Barbell Shrugged - Shoulder Pain, Performance, and the Difference Between Good and Great Coaches w/ Tony Gentilcore, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson — Barbell Shrugged #388

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

Tony Gentilcore (@tonygentilcore) is one of the co-founders of Cressey Sports Performance, which really should have been called "Cressilcore Sports Performance" because that sounds like an awesome castle where a wizard lives (and plays sports). He's no longer coaching there, but his legacy remains. Tony's Techno Tuesdays will live on forever.   When he’s not picking things up and putting them down himself, he trains people at his studio, CORE, located in Boston, MA. He also contributes to the top fitness magazines and websites around, and sets up a camera in his garage to record his lightsaber skills. He lives in Boston. With his wife, Lisa, and son, Julian. And cat, Dagny.   In this episode of Barbell Shrugged we talk about Tony’s background in fitness, writing for t-nation, how to train baseball players, off-setting pitching with training, taking the demands of the sport translating those into training, what makes and maintains a healthy shoulder, PRI, knowing your scope of practice,  the flow of Tony’s programs, quasi-isometrics, where there’s meat there is movement, and much more.   Enjoy! - Anders and Doug   Episode Breakdown   0-10: Barbell curls, music, and Tony’s background in fitness 11-20: Writing for T-Nation, meeting the O.G.’s over the internet, and the importance of surrounding yourself with people with a good work ethic 21-30: The pioneers of strength and conditioning forums, leaving room in your life for growth, if you’re going to talk about the trenches you better have experience in them, and the importance of working your ass off 31-40: Finding sports coaches who are supportive of strength and conditioning, how Tony and Eric became “the baseball guys,” becoming “top of mind,” and finding your niche 41-50: How to train baseball players, off-setting pitching with training, taking the demands of the sport translating those into training, and what makes and maintains a healthy shoulder 51-60: How to present information, adjusting technique to fit anatomy, and why you shouldn’t make generalizations 61-70: Focusing on alignment before mobility and stability, breathwork, creating spatial awareness, PRI, and knowing your scope of practice 71-80: Writing the warmup into the program, when to add in breath work, pairing movements with corrective exercises, and the flow of Tony’s programs 81-90: Finding someones trainable window, the separation of the good vs. great trainers, why you can always train, and how Tony writes programs 91-100: Quasi-isometrics, why you should sit in the bottom of a squat, a breathing squat, the lost art of hinging, and why you need to be utilizing exercises that get people strong 101-110: Why your back might not like you, where there’s meat there is movement, where movement should come from, and the progression of movement 111-120: Assessment, what fixes most peoples issues, Tony’s digital product, and where to find Tony   ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-gentilcore ----------------------------------------------------------------------- @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% @halo- gethalosport.com/Barbell  $20 off an additional $100 for presale orders @whoop - whoop.com  “shrugged” for 20% off @sunlighten:www.sunlighten.com "ShruggedCollective" for $200 off + free shipping   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

The One Ton Challenge is coming to Barbell Shrugged. Six lifts, one goal, one ton. This will be the most fun you have ever had lifting weights. Starting Monday, April 30th, Doug Larson, Travis Mash and I will spend nine weeks breaking down the One Ton Challenge. The six lifts that create the one ton total and why this challenge is the gold standard in the lifelong pursuit of strength. Monday, April 30th, we are kicking off the One-Ton Challenge Prologue

with John Cena to tell the history of the challenge, my personal experience joining the One-Ton Club, and how you can be a part of the action. Monday, April 30th, the One-Ton Challenge is coming to Barbell Shrug. This week, we are back with another episode of Barbell Shrug with Tony Gentilcore. This episode was special for me because I've been following Tony for over a decade. I first started reading his articles in T Nation and have been a fan of his consistent work ethic and commitment to quality coaching over the years. In this episode, we take a turn into the history of online forums, T Nation, meeting legends in the strength and conditioning community,

take a deep dive into shoulder function, assessment, eliminating pain, performance, and intelligent programming. And about the most epic foot race happening in Jamaica in two weeks. Yeah, there are still a few spots open for Project Stronger Jamaica. This is your chance to stay in a house with the top speed and strength coaches in the country. Hang out with track stars and watch me get destroyed in the 100 meter dash by Johan Blake. Get over to StrongerExperts.com and find Project Stronger Experts to apply for your spot today.

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Monday April 30th the one ton challenge is coming we'll see you guys there three days like it's time to go home I don't even care that you won the competition I'm just doing this for the people so what you're fit whatever let's go

like speaking of jokes bombing certainly regional jokes. What works in Boston doesn't really quite work in Fargo, North Dakota. And I'm like, oh, man. Dude, that's so funny. Are we on right now? Yeah, we're right on. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged.

I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson. You bet. Tony Gentilcore. We are core. Is this core fitness? Just core. I was trying to be witty with my marketing. It's like my last name ends with core. Core is kind of like fitness related, so let's run with that.

I dig your tagline, by the way. Heavy things won't lift themselves. Yeah, so people know what they're getting themselves into. All the time, I know people can't see us because we're talking on the microphones, but when people walk by the window, it's always like they look up at the sign, they look in, they look up at the sign,

they look in. What are they doing in there? Just a bunch of abs. Yeah, yeah. Why is it a heavy thing? Shouldn't they just be doing abs? We were talking about the regional jokes.

We went to Boston Sports Club this morning. Yesterday, we were at Whoop and the videographer girl, she was super cool. We were like, hey, can we just schedule a photo shoot? She's a student at Northeastern. We got in there and some lady

was like, can you not take my picture? We were like, we weren't. I don't know why you thought we were taking your picture. She's like, we're just working out. I was like, well, we're from San Diego and if you're working out, you better have a videographer with you or it doesn't or it doesn't count yeah like this is film everything this is normal i don't know why you have a

personal trainer and not a videographer that makes no it's kind of backwards yeah um yeah i guess that doesn't happen here as much that i'm assuming that doesn't happen often when you guys are traveling. Well, no. People are like, hey, stop. Stop filming. Stop it. I don't know. We don't normally have our videographer with us, but she was super cool, and I've never gotten yelled at before.

Being in SoCal, never had somebody be like, why are you filming? Everybody there is filming. Well, people are exercising while they're waiting to get their groceries and stuff. Right. They're just all exercising at all times. Yeah. Well, dude, this is super cool. I've been a big fan for a while.

The fact that you have the original Boston University bumper plates behind you means we have a lot of history to talk about. Where did this fun adventure start for you? Well, my career was started in central New York in the Finger Lake region. I didn't even know that part. Yeah. So when I say I'm from New York, I'm originally from New York in the Finger Lake region. I didn't even know that part. Yeah. So when I say I'm from New York, I'm originally from New York. Cool.

And, of course, when I say I'm from New York, like, oh, Manhattan? Brooklyn? That's the only part of New York that exists. No, New York's pretty big. Yeah. No one even knows about the north part. Yeah. I grew up, the largest city that I grew up close to was Syracuse. Okay.

So I'm from a small town, Groton, New York. No one's ever heard of that. And it's in between Cortland and Ithaca. Cool. Ithaca is where Cornell University is. All the SUNY schools are up there. Yeah. So I went to Cortland State.

Cool. So that's where I got my degree from. After I was done playing baseball for four years in college, I was like, well, there wasn't a lot of demand for a right-handed pitcher throwing 87 miles an hour. So I was like, oh, I guess I'm not getting drafted. Let's find what I'm going to do with my life. And I transferred to Cortland State, got my degree in health education. And I often joke that I was this close to becoming a health teacher. I did my student teaching as a senior there.

And I had to teach sex education to 13-year-olds. Whoa. And that pretty much sealed the deal. I was like, we're not even talking strength and conditioning. I want to teach sex education to 13 year olds. Whoa. That pretty much sealed the deal. I was like. We're not even talking straightening and conditioning. I want to hear that story. Yeah. Talking nocturnal emissions with a bunch of 13 year olds trying to keep a straight face.

That was interesting. But I did a concentration too. That's a penis. Yeah. It's okay to laugh. I mean, I was laughing. But then luckily I had a concentration, so I had to do an internship at a gym. I found one that was just outside Syracuse.

Did that for a summer. They hired me right away. So thankfully it was like maybe get a sort of maybe job as a teacher and have to wear a tie every day or wear sweatpants every day yeah so i took the sweatpants i love that um is this somewhere you were already training that you've been lifting weights your whole life or like you already had an interest my i i'm a i'm weird in my family and i'm the only person in my immediate family that's remotely health conscious uh and that that isn't throwing my family under the bus, but I'm talking in terms of lifting weights

and being physically active. I played baseball all through high school and college, so I just kind of put two and two together and was like, you know, I think lifting weights might help me be a better athlete and throw a little bit harder and try to get the opportunity to play in college. So I think back in my early years of training,

Santa brought me my first weight set when I was 13. And that was in my basement. You know, like the plastic-covered cement weights. Oh, yeah. My dad had those growing up. Yeah. Well, I think everyone our age is probably in that category where we had that weight set,

and we followed the big poster that came with the set. And so I remember doing a lot of barbell curls in front of a mirror listening to Stone Temple Pilots growing up and Tribe Called Quest. And, you know, I just gravitated to that mentality as far as, like, just trying to be physically active. And, you know, of course, there's some vanity. Like, oh, maybe girls will pay attention to me. And that never happened. Always a girl. But damn you, Haley.

If they're listening. High hopes. And so I fast forward those few years into college. You know, fitness has always been a part of my life. And I did my health education and my concentration in health wellness promotion, got a job at a gym, corporate fitness, and I interspliced that with some commercial gym work. We're at Bally Total Fitness, which I don't believe exists anymore.

And I don't think it does. Great marketing. Yeah. That was like their peak was late 90s, early 2000s, I think. They rode the fitness influencer body type really hard for a couple years there. So I was working there as a trainer as well as corporate fitness, which when I say corporate fitness, people are like, what the hell is that? And that was essentially I worked for a company who was hired by other companies to run their gym for their employees as a way to offset health

health costs health insurance which was great so basically i would show up and people come in before work and their lunch hour after work when you were training people doing that was it like strength and conditioning that's what my preference was. Yeah. Because most people would not be turned on by that, especially 15 years ago. It was a very endurance-centric community as far as where I was. Like, you know, let's get people to sign up for a 5K. Let's get people to do this and that and do a bunch of stuff. Yeah. I was like, no, let's deadlift and squat and let's lift heavy things.

It's like what exercise is to most people is just finding ways to move around a lot so they can burn calories. Which is cool. Like now that I'm, you know, I think the transition of a fitness professional is that now I'm at a point where if people like doing that, cool. Let's intersplice that. But back then I was like, oh, that's stupid. Just lift heavy things. And so I was there for three years. It was my first job out of

college you know i butted heads a little bit with my boss not much because they it was a fully equipped gym i mean it was a pretty legit gym yeah and uh i was able to um just learn like i mean that's when i first started reading t nation and all these other i didn't even know that the site existed until 2002 when I graduated college. And I was like, what is this? That's when I found it. What is this? Who's John Berardi?

Who's Christian Thibodeau? Who's this Day Take guy? He's saying some cool things. I like this. And I started reading everything. I joke that part of my job there was just reading T Nation and getting on the forums. Dude, that was like how I lived in my corporate job. I would print these massive articles and then go to the bathroom and read them.

And people, who's going to argue with me? Like, oh, what are you doing in there? Are you reading T Nation? Like, no. No. I don't feel good. Same thing. Like, my job in graduate school, like my how to make a little extra cash on the side job was,

I was the fitness coordinator at the gym at the university. And I just mostly sat in my office and read T Nation. I was actually reading your articles back then on T Nation like 2005, 2006, 2008. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Yeah, that's when I found you and I found T Nation really was like 05, 06. Yep. So everything I did in my corporate job was like faking, enjoying being there, and then TNation and CrossFit.com videos.

Yeah. That was like how I learned about how to coach people. The first time I ever heard the term CrossFit was on TNation. I'm sure this article is still out there somewhere, but it basically said some people are built to be more weightlifters, some people are just naturally going to be better

fitness competitors, some people are just naturally better strongman competitors. Like, they're all strength sports. Everything's cool. Everyone has, like, the thing that they're going to do a little bit better at. Like, it's all the same. Like, we're all fighting the same fight. It was like this big positive, like, just because you choose weightlifting over powerlifting doesn't mean that someone else can't choose powerlifting and that's cool for them. You doesn't have to be butting heads.

