Barbell Shrugged - How To Hack Fear

Episode Date: February 1, 2017

More dangerous than your opponent is your mind. If it doesn’t support you, you’re beaten before you’ve started. There are really only two types of fear: biological and psychological. -Tony Blauer When does fear come up- That moment you step up to a heavy barbell… When you are getting hit on by someone attractive at a bar… When you are speaking up to a new group of people… snakes… spiders… Fear is always driving us. Our awareness of it is more important than thinking we can ignore it or make it go away.  Tony Blauer has dedicated his life to knowing fear, and learning/teaching others how to manage it. He works with fighters, military units, CrossFitters, and everyone in between. We brought Tony on the show to talk about fear and how we can understand and manage it as athletes. As humans, the fear is build into the programming …the macho “I’m not scared” mentality is as much a lie as it a shitty strategy. Fear is biologically built into us, and ignoring it is impossible. However understanding it, and reacting quickly and appropriately to it is what leads to success in your endevours ....and getting out of bad situations.  We cover the psychology of fear, chat about street fights, and dive into functional movement and personal defense.  Tony runs a section of CrossFit education called CrossFit Spear. It isa full depth course going into the practice of self defense. You can learn more about it at CrossFit.com enjoy! Mike

The vest is the metaphor for fear. That there are things in life that you need to wear, but you need to wear your fear properly. You need to understand how to be comfortable with it. So you need to face it. You need to understand it, research it. Then you've got to confront it. It's going to be there.

But if you decided, I'm going to do this fight. I'm going to ask this person to marry me. I'm going to quit my shitty job and open up a fitness facility, a box, or become an actor, whatever you're doing, it's fear that holds people back. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe, and I'm here with Doug Larson. And we are hanging out with Tony Blauer.

He is the founder of the Spear System. CrossFit Spear. It used to be the CrossFit Combatives. CrossFit Defense. Yeah. It used to be CrossFit Defense and now it's CrossFit Spear. Correct. So you've been hanging out with Greg Glassman for a while teaching people in CrossFit gyms and running certifications for in seminars on how to have self-defense in your life. I've worked with everyone from like soccer moms to UFC fighters to Navy SEALs, kind of the entire spectrum. And you basically built your entire life around self-defense. And we now have, fuck fear. Oh my God, I didn't even realize that that's so weird all my shirts say this

and so it sounds like you have a lifetime of teaching self-defense correct uh doing combative type training and uh i think what we started talking about before the show was you're really getting into the psychology side because there's no way you can live in that world for that long without having to start to peel that back because usually that's what's keeping someone you know it you can learn all the the moves in the world but if you freeze up in that moment then you're kind of screwed yeah well listen we're in an amazing environment here where you know as a coach and experienced uh uh athlete you can tell when somebody's afraid of a box jump right the way they stand in front of it hesitate and stutter and you know very often when you grab the

bar whether you're going to make the lift or not right before it if you peel that onion back there's a moment where where you go i knew i was going to miss that but you didn't you didn't listen to your intuition your and your instincts and a lot of that is what we define as the fear loop and so what's important important when we're training people is for them to differentiate between the biology and physiology of fear and the psychology of fear. The biology and physiology is just going to be there. You know, some people respond differently to stress.

You look at, let's say, you know, Annie or Froning, and you can't tell if they're freaking out most of the time. Where other athletes, you can tell. You can see in the eyes. Yeah, and the body language is being 60 of communication but the big the big thing that we do and it's and it's interesting because having i've been coaching now for like 36 years and and uh there was always a common denominator and people like you like you said mike is is that uh you can learn all the moves. And then someone would say, hey, go spar with this guy or go grapple with this guy or go do that. And then you'd shift down and then there's that guy

where you know just before you're about to start whether you think you're going to win or lose. And so it changes, the mindset changes everything. And so what we did probably like around 2000, 2001, we really started talking about the psychology of fear and understanding just what's going on in the head. We created what we call the neural circuitry of fear and it's this flow chart. And it's almost a map that if you think of it like a hologram, where if you understand it, you can be hanging out and we're about to fight or I'm about to do a speech or I'm about to do a deal or I'm about to propose to somebody. And all of a sudden I go, I can't do it.

And you start having this conversation with yourself. And the maxim that we've now put forth to people is fear throttles everything we do in our life. Who you marry, how much money you make, where you live, how much weight you lift and whether or not you defend yourself. And what we do is, because I've always been fascinated with, with real world self-defense is it's, we, we build that into the course. You know, we, you know, I argue, and of course I'm biased that, uh, the ability to protect yourself or a loved one is a single most important skill anyone could have. And if I said to you, I don't, you know, whatever money you have, whatever guitar collection, stamp collection, materialistic wealth,

that if I said to you, you get to keep all that, but this person who you really care about or yourself, that's done tomorrow through some opportunistic violent act. Pick. You've got to pick right now. Most people who aren't insane will go, unless you were given everything in your life, you go, you know what, I can regain my fitness. I want my health and my peace of mind.

I can get back. I get all those materialistic things back. And so this is, again, that kind of self-awareness and situational awareness. But everything, if you peel the onion, comes down to your ability to manage your fear. I don't imagine fear is something that you can train someone to not feel. That's not an emotion that you can train to go away. It'll always be there, but how you deal with that fear really is the fundamental skill that you're honing with people. Correct. And so for example, like the story popped to mind here where I was down at Fort Bragg and I was working with some tier one dudes and we met on the weekend and they asked me, hey, do you want to go jumping? And I'm like, Oh, jumping, like, like jumping. They're like, no, no, no skydiving. I said, I'm good. They go, are you afraid? I said, well, I've done it twice as a fear management exercise. So I'm good. I know I can jump out of an airplane on purpose. And I've decided it's not a big thing for me. I did it. I free fall.

I did a static line. I did it. And, uh, they went, come on, you're afraid. I said, I said, well, yeah, yeah. I prefer not to jump out of airplanes. And they went, come on, you're afraid? I said, well, yeah, yeah. I prefer not to jump out of airplanes. And so they were teasing me because they knew part of what I was about. And I said, are you guys afraid? They go, no, that's where we're going. I said, well, why don't you let me pack your chute for you? And he was like, fuck that.

And I went, so you are afraid. You're afraid of if the wrong person packs your chute, that might not deploy properly. And it was really about semantics. So coming back to what you asked me, you know, doing reps and reps of stuff, you stress inoculate. You get used to it and everyone develops their own ritual. So if I ask somebody, hey, like a new person about to do a competition or a new person about to go into boxing or an MMA, he might be shitting his pants, has to piss. He wants to throw up. But I bump into him 10 fights later, he might be shitting his pants, has to piss, wants to throw up, but I bump into him

10 fights later, that's all gone, but now he's got a little bit of performance anxiety. Do I have my lucky rabbit? He's got some sort of ritual. Most of us athletes have that. What I'm trying to do is help people break people of that attachment, that codependence

on that. The ritual? Yeah. I mean, if someone has a ritual and that's what they like to do, that's fine. But it's more like when I work with a high-level athlete is to let them understand that they're the reason that they are right here in this event, that it wasn't their rabbit or their, where's my socks? My socks that I always like. Trust me, your socks had nothing? My socks that I always like.

Trust me, your socks had nothing to do with last fight's victory. Unless it's baseball. That's what I was going to say. Like the most superstitious sport in the world. Yeah. But like all of us are, and I am too, but what I do now is I laugh. It's the idea that you can catch yourself doing that and go, because if you disconnect from that, the power comes back to you. Right. That's interesting. People tend to give their power away to certain things.

Right. They have an experience. I see this happen a lot. They have an experience where, oh, I did this thing. It helped me get past this. That thing totally took care of that for me. Or I need, I need to get past this, this mental block. If I just do this one other thing that's outside of myself i can get there and sometimes and i i've been there myself yeah and sometimes i just say hey you know you can just choose yeah yeah choose your way there but but but we're all there it was easier said than done like everyone does that you want to you know could be your kid that you didn't you know you didn't kiss them good night and so they had a nightmare so they associate you know it's just the human condition which is why this the psychology of fear is so important that if you can see the fear loop and understand that negative spiral and how you get you get locked into that you can work your you know you can work yourself through that so that's that's really the biggest thing that, that I love doing.

And the, you know, blending it in as, as part of the serendipity of learning how to protect yourself, people can argue, well, you know, like what's the chances of me ever having to defend myself? And I go, you know, here's the thing is like, you know, having life insurance is a good idea, except that you need to die to collect it and you don't actually get to collect it. So isn't self-defense a form of philosophic insurance? It's life extension insurance. If you've got better situational awareness, good verbal de-escalation skills, and a push comes to shove some simple self-defense, that's life extension insurance. And so I tell people, we liken, as a metaphor, learning how to defend yourself to putting on a seatbelt or understanding, like you can go do a CPR first aid kit course in a day, six hours.

And I tell people at the end of that course, you have the skill to save somebody's life, but you're not a fucking doctor. You didn't go to school for four years. Right. school for four years, right? And so the idea here is you can learn simple self-defense in a day that might help you avert, you know, some sort of, you know, catastrophic event in your life. And everybody, if you think about anybody that's been in some opportunistic situation, if you could go to them and say, hey, you know, if you turn left on that street instead of right, or if you hadn't been on your phone there, you'd have seen those two guys come off the wall towards you. They'd of course want to Mulligan.

Let's do that over. I'm turning left. I'm going to not be on my phone. And so the magic of the course is in order, and we break it down almost like, almost like a, uh, like a, like a CrossFit model in the sense of that, that we need mechanics, consistency, intensity, the MCI, But I tell people, you need situational awareness. And if you have situational awareness, you will get a fear spike when you realize,

shit, what is that? What am I looking at there? Is that danger to me? If you don't have fear management skills, nothing positive happens there. Either you retract and recoil, and so you're lowering your self-esteem and your confidence, or you move through it with blinders on

and something bad happens to you. So fear management, even in that model, and that's why I was saying earlier, is it occurred to me a long time ago, and that was just my calling, that self-defense is the most important skill we could possess. And then I realized that, going back to what you said, I was teaching all these moves. calling that self-defense is the most important skill we could possess and and then i and then i realized that going back to what you said i was teaching all these moves my first student this is

like 1980. i was teaching this kid uh when were you born 81. wow that's kind of scary i'm out of here the um uh when i was teaching this 15 year old kid who's having a bully problem in school and what was i teaching i was teaching him at a box i was teaching him at a grapple i was teaching this 15-year-old kid who was having a bully problem in school, and what was I teaching him? I was teaching him how to box. I was teaching him how to grapple. I was teaching him taekwondo. I was teaching him this mishmash of stuff that I've been practicing. And he got his ass kicked.

