Barbell Shrugged - Body of Knowledge  — Chapter 4  —  Transforming Training w/ Michael Blevins

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

In chapter 4, Michael Blevins  joins us for a fascinating conversation about the philosophy of transformation. Michael is known for training actors to play superheroes on the big screen but the path to get there was very unique. He began changing people as a hairdresser then stumbled into training through personal experimentation with physical experiences. Enjoy! - Kenny and Andy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bok_blevins ------------------------------------------------------------------------------   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: 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 bucks 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. Hey, hey, fellow bipeds. It is me, Kenny Kane, one of the co-hosts of The Body of Knowledge. Now, today's guest, Michael Blevins and myself, are going to be heading to London on Saturday, May 13th at 12 p.m. Now, we're going to be talking for about three hours about some pretty big picture coaching themes, context, transformation, and the evolution of human performance.

Seating is limited because I can only hold four people on my thighs. So, for more information, go to thebodyofknowledge.com or Perpetua Fitness. Thanks, guys. We hope to see you out there and enjoy today's 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 practices 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. He's gold, man. Yeah, he's good. The guy just spits gold, man. Yeah, so you're living up to Jack Osborne. Nice. Yeah.

Well, you got your own thing, dude. I mean, if I was going to, I'm more like the person, you know, dodging clubs like a seal, gold man yeah so you're living up to jack osborne nice yeah well you got your own thing dude i mean if i was gonna i'm more like the person you know dodging clubs like a seal but maybe a walrus people appreciate me but not enough to save me enough to be like oh man that's too bad but not enough to actually do anything yeah yeah yeah because walruses aren't cute right Right. Right. It's the whole good-looking thing. You've got to have that up on you. So Jack is lucky.

Jack gets to be a cute animal. Good people, if you're just tuning in, this is the voice of Michael Blevins. He is Henry Cavill's trainer. Henry played Superman most recently in the Superman movies. So welcome, Michael Blevinsins to the body of knowledge. Alongside me is, as always, Andy Galpin. Michael, you've had a very interesting story to becoming Superman's trainer. As it were, at one point you were a hairdresser, turned semi-professional road cyclist, turned many other things along the way.

Your path is, I would say, very unique. And I'm very excited about having you on today to kind of talk about your road to getting to where you're at. So first of all, what is going on in all these superhero stories, and where are you going to be in the coming months and years? I mean, in the movies themselves, it seems like all of them end in some kind of apocalypse hell, and I have no idea how we rebuild that many cities before the next one, but I don't understand the logistics of it. Not your job, though. Not my job. I let them destroy things and I tend to build things. It's really interesting because there's definitely a precedent set for what a superhero looks like. And it's not

what we see even in fitness magazines. It's what people drew in the 50s and 60s. It goes beyond what we knew humans were capable, and we had to live up to that expectation. And I think that in itself had made the problem-solving of making a superhero match what our ideals are and hit the standards really, really high. And that process is interesting, but the components to it, I think, are really misguided in what most people think. What we recognized in doing this thing is that most of the components that go into making a superhero or the person that can do it,

we have to actually start with the foundation of a mentality to be able to accomplish these tasks uh you can lift all the weights in the world you can do all the diets in the world that you want but there's this underlining foundation of mindset and the ability to accomplish a task and like what i think i'm capable i have to move past that because most people live in that world and so that's what's led to what people see on the screen as like, oh, look at the six-pack. And look, oh, he's got the abs, and the shoulders are big. And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that stuff's there. But it was because of this transformation process.

So it's bigger than just being disciplined. 100%. And obviously discipline, that's a huge component of it, because maybe that's the day-to-day habits that get you to think the discipline to not eat the donut the discipline to eat the donut when you need to

I have to throw that in there because a lot of people bash on donuts and I just gotta I gotta come swinging Donut lover? No but defender of justice

Okay For the listeners how long Defender of justice. Okay. For the listeners, how long does it take to prepare an actor for a role like Superman? It definitely depends on the individual. The first input is where that person comes from, like what their background is, how they've taken care of themselves. Because we do damage control first once we do uh damage control then we're generally looking at you know a six month period a good you know we've been done faster you have the ability to go faster but six month is a good buffer into taking somebody from point a to point b which looks unrealistic to normal people i guess i

didn't really even think about this before, but he doesn't have to look good for that day. How long does a movie shoot take? Because he's got to look good the whole time, right? Right. And they're going to cut scenes in different orders, so he can't look completely different from one month to three months down the road, right?

100%. And that's what a lot of... I didn't think about that. That's where it becomes kind of a specialty. And I would give a lot of credit to bodybuilding in the form of uh it gave us a lot of information on how to do the original task but the day thing is a real trick because the deprivation involved in that is like well i know it's just this one lasting thing and if you hit your mark right the next day you can eat whatever you want

so a movie generally the pre-production in my experience has been about three months. And it will go anywhere from three months of filming to six months of filming. And I've been on them as long as a year. And the year thing is really rough. But that's why I set very realistic goals that can be maintained, not just seen once. And so in most films, there's generally, so it's not all, they don't have to look identical all the time, but they've got to be real close.

And so we usually look at the shirtless scenes because we want to show what they built. So if you're a Jason Statham, it's like whenever you're about to fight somebody, you're like, fuck this shirt. Too restrictive, Too restrictive. Too restrictive. God, why did I wear this T-shirt?

I can't kick in it. Yeah, there's the glorification of it. And to be honest, I think it's fair. What's funny, Michael, is that you and I go back, and we have had adjacent paths for many years. And funnily enough, it took us probably 10 years to circle towards each other but one of the things that you talk about is your general frustration with the lack of understanding that something you just identified and that is the mindset like

people want to go to you to basically say okay what is it to equal the the abs and the shoulders and the pecs or whatever? But you started with something very critical to me in this conversation in the mindset. What are the key pieces that you have to do to keep people in the cut, if you will, being able to play in season? So first of all, there is a fundamental misunderstanding with the idea that it's easier for an actor. It's easier for the guy who can afford it. It's hard for everybody.

