Barbell Shrugged - Pain-Free Performance with Dr. John Rusin, Doug Larson Travis Mash & Dr. Mike Lane #831

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

In this episode of Barbell Shrugged, Doug Larson is joined by longtime co-host Travis Mash and new co-host Michael Lane as they welcome back John Rusin for his first appearance on the show in five years. The conversation opens with a candid transition moment for the podcast, acknowledging Anders Varner's departure and setting the stage for a new chapter of Barbell Shrugged. From there, the crew dives straight into Rusin's background in sports performance, physical therapy, and global coaching, including his work with elite athletes, Olympic committees, and thousands of coaches through his Pain-Free Performance system. The heart of the episode centers on biomechanics, individual anatomy, and why "one-size-fits-all" coaching models fail athletes over the long term. Rusin breaks down how differences in femur length, hip structure, and torso proportions radically change how people should squat, hinge, and load movements. The group explores why goblet squats are one of the most universally joint-friendly tools, how assessment should guide exercise selection, and why chasing perfect technique without context often leads to chronic pain. The discussion also highlights the importance of strategic variability, offseason training, and removing aggravating patterns rather than blindly pushing through discomfort. The episode closes with a deep look at Rusin's new book Pain-Free Performance, a multi-year project born out of burnout, injury, and a desire to preserve his system in a lasting format. Rusin explains who the book is for, coaches, athletes, and everyday people alike, and why long-term health, movement quality, and consistency ultimately drive performance and longevity. From youth sports specialization to elite training volume and survivorship bias, this episode delivers a grounded, experience-driven perspective on how to train hard, stay healthy, and perform at a high level for decades, not just a season. Links: Pain-Free Performance: Move Better, Train Smarter, and Build an Unbreakable Body Dr. John Rusin WebsiteDr. John Rusin on InstagramDoug Larson on InstagramCoach Travis Mash on Instagram

Friends, Doug Larson here. Myself, Travis Mash and Dr. Mike Lane. Welcome Dr. John Russon to the show today. John's a longtime strength coach and doctor of physical therapy. Very well known for helping people train hard but trained very intelligently to keep their joints healthy for the long term. So this show is all about joint longevity. He just put out a new book called Pain Free Performance, which I highly recommend. It's very high quality, very good.

So if you're a person that wants to be able to train deep into your 40s, 50s, 60s, and ideally, of course, all the way to the end, this show is for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barwell Shugged. I'm Doug Larsen here with long-time host, Mr. Travis Mash, and now Dr. Michael Lane has also joined us on the show. If you had not heard yet, Mr. Andrew Varner, one of my best homies in the whole world.

We've been business partners for eight years now, and he has just recently moved on to his next phase of life. My man moved out to the country, bought a cow, bought some chickens, started hunting, and has decided to exit the fitness, health, and performance world altogether, and move on to again his next phase of life. So it's all good between us, of course. Like, dude, one of my best friends in the whole world, of course, talked to him yesterday.

He's just ready to move on. So he is no longer the host of Barbell Strugg. And so again, Mr. Michael Lane, Dr. Michael Lane, is joining us here as a co-host. So a quick intro from you, Mike. And then we're going to dig in with John Rustin, who hasn't been on the show in five years and has been just produced a monster text that we're going to do. dig into it in just all the other things he's working on these days. So Michael Lane, I'm going to kick it over to you first.

Just a quick hello to the audience. And then we're going to dig in with John. Yeah. Hi, everybody. Obviously, I'm Mike. Unfortunately, you're going to get to know more about me as we go through week by week. And I am a longtime listener, a big fan and obviously excited to hopefully carry the mantle on, which was obviously started by Doug Bledsoe and Chris back in the day and obviously

carrying out on forward. So I can at least tell you so far, I've got more hair than Anders. But we'll see how much I stack up in the other areas as we go. So thanks again for the opportunity. Yeah, man, a large chunk of the audience may not even know Mike Bloodsoe and Chris Moore and all those guys. At this point, I've been on the show for, you know, I started the show back in late 2011. We started doing recordings for this. Early 2012, we posted our first episodes.

MASH, you were on the show for the first time, probably like 10 or 11 years ago. Yes, at least. And then again, Anders took over in 2016. as the as the main host and did it for eight years and so again my claim long time listener and uh john russon you haven't been on the show in five years so we've all we've all been around god we did there so much covid right i just i still remember those days of like five in the morning during covid yeah trying to get some work in before my kids woke up yeah yeah same all right um dr john russin dude um again you have this this new text out which is

just an absolute beast. I want to walk through it. But first, for all the people that don't know you, they haven't heard the episode of you're on five years ago, just a brief background on yourself. How'd you get into the industry? What are you working on? And then why did you decide to take on the large task of writing a real textbook? All right. Let's get it started. John Rustin, I've been a coach for 19 years in the performance and the fitness in the physical therapy space. Doctorate in physical therapy, also exercise science and kinesiology degrees. And I've worked a vast majority of my career in sports performance and high performance athletics, took me everywhere from professional sports to Olympic committees overseas in China and Australia. And right

now, I work on education predominantly in coaching in the health and fitness sector with our Painfree Performance Specialist Certification, which has done 20,000 certified coaches in person in our two-day certification courses over the last eight and a half years. And it's kept me busy. doing a thousand two-day in-person certification courses in that time. But that's been the real big focus, has been trying to bring our training system to the masses, trying to bring a more holistic health approach to strength and conditioning, and bring a lot of my background and my experiences to more of a mainstream audience

to be able to take advantage of what it is to be healthy and also perform well. Do you do a thousand two-day seminars? We surpassed it this year. So this year was a huge one for pain-free performance because we got to two of these thresholds that we never thought were possible, which was 20,000 certified coaches. Like, holy shit. And then also we ran our 1,000th event.

