Barbell Shrugged - Body of Knowledge  — Chapter 2  —  Contextual Practice

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

In chapter 2, Kenny shows the value of context through stories about growing up in a fitness business, playing sports, performing stand up comedy, and becoming a human performance coach. Kenny’s life experience has significantly contributed to the development of the Mastery Method, a philosophy for teaching life lessons through the template of physicality.   Enjoy! - Kenny and Andy ----------------------------------------------- Please support our partners! Thrive Market is a proud supporter of us here at Barbell Shrugged.  We very much appreciate all they do with us and we’d love for you to support them in return!  Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of FREE Organic Groceries + Free Shipping and a 30 day trial, click the link below: https://thrivemarket.com/body How it works:  Users will get $20 off their first 3 orders of $49 or more + free shipping.  No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so why not give Thrive Market a try! ► 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/barbellshruggedp... TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Mike Bledsoe here, CEO of the Shrug Collective. If you haven't already noticed, we've got a lot of new cool stuff going on. You hit shrugcollective.com, you'll see some great content that you won't be catching if you're only listening to the podcast. Hit the website and see the new look and feel. This week, we get to introduce you to two new shows. Today, we bring you Body of Knowledge. This show has been created by a couple of guys you already know, Dr. Andy Galpin and Kenny Kane. They've had their own project and I love that we get to share it

with you here. As we're expanding and improving the shows, we have partnered with amazing companies that we believe in. We talk and hang out with the people who run these businesses and know why they do what they do. Not all products are created equal, even if it looks like it on the surface. We've done the research and have been in the industry long enough to see what really works and what will make the biggest difference for you long term. With that being said, one of my favorite companies, Thrive Market, has a special offer for you. You get $60 of free organic groceries plus free shipping and a 30-day trial. Go to thrivemarket.com slash body. This is how it works.

Users will get $20 off their first three orders of $49 or more, plus free shipping. No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so hit up Thrive Market today. Thrivemarket.com slash body. Enjoy the show. Can we start again? Yeah. Where's the future of this understanding going?

Don't know. Why? Anyways. We are not a singular thing. We are built to change. At the most advanced levels of everything, it comes down to fundamental basics. These are general health practices

that every human should be striving for. It's candy madness. Scream if you like candy. that every human should be striving for. It's candy madness. Scream if you like candy. I don't know where that came from. I wasn't listening. I was just thinking about that. Good people, I'm Kenny Kane alongside Andy Galpin.

And this is the Body of Knowledge with dope, fun, super rad stories at the intersection of science and fitness. If you happen to tune into the first episode, we got into some deep science as it relates to physiology, whether you're born with it or it's something you can build. And personally, Dr. Galpin, I learned a ton from you during our first ever episode. Well, now it's my turn to learn from you. One of the things I really hate about you, Kenny, is the fact that guys like me had to spend my entire childhood and my whole life making a bunch of training mistakes, but you had the advantage of being literally born into this space. Well, yeah, I did grow up in the fitness industry, but that doesn't mean that I haven't

made and continue to make countless and thousands of mistakes. As well as disappointing your mother for your entire life. Something that still chases me post-mortem, actually. She's in the Swimming Hall of Fame for several things. And we come from sort of like a little bit of swimming royalty. So my grandfather's been a doctor, my mom's there, and my dad's sort of an honorary, or he's been honored by the Swimming Hall of Fame. You know, I tried to swim one time. The extent of my swimming abilities is not drowning. I don't think that you and I are too far off. By the time I was four turning five, my mom put me in the competitive swim program at our family business, Oak Park up in Santa Rosa, California. And the team would go all around the

state competing with other swim teams and so on. But I reluctantly competed in it. And then after just a few short weeks decided to quit at which point quit quit you quit the family business i quit the family sport what she did is she then signed me up for martial arts so she was very clever she never hit me she just simply signed me up and paid for other people to hit me um beautiful one of the One of the inevitable lessons that I learned in martial arts was never to take your eyes off of your opponent. How did you? And I learned that at a very young age

when Mr. O'Hara used to punch me in the face when I would bow looking down. Ah, because you got your eyes off the target. Yeah, eyes off the target. Classic. Always keep your eyes on the opponent is what Mr. O'Hara used to teach me. The business itself was basically, back then in the 70s, it was sort of a leisure club.

So there was a time and space where Americans had leisure time and leisure money, meaning that families would take their kids there, spend the whole summer there. We had sort of an adjunct fitness room. And then by the time I was a teenager, I was learning how to train people from my mom. So by the time I was 17, 18, 19, I was teaching people how to use the universal machine in the back of the business. And you were still practicing martial arts.

Was martial arts your primary movement at the time? Or had you expanded to other sports? Yeah, I was a pretty decent soccer player. I was an all-state soccer player growing up and then a decent martial artist. I got my black belt when I was 14 turning 15 and continued to train until I was 19. And then soccer was the sport that I played in college until I found track. So I did two sports through college, soccer and track, and then picked up a love for hip-hop. So it was a very eclectic sort of background.

