Barbell Shrugged - [Physiology First] A Curriculum for Mental and Physical Health w/ David Bidler, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #765

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

David Bidler is the President of Physiology First-an organization dedicated to teaching the science of health and human potential to youth and families around the world. Through partnerships with schools, free programs for youth, and the online Physiology First University platform David and his team are dedicated to creating a revolution in health education for the next generation. Physiology First built their flagship campus for community health and fitness education in Freeport, Maine in 2019. Physiology First is preparing to launch their next campus in the town of Sale, U.K on September 7th! David and his team are training coaches, educators, and healthcare leaders around the world through the Physiology First Certification Program to bring the Physiology First Approach to their communities! Work with RAPID Health Optimization Work with Physiology First Physiology First on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged family this week on Barbell Shrugged. David Bidler from Physiology First is coming in. You know this show is something that is just near and dear to my heart. We had Matt Boudreaux on maybe two months ago talking about the Apogee school system and since we had him on the show I have actually looked at many options locally. To me there's a an Apogee school that's starting in my town, which is very, very cool that I am very excited about potentially having my kids go to. And one of the coolest parts where I was actually introduced to Physiology First was through that podcast with Matt Boudreaux. When David comes in today and he's really talking a lot about how we can start to build the habits of physical and mental health. Of course, everybody

understands that there's like a massive crisis of just creating healthy human beings and how sick our kids are. And if you're paying attention to any of it, which if you're listening to the show, you definitely already are. We've got to figure out a way as a society that we can start making healthier children. And a lot of that just by the time kids get to 18 years old and they're making their own decisions in the world, they don't have the tools of understanding how to eat healthy, how to work out. They've been doing whatever it is, whether it's staring at a TV or an iPad or video games, or they just don't have an understanding of what movement is, how great it feels. They haven't built those patterns into their life.

And Physiology First is the program that inside the Apogee School System as well as just in many other places, that's just the one that's closest Apogee school system as well as just in many other places, just that's just the one that's closest to me and closest to home. But they they're building these curriculums. They're showing kids what it means to actually be healthy, how to eat well, how to get into cold tubs, how to deal with hard workouts, saunas and layering the curriculum, laying the education system around mental and physical health so that by the time they are on their own, they have an understanding of what it means to truly

be healthy, having some tactics that they can use on a daily basis to improve their lives. And hopefully over time, we can start to change the conversation so that we're not just sending people out into the world world hoping that they can just figure it out, but actually empowering them with being able to make healthy decisions and having the education behind all of it. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com forward slash results. That is where our good friend Timothy Jones has an article that was up in Men's Health and in Apple News, a case study on how he lost tons of weight, got super shredded, and cut his cholesterol in half. And you can go access that free case study

over at rapidhealthreport.com forward slash results. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Warner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash. Today on Barbell Shrugged, David Bidler from Physiology First, a school or a program that every single kid in this country needs to be a part of. I first learned about you from the show that we did with Matt Trudeau talking about the Apogee School System. Before we kind of dig into all things Physiology First, I'd love to know where kind of the inspiration for building this company started. Man, so I have to say I'm so inspired and

honored and grateful to be on with you guys. Barbell Shrugged has been a source of inspiration and knowledge and wisdom for me for years. It's one of my first introductions to movement culture, performance culture. So thank you so much. When was the first time you listened to the show? Do you remember how long? I do remember. It must have been 10 or 11 years ago. I was learning how to squat.

I was kind of figuring out human movement as an endurance athlete. So my journey into all this, well, I should pause and say my journey before being an endurance athlete was being an incredibly unhealthy kid. And so, I mean, at the depths of physiological dysregulation, lived a very unhealthy lifestyle, and the winds of fate pushed me into the world of ultramarathoning. Oh, wow. I would say to anybody, I say this to kids, I say this to everybody, if you want to know what your physiology is capable of, run an ultramarathon. No kidding.

You can do it. You will learn so much. You hear that, Matt? Time to step your game up, buddy. Time to figure out what your body is capable of. It's deep learning. I know. That's what I was going to say. As soon as you guys put a thousand pounds on your back, I'll do the 100 mile marathon.

I love that, though, because it's all the same game, right? It is the same game. These boundaries of our perceived limitations. Slight different energy's all the same game, right? It is the same game. Pushing these boundaries of our perceived limitations. Slight different energy system on the other side, right? Yeah. Right. Phosphocreatine only on this side. I do want to, I had the Matt Boudreaux, not Trudeau, that guy from Canada.

This is Boudreaux. I got to get myself right. Different individual all together. Got to get off Twitter. Got to get off right. This is a different individual all together. Got to get off Twitter. Got to get off Twitter. Yeah, no kidding. Me too. Go ahead. Sorry. No, no. To answer your question, I grew up in a very, very, very unhealthy set of patterns and behaviors. I started smoking really young, drinking really young. Somebody dragged me into a jujitsu gym when I was maybe 19 years old and it saved my life. It turned my life around. I saw a culture of people pushing each other to get better, to get

stronger, to get more skilled and to treat movement as a skill, to treat training as a skill, to treat self-development as a skill. So that world of jujitsu pushed me through a kind of circuitous route into ultra marathon running. And I took the same mentality that I picked up in jujitsu pushed me through a kind of circuitous route into ultra marathon running. And I took the same mentality that I picked up in jujitsu to the ultra world. I thought, well, how the hell do humans run? And what are the skills associated with this? And how do I build a knowledge base where I can do this well? I took the kind of curiosity that you have to have in jujitsu,