And we're like, are we crazy or are we really just passionate about this curriculum? Like, I think both. So can you, I'd like to know, like, is it obviously is somewhat, it has to be assessment based, I would assume. It's like to be able to say pain free. So I would like to know, like, where did you get your, you know, your, I guess, basis. of this program. Yeah, so pain-free performance is all about being able to run our entire training system. So the training system is sitting on the six foundational movement patterns.

It's a movement-based screen assessment programming protocol that will run to be able to go in and get somebody going, being able to have them moving well from the get-go, but then also be able to optimize based on their animal anatomy, their injury history, their biomechanics, and therefore. And then being able to plug it and play it into a more concrete system with checkmarked. where we can be able to have everything trained across the board in terms of all the factors that lead to health and longevity, but also a well-rounded movement system. So it's hard to cover that amount of material in 16 hours over two days, but we've managed to do it a number of times.

It's basically like everything we learned in school. So, yeah. It would be everything that we didn't learn in school in terms of actually taking action upon it. It's like we learn the textbook and we learn all these things that we can pass our tests with. or we can get through our CSCS or our CPT, but nobody actually trains trainers to train anymore. Nobody actually gets in there and mentors them or looks at the actual art of coaching.

And I think by going in and doing that, we actually bring the education and the academia to accessible to being able to actually do the thing that we're professionals in. Sure. I mean, yeah, like biom mechanics isn't really irrelevant unless you're actually applying it. Like, how are you going to apply biomechanics to everyday life

or like, or whatever it is your coach? or the athletes or the everyday person, but it applies to everybody. The big misconception out there that we've seen time and time again is that we've been taught this cookie cutter approach. Everyone's the same. Everyone should squat the same and deadlift the same. That's crazy.

And you hear this over and over thousands of times, and you're like, where did we go wrong? And we went wrong and not looking at the individual and their presentation in front of us, looking at their limb lengths and their torso So in their anthropometry of their hips and their shoulders, we have so much variety in terms of human body shape, size, and anthropometry. We just need a couple key tools to be able to look at some things,

especially when people are having pain or they're hitting performance plateaus. You know, it starts with being able to move well, but how do you actually classify what moving well is and how do you optimize into taking action upon being able to make some key adjustments, whether it be execution of the movement or just a base setup that is a better feed in terms of exercise selection? You know, we were just having this talk yesterday with some of our athletes. We're like, you know, who came up with this, that everybody should do a pool like this?

Everyone should do a squat like this. When you think about all the different variables of like, you know, the neck of the femur, the, yeah, like you said, the femur length compared to the torso, there's so many variables. And when you take all those variables, you put them all together, it's, it's finite. You know, it's like, it's finite in the amount of different ways someone could squat. So yes. It was an eye-opening experience. So like after a doctorate of physical therapy, I never planned to be a physical therapist.

My claim to fame is I've never actually worked a day of physical therapy in my life, even though I have the degree. But I went into this orthopedic residency. And this orthopedic residency was super cool because it was sports performance. I was working with high-performing athletes, doing some hybrid training and rehab. But then they also sat me in where I was like watching some of these orthopedic residents go through and do total hip replacements, total knee replacements, total shoulder replacements. And you get into the surgical suite and you just be sitting there like watching the carpenter work.

And all of a sudden, everything would pause for a good like 15 minutes. And all of a sudden, this guy, the surgeon just leaves the surgical suite. And he's gone. And you're like, what's going on right now? And then he's out. Yeah, he's out there. And he's like looking with the consultant of like what type of hardware is going to go into this hip right now. And he's looking at a myriad of different options.

There's thousands of different combinations between these two. two orthoses. And you're like, wow. Like he spent 15 minutes while somebody is under to be able to make sure that the biomechanics were correct on this hip. Why the hell are we teaching everyone to squat the same? It's like, holy shit. It's just impossible.

Like for everyone to say that everyone should say shoulder with feet turn this way. It's impossible. Plus, anyone has ever been a power to me. You see a million different ways someone can squat and squat very well. So without pain. Wait, so give us some of the nuances there. Like what are all the things that are kind of foundationally the same for everyone or conceptually the same for everyone?

And where are the distinctions? Like what are the variables that can be adjusted based on body type, whether it's torso length or femur length, mobility restrictions, socket depth, etc. Yeah. We tend to focus on the things that are unchangeable unless you go into a surgical suite and get a total joint replacement, which is going to be your bony anatomy. The bony anatomy is not going to be able to be improved based on your mobility in terms of your stretching protocols or any like a cold plunger or saunit at work. That's just going to be static.

And those are the things that we need at the deepest level to be able to account for. But the things at the lower body, the variables that we tend to look at right away is that hip anthropometry. So there are a number of different types of hips in terms of the ball and the socket, this being a ball and socket-based joint with a lot of degrees of freedom. We have different amounts of depth angulation, but also acetabular angles coming off of the pelvis itself. And we can do a really quick maneuver called the hip quadrant test to be able to essentially look at somebody's terminal squat depth and terminal hip depth when you increase hip flexion plus hip external rotation plus hip abduction and actually get them into kind of like a squat on their back position and go, hey, from a structural perspective, this is where we have the, open-pack position. We have no muscles that are inhibiting us getting into this position. This is what your bones say that you could possibly get to. So it's like the glass ceiling of that squat. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the

