Michael Rintala, D.C.: Principles of Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS)

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you wanna take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you wanna learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
I guess this week is Michael Rintala. Michael's a chiropractor based out of San Diego, California, where he has a practice that focuses on rehabilitation, which is how I met him. In addition to his practice treating patients and training a wide variety of patients, he's also one of only 18 international instructors for the Prague School of Rehabilitation, teaching dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, also known as DNS. He serves as part of the PGA TOUR sports medicine team and the USA surfing performance committee.
This is an episode that's really dedicated to understanding the Prague School of Rehabilitation and DNS or dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, which many of you have probably heard me talk about in the past. It came up a little bit during the podcast with Beth Lewis and it's come up on a few other podcasts. It also comes up from time to time in social media when I post videos of some of the movements that we do in our DNS training. In this episode, we get into the history of DNS, which is a relatively new discipline. It's really been around less than 20 years and how it grew out of the Prague School of Rehabilitation, who the effectively the founding fathers of that school of thinking were dating back to the 1950s. We then kind of get into how the developmental milestones of an infant factor into or weigh into basically things that anyone listening to this should care about, which is how they move and how they function and how they avoid injury and maintain longevity. So this is a complicated episode in the sense that I have to be honest, I think some of the concepts here don't always lend themselves well to discussion. I think being able to watch this on video gets a little bit easier, because at least you can see some of the hand gestures. And of course, this episode will be accompanied by a video where Michael, Beth and I go through many of the foundational movements. Now that video will be available only for the subscribers, but I certainly would encourage all subscribers or even non-subscribers to sign up to make sure that they see that, because I think that's where a lot of the heavy lifting gets done. Ultimately, of course, DNS is something that needs to be felt more than watched. So my real hope is that most people try to put some of this into practice and begin to experience it. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Michael Rintala.
Hey Michael, thanks for coming all the way out to Austin to work on some DNS for a few days with me and Beth.

**Michael Rintala** (3:23)
Thanks for having me. Thank you.

**Peter Attia** (3:25)
Been wanting to sit down for quite a while, and obviously the events of 2020 kind of got in the way of that, but maybe just start for folks by giving a little bit of your background. You grew up in Northern California, right?

**Michael Rintala** (3:36)
Yeah, grew up in Northern California, and eventually went to school down in San Diego at UC San Diego.

**Peter Attia** (3:44)
What sports did you play growing up?

**Michael Rintala** (3:46)
My primary sport or the sport that I was most passionate about was tennis.
And interested in that from an early age. Played other sports, other organized sports, but tennis was the one that I was drawn to and had the passion for. So early on, specialized in that, played lots of junior tennis tournaments, trained a lot, eventually played in college.
And that obsession or passion kind of drove me to the way that I practice today. I'm a chiropractor, I'm based out of San Diego, California, as you know. I specialize in rehabilitation, sports medicine. I am also, so I have the private practice there. I'm fortunate enough to also be able to spend some time on the PGA Tour and the World Surf League Tour as part of their sports medicine crew or team. And also fortunate enough to be part of USA Surfing, performance committee, helping with assessing and training the US athletes, the surfing athletes for the upcoming Olympics.