Barbell Shrugged - It’s All In Your Head, Kinda - With Dr. Todd Dersham - Active Life Radio #13

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

Have you ever heard someone use the expression “it’s all in your head” and find yourself wanting to punch them in the face?   Yea, us too.    In this episode, Dr. Sean talks to Active Life 1 on 1 coach, Dr. Todd Dersham about a particular client he had who was in her own way in regards to her mindset around pain.    They discuss how mindset can increase pain or decrease pain and how it plays a role in the recovery cycle.    Hint, it’s not in your head, but your head could be in the way of your body.  Minute Breakdown:   0-10 - Dr. Sean ate Weed Cookies? 11-20 - How to spot emotional distress on an intake. 21-30 - Should Active Life partner with World Star? 31-40 - What is pain? 41-49 - Why keep working with an Active Life coach after symptoms are gone? ___________________________________ Please Support our Sponsors   Organifi - Save 20% at http://organifi.com/shrugged Ned - Save 15% using the code “SHRUGGED” at http://helloned.com US Air Force Special Ops Work with an Active Life Coach: http://activeliferx.com/shrugged   Find Dr. Sean at @DrSeanPastuch Find Dr. Todd at @DoctorDersh   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/alr-toddd ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

What's up everybody? Welcome back to Active Life Radio on the Shrugged Collective Network. On today's episode, we're going to talk to Dr. Todd Dersham, who is a one-on-one staff with Active Life, about a client he works with and has been working with for over a year, despite the fact that she hasn't been in pain for more than half the time. So why does she stick around? We're going to talk about that. And before we get to that, I want to make sure that we thank our sponsors. This show is brought to you by Organifi.

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let's get you to the show. I have Dr. Todd Dersham here with us. What's up, Todd? How we doing, Dr. Sean? Doing great. What do you mean, how am I doing? It's a Monday. I'm doing great.

It's beautiful, man. It is beautiful. When you guys are listening to this, it won't be a Monday, but podcasts aren't live live and you know that. So Todd has been on staff with us now for how long? What, like two years? Two years.

Yeah. And I know Todd since chiropractic school. So we go back over a decade. That's fucking crazy, man. I know. I think about it often and I'm like, where did the time go? It's crazy. I don't know if you guys listening to this are past your 30s into your 40s or if you're in your 20s.

I don't know how old you guys are. What I know is that I used to remember thinking about like, oh, when you go to college, that's the older person. And then when you graduate college, it's like, oh, you're kind of in that weird creeper state because you're not old enough to be in the real world, but you're too old to hang out with college kids and do college kid things. So for us, it was perfect. It was like, oh, let's fill that gap with chiropractic school. Right. Some of us still acted like we were in undergrad.

All of us. All of us. All of us. I remember the time. I don't know if you remember this or not, but somebody made edible snacks when we were doing a house crawl. Do you remember this? Yeah, you do.

He's shaking his head saying, oh, he remembers. And it was my first time ever eating an edible. And I remember eating like half of a cookie and being like, this is stupid. I don't feel anything. Sitting around a campfire, and then we ate the other half. And it was you who came to the backyard, and you're like, all right, go to the next house. And I was like, yeah, I can't get up. We're good here.

I'm stuck so yeah chiropractic school wasn't exactly um i mean we learned a lot but we weren't exactly the picture of professionalism as chiropractic school students that's where we started our journey to change lives that's that's right but for those of you listening, I think it's important that they hear stories like that. You know, we're people. We did the same things other people did. And there's no perfection here. There's no like, oh, I've always been this consummate professional. No shot. Right. We weren't hurting anybody either, except maybe ourselves. Yeah, maybe. I mean, maybe. I felt great. Yeah. Well, we know the benefits of that ourselves. Yeah, maybe. I mean, maybe I felt great. Yeah. Well, we know the benefits of

that now. So, yeah. All right. So let's get to what we're going to talk about today. I want to talk about your client who will call Jamie. Okay. For today. Cause I know we weren't able to get in touch with her in time for this show. So Jamie, when Jamie came to you, she had low back pain. And I remember you talking to me. Well, I remember because it was five minutes ago. You reminded me that she came in with an intake form that was different than everybody else's. Why don't you tell us about that? So typically, just for everybody listening, our intake form is going to be like online.

