Barbell Shrugged - Active Life Radio 12: SPECIAL EPISODE - Is the USA Becoming Too Unhealthy To Stay a Military Power? With The US Air Force w/ Lieutenant Colonel Heath Kern

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

Show Overview:  The United States makes up 5% of the world’s population and consumes 80% of the world’s pharmaceutical drugs. That’s a huge problem for the military, and for the country. Many drugs that are taken in the US are taken by children and adolescents. A percentage of those drugs are disqualifying for military service. Some of the drugs cause side effects that cause weight gain and lethargy which are also, ultimately, disqualifying for military selection. If we don’t get ourselves healthy as a Country from the youth on up, we face some serious problems. If the adults don’t lead from the front, the children will fall from behind.  Obesity, drug use, mental health disorders, and so many more issues plague our youth, and yet, in many ways, our military special forces represent an equal, opposite. The reverence that our Special Operators in the military are held in can make these extraordinary men and women seem virtually unattainably virtuous.  In this interview with Dr. Sean, Lieutenant Colonel Heath Kern breaks down what it takes to go from every day American to American Hero, and you might be surprised what he says.  Minute Breakdown: 0-10 - What’s at stake? 11-20 - The joy of living a life to your calling. 21-30 - Do different branches of the military get along? 31-40 - How do you reconcile wanting to serve and not wanting to need war to do it? 41-49 - What are we going to do about health issues facing the country? Please Support our Sponsors Organifi - Save 20% at http://organifi.com/shrugged Ned - Save 15% using the code “SHRUGGED” at http://helloned.com US Air Force Special Operations Work with an Active Life Coach: http://activeliferx.com/shrugged Find Dr. Sean at @DrSeanPastuch

What's up everybody? Welcome back to Active Life Radio on the Shrugged Collective Network. I'm Dr. Sean Pastuch. I'm your host and today's episode is a doozy. We're going to talk to you guys about how you can start helping yourself the way that we help our clients. No more running to the foam roller. No more running to the mobility ball. We're going to teach you how to decide where your biggest problems are so you can start deducting how to solve them. We're also going to give you an opportunity at the end of the show. So stick around until the end. If you're a coach or a gym owner, we're going to provide you the opportunity to come learn from us, to help your clients the way that we help ours. As always, I want to thank the people who make producing this show possible.

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We also have Ned with us again. That's HelloNed.com. N-E-D. Helloned.com. You're going to find some of the most well-sourced CBD and hemp products on the market. Anti-inflammatory properties, healing properties. If you're into CBD and you're worried about the value of the product that you're taking, you can be confident that a company like Ned, not a company like Ned, you can be confident that Ned is going to be putting the right stuff into your products and you are going to get the results that you desired from them if they tell you that that's what they're going to do. So head to helloned.com and use the code shrugged and check out for 15% off. Now before I get you to the show, which is going to happen here in just a moment,

if you like this podcast, please also check out the Active Life podcast. It's my other show that I host for Active Life. And what we do on that show is essentially talk to people who have either gone through or assisted people in going through major transformation in their lives. What I want to do through that show is continue to pound home the mission of our company. The mission of our company is to humanize the doctor, professionalize the coach, and empower the individual. If you listened two episodes ago, maybe three by now, you also know the vision for our company long term. The way I believe we can best empower you is by showing you that it's been done before.

By showing you that whatever it is that you're trying to do, you can do it because it's been done. If someone else can do it, so can you. I want to give you an example. I should have known these numbers better before I hopped on, but let's just go right to it. Before anybody ever ran the four-minute mile, the four-minute mile was impossible. Nobody thought it was possible, but there were a handful of people who were chasing it. As soon as the first person ran it, it became the standard minimum to be elite, and now over a thousand people have run a four minute mile since.

The next record to fall like that in running will be the two hour marathon. Mark my words, that's going to happen. And once it does, it is going to be the standard. We at Active Life on the Active Life podcast will show you how people have done things that you believe are impossible or improbable so that you can do them yourselves or help other people do them. So tune into the Active Life Podcast and let me know you found it and you liked it. Now, I'm going to get you to Dr. Ray Gorman and we're going to teach you how to solve your own problems. All right, here we are, Dr. Ray Gorman. Welcome back to Active Life Radio on the Shrugged Collective Podcast.

I'm always excited to chat with you. Always a good time, man. I feel like we're going to be talking for most of the day today. Even though the Shrugged Podcast is only going to be 45 minutes to an hour, after this we go straight into staff meetings and I just feel like we're going to be talking all day. Yeah, today is going to be one of those days that never ends. Always a good thing, though. That's right.

