Barbell Shrugged - 865 - Built to Last: Strength, Recovery, and Return to Performance w/ Brian Newman

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

This week on Barbell Shrugged, Brian Newman joins Doug Larson and Dr. Mike Lane to talk about getting stronger, recovering from hard training, and staying healthy enough to keep doing what you love. Brian spent years working in professional baseball and now serves as Director of Health, Performance, and Safety for Fort Worth Fire. He explains how he trains firefighters who don't have an off-season and might get called out in the middle of a workout. We talk about moving in heavy gear, building a program around the squat, hinge, push, pull, and carry, and why getting crushed by a workout doesn't necessarily mean you're getting better. We also get into what it takes to come back from an injury and actually perform well again. Brian explains why your wearable can't tell you everything, how to adjust training when you're not recovering, and why strength coaches and medical staff need to talk to each other throughout rehab. Whether you're training for a sport, doing a physically demanding job, or just want to keep lifting as you get older, there's a lot here you can use. Have a reason for the work you're doing, give yourself enough time to recover, and make sure the people helping you are on the same page.

Shrug family. Doug Larson here and this week on Barbill Shrug we welcome longtime strength coach Brian Newman to the show. Brian spent years working in professional baseball and now runs health performance and safety for Fort Worth Fire overseeing hundreds of athletes that need to be fit, healthy and ready to go every day of the year. We discuss how to train when you don't have an off season why the hardest workouts aren't always the ones that lead to the most progress as well as how to get back into training and competing after an injury. We also get into wearables and why having more data isn't only helpful if you actually know what to do with the data and in some cases can even be a distraction from how you're actually feeling and performing. So if you want to

get stronger, recover better and keep doing it for a long time. This episode is for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barbell Strug. I'm Doug Larsson here with Dr. Mike Lane and our man Travis Mass is in Australia right now on a very cool trip. So he's out for the day. Brian Newman, long time strength coach, former professional athlete. You work a lot with firefighters these days and we talk a lot pre-show about return to play. You're very opinionated about the kind of the spectrum of strength and conditioning out how it crosses over into physical therapy and back. It's all the same spectrum. It's all movements. And you have some very good ideas about how to kind of improve that world and the coordination between physical therapists, athletic trainers,

and strength condition coaches, getting athletes back on the field. Brian, turn it over to you. What's your background? How did you get into strength and conditioning? You said you played baseball for a long time and then you are a strength and condition coach in major league baseball with the Padres. Give us your background. First, thank you for having me. I appreciate this. Always a chance. My background, I'll try to keep this in under three minutes, not because it's extensive, more because I just get long-winded and like to talk. I was college athlete. I was a wrestler, and I played ball in college and on scholarship and then end up getting a chance to play minor league baseball for about a season and a half for a little bit. I was no good.

I sucked, but I was like to say I had a job because we had to fill a roster and prospects needed somewhere to play. And I was versatile enough that I didn't have to go get a big boy job. So I got to do that. At the same time, I went to school. I was an undergrad, dual major. So in sports and athletic training as well as exercise physiology. So I was in both kind of playing in both worlds, NETA and NSEA, trying to get certified.

on both and passed my CSCS while I was still in baseball and got the opportunity once I got released to go back and actually be a strengthening coaching coach with that same organization. And that kind of propelled forward, end up with a couple other organizations over the years and then into grad school for sports medicine. That led on to a PhD in epidemiology and specializing in nutrition. And so studied disorder eating because, well, I was a wrestler. So what's better than a disorder eating wrestler than to study a disorder eating wrestling? My wife jokes that I was patient one.

So I was my dissertation was me and that. And I just scow at her and say, no, it wasn't. I didn't have that eating disorder because we deny it. And that led down to having a 16 plus year career in pro baseball through a couple of few more organizations. and ultimately led me to where I'm at now. I'm the Director of Health Performance and Safety for Fort Worth Fire, so a few years back, I left Major League Baseball to kind of start a new adventure

and a new challenge of how do we take what we've been doing for college athletes and pro athletes for decades and introduce it into a tactical population. And it's been out. it's been done. I mean, we have, there's plenty of successful departments in technical military's had it for years. PD's had it prior. Everything.

So we, I got the chance to, with a large department, they had some questions and they kind of approached me of, you know, would this be something I'd be interested in? And I said, it sounds, kind of sounds entertaining and fun. So we started that in November of 2021, started kind of building the idea in the program here. And fast forward, we're still building. I mean, my joke is when it's fully built and it's running smoothly, it will probably be the time I retire or die, and that'll be in 20-plus years. So it's always changing to large department, 1,700-plus personnel, that single role and dual rule. So I have firefighters, then I have paramedic EMTs that are in the same department, but have different job functions.

So kind of two different criteria, two different style athletes that I have to work around with, both have different needs. So it kind of all stem from there, and that's where I live. Yeah. You look at that, oh, sorry, when you go with that tactical population, and specifically, EMS and fire, they're going to possibly have to pick up a human that's not exactly in a great position. and or they're doing it in their full firefighting gear if you're dealing with those firefighters, and then those shifts, like they're working, what, essentially every 24 to 48 hours? So how do you try to organize like the basics of the training, given the fact that they're not like

a football player that just has to worry about Saturday, you know, now that college football is back upon us? Yeah, so it really, we do. We have two different populations. we have, we don't have a in-season and off-season, a true in-season off-season style form. I have recruits as well. So it kind of all gets individualized or it all gets kind of bucketed out into different areas. I have another problem that we haven't even talked about.

I've got a department, we've got 500 square miles. So I've got 46 stations in 500 square miles. So where I'm located at our training, at our admin training, we have a gorgeous complex, and I have a ton of toys. And we have a pool and high-rise towers, nine stories, everything at my disposal here. I have a warehouse that has my own, you know, agility tested it. But I have a station that's 35, 40 miles from me. It's going to take them an hour to an hour and a half depending on traffic to get here. So we're not centralized necessarily.

So there's a lot of departments that have that issue. So it's a lot of new complexities. And I'm not dodging the question. I just got to lean into it's not, it's not just, oh, how do we train for this? So yeah, that large individual, we had one this morning. I had one of my firefighters text me yesterday. And so it's kind of free flow. They text me like, hey, can I come in first thing tomorrow?

I was like, absolutely. He's like, it's my back. I was like, okay. So he gets in and we look at him. And I was like, you know, going through his history and what happened. And, well, this injury occurred lifting a 500-plus pound individual back into, they were discharged from the, discharge from the hospital. This is not something we normally do.

