Barbell Shrugged - Body of Knowledge  — Chapter 8  —  Human Performance

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

In chapter 8, we describe the evolution of human performance and the factors that influence it. We show how the modern fitness industry came to be plagued by extreme ideology, persuasion, and isolation. Andy provides context for this conversation with the history of training from the ancient Greeks to the birth of bodybuilding.   Enjoy!   - Kenny and Andy   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bok_chapter8 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   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

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, this is Doug from Barbell Shrugged. I just want to let you know that we now offer 11 of our top training programs as a part of a single membership site that we're calling the Program Vault. We used to launch training programs every few months and people were always bummed that they couldn't sign up at any time. You had to be around for the launch. The launch was only 4 or 5 days. If you missed it, then you had to wait 6 months or a year depending on what training program we were offering next.

And it was kind of a hassle, even when people signed up for training programs to switch to a different program when they got to the end of their current program or they just happen to be in a new phase of training they hit their their past goal and now they have new goals and new goals require different training programs so inevitably it was a pain in the ass for people to switch programs so we took all that feedback and we decided to just put all of our programs together on this thing we now call the program vault that way all shrugged athletes can have access to all the workouts that we have and move from program to program as they saw fit for themselves makes sense so there's 11 programs three of them are long-term very comprehensive programs where there's you know a warm-up and there's mobility and there's nutrition added in there all the workouts are there there's a cool down there's there's stuff

to do on your off days they're super super comprehensive and those programs last for over 18 months if you want to stick around for that long and there's also eight short-term programs these programs are three months long and these are basically add-on programs so if you are already doing classes at a gym and you don't want to stop doing your classes but you want to work on one particular thing maybe you want to like work on your shoulder health or you want to work on your conditioning like your your aerobic capacity or maybe you just want to work on your squatting strength or your pull-up strength or something like that then we have these short-term add-on programs that are super low volume but

they're just like an extra you know two or three exercises at the end of your workout to help work on whatever those very specific goals are that you have so the three long-term programs are flight weightlifting that's a very weightlifting specific training program it builds it builds you from someone who's more like beginner intermediate at weightlifting and build you up to be a more technical professional style weightlifter you know over the course of 12 or 18 months now we also have muscle gain challenge if you just want to put on muscle mass and you want a higher volume training program this in my opinion is more of an intermediate program if you don't have good technique on the olympic lifts yet you're going to kind of be throwing right to the wolves so to speak that It doesn't ramp you up like flight does. Flight has very specific progressions for weightlifting

to let you learn all the technique over time. Muscle gain challenge kind of just throws you right into it. So ideally, you already have some experience with Olympic weightlifting before you start the muscle gain challenge. And there's a very high emphasis, of course, with the muscle gain challenge on gaining muscle. So that means you've got to eat a lot of food. so there's a lot of emphasis on how much to eat, what to eat, and your recovery as a part of that program, so that way you can get bigger and stronger.

Also, we have Strug Strength Challenge, which is more of a traditional kind of CrossFit program. If you do CrossFit classes at a CrossFit gym, you probably do some strength movements at the very beginning of class, you know, maybe do front squats for five sets of five, and then you do a Metcon that's, you know, 20 or 25 minutes or whatever it happens to be. That's more typical of the shrugged strength challenge where strength is the goal, but certainly conditioning is a key part of that as well. It has more of a strength bias than kind of a regular generalized CrossFit-y type program. So the eight short-term training programs, again, these are about three months long, and they're kind of an add-on program. So the first one is boulders for shoulders. That's a shoulder health and stability program, health, mobility, and stability program. That doesn't mean you're going to be doing a whole lot of jerks and

overhead presses necessarily. This is, again, an add-on program. So you're going to be doing a lot of assistance work for your shoulders, your thoracic spine, etc. That way you can have the healthiest shoulders possible. There's the aerobic monster program, which is adding in a bunch of extra mostly aerobic conditioning. You're going to be on the airdyne a lot. You're going to be on the rower a lot. You're going to be doing a lot of monostructural stuff. So, you know, if you already have your regular workout, you do strength, you do your Metcon, and then, you know, as a very overly simplistic example, you do, you know, 20 minutes of rowing, or you do 30 on 30 off for 10 rounds, or you're doing a hard 30 and an easy 30, or whatever it is, just a little bit extra aerobic work. There's the squat the house program where, you know,

we add in two leg exercises three days a week. So you might squat and then do some lunges or something like that. Depending on what your regular classes are like, you might already be doing a lot of squatting. But if you're not currently able to do a lot of squatting and you want to do some more squatting and you just want to add that onto your current training, then Squat the House is a great program. Anaerobic Assault, that is a high intensity interval style program where you're doing very fast Metcons. So you might be doing airdyne sprints, you know, 30 seconds on 100% full speed and then take a three minute break and do it again. Or even, you know, five touch and go

deadlifts followed by, you know, 10 burpees, rest two minutes and then do it again. But you're doing it all 100% speed really teaching how to kick it into high gear and move very very quickly when you're doing your metcons there's my first pull-up which is not going to give you a whole lot of actually doing pull-ups these are this is a program for people that can't do a pull-up yet so there's a lot of assistance work for pull-ups and there's a lot of extra assistance work for just all the muscle groups involved in doing pull-ups everything from just doing extra extra lat work extra scapular attraction rhomboid lower trap work extra bicep work etc to help get you to the point where you can do your first pull-up

there's a strongman accessory program where you can be doing yoke walks picking up stones pulling heavy sleds and things like that and then there's two more programs that are kind of a little bit higher volume. You could do them on your own if you wanted to. And you also can combine these. You could do Aerobic Monster and Aerobic Assault and My First Pull-Up all together if you wanted to, if you just wanted to add extra volume. But the last two, Open Prep is exactly what it sounds like.

This gets you ready for the CrossFit Open or other similar competitions. You'll be doing a lot of Metcons. And the last one is Barbell Beginner to Meet. It's prepping you for your first Olympic weightlifting competition. Each program is scheduled between three and five days per week. There's videos explaining all the programming. There's demos. There's technique explanations for everything.

And then also you have access to the private shrugged collective facebook group that way you can get advice from ourselves we'll be in there hanging out our guests from our shows we also have a bunch of athletes coaches and strength experts that are friends of ours that are in there too to help you out if you're interested since i've been talking long enough you can go to shruggedcollective.com backslash vault for all the information. Again, that is shruggedcollective.com backslash V-A-U-L-T. That spells vault. Go there, check it out. If you have any questions, email help at barbellshrugged.com and enjoy the show.

Mike Bledsoe here, CEO of the Shrugged 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. Can we start again? Yeah.

Where's the future of this understanding going? Don't know. Why? Anyways. 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. I don't know where that came from. I wasn't listening. I was just thinking about that. All right, good people.

This whole volume is about change. Now, the way I see it, real change is a matter of perception. Perception results from alterations of perspectives and shifts in reality. Today, our intent is to deepen our understanding of how historical perceptions and changes of human performance have evolved or possibly devolved based on your lens, based on a few significant players in the science of physiology and the market of fitness. So if you're willing, Andy is going to take us a few steps back so we can see how we've been and continue to be influenced by some watershed moments and peeps. In preparation for this chapter, I can't help but observe a whopper combo. And that's a scientific research mixed with the

market of fitness create for a whole lot of content, a fair amount of confusion, chaotic distribution, and a million different ways to improve health. At the center of this mostly well-intended dialogue are the creative types who help change perceptions and the innovative types that help change our realities. Naturally, as humans, most of us find content to fit our narratives and biases. I'm certainly a perpetrator of this, and so is my co-host, Andy Galpin. And as Epictetus pointed out, men are not disturbed by things but the perception of things and let me tell you my ego is the biggest contributor to perception and therefore limits my ability to change recently this idea of what do you fit for seems to come up and i think it's

a fantastic question that everybody should ask. Some of my colleagues say, well, I'm fit for the zombie apocalypse. And let me tell you something, fuck zombies. Fuck this idea for a couple of reasons. First of all, I don't know if we're dealing with a slow zombie or fast zombie. So that's confusing, point one. Point number two, if we're really going to be combating zombies, whether they're slow and hard to kill or super fast and get up on us with the quickness, I would want to work more on my combative strategies than I would my fitness strategies. Regardless, these are people who are helping to create changes in perceptions and our realities as it relates to fitness.