That's right. It never ends in a we wish it never ended. Right. In a productive sense. That's right. And then, of course, if you follow my personal social media account, you know work is work, pleasure is pleasure, and they're not the same, but you should enjoy your work. So by all stretch of the imagination, today will be a work day that we will enjoy.

All right. So what I want to talk to you guys about today with Ray is how we identify the needs that a client has in a way that makes it simple enough for you to identify your own. Too often, people deal with aches and pains and whatever is going on, and they go into the gym and they start mobilizing. And that's in part because Kelly Starrett did such a good job of coining the term mobility. But if you pay attention, he said a lot more than that. So today, Ray and I are going to break it down for you. So Ray, why don't you introduce him to the Athletes' Hierarchy of Needs? And how did we derive, how do we make these decisions? Absolutely. So the Athletes' Hier's hierarchy of needs essentially represents the way

that we view athletic injury. It doesn't necessarily give us the answer, but it gives us pieces to start to solve the puzzle. So just like a traditional hierarchy, it has levels that build on something. The base of our hierarchy starts with flexibility, meaning that an athlete first needs ranges of motion to be able to explore them. And then at the top, at the pinnacle, it ends with skill. So something like an overhead squat would kind of summarize both of those, meaning that you need adequate flexibility. You need good range of motion in your ankles, knees, hips, thoracics, behind shoulders in order to do an overhead squat. But if we start with something too high skill, like that movement, we're going to miss some

things for our athletes because they lack the prerequisite control to be able to go into that movement. Well, and, and the best example of that, that I think maybe I've ever seen was, uh, when Drew Canavero was helping with workshops and I watched him do 185 pound overhead pistol. Yep. And then I watched him squat clean thruster 205 on a single leg yep i mean stupid strength the technique looked beautiful and the guy had an inch and a half of ankle range of motion and excruciating knee and low back pain but if you watched him overhead squat you were like that is what an overhead squat is supposed to look like. So he became a really good example of why we don't look at movements and start to try to figure out what's going on. We look at movement, which is different than movements, and we try to predict what they're

going to become when we put them into something compound. So the base of the pyramid for us, the first thing that we need to look at with any athlete that you should be considering for yourself is flexibility. Ray, would you explain to them what flexibility is and why it's at the bottom of our pyramid? Yeah, so flexibility is essentially passive range of motion. We're looking at the ranges of motion of joints with the assistance of gravity or external load. So something like our ankle dorsiflexion test is going to be a passive test.

Our supine hip flexion test is going to be a passive test. Our supine shoulder flexion test is going to be passive. So I just want to break down for them what those are so they can understand exactly what you're describing. The ankle dorsiflexion test basically means how far over the front of your toes can you get your knee. So we set people up against an upright on the pull-up bar or on the pull-up rig, I should say, like a squat rack. And we want to see how far from the rig you can get your big toe and get your knee to the upright without your heel coming off the ground. The average length of distance that we want from your toe to the rig is four and a half inches for ladies, five and a half inches for men, less than that. And we start

to consider that there might be implications upstream when you squat. Simple, simple, simple, simple. Yeah. And the one thing to add there is, you know, it, simple, simple, simple. Yeah. And the one thing to add there is, you know, it's not always black and white. And I think that that's a big misconception that we get is like, oh, if this is limited, then it means you can't do X, Y, and Z. And there are multiple occurrences where athletes fall within an outlier, meaning that they don't hit the norm for the test that we use, but their implications to squat are totally fine. Well, now you're talking about our lighting system. Correct. That's another podcast.

That is another podcast. We'll do a podcast on the Active Life lighting system. Yeah, but the thing that I don't want people to take away from this is, oh, my ankle range of motion is short by, you know, an inch. And that means I can never do X, Y, and Z. Perfect. So all of our screens that we do with clients and that we teach coaches to do with their clients are what we call sensitive, not specific. Sensitive means when we see something, it lets us know that there might be cause for concern when you add that to a movement, when you add that to an exercise. It doesn't tell us what is wrong. It doesn't tell us what structure is the problem.

And this is a huge, huge, huge differentiating factor for the way that we work with clients and the way that a physical therapist works with a patient. We are sensitive, not specific. A physical therapist is going to be sensitive and specific, and so will a chiropractor, and so will an orthopedist. Huge difference. We also, like Ray was saying, have gray areas, which means if you fail one of our tests, it doesn't mean you can't do something else. It just means that we have to gather more information before we decide what is and is not appropriate. And like I said, we'll do another podcast on the lighting system. Yeah. And so essentially what the flexibility, what our movement screen allows us to do is it allows us to set our athletes up with movements that they're going to be successful at.