And just because you're getting paid to do a job that requires the necessity of looking a certain way doesn't make it any easier. Money never fixes our ability to quit a situation. It really doesn't. And so for the people, first, the people that think that, I would like to invite them to find out how good they can actually be if they themselves don't use that as an excuse. It's hard for everybody. We make it easier for sure. We try to minimize all the distractions that can derail the process by, you know, controlling food and teaching them how to eat and showing them that eating in a good way doesn't have to be broccoli and chicken every day. You just have to have some kind of conscious thought. And that's why mindset becomes such a fundamental part of this is because it's it's a conscientious decision to do something

and and to get the the most longevity you'll have in any of this stuff is to make them understand why it's what it feels like why it's good for you and what else it can do for you besides get you a paycheck on a movie so the idea is not just to like yeah there's a we're all getting paid to hit this target on this date but i'm looking past that target at what the other things are that will sell this person like i want to show them that being more capable is actually the goal being uh cycle out psychologically more fit will make their job easier because in their day to day, I mean, yeah, they're getting paid to, to be fit,

but a lot of these guys are running micro empires. Like just a shooting schedule by itself is, and it's just absurd. Like, you know, most days, 12 to 16 hours. But then after that,

they have like, they're constantly negotiating new deals, going to the next job, figuring out endorsement deals, figuring out their business, their investments, their other stuff. So they run out of time probably faster than most busy people. And the money doesn't matter. They're not doing it for that most of the time. So it actually is a harder situation to fix. And that's why we try to put a mindset underneath that whole thing.

The mentality behind this thing is, A, you want it. You want it for good reasons. And it's going to improve your life beyond just the six pack on the screen. Do you feel like that's actually helping them be more sustainable like a normal person could use in their just normal life? 100%. If what I did works. it doesn't always work. I'm not always the best salesman. Uh, sometimes I'm a very harsh trainer in that, you know, the,

the, the, the, the undulations that your pendulum that you're describing, um, it happens. We see it every day when people pick up a, uh, you know, not to bash them, but like a 30 day challenge, you're going to see a pendulum effect. That's an everyday kind of thing that we, and so I always try to stay away from the extremes, but we also see it because a movie is extreme. The intensity towards preparing for it is extreme. The training to them is very extreme. The dietary stuff, all that stuff is just waiting to swing back and forth. We're not immune to that. But what we're really trying to do is minimize it and show people that on a general basis,

if you take care of yourself on the day to day, it'll be easier for the next one. And that's what we've seen 100% is that, and we've seen both extremes to it. Guys on the first 300 that came back to play in the second the the movie the 300 yeah yeah when they came back there was some all right it's been seven years like how did you treat yourself not everybody is a free not everybody's a spartan and they knew they've gone through the process they knew how hard it was it was so hard on them that they saw this like i'm never doing that again and it's like ingrained in them that it's so difficult and so when they come back we have to like talk them

back into that process in a way that has more longevity than it did on the first one if i might i mean we've worked with some of the same casts or people from similar casts and one of the things that happened early in functional bodybuilding, which effectively is the road that you and the company that you used to work with kind of carved out. In functional building at the beginning, there was a lot of, like, there wasn't as much movement awareness. So getting banged up and injuries were part of the thing. And that is in part what made it hard. It was a path to get

people to an end point and it was the efficacy of it was was better than what we had seen before as far as time the level of intensity that you could create that had the the broad metabolic um application as far as like you know muscle mass increasing and fat loss yeah simple profound and and and useful when carving bodies for for film but by the second one you're saying yeah as you saw the cast return yeah there was um there's enough damage on these things and you know i'm not one of those people that believes that crossfit is harmful just like i don't think running is bad for you or deadlifting is bad for you. You just have to be a total asshole to, to blame something that's external on your internal problem. And that's generally what's happening. That being said,

people are led into this by like really high intensity group training. They're led into doing things that they might not normally do because of peer pressure and all the like whatever the group mentality is that needs to be very very like that is a a really strong poison that has a good effect through hormesis but it lacks control if you don't have a masterful skill now when we apply intensity because we have to and we have very little time to teach people like these really complex movements. I mean, three months to get to a position, the, probably the last thing I'm going to choose is a snatch just because it's like, it's like a two month buy-in to just be able to use a weight that's meaningful or, or one that would do the thing. So we'd lose all that time, but we do to, okay. So, but we take the rules from that movement and take away all the um all the things

that might cause harm and then we try to apply that to something simpler with safety nets so how it looks is you know if i want to implement a snad well i'm looking at like full body movement quadrupedal movement i'm looking at things that aren't going to fall apart under fatigue or load. So I start ending up looking like I'm using a machine, like a Concept2 machine, to mimic what multiple snatches would look like. I've got almost triple extension. I've got all these mechanics that are very similar, not identical, obviously,

and they lack a lot of the same physiological. And we're not going to make them as fit as we'd like to because there's no balance. There's no real coordination. but we're getting the fitness kick for sure right and we're getting the metabolic function and i'm no i'm not you're never going to hurt somebody on an airdyne right right go for it like go all out and i could tell somebody go all out but if i tell you know a group of 30 stuntmen who are all snatching at the same time go all out fuck right that's a subtle but really significant I think distinction that you just made because again that comes back to functional bodybuilding and functional bodybuilding I think loosely as I

I would might define it on air with you or off air would would be the absence of basic proprioception balance balance, accuracy, some of those skill biased things that just take neurological adaptation. So Michael, you didn't start as a super trainer, you've evolved into a super trainer and your roots continue to interest anybody that's ever read anything that you've done or anybody that knows anything about your background. As a starting point, you were a hairdresser that said, I'm done with hair, I'm moving to bodies-ish. And then you went from basically hairdressing to Jim Jones. Is that right? Yes, correct.