And he got his ass kicked because of fear, because of emotion. And when I was telling him what happened, he went, well, the guy tripped me in school. And I was in front of a bunch of kids. And they were laughing. I mean, they're 15 years old, testosterone, right? And he goes, I lost it. And I picked up my books.

And the guy, and I was going, you motherfucker. I was so mad. And the guy go, what did you say? And he came up to me. And it had never gone physical. It had always been verbal abuse until then. And the guy poked him. And the student of mine, Mitchell, who was my first until then and the guy poked him in this student my

mitchell was my first student grabbed the guy slammed him against the locker bank and screamed leave me alone i don't even know who the fuck you are you know you've been bugging me since school and he pauses and he looks at me and he goes he just looks at me and he goes and i go and he goes and he dropped me there like what do you mean he dropped you he's just he hit me with a left hook and i just i was next thing i know i was on the ground i was like dude why didn't you zig or zag or block or wax on wax off there was no karate kid back then so no wax on wax off but what i found out when when mitch told me the story i said this doesn't make any sense why didn't you check when he goes well i was holding my school books and i was holding him shirt and i was like at that moment i was like how do you use your

boxing or your wrestling or your krav maga or your taibo or your if you're or if you're in this position right and it was like it was like the god of self-defense hit me with a light bolt and i it was 1980 i said oh my god we teach self-defense wrong and from that day forward i reverse engineered everything was based on a scenario everything reverse engineered. Everything was based on a scenario. Everything we do is based on a scenario. But the key, it doesn't matter what I would teach people, it was managing your fear. It was teaching people to manage their fear.

Well, it sounds like if that spike of fear is the first moment in which you start considering you need to defend yourself, it might be too late. The situational awareness needs to come first. So the fear, if it comes at too much of a surprise, then you end up in your – Fetal alert. Yeah, you end up in like a sympathetic nervous system response where you're going to like freeze, fight, or flee. And by then, you're not choosing anymore. It's just your body's taking over. Uh, if you have the situational awareness first, you can kind of say, Hey, those two guys kicked off the wall and they're coming my direction. Right. And then the fear spikes, but you already are considering the

situation. Would that be true? Yeah. And that, and that, it was, that was, that was great. And we talked about the, you know, the, the reactive response, that reptilian brain of, you know, uh, you know, fight or flight or, or submit. And, but here's the thing is by through the education, at the end of the day, there's, there are situations. So we broke it down into what we call the three D's detect and avoid. So D1, D2, D3 detect and avoid defuse and deescalate and defend yourself. And so what we've got is a more legal and ethical kind of framework and formula. But stuff can happen right away in D2 where suddenly like a fight breaks out, but you're like a verbal thing that just escalates really quickly.

And sometimes you're sucker punched and shit can happen. So in our training, somebody who goes through, so we've got pretty much three tiers of training. One is called a no fear seminar, which is understanding the psychology of fear. Then there's a, another seminar we do called essential self-defense and it's just primal gross motor movements. And then there's, we do this be your own bodyguard gig where we're getting in our high gear suits, we're getting in protective padding and we're doing,'re doing scenarios we're replicating shit you know in confined spaces and so we talk about all of that we actually do some scenarios depending on the on the course room but we'll do a scenario where you are dropped and you're on the ground

and fetal and and because you're wearing gear and protective gear people are like hitting and nailing you and so what you're doing is you're you're it's it's all what we call brain-based neuroscientific uh training because you're replicating a primal protective and tactical option and you're doing it in a way that your brain is recognizing that inaction here gets your ass kicked you know and then reaction gets you back in the fight. And then responsive is how do I pick up the pre-contact cues earlier? And it's all, it's working with, uh, you know, neuroplasticity theory and, and the anticipatory cells, you know, in, uh, in your, um, in your brain. So you could literally, for example, if you took a boxing stance, I know you wanted to hit me before

take a boxing stance. Okay. So this to hit me before. Take a boxing stance. So this is how most people practice self-defense. This would be Karate Kid wax on, wax off. So I would stand here like this. You'd throw a punch. We'd slip. We'd power. We'd block.

But in the street, this would be too late. If you let somebody put their hands up, like this motion from here, you're never going to block it. It's just the hand is quicker than the eye, but really the hand is quicker than the brain. I've never seen a street fight where two guys, like it's usually someone says something, and then I'll say, no, boom. And so interestingly enough, like most people will start their training

from this type of position, and they work on that. And then what you just observed is, but it starts over here. So we have all these drills, and one of them is like a six-stage drill and it's done in super slow motion it's called emotional climatization where you actually stand here and you catalog you actually narrate what you hear what you see and what you feel and you go through so the three fundamental stimuli that trigger a flinch is our auditory, visual, and tactile. And so if I'm standing here and we're talking, tell me when you think I'm going to hit you.

Now. Right? So what you'll see, now most people who get locked into that moment, they don't go, oh, I just noticed the guy bladed. You know? Oh, and the guy just he just looked around for witnesses now you know his fingers are twitching you know and we teach people pick up

that shit because you can be out that door out that door or intercepting depending on the scenario and so we do all of this where the least important part of what we teach is actually that part. That's the easy shit. The hard stuff is picking up the moral, ethical, legal pre-contact cues. And then people ask me how important is speed in a fight? And what they think, what they're talking about is fast twitch muscle fiber, non-telegraphic motion.

And I go, speed is everything. And they go, I thought so. And I go, speed of recognizing you're in danger, speed of recognizing you're in danger speed of making a decision and managing your fear speed of also giving yourself permission to avoid the situation most guys like most of us there's a point in our lives where we'd have gotten into a death match not realizing it was a death match over a fucking parking spot guys when i was younger right i ended up in brawls that made no sense.

It's just stupid. Now someone is trying, like I recognize, I'm like, all right, let's just go over here. Right, right. Completely avoid this crowd. Yeah, and so that's a neat thing. And so I'm trying to, again,

redefine that for people and kind of plant those seeds way, way earlier. I was just teaching in Singapore and I was talking to the group and I said, uh, you know, I'm 56 now. I said, there's things that I heard 30 years ago when I was 26, but I wish I'd known them or understood their potency when I was 26. Cause that would have saved me a lot of stress, but it took me 30 years to get to here. Yeah.

And, uh, I said, man, I wish I knew that when I was 26. And they looked at me, you know, and you could see like, you know, like, yeah, yeah, that's deep. And then I said, but that makes no sense. I'd have had to have been taught it when I was minus four. Right? Like if it still takes 30 years for you to. Because we have what we see the cool meme and we look at it and that's a cool meme or that's a cool max. Oh, yeah.

But it doesn't mean that it's going to sit with you and that you're going to be able to act on it. I mean, there's, there's also things that I saw 10 years ago or quote and I saw that quote and I was like, oh yeah, cool. Right. I see the same quote now. I'm like, whoa. Right.

That has, it carries a totally different meaning. Yeah. It's like reading a book five years apart. It's not the same book anymore. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Practically, how do you, how do you get somebody to, to manage their fear? Like how do you,

how do you practice something where if you're in a, in a, in a training scenario, like they, they might be a little uncomfortable, but not scared. Like they would be scared if someone stuck a wife, stuck a gun in their wife's face. Right. Not, not the same level of fear will, will come up for that person. How do you simulate that? So everyone has different types of fears. Like the number one fear in the world, do you know what it is? Loneliness or death?

No. Consistently, the number one fear in the world, and it might have changed, I haven't checked in a few years, is public speaking. There you go. Right? And I remember, and I'll come back to your question, but I was teaching at this university,

and there's this amphitheater setting here 300 students and I said who knows what the number one fear is and I was brought in like you know as a self defense situational awareness safety consultant I go okay you know how many of you know what the number one fear is in the world and they all you know hundreds of them public speaking I said number two

it was like loss of a loved one and or personal security. And then sharks and shit like that. And I'm like, I'm going. Sharknado. Yeah. And so, and this is several years ago. I'm sure it's changed.

Were you in Ohio? Right. You're afraid of sharks? Land sharks. The land sharks. You know, they have them all over the place. So they had these giant TVs up here. I said, picture this here.

How many of you, and it was a mixed audience, but mostly female. I said, picture up here on these big TV screens, you being chased down an alley, and you're being raped and beaten. Or you come up here and give a speech. Which scenario would you put your hand up to purchase and they're like they were stunned that i said that right all that is we we and why i'm using that is like like you can use what i'm about to share about how do you manage fear if you understand the formula you can apply it to a lift you can apply it to a date you can apply it to a lift. You can apply it to a date. You can apply it to anything.

Fuck fear comes from. It's face it. Try to understand it. Do your research on it. Then control it. It never dissipates. I did this five-hour fear management lecture in New York years ago. I'm sharing a cab back to the hotel with this guy.

And he says to me, hey, can I ask you a question? I'm like, yeah, sure, man. He goes, what's it like to have no fear and i look at him we're in a taxi cab in new york and i go you're talking to me you're talking to me and you got that thank you but uh um taxi driver deniro thank you um and so classic um and i looked at him i said what makes you think i have no fear he goes well that's talk on fear and the whiteboard thing in that chart i I go, dude, that's just fear management. That's the map. That's the path that you take. And I said, listen, I said, would you be afraid of like a charging

tiger or bear? You know, if we're walking on the street and an animal came out, would you be afraid? He goes, yeah, I go, me too. What about if you were walking down the street and three guys saw you coming and they put out their cigarettes and walked towards you? Would you be all fucking, yeah, me too. You know, the difference is you'll be fearful for this long and get hit or jumped. I'll be fearful for this long and then I will use it as a fuel.

