Barbell Shrugged - [Neuropsychiatry] A Root Cause Approach to Rebuilding Brain, Body and Mind w/ Dr. Michael Miletic, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Travis Mash, and Dan Garner #741

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Dr. Michael Miletic is a former Olympic athlete and a prominent physician specializing in clinical neuroscience and metabolic medicine. Dr. Miletic evaluates the brain, mind, and body and brings the latest science and evidence-based treatments to optimize your health. Specializing in athletes, executives, and adolescents looking to reach their full potential. Dr. Miletic’s comprehensive training and evidence-based research have enabled him to understand something many healthcare providers do not: that approaches that treat the body without addressing the mind are limited in their effectiveness. Getting to know you, your life experiences, and the way you think and feel is thus a critical aspect of the care you receive from Dr. Miletic. Work with Dr. Miletic Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Truck Family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Michael Militech is coming into the pod. If you guys have listened a couple times, we've had Emily Hightower on. Dr. Militech and Emily Hightower work hand-in-hand together, sometimes with our clients, but also just kind of out in the real world in their day-to-day practice. Their skill sets complement each other greatly, with Dr. Militech being kind of on the specific doctor side of things with Emily being just an absolute savage when it comes to kind of the practical implementation leading all the way up to somebody that would need an MD in their life. Very happy to be able

to have both of them in our network and the cool, cool piece of this, we're going to dig into it immediately because I feel like so many MDs don't speak meathead. Well, guess what? Dr. Militech went to the Olympics for Olympic weightlifting, which means he is right in our wheelhouse and a very, very cool show. So as always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that you can access over at rapidhealthreport.com.

Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, Dr. Mike Militech. Welcome to the show, man. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, guys. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be digging into how to get through plateaus, working on some like breakthroughs. But first, you lifted for Canada in Olympic weightlifting. We need to hear the story. This is how we all connect. We have to grunt over barbells and talk about kilos and things like that before we can really dig into like the mental side of things. This is how we like break bread as meatheads we have to talk about how much weight we can lift uh when did uh when did you start doing olympic weightlifting well i started olympic weightlifting at about 14 because i was a scrawny tall kid that loved to play other sports but um i needed to get some meat on my bones. So I actually had access to a gym.

And then we lived in a small town in Ontario that was close to another town that had produced two Olympians. And one guy had had Pan Am records and Commonwealth records. So I got access to them by the time I was 16 and started going back and forth, you know, several times a week and really got my start there. Was it the Santavi family? Santavi and the Boney? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I figured. I knew that was going to happen.

I knew that was going to so that was gonna happen so bob bob sanderson was the man at the time i mean he was i love that family and then brody now is is a world-class lifter himself oh i think he's the best drug-free you know what is the 89 kilo lifter in the world yeah yeah yeah he's a beast you know snatching 180 kilos dudes yeah he's up to about 180 now yeah yeah yeah he's double body weight snatch it's uh i mean i've been at his gym and not trained with him because that's not my gig anymore but he's aggressive human a real quick funny story is that those i hung out with that whole family because usa weightlifting for a little bit said coaches aren't allowed to

you can't have a beer so i would just not hang out with them and i'm going out with this with bode and his dad and brother so i love them they're the best so you that's my story did you meet bob the grandpa the originator of all this? No. I've just heard all about him. I've met both the younger, you know, Bodie and his two younger brothers who are kids now. And his sister. Like, the whole family is just freaks.

The dad is a great guy. I love him. Yeah, absolutely. That dad, when I was a kid, or when I was coming into it, he was a little kid, but he'd come to all the workouts and he'd be hanging around. He's still tough. I wouldn't mess with him. What year was it that you went to the Olympics? Okay, so I'll just backtrack a little bit. So I went into medical school in 78.

I got in a couple of years early and I did a fast, I did four years there. That's when I started international competition or national competition. I was my third and fourth year of medical school. I was the national champion in Canada. And then I did a year in. Yeah, it was insane i mean yeah medical school and training the way we had to train to get there was i i have no idea how to do that i wouldn't recommend it in any way because the year the year after that was even worse

as an intern we're on call every other night or every third night. They let me move my equipment into the hospital. So I'd be on a call and in between calls, I'd go and get a lift. Are you kidding me? That's the most dangerous story ever. You're prepping for the Olympics and basically not sleeping is what it sounds like. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, the recovery, you know, all the recovery optimization things were in place, you know, the, the food, the food out of a vending machines and not sleeping,

but no stress, you know, 100% ideal conditions. It sounds like. Yeah. Every time, every time I wake up and my readiness score on my aura ring doesn't now I have no excuses. Yeah, you just do what you do. And then I took a silver at the Pan Ams that year. So something worked.