The wide variety of sports, how did that influence your athleticism? Well, it taught me fundamentally how to move in space and time. I think there's a couple great anchors with teaching young people, like martial arts and gymnastics and dance are three anchors to teach any child how to understand their body as it relates to the ground space and just general balance proprioception all those things that we kind of train as coaches and want people to learn without using the word proprioception you want your clients to have it through through movement in general but when somebody has a background in gymnastics or martial arts it it just it gives you sort of a not just an awareness advantage but it also gives you a kinesthetic advantage because you can sort of

you can sort of figure out movements later in life without having to go back to elemental pieces because those elemental pieces are laid down for you. Did you feel lost at all at this time in college in terms of your own personality? Because your entire family were swimmers. You know, when I was a kid, Mark Spitz used to come around and he, until Michael Phelps was the greatest swimming Olympian of all time. My grandfather used to tell pretty funny stories of, of, and he described it as babysitting because apparently Mark was quite the personality and it would apparently rub people the wrong ways. But my grandfather was

very familiar with a lot of track Olympians and swimming Olympians. And my mom was super innovative, not just as a swimmer, like she, pre-interval training, she used to swim 10, 11 miles per day. So as I got into fitness, my own fitness, in experimentation, in track, and so on, in my own training, when I was preparing for my black belt test, I used to go out and run 5, 7 miles. And she would just scold me. She'd be like, nah, we got to get you out to the track. You got to do intervals. I'm like, what the hell? What are you talking about?

And I'm like 14 years old, and she's there like beat me up with four by 400 meters. And her background led her to the understanding that that sort of overspeed training, dealing without oxygen is a way to create really strong advancements in your physiology. My dad was a pretty good speed swimmer, not to her level, but they used to, on dates, swim out to Alcatraz when it was still a prison and the guards would come and they'd put the guns at them and they'd swim back. I'm sure the guards are like, we're out here because this isn't supposed to be a survivable swim. And they're like, sharks? Fuck sharks. Pre-wetsuit, pre-everything. My mom was like, now they use all these wetsuits.

I've said this on different podcasts. My mom had one of the greatest quotes ever. She said, people only get attacked by sharks because they don't know what they're doing. And they look like seals. They're just flopping around. And I'm just like, okay, mom. okay probably me that's a very arrogant position i'm sure there's some like expert level surfers and swimmers that have been attacked by sharks now i teased you earlier about being a disappointment to your mom because you weren't a successful swimmer but she didn't really put that kind

of pressure on you right she didn't want you to specify what was her reaction like when you first said i don't want to do this. I want to actually explore a bunch of other different sports and movies. You know, I was really, really fortunate for being as successful as she was in one sort of discipline. She supported whatever it was that I was interested in or showed interest. And so whether it be martial arts or fitness in and of itself, like martial arts, for example, set me up to learn about weightlifting. Like before my black belt test, I would run or bike to a gym that was about two and a

half miles away from our house. I got a membership. I'm 14 years old, running to a gym, lifting weights with a bunch of- And this is in the 70s. This is in the 80s. Or the 30s. Yeah. Sorry.

He's a year old. The year was 1956. Mike was president. It was a long time ago. It really was a long time ago. This was way before it was normal, right? Yeah. I mean, a teenager-

Especially for a 14-year-old. Yeah, a 14-year-old biking to a gym, lifting weights with a bunch of old guys left over from the 70s. In way too short of shorts. Dolphin shorts. Oh. Yeah.

So, you know, just, but that love of movement and the sort of kinesthetic awareness that she was seeding in me that I didn't know at the time was sort of gestating or taking root. So by the time I get to college, soccer was something that I'd been doing my whole life and something that I was good doing my whole life and something that it was

good enough to play collegiately. Track was relatively new to me. And so my roommate was a 400 meter runner, convinced me to come out for the team. And I walk on, I walk on to the track team with no experience running track with no, no, no significant experience other than my mom taking me out and you know brutalizing me for workouts and introducing me to interval training and showing me why that's significant but again only feeling like god my mom's tough and that like not understanding that there's like a there's like a physical reason why she's having me do that right but you know through college i was able to adapt and learn a bunch of different things.

And at that point, hip-hop was becoming very, very huge. I always joked that back then there wasn't a whole lot of white guys that were dancing. Vanilla Ice was the made fun of example. But I fell in love with hip-hop. And my mom supported that so much so that when I would come home on breaks, she would make it so that at the family business, I could teach hip-hop classes. What? So I just started teaching hip-hop, not knowing what I was doing.

In fact, I didn't even know what eight counts were. So anybody that's got a dance background, that's sort of a requisite to understand, A, music. That's the foundation, right? Certainly. That's the pillar, right? I just knew moves and when to do the moves during the song that I liked. And I would teach classes and, you know, slowly through the years, like self-taught how to teach things would fumble through. But there was this environment of physicality always. And, you know, there's one story that I love to tell about an away track meet that we had.

And my mom always believed that there was an overlap of your body and your mind are inseparable. And so you're going to be of sound body, but also of sound mind. We were on this away trip and she stopped me after a race. And we were looking at the stadium that I was competing in. And you could see all the Davis students literally with their books out studying between events, assuming that some of them had another event to do or they were between races. And it was just the fundamental nature of the UC Davis student athlete.

And she was a moment of pride between a parent and child. Like she was proud of herself for getting me to that space where that was a value system where we as student athletes were going to study. And it wasn't just all about the, the, the, the sport itself. Although we wound up doing really well athletically at that time for a Division II school. So you had love of a bunch of different movements. Really, at this point, it wasn't necessarily a love of a sport. It was just a love of... Yeah, anything physical.

