Mike Thomas was my first Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) client. He was actually the first SCI person I had ever met; and truth be told, I was terrified of the injury. Mike sustained a C6/7 spinal cord injury in a car accident in Cuba in 1998. The first day Mike was pushed into my center I wanted to run out the back door and hide until he left. Instead, I sat down and talked to him. He explained who he was and what he wanted to do. Since I wasn’t an expert on SCI at the time, I didn’t think his goals were crazy–he wanted to dance with his daughter at her wedding the following year. I said, ok!
Mike was under the care of one of the top SCI experts in the world, Dr. Barth Green from the world famous Miami Project. When Mike entered my program it was with a 5% chance of ever walking again. The traditional medical community had released Mike into the world with no lifelong treatment plan or, as we would come to learn, the dirty word–HOPE.
That first day I observed Mike tied into his wheelchair so he wouldn’t fall out of it. He had no control of his body. Initially I couldn’t figure out how to train him because I couldn’t do it in his wheelchair, so I asked myself how do I make gravity my friend? Because right now gravity is winning and Mike is losing! I concluded that in order work with him, I had to put him on the floor. So we took him out of his chair and placed him on a workout mat (eventually we developed a huge table that was wheelchair transfer height, but on the floor was how we started in the very beginning). Getting Mike out of his chair and placing him supine on the floor allowed his joints from head to toe to be in correct anatomical alignment for the first time since his injury. It is the perfect training environment for a SCI injury. Mike told me he could not move anything and he couldn’t feel anything below the level of injury. My training center had high mirrors so I asked Mike to look into the mirror so he could see what I was doing (visualization). I picked up his leg with one hand and used the other on the sole of his foot to close the chain; I then moved his leg through normal ROM and when his hip hit a certain spot his muscles fired and he almost pushed me over. Not being an expert in SCI, I reacted with excitement that he moved his leg! He explained that he did not move his leg, that the movement was an uncontrolled muscle spasm and that he was on a lot of medication to diminish the spasms. That did not make sense to me, so I did some experimenting with the movement and found that I could reproduce the spasm by hitting that same spot. In the coming weeks, with a lot of hard work, we were able to control whether he had the spasm or not. (After reproducing this technique with other new SCI and producing the same results time after time, I perfected my technique and officially named it Active Nervous System Recruitment (ANSR); this became the keystone of the groundbreaking Dardzinski Method and the sole reason new SCI were able to reorganize their nervous system and regain function below their level of injury, because they were healing).
To this day, I have personally only trained a handful of master ANSR trainers around the world. It was not easy to teach and it took two to three years to learn and understand. This degree of knowledge cannot be taught in two to three weeks. It requires hours and hours of supervision and personally working with a multitude of SCI throughout their journey towards recovery. Learning about and understanding how to teach the human body to reorganize its nervous system is what makes a true master in SCI recovery. It is this very knowledge that provided my SCI clients the ability to regain function and many walked out the door during the first 10 years of Project Walk. The approach I created, the Dardzinski Method, is about training spasms and reorganizing a damaged nervous system. It is about a master specialist adapting and redirecting the dysfunctional nervous system of a new SCI client. It’s a special partnership that done right, changes both.
At that point I knew that everything about spasms and how a new SCI healed was wrong. Mike was controlling his spasms –so they weren’t spasms–because a spasm is an uncontrolled muscle contraction and Mike was controlling his. He began building muscle mass, power and endurance. Eventually Mike was moving his legs without my help. He did accomplish his goal and dance with his daughter and my life was forever changed from that day on.
Project Walk was born from the efforts of Mike and I. Many SCI clients without hope or a chance of recovery showed up at my training center, all wanting to be like Mike. For many years afterwards I worked with numerous clients, focusing on them, matching their efforts, adapting and learning and providing hope and results. Almost every person doing some form of activity-based SCI recovery today should thank Mike Thomas for stepping outside the box and taking a chance!
Mike was my first SCI client and the highlight of my professional training career. Together we helped change the lives of thousands of SCI around the world.
Nothing has changed with the way I train SCI clients or the results, except for the name of the company, TEDD. You will be hearing more from me in the future.
Ted Dardzinski, Founder
TEDD – Therapeutic Exercise Design & Development
Project Walk SCI Recovery Center
Function First, Inc.
RR Sports Training Center