Automatic episode summary
Episode 26 of Still Strong brings Dr. Ethan Surprenant, a 29-year-old upper cervical chiropractor from St. Petersburg, into the chair for a nearly three-hour conversation that travels from backyard airsoft wars to the neurology of a heavy squat to what it costs a man to stand as prophet, priest, and king at home.
Host Keith Vance opens by explaining how he found his guest. Years ago a Spartan Race account reposted a video of a young man backflipping off an eight-foot pull-up bar at a St. Pete park without crediting him, and a mutual friend called them out. Surprenant says the flip was unremarkable to him — he was coaching gymnastics then and had spent the day learning to drop from height — and that his athleticism has always been framed by stewardship: his body is a gift, and he works at it as unto God rather than unto men.
From there the conversation turns to inheritance. Surprenant's father told him from roughly age six that he was expected to surpass him: "I have to decrease so you can increase." He used an ornament of a boy looking up a chimney as a picture of expectation and hope. His grandfather came out of Skunk Hollow, New York, shoveling salt, built an insurance career, was ruined when a company broke a promise, and rebuilt. His father ran a countertop shop for twenty years while refusing to let his son follow him into it — "you're built for something else." When he asked for a gym membership as a teenager, his father made him earn it with a month of daily push-ups, squats, and sit-ups, then showed him the math: three hundred dollars a year is about a dollar a day for a discipline that would carry him for life.
The middle third is the guest's clinical wheelhouse. He walks Vance through the nervous system as the thing that actually governs training — proprioception, the brain's real-time negotiation during a squat, and the sympathetic and parasympathetic balance he pictures as a lever. A man already pinned toward fight-or-flight by work and bills has almost no room left to surge in the gym. He argues that pain is mapped in the brain as memory, that arthritis is blamed for far more pain than it causes, and that the deepest question in health care is whether the body is built for dysfunction or built to heal. Writing a fifty-year-old off as bone on bone, he says, destroys a hope the physiology does not warrant.
He describes adjusting his own newborns: his daughter within seconds of birth after the cord came around her neck, and his son minutes after delivery when he went from pink to blue and would not cry or latch. He traces misalignment to what he calls the three T's — traumas, toxins, and thoughts — and explains that the familiar cracking sound is only nitrogen leaving a joint, unrelated to the adjustment itself. He reframes ADHD as focus that can be harnessed rather than a defect, describing an eight-year-old whose reading score moved from a one to nearly a five.
Vance answers with his own family's story: a daughter pulled headfirst down a playground slide at eleven, a cracked rib and a concussion, a year of daily migraines out of school, a depression diagnosis offered as the answer, and finally a referral to a neuroplasticity clinic that gave her back.
The last hour turns lighter, then heavier. Surprenant recounts a disqualification at his first obstacle race, a first-place run at the next, and becoming the first to complete a twenty-one-foot warped wall in Minneapolis — then falling short twice on American Ninja Warrior because he had stopped training. He reads that failure as a door God closed: had he won, he would have proposed immediately, his wife would never have become a massage therapist, and he would never have become the doctor he needed to be. He closes on the weight of fatherhood — the higher standard carried by teachers, the charge to provide, his wife correcting him to pray with his five-year-old rather than send her off alone, and the peace they carry after a miscarriage.
Speakers
- Intro voiceover other
- Keith Vance host
- Dr. Ethan Surprenant guest
Chapters
- 0:26 The backflip that started it
Keith recounts discovering Ethan years earlier through a Spartan repost of a backflip off an eight-foot pull-up bar in St. Pete, and a mutual friend calling the account out for not crediting him. Ethan explains the flip came out of his gymnastics-coaching and ninja-warrior years, and that he trains as a steward of a body he considers a gift from God.
- 5:11 Setting the standard, refusing complacency
Ethan describes his upper cervical practice in St. Petersburg, nearly nine years with his wife, and three children aged five, three, and one, and why he still trains hard so his kids' 'better' starts from a high bar. Keith explains the morning self-diagnostic behind the show's name and how complacency slips in quietly once the bills stop chasing you.
- 12:12 A father's charge to go further
Ethan traces a generational pattern: a grandfather who rebuilt after an insurance company broke its promise, and a father who told him almost daily that he had to surpass him. The conversation lands on the sobering arithmetic of eighteen summers and whether presence with children is a matter of quantity, quality, or both.
- 21:57 Earning the gym membership
Ethan's dad made a party out of the backyard — airsoft wars, zombie hunts, manhunt nights — and then made his son earn a gym membership with a month of daily push-ups, squats, and sit-ups. Keith answers with the weight set he inherited at thirteen and Bob Whiteman, the Vietnam veteran and prison chaplain who taught him how to lift.
- 34:42 From basketball center to doctor
Playing center at six foot three forced Ethan to get strong, then to learn coordination, speed, and self-taught rehab as he crossed from bodybuilding into athletic training. Dance, ultimate frisbee, ninja warrior, and gymnastics coaching all fed the same question, which traces back to a sixth-grade moment in a doctor's office and a chiropractor who invited him to shadow.
- 47:32 How the nervous system runs training
Ethan gives what he calls the cliff-notes version of exercise science, framed neurologically: proprioception, the brain's second-by-second decisions during a squat, and the difference between anaerobic and aerobic demand. He then explains the sympathetic and parasympathetic split with a lever picture — a nervous system already pulled toward fight-or-flight has almost no room left to surge.
- 1:01:57 Pain, arthritis, and rebuilt trust
Ethan explains that pain syndromes are mapped in the brain as memories, that reinforcing a limp teaches the brain to accept it, and that rehab works by rebuilding the brain's trust in a range of motion. Keith's shoulder — a childhood clavicle fracture, a torn labrum, and arthritis — becomes the working example, alongside Ethan's argument that arthritis is blamed for far more pain than it causes.
- 1:10:35 Built to heal, not to decay
Ethan names the fork he sees in health care: whether a practitioner believes the body is built for dysfunction or built to heal, and why telling a fifty-year-old he is finished destroys hope. The two also cover chiropractic's old stigma, the Wilk antitrust case against the AMA, Keith's daughter's snapping hip syndrome, and the case for exhausting conservative options before surgery.
- 1:23:34 Adjusting newborns, and what adjustments do
Ethan describes adjusting his daughter within seconds of birth and his son at about five minutes old after he went from pink to blue and would not cry or latch. He then explains what an adjustment is meant to change — the brain's perception of the body — covering digestion, vestibular problems, immune research, the three T's of traumas, toxins, and thoughts, why the cracking sound is only nitrogen gas, and why care is a long consistency rather than a quick fix.
- 1:51:50 ADHD, concussions, and brain recovery
Ethan argues developmental disorders are multifactorial and walks the chain from restricted movement to disordered autonomic function, then tells of an eight-year-old whose reading score climbed from a one to nearly a five. Keith answers with his daughter Ella's concussion — a year of daily migraines, a depression diagnosis, and the neuroplasticity clinic that finally brought her back.
- 2:13:16 Ninja Warrior and the closed door
Ethan recounts a disqualification at his first obstacle race, a first-place run at the next, and becoming the first to complete a twenty-one-foot warped wall in Minneapolis — then falling before the warped wall both nights on the show because he had not trained. He reads the loss as a door God closed, and describes the four years of chiropractic school that followed on twenty-minute workouts and a 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. schedule.
- 2:35:02 Prophet, priest, and king at home
Asked what stresses him most, Ethan names the standard a Christian father carries, working out the three offices a husband mirrors and admitting which come hard. He tells of his wife correcting him to pray with his five-year-old rather than send her off alone, distinguishes obedience from a facade of faithfulness, and closes on the miscarriage, the children who followed, and the peace they carry.
Key takeaways
- 11:02 Ethan's picture of drift: the enemy does not arrive with the full chain, he adds one link at a time. Each link is survivable, each next one is easier to accept, and the weight becomes normal — what he calls the bad version of progressive overload.
- 19:19 Eighteen summers — and realistically fewer, since by sixteen or seventeen the summers begin shifting from family to friends. Ethan calls it one of the most humbling truths he has heard about the limits of a parent's window.
- 1:11:35 Ethan's central clinical conviction: the body is built to heal, not to fall apart. A cut closes without being told to. When a practitioner assumes decay is the default, he writes a fifty-year-old off — and that assumption, more than the pathology, is what destroys hope.
- 1:40:51 The three T's — traumas, toxins, and thoughts — with the corollary that you cannot simply avoid them. Life is supposed to be hard because hardship forms character, so the aim is adaptability and resilience rather than an insulated life.
Pull quotes
"If I fall in love with complacency, my kids will fall in love with complacency." — Ethan on why a father staying sharp is not vanity but inheritance.
"There's always that voice in my head that wants to negotiate down." — Keith, noting there is never a voice offering to negotiate up, and that the quieter version is the dangerous one.
Ethan repeating what his father told him from about age six onward: "I want you to be smarter than me. I want you to be stronger than me. You have to be better than me. I have to decrease so you can increase."
Ethan's account of his son's birth: the baby's head tweaked on delivery, he went from pink to blue, would not cry, breathe well, or latch. Ethan adjusted the atlas, the top bone of the spine, and says the boy let out a full cry and latched.
The twenty-one-foot warped wall in Minneapolis: about a dozen failed attempts, minutes left before the gym closed, and a jump that caught the top lip to the second knuckle. Ethan describes the gym going silent, then erupting — the first official completion of that wall.
"But God had different plans." — Ethan on falling short on the show, and why he now believes winning would have cost him his wife's own path and the doctor he needed to become.
Ethan's wife corrected him for sending their upset five-year-old back to her room to pray alone: he needed to lead her in prayer, not assume she knew how. He went in, prayed with her simply, and she came out later having prayed the Lord's Prayer on her own and feeling settled.
Scripture & context
- 4:46 Ethan paraphrases Colossians 3:23 — work as unto God and not unto men — as the reason he trains: his body is a gift from God and he wants to be a good steward of it, and to walk the walk he was teaching the athletes he coached.
- 9:16 Keith reaches for 2 Samuel 11:1 — the season when kings went out to battle, and David stayed in his castle — as a picture of midlife complacency, when the bills are no longer chasing a man and the pressure that once forced him up is gone.
- 2:03:18 Keith's daughter Ella, injured at eleven, spent a year out of school with daily migraines before a referral to a St. Pete neuroplasticity clinic. He is candid that the standard path ended in a depression diagnosis and a prescription, and that the referring specialists showed no interest when he called back to tell them what finally worked.
- 2:35:35 Ethan builds the closing segment on marriage as the mirror of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5), with the husband carrying the three offices Christ holds — prophet, priest, and king — and Keith answering that Christ is a servant king who came not to be served but to serve.
Questions answered
- What does Dr. Ethan Surprenant do for a living?
- He is a practicing upper cervical chiropractor at Cerebral Chiropractic Center in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he says he handles tough cases and is regularly humbled and stretched. He is also a pediatric certified chiropractor and sees pediatric patients in his office. At the time of recording he is 29, has been married about six years, and has three children aged five, three, and one. jump · 5:11
- Why did his father make him earn a gym membership?
- When Ethan asked for a membership around age thirteen, his dad agreed to pay for it but required proof of discipline first: a hundred push-ups, two hundred squats, and three hundred sit-ups every day for a month. After watching him do the reps outside after school all month, his dad paid for the year outright and showed him the math — roughly three hundred dollars a year works out to about a dollar a day. What his dad was actually buying was the discipline, which he told him would carry him for a long time. jump · 27:47
- Why does he say most people's strength limit is not their muscles?
- He frames it through the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system — the gas pedal and the brake. Many people already live pulled toward fight-or-flight by work, bills, and family stress, so by the time they reach the gym the lever is nearly pulled and there is little room left to surge. Building the parasympathetic side is not about being relaxed all the time; it is about restoring the capacity to kick into high gear when it is needed. He calls it a physiological self-limitation rather than merely a self-limiting belief. jump · 57:11
- Is arthritis really what is causing joint pain?
- Ethan argues arthritis is blamed for far more pain than it actually causes, and that there is substantial literature against it being the source of most pain syndromes. Unless a bone spur is contacting a nerve coming out of the spine or pressing into soft tissue, he says the clinical correlation generally is not there. He describes patients being told they are 'bone on bone' and finished, and considers that a message that destroys hope the physiology does not warrant. jump · 1:06:12
- What did he do when his own children were born?
- He adjusted his third child within seconds of birth because the cord had been around her neck and she could not turn her head to latch; he worked gently on her upper neck, cranial bones, and jaw over about ten minutes until she latched and settled. His son, adjusted at roughly five minutes old, went from pink to blue when his head tweaked on delivery and was not crying, breathing well, or latching. Ethan adjusted the boy's atlas, the top bone of the spine, and says he let out a full cry and latched right away. He notes the doctors in the room either did not see it or did not comment. jump · 1:24:03
- What causes the misalignments chiropractors look for?
- He groups them into three categories he calls the three T's: traumas, toxins, and thoughts. Traumas include falls, car accidents, and difficult deliveries such as C-sections and vacuum or forceps births; toxins include things like heavy early antibiotic use that damages gut bacteria; thoughts are the emotional stressors the body carries. He adds that avoiding all three is not the goal, because life is supposed to be hard and forms character, so the work is building adaptability and resilience to carry the load. jump · 1:36:04
- Is the cracking sound during an adjustment the adjustment itself?
- No. Ethan explains the sound is nitrogen gas leaving a synovial joint as the joint moves, and that its presence neither helps nor negates the adjustment. He practices a more neurologically focused style using a sound wave instrument on the upper neck, so he does very little cracking and popping and still gets the neurologic change he is after. His framing is that the goal is changing how the brain perceives the body, not producing a noise that performs well on social media. jump · 1:42:43
- How did the Vance family get help for their daughter's concussion?
- After Ella was pulled headfirst down a playground slide at eleven, she had a cracked rib and a concussion, could not walk or see clearly, and had daily migraines that kept her out of school for a year. Standard physical therapy ran its course and the outcome offered was a depression diagnosis and a prescription. Keith's holistic chiropractor referred them to a neuroplasticity clinic in St. Pete, where a week of eye, vestibular, and rotational testing and therapy, plus follow-up work at home and a hyperbaric chamber he bought, brought her back. jump · 2:03:18
- Did he compete on American Ninja Warrior, and how did it go?
- Yes. After placing well at local competitions and becoming, by his account, the first person to complete a twenty-one-foot warped wall at a gym in Minneapolis, he submitted an audition video and got on the show in 2018. He fell before the warped wall both nights, and he attributes it plainly to not training hard enough — he had skipped the dead hangs and reps and had not trained at the early-morning hour the show records. Looking back, he reads the loss as a door God closed on a path that would have cost him more than it gave. jump · 2:18:17
- What does he mean by a husband being prophet, priest, and king?
- He starts from Jesus as prophet, priest, and king, and from marriage as a mirror of Christ and the church, so a husband carries those three offices in his home. The king sets direction and cares for the household, the prophet reads patterns and speaks accordingly, and the priest is the expositor of right teaching who is first to prayer. He says the king role comes easiest to him and the prophet and priest roles are hardest, and that the whole standard is heavy because teachers and leaders are held to a higher account. Keith adds that Christ is a servant king who came not to be served but to serve. jump · 2:36:27
Helpful links
product
- Shop Still Strong Where listeners can get the Still Strong hats and shirts Keith mentions at the top of the episode.
verse
- Ephesians 5 (King James Version) The marriage-as-mirror-of-Christ-and-the-church passage underneath the closing prophet, priest, and king discussion.
Full transcript
Intro voiceover: I learned the hard way. Nothing's overnight. Some days you lose, some days you survive. Still
Keith Vance: Doctor Ethan Supernaught. Sir. Welcome to the podcast, brother. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was a good time. How was the trip? Easy drive down. I got some good kids, and they, they enjoyed singing the songs and playing the alphabet game all the way. So kept it nice and nice and simple. You're from you're Saint Pete. Right? Yeah. Yeah. The Saint Pete area. So it's kinda Central Pinellas. Good. We're gonna get into this, Ethan. The reason why you're sitting in that chair was I'm I'm bad with you. The older you get, the bigger time gaps are. You know, everything feels like it's just a couple years ago. Mhmm. Mhmm. You know? But I wanna say five to ten years ago, I was scrolling through my social media and Spartan you remember the Spartan races? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big obstacle course routes. Spartan, I used to do those with my sister and, some friends. And, Spartan had reposted a video of this guy. There's, like, a high pull up bar at the beach, if I'm I can remember at the beach, and this guy, like, did some kind of crazy backflip Mhmm. And landed. And, Spartan reposted it. And then a mutual friend of ours, Morgan Wright Yeah. Yeah. The moose. The moose. Yep. He's like, hey, Spartan. If you're gonna post my boy, at least give him some props. He he tagged you he tagged you in it. And, that's how I came across you, and I've been following you throughout the years because you were, your fitness was inspiring to me. K? At that time, I started following you. You're single, but you're doing this crazy stuff. So that's why you're here. I'm gonna let you tell your story of where you are in life right now, And, there's you and I talked a couple nights ago. There's, several different facets where we're gonna take this thing. Oh, yeah. Before we dive into it and get into it,
Keith Vance: everyone that that comes on the podcast gets a Still Strong hat. Absolutely. This is a new design. They're Richardson one twelves. My kids tell me they're the best. Okay. You can get those hats and shirts one of two ways. You can be on the podcast, and I'll give you one, or you can go on shopstillstrong.com. Right on. And buy one. So Restock once I re restock once I Yeah. If I my kids end up taking this one. Gonna cover my boy here. We spent some money on this place. My wife told me how how much we spent on this place. I didn't realize it. So now I gotta I gotta recoup some some money. So That's fair. Yeah. Yep. So, Ethan, what are you what are you doing nowadays? What's life like for you?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Where where you at? Yeah. Well, you know, going back to that, that video, yeah, it was real funny because, that was down at, I think, like, North Shore Park over in Saint Pete. I just had the day off. And so I was just doing pull ups and backflips and just learning some of those things. And spa and Spartan reposted that. And then after Morgan commented on it, then I reposted his repost. And then, like, all of my friends and family were like, hey. Come on, Spartan. Give the kid credit or something like that. And, never happened. Moved on from that. Remind me because I have a memory of it, but it's not clear. How high was the pull up bar and what what? It was probably eight feet off the ground or something like that. Like, just high enough to actually make me have to stand up. You know, I'm six three. Okay. So I can reach about eight foot. And so it has three levels to it. I think there was, like, a five foot one and then, like, a six foot one and then an eight foot one. I just spent the day learning how to do flips off of high stuff. Okay. And that was during my ninja warrior years. Okay. So I was trying to get some social media presence because that would help me get the better chance of coming on the show. Understood.
