What is DNS? Part 2: The Czech Instructors

The Symposium of my second DNS seminar was located in Chicago, a five hour drive from where I was living and going to school and St Louis Missouri. I drove up and split a hotel with a few of my classmates. The course I selected was an exercise course, designed to teach how to utilize the technique with athletes, a population I was particularly interested in working with. The atmosphere in the hotel conference room was much different from the first seminar I had taken. The main instructor of the class I was taking was a PhD rehabilitation specialist who had flown from across the world to try to teach how to apply an entire technique in a matter of two days. Despite wearing a European style tracksuit, the instructor had a demeanor of intense discipline and a no nonsense attitude, which was perfect foreshadowing to her teaching style. The american culture of non offensive tiptoe in order to not offend a participant who provided a wrong answer was an interesting juxtaposition to the sharp and blunt responses from the Czech instructors. The sheer amount of information was overwhelming as we tried to simply stay afloat while being constantly grilled and tested critiqued on our attempts to use the technique. This seemed all a bit harsh until I attempted to perform one of the exercises on one of my partners. He had had a long history of knee and hip pain, and the particular exercise we were doing was designed to target those joints while placed in a position that mimics the muscle activation while walking and running. It was an opportunity to showcase my ability to use the technique we had just learned, and I floundered. My partner just chalked it up to his long standing issues in his hips and knees, and that the technique simply didn’t work for him. Then the instructor came over. She sensed my frustration and proceeded to place my partner in the exact same position I put them in, then shifted his body two inches to the right. His knee began to shake uncontrollably, his muscles behind his hip began to take the load of his body for the first time in years. He started sweating and could barely hold the position for a few seconds. As he stood up he felt muscles activate that he hadn’t felt in years. She had somehow managed to get to the root of his long standing issues in a matter of a few seconds. 

Pavel Kolar Pt, Paed., Dr., PhD

Creator and Developer of DNS

Then I was able to watch Pavel himself speak. Watching the inventor of a technique speak is like watching Thomas Edison talk about the lightbulb, only this time it was in somewhat broken english. He had a translator, much of the points he made were expressed through his movements and gestures. He was able to provide case study after case study of olympic gold medalists and professional athletes that he had worked with. Each one showcasing a different nuance of movement and aspect of the technique. What was interesting was that all of the corrections and modifications were completely different for each athlete. They explained that there was no cookbook or recipe for great rehabilitation. Each individual has specific needs and changes. This is why what I did was unable to get the same response as the Czech instructors. I was trying to follow the recipe, but I was missing the key ingredient which was taking into account that individuals unique physiological and anatomical makeup. Most physical therapy programs follow pre set protocols based on specific pathological diagnosis. There are many limitations to this way of performing rehabilitation, because not every recipe fits every individual. Also many of the diagnostic tests which we use to try and establish specific diagnosis based on anatomy are unreliable, and weak at best in their ability to establish specific anatomic pathology. This truly changed my thinking in rehabilitation. Each person needs their rehab to be catered to their own personal anatomy, the sport they play, and what potentially injured them in the first place. All of the instructors stressed how difficult it is to teach the technique, because there is no cookbook, no one size fits all in rehabilitation. This concept struck me as an extraordinarily rational thought. Western rehabilitation techniques were all based on rigorous research, but the first step in creating a research design is to eliminate all variables and then provide each individual with the same treatment. That way a protocol can be developed and utilized. In this way we try to create the best odds ratio for an optimal outcome. This does work to a certain extent, in no small part due to the body's capacity to inherently heal itself. The unfortunate aspect is that through this process we can lose the trees through the forest. In this case the individual trees being the aspects of the individuals that make them unique. If we stick to rigid protocols developed in the research setting, then we will lose out on the individual aspects that may make our rehab successful, like the knee two inches to the right or the multiple examples that Professor Kolar provided. The Technique of DNS is mastered by mastering the fundamentals of movement and how it develops, and then applying these fundamentals to each individual according to their unique anatomy and issues. What are these fundamentals based on? That is where the baby pictures come into play. 

For more on Professor Kolar’s work and the Prague school, click here

For an article on Professor Kolars work with Ester Ledecka, first person to ever win olympic gold in two different sports in a single winter games, click here