R-Tay program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garland and I have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. Artae is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre-imposed pictures. Arate is something completely different. Aratee is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature, find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special

expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Artee isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit Arteelab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E-Lab.com. Now, back to the show. But then on the lower body as well, you look at the TF ratio is a big one that we look at. So it's the difference between your shin and your femur and the length of these two things. You know, the average person out there has a 0.8 TF ratio, meaning that your shin is about 20% shorter than your thigh bone. And that impacts a lot of things in terms of the hip anatomy and then also the squat, the single leg, and the hinge anatomy when you actually start to put a load under people and start to get them moving.

moving in a training-based scenario. And then the last one that we'll look at is just something called the hingeback test is being able to look at the torso relative to the hip, the femur, and the shin bone to be able to look at, hey, from a pure hinge position, do we even have access to be able to go down to 8.75 inches of the bar on the ground with Olympic plates to be able to have us in a prime position for performance, but also injury prevention in terms of centration and neutral zones of the hip and the spine together? So those are the big three at the lower body that are like mind-blowing for people because they've been taught one of two things.

Hey, you're hurt and you need to protect your body. So squat like you're going to protect your body. Or you know what? You are going to be in this specific sport-specific stance that needs to line up for performance enhancement. And everyone needs to do this the same way. We see this a lot on Olympic lifting and power lifting. We're even seeing it in CrossFit now where it's like, hey, everyone needs to do it this way because this is what the games winner just did. It's like, hold on a second.

Let's look at these unique biomechanical properties of your unique anatomy, and that will give you the tangible data to say, hey, I can justify actually bringing you out into something a little bit more oblique in terms of the way that you're setting up and the way that you're uniquely moving. But essentially, we want to maximize full and authentic range of motion. We want to stack the joints in centrated positions, and we want to be as neutral as possible being able to hammer the muscles and spare the joints. If we can do all of those things, it lines up performance enhancement and also injury risk mitigation. So over a long enough period of time, people tend to gravitate towards the movements that are either orthopedically appropriate or they keep slamming that square peg into the round hole. I'm going to do the overhead squat because good luck with your femurs being twice the length of your torso. What would you say are probably for someone who doesn't have the access to people like yourself, what would you say is probably the most? orthopedically gentle given the wide variety of statures and anthropometrics for something like a squat

accessory. Like where would you say here's the one that is likely to capture 90 plus percent, not just the people whose femurs are half their torso length and they're like, why do you have to lean back when you squat? Like, because I have this body called femur I need to get around. So what comes to mind there? So knowing very well that there is no one size fit all model. I think we need to classify the goal of, say, a given squat. The goal of a given squat is to go in competition and get to parallel and being able to have white lights. Like, that's a different goal than being able to make sure that you have an authentic squat pattern so you can take a shit in a hole while you're camping in the woods with your kids and not have to go to the next town over.

So these are two different things. But if I were to say that there's one squat that anthropometrically fits the most people with a lot of variability, it would be goblet squatting. Goblet squatting is super unsexy and everyone's like, oh, that's a fluffy physical therapy exercise for broken people that can't man up and squat with the bar on their back. I'm like, oh, hey, hold on a second. Hold on a second. I have people that are super strong being able to utilize something like that in their accessory work. But the key to being able to goblet squat is you maximize range of motion. You have a knee over toe angle in terms of you being able to play with that TF ratio that we're talking about. You have a torso angle that can line up for hip centration and stacking the spine. And you also have a load

that is very close and on contact with anterior center of mass that allows us to make this a full body movement base. So that is the one that I would say like, hey, not everyone's going to want to train goblet squats, but you should probably cycle them into your program. I do every day. I think every almost, I would say 80% of every single day I do. Yeah, that's how I get my mobility. Every morning I go downstairs and I do one of the isometrics I do is a goblet squat where

I sit in the bottom, you know, and like, then I'll do like where I'm like shifting my knee over my toe to the right to the left. I'm like, yes, it's helped my mobility immensely. Like as a 52 year old too, like I've seen obvious measurable improvement with a goblet squad. I love it. And I love being able to find success with those things. Because as soon as you start to access those positions like Travis is talking about, it's like, holy shit, I feel like now we have the opportunity. to try to move some of these authentic end ranges of motion back into some heavier loading. And then all of a sudden, you get into the opportunity point to be able to have barbell front rack loads come into play where we start to get more forward knee translation,

or we get the barbell back squat in a high bar position to be able to go in and get a little bit more forward torso lean with it. But I would say that there is going to be differences in every single person. And we've been taught so many times that it's like, hey, don't face your chest towards the ground when you squat. Well, what if your anatomy says that you have to in terms of keeping the neutral spine and being able to hit authentic depth with your range of motion? Or, you know, front squatting versus back squatting. It's always one versus the other. Many times when we unlock somebody's pattern, whether it be squat, hinge, lunge, push, or pull, we're then able to get that pattern done

authentically and then build a lot of variability right or left of that pattern in terms of then being able to be strong and stable with different muscular stresses, but also different mechanical stresses that are going to be on the pattern itself. Like the squat bench and dead, the same way all the time for everyone, is never going to be a recipe for success. We need to be able to do the big base movements, but then we need to get good at being able to sprinkle in strategic variability in terms of making a complete movement system that is varied and robust in terms of its capacities to be able to perform in any different

degree of challenge. Agreed. If what you said was true, people couldn't lean forward. Lane Norton would never been able to do a squat. Like, you mean, and the dude is done. He exceeded even any expectation I would have had for the guy. And I've known him since he was young and still in school. And the guy was like, so the skinny, long dude, I'd never would have dreamed would be a

great pilot. And like, that dude has maximized his ability to squat. And he's got that forward lean. And that's what's going to be. He's not going to change that. that. It's interesting though. So it's like you get into the concept of pain-free performance. Then we're talking about different SWAT anatomy. And all of a sudden, we have the people that are falling through the cracks the most are the ones that are in chronic pain or had an acute injury that is still lingering

mentally, physically, emotionally with them. And all of a sudden, they lose confidence in their body to perform. They lose confidence in that variability that they have in terms of rebuilding their system. And then all of a sudden they get locked into one way of doing things. And that is a slippery slope because that's not what training is all about. Even for my power lifters, it's like very rarely are we going to train the same exact variant all year around? That never happens. We'll have seven, eight, maybe nine months of an off season where we start having varied positions and varied exercise selection and then get them back into their sports specific movement pattern itself. But really, we need to be able to go in and service the people, especially if we're having pain or if we have old injuries that are lingering with.

