Barbell Shrugged - Holistic Lifestyle Coaching with Legendary Strength Coach Paul Chek

Episode Date: February 21, 2018

Paul Chek is an internationally-renowned expert in the fields of corrective and high-performance exercise kinesiology.   For over 20 years, Chek’s unique, holistic health approach to treatment and education has transformed the lives of countless men and women through programs like the P~P~S Success Mastery Coaching Program. Not surprisingly, Chek is sought after as an international presenter and consultant for successful organizations like the Chicago Bulls, Australia’s Canberra Raiders, and the U.S. Air Force Academy.   In this episode, we learn about Chek’s life and training philosophies, the last 4 doctors you’ll ever need, working in vs. working out, the 7 primary movements, and much more. Enjoy!   Enjoy!   -Mike, Doug and Anders   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   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/shrugged   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!   Organifi is another great company with whom we’ve chosen to partner.  They offer a premium line of health supplements you can use to optimize your body.  Doug and Mike use their products everyday and highly recommend you give them a try.     If you’d like a discount you can use the code “shrugged” to instantly get 20% off your order, click below to check out their supplements:   https://organifishop.com   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged'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   Barbell Shrugged helps people get better.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well.  In 2012 they posted their first 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 Barbell Shrugged here:   Website: http://www.BarbellShrugged.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellshruggedpodcast

If you think of a wheel with only four spokes, if you remove any one of those spokes, it turns into a triangle quite quickly, and those don't roll well. So if you lose awareness and practice of what is happy making, how do I use exercise intelligently, how do I eat intelligently,

and how do I rest intelligently, every one of those spokes that's disabled creates tremendous amount of resistance in your life, and the pain teacher comes to kick your ass until you finally find a doctor or a therapist that educates you on what you need to know Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson, Andrews Varner. And we drove into the desert all the way to Escondido to visit Mr. Paul Cech. And we thought we were entering his home, but we're actually entering his office.

And came up. You saw the tour and came up. There's, you know, you saw the tour and the gym and I am really excited about this primarily because I've heard your name since, I mean, since I started studying health and fitness and I got on a plane about three years ago and I ran into a couple of your students. Oh, is that right? And there's a few of them out there. And, uh, we ended up having a layover and we were going to the same competition and we got sitting down and talking. And then they, uh, uh, they asked me if I knew who you were and I was like, well, I know of him. And when they started sharing with me all the things like the depth and uh that you go with uh your teachings i at that point said to myself i want to meet paul at some point so this is

thank you it's a real pleasure um and i i'm most excited about hearing about how you think about it sounds like you think about everything from a big whole systems perspective and consider more than what most people are considering when they think about their health so that that's what I really like to learn today yeah I'm very much a systems man yeah because in both life and in the human body there's no system that operates independent of any other system so if you think of the body like a spider's web you cannot touch any part of a spider's web without affecting the whole thing so if you look at the way people do research and try to isolate hormones or do research on elbow flexion or these kinds of things this is creates the illusion of knowledge and it's

dangerous knowledge because it leads people to actually believe in things without understanding how it's affecting other systems. So in my life and in my work, I've spent a lot of time learning how each system influences every other system because oftentimes the symptoms are really not the problem. They're the symptoms of a system that's stressed from excessively compensating for other systems.

Yeah. So on that note, what are your thoughts about the scientific method in general about isolating a single variable to do a research study? Is there value there? Or how do you do research if you can't isolate a variable? Well, there is value there, but you have to be um conscious

of what it is that you're looking at and i'll give you an example of that um i can give you a 24-hour cortisol rhythm test with just taking your saliva and let's say the test come back and it shows me that your cortisol dHEA ratio is all screwed up and indicates you have phase three adrenal exhaustion and then I can give you licorice root DHEA and a number of other supplements to bring cortisol levels up and that sounds really good and that would be very scientific wouldn't it yeah if you're only worried about those two things the question is though how the hell did your adrenal glands get burnt out in the first place? So when I look into your life and find out you're going through a divorce

and that you're now having to pay rent for yourself and pay for your wife and alimony for your kids, so you're now having to work overtime every day and you're training for some athletic event, well, there's not enough licorice root in the world to address those issues so you know you could swim in this stuff so this is what happens and this is why a lot of elite athletes come to me because they've seen all the scientists and doctors in the world but they keep looking at the symptoms of problems that you you know how do you research love how do you scientifically validate the health of problems that you, you know, how do you research love? How do you scientifically validate the health of a person's relationship with their spouse? How do you really effectively

research what foods work for them on any given day? Because you change so rapidly with weather, with exercise stress, with toxicity, the list of things that will change your internal genetic workings through epigenetics and change what you need at a dietary level are so long that we get people reading books like the China study and then they start eating like they're a Chinaman, but they're not. And they're not looking at the fact that we each have genes. And if your parents, for example, are from England or Scandinavia or any place in the world where the ground freezes in the winter, well, plants don't grow out of ice, so we had to live off of meat.

So if you've got genes that are wired to use flesh foods to get nutrients from and to rebuild cells, and all of a sudden you're reading a vegan diet book or an Ornish book, well, you think you're doing the right thing based on on science but you can end up very sick and very dysfunctional and I've had many vegans and vegetarian athletes in here very screwed up but they'll sit here and argue with me till they're blue in the face about how good their philosophy is and I have to remind them well if it's so good why are you here sick and broken so what in your mind are the most common root causes for people that come to you that are sick and broken? A lack of understanding of the principles that life works on. Period. Yeah.

Just not understanding how life works. Not understanding how stress summates from all areas of their life. So if a person's got financial stress, if they've got relationship stress, if they've got performance anxiety, if they've got musculoskeletal problems, if they've got bacterial dysbiosis, parasite infections, fungal infections. I mean, most people that I see, even people that think they're healthy, blow the charts right off when I start doing assessments on them and start using functional medicine to look at their hormonal systems. They look like total wrecks, but a lot of them look good in the mirror. I'm the guy that coined the term the fit sick person because we now have an era of people that look good in the mirror

but are very, very sick on the inside. Yeah, do you think this necessity to have more of an understanding is coming and it's 2018 now because we've got pretty much an artificial environment we've built around ourselves. Is this an understanding that wasn't necessary, you know, 100 years ago or 500 years ago that we now need to have because there's so much going on?

Yes, we do need it because we're so disconnected from the earth, and we're also, we've just moved through the age of information though it's very alive the experts on on the ages and you know like social ages that we're going through say we're now moving into the age of context we've just come out of the information age that doesn't mean information's not growing very fast all you got to do is track the speed that computers process and now we're you know entering the realm of quantum computation which is going to take us to a very wild and crazy experience that most people have no idea what's about to happen but it's it's going to be very positive but also very scary at the same time because we're about to unleash a dragon it's going to get weird it's going to get

weird you know um we don't we don't have to go down that path because that's a whole other topic, but, you know, most people live so much in their head and spend so much time looking at television screens, video screens, phone screens, and we've developed an entire academic culture that prides itself on the ability to state facts, figures, and memorization, but people don't realize that knowledge is just a collection of ideas. Wisdom is the synthesis of the practice of those ideas, and it's only wisdom when you are sure it works. So we now have all sorts of people worldwide, the majority of our population,

that actually thinks that they're doing the right thing, and like the vegans I was talking about, and I don't have anything against veganism if it's working for you great like people using various supplements that they read and this is going to do this or this will lower your cortisol this will raise your cortisol we have people that believe what is stated by anybody that has some kind of advanced fancy degree or wears a white jacket like it's the word of god but what's happening is they're spending so much time trading information and using information that actually is disconnecting them from the most essential principles that I call the four doctors, such as what am I doing all this for? What is my

dream? What am I working to create in my life? What gives me a sense of meaning? Dr. Diet, how should I eat for my individual needs which you can't do until you develop an intimate relationship with your body so most people just read books and research articles and pay no attention how they're feeling and i watch people get fat i watch them get skinny i watch them get pimples i watch them get exhausted i watch them burn their adrenal glands out all while they're doing this diet that's scientifically validated without realizing that that diet is only valid in a computer. Yeah.

In a piece of paper. I think people look at athletes and people that may have great looking physiques and if you would ask me 10 years ago, Hey, uh, are you in touch with your body? I'd have been like, Oh yeah, for sure. And then having lived a little bit longer and, and having a actually creating a relationship with my body, I go, wow, I actually didn't know. Right. How do you, how do you teach somebody to build that relationship with their body? And who are the people that you interact with that they come to you and they go, they may think they have a relationship with their body.

What do you tell them to help them see that differently? Well, first of all, I do very comprehensive testing. And I test 29 different systems in the body, which I graph out for them. And like I was saying, I have vegans and vegetarians telling me how great their diet is. But I put their test results in front of them. They look like they're ready to die any minute. And so, you know, the simple thing that I do, but before I tell you that, I've got to finish what I was saying earlier.

We talked about doctor happiness. What's my dream? What am I doing this for? We talked about doctor diet. Then we have to be aware of doctor movement. And there's two classes of movement. I coined the term working in, which means doing any activity at a low enough intensity and time with breathing to harmonize your biological oscillators which are your brain your heart and your solar plexus or your gut

at a low enough intensity that you actually generate more energy through the breathing and movement than it cost in energy and resources to do the exercise so their exercise is designed to produce a surplus of energy where working out by definition means to work out to spend more energy and resources than the exercise returns that's why you have to recover from working out so each person has to learn through practice and training by someone like me that really knows the science and practice of these things, how to do these things, so that they can actually begin to have a sense of awareness

of when they actually need working in more than they need working out. And we've also got a very sick culture because we have this whole no pain, no gain kind of attitude. So people just burn themselves completely out and they might get a little success training incorrectly and then maybe get a trophy or set a record but then they don't realize that that

practice cannot be sustained by the body so they shorten their careers and end up injured and having all sorts of health problems mental problems emotional problems hormonal imbalances so that's doctor movement in a nutshell and then dr, which is the science of effectively using rest, and working in is the dynamic component of Dr. Quiet. So Dr. Movement has a yang component, working out, and a yin feminine component, working in. The feminine component of working out is the masculine component of Dr. Quiet, relatively speaking.

So sleep would be the yin component of Dr. Quiet. Working in would be the yang component. So much of this stuff didn't just start today with you having all of this. You began this as an athlete. Yes. And your upbringing. So when we all start lifting weights,

we come at it from this hyper-aggressive, we have to be the biggest, strongest, fastest, meatiest person out there. We can lift everything. There is no off button. But while you were going through that, becoming an athlete, learning how strength training worked, you were also in self-realization camps. You were doing this yin side to understanding spirituality at a very young age. And I think all of this stuff just kind of slowly progresses to where you are today. Is there any shortcuts to the journey or, you know, how did those, the very first time you sat for 20 minutes, an hour, whatever it is,

when does sort of that breakthrough start to happen of, wow, this intensity weightlifting piece that I'm working on is also very similar to me sitting in silence and doing this self-work. When did you start to connect the dots on the two and start tying the pieces together? That's a good question. I'll give you a very good answer. Every time I got injured and I had to say, what the hell did I do wrong?

Yeah. And, you know, I was a highly competitive motocross racer. I've had six concussions racing motorcycles. I've been very badly injured, woke up in the ambulance multiple times and didn't even know how I got there and was covered in, you know, scars and rash from sliding 70 miles an hour down a dirt track covered in rocks. And I rode in the rodeo and got trampled when I was a kid. I've, you know, I was a paratrooper, had a very bad left shoulder, almost had my left shoulder torn out of the socket in a parachuting accident. I've broken my left leg in five places cliff diving. I've got four broken noses from boxing and kickboxing. I broke my left wrist. I broke my left index finger.

