Barbell Shrugged - The Bledsoe Show w/ Mike T Nelson  — Training the Core for Strength Sports - 95

Episode Date: August 13, 2018

Dr. Mike T. Nelson has spent 18 years of his life learning how the human body works, specifically focusing on how to properly condition it to burn fat and become stronger, more flexible, and healthier. He’s has a PhD in Exercise Physiology, a BA in Natural Science, and an MS in Biomechanics. He’s an adjunct professor and a member of the American College of Sports Medicine.   Dr. Nelson has been called in to share his techniques with top government agencies. The techniques he’s developed, and the results he gets for his clients have been featured in international magazines, in scientific publications, and on websites across the globe.   In this episode, Mike T puts Mike B through some of the most intense bodywork of his life, and talks about the hidden anatomy of the psoas and the diaphragm (which are technically one), how human dissection works, pelvic floor, the core and how it all works together and how dysfunction occurs, why people have neck issues and how to correct it, reflexive performance reset (RPR), how to improve breathing mechanics, and much more.   Enjoy! -Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: https://shruggedcollective.com/tbs_nelson ------------------------------------------------------------------------  Please support our partners! Onnit's is a Total Human Optimization company with a mission to inspire peak performance through a combination of unique products and actionable information. As the founder and CEO Aubrey Marcus likes to say, Total Human Optimizaion is a commitment to get strong in the places where we are weak, become great in places where we’re good, and shine a light on the stuff we need take a look at. Improve your focus, concentration and productivity by getting a bottle of Onnit’s flagship neutropic supplement FOR FREE ($80 value) by going to: http://www.onnit.com/bledsoe ► Travel thru Europe with us on the  Shrugged Voyage, more info here: https://www.theshruggedvoyage.com/ ► What is the Shrugged Collective?  Click below for more info: https://youtu.be/iUELlwmn57o ► 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

Welcome to the Bledsoe Show. This is your host, Mike Bledsoe, and today we have Mr. Mike T. Nelson. That's actually Dr. T. Mike T. Nelson. And he knows a lot about the human body in general, and we talk about the core and how to train the core specifically for strength athletes and strength sports because it is different if you're picking up heavy loads. So we'll get into that. I learned a lot. You're going to learn a lot. One of the things I'm doing right now, I'm up in Idlewild, California, which is about two hours outside of San Diego and or LA, depending on where you're coming from. And we are running Training Camp for the Soul. And we've got six people up here, six students, whatever you want to call it.

And we are digging through some really, really great stuff. I'll be posting some stuff to my Instagram this week. And you'll be able to check out what people are getting out of this. So you can see if you want to do it come November. So we're looking at November for our next one. So if you want to check that out, go to trainingcampforthesoul.com. And again, check me out on Instagram.

That's Mike underscore Bledsoe. And what I'll be doing is I'll be posting some stories and you'll be able to hear from the people that are here to see if it's something you would be interested in. One of the things that are fueling me while we're up here in the mountains is Organifi. Drink the green juice every morning, drinking that gold every night. And when I need that boost in the middle of the day, I drink the red juice. I'm addicted. I'm addicted. It's

official. Go to Organifi.com. Use the code BLEDSO and you will get 20% off. So again, that's Organifi.com. Use the code BLEDSO. You'll get 20% off. They do call it the sunrise. I think it's the sunrise, the sunset pack. And that is the green juice in the morning, red in the afternoon, and the gold before bed. They have a lot of really great stuff in there, adaptogens, medicinal mushrooms. And you know what? It's the best tasting green juice I've ever had. And as far as powdered juices go, it's the best I've ever had. And last thing I want to mention is go over to the vault at the shrug collective.com and you will get access to all the training programs we've been putting together the last six years. And you'll get access to a Facebook group where we're all having a nice conversation about training, nutrition, and everything in between.

Enjoy the show. They let you out in public. You got to put something on your feet. You know what? I've been surprised by how many restaurants let me just go in barefoot. Really? Yeah, and then not surprised when they don't let me in. But, yeah, most of them don't say shit.

Oh, that's good. Some really nice ones. Really? Yeah. Nice. Yeah. All right, so you just put me through the ringer. Yeah, literally.

I've had a lot of body work done. And that was some of the most intense. So I don't know if I would call it painful. I would just call it intense. Totally. So one of the things. All right. So I'm just going to do a little setup here.

Yeah, yeah. Mike Nelson is somebody who I'm really blessed to know because if I have any scientific questions at all, like, oh, what's the legitimacy of this thing? Because I get hit up by a lot of people with I've got this supplement or – Oh, I'm sure. Or I've got this protocol or I've got this. And so I'm really fortunate to have guys like you and Andy Galpin to just go, boom, what do you think of this?

And then the really cool thing is you don't just give like a yes or no answer a lot of times. Like so many times you're like, well, I'll have to look more into it. And then, you know, here are like five, you know, here's a few links to show you why this is good or not good. So it's really cool. And then, so it's awesome having you as a resource is always beautiful. Thank you. You know, as well as just a friend.

Yeah, yeah. Just a friend. But you also cut people up. I have. Cadavers, cut people up. I have. Cadavers. They were dead. They were dead people. Yeah.

Not just running around doing anything weird. Yeah. So I think a lot of times people in the strength and conditioning field follow you. And a lot of people study movement and all this kind of stuff. But you're actually looking at it from every angle possible. Yeah. You're like, oh, yeah, I just got to go do this or that, and I got to go, you know, slice up some cadavers.

And you were doing some work on me earlier, and you were talking about something that never even occurred to me is, you know, when you're doing a dissection, you're, you know, you might be following how someone else did a dissection before and you might miss something. Oh, totally. And so recently there was, I guess they knew that this system existed, but it wasn't classified as an organ. Right.

So that was something that happened recently where it was like, okay, no, we actually understand this as an organ and how it operates a little bit more fully and things that may be missed by certain types of dissection. You were talking about how the psoas connects right into the diaphragm. Yeah. You were working on me. And, yeah, if you look in an anatomy book, you know, you see the psoas goes from the hip to the spine or the leg to the spine.

And but it doesn't really highlight that it's just like what it just flows right into the diaphragm. Is that right? Yeah. So the first time I heard that was actually from Ron Hraska at PRI, the Postural Restoration Institute. And so I'm taking this class and Ron's like, well, you know that the psoas, the other end of the psoas is the diaphragm. And I'm like, it is the diaphragm. Yeah. Yeah. That just connects to like the diaphragm. Like what? I'm like, what? So afterwards, you know, I politely asked him, I said, now you said the psoas, the other end is a diaphragm.

He's like, yeah, I went through and did it in dissection. I've seen it on multiple cadavers, and you can find some books that actually have it. And at the time, I'm like thinking, wait a minute here. I was teaching anatomy and physiology at the time. I had taken tons of anatomy and physiology, completed my PhD in exercise phys. And I'm like, wow, he seems pretty damn certain about it. And he actually did the actual work and went and investigated so I'm old enough to learn not to just argue with him and like well maybe maybe I missed something although at the time it seems impossible so I went back and looked at the

pictures and you're correct that the pictures that they show because it's very heavy on origin and insertion you're correct inside the the femur all the way up into the lumbar spine. It splits and attaches to the front part of the lumbar spine and actually the back part of the lumbar spine. But in most of the classic quote-unquote textbooks, the rest of the view, if you look real close, is cut off. Because in their brain, okay, this is the origin, this is the insertion, there's no more to see.

And so we're cutting out the other stuff so that you can get the good visualization of it and so then I went oh wait a minute so I went back and I did some fresh tissue dissection with Tom Myers. Tom Myers has done a lot of the anatomy trains a lot of fascial work and he's described it as the diaphragm looks kind of like the head of a cobra and the psoas is actually the kind of the bottom part of the snake. And so when I did the dissection course the first time, and this is all fresh tissue, so these cadavers had only been frozen once. They've not had any embalming fluid or formaldehyde or formulin or anything. And what you realize when you do fresh tissue stuff is that everything looks different. So the reason they use a protein fixative is because they have to use the cadavers multiple times.

