Barbell Shrugged - The Ready State w/ Dr. Kelly Starrett, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash Barbell Shrugged #578

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

Kelly Starrett is a CrossFit trainer, physical therapist, author, and speaker. His 2013 fitness book, Becoming a Supple Leopard, was featured on The New York Times bestselling sports books list. He is a co-founder, with his wife Juliet Starrett, of the fitness website MobilityWOD.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   How Kelly Starrett changed the game overnight The birthplace of San Francisco CrossFit  How Mobility WOD has transformed over the last decade Dealing with fast growth of a business and methodology Explaining what it takes to be a great coach over a lifetime   Dr. Kelly Starrett on Instagram   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   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   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

Shrugged Family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, the greatest of all time, Dr. Kelly Starrett. I start the episode off talking to him about the fact that I literally think he is the greatest of all time in creating a methodology that rapidly changed the landscape, strength and conditioning, mobility, physical therapy, all at once. Me personally, I have never had a human, I shouldn't say that, maybe Greg Glassman when I found CrossFit when I was 22. But shortly thereafter, Kelly Starrett showed up in my life. And I think he did more on a tactical level of being able to help me solve more people's problems than anybody else I had ever met in the fitness space. And still to this

day, I think that his methodology and the way that his brain works is just above and beyond anyone in our field. And today's show was just a true honor to have him on. And he really is one of the people I admire the most in our industry. And it's unbelievable to have watched the very first Mobility WOD that he put out, like selfie style on YouTube, to see what Mobility WOD and now the ready state has grown into, and this episode really is an honor. Before we get into everything, I want you to talk to our friends over at Organifi. You can do that by going to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. And when you do that, what's so awesome about going to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged

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forward slash shrugged. Friends, Dr. Kelly Starrett, let's go. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, Dr. Kelly Starrett. To start this off, I have to tell you, you are the first person that I have watched that I feel like I watched the very first video they did. And then I saw you squatting on an iPhone like this, influencer style, before influencer style was a thing. And then John Wellborn put a link up on CrossFit football. And now it's just been truly an honor to be a part of the lineage the lineage that is kelly starrett and all the things that you have created and i i truly it is an honor to have you on today well it's so fun i mean we're we're at a really interesting inflection point in fitness time but let me just go back in a second

say i'm sorry i filmed my crotch for 10 minutes. I love it. Change the world in 10 minutes. You know, what do they say? The influencer life doesn't choose you. When I don't choose it, it chooses you, right? Yo, you doing crotch shot squatting is the 2021 equivalent of the influencer butt shot. So you were way ahead of your time. Dude, you know, it's so great.

Here's a little back. First angle, first angle. Look, you know, it's so great. Here's a little first angle. Look, you know, the iPhone didn't have a video camera. So when we started this thing, you know, YouTube was barely a thing. There's no Instagram. I think just people forget what it was like when we first started going out there. I remember. Yeah. Maybe

you're on a blog, right? Maybe you were lucky enough that Travis is your like your best friend and you ended up in his gym. The rest of us were just figuring it out and really stitching together. Some of the most early influence for me was like watching Joe DeFranco actually put out DVDs of his guys actually doing sessions where I was like, oh, that's what a real session looks like, right?

Where I could see start to finish all the dirtiness. And so no one knew what this looked like. And so when we started this, I was filming on a camera, downloading to the internet, uploading versus like via our modem, you know, our dial-up. And it took forever to get that done. And, you know, I walked into the gym the next day. And this is total – I don't think I've talked about this before.

But Diane Fu, our Olympic coach at the time, was like – she's like, hey. She's like, those are the nut shorts you wore yesterday. And I was like, Oh boy. It's like, you know, she's like, Hey, just, you know, pro tip, maybe, maybe just camera up a little bit, but you know, what we didn't appreciate or what I did appreciate at the time was, Hey, I was going to be radically transparent. I was going to show my understanding, my thinking, and then just let that ride. Let those chips ride over. It's been over 10 years. And sometimes I still see, I get upset because, or I get fired up because, you know, people will drop into this river, this ocean we've created where we've been as transparent

and given as many models. And I literally explain myself every day on the internet. I use, like, I don't have millions of followers. Maybe the whole thing together, we're at like 1.2 or something like that. But, you know, you look at the people who are having huge social followers right now. I'm like, that's not me. That's not, you know, I just need to take my shirt off more.

I need to do more sexy stuff. But we use this internet as a way of explaining and teaching day after day. So when someone drops in and then like they don't like something or they don't understand the context, I'm like, dude, I spent 10 years explaining what I mean. You have 824 followers and you're being a douchebag on the internet. Quit that. So, you know, it's a really powerful tool. We're in this inflection point of figuring out, are we part of the industrial fitness complex or are we actually trying to transform society? And that's the question we need to ask ourselves. The very first time that I remember, it may have even been before MobilityWOD and the 10-Minute Squat Test, but I remember watching you and Boz doing like just gnarly workouts.

I remember a handstand walk prowler or sled pole, like in the parking lot and just going, what in the world are these guys doing up there? Like it was beyond just, it was beyond, it was like a way of thinking about fitness that I had never come across ever. I had always just played in this lane. I'd had strength coaches just stayed in their lane.

Did, like, do you remember any of the, like, influences that kind of got you to this point of saying, like, this thing needs to be completely shattered in a way and rebuilt through with the new education system. I came out of like that classic, you know, I was sponsored by a climbing gym when I was paddling on the national team. We would go and do our selectorized equipment. We thought we were strong. You know, we really did try to train. And then believe it or not, the first sort of wake up. I mean, this is when we were – this is in Durango in the 90s. Colorado? Durango, Colorado? Durango, Colorado. One of my favorite places in the whole world.

Oh, it's so good. It's so good. And I remember finding a book, like looking for plyometrics. I'm like – somehow I was like, I need to like – if you go and look at track and field, that's what I was talking about. If you look at track and field, they have been on the sort of explosive running, jumping, throwing forever, because that's the heart of track and field. If you get into an Olympic lifting program, then it really is about power and springiness and knowing where straight up and down is. It's movement practice and then there was the rest of us like trying to figure out how do we get stronger i guess it's the yes no machine on the adductor thing it's it's chest you know fly and it was you know muscle muscle muscle

muscular development magazine like that was what we were doing there was such a divide between pro athlete and i just want to look good naked. You had to either be like an extreme bodybuilder or part training for the combine. Yeah. And so, if you fell into one of those categories, if you fell into that cool category of actually, this is how we've been training athletes for hundreds of years. Cool. The rest of us did not have that experience. And so, I found this book by Donald Chu out of Stanford, who wrote this book about like plyometrics. And I was like, I need to do plyometrics. My girlfriend at the time, her parents gave me a, like a 20 pound medicine ball for Christmas, because that's what I asked

for. I'm like, I need a medicine ball so I can throw this around to be more explosive and springy. Didn't even really understand. And we, my friend and I got the book, which was like a little, like flip through book with stick figures, had no rep schemes, no concept, no technique, just stick figures kind of flexing side to side. And we went, we started at page one and worked our way to the back of the book in a single session. And then we're crippled for like a week. And that is really the heart of what, what we really started to wake up and realize, man, we don't know anything about how to integrate this, and more importantly, integrate it into sport. So, when I started PT school, I was actually working with Coach Jim Schmitz down in South

San Francisco, learned to Olympic lift with Jim Schmitz, just old school. Decent program. Yeah, right? And well, you know, he was like, look, you can get really strong lifting three days a week, and you know, you're just gonna have to do 500 sets of everything. And Jim was so I mean, I had to drive. No one had Olympic lifting shoes. I bought a pair of Olympic shoes at the back of someone's car. You know, his program was 50 bucks a month to get in person coaching. It was just was just really different. And when I realized at the time, you know, in physio school, they asked me to like create a, like a GPP program and GPP wasn't even a word they use, but like in part of my exercise phys class. And I literally had like a 20 minute FTP time trial on my bike. I had some Olympic lifting metrics. I had some plyo things in one minute. And then, so I was already really struggling to integrate, like, how do I do all of this and develop all these capacities?

And, you know, I was reading Michael Colgan, who was a physical therapist guy. I found Pavel. I was suddenly deadlifting and bent pressing. I was just trying to do what I could do. And then I found CrossFit. And it was the first time where I realized, no, I wasn't very fit. I wasn't very strong. I wasn't very skilled. And early CrossFit, because CrossFit now is a different thing than it was. In the beginning, no one was fit. No one was strong. No one was skilled.

