BATR Progress and Setbacks: The Danger of the Symptom Threshold

By Dr. Logan Chopyk 

August 10, 2026

For the past few months, I have been deeply engaged with Norman Lu’s BATR dystonia retraining protocol, and the initial success has been nothing short of unbelievable. To my immense relief, entire elements of my dystonic symptoms have simply vanished. However, the path to recovery is rarely linear. Recently, after a practice session where I carelessly lingered above my symptom threshold, I suffered a mild but deeply educational setback. Here is the story of that regression.

Interestingly, much of my recent BATR work for trombone dystonia has been executed on the saxophone. Because they share many of the same muscle groups and mechanics, the saxophone serves as an excellent surrogate—yet the dystonic symptoms present far less aggressively. On the sax, I successfully tackled sustained notes, complex scales, arpeggios, fluid musical melodies, and legato articulation. Buoyed by these victories, I let my guard down. I decided it was time to attack one of my most notoriously stubborn triggers: detached, articulated passages.

The symptoms flared up almost immediately. Falling back into old habits, I tried to muscle through, operating under the misguided belief that I could simply "practice my way" into improvement. I made repeated, forceful attempts to execute the same passage, and predictably, the dystonia only tightened its grip. I was left feeling physically and neurologically "icky" afterward. Worse still, by the next day, the disorder had bled backward into my previously mastered techniques; suddenly, it felt as though I had dystonia on my sustained notes all over again.

Realizing my error, I immediately walked back the challenges and restarted the retraining process from a safe baseline. By the end of that recovery session, I was thankfully close to where I had been before the flare-up. But the experience was a shock to the system. It was deeply disturbing to witness how rapidly a single session spent above the symptom threshold could plunge me back into disorder.

If this experience taught me anything, it is how ruthlessly disciplined we must be with the BATR protocol. Hard-won progress can be erased by a single session of careless practice. Respect the threshold.