Barbell Shrugged - Body of Knowledge  —  Prologue  —  Origin Story

Episode Date: April 13, 2018

In the prologue, we introduce Kenny, Andy, and Josh who each tell their side of the show’s origin story. They individually explain their motivation for launching the project and provide context for what’s to come in volume 1. The first volume focuses on how human beings can change their minds and bodies to improve overall quality of life. Enjoy! - Kenny and Andy ----------------------------------------------- Please support our partners! Thrive Market is a proud supporter of us here at Barbell Shrugged.  We very much appreciate all they do with us and we’d love for you to support them in return!  Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of FREE Organic Groceries + Free Shipping and a 30 day trial, click the link below: https://thrivemarket.com/body How it works:  Users will get $20 off their first 3 orders of $49 or more + free shipping.  No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so why not give Thrive Market a try! ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.ShruggedCollective.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/shruggedcollective

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

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

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

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

that every human should be striving for. It's candy madness. Scream if you like candy. that every human should be striving for. It's candy madness. Scream if you like candy. I don't know where that came from. I wasn't listening. I was just thinking about that. Good people, thanks for checking out the Body of Knowledge.

My name is Kenny Kane, a gym owner, former stand-up comedian, and somebody who cares about the wellness, fitness, and experience of human beings in general. Co-hosting the show is my good friend from Cal State Fullerton, exercise physiologist, Andy Galpin. Now, before we get too far into this prologue, I wanted to take a moment to introduce our producer, a fella who happens to be a student of mine, but also, and I think far more importantly, a PhD in behavioral statistics. I say that's important because he is the organizer of Andy and myself, which is literally much harder than herding cats. So I'd like to turn it over to Josh right now to kind of explain how the show is going to work. Thanks, Kenny.

The Body of Knowledge is principally about the intersection of science and fitness. So we're planning to release the show in volumes, and each volume is going to have a handful of chapters. This first volume is primarily focused on change. And what I mean by that is the ability, the motivation, and the structure of how human beings change at all levels. This first volume about change has nine chapters, and in it, we're going to cover a handful of things that we'll kind of get into later. But on a more personal note, the goal for me with this show was to create something that can last longer than a daily or a weekly news update that you might get on a typical podcast. And I'd been listening to you and Andy on various podcasts and then having personal

conversations with you guys over the last year that really motivated me to help facilitate and build something that can live on for longer than the 45 minutes that people actually listen to it. I think one of the things that connected Andy and I, as we talked about this last year, was that as a scientist, I know, and I'm going to speak for you, Andy, as a scientist and me as a coach, sometimes we're respectively teaching people how to ride bikes, but then

they were figuratively running into intersections against red lights. And, you know, that's one of the things, that's one of the many mistakes I've made in my own coaching career. I've taken people and turned them into fried pieces of toast or broken bodies. And I know that's one of the things that frustrates you in the scientific world is that these small little advancements sometimes get sold and manipulated to move product. Sometimes it can benefit people, but sometimes it doesn't have the full scope that as a scientist you would hope that it would have you know honestly when kenny when you brought this up to do this show i think it was pretty much your idea initially i was like oh my god i did not want to do a podcast i just could not be less interested in doing a in fact we had that conversation right yeah but then once we stumbled upon this idea of this format i was like oh my, this lets me do the thing I like to do most, which is tell stories because I have interest in multiple things.

I'm a scientist who studies muscle physiology. I get really excited about the details and the cellular mechanisms of how muscle growth shrinks, dies, and repairs. But I don't want to spend all day talking and hearing about that. Sometimes I like to hear about how we make better relationships with people and how we can more effectively program. And sometimes I want to hear about the details of the slight position of your knee when you front squat. And so I just wanted to do a show where we could talk about all those things, but not just random blurting every week in no direction. I like to tell stories. So I wanted to build it and craft it so that it all makes sense so that the listener, you out there can go like, oh, this build to this and this build

to this and this build to this. And now I'm super entertained and sucked in. Look, so principally the show is about science and fitness at a very high level, but the conversations that we have throughout this volume are about more than just the science or just the fitness. We're all motivated by better health and wellness and overall quality of life. Yet, whether it's Kenny and Andy talking about the history of kinesiology or Brett Bartholomew talking about conscious coaching, there's a unifying theme, but the conversations often go places that you do not expect. And as the producer of this, I find it very challenging and engaging to find those moments and bring them to you, the listener, in a way that broadens the conversation beyond just the sets and reps or the prescription or the diet.

This is a bigger thing that we're extremely excited about. And we hope that you stick around to listen to where these things might go because there's some stuff that's unplanned and there's some stuff that's planned. These things evolve over the course of this first volume. And it's because we have the space to work beyond the things that we're each subject matter experts in. It's not about the expertise or about the individual details. It's about how they come together to form the bigger picture. And we're hoping to push that bigger picture forward and expand it so that it can impact you as significantly as possible. So in this first volume, these chapters are going to be dedicated in some form or the other to helping you make a change somehow whether that means you're a person who is trying to start

exercising for the first time or you're a high level athlete and you need to make that small little change in your performance it doesn't really matter because the vehicle the bicycle kenny it's universal. We're just riding a different type of bicycle. If we give you the scaffolding and the tools you need to make a slight change, which includes the motivation, but also it includes the detail. I need to know exactly what to do. If we give you both of those pieces, you can then make the change that you need or that you want. And so I wanted to cover in these initial chapters, I wanted to cover the things that

excite me. I'm a storyteller. I like history. I wanted to cover things like the history of our field of kinesiology, the history of human performance, and the American healthcare system. Because if you do that, number one, I think it's just really cool. I'm a science nerd. And number two, you understand how and why things were built this way or how they developed this way. It gives you better perspective. But then we also wanted to have other conversations that, Kenny, you first brought to my attention about context and the value of improving your communication and connection with other people and your loved ones and your athletes.