Weightlifting is better than powerlifting and all that except for CrossFit. I was like, what is CrossFit? Why is this guy mad about it? Because they always are like, and then those little people over there that do air squats real fast

in the park. We hate them. Boar shorts. Zumba. Idiots. Yeah. But yeah, like I,

early in my career, I joke, like I said, I joke half my time i was getting paid to read t-nation yeah in a lot of ways and then using what i learned there to like experiment with my clients because i was actually training people i was i was a trainer yeah uh and i was just experimenting with what it would and i joke i mean now i i'm known as like a deadlift guy like i i write about it a lot i i love deadlifts uh back then i was like what's a deadlift guy like I write about it a lot I love deadlifts

back then I was like what's a deadlift I look because I think we can all go back early in our training careers I can look back even when I was training in college and look back I train like a moron like I wish I could go back in time and like retrain myself

anytime I walk into a corporate or not a corporate but like a Globo gym or something like that, and I see somebody do a power clean or a deadlift or something, I'm like, if I could just get three minutes of your time, that'd be really annoying to you. But I could help. I could help. Just push your knees back. It's a squad. Just push it back a little bit.

Find your hamstrings. That's hard as a coach. You just want to walk up and just push your knees just a little bit. It's that hard line of unsolicited advice. It's like, I really want to fix that person's form, but – Please stop pulling the bar with your arms. I used to be like that a lot. Did you?

And now I look at them and I go, please don't talk to me. I don't even want to go down that road. Yeah. I think that's where the iPod helped the most is like you can just put your headphones on and people would not – Okay, don't talk to that guy. Now I wonder when I see them, I'm like, do you know something I don't know? Like, do you know how to move that barbell better than me? Is that why I look so weird?

What are you doing? Is that a new way? Can you teach me that? What is it? Yeah, what is this little thingamabobber that you're doing over here? Are you on Instagram? Do you have a following? Yeah.

That's another conversation I have right there. Talk about that. Oh, man, that grinds my gears. That's the foolproof business plan. You know I'm angry when I say grinds my gears. Yeah, that's the one. We were talking about it yesterday. The foolproof business plan is to teach Instagram models how to move well

so it's not nails on chalkboard when you watch their videos. It's like, oh, you're super. Oh, God, you can't deadlift. You don't even know how to row. Stop. And it was interesting because when instagram went down last week and then all the all the memes went out like all these influencers what are they doing like they're just they're melting down like they built their entire business on just being hot on instagram like what what does happen when that goes away i mean that's that's actually another cool conversation to have like what what what what

are they doing to actually build a business that doesn't revolve on like one revenue stream yeah that's a real thing too like i lost an instagram account one time for for a different business yeah and then i just recently lost my twitter account someone just took it oh i have no idea how to get it back yeah still working on it because it says you're actually in there right now but you're not yeah i'm still signed into my account. How the hell does that happen? I have no idea. I'm still signed into my account, but then my handle has just disappeared.

When I try to do anything, it says I need to re-sign in. When I try to re-sign in, it says that account doesn't exist, even though I'm still signed into it. Man, that scares the life out of me. If your whole life is on Instagram or Twitter and you lose that account, you don't have an email list or a following or a blog or a website. If that happened to me, it would suck, but certainly I have Twitter. You lose that account. I mean, it wouldn't be. You don't have an email list or a blog or a website. If that happened to me, it would suck.

But certainly I have core. I have my blog. I have my distance coaching. I have my speaking. I have other ways of making a living. It's funny that you talk about how your job was basically like reading T Nation. Yeah. How many years have you been writing the weekly column that says things you are supposed to be doing while you're at work? Stuff to read while you're pretending to work?

I might even have to change the title because I think most people are reading it on their iPhone. So it's like stuff to read while you're riding the train or I don't know, something. But that's been years. That was more so me being lazy. I started that just being lazy. It's like, okay. I need content. I need to produce a day of content.

What could I do? And I know I'm reading through the week i like this article i like that article are you still reading articles not admittedly not as much just because i have a two-year-old at home and that's taken up a lot of time uh since he's been in the picture but i i mean i try to like my my schedule now is i drop him off at daycare at eight in the morning yeah and then there's a there's a coffee shop right across the street from his school. I'm living that life with you. So where I try to give myself a good hour and say, okay, I'm going to try my best to avoid social media and email,

and I'm going to dedicate this time to me. Yeah. Because especially the first year that he was in the picture, I really did not had the time to, and I just accumulated all these articles and digital products that were handed my way. Like, hey, watch the stuff I wanted to watch. I just never had a chance to watch it. Now I'm watching it. So that's been lovely. and you guys are familiar with it too when I read somebody else's content or watch their stuff,

certainly I'm not going to recreate it, but I can certainly put my own spin on it. Like here's what I think about it. Here's how I would do it. And that is content. So the more I read, the more it's easier for me to come up with my own content.

It's one of those standing on the shoulders of giants and things. There's nothing new. I didn't invent anything, but you're kind of putting your own spin on it yeah uh and i i don't view myself as uh one of the innovators in the industry like i i i will fully admit that i'm not coming up with new stuff like no no i i and i i often i i often say that i'm i i'm i'm an idiot like i i'm i get really jealous of some people, like Ben Bruno, for example. I know you guys had him on the show recently.

His brain, like the exercises that he comes up with, it's like they're not, like, inherently, like, oh, my God, mind-blowing. But it's like, why did I not think of that? Well, he's also one of those. They're so simple. There's something about the way he does things, too, because I don't know if you've ever been out to his house. Yeah, yeah. Like, this, where we are right now is what, 800, 900 square feet? It's 800 square feet. Yeah. So his is, like, 400. Smaller. And he doesn ever been out to his house. Yeah. Like this, where we are right now is what, 800, 900 square feet? It's 800 square feet.

Yeah. So his is like 400. Smaller. And he doesn't even have a squat rack. Yeah. And he's training some of the best athletes in the world and the most famous performers in the world. Yep. And he's got to get them all in shape.

But he has like four pieces of equipment in there. Yeah. And there's no space. It's very, I mean, him and I are on the same trend. I take a more minimal approach to training people. I feel like if you just give me a squat rack, and he doesn't even have one, but he has barbells and stuff. You can get a lot of good work done.

Not one barbell. He has a trap bar. Yeah, a trap bar. And it's a funky trap bar. It's hooked into a landmine, of course. Yeah, it's a big trap bar too, I think. I forgot what that thing's called. He was going to send us one.

Ben Bruno, where are you at? Yeah, what the heck, Bren? Where are you at, buddy? Look it up, dude. When did you start writing for T Nation? That was kind of more like the natural transition or progression of my career was when I eventually met up on the Internet with a gentleman named Eric Cressy. He and I met.

I say this story a lot, but we met on the Internet one time when it was really kind of creepy to meet people on the internet with a gentleman named Eric Cressy. He and I met I say this story a lot, but we met on the internet one time when it was really kind of creepy to meet people on the internet. Where it's like if you said, hey, I met this person on the internet people are looking at you like, what is that? We don't trust those people. And he... That was before social media was like a big thing. Yeah.

In chat rooms. I think this is a time where there was no social media yet. The very beginning stages of Facebook where it was only like harvard students using it um there was no there was no social media per se but there were forums so t nation and then uh other websites other strength and conditioning websites but he and i met um in a group in New York, and then we just constantly emailed each other and just kind of crossed paths in forums. He graduated UConn and got a job in Connecticut at a gym in Ridgefield, Connecticut. And he was like, hey, dude, they're looking for another trainer.

I know you're itching to get out of central New York. Why don't you come out and interview? So I was like, okay, I'll drive out to connecticut and see what happens and they ended up liking me and hired me and i i had to have that conversation with my mom like hey mom i'm moving to connecticut with the dude i met on the internet we're gonna live together and of course she was like okay what what it was what's happening uh and in it of course it ended up fine yeah we live we were living together in an apartment in Connecticut, and we were there for about a year, and then we moved to Boston.

And it was in that time within Connecticut and transitioning to Boston is when I first started doing a little bit of writing and saying, you know, I think I could take what I'm reading here and kind of apply my own little pizzazz to it and some pop culture references and make it a little bit more engaging, which is kind of what I think I'm known for with writing fitness content. You always have that fun style. Just a little bit more conversational. And Eric, of course, I mean, he being around him for we were roommates for two, two and a half years, being around him and his work ethic.

I mean, that guy and his work ethic. I mean, that guy has a work ethic that's just not a lot of people have. And he would be in his bedroom, closed door, writing a book while I'm watching Lord of the Rings for the 15th time. And certainly being around him helped. It's like, okay, well, maybe I should put a little more effort in building my brand.

Has writing always been a skill of yours? Is that something you enjoy? No. I mean, I enjoy it now. In the beginning, I think any – and I don't even consider myself a bourgeois writer. Yeah. You know, of course, I write. I get paid to do it.

So, I mean, yes yes i am a writer but especially in the beginning i i had no aspirations of like hey i want to i'm going to become this like fitness writer and and see where that takes me it's like oh i'm going to start a little blog that maybe 10 people might read and you know have a few things to say but at the time 10 people was a huge number yeah like nobody had a blog yeah teenage was the only place i think boyle had uh his forum yeah which was like three bucks a month or 10 bucks a month something like that i think that's like a yearly thing now and then i think that i mean that's why crossfit was so awesome to me because there was nobody putting like really good video content out like you could yeah oh man back then video was like so yeah and he was putting training

videos up like still to this day if you produce a dope training montage i'm watching the shit out of that forever i'll watch bodybuilding training montages all day long and see i view that as my i don't like doing video i mean i do them i don't i'm not aggressive with them writing i mean i i think before we started recording i mentioned how the reason why I think I gravitated more to writing was because of my introverted side. Not that I'm a social recluse or anything or I don't like being around people. It's just when I am around people in this profession, I am. I have to be on for many hours at a time. I recharge by just being alone.

Like going to a bookstore, going to a movie by myself, writing on my laptop in a coffee shop. Yeah. You know, so I started writing a few things on my blog, what if you want to call it that. And then it's like, oh, I'm going to see if T Nation will like something I send them. And I sent my first article, which was kindly rejected. And I was like, I was going to try again.

And then eventually, I forgot what my first article was. I think it was like program design for dummies or something to that effect. Yeah. I wrote it. And I got an email back from TC, Luoma, saying, hey, yeah, we're going to use this. And I was like, whoa. I made it. Yeah.

And when that sucker went live that was a big deal yeah like i was probably i think that was in the fall i think it was around 2005 maybe early 2006 because it was that or bodybuilding.com yeah only two that's huge you could actually write an outside source could come in and write it write something and and so it was accepted it got published and that that just was like a little bit of like a snowball effect where it's like okay i got that published then once you're in kinda yeah then you're in and uh and then it just got to the point where if i submitted something it would generally just go up yeah and um and i remember

tc gave me a good piece of advice when i first started writing uh where you know people want to be informed they want to learn informed. They want to learn something new. They want to get something actionable, but they want to be entertained. And so I really latched on to that where it's like, okay, I'm going to throw in some Star Wars references. And especially when it comes to swearing and using vulgar language, like not that I'm egregious with it, but I do think there's authenticity to it if it's used appropriately yeah and i do that with my writing and when i speak certainly you have to temper it for the audience like what i can get away with on t nation i'm not going to do on men's health of course or even bodybuilding.com and when i present

in boston it's different than when i have somewhere in the midwest as far as like the language i use yeah but sometimes it just comes out. That's just who I am. And I like to think that how I write is how I am in person. And I think it comes across that way. But yeah, the T Nation stuff, that was a huge boost to my career as far as my ability to not just be a trainer on the floor making not a lot of money. Well, there was no way to really educate on the masses i mean when we interviewed boyle and he was talking about his like full career and he was saying like the biggest thing that happened to me i had nothing to do with it was like a personal

computer the fact that i could actually educate people on like a wide scale i could write what's in my brain and have potentially an unlimited number of people. Like having infinite people read your stuff is incredible. And I'm very, there's a bit of luck, especially. I always say there's a bit of luck with everyone's career. I hate when people say like, oh, I'm self-made. I'm like, no, there's a bit of luck, asshole. There's a lot of stuff that has to fall in line.

But that time, I mean, again, we're talking early to mid 2000s. Yeah was i was in that realm where it's like okay social media was almost there blogs just became a thing uh and i was one of the early adopters of that yeah and i was consistent with it like i was like okay i'm gonna do it here we go um and i do owe a lot of my career to that just just the fact that I was at the right time. Yeah, because you never know what's coming down the line if you just keep practicing the thing that you enjoy doing. So, you know, it was because, I mean, again, we were talking prior. It was like myself, Boyle, Eric, Breckin Charis. Yeah, all those guys were in there.

And if you go to, like, a Perform Better summit, they all still hang out together. Sure. They're all still in the same like, it's like, oh, you guys were the first ones that did this thing. You built the trust with each other and you kind of looked at each other like, hey, I got a good idea. Let me run it by you. Yep. Oh, you like that idea too? Cool.

Let's go to Perform Better and sell it to a bunch of people. Yeah. Teach them about it. Yep. And then now we've got books and we've got programs. I think there's an entire like publishing, I can't remember the name of the publisher that like produces all of Dan John's stuff, Boyle's stuff.

