Barbell Shrugged - Precision Muscle Analysis with Matt Brown of Springbok Analytics #824

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

In this episode, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash sit down with Matt Brown, Director of Business Development at Springbok Analytics, to explore the cutting edge world of MRI based muscle analysis. Matt breaks down the origins of Springbok, how the company grew from a university research lab solving cerebral palsy surgical problems into one of the most advanced muscle segmentation platforms on the planet, and why professional sports teams, medical researchers, and longevity practitioners are all adopting this technology. From 15 minute full body protocols to AI driven segmentation of 144 muscles, Springbok is redefining what is possible in muscle profiling and objective performance measurement. The conversation dives into real world application, how Springbok helps pro athletes understand tissue quality, fat infiltration, tendon health, asymmetries, compensations, and injury risk with unprecedented precision. Matt shares examples across the NBA, NFL, soccer, and clinical research showing how MRI data is being used to shorten rehab timelines, guide targeted strength work, map scar tissue, and track atrophy after major injuries like ACL tears. The group contrasts traditional tools like DEXA with what is now possible using MRI, individualized baselines, normative values by sport and position, and 3D interactive models that reveal exactly where muscle is strong, weak, or compromised. Finally, the team covers the massive opportunity in longevity and consumer health. They discuss how muscle quality predicts aging trajectories, why fat infiltration accelerates decline, and how Springbok's new FDA cleared body composition capabilities unlock deeper insights into visceral fat, liver fat, bone density, and long term risk. Doug outlines how Rapid Health Optimization is partnering with Springbok through Optima Muscle to bring these pro level analytics to everyday people, combining MRI data with elite coaching, physical therapy, and strength programming to create personalized, actionable plans that maximize performance and minimize injury. This episode is a powerful preview of where the future of muscle health, performance diagnostics, and longevity is headed. Learn more at: OptimaMuscle.com Links: Barbell Shrugged on Instagram Springbok Analytics on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family this week on Barbell Shrug. Matt Brown is coming into the show from Springbok Analytics. And if you remember, probably about six months ago, our in-house physical therapist, Doug, one of two that we have, works with Springbok analytics. And we spent a ton of time talking about the capabilities of the MRI scans, how Springbok is able to go in and figure out where the imbalances are. Today, we're taking an even deeper dive into how this works. with people that have degenerative muscular diseases, how it works for professional athletes, what we see in professional athlete,

populations, especially those crazy basketball players, the longest, gangliest, craziest people. They're like the top. Turns out, if you've ever read the sports gene, if you're over seven foot tall, you have like a 98% chance of playing in the NBA. You know what? People 5'8 like me, we don't have any chance.

We have a 0% chance. Mugsy Bogs doesn't exist anymore. They don't allow people like me, the little people in the NBA. Go figure. Hmm, I wish they did. It would be nice. But they have a contract with the NBA.

They run tons of scans on some of the best athletes in the world, as well as being the company that is working very diligently on the degenerative diseases that come with muscular issues and how they can prevent that, how they can start to predict improvements and very, very cool technology that Matt's going to be walking us through today. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis, and you can access that report over at rapid health report.com.

Friends, let's get into the show. We're going to Barlow Schug. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, coach Travis Mashed, Matt Brown from Springbok Analytics. Hey man, this is like the coolest technology of all time. And we had Doug on the show, is that a year ago now, six months ago, eight months ago, somewhere in there? Shave a year ago. He's been on before. And what's very funny, I think I told the story, but Springbok called when we started

Rapid and was like, Anders, you really got to go do this thing. And I was like, I don't really want to go all the way to Duke right now to just like do more fitness stuff. Like it takes a lot to get me out of my house. One, and then two, for fitness. Like, I have a lot. I got a lot of. And then he started going through it. And I was like, hold the phone. Can I retract that? I want to go back in time and get my analysis done. Then you guys were actually busy. Haven't gotten it done yet. But I'd love to dig it again and understand what was the beginning of this company and the idea

behind taking like a super deep dive into all things, muscle tissue and just the big scan. Well, first off, that was me who reached out to you. Was it? See us all right. So it was me on the emails as well. I apologize for disrespecting you. I didn't mean it. So, but the, so I'll give you the genesis story of Springbok and kind of where we came from where we're going.

Man, I feel really bad right now. That was embarrassing. That's okay. It's embarrassing for both of us. I was going to be able to get out of the back. It's okay, bud. My emails, you know how it goes. But this is how my life is anyway, right?

So Springbok was born out of a lab. Chief Science Officer Sylvia Blumker is a current professor at the University of Virginia. she worked with our other scientific co-founders. And back then, they kind of like all startup ideas, like there's got to be a better way of understanding muscle down to the individual muscle level. So most in-body scanning that we're all familiar with dexas scans in-body, other ways, caliper methodology, whatever it might be. A lot of that is estimations.

It's not very precise, not very granular when it comes down to like, what is the size and the shape and the structure and the morphology of a right rec fem on. Anders Barner. And so they, with that in mind, utilized MRI as a form factor to create a AI around muscle segmentation. So how can we look and find boundaries of muscle, create a better, quicker way to something that would generally take someone in a lab a week, a week and a half to create a manual drawing of the muscle boundaries? How can we do that quicker? And then Springbok was born. And it's one of those 15-year overnight success stories. So the original impetus there was, can we do a better job of segmenting muscle to help surgical decision making for kids of cerebral palsy?

So a really nice, you know, like heartfelt thing that we're trying to make things better for those with a disability of sorts to help doctors who are trying to figure out the right surgical intervention with them. That then turned into, well, muscle powers sports and athletic performance. Maybe there's a play here. And so outside of creating the initial kind of AI segmentation tool and a better way of understanding muscle volume and muscle. architecture and the quality and the health of muscle. Being able to do it quicker and creating different scanning pathways of like, we can do the lower body in eight minutes. We can do neck to ankles in 15.

