Ideas in the Wild: How Garrett Salpeter Aims To Help Us Reconnect with Our Nervous System to Achieve Restored Health and Higher Performance

Humans are resilient. In fact, we’re built to endure trauma. Whether facing chronic pain, invasive surgery, or debilitating injury, we’re capable of healing, repairing, and adapting to return even stronger. But sometimes the road to recovery feels like a journey with no end.

During these times, we need a new path forward with an ally in healing that’s been there all along: the nervous system. The nervous system works on our behalf, protecting, adapting, and taking its cues from the signals it receives. Sometimes the protection can go overboard, limiting performance and impeding recovery. But with the right neurological inputs, we can unlock a direct path to restored health and higher performance.

In The NeuFit Method, Garrett Salpeter helps readers reconnect with the nervous system and improve outcomes at every stage of rehab and fitness. Based on Garrett’s proprietary NeuFit methodology and Neubie technology, the solutions in this book will introduce the world to a framework for overcoming virtually any physiological challenge. I recently caught up with Garrett to find out what inspired him to write the book and the biggest lesson he’s learned.

What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?

The journey to write this book began with an incredible healing experience I had 15 years ago. As a college ice hockey player, I injured some ligaments in my wrist and was told it would require surgery. And based on my previous experiences with physical therapy and orthopedic medicine, I assumed that would be the case.

Serendipitously, I met a doctor who introduced me to the new field of functional neurology. Instead of focusing only on the injured tissue, we worked on activating the muscles around that tissue so they could support the ligaments as they healed. We also used direct current electrical stimulation to jump-start my body’s healing.

The result? I ended up healing in two weeks instead of three months and avoided surgery altogether! In that moment, I felt called to share this work with as many people as possible, but it still took many years to get to the point where I could write this book.

This calling led me to attend graduate school in both engineering and neuroscience, study with several leading clinicians, open my own practice, and — after several more years — develop the NeuFit Method and invent the patented Neubie device. As NeuFit and the Neubie continued to make a greater and greater impact, eventually that same internal calling told me that I had to write a book to share this transformative work with even more people.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned going through the journey you share in the book?

To achieve what we want in life, we often have to overcome instincts that naturally cause us to hold ourselves back. By working with the nervous system in the right way and changing our perspective, it’s possible to alter these subconscious patterns and tap into greater levels of healing and performance.

I’ve learned about (and am in awe of) the healing potential that we all have inside of us. By harnessing the power of the nervous system, we have seen people recover from injuries faster than they ever thought possible, restore function they lost due to severe impairments like stroke and spinal cord injuries (and were told they’d never get back), and establish sustainable fitness routines to improve their health for the long-term.

I’ve also learned about the other side of that same phenomenon, which is that in many ways we actually block ourselves from that potential and prevent ourselves from achieving our own healing. It’s usually not intentional, of course. It’s typically subconscious and automatic. Because our brains are so focused on survival, they actually want us to do less, not more. Our brains want to limit our speed of movement, our flexibility, and our energy expenditure to prevent us from getting physically injured just the same as they want to limit us from public speaking or taking other risks out of a fear that we may fail or embarrass ourselves.

How will you apply this lesson in your life moving forward?

I will continue to share the NeuFit Method and do my best to inspire medical practitioners to harness the power of neurology and our technology to transform their patient’s lives.

To that end, we will continue to invest in our research and development efforts. Originally, we used our core technology and methods to help athletes recover faster from injuries. Because our methods were neurologically based, we began to attract more medical practitioners who work with neurological patients looking to improve the function they had lost due to challenges like stroke, MS, spinal cord injuries, and more.

Through experimentation, we started to generate some really incredible outcomes with these patients, and have become very passionate about helping these neurological patients. Inspired by that phase of our evolution, we will keep innovating by creating new methods and protocols to help even more types of patients recover from a wider range of challenges.