KTC

Kairos Training Culture, known in the profession as KTC, is a full spine adjusting method taught as a training culture rather than a protocol. Dr. Brett Jones and Dr. Lance von Stade built it from a student training group at Life Chiropractic College West. The adjusting is osseous and by hand, with no instrument at its center. KTC finds ease in the joint first, then sends a fast and specific thrust into that opening. It drills the thrust the way sport drills a skill, on scored repetitions with feedback.

KTC began with a hand drawn flyer and two students who showed up at six in the morning

Brett Jones drew a ninja in a school journal during his first quarter as a chiropractic student and printed the drawing on a small square flyer. The flyer named a time and a place and almost nothing else. Two people came. He had arrived at Life Chiropractic College West from athletic training and strength and conditioning work, and he wanted the adjustment itself rather than the soft tissue methods he already held.

The group he named Adjusting Ninjas became consistent by his fourth or fifth quarter, with Lance von Stade among the first regulars. Jones borrowed the discipline from a martial arts teacher who had required him at six in the morning four days a week. One quarter, twelve students met at that hour and nobody missed a session. Jones also recorded seven Adjusting Ninjas interviews with senior practitioners while still a student, and the first of them was with Arno Burnier.

Jones graduated in 2013, was named the college’s student of the year, and opened The Source Chiropractic in Oakland. The first camp ran in Atlanta in early 2014. By KTC’s own accounting the culture has since trained more than 6,000 doctors and students across more than 300 workshops. Camps have run in the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

KTC’s founding claim is that the adjustment is a trainable physical skill with measurable properties

Jones set out the claim plainly at the 2019 Technique Summit. He had played sport through college, looked at the adjustment, and saw a physical skill that training should improve. What he found in technique class was setup and description, with the delivery itself rehearsed rather than performed. KTC exists to close that gap, and it does so by treating speed, precision, power and ease as four separate qualities that each respond to drilling.

Force plate studies describe the same gap KTC set out to close

Instrumented measurement supports the premise directly. Owens and colleagues tracked 16 chiropractic students across nine to ten weeks of a standard full spine technique course, recording every thrust on a force sensing table (J Chiropr Educ 2018;32(1):3-9). Peak forces ranged from 66 to 880 newtons and thrust speeds from 1.8 to 8.1 newtons per millisecond. Within a single session the students were consistent, holding a coefficient of variability between 15 and 20 percent. Across the course they did not reach the speed and force values of experienced practitioners.

Targeted drilling moves those numbers. Marchand and colleagues had 40 students deliver manipulations against a 350 newton target and measured accuracy and consistency again two days later (PMID 28121458). A separate pilot ran six thirty minute sessions over four weeks. It set peak force goals of 350 and 550 newtons with a thrust duration ceiling of 150 milliseconds. Verbal and visual feedback followed every single thrust (PMID 30951380). That loop of a defined target, a delivered repetition, and instant feedback is what Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer called deliberate practice in Psychological Review in 1993 (100(3):363-406). KTC calls its trained thrusts strikes. It scores them on precision, biomechanics and speed, then returns the feedback on the spot.

KTC sets the joint at ease before the thrust and credits that rule to Arno Burnier

The standard high velocity setup carries a joint to its barrier in every plane before the thrust arrives. Cervical work under that model means laterally flexing and rotating the neck over the contact until the slack is gone. KTC does the opposite. The doctor sets close to neutral, sinks into the tissue, finds the state KTC calls an open window, and sends the impulse into that opening.

Jones names the source of the rule without ambiguity. Burnier’s MLS teaching, which Burnier began giving in 1983, holds that a spine brought to maximum tension is the wrong place to put a correction. Jones describes his own practice in the same terms. “We’re looking for the ease and we’re moving towards the ease.” His stated mechanical reason is that a pre-tensioned muscle takes the irritation, so a neutral setup and a slow sink produce a cleaner delivery.

Burnier’s place in this history is teacher and influence. Jones sought him out as a first quarter student, interviewed him, and carried the ease principle into everything KTC teaches. KTC is an independently branded training culture and is not a branch or franchise of MLS, and Jones has built sixteen years of his own analysis and terminology on top of what he took. The other half of the rule is that connection precedes correction, so the doctor establishes contact and tone before any correction is attempted.

KTC trains perception in layers, from the facet to the disc to the cord

KTC organizes its curriculum as a ladder of perception rather than a list of moves. Jones taught the structure directly at a 2020 camp. Level 1 gives the doctor a facet lens. The whole weekend trains one question: which facet joint is fixated, and in which direction. Level 2 moves the lens to the disc and to adaptation patterns. Deeper work moves to the cord, where the release and the unwinding behave differently. Jones is explicit that the sequence cannot be skipped, and that a doctor who bypasses the facet stage builds on a weak foundation.