For example, if they don't have prerequisite ranges of motion in their ankles and hips, and we ask them to do an astagrass squat, and they can't do that, you know, we can't be surprised. Instead, we can ask them to do a box squat. They got the stimulus that they wanted for the day, the stimulus that was intended, but they didn't feel like they failed at the movement. That's a really big thing that when we're educating coaches, it's setting clients up for success. And if you're a coach out there who's listening to this or an athlete who's saying, well, wait a minute, if you don't squat ass to grass, you didn't squat. If you don't have ass to grass range of motion in your hips, then squatting ass to grass is just going to be a lumbar spine flexion extension exercise.

And that's not what you want to do. Yeah. Right. You're just going to compensate. So I want to put everyone listening to this through the same test that we put people through to have them understand what flexibility is. Really, really simple. If you're driving, please don't do this. All we need you to do is grab your index finger and pull it back as far as you possibly can. That's it. That is the end of the range of motion for your index finger. That is the amount of flexibility

that your index finger has. Passive range of motion. That's the first thing that we look for in all of our clients. It just so happens we don't do it for the index finger. We do it for the major joint structures included in exercises in the gym. So bottom of the pyramid, flexibility.

You gotta have it. What's next, right? Going up next, we have mobility. So mobility, we define as active range of motion. So if, like you said, flexibility is our passive range or our potential range of motion that a joint can move with gravity or external force, then mobility is our range of motion or our control within that range. So if somebody laying on their back can get their index finger to the floor doing a supine shoulder flexion test, just letting their arm fall over their head, and that range of motion is full, they have full flexibility. However, if they stand up and they try to raise their arm up over their head and that range of motion is full, they have full flexibility. However, if they stand up and they try to raise their arm

up over their head, they're missing mobility. So to build on the example that you were just saying, if you're pulling your finger back, that's gonna be flexibility. If you're just lifting your finger up, that's gonna be your mobility. So the reason why supine, which by the way means laying on your back, shoulder flexion, which means bringing your arm straight up in front of you all the way back.

The reason why doing that is a passive test, a flexibility test, is because we're allowing gravity to assist pulling your arm down. The reason why doing that same test standing is an active test is because you are now resisting gravity. That makes it a mobility test. So let's talk, Ray, about some examples that we've seen at workshops. Let's talk about the woman, Karen, who was at the workshop that we did in Minnesota, who has been working on gaining flexibility for years without being able to alleviate her shoulder pain. You want to walk them through what we found? Yeah. And the nice part about this is everybody in their gym has somebody like this. They have the client who's, they've been stretching their shoulder for two, three years. Nothing's changed. They

have shoulder pain when they go overhead and they're not attacking the right piece. So, so, so, so, so just to, just to explain what you were just describing, because I think it's, it's valuable to go deeper. What Ray was just describing is the person in the gym who's had shoulder pain for a year, two years, three years forever, maybe not even pain. They just don't have the range of motion that they think that they should have to do a given movement. So before class, they come in, they foam roll, they lacrosse ball, they stretch, they voodoo floss, they do banded distraction, they hang from the pull-up break. They do all, all, all of the passive things that you can do to extend joint range of motion. When I say extend, I mean it in a lengthening to make longer joint range of motion. They do it every single day,

but do not see lasting results day to day, week to week, year to year. Ray is now going to go deeper into why. Yeah. And I think part of that is just because it's kind of what's become ingrained in our practice of if something hurts, what do you find when you Google? You find stretches to make it feel better. And really that's just not what happens. So in the case of Karen, we were performing this, these tests on her, a movement screen on her. And in doing the supine shoulder flexion test, which is a passive test, she had full range of motion. That's the one with your arm falling over your head, laying on your back, doing our standing abduction test, which is a different test. This that's going to be like in the plane of

doing a jumping jack, bringing your biceps to your ears from down at your side. That is a mobility test that we can secondarily do a flexibility test for. So what I mean by that is when the athlete brings their arms up over their head, like they're doing a jumping jack, we want to know, can their bicep touch their ears? In Karen's case, the answer was no. She couldn't do that by herself. But when we applied just a little bit of overpressure, we were able to get her biceps to her ears very easily. So I want to jump in and I want to paint the picture of what Ray is describing here. When Karen stood up and tried to bring her arms to her ears with her elbows extended

in the same way as if she was doing a jumping jack, she was far from capable of getting her arms to her ears. But when we came up behind and gently pressed on her elbows with two fingers on each side, we were very, very simply able to get her arms to touch her ears without any compensation happening at the shoulder blade. What that tells us is that Karen does have ample flexibility in her shoulders. It is the mobility, the strength, and the control in the end ranges that she lacks in order to get her shoulders to her ears. But when she comes into the gym every day, she does things that would be perfectly appropriate for somebody with a flexibility issue. Correct. Karen's problem wasn't flexibility. So Karen's solution wasn't working. Right. And that can be extremely frustrating for a client

when two years go by and you see no change in, in the one thing that you've been working on. So in her case, it was less about getting her more passive range and more about getting her stronger at that end range of motion. So one, we're able to give her effective drills for her problem. And two, we're able to save her time in the gym from doing something that's not going to yield results. So if adding flexibility comes from things like joint distraction, time at end range, potentially stretching, I'm not going to discount it completely, what kind of things would benefit Karen? End range of motion holds, so doing something like an overhead carry, doing something like an overhead, even just a barbell hold overhead, handstand holds, pike handstand holds off of a box.