I just love stuff that was physical, and I love challenges. And sport is a great equalizer if you're interested in something that's challenging because there's always people that are better than you and you can always level up the one thing that threatened that though is i was at the university during the early 90s and for listeners that are old enough to remember there was a recession at that time and that recession threatened athletics at a lot of different universities and at uc davis the then chancellor had decided to cut the athletic program. And a group of us got together and said, no, we're going to form a referendum to not only keep the teams that we have, but also add women's sports to comply with Title IX, which

was a big deal back then. Oh, yeah. And so we were the first university to successfully create students deciding to willingly tax themselves to maintain the athletic program and add sports to the overall breadth of the UC Davis athletic program. So not only did you stop it from being canceled, you added. We added. And so we had a very innovative group of students who led this. And I was lucky enough to be part of this sort of leadership crew. What was that called? Well, that was just a crew to create the referendum. The sort of adjunct part of it that was really interesting and compelling at

the time is we created this thing called the Aggie Pack. And while we were fighting to maintain the athletic program, we're also simultaneously fighting another thing, which is we wanted to show the student a very academic oriented student population that, hey, coming to games is actually fun. Something that like big universities got the benefit of. But at Davis, it was like, well, we like our books and we're very academic. Right. And some people didn't necessarily go to sporting events and didn't feel that they were fun. So a few of us got together and said,

you know what? Let's get people to games of all kinds. So we would get people to women's lacrosse and men's basketball and football. And then we'd also get people to soccer games and volleyball games. We get people to all's lacrosse right and men's basketball and football and then we'd also get people to soccer games and volleyball games we get people to all the different sports and the way that we did that is something that wound up being also replicated throughout the ncaa is these crazy giveaways so we give away which is now a staple it's a staple program so we didn't know we really didn't know what we were doing other than let's

just have a shit ton of fun and everybody that comes whether it's two people or 10 000 people they're going to have a blast so the ways that we did that we would give out free t-shirts to the students but then we'd also have this thing called candy madness where i'd get on the microphone and start screaming it's candy madness! Scream if you like candy! So the Aggie Pack was hugely successful in getting students to athletic events. Other teams that would come to our sporting events would be like, what the hell's going on?

I would jest in this furry gorilla jacket with zebra stripe pants and go out and get on the microphone during football and basketball games and literally heckle other teams as they're shooting free throws. I might go back to Caddy Shack and be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just quoting movies as poor guys are shooting. Things are the NCAA made illegal. I would used to, on timeouts, go out and pelvic thrust the refs as the band would play.

But the refs didn't know what to do because nowhere they're like this hasn't been done so people like what the hell's going on there's this guy in a furry gorilla jacket screaming candy madness and pelvic thrusting me and they're not knowing they don't even know whether to give it a technical because it's like there's no there's nothing like that in the rule book wow but fundamentally the thing that that came from for me was this love of sport like as humanity goes it's one thing that is universally agreeable like sport sport is that is to say in the the physical expression that is sport but like that's one thing that can take all cultures despite sex religion um political visions, all that.

You decide on a set of rules and you put your physical bodies out there. And there's some beautiful purity in that as a philosophical statement. And so I've always been in love with sport, the energy that it can create. And the thing that it can do is just unify humans beautifully so at this point you pretty well probably understood your own personal love of movement and sport but when you develop this aggie pack and when you were out there performing in front of all these people what else did you realize well a lot of things. I mean, there's a couple of concurrent themes I'm starting to realize by the time I'm in college and finishing college. Like I left college, I left UC Davis to become

a PE teacher at a K through eight school. So it makes sense. Yeah yeah and so there's this like there's this emergence of like consistent physicality sport human movement and then there's also this like dual thing through college i was doing plays dancing in hip-hop shows doing little theater things so there's also this concurrent thing of performance and those those themes have run concurrently on two single tracks adjacent to each other for sort of the entirety of my life you know my mom used to put on like big water shows she choreographed world's fairs and so she had this very artistic mind as much as this athletic mind she could sort of see things in ways that other people couldn't and she had a certain theatricalness to her that i think i just sort of learned by being around her

and it was also inspiring like the the thing that was so similar and performing whether it was uh what later what i started doing with stand-up comedy but in hip-hop shows theater and all that kind of stuff is that there's a beauty in the moment there's a pressure in the moment like you have a dance routine you know that you're going on at 8 p.m you've got to stick it a comedy show same thing theater show same thing you learn as much as you can prepare yourself as best as you possible as you might a sport but when it it's go time, all that preparation, all that practice, all that hard work goes into just a handful of moments. And there's so much. I love the connection that happens as a human being in those moments.

So you were a professional headlining stand-up comedian for a long time, right? Yeah. So as I started PE teaching back at my hometown of Santa Rosa in 1996, I also started my standup career. And by starting a standup career, that means I started going to open mics in 1996. By the time 2000, 2001 hit, I'd been working on my act long enough and hard enough that I could start getting paid for it consistently. And by that time, by the year 2000, 2001 hit, I'd been working on my act long enough and hard enough that I could start getting paid for it consistently. And by that time, by the year 2000, I had relinquished the sort of teaching and wanted to pursue stand-up comedy. Because I knew that if I didn't pursue stand-up comedy, that I'd always have that thing in me. Pursue it meaning taking it from one level, being like an open miker slash sometimes getting paid,

to can I do this thing for a living? What was it like, I guess, what was more difficult? The first time you walked on that college soccer team or that track team or the first time you walked up on stage? Because both times you're doing something you've never done before. The sport is easy because I was doing that. I never wasn't doing sport and I never wasn't competing. Just a different mode.