You really have to appreciate that that was the case. And so when early on, too, what we were seeing is that we were suddenly, because of the internet, I had access to Mark Ripoteau, and I had access to Mark Ripoteau and I had access to Mike Bergner and I had access to, you know, people who are interested in sort of tangential to the movement. And I just deep dived. And then that really started to blow open my brain around how are these things connected? What's essential? And I think for a second, what we had was this really rich exposure explosion of figuring out what is possible. How do we have more fun in the gym? Cause all of a sudden it was wide open. I mean,

there's no rogue fitness. We made our own racks. We, you know, you just, you couldn't buy a prowler, right? Those are the things that, uh, and then, and then we, um, you know, I think we lost our minds for a second because what we have to be thinking about simultaneous is look, GPP or Olympic lifting is great in for itself fitness or you're doing a sport. But how do I integrate these things into a sufficient dose that my athletes can still be athletes? They can still go play volleyball. They still have, right? And the training in the gym has become so dense that you're, that's what you're doing for the day. You went for an hour of CrossFit, like, man, it is so dense and that you do not have enough energy or speed or time for another sport. So that's the next phase, right? How do we synthesize all of this essentialism beyond just gym culture into what's essential? And I'll tell you what, the Olympic lifters have been doing it forever because they were working with track and field. They were working with sprinters. They were,

they realized that, Hey, what's the minimum dose to be explosive in spring, work on your positions and still go be an athlete. And that's where we are now. How do you feel about some of those, uh, the early days of CrossFit? Um, when Glassman was putting up like a 20 Cindy, 20 minute EMOM, you're literally in the gym 20 minutes you've got your warm-up for 5 to 10 20 minutes of hard work and then we stop or we do some skill work whatever it is turning into strength skill Metcon every single day of the week and I feel like as as CrossFit grew we like we we ramped up the intensity we ramped up the amount of volume we crammed as much as we possibly could into an hour and the further i move away from crossfit in my own training the more i

feel like i go directly back to what glassman was always saying at the beginning of like go hit the 20 minutes really hard get the hell out of there and live your life sometimes though yeah so you know what testosterone peaks in 55 minutes remember that remember that like that's you know we're like so here i am three hours into workout seven you know yeah um you know what i'll say is we have run this experiment a lot so if you look at our best lifters travis is a great example Sometimes your guys and girls are doing two sessions a day, but they're not too grindy sessions, right? Really dense, really focused. What's the goal?

Hit the goal, go recover, go do it again. And only when they have to. That's after, that's when four sessions, five sessions, six sessions, stop working, then seven, then eight. But like, yeah, we don't just go, we don't just wake up one day and say, all right, we're doing two a days. It's just when that volume, you know, prescription stops working, then you add a little bit more. So that's where people stop.

I think that what you're saying is really interesting because, you know, early on if you're doing Cindy, five pull-ups, you know, 10 push-ups, 15 air squats, doing 20 rounds of Cindy on the minute, staying on the minute was actually a thing. It was really a big deal. You're a monster. Most of us, 12 rounds, 14 rounds. So 12 rounds times five, you know, that's not that many pushups. That's not that many pull-ups. And what you see is that people were really rate limited and protected by their lack of fitness. But suddenly those prescriptions, like if we took something like, you know, a Diane deadlifts and handstand push-ups, that's 45 reps at like a 50%

load. Like that's actually not that crazy. Forget the technique, forget some of the intensity slop that doesn't transfer well, forget that. But the actual volume was really reasonable. And the loads were very reasonable. But suddenly it's, you know, because people are getting fitter, what you said, Travis, was, hey, people stopped having this adaptation to the exercise, the exercise by nature got higher and higher. And by the way, run this experiment already in running. Well, you have to run 100 miles a week. Now it's 110 miles a week. And now it's 120 miles a week. So why is gym training any different than any other cyclist, swimmer, runner, triathlon group where people start to adapt and they're looking for different stimulus? The key is, are you using your fitness? Yes and no. And to your

point, there are some days where, you know, you're probably served by going for a two hour bike ride, right? And then coming home and doing some pressing or working on your muscle snatch. That's really tight. But what we've done is said, if you're not hitting this freakish amount of volume in this freakish amount of work, somehow it's amount of work somehow it's not good enough and what I don't think we've run we don't know what's gonna happen in terms of those volumes and how the body holds up and you know we're just into this experiment now so I think we're pulling back to your point and there's about being a lot more dense yeah we can be a lot more hyper focused and and then go actually have a life outside the gym. Go do a sport.

And what you'll see is that you're arguing about the primacy of your programming and yet you couldn't play soccer because your legs are trashed. You couldn't go run a fight. You can't do anything. So what are we training for? Is it just body composition? Well, let's get on your diet and stop trying to smash ourselves into the ground. And what we really have created or tapped into is exercise addiction. And don't get me wrong. That's why I'm not addicted to drugs. I have exercise. I mean, I've figured this out early on in my life. So just I'm self-medicating like the rest of you. So I'm not, I'm not throwing shade, but understand what it is. Yeah. I actually, I'm curious over time, you talk about training volume and with respect to age i want to know how your training especially regarding training volume

has changed from when you're in your 20s to in your 30s in your 40s etc well it's you know what i've done it's interesting so i'm i'm gonna be 48 here soon and first of all i don't compare myself to travis on the barbell ever. That's just – that's a recipe in having – A losing battle. You know what you should do? Set to eight. Yeah, then you win.

Then you got him. Well, let me ask you. I mean, I do sets of 7.5 and 9.1. I just feel like the eight doesn't – Yeah, sets of eight. Sets of eight. So, you know – That's the secret.

Yeah, the secret is just get him breathing. You got him. Then I'm done. You's eight. So, you know. That's the secret. Yeah, the secret is just get them breathing. You got them. Then I'm done. You're done. Tap out, coach. So, you know, part of, I think, what's happened is, you know, man, it takes me a little bit longer to get warmed and prepped. I cannot handle the same kind of intensity volume. But what I'll do is I program a lot more open ended pieces. And so instead of saying this is my work set, the second work quality drops, or technique drops, or speed drops, I really am tied into the day. So that if my intention is I need to muscle snatch

today, all of a sudden, I would rather be I'm like, I'm really good today, I'll put another set of three or another set of five in there and keep dropping that. It's an old Pavel model, right? Just, oh, you need some more volume. Here's another couple sets. And then, or if I'm just dogging it today, then I can work on technique or, but I really program a lot of openness. Here's my intention. Here are the positions I'm trying to restore. Here are my energy systems or the time domains I'm trying to work for. And I'll tell you this, this Travis, you're going to just roll your eyes at this because this is not true in your world. But there is a time where I believe you're strong enough. There is a time when I'm actually big enough and heavy enough. I'm with you. Yeah.

Where, where now the needs of my beginner athletes and who are like, are arguing about, you know, you're strong. I'm like, you're not strong. You don't even deadlift 500 yet. Like you're not strong yet. You're not even deadlift 400. Like you can't, ma'am, your son can't do 10 pull-ups. We're not worried about him doing too many pull-ups yet.

