Barbell Shrugged - Barbell Shrugged  — Cultivate Your Mind, Body, and Movement w/ Aaron Alexander  — 334

Episode Date: August 29, 2018

Aaron Alexander CR, LMT, CPT is an accomplished manual therapist and movement coach with over 13 years of professional experience. He is the founder of the Align Movement™, an integrated approach to functional movement and self-care that has helped thousands of people out of pain and into health. Aaron also hosts the top-rated Align Podcast featuring the biggest names in movement and wellness. His clients include Hollywood celebrities, Olympic/professional athletes and everyone in between. He teaches workshops and speaks at events all over the world. In this episode, we talk about how to implement breathwork into a daily practice, postural alignment, functional movement and self-care, developing a floor culture, how to add flow to your training, and more.   Enjoy! - Doug and Anders Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs_alexander ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please support our partners! @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% @thrivemarket - www.thrivemarket.com/shrugged for a free 30 days trial and $60 in free groceries @OMAX - www.tryomax.com/shrugged and get a box FREE with your first purchase @Onnit - www.onnit.com/shrugged for a free 14 pill bottle of the leading nootropic Alpha Brain and 10% savings on all purchases. @foursigmatic - www.foursigmatic.com/shrugged  to save 15% on your first purchase @mikesalemi- www.mikesalemi.io/shrugged for 15% off everything ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

🎵 We'll be right back. Thank you. Shrug family. Anders Varner here. We are back with another week with Aaron Alexander from the Align podcast. Dude's got tons of good information. Super fun hanging out with him. And I think you're going to love the show. We recorded this down at Paleo FX a couple months back. And life is good because he is an interesting human being.

Um, just knows a ton about the body. Um, comes from a rolfing background. And I think he just comes from a I love human movement background because he is one of those crazy mover guys. That's always sitting in a squat and always doing all the things. Looks really weird in public like doing handstands in airports. But that also means he's living pain-free and also knows how to help you live a more pain-free, empowered, strong, healthy life. Want to let you guys know where we are going to be. If you are headed to the Granite Games, you've got to get there early.

Go on Thursday, September 6th at 5.30 p.m. I am going to be hosting a roundtable at the Granite Games Fitness Convention to kick off the 2018 Granite Games. Granite Games are going to be a massive piece of the future of the CrossFit Games, and I cannot wait to be a part of everything they have going on. My roundtable, we're going to be doing a ton of discussion, Q&A on coaching development, professional development, marketing your business, podcasting specific questions. I'm there. We can talk about talking, interviewing people and just kind of how this podcast plays into larger business purposes

at the Shrug Collective, us expanding into a network, our larger goals, and how you can start to implement these strategies into your own business to help grow a better community in your gym, a better, more trusting relationship with your clients. Tons of things that we can discuss. That roundtable at the Granite Games is Thursday, September 6th at 5.30 p.m. Once again, get to thegranitegames.com. They have all kinds of fun information going up. There's 23 gym owners, coaches, Jason Kaliba, Marcus Philly, Anders Varner. See how I just dropped my name in the middle of that group? About 5.30 p.m. September 6th at the Granite Games. Really stoked to be doing a roundtable and answering all your questions.

Later in the month, we're going to be at the Spartan World Championships in Tahoe. I believe I will be speaking on a panel there as well, which I am super stoked about. And Mike and Doug did the Spartan World Championship course last year. It's like 17 miles. That's totally madness. But make sure you are getting to these events. We'd love to meet you. Take a selfie.

We'll put it on the Instagram story. You'll be sort of famous. It's going to be killer. I want to thank our sponsors getting into the show here. Organifi. It's been important that we've been with these guys all year long. Why? Well, their products are really healthy.

Their products are really, really convenient. They taste delicious. The shrugged stack, the green, the red, the gold, meeting you in your day at all the places and all the times, making it easy, convenient, and delicious. So many of the green drinks taste like dirty, muddy, gross. It's like they put mud inside milk. Gross.

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Go to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. Use the coupon code shrugged. Also want to thank Four Sigmatic, natural soup, excuse me, superfood company specializing in mushroom-based drinks, benefiting immunity, energy, longevity, helping you live a healthier, more enhanced life. Four Sigmatic makes a wide variety of blends, including mushroom coffee, mushroom elixirs.

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It's got lion's mane in it. Do you know what lion's mane does? I didn't until I talked to Taro, the fun guy. But promotes productivity, focus, creativity, balanced stimulation. Basically, you're getting coffee, but without all the jitters. And I drink the stuff every single morning. I love it. If you're on coffee but without all the jitters um and i drink the stuff every single

morning i love it if you're on our email list you got a sweet email about how delicious it is um the the coffee is and i'm a i'm a huge fan um the chaga the lion's mane the cordyceps the cordyceps are a huge piece of cardiovascular health. All the things. Get over to foursigmatic.com backslash shrug. You're going to save 15% off your first order. That is foursigmatic.com forward slash shrug saving order. Now, into the show.

Aaron Alexander. We'll see you guys at the break We'll go to Barbell Shrugged. My name is Anders Varner. That's Doug Larson. Mr. Strong Coffee out of Bonn Adam Barthelder in the house. Yo, yo. This is super cool. We're standing on a stage here at Paleo FX in Austin, Texas. We came all the way down from San Diego.

It was in a plane. We didn't walk or drive or anything. We're joined by Mr. Aaron Alexander. Without the name tag, you nailed it. Yeah, we crushed it. The Align Podcast. Host of the Align Podcast. Body healer. Movement coach. Yeah, that crushed it. The Align podcast. Host of the Align podcast. Body healer. Movement coach.

Yeah, that was good. That came out. Body healer. He's available later in the afternoon. I would never say that, but I'll receive that. Yeah, I'll receive that. Just won't correct anyone else that says it. Just nod your head and smile.

You can put that on your card now. It's on the card, but I just don't say it out loud. Alexander Healer. Yeah, thanks. You can put that on your card now. It's on the card, but I just don't say it out loud. I think of Sons of Anarchy, I'll accept that. We're funny with that, with compliments. It's like if someone says something nice about you, you're like, you immediately put it back on them. Sometimes it's nice if you're like, whatever. I'm not comfortable with what you said. I'm good enough.

We were, as we started. Don't make me a star. It doesn't have to be complicated. Just say, oh, thank you be like, whatever. I'm not comfortable with what you said. I'm all right. I'm good enough. We were, as we started. Just say thank you. Don't make me a star. It doesn't have to be complicated. Just say, oh, thank you. Cool. Done. We started our day.

Von Rothfelder's downstairs getting a back massage from you. And then you guys were doing some capoeira dancing, salsa. I don't know what the hell's going on. He was over there fighting with Kyle Kingsbury. Trying not to get punched in the face by a former UFC fighter. It's not even 10 o'clock in the morning and you've had a huge day. It's been big. It's been big.

Tell us a little about it. You've got a rolfing practice. You've got a podcast, the Align podcast. Where did this whole process start for you? Man, well, so messing my body up with bodybuilding. Yeah. That's the beginning of a lot of things for folks in this industry, I think. So a lot of insecurity, a lot of kind of figuring out

how to pack one muscle onto my frame here to feel validated. You're doing great so far. I've thinned up quite a bit. I greatly appreciate it. I'll receive that. You know, and so early stages, a lot of weird stuff, daddy issues, whatever, packing on muscles

and needs protection, that turned into the parts falling off and then kind of falling more of like a healing type journey, healing in quotations. Yeah. And then my mic being all jacked up. There you go. Communicate this. Now you're in.

You got to eat the thing. You got to eat that little mofo. The smartest lips in strength and conditioning have shared that with you. True that. It smells a little funny. That's Breckenridge. He's my favorite. But, yeah, so I went from starting off packing on muscle, going really, like, linear A to B movements just to pack on muscle.

That was the big thing. And then from that I was playing ice hockey like you, and then I noticed my hockey game starting to go down pretty fast. Huge. Biggest guy on the ice. Yeah. Also slowly descending into, like, one of the crummier guys on the ice. For sure.

And it was a product. It was this reciprocal relationship. The bigger and stronger I felt like I got, the less athletic I became. Right. And so then that turned into pursuing things like jiu-jitsu and surfing and dance and other stuff that was a little bit more dynamic and movement oriented. Yeah. And figuring out how to put the parts back together.