We can do the entire body all the way down to the wrist in 45 minutes. It allowed the company to kind of start thinking through like, what does commercialization look like? Because what we do is slightly complex while also being simple. And so I was brought aboard to the team about three years ago. At that time, we were still a very early seed state. companies. We had not taken any institutional capital, hadn't really raised a really big round of investment money. And part of that, me coming to the team was like, how do we commercialize

this in the in the pro sports space? How do we potentially commercialize this in the longevity space? And then our team is very, very good on the research side. So we're already working with researchers across the world. How do we then expand and like utilize like the leverage that pro sports gives us to make this a potential big viable company? And here we are three years later. I still have a job, which is a pretty good sign. The NBA invested in us about a year and a half ago. We're part of the NBA Combine. We work with 50 plus professional sports teams.

We're growing in the longevity, healthy aging, preventative health space, whatever terminology you want to put to it. And then we work very closely with drug development, therapeutic development companies who are making drugs and or therapeutics that are going after very advanced muscle wasting diseases. So we measure the outcomes of those therapeutics really, really well. So there's some people much smarter than me who are after like, how do we help solve for muscular dystrophy? How do we help solve for sarcopenia, age-related muscle wasting?

How do we help solve for other neurodegenerative diseases that might happen? And since we probably do the best job down to the precision level of really understanding muscle quality and intramuscular fat and all the other things that we do, we have a very interesting opportunity across all those different markets. yeah you know um when you talk about the uh degenerative like muscular disease side of things um we're definitely going to talk about NBA players and that's awesome but what are you guys uh i kind of think about like MS and uh i had a neighbor that is younger than i am like in her 30s like i had diagnosed with it and i don't typically like get weirded out by people that have diagnosed or things like that, but when it was somebody that was like 35 that has like two kids and just out of nowhere gets hit with this thing, it was like, this is you forever now.

And it really freaked me out. I'd love to understand just what you guys are looking for and just when it, and it doesn't need to be specifically like MS. But like, how do you, how do you think the technology, one helps understand what's going on and then what data can you get that actually is able to improve that person life. So with, let's just call them very complicated disease states, and since we're so deep in muscular dystrophy and we've had some conversations with the MS world as well, this is like the heart-wrenching stories, right? Kids get FSA HD, right, which is just advanced muscle wasting.

Think of it as like sarcopenia on steroids, right? Like we all are going to get older. Our muscles will be replaced by fat. That happens on a general longitudinal timeline for FSAHD and for different muscular dystrophies. That is just on a very very. very short in timeline, right? And so fat replaces muscle. You lose mobility, you lose the ambulatory nature of what it is to be human. And so it's a very just scary disease when it comes to that. What we're doing is we partner with a lot of these global initiatives around like understanding the root causes of FSHD. Can we potentially predict the disease progression? So when you have specific muscle analysis of understanding here's where you were, here's where you're going, and here's

what is expected. With enough data, we can start to understand and almost create a digital placebo of like, here's a disease progression model that our chief science officer and our kind of crack science team has already created. Can we create a better way of taking in data from this patient base that they have in getting to answers way more quickly so that the kind of the cycle of how they develop drugs, how they test and retest, how they do placebo controlled studies, how they do phase one, phase two clinical trials? Can we make that a lot quicker? Can we also then give them what is expected you're behind the curve, you're ahead of the curve? And then understanding, again, the pathology of like, what does a F, SHD case look like?

What should we expect? Is it muscle wasting generally in X, Y, and Z muscles down in your lower body? How does that translate to the uppers? So it gives them a much more encompassing data set to understand, like, what is going on here? Because right now the current methodologies are not as exact and precise as what we provide. And so it opens up this new lane of really understanding the mechanics of how the disease works gives those who are actually building the drugs. Like, we're not the ones who are going to solve for it.

But we partner with the companies who are creating the therapeutics who can potentially solve for it. And we just give them a much potentially quicker timeline to understand the mechanisms of those drugs. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA 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. Arte is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros on a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre-imposed pictures.

Arte is something completely different. Arate 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 artaelab.com. That's A-R-E-E-E-Lab.com. Now, back to the show. I'm just curious. What is kind of like the part that is, call it, like, most exciting about the technology to you? Is it the kind of NBA side of it or kind of like the life-changing side of it of being able to potentially help people that have these degenerative issues? I'm an NBA junkie and a sports junkie.

Love the pro sports world. Love who I get to work with, right? We work with some of the smartest and brightest people in human performance, and that is great. Yeah. Do you think you could use this to make them not cheat in basketball for gambling? Just saying. Just throwing it out there.

It's a very topical, timely joke. Very topical, timely joke. I was at the Nuggets Home Opener the other night discussing this exact thing. So the... He's got one trap smaller than the other. He's got to sit out tonight. And we're going to hit the under for sure. Yeah.

For everyone listening, we do not use this to do any future betting as well. So the pro sports world was probably the initial reason why I joined the company. And I come from working in the early stage sports startup, sports tech startup space. But when you see kind of the impact that this has for just the general human condition of those who got the raw luck of all things, genetics and all things on a disease state. that's where the tears come. That's where like the real impact of what we can do. Like it's great that we get to work with the world's best athletes, but we also work with the other side of it,

like those who have the most disadvantaged muscles and seeing the potential impact that I would not have ever known about until being around it and seeing like how we are actually advancing the science, not just providing lip service to it. It's really impactful, right? Like you want to be able to use pro sports to leverage that as an understanding of how the elite performers move. And if we can translate that into the general masses

and into these more complicated disease states, I'd say that the majority of our team, yes, we like the pro sports logos, but what we're doing on the other side of the coin is impactful beyond all both. Yeah. What about longevity? Like, I mean, like, that's the, I mean, obviously, I'm 52,

so it's important to me. But like, that word gets thrown around a lot lately. on our last podcast we're talking about the Dr. Adia, say, right? Atta, Atia. Atia. Atia. But like, how are you guys helping in that world, in the longevity world?