I've had two broken ribs boxing. I told you I had a stunt lifting accident and blew my two cervical discs out and tore ligaments in my spine. I've had a variety of injuries from just being young, dumb, and full of cum in a gym and trying to outsmart and outlift much stronger and bigger guys than me

so you know even though i was raised by a mother who was a full-fledged yogi and a very consistent meditator probably hasn't missed a day of meditation 30 years and uh was trained by monks you know when you got a lot of testosterone going through you that all that yogi shit that's just like stuff your mom makes you do you know but my mother and my mother and father are farmers i was raised on a 140 acre sheep farm with uh with chickens and pigs and horses and cows and we sold produce and we sold firewood so it was a full working farm so there's you know a lot going on there and there's a lot to learn there but you know what i'm telling you is we go through cycles in life i i basically break the the life cycle from birth to death into four phases we have the childhood phase which is where we're

co-dependent on our parents for everything then we go into what i call the warrior phase when we go through puberty we enter the warrior phase. And most of the problems and most of this attitude is part of the warrior phase because our hormones are raging and we're trying to differentiate ourselves from our friends and our family and our parents especially. We're trying to say, you know, screw you, mom. I'm not doing that. Or screw you, dad.

I'm not going to do that. And we're trying to develop a sense of individuality which has to happen or evolution will halt if we did everything our mom and dad did we then evolution would cease we'd keep making the same mistakes over and over again that they did and when the environment changed we'd all be dead so the warrior stage of development is when we get into all this ass kicking and trying to prove ourselves and we're trying to prove ourselves to ourselves, and we're trying to prove ourselves to other people. And so we do whatever we've got to do to get a sense of recognition or acknowledgement, which means oftentimes pushing the red line, really going for it,

especially for the males and especially for the high-testosterone males. Like, you know, I'm a high testosterone you know alpha male type guy um thus the parasite you know being in the 82nd airborne division kickboxing boxing motocross racing i was a stock car racer i was a drag racer i mean a lot of crazy shit rode in the rodeo all just to prove to the world i was a fucking badass and to prove it to myself too yeah right not just everyone else but to me i had to test myself because I had a deep need to know what I was capable of. I really just,

something, you know, there's a lion in there that wants to hunt, so to speak, as a metaphor. So then we go out of the warrior stage into what I call

the king and the queen stage. And that's when we usually, somewhere around 35 to 40 years of age, we've now established ourselves in a profession or a career or a vocation. We can pay our own bills. We usually have our own home, oftentimes a wife and kids. So we have our kingdom, which can be a little kingdom or it can be you know you can be a wild out of control person like Donald Trump who's you know got a big kingdom as a metaphor but in the king and queen stage you you enter the king and queen stage by becoming an adult accepting responsibility for yourself paying your own bills basically being a responsible contributing adult, but you

have a sense of ownership of yourself, a sense of confidence in your skill, that you're a contributor in some way, be it owning a business, being a craftsman like a mechanic or a woodworker, and you have this sense of, okay, I know how to make it through the world now but we end up finding that a we often cannot keep the pace up that it takes to maintain the lifestyle that we developed in our younger years our overhead gets high um bills come at us things happen we learn that dealing with people can be very challenging you know you start running a big business you know i've got employees that have 50 60 000 clients that have 50 60 000 employees uh one of my clients owns 50 000 commercial real estate

properties one of the richest men in the world you know so my point is there's an example of someone who's really in the king stage, right, or the queen stage, but it comes with, remember when we build our kingdom, we're in the warrior stage, so we're full of fire, I'm going to own this, I'm going to be a millionaire, I'm going to have a big business, right, and then by the time we get to be about, depending on how well you take care of yourself, somewhere between about 45, earlier today, because most people don't know how to take care of themselves, but somewhere between around 40 and 50,

we face a thing called a midlife crisis, and we realize it takes so damn much energy to own all this stuff, and to protect it, and to maintain it, and that people can drive you goddamn crazy, and you get exhausted, and that's where you get trapped.

If you don't have the willingness to downsize and to get clear on what's really important to you at that time in your life, then you go through a crisis, and you burn yourself out, and a lot of people have to get a disease in order to get the rest, you see, because it's politically correct

to get a disease and go rest, but in our culture, it's not politically correct to get a disease and go rest. But in our culture, it's not politically correct to say, well, guys, I'm tired today. I'm not coming to work. And you're going to have to work harder by yourself to pay the bills because I need a vacation. As soon as the boss walks out the door, nothing gets done. That's one of the things you learn owning a business, right? When the owner's away, the cats do play. So the point I'm making is we reach this point where we cannot maintain that youthful exuberance of the warrior, and we've often built such a big kingdom to serve our egos

that we don't realize we cannot continue to carry that kind of load. So if we don't go through a process of getting clear about what's honestly important to us and what we really need to fulfill our sense of connection to life and to the world and to make our journey, our human journey on earth, meaningful, then we go into a midlife crisis, we get a disease, we get sick, we become someone else's responsibility, we become a codependent. So we fall backwards to the child stage

and someone else ends up paying for it or we die. So you're at the transition now to the final stage, which I call the wise man or wise woman stage. And that's where you realize what's most important. So how this ties into what we're saying is when we're in the child stage we're just doing what we're told to do so if you're an athlete you just do what your coach tells you to do you don't question it because you don't know what to question when you're in the warrior stage

you do whatever your buddies are doing but you try to do it better harder and faster because if you can do that then you're acknowledged you're loved and you feel valued and even if it causes you to lose skin break bones or whatever as long as you can figure out how to do it again you're acknowledged, you're loved, and you feel valued. And even if it causes you to lose skin, break bones, or whatever, as long as you can figure out how to do it again, you're okay. And you just keep going. And if you've got to use drugs or coffee or stimulants or wraps or straps or props or enemas or whatever the hell anyone else is doing, you'll do it. Because your identity is so trapped in your performance

that if you can't maintain the performance, you actually feel like a nobody. So it can lead to a very deep emotional crisis and a loss of a sense of self. I feel like he's describing me right now. Are you talking to me? I'm in the warrior stage, and I don't want to be in the king and queen stage. Yes, well, you know, that's a problem, too. It is a problem. I think it's more of a problem than anybody.

If I start crying, it's okay. Just keep going. That's part of the healing, right? That's part – which brings up a point. A man's not really a man until with his emotions and to cry and to share his feelings. And so what happens is all that stuff gets bottled up. And, you know, there's a book in my library, and the title of it is very true, Feelings Buried Alive Never Die. And I work with all sorts of the best athletes

in the world and people with diseases and I would say 85% of those cases I have to work on feelings that were buried in men especially because it was not manly to be honest about their feelings and so we've got all these tough guys that are like crying little boys inside. And until we can meet the little boy and let him cry and really share what it is that we need emotionally or what kind of support we need or be honest about being tired or be honest about, honey, I can't keep this business going like this anymore, whatever it is, if we don't deal with that, then that energy gets trapped in our glands our organs and our tissues and it creates disease it mirrors itself the psychic energy mirrors itself in the

tissue so trapped emotions are blockages which leads to circulatory blockages which leads to reduction in oxygen levels which leads to reduction in energy levels, which means the immune system can't support you, and now you've got diseases like cancer going on. So coming into the wise man or wise woman phase for a man especially requires that one be brave enough, and this requires a higher level of bravery than anything in a boxing ring, right? For you guys to actually meet the woman inside of you the feminine and connect to that person and be honest about it it would be scarier for you than almost anything any of your buddies could ever throw at you so much of what you're talking about i think is people taking that look inside to find some sort of processing system

because everything that goes on in our lives is throwing that dart, that arrow at you. And all that stuff is just stored inside. And if we don't have some sort of system in place to work on processing that stress, it's going to show up what we're probably about to get into, but in our organs, in our tissues, in our joints, and that's where these systemic problems come down to.

What are some of the pieces that you start to use? Because there's no way someone's going to walk in and go from zero to Paul Cech today. It'd be a good start, though. It'd be a big afternoon. Just being aware, right? The first step of change is awareness, right? Being aware.

And being aware that it's okay to feel shitty but it's also okay to find a way to solve it that isn't painful expensive radical and you know our i call the pain teacher anything that leads us to have to look deeper into ourselves. Like many of the athletes see me they've seen all sorts of doctors. They've had their necks, backs, shoulders, knees looked at 50 times and nobody can figure out why they're still in pain. So what I tell them is because you're actually not addressing the problems, you're addressing the symptoms. The pain teacher will not let go of you until you

learn the lesson so what i'm saying is the first step is just being aware that if you're doing the standard physical therapy stretching joint mobilizations you're taking the supplements and doing everything else everyone everyone tells you to do and it ain't working it's because you're looking in the wrong area i would say, I've seen the biggest improvements in my posture and movement, um, after getting organ work or doing some type of emotional release work. And, um, I guess I want to, I want to point this one thing out is I think a lot of times people think they may be in touch with their emotions. Yeah. But when they're describing and expressing their emotions, they tend to gravitate towards telling the story about their emotions

versus being honest about what's actually going on inside of them. Yes. Can you comment on that? Well, once again, we're not taught how to engage our emotions. So one of the key things I teach my clients is to use the words, I'm wanting, I'm feeling, and I'm needing. When you express yourself,

especially in relationships, if you say woulda, shoulda, coulda, didn't to yourself or anyone else, that's a judgment. It always creates separation. If you say to your wife in an argument, you should've, you could have, or if you'd have done this, I would have, you are now inciting pain.

You're pouring gasoline on the fire, and you're not feeling, you're defending. If you say, honey, I really want some rest, or I really want dot, dot, dot. Honey, I really need. Or if you're talking to yourself if I'm talking to myself Paul I really need a longer vacation this year Paul I'm really feeling sad about the way my finances are right now it's scary for me and I feel tears coming, right? It's just like, can I keep this up any longer? I'm really needing some help right now. And maybe we're used to being the badass that carries the whole world on his shoulder, which I've been guilty of many times. But to really just acknowledge I need help.

Somehow I've got to get help from someone I trust and somebody that I can be honest about my feelings with without it disabling them or scaring them, right? That's another problem. There's not many people we can be honest about our inner worlds with without them feeling uncomfortable because if I'm honest with any of you about something that's really painful or scary for me, you then have to be exposed to my pain. And if a person's not whole enough to have empathy for somebody else without getting lost or getting afraid or feeling like they got to defend themselves then all they try to do is fix you and tell you why you're stuck or you know and that doesn't

work that's like a typical guy telling a woman well if you would just eat different your hormonal cycle would be different and your painful periods would go away silly and now you've just lost sex for another week is what you did but you went backwards so that's a simple technique just deal in wants feelings and needs when you're in with your inner dialogue and listen carefully for the words i have to yeah. The words, I have to, are the words of a child. It's mom that says you have to clean your room. It's dad that says you have to follow the rules. So part of our spiritual growth is whenever we use the words, I have to, to replace them with the words, I choose to.

And when you realize that what you're wanting, feeling, and needing to recover from what you created is something that you chose to create, then you realize you can choose differently. And as scary as it might be, that's part of your spiritual growth. That's part of becoming either a king or a queen at that stage from going warrior to king or queen, or it's from king or queen to wise man. You've got to learn to acknowledge what you've chosen and as arnold patton says beautifully in his universal principles if something's happening in your life and you don't think you wanted it look carefully at what you're choosing unconsciously and most of us are so detached from what's often called clinically in psychology the shadow the parts

of ourselves we don't want to acknowledge because we don't like them or they're socially unacceptable that we tend to blame everybody else for those problems so part of our real healing is acknowledging the dark part of ourself so like our insecurities for example like a lot of people train like hell in the gym because they're insecure about themselves and without you know a bigger dick or a bigger bench press they think they're a nobody so when they lose their ability to show their dick off or their bench press off now they don't know who they are anymore so they go into a crisis of self so there's a lot of layers of growth and development as i often say to my athletes i don't care if you can squat a thousand pounds if you can't get along with your wife and kids. What do you got?