And then that qualified me for the national squad, moved to Montreal right after the internship and then started training with moved up lifts pretty quickly we had a soviet coach and um i mean they were insane at the time with their training programs because they were max lifts all the time i mean they're max lifts i mean squatting twice a day and pulling twice a day and you know all the stuff that you need that we did and and there was nothing less than 90 percent like nothing so it was a combination of sort of the bulgarian thing with the soviet thing at the time and uh people either got really really good and metal or god that's part of it really good right i feel like all of those so many of those systems are

like well we're we're selecting only for the best and in order to get there we have to break the other thousand people and there's only a couple left and they just are the best people the mentality yonders exactly the mentality guys because they don't own gyms that's why they they don't have to go in and be like how do we take care of these people so their recurring billing keeps happening? They don't care. Isn't that why they called Abhijay the butcher? Because he just broke

everybody that didn't end up being a world champion? Literally that was the culture. It was the culture. Same when I was at the limit tracers same with dragomir it was my coach it was it was gangster like percentages volume and two three times a day yeah if you survived it you're a beast if not it shouldn't have been there i guess

well beast genetics and luck i luck. I would agree. I would agree. Some intangibles would go into that. Were you continuing med to be a doctor through all this? I was able, I qualified to do general practice. So I was quite, I grew up learning some French because I was from Canada, right? But only in school but you know the cocky kid that I was at the time I started seeing people and treating people in an outpatient clinic in French completely French speaking place twice a week because they didn't pay a shit sorry

they didn't pay us anything at the time you, we got a nice Adidas gear and boots and stuff like that and a tiny stipend, but not even enough to buy food for the week. So I went and plunked myself in this clinic two afternoon evenings a week on sort of off days. And that's how I made enough money to get to live in Montreal. Sir, you're the most gangster athlete I've ever talked to. I have never. That is the coolest thing I've ever heard from an athlete. Nowadays, athletes will cry if everything's not perfect. Oh, I only got seven hours sleep last night.

I'm like, I'm making everyone that ever works with me again, they have to listen to this podcast. And then if they whine, I'm going to smack their face. You walk into Rise Indoor Sports and they have the pristine everything. Oh, yeah. If everything's not perfect,

they're going to cry. Oh, I need this thing. I need this thing. Shut up, man. Let's do it with the Olympics. While he's in med school, be quiet. What year and where was that Olympics at? So that was in med school. Be quiet. What year and where was that Olympics at? That was 84 in LA. 1980,

we weren't allowed. Canada, the US wasn't allowed to compete in Moscow. Boycotted. They turned around and boycotted us in LA in 84. It was terrible.

And weightlifting is a winter sport, right? No, summer, summer. Summer, guy. Yeah, because Paris is coming up. Paris is coming up. Because the Winter Olympics in 80, that was the miracle on ice. So everybody competed at that one. But they boycotted the summer that year.

Correct. Yeah. I mean, so many athletes missed out on the olympics because of politics uh in america it was a butch curry like the poor guy he just passed away rest in peace but he never he was he would have gone in 1980 and then couldn't go so that was a sad thing, just politics. Politics should never interfere with the Olympics. Ever. They put their whole lives into one pursuit, the last times a few seconds, and then they get shacked around like that. I know. People forget that the whole thing is about solidarity of the world. It's the one time.

Can we shut your mouth, you idiot politicians, and just let these athletes go nobody cares about this mess you're arguing about except you thank you yeah well we celebrated that all i want to do is go watch people lift weights yeah man run fast it's trying to get yeah just trying to lift some weights let leave them alone you guys go you know what it's too bad that politicians is not like the old days you want to fight you two go, you know what? It's too bad that politicians is not like the old days. You want to fight? You two go first. You know what happened?

No wars. That's what would happen. That's right. That's right. And we got to express that kind of international solidarity in the athlete's village in very complete ways. I bet. That's a story for a long time.