Keith Vance: And so I just doing some antics around the city on some of my days off. How long did it take you to land that thing? Because it looked it looked high, and it looked like you landed far away from that bar when you landed. So I had been coaching so I think that was I think that was 2018,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: 2017, something like that. That sounds right. Somewhere around time around that era. And I'd be coaching gymnastics for a year and a half at that point. Okay. So I had been doing flips in the gym onto soft pads over and over, so sand felt no different. Okay. So it really was like, can I get on the bar, stabilize, and jump off? It took me probably fifteen minutes to get to the point where I felt comfortable on an eight foot drop. So you're athletic. Yep. Yep. Yep. Kinda raised that way and always strived for that to be the best athlete I could be knowing that my body is a gift from God, and I wanna be a good steward of that. So how can I Colossians says, work as hard as you can, not as unto God, not as unto man or as unto God, not as unto man? And so how can I honor God with my body? And how can I be a mentor to the athletes that I'm saying? Do these hard things. It'll make you a better athlete. It'll make you more mentally strong. You know, how can I walk the walk that I was teaching? So let's do that. Let's
Keith Vance: tell me where you are in life now, your kids, how long you've been married, what you do, and then let's pivot to athleticism. Yeah. Yeah. How you got into it, where you're at now with your list your athleticism. Let's just let's just Yeah. That first chapter will be athleticism.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I love it. So right now, I am a practicing upper cervical chiropractor, down over in Saint Petersburg. Awesome practice called Cerebral Chiropractic Center. Just having a great time over there. Really handling some tough cases and learning a lot, being humbled a lot, having to be stretched a lot. My wife and I have been married for six years together since 2017. I better get these dates right. So 2017, we started dating officially. Actually, it would have been it would have been, I believe, June 2017, so we're coming up on almost nine years of being together. Good for you. Three kids, five, three, and one. Good for you. Awesome kids. They you know, I I say often is that kids are the best reflection of our worst qualities. And so whenever I see my kids doing something, I'm like, oh, I don't like that. I'm trying to figure out where they got that from. It's usually me. And so, learning a lot of what it takes to be a good dad, be a good husband, be a good father, be a good role model for him. I still train pretty obsessively to make sure that I can I want my kids to be so much better than me? But if I'm not very good myself, then their better is not gonna be a very high standard to achieve.
Keith Vance: Fair. Because, man, you and are gonna have a good conversation. Fair. Because even today, I'm 50 years old Mhmm. Nobody measures up to my dad. Like, my dad is a standard. Mhmm. So what you just talked about, if you have a high bar standard, they're gonna measure everything to dad. That's right. That's right. And that's what we're supposed to do as fathers is set the standard for the family.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And so, you know, I wanna make sure that my kids are faster than me, can jump higher, can be stronger, can be smarter, can be more quick witted, can do all of those things, can be more skilled, can make more in the future, can supply their family with better outcomes than even I've I've I've worked to to supply my family with just like my dad did before. Just like his dad did before him. Each time a generation of my family has just gotten a little bit further in life. And, if I stay stagnant, if my wife said it today. If if I if I fall in love with complacency, my kids will fall in love with complacency. And then I and then the next generation will not achieve what they want. K. So a couple thoughts.
Keith Vance: There's there's several facets to still strong. Mhmm. But still strong, I ask myself every morning when I get up, are you still strong? And it's in regard to complacency because complacency slips in so quietly and easily.
Keith Vance: And sometimes you don't even realize it. That's right. And peep and for sure, people won't realize until months, sometimes years. So every morning I get up, my routine is a self diagnostic.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Do you ever find that you're having to refocus? Right? Like, you you wake up. You're like, are you still strong? Do you find that sometimes the answer is no, and you have to bring yourself back to what still strong looks like?
Keith Vance: Sometimes. Yeah. That thing is the tougher days. Right? Well,
Keith Vance: so it's different. Where I'm at in my life right now is different because when I was younger, still strong was the only option, Ethan. If I don't get up and do it, the family's gonna suffer. The bills are gonna pile up. There there was only one option for it to be still strong every day when I'm sick when I'm sick and I got a fever, but I gotta get up and roll because if I don't, the family suffers. Mhmm. That was almost simpler and easier. Because now at 50, I relate to it to King David and Bathsheba. Bible says there was a time where kings went to battle, implying that David should have been on the battlefield with his men instead of in his castle. So I think you hit a certain time in life where your bills aren't chasing you, and so you can maybe complacently slip slips in. And our roles change. You know I mean? As as a father and a grandfather and a business owner, like, it's not the best use of my time to be out pounding nails all day because there's people that need me. Mhmm. Mhmm. And being in those strategic positions where I'm accessible and I'm needed, but sometimes there's I just wanna go pound some nails. That's fair. So sometimes it's a little bit simpler to keep the one task. Right? Because then I know I'm not being complacent. That's right. That's right. So I'm just there's there's always this voice in my head that wants to negotiate down Mhmm. That when the workout says this, it calls for five sets of five, and you wanna do four sets of five. Or you go out to do a run, and you're gonna do a five mile run, and you get halfway into it, and it says, hey, four miles is good enough. There's always that voice in my head that wants to negotiate down, and I gotta walk around and stomp him. And, no, this is what we're gonna do. There's that not there's there's never a voice in my head that wants to negotiate up. Mhmm. I gotta kill the voice that wants to go that wants to take the easy route, that wants to be complacent. And, most of the time, I can identify him pretty easily, but sometimes he he gets sneaky. It's a little bit quieter. This quieter voice.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: You know, I saw I saw an analogy of this kind of concept of, like, the slow build, kind of off target. Right? Slow build towards a life of sin, a life of complacency. Mhmm. And it was it was you know, Satan doesn't come in with a a full chain and say, alright. Here's your shackles. Now you weigh now you're weighed down fifty pounds. He goes, hey. This one decision puts one chain link. This one is it's not gonna kill you. One chain link, which is right. One chain link, it's probably not gonna derail the whole lifestyle. But then he does but then it gets easier. So the second chain link is easier. But the tenth chain link, it's it's way easier to make the change, and you've adapted to the to the weight of it. So you're not gonna feel it the same way. Just like I mean, it's it's the bad version of progressive overload. Talking about athleticism. You get a little stronger each week. Well, if you get a little bit more complacent each week, it's way easier to get more complacent. Right? Yeah. So that's that's one of the the biggest overcomes that that comes as a father, as a husband, an athlete, doctor is if I let off the gas, not just my family suffers, not just I suffer, my patients suffer, the city suffers, the people I impact beyond my patients
Keith Vance: suffer. I had another question for you. Mhmm. You said that you want your kids to be a better version of you more or less. Mhmm. Mhmm. They're just little. They were here. They're just little. And you said that it seems to be the characteristic in your family line to that you get sound like you guys had a formula or plan to, hey. Let's keep the next generation stronger, better, smarter, whatever. Is this is that something that you're doing intentionally?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: So What does that look like practically? Yeah. I think I I don't know if it was intentional, the steps to get each generation a little bit further than the previous. The only intention that was behind it is the core concept of my dad wanted me to be smart, and he told me that every day. Like, every day I was growing up, my dad would consistently say, Ethan, I want you to be smarter than me. I want you to be stronger than me. You have to be better than me. I have to decrease so you can increase. It has to be that way. That was like a core man to man kind of concept that my dad instilled with me. Do you remember how old you were when you when you were cognizant of that situation? I don't think it became reality until I got married Okay. Actually. I got married around the time my my frontal cortex started becoming real. I wasn't an idiot teenager anymore. Okay. And so I think it became reality then, but my dad had repeated that message from the time I was six or seven years old all the way through. He still does it now. Still does it now. I had this little ornament growing up. It was a little kid looking up the chimney for Santa Claus. And my dad would probably once or twice a week when he's putting me to bed as a kid growing up, he would talk to me about that ornament. He's like, this this is gonna be so important in your life, Ethan, is that kid looking up the chimney to Santa Claus. Now my parents didn't propose Santa Claus. They were just using this as an analogy. And he was saying, that kid has the expectation that something's coming. He knows something's coming. And so he's like, there's there's something that an expectation I have for you is that you will go beyond what we've already done. Just like we have the hope in Christ, I have a hope that you are going to be better than I will. And he was always that kind of message. It's like, we have this hope in Christ, and because we work to serve the Lord, I expect you to go beyond me. And his dad instilled that in him. So his dad is from Skunk Hollow, New York, Upstate New York. You know where that is? No. I know where Rochester is. Yeah. You know where And I know where Churchville is. Yep. Yep. My best friend. I don't even know where Skunk Hollow is. He never points it out on a map for me. But I don't know if I wanna visit that thing. No. No. That's I know there's a hell Michigan. I don't think I know where going. Go to hell. Right? I think Skunkville sounds about Yeah. Skunk Hollow. So my my grandpa was born in Skunk Hollow, doing some of the the the his one of his first jobs was shoveling, salt out of the warehouses there, getting it to the people and getting it out to the country. And, he ended up working his way into insurance, did pretty well in insurance, and and moved his family up. Then the insurance company just decimate. Like, they promised something, didn't fulfill the promise, and it crushed him. And he rebuilt. Still strong, bounced back from it, but instilled that value in my dad, his two brothers, and and my aunt.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: My dad being the youngest knew he had to rise to the occasion as as best as he could knowing that his brothers and sisters were already ahead of him. So he steps up and and does everything he can to give us, a solid foundation and anchor point. He knew we didn't he didn't want us to have to move around. He wanted us to have a safe place. And so he they moved down to, Florida when he was, I think, college age or so.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And he meets my mom while they're down here, and
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: he they kinda anchored themselves in Pinellas County. Dead center of Pinellas, fifteen minutes from everything. Perfect. It's actually, like, two minutes away from where I live right now, which is super cool. Get to rebuild, kind of a life for my kids in the same area I grew up. Mhmm. But he would consistently and my dad does kitchens and countertops, he did for a while. And he would say, when I you know, every kid wants to be like their dad growing up. It's a natural thing. It's a natural thing. So I I would tell him, like, dad, I wanna do what you do. I wanna build those kitchens. I wanna do the the cabinetry. I wanna do that craftsmanship. I think it's awesome. I'm I really love the he had such an artistic design. So good at it. And and he would every time he'd shake his head and be like, no. No. You're not gonna do what I do. And he didn't mean it of, like he and he's like, I'm not gonna I'm not saying that because you can't do what I do. I just you are built for something else. I don't know what that is, but you're built for something else. And so he spent most of our my sister and I's childhood pushing us to do something better than what he's done because he knew the toll it took on his body. He knew the toll it took on his mind running the business, and, he wanted something better for us. And so he allowed us to pursue academia. My sister, physical therapist assistant, an awesome one. She's one of the best in her company by a long shot. Beyond proud of her. And then myself, I went off and pursued pursued doctorhood, and and wanted to learn how to help people. I always wanted to help people. And so doctors seemed like a natural consequence of that. But my dad and mom were always saying, yeah, you have to be go further. Go be better than what we've done.
Keith Vance: What's your dad doing now? He's actually working for,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: he just closed the shop after twenty years of business. He went to work for the city of Pinellas Park now. And old is he?
Keith Vance: Good question. We kinda lost track after 39. I think he was born in '67, so whatever that math turns out to be, he's getting getting close to Yeah.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Yeah. But yeah. And so he's he's doing really well over there. He's enjoying it. That's the newest career shift for him, but I have not seen him as at peace as he currently is. Good. He smiles in pictures now, which is cool. He's just not thinking about business on the side. He's actually focusing on the task at hand.
Keith Vance: It's I'm I'm glad we diverted this way because, the family unit you know, you got your little ones and you're just getting started. The family unit is so important. And you just talk about how the role of your dad in your life and where you are in life wasn't just a role that dice in accident. It's because your dad was actively investing in you. Absolutely. And that's the fruit of that. So I think it's important nowadays with young families getting started out, you know, we're just it's almost like you wake up and you just start reacting to life around you. Mhmm. But you need to slow down and be intentional with those little ones because you only got limited time, brother. Mhmm. You got limited time. Right? So
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Yeah. That was one of the most humbling truths I heard. And it was it was a it was a scroll through on social media that I saw this perspective. It was you get 18 summers. Isn't that scary? That ridiculous. And, you know, when I turned 16, 17 years old, the summers started to kinda move away from family summers to being friends summers. Yep. So you have less than eighteen summers. You have you have eighteen years to really make this incredible impact on your on your kids,
Keith Vance: and, that's such limited time. That's that's not even a quarter of their lifetime should they get to the hundred year. I had I had my pastor on this podcast, and he talked about quantity of time over quality of time. I heard that one. I like that one. I you know, we all think, hey, quality, like, we're gonna go do this thing. And he said, man, it's just the ride to the grocery store. It's just those small moments Mhmm. Where you're just dropping those little pennies in their piggy bank. You know what mean? Mhmm. Just investing in them. That that really helped me. And it's so true. Because over time, those little investments, small investments over a long period of time go farther than a big investment
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: rarely. Right? Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. Now and I think I think there's almost a I would I would actually disagree partially with the quality time versus quantity time perspective there that that it's better to have quantity time. Because if you have quantity time that's distracted, that's not intentional, it's not focused, doesn't matter how many times you show up if you're on your phone. True. When I coach gymnastics, would watch my athletes watch their parents out in the in the stands. Yeah. And often, I would see parents on their phone. Now they're working. Right? They still gotta work. It's 05:00. So, like, they still have their, you know, six to seven kind of emails they gotta answer. So I know they got jobs that have to get done, but that's a quantity time without the quality. So I don't think it's either or. I think it has to be both and. How can how can you make the tiny moments that you intentionally make a lot of also be
Keith Vance: moments of connection. Yeah. And I think you're right. It comes it goes down to intentionality. Mhmm. Yeah. So, man, that was good.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Are you done talking about where you are in life right now? Oh, I could talk. I could go on and on. We're in so many different places, but I know you wanna talk about athleticism and kinda what start what started off on all that. Are you ready to jump on that? Oh, yeah. It's a whole other topic we'll we'll keep diving down too. We got so many avenues we could go with. But as far as athleticism, like, my my parents, my dad was not necessarily an athlete growing up, but, he played outside enough and did enough crazy things that he knew how to have fun. He knew how to make athleticism fun. And I remember So you're how old are you? I'm 29 right now. You're 29. So your dad's mid to late sixties. Kyle Warren Mid to late fifties. Yeah. He's not quite 60 yet, I don't I don't think. No. He's late because I'm 50, and I'm I was born in '76. Michael, do that math. Yeah. Yeah. So that that because he's '67. So the because he was born in 1967. He was born in '67. So it's nine years more than you. He'd be 59. 59. Yep. Okay. So 59. And how old are you? 29. Yeah. Your dad's 30 years. That's right.
Keith Vance: So my dad my mom dad had me when I was 17. Oh, wow. So they're just they're just a few years. You know what I mean? They're the gap was a little closer. Mhmm. Mhmm. But that what I remember growing up with my peers is my parents were the the young fun ones. Because when I was Oh, yeah. When I was growing up, all my friends' kids were old. They're the ones sitting on the couch watching TV while we're playing. Meanwhile, my dad's on the floor wrestling with us. You know I mean? Like, there was that, and everybody just liked being at our house and Mhmm. Because my dad would, like, do stuff with us because he could. So I was just curious the age difference between you and your dad, but it was it kinda, like, goes against my point. Yeah. Yeah. So my and my like I said, my dad was intentional with with his with the time he spent with us.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And he he would play on the ground with us, and he loves hosting things and being, like, the life of the party. That was, like, something that he, and he he didn't want to be the center of attention life of the party. He wanted to create a party atmosphere to the state where everyone else could be elevated. Oh, wow. And so he would like, let's say, I had a friend coming over, and that friend loves, loves hunting or BB guns or Airsoft or something like that. He would create the environment where that could be, like, that could be shown. And so we'd have airsoft wars in our backyard all the time. We didn't have a back big backyard. It was it was bigger than some of my friends, but way smaller than some of the other ones. And, he would set these obstacles up for us to play around. He'd have zombie hunts in our backyard. We'd have manhunt nights. He'd, pretend to be a deer while we're shooting them and stuff like that. He would take the hits. It was it was incredible because no matter how tired he was at the end of the day, which he was exhausted
Keith Vance: every day. Doing a are you doing a difficult job? Every day.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: He always played. He always played with us. He was always he'd get cleaned up. He'd eat his dinner, and then he'd be with us, as attentive as he could be. I just had a memory. Yeah. So Sure. You got a good dad. Very much so. Spoiled.
Keith Vance: If he was working hard and then doing all this stuff, I just had a memory, brother.
Keith Vance: I work in construction, you know, framing. I my kids are little and come home tired. They want to spend time with me. We sat on the front porch, and, they're wanting to play and stuff. And, so we played two games. I had this marble. I found this marble. And you see my front yard. Yeah. Yeah. And there it is. Let's play find the marble. And I would whip that marble out in the front yard, and they'd be searching for that marble. I'm And sitting there, you know, like, You know what mean? Yep. Like, resting. Dad, I found it. We'll bring it back here. And then I found this big it wasn't like a dodgeball, but it was like that material, but it's bigger. Okay. And, I was like, alright. If you guys run and if I don't knock you down with this ball, you can stay up, you know, later. You know? There you go. Past your bedtime. And they would run. And it actually had a handle on Oh, that's what it was. It had a handle on it and you would, like, sit on a bounce. Oh, it was one of the the the bouncy balls. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I had that thing by the handle, dude. I could whip it. Yeah. You could. So they would I said, alright. Count on three run. They'd take a run over their little legs, and I'd whip that thing and, like How old were the kids at that time? Bro, they were little. They're like Between ages of three and targets at that point. Three and seven. Yep. You can catch them quick. I knocked that that balled down, bro, because I can't let them I can't let them not fall because then I gotta stay up spend a lot more time with them, and I wanna go to bed. That's right. So you had a good dad because I did stuff with my kids, but was, like, selfish intentions. Here, find this marble, buys you some time to rest. That marble was so small in that yard. Like, I found it, dad. That's right. So, anyway Yeah. Yeah. My my dad was he
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: really was an incredible dad. And, you know, what's what's interesting is as, you know, when you're young, you view your dad as, like, he can do no wrong. When you turn into a teenager, he only does wrong because you know best. Right? Because you're 13 and 14, and so you know how life works. And then when you get married and have kids, you realize, oh, snap. He was Right. He was pretty on par with with everything he should have been doing given the circumstances. Funny how that works. Yeah. So he had always so he had shown us how to be how to be active. Right? You're outside till the till the sun goes down till the streetlights come on. And this is in the early two thousands. So, like, that nineties lifestyle kind of assimilated into our lifestyle. And, we had some kids around the neighborhood who come over, play basketball until lights come on, then they all bolt home because it's the same rule. We're drinking from the hose outside, and, you just you play, you get cleaned up, you go to bed. And, my dad was always encouraging for us to do stuff like that.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I turned 14, and I said or no. I think I was 13 at the time. Going into high school, I'm like, you know what? I wanna get strong. I wanna get strong like those kids I see on TV, the the high schoolers that are actually 23 year old actors playing a 16 year old. Got it.
Keith Vance: Sleep by you're talking about sleep by the bell. Oh, okay. Yeah. That's one of the shows we'd watch. Right?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: But I I'd see that, and I'm like, I wanna get strong. I wanna get athletic. I wanna be in shape. I wanna do that stuff. So dad, can I have a gym membership? And he's like, yeah, you can, but you have you're gonna have to earn that. And I was like, what do you mean? He was like, well, in order for me to buy you the gym membership, which I will, I'll buy you the gym membership because I know it's gonna carry you for a long time. You have to show me that you have the discipline for it. And so what he had me do is for a month straight, was every day I had to do a 100 push ups, a hundreds or 200 squats, and 300 sit ups every day. Just and I'm young, I can bounce back from that workout and do dailies of that. And so I'd be outside every day after school doing my reps because I wanted that gym membership. To earn your gym membership. To earn my gym membership. And after he saw me doing it because he'd be out there after work and he'd come out, do yard work or whatever, he'd see me doing it. So he saw I built the discipline. When the time came, he paid for the gym membership flat out. And, and he showed me the math. He's like, alright. It's like $300 for a whole year. If you show up every day to this gym, it's $1 a day. And that $1 is gonna carry you for a long time. The discipline you get is gonna carry you. So he showed me that little math, and, I started going. I think the place was called Hardcore Fitness. It was over in Pinellas Park on 66th Street. They sold out to UFit, and now they're a UFC gym or something like that. Oh, wow. It was kinda interesting watching that turnover. But it was such a cool environment. That was my first exposure to
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: athletes, to strong guys. Like, I've never I had in the at that time of my life, I hadn't I'd never seen anyone stronger than my dad as far as, like, physically can move weight. And I'd watch these bouncers come in from, from whatever they're, you know, they're getting ready for their day or they're just bodybuilding or whatever it is, and they're, like, got four plates on bench just repping it. I'm like, how is that even possible?