where you'll just get choked out every five minutes into ultra running. And I enjoyed it. I loved it. So I built my first performance training center called the Distance Project, which really was a lot more literal at the time. It really was for endurance athletes, but it took no time at all before we evolved into thinking about the endurance sport of life. And we got young people in, we got adults in, in their 80s. And we thought, what is the future of healthspan? What is the future of longevity? And before long, we realized that so many of the young people who were coming into our center, the things that were affecting them, it wasn't that they weren't running a fast enough mile, that they weren't

squatting enough weight. It's that they were dealing with unprecedented levels of exhaustion, of anxiety, of overstimulation, of depression. I think that we created an environment where they were comfortable talking to other mentors and peers and leaders who were physically and mentally pushing themselves to get better as well. So through these open conversations about the physiology of anxiety and depression and stress, it was obvious as it would be to anybody in the performance world, it's we're never given a baseline understanding of the physiology of depression, stress and anxiety. And without that baseline understanding, how could they build a skill set? How could they build a program? How could they adapt their physiology on purpose? So we really pivoted

to focusing on creating a new paradigm in education where we learn this stuff first, not when we're 45. What a shift we can make in health if we all had these skills earlier. So that might be counterintuitive for a lot of people. You hear depression, stress, anxiety. You don't think physiology, you think psychology. Of course, they're closely tied in many ways. Why is the name physiology first, the name that you, the skills, the latest neuroscience, the latest breakthroughs in life sciences to understand how a physical foundation is necessary to build psychological health. And without that foundation, these kids are absolutely

lost to build an actual program where they can understand the neurophysiology of anxiety, understand, I'm sorry, the neurophysiology of depression, understand anxiety from a nervous system perspective, and take these words into the tangible instead of the more abstract concepts, because without understanding what anxiety is physiologically, I'll be hard pressed to build a skillset to manage it. If it's something that happens to me me i won't be able to prepare for it from within i think that's brilliant i think you know there's two people that come to mind when i think about physiology and how it might affect anxiety or depression you know we had dr john rady on the show he wrote this book spark and he talked about where you know exercise is going to affect the hippocampus potentially help us learn better and also like you know it's is going to affect the hippocampus, potentially help us learn better. And also like, you know, it's clear, clearly it's shown to like decrease anxiety, depression,

matter of fact, helping with like things like ADHD. And then there's Andy Galpin, who's our buddy. And he talks, yeah, he talks about it from a slightly different viewpoint where, you know, through exercise, lactate might be a better driver for mental capacity and like the brain function. So I'm curious to hear what you, you know, is there conclusive evidence as to why it helps with anxiety, depression? Oh, for so many reasons. And I love that you mentioned John Rady because he was a huge source of knowledge for me as I was kind of on this journey of exploration myself. What is the foundation, the physical foundation for psychological well-being?

And how does movement, how does training affect our brain? And we talked to young people about this to give an example of why I think that more concrete physiological language is so important in what we're calling a youth mental health crisis, is I've presented to groups of hundreds of students, and I've asked the kids, who here thinks that anxiety is a big problem? Every single hand goes up. And I say, who here can define anxiety? Great question. There's this kind of in-drop in the room where everyone goes, and sometimes a lot, you know, is it a big problem does it affect your life does it impact you is it and everybody's yes it's a big problem

and i'll say what is it great question i have no idea and it's like well how are we going to build a skill set around an abstract concept so sometimes what i'll ask the kids and adults as i say well who wants some anxiety do you want to get some do you want to taste some do you want to get in the ring with this thing? So it doesn't just happen to you. And we'll put them on a bike, maybe an airdyne bike. We'll have them practice different breathing exercises and breath holds to induce that physiological response of anxiety.

Have them get familiar with it. Know that they can train their capacity to navigate it in an environment where they're playing, they're with their friends. And then we even do things like measure the blood SpO2, the blood oxygen saturation, and help to decouple the physiology of anxiety from this larger thing called psychological worry. Because if I don't understand it from a physiological perspective, I'm going to be hard pressed to build a skillset to manage my physiology. And that's the foundation I need to bring into the things I'm actually worried about. So it's important to separate these two things out.

When you say that anxiety can be looked at in two different ways, like if you're a competitor, say you're going to get in the ring and some people, everyone is going to have anxiety and some people are going to perceive it as like a superpower is like it's game time. And some people are going to perceive it as like a superpower is like it's game time. And some people are going to perceive it as fear. And so like, what are your thoughts on that perception of anxiety? I love that question because perception is everything. You know, what we call that particular exercise at my campus is tasting fear. Can I taste a little fear? I'm not waiting for it.

I'm coming to engage with it. Now, if we had told them, if we had made the same exercise, something that they had to do, they were compelled to do, they were forced to do, there was no volitionality, no choice, we would see a whole different outcome. But we invite them into the ring with these things that we call fear, anxiety, panic, and stress. And to your point, the language, the framework, the mental framework of physiological discomfort for the sake of self-adaptive growth is the most positive thing in the world to the eyes of our students and members, right? They're like, let me add it. And we don't train this once a month, we train it every single day. This is awesome. single day. When they hear anxiety, they can understand. Exercise for the audience,

because I say this a lot when I speak. If during this podcast, if I were to fill my big bottle with just high test espresso and just start chugging that stuff, I mean, just you would see a lot of physiological changes in me. I might start to sweat. You would see a respiration rate would increase. I would probably be a bit jittery, but I didn't develop a mental health disorder in the span of 40 minutes. 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 rapid health report.com. When you get to rapid healthalthreport.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. And 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. And 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 my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidealthreport.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 rapidealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. It's just a response. Very much a physiological response that we can control.