And you're in Venice, so it's like the movement culture of the world. Yeah, it's the crunchy granola, new age mecca. I love being out there because any time you go to Santa Monica or Venice area, there's like the movement culture of the world. Yeah, it's the crunchy granola, new age Mecca. I love being out there because anytime you go to, like, Santa Monica or Venice area, there's always somebody doing something I've never seen before in the movement world. A little grassy area. Old Muscle Beach. Yeah.

The green. The original. Yeah. When I was an electrician, I had this old-time electrician. He'd call California the granola state because it's full of fruits and nuts. Yeah. So it's like. It's true. It's true. it's like we're the nuts.

I fall somewhere in between there, I think, judging from what you saw this morning. But, yeah, that's the intro, man. So you had a rolfing practice in Oregon, but you still own that? I do. Yeah, so what's the background there? So there's a clinic there that people can still go to. We've probably barely ever mentioned Rolfing on this show, so a lot of people may not even know what it is.

What is that to start with? It's a terrible brand name, for starters. It doesn't sound pleasurable, whatever it is. Yeah, like LARPing, like live-action role-playing, or rolling on the floor laughing. So it's the last name of Ida P. Rolf. So she was this carmudgeony old German lady that's now passed on. And super brilliant woman, but structural integration is what she called it. So we're looking to organize your physical structure,

organize your foot to your knee to your hips up to your spine to the top of your head. So if you can find that organization and that stack, your body starts to heal itself through you just being inside of your body. But as long as you have any type of misalignment in any joint, everything you do becomes friction. So what we're looking to do is figure out, okay, where are you creating friction? How can we start to ameliorate that?

And now go, go be free. As opposed to you becoming dependent on seeing a rolfer or structural integrator. When I first heard about rolfing years and years ago, the example that was always used was massaging your psoas through your stomach sure that was like that was like the thing everyone always talked about like rolfing so fucking painful because like they have like dig through to get to your back through through your front right more or less but there's there's so much more to it than that yeah yeah so it's it's always if someone pushes too much it's the same thing in a conversation right so conversation is just two nervous systems communicating with each other right too often it's like two kind of

intersecting monologues as opposed to actual dialogue we're all sitting waiting for something clever to say you know as opposed to just receiving what someone's saying processing it and then communicating yeah that's body work right so if i come in and i say i have my values and my idea of what you should be then i'm totally missing the experience of you so if i can actually kind of feel where you're at this sounds like woo-woo out there but we're talking about granola mecca so so screw it you know so i can really feel what your nervous system is communicating through like the pressure of my contact we can actually have this conversation through pressure i don't think i explained that very well but that's kind of a start i imagine that's something you need to

have experience at and need to be able to feel to understand. Yeah. It takes time, man. Just like a conversation. Yeah. Just like running a business, just like having a marriage, just like anything. It's all relationship based, you know, so that you can see someone that's going to be good. How you do anything is how you do everything, right? So if someone's really in your face, you know, they're probably going to have that similar effect with the way they do a podcast, with the way they do body work or whatever it is. I really dig that. We were talking to Paul Cech, and he was talking about how much of the spirituality is stored in our tissues and the way you think is stored in your tissues.

So if you're suffering from a shoulder problem or a knee problem, a hip problem, whatever it is, just the tissues in the joints are not going to be the same for every single person. You have to start to get into a lot of the nervous system things, the way that you're thinking in order to just free up the tissue or free up a lot of the stress and tension that's stored in your tissues. And that's the actual release a lot of what we're talking about. Yeah.

So there's several different roads that one could go down with that i don't think anybody really knows what they're talking about with this yeah you know we're all just kind of figuring it out into the board like how's that that's why we're here we have to talk about it here we are we gotta figure it out but one potential kind of the funnier direction is when people do heart transplants or any kind of like like like organ transplants they'll actually i believe it's the dendritic cells from that previous organ, they end up carrying over that memory into the next person. So all of a sudden, I have somebody else's fill-in-the-blank organ, and all of a sudden,

I start having these memories of prom and this weird stuff. And you're like, what the hell is that? It's like, Bobby, who's Bobby? Am I gay? And you're like, you are gay, yes. But that's actually Timmy with the livers memory. Right. There was a movie when the girl gets an eye transplant

and then she starts seeing these horrible things that this other person saw. Face off. But it's kind of like touching on that idea that the emotional trauma and stuff is held within our tissue. And the ability to release it is within ourselves, right? Like you were saying like like letting go of something yeah and it's the same thing so another potential road we could keep going down that one but just another option of a road is also the way that your physical

posture is formed that's an expression of the way that you feel okay so if i go into sadness then sat like everyone knows what sad is yeah right yeah i don't need to say, like, you come in, I'm like, Anders, what's going on, man? Are you okay? You're like, what? What is it? It's like, well, your shoulders are immediately rotating, your spine's hyperkyphotic, it's folded forward,

your head's, you're in a defensive position. Oh, you don't feel so good. You're defending, right? You just won a race, all right, for being world's best podcaster or whatever. You're like, I feel good. Totally. I'll take that.

I'll accept that. Yeah. Steven. You didn't know there was a race. Trust it. Thanks. Thanks. Everybody knows. Healer. podcast or whatever you're like i feel good totally i'll take that i'll accept that yeah thanks everybody knows healer best podcaster but everybody knows like cool andrews is feeling good what's the deal right so we're communicating there's numbers for it that are probably not accurate but they say 55 of our communication is via body language 38 is tonality 7 is the actual words that we're communicating. So when we're talking to each other, we don't really give that many shits about the words.

We care about, is this person lying to me? If you're speaking to me, you can lie out your ass all day, but your body always has this feeling of you'll look away, or your shoulders or your hips will start to... That's how we talk. The words are really just like the tip of the iceberg you can feed everything

Yeah, that's what we're doing. Yeah, I love it What wait if your brain went into his body and vice versa? Would you be him in his body or would he be you with your brain? Ooh, I just had like a total brain fart I don't even know how to Keep your brain out of my head. That's currently what's happening. That's all I can think about when you're saying transplanting organs. I'm like, God, which person would it be? Who am I?

As I was not listening, thinking of something. Something clever just happened. Verifying your point. The dialogue. The dialogue. Come on, Doug. Pay attention. So moving – like where did – you know, looking at the practice that you started in

and the place that you began, which was basically, you know, in a sense, you were building yourself up. But at the same time, you know, bodybuilding, you're actually breaking yourself down. You were like you were hurting yourself. At what point did you find this? Like where like where were you in your life when you realized that all of this fitness, right, like what we see on the covers of magazines and what we aspire to be as 12-year-old kids watching Sylvester Stallone or whoever it is that we emulate, when at what point was it all of a sudden, shit, this is not for me, and now I have to find how to fix this,

and which is what led you to Rolfing? Kind of, sort of. I mean, I'm still finding it. Yeah, whatever it is yeah yeah you know so on a momentary basis hanging out with people like you guys and hanging out kyle kingsbury kicking my ass and like all these different things like everybody has you can think of every person as kind of like a nutritional supplement you know so we could all use a little bit of of you know kyle or adam or andrews or doug whatever it's like everyone has something different to offer

yeah you know but i mean my joints started popping off my body. So I've dislocated both. I don't like to talk about it that much It's rare that I actually mention it but I've dislocated both my shoulders more times than I can count. I've dislocated my ankle I had a hard one dislocate. Yeah, it's pretty fucked up. Yeah, I had to says playing basketball Does personal training at LA Fitness? I was 16 years old and playing playing basketball with all the boys. And I came down. I don't know why I said all the boys in such a fabulous way. You hear that?

That was terrible. All the boys. That's Timmy's liver talking. So I was with the boys. And came down off a rebound. And yeah, my fucking ankle popped off. So my joints literally started popping off my body. The most dangerous thing you can do. It's terrible. And you're wearing all these ridiculous sneakers that throw your whole proprio fucking ankle popped off. So my joints literally started popping off my body. The most dangerous thing you can do.

It's terrible. And you're wearing all these ridiculous sneakers that throw your whole proprioceptive system off, especially if you're a more barefoot guy, which I wasn't yet, but now I am. What was the rationale for why you think your joints were so weak in this example? Like two shoulders, you're only 16 years old. Like what were you doing at 16 that was causing you to be so weak at those joints? Beach muscles. Wouldn't that still in some context make you stronger, especially at your ankles?