I would like to hear that. Yeah, exactly. Shark family, I want story for a long time. I would like to hear that. Yeah, exactly. Shark Family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover

everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. Then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. Then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in

my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. I'd love to hear how this kind of turned into the practice that you have today and kind of moving away from Olympic weightlifting as like a big, maybe this is still a big piece of life, but at some point you got to kind of transition into the professional career and how that makes money. Yeah, right. You can't live in the office anymore yeah exactly and actually so what was weird guys is after after the olympics were over um i just i didn't know who i

was i didn't know what the hell i was going to do i'd had offers to do like high-level residencies, one through Mass General at Harvard, one through McGill in Montreal. I didn't have a clue who I was. My identity was as an athlete. It wasn't as a doctor. So I had to find where that was. So I'll take you back a little bit to get to your question. I think a lot of this kind of drive and in athletes I've seen in special forces guys I work with, a lot of it is early childhood trauma stuff because we convert, I think that's what got me through at least, we convert pain into energy. Now with that pain comes scars, obviously, but I had the combination of that.

And then a really sick mother, she had, um, lupus systemic lupus therothematosus and nobody knew what it was. Nobody even had a name for it. And she was, I'd come home from school, not knowing if she was going to be alive or dead, knowing if she's gonna be alive or dead like literally because she'd be gurgling like trying to breathe in her own fluids but her lungs were filling up best medicine had to offer was taking taps of fluid off her lungs so i became kind of the caretaker i was the oldest kid my dad didn't know what the hell was going on. And I became kind of the caretaker. So I've got this dual path, right? This drive for sports, because when you're in a gym, I mean, you guys know this, when you're in a gym, that's your place. I mean, that is your haven.

Everything else goes away. You can emotionally regulate yourself.'re in control there's no better feeling so I had that but then I also had this sort of caretaker thing built in and I got really good as a little kid at recognizing signs when she'd be going downhill either physically or mentally because it's a brain body thing physically or mentally or whatever that is so um you know these both of these things were going on in the back in the background and then i'm thinking okay but i don't really trust doctors at this point because i didn't see anybody helping her nobody's thinking outside the box nobody's coming up with anything new so what kind of doctor am i going to be? I didn't want to fit into a box. So I needed to try different things. So I did emergency medicine in a small, in my own small

town for a period of time. That got to be a little tedious. That's when I immigrated to the U.S. I've been in the U.S. a U.S. citizen longer than a Canadian now and started off with internal medicine sports medicine kind of track that didn't really feel right but in the background when we lose our careers in sports or especially because we're so connected. My practice and my experience has led me to see that the prevalence of depression for people that are forced out of, you know, whether it's injury, retirement or whatever. I mean, you saw Jason Kelsey yesterday. There's depression. People get significantly depressed. So what did I do?

Not very aware of myself. I started a psychiatry residency, but that psychiatry residency was mostly about handing scripts and sticking labels on people's foreheads and so on. So then I also did a psychotherapy track, which I paid for on my own to get all of that stuff. And then got myself involved in child and adolescent because I wanted to know everything. And I'm an integrator, put things together. I don't like silos. When you're in a silo, you can't see anything outside that place, right? So I was doing a little bit of a lot of things. And that's when I started to see, like literally right away,

began to see professional athletes and a lot of people in trauma and that's when i began to really start my work in that field so that don't you think it would it would be a good idea for people in the military especially the ones that have been in combat that they should immediately see someone like you upon retiring from the military i know so many of those poor guys it's like how do you expect a guy to go from like you're in battling you got your brother besides you bullets are flying to like you know being a milkman it's just like they need something to help them bridge that gap they've lost their brotherhood right they've lost their brothers through war they're traumatized there's nobody comes back without a traumatic brain injury that's

been in in real combat they've got all this energy like we're talking about pain gets converted into into energy right they've got all this energy coming from more pain and then they shut down and they shut down to the world without a purpose, without a connection, without. I mean, it's 100 times greater than what I was just describing that I went through. Yeah. And absolutely everybody in the military should have something. And that's another thing I have a problem with, with the VA, because they provide nothing. Nothing.

It's just they abandoned those guys abandon is the word yeah you said pain turns into energy you said that twice now tell me more about that that idea how does that work so without going into a lot of sort of personal details here if i'm working okay so i can say this a hundred of, we're going back to the, especially the SF guys, special forces. There's nobody that I've seen coming out of special forces that hasn't had childhood trauma of some sort. So what does that do when you really when you think about it it makes a person overwhelmed with all kinds of emotions especially when people that you count on and can on taking care of you protecting you being there for you those are the ones that turn against you so you your brain and you're very

young you can't understand that so you internalize that as there's something wrong with me. So that's the scar part. There's something wrong with me. I deserve this. I brought this on myself because that's how kids think. I mean, they make it about themselves. I must have done something. So there's a sense of inadequacy that's underlying it.