Need skills, tools, and support. When do you, when are you and the programs that you're building kind of meeting kids where they're at? Is it kindergarten, first grade? Like, where do you begin kind of the education process? So to backtrack a bit into how we built our campus, because it was really important to us when we built Physiology First to reach as many kids across the breadth of the age spectrum as possible. And our first approach, our first strategy was to take this into schools. And I cannot tell you the resistance and the pushback that we got

trying to take this into the schools in our community. And I'm somebody, and our team is sort of oriented to knowing that the future by definition looks different from the present and the past. You have to build new things, things that no one's ever seen. And we thought we're going to build a campus. We're just going to build a campus, a school for this so that we don't have to ask anxiety. And can we let kids come to us?

And what we found is that the age range of the kids who come to us every day is pretty much 14 to 22. And what happens is they come in at about 14, they stay till they go to college. And maybe the coolest thing, I'm so excited to share this, is when they do come back from college, the number one thing they want to know, hey, is the key still in the hiding spot? Can they get in? Can they come back? Of course you can. So we've worked with kids from 14 across this journey through adolescence and then the transition from high school to college. And they know that when they come back from college, it's there for them. The sauna's there, the ice bath is there, the community's there,

the infrastructure for mental and physical development is still there. Do you have any tips for people, for us that have people under 14? I have a five, a seven, a nine-year-old. What are some tips I could be doing now to set them up for success here? Well, you know, one of the really interesting things about that particular age range is we have a cold plunge in the back of our campus. And I can't tell you how much the young kids, the five and six-year-olds just, they can't wait to get in it because they don't have any negative framework built around it. Sometimes you have to kind of coax a 40 year old in but they're just like hey can i go in that's of course you can and the simplest thing we like to do with them there

is we'll say hey when you go in there do you want to be calm focused cool chilling out or do you want to feel nervous do you want to feel revved up and they say i want to be cool calm and chilled out we'll tell them well i would love to help you get calm before you go in and learn to hold the calm in there because you may not find it in there if you just dive in probably not teach the right we'll teach them how to lower their heart rate how do i lower my heart rate on purpose how do i find calm and now can i hold it instead of jumping and flailing around and hope it's in that ice bed yeah we actually um this was like a question that i've been trying to solve for six years since my kids were born um and this is my my kids book that i'm gonna write one day when i don't have

kids and have time to do things um but i started making up characters for all of the muscles that they have in their lower body. And those were the things that they were calling their own body parts. Like my kids think it's hysterical to call their glutes booty butt cheeks. Like if you say that in my house, they will just absolutely lose their mind and how funny it is to say booty butt cheeks. I don't know why, but booty and glutey all rhyme. So I nicknamed the superhero that makes them the strongest glutey butt cheek and then calves and hamstrings. Hammy hamstrings, my favorite one, that little dude, he's like the superhero that makes him fast, but it took them literally a day when I had cool characters made for them to be able to name all the musculature in their lower half. And it was, and then how do we, how do we

actually tell these, get these superheroes to be strong? We have to eat mom's mom's chicken and we have to eat beef in a bowl. And those are the things that power the superheroes. And all of a sudden my kids literally inside 24 hours knew all the muscles in their lower body and how to eat protein. It was the most incredible thing I'd ever done as a parent. I've been failing them since, but that moment I nailed it. Oh, I couldn't love that more. There's one of the most powerful things, I think, about that. Yeah.

Is that if we could get health education to kids by simply putting a chart up, saying 10 things that'll make you healthier, it would have been solved. The problem would have been solved, you know, decades ago, right? We learn through story. We learn through the power of powerful, captivating stories. So if we can learn how to tell the story of health and human potential, and, you know, it's really fun because you can go into an auditorium of 16-year-olds who are stuck on a phone, if there's a phone allowed in the school,

and then our job is to create a more captivating story than that phone. And to tell the story of why breathing and sleep and nutrition and exercise matter. And if we can't become great storytellers, we can accidentally blame the kids. Oh, they don't want to do the workouts. They don't want to do that. It's like, well, that's our job. And our job is to- Because anatomy class is so boring.

And it's interesting. I had a young man come from, he came from a local high school one day. And I said, how was school? And he said, it was boring. And I's interesting. I had a young man come from, he came from a local high school one day and I said, how was school? And he said, it was boring. And I said, what'd you learn? He's like, we learned about the cell. We learned about mitochondria,

a powerhouse of the cell. And he said it like the saddest thing you could ever learn. I'm like, that's all of your power, man. Like you're learning the good stuff, but it's not engaging. We need more teachers like Andy who can like make it cool. Make it cool and come alive.

