Barbell Shrugged - How To Start Training High Skill Movements

Episode Date: April 12, 2017

We all see the cool shit on Instagram- the handstands, the backflips, the one handed balance thing on the fire hydrant, but want is not often highlighted on the social media is the process it takes to get to that skill level. In this week’s show, we brought back Max Shank to talk about how you can incorporate more movement development into your training. Max has been on the show before and we recently recorded an episode with him talking about healthy shoulders. You can find that episode here. This time around, we visited Max at his backyard gym to talk about what is often referred to as flow and how incorporating a movement practice into your daily routine can help you prep your body for hard training session later on.  Whether you are interested in pursuing higher skill level movements like acrobatics and hand balancing, or just looking to start your day with a routine that will prime your body to get shit done in the gym, this episode will get you on the right path to start pursuing more higher level movement awareness. The cool thing is, all you need is 5 minutes a day to get started, but first get your listen on with this episode. We also highly recommend you check out Max's 5 Minute Flow guide and instructional videos to help you decrease pain, stiffness and physical and mental stress. Go to barbellshrugged.com/fiveminuteflow to learn more. Use the code "barbell" (all lower case) to save 20% on 5 Minute Flow. Enjoy the show, Mike

That's really what I think gives you the potential to have your mobility work not only make you stronger, but also increase your overall movement capacity over the long term. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson. And our guest, well, we're a guest at his house. That's right. He's hosting us. That's right. Max Schenck. And we've already done a couple shows with you. First one was episode 242, talking about shoulders.

And then we also did a Barbell Business show. So if you go to barbellbusiness.com and search Max, he'll pop right up. And on that show, we talked about productivity. So even if you're not a gym owner, I think that show would be really beneficial. If you like getting shit done, I think that's a good place to go. I prefer to procrastinate, but I did get a little more productive after that show. Yeah, me too. Yeah, that was good.

We had a good time on that one for sure. For sure. So we're kicking it in your very cool backyard. You got a legit outdoor gym set up out here. Mi casa es su casa, man. Yeah. You got monkey bars for the audio listeners. You got monkey bars.

You got some parallel bars. You got some rings. We got ropes. A lot of it you made yourself, it looks like. Some, like, grip accessories. Yeah, I mean, I essentially have a fully outfitted gym here, and the gym I own, you guys know, Ambition, is about three miles away, which I think makes me a certifiable insane person.

I would agree. A home gym three miles away from the gym that I own. I think I would do the same. All gym owners know that they don't want to train in their gym 100 of the time and it's just nice to have your own space you know it's hard to get a it's hard to get a session in when you're uh what is that i forgot to turn off the pool thing no i mean i figure it's like this if you stack the deck in your favor you're going to be a lot more consistent i know for a fact that if i'm at the gym, I'm probably going to be interrupted.

And if I'm not already at the gym, like if I'm writing books or something like that here, because I'm not going to do that work at the gym either, if you're busy, even a 10-minute drive both ways, that is valuable time. So if I can just walk outside and get like a quick five or twenty minutes and it makes a huge difference yeah and having a frequency helps being able to just walk out do a little bit if you're going to train more than once a day or do it do something nice and easy i like to do something easy and then something tough i think you i mean really like if you aren't doing at least something every day you you're really leaving a lot of

benefit on the table no matter what the goal is like even if you're on like a let's say four day a week training plan you should be moving seven days a week i mean we're freaking animals like for us to not move is ridiculous yeah i my physical activity overall is higher than i think it's been in a long time and i'm spending less time in the gym but it's it's doing things around my house, just doing other things that are physical activity that might not be happening inside a box. Exactly. Still going in the box too. But having that physical activity, I feel a lot better moving seven days a week versus, you know, I move really hard for four days and then I'm taking two or three days off and getting sticky. Well, and I think everyone has to find like the balance with how much

heavy shit they're doing and how much light shit they're doing like and i know for me when i was first starting i actually worked out at uh one of the first crossfit affiliates crossfit encinitas like way back in the day like almost nine years ago or something like that and at the time i was basically doing heavy heavy workouts like you know front squats, deadlifts, things like that, like six days a week. And then my off day was like Cindy, like push-ups, pull-ups, and squats. You know what I mean? So that totally broke me down. I don't know, somewhere between like two and four days a week of heavy stuff and then between like three and four days a week of just like body weight stuff, like movement type oriented things. I find that the strength gains are still increasing, but my body feels so much better.

