By Steve Davison
Over the years, since the late 80's I've been involved with physical therapists, athletic trainers, coaches, and high performance athletes. The goal has always been to develop a program, or regime, which increases and enhances human performance. I have yet to see the Impulse fail in this regard under knowledgeable management. However, in the late 90's I started working on how to get results faster, both in teaching the subject and attaining ultimate results for the user or athlete. With increased learning performance as a goal and working with therapists, trainers, and coaches over a evolutionary period of several years, the STAR philosophy emerged in the early 2000's. Refined to the point presented here, you'll get faster results using STAR with Impulse than without STAR.
STAR is important because everything done with the Impulse is neurological. Proper spinal alignment is critical to efficient flow of electrical communication with both afferent and efferent signals. It is critical for the maintenance or development of an excellent postural synergy motor program. It is critical for the execution of an excellent focal set motor program. Balance, sight, and reflex response are all critical to excellence of motion. Hence, I call this our Critical Philosophy.
STAR is a guide and mental checklist of proper and efficient motion in exercise. It is productive as a discipline in any form of exercise. The description below describes the components as they relate to our stabilization program.
 Stance/posture: The initial and most important aspect of any portion of an exercise regime is stance. It governs everything that you incorporate into your posture. Your stance governs how you task your vestibular (balance) mechanisms, and therefore your core stability (am I vertical or leaning toward one side or the other?). Be sure that you pay close attention to foot placement and weight distribution on each foot as depicted in the exercise descriptions of each exercise. In general, all exercises should be accomplished with body weight loaded on the balls of your feet (the heels will just barely be on the ground, about 20% body weight on the heels). This stance will naturally load the abdominal and thoracic ar eas in stability. Once you have identified a proper stance mentally, decide to do the entire exercise session with proper posture. Pay particular attention to cervical, upper and lower back alignment. Each exercise repetition should be accomplished with excellent form or beauty in mind. As the body fatigues, the mind will convince the body that posture is not an important issue. It is, and therefore training the athlete to have the maturity of maintaining posture while fatigued is extremely important. Posture governs your efficiency of energy flow. Lose it, and you will lose good flow. Always keep in mind the importance of posture from the first repetition to the last in each exercise. As the exercise sessions progress, use each session (each repetition and each exercise) to better develop your ability to govern your energy levels required in order to maintain proper posture through the entire exercise.
 Targeting: The end result of motion is to move something from one place to another. Productive motion is the result of acquiring by some sensory mechanism (sight or feel) the object to be moved (such as a baseball in your glove hand or just where your left foot is in space as in beginning a step), then acquiring a target in space where that object is to be moved, and finally placing that object where desired. Proper targeting can only be accomplished if proper stance is in place and therefore is secondary to stance. However, in functional and efficient motion, muscle activation is predicated on a target in space having been acquired. The body must move while having an acquired target in order to develop functional confidence in motion.
Activation: Understanding the proper amount of energy to maximize efficient propulsion is critical in any physical activity. Too much energy, too soon, and you lose stance, and ultimately, the energy required to maintain posture. Too little, and you don’t move well. The purposes of these exercises are to create higher levels of energy through the entire movement experience while developing an instinctive knowledge of the resources available to complete the task at hand. Developing the mental maturity to control stance and posture while fatigued will be an important asset. Each repetition should be accomplished with enough energy to accomplish at least two repetitions per second through the entire circuit. In actuality this will not happen, as your judgment of energy reserves will generally be incorrect (a natural human phenomenon). However, each exercise completion will give you a fresh view of how you judged your energy bank. This new knowledge will help you in governing your aggressiveness in activation of muscle. If using the Stabilization Program, judge your energy output at 50% of your perceived max power. If using the Anaerobic Endurance Program, judge your energy output at 75% of your perceived max power. In Super Training, go as hard as you can while maintaining proper stance and posture with no pain. When fatigue challenges your STAR, powering down on activation, to a level that will accommodate correct stance/posture, will preserve your STAR. Do not sacrifice stance/posture for activation…just power down and finish the exercise with excellence of form. As time progresses, you will develop greater power and energy management potential, ultimately finishing each exercise with power and stance/posture equilibrium.
 Release: Improperly powered release of activation is a waste of energy, creating a loss of stance, posture, and ultimately balance. It is the antithesis of activation. As fatigue sets in, this is the area where loss of control will manifest itself first and usually without warning. The symptoms are a desire to change stance/posture. Being self aware of these tendencies to change stance/posture is possibly the most important aspect of exercise with this technology. The release should always be a controlled smooth transition from activation to tracking the sled for the next repetition. With each repetition you should prepare your body for the next activation. This means being aware of your STAR and the need to be in the proper position physically and mentally for the next activation. Either weak or aggressive release will cause a disconnect with the mass of the sled resulting in imbalance, causing a loss of stance/posture as you instinctively seek to recover. Seek smooth and controlled motion with good STAR and everything else will work itself out.
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