That's Larry Draper, OT books, something like that. But they, I mean, that whole crew has really stuck together. And I mean, you guys were the,

in a way, like pioneers of putting the articles out. I just called you a pioneer. Yeah. You know, I don't, I got a little't know smile again we were yeah yeah i i have a hard time and i i and i will and i'm pretty candid about it i have a hard time lumping myself with that group of but it was like like the pre 2010 people before it kind of like social media went crazy of where are we going to learn about this stuff? And my first business partner was big into the body for life.

And he used to hang out on those chat boards all the time. And that was like the one of the only places that you could go and find a forum to talk about working out and who was actually knew what the hell was going on. And there's a speaking of like hanging out and meeting people in the industry. I remember the first time I met Mike Boyle and Alvin Cosgrove at the same time. Eric and I, who were then living in Connecticut, we drove, like Alvin and Mike were somewhere presenting, somewhere else in Connecticut. I'm like, hey, we're close by.

You should come and meet us at a bar, which is really weird. Of course they want to meet at a bar after they present. So you should come and hang out and meet up and we can just chat, whatever. So that's what we did. And this is right, I think I maybe had two, three, maybe four articles up on T Nation. So the name was out there. I wouldn't say it was like people knew who I was, but I had a few articles up on there. And at the time,

I always made a, each article had like a little jab at Ben Affleck because at that time I was obsessed with Jennifer Garner. Like I was like a full-blown alias.

Like this is my favorite. This is the best show ever. Like she's, like I love Jennifer Garner. And I would always say, oh, Ben Affleck, I hate him. I only hate him

because I wasn't him. You know, that's really why I was writing about him. You probably lived down the street from here in Boston. Yeah. You're like, Ben Affleck, I hate him. I only hate him because I wasn't him. That's really why I was writing about him. You probably lived down the street from here in Boston. You're like, I hate that guy. I hate him. See him at the grocery store.

So anyways, Eric and I show up at this bar, and Owen and Mike are there. And Owen was like, oh, I think I've read some of your stuff on Teenage. And you're the guy that's obsessed with Jennifer Garner. I was like, yeah, I mean, I guess that's what I'm known for. That's a little creepy, but I guess I don't know if I'm giving off the right vibe here.

I actually write good articles on Deadlifts too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Hopefully I'm putting out good content. So then he's like, oh, well, here's her trainer, Valerie Waters, who's also there. He's like, this is her trainer, Valerie Waters. And's also there. He's like, this is your trainer, Valerie Waters.

And I was like, oh, oh, hi. And then Owen looked straight at me and said, you're never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to sleep with Jennifer Garner. Don't even try. I was like, oh, man. You're like, I'm only one degree away? So close. Yeah, so close. You gave me hope just for a moment. So that was my first meeting of the big guys,

Alan, Mike, and, of course, Valerie. So I always, yeah, that's my first indoctrination meeting. That was, like, one of the coolest parts of going to perform better was, like, I felt like I was walking into, like, the 25-year-old version of myself at, like, T Nation. I was like, oh, you're all still here. Yeah. You all still lift weights.

And they're all still, yeah. I think what's great about Perform Better is that everyone practices what they preach. Yeah. You know, they're all still in it. Yeah. Dan John still puts out a book, like, every year. Yeah, that guy, man. He just hangs out in his garage, trains strong people.

Still training people. I love that. I think there's a lot to be said about that. I do think as far as integrity in the fitness industry, I think that's important. You don't train people. I talk about that a lot when I present to other trainers. There's a reason why. When I opened up Core, I was at Cressy Sports Performance for eight eight years one of the co-founders uh full-blown coach i was

training a lot of people and when i eventually opened up this spot i had to draw the line in the sand as far as like okay how many how many hours what do i want to make first of all okay here's what i want to make training people how many clients do i need to do that as far as like my price point and then i had to draw a line in the sand as far as like, okay, how many hours per week do I want to be coaching? And I decided what that was because, again, I still have to factor in writing responsibilities, travel responsibilities, plus then a wife, now a wife and kid. And training kind of becomes like the way you just break even on monthly costs.

Yes. Which is a really tough business. So now I'm coaching 20 hours a week. That's still a really big number. It's still a fair amount. That's a big number. And I do semi-private. So it's not 21-on-one sessions.

It's 20 sessions where I might have four people in here. Maybe sometimes five, sometimes it's three. But I have a hard time writing about how to train people, how to talk about assessment, how to talk about program design or

motivation if I'm not actually training people in real life. However minimal that is. I'm not saying like 20 hours is like the guru cutoff point. Yeah.

You've got to keep your head in the game. Yeah. 20 hours is kind of like a full-time coaching schedule. And I tend to respect the coaches more that are still in it than the ones that are just kind of like writing about stuff. Because I think even Ben, not to bring him up all the time, but he said it a few times where the bullshit meter, when you read somebody's programming, is like you can tell the ones

that actually coach people don't just by like the programming. It's like that person doesn't coach anyone. Like that workout takes like two and a half hours to do just to get through half of it. So, yeah, I do think it's great when even the older guard, so to speak, Dan, Mike Boyle, Gray Cook, Sue Falzone, I mean they're still, working their ass off, which I really have respect.

When we went in and, I mean, we're headed to MBSC a little bit later today. But when we walked in there, dude, Boyle's gym is so rad. Not only is it huge. Wait, you mean this isn't like a beautiful gym? His gym is like five times the size of like any, especially kind of like an actual strength conditioning gym. I would say a lot of them are this size, maybe a little bit bigger, but there just aren't a ton of people that are genuinely interested

in like pure strength conditioning the way that he's teaching it. You walk into his gym and there's a bunch of like 10-year-olds learning how to sprint. And they're doing trap bar deadlifts. And they've got big goblet squats going on in the corner. And you're like, holy shit. Like where did he come from to be able to find like from 10 years old to Eichel's hanging out and everywhere in between.

There's adults. There's parents. Yeah. It's like, wow, that guy's really created in a way the system that most people can't create in a in a gym especially in strength conditioning because it's hard to find well people also how many years of coaching and experience is he he's so rad right he created his own position at bu yeah yeah like that was the one of the coolest stories of like yeah i just walked into this little room and said like i'm the strength strength coach. Like, are you, who gave you that title?

Like I did. Okay. Well, does anyone believe you? Nope, but I'm going to make them. Yeah. I'll make it better.

Yeah. And, uh, it just goes to show that, uh, you know, as far as success in the industry, it is experience and it's just like doing the work.

Yeah. I mean, it sounds very lame of vanilla to say, I understand that, but it's, it's, I, I,

I, I, I have such a hard time impressing on young fitness professionals how because they of course in the and the advent of social media and the internet it's like i want to be famous and making a lot of money now and it's like that's not really how it works one thing awesome about social media is when they when people do kind of lash out at what you're doing or what you're posting and you're like this actually happened we're like on boil right now he very much did this to me where I was like in a forum with him and I was like you know not all CrossFit's real shitty like you can do it well and then like two years later I was like Boyle might have been right Boyle might have been right he and he was like when we talked to him and he was like yeah I uh just I've been there before he's like I know where

you were at you were doing it right you were on the've been there before. He's like, I know where you were at. You were doing it right. You were on the path. Just keep going. Yeah. I was like, thanks, Dad. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, because that's a lot of controversial points.

But if you understand why he's saying what he's saying, I feel like he's pretty spot on most of the time. And he's a good example of a guy who I wouldn't call him confrontational. I wouldn't call him. I. I wouldn't call him. I mean, he's set in his ways, but he's also very open-minded, which I respect the tongue. He's certainly not abashed to say, hey, I was wrong. I've changed my mind on this point. I mean, he's done that many, many times.

But I lost my train of thought. I feel like the more experience you get, the more you gravitate toward Boyle. You realize he's trained a lot of people. It's hard to discount that many years of coaching. Yeah, it takes a certain amount of experience to understand someone else who has a lot of experience because they're saying it for a particular set of reasons where if you're brand new, you just don't have that perspective yet. Yeah, and it's hard for me to discount that much

experience yeah i mean i think you guys dan john's another guy like that too yeah you look at his program and it's so simple so simple and like his books you read them you're like oh i'm just supposed to show up and work hard yeah but do it every day yeah like every day so simple don't take a day off and so when i when i first when i first started reading your stuff and crusty stuff in 2006 i did a a one season with the colorado rockies and so you know when i first when i first started reading your stuff and crusty stuff in 2006 i did a a one season with the colorado rockies and so you know baseball a lot of shoulder stuff you guys write a lot about shoulders like how did you get into kind of the shoulder game i know you said you played baseball yes was that really what what got you into it or that we joked about that a lot

because when we opened up crusty sports performance we certainly didn't open it under the context like hey we're gonna we're to be the baseball guys. That was not. We just wanted to have a gym and, like, make a career and actually be able to pay our bills. So when Pete Dupuis, Eric, and myself opened up Cressy Sports Performance out in Hudson, Massachusetts, it was inside an indoor batting facility. So we basically sequestered this corner uh put up our walls put up

our put in our equipment so that in of itself kind of led to training baseball players um and in and we also when we opened up the facility in 2007 we had and we we kind of already had a client roster because where eric was previously uh his client roster basically just followed him to Cresty Sports Performance. I was training at a high-end gym in the city, and CSP is 25 miles outside of Boston. So I had one client who was like, yeah, I'll come out to Hudson. I was like, all right, cool. But I didn't expect anyone to travel from Boston out there. So we had a set. We had, via Eric, a client roster of 30 to 40 young athletes ready to go.

And what was nice was that three, I forget if it was three to five of them, were athletes of a local baseball team that were close to Hudson. And they trained a whole offseason, and they ended up winning the state baseball championship. One of the players ended up becoming state baseball player of the year. And what was nice is the coach was very much approving of what we were doing. Like, he was all about what we were doing, which helped a ton. Because in baseball, especially that –

It doesn't always happen like that if you're not in that world. And it was still hard. A lot of times you get flack from head coaches and sport coaches like like either especially in baseball world back in the day like weightlifting is bad for you it'll make you tight you make you muscle bound like they're all these like old myths associated with exactly what we had to do it was all about just like especially for pitchers just like just getting your leg work in which basically means like going for jogs yeah it was very old school did you run into that at the rockies were people kind of against what you were doing at all no they hired you to be there no no not so much i mean uh the big league strength coach was awesome the minor league coordinator

was awesome um and the players pretty much just had to do what we say except for like except for the big league guys all the minor league players just have to just have to do what you say the big league guys have a little more flexibility they can kind of give you the finger and walk away if they don't want to do it but but it's their fucking career and yeah yeah and if they don't want to do what you say the big league guys have a little more flexibility they can kind of give you the finger and walk away if they don't want to do it but but it's their fucking career and yeah yeah and if they don't want to do it you're just like great you don't want to stay in if you want to stay in the league for an extra five years because you're healthy for longer then that's up to you yeah yeah and and that and that was what we fought a lot early in in those years was like that that old boys club way of approaching strength and conditioning of baseball players

because you nailed it it's like strength training is going to make you, it's going to slow you down. It's going to bulk you up. We don't want that. Like I was a pitcher. So running poles was our legwork. Totally. Which, no. So, but really like we all, that high school coach was very much a fan of what we were doing.

And because, and the three guys that were training with us were kind of like the mavens of the club. They were the upperclassmen. And if those guys were doing it and doing well, and they told the underclassmen that, yeah, you should be going to work out, of course they're going to be like, yeah, let's go. So eventually we had more or less the entire team training with us. And that kind of bled into more local college players, which bled into some more of the local professional players.

And two, because of Eric's expertise, let's be honest, there's not many people in the world that know the shoulder better than Eric. So it made sense that we would gravitate towards the overhead athlete, you know, in a sport that relies a lot on shoulder health and shoulder performance. Were you guys into that before training the baseball players, or was that a result of – Well, Eric got into shoulders because he basically self-rehabbed himself from a shoulder injury, and he just became a shoulder geek.

Yeah. And so he had written many articles on T-Nation and his website on shoulder stuff yeah and then um you know he's just i mean he's just an anatomy nerd like again there's not many people that know the body yeah better than him he's like an encyclopedia it's like he'll quote like research articles off the top of his head like when he's talking i'm like i barely remember like what i had for no one's one's listening anymore. So, and then we, at some point we had to have a team conversation where we're like, okay, do we really want to like be that focused or that much of a niche where it's like, okay, we are going to be coming to baseball guys. Like, cause we were scared that we were going to lose revenue because like, oh, they're just doing baseball.

Well, screw it. We're not going to lose revenue because, like, oh, they're just doing baseball. Well, screw it. We're not going to go there. But we also saw that it was an underserved community, and there was a lot to be had there as far as, like, building the culture. And, you know, so we ran with it. And, of course, it's now become where I think if you discuss training baseball players, and particularly just strength and conditioning facilities in general, like Cresty Sports Performance is listed in the top, if not the top.