Right? Or getting too bulky, et cetera. Right? So what's happened for me then is I put a lot of my lifting. So I don't do high volume sets. I do lots and lots of singles, like one plus one plus one plus one plus one. So if it's a set of five, it's not, you know, it's I get to reset in between and I work on my position. And so instead of like, I never tap and go deadlifting anymore. Like that just feels terrible to me. Instead,

I reset from the bottom and start again. And it's slower. But if I want that repetitive motion, I reach for my kettlebells, I reach for a different tool. And in between a lot of my heavy lifts now as I get older, is some cardio, I put in a salt bike, I put in a row. And so I bounce back and forth between like, hey, if today coach is saying, hey, like what I want to do today is work on overhead. I'm going to work on my strict press because that one makes me, you know, push press and push jerk are all about hips. Strict press is about my shoulders being bomber. That's why I think about strict press and why I love strict press for older guys. You know, not that you shouldn't be able to push press and jump from a flat foot. Don't get me wrong. I think that's important. It's crucial, especially for

young people. But for me, I'll end up doing a minute and then come over and do a double or triple something heavy. And I'll keep repeating that until, you know, again, my stimulus is met, I'm running out of gas, or I'm standing looking at the bar for one extra second, or I check my phone and I'm like, my brain is telling me you've had enough, son. So I would much rather train seven days a week, pull back on a little bit of the volume and keep the engine running, then put myself in the hole, be critically sore and not have this desired training because I still want to go ride my bike and do sports. That's exactly where I'm at in life too. Like I have, I keep my trap bar in my basement loaded. So like i'll go pick one

movement i'll do that movement do some carries do that movement do some care until yes until i feel like my movement's about to start to go awry and then i'll stop and i do that every day you know sometimes for an hour sometimes 20 minutes but every day so yeah we joked about it the other day travis but we all turn into dan John at some point. Should have been listening. The problem is you were too young and too handsome. Yeah. One of my go-tos I do it about every three weeks is that I pull 315 every 30 seconds for 20 or 25 minutes. And it's my heart rate doesn't get too high. I don't get sore, but I get 40 or 50 pulls at 315. That's 40 or 50 setups of organizing, of practice.

And when I do that, my body feels fantastic. And that's what I've come to realize is that, you know, what, and some of the sort of of elite thinking around strength and conditioning, for example, like I'll point you to Franz Bosch, who is this crazy Dutch writer about strength and conditioning. I think what we're doing is about coordination and motor efficiency and reacquiring positions and shapes and coordination as much as it is about physiology and strength. Totally. I think most people should agree with you.

What you see suddenly is that what you're doing, coach, is a movement practice that also loads your joints and tissues, that also gets your heart rate up, right? And suddenly I'm like, that is super sustainable. When I'm traveling for work, my range of motion drops way down. I keep it tidy. When I'm at home and rested, then I start to open it up and take risk on speed. And, but what I'm saying is it's very

much a dynamic document about what's going on. You know, if I program for my wife and she, I do a lot of programming for Juliet and she's three-time world champion. She's a rower. She's a monster, greatest training partner I've ever had, but she hates all of my open workouts. She's like, well, what are we doing. Greatest training partner I ever had. But she hates all of my open workouts. She's like, well, what are we doing today? I'm like, well, we're going to shoot for between eight and 10. But if the volume drops off, we're going to cut it early. Or if we're going long, we're going to just keep going because it feels so good and we're cooking. She hates not knowing where the ends are. And I'm like, doesn't matter, kid, because, you know, I've trained my daughters into, you know, having a mindset that we're

going to see, here's the minimum stimulus that I'm shooting for. And then we're going to see where the volume takes us. So my youngest daughter or my oldest daughter will be like, how am I doing, dad? I'm like, oh, we're gonna shoot for 15. She just goes, okay. Because she knows probably it's going to shut down at 11 or 13 or nine based on what we're doing. But, you know, that flexibility really makes it so that

the athlete is part responsible for when her quality drops, her speed drops, because Travis can coach and program for you until you're a puddle on the floor, but you are no longer being athletic. We're no longer fast, right? And so, you know, for a lot of my cyclists for example will do work and I'm like when you feel your speed done you're done yeah and that means they have to feel and not just be like I'm doing 10 sets of five because coach told me to and that means that we have to have a little bit more nuanced awareness of where we are and what's going on not did I put up the most points for the day because that that is where we came from. I think you've hit on the future.

This is what a few of my friends and I have talked about. I think what you're talking about is the future of strength and conditioning. I think that a coach will come in with a plan with multiple variables of directions it could take. You know, you come in and like maybe today is my maximum effort. Everyone knows what that is. You come in, we in and like, maybe today is my maximum effort. Everyone knows what that is. You come in, we're going to go heavy today. And you look and you notice that the velocity is down, you know, 7%, 10%. Oh, we're not going to do maximum. What would be the point of that day?

So now we're going to take this direction, but you'll come in with a main direction and then prepared multiple variables of which way it can go. So, like, you'll have to – I think the coach of the future will have to be very versed in physiology and the neuromuscular system or else you won't understand these directions. But that's where it's coming. If you're going to be good, FYI, any athlete listening, if you're going to be good, what he's saying is exactly where things need to go or you'll be left behind.

I believe it. You will be. Yeah. And then, you know, what's really great then about that thinking is suddenly you're thinking, okay, as a coach, you're like, what's the stimulus today? And, you know, one of the things I appreciate about someone like Cal Dietz, for example, is that his programming is actually ruthlessly simple. Yeah. Right? his programming is actually ruthlessly simple. Yeah. Right. Because he has athletes who are actually going to other sports and he knows that he can have enough sort of input based on a few parameters to have a

stimulus adaptation. Right. And that's really what he's going. So suddenly if you take that and expand that out, the goal today is a certain position or a certain shape or a certain, we're either working on speed or some aspect. Suddenly I'm like, look, if I hand you a sandbag or a ball, we can do the same thing. Because I have a ton of athletes who have injuries who actually can't Olympic lift anymore, right? They can't. They have a bad wrist. They have

something happen. They actually got injured doing real sports. But guess what? All of the adaptation, all of the stimulus for Olympic lifting is there. And if I'm like, well, can you hold this trap bar? Can you hold this football bar? Can you hold this ball? Well, guess what? The stimulus is the same. So don't get caught into the specifics of like, unless it looks and smells like an Olympic lift, it's not. I totally agree. It is the stimulus for what we're trying to do. And when a coach comes in with an idea around what we're trying to achieve for that day, all the athletes know, and they know what the parameters are. Now we're really starting to engage. Look, I'm on, I've just been asked to join the high performance team for us rowing.

So like a steering committee, right. For the, for the national governing body. And you know, one of the things that I'm really pushing all of these sports for is for athletes to own more of the experience and be responsible. So that if I bomb out, I never look at coach. I look at me. I look at what's going on with my bad racing. I am as a participant in conversation with what's going on. So if you come in and you've written up the program, you and I are talking, it's not negotiating. Like if it's heavy sets of eight, I'm going to suck it up and do heavy sets of eight.

But if something's not working or I need to change something, this is where this nuance of you're saying this dynamic open program model a little bit, it kind of got explained in the Russian like this repetition method. And then they would take these big jumps, right? Well, you know, people were like, well, how did you know to take the jumps then? Well, because it's a dynamic conversation between athlete and coach, and the coach actually knows the athlete and knows the athlete is controlling for enough variables, you can make those decisions. Yeah, we're talking about kind of like the, on one extreme of the,

the spectrum of people that have been training for multiple decades and been in sport and have pushed the limits too far, probably too many times and now can go back and say, well, this is how I feel now. And since I've those feelings lined a million times in my life. I know that if I do three more reps, form breaks down. I wake up terrible tomorrow. My sleep's trash. I'm going to binge on some sort of food because my body's just wrecked and dying for calories. All these things happen. But do you feel like there's still a place for that high level of intensity just to teach people in those beginner

to intermediate stages of training that truly don't understand what it's like to play at the end of the spectrum and feel out those edges? Amen. Let me just first of all say amen because many people think they have worked hard. So, here's a test you can do i believe in when we really go big right we really ramp up the intensity and i don't mean like average intensity you went really hard for 40 minutes i'm talking about peak wattage peak output right you're the limits of your capacities and abilities to hold your position one of my favorite ways to do that is on the assault bike and what i see is that people are really good at like one minute, two minutes. I'm like, that's so cute.

Let me see your peak wattage. You have 15 seconds to throw down 2000 watts or 1500 watts. And I see good athletes not be able to hit a big, big number, not be able to suffer and actually vomit. I haven't seen someone vomit in years from working out. It used to be like, if you're listening to this, there used to be this thing called pukey the clown and CrossFit. And that's because people barfed every day at the gym. Now we've got SoulCycle and, and BootBerry's Bootcamp and, you know, F45. And people, people have been inoculated

from intensity in terms of the barfiness, right? We've gotten really good at having these high lactates. But what we're still confusing is I went to Orange Theory, super hungover, hyperhydrated, dehydrated, and then spiked my heart rate. That was super hard. That was not hard. You just sucked. And you did a bunch of work until someone said stop, right? That's not what we're talking about. So teaching people, absolutely.