Keith Vance: Oh. You know what's funny is a couple things. Yeah. One, our brain kinda, like, sets these limiters on what's possible Mhmm. Until you see somebody doing something, and then it, like, slowly unlocks. Mhmm. You follow me? So just being in an environment where there's four plates where your dad maybe could do two, like, four plates was impossible. Mhmm. Just being in an environment where people are pushing these boundaries, it's like it happens to me. I automatically set these parameters on myself. Like, this is you get it. You're you're good within here and here. Mhmm. Until you meet someone else that's past your boundary. Mhmm. Like, oh, okay. So I can go farther. Like, this and that's another thing about still strong at 50. I'm curious how far can you go with this thing. That's right. You know what mean? That's, like, kinda I kinda I'm kinda, like, looking forward to being what I'm seventy, eighty. Like, how far can you go? Yeah. I saw I saw a really crazy video. It a I think it was, a 92 year old who ran, like, I I think it was, like, a fifteen second 100 meter Wow. At 92.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I was like, cool. If I'm not doing that, I'll be embarrassed. Wow. Like, now that I know that that's possible Mhmm. You have to be able to pull something like that off.
Keith Vance: So when you were a kid in the gym, did people kind of did you have any mentors in the gym? Anybody kinda take you out of their wing that looking back, like, showed you how to lift properly?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Or I only ever had one guy come up to me, and, he was I was doing dead lifts, and he corrected my form there. But I didn't really have anyone approach me in the gym.
Keith Vance: You're just you were kinda self taught?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Yeah. So there was this, there's these guys on YouTube, buff dudes, and I just they had free plans. They were just starting the YouTube channel, and they were big guys. And so I was like, oh, let me just do what they do. They're big. They've done it. Let me just do what they say and see what happens. So I printed out their plan, and I just followed it to a t. And
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: and I got their they had a free diet plan, so I followed their their protein diet plan and their protein recipes. And I learned to cook that way. It's like, how can I fuel my exercise best? And I didn't learn advanced nutrition or anything like that. That's way later. But I learned the basics of how to start fitness as a kid. And then what kind of fueled me beyond that is, like, I would have older guys not mentor me, but just encourage me while I was in the gym. Like, dude, you're looking big today. And I'm like this scrawny 14 year old. I'm like, still, like, 100 and I think at that time I was I mean, I was tall, so I was probably, like at 14, I would be probably five eleven, almost six foot at that point. And I didn't put on the size, so I was skinny at that size. So when I was 13 or 14, my grandfather, he owned some duplexes
Keith Vance: Mhmm. In Fort Myers here. This fly is gonna kill me. I've been seeing that the whole time. Flying around this whole time when we just fly famous here. Once you just land on my phone. It has. Yeah. Because he stays there. Like, stay still fly. My grandfather, when I was, like, 13, 14, he owned these rental properties, and he had to evict someone. And one of the guys he evicted was this big old jacked black dude, like, big dude. And he left his stuff there. It was all weights, like, the old metal weights. Yeah. Yeah. And so my grandfather gave them to me. And I still remember those things. Like, I was so excited, man. Like, was it the good ones. Not the one not the plastic ones filled with concrete, but it was, like, the actual metal, like, real make the nice noise as you move around. Yeah. Yeah. So It says 45, but that thing is definitely 60 pounds. Yeah. So that was that was my introduction to wanting to get strong. Mhmm. And then, so I'd work out and stuff, not knowing what I was doing. And then, there was a guy that would come to our church. He was he was a Vietnam vet. He was a Green Beret. He was the chaplain at the local prison here, and, he was disciplined in his fitness. And he will he saw my weight sack. It was, like, a good one. You know what mean? It was a good one. So I think he just wanted to use my stuff. You know? They use this kid's stuff. But he taught me his name was Bob Whiteman. He taught me how to lift. And you'll come over. So you get this 40 year old guy come and hang out with this 13 year old kid in his bedroom and, like, lift him with me. That's awesome. I still remember that stuff. You know what mean? Like so Yeah. Those mentors who come alongside you and bring you to the next level. Show me how to do it right, how many reps you supposed to do. I remember doing 20 ones with them, the curls 21 with them, and, just arms on fire, but not want not wanting to disappoint him. Mhmm. Mhmm. You know what I mean? So, anyway, I was just talking to you. I'm having my own memories those flashbacks. That I had forgotten about, those things that kinda shape us and make us without even know you're being shaped or that or that how important that was back then that you're still using now. Like, those little seeds that are planted without even realizing that they're of value. Yeah. You know? So it's thank you for, like, helping me remember these things.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Yeah. Yeah. So from from there, it's just it was and then what is nice is I ended up because I I trained under the that same program for quite some time, and then I was started playing basketball around that age too. I played in middle school a couple times, but, like, church leagues and stuff. I wanted to be on a basketball team. And, I don't know if you know much about high school basketball, but if you're six foot three, you're a center. K. Because everyone else is five nine in high school, unless you're at, like, the top schools. So you're six foot three, a center playing against six foot nine guys who are going to college. Got it. So you only have one option. That's be strong, like, real strong. And so it was it was get strong, get athletic for that purpose. So I can grab a rebound, box a 220 16 year old out to the three point line so we can't grab his rebound, his twentieth rebound of the night.
Keith Vance: I got a nephew. He plays basketball. He's big for his age, and my my brother is his coach over at the school. But it's funny because he plays at center position. And my I hear my my brother is a kid hasn't grown into his body yet. He's big, but he doesn't know how to use it. Kinda clunky. Tells him, get big and get strong. Mhmm. So that center position
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: is what you're talking about. You're you're That's right. You're you're be strong, get big, take up to some floor space. That's what you gotta do. So That's what you gotta do. So it was get strong. That was the only option I had. And so I would lift with the bigger guys and lift some of the football players and try to get strong so I could do that. And, what happened is as I learned how to do as I learned how to get strong, I had to then, like you said, learn how to get coordinated, get skilled with how my strength came. Mhmm. Because I didn't wanna I didn't wanna hurt people. I wanted to be controlled with it. I couldn't fall out of the game. I needed to be there. So I learned how to learn the athletic steps, how to be explosive, how to be quick, how to use the muscle that I put on and make it fast. And that's a whole different kind of training. Speed training, athletic, true athletic training is a whole different kind of thing, not bodybuilding style. It's not ISO ISO isolated work. It's a lot of full body coordination, use your body well kind of stuff. So I learned that avenue. And then this that's about when things started to become self taught. It's like, okay. I knew what bodybuilding was. I knew what athletic was. Well, what happens is a lot of times is people who are inexperienced get injured on that transition. Yes. You get stiff from bodybuilding. You're not mobile. So then you get injured while learning to be an athlete. Or you think because you're strong and can squat 300 pounds or whatever, you can jump to the same kind of force, but the force vectors don't don't align like that. So to save myself, I was learning more of the rehab kind of stuff. This is, like, 17, 18 years old. Wow. Learning how to rehab my body. I had been seeing chiropractors for a long time, and so that helped a bit. Their perspective helped me stay kind of holistic and full body knowledge. It was around that time that I'd started taking dance classes. Learning how to dance, how to move my body in that way. And then at that time, I met some people who invited me to ultimate Frisbee. What kind of dance? It was all kinds. It was like hip hop. I had had a history of jazz and ballet from elementary school, but this one was like hip hop, West Coast swing, little bit East Coast swing, partner dancing, some stuff like that. I I I would imagine it came pretty natural to you. Because I had had the history of it, my, like, child brain kinda just reinvigorated. But I was way clunkier. So, like, it's really funny. I have a bunch of people who are, like, really smooth in their movements and then this, like, bodybuilder kinda dude, like, really choppy and awkward.
Keith Vance: The reason why I asked is Yeah. We had a a woman, Adele Smith, on the podcast. Oh, yeah. She's a ballroom dancer in her eighties. And, I heard I read a study about dancing, how it's good for the brain and, like, in regard to like, there's some kind of state in regard to, like, Alzheimer's and, dementia Mhmm. That that listening to music and moving the body to music does something to the brain, like, creating these these new tributaries in the brain. Mhmm. Like, the worst thing for the brain is routine, driving the same place every day, the same job, eating the same, like like, routine. So you gotta create these new tributaries for the brain as you age. So I, start taking some dance classes with my wife. There you go. She's a cheerleader. Bro, she's she can move her body. I don't know how she does it. She's just just listen to music. I'm trying to listen to music, but I ain't hearing I don't hear what you're hearing. My feet don't listen to the music. They don't have ears on their own. Bro, so I'm counting. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm and she's just laughing at me. Is this ballroom you guys are doing? Is this ballroom dancing? Different castles. It was all different kinds of stuff. It was all it's it's all different kinds. So I'm I'm accounting, and, bro, my my brain is literally sweating trying to do something that's come so natural to her. Mhmm. Mhmm. So that was really difficult for me, man. I would come out just, like, like, fatigued. So Yeah. Because you're you're mentally exhausted and physically exhausted, and then those things kinda, like, blend together and you just crash the body. Crazy. Yeah. So I do hard things. Mhmm. I was boxing at the time that came boxing came more natural than than the dancing. Than the dancing. I had to really focus. And she was like I'm, like, looking at her. She just, like, laughing because I'm concentrating so hard. The most intense stare of love to your to your dancing partner there. So that's funny. Yeah. Yeah. So it was So you're you're you're very well rounded with your
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: athleticism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and kinda how it kept gravitating. I just kept learning new new disciplines of fitness. I met a cool family around that time who, they they started this, like, ultimate Frisbee Sunday discipleship thing. And so I would attend there, and I'd meet the whole family, and we play ultimate Frisbee. And so that was a nice transition from and that was this is after high school, so I graduated at this point. Doing the dancing, doing ultimate Frisbee with them. They invite me out to do some Ninja Warrior stuff for the first time. And I was like, sure. I can do a pull up, I should be able to have fun with this.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And we've gone rock climbing a couple of times with them, so they invited me to this ninja thing, and we have a great time. I do the salmon ladder. I do the warped wall. I do some lache stuff, do some swings. Had a great time. And so I grew really close to them. And we're doing ninja and we're doing rock climbing and we're doing, they actually, the the son, he told me about a gymnastics gym that was open or that was hiring. He was gonna get a job at it. And I was like, I was sick. Let's go do that. And so I got the gymnastics coaching position there, and then learned how to use my body through gymnastics, learned how to coach everything from five up to five year olds. I think my youngest actually was four. Crazy kid. That kid was so talented. But from, like, four years old up to, like, my oldest, I think, was 72 years old Wow. Who was getting back into gymnastics after a long time. But you learn rhythm there. You take your dance history. You learn how the rhythm goes from playing basketball. I did learn the rhythm of a dribble and how to do if you dribble the exact same way every time, the defender can take the ball because it's a good defender can read that rhythm. So you have to be unpredictable in your rhythm as a ball handler. And so I learned a little bit of that after high school when I was able to play pickup and stuff around the area. So I learned the rhythm there, translated it around, just kept finding the ways to take different avenues of fitness and make them analogous to each other. Understood. How can we blend all of these thought processes? And then what's the nervous system doing to that to create adaptability? How can we use the brain to rehab the body, the body to rehab the brain? How can we kinda blend all these ideas that I've been consuming?
Keith Vance: And how old are you when you're having these thoughts? So this is
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: that's 19 to 21 is my my thinking through that. Those are some scientific thoughts for a 19 year old kid. Yeah. I was having a I was like, my my dad kept saying when I was a kid was, like, you're you're gonna be for something else. Yeah. And I think that's when god started really putting it on my heart. It's like, it's gonna be that kind of a thing. Mhmm. And I was I was pursuing so when I was in, like, sixth grade, I was sitting in the doctor's office. This is this is kinda where all of this is, like, why it blended. It jumps all the way from there to from sixth grade up to 20 years old. I was sitting in the doctor's office about to go home sick from school for whatever reason, and, and I was like, you know what I need to be? I told the front desk that. I was like, you know what I need to be? I need to be a doctor. And the front desk is like, what? I go, well, my mom is taking care of me, getting me from school. I should be able to take care of them in the future. I have to be a doctor. And that was just the thought. That's where it was planted. That's where that drive got put on me. And, kind of investigated what kinds of doctors were out there over from that age of 19 to 21, and I was pursuing optometry, actually. And I don't know I don't know how familiar you are with, like, the structures of the eye, but I got pretty obsessed with it over that period of time because, Charles Darwin, one of his statements was along the lines of the the eye is one of his biggest doubts to his theory of evolution because of how complex it is. Right? Light comes in through a hole in the eye that's covered, focuses through a lens, projects on the backside of the eye, and then these rods and cones make sense Mhmm. Of an image that is inverted Right. With color, with brightness, transmits that to the brain, the brain flips it so you can see what's going on. Right. And then that visual information tells your body what to do in the space you're in. Right. So it changes the way your ears and inner ear reacts to coordination. It changes the way your legs are gonna react, your arms are gonna react. There's, like, these deep connections neurologically from the eyes, and I was like, oh, snap. I should do that. That's super cool. Shadowing opportunities never worked out. So the doctors I was trying to talk to and get communication with never worked out. And so I was talking to my chiropractor at the time, and he invited me to shadow him. And so I was having these neurologic thoughts. I was having these, like, I gotta figure out how the body works really well. He invited me to shadow him, and that's that's kinda where that chiropractic kicked off was that moment of shift of, like, here's the doctor I wanna become. It's something like that.
Keith Vance: That's how life works. Mhmm. So you're built for I I believe everybody's built for a purpose. Everybody's built for something specific.
Keith Vance: And then when you you get kinda, like, tuned up to what I think I think this is what I'm meant to do, and then to have somebody that you're not pursuing or some random person or thing just fall into your lap and it takes it in that direction, it kinda solidifies that, yeah, this is what when you look back at your life and you have these goals or thoughts or ideas or your you know, these dreams, and then as you're having these dreams or, you know, thoughts about what you wanna pursue to just have random people come in, just throw a little bit gasoline on that or mentor you. That's right. It's interesting how that works and that it kinda, like, as you
Keith Vance: continue down that track in life, when it gets hard and you doubt, am I doing the right thing? You can look back and say, no. I am in the right place because of this that wasn't that was out of my hands because of this because of this influence, all things that
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I wasn't controlling. They start to retrospectively see all the doors open. Right. Like, that open door led to this open door. It had to be this way. Yeah. Yeah. So seizing all those opportunities as they present themselves, like, when ninja presented itself, went that avenue, learned that avenue of fitness. When doctor presented itself, you just pursue that.