One thing I learned from Alan Cosgrove you mentioned earlier, the top of mind, I forget what his actual saying is there, but it's something about having you be the first thing that pops into someone's head when someone says baseball. If you're top of mind, then being being niche is that much easier like a baseball player who do i need to talk to you and they're like fucking tolling general corps eric cressy bam go there yep especially if you're training guys at the elite level they want the best yes they can if they can afford it and if they can logistically make it happen when they

can show up at your facility like and you're the best and you're the first person that pops into their mind you're going to get that client and and It's to the point now where there's a Jupiter facility that Eric opened up in 2015. That's in Florida, not in our space. Yeah. Good clarification there. That'd be, yeah, we're in Jupiter. I can hit the ball so far. I guess on Jupiter you wouldn't hit it far at all.

Too much gravity out there. So that, I mean, that, of course, because, you know, obviously because of spring training and that's, I mean, who wants to train in Boston, Massachusetts in January? Although, even when I was still there and even now, I was there a couple weeks ago hanging out, and there's still many pro baseball guys that train there. And it's like a, I wouldn't say rite of passage,

but it's like a competition. Like, oh, I train in Boston in the winter. I'm hardcore. So you sign your second contract. I'm not in Arizona or Florida. Yeah, I'm not in Florida playing golf. You have to have your second contract to go to the one in Florida. Yes, yes.

So you have a bunch of kids in there, and you guys have pro baseball players. Are you guys treating the kids on a – like how do those programs differ? Are they very similar? They're more similar than they're dissimilar. I think it's just tempering the movements. I mean, we're very much – when I was there, we're very much movement pattern-based, like hinge, squat, carry, push, pull.

Like that's – I mean mean i really don't think you have to make it more complex than that yeah uh but then of course what we were doing with a 13 or 14 year old as far as teaching a basic movement pattern was a little bit that's where the difference was like you know they're goblet squatting these guys are using camber bars versus chains you know it's still squat but it's just a little bit more of a higher higher echelon of squatting um but it's very much i i honestly and i know we're bringing up boyle's name a lot but he would say there's a lot more similarities between certainly even age groups in a certain sport but just the just sports in general whether you're working with a football player a baseball player a, a sprinter, there's way more similarities than

there are differences. Basic pattern. It was either Gray Cook or Boyle. I was at NSCA and one of them was speaking on stage, and I forget, I want to say it was Boyle, actually, where he was talking about writing programs for the university, and they were like, we just took the workout and just crossed out baseball and wrote hockey. All the

programs were essentially the same. The body is the same body, like that joint by joint approach to to technique and how you're supposed to be moving applies across the board like we're making better athletes and then the sport coach is making them better specifically at baseball or hockey yes you know you take you take the demands of the sport and you say okay where do they what's required to be successful in that sport like as far as like the joint by joint approach like what what does the joint need to be able to do to play that sport uh and i think what what makes people elite is a lot of times they just pick the right parents you know you know some like baseball players are known to be pretty hyper mobile uh pretty

lax so that they have a lot of and of course playing the sport you get bony adaptation so you get a little bit more retroversion or external rotation in that shoulder so you're able to throw a baseball harder um but you know looking at the demands of the sport what what is required to throw a baseball is not is not healthy for the shoulder uh in an overhead setting like i mean that's different underhand like with softball pitchers but when you're throwing a baseball uh the the joint distraction forces that are going on that shoulder are really really intense yeah um you know to the point where the way we describe is in order when you release the baseball like the rotator cuff is i mean it's equivalent to

rotating if it weren't doing its job like that that humeral head is spinning 40 times a second i mean it's just violent yeah uh and then not to mention just that layback position. Then you've got to decelerate that thing. That layback position. When you see a still shot of a pitcher throwing a baseball, right before they go to release the ball, that's nasty. Especially when you would see a guy like Pedro that's, like, small, but through 98.

And, like, his hand would be, like, below his elbow. And just his hand would be like below his elbow. And doing that. Just think about the joint distraction on the elbow there. Just holding it there hurts. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, you got to do that 110 times tonight. Yeah. Every single time perfectly in the same position. And then so from a training standpoint,

what can we do to offset those forces as best we can, but then try to prevent them from breaking down as much because it's going to happen. I mean, we just try to offset it as much as we can. So certainly from a sport-to-sport perspective, those are where the differences are because a lot of the arm care work we would do for a right-handed pitcher doesn't apply to a hockey player.

It doesn't have to say we aren't being aware of shoulder health. I mean, of course we are because, I mean, they're ramming their shoulders into a wall. And, I mean, there's a lot of blunt trauma there too. But a hockey player isn't really required to be up above their head if ever. The hockey player is going to have a lot more hip issues than the baseball player. Sure, exactly. Yep.

So it's just a matter of taking the demands of the sport and then taking that into context. But as far as the movements in the gym, the main ones are pretty much the same. I think it's where maybe the warm-ups and the correctives and the fillers is kind of where most of the differences are. I mean, most of our audience is more in the CrossFit, weightlifting, powerlifting world.

But shoulder injuries are huge in CrossFit. Every sport has their every sport has their thing you know if we're talking soccer we've been talking about acl tears and sprained ankles and whatever it is so but in the crossfit space you know shoulders are probably the most commonly injured joint you know in your mind to like really dig into the shoulder like what makes and maintains a healthy shoulder so i always when i present on the shoulder i think i usually try to hone there's a lot we can talk about, but I usually hone in on overhead mobility, like the ability to bring your arm overhead, so shoulder flexion. You know, dealing with an overhead athlete's a thing, but certainly CrossFitters very much want to be able to do stuff over their head.

And even if they're not a CrossFitter, like lifting over your head is kind of an important thing to do. And I usually say, okay, well, when I'm talking to fitness professionals or when I'm talking with a client or or a person who comes in my shoulder hurts i want to look at their ability to do that uh i want to see okay can they get their their hand overhead yes they will but they're probably going to compensate somewhere yeah you know so i always tell people like yeah when you're looking at somebody's shoulder flexion don't just look at the hands because people are going to get their hands over their head but they're going to be cranking through the lower back they might have a little forward head posture they might go into a rib flare yeah you know and that's something to be

cognizant of like that is important i mean we want to probably be able to correct that and i'm i'm just a stupid meathead strength coach like i'm not diagnosing anything yeah i'm not saying like this is the cause of your shoulder pain because of this but i can look at movement and be like oh that's a little off and wonky like we maybe want to address that and like and see if that helps and i just say well what what actions have to happen at the shoulder blade to get the arm overhead and we say it's upper rotation we say it's posterior tilt and we say it's protraction and then i say an upper rotation is kind of the big one that we're after i want to see like how well did the shoulder blade and the arm bone,

the humerus, play to get the arm overhead? Like, is the shoulder blade actually getting into upward rotation? Is it allowed to move? And when you're dealing with a lot of CrossFitters and when you're dealing with a lot of meatheads who lift a lot of heavy weight, you'll see that that shoulder blade is kind of, like, stuck down and together. Like, it might move, but but not enough and then that's where the compensations comes like they're bending their elbow they're cranking through the lower

back because they want to get up there right um and then i'm like okay well what muscles are involved with that upper traps lower traps serratus and if i know that from a strength and conditioning standpoint from an anatomy standpoint i can look at the movement and be like well i can use my my my knowledge of anatomy and and pyomechanics say well look at the movement and be like well i can use my my my knowledge of anatomy and and pyro mechanics say well these are the muscles and stuff that are in play like that probably aren't doing their job so let's hone in on that um you know as far as like most a lot of people need more upper trap work you know uh because it's just that force couple of like pulling that shoulder blade up and upper rotation so So then when I know that, then that guides my programming.

Because, again, most people are stuck in that – their shoulder blades are stuck in that downwardly rotated position and they're together and they can't – they're kind of like – I often say the shoulder blades are kind of making out. I want them to get a little further apart when they come up overhead. So if I know all that information, then that's what dictates my programming. And then it's really as simple as that. I mean, that's about how I try to break it down to them anyways.

Yeah. So referencing that joint-by-joint approach again, like you want to have good thoracic mobility, you want to have good scapular stability, and then you want to have good glenohumeral mobility. Thoracic extension is very intuitive if you're trying to get overhead. But how does thoracic rotation and having enough, the ability to twist side to side at your torso play into shoulder health yeah i mean especially when you talk about like the decelerating the body when they are

throwing a baseball if you don't have access to that rotation that that's going to have that's going to pay dividends on the shoulder because then you're going to compensate somewhere um i often say that the shoulder blades are at the mercy of the rib cage. Like if that isn't able to move, whether we're talking about extension or rotation, the shoulder blades are going to have a hard time following suit. And then that's where they, if they're stuck, that's going to affect the glenohumeral joint. We started talking about impingement. So, you know, I'll look at rotation. I know there's many, many screens we can do to look at rotation. I just stand behind somebody and I ask them to turn one way or the other, left or right. If I can see the opposite shoulder, I'm like, okay, we're probably good.

Like anything we do in the weight room, we're going to pass. But if I'm dealing with a rotational athlete, they're probably going to need a little bit more. And if it's lacking, whether we're working with an overhead athlete, a golfer who needs a lot of rotation, I certainly want to see like left or right what the discrepancy is. And if it is lacking, then certainly I'm going to be addressing that. How important is symmetry for an athlete that is very obviously not playing a symmetrical sport?

You're a baseball pitcher. You only throw with one arm, and so you're only twisting violently in one direction, et cetera. Yeah, that's a great question. Because we can make a case, I think, that it's because of the asymmetry why they're successful in that sport. So when we look at a baseball pitcher's shoulder and they have more external rotation on that throwing side and less internal, but it's the exact opposite on the other side,

the old train of thought is like, oh, my God, they're asymmetrical. We need to fix that. But really what we're looking after is total range of motion, like combining external and internal rotation. And if you do that, you'll have to find that both sides are the same. You know, Mike Reinhold has talked about that often as far as like don't just look at a – they lack internal rotation on one side. Look at the total range of motion on both sides.

And then oftentimes you'll find that they're the same. But certainly when I look at if they lack internal rotation on that throwing side, it is kind of a predictive pattern of the sport. It's just common sense. They're going to have more external, less internal. So I'm not necessarily trying to correct that.

But certainly trying to maintain it as best we can with their programming. I think I've heard Reinald say it as one approach to fixing that problem. If you have that, you guys call it glenohumeral internal rotation deficit. If you have extra rotation on your throwing side and then the total range of motion side to side, if there's a discrepancy, you make up for it by getting more internal rotation on the throwing side,

and that tends to alleviate some problems and even even with that it isn't about stretching or smashing or thrashing into it like i'm not trying to dig into the joint and trying to release stuff yeah um that's where we start talking about like positional breathing and and building that proximal stability so a lot so again like if if we can build stability get the get the ribs down build more stability there getting that canister position get the core on you know a lot so again like if if we can build stability get the get the ribs down build more stability they are getting that canister position get the core on you know a lot of times you see that distal mobility and i'm sure i don't know if it was great cook or there's some smart physical therapy person that originated that concept but it may and i know there's some out

there that disagree with that mindset and they they're much smarter than me and they can break it down a little bit more. But it makes a lot of sense to me as a strength coach, and I've seen it time and time and time again. If I get people to do like a forceful exhale in a plank position or even just in a deep squat position, and I get them out of that rib flare position, get their ribs down, which gets their abs on, push them into better alignment,

oftentimes I'll see an improvement in their shoulder range of motion or even their hip range of motion because they're in a better position. I don't have to do incessant stretching on somebody, which, let's be honest, a lot of people, that's all they do. It's like their go-to is like, I got to stretch, I got to mobilize, I got to stretch, I got to mobilize. I would argue that what is often deemed as the mobility deficit for most people

is lack of stability because the body is kind of putting the emergency brakes on because they're not in a good position to begin with. So the stiffness is compensation for instability. Yeah, exactly. Great. That's learning. That's the drop the mic moment right there. When you're working with people that are more like strength athletes,

if they're in strength sports, everything is pretty much a bilateral. You're lifting a barbell over your head. Do you change the program or address the shoulder issues differently? Because if you're throwing a baseball, it's a single arm. If you're running, playing hockey, I think that a lot of times the back squat issue gets into like, well, if you're coaching an Olympic lifter, you should probably, it's a bilateral sport. You're standing on two legs and lifting the weights. Are you addressing some of those issues differently in strength sport athletes?