Everybody's got a lens that they're looking through, and they try to match that with the people that follow them. And today, we're going to dive really deep into our understanding of something that, if we were to just title it, the history of human kinesiology, we could probably bore the fuck out of everybody who's even really interested in this stuff. So, you know, we decorate it, human performance. So it's just a little decoration change that, you know what, listeners, it's bullshit. It's our way to bait you. So what makes us different than some of the other clickbait nonsense that Google is directing our consciousness with? Well, not a whole lot as it relates to this, but at least we're being

honest about it. I don't know if that makes us better it makes me feel better at least as a human being and as somebody who is ironically contributing to the noise that we're fucking critiquing good god we are so full of ourselves but look if we do take a couple steps back and understand that a couple hundred years ago some swedes got together they introduced some research that allowed us to understand really key things quality of movement and vo2 max we go down the road another 50 60 years and we realized that weightlifting is kind of important unfortunately the dude that developed this weightlifting stuff croaked at 42 and he was a harvard scientist and everyone don't lift that shit fucks you up

fast forward a few more decades and well what's winning in the in the understanding of kinesiology and physiology well cardiac research related to monostructural studies because that's all that we really could understand interpret and disseminate then this guy guy, Bob Hoffman, comes along, as we pointed out in a previous chapter, and challenges Peter Karpovich. That's a whopper of a fight right there. Hoffman, as we're going to discover today, goes on to have his own little battle with this guy named Joe Weider. Boy, these two contributed a lot to the supplement market and the fitness market. Now, what we are hoping you understand is one giant thing. And that is that these guys kind of created the aesthetic fitness market. There's a little bit of science in it. There's a whole lot of market in it. And it's definitely

influenced all of us and our desires to look good because our dopamine driven brains go, I want to look good. I want to feel sexy. And these are the people who contributed to our perceptions, our realities as this thing goes. Then there's a whole nother thing, a group that Dr. Galpin kind of fits in. And that's that strength and conditioning group of people who go science first and adaptations create changes and certain stimulus make us better for these reasons. Eventually, as Galpin has pointed out, that everything that he thought continues to get flipped on its head. And that's just the nature of science. And that's the Hegelian dialectic. You get a thesis, you get an antithesis, and then you get a synthesis. And that process never stops. And we're trying to interpret that

information as we pointed out at greater rates. Now, enter this other thing in the functional fitness world. Greg Glassman comes along and challenges the aesthetic market that Hoffman and Joe Weider had created. What he did was very revelatory and pushed a lot of really sharp minds in the strength and conditioning world into a corner. And now we've got all these people fighting over what is most right and a lot of confused people in the market of fitness. So we're going to jump into this with Dr. Galpin right now and try to understand some history, how that applies to our natural biases. And if we can get over our fucking selves, we can help people even better. I get really frustrated in this field a lot

when I hear a lot of the arguing on the internet, articles fighting back and forth. It's soul crushing. And to be honest, it's mostly boring as shit because people are fighting about things and they think they're winning or losing an argument, but really they're just simply talking past each other. They haven't really established the foundation, the groundwork of what they're even talking about or why they're there. Like that Greek quote, they're focused on the perception.

It's not the thing itself. It's how they're perceiving that thing. Exactly. They haven't taken a step back and asked the fundamental question of for what. So the great examples of Darwinian quotes of, hey, survival of the fittest, right? That doesn't refer to the person who is the most physically fit. Only the strong survive. It's not actually talking about the strongest physical person who has the highest deadlift survives. Both of those things are really referring to who is the most fit, who has the best fit for the current environment. Yeah, there's a really interesting thing.

There's a really interesting shift that's happened over, it's become very apparent in the last century, which is human beings have risen to a level where we have more control over the environment in which we exist than ever before. So we're now faced with the challenge of not only adapting to the environment, but we have to make conscious choices about what are the environments in which we're going to exist, because we're not only a product of our environment, but our environment is a product of us collectively and somewhat individually. So when someone comes through the doors of Kenny's gym, and he needs to convince them of whatever he's going to convince them of they are they're going to be a product of his environment and they are also going to influence that environment

either in a small way or a big way and a really interesting point that a former student of yours kenny uh tristan harris makes and he was a former uh i believe, ethicist for Google. He was a design ethicist for Google. And he makes a really interesting point that we now have, since we have the ability to manipulate our own environment, we have to then step back and say, well, what makes me think I want to manipulate it in a certain way? What persuaded me to want that in the first place? And that's a whole nother level to this entire conversation because we have to acknowledge first, what am I training for? What's the outcome I'm trying to get? Am I trying to lose weight? Am I trying to gain muscle mass? Do I want to just be more fit for health, live longer, more energy? What is it you're training for? That first question establishes our basic

ground rules. On the bigger level though... Andy, is a bicep curl bad for you? Great example, right? One of the things that I love to do in my class is I'll pull up YouTube videos, and I'll get the most bro science person you could possibly think, and I'll play the video. And my students, predictably, respond by being like, oh, idiot, doesn't know what he's doing, blah, blah, blah, right? And they'll want to pick him apart, which is what people on YouTube want to do, right? But what I do is go through those, usually those videos,

point by point, and show the students why that person in the video was dead on right. Because we have to understand that person was talking about how to maximize calf size for a 24 to 28-year-old male bodybuilder. You were the one who made the mistake. Very hard to do, by the way. Right. You were the one who made the mistake of thinking that was going to make you a better football player. So he's not wrong. You're wrong.

Right. For perceiving his outcome to be different than what you want it to be. If you can't get out of your own contextual frame of I'm training for football, then anything that's countered to training for football is going to look stupid to you, and you're going to attack it with blind rage.

Exactly. And so we can have a conversation about, we'll go back to when we talked about, are machines a good idea? Should you lift with machines? Well, if I'm trying to become a better football player, perhaps a machine is not my first stop as a training modality. But that doesn't mean there's no benefit ever

in using an exercise machine. But if I tore my ACL playing football and I can't stabilize my knee and I need to rehab it, maybe a machine's a good idea. Bingo. And so that's what we want to do, broaden the conversation so that we realize when to apply some of these things and when some of these classic rules of exercise and health and nutrition, how they're all just rules inside a certain lens. Right. A hammer is a great tool for hitting a nail. It's a pretty bad tool for stitching up a wound. Yeah, right. Or eating cereal. Yeah, right. Goodbye front teeth. We want to address some of those very practical questions for you. And hopefully by the end here...

Josh, you done with breakfast? No. You came to the hammer. What do you expect? By the end of today's chapter. Why are you eating cereal? You'll be able to answer a lot of those questions on your own. And we won't have to even address them.

Which is the ultimate goal is to save you time and to reduce some of your anxiety of being like, oh, my God. Andy, Josh is eating grain. Is he going to die? Yeah, I think. And milk. You look awfully inflamed today. With a hammer. The second, and some would argue a bigger question,

is why did we decide to train for that adaptation in the first place? What persuaded me to want to lose the weight, to want to be stronger? And we have to realize that our perception of what we desire is heavily influenced by social constructs, marketing, like Tristan talks about. These big companies are very clearly establishing what you think you want, whether you know it or not. He made a great point on Sam Harris's podcast recently that just simply acknowledging that there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the wall trying to get you to do something will change the way you view a lot of these things. Exactly. And that comes down to, I mean, that's marketing in general. We just need to collectively acknowledge that there are people trying to get us to do things and we just need to be aware of that. We haven't had an ethical conversation about what it is we

want them to convince us to do. When I don't get that conscious control of where the persuasion gets to, that's when we have problems. And probably more importantly, not even recognizing or realizing that that persuasion is happening is a real problem. And at the same time, we're also fighting our own evolutionary biology, like we talked about in the nutrition chapter. We have evolutionary reasons that are persuading us to make food choices, to make exercise choices.