It's almost like I've really been able to take off the brakes on my strength while progressing on like flexibility and speed. Yeah. A lot of people, they would like to do something every single day, but their whole model of working out is what you just said. Like if I'm going to train, then I have to train balls to the wall and I have to train super, super heavy. And if I don't do that, then they feel like they didn't do anything and they might have a good idea that they shouldn't do that every day

for all the reasons you just said. Like it will break you down and they don't know what to do, which slides very well into the topic of today's show is you have this interesting concept called five minute flow where you you do some movement every single day but in a way where it doesn't beat you up exactly and i mean you have to decide like what you were saying before too with regard to what people expect out of a workout the problem is that people there are two like dysfunctional expectations for workouts one of them is burning calories just for the sake of burning calories that's utterly ridiculous like there are so many fun things that burn calories for you to do like a stupid workout

just for burning calories is completely asinine for you to do a workout hang on hang on back up how am i burning calories when i'm not working out you're burning calories right now by staying alive keep at it oh shit you can like there if you like look at but am i burning that many come on dude like maybe you see some of the advertising bullshit like they say you can burn 600 calories doing cryotherapy or jumping in a sauna for 45 minutes like it's all nonsense a lot of activities will burn calories. Salsa dancing is going to burn lots of calories. It may not burn as much as cross country skiing,

but you have to figure out which one you actually want to do so you can stick with it. So that's like the first dysfunctional exercise expectation. The second one is how sore can I get or how hard can I feel like I worked? And that's similar nonsense uh they think that like the harder you work the more benefit you're going to get out of it but that's completely not the case like I've made much better gains since dialing it back using like the 80 percent rule things like that than I ever made when I was going balls to the wall because when I was going

balls to the wall I was also getting broken all the time. Yeah. I've had a lot of athletes back off. They were going hard five or six days a week, spending two or three hours in the gym, and then they'll hurt something that caused them to back off. They come back, and they're even stronger. They had to dial back their training, or they didn't lose so much of their strength gains or something like that,

and really they're they're shocked it's like well that might be a sign they're just overdoing it and like you were saying before are we looking at the result or the difficulty because i know a lot of people remember when uh we were running a box where and we were interacting with athletes every day and if a workout didn't completely make them want to puke or they didn't get sore at all that week they were complaining right and it was just and it was like well that was the intent of how things were programmed right now right but when when you have clients and you have people just begging for it it's kind of hard a lot of times as a coach it's like uh trying to make that the client happy and and all that that. It's a tough balance to find too because it starts with the culture that you create at the gym. So like CrossFit, for example, typically has that culture that's oriented toward like,

oh my God, like I killed it yesterday. My legs are shot, but I did like the fastest time ever. And that's fine. But if that's the sole purpose, I think you're really leaving a lot of potential gains on the table. So I think if you're a business owner, and I know we're not on the Barbell Business Show right now, but if you're a business owner, you have to create a culture of the behavior that you want your clients to exhibit. Yeah, and I think when we look at CrossFit, there's been this huge focus on intensity over anything else. And for me personally, what I've found over time is frequency is more important than intensity.

Far more. And you actually have to look at the volume here. It's all very important, and I think there's been this overemphasis on the intensity piece. I think the key there, borrowing off of what you just said, is to put the emphasis back on skills. Because I always use this example. Like if I were to give you two different options as far as practicing golf, you can practice 90 minutes every Sunday or five minutes every day. Which would you choose?

Five minutes every day. Five minutes every day, even though that's only 35 minutes. So on an absolute standpoint, you're at like almost a one to three ratio yep so even though you're doing one third as much total work i would still suggest that you're probably getting about double the benefit from doing it every single day and um there are a lot of books like uh mastery by robert green have you guys read that one i think i know you read that one we have you he recommended it to me. He's read it as well.

Really enjoyed that. It's a great book. And I think in that book he talks about how if you do something and then sleep afterward, like every time you do something in sleep, it helps you reinforce and download that information. So not only sleeping is kind of like a break, right? Yeah. Just the same way like if you take a layoff from the weights due to an injury or preferably due to like your own volition, you're going to

come back a lot better. Like I remember same thing happened with me for guitar. Like I just started picking up guitar about a year and a half ago and I went to Sweden for two weeks, didn't play guitar, came back and was just, it was better even though I hadn't practiced for two weeks and I was practicing every day. So it's amazing what dialing it back or taking a little break or doing something every day and sleeping will do for you. It's not even just about the muscle rebuilding. I think I know I've been in this place where I'm thinking about,

oh, does the muscle tissue repair in time? Right. And so much of it is the nervous system and talking about the skills. And if you're moving better, you know, because you're getting rest and you're learning movement faster, then that's a good thing. Well, I mean, let's take free throws as an example. Do you want to practice free throws, which is a skill, until your arms got like a ridiculous pump in it

and you can barely hold the basketball? No, that's stupid. But we do that exact thing when it comes to exercise yeah like we way too much training to failure way too much uh training to the point where biomechanics deteriorates into something totally different like push-ups are the perfect example you know you do whatever your first 80 of push-ups like this and then you start doing like some sort of like those are the weird business like this and and that's what your body remembers because it remembers the last thing you did more than all that stuff in the middle yeah so even all the more reason to uh dial back that

practice a little bit so we came here because we want to talk about flow today and it's it's become a very popular thing uh if you if you're on Instagram looking around very hard, you start seeing people do some pretty cool stuff, actually. Totally. And then some people, you know, like myself, trying to do cool stuff. Yeah, I think you do cool stuff. Okay, cool. Thanks. That's what I was fishing for that.

