Achieving true greatness through gait and balance.

Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France bicycle race seven consecutive times.

For seven consecutive times, Lance Armstrong's on-scene chiropractor was Jeffrey E. Spencer, MA, DC, CCSP.

Put two and two together, and what do you get? An answer suggesting that Spencer clearly knows his stuff.

Among the things Pasadena, Calif-based Spencer knows is that a stellar performer like Armstrong is not in a class by himself. Everyone, he asserts, possesses the potential to scale the loftiest of heights—if not as an athlete, then perhaps as an entertainer, a captain of industry, or a giant in the field of education, politics, or science. You name it.

Unfortunately, few ever manage to reach the pinnacle, held back by—or as a consequence of—illness, injury, or both. Spencer finds that tragic. For that reason, he has devoted his broad-scope, full-spectrum practice to helping people overcome the conditions preventing them from achieving true greatness.

Spencer's help comes in the form of manual therapies and physical medicine modalities addressing every aspect of musculoskeletal rehabilitation, combined with ancillaries such as nutritional counseling and career planning. An overarching goal is the creation of energy-efficient, strain-free motion. "The most fundamental aspect of living is to be able to move correctly," he says. "If you can move correctly, you can conserve energy, which leaves more energy available for you to be productive. It also limits the risk of disruptive injury while increasing longevity and the capacity to push through barriers."

Energy conservation is important, too, so that one can endure the rigors of the day without sputtering to a halt around midafternoon. "If the body is in distortion and has altered gait, it's like having your foot on the gas pedal with the gears in neutral—you're consuming tons of energy while basically going nowhere," he says.

Gait Crashers

A leading cause of wasted energy is compromised gait, Spencer points out, noting that health and correct ambulation are intertwined.

Athletes can find balance with insoles and orthotics, such as ParFlex Spinal Pelvic Stabilizers from Foot Levelers, designed to support all three arches of a golfer's foot.

"If you have a distortion in gait, strain will be placed on the internal structures—strain they are not designed to handle," he says. "As a result, organs are prevented from functioning correctly. This incorrect functioning sets the person up for sickness and turns him or her into an injury case just waiting to happen."

Spencer is dismayed by misconceptions regarding the relationship between spine and gait. Often these erroneous ideas are premised on the body being composed of systems, plural, instead of a system, singular. "The body is an interconnected whole," he says, and, as such, spine and gait go hand in hand. "They share the connective tissue, they share muscles, and they share the skeletal system. So, if you have a distortion in any one of those locations, you're going to have reverberating change as to where tension is distributed and loads are placed," culminating in a squandering of energy and, worse, possible injury.

Seeing the body as a unified system opens the door to better decisions about which pathways to health and performance the patient needs to embark upon, Spencer asserts. "Never view the person's complaint as being the origin of the problem, since everything is interconnected," he says. "If a person is symptomatic in one area, that's more an indication that there's probably tension somewhere else in the body. Because those parts don't have normal tension, they don't know what to do in the context of full-body function. Or they don't have the capacity to be able to maintain their correct geometry to be able to create energy-efficient, strain-free motion."

Winning Streak

Spencer's philosophy of care has been strongly influenced by the research and writings of Jim Oschman, PhD, author of the book Energy Medicine: the Scientific Basis. Says Spencer, "Dr Oschman's work has given me insight to how I can access the body in a more effective way to achieve better clinical outcomes with less effort and in less time."

Spencer himself, by the way, has a new book out. Published by Health Communications Inc (printers of the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series), his 288-page motivational tome landed in bookstores this past June and is titled Turn It Up: How to Perform at Your Best for a Lifetime. "It brings a deeper level of insight into the chiropractic world, even though it's not really a book devoted to chiropractic care," he insists. "It's really an information-rich manual that delves into the methodology I use to create and perpetuate consistent top performance in people's lives."

Prefabricated orthotics such as Powerstep ProTech from Stable Step Inc help to stabilize spinal adjustments and relieve heel and arch pain.

On paper and in clinic, Spencer's message is the same: All humans are born as winners. "It's just that we don't believe we're winners, or that we haven't discovered how to become one, which is why success has to be a learned behavior," he explains.

A behavior Spencer himself had to learn—or, rather, unlearn—involved reaching conclusions about patient health status based on outward indications. "Asking the patient how he or she feels can't provide the insights needed to gauge the erosion of the functional reserve, an erosion that occurs silently while the body is compensating and trying to strategize getting through life," he says. "My job in working with top performers is to identify and purge those silent time bombs so that we don't have to deal with a symptomatic episode at some inconvenient or inopportune time in the future. I'm a big fan of wellness care—wellness care being defined as finding where in the body the kinetic chain or organ system breakdowns are and dealing with them before they can trigger a cataclysmic event that significantly alters functional capacity."