Really, now you're just a, you might as well be on Planet of the Apes moving rocks. Yeah. Because you've spent all that time to develop something that does not help you grow as a human being. While it's on my mind, and I have an answer for your question I haven't forgot,

you see that piece of art right there? Yeah. Okay. This ties into this. This is around the time I was probably 48, 49. I was getting really exhausted. I had been traveling on airplanes nonstop for 20-plus years all over the world, lecturing constantly, building new programs,

training in gyms all over the world, in hotels, parking lots, in staircases, sprinting in underground parking lots, anything I had to do to maintain myself while living on airplanes all the time. And I had to teach my Czech level four, which is my most advanced class. And quite honestly, I didn't want to talk to anybody. I didn't want anybody around me anybody I didn't want anybody around me I just wanted to go smoke infinite amounts of pot lay on the beach read a book cry a lot and be alone but here I you know I got a here I am on my king or queen stage I got a huge huge overhead at that time our overhead was probably $100,000 a month before I got paid.

Many employees all over the world, 20-something instructors traveling the world, and here my most advanced students are coming to learn from the master. And I'm like... You hate it. I'm just like, all I got to teach them right now is how to cry and how to be very careful

about what you create in your life because you might get eaten up by your own creation. And and so i asked my soul which is the consciousness within i just went quiet and said how do i get through this my soul said get out a piece of paper and some color and express your emotions and just be honest about how you feel And that's what came to me as a vision. And I sat down. It probably took me half an hour to do that with pastels. And I'll tell you what, it was like somebody flipped a switch in me. I literally painted the emotion out.

I painted the pain out. And every time I was on a break, I would come. I had it on my art stand. I would come and just sit there I might drink some tea or whatever and I would just sit there and look at that and be with it and I would see

the pain of my love I would see the purpose of my love the red is the pain of my love the green is the purpose of my love to connect to other people the blue is the pain of my love the green is the purpose of my love to connect other people the blue is my love of teaching and the white is my love of achieving higher consciousness and the spiral is the spiral of life the growth spiral and the tunnel is the tunnel of the unknown because nobody on this planet knows where the hell we're going but we're traveling at 68 000 miles an hour and nobody's at the wheel yeah well we're destroying the spaceship i um i want to go back a little bit you said something

can i answer yes please bob one's question andrews um the the simple answer and what I created for the world was my four doctors system. And I have an e-book called The Last Four Doctors You'll Ever Need, How to Get Healthy Now, which teaches you how to be aware of those four doctors, what the essentials are, and gives you very simple practical guidance. I mean, a decently intelligent 12-year-old could probably understand the book, but it shows you the four essentials that you must have to have a healthy living philosophy. I don't care what religion you study, what martial art you study. If you don't have clear awareness of what happy making is for you, if you don't have clear connection to your body and awareness of what you need to eat and how you need to hydrate yourself, if you don't know how to use exercise

intelligently to keep yourself healthy, let alone strong and fit but healthy, and if you don't know how to use rest, you have a disabled philosophy. If you think of a wheel with only four spokes, if you remove any one of those spokes, it turns into a triangle quite quickly, and those don't roll well. So if you lose awareness and practice of what is happy making, how do I use exercise intelligently, how do I eat intelligently, and how do I rest intelligently, every one of those spokes that's disabled creates tremendous amount of resistance in your life and the pain teacher comes to kick your ass until you finally find a doctor or a therapist

that educates you on what you need to know but we also have a drug happy culture that's been conditioned to sell their problems to doctors so people want to sell their problems want to medicate their problems to make them go away so they can keep living a dysfunctional philosophy so ultimately we get to the point where the drugs and the pills and the undereducated doctors and therapists don't work and we get pushed so deeply into ourselves we have to figure it out so some people get so exhausted that they simply have to skip work for a couple days a week.

And after sleeping for two days, they wake up and go, oh, my God, I feel so much fucking better. Yeah. Oh, I just think maybe I wasn't getting enough sleep. And the next time they start feeling shitty, they go, oh, my God, I'm starting to feel. I got to take a couple days off and go to sleep again. And they finally wake up one day and go, wow, sleep's the most important thing. I better stop fucking around and messing my sleep up with late night coffee and sugar and crap. So the pain teacher will not stop until you get it or you die. So the answer to your question is how do we begin

to learn that? The first thing you got to do is be aware that those four essential categories of a living philosophy have got to be addressed openly and honestly, or you will become very expensive to yourself and broken and sad. And the worse you get, the worse your relationships get. And this whole, these four principles have kind of created this totem pole that we are staring at, I think. No, that's a different thing.

We'll talk about it in a second. The totem pole. That was a terrible segue. Sorry. I want to get in the totem pole, but before we go too long, you were talking about people training out of insecurity versus what? Versus a willingness to explore their potential. And how does somebody know?

I mean, what are some signs that somebody is training out of insecurity? Maybe I think I'm exploring my potential, but I'm really... I'll give you a simple sign. Perfect. Someone who's training to explore their potential doesn't get upset when they get beat by somebody. They just say, well, that was the best I could do today. And that guy's fucking good.

Congratulations. Yeah. When I was a competitive fighter, I was a hard trainer. You know, I grew up on a farm. My father's an extraordinary ass-kicking drill sergeant that you do not say no to. You do not talk back to. You do exactly what you're told when you're told, or you end up in a hospital. And he's a 6'4", 220-pound ex-professional rodeo rider, and he's fast as a cat, and can

pick you up with one arm and throw you on the fucking roof of a house. when I was young, I learned that I wanted to explore my potential because the threat of being in the environment of my father was such that I learned that eventually one day I was going to have to intervene or he might kill somebody. He might hurt somebody so bad. So seeing my mother get slapped around like a rag doll as you can imagine by the time you're about 13 years of age your hormones turn on something inside you says i can't just put up with this so i went on a quest to study martial arts and boxing to prepare myself for the day that I had to confront him, and I wanted to do it as quickly as possible.

So I had a pursuit for the need of safety, but I also had a deep interest. For example, when I was in martial arts and we were breaking boards and bricks and things like that, yeah, I wanted to break more boards than anybody else because I'm a healthy male, but I also thought, well, what the hell, what is it, what am I capable of doing? This is amazing because I was breaking stuff that I never knew I could break. So it opened up this kind of explorative frontier. So if one of my buddies broke more bricks or boards than I did, I didn't get pissed off. I said, well, how the hell did you do that?

And I said, what am I doing wrong? And he might say, well, Paul, you don't have enough snap in your delivery. You're trying to use force. You've got to work through it. You've got to put your intention on the other side of it. So I would be more interested in how they were doing it, but wasn't so disabled by the fact that I got beat. Of course I wanted to win, and I would think, okay,

I've got to train harder and train better, and I've got to study more. I've got to learn how to eat better or train better or do whatever I can do to beat them but I didn't get disabled by it I didn't get feel weaker I didn't feel less in love with myself I didn't feel like I was less of a person so if a person's identity is attached to their performance and losing makes them feel less of a person or more insecure in themselves than they're marching down a very dangerous road because there's always someone faster there's always someone stronger there's always someone better there's always someone better in bed that your girlfriend will hear about so the point is you know you're discovering my 2016 you know but but do you see the

difference there if if we are if our sense of self-worth and self-esteem is low we can use athletics to compensate for that but it it's kind of like now women to give you a correlation women use their beauty to do this right they use beauty as power so many of my clients over the years who are dealing with anxiety and depression are women that are now in their 40s and their boobs are falling and their ass is falling and they're taking all the supplements and they're going to kettlebell classes and they're now like you know they're fit looking mothers you know but they're frustrated because the young soul of them still wants the young healthy men to be attracted to them but they're not they're attracted to their daughters. So as their beauty goes away,

it's like a man's power going away. So their beauty power is the functional equivalent of a man's physical power or his badass ability as a martial artist or whatever he is. So they go through a crisis as well. And there's other things, but do you see that if we aren't connected to the depth of ourselves and if our interest isn't

truly oriented towards being all that we can be as an exploration of ourselves then we get lost in needing to achieve whatever we've got to achieve to get other people's approval, attention, recognition, and love. And because that's an external source of love, it halts your spiritual development because now you're really stuck spiritually at the development of a child that needs mommy and daddy's approval to be feel good about itself so we don't realize we've just projected our childhood into our adulthood and we're not an adult yet so that's hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around because they what do you mean i'm not an adult you know and then they'll give you 50 reasons why they are and i'll say well then why are you so upset that your boobs are sagging? Or why are you so damn upset that your dick doesn't work now?

And why do you have to take, you know, whatever it is, that brain farting, you know, the dick drug. Viagra. Viagra, right? Like, I've had 18- and 19-year-old athletes ask me how to get off of Viagra. Whoa. I'm like, are you kidding me? When I was 20 years old, I could use my dick as a dinner bell.

Ring it, and it would sound like a Tibetan bowl. And here you've got 18- and 19-year-old guys that should be at the prime of their life, and they're honestly having to take drugs to have sex. I mean, that's how far off the path we've become. And these guys are the ones using all the supplements and all the scientifically validated stuff, right? Well, every drug on the market that ever had to be taken off the market was scientifically validated first. So there's an example.

And the other problem with all the scientific validation is about every five years, everything that was scientifically true yesterday becomes not true because we learn more about systems integration and what we thought was the ironclad truth turns out to be not the truth so my only point that i'm trying to make is the answer of how do you distinguish when your pursuit is actually healthy or unhealthy or whether it's positive or potentially negative or going to come back and bite you and the difference is and and the signifier i gave is if you if you if losing leaves you feeling less of yourself but you know you're doing the best job you can then you're trying to win for the wrong reasons. If you're trying to be stronger, faster, or smarter for those reasons,

you can never win that battle. It's like you're marching toward a guillotine and you don't know it. But if you're really in the pursuit of just being the best that you can be, and the only person you've got to talk to, and this is one of the reasons I got out of team sports. It used to drive me nuts when guys in team sports wouldn't play hard, and I knew it, and we would get beat.

And I'm like playing football, and they're kind of running half-ass, so they didn't care. I'm like, I am here to win. It's important to me to win. That's what a competition's about. So team sports irritated me as a young man, and I was raised by a man that didn't accept half-assed performances for an answer.

So I came from an environment where you didn't perform half-assed. You just didn't, or you were hurt. So I had a hard time transitioning into the team sport with all these kind of, oh, it's okay, it's just a game. Well, it's not just a game. We're here to win the championship. We're not here not just a game. We're here to win the championship. We're not here to just play games. We're here to win.