I got you. Yeah, yeah. I got you, baby. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, after this weekend, I needed a little help, yeah. Yeah. I feel like it was likely Ido Portal that really kind of started this trend, and then a lot of people have jumped on.

There's been all kinds of other variations of flow. Like you said, you went to an animal flow workshop the other week, and then now you have your own kind of style bending on this where you have this thing called five-minute flow, which an easy way to look at that would be give a hashtag for that, right? Yeah, five-minute flow. That way you can see max doing all kinds of stuff number five right right over there it's number five okay number five yeah yeah and you do a lot of that in the in the backyard here yeah exactly uh every morning every morning i'll do something i don't always

film it because i try to uh typically stay off technology first thing in the morning but um every morning basically starts for me the same way and actually i added uh music into the morning routine because i found that's uh really good for my brain but um what type of music uh i mean i'll play guitar or piano oh you're playing the music yeah yeah yeah yeah um it's funny i'd never played music my whole life and then like a year and a half ago i was like i really want to try playing some music. And it really has made my memory a lot better. It feels like meditation. And it's extremely fun.

So I would recommend to anyone, no matter what age you are, just pick up even like a drum set or something like that and just bang around on it. And it'll stimulate creativity and things like that. Nice. If you can't wake up in the morning after rolling out of bed and playing the drums there's there's really no hope there's no hope my wife's gonna be so excited about that yeah my neighbor i'd be in there like my neighbors love the drums okay so you play a little music in the morning and then yeah so five minute flow basically every single morning and it's simple it started out basically out of

frustration because i was putting together all these mobility programs for people only to check in with them and have them say oh i didn't really have time to do that i'm like losing my freaking mind trying to get people to do mobility work and what i realized is it's not fun. There's a great mobility system called Z-Health. It's by a guy named Dr. Cobb. He's very smart. I took that course like eight years ago or something. It was one of the first courses I shelled out a lot of money for. I was really impressed, but it was fucking boring, honestly.

I couldn't get anybody to buy into it. It works. It's really isolated,, focused joint mobility. And I'm sure a lot of people are doing that now. But it just isn't fun enough to get like the masses to buy into. So five-minute flow, it's a finite amount of time, five minutes. So it feels approachable. And it was all based on behavioral psychology and a little bit of exercise science so

i mean we all have a pretty thorough understanding of joint mobility and things like that but in order to get someone to buy in you need to make it a small enough starting point so it needs to have like a low barrier to entry it's got no equipment required it's something you do every single day for only five minutes so it it feels manageable. It's easier to break the inertia into something small than to say, okay, here's what you need to do. Body transformation time, workout two hours a day, six days a week. It's like, there's no chance like you're going to quit. So you have your five minutes of mobility. You have a big glass of water at the end. And the reason that's important is from a behavioral psychology standpoint and habit formation, habit formation

is very dependent on two main things. One is a trigger that reminds you that it's time to do that habit. So if you wake up and your first habit is five minute flow, perfect. There's your trigger. Waking up is the trigger. The glass of water is the reward because you need to sandwich that habit between trigger and reward. And that's part of what makes it easier for people to stay consistent with. It's also another way just to think like how am I starting and stopping this routine. Like a lot of people, if they don't have a set time limit and they don't have something that cues them to start and something that cues them to stop,

then even if they do five or ten minutes, they don't know when to quit. And so they go, can I just finish and then I guess I'm done. And even though they did ten minutes of warming up and flow or mobility work or whatever, they still might feel like they quit at the end of it. And then they feel like they're not doing a good job and then they stop doing it altogether. Having that set pattern of trigger five minutes only and then glass of water to say okay i am done with my routine i can move on with my day exactly just ties the whole thing together very well move on to the next thing and actually it's funny you say setting the clock because i

think that at least for me personally and the people i work with has been one of the most important things that i've done to accomplish tasks. Because that actually breaks the inertia before you actually start doing the thing. Like if I say, okay, I hate answering emails. It's like the bane of my existence. I still do it because I want to stay in touch with people, but I hate it. But.

For all of you who tried to email me, you know it doesn't happen. But what I find is if I set a timer and say, okay, this is email time, setting the timer itself breaks the inertia for me. When I don't do that, it's like every time I want to go touch the kefir, I'm like, no, I'm out. I can't do it.