Keith Vance: Let's take a break. I'm gonna kill this fly. And then I'd like to talk about in the field of fitness, like, the different energy systems and that type of stuff. So you talked about the bodybuilding thing, the Mhmm. And then you talked about moving heavyweight quick. Yep. Can you speak to how muscles work, like fast twitch muscles, like the different muscle like, how the the body works? Yeah. Yeah. And then, from there, we'll move on to something else. I like it. Let's do it. This part of the podcast is brought to you by Boots and Bubbles. This is a special one for me, man. It's my two girls, 15 and 17. Boots and Bubbles specialize in southern style dirty sodas, an alternative to your regular boring soda. If you're in the Lee County area and you wanna book them for an event, find the link in the bio. In the meantime, let's get back to the show. Alright, brother. We're back from the break. I don't know if this fly's gone or not, but I don't see him. We left the door open for a little bit to see if it would get out. He is annoying me. So with your expertise, let's just talk about because I I love this kind of talk, and I Yeah. I'm I, like, barely scratched the surface with my knowledge of it, but different type of energy systems. So when you're lifting, no, like you mentioned bodybuilding. You know, there's there's a way they lift where it's it's it's slow movements that ecocentric ecos Eccentric? Eccentric. Is the downward. Yep. And then I'm I'm working with a guy twice a week. It's Vadim. He's an Olympic weight lifter. Wow. And that's moving heavyweight quick. Mhmm. And he's also working on my flexibility with that. Good deal. Had a girl in here, Angie. She's a power lifter that's moving heavy weight, bro, slow and controlled. And, when I was doing, like, that heavy lift, slow, like, heavy squat,
Keith Vance: something happened in me emotionally. Like, all the weight of life, like, came on. I would either get mad or I would break down crying. I remember when this happened with my wife. I had her work out with me for a while, and I wanna test something on her. I had her doing some heavy dead lifts. Mhmm. And she just had a mental break. Not a mental breakdown, just an emotional breakdown. Wow. Because she's the rock of this family. Everybody goes to her, and I felt like she didn't she had no outlet. She had no hobby. So I just say, Just come on. Wanna test something. And she's like, she's she's grunting, she's they tend to get back on the bar. And before it's over with, she just had all these emotions in the one. She's crying. She's frustrated. So there is a Wow. There is a thing that happens when we're the body's under heavy stress, under heavy load. Mhmm. Moving heavy weight quickly, that's a different system. Can you just speak to this on a scientific and, like, a level from a doctor to help me understand the importance of each one of those energy systems? Yeah. Like, all of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you that's where the we go through a,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: cliff notes version of an exercise science full program. Right? Get everyone a honorary doctorate before before we're done here. So a lot of the work that I do is is is brain driven, brain based, and neurologically kind of framed. Right? So the way the body works from its root at the very beginning as soon as conception happens is the neuro the neural tissue starts to form. That neural tissue guides development. Right? So the first thing to happen is those cells can, converge and fall into the neural tube. Notochord is how it initially starts, begins the nervous system. That nervous system, the electricity in there starts to direct what the other cells in that little, embryo divide, how they go, what genes get activated. So from day one, minute one, all of the nervous system is what's guiding the developmental process. What ends up happening is as you get to athletic age, you're starting to use your body. Right? And I and when I say athletic age, I mean, soon as you're out of the womb and need to take that first big breath, your brain has to tell you, I'm not breathing amniotic fluid anymore. I'm not getting oxygen from an umbilical cord anymore. It's out here, this gas I have to sort through. Wow. So the brain has to perceive that. Soon as the brain perceives that, then it says, okay. Now I need to find mom. So it starts to root. We start to get those primitive reflexes. Nervous system is guiding all of these little stages and steps. When we get to actually training, actually getting into athletics, we have to think about the energy systems from the neurologic perspective because the only reason why we can do a squat, why we can bench anything, why we can deadlift anything, why we can jump is because the brain perceives the task at hand, equips the rest of the body to accomplish that task, and adapts in real time during the task to lead to the output. So take a squat. Emotional breakdown of a squat right there. All motion in the body can be tied into the limbic system, emotional centers of the brain. When I say motion of the body, it's it's this concept called proprioception. How well the body perceives itself. Right? If I close my eyes, lift my hand up, I know my hand is up because my arm is reporting to my brain what I'm supposed to do. Well, during a squat, you get under that bar, you throw it on your shoulders, find that right spot, that's not a bother. Right? High bar, low bar, mid bar, whatever it is. You lift that weight up. Your brain has to register. Is this weight gonna kill me, or can I handle this? If you're swatting an okay weight, it's going to be closer to that this is gonna kill me thing, which means your body kicks into its fight or flight state a bit heavier so it can stabilize what needs to get stabilized. It can kick the heart rate into higher gear. It can get the respiration to what it needs to do so you can get the right oxygen to the right muscles, to the right stabilizers, and then that squat commences. And every change in angle of joint angle, your ankle joint compresses, your knee joint compresses, your hip joint compresses, all of those have little stabilizers that are also reporting to the brain. Those little reports are telling the brain, as we hit this angle, I need you to recruit this muscle this much, this joint this much, change this receptor this much. We make our way through the squat. We get to the bottom. We tell the the brain tells, okay. I wanna go up now. So it shifts the quads from a stretching motion into a contractile motion so that the muscle spindle starts to come together, ratchets together, and contracts that way. The glute muscle starts to contract. The calf starts to contract. All because of the proprioceptive feedback to the brain. And then we stand back up. So and that's we work our way up. Okay? So when it comes to the energy systems in the body, we gotta frame it neurologically. We don't make movement without the nervous system telling us to do x y z movement. When it comes to the types of, like, anaerobic versus aerobic exercise, again, that's a nervous system feedback loop. We have to do it fast, and we don't need, a slow burn energy. We gotta use a real quick release of ATP. That's our anaerobic without oxygen kind of metabolite.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And then if we wanna do something for a longer term, a longer run, a 20 mile run, a a marathon, 50 reps of of a squat, we require that aerobic exercise. And so or the aerobic system where we supply the blood with more oxygen to accomplish the task. And so it recruits different muscle fibers a different way because they have different neurologic feedback. The body doesn't like to use aerobic with oxygen for an anaerobic movement, and the body doesn't like to use an anaerobic system for an aerobic function. So the brain shifts back and forth between all of these things. So we look at different types of fitness. And what's nice is the the kind of the the the dream is that everyone on earth can work out to their max capacity. And what they have to do is different. Right? Some people like Pilates. People like weightlifting. Some people like kettlebells. Some people like barbells. Some people like athletic training exclusively. Some are just calisthenics. Some are just yoga. You know, whatever it is. But the idea, the hope, especially from a doctor perspective, is that every person can use their body the way they were designed and push their limits to it. And so what happens often in the fitness space is people will try to get nitty gritty. Like, how can we optimize and bioengineer, like, the perfect conditions for a squad, the perfect conditions for a max lift? But it doesn't really work that way. We you can't necessarily exploit systems. You can get that, like, extra couple things there, but the average person doesn't need to do that. The Olympic lifter, we have to get those extra needle moves to achieve it. But the average person to just stay in shape, to just retain their health overall over the long run simply needs to follow a couple simple guidelines, which is pick something you're gonna continue to do and then challenge yourself in that each time. And if that challenge is going for ten seconds longer than you did the day before Understood. Lifting one pound more than it was the week before, Those little things that'll equip it, and that equips the brain to start adapting heavier over over time. Understood. I know it's a lot to unpack there, but
Keith Vance: No. Like, when you get when you get into the upper range of, like, your abilities, like, say, we we talk squat. Mhmm. When you get up on the upper range and you've maybe this weight, you've done it once. So you got that you have that sense of, okay. I've done it once under your belt to give you some confidence. Mhmm. But you still gotta get your mind right. Mhmm. And, that's what I found. Like, when I'm going for my what I what I think is my maximum,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: and I I I don't know if my maximum is limited by my muscles or if it's limited by self doubt. Mhmm. I don't know. I'm, like, up in the air. So what often happens and you hear stories about this is, like, a a mom whose kid's trapped under a car. She lifts the car. Yeah. She definitely did not deadlift a thousand pounds last week. Right? She didn't train for that. So why is it that something can kick into a high gear? That's the question. Right? How can we use that understanding to achieve more levels of athletic development? And that right there is this, people heard about it, the sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system, probably. You go. The ability to get into a fight or flight state Yes. And the times that we need that versus the times we don't. So for for anyone who doesn't understand that split, we can just kinda break it down in a few few moments here. We have we have two sides of the nervous system, the somatic conscious control or the autonomic unconscious control. Autonomic subdivides again. We look at this, like, tree of breakdown. Autonomic goes into sympathetic and parasympathetic. Auto, meaning we don't control that autonomic part of the body. Sympathetic and parasympathetic. Sympathetic is our fight or flight response, our gas pedal, the one that helps us go really hard. This is the one where if we have a job interview or we have a performance review or if we have an athletic event, it's the one that kicks our heart rate to high gear. It's the one that increases our respiration, the one that helps cool us down so our body doesn't overheat. It's the one that you feel that stress response. That's the that's the fight or flight, which is good when you need to be ready for a stressful situation. Right? If you're gonna squat a thousand pounds, better have that sympathetic firing. Then there's the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest. It's the reason why after the heavy lift, our body can recover to a calmer state, and we don't go from what you remember you're saying, It's like it it you feel the the anger or the emotion during the lift, then afterwards, it kinda brings it down a bit. The parasympathetic is that brake pedal. Mhmm. It calms it down. That's the rest and digest. And that's the reason why we go from lifting or if anyone, you know, anyone who's done a long run knows you're not really gonna go to the bathroom during the long run. Right. That's a parasympathetic function. During the run, you need your sympathetics firing, so you're not gonna go to the bathroom. You don't need a break. You're running from a tiger. You don't need to stop. You need to survive. Parasympathetics brings it down. In the parasympathetics, that's when we can get our recovery. And so when we have the limiters to our body's potential, it's really a question of how adaptable is the nervous system both ways. And if we can visualize kind of a meter like a line a line graph, dead center is perfectly balanced between sympathetic and parasympathetic. Many people operate favoring the sympathetic because life is stressful. Their job is stressful. Supplying a family is stressful. Don't know where groceries are coming from. Don't know where gas is coming from. People are stressed out so often. And so when they try to go to the gym to get that extra capacity, they're already almost crashed. Understood. And so it's a lot harder to kick into that next year because you're already in the next year. Wow. So if if people are in that boat, they can they we can work to increase the parasympathetic side. Not so you're always relaxed and crashed all the time, but so that way you have the most capacity to kick into a high gear. Understood. Does that make make sense? It does make sense. Yeah. So, it's like you have the lever. If the lever's almost already pulled, you can't really do too much. But if the lever is all the way, you've got the most room to work with. So a lot of times, people's people's potential is limited not by their actual strength capacity, not by their muscles firing. It's limited by the nervous system's ability to understand what the task is. Understood. Yeah. And so it's it is it's a self limiting, not even belief. It's like physiological self limiting, which is a really it's that's a tougher thing to overcome only because there's not a lot of teaching
Keith Vance: that direction. Understood. Yeah. That lever thing helped me helped me understand that. Because if you're if you're already stressed out, you can only go this much farther. That's right. But if you're chill
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Correct. You can go. Correct. It's like the it's like the dad, it's like the dad who's always chill or the mom. Mom's better. The mom who's always calm. Like, my wife is the most levelheaded individual ever. Like, I'm a bit more up and down than she is. She is so levelheaded so much of the time that when when she blows up, it's a much bigger explosion because, like, she's got more potential for it. It's been building up for the longest time. Got it. And so we all kinda quiet down. We're like, yes. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Because she has the potential, but she gets to be in that more restful state. Understood. Yeah. Yeah. So in building athleticism, a huge huge step for for those trying to get into it or trying to trying to optimize where they're at and trying to push their limits. One, like we talked about, you know, you don't know what's possible. If you don't know what's possible, then you're never gonna be able to keep striving for it. Mhmm. But that self limiting belief and then self limiting physiology is what get seems to get in people's way Understood. Of achieving it. That that helps me. Yeah. And that actually applies to to, like, pain syndromes. Right? Talking clinician stuff. If someone this is something fascinating about pain science is when when someone gets an injury, their brain records that injury and does things to protect the body from getting that injury again. And so people who develop a limp, if they just continue to lean into the limp over and over, the brain accepts that's reality. I don't I can't change that, which means you're now you're trying to at the moment when you're trying to heal from that, like, oh, I have a bad knee. Oh, I have a bad elbow. The more you reinforce that, the more the brain believes I can't achieve x because of the limiter. So if I've got a bad knee, I can't achieve this because of my bad knee. So it limits the potential for training. But if we know that all pain syndromes are mapped in the brain as memories, we can, start to lean into some of those pain syndromes a bit and start to rehab the body saying, like, this range of motion is safe now. Someone broke their arm, someone breaks their elbow, they're limited on how well their elbow can move for six to twelve weeks while the cast is sitting there healing. When they get out of the cast, the first thing they gotta do is go to PT so they can start to trust their range of motion again. And the brain will trust. I can go a little bit further. I can go a little further. Once the brain trusts those pain syndromes or trusts the joint to handle the load, it can start to heal. And so we have to, as athletes, do the recovery portion to build the trust in the brain. Right? Your your trainer's got you doing stretching and stuff like that. Yeah. Because it has to trust that you can move in those ranges of motion. Otherwise, it'll send it into that that fight or flight and crash your system before you get to the lift.
Keith Vance: I'm glad you brought that up because,
Keith Vance: I had him on the podcast, and we were gonna mess around and, like, do some Olympic weightlifting, which I've never done before. This is, average Joe versus, you know, a true Olympian. Oh, yeah. I remember that one. And Yeah. We were warming up and he noticed there's no way I'm gonna be able to do a snatch in the warm up. He he just knew it. Mhmm. And he's like, what's going on with his shoulder? I was like, well, I broke his collarbone as a kid. I said, I just it just whatever. I said, I've been trying to work on it. And, so I had an MRI done, and I got some, like, little bone fragment things in the front. Yep. I have my scapula is kinda, like, locked up, and I got moderate to severe arthritis in my shoulder.
Keith Vance: But the hardest thing I do with him when we when we train together is stretching everything out. Dude, I cold plunge used to be the hardest thing. Like, it never gets easy. Like, you get anxiety every time. So there's a bit kick into high gear there. Now getting ready to do in the bottom position in the bottom position,
Keith Vance: snatch grip behind the head, pulling that down, stretching it out. When he says, hey. You're gonna do eight eight reps of four sets. That gives me anxiety. Mhmm. Because it's so much pain stretching that out. And but my the body's been adapting to it. I thought I I I was I afraid to tell him I can't do this. Sure. I was afraid to tell him no, so I'm just, like, doing it. And, now I can actually after the first set is still stiff, but after the second set is loop lubricated. Mhmm. The body's like, okay. You've done this before. It remembers You built trust. It built trust. Trust. And I I okay. I know I can go this far now. Mhmm. So it's just funny how I thought, again, we talked about that voice and you had that weak voice. Mhmm. Okay. Well, you're 50. You have arthritis. You don't have to do this now. I was trying to talk myself out of not doing that one exercise because it's so painful. He makes me do it,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: and it's it's getting better. Yeah. Even with freaking arthritis, it's getting it's getting better. Well, it's it's wildest. Arthritis is always taught here. It's bone on bone. Like, it's this demon that exists inside of your spine or inside of your joints or something like that. And there's there's too much there's too much literature about arthritis not being the cause of pain syndromes. It can cause some, but it cannot cause the amount that it's blamed for. And so you hear, like, your knee is bone on bone. Your shoulder is bone on bone. Your spine is bone on bone. It's over. You're done. The only thing you have is surgery and sitting for the rest of your life. And it's just physiologically, that's not true. You can't necessarily remove a bone spur, which is what arthritis ends up progressing towards is these osteophytes, which are bony growths to add extra kinda concrete to support that area. But it doesn't lead to pain syndromes often enough to actually warrant the fear that's around it. And I think that's and that's a that's a bit of a sensitive spot, for me in the work that I do because the amount of patients that I have who I take images on and they've got arthritis and they're like, oh, yeah. That's what's causing all of my problems. I'm like, it's just it's just not. Wow. It just doesn't there's no correlation clinically to those things. Unless we're having it touch the nerve that comes out of your spine or unless it's poking on a soft tissue because it's grown that far, it doesn't really work that way. Not often enough to say definitively every time. Like like I said, rarely. It does happen, just not nearly as common. And so what will happen more often, especially in the case of shoulder injuries with a fracture
Keith Vance: Oh, I tore my labrum too. You tore your legs. Yeah. I didn't want it's adding more to it. It's an old injury. I tore my I'm just remembering. I tore I tore my labrum also. Holy cow. And I my I got bicep ten to 90. It it's it's jacked up. Yeah. Yeah. And so what happens? You know, what came first? Did the clavicle come first? I don't remember because I've just it just It's kinda what probably because when I was 15, this this dude, Michael Selby. God bless you, Michael Selby. Calling him out completely. Freaking sumo, like belly to belly sumo at school.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Man. And after it collapsed like that, and then he knocked the wind down on me. That that was probably the that was probably what it did. So so what happens is the clavicle so you have the clavicle, the scapula, and the and the humerus. They all work together for the shoulder girdle. It's this whole region that has to work together. So when I bring my arm in, my clavicle should collapse. Mhmm. When I bring my arm out, my scapula should move. My clavicle should go with it. It's this whole thing that should work together. Well, what happens often is is we injure one of those spots. Yours was a fracture. Well, to protect the body, the body has this fascial lining. We have the skin. We have the muscle. Between those two is this fascia. Right. This fascia is an electrical signal. It's lubrication. It allows the body to move much smoother. Well, to help with the protection, the body registers where the injury is and then takes that fascia, which is usually in a nice orient orientation.
Keith Vance: Not mine. And it well, no. Because you got it hurt, it tangles it. Yeah. Mine To stabilize. Mine's a knot underneath my collarbone. It's a it's a knotted mess.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And so what what what happens is the clavicle's biomechanics are lower. So the body has to do something because you still have to use that shoulder. So it says, alright. I'm gonna move this area a bit more. I'm gonna change this biomechanic. I'm gonna do that. But, eventually, the body breaks down over enough time. And that's why when that's my suspicion is just off of this first, off the cuff, when, when the guy you were training with says, Bring your shoulder into this position. It's taking all that fascia which had mangled here, and it starts to move it into more of that position. And then over time, more of that position, and eventually, it gets into that nice line Wow. Where it can handle that load. And if you train it in not just this direction, but that direction Mhmm. And then this direction, now can handle all of those directions. And so, the the body those those book, Body Keeps the Score. Right? You get those injuries. Right. The brain maps it and says, I have to protect it, but I still have to live So it works its way down. Figures it out. Yeah. And then it lays down the arthritis, the concrete to help stabilize further. And then that's about when symptoms start showing up to a pretty extensive level. You'll go see a doctor. Doctor will say it's bone on bone. You're done. And they'll just kinda write it off and, like, only surgery is the option. Or sometimes you'll have a nice hopeful doctor who says, alright. Do some PT.
Keith Vance: I And I felt so satisfying to give a deem the MRI imaging
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Mhmm. And the list of everything he had because it was, like, two pages of all this stuff. And I'm thinking, okay. This is not me saying I can't do this anymore. This is the doctor saying I can't this saying it. And he, like, looked at it, like, oh, that's cool. I put it down. He's and he made me keep going. That's right. That's right. And the amount of times I see that, like, it is it is uncanny. The amount of times I'll see someone who who has been who who believes what the doctor said, which is which is awesome. You wanna have a good doctor that you can trust who has your best interest at heart, but there's these two frameworks that I see common in the medical system and the holistic system, and it depends on where what's the end goal for the what's what's I guess, what's the what's the perspective on the nature of health? I think that's where a lot of these issues and this this kind of dichotomies come from. K. Is the nature of health that we're built for dysfunction, or is the nature of health that we're actually built to heal? And and it is my perspective. It is a lot of holistic, practitioners' perspectives that we are built for health. Yes. If we look go all the way back to Garden of Eden, we're designed for optimized health designed for health because we were in intentionally, Adam was supposed to be able to worship God in the Garden of Eden forever. Right. Till sin enters the world, and that completely degrades. After the flood, we get the the with the hundred and twenty year limiter or whatever it is that that we've we've I've heard about. So it's we're designed to heal. When I get a cut when I get a cut, I don't have to think about it. It does close-up, and it does heal. Not because of the Band Aid I put over it, not because of the neosporin I used to kill the bacteria. It's because it's healing. The body's designed to figure out every way to still retain function. If we were made more towards the law of entropy, the thermodynamic breakdown K. Then we would notice people much more often just getting decimated, just like their body breaking down at a much faster rate rather than trying to recover ever. Understood. So the brain's trying to keep us going. And then natural cell death happens, but we're supposed to but we are always striving for how it can retain the top health given the mechanical limitations. Then we've got some DNA activation in there where we have every cell has DNA in it. That DNA has little ends called telomeres. Those telomeres, as cells divide, they break down slowly. So it leans more toward that, but it only breaks down when there's enough oxidative stress. And that's and anything stressful in life can cause oxidative stress, but it's still the body still tries to figure out how to heal in spite of that system. So when a practitioner is is is seeing a pathology, seeing a problem,
Keith Vance: is their perspective that you're designed to be healthy, or is their perspective that that you're designed to be falling apart? Understood. And if their perspective is that you're supposed to be falling apart, right, they write you off at 50 years old. They're like, yeah. You're, you're done. You're supposed to be breaking down now. That's that's a miscommunication,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: and that destroys hope because you should be having at least seven you should be at least fifty more years of awesome health, having a great time. Then you then you fall asleep and go see God. Thanks for bringing that point up. Yeah. Because as you were saying that, I'm just
Keith Vance: scenario after scenario. Oh, yeah. You're 50 now. Yeah. You're 60 now. That's your yep. And that almost gives you the script to That's right. Stop. Yep. Almost give you the script to, okay. Well, that's it. Thank you for that. Hey. We almost I know where I'm going with this now. Yeah. Yeah. I know where we're going with this now, but we're almost there, from this transition. I wanna make that jump into holistic chiropractor. Yeah. Yeah. Because we're it's it's it seems to be like a smooth transition right now with where we're at in our conversation. When I called you the other day,
Keith Vance: when I was a kid, chiropractory was, like, a fake doctor. It had that stigma of, oh, that's for doctors who can't become real doctors or something like that. I just remember I don't know where I got that from. When I was a kid, there was that that stigma. Sure. And you said it was a like a real thing. So can we talk and we've already talked about energy systems and how certain things work, but can we talk about it from your field of view, what you do, how the body works in at another level that we haven't talked about, and just spend some time in that
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: in the this chapter of of the podcast. Absolutely. So I think we we were talking about how yeah. Like, the the stigma that comes with chiropractic is like, oh, I went to go see a chiropractor. Oh, you went to go see a chiropractor. I hear that they're really bad for you. It was interesting. There was, it was like Chester Wilk versus the AMA back in the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties, that there was a huge antitrust lawsuit of the AMA, American Medical Association, trying to defame chiropractors. And it didn't stick. They ended up winning the lawsuit, ended up being this whole thing. But the the repercussions of that were that medical doctors and, physical therapists and osteopaths were, like, poisoned their minds as far as what chiropractic does and what it is and, that it's practicing medicine. And I at least the the circles that I'm a part of, we don't claim to practice medicine at all. In fact, the philosophy of it is more commonly touted that we, as chiropractors, find the areas where the brain can't perceive the body well and improve that perception, allowing the body to heal as naturally as possible. Now some some chiropractors, because of things that have happened in our clinics, we we have a tendency to, claim we can solve more problems, like, that we can do it all from just chiropractic because we've seen some incredible miracle cases. I'd love to share some of those. We have some some incredible things that are unexplained from other perspectives.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: But this, like, this health care field ended up getting kind of, like, poisoned towards what chiropractic really is, what it really does, how it affects the body, how it affects the brain. What's really nice is that as we enter into 2020 and 2026 and going into the twenty thirties, there are more practitioners out there right now who understand what chiropractic is and does that the entire narrative is shifting. We have enough new doctors in the medical field who've been around a chiropractic holistic space that generally the perspective of chiropractors is is moving more towards the favorable side within the things that we help. So I can testify that just in my own
Keith Vance: small world and my own, relationships that I have. Again, I don't know how old I was. I'm 20 years old, maybe. So thirty years ago,
Keith Vance: a friend of ours, had a baby. And she took her baby to the chiropractor, like, the first week. And that was, like, so weird and, like, what's like, what kind of voodoo is this? Gotcha. But my daughter Lily just had her nine month old son. Yeah. And he goes to a chiropractor regularly and gets his little adjustments, and it's just it's it's like a normal thing. So in the in the thirty years, the perception and where we're at now,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I think, testifies to what you were Yeah. Just just speaking of. Yeah. There was a really cool, research study kind of, like, evaluating the perception of chiropractic in the field just to see, like, alright. What what do people think about the field of chiropractic? And there was a direct, correlation between the way the the the amount that someone knows about chiropractic, the more favorably they on they, view it. This is applied to, practitioners across the across the nation. So the the better a physical therapist understands what a chiropractor does, the more favorably they view chiropractic. The better an osteopath, the better they view it. The more a neurologist understands it, the better they view it, which is great because we we're all all of us practitioners despite the the the viewpoints that kind of we all hold as far as what helps the body and what doesn't, we all have the same exact goal, which is get that person healthy, whatever it takes. And we have different avenues to make that happen, but we're trying to figure out what's the root of the problem and can we affect it? Can we help that person? Since we're all in that same team, right, then the then any, arguments are simply person to person instead of
Keith Vance: goal to goal. I think we're the people that I associate with,
Keith Vance: we wanna try to figure out, for instance, my shoulder. Mhmm. Can I can I get this healed without getting cut on? And I wanna go that route first. Absolutely. And I think most people that I talked to, they're were were before years ago as, oh, you alright. You need surgery, and that's what you do. But now it's like, can I are there some exercises I can do to open some things up? Are there some things that I can do? Mhmm. Am I mineral deficient? Like, are there some things that the body needs that is not getting that can can heal this? Yeah. And again, I one of the first times that we dealt with this was my daughter, Brooke, Michael's wife. She was in high school, and she was real active. She played volleyball, and she had a thing called snapping hip syndrome. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, bro, when we would go to, Disney World, we'd have to get her a wheelchair because it would just be inflamed. Mhmm. She couldn't walk. So he's just rolling over the hip joint.