Stand-up was different than any of the sort of hip-hop performances that I had done or theater performances that I'd done or the little bits of acting that I've done through the years and that it is so raw and so authentically in the moment and there's a connection that you have to forge with the audience very, very quickly. And if you don't make that connection, there's an essence of boy this is going bad for everybody and everybody understands bad comedy because it doesn't feel right there's a disconnect that happens as an audience member typically audience members feel that as this is uncomfortable and if they think it's uncomfortable having been in that position it's infinitely more uncomfortable being on stage when everybody in the room is thinking the exact same thing and you're the one creating it. So that's sort of a powerful – I guess the difference there being when you're doing a sport like track and field, it's just whether or not you run fast that day.

You're not relying upon creating a connection between other people like where the comedy is almost entirely dependent upon that you could have your best day that day but if you don't make it work with everyone else in the room it's not going to matter yeah there's a there's so in track there's a dependency on self with comedy there's sort of an interdependency yeah and you you need to be energetically in and engaged with the audience and that's a very subconscious thing for all is that where you developed this idea of context i didn't know that i was developing it through stand-up and through all those years of performance but it was inherently part of my stand-up process now let me kind of dive into that a little bit

more like when you asked the question did this help you develop this idea of context like no not while I was doing stand-up but as I came to coaching, it did for sure make a big impact on my coaching. So it was probably there, but you didn't see it yet. Absolutely. Couldn't see it. Was that because you were so focused and you were having so much success in comedy? I mean, let's be real. You had some pretty big success in some pretty crazy situations, right? So, yeah.

I mean, for me, success was being a working comedian. So making that transfer of living, hey, you're just sort of doing this and hoping that you crack or you're just going out and doing it and making a living and figuring it out. Did you have one particular comedy show or one headlining event where you crushed and you thought like no because that's always uh relative because there's all so one of the reasons why i left stand-up comedy is you can never stop because there's always one thing that's bigger yeah and so it becomes this

weird trap it becomes a personality trap and let me let me just sort of describe that for a second. You create something that becomes monetized. And that monetization is an expression of yourself. Now, people start to consume that thing that you've created. They may or may not be interested in your evolution. And you may or may not be successful evolving from that so i had witnessed a lot of headlining comedians go through this very i would qualify it as traumatic because you get they people pin you into being this thing that they want you to be which is the thing that they saw last yes at the same time these very same people are critical if you're not evolving new material so it's a trap that you can't get out of like hey come up

with new shit but you got to be you yeah okay well where where does that stop and end and by the way if i'm dependent on getting payment for that then there's there's got to be some sort of non-growth that's securing that. I could see myself getting trapped. People sort of knew me as generally a clean energy comic. So that was my thing. But there were times where I didn't feel energized and I didn't want to be clean. And I didn't want to be any of the things that the people wanted me to be. And that starts to feel like a trap.

And what I was doing is I was using all those years as an athlete to come to every single performance as if it was a do or die game. So in comedy, it's called the kill mentality. So you get into this thing where you want to kill and if you don't kill a couple things are hurt one fundamentally is your ego yeah you're training it ironically you're training it to be weaker with time yeah because you're you're seeking the kill rather than seeking the evolution it's the same thing of when you're showing up to the gym and you're trying to pr every day instead of focusing on getting better right over time over time time. It didn't PR today. It's a different, and it takes a humble conversation.

It takes an egoless conversation. And I was at a point where I wasn't well-known enough. Yeah. So I had to kill to get the next gig. Yeah. Right? Without getting, without annihilating, I wasn't eating or making payment for my airline ticket to ticket to get me back home was there a particular time when you you had a major success and at the same time

where everyone might have been looking and going he did it he did it he did it but you went no like i'm not here anymore there was a crazy moment that happened that was sort of a confluence of a lot of really important things in my life and it was in 2010 daughter cam was born in april and that spring was very transformative and And her birth, her literal birth, was a transformative moment for me. So a lot of things came into focus one night when I got a call to do a show at the Laugh Factory. So I was a paid regular at the Laugh Factory on Sunset, which is an amazing club. Legendary comedy. It's a legendary comedy club.

And I was very lucky to be, you know, basically a weekend regular. So anytime I wasn't on the road, I was working at the laugh factory on the weekends. People would kill for that. Oh, absolutely. And I remember first coming to LA, you know, 10 years before that and just dying for a spot at the laugh factory. Anyway, I got a call to do the 10 o'clock show. Now, that same week, a couple things happened. I found out that Cameron's mom, who originally was planning to move out to California from Minnesota, had decided to stay in Minnesota. So I had a crazy life moment realizing my daughter is going to be in a different state unless I move there.

And the original plan was for them to move here. So I get the call to go to the factory. I'm exhausted for innumerable reasons. I was at that time simultaneously choreographing a hip hop show for kids. So they were going to be performing the day after I was trying to deal with this major life crisis. I'd given up my apartment at the time and going into that following week was then going to be without an apartment. So there's this sort of like real life, like I don't even know where I'm going to stay in a couple of days. And then, um, I get to the laugh factory that night, Dane Cook is on

stage. Now, just for contextual reasons, Dane Cook is at the absolute apex of his career. As big as a comedian can be in what is his home club. And basically what that means is he's got liberty and latitude to do whatever he wants in any fashion and way that he wants. I see Dane on stage. I'm like, shit, man. And then all of us are waiting.