And right now, because of the current level of abundance and the control of our own environment, the ability to consume food, the ability to be warm, to be fed, all these things, now we've got a bunch of battles we have to fight that we have just never, ever had to fight before. So I feel like it's important that we take a step back and really look at this entire field of health and human performance, realize where it came from, where it is now to help us understand the influence that you as a listener are getting about what you're choosing to train for and why that's happening.

And hopefully when we do that, you'll have a better understanding of a lot of the common questions you have about what the right thing to do is for your training. Yeah, because there's a lot of people that can speak with a lot of authority. But again, it's absent of context. And one of the things that we try to establish early in this volume is that context is critical. So let's go back. First of all, my wife is here to help us understand the actual pronunciation of G- and just for our listeners my wife has run competitively at iaa f meets here at yeah i double a me yeah the office is located right by the um stockholm stadium in sweden where they have a bunch of famous track meets and non-famous track meets.

So it's right around the corner from that. Did they have an Olympic event there too? Yeah, 1912 was the Olympics in Stockholm. So they built a stadium for that and established this G.I.H. I don't know when, but in connection with... 1813, Peter... Yeah. Peter Per...

Perling. Henrikling. 1813. There you go. 1813 is Peter. Yeah. Peter. Pear. Pearling. 1813. 1813. There you go. 1813 is a year. We're going to go even before that. Okay. Let's understand the framework a little bit of what even set up GIH.

So people have been fascinated with the human body and physicality and physical culture for as long as people have been around. I mean, we have classic stories of Galen, the second century Greek philosopher and surgeon and physiologist. He talked a lot about why it was important to build firm parts of your body. And I don't mean those kind of firm parts. Right? And while it's important to exhale the waste products and carbon dioxide and move it around. And if you look

around, you can find a ton of different Greek philosophers and Romans talking about that. I mean, everyone now on the internet has posted the famous Socrates quote, you know, no man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. And it's a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and the strength in which

his body is capable. So Socrates was all over these things. Well, the Greeks loved that body. Yeah, right? They famously trained naked on purpose. The Olympiads were started naked, right? Because we wanted to see the physical body. Nothing else can be, nothing's more pure than that. If we kind of zoom in and talk about that, we really didn't make any changes in our approach or our belief system in human performance from the Greeks until about the late 1700s. There's a really famous letter from Benjamin Franklin in 1772 where people had asked him how he had so much health, energy, and vigor well into his 80s. And he said, you know, I live temperately. I drink no wine and I use daily the exercise of dumbbells.

Hey, Ben, want to fly a kite? No, I got a few more reps to do. Yeah, exactly. So Franklin was adamant about the use of dumbbells and physical exercise and strength conditioning. And I found another quote from that timeframe that Josh really loved and where they talked about the widespread concern for these what they called city dwellers they were really concerned that gymnastics and resistance exercise were repeatedly being touted to these urban man's defense against what they called the moral and physical decline of these city dwellers. Y'all city slickers are getting soft. Yeah, right? So you need to start getting some dumbbells because, you know, your life with your plumbing and stuff is just far too—actually, I don't even know if they had plumbing back then. Whatever they had, it was making them soft. It was making them soft, right. What to me was really interesting about this was that strength training and gymnastics

was all about maintaining and improving human performance and function. And for the most part, it stayed that way from the time of Socrates all the way up until about 1940 or so, which is this epic Karpovich battle we talked about in chapter 1.5. The reason that happened, though, we actually have to take a little bit of a sidetrack and go along a horizontal path, which is what I'll call the beginning of modern strength and conditioning, physical health, fitness, and really exercise physiology as a science. Keep that evolution of human performance in your mind, and we go back to 1813, and that's when a guy named

Per Henrik Ling went to the Swedish government and said, we should develop an academic institute for the study of gymnastics. And they called that original university G.I.H. G.I.H., which stands for Kungliga Gymnastiska Centralinstitutet. Yeah, and you guys wonder why I have a hard time

learning Swedish. What really mattered there is he decided that it is actually so important for us to understand gymnastics that we need to make an academic, scientific, rigorous study of it. And if you hadn't put this together yet, when they said the word gymnastics, they're not talking about the sport like we think of it now And if you hadn't put this together yet,

when they said the word gymnastics, they're not talking about the sport like we think of it now. To them, that was all general human movement. This is where we get the word gymnasium, by the way. Gym, right? The study of gymnastics here. I don't know if a lot of folks realize it,

but this is a huge cultural honor that the Swedes have. This is something they bestowed on the rest of the world that's really still running us through now. Well, because G.I.H. focused, right, Andy, on the quality of movement, the virtuosity of the movement, the cleanliness of the movement. Yeah. I mean, there's like multiple parts of what gymnastics represent. Exactly. To them, they broke up gymnastics into four categories. So category number one

was what they call educational gymnastics. And this is what we consist of now perceived to be sports gymnastics. Okay. Number two was medical gymnastics. And that's actually what we now would refer to probably as physical therapy. The third branch was the military gymnastics. And this is, you know, again, what we would basically call combatives training, things like that now. And then the fourth branch was the aesthetics. Wow. Very much like today's market, right? Now, again, we've got to do some understanding here because they, when they meant aesthetics, they're not talking about look good. They're talking about, does the quality of your movement look good, right? This is the aesthetic component. Nowhere did they have a, you should physically look good for them. The aesthetics was more like ballet or pantomime or, or things like that. It's

movement quality is what they're after. After a couple of decades of doing this, it really evolved into, and there's some Swedish translation here, but they developed what was called the Swedish School of Sport and Health Science. And that really gave us this term of exercise science. The success of GAH really led us into what I would call the first official paradigm shift, which is the development of exercise physiology. So prior to the 1900s or so, we had always used physiology as a basis for clinical medicine.

And that really exploded once we started to make this connection between exercise, physiology, and health. They laid the foundation for some of the most fundamental exercise physiology concepts that every trainer knows in America or throughout the world and half just general exercises understand. GAH was responsible for this very classic series of five studies where they were the first ones to really outline what happens with carbohydrate and fat metabolism during exercise. It was actually so important that most people refer to these as the first ever sports nutrition studies. There was no marketplace for supplements yet. There was no nutrition marketplace.

Nutrition was still at the point of starvation where it was like, eat what you can, who cares? And they were starting to establish, wow, when I do high-intensity exercise, I burn a lot of carbohydrate. Lower-intensity exercise is primarily fat-based. That's crazy. And the details of these whole five studies, it's just tremendous. It's tough to read for the layperson, but it was just really impressive what they were able to accomplish so long ago. So, Andy, G.I.H. set up something that was really profound

in the development of exercise physiology as a discipline. And principally, what they did in the 1800s was establish the study of movement and how it relates to four different things. And just to kind of repeat them, one, there was an educational element to it with basic gymnastics, the sport of gymnastics. And there was a medical application of it, physiotherapy, or what might look like today, PT. There was also a military application, so to prepare soldiers to go and do battle and have their bodies prepared for it. And the other is the aesthetic, the sport of gymnastics. So making movement look good, cleaning up lines and so on. So now that that's established and there is a century or so of some sort of experimentations in exercise science, if you will, there's a rapid expansion

of study by the mid-1900s. So break that down for us so we can kind of deepen our understanding here. Yeah. The GIH, the establishment in that 80 or 100 years of work in gymnastics, provided the foundation we needed to launch into the study of what was now called exercise physiology. So it was an expansion of just move well into what is the true physiology, what's the biochemistry, what's the biology, what's the chemistry of exercise. And that happened really across the world at the same time. So here in America in 1927, we opened what was called the Harvard Fatigue Lab, and we were all simultaneously studying these extremes of human performance, or we could really think about this as the limitations of human physiology.

Like we talked about in the nutrition chapter, we needed to understand wartime efforts. In the 1920s and 30s and 40s, we had multiple world wars going on. We didn't understand that there was cellular respiration. We didn't understand blood pH or chemistry or any of these things. We had known them in their individual silos of study in physiology, chemistry, but no one had really understood how they were being implemented or influencing us from a human performance element.