I try not to match too much, at least in the offseason, like what they do on the field in the weight room. So I try to do more of what they don't do yeah you know as far as i mean and actually baseball especially in particular pitcher is they're on they're on one leg quite a bit yeah uh so like as far as like their landing leg and even even batters like sometimes they're even on one leg and obviously they're running yeah um so i i'm still trying to incorporate single leg work and you know at least when i was at crusty sports performance we didn't back squat any of our guys with a straight bar but we would do safety squat we would do a camber bar because just like the at-risk position of the of the shoulders so we want to protect them as much as we can uh we see we still i'm like i'm like that too i had a slap

tear in 2008 yeah and just holding on to a straight bar it's horrible yeah it's not it's not worth it you can still squat it's just with a safety squat bar or a giant cambered bar because that is just less stress on the shoulder. Not that I think someone's going to blow out their shoulder joint by doing three sets of a back squat, but it's like why risk it if we don't have to? They're not a power lifter, so who gives a shit? They just need to load themselves and work their legs. Exactly arms doesn't matter that much uh but yeah being in kind of the crossfit space

if if they have that some of those asymmetries um do you think that spending a lot of time on that weaker side if you're not doing it so much talking about like a strength discrepancy yeah sure i mean if you could just say well oh we'll just do some extra sets on that one side and honestly like i talked about this i talked about this last weekend when I was down in Raleigh speaking to a bunch of trainers. Dean Somerset and I, we do a lot of presentations together, complete shoulder hip blueprint. And he does a better job than I do in explaining it. But I think we need to lean into more asymmetry rather than trying to correct it at all times. Cause if, cause if you look at,

if you look at skeletons and there's, there's many pictures of people's different acetabulum is pointing a different ways from roll next being different lengths and all that. Everyone's different. So I don't, I don't buy into like, we have to be in a symmetrical stance doing a deadlift squat, whatever. And if, and honestly, like, we have to be in a symmetrical stance doing a deadlift, squat, whatever.

And honestly, like, if it feels like garbage, for some people it will. I understand there's a standardization of assessment and screen and there's a starting point. I get it. But if I have somebody do a little bit more of a wider stance and they actually rotate that right foot a little bit more and it feels better when they squat and it matches when i do their hip scour on the assessment i can i can i don't have x-ray vision i don't i can't i don't know but i can do like a little hip scour and then check their hip flexion and do their internal external rotation and it matches that and it feels better they feel more stable why not use that yeah i'm not going to force them into a symmetrical stance and i understand why

some trainers and coaches and fitness professionals would be like well aren't you causing more harm if you if you don't fix it well i would argue the whole point i i usually do like a 10-15 minute thing on like like bony structures and this is like every you know retroversion and yeah and antiverted hips and femoral necks and here here's the evidence. You know, these are real bones. Not that I'm bringing real bones in. It's a picture. You have a suitcase of them? Yeah.

That'd be tough to get through TSA on that. It's just a body. But usually if we present it in that way, then it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, I had a trainer this past weekend when I was down in Raleigh who's that person. He was like, oh, I was always told to squat with a symmetrical stance. My feet have to be this way. I can't go in.

My toes don't deviate. And squatting has never felt good. So I spent 45 minutes talking about squat assessment. I was like, here's the anatomy stuff. Now I want you guys to play around with foot position and width and stance and see what feels better. And if you see an improvement in range of motion or if you get rid of your little hip sway from side to side or butt weight.

Well, and it's tough too because you look at the best lifters in the world and the best pitchers in the world, like, well, their bones are built to be the best pitchers in the world. Like you're talking about the ability to get their arms so far back. Yeah, and it's like, well, you can look at the top quarter of a percent in the world that have the perfect structure, but nobody else has that. So we shouldn't use that specific thing of looking at a professional or like a gold medal Olympic lifter and saying, like,

we have to look like that every time we squat. That guy's femurs are four inches long. Of course he squats well. We have to look like that every time we squat. That guy's femurs are four inches long. Yeah. Of course he squats well. And, yeah, I always hate that analogy of Olympic lifter depth. Yeah. Like when you watch an Olympic lifter catch a clean or do a front squat, they're ass to grass.

It's like, oh, that's such a beautiful squat. And it is. Yeah. It's beautiful. Perfect. But they pick the right pants because they have a shallower hip socket they probably have most of the time they were yanked out of an elementary school because they could squat that well yeah like you don't you no longer think about anything except olympic lifting yeah exactly um so so i think going back bring it

full circle i think when it comes to symmetry asymmetry, I don't think we need to correct it as much as we think. Certainly we have to take into context of injury history and currently symptomatic and stuff like that and kind of peeling back the onion there, but more often than not, I lean into the asymmetry a little bit more than trying to

correct it. Right on. We're going to take a quick break and I want to talk a little bit more about that connection between mobility and stability once we get back. Right on. We're going to take a quick break and I want to talk a little bit more about kind of that connection between mobility and stability. Sure. Once we get back. Right on. 113 and 47. 88 and 42. Do you know what those numbers are? 113 is the average heart rate variability that I have. My average resting heart rate is 47. Last night, I only recovered 35%. That means my HRV went down to 88 and my resting heart rate actually got better and went to 42. You know how I know this stuff? Because I have a Whoop band, and I love it. Whoop is this really cool performance tool that I get to wear. It's changing the way people track their fitness and optimize their training.

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Friends, Monday. The One Ton Challenge. It's coming. Prologue. John Cena in the house. code barbell shrugged save 200 bucks you're gonna love it monday monday friends monday the one ton challenge it's coming prologue john cena in the house man we're about to light this thing on fire friends it's gonna be so lit so lit one ton challenge six lifts one goal one ton can you snatch clean jerk squat squat dead bench, PRs, add them up, get to 2,000 pounds. I'm going to tell you how to do it on Monday. Welcome back to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson,

Tony Gentilcore. Hi. We're in Brookline, Massachusetts. Not Brooklyn, Brookline. Brookline, which is literally like a nine iron away from saying I'm in downtown Boston. It's not that far at all. Fenway Park's right over there. Fenway. Man, that was so

cool. The big green building was like in the background of the video shoot we were doing yesterday. Plus where you

guys are staying. It's right there. It's like right next door basically. All these cool places. Can you imagine during game night?

It's a very quiet area where you guys are staying. We should have waited a couple weeks for baseball season to start. When baseball season

is happening, like when they win the World Series, they probably almost burn down our hotel. Like it's right in the firing line of the big party. We're just so used to it here. It's been a good decade for you guys. Yes, and I've only been here. I moved here in 2006.

Are you a Yankees guy? No. And it's funny because, again, I moved here in 2006. So I've been here 12, 13 years. And it's like we've been to the Super Bowl five times. We've won three World Series. The Celtics have won. The Bruins have won.

I was like, man. Yeah. I actually went to high school up here. And everybody was so tortured when I was here. And now I look at everyone and I'm like, you guys win everything. Yes. It's cool. Yeah.

We were talking a little bit about mobility and stability, and one thing that was kind of in my brain as you were talking in the beginning of the part, when you mentioned mobility in the shoulder, were you guys doing a lot of soft tissue work before? Because in our world, Kelly Starrett was kind of one of the first guys with Mobility WOD that, like, introduced a lot of the soft tissue work, self-manipulation kind of things that you can um do to loosen up tight traps yeah like lats things that people can do on their own what were you guys doing kind of at the beginning and then how has that like so i think we did your very standard

boring vanilla foam rolling first which no most people skip yeah but we were doing i was looking back not too long ago like eric and i filmed a an original like cressy sports performance foam rolling series on youtube back in like 2008 it's got a couple hundred thousand views i was like oh man it just shows me like it's still your number one video basically yeah basically uh so we're doing we're doing that uh but we also recognize that um especially at least for the So we were doing that, but we also recognized that, especially at least with the demographic we were working with and who they're working with now, we need to –

the shoulder, you sacrifice a lot of mobility to – or sacrifice a lot of stability to get mobility. So they rarely need more mobility in that joint. If anything, it's like what Doug was talking about earlier. It's like let's work on a little bit more of the stability component yeah um uh and then see if that kind of gets things shaken free a little bit but it was just normal uh foam rolling maybe yes peck like the lacrosse ball into the peck you guys were doing that sure yeah yeah we were doing i mean it's just like Upper Cross Syndrome 101.

People get tight in the front. They're weak in the back. Let's work on that and get people in a better position. Because that's what it really comes down to is alignment and position. Because Mike Reinhold, we brought him up a couple times or brought him up in this conversation where he did an in-service for us at CSP a few years ago that really kind of set in line a big dichotomous change of thought on my end as far as like which is more important mobility or stability because I think in the industry we can divide it and we can set a line say your team mobility yeah you guys are team stability

and we could probably straight up debate team it and like you guys the mobility side will come up with like 101 different ways why mobility should be stressed. And then the stability team could do the same thing. And that's exactly what he did with our – there's the staff. It's like, what do you guys think is more important, stability or mobility? I'm team stability. No, mobility is more – no, it was like – we were like, no, this is why.

And he made a point saying they're both important. However, alignment should be stress first. Because if you stretch somebody in misalignment, meaning more mobility work, you're going to create more of an imbalance or more instability, I should say. And then if you strengthen or stabilize in a misalignment, you're going to create more of an imbalance. So again, whether we're talking hips, whether we're talking shoulders, we need to work on getting people in a better position, alignment,

and then we can focus on whether it's a stability issue or a mobility issue. So yeah, I think that's where we need to kind of bring the conversation to is just looking at alignment, and then we can figure out which one is more important. Yeah. Did the breath work piece and understanding that, was that around? When did that start? It feels like that's a new-ish thing. New-ish.

I would say when I was at Cresty Sports Performance, we were one of the first facilities to start implementing that a little bit more or making it a thing, along with IFAST, Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman. I feel like Postural Restoration Institute was really pushing that. The PRI stuff, they've been around for decades, at least two decades, but it wasn't until mid-2000s where the strength and conditioning crowd got its claws on. It was like, oh, look at this bright, shiny new thing that we should be talking about.

We need something new to talk about. Yeah. And I remember, gosh, I forget the name. shiny new thing that we that we we need something new to talk about yeah um and i remember gosh i forget the name um it was uh uh it was on the the training staff of the arizona diamondbacks um i forget i'm i'm drawing a blank but he came and did a presentation at uh crusty sports performance and started talking about positional breathing and i remember too when i started reading some of the dr evan osar stuff uh who's based out of chicago he wrote a book back in the in the in the 2000s or mid 2000s where he was kind of one of the first guys that i read that was talking about breathing patterns and positional breathing and you know at that point i'm like ah whatever

no he's not talking about deadlifts this is stupid. But now it's like now I'm all about it. And it's just like getting people to understand the scissor position, which is like pelvic floor, rib cage, or our part, you know, where the extended rib flare position, and getting people more in that canister position where things are stacked. And I think probably circa 2009, 2009 2010 2011 was when we started implementing some of the pri centric stuff uh eric i believe eric went to one of the modules uh we we had uh staff like miguel aragoncillo he i think he now he's the only coach in massachusetts who's pri

certified as a strength coach uh and michael m, who's a PRI practitioner from Maine, would come down and do in-services for us and really kind of like explain it to us in a way that was not elvish. And then Clay and I was like, okay, this makes sense. And I think we did a good job of implementing it in the sense where, because it's a deep, deep, deep, deep, deep rabbit hole. Yeah. And it is very much a pet peeve of mine in the industry where it's like. It's currently a pretty lucrative one, too.

It's lucrative. But now it's a double-edged sword because now I see we have strength coaches and personal trainers spending 30 minutes blowing into balloons when it's like, no, we need to fucking train. That's an interesting subject. So you're an expert on the shoulder. Well, expert might be debatable. You're very, very well versed in the shoulder. And as a strength coach, I run into this a lot.

When you see the problem, but we're not doctors. Yes. And we have to, where does that line, if there's a line, because there's a ton of gray area in there, when someone comes in and says, overhead sucks, how do I get here? And it's like, well, we don't have to diagnose people, but the movement patterns are really like, they're so obvious to us.

Yes. But we're not doctors. And I think that as an industry, we get really, it's very tough for a lot of coaches. And then you get into the breathing aspect of things i think and that really gets it can be you you start talking about scope of practice yes where where is that line drawn um and i think uh uh john russon would say like you know now you're at a point where you have a lot of trainers crossfit strength and conditioning coaches whatever who are doing really shitty physical therapy when they shouldn't be.

Yeah. It's like there is definitely a scope of practice here. You know, in my defense, I think I'm at a point in my career where, and I'm not putting my hands on people. Like, I'm certainly not. I'm not doing any, like, manual therapy. But I can teach somebody, like, okay, when I say breathing drills, I'm not talking about oxygen exchange. Like, evolution is taking care of that for us. Like, we're cool.

But I am talking about position. Yeah. Like, getting a full exhale, getting all your air out to get the ribs down and get that canister position. And then, yeah, then we can start talking about balloons and stuff. But PRI, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of positions they put people in. You know, then we talk about, like, sucking that left hip in and doing heel taps i mean i don't really go that far down the rabbit hole but if i can do a dead bug a dead book to me is like positional breathing 101 crocodile breathing yeah as far as fms um that's positional breathing 101 and a lot of that is learning people

to understand that we're talking about getting like a 360 or 3d expansion of the rib cage so it's not just breathing forward or breathing up we want to breathe out we want to breathe back and get the rib cage moving which is going to help the shoulder blades move a little more which is going to put the glenocubal joint in a better position so oftentimes my first layer when i'm if someone comes into me with a shoulder injury or their shoulder currently doesn't feel great that is often the first layer I gravitate towards. Yeah, I screen it. I assess it.