You know, your options are really limited by your imagination, is if somebody can't access an end range of motion unweighted, how do we expect them to access it under load and thereby strengthen it? So we can always get them into a position with a little bit of assistance and then have them cue over into where we want them. Like for example, if she wasn't able to press the weight, we could have her push press the weight and get there. We could start in a way that was assisted with less body weight, like a pike position, progress that to a handstand position. It has to be dosed appropriately is the big thing there. Yeah. Another great example of how we do this with people is inchworms. Correct.

Because an inchworm is going to be a partial range of motion that gets us towards the end range, but will only tax as far as you can go because you'll fail the movement. And so what happens is athletes get stronger and stronger close to their end range. And then their end range goes further and further to where they, to where they're able to access. Yeah. And, and the nice part about this is all of the things that we're prescribing for these athletes start to look like things that would typically be in a shoulder day warmup. So when you're talking about efficiency of time, it's making it so that our athletes

aren't wasting time on warmups and that warmups actually become valuable to prime movements and to solve problems. Yeah, I think that's extremely valuable. This kind of stuff doesn't need to take 45 minutes. We help some of the clients who work with us. If you looked at how much time they're spending working with their active life coach, it's 20 minutes a day, three days a week for the same price as somebody who's working with us five days a week for 45 minutes a day, because we're not helping

people through, you know, time. We're helping people through appropriate dosing and exercise selection for outcomes and people are buying outcomes from us. So, right. And ultimately it's how can I be the most efficient with my time? Right. So some athletes, everybody wants more. They think they want more and our job becomes selling them as to getting them the what we call the minimum effective dose the least amount of work you can do with the most amount of return that then allows you to do the things that you want to do the most yes and and to be straightforward that's the same case with the most elite of athletes that we work with and athletes who are the most novice. So it's not different when you're talking to, you know, James Newberry as

compared to when you're talking to James Brewberry. I like that one. Yeah, I almost got stuck on it. I didn't have a name picked. But so let's give people a basic breakdown so they understand step one to step two. Step one, if you are limited in flexibility, it means that your passive range of motion is limited. You can head to Active Life on YouTube. Go to youtube.com slash theactivelife. Pull up our movement assessment and you will be able to put yourself through the same movement assessment we put all of our clients through. If you find yourself limited on any of the tests that are gravity-assisted or partner-assisted, you then have a flexibility issue. And the thing that is going to help you the most is time under tension loaded, period. Now, that could be distraction. It could be bottom of a squat. It could be partner-assisted. We're not going to get into the specifics of exactly how you should do it

because we would be doing you a disservice and leaving too many variables off of the table. But that is your basic, basic, basic principle. If you're finding yourself limited on the active tests, then you need to start adding strength. Very simple. Moving through full range of motion and holding those end ranges under load. Eccentric contractions sometimes, concentric contractions others, isometrics others. The big difference between what's going to happen for a mobility limited client versus a flexibility limited client is the strength that we're looking to gain as opposed to the length that we're looking to gain. What we're going to do next is we're going to start talking about strength as it applies to balance across the joint. But before we do it, we're going to just interrupt this podcast for a minute, minute and a half to tell you guys

how awesome we are and give you an opportunity to work with us. What's up shrug nation. Are you enjoying this episode? I bet you are. I'm going to keep this brief. We'll get you right back to the show in a moment. In the meantime, if you're interested in anything that we're doing at Active Life, make sure that you head to ActiveLifeRx.com slash shrugged. You want to be a better coach. You want to help your clients better. You want to get out of pain, but you don't want to go to the doctor or miss the gym. ActiveLifeRx.com slash shrugged. That's where you need to be.