But then there's this absolute drive that comes out of it to transcend it. I'm not going to let myself be hurt anymore. I'm not going to let myself be a victim anymore. I'm not going to let myself be treated the way I've been treated anymore. That's what I mean, where the drive and the energy comes in. And I've seen a lot of Olympic athletes, professional athletes, and so on that have the same story. They just go. And the more they go, the more it sort of brings on more. Energy begets energy. And the more movement and drive towards something brings on more movement and drive.

I totally get where you're coming from. As an athlete, I was just talking to Brandon Lilly, who was a world champion powerlifter this past weekend, and we were talking about this exact thing as to why, like what drove us to lift more weight than anybody in the whole world. It was definitely a feeling of inadequacy. And I was going to show them that I am this, and then they were going to be wrong. And they're just like, but like,

it is an endless, it's an endless quest because you're never going to get what you want out of these people. And so it leaves you into a dark, leads you into a very dark place sometimes yeah i've heard that as a paradox i was gonna say well we're talking over each other thank you get after it dude get after it dude even quiet layla get it while while you were saying that uh i was just thinking in in uh the framing of that when some sort of trauma creates energy, I where really it's focusing more on or framing that in the positive of not trying to escape your childhood or escape that trauma, but actually,

how do you get to be great at something that actually offers probably a more positive benefit to solving that problem? That's the great question and uh you know i want to go back that's why i cut doug off because i knew it was a great question no that that's that goes back i'll tell you a little vignette because i um are you are you aware of swiss the conference conference yeah the conference yeah yeah i spoke there the one before this last one yeah oh so you and i met then i'm sure we i'm sure we did but there's a lot of people there i spoke with brian then okay so a bunch of the west side guys were there and they they got uh you know i was fortunate enough to be given a sort of lifetime achievement award with a bunch of those guys.

And I talked about this there. And I had probably three or four of the West Side guys come up, like, within the first five or ten minutes after and say, I just felt like you were talking about me. There were people, you know, guys, you know, I mean, guys you probably trained with and. I, I, guys, I beat them. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, we got into this, this exact conversation, and you can't solve pain with the drive and the success.

The pain stays there. Absolutely. And so the pain is there as a scar, what I call a scar. It's like a psychic scar. Why? Because with trauma, our brains literally wire themselves in particular pathways. And we don't think a whole lot about neurotransmitters and so forth these days. We think about networks and pathways and processing systems and so forth.

Our brains will form pathways as kids that are wired to receiving this trauma and then interpreting it, right? Because we need to interpret what goes on around us at all times. So if you're only driven to get a gold medal or be the strongest man in the world in your case or anything else like that, you're still going to bed with these same bad feelings. They might get worse. They actually get worse. the more successful you get the more they're pulled up to the surface absolutely it

was like the worst i ever was the minute i won the world championships it was the worst of all time so the way i understand that god it gets exciting to me to all talk in the same language here. But the way I understand that is that so much of our pain is also in our bodies. And our emotions are actually created in our bodies and then transferred into our brains and the more that we so we start with feeling inadequate and small because this is the kind of stuff that happened to us when we were little and let's wire it in to picture ourselves getting to the top or being successful or being a world champion or something like that, that's unknown territory. I mean, we're wired to feel small and helpless and inadequate. We're going into a whole foreign land when we are at the top and we're successful and we're achieving, that can feel more dangerous than going back into something that's more painful and so the higher our well the

higher we achieve the more this pain pulls us back there's a push pull that goes on with success and achievement 100 i think when you get there it's almost like you just keep feeling like you really don't belong there and you got to keep proving it again and again you break a world record you do another one you do another one it's like because you don't believe it like you know like you just you feel like you're a fraud that how does this must be a mistake or is the craziest feeling in the world it's the craziest i've heard that about entrepreneurs like about the paradox of being an entrepreneur is that you simultaneously feel like you're better than everybody, but you'll also never be good enough. Like I remember hearing Steve Jobs say something similar where someone was like, well, what do you do after you create like a new breakthrough product?