They were discharged from the hospital. A private ambulance service transports him back, but they can't, they can't get him up to his apartment. So they end up calling us. So one of my stations helps out on this lift assist. And one of my firefighters Enduring his back lifting this guy helping lift this guy up the stairs

in a stair chair to his apartment. So we have injuries like that. We don't have a season. So the big picture, I train them for everybody out there that works in tactical. I'm going to preface this early. Nothing is new.

It's not novel. It's not we didn't just create this like out of nowhere and we're the smartest people in the world no it's just looking at the same things the same style athlete and just twisting one thing or dialing one knob differently so instead of training for a single competition you know i like to say the competition is the is the call we're training for every for the calls the big competition is the structure fire sure that's the fun one for all the firefighters that's the one that they they get up for um that's why they signed off want to do this. Like if you really get down to it, most of them are like, hey, I want to run into a burning building and I want to put out a fire. Like that's your traditional style thinking firefighter. And that's what we kind of train for. And that's our worst case scenarios. But I train them and we train for residency. I like to say there's two things I need to create a decent firefighter. So if I'm building a firefighter, I need two things. Everything else, I can buy, borrow a steel. And that is, can they generate leverage and are they resilient and durable? Can they post? So can they work day and day out and continually work and get the job done? Do they get hurt a lot? Are they fragile?

How often do we have to put them back together? Or are they just durable? Are they a dump truck? Can we drive them until the wheels fall off? And I hate saying it, but it's true. can you drive them to the wheels fall off for 25 years and they come get up and do it and my guys are on a 24 48 so they work 24 hours and they're off 48 hours there's a lot of other schedules out there's something to be said for some of these different schedules some have benefits some don't some it's all give and take but can we do this day and day and day out and like I said can you generate leverage at the end of the day it's all about leverage and I can take leverage into athletics I mean I did it on that side for years too a quick break in the the action here to let you know that I've just recently chosen to get back into coaching, and I specifically am looking to coach Masters Jiu-Jitsu athletes, just like myself.

I've been doing Jiu-Jitsu for 22 years and strength and conditioning for 30 years. I'm a black belt, of course, and I live that life. I understand exactly what goes into it. I understand what's like to run a family, do Jiu-Jitsu, try to tie strength and conditioning into it all and all of the ups and downs that come with it from joint pain to busy schedules, to travel, and all the things. So if you are a master's jujitsu athlete and you're looking for some support, I'm happy to give it. You can DM me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson or you can email me, Doug at barbell shrug.com. Happy to help.

Back to the show. Power, torque, everything we work on, rate of force. It's all leverage. At the end of the day, it's can I generate more leverage over what I'm moving? If I can, if we put it back in football, can a lineman generate leverage over a defensive. of the line. If he can, he wins the battle then in that period. Can a running bit generate leverage at the point of contact and beat the linebacker or the DB or whoever's coming up to make the tackle? If he can, he's getting more yardage. If he can't, he's not. So, sure, and a firefighter,

if I have a six, four, two hundred twenty-pound firefighter, he can generate some leverage. Pretty easy. He can get away with bad habits and still generate leverage. If I have a five-foot-two, 120-pound firefighter, They can generate leverage, and I'm probably going to need every ounce I can get out of them to generate all that leverage and some tricks and some biomechanics to help improve it, but they can generate the leverage. They probably can't get away with as many bad habits. So it comes into that. That's kind of the end of the day, and then can you do the job or not? that gets into how well you, the autonomic nervous system and downregulate and how fast can you recover? How quickly and efficient can recover?

You're dropping a whole lot in at the same time, which I love. And I really like leverage because that's a great way of thinking about it. Because to give you a context, like Brian, you're what, probably like 240 right now, like around 5-11, 6 foot tall? I'm like, so like you're strong enough that you can pick up a 30-pound dumbbell and straight arm it in front of you and not have an issue. but hence the whole leverage thing, he can get away with picking up the dumb way, so to speak, because you've got that excess amount of strength. But if that's a 300 plus pound barbell, you're going to definitely get more center mass on top so you have a control. So I like the way of thinking about it.

And aside from the injury side for resilience, but I want to come back to that real fast, what's like your indicators, obviously before getting injured that you consider it be a good example of like, you've got a resilient athlete here, as opposed to a non-resilient athlete when it comes to, the injury risk, recovery, whatever metrics you like to look at. So Mike, do you want the nerve side of it or do you want the meathead side of it? Yes. Go with the meat head first. If I don't understand, then I'll have you say it's slower.

Then we'll go the smart version. Okay. So the meat head side starts really without going into injury and seeing the injury happen. And okay, hey, we're not resilient. It goes into a little bit of their physicals, their annual physical, medical physical. So not a fitness test or anything like that. The first part really gets into what is their aerobic capacity for a firefighter. What is their aerobic capacity and what is their anthropometrics or their body weight and their body fat?

What I started noticing right at the bat is I call it the rules for fire. This is directly fire right now. I will take this into a college athlete or a pro athlete or a high school athlete later. But in a firefighter, it's kind of the rules of threes. 30% body fat, 30 years of age, and a VO2 of 30. When the VO2 is below 30, the body fat's above 30 and the age is above 30, we start to have comorbidity in a lot of issues. They start to have health issues.

And we, like I said, there's a firefighter. Our high school athletes, God forbid, you have a 30-year-old high school athlete, which doesn't exist, but in a 30% body fat high school athlete with a VO2 of 30 or lower, they're probably not an athlete. But in a firefighter, that is an athlete. I mean, that is one of my, I have plenty of firefighters that meet that. So we just have to move those numbers a little bit. But if their body fat will go into this and you don't need DEXA or L, you know, BIA or anything like that to measure this,

there's plenty of pen and paper body round his index works great it's not bMI it's better than bMI so that's small plug to dr drew gonzalez in a body round this index paper that he did at least measured how round you are basically if you're wait a cycle back real quick like why are we why are we talking about this like in my mind kind of like incredibly low standard for firefighters why are we talking about that low standard Yeah, I expected a much higher standard to come out of your mouth this now. We're talking about people that really aren't in very good shape at the moment. Yeah, that's across the country, majority, the number one cause of death right now in firefighters is cardiovascular disease. Okay.

Quickly followed up by cancer. Most of these are when they're like, they can be line of duty deaths, but they're happening after. It's majority of firefighters' issues or medical. medical complications or their health is from poor health. And we're kind of in a, Mike, this is kind of getting off your question a little bit, but I'm going to kind of keep it tight enough. We're in a transition zone right now. We're always in a transition zone.