And then one by one, all the people who are supposed to follow Dane are telling Jamie Masada, the owner, like, I'm out. I'm leaving. I'm going to think. No way you're following Dane Cook. So Jamie Masada comes up to me and he's got this action.

He's like, buddy, buddy, buddy, you got to go because, you know, you have so much energy. It's good. You got the energy. You go after Dane Cook. You kill. You do good. I'm like, Jamie, I don't know, man. Like at this point, I'm 15 years into my career, 14.

So I've got chops. I can handle hard situations. But the people who were dropping out were 20, 25-year vets. I'm like, what about these guys? Like can't any of them follow? Like, by the way, they were scheduled to follow him. They're introducing me like, hey, following the most famous guy that you all believe to be is this guy nobody even knows. Kenny. Good luck to him and by the way you're all exhausted and pissed at this point because you bought nine drinks and

your bill is 700 clap for this guy so i go on a stage people are like hate clapping me and they're like where's fuck dane going like i want more him so go on stage and immediately just start killing and normally when i perform i'm in the moment like in my body but one of the few times i've had a truly out of body experience i was watching myself perform just going fuck i'm killing and this is really weird i'm watching my body you're literally talking to yourself I'm talking to myself oh my god because the the routine is routinized and somehow the connection the audience was buying that connection that I described earlier as authentic now in my head I'm going it's the furthest thing from authentic because I'm actually over here 15 feet away watching me.

But somehow you guys are with me, engaged. So I slaughter for 20 minutes. Now, at this point, it's close to 1 a.m. I go home the next morning. My clients are – I got Greg Penske. And then I go to Gerard Butler and from there to Tom Cruise's house. That was my training morning. The day after. The day after.

The day after. So that's- Because you're coaching at this point too. This is coaching, yeah. And so- So comedy at night, you're coaching the next day. Yeah, and it's this weird sort of vortex. And I go from that then to this like kids hip hop performance.

And that night when I got to unintentionally reflect, there was this sort of – On what should have been about the greatest day of your life. But it was also like horrifically painful because it was this decision to say, you know what? I'm going to physically stay here in Los Angeles and I'm going to concurrently figure out how I'm going to be a kick-ass father to my daughter, who's an infant now, but is going to be in Minnesota. So I've got to figure out some of these pieces. And that's not an enviable position in any way, because any way that you do that, you do that wrong. And listeners can easily go, well, pick one or the other. And when you're in those life positions it's not that easy and so what i had to do is

just listen to my intuition which is very strong at that point which just simply said staying los angeles now what was really interesting about that decision was there was also this relinquishment of stand-up comedy so here i was in arguably one of the most difficult situations I'd ever found myself in stand-up comedy. Following Dane Cook at his apex with an exhausted audience and no way was that going to be a successful set for me.

No way. And at that point, I'm going, I'm arriving. Like I'm in the zone. And at this point in my career, I'm getting auditions for movies. I've, I've had several pilots be shopped around for TV things. Like all of these things are happening and I'm concurrently training and kicking ass in the training world. But like all of that just made me realize, wow, like this, this thing that I had cultivated and created hard for 15 years,

I am now starting to get exhausted by and am no longer interested in. And that is the stand-up. The thing that people would kill for, like, you're living your dream. I'm like, yeah, and I've sort of lived it, and I'm sort of done with it. And I was arriving in that space by 2010. It wasn't really your dream, though, was it? That's a really good question i it was wow um i don't know if anybody's asked me that directly it was you know what's funny andy is i did it because it was really hard to do and it was a really hard challenge and i love

challenges and what's fucking hard hey you want to do something hard go be a professional stand-up comedian so you had realized that this was really more of a task accomplishment other people had dreams for me in my stand-up and for me it was just like just be a working professional what was missing from that you checked it off but there no- It was a narcissistic endeavor. It was about feedback to me and Kenny Kane as the name, as the corporation, as the thing. That didn't move me. I enjoyed making people laugh. I loved how difficult that was.

What moved you then? What really has moved me all along is getting people in their bodies and using the template of physicality to learn the lessons that I got to learn through sports and through being raised by the mom that I described. In other words, the template of physicality is the greatest template to apply life lessons. So everything from, you know, tenacity to grit, to character, to honesty, to integrity, that, that is all, whether it's sport or physical training or the combination of those things, that's, that's transferable to life. Stand-up comedy starts to become its own weird universe. It was all about me, which was like, you know, that well ran very dry. And so we all probably have something like that. Yours was there, but if we all have something,

probably whether it's our job, whether it's the gym for us, we can win, we can check off these goals. But what are the problems then if we don't have that context in all those issues? You know, I mean, a mentor had once asked me this question, are your actions contributing to the joy of the world or contributing to the misery? And I feel like with most of my professional choices, whether it be a PE teacher,

a standup comedian, or now as a gym owner and coach and all along being a coach, coach has always been the thing that has the most authentic and natural resonance for me just because, A, I can be a performer, either one-on-one with people or with groups or training coaches. So I get that, but it's not about that.