What was the catalyst? It was, if I was going to narrate what it was, looking back on it, it would be different than what it was at the time. But looking at what caused that, it was just a love of being able to be part of a process of change i was a hairdresser but in the sense that i wanted to be the best hairdresser you could be like i learned from vidal sassoon i went to like the the best hair academies i learned you know constructive really skillful hair cutting

technique when when people talk about getting their haircut, this isn't talking about like, you know, I went down and got a trim. We're talking about, it takes me two hours to cut triangular graduation and make it perfect. And that skill took me eight years to develop. So I developed this really, really, really precise skill. And what I noticed is that training and hairdressing are basically the same profession. People get their hair changed not just because it's, you know, I want a haircut. Women specifically come in, they want to change their hair because it can't change their life and they need help in order to change something about them because they can't change the thing that's deep or seated. They hate their situation.

They hate their job. Their husband sucks, whatever the thing is. And it's my job to comfort that person and let them like, Hey, let me take you on a journey. We're going to talk about it. I'm going to give you a glass of wine.

We're going to change your hair. You're gonna look fantastic when you leave. And then you're going to feel like you made a change. It was totally superficial though. The conversation was great. The people are great. The interactions were really genuine, but the results didn't equal anything that I could appreciate after six weeks and the hair grows out or she goes back to a life that's completely mood of any like, uh, any change, any real change. Another great, uh, experience was,

uh, on the first Man of Steel, I got to work with Antia Trout who played was uh on the first men of steel i got to work with auntia trow who played uh the evil i can't think of the character name now but she was an amazing like east german girl uh amazing attitude gymnastic background but completely terrified of weights because her gymnastic background gave her the appearance that ho likes to shame people for. So on one of the tricks, one of the tools that we use is self-imposed limitations. So one of the basic movements that's really good to show new athletes or new people an experience is using a deadlift because it's technically pretty easy to kind of at least be a novice at. So for her, it was a slow build to get her to pull heavy weight. And heavy is relative to what she was capable. But we learned often that she was very good at counting.

Like she would know exactly how much weight is on the bar. So I started just stacking a weight, putting a weight in, stacking a weight, 15s and 10s and this, until we work up to a weight that would have been maybe a new personal best for her and she knows it so she goes to pull hovers for a bit and then just quits right and then she like kicks the ground she's like oh puts her hands on her hips and looks at me like i know you're an actress but i'm playing my role as somebody who's really concerned with her journey because that's my real role like i want her to develop it she doesn't need it to play feora or whatever her character was

but i need her to get this to show that i can do my job correctly so i go over i take off some plates i put smaller ones that equal the same amount and i'm like all right let's get you some confidence let's pull this thing and then we'll readdress the one that failed. Okay, goes the bar, pop, pop. You know, goes right up. She looks at me, and I'm smiling, like bigger than you can ever see, and she's like, fuck you. You tricked me.

She knows because it's the same weight. She weighs the same thing. She sets it down, and she has this moment of like, I can do something that i'm telling myself i can't like that that's a that's a positive feedback loop that was taught on top of failure that will lead to another failure eventually but you'll be able to go okay what was the thing like okay i didn't do this all the lessons of the first thing will carry through what i recognized in the moment was like, if I

really want this to stick, I'm going to erase the whiteboard and we're going to sit down and have some coffee and talk about how that felt good. And that's going to be training. It really mirrored what I loved about hairdressing, develop a skill, cultivate that skill to the highest ability, test it, you know, do this, do this process and then rearrange the rules so that skill makes you a phenomenal expert in whatever you're doing, whether that's punching people in the face or changing somebody's hair. So when people go to a hairdresser and they tell the hairdresser what to do, that's a fucking fast food person.

Like that's a clerk making a thing that's on a menu. That wasn't me. I was tailoring a thing that fit, you know, and it sounds really dumb, but their bone structure, their head shape, their hair color,

their texture, all this stuff went into. So when you sat down with me, I charge enough that you ask me what I can do for you. Like, how can you help me change? And so when somebody sits down, I look,

I, you know, I get to know them a little bit, but there's a key moment where if I'm standing behind somebody, we're looking eye contact in the mirror and I can just touch their shoulder and reassure him that I'm going to do the thing that they want to get out of this experience. They have to let that, they have to trust me because somebody standing behind them that they don't know just made physical contact to them. That's a very vulnerable position. And so our psychology

is either this person is a threat and I'm fucking out of here, or, okay, this is a friend. It's an ally. He's going to take me somewhere where I'm going to be in a better place. Now that's a really deep psychological human interaction thing on its own. But where I noticed that it really worked was that in being an expert, you have to always control the situation. You are not a menu item. People don't come to you and ask for a six pack. You tell them what they're capable of because you can see beyond what they're capable of. That distinction to me is the difference between an expert and just a novice. In training people, the same exact thing. Usually we do an assessment.

Like a wall squat is a really good predictive movement for seeing thoracic mobility, ankle mobility, hip stabilization, all that stuff. Their inclination to move their neck during neutral spine, all this stuff, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what's really great about it is it gives you two moments to teach a very valuable lesson. I start by first doing it and showing

because I think that is like a really deep key towards coaching is to show somebody that you're capable. And also to show them that it's easy, that doesn't cost you anything. And I'll do the movement first because if I do it second, the situation changes. If you do something first and it's easy

and they think they can do it because the perception is easy, then they're like, wait a second, I want to learn this thing and if you make them do it and they fail and then you do it,

they think you're a freak and you think now it's a humility thing and they will deaden their response to that so when i show them first clever it's easy then they do it i warn them about all the things that are going to happen two things will happen if i predict correctly if they have long femurs and their knee touches the wall eventually they're going to move back to their heels they're going to get really uncomfortable and they're going to stumble and they're going to fall back to their hills. They're going to get really uncomfortable and they're going to stumble and they're going to fall back. It's like, good, you felt that tension. Now I'm going to stop you from falling. I want you to go down a little bit further. The second they go to fall, the same trust happens is when they're falling, their coach