I will use it to, I will inject the energy that fear spike gives me into a D1, D2, D3 decision. To make that happen, I need to understand, I got to face it. In other words, no apathy. I need to understand it. Ideally, this is done in advance, right? Where you go, why am I afraid of the dentist? Or why am I afraid of doctors or this, or do a little research, and then I need to confront or control it. And the big thing on the C part is that we're telling people, just because you're going through this process doesn't mean it goes away. And I use this metaphor, and then the last part of the K,

and I wish I had my other shirt here. So you remember the No Fear Company? Oh, yeah, totally. So I used to, and the reason like studying fear and the psychology of fear is so, um, important to me is I grew up with what I thought was way more fear than anyone else ever had. But I grew up in the sixties and you didn't talk about this shit and you still

don't to a degree, but nobody, nobody talked about it then. And, uh, and I remember I grew up in Canada and you're either't to a degree but nobody nobody talked about it then and uh and i remember i grew up in canada and you're either a skier or skater and i grew up on skis and i was considered by thomas 13 one of the top prospects i was competitive skier my parents were on the ski patrol everyone's like oh there's tony you know and i was at this big race really important race to get that at next level big

zone race at montromba the starting gate was above the tree line it's fucking freezing up there i'm up there i've already pissed three times i want to projectile vomit i'm scared shitless my coach is rubbing my leg and i'm you know two skiers away and he goes how do you feel kid and i go great coach it was a fucking lie, right? But it was 1973. You didn't talk about feelings with your coach, right? In many respects, you still don't. And I tell this story at all our seminars. I go, listen, I went down the hill,

and I caught my tip about three gates from the finish line. I wiped out so hard, I actually slid through the finish line. So I actually, I was disqualified because I missed the gate, but I did get through the finish line. And somebody came up to me and they said, man, too bad you fell, kid, because you were like a second faster ahead than the guy who won it. It was like a mile in a ski race in a giant slalom race. And I talk about this because had my coach come up to me 15 minutes early and said, come here, kid. Yeah. What's up, kid? How do you feel, kid?

Great coach. Hey. And he put his arm around me and said, have you noticed that you've never won a race, but you're one of the top skiers on the team that you always wipe out that you've got the sabotage thing going. I'd have looked at him and gone, I don't know what you're talking about, coach. Right? And he goes, come on, man. What's going on? I was so afraid to win.

I was so afraid to lose. I was afraid to let my parents down. I was afraid to find out how good I was because everyone all for years, oh, you're so good. You're so good. You're probably going to represent Canada in the Olympics. And like, really, really, really. And, but I never had a, a, anything in my head to wrap around that to understand how did I, how was I supposed to process that? And I, and I think about this and

I thought about this years later when I started teaching self-defense after that incident, because I wasn't teaching how to think I was just teaching what to do and the, what to do. There's lots of guys that knew what to do against Mike Tyson, right? But they were so scared shitless they couldn't make anything happen. And so, you know, even Froning said, he says, there's guys faster and stronger than me, he says, but no one

more mentally tough. And when it gets out there, you're looking at him and looking at the clock and looking at him, you're killing yourself. You're beating yourself out. Beating yourself up. So in the ski story, I visualized this. If my coach had pulled me aside and said, I want you to snowplow today.

I don't want you to try and win. Just snowplow down the course, and your victory will be not wiping out for the first time. That'll be your PR. You know, I go, wow. Cause nothing breeds success like success itself. And so it's giving people little tools. Like when somebody is afraid to box jump, screaming at them, come on, you can do it. Or giving them 25 pound plates is not coaching them. Cheering is not coaching. And that's what a lot of coaches do. They cheer getting inside somebody's

head and going. So, you know, if, if, if if if i break this down i talk about technician trainer coach and that is the path right you know i train trainers so i go listen you're a technician when you start and then you start to understand programming now you're a trainer but you're not a coach until you can inspire performance right and and you got to look at yourself that way and then there's times where you might arrive at a point where you are a coach, but you go, I want you to work on your grip more. I need you to do this exercise here. And you're giving them technician shit.

Move your feet out a little bit here. Right. But you don't have that wisdom. You're just parroting shit in the beginning. And so, you know, going back to this ski thing is I wanted to say, and I blurted it out one day years later, where I wanted to say to my coach, if I'm so good, why am I so scared? Because nobody had ever said, and I've since then dealt with military law enforcement guys with PTSD, been in incidents, and they're shook up in here.

And I can literally in a five ten minute conversation turn their head around about an incident because nobody has said to them this is what physiology feels like this is what when you when you when your brain triggers a tacky psyche moment which is big obnoxious pedantic language for slow motion like you're processing shit so fast that it feels like it's going in slow-mo. There were a few survival responses that your body makes happen in a crisis. And if nobody teaches you that as a kid, then like butterflies in your stomach. Like, you know, you're prepared, everyone's rubbing your shoulders and you're like, man, why do I got butterflies? My palms are sweaty. How come I'm breathing hard?

Why do my feet feel like they're like 50 pounds each? Well, that's all natural physiology. Yeah. But most people have to go through a bunch of tournaments or competitions or fights or public speaking till they naturally acclimate, naturally stress inoculate, and then they do it. Where if we just started teaching people like kids going, hey, these are some of the physiological changes you have in your body. They're not a big deal.

They don't change what you have to do. And I use the metaphor. This is something we teach in the CrossFit Spirit Course where I go, do you know the difference and understand the difference between doing MRF

with or without a vest? Right? And so, you know, you guys have obviously done Murph, right? With a vest? Yeah. I have not. Okay.

Without a vest, obviously? Yeah. Without a vest, which is easier with or without? Definitely easier without. Yeah. Right. And so if you were never in the military,

the first time you put on the vest, you put it on for a pre-Murph picture, you put it on too tight because you don't know what you're doing. And if you put it on too a pre-MIRF picture, you put it on too tight because you don't know what you're doing. And if you put it on too tight, you can't breathe when you start moving. So you start to panic because that's a physiological,

that's like you're big into jujitsu. It's like, if you remember back in the beginning, guys who knew how to relax, you're going, this guy's 140 pounds, there's no way because I'm like dying here. I'm getting claustrophobic, I'm panicking because when people know how to relax their weight on you, it's a scary feeling until you stress inoculate, right? And so the Murph metaphor is this, is that you're wearing the vest and you start to run

and it's too tight. So right away you're like, and so if you don't know what you're doing, because you never wore a vest before, you swing the pendulum too far the other way. And now it's too loose. And now it's bouncing and hitting you and now you're running like this and what's happening is your brain is going I'm losing time, they're getting ahead of me I'm panicking and at some point you finally say fuck it, stop, and you find

how to wear it and the vest is the metaphor for fear that there are things in life that you need to wear but you need to wear your fear properly you need to understand how to be comfortable with it so you need to wear, but you need to wear your fear properly. You need to understand how to be comfortable with it. So you need to face it. You need to understand it, research it, then you're going to confront it. It's going to be there. But if you decided I'm going to do this fight, I'm going to ask this person to marry me. I'm going to quit my

job and open up a fitness facility, a box or, or become an actor, whatever, whatever you're doing, it's fear that holds people back. And so really just, you know, it's something maybe you can't say around your grandmother, you know, or maybe you can, but it's just that in your head in this day and age, I mean, we're so loose with our language. This wasn't, this wouldn't be popular in the fifties, right? But there's many times that we've all said fuck it let's fuck this let's do it right and so many many years ago i you know i came up you know with the acronym at the end of the day it's just that little trigger you know you're gonna have

the fear you've got to you gotta you just gotta go for it fuck it yeah so so it's a big part of fear management as well just realizing realizing that fear is totally normal. Everyone is afraid. Like in your case when you were skiing, knowing if you had the realization, or maybe you did know this, I don't know, that all the other competitors at that particular tournament or race or whatever it was, they were all just as scared as you were. Would that have helped?

Do you coach people on that? Oh, yeah. We definitely talk about that. It just triggered a funny fighting story so i was coaching uh kick boxers and this guy sean he's fighting for amateur kickboxing three round fights when you go for the title it's a four round fight and uh so sean uh we're he's he's doing his warm-up the the official comes in he goes you know 15 minutes closes the door it's like an old scene an old rocky movie right bottom of the auditorium and uh and uh i go how do you feel kid you know like feeling like like you know mickey hey how do you feel right and uh he's he's shadow boxing he's moving around and he goes i feel good

coach he goes i'm nervous but i feel good i go you're supposed to be nervous dude because you're about to get in a fight right and uh i go listen no matter what the other guy that actually said this i said no matter what that guy looks like however he's standing there and this is back in roberto duran sugary leonard era i go he's looking at you he's's got that freaking face like that Duran stare. Inside, his heart is pounding too, just like you. And his blood is racing up and down. He's got butterflies. But he's standing there and he's giving you the look

because that's the facade. That's what you got to do. But he knows you're there to fight too. And he goes, thanks, coach. And he goes back and he continues shadowboxing. And I'm sitting there with my assistant and something starts to nag me. And I'm like, fuck. And I look sitting there with my assistant, and something starts to nag me. And I'm like, fuck.

And I look up at Sean. I go, Sean, dude, I've got to apologize for that answer. He goes, why? It was great. I loved it. It relaxed me. I go, yeah, but I never asked you what you're afraid of. Remember what I said earlier, that cheering isn't coaching?

I told him it's okay to be nervous. But I never asked him, what are you afraid of? Because he could have been afraid his girlfriend was watching, his mom was watching, and she never watches the fight. Maybe he hurt his hand in training and he didn't want to tell me, right? And he's like, what is it? Because

that might change how we strategize. And he says to me, true story, I love this. He says to me, you know, I've sparred 10 rounds the fight's only a four round fight i've done three round fights in this type of environment but this is my first four round fight and i'm worried about getting all my kicks in because the minimum kicks in each round and all that and he goes i just i never done it's stupid it's stupid

because i've done 10 rounds but I've never done a four round fight where I'm fighting, really fighting the guy. And I was like, I would have never guessed that. So I looked at him, I said, I paused. I said, can you do two rounds? He's like, yeah, of course. I said, so just do two rounds twice. And he looks at me, he goes, okay.