And then once you type in your answers, it's going to be automated, filled out, and then kind of reproduced as a report that's sent to each coach. So everything is essentially digital. I received hers as a scanned in document that was written in pencil. So my initial reaction was like, OK, like there's going to be there's going to be something more to this besides just dealing with some back pain. And I understand too that people have, maybe she was just in a crunch or whatever happened, the reason was, doesn't matter. We got this intake form filled out in pencil, scanned it. Well, I think the beautiful thing about that is it demonstrates how powerful habit is and comfort. So we're all an accumulation

of our habits. It's all that all of us are. And somebody who would get an intake form from us to fill out online, to follow the procedure that we go through to make sure that we're thorough with all of our clients and be like, yeah, I'm going to write it by hand, scan it and send it in. That is because for whatever reason, they're more comfortable doing that, which means we're happy with it. We're going to get better answers. It just means that we're going to have to kind of groove new habits with that person for them to be successful in our system. Absolutely. And I remember having a little conversation around it in regards to that, where it was, she kind of just brushed it off as

something like, oh, I just did this and hope you don't mind, you know, but you knew that there was, you know, going to be some more to it. Well, it means that she understood that she was going off, off the, off the book. And I want to give people a little bit of a heads up as to what actually happens after somebody signs up with us, because I've gotten a bunch of those questions. So when you sign up to work with Active Life one-on-one, the first thing that happens before we even let you sign up is you speak to somebody on our team to find out if you'd be a good fit to work with us. And we're still turning away 30 plus percent of people who reach out because we just don't feel like we could be effective for them. They're either in need of a local physical therapist, chiropractor, orthopedist. They have crazy goals that we can't hit in the

timelines that they want hit. Whatever it is, we just tell those people that we don't think that it would be worth their money to work with us and we send them out. The other 70% or so we take on and they immediately get a five-day recovery template that we ask them to do to kind of reset their schedule. And that template is not custom. It's totally templated. The same one everyone gets. Our clients are not charged for those five days. Those five days are on the house. And we use it kind of as part of our assessment. If you can't do something, then we know, okay, good. At that low intensity, it's certainly not going to work at high intensity. Then our coach gets on the phone, talks to you about what's going on. So Todd would get on the phone with this client named Jamie, talk to her about what's going on. And then based on what she tells him,

Todd's going to build her a custom assessment that we're going to watch video analysis. We're going to get strength numbers. We're going to get range analysis we're going to get strength numbers we're going to get range of motion testing all that kind of stuff based on what we find on that we're going to then tell the client what we saw tell them what their deficiencies are and begin building a program for them that is going to clean up those deficiencies we write one week for the client, but we have six months in mind. So the first week sets the stage for that client. And every week thereafter, we update their program based on how they performed in the prior week. I think that spells it out for people.

I think that's pretty good. Yeah. Todd's been anxiously waiting to tell the story and I'm just talking, talking, talking, talking, talking. It's all good, man.

All right. So Jamie sends you a handwritten intake form. What's next? Take me through it. What was she dealing with? Uh, just, just mostly the back pain.

But when we get into the conversation, you could tell like it quickly, you know, she was so used to high volume. She was used to lifting heavy weights and she would just get to this certain point and just kind of either plateau or the lower back would be just setting her back. So this is a CrossFitter? Correct. Elite or not elite? What kind of a client? She's, she's in shape, but not elite. Like she, yeah. And she, she also does nutrition coaching. So she's, you know, in tune to taking care of other people as well and working with other people in regard, in this regard. Meaning she is a nutrition coach,

not she has. Okay. Yes. I apologize. No, no, you don't need to apologize. Okay. So what was the first phone call? Like, Do you remember the initial conversation? I remember it quickly going from my lower back and my training to a lot of things that were going on in her life. So it was like, I'm handling this, I'm dealing with this. And you could just tell that a lot of the conversation switched towards the amount of like stress and things that she had to cope with outside of training. And that training was starting to become a way that she could escape versus something that she looked forward to and that was going to help her progress and help her kind of stay on this idea of like longevity and keeping her body in shape. I think what would be valuable right now is for you to give our listeners a little bit of insight into why that matters. So before you

get to that, I want to give you some context to do it. And the idea that like, oh, you're stressed out. Oh, so, so all my pain is in my head then. Is that what you're saying? It's like, no. So you're calling me crazy. No, but you just said it's in my head. Cause I'm stressed. No, you're stressing me out. Okay, sorry. Right? Like that's what I want to make sure people don't get. So I know you had a unique experience at the clinic or in the gym where you provide services. And you told me that when you told two grown men, or was it online with your clients,