I always feel like when it comes to performance or medical or something like that, like everybody's always saying, oh, we're transitioning. We're coming from one aspect to the next, from one error to the next. The fire is really in a transition zone. A lot of what I refer to as the old guard, my guys that came on, they're in their late 40, 50, 60s, they're retiring. These guys came on when you were, you know, when a lot of them were still smoking on scene. They weren't, you know, their PPE gear. They weren't going on air all the time.

They were going in, you know, they were the goodle boys. They just got it done. They were blue collar. they just came in and did it. You think of your traditional firefighter, you know, when the United States started, the history of the fire service, you know, Irish Catholic. You look at Boston, you look at New York, it's Irish Catholic. Like, that's, it was, you just do this.

It was a family thing. That's why it's still a family thing today. Like you see legacies and dynasties, you know, we have two families here that have been on in Fort Worth since the late 1800. There's always been, you know, one of somebody from that family name on the job. So you kind of, it's a family as a tradition thing. That's one aspect. The other aspect, I'm going to say it.

I'm not going to make many friends with this one, but 200 years of tradition built on no empirical evidence when we're all overing health. It's only until recently that the fire service has really put any substance into the, their health. Like for a year and in recently it's like the 90s. I'll still I'll give the 90s like but you have years and years of it's just doing the job not even it's we do the job, we do the job, we do the job, great. And it's nothing against that. It's just sometimes they're the last of a good old network of well, I can do this. Yep, you can you can. But at cost at what cost and so i'm not the guy against a firefighter i'm not like oh you guys didn't do the front no it's just they now have access they have greater access to it it's become more mainstream

you think of you know our careers you know a high performance model that existed at the top level d1s pro sports in the olympic in the olympic level and that was still as of the 2000s you know cross the country that wasn't something you would you're going to see in the olympic and the olympic level and that was still in a fire department. And so now we're looking at that. We're looking into our exhaustive, you know, we do an exhaustive physical here. I have a third-party company that does physicals. They're on, they're on location across from my office, and it takes us a year to get through all my physicals for all my guys. But we're looking at that. We're screening for, you know, right now we're screening for 13 in their physical. We're certainly 13 of the 19 presumptive

cancers. And we're trying to come up with the difference to get those last six, to be able to truly screen for those last six which essentially would take a full body MRI to do it okay well that's that's money but we're getting there um yeah you would think the numbers would be higher um the sad things they're not you know and i have i have a department in texas they're not i would love to say my department was all of them were healthy everybody in here you know is healthy they're alive you know we're we're working on it. We're making the steps to become healthier. But at the end of the day, firefighters still are grown adult. Some of them have families. They have other things going on. And the weird perception, I think we put firefighters is we think this hulking beast that's going to come in and save,

but they're human beings just like everybody else. They have problems just like everybody else. life gets in the way just like everything else. So it's more of a job. Is it more of a job? Are the guys that have come in in the last decade or so that are younger, that in much more of a way than the guys that came in in the 80s and 90s that are kind of on the older side now, like did they come in with much better health habits?

Like they had strength conditioning in high school like you're talking about. Like they had better access to information. Like shrink conditioning, nutrition is all part of modern culture right now, way more than 50 years ago. Yeah. So it is hard because the size of department we are, I have an upcoming recruit class that will start next month, and that's going to be probably north of 70 plus recruits.

So with 70 plus recruits, you're going to see a lot of, there's a lot of variance across them. Do we get those? Yeah. And I call those the blue chippers. And I met with our recruits. our recruiting captain in their office. And him and I have had lovely fun conversations.

I've said, hey, fire's going to have to start. And it's not just here. It's, I think, all the fire, all the major departments, they're going to have to start recruiting and recruiting like D1 recruiters and scouts. Like, you can't, you can't just sit back and wait for them to come to you. You've got to go find them. So if you think about that, there's only so many blue chip recruit fire recruits each year. You know, the former athlete, the college athlete that now wants to go into fire.

Yeah, we get those. And I get my fair share of them. And then I get all the way down to the person that they're not real athletic. They're more, they're very cerebral. They can get the job done. We had to recruit a few years back. And he's very not athletic. watching him do a

lunge, not a body weight lunch, was painful for me. Like, I was having to teach mechanics and body control, like, all over again. You would think that would be a very simple thing. Yep, and it struggled. And in the weight room, he struggled.

And condition-wise, he struggled. He passed, and he got through things, and he worked at it. He had a great attitude. But you put him, you bunk him out, and you put him on the fireground, and he was a savant. he knew where to be and how to be and how to move his body and how to move the line and you get the job done. Yep.

It was great. And I've seen others that are some of the greatest athletes and you bunk them out, put them on air and they can't move. Because when you put bunker gear on, you're talking about, you know, bunker gear on air. We're talking about anywhere from 50 plus to 75-ish pounds of extra weight. just depending on what you have in your pockets, the density and the thickness of the gear, what type of pack you're wearing and all that. So we can get it.

But we're going to change your center of mass. We're going to change your articulation points. And this gets a little heavy on this, but, you know, if it's not fit, if it doesn't fit correctly, the knees, they have articulation points. So if it's too tall, too long or too short, you don't have the same squatting motion.

You're in, your bunker boots are restrictive. Like, so you don't get the dorsal flexion. So you think of a squat and all of a sudden you squat in bunker pants in bunker boots. You might have the cleanest squat ever, you know, in flat or platform shoes and shorts and your, you know, squat suit on and whatever you want to do. But we hook you out. All of a sudden, you don't move as well. And when you don't move as well, if you don't have, we both, all of us on this call knows this and all listeners know this probably, full range of motion. if you don't have it, you don't have full strength.

And if you don't have full weight of your motion and full strength, you're eventually going to ask for an injury because something is working in a shortened pattern and we're over exaggerating one side and under exaggerating another thing. It's just like guys in the trucks, compensating somewhere. And so, in fact, just a point of information for those of guys listening, bunker gear is turnout here. It's the things you see firefighters when they're fully kidded up on air

means that they're not just have the air pack on, but they're breathing through it. So hence my look of, oh, Jesus, like they're going to fires and not breathing the actual clean air, but breathing in the soot and everything else. The other thing is that the SCBA,

that's the backpack, those things are hard, so you can't try to compensate with spinal flexion. So hence, if you don't got the hipside move, the knees are going to always be that first thing that has to compensate hard because, you know,

you're belted in and strapped into that SCBA, so you can't really get much flexion there. Yeah, so you think about that. We talked about leverage with the size of a body. Like, sure, everybody can bring something to the table, and I agree with that. And I can train a lot of people. I like to say I'm good at what I do.