So, when we were talking about doing this show and we were, Kenny, you brought up the idea of doing a podcast, I initially was abrasive because I'm like, God damn it, there's so much noise. I don't want to just get up there and talk about the next thing. That's right. You know, both of you brought up this idea of noise and that is something specifically that I wanted to avoid. And ironically, while creating content in the fitness space, in the scientific space, it's very easy to have it be another noisy thing.

I'm very sensitive to that because I didn't want to contribute to that because I feel like there's so many things that are distracting people. And I feel now we're in a time where people simply cannot handle the acceleration of information coming in. So, although there's really robust, thoughtful pieces coming out from very high-level thinking people that have done the work to positively impact others, that is getting chunked down and hacked to the point to these little consumable pieces that unfortunately don't take the sort of holistic ideas behind them. And so, that gets very short-sighted in its process. And I think what I've seen is that winds up getting unintentionally destructive, unintentionally something that is not sustainable. And so, as we were talking and kicking around the ideas of the show, the idea of let's create a platform where there's this dense, curated information that is thought-provoking and compelling and periodically and ideally entertaining that can, upon a listener's first, second, or third listen, be beneficial to them in a profound way?

One of the biggest things with this project, this is a long-term project, and one of the things that we've identified in, especially in the fitness industry, but also more and more in the academic and scientific communities is that the the consequences for being wrong or appearing wrong are becoming more and more negative for people so as as someone rises to the top in fitness and becomes the new voice of high intensity interval training or crossfit or strength conditioning, their brand is so tied to their prescription. Or if you're the scientist who discovered the protein that's influencing some cancer cell, like your brand is tied to that thing being right. So your ability to make money and sustain your livelihood is completely determined by whether or not you remain right in the space, which as we all know,

inevitably, we're all wrong. Yeah. To some degree. And so, one of our primary motivations with this project is to bring people in and unite people in a way that it's okay to be wrong. It's more about the thinking and the conversation and the evolution of the people involved rather than who's right, whose brand is the hottest, who's making the most money doing things that are not actually helping people. So we completely acknowledge that we're not ever or always going to be right. And in fact, it's not about right or wrong. It's not black or white. It's about the conversation. It's about the thought process. It's about problem solving. And the ultimate goal is higher overall quality of life for everybody. And if we stay focused on

that and we unite people around that, we believe that it's going to end somewhere positive. We don't know where it's going to end yet, but we hope that you take a chance and come on this journey with us and see if you can be a part of it. Truth is only a lack of perspective. That's it, right? When you think you've got the truth to something, you haven't looked at it deep enough or from a high enough angle. It's just a lack of perspective, which is another way of saying when we gain perspective via technology, via experience, we're always going to find out what we thought was true was wrong. And then it may circle back three or four times. Now it's right again.

Now it's wrong again. It may change directions. But truth is only a lack of perspective. The reason I wanted to create the body of knowledge is because I watched guys like Carl Sagan teach the entire world about astrophysics. I grew up in a generation that was taught to cook from a TV show created by a guy named Alton Brown. And so I keep asking myself, why can't we do this same thing with physiology and exercise? Why can't we just tell great stories and along the way inform you about how your body works, how it can change, and what you need to do to make that happen? So I got excited to be a part

of this platform because it gave me a chance to do what I do, which is teach people about their body and teach people about physiology and science in a way that is accessible and entertaining and allows you to digest it and take actual action at your own pace. Yeah, I can verify for you guys out there that I get to listen to these things as we record them. I have to listen to them raw before I edit them. I edit them, listen to them again,

and then re-edit them and listen to them again. And every time I learn something new and I know stuff in this area, yet I get more and more out of it each time because it's so dense. One of the main reasons I'm doing this show is I've been blessed with some great coaches and mentors throughout my life. And I'm very disheartened by the fact that so many people don't get to have that experience, that I wanted to contribute to something that might be able to scale the coaching and the mentorship that I've received and continue to receive. And, you know, Kenny, you as my personal coach now, that's a very deep and meaningful relationship that I value greatly. And I wanted to find a way to take the things that we get to talk about every

day and create something that can have lasting value for more than just the people in your immediate community. create something that can have lasting value for more than just the people in your immediate community. Yeah. And that's very compelling because that's one of the problems that, you know, how can it be that we know what we do about science at this point and have the sickest population humanity has ever seen? And in my field, knowing about fitness and wellness, same question, how can people be this sick? And that is one of the questions that I think we all, listeners and participants, guests on the show, are intending long game to help look at figure out and solve because the consequences of it are rather gigantic and if we don't get that shit together and we have the tools to do it but the

thing that's interfering that is righteousness yeah that is one of the things that right that level of righteousness is probably something that a i have perpet perpetrated, but also B, in my practice, I try to push away from and evolve from. And that is largely one of my big whys for doing this thing. If I'm leaving a legacy, I don't want it to be that I was the most right coach in the room. Rather, like you fellas, I would like it to be a conversation evolver that's inclusive of a lot of people trying to solve this giant healthcare crisis that we're looking at. Look, there's a lot of people with a lot of really good stuff. There's always this evolution of what is right. It's the application, execution, and long-term practice of it that is really compelling to me. And I'd

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

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