You know, you asked a question earlier, Andy. It really didn't dawn on Andy, like it really, it really didn't dawn on me this, this contextual piece, but standup comedy and sport had taught me so much about like, like the kill mentality of sport. Like I got to win. Yeah. Okay. That was transferable to standup comedy. I got to kill. Okay. Killing is the same as winning in sport. So you kill, you win. And, but the thing thing is is that both of those things in and of themselves start to expire energetically if that's the focus like that's not a sustainable practice right like winning and killing and a lot of people go no no you know what you're talking

about kenny is the road to mediocrity and i'm like no i don't know if this is the road to mediocrity at all i would say that this is a way to honor yourself as a human being. Like understand that there are variables day to day in everything from your cognition to what your hormones are doing, what your physicality will allow you to do, what your actual environment is. Like all of those things matter to your physical practice. And then if you look deep into your physical practice, treat it like a martial art, like the way that I was raised with martial arts, like there's universal transference of,

the movements are one thing. Yeah. The fighting form is one thing. Okay, whatever. The bigger pieces are like the philosophy of it. Yeah, the approach. So you take this, you have this major realization that comedy is not the end goal for you, that this was just something that was important and really awesome along the way.

But now you want to actually go back to these additional routes, which was coaching. So you open up CrossFit LA and you get going. Or buy CrossFit. You buy CrossFit LA and you get going or buy buy buy CrossFit LA and then you you did you realize this whole package because I want to get into mastery method here in a second which I didn't even realize and maybe I can every just take a second to explain to you how we uh explain to you audience members how Kenny you and I got together we were actually at some mutual friends we were taping a show I had gone first you were going to be following me and so we happen to be in the same room at the same time and i was really about to leave because

they told me this guy uh is coming up next to do it um his name's kenny he runs crossfit la which immediately told me i don't care yeah which is a strong bias in the strength and conditioning world and in the scientific world and scientific right absolutely i'm really about to leave i'm half ass paying attention and then you start shooting and within literally minutes like i'm starting like oh that caught me like oh what and you start describing this mastery method and i'm like what the hell is this and then you start drawing triangles and i really started to sing like oh my gosh not only has this guy got some really good information shit i'm learning and then i was just stopped in my tracks I'm I'm shocked with what I'm hearing because you had set up a way to approach not only program design but also how we really

get this to be implemented in a group setting and how we can really change the entire way we're thinking about running a program and I had just never seen anybody do anything like that and it made such intuitive sense to me and I just, man, not only are you nailing this from an X's and O's perspective, like how many reps, sets, exercises, you're just completely crushing this in terms of how can we make this for a normal person sustainable for months, weeks at a time. And then on top of all that, the way you're doing this makes a major connection between what they're going to do in their gym. And then when they walk out of here, what they got to go do in life, what they did before they showed up. And you did all this in

about two minutes with every person. And I couldn't believe it. So I learned a big lesson right there, which is number one, you know, to really pay attention to people, what they're saying. And number two, wow, maybe this guy has some life experiences that I don't have. And there's a different way around this. Yeah, I think, I think the big thing for me was learning. And we were kind of talking about that a little bit earlier is that if you're only and always going hard all the time. Like I've seen that result in a path that generally ends with a wall at some point. And so like as much as I appreciate the competitive mindset and see – like look, my mom was and will forever be as far – like I have yet to meet anybody more competitive than her.

She was so, so damn competitive like through her just fingernails i mean she couldn't stop but to ruthlessly compete within that she had such a strong natural willingness to work on the basics and have any of her people work on basics foundations foundations foundations and every great coach that's always the same thing. Like you can't get away. That's inescapable. At the most advanced levels of everything, it comes down to fundamental basics. So within that, one of the things that was sort of driving me nuts was the over calculation

and the over protection, let's just say thematically from strength and conditioning perspectives and then the over sort of competition and and and and marketization within the crossfit world so like running people into walls yeah and then and what i was seeing too is that there is success in this hybridized training that sort of CrossFit was evolving. But to dismiss everything intellectually that had been stacking on top of our understanding of kinesis and physiology and anatomy for decades, like to simply excuse that and go, no, CrossFit's the only solution. I really felt like there was a great way to sort of marry these two things and then most importantly create a platform because if you have you know coaching leverage where you can talk to people and you get them i always say if you can get people between the ears and in the hearts like it's a lot easier to have a sustainable physiological conversation. Because, you know, whoever programs the best is,

whichever wind is blowing and whatever, you know, who's cooking pancakes one day and who's cooking bacon the next. Like that's what's going to smell the most interesting. And with the way that our brains are generally wired, we'd like to sniff those quick fix things out. Unfortunately, if you're looking at physicality as a practice and making it- As a lifetime practice. As a lifetime practice, like a yogi might, like a martial artist might.

And for me, the influence of martial arts is so significant and inescapable. Like, look, we're trying to do this thing for a long time. Like we can't not view the long scope of this thing. And we got to get people back to the basics. But in order to do that, you have to have a mindset in place where they value that. And they also have the physical ability

to vary the things that they do, but have a mentality to match that. So being able to have some lateral mental landscape to match your physical lateral landscape if that makes sense yeah it's context right there's that's there's a word right and that's and that's what this word we've been saying all episode or all show here is this context and that's what you mean by it is is taking these things and being able to transfer uh from your workout to everywhere else and putting this better and having context and foundation. And that's what

you had established in comedy. That's what you established with the Aggie Pack. What's the theme between why your gym was so successful and why the Aggie Pack was successful? You created a context or a reason for these people to be there. Why are these people showing up to lacrosse games?