That's what a team's for. So I got so irritated that I said, well, look, I've got to get into boxing and kickboxing and motocross racing, because if I'm racing a motorcycle, if I lose, it's my fault. If I lose in a boxing ring, it's my fault. And so my strategy in boxing was,

you might be a better boxer than me, but I will make myself so fit that if you don't knock me out i will get you so tired by the third round you won't be able to hold your hands up and i'm going to hurt you and that's how i became a successful boxer you know i didn't start boxing until i was 12 but when i was on the army boxing team we had guys that were 22 years old with 320 fights under their belt that started fighting when they were six so i got guys in there and even though i'm good enough to be on the army boxing i got guys that could hit me three times before i could hit them once and i'm like holy shit so i had to

develop a strategy and my strategy was do everything you can do to make yourself the best you can be and know if you get beat my philosophy was if you're gonna beat me you're gonna have to earn it and the point that i'm tying this into here is if someone beat me in a boxing ring or in a kickboxing match they're the first person i wanted to give a hug to even a kiss because i knew how hard they had to work to get there because my philosophy is my job as an athlete is to give you maximum opportunity to lose you understand oh yeah but at the same time what i'm saying is if i lost i didn't lose my sense of self-esteem i said where do i need to study i just met my master if this guy could beat me

around that motocross track beat beat me in boxing or anything, I just met a teacher and I would study them and I would grow from it. Some can't handle that. They lose. I've watched athletes get injured and or get beat and they get so emotionally broken that they go into states of depression because they don't have all the pats on the back anymore. They're not the golden boy and now they don't know who they are anymore they don't have any sense of self-worth the next you know they're on drugs or they're trying to take shortcuts using steroids or whatever it takes and then that opens up a whole other can of worms so they just keep drilling themselves deeper and deeper and getting further and further away from the core of their

true being is what i'm saying yeah so you seem to be extremely well educated despite not having graduated high school which i'm not sure if you said that on on the show but you didn't graduate high school but you're you're phenomenally well educated in many different categories like if you look around the room if you're watching the video we're essentially in a library the whole damn house is a library there's there's bookcases in every room they're all packed yeah you know what have you learned about educating yourself that that people that are just just beginning their world their journey rather into the world of health and fitness or their their they've gotten out of college and they've got their feet on the ground with a career and they want to have a family and the whole deal but they but they they want to to pursue mastery in in whatever they want

to pursue it but and they want to educate Like, what's the best way to do that in your mind? Yeah, that's a very good question. I actually have a course called How to Learn. It's a PPS Success Mastery Lesson 7, I believe. So if you go to ppssuccess.com, that's a website where I put 12 lessons together based on the 12 most common things I saw stopping people from living a

healthy life, achieving their dreams, or being successful in their careers or their sports. And I have a whole lesson on how to learn because I repeatedly would have conversations with medical doctors and scientists and all sorts of people that would be at lectures and go like, where in the fuck did you learn all this stuff so the answer is this first of all preface this by saying our educational system is very dysfunctional it teaches you what to learn but does not teach you how to learn they tell you what books you must read what tests you have to pass but oftentimes that stuff in the real world doesn't help you at all right so once i got to the point in high school which is when i well first of all by the

time i got to the 10th grade my my girlfriend got pregnant and i became a dad when i just turned 18 so i just and i'd become so frustrated because teachers couldn't answer my questions they got pissed off me same thing happened to me in church when i'd ask questions you know i'd ask some very interesting questions and i wouldn't get very well received answers so once we went to self-realization fellowship that all healed because the monks were very open and honest but the people in the Christian churches were very very unreceptive to young minds that ask deep questions but the point that I'm leading towards here is we have a system that tells us what to study,

but it often doesn't work. I was raised on a farm where my father would say, the baler's fixed, I'll be back in an hour, or the baler's broken, I'll be back in an hour, it better be fixed. Okay, what he meant was, if it's not fixed when I come back in an hour you're gonna be broken so I learned if you have to beg borrow steal

run to the neighbor's house talk to the neighbor about why the baler won't work or why the how the fan came up the fan belt came off the drive pulley or whatever the hell I learned do it do it fast think on your feet be practical so I learned on a farm it doesn't you can read all the books you want and why an animal has hoop rot but if you fart around reading books and not getting something done to fix the problem you lose all your animals so in an environment where you depend on your crops and depend on your animals you can't get into a bunch of fancy-dancy theories like they do in agricultural programs and universities. You've got to keep the animals alive or you starve to death.

So I learned to think practically and test things efficiently and go with what works so how I developed my knowledge when I became the trainer of the army boxing team I also took over massage therapy studied massage therapy practiced it and did a two-year internship with a team doctor who was an osteopathic physician so what I did was I used the same principles of learning that I'd used in my youth on the farm and in my exploration of athletics, studying diet, studying exercise, which is to study the people that were getting the best results and ask them how they did it. Then I don't have to read 50 books. I just went to the person that already done all that and said, oh, that's all bullshit. Just do this but the key thing is this I developed a tremendous amount of practical knowledge because my living was based on getting results as a therapist and as a conditioning coach

or a coach and so what I did is whenever I came into some kind of a challenge, be it an athlete that was having chronic pain or couldn't achieve a certain objective and get past a plateau or somebody that had an internal illness nobody could figure out, which might have been a parasite infection, I studied exactly what I had to study based on what the situation was. So I would study your symptoms i would go to a medical library and would look up anything that talked about those symptoms and the next thing you

know i'd find well there's 14 different things that can cause that and then i would study those 14 different things and say okay that says this happens when you're in a dirty house where there's mold growing in the bathroom so dot, dot. So then I would say, okay, let's check your house. And lo and behold, there'd be black mold in the shower and in the sinks. And I realized I got a serious fungal infection. They're being poisoned by mycotoxin. Now I might've had to go through four years of university and still wouldn't have learned that. Right. Right. So what I did is I did what I would call situational research. What is the situation at hand? And what can I take as indicators?

What are the symptoms? What are the challenges we're facing? And who has the most knowledge on those topics? Which medical professional? Which strength and conditioning professional? Which coaching? Which sport? Whatever.

And so all these books are all the research that I did into myriads of these types of situational experiences. And after a while, you start to realize, wow, all sorts of things lead back to food. All sorts of things lead back to water. All sorts of things lead back to sleep. And all sorts of things lead back to over or under exercising as an example so those were the common denominators for example i developed a system of movement called the primal pattern movement system and what i did is i did i studied the science of human movement and looked at it scientifically but i could not find the answers to my questions so what

I did is I studied developmental man and my wife Penny has a master's degree in biological anthropology so I'd figured this out before I met her but when I talked to her about how I figured us all it was very fun because she could show me a more scientific academic concepts that would reinforce what I'd figured out on my own, which she was always quite impressed with. She was like, Paul, you never set foot in a university. You're talking to me about stuff that professors don't even talk about.

And I said, well, I ask myself a lot of questions. I pretend I am that man. So what I did is I, and here's how it happened as a segue here. When I came to work for the largest physical therapy clinic in San Diego in 1986, I think it was. 86, 88, January 88. I was the first massage therapist to ever be hired by a sports and orthopedic physical therapy clinic in San Diego. And it was considered weird and why would you ever hire a massage therapist? They're hippie nobodies, right? But the owner of the clinic had had four knee surgeries.

None of her 22 physical therapists with master's degrees or whatever could figure out what was wrong. The surgeon was confused. He had to manipulate her knee twice. And he said to her, her name's Kathy Grace. He said, Kathy, if we have to manipulate your knee again, the damage could be catastrophic. You may never be able to play golf or tennis again.

Well, I had rehabilitated an elite level runner who was sponsored by Nike named Kevin McCary from Bilateral Achilles Problems because nobody could figure him out. And I got that guy back in the game and running within a few weeks. So he, when he found out about this, said to Kathy, said,

I know a guy you got to go see. He does all sorts of stuff I've never heard of before, but it works. So on my first visit, I got eight degrees more range of motion out of her i've never heard of before but it works so on my first visit i got eight degrees more range of motion out of her knee than they'd gotten in three months of therapy and she was shocked and she said to me paul i've never seen any of these techniques before where'd you learn them i said i learned them by just listening to your body i just pay attention i connect to the body and ask it what it wants to need i said you have a lot of fascial binding

you've got deep fascial adhesions I said the techniques I'm using on you are classically called rolfing techniques and other techniques as well but but the long and the short of it is she I rehabbed her and got her back and the surgeon said I want to meet this guy whoever did this I want to meet him so she brought me in to meet the surgeon well they offered me a job I got to work with 22 physical therapists and trainers. But what happened was, because the doctors are so uneducated about exercise, I'm rehabbing all these spinal injuries

and I'm giving them squats and deadlifts and cable pushes and pulls, and they're freaking out. They're like, what the hell are you doing? You can't do that to people. I said, really? Why don't you go ask mrs smith how she's doing i said ask every one of them every one of them was doing better and getting better faster

than they'd ever gotten and they were completely confused so the head physical therapist said paul we really need you to explain to us how it is that you choose these exercises and how you do it without people getting hurt well what i had done is I had been going through a process inside myself, which is based on what do we have to do to survive in nature? You know, doctors used to say to me, well, nobody should be squatting in the gym when they have a back injury. I said, well, I have a question for you. Have you ever seen anyone have a shit standing up? Have you ever seen anyone levitate into their car? Because not only do you have to do a squat when you get into your car, you got to do a single-legged squat with a lateral shift and a twist coupled with a side bend so if you're telling me this

person can't do a squat with a dowel rod on their back and you've just done surgery on their spine I got news for you how are they gonna get in out of that car without hurting themselves how are they gonna pick up their kids how are they getting on off the toilet and they look at me like I'm from outer space I'm like these are basic damn questions that you should have been asking long before you even got your medical degree because it means you are not paying attention to anything once that person leaves that operating table and you're making shit loads of money and all these re-injuries which is unethical so the point I'm making is

what I what happened was Chris Siegel, the head physical therapist, who was very smart with a master's degree and very top-notch woman, who was very open to me, unlike a lot of them,

they fought with me like cats and dogs, but they learned the hard way that they should pay attention. I used to tell them, you guys could never run a farm. You'd all starve to death. All you could do

is ultrasound the cows to death. Burn their titties off. So, you know, like I used to ask him, why are you using ultrasound on hypermobile joints? Ultrasound produces heat in tissues. Heat causes fascia to lengthen. And you're doing it on people who have seriously loose knee joints, shoulder joints. I said, you know, they're just doing what they were taught to do in school.

They didn't think about it. This is what, anyhow, the point is, they said, we need you to teach us how it is you're doing all this exercise selection because we don't understand it. So I'd never had to teach a class to a bunch of physical therapists like that before to explain what I used to do as an internal process. So what I did is I got a bunch of physical therapists like that before to explain what I used to do as an internal process. So what I did is I got a bunch of pen boards. I had like three big full-size pen boards out.

I wrote down every single exercise I could think of, and it was a lot. The pen boards were packed. And I said, what is the common denominator amongst all these exercises with one question in mind? What would we have to do to survive in nature? So to make a long story short, I kept connecting all the exercises and reducing them down to their essentials, and I came up with seven movement patterns that all of them were derivatives of.

Squatting, lunging, bending, pushing, pulling, and twisting while standing on your own feet because in nature there is no chairs or leg presses to balance you. So I said what I do whenever I have a patient is I look to see which of these key movements and now that I've shown you that these 350 or 400 or 500 or 600 exercises all come from those generalized motor programs, which is the actual term, I choose which pattern they're the weakest in and need the most improvement in, and I build them up. So if I have to have someone hold two dowel rods and do a squat, even though they now have a bigger base of support, the dowel rods still move.

That's far, far more neurologically complex and rich than a smooth machine because as soon as you lean against something that's stable, your core shuts off and your balance center shut off. So you now just cut out half the brain and no matter how strong you are on a smooth machine, you can't do that. Your brain cannot apply force where you can't stabilize your joints because you'll injure yourself. So I told, I showed them that there's seven key movement patterns that everything else is an emergence of, unless you have what I call a specialized pattern, like

figure skating, skateboarding, water skiing. Then you have what I call specialized patterns, where you have potential for squat, lunge, bend, push, pulling, and twisting, but you have unusual patterns that require a very specific skill set that would not have been necessary to survive in nature.

So for certain athletic applications, I have to do what I call specialized pattern training. Those are skills the nervous system has to learn. To finish the point, though, this is just an example of how my farm boy, not academically trained mind would process information and it helped me help a lot of people with very fancy degrees could not help because they had not learned how to think and they had learned what to think and when they were taught what to think

they were taught what to think by other people that also weren't grounded in reality and were doing so much research that they got detached from reality. And though it looks good on paper, like, look at thousands of isokinetic studies. Physical therapy used to be all isokinetic. Isokinetic means constant speed.

I've never met a single person in the world that functioned isokinetically, yet they would rehab them on isokinetics. technology is actually abnormal. I've never met a single person in the world that functions isokinetically, yet they would rehab them on isokinetics. I'm like, there's no way that's going to work. You're using a technology that is actually abnormal. The closest thing you can get to isokinetics is being a fish or

a rower because the water creates constant resistance. I would see people get 300% improvements in isokinetic strength, but they could not even get get 300% improvements in isotonics strength but they could not get a 5% improvement in picking up a box with weight in it so it didn't make any sense to me so I built the whole check institute system by studying situations and looking into and asking anybody that had knowledge about anything that my own research said for example if i had to talk to a mycologist to find out well what kind of mold

do i need to be worried about and how do i figure out what i would hire a mycologist i would pay them for their time or i would study mycology journals. That's how I built the entire institute. That's how I grew up in the United States. All these thousands of books around me are information by people that I respect and want to study. So I do want to dig into this totem pole model that we print out here in a second. Can I have a moment to go alleviate the pressure in my bladder? Sure. You want a quick break and then we'll check out the pressure in my bladder? Sure.