Keith Vance: And, sometimes it would come out of socket. My wife learned how to put it back in socket. Holy cow. Yeah. So she's a teenager, and it's it's you know, she plays volleyball, and then she's in bed for you can't walk for a week. Okay? So nobody would touch her because she was so young. They do it for older people. They wouldn't they wanna do surgery. Mhmm. File down that that nub so that that thing could go over. And there was a one doctor up in Chicago area, I wanna say, that would do it, an an athletic sports person that would do it. But we just my wife and I just didn't feel like just didn't have peace about it. So we came across a holistic chiropractor guy here locally and, like, let's just try it. Let's just try it. And, he gave her a regimen of exercises to stretch that thing out. Mhmm. Gave her some supplementation because she was her she was low on so she has some mineral deficiencies. Yep. And, bro, in a few weeks, she was ready to rock. Yeah. Good to go.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: So Yeah. And so I think that comes that comes to the perspective of, like, again, what's the root cause? Is the root cause because your bone has grown too far out and it's snapping over the joint, or is the root cause because the body's not supposed to have that snap? Are we missing what's called the bursa, which is like that soft tissue guard between that ligament and the greater trochanter on the hip? Is that the root cause? Is it because the body can't supply and refill that balloon with nutrients, so we got the mineral deficiencies? Is it because the muscles around it are tight or weak in such a way that it can't pull the muscles where they're supposed to be? Completely different perspectives.
Keith Vance: And then if we can start with you and then, okay, let's I think I can help you go through there or and then maybe it does need surgery. I mean, maybe there is there there's there's a point where there's some kind of deficiency and we it needs a surgery, but I think we're so
Keith Vance: our culture is so geared towards, yeah, cut me open. Right? Mhmm. And there's there's alternatives that I think, dude, I don't like this thing here. These bone fragments, I guess it's they told me that's like a ten week, twelve week recovery time. I'd rather just
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: exercise it out and, like, try to get it Exhaust every other option before you create a, I guess, a controlled burn. Right? Before before you damage the tissue in a controlled way. The surgeons are incredible. Surgeons are like, the surgeons we have nowadays are so much better than ever in history. They just have some of the best training. They have some of the best resources available to them. And, and we're spoiled over here in The States that we get some incredible surgeons. But if we can find every possible route before damaging the tissue, we have to explore that. Have to. And, yeah, we'll see you know, we we're talking about the, kind of pediatric patients. Right? The the the small age, why would you take a kid? And people think chiropractors are thinking the the TikTok videos that get thousands of views and stuff of, like, the you put the mic next to the neck and then make some cool noises and stuff like that. And and that's not actually I haven't I have yet to meet a chiropractor who adjusts children that way,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: especially young babies. Usually, it's a very, very gentle approach. I'm I myself am a pediatric certified chiropractor, so I see pediatric patients in my office. The youngest youngest I ever adjusted is my, my third child who's a year old now, but I adjusted her within seconds of her being born because she had the cord wrapped around her neck. And so I'm there at the birth center with my wife, and she comes out. And as soon as she's on mom, I'm like, I gotta start getting her cervicals in line because I know that houses the brain stem. I know that that's where a lot of these, proprioceptive integrations are. I know that if damage is left there alone for long enough, the next steps, can get into the developmental disorder kind of stuff. And it was I'm glad I did because while I'm sitting there in in the birth center with her, She comes out, gets on mom skin to skin, and I'm watching. She she's not able to really turn her head and try to find to latch. And then my wife's like, yeah. She's not latching. You gotta do something there. And so I started adjusting her upper neck very gently, and I adjusted her cranial bones, and I adjusted her jaw. And I started working all these little biomechanics, and it would I would adjust it, and then I'd let it go. And then we'd get a little improvement, and then she'd detach again, and I'd check it and adjust it again, and then she'd reattach. And we kinda went back and forth like that for, like, ten minutes straight. And by the end of it, she was latching, turning, eyes open, ready to go. So she's currently my my record of, like, eight seconds old. My previous record was my son who was about five minutes. And we were in hospital at that point. I had just finished the learning how to adjust kids in in school there, getting that training. And my son this is a natural birth. No C section. No forceps. No vacuum. All the nurses are just kinda standing around because my wife is crushing it. She is just she has handled these births so incredibly. She and she trained for that. Are we talking about training and making sure that you can get the nervous system down? She trained. That way in that moment, she'd be able to handle it. She incredible. You know, there is a good wife is is hard to find and should be treasured. I got a I got a gift.
Keith Vance: So, anyway, she she, she
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: pushes him out. And on that last push, the Obi has to catch him because he's flying. He's about to launch out across the room. And the Obi catches him, and at that same moment, his head tweaks because he's, like, flying out slippery. His head tweaks, and he goes from pink to blue, like Wow. In a second. Really? Yeah. And and, it was terrifying. And some babies come out gray, so it's like, you know, the the nurses have seen it before. I've seen the pictures. I've seen it happen before. But when you go from pink to gray Wow. Something happened there. And so I got real nervous. I'm staring at my wife. She's staring at me. He's not really crying. We had only one kid at that time, so we knew, like, they're supposed to cry. He's not really turning. He's not really latching. It's, like, weak movement. It it looks really rough. And, and so my wife's, like, staring at me. She's like, you gotta do something. Like, help him. And, like, sitting around, like, I got doctors around me. I don't know what I'm allowed to do in here. It's my kid, but, like, I don't know what I'm allowed to do. And so, like but he just wasn't getting better. He wasn't crying. He wasn't breathing. He wasn't he wasn't doing the things I'd expect a newborn to do. And so I took took my took my hands, and I just found his atlas bone, which is the top bone of the spine, surrounds the brain stem, and I just I adjusted that really gently. I held it in the right position. I felt all the muscles start to kinda melt away. He goes and then cries and lets out this belt of a cry, and he's trying to find mom now. Boom. He latches. He finds right away. He starts getting that skin to skin, and, like, the doctors the whole time are like, oh, don't worry about it. He'll be okay. Trying to encourage us. Right. And but he wasn't getting better. After that moment, he goes from blue to pink, getting better. I can breathe. My wife can breathe. All good to go. So when you did that, were the doctors aware of what you're doing? Not a clue. Not a clue. Or if they did, they didn't they didn't say anything about it. And I adjusted them. And so, yeah, they I was worried that they were gonna say something about it genuinely. But they either they didn't see it. They didn't really care. Didn't know what was going on. It might have just been dad hovering over his son. Understood. But regard and what's what's nice is, you know, I don't know what life would have been like had I not done that. All I know is the life I currently live is that my son is is thriving beyond that, and he's doing all the things you'd expect a young kid to to do. He's eating. He's sleeping. He's pooping. He's moving. He's running around. He's getting loud. He's hitting his milestones. He's talking like crazy. He's energetic, fun kid to have around.
Keith Vance: And so those are my those are my two youngest patients I've ever adjusted. What's the importance of adjustments? Is it important? Like, my neck is always tight. Like, is it important to to to get chiropractic adjustments, and what causes the the tightness and all that stuff? Like Yeah. So
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I I very much am a proponent of it's everyone on earth should be under chiropractic care to some extent, but not just like the I have an ache and pain, and so I go get a quick cracking sound of an adjustment and then never see it again for a long time. In the same way that I'm a proponent of, everyone should be in some level of fitness for their life. They should use their body Yes. For their entire life. They should at no point become a couch potato if they wanna be healthy. Mhmm. So I I very much espouse that's everyone should be under chiropractic care, and that's because the effects that it has on brain health completely. Well, then we can dive in on that one. But the effects that the the effects it has on the brain, the effects it has on the nervous system, the effects it has on the immune system, on the normal functions of the body, they kind of just keep increasing. There's a wonderful group of researchers over out of New Zealand who are trying to figure out some of this neurology, like, happens during the adjustment. And what they'll find is or what they found is, at the the moments of adjustment, the brain's frontal cortex or sensory motor cortex to the backside of the the front side of the parietal lobes gets a better perception of the body. That proprioceptive increases, which means that the brain can now, as it sends a signal to the frontal lobes, have better executive control over the body, which means when the body sees itself better, it can make better decisions as far as what needs to happen. So often medication, Advil, you have a bum elbow, take Advil, you take a ibuprofen, whatever it is, and your elbow pain goes away. Really, all you're doing is numbing that area with that medication. You're changing the brain's perception of that area so the brain's like, I don't need to freak out anymore. Well, with chiropractic care, you actually change the way the brain perceives it in a more beneficial way. It'll find the problems and then administer the internal medicine that has to happen to it. A good example, is, like, digestive issues that we'll see, especially with kids. When we have a digestive problem, constipation or diarrhea, either one of those, The brain can't get the right signals from the gut to tell the gut what it should be doing. And so if we end up having a break in that proprioceptive chain, the brain can't tell the gut, hey. You're supposed to move and get this stuff out. You're supposed to hydrate some areas, take these nutrients out. You know, you're supposed to cycle through all of this stuff. And when we reconnect it with that adjustment, the brain can perceive that area better and say, oh, I found the problem. I know what I needed to do. Gotta hydrate the stool over here. Gotta get some more water out here. Gotta absorb these nutrients there, and it starts to move better. So we see constipation improve because we're having better perception of the gut full system. If we have, vestibular conditions like, dizziness or vertigo and stuff like that, that's a proprioceptive problem. It's a mismatch between the eye, the ear, and the proprioceptive information that's coming in. And when we do that adjustment, it changes the way the brain perceives all of those signals, and it can actually organize it. Great way to you've you how many kids do have again? Seven. Seven? Seven kids? So when they were young, they'd come in the room. Like, one of them would come in the room and blame one of the other ones for something that happened. Sure. Right? And then the one that got blamed would come in and tell you a different story. Mhmm. And then a third one a third witness would come in and tell you a different story. Right? You're getting a bunch of different information you don't really know what to do with. And so you're like, I can't make a good decision until I have all of the information. So the adjustment organizes all the stories and says, oh, I know what to do in this situation to adapt better to it in the future. That's a good, that's a good picture. Yeah. And so the the New Zealand, research, group over there, they're figuring that stuff out. As far as immune system goes, there's a wonderful, study by a Florida local, doctor Julie Hunt, who, she found she she did a research with another with a bunch of other upper cervical chiropractors, about the way like, do we have influence over the nervous system? And there's this really cool molecule called secretory immunoglobulin a. This thing comes in all of our secretions, so it's saliva, nose, eyes, inner ears, wherever your body kinda, like, oozes, for lack of a better term. This immunoglobulin is in there to detect pathogens and defend the body. And they found that after after an after an adjustment, after an upper cervical adjustment, we have a boost of this secretory IgA, of this siggo protein. So you're having not necessarily a hyperactive immune system. You're having a better defended immune system. Understood. It's like you have a bunch of guys who are, sitting on their castle wall, and they're looking out and trying to figure out what's going on out in the the field to make sure no one's attacking them, and you just gave all those guys spotlights. Way easier to find a problem when you can see it. So because of the effects that the the chiropractic has on digestion, on respiration, on immune function, on cognitive awareness, there's another few studies about the spinal fluid flow and the way it, decreases Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, dementia, can increase the brain's body to detox and clean out itself.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Because of all of those improvements in function, it's almost like a no brainer. It's like once you know that the chiropractic adjustments can do that, it's like, yeah, you should probably get under good consistent care.
Keith Vance: What's, what's a good regimen for the average person?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: That that really is so case by case. I would love to give, like, alright. Flat out. You gotta see this many people. It's gonna be this predictable. It never is that predictable. What would be the best thing to do is you you you find that good chiropractor who understands the nervous system and is not just trying to chase the pain syndrome. K. Figuring out how the nerves are disconnected. Is there an effect on the neurologic function? So are they measuring autonomic functions? Heart rate variability is one of those things or vestibular coordination things. Are we finding those functions that we don't have to think about? They should be automatically run. Are they looking at it from the neurologic perspective? And then are they, like, are they evaluating the other elements of your life that could affect that? So you asked a question earlier. What what causes these kinds of misalignments? What causes these neurologic issues afferently? These these sensory issues. And it seems that they fall into three categories.
Keith Vance: What are they?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: First one is is physical traumas. Hit to the head, car accident, fall off a bench as a baby falling off a changing table, things like that, C section, vacuum forceps, deliveries.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Second one is emotional stressors. Right? You talked about how you and your wife are working out and you're having the, like, emotional explosion because something's going on in the body that hasn't been kinda dealt with until you get a good enough proprioceptive input. Go for it.
Keith Vance: People say, I carry my stress in my shoulders or I carry my stress. So that's a real thing. Very much so. Very much so. So that's part of the body keeping the score. Absolutely.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: What happens is in that fight or flight state, so many mechanisms happen, but one of the biggest ones that happens is we get this, like, protective mode. Right? Babies in utero are in this fetal position. This is our protection. You're getting beat up by the bullies at school. You're going to fetal position. You try to protect yourself from everything that's happening. So you carry your stress in these areas, but that's not where the stress is. The stress is not your shoulders. The stress is the way the brain perceives the stressors. You can increase the adaptability of the perception of the stressor and then decrease the way the brain the body afflicted by it. Okay. So, yeah, emotional stressors. And then the last one is toxic overload. And this is, excessive medication at an early age. A lot of kids will deal with antibiotics early on when they get some infections. They'll get given antibiotics. Those antibiotics will destroy gut bacteria. Gut bacteria is kind of termed as our second brain. So if we destroy the anti or if we use the antibiotics, destroy the gut bacteria, what ends up happening is, the gut bacteria can't protect us from bad gut bacteria. It can't absorb the right nutrients. It can't produce the right off, the the right metabolites that we use to actually fuel ourselves. Like, I think it's, I think vitamin k, I believe, is is, like, a byproduct of gut bacteria. So you have to have good gut bacteria to have good,
Keith Vance: good nail development, good hair development. Right? So I had a another one of my daughters. We haven't met her yet. She can be 18 here shortly. But when she was
Keith Vance: five, six, seven maybe, she had gut she had gut issues. And she had some type of,
Keith Vance: like you said, you got good good gut health, like and bad. She had this this man, I wish my wife was here.
Keith Vance: She had something going on with her. It was a legitimate thing, like, kind of viral type thing. Okay? And it was she was in and out hospital. She was it was debilitating. She was just out of school for weeks. Like, it was like it was a problem. That's gotta be hard for y'all. And, it was, like, kinda like a long term problem. It's been going on for months, so it get better for a little while, then okay. And then then she landed the hospital IVs, everything. She has this thing that I can't think of the word. And, so the the hospital is wanting to, give her a prescription that would strip everything. It would strip all of it. Mhmm. The good, good health Reset the whole thing. Reset the whole thing. And, again, my wife has an intuition as a mother, you know, like so we went to a holistic guy and say, hey. Here's what they said she has. And through, like, some natural like, some liquid silver Mhmm. And through some natural remedies, it took a little longer, but she she got over it. That's awesome. She got over it. Glad for you guys on that one. I'm thankful for, yeah, I'm thankful for science and the Yeah. The medical community, but there's also some natural remedies. I just feel like I would I would prefer as a dad, as a protector provider caretaker for the ones I love the most to let the body heal itself and give the body some natural things to to get it there. If that if that doesn't work, then okay. Let's let's
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: cut me open if that's if that's what we have to do. Sure. And I've had to tell patients. I've had to give patients that It's like, listen. We've hit the capacity of conservative medicine. It is important that this, which is not getting better, gets evaluated by that surgeon at the highest level because there's there's sometimes a limitation of matter. Right? If we're noticing a pattern of it's just getting worse, then it might not be a conservative case, and that's okay. Sometimes that's how it is, but we should exhaust all the opportunities go into Yeah. And so when it comes to yeah. That's and and those three things is, you know, traumas, toxins, and thoughts. Those the easiest way to remember, like, what things cause those misalignments, what things cause those neurologic stressors. And if we can kind of whittle it down to those three things and figure out, alright, how can we manipulate that? How can we build adaptability? One thing that happens is, you know, you tell people, alright. If traumas and toxins and thoughts cause the problems, then you should avoid traumas, toxins, and thoughts. That's a terrible way to live. Right. Because those things are gonna come. Right. Like, life's hard, and it's supposed to be hard because it's supposed to create men of character, women of character, people of intention who have a value in the day. So it's gonna be hard. So we have to increase the adaptability, the the ability to handle the load Resilience. Comes that's right. Build that resilience. Have that intentional intentionality towards resilience have to have it. Like that antifragile mindset. We're made for health. We're made we're designed to handle incredible things,
Keith Vance: and we should build the capacity to handle those things. And I get you you're helping my own mindset. Even you just saying the body's prone to self healing Mhmm. That helps my mindset because we're so quick to the body can't do it on its own. I need an Advil. I needed this or that just because of where we are in society and in space and time. Like, everything is a quick watch TV. How many ads do you see that are about these new prescriptions that come out all the time? So everything's like a quick fix Mhmm. Medication. Let the give the body time to do its thing. Mhmm. Right? Like
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: yeah. Yeah. It it those those medication things my my wife and I have a fun time. Those are the only ones that we unmute, my wife and I Mhmm. Those medication commercials because we get a kick out of the side effects. Crazy. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Who was it? The comedian, Tim Hawkins a while ago. Like, when back when I was a kid, he put the special out. And one of his one of his funniest jokes that I got a kick out of was like, I'll take the vomiting, headaches, nausea, and fainting to make my elbow feel better. Yeah. Like, that I got a kick out of that. And and Can I ask you a Please?
