What You'll Master

✓ Why Adjustments Don't Hold

Conventional adjusting drives into the paraphysiologic space at end range. This resets both tonic and phasic muscles — but may further inhibit already-compromised tonic muscles and load joint structures in the vector of failure. The compensation returns because the mechanical reason for it was never resolved.

✓ The Difference Between End Range and Adjusting to Neutral

Both use high-velocity force — but what that force does to the muscles is completely different. End-range adjusting targets the phasic compensation. Adjusting to neutral targets the overactive antagonist tonics that are preventing return to centre, allowing the inhibited tonics to re-engage and the compensation to release.

✓ Why Stability Produces Range of Motion — Not the Other Way Around

When the joint returns to its optimal centred position, the protective system has nothing left to guard against. Phasic compensation releases. Range of motion increases — but now with stability behind it. This is why it lasts.

✓ What a Different Assessment Approach Requires

To adjust to neutral, you first need to find neutral — which means identifying the vector of failure, not just the direction of reduced motion. You need to understand which tonic muscles are inhibited and which are overactive. This requires a fundamentally different clinical question: not "where is motion restricted?" but "where is the joint displaced?"

Who Should Attend

• Practitioners whose patients hold their adjustments for a few days then return to the same pattern

• Clinicians who want to understand why driving into restriction may be reinforcing the problem they're trying to solve

• Practitioners looking for a biomechanically grounded framework for when and how to adjust

• Students and recent graduates who want to build their clinical reasoning around joint stability from the outset

What Makes This Different

Most adjusting approaches start with the restriction — find what won't move and push it. The result often feels good immediately and shows measurable range of motion improvement in the room. But the correction doesn't hold, because the restriction wasn't the primary problem. It was the phasic system protecting an unstable vector.

This webinar gives you the mechanical framework to understand why that happens — and what a different approach looks like. You'll see why the direction you feel resistance may not be the direction you should push, why adjusting toward neutral addresses the actual displacement rather than the compensation, and why that distinction is what determines whether a correction lasts.

It's about being more precise — and working with the system rather than against it.

About the Presenter

Dr. Russ Hornstein, DC has been a chiropractic neurologist for 30 years and holds his Diplomate in Functional Neurology from the Carrick Institute. He developed Adjusting to Neutral to address the root cause of persistent musculoskeletal and sensorimotor problems through tonic system recalibration.