If I'm presenting to a large group of students, one of the first things I try to do, and I share this just because the audience could use it, is I'll ask them, I'll say, I want you to just lay back, chill out for a minute. And I want you to think of the version of your life, of your future that gets your heart lit up. And I don't care what it is, because I'm not going to ask you, this is not a kind of setup, you know, to say that your dreams are somehow like less valid than

the person next to you. You think of whatever lights you up and give them a minute. And then the amazing thing that happens is these kids are so exhausted and like over generally like stressed by like schedule that they all chill out. They think for a minute. And they come back with a vision. They bring a vision with them of what gets them excited. And I'll share with them that all of these skills and tools are skills and tools for you on that road to get there because most people don't get there everybody got there be an easy road you're going to go through hell you're going to go through barriers you're going to go through barricades and you're either going to have a skill

set or you're not and i'll share with them all that the number one skill set i've seen in people who've reached it to that place in their lives that that goal is that they could control their internal state in any external environment and now the presentation has context now it's not you should be healthier it's like you can kick ass you're unstoppable but you need skills and tools and so do i this is so brilliant it's like i teach my kids the same thing like so when we're talking about math i explained to them first before we talk about math i'm like do you think it'd be super cool if you could build the biggest um skyscraper ever of course they think do you think it'd be cool if you could figure out how to get to have a how to get to the moon and live there i'll be awesome you know like i said

well then you're gonna have to have math to do any of those cool things. The pyramids. We still understand the math of that. It's like, understand math better than anybody, and you can create anything you want. But you're applying the same exact thing, but to physiology, which is even more brilliant. That's awesome. A question that Doug asked that I want to circle back to that I think can also be useful for the listeners. Maybe they can try this out with young people in their lives because I find it a really interesting experiment. When we think about how we talk about physiology versus psychology,

an experiment I've done a lot with students of all ages, but particularly in high school or early college, is I'm very careful about inflection. I'm careful not to bias the answer that I want in the way that I ask this. So I'll say to them, what do you think of when you hear mental health? And they'll say, I think of depression. I think of anxiety. I think of addiction.

I think of, and you get this, and even though health means health, not illness, what it does psychologically is they hear mental health and you get this string of things that are not necessarily self-adaptive positives. And then with the same exact inflection, I'll say, what do you think of when you hear brain health? Oh, I think of memory.

I think of focus. I think, and all of a sudden when we frame the function of the human brain around brain health, all of a sudden, just off the cuff, it's positive. It's things that I can train. It's self-adaptive. It's growth mindset. So I eventually started listening to the students and saying, look, we are talking about cellular and metabolic processes

if we're talking about the body and the function of the body. If somebody has a broader set of concerns socially and globally, well, that's psychology. We can go down that road. If it's appropriate for a young person heading into a whirlwind economically and socially to feel worried, of course it is. But the physiology of stress, anxiety, and depression, it's like they can start there and they can build a foundation for all of those broader challenges and that foundation they can build within. Yeah. You've mentioned kind of the mental health side of things a lot so far. Do you feel like

that's one of the largest challenges really facing youth? I'll tell you, you know, I think that the challenge is that we're having an antiquated conversation where kids are sort of stuck in a language game. I'll use a specific example of this. Let's say that a young person has two fast-acting copies of the gene that helps us metabolize caffeine, and their friend has two slow-acting copies of the same gene. And they both have, after school, they both have a study break at Starbucks. And the one student, caffeine goes right through them.

They're back to baseline fairly quick. The other student, heart rate's elevated. All the analogies I used earlier in the show, their physiology's revved up. They're more in a sympathetic nervous system state. And they continue to have the same amount of caffeine. One will respond completely differently. They will be overstimulated and pushed towards the borderlines of what we talk about when we say anxiety and panic. Well, that's not a mental health disorder. That's a clear physiological response to stimulus.

But without knowing that, it will be termed a mental health disorder. And the mental health disorder will be called an anxiety disorder. So I think if we don't create basic physiological assessment systems around lifestyle and behavior, we're going to conflate these two things. And that's my biggest fear for the next generation is that normal physiological responses to stimulus and environment get pathologized as mental health and psychiatric disorders. Yeah. Where do you feel like that conversation starts to go wrong? Like I, now that my, at least one of my kids is in public school are these things that are talked about maybe even just passively in school that may almost be the catalyst for people having

problems later on when it gets to middle school or high school? There's a lot to be said for that. Yeah. And I think that when, if we kind of zoom out and you see among a youth populace, anxiety and depression rates, which have risen 50% since the early 2000s, that's a seismic jump. Yeah. And if you put that in the box of psychology, you're going to treat it through a particular set of practitioners that you may start to put into the schools and sort of surround these kids with. But if what you're actually seeing is a blend of physiological and psychological responses,

we have to find a way to put physiology first and then build a tier of skills, learning and better understanding the nature of our psychology. One reason we call the organization Physiology First is that a house needs a foundation. It also needs a roof. It's not a great house with no roof. It's like just raining on you all.

It's not a great house with no foundation because it's like sinking into the sand. But the reason that you lay a foundation first is that you can build the scaffolding of a house. And if basic health was not the cultural anomaly that it was, if we've normalized health as opposed to sort of radicalizing health and normalizing illness, it wouldn't be that strange to lift weights, to run, to sauna, to cold plunge. It wouldn't seem counter-cultural. And then the foundation

for health would be there. Now we can work through the higher psychological issues of our time, because it's certainly an interesting time to be alive. Kids are going to see more technological change than we've ever seen in our generation. And they're also seeing something incredibly unique, I think. And I'd love you guys' opinion on this. You know, they're seeing not only all of the news that's happened in a 24-hour time span on a four-by-six-inch screen that they're glued to their palm, but the worst of the news. And not only the worst of the news, but only though not only the worst of the news but they're hearing

everyone pile on into these global very very heated conversations and it's right at their fingertips so it's constant that is a lot but if we can give them the skill of sleep movement nutrition first at least they have a foundation for those very complex, dynamic 21st century issues. And the understanding, because if they understand physiology and then they have these tools as well, you know, they're going to feel more in control versus like feeling like, what am I going to do about all this? You know, they feel so out of control. So, I mean, I love that you mentioned control because for us, it is, you know, when we build training systems, we talk a lot about high agency adaptation, evolution, adapting on purpose, evolving on purpose. And so when we take them through systems where they can control their breath, their heart, they can learn to design exercise programs, they can understand the why behind it.