Like you may have a cadaver maybe for a whole year. So you kind of have to do that, otherwise it's going to smell horrible, the tissue is going to degrade, and you'll literally have nothing left after a few days. So I understand why they do that. And then most of the time, like you said, they're already what they call prosected. Like when I took anatomy and physiology the first time everything's already done you just go in and identify what it is you know as you get to like kind of graduate level stuff you get to do some of your own dissection work but it's still very guided okay you go in and you find the origin

insertion of the psoas it's fixed tissue already now The course with Tom Myers was literally, here's five days, look at whatever you want, we'll give you kind of a progression to go through. And when I did that, I actually saw that the other end of the psoas, the fibers literally become the diaphragm. And it was amazing to me after that course, I had written like probably 10 pages of notes of like all the stuff I had literally gotten wrong. And it's stuff that you would miss so even like fascia when you do a lot of embalm work you can't really ever see any fascia

you don't see any color differentiation you don't really see fat all that's been removed away when you do fresh tissue and you make your own cuts the first thing you do is literally remove the skin off the fascia and the fascia will show up very clear to white and the rest of the tissue muscle will appear very red because all the blood everything else is still present and it's amazing to see the difference in the same body and i think that's why fascia is becoming a little bit more quote-unquote popular now is that there is more fresh tissue work it's more of that's been done it's's been around for quite a while, just in fitness hasn't really been popularized. But I understand that how people have kind of stuck with the old model

because if you're, let's say, a strength coach and you've never done any fresh tissue work, you understand the role of fascia, but you've never really seen it. And it doesn't, I don't think, have nearly as big of an impact to when you do fresh tissue work, you go, holy crap, this stuff is everywhere. And the lines that it forms are not what the textbook always say. So if you look at the fascia that covers the quad. Are they different from person to person? Yes. So they'll follow the general same pattern,

but because of the specific loading to that individual, the fascia will reform under lines of loading, just like any other tissue. And like if you look between the tib and the fib, you can see this fine webbing and you'll see cross sections of fascia going in every which direction. Why? Because that tissue is exposed to different lines of force. The body is going to lay down tissue, which is Davis' corollary, to handle that type of loading. So being able to see that firsthand, for me, was like super profound. Wow. What implications are there with the psoas becoming the diaphragm?

And I got hip to this a few years ago after having hernia surgery and then really questioning, because I've always been of the mindset of, you know, like a lot of people will say, even doctors will say, well, you just get a hernias. We don't know where they come from. Yeah. And I'm like, and I'm thinking anything that is causing injury in the body, there is a root cause. Sure. And, you know, with my hernia, I got talking to Jill Miller and I got down, I got down, my breath must be fucked up and my, my pelvic floor wasn't firing. And, and it was actually a long arduous process to just get my, my, uh, my pelvic floor to even be able to feel it. Like I just wasn't complete unaware,

unconscious of how it should even feel or could feel or to activate it. And then just worked on that for years. So then I got to a point where I was like, you know what? If I have any mechanical dysfunction ever, if I'm not addressing the breath, then I'm probably just asking for that mechanical dysfunction to show up again. For people who may be experiencing problems with their hips or shoulders, how does the diaphragm

being the psoas, how does that impact all that? Yeah, so it impacts a lot of stuff. so as i've done more kind of hands-on work and different things on people the more time i spend working on diaphragm kind of the visceral gut area rib cage like everything else just got much better and stayed better right and if you think about where we're generating force it's kind of more from the core kind of out when you say core because i think people hear yeah just think about the abdominal region right like could you describe to us what is i also have a new view of the core now than i did even three years ago so i'm curious what yours is yeah so how i explain this and i got this from a physician theresa nesbitt years ago is that imagine'm curious what yours is. Yeah, so how I explain this, and I got this from a physician,

Teresa Nesbitt, years ago, is that imagine you've got like a can, right? And the bottom part of the can is your pelvic floor. The top part of the lid of the can is your diaphragm. The front part of the can is like your rectus abdominis and the classic abdominal muscles. You've got the sides, which are more your internal and external oblique. And in the back, you've got the spine, and you've got all the smaller kind of supporting muscles. You've got the sides, which are more your internal and external oblique. And in the back, you've got the spine, and you've got all the smaller kind of supporting muscles. And if you think about it that way, if the bottom part of the can, the pelvic floor, is off,

and you're managing pressure as one of the things your body has to do all the time, then it could push pressure up into the diaphragm and cause a dysfunction in the diaphragm. So imagine if I'm going to pressurize this can and I put a really crappy lid on it, I'm not going to be able to hold that pressure there. Or if the abs in the front aren't working right, or if there's any sort of thing that's not coordinated to function at that time. This is like not just 360 degrees around, but in every direction, up and down as well.

Every direction, up and down. I started thinking about the core as a sphere. Yes. Same idea. Just to simplify the shit out of it is I need to be strong in every single direction, like up and to the right, up and to the left down and so and and so few i mean just like what we were discussing with the with the anatomy with the uh dissections is what's typical in science i find is we like to separate things have you ever read uh uh zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance you know it's been on

my list for years and i haven't read it yet but i got to bump it up on the list now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He talks about in that book basically the scientific method likes to create separateness. Yeah, it's reductionist. Yes. That is nature. Yeah, and we like to look at things one thing at a time, which is the only way you can really get deep with something. Yes.

And the beauty is expressed when it's all working together. Yes. And so being able to see it from both sides has a lot of value. It sounds like as well from the core perspective, it's like I was brought up in very traditional strength and conditioning. It's like, yeah, you do, you work your, basically the sides, anti-rotation. Pull your belly button in. Yeah, just all sorts of shit. And then I more recently started playing around with my movement and training

and going, you know, if I just think about there being a ball right there in my core and trying to be strong in every direction, it's been helpful for me as an athlete. Yeah, and I'll get back to your psoas question too, is that I think then how should the core work and how should it function? And I guess kind of where I'm at now, which I may change my mind, is that I think most of it should be unconscious. Yeah. Right. So if you look at kids, they know if a weight's kind of heavy or if a weight is lighter, right? Only in the fitness world do people go up to a light dumbbell that they could easily pick up with no injury and try to pick it up like it's the heaviest,

like it's a 300-pound Atlas stone. Only people who have been taught in fitness do that. Now, granted, you could argue the other population does the inverse, right? They're not prepared to handle any load, and they're kind of messed up in that way. So I like to look at asymmetric movement that forces the correct firing pattern. So a big one I do with online clients is I'll say, sit on the floor, put your feet out at 45 degrees, no back support. Take a dumbbell or a kettlebell and say your right arm and press it overhead in like a kind of a 45 degree angle. Because I know if you're going to hold that dumbbell ahead and I took your legs out of it so you can't hyper extend super far, that opposite side has to stabilize or that dumbbell or kettlebell is not going to get over your head.

Yeah. Right. Trying to put people in positions where they have to get the right function or they can't execute the movement, especially when I'm not there to kind of watch them do it. Yeah. And I think that reflexively the core, that area should work better in that regards. And you go back to psoas and breathing,

I find that people whose breathing is very not so good, right? So their ribs don't expand well, their diaphragm doesn't move so well. They tend to be more kind of classic upper chest breathers that their core stability is not really that good either. Those tend to be, in my opinion, pretty highly associated. So I'll do stuff on them like we kind of did on you. Get their breathing better. Make sure that they're in a better position. Make sure the pelvis is more classically kind of quote-unquote neutral. I don't want them in this super heavy anterior pelvic tilt that puts their low back into extension.

And the main way I found to help that is with the psoas, again, getting that other end, that diaphragm, to work better. So we did a passive leg raise on you. And what that's really looking at is people would say, okay, that's a classic hamstring passive flexibility test. Yes, absolutely true. But I got this again from Ron Hiroska, Pure Eye, is if you're sitting in a super heavy anterior pelvic tilt,

the insertion of the hamstring behind you in that SI joint area, those hamstrings are already pre-stretched. Yeah. And if we leave you in that pelvic position, we measure hamstrings are already pre-stretched. Yeah. And if we leave you in that pelvic position and we measure your range of motion, it's crappy. But just by doing breathing work, so you got like, you know, 20 degrees on one side, 30 degrees on the other side, and yours wasn't that bad going in. We didn't stretch your hamstrings.