So the world of longevity, as we're hearing from Atia, Huberman, Andy Galpin, and others, muscle is a very good biomarker to understand how kind of pretty your body is to fend off disease states, whether that is cardio respiratory, whether that's neurological degeneration, whether that's just aging and your muscle. So I think the Atea thing is rather topical because he's just done 60 minutes, right? I'm talking about like the importance of exercise and the importance of strength training. Everywhere I go, he's everywhere lately. There's a newfound love of muscle as it relates to just aging and health in general, right?

That speaks well to what we do and where we think we have the most unique advantage there is we are the most comprehensive analysis available on the market today for skeletal muscle health. And like skeletal muscle health, the current methodologies for Dexa billions of data points. It's a very good in vivo body imaging to understand body composition, bone mineral density, lean mass versus adipose tissues. Sure. We take it to a very next level. So MRI, there's no ionizing radiation, right? So it's the safest form factor to grab imagery inside of the body versus DeXA, which there's some very small amounts of radiation.

The secondary piece, like the visualization of what we do, it's an interactive 3D model of your actual body. So what we're looking at is in a flat image that you've probably seen from a Dexascan or an in-body scan. It's your body brought to life with an interactive analysis where we can look at your right peck and understand like that size. What's expected of a 52-year-old male like yourself, are you below or behind the curve? And so as a proxy for understanding like muscle health down to not just your entire vehicle, but each individual muscle group, creating normative bounds of 144 muscles of like what is expected along with your age or your height, your weight. It gives you a much better proxy of like, are you ahead of the curve potentially when it comes to having healthy skeletal muscle? Are you behind the curve? What can we do

in terms of actionability around that? Like focusing on strength training, the nutritional protocols, whether or not is any kind of supplementation or any other kind of outside interventions that are needed. this whole idea of skeletal muscle health leads to less disease chances, longer, better lives. Like muscle for all of us is the most important thing that we have to stay upright. And as Atia puts off, generally how aging looks is like you're healthy, you're healthy, you fall off a cliff. And then from there, how do you ever get back to that? And so if you're managing your body and your vehicle and your muscle structure and your your muscle health at a much more proactive level, we think we give practitioners and just wealthy or not wealthy but healthy enthusiasts like all of us on the skull

a better mouse trap to understand like how good our muscles are doing versus what is expected of someone of our demographics all of a sudden i looked at and noticed that you guys also tell like um where there's fat um you can also look at tendons you can look at bone and so like uh for me i mean that's like the tendon becomes important because i'm like trying to avoid any kind of like a you know tendon snap you know which i've had the past and so. Ouch. Yeah. So as you can imagine in the NBA, they're dealing with a lot of Achilles ruptures currently.

And it is a R&D initiative from the league level to understand why are Achilles tendon ruptures happening at a higher clip. We can also quantify the morphological properties of the Achilles tendon, of the Pateler tendon. But the beauty of what we do, we don't just focus on the Achilles on the right side of the left side, we then also visualize and quantify the muscles above and below tangential contralateral side. Sure. So now you're getting a fuller picture because generally the symptom is not just the symptom.

It's like, I have a sore kill. He's like, well, how is that translating up the chain? How is that translating to the other side? How are you compensating? And what kind of breadcrumbs are we seeing in a muscle profile that potentially understands, like, oh, you are favoring your right side. You've shortened your stride. And like we're seeing these compensatory patterns in your contralateral limb that are like

growing. So sometimes the idea that like muscle size is always good. And muscle size might be due to a dysfunction that you're having on the other side. Right. So you might have an overdeveloped left leg. And that's not just because you have the strongest left leg. It could be because you have some inherent patterns from previous injury history that is leading you to compensating your left side. And sweet. You've been doing that for years and years and years. And now that we can like visualize that, quantify that and measure it in a really precise way. What can we go do to potentially future-proof you towards that injury that you're scared of? Sure. I know Dr. Keith Barr, he's known to be like the tendon expert, but he talks about

the relationship between muscle and tendon, you know, between like, you know, especially where they start to, you know, connect, you know, like if tendon's super tight, a lot of times the muscle is weak and, you know, vice versa. The tendon gets super weak. The muscle getting super strong and tight. It's the relationship between the two that will predict a lot of injuries. And they can, that can speak to probably a lot of the high-level Achilles ruptures that have happened in the NBA over the last few years, right? There's a few athletes who had had calf sprains, right? So they, they had a, let's just say, a muscle architecture of their calf that could not

handle the load. So that load then went into the Achilles. They did the false step mechanism and then pop it goes, right? Durant was, you know, he was doing with a calf injury prior to his Achilles rupture. So there, I've met Keith a couple of times. Yeah. He's way too smart for me to understand everything that he's saying. But understanding that muscle to tendon kind of connection is where we fit in quite well because we visualize muscle and the tendon component.

We're not the end all, be all catch all for everything, right? Like this data pairs really well with how they actually move it. Like you do movement screens, you're isometric strength testing them. Are you doing counter movement jumps? Because function and form work together really well. Sometimes it doesn't match up perfectly. You might have a bigger muscle on one side, but it's not producing as much force as your other side. All right, now we have a neuromuscular thing that we need to go after.