Keith Vance: It's gonna sound like a dumb question, but I do wanna know. Yeah. The cracking noise.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: What is that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, that's so that's gas leaving a joint. Is it really? That's all it is. So, with within the the it's called synovial joints, which are the the ones that move really well within your body. That synovial fluid can have a a tendency to produce nitrogen gas. That nitrogen gas creates little bubbles. We move the joint, and that joint and then it makes the cracking noise. That does not that is not what the adjustment is. That is that if it's there, it doesn't help or negate the adjustment. Okay. Actually, kind of interestingly is I I practice, more of a neurologically focused chiropractic care, so I do a lot less cracking and popping in my practice. And the instrument that we use, is a sound wave instrument. So I'll take some advanced measurements of the upper neck, some pretty crazy biomechanics that happen up there. And so I'll we'll measure that area, and then we'll use this really gentle tool to adjust that. And so I don't crack the upper neck and get but I still get the neurologic changes that come with that. Understood. So the cracking sound is nitrogen leaving a joint, and it doesn't mean one thing or the other. I've done plenty of manual adjustments like that where it doesn't make a noise and the nervous system change. And so it's what's our outcome? Is it to make a fun noise that really gets good views on social media, or is our goal to change the nervous system to have a better viewpoint of the body? If we stay in that one, we tend to get much, much better results. Understood. Yeah.
Keith Vance: Again, I'm just I'm just having some thoughts while we're here before we move on. Yeah. If I'm if I'm living a stressful lifestyle or say I'm going through a divorce or some, like, some traumatic thing that's just got me stressed out and I'm I'm locked up and I go get an adjustment, but this situation doesn't improve. You know, I'm still dealing with lawyers. Like, whatever hardship you're going through, this guy, this.
Keith Vance: How long does the adjustment does the adjustment last for? Like because I feel like you gotta fix your Mhmm. Your stressor Mhmm. Along the same time. So it's not just there's two things going on here. Right? Yeah. You have to you have to you have to fix the the source of the bad water.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: K. Right? So so, absolutely, you have to you have to figure out ways to navigate those tough, difficult situations. Like, I've had some I've had some patients who, they had mold in their homes and or we just had those hurricanes rip through a couple years ago here in, here in Florida, and that decimated their homes. So they're stressed out of their mind. They're relocated. So the stressor was there, and that made their nervous crash significantly harder. It was a lot more work to keep them keep them up.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Adjustments will vary in time as far as holding times go. But if you don't fix the polluted source, it's gonna be a lot more patchwork. Right. And you have to go way more aggressively to make up for the lack thereof. Understood. I've had patients in kind of both categories as far as, like, the source of stressor doesn't change, but we're still able to make progress because we shifted the intensity to bring it back. Understood. And then out and then took everything else they could control. Right? Those the polluted water was out of their control often. So we made sure their nutrition was good, their exercise was good, their habits were good, their mindset was good, that they were in alignment, which built the capacity to handle the stressor. And so when we're when we're doing this kind of care, an adjustment is likely not gonna do what we all really want it to do, which is be that fast, quick effect. It's a long period of care. And the best way I've explained that and when I say long period, it kinda varies between twelve weeks and a couple years depending on the situation.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Decreasing frequency over time. But it's like when you go to the gym for the first day, you go to the gym, you've never been there before, and you get home and you look in the mirror, and you're like, I I lifted for two hours. Why don't I look different yet? Where's my abs? Where's my bicep vein? Where like, where's all this stuff? And then day two, you go back to the gym, and you look in the mirror again. You're like, where is it? People said you go to the gym. You get in shape. Then day, you know, day 14 comes around. You're like, well, that was easier, but I still don't see the change. Day 30 comes around. You're looking at yourself again. You're like, I I don't see it. Where's the change happening? And then all of a sudden, your friend who you haven't seen for two months comes in the room, and that friend goes, dude, you've been working out? You look awesome. Well, you couldn't see it yourself because you were staying consistent, but you're getting adapted to your own appearance. Someone who's never see who hasn't seen you in forever looks at you and says, oh my gosh. You have obviously changed something in your life. You are a different person than who you were when I saw you a month ago. It's like when you don't, it's like when you don't see one of your kid's friends for a while, then they come over and you're like, when did you turn into a six foot monster? Right. How does that happen? Yeah. And so it's the repetition over time. And then that same person who looked in the mirror for thirty days straight, didn't see any changes, three months down the line is gonna look into the mirror and be like, oh, I am not the same person. They start to recognize it.
Keith Vance: That's what happens with chiropractic care. It's not a chiropractic adjustment. It's called solves all the problems. It's consistency over time. And I feel like in my health journey at 50, it's just one tool in my toolbox. You mentioned nutrition. A 100%. You mentioned athletics, like, working out. Gotta be. So it's just another thing just to be overall
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: well rounded. Yeah. And it actually because of the influences of the brain, you'll see the other things accelerate in progress. You will. Yeah. Because it changes the way the gut works and the speed of absorption. Okay. It changes the way athletic development works. That's why in the Olympic, during the Olympics, they have in the Olympic Athlete village, they have chiropractors on standby because it speeds up recovery. It increases the capacity to handle more stressors. Well, that that tells you something there. Mhmm.
Keith Vance: I got another question for you, and then
Keith Vance: I'll ask you if there's anything I haven't asked for you in this wheelhouse. But what about, blood flow, the importance of blood flow into healing those areas? Have you found have they found that there's
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: science behind that? Like, do you do cupping or any type of that? So I don't do that in in my practice specifically, but, I work with quite a few practitioners around I'm very spoiled in Saint Pete with the amount of doctors in that space that I have at my disposal to send patients to.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: So many. I'm very blessed. Very blessed.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Simplest way to think about blood flow is blood carries two things that our body needs, oxygen and nutrients. If you don't have oxygen to the cells, they can't function with all of the metabolic reactions that require oxygen. If you don't have fuel, nutrition to the area, it can't supply the area with what it needs. So you'll get symptoms let's say you don't if you don't have right oxygen flow, you'll get that numbness tingles into the hand because it cuts off the blood flow. It's like if you fall asleep on your arm and your arm you wake up and it's, like, still numb and tingles. That's because of the blood flow lack of blood flow. So if you need oxygen, you need you need fuel for any any tissue down the line to function, then, yeah, you need good blood flow to those areas. If we entrap the blood flow, then two things happen. Not just blood out to the area, but blood back into the heart gets changed up. If blood flow gets stagnant in the extremities down here, then it gets deoxygenated, uses up all the oxygen in it, and then it's supposed to go back in your veins. But if there's an entrapment that freezes the blood flow from getting there, now your heart can't oxygenate at the right pace. And over enough time, those tissues start to break down, get more different pain syndromes and things. So blood flow is absolutely necessary. Are you are there ways to increase blood flow? Yeah. So, I mean, you can consciously control it by making sure you're increasing your heart rate. So going off for a run, go for a walk. Have to go for a run. Literally going for a walk will increase your heart rate. Standing up increases your heart rate. It's supposed to because you have to get more blood to the areas. You should have good cardiovascular health because the better your heart can pump fluid, the faster it can get to the areas it needs to get to Mhmm. The faster it can reoxygenate things. So we have to have good blood flow, and you have to, and you have to use your heart by doing aerobic cardiovascular kinds of things. Important. Have to. Okay. Have to.
Keith Vance: Any other questions that I should have asked you in this wheelhouse of chiropractic care that I didn't that you're just dying for me to
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Oh, man. I could just talk about that all day long. That's my whole life right now is is the ways that I can help with neurology. Are there any new advancements in your field that you're excited about? I think one of the big ones that, I care most about is is the the biggest one of my heart, especially with my own kids' stories, is the developmental disorder side of it, the ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorder, these kind of mental health things. Because it it used to be primarily kids getting these diagnoses, but the kids of 20 ago who got the diagnoses are now adults. Those adults are having kids, and the kids are getting the diagnosis again. So the the developmental disorders,
Keith Vance: that whole Listen. These disorders you're talking about Yeah. Again, this just came out within my lifetime. I remember never hearing about it. And then, like, that seems like the last twenty years is it feels like it's progressively more and more. Like, it's it would be
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: if you don't have ADHD, you're a weirdo. It's kinda how I mean, is it is termed as it's a spectrum. Right? So there's gonna be people who have all of it, people who have none of it, people in the middle. And so but what's happening is everyone's trying to figure out, like, why why these things are happening. And that we're always looking at this this developmental disorder conversation from, like, a textbook point of view where it's like, it's only one system or it's only this other system. And, what's nice is there was a, there's a report that came out recently by the McCullough Foundation, I believe is what it was, and it showed the multifactorial elements that contribute to autism spectrum disorder, that it can't be blamed on one thing or the other. It has to be blamed on a bunch of stuff. There has to be a lot of perfect storm things in the same way, all happening at the same time. There has to be gut dysbiosis, way the gut bacteria works. There has to be, toxic overload. There has to be lifestyle changes that are leading to a higher propensity of these problems happening. And then in our work, as far as the upper cervical world and chiropractic world goes is, the the increase of understanding of how if you have less it's called it's called dysafferentation. Rather, we'll start with dyskinesia, less movement, improper movement in the body, the brain can't make those good executive decisions. This so if you have improper movement in the body, it sends the improper signal to the brain. That's dyskinesia to disafferentation. And then it ends up working its way down the line into a dysautonomia. And dysautonomia is a dysfunction of that fight or flight, rest and digest, where you're heightened in fight or flight all the time even if you're in a beach shipping a coconut kind of relaxed state. And when you have an increased stressor load over too much time while other stressors are piling on top of it, you end up with disorder. And so right now in the in the chiropractic world, some really incredible doctors are working on trying to bring that concept to light is, we talk about the three t's, traumas, toxins, and and and thoughts. The, increase in cesarean sections in vacuum deliveries, forceps deliveries is leading to an increased chance of that dyskinesia in the upper neck, in the cranial bones, in the sacrum, in the rest of the spine. That dysafferentation leads to the or that dyskinesia leads to the dysafferentation, leads to the dysautonomia, leads to the developmental disorders. And what's nice is these doctors are working really hard on getting that to be part of the conversation again because that's why we'll see ADHD go from a dysfunction into a superpower. I haven't met many, entrepreneurs recently who are not some level of ADHD because you have to be. Right. Right? How many hats are you putting on as a business owner? You got the employee mentor hat. You got the financial hat. You got you got all these different hats. You have to be a little ADHD. And but it's not a disordered thing when you can shift focus quickly. Understood. As long as you can make the shifts and and have self control over those things. But when you have these dysautonomic things, the shifts don't the shifts aren't able to be made. And so these kids, if we can change the kinesia, change the movement, we can change the afferentation, we can change the disc the autonomia, and then we can have that awesome health that, we want all these kids to have. Change the generation.
Keith Vance: So if I'm understanding this right, you think an ADHD diagnosis
Keith Vance: through chiropractic care can be focused
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: in a in a positive direction? Mhmm. Yeah. And I'll see that often in my practice. So I'll give you I'll give you awesome. This is a cool testimony. This kid was this kid was wild. So he's always jumping off the walls, this young one. He's just bouncing, going crazy. And he starts caring with us because his mom's like, okay. There's there's something that we can do. I bet we I bet it's neurologic, but I don't know what to do about it. So maybe you can help. No. It just it was literally just like, maybe you can help kind of an approach is what this mom was going for. And he just did his testing, to to, go out of third grade. They did they do pretesting, at least here in state of Florida, at least in Pinellas County. They did, they did pretesting for his reading scores. How good was he at reading and comprehension and things? And he scored a one out of five on that test at the beginning of the year. If he continued doing that, he would fail out of the grade, and he'd have to repeat over again. So he starts care with us, and and that was, and that was about halfway through the school year that he started. So he was pretty much on this track of, like, you're gonna fail. You're gonna fail. You're gonna fail. You're gonna fail. There's no way. Like,
Keith Vance: he wasn't making any progress. How old is this kid?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I think he's eight. Pretty sure eight or nine. And so, like, the people around him aren't telling him he's gonna fail, but all of his scores are showing him. Yep. You're if you can't bring this focus, if you can't focus in, you're not gonna make it. You're gonna be stuck in this grade again. Well, over the course of our care, we do the chiropractic work with him. We do some eye work. We do some vestibular work with him, all within about a hundred and twenty, a hundred and sixty days or so. And then he gets to decrease his care because he's doing really nicely, and he takes the test at the end of the year. And first off, when we started the care, his spelling test scores went from getting, like, fifties and sixties up to hundreds. He was, like, starting to ace his spelling test scores because he could focus on study. He could focus on memorization. He could focus on the test. Cool. He still has ADHD, but it's focused. It's focused ADHD, which is a wild thing to be able to say. He takes the final test at the end of the year, and he scores almost a five. Wow. And his mom is a ex teacher, so she kinda, like, framed it for me, helped me understand what what that means. It's like, you go from a one to a five in any subject, that does not happen. Right. You'll go from a one to a three. Right. You'll go from a three to a four, but you're not gonna go from a one to a four. And so they were over the moon. So it took his dysfunctional ADHD and allowed him to harness it where he could study faster and assimilate information faster and catch back up. So superpower. Superpower, not dysfunction.
Keith Vance: As you're talking about that, I'm my, my youngest daughter, she just turned 16 yesterday.
Keith Vance: She was at school on a playground when she was Michael Hall, was she 10, 11? Ella, when she got hurt. 11 years old. She was on the playground at school, and there's a a tunnel. You know, you go down the slide. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She was sitting on top of the tunnel. And there's this game where if you sit on top of it, you know, you're the queen. Okay. You're a boy, you're the king, and you get to tell who gets to go down. Go down. Go down my tunnel. You know? So she's straddling this tunnel, and, the kids are, you know, waiting to be told if they can go down. And so she gave one of her subjects permission to go down the tunnel, and, that kid's older sister wanted to be the person to be she wanted to be the queen. Gotcha. So she told her little brother, hey. When you go down, pull Ella down. She staged a coup. Pull her down with you. So he My goodness. He runs and goes down the slide and grabs her by both her arms, and he pulls her. And she hit her head on the Run. Hit her head in front of her face, slid all the way down the slide, and,
Keith Vance: went to try to find a teacher. And, anyway, long story short, she had a cracked rib. Wow.
Keith Vance: She
Keith Vance: we pulled out of school for a year because she had a
Keith Vance: concussion. Yeah. So this happened, like, on a Thursday or Friday. Sunday, my wife calls me, and she's like, Keith, Ella can't walk and she can't see.
Keith Vance: So we took her back to the hospital. And they're like, oh my goodness. What happened to her? She'd been in a car wreck? Mhmm. Well, she got pulled down a slide three days ago. She was complaining about her ribs and stuff, not the other stuff. So they so we had taken her twice. So
Keith Vance: through that injury, she had chronic migraines. And the best way I could they could describe it was, you know, when you're driving down, you drove down I 75 on the way here. Yep. That's right. So you're driving down I 75, your vision, you see the trees, but the trees are blurry. Yeah. Her eyes are trying to focus on each one of those trees. If you can imagine driving down 75 at 75, 80 miles an hour, her eye is trying to focus on each one of those trees in time.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: It doesn't get rid of unnecessary information. It focuses on every single point. Yeah. Every single point.
Keith Vance: Lost her appetite because she's nauseous. Yeah. We pulled her out of school for a year because she couldn't school's off the table now. Migraines every day. I bought her a freaking little puppy just to give her something to distract her.
Keith Vance: Went through all the the PT stuff that the mainstream stuff you're supposed to do. Did all of it. Not getting hit any milestones. Mhmm. We came to the end of it. It's like, alright. That's it. You finished your training. Well, no no, we're not because she's still having migraines. They diagnosed her with depression. That was their answer. Their answer was to write her a script for depression and say that that's that's her problem. Mhmm. Well, you'd be depressed too. Mhmm. If you had a freaking migraine every day of your life, you everybody else is going to school and your life is on pause. You're just sitting there. Yeah. So, what'd you guys end up doing? Noticed a shift in her emotionally, like she's given up, bro. She's given up. When did that depression diagnosis come in? If if you can share them, I don't wanna be doing that. At the very end of the PT when, hey, what are we doing here? Yeah. And they exhausted all their All their potential. Right? Extreme stuff. They exhausted everything they could do.
Keith Vance: So I went to my chiropractor, my holistic chiropractor that I wish I would've went to the first time, but because this was such a traumatic thing Yeah. I'm thinking this is a medical thing, and it was. It was. Sure.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: So I go to my I think you guys made the right call going to the hospital now, you start there. Absolutely. You start there. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Keith Vance: So I go to my chiropractor guy. Hey. Here's what's going on. He referred us to this place. It's called Plasticity. You ever heard of it? Plasticity? Plasticity. Mhmm. Have you heard of this place? It depends. I know of a place in Saint Pete called neuroplasticity. That's it. Is that the one? That's the one. Right on. Good friend of mine over there. It I I Do remember the doctor's name? My wife does because my wife spent a week up there with my daughter. Yeah. So we stayed in the hotel across the street, and every day we did training for a week. Right on. So two things. I sent her up there. Cost me, I think, $10.15 grand.
Keith Vance: They did some tests with her eyes. They put her in this gyro thing. Okay. I think that was what you're talking about. She was she she she didn't know where she was in space and time. Her brain was trying to she was always dizzy, so she don't know where she's at in space and time. Correct. So when she would, she they closed she said, close your eyes and walk. So she closed her eyes, she's walking, she would it would Yeah. She couldn't go straight. Yep. Just like when you said, hey. When you close your eyes, you know where your arm is. She don't know where your arm is. Correct. So they they measured the arc that she walked with her eyes closed. They put her in this freaking gyro thing that they invented, and they flipped her around in this thing. Yep. And said, okay. Now walk. And it would get better, better. Eventually, Eventually, straight. But they don't they deal with a lot of, like, athletes, football, concussions, hockey players, stuff like that. So $10,000 a week later, and then we did some little stuff at home, some little home treatments. She's good to go when she was good. They were gonna diagnose her with with With depression and get her on antidepressants the rest of her life. Some antidepressants. Mhmm. So I did that. And then I also there was a a company that you can go to that they do hyperbaric air chambers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. HBO. They're going out of business, and I bought one. That was another 10 or $15. And put her in a hyperbaric air chamber. There you go. So having you on here talking about, you know, I told you when I was a kid chiropractic care was like voodoo stuff. Yeah. It hits close to home because without
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: what you do Without that referral, you don't end up at that clinic. You don't have the same daughter you do today.
Keith Vance: No. Yeah. And she would think, like, things would come so easy to her in school. Now she she has to work a little harder. Yeah. She forgets things still a little bit, but we got her back. We got her back. Yeah. So Huge jump from what the outcome of life would have been. Your body is trying to reset itself. It's trying to heal itself, and the medication just kinda, like, masks
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: that stuff. Very often. Yeah. And
Keith Vance: I was so excited.