We didn't really do any direct hamstring work at all. We just got that pelvic position to be a little bit better, and that allows a greater range of motion then again. Yeah. So I find everything kind of starts in the middle and kind of works out from there. Yeah. You were talking about the can before, and there's a leak in the bottom. Yeah.

And for me, at the end of my weightlifting career, I was obviously getting a leak at the bottom because I had the hernias. Yeah. But I was also experiencing a lot of my weightlifting career. I was obviously getting a leak at the bottom because I had the hernias. Yeah. But I was also experiencing a lot of shoulder pain. Yep. Because the whole core was collapsing. And I think for me, I looked at core when I was younger as, like, I did as little as possible to keep up with the sport.

Yes. It was like, oh, I'll do just enough core to compete in my sport. I really didn't value it to the degree that would have kept me healthy. And now that I've been retired for a few years and I'm really just seeking health, I love being strong. I want to train to be strong. Yeah, everybody loves that as far as I've found anyone I love being strong. I want to train to be strong. Everybody loves that as far as I've found anyone who likes being weak.

I would say 80% of my training is core oriented these days. Even if it looks like it's not core, my intention is for it to be a core exercise. I'm never lifting a weight that puts my core out of place.

So do you do, quote-unquote, belly breathing at the end of a lift? So, like, if you did, I know you didn't do a lot of overhead lifting right now, but have you done, like, an overhead lift and held it there and then done belly breathing specifically? Not overhead, no. Okay. Have you done that in other positions? Yeah, I've done that with squatting. Yeah.

I haven't done that with a lot of pressing in overhead. Should I? What I've been playing with for about the past two years, I haven't really talked about this much at all, is that I think if you can gain control over the end range of motion and demonstrate to your body and your system that you have control over it you're literally making it easier right this is something i've done with say a front squat yeah i get to the bottom of a front squat and i just sit and breathe there yes so i've done well

there yes but i i should be doing this over i would extend that concept to either weak position or end position right so a lot of front squat, most people are weak at the bottom. So the completion of the lift because of the levers is relatively easy. An overhead lift, the completion of the lift is to get the load overhead, usually holding it at your chest or wherever you start, relatively easy because you don't have any arm movement. So what I've done is I've said, okay, take a very light sub-max load and either go in the weak position or go in the extended position.

So like overhead would be extended overhead. And then I want you to do two to three belly breaths there and then either drop the load or finish the lift or just get out of it, right? So on a front squat, take a moderate load to start with, get in the bottom position, do two or three belly breaths. Your position should never change your position should look exactly the same and then stand up gotcha so i think what you're doing is one you're seeing can you breathe under load right because for a lot of more advanced activities like some crossfit stuff some strongman stuff if you're doing a 60 second

like event you're gonna have to breathe right you're not gonna hold your breath for that whole time and a lot of times i see people's mechanics go to crap as soon as they breathe right so you'll watch them do a max load so like strongman's a good example you'll watch them do a deadlift and they can get away holding their breath for a single rep but now you tell them okay let's go do even 100 feet of a farmer's carry. Now you're going to have to start breathing as you're moving load. And can you do that? Can you keep your stabilization?

And I think it's a good way to also demonstrate to your brain that I own that movement. I've got years of Valsalva under my belt. Oh, yeah. Where, like, you know, it's always a breath hold. Yes. Because weightlifting, power know, it's always a breath hold. Yes. Because weightlifting, powerlifting, this is what was common. Yes. And it's like I was treating every load like it was a heavy load.

Yeah. I'd say probably even sub-max loads. Yeah, sub-max loads. I was doing a lot of breath holding. Yeah. And now I look at it and go, I almost want to do no breath holding. Well, if I was competing, I would do it at heavy loads. Right, but that's a one rep max.

And one rep max and stuff. But now I'm like, fuck, man, I overused that. And that has led to a lot of issues. Yeah, so one of the things related to that is let's say someone, let's say their squat's 315 and I see them start in their warmup with 135 and they're doing such a heavy Valsalva They look like they're gonna turn purple Holy crap for me. That's like a massive red flag. Got right

What are you doing to hold your body together under a very very sub max load? Like you talk to Caldeetsa University of Minnesota some of the stuff from Doug Heal They may even extend that to say should we even really be doing a breath hold under a max load? Again, they're talking about more performance, not absolute load lifted like power lifting. If you're training an athlete whose job is not to lift the heaviest weight possible,

if you're training football players, you want those dudes breathing as they plow through people. Oh yeah. So I think for people listening, what they can do is play around with different positions, start with a way sub-max load, get a video or have a coach look at you. Can you belly breathe under a load,

and then can you slowly elevate that up over time? The second part that it does, too, from a neurologic sense, if we want to increase parasympathetic tone or the more relaxed and I would argue, almost control, holding a load overhead and now belly breathe is demonstrating to your nervous system that you are having control of that lift, right? You are becoming a little bit more parasympathetic. You're not in this complete sympathetic, stressed-out position.

And what I've noticed is that people's max will go up faster in a much safer manner too. Oh, nice. I would say the majority of my training now too is like core is always at the top of my mind, but also like skill development. And I think about more of building the nervous system over time. Because it's like, yeah, I think we can build engines, you know, build like someone who can run hard for a long time. I actually find that to be very easy by comparison of nervous system training.

How do you define nervous system training? I would say a lot of how I challenge my nervous system now is always, not always being conscious, but having nice breathing patterns. Like I do a lot of just nose breathing only and then working on new skills while maintaining good posture. So I'm maintaining, I'm being conscious of my posture, I'm breathing nice and steady, and I'm working on new skills, something novel all the time. And one of the reasons I do that is I see that when organisms stop getting new stimulus, they die. Yeah.

I go, oh. The sea slug. Yeah, if I want to live a long life, then constant stimulus and different types of stimulus, things that I need to constantly be adapting to. Yeah, I mean, the way I see it is I've noticed that a lot of the work I've done, I have more fine sensation in my body. And with touch, smell Smell sight even hearing yeah I can hear I can sense everything better and I think it's because I put a lot of attention into

Training my nervous system and not as much attention into you know, am I training my anaerobic aerobic system? I'm doing less of that and I might do a two-hour movement session where it's skill based I'm probably in that aerobic zone when I'm training the aerobic metabolic system. Yeah, and as you increase parasympathetic tone, your senses get better, right? So there's a thing called hypervigilance. So there's been reports of even, like, policemen and a report of a gunfire directly behind them, and the officer says, I did not hear the gunshot. Right.

And you're like, what? How the hell? Well, you read the report. There's a guy coming at him with a gun. So his brain is like focused on the immediate threat. Heart rate elevates. And your brain says, OK, I'm survival based. I'm dealing with this immediate threat.

I don't care about anything else that's going on because this is the immediate threat. Yeah, and the military, we call that tunnel vision. Exactly, same thing. You get into a combat situation. Yep. And you have to, they have a lot of training now to keep that from happening. Yes. Like, put you in a lot of stressful situations.

Threat inoculation. Yeah, teach you to chill the fuck out when things go south because you get tunnel vision, that's how you die. Oh, yeah. I've even used that to a lesser degree like kiteboarding. I do a lot of kiteboarding. I went out last year in Mexico the last day. I went

in waves I probably shouldn't have been in. I'm like, oh, it'll be all right. The waves were not set up. They were super messy. You just got waves were not set up. They were like super messy, like you just got dropped into a washing machine. And they were like 6-7 feet tall. Again, not, you know, for most surfers those are not big waves, but for

someone like me who lives in Minnesota and has only been in, you know, 2-3-4 foot waves, when they're not lined up, it's kind of a disaster and you've got this massive kite. They look way bigger when you're out there. Oh, totally. From the beach you're got this massive kite. They look way bigger when you're out there. Oh, totally. From the beach, you're like, not bad. I've got that plenty of times.

I've learned my lesson. A buddy of mine did get a picture of me behind a wave and all you see is kite lines. So I'm like, yeah, they were legit. I remember just being in the troughs, just trying to ride and just going, okay, I just need to control my breath because I can't freak out when I'm out here i just i'm just gonna ride easy i don't care if i'm losing ground i don't care if i'm going down man i got you know a mile and a half of beach i know

i'm safe i just need to get control over my breathing so that i can you know come because i knew my senses were starting to close off i could feel like the world around you just gets smaller. And I check in with my breathing and I'm just like, you know, I'm like, okay. Chill out. Double deep breaths. It's going to be okay. You know, that type of thing. Do you have any tests for people? So I remember I walked into a gym one day and I was talking to a guy.