And do you celebrate? And he was like, nah, you should just get on to the next thing. Yeah. He couldn't. Yeah, he couldn't do it for some reason. You can't sit in the moment. So back to Anders' question. I think what really needs to be done, Anders, is you really have to begin to unpack that stuff, to unpack the scars, unpack this, rely on neuroplasticity as we do it. So there's a process that has to be undertaken

with a partner, with a teammate, because you have to reestablish that trust in a relationship in order to do that. You know, I liken it to a tennis player never got to be a world champion by hitting a ball against the backboard, you know, over and over again. You know, a wide receiver, Odell Beckham Jr. never got to be great on a ball, on a jugs machine catching balls. You know, you've got to have a partner that you're connected to, and that partner can establish a trust with you who begin to see things that you may or may not be able to see yourself but then you have that trust where the person is then able

to bring some of that new knowledge in and once once you know your pain once you're able to label your pain you take away some of its negative energy internally. Once you put it in writing, once you put it in words, once you share it with somebody, it doesn't hurt so much and it doesn't have the same energy to hold you back. Yeah. 100% agree. I've heard kind of like both sides of that sometimes where it's like, labeling it can make it easier to talk about um but then there's also the side of it where now we have like a diagnosis um are are

those kind of the the same things because sometimes people just get their identity stuck around that diagnosis and can't escape um but you're saying it's it's it it likely can be a positive thing as well if you can label it, because now it becomes easier to talk about. It was 100% positive for me. Yeah. So what you want to label is not a diagnosis. I should have been clear.

You want to label an experience. Right. Gotcha. This happened to me because if I was beaten, for example, it wasn't because I was bad and inadequate and didn't have enough of whatever I needed to be loved. It was because that person had a problem. Yeah. And you begin to understand the experience and put that into words without the diagnosis. Because I 100% agree with you that if you start living your label, you put yourself in a place of being a victim again.

Yeah. You know, this is the best talk I've ever had. There was a moment when I was done with lifting, and so I saw one therapist who did exactly what Andrew's talking about within a minute he labeled me as like manic depressant bipolar because and here's how he did it he said are there times where you feel super excited I'm like yeah he said are there times where you feel super low I'm like yeah he said and then he immediately labeled me as manic i'm like i and

i was like excuse me sir so you're telling me this if you won the lottery today would you be excited he's like yes if your mama got killed the next day would you be down yes i mean this is me you can't diagnose me with those questions but but the next guy but the next guy talked to you did exactly what you're saying he He, like, we talked. And then the breakthrough was he asked me to do a family tree. And so it's broken. You know, my mother was married three times. And my dad was married twice.

And so I had to label every single person and talk how they influenced my life. That was the breakthrough. And then the best thing is once we pinpointed what it drove driven me crazy is like you know look at that person as a human like you're saying that person must have had even more problems and they're a human being they're not you know sometimes we look at our parents or step parents as they're like god or something and they're not they're just like us and they were making mistakes and And you say, okay, let that go. That person, who knows what happened to them.

And now start living your own life, your own way. Make sure you don't repeat it. It was the best thing ever. It changed everything that moment. I mean, I've had to keep working, don't get me wrong. But it was the breakthrough, all breakthroughs. Well, you get to define yourself in a whole new way. Right. Which adds for so much more flexibility

in the way you approach the world and where you see the world the way you experience the world going forward is not you're not locked in those old like i keep doing this but you're you're not locked in that that old yeah habits habits like yes the way i treat my kids i don't have to do what they did the way i treat my wife i don't have to do what they did the way I treat my wife I don't have to do what they did and so you can either keep going the same way and do exactly what they did or worse like you know one of my brothers or you flip-flop and you change it you see what what what did cause pain in your life and you don't do that it was in the way they got taught to me it was so like you know it wasn't some mystery like you know some therapists want talked to me, it was so like, you know, it wasn't some mystery like, you know, some therapists want to do.

It was so direct. It was so good. That guy was amazing. He got to stay in the moment with you. And then, you know, going all the way back to what Anders asked about, now you're in control of your life and your mind moving forward you the the need to go to to to lift you know thousand pound squats is not the same anymore or if it's still there the drive's still in you it's not there for the same reason totally different now it's fun it's it's something fun it's not something i have to do yes it's not my drug. Do you see any downside of working with athletes who

are say they're going to go to the Olympics and six months out, you're working through all their past traumas and labels and whatever else. And they, they get, they get psychologically healthier, which then diminishes the drive that was pushing them toward being the best and proving to the world that they're X, Y, Z. Like, is that, is that a thing? Is that possible to then? You don't want to take Travis Nash and turn them into Anders Warner right before the, I don't know. I honestly don't know. I think like, look at Ed Cohn. He was much healthier in his approach. You know, like he didn't have this trauma and he, he dominated for 20 years.