Now, we hadn't gotten into the sport side of study yet, although that was happening simultaneously in the background, which we'll get into in a little bit. But we really were now launching into this thing because really physiology was always the basis for clinical medicine. Now we realized we need to start studying this from that clinical perspective. So I needed to understand how long human can go without food. What is a calorie? How many do you need? How much water do you have to have before you die of thirst? And these are all things that were being studied at the Harvard fatigueigue Lab, which is a great name for running the experiments that they did. What were some of the things that they did at the Harvard Fatigue Lab? The Harvard Fatigue Lab was started by a

guy named D.B. Dill, who was a biochemist. And also a great rapper. Yeah, right. Should have been. He was interested in the military aspect for the most part. They did extreme altitude stuff. They did temperature. One of the most famous applications was did extreme altitude stuff. They did temperature. One of the most famous applications was they had two rooms in the lab. One of them was kept at 115 degrees Fahrenheit, and the other was kept at negative 40. So it sounds like a yoga studio right down the street and or an experience that you might run with Laird Hamilton. Yeah, so again, let's complain about getting into that 40-degree water next time that we're with Laird and not the negative 40-degree temperature. But the funny part about this is I read an account from a guy named Edgar Falk

who worked in a lab. I ended up getting his PhD from there. And he was talking about how the military would come to them and say, we've got a problem. We need to understand how cold people can get so we can provide them with the right equipment so that they don't die in combat. A great example, they came to him and they said, how long can you survive in this cold?

And he's like, well, I don't know. And they're like, great, find out. Talk about a thesis project. Yeah. Well, he sat in this cold chamber at negative 40 from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. And he counted this in this awesome article, and he was like, you know, at some point during hour 8 or 10 or something, I started to ask myself, I wonder

how long the human mind can breathe in negative 40 degree oxygen before dying. Turns out he didn't, but he didn't know that. Yeah, he didn't know that. Weren't they also doing experiments where they were depleting people of carbohydrates or not allowing them to eat them and then putting them on treadmills and then running

them till failure? Yeah, actually, he teamed up, this guy named Christensen back at GIH, teamed up with a guy named Ole Hansen and published a series of five studies that actually, for the first time, told us about the relationship between carbohydrate and fat metabolism during exercise. Of course, from there, they started saying, well, what happens then if we take away the carbohydrate or we give you extreme amounts of fat? Probably dozens of Nobel Prizes came from this period of general physiology, the understanding of basic metabolism, respiration, the classic Olaf Ostrand teamed up with his wife, Ry rhyming and they came up with the ostrand rhyming equation which has allowed uh people to do a submaximal test measure their heart rate and use

that to calculate their vo2 max or maximal aerobic capacity and this is something that probably most middle school and high school people are doing now right you walk a mile and a half measures your heart rate and use that to calculate fairly accurately your VO2 max. So all of this came from the same period in this explosion of exercise physiology. I think I'd like to take a second to appreciate the mental toughness of the people involved in these things. Michael Blevins talked a lot about quitting and failing, and the fortitude involved in sitting in a negative 40 degree room for 12 hours to find out if you would die. Oh, my God. The resilience it takes to not eat carbohydrates for 30 days and then get on a treadmill and literally until you fall off to find out when your physiology fails.

That's not just a physical thing. That's a mentally challenging thing that i don't know if i could do that that's a commitment to a new reality that i'm helping to create yeah you could dive hours into the crazy studies that they did and to your point josh you would be like oh my god this really was it exploded in the 1950s because we had a series of really amazing human feats take off. In 1947, this girl named Pudgy Stockton became the first female to ever have a weightlifting meet. In 1953, of course, two names you'll probably recognize, Watson and Creek, discovered the double helix of DNA. The same year, Sir Edmund Hillary became the first person to ascend Everest.

And then right about this time, the four-minute mile. The next year, Bannister did his four-minute mile. The same year, we developed the American College of Sports Medicine, which is probably the largest international sports medicine-focused educational informational body. In the same year, 1954,

the sliding filament theory came about. So Huxley and Huxley outlined to us the exact mechanisms of how a muscle contraction happens. So a lot happened that all was because of this explosion of exercise physiology, that was actually a result of GIH and their initiative to start basic understanding of gymnastics all right andy so you're a professor that knows a lot about this stuff and it's easy for uh an average fellow like myself to get a little bit lost so let's go back just a smidge bit yeah kenny i do not go back on my lecture that's your responsibility just a little okay fine professor galpin i do not share slides um we had started a little bit earlier in this conversation ben franklin was using dumbbells we established that gi gih has this massive impact

of our understanding of physiology and movement and then there's this decade of the early 50s that was preceded by the battle between Hoffman and Karpovich that we talked about in chapter 5. But I think that we're a little bit lost on how and where this strength collision is coming from. Yes. These people we opened the show with,

Franklin and Socrates and G.I.H., they were all using strength training and gymnastics as a mode to improve the human condition. Well, at some point, because of what happened with the Harvard Fatigue Lab and the military and the government's resources, science took a detour and pretty much focused only on the endurance aspect of human performance. What can we endure? What can we endure? Wow, we can make it up a mountain. Edmund Hillary gets the top of Everest.

What's the minimum calories we can get? And we really had no vision of the importance of studying the strength aspect. So that was going to change really sharply in the 1950s and 60s with what was called the muscle wars. What can we perform? Right. So we had lost the performance aspect of it in anything besides the endurance realm. We had become very narrowed in our lens of study. Something had to happen that hit us in the face that went like, wow, we have not been seeing the whole picture here. Let's reset and go back a little bit to understand what happened to the strength and to the spectrum and what happened in this big collision.

So there's a dude in the 1870s named George Winship, also out of Harvard, who was a small little fella who maybe had a chip on his shoulder. You bet. Who wanted to get strong because he didn't like real-life bullies. who was a small little fella who maybe had a chip on his shoulder. You bet. Who wanted to get strong because he didn't like real life bullies and he probably didn't like being Joe Pesci size. Right. We mentioned Dr. George Winship in the previous chapter. Now he was a badass.

He was the guy who invented the first adjustable dumbbell. He invented a lot of other machines out of the forerunner for the vast majority of the exercise equipment we have around today. One of his protégés, Robert Roberts, was one of the major influencers of the YMCA. At the ripe old size of about 5'7",

150 pounds, he supposedly did dumbbell overhead presses with 100-pound dumbbells in each arm. That's, I mean, that's a load for 100 years ago, but he didn't start's i mean it's a load that's crazy for 100 years ago but he didn't start that way for now dude yeah although he was nicknamed the american samson or the roxbury hercules uh his stature did not measure up to the vast majority of the strong men in the world there were people touring the world that were physical giants at that time that

were putting on these strength demos and being in circuits but he dr winship was quite the opposite he was actually picked on as a kid he was undersized so the story goes he was something uh along the size of five feet tall 100 pounds uh when he entered harvard 1950 at the age of 16 he was getting picked on bullied uh and he decided to take life into his own measures, and he started lifting weights. And one of the things that I love about his story is years later, he reflected back on it, and he talked about how his desire for retaliation, so he had started training to get back at the bullies, but that desire for retaliation was quickly extinguished as the habit of the training and the progress took its place,

which is, in my mind, a great example of an exchanging of motivation to a healthier thing. Anyways, he discovered that his perseverance in exercise transferred to other areas of his life, and he found that he gained the ability to, in his words, resist and overcome other bad habits and ailments of his body. So he said in an interview on Time that, quote, to, in his words, resist and overcome other bad habits and ailments of his body. So he said in an interview on Time that, quote, a discovery which subsequent experience has so amply confirmed that if I were called on to condense the proposition which sums it all up into a formula, it would be these words, strength is health. Whammy, that's a pretty spicy quote, strength is health. Whammy. That's a pretty spicy quote.

Strength is health. Right. There was a famous part of his tour when he was going around the world, and unlike most of the physicians at that time, he was not purporting people focus on vegetarianism and moderation. He was talking about you've got to be strong to be healthy. He had this famous lecture series where he'd go around and he'd give these talks. And at the end, he'd basically challenge people and let them say, if you can come up on stage and outlift me, mind you, he's only 5'7", 150 pounds or so at the time, that'll give you $200.