you took them through what we call a load versus capacity and they cried. Can you tell that story? Well, it was actually another one-on-one client who is transitioning to the immersion who did this. Got it. So it was a one-on-one client of ours who ended up electing to go on and learn how to do this for other clients. Yeah. And then we, we've remained in contact. So we, I called called him one one evening and he started talking about how he was discussing the load versus capacity. And like I think he said in front of two 40 year old men. to tears because they understood what loads, whether it's physical or emotional, were being placed on their bodies that weren't allowing them to function the way they want. So we're going to do a full podcast about this with myself and Dr. Ray Gorman, who you

guys have heard on this show multiple times. But I'll give you a brief understanding of what Todd's talking about with low-verse capacity. I want you to think about the person or yourself as the one who, instead of everything being nice and orderly in their life, is stressed all day long. They get home, they're stressed. They go to work, they're stressed. They wake up at four o'clock in the morning to go do their job and they slug down 24 ounces of coffee just to get their day going. They immediately are in conflict mode as soon as they get to their first job site.

They show up at the gym after a 12-hour day and they bang through heavy Fran. I mean, it seems obvious when you think about it that way, that that person would be more likely to get injured than the person who wakes up at 6 or the same time, hangs out a little bit, rolls out of bed, does a little morning routine, goes for a walk, gets their presents together, goes to work and enjoys their day all day long. And then shows up at the gym after a nice, relaxing, fulfilling work day and hits the same workout. I think it's clear to people. They can hear it. But we'll go through it in a full podcast with Dr. Ray.

So she pointed out that she had a lot of stress in her life. How did you help her with that as someone who's not a psychologist? Because I want to be clear, we don't offer psychology services at Active Life. Yeah. One of our friends and one of my mentors said something really powerful to me. Who is that? Let's give him credit. Chris Stepien. Dr. Chris Stepien, the owner of Barefoot Rehab in Denville, New Jersey. Because I had the same exact question to him. I said, how do we – I feel like we're flirting with this line, and how do we dance around it per se?

And he looked right at me and he just said, it doesn't take a degree to be kind to somebody. And just by asking somebody a simple question of how are you, what's going on in your life, I'm not trying to manage that from a deep psychological perspective, but by just being a sounding board for somebody, and for Jamie in particular, it was all she needed, you know, and that relationship just grew over time, which we'll talk about. Yeah, it's amazing how many people don't have somebody to tell their stuff to who's not going to offer them the solution that would only work for the person providing the solution.

Right. I also want to be clear. Sometimes people are asking for advice and you got to give it to them. But when someone is just trying to vent and tell you what's going on in their life, Very easy to try to solve those problems for people, but what ends up happening is we cause them more and more and more stress, which leads to more and more problems, and them being less likely to tell you what's going on. And I just worked on creating space for her to just figure that stuff out, which I think most of us need to be doing,

sitting with ourselves a little bit more. But it was just more about asking certain questions and getting her to think about this stuff. And then she was able to come up with a lot of the answers eventually on her own. Well, it's funny that you say, um, we need to be able to sit and think for ourselves about, you know, with ourselves because the other, just a few days ago, you texted me a question. And then before I even had the opportunity to answer it for you, like, nope, got it. Just needed to think about it myself a little bit. Yeah.

And I need that like virtual, you know, kind of backhand, you know, or whatever it is. Like I, it's like an energy thing. So I know when I, when I like speak something to you, you demand that I am at a certain point of understanding of what I'm asking you. So if I'm not there yet, I'll ask questions prematurely, but then like quickly be like, Nope. All right. I did my thought process. And then I, yeah. I learned the way I respond to that kind of stuff from our media guy, Sean Cleary, super Cleary. Um, I used to send him questions like, Hey, I can't get the, uh,

the garage band working. What do I need to do? And he would be annoyed and he would answer me. And then I would ask him questions about like a myriad of things. And finally, he started being like, hey, man, there's this awesome website that you should check out. It's G-O-O-G-L-E.com. You can type any question you want in there and find the answer to it. And I've typed it in. I'm like, oh, it's fucking Google, man.