Yeah, no. Not to know, like shut that down, but no in the sense that I was. So we're already in this. Life lives in this 12 by 12 box in front of us, right? At that time, my cell phone didn't live in front of it, but that's where we live. We have the iPad and the computer. Then your car rolls you forward. rolls us forward so when you go to a gym if you're so you're only doing like like pecs and abs and biceps like the only the stuff

i won't say i'm gonna say only but but predominantly now i pretty much still not only but the things that i'm the most enamored with now is engaging my back and my butt like the back i just i just want to like introduce myself to the back of my body. Were you not doing deadlifts at the time or anything like that? I was, but I was doing a terrible job with it. Got it. I was like personal trainer extraordinaire, super jacked, lots of creatine, lots of glucosamine,

all the supplements, just railing them down. From an outside perspective, I looked like I probably knew what I was talking about. The reality was I was hurting myself and everybody around me. But that's really just like the journey of understanding or digging deep into the education side of it. But that now leads into like we talked about dance. It's a big thing.

Yeah, dance is beautiful. These little flowy movements. Flowy shit. When did you start to transition into a little bit more of like the movement culture stuff? Yeah. I think surfing was a big thing. Yeah. You know, so like the ocean. So, again, it's like people are a big thing. Yeah, you know so like the ocean, you know

So again, it's like people are kind of supplements So is nature and different, you know, we put yourself in any environment you start to attune to that environment totally So if you go into the ocean, I can tell right away if somebody can surf, right? That's not hard to say like if someone's real Yes, low good luck in the ocean liketon's behind the cam over here, dude. Smooth. Killer. Look at this guy. So flowy.

That's a good look. His hair looks like he can surf. That's a legitimate look. Just the hair looks like he can surf. He's not straining at all. If you're walking around in super tight women's clothes, you can shred. Look at those shoes. They're beautiful.

Yeah, that is nice. He didn't know he was getting brought in right now. No, that is a good look. We could learn something from him. Oh, yeah. We learn a lot so so getting to that question about like you're flowing and moving i mean interestingly enough we met here oh yeah yeah that's right four five something like that four or five years ago i'm teaching a handstand course and we're talking on the way there and you're like can i jump in yeah and that

was at that time how long you know in there were you kind of already moving right you're you're newer i know at the time in that sense like where you and i even had this conversation where you're like oh i've been moving more and like kind of doing this thing and you started getting into dance a little bit at that time. Was that new at that time? I was always enamored with handstands. So when I took a handstand, I can muscle through a handstand. But most people can muscle through a handstand. If you have enough, again, superficial muscles on there,

you can hold yourself in almost any position for 10 seconds. But through that, so that was kind of one of those things so people can applause. That was where most of my brain was focused. I think, yeah, around maybe the last five years or so, I got into ballet around that same time, maybe a year after that. Started taking hip-hop classes, a little bit of breaking classes,

and I'm like a C, C-minus, at a lot of different modalities. But what that ends up being is... That's like an A to the real world. Yeah. You're a C compared to like the people you're training with when you're doing whatever flowy stuff and they're like, wow, that's gorgeous. Where did he learn that?

Are you a professional? Put me next to somebody that actually does that shit. I was just standing on one leg. It's okay. Wait, have you ever breakdanced? You look like you'd fucking smash breakdance. Yeah, I can show some stuff. Yeah, I mean, I... We should have a breakdown.

We should have a ballet off. Boats are ballet, people. We need some cardboard boxes. This is actually something I thought when you were on the show that I learned a lot about when you're talking about coming from the fight culture

where everything is super internally rotated and we hold all that stuff in so you're not getting hit by whatever the hell it is. And then we start to mimic that stuff in life with external stressors and hiding. And then you get into the more performing arts pieces and opening up. I learned that a lot from you around the show, and it was super cool. And I think that that's a lot of the expression of what you're talking about,

of opening up a little bit, finding your posture, finding a way to present yourself that's a little bit more globally healthy. Yeah, I think Adam's a really good example of that. He may or may not have advertently or inadvertently exposed himself to more of that open, expressive type movement.

That's beautiful if you're on YouTube right now. People look at this. But that movement, that wouldn't serve you very well in like a UFC cage match. I don't think I said that right. There's nothing that shows you have never been in a real fight. Like the cage match where they punch.

With the boys. With all the boys. They're very sweaty. That guy looks mean over there. There's only gay if you make eye contact. That guy looks mean over there. There's this great poster with Vanderlei Silva and this other guy, and it's like, it's only gay if you make eye contact. It's classic.

It's a good t-shirt. But, yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, as to what Andrew said, you know, with the internal, the bringing it all in, internalizing it, and then, like, the external, like, opening up Port up, port de bois and stuff with like, you know, port de bois to those at home is arm gestures in ballet, right? So if you open up your hands and you express yourself, you open up your legs and express yourself that way. Do you feel that that is enough to reverse the internal,

like that internal, like just the physical? Yeah. Yeah. the internal like that internal like just the physical yeah yeah yeah i think it's i think it's it's a gateway into your more real emotional other layers of your emotional self yeah like you're physical again so so let's assume that this albert morabian is the guy that came up with that was at harvard's in the 60s people want to like fact check the 55 38 7 thing so if 55 of our communication is via this body language expressive thing and i'm always training myself to be in this position adam's probably just like that's

a terrible position right but if i'm if i'm training myself to be in this position all the time i learned front foot up that's muay thai back foot up that's something else kyle just broke that down he's like put that down there yep let me more boxing. You look like such a pussy. Yeah. All right. Pussy's a very resilient genitalia, by the way. It is. I shouldn't have. So actually, it's like the reality. I've tried. I've tried my best.

It's more like you're a. You can't beat it. You can't. You can't. It's undefeated. You can keep trying. It's undefeated. It's never lost.

But with that, so if our communication is via that, and you start to mold yourself into more of a defensive position you take that into the world all of a sudden you literally take on it's like two ends of the same rope right so my emotional self is communicating my physical self my physical self is going back the other direction okay so if i'm in this position emotionally physiology physiologically hormonally i'm sending myself a signal that defense, cortisol up. Testosterone actually decreases from being in this position. It's more like Harvard study stuff.

When we go up into this position, two minutes in this position, they did... Very dance posture here. I get a little feel to go. Ruin my posture. Being in that upright position, they call it the superwoman pose. Amy Cuddy, she did a thing. She's got a bajillion views on that thing.

So probably a lot of people. It's really good. Fake it till you make it, basically. Fake it till you make it. Stand tall. Be proud of yourself. Stand tall. Fake it.

Yeah, right. And that gets into some other stuff where faking it is kind of like a funny thing. But, you know, if we can start to put on that position, then all of a sudden, hormonally, our cells are listening to that. Okay? So we can communicate to a deeper level of ourselves through this physical posture. And we can communicate through things like talk therapy that will actually have physical structural change.

If I feel better, if I feel safe and supported in my world, all of a sudden I might start moving like this a little bit more. Right? If I feel whatever that was. Whoever's watching on YouTube, I apologize in advance. No, you have collagen protein. Tell me about it. I'm not a mime.

This is how I move. But yeah, I mean, I move a little funny. And a part of that is me just trying to figure my shit out. Yeah. The wiggling, as you called it. Yeah. Fucking wiggler. Years ago.

We were like, we should call it wiggling. Just a second ago, you were mentioning how your external physiology can influence your internal physiology, your hormones and whatnot. When I was doing MMA back years and years ago at Team Quest in Gresham, Oregon, like 2005 and 2006, Robert Falls, who unfortunately just passed away, he used to always mention how there were studies done that people that were depressed could look in the mirror for like 30 minutes and just smile at themselves yeah just like just just smiling yourself like goofy in the mirror it's a little

creepy and that was huh it's a little creepy but it works yeah it's really weird to just smile at yourself for any period of time in the mirror longer than a few seconds like you i i shouldn't say anybody else like i want to look away but like i just have to like keep forcing it when i when i try this after talking to him yeah and he was saying that people that are depressed, they do better smiling at themselves in the mirror for 30 minutes each morning than the people that were taking all the antidepressants and whatnot. Yeah, and half of antidepressants are placebo. Half of everything is placebo. So when you're taking that pill, so much of that is the belief system

and the intentionality that goes into, okay, pill goes into face, I'm feeling better you know that's why having a gratitude journal starting the day with some degree of like oh it's okay it's like this i'm grateful to be in this body yeah that's literally you writing on that paper is a lot like you putting a pill into your face right they're they're cousins they're close close relatives you know so there's all these different placebo options all around the world. That's why I'm like a, you know, I try not to be too much of a, I'm like a long hugger. You know, like I like to, I'm like not creepy like Venice long hugger.