Now, at the time, that was about… About $47,000, we figured out today. And that's a chunk of money. So he had a vested interest in... That's a big challenge. In trying to win. There was this one famous showdown in February of 1861, which a guy came up and actually beat him

due to one of the straps in his machine breaking, and he had kind of no option. But that was what most historians would refer to as the first ever true weightlifting competition in America, with, of course, Dr. Winship being the first ever weightlifter. And performing then what was called a deadlift. It's morphed considerably since that time. Yeah, he was doing a bunch of different exercises,

more like strongman things, extremely heavy 1, heavy 1500 pound yoke carries, things like that. But what happened was Winship died unexpectedly at the age of 42 in his house. And it almost single handedly ruined the entire strength movement because he was pitching so hard that this strength is healthy. And when he died of a heart attack at 42 years old, people were like, yeah, obviously it's not very healthy. Almost overnight, people left strength training and picked up the new fads of the day, which were cycling and baseball. So Andy, there's two kind of tracks going on here. One is this study of physiology that is largely endurance-based and cardiorespiratory-based.

Underneath this, the strength movement, if you will, is kind of deadened because of an unfortunate incident, which is Winship dying. Yep. And at the same time, it didn't make sense governmentally for what they needed. War efforts, starvation. Totally.

No need to study maximizing strength globally societally research money going into things it didn't make sense for people to actually research and understand this and there wasn't actually a market for really no one wanted to do it and they didn't see any potential benefit why waste time now as this is happening there um is a an american fella named bob hoffman who we covered in 1.5, who has this epic showdown with the top exercise physiologist at that point in the world, Peter Karpovich, if you happen not to hear that episode. And in this, this fellow Bob Hoffman brings some of his cohorts. One fellow basically does a backflip with two dumbbells in his hand. Two 50-pound dumbbells.

Two 50-pound dumbbells. And the world of exercise physiology has changed. Yes. And why it changed is because that demonstration single-handedly re-established the connection between strength training and human function. Well, there's a good thing to point out here, which is there was a hole in the marketplace for performance. There was space because no one was really doing strength training and there was potential there, which allowed Hoffman the space to come in

and build momentum back into this movement. Exactly. There wasn't a demand from the perspective of numbers of people wanting to do it, but there was a demand in the fact that we needed it. There was a missing piece that we didn't know. There was darkness over it. So we didn't have a marketplace yet,

but Hoffman, in fact, you could consider, built that marketplace. Hoffman showed people, you can look like a superhero by doing this stuff and people want to look like superheroes. Yeah for sure. He was the first one that put the connection together with protein and muscle mass and he actually got sued a lot by the government for making these false claims and being a selling snake oil and saying like oh your protein powder is not going to help anybody you have no science behind your claims and so he fine, I'm going to go out and we're going to have some science.

And now we've launched the supplement company because it was working. People were consuming more protein powder. And getting stronger. And getting stronger. Making muscle gains. Which is a very good example of what happens oftentimes is, number one, the person who challenges a paradigm is called the quack until we realize they were right. Right, again, one of the big things

that we're talking about is changes are often about perceptions and he's kind of switching the lens and creating a new reality. Right. Well, and Hoffman wasn't exactly pure in everything that he did either. And this is a good point to make

that when the scientific community is not addressing something and somebody who is addressing it in the marketplace somewhat effectively gets challenged by the scientific community they go then fund scientific studies that back up what they're trying to sell sure yeah and he was also putting things in his supplements that people weren't aware of and he wasn't telling about so they're very good for horses yeah things like that um but really what's happened here is we've got this culmination and karpovich because of what hoffman had showed him had started to change his research and he was the first real big name in the field to start saying no we need to start studying strength training at the same time people are picking up on the concept and we're like okay maybe there

is something here and so the field is really divided on one corner we've got physical activity and physical education the ymca let's get kids moving in schools is its own branch now we've got health science or public health or the study of disease prevention and treatment that's another branch and now we're launching into this exercise physiology field that had been dominated by endurance based stuff and now we see an opening for strength training and resistance exercise and it's being carved out because it's being so clearly shown in our face from a practical perspective like there's some benefit here there's a lot of need here we hadn't yet opened that floodgate up entirely but there was a crack,

and we needed something to go in there and light that fuse for that thing to blow up. And that was our next showdown of Hoffman. There's a contextual thing that I want to point out here, which is the Hoffman-Karpovich showdown led to this massive shift in trajectory for the scientific community by way of Karpovich. So Karpovich was shown the potential of strength training and all of his, or some of his biases were confronted. And that then shifted the scientific research community in the direction of there's something here to strength training. Let's go study this. In parallel now, there's now a market for selling this. This is where it gets interesting. Yeah.

We opened up the show today telling you, we want to help you understand why you're being influenced the way you're being influenced. And this is the culmination right here. You've got study of endurance still. You've got study of suffering and disease. And it makes total sense for the government to pay for the study of disease still. You've got study of suffering and disease. And it makes total sense for the government to pay for the study of disease and suffering. People are in pain.

That is probably something most of us agree. There's wars going on. Government should take care of it. The military has a strong rationale to still study endurance. Because most military activities are not power-based. The fact that you can broad jump six inches longer is probably not saving you in a military endeavor.

Effective soldiers are soldiers who can survive and endure. Right. We don't have any reason or anyone to pay for maximizing. What type of tricep exercise activates your tricep better? What's the best way to get stronger? There's no reason to do that. We now have started to build a marketplace of

people who want it, though. It takes off when we find money. And Hoffman and this other guy he was about to go into battle with, Joe Weider, saw that immediately. And they went out, they battled to the death, almost literally. And the winner changed everything about the current field. And we're still living in the riptide from that if the karpovich hoffman showdown was for the brains of human performance the hoffman weeder fight was for its soul in what way hoffman and this guy named joe weeder went back and forth fighting for really a decade or more in the 1950s and 60s to what journalists and historians now call the muscle wars.

Weider actually looked up to Hoffman. He was one of the guys that inspired him. And Hoffman was a performance-based guy. Remember, he wanted guys to be able to do backflips with 50-pound weights, to do splits, to carry hundreds of pounds. Where Weider differed is he said, no, no, look, for every one man who wants to be strong, I'll show you a hundred who just want to look like they're strong. So sort of functional training versus an aesthetic.

Yeah. He actually did have the same goal. He wanted people to be stronger too. His opinion or his philosophy of how to get there was just different. He thought, give me shape first, give me physical size first, and strength will follow. And Hoffman said, no, no, no, like strength is most important first and always. And so it's just like we talked about. They were actually wanting the same thing. They just differed on how they thought to get there. And of course, because of ego and how we handle these things as human beings, it ends up in fights and battles.

And they attacked each other nonstop. Well, you need somebody to pivot against. Yeah. And what's really sad is what that does to the consumer well and what's what's the scoreboard here too it's money it's who it's who can sell people things yep and the details aside this battle goes on and on and on and eventually weeder ends up winning primarily because of his young protege he was able to put up on a pedestal and launch the world, and that just took off.

And his protege being Arnold Schwarzenegger. Right. So that's a massive global game changer right there because here's this picturesque, like literally Mr. Olympia coming out and doing movies. Yeah. If you remember the previous chapter, we talked about Hoffman starting his famous magazine, which was an homage to Winship, which was strength and health, right?

Well, Weider started Muscle and Fitness. After this battle, Weider, who's most people call the father of modern bodybuilding, puts up Arnold. Arnold takes off. Strength and health dies. Muscle and Fitness takes off, and it's still a huge magazine to this day. Anyone that grew up in the decade we did knows exactly who Weider is because you probably bought some of his bench press machines or his magazines. Yeah, we were heavily influenced by him. And, you know, with my parents owning a health club, we could not be influenced by

muscle and fitness. It was sort of just a necessary influence of the market during the 80s. And the sad part about this is because of the explosion of Arnold, we went from Karpovich, which initially started off saying, hey, this strength training stuff is bad for your health. Look what happened to Winship. Remember all those myths we covered in that chapter? We had gotten past that, hey, it's going to kill you. But from the 1940s and 50s up to the 70s, it's not going to kill you,

but what good is it going to do? We hadn't established that yet. And it wasn't until Arnold came on and literally became a superhero. Conan the Barbarian, the movie comes out, and people went, I get it. I can actually use this stuff to transform myself into a real-life superhero. You can argue that Arnold created a demand for the product that Weider was selling. Exactly. This is a really important point to make.