stopped them from falling back by touching on their thoracic and pushing them forward. So it's, it's a metaphor for what this situation is going to be during a transformation process. You're going to keep falling. I'm going to be there to catch you and make sure that it's okay. You're going to keep failing. I'm going to reassure you that that's part of the process. We all want to do this process. We just don't know how. We need guides. And Mark became really my first guide to mentally transforming myself. When I read Mark's words, it was like something clicked and I started to go down a rabbit hole. When I read Mark's words, it was like something clicked and I started to go down a rabbit hole and I started to read what he wrote about. I just tried to pick up what he was doing. He was riding a bike. I was like, I'm going to ride a bike. I

like riding bikes. So I would go ride a bike and try to experience what he was talking about. And I could because he described it perfectly. It had the words that matched what humans want to experience, which is self-transformation. Very quickly, that turned into really having a disdain for the job that I was doing because I totally understood the superficiality of it. It was an ability to, now my conversation is like, I don't give a shit about your husband. I don't give a fuck about him.

Don't tell me about your stupid problems. I want to go ride my bike, get the hell out of my chair. Like, I know you're here. You want a cute cut. You think it's going to change your life. You haven't changed shit. And I haven't changed anything. But you're stopping me from changing myself.

And so I bought in really early. Some things worked out. Some really, really lucky things worked out to the fact where I got to meet Mark. I got invited to train and it changed my entire life. I spent all my money doing that experience without any kind of cognitive idea of where it was going. And then when I was penniless, I was like, uh-oh, like something now I got to like, now I've, I've literally like ditched all my clients because I've been riding my bike and not working and doing random stuff. So I had to, I had to pick

up the pieces in order to like figure out what this thing was. I've never cared about money. I've never cared about that. I just don't want to be, you know, homeless. So I was like, I need to make a change. Something popped into my head on a Tuesday. And I told my boss I'm leaving on Thursday. And she asked what I was going to do. I said, I'm moving home. Uh Tuesday and I told my boss I'm leaving on Thursday and she asked what I was going to do. I said, I'm moving home. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I think I need to do something different. Moved back to Salt Lake on a Thursday, went down to my friend's gym, asked if I could

work. I had no idea what to do. So he said, yeah, bring in some clients. So I just like some people who had been interested. Hey, let me train you and we'll see where it goes. After about two months of that, I had developed a level of skill and at least knowledge. The whole time while I'm educating myself, for the last five years, I've been reading and reading nonstop, like developing ideas, testing, I'm doing all this stuff. So it wasn't a freebie. But in the two

months of practical application of training people, it became really apparent that it was a little bit ahead of the curve from the gym that I was at. So much so that it became noticeable and I got invited to just work at Jim Jones. So I took that opportunity. I mopped the floors. I just became a student again. I developed the skill. I asked questions. And then another coincidence and luck made it so that I was the next person up for an assistant job on a movie. And I just jumped on it and proved myself there and my ability to like use what I learned and master the skill and all that kind of stuff. And it related. It was a progression where I took. It wasn't just I've been a, now I'm a trainer,

I've been a trainer for a year and suddenly I'm working on movies. It was, I have been trying to change people for 10 years and I've been using the wrong tools in that I suddenly developed the right tools, but I had a decade of history on how to talk to them and interact with them and how to get them to be comfortable in order to take my advice. So relatability was the transferable skill. Yeah. Want to take a break? Great time to take a break.

Cool. Recently, while I was in London, I came across a colleague, Michael Price, who owns Perpetua. And I want to take a moment to thank our now sponsor, Perpetua Fitness. Well, thanks for the warm welcome. It's a privilege to be on the show and to be a main sponsor for The Body of Knowledge. Michael, how long have you been open in London? We opened in 2011. As Perpetua?

No, we originally opened as CrossFit South London but we wanted to offer more in terms of a hybrid facility and give it our own sort of flavor and so we evolved and we felt like the brand needed to evolve at the same time I've tried to create an experience that offers a huge amount of value and value for me is a place where you come and you feel like you can grow, you know, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Michael, you've got two gyms, one in London, one in Dublin, and you've got some social media.

Where are the gyms? Where can people find this awesome experience? Where are you? Where do I find you? Yeah, it's a bit nosy, isn't it? It's time to shut this thing down, lads. I've got no more information for you. You know what I mean?

On the first Man of Steel, I got to work with Michael Shannon, who is by far and large probably one of my favorite human beings I've ever met in my life. Funny that he plays a bad guy. Totally. Yeah.

I don't know anything about celebrities who's that. Michael Shannon, he was Zod in Man of Steel. The bad guy. The bad guy. There you go. Yeah, yeah. His personality is so great for this stuff. And so the really interesting thing about him and why I loved working with him specifically,

it wasn't because he was good at anything. In fact, that's probably the exact opposite. Bless his soul. why I loved working with him specifically. It wasn't because he was good at anything. In fact, that's probably the exact opposite. Bless his soul. I hope he doesn't get mad at me for saying this, but he is not a physical person. Like he had never played sports. So he came to us with the idea that he needed to make a transformation

because he's playing this big, bad general. And then about a couple, like maybe a month or two into pre-production they were like nah nah nah we're gonna do a cgi suit so you don't need to train anymore and he was like oh okay like whatever he doesn't care but what we had instilled up to that point was one we showed him hey this is a big key that's missing from from yourself you don't know this about yourself and watching him do a turkish getup would make you pull your hair out you were like watching him do like a push press and he's just like he's so like just is is awkward and offset and like you just couldn't

coordinate one limb to the other and so to get him to respond was to be like well let's show like he has an incredible amount of strength he He just doesn't know how to apply it. So we took all those barbell complex things out of it and we brought him to a leg press machine and show him that he could press a thousand pounds. And then he was like, oh, I get it. And then the other mental aspect was just a really, like we have, I love airdynes. Like I know that sounds sadistic,

but I've always loved them because an airdyne or a machine that's counting and the effort is known, like a time trial, there's no escape from that. Truth. When you decide to stop pedaling, it reflects your quit. It reflects on the screen what is going on in your head, in which case there's a really famous workout called 300 FY.