And so I like the challenges. You know, I don't need the same person over. But yes, would I love to have six foot plus, 200 pound plus, lean athletic high aerobic capacity good anaerobic capacity you know can generate leverage can generate force and torque yeah it's an easy firefighter to work with like we can we can start getting to the upper extremes but when you think of bunker gear and being on air and now you hand me a somebody that's shorter than 5-5 and their bunker gear doesn't it fits them it's their size it's been fitted to them but it doesn't fit them a lot of my females have the tissue and this is a big

thing. They're it's not built for their body. I have males with the same issue. So they're always having to pull their pants at like at their at their thigh or their quads and height them up because how they're falling they can't they're not getting able to walk properly or they can't lift their leg up enough to step up onto the engine let alone stare. So now we put a tool in their hand or we put an inch and you know an inch and three quarter line in their hand that's charged or running you know, pressurized, pressure as water, that's, you know, pressure is it 80 pounds per square inch plus. So you've got to now advance that.

But you're still struggling just to walk in your own gear. And it's not because you're not strong enough. It's not because you don't have the range of motion. It's not because you're not an athlete. It's because your gear has just added this much bulk to you. It's another diminishing return. Now we, let's go in Texas. when the wet bulb's over 92, which everywhere else,

for athletic trainers or anybody listening, a wet bulb of 92 shuts you down for anything that day. I mean, we had a college football game that ended in a tie because the wet bulb got too high and they decided for safety to shut it down. So we're being smart, but fire doesn't get that luxury. Just because it's hot doesn't mean they don't go in.

Oh, we're not taking that call today. It's too hot out. Texas. I mean, we've run strings. We still haven't gotten any rain in Fort Worth in the last. It's been a, God, we've got to be close to a month, you know, and it's been in the triple digits every day. It's hot. And they still have to bunk out. They still have to go on the call. They still have to do it. And we still got to get recovery. So there's a lot of things going back to the road cushion. Yeah, there's a lot of things stacked against, against me, and getting these guys to be successful. there's life.

They've got, you know, they've got kids and, you know, wives and husbands they have to go home to. I would say they're tired, you know, and it's, they may have other things they want to do. They may, at the end of the day, everybody probably listening to this and you guys, we like doing what we do. We like working out. We like lifting. Weird. I was never around this too much. There's people out there that don't like that.

I did not know those people exist. but I have ran into a few. It's like, wait, you, you don't like lifting, lifting heavy shit and putting it down. You don't like sweating or working. Wow. Okay. So getting them to just move, do something, you know, be active. That's, you know, that's another company.

It's weird. It's a little different, but it's a challenge. I mean, it's just a different side of challenge of how do I take somebody that's never done anything and teach them how to do this. I used to think taking in baseball, taking a kid that's never been in a weight room. But it's athletic, it has a very high athletic talent or a high athletic skill set, we'll say,

and putting them a weight room, and they've never squated before, and teaching them to squat for the first time. It's complicated, it's tough. I found a new challenge that, and that is taking a fire recruit that's never, that's not athletic, that has no shred of athleticism in their body, has some desire to do it, but they just want to be a firefighter. Like, and teaching them to squat, and why squatting is important. It gets down to, like, the five basic movements that we do. you know, I've had the break

stuff down to very simplified things. We're going to do five things here. We're going to squat. We're going to hinge. We're going to push. We're going to pull and we're going to carry. And the carry constitutes grip strength. So it can be a carry. It can be a hang. It can be something. Anything that's going to work on holding on to something. So it's those five things because those are the five things that translate into

just about every job skill that they need to do, whether it's forceable entry, extrication, you know, advancing a hose line. tool work, ventilation, all that. So the nice part is the athlete looks different, but at the end of the day, we just changed what the sport is. It's just, it's the difference between training a football player and training a volleyball player. They're still an athlete. They still, they still have their, their skill set that they work in their sport.

You just got to translate the foundational stuff to the sport. Mm-hmm. You know, earlier you mentioned the one day on, two days off, 24 hours on, 40 hours, off. You also mentioned baseball. That's like very similar to how starters work in baseball. Like they they pitch every five every five days or whatever it is. Um, I didn't internship with the Carlottar Rockies in 2006, uh, similar to what you were mentioning earlier with the Padres back, uh, which is 2002 you did that originally. Uh, you're an intern who, who, uh, one was one and then two and then in, and then

in three, I went to Milwaukee. Yeah, very cool. Uh, but the, the starting pitchers would, they would, they would throw and then they would go inside and immediately do their, their, their hard just work out of the week. That way they had the maximum amount of time to recover before their next session. Do you guys do anything similar to that? Like do a 24-hour shift and then lift weights and that way they have like a full 48 hours almost to recover before they're back in there? Exactly like that. No. I'm actually almost trying to hit it from a different angle and that is where do we not put what I'll refer to as random acts of movement.

not going to name any formal names of competitions that have high sponsorship out there. But now there's a million of them, but our hits and our functional crazy workouts, most of them when you get away from the, when you get away from the highest elite athletes of those, they become random acts of movement, random acts of work, you know, random acts of workouts. There's no periodization to them. There's no rhyme or reason to them. It's just, oh, we're going to do this today. So trying to get, and the hard thing about the fire service is you're trying to reach a large group of individuals that have a massive amount of time to look up anything and everything randomly.

So you're having to answer a lot of, for me, sometimes I'm having to answer a lot of questions of influencers or this or that. because they saw it on, they saw it on the web. They Googled something and, oh, well, this came up. And at first, when I got here, it was frustrating. It was like, oh, man, how do we do. But then I started realizing they don't know any different. It's education. It's teaching.

And a lot of where I'm trying to reach the 1700 plus and there is teaching them to teach themselves. How do you differentiate information? How do you know what's credible, what's not? How do you know that this has been tested? So, and I'm not dodging the question, but it's one of those, it's less of because it's so hard to wrangle everybody in their shifts and some guys are on vacation, you know, and then they're gone for a week or two. And then they come back or we talk about the seasons. Well, we're coming up to a season. We don't have off season and in season.

It's not just in season, but hunting season is going to start. And most of my guys disappear to hunting season. They'll take long breaks and go out of state and go hunt. Yep. Well, guess what? That's recovery. It's not true recovery, but they're getting away for a little bit. So we can actually, you know, down cycle and we can get these things.