The Full Spine Certification maps the same ladder onto six domains: facet level adjusting, thoracics, side posture, disc level adjusting, biotensegrity upper cervical discovery, and energy support (KTC curriculum). Facet level adjusting alone covers posterior unilateral and bilateral cervicals, anterior unilateral cervicals, and seated cervical work. The specificity language matches. A KTC doctor clearing one side of a single joint calls it a unilateral posterior facet dysfunction and changes the vector accordingly.

KTC teaches doctors to feel the charge a displaced joint carries

Jones teaches that a joint out of position produces a palpable buzz. Bone supplies the charge. Fukada and Yasuda measured the piezoelectric effect in human and ox bone in 1957 (J Phys Soc Jpn 1957;12:1158-1162). The charge appears when shearing force makes collagen fibers slip past one another. Bone converts mechanical shear into electrical charge. That a practitioner can read a specific joint dysfunction from that charge is KTC’s claim, and Jones teaches it as a trained perception rather than a given one.

Three KTC thoracic demonstrations show the method working inside one region

Jones filmed a Thoracic Adjusting Mastery series in July 2019. Three demonstrations from it lay out the setup rules, the vectors and the contraindications in full.

The long lever heel release reaches the thoracolumbar junction through the foot

The setup treats the leg as a lever into T11, T12 and L1. Jones palpates compression at the thoracolumbar junction and tests which torque direction relieves it. A second doctor anchors the segment he intends to distract, which is what makes a long lever contact specific. Jones then tractions the leg until he meets that anchor and pulls, and the cavitation appears at the anchored level. He moves the contact up to the distal calf when the calcaneus is hypermobile. He clears tension through the hip socket first, because a force that spends itself in the hip never reaches the joint. He names his own contraindications: a hot low back, a prior Achilles injury, and ankle hypermobility.

The seated first rib adjustment is read from the breath

Detection starts with fullness in the trapezius and scalenes, then fingers to the front of the neck to localize it. The rib should rise on inhalation and descend on exhalation. A rib stuck on the exhalation reads as superior and slightly lateral, and the correction runs anterior to posterior, lateral to medial, with a small superior to inferior component. Jones stands to get above the contact and braces the spine with his own leg. He delivers at the point in the exhalation where the rib sticks. He keeps the person seated afterward, because the release is large enough to leave them lightheaded.

The third demonstration is an over the knee move for the cervicothoracic junction, learned from Dr. Katina Manning and modified. Calves at the table edge, hands behind the neck, maximum flexion to load the target segment, then a lift before the extension over the thigh.

KTC adjusts the whole pattern rather than the loudest segment

KTC frames distortion as three findings that travel together: joint dysfunction, fascial distortion and muscular derangement. Jones’s Tensegrity Series, begun in 2022, teaches the reading through tension and compression. A widened scapula puts the rhomboids under tensile load and pulls the rib heads posterior at the costovertebral joints, and the pain shows up along the medial scapular border. The primary can sit in the pelvis. In one demonstration a posterior ilium produced the slope that held the rib pattern in place.

A 2019 KTC case shows the same logic in the spine. The apex of a student’s kyphosis sat at T9 and T10, and a facet fixation was palpable there. Compression at T2 changed the shape of the entire curve. Jones adjusted T2 and the sacrum shifted under his other hand. He teaches doctors to adjust where the system reorganizes, not where the restriction is loudest. Bones, in his teaching, are levers that alter the tone of the muscles attached to them, which is the same reasoning that governs Bio-Geometric Integration and the biotensegrity reading of the body.

KTC holds a window open after the thrust and calls it integration

Jones named the interval directly in a 2019 teaching video. After the impulse lands, the system reorganizes, and that window is an opportunity to introduce a new pattern through traction, contact or breath. Breath is the cue he uses, and he reads a spontaneous deep breath as a sign the reorganization is running.

KTC builds clinic architecture around the window. Jones adjusts across three tables in an open bay, spacing them deliberately, and states that a person should have at least one to two minutes between impulses before the next input arrives. He rotates so that each person on a table is either being adjusted or integrating. The historical precedent he cites is the B.J. Palmer Clinic, where patients rested after care rather than leaving immediately, and his summary of the principle is that healing runs as a process rather than an event.

Where KTC meets the Unified Model of Tone

KTC and the Unified Model of Tone arrived at the same position from opposite directions. KTC got there by running roughly thirty seminars a year and watching what changed under the hands. The model got there by reading the physiology. Three correspondences and two predictions follow.