Mark developed it. 300 fuck you for you don't know. The requirement is on the old 84 Schwinn Airdynes. You have 10 minutes to get 300 calories. If you didn't do it, fuck you.

Because there was a lot of talk about the 300 workout and people were doing it and like, oh, I did it faster. And then they were like, well, you didn't do the rep right. And it became this stupid, contrived conversation. So this workout got thrown out of there.

What we noticed from it is how absolutely terrible it is on people. Because the progression through this 10 minutes, you see all sides. Two minutes in and you're just like full throttle. I got this. Like your, your arrogance carries, it's louder than, you know, it's bigger than your stomach. At two minutes you make a like, Oh, I, I bit off more than I can chew. So you tend to slow down. And then the halfway you're like, okay, I'm halfway. And you do a little kick at the seven minute mark is the no man's land where you're just like,'m never gonna make it like all doubt all the black hole the abyss and then you reach the last minute and because you rode this roller coaster you'll like sprint to impress me and it's like you'll never get 300

calories like that you can't you have to consistently beat down that voice in your head so i'm telling michael shannon this story about like what this does to you. And he's like, oh, yeah, okay. I come in the next day. He showed up early. We still continue to train him. And he's on the airdyne just thrashing back and forth trying to get this thing to go. And then I'm like – I just sit back and watch him.

I'm like, that's my man. Like that's the kind of person I want to hang out with. The person that didn't – he wanted a guy. I'm like, I just sit back and watch. I'm like, that's my man. Like that's the kind of person I want to hang out with. The person that didn't, he wanted a guy, he just needed a guy to like open the door and then he's going to fuck shit up from there on. So I wait till he finishes and he literally just like falls off the thing, falls on the floor.

And I go over and look at the Airdyne and I'm like, okay. I'm like, you know, he stops hacking and coughing and eventually he's like, how the fuck do you get 300? And I'm like, well know, he stops hacking and coughing. And eventually he's like, how the fuck do you get 300? And I'm like, well, first of all, you don't use the model from 1970 because that thing doesn't register calories. Whoops.

I was like, I forgot to tell you that we don't have the model of Airdyne that we measure this on. Second of all, that's probably the single most impressive thing I've seen somebody do on a movie job. And therefore he kind of, I just put my- Anchored that. Yeah, yeah.

I just, anything he wanted to do, I was game. So we found ourselves, I would take him to parks. We did this insane workout where you lunge 400 meters. Every five lunges, you do five push press with two dumbbells. You can't drop the dumbbells the entire time.

Oh, man. Love it. We went and it was Chicago in the summer and the humidity and there was a lightning storm going on. And like in my head, it's the most dramatic event ever. There's torrential downpour. There's me. There's a tornado alarm going off in the background. And I'm just looking at Michael Shannon like why is that guy fucking here?

He doesn't need to be in shape and he just wants to experience this stuff. And he was just like this is what you do and I'm like yeah pretty much. But there's a purity of experience in that. I want to go back just so people do know and you and I have talked about this for those of you that did just

hear that workout do know that the Schwinn Airdyne records metrics differently than the aerosol bike and it's a subtle difference and people most people that try to do 300 calories on an aerosol bike disappointed yeah you're not going to come anywhere near that we can get into that next time you come on or the science of that why different instruments measure different things and how they do it but uh don't try that on an aerosol bike i want to also go back actually for a second you said something you said way earlier that tied in very nicely to that story which you almost mentioned that when you bring intensity the program there is an additional responsibility the mistakes that are commonly made are there's a

bigger cost you've got to pay attention to when you start adding the intensity but that's the piece that actually causes adaptation i mean the whole premise of that is that you're allowing an adaptation so the intensity is only allowed to work as long as you let the the other side drop so how do you make that balance where we get enough to cause adaptation but we don't put ourselves in a dangerous, irresponsible positions? I do this thing that's really rare these days where you show up and you coach somebody. Anytime you can talk somebody into doing something they don't want to do, you're a coach. That's a wrap.

See you next week. In all reality, if I have a structure in my head of where we need to go and I know the stimuluses that need to be applied, I don't ever want to dictate on the day what the right stimulus is until I see the reaction. Because coaching is a reactive skill. You're not dictating everything. You're only 50% of the equation. The person's reaction to what you're getting, that's just as important. And if they show up tired, they show up, they had a bad night, they fought with their spouse, they, you know, whatever happened, they're still here because they're responsible, but it's my job to do the right thing on the day. I teach two lessons to people. The first of which is a very long road of learning

to not be lazy. You show up every day, put your shoes on, you do what it takes. The next part is learning not to be an idiot. Not being lazy made me drop 50 pounds or made me qualifier for regionals. And then people

have this ad hoc post Proctor Hawk problem where they're like if i do this it does this therefore they just multiply the problem but we've known for thousands of years um that by you know different uh parables that that's completely untrue like the the camel that gets to the house is not the best thing to get you in the house or in the military like the vest that saves you in the forest will kill you in the water. So just because you went hard and it changed your life

doesn't mean that going hard all the time and being late, you have to, there's an adaptation there where you're like, man, I got to think about this thing differently. There's something that comes from like, the pieces that you pick up aren't taught.