We'll see you when you get there. Turn pro. Here we go back to the episode. All right, Ray. Third rung of the ladder to the athlete's hierarchy of needs is strength balance. What does that mean? What is strength balance? Strength balance for us, let me first tell you what it does not mean. It is not a relationship between the length of your pec and the strength of your rotator cuff. When we're looking at strength balance, this is really the one thing that I felt like was always missing for me and where I got stuck with athletes. When you say that, you mean when you were a physical therapist at University of Nevada prior to working with Active Life, yes? Right. And also just as a PT in general, it was like, all right, well, what do I do next? Why are my athletes in the gym struggling with a snatch? Why are they rotating with a squat when

everything is full range of motion? I ran out of options of what I wanted to look at as a coach. So strength balance for us is if an, if an athlete came into your gym and it was their first day, but they were an experienced athlete and they said, coach, my deadlift is 300 pounds. My back squat is 400 pounds. That typically raises some red flags for us. Repeat that one more time. My back squat is? My back squat is 400 pounds. My deadlift is? 300 pounds. Okay. So you guys understand. It should be pretty clear. Most people in the world, we're not talking about the upper echelon of powerlifting. Correct, are going to deadlift more than they squat. Correct. Okay, continue.

That would raise some red flags for us, knowing what an ideal or what just a general percentage would be. It also becomes just kind of an awareness thing of where is the low- low hanging fruit of opportunity? So clients in the gym, athletes in the gym, coaches even pretty much know their one, three, five rep for big lifts, pressing, push press, deadlift, squat. The way that we break it down is what about your ability to produce force in a front rack step up on your left leg versus your right leg? It might be something where your back squat isn't actually

limited by your ability to back squat. It's limited because the only leg doing work or the leg that's doing twice the work is one side versus the other. So let me jump in here. This is why we talk about the value of single leg work and single arm work. It is not because we believe that single arm or single leg work is more valuable than bilateral. It's because we know that most of the people in our audience, you guys listening to this show, are doing the predominant of your work bilaterally, which means there's a strong likelihood that you don't even know if one of your arms or one of your legs is substantially stronger than the other. And if one of your arms or one of your legs is substantially stronger than

the other, then when you go to use both, you're fucked. Carry on, Ray. So just talking through the hierarchy so far, let's look at the squat for an example. If we're taking somebody who shifts to the right on a squat, some things that we might see are, let's assume that flexibility, they could have limited ankle range of motion. They could have limited knee range of motion on the left side. They could have limited hip range of motion. If all those things are full, what we've now deduced is it is not a flexibility issue. Could it be going up to the next rung, a mobility issue? It could be the end range, like they're not able to actively pull their hip up. That's not really something that we screen for.

So let's assume that it's not a mobility issue. Now we're going to go up to strength balance. And we find that on their left leg, they can do five reps of a front rack step up. And on their right leg, they can do 12. That athlete is going to prioritize shifting the load to the right side simply because it's more efficient. It's easier for them to do that. Their ability to bilaterally back squat, to produce force bilaterally is going to be limited by the left leg. And to dive into that more, I don't want you guys thinking that what Ray is saying is that every time somebody shifts to one side, it's because that leg is stronger. Ray is describing an example when somebody's flexibility screens are all full. Their mobility screens are all full. Their strength balance screens

test such that one leg is stronger than the other. And then we see a shift from one side to the other. All the work happens on the stronger side. We are not making a diagnosis. What we do from there is just deduct that one side needs to become stronger. We strengthen that side and then we re-evaluate the bilateral squat to see if the problem is cleared up. If it is, outstanding. If it's not, we move on to other potential variables. I hope that makes sense for you guys to keep it simple. Yeah. So let me give you a quick example here. I had an athlete who came in to work with me and she was, uh, this was in person. Okay. Um, she came into work with me and she was a master's Olympic weightlifter and she was getting low back pain

when she weightlifted. She was her main complaint though, was she was stuck at a 300 pound back squat for about two years. So she also said, I've done every single back squat program out there in that time. Nothing has been able to break through this plateau. We did some front rack step up test. She was twice as strong on the right leg as the left. We gave her some simple dosing. I think it was like started her at three by six with 25 or 35 pounds. It was nothing super heavy, nothing that was strength oriented with an extra set on the weaker side or left side. In six weeks, she retested her back squat and she PR by 30 pounds. Now I am not suggesting

that three by six at 25 pounds step-ups got her 10% stronger. What I'm suggesting is that her brain and her body was now able to say, Oh shit, this is how we use our left leg. Maybe we should start doing this when we squat bilaterally. So by proxy, it did make her stronger by 10%. It's just what you're saying is it didn't build 10% more hypertrophy. It didn't build 10% more neurons or muscle fibers. It essentially accessed 10% more motor units, potentially. Right.

It said getting over to this left leg is our limiting factor bilaterally squatting. Let's figure out how to do that. Yeah, and this is where I find what we do to be the coolest because it's where the gradient starts. What I mean by that is flexibility is – there's a hard line. If you don't have the flexibility, you don't move on to mobility.