And I really believe, I mean, he did all the work, but that strategy is how we won the fight at the second, at the end of the second round, I'm squirting water in his mouth. I go, can you do two rounds? He goes, fuck. Yeah. Right. And, and, and honest to God. So in, in, uh, amateur kickboxing, the, the, uh, the ring is 16 feet. So you've got a foot on each side. So it's 14 feet between the rope. So you can hear the other side if you're listening. And just as I say, can you do two rounds?

We hear the other guy, and he goes, yeah. The other guy goes, coach, what round is it? Like it's that subtle stuff where you realize, I'm better prepared than this guy. You just know the map. You know where you're going to run. You know your escape route. You know where you're going to rest. And it's you know, where you're going to run, you know, your escape route, you know, where you're going to rest.

And it's, it's the same thing when, when you're programming or planning like a workout, you know, you know, if you get tired and box jumps, now we know rest on the top because jumping down is easier than jumping up. Yeah. Right. It's just, you start to, as you get more experience, you start to strategize stuff. And a lot of that is having, it having that self-awareness of the understanding part. Do I really understand what I'm doing, what I'm in for? Let's take a break real quick.

When we come back, I want to understand more. Seriously. Hey guys, what's going on? This is Dave Tilley. I'm here at Power Monkey Camp. We're here with the guys from Barbell Shrugged and we want to do a quick little assessment for the front rack and talk about some things that can go wrong. You know, it's really important in the front rack that if you have wrist pain or you can't get into a good

front rack position, there's a lot of reasons why that could be happening. And if you just kind of like jump to a random drill and don't actually assess in front of that, you're going to spin your wheels and you could probably actually be leading to more problems down the road. So most common example, people do a front rack they try to do you know push jerks or whatever and they feel like their wrists are gonna explode so this wrist may be getting pushed into a motion hyper mobile wise and getting pain because maybe my elbow is stiff my shoulder is stiff my middle back is stiff if you don't clear those things off in a checklist one by one you're not

gonna know what's causing the problem so So we're going to have my friend here just go up in a front rack for me. Full grip or? Yep, full grip. OK. All fingers. This is going to be hard. So he's going to guillotine himself right in the neck. Now, so what we see, right, so we see the elbows are dipped, right?

And it's really hard for him to get his chin locked down all the way. So what we're going to do is have them come back down rest the barbell we're gonna check these things one by one right so first thing we want to see is can your wrist extend to 90 plus degrees backwards this way okay without having a pinch here very important for handstands to get your center of mass over stacked in a good alignment also again as we're talking very good for front rack very important overall we find that people grip all day long right barbell CrossFit Hanging rings and they're inside of their soft tissue here becomes extremely stiff

So let me have you just go like this for me. I'm gonna go like that Good, and if we look at this angle Alright, he's got a little limitation here, and it kind of bends back here The other one you can also do is on the floor Let's come down hands and knees for me and just see if you can go here and just rock your wrist straight over. Good and we're looking to see can he make an angle with the floor here and not let his heel pop up of his hand and how does that feel? Pretty rough. Come on back. So that's what it is. Can you get there? Does the heel not pop off

and does your wrist feel like it's gonna explode? So for for people with these issues, definitely something you want to work on. The easiest thing you can do, come on over here. We're going to have him just go right on the inside of his forearm, and he's going to do a couple passes up and down right through his inside of his forearm. Go ahead and try that. Obviously a little bit harder surface, but we're working with what we got. So all the way down yet and let your hands move up and down. Let's go five on the front and then five maybe on the inside here.

Pretty great, huh? Feels good. And then on the outside. Yep. So again, we're trying to get inside the soft tissue of when you grip all this flexor pronator tissue attaches to your medial epicondyle right here. And again, as you grip more, you can progressively lose the ability to extend your wrist here. So spend a lot of time on here for people that have that screen as a

positive for a limited mobility. The other side? Yep. I will just do one for the... Okay. So let's stand up. So next we're going to check elbow. So can he get his elbow bent so that his knuckles are close to his shoulder? Not at all. Yeah. So we turn sideways. He's got some space here.

Too much guns, man. Too much guns. The biceps are huge, right? So the biggest thing we see is an error here, turn sideways. Sometimes people are doing this assessment, and they're way out tall like this. Wouldn't really want to jerk like this, so we're going to come nice and close in the front,

and as he moves in closer, we see that he's limited. So the other thing here is if he relaxes totally, and I go to try to help him, I get the same thing. It's stiff, right? So this is probably a true mobility problem. And where do you feel that? Let me do it again. In the triceps. Perfect. Yeah. So this is common, right? Sometimes it can be the bony alignment in the capsule itself. Those things are a little bit harder to address and I wouldn't recommend trying to do those on your own. Maybe find someone who's a little bit more specialized in elbow rehab. But if it's just a big old stretch in the back of his arm,

long head of your tricep comes up behind, right on the underside of the glenoid, and it crosses both joints. So if you're here and you're tensioning one side to get your elbows up, you could be limiting it on the other side. So similar to this one, find the long head of your tricep on the outside,

and you're just gonna go a couple passes. You can do this with a barbell, but just up and down about three or four times try that you can also use a foam roller a little bit easier but usually you want to find a couple hot spots oh man okay crazy but a lot of push-ups a lot of dips people become very stiff and their triceps soft tissue but again so now we have two things we know are going on we have his wrist extension is limited his elbow flexion is limited so those are already coming a little bit of a warm up

for whenever he tries to do a front racker and an ollie workout with jerks in it. Cool? I'm like the Tin Man, right? That's all right, that's all right. You have other great qualities, that's okay. So next thing we're gonna do is just see can he have pure shoulder elevation in this plane,

which is slightly close to flexion, but we wanna see can he elevate his arms up and keep his ribcage down. We see people who are stiff and sometimes in their Terry's they'll lift their arm and the inferior border of their angle of their scat will come along for the ride and they hyper extend into their rack position or they don't have good lumbopelvic control and they get to here and again those ribs pop up so he'll turn sideways and let's just see if you can go straight up this way

keep your core nice and tight good it's pretty good but you see this coming up a little bit relax for me I'm gonna help you out here. I'm narrow. Good. And I can even kind of hold his shoulder blade, come on back down. You can even kind of resist a little bit of that inferior motion. Go ahead. But he's pretty good. You know, he's got really good elevation of his shoulder, not too much stiffness. Say somebody was really struggling with this and they were just kind of stuck and you pushed them and they couldn't go anywhere. They're just like tipping over backwards. The one we like a lot for this is gonna be with a PVC pipe so the biggest error we see people who are stretching their shoulders you know lat and teres are

internal rotators along with your subscap and that's usually the offending tissue from all the volume of overhead pull-ups or rope climbs or trying to keep close bar path into here you can get very stiff in your lats now when you stretch if your palms are internally rotated or you're hyper extended in your upper back you're slacking that tissue and you're not actually targeting what you need to find we find a lot of people who come to us with shoulder pain because they're stretching their arms like this with their thumbs down or they have their hands on a block and they're like this sorry if I just screamed in the mic but

they're stretching in an internally rotated position so now we're bypassing the tissue and a lot of people get an impingement based pain from that so we want to tweak this a little bit so I'm happy to grab this pipe and an under grip position all right and you're going to kneel down elbows are going to go about shoulder width apart where you would rack up for your front rack round in this upper back quite a bit so for this drill we're trying to focus on the soft tissue right so we're going to round in our spine and now this is an externally rotated position his elbows are locked in and just have you sink back to your heels and then take a deep breath in exhale fully and you'll see he

has pretty good motion someone who is stiff they're gonna rock back and they're gonna be about here and they're gonna feel like their arms are very very stretched here make sure the person feels the stretch here they do not feel the stretch up top we don't want to have a closing pain here from a pinch. Okay, so you can relax with that. So we got wrist, we got elbow, we got front rack this way. The last one we want to check is stand up again for me is along with flexion and elevation. Do they have external rotation? Your shoulder joint capsule is taught here differently than it might be for a back squat or it might be for an overhead position. So he stands up with his elbow here can he externally rotate this way which he's doing a pretty good job of right so that's not too terrible somebody might be stiff and they might have limited here this is a tricky one be careful about how hard you push this one because sometimes again the soft tissue is limited and they might have a problem there but we want to make sure we can

rotate this way to get a wide jerk grip for people who are trying to get more collarbone front rack space here right to get your arms to press through. So if someone is limited, the one we like here, very gentle on this. Don't go crazy. But you're going to hold yourself in a front rack and just very gently kind of mobilize your shoulder joint this way. Should not have any shoulder pain. It shouldn't feel like it's going to hurt at all on the front or the back. Just keep your elbow nice and relaxed.

Okay, this one's not as common you probably find some other areas that are more limited but just try that again he is not appropriate for this one we're just gonna show it so the ones he has so far yep good and he has good motion there but so we've said he needs wrist he needs elbow he does not need shoulder flexion he does not need shoulder external rotation if he just warms up every day and starts cranking on this he might cause him some shoulder issues because he's already probably mobile enough for that position. And if he feels pretty stiff elsewhere in his front rack, but he's doing this,

he doesn't need that. He needs wrist and elbow. What kind of range of motion should I see here? It's dependent on the person. And sometimes Chad and Jody, they like to see about one to two inches outside your shoulder width. So if you can get outside of shoulder width, see here, some people are different, some people jerk a little bit more closer, a little more wider, but we try to see if we can get just your hand, finger, outside the width and again I mean it's probably between 20 and 30 degrees. And how many reps would you say to do? Yeah I'd say maybe 10, 10 or so on each side, just more breathing than really cranking. We're more fans of consistency over intensity, so we don't want to like you know torque on our shoulder joint like crazy to get it way out here.

So like maybe one set of 10 for each side? Yep, we have people make a checklist, so like one set of maybe 30 to 40 seconds on each forearm, 30 seconds to 40 seconds on each soft tissue on the lat, 30 seconds maybe in your front rack stretch, all the things that are limited on. And yesterday you were having us do the,'re having us do it in between our sets. Huge, yeah. Yeah. So would you say yes, if you're doing like say front squats and you know you're tight in maybe the wrist, you go in between your sets of front squats, you do your wrist, you do your soft tissue work for your elbow. Yeah. So maybe 10 minutes in your warm up and then in between sets that you're doing whatever technical drill or if you're even front squatting, you know, whatever your volume is, you'll probably have five or six sets between warm-up and actual volume.