You want a quick break, and then we'll check out the totem pole model? Yeah. Cool. Thanks for watching the show. If you'd like to learn more about how to improve your snatch, clean, and jerk, we have a free 55-page e-book you can get at flightweightlifting.com. It has sample programming specifically for weightlifting, weightlifting how-to technique videos,

and other tips on how to improve all of your lifts, go to flightweightlifting.com, and you can download that e-book for free. Download it now. And we're back with Paul Cech. Can we get into – He said he had a couple of questions. You want to hit that before we – I had a very small question about one of the points we left off on.

You said you had seven primary movement patterns or however you described it, but then you said squatting, hinging, lunging, pressing, pulling, bending. Squatting was lunging, bending, pushing, pulling, and twisting. Twisting, and that was six. Seven. Squat, lunge, bend, push, pull, twist. Oh, yeah, is it six?

Squat, lunge, bend, push, pull, twist. Oh, okay, it is six. Okay, I thought we missed one. Okay, cool. I brain farted twist. Okay, it is six. Okay, I thought we missed one. Okay, cool. I brain farted there. I guess counted too quickly. In the break, we had our statistician. Oh, sorry.

We were counting most. You're right. I left one out. Okay. Gate. Gate, okay. Walking. Walking, running.

I left one out. You know, because I know this stuff so intimately, I don't think about it like that anymore, but the seventh pattern is gait. And here's an interesting thing, I'll tell you, since you're talking about that, I'll tell you what's one of the most

powerful experiences you can have as a pioneer of anything. I told you how I figured this all out, right? Remember that discussion? Writing everything. How does a man, what does a man have to do, a human have to do to survive in nature? I told you how I figured this all out, right? Remember that discussion? How does a man, what does a man have to do, a human have to do to survive in nature?

And so I wrote all the things down, like, you know, I just looked at everything and I grew up on Vancouver Island. I'm a hunter. I know what it's like to be out in the woods. I've done all sorts of journeys out in the woods for multiple days at a time. I was a soldier.

I was in the 82nd Airborne Division, so I know what it's like to be out in the woods for multiple days at a time. I was a soldier. I was in the 82nd Airborne Division, so I know what it's like to be out in the woods, right? So I just went through the process. Well, you know, you're walking on a trail. You come to a great big log. You've got to get over it. So you have to use a lunging-type movement. You have to, if you kill an animal, you can't just say, follow me home so I can eat you.

You've got to pack it home. And how do you pick it up? You've got to bend over to pick it up you got to get it up on your back you can't walk without twisting every single joint in your body functions on what's called triplanar movement which means there's always flexion extension side bending and rotation no matter what you think even when you're bending forward in the sagittal plane there's triplanar movements going on because nobody's perfectly symmetrical in their body for example so check this out in 2000 i think it was i did an advanced training program for seven days in the czech republic with two of my heroes

vladimir yonda who's a serious pioneer of musculoskeletal medicine and carol levitt who was his primary teacher and is one of the people whose work i studied quite a lot to understand the integration of the glands the organs and the musculoskeletal system you can look at his book manipulative therapy and the rehabilitation of the locomotor system which is very very deep and comprehensive and expensive. So they gave an advanced training at the Charles Hospital in Prague. And part of it was, in that hospital, was where Dr. Vojta, who had done 50 years of research on child development, and had developed an entire system of infant development that can be used to rehabilitate people from spinal cord injuries brain injuries comas and he found there's reflex points on the body that you

can touch and if you touch them in the right sequence it activates programs in the brain and spinal cord that activate movement patterns that are infant movement patterns the very patterns an infant has to go through to integrate their musculoskeletal, hormonal, nervous, and biological systems. So I was so fascinated by this, I bought piles of books on infant development and studied it extensively. I got them all in the library if you want to see them. And lo and behold, guess what I found out? There are seven movements that an infant has to go through. Squatting, lunging, bending, pushing, pulling, and twisting. And I was able to correlate those with my primal pattern system, so I developed my own system of teaching infant development

through several years of research and the training at the Czech Republic, and was able to show that exactly the seven movement patterns that we have to have to survive in nature are the ones that an infant has to go through to integrate their musculoskeletal, brain, nervous system, hormonal system, and biological systems. And I developed a whole system of infant development movement assessment and was able to apply it to athletes and people worldwide

and could show exactly where they did not do infant development correctly because of environmental stressors such as hard floors that kids can't crawl on because it hurts their knees so they skip developmental steps or inflammation in the guts. I've rehabbed kids that had terrible back and hip pain and nobody could figure out

but they didn't realize the child was gluten intolerant which was stopping the child from being able to rotate and shutting its core down. So it wouldn't do key movement patterns, couldn't walk correctly. I saved people from all sorts of surgical procedures that the same exact movement patterns are what we go through as children that I had identified as primal pattern movements when I was like 26 or 7 years old by doing a reductive analysis without any awareness of it. Then you see that your intuition's working. Then you realize that having an open mind and observing and paying attention and practicing

will always take you where you need to go and it's far more important to do that than to listen to some dude standing in front of a class called a professor telling you all the shit that you're supposed to know when most of them can't even demonstrate any evidence of that themselves. Like I've seen lots of experts on weightlifting that can't lift weights. Right? Most of them. They're broken. We all went through undergrad and graduate school for kinesiology, and a lot of people that graduated with us, they have degrees in the field,

and they have no idea how to train. Exactly. I've had numerous cases of people with master's degrees in exercise and sports science, kinesiology, and all sorts of degrees who have told me they learn more in one of my three-day workshops than they did in their entire master's degree program and it's practical, it works.

And this goes back to learning. You see, I studied situationally and instead of listening to professors, I said, who is the best person in the world at this problem and I fortunately was making enough money that I could hire these people for a day at a time whether it cost sometimes two grand a day to go sit and ask questions and and learn so I went right to the master's and my whole system is really a collection of the knowledge I gained from studying the masters rarely ever

were they academic people I mean they might have had a degree but they were way past all that they just said that stuff doesn't work or that part did but that part didn't well where does so much of the stuff that you're working on it clearly does not built in academia or it's, it's, I guess you could say it's supported by academia. Yeah. It's very, yeah. It's, it's not that academia is bad.

It's just that it doesn't make the gap to practical applications. And it often is so segmented. It makes the mistake of believing partial truths as facts. And it takes someone with more processing power or power of integration and general knowledge of multiple fields to say okay that fits but only to this point and you got to add the knowledge of this for example you have to have a knowledge of how the glands and the organs work for an athlete to achieve optimal strength or they will break down and they will not know how to eat right, and they won't know the ramifications

of all their protein powders and blah, blah, blah, right? So there's a lot of great knowledge, and I've studied massive amounts of science, and I am not against science. I just say you have to be very careful with how you use it because scientific studies are like knives. You've got to be careful with a knife. It can be a helpful tool, but it can be a dangerous

tool. That's really the comment on that. Yep. Now's the time. We're going to attack this totem pole model of yours. First of all, what do you actually call it? Is it called totem pole? It's called the Czech totem pole. Okay. So what is it?

How did you develop it? It's a beautiful model, by the way. So what does it all mean, though? By the way, we're going to have – we're going to give you access to this. Yeah, there's a PDF of this on the show notes. So if you just go to barbershop.com slash check, C-H-E-K, then you can download the PDF and see what we're talking about. Okay.

So here's what happened. First of all, when I got out of the Army, I needed to get a license to practice professionally, and I wanted to study sports massage therapy. So I did research all over the United States to see who had the best sports massage therapy school. And the one that I felt was the best, based on my knowledge and investigation and to what i wanted to learn was the sports massage training institute in and it was in either costa mesa or

encinitas they had two and it was owned by a lady named mike hungerford who was a russian trained massage therapist i don't know if you know this but it takes seven years of training in russia to get your massage therapy license and they're treated as equal to medical doctors in Russia. Wow, dang, I didn't know that. Yeah. So when I went to the Sports Massage Training Institute, it was a very good school, very comprehensive, multiple teachers that were practicing professionals, and it covered joint mobilization, stretching,

a wide variety of techniques, Cereax, deep tissue therapy, corrective techniques. It was 350 hours of very good, high-quality intensive training. And because massage, at that time there was like five massage therapy schools in San Diego alone. If you open up the San Diego paper and go to the massage therapy section,

there's like five, maybe ten rows of massage therapists. So the point is, the market was just flooded with massage therapists in town. So I thought, well, the only way I'm going to make a living is to specialize in problem cases. So I just had a deep sense of trust because I'd had such great work with the boxers and gotten such acclaim from my work with the boxers and accolades from generals and from medical doctors working with the sports teams and they shit they said Paul since you've been the trainer of the team our injury rates dropped down to almost nothing compared to before you started and I said I did two years of training with an osteopathic physician

so I already had an inner sense that I could help a lot of people because I could see what was being missed in all these traditional therapeutic approaches just like I got the job working at sports and orthopedic physical therapy she actually hired me away from the chiropractic office where I worked for a guy named Dr. Keith Jeffers who specialized in in athletes but especially running athletes and he was one of the teachers in school and he had an Achilles problem that nobody could figure out. So when I fixed him up, he said, I want you to come work for me. And so what I did is I went all over San Diego. I made up business cards and brochures and I went to every doctor, every physical therapist, every chiropractor, and even

massage therapist I could find and said, give me the toughest patients you got give me the people that when you look on your schedule and you see that person's name you go oh not them again because they're not responding to therapy and you got nothing to lose yeah and I would offer a money-back guarantee if I didn't give you results that you were happy with I'd give give you your money back. I've been doing that most of my career. So I started getting all these patients. And I, after a while, I started, you know, having a list of people that would vouch for me. So yes, this guy's for real, because I'd rehabilitated them. And some of them were doctors and physical therapists. So the point is, I built this practice of very complicated people. I mean, some of these people would come to me with two medical files, two inches thick, and it would take me a week to read all the studies, all the blood samples, all the x-rays,

scanogram, you name it, MRIs. I'd have to study a lot because they were very complicated people so after a few years of this and having these complicated people I started saying Jesus Murphy this person's got this chronic back pain they've seen 50 chiropractors they've seen neurologists so I started saying what's missing what's missing and and so then I would start studying like I said, what influences the low back? So you find, for example, when a woman's premenstrual and the uterus is inflamed, they have chronic, commonly have back pain. And their legs get weak and their core stability goes down

because the uterus reflexes through the entire sciatic distribution, all the way to the toes, right to the belly button. It affects the suboccipital region, and women oftentimes have a hard time keeping their atlas in position when they're premenstrual because of the effects of estrogen, and the atlas is the most unstable vertebra in the body. So if your structure is not well aligned, it pops out and it pinches the spinal cord and causes all sorts of problems. So what I would do is I would start saying, okay, well, this system connects to that. This woman's got menstrual dysregulation.

What causes menstrual... Okay, diet and lifestyle factors, caffeine, some of the things we're talking about. So I started noticing that if somebody has a uterus problem, that you cannot rehab them from an ACL injury if their uterus is inflamed because they can't stabilize. If you've got back problems,

you can't do it because the organs have a reflex control of the muscles. And I learned this studying Byron Robinson, MD's book, The Abdominal and Pelvic Brain that I just showed you, the first edition, 1899, second edition, 1907. I studied a lot of old medical books because back then those doctors were actually doing research to help people not to make money. There's a big difference.

You understand that? They weren't being paid by people to prove that some drug or some machine or some gadget worked. So they were doing honest research. So a lot of the older medical books are loaded with fantastic stuff. So then I came to the conclusion, okay, I need to look into organs. And what I found studying Byron Robbins and MD's work is that the autonomic nervous system is designed so that whenever there's

inflammation or stress in an organ, it will down-regulate the flow of blood to any muscle on the same nerve channel because organs borrow their sensory neurons from the musculoskeletal system, which is why when a person's having a heart attack, they feel the pain in their chest and the left arm. No one says, my heart hurts. They have the pain in their chest and the left arm. No one says, my heart hurts.