I got a really long hug. I get a long hug from you every once in a while, but it's not creepy. But I'll do it, well, because I like you. You're calibrating against the people in Venice. So you're like, to the rest of the world, you hug extremely long. They give you a couple of bat pats and then they let go and you're still there. They're kind of like, go. So you're like, to the rest of the world, you hug extremely long. They give you a couple of bat pats, and then they let go, and you're still there. They kind of like go back for the second hug, so they don't feel like they're just standing there with their arms down.

But having that, like, same thing with, like, eye contact. You know, like, I try not to be too creepy with the eye contact, but, like, I'm down to have some eye contact with people. Right? It's that ability to kind of see, like, yeah, like, I'm here with you. Right. We're in this thing together. Yeah, for sure.

You know, so when people go through the traumatic like, yeah, I'm here with you. We're in this thing together. So when people go through the traumatic experiences, like the blitz on England or the 9-11 or firefighters or police or whatever, they want to go back to that shit. Because all of a sudden it's like, we're in this. You got me, I got you. Let's go. In this

world, I'm doing it for effect. I'm actually staring right at the back of your head right now. He's like, don't look away, don't look away, don't look away.

It's for effect. Fierce gaze, fierce gaze. Careful getting locked into these. But imagine if you and I were about to, it's either us or them. We're about to die.

All of a sudden, it might be, forget everything I was saying. But people going, we don't have enough of that in our culture. It's all about get to work, pay the mortgage, pay the bills, get laid, be validated in whatever these superficial ways are. Be in the tube, deep in the tube.

We don't have that kind of like, we don't go beyond that much. I feel like a lot of people break eye contact due to insecurity of one facet or one way or another. But with my kids, like I have three kids that are three years old and younger. I've got an 18-month-old and a two-month-old. And with them, a lot of times I'll be looking at them dead in the eye, and I'll just kind of hold it, just peacefully looking at them, and see how long they'll look me in the eye. And they'll just sit there and just fucking stare at me.

They don't have anything to hide. Yeah, they're just like, they just eat it up. I feel like this is a really psychologically healthy thing for my kids to have really long eye contact where they can tell that I'm paying attention to them. And then after having that realization, I'm like, fuck, it's probably like that for everyone. People want to have the eye contact. They want to have the connection,

but they, at the same time, are like, I don't want to be a weirdo. So as a three-year-old kid, you don't have anything to hide yet. Right. Right? You don't have any. He might have something to hide sometimes.

But if he does, then you'll see it. He won't want to look at you anymore. Right. You know? So we're like these filters that are always aggregating all the shit of the day,

you know, or our lifetime. You know? And so if you have some stuff that you're insecure about, whatever it may be, you stole some stuff, your sexuality, you're still in the closet, you are filling the blank thing, you know? And so if you have some stuff that you're insecure about, whatever it may be, you stole some stuff, you're sexual, you're still in the closet,

you are filling the blank thing, you know? And you're like, I don't want you to see me, right? All of a sudden, your posture starts to change, your eye contact starts to divert, right? So, and then there's the, this is like the fake it part, there's the creepy eye stares and the creepy long huggers where they're, they have something to hide, but they kind of force through it like i

don't have anything to hide i'm a creepy long stare you know you're like oh that didn't feel good either that's like a power move yeah right yeah somebody's trying to yeah pull power i forget i forget where i where i heard this or saw this but there there was a study where they had you know large groups of females large groups of males and they were looking at photos of people and all the photos of when women were looking at photos of people. And all the photos of, when women were looking at photos of the guys, whenever the guy was looking at the camera, and he had like kind of a half smile, no teeth, just like that, like women were like super like, that guy's creepy as fuck, get away from me.

If the guy was just like, you know, no half smile, just kind of like, you know, calm face, it was totally fine. And if it was a big smile, big teeth, like just happy, nothing just happy nothing to hide smile then like oh that guy looks really friendly and nice but like the half smile was like was like the mouth closed smile was like that guy's a fucking creeper the devil smirk yeah he's he's gonna be looking at me from across the room never come talk to me and then and then kind of creep up on me when i'm not looking i'm gonna be like fuck get me out of here there's a there's a guy called paul ekman are you guys savvy with his work at all? So he gets a lot into facial expressions.

So he spent his whole life studying facial expressions of various different primates and people. Is he the guy that can predict divorce up to

like 95% after watching a two minute video of somebody and just based on the facial expressions. I feel like it's even faster than

that. I'm not sure. I feel like it's even faster than that. I don't talk about that guy in a book. I'm not sure. I'm recording a podcast with him next Monday or something like that, so I'm about to dig even deeper into his stuff. But he came up with this number of 10,000 facial expressions. So each person, we think it's like I have happy, sad, angry, oh face. I have like four.

There's not a lot of potential range in here. The reality is you have, you know, I think a lot more than 10,000. Jim Carrey? Yeah. Right. He's an outlier. So that's another thing. He's got a million.

Right. So we have insecurity around exploring various ranges of dimension in our face because it's not socially accepted. Yeah. But if you go and hang out with a couple primates, which we are, I think it's like 99% of our genetics are primates. The difference is bacteria. So if you go hang out with some primates, they're like, it's fine.

They're picking each other and they're doing all this stuff and they're squatting down. It's like, dude, totally. You're getting well. Your system's working. It's healing itself. Because of shame, we want to stay within this mold that we conceive as being acceptable. That mold becomes a prison, and then we end up getting toxic.

I love it. When I sometimes think about eye contact, I think about the situations that we're generally in eye contact, and it's usually a moment of aggression like um conflict right where conflict is about to happen right or sexual right that's kind of like the two eye contacts in some sense sure right and then there's like the third which is like the flight the person that's like not looking right you know so. You know, so it's, like, fight, fuck, or fly. You know, like, these, like, three things are happening in this, like, visual. So when I'll do, like, a balance drill with somebody, I'll, like, get close to them. And all of a sudden, they're so thrown off.

Right. But if they're secure, they don't move. And that was something interesting by, like, just getting into somebody's face with this eye contact of like conflict yeah where i'm like promoting like fear to see what happens yeah and all of a sudden they respond with boom off the off the balance beam right is this something that you you've experienced as you've explored this kind of eye contact facial gesture body gesture where you see like these certain type of characteristics that people do as they're uncomfortable like is this like other than just the shelling yeah right because the shelling is uh also like within a handshake yeah you know oh dude there's so much

science in the handshake i love talking handshake and when it's like it's interesting because you know yesterday i saw you go in john went for a hug you went for a high five and then all of a sudden it became this thing where you like slap his arm out of the way and it's like hi bam you know like that's almost what it starts turning into right because we don't know what's gonna actually happen here right just a bunch of confused boys trying to figure it out right exactly how do we engage without seeming like one of those three things that we're doing with our eyes? The thing that pops up for me is you're saying that. It was something we were talking about yesterday.

I got some spiritual yoga whatever person. They were talking to me about or talking to a class that I was in. And they said never waste a trigger, which I thought that was really profound. Never waste a trigger. A trigger, right? So when you're in the car and someone, you know, cuts you off or whatever, and you have this, like, all your sphincters clenching, and your middle finger starts getting, ah!

You're like, oh, whoa, what was that? You know, like, that wasn't me. Yeah. That was just this layer that I've been carrying around. Yeah. Right? That's a response that I've been repeating over and over again. I could be able to step outside of that and say, whoa, what was that?

Yeah. Practicing road rage all the time. You know? It's the same thing if my trigger is whatever. Just watching your reactions to things, kind of almost having like a third-person perspective. It's a little creepy talking about it like that, but it's good. When we get back, we're going to talk about how we can start to implement this into people's lives because you do have a practice and you are helping people

and taking these kind of larger concepts and how we can implement them into people's lives. Let's do it. Right on. Awesome. Shrug fam, hope you're enjoying the show. I want to discuss Omega-3s for a minute because Omax-3 Ultra Pure, the purest Omega- 3 supplement on the market, contacted me about sponsoring the podcast. In case you're unaware, Omega 3s and Mentata is one of the

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great coaching great community of people shrug collective dot com backslash vault and back to the show welcome back to barbell shrug we're here with alexander we literally just spent the last 15 minutes going over the science of bro hugs slap slap pounds, and how you can introduce yourself to new personal training clients. That was the most inside joke that nobody got. Not how to hold on to clients. It's just how to obtain new ones. You're going to have a 50% success rate. That's a pretty good close rate.