I had a neck issue that particular day, which I almost get well I got a funny story about that too but um I walk in he goes take a deep breath for me I took a breath and my shoulders went up and down yeah and so that was a that was a test I adopted I started talking to people and I go you know they're like man my neck is bothering me or you know I feel like tension in my shoulders I I'm like, oh, take a deep breath. And I watch my shoulders go up and I go, oh, yeah, your diaphragm is just not filling. So I think you could probably lay it out better than me and probably teach me something in the process.

But what's happening there? Yeah, so if you look from an anatomical sense, right, so everyone now talks about, okay, we've got belly breathing, we've got upper chest breathing. The reality is it should be a combination of both right in a perfect world the diaphragm is pulling air creating a negative pressure into the lungs the lungs and the ribs actually have this 3d type movement uh to them if you kind of oversimplify it a little bit people will be described as a belly breather or an upper chest breather. So what you're describing is an upper chest breathing. And that normally corresponds, it's a two-way street, to being more stressed.

If you think about, okay, I'm going to go sprint and I'm going to run as hard as possible, at some point your diaphragm is going to max out and your brain goes, okay, how else can I get more oxygen? Can I get those ribs to expand more because I'm reaching the peak part? And what you'd look is like, so the muscles in the head and the neck. So SEM, scalenes that attach from the head down to the ribs. If your head is stable and those fire, they kind of pull up on the ribs like a bucket handle. And they're primarily designed for huge amounts of high-stress exercise to move those ribs a little bit more to drive more air in.

What happens is a lot of people get rewired that when they're stressed, that is their kind of quote-unquote normal breathing pattern. So what you'll see is exactly what you described, that the shoulders are actually moving kind of more up and down. And you ask them, you go, is your neck tight? They're like, yeah. And you go to the bottom of like the earlobe into the clavicle and you kind of just palpate on their neck and you're like, holy crap, those are very, very tight. And they're just being overused as not an accessory breathing muscle, but as a primary breathing muscle. And that doesn't mean that your diaphragm

is not working at all. It means that your diaphragm's not working at all. It means that your diaphragm's probably not working to the degree that it should be. And so I think, yeah, the assessment you did I think is a pretty good one. I'll tell people, like, when I lay them down on a table or even when they just walk in, the first thing I look at it, I'm like, ah, screw it. I'll tell people that. Everyone who listens to this comes in for assessments is going to be careful. But I watch them. I spy on them through the window when they get out of their car before they walk in.

And the second they walk in, the first thing I look at is their breathing pattern. Another tip which I got from ZHealth is if you have someone do a normal gait pattern, so you're trying to get them to do what is their subconscious programming, when you tell someone, okay, I'm going to watch your gait. I want you to walk. You'll see everyone just try to fix everything because they want to impress you, even if they're there to be worked on. We have this desire to be liked.

Totally. Yeah. So what you do is I'll tell them, okay, that's cool. Walk a little faster. Walk a little faster. Oh, so what did you do yesterday? And a lot of times you'll see them stop and look at you and go, Oh, well, yesterday I went, No, no, keep walking, keep walking.

So what you do is get them to walk at a fast enough pace and then distract them by holding a conversation. So they have to go into an unconscious pattern. They can't hold all those compensations together. Right. And that gives you a little bit of a sneak peek into what they're kind of unconsciously programmed. And I'll watch their breathing pattern at that point too. If're on a table I'll have them lay down and the first thing I'll do is like all right just relax take a couple breaths and I'm not really telling them that I'm just watching

their breathing pattern and I'm looking to see you know how much their stomach's moving how much their ribs are moving their ribs kind of just everything kind of scrunching up? You know, what are they doing in order to breathe? Because if you go all the way back to the body is very much wired for survival. And if you go, okay, what is probably the number one thing we have to do in order to survive? So what is the thing you can not go the longest without doing? By far and away, it's breathing. Right. Right.

You can go without water for a couple days. You can go without food. I think the world record is like 373 days or something crazy. Both are quite a while. Breathing, it's like minutes. So, therefore, you're probably going to have a lot of unconscious compensations in breathing because no one was found dead because they forgot to breathe. Right?

You don't hear the newspaper. Oh, no, man. I ate a pot cookie once. You thought you were going to die? I had to remember how to breathe, right? You don't hear the newspaper. Oh, no, man. I ate a pot cookie once. You thought you were going to die? I had to remember how to breathe for hours. Did you call in and tell them the time stopped? No, no. I was watching the Ninja Turtles movie here in Austin, Texas. We went to the theater and come to realize the three people I went with

were also panicking during the movie. So I wasn't the only one that had too much. Yeah, I mean, what is it, the chicken or the egg? Because I, you know, the way I, it's like the chest breathing, not getting enough diaphragmatic breathing causes there to be a cortisol. It can. It's a stress response. So if you look at your autonomic nervous system, you're definitely going more towards a sympathetic state.

Right. It could drive the nervous system to signal we're in a stress state. And now your body produces hormones to be stressed, which then informs your nervous system that we're stressed. And now you end up with somebody who's i mean i i think that in the western world in the united states we have a a huge amount of people who are um breathing really bad yes their posture is completely fucked up i mean we could talk about people sitting at desks and all that shit but there's there's the stress that's happening with the bad posture and then it's it's like a vicious cycle.

Yeah. How do you break that? So what's cool is I always look at physiologic systems, and you can use an analogy like a push-pull, or I like to use an analogy of a one-way versus a two-way street. Most systems are what I would consider a two-way street. So in the example you gave, which is brilliant, so someone comes in and they go, yeah, your breathing is really off. You look like you're super stressed. I can see your shoulders are scrunched up. If we put heart rate variability on you or we try to look at your autonomic nervous system, we can actually put numbers on that. Yeah. The cool part then is we know from HRV research

the inverse is true. So even if i don't change your mechanics at all i get you to take nice long slower deeper breaths without changing your mechanics they will change a little bit by doing that you actually become more parasympathetic right so i think that breathing is also the fastest way to get somebody out of that sympathetic state. Nice. So you can do that consciously. You can do yoga. You can do meditation.

You can do all that kind of stuff, which I think is great. I'll say there's a – I think the ratio they found that's pretty ideal for most people for box breathing is a four-second inhale, a one-second pause, six-second exhale. Okay. One-second pause, four-second inhale. Yeah, it's a lot of Buteyko stuff. It's basically like four, really all you got to remember is four-second inhale, six-second exhale with about a one-second pause at the top and bottom,

and your HRV mellows out pretty well from what I've seen. Yep, and that would make sense because in HRV, it's been known for a long time, like even some of the apps, they will pace your breathing. They will tell you breathe in and breathe out, breathe in and breathe out, because we know that just by changing your breathing, your HRV will change. I was doing biofeedback when I learned that. Yeah, you can do that.

Like HeartMath has some cool stuff. Yep. Or I'll tell people just do an HRV measurement first thing in the morning. Like I'll do some meditation stuff, which I learned from you, a lot of that stuff, which was awesome. Yeah. And then I'll do HRV again. Even with paced breathing, my HRV is almost always better.