Recognizing that patients do not live their lives in a clinical setting enables Spencer to provide the help they need based on where they actually do live, which is in the real world. "Life occurs in a three-dimensional environment, translating space against gravity every moment of the day and night," he says.

Looking for Trouble

And because his patients live in the real world, that is where Spencer often must conduct his examinations of them. Thus, his "office" can be anything from a bench on the sideline of a stadium to the floor of a bus parked along the route of a marathon.

Spencer's methodologies during preliminary evaluations boil down to palpation, observations of tissue texture and suppleness, and putting the patient through a battery of short tests for range of motion and movement patterns. Identifying strain points that can create disability in function and locomotion is a preoccupation.

"First, I look for distortion in the body, such as scars that can bend, warp, and tighten the body and affect the way it moves as a single entity," he shares. "I look at hypertonic muscles that can create asymmetrical presentations in the body and favor unilateral rather than bilateral movements that share the distribution of load during movement. I look at tight muscles that alter posture and create inhibition of their antagonists. I look at very specific movement patterns in terms of how the job of movement gets done—to make sure that the muscles designed to create the movement are working correctly and there are no substitutions.

"As far as gait, I look for pronation, excess varus and valgus, different tones in the Achilles tendons, tightness in the abductors, atrophy of the vastus medialis—all the functions that suggest the body is not working cohesively in terms of being able to create energy-efficient, strain-free motion in gait."

It takes Spencer perhaps less than 5 minutes to produce a snapshot of the patient's bodily condition. "From there," he says, "it's a matter of creating an individualized solution for the patient."

Tools of the Trade

Because many of the evaluations Spencer performs take place in the field, treatment must be provided there as well. Often the most challenging cases are those that present themselves during the 23-day Tour de France. "It's the most violent environment imaginable," Spencer says of the internationally renowned bicycle race. "The riders sustain puncture wounds, broken bones, lacerations, flap wounds, road rash. And, rain or shine, healthy or injured, they get up each morning and hit the road once again. They are some of the toughest people on the face of the earth."

Regardless of the circumstances necessitating care, Spencer contends that clinical choices always should be geared toward restoring function to the highest degree so that the patient can experience a long, vital, productive life. With that in mind, Spencer has developed a tool kit of modalities and techniques. "These are the ones that best help me to start dedistorting the body and make sure the cells are talking to each other so that systemic cooperation is occurring for body growth, repair, and energy production," he says.

Contained in Spencer's tool kit are: adjusting; an Erchonia ultra low-power cold laser (he used it in the last six Tours de France to activate inhibited muscles and relax those that are hypertonic, favoring it because of its quality, versatility, portability, and efficacy); frequency-specific microcurrent; earthing technology; the NRG system; kinesio tape; TENS; foot beds (such as eSoles and Superfeet Premium Insoles); and a Sunlight Saunas infrared sauna (to facilitate detoxification).

At the conclusion of every treatment session, patients receive from Spencer a "homework" assignment. This typically consists of individualized stretching, strengthening, and coordination exercises to challenge the whole body, not just specific muscle groups. Says Spencer, "I give homework to make sure the client is creating the environment his or her body needs to achieve a higher level of function or to return to preinjury status or better."

Rise to the Top

Spencer—who in 2004 was voted the International Chiropractors Association sports chiropractor of the year—has been in practice since 1988, the year he graduated summa cum laude from Cleveland Chiropractic College. Five years later, he picked up his certified chiropractic sports physician (CCSP) credential from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and, in 2000, he completed a program of the Institute for Functional Medicine with regard to the application of functional medicine in clinical practice.

Before receiving a bachelor's degree in physical education from the University of Southern California (the same school that later conferred upon him a master's degree in that same field), Spencer basked in a summer of glory as a member of the US Olympic Team at the 1972 Munich, West Germany, Games. He competed in two cycling events: individual sprints and the tandem.

For the first decade of his chiropractic practice, Spencer worked almost exclusively from a brick-and-mortar clinic. For the last 8 years, however, he has performed his wonders mainly on the road, traveling with his clients. Those clients have included—in addition to Tour de France competitors—Olympic athletes, PGA golf champions, NASCAR winners, major league sports stars, triathletes, top-seed professional tennis players, big-time celebs, and household-name business leaders, among others.

It matters not to Spencer what a patient's occupation is, since to him, "the human body is the human body, and we're all capable of top performances," he says. "Beyond having a body, the one thing everyone who comes to me has in common is a desire to be a consistent top performer. That's really what my job is all about. I'm not a sports chiropractor. I'm a chiropractor who helps people reach the top and then stay there."

Rich Smith is a contributing writer to Chiropractic Products. For additional information, contact .