That secret's coming up. But before the break, we left, and we kind of covered a whole bunch of topics kind of on this personal development side how you're presenting yourself to you not just other people but kind of to yourself and building confidence but when we start to implement these things what are some of the when you're building a relationship with a new client how are you kind of presenting these ideas to them so that they can gradually start to believe it themselves and start to implement this stuff into their life yeah asking questions as opposed to putting things on people, you know,

that's something that I find like I try to throw the word should away, you know, that's all, everybody knows that one. But just asking people questions, like ideally we want to get people to present, they want to come, people want to come up with their own answers, you know, so if you're the one, you're the sorcerer with the bag of tricks and you're like, here, I'm doing this to you, it still feels kind of contrived. It's like it's coming from the outside. So that's

something. It's just kind of asking people questions about how they're feeling with their hip or their knees or whatever as opposed to telling you your knee's fucked up. So that's a start is thinking more question based. You blew right over that whole should thing and just said like, oh, everyone knows that. I don't think everyone knows that. What's the story there?

Do you have any, so if I say you should make my gain louder, you should talk less or you should talk more, like how does that feel to you? It doesn't feel very good. Feels like I've been doing it all wrong. I'm an idiot. Yeah, right. So all of a sudden I go into this kind of, I'm putting you down. Right. So that place, as opposed to feeling, and this kind of gets into the handshake stuff too,

there's a more submissive or more dominant or more neutral way to shake a hand. You turn someone's hand over or the hand on the arm. Side shot. Exactly. Yeah. That's so weird. When that one comes at you, there's no trust in there.

That's a dominant handshake. So that one comes at you, there's no trust in there. That's a dominant handshake. So that's like a should handshake. It's like we're arm wrestling right off the bat. And that's because he's a top rope, right? Like when somebody goes like this, they're basically looking for the dominant position. That's it. Yeah.

So I'll volunteer. If I feel like someone needs the dominant position, I'll volunteer the submissive position. Yeah. All right? So if someone comes in with that, I'm like, sure, volunteer the submissive position. Yeah. Right? So if someone comes in with that, I'm like, sure, you can have it, bro. I don't need to fight you.

I'm cool. You know? And that's jiu-jitsu or Aikido. That's like martial arts stuff where it's like if someone has all this energy going in that direction, I don't need to come in and just like muscle you back and then we're in this kind of like weird, you know, friction. Ego struggle. Yeah.

So if someone feels like they need to feel that I'm big, strong,power whatever it is i'm like you can have it that's your line right and so it's just the feeling of like it's not your role to change anybody right so it's like leading by example as opposed to telling people what they should and shouldn't do it's like this is what we got if you would like to get into it you can you know but not feeling like i'm better than you i have the answers like none of that how did you develop this like flow state of your kind of just more or less existence where it's you're you're okay you've like checked your ego was there some catalyst to not that it doesn't exist but have you was there some sort of transition period where you're like man this is just a broken system inside my body right now?

I think just continue to bang your head up against the wall over and over again. Yeah. You know, it's like there's a guy, Andrew Taylor Still, who founded osteopathy, and he got migraine headaches all the time. Right? It's like, why do I have these migraine headaches? You know, then he's got this crunched up neck and all the posture stuff we talk about, finally he started like, what if I just put a little string behind my head and kind of lay down and start to lift this suboccipital territory here, all of a sudden I start to move this cerebral spinal fluid.

I start kind of like moving, relaxing my neck, relaxing my body. Oh, the headaches start to go away. Yeah. Right? So with any of that, for me it's just like I'm still doing stuff wrong. Yeah. What does your daily practice look like of this?

So I like to squad a lot. Yeah. Right? I'm barefoot a lot. But it's not like it doesn't have to be like a weird creepy thing, like I'm barefoot in my yard. Yeah. You're talking about working out right now.

Yeah. Throughout here. So this whole entire time, I've been kind of going through like Adam and I were talking about this yesterday, like ideally we're at the Paleo FX Ancestral Health. Ideally, we'd be out. The bros are out. We're like hunting down a woolly mammoth or like gathering some seeds or something.

You gather, I'll hunt. There it is. That's the dominant piece. I'll take the undershake. I'll take the undershake on that one. There you go. Backhanded pound there. You can have the overhead. I'll be back here. I'll receive the under shake. I'll take the under shake on that one. There you go. Backhanded pound there. You can have the overhead.

I'll be back here. I'll receive. I'm the catcher. One more level go. What's another? More creepy analogies. Where can I go? Where's all the boys?

So ideally, we'd be out, and we're like out. We're getting adaptation of our feet on the ground. I'm walking on roots, and I have to climb up a thing. Oh, I have to run now. I have to sprint. Oh, I got freaked out. All of a sudden, I go to this sympathetic fight-flight type experience, and now I'm going to kind of like shiver it off and get that shit off of me.

You know, like that's our body healing itself. Yeah. Right? So we don't have enough of that's our body healing itself. Yeah. Right? So we don't have enough of that in our day-to-day because we're stuck in this kind of cubicle lifestyle. And again, we start to suffocate.

Our cells suffocate. That's one piece that I try to talk about so much with our clients and just people that are kind of in our world is, you know, that hour in the gym

is really just not everything you think it is. And if you can think about where you're moving, how you're moving, how you're sitting, all of that stuff throughout the day, and just try and practice getting better at maybe sitting at your desk. If you have to, there's probably, you could think about different ways to do it, healthier ways to do it, postural ways where you're building confidence versus this, like, terrible position.

Because people aren't going to get out of that, and they think that the gym is the place that they're moving it's like no the majority of your movement is really shitty and it is the other you know 10 12 15 hours of your day so if you can find that congruence between the gym and the office and your travel all of a sudden you become you know like yoga or you become olympic weightlifting or you become fill in the blank thing you become yoga or you become Olympic weightlifting or you become fill-in-the-blank thing, you become judo, whatever your thing is, it's once that starts to spill into the rest of your relationships. I've experienced that with a lot of martial arts people.

I'm not that great at any martial arts, but I've been around people and I've felt little bits of it where if I'm doing something a lot, I feel it start to become a part of the way that I make the eggs and everything. I'm kind of like in this, because you're doing so much of it your ballet fried egg is delicious you love my friend you know so if you could start to create a little bit more congruence connection between the way that i was sitting in my car i wasn't hunched up in this bucket seat the whole time i threw maybe i threw a little bottle behind my t-spine right so now all of a sudden I'm stacking myself up the same way if you were coaching me on a front squat

Right you wouldn't want me to collapse forward in that hyper kyphotic position You want me you wouldn't want me to lose that lordotic curve you want to keep that long neutral spine, right? You want me to keep that hinge so I can drive that weight through my body Yeah, as I'm in the car do that right as I'm flipping my eggs do that Right if we can start to do that then all of a sudden the way that you reach out for the door to go into The gym you're creating that external rotation of the shoulder girl active I love it like I literally like just standing here. We do these things standing up all the time. Yes, you're talking Yes, I'm paying attention

But the majority of time I'm really thinking about am i squeezing my butt when i stand how stable am i like i feel the positions when we're standing here and like by the end of the day i always find myself in some like yeah it's awesome tree pose like opening your hips up and it's like we're here all day and we have these cool little moments to actually build some movement and connect some wiring and if people can find the opportunities to do that it opens everything else up like even on the performance side of things i haven't done crossfit or whatever competitively in so long and the further i get away from it and the more i get into just understanding movement and releasing tension in my body i can go back and do that stuff and i actually move better i'm still in great

shape ish but you get rid of all the shit and you're going to get better by eliminating bad versus having to go and force yourself to get better at all of these things. So every dogma has value. So as you're talking about that, I'm kind of thinking of one of the values that you learn in a CrossFit reality would be if you can create that external rotation in the shoulder girdle, like break the bar, right, and activate that pinky, activate that posterior chain and tricep and all the backside of the shoulder girdle.

Yeah. Right? That's because we're pretty much asleep in that. So you're retraining yourself on how to activate that back of the body that's asleep. You can do that as you're driving your car. Oh, yeah. Feel your pinky on the steering wheel. Yeah.

Right? As I mentioned, reaching out for the door to go into the gym. Feel the fucking pinky in there, man. Start activating that whole thing. So now we have this continuous gym experience. If you can create a continuous gym experience, now you're on it. If you haven't figured that out, figure that out. That was the most aggressive I've ever heard anyone say the word pinky.