We have some kind of something else that is getting in the way of you being able to activate kind of the size and the capacity of the muscle that you have on one side. Brilliant. Yes. Well, I know you guys have some metrics around tissue quality. I know fat infiltration is a big piece of it. Can you guys actually directly see scar tissue as well? Is that possible yet? We can.

And so our, and this is kind of MRI nerds peak, we run a T1 weighted protocol. When T2 images are done, which is a general clinical MRI, so they're usually running a T2 imaging protocol on a kind of a narrow field of focus to understand the inflammation and the edema that's happening in that subset of an area after a hamstring strain, after an ACL, after a sprained ankle. We can then visualize and map and also quantify in millimeters. How much scar tissue is there? Is it in the muscle? is it out of the muscle? Is there, is there edema? Is there additional fluid there? And then we've got some researchers like Brian Heider Scheid at University of Wisconsin, who is one of the world's best. I would highly recommend having them on your podcast someday in the future. He maps that to like,

how close is that to the sciac nerve, right? Because that then is the perception of pain for an athlete and when you're trying to return someone from injury understanding how much inflammation and edema do they have? That's an important piece. Where is it located on the body? Like, is it touching the sciatic nerve that's giving them more perception of pain. Is that why they're having a hard time moving again, getting load back into their limbs? So like understanding and measuring that, especially for return to play, has become a very important piece of how a lot of teams utilize us for hamstring strains, abductor strains, adductor strains, adductor strains, anything with the thigh cath muscle as well. And then beyond that, I just mentioned the fat

infiltration piece. Most people have probably never thought about tissue quality or muscle quality, what that means. And regarding fat infiltration, like, why would kind of fat in a muscle be a problem? Like, everyone knows that, like when you, we cut up a steak, like there's going to be fat in meat. It's the thing. Yeah. But yeah, how does it fluctuate within a muscle? Does more, is more bad, is less good? Like, how does it all work? More is bad. So aging and sarcopenia is kind loosely defined as, you know, like muscle wasting. But what happens is more fat gets inside of your muscle versus muscle, right? So as we age, it's kind of a replacement. And this is from a non-scientist, like fat starts to replace muscle aggressively. The more fat you have inside of your

muscle, the less capacity that muscle has to generate force. So as a proxy of understanding how much of that muscle is actually infiltrated by fat gives you a pretty good, as we call it, muscle health marker of understanding the quality of the tissue there in a pro sports environment. So a lot of young 20-year-old athletes who are the healthiest of the healthiest with the strongest muscles you could imagine where we see fat infiltration kind of having a say is recurrent soft tissue injury. So if you have someone who's got a problematic hamstring and they continually keep restraining and respringing that muscle and tendon structure, fat does replace muscle. in those areas of like recurrent soft tissue injuries.

So teams will use that as like a very minute, precise understanding of like, wow, this guy's been dealing with multiple hamstring injuries over and over and over outside of the muscle architecture that might be changing atrophy patterns that might be changing. Understanding like how fat is getting inside of that muscle, where it is inside of the muscle as well,

helps them just make better decisions for how they work with that athlete to shore those deficiencies up. Yeah. So that's on the tissue quality side of things. Zuming out more big picture on the quantity side of things, both like total body muscle mass. What normative values have you guys seen for kind of what is the ideal amount of muscle mass for just general health for, you know, for every age demographics slash genders, et cetera?

And then what have you found for specific sports profiles are the baseball players versus football players and that type of thing? Have you guys gone down that road? On the sports profiling thing, this is one of the big offerings that. every pro sports team has asked us for. Well, do you have normative values of what's expected for an NBA player? Do you have normative values of what is expected for an NFL player? Do you have normative values for pro soccer? And so for each one of these sports that we work very closely with a lot of teams, we now have sports specific databases. So when an NBA player gets a scan, he's now being compared to an NBA population. And how we normalize that is like, to your height, to your weight, what is expected

of someone who's 6'7, 225 pounds NBA player, are your muscles bigger or smaller? Because that would probably be very different versus a 6'7, 220-pound, healthy normative male like myself. The same exists for the pro soccer world. Same exists for the NFL world. We've done some pretty interesting kind of lookbacks

on what is different between these guys. Like who's more asymmetrical? Who's less symmetrical? And so we have these unique phenotypes and profiles of like soccer players, of NFL players of AFL Australian rules football players down in Australia. And so we have these archetypes built out already. And as we get more and more scans, what can happen soon will be in the NFL. Like not only are we normalizing expected muscle size and expected asymmetries to your height and your weight,

but what position do you play? Because the demands of a cornerback, a lot of backpedaling is going to be very different than demands of halfback. So being able to understand like, ooh, you're you're mapping quite well along these expected trend lines of an NFL player who plays your exact position. Same in the NBA. For the healthy normative population, we're working with a bunch of different research sites who are trying to answer that question right now.