He's like, yeah, use it. Stop texting me stupid stuff. Fair enough. I'm not saying you were texting me stupid stuff. I'm saying that there's a level at which we all need to understand the question that we're asking before we go asking it to somebody. Cause it just means we haven't done any self exploration first and we're asking someone else to do it for us. Exactly. All right. So we're getting way off topic. I think it's valuable, but I do too. All right. So continue. She's got back pain. She's got stress. You held some space for her, let her think about herself

and did her back pain start going away because she was all of a sudden less stressed? You held some space for her, let her think about herself. And did her back pain start going away because she was all of a sudden less stressed? Not necessarily. We had other things that we needed to work through, which was an understanding of, in a respect to the volume that she needed to train at now versus what she was used to training at, which is what, which was a part of the reason that brought her to us is that as, as things started going on and as time went on, the body just is different. It's going to function different. Maybe there's things that we weren't paying attention to. So over time it became one of those things where she wanted to continue to train at the volume that she wanted, that she was training at,

but the back pain wasn't really moving in the direction that we wanted to. It wasn't getting worse. It just wasn't going away as quick as like she wanted to. So, you know, in the first couple of weeks, we immediately had to sit down and again, discuss, Hey, listen, something else has to change in order for the back pain to change. And what was that something else specifically? What was that something else? And how did you help her get to it honestly just like i said mostly was was volume was just training volume and it was learning how to how we need to scale back enough to get our symptoms to a certain point where they weren't interrupting or

affecting the rest of her day which would then cause things to spiral out of control tactical things would be more of like figuring out the right loads and grooving some new motor patterns with things like deadlifting and even squatting. So what I want to do right now is I want to go to a quick break. We're going to tell everybody how freaking awesome we are. I'm going to give them an opportunity to work with us if they want to. And when we come back, I want you to tell everybody specifically how we find the right loads, the right volumes, because so many people are just easing out and easing back in and they're causing themselves to be a disaster. So we'll be right back. It's going to be less than 30 seconds. Stick around.

What's up, Shrug Nation? Are you enjoying this episode i bet you are i'm gonna keep this brief we'll get you right back to the show in a moment in the meantime if you're interested in anything that we're doing at active life make sure that you head to active life rx.com slash shrug you want to be a better coach you You want to help your clients better. You want to get out of pain, but you don't want to go to the doctor or miss the gym. ActiveLifeRx.com slash shrugged. That's where you need to be. We'll see you when you get there. Turn pro. Here we go back to the episode. All right, Todd, Dr. Todd, Dr. Doctor. So, I mean, yes, scale back. It seems obvious, but so many people do it and they just end up mangling themselves because they

scale back for a week or two weeks or six weeks. And then it's like, oh, yeah, I scaled back for a bit. I'm going to jump back into everything. How do you do it? Very carefully. A lot of it just is based on any of the assessments that we do. So when we start with a mobility assessment, we look at those things and we got to figure out what that low hanging fruit is. And if mobility is one of the bigger issues, then we need to put strength,

not away, but aside to say, let's start improving the ranges of motion to make sure your joints are healthy. And just to make sure that you guys all understand exactly what Todd means by that, we go through flexibility and then we go through mobility. So we're looking at movement when we combine the two of them. The idea is we're solving the low hanging fruit prior to moving up the ladder. And if you listened to last week's episode with Dr. Ray, we talk about the athlete's hierarchy of needs in which that is exactly what we cover. So I interrupted you on purpose. That's all right right well i hate when people say like i don't mean to interrupt you but but i kind of do yeah that's fine i think it's good for people to to hear that so that way if they've seen that stuff they can at least visualize it and start to put

it all together um so after the mobility stuff which there wasn't a there wasn't a huge um number of mobility tests that she was limited in um so then we started looking at strength ratios and when we started looking at strength ratios we those things were off particularly um from side to side which was severely impacting her ability to squat heavy and even deadlift can Can you give an example of a basic strength ratio? And before you do, what I want to make sure we do is give some more credit out. Because one of the things that I think people make a mistake of, especially coaches, is thinking that they need to come up with their own everything. That if they just do what somebody else did, then they're not

special. And when it comes to our strength balance figures, our strength ratios, we took those straight from Dr. Corey Duvall at the Stay Active Clinic in Nashville, North Carolina. We did not create them. We ended up editing some of them a little bit based on seeing thousands of people go through stuff. But the credit there does not belong with us. It belongs with Dr. Corey Duvall. So can you explain briefly what you mean by the left to right strength ratio? One of the things that in our initial assessment program is step ups. So we like to challenge the single leg strength with step ups in a squat pattern. One of the other things that doesn't necessarily show up in the initial assessment, unless we're going to tailor to somebody like Jamie, was like a single leg RDL.

I like to expose somebody and see how well they can pull on one leg versus the other. So what we're looking at is just how well they can take a certain amount of weight and perform those reps slower down faster up and see what kind of feedback we get in regards to not only the number they can do per side but also how well how well it looks and how well it feels so if we're not seeing them yeah so if we're not seeing them their feedback's gonna be like the right was real wobbly the left was solid and and we just use that feedback to make the decisions going further don't you think it'd be cool if we could get somebody from like world star hip-hop to uh to jump on and do a commentary of someone who's terrible on one side and great on the other

side they were like expose him you know what i'm talking about laughing because i can see like next to your face right now someone coming in and just being like, wow, damn expose him. Like, like what they do on barstool sports when like a sixth grader crosses over a grown man and he falls over. Expose him. Yeah. We should, we should totally get that going. That would, that would get some followers.