us, there has to be some sort of rebuild plan to be able to address weak links, rebuild them back up and baby play with these variables that are unchanging. And that's just the start as being able to stack them for wins. And then the ability of coaching and being able to execute when the body is actually in motion and dynamic, you know, that is where I think we are really good as coaches. We're not great as coaches being able to make assessments and screening-based protocols to say, hey, no matter what you do, you're not going to squat well with your feet crawl. It's like that's what many people are doing, not literally, but figuratively.

And they're wondering why their knees always hurt or their lower back is hurt every 12 to 16 weeks no matter what they do. You sometimes need to take two steps back to take 10 steps forward. And that's what going back in and looking at your unique bioanatomy is all about. Yeah, I think Ed Cohen, one of the things he did that was so brilliant was taking that, you know, that offseason. And like a lot of power that just never take a true off season. And like that dude would take half the year every single year and just do bodybuilding where he would change it up to a high bar front squats. He would go completely away from his traditional low bar, wider stand squat. And I feel like that's what kept him in the game for so long and allowed him to exit and still be fairly in good shape.

Let's talk about the barbell sports for a second here, though. I don't know any other sport other than the barbell sports programmed and executed poorly that never has a true off season. Yeah, it's crazy. I know. Yeah, and weightlifting, it's almost like it's not the weight lifters fault. It's like it's the way the IWF sets it up and it's really tough. And luckily, you know, we just had one of my best athletes, Ryan Grinsland. We just had like the first offseason it felt like in forever. And it's easy. It made the most progress in such a long time because he had some time to do. We had to address some weaknesses. We did this huge assessment. And we did a biomechanical. assessment we went to where was it up north it just it was a university he did a big protocol on it it allowed us to address its little things like his week and he would never dream that he would have knee flexion weaknesses and is that going to make him a better you know waylifter no but will it prevail possibly from injury yes and so it's been a great all season so yes I'm with you on that that's where I cut my teeth though so when I left that residency I was like

like, you know, fuck this. I want to go right back into performance because prior to going to graduate school, I was Division I trained in conditioning coach with Olympic sports at the University of Buffalo. A lot of my mentors came through there, some amazing coaches that I'm always grateful for, their mentorship and just their guidance through my younger years. But I always knew I wanted to get back into performance. So I ended up in Southern California and I ended up working at MLB and NFL offseason programs. And that was like the thing that I did. I love the camaraderie of sports. as a visual and baseball player myself, but I was always in that as like my big focus.

It's like, hey, I got this guy for eight weeks, nine weeks, maybe 10 weeks. You know, how do we actually go and rebuild them? Get them healthy, get them feeling good, have them recuperate from their season, and maybe dabble in a little bit of performance. And that was really cool because you could go back and you could take some steps back. And those guys were already like blasted. You know, you just came out 162 game season of baseball. You're not going to be super psyched to go in and throw the next.

say so weight training and strength and conditioning became like the thing that they focused on for that eight weeks or so and that was cool because you could see the progress being made but just like you're saying travis it's like not like hey he's going to hit the ball 490 instead of 485 now that i gave him so much more power and is that trap our deadlift like that's not the way it works it's about being able to address weak links so you can train harder you can stay more consistent you can recuperate and you can recover faster, and then you can compound that into optimized performance and being able to stay in the game longer. That's the name of the game. But we missed that when it comes to a lot of barbell sports, power lifting, Olympic lifting is really no better, especially

some of like CrossFit and high rocks. Everything's all intensity all the time. And there's never a true off season. And that really stuck with me because when I transitioned into working with some higher-end barbell sport athletes, it was foreign to them. I'm sitting there saying like, hey, you know, for the next four to five months, we're going to actually not have you doing the big three. We're going to have you doing variants of this. And they're like, what the fuck are you talking about about the fire me day one? And all of a sudden, it's like trying to re-educate on just the general principles of how a high performer is supposed to train and then it's supposed to get prepared and then supposed to compete and do that cycle over and over throughout the years. It's no different. If you want to be a high

performer in any sport, that is the type of cycle that you need to go through linearly every single year. You would want to, the problem in Wayliving is that they, you know, they set it up to where you compete, you compete, you compete. And like now the way this next Olympic quadrennial setup, it's like it's back to the scoring system. So it's not like you can't pick this one meet to like peak for. You got to do several meets. It makes it really, really tough. I mean, you can, but it's really tough.

It's not as easy as it used to be. To go back to your previous. Yeah. To go back to the previous comments of throwing academia under the bus, because that's my main job, is the lack of understanding of purization. So you get folks that, A, they never have an active rest cycle. And B, they never just do something that's just straight up hypertrophy, picking the exercises.