They have terrible pain in their chest and their left arm. The uterus borrows its sensory nerve endings from the lower segments of the sympathetic chain system, which feed the legs, for example, and the lower abdomen and the back. So what Robinson showed way back then is that if there's ever a competition between muscles and organs for blood supply, nutrients, and waste removal, the autonomic system will starve out the muscles to make sure that the organs and glands have maximum opportunity to heal. So I learned as an example you cannot effectively rehabilitate any musculoskeletal

problem without a complete analysis of the gland and organ functions because they control the musculoskeletal system. And then when you think about it, watch this. When you are hungry and your stomach's empty, what does it make your arms and legs want to do grab food go hunting this would be the answer you got to go catch it right at whole foods usually yeah but but but our nervous system was wired developmentally so when we're stomachs empty all of a sudden we're very motivated to go hunting and we can't fart around so it really activates the body when your penis gets hard, what do you do?

Cross your legs and just hope some girl's going to fall on your lap? Definitely not. No, you got to go hunting, right? Usually crawling. Yeah. Without a long, drawn-out explanation,

but you can actually look and you will see that there are emotional functions and psychological functions connected to each of your major organs that drive the musculoskeletal system to feed those needs, is what I'm saying. So I immediately realized at that point,

in studying lots of research that backed this up, and even people would say, where'd you learn all that? I said, well, how about Netter's Anatomy? I can show you right in Netter's Anatomy. I can show you the exact anatomy, proving exactly what I'm talking, right in a standard anatomy text.

But it was amazing to me, all these people just completely overlooked it and pretend it wasn't even there. I'm like, what'd they teach you in school? I would look through this anatomy book and ask them one question, how do the organs relate to the muscles? And I found it in 28 minutes.

So what happened was, as I said, okay, I know now that I have got to look in every medical case for any indication of hormonal imbalance, which is glands, things like inability to produce hydrochloric acid, which causes all sorts of problems with the stomach and parasite infections and fungal infections, dot, dot, dot. I've got a, and whatever I found, whenever I had someone with chronic musculoskeletal problems, 98% of the time I found gland and organ dysfunctions connected to it, and they couldn't heal because they didn't have a good enough diet, they didn't have the right nutrition, they didn't have enough sleep or rest they were either over under over exercising or under

exercising do you see what i'm showing you i could show why that person wasn't healing and when i corrected the things to allow the organs to have the nutrients and the rest they needed all of a sudden spine started to stabilize pain started to go away trigger points would clear up magically so one thing led to another, and I said, okay, well, what would control organs then? So if you look at the map, well, what controls organs is the upper cervical spine. Why? Because the spinal cord goes right through the atlas. Every single nerve in your body passes through the foramen magnum into the spinal cord through the atlas, and the atlas, by the way, turns out to be, there's only two places where you have significant

ligamentous connections from the spinal cord to the spinal vertebra. The denticulate ligaments attach to the atlas and sometimes to C2 and the phylum terminellae, the tail of the nervous system, connects to the coccyx. So if you have an atlas problem, and then I did tons of research and read piles and piles of studies by the National Upper Cervical Chiropractic Association, I literally read every one of their scientific journals, monographs, since they started writing them, hundreds of them, like since 1980-something,

and found piles of evidence. Then I studied the medical literature, then I studied anatomy, and lo and behold, I found a mountain of evidence showing if the atlas is out of place more than three-quarters of one degree, the denticulant ligaments will put torque through the dura and will disrupt the axonal connections, and the synaptic gaps either get stretched too much, which inhibits neural activity, or they get compressed, and slight compression causes neural excitation.

So all of a sudden, I was finding that people, for example, that had chronic constipation would get their atlas corrected and then instantly start pooping. I've seen many cases of women that had not had a period for six months, a year, two, three years, get their atlas correction, and within 10 minutes would start menstruating because the spinal cord was being compressed or put under traction. So then I said, okay, what happens if the sacrum's out of place? Well, it puts adverse mechanical tension on the spinal cord and can do the same damn thing. So what I'm showing you here is I found, okay, well, if the atlas is out of place, it will override those organs because it'll disrupt the communication between the brain and

the organ, and the system cannot regulate itself. It can't compensate effectively. So if you take the same scenario I was just talking about, say the uterus being a problem, but the person comes to you with chronic low back pain that won't go away and then you try to do all the things you need to do to help the uterus heal and it's not working if there's an atlas subluxation it could be stopping the body from responding because even though the brain has the body has the resources the brain cannot regulate the control mechanisms because the communication system is broken it's out out of balance. It's being torqued, right? So then I thought, okay, well, geez, we always have to clear that. So I studied upper cervical pathology.

I took courses, advanced physical therapy courses. I made a deal with all the physical therapists that I worked with for four years because they kept wanting me to teach them stuff. But whenever I'd ask them to teach me stuff like Atlas stuff or whatever, oh, you can't do that. You don't't have a license you're not allowed to touch the spine I get all this professional nose up horseshit I said okay I got a new rule for you I won't teach you anything unless you teach me something I want to know and if you don't want to share with me I will not share with you and some of them were so up themselves they would never ask me any questions but fortunately for me the best physical therapist I found the best therapist and

the best doctors are the most open-minded and play the don't play the silly games I've had the some of the best doctors in the world happy to sit down and swap information with me all day when teach me anything I wanted to know because they knew I was smart enough not to abuse it, right? Yeah. So then what I found out, and I would keep studying the research and say, okay, well, what could cause an atlas subluxation or what would be more important than an atlas subluxation that if you didn't address it, either would keep you in a state of subluxation, keep triggering the subluxation, or would cause the body to compensate in such a way that it set you up for subluxation because you have a distorted posture, or like a lateral scoliosis, for example. Well, I went and found any time there's a problem with

the vestibular system, you have to clear that first or none of these things will respond. And then I found out in many cases i would test people's hearing and find that they were tone deaf in one ear so take a a banker who sits there talking about loans all day with people trying to sell loans and he can't hear out of his right ear so he turns his head to the left doesn't even know he's doing it but he's got his head turned 14 15 degrees to the right all day to get his left ear closer to the person. So this person's got chronic neck problems. And if you're constantly turning your neck and then your neck adapts to that position, now your back is torqued because the neck controls the back.

The neck's a huge influence over the back. So you see what's happening here. So I thought, well, you've got to clear the vestibular system and you've got to clear hearing. And I found piles of people with hearing problems that I didn't even know they were having that were causing these kinds of problems. So I said, well, what would be more important than that? So I studied the research. I studied the neural pathways.

I studied mountains of papers. And I found that the eyes actually are more influential on the system than the vestibular system. And the ears are. 80% of your proprioception in space comes from your eyes. And then I found research all the way back from like the 1930s and 40s, and actually as far back as 1925. One of the authors is Lomax, I can't remember the other one right now, but they actually found an orthopedic surgeon, I found research, and the orthopedic surgeon was

running into the same kinds of problem that i had was having back patients that weren't responding and he made friends with an ophthalmologist and the ophthalmologist said well i've found that when i correct people's eyes a lot of their back problem goes away and he said really so they started doing research together and this paper showed the correlation of their research. And they found that one out of every three chronic back pain patients had an ocular dysfunction. They either had a visual dysfunction or an imbalance in their eye muscles,

and the eye muscles control the entire musculoskeletal system. All you've got to do is hook someone up to a 32-channel EMG. You can bolt their head still if you want to and their whole body. Whatever direction you look, that whole EMG fires up. If you look up, all the extensors turn on. If you look down, all the flexors turn on. You look left, every muscle that rotates you to the left turns on. It pre-facilitates the whole motor system.

So if you've got an imbalance in your eyes, it will induce a musculoskeletal imbalance. And it will throw the whole system off and the for example if you've got an exophoria in your left eye which means the eye is the lateral recti is too tight it'll pull your eye to the left your whole body will twist to try to get the eyes into binocular vision because if you can't maintain binocular vision and here's another thing the eye muscles are striated skeletal muscles. So they're susceptible to fatigue just like any muscle when you exercise. So if your eyes don't rest in parallel binocular vision, they become exhausted and people get terrible trigger points in their eyes

which refer pain right into their brain and shut down circulatory systems in the brain and cause reflex changes in the autonomic system that shut internal systems down. I've known of two cases where someone treating trigger points in the eyes in a blind person had complete restoration of sight because the trigger points were referring pain into the visual centers causing so much vasoconstriction it shut down the visual centers in the brain. I've seen wild stuff happen under my own hands in clinical practice because i knew where to look and how to look so what you find out is everyone that sees me gets

an eye exam you can see the eye chart right at the end of the hall yep i studied neuromuscular therapy i learned to treat the muscles of the eyes with trigger point therapy using special techniques i studied pelvic floor therapy i know how how to do intrapelvic work. I'm trained in that. I had doctors who kept trying to do trigger point injections and couldn't hit the trigger points because their palpation skills were so... So 13 doctors signed a letter petitioning the state of California to let me go to physician's assistant school to get licensed to give medical injection without having any kind of university degree or anything and it turns out it's legal in the state of california so i went to

physician's assistant school and got trained in medical injection and would do all the trigger point injections for doctors so i learned all sorts of stuff about that then i studied dry needling with c chan gun a famous medical doctor from san diego and found out you could do a better job with an acupuncture needle than a hypodermic needle because hypodermic needles cut and damage the tissue so you create an injury trying to fix something so what happened was is then i said okay well what what might have more power than the eyes and lo and behold i found the research showing that every time you have malocclusion, your body will change the position of your head to try to get your teeth to fit together because if your teeth don't fit together, you open and close your mouth on average 4,000 times a day.

So I have a question for you. If your teeth don't fit together and you keep opening and closing, and every time you swallow, your teeth engage, and you eat and you talk, how long do you have before you wear your teeth out? Oh, are you talking about a couple of years? You've got a couple of years, and you can watch the teeth shrinking. I've seen a thousand cases of it. They lose vertical dimension.

When you lose vertical dimension in your teeth, then your temporomandibular joint sinks up into the temporal bone and compresses the neurovascular supply to the temporomandibular joint, and now you get degenerative changes in the joint, you get tremendous pain, and then I found studies by Irvin M. Kord, the collected papers of Irvin M. Kord, who was hired by the American Osteopathic Association

to do years of research to try to prove physiologically how chiropractic and osteopathic manipulation worked and his research was mind-boggling and he showed you can put a one millimeter shim between people's teeth anywhere in the jaw anywhere in the bite any tooth and it will cause the musculoskeletal system to go crazy and he had multi-channel emg research showing this any now so i have a question for you have you ever got a sesame seed stuck in your tooth before yes and what does your tongue do trying to get that son of a bitch out of there it won't stop it won't stop you will injure yourself yeah the tongue will get raw just trying to get it out why because your jaw has to fit together

and your jaw muscles are wired to your upper cervical spine and your eyes. You have an oculoservical pathway. So if anything affects the eyes, it affects the neck and the jaw. If anything affects the jaw, it affects the eyes and the neck. And the eyes, neck, jaw, and vestibular system are all wired together, and they control everything below your head. Boom. Aww.

So that literally is like a survival instinct when your tongue's going crazy because your jaw's not fitting correctly. Absolute survival instinct. There's no way to turn your tongue off because your body recognizes there's huge problems coming your way. And your tongue's actually an internal organ. Your tongue's really important.

It's innervated by the gloss of her and you on her. It's super important. There's some like balance. My wife says that. Okay. It's super important. Probably the second most important thing I've got going on. So then I said, okay, who's the best at jaw stuff?