You can get a lot of good changes within that set and hopefully help them transfer over to whatever you're working on. Okay. Cool. So the last one we want to do is thoracic spine. A lot of people do have true stiffness in their middle back. So these 12 levels of rib cage here, they get stuck into a rounded position and they can't get their elbows up like this, right? So they're like, they feel wrist pain, they feel elbow pain, but they're stuck into a rounded position and they can't get their elbows up like this right so they're like they feel wrist pain they feel elbow pain they're stuck this way right and they're mobilizing this and this so they're

trying to stretch this and this they're doing all sorts of crazy stuff on their forearm but the problem is here yeah you can't extend through here so we do two assessments for this both the kind of crossover let me have you lay in your stomach for me and you're gonna push up into kind of like a seal Yep, so this is also assessment for the hip extension mobility on this side, but we want to like see a very nice flat, sorry, a nice even curve throughout his entire spine, and we see in him he's got a little bit of a hinge point, so if I put my hands here, there's a pretty steep angle here, and then it flattens out, and he even kind of starts to round a little bit on top, so you can relax for me. We'd like to see a nice smooth even curve so that

each level of his spine is doing equal share, and he's not getting loaded. So we do this one, I would say you're a little limited there. The other one we can do is have you kind of sit like I am on your hands and your knees. Yeah and just face this way. Okay. And we're gonna go one elbow between right here. Yeah rock those heels all the way back. We rock them back so they can't cheat with their lower back. Some people can kind of cheat this test but we want to make sure we do both together. One hand goes across your chest. And you're going to rotate up and try to look at the ceiling. Good, come on back down. And we're going to look from here straight ahead. Do one more for me. Good, not too bad. But he is lifting up a little bit. Let's try the other side. Make sure that elbow goes right between

your knees too. Yeah, try too bad. But he is lifting up a little bit. Let's try the other side. Make sure that elbow goes right between your knees too. Yeah, try this one. Good, not too bad. So it's a little limited on his left, right's not too bad. If somebody was really limited, they would probably look like this. Just the elbow between. So he'd probably try to move and he would only get to here.

If I came over and tried to help him a little bit, we'd be really stuck. We'd like to see about 50 plus degrees from this angle to the horizon to here. If somebody is limited what they're gonna do we can use a foam roller let me have you lay on your side for me yeah and you're gonna put your top leg up on top of this yep this bottom hand can go actually support your neck actually usually you'd have somebody support their head use your hand for that we don't want to have someone's

neck like flopped over Paul look at this perfect excellent so we got a team teammate assist here so this hand will hold in your lower lower back position and this hands gonna go right in your ribs this is gonna be the cutest thing ever ready you're gonna turn your head and you're gonna rotate away and you're gonna rotate take a deep breath. Hey, honey. And then exhale. Good. That was the best thing I've ever seen.

That's enough. So, and you can relax, but we want to get somebody in a position where their lower back is not excessively moving. There should be no low back pain at all. Turn the head, eyes go where the rest of your body goes, and you can even look all the way with your neck, and then you can rotate with your ribs. And as you breathe at end range, your lungs expand your rib cage, which attaches to your thoracic spine. So when you're at end range your lungs expand your rib cage which attaches your thoracic spine so when you're at end range and you're a little stuck when you inhale exhale you mobilize

your ribs on their own so we're a big fan of breathing for the mobility part of it we're also a big fan of breathing because as you fully exhale we can tap into like the parasympathetic side of kind of like relaxation of tone and sometimes you'll get really good changes between so how long would you stay in this position I usually go like two to three breaths. Okay. Yeah, cycle breaths, fully inhale out on both. Right?

So based on what you find, right? So we would do these things, and then we would go back and we would retest your front rack. And we'd see how it feels. And between sets, if you just do one or two things, we see people who have really good progress over time. But again, the take-home message is here is like make a checklist. Think about all the things that could go wrong. Think about whether they have a mobility problem or maybe all these things check out and their front rack still looks terrible.

They need coaching, some stability work maybe, or just a better technical cue to get them into a right position. It's mobility, control, technique, maybe programming. Maybe they just fall apart at the end of their heavy sets of front squats. All those things can be possibly limited. Alright, so for more with Dave, we did a whole podcast with you and Dan.

Check it out on barbellstrug.com. Yep, and you can find Dan at fitnesspainfree.com. You can find me at shiftmovementscience.com. And then I also work at Champion Physical Therapy in Boston, if everyone's in the neck of the woods. Thanks, Dave. Cool. Yeah.

Yeah. Where it goes, there's a whole play on the No Fear. Oh. That's the – I still remember I said, remember the No Fear shirts? Right. There's a whole – yeah, I left that. I got to finish that. Okay.

Well, let's just go straight into that then. Yeah, yeah. We're back, if you didn't notice. All right. Okay, so earlier you mentioned the company No Fear. Yeah, yeah. That a lot of us probably recognize from if you're my age, high school, roughly. I think they're still around.

I think so. Mostly, like, I think motocross stuff branched off. But I remember buying the No Fear shirts because they were cool, badass, and everything. And then because everything that I did, like secretly when I was doing all the training, so much of it was for me. Because I had this fear growing up of, you know, every time I walked around a corner, I was like, what if somebody jumps me here? I remember, you know, asking my dad, hey, I'm going to high school next year. What if something happens? And he's the one that said, oh, you've got to learn some martial arts, you know, if you're worried about that shit. And, you know, that's how I got into it.

And I'd wrestled for years, but it never, you know, most wrestlers never thought of wrestling as a foundation for MMA or fighting until the UFC hit, which didn't even occur to anybody. But so in 2001

when we first started doing our weekend certifications, we were talking about this, what we call cycle behavior, neural circuitry of fear. And that basically that there was no such a thing as a state of no fear. That there's always, and you said it earlier, that there's always going to be some sort of fear relative to your experience. But then as you get more experience, maybe you don't say fear, you say caution or respect or, you know, let's's make sure you know that that everything's set up properly well that's lingo for hey do you guys look over the plan do we have enough gas right you know like why do pilots do a checklist before they take off well that's fear i mean if you

reduce it right you don't want to be they're gonna did you fill up no right like you know like you know you check so i'm glad I asked. Yeah, exactly. So, so that checklist. And so what we did is, is when we're teaching guys on the whiteboard, we write down no fear. And we talk about how many of you would like to have no fear and everyone like, yeah. So you're, you're leading to, if I'm not mistaken, like to not have fear would actually be a bad thing. Not really. It's, it's, I mean, that would, if that'm not mistaken, to not have fear would actually be a bad thing? Not really. That would really contradict this idea of

that Murph metaphor, that there are going to be stuff in life where you go, you don't need to worry about this, and then you go through it and you go, yeah, I don't know what I was worried about. But then there are things that you should always have fear. If you're in a gunfight, you should always have fear. If you're in a fistfight, you should always have fear like if you're in a gunfight you should

always have fear if you're in a fistfight you should always have fear if you're snatching a heavy weight you should always have fear you should if you respect the weight and i've had a friend he talks about uh you know the ego you know if you were actually ego less right then you just wouldn't eat and you would just die like you you would have no concern about your own wellbeing at all. And then that would be it. But a healthy amount of ego is necessary to say, Hey, sure.

I'm going to keep living. So I'm going to eat this food. and so I don't know, it sounds like kind of the same amount, same thing is like, there's a healthy amount of ego or fear is necessary to just to keep you, you and your loved ones alive type of thing. There's, I mean, it's a

I get the parallel. The fear thing, so the ego thing is a constant. You don't want it to be pejorative ego because then you're a douchebag, right? But it's a good ego. Like, my ego and your ego and your ego allows

us to be on a talk show, right? And we're trying to entertain people. We're trying to educate people. We're trying to inspire people. It's being done in a good way. And then there's somebody who goes, that guy's got such a big ego. It's pejorative. It's negative.

He's a douchebag. The fear thing is there are areas. is so like the thing about the fear and this is the similarity there is that you don't have an on-off for your ego or your fear right it's just there and some people are more afraid or less afraid if it's a psychological thing then some of this acronym and some of this work can really help the danger is in our in our culture and the way we kind of you know immortalize heroes and stuff and and some of the things they talk about a fear and i make the joke like when i bought the no fear shirts in my no fear seminar i joke i go they were all defective because i bought the shirt and i

still had fear you know so i checked the label maybe i was like washing it wrong or something but why did i still have fear? And what we talk about is that if you want real no fear is this. Yeah. That's the real no fear. And we tell people, look, if you want to get to no fear, really look at it and understand it. And that's where the K is on this acronym.

Face it, understand it, control it, confront it. And then you know fear. And it's really just embracing and accepting it and going, you know, you might know somebody who isn't afraid to go to the dentist. I don't like going to the dentist. Me neither. But someone else might go, I don't give a shit. I don't care. So you have no fear doing that.

No, whatever. It doesn't matter. What it is is it's the person who allows the psychological fear to prevent them from doing what they need to do so that that little cavity doesn't turn into something really bad and now they're in a really shitty space because they let the fear control their life i heard a interesting expression or or saying a long time ago called or said that suffering is pain times resistance i feel like basically what that is saying is that if you if you are experiencing some type of pain and you you try to hide from it and you you try to resist it in some way it just makes the whole situation worse, and now you're suffering. So in a similar sense, like if you have your acronym where basically the first F in your acronym of fuck is to face it,

you're choosing actively, proactively choosing not to resist the fact that you are afraid, and you're facing it head on. And if you do resist it, it'll make the whole situation worse. Is that essentially what you're saying? Yeah, I dig that expression. It's cool. It's good. It's good. And that's what it is. It's like, it's at the end of the day, if whatever's going to happen, if whatever you're afraid of is going to happen, anyhow, the fact that you don't want to face it isn't going to change that it's going to happen. And so if you face it and then do your little research and then confront it, you know, you're in and you're through it.