And I like your logic of let's pick things that aren't going to bang you up, but it's going to toast the muscles. So we go back to your low bar, wide stance, heaviest load, you've got more muscle supporting it, you've got stronger connected tissue, and in turn, you know, you don't have all that mileage

in that pattern be you down because it's always great when you name an injury after a sport, kind of like you know you might be overusing a certain tissue. Yeah. Our famous athlete, sorry, forgot your baseball reference.

And you're already touching on this quite a bit, but if somebody comes to you and they have chronic pain, their shoulders has been hurting for a decade, but they kind of just train through it, and it's not really enough to like have surgery on specifically, but it's just kind of always there. And in this case, maybe they are in season or they do have a competition coming up and they don't want to like just take five months off, so to speak.

I know it's not off, but like take five months away from their primary lifts or from their more sport-specific training. Like what's your general approach to having someone continue to make progress, but also have that achy joint eventually not bother them so much? It's a great question. It's a common question that I get. And there's this sect of people out there that, makes up the majority of the fitness industry in the strength industry, which is like the subclinical

pain response. It's like not serious enough to go see your doctor, get imaging or even go to physical therapy or chiropractic or any of the rehab docs, but it's enough to be like, yo, I can't train the way I need to train. My performance is going backwards. I'm going nuts. I'm just trying to force feed a square peg into a round hole. And those are the people that end up usually coming to me. And there's kind of like one or two different, avenues that you can take with that person. The first one is to be able to go, okay, we need to just take away the exacerbating issue. You know, if your goal is to go and compete in six or eight weeks, the best thing that I could possibly do for you in six to eight weeks is not make you

stronger or not really fine-tune your form because pain is the restrictor of all performance. So if I can simply just get you feeling even a little bit better, it's not going to go from like, man, nine out of ten pain every time I bench to 100% pain-free overnight. But if we can get that incrementally better just by taking out an exacerbating movement pattern, exercise variant, we can keep the core capacities of strength or power or whatever the sport is still in program, but we can just kick the can down the road just a little bit to have time be the healer of all. Many times people always want to look at the positive addition of something into your program to fix things. And many times it's not as easy as just like, hey, here's this magical exercise.

I saw an Instagram on a 15-second reel that said that it'll fix my lower back pain that I've had for the last 18 years. That's not the way things work. It's being able to have addition by subtraction of being able to identify. What's the thing or multiple different things that are exacerbating this on repeat, causing a vicious pain and injury cycle and maybe pulling that back a little bit and being able to then move forward faster? So I deal with this all the time, six to eight weeks out. Hey, what do I do? I just flare it up in my car.

comp prep. Well, we can either just be a total meathead and just continue to go forward and just hope that your lower back and your shoulders hold on for the ride and we get to competition and you don't blow it out right there on the platform, or we can step back, get you feeling just good enough to give you that mental confidence back in. You know, many times, like I think that we think it's just such a linear process moving forward with our strength or our power. It's not that way. It's our ability to perform at the competition. It's the the most important thing. That's the only important thing, sure.

Yeah. It's the only important thing. And that's where you can actually show what you have. And just in my experience, it's extraordinarily difficult to hit PRs when you're in pain. Or if you have a restricter plate on your movement system, that is going to ultimately be in protection mode instead of performance mode. So I'm always a big advocate for taking a couple steps back, removing the exacerbating things, and then trying to re-implement them quickly, right.

for competition to be able to get them into that sports specific skill and that motor control back in just enough where they can go and be the beast that they are. I think that's brilliant. I think Stuart McGill, I learned the, oh, I know he's very controversial. And so like, I'm not trying to debate flexion, not flexion on the spot, but I'm saying the thing I learned for him the most is finding that, finding what exacerbates your ear injuries, you know, and like trying to eliminate these movement patterns from not only your training, but your daily life as well. That was the biggest thing I learned from the guy.

It's like, you know, just what is doing? It was causing your issues. It's not the same. It's not the same for it. It's quite the opposite. It's very different for each individual person. So find it what's what's messing you up. Don't do that. Don't do that thing. I mean, it's not very, it's not very complicated. It's funny that you said that like controversial Dr. Stuart McGill, like big influence of mine. Mine too. Absolute OG. And, you know, I don't really like get into the nitty gritty of the fitness industry, but you got the book. And he took a picture of him reading the book on his chair in Canada and his daughter took the picture. And he wrote this big review of like, man, this book's awesome.

Like everyone should have it. And all of a sudden it's like I hear people talking shit. Like this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, you know, on comments. And I'm like, all right, people. All right people. But I think that there is some truth to, hey, we're talking about. whoa, we have to take away the one thing that is exacerbating to your pain right now or your injury right now.

But we don't necessarily break it down to, hey, what if that doesn't actually happen in the gym? What if it's your hydration levels? What if it's your piss poor nutrition? What if your sleep cycles are off? What if your training volumes overall the last seven to 30 days are totally fucked? Right. There are all these different things that can cause a pain response. And without getting like two biocytes social physical about things, there are a lot of different things that we can do as coaches to be able to get people feeling good again.

And number one thing is like if you're going in and you have a mechanical problem, which isn't everything, but many times in barbell sports, it is a key player. We can take that mechanical problem away. But we have to look at the span of everyone else's hybrid health plan of being able to look at the holistic nature of the way that you're managing an athlete. as many times you can get somebody feeling really, really good just by improving one of a number of different metrics that would happen outside of the gym and the other 23 hours of the day. Especially when what you said something about volume is like, and the fact that you can take volume down so far without it affecting performance much at all. And I feel like we just put more and more and more and more. And there comes this point to what you can't go any further, especially when you get the elite athletes, there comes a time where you might want to consider quite the opposite.