So the mechanism of us creating like the expected muscle size score, are you smaller or bigger than expected, how does that translate into a whole bunch of outcomes? How does that translate into just all cause mortality? How does that translate into how well you can handle cardiovascular disease and or surgical interventions that might be needed. How well does that go into any kind of neural degenerative development disorders that might happen as you get older as well? So we don't have a ton of answers yet on what is ideal for you as a 70 year old, but we can give you, are you above or behind what is expected? And then soon researchers and those people who are leading the fields in their research space

are going to come up with a lot of interesting answers that we can then utilize on our behalf. So there's the comparison to other people, which is very interesting. And then there's also the comparison to yourself side to side. It's very interesting to me that you can see that your left lower trap is 4% bigger than your right lower trap. And that level of nuance and that level of precision just isn't available anywhere else. Nope. I'll use myself as an animal. So I got a springbox scan, not too long after I had a menacectomy on my right knee. I use that to do a lot of targeted strength development work leading up to surgery. I got re-scaned three months later. Generally, you would have expected a lot of attribute between my right and my left side, but due to

my focus on I want to stave that off prior to, I ended up pretty balanced. Problem is I started to have a giant discrepancy on my QL, so on either side of like my trunk muscle architecture, nearly a 20% difference. I had some low back pain. So I used kind of the roadmap that Springbok provided. I started to do unilateral training, a bit more side bending, a bit more like side lifts. Back pain started to go away. I wanted to retest myself on the Springbok side. I had shorted up those asymmetries down to only like 2 to 3% versus a 20% difference. And again, end of one only. But for myself, me kind of working on the imbalances that I had seen from Springbok

with the help of Doug and a few other people I know in my life were quite good at understanding like how to go after these things. I was able to kind of go after I'm 6 foot 5. I'm 210 pounds. Six foot 5 people have a lot of low back issues. I'm not really dealing with low back pain and I've been able to. shore that up over the last few years as well. Yeah, it's funny. I've been doing the same thing.

The side biz trying to, you know, work on my QL. But I'm just guessing, you know, it'd be super cool to be able to, like, quantify some things. Yeah, especially when you know how you feel. Like, really objective, but you tie this into the subjective piece of how you feel, how you move if you play a certain sport, if you're lifting weights and you know how you're performing. It gives you some unique insights that you never would have known. Sure. Yeah.

Easy example that I never would have known. So I believe I you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe if I don't hold the record, I'm pretty fucking close to holding the record for the biggest single muscle imbalance. My left obterator internus is 45.6% smaller than my right. I'm like that. When I first saw, because I've done, I did a lower body scan that I did a total body scan. So I have two, two scans now. When I first got it, I was talking to Doug and I was like, this has got to be wrong.

There's no way. Like my deep six external rotators, they're all like one or two percent. then one of them is 45% are you I mean all my glutes and hamstrings and all my abductors etc like everything's normal like I'm pretty I'm pretty proportionally balanced and then one and then I hold the record for one single very small muscle it's got to be a something else going on there and then and then later I see I don't think I actually said this to him when I first saw but I had a posterior hip dislocation and so when that thing popped out of the back of the socket it'd be like my my analogy is like say there's a rope holding the door close and then you just

kick the door open and that rope snaps. That's like kind of what happened. I have to have some nerve damage or something in that muscle that is preventing it from firing and then it's atrophied over time. And so whenever I do, Riff it outweigh split squats or or single leg, single leg RDLs or anything like where I'm going to have a lot of soreness and my glues, my glute needs and that's kind of that whole general area. It's beyond just soreness.

Like there's something else like twingey weird like not sciatica e but like I'm always like one in like my peer formis is messed up like uh i never knew what was going on but it's been that for years and then i saw that on the scan i was like oh yes okay now i had now i have some direction i can go like try to potentially solve this problem or at least get around it now now now that i know i have some guiding objective data that i just didn't have before and so now i'm like just now in the process of like starting to do some work with Doug to you know it's not a big problem but i got but i got to go got to go such a small muscle yeah that's so crazy muscle

I mean, if it's truly nerve damage, I'm not sure what I can do about it. But yeah, me and Doug are going to meet about it soon. We haven't actually started to attack it yet. But we have direction now, which is a huge step forward. I would be an assumption from not just exercise selection, but also how do we make sure that muscle is firing? I'm going to speak for Doug because I know Doug quite well here, right? So what can he do on like soft tissue targeting to ensure that you can grab access to that muscle? Again, dumb guy.

Dumb guy saying dumb guy stuff here, but part of his approach is, Jen, like, If a muscle is way atrophy, you have lost access to using that muscle. We need to regain access to using that muscle so that it can develop. And you are actually using it the way that it was meant to be used. And the beauty of this, and I use this term, it's like no muscle left behind, right? So in the world of hamstrings, which were, we did this NFL-funded hamstring study that was three years of data collection with the potential outcome of that. Is there a predictive index of hamstring muscle ratio in a, a bunch of other factors for non-contact soft tissue injuries.

Like, we're going to find out soon enough because data collection is done and the scientists are going to be reporting on their initial findings here soon. But someone restrains a hamstring. There's, you know, three to four main movers. Oops, three to four main movers on the hamstring musculature. You might have a really strong semi-teninosis that is like helping you look like you're moving really well, but you might have lagging development on your biceps fem, longhead or short head.

And that might have you at greater risk for future re-injury because architecturally, morphologically, you don't have the muscle structure to support the movement, even though you have one compensating muscle in that entire complex that is doing the majority of the work. And so without having Springbok, you would never have been able to really understand, like, wow, I'm moving really well, but like, I'm lagging right here. And if I really want to try to future-proof myself, maybe we need to change the way that we go after targeting those. through Nordic curls or whatever it might be. Just having that level of muscle data to know that there might be a weak spot. And again, I'm going to say softly might, just arms you with more data to try to attack those problems. The little kid in me wants to know when you're dealing with like a seven foot three NBA player,

their muscles are so long. They're not like my size muscles or my length muscles. Is there a piece of this where there's just, more opportunity for imbalances or movement dysfunctions or unhelp, like if their bicep muscle is a foot longer than mine, does that just create an opportunity where there's just more opportunity for dysfunctional movement patterns or not in the bicep, you're just kind of folding your arm?

But with just the amount of tissue is there, just more of a chance of a problem? So with the NBA population, as you can imagine, we've scanned a lot of seven footers, seven foot and above. And we can create the expected norms for that crazy subpopulation, right? Like comparing them to a healthy general population doesn't matter because I'm about the tallest guy that we probably have on our database, 6566.