So what I look at is when they're on shift, not doing the craziest workout ever while you're on shift. But sometimes they swing the pendulum too far. I don't really want to work out. We might get the call that day. We might have to do this. I might have to do that. And it's more of, no, you can, I kind of have the same thing with baseball. you can train and lift and still play that day.

Like you go way back to the, way back to the early days of, you know, baseball and strength conditioning. Oh, God, you know, I'm in the lineup, I don't want to lift. I'm going to get too, I'm going to get too bulky and, you know, no. Now, I might not be a good example because, like I said,

I sucked. But I lifted, I lifted every day. I lifted in the morning. And still, if I was in the lineup that night, if I was lucky enough, still played, I, times because I lifted chest that day and I was bulk. I struck out three times because I sucked. Like, so it's kind of one of those like, you can do this. You just have to start training yourself to do this.

So do I want the firefighters to work out on shift? Yes. Does it need to be this crazy, exhaustive, you know, high intensity, random acts of fitness, knock yourself into the ground. Even the best athletes in the world couldn't recover from that workout? No. can we can we get steady state cardio that you know maybe in the morning and an upper body lift that afternoon you know

based on what we have at the station like and I'm building up the wait room's at the station so we have you know standards across that no matter where you're at the city you know what you're going to have at the stations yeah we can get that you know and then yeah and work towards hey now here's your recovery day

and that goes into your next day It's hard on a 2448 because the first, your most important day for recovery is your first day after. So it's Tuesday right now that we're talking on Tuesday. So tomorrow would be the most important recovery day. The next day, we go, but that's my go into shift day. It's my pre-day before I start shift. So you're almost always never quite, once you get behind the eight ball, you're never really getting back on front of it. So that's the argument for some of these longer, longer duration on and off shifts.

You know, you talk about a 4896. You'll hear shifts like that. You'll hear 2472s. You'll hear Kelly shifts. So you have all these different variations. Ultimately, it's getting them more off days. Does it help? Sure.

But it's individualized, meaning it all depends on what you do with it. If I have more off days, I have more potential, but I'll have more potential to not do anything that's beneficial also. and when you look at ROI and objective measures of like, hey, was this better? Yeah, it's hard to measure that because if one guy goes off in parties for three days, he's not recovering. If the other guy recovers, but ultimately, did we change anything? You know, and with our time down. So, you know, right now we've got a couple of studies that we're doing, myself and colleagues,

we're looking at, you know, fatigue on shift. So we look at, you know, fatigue on shift, you know, versus recovery. So is it really the shift that's breaking you down? Is it lack of sleep? Is it the fact that you don't recover on your off days? What's our biggest bang for the buck? Because if you think about it, just about anything is going to make a difference. It's an untapped area.

So these guys are versions when it comes to like all of this. recovery and truly like a strength training program. They've worked out, but they've worked out. Not a, not a dedicated, you know, most firefighters, not a dedicated training. And I always kind of break it down to, it's kind of three models. Do you work out? That's somebody that goes to the gym. There's no rhyme or reason.

They're changing their programming up left and right. Their nutrition's probably not dialed in. They're not really well-rounded. They might not do any similar work cardio. They kind of, they pick and choose it. There's no plan. That's somebody, I'm going to go work. Then there's kind of the next step of, do you lift, bro? Like, yeah, you got a plan. You've read a few, you've checked Instagram out. You've followed a few people for all of us that are old. We read, you know, Flex magazine or

muscle and fitness and got, you know, the craziest bodybuilding split or a powerlifting split or, you know, looked, got online and followed a block. Great. So you kind of got a plan, but there's really no end game to it. you're just kind of running along. And then are you training? Training, there's a goal. There's a specific thing. Is it a power lifting meet? Is it a bodybuilding show?

Is it, you know, is it for next season, you know, to get on the start? Whatever. There is a goal and there's a specific training plan to meet that goal. That's kind of your three. And people, you know, at different times in their life, are, if you're a competitive athlete, are moving through all three of them. Like, I've computed. Do I train every day?

No. Like right now, I got nothing to train for. So I'm kind of in the delift, bro. Like, I'm still staying on my programming and all that and my nutrition style, but I don't have a specific goal of mine. So if I miss a day, okay, cool, whatever.

So fire is kind of, they're novice to this in that training. So anything we throw at them, it's going to benefit. It's that first, it's that neuroadaptivity. It's anything out there. If we get a better recovery, they're going to improve. If we get them better training, they're going to improve.

And then we need to take those next steps of what comes fall up. So Mike, I want to answer your original question of what are those things we're saying, and I want to give you the nerd answer. I was measuring it with the recruits. The nerd answer is what can I see that was going to tell me are they going to be successful now? And that's their, I presented on a T-SAC, it's impairment. It's do they recover? So can I objectively measure an impairment gets a bad word so we can call it what I'm calling it armadillo.

I don't care what you want to call it. Call it a peanut. It's are you trending the right way? Is your body recovering over days and days? And can we adapt and change to that? Meaning can I give you enough stimulus to start adapting over time, said principle, specific adaptation to oppose demands, and we get through it? or do we get into this allostatic load where we are now too much too quickly we have this overload and you're not going to be able to keep up we're just it's going to continually break down so one thing

i was looking at with the recruits was we were looking at an impairment screen and we were doing them i was having them we created an impairment screen they were doing it twice a day and so what i was looking at is the big picture of do we need to change how we're laying stuff out because they They start at 6 a.m. my recruits. They get done about 4 p.m. Wrens repeat every day. They got a study. They have a test every Monday. And if they don't, if they don't pass, they wash out. So how my goal is I was tasked with keeping them on their physiological side, injury-free or minimal injuries or injuries that weren't going to lose this a lot of time and getting them prepared to be a operational firefighter. So getting them in shape. And now I have a long academy. Our academy here is 30. 30 plus weeks. So I get plenty of time. Yeah, 30 plus weeks. So I get from October until about May, you know, in an academy. So there's a lot of time. I get to be slow. We get to work with these things. So we're measuring impairment. Okay. Well, what I started noticing is over time, retrospect, is I can start seeing an injury about three days out. Their impairment started to increase about three days, 72 hours pre-injury. It increased other things, but every time we saw an injury, you could slip back and you could start seeing, huh, they were already starting to become impaired.

They were already starting to downregulate. They're already starting to not be resilient. Okay, does that mean every time they're not resilient, they're going to get injured? No. It just means, hey, when you start seeing these things, we need to make a change. We need to adjust something. We need to find out what it is. We need to adjust.

