Barbell Shrugged - The Psychology of Elite Performance w/ Dr. Lenny Wiersma, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Travis Mash, and Dr. Andy Galpin - Barbell Shrugged #520

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

Dr. Lenny Wiersma is a Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton, where he has taught since 2001. He is the Director of the Performance Psychology Lab at CSUF and has conducted research and/or worked with a variety of extreme sport athletes including big-wave surfers, extreme backcountry skiers and snowboarders, ultramarathon runners and cyclists, Crossfit Games athletes, and UFC fighters.    He serves on the advisory board of the Nike Sport Research Lab in Beaverton, Oregon, as well as on the advisory board of XPT Extreme Performance TrainingTM. Dr. Wiersma is currently on the staff of UCLA Men’s and Women’s Water Polo teams as a sport psychology consultant as well as USA Swimming’s National Team, specializing in Open Water.    He serves on the editorial board of The Sport Psychologist, is a former Associate Editor for Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, and was the Co-Director of the Center for the Advancement of Responsible Youth Sport at CSUF from 2001-2014. He received his masters and doctorate degrees in Sport and Exercise Psychology from Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts and his bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology from Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   What can you learn from extreme sports athletes? How do you get in the zone for optimal performance? How do you mentally prepare for hard training or competition? Physiological responses to stress and what to do about it? How can you use both to get super jacked   Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram ———————————————— Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa ———————————————— Please Support Our Sponsors   Fittogether - Fitness ONLY Social Media App   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   www.masszymes.com/shruggedfree  - for FREE bottle of BiOptimizers Masszymes   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://bit.ly/3b6GZFj Save 5% using the coupon code “Shrugged”

Shrugged Family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Lenny Wiersma comes in to the Shrugged Family talking about the psychology of training and performance, what you can do to get stronger between your ears, and what the craziest athletes in the world, when I say crazy, I'm talking about like the most extreme people jumping off cliffs with little parachutes attached to them, I'm talking about people that go wingsuit, skydiving, whatever that is. The sport where you have a 73% chance you're just going to hit a big rock one day at 75 miles an hour wearing a squirrel suit. Those people, why they're so calm, what makes Alex Honnold so insane climbing El Capitan without a rope attached to him? And what big wave surfers have to do with you getting strong, lean, and athletic performing in the gym?

The Diesel Dad is launching next week for all you dads that want to get strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, and fitness. I'm so fired up. This is the most authentic training program to what I do, to what Doug does, that we've ever put together together. And I'm so excited about it. It's just, man, it's so, so just us. And it makes me so happy because we're dads. We like to get jacked and we're going to unite all the dads in the world that live by the code of the barbell, getting strong, lean and athletic. See you guys at the break. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged.

I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Dr. Andy Galpin, Dr. Lenny Weirzman. There's a lot of doctors on here today. God, so many syllables. Dr. Lenny Weirzman, you are on episode 266 talking about the science of motivation for all of our long-term Shrugged listeners. If you are new to the show, make sure you get back and check out that episode, episode 266. Today, coming off of our show with Dr. John Rady and talking about neuroplasticity in the brain through physical exercise and movement, I wanted to have you on so we could talk a lot about kind of the mental side of things, the way that we're able to program our brains through the way that we think and the way that we feel and the emotions, fear, anxiety, and confidence that kind of go into the way that our brain works.

But before we get too in the weeds right off the bat, I would love to just kick it into your background for some of the people that aren't familiar with episode 266, the last time you were on the show. When did you start digging into the brain and talking about motivation? I guess it happened, the impetus for this was when I was in college. And when I was in college was kind of the birth of the field of sport and performance psychology. It was a great interaction between, you know, my personality and my interests and then that trajectory of the field. So I got pretty lucky in terms of like, when you're deciding what you want to study and what you're passionate about and interested in, it just was a beautiful intersection of that stuff. So

I technically, I don't do brain research per se, You know, my role is to try to help athletes and performers kind of get a sense of how their mindset, how their thought processes might influence their experience, their performance. You know, I would use the term metacognition to describe what I do. Metacognition sounds like a very mystical word, but it's not. Kind of a hippie word. Cognition is thinking, and metacognition is thinking about thinking, studying thinking,

and being aware of how our minds, our brains, our thoughts have an impact on our emotions and our performance. I can't express to you how much pleasure this is going to bring me because I know that your listeners can't participate this, but I get to look at Andy Galpin's face for the next hour as we talk about our feelings. It's so long. So lucky.

You don't see me grimacing to the, I know you can only hear. Andy has feelings? You chose the softest of the soft sciences in Andy's words. And, you know, we could have discussed mental toughness or grit or combat psychology or how, you know, sea fighters use psychology. But you chose emotions and feelings. So I did not choose choose in advance for that. We could go into all of them. I love the, just when you say how we feel about how we feel or how we think about how we think, I'm going to steal it from Doug Larson right off the bat, because him and I talk about these meta feelings and emotions and thoughts all the time. Can you

dig into just a little bit about what, you know, how you feel about how you feel and how you think about what you think, but really plays. You got a guy on the, on the mic right now, who he is a sports psychologist for UFC fighters and big wave surfers and guys that jump off of mountains and Red Bull nuts. And you want to talk about fucking feelings. What are we going to do?