I was feeling it on that one. I'm going to back down a little bit. I'm going to go down a few desks. I'm sorry. I got on my podium there for a second. I want to jump back to the martial arts. The pinky. It's funny because not many people actually have something as simple as a push-up.

They won't put tension across the pinky to the thumb. Right. Like they're like rolling to the outside of their hand and they don't engage. Yeah, you need both sides. Right, you need both sides. Same with like a, let's just say like something that somebody is very, you know, a lot of people are, you know, very familiar with, which is like a bicep curl. Right? Like a lot of the pressure is here when somebody is doing bicep curls and they don't actually put the pressure off into their pinky.

Yeah. curls and they don't actually put the pressure off their into their pinky yeah which uh you know basically as somebody who bodybuilded you know that gives you like a deeper contraction more control more stimulation of the muscles the nervous system everything so it's it's uh just engaging and when you're speaking about engaging through martial arts do you like looking at most martial arts i mean i've done a lot from karate to taekwondo and you know belted through these things everything is like here right and like throwing those roundhouses i mean yeah there's I've done a lot from karate to taekwondo and, you know, belted through these things. Everything is like here. Right. And like throwing those roundhouses. I mean, yeah, there's like the outside crescent kick or something. But when I think about jujitsu, I think about jujitsu is probably one of the most kind of like social, like social, like you're open. Like, oh, I'm letting you into my guard right right and do you believe that

something like jujitsu could even be like a way to be more accepting of what's happening versus something like karate which is like stay away from me right you know you know whatever it is yeah all yeah all of it you know it's like thinking of jujitsu and i think dance is another one yeah so partner dance jujitsu capoeira you know all those they're just different mediums of creating that conversation between two people you know and one of the the interesting things with with dance and martial arts but dance specifically it has huge effects on preventing alzheimer's and any kind of cognitive dysfunction right right so as we're going through like they say jujitsu is like physical chess essentially right so as we're going through there you're thinking with your body of how to get my foot up over the thing and

you know you're going through you get all right yeah you pull my yeah so but you're going through there and you're really you're starting to put your brain into your hip into your knee into your foot which by the way your brain and your skin comes to the same dermal layer. So from an embryological perspective, they both come from the ectoderm. So you can start to think of your brain as being an extension of your skin or your skin as an extension of your brain. So there's dry brushing. So you go through and dry brush. You're literally flossing, exfoliating your brain as you're doing that.

It's not just about, oh, I have like better thigh skin. It's you're trying to turn on and liven your whole entire body. And so something like jiu-jitsu is such a beautiful way of enlivening that because we're contacting all these different parts of you, which all of a sudden makes you more real. You're here. If we have disassociation or disconnection, which again, more metaphors, disassociation, that's all like talk therapy stuff, same thing with physical

disassociation. So if you don't feel a certain part of your body, if you can't visualize it, oftentimes there's pain associated with that area as well. What are we getting distracted by? Too loud? Oh, we're blowing up paleo. Oh, too loud. We got to turn this down.

Turn this up. Off. I love how they're just completely in the middle of the show. We're going to have to edit this out. Do a little edit. That's the power of. They want us to put those things back up. Whoever was annoyed, sorry.

There we go. All better. Can we edit? Yeah, we can edit this. That's an edit. Colton, editor, everything. Editor, edit. Do you feel like the cops just showed up? Like the fun cops?

Turn that shit down. I'm so used to it. Turn it down. Isn't that what they wanted? Didn't they want us to broadcast. Yeah, but those Things were up here lock it from this people people speaking on stage With you When you're speaking we're're going to get rid of him again. We're still doing it, guys. Perfect. Aaron Alexander.

Shrug Collective. Were you doing your question? Well, hold on. I do think, like, anecdotally, from doing jiu-jitsu for a long time, wrestling for a long time, there's definitely something about it that I've noticed that I'm such a happier person when I do jiu-jitsu versus other physical anythings. Like, if I go for trail runs or if I go lift weights or do CrossFit, even if I'm, like, doing CrossFit, hanging out with, like, my good friends, it's different than doing jiu-jitsu versus other physical anythings like if i go for trail runs or if i go lift weights or do crossfit even if i'm like doing crossfit hanging out with like my good friends it's different than

doing jiu-jitsu and i think i think i'm happier when i do jiu-jitsu a couple times a week because i just get so much more physical contact like especially if someone like like doesn't have they're not in a relationship and they're not in a you know they're not in socal where everyone hugs for like 10 seconds like we were talking about earlier. They don't get a lot of physical human contact. Like if they go do jiu-jitsu, aside from like the fitness benefits and like they're working their muscles and they're breathing heavy. Confidence. Like just the fact that they're getting an hour of physical contact with other human beings. Like totally non-sexual contact.

It's male to male in most cases. Like it just makes me feel better as a person having gotten that physical contact versus just working out and lifting weights yeah there's a there's a creepy mouse study in japan where they tickled rats or mice or whatever they tickled the rodents okay and so that the road is a creepy mouse how do you get that job how do you close up balls of a Close up. On the rat fluffer. Dibs on rat fluffer. Reading the fluffer. Von Roth is the best at it.

There's a lot of them, but he's world class. So they'd fluff the rats. And the rats that were fluffed, the well-fluffed rats, they ended up actually adapting to their environment much better. So they ended up feeling more well-adapted and feeling like they measured hormones and all that stuff. They were healthier rats. There was a reason to keep living. The ones that grew up with that physical contact, the same thing with societies that end up having more physical contact growing up,

they tend to be less warlike. Yeah, I mean, on to what Doug is saying. I mean, if I do Muay Thai, right, and I'm, like, here with you the whole time and I'm just hitting this pad, the rest of my day is not nearly as good after I get done doing jiu-jitsu. Yeah. I mean, I'm more aggressive on my answers. You know, like, if I go home right after Muay Thai and my wife asks me something, I'm a little bitier. Oh, yeah. Where, like, jiu-jitsu, I'm like, oh, yeah, no problem.

Muay Thai is a very aggressive mindset compared to jiu-jitsu, which is very chill. Like jiu-jitsu in a lot of cases has like a fucking chill surf culture associated with it. And muay Thai, boxing, like a lot of times in MMA are much more aggressive. Jiu-jitsu, you're also practicing receiving. Whereas muay Thai, you're hitting pads. It's crush the pad, crush the pad, crush the pad. Right. Whereas jiu-jitsu, it's like, what are you doing? How do I receive and communicate with that?

Now I go into conversation, I'm like lubed into that next thing. Hopefully you don't take any sexual notes. I actually have noticed. I'm so lubed right now. I'm always lubed at Jiu-Jitsu. Catching all the boys. That's all they say. I'm just like casually saying no for practice.

Like okay, I'm a mat-slinger. I got to lube up our bitch. Just like totally brush over it. Walk up to your partner, put a haywire in your hand. I have actually, just the few times that I've been to jiu-jitsu or when me and you rolled when we were. I introduced him to the mat. Yeah, it's awesome.

But I've done it so few times in my life, and I've spent so much time in a gym and not in that like, oh, shit, we're within a foot of each other right now And this is real like we're making eye contact and we're about to engage in this thing And I don't think many people get that just that really tight interaction where you're in my bubble, and it could get weird Yeah, yeah all three of them right in front of you We're joking about the personal training client stuff which will never be mentioned again. But we have a very binary relationship with contact. Yeah.

There's no contact or we're doing it. Yeah. Right? So then there's this huge gap in between that. There's all this potential conversation that we're 0 to 6,000. So if you can start to implement a little bit more of that 45 miles per hour, 75 miles per hour, all of that, all of a sudden it's like you become a more intelligent communicator from a physical, from every perspective. Too many people are like zero to snap.

Right. You need more gears in between. Yeah, gears, man. First gear, 12th gear. Right. It's a practice. So what are you working towards now? So like all this education, you move from, it was Bend, right. It's a practice. So what are you working towards now? So, like, all this education, you move from – it was Bend, right, is where your practice is? Bend, Oregon.

Bend, Oregon. Yeah. Another granola mecca. Which I actually got to drive through when I stopped at Nora's and I went on this road trip. Oh, she's in Portland. Oh, yeah, yeah. Nora got us. Shout out.

Yeah, yeah. Nora got us. She'll be here, right? I hope so. Yeah, yeah. I love Nora. I saw her on the speaker. All right.

