Sue Hitzmann - MELT Performance A Step by-Step Program to Accelerate Your Fitness Goals, Improve Balance and Control, and Injuries for life

I was honored when Sue Hitzmann asked me to write the foreword to MELT Performance. I respect Sues prolific work as a writer, thinker, and exercise physiologist who continues to modernize the fitness industry with her innovative blend of connective tissue and nervous system techniques. The nervous system has the rare ability to record our responses to life events. With repetition, these responses become fixed in living tissue. When an event such as an injury occurs, the recorded response may be vital in the moment but not suited for long-term success. Like an orchestra, each part of the body is related, and when one section goes off-key, the rest of the group jumps in to compensate. The goal of this supportive compensation is to attain the most balance possible for maximum operational support in the moment. However, problems arise when we continue to use neurological compensations long after an injury has healed. This is where Sues NeuroStrength self-care program can help. By recognizing the connection, function, and structure of connective tissue in the body, NeuroStrength allows us to assess and treat altered brain maps that may be causing compensations and, in turn, leading to loss of spinal and pelvic stability and efficient motor control. Thickening, snagging, or holding in any part of the connective-tissue web results in a general heaviness of movement. What begins as a way to protect the body (particularly a part that hurts) eventually results in reduced fluidity throughout the entire body. One of the hardest things to do in a presentation or in print is to take complex topics and make them simple. This book does just that. MELT Performance is written in a way that educates the novice and the experienced trainer. Sue provides a user-friendly road map that teaches us to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses more objectivelyand take the necessary action to make lasting changes.

What strikes me most about Sues work is the method and quality of thinking. As you explore her blogs, articles, interviews, bestselling book The MELT Method, and this newest book, it becomes apparent that all these pieces come together to form a cohesive whole. Everything from pain reduction, biomechanics, and the sensorimotor system to psychology, strength training, and athletic movement is eloquently blended. Thus, MELT Performance provides one-stop shopping for a total-body training program. The work itself has the bracing clarity that comes from thinkers who spend their entire lives in direct empirical engagement with a subject they love. Sue approaches her subject with as much humility and as few preconceived notions as possible. Her ideas emerge from observation and not vice versa. What works for Sue and her students comes to the fore. Everything else drops away. What remains is a humane, flexible, systematic, and nondogmatic approach. The job becomes, as often attributed to Albert Einstein, as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Whenever I find such thinkers, I cling to their worknot just for what I can learn about the subject at hand but for what I can learn about how to live, how to think, and how to approach life. If youre like me, as you read through these chapters, youll feel a growing compulsion to make your body better and to make you better.

Its been said you should seek out and study people who have been there and done that. I believe its better to study with those who have been there, done that, and are still doing it! No one in the fitness business has Sues breadth of quality and experience. She has tried everything, improved everything, and come to more fitness eureka moments than anyone around. In an industry that changes so fast, you need to keep up with people who stay on the cutting edgepeople like Sue Hitzmann.

In MELT Performance, Sue teaches us how to get ahead of the factors that contribute to injury and pain so we can perform at our highest level. She makes clear that optimum health requires a seamless continuum of proactive care, not just reactive rehab. I hope this work changes your perspective on health care. You should have the mindset that you, both personally and professionally, are a powerful player in the quest to get upstream of lifestyle-induced stress and injury conditions. By following Sues protocols, we can upgrade our lives and accelerate quality outcomes for all.

Erik Dalton, PhD, founder of the Freedom From Pain Institute and author of Dynamic Body: Exploring Form, Expanding Function

A re you dedicated to living a healthy, active lifestyle but constantly dealing with joint aches, tendon or ligament strains, or muscle pains that make it harder and harder to reach your fitness goals?

Are you an athlete striving to be at the top of your game but facing repeated injuries that hold you back?

Are you ready to be active and exercise regularly without worrying about injuries or muscle and joint damage?

Then you are ready for MELT Performance, a revolutionary new method that applies the most cutting-edge science and research to maximize and accelerate your fitness goals. For anyone looking to achieve peak performance, this technique will help you reach your goals faster, improve balance and control, and reduce your risk of injuries and your chances of having persistent painfor good.

MELT Performance is the missing link that will transform your body from the inside out. Im going to teach you about a very vital but overlooked key to unlocking your ability to sustain your athleticism and maximize your results. The secret is neurological stabilityor what I call NeuroStrength.

Stability seems like something that regular sports and exercise training would improve. Yet one of the most common roadblocks to leading an active lifestyle is sustaining a stress injury or managing chronic joint pain or muscle strains. When I see clients who have hurt themselves being active, they often say, I wasnt even doing anything out of the ordinary! Why is it that you can practice the same pitch, the same swing, the same Downward Dog, or the same pirouette for years, yet somehow, suddenly, for no reason, that movement causes a sudden pain in your back or your knee? When youve done these movements skillfully, thousands of times already, why did that last one cause pain?

There is a little-known problem that affects anyone dedicating time and effort to staying in shape, playing sports, or performing at the peak of their ability. Whether or not youre an athlete in training, if youre dedicated to leading an active lifestylethrough running, cycling, practicing your backhand, doing training drills, or even perfecting a yoga poseyou practice and repeat movements over and over to improve your performance. And if youre like me, when you meet your goals, you train harder and set even higher goals.

The problem is that the repetition required to continuously improve how you move has a downside. Whether youre an Olympic athlete or a weekend warrior, 80 percent of orthopedic injuries happen because of repetitive stress, not accidents. Even professional athletes who have a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars from endorsementsand who have access to the best therapists, technology, and supplementsstill sustain injuries all the time. Constant training for a sport creates patterns. Think of patterns like your favorite pair of jeans. After you wear them a hundred times, they deform and lose their perfect fit as the denim loses its elastic recoil. Repetition causes connective tissue to endure repeated tension and compression in local regions that, over time, can cause global instabilitiesand that causes your body to compensate.