But suddenly, remember, it's not just about work. Like we can control domains and we can do it on the minute. We can have, you know, these intervals where I can take, instead of just running intervals, I can be like, hey, we're going to do some swings and some jumps, like a little French contrast, for example, simple French contrast. And then I can be like, all right, now we're going to rest a minute or rest two minutes. And so we can really bring that intensity back. And you're right. People do not know how to suffer. My daughter is 15 turning 16. She is on the water polo team. She was started last year. She's battling it out with a senior for the number one position, but she didn't really learn how to suffer and grind until she

joined the mountain bike team. And now she knows what it is to go, like she comes home from workouts and she's got the cough and she's like, I almost died on that climb, you know? And I'm like, I think there's metal in my throat. What's that metal daddy? And, um, and, uh, what we're seeing now, you know, now she's between water polo mountain biking. And I'm like, okay, so now the sessions we do in our backyard are power snatch, muscle snatch, right? Strict control, Turkish get ups, shoulder stability, power stuff to augment the other things. But yesterday I put her on the, you know, the ski erg. We threw the medicine ball at her and just worked on some strict pushups, which is a great way of just getting some exposure.

And again, I was like, here's our domain. When I see the intensity drop off, we're done. I throw the ball at her until her speed dropped. So the sets were between five and eight. But what I saw was here's a kid who finally figured out what it is when it's time to go. She really can go. And we have to teach people what that feels like. Because what they think is,

like we have a bunch of people in our neighborhood who come to what we call the Starrett Home Health Center. Like our garage and our side yard is a gym. I can't wait for those days. I'm already trying to recruit the kids to come in. All our neighbors come over. Pick up the dumbbell, do your thing. Just don't drop it on

your toe, please. Please. It's totally fine. They've signed the waiver. I'm like, drop it on your toe. What we see is we have a whole bunch of neighbors who cannot work hard. They do not know how to go hard and they've trained themselves out. Like there's something that brains are like, nope, I'm just going slow. Right. But I can do this for two hours. So so 100 what you're seeing is my my daughter caroline is in an olympic lifting club here and and water polo that's her two sports olympic lifting and water polo i'm literally like i have won the jackpot as a dad right this is a 12 year old you told me she's like incredibly tall she's gonna be 10 oh yeah she's got little chapstick tubes. If you watch her front squat, her knees go like past her head. You know what I mean? She's that young, right? But you know, what we're seeing is

we have to have a little bit older training age. And to your point, the training age for some of our kids now playing sports, doing these things is very early. They're being exposed some like they don't need to do CrossFit. My kids don't need to CrossFit. They need to do couplets because it's a useful time. We're challenging their position under a little fatigue, right? I'm much more interested in that. Like the overhead squat, I'm like, you know, we heard early on, like, I don't remember who said, like, if you can overhead squat your body weight, stop overhead squatting your body weight. Time to start doing things like keeping snatch balance and pressing snatch balance and snatching, right? Like, but overhead squatting as fitness stability with high heart rates at

light loads, that is great if you can overhead squat, right? Because that's just challenging your ability to be coordinated, you know. But my point is, what we're seeing is to your point is that people have come in with no background they've done things that smell like fitness for a long time and all of a sudden are exposed to real strength and conditioning and they suck i'm curious i read a note it was the other day am i i'm sorry and so um i wanted to ask you know, most people would say that the reason why that we can't go, you know, the threshold for the lactate system would be a lack of oxygen because, you know, then it can't recycle through. But now it's the, I read in the book, bigger, I'll add it right here, but they said it's the brain. It's the brain's capacity to be able to, you know, to, it will,

it will take all of your different variables, your, your lactate threshold, you know, your aerobic system, and it will tell you when you fail. So like failure is, is governed by the brain and not lactate or, or not, uh, yeah, lactate is just part of the whole system and not oxygen that helps to recycle all of that. So what do you think? Because that's not what I've been taught.

Right. No. So I'm asking you, is that the case? So let's put it this way. Let's put it in the terms everyone can understand, exposure. Right. If you're exposed to high levels of lactate right lactic acid generated in the lactate your brain actually thinks you're being

poisoned what's going on here plus look at co2 tolerance so suddenly you know you have suddenly these really high levels of co2 in the system and the brain is like oh you're being poisoned and you can't breathe let's shut you down right so what you're what you're so this is a good example i've worked in and around tour de france for over a decade now right cyclists the cyclists i worked with were the first people i knew who could desaturate into the low 80s working in the high 70s they could actually perform enough work because they were physiologically that efficient on the bike and could do it. An average person cannot desaturate past like 95. They think they're going to die. And I'm like, look at how much oxygen you have in your system still, right? Your brain is like you're dying. Meanwhile, you can't even push past 90. On a

breath hold, you can't push past 90. So So some of what we're figuring out is the CO2 tolerance. That's really been this breathing efficiency, trying to get people breathing through their nose, comfortable with this. But we spoke to this earlier where we saw people stop throwing up. One of the reasons people were throwing up is that their brains thought they were poisoned by the circulating lactate in the system. And they were like, oh, this is, you've been, you've eaten something that's killing you. You should vomit now. Like that's what's the vomition centers in your brainstem. In the area post-trauma and the brainstem, which, which when you eat, you eat something, get food poisoning, your brain is like eject that because it's now

poisoning the system. Right. Well, the same thing has happened with, with our intense exercise, but suddenly your brain's like, oh, this is totally normal. The same way we are like, hey, are you exposing your ligaments and tissues and tendons and fascia and bones to load over and over again? This is why the exposure matters. Right. Okay. That's what the book said. 100% this exposure. So what I think is really interesting is where we thought the limits were, they're not, right? That's really powerful for us, especially as we look at efficiency. Because now I think what's happened is we've kind of, for many of us, we've gobbled up the easy gains,

right? Like I said, like you can't do pull-ups, now you can do some pull-ups, great. Those are the easy gains, right? Like you know how to muscle snatch and power snatch now, easy gains. The efficiency of that system, the coordination of telling your brain this is a safe position to absorb force in is just as much as the game as the training stimulus, exposure to the tissues. So it shouldn't be no different in our thinking around the actual blood physiology or oxygen physiology. So now we're seeing you can push up to 90% of your max heart rate through your nose only breathing if you're that efficient and you've gotten your brain

comfortable with that high level of CO2 and that high level circulating lactate. And that's where I was stronger as the book, by the way, by Mark McCluskey says exactly what you're saying, which is so for me. so everyone's listening to this, don't get into the weeds because Coach is saying it's crucial, but really it's about exposure and we cannot shorten that process.

Those processes take a long, long time to develop. But suddenly when you're like, oh, exposure. Well, in my model and system, I look at a lot of positions as exposure. Like, are you exposing yourself to this shape and this range of motion? Yes or no? One of the reasons that I say things like the muscle snatch cures shoulder rabies and shoulder cancer is that it forces you into internal rotation of the shoulder. That means we're keeping it on. So if you do the Bergner warmup or you're working on your high hangs or your speed pulls, what we're doing really is touching that internal rotation.

Every time my daughter lowers the barbell from overhead for after snatching, she's basically restoring a position of her shoulder that's crucial for normal range, right? That lowering of the bar is as important to me as the movement of putting the bar over her head in terms of maintaining that internal rotation of the shoulder and that hang shape. But if we're not ever touching those shapes, if we're not exposing the tissues to this normative range, to these basic principles,

we're not going to be capable and competent and the brain's going to protect us there. Apply that to your physiology, et cetera, et cetera. Would you say a baseball player, if they would do it from the very beginning, then like a muscle snatch would be a very smart movement to do the whole time that they're playing sports. How about this? Let's not even muscle snatch. Have you ever heard of a Cuban rotation? Let's do that. Because snatching is so scary. So there's a former pro football player in our neighborhood and they're a great family. They're super fit. His son is the same age as my daughter and they're a great family. They're super fit. His son is the same age as my daughter and they go to Olympic lifting club together. And this old football player is like, my son will not snatch.

And the coach there is smart enough to be like, fine, that's fine. We'll just do a bunch of other stuff. Right. He's a really good Olympic coach. And he says to me, he's like, kind of pulls me aside. He's like snatching. Okay. I'm like, if my daughter doesn't snatch, I'm going to come fucking kill you. I'm here for the snatches. I'm not here for the other bullshit. I don't care how much she can front squat.