Like no one teaches you that. And I think one of the, I had a lot of latitude as a trainer even at jim jones for the most part to construct situations that really tested that boundary and yeah for the the most part it was haphazard and it was like learn i learned my skill through a very brutal way of failing like i failed to get anybody anywhere for a really long time because i didn't notice oh my god they're just weak ah they're just quitters ah they don't fit into my mental complex I needed to pick up my

own pieces which weren't picked up at the time to learn this stuff I was in the middle of a really devastating like eating disorder that thankfully I pulled myself out of but it could have easily never succeeded like Like I, I was told, Hey, if you want to, if you want to work here, you gotta like, you gotta do the thing for real. And if you want to do the thing for real, you've got to ride bikes or do the thing. Cause that was my thing, but God fuck, I got to get lighter. So I'm like a 195 pound human being trying to weigh one 75 at six foot two, trying to race bikes failing miserably eating 1600 calories a day and riding my bike for four hours just like just withering away my fucking nails

quit growing my hair started falling out and in the meantime i'm like you're fucking weak you're this you're that i'm a i am jack's ironic sense of self right that and so it clicked and this this isn't a play to say how important my wife is to me but before we started dating like my experience coaching her was probably the single most important thing that i ever saw coaching and it came from me playing games like i do like psychological warfare games, I got inspired to come up with a workout that would let people experience failure at some point. It's like a 10-tier mountain and each level that you go is a pass or fail. Now, I was very specific about what that individual, where their competency was on finishing an event. It would go between a hard aerobic event

to an isometric hold or a plank or something. So I would switch back between different modalities to test, and I would put them right on the line where they had to push past where they think they could on every single event, and then a rest period, and then the next thing, and then a rest period, and the next thing. So there's 10 events.

The second to last one was probably the hardest. It was a rest period next thing so there's 10 events um the second to last one was probably the hardest it was a 10 minute rack hold oh just standing you can walk around you can stand you can do whatever you just got to hold on to those things and they can't leave your shoulders oh whoa so at any point if anybody fails you're not even allowed to talk to anybody you get your shit and you leave and they're like okay and people know me that i'm like okay i'm a serious person but i also like to joke and that stuff's kind of funny to me and so they're like yeah we'll play those games i act like an asshole i was an asshole but it wasn't good camaraderie right um so i explained the rules and i'm like you just you have to earn your right to see what happens like you can't just like quit and then like be

the guy who experience other people's glory exactly you can't be like quit and then like be the guy who experience other people's glory exactly you can't be a part of the ride unless you fucking don't quit and so that was the idea behind it so uh the whole morning i'm throwing this at my clients and everyone's failing like nobody's making it through shit they're failing all over the place and aaron was my client at the time now my wife but at the time my client, and we weren't dating. She thought I was gay because I was a hairdresser. And she gets to this second event, and she's a tough girl. I know she's tough, and I give her really good. She blows past the first one.

She's on the rings doing a forward-leaning rest thing. It's only a minute in. I think the time she had to make it was like two minutes and 30 seconds or something unbroken plank. And I look up at the clock and then I look back at her and she like was touching her knee. And then she's like adjusted her hand and then went back. What are you doing? She's like, oh, I just needed to adjust. I was like, get out of here. You quit. And she was like, no, are you serious? Yeah. There's the door. And her eyes just welled up with tears. Like immediately she was just like, well, I didn't know. I was like, well, you didn't listen.

And this happened for about two minutes. I was like, seriously, the door's right there. You're interrupting the process. You got to get out. I didn't care about the, like I never once was like, I need to get the money. I need to make more clients. I was like, I need to fuck with people and get them to see what I see about this stuff. And so I risked everything, my own income. And I felt it. I was like, Oh, that was a bunch of money that I just lost. Like that was, that's going to hurt, but so be it. Like she

wasn't tough enough. And so the next, like the next people fail, the next people fail, another girl fails. And like, I'm like, I just can't, like like i didn't have it in she's bawling in the bathroom and i couldn't like i didn't at that point have the gumption to like be like you're gonna get out so she comes out of the bathroom the girl the other girl who's bawling and she looks at me like ready to be coached like pick me up and i was like, I don't know how to do that part. Fuck. Like, get out of here. Like, it literally was like something's wrong with this, like, system. So about an hour after that, like, that was the morning sessions.

About an hour after that, I get a text from Erin. And she's like, I got to come back and do it. You got to let me do it again. And I was like, no. That was the deal. I'm like, I still, like, I haven't learned any fucking thing yet. And I'm just like, no, that was the deal.'m like I still like I haven't learned any fucking thing yet and I'm just like no that was the deal whatever I'm gonna just be like you can not come in you can you know you I'll invite you to the next session if you still want but that was that she's like no seriously I'm like having a fucking breakdown mentally like I don't know what's wrong

with me I just need to come back and do that thing I'm like oh yeah this sounds like I'm like on a suicide watch situation so like I let her come back into the evening classes but I'm like, oh yeah, this sounds like I'm like on a suicide watch situation. So like I let her come back into the evening classes, but I'm like, it's going to be harder. Like I'm going to give you harder things to hit because that's the only way that it makes sense. It's not fair to everybody else. And so she's like, okay. So she comes in and puts the bag down, gets on the air and starts warming up. I give her the things.

She just starts fucking plowing through them. Like they're nothing. Like I'm the worst predictor of fitness on the planet. She gets through the 10 minutes of rack hold, drops a kettlebell. And so your, your, your score is dictated on how many snatches you can get before you drop the kettlebell. So whatever that is, if you don't get to that point, you score nothing. But the second, you know, you want to, so she's swinging and I'm just like watching in amazement like she's not fucking quitting she's on like rep 120 rep 130 rep 140 the fucking skin comes off her hands and blood starts like literally on every single one

the whole thing is like dripping i'm not gonna fucking tell this girl anything. She's on a mission. And whatever I say, she's going to like throw that thing at me. She gets to like 217 and drops the fucking thing, looks at her hands and then grabs her bag and fucking leaves. And I like sat down and I was like, I think I did something. I think I created a scenario in which somebody was able to recognize a need to change. And that was a teaching moment for you. For me. Yeah. She was capable of that. All it took was like a spark and then she was on her way.

I didn't do anything there. So that was the moment of, we call that kind of coaching leverage where there's a sort of shift in responsibility. Right? we call that kind of coaching leverage where there's a sort of shift in responsibility, right, where you just go from the power position of what it feels like to put people in the pain cave, which is very elementary and very primal and very basic, and it's just based on insecurities. Then there's a transition to excellent, masterful coaches where they understand this sort of delicacy and stability of the that positive psychology and that's what you needed that was the lesson for you yeah yeah and i wish i could say that that was it thing got it that was just the beginning beginning yeah it was like the i just started to recognize

exactly how much i didn't know i knew enough to know how much i didn't know i think i feel like i understand what you're saying on a surface level, the basic idea of this bigger context. Can you give me any more concrete example of this or really spell this out? The transfer, like what happens from A to B. What are we really talking about here?