Keith Vance: I was so excited that after a year and a half, we found a place that fixed my daughter.
Keith Vance: And we called that other doctor and say, hey. There's this place.
Keith Vance: And they didn't even care. Didn't even care. You would think that if you, you know, you go to a new restaurant, this really awesome restaurant, man, you gotta try this place. You think, man, I have other patients that that investigative
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: mind.
Keith Vance: Oh, yeah. Let me know who it is. Let me It just really blew my mind, bro, that because they knew this journey we went through with my daughter. They knew. And they exhausted all their all that they could do, and there's this place just right up here that that can help. It just I'm still processing, like, medical care and all this kind of stuff. I think everybody does what they're supposed to do, what they think is best. Mhmm. But I think there's a balance between why can't the, you know, the mainstream medical community and the holistic side work together. Yeah. I don't know why it has to be this or that, or why can't it be both? Yeah. How can we find how can we strike the nice balance? Why can't we just let the patient be the let's how how can we help this person instead of being I feel like it has to be one or the other. Yeah. And I think I think you said there's in your wheelhouse, you're seeing
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: a a bridge back and forth? Much more commonly. Yeah. Much more commonly. Yeah. Yeah. We're seeing a a a big jump in that, which is really exciting. And, like, NTBI care, mild traumatic brain injury care, is is increasing, especially in in the upper cervical chiropractic world, with veteran care, football players, things like that to make sure that, the results of concussion are able to be treated quickly and and if possible, permanently, where we're able to actually have a full full recovery beyond it. Yeah. Because there's a whole slew of mechanisms that happen during different types of concussions, whether it's a blast injury for a veteran or if it's a a football whiplash injury or a car whiplash injury or a pull down a slide head plant, straight on your face there. The things that happen as a result of that, that's one of those huge traumas. And so we need the brain to become adaptable to resist those things when they come, but also to recover should it actually cause a serious damage to it. There's some really awesome research. Actually, the the doctor Chris Slininger is heading up, some pretty incredible studies on that. He's trying to we're getting those things off the ground, on what MTBI care could be for veterans. How to you know, the the current mechanisms or not make the current approach to healing with it is, put in a dark room, take some painkillers, and, maybe a little psilocybin mushroom kind of stuff and see what happens. Mhmm. But that doesn't match physiologically what's going on during a mild traumatic brain injury, the different neurologic implications, the brain injure injuries, the spinal fluid flow dynamics, the, blood flow too from the brain, ocular, vestibular.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And so when you put all those pieces together, there should be a physiologic plan in place. And, doctor Chris Sonadier is doing a really good job of spearheading that movement. He's a veteran himself too. And, huge heart for the veteran community and wants to change that outcome.
Keith Vance: Well, I'm thankful that he's doing that work. Mhmm. And I'm thankful that that neuroplasticity whoever decided Whoever was over there. Yeah. That up. Thank you. Because what was going on with my daughter, again, my wife was on the front lines of that. But there was, like, three or four things that were going on simultaneously, and their their brain was trying to prioritize, and it just kept getting, like, like, a reset. Like, just it couldn't. So they identified the four things that were going on and, like, okay. The path of least resistance is we'll deal with this one first. Yep. And just started, like, resetting everything, and it just dude, and, like, and, like, she we spent a week up there, and there's, like, a month worth of therapy Mhmm. At home. It was, like, day and night. So this kind of stuff is I wanna make it I wanna get it out there. Absolutely. You put neuroplasticity in the link, bro. I owe them, like, a huge I got some good doctors up there to work with. Yeah.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Yeah. So that's that's some of the cool stuff that's going on between pediatric care and, and MTBI care and that, like, these holistic there's there's a lot more available, a lot more tools available, a lot more approaches available than what has been in the past. That's good. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And thank you. I mean, like, I thank God for you that God put you on this path to be in that position because there's it's it's needed. Mhmm. It's needed in this space that we're in. Yeah.
Keith Vance: Know how the body works, that the body wants to self heal, and to give it the tools it needs to self heal. That's right. Yeah. It's it's good. It sounds so simple. Yeah. I wish
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: we we we have a, a principle that we try to apply, and that's, it's gotta be napkin simple. It's gotta be napkin simple. Some of these complexes some of these things we've done, we've had the long form today that we could, like, expand on it, break it down. But it should it should all be broken down at napkin simple. If you can explain something to a 10 year old, you you know it's it's that. And and health principles kind of fall into that category. It it's more principles. You can get really nitty gritty with it, or you can just apply the principles and let the fruit show up. Good. Yeah.
Keith Vance: I got two more segments I wanna move on with you. Sure. Sure. Before we do, you gotta wanna take a little break? Or Yeah. Let's take a second. Alright. Take a second. This part of the podcast is brought to you by Vance Ranch. Vance Ranch is our family 100 acre ranch in Henry County. We have a 6,000 square foot barn where we host wedding venues, corporate events, anniversary parties, and whatever else you wanna use it for. Find the link in the bio. Now let's get back to the show. Brother, we're back. Absolutely. Alright. We hit some heavy stuff, some deep stuff, some really science y stuff. You're you're using some words. I was going like this. Yep. But I gotta go back and check Google. Alright? That's fair enough. But I think I 've you explained it well enough. I understood it. So thank you. I wear the glasses for the part there.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Pretty big nerd.
Keith Vance: So I can't have you on and not talk about some fun stuff. Yeah. So ninja warrior. Everybody knows American Ninja Warrior, at least they should. That would be helpful. Hopefully, at this point, they've done a good job. So let's, let's talk about that for a while. Yeah. Yeah. We wanna know. How did you get on it? Like, what what what inspired you to wanna do that? What was the training like? Like, all of it. Like, just as you think about that knot in your stomach to compete. Yeah. Like, so walk me through it. Yeah. So that was back when I was
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: that was a family that I played, Frisbee with is they invited me to that ninja gym, and I had a great time that first day. And it felt natural to me playing on the bars, doing the salmon ladder, that that bar hop obstacle, the warped wall, that curve wall they gotta run up, that was, it was a really cool first introduction. It felt like I was, like, ready for that sport. And then, you know, while while doing that, we went to other there's another gym, down or I guess from here, it's up in Palmetto, called Live Training Center, and they had a a competition that was that was available, to us and went and competed. And, actually, let me backtrack because the first one was over in Fort Lauderdale, my first competition of an obstacle course. Like, I've been training a little bit, and I was having fun with it. I was doing pretty good with, like, my own little training that this, this family had in their in their backyard. They're actually the the owners of, of Jungle Gym over in in my neck of the woods. Yeah. Cool. Awesome family. Incredible story. But they built some of the obstacles in their backyard, I was good friends with them. And so I went and hung out and played. They invited me to one of their competitions, one of the competitions over in Fort Lauderdale, and I blew it. They have very strict rules at that competition as far as, like, what's in and out of bounds. Oh. And I was crushing it. I was having a great time, and then I just stepped out of bounds and it DQ'd me. Oh, no. And I was like, come on. You gotta let me finish the run. Like and he's like, can't league rules are if you step out of bounds. And I was livid. I was so mad. I was, like, sulking in a corner, and, I was so upset. And, the the the the dad, his name is Jason, he came over to me, and he's like he, like, encouraged me, and he was like, listen. Maybe we can get you to to do the test run for the second wave. And let's just go talk to the owner of the gym and see what he says. So I went over, talked with him, and he's like, yeah. You can you can do the test run for the next guys. It won't count towards your official standing, but you could do the test run. And so I demoed all the obstacles, and I did all of them. And I was like, come on. How did I step out of bounds? So that was my first experience competing. Got those jitters out. The second time around was at this place, live training center. And this is gonna be a three stage competition, and it has a one do over rule. On the qualifying round is if you at this time, this league was if you mess up on an obstacle, you can do one do over. And your second mess up, you're done. That's the end of your run. And it was what I felt like it was a very simple course. And I was like, as soon as that buzzer as soon as the the guy with the timer says go, I'm taking off. And halfway through, I do a little misstep, and I didn't I went on the other side of a line that I wasn't supposed to go on. So he said, go back. So I went back, did it, crushed it, and I still got first place overall in that run. It was, like, nearly a sub one minute speed run. Wow. And it was very compared to what exists now in ninja, it was very low level. They the the sport has exploded. And I just, like, felt again, felt natural. And then on that day, think I took second place overall to some veterans who had been practicing for a number of years. And, I'm the tallest, biggest dude. I was thinking I was two hundred and five pounds at that time competing against That's one reason why I like watching you because they're all little rock crawlers, and then you got you. Like, you're like a football player player of them. Like, there's They're supporting the big guys. Yeah. There's, like, three of us in the in the ninja world that were, like, huge guys, like, one ninety five and above. And and yeah. So I was just I was able to keep up with those with the the smaller athletes who were just explosive and quick and agile, and I loved that. I attribute that a lot to my my chiropractic history that my neurology was, like, primed to perform. But yeah. So I do that competition. I do really well in it. I get qualified for I think that qualified me for, nationals that year. So my dad and mom encouraged me, and I I fly out to to nationals and and compete and, blow it on that stage. And, that was a bummer. I just messed up. I just went too slow. I didn't train. I thought I was good enough, and I didn't continue to train. Where was this at? That was over in Texas. Over in Houston. That's when they had in Houston? Yeah. It wasn't the show. These are all, like, little sub leagues that kinda, went from that, delineated from it. It wasn't until 2018 that I had a chance to get on the show. Okay. And, again, it was it was, Jason, the owner of Jungle Gym over there in Park Park Pinellas Park. He called me up and he goes, hey. I heard you're going up to to Minneapolis. So I was visiting a friend of mine who had moved up there. And I'm like, yeah. What's going on? He goes, there's a gym up there that I visited that has a 21 foot warped wall. And the show is is 14 feet. And so it's like seven more feet. And and, he's like, you should go give that a shot. I was like, there's no way I could do that. And, like, no one had done it at this point. Bro, this That's two stories. It's insane. It's this huge warehouse. And, he's like, you can do it. I'm like, there's no way I can do that. That's so high. And so I fly up and I convince my friend group who I went with. I'm like, hey. Can we go to this ninja gym? It's gonna cost everyone $20, but can we go to this ninja gym and and run this thing? We they have a competition. No one's done this wall. Can we please take one, like, afternoon and go do this thing really quick? And they're like, yeah. Sure. So we went to their open gym, went to the gym's open gym, talked to the owners there, and, got warmed up. And then just like it was it's like an hour long open gym, maybe two hour open gym, and I procrastinated for, like, an hour. I'm like, I it's you just walk in. It's this it's this beast on a wall. It's ominous. I You're looking at it. You're like, no way. And your run up is, like, how the gym was structured is, like, in front of you, there's the huge wall. You walk in the building, there's the huge wall. And then about 12 feet horizontal space, and then there's the next set of walls, which are, like, 14 feet, 10 feet, and six foot. So you only have, like, 12 feet of run up to get up into the thing. And so I'm looking at this. No way. I'm playing on the obstacles, procrastinating on on the challenge that I set out to do. And my my friends are like, you have we have to leave soon. The gym's gonna close. If you don't start, you're not gonna get it. And so I'm like, alright. Let me just give it a shot. And so I do a quick trial run, and there's a bunch of tape on it for the highest runners. And I hit the bottom tape, which is, like, I think 14 feet. And I hit that bottom tape. I'm like, okay. Cool. Alright. I can get 14 feet. And then I aim for the middle tape, and I hit, like, 17 feet. I'm like, okay. 17 feet. I can do that. I can do that.
Keith Vance: 21 feet. God. That's high.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: So I'm just, like, sitting on the warped wall on the other side of the gym just, like, looking at this thing for, like, five minutes. I stand up, try to explode up, and I get, think, 18 feet. And I tapped that, and I'm like, 18 feet. That's pretty close. They're all, like, excited. It's a huge slide down, so it's kinda nerve racking the whole way down. I was gonna get it. If you don't get it, the higher you get You're coming you're you're coming down. So, like, the trick is to not fall off and fall 18 feet onto your head. Terrifying thing to overcome. But if you just lean forward, you'll make it. And, so going thirty minutes. Thirty minutes goes by. I got probably, like, twenty minutes left of open gym, and they're like, you have if you don't get it done, like, we have to close. Like, we can't leave it open longer for you. We're closing. It's the afternoon. We have to be done. So there's, like, buzzer that has to be done. And I'm just like, try fall. Try fall. And then, like, I I probably, like, thirteenth or fourteenth, give it a shot. I run up, and my fingers graze the 21 foot mark. And I'm like, it's possible. I can do this. There's no there's no way I fail today. It has to be I got ten minutes left. That gives me three runs. I have to be able to pull this off. Because when you're doing explosive training, it's gotta be longer rests so you can have max output. Right. And so I'm like, I can I can get this? No. I can't. I got all the all the kids in the gym are, like, staring at me. The staff's staring at me. My friends are, like, video recording every trial, every mess up. That one, I came down. I was, like, head head in my hands. Like, I gotta pull this off. And I just, like, stand up, and I've got,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I've got, like, I think it's the chorus of won't back down by Eminem in my head at this point. Don't know why that popped in my head, but it's like, I can do this. And so I I take off and I sprint at the wall, and I'm like, I don't know if I'm gonna get this. I'm gonna give everything I got. I jump and my fingertips up to my second knuckle grab it. I still remember the feeling of, like, my the there's a little wood lip up there. Yeah. And that wood lip is just big enough that if you hit your first knuckle, your other finger will curl over and you're you're cinched. You're done. You got it. And I felt my hand curl that top. I grab it. And, like, it it, like, it took me it took the whole gym was, like, silent for, like, a second. So, like, he's he's not falling. He's not falling. And then just eruption. And I'm, like, hitting the wall. I'm like Wow. But I don't wanna come down. And I looked down. I'm like, oh my god. 21 feet up. And I slide down, and I'm, like, doing flips and jumping high fiving the kids. And that was, that was the first official completion of that wall. That's cool. And remember, we talked way early on in this in this episode here. The, once you break the glass ceiling Yes. Limits are limit And that's why I was getting at. As you're talking about this warped wall,
Keith Vance: you're you're hitting the 14 foot because I've done the 14 foot. There you go. And then you go in the 18 feet. Okay. You're working your way up. Like, the way your brain has to adapt and, like, okay. Yep. Okay. Trust it. Okay.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: So Yeah. Like, why don't you just go for it? Like, come we're not built just to Just to stay. Right? Go for it. So yeah. It is wild because then they host they hosted a competition. They called me back up for it. That wasn't able to fly up, unfortunately. Had some finals that had a good time because I was an undergrad at the time. And they called me up for a comp, and they're like, hey. We're gonna who can run up the wall? And, they had, like, I think, 20 or 30 of the top ninja athletes coming out now. And they tried to run it, still, like, none of them were hitting that mark until they opened the front door, had the guys run from outside the front door up the wall. And then, like, a couple of the guys got it, which was super, super cool.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And I'm still, like, puffing my chest like, I went from the shortest distance at that time. And, so I got that. So I ran up that wall. And then when Ninja Warrior auditions were coming around, you make a video, you submit that video, maybe they call you back. And so I had that video. Was like, I I was the first guy to do this 21 foot warped wall. And then just like, you're an awesome athlete. Come on out. And so, because I had placed really well at local comps and I'd I was, like, one of the better ninjas in the circle I was a part of, I didn't train as hard as I needed to. Like, I should have trained probably 10 times what I should have trained because I'm way too heavy for some of these longer obstacles. Got it. So I didn't do my diligence. I didn't do my dead hangs. I didn't do my my reps the amount that I should have. I didn't train at 4AM like they record the show at. That's why it's dark outside because they're just recording it in the middle of the night. Yeah. And, I didn't train hard enough, and then I fell before the warped wall both times. Wow. And the warped wall they had there, that was the first year that they unveiled the mega wall as part of the challenge. Yeah. And so, like, it was and that was only 18. I say only. Only 18 feet. It's like, that's that's that should have been possible. I should have pulled that off. But God had different plans. Yeah. The the consequence of me not training was me falling on the obstacle looking at the warped wall both nights. Huge bummer. Would have loved to go further. But I also know what my heart was like at that time. And I know that had I gotten the warped wall, which had, like, a 10,000 grand prize, if I had gotten that warped wall, I would have, at that moment, proposed to my then girlfriend who's my now wife. I would have proposed to her, and she never would have gone on to be a massage therapist. She would have been stuck as a patient care tech, which she didn't enjoy. She went on to be a massage therapist, because it wasn't, like, immediate marriage. You have to keep the job to make sure bills are met, stuff like that. She was able to explore that new avenue. I would have probably held her back in that avenue, and I would have pursued ninja, never would have gotten to the doctor that I needed to be. And so I know that, like, God has God has been very gracious and, like it's, like, pat me on the head. You know? If you had gone that way, it would not have been the best Wouldn't have been good. The best thing for you. So it's why it's why he closed that door, and he he didn't allow me to achieve what I what, probably could have had I trained hard enough or something. He just he just it really held me back from that, which I was very grateful for. Looking backward. It's still a good story, and you get to experience it. Oh, yeah. Like, you've always you're gonna tell your kids. Oh, yeah. And we have those we have those highs. We have those lows. We have those crushing moments of, like like that. I was like, man, what am I supposed to do then? If I can't if I can't do ninja, what do I do? Well, let's go be an academic and go be a doctor and serve my family and serve more families. Because if you're not gonna open a gym as a ninja, it becomes a bit more, just kind of serving you. Understood. And it's not maliciously. It's just like the natural consequence of you're an individual sport. So you get the chance to I get the chance to serve a lot bigger problems than my own. I get to help people come from very, like, destitute places in their health to a functional thing, getting people who are bedridden out of bed, people who can't drive to drive. I'm helping people beyond my own family, and that's humbling. And you don't get that opportunity much in life. Wow. That's a it's a calling. Yeah. Yeah. And we talk about those callings there. Yeah. So yeah. And then I did a couple other world comps, and it just wasn't the right fit. God called me away from that. I went off into school, stopped training pretty much altogether. Kept my fitness, but my schedule in school was ridiculous. Like, to to be a doctor, it's and to be a to be a good doctor. You can be a doctor, but if you're gonna do something well, right, you should just do it. And you were built. I mean, just going back to your dad,
Keith Vance: you want a gym membership?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Show me some discipline first. That's right. So that that prepared you for the discipline to buckle down and be prepared to be a good doctor. Yeah. Which I thought I was ready for. I thought I was, like, disciplined enough for it. But, like, in undergrad, you're doing, like, nineteen, maybe nineteen hours of, like, credit hours of school. Chiropractic school is about thirty one hours a quarter. So every 11 weeks, you're doing thirty one credit hours of Wow. Of effort, over four years. Wow. And if you're gonna be a good chiropractor, you have to be training the things you've just learned. It's physical medicine. Your body has to be ready for that. Otherwise, you're going to break down. Well, they go off into school, and that's 2020. So COVID's happening. All the shutdowns and all that stuff. And, my wife, and I got married in 2019. By 2021, we have our first we have our first baby. So pregnant throughout 2020, have our first baby on January in 2021. And, so my schedule throughout school is essentially 5AM to 11PM every day for four years. Wow. With a little bit of respite on Sundays to try to honor the Sabbath as much as I could. But I ran a study group so I could learn, teach, and help others move up with me. Wow. So five 5AM, when you wake up and you go downstairs and you run your chiropractic drills, you study what you gotta study, you review, you get ready for the day, you got class at seven, you're done with class at around six. I get home. I have to take care of my baby while my wife goes off to work. I still gotta study. So baby goes down to sleep, and I'm sitting there studying until about 11:00 at night and,
Keith Vance: repeat rinse and repeat over and over. So we talked about stressors on the body. Yep. What was that like, and what was that time of life like for you? That was exhausting.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: That was so exhausting, and that pushed me beyond limits I never knew. Like, I I I didn't even know I had. Really? One of the things that I made sure to prioritize is, one, I knew when I was getting out of school, I was going to have to tell people, despite how stressful your life is, you are going to need to make good health care decisions. Your life is stressful. You have to make good decisions, which means I had to drill that into myself over those four years. And so that 5AM wake up time was 5AM, go down, do physical exercise, then do my physical chiropractic drills, then eat my breakfast, do my bible, do my reading, do my prep for the day. And that was the first, like, hour and a half of every day. So many of my peers, knew that that was necessary, but didn't didn't consistently hit that mark. And so their health started deteriorating, and I watched them, and it was really tough. And because of chiropractic, the way it works, they were able to stay consistent because we're all getting care while we're in school. So we're able to at least stay somewhat healthy. But, like, everyone who was an athlete going into school, almost all of them dropped off their athleticism by the end of it because it's so much stress around the body. I didn't want that to be the case, and I had kids to motivate me to keep going. My training did drop from pro level from ninja down to more like a casual level. I had probably twenty minutes a day to be efficient, so I had to get really good at working out really, really good at how can I stress my body in twenty minutes a day? And I don't know if you ever tried twenty minutes of burpees. You ever tried yeah. That's exhausting. You get in shape. So it's twenty minutes of burpees, twenty minutes of pull ups, twenty minutes of jump squats, go run around the neighborhood. You do what you can to to make it happen. Do stretching on that day. Do Bulgarian split squats on a chair in the living room, holding a couple holding your backpack or I bought some weights at some point, and I was able to do that. And keeping that discipline allowed all those stressors. Right? If the stressor can still be there, but I built my body to rise above the stressor so it didn't crush me.