It's like, but we just, it's hard for us to think, like, maybe let's take a step back on that volume just a bit. But yet you look at all the majority of the research would say, like, intensity is way easier to recover from. Then say set volume. And so like there's so many ways you can stack it and still get to where you want to go. So it's very interesting. Like when I was working in China with the Chinese Olympic Committee, I wasn't doing their Olympic weightlifting. I'm not an Olympic weightlifting expert by any means. I wish you had.

I would definitely shift this whole thing, yeah. But I did work with a number of these teams in their functional training, which I thought it was super funny. And it's like they were going to train their own way. And then they were going to bring in guys like me to be like, hey, functionally train these guys. Like, what the hell does that mean? I don't know if it got lost in translation or what the hell was happening. But actually train losers.

So I'd have these guys and, you know, some of the Olympic weightlifters, these guys were super jacked and super skilled. and probably the best athletes of all athletes at Olympic Village. And all of a sudden, it's like, man, you get them into something like a Bulgarian split squat or just some like some base movements. And they're like very weak because they're not necessarily calloused in those positions quite yet. But they tended to do high intensity, huge rest periods. They train six, seven hours a day.

And they basically be sitting in a chair next to the platform, go in every 20 to 30 minutes, hit something high intensity. and they could recover really well. So they had it. There's a reason that they have success, right? They knew what they were doing, and they were smart enough to bring in some skinny, bald people like myself to be able to functionally train them as well.

But then you had some other teams that, like, didn't know what the fuck they were doing. You'd be, like, dealing with a badminton athlete. And this guy's, like, going to go win a medal. And all of a sudden, it's like they're doing two, three-hour machine-based circuits every single day. Then they're having you come in and doing, like, one-on-one physical therapy.

with them, then they want one-on-one functional training. And all of a sudden, you're like, man, this guy is super overtrained. If I've ever seen it over-trained, it would be this guy. And that came full circle. I remember one day, because we did everything through translation. And I was like two hours into a training session. I'm like, I can't believe I'm training this guy for two hours. He just trained three hours before he came in to see me.

All of a sudden, we had like a bathroom break. We're like, all right, bathroom, bathroom. Bathroom, let's go to the bathroom. And he was actually just pissing blood. And I was like, this isn't good. You literally have Coke and blood coming out of your penis right now. And this is not awesome. So I'm going through translation.

He doesn't speak English. I'm not speaking Mandarin. And it takes two to three hours to say, hey, can we meet with your team physician? What the heck is going on? And it got to the point where three hours into it, he said, this is the volume that we need to train at in order to get a metal. And if this is what it takes, then that is fine. I don't know what to do with that. The other guy, like, to kill, destroy his kidney.

All right. Yeah. But we had the different teams at the same center, and it was like, hey, high intensity, high rest, high volume, all dog shit intensity. And you could see which one would actually win out. I don't think it's appropriate for anyone to be training five, six, seven hours per day, even at those levels. But it was very interesting to see just the dogma of what had worked in the past, what had worked through the last. what had worked through the last two, three, 10 decades in those specific sports.

And when you get the head coaches of those sports, they are going to be the dictator of what everyone is going to do, back to that cookie cutter approach. So it is very, it's very old school when it comes to that. That's too bad. I feel like that's the strategy of what? You're actually kind of saying the same thing that I was about to say.

It is, it is survivorship bias. Go ahead. Yeah, you have, you throw enough meat at the machine, you eventually have a survivor. And, you know, always remember when you first try a sport, you know, oh my God, if I practice twice a week, I get better twice as fast. If I practice three times a week, I get better three times as fast.

And that works if we're, I don't know, practicing billiards. But obviously there's certain sports skills that practicing of itself is incredibly stressful in the body. Obviously, maximal lifting is a great example, high level gymnastics. But, you know, any of us can shoot free throws for five, six hours a day and like, oh, you might get a blister. Yeah. be a little annoyed but therein lies the thing is when you what if your only tools a hammer everything looks like a nail yeah well we'll just we're gonna out train him like that's

why we speaking of coke we don't pee it we do it so we can just train 24 hours a day we never have to sleep yeah and that way you know 10 000 hour rule i just don't sleep for a full year i mean i'm right i'm getting close right yeah i hear a lot like i always get asked i have a 10 year old son i'm very involved with coaching his basketball and his baseball and he's 10 but he plays at a high level because we work practice a lot and we work obviously straight in the condition at a low level. I'm in the business. So everyone's like, oh, now that you have a son that's in sports and you have all this

sports coaching background, like, what do you do with your son or what are your views on this and that? And it's an interesting conversation starter, but just because I'd worked overseas in totally different worlds, man, it is totally different. Survivor bias is 100% real when it comes to China in some of the world. of the Eastern Bloc countries. Whoever makes it out will most likely be the one that is going to be the top contender when it comes to those medals.

But that is not the same as us sitting here in America with our youth early sports specialization models. These are two totally different things. And that's okay, but they can't be compared against one another. My biggest pet peeve is when somebody goes, well, the Russian Olympic lifters and the Chinese Olympic lifters. Hey, you don't live in Russia, good, and you also don't live in China, even better. You live here where you have a lot of different opportunities, and we have the ability to actually be smarter with the process and be able to be successful with it. But you can't compare apples

against oranges. And when we start to do that, we start to get into these problems that we're having right now with sports specialization across the board, whether it be baseball, basketball, ball, whether it be Olympic lifting or CrossFit, it's crazy. And one story from China was some of the performers that were actually escalating very quickly in the youth development model were athletes that were coming from one sport and at age 10, 11, 12, they actually shifted them into another sport. And all of a sudden, they put the skill capacities on them at high frequencies, but they were able to develop a certain trait in one sport, translate that to the next

sport and be fresh about that 12 and be able to actually go in and develop the skills that they needed to get up to 17, 18, 19 at their physical peaks. And I thought that was super intriguing because every once in a while, it would be like once a month, the sport coaches from all different sports would go look at everyone else's athletes for the other sports. And I'm like, what the hell are these guys doing? They were literally trying to steal some of the youth development athletes out of different sports to be able to see that they would be healthy enough.