Why? Because I'm in more of a parasympathetic state at that point. Yeah. So if I want to start my day, okay, well, so I work on my breathing mechanics and I do like breath work. So I'm wondering, and I've played around with both, is doing my movement first to work on mechanics or and I played around with doing like some breath holds and some some breath work first yeah that's more like you know physiologically driven do you have an opinion on what to focus on first like if you're doing a morning routine yes so what I do myself and I have my clients do is we did some of the RPR work on you reflexive performance reset and a lot of that is hands on work

which can be done on yourself working a lot on the rib cage, a lot of the fascial areas, some different points, pressure points, that kind of stuff I'll tell people go through and do those main points first why? Because I want your mechanics to be actually better, I want your

psoas to work better, I want your glutes to work better I want your mechanics to be actually better. I want your psoas to work better, I want your glutes to work better, I want your diaphragm to work better. So then when you do whatever breathing you like to do, your mechanics are already better, so the breathing is going to be substantially better. You're practicing good reps. You're increasing the quality of the work that you're doing. Now you can do the inverse and i find that it's not quite as beneficial it would almost be like if someone's coming to train um we're going to do our activation work after training right yeah i do it before right because you want the quality of that stimulus to be higher right and i find that that has a much bigger

transfer and in some people who come in, they're like already doing some pretty good meditation and breath work, but their rib cage and diaphragm and everything is just stuck and screwed up. So are they getting the benefit from what they were doing? Yeah. Could they get a much greater benefit from getting better mechanics? Yeah, absolutely. And usually we find that with resting heart rate will go down hrv will go up even just doing work on them without them doing any breathing work like i've seen pretty massive changes in hrv and resting heart rate just by getting better mechanics yeah the the cool part about it that i realized is that your brain is always seeking efficiency

also so when i was doing some of the hands-on rpr work like today i didn't really ever give is that your brain is always seeking efficiency also. So when I was doing some of the hands-on RPR work, like today, I didn't really ever give you a cue to change your breathing. Right. But you reported that your breathing felt a lot better. Right. And to me, I think that's the fastest way because I want the unconscious to switch.

And it appears that if you make breathing for someone more efficient, their brain will almost automatically switch to that new pattern without a lot of cueing and without a lot of other drills and other things. Those things can still be beneficial, but I want to get back to that autonomous programming, that unconscious programming, because that's how I think you get the greatest change with the least amount of effort going forward. Yeah, that's awesome. So, you know, I have a lot of friends. They do a lot of breath work. And I played around with some more mechanics-based breath work. Nice. Which is like some ujjayi. And I'll put my hands.

Ujjayi just means that it's a type of breath work where you're constricting the flow of air through your throat so it's also called like ocean breath is what the yogis like to call it we call it Darth Vader and so it's just nose only so you're actually causing resistance to breathing in and out so it's like so it's like and then when you you're doing the ujjayi breath and then you stop and you just breathe normal it's like like, oh, it feels more expansive. And then I do where I put my hands around my waist. I breathe in my hands there. I put it up underneath my arms, breathe into my ribs,

and then I put my hands on my back behind my neck. And I sit up straight, and I'm breathing with that four seconds in, six seconds out with that Ujjayi breath. And so I do those mechanics breath before, work on the mechanics of breath before I do, say, a Wim Hof or something like that. Yeah. But, you know, I know a lot of athletes,

they focus on belly breathing in between sets. They do, you know, Wim Hof or something like that in the morning. But it sounds like to me that we really need to be working with a professional to help us on our mechanics. Like what we just did because a lot of the practices that I'm doing, like I'm doing a lot of breath work in the morning that doing the Ujjayi breath is a practice for building better unconscious patterns. Like I'm doing a conscious practice in the morning so that my body ends up embedding those as unconscious patterns is what we want. But anytime I get work done or like working with you today, I know that like the progress we made was huge. And so tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up and I'm going to make sure that I do, you know, if I learn anything new from you that I'll implement, which I always do when I'm working with anybody, I go, oh, yeah, this is actually a little bit.

Even if what I learned isn't like a technique that I'm using, but just an awareness of my own body as I'm doing the breath work. So I'm excited to get work done with you and then go right into my practice where I get to embed that even deeper. So, yeah, cool. practice where I get to embed that even deeper. I guess what I'm encouraging people to do is to do the big work with people like yourself get your breathing mechanics dialed in but also have that practice because it all builds together. Yeah definitely and that's one of the big benefits I've noticed from doing some of the RPR stuff that I didn't expect is if you get someone's breathing better,

how much a lot of their other stuff just starts sorting itself out. Yeah. You know, from, like you mentioned, shoulder issues, hip issues, all sorts of stuff. I mean, you can get into some pain stuff with autonomics being, you know, more elevated. Pain tends to be worse and things of that nature too so it's and the nice part is with that stuff is you can do drills on yourself once you know what to do so it's not like you have to go into a practitioner you know once a week or every few days yeah you may have to do a little bit more intensive at first to get some stuff sorted out but it's not like you're dependent upon that person

and that's what i liked about that system is I can then hand the responsibility off to them. Here's a little video. Here's your drills. Here's what to do. Go work on that. You know, just take a couple of weeks to see what sorts out. You know, let me know what you find.

And if you want to do some more advanced work or stuff like that coming up, hey, cool, we can work on that. But I don't want to be working on the exact same issues all the time. And actually, it's a really good shit test for me with clients because it's like, hey, if you didn't do your homework, I don't actually do repeat sessions with those people that much. Right. Because if you're not going to, at some level, take responsibility for it yourself, I'm not

going to take on your responsibility. Yeah, and you don't want clients walking around with no results. Right, and that's the thing, right? I don't want to feel like I have to fix you because that's just a horrible paradigm to get in. I will help you, and I will provide you tools that allow you to move better, and then you get to a certain level, and, hey, you want to do something after that? Cool, we'll try a few other things.

We'll look at this. All right, here's your new drills for things to do. It's the exact same thing as training, right? Even if someone comes in, the beautiful part about training is, I use the analogy of Oprah Winfrey. Like Oprah could hire the best trainer in the world. She could hire a chef. She could have someone follow her around every day with a cooler

and maybe a freaking microwave and a generator on wheels or whatever. But she'd still have to lift the weight. She still has to eat the food. No one will ever be able to do that for her. So at the end of the day, it's even in that extreme situation where you could outsource a whole bunch of stuff, she still has to put

in and do the work, which is the exact same as everybody else. Brad, personal responsibility. Yeah, go figure. Everyone thought they were going to get the answer on this show. I think people keep listening to the shows, hoping that they'll get the silver bullet.

Yeah, and that's so hard, too, with physiology, right? You see people go from one thing to the next thing to the next thing, and they're looking for the one thing that's going to change everything and what you find with physiology is that it's a multi-redundant system right and that's why even with training and everything else you know hands-on work nervous system work whatever there are so many systems because a lot of stuff does actually work. Now, some things are better than other things, and some things may be faster. But if there was only one particular thing that worked or only one way of increasing your squat,

well, shit, we would know what the hell that is by now. And everyone would just be doing that one thing. Yeah. I mean, I've made a lot of progress in a lot of aspects of my life, physically, emotionally, spiritually, whatever you want to call it. And when people ask me, oh, what did you do? I'm like, fuck, man. I was attacking it from every fucking angle.

You know, it's like I wish I could tell you the thing that worked. But it was probably a dozen things that all worked together in some way. And maybe had I done things in a different order, it would have been faster. But you know what? I was just picking up the pieces as I was going. Yeah. And so in my brain, I go, okay, what's the – so one of the pieces as I was going yeah and so in my brain I go okay what's the so one of the big things I do with the online clients even in person is

they'll come to me and say okay here's all the stuff I got going on and I'm doing their training doing their nutrition doing their lifestyle in my head I'm thinking okay what's the what's the kingpin right what's the log jam what's the the one or two things that I pull out or give them to do. The highest leverage. The highest leverage point. That's all I'm looking for. And it's hard for people to go, okay, it's only these couple things. And those couple things may be responsible for 60% or 70% of their result, but they're kind of majoring in all the different minors.

And one of the ways for a mental model I use to look at that is going back to survival. So if your body is wired for survival, we go back to what is the top thing for survival? Breathing. So in pretty much every single program I give someone, change psychology aside, there's some type of maybe hands-on RPR work that's just showing how to do it on a video, some type of breath work, maybe some type of biometric intervals during training, which I got from Cal Dietz. You know, squat, don't care what your max heart rate is, okay, your next set of squats, you don't start until your heart rate gets down to 80 or 90

or some programmed level, right? I'm purposely having you figure out your own breathing in some capacity, because I found that that's breathing in some form is going to be one of the highest leverage points yeah dude um oh yeah one thing I want to talk about yeah is you did work on me and we found that uh we had would it be would it be accurate to call it ocular dysfunction uh I would say uh eye movement or ocular vision issue, per se. So I was really curious, and this is something that when we interviewed Paul Cech on Barbell Shrugged a while back, and we got into, you know, he has like this totem pole where it's like the musculoskeletal system is at the very bottom and consciousness is at the top, and he has all the different levels.