Keith Vance: So twenty minutes is a long time, but depends on what you're doing. Depends on what you're doing. But everybody's got twenty minutes. Here you go. Here you carve twenty minutes out where it looks like you had to be regimented because you're what did you say? 5AM to 11PM. Okay. Pretty much every day. And so you still carved out twenty minutes? Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Because I knew I knew the repercussions of it if I didn't. So two. Yeah. One, fitness to build resilience. Correct. But also for me, fitness to
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: detox the stress and everything. Yeah. Yeah. The endorphins that rise from it. There's two there's two sides of it that's so important. Gotta have it. And we talk about heart rate. Right? You gotta you gotta increase blood flow. You don't get your blood moving, it's gonna get stagnant. Not that it stops flowing. Your heart's going to pump. Sure. But it doesn't increase that stressor, which means it's not as efficient. It doesn't change the way that your aerobic capacity going back to that increases. It doesn't change the way your power output is. You have to be consistent. Your heart has to be strong. Your brain has to be sharp. If you don't move your body, it all wastes. And then plus just you being,
Keith Vance: providing health care for people, having been through that, you can identify with Yeah. Stress.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Very much so. And, I mean, we've all had the, PE coach who is telling you to run laps, but is very much overweight and sitting in the chair. I wasn't gonna let that happen. I you you I have I take a lot of a lot of issue with, health care providers who are giving health advice despite not taking it themselves. I I I'm not a huge fan of talking the talk, but not walking the walk. Right. It kinda goes back to, like, the book of James, like, without works is dead. It's like the evidence of your faith is that you work. Yeah. Yeah. So we trying to balance that while going through school, being a good dad, being a good husband, carve being intentional. Right? Going back to intentionality, it was all it had to I had responsibilities I had to step up for. If I didn't, something else would or something would replace me, and we couldn't do that. It's it's God's given me a task, and so I have to I have to achieve it.
Keith Vance: Michael, how much time do we have left? I don't want my daughter mad at me. That's fair. Probably thirty minutes. Right. We can we can do this. There's plenty of time. Yeah. That's good. Just, when we're getting close, just give me something. I don't want Brooke mad at me. Alright. My daughter is the female version of me. Oh, gotcha. So and we work together. So when I come into the room, I, like, kinda, like, size her up. It's like, hey. Are you having a bad attitude today? Because I'm having a bad attitude. We both can't have a bad attitude at the same time. You don't get to both have it. So if she's got a bad attitude, I change my attitude. There you go. I'm not I'm never allowed to have a bad attitude if she's got one. That's quite a skill as to be in a good mood despite nothing to be in a good mood about. She is me.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Michael Michael knows. But the apple fell straight down from the tree?
Keith Vance: How does it feel to get in bed with your father-in-law every night, Michael? Well, that's a wild thing to say. Believe me, somehow somehow, my marriage ended up being basically the mirror opposite of your marriage. Brooke is you, and I'm I'm Karen. That's it. That's so funny, dude. It's so hilarious. How about that? Alright. So I wanna move from
Keith Vance: the discipline of being in school, becoming a doctor,
Keith Vance: life as a father Yeah. Your new dad Yeah. Like, the the the fears, the failures, like, all that stuff there, like, the responsibility.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: What's stressing you out today? You know what's stressing me out is the, the standard that fathers carry in the home from the Christian perspective. Let's talk about it. So the the a a Jesus is the standard of what a man ought to be, of what an individual ought to be. He's the prophet, he's the priest, and he's the king. Right? Well, there's the the mirror of a marriage is Christ in the church. Or rather, the marriage is the mirror of Christ in the church. That's the original, and we are the mirror of it. So Christ is the prophet, priest, and the king in the marriage of Christ and the church. And a marriage between a man and a woman, the husband ought to be prophet, priest, and king.
Keith Vance: If you are prophet, priest, and king, that means you're teaching to some extent. So pause Yeah. For people who may not know what prophet, priest, and king are or represent.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: What are those? Yeah. So we have the the the king, the overseer of the entire nation, the one who governs all the things, who regally determines the direction of a nation and cares for the citizens within it. Prophet is the one who is not necessarily foretelling, but is definitely forthtelling. Foretelling looking downward or forthtelling predicting according to patterns. And then priest is the expositor of right teaching. And so we're supposed to be as husbands, not a, not evil in the way we have kings. So back in the, the the ancient times, you had Judah and Israel, and they had good kings and they had bad kings. We're supposed to be the god fearing good kings, the ones who keep Christ at the center of our of our family, of our life. And we're supposed to rule that way, not in an overbearing, crushing kind of way, but in a, in an encouraging, in a gentle, in a redirection towards Christ kind of way. We should be a mirror image of them, of him. And we're supposed to Speaking of kings Go.
Keith Vance: Christ is referred to as a servant king. Mhmm. So when you talk about that mirror, just to give you a picture, a servant king in regard to our role as leaders, we are to serve our wife and children. Even though we're the strongest one in the room, we use our strength to serve. Right? Yeah. Jesus washing the disciples' feet. All that good stuff. So if you just picture these things, picture Christ.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: How did Christ do it? And that's our example, and that's our goal. That's right. That's right. So we're supposed to be prophet He didn't come he didn't come to be served. He came to serve. To serve. Man, it's good stuff. I'm glad I'm It's one of the most humble things. Thankful for where we're going with this right now. Yeah. So go ahead. Didn't mean to cut you off. No problem at all. So so if we're supposed to be because we're talking about, like, what's stressing me out? And that's why I'm laying all this groundwork because it puts into perspective the the single point. If we are supposed to be prophet, priest, and king, and we're supposed to teach, the bible warns that the standard for teachers, they will be held to a higher standard. Teachers and leaders are supposed to be beyond reproach. So the standard for a father of a husband is to be beyond reproach. We have so much pressure to not screw up because there's this crazy trickle down effect. When we set the standard of a high standard in a gentle way with our families, in intentional way with our families, they will come up to that. If we set the standard incredibly low, they'll come up to that too. They just won't achieve what needs to be done. And so the the the stress of being a husband and a dad is I have to be the caretaker for my family. I have to set the tone for my family. If I'm freaking out every single day, if I'm not relying on the Lord every single day, then my family won't either. And my wife actually convicted me on this recently. She like I said, an incredible woman. An incredible woman. And, I didn't know what I was I didn't know who I was getting to this extent when I first married her. We are beyond blessed. She, my my daughter was was, just stressing out over,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: over a toy or over a dress or something like that the other day, and she just needed time. And so I'm like, just go back to your room for a little bit. Get a little bit more sleep. Like, it's it's 7AM. They woke up for breakfast. Just go back, sleep a little bit longer, pray a little bit, you'll be good to go. And my wife was like, don't do that. I said, what do you mean? What do mean don't do? They'll do what? She's like, you need to pray with her. You need to show her what it looks like to actually lead her in prayer. She doesn't necessarily know how to do that. And I'm like, well, I've taught her how to. Shouldn't she know how to do it by now? She's we've prayed with her every single day since she was born. She's five years old. That's about fifteen hundred days. She better know how to do it a little bit. The wife's like, no. You need to guide her. And so she's like, go in there, pray with her. And then if you and then if she still needs time, give her the time. I'm like, okay. Cool. So I go in, and I'm like, hey. I talked to my five year old. I'm like, hey. I, I forgot to do something, and your mom corrected me on it. I need to pray with you. And so I prayed over her and just kept it really simple. I said, alright. Now why don't you give it a shot to pray? She's like, I don't know how to pray. And that makes sense. Her brain's freaking out. So she she would struggle with praying in that moment. So I helped guide her through a simple prayer, and I said, alright. Now you take your time in here. I'm gonna go eat breakfast with everyone. And when you're ready, come join us. Just take your time. It's okay. Spend some time with God. And she comes out about twenty like, I leave. She spends her time crying. She comes back out, and she's like, dad, I said the Lord's prayer. Because we've taught her the Lord's prayer, so she knows she knows that whole breakdown of the father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. So she said that. She comes back, and she's like, I feel a lot better. Thank you. She sits and eats breakfast with us, and I go off to work. And, and so the standard is, like, I I have to make sure that I'm returning my kids to the right direction. I'm supposed to point them in the right direction. I'm supposed to guide them to Christ. And so it is stressful day in and day out. If I don't provide for my there's another verse too. It says if you don't provide for your family, you're worse than an unbeliever. That's terrifying. So that takes that financial load. You gotta make sure you're doing it. You gotta make sure you're providing for your family monetarily, spatially. You gotta have a home for them. You gotta have clothes on their back. They gotta have freedom to do the things. They gotta be taught. They have to have community around them. They gotta have food in their bellies. That's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot of pressure.
Keith Vance: Which one's easier for you? Which one's harder for you? What do you mean? Which Out of all the roles that you're supposed to be fulfilling as a dad and a husband, which work is easier? Which work is heavier? I think I think the easiest one,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: for for me is probably the the king side of it, not the prophet or the priest. Because if you're gonna be a prophet, you have to be attentive to a lot of things. You have to be able to just notice the patterns and approach and then react appropriately. If you're gonna be a priest, you have to be so dedicated in the word day in and day out that has to absorb every thought that you're having. You have to be first to prayer. You have to be first to establish those things. And, admittedly, I don't I don't not that quick on those things. I'm a lot more of trying to solve it myself first. I'm notoriously terrible at solving myself solving things myself first. So I think I learned at this point. But then the king being able to to, like, set what the standard of the family ought to be, say, like, I want the family to go in this direction, I can lay out that plan. So But I won't always I I I struggle with the making sure that I have my plan, but I put God in front of that plan and let him actually guide the process.
Keith Vance: Have you ever
Keith Vance: done what you're supposed to be as a father because they're watching you, but you're just doing it to check the box for them to see it. So for instance,
Keith Vance: praying because you're supposed to because they're watching you or reading your reading the word because you're supposed to, but you're just checking that box, but you're not it's not it's not for the right reason yet. It's just they're watching me. I'm just doing this as my routine. I'm gonna check this box. Have you have you experienced that yet?
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I because so one thing I'm I'm very grateful for is God's put a lot of elders in my life, a lot of people who've made mistakes in the past that, I don't wanna replicate. I don't wanna do what the same mistake they've done. I'd rather make my own mistakes or hopefully make no mistakes. That's gonna happen, though. And I've been warned about that exact thing enough times that you can't put on the facade of faithfulness.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And even if you're doing it, not always with with the correct intention like, might begrudgingly say, I'm gonna stop all the work. I've been in this awesome workflow all day, but I need to stop so I can read my bible with my kids or read my bible on because I haven't had god time, which means I'm egocentric as opposed to to god centric at that point. I've been warned about that enough that I haven't found myself slipping into that. Although, probably this next week, I'm gonna notice it a lot more now that you've kinda queued me into it.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: But I don't I don't find myself doing it as a facade. I do it out of obedience. And the Jesus tells a parable of two sons. The first one says like, the the father says go out and tend to the fields. And the first one says, yeah. Okay. I'll I'll go do it. And father checks in with that son, and the son's not doing it. So the verbally obedient was not visually obedient, was not actionably obedient. The other son, he says, go tend to the fields, and the son says, no.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: And then the father looks out later and sees that son tending to the fields. And so Jesus poses the question, which one is the obedient son? So I don't I think it I don't think it it matters how begrudgingly you are you are obedient. We wanna obey with a happy heart, absolutely, but obedience for the glory of God doesn't always bring isn't always a happy moment. It's much easier to to give my kids the candy and not give them the good food. It's much easier to make sometimes the just put them in front of TV and let let TV handle them for a few hours rather than engaging with them after a long day of work.
Keith Vance: Talking to you, I'm just remembering, like, how I raised my kids and having devotion time. But it's something that we did because they need it. It's something that supposed that I'm the one supposed to be doing it, but I'm just doing a check the box Mhmm. As opposed to as I've grown, maybe we don't have devotions around the table. But if I've spent my time with God in the morning, it can't help but be an overflowing in those everyday moments. That's right. There's a diff there's a difference there. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm just looking back at at how I raised my kids and, like, the things I got right and things I got wrong. You know what mean? And I think those the things that go wrong, it's it's so easy
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: for for husbands, for fathers to allow those things to crush them or make them feel disqualified from the profession Mhmm. From being a dad, from being a husband. And I don't think that's what the gospel of grace teaches at all. Like, Jesus Jesus welcomes us despite who we are and in spite of who we are as opposed to because of who we're gonna become. He doesn't welcome us in because if he's because when he pulls on our hearts, he's gonna make us in this awesome super rich person. He saves us because he chose to save us. He pulled us from the flock. He pulled us as this as the elect, as those who are meant to be his. And his high priestly prayer in in John 17 is those in my hand, the father cannot like, no one can take away. Those are mine. Those are my sheep. They know my voice. And it doesn't there nothing that necessarily qualifies you to be a dad or a husband. It's there's enough grace that those heartstrings that are pulled and you're like, oh, man. I messed up. If you can even acknowledge that you made a mistake, then you know your heart's in the right place. People who don't care do not acknowledge mistakes. People who care acknowledge mistakes. So you get to have peace that, like, yep. I messed up. Either I'm gonna define my life by that mess up, or I'm gonna acknowledge it, grow beyond it, handle it better the next time around. And then when you screw up again that time, do it again. But acknowledge it, adapt beyond it, handle it better the next time around.
Keith Vance: So you got three little ones. They're in other room. Can't They are. I can hear them under us. I can hear them going going potty there.
Keith Vance: Out of everything that I've done in life and been in life, like if something was to define me, like, I'm a dad.
Keith Vance: Yeah, brother. Not a husband? My dad and a husband. Now I'm a grandfather. There we go. You know I mean? Dad, husband, grandfather. Like, thank God we talked about your work. You know, God has a specific place and a thing for you to do. Yeah. I think as men, he baked into us to be those providers, protectors, like those things in us to design us to be who we're supposed to be. And then when you have the opportunity to be a husband, you have the opportunity to be a dad to three little girls, and you get to work those things out, it's so satisfying. It's it's what we're designed for when we do it according to his leadership the way he did it. Right? When we make ourself the king, when we make ourself all those things, that's when things spiral out of control. Right? We we we pursue him. Right? And then and then they follow follow dad, you know, follow husband as we pursue him as he's he's he's the focus. That's right. So even though it is mess scary, Scary having to be the one to be responsible for those little ones and guiding them. But It is no small task. I wouldn't
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I would have no other life, bro. Yeah. I would agree entirely. Like, if if I I think who asked me this question? A lot of a lot of kids in my generation will ask the question, like, if you could go back to any year, what would it be?
Keith Vance: And I have some friends who are like, oh, 2016 was, like, the best year of my life because that's like, that was a pretty cool year. There was some cool stuff going on in that year. Technology hadn't completely decimated,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: attention spans and things like that. It was so it was a cool year. And they asked me, like, oh, yeah. 2016. I go, that was a good year, but I didn't know my wife then.
Keith Vance: So
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I was like, could you go back to any years? Like, I I can't. Because if I went back to 2017, I wouldn't have any of my kids right now.
Keith Vance: If I went back to 2021, I wouldn't have two of the three. If I went back to 2024,
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: I wouldn't have one of the three. And I can't imagine life without all of them. Sure. You know, God has been so so gracious despite my failings to to trust me with the stewardship of of these little lives. And that is it's such a blessing. It's such a humbling thing to know that myself as a as messed up a person as I am, that I get the chance to to rear to fill my quiver and and and bless the next generation with three super cool kids. And if we get more, then that'd be incredible. And if we are done at three, then so we that's the Lord's will. We are blessed to even have the one. We, we didn't start out with one. We, we actually started out with miscarriage. And so that was that was tough for us. Then we have our rainbow baby, and now we have the three beyond that. And then we've got a cool one up in heaven that we get to meet one day. And, peaceful. It we get to have peace. Like, The Philippines, I believe. I think it's in Philippines. Peace that surpasses all understanding. Yep. That's what comes with the gospel. Good.
Keith Vance: So you're 26? 29. You're 29. 29.
Keith Vance: Glad I reached out to you. Likewise. I'm looking forward to developing a friendship with you. And at 29 years old, it's inspiring that you've connected a lot of dots so quickly. We're talking about things that I wouldn't that I wouldn't have thought I'd be talking to with a 29 year old doctor kid. Doctor. Doctor. Kid. 29 years old. Yeah. So I think that's says a lot about you and your spiritual growth. Says a lot about you and how you're raised. Like, I'm sure your dad's an amazing guy. Pretty cool. I like him. Yeah.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: He and our friends. And then even your
Keith Vance: your wife, your help meet there, just being around here for those last few minutes where you and I have good good wives.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Yeah. Yeah. Good wife is hard to find. Yeah.
Keith Vance: Any other thing you wanna hit before we wrap this thing up? We've covered a whole ton. Anything more? Talk another I'll get on a whole new rabbit trail. We'll talk for another four hours. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Let's close it down. I'll keep my daughter from being upset with me. My son-in-law is gonna be on time. I'm gonna give you some money in your hands. You can take it to her for a birthday. Little bribe there. You and I will get some lunch. Let's do it. We'll go hit a lift. What do you wanna do for a lift today? What's your what would you do today on your training? Oh, man.
Dr. Ethan Surprenant: Yeah. I'm following a a program right now to get a 40 inch vertical before I turn 30. Yeah. So I have until December to pull that off. I don't wanna jump. I don't wanna jump today. If you don't wanna jump today, then I would, we'll see what you got equipped, and we'll kinda make it up as we go. I'm good with that.
Keith Vance: Race.