We also probably lose a bunch of people. Yeah. Like you're picking on lose a bunch of people. Yeah. Like you're picking on people having imbalances? Yeah, let's just have our credibility go straight down the toilet. All right, so let's get back. Professional face. Got it. All right, so we find some major imbalances left to right.

What happens next with her? And how do you explain to her why this is relevant for her low back pain? Because one of the things that I think is, is a challenge for coaches that we obviously have been able to overcome is yeah, cool. But my pain's in my back, not in my legs. So who cares that my left leg can do four times as much weight and reps as my right. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's really cool to try to explain that because for us, it seems pretty obvious with the amount of people that we've been working with and what we've seen and with that feedback, what we can do with it. The challenge, I don't think it was as

big of a challenge in this case, in regards to when you have somebody assess it and they're writing down the response, it's pretty obvious their feedback will be like, well, that was quite the difference in reps on from side to side. A lot of times I don't get a follow-up question because they're just like, wow, that does make sense. I understand. But for anybody listening, it's important if you're doing a lot of bilateral movements, whether it's squatting, deadlifting, you have the ability to pull or squat in each leg with the same amount of force. Or what's going to happen is you're going to see that force get transferred somewhere else unevenly.

And then over time, that's how you're going to see your body break down. And that's why I love doing what we're doing and creating that functional diagnosis. Because the functional diagnosis is at least telling you why these things are. If you had five different doctors tell you you had a disc herniation, none of them are really telling you why that disc broke down. Well, if you go to a gym where there's an active life coach, they're going to, you know, as long as that person has been cleared to come back to the gym. Yeah, I think that's great.

I also think something that you said there that was valuable was when they write it down themselves, it becomes an internalized thing. And this is something that we do in the sales process. When coaches, for example, are thinking about buying our immersion course and they're like, oh, that's expensive. I'm like, yeah. What did you think? Awesome was going to be cheap. And then you take them through the idea of, well, let's, let's just break it down. How many, you know, how many dollars is it? Okay. How many, how much money do you make per client session? Got it. Okay. Let's divide that many dollars by that many. I mean, that many dollars that you're spending on the course by that many dollars that

you make per session. How many sessions do you have to do to make your money back? I have to do 50. Wow, the dog is not liking the story. I have to do 300 sessions. Like, wow, that's a lot of sessions. Okay. Yeah, it is a lot of sessions. Okay, well, how many sessions per week per client are you going to do? I'm going to do three sessions per week per client. How many clients are you going to have? Five. Okay. So you're going to do 15 sessions per week. Yeah. So in 10 weeks, you're going to make all, you're going to make half of your money back. Yeah. I guess when you say it like that, it's kind of, it's kind of easy. And I, by the way, grossly overestimated what it costs and how fast they get back when I backed into that. But if I did the math, they don't believe it.

When they do the math themselves, they're like, oh, yeah, okay. So I could make all my money back in eight weeks. It's like, yeah, that's why there's a money-back guarantee before the course is over. And it's much more powerful when they do the math. So let's get back to, she wrote it down. She understood the issues. How long before she was dealing with less or no pain? Less pain would, was pretty early on.

I would say within the first two to three months she was, and then, you know, there's a hip thing that popped up. So as we were going through certain movements and we were starting to, you know, apply certain stresses to her, it was more just for more, you know, but we had to resort back to the conversation of, hey, we can build you up now and build that volume up to where you're working out more, you know, pain-free, but we need to, you know, we need to progress it the same way that we progressed you through the rehab. So you discussed the word irritation. Can you explain to people what you mean by that and how it compares to pain because i want to be really clear to people who are listening we're not suggesting that you just tough it out and go through the pain yeah um well that's another thing that we

make sure we remind like we have certain parameters around what we want people to feel or not to feel while they're doing certain movements but But in regards to irritation, when we talk about irritation, we talk about, we also talk about insult. So your body is being like insulted in a sense on a daily basis, like your shirt, you sitting on a chair, it's not impacting you. It's not bothering you. It's not like it's a subconscious thing that's happening. And your mind isn't really recognizing that it's bothering you. Where irritation, it becomes more of a conscious thing. Your mind becomes aware of something that is bothering you. So when you start to feel certain things, it's really good that you and the athlete can communicate on this because a lot of people will just say, I have pain here.