Creating demand for something that you sell, once you realize you can do that, now you can make money. So why did this research on optimization and human performance and strength launch? It's because we now had a funding source, which was supplements and nutrition. And we're still at that place today. The National Institute of Health, our $40 billion a year funding agency, is basically funding for disease prevention and treatment. And we would probably argue, again, that that's a good thing. We have the military funding a lot of our endurance-based research. And almost all performance or sport or muscle growth research comes from supplements.

So we've got not necessarily competing resources helping create an understanding of this, but the kind of a conflux of different sources producing our variety of understanding. Yeah, exactly. And what we have to realize now is because Arnold got so big, so much of what we feel like are our go-tos, here are our rules that we talked about at the beginning. All of this is coming from the lens of bodybuilding. There's nothing wrong with trying to improve your physical appearance. We just have to understand the limitations of that.

So quick example, let's take this one. Should I work a muscle out twice in a row? If I'm trying to maximize muscle growth, I probably don't want to train a muscle two days in a row because it needs time to recover to grow. But what if I'm training for weight loss? What if I'm training for health purposes? What if I'm training for performance? Then the answer is actually quite the opposite.

You probably want to train that day for muscle in a row. You know, it's funny. Yesterday I sat with a kid who's a USC graduate and he was referred to, excuse me, USC business student. And he was referred to me by some clients who just felt like he needed a little bit of stewardship as it relates to his health. And so he knew nothing of supplementation, knew nothing of nutrition with a very brief exposure of lifting and creatine last year. And he knows very little about just the general fitness industry. So he comes and as we're talking, I basically sat him down and go, look, you're 22. I've been preparing for this podcast, and I have a greater understanding of how the broader fitness industry is going to sell you a bunch of shit, starting with me.

I'm going to have my biases. And everybody that you talk to, whether it be science, fitness, or nutrition information, is going to have some sort of angle on this thing. Now, most of it probably is going to be well-intended. Yes. But if you can take a little bit of understanding and get that, there's one big piece of the market that is aesthetically designed. There's another big piece of the market and science that is how broadly capable are you? And then there's another chunk of the market, which is sort of designed around how can you peak for performing with a specific thing in mind? And not that those things can't overlap, but the way that they overlap is somewhat minimally.

So if you, the 22-year-old, can understand where you fit in this gigantic thing, you're going to help me guide this conversation. He got to, I'm 22, I want to gain a whole lot of muscle. To which I said, great. You need to find yourself somebody who understands most probably hyperphotry. Hypertrophy. Hyperphotry. Hypertrophy.

Hypertrophy. Hyperphotry. So find yourself somebody who understands this. Simultaneously understand that you might not need all the functional stuff because that's not really what you can care about. And if you can, just listen to me and understand that probably in a few years, this might all change. But right now, you basically want to get jacked. We started off with Benjamin Franklin and this establishment that performance-based and health and movement quality is important,

and the way you move, the way it looks is super important. A couple of hundred years go by, Weider wins, Arnold launches off, and now we've evolved, or as you said, maybe devolved, into bodybuilding and specialization of muscle. And I want to get healthier, so I'll go to the gym and I'll do my single muscle movement. And I wonder why I'm not reaching my goals.

So we're getting to this interesting place right now, Andy, of perspective and biases. So we're clearly influenced heavily. The entire fitness market and a lot of the science, supplementation, and things driving people, what they want, what they're being told that they want, and how they're being marketed to, is largely a derivative from the 70s, 80s, and part of the 90s going, you want this superhero physique. Now, at this time, there's this cauldron of functional fitness that's starting to rebuild itself and start to gain some definition. Concurrent to this is the background that you come from the strength and conditioning world which is the understanding of physiology as it relates to sport and sport performance so it's a some people are training in that and there are functional movements being used for that but it is

from the perspective of a periodized approach which is applicable to people that are very specific and goal-oriented and focused on getting to an end in sight. Yeah. Enter Greg Glassman and the creation of CrossFit. He basically refutes, in many ways, the idea of limited ranges of motion for exercises, declaring, look, this is time consumptive and is not improving key biomarkers of your health. And furthermore, some of this other training is so specific that you're neglecting other elements of your broad physical capabilities.

Yes. So he, in a package, bundles it so completely that there's this rapid acceleration of CrossFit, simultaneously challenging sports science at its core roots, flipping everything on its head, saying, look, you're not only getting stronger, but your ability to endure is also concurrently improving. So this is a massive challenge to the strength and conditioning field. As this is happening, there's a group of super humans evolving within the CrossFit space. If you're looking at the elite CrossFitters, whose bodies don't look too dissimilar to what bodybuilding was looking like

three or four decades ago, but their capabilities are far superior. So now within this space, there's a lot of pivoting for the market. And ironically, CrossFit is still such a small piece of this global fitness market and those being affected by supplementation. And Josh points out that a good part of the general market of general big gyms are driven by people who don't show up, subsidizing the very existence of the gym itself. Like the business model is based on that. Not showing. Of people not showing up. This is an old case study that they do in business school where if the probability that people show up to your business goes down, you can offer a cheaper price for the thing in general because on average your cost is lower.

And the big box gyms nailed that. I can't remember what the number is, but there was something published a few years ago that something like 90 plus percent of most people with gym memberships never attend. So if you only have a 10% rate of people showing up, you can effectively discount the rate for them by 90% and still make money. So for those of you who show up to your $10, $20 a month gym, just remember it's being subsidized by sick people who are not showing up. Josh makes a great point about how the market works. We understand how that works. And I know that you're chomping at the bit. Yes. I mean, let's look at the entire arc.

The criticism from Karpovich onto Hoffman is what specifically allowed Hoffman to explode. It's the backlash that all the scientists and everyone had against the strength training that gave him a marketplace of once he showed them they were wrong, everyone was like, whoa, everything was now questioned. The same exact thing happened when Hoffman was the one doing the criticism of Weider. That created the opening once he was shown wrong that that yeah, wow, look what I can get out of it. Boom, that thing exploded. So if we look at what you just said to follow that up, what happened was it's not that bodybuilding is wrong at all. What was wrong about it is when we

were being pitched that we can cure all of your ails with this one type of truth. Do this type of workout, eat this kind of weight, and we'll fix everything. And when that wasn't happening, after 20 years, people were like, I'm not getting what I want to get. That left a hole in the marketplace for CrossFit to jump in. We will do shorter workouts, bigger movements, more complex things. We'll get other health outcomes. And then people started to get really better, really, really, really fast. That then had to be associated with that must mean bodybuilding is completely 100% wrong, which was the wrong interpretation. Because when CrossFit then got popular, and it took off, and it went to its end of the spectrum, and people started getting hurt,

we had to then come back on it and go, okay, we again have lost our way because we were so now dogmatic about our approach that we've gone from people like Franklin saying strength is human function and performance. Let's start GAH so we can optimize health through specialization workouts. Oh, specialization workouts aren't great. Let's do the opposite of a specialization workout and train for the unknown. Oh, if we focus too far on that we got a problem and hopefully we're landed now in a spot where we say oh okay let's use the positive benefits of all of these things we we see a theme it's i'm right you're wrong yeah which if you take the i'm right you're wrong approach eventually you will be wrong yes well what's interesting is a lot of these things were better than the original when they started,

and then they got consumed in themselves. Well, the dogma becomes blinding. The original CrossFit, you've said this a hundred times, you loved the original approach. Unto itself, it is just a beautiful design. It's the marketization of it. It's the consumption of it, and it's the misapplication of it. It's just like... The same thing with bodybuilding. Let's talk about, let's talk about the market for a second. So one thing that advertisers realized they could do a few decades

ago was create anxiety. This is one of the dirtiest tactics. So anxiety from an evolutionary perspective is a very good thing. Anxiety loosely is a type of ongoing fear that gets you to act. So something is dangerous, something is hard, something is challenging. I'm going to feel some level of fear about it to either avoid it or confront it or just generally get rid of it. So anxiety is there to get you to do something to get rid of the anxiety. Advertisers realize they could say things like, tired of that belly fat that you just can't get rid of? Translation, you're never going to reproduce. The subtext of these things is terrible and it is used to create an anxiety, which then

facilitates action. And then conveniently, the thing that the people are advertising for is a solution, in air quotes, for the anxiety that they've created. So the anxiety creates this momentum where people are looking for solutions. And people are drawn to novelty. Novelty, like the attraction to novelty is a good thing for humans. It brought us out of our caves. It brought us off of our continent.