But there we've done seven foot to seven five, right? So the number one, they're going to have a better understanding of like expected, size of these crazy phenotypes that only exist in one sport. When it comes to the muscle dysfunction piece, I don't want to get too far out of my skis, but the longevity of seven foot footers and above is probably very, very different than what we see in six foot seven and like structurally sound muscle to bone ratio kind of matches because those are outliers like so deeply, so far and one end of the scale.

And generally speaking, what we do see is. to scan them quite often. For what reason? Maybe they're thinking on your track lines, and they probably know a lot more about this, but their phenotype is so unique and so different that understanding how certain interventions are driving change in adaptations, I think, is a very big focal point for them because they're highly valuable athletes because of their size and the sport that will play. So can we do everything in our power to get better objective data to drive, like, data-driven

decision making around are we doing the right things are they performing well on the court the springbok correlate to x y and z tests that we're running on them but we do see a lot of that far end of the spectrum especially in the NBA of dealing with the people who just don't even fit any plot lines and graphs and statistical analysis that exist yeah i remember seeing my nuke ball playing with mugs it was the strangest thing i've ever seen yeah five foot three and seven foot six it was incredible. Two foot delta between two people playing the same sport. Same sport.

Yeah, it was insane. It was such a great thing to see them together. Because I'm 5'6 and played basketball. I was just like, if you can do it, I can do it. I can't. Well, speaking of skeletons, you guys also can measure to in great detail, bone length, right? And bone length discrepancies and ratios and all the,

all the bone related items as well? Yep. So with a singular scan, you'll get kind of your very in-depth muscular profile. You'll get bone mapping as well. So everything from the lengths of the long bones of the lower body and the bone structure of the upper body, we're

further down R&D development there on quantifying how accurate our measurements up there, but soon that will come. This new release, so we just got recent FDA approval a few weeks back where we're now going to be able to do body composition out of that same scanning protocol. So looking at visceral subcutaneous and intermuscular fat, liver fat.

Along with that, it would be one of the first MRI-based assessments of bone health. I'm going to say that softly, looking at the amount of lean bone versus bone fat or bone adiposity, two terms that I did not know existed until recently. But we can then map out, much like you would be familiar with bone mineral density have a Dexas scan, we can map out like where your bone is the strongest and or the most dense. And that's now being baked into our analysis as well. So translating that into what people are used to in Dexa, it gives us a very good bone health marker outside of understanding the volumetric measurements and the morphological differences and the, the length discrepancies

that exist that sometimes are unseen. But that was a new release a couple weeks ago. A lot more publications research to be covered. coming out of that as well. I'm definitely curious, just because of seeing this doctor, Addya lately. But, you know, he's all about, he's, he's so big on requiring his, or recommending that his clients will get the, our patients will get the MRIs, you know, but the full body MRIs, but, you know, obviously to detect potential cancers. I mean, like, were you guys, are you guys able to pick up any, any type of activity like that?

We play in the other side of the spectrum. So we are, think of us as the performance full body MRI versus the diagnostic MRI, right? So companies like a per NUvo, there's a new company, Corviva, all of the whole body pre-cancer screenings. Like their goal is to find the nodules and the tumors and the risk factors on the diagnosis size so that you can potentially get ahead of that and understanding like, you might have some things you need to get checked out on further tests or needed. It's so scary though. I mean, like, I would love to do that, but like he's like guaranteed you're going to get some full. false positive. So you're going to freak out. I'm like, man, I'm going to need some good drugs just to get me through that process, you know? Our risk appetite is not the same, right? So none of us

want to play in the diagnosis space and give false positive. So what our FDA clearance clearly states is that we are a comprehensive objective analysis of muscle. And like we are not there to like look for cancer. We're not there to look for any tumors, any nodules, anything of that nature. And so we are optimized for muscle volume, optimized for the body composition piece. And so as it relates, the performance, whole body MRI is really kind of where we stay and where we will never get into the diagnostic. We might play with companies who have diagnostic screenings. And also, hey, you want to get like your musculoskeletal profile and you want to get your body

composition profile. We can offer those scans as well. We partner with imaging partners who had those things. I would love it, but I'm scared. I would be like, yeah. So just go get a muscle scan instead because we're just going to tell you that our muscle. I'm not afraid of that, but it'd be cool just to see that. Yeah.

But it's a very, like, there's this entire new world of like whole body MRIs for preventative screening. I see that. Five years ago, six years ago, it wasn't much of a thing. It was kind of in its infancy stage. And now it's, it's popular. It's like the celebrities are getting it done. They're tweeting about it. They're putting it on Instagram.

And to me, it helps any company who's doing MRI, right? So MRI is usually scary, right? Because you either get an MRI when you're injured, you or you get an MRI for a pre-cancer screening. What we do, it's like you just want a better view of your body and your muscle and your anatomy so that you can go train better and have objective data to understand like how your tissue changes. So those companies who are doing it,

even though we operate very differently in them, it's kind of like the rising tide lifts all boats. Like there's more awareness on MRIs being used, right? There's more awareness for a general consumer of like using an MRI for preventative health. Again, cancer on one side, us has much more of the muscle-centric analysis on the other side. So it gives us, I think, more people paying attention to what is that we're doing because

MRIs are now in the zeitgeist across the world's culture. What about the fatty tissue, like in and around the organs? You know, you always hear that. Is that something you guys do? Yep, we do now. So that recent FDA release was so visceral, subcutaneous and liver fat, the same things that a lot of practitioners are using to understand comorbidities and other kind of disease states, we can now do that out of that same suite of muscle profiles as well.