That's a conversation. That's where, you know, strictly, the issue goes, 80s doesn't matter. It doesn't matter anything. A conversation needs to happen. Hey, how's your sleep? Are you sleeping? Are you getting, like, sleep is two things. It's quantity, but it's also quality.

Are you getting enough? And is it worth anything? So the first question is, how's your sleep? Okay, so then my next one is, hey, have you been getting, you know, at least seven hours last few nights? Like, consistently? No. Okay. We just need to get you, like, what's going on that we're not sleeping?

Then if we're getting enough, hey, what's the quality of it? Is it garbage sleep or are we getting sleep? Are we actually recovering? Are we getting into those, you know, non-REM-3 and REM sleep where growth hormone starts to kick back up so we can recover? We can actually be stronger. Or did I just waste everything I did in the day? And you talk about your little peptide ptide psalm goblins. Did I just go bro it out in the weight room, you know, swallow down some pre-workout, you know, pop a bunch of sarms and inject a bunch of peptides thinking,

And I'm going to be, you know, the next Ronnie Coleman or whatever. And I sleep like crap. I drink. My nutrition sucks. And I'm stressed all out. Well, those four things pretty much outweighed everything I just did for that last hour and a half in the wait room. So cool. I like to go.

I played for the tie. And maybe I got the tie. Maybe, you know. But is everything lining up? So you go back to the firefighters. We go back to an athlete. you know Doug we go back to the question of is that heavy lift having that first day it depends I had plenty of athletes prior to here come in on their off day and be like hey I want to do this

today I want to do this today I want to get this recovery done you know I'm going to lift heavy this day and I would look at them with that sideways dog look and be like you're not in the line up to the area no so it's their off day and so all of a sudden it's like we got to do everything all in my off day because I'm off today. I don't have to play today, so I'm just going to, I'm going to do it today. It doesn't work like that. You know, the human body doesn't work like that. The human body is a machine.

It likes continuity. It likes consistency. If you don't, if it's haphazard, the results are going to be haphazard. So if recovery doesn't match our training and our training doesn't match our recovery, something's off. If we train so hard, but our recovery doesn't match that training. So I kind of made that comment earlier. of the craziest, hardest workout ever

that even the greatest athlete couldn't recover from. But we did, I killed myself. Well, all I did is just killed myself that day. What am I, what am I gonna gain? Because the gains, the gains and all the improvements come on the back end of that. The hard work's put in, but then now the science has to come in.

The fun part is the workout, you know, for most, anybody training, the fun part's the workout. The recovery is, it's not what's fun. The, do I need to, What do we need to do? What nutrition do I need to put it? What's the timing on it? How much sleep do I need? The quality of the sleep. Do I have to, am I a poor tissue? You know, I'm going into back to a traditional athlete. Am I a poor tissue guy? Do I have a lot of strains as frames? Do I need to spend extra time working on body movement and all that? It's not fun. Nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to sit and do 30 minutes of dynamic movement and, you know, articular rotations and work on their thoracic spine and all of this. Nobody wants to. But, you know, how much money do you want to make and do you want to have a, do you want to have that God-given talent, you know, that can we extend it?

You know, I didn't come up with this phrase in pro sports and when I was in high-level college football, but there's always going to be great athletes. Everybody, the coaching staffs and the performance staffs, all our job is just to not screw them up. like you've already got the talent look you've got that I just need to I just need to fine tune that and not screw you up and how can I and I always said

how can I buy you an extra year of your career that's great talents I'm just trying to buy you a longer career you've got the skill you throw you throw 99 with three inches of tilt and six inches of vertical movement you're going to be a great picture

you're going to be phenomenal I want to see, can I get that for two innings? Can I get that for, you know, multiple appearances in a season? Now can I get you a 20-year career out of that season? So you look at that, that's where the performance specialist comes in. So we get all the recovery. So having a 20-year career here, transitioning to kind of like the part two of the show here, we mentioned earlier that you had a lot of opinions about return to play

and any athlete in 20-year careers bound to get injured at some level. And returning and not getting re-injured is an incredibly important part of, you know, staying a professional athlete for as long as possible. What are your kind of initial thoughts with kind of where people do well with return to play and how the industry at large could radically improve that whole world? I think right now, once again, we're in a transition zone. We're in that, you know, modern day, we have a lot of data. Like everybody has a wearable nowadays.

Everybody, we're getting dashboards left and right. We have a dashboard to read. We probably have a dashboard that is the dashboard for five other dashboards just to put it in one spot. So we can look at it and decide, you know, do we train that day? We're being thrown information. Is it good? It's phenomenal. Is it bad?

Yep. Because is this right? I don't know. it's just my own opinion on it and athletes an athlete like some of the greatest athletes make the worst coaches we know that like we've seen it we've seen that transition try to happen like

oh they're a great athlete and they go into coaching and they go into this and they're horrible well they were a great athlete because they were a great athlete not because they had hard work great work ethic or they had to work hard at it they just had a great skill set sometimes we have that sometimes we have a great athlete because they have some talent and they have their hard work

and they just won't they won't say quit and sometimes you get a combination of both so where am i going with that data and where am i going with the return to forms well with all the data it's just more stuff being thrown at you if we don't and we all have been talking about it if we don't do something with it and we don't utilize it it's just noise okay you'll find I don't wear a ton of wearables I'll try them out I'll play with them for a while but I don't need a wearable day and day out to tell me stuff I already kind of know. Like it's a trend. Do I, when I change something, do I go with one?

Yeah, I'll, I want to get kind of a baseline. But after a while, I don't want the extra noise. Is it a bad thing? No. Am I against wearables? No. It's just one of those. I just, I don't want to get down that rabbit hole.

And my brain's going to go down that rabbit hole. And then all of a sudden, I'm going to start hyper-focusing on it. And now I don't get recovery. So now all of a sudden, my limbic systems through the roof and stress through the roof, neurotransmitters are going out, and I'm just adding allestatic load and overload to everything because I'm stressed out because I'm looking at a wearable telling me I'm not sleeping, or my heart rate variability is always low, but I'm managing it well.

Okay. So with all of that data, we have everything at our fingertips. I mean, we just got done talking about, you know, a couple weeks ago on, return to perform from an injury and looking at force plate data and grip strength and all these different things and being 90% of your uninvolved side okay that's one component but i remember a time with a team we were testing a lot of young non-u-s based baseball players and we were looking at we're looking at their ability to generate, you know, they're ready to force displacement, essentially.