So I found Mariano Roccabado, who's a professor of physical therapy and has a PhD in dentistry at the University of Santiago, Chile, and he comes to the United States, and this is a long time ago, so I studied every one of his courses. I did his TMJ training, his advanced TMJ training three times, because it's very complicated, but I mastered it, right? So then I said, okay, now I've got to not

only check everybody's sacrum, I got to check their emotional system, we didn't get into that one yet, I got to check their glands and organs, I got to check their cervical spine, I got to check autostoribus tibular. I've got to check eyes. I've got to check teeth. And I said, holy shit, every single person I found

that was failing in the medical system, that was an athlete with chronic problems, I found not only one or two, but I often found 25 problems in here, right? And I learned by studying and training intensively all over the world how to address a lot of these things, how to do manual therapy, how to do muscle energy techniques, how to do mobilization techniques world how to address a lot of these things how to do manual

therapy how to do muscle energy techniques how to do mobilization techniques how to do soft tissue therapy how to do trigger point release how to release the fascia how to normalize the system there's a lot of training involved now you know i take seven years to finish your training as a check professional it's deep stuff and i have medical doctors in there podiatrists it's a people from all over the world and every profession come to take my training because they don't learn this stuff in school nowhere okay so then to make a long story short i said okay well what's even more powerful than the jaw breathing that's oh yeah and i looked at the research so i have learned yes and i looked at the research of Major Bertrand de Jarnet, a famous chiropractor

who back in the 1920s got very rich because he invented one of the first systems for processing film. He was a chiropractor, but he was a genius, and he figured out

how to process film, sold his ideas to Kodak, made millions of dollars, and so he was getting such great results with chiropractic, but he couldn't figure out how some of these results were happening. So he hired somebody to do research for him, and most doctors, I've never met a single doctor that realizes this, but guess what the name of the man he hired to do research for him to figure all this stuff out? And when I tell you, I bet you'll know if you've done any research on the human body. Arthur C. Guyton, the author of Guyton's textbook of physiology, which is used in almost every medical school,

physical therapy school, chiropractic school, anywhere in the world, because it's the definitive text on human physiology. And what medical doctors who hate chiropractors don't know is that their whole research, the whole book was largely funded by a chiropractor's research, and Guyton learned all that stuff

working for a chiropractor. How's that? I love how hilarious you think that is. It's hilarious. It's hilarious, right? So the Guyton textbook of physiology was largely funded by a chiropractor who was so fascinated

that he could get these results but couldn't figure out how. So just like the American Osteopathic Association hired, what's his name? Irvin M. Kaur, who's an amazing man. I don't know if he's alive anymore, but I've been to lectures with him. When this guy was 85, 88 years old, he was sharp as a tack, funny, a genius of a man.

I mean, I love Irvin M. Kaur. And his research, if you read it today, if you just get the collected papers of Irvin M. Korr, which was done in the late 40s and early 50s, it's rocket science even today. And most people don't even know about it. And I'm like, you guys got all these fancy fucking degrees. You don't even know what the real research is. You don't know where all this stuff came from. You haven't looked at the good stuff.

You're getting all this fluffy shit. I think I've got a couple decades of reading to do. Just standing here. It's taken me. You can pay rent over there in the library. I've been doing this for 32 years and my wife can guarantee you the studying has been intensive

because there's a fucking lot to know. This is what I tell people. Look, you've got personal trainers in the gym that can get their goddamn personal training certification out of a bubblegum machine, pass 75 multiple question tests on the internet. I say, look, physical therapists play with pink dumbbells and stretch cords. But you got people with their body weight to two to three times body when they're back and you're torturing them. And did you realize 72% of people have an undiagnosed disc bulge ready to blow at any time and they don't even know it. And that's people that have never had an incidence of low back pain. That's solid

scientific research using MRI studies. People in gyms are booby traps that are eating crap food, taking drugs, not sleeping, unhappy, and you're getting the shit beat out of them in CrossFit and all this other stuff. And when a guy like me walks in the gym, I can look at any one of you and in about three seconds tell you more than your mother knows about you and i'm watching these people just get the shit beat out of them and they end up in doctor's offices i can i don't have nothing against crossfit i just think it's dangerous for people who aren't prepared for it i don't think there's anything wrong in any sport for any sport. It's any sport. It's kettlebells. It's medicine balls.

All of it, right? That's why the check system is designed to teach you how to assess people and how to build them up progressively, safely, and intelligently. Check Level 3 is a nine-day course where you learn how to assess all this stuff, and it's the most intense course, and it takes tremendous study to get ready for it and i've had physical therapists and chiropractors break down emotionally and walk out of my classes because they said i can't handle this it's too much for me this is i never even dreamed that there was personal trainers let alone a guy with a ninth grade education that could take me this deep and they're just not ready to study that hard anymore this is

because i test you on this is you don't there's no faking it and guessing at multiple choice questions you either know what you're doing or you don't there's no in between for for for me right because i work with very expensive athletes and people that i cannot fuck around with yeah right so the point is you get up to the breathing center, so you study resp, I've got entire volumes on respiratory physiology. I found breathing problems

out the Yazoo. As a matter of fact, it's the most common thing I see. I have not met a single professional athlete. I won't name names, but some of the biggest names in many sports

have been in my hands, and I haven't met one of them that knew how to breathe properly and the breathing mechanism is so susceptible to emotional sources of disruption so we didn't even go down there yet but the limbic emotional system is where you see the face frowning and the heart and the gut and the colon I talked to you guys about that earlier before the interview and that's related to our emotions and its effects on our physiology and our organs and our structure, right?

So the emotional system floats because it can overpower every system in the body, including breathing. And if you're emotional about anything, happy or sad, it affects your breathing instantly. And the reason I was talking about djarnet by the way is because djarnet showed beyond a shadow of a doubt now without a technical explanation just know that every time you inhale and exhale when you inhale all your spinal curves reduce which makes your spine longer you're aware of that right all you got to do is lean against a wall and take

a deep breath and your head will slide up the wall you'll get longer this is part of the cerebral spinal pump system so as you inhale your the distance between your coccyx and the base of your skull lengthens so the lumen of your spinal cord which is full of cerebral spinal fluid gets smaller which pushes it back up into the ventricles of the brain. Then when you exhale, your curves increase, which then allows the fluid to come out of the ventricles of the brain back down into the spinal cord. It takes something like 12 hours for your cerebral spinal fluid to circulate one time through your body.

And every single part of your body goes through supination when you inhale, an opening, so you have abduction, external rotation, and extension when you inhale. And even your so you have abduction, external rotation, and extension when you inhale. And even your cranial sutures move, right? And the medical system's been telling us those cranial sutures didn't move. The osteopaths proved that they moved. CORE showed that they moved in the 40s. And there's still doctors that tell you that you're a nut if you think those things move.

I'm like, you've got to be fucking kidding me. All you've got to do is smoke some good indica, relax, and put your hands on somebody's head for about five minutes, and you'll feel the damn things moving. And can't feel it you shouldn't be a therapist you got 10 thumbs okay okay well i've got one question is um i i've studied a little bit of breath work and with the spinal fluid yeah uh what i've been told with certain practices you can actually speed that up beyond 12 hours and process things more quickly and clean things up. You probably could.

Tai Chi, Qigong. On a side note, one of the things that's been shown to clean up the cerebral spinal fluid is chanting, toning, or singing. Because the resonance in the nasal cavities and the throat cavities causes a vibration that actually has a cleansing effect on the cerebral spinal fluid. My oming is not wrong. I had that right word.

So the Tibetan monks were way ahead of us. I could tell you all sorts of stuff about my studies of ancient shaman and Tibetan monks and the stuff they knew. That'd be a whole other podcast, but it's mind-boggling. We think our doctors are smart? It's a joke with the we only figured out that acupuncture worked in the 70s and we only figured out that the human

energy field was real when we could capture on a curling photography but the monks were mapping this stuff out the tibetan monks for example showed that the energy field of the body including the meridians shows up at within minutes of gestation and the whole body is following the electromagnetic map that's created by the soul moving into the body and activating the polarities of male and female and the sperm and the egg meat they figured this out because they were clairvoyant. They used to sit in caves and meditate and they could see energy. But medical people didn't even believe that until they started filming it with Kirlian photography.

They figured that out 900 years ago. I got books in my office right here documenting the whole thing. I haven't finished my point, though. D. Jarnett showed that if a disruption in the musculoskeletal system stops the normal cerebral spinal pump mechanism, or disrupts the ability for the sacrum to go through what's called nutation and counter-nutation, nutation is flexion, Counter-nutation is extension. So when you inhale, you reduce your curves. Your sacrum goes into counter-nutation.

When you exhale, it goes into nutation. These are osteopathic terms. The point is, DeVarnett showed that is a critical survival system, and the body will sacrifice any system to compensate, and he showed that the first thing that'll happen if the body can't do it is people start leaning forward and backward and you can actually put them on bilateral scales and watch their weight shifting.

So I started measuring it and tracking it. I found if you have a left to right weight shift or an anterior to posterior weight shift of more than five pounds, you've got a significant problem going on. So all my practitioners are trained how to measure and assess this stuff. I'm getting terrified.

I'm like, how many fucking things are wrong with me? Well, the thing is, is your body's a master compensator. Remember, we're designed to function without doctors. So the thing is, compensation is stress, though. Right. Compensation is not the problem. It's when you go into decompensation, when you run out of energy to compensate. That's when you get things broken.

Okay. So to finish my point,jarnett showed first people start leaning forward backward okay watch this you guys are intelligent people i'll give you a tip the average person breathes 25 900 times a day oh by the way that's exactly how many years it takes for our planet and our sun to make one lap of the galaxy. Steiner showed us that. Your breathing cycle's tied into astronomical cycles. You are the fucking universe breathing, talking, and hanging out with Paul today. Okay? Yes. So, what he showed is this, that a person starts flexing like this to pump, because when you bend forward like that, it stretches the spinal cord. Okay. I have a question for you. You know what the nucleus of a disc is, don't you? What happens if you bend forward 25,900

pints a day, but don't go back into extension? You're just going to get stuck there. No, you're going to pump the nucleus backwards until it herniates until it herniates okay now you do research on what percentage of people have breathing pattern disorders it's about 90 to 95 percent and then you see why you have all these herniated discs popping up out of nowhere and people that 85 percent of all orthopedic injuries are idiopathic that means there's no knowledge of an event that caused the problem so then Dijarnet showed that if the body gets fatigued and can't compensate in the sagittal plane it starts leaning to the side well guess what happens the posterior lateral aspects of the lumbar discs are the

weakest areas of the disc so you get posterior lateral disc herniation which is the most common right so once a person goes into stage two or i think it's stage three in his system compensation they usually end up with a posterior lateral disc bulge because the system breaks down it can't take it anymore yeah and they're grounded they're they're in deep shit okay now to to finish just to if i can just finish sure go ahead so i said okay well i got something missing in my totem pole because even though i had done a lot of work and figured all this out and i was quite impressed with myself my little ego was petting itself but honestly a lot of the greatest doctors I've ever met in my life look at the system

and started using it, and it blew their minds. In fact, one of my students is the head of physiatry at the Mayo Clinic, and he was taking this stuff back to the Mayo Clinic and teaching the physical therapist and it was blowing their freaking mind. Because it works. One of my students is a physiotherapist and a chiropractor, and is part of his,

Kieran McPhail as part of his school work to write a thesis and do his research he wanted to see if he could scientifically validate the totem pole he found 149 scientific papers that backed up my totem pole 149 of my have them all wow okay but there was a lot of people i could correct all this stuff except some of these things would not keep would not hold like i could teach a person how to breathe right and i have what's called the parking lot test if you can walk out to a in my clinic in my rule if you're you don't know you've done a good she a lot of therapists think just because your pelvis is straightened on the table that you're fixed so i used to say to the therapist that's bullshit you got to do the parking lot test what's that have your patient walk out of the building touch

their car and come back and retest them if it still holds you did something because if you've got a higher order control system the instant you start walking it'll manipulate to go into compensation to serve a higher order system you follow me so most people don't pass the parking lot test so i was finding that my patients often failed my own parking lot test which was frustrating because i'm like oh my god i am missing something and i've covered a lot of something now by this time i've studied a lot and i've seen thousands of people and i'm you know I got some firing going on up here something like there's something missing so one of the first things I started realizing is that when I was looking into the emotional aspects of people's lives and their relationships and their diet I found

issues that were driving the respiratory system because they were holding on to emotions which tightens up the abdominal wall, which disrupts the entire breathing apparatus, turns them into chest breathers, overworks the scalenes, causes chronic neck problems, and a long, long list of things. So what I found out also, by the way,

and this is a later thing I learned, anytime you eat processed sugar, it acidifies your body so quick that in order to protect the pH of the blood, which has to stay right at about 7.35, your body begins to hyperventilate because oxygen alkalinizes the blood. So processed sugar is such a powerful acid, it leads to hyperventilation in people, and you can never normalize their blood gas ratios

which leads to anxiety, ADD behavior because it keeps them sympathetically charged all the time. So I found I couldn't correct the breathing pattern in anyone eating processed sugar

and it's in almost every damn thing. It's in meats, it's in bacon, they stick that shit everywhere. Why? Because it's highly addictive. It's hard to eat

at a restaurant because in order to make it taste good, they've added something to it. It's everything. eat at a restaurant because in order to make it taste good, they've added something to it. You go to a supermarket and look at every label and you'd be blessed if you can find something that does not have processed sugar hidden in it. And they use all sorts of things like dextrose or maltose.