and then we could actually put these high training volumes on them because they haven't had six or seven years of it, you know, from ages six to 12. It was intriguing. It was like, it was an educational lifetime being out. I mean, that happens in America as well. Like in the weightlifting, especially a lot of our better weight lifters were gymnasts, you know, like just part of what happened. Even the boys now, but a lot of the girls, I mean, Kate and I, you know, it was Maddie Rogers. She was, she was a cheerleader, you know, like the tumbling, you know, all of them were. Grades gymnast.

It was all, of course, the boy who's done the best. He started a waylifting and ended up waylifting. But Ryan, my guy, he did gymnastics crossfit first. Now he's one of the top. So, like, you know, so yeah, that happens even in America. You know, we're finding. I think in the U.S. you're forgetting about American football. The amount of people leave football or leave throwing in final Olympic lifting.

Yeah. They already were a really powerful type two athletes. No, the bar doesn't punch back. Yeah, totally, especially if they're bigger. You don't find many, the thing about football with weight living is only in those top, you know, the bigger weight classes, you know, because like, you know, the smaller weight classes, they weren't going to be playing a lot of football anyway. You know, if you weigh 130 pounds, what's what happened? So, yeah, you had like West, we had West kids, who was an American football player, darn near NFL guy. So some of that in those bigger weight classes.

The following gymnastics, I still think. I look at the gym. You know, the ones we weren't quite good enough to be like the, you know, how many gymnasts are going to be the top levels. But yeah, they could come to a way of the team, maybe, you know, because they're too, they're too big. That sport, you know, not big enough for football, you know, so it's like, just find that, find that good match for that great athlete.

Football's the perfect, the perfect sport to be able to say, hey, this person is probably and not overtrained. It's the only sport in America today that you can go out and make tens of millions of dollars per year if you can get it to the NFL that you didn't have to spend your entire year specializing. Exactly. Yeah. Everyone points at that and they go, oh shit, maybe this model isn't good that I have Jimmy playing baseball 12 months a year at age nine to be able to make sure that he gets a Division I scholarship when he's 18. You know, it doesn't work that way. I think that the more hybridized that we can create physical abilities from, the more well-rounded that we can create ultimate athletes from in terms of power,

strength, obviously body composition, agility, athleticism, and then being able to display mobility through different stages of movement patterns, all of a sudden, like, you can put specialty on that. But unless you have that and unless you develop that by age 16, 17, 18, it's going to be very difficult to go back in and start rebuilding. That's what all of us are doing. We're like trying to rebuild those physical capacities so we can have help in longevity. but when it comes to performance,

it's a little bit different. So totally. When my kids, I'm trying to do as many things as possible. You know, we do Olympic weight lifting, we do gymnastics,

wrestling. They're going to start moving Thai now. Like, I want them to move their bodies in as many ways as possible. Until they find the thing they love and they're a little bit older, you know.

Yeah. I think it was the old Russian model. No, yeah. Like I said, I wish I started Muay Thai when I was like seven, eight years old, like your kids,

man, that'd be fantastic. I know. I know. My son Rock can really punch hard. Like, I wouldn't want to hit. He's got a good build for it, too. Yes.

He's that long and, you know, he's fast. He's really good. He'd qualify. He'll probably hate to make this. I hope he never hears me. But I think he's going to win the nationals in weightlifting. And like, he's really good at weightlessly. And like, like, with that long arm of it, man, I don't want to hit me in a face.

Like, no way. And we're like, yeah. How about this transition? So the co-author of Pain Free Performance, Glenn Cordosa and also the CEO of Victory Belt Publishing House that put out my book and all the other OGs in the space. They were both professional Mwai Thai fighters in Thailand together. Wow. Yeah. All their initial books were all martial arts books. I bought their stuff like 20 years ago almost. Yeah. 2006, I think, I bought one of their books, one of their books, one of the Judisu books.

Yeah. Eddie Bravo's books. You don't argue with them. You're like, all right, man, we'll make that change. Yeah. Yeah, dude, let's dig into this thing. This is a, again, I said at the beginning of the show, like, this is a monster text. Like, A, what prompted you to want to write a real book? This isn't like a small self-published. I'm just going to knock this out in a couple months kind of book. Like, this is an enormous volume of text. Great pictures, like high production value. This is a real book, man. Like, give us the background. How did you get into it? And what was it like putting it all together? I've been approached many times over the years, especially running pain for your performance. Special Certification to come in and write an ultimate resource with the system inside of a book. But I was like, you know what? I'm too busy for this stuff. And I alluded to running all these events. And I'll be totally honest right here and right now, like by 2000 or 2021, 2022, I was burned out,

traveling 40 plus times per year, going back to backs on different continents, developing the team, having this thing flourish. Like I was down and out. I was dealing with some of my health issues of my own, you know, not due to my training or my nutrition or my sleep. It was due to just sheer stress and like, what else could I do because I was doing something 24-7? And Glenn had reached out to me at like a low point in my life because I was fresh out of surgery. I had some GI issues. I had COVID all at the same time. I had full body poison Ivy. I was fucked. I was absolutely fucked. You know, September of 2022,

I went in for surgery and I was down and out and utilizing my own pain-free performance systems to rebuild my own body. And I found myself on Thanksgiving Day at 2022 getting a call from Glenn. And Glenn being like, yo, I was just at the course. I train on your programs. We need to do this. Now is the time to do this. And at that time, I was still like rehabbing myself.

