.
And after two hours I can see why he leads with that.
Las Vegas massage therapist applying eye drills
I know I'm a bodyworker and not a personal trainer, but I'm always testing range of motion in clients and how their bodies are bracing against life. Plus, this stuff has helped me a lot so I incorporating it into my clientwork is important to me. Z-Health's YouTube channel has 12.6 Million+ views and growing, so there are lots of other people out there who agree with the value of Dr. Cobb's work. You should totally go subscribe to their YouTube channel when you've finished reading this blog post.
Before he taught us anything, Dr. Cobb had us test a movement. This is something I do with almost every one of my Las Vegas massage clients who walk into my studio. I checked the range of motion (ROM) in my shoulder/pecs. I noted that the ROM was ok, but it was a little sore in that area from all the extra push-ups I've been doing since I've got my AI Agent, Pip, sending me reminders to "drop and give her 20" 3 times a day. I rated the soreness from 0 to 10. Then came the drill, which I'd done many times in the past with my personal trainer, Peter Pinto. It was a chart full of stars, and for twenty seconds you tap your left thigh, your right thigh, or both, depending on where each star sits on its line. The point is to stay relaxed, breathe well, and go as fast as you can for 20 seconds. Then you test your shoulder again. Better, worse, or no change. Whatever you get is data, and it tells you something about how your visual system is interacting with the rest of your body.
What happened underneath the eye drill
The reason a twenty-second eye drill can change a shoulder comes down to how the nervous system runs. It works in a loop.
Input: your eyes, your inner ear, and your joints report to your brain.
Integration: your brain asks one question, which is "am I safe right now," and it asks that question before you're consciously aware of anything.
Output: movement, muscle tension, range of motion, or pain. Dr. Cobb highlighted that as movement professionals, the output is usually the only part we can see, so we work the tissue in front of us. When the input is the real problem, the same output keeps coming back no matter how good the tissue work is.
One number from the class struck a chord with me. The corticospinal tract, the wiring that carries commands from your brain down to your muscles, is about a million fibers. Your optic nerves carry 2.4 million fibers, 1.2 million fibers from each eye. Your brain has spent more than twice as much wiring on seeing the world as it has on moving through it.
The threat bucket
The other big idea is something Z-Health has called the threat bucket since 2007. I become familiar with it back in 2009 when I was training with Peter Pinto. Every stressor you carry goes into the same bucket: bad sleep, grief, pain, and the 13 hours a day the average person now spends on screens, which our eyes were never built for. When the bucket overflows, what spills out is protective outputs: pain, stiffness, anxiety, weird neuropathy, reduced performance. Some clients walk in with a big bucket and room to spare, and some walk in with a very small one. So the work has two directions. You modulate threat to empty the bucket, and you inoculate against future threat by teaching clients to practice drills and grow a bigger bucket. Every drill in the class can be used for one of those two things.
The science-y part of vision training
One of Dr. Cobb's slides said "Here's the science-y part," and as someone who teaches anatomy and physiology, I appreciate a teacher who warns you before he says a word like periaqueductal gray.
Deep in the midbrain there's a structure called the superior colliculus. It holds a map of the visual world around you, laid out in layers, with visual information in the superficial layers and touch and body sensation located in the deeper layers. Right next to it sits the oculomotor nuclear complex, which controls the muscles that move your eyes. And sandwiched between the map of what you see and the machinery that moves your eyes is the periaqueductal gray, whose primary job is modulating pain. When that pathway activates, it can turn your perception of pain up or it can turn your pain down. So the structure that maps what you see, the structure that moves your eyes, and a structure that dials pain up or down are all neighbors, and they act on each other constantly.
The research on the wiring goes back decades. In human electromyography (EMG) studies, visual targets recruited neck muscles before the eyes even finished shifting gaze. Stimulate the eye fields in the frontal lobe and the head-turning muscles fire. There's a direct link between eye stimulation and neck movement. And long before you consciously decide anything, your amygdala and hindbrain have already assessed the incoming information for danger. This is the low road and high road work from Dr. Joseph LeDoux. Your brain is wired for survival over performance, and that assessment is unconscious, which means by the time you're thinking about any kind of movement, your nervous system has already voted.
Central vision covers about six degrees of your vision, and everything else outside of that field of range is ambient, peripheral vision. Under threat, that field narrows, and anyone who's ever had tunnel vision knows what that feels like. I teach my anatomy and physiology students about the 6 muscles of the eye in our Anatomy II class. The muscles and mechanical tissues of the eye are what they are. We are limited in how we can influence and change those. But awareness and perception can be trained, and peripheral training turns out to be one of the greatest threat modulators we know of.
The loop: assess, drill, reassess, adjust
Everything in this system runs on one loop. You pick a movement you can repeat safely, like turning your head or raising an arm, you note the range and rate any pain from 0 to 10, you run the assessment or the drill, and then you test the same movement again. If the retest improves, you've found a high-performance drill, and you do more of it. If the retest gets worse, you've found a rehab drill, which you train gently and revisit later (and Dr. Cobb taught us that you should never do a rehab drill right before a big event or a game.) If nothing changed, you try a different one. And the whole time, you're watching the whole person: startle responses, muscle tension, breathing, posture, endurance. A worse result on a retest travels through the same anatomical structures of the brain as a better one, and it means you've found a rehab drill, which is useful information, and it never means a failed client.