I care for the snatches. Which is why my son will kick your son's ass. Don't snatch. Every single day. You know, and I'm like, so you're absolutely right. What we realize, of course, is when we start to expose these tissues, look at the finish position for a pitch or a throw. It's that internal rotation for the hang. So, what we can do is we can always say,

well, let's grade it. How are we grade it? Well, we can stop. We can go slow. We can add speed and power from the hips. But man, but if you just muscle snatch an empty barbell every day, I guarantee you, no one's shoulder is going to explode and you will have shoulders that will last till the stone age comes again that's my point like you know what you know muscle snatch even my my um power lifters who i have that 17 year old is arguably going to be better than all of us and he does muscle snatch yeah that beer because i don't want him to number one you know for him it's the external rotation part of it Yeah. Because I don't want him to, number one, you know, for him it's the external rotation part of it.

That's right. In fact, I don't want him to be stuck in internal rotation like most power lifters, you know, which inevitably is going to lead. Well, whether you're stuck, whether you're a baseball player who can't get into internal, whether you're a power lifter who can't get into external, either one is going to lead to injury. It's just a matter of time. And I don't want my young dude, he's only 17,

I don't want him to be hurt before he becomes this great champion that I think he can be. I definitely wouldn't say don't. It makes no sense. Why is there no common sense? Why can this kid not do a muscle snatch with a barbell? But you'll let him go – you'll want him to throw 100-mile-an-hour baseball. Yeah, I think even building on that, though,

and you have all those kids, like it's obvious when you look at athletes that I feel like they should be doing these specific things. But you were talking about how your house is turned into where all the kids go and they're lifting weights and doing these things. How do you host them when they need? Ask Anders about his little girl that came over to his house. My neighbor came over and lifted weights in my garage. She's 16 and didn't tell her parents. So I pulled over on the side of the road after picking my daughter up at daycare.

And I was like, hey, your daughter did great today. I just want to let you know she's sore tomorrow. Just make sure she gets some food and some water and everything. With no context and i was like maybe i'm not the house that should have all the people coming to lift weights at it it doesn't get much more awkward than that trying to do the right thing and well having to come out terrible but i like when you're when you're when you're bringing the this education system into these these kids brains at such a young age and you know the things that they need to be doing

you can't just sit there and have them doing muscle snatches every day but like is is there a almost like a process a system that you have for because i'm going to need to do this yeah decade and be able to teach this to kids. So remember, first of all, when we're talking about the muscle snatch for everyone, as soon as I take a barbell out of your hand, everyone, like the threat deescalates. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's just lifting a dumbbell. Right. Yeah.

So I'm like, perfect. Here's, here's a hundred harder. And you're going to have to have more range of motion and better control and more proximal stability. Oh, thanks. Thanks for not hurting me. Thank you. That's right. You're welcome.

So, I have no problem. And so, I teach everyone all of our Olympic lifts with dumbbells because they're like, they don't freak out, right? And if someone grabs a dumbbell, they're like, oh, this dumbbell is fine. I'm like, oh, is it? Let me know how you feel in a few minutes because you're going to beg for the barbell right where you can be on this closed torque and and cheat and do all the things you want to do so what ends up happening then in our

model is i talk about archetypes which are the book ends of the positions that your body needs to be in and be able to have in order to claim full physiologic function. So what I can say for your power lifter is that if he can't put his arm over his head or doesn't have rotation, there's no way he's going to bench as much as he's capable of. And we can argue about what the mechanism of the posterior cuff to stabilize the humeral head, but what I'm really saying is if you don't have complete position or you're working towards restoring complete position, you'll always be leaving function out. And what's nice then is suddenly if you get into Olympic lifting and

really understand, it's almost the most complete movement practice there is, except you need to practice some jerks on your opposite side, right? That's important. You probably need to spend a little bit more time with your hip in extension, but that's why we have Bulgarian split squats. That's why they're there. And you need to bench a little bit, but guess what? Every Olympic lifting program I've ever been around benches a little bit. Why? Because you have to take the shoulder into extension because there's no shoulder extension. And suddenly, if you look at the Chinese and look at their accessory work, all those heavy rows, that's about taking the shoulder into his extension as much as it is pulling in a different

plane. You've got to take the shoulder into extension. So suddenly, the dips, right? So all the accessory work turns out it's there. And what you have is a complete movement practice. So now suddenly, if we say, okay, well, what are the ways that I can get your arm over your head into that shape? I can press from there. I can snatch from there. Am I exposing you to those ways of getting your arm over your head, right? So first of all, are you putting your arms over your head? Well, welcome to downward dog.

No one's afraid of doing downward dog. Everyone's afraid of putting their arms over their head, right? I'm like, if that's the case, your baseball player should not do downward dog. That's so scary. Zero logic anywhere in the world. Right? Well, we inherit. So I'm working with the England national soccer team right now. And what I'll tell you is that we had a generation of athletes who came, were products of old school coaching, right? That's what I'll say. They learned everyone comes from a tradition. This next generation of soccer athletes, of football athletes from the UK are savages. And one of the reasons is that I worked with Arsenal for a long time. Arsenal hired rugby strength and conditioning coaches and superstars to come coach the kids in the academy.

So suddenly you have Jerry Flannery, a superstar rugby athlete, strength coach, coaching young 14-year-old soccer players on front squatting. And guess what? Those kids have now grown up and become big time. And they are interested, bulletproof, training age is old, understand nutrition. And so some of this is an artifact of our old school thinking and those coaches are retiring and bless their hearts, we learned a lot from them. I'm not trying to be condescending. They didn't have the resources or the connections or the friendships

or the depth of understanding that we do now it's on us to resynthesize it sure so as you're working with your kids pretty soon suddenly you're like what is essential so i don't start deadlifting with my kids i start kettlebell swinging with my kids and the reason for example is that it's a top down that's teaching everyone from the hang isn't that where we teach most olympic lifting from the hang because you don't have to have any range of motion to start from the hang. You get to a kettlebell swing in two minutes. Yeah.

So now I suddenly I'm like, oh, I've got the speed piece. I'm not just letting kids hook into a weird position and grind away. And by the way, what's so interesting is that as soon as you add speed back to movements, what we see is that the brain says safe, unsafe, and you either make the lift or you don't very quickly. You never see kids power snatch or clean effectively of these rounded rainbow back positions. See why? Because it doesn't work. Your brain recognizes that speed, and this is why we use speed to challenge position. Speed is such a coaching tool because when you add speed, your brain will say that shoulder will not support that. You don't support the lift. You just drop it down or you can't pull. But if I'd say,

grind slow, pull this 500 pounds off the ground, you'll rainbow and dog shrimp that back thing until you hump the bar up because your brain's like, no speed there. You can do whatever you want. So I teach a lot of speed element things to foundation but again once my kids can strict press a barbell where they know straight up and down is man we go right to push press because i think push pressing is one of the things that teaches kids how to keep the torso upright and jump with the flat transfer power which is exactly the push press is a transfer exercise for the hips it's not about getting more weight over your head so suddenly you'll start to see these basics can you you do pushups? Can you do pull-ups? Can you swing

a kettlebell? Can you get into some of these basic shapes? Your language starts to reflect positions you're trying to have exposure to. You can bring in exercise like cardio and look at the time domains. And now you can rinse, wash, repeat that for a decade or so. And then as kids become more competent, you open it up, you open it up, open it up, and now suddenly it's glued hams and full snatches. And that's how it starts. Yeah. I think Travis mentions all the time that on Twitter he'll talk about training kids

and then he'll get attacked by mostly physical therapists talking about growth plate fractures and whatever else uh from you being a physical therapist do you know what the research says about the the safety of strength training for kids you know age age six age 10 age 14 if a child everyone stop now they should go to their room and get on netflix i actually think starting battles with Travis on Twitter is the most effective way to solve problems. It's nice watching him just yell into the ether. It's the most effective way to look dumb for you.

I don't need any help, Travis. I'm about to post a video that's going to blow the internet up. My son now is doing an overhead pistol squat an overhead barbell pistol squat controlled slow both legs at six they're about to lose their damn minds people are going to lose their mind adrian bosman i did that in like 2007 so i mean welcome to the game you know but not at age six definitely six so what what showing there, though, is positional fluency and coordination. It's not even about strength. No, it's not at all.