I thought it was really, really enlightening. He mentioned the vestibular system and the ocular system and all this and how that impacts movement. I was just like, oh, shit, he's right. As soon as he was saying that, I was going, well, of course. I've just never thought about it before. But as someone lays something like that out, you go, well, this is obviously true.

Yeah. This is all connected. You know, if one eye isn't seeing as well as the other, you might be shifting the way you look at things, which is going to shift. And you'll sometimes drop to monocular vision. Yeah. You'll drop 3D vision.

Drop 3D vision. Yeah. And it's maybe such a slow thing that people don't notice that it's happening. Yeah. So in my case, right now, my 3D vision is okay. It's probably better than it's ever been. But for many years, I had very much monocular vision, right? So you've got two eyes.

Too much reading. Yeah. Well, it's funny. As a kid, I loved reading. Right. Right. I hated activity because I get hit in the face with balls.

Like, literally get hit in the face with balls because I would play in high school. I hated softball because I wouldn't even get close to hitting the ball with a bat. If you don't have great 3D vision, that's pretty hard. And think about

the easiest thing to do would be to catch a fair ball that you've got plenty of time to watch it come down. Sure. If you don't have 3D vision, you look up, there is no reference point other than light to try to figure that out. Fuck. And it would literally hit me in the face. And, of course, everyone else does it.

And at the time, I didn't understand it. But everyone else is going, wow, you suck horribly. Right. As a kid, you're going, fuck, man're going fuck man i suck yeah exactly that can't be great and i just figured well i'm just horrible at sports that's just the way it is you know i had a open heart surgery when i was four and a half for a congenital defect and some stuff yeah um but what i realized going back as i spent a couple decades trying to unpack all of this is that oh i probably haven't had real good 3d vision ever so as a kid I was diagnosed with what's called a strabismus or a lazy eye so back then you know 1978 they would patch the quote-unquote good eye and force I remember

seeing kids I remember seeing a couple kids growing up that yeah yeah yep and then did you do that oh yeah yeah okay yeah totally you were one of those kids i was totally one of those kids like i literally walked around with about a 45 degree head tilt and like massive scoliosis shit because think about what happens right to your body your brain goes my right eye sits up and out farther than my left so the two images go to the back of the brain and your brain will normally fuse those images because the eye position is off a little bit because of the way they're set in your head. The brain fuses those images, and that's what creates 3D vision. Right.

And in my case, the images were so far skewed that for a while I saw in double vision. So I went in as a kid. My parents told me this later. They did this little exam, and the eye doctor goes, hey, how many of these little dogs do you see at the end? And I go, well, two, but only one of them is real. Because when you proprioceptively interact with your environment,

you learn what's the real image and what's the false image. You can't grab the false image. And because that is the same all the time, your brain learns what's real, what's false. And your brain doesn't want to be confused. So its solution, which is pretty brilliant, is it'll drop the one image. It'll do what's called suppression. So in my brain, the two images go to the back.

They're skewed pretty heavily. My options are seeing double vision, which is not very cool, or your brain to suppress or to drop that other image and drop to monocular vision. So I could see good out of my left eye, I could see good out of my right eye, but they didn't work together. It'd be like walking around with one eye closed all the time. And I didn't know any of this, so learning to drive, all that kind of stuff was very hard. It wasn't until I took some stuff from Z-Health, they were doing one of the first eye training courses. And it was funny because everyone in the class is like, holy shit, you got

to go test this guy's eyes. They're crazy. And so everyone in the class is going through doing all these eye tests on me. And literally by like day two, I wanted to pass out in the corner. I remember going to the coffee shop, getting a 24-ounce, like the biggest coffee you could find. I drank that, and I literally wanted to go to sleep. You were smoked. I was so smoked it was unreal. Wow.

And that was the first time in my life I really had, you know, CNS fatigue, central fatigue, whatever word you want to throw in with it. Right. Muscles, skeletally I felt fine. Right. I just felt like I got hit in with it. Right. Muscles, skeletally, I felt fine. Right. I just felt like I got hit by a truck. Right. Wow.

And then I started to realize, and they go through your history, and I'm like, oh, you ever had laser as a kid? Yeah. You had a strabismus? Yeah. And so then I went, oh, and tried to figure out and so spent probably the next couple of decades trying to figure out what was better with that. Long story short, some of the RPR work initially was deactivated from Doug Heal,

helped made a massive difference. He did some stuff like we did with your eye testing. Behavioral optometry, I was so bad off that they didn't want to deal with me. I got kicked out of, like, I don't know how many different practitioners' offices because they because they're just like now we put a 10-degree prism on you Your brain can't figure it out. Go have surgery and I'm like, oh, what's the success of surgery at 20 30%? Good luck. What if I'm like that sounds horrible now and It wasn't until I went to a PRI class on vision that I bought for myself as my birthday present like four years ago And so I go

down there in Lincoln Nebraska and so Ron Hraska there works with Heidi Weiss who's the person who does a lot of the vision stuff so he has like a dentist there he's got someone who does shoes he's got someone who does vision stuff and they all coordinate within the same office to figure out you know muscle skeletal and other problems going on if If you think about it, that's brilliant, right? Because back to your comment about where are you getting information? Is that information not the best that it could be, and that may be messing up your movement? And I remember going through that course, and they said,

we have like a type 1, a type 2, and I think it was like a type 3 patient that they see in Nebraska because they get kind of the worst of the worst. And they had these lists. So type 3 patient is like, have you ever been hit in the head? I'm like, yep. You ever had any major surgery? Yep. Do you have midline scar?

Yep. You ever had torticollis? Yep. Were you born like in kind of a weird, you know, breach or weird fashion? Yep. You had a lazy eye? Yep. I had everything on the list except for ALS and Parkinson's.

And part of my brain is looking at the list going, man, I'm fucked up. I'm fucked up, man. And the other part was, oh, thank God they have a list because that means they've seen these people before. Right. And they didn't think I was just a complete utter whack job for coming in and having all these things going on. Wow. So that was actually reassuring.

And so now I'm doing some work from a local functional neurologist. I work for the Keurig Institute, so I'm a faculty member there. They do a lot of functional neurology. And so they'll look at all these different eye movements, vestibular movements, and figure out via testing, okay, where are you missing? Like your saccades, are they off? Can your eyes move vertical? Can they move horizontal? Can they do all these different types of things?

And then they'll figure out what part of your brain is not as active that should be and will give you another drill to activate that part of the brain to get you to be able to regain some of that lost function. Yeah. And we saw it today in myself. Yes. And I haven't had the kind of history you've had. I think I've been hit in the head quite a few times.

Yeah. But we found that when I looked up and to the right, I got weak. Yeah. I felt weak. And you didn't want to do it. Oh, this was hilarious. I was chuckling at myself on the inside when this happened. You said, look up and to the right at my hand.

And I thought I was. Yeah. And you go, no, come. You're like, come on, let's go. And I go, oh, I avoid that area. Yeah. I don't even like, I had to like force area. Yeah. Like, I don't even, like, I was like, I had to, like, force it. Yeah.

And then when I did get there and then we did the test, I got weak. Yeah. And then we did some, you did some stuff where you did basically some, I would look up and to the right and you would do a lot of activations. Yes. I guess is what it was. Yeah. So I'll spell out the result and then I want you to tell people what you did.

And then we retested. I was looking up into the right, and I was strong basically after the session. And then what I also found was it felt like my vision expanded. Yes. All of a sudden, I could see more of the room at one time, and I found myself looking over to the right, which I normally avoid, but didn't know it. I was unconscious of the fact that I was not looking up into the right and I'm actually enjoying looking up into the right. Yeah. I'm like, I want to go do it more. Yeah. Which is hilarious but and i went for a walk afterwards and it felt like the upper right

uh the back right side of my brain or my head felt like there was like a new awakening sure and that part of my head where it was just like like blood had just like gotten access or something sensations to that part of my my head And I'm going, what the fuck? And, you know, like having explanations for those types of sensations, I've had all sorts of, you know, it's like, what can you feel? What can you not feel? I can feel a lot of stuff inside my body I used to not be able to. So it's cool to get this kind of work done being like, oh, shit.