And I'm just like, okay, let's play around with some things. Let's work on this positional breathing stuff. You know, just get you to learn what it is to get all your air out. Learn to breathe. Like, actually get lateral expansion of your rib cage. Breathe into your back. I'll have them do five five ten breaths of one or two different drills and then i reassess shoulder flexion and oftentimes what do i see it's better

i see an improvement and they get more range of motion it doesn't hurt so then i'm like okay well i'm i think i'm barking up the right tree here and and let's run with that you know then we can start talking about doing like you know pec release and acumobility stuff. And that's another layer. And then certainly just getting shit to move too. That's another layer too. Then we can start talking about, okay, what are some drills I can do to activate this radius? Like doing more reaching drills.

What are some drills I can do to get more upper trap involvement? Like forearm wall slides with a reach. Then I start throwing that stuff in. But oftentimes the positional breathing is layer number one. And when we started implementing that stuff at Crested Sports Performance, and I did a dead bug or a deep squat belly breathing or whatever, and I saw people getting improved range of motion in their shoulder flexion or their internal rotation of their shoulder or the hip.

I mean, something's working when I do it, so I'm going to run with it. And it is just one to two, maybe three drills. It's like, okay, now we're going to go lift shit. We're not spending 45 minutes. Yeah, as long as we're not just saying, like, you have this. Don't do that. Don't do that. That is way out of our scope.

But the ability to just get somebody on their back, and even if it's down regulation, that just allows for a little bit more space. That's a massive piece of it. Well, it's getting people more parasympathetic, too. That's really another. Because, I mean, in Boston, as you can imagine, I work a lot of type A individuals.

Now that I'm in this small space, I do predominantly work with more gen pop clients now uh so like uh lawyers doctors just like businessmen it's just they want to go go kill me today uh it's like no that's not quite what you need like let's and a lot of the the breathing stuff as far as getting in a better position is just getting a more parasympathetic just getting to chill out a little bit so there's a benefit of that too so how do you think about breathing when you're when you're doing something like a one rep max deadlift or running that's different that's that's a different intensity so that so then we got to start talking about uh

certainly valsalva maneuver stuff like that um but when i'm coaching up a deadlift or coaching up a squat and we're ramping it up like i mean i don't just throw a barbell on people's backs or put a barbell on the ground we're gonna dead to deadlift. It could be a goblet squat. It could be a trap bar. But I am teaching them what it means to reset the breath, gulp their air, create a flexion moment in their abs, like clamping down those abs so they don't move through their lower back. That is part of breathing and getting them in a better position. So I'm trying my best as their coach to build context with that with the little stuff.

If I do it, like a dead bug to me is that's the first step because, I mean, certainly it's positional breathing, but it's also a great anterior core. They need to feel it working on the floor before I start doing it with a barbell on their back or if they're doing a front squat. So I'm just trying to really hammer it home early with this, building context with the simple stuff so that way when we do go for a one rep max, for example, that they know like, okay, I've got to get that air and clamp it down

and be in a good position to be able to exhibit proper strength. Because I think a lot of times, too, a poor position isn't going to let people to experience their full strength potential anyways. Because whether we want to call it energy leaks or something else it's a little bit more snarky to say i don't know but um uh but that's part of the conversation too are you building that stuff into warm-ups for oh yeah for normal yeah so i mean of course there's foam rolling you know and i usually the way i write my programs is very much just what i did at crusty sports performance is you know people do their foam rolling.

They might do their laundry list of glute activation, thoracic rotation, what have you, single leg stance, what have you. But I'm a big fan of what I call fillers, which I don't think is a term that should be too unfamiliar with people but instead of me i've kind of leaned away from instead of giving people like a list of 10 to 15 warm-up drills there might be a few that i think are are important i'd rather put it into the program not make the warm-up the program you know what i mean so because i think if they're here like if i'm if my eyes are on people i know they're doing their warm-up but i know full well when they're on their own they're half-assed they're not they're not their warm-up, but I know full well when they're on their own. They're half-assed. They're not doing it. Let's be honest.

So if I can put a positional breathing drill, and I don't do it often because I think there's a bit of a butting of heads of what I'm trying to get after. To have somebody do like a max effort lift, like a deadlift or a three rep max or a set of five or whatever, And then something that's pretty symptomatic, like they have to be on. And now we're going to come over here. We're going to do a positional breathing drill to kind of bring you back. I think there's a budding of heads there. So the breathing stuff is usually right at the very beginning because I just, okay, let's work on getting a better position. We're going to warm up. Now we're going to go train. So the positional breathing stuff I rarely pair with the iron work because I just feel like there's too much of a dichotomy there as far as what I'm after. But as far as like pairing a front squat with back-to-wall shoulder flexion or some kind of serratus drill or even a core exercise, like I think that's a beautiful part to put it.

Because then it's like it is a corrective drill they need to be doing, quote unquote. But then it's part of the workout. So, instead of just sitting there looking at Instagram for 90 seconds, they're doing something productive with that time. It's just more efficient use of their time. Yep, exactly. Yeah, when they're actually here. Is that how most of your sessions?

I mean, we have the warm-up. You're doing the drills. But is everything kind of supersetted at a not intense session? Yeah, because I often say that the way I write my programs is there is like a main lift of the day or a main intent of the day, whether it's a deadlift, a squat, a bench press, chin-ups, whatever, there's a main lift. Yeah. And that's usually paired by itself but with a filler.

And then after that, then we start talking about, you know, compound sets, tri-sets. Yeah. But, yes, there's usually always something paired with something else. For the majority of people, I mean, you were just talking about having people from Boston, these high performers, they're big business people or whatever it is, and, you know, those people have their shoulders and their ears all day long with this stress yeah is how i guess there's there's a lot of tactics but um how do you get somebody like that to actually give a shit about the way that they breathe that's a tough call yeah that that's that's i'm still trying to figure that out actually because they don't they don't

want to be chilled out yeah like you said they want to come in and just get like broken i think if i break it down exactly how i explained it, they kind of get it. And really what I'm saying, this is 30 seconds of your time. Yeah. Just create a little space. They understand. And I don't talk about posterior medial stymum and all this cavity between your spine and your ribcage. It's like getting impinged.

They don't give a shit. Yeah. I just say, hey, I just want you to chill the fuck out. This is why we're doing this drill. And if I put it in that way, they get it. And if I'm setting the precedent, like I'm the coach, you're paying me for a reason, like I'm the expert, I think this is something important you should do,

they're probably going to do it. And if they think it's going to help them, sure. I know they're doing it here. Whether or not they're doing it to do it yeah uh and if i and if i think it's and they think it's going to help them sure um i know they're doing it here whether or not they're doing it on their own uh it's another discussion i suppose but maybe i gotta i don't know maybe i gotta like start randomly showing up at their their other gyms that they train at hey when you when you talked about bracing for the deadlift you mentioned a a method. It started with a V. Valsalva. I've never heard of that actually. So that's just where like bracing just like a normal brace, like just clamping down and making sure it's not moving. It's kind of a fancy way to say holding your breath.

To like understate what we're doing. Yeah, I've never heard it said like that. Yeah, so basically it's just a bracing holding your breath, yeah, while you're doing something, while you're lifting something heavy yeah yeah um low back stuff um when you when people are getting overhead and we see that kind of ribs out yep kind of space are you seeing that at all levels of from gen pop to do everywhere professional athletes actually come in and they don't understand these positions. They're able to throw a 95-mile-an-hour fastball

and they're not connected. Yeah. I mean, we're just good at compensating. That's not to say that when I see it that I'm, oh, we have to fix that immediately. Because, I mean, if someone walks in and they feel fine and there's not like this long injury history that I'm looking at, and I see that.

It looks a little awry and off. I'll make a mental note of it and say that might be something we want to address. We can do some dead bugs or maybe they have tight lats. Because then the answer is like, okay, if I see them bring their arms up overhead and they are cranking through their lumbar spine, why is that happening? And that could be anterior core. They just don't have good pelvic control. It might be because, like, as you bring your arms up, when you think about what the lats do, they internally rotate,

they adduct, and they extend. So to bring your arms up overhead is the exact opposite of all that. Yeah. So a lot of people are just fighting their lats to get up overhead. And if we talk about CrossFit, lats are on a lot of people are just fighting their lats to get up overhead and if we talk about crossfit lats are on a lot yeah during during their workouts like i mean it's like pull-up central it's olympic lift central it's like lats lats lats lats lats um so sometimes oftentimes i have to say we have to work on the loosening up those lats a little bit so we're going to tone

down their chin-ups and your pull-ups and you know try to loosen those up a little bit because it's just pulling you down and you can't keep your arms overhead and that's why your back hurts it doesn't back issues because your lats are super tight so let's address that yeah do you do much in the kind of rehab space i was recently actually two three months ago partially tore my bicep tendon which made me feel like i was gonna have to chop my arm off forever because it was so painful i bet um do you guys do much in the rehab space, just getting people back to strong? Well, when I was at Cressy, Reinhold was there often. So we had a really brilliant physical therapist coming once or twice a week

to work on people. Now they have an in-house PT, Andrew Millett, who's there. He's part of the staff. His training table is on the gym floor. If the pro guys are there, or the high school athletes are there, or the gym pop person's there and they need some soft tissue work,

it's like, go see Andrew. Let him look at it. Here, there's a physical therapy place right across the street. I'm friends with them. It's like they know where the gyms are at. No, they were there before me. They were there before me.

There's a physical therapy place that's in my neighborhood a mile that way. Ryan Hole's not that far away. I have a husband-wife team in Back Bay here in Boston. Back Bay Health. I send people to them. I have a nice community of physical therapists because, again, it's scope of practice.

I'm not diagnosing anything. If I think something's wrong, go see so-and-so. I always think about that. Well, a strength coach can handle a large chunk of this stuff, and then I got injured, and I was like, but not this one. There's a very definitive difference between being injured and you need a doctor badly. There's definitely a bridge. I mean, there's a very definitive difference between being injured and you need a doctor yeah badly and there's definitely a bridge yeah i mean there's an overlap but yeah with a bicep tear

yeah no i'm not i'm not i'm not touching that i'm not there's no amount of well in building people back though when they are ready to come back after that that's where i come in how do you start to address shoulder stuff because i'm sure you guys have dealt with plenty of Tommy Johns, lots of labrum tears, things like that. That's where we talk about there's a strength coach that was on Mike Robertson's podcast maybe a year or two ago, Chris Chase, who is now at I believe he's the head strength coach for USC baseball right now. At the time he was with the NBA team.

I forget who he was with at the time. But he puts it beautifully in the sense, like, that's a point where you find someone's trainable window. And it was such a brilliant term. It's such a brilliant term where it's like, okay, you have an injured athlete, somebody coming post Tommy John or bicep tear or what have you. They're in a sling. What can we do still? We have a lower body.

We can hammer. We can do glute hammer raises. We can do safety squat bar squats. We can do single leg work. We can train his opposite arm. We have the core. So that's where I feel like that's where people start separating themselves from the okay trainers and coaches to the ones that know their shit.

It's like finding people's trainable window, not focusing on what they can't do, but like how am I going to get a training effect for this person? Hopefully, of course, they're still going to be going to physical therapy to get manual therapy and stuff, which that again is outside my scope. But I, but as a, as a strength coach, it's my job to find that that training effect.

And there there's many, many, many things we can do in those scenarios. I mean, I've had, I've had people in crutches doing doing workouts it's like they might be there they might be in a knee brace on a crutch they had knee surgery we're still going to train the opposite leg we're still going to do upper body we can do push-ups we can do rows if you had to stop training every time you had some aches and pains or an injury like you just never train ever that's part of the battle never have fun make a career as a professional athlete like yeah i mean all the time i have clients who, I mean, it's their, I mean, they know their body better than I do. They'll say, oh, no, this doesn't feel great today.

And I'm just like, get the fuck in here. Like, we can still train. Like, we might not be able to go off your current program. I mean, I don't write perfect programs. I mean, I'm going off. How do you write programs now? I'm going off the track all the time. I mean, I. Is it much programs. How do you write programs now? I'm going off the track all the time. Is it much more of like a flexible template than specific things?

Well, there's a template I have, so it's all Excel. I'm old school. I'm not using iPads yet. Thank God. Anytime I see a trainer walking around with their iPad, I'm like, no, I'm not hiring you at all. There's so much variability with day-to-day training and auto-regulation and stuff like that. I do hand people a printed-out program. This is your program that you're going to follow for the next month.