I survived like three before I was broken because I had to keep proving it. He can make intelligent decisions, and I was making it all emotional. So, I mean, yeah, it made me really good. Maybe you can do it without the trauma, but if you have the trauma, and that's the driving factor, and then you decrease that drive by getting healthier, then you're not training as hard. You know what? Yeah.

I don't know. Is it a thing or no? Well, that's a great question because I get asked that a lot about, you know, artists and musicians have the same question too, right? Because they, it's a different process. It's a creative process, but it requires them to have access to these sometimes really dark parts of their brain that they have to put out

out there in their creative work so what i have found is kind of the opposite to be honest with you i don't go messing deep inside with somebody that's six months out of the olympic games um you know i i had a uh a female sprinter in the last games. And, you know, we were able to get to the metaphor of she's a world record holder, right? She's blasting out of the blocks toward the finish line. And then she was able to grasp the metaphor that that's like her trauma, where she's running toward something with all the drive and energy and that a world class athlete has, but she's also running away from something. And when she was able to sort of just see that much, it actually helped her feel freer of some of the things that, that, um, Travis and I were talking about, about that pull backwards, and it actually helped her feel freer to move forward.

Now, would I bring something up that she wasn't already bringing up that was going too deep? No, because that's selfish. That's my agenda. That's not where she is in that moment. But I would stay where she's at and let her go with it. And then I would follow with her. And that's freeing for people. And there isn't sort of a light bulb moment for this stuff. It's like peeling back things.

After the Olympics, when we're able to work more closely together, then she goes back into that. But now she's back again ready for paris and ready to you know she's setting prs already in training so i it hasn't been my experience that that happens i think i would have made much better choices uh more often and for the right reasons versus just you know just making emotional mad i just going to show everybody every single day. I believe I would have been much better had I met someone like him sooner, but, you know, sort of could have. Probably some of the hardest pieces of this

are just identifying where these roadblocks are that you can't get past. Do you have sort of like a system in which you're methodically kind of walking through finding these trauma points, finding the things that trigger the trauma and the emotions that come up with that, that people can start to work through? Yeah, absolutely. You know, just as an aside to that, before I jump into this, I was thinking about how similar some of the stuff is than what you guys do too. Like you can give, first of all, people don't know what they don't know.

You know, the folks that you start to see for performance, they don't know that their hormones are off. They don't know that their HSCRP is through the roof. They don't know that their insulin resistance is elevated. They don't know that their VO2 max is at the bottom. They don't know that their insulin resistance is elevated. They don't know that their VO2 max is at the bottom. They don't know until you tell them. And you put that into words and show them their labs and do that. But then the other thing is where a block will come in, you know, I'm thinking for you guys is that, that okay now that you have this information what are you going to do with it and a lot of people i found that we get to a certain point even though we've given them all the data and information they're not putting it to use they're not

committing to it so that in my mind would be a a block. Like, what's blocking you from doing what you know you need to do in order to get healthier? So, and then, you know, I was also referencing the work with Emily, who does a lot of the sort of emotional help somebody calm themselves down, to help themselves, you know, realign brain and body, to help themselves feel freer. But there are certain people that can't get past that. So what do I do at that point? Like I said before, I think the most important thing is the relationship. Like what Travis was talking about with that second therapist. I mean, he somehow was able to establish a trust by understanding. And when you begin to understand somebody, that you bring understanding into that person.

That person can then receive it. If the trust isn't there, they can't take it in. So once you begin to take something in, then you've got your start. So I think that's the fundamental part, the relationship, the trust, and you've created a pathway in. Yeah. Do you feel like you've become their training partner in a way? Yeah.

Like, it kind of comes back to- I use those words. I use those words with people. I say, look, I am not here as an oracle. I'm not here to diagnose you. Yeah, okay, if you've got, something, blah, blah, blah, biological, genetic, we're going to treat that. We'll do that, but we're going to do it together. And then we're going to look at all the other stuff. We're going to look at all the positives

you've got going on. We're going to look at all these other things. And I say, the only way we can do that is, is as a training partner. So I talk to people about working on their mental game more than I talk about doing therapy or something like that. Yeah. And so that enhances the trust too. When somebody comes in to, you know, a doctor that's acting all, you know, sort of arrogant and they know more than you do and, you know, whether they do or they don't, you don't need somebody preaching at you. That's not going to help you. Yeah. A few minutes minutes ago you mentioned labs um to what degree are you are you pairing the physiological side of things with the psychological side of things yeah so to a