Not only are parts of my body becoming active that weren't active before, but parts of my mind, I mean, it's all connected. Totally. There is no such thing as a mind-body separation. Like if your body's fucked up, your mind is fucked up. Yeah. So this is – it felt so good. Just sitting here right now, I feel amazing.

Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Yeah, no worries. I hope it helped. here right now, I feel amazing. Well, thank you for that. Yeah, no worries. I'm happy to help. And can you describe to us what you did for me in a 15 minute period? Yeah, it wasn't very long. To be strong. And some things I know about emotional trauma even

with vision, as you smooth out some things that have to do with your eyes wanting to skip over an area and not wanting to go to a direction, you smooth that out with something like EMDR. Sure. And this is a similar concept. There's probably some repercussions to you doing this treatment on me that we're unaware of that may change my life in a really positive way. Oh, yeah. It probably creates more emotional stability and intelligence.

So, you know, I think a lot of times people don't even consider that as one of the benefits of this type of work. Yeah. Yeah. So how do I explain it? So that's based off of some work from Be Activated, which is from Doug Hewitt out of South Africa. He licensed the course as RPR, Reflexive Performance Reset, for coaches and trainers. So Doug teaches more of the medical model. And what you're doing is, so we did some initial testing on you to figure out, okay, what muscles are kind of weak, which are strong,

do some of the activation points, get those to be strong. A lot of times, if you were to test your vision ahead of time, sometimes just by getting the right muscles to do the right job, vision will actually start to clear up on its own, which is crazy. In your case, we tested you at the end just to see what we would find. A lot of times in person, I'll go kind of through their whole history if they've had injuries, trauma, and I know a lot of your background already, so we didn't really have to go that far. And what you're literally doing is if the body is survival-based, you will not really voluntarily want to go into positions where you are weak.

That's funny because people who have emotional trauma do the same thing. They avoid the emotion and get us all tied together. Why? Because it's, in why because it's together it's in essence it's overly simplistic but i view it as a weakness and that doesn't mean that they're a weak person that just means that if i see like in car accidents a lot like someone will get t-boned from the side and have you know like some trauma to their face or something like that one guy i worked with he was a goalie and he got hit with the puck on the right side of his head. So we went through, did a bunch of stuff, got better.

We did some of the testing with the eye position and vision like we did with you, and found that anything on his whole right side was not testing well at all. So I'm like, okay. So this is the third session I worked with him. I had known him for a couple years so I put him in the position that he would be playing goal and I just

barely touched the right temple area and for like a split second he looked like he was going to kill me because what did I do to his brain and his nervous system I put him in the position that's very very threatening and I by touching him and giving him some proprioceptive feedback there, for a while I'm literally recreating that injury to him. And that's an incredibly threatening area to be in. And I said, okay, I'm just going to do a little work here. What I want you to do is I just want you to belly breathe. We've done a lot of the breathing mechanics on him already.

And within about two to five seconds, you can see him start to calm down, did some work on that area, had him walk, retested. He was good. And I asked him, I said, what did you feel like? He's like, I literally felt like I was going to kill you for a couple seconds because it's so threatening to him. And he had got hit by a puck there. He had been knocked unconscious, all that kind of stuff.

So what you're doing is you're looking for areas that are kind of weak and then you're activating them in that weak position so that it is no longer a weak position. Yeah. And you can really kind of mess with people a little bit and you can watch interactions with people and watch what side that they will approach someone or they will be approached by though i don't recommend people do this but if you get bored if you all right so i will do this sometimes just for fun which is kind of cruel but if i see someone

who's missing i think an area of vision i will kind of walk up to them in that area, and I'll see what they do. And almost all the time, they will unconsciously turn so that I am in their stronger side. So I would imagine, I'm guessing, for you, approaching way up on the right, getting close, is probably not something that you would consciously even allow nor even know that you were doing. You'll probably back up and turn a little bit away from them. probably not something that you would consciously even allow nor even know that you were doing.

You'll probably back up and turn a little bit away from them. Yeah, I wonder, too, I mean, training to fight a lot of my life is left side forward. Sure, yeah. It's like I'm always protecting the right side. Yeah, and you had mentioned shooting guns and things like that, percussion trauma possibly in that area. Yeah, interesting. So then you wonder, right, and we don't know, is it because that has always kind of felt stronger

or is it because that's been more of a weakness because of kind of what you've done in the past? Trauma will change that. Last comment on that too is that if you put someone back in a position where you're recreating some trauma that may have happened to them, you have to be exceedingly careful, in my opinion, because if you leave them in that state, congratulations,

you probably just made them a whole lot worse, right? Because what did you do? You're further neurologically embedding a threatening state into their brain. Now, if you get them to transition out of it and retest them and show that they're strong in that position, I think you can kind of rewire that to be much, much better. And so that now a little longer becomes a weakness for them. But, I mean, I've worked with some people, and, again, I'm not trying to treat their trauma. I'm just trying to do movement. I'm trying to make them stronger in weak positions as a side effect you can have extremely pronounced people with a lot of very emotional release a lot

of crying I've worked on a few women who just had a lot of one girl had a lot of issues on her whole right side you know we didn't get into get into any trauma or anything like that. But if she had three injuries on her right side and she was not even 18 yet, and her mom was present for all of it, and she's been knocked out twice, that's pretty threatening. There's obviously something going on that she's in a symmetrically based sport that she's re-injuring everything on her right side right sure enough testing on the right side was very bad you know she had a very big emotional release to it and she you know just

started crying and she's like and I don't even know why I'm crying right you know it's because you're you're eliciting that that same response and then she did some breathing we did some work with her and then she felt great after. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. What, so we did the work on me today, I'm now enjoying looking up and to the right. Yeah, which is cool to watch you

keep looking up to the right. Yeah, how do I keep that? Is, there's obviously an old pattern of behavior for me not to do it. Is there any exercises for me to do here on out, or is this something where it's like, well, we probably got most of the work done today, and it'll work itself out?

Yeah, so what I find with the general activations is doing the points on yourself, and I'll send you a video on how to do that. That definitely helps. If you can do it before your breathing practice, even better. If you can do it before training, even better. What's cool about some of it is, like when I've talked to Cal and JL and Chris Corfis, who do this a lot, they've taken guys

and literally activated them and put them directly under load. Right. Which, at first, I was like, holy crap, are you kidding me? Because I think of, like, static stretching, I think of kind of common activation type drills I don't know if I want to load someone right after that but it's different because you're literally activating the right muscles to do the right job and so now if I have people come in when I'm at home I don't really have them work up to an absolute max unless I have them go through

and do some of the activation stuff because I believe I'm actually putting them at risk. So Dave Tate had some of this done, added 90 pounds to his squat. JL was there and said that he no longer shook like a leaf because they'd watch him train and Dave's been very open about all the injuries and stuff

that he's had and they said you could just see him like he had no stability. Once he got had no stability and once he got all that stability and everything back boom you know weights went up quite a bit obviously extremely experienced lifter that type of thing and they've also said I don't care how much this hurts do whatever you want I just want to be better and so they tortured the piss out of him but it you know it worked so all that to say I think doing something where you're adding strength to what was a weakness it's hard to know

exactly what the benefit is but it's definitely better relation to the vision thing usually I find once the vision thing has been quote-unquote cleared as long as the other activations stay good it normally won't come back to that exact position. And I think it's because your brain is searching again for those efficiencies. So now you are unconsciously trying to always go more to the right because it feels easy, right? So we've now opened up that area. I mean, my whole right side will probably be more open from now on. Yes. And I would imagine your right shoulder will probably get better too. It already feels better. Yeah.

I feel broader. And even though I noticed my pecs are a little sore. I mean, you were digging in. Yeah, yeah. But it's like, yeah, I feel more almost like a stretch. But I imagine that will feel normal in a day or two. Yeah. So what do you find is that your amount of sensation goes up.

And then what you find is over time that becomes unconscious and just bigger movements and more open. And that's just kind of how you feel. Because the brain likes efficiencies, you're actually moving more. So watching you walk around is cool because your eyes are like, hey, I can go to the right, I can go to the right. So you're unconsciously practicing that all the time, probably without really thinking about it.