So it helps bridge the gap between clinicians who potentially did not know exactly what to do with a muscle profile, whereas I go to a performance coach, a Doug and Andy Galpin, a sports scientists for the Boston Celtics, whoever might be, they know what to do with our information, but a doctor, a general physician might not have now that we can, bring in the visceral fat subcontaneous fat they can they can actualize that that data as well that's super cool I'd rather see that the tumor thing that yeah I don't want tumors either so I don't want to see it man I pretend it doesn't exist yeah so it seems like we ran through each major

component we went through muscle bone tendon injuries bounce any of you know the major pieces here that we've that or that have remained kind of unmentioned that need to be brought into the in the fold here no that's like kind of the let's call that like the capabilities of what we do and then like how does this fit into let's say some listeners like what I think about using springback right oh god it's a million ways I mean yeah and so the you know like in a general healthy state you wouldn't expect wholesale muscle volume changes for a well adapted person inside of three months and so you know like the most you probably ever get a spring box scan would be four times in a calendar year.

Most of the programs we work with outside of pro sports, they're thinking about it's like a semi-annual, so twice a year every six months like, we're going to get you a spring box scan, and we're going to see like what kind of changes we're seeing from your tissue as it relates to nutrition, as it relates to strength training, as it relates to any of the endurance training that we're doing. If we were going after imbalances between limbs, we're not saying everyone should be perfectly symmetrical. That's not the point of like understanding limb to limb asymmetries.

you might golf. If you golf, you're going to probably have some imbalances because you're right-handed or you're left-handed. It's a very violent swing. But managing and understanding, like, what is the threshold of where that might put you at risk? Or what is the threshold of, like, where you're performing better, where you feel better, even because, like, the subjective component of how we feel,

if Springbok can help you understand, like, you felt really good when you looked like this. And now you look like this. And there's some major changes to what we're seeing on the muscle structure side. maybe we want to get you back more to where you were when you felt better than when you were moving better. And so, like, really the understanding of, like, how this gets adopted into me. I'm a 43-year-old male who likes to take care of myself. How often would I utilize it? What would I do around that?

We've got our other stuff kind of, like, starting to go in the world of orthopedics. How do we help drive better physical therapy after an ACL surgery? How do we help drive better physical therapy? after a severe ankle injury, whatever it might be, a shoulder rotator cuff. We can do an analysis there too. So there's a few different ways that we're starting to really suss out what the opportunity it looks like for us so that we can give much more personalized information strictly to that patient who just went and got a surgery.

Now they're going to be handed off to the PT world that is generally not really handed, handed data that is individualized to that patient. Now they might have better data to ensure that, like, we want to make sure. sure you don't have to have another surgery. We want to make sure you're doing better. You're returning to performance or perhaps getting even better than where you were in a previous state. So like those are some areas for us that is heavily heavily the next phase of what we do. Pro sports is one thing, but there's so many other people that this could help benefit that we're heavily focused on how do we go do that. Do you guys have any data on kind of like the targeted

rehab phase of coming back from an ACL in which somebody typically it takes, I mean, for sometimes, depending upon how bad it is, it could be an entire season, but going from, call it, eight months to being back to 100 percent and then getting people to, say, cutting it in half or anything along those lines. With enough data, we could put together a what is expected in terms of, let's call it an ACL. So how much atrophy is expected on the affected limit? cool what is like what would you what should you look like two months post surgery are you behind it are you ahead of it six months post surgery where you add in comparison to what we've seen

across all of the studies that we're currently running are you behind the curve or you headed the curve nine months 12 months past there's been some very interesting research again by brian hydersite's lab two years and further out post ACL reconstruction muscle atrophilings no matter what you do right Like, no matter how hard you work, and some of these, like, they're doing a professional population of professional athletes and then just like standard humans like me. And like that muscle atrophy, that still exists two plus years, five plus years down the line. Like what is normal there, right?

Like we know, if we now know that that is expected, can we create like, here's that marker and that benchmark you're behind it or above it. Like, we think we can get you back to here. Obviously, there's going to be variability for every individual human. and their muscles that comes with it. But with enough data and with enough interesting researchers like running these studies, we can start to put together trend lines of expectations between time point scans, which to me would be wildly, wildly fascinating.

We're not there yet. There's a lot of lot to be done. But that's an area of focus that some researchers are going after right now. Yeah, I think it would be super cool. I'm always interested, you know, after there, I feel like after call it 30 years of training, like there isn't a training program I haven't done. And then the next one is just like another day of lifting weights. Like there's no like big changes that are going to happen to my body,

my strength, et cetera. But I always wonder like what would happen if I just like took a year off? What would happen to my muscles? And how fast would it happen? Just living like in an active life. And maybe it's like a weekly scan or I mean, daily would be way too much in real life.

But like to see like, oh, yeah, well, you're good for 60 days, but by day 90, you've lost 25% of your muscle mass or something like that. And then by month six, it's here. I'm actually, you know, my personal training and like outlook on all of it is I'm just here for life. So I'm going to do it all the time. And I like it. But the volume's lower. And it's mostly a game of like maintenance. But I always wonder, like, what would happen if I just stopped? Never going to. But it would be interesting. thing to run the, to like roll the dice, see like what the speed at which the decay happens.

I saw it. I got it. I lived it when I went back to school. I saw that. It's not fun. I don't want to ever do that again. Hell no. Yeah.

And, but to have all of that data on like what body parts go away, like, having strong legs, I just know I'm going to for as long as humanly possible. Like, if you just stopped, what happened to your legs? It would be terrifying. I couldn't imagine having soft legs. What a waste of life. It would be so depressing, like showering. You're just soft, fat leg.