But if I set the timer, just like with 5-Minute Flow, just like anything else, I feel like that really overcomes that inertia. Yeah. I start doing Flow in the morning. I don't do it before my glass of water, but I've been doing it. I've been doing maybe 10 or 15 minutes in the morning, and I was doing it before I worked out. So I would do 10, 15, 20 minutes of flow, and then I would go to the gym, and that would work out. And one of the things I found is I wanted to do some type of movement first thing in the morning,

and that seems fairly ideal to me. One of the things I agree with you, it feels meditative in nature. It's way more fun than doing a static stretch. And for me, it creates a lot of blood flow. And I've noticed that my warm-ups, when I do go to work out, so I work out usually around between 11 and noon is when I go train if I did my flow work at 7 8 a.m my warm-up is super short now because you're already more limber I'm already and I don't sit in a chair right so I'm standing at a desk I'm

walking around you're moving I'm moving um so when I do go to train I don't need that 30 minute warm-up I just need about five minutes, get the blood going again. My joints are already where they're supposed to be. And I just noticed that overall my joints feel better all day throughout the day. Well, and it's interesting you say that too because there are a couple reasons for that. One is if you do mobility work first thing in the morning, it's going to make every step you take corrective exercise. If you wake up and do nothing, like you know how you feel when you first wake up right out of bed, you probably feel like a little bit stiff. Naturally so, because you've hopefully stayed

still for about eight hours. If you do some sort of mobility work, every step you take is going to be corrective exercise. Whereas if you don't do something like that in the morning, every step is just reinforcing your sleeping posture, which is certainly not ideal so in that case you're just grooving a bunch of bad patterns exactly you're grooving bad patterns essentially all day until you move it's really funny we're like the only animals that like don't move around we just go through life like moving from chair to chair it's horrible so a lot of people when they it's true a lot of lot of people when they hear mobility work, they think stretching, but that's not really what you're talking about right now. Is that correct? Not at all. And it comes down to the difference between active and passive flexibility.

People typically in the past have emphasized passive flexibility far too much. Like, you know, the ability to throw a leg up and do like a forward bend stretch is not actually very useful if you don't have the accompanying active flexibility which would be where you have the leg up and then you lift it off the table and you can just hang out there see that people that was super impressive i know showing a little leg too uh so it's mainly about active flexibility there are a lot of strength components to it in the different movements. Like a lot of things are derived from either like crawling or yoga.

I mean, really like yoga has been around for like 5,000 or so years. There are a lot of benefits to it. There are some drawbacks. But if you can understand the difference between active and passive flexibility and apply that to some yoga and martial arts and dance type of movements, it's actually very effective. So what we're actually trying to do is build strength in the full range of motion in all your joints rather than just simply stretch them one way or the other. So you're always more or less doing either circles or active movements like that. And then the way you tie it all together is through flow and the reason i think flow is so important is where it gets the brain involved

right because what you have is you have all these different movements and positions that you learn and the ultimate goal is to be able to decide on the fly where you're going to go next almost like a choose your own adventure kind of thing like okay i'm in this position now i have like four different options and the more fit you get the more flexible you get the better you get with your mobility the more options that you have right so i think that's uh that's really what i think gives you the potential to have your mobility work not only make you stronger, but also increase your overall movement capacity over the long term. Yeah.

Let's take a break real quick. I want to get into exactly how we take steps to finding that flow. Sweet. Folks, we're back with Max Schenck talking about flow. And, you know, I actually was intimidated by flow in the beginning. You know, I'm watching all these videos, all these people are doing really amazing things and it seemed really complicated

because it's kind of like the person who posts a 300 pound snatch you know, oh I don't look like that I don't want to look foolish, I don't want to do that I don't know exactly how it makes sense and with the flow stuff people are usually posting like the epic shit, you know Ido Portal's doing back flips and then hanging from a tree and all this shit.

And so it wasn't until I met somebody who was able to introduce it to me in a really fundamental way where I was like, okay, just do the wrist. It's like, oh, oh, we can just do this step by step. Interesting. Because nobody's really telling you that. They're just posting really cool shit. Well, I think that's like the bane of social media, right? You see a lot of people demonstrating strength, but you don't see a lot of people building it.

What builds strength is doing rows. But rows look garbage on Instagram. No one cares if you do rows on Instagram. I saw you post some rows just the other day on Instagram. Exactly. Garbage. But when I do it, it looks so good. Making rows cool. I'm making rows cool again. You were like, yeah, I remember it was Instagram.

Posted the rows and he's like, don't do heavy weight. Yeah, you don't need to use heavy weights. I mean, you look at someone doing rows, it typically looks like some sort of heaving half continental clean and you completely eliminate most of the benefits it typically looks like some sort of heaving half continental clean. And you completely eliminate most of the benefits of the exercise and you completely increase exponentially the risk of the exercise of hurting yourself. So, you know, taking ego out of the equation for that,

the same thing can be said with five-minute flow or any kind of flow movement. So, like one of the things that I'll do on video is I'll stand, I'll drop back into a backbend, and then I'll stand back up. And that looks really cool, but it's not a way to build flexibility. It's a way to demonstrate flexibility. Just the same way that snatching 300 pounds isn't necessarily what built that. You know what i mean what built that is like tons of technique practice a lot of squatting probably a lot of additional core work certainly some shoulder mobility work and the same thing is true with flow so it's all relative right it doesn't matter what