So you're already using those sort of new capabilities, which, again, is how you kind of keep something. Yeah, that's right. So more movement, more practice. Yeah, more movement, more practice. I mean, I'd say do the little activation points. We'll send you a video on that. That will activate the particular muscles. And then just, you know, putting them under load or some type of movement, you know, works pretty well to keep that.

And most people get that pretty good and then, you know, you may plateau at another point and you may find that, oh, something else may show up, right? It's like killing the onion. Yeah, like I've done that on myself a whole bunch of times. I've probably gone through four or five different eye positions. And one of them, like, was probably a couple months ago, probably six months ago now, I just got really stuck. And one of them, like, was probably a couple months ago, probably six months ago now. I just got really stuck. And when my eyes get stuck, my HRV will drop, and it'll stick low. It just won't come back no matter.

I get sleep. I do all the other stuff I normally would. It just doesn't come back up. And that's how I've realized that, oh, man, something's stuck somewhere. I got in a go-kart accident probably a year and a half ago in Chicago. You do some weird activities. I know. We can blame Angelo if he's listening.

Probably. Yeah. So we're doing this, driving around, and the go-kart, you had to sit, and I'm pretty tall, so my legs are right next to the steering wheel like this. And I come around a corner, and I kind of spun out, and all of a sudden this kid in another go-kart hits me, and his go-kart is on top of me. His go-kart is halfway on top of mine.

Angelo told me about this. Yeah, and it's on my left knee. He felt bad. And I'm sitting there, and so he comes running over. The two guys working at the place come over, and I'm like, get this go-kart off of me because I could feel it twisting my ACL on my knee. And I'm like, just get it off because I'm thinking in my head I'm going to blow my ACL. Right.

And they're all just staring around looking at me, so I kind of pick it up, and I just shove it off, and I stand up, and I have these pants with little zippers, and I can feel my knee is just wet, and I'm going, I'm like thinking please let there be lots of blood please let there be lots of blood because that means it's just a sensation on the outside so I look and there's just blood all running down my knee and so I stand up and I'm like moving around to see if I can you know laterally cut and do kind of other things which I don't recommend people do this on themselves but I wanted to know what you're doing right yeah I wanted to know did if I don't recommend people do this on themselves, but I wanted to know. You know what you're doing. Right.

But I wanted to know, if I can't move certain ways, that means that something I know is horribly wrong. So anyway, go through all that. The left lateral commutative limits, everything is just messed up. And I realized about five months after this happened that everything in the left side, when my wife tested me, off so what did I do I put myself in the go-kart position like I'm driving and had her do specific work with me looking up and to the left and holy crap did that hurt like hell it felt like I'd never worked on my body in my whole life but after that everything

there was good HRV goes up like 13 points the next day and was great. Nice. Yeah. That's fucking rad. Yeah. So kind of crazy. This is some awesome shit. I'd be willing to bet most athletes, if they did something like this,

would see dramatic improvements. Yes. Do you find most athletes are just, they'll go on. I mean, I was talking to a guy. I won't say who it is. Yeah. The other day. And he was like, I was telling him about, he's like,

I just don't get this animal flow stuff. He was like, my coach had me doing in between sets and all this. And I just didn't get the point. So I fired the coach. And now I just let that go. And I was like, I love the animal flow stuff. He's like, why? I was like, because if I don't do it, I get fucked up.

Yeah. Like, it's, you know, a big part of my core training and just staying healthy. Sure. Like, it keeps me strong, and it really highlights me. And this is somebody who competes. Yeah. Like, at a high level. It's like, oh, they're so unaware of these really simple things.

What you're talking about is fairly simple, but unknown. It's just, it's hard. People don't intuitively connect the dots on their own with these types of conversations. Yeah, and I find like even some high-level CrossFit athletes or athletes that do a lot of sagittal-based sports, I'll look at them and I'm like, ah, on a max squat, does your hip shoot to the left?

They're like, how did you know? I'm like, because you're a max squat, does your hip shoot to the left? They're like, how did you know? I'm like, because you're missing lateral stability in that area. You do a simple lateral stability test, they're horrible. Oh, yeah. And in their head, they're going, well, wait a minute, I'm doing a sagittal-based sport. Yeah, but you still have to stabilize in three-dimensional space. We do live in a three-dimensional world. Yeah, but once you get that cleaned up, which doesn't take that much work, a lot of times, they're like, wow,

my squat feels so much more stable, and you watch them, and their hips don't move around, right? And they're like, and I can lift more now, and it feels easier. I'm like, hey, cool. And then sometimes I've tested some pretty elite, one guy from the NHL, one of the top players there. And, man, he was amazing. He's probably the best player I've ever tested just in off the street. He's one of the players that was known for he'll literally deflect pucks in midair into the net.

And so we did a bunch of vision stuff, like just trying to figure out position-specific stuff, a whole bunch of stuff. And I caught something real fast on his vision as I went through a specific type of movement that he had been injured in in the past. And I literally went through again to do the second rep to verify that I saw what I thought I saw. He had already corrected it. And I'm like, holy shit.

No wonder this guy is so good. He's plastic. He's plastic. He unconsciously realized his error and had already fixed it, but he didn't even know what he did. And if you think about it, that is the elite of the elite. That's just high-level adaptability. Totally, yeah.

Yeah, and that guy is just a parasympathetic monster, too. He falls asleep on the table. That's the thing. He's got that vagal tone and he's, I mean, and this is why I was asking about, do I breathe before I work on mechanics? Because if you get into a parasympathetic state, you can learn faster. Oh, totally, right. So it's like, yeah, it's crazy. So like a lot lot of times if I'm gonna learn a new skill, you know, I do some breath work before Yep, I learned the new skill and it just comes so much quicker. I have people make comments like how do you learn? I got how do you how'd you learn to get on a slackline so fast? It's like minutes later I'm I've got it figured out or to degree. It's like how the fuck I'm like, I am chill the fuck out

Yeah, like I I did I did a 20 minute thing before I showed up. I didn't just like how the fuck i'm like i am chilled the fuck out yeah like i i did i did a 20 minute thing before i showed up i didn't just like step on here and that's why i picked it up so quickly yeah and like with weight training like if i'm teaching someone how to deadlift or something like that the comments i always get are like wow my deadlift feels so much better i learned it so much faster it doesn't feel like i did anything right because i'll go through i'll figure out where they're weak. I do the activation first. I then do their deadlift. I'll do like a light before just to have them be a comparison.

But then all the work we're doing is skill development. So if I put a heart rate monitor on them, their heart rate probably never even breaks 75 or 80. Yeah. Right? Because if I make them more sympathetic, right, the body's going to run towards fight or flight. And what did I do to motor learning? Screw that, man. Gross motor activation activation fine motor skills go to shit like i

don't want to stay away from that i want them to be as parasympathetic as possible and then yeah over time as you get that embedded can you add more stress to that and do okay yeah but if you're learning that new skill exactly what you said i want to keep them as parasympathetic as possible, long rest, lightweight. I want to keep the skill component high but the risk very low and teach them in that space. And then once they get and learn that and it starts to become more permanent, now you can do things. Now you can start amping them up and that type of thing.

Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Fun stuff, man. Dude, thanks for joining me today. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for letting me work on you. That was fun. We've been planning this for quite a while, and I'm glad we got to do it. Got it done. Yeah. Got it done. I feel good. Where can people find more about what you're up to?

Sure. Probably the best place is just MikeTNelson.com, M-I-K-E-T-N-E-L-S-O-N.com. Most of my content goes out through my newsletter, so there will be a place I can sign up on the top there to get on free newsletter area and a bunch of articles and calendar. Everything else is there. Rad. Look them up. Check it out.

Thank you so much. All right. All right, folks. If you learned something, go over to iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you go. Five-star review. Positive comments, please. And remember, Organifi.com, 20% off if you use the code BLEDSO. And you know what?

If you want to do that deep excavation, if you want to look at every aspect of your life and see where you might be leaving something on the table, go to trainingcampforthesoul.com. If you heard me interview Paul Cech a couple days ago on The Strong Coach, some of the subject matter we got in there, that's the type of stuff, that's the type of work we're doing here.

So check that out. I'll see you next time.