What they have at the end of the day in this sort of wild west, meaning that there's so much dynamism in our world right now, they have a set of leadership skills built from within. I love it. Most that we can do to begin as they head out into a very, very, very complex, divided, contentious, different, unique, and unparalleled time. As an athletic performance coach, I you know i can tell you this the biggest difference between the person who ends up being like the olympian or the champion

and the person who doesn't ever quite reach their potential is what you're talking is like their ability to perceive anxiety is 100 different richiator i've had two athletes. I mean, exactly the same two people. So I won't name, you know, but they were actually one of them. The one who ended up not doing as well was probably more talented. The only difference was the perception of anxiety. One would absolutely like hyperventilate, turn pale, sweat before they would compete. And the other one would be laughing, joking, you know, loved it, loved the attention. That was the differentiator. So for athletes or parents listening, or even for people who want to be high performers, I would probably listen to this one.

Well, you asked a great question earlier and I want to, I want to answer it, which is we talked about conclusive physiological and neuroscience-based research around depression and anxiety. And one thing I always want to mention is that it's impossible to pull out the different threads of why this works. Because let's say that we said it works because ice baths work, and we get into the literature of ice baths. We miss the fact that these young people who come are choosing volitionally to engage in an uncomfortable experience for the sake of their own growth and development, you can't ignore that that's a framework that they're building. And when they come to sauna at the end of the day after school and they set it up to, you know, the thing is roaring,

and they choose to train with the adults and do very difficult exercises, you know, it's a challenging environment. We can look at just the physiological benefits of strength training, conditioning, the specific modalities that we use, but we'd miss the fact that they chose to come to an environment, to embrace discomfort, to learn through growth and to be supported by community.

It's almost like all those things are the magic. Super unique right now. I mean, incredibly unique and pretty much magic. Super unique right now. I mean, incredibly unique and pretty much non-existent right now in society where kids are choosing to put themselves in uncomfortable situations. Matter of fact, they look at something that might be uncomfortable and they choose the opposite. It's like, you know, we've made things too comfortable. I love where you're going with this. Well, can I share maybe a story that inspires me every time that I think about it and the audience might enjoy? Yeah.

So one of our members at the campus, Emily Grimm, she's a local school principal, incredible human being. And she joined eight years ago or so. And when she first joined, she told me, she said, my goal, she was probably 37 years old at the time. She said, my goal is to try to get as fast as I was in high school. And I was like, why not faster? And she knew that she was in the right environment. Exactly. Yeah, she's a growth.

She said, you got me right there. And she signed up. She's been here ever since. Right. No barriers, no limits. And so just this year, this is so cool. She took her family, her husband and her eight-year-old and her 10-year-old on a journey across the Pacific Crest Trail. Over 2,000 miles of rugged climbs and deserts and snow and I mean, epic mountain landscape. It took them, maybe it took them five months-ish.

And every day, those kids grew in ways that are almost unparalleled. They came back with an inner wisdom and a love for nature and challenge that I've never seen at that age. They had their birthdays on the trail. But the thing I want to share with the audience is on day one. Well, on day one, they were very excited. They had their packs and they're ready to go. On night one, when they learned what a 10-mile day was, they really hit, they faced a wall, a moment of, can I do this? And they learned, part of their mom and dad, that, yeah, they could do it.

Not only could they do it, but by the last month month they're bounding up mountains 20 mile days and now that they're home the number one thing that they say i miss the mountains i miss the ups i miss the downs yeah i miss the challenge when you give them that challenge oh god do they grow yeah you You're up in Maine, right? That's where your facility is? Yes, I'm currently in the UK right now. We're opening our UK facility next week. I saw that, yeah. But our flagship campus is in Freeport, Maine. Yeah. Not too far. You're in Maine. It could be very far. It's way up there. But in Vermont, Joe DeSena, we've been friends with him for a long time.

And Joe brings lots of kids that don't face much adversity out to his farm and beats the ever living crap out of them for like a week. Joe DeSena. Wrestling practice in the morning, climbing hills, carrying sandbags all over the place. And when the kids show up they start crying home for mom by the end of the week now they're tough it doesn't take long but they're they start to love the struggle yeah it really doesn't take long and shout out to joe i ran my first 50 mile on his course in peaks vermont that 10 mile loop and a monster. And I keep seeing people show up to tackle it because there's a 50 mile distance, a hundred. And then this is interesting. There's a 500 mile

around that 10 mile loop. There's a 500 mile around the 10 mile loop. I feel like maybe three human beings have ever completed it, but every year people come to the loop. So what is it in our culture today that makes us think, you know, I'd really like to run that 10 mile mountain loop for 500 miles. Well, we're built for challenge, you know, limits of our capability. And when you give kids that opportunity, they just thrive in it. I have a question. Like I never thought about it till I hear you talking,

but my best friend, we grew up in a horrible, when I say horrible, in a very impoverished, in the Appalachian Mountains. We both come from broken homes, and so we found each other just kind of supporting each other. And the reason we became friends is we're at this football game and somebody was trying to beat him up. It's mountain people. It's just what we did and i'm seven i'm younger than him i'm the tiniest dude

in the group and i was the only one who would go with him to help him our whole friendship was based on moments like that where we would never back down from things like we would go to cliffs and climb cliffs and jump off into you know into water off cliffs and that was we called it being on the rock meaning we have to do it and we would do it anyway so these two guys both from the mountains both from broken homes both with no clear examples of success really and here he is is about to sell his his company for 800 million i became a three-time world champion i've coached some of the best athletes in the world. I'm curious. I wonder if us putting ourselves in those situations and learning to overcome fear, what if it had anything to do with the way things turned out?