There was now context. Folks, this is why we have to support it because we love our lacrosse players as much as we love our basketball players because if we don't all have this bond, it all goes away for all of us. Well, the why, you know, everybody's – it's sort of hacky at this point. Like you've got to know your why. Yeah, right. But it does. I feel like at least with a physical training program, you've got to know your why yeah right you know but it does i feel like at least with

a physical training program you got to know your why's x and o's as far as like yeah what are you exposing people to like that's on the most base level of programming for people like you got to hit that and you got to know your population so you get a program for your population and but then what's underneath that contextually is that mind emotional space. And if that's not the platform, because we're physical mental bodies, like everything goes from the brain. And there's a loop, looping system between our relationship, between our thoughts and our emotions. It's expressed in our bodies. And if we can't clean up that loop, the physical expression itself will just trap

thoughts and emotions. Boy, now we're getting somewhat abstract. But as far as like the evolution of people and sustainability, I think that coaches need to start getting comfortable with that language. Because if it's only the physical, I can guarantee you're going to have short-term physical conversations with your athletes or clients. Going with this theme of connecting the loop, your son, he's now he's growing up just like, well, not just like you did, but in a similar way, right? He's growing up. Yeah. It's funny. Like, you know, growing up in the fitness industry, like I was handed from person to person at Oak Park and in an environment of trust and my mom would be by the side of the

pool coaching either regular you know people the team competitive team or synchronized swimmers or whatever there's choreographing something whatever the hell she was doing and you know one of the members or one of the swimmers would be holding me and then she'd take me and then another member or athlete would take me. And then, you know, there's a lot of Olympians that I've met through the years. I remember when you were just such and such. I was getting handed to these gold medalists, not even, you know, just shitting in their hands or whatever. I wish I could say I've shit in the hand of Olympians.

Somebody just told me a story recently. I used to have a tricycle that didn't have handlebars. I'd dress as Batman and then drive the little bike around. Apparently, I'd get up on two wheels, one wheel up and come down the side, Duke's of Hazzard style. But yeah, growing up in that environment, now I'd see Thor, who is- Who his mom is an Olympian. Well, yeah, and I'll go five minutes without knowing where he's at,

but knowing he's totally okay. Somebody's got him upstairs and he's throwing lower bars or getting recovery proteins and tossing them all about or whatever. But it's the same kind of thing. So we're going to talk in a lot of these episodes as we move on throughout the show more about your mastery method. We'll get into the details of how it works but any takeaways you have from some people or for people any usables things they could start putting into practice right now without giving them the whole details

the mastery method about of course tools to improve the context look like i think the simplest and the most relevant one that most easy for people to understand is that if you just simply look at your training a little bit differently as far as each day setting an intentional intentional context so not a goal not a workout goal that's part of it but like if you look at it this is a practice day it's an opportunity for me to work on the things that I'm working on long-term, short and long-term. And allowing that to be so foundational and so habituated that it's worked into your everyday practice. Because to me, that's very relevant to life. Most of us experience life like it's a lot of maintenance.

The wheel is moving and a good chunk of keeping the wheel moving is handling the things that maintain the wheel moving. Yeah. Then there are times just like in life where you have to use whatever skills you have, put them together and get after it. Bring the pain. Bring the pain, but also compete. Step up. Go for it. If you lay a goose egg, you lay a goose egg, but do not back away.

Put yourself out there. Yeah, do not back away from this challenge. Get up on stage. Get up on stage. Do whatever it may be. Follow Dane Cook. Follow Dane Cook. And the last one is the sort of the thing that we all

relate to is in the way that we contextualize around here is this mental toughness piece. And so mental toughness is basically like, who are you when things get really, really difficult? And having some clarity and definition around that before you get into it. So if you can walk away and if you can undulate that day to day, then you're training yourself to be mentally agile. So what you're saying is before you go to work or before you go to your workout or before you, whatever it is, you got to do that day. This is something you're going to do before you step into it. This is going to be a mental toughness day, or this is going to be a kill it day, or this is going to be a practice day, not something you're deciding halfway through. Yeah.

No, look, if you're a businessman and you wanted to apply this, you'd say to your team, you guys, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we are going to handle the basic things that keep this thing going, grease the groove, and clean up whatever little pieces that we can to make it better. Email, customer service, whatever those things. All those kind of things that make the thing tick. Yeah. Then there will be a day where it's like, let's put those pieces together and let's go out there and compete and build our business and get after it. Right.

Then there would be, for the business person, you know what? Let's handle the sewers. Yeah. Let's go clean the drainage pipes and make sure that the plumbing is working. Do that stuff that nobody ever wants to do, but be comfortable doing it because that's what we've got to do. And it undulates. But knowing that you can only go to those places sometimes and if you're out there killing it with customers then eventually you know it's just like hey do we have any paper for the printer or like is that down like that

all that stuff needs to be maintained so like that's part of it like this is very life relevant obviously there'd be comparisons to personal life there life. The application of this is intended to be very broad. And I've always believed that the physical platform is the place where those usable life lessons are most available. So I feel like coaches listening to this or physical practitioners that aren't thinking about this and maybe not considering just how much it can evolve their lives, might be missing something. So working out for a lot of people exists as a box that you check off. Hey, did you work out today? Yeah, I checked it off.