It brought us off of our planet. We went to the moon. Novelty, that attraction to novelty is good. But when it gets used to sell things and when it gets used to get people to do things that are not necessarily good for them you create this spiral of confusion well where I'm constantly anxious and I'm constantly seeking novelty you you whoa and you bridge novelty becomes certainty yeah yeah right you lock in a loop which is psychologically very human but also as it's it's what you're describing as the market fucking the client.

Yeah. And when you do that a bunch of times. In a mean way. You end up looking for a shortcut. Because I'm so tired of going through this process and not getting anywhere. And I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying. Where's my shortcut? Which is a frustration issue.

Because shortcuts are low risk. Right. Even if they're unlikely to succeed. If I tell you I can get you fit in two weeks. And Kenny tells you it's going to take two years, you're going to go with me because I'm low risk. Even if you know in your heart of hearts that it's unlikely, it's only two weeks. Why not try it? Right. Which is why we're able to, this is the explanation for fads, right? This is why they work. A new fad comes in and we're seeking novelty. We're seeking nuance. It's another way to go about it and if we look back training

really hasn't changed that much in hundreds of years but yet there will be somebody else that comes up with a new style of training or a new nutrition plan and then we'll continue to have more and more and more of these things because we are generally picking unsustainable or limited practices and we don't see what we want to see in results. And the thing is, if you pick a reason to train that is even slightly deeper than the shallowest of shallow anxiety-fueled bullshit, as you pointed out with Winship,

the fear of being picked on and bullied as he trained went away. The training and the satisfaction and the fulfillment from the personal growth picked on and bullied as he trained went away. Right. The, the training and the satisfaction and the fulfillment from the personal growth and evolution, it eliminated the fear that inspired the thing. Like fear is a good thing for getting you to move and getting you to be active and getting you to do something.

But if you let that fear dominate you, it's just going to keep you jumping around. If we look at last week's guest with Brett Bartholomew I mean his upbringing and being cooped up in a tower up in Minnesota being told all these things you know created this need for a higher

level of thinking and understanding human beings a greater expanse of consciousness as it relates to communication and keeping people engaged in their physical practices. Kenny, I'd love for you to give us some historical context from your personal experience about what you've seen over the years. If I'm to condense the last 46 years, you know, early childhood exposure to Olympic athletes and mostly swimmers and aquatic athletes.

But then there was track athletes as well through the 90s being exposed to Coach D and her pedigree of being the 96 Olympic coach. In the middle of that being part of a health club that's competing with other fitness and health clubs at the time for what kind of training is best for the person and realizing back then things weren't as fast as they are now. So you had a couple different genres. We were effectively a leisure club. So people would get some tennis in, maybe some swimming. And we had a weight room

with a few pieces of aerobic machinery. You know, seeing this firsthand and these first iterations of these things that have slowly started to accelerate into the nineties and certainly into the two thousands. And then myself personally being a big seller of the bullshit by doing some of the really corny fitness videos that I've done in the past, did one called Lose Weight in 8, eight-minute workouts designed to help you lose weight, which is just my contribution to the noise and certainly the – Did you know I did a seven-minute lose weight video?

Did you? No, but that would have been awesome. That would have been awesome. It would have been really, really awesome. That's why yours didn't go anywhere. So, you know, look, the big thing I think for all of us to sort of walk away from and start to understand that we've now partitioned two different times is, look, there's three giant bubbles.

I think fundamentally we come back to that big question josh likes to ask that i love to ask this contextually and that's the foundation of contextual training which is why are you doing this thing like what's the application the zombie apocalypse right and if you can kind of understand that muscle creation, aesthetic design are something that those are themes that might be evergreen. Like human beings should and maybe want to look good. And I don't think we need to apply unnecessary judgment or have that be something wrong of people.

Similarly, if people want to be function you know, functionally fit and have broad general capacities, then there's a lot of beauty in that as well. I've seen specialization work and I don't, I'm not of the opinion that generalization creates the best specialists. I think in 10 years, that's a great, good principle. But I think if you're a professional athlete, it's best to focus on your sport and you're going to have a limited time to do the thing so focus on the things that are going to accentuate you doing that thing at the highest level and then when your time is done, your time is going to be done

and so overexposure to some exercises might be a necessary risk that people who by their early 30s are going to take if I can summarize this whole episode up Kenny it comes down to two things. It's silos of manipulation and ignorance. Okay. So in terms of the ignorance, I don't mean that pejoratively,

but it's someone going, oh man, I really want this to happen and I'm going to make this physical change and you pour your resources and your heart and your soul into something and you're not getting that outcome because you don't know the right information. And that's really frustrating to me. I feel like a basic human right is to understand how to manipulate your body to get what you want or some aspect of that. We have to be careful about the lens of the information. So the fighting

and bitching I talked about earlier, and someone's telling you about why CrossFit's so stupid, or bodybuilding's dumb, or weightlifting's unimportant, they're probably viewing it from one of these limited scopes. Instead of saying, well, what can we pull from weightlifting that's good? What can I pull from powerlifting that's good? What can I pull from American football to help me land in the spot where I'm going to have the body I want, the performance I want, and to make it sustainable and lasting. We end up

confusing the living shit out of people so they live in a place of ignorance. That's level one. On the bigger level is the manipulation, which is to say, okay, now that you have identified what you're training for, do you understand why you've been influenced to do that? Right now, we're living in the influence still of the Weider Muscle and Fitness. I mean, look at the name of that magazine. There's no aspect of fitness in that magazine. Right. It's muscle. Remember, fittest survives.

Who's the best fit for the environment? Well, we haven't even established what environment we want to be in. They have totally determined what environment you want to be in, which is to optimize the way you look. And now we're going to sell you everything under the sun to get to that. And then like Josh said earlier, we're going to convince you no matter what you do look like, that it's not good enough. So we continue to resell you things that are going to work in a short term and you got to go over and over and over again. The good news, we're making our way out of that. And I really feel like we're in the middle of this last big paradigm shift. We started off the chapter trying to draw the connections between strength and health,

and we're finally, in the last couple of years, matching that with science. We had this terrible connotation that, oh, anaerobic exercise is something we do for sport. Lifting weight, strength training, oh yeah, that's what you do to look good. Oh, you want to be healthy? Oh, that's aerobic exercise. Oh, you want to be healthy? Oh, that's aerobic exercise. Oh, you want to lose weight? Oh, that's aerobic exercise. And all the research, CrossFit is a great example of this, quite clearly shows that's not how it works. That's an ignorant silo again.

We even now have a ton of research on high-intensity intervals. Wow, that's actually more effective at improving cardiovascular function. Weight loss? Boy, intervals are equally, if not more effective than steady state endurance exercise. So hopefully we're evolving as a community out of this siloed idea that strength training does muscle and sport and endurance is for health. We haven't gotten there as a culture, but we do have the scientific evidence. It just takes us some time because it's not as appealing. And more importantly, I don't have anything to sell you behind it. I don't have a marketplace to support this.

