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3. Hold for two minutes.

3. ADVANCED MUSCLE-INTEGRATION THERAPY (AMIT). AREAS FIXED: PECTORALS, GLUTES, CALVES.

I split guinea pig duties for injury reversal with a semiprofessional athlete we’ll call “Seabiscuit.” He had torn his hamstring in sprint training. I took the bullet for biochemical experiments and injections, and he tested the unusual therapies and painful mechanical corrections. From Mexico to Miami, we’d seen a lot and spent more than $100,000 already. Few things paid off.

“Dr. Two Fingers” was Seabiscuit’s single best find, and I received a text message to that effect, which ended with:

“Mate, you need to break something just so Dr. Two Fingers can fix you. Trust me.”

I’d already taken care of the breaking things, so I booked a flight to Salt Lake City and drove almost an hour to the small Mormon-dominated town of Kaysville, where the ChiroMAT office of Craig Buhler—“Dr. Two Fingers”—is located.

The walls of his waiting room are covered with thank-you letters and signed jerseys from the best of the best in their respective sports: four-time Super Bowl star linebacker Bill Romanowski, NBA players John Stockton and Karl Malone, and alpine ski star Picabo Street, among others.

Buhler approached injuries differently than most.

Unlike the majority of therapists, who treat the tight or painful muscles and joints themselves (i.e., sore lower back? → work on the lower back; painful Achilles? → rehab the Achilles), Buhler’s sought to unpeel the onion of proprioception, how the nervous system, in this case, turns muscles on or off.

Seabiscuit had nicknamed Buhler “Dr. Two Fingers” because of his unusual approach to isolating and reactivating individual muscles that had been injured or deactivated. For his highest-level athletes, this could be done for up to 700 muscles. With one finger pressed deep into the end of a given muscle (a tendon insertion point) and another finger of the opposite hand pressed into the opposite end, he would progress through a series of tests to return a dormant muscle to its previous function.

From a brochure at his clinic:

We have found that when a body part is overloaded or stressed past its capacity to handle the load, there is a predictable result. Either the muscle or connective tissue is injured, or the proprioceptive system deactivates parts of the tissue, much like a circuit breaker in an electrical circuit.

The body adapts, recruiting other muscles to take over the load. With repetition, the adaption advances. Recruited tissues get stronger, impaired areas atrophy.

It didn’t take long to demonstrate this “reactivation” in practice. Dr. Two Fingers first tested the strength of my supraspinatus (the most commonly injured rotator cuff muscle) using an FET force sensor, showed that I had the strength of Dakota Fanning, and then proceeded to reactivate it, more than quadrupling my strength.

I went from lifting 6 pounds to lifting 28 pounds in less than five minutes.

“Do you have pain at the bottom of your right Achilles tendon?” Buhler asked. He hadn’t even looked at this location, and he had pinpointed one of my most serious problem areas. He could see I was confused, so he explained:

“Your gastrocnemius [calf] isn’t firing properly—it’s turned off—so it makes sense that you have Achilles and knee pain, and most likely referral pain in your hamstring.”

And so he continued, proving again and again that what I thought was the problem wasn’t the problem. It was a muscle that had taken over for another muscle, which had taken over for yet another muscle. The original muscular deactivation could be on the opposite side of the body, nowhere near the site of pain.

His spotting ability was incredible. One world-class powerlifter who’d visited Buhler shared an anecdote from his first visit: “He hadn’t even touched me and he announced that I had weak quads. I responded back with ‘Weak quads?! I deadlift 900 pounds!’ to which Craig just shrugged and went to work.” The lifter later reviewed slow-motion footage of his pulling technique in competition and realized