Everything else was volatile. So when we go into a workout and this is just one domain but it could be an allegory for life when we go into a domain and we quit or we don't perform as well as we think we should there's some kind of negative reaction to that and the idea is to let those negative reactions improve each sequential moment so that eventually you have less of those negative moments or what's actually going to happen is that you continue those negative moments but you've blossomed into something else you've you've become something looking back down that you didn't even

think you could become because you were able to self-assess analyze and recruit and this doesn't happen on your own you need people to help you do this because we're all wired to lie to ourselves. It's hard to describe what the process is because it's different for everybody. But some of the constituents are always the same. They include failure. They include quitting.

What people don't want to talk about is positive reinforcement because that's the direction you're heading like the negative stuff is just a way to like see which direction and then as soon as i see a positive i'm gonna head in that direction until it's just like a a compass where and you're waiting for the needle to stop and then okay that's north and then i start walking and that that you need direction you need positivity because that's your guide to show you where the positive stuff is but you need the negative stuff to allow you to realize what is positive so it's strategic failure so that you understand then where to go next right so in like a uh what i would say a physical example because that's what we're generally talking about um a lot

of people use like effort so if we're going to use our 10 minute effort on the Airdyne. Okay. That the consequence isn't just that I didn't hit the number. That's what most people will superficially take away from it. What really is, is like what the negotiation looked like. Like what was the reason why you slowed down? In your head. Your head negotiation.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's like, let's analyze like, yeah, yeah. You didn't make the thing. looked like? Like what was the reason why you slowed down? In your head. Your head negotiation. In your head. Yeah, yeah. Let's analyze like, yeah, yeah, you didn't make the thing but that's not the end of the lesson. The lesson is like

it's seven minutes. What were the things that you told yourself that made it not worth continuing to go? And then let's talk about why those things appeared. So this is literally

a conversation you're having with this person when they're done. 100%. Totally. And that only happens once the trust is there and a relationship is developed. For a very long time, failing is just failing. And that's why I think a lot of people don't have a grasp on what we call picking up the pieces is because we just identify failure as quitting or failure because they're too weak. Like I missed the lift because I'm too weak.

I'm like, no, no, no, it's deeper than that. Did you even think you would get it in the first place? Because if you didn't, then we have a problem up here, not a problem in the muscles. One of the cool things about doing what you do is that effectively you're a Sherpa. That's a word that we will periodically use around here. And that you take people up mountains. But in many ways, it's not so much about the objective getting to the top of the mountain. It's respectfully

understanding the environment may or may not change. And that will also, by its context, change the situation. So there's a lot of responsibility in that process. And it sounds like that is something that you learned through now the decade plus that you've been coaching and training yeah the what i what i always skills are transferable if they're not transferable then they're party tricks and i think that's the, you could say that you climbed Everest or you used your climbing example, but the summit is not actually the goal because part about achieving that isn't maintaining it or staying around that area. It's actually realizing how unimportant that was. And then the reflection on the way, the dangers that you face, the lessons that you learned along the way that led to that thing. That was the lesson building.

And then the lesson from there should be not just how to to maintain it but how to keep learning from that thing and those are what i try to instill you know taking people up but also making sure that they come down okay you're using these people's physical practice to show them how to climb and to descend a mountain so that they can then pick whatever mountain they want right so in your example learning how to be a hairdresser learning how to physically train somebody whatever skill you want to do if you understand that basic process of getting up something really difficult and getting back down you you feel like you can do this in any area yeah and i think like a it's really hard to because we're talking kind of esoterically about theory around training but how it hashes itself out is very interpersonal. Some of the best examples I've had are tricking,

like having control of a situation. When you have control, you're able to guide a little bit better, but you never have total control. So as a, for your example, like a Sherpa, I have the right ladder to cross the thing or I have the right rope to show you like, this is how you do it.

Whatever the equipment is with me, the rope to show you like this is how you do it you know whatever the equipment is with me the tools to accomplish the task are with me I just have to implement that in a way that gets you to realize how important that tool is in the university education we can't cover any of what you just said there's nothing like that and I don't think people really understand when they look at these celebrities or they look at celebrity trainers like you right which is a term i'm sure that just drives you batty right it makes your skin crawl and they think oh what is he doing what's his workout what's his diet if i do the workout and I do the diet, I'll get that result. And I think your demonstration here

has been pretty clear that that is a portion of it, but that's only the entry-level information. Yeah. I mean, talking to somebody who's very highly educated, obviously, and it's always kind of like a asterisk by my name when it's like Michael Blevins and nobody knows what to call me because I don't know what to call me like I don't call myself a coach I don't call myself a trainer I generally jokingly but with

a little bit of honesty call myself a self-assessment analyst like I always pick up on whether people are able to view themselves like how they view them, like how they should view themselves. And that's how I title it. But I don't have any certifications. I don't have any like formal education. Although I love education, like I'm in love with the process of learning. I just took that and just tried to teach myself and learn from other people. So a question I get a lot from people is like, how do I, what, what certs should I do? Like, how do you become a trainer?

How do you do, like, how do you do this question comes up all the time. And first of all, I don't know a it's, it's luck a lot of it, but if I was going to add constituents into what made up what I do, it's showing up and being valuable. So doing, doing something that somebody finds valuable and you'll find people that can give you opportunity and then be ready to take that opportunity, like drop whatever. For me, I've always cleaned.