Good job, buddy. Good thing. It's called. Whatever. Go ahead, Lenny get there we're gonna get there all right so i think i think you're so good at interrupting he just leaves it open i know that he leaves he didn't take the bait at all you would have thought a full hour yesterday was enough for him what did you guys talk about yesterday what was drinking water hydration just drinking water so i was gonna say lanny good go ahead and dig andy just mentioned ufc fires big wave surfers like all that stuff sounds really exciting like how do you

what do you do when you're mentoring somebody that's, that has a big physical task or a big challenge ahead of them that, that likely is, is very exciting, but also there's, there's, there's high consequence to getting knocked out, hospitalized, you know, drowning, whatever it is. It's a, it's a real honor to be quite frank, to be able to, you know, spend time with people who are doing things that are amazing. And what an outsider might think of is crazy. And so, you know, one of the things that struck me, the earliest in my relationship with this type of an athlete who does sort of more the extreme pushing the envelope type tasks is, you know, there's such a disparity between what an outsider thinks about what they do

and what the performer thinks about what they do. You know, we see it as, we as in an outsider might see it as they're crazy. They've got a death wish. They're doing it for the adrenaline rush. They're doing it for the media. And it's, it couldn't be further from the truth. If you talk to the, talk to those performers about what they really get out of it. And the ability for them to master their mindset without the aid of anybody in my field or in our fields, it's humbling actually to see that they've pushed the envelope that far without really tapping into the formal study of how we think and how our thoughts might dictate our level of readiness or our trust. So, I mean, it's such a great environment to work in.

Yeah, I know Andy comes from a traditional sport background. and working with this kind of alternate population has changed my perspective on the perceptions of excitement and emotion and energy and that sort of thing. So it hasn't quite bored me to traditional sports, but I have a tendency sometimes of seeing the demands in traditional sports and thinking, ah, this is all relative. Although I don't want to be the baseball player at the bat in the batter's box who's got a, you know,

bottom of the ninth, two outs. I don't want to be that person because that's real. There's a lot going on there. Yeah, that's the all eyes on you situation. Right. A lot of pressure. And so when we think about metacognition or just thinking about our thought process, it's actually quite surprising to me, maybe because I delve into this regularly, but how few people actually stop and think about their thought process and reflect on, you know, what got me to this place to begin with? And what are my triggers? I don't mean that in a

snowflake way, but I mean, what are the things in my environment that tend to lead to a predictable response for me? And how come I don't know that's predictable? And even, why do other people, my coach or my spouse, why do they know what my triggers are before I even know what my triggers are? So the opportunity to just take a step back with performers and just kind of reflect on some of that stuff without even trying to do anything with it can be quite a powerful process for somebody. Can you give an example of the concept of being triggered? Again, not the snowflake way you mentioned of being like recreationally offended at just anything, but, but something in the environment that just makes you go

down a path that potentially is not good for you. Well, let's, let's do this then let's, let's have your listeners and each of you just, you know, paint a pretty vivid mental picture of your training place where you train and where we compete or perform. So it just starts with just what are some of the associations that we might make in these different settings. I think one of the things that's really interesting, I think it has a lot to do with success rates in people training is the ability to actually create those thoughts and emotions that go in. It it's, and it, it kind

of gets into the idea of like flow States and actually feeling comfortable with, uh, being in the gym and having positive associations with being there. Um, but I mean, I, I built this garage gym six, seven, eight months ago, right before COVID. And I never trained in it until all the gyms in the country were shut down and I was forced to and the workouts at the beginning sucked because the my garage just had no vibe I had no energy in it and I had to go and create this like mental path to being able to build intensity in my own dojo here is there something to that where people walk in in this like white belt beginner type thing and they have to actually physically go and create the thought patterns that create that bring a positive outcome to their experience? you know, you commented on my house, you know, you see this stuff around me. I'm super mindful of like, all right, when I'm in a certain space, what are some of the things in that environment

that I'm going to be seeing or I'm going to be hearing that's going to, that I'm going to be able to control then the mindset that I'm in when I'm in those spaces. So at the beginning of this semester, when we started virtual teaching, when we knew that we were going to be doing it, going into it, I told my students, you know, take a step back for a second. Think about the environment that you're going to be reading and watching videos and studying. Have you thought about whether or not this is an environment that's conducive to those things? And you may not have a lot of control over your environment per se, but you can do a lot to do that. So when you're talking about a gym setting, you might need to increase the natural light that you have in that setting. You might need to be

mindful of the airflow that you have. You might need to ask yourself, what am I looking at all the time? Where are my eyes going? And what is that? Is that helping me with something? Is it distracting me by something? So all these, all these things, you know, in our senses, the sense of smell and the sense of taste and, and our audio sense and everything, our senses are, are very connected to our emotions and our memories. And so it's like, you kind of go down the checklist and ask yourself, you know, what's around me that might unknowingly be changing the quality of my mindset or how I perform? And, you know, so that's something I think, Anders, what you experienced was something that I think very typical. And then you have to ask yourself, okay, so what's going to be the biggest return on my

investment? What can I possibly control in my environment that is going to bring me the biggest return on my investment? What can I possibly control in my environment that is going to bring me the biggest change in my mindset? And it's different for everybody. Yeah. For some, it could be as simple. Go ahead, Anders. No, I was going to say, I mean, my example is so low scale and low intensity compared to a UFC fighter about to walk in the ring and literally get punched in the face for 15 minutes like that's that's a different conversation how does somebody prepare for you know one of the first times I even thought about this subject was watching um what's the the guy that free free solo where he climbed Alex Arnold when he climbed El Capitan without a rope. And they went and scanned his brain and he just doesn't understand fear.