That's what people don't understand. We're talking about coordination. So we said things like, man, gymnasts make good athletes. I'm like, hmm, why is that? What is that about? They have a springy floor under them. And they're coordinated. They have high degrees of body awareness and coordination.

Then you can start to layer on these other skills. So what, what is amazing then around that is what we haven't done for people or what we've done a disservice from the exercise physiology community is that we've said things like, you know, the steady state cardio is the way because it's easy to measure. It's, but what we haven't done is said, do you understand what compensation positions are? Do you know what good shapes look like? Good positions. And what we've done is said, well, as long as you got faster or as long as you put another half kilo on the bar, it's fine, right? You got stronger during the session. Welcome to basic linear progression, grind away on the internet land. Meanwhile, your kids are duck-footed, flat-footed, valgus, soft. Let me just, and then let's layer

on the fact that again, kids don't have exposure. So if your kids are playing soccer and you're worried about them learning how to swing a kettlebell or press overhead, man, we have gigantic disconnection in what we think is dangerous. No kidding. And let me say that what we're seeing is let's just take the hypothesis of what you're saying at face value. And let's just say, okay, well, lifting weights is dangerous. That's why a lot of kids don't do it. How's it going for us? Oh, kids have torn their ACLs at freakish rates over the last 10 years. We're seeing skyrocketing all of the orthopedic injuries going through the roof, energy deficiency syndrome. What I'm telling you is that if you want to look at any metric and apply our current methodology and say, well, are we less obese or more obese?

Are we less metabolic deranged? Are kids running slower? How about that? Well, it turns out your kid runs the mile like a minute slower than you did when you were in high school, like just a minute, no big deal, right? So every measure of core strength, anything. We have a physician we work with, Dr. Nick DiNubile, who's a knee specialist surgeon. He's been on the Presidential Physical Fitness Council. He's head of the Knee Council in America. When he used to do ACL injury rates in kids. And if everyone here on this call can listen, how many kids tore their ACLs in high school? One. He got tackled sideways. It was one kid. Not one. That's right. So what we're seeing suddenly is he's doing surgeries on, you know, 15 years ago, and he would start the core by hand for the graph, and then have to reach for the power tool and grind into the hard cortical bone to drill the tool with a power tool, which tells me we have this real mismatch between loading early in kids.

And we have a mismatch of environment organism and parents don't know what's a good position and bad position. Coaches don't know what compensation looks like. So FIFA has a, the world soccer organization has an injury prevention program they do for kids. And it's shown, and it's really simple. Like it's hopping on one leg, learning how to balance, learning how to absorb force. Like it's so simple that people are like, this can't be working, and so they don't do it.

It only showed, was demonstrated to reduce injury rates in kids by like 90%, right? That's how low the bar is. By playing. You're saying, hey, I know you don't ever play if you play a little bit you won't get hurt go jump off a fence stop it go play hopscotch jump rope i think also though and i'd love i'd love to know your thoughts on this of the early specialization in children instead of going out and like when i was a kid i just played sports it just it was just what everyone did.

It was like if I'm not playing a sport that's organized, I'm playing the unorganized one out front trying to take kids' lunch money and street hockey. And then I go to baseball practice at night. And then I go to hockey practice in the winter. And now it's at the age of seven, it's like, well, you have to go play baseball. And now you've got kids throwing curveballs at nine years old. And like this over-specialization, does that play into the kind of the pieces that you're

talking about? Let's take a step back and just say for a moment, first of all, as a community, what part of this do we own, right? This hyper-specialization. So let's turn the mirror around and say like, you know, where did we start to fetishize performance and elite athleticism? So, we do, we fetishize it. We don't, you know, love and value good play. You know, I love the old Gretzky story where like Gretzky's hockey team was like, early on was like, everyone plays, everyone touches the pass, we work on fundamentals, we get beat. And they were getting home and Gretzky was complaining to his dad. He's like,

you know, we could beat that team. He's like, not a single one of those kids is going to play in the NHL. And the best team in the world that they were playing against at the time is youth. Not a single one of those players made the NHL. But meanwhile, on his youth hockey league, like eight out of 12 kids went to the NHL, right? So this isn't a story as old as time. But what we want to say, as long as we continue to fetishize and romanticize these high level athletes, then it's going to feed back to college. College is a professionalism, feeds back into high school, feeds back into middle school. And parents who don't have any education in physical culture are going to say, well, that's what they have to do. My kid has to be the best outside here

available. So we need to ask ourselves, first of all, let me ask you as a parent in your specialization, what does your program look like? Does it look like Peloton and Pilates? That's highly specialized. You play sports, you're a highly specialized adult and your kids are like, well, my dad just does Peloton. So we're, you know, we're in there. So what I'll say is university, of course, the durability of our best athletes is because they play diverse sports. Right. But what's happened though, is that an our age and demographic, I'll just say people in their forties,

now early fifties all came out of a tradition where we did not have enough formal movement training. We needed a little bit of gymnastics. We needed a little ballet. We needed a little bit of Olympic lifting. And if we'd had that on top of our basic sports, we'd be so durable. And what we're seeing now is that many of us are paying the price of some orthopedic surgeries because as kids, we were just told to play more, play more, play more, play more. That got us here. Now, what we're seeing is, man, kids need more diversity and they need so much more formal movement training because they can't do anything except take one

step hit from the outside. And we should not be surprised that people are tearing lats and their discs are falling apart and they don't rotate and they don't have fun and they don't play sports their whole lives. It's so funny that you mentioned ballet and I hadn't even thought of it until you said that, that when I would go to hockey camps when I was younger, the figure skaters would teach us how to skate. Like they would be the ones that went out and taught us balance and how to actually like use edges. And it's like the exact same thing that you would never think that ballet is going to be a part of it, but they've turned ice skating into a movement practice, which then translates into just being a better, stronger,

more athletic athlete that can, that has a movement skill. Um, that just totally popped in my brain as you were saying that. I, exactly right. You never think about that side of it. It's always just go, go, go, but not building that foundation of capacity and skill. Well, I saw a miracle, right? You know, again, again, right? Just, you know, running suicides until someone dies, right? The key here, again, is what we're starting to see

is a generation of coaches who can say, okay, I see you're losing to see is a generation of coaches who can say, okay, I see you're losing position. What I want everyone to appreciate is that you have to become a master coach. Dan Fath is one of my heroes. He's an Olympic track coach, probably has more Olympic medals he's coached than anyone else I know in the history of the earth. I literally just read about the guy. He's amazing. He is so knowledgeable and he can coach any athlete from any position in the bleachers above, below, sideways, any sport, any time. And he is so good and accomplished that he can see what's going on in the sports and be like, oh, that kid's missing some internal rotation or we need to work on this position. Right. The rest of us, and I'm just going to say the rest of

us, collective us, it's really hard for us to appreciate when an athlete has good position or bad position in their sport because we're working on them playing their sport, right? There's so much we need to do so that the skills can be there. What we're seeing then is we're laying on all of this movement, competency, movement, fluency requirements onto coaches who should just be there to coach right coach the team work run a basketball team not worry about your crappy collapsed foot and so who picks that up so the question then yes is the parallel diagnostic process is always going on so the gym for me is the only place where we can truly understand movement deficiencies

skill deficiencies strength deficiencies position deficiencies because what ends up happening then is if you're actually in a sport and i bring you into the gym this is the place where i can diagnose and reinforce your positions and not just make it about, did you get stronger? Did you get, you know, more reps, less? Like that is a great side effect. But I suddenly can fix and remedy and minister to these lack of positions, put you back out into the field, and your positions and shapes and tissues and tolerance and skill will be more increased. What we're trying to do is everything in that session,

but we have this parallel diagnostic tool. It's called the gym. And what we haven't done for people is giving people the tools to identify when is a good position, when's a less effective position. That whole thing is like the framework of how I, when you walk, when you see somebody walk and you go, Oh, you have back pain, you have knee pain, you have this, you have that. I love when you, when you talk to somebody like on the golf course is so great. And they're like, Oh, I can hit the ball really far. And you see them address the ball and you go, Oh no, you don't at all. No, I can promise you, you don't have to do anything just the way you set up.

I can tell that there's nothing organized in there. It's going to be a tough way. It's going to be hard to get the ball to go straight twice in a row. Like all of those things. Yes. And Travis can spot whether you're going to make the lift from the first pull. Absolutely. I will walk away as you're pulling.