We were, we had them on, hooked up on trap bar and gym aware, and we were seeing how fast, I'll see, my street coach were looking at how many meters per second they can move that weight. And I walked in that afternoon, and I'd been kind of elsewhere, and I kind of looked around, I paused, and every strength coach there, none of them were looking at the athletes. They were all looking at a damn tablet. So I had, I will say some of the most interesting trap bar slots I've ever seen.

Oh, they were moving that way fast. They were moving that way fast. But like, who cares? You had asshole. You were going on your asshole to get to your elbow. And I saw a form that I don't think I could ever recreate if possible. And, but they were moving. Oh, man, they were moving at, you know, meter per second square.

Awesome. they're generating a lot of force. They had a great power, but I don't know. Like, can I replicate that? Is that replicable to what the sport was? Like, what's the form? Are we going to get in? So I started looking at the strength coach.

I was like, they were all into the tablets. I was like, pull the hold up. And so we talked about that. And I was like, look, we actually have the coach. There's coach in our name, like, or, you know, especially, whatever. You got to look at the athlete. And I love the data. And this is where it all comes back down to is I love the data, but there's also the eyeball test.

And I hate to say it, but the stupid movie Moneyball and the scene where the old scouts are like, does he have an ugly girlfriend and the confidence? Like, it plays. We need both. We need the data. But the eyeball test plays. Like, does it look right? Is it, does it function? Or is it just elaborate?

I love analogies and fours and all that. Rocky Four. Rocky versus Dolph Lundered built in a lab or go to Siberia and go train out in the snow. No data, all the data. It's a movie, but who won the fight? I'm sorry, you're talking about the greatest sports documentary of all time. I don't know what you're talking about it. And I still get motivated.

And it was Ivan Drago. I don't know who this Dolph Lundering guy is. I still put the sound track on and go move heavy shit from time to time. And like it gets you motivated. But it actually plays. It's one of those, you need them both. So we can't look at something from one angle. Just like in return to performance, return to play, I kind of break it into it, too.

It's return to play and return to performance. We're getting kind of the return to movement, return to functional, return to play, and then ultimately to better than where you were before because that's the ultimate goal. And so it's one of those when we look at all of it, one of it. one of you said that I picked up on a second ago is not not get re-injured I'd love that goal I honestly if I could make somebody not re-injured I probably should be a billionaire because I found the magic and I can go sell myself on some social media be like I can guarantee you no re-injury but the problem is that's not like you're going to get injured

you're you're you're gonna injuries are going to happen if honestly if if you don't get hurt you don't get injured, you probably didn't get to your full, that you weren't on the breaking point. And I'm not saying you have to get injured to be on the breaking point. Some people are well, are well but together. So the one thing I want to touch on with you bringing that up is you can look up the injury rates of most professions and most sports. So your goal is a practitioner should be to be lower than the average. So it's one of those things like you're right. If you live long enough like the way to never get injured again is to not be alive anymore because you can't get hurt again because you're not alive to get hurt again or to never do that activity again both of

which don't sound pretty cool to me so hence like i think that is something definitely uh worth striving for yes being i like i like how you put it being under the the average of what the the norm is for that's for or that that demographic with that we want to build like you want that resiliency. You want to lower it and get there to where you can extend them, push them, and find that sweet spot. So it's the price of our range finder game or a mountain climber game. That's the three, it's Goldilocks and three bears. Too much, we're breaking too little. We didn't, we didn't stress them enough. We want to find that the porridge and the sweet spot and then maintain them there as long as we can and then find where we need to do a reload

or where do we need to we need that weak off break we need that we need to get out of the norm just to give their body ability to it to adapt and it so in return to play return to perform getting those injuries down how do we do it well just like the data just like the eyeball test you can't do it from one angle. It takes, it takes a team. It takes, you know, your AT, your PT, your physio, whatever, wherever you're at in the world, whatever they're, whatever they're at, their letters behind their name are. It takes your condition specialist, okay, it takes your nutritionist, it takes your mental health. It takes your skills coach. All of them, like, throw in, throw in your ortho and your physician, if we want to go all the way back, but we'll kind of stop.

it before it's there it's going to take all of them and the ones that are successful it's not built by a committee I'd love it to be we all want it to be built by a committee everybody has an equal voice and everybody you know is pulling the same way and all that doesn't work like that way because the committee a camel was a horse that was designed by a committee let that hit for a second that's what it was everybody put their own little two cents on and hung and nobody stopped anything, nobody oversaw it, and all of a sudden we got two humps and everything like that. So how do we build it out? You need dimmer switches. So at different times, somebody else, somebody's driving the car. And we just switch who's driving the car. You know, early on, we need to protect the injury. We need to protect, you know, maybe the graft from the surgery.

Okay, that's probably the medical side. They're probably driving more. That doesn't mean the other sides aren't doing anything. they're not involved. Yeah. They're just taking, they're just not the ones leaning right now. Okay. So if I have an upper body injury, yeah, we're working on our conditioning.

Maybe it's, maybe it's a steady state to where it's a shoulder surgery. I don't want to jar the shoulder. I don't, they're in a sling. That doesn't mean I can't put them on a bike. It doesn't mean I can't get, you know, into a zone two or, you know,

a controlled zone three and four and tax them a little bit. Lower body. We can get creative. And then as they progress, yeah, that strength coach is probably taking over a little bit more. And then we have that brackish water, that transition zone of the handoff. And the handoff sometimes is very complicated. Sometimes it's very simple. But it's we're all coming together.

How do they work best? Communication. We can't, you know, it can't be a siloed up. Okay, you're going to go over here and, oh, I think I can do that job. Or I think I know better than that. It's, you know, everybody sets their ego kind of aside, and that's hard, you know, because ego's not a bad thing. We make it, we make ego a bad thing.

We make confrontation or disagreement a bad word, but it's not. It actually is not a bad word. It's what we do from it is becomes bad. It's when we let it fester or we let it dictate things. But just because you disagree with me, hell, I was, I had a mentor that told me this. You want to be the best? Surround yourself for the best. You want to stay the best?

surround yourself with people that disagree with you. Because if I have to explain myself and justify every time I'm staying sharp, doesn't mean I'm wrong, doesn't mean I'm right. I want your perspective. Similar to that. I heard famously Steve Jobs would, with his board and or his executives, if he had people that disagreed with him on everything, he'd fire him. He's like, well, if you already agree with me and everything, like, what do I need you for?

Like, what are you doing here? I don't need, I don't need an ego, what I call it, an ego stroke, you know, vortex where you're just telling me I know, okay, cool. I've got my own self for that. Like, I can go home and sleep just fine, go like, how, I did a great job today. That's what I'm mirror for. But disagree with me. Like, bring a different perspective. I might not like it right off the bat, but convince me of it.