Like it just isn't there. It's not a feeling he has, which was mind-boggling to me. But how does somebody kind of start to change their environment so that they're able to walk into the ring in a UFC fight against trained killers and, and take that, prepare for that beating. Yeah. And on that note,

is that, is all I want to know if your amygdala not working is actually a thing. Is there any validity to the whole Alex Honnold doesn't feel fear thing? Or is that just like sensationalized documentary type stuff? I want to hear that. A little bit of both. They, he has done the functional MRIs. And so what, what's happened is that when he's been in that, in the fMRI machine, they've flashed pictures and videos that in most quote unquote, normal brains would register amygdala activity that that's associated with fear or discomfort. And his reactions to those were

depressed, lower than what you'd consider that quote unquote normal brain to be. So there's definitely, Doug, some truth to his brain and how it works. Now, if you were to say that that's the only reason why he is capable of putting himself in those situations, I'd say that's probably overreaching quite a bit, but I do believe from the scientific perspective that what, what they've been able to study with his brain is actually quite accurate with respect to, he doesn't respond the same way that most I'm going to put normal in quotes.

People would respond to certain situations. So all right. So Anders, there's a lot that might go into the mental preparation for a fighter to go in those environments. Obviously, one of those things is to visualize different scenarios that you might be in. And I don't oversell visualization or imagery. I think it's one of the things that when people think about sports psych, it's one of the first things to think about because they've heard of Michael Jordan closing his eyes before taking free throws. And you don't have to sell people on the importance of that. But it is, though, important that we help our fighters, for example, just think through, okay,

what are some likely situations that you might find yourself in? But you've got to be able to see those things while you're also feeling the emotions of what it would be like in that environment. And then see yourself making good decisions. And then it's like, how do you even get a sense of what are the most unlikely things to occur? I take some of this stuff from Michael Phelps, the swimmer in 2008, when he was going for eight gold medals in the 200 meter butterfly, he dove in and we all know the story is goggles filled up with water. And he essentially swam that race blind. I don't think people recognize how impossible of a feat that was

then to win by hundreds of a second for the gold medal. But the reality was, is that he visualized that scenario happening in advance. And his coach, Bob Bowman, had at one point at nationals broke his goggles before a race when he was pretty young. I think he was 12 or 13 and said, okay, what are you going to do if this happens in the water? So that's a situation that he saw in his mind, he prepared for. And so I'm trying to help, for example, a UFC fighter also kind of create these in advance. Okay. What, what could happen? What might it feel like when it happens? Part of it too, is, is to allow that fighter in my presence to, to admit vulnerability, to admit fears they have, to,

you know, UFC fighters are humans. I know people don't like to think of them as humans. Kevin Hart said, these are superheroes who walk amongst us, but, you know, they have the same feelings that everyone else does. And so they've got to be vulnerable in certain spaces to say, okay, these are my concerns. These are the things that I might be afraid of. And they'd never say that publicly, of course, but these things do exist. And little tiny things stand out to different fighters. So I'll give an example. I am working with a fighter right now, and we meet at my house in the backyard sometimes or in the living room. And I've got a, I think it's called an ottoman, right? Where you kind of put your feet in front of your couch is an ottoman, right? So one day we're talking and

this tends to be a fairly emotional fighter to begin with. And I'm talking about, okay, now let's look at this ottoman in front of you. And imagine this ottoman is just a cement, squared cement object. It's movable, but it's not easy to move it. It's pretty solid. And then someone walks up and tries to push it. It's going to take a lot for them to push it. Now compare it to the ottoman as it is. If you want to push this thing, you just put any pressure on it and it moves. So mentally speaking, I would want a fighter to go into their performance saying that they're going to be mentally solid. And what does that mean? Well, there's going to be a whole bunch of things that are going to be pushing on you that are going to give you an

opportunity to be reacting to that. But you've decided in advance that it's going to take a shitload for you to actually move. This goes into the interacting with the fighter when you see them in the lobby of the hotel where you're both staying, to the weigh-ins where you're facing each other, and you know this fighter is going to say something that has the potential for you to react. And so, just something very simple, solid, be solid. You are in control of whether or not you want to react to that or the extent to which you can allow that to happen. And that little tiny word, solid, has a tendency then of perhaps getting that fighter

through all of those situations they might find themselves in. This actually reminds me of something you posted a little while back, Doug, about something you're teaching your boys. Could you remember what that was? The resiliency of being tough and stuff like that? Yeah, I posted a few things that you could be talking about. One thing is that I teach them that they can't control their thoughts and their feelings.

They kind of just arise in consciousness, but they do have complete control over how they react and respond and behave following, you know, the, the emotion of, of fear or whatever. So you can get scared, but then once you get scared, you can choose what you actually do in the real world about feeling scared, et cetera. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. And then there was another one that was similar where I think you're like, the one about courage. It was like that or telling them to Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. And then there was another one that was similar where I think you're like, the one about courage.