I was still feeling like shit. I was still in pain, you know, post-surgery. And I was like, you know what? If this is the last thing that I do, I want to make sure that I can actually get this out to the people and it can live on forever and it can be in a physical space with all the people that have come to the course over the years because I'm so grateful that they've done that. And that was the push for me to go into a three-year period of doing the hardest thing that I've ever done by far, far harder than even running the courses is being able to put this book together.

But it all came towards like, man, it was a low period. I didn't know if I was going to be able to continue on doing what I was going to do. And I wanted to be able to have this live on. and it was the right place, the right time. I didn't know what I was getting into because Glenn's a perfectionist. I'm a type AAA personality, and I want to do something as good as I can possibly do it, no matter what it takes. And we thought we were going to be able to knock this out in like 12 to 18 months.

12 to 18 months we got in, and it wasn't even close. Like the depth of what we had to put together was wild. And it took us two years, nine months, and 18 days to get it from start to actually holding it in our hands. And it took around 7,000 man hours between everyone on the team to be able to make this thing come to the light of publishing. But I'm just so proud of it because we did create something that is gold standard. We created something that did encapsulate everything that I've done with pain-free performance. and it's finally in one spot. But, man, it's been a wild ride to be able to get it delayed a year,

delayed another six months, delayed another six months after that, and then finally get it out and be able to have people have it. But the reviews have been awesome. We knew it was good when we were going in, but it's always good to be able to have the reviews come in and be able to have people interact with it for the first time, knowing very well that, holy shit, yeah, we just busted our balls for the last three years and we didn't, you know,

waste it on people that didn't actually. appreciate it. Who do you primarily write this for? Is this mostly for coaches and professionals in the industry? Is this for athletes or a combination of both? It's going to be a combination of both. We'll automatically get the coaches and the personal trainers and the physical therapist that will come in and utilize the systems.

But it's written in such a way that you guys could be able to give this to your mother and she could be able to go in and start training on the pain-free performance program. She could put her rehab and her prehab together in terms of getting healthy and be able to have a more holistic approach of the way that I look at training for long-term health and longevity. So we wrote it at the mainstream consumer, and that was one of the biggest challenges, is that we've done all this professional education, but only 5 to 7% of the people that go through the certification course are non-professionals in the field. So we've been doing a lot of professional education,

and we needed to bring that education to the level of being able to make it stick, being able to sell stories and be able to be real and human with the process, and engage people because we know very well that I wanted people that didn't have DPTs or CSCSs or be training people for the CrossFit games, be able to come in and take appreciation of it, but also take action upon it. So being able to write it in that way, it's naturally the way that we present and we educate inside of pain-free performance anyways. But I think that making it a human element and making sure that my voice was still resonating

in the written form, the way that it does when I speak to groups, that was the biggest. test. But I will throw Glenn under the bus here. So we wrote the first chapter. And it wasn't like the first chapter chronologically, but it was like the first one that we locked in. And it was about breathing and embracing. And I tell this anecdote and we have this step by step protocol for breathing embracing protocols. And Glenn's like, man, this chapter is awesome. I'm going to send it to my boss, the CEO. And Glenn's written like 18 books or something like that, like all time bestsellers, millions, tens of millions of books sold. And his boss goes, Glenn, this is the single best chapter that you and John have ever produced in victory belt history. And then me and

Glenn are like, I guess every chapter has to be like that. 20 more chapters later, we're like trying to beat that chapter. So I always blame like, hey, it was our own perfectionism that took us three years to do something that should have took half the time. But like now that you sit back and it's done and like you're out of the shitstorm, you're kind of like, I'm so glad I took that amount of time to do it. Yeah, dude, hell yeah. Yeah, it looks very high quality. I'm very impressed with my where can people find more? Where can they get the book? Where can they learn more about seminars and attend if they like? You can grab the book. All places books are sold. Amazon usually has the best deals worldwide. So they'll usually have it on discount. So just search pain free performance, John Russon and Amazon. And then you can find me on social media. All my handles are at Dr. John Russon, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. You can find me there. And painfree training.com is everything having to do with pain free performance in the certification courses. beautiful Travis mash bro congratulations I mean I can't wait to read it myself so I appreciate that guys

this is a lot of fun man you know like not every time is it is our guest so amazing but today I learned a lot so matchlead.com for all of you guys who want to check out we have a lot of new products out now so beautiful dr mike lane yeah john very much happy to get a chance to talk with you I'm looking forward to your follow-up of the Max Payne training program. Let me know what that's going to drop. We'll all join the one immediately. And, yeah, it's just a Mike Lane, PhD at Instagram. I probably need to get more of these handles up and running.

So thanks again, man. Thank you. You bet. John, dude, I'm stoked that you got this thing finally off your plate after shy of three years, it sounds like. I've often heard that about books. You don't write a book. You rewrite a book.

Exactly. Once you're done, you're really half done at best. Sounds like you experienced all that. But dude, very high quality, very impressive. Enjoyed having you back on the show. Let's do it again, hopefully in a tighter window than five years for the next time. You can find me on Instagram. I'm Douglas E. Larson.

We are barbell shrug. You can find us at Barbell underscore shrug. If you want to work with Dr. Mike Lane and Travis Mash, they are coaches inside our RTA program at Rapid Health Optimization. If you want to learn more about that very premium health and performance approach, you can go to a r-t-a-lab.com that's a r-r-et-e-l-a-b dot com friends we'll see you guys next week