Like, or explain to me, because maybe it's an area that I'm not strong. I can't be, we can't be the master of everything. We can't know everything about everything to the depth that everybody knows it. Like, it's pretty tough to do. And if you do know that, I hate to say, you're probably not a strength condition coach, and you're probably not an athletic trainer. At the end of the day, you're probably not in either one of those professions because, you know, that much about everything.

So it's meeting, it's communicating, it's getting early and making a plan, but it's also being adaptable. And that goes into fire, too. Like, how well can you adapt? adapt. It's these aren't rigid situations. You know, I had another mentor that say it's not a joke. It's not medical perfection. It's, you know, it's medical practice. And so it's one of those how do we how do we, how do we? Yeah, I know, it's kind of bad, but like how do we adapt from this? So every day like even, even for me and I guys told you earlier like I'm the

string position, go to and the AT here and kind of building it. So it's me just talking to myself when I transition somebody. But sometimes I transition. And it's like, I have to make a decision on the fly like, hey, I need to give me an extra day of recovery. Or we're just going to do tissue. We're going to look at tissue work. Or maybe there's just a range of motion day because in the long run, they're just not recovering at the speed or at the rate I thought they were. They're aging. They're older.

They've got other injuries. They're, they smoke. They've got their, they drink. They have other complications that are slowing recovery down. It's slowing healing down. Okay. I need another day. So if it's not just me, if.

if Doug, you're my strength coach, or I'm your strength coach, we're having a conversation of like, hey, this is what I'm saying today, but I want to give you, it's your world. We're into the same, we're into the same house. It's just your side of the house. We walk back and forth on the side, but all right, hey, here's where he's at today. What do you want, what do you want to, like, what do we want to do? Let's watch this. And it's not me dictating it. We're having a conversation about it, but we're blending.

And it kind of starts off more, more PT, AT, you know, 80, 80, 20, 20% you. And then it kind of moves to 50, 50, and then kind of switches eventually to 2080, but you're collaborating the whole time. You got to have a good relationship, high trust, and like be working together. And I, and I know it seems like the funny thing is it seems stupidly simple. And it seems like, well, that's not hard. But you'd be shocked at how many programs or places. It doesn't work like that.

I've seen where the 18s and the strength coaches don't talk to each other. They don't collaborate. Like they're in separate offices. They don't. Or you've got one. A lot of times like for a high school kid as an example, he might get injured. He goes to an orthopedic clinic and he gets PT over there. But then he goes back to the high school and the high school strength coach is just not associated with that clinic.

They're just, they're not, they're not team members at all. And so maybe, maybe you got, you got a great high school strength coach that will reach out to the physical therapist and make the effort to collaborate. But it wouldn't be common. and for the for the PT to be like going the extra mile to talk to the strength coaches after this person has been discharged, et cetera. Some people are, this is not the situation they're in as a non-professional athlete with no with no real money behind them, et cetera. You've got those high school or you got a high school with their being out. It's outsourced PT and you have an AT at the high school. But because of time, the AT is not doing the rehab.

Like maybe they want to, but, you know, it's a minor. And so you got a PT and maybe the AT, AT is reaching out. maybe they're not. Maybe. So there's a lot. That's where I'll say is everybody's world and everybody's house is different. And I'm never, it's not a one size fits all and you can't sit here. I can't sit here and be like, hey, I got this great idea.

And we all need to, you know, hold hands and get along and do this. Here's the theory behind it. You've got to make it work in your world. But if you're missing big gaps because there's not communication between the athlete or the athletes, the one communicated between the coaching staff and the AT and the strength coach, maybe it works for a while, but you're asking for problems eventually because at some point, something's going to get lost in translation. It's not going to get, it's not going to get, you know, get to all the right people or it's

not going to hurt. And so, and then you get people trying to help. And this is, this is the best and worst thing I've ever seen. It's you get professionals, they're trying to help. They think they're helping, but really, they're hindering and they're getting in the way. because there's not communication. And we all talk about this and, oh, communication and, but it's the simplest thing, but it's the first thing we stop doing.

And I'll sit there when I consult and I'll sit there when I meet with other professionals or colleagues and we talk and you realize there's no communication there. Or there's some animosity between the staffs or somewhere, somewhere in that department. there's something or there's division or there's not trust or it's or it's honestly it's a doggy dog world and whoever has the idea first win somehow like and it's just a that's you know i hate to tell somebody this but that's just poor leadership in the organization like i don't care where you're at find a different organization because if it's coming from the top your athletic director or a general manager or whatever and that's what being bred like there's better places to be and i would i would

be quickly trying to get to a better place because that's not sustainable you're gonna you might be at the top for a while but eventually somebody's going to cut your legs out or somebody's going to take take you from the top or come up top so it's it's not being it's not being scared it's not being scared to not be, I don't want to say not right, but you don't have to have the answer. And when you come at it from a, from a, from more of an interdisciplinary approach, you start to understand where everybody's coming from. And yeah, there's people that have knowledge in multiple areas. You can have an AT that's a strength coach or dietitian, sure.

And in that capacity, are they functioning in that? I would hope the top is. I would hope the top could understand like, all those worlds and know hey when each each dimmer switch needs to be you know dialed up a little bit more you know that would be an ideal goal having somebody at the top that understands that instead of somebody that doesn't understand it and they're just kind of just kind of throwing darts up there yeah so that's kind of the that's kind of the big process with what we're working on now for that yeah hell yeah man uh we're right on we got to shut it down here where can people find more

about about you social media channels websites etc and and any projects you're working on I'm a dying breed, so go ahead and put this out there. I don't have any social media. I'm not a big fan of social media. I think it's beneficial for some people, but I got to let some things go. And for me to get stuff done and do research and handle firefighters and beyond committees, it's social media and it's posting. So the easiest way to reach me is email. So I'm going to give it to you.

It's bryan.n.com at Fort Worth, Texas.org. Anybody and anybody, if you have a question, feel free to reach out. I will definitely love to meet you, talk to you. Doug, if you guys, you and Mike have anything, let me know. Yeah, 100%. Appreciate coming on my show. If you want to follow us, I'm on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. We are Barbill Shrug to Barbell underscore Shrug.

And if you want to work with Dr. Mike Lane, Coach Travis MASS, Dr. Andy Galpin, and the whole team at BioMolecular Athlete. You can go to Biobolecularathlete.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.