Oh, gosh. Do you see my before and after that person? I looked like a dead person. Like, I never want to do that again. Never, ever, ever. You've recovered well from being a dead person. Man, I was so, such bad shape. You know, similar ish to all this.

Like, have you guys had much, much, much, uh, many conversations with the, the physique world, like bodybuilders, et cetera. Like, you would think body builders would want to like build up a lagging body part. See very specifically that body part is seven percent more than it used to be. And then they do their cut. Did I maintain the gains on the lagging body power? Or did it just atrophy quicker than the rest? Because it's only been, you know, extra muscle for, for two months or whatever it is.

Like, I feel like bodybuilders would just eat this up. Yeah, you're talking my language. Here's the campaign for the subjective way that they do bodybuilding competitions today versus the springbok. Why don't we do the actual real measurements of the most symmetrical who has the highest to their height and weight biggest certain muscles? That would be amazing. That should be the future. Have I had any discussions with bodybuilding? No.

If you guys want to help me. I want to go back to like Johnny pre-steroids. Just what does that natural bovine meaty cow look like? Just scary giant man. No, no drugs in him yet. Man, you know, the guy who just won the Olympia, they're shredding that poor guy. I mean, I feel so bad for the guy.

I'm like, he didn't, he won, it wasn't his fault. People were just like wrecking him. I would love to have it. You'd be cool if you guys be to quantify it. But shut the hell up. This is what the truth is. This is who's symmetrical. This is who's not like.

It'd be cool. The pilot test. Wait, what are they upset about? Ash, I missed all this. I mean, it's, what's his name? It does anyway. They don't think he's the nearest, like, as cut as people in the past, like Ronnie or like Dorian, you know. And like, so they're just, they're just poor shredding the poor guy.

And like, it's not his fault. They picked him, you know? I think this for Olympia is like doing like a bench press with a giant suit on at this point. Like people want to be Bumstead. They don't want to be that guy. Derek Lunsford is his name. Yeah, it's Derek Lunsford. I mean, he's a nice guy, you know, but yeah, maybe he wasn't as Jack.

Some people who've seen the past, but he was. Be mad at the judges. Don't be mad of him. Y'all, I'm with Matt on this, though. Like the objective Olympia. sounds fucking rad. That's the way to go, man. It's 2025, we can measure better

versus just having six judges to say that that guy is the best. The judges love being to control. Like if you get it deep into the bodybuilding world, you find some dark stuff happening. They don't want, they want to be in control. They want to control these dudes

and make them do what they want them to do. And I'm not going to get any deeper than that. Hold on. Keep going, buddy. No way. I'm not getting any deeper than that. Hold on. What do you know? The secrets after the show.

People do what they got to do. When they're winning, that means they've done something. Yeah, that's all I'm saying. A lot of foot massages, huh? Exactly. Like, exactly. Matt, tell the people where they can learn more and how to find you. Springbokanalyics.com for all things Springbok related.

As mentioned, we work heavily in the pro sports world moving into the longevity space. A lot of clinical trials, drug development stuff. But in the next six months, there'll be a lot more opportunities for kind of, how do I go get a springbox game? We're going to try to make that easier. Right now, it's not the easiest thing because we're heavily focused on sports. But check out all things springback ad and analytics are crossed everywhere. I myself don't have much of an online profile. So there's nowhere you need to go find me anywhere.

but go find all things Springbok elsewhere. Coach Travis Mashlea.com. So there's my new e-book and my new program out. It's all about power, but the book is called Mass Explosion. Ooh. Ooh. Very well, very well,

Brandon, sir. Great job. Very well branded. It hasn't. Douglas Larson. Yeah, very cool. On my Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. Also, we're doing some work with Springbok.

That's why we're bringing Matt onto the show to tell you the cool things they're doing. If you couldn't tell, they're doing something very unique. And all this is going in the right direction, in my opinion. As Matt said, they've been working primarily with professional sports teams to date, but trying to bring this to the masses. And we're going to help in that process. We're launching a program in partnership with Springbok where they are an analytics company. They have all the data. But you guys, if I'm wrong, Matt, you guys don't do the analysis to the point where you're not providing advice and suggestions for people you're giving the data to the pro athletes the pro athletes take them to their team so if you

have a team you already have physical therapists and strength coaches and physiologists and all the people that can help you interpret that data and then tell you what to do about it that's fantastic but most people do not on the other side of that rapid health optimization we have all those people we have the most preeminent muscle scientist in the company that's dr indy galpin we have many sport physiologists PhDs we have a great physical therapist we have many many great strength coaches a whole a whole data analytics processing fulfillment team. We build beautiful reports for people. So we are,

we are in many ways a, a perfect partner for this relationship where if you give us lots of data, we have all the people to analyze that data, to then collect a lot of our own data to complement that data. Springbok is the centerpiece, but also there's movement in the real world and strength balance, balancing and many other things that we can do to collect data on your performance and your musculoskeletal system.

And then we can take that. and decide what things are actually issues. If there's imbalances, are they functional asymmetries? Or to your point about the golfers, like, are this supposed to have that asymmetry? Is this normal or is this not normal? And then we can give you very detailed instructions and advice and recommendations on what to do about those issues and how to fix them. That way, hopefully in the future, you're performing even better than you are now and or we're reducing any potential that you might have for future injury. So our team is going to be helping Matt do that.

and that is called Optima Muscle, and you can find that at Optimumuscle.com. I'm going to need one of those shirts. Right here. Right. Right. I'm Anders Warner at Anders Rohner. We are Barrel shrug to Barbell underscore shrug.

And make sure you get over. Go hang out with Doug. Optimummuscle.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.