I have pain here. So if we can start to break down and get really particular about what some of that stuff means, then our communication between the athlete and the coach becomes a lot clearer and the expectations that we set up become a lot clearer. So that way every day they're not telling themselves they're in pain. They're just saying, hey, I was slightly irritated today on this particular movement. And I think that that's one of the things that we do that is actually most beneficial for the clients is having them reframe the language around what they're describing. And the reason why that ends up being so valuable is I want you guys to think about it this way. What we tell people at a workshop is you're sitting in a chair.

Raise your hand if you're extremely uncomfortable right now. And nobody's hands go up. We say, raise your hand if you're uncomfortable right now at all. Nobody's hands go up. We say, okay, good. Freeze. And stay in that position for the next three hours without moving. And everyone laughs. We're like, well, eventually you would need to kind of shuffle in your chair, move around a little bit, scratch an itch. It's at that exact moment that you begin experiencing

irritation. It goes from being insult, which is the atoms bombarding your system today, right now, subconsciously, to being irritation the moment that it becomes conscious and you decide you need to move. But if we were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, are you okay? Like, yeah, bro, what the fuck is wrong with you? I just slid onto my right ass cheek. Got it. Okay. Sorry. It's the same when you deal with discomfort and you just define all of it as pain because you can't identify exactly what it is. What happens when she starts to be out of pain? I mean, six to eight months in at that point, if you're working with an active life coach who you signed up with, with the expressed interest of getting out of pain without going to

the doctor, missing the gym, that's, that's go time, right? Like, I feel good. Yeah. I mean, I think the conversation just switches to how can we make sure we maintain this? And maintaining it is by doing and performing the constant assessments every six to eight weeks, making sure that we're checking in. And it's not just the assessments. It's on a daily basis. We've also implemented a lifestyle check-in. So every Friday, everybody's going to get a, like a workout, if you will, but it's in True Coach as a workout asking you what's your sleep, what's your quality of sleep, what's your nutrition, can you

rate that for me? And I think what's really neat about that is it's not only feedback for you, but it's another spot where the athlete can do some self-realization. Um, and, and when they're looking at it, hopefully, you know, they're, they're just not feeding me what I want to see because the important part of all this is it's, it's about you. So if, you know, they're not being accurate with what they're, they're saying on the lifestyle check-in, but somehow their body's still breaking down and their load is like minimal. Um, then, you know, that's just something that we all need to be, you know, communicate effectively and be honest about so that way we can move forward. Yeah. And I think that that lifestyle check-in, which by the way was Dr. Katie Harper,

our one-on-one coach's idea. Great idea. I think that it's a huge value add we also include questions about stress it's not it's a it's minimum effective dose how's your life going kind of stuff every week and and at what point did there was a point i know that jamie said to you hey man i'm i'm looking to quit like i'm done with this was that before she was out of pain or after she was out of pain uh long after i would say months after she was out of pain she she said was out of pain? Long after, I would say months after she was out of pain, she said that there were some things in life that she needed to attend to and she was going to cancel, you know, which is always tough.

But at the same time, when somebody's leaving and they're feeling good, it's, you know, it feels good at the same time. So she said she was canceling, but she didn't. Right. So right around the time. Right. So I'm going to need you to come in on Saturday. Yeah. Yeah. We, we fixed the problem with payroll. We fixed the glitch. Right. No. Yeah. It was,

it was right around the time that she, I could felt, I felt things were just real heavy. And that might be intuition, call it whatever you want. But just the way she communicated, it was really short. It wasn't the same way she communicated with me. And you could just tell that some of her feedback on the workouts were also like, oh, I'm not feeling as strong as I was. I didn't get through this workout as quick as I thought I would.

I'm not, you know, and little aches and pains started popping back up. You know, it was kind of like, oh, the hip fell a little off today. But then it was hit or miss. It was like week after week. It was like feeling good this week. And then so leading up to it, there was a lot of this kind of up and downs. And right around the time that she said she was going to have to cancel, I just reached

out and you know i said hey there seems to be a lot going on um i just want you to know i'm i'm a safe space if you need to talk about this and and let whatever you need to let out um and just know that you know i care about you no matter what happens and kind of left it at that and it wasn't long after that where I got the cancel notice and then I got the restart notice and she reached out to me and she was like, this message alone was enough to tip me back over to the edge because I thought I was making a mistake leaving and I didn't really want to, but this helped me stay on. So what's the value to her now? Well, so first of all, great job. I think