However, I'm always crossing stuff out and doing something different. Or maybe I was overzealous. Like, hey, I thought they could do a certain exercise. They're not quite there. We're going to bring it back down to this. So I'm always crossing stuff out. But, yeah, the expectation is like they're, yeah, they're tracking their sets and reps and their load and stuff like that.

And I'm looking at it and adjusting as needed. Have you found yourself to become, like, very proficient in fixing things a little bit further down the chain from elbows to hands, wrists, things of that nature? Because so much of that stuff stems from the pec. I mean, honestly, yeah. Because, I mean, you talk about, say someone comes in with elbow pain. Oh, I got, like, a pain in my elbow.

A lot of it's just the fact that brachial plexus area, like, they're getting impinged up here. And, again, I'm not diagnosing thoracic outlet syndrome. But if I see someone's, like, shoulder is lower on that side or they have a lengthened trap on that side, I could probably surmise that something's getting impinged. Anytime I hear, like, tingling or radiating,

I'm like, I'm thinking nerve. Yeah. So if they have a little ouchie in their elbow, I'm like, well, it's probably stemming from up here by your neck. Yeah.

And that might be the case. And headaches come in. Headaches, too. Same thing. I mean, you get the computer guy who's in that ball of flexion all day, and they're in that state all the time. If I just reverse that, of course, I'm not saying anything like, oh, I'm diagnosing your this or that.

I'm just like, well, I'm just looking at what you look like right now, and we're going to do the opposite. How much are you guys hanging from bars? Here? Just hanging in general, like as a skill of just getting people to... So, like, as far as, like, grip and stuff like that? Or just creating space in the lat. I do that all the time.

I mean, there's actually a... I've started to love to do it on my own. Yeah, I mean, even just building traction in the spine, too. Not, like, strict hanging. I'll still have people stand on a small box and i say like okay you're 90 of your weight is hanging 10 of it is in the box and then they're and then i'm getting them to breathe in that position to build a little space uh certainly like doing scapular pull-ups and stuff like that come into play but yeah i have a few i have a few clients who just i have

them hang from a bar and that's actually a good example of sometimes when they're doing like a heavy compressive exercise like a deadlift or a squat, and I just want a little bit more traction, I'll have them do like a light hang at the end of their session or sometimes even between sets. Yeah. What do you feel the benefit is of getting that traction? Just because if that spine is just being compressed at all times with lifting heavy things and just getting a little bit of space in there. It just feels better.

It feels good. That's about as best way I can explain. I'm very unscientific with my explanations. It works because it feels good. But just that lengthening and separation of the spine is where we're at on that one. I've found that hanging is something where it really connects the breath to understanding down-regulating

tissues and just getting stress out of the system. Like, it's compression or it's the, like, I'm losing. You just said the word and I lost it. Traction? Yeah, the traction. Yeah. But also, like, in my lat, you talk about how tight our lats are all the time.

And if you can hang up there and just go 20, 30 seconds, and you've got five or six breaths in there, before you know it, your shoulders are like in your ears, and you've just grew an inch. Yeah. It's really wild how much you can actually, how much space you can actually create. Do you remember the doctor's name?

I think he's been on Rogan before. But he's talking about how that he he's the an overwhelming majority of the shoulder issues that he has he's got like a hanging protocol that i'm gonna have to look it up um of i don't remember his ability to like solve just shoulder problems by getting people to be able to hang swing a little bit the grip component to the irradiation of it yes rotator cuff and how it relates to grip strength. Can you talk about that a little bit, actually? So, I mean, it's just called irradiation.

So if you talk about, like, the ability to – oftentimes I'll have people, like, hold their arm out in front of them, and I just say, okay, feel – see how that feels. And I say, keep it there. Now make a fist, like squeeze. And they'll kind of feel that shoulder suck itself in. I was like that's what we're after that's going to help your shoulder that's yeah that's stability um so even like just people often ask me well how can i build my strength my grip strength i was like hold dumbbells and hold barbell let's have a tighter grip less

less machine work less machine work and like hold like work with dumbbells and barbells and melt the handle in your hands. Like, just the grip is going to help probably. Like, I love carries that way. I was going to say, do you guys do a bunch of carries? Yeah. When weather permits here, like, people are doing carries. In the middle of blizzards. Yeah.

Well, not blizzards, but I'm sure I have some psychos who would want to do that. But I have people doing carries outside all the time on the sidewalk, and a lot of it is, like, I want them to work on their grip strength. And I think carries are fantastic for shoulder rehab, especially when we're talking about, like, rotator cuff issues and stuff like that just because it gets people to understand tension. That was one of the biggest things, getting the, like, just traction and just, like, swinging my arm back and forth with my –

more using my core but creating just some movement in there that was able to just get the process of like loosening some stuff up. To tie both those together, I've heard great cooks say the same thing about deadlifts as kind of like a phase three step of rehabbing a shoulder. Not like post-surgery, but like after you're to a certain point. You know, doing deadlifts and or kettlebell swings, to your point, both are really good for just creating stability with the grip, with the traction from the swing

and then just from the traction from just hanging a heavy deadlift off your arms. Yep. Having that powerful squeeze, that crushing grip just makes people's rotator cuffs fire so you get that shoulder stability. And it's simple because they think it's going to be a bunch of external rotations

and band work which you know what else are you supposed to do? honestly a side lying external rotation from an EMG standpoint is number one as far as getting the rotator cuff to fire first of all most people do it incorrectly they're cranking through their back, they're not in a good position

but I do use that I feel like it's the equivalent sometimes of just like, I stretch. I stretch my hamstrings. You're like, is that all you do? You got to do more than that. You can't just do that. Just carry and deadlift. That'll fix everything.

How much do isometrics play into some of the programming or getting strong shoulders? Yeah. I mean, I'm starting to dabble into some of the FRC stuff, functional range conditioning, which is Andrew Spina. And I forget the other fellows affiliated with it. Hunter? Hunter Cook, yeah.

Hunter Cook, yep. And so that comes into play as far as using isometrics to work on end range stability. Yeah. So that – and I admittedly have never taken the course um but my one of my dean somerset who i present a lot with has and he presents a lot on it frank duffy uh who was at crusty sports performance now he's he he just switched jobs he's he's now back in manhattan but he's a big ken stretch guy frc guy puts out a ton of great content on instagram so he does a lot of stuff um so FRC guy puts out a ton of great content on Instagram.

So he does a lot of stuff. So I'm playing around with that a little bit as far as like just having people fire isometrically in, in ranges of motion to help build stability and mobile. I mean, it's kind of both just working on like range of motion too. But as far as like dedicated isometric work, I use it more so for like,

if someone has like a cranky knee or whatnot i can have them hold a split squat iso hold you know in the bottom position just to kind of get a little bit length in the quad but but just get some tension in there to some capacity yeah i'll have them do stuff like that uh we can make a case for uh potentiating the system for deadlift so if i have somebody I have somebody take a barbell, set it up against the pin so it's at mid-shin level, and have them pull the barbell against the pin and do a 5-10 second hold there, which sucks,

and then have them go do a speed pull, that's another way of incorporating an isometric just from a potentiating component. I've dabbled in those. That would be how I've implemented some isometric training in my training. I know there's the triphasic approach with Caldeets. I know he does a lot of isometric stuff too. So that, yeah.

To answer your question, yes, I do. I use it. How do you view that as different than just doing like PNF type stretching or the eccentric quasi-isometric? Yeah. That's great too. I mean, as far as stretching, yeah, the quasi-isometric stuff is great too. I feel like people are more prone to do that than have them sit there and like hold the stretch.

If I can have them just get in a split squat, elevate both feet and lower yourself down and just let gravity kind of like do its work uh that's a stretch uh and i i feel like that's a little bit more palatable for for some people yeah um so that stuff's not really popular in the crossfit space like can you can you re-explain kind of what how so the quasi-atmometric is basically just using gravity and body weight to let let that to elicit that stretch so the the example i just gave was if i have somebody in a split squat position uh and they lower themselves down the floor is going to be the limiting factor like they're going to stop at some point so if i elevate both feet on a couple boxes and again then i have them

lower now i can increase that range of motion and say okay just sit there like resist gravity but over over a minute like gravity is going to lower them down they're going to get a little bit more of a stretch on there and get that get that um the quasi isometric eccentric yeah uh with a little bit of load but yeah oftentimes body weight or but then yeah of course you can add a goblet or a kettlebell in there too yeah so like in the cross space where everyone's you know squatting squatting is like the thing that everyone loves to do. If you can't get into a really deep squat in a good position, you just put a bar on your back, maybe just the bar, and you lower down into the deepest squat you can do where you're not compensating at all.

And then without compensating, you just hold that bottom position, and over time you will sink. You'll get that tissue creep, and you'll sink lower and lower and lower. But you don't want to fault and compensate just to get lower you want to only sink lower if you can do it without compensation and the key yeah i think you nailed it the key is to do it with being by staying active you don't want to let your passive restraints take over you don't want just like your ligaments and tendons to like fall into them you want to actually actively be engaged and just creep into that into that stretch i actually think about doing when i do the stuff like that it's a really good check-in to like are the right muscles actually moving the load like sitting

at the bottom of a squat and how many times when you have 225 on your back or whatever and you just down up down up okay cool but if you sit down there and you think sucks can i squeeze my butt here like can i actually get down here and then all of a sudden your knees go out a little bit you're using all the proper muscles and the next morning you wake up and it's like oh shit i haven't been sore in that place because the majority of the time i just show up and i just squat because i'm supposed to squat i'm not actually connecting my brain with my glutes to where my knees are to my ankle like there's so many awesome things that happen from just training that movement pattern in a really slow, slow way. And you may even say, like, it's like a breathing squat.

Yeah. Get in that deep squat position and breathe. And be able to move your head. I mean, it's not super loaded. Like, a barbell is plenty for most people. It doesn't have to be a ball-busting thing at all times. But, yeah, you'll notice that you just creep into a more range of motion. And a lot of that stuff, if you incorporate it,

I think the overhead stuff is really tough with that because you can't resist gravity in those positions. So, yeah, that would be a little bit tougher. But that's where I'm just like, honestly, I'm just having people foam roll. Most people don't foam roll their lats. So if I just have them do that, oh, we get more. Yeah, it sucks. But that would just be a case where I would throw that in there. A just have them do that oh we get more yeah it sucks uh but that that

would just be a case where i would throw that in there yeah um a little harder to do that isometric i'm sure there's a way to do it i'm just yeah uh so what is it about the deadlift that that appeals to you uh over over and above the other lifts it's because that's like the one lift i'm good at i i i have long it makes me look cool from a personal standpoint i i from a from a global standpoint uh i just think there's a there's a lot uh to be said about maintaining a neutral spine and owning that position and and then just really just lifting heavy things as far as like the resiliency is going to build in within the body but also strengthening areas that most people are weak in as far as their glutes their hamstrings their erectors um but then but not to mention just the core integrity involved too and grip i mean it's very much a

full body exercise uh not to mention then we can talk into like okay uh calorically speaking uh you're utilizing much more um many more muscles many more joints so from an training efficiency standpoint that's going to come into play uh as far as like okay if i if someone wants to uh lose some fat let's deadlift as opposed to just doing a bunch of leg extensions and leg curls and that's not to demerit those exercises or demerit coaches that use that but if i'm looking at from an economically training efficiency that's not to demerit those exercises or demerit coaches that use that. But if I'm looking at it from an economically training efficiency standpoint, and not to mention from a strength standpoint, if I want to get somebody strong, I want them to utilize exercises

that allow them to lift more weight. And it's a lot easier to do that with a deadlift than it is with a leg extension. So from that standpoint, from a global standpoint, I think there's a lot to be said there um anytime the confusion is is that a lower body or an upper body exercise you should just do it and then yeah just do it but but but learning how to hinge correctly is a pattern that pete that's lost on a lot of people yeah um especially when you when you get an office worker or someone who doesn't move well,

like being able to dissociate hip movement from lumbar movement, which is a deadlift. I mean, we're just talking about a hip hinge. That's medicine for a lot of people. And when we talk about low back pain, which everyone at some point has a back that hates them,

you look at their quality of movement in that area. They get a lot of motion from the lower back, and that's probably, not always, but probably why it hurts. If we can get them to move from the hips and be able to load the hips and get the hamstrings stronger, get the glutes stronger, that to me is also very much a benefit of the deadlift. And also, when I say the deadlift, sorry to cut you off,

I'm not talking about shitting your kidney max effort deadlift. The beauty about the deadlift, too, is it very much can be catered to the ability level and injury history of the individual. So that's where a landmine deadlift comes in, a trap bar deadlift comes in. Much more user-friendly, back-friendly ways of deadlifting, but it is a hip hinge. I think for the most part, if people could just do it with a kettlebell, and it makes the actual movement so much easier than... Like, a barbell is actually a tough way to go about... That's an upper echelon.