it looks like it matters what it does for you so for example when i'm taking a beginner they can get enough stimulus to adapt with a set of five inclined push-ups like on something as high as this table that will give them enough stimulus to grow at the same rate that it might take doug to bench press 400 for five reps you know what i mean so been there yeah i mean so essentially it's not about what the thing is itself it's about what it does for you so for someone just starting out all you need to do is make some joint circles head to toe just do some neck rotations do some wrist circles do some elbow and shoulder circles hips spine, spine, that kind of thing. And just run through that at a variety of speeds. And then as you feel more comfortable and confident, as you get more limber,

then you start to increase load, complexity, and speed. That's one thing I do like about the videos I've seen you do for your 5-Minute Flow is that I feel like it's very comprehensive. It hits all the joints. If I see someone warm up, very often they do some shoulder work, they do some hip work, they might do a little bit of core stuff, they might maybe stretch their wrists or maybe do some ankle mobility, but they're definitely not doing anything for their neck,

they're not doing anything for their fingers or their toes. Like all the stuff on the periphery gets neglected while all the stuff that's like the big prime mover joints, shoulders, hips, et cetera, get all the attention. Exactly. Well, and that's why taking a whole body approach to mobility is so important. There's a very famous therapist named Ida Rolf, who you guys probably familiar with, has very famously quoted as saying, with regard to pain, where you think it is, it ain't. And so essentially, it's the same thing. You have no idea how many people i've worked with where their wrist is causing an elbow or a shoulder problem or their neck is causing a low back

problem or their left big toe is causing a right shoulder problem like you just don't know until you work through the whole body what that's going to be like that the best you can do otherwise is guesswork and unfortunately what most people do, and I actually talked about this last time during the shoulder talk we did, is most people just focus on the ball and socket joint at the end, which is already prone to injury. It's already the most vulnerable joint. It's already the most mobile.

And they don't take into consideration the whole rest of the body, which is how your brain decides that you function. It looks at your whole body as one piece and decides if it's going to be strong, mobile, and healthy enough to perform a given task. I feel like that's really hard to sell to somebody. If someone comes to you with a shoulder issue and you're like, okay, okay, I'm going to fix your shoulder, but you start talking about everything else that's going on with their whole entire body,

they're like, hello? No, I came here for my shoulder. I don't need to pay you 200 bucks an hour to talk about my left hip and my right wrist and all these other things. Like you're just trying to get more money out of me. You're just trying to sell me on all these other services so you can, so you can like squeeze my wallet a little more dry when really all I want is my shoulder fix. Exactly. And I think that comes down to educating the people that you work with to understand how the nervous system works to a higher degree. And one of the things I have done with Five Minute Flow is I've introduced the concept of testing and retesting as frequently and regularly as possible. So when I give courses on this, in the products I've put

out on mobility, I always encourage people to do some sort of mobility movement and then recheck stuff, whether it's, whether it seems related or not. Like I have people do, you know, this one's great. Like if you're sitting at a desk, you extend your wrists and fingers, you reach them out to the side, you do a couple little shoulder circles, do a couple neck rotations. And overall, it's probably one of the best things you can do if you're spending a lot of time gripping stuff and with the shoulders forward that helps so many people improve their squat but fundamentally it kind of shouldn't right so have them do that have them do a body weight squat they're like wow that's a lot deeper and what you need to understand is that your nervous system doesn't care where the problem is it It turns on this, what is essentially like a neurological governor

to prevent you from being as strong, prevent you from being as flexible, and can sometimes also give you pain. So those are the three ways your nervous system communicates with you. It makes you weaker, stiffer, or feel pain. So those are just action signals from your brain saying, please do something different, but it doesn't specify what, like if your right shoulder hurts, it doesn't necessarily

mean fix right shoulder. It means there's a problem. I don't want you to do this thing anymore. So you need to look at the whole picture once again and figure out where the dysfunction is. That takes time, but the good news is if you do approach it from a whole body perspective, you have a much better chance of solving those problems. So for someone that we haven't really given many examples, for someone that's never seen this, even though you have your headset on and whatnot and you're kind of in a small space,

maybe you can step to the side and just give us like a 30-second to one-minute mini flow and just kind of walk through kind of how it looks looks yeah sure essentially and with the headset on i can't really do anything fancy but if you if you just get started with doing some neck rotations at a couple of different planes you learn to disassociate and move the scapula independently which is also something we talked about uh during the last show, and I think that's really pivotally important. From there, then you can start working on rotation, the inner and outer spirals of the hands. And then this one's pretty challenging for most people, but being able to segmentally control

your spine, I believe is one of the most important things you can do from a mobility standpoint. There are a lot of muscles responsible for articulating each individual vertebra. And the problem is, is you end up having some that move too much and some that move zero. And I would recommend that you do this in front of like a video camera or something like that so you can see where there's

maybe like a lot of curve and maybe where there's a flat spot but essentially for the thoracic spine which some people refer to as like the keystone of the upper body you place your hand on your sternum and you reach your actual spine backwards and you try to get everything to curve just through there and then you push the sternum forward and close the back of your thoracic spine together and then eventually you can actually turn that into a full circle so you get some of that lateral movement as well you make that look really easy but that's not that's not easy to do this takes a lot of time to actually figure out it's also a great dance move. Definitely.