great degree actually everybody that comes in uh we do a set of labs that are actually similar to you to your guys um you know i'm looking because i'm boarded in metabolic medicine as well. So we that's where, you know, I got a lot of my physiology and biochemistry knowledge from. So I look at the HPA axis. I look at inflammatory markers. I look at hormone levels. I look at micronutrient levels. I look at all of that because I really do believe that everything arises in our body by virtue of our nervous system, our peripheral nervous system, our sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetics, they go

much, much faster than our conscious brain. So I try to bring all of that together. But this is part of why I'm interested in potentially working with you guys, because I don't have the bandwidth to do it all. It would be so much easier if I had real experts that are in the field looking at this every single day that are able to give me that information. Then I would take that information and use it to help somebody that may be stuck in an anxiety state, for example. And we can do other things physically and physiologically and from a physical health standpoint to be able to help support their ability to do the mental work.

I'd love to think about or kind of have a discussion on the tactics that we use to break through some of these traumatic events. Are you big into breathwork? Are there other kind of tactics that you use when someone leaves the office that you believe in? Yeah, so there's two pathways that i use i use an insight oriented approach and that way like we have to uncover that which we don't know and just like just like you guys with your labs and your dexascans and so on i mean you don't know until you look under the hood. So we have to keep looking under the hood and finding the why underneath. That's the partnership work.

And I would say that what we're doing under the hood, this is, you know, 99.99% of our brain is unconscious. In fact, the work of Daniel Kahneman, who was a neuroscientist, neuropsychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics, of all things, he was able to see that there are two separate parts of the brain. There's a fast brain and a slow brain. The fast brain is the emotional part, the part that gets driven into the unconscious,

the part that goes into our bodies, the part that we're able to use our senses with, the part that, you know, call it intuition and use all of that. The slow brain is more the cognitive conscious part. Well, the cognitive conscious part, we're able, neuropsychologists have come along and measured this stuff. So the fast brain is able to assimilate 40 million bits of information per second. 40 million. Big number. The brain has a maximum capacity of four. So how do we unite these, right? When somebody is consciously working in a, or working in a, you know, executive setting or working in a medical setting or working in an athletic arena or something like that, you got to find a way for these to come together well the more the 40 million becomes conscious the more we can use it so

we're doing that track but then the other track i do is it's sort of a this word doesn't really capture it under it's like a mindfulness meditation thing where you self-regulate your first so that's where the breath word comes in. And working with somebody to constantly work on this, like every day, almost as many moments as you can during the day, to regulate yourself with your breathing. Because without that, you don't have access to that 40 million bits at all. And then you use your consciousness to become acutely aware of everything going on around you. So I will send people home with exercises,

both to write down in diary, their sort of experiences or dreams or things that they haven't expected. You know, the tree that you were talking about a minute ago. Be able to do that sort of work, and that gets to that part of your brain. But then you're also doing the breathwork part in which you become much more conscious and much more self-aware. So what is my body doing at this moment? Oh, I'm feeling my shoulders getting a little tense. I'm feeling my heartbeat go up a little bit. Okay. Settle, breathe, relax,

focus on, all right, why is this happening right now? So you're self-regulating, but also improving your ability to be self-aware. And that's, that's a lot of the work day-to-day. And it's a lot of work. Speaking of kind of self-awareness and not knowing what you don't know or maybe you don't have access to, I saw on your website that you guys do ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. What are your thoughts on kind of just altered states of consciousness related to psychotherapy. What are your thoughts on kind of just altered states of consciousness related to psychotherapy and specifically the, I'll say, I'll say hopefully the legalization of MDMA and ideally the near future with MDMA assisted psychotherapy.

Yeah, I think MDMA is next. We've used ketamine for just a little bit over a year and a half now to very, very good effect. I'll start with ketamine because I know the most about that because we're doing one right now, actually. So we do ketamine IV with a medical provider there. And the reason we do IV is that ketamine will actually shut down the sensory input into our conscious brain. So it's the only medication that we know, and it's a well-known medication that works in hospitals all the time. It shuts down sensory input, including pain. So sound, sight, pain, smell, everything like that, those pathways get diminished. But what gets enhanced is the pathway from our limbic system, which is where a lot of the unconscious memories are, to go into our frontal lobe.