It was like, it was that or telling them to be tough. And you're like, what tough means is. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I tell, I tell my kids that, that the toughness is doing the right thing even when you're hurting. It's like how I explained to them where even if, you know, even if you're tired or even if you're like physically injured, like being tough means still doing the right thing. Or, or if you're tired or even if you're like physically injured like being tough means still doing the right thing or if you're an adult like if somebody's rude to you and that and it stings

that they're rude to you you still you know treat them in a respectful manner etc yeah so that kind of maybe uh maybe maybe this can be a platform uh i've i don't have the energy or time to do this, but I believe that at first grade, that every child in the American school system should learn mental and psychological skills in the first grade, and then the second grade, third grade, et cetera. And you sort of start with where they're at. And why wait until they're in middle school to have to deal with their emotions and maybe getting bullied and dealing with social media expectations and why wait for that? I mean, what child at age six is not dealing with stress and emotions? So, Doug, what you are doing with your own children, and it sounds like a very mindful approach, is what we should be doing

with every single child in America is teaching them some of these skills from the very beginning and before not to take away from math and history and English, but that should be like the basis of all of this stuff. Because, you know, when you talk about the rising health rates of mental illness and young people, and it starts with mental health first, if we want to prevent mental illness. But at any rate, that's a little bit of a tangent. Are you familiar with all the concepts involved with cognitive behavioral therapy? I am. Yep. Yeah, I feel like a lot of that I drew, I looked into that at one point and just saw like kind of like a checklist or not like a checklist, but like a list of like the top 10 things that you might learn as a result of cognitive behavioral therapy, like how to recognize that you're catastrophizing, et cetera. And so a lot of, a few rather of the things that I've taught my boys have come from that. What are your thoughts on learning those concepts prior to

actually needing actual therapy? Let's see. There's nothing wrong with quote unquote needing actual therapy, of course. I know that you didn't mean that, but the cognitive behavioral, I'll use the term framework, is something that we could be utilizing all the time. okay, let's think about how our thoughts lead to our behaviors. And then are those behaviors outcomes that we want to see? And if so, then what sort of thoughts are leading to that versus, you know, if our behaviors are not what we're looking for, then how do I take responsibility of my own thinking? And as you teach your kids, you could choose your reaction to it. So that's huge. And I could get better at this. I'll give you an example. You guys were just seeing my backyard before my internet broke up, but that deck that I was sitting on, my dad and I built together and we did it right when I moved into the house. And when I bought my home, I thought that I did everything I needed to do to make sure that

this was the right decision for me. I mean, I came to this house, my realtor gave me the combo to the lockbox. I came to this house on a Saturday at 2am and just stood in the hallway and just, what is it like here on a Wednesday at 11am? What is it like? I mean, I did everything I could. The very first night I moved into my house, I was woken up by a train, the horn of the train. And it pissed me off because there were train tracks that I drove over to get to this house, I don't know, dozens of times. And then that train waking up, it didn't piss me off because it woke me up. It pissed me off because I let that get by me. So within the first week or two of me buying this house, my dad was over and we were building the deck together and the train noise went off.

And my dad's father worked on the railroad. His grandfather worked on the railroad. And the first thing my dad said was, oh God, I love that sound of that train. It reminds me of Papa. And so what I was able to do is I was able to do a cognitive restructuring technique where I said, okay, when I hear the train, what do I think of? Is there something I can replace that with? Doug, this is the heart of CBT. So when my dad said something very pleasant about the train, the next time I heard that, I got to immediately shift to my dad and my grandfather and my great-grandfather. And it was such a simple task. And imagine if I didn't have that moment. Imagine if my dad didn't come

down and build that deck with me. Every time I heard that train, you know what would have happened. And then within a couple of months, they had an ordinance in the city where they couldn't do it anymore. But it was a great lesson on my part that we could be doing this stuff. And I know that sounded like a simple thing. It's not simple. Sometimes it takes years to change those, but it doesn't have to take that long. So. Oh, sorry. Go ahead and finish. No, that's good. So the sentence or the way that I reframe things, again, teaching my kids is that we say that's actually a good thing because dot, dot, dot. That's our reframe sentence. You don't like something, you go, well, it's actually a good thing because there's an upside and downside to pretty much anything. There's nothing that has only upside or something that's only downside.

Life is all about trade-offs. And so if you're just focusing on the downside, then you could spiral down into depression potentially. But if you're focusing on the upside, then maybe you think something is actually fantastic when someone else might think it's horrible. It's hard to do that when it's something that's really, really tough. When something is really tough like that, it's like it's really deeply upsetting and you're trying to reframe it.

How do you do that when it's like a life-altering situation, so to speak? Like the train in the background is one thing. It's an annoyance. It's a nuisance or whatever it is. But if it's something that kind of, um, it's a bigger deal. So maybe, maybe, maybe like your, your spouse died or something like that. Like how do you, how do you get around that and reframe it?