I think it's pretty important. And then, you know, from there. You used that in Miami just last week? I may have used that in Miami just a little bit. So then you have, like, just, you know, your regular old hip circles. And, again, none of this is really that fancy. This is just level one. Well, this is interesting about the spine by itself because I think most people that are coaching strength, you know, always are like always a straight back.

Right. And then it's, I think it ends up being communicated as a stiff back over time. Absolutely. Well, and speaking in absolutes is always really dangerous. Always dangerous. Always dangerous. Thank you for picking up on that. But typically the reason people say that is just they don't understand the other side of that coin.

So, like, if you go to, like, a yoga studio or something, they're like, oh, yeah, forward full, like, full curvature. And I think that's a great idea. Do I think it's a great idea to deadlift 500 pounds with a round back? Generally, no. Do I think you should be able to round your back under some load? Absolutely. Do you want to be the guy who like throws his back out lifting a bag of groceries? You need to be able to have some sort of strength in those weird positions. And that's kind of what five minute flow does as well. Are you guys familiar with Saxon side bends?

I've heard of them, but I don't know what they are. Yeah. Essentially you take two dumbbells overhead and you bend all the way over to the side as far as you can. So it's complete spinal lateral flexion. You're also getting a lot of load on the spine because of the leverage. And you don't have to use heavy weights. I mean, seriously, use like five pound dumbbells. It feels like that's a lot monstrously heavy. I had, I had my wife do those a lot when she was, when she was pregnant. Cause the range of motion is relatively small, especially if you do have anything over five pounds. You're not going to want to go that far.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And you will definitely feel it in your obliques. Like the sides of your torso will get smoked from doing that. Exactly. Well, and when it comes to injury prevention, the way I feel about, you know, whether you're supposed to, like, curve your spine or not curve your spine or whether the vertebra is supposed to articulate or not, number one, if they weren't supposed to articulate, it would just be a post. Like, evolution would just say, okay, a stiff post is the best option. That's not the way it works.

If at some point in your life you are going to end up in a position where your spine is curved, it's better if you have prepared it before then. You know what I mean? So that's kind of how I feel about that. Okay. So we cut you off kind of halfway through. You were just getting done with the upper body. You started moving to hip circles.

Yeah, I was moving. I actually forgot wrists and fingers, unfortunately. But we'll come right back to it. You got paint the fence up and down. You can actually turn that into a full circle. And if you're watching the video, this looks easy, but it's actually really challenging to get your wrist to move but not your fist. So that's where you're putting the emphasis, right, is you're putting the emphasis on that wrist back and forth and then this next one i think is maybe the most important where you actually turn that into a big figure eight and the cool thing about five minute flow is it's very modular so as you get more competent with

these different movements going in both directions you can start doing the movement out here and actually if you look at something called neuromechanics, which is nerve flossing, by doing this wrist figure eight out there, you're actually flossing your median radial and musculocutaneous nerves while you're doing it, which is also very good for shoulder rehab and carpal tunnel. Moving on to the hips, I find that closed chain hip circles are really beneficial for a lot of people. So you move your pelvis, but you keep the legs completely locked. And then the other one is the pelvic circles, and that's where you're actually going to kind of use your hands to help you guide the way. And when you do this, you want to try to make eye contact with someone,

usually a lot better. And don't break. Don't break the eye contact. Don't blink, don't break. It's easier when you've got sunnies on. That's a creepy smile. You guys can only see that. And then from there, you know,

you make some knee circles. And the idea with the knee circles is, once again, the knee is a hinge joint, right? And you're going to get a lot of people who say, you know, it should never go past the toes and it should never deviate one way or the other. But as bad as squatting with a heavy weight and having valgus collapses, everything's okay if you do it on purpose. So being able to load the medial side of the knee is a great thing if you do it on purpose and you do it under control.

Then it's just going to make the joint itself much stronger. And actually, by making the joint stronger, you're going to reduce the likelihood that your nervous system is going to cut your strength when you're in a disadvantaged position. So it's going to make you safer and stronger. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. And then just ankle circles. And the key with ankle circles is you don't want your toes to lead the way.

So this is something a lot of people miss is they start to move their toes a lot or they start to move their whole leg but if you can really lock that down lock the toes down and think about like scooping brownie batter out of a bowl or something like that or whatever dessert it doesn't really matter specifically brownies what it is for sure brownie last night what were the ingredients? Let's keep on going. I'm no fool. Okay, so that was all.