I mean, bad shit, good shit, it's going to happen anyhow. And so really it's about being efficient with your time, with your energy, with your focus. But we've all had these things where you worry about things, about calling somebody or talking about or doing that. And then when you finally do it, whether it was a minute or an hour conversation, that same outcome probably could have happened a month earlier or a week earlier. And a lot of it, it's not to judge that. It's really because sometimes it's in the understanding part where your internal or external strategy, you know, crystallizes in your mind. Okay, I'll say this, I'll do this, I'm going to go here. It's a fascinating thing.

But what I found, so I was just on, I don't know if you know Kyrian from Combat Sports Academy. I don't. So he's one of the best trainers in the world right now. I mean, UFC fighters, K-1, Thai boxing, Bellator. The gym's awesome. I know the gym. Yeah, it's insane what they have going on there. So I've known Kyrian for maybe 20 years.

He was a student of mine years ago. And he's really studied and he's brought in, he's written some wonderful posts about how he's incorporated my fear research with his fighters, how he mentors them and stuff like that and um the the the amazing thing is with all these guys here and and uh you know when he's up there and he's training the guys is he's working on their spirituality and their ability to make those decisions and beat and be tough in the workouts and be tough in the fight and he's posted a couple times where with his guys where they really resonate with that the knrw fear that i've got i've to i've got to do this and if you you know it, it's almost like, think about the first time you see, you know,

a wad written on a whiteboard. You go, and I remember doing this. I was training one of the troops down at Fort Bragg, and I walked in the gym. I had, like, M4, replica M4s, my high-gear suits. I'm walking, and a couple guys were walking over to, you know, to go do some scenario work, and I see on the board 15 push-ups, or no, 15 squats, 10 push-ups, 5 pull-ups. What is that?

Cindy. Cindy, right? And then it said 20 AMRAP. But I don't know what it is, it's like 2006, I see this. And I walk by and I see that. I go, you guys having trouble doing 15 squats, 10 push-ups, 5 pull-ups? And they're like, well, no. And he starts to talk. He goes,

what's 20 AM? He goes, oh, as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes. Whatever. You know, it doesn't look bad. And then... You've never done it so you don't process it properly. And then when you do it you're like holy shit right um and then the next time you see it depending on how it was before you're like whoa and then at some point your body starts to stress inoculate and then you get a little cocky

and you go you know i'm gonna crush this wad today and then it kills you it's just that it's just this it's like uh you know Simba in the cycle of life. But the message there is always we've got to face our fear. We've got to confront our fears. So practically, if you're a CrossFit coach and you're in charge of the competition team, say, and you have some newer athletes or even some more advanced athletes, you recognize at some level everyone has fear, but maybe you've never had this conversation with your athletes before.

How would you approach, if you were a new coach, approach your team about this type of a conversation about mindset and managing your fear? Yeah, that's an awesome question. And when I mentioned Kieran before, I forgot where I was going with that and was trying to like pack where's it going and you just reminded me he he was recently a coach on the ultimate fighter and he brought me on to talk and you know this past season there's all these champs from all over the place and i was talking to the entire group and i said to you know i think there were like 12 guys or whatever how many of you are afraid before you fight? And like a bunch of them were like, and they go, come on, seriously?

How many of you, seriously? You're not like at all performance anxiety, worried about your sponsors, worried about your next fight. Are you going to win? Are you going to lose? That's all fear. Obviously, you're not afraid of fighting.

You're professional fighters. You're world champions. How many of you, it's really, it's calibrating the conversation. So when you're talking to, and we had like, there were about I think four or six guys ended up putting up their hand and other guys are like, you know, and so if you're the coach of the competition team, you need to find a way to say, like, for example, dealing with military and law enforcement, I don't use the word fear.

They don't want to, they don't want to deal with that. I mean, they've been doing stuff. Are you afraid to jump a way to say, like, for example, dealing with military and law enforcement, I don't use the word fear. They don't want to deal with that. I mean, they've been doing stuff. Are you afraid to jump out of an airplane? No, I've been doing it for like 10 years, right? So you can't use that language. So if you're trying to give people new emotional, psychological tools to perform better, right? So when you're an elite athlete, tactical athlete,

or competitive athlete, whatever, the changes in performance are minuscule. They're little, right? You're not making big leaps at that level. Right. And so sometimes it's just having that subtle talk and finding the way. So it might be, hey, guys, let's talk about performance psychology. What the hell is that, coach?

Just positive thoughts versus negative thoughts. Like don't strike out versus focusing on, like saying to yourself, don't strike out. You're motivating through a negative. And so little things or something, I never thought about that way. And knowing the coach knows his athletes, so what I'm going to say to you is going to be different

than what I'm going to say to you at that moment. And that's why we define the coach as the person who his athletes. So what I'm going to say to you is going to be different than what I'm going to say to you at that moment. And that's why we define the coach as the person who inspires performance. And so you've got to know what's going on and what their head's about. Like Angelo Dundee knew that with Ali, Ali didn't like being told what to do. So he said if I was going to give him, like if I saw a strategy on an upcoming fighter, I would talk to it to somebody, one of the other teammates near Ali,

and kind of be standing here going, I wonder if Ali could do this thing. It's kind of a difficult combination if he times it off of that. Knowing he could hear him while he was tying his shoes or whatever. And then he'd see him hitting the bag or shadowboxing that movement. And then he'd go, hey, what do you think of this? Angelo Dundee was smart enough to go, and that's a great coach, to understand how to get in his athlete's head and inspire that next level performance.

So, you know, for a professional coach, it's understanding. And again, a lot of them, I say this with all due respect, most coaches don't understand psychodynamics and psychology and fear and emotion and so they're cheering come on man you can do it as opposed to why are you afraid to box jumps what's going on in your head here your technique is perfect here we go up five pounds and now suddenly everything goes to shit right I know you're strong enough to do that what's going on there and have that conversation i um i was talking recently to somebody who uh trains fighters i can't remember who it was he's talking about how um one of the big turning points for a fighter he was training was that

he had her basically imagine losing. Like imagine all the different ways that she could lose. Yep. And then what would her friends think of her if she lost the fight? Or would her friends still be friends with her and love her and all this stuff? And just going through the exercise of I could lose these dozen different ways and go, oh, and my life is not over. And so being able to, you know, it sounds like that's kind of like

knowing, understanding that fear, and then being able to walk in the ring and just go, you know what? It kind of frames and puts things in perspective a little bit, certain situations. You still don't want to lose because getting your ass kicked sucks. Right. But life is not over in that case. No, and the thing, having worked with military, law enforcement, boxers, kickboxers, MMA guys,

when we moved out here, my daughter, when she went to the next school, I come home from a trip and I walk in the door and instead of like a big hug from my wife and everything, it's like, you deal with her. And I'm like, what's going on? I go up to Olivia's room and she's in there crying or like whimpering

when she sees me. It goes from the whimper to the, I'm not going to school. She's like sobbing and I'm going, what's going on? You can't make me go to school. You know, she was going to a new school and she was terrified. And so here's this badass, cool fight story

I'm about to tell you with my, you know, nine-year-old daughter who won't go to the new school because we just moved. I go, hey, I just got back from a trip. I want to go to Starbucks and get a chamomile tea and just relax before I go to bed. I'm a little wired. Do you want to come with me?

I get her out of the house. We get there. I got my little iPad mini. I've got this chart called the cycle behavior. And it's this, what we call that neural circuitry of fear. And I go in and get the tea. I get out there. We're sitting in the car.

She's nine. I open it up. It pops open to the cycle behavior. And all my kids have been in strollers watching me teach, right? And she's literally like this, totally cool. Hey, Dad. What's up? How was your trip?

And I pop open cycle of behavior. And she goes, really, Dad? Cycle of behavior? You're trying not to laugh. And I go, hey, sweetheart. What's going on with school? Mom said, I'm not going. She freaks out, starts the sobbing and everything.

And I point at, so in the cycle behavior, there's a fear loop and it says the fear loop. And I go, you're here. What's going on? It took me 10 minutes for her to explain she was worried that she wouldn't have any friends and no one would like her. So I could have said, you're going to school. You trained, you're going, you're going to fight. We trained you, don't be afraid, right? And there's different ways that people coach.

And I really believe, you know, if you understand what someone's fear is, that you can get them to that point where your life's not going to change, it's going to go better, we're going to go through this, we're going to go through this together, here's what you need to think about. And all I said to her, you know, I said,

hey, listen, how's it even possible that no one like you you are funny and you're smart and you're cool why wouldn't it you know there's going to be and everyone feels that way it's new school right yeah i'm not going i'm not going i said well listen you know and it took 10-15 minutes and and she went to school but it was ironic and not that's that same thing that I might work with a military team with. You know, it's the same thing. So it's, you know, in this case here, the fighter coach, he said he figured out a way to get her to say some stuff.

And I want to say something on that because I don't want any coaches listening to this or any experienced athletes or, you know, parents or whatever going, oh, I'll do that because it's not, it's like no one diet works for everybody where that guy would be a billionaire. No one workout works for everybody. And so I've worked with different fighters where as a kind of a cartoon example, there's the fighter that's always doing this.

You know, he's pacing in the changing room. Then there's the guy that's standing in front of a locker bank and he's banging his head on the wall. And then there's the guy that's punching his face. And then there was this one time Maurice Smith is lying there. Do you remember Maurice? I sure do. Okay. Do you know him? I've never met him, but I know who he is. So I was kind of friends with him, not close, close friends, but he was good friends with a good buddy of mine. And so I knew him and he's getting ready to go out and he's wearing headphones listening to like well whatever the beats were of the day because this is back in the day and so for people who don't know maurice was a usc champion a k1 champion badass dude and i always would interview i interviewed people that were raped attempted

murder people who kill people i want so Because there's certain experiences I, as a researcher, know that I'm never going to have. So how do I figure out this system? I'm seeing stuff differently. Well, if I can extract information, what's the common thread? I would talk to them and I would ask them questions that weren't like, so tell us what was going on. I'm in their head. And I tell Maurice,. And, um, I tell him where he said, go more.

He says, study fear and fear management. I couldn't help but noticing like you are lying here like this, like, you know, on a massage table, just chilling out. And you're about to get into a fight. Like what's,

what's the story there. Right. And he looks at me and he goes, he goes, can I ask you a question? I'm like, yeah. He goes, do you have a job? I go,, yeah. He goes, do you have a job?