So we're in a little bit of a dark age, but the information's right there. We just got to get it to the people to realize this broader approach is what real health actually is. One point to make about the market and the manipulation and the silos is I think often these practices or these ideas become identities. So people love to internalize things, especially things like quitting, failing, CrossFit, bodybuilding. It's you're a quitter or, oh, I'm a CrossFitter. Things become identities. And I think that's a fundamental issue. For example, if you create your identity around playing a sport

and you get injured or the sport is just not sustainable for you long-term, then when you stop doing that, you go through a major identity crisis. The way that I approach these things and the way that I have sought out an environment that suits me or that I'm fit for, I guess you might say is, is to surround myself with people who are more like craftsmen or, or artists than marketers or business people. So the thing that I like so much about Kenny as a coach and as a business

person is I see him as more of a craftsman where all of these things are tools at his disposal to transform people in the ways that they want to be transformed. And I have complete confidence that if a new tool comes online, he will learn about it and test it and try it. And if it works well enough, then he will experiment with it on people who are willing to be experimented on. That gives me some safety and some security in having him coach me because it's about what I want. And he's also there to help me figure out what I want. And I respect that and I appreciate that. And so for the listeners, as a person who's navigating this and has been navigating it for

years, the only advice I can give is find people to surround yourself with who will create an environment where good things can happen for you and you can evolve and you can change and you don't just pick a thing to do and let it become your identity. One of the big things that really strikes me about this overall conversation is a broader theme of isolation. Like we just talked a moment ago about the isolation of of movement as a sort of bias. And then it became a cardiorespiratory sort of bias. And then there was an isolation thematically on strength movement. And then it was the pivoting of these things against each other. And then if we look at the marketplace as it's sort of revealed itself over the last 30 years, there was a very basic isolation of body parts

for body development with this isolated opinion about how the aesthetic should be defined by a couple of principal bodies. Who knows? Who knows? And supplement providers. Right.

Selling things. Maybe good, maybe bad. I'm not necessarily even trying to judge, but I'm just offering that as some reflection. And without derailing you too much, what's interesting about that conversation is what we find to be aesthetically optimal changes every century or so. Faster than that, every couple of decades. And then what we saw in the modern gym by the 70 the 70s 80s and 90s was a division of two gigantic ideas that took two centuries to develop which is you would have your people do some cardio

training and then they do some lifting probably in an isolated style most likely not a functional compound movement big revelation glassman comes along and says okay, okay, let's move away from that because there was an observation of isolationism, not just of the movements and the principles being used, but of the individual. So these people going in and being in individual pods, drowning out the noise of other people, maybe via headsets, maybe a TV set, maybe even it's from this experience of not even being in their body yet moving. CrossFit somehow condenses all of this, makes it very time efficient, makes it very community oriented. And ironically, the focus on getting really good at being a generalist became something that created what more isolationists who then needed individualized programming to go be in a corner of a functional fitness gym to do something that somebody remotely had said, this is how to individualize and optimize your

principal training, dissecting them from the community dividing communities unintentionally but this is seeming the way that this or organic growth of all of this has gone in your very specific world of strength and conditioning that same thing happens teams start to any professional team will have an influence of professional strength and conditioning coaches. So they'll have one that's hired for the team. And then each of the superstars will also have their own people that help them. So we continue to optimize, strategize, and individualize. And the one thing that seems to be evergreen is our need to come together.

At some point, there may be some psychological balance in this. I don't know if we're quite there. We, meaning the entire marketplace and the science of this whole thing. Populations come together and that need of the individual versus the need of the group sometimes are antagonistic to one another. They stop growing at similar sort of patterns. As a leader in this space, I understand that. I understand the need for individual optimization. That's why we offer personal training because that's exactly what that is. Cool. You want to do your own thing? Maybe sometimes be with the group. That's fine, but we can have some individualized attention to this. I do know that fundamentally tribes have worked successfully together because of the energetic need of other beings in space and time. And unfortunately, we're living in an era where

if we don't have physical practices, we may not get back to some of the things that Josh had pointed out and you have in previous chapters, which is our environment and our training are dyssynchronous with each other. And at some point, our adaptability is going to require us to address not just the physical conversation, which we addressed today, but a deeper one, which is a psychological conversation. And in marketing fitness, we have created all sorts of dysfunctions. We've created needs that may or may not exist. We project, we naturally are going to project. You as a scientist, me as a coach are going to project the things that we find of value. But at some point, I'm hoping that this whole field can evolve to a deeper place, one that gets some sort of humanitarian authenticity. if you are not constantly seeking your own adaptation and evolution,

then you are faced with a problem, which is the skill that I've developed and crafted that has value. If someone comes to me who wants something different, I'm faced with a decision. Do I change and evolve and develop a new skill that can address their need? Or do I convince them that my skill actually, or do I manipulate them into wanting what I have to offer? And what's faster? Manipulation. Personal growth is slow. Manipulation can be fast. If you are one of these leaders, I call you out. We have to, as professionals, start understanding that our own ways, our own principles are being heavily biased from the very things that we discussed. If we can't get over our egos, we're going to continue lining people up unintentionally, running some of the people that care for us, love us, and who pay our children's tuitions, our rents, our mortgages, and even the very cars that

we drive in. They are supporting us. And that is in part built on us being right. We think about this thing that we're selling some variation of what we've described as fitness today. you guys, we might be wrong. The thing to consider is how well balanced is your program? Is your program keeping people moving in ways that promote growth sustainably over time? We're in a time where we are hurting people. We described a gym industry that is based on people not showing up. We've also created a sub-industry that is based on intensity or die, motherfucker. And at some point, I look at the stress of real human beings in real times and spaces where we're only adding to their stress. And sometimes people can't perform under that stress. Another day, high intensity training might be just the exact thing that they need to

blow stress off. But humans undulate. Even more broadly, we need to understand that psychological chemistry that makes people work well. What makes people work well is they've got to have a sense that their quality of life is being improved. They got to have a sense that they are connecting to those in their environment, whether that be their coach or the people that they play and learn from. And at the core, at the center of that thing, there's got to be some sense that growth is actually happening and then you can take that

back out similarly if you're not introducing some novelty with some certainty people are going to either get bored or you're going to run them into the walls because it's like it's a clown show with like constantly varied everything with no actual skill development and that's going to take some work onto itself. I wanted to put a challenge out there as well. And I can say this in good conscious because I made this mistake a ton of times, which is before you even dare criticizing one of these other silos, as we call it, do it first. So if you've only trained in weightlifting your whole life, don't even consider

criticizing bodybuilding's approach. Don't even remotely consider criticizing CrossFit. Because until you've done those things, I guarantee you realize, wow, there was something here I'd never experienced before. This part of it was right. A couple of people we'd like to acknowledge for supporting and helping us construct this episode. On my end, Super Coach Yami Takanan of The Training Plan, one of the world's sharpest coaches and minds, in my view, and really helping me understand the concept of change in a very significant way. Yeah, and from my side,

several historical papers and places I went to to pull from, first and foremost, Randy Roach and his great book, to pull from. First and foremost, Randy Roach and his great book, Muscle, Smoke, and Mirrors. As well as historians Jan and Terry Todd. They've got several papers I pulled from. The titles, the condensed versions, The Conversion

of Dr. Karpovich, Strength is Health, John Farr, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name, and his article, The Golden Age of Weightlifting. And then finally the website, explorepahistoryory.com next week we're going to talk to probably the most epic guest we've ever secured for the show well we've only secured a handful of guests for this uh but they've been damn good but they've been not just damn good like epic good epic good but next week it's our honor to have on linda rosenstock somebody who

was appointed by the clinton clinton administration back in the 90s to help 330 million people understand this giant health organization then and on top of that she's been the Dean of UCLA Med. She has helped public policy discussions for the last 20 or 30 years. She's forgotten more than Andy and I will ever collectively know. The good news for us and the good news for you is that she's going to bring that reservoir of experience and help broaden and deepen our understanding and assuming that you guys continue to be interested in broadening and deepening this understanding of health, fitness, and wellness, she's going to give us a scope that is epic

and only a few people in the world can talk at the level that she can. So I hope that you tune in for that. As always, you can find Dr. Galpin, Dr. Galpin, Dr. Galpin available on Thilth Media at Dr. Andy Galpin. Josh Embry and this show can be found at The Body of Knowledge on the socials. And you can find me at The Kenny Kane. We thank you for listening.

Remember to try to take the cap off of liquids that you drink with your mouth holes. The rule may not apply if you try it with your ear or nose. There are other holes that we'll leave out of this particular sign-off, but just know that that's up to you to think about those things as I do so. Good night, God bless you, and hail to the chief. 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.