So we can become much more aware of what's been buried. Now, that'll be a little bit distorted, a little bit like a dream. But the psychotherapy part comes following the ketamine where we're able to unpack this and put it in a narrative with a patient. And that allows us to go a lot deeper into that space because when you're in ketamine, it's a very calm experience in which you're looking from the outside in. Now MDMA is a different kind of experience. That's a dissociative experience.'s very very powerful especially when you're you have to link it with the therapy i mean whenever you see a ketamine clinic around that's just pumping out you know they're just trying to make money but if you really it has to be ketamine assisted

therapy and the same thing with mdma now md, you have to have that. That's longer. It's going to be 68 hours. So you go through that experience and it's under, it's guided as well. But then the next day has to be followed up with, okay, what happened? What went through your mind? How did you feel? Go in with an intention. I want to address, you know know my sadness in my life i can't get happy i

can't enjoy the moment something like that then you go into the into the mdma six eight hours later you're out you go to home you relax you take it easy then you come back for integration the next day and we talk about what all has happened and where did you go what, you relax, you take it easy. Then you come back for integration the next day. And we talk about what all has happened and where did you go? What do you feel? How does this, how can we use this to integrate into your life? So I think that MDMA, particularly for PTSD and trauma is going to be a huge, huge game changer in this field. When done properly. How does it work? I've heard so many good things about mdma the way it lets people open up and and talk about things that they you know that they don't either don't want to talk about or they even realize they were feeling and like how does

that how what's the mechanism do you know yeah well there's a a whole kind of a combination of neurotransmitters that floods the brain. But the end result of that is that we set ourselves into a nonjudgmental state. That's what I'm hearing. Yeah, and it takes away that self-judgment. judgment. So we're able to look at our experiences without feeling ashamed, without feeling critical, without being guilty, without fear. So we're seeing things because it has a kind of a euphoric effect too, right? The MDMA, because we're feeling somewhat euphoric we're able to look at these experiences but then not get pulled into the pain of it we're able to understand it without the pain that's all i mean it sounds awesome i wonder why it ever got um you know made illegal it sounds like i've never heard

anything negative so i'm not quite sure why they ever did that i heard for couples it was amazing that's what happens when things work i mean for real i mean yeah i mean if it i never and people weren't sick anymore nobody makes the money oh yeah good point i mean for real that's yeah this is not this is that's why you need 10 COVID shots. For real. The new booster just came out. Did it really? Oh, my gosh.

Eight people took it. Anders is right. This is not conspiracy theory woo-woo stuff. This is FDA's, this is big pharma lobby into the fda and if the fda can't find a way to make money for this stuff and patent it which is the problem with ketamine they can't patent it then they're not going to touch it they don't even have money to research it anymore that's so sad see this is exactly what i was talking about before the show if we start to go into something right at the end we're gonna have to keep you around here forever and you got that was a great time to go see yeah um i really appreciate we're gonna we need to have you back

on here soon uh but i know you got you know patients coming up um where can people find you if they'd like to work with you yeah so, so my website is probably the quickest thing to go to, themiliticcenter.com. And I've got a bunch of blogs up on there and a bunch of other information where you can – that will set you on a path to be able to get whatever you need. Fantastic. I'll be checking that out today. Coach Travis Mash. You go to mashley.com you can also

check out all my articles and videos uh at jim warrior.com that would thanks for being on that was my favorite uh session so session favorite podcast it's got my brain going a million miles an hour, but I appreciate you being on. Well, look, I told, you know, I told Anders this, it's just a breath of fresh air for me to be able to talk to people that really are in the same space and they get it. And there's synchronicity with, and you guys are great. I mean, what you're doing is great talking to you

is fantastic it's just any any place you want to go in the future i'm i'm here and available i would say this to any athlete who's or anybody even an entrepreneur who's like trying to crush it who's dealing with what we talked about here's all I know. The power lifters I know who became amazing, either one of two things happened. They either figured this thing out or they died. There's so many. I know. I mean, at least I bet 30 people that competed

either slightly before me, during me, or slightly after are dead. So if you're listening, you should probably get some help. We didn't emphasize that enough. We didn't emphasize that there's a point where the adaptation of the drivenness and the competitive stops working, and you go over a cliff. I said depression, but depression, addiction, suicide, it's serious stuff. It is serious stuff. I can promise you that doug larson all right find my instagram douglas e larson um dr milotic really appreciate the conversation today though that was a fascinating and enjoyable so thank you for

coming on the show yeah my pleasure my pleasure great meeting you and uh seeing you down in mexico and i realized we need to do this longer. 30 minutes isn't enough. So I appreciate you coming on. I am Anders Varner at Anders Varner. And we are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com. That's where Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab, lifestyle, and performance analysis

that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that free report at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we will see you guys next week.