But hey, could it be also a more evolved way of looking at that that deepens your life experience? It doesn't have to be, but shoot, if it could be, why not? And this is really helpful for somebody who is trying to make their first steps into exercise. Right? So I'm not really training every day. I know I need to do it, but I don't know where to start.

If you walk in your first day and you're super motivated and you crush it, and you crush it the next day, and the next, well, that only is going to, and that's why we burn out, right? That's what you're saying here is we didn't build context in that we went in trying to fire and burn the whole thing down every single day. And then you fizzle out after a week, two, three, six weeks, right?

If the definition is a performance metric solely, there will be times where there's failure and repeat failure enough. And that becomes a very defeating endeavor. So instead of launching into this physical practice with that mentality, we need to launch in saying like, I'm going to do one day a week where I'm going to get after it. I'm going to kill it one day a week or something, but then I'm going to realize I haven't really worked out that hard in six years. So I'm not going to try to do that every day. The other couple of days, maybe it's a 20-minute stretch or yoga or something that maintains the physical practice

so when I get back to that day again next week, I can go hard and I'm not ruined. And I'm not disappointed with myself because three days later, I'm not ready to go again, so I end up quitting, right? So whether we're talking high-level athlete, trying to get into workout business, all these other applications, it's really a foundation of being realistic with yourself so that we don't burn out and you don't set yourself up for mental disappointment.

Yeah, that's the biggest thing. Look, growing up in the fitness industry, one thing that I've seen happen very consistently through the generations is that people quit. Yeah. Because they're not... Has to be sustainable. And there's not a sustainable quality to their practice. And that's happened.

I've seen it in the very intense sort of area of CrossFit, but I've also seen it in aqua aerobics. Yeah. Like it's not the physical part. It's the mental part. And that's where people... To me, it's not the physical part. It's the mental part. And that's where people, to me, that's where the whole industry has sort of like focused on the physical and selling to the physical and the fat loss and all the just noisy, noisy bullshit versus just having very authentic conversations. Hey, by the way, you might want to think about this long-term and

treat it as a self-development path where you can learn to undulate your mindset day to day so that you can, let's say, develop a squat or a push-up and just work the nuances of that, the basic elements. And then one day a week, you put that together in a crazy combination and do squats and push-ups as many as you can for five or seven minutes. And then six months down the road, you test yourself and do 30 minutes of squats and pushups in the context of mental toughness. Like it doesn't have to be horribly sophisticated, but if the things aren't stacking up on top of each other, then foundations aren't being built.

You're inverting a wellness and fitness pyramid onto the point of the pyramid and eventually that will topple. So, you know, the idea is to stay with the foundations, not just physically, but underneath that, like what, how are you approaching that daily? And if people are coming with the flamethrower to it every day, eventually the flamethrower is going to run out of the, whatever makes a flamethrower go. It's all about context. Yeah.

I feel like it's one of those moments where it's 3 a.m. and you've just finished college finals. And then the guy that you've been studying with or the group that you've been studying with, somebody in the group goes, it's all about fear, man. I feel like that's where we're at right now. It's all about context, bro. Listen, I think context is a really useful tool as far as training people and guiding people in really healthy, sustainable ways.

And if that is significant to you either as a coach, a scientist, or a practitioner, somebody who trains with regularity, I think it's a great thing to play for.

And universal application ad infinitum. Thanks for sharing all that today, Ken. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for diving in with me, Doc Galp. Next week, who do we have? Next week, we've got a real special guest, somebody you've heard before, Jack Osborne. The Jack Osborne.

The Jack Osborne. So Jack's going to be coming in, and we have a lot of interesting questions for him. Some of you may know that he is successfully dealing with MS. Additionally, he has been through major life transformation. A lot of people recognize him from the reality show, kind of the original reality show. Yeah, one of them. Yeah, that might be the original reality show. Yeah, one of them. Yeah, that might be the original reality show. He has come a long way since then.

We're going to dive into a lot of really groovy stuff. Tackled obesity, physical disorders, and other problems. A lot of challenges, and it's some real interesting things that we can learn and we can all apply. Signing off for Dr. Galpin, this is Kenny Kane, and thanks for listening. And thanks for listening. And thanks for listening. And thanks for listening. And thanks for the application, execution, and long-term practice of it that is really compelling to me. And I'd like to see this thing evolve. With all this in mind, we're going to be releasing the chapters of volume one approximately once per

week through the entirety of this first volume. And then we're going to take a little break and hopefully release volume two sometime near the end of the year. There's a lot of time and energy and emotion that goes into crafting these chapters. And we want to give you enough time to really listen and dive in and understand what it is we're trying to convey. We hope that you guys come on this journey with us and learn some things and grow a little bit and participate through reaching out to us directly or sharing the chapters with your friends and family. You can get updates via Instagram. Our handle is thebodyofknowledge. You can also check

out the website, thebodyofknowledge.com. You'll get some more information about us individually. You can also find us on iTunes. The podcast is The Body of Knowledge, and we appreciate your listenership and your involvement in any way, shape, or form. Good people, thanks for tuning in to The Body of Knowledge, where, as always, we like to keep it loose and slippery. For Josh Embry and Andy Galpin, I'm Kenny Kane, reminding you to floss your teeth and brush your face. One more thing. Lift with your back and keep your knees straight. Out.