You're like, this is a waste of my time here. I do this several times. I just walk away. The reason is that your pattern recognition for understanding fundamental shapes and positions in which to generate the most force is so honed that you get a snapshot. You're no different. Don't take this the wrong way. And Tom Brady, who can just look down the field and understand where everyone is in a snapshot.

That is pattern recognition. What we haven't done is giving coaches these pattern recognition cues so that they appreciate what's a good position, what's a bad position, or what I'll say is a really effective position that transfers more or positions that are less effective, right? Because what we're waiting around for is that for someone to have pain and then we're like, oh, let's fix that now. And that's like, that's the madness, right? Because you may or may never have a pain. But what I'm telling you is you're mucking up your sport.

You're forgetting. So, for example, I was just out at Mayhem with, and I'm working with that community. Love Rich. He's an old friend. I just interviewed him about being durable. And what he was like, he's like, play as many sports as you can keep playing your sports. You know, he's like, I still play sports and I'm trying to win the, you know, CrossFit, but I'm still playing all the sports. I'm in a flag football league because it makes me a better person. So there's that one piece. Then the other

piece is I see very technical Olympic lifting going on, very smart Olympic lifting. Then I watch the conditioning going on and I'm like, why are you moving like that in conditioning? Because it doesn't matter because it's lightweight, it's metabolic, and you can just muck up and garbage up the rest of your practice. And so what I want people to realize is I have this concept called skilled conditioning, which means we're going to use your assistance work. We're going to use your, your accessory work as some conditioning work, but your positions matter. So if you jump up from a burpee, I see why coaches don't like burpees.

I'm like, you jump up from a burpee and you land with shitty feet. You just made my Olympic lifting much, much harder. And you're sprinting much, much harder because you practice that for a thousand reps in these dog shit positions. Remember what we said early on was like, look, the stimulus is the same.

So if you're picking up a sandbag and putting it over your shoulder, that's no different than lifting the barbell and getting through transition and put it on your shoulder. So why are you doing a completely different movement pattern when we can be reinforcing, but we haven't taught anyone what those movement compensations look like. And what we said was, I don't want to get in the way of your intensity, right? What a bunch of horse crap. If we're going to unlock the next

level of the game, we need to start paying attention more. Amen, man. Because look, do the math. Like if I do 50 pounds times 10, it's 500, or I do 500 times one, it's 500. But when you do those movements, those poor movements over and over and over and over, and you're not worried about that, well, you're not doing the math, man, because you go out and run a mile. You do every step. What is it? There's like, I think, 2,000 steps in a mile, roughly.

So 2,000 times my one squat, your 2,000 is going to get you hurt way more than my one 500-pound squat. I mean, you do have to pay attention to those little things because if you go to any PT office or any chiropractic office, it's not filled with weightlifters. It's going to be filled with runners for the most part simply because of volume. It's just the number of repetitions. The body, first of all, is ridiculously robust.

It is so bomb-proof. I don't think people realize. So by the time something is- Yeah, I've worked hard to get all these scars. I did work hard. I know, you worked so hard. It tried. It tried to hold up.

We made the joke the other day. It takes you two years to find out if you can be good at something. And it also takes you two years to find out where you screwed it all up. Yeah. All those injuries happen right about the time where you think you're starting to get good

at it and you go, ah, shit, I got to go back to the beginning. I swear a bomb went off. Right when I got super strong, it was like, doo, doo, doo, doo, everywhere just blew up. Your body was like, all right, well, we can do it for this long. That Franz Bosch guy I talked about has a great saying. He said, there's more variation in waltzing than there is in sprinting. And let me translate from coach speak for you. What that means is you can do anything at low speed, low load, low intensity, and you can get away with the bounty and the quality and badassness of your tissues and your system because you're that durable a person. But if you want to go fast and really heavy and really explosive, there are positions that work way better. And that's why universally you do not hear fighting about the shapes that people end up in, how we get there, or the tools that we train. Those will all have different tools. If you go watch Travis's athletes Olympic lift, they look very similar to all the other best athletes in the world

who Olympic lift. Their training is all radically different, how they approach, the volume, their culture. That doesn't matter. But the end up position, I'm not talking about do you slide your feet or donkey stomp. Yeah, I totally get it. I'm just talking about that you'll see that universally we understand the best positions

to generate force, to receive load, to run the fastest. This is why all the Olympic runners, sprinters look very, very similar. The only differences in their technique is differences in their anthropometry. Their femur is a little different. Their torso is a little longer. Their arm swing, like they're just, my pelvis is a little narrower than your pelvis. Those are the signature cues to someone's movement,

not their unique way of receiving a barbell. That's bullshit. That is, you know, those positions are universal. Can you imagine the early Olympic lifters were like, Dimitri, turn your shoulder all the way down. And sorry, Dimitri, I guess we'll see you in the hospital. Like that just didn't, we have been obsessed as human beings with lifting more and running faster

and going longer forever. This performance thing is not a new idea. But what we can say is that, yes, you can do a whole bunch of crappy work at low loads and low intensities. And it probably doesn't matter for a while. But that's not our game. Our game is to prepare athletes to learn new skills more quickly, to have best expression, to restore their normative ranges so they have the most bomb-proof positions.

And it turns out if we go to gymnastics, if we go to Olympic lifting, if we go to track and field, all of the cues are for us there about where we should be striving to get our movement. And you're never going to win. You don't win the fitness. You don't win positions. Travis, have you won Olympic lifting yet? No, no. There's always one more pound you can put on that bar. Yeah. It's endless. Even the best of the best, even people who are future Olympians are still trying to get better. You know, I guarantee the gold medalists would say, I bet, I bet, uh, Lasha would still say, I haven't won Olympia lifting.

He's still trying to get better. No. And he will. I mean, I mean, when he finally snatches 600, we'll finally be satisfied. God, it's going to be great. I doubt it. He will be a 605. It's never ending. Donnie Thompson, the first time he squatted, uh, you know, he was like, he was trying to set the world record in squatting.

And it was like 1205 and he ended up squatting at 1245 or 1265, something like that. And he's like, I unwrapped the weight and I could feel my femur's bow. I could feel my femur's flex. And I was like, so that's, that's the limit when you're both your femurs snap, snap, snap. Then you're like, okay, I found the limit. But, I mean, think about it. Probably not. We would just tape that shit up.

Louie Simmons is taping up everyone's hamstrings with duct tape. Let's do this. Duct tape. Exactly what I was about to say. Duct tape those shits, man. I got more weight to put on there. Yeah. It is when it kills you is when it ends.

Between the four of us – go ahead. I was going ends. Between the four of us, go ahead. I was going to say, between the four of us, we probably have 100 years of strength training under our belts collectively. Being a lifelong strength athlete, what does it take, in your opinion, to be a lifelong strength athlete and to be in your 50s and 60s still training and still

have all of your joints feeling fairly normal, not a lot of joint pain, no replacements, and no big orthopedic issues but uh he's got orthopedic issues so do i so you know first of all um accidents happen sport happens so i was racing a stranger i grew up racing i skied in the junior olympics i raced fis as a kid i'm pretty skier. And I had my hip on the ground on my slalom race skis. I've gone about 50, 60 miles an hour, cranking turns, and I just booted out. I slipped out and I ended up putting my femur through my tibia. So I had these two gigantic,

gigantic bone lesions in my knee. I was wondering what happened. I crashed and just had this impulse, the ski caught.ink wait when did this happen seven years ago so you went a long time on seven years yeah and people on the internet were like well you couldn't mobilize it like you couldn't couch stretch couch stretch yeah that's pop them back into place what the hell i'm like you know i love the internet so good it does happen i or people were like, oh, it's your squat technique. I was like, well, if it was my squat technique, wouldn't it be both my knees and both compartments? You know, I was like, you mean, you mean my squat technique where

my feet are flat on the ground and don't collapse? Is that what you're talking about? My squat technique? Voodoo floss it. Yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't have voodoo floss it turned out. And then I also, by the way, there's's no there's no number of stem cells magic fairy dust that you can inject into my knees that will just regenerate like a salamander my knee so i tried yeah i actually tried that first yeah yeah it's totally because bioadhesive bandages work sometimes on little cuts sometimes you need some power tools so yeah to your question, what I want people to appreciate is that your environment matters. How you eat, how you sleep, how you decongest, how you take care of yourself. Are you in a loving, feel supportive relationship?