Like, a conventional deadlift with a conventional stance, meaning your feet are about hip-width apart, and the bar's in front of you. When we talk about, like about sheer loading on the spine, unfortunately that's what most people deem the deadlift is that. Most people here, and even when I was at Cresty Sports Performance, a trap bar deadlift is home base. If you're not a competitive powerlifter, who cares?

I have two. I don't have a very big facility, and I have two, and those are always going to be used. I know I cut you off. Sorry about that. For someone that doesn't have a degree or a real background in this, from a functional anatomy perspective, why is getting range of motion, unwanted range of motion,

at the low back such a problem? Well, it's not designed for a ton of range of motion at the low back such a problem well it's not designed for a ton of range of motion um so when we talk about uh loaded and and like for flexion for example so if we want to bend over to pick something up we you often say that's going into into flexion unloaded flexion not the end of the world like if we're bending over to pick up a pencil or bending over to tie our shoes. I do think we need access to that. However, if you look at a lot of the research, particularly Dr. Stuart McGill, we talk about loaded flexion.

So like if we have a barbell on our back or we have a heavy deadlift that we're trying to lift and we're going into that lumbar flexion and range motion of flexion, a lot of that is a mechanism for disc herniations and whatnot. So if we can offset that by just getting people into a proper position and resisting that shearing of, like, going into flexion and resisting that, probably you're going to keep them pretty healthy. I don't deal in absolutes. I'm not a Sith. Certainly accidents happen.

But yeah, as far as like, I often tell people when people come in with a lower back issue, oh, my lower back always hurts. And I watch them move. I mean, I'll do a hip scour. I'll do the table assessment. But then i watch the move they get a lot they're moving from their lower back a lot that people with lower back issues often have very strong lower backs and that's that's probably why their back is doesn't like them at the moment because they're using it for everything they don't know how to use their hips they they have no thoracic movement it's just all from lower back uh and it's going back counterintuitive to think that a heavily high perch speed low back spinal erectors and whatnot would be a problem. Where there's meat, there's movement. I did not

come up with that term. I forgot who I got it from. But honestly, if you have someone take their shirt off and you look at where the meat of their erectors are and you see a lot in the lumbar area, that's telling you they're probably getting a lot of their movement from there.

But if you look at a lot of CrossFitters and powerlifters, where are their upper backs the thickest? Mid-back and up. Where we want movement to come from. The T-spine is designed for a little bit more movement from a biomechanical standpoint. That lumbar spine, yes, it is allowed to move. I'm not saying it has to be locked in.

It is always moving. We just don't want it to move too much. I forget who I stole that term from, but I remember hearing it. People like alliterations. Where there's meat, there's movement. That will tell you a lot, too. Did we just title the show?

We'll see. Do you guys, are you coaching a bunch of power movements? So progressing from the deadlift to a kettlebell swing? Yeah. So I always tell people I want people to control slow before we can move to fast. And because of the nature of the demographic that I work with, I do have to have some kind of like progression or standardization like i often say like okay i want you to be able to deadlift the beast the the which

is 900 104 pounds uh five times before we progress to a romanian deadlift or even a trap bar deadlift and then when they get to the trap bar deadlift i was like i want you to be able to deadlift your body weight five times before we even think about experimenting with a straight bar. But honestly, like I said, most of my clients, at least now, home base is trap bar because they are not power lifters. I don't care. Certainly, sometimes I get a little pushback. It's like, oh, well, I read this article and so and so. Deadlifting this is that.

But I just like, listen, dude, like, there's a cost-benefit to doing this. I think people should want to be on the trap bars. You can lift more weight that way. Yeah, more weight. And it's just weight. And honestly, it's more intuitive. Yeah. Because it's just they can get better torso.

They have a more upright torso. It's just the handles are higher. It makes you stronger. Yeah. It's like a hybrid deadlift. Yeah. But, yeah, so and then once they get to a point where they're pretty competent with their deadlifting, whether it's like deadlifting their body weight

for a few reps, then I'll start playing around with the kettlebell swing because that's just a hip hinge that's explosive. But they have to be able to control the slow component first before I even think about adding that in. Kind of getting back to what we were talking about earlier, is there any rotational power? Are you throwing med balls and stuff in here? I can do med ball stuff outside.

So there's a one-way street on this side of the wall. I know listeners can't know what I'm pointing at. But it is part of the program. There's a one-way street so people are less apt to get hit by a car. They only have to look one direction. And when weather permits, I can have them take those med balls and throw stuff against the wall outside. Obviously, during the winter, that's a little less of a thing.

But once springtime hits in the summer, there will be people throwing stuff against the wall most afternoons. I don't know if the neighbors like it, but I haven't had any complaints yet. They're not as strong as you care. So what are you going to say? But, yeah, people love it. I mean, there's certainly a movement quality component there, making sure they're getting into the hips

and getting rotation from the right areas. That's like the hardest thing in the world to teach somebody, especially gen pop people that may not have played sports. It's like how do you push the ground away brace your core and then spit it out some easy stuff like overhead slams and stuff like that but adding in rotation it's a little bit tricky so that's where we start really close to the wall and like okay get into that hip and like throw throw into the wall so i'll start them closer to the wall and we we move our way back and then and then then it's just getting people aggressive.

I think people tend to be pretty timid. And it's like if I give them like, you know, your boss's face is on the wall, like hit it. Like, I mean, if I give them more of an external cue like that, everything else just kind of takes care of itself. I've actually seen some – yeah, when people get more aggressive in the movement, it actually seems to help that athleticism side of it because there's a real reason to actually drive through the floor. But I train often. Sometimes you see some funky stuff.

People are pushing med balls with their arms. They don't realize how goofy it looks. And a lot of times that's where the advantage of just filming them. Say, hey, see how unathletic that looks? Do you think this looks right? But, yeah, so dancing, I definitely like doing it, throwing it in there just because people like throwing stuff around. So give them a little fun with it.

They feel like they're doing some stuff. Yeah. So if someone has a low back injury, maybe they've done poor deadlifts and they did slip a disc and they got pain shooting down their leg or whatever it is. In your mind, does that mean that that person's lower body training is just cut off? Or do you incorporate more single leg work and split squats and whatnot as you ease them back in? Yep, certainly. Again, going back to that trainable menu situation.

But honestly, I'm still going to probably have them deadlift. It's just finding a position that they can own so whether i have to elevate it or or a different uh um implement so kettlebell trap bar they might be used to a straight bar they're not ready for that so let's try trap bar see how we see a better torso position and oh it doesn't hurt uh just showing them a a variation that's just more attuned to their leverages in anthropometry well sometimes helps uh i mean even sometimes like people are so attuned to be like it has to be conventional whereas like well why don't we just try a modified sumo stance and see what that feels like oh my

god that feels so much better where i just where i just widen their stance a little bit uh and if that feels better then let's run with that um Because I don't want people to feel like they're a patient. Because they come to me to work out. They want to get a training effect. So I try to do that. And if I can just show them that, hey, you can move without pain. And we kind of have to tinker with that threshold, of course. There's always going to be a little bit of ebb and flow of that happening,

especially when you're dealing with somebody with a chronic injury history. But if I can just show them that training effect, you can do stuff. We're going to make some progress here. So I don't omit all. I mean, honestly, I'm going to use the deadlift to train the hip hinge because they probably just don't know how to hip hinge in the first place. Right. You guys put a bunch of this stuff into a course.

It's like the shoulder blueprint. So, yeah, Dean and I, complete shoulder hip blueprint. So, it's the first iteration was an entire day of me talking shoulders, day one. And he does an entire day of hips, day two. We're currently doing iteration two, the even more complete shoulder hip blueprint. Deeper. Deeper than level one. Such a witty name.

That we're going to be. The sequel. We've done a few times. We're filming it later this year, but we're going to be in Philadelphia next month, and we're going to be up in Edmonton, and we're going to be actually down in Australia doing it we're going to be actually down in australia doing it in sydney and melbourne um which would be very cool it's an online course or is it just it will be yeah so the the we do it in person so we'll get a bunch of coaches and trainers in uh and do the presentation for two days but we but we but the well the second one's going to be filmed the first one's already been filmed it's been out for

two years yeah i remember he goes long but that that the the second one is going to be filmed. The first one has already been filmed. It's been out for two years now. Yeah, I remember when you guys launched it. But the second one we have not filmed yet. That's going to be later on this year. Cool. People should still go to the in-person one. Yeah. So you guys just basically walk through anatomy and then how to fix each piece of it? Yeah, so iteration one, we definitely went a little bit more into the assessment protocol, a little bit of the anatomy stuff.

Certainly talking about, okay about okay well if someone's serratus isn't doing this job well what exercises do we do to fix that or what is a hip scour like what does that look like what are we looking for like what what don't we want to see when we're doing it uh how can we better match someone's anatomy to the lift yeah talking about bony structure and uh asymmetry and stuff like that yeah uh this version we go a little bit more into the programming now we talk about like i really let's really do a deep dive on deadlift technique and where we where do we see technique faults and weaknesses okay if that's the case what do we do to fix that what exercises will complement that same thing with a squat show more shoulder

friendly exercises landmine variations how can we better coach up the bench press to make it because honestly what fixes most people issues, especially with shoulders, like, oh, bench pressing hurts my shoulder. I might not avoid bench pressing. It just might be they haven't been coached up on how to do it correctly. Totally.

As far as, like, where the shoulders are. Like, together and down. I feel like the biggest problem with bench pressing is people don't know where to bring the bar. That too. And they bring it all up here. Yeah. Well, look at where your freaking forearms at. Of course you've got jacked up stuff. So sometimes it's just a technique flaw. They just haven't been coach to bring the bar. That too. They bring it all up here. Yeah. Well, look at where your freaking forearms at.

Of course. So sometimes it's just a technique flaw. They just haven't been coached up on it. Watch somebody do a row. Yeah. When you see people do a row, they think more range of motion is better. That elbow is way behind them, and they wonder why the front of their shoulder hurts. It's like, well, let's just coach you up on how to do a row correctly.

Yeah. So there's your corrective. Just doing it better. Yeah. So we go a little bit more into that on version two very cool um and of course what's cool about presenting in person is even though it's the same material so to speak every every crowd is different so you get different stuff come up different people are demonstrating so oh look at this like let's let's not that we're making fun of them but yeah like oh let's let's see see what we can do to fix that.

So that's always cool to do them in person. But, yeah, the goal of the digital product is it just gets to more of the masses. Nice. Where can people find that? CompleteShoulderHitBlueprint.com. There it is. That's the website. Easy.

There it is. Bought that domain name early. Right. Where can people find you? Homebase is TonyGemicore.com, my name. Thankfully, I have a very unique name in the industry. It wasn't Hardcore, Tony Hardcore. Tony Genticore Fit?

Yeah, well, there is another Tony Genticore out there that's a big programmer guy. We've crossed paths a few times. He's always said, like, people think I'm him. And he lives out in – Doug Larson, motivational speaker. Yeah. Oh, yeah. People tag me on quotes all the time because some dude out there named Doug Larson has lots of quotes floating around. People always attribute them to me.

Sometimes I correct them. Sometimes I don't. Like, you just roll with it. Yeah. That's my base. Everything as far as my website, that's social media. That's all the blogs. That's podcasts.

And you put out one or two blogs a week still? I try. I'm less prolific than I used to be as far as when my little guy showed up. But I'm at least doing one or two of my own. But there's usually a guest post, which is nice. People want to get more exposure. As long as it's good and it's actionable, I'm like, okay, I'll publish that. Is there anything that you have learned about movement from watching your son move oh it's it's crazy um i have learned

way too much in the last eight months about like watching the body yeah he's at a point now where he's he's like legit sprinting now oh wow i mean i mean of course it's wobbly but to see him the progression from when he was just like like hovering around holding on to walls now he's like when i'm chasing him yeah when i think about like movement regressions i'm like oh we got to go back to where you're on your back just flailing your arms yeah that's where we start well i mean that's number one well it's like uh what what's the group is it simple strength um that's kind of i i'm i't think – I'm pretty sure it's Simple Strength, but it might be wrong. But that's where the ground-based movements and all that stuff,

like bear crawls and all that, and, like, baby breathing. Yeah, it all stems from that. It's pretty cool to watch. It's really cool. Yep. Doug Larson. Right on. You can find me on Instagram at Dougal C. Larson.

You can come to at Anders Varner because I'm Anders Varner Shrug Collective for all things Shrug Collective Barbell Shrug Wednesday Saturday get into iTunes, YouTube, like, subscribe write us a nice comment if you want and we will see you guys on Wednesday that's a wrap friends remember Monday April 30th

the one ton challenge 9 episodes the prologue starts with John Cena, Doug Larson, myself, and Travis Mash are going to walk through nine weeks of getting you to be stronger than you've ever been. The lifelong pursuit of strength. It's happening. We're testing this.

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