The concept of this could be either seen as good or bad. And I get to choose how I see it is really good when we're young and when we're learning this stuff. But the reality is, Doug, is that things happen that are just shitty and all the energy that you're going to try to take to try to switch it to, well, this is good because is going to just exacerbate it. And so at some point we need to be okay with not being okay. And I think you look at the history of psychology, for the first 200 years or 150 years of American psychology, it was focusing on abnormal behavior and getting people who are experiencing negative emotions and trauma to become quote unquote normal. And then in the 1990s, right about the time sports psych was coming out, there was this field of positive psychology and people said, why not study only people who are dealing with stroke, but why don't we look at people who are thriving and study the psychology of happiness? And that was a great thing. The problem with that though, is that it

set up then these expectations that we need to be we need to seek happiness and if we're not happy then we need to make changes in our life or and so Doug one of the things that the language I've been using a lot lately with with athletes and with my students is I want us to get away from the distinction of positive versus negative or good versus bad, because there's so many layers of stigma around that. And so when we talk about our thoughts, I want us to think about it, not in the distinction of positive versus negative, but I want us to think in the distinction of effective versus not effective. Because there's a lot of effective thought processes that in that other dichotomy, other people might think of as negative. And so, one of the things that we've done wrong

in our field for years is we've taught that we need to think positively and we need to reframe things in a positive way. And Doug, I don't mean you taught your children wrong, but I mean, they're going to get to a certain age where they have to feel shitty and they've got to be able to perform in their shitty or in their feeling shitty. And so to release that, then this expectation that I have to either choose to see something as good or bad to let me analyze for myself what might be a more effective versus ineffective response to the situation that I'm put in. And so that enables people to choose for themselves, not how other people say they ought to react to it. They choose for themselves. What do I need in this moment? And sometimes we need to feel upset about something. Another thing I teach athletes is, okay, so you're feeling

sorry for yourself. And that's framed in most people's perception in a negative way. That's a negative connotation. You're feeling sorry for yourself. But shit, if you just fucked up your performance and you thought you had one shot or, you know, you, you said something that profoundly hurt somebody or you did something real, right? You're going to feel sorry for yourself. And I wouldn't recommend against doing that because you have to, but you also have to get a sense of, okay, how long do I want to let this happen? At what point do I want to say, okay, I'm going to allow myself to feel sorry for myself. I'm going to sit in this for a while.

I'm going to accept these emotions without trying to change them. But at some point, you've got to say, okay, now I'm done feeling sorry for myself. Now I get to move on or something. Yeah. And so the period of ahead go ahead go and finish one of the faults of zoom we talk over each other go and finish the period of time that a person

might need to say okay i'm going to give myself this time just to sit in this a little bit to not try and change it at all to just feel it is going to be based on the magnitude of what they're experiencing. And so for some people, it might be a few seconds that they need. If you're talking about a weightlifter and they screw up their clean and jerk or something, and they've got within a minute then to do their next attempt to make an Olympic team, for example, they don't have a lot more than seconds to just say, Aaron Judge, the baseball player, you'll see him when he's making bad decisions in the plate, he'll step away from the plate, he'll take some dirt, he'll sprinkle it in his fingers and throw it. And that's his way of mentally saying, okay, let me just sit with this for a second and

feel it. And then I'm going to release it and go back. Well, when you're talking about the situations that you were referring to, sometimes those things need a lot more time to. And so what I don't want to do is I don't want someone to say, you need to control those. You need to master those emotions because that shit ain't going to happen. You're not going to control those emotions. You're not going to master those emotions. There's some level of truth in the Buddhist notion that the cause of suffering is struggling. And if we stop struggling, then we'll stop suffering. Friends, we're going to take a quick break. We got to pay the bills.

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Joe from the ability to stay on a nutrition and training plan to elite athletes that get in their own head and they're costing themselves the performance that they're capable of. How do you break that cycle? Because it's so easy to get into. Most people I work with are fairly accomplished. And most of us, your everyday Joes, have accomplished things in our life. And so what I want them to do is to ask, okay, who are the judges who are making me question myself or who are instituting doubt in my mind? So let's look at these judges and let's examine the validity of the judges. Let's say, Anders, that your daughter was like a gymnast and I said Anders I'd really like to be

a judge at the Olympic Games in gymnastics has always been a dream of mine and you had an in with USA Gymnastics and I said do you think you'd be able to talk to the CEO and maybe give me a shot at becoming a judge I'm guessing you wouldn't just outright say, sure. My thinking is that you'd say, I didn't know you were a judge, Lenny, or have you judged at that level? And I'd say, I've never done it before. I just want to do it. And you'd say, I don't think that's a very good idea because you wouldn't be a very valid judge. All right. So recently I was contacted by a person who had three doctorate degrees. She had a PhD, she had an MD, and she had a Juris Doctorate degree. And she was trying to pass the California Bar exam to become a lawyer.

This is one of the smartest people I've ever, and she had, she had tried on two occasions to pass the California bar and both times she didn't pass. And so the, the thing is maybe she's got testing anxiety. So she went to see a learning specialist and learning specialists to her credit said, you don't need a psychologist. You need a sports psychologist because you don't have a learning issue. You have an anxiety issue about your ability to, you know. So, you know, the first time I met with her, we met at a little coffee shop and I said, I want you to write down a list of all the major exams that you've passed in your life. And you imagine three. I mean, think of all Andy, all the exams

you had to take to just to get the PhD. So she had this long list. And I was like, I guarantee you that when you go into every single one of those, you would have felt scared. You would have been anxious. You would have, but you passed every single one of those things. So what are you listening to? There's something in your mind saying this is going to be tough. You may not pass it. Well, look at the validity of that judge. Just like me judging gymnastics. And so drawing attention to Anders,

drawing attention to the validity of the source of what you were describing. Sometimes there's a big light bulb moment going, shit, I've passed all these exams. Why in the world would this one be any different? Yeah. And, you know, you were going back to what you were saying a little bit earlier, I was thinking about the stories that accumulate in people's brains. And, you know, you work with extremely high performing people. And what I have found over years of meeting very successful people is a lot of those people are very successful because of a lot of trauma that happened in their earlier childhood. And at some point, that trauma either veers towards being extremely successful or it veers towards a lot of problems. And is there some sort of path

that after you see this over and over again of people that are actually able to get out of that trauma and move towards high levels of success and use that as like their superpower versus this detrimental thing that ends up just keeping them fumbling in their life without actually finding a true path. There's actually an interesting line of research in sports psychology, and there's a couple of researchers who have this theory that they call it their rocky road to the top, that why success needs trauma. And so they make some of the arguments, Anders, that you just described. And actually, they've got some data to back it up when you look at the number of players in the NFL who come from, quote unquote, broken homes and poverty. And so they make a compelling argument.

However, I would say, let's not think of the term trauma the way that in maybe clinical perspectives we think of it. Trauma is basically a challenge, right? And so some of these things are actual traumatic experiences, but some of them are not by definition traumatic. It could be you dealt with an injury, you got cut from a team. Those are different traumas than sexual assault and the death of a parent at a young age. But there is some evidence perhaps that those, you know, experiences that people have along the pathway that maybe this is, there's kind of a fork in the road. And maybe we go down one path and we have the support that we need and we admit that we need to deal with this thing, or maybe we go down the different path of saying, I'm too tough to seek help. I'm not going to admit that this is an issue

and I'm going to power my way through it. And the people who choose to go alone in that path tend to be the ones who experience the most either failure or difficulty transitioning out of the spotlight or their career because they had all this stuff that was underlying that they never really kind of dealt with. So it's like in this, in this pathway, our athletes using the resources that are available for them to say, I'm not perfect. I'm shouldn't have to be expected to be perfect. But that's why actually I joked about Andy at the beginning and about talking about our feelings. But of all the people I've worked with in sports settings, Andy is one of the people who has the most intuitive sense of, and Andy is a tough guy and Andy is confident, but like you, you might,

you should probably, you should probably look into this. This is something that, uh, you know, maybe you should, and he, he's been phenomenal about just knowing when he can handle things and, but we need people like Andy who athletes trust when Andy says, you know, there's, I joke about this, but there is a, there is a resource here that we can look into. They're going to listen to someone like that because they trust him. Yeah. I think one thing that, and we're talking about Galpin and he's right here, but I think one of the very cool things that Andy does is a lot of the breathwork

stuff and making breathwork cool, because that gives us this really cool uh shouldn't say cool when the way that galpin does it and talks about it and the xpt people as well in that it's a performance enhancing tool to be able to calm your nervous system connect with your breath and really create this mindset piece um is different than if you sat down and read the Buddha's brain and he's like, sit here and be a monk for the next 12 years and you'll find enlightenment. We don't really need that conversation. We need people to understand that if they're able to slow down and have a conversation and watch their brain turn, it turns into a performance enhancing thing because you have these default patterns that just continually show up and find a way to be able to break those stories down. Is meditation or just general breath work, is that a big piece of your work?

I hate to admit it because I tend to be the type of person that if everyone's talking about it, I want to go in a different direction. So mindfulness right now and over the last couple of years, I moved out of California. I've lost touch. Well, that's all you hear about is mindfulness. And, and, and that's not, you know, I say that like, it's a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. Of course this stuff is, is, could be potentially life-changing, but you know, I try to not use that term mindfulness because a lot

of people who have no reason to use it, use it and try to profit by it. But it really is though a matter of just learning these complex tools that you can teach in a simplified way. That's what Andy does so well with the breathing stuff. Breathing is, we think it's simple. It's the first thing we do when we enter the world. It's the last thing we do before we leave the world. We think it's something that's so simple, but it's actually a lot more complex than that. So, but yeah, those type of things that, there's all kinds of resources for that as well. Yeah. One thing I tend to think about when i think about meditation mindfulness is like it's the it's many things but one thing is that it's an active practice of just being in the moment and we earlier we mentioned big wave surfing fighting mma whenever i think about extreme

sports you know like wingsuit flying things like that uh i think about the, that book by Stephen Collar, breathing, stealing fire, excuse me, stealing fire, where one of the big concepts in that book is that people do extreme physical tasks in order to be mentally and emotionally completely present where they're not thinking about their bills and their kids and their anxieties and their, their longings and whatever else where maybe the same way, and this is probably totally not appropriate for this show, but like the same way that like, you know, high level CEOs and politicians will end up doing like BDSM type sexual acts where it's like they need something so extreme because they're under so much pressure to actually bring

them out of their head and into the moment for like the first time ever. Are you familiar with, with that, with that book and those concepts and what do you think about it? A BDSM book? Is that what you're asking me? Yes. Tell me your deepest sexual thoughts. I want to hear it. Lately. He says lately. To bring us back, Doug, one of the things I remember so much about the interview that we did the first time three years ago is you asked so many really insightful questions.

So when I was working with big wave surfers and I was doing research with big wave surfers, there was a big wave surfer who was older. As a matter of fact, he was in his late fifties when he was still regularly surfing this spot up in Northern California called Mavericks, which is pretty remarkable at any age, but much less almost 60. And he said to me one time, he's like, he grew up with, he did a lot of meditation. He's like, you don't have to meditate for 15 minutes to get the benefit of it. He's like, when I'm in big surf and I'm in the lineup and I'm waiting for a set to come in, this is also somebody, by the way, who does, he's a doctor and he works with life-threatening illnesses and that sort of thing. He's like, if for one second that environment forces me to be right here right now, that's all I need is that one second.

And it has a massive impact on the rest of my life and so one of the things that I think that that turns people off about this notion of mindfulness is that we've got to do it for 20 minutes at a time to get the benefits it can really be just something that is so what I need in this particular moment and when I mentioned earlier about like the extreme sport athletes and, and, and our like perceptions of why they do it versus why they actually do it, being able to,

for example, I've, I've worked with these back country snowboarders and skiers who climb these mountains and then try to ski down them. And you know, that, that moment where they've got to make a decision, are they ready? Or when they're climbing up to be mindful of the things that they're going to

be needing to know on the way down. So this notion of shifting my focus from, I need to focus on this step right now, but I also need to be focusing on the future. That's one of the things that get out of it the most. It's not about the rush or that it's in this moment right now, I'm just stripped of everything. And I think that's why like, you know, the beginning of COVID, a lot of people started doing puzzles and just, you know,

when you're doing a puzzle, you're not thinking about, you're just in that one moment you're, and that's, to me, that's what mindfulness ought to be. It shouldn't be that we need to close our eyes and breathe for 20 minutes. And now that stuff works and that stuff, I'm not going to argue with thousands of years of research on it, but if we really want people to do it regularly, we'll, we'll talk about those small moments that it could be a benefit to them. Do you think that's part of the reason that, that social media seems to be so psychologically unhealthy for so many people? Because social media is all about wishing I was there rather than being here.

Yeah. You know, my, yes, my, my students will be very surprised if they know that I'm going to talk about goal setting because I hate the topic. There's nothing been new about goal setting in 30 years.

And so I don't like teaching goal setting, but I do anyways, but there's a, uh, uh, oh, my laptop. There's a researcher from Harvard university, Tal Ben-Shahar, who studies the psychology of happiness. And, um, he, he talks about like, we aren't very good at predicting what our goals are going to bring us in terms of emotional states. And he says, we set a goal because we think that reaching that goal is going to make us happy. And then ultimately, if we do reach the goal, we's we're happy for a bit, but then that goes away. And then we're back to, I'm just a miserable person again. And so there's a lot about like this connection between thinking about what we want to be doing with our lives and what we hope to get out of it and recognizing that we're not very good at predicting what's going to actually make us

happy, which is why a lot of athletes post Olympics go through great straits of depression. And because it's not about reaching your goal that brings the most happiness in people's lives. It's having a goal that we need to reach on a regular basis. And so like with your listeners, I want them to get a sense of like, why are they doing what they're investing all this time and energy in doing? What are you hoping to get out of it? And it's not the future that's going to bring us the happiness if we attain it. It might be short-lived, but it's what am I getting out of right now, day to day, by showing up at the gym every day and putting myself through this stuff. And maybe I'm not feeling it right now, but when you take a giant step back back right now, you're actually a lot more happy than you think. You're going to look back on what you're accomplishing right now and what you're investing right now. And it could

be very special. Forget about the future for just a moment. Now you're struggling, but you know what? You're back in the gym the next day. That's something to be celebrated. I think, I think it was Daniel Gilbert. Are you familiar with Daniel Gilbert? Daniel Gilbert? I'm not, no. I want to say that's his name. I think he was also a Harvard professor or something like that.

But I think he wrote Stumbling on Happiness is the name of his book. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Maybe I'm getting his name slightly wrong, but I think that's his name.

He said some very similar things about how people, they are very poor predictors of what's going to make them happy and then he also pointed out that um it's not when you actually achieve your goal when you're the happiest it's like immediately prior when you kind of see that it's like within reach and you and you think holy shit i might be able to get it that's when you're at the peak peak happiness state not actually once you've accomplished it. Yep. Yep. I'm actually really interested in some of the big weight surfers that you work with. And in general, just people that face life and death situations on a regular basis and the preparation that goes into it. And one of the things that I've heard many times get talked about

is just a general risk analysis in that to the average Joe, to the average person, you go and surf a 25-foot wave at Mavericks, which I've actually seen a 25-foot wave at Mavericks. The last time I drove through there, it was firing and it was terrifying. It was like the scariest thing you've ever seen. It looks like I've never seen Everest up close, but I've seen big mountains and it looks like a moving mountain coming at you. And it is frightening standing on the shore and hearing that rumble.

It was, I don't know how people do that. But preparing and for a moment like that and understanding what actual risks are and eliminating as many of them as possible to get it down to just a very few simple number of things. How do we get people to understand just simplifying these extremely complex scenarios by just eliminating whatever minimal risks maybe in some maximal risks. But for most people, just minimal risks that can be involved in whatever events they're choosing to do and steps they take towards having success in them. Well, the crazy thing about big wave surfing, Mavericks, I mean, it breaks at Mavericks maybe, I don't know, six times a year.

I was so lucky. six times a year. I know. I was so lucky. It was so crazy. Well, I mean, you can't go to it every day and get better at it every day. You have very few chances to actually put yourself in that way, five, six foot wave, they don't stand out. You've never picked them out of a lineup if they're surfing regular waves. So what makes the distinction between the person who looks like everybody else on a five or six foot wave to their ability to do that? And I believe it's their ability to

be prepared for dealing with their emotions when they're afraid. And when they are in a situation where their life might be on the line, they don't accidentally show up in that moment and then say, okay, what am I going to do to survive this maybe two minute hold down with three waves? They train for that. They visualize that. They talk to other people who are aware about that. And don't forget, these extreme sport communities are really small. And how many people wingsuit fly in the whole world, much less in an area that you live? It's very small. So they teach each other. They trust each other. They listen to each other. They mentor each other. And to me, I wish listen to each other, they mentor each other.

And to me, I wish we had more of that in this world. It's just this desire to want to share and help other people thrive as well. So, Anders, there's a lot of things, you know, there's the, they do a lot of like, you know, visualization. They do, some of them watch videos and then pause the video and then go back and imagine themselves in that in that you know from the first person perspective you're watching a video from a second person perspective but you're seeing yourself in the first person perspective they do things like breath work holding their breath and learning how to not fight the wave. You know, a lot of this is just knowing what our, you know,

I don't want to use the word evolutionary response is going to be, which is to fight if you think you're going to die. How do you give into the ocean when you think you're going to die? How do you let go of that and just wrap into a ball and let it take you where it's going to take you versus the fight or flight response, which would be to try to change the situation. So there's a lot of acceptance that goes on with, all right, I'm in this bad situation here. I'm going to do whatever I can to just let

it pass. I know it's going to pass. I know it. And just that thought alone, I know this is going to pass. I just have to give myself the next 45 seconds to just let it happen. Yeah. Okay. So on that, I guess one example that's similar is if you were standing on a ledge, right, and the ledge was a foot in the air, you would have no basic reaction whatsoever, right? Now, that exact same scenario, put it 100 feet up in the air,

everything is different, right, which tells you it's like something is going on internally with you when you, I guess, perceive danger. Similar to, like, guys will spar in practice, right, in MMA a trillion times, but when they go and do it, you know, for reals, it's the exact same thing. Like they're doing the exact same thing. It's just now all of a sudden they can be totally different person in that real walk versus all the fake walks right through there. So with those things in mind, like, is it just the perception of danger that gets you? Is it the perception of,

Oh, I only get one chance to do this and i don't want to blow it like what what is that thing and then what can you do about that i actually just to even add on to that galpin i went to the horseshoe loop in utah whatever it is horseshoe bend yeah and i tried as hard as i possibly could sitting on the ledge to get both feet over the ledge there was not a single thing in my body that was going to allow my second foot to dangle over the edge at that location it was physically not possible it was my body that just was like dude a strong gust of wind and you're out of here. No chance. Yep.

Anders, you had a choice on whether or not you wanted to dangle that second leg. And so that's what a lot of – My brain would disagree with you. Yeah. Well, ultimately, you didn't have to do that. If there was a child who was dangling on that ledge, you would have been able to get to that ledge and put yourself in a position that otherwise you wouldn't be able to do if you felt like you had to make that conscious decision. That's my point but yeah the big thing for uh the extreme athletes is not necessarily in and of itself a survival function

but it's an ego function and they are very good at asking am i going to do something stupid because my ego is saying i've got to do it? And I've asked a lot of the, the one of the surprising responses I've got is, or the presence of cameras, you know, they do these things in documentaries. Do those put unnecessary pressure on you to do something that you're not ready to do? And across the board, it's no, because I know that I would rather live another day than walk off this thing and have my ego bruised. You know, there's a saying, there's no because i know that i would rather live another day than walk off this thing and and have my ego bruised you know there's a saying there's no there's no or there's bold

pilots and there's old pilots but there's no old bold pilots they they sort of they they live by that philosophy of risk management and and have to put their ego aside. I think in that wingsuit community too, where like one out of three people die. Yeah. That's probably, uh, like if you, if you put that suit on, you're basically saying, I'm okay. I'm okay. Not showing up tomorrow. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, I think any, any, any extreme sport athlete has probably lived through the death of somebody and seeing their family go through that. Their colleague's family is enough for them to say, I'm good. I don't need to prove myself. Dr. Lenny, where can people find you? That's kind of a personal question. I would like to, I'm really trying to just get in that green truck of yours with some long boards because nobody owns a truck like that that doesn't like a nice afternoon out in the Pacific Ocean with some three-footers. Anders, you have an open invitation at any time.

And I have long boards in the garage. Of course. 20 minutes from the beach, I, you know, unfortunately I guess I'm not on social media, but if they were to Google me, I assume Anders, they're going to find what you found earlier. So they can always get my email address or something. And I know that sounds so boomer like to say, but that's just where I'm at.

There it is. Andy Galpin. Yep. Yeah. Dr. Andy Galpin, Twitter, Instagram.

There it is. Doug Larson. I'm an Instagram. Douglas C. Larson. I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner. We're Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. BarbellShrugged.com forward slash store programs, e-books, nutrition, mobility, making strong people stronger. We will see you next week. That's a wrap, friends.

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