Like when I would go learn from hairdressers, I would just start sweeping hair, handing them foils, cleaning up their mess, getting ready for their like doing the laundry, doing the towels, folding towels. I didn't want to be the awkward person standing in the background. Yeah. Like I'm here to learn guys. I was just like, well,

if I just learn, but I can do something that way, this person gets something out of me being there. Eventually I noticed they're like, Hey, you want to come in on Saturday? Like, can you help me here? Can you help me here? And then I could ask questions because I'm doing them a favor now. Now I'm valuable to that person. They're more likely to teach me. And so from hairdressing to Jim Jones, it was start at Jim Jones, get the mop out, start cleaning the floors because floors are dirty. And so I bought my way into some conversations by being valuable in a certain aspect. Somebody asked me, I taught a seminar recently, and somebody asked me about mentorship and where to get educated. Same question. And I had a really hard time answering it,

but the one thing I could give you is that whatever you want to spend on education, use whatever money you're going to spend on that. Find a city that has one to two people that you respect in your industry and go pay to be a part of their culture, whether that's at a gym, whatever. And hang out in an organic manner and see how that person interacts in real time.

And what will happen is, one, you'll either find out that that person is fake and it wasn't what you thought and they're not doing anything special. They just look cool on Instagram. Or you'll develop a relationship with that person with the opportunity to have a mentor. Like I didn't know Kenny, like I've always admired, I've listened to a lot of his stuff, known his story for a long time. And I've always said in the back of my head, man, I'd like to meet that guy. Like I want to, I really want to like spend some time. We talk on a level that I think like I would really appreciate to hear some more things that he

has to say. The last thing I ever thought was like, Kenny's going to find me interesting. I'm going to show Kenny. Well, he doesn't. I know. He doesn't. That wasn't in my head. And so the organic thing that happened was that we met through a mutual friend. And it was just like, I think you were teaching a seminar in London.

And I was using that gym you were teaching out of. And Pricey was like, oh, Kenny Kane's going. You know Pricey is swearing and kicking babies or whatever. That's our sponsor. Did you say Kenny Kane? He's like, yeah. I literally just canceled everything that day, walked down to the gym, sat down totally late because I didn't know your teaching and I was just like,

wanted to listen to him. Sure, everything that came to my mind, God, I really like what he says. And then the opportunity we can work out. I'm like, cool, I want to work out with this guy. I hope I didn't like bug you with questions or anything.

No, we just chatted. We couldn't stop talking. I mean, that was the thing. We couldn't stop talking. The lesson there though that people don't really understand is you were already at a very high level of success when you did that right you weren't a nobody this didn't happen when you were like an entry kid looking to get your way right for for training

yeah um i had i had um i had worked with enough like i was educated enough and i had worked with enough clients to prove that I could take somebody through A to B. Yeah, right. So my point though is you had the humility to say you didn't need to go to this seminar to get the next celebrity client. That added no chance of that actually happening for the most part. You had to have the humility to go, although I could stand over here and tell everyone, I don't need this because I'm just going to go do my next thing. Actually, the opposite where I'm going to humble myself and say, there's somebody else that has value who may be less people know of, but I am really interested in this. And so I'm going to put myself in a situation where I go up and say,

man, can I learn from you? There's knowledge you have that I would like to have. And that's a really difficult thing for some people to do. But now look at the relationship that fostered. And now that will, of course, breed opportunity. There's a really interesting thing when we talk about human experience. A lot of people... I equate it. I wrote this article.

I never published this article because it just didn't finish right and it made me sound like maybe an asshole. I relate the experience of being a human to boarding an airplane. just didn't finish right and it made me sound like a maybe an asshole like it i relate like the experience of being a human to like boarding an airplane when you board an airplane you see people live through their class it it's total generalization when you walk in and i'm like an economy flyer unless i'm on a project and they give me a business class ticket other than that i'm buying an economy ticket so i'm not saying that it's that class thing.

But the ethic that goes along with the class is very apparent. When you walk in first class, people are working very, very hard. They're on phone calls. They're doing their typing. They're finishing up the last things that they can't do. They're just busybodies, right? You then break that barrier. You go to like Comfort Plus or whatever the fuck,

the new thing that they're charging an insane amount for nothing different. But the prestige is that these people are learning and then you start to see like people have their like little tablets out and they're reading their books and their novels

and some people are working, some people are talking, but they're starting to see a difference. And then you go to coach and you see the epitome of human existence as what people think it should be which is i want to be comfortable like i have my fucking neck pillow and my eye thing and my game and my other like they're just like chips and like soda like i just want like

and you recognize that that that isn't have anything to do with the price of ticket you bought we're dealing with majorities now there's something else that happens that a lot of people don't recognize that happens on private airplanes. On a private airplane, you have access to all the movies, all the free shit, all the champagne. People, they don't give a fuck about that. They're talking to each other. What shows me that if you had the most money possible to experience life, what you want to experience is human connection. You want to build a relationship. Once I really felt that, I was like, okay, I'm going to go through life just trying to build some relationships,

like trying to experience relationships. That means I have to add to the relationship. It means I have to bring something to it. If I want to take something from somebody, I've got to replace it with something else. That's how a relationship works. Michael, you have some great writing available where can our listeners find your writings right now i write a few pieces um for free on my blog it's called grit and teeth.com i realized i just sounded like a 13-year-old girl saying my blog. Grit and teeth.

Grit and teeth spelled out. And it's where I'm on Instagram as well, which I post some pictures and some stuff that goes along with some musings at the well. But I am eventually working on a piece that's documenting this experience that I've had, and I can hopefully release that this year at some point. So all that information will be found when it is available on my website and on Instagram. I should just say winter is coming.

Good people. Thank you for tuning in, hanging out with our guest Michael Blevins of Grit and Teeth and superhero training in addition to being a very high thinker who's helping advance this whole field of getting people fit, not just physically, but mentally. My name is Kenny Kane for Andy Galpin. Thank you very much for listening to The Body of Knowledge. Looks like you enjoyed the show. Make sure to go over to iTunes, go over to Shrug Collective, give us a five-star review, positive comment only, and make sure to go over to thrivemarket.com

slash body to order your groceries this week.