I go, I do. He goes, are you afraid to go to work? I go, no, I'm not. He goes, me either. Puts the headphones back on and lies back. How cool is that? That's a line from the last Boy Scout Part 4, right? That's just a cool line.

I'm not afraid to go to work. That was his job. Now, he didn't say that at his first fight or his 10th fight. This is now years in, he's a pro, and this is how he feeds his family. Why I bring that up is because in that same room might have been the guy sitting on a chair with his leg, you know, like that nervous, his leg is going 100 miles an hour. There's another guy punching his face. If I had gone up to each one of those athletes and said, this guy's a world champion. I need you to listen to smooth jazz and relax. They all might've lost. Right.

You need to find the ritual that works for you at the phase of your life and have it. The big thing is self-awareness and self-awareness and fear management are intrinsically connected, right? It's just like, what do I need to do right now? And there's times when I'm doing stuff where my team, we're about to do some stuff and I'll look at them, I go, guys, when I'm about to do a demo,

I get a little fucking crazy. And so if you screw up the timing on some of the stuff, my intensity is going to change because this is about them reacting to, emotionally reacting to this scenario we're doing so don't take that personally if i move on you really if the timing's off i'm gonna have to move on you like the creature of alien you know from alien and and they're like and i go but i

know that that feeling in me because i have the self-awareness i can articulate it and get and get people prepped and that's the that's the danger um with that is that lack of self-awareness where you can see how many times you've gone out to whether it's a girlfriend wife family member and you know something's fucking wrong and you go hey dude what's up and you go and there's like nothing why and you're like seriously you don't talk about're like, seriously, you don't want to talk about it? I don't know what you're talking about. Right? And then like an hour later, it erupts or a day later.

Because we could pick up on it. That's why I'm so pissed off. Never happened. Right. Right. You know, that all the time. And it's a funny thing at my house with the wife. You know, because I'm so tuned into this because I teach it all the time.

It drives people crazy. I'm like, what's wrong? I said, okay, so we'll have a fight tomorrow around three and then we'll make up the day after around four or we can talk about it now, you know, fuck you and your psychology and all that, you know, and then it's like, and then it's like, you know, you, no, no, no. And are we going to edit this part out? So my wife can't hear this.

Right. So, um, Oh no, I've had the, the, can't hear this, right? Oh, no. Are you trying to fix me? No, no, you're perfect. Right, right, right. You got to figure out a better approach. This way is not working. I got to move over here.

And it's funny. The truth of the matter is for me, just like the semantics of it, it's not about like fixing. And I know you're making a joke there, but it's knowing we need to talk about something and I don't know what it is. Let's, you know, and it's a neat thing. And at the end of the day, somebody's inability to express themselves is based on their relationship with fear. Right?

Definitely. So it's kind of neat. What are your thoughts on kind of telling people how to feel? And what I mean by that is like I've seen people, two people in a conversation before and someone says like, oh man, I'm really scared about this thing or I'm really nervous or I'm worried or whatever. And the other person goes, oh, don't be worried.

Like you don't need to be worried. And like they try to like, they almost discount the fact that this person had brought it up in the first place. And there's a lot of don't need to be worried. And like, they try to like, like they almost discount the fact that this person had brought it up in the first place. And there's a lot of downstream effects that could happen from saying something like that. But in your opinion, is that type of talk beneficial at times?

Or is that something you should shy away from? What are your thoughts? Yeah, that's a cool question. I think it has to do with the relationship between the two people, right? So if it's like, you know, if it's your 12-year-old kid and he's nervous about, you know, playing baseball,

and he goes, I'm afraid I'm going to let the team down, strike out, and how you say, don't worry about that, go have fun or whatever, it depends on, again, I think the relationship. If the person that is, like like mentoring has that experience and wisdom i mean there's certain certain times where like a certain type of doctor or a certain type of coach would go you got this and it just changed your whole demeanor right and then there's somebody else who who you know has no experience in this. And then they say, that's not a big deal.

And you're like, how the fuck would you know? Yeah. But it totally unnerves you. It doesn't help. So I think the answer is it depends. Yeah. It depends on their relationship. That seems to be the answer with almost any question in the world of strength conditioning. It's always it depends. Yeah. You know, depends on their relationship. That seems to be the answer with almost any question in the world of strength conditioning.

It's always, it depends. Yeah. I think, I think too, I've had a lot of instances where I've said that to people and then realized after the fact that that was the wrong thing to say. You're like, oh. Right. Yeah. It wasn't that helpful.

And then as you guys were just talking about, I was thinking, I was like, that's probably how, I probably heard that a lot growing up it's like so like that becomes my automatic response it's like oh my dad probably said oh don't worry about it don't be afraid it's no big deal a lot and then now i'm like that's my automatic response to other people and so i think it kind of depends like i think it's good to note, are you just automatically responding based on how you're used to talking to people? Or are you being thoughtful about what that person needs to hear? Yeah, that's that whole listening piece. Are you really listening?

That's a lifetime deal, huh? Yeah. It's really interesting and deep stuff and the and and some of the like in the last year become so fascinated with the psychology of fear piece and i've always like you know for decades we've always taught it but it was like okay you know for two hours you're doing this and for two hours you're doing this and and now i find myself over and over and over coming back to this is just fear you know what you wrote what you said when you moved how you moved and all of that stuff if if you look back to really what was the spark or the genesis of that

that movement it when you say i'm going to say this this now, when am I going to interrupt here? Because the semantics of fear, if I talk about fear with people, they visualize for some people like fetal position, thumb in the mouth. And they're going, no, no, no. Doubt is a cousin of fear. And unchecked doubt becomes hesitation. Doubt and hesitation, if you leave it marinate too long becomes a little type of like anxiety right so doubt hesitation anxiety and you can see you know it could be like a fighter who does this and and the guy doesn't move and and then this guy's like and just see that little shift in his face there's doubt now he's in and and the ring

announcer goes oh you can see how they respect each other i'm going well no that's fucking fear right otherwise why wouldn't you when when haggler lost to leonard i don't know if you remember that fight yeah the boxing and he goes oh leonard you know uh you know uh uh i don't mean to offend anybody i'm quoting haggler he hit like a girl you know he he said. And I'd screamed at the TV, then why didn't you knock him out? You know, like if he wasn't hurting you, how did you go, you 12 rounds, you're wailing on him, he took your punches, he hit you back, right?

And so everything, every example at some point I come back to, you know, how did you manage the fear? So in your opinion, fear is the kind of the underlying emotion for, for any kind of negative, negative thoughts that someone will be having any, any worry, anxiety, um, does any of that stuff kind of, kind of stems from fear as like the underlying root cause? Yeah. So there's, there, so there's external fear, there's internal fear. And so I can see something like a stimulus out there

that triggers a negative thought here. And then I can also have a negative thought here and then I go looking for that, right? And so, you know, there are like legit, like physiological people that have like a chemical deficiency or they had some sort of trauma or PTSD and they've got true impact. What I'm talking about is like people who are just afraid to move out of their comfort zone. And that's really where the power in this is. And so if you think about the comfort zone, around the comfort

zone, so comfort zone is like all the things you're cool with. Yeah, I'll do that. And then we change it and I could say, let me see a snatch PVC. Let me see a bar. Let's put, you know, 25 pound plates on it. Let's put, you know, 65 pounds. Oh, wait a minute. Now it's like some the ugliest thing ever, but the person has the strength to get over it. You know, well, you're strong enough to fling that up there, what's going on. Now they're thinking about, and so comfort zone and around the circle, around comfort zone is discomfort zone. And then the circle around discomfort zone is holy shit zone.

You know, and this is. I go there sometimes. Yeah, but that's that whole thing is like, is if you go there on purpose, you know, you look at like Andy Stump. Like, you know, for us, you look at Andy Stump. For us, the stuff that he's doing in the jumping and stuff is like, I'm scared watching

shit on the fucking phone. Oh my God. I'm with you. Hey, he texted me a few weeks ago. Hey, we should go jumping. Did it? I'm good. No, no, it's good. I'm cool.

I'll take you. Maybe you'll talk me into it, but not today. And so he doesn't look at it that level, but I can tell you this. He has total respect for fear management and understands that preparation and how to do that. So really, this is, you know, if you go, I want to do this. I want to get this good. I want to do that. I want to get this good. I want to do that. I want to, I want to start my own business.

I want to marry this person. I want to, you know, I want to lift this weight. All of that hinges on your ability. Cause at some point in deciding to, uh, and it could have been, if, you know, we had a, a, a video of you guys, when you're first starting the blog. The day you decided to do it, look, three months later, it didn't happen. Somebody had to figure, what if it doesn't take off,

or what if the equipment sucks, or what if we don't, or what if we're stupid? All of that. Mostly the stupid part. Did you guys, you just accepted it? Yeah, pretty much. At some point, yeah. Well, we knew it was going to happen,

so what was there to be afraid of? That's right. But all of that stuff creates doubt and hesitation. Sure, for sure. And so really, it's almost like my story I told with my daughter, where I said, we're here. And if you visualize like a hologram,

what's our scenario? I need to get motivated. So the stages of it is motivation expectation visualization fear loop what are my beliefs what am i thinking right there i'm now in the fear loop how do i get out of the fear loop that we call the challenger threatened door so you can be about to do something and you go you know is that the guy that's bothering you mike i'll go talk to him and i go hey you hey, you bothering my friend? And the guy stands up, and you thought he was standing. And you're like, holy shit. And everything changes right there.

So you were motivated. Your scenario was you're a bouncer, doorman, whatever. You're motivated, and then you realize, oh, shit, that guy's got three friends, and it looks like that guy's got a weapon on him. And now your nervous system starts going. You're changing, and nobody knows you're there. Your buddies are over.

And all of this is happening in your head in nanoseconds. And so it's, it's, it's recognizing the fear spike and then having a system that you deploy right there that is better than just like hanging out. So, yeah. a daily practice that someone could do to help manage their own fear or if they end up in a situation where they are nervous or they're coming up on a situation where they're being approached by three people that are all bigger than them, that they could think through in that moment? They don't have much time to think, of course, but do you have anything like that? Well, I mean, there's not like a daily mantra other than this you know obviously you know it's uh um you get a it's it

it's it's funny because i'm not trying to sell the t-shirt but it's like it's it's uh it's just if you're there and it's a choiceless choice you've got it you've got to go and you got to do some stuff but the like fear management is a type of courage and And if I asked you real quick, try and do this without overthinking this, what's the opposite of courage? Spit out a word. Bravery? Oh, opposite of courage.