That's good news. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nara Gagaitis. She'll be here, right? I hope so. Yeah, yeah. I love Nara. I think I saw her on the speaker. All right. That's good news. Now that you're in Venice, you've been, you know, doing a lot more, like, seeing your podcast grow and everything, seeing the acro side of you and just kind of everything. Where is this leading as I'm seeing, you know, something happening, right? Yeah. It's the rubber, you know, the movement, everything. It's happening. Yeah, it's happening.

So go to book right now. Okay. And so that's that's i can talk i'll probably talk more about that in like a couple months okay uh but the book is happening and then creating online content or courses around how to this this idea of how can every moment be an opportunity to grow my body and also grow my mind but we'll the body is the trojan horse you know so figuring out basic mechanics of hip hinging and neutral spine and organizing my feet all the way up to my head, how can that relate to everything that I'm doing? So essentially creating a driver's manual of our bodies.

Somehow, some way, we just blank that in school because teachers don't know how the hell to move. Yeah. Right. Well, you talk about your feet, though. I actually want to dig into that because I think the feet actually are like i started walking around barefoot two years ago or so yeah and it's freaking awesome it's way cooler now when i have shoes on even we get to wear tennis shoes to work every day like we're wearing it's not like we're in

dress clothes all day but still when i get home at night i I'm like, I don't feel free or, like, free to move until I'm able to, like, actually walk. Yeah, the socks come off. You feel like you're just, you can finally just let your feet breathe. And I actually, like, very much notice a difference just in my personality of the way my feet contact the ground. When I go walking with my wife, it's always barefoot now. Talk about that because I think that when i see people like last night we're hanging out on the porch you had your shoes on and i was like what the fuck why is why is he doing that relax i think i was too high yeah i'm too high that's what was going through my head while

we were i was like he's he's stressing me out with just having his shoes on and i mean it's funny that i wear shoes because i never wear shoes. Yeah. And the only reason I – I noticed it. Right. I bought these just so I could stand still for an hour and a half at a time because I'll get a little lower back discomfort. Yeah.

Well, so getting into like one of the things I really started to learn was like stretching your toes. Now I'm constantly massaging my feet. Like I don't really sit on my couch too much. I try and sit on the floor as much as possible. And when I'm on the floor, it's like constantly just massaging my feet. Like, I don't really sit on my couch too much. I try and sit on the floor as much as possible. And when I'm on the floor, it's like constantly just massaging your feet, and it just makes everything feel better. We have a buddy, Max Schenck, and one of the coolest things I've ever heard come out of his mouth, I don't know if it was actually him or someone we were talking to from him,

but people talk about, like, oh, I have plantar fasciitis. And he's like, well, just massage your feet for five minutes a day. And that might be really weird to some people to actually, like, connect massage your feet for five minutes a day yeah and that might be really weird to some people to actually like connect with their feet and get into the tissues in there but you don't need to go and have some doctor whatever it is tell you what's wrong with you but like just spend some time actually connecting with the bottom of your feet and the way it contacts the ground stretch your big toe the big toe is super important for balance. Like everything kind of stems from the roots. Yeah.

Yeah. So a wacky kind of, people can fact check this one as well. Check it out. It's a PubMed study where they connected schizophrenia to high heel usage. So when you lack that full dorsi and plantar flexion, range of motion of the ankle, all of a sudden you start to mess with,

it's called the dopaminergic cycle or center of your brain, the way that your brain releases neurotransmitters. In this case, dopamine. There's a whole other part of that that I, you know, look it up. Yeah. Right. But this range of motion through our ankles and that contact through our feet, again, that's relating up into our central nervous systems, relating up into our brain. Yeah. You know, so the same conversation we're having where our face is stuck in a very limited range of motion Our feet are stuck in a prison as well You know so just starting to have that conversation starting to open your feet up like So much this stuff we spend so much time doing self-care and balls and bands and foam rollers and all that I think all that's great and comma you can just go walk on some roots. Totally.

You know, underneath your office, whatever situation, you don't need to spend $85 on getting the perfect urban album. Go get a fucking rock. Yeah. Put it under your desk. There you are. You did it. You nailed it.

Right? We just mentioned dorsiflexion and plantar flexion. Like, in the CrossFit weightlifting world, everyone's so concerned about getting enough dorsiflexion that we can do astrograph squats and you have full range of motion and you're not compensating in a particular way but but plantar flexion where you're pointing your toes is not nearly talked about as much as dorsiflexion and a couple years ago I realized that like I can barely point my toes like like if I'm at Muay Thai and like I miss a shin kick and you you dart back quickly and I and I land my toes like like my't, my feet, my ankles and my toes don't flex the other way very well at all.

But I've been doing weightlifting for 20 years. I did gymnastics growing up. Like getting enough dorsiflexion was never an issue because I just had that background my whole life. And so now I've been like consciously on a daily basis trying to sit all the way heel to butt on the ground. Yeah. And try to get that range of motion the other way the ground yeah and try to get that range of motion the other way and then now now i've gotten that range of motion i'm trying to lean back and point my toes like you know like a ballerina would like we talked about ballet on the show today like they

would like point their toes with the full body weight on their toes like doing something like that no fucking chance i would ever be able to do that like a couple years ago it still would hurt to do it these days but like but having that realization that I felt like my ankles were so mobile, but they're only actually really mobile one way. People always comment, like, you have a lot of dorsiflexion, but then when I actually realized that I only have mobility one way, I was like, I need to full swing the other way and make sure that I have that balance. I've heard of it referred to as Barbie foot, where it's like your foot is stuck and the toes don't move in the way

and it's like you're stuck in this kind of like Barbie because we're good at extension and our toes are good at extension but not flexion. Yeah, you just need both. You need it all. And that's what we do. We villainize pronation of the foot as well. So that we were like, oh, God, everybody's feet's collapsing. The navicular's dropping.

We get wigged out about everyone's gotten the valgus knees are dropping in, the glutes are disengaged. So then we become fixated on, ugh, get it out. Now all of a sudden the big toe's raising up, and we're stuck in supination. But it's like flying a plane or a boat or anything, where you steer a little bit, course correct.

Now, whoa, we're over here. Yeah. Oh, god. So it's if we can kind of, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, whoa, here we are. We're finding this midline. Yeah. Right?

That's like a Rolfing or structural integration or Feldenkrais or Alexander technique. You know, they're all saying the same stuff. You want to find that midline point. You know, if you can find that full plantar flexion, that's going to be full activation of that posterior chain. Right? Full dorsiflexion, now we're going up the front. So we want to be like, whoa, whoa.

It's all of it that's relevant. That's the thing. Each dogma has value. Pinky, get wrapped up in that pinky. Posterior chain, tricep, post out. Yeah, absolutely. Don't forget about the pointer finger. Don't forget about the ring finger.

It's the whole thing. Yeah. One thing I love, Andy Galpin talks about this a lot but it's like eliminating things to find that midline and then once you get to that midline kind of opening things back up a little bit and re-exploring that's it to adapt bingo yeah so that's so exploring galpin guy he knows shit he knows that guy so yeah good so exploring so an issue that people have is they explore instability before they found stability. So there's a lot of people that are doing all this, like, dropping the knees,

intentionally dropping the knees and doing these whatever the – what are they called? Not sissy squat. What's it called? You probably know what it's called. When you do, like, a squat and your knees drop in. An ACL injury. That's why people are doing them, though. A lot of people think, like, if your knees dive in, you're going to get ACL tears.

But a lot of people are like, well, if you don't train it, the same way you would train anything else by starting off with a load that's within your ability to do under control, even if you're technically compensating. If you had 300 pounds on your back, you'd be compensating. Because if you're trying to push your knees out and you can't do it, that's a problem. But a lot of people, like Asia Bartow was doing this a while back

where he was on his Instagram talking about, I'm doing a bad squat, quote unquote, intentionally to strengthen those structures. That way, if I do it unintentionally, maybe they'll be a little stronger. Super smart. Well, strong men approach like an Atlas stone in that way. I mean, they're here. And then as they get it here, they're here. And they sit into it, get it. And then they lift up and open up their then as they get it here, they're here, and they sit into it, get it,

and then they lift up and open up their knees as they lift. It's yoga, too, bigger than yoga. Yeah, yeah, I've seen that in yoga. They clash a lot of positions. I love it. And grabbing that stone while being super round over. They don't have, quote, unquote, a neutral spine, but if they're braced in that position and they're able to hold and maintain that position, the likelihood that they're actually going to hurt

or injure their back in that position is really, really low. If you start in a position and as you go through the motion, you're changing shape because you can't hold it, that's when people get hurt. But if you can brace in a position and maintain it throughout and you have stability, then you're not likely to get hurt at all. I'm watching somebody squat right now on the floor that I'm not going to mention who, I don't know who that is, but they're probably listening. And so I would like to work with, we're listening now. Hello. We're talking about you. I wish she was here so we could talk about the squat.