Oh, well, you know, I think that, you know, my background is I'm completely self-educated. I left school at a very, very young age. And so I had to ask myself when I left school, what should a person learn so that I don't end up on the street? Because I was in a rough neighborhood as well. And I thought, well, maybe I should learn something about me. Maybe I should learn psychology and physiology, because these are the studies of the self. And I feel like to your question, you know, we're so blessed because we have this trail of psychological literature of not only the benefits of facing adversity, but the necessity of constantly pushing ourselves to the next horizon, testing our boundaries. Now, currently, we have a cultural narrative right now that's tried to rewrite the script around human self-development, but all of the incredible

work in psychology and philosophy over the course of our existence, it keeps saying to us that if we want to unlock the most that we can be, we have to go to that next mountain. We have to go to that next challenge because we manifest ourselves, not only psychologically, but genetically. And I personally think that the genetic expression will be the next sort of wave in the human performance world we become a different version of ourselves when we go to where we haven't been to test the waters and get deep and to learn and to push and i can tell you from our campus the kids they just eat it up it just forced me into this into this mindset of like when i was about to try to overcome this fear because i

was refused to back down from his challenges it it got to where i found this place in my brain where i would go fearless and i would be so calm and i was yeah and i would be scared scared scared and i'd find that place and i didn't care about anything and i would just do it and i would find the superhuman power and it worked all throughout my whole life, even competing. When I was about to lift a weight that could kill me, there was a world record that no one had even thought about doing. It was a place I could find where I was excited that I was going to have this challenge in front of me. But I don't think I would have been able to do any of those things had we not found each other. But yeah. I also think it's interesting. Like when, when you're a kid, the only place that you really get to build confidence in yourself is through physical performance. Yeah. Like you don't really have, it's not like

you can be nine years old and go, well, it turns out I've been in business for a decade. Only nine. And I know how to go make money. But what you can do is go play kickball and you can go play dodgeball and you can go run and you can climb trees and slowly build the confidence in yourself that you're just capable of doing things. And later in life, you can then grow on that as time progresses and your interests get larger. But when you're young, I mean, I don't know how many parents or dads specifically don't do this with your kids, but yo, if you're not playing WrestleMania, like three nights a week, I feel like that's where all the fitness comes in. I'm training VO two max tickling the crap out of my kids every night. Uh, like it's, it's like a real thing to be able to get in and understand play. And, uh, when you cross lines and, you know,

how to just trust your body in the physical space. Um, I don't, I don't know if there's many other ways. I've never even really thought about teaching my kids breath work or anything like that. But as far as like the physicality goes, that has to be like the first step to believing in yourself and trusting yourself. Well, you know, one thing that we do is we've only trained barefoot since day one. I took that with me from jujitsu. And so when people come in, they come in of all ages, but I want to emphasize too that our programs are free for teens. We said, I'm just going to blow the damn door off because the challenge with getting young people engaged in a program often, maybe they'll have the money, maybe their parents will have the money to do the thing,

but the chances that all of their friends, parents will want to invest in the same health and performance and self-development program are slim. And what teens like to do is things with each other, right? We just made it free from day one. We said, you know, we run a great business. We run a business at the edge of human optimization. We're doing fine. We can give back to our community. It's necessary for me to live up to my own ethos to do that every day. I love opening the door for kids. So they can just come in and they kick their shoes off and now they can feel what's going on in their body.

And now they're in an environment training with other adults. And one thing that I think is unique is that the mutuality is 100%. If you have a 40-year-old ultramarathon runner helping a 14-year-old load up a barbell for the first time, it's as a peer in that environment. In that environment, because they're all doing the same training system, right? Then they go into a workout that has breath work and has breath holds and they get to feel back together. But the thing that comes after is when everybody's in the sauna at the end of the workout, what does happen is the kind of intergenerational mentorship that I feel we're missing. A 14-year-old will ask a question and somebody in the room, somebody in the sauna may have some experience by the sheer nature of being three decades older.

So they get the physicality, they get the mutuality, but then they also get the mentorship that we all need. Let's zoom out a little bit. That was a great example of the kinds of things you do on a daily basis in the program, but what does that whole program look like? So our program looks like the foundation is breathing and barefoot training. And the reason that that is a foundation is we're looking at sort of the age of normalized desensitization. So many people have been trained to be strangers to their body. And so if we can give young people a pathway into understanding their body from the inside out, they're going to have a set of higher order skills more so than most adults. An exercise that I often coach, ask people, ask the audience is I'll ask, can you wiggle your ears? I ask everybody this when I present,

can you wiggle your ears? It's like one dude and a couple, you know, there's a couple people whose ears start wiggling. And I'll point to that person and I'll say, well, that's cool. Like humans can wiggle their ears, but that person has access to that dial. And there are many dials in our nervous system. And I don't know that wiggling your ears is that important, but can you lower your heart rate when you're getting on stage to speak and your heart's racing and you're nervous? Can you control your state and your breath when you're, I don't know, a job interview, asking someone on a date. I mean, some important thing. If we can show you how to turn those dials of your physiology,