All of those things totally matter. Culture matters. Tribe matters. Environment matters. But also, so does your genetics. So if you want to be a badass strength athlete, choose your parents wisely. That doesn't mean you can't continue to strength train your whole life. What you'll see is that it's easy to pull the speed out because

what will end up happening potentially is your tissues may become less tolerant to speed, right? Which I mean is, you know, we don't need to, you know, snatch if that's killing you or you don't have access to that position, but we are going to muscle snatch or cube and rope. We just pull some of the speed out, right? So what you'll see is I don't know why you have to lose muscle mass necessarily. I don't know why you have to lose bone mass necessarily. I don't know why you have to lose muscle mass necessarily. I don't know why you have to lose bone mass necessarily. I don't know why you have to lose your positions necessarily. It'll be more difficult to, to regenerate, to recover. It will be slightly more difficult to put on muscle mass as your androgens change, but there's no reason why you, you understand why powerlifting is the people's

sport because it's these little tiny ranges of motion done slowly. I'm like, there's no reason why you can't box squat to parallel the rest of your life with load or floor press or deadlift off blocks. Those are the things you can do the rest of your life. Right. I've got to get power the rest of my life. Not the way I like to power lift,

but like I feel like I can squat bits and deadlifts, you know, that's your squat 500 for the rest of my life. Not the way I like to power lift, but like, I feel like I can squat bits and deadlifts, you know. That's your squat 500 for the rest of your life. Oh yeah. I would have to be dead not to be able to squat 500. Yeah. Yeah. I think I could die, get up one more time and squat 500 pounds. I think that's true. And I think that's, what's really amazing. What we're talking about is this training age. Yeah.

But what I'll say is, you know, if you are exercising yourself into a hole and waiting around for something to break, right, or to fail, look, if you have, you show up at Travis's session and I suck today, right? Travis comes up to me, he's like, hey man, what's going on? And you're like, man, I got into a fight with my girlfriend and then I ate a bunch of pizza and got smashed last night and I didn't sleep. And you're like, okay, there's a one-to-one correlation there, right? We can see that. But what we do is people are like, I don't know why my shoulder hurts. I just woke up and it was like that. I'm like, really? Like you just waited around. I want people to treat pain just the way we treat lack of range of motion, loss of force production. It's just

information. If you can't go heavy or fast today, or you have pain today, those are in the same buckets for me. Pain does not mean tissue damage. It doesn't mean trauma. What it means is your brain's like, hey, I don't know what's going on with this, but I need you to pay attention to this. And everyone can relate to this because when you step onto the field, oftentimes your pain goes away. You go onto the platform, coach, my knee hurts, my knee hurts, my knee hurts. I step on the platform, there's no knee pain anymore, right? So the brain, to your point, is a big regulator. And I'll tell you what, the number of athletes I've worked with going up the weeks before the Olympics, two weeks before the Olympics, two weeks before world champions,

oh, my lat hurts, oh, my knee hurts. I'm like, there's nothing wrong with you. Your brain is freaking out and it's trying to take your tension off this, right? You're going to be all right. You're going to be all right. And then they step up and they're like gold medal. And I'm like, isn't that weird? It turned out it wasn't a big deal. But what we want people to appreciate is that your range of motion, tissue quality, availability, your brain budget, your body budget is a dynamic document. Because remember how Travis and I started this conversation, we go to the gym, we have a plan, and then we adopt up and down per what we're needing, right? Well, the same thing is true a little bit of your body. Because guess what? Have a baby, jump on a red eye, run a marathon, let me know how you do

the next day, you're gonna be killing it, like know how you do the next day. You're going to be killing it. Like you're going to suck the next day. So if your range of motion and tissue quality is very much a moving target, then let's make sure that the training can adjust to support you. And it's naturally an additive doesn't keep just making withdrawals from the bank. You should leave the gym feeling better. I love that statement. And most most people say that but they don't practice that that is exactly what needs to happen um i have a question and i've wanted to ask you this almost since 2010 when i when when the video uh when the videos and mobility wad was like a

daily video that you were putting out. And I mean, I had, I had just professionally gotten into strength conditioning and opened the gym and gone through the CrossFit thing that we all went through. But I, I still, and to this day, have never seen somebody radically shift and shape an industry in the way that you did with those early videos. And what was kind of the, the the the process in your brain when you start posting those those daily videos and and seeing how quickly though that methodology got adapted by not just your peers at san francisco crossfit but by people across the world and now are taking this core message that you have of being having like a maintenance checklist that everybody should be able to perform basic human maintenance on

themselves and uh taking it into their their own story and their own framework when you don't control any of that messaging um it truly is something that I've never seen since the early days of MobilityWOD when that popped up. And I just, I've always wondered what you thought as your message got further and further away from the central core that is the way you thought about movement or think about movement. Well, you know, I think, imagine this is my brain process. So all seriousness, step one, stretching video, step three, profit. And no, it can't. What I realized, because I was a physical therapist, I was a coach first, is that we had people exercising, training, engaging these things who did not have access to

their positions. So as we start to untangle the Gordian knot of pain and injury, the one thing, because it's very complex, there's a lot of things going on, previous injury history, your hydration, your arousal, your tissues, your genetics, it really does matter. But what we, I started to see is that people who are having a lot of these problems and loss of position, those things were tied together that you couldn't, you, what I saw was that, Hey, I, you're not moving the way your body is supposed to, AKA, you don't even have the tools to be able to express a choice in your movement. You're only doing the one thing that you do. You basically are courting yourself down into the bottom of that snatch to make the snatch

happen, which is you jumping out of the tree, landing on some rocks to chase after the buffalo. I mean, you're going to solve this problem, right? It's a survival mechanism. This guy's great. Right? You are a survival animal. So there's tolerance built in there and so what we set out to do actually i set out initially to solve a problem which was how come you don't know this why are you wasting my time with this unskilled low level stuff like this isn't even interesting to me anymore yeah you're you're supposed to be able to put your arm to your mouth your elbows is stuck at 90 degrees.

You think that's why your neck hurt or your wrist hurts? Tennis elbow. I got tennis elbow. I can't eat. I can't eat. Well, you know, yeah, obviously it's your neck, bro. It's your jaw, right? Meanwhile, I'm like, hey, let's just give you back your normative range. Another thing that I saw, because remember, I came out of a system. I paddled on the U.S. canoe and kayak team and I paddled myself right off the U.S. canoe and kayak team with a neck injury where I basically had a numb arm and couldn't turn my head for a few months. It was great. And all I did was outwork everyone. I biked, I swam, I paddled twice a day. We worked out 300 days a year on the boat. Like I just killed everyone in volume. Meanwhile, didn't have my basic positions, wasn't strong, shitty breather, didn't mobilize, didn't take

care of any of those things. I just got in the boat, crushed it because I was young. And then, you know, I'd, so I'm classically that person. I did that thing. And what I saw was more squats didn't always beget better squats. It was important that you squat to the limits of your range. But what I saw was that the more you compensated to solve a problem, the more your body reacted by creating stiffness and preventing you from having access to that position or shape, especially when it got heavier fast. So we set out to do is just raise the bar a little bit, right? We just I'm gonna make a video a day about everything I know. And that way, it was for me, for my athletes, and for my for the coaches that the people I was working with, I was like, you can go to video 75

and just do that. So it was as a bookmark in that. And what I also realized was that there were lots and lots and lots of corrective exercises in the world, which for me, I was like, when do I do corrective exercise? So I like assistance exercises. I like accessory work big time. Yeah. For me, moving well is a corrective exercise. And what I saw was that there was this whole industry of low level, we'll call it condiments of exercise, right? Like you can pull out all the mustard and all the ketchup and all the salt and pepper, but that is a crappy meal and you never ever get to cook. What I did was say, okay, if I'm exposed to myself to classic strength and conditioning where I'm

exposing these tissues and I can't get in there, more of the same isn't getting there. So mobilizations became what I call position transfer exercises. And one of the reasons it worked is that athletes are smart enough to figure out what works and what doesn't work. So physical therapists come at me all the time because they don't understand where I come from. They haven't watched our material. They just kind of drop in and cherry pick. And I'm like, look, the key here is that you are saying that people are too dumb to know what works

and what doesