Barbell Shrugged - The Intersection of Medicine, Muscle, and Strength Training w/ Dr. Jordan Metzl, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Kenny Santucci — Barbell Shrugged #394
Episode Date: May 15, 2019With a practice of more than 20,000 patients, Dr. Metzl is widely known for his passion for sports medicine and fitness. He completed his residency training at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and Sport...s Medicine Fellowship Training programs at both Vanderbilt University and at Harvard Medical School. In addition to his busy medical practices in New York City and Stamford, Connecticut, Dr. Metzl is the author of the bestselling titles Running Strong, The Exercise Cure, and Athlete’s Book of Home Remedies, and has also authored three other books including The Young Athlete. Dr. Metzl is the medical columnist for Triathlete Magazine. Dr. Metzl is a highly sought after teacher and fitness instructor. He lectures both nationally and internationally to health organizations, fitness communities, and in wellness venues on the topics of sports medicine, fitness, and preventive health. His research interests include the treatment and prevention of running related injury, the effectiveness of preventive wellness programs, and the prevention of youth sport injury. For a list of Dr. Metzl’s peer-reviewed journal publications, click here. He created the Ironstrength Workout, a functional fitness program for improved performance and injury prevention that he teaches in fitness venues throughout the country. The workout is featured free online where it has been performed by more than 9 million athletes around the world and was also featured in the New York Times. It is also available on DVD here. A former collegiate soccer player, Dr. Metzl is a 33-time marathon runner and 12- time Ironman finisher (and still going). In this episode of Barbell Shrugged we talk about how Dr. Metzl built his practice, the importance of merging the world of medicine with the world of fitness, fitness classes for Doctors, how the medical field views strength training, the branding problem in fitness, reaching the people outside of the fitness community, where to find Dr. Metzl, and much more. Enjoy! - Anders and Doug Episode Breakdown 0-10: Dr. Metzl’s background, Ironman, how Dr. Metzl built his practice, and the importance of merging the world of medicine with the world of fitness 11-20: The problem with the culture of constantly pushing your body, knowing your body, why your biggest screw ups lead to the best life lessons, and the business side of Dr. Metzl’s model 21-30: Steroids, men’s health, and the last 5% 31-40: Fitness classes for Doctors, the importance of a fitness education for health professionals, and looking at the research of muscle mass and heath 41-50: The benefits of strength training, how the medical field views strength training, the branding problem in fitness, and reaching the people outside of the fitness community 51-68: Knowing your scope of practice as a fitness professional, do no harm, “regenerative medicine”, Dr. Metzl’s books, and where to find Dr. Metzl ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-metzl ----------------------------------------------------------------------- @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 @vuori - www.vuoriclothing.com “SHRUGGED25” to save 25% storewide ► 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
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This week, Dr. Jordan Metzl is on the show.
He has a practice of more than 20,000 patients.
Dr. Metzl is widely known for his passion for sports medicine and fitness. He completed his residency training at Tufts Medical Center in Boston
and sports medicine fellowship training programs
at both Vanderbilt and Harvard Medical School.
In addition to his busy medical practice in New York City and Stanford, Connecticut,
Dr. Metzl is the author of the best-selling titles
Running Strong, The Exercise Cure, and The Athlete's Book of Home Remedies.
He has also authored three other books, including The Young Athlete.
Dr. Metzl is also the medical columnist for Triathlete Magazine.
Had a blast doing the show in New York, and let's get into the show.
Welcome to Barbell Shrugged.
I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Dr. Jordan Metzl.
Somehow, Kenny Santucci is going to creep in this door here any minute
and be our co-host here.
We talked at 1045 last night,
which means this is going to be two very late nights in a row for you
and early mornings because you were on the Today Show
and you just had your new article come out about the knee,
which we're going to talk a little bit about.
And the author of two of four books, which I'm holding, The Athlete's Book of Home Remedies and Workout
Prescription for High Intensity Interval Training Workouts.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks, guys.
This is really cool.
You not only invited us into your house, you have no idea who we are.
You brought some sushi.
We've already had a little bit of elevated conversation.
Life is so good.
Dude, I grew up in Kansas City.
I'm a big believer in hospitality.
I love it.
Can you give us just a little background on this practice of yours
and how you got into creating, one, all these books
and how the exercise thing is integrated into your practice?
Sure.
So I guess I have kind of several lives that have
come together. So the first life is as a sports medicine doctor. And I work at a place here in
New York called Hospital for Special Surgery, which is the biggest orthopedic and sports medicine
hospital in the world. And all we do is musculoskeletal problems of back injuries,
shoulder injuries, knee injuries, etc. and it's a great place and my
sports medicine practice is a lot about uh getting people back into the activity they want to do so
that can be everybody from like a eight-year-old gymnast to an 82-year-old person that wants to do
the marathon everything in between and so during the day uh my practice is a lot about that getting
people figuring out their injuries figuring out how to keep them going, how to prevent their problems, et cetera.
In addition to that, over time, I have kind of melded my world of being a sports medicine doctor with the other strong passion of mine, which is fitness, health, and prevention. I played soccer in college. And then when I finished college
and med school, I started doing triathlons, ran my first marathon as a resident and now have done
35 marathons and 14 Ironman triathlons and try and keep myself going. And over time,
have kind of built a whole separate practice in the realm of fitness.
And so that started about seven, eight years ago,
starting the first physician-led fitness community.
Started with 20 people in a basement.
One of my patients was the general manager of a gym
and kind of recruited some of my patients.
And I started teaching a strength class.
That has grown into we have our listserv of about 38,000 people
we send out monthly mailing to and
we do these different free classes different companies help subsidize locations we do
thousand person classes on the flight ticket the intrepid every summer we do big classes in central
park that's a thousand people in person a thousand people in person dang the same time it's awesome
you should run a business class i know all the gym owners too if you will
have any extra time on your hands so it's been it's been cool to kind of grow that part of you
know not only talking about getting people fit and active but actually getting out and doing it
and teaching people how to do it and inspiring people to do it and then i've been lucky also
to team up with uh rodale books and other folks just to put out a whole series of books about the interface of
medicine and fitness. Because in my opinion, you know, the medical system is a lot about,
you know, when something goes wrong, when you have a heart attack, when you have high blood
pressure, when you hurt your knee, you go see the doctor. But I think the fitness world is a lot
about preventive health, staying healthy. And I feel like both worlds need to learn from each
other. So I'm really kind of view what I've been doing,
both in my medical practice, in my sports medicine practice,
in my fitness community, in all the books and things I do,
about trying to bring those two worlds together,
the world of medicine and the world of fitness,
to promote prevention and health, which I'm big into.
Was this an idea of yours to kind of bring those worlds together,
even back in medical school, or is this more of a recent thing?
No, I kind of had two separate silos. I had kind of my my work life which was all about being a doctor
and i had my fitness life which is all the stuff i love to do get out and move and
do sports and what i kind of realized over time was that on the medical side we did a terrible
job of thinking about preventive health and thinking about ways to make people healthy
rather than just take care of the problems that they're done. And I thought, in this fitness world,
everybody's doing all the things I would like to do.
How do I start bringing these worlds together?
So I kind of made a conscious decision
to slowly bring these worlds together.
We run a seminar every year at Cornell
for the med students now.
It's our sixth year doing this
called Prescribing the Medicine of Exercise,
teaching doctors of the future how to prescribe exercise
as part of what they do.
And you think that makes a lot of sense,
but if you go to any doctor, we talking before over sushi saying i go to the
doctor and you say i want to lift some weights and they're like well i don't really understand
that they don't know how to give you advice and they don't mean badly they just don't know anything
about it so teaching people how to you know if you're a 62 year old guy who's had a heart attack
and you want to to be active you know what do you do if you're somebody who's like a 75 year old guy with arthritis in their knees and wants to walk or run or whatever what do you do? If you're somebody who's like a 75-year-old guy with arthritis in their knees
and wants to walk or run or whatever, what do you do?
So how do you start bringing what you want to do, what you can do together
when thinking about that I think becomes really important.
So I think that's all part of this discussion about bringing these worlds of medicine
and fitness together.
This one's for you, Homer.
Kenny Santucci in the house. Our boy Kenny Santucci coming in
fresh off a New York City nighttime party.
Yeah.
Coming into an interview.
Pull that mic up.
There you go.
In his hat, kind of at the right angle.
I know.
He's got the cool guy look to him.
Totally.
All right.
I'm so glad we got this to happen.
Dude, no pleasure.
No problem.
It's unbelievable.
Is there a side of the two things
that you're working on that you're a little bit more passionate about or do you still enjoy being in
in the clinic in the office i like them both because it keeps me personally balanced like
i feel like if you get too far you know in the fitness world you uh can kind of lose track of
who you are some ways i think i think you kind of there's there there's some it's great but there's also kind of a lack of reality versus when you're sitting with somebody who's you know a real life
person who has got a lot of different health issues it really keeps you grounded so for me
uh i like the balance because i think they both they balance out what i'm doing well you came
from the triathlon world and i think that in that triathlon world when you kind of step back and view that
world and pair it to kind of the crossfit world or powerlifting or any group of people doing a
specific thing and they're trying to be great at it you end up getting into that that seems to be
where like a lot of the problems show up it's not that they're not motivated it's not that they
don't understand health it's that they get really lost in it. So is there a piece of this that you kind of start with like the behavioral health side of this,
and let's have an honest conversation about what good exercise is and doing it properly for a long
period of time versus are you running triathlons? Are you doing CrossFit and the modality that
people choose? Well, I guess I have a few things about that. That's a great question and a thoughtful question.
And, you know, my feeling when I kind of see, even when I lecture to kids group, to parents
and kids at a young age, I say, listen, the odds that any of you will be like a professional
football player, professional baseball player, or, you know, Olympic gymnast are really,
really small.
My goal for you is across your lifespan is you will have the
same joy of activity that I do, which is that I love every day moving and being active and
fitness as a big part of what I do and a big part of what kind of defines my role in life, I would
say. So I think that part of the reason people get lost in whatever fitness community they're in
is they really, you know, they get so wrapped wrapped up I see it with kids dancing ballet where their their
their teacher was a former professional ballerina and what's normal for her she grew up with a
needing disorder she's had a whole bunch of stress fractures she used to you know smoke and drink
coffee so she wouldn't eat she kept her body weight way below where she should be for her age
and that was normal for her.
And so all the kids she's teaching, you know, what's normal for them
and normal for her is all normal, but it's really abnormal.
They just don't recognize it.
And I think that's true in every sport, be it, you know, CrossFit or triathlon or anything.
So I think a big piece is both kind of being wrapped up in what you're doing
but simultaneously keeping some perspective about, you know, what is
healthy. And sometimes you don't even see it yourself. Yeah. And I think that there's also
a conversation of culturally, why do we chase these things where we have to have overuse injuries?
Like, why do we have to go be the warrior? Every single time we try to just go do something. I
think if we just looked on a very macro level, if we could get people to increase their strength a little bit and
then walk or like go for a run we could do a massive amount but instead the conversation always
goes to like how intense are you working out or how crazy do you have to be to be healthy you don't
really need to but how do we start to change as and if it comes from the medical community or it
comes from gym owners or podcasts how do we start to change as, and if it comes from the medical community or it comes from gym owners or podcasts,
how do we start to change the conversation or the cultural shift that we need to get people to understand that, like, Nike's selling you a shoe.
They're not selling you fitness.
Like, we don't need that commercial to be you.
We just need you to start moving and understand your body.
Yeah, I think that those are all great points i mean i think uh i actually start some of my lectures with one of the great i was in africa last winter
and of all like the lions and the giraffes and the zebras and the hippos and all the cool things
he's had the coolest animal which i saw was the african dung beetle have you guys ever never heard
about that so anytime like in africa when one of these big animals just takes a massive poop,
if there's a dung beetle in two miles, the dude will fly there.
And within 10 minutes, he will build a baseball made of poop.
It's like a perfectly symmetric poop baseball.
And then the woman, dung beetle, and he knows where he came from.
And he basically will start to roll this.
It's an awesome video. He will start to roll this. It's an awesome video.
He will start to roll this poop baseball back towards his house,
and the female will assess who has the best ball of poop.
Wow.
She will stick herself on this ball of poop,
and the dude, based on the sun, will literally roll this ball of poop up the two miles
back to his house where they will devour the ball of poop and reproduce,
and that's their cycle, man.
Wow.
What I tell people is some days you will be the freaking dung beetle flying there building the freaking ball.
Some days you'll just stick on that ball and just be pushed along.
And that's fine.
Like you don't have to be the freaking flying dung beetle making the ball of poop every single day.
And I just think people have to be comfortable understanding that because I think part of the problem is the culture of, and I think CrossFit
as a sports medicine doctor, I see, I like CrossFit, so I'm not down on CrossFit at all.
In fact, I like it. I think it motivates people, keeps people, you know, ramped in a community,
which I think is the biggest piece. But if I was going to give you one knock on CrossFit,
I think if people lose sight of their body's capability and they push themselves too
hard in that group setting. And I think that's the big piece I would say that I think that you
have to recognize that you're not going to be able to put the same output every day and your
bodies are different at different ages and times and capabilities. And so you don't want to keep
up with the person next to you. So there's a great camaraderie of saying you do this, I'll do this,
you do the pushups, I'll do the pull-ups you come back we'll switch off i love that stuff
it's awesome but simultaneously i think it's dangerous if you don't know your own body and
you're not receptive to that you're just kind of buying into that community so how do you present
how do you present that to because nobody starts this and they're like you know what i think i need
an education in fitness they go run a triathlon.
Yeah.
And then they've got chin splints.
Yep.
And then they tape their knees.
And then they have a hip problem.
And then next thing you know, they're like, oh, now I need pose running.
It's like, no, what you really needed was like an education five years ago to save yourself all these problems.
But where do you come into that outside of the books
and hoping somebody's going to come for the education?
How do you start talking to your clients about this?
So here's what I tell people in any lecture I give or anything.
I tell people that, A, I want you – I never want to be the douchebag doctor that's like, all right, don't do this.
Don't do that.
I hate that.
I feel like – what I feel like.
I mean I want to set a goal.
I want that goal to be outside my comfort zone i mean the iron man is very uncomfortable but i think it's a great
goal for me just because it pushes me beyond where i would comfortably be and to me a really healthy
i think it's a great healthy thing but i tell my patients the same thing which is that you know if
pain is changing your mechanic of movement you got to get it checked out so if you just keep going
going going going and not listening that so if it's a swimmer, it's a runner, it's a strength
trainer, whatever it is. And I think part of the knock, I would say of a part of the culture of
group fitness is people really don't respond to those cues. And then beyond that, then we figure
out, you know, your form is bad on this. Your running form may be a problem. Your lifting form
may be a problem. Your, you know, whatever it is you're doing, we can then based on what kind of
coach or strength coach or whoever we're working with can figure out what's the
modification we have to do to try and fix that i've never in the history of talking to anybody
where they sit down and they run a group class not run into this problem it's when we have personal
training or there's one-on-one and kenny's got great classes upstairs that aren't crossfit to
be able to kind of monitor the intensity and load and all these things. But you also run group classes. There's no way that you have a thousand people on a ship
doing your workouts and they're not kind of sizing themselves up next to the person next to them
saying like, okay, like, oh, you're going fast. Let's, let's go faster. Yeah. And I think part
of that's very healthy. So the question is, where is the line and how do you educate people about
that line? And sometimes, you know, like anything you've very healthy. So the question is, where is the line? And how do you educate people about that line?
And sometimes, like anything you've done in life, the best way you find out what the problem is is when you screw it up and go a little bit past that line and recognize that's what I did wrong.
Because like anything, people don't take what I'm saying seriously until they hurt their knee or they hurt their back or whatever.
Then they're like, oh, my God, I've got a problem.
They don't think about this enough.
And they probably shouldn't because some people do great, but it's important.
How do you think you blend the business models there?
Like fitness is low revenue,
high client interaction,
high client effort.
Medicine to stereotype is high revenue,
low client interaction,
and low client effort in a lot of cases.
Like they're a world apart in many ways.
Like how do you blend those two models together?
Like a lot of doctors probably want to do fitness stuff, but they're like, there's no money there.
What am I doing?
Yeah, I've actually not, you know, I've not made almost any money in fitness.
And so I think if you're looking to make money of the problem in medicine is that there's you know increasingly
there is a revenue focused part of medicine which i don't love so for example uh if anybody in this
room we got an mri of anybody and kenny knows this because i've talked to myself it's like you
want to get an mri of anybody any of you guys you would all have a meniscus tear and does that
meniscus tear need surgery no but does the whole system getting an mri showing the meniscus it's probably a normal variant in people over 40 everybody has a meniscus
tear so i wrote about this in the new york times today so you find this thing you see it's there
and then people say all right i got a meniscus tear your knee hurts we better do surgery take
out the meniscus and the answer is you probably have meniscus like everybody knees have been
around for 20 million years mris have been around for 40 years.
And it's asymptomatic and your knee hurts.
And yet, you know, people are kind of encouraged to the system pushes you in that direction.
And so I think the profit piece of medicine, you know, it's a problem.
Number one, in terms of the fitness world, I've come across so many awesome people in the fitness world uh you know passionate about what they do that love it and i've also come across people who
you know i think are doing stuff that's you know really questionable like in any field um
how do you blend those business models i mean i think i'm in a great position personally
just in the sense that i do the fitness piece because i really believe in it and i love it
um i it's hard because the fitness folks are always, you know, the margins are small and they really work hard.
I mean, look at Kenny here.
He gets up at freaking like 3 in the morning and he's training people until freaking 10 at night.
He just rolled in.
That's weird.
He also stays up until 3 in the morning.
I know.
Do you sleep at all?
No.
When I watched that speech the other night about sleep, I'm just like, I never get any of that.
You're the only guy in the room with a standing applause like, that guy's smart.
You should get more sleep.
I'm like, that's a good point.
Totally.
I wish I'd gone into that.
To your point from earlier when we were having dinner, in the fitness space, there's a lot of things that aren't backed by science. And because it's a low revenue structure, you need people tend to gravitate towards these things that are new and sexy but aren't backed up by anything because that's the only way they can see getting any money.
And that's a problem as well.
Yeah.
I mean, so here's what I would say, that I feel like maybe I'm taking this from the perspective of I want people to be active, but I don't want them to do stupid stuff.
And so to me, the question becomes how can I keep them active without doing stupid stuff?
And I think that's exactly right.
I think this kind of leaning into doing things because they're new or trendy and they're not scientifically validated
you know anything i would ever do to anybody i would do because there's been a good body of
evidence supporting what it is i would recommend they do i think you know people that you know
want to put pellets of testosterone in their butt you know underneath their gluteus muscle to keep
their testosterone surges going when they're 50 and 60 and 70 years old. Does that help some people? I guess. I saw a guy from Brazil three months ago
who had a total reaction to that stuff and was getting tons of glute pain and hip pain. He had
it for like three years. He couldn't do any activity. He wanted to get those things out,
but they couldn't take them out and it was just a mess. And so people don't hear about the downsides of trying something new like that so i am really careful about many of these new treatments that people are kind of excited about
and even things that may make you stronger or more fit in a short term sometimes have long-term
ramifications we don't know anything about some of the drugs and medicine that people have used
haven't been studied and you realize that they've caused all kinds of problems and so i'm really apprehensive about you know cryotherapy like what do we know
about that seems like it sounds all right cold is good a lot of cold is better but is that really
true like anything where you have to cover your parts where you freaking go into thing like they
give you a shield to put over your special parts yeah like dude what's up with that like that can't
be good like people I love cryotherapy.
Based on what? People are just throwing people in cryotherapy
because they can't. That makes me worried.
Freeze them.
Dude, if they said you've got to cover
your things and get in a freezing tank,
I'm like, thank you, no thank you.
We kind of touched on this a second ago. We talked a little bit
about it at dinner as well. The whole TRT
industry. We took this thing that was called
doing steroids before and then now it's called TRT and there's clinics for it all over the well, like the whole TRT industry. Like we took this thing that was called doing steroids before,
and then now it's called TRT, and there's like clinics for it all over the place.
But do you know how much research has backed up any of that?
Yeah, no, I mean, there's a lot of stuff.
I mean, there was like the whole kind of, you know, a couple words on this.
You know, anabolic steroids are kind of concentrated strength-building steroids
which mimic, you know, some of the natural sex steroids made in your body, but they're more targeted towards building strength and muscle.
But they come with a lot of the secondary ramifications of loading exogenous or outside-your-body testosterone.
So you can build muscle. They definitely work, which is why they're banned in sports because they make you stronger, but they come downside of your body's natural making of testosterone shuts down.
And so what I tell, you know, young adults and teenagers are like, you know, it sounds great, but you're going to end up with like, you know, testicles the size of like peanuts or pecans.
That's not people are not excited about that but when you get older then you start loading this stuff in and you know what happens to you need your body will still make
some of that what happens to those levels and in does your body recover from taking that stuff
exotic you can take it for the rest of your life like we don't know anything about that are there
any people doing long-term trials on any of that right now i don't know but i mean i but but it
just makes me very you know it worries me about that stuff so i don't know but i mean i but but it just makes me very
you know it worries me about that stuff so i i really stay away from it and there are people
who want that kind of advantage and i put the quotations around that makes me worried so i
don't know we were talking about it before uh you know how many young guys go for it and start doing
that stuff at an early age and later on you know nobody really knows
what's going on nobody really talks about it there's not a lot of people coming out saying
oh hey i can't get it up i can't have kids i can't do this i can't do that because most guys don't
want to talk about a lot of that stuff yeah um but it's definitely a consequence i mean i'm curious
in your world because you guys are in this world. It's so hot in our, you know.
How does it come up?
I mean, is it a topic?
Do people do it?
Do they talk about it?
Where do they do it?
I'm kind of curious.
I'm actually really interested in hearing a lot of the, you would be a very good person to talk about how there isn't a ton of science backing what we generally believe to be true, is yes you have a normal range of testosterone
the high end is what 900 you don't have to live at 900 but say you're down at 300 and you are
depressed and you feel like shit and you like working out yeah like training your recovery
sucks and now you're tired all the time your mood's down well if i can get that up to 500 600
i'm still in normal range.
My body's already not producing it in a manner that it should be.
So what's wrong with getting to 600, increasing your mood, increasing your libido, increasing your recovery?
You get stronger.
You feel younger.
In a vacuum, it seems like this should be something we should all be looking at because, I mean, how far do we have to look?
The constant lights out.
We don't sleep great.
We're constantly under stress.
These things demolish testosterone.
And if we have a way that we can safely stay within the realm of natural numbers, where do we go wrong if we're hanging out at 600?
We're not 1,000.
We're not 1,600.
No, it's a great question.
And the answer is,
there are certainly some people that have clinically low testosterone
that need testosterone replacement.
I think the question is,
when you take normal physiologic testosterone and bump that up,
I just don't think we know the answer to that question and so the question is uh i guess how much risk are you willing to take on
is there is there some risk with this i don't know the answer i don't think anybody knows the
answer to that so there are people who are kind of capitalizing on that exact argument you just
make made and saying all right well we're going to start doing you know hormone replacement or hormone augmentation.
And I think it's every single drug in quotation marks of like,
okay, how much weed do you need to smoke to just lighten your mood a little bit?
How much steroids to get your T levels to a normal amount?
How much of these things, like, do they have to
be taken to the nth degree before we're like, okay, that's bad? I guess I would say that in all
aspects, I think I'm more of a, personally, more of a purist of the human body. I think the human
body is awesome. And I just feel like the human body is designed to kind of correct and recorrect itself.
I just feel like in all the patients I've seen, you know,
hundreds of thousands of patients over 20 years, I just am super impressed.
Like I would say to myself, like I tore my ACL two years ago
making a great catch in right field that was not worth it.
I caught the ball.
I was being so awesome.
Maybe it was worth it.
Yeah, that was a good catch and uh and i
didn't get surgery i actually worked on just tons of functional strength and strengthened all my
muscles around my knee and i got back i was skiing like crazy this winter i just did the marathon
last year it's been a half marathon on sunday teaching all my classes and i just really believe
in the power of the human body yeah i think that there's like a massive amount that we can do as humans that like 95 of the things like that's just a random yeah
like an overwhelming majority of the things of if you can learn how to down regulate your nervous
system you're going to do a lot better if you can learn how to just sit down and breathe and
meditate or something along those lines if you know anatomy and how your body's supposed to move,
you can strengthen it in a manner that's going to help you move better
so you don't have to worry about nagging injuries all the time.
It's that last 5% where people don't want to put in the work to learning the first 95,
that that's when things start to get out of whack.
Because if you just hit the gas pedal
on an already broken system now all of a sudden if you're an asshole and you take steroids you're
gonna be a huge asshole triple ass like a dangerous ass yeah and if you move like crap and you're
lifting weights at high intensity and you put steroids in your system you're gonna be super
jacked up but if you do it all well and you're looking for just a little bump yeah maybe
yeah well i feel the same way about like adderall like why is that an okay cheat like so many people
are like oh i took adderall through high school college oh i take it to work meth's a street drug
i'm going with with you probably don't think that's an okay cheat i don't but but you know i
for me like i'm like you know go out a little high intensity
interval burst it up the same basic concept and uh but but it's an interesting thing people
people would rather take a pill well when they would rather take a pill what would you need to
see to make you think maybe this is a viable thing um i think it's a personal choice like i
you know there's certainly people that take
adderall a lot of people kids that take adderall and you know all through school that it really
benefits i'm not anti-drugs um i'm certainly hugely pro vaccines and things like that's another
topic driving crazy um so i'm very pro western medicine but i just feel like there's no such
thing as a perfectly safe drug i don't care if you take a Tylenol, a Motrin, everything has a risk.
And so I'm just a much bigger believer in the capacity of the human body.
I really am.
How old are you?
52.
You're 52.
You're still very active.
I mean, you certainly appear to be in great shape.
Thanks.
Cognitively, you seem like you're totally on point.
You're a medical doctor.
You're into fitness. I'd imagine longevity is top is you know top of mind it certainly is for me
after i had kids um you know all these things and you you seem to be into kind of more natural
remedies and and not messing with with all the things we've just been talking about like what
do you what do you do for yourself to to optimize your performance and your health and your longevity
what do you recommend?
Yeah, so that's a great question.
I mean, I think some combination of, you know, diet, nutrition, activity daily.
I'm a huge believer in exercise every single day.
I almost never miss a day, ever.
Actually, the book you guys don't have here, but the blue book called The Exercise Cure,
I looked at the evidence, the medicinal evidence of the medicine of exercise and movement
and how it applies to different body systems.
And I talk about something called the exercise wheel,
which is that if you take a tractor tire, like you guys use at CrossFit sometimes,
and you want to get it up and start rolling,
the most energy expenditure is getting that thing up and moving.
Once it's moving, it's pretty easy to keep it going.
So I kind of take that concept know starting behavior change and making it consistent
um you know the the biggest data on longevity and fitness the things that make the biggest
difference are being consistent so consistency you know half hour a day consistently minimum
uh seems to make huge difference community makes that's why i like crossfit i mean it's a community and i think the communal experience is so important if you look at
people like blue zones that live over 100 years old one of the main commonalities of blue zones
is this community yeah they're not doing crossfit they're doing community and they're just you know
their activities some but they're doing community i think that's you i feel like that community is
great like the triathlon or the running community you know humans are meant to be social um and so i think about those things community i think about
activity i think about all those kind of those things that i want to try and
you know do as much as i can for as long as i can for a long more time i hope
have you are many of your patients coming in and not already in the fitness space are they just
coming to you for injuries so i see some probably everybody that comes to see me i'd say the commonality is
they're active so it doesn't matter who they are they're they can be any age almost everybody i
see wants to move and that can be walkers runners swimmers anything um but they see i think they
seek me out because they want to move and they know that my focus is on not only fixing, you know, Western medicine but also prescribing movement.
And I will use – so, you know, if somebody has an injury, I'll send them to, you know, oftentimes to a physical therapist for the injury.
But for working on kind of – you know, I have a number of kind of outreach sort people.
They're like people like Kenny.
I send Kenny patients.
So I'm like, listen, I want to get this person.
They don't need a physical therapist.
They need an ongoing strength training program to keep their mobility
and keep their strength. I talked to one of the guys today. Um, and, uh, it's, if people want to
be accountable, you know, it's too easy to just kind of say, I'll do it tomorrow. And so having
a good, you know, good educated place to go do that, I think is really valuable. Uh, and so I
have probably as many kind of talking about this
interface of medicine and fitness. I have as many referrals to trainers, either direct or remote
online folks than I as I do to kind of in person health professionals, per se, I think that's a
really valuable. And I would say for all the people in the fitness world listening to this,
all the strength training coaches, gym owners, invite doctors in, you know,
they don't know anything about what you do and they don't know what they don't know. And you
don't know anything about what they do. And so I would say, invite them in, you know, one idea I'll
give to you if you're listening to this in like Sioux city, Iowa or wherever is, you know, put on
an evening clinic for an hour and invite all the doctors from your local internal medicine, whatever,
and have them come in pediatricians. Run a class just for them.
And run a class.
Run a free class for the doctors.
Let them see what it is you're doing and let them learn about it
because I feel like it's just really an issue of education as much as anything else.
Have you paid much attention to the new direction that CrossFit has gone?
I have, yeah.
In having a level 1 MD course for doctors?
Yeah.
Have you been to it, thought about going to it?
I've heard about it.
I haven't looked into it. I saw it and I thought it was great. I thought, you been to it, thought about going to it, or looked into it? I've heard about it. I haven't looked into it.
I saw it, and I thought it was great.
I thought, you know, it sounds great.
I think I'm doing all that stuff already.
Yeah.
But yes, I think it's a,
listen, I think it's a great idea to do that
and to think about, you know,
as I kind of mentioned off the top,
when I give my lecture to the med students,
I show a big picture of a dam,
and, you know, the water on one side of the dam
and the water on the other side of the dam
and I say that our healthcare system
spends all of its money, $3 trillion a year
taking care of the water after it's come through the dam
we spend almost no money thinking about
how do I get that water before it goes through the dam
and prevent it from going through
and that's the space
that's happening
When you're teaching courses
I think that this is a
really good like i imagine this is why you do it still when you're teaching future doctors
something that doug talks about all the time i don't want to hijack your question you can add
to this wherever but um are are there any studies or places in which we're actually talking about creating muscle mass and overall health
benefits of actually having just lean muscle mass in your body it's something that isn't
talked about too much i would imagine in the medical community i think somewhat so i guess
the question of kind of functional mass muscle mass versus muscle bulk are kind of two separate
things so i think functional much definitely uh you know for example the thing we put out this morning um you guys could you'll look at it later you can even
link to it and the thing it's this this is guide to knees and i talk about arthritis in the knees
and the first thing i talk about is if you have an arthritic joint the worst thing you can do is
sit at home and feel sorry for yourself at the kitchen table that basically there are a number
of studies that i reference in here and i have a meta-analysis of all the studies looking at
the effect of functional strength on osteoarthritis in the knee and if you have an arthritic knee
and your muscles get weak your knee hurts a lot more and so the first thing i talk about is getting
your joint moving and building strength and just because you have arthritis and so i think we talk
about it a ton back pain shoulder pain knee pain hip pain the role of strength to offload
joints which are more symptomatic.
As they get stronger, they get less.
And so anytime I see anybody in my office for injections, anything, I simultaneously talk to them about the importance of building strength and maintaining strength.
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yeah you said a couple times that we we want moving. Do you educate them on how to move?
I educate them on how to move insofar as how they can be active. I think, you know, the next step is
how to do certain maneuvers. And for that, I will often outsource that because I don't have the time
to do it. Yeah. Cause sometimes I feel like it's like, Hey, just get up and go do something. And
then they do it and they screw it. And then six months later, they're back in your office
because they have no idea how to run.
They haven't run in years.
And now they're running and they're over fat or whatever it is.
And they've got these crazy things that the deck is stacked against them so hard.
Is that where Kenny comes into this?
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, that's why I think having a, you know, I think that physical therapy is great for
injury, but you know, I think a lot of the physical therapy clinics are so busy.
They don't have the time and focus to dedicate to kind of the next step, which is I tell
people, if you want your car to drive 70 miles an hour, I think physical therapy is great
from zero to about 40, but from 40 to 70, there needs to be something beyond something beyond that to work on you know functional movement patterns on maintain building and maintaining strength
on form technique those kind of things and i think that's where uh you know someone like kenny
is a great help because i think that's where you know we can start taking that next thing and
getting people to commit to an ongoing presence so they they don't slack off well how do
we get that into school how do we get mds understanding how the hip works and how running
form works yeah i mean it's a it's a process the you know it's a you know you you don't want to
sacrifice like if you show up in the emergency room tomorrow with chest pain and like i don't
know shit about chest pain but i'd know how to have you run.
You're like,
dude,
I wish you would have sat through that.
I think you got it.
You went to meathead doctor school.
That sucks.
I'm dying.
Exactly.
But I can show you how to do a squat.
Hips back,
knees out,
squeeze your butt.
Exactly.
It's my heart.
Exactly.
That's okay.
That's no big deal.
So I think you want to,
you want to make sure we don't.
I mean, there's a lot of great things we do in medical education,
but I think there needs to be some of this.
And I think we're trying to do it, but I think it's a slow process
because the system, you know, it's been very,
it's fundamentally established on taking care of problems after they've happened.
I think that's the biggest thing I would say.
We could set up a residency at Solace.
That'd be nice.
Cool.
Have all the doctors in there, sleeping upstairs.
Well, I always think about, like, how does the, you know,
anytime you look at some of these posts that people put up,
I work with some other doctors who are doing some stuff at Solace
that we have coming in the next couple weeks
who talk about, you know,
all the benefits of strength training.
Like there's really no downside to it.
If you're doing something wrong, if you're doing something stupid, you're going to the
wrong place, obviously there will be an issue.
But if you're going to the right place and doing all the right things, there's really
no downside.
There's really no downside to working out.
So how does the medical field look at strength training overall?
Like the overarching theme? So here's what I'd say. I think that I would say for the folks listening to this
in the strength world, I feel like you guys are suffering from a branding problem. And so far
that I would say that there's a huge difference between power lifting, weight training, strength
training, functional training. Like if I talk to you guys about this, there's different terms that I think,
and you guys probably, there's a whole different, if I say power lifting,
that makes you think one thing.
If I think functional strength training, that's something else.
If I think weight training, maybe something else.
I think CrossFit's something else.
Like you guys know your terminology, but for the people outside the world,
they don't know anything.
They're like, all right, just lifting something.
They don't know.
So I think part of the issue is on your guys' community to kind of do a better job explaining what the different things are and how people can access them.
Meaning that a functional strength class is good.
In my class, I have sometimes like a kid, their parent, and their grandparent all in the same class doing functional movements because it's great for any age.
You know, if you guys could help get that word out about that kind of stuff because I think that doctors often hear the word strength training
and they feel like it's like Arnold Schwarzenegger back from Conan the Barbarian days.
That's not what you're talking about, but that's what they hear.
And so I feel like there's a big piece of that.
Well, we're lucky enough to have had two amazing dinners tonight,
one with Kenny and one with you. And we were talking about like there's a big piece of that we're lucky enough to have had two amazing dinners tonight one with kenny and one with you and we were talking about how there there's a
massive problem in that crossfit tries to lead from this place of education and teaching movement
patterns well then the gym down the street is telling you no information but selling the warrior
hype and like all this super intense stuff and they're not teaching anybody anything. And they're saying,
you can only get this workout here.
So there,
there's a hundred percent,
a branding problem on fitness,
but how it's almost impossible to get away from the,
the branding issue because people have to have a business and they have to
keep their doors open.
Kenny's got five gyms probably on his block, basically,
that are all trying to say, I'm the best gym in town.
And it becomes a really difficult thing for, like, you have to segregate yourself.
You have to be unique.
You have to have powerlifting.
You have to have CrossFit.
You have to have these little things.
For sure.
I'm not saying you don't have to have it.
I think it's great, and I think he does a great job of having different zones for different things.
I think that's all awesome.
I think the question for us is to figure out how you take that information and you disseminate it to the public so they know the difference.
And I think that's, at least from the outside, I think people don't know how to access that.
You know, when I refer patients to you, there's not, I mean, think how many doctors there are in New York City.
They should all be referring to strength coaches.
They should.
I think there's really three pieces to a lot of this.
One of them is you as a doctor.
One of them, Kenny, is running programs.
Then there's also the media, companies.
Nike owes people the real story on how to get strong,
to sell their shoes.
But when they sell you
a commercial of somebody or pro athlete and this is how they train and it's this super intense thing
like joe schmo on his couch thinking about living a healthier life is going to look at that and be
like dude i'm not that guy well i can't get up and do that when you see like that under armor
commercial of you know michael Phelps and it's like
he's eaten 10,000 calories a day and he's got three workouts, that's because he's an
athlete.
But the average guy just needs to, you know, do the half hour, like you said, put in that
half hour.
And I think like minimizing the time that we tell people, hey, you need to do this,
this and this.
It's like, all right, well, I got to hit cardio and I got to hit strength and I got to go for a run and I got to, you know, do all this stuff. It's like, all right, well, I've got to hit cardio, and I've got to hit strength, and I've got to go for a run, and I've got to do all this stuff.
It's like just do something real quick, and you're good.
And I also think that I think about one of the great movies ever made, Dodgeball.
Obviously.
If you think about like Average Joe's Gym versus what was the other one?
Ben Stiller.
Globo Gym?
Globo Gym.
So if you get Average Joe's
I think there was something
really in that
that like you know
Globo Gym had all the things
and the people
and the uniforms
and the augmented body parts
but people weren't
having a good time
and freaking Average Joe's
had his shitty equipment
and the freaking
craziest dude
throwing the wrenches
at people
but people were kind of
into it because
it was a community and I just feel like that's a big piece um that will keep people there i just
feel like you guys should all embrace that community because i feel like that's it i know
you think you're selling strength but you're selling community with muscles that's you're
selling community with muscles and i feel like that's the piece that people really i think it's
a unique feature of not being a big massive massive globo gym, of selling a community.
Do you work, maybe it's a behavioral thing, a psychological thing, but the idea that, say, somebody's in their family and they've got a somewhat overweight family and the daughter or the son wants to get in shape.
And now they come to Kenny and then they go home every night and they have to
in a way be leaving their family and going against this like status quo of
your family values or the way your family eats every night.
It's,
it's almost in a way for many people,
like life is stacked against them in so many different ways to
get that 30 minutes yeah no i think that's true i mean i've i've started thinking about ways so
whatever it whatever it is as a doctor if you tell people you want to do something take a medicine
or do an intervention you know the the data on uh efficacy of any drug is that it drops down below 50% after about six months.
So if you say, I want you to do this for six months, take this medicine, about 50% of your patients won't do it.
And so when you're talking about an exercise program for the next 60 years, how do you get people to kind of really stay on course for that?
How do you, you know, we call it patient compliance.
And how do you kind of think about getting people to be compliant? And so you start thinking about
what are the factors that make people, I think technology will be ultimately very helpful. So
for example, when you go see your doctor now and they get like a height, weight, a blood pressure,
a pulse, I think that stuff's great. But I think like using, you know, virtual step counters and
how many steps that you've taken the past day, the past you know virtual step counters and how many steps have you taken the past day the past week the past month how many intensity minutes um you know all
that kind of data i think is going to be compressed into something your doctors in the future and in
our cornell course we talked to our med students about kind of learning how to access that um and
use that stuff so i think that uh you know i'm optimistic about the future of where technology
will help us get there but i think that in terms of families and changing behavior patterns,
there's a lot of factors, including fun.
In our big classes, like in Central Park, I bring balloons.
I bring like 100 balloons, and I do a drill where we get like 200 people.
Everybody gets a partner, and you have to keep your ass off the ground,
and you're basically a reverse crab.
You have to keep your balloon in the air, and the people that keep the balloon in the air the longest
win a hat and these people go crazy with this core they don't even know they're strengthening
their core they're just trying to keep their balloon there when a hat yeah but the role of
fun for all that is so essential so i just think that figuring out ways to be creative about that
but i really do feel like that kind of concept that the community is what you guys are selling is big.
We're in New York City.
We've been here 48 hours now.
And how do you do that in a city like this?
Like there's three parks.
It's hard to go play.
Yeah.
I figure out creatively.
I'm from Kansas City.
Not just you.
Like you make it happen.
You're leading the charge but yeah who someone that hasn't found like we're on the subway tonight and i'm looking around and
i'm like how many people on this car right here are thinking i gotta get to the gym i'm gonna do
some do some rows strengthen my back a little bit i'm gonna go hit the treadmill for 10 minutes just
to get some blood flow like it just it's it's hard because that
people are they're just ants marching in a direction they're on the subway and then they
go home and then they eat and then they go to bed every ant is a story my brother every ant is a
story you got to figure out how to how to you know yeah and that's just how it is but i think that
this with all of the people and um the ability to have access to that,
because one of the things that I think about all the time is, like, I train seven days a week.
But it's kind of like if you were to walk up to a kid and be like, you want to go to the playground?
Like, that's just my playground.
That's where I go.
It's what I do.
I'm just playing.
Yeah, I hear you.
And to get people, maybe it's just, like, changing the word. Like, you're not working out anymore. Let's just go playing. Yeah, I hear you. And to get people, maybe it's just like changing the word.
Like you're not working out anymore.
Let's just go play.
Yeah.
How do you get the balloon on their stomach and kicking it up in the air and all the things?
Like that's, it's very challenging for people to have that creativity and to get outside their box.
It's like we have to, the conversation has to change in a way and how do you i guess in a way like how do you get people
to recognize that there's such a minimum dose that you need to to outside of your class but
like in your practice really of saying like you gotta get moving i mean i think like you know
kenny came to this thing we did the other night so we do this thing every year we get a big grant
from a drug company we put on on this free wellness symposium.
All the faculty donate their time.
We had over 500 people show up for this thing.
We had a waiting list of over 1,000.
We're going to get a webcast.
We get this thing subsidized, so it's all free for everybody.
I think the energy in that room was just unbelievable.
It was so cool.
Yeah, and it's just like people are so into it.
I just think there's a real hunger.
I don't know.
You guys go to different cities and see what the, I think the fitness community here is
awesome.
Like there's something about the energy in New York, which like encourages it.
Well, it's funny because in my community, I'd say the majority of my clientele are 25
to 45 year olds.
Your clientele, like when, anytime I come to any of your events and stuff,
you have a little bit older of a demographic.
I'd say 45 to 65 maybe, but they're super enthusiastic about fitness
and they want to learn and they're interested in a lot of this stuff.
So it's cool to see that the age gap, you know,
that, I mean, it encompasses most New Yorkers
who are interested in the
fitness space pretty much me walking around and just looking and being like man this doesn't look
like not the people but like how do you do it there's giant buildings you're gonna get hit by
a car all the time yeah i can't even figure out how i'm gonna walk much less i'm gonna go for a
jog today from country bumpkin
but bring this back to some of the things we talked about earlier.
Like you don't like the things that are anecdotal.
They're not backed up by research and science.
Like how do you think we accelerate that process to debunk the things that need to be debunked
and to get solid data around the things that actually might be working?
So here's what I'd say.
I would say for the gym owners folks and listening to this which I'm
guessing is a lot of your folks um I would just be very careful about first of all recommending
stuff that just because this person did it and they did this or this person did that I would
just really ask the right questions or talk to somebody in your community um where they can help
you ask the right questions Kenny has contacted me a few times on different questions,
and I've tried to give him the right answers on different stuff.
I'm just very, you know, I see medicine as either,
A, it can help you, and it has no downside.
B, it can help you, and it maybe has a downside,
and you assess the risk of that.
C, it's kind of neutral.
D, it can hurt you.
And E, it can hurt you, and it can really screw you up. And I feel like if it can help you and E it can hurt you and it can really screw you up.
And I feel like if it can help you and there's no downside, that's fine. Uh, but there's very
few things where there's not a kind of cost. So I'm just very cautious about, you know, for example,
as you guys know, the supplement industry is completely unregulated and there's all kinds
of crap in those things that, you know, so just being careful So just being careful about that kind of stuff I think is important.
We talked about hormones earlier.
We talked about supplements just now.
Are there any specifics that you see that are like big pet peeves of yours
where you're like, oh, not that fucking thing again?
God, why do people think this is a thing?
Juicing.
Fucking juicing.
I honestly fucking hate juicing.
I do.
I'm sorry.
I do.
I mean, listen, if you want to take juice as part of your thing, that's fine.
But do people think that they can live on juice?
Like a juice cleanse.
Fuck that, man.
Is celery juice good for you?
Not as good as celery.
Dude, like fucking juice...
Go eat dinner.
Totally.
I fucking hate the juice cleanse i hate all that
dude like we're made to eat stuff and i just feel like this whole kind of juicing i hate juicing um
just not a big fan she's not a juicer don't worry i feel like she's heard this rant before
for sure um but no so i feel like that um that uh those kind of just i i'm inherently
a little skeptical of different fads and trends.
And especially I'm very skeptical of kind of celebrity driven fitness advice and trend
and nutritional advice and without naming any names.
But I just feel like there's a lot in that space of, of, you know, celebrity endorsed
stuff.
And people, I think as a, as a society, we have a big problem of kind of idealizing celebrity
as they know what they're talking about.
And some people know what they're talking about
and some people are celebrities,
but they're not the same thing.
So you just want to try and get your information
or at least ask the right questions.
You know, if I'm going to give somebody a shot in their knee,
like, all right, what's this medicine?
What's the science on it?
What's the upside?
What's the downside? You should be asking those questions before you take anything, put anything in their knee. They're like, all right, what's this medicine? What's the science on it? What's the upside? What's the downside?
You should be asking those questions before you take anything,
put anything in your body.
You know, you should be asking those questions.
Do you know much about regenerative medicine, stem cells and whatnot?
Yeah.
So basically there's a whole marketing tool around what's called regenerative.
And I actually have this in this Times Guide today for the knee,
and I kind of have reference to regenerative medicine.
So people talk about kind of stem cells and everybody like who like as you know like in like
1400s ponce de leon is like i'm gonna go find the fountain of youth and he like sets off to sit and
ever since then and before then people want to regenerate like my knees jacked up i want
regenerative my hair is falling out i want regenerative my people love the idea of regenerative medicine it does sound good it does sound great lots of syllables yeah intelligent
sounds good and it's got a little air to it yeah it sounds like i'm winding the clock back
exactly and so the whole idea of like stem cell therapy but the truth is that you know as i
referenced in this article today we don't know we can't regrow cartilage. We can't,
that's complete BS. That's total marketing. Like the whole idea of regenerating sounds great.
Platelet therapy, which I do some of PRP, where we take your blood and spin it and take your
platelets. That's an anti-inflammatory agent. It's not a regenerative agent. So this whole idea of
like regenerative medicine and is being marketed. It, the regenerative piece at this point is still more marketing than it is fact.
But people kind of love the idea of regenerative.
And so I'm very, listen, I do PRP when it comes to anti-inflammatory stuff like an arthritic knee.
I will sometimes use PRP as one of the agents to make the knee feel better.
But I always explain to my patients, I'm not regrowing your cartilage.
And stem cells don't regrow anything.
That's complete marketing,
and so that's where I feel like people
have to be really careful about the information
they're kind of reaching for,
and where's that coming from,
and how accurate that is.
Have you seen stuff about taking kind of young guy blood
and putting it in old guys?
You know what I'm talking about?
Bezos.
Have you heard this?
Bezos. Oh, yeah, all the Silicon Valley CEOs are into it. guy blood and putting it in an old guy's you know i'm talking about you heard this bezos oh yeah all
the silicon valley ceos are are into it i heard peter teal was was that just smells throwing it
around as well ancient rome how wild does it happen in a sauna i mean what do you know i'm
talking about no i've heard about it it's crazy i mean it's crazy you don't buy you're not buying
it dude no no but it's Jeff Bezos.
He has to know.
He knows Amazon.
He did screw us here in New York.
I'll tell you that.
So I'm pissed off.
Well, we have to talk a little bit about this article in the New York Times.
Sure.
Is this the first big article in the New York Times?
No, no.
I've done several of these.
So I did a couple of years.
We did a whole New York Times, the nine-minute workout I did with them.
And then I did something called the nine-minute workout with weights,
and those were the – and then this today was our New York Times guide to knees,
and it's everything about your knee and how to recognize it, how to fix it,
how to prevent it, and then a bunch of the science on, you know,
things like torn meniscus and ACL tears and stem cells and PRP and nutritional supplements.
And what I try to do with each of these topics is kind of cross-reference scientific evidence
for each of these things so people aren't just kind of making up, you have a torn meniscus,
you need to get surgery for that thing.
But what does the evidence say?
When do you think about it?
When do you not?
So it kind of goes through with all.
I'm big into between all my books and all the other stuff.
I'm big into educating athletic people about how to take the best care of their body so they make good decisions for themselves.
If somebody's a runner, crossfitter, and they have some nagging knee issues, is there a place that they can start?
And how do they start to assess their own issue before they go and start chasing craziness yeah so i think that they have to you know just be educated about
what the kind of pain is what is it get a definition of what it is understand why it's
happening i generally tell people to look for people um you know it's hard to find if like i'm
in the health care world and my whole family is both parents. I got three brothers.
Everybody's in health care.
So to me, finding a good doctor, I know how to do it.
But if you're not in medicine, people have no idea how to do that.
And they kind of, you know, just do their insurance plan or they go to who their friends went to.
And so, you know, I would say find I'm a big fan of active people finding active minded individuals.
So finding people in your community who are active, I think, makes a big fan of active people, finding active minded individuals. So finding people
in your community who are active, I think makes a big difference. Um, and, uh, and then talk to
doctor friends. I'm a big fan of that too. Of like, you know, we know how to figure out who's
credible. Uh, and then for your own injuries, trying to get a definition of what is our,
actually our athletes book, a home remedies book goes through all the anatomy of every single,
almost every injury somebody will get and explain what it is
and and how it happens and what you can do we have a whole set of exercises of how you can fix every
problem with each injury it's in tons of crossfit gyms um already and uh with each injury we kind
of talk about um you know does it need surgery what questions you should ask your doctor so
uh this is a dope book by the way lots of Lots of great visuals in there if you really want to learn about the anatomy.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
I'm happy to have a dope book.
Yeah, no, it's been good.
It's been cool to see that.
It's been around for a while.
If someone has joint pain, they've got achy joints, aside from just backing off whatever
exercise is exacerbating the problem, et cetera, are there more natural things that you can
do to alleviate joint pain?
Sure. So I'm a big fan of like joint mobility, joint function, joints, you know,
muscular strength around the joint, and then figure out where pain is coming from. Is it
coming from, you know, cartilage? There's both, you know, in the knee, for example, there's meniscus,
the plates of cartilage, there's articular cartilage lining the surface of the joint,
what's causing the pain, you know, and then trying to figure out what you can do to fix the reason
that pain is happening. Um, you know, generally you get most pain happens for a reason so you want
to try and figure out why and then i think functionally things like you know pain around
like a shoulder and the shoulder is unique in the sense that it's very the force around the
shoulder is dependent on the muscle strength in the front and the back of the joint a lot of people
especially dudes want to get lots of big pec action going on without enough posterior shoulder strength
so they end up anteriorly too strong.
They get impingement or pinching in the shoulder.
So, you know, working on how to strengthen the muscles
in the back of the shoulder,
how to balance out that strength makes a big difference.
So in general, I want people to kind of understand
what they're doing and be smart about it.
This has been awesome.
Dude, pleasure.
I really appreciate you, one, having dinner ready for us no problem kenny
thank you for setting this up i know we we talked at 10 45 last night and uh you started on the
today show this morning and you're ending with barbell shrug so what a day your girlfriend walked
in and she was like you're still working there's a podcast going on in the living room what is
happening um so thank you for letting us into your house.
Make sure you guys check out
The Athlete's Book of Home Remedies
and Workout Prescription by Dr. Jordan Metzl.
Where can people find you and these books?
Everything's on Amazon under my name.
And my website is drjordanmetzl.com.
Instagram?
Do you do that too much?
I mean, I've seen the... There's a killer on it. Yeah. I think I do it. I don't know if I do that too much? I mean, I've seen the killer on it.
Yeah.
I think I do it.
I don't know if I do it too much.
It's hard to know.
I feel like if you don't do it,
you're out of touch.
Yeah.
If you do do it too much,
you're kind of...
You're wasting your time.
Yeah.
But I think there's a...
I don't know.
Is that too much or is it okay?
You tell me.
Is it digestible?
Oh, yeah.
It's great.
It's a resume. it's a snapshot resume
yeah how did i do great we're here in your house 10 o'clock at night that's fair i told you i was
persistent i was like we'll come at 10 no whatever works when they first asked me who they should
they were like who do you have in new york i'm like we have to talk i'm so glad you guys came
it was a lot of fun we'll do it again have again. Have you guys come up to the Intrepid?
I'll send you one of the videos.
It's pretty cool.
Yeah, it would be awesome.
Now that we have a home, well, we've had a home up here for a little while,
but making solace our East Coast headquarters here.
We'll take you.
We're going to have you back on.
We'll pick it up, man.
Most shows are two hours long.
We're on an hour here.
I feel like we're just getting started.
No, you guys have been awesome.
Mr. Beautiful, tell the people where they can find you.
At Kenny Santucci.
Real easy.
Solace, New York.
Solace, New York.
You can find us in the corner at Solace, New York.
Talking away.
Front window.
Front window.
You guys have office space.
You have a corner office.
We do.
Our office is the size of most people's homes in the city.
A little fold-down bed.
Doug Larson.
All right, there you go.
I took a little break from Instagram there for a while,
but I'm back on the train,
so you can find me on Instagram,
at Douglas C. Larson.
Strong content coming out of that guy.
I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner.
Shrug Collective, at Shrug Collective.
Wednesday, Saturday, Barbell Shrug.
Strongest show in the podcasting.
First time I've ever said that.
It just came out right now.
I have to say, these must be the strongest podcast of three of you dudes.
It's freaking great.
It's awesome.
Get into iTunes, YouTube, like, subscribe, leave a nice comment.
Kenny reads them.
He's emotional.
We'll see you guys on Wednesday.
That's a wrap, friends.
Thank you, Dr. Jordan Methel.
It was so phenomenal getting to come over to your house and hang out,
eat some sushi, talk some fitness.
You're an all-star.
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