That was a very abbreviated version, but those are basically like the building blocks of getting flexible enough to the point where you can start doing the really cool shit like Hindu push-ups and weaving in and out of back bends and thoracic bridges, deep lunges, and things like that. So the cool part, though, is as you get more comfortable, you do all those in those different positions. So I find myself in all these different weird half-kneeling positions, doing wrist circles and doing shoulder circles and doing scapular movements and once again you get the freedom to put it together the way you want it so it's almost like an artistic expression and it also makes it mentally stimulating enough

that you want to stick with it and you have these markers where you can really elevate your flow game. You know what I mean? Like I'll throw handstands into my flows now and actually do some like leg movements up there. And over time, that should be the goal is to enhance your movement to the point where you really have like complete physical freedom. And that's really what five Minute Flow is all about. So we were talking earlier about the, you know, doing five minutes in the morning and then also talking about learning and not doing too much at once. And I think a lot of times, I mean, I'm one of these people that want to get all of it right now and committing to only, say, five minutes at a time can be really beneficial

in learning the skills like we were talking about in the first half of the show. How long does it take when I go from my wrist circles to being able to do handstands while doing ankle circles? Well, that's a very silly question. I just want to look cool on Instagram. For you personally? Of course. We don't care about anybody else. Two months, you could look very cool on Instagram with my help.

All right. How much is it going to cost me? You've got to quit trimming your beard. A lot. It's not going to be cheap. I'm easy, but I'm not cheap. Okay. So this is all very basic level one type stuff.

This is basically like a high-level gymnast doing a set of push-ups in the morning to knock the dust off. Exactly. At that level. Which I still think is a great idea. Absolutely. Throw some push-ups in the morning to to like knock the dust off exactly at that level which i still think is a great idea absolutely throw some push-ups in there why not yeah so so five minutes in the morning you you wake up you do you do five minutes of easy joint circles you're just taking every every joint you have through its full range of motion just so number one you can keep the range of motion you have but then also ideally with all the other mobility and strength work you're doing this will help you gain additional range of motion.

Right, and strength as well. And then the other thing that I forgot to touch on is the reason this is so important is that joints themselves don't have a direct blood supply. So the only way that they can be stimulated to regrow tissue and to improve the quality of that tissue is through movement. So that movement is what stimulates regrowth of tissue. So if you don't do that, everything just freezes up and basically stagnates. Right, like if you tear your meniscus and your knee, it's an avascular tissue, and so they try to get you moving right away to push all the synovial fluid through the joint. That way you actually have some new nutrients coming in and waste products being removed.

Exactly. And it's amazing how few people take all their joints through their full range of motion every day. I mean, it's really fascinating too because when I first started with 5-Minute Flow, literally I just had a blog that was the only instructions were me showing people how to do joint circles. So I've had like hundreds of people email me, send me messages on Facebook that things like to the effect of for years, I thought I had bad knees and a bad back. But until I started doing this, I just realized I had a mobility problem. So like people are emailing me with no specific instructions whatsoever that their pain has been eliminated. And it comes down to do it every day

and do the whole body. Like, I don't know how to evaluate someone over the internet who I've never met before, but I do know that if you stay away from painful movements and move your joints every day, you will get better. I mean, it's just guaranteed you will improve. I would say this is really important for rest days, you know. Yeah. I think that there's a lot of days where I don't do anything intense, and on the days I'm not doing something intense, I might spend 30 minutes doing flow work.

And I feel amazing. Exactly. You should still sweat every day. You should still move every day. Just because it's flow doesn't mean it has to be ridiculously easy either. I mean, you can do a set of 50 Hindu push-ups as part of a flow if you wanted to. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve with it and what else you're doing in the rest of your week.

It's interesting. We were talking about getting nutrients in and out of the joints. And I was recently talking to this, he's a president of a chiropractic school. And we were talking about getting nutrients to the brain through the, I guess the spinal column. And he's talking about getting that spine moving as you were discussing before. And that actually can really help with cognitive function as well. So it's good for the brain to get your spine moving. So having that stiff back all the time may not be great for brain function as well.

Have you heard that or am I? No, but it sounds 100% right. Honestly, I haven't heard that before, but I certainly believe it. There are a lot of things that are dependent on movement, like lymph, for example. So like the lymphatic system, it doesn't have a driver. You know, your heart pumps blood, but nothing pumps lymph. So the only way that you move lymph around is by moving. And if you only move some stuff, you're really not going to move that much lymph.

But if you move everything. Can I just jump on a trampoline? You stumped the Schwab. Honestly, I've heard that. I've heard that, and here's the thing. If you're doing nothing, jumping on a trampoline is great. If you have the ability to jump rope or actually move around yourself, I think it's infinitely better.