Right. You're not going to gain it. If you don't have the mobility, you have to go into strength balance because we have to figure out where your strength is lacking so that we can increase your control in those places. So strength balance and mobility kind of start to bleed into each other. And that's a, I find a fascinating thing. Yeah. The, the one place where flexibility can, and just to kind of build off that where flexibility can skew your strength balance is let's say you have an athlete that has one inch of ankle dorsiflexion and in their strength balance numbers, they're very deadlift biased, meaning that they prefer to deadlift or their numbers suggest that they prefer to deadlift. You can't start attacking

their squat patterns until you clear up that flexibility, that flexibility issue at the ankle, because the ankle is driving the squat to look like a good morning. So I'm going to take them through that so they can understand what you're saying. If somebody is limited in their ability to move through ankle range of motion and they are much more proficient in the deadlift or the hinge, if you will, than the squat, We can't simply start loading squats because there's a strong likelihood that their squat is going to look like a hinge. This is the talk to all of you guys out there with no ankle range of motion whose chest dives down every time you squat and it looks like a low bar or a good morning. That's essentially training a hinge pattern, not a squat pattern. So with those

people, the only way we can build squat strength is unilaterally where the ankle range of motion is essentially unimportant. It's when we would move the barbell to the front rack because despite the barbell being in the front rack, leading you to believe that you might need more ankle range of motion it does allow you to sit back because of where the load is in respect to your center of gravity so we're able to access less ankle range of motion and load more weight in a front squat than potentially in a back squat for a client like this so So this is where the, the, the limited ankle range of motion could lead to limited squat strength, but not because you couldn't potentially build squat strength simply because every time you squat you're hinging. And that's the, that's the beauty of our hierarchy is we're able to create a program based on all of these needs that we're finding yeah which is which

is i mean it's like adding gasoline to a fire that looks like it's burning out then all of a sudden you're like oh shit throw a log on that bad boy right so okay up next is work versus recovery right and and as we were talking before the show, we're talking about moving that to be on the side, to almost make our pyramid look like a three-dimensional pyramid where the back of it, the entire support structure, is work versus recovery. So can you explain what that looks like?

Yeah, so essentially our work versus recovery is, you know, fourth on the hierarchy, but really kind of has an underlying tone through everything that we do, because if your work recovery isn't in check, nothing else is going to matter. So if you have piss poor ankle range of motion and you have a, you know, right to left front racks, racks step up discrepancy, but you've been training seven days a week for two, three years, it's not really going to matter what you do. That underlying volume issue is always going to present an issue to that client. Yeah. So one of the things that we talk about

is for every hour that you work out, schedule 15 minutes to work in. And I got the term work in from James Newberry, actually, when he was here about three years ago, staying at my house prior to the CrossFit or after the CrossFit Games. And he talked about for every hour that he works out, he spends an hour working in, which for him is recovery. Now that is something that you don't need to do because you're not working at the intensities that James Newberry is.

If you are, stop. Okay, James? Unless you're going to the Games. Unless you're going to the Games. And in that case, you know, fuck me. But the likelihood is you're not. And if you're going to sanctionals and in that case you know fuck me but but the likelihood is you're not and if you're going to sanctionals cool good for you go to a crossfit sanctional but keep in perspective the reason why you train if you train because you want to be the most competitive

athlete you possibly can then you're gonna have to deal with some of the discomfort that an extremely competitive athlete lives with every single day, but don't confuse it with being healthy. That's all. So workforce recovery becomes an extremely important thing that we discuss. Right. And I think too, it becomes defining some terms within that. What's the difference between rest and recovery? Rest is a process. Rest is a process of letting your body heal, right? Rest is a day off living your life. People get confused taking a rest day and then go and do, you know, a 5k row thinking that they're resting, not realizing that they've just done, even if the pace is low, 20 plus minutes of knee flexion

cycles, hip flexion cycles, and a low back hinge. And then when you come back in the next day and more squat patterns are programmed, you never really gave those tissues a chance to get back to their baseline. Recovery is an active process. And for me, the way that I like to explain athletes to use recovery is recovery is used on a day where training is programmed. Active recovery is typically used on a day where training is programmed, but your capacity for that day isn't necessarily where you need to be to train at that intensity. So I like to have athletes take those recovery days as like, you know what, maybe I shouldn't five rep max deadlift today because the rest of the gym had a nice relaxing weekend and