They hide it all sorts of ways. But it's processed sugar and it screws up the pH balance of the body, which triggers hyperventilation processes. So, you know, what I'm trying to show you here is that the mental-emotional factors drive the breathing. And the breathing drives the body. And the mental-emotional factors, all behaviors, are the product of beliefs, conscious or unconscious. So after all my years to finish this thing, I realized I had to look deeply into a person's mental, emotional life,

their relationships, that you could not avoid diet, not only for the dietary and nutritious reasons, but for balancing pH in the body and regulating the breathing apparatus. So that took me into a deep study of depth psychology relationship everything i needed to to learn about relationships relationship counseling look look into in issues of self-esteem self-motivation i studied adult attachment and infant detachment disorders childhood childhood development, parenting influences. And it's a long story,

but it's took me years and years of research to now have a very comprehensive system and not a lot slips through the net. It's not perfect because the body is really complicated, but it takes about seven years for my students to master that. And it took me 32 years to figure it all out. And, you know, including because I'm still practicing and learning. I had the totem pole up to the breathing figured out by about maybe 99, 2000. And then I add the psyche on maybe in 2006,

because there was just people that I couldn't get to normalize unless I went into their mental emotional life and their relationships and then that led right to religious programming almost every time, right? Remember, all behaviors are the result of beliefs. If you track beliefs back,

you'll be surprised to find that you almost always get to something that's a belief about what god wants or demands of you as a commandment or i thou shalt not and i found religious programming at the root of massive numbers of chronic musculoskeletal organ and gland and hormonal disorders so i studied studied world religion. I took numerous courses on it, university courses on it to learn how these people think.

And then I developed the skills to help. And I studied consciousness. I studied Ken Wilber's work for years. So I developed a system of showing them where their religion's at. And most people don't even understand their religions. I've never met a single Christian that knew what the word Adam meant,

what the word Eve meant, or what the word Christ actually means. Most people think, for example, Jesus Christ is a name. The word Christ is a title. It means that you are one with the universe. It means you've achieved universal consciousness, that you are now one with the universe.

So as I say to the Christians, if you know what the word Christ means, I have a question for you. If you're one with the universe, how do you come back? They're all waiting for the second coming of Christ. I say, Jesus Christ is someone whose consciousness unified itself with the entire universe, so he's here all the time. All you've got to do is act like Christ. Be Christ-like. And then you don't need jesus to come back all this warring and fighting is because you're not

acting like christ you're not practicing christianity christianity is one of the most radical religions there is that you get to the core tenets of it but people are practicing corporate christianity because it keeps them profitable profitable to the real vatican profitable to the medical system profitable to all sorts system, profitable to all sorts of systems. I mean, the list is so bloody long, and it's not just Christianity. It's Islam, it's Judaism, and Buddhism has its own problems. Less, though. I studied this extensively, so I had to study the science on how consciousness grows and develops to actually then say, okay, here's where a person's at in their religious beliefs.

How do I take them up one step? Because if I take them too far, it blows the wheels off. Now, you know, what do you do? You go home and tell your mom and dad you're not going to church anymore. That's going to be a lot more stress than your breathing system can handle.

And it ruins your relationship. So I had to spend years and years of studying and working with patients to learn how to take them up one step at a time. And I learned that most people do not, I would say 98% of people actually don't understand their own religion. So I studied these religions.

I got dictionaries for all the religions from all over the world, studied what the words meant, and I sit them down and show them if you just practice what your religion actually means, most of the stuff goes away because what you're practicing is what was programmed into your head

like a little child, and you've never actually questioned the authority figures. And so I'm going to give you a quote that you should always remember, and it's by a very wise man named Shankara, who was a philosopher sage, a Hindu philosopher sage, who at eight years of age was walking all over India

looking for the greatest gurus to debate. And he rarely ever lost a debate at eight and ten years of age. Shankara said, No man can understand scripture until he is enlightened, which means Christed. And when he is enlightened, he does not need scripture. Okay, so here's the question I have for you. How many people teaching in Sunday schools and churches all over the world in temples are enlightened? Almost none. So what are you getting? Poor interpretations from underdeveloped people that should not be teachers. It would be

like having fat sick people teaching exercise in a gym, which we often do. So what I found in my journey is that to be a skilled therapist requires a tremendous amount of study and it requires a tremendous amount of development because you cannot take a patient or a client or an athlete any further than you've taken yourself if you hire someone to take you up a mountain but they've only climbed halfway up the mountain the instant you cross the halfway line you're now paying someone to get lost with you you don't have a guide anymore so czech professionals are taught and tasked to apply all these teachings to themselves and to be authentic leaders in the community and to grow themselves and to be authentic and not bullshit people and know when they're in above their head to ask for help so that they don't mislead people and take money from them when they're lost. And that's my life mission. That's what I'm here to do. And that's why you're standing in the room with me.

Because if I hadn't done it, you wouldn't be here. That's my final comment. Oh, my God. Yeah. Thank you for. Yeah. I don't think anyone. Does anyone have anything to say?

That was a fantastic show. Thank you. Thank you for having us to your office. Thanks. Thanks for the tour, and thanks for just sharing authentically and vulnerably. This has been really amazing. It's my pleasure. I applaud you guys for sharing too because, look,

if people like us don't work together to help other people find healthier, more honest, more authentic ways of doing everything from lifting weights to eating to living to sleeping, you don't need to be a genius to do the math. We're heading for big trouble. The earth is dying. We're running out of resources. We have a lot of major problems that are far bigger than how much can I lift tomorrow. But the reality of it is if I can motivate an athlete to eat organic food and to drink quality water and to spend money on the companies that are making products that are produced by corporations that are earth-friendly, the rule is this. Humanity itself is like an organism, and each human being is like a cell in that organism,

just like your body's made of 100 trillion cells. So cancer starts with one cell and grows to be a problem that kills you. And if we want to make a change in the world, the one thing we can do to make sure we do that is to take care of ourselves better, love ourselves better, grow, heal, and be a good example for others, and spend our money where it supports the earth and other people. And then you know you can leave the planet knowing you did

something to make the world a better place each day. So you don't have to run out and rescue people and tell the Bible thumpers to put their Bible down and go study with a yogi or whatever. All we got to do is teach people to eat better, live better, love better, and take care of themselves. And the research shows that we grow consciously. There's something inside of a human being that wants growth. As long as we feed people and show them how to keep their bodies healthy, then the spirit of the human being keeps reaching because it always wants to find out what it is. And what it is

is something greater than we can put on paper because the instant you try to describe the source of what we all are, you're already wrong because that thing is everything. And to describe something means to dissect it.

So the problem is with all this talk about God, the instant you start talking about it, you're already wrong. And that's why whenever anyone asked Buddha to describe God, he just went silent. And they thought he was just playing tricks on them or didn't want to tell them. But he was making the point. You cannot talk about what we are. You can't talk about what the source of the universe is. But you can love each other. And the more you love yourself and the more you love others,

the more you're godding. Yeah. And to understand how life works and how the body works is to keep yourself healthy enough to naturally follow the growth of consciousness, which means to become a more loving, more intelligent, more capable human being.

And so my point is, it's because of guys like you that we can share these kinds of things. So now all the athletes training becomes much more meaningful because now it's not just about dick swinging. It's about supporting each other and it's about making ethical,

honest and moral decisions. A moral is a code of conduct that is life affirmative. An ethic is a code of conduct that may or may not be life-affirmative. When I was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, I had a great big manual about who to kill and who not to kill. That's an ethics manual. But morality is about making decisions that are life-affirmative,

which means supporting all of us, and we need each other, right? We're all here together. We're all cells together we're all cells in that same organism so if one athlete learns to eat better live better and love better and embraces the kind of things we're talking about we've already made an honest change in the world so thank you guys for giving people like me a chance to share because we need all hands on deck right now yes sir where can people find more if they want to go to the Czech Institute? What do they do?

www.chekinstitute.com My personal blog is www.paulchecksblog.com And my YouTube channel where I have over 500 videos you can watch for free on all sorts of stuff I mean from everything we've been talking about and more is YouTube.com forward slash Paul C-H-E-K live

YouTube.com forward slash Paul Check live over 500 videos some of them quite deep too Thank you. Anders I just want to say thank you. I am very much on this path. I got rid of my, well, I say get rid of, sold my gym and got into this rehabilitation world, finding breathing, and this entire journey that you were talking about.

One of the goals of my life is to be in rooms with people like you and you guys, and this has been just like such an awesome experience to see your office and experience kind of your journey. Thank you. Know that I'm kind of on this same path and to see somebody that's been there is just really incredible. So thank you.

I'm with you on it every day. And I'll just say before we go, remember the books that are most suitable for the public are my book, How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy, which is unique. Love that book, by the books that are most suitable for the public are my book, how to eat, move and be healthy, which is unique because that book, by the way, yeah, it's the only book that I've ever seen that gives you an assessment that you can fill out a questionnaire shows you exactly what specific challenge you have in your body. And you can follow the book and it'll give you the specific information you need. You can follow the exercise

programs and they're the based on how much stress you are. So it's one of the only books I've ever seen in the world that individualizes your unique program for your needs, which I did because we're all as different on the inside as we are on the outside. So I wanted to develop something that wasn't a cookie cutter because that doesn't work. And then my little e-book, The Last doctors you'll ever need how to get healthy now both of which are available at thecheckinstitute.com uh eat move and be healthy is on amazon we've now sold 160 000 copies of it so it's doing pretty good excellent yeah very cool thanks um yeah if

you want to come and find me movement-rx.com we are combining strength and conditioning and physical therapy into programs that are accessible by gym owners members anyone suffering from shoulder low back knee pain incorporating breath balance behavior patterns that lead you to a healthier life if you want to find me on the socials it's andrews varner but movement rx movement-rx.com. Cool. Right on. You can find me at Douglas E. Larson on Instagram. Also got a cool side project coming up, douglarsonfitness.com. That's kind of like my catch-all site where I'm going to be putting my thoughts on all things fitness as well as if I have seminars coming up, which right now I do have some seminars coming up over the summer.

So if you're interested in that, go to DougLarsenFitness.com and have all kinds of cool stuff there to check out. You can find me at TheBloodSoShow.com. A lot more podcasts happening over there, and I have some events and seminars coming up. You can find it on that website. Thanks for joining us, and make sure to go over to iTunes. Give us a five-star review, positive comment, and I'll see you next week.

And as I say, if you like the – this is what I say to my students. If you like the seminar or the workshop, tell everybody. If you didn't, it's our secret. That's right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for making it all the way to the end of the show. If you like the show, which I know you did, please go share it on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever social media

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