where you can lower your heart rate like this, you can go from stress to calm. You're going to be building a skillset for life. And once that framework is set, we use breathing and barefoot training as a way to, again, increase body awareness and state management. Then we move that into heart rate variability training. We get people to slow down, use a specific heart rate variability program that we built to learn what calm feels like, because for so many people in today's age they don't even have a reference point then we build a very very education focused strength and conditioning program every

every lesson has to be physical and experiential so more than how much they squat i want them to know why we're picking a squat for this person versus this person and i want them to be able to coach that by themselves i want them to be able to coach that by themselves. I want them to be able to walk in, design an exercise program for them and their friends and have it make sense. From there, we use sauna and cold plunge to better understand the stress response and our adaptability to it,

as well as the brain and body benefits of it. And then finally, we use things like wearable technology, VO2 max testing and resting metabolic rate testing to show us the things we can't know. We can't know them without an external source. So we really like to combine an internal deep knowledge with all of the latest technology that lets us understand our physiology at a deeper level. And I can say that with the resting metabolic rate testing, the number of young people dealing with disordered eating

is an elephant in the room, and it is growing. What do you mean by that? The number of, to be very direct, the number of young kids starving themselves, the number of young kids starving themselves because they've never been taught how to eat. Oh, starving themselves from nutrients. Starving themselves. Yeah, because-

Because we got overweight problems, so there's some kids eating. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because on the one hand, when you get young people who are athletically driven, maybe they're part of a track club and they're living on TikTok, body image becomes something very difficult to figure out. And that's always been true in the endurance culture in general. So when you can show a young person how much they actually need to eat, to perform, to feel like an animal, to feel like a rock star, to have optimal cognitive function, blows their mind.

No doubt. Then you're creating something at the frontiers of healthcare. And that's the future is the intersection of education and healthcare. No doubt. If we could teach people to eat for fuel, to, to, you know, like I see what you're doing. You're giving kids the recipe to do whatever they want to do with their lives. It's like, here's what physiology can do. What do you want to do? I want to be, you know,

I want to be a rocket scientist where I want to be the best boxer in the world. Perfect. Here are all these amazing tools. Instead of looking at food as just a way to please myself or a way to, you know, to comfort myself, you're saying this is your fuel for whichever way you want to go. Why is this so, why have we not been doing this already? Like, why is it so slow to come to life? But this is great.

Well, you know, Andrew's made a really good? But this is great. Well, you know, Andrew's made a really good point when we were talking about, you know, I guess to circle back real quick. One of the things that I think is happening in our kind of cultural moment right now is because we're living on small screens and because we see big public issues, everyone has an opinion and everyone assumes that the world is easy to fix if they just had things their way, right? In business, you come into contact with this amazing force called reality. Because if your business isn't working, it's real, it's obvious. You come into contact with the greater reality. So when you're looking at the world around you, I tell young people, if you can't start with your system, if you can't dial in your physiology, if you can't start the great changes you want to see within you, you've not yet met that wall of reality.

No doubt. Any future you want to see, it has to start with you figuring out your physiology and taking care of your system. And you're going to find it's like a lot harder and it's a lot more complex it's a lot more challenging but if you can get your system in order your sleep your nutrition your training you have an unparalleled advantage in creating the kind of future you want to bring to life because you're dealing with the difficult challenging nature of real problems but you're doing it with a skill set that's earned through actual discipline and training. Everything you're talking about sounds very positive, of course, but earlier you said that when you were trying to get some of this into schools, there was a lot of resistance.

What was all that about? Yeah, they don't want you to be healthy, man. Come on, a free thinking, physically fit human. How dare you? Well, you know, we can talk about this forever because I love it. Shout out to Matt Boud you know, we can talk about this forever because I love it. Shout out to Matt. Shout out Apogee Strong. Shout out to the Apogee family, the Apogee crew. I strongly believe that you cannot put health in an institution of illness and expect it to work. And the reason for that is that kids see the contradiction. These are sharp kids. They're no BS, you know, and they understand that if I tell you, you got to sit still for seven hours and be quiet. This is this is the school lunch, but the curriculum. Movement is the curriculum. And every day when I design the physical element of that, all the things we're talking about from barefoot

training to breathing, to inner knowledge cultivated through experience, it's not up for debate. It's not something that gets cut when it gets too busy. And one of the things I've noticed from working with the schools, and we do work with schools, we work with schools around the globe. They are, in my view, if you can make a dent in one person's life for the positive, which one of these kids, there's not an alternative in that system, you can save somebody's life. You can change somebody's life. It's valuable work. And I don't mean to suggest that it isn't. But when we do work with schools, when the day gets busy, and it always does, and when other priorities take precedence and they always do, what gets next is this. I've had schools buy our program and never use it once. And it's like, well, okay, this has to be more than checking a box.

It's the most frustrating thing in the world. My daughter comes home and she goes, the bad kids were bad and they took away recess. And I go, why do you think the bad kids were bad and they took away recess. And I go, why do you think the bad kids were bad? They took away recess. Because they didn't get into it and go play. We've always felt like if the mission of education is truly about learning, it would clearly put brain health first. Because that's what we learn with. No doubt.

I think the contradiction is right there. You don't shut down activities that promote brain health in a learning environment unless you're teaching something more similar to obedience than education. The brain is what we learn with. It's our physiological machine for knowledge acquisition.

So you have to be first. Yeah. Hey, Mass, I bet you feel great about un-homeschooling your kids and putting them back in regular school. No, I'm about to jerk them right back out. yeah right now we're in private school so even worse that's maybe it might be more institution they sit longer that's where i'm at right now these guys are play based they're play based montessori school no it's just a it's just a christian um public school

that is that is definitely based on being able to be active, moving around. They can raise their hand. They can talk. They can talk anytime they want as long as they whisper. It's like they're killing it too, like so far. Yeah. Yeah. I want to just say to all the educators who might be listening or people, because one thing we get, parents go, well, my kids are in these schools.