So with that, it's like figuring out, first figuring out that stable position. If we can figure that out, then we all of a sudden, it's almost like you go through school, you graduate first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade. So if you just go straight to post-grad, which is a little bit more complicated. Yo, dude! A little bit more complicated. For audio listeners, Bledsoe just photobombed us. The Bledsoe bomb.

So if you go straight into post-grad before figuring out all those layers of that movement, it's quite dangerous. It can be quite confusing. So I would recommend people first figure out basic hip hinging, basic neutral spine, basic figure out get your knees stacked over your ankle correctly. You guys probably have content about what that looks like. Figure that out.

Nail that. Yeah. Now, OK, cool. Now let's play with some weird arbitrary kind of aberrations of good movement so you can fill in all those holes You should learn the rules before you break the rules. Bingo. That's it Have you seen much of a foundation training like Eric's a good buddy? Yeah, I love the the internal Founder, uh-huh, you know and turn that in torque in the hip. Oh my god

I mean, it's it's a position that you know, if you have you ever seen yeah I mean when you see that movement you try it and you're like, why haven't I mean, it's a position that, you know, if you've ever seen. Totally. Yeah. I mean, when you see that movement, you try it and you're like, why haven't I done this before? Yeah. Because everybody told me not to turn my toes in, not to turn my knees in. Yeah. Right? That was everything I'm not supposed to do, but it's still a movement. Yeah.

And it's like bastardizing a movement. It doesn't mean, not a bad movement isn't a bad movement to practice. Yeah. Right? Like in some sense, it actually will aid you in the sense of if it happens in real life, you might be more ready for it. Yeah. As you're going through any type of squatting motion or anything, gymnastic motion, whatever it is, you want to keep yourself safe.

You want to take up all the slack out of all those joints. So creating a little bit of that medial rotation and then adding that external rotation on top of that, it really is like if you have, we can see on the video here, it's like my hand's inside my shirt right now. If I want to take the slack out of that and I add a little twist to it, all of a sudden, ooh, that's a really stable joint. But if I have all this loose, floppy motion,

so my feet start off in that external rotation, I don't have as much capacity to create that torque in the hip yeah so it's a nice move so earlier we were talking about ankles and toe mobility like when you first start doing weight lifting or strength conditioning it's all focused like on the big joints you know can you hit pins like you're saying do you have full range motion at the hip at the shoulder etc and then as you get more experience in my experience people tend to gravitate out to the smaller and smaller joints as they get kind of the big prime moving joints handled.

So we talked about ankles and toes, but what about like wrist, finger mobility, neck mobility? Like you're very comprehensive in the way you view movement. Like do you assess people's like smaller joints, like finger mobility and whatnot? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it's easier from like a manual therapy perspective to feel all that individual range of motion in there. But just through going like, I don't know what this stretch is called. What's it called when you put your hands backwards and you go in to do like the flexor stretch? Like a flexor extensor stretch. Yeah, we can do these shotgun approaches that go through and affect so much.

Like I like shotguns, you know, so as opposed to... Shotguns are cool. Hell yeah! It's American dream, we're in Texas. There's like 19 shotguns around us right now in Texas. That guy's got a bazooka actually. The guy in the coffee stand over there. An assault rifle.

Would you like this coffee? But a big thing is you're exploring all those more kind of like the appendicular, like the outside type ranges of motion, I think it's still really important to keep stability throughout the chassis or the mainframe. or like the outside type ranges of motion, I think it's still really important to keep stability throughout the chassis or the mainframe. So as you're going through and mobilizing your wrist or your shoulder or whatever, oftentimes what you see is people end up dumping their spine

and trying to sort out my shoulder, but I'm in this terrible spinal position. I'm dropping my hip, my whole body's contorted, and I'm trying to get into the shoulder. Something for people to ponder on is figure out first, okay, I'm loading up for a squat, right? I'm keeping myself good and stacked. Now from here, I'm going to start to mobilize my shoulder. Right?

From here, I'm going to start to mobilize my hand, but I'm in a stacked position, as opposed to just forgetting about my whole body and thinking stretchy. I love when anytime someone comes to you with some sort of pain, they're like, so what should I do? position as opposed to just forgetting about my whole body and thinking stretchy. I love when anytime someone comes to you with some sort of pain, they're like, so what should I do? You're like, just squeeze your butt. Like, let's start there.

Do you know how to squeeze your butt? Because I can't fix anything else if we can't figure out how to organize your pelvis and low spine. Yeah. And those glutes and the butt, that stabilizes, like you're saying, stabilizes the low back. All those muscles run perpendicular with the sacrum. So when they're engaged, all of a sudden that low back,

which tends to be quite wandery, we don't have a lot of range of motion through our thoracic spine. The ribs all connect into that space. So many people are stuffed up in their T-spine. So what we end up doing is we do this overhead flexion stuff. We don't have it there, so we end up stealing it from our lumbar spine. And now all of a sudden we have disc herniation and this like hyper laxity in this territory yeah you know so by engaging those hips that's a nice shotgun to start to communicate to the low back yeah been a pleasure

sir where can people find you oh uh align podcast is a fine place aligntherapy.com is that's like the hub of everything yeah on there there's a five-day movement challenge people can integrate these practices that we're getting after here um yeah instagram align everything's aligned podcast radical yeah yeah i checked this stuff out it's awesome thanks man i feel like when i met you i knew you before just because of the internet the nature of events like this you walked into on it yesterday and i like, do I know that guy? Viv was hanging out.

She was like, I think I know him, too. And we were like, I think his job is for people to think they know him. That's kind of like us, too. Do I know you? Here we are. No, my voice is just everywhere. Yeah, it's creepy. Yeah.

It would be awesome if we had a delicious coffee to talk about right now. Well, you had a delicious coffee this morning. God, it was delicious! Look, we're in the car right here and traveling. We got in at 1 o'clock two nights ago. Last night we had a little bit of fun on the porch. Wake up, shaking off a little bit of whatever it was that we were shaking off in the morning. I got up at like 5.45, one cup of coffee, the strong coffee,

and I was like, I could just cruise through the day now. It's delicious. I'll let you finish. I stole your mojo there. Yeah, I mean, you guys have been coaching me now for the last 12 shows. It's delicious. Some people are just better at hyping other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's 100% instant. I mean, It's delicious. Some people are just better at hyping other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's 100% instant. I mean, it's delicious. I mean, those are the most important things. And really, it's full of nutrients. I mean, it's all the protein you need in the sense of getting out of that fasted state and getting the anabolic system

moving from the hyaluronic acid and the coconut water extract helping with overall hydration. And then, you know, we're all under stress. And if we could kind of channel that and remove some of that physical stress through something like L-theanine, which is naturally found in matcha, which is why matcha has become really popular. We've combined the L-theanine in there. And, I mean, it's awesome.

I'm super excited about it, and it seems like everybody else is too. I'm excited about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If they want to try some strong coffee what do they do yeah yeah you check me out at at strong coffee company or at von rothfelder and visit uh strongcoffeecompany.com and use bbs20 and get 20 off your sale uh off your entire purchase so all the stuff that you're mentioning that you put in there, I make these like coffee smoothies in the morning, and I put a high percent of that stuff in my smoothie. So it sounds quite convenient. Well, I mean, that's where I started. You know, I mean, four years ago, five years ago,

I'm mixing this in my kitchen, and a friend of mine is like, you should put this in a bag. And I didn't have the time for it. And then I tried it, and I failed miserably. And I learned a bunch of stuff over the couple of years, and bringing it all back. He stole your recipe. I'm still on it.

I still have, like, every morning I have, like, powders I have to sweep up every time. I just wanted a cup of coffee. Be great if someone put this in a bag. We'll make sure we get you some where you just tear it open, pour it in, and bam. Doug Larson. You bet.

Dougie. You can, of course, follow me me on Instagram Douglas E. Larson I recently moved back to Memphis Tennessee so if you want to drop in and train at Faction Strength

and Conditioning in Cordova right outside of Memphis I'm hanging out training there all time fantastic you can find me

at all things at Anders Varner and more importantly follow the Shrug Collective we have the coolest kids hanging out

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