Opposite of courage? Is it not fear? It sounds like fear. Okay. So fear is the emotion. Courage is like an action. So most people in a big group, someone says cowardice.

Yeah. Right? In terms of like an action so most people like in a big group someone says cowardice yeah right in terms of like like an opposite and so um when we talk about that i'll look i'll look at the group and i'll go hey listen very few people are truly cowards what happens when you want to do something like be the courageous bystander, intervene on something. And I write the word courage on the board and I go, what's the opposite of courage? And someone goes, you know, cowardice. Everyone says, a lot of people yell out fear.

I go, no, fear is an emotion. A heroic person can still perform with fear. I'm afraid, but I'm going to go towards the danger, right? So, so we want to clarify that. And what I do on the board is I write the letters D-I-S hyphen in front of the word courage. That the

difference between the courageous person and the person that doesn't move is that the other person discouraged themselves by visualizing their failure, their pain. That they said, I can't do this. I'm going to lose. This is going to hurt me.

I'm going to screw this up. And they step away from that. And another play on words that I love is responsibility with a hyphen. Responsibility, your ability to respond to anything. And so those are two huge ones for people to introspect, to inspire some introspection,

is face it, understand it, control it, or confront it. And then you get to the K, the no fear. And what I mean by no fear is it's not like I've eliminated fear. It's like I understand this is going to be scary. I need to have this conversation with you. My heart is pounding. I'm fucking scared because I don't know what you're going to say, but I've got to tell you this.

And it could be, Mike, we're breaking up. Or it could be, Mike, I'm in love with you. Right? And it's... That would be terrifying. Because there's nothing you can do about it tonight on our wedding night. It's our wedding night, and you're my wife. I'm screwed.

Exactly. Soon. Wedding nights are four. Exactly. But exactly. Soon. And so. Wedding nights are four. Exactly. And, but like, it's my fear that prevents me from having either of those conversations. When I talk to people like, well, why didn't you hit the person after they had punched you and grabbed you like that? And when you peel the onion, it was, I was afraid of this happening or that happening or escalating or, or getting hurt or hurting them or getting sued. It's always some sort of fear. Um, so no magic recipe like, like there is other than, uh, in, in the cycle of behavior. If you Google Tony Blower cycle of behavior, uh, you'll get a bunch of shit that pops up on Google. And shit isn't shit. It's another acronym for seriously high-intensity training.

And so you'll see videos of me talking about it and going through the cycle behavior. There's pictures you'll see with some articles on it. And if you just study it, if you just look at it, you start to learn the map where I want to be motivated. I want to think positively. I want to go through this, but I'm in the fear loop here and now I'm spinning here.

And then what do I need to do? And there's just like three or four steps. I need to, I need to know where it's supposed to go. So we call that GAR goal, action, result. I need to have a plan.

I need to review the plan. I'm big with hyphens. Review is spelled with a hyphen R E hyphen view because we see shit in our head go talk to them right you know like you know go up there ask her ask her for her number why you don't go ask the person for a date is because you're visualizing rejection if you thought you're gonna that she was the one you're gonna get married you'd run up there if you knew that yeah right and so um it's it's cool it's like it's like little things and it's not the same for everybody and that's one thing that i'm adamant on when i'm when i'm training trainers

is like it's not a one-size-fits-all you gotta you gotta look at the stuff and and uh you throw it out there and it's not even like a like a good strength and conditioning coach can see a deficiency oh this guy's got no calves or this guy no wonder he he can't lift these weights. He's got no quads. And so you can look at that where we don't know because it's all in here. We don't know what the deficiency is or their level of efficiency. And so you throw shit out there

and it's almost like this ice cube tray metaphor where if you run an ice cube tray under the faucet, right? And it's half full. what you'll do is you'll fill some of the blocks and some of the other blocks that already had ice in it the water will run over it so if I say here's a really good idea and you've already let's say you've been meditating on that for ten years and you go well I

haven't heard it like that but that's what I do that information isn't going to displace your information. It's consistent with what you understand. But there might be another block that you didn't realize was empty, and that fills up, and they kind of link up and connect. So it's real synergistic. Yeah. Where can people find you?

Where do they need to go? It sounds like you've got about a dozen places. Yeah. You're talking about online, I guess, right? I don't want any stalkers. What is your home address? And your phone number. So, Blowerspear, TonyBlower.com. Everything goes there.

I've got a blog that I do some weird stuff on. If you want to see what I eat, go to my Instagram page. But actually having a lot of fun with Instagram these days. Food and booty pics mostly. Yeah, mostly food. But no, a lot of neat things in there. But I've got a page for our spear system that's more obviously tactical training oriented and um and then um but if you're interested in the training all

the training is listed on blower spear.com and uh you know if you just google tony blower some shit should pop up i've been around since i mean al gore and i pretty much invented the internet that's how old i am. For the SPEAR, it's a seminar? Do you call it a seminar or workshop? Seminar or workshop. We do all sorts of things. Okay.

So briefly, what does that seminar or workshop look like? So we've got one for military and law enforcement and there's different programs. So our trainer certification is four and five day courses. And that's mostly defensive tactics, combat as instructors. And, you know, that's really how to teach people to bring that stuff to their agency or unit.

And we've got another program for what we call personal defense readiness. And that's for professional self-defense instructors and martial artists, people that want to bring our research in and make their students safer. We've got the CrossFit program, CrossFit Spear, and used to be CrossFit Defense. But, you know, we had a lot of people didn't understand that, you know, again, I've been doing this for 36 years. We spent, I spent two years beta testing the program, teaching it. And I had games athletes in some of our courses that were having trouble with some of the moves i was teaching and i realized holy shit like you know this

rotational this spontaneity you're here this is it's just not lending itself to a hardcore crossfitter that's working in and around equipment and one day working out i uh um working out at lunch it was like like sitting there and i was watching somebody do wall balls and i'm visualizing this like your face is a med ball and i'm going whap karen you know and i'm going holy shit the quarter extremity movement of a wall ball is the same kinetic chain as a palm strike and if you grab onto my shirt if you do that i'm going whoa take it easy mike what are you freaking out for that movement triggers the startle flinch so those startle flinch part the spear spontaneous protection enabling accelerated response is understanding how your startle flinch is like

an organic airbag in a car that if you go boo boo, those hands come up. So the startle flinch deploys your most effective close quarter tools, your fingers, your palm, your forearm, your elbow. So when you grab me and I go, whoa, take it easy, man. As this evolves right now, so D1 has been compromised. Now I'm in defused D2. If he goes, listen, motherfucker, and it's going to go, I suddenly apply this what i call closest weapon closest target and what i do is visualize for the crossfitter that this is this

is a uh dynamax ball and i see you know 10 pounds of one on his eyelid and it's like rep 150 in karen and you're in here slam and you just and it's and i saw this and all of a sudden i went oh my god, there's a hidden arsenal inside of CrossFit, that if I can do a front rack, I can elbow you in the face, that if I can do a box jump, if I can do mountain climbers, if I can do knees to elbow, then I can open and close my hips fast, and if I can do slam ball, so imagine I go, Karen, I hit you, and then I grab your head like a slam ball, and as I do slam ball, I go knees to elbow.

I'm now a shitty tie fighter, and I've never even been in it. And if you look at real fights, and so when I explain this to the CrossFit community, you can see their eyes light up because I've now eliminated this mysticism of having to train, that the engine that a an intense workout produces and the the the mechanics the range of motion that there's four movements inside a crossfit that can be used immediately in your personal defense and so it's really i don't know if you

can pick up my my enthusiasm for this it's the most creative course i've ever gone i've come up with some pretty crazy shit for some different elements in military law enforcement. Some really important courses where I look at this thing where I said, how can I take somebody who has no martial aptitude? It's not interesting. But they're like, you know what? It would really suck if something happened to me. Talk to me about situational awareness and some fear management. And how do I, and it's demystifying this idea that you need a black belt or a martial art.

It's, it's ridiculous. So you can do like, for example, I, I, I like, and this, this will relate, uh, resonate with you guys. Like a thruster is like a street fight and Olympic lifting is like martial arts. There's timing, there's mechanics, there's technique. You got to pause here. You got to, someone's got to go. Yeah, that's good. Right.

Where, you know, you can still get a wicked workout without really good range of motion. If you don't go too heavy, right. Just, just doing air PVC, 20 and 59, right. You can, you can crush yourself. So doing that sort of thing, I realized, like, you know, in a real fight, intensity is king, not technique. The litmus test is not what you believe, it's what you see. And when you study real fights, you don't see clean jiu-jitsu.

You don't see clean boxing. You don't see real fights. There are a couple of exceptions, but most of those exceptions are usually like a douchebag fighting somebody really skilled and it's usually man i don't want to fight i want to fight it's what i talk about is a violent encounter a violent encounter triggers a different type of fear spike and it's happening at a different pace so that's like an atm or car ATM mugging or carjacking or home invasion or getting jumped. And it's totally different. So I went off on a crazy tangent there.

That was great. But I get fired up about this shit because you know what it is? When I was 20 years old, someone asked me what I wanted to do. And I said, I want to make the world safer. And they were like, how are you going to do that? I go, because, and it was after my student had lost the fight. I go, because we teach self-defense wrong that if we taught people about psychology and we talked to them about fear and we talked about

natural movements that were congruent with that de-escalation and then i looked at how would i move if i was afraid because that's that's the trojan horse if i look afraid to you and i would have organic fear in a real fight if i look afraid to you that'll lower your guard where if you want to mug me and i go you want to mug me man and i start bouncing like this if the guy doesn't run he now knows that i know that he knows that i know and there's no element of surprise and you get a more dangerous adversary so it's a really holistic approach it's behaviorally based it's genetically wired because it's all based on the startle flinch response.

But it's I get fired up every day just to try to make good people safer. Awesome. Thank you. Very cool. Thank you guys. Thanks for coming on the show.