What do I do? It's like, well, you know, the way that we're sure that an educational experience is happening is that we're challenging paradigms, disrupting things, innovative and creative about the future that we want to see. The school is just a building, right? A school is a building. So if we can engage the teachers, engage the parents, create something new, let's do it. But what you'll be up against is an institution that's not necessarily at its core incentivized to put health first. And the alternatives to the institution like Apogee Strong and others and our program at our campuses, health comes first because again, if we want to think about learning, we learn with our brain. There's no doubt about that. And cognitive function and cognitive development should be at the root of

education. If it's really about learning. Even to add on to that, it's not necessarily the teachers. And I'm not saying all the teachers are amazing or bad or not on all levels of that spectrum. But my daughter's kindergarten teacher, when I talked about many of these things, anytime like a behavioral thing happened at school, she'd be like, look, this isn't really how it's supposed to be. She'd be like, there needs to be more outdoor times. I'm one of the teachers that forces them to play more. And she's like, the computer time thing is, is such a cop out, but you're going to run

into that teacher. You're going to find these people that don't have the energy to have kids that play and to deal with that extra level of chaos in the classrooms. Well, you know, you asked earlier too about the correlation between mental health and physical health. And I think that what we're seeing right now is if you take, let me ask you all this as healthy, you know, humans who train and engage your bodies. If I said, Hey, I want you to come visit my campus, you come visit the campus. And I said, well, look, the first thing I want you to do is sit in that chair for seven hours. And when you can get out of the chair, you have to ask me and you have to ask me if you have to go to the bathroom, regardless of whether that teaches you to be a complete stranger to your body.

And at lunch, I'm going to feed you something that's going to spike your blood glucose like through the roof. How would you feel? You'd probably feel freaking terrible and you wouldn't have a psychiatric disorder. You'd be responding to an environment that we want to pretend is healthy, but it isn't. And so how do we make these environments healthy? I love what you mentioned about what your school is doing. They're prioritizing movement, Apogee Strong. But I think we're going to see a movement of parents who say, look,

maybe I love the school I'm in, maybe I don't. But we have to solve a healthcare crisis, because no matter how many degrees we end up with, and no matter how much academics become a priority, if we're too sick to stand, that's not an optimal future. So I feel like there is a paradigm shift happening. I feel like the passionate teachers realize something needs to be different. The parents realize it. And I think between innovators, entrepreneurs, and people in the institutions who create the change that they want to see, we're going to support this generation because we know for a fact looking at public health statistics today what happens when we don't well i'm looking at the time looking at how america has steadily declined in education

throughout the last decade right now and so like and how we're so below average in so many of our scores it's like i feel like in america we talk about all the wrong things about all this stuff that doesn't matter meanwhile right in front of us, this is happening. But luckily, I'm a host on Barbell Shrug, and I get to meet people like you. So I can look for solutions for my own kids. And you know what I'll say to anybody listening, because I think that we responded to an idea that it's our job. Like in health and human performance for me, I learned a lot in the 100 mile races, the 200 mile

races, the 24 hour races. I kind of found the lessons that were in that practice. But to me, it was always just a mechanism for figuring out what are you doing in the sport of life? What impact are you going to make? What is your battle that you're going to commit to fight to win? And in my eyes, it was reshaping education and putting health first because I can fast forward 20 years and see very different versions of a future America, very different versions of a future Britain,

very different versions of a future world. So every time we teach a kid to make health cool, like you're shaping that picture. It's the coolest thing in the world. It is so damn inspiring. Yeah. Where can people learn more about Physiology First? I'm quite active on Instagram.

You can check us out at Physiology First. I post often. I like to get DMs from people and share what we're doing in a very practical way. Physiologyfirst.org. You'll find our programs, our online programs, and our campuses, which we're working to take globally. Fantastic. Coach Travis Mash.

This was so much fun. I really appreciate you being on. Obviously, I love this whole, you know, I mean, we have kids. You know, all of us do. So it's such a big, it's important to all of us. But it's just good to hear someone that's trying to do something instead of just complaining. So I appreciate you being on, but you guys can go to mesh lead.com to check out all my stuff,

or you can go to gym wear.com to read all my latest articles and videos. Douglas E. Larson. Yeah. On screen. Douglas E. Larson. David, you're doing good things in the world, man. I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing with us both, both you and Matt. I wish, I wish I had a school for my boys right across the street that i could send me to where they currently go i'm sure that there'll be a physiology first and an

apogee strong coming to many neighborhoods yeah i hope you guys know how it goes um you know what's super great having somebody on that remembers the early days of barbell shrug now there's a whole bunch of meatheads still talking on barbell shrugged but now we talk about our kids yeah we got a little less meaty a little more uh maturity the uh the shape of the show just a little yeah i mean at least as far as y'all know anyway behind the scenes something totally different but anyway i'm andrews varner at andrews varner and we are barbell shrugged at over barbell shrugged.com. That is not right at all. We are barbell shrugged at barbell underscore shrug. That's the old website. I guess still the website. And make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com

forward slash results. That is where you can read the case study on Timothy Jones cutting his cholesterol in half and getting absolutely ripped. You can see that over at rapid health or at rapidhealthreport.com forward slash results. That was two botches and one outro. That's embarrassing. That's why it's brand new. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.