So that's kind of my side benefits. If your primary goal is to circulate lymph. Sure. No one's ever come to the gym. What are your goals? They're like circulation. My wife is unsatisfied with my lymph circulation. I'm going to go to a gym this weekend to check it out.

And just, that's just, just so I can say that. What is your goal? I'm going to drop one on a personal trainer. Mike's going in. Do you guys have any trampolines here? Because that's a deal breaker for me. Okay, so you're also not saying necessarily that this is like a replacement for doing hardcore exercise.

This is just something that you can add into your current routine that'll help you feel better i think that's a really common misconception and you end up getting a lot of uh divisiveness between people who associate with being like mobility people versus people who are strength people and one of my like goals in life is to bridge the gap because I think it's very cool to be able to do some awesome flow stuff. And I also think it's extremely cool to be able to deadlift 600 pounds. So I, I don't see them as competing ideals. I actually see them as two sides of the same coin. And, uh, just speaking for myself and the people that I've worked with, being better, being more mobile makes you stronger, makes you more resilient to injury.

Being stronger gives you a better foundation to have good flexibility. And what I mean by good flexibility is a stable form of flexibility because I've worked with a lot of people who have very weak core, very weak legs, very mobile, but it's not in a positive way like they're mobile to the point where it's just like you know that they're they're loose you know what i mean so there's there's like a spectrum you know you have a total rubber band on one side then you have like a steel pillar on the other side and the truth is most people train as if they want to live as a steel pillar right the truth is i think most of us would prefer a result from exercise somewhere in the middle

where you can be freaking rock hard but also be pliable and flexible rock hard yeah we how old are we you said rock hard and me and Mike both smiled and looked at each other. Why did you look at each other when I said that? You guys have been doing this podcast together too long. A lot of lonely podcasting nights. Yeah, we can read each other's minds. It's like on the Grip Shrink episode. We were talking about me, Andy, and maybe even Kenny. We all had separate experiences sleeping next to Mike,

and we know that he gets a little handsy. I walked through the room today, and that part of the episode was playing when my wife was listening to it, and she was like, what are you guys talking about? I think it's amazing that Marci listens to the show. I love that she listens to the show. She listens to all of them. My wife won't do it. This took a turn.

Yeah. All right, so if people want to learn more about 5-Minute Flow, what is the process? Go to 5minuteflow.com. Or if you want to just kind of explore a little bit, if you just search for 5-Minute Flow and my name, Max Schenck, you'll find tons of free information on that. But obviously the mobility system I put together kind of supersedes everything I had intended with five minute flow. Because remember, five minute flow, my intention was as little instruction as possible, as little equipment required as possible.

Just seriously, go move, drink a glass of water in the morning. The end. But when I set out to make a product for it, and the only reason I did was because so many people asked me for it, I really wanted to make something comprehensive. So in the five minute flow product at five minute flow.com, what I've put together is a very comprehensive mobility system that includes core strengthening as part of the program that includes strengthening the shoulders and different positions as part of the program. It includes strengthening the shoulders and different positions as part of the program. It includes various forms of locomotion, like crawling and crab walking and monkey and bear

and different things like that. And it also provides a foundation for how to weave them together specifically. So it takes everything from the isolation, joint mobility movements, like I just showed you there. And then I have some of what are called like primary positions. So like downward dog, upward dog, deep lunge position, thoracic bridge position. And then you link those up together in combinations. And then those

combinations are put into full-fledged flows. And so if you need a little bit more direction exactly how to do it um i basically wanted to make it so what i do with all my products is i want to make it so you can start at complete level zero and it's a lot more work but i think that's really what determines a good coach is if you're able to take someone who's really a total beginner and take them every step of the way into a really advanced athlete yeah Yeah, I've read your Ultimate Athleticism book, which was very, very good. The Simple Shoulder Solution, which we talked about on the last show we did with you about shoulders, is also very good.

And then now this is your latest product that me and Mike have both seen that we both think is quite good. So we highly recommend it. We definitely want you to check it out. We have a promo code if you go to 5minuteflow.com and you want to invest in that product. It's Barbell, and they get 20% off. 20% off. Yeah, man. 20%.

So if you want to check it out, I highly recommend it. Yes, sir. Sweet. Is there anything else people should be checking out? Should they be watching your Instagram so you can swing sticks in your backyard as you walk on planks? I think my Instagram is pretty cool, I guess. I mean, there aren't a lot of people with the name Max Schenck. backyard as you walk on planks i think like uh my instagram is pretty cool i guess i mean there aren't a lot of people with the name max shank so i mean like all my social media it's all the

same stuff but i uh i try to put out like 95 free stuff and five percent paid stuff through the course of a year so i'm always putting something out there for free i do an article every single week uh without fail for the last couple years. Yeah, I just love this shit, which is why, obviously, I have the playground lab in my backyard. Yeah, excellent. Thanks for joining us.

Oh, dude, thanks for having me on. I fucking love you guys. Right on, dude. Thanks. Cool.