I just got back from a work trip. And so for me, it was being on the road. It was traveling. It was sleeping in a bed that wasn't mine. It was eating food that I don't normally eat. And Monday morning, I just need to move and feel good instead of trying to blow through something that my body just isn't ready for. Yeah. I mean, as we discuss almost every time we see each other now, I'm basically a professional fighter now, right? So I've been training MMA since I had my third daughter because I don't feel like having some 16-year-old walk into my house

in 16 years and beat the shit out of me. That's just the flat reality. Right now, I'm probably still in danger of that if the right 16-year-old walks into the house. But all of that aside, I walked year old walks into the house but all of that aside i walked into training on monday morning this week after flying back from tahoe on the red eye from the spartan world championships uh the media festival that they had there and it was coming off of two weeks prior to that or one week prior to that was our first active life professional pro path workshop and

a week before i had been on like 20 straight days of work I come back on Monday morning to training and my coach is like no you gotta you gotta slip to the right slip to the left and he's showing me the lower body movement I'm like yeah I've been doing this for a year now he's like well you got hit with the last five punches in a row I'm like yeah um yeah I'm just really slow today and I like it's easy when you're in something like somebody throwing punches at your head to understand I'm not quite as sharp as I normally would be. But when you go into the gym and it's just like warm up, get into the lifts, why, why would you be weaker? Why wouldn't you be as strong? Why are you more at risk for injury?

So it's, it's important to be able to respect that. And I'll tell you a quick story from when I was at a brute strength athlete camp in New Orleans four years ago, three years ago. This athlete who was there, I was like, this guy is going to be perfect for my example. I'm standing in front of 40 people. I had just taken them through flexibility, mobility, strength, balance. He was perfect on everything. And I'm like, hey, tell the group, how was your flexibility? Perfect. Mobility? Perfect. How was your strength balance? Perfect. Like gave me the numbers. It was perfect. Like awesome. Do you have any shoulder pain? Expecting him to say, no, I'm great. And he was like every day. I'm like,

busted. So I'm like, all right. And then I just went up the pyramid. And I asked him, what does your work week look like? It's like 16-hour days. I said, 16? He's like, well, there are days I work 14. But the average work day, I'm probably somewhere between 14 and 16 hours. I'm like, wow. OK.

How many hours a day do you work out? He's like, hour and a half to two. I'm like, wow, okay. How many hours a day do you work out? He's like, hour and a half to two. I'm like, okay. So the math tells us that if you sleep at your desk and don't take any showers and don't take time to eat, you might be able to get eight hours of good sleep, but you would smell way worse. So how many hours of sleep are you getting per night?

He's like, four to five. I said, okay. What does your diet look like? He's like, four to five. I said, okay. What does your diet look like? He's like, whatever I can get at my desk. So, you know, sometimes it's fast food, whatever. I'm like, got it. So your work recovery is a disaster. He's like, yeah, it's an absolute disaster.

And that was the only thing that was wrong with this guy, and yet he had shoulder pain every single day. So it's that important. Right, and one of the things that we do in our seminars is we just put a numerical representation on this that kind of arbitrarily defines the decrease you need to then have the increase above your capacity. Well, it's not arbitrary. Well, but I mean, you can't really define it. Right. So it's more esoteric than arbitrary. Sure. So we understand that training is a breakdown mechanism. So if every day we train is a negative one and we train three days in a row, so Monday is negative one, Tuesday is negative one. Wednesday is negative one.

Those are our three training days. Our compound recovery, including Thursday, in order to get us over our baseline capacity line, which is how we improve our fitness, improve our strength, would need to be a positive 3.1. And we'd have to repeat that cycle over the lifespan of our time in the gym. And that's what's ultimately going to allow us to continue training. And that's what's ultimately going to trigger deloads and then periodization of strength training, things like that. So getting all of that stuff in place and getting athletes to realize that the mentally tough decision isn't going into the gym and pulling a five rep max deadlift on a day where you're physically, emotionally smoked. The mentally tough decision is actually deciding to not do that. Yeah. We, uh, one of the things I said to Lindy Barber when we were working with her a while back when she was competing was cause she always wanted to be tough, mentally tough,

physically tough because she is, I mean, she goes a savage. I used to explain to her all the time, mentally tough athletes make tough decisions, right? They don't do physically tough things just to do them they make mentally tough decisions so something very important for you guys to keep in mind so i feel like i feel like we could talk about this for an hour yeah maybe maybe we will another time so moving moving up the ladder we started a flexibility now we're mobility strength balance and then we went to work recovery so so far you guys should know what you need to work on the most what's the top of the pyramid right top of the pyramid is skill so this is where the magic happens when you hit that beautiful squat snatch where you hit the muscle up because

you have all the prerequisite ranges of motion and strength before that this This is why, I mean, everybody who's in the CrossFit space can pretty much relate to the first time they tried to do an overhead squat. You felt like a baby giraffe that was just born and you got about halfway down, your chest was dropped. The PVC was pulled way back over your head. Your butt was sticking out way behind you. And you look at your coach and you're like, am I all the way down yet? Like you understand what that felt like to progress. Now I want you to imagine a client who doesn't have the ranges of motion to get there being put into that position. That's the portion where it's like, let's not set our clients up to fail.