that that should demonstrate to people who are out there listening to this that a coach is not somebody who writes a program. It's somebody who executes the application of the program that they wrote, which means addressing the human on the other side of the phone, the other side of the table, right across from you in the gym, whatever it is. Assess the human. Help the human. The program is meant to be an accessory to you doing that, not the other way around. So what's the value now though? Because what I want to make sure people understand is that we have clients who leave all the time. I mean, you had a client of yours who recently left who we posted the exit survey from, who leave all the time. I mean, you had a client of yours who recently left who we posted the exit survey from who was like, this was so good. I decided I wanted

to go get the immersion course to learn how to do it for other people because I was inspired by it. And you posted it, we shared it. And that's exactly how we want clients leaving. We don't want clients to stay forever who don't need or want what we're doing with them. So what's the value to someone like Jamie to still be with you? Yeah, that's, man, that can be a tough question. I think a lot of it just has to do with this idea of like maintenance and not being completely ready. And maybe there's some things in our program that we can start to work on that will allow for her to feel more confident leaving the program. I think it's one of the things that comes to mind is like, well, if you lose X amount

of pounds to get to your goal weight, and your question is like, what's the point of eating healthy now? There's still this idea that you have goals that you're working toward and something inside you is telling you that you're not completely done. Um, and it's just sitting down and having that conversation. So where ours has shifted to now is more so how do I get back to performing at the level or close to the level that I was performing before the back pain, like impacted the way I work out in my life. And then once I'm sure we get to that point, it may be a different conversation and it may be, you know, the end of that type of professional relationship. It might be, it also might not be. I mean, when we work with, when we work with elite

athletes, professional baseball players, Olympic weightlifters, when I say Olympic weightlifters, I don't mean like the guy in the gym who snatches 200 pounds. I mean people in the Olympics who weightlift in the Olympics. When we work with CrossFit Games athletes, they're not all in pain. And what happens is the reason why people decide to stick around is because they want to do things that they've never done before. And the fear and the reality is that they don't know where the line is for diminishing returns. And there's the initial diminishing returns, which is like eventually you're just training more than your body can adapt at the rate it was previously adapting and then for people at an elite level there's i think there's another

kind of cliff that they fall off of in terms of the diminished return where they're looking to be the top 0.1 percent of the top one percent and if you talk about like spending two, three, five hours a day to move up percentages of a percentage point, that's intense. And the best ability in any sport is availability. So we help keep them on the straight and narrow. And I didn't want to like put that in the world that I don't want her to be with us. You know, they're just. Yeah, because I would love for her to for jamie to stay but at the same time you know if she feels like she's ready to move on then she moved on well i don't think any i didn't take it as you saying you wanted her to leave or that you wanted her to stay the idea for us with all of our

clients is that we want them to do what they feel they need and want to do right you know rule number one of any sales process is never sell anything to anybody who is not in the market for what you have and always sell everybody who is. Otherwise, they're not going to get helped. Right. So what's it like now? Like, I mean, what are you doing with her now? She's out of pain. She's been out of pain. What do you do now? Building in more Olympic lifts and then just working on working on some of the things that she felt like she wants to prioritize so strength was one of them she wants to get her strength back she wants to get a little bit more like definition and and in her legs and so we just

we're focused on some of those things and building that. And Todd, how do you balance the idea that sometimes people will want to do things that go beyond their goal for training? So what I mean by that is if you ask Jamie what her goal for training is, she might say to be a competitive CrossFit athlete. And in which case, great, all this stuff makes sense. But what if she just said i just want to look good naked i want to enjoy my life i want to live easy physically outside of the gym and now she's talking about wanting to clean 200 pounds and snatch 150 and run a five minute mile like at what point is that a yeah yeah doesn't doesn't line up with what you said you want. How do you handle that?

Just having that tough conversation. And you don't want to push people away because if you approach them too aggressively and just be like, look, this is not anything of what you want. It's what we talked about in regards to your goals. We're way off path here it looks like you know now that you're starting to feel better you're trying to achieve something that we didn't talk about or maybe we haven't you know set up a plan for and so it's just going in and having that same conversation rewriting out those goals having um the the tough conversations in regards to what is it that you actually want and and even if that

is something that they wanted and they wanted to build in more of being realistic about how long it took to get us where we are to where we could get get them to to that point but also i'd let them know the risks i say you know the more that you're going to want to start doing some of this stuff it's easy for us to like see the numbers and slowly build up. But just understand comes, you need to be taking care of yourself better. You got to make sure that, you know, you've removed or you're handling these stresses in your life better. So it's not impacting you while you continue to add on more load. I love that. I think that's a great way to address it. So I want to move. Is there anything else that we should know about Jamie before I move and ask you some questions about a relatively different topic?