The assessments
Each assessment tells you something specific about how someone's visual system is doing.
The killer bunny. This is the peripheral awareness test, and yes, that's really what he calls it. You stare at a dot on the wall while a coach wiggles bunny-ear fingers into your peripheral vision from behind your shoulder, and you say when you first catch the movement. The peripheral system picks up movement well before it picks up detail, and we should have about 200 degrees of it. It is important to compare data collected from doing this in all four quadrants.
The multi-size font card. This tests visual resolution up close. You find the smallest line you can read clearly with both eyes, then the right eye, then the left, keeping the distance and the lighting the same. Then you give the hardest line a good, lonnnnnng, ten-second effort and reassess. The stress of trying to resolve an image shows up in the rest of the body.
Smooth pursuits. Keeping the head still, follow a target slowly through eight directions, like cutting the lines while slicing a pie. You'll find lines where the eyes glide and lines where they jump off target, and those jumps are information.
Standard saccades. Two targets about head-width apart, and you shift your eyes between them for sixty seconds, only jumping to the other target when the new target is clear.
Pencil push-ups. Hold a pencil at arm's length with the eraser at eye level and bring it slowly toward your nose. Stop at the first blur or double image. A partner watches whether both eyes turn in together and whether one drifts. An eye that won't hold convergence is an eye muscle problem, and it feeds a depth judgment problem.
The Brock string. A string with beads at different distances, held to your nose. You look at one bead and check for two strings crossing in an X right at that bead. If the X crosses in front of or behind the bead, your eyes are pointing somewhere other than where you think. If one string looks like a ghost, one eye is partially suppressed. If you only see one string, that eye is fully suppressed. Dr. Cobb's analogy: if your right eye is a new iPhone and your left eye is an old one, the brain can't merge the two resolutions, so it ignores one of them, and people walk around every day assuming they have binocular vision while their depth judgment is compromised.
The Worth four-dot. This one is equipment-based and coach-led: a special light with red and green lenses, red over the right eye and green over the left. Four dots means the eyes are fusing. Three green dots means the right eye is suppressed, two red dots means the left is, and five dots means double vision. It tells you whether suppression is happening up close or further out.
The eye drills
Once you've assessed, these are the drills you train with. Every one gets the same treatment: test a movement first, do the drill, pause to breathe, retest, and let the result decide what happens next.
The star chart. This is the hand-eye drill from the beginning of this post: stars on a chart, tap your left thigh, right thigh, or both, twenty seconds, relaxed and breathing. Simple, and it's the one that opened the whole class.
The peripheral awareness chart. Hold the chart at arm's length, soften your gaze on the center dot, breathe long exhales, and read the rings of letters outward without moving your eyes. Notice which quadrant is harder, then retest your movement.
Near-far focus. This trains accommodation, which is how fast your lens changes shape between near and far. Switch between a target six to twelve inches away and one at least twenty feet away, and only switch when the new target comes in clear. If it takes three or four seconds to resolve, that's a skill worth training. Dr. Cobb emphasized that visual resolution can improve with twenty to forty hours of practice, so vision is a lot less fixed than most of us were taught.
Pursuits and saccades. The same setups from the assessment section mentioned above will become drills when you work them on purpose: slow pursuit work through the directions where the eyes jump, and sixty-second rounds of saccades, always waiting for clarity before the next jump.
Pirate catch (this is just what I call it from my workouts with Peter. Arrrrrgh, matey!). When the Brock string or the Worth four-dot shows suppression, this is the drill Dr. Cobb names as the fix, one eye covered like a pirate, and then play catch with a tennis ball. I've even performed this with a soccer ball before. The soccer ball had letters written on each spot and I'd have to name the letter that I see before throwing the ball back to my trainer.
Optokinetic stripes. This is the reflex between your eyes and your inner ear, the slow phase that tracks the world sliding past you and the fast phase that jumps to the next thing. You hold moving stripes close enough to fill the visual field and test them in different directions, up, down, diagonal, and off to each side in the periphery, checking how each one makes you feel and retesting your movement after each. Optokinetic work activates the posterior insula, a part of the brain tied to interoception, the autonomic nervous system, and the emotional component of pain. This is the drill I immediately thought of for people in my life who struggle with motion sickness.
The case study that pulled it together
Dr. Cobb showed us a client with neck pain, limited shoulder range of motion, and a history of concussions. Pencil push-ups combined with peripheral stripes made her unsteady. The visual stress was destabilizing her. A simple tap on the shoulder changed the input, her stability jumped, and on the retest her shoulder moved pain-free. Humans are complicated, and one input rarely tells the whole story.
One last line from my notes from Dr. Cobb: in athletes, the eyes fatigue before the body does. I'm keeping this in mind in my work with the UNLV Athletics Department and Cirque du Soleil. If you're only looking at tissue, you're missing the biggest input the brain has.
If you'd like to know more about how I use these in my "UnPattern Your Shoulder" coaching program, then book a call with me to see if my program is a good fit for you.
*A word on safety
Stop any drill that causes dizziness, headache, nausea, or increasing discomfort. Sudden double vision or new vision loss needs prompt eye care. Red-and-green tools like the Worth four-dot need real caution for anyone with strabismus. And none of this replaces an actual eye exam.
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