Let's make sure that they have full flexibility. Let's make sure that they have ranges of motion actively. Let's make sure that they can press a barbell overhead and hold it there for 10 seconds before we try to have them squat with it. Let's make sure that they have endurance and strength across their joints and that their nervous system from a recovery standpoint is ready for often is wrong. Right. And I'm waiting for somebody to give me a definitive on how to use it. Right. I had a little pushback on one of the posts that I made, um, about how we, how I wasn't describing it used, right. Yeah. So, so if you

guys are ready for it, I'm going to pull it up right now. Let's see. I'm going to, I'm going to find it on the Instagram right now on the gram, as you guys might say. So, um, all right, there it is. If you go to active life professional on Instagram and head to a post from September 14th on our main feed, it says, say no to squat therapy on the thumbnail. That's where you can find what we're talking about in regards to squat therapy being an ineffective way to help people improve their squats. What we're not saying is that squat therapy has never worked for anybody. Correct. Please understand that. What we're always looking for at Active Life is the most efficient and effective solution to any problem. Because we believe that if it's wasting your time, it's dangerous. Because it's teaching you, A, that it's okay to waste your time, and B, that you might not be

fixable simply because you're doing the wrong things and believing them to be the right things and therefore deducting that you're screwed. Make sense? Absolutely. So what we just took you guys through from the base to the top was how we decide what to do with a client based on what we find. So sometimes it's skill. Usually those are people who we're going to refer back to the coach in their gym. Sometimes it's work recovery. In that case, we're most definitely going to dive in big time, help them out with that. Strength balance, right in the active life wheelhouse. Mobility, you're sitting in the passenger seat, we're driving the car, it's a good day. Flexibility, sometimes that's in our wheelhouse. Other times, we need to refer that to a local physical therapist, a chiropractor,

a soft tissue specialist, an orthopedist, whatever the case might be. But this is how we start to make decisions about how to help clients when they come to us so that it doesn't just become an arbitrary, throw it at the wall and see what happens. And now you guys have the tools to do the same things for yourselves. The tools we didn't give you on the podcast, because it would be irresponsible to try to do that are how to fix all of the problems because we take people through a 13 week course on how to do that. And they frankly need to be a coach priority even taking that course. Yeah. And the one thing I want to add to wrap up there that you said is this isn't a solo effort. This is a team effort. We understand that coaches are our number one ally in assisting us in preventing musculoskeletal injuries in the gym. So when you talk about working with a coach, you know,

on the skill, my job as an active life coach becomes referring that back to the coach in person and saying, Hey, look, I'm going to work on X, Y, and Z. In the meantime, what I found on this level and let me know what your thoughts are, are working on A, B, and C. So really getting a team that wants to work together and having coaches that understand that this isn't a turf war. It's really an athlete is the best interest. That's going to be how you go the farthest as an athlete, as a successful gym, as a successful coach. Yeah. And if you are a coach who wants to be able to dive deeper into this stuff, head to activelifeprofessional.com and click on our

workshops, check out our immersion course. If you're a gym owner, let's see you in the pro path. That's your fastest way to getting the same kind of education that all of our staff members have that is within your scope. So when I say that, what I mean is we have a team of 17 right now. Most of those people are some sort of doctorate level education. That being said, the only reason that they use their doctorate with their clients who we work with is to tell them that they would need to see you in their clinic to solve this problem so we can't help you as active life coaches. What that means for you if you're listening to this and you're a coach is that we can teach you how to do everything that we do for our clients yourself. There's nothing that we do that stems from being a doctor with a client online that we could not or would not teach you to do for your clients

if you're a coach. So if you're interested in learning that stuff, head to activelifeprofessional.com. Check it all out. Anything you want to add, right? Uh, if you guys have any questions, feel free, feel free to reach out to us. I think pretty much every time we release this podcast, somebody reaches out and we make sure to answer every single message we get and get you in touch with the person on our team that is best for that. So if you're looking for me, you can find me at Ray Gorman DPT on Instagram, or you can shoot me an email at drrayatactiveliferx.com. There it is. All right. That's all we got for you guys today. So turn pro. That's going to be a wrap for this episode of Active Life Radio on the

Shrugged Collective Network. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please head to wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a five-star rating as well as a great review. If you really love this episode, make sure you're sharing it with the people who need to hear it. Value unshared is value wasted. And of course, if you're looking to get more from us, whether it's coaching courses, one-on-one coaching from one of our staff members to help you get out of pain without going to the doctor or missing the gym, head to ActiveLifeRx.com slash shrugged. We'll see you then. Turn pro.