No, she's just pretty awesome. And we I like that, you know, through all my clients, I get to learn as well as, you know, be there for them. So it's been it's been an awesome journey. I want to thank her. Very cool. So, Jamie, if you're listening, you know your real name. And thank you. So I know, Todd, that you see patients in Massachusetts near Whaling City CrossFit, right? And you also provide services at Whaling City CrossFit with Eric Hedbloom, who's a great gym owner who we've worked with in the past, who is doing his best to professionalize everything about himself and his gym. So, by the way, that is a shameless plug. If you guys are in, what's the city?

New Bedford. If you're near New Bedford, Massachusetts, go to Whaling City CrossFit and look for Todd, look for Eric. You'll be happy. Now, one of the things that I have found, and I'm curious if you have found this, so the coaches out there who are listening to this can maybe take some solace in it, or not, maybe they're just screwed.

I find that it's very difficult to be the expert unless you live like 50 miles away. So what you just described to me was a masterclass and how to handle helping somebody who is dealing with physical pain derived from both physical problems as well as emotional problems. How easy is it for you to have conversations and work with clients who are local to you on that same level? Not that easy. And why do you think that is expectation and the part of it is going to be the level at which the the level at which the people around here in the healthcare community are are working at um i think they just get so used to a certain paradigm um having these kind

of like superficial conversations about what's going on in their life and about their back pain and they're seeing people who are just going to be like oh yeah well that's cool like don't you know a lot of doctors aren't going to empathize with them right they're just going to be like i don't know what snatching is or i don't care that you snatch or whatever um i'm just going to either adjust you or give you a pill or try to take care of you and go on your merry way i think it's what's been tough is some people just haven't been used to that like human connection and understanding that like someone cares on such a deep level that there's this energy exchange that's going to happen between us and that's going to cost money and we need to get to the bottom of your issue and we need to make

that commitment together. I agree with you a hundred percent. I agree with you. Now, one of the things I have found interesting at Active Life is that it actually gives us an advantage not being local. An advantage in terms of our ability to connect because there's less junk in the way. And what I mean by junk is they've, you know, our clients didn't see us eating edibles at a party 11 years ago. They didn't, you know, we never had a slip of the tongue accidentally with a joke that was inappropriate to them in the gym in a moment. We never missed them when they did something that frustrated them in the gym and did not receive coaching from us for it. So our level of trust and credibility and professionalism is able to be put on a pedestal. And I want to make sure that the coaches

who are in gyms every day know that we don't believe for a moment that what we're doing is better than you. And you need to understand that a part of the reason why it is so difficult for you to get the people in your gym to believe in what you do the way that they believe in what we do is simply the amount of time that they have with you. They get to see more of the scars, which by the way, make you more human, which is cool. It just means that you have to elevate your level of trust and credibility to such a degree that it overcomes the humanity that you are, that makes you so common with them that maybe working together doesn't feel like a professional relationship, but more like a friend. Yes. Todd's nodding.

He nodded and said the whole time I said that. I did. It was like right on. Well, it's true. I've been there you know i remember when we were when we were working with um noah olsen and with rich froning and with lindy barber and with james newberry and jacob hepner all at the same time and people in the gym wouldn't listen to what i'm telling them to do and they're like yeah yeah yeah you realize that that these guys who are taking top five at the CrossFit Games, winning the CrossFit Games,

are hanging on everything that we ask them to do. And I'm just asking you to reduce your load by 10% so that your technique can look better. Like, yeah, whatever, man. Like, all right. So if you're a coach out there, that happens. And it just means that you need to do a better job with gaining trust on purpose, something that I've learned over time.

And I wanted to get that out because I think that it's a valuable thing to say on this show. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that because it's something that, again, with you, I've felt a little frustrated with. But then, like you said, I just had to continue to elevate and elevate and just be better yup Dr. Todd Dersham where can they find you brother? at Dr. Dersham on Instagram

spell that doctor so it's spelled out D-O-C-T-O-R-D-E-R-S-H there you go on Instagram that's probably the main one right now they'll find everything from there. All right, guys.

It's been real. Remember, if you're listening to this podcast, you have one responsibility. Turn pro. That's going to be a wrap for this episode of Active Life Radio on the Shrugged Collective Network. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please head to wherever you listen to podcasts

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