KTC’s open window is a reading of tone

KTC describes the setup as co-creating ease before applying force. The Unified Model of Tone reads that as the doctor waiting for the tissue to report a state rather than forcing one. The model holds that specificity is correspondence rather than force, and KTC’s setup is that doctrine made physical. The window is the moment the system’s own organization becomes legible, and the thrust matched to it is an input the system can use.

KTC’s perceptual layers are one variable sampled at different depths

Facet, disc, cord and fascia are taught at KTC as separate perceptual lenses acquired in sequence. The model reads them as four depths of the same organization. A facet fixation, a disc restriction, a cord level pull and a fascial anchor are four places where one distorted tone becomes readable. That is why clearing the deepest one so often settles the others. Jones’s own instruction to hold multiple perceptual fields at once is the model’s triangulation doctrine stated in a practitioner’s language.

KTC rejects the single technique and the model explains why that works

KTC took its structure from Bruce Lee. Jones and von Stade teach from the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, published in 1975. They call their method the form of formlessness. A practitioner absorbs what is useful from each technique and discards the rest. KTC states its ambition as the Jeet Kune Do of chiropractic. That means a doctor who can deliver a knee chest upper cervical adjustment, a toggle recoil, or a Virgil Chrane occiput lift, choosing in the moment. Jones puts the challenge as a thousand kicks each trained a thousand times.

The Unified Model of Tone holds that there is no single lynchpin in the body, and that an input can reach the whole system from many places. That position is ours, and it is what makes KTC’s eclecticism coherent rather than unfocused. The atlas, the sacrum, a seated cervical disc and a first rib can all be genuine doorways at the same time. A model built on one lynchpin cannot say that. Ours can.

What the model predicts about the integration window

KTC’s one to two minute integration interval is a clinical rule. The Unified Model of Tone turns it into a measurable prediction. On the model’s account, an adjustment delivered into ease and then given an unloaded interval produces a larger and more durable shift in autonomic state than the same adjustment followed immediately by another input. The measures already exist: heart rate variability, paraspinal surface electromyography, and thermal asymmetry across the interval.

The model predicts the bidirectional signature here as well. People who arrive with high sympathetic tone and people who arrive with blunted autonomic response should both move toward their own midpoint, and the spread across a group should narrow. That is a different result from a group mean shifted one direction, and it is the prediction the model is willing to be measured on.

Who carries KTC forward

Jones holds the title of Owner and Artistry Director. Dr. Hannah Donahoe is Caretaker of Camps and Culture. The current lead facilitator roster names Dr. Jamal Fruster, Dr. Andy Varnham, Dr. Malcolm Young, Dr. Jordan Fairley, Dr. Lance von Stade, Dr. Lydia Davis and Dr. Zach Trajhovski (KTC training roster). The programs run as Level 1 Foundations, Level 2 Adaptations, an annual four day Facilitator Camp, and the Full Spine Certification. That certification runs four days in Tucson in November 2026, caps at 30 participants, and requires twelve submitted adjusting videos across the twelve weeks of follow up.

KTC’s lineage is a weave rather than a line

Jones’s own training spans Burnier’s MLS, Professional Applied Kinesiology, Bio-Geometric Integration, knee chest upper cervical work and the Webster Technique. All five surface somewhere in the KTC curriculum. KTC honors B.J. Palmer as the profession’s original artist. It credits von Stade for the Foundation Training material, developed by Dr. Eric Goodman, whose book True to Form was published in 2016. The Chrane Condyle Lift, a high velocity decompressive upper cervical move that Virgil Chrane Sr. built over nine years and used on hundreds of patients a day, is taught as the seated occiput lift (Planet Chiropractic). Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication supplies the camp language, and Wim Hof breathwork entered the Level 2 curriculum in the mid 2010s.

How KTC relates to the rest of this library

MLS is where the ease rule originates, and reading it first makes KTC’s setup legible. Bio-Geometric Integration shares KTC’s premise that the body’s shape relationships carry the correction, and Jones trained in it. H.I.O. knee chest supplies one of the upper cervical adjustments KTC teaches, and holds the single lynchpin position KTC declines. Gonstead explains why KTC adjusts some cervical fixations seated, which is that the seated set reaches the disc rather than the facet. KST is the Koren Specific Technique, and it shares three letters with KTC and nothing more. Its founder, its instrument and its analysis are all different. Proprioception is the physiology behind KTC’s claim that a joint holding still degrades the body’s sense of where it is. Tone is the variable KTC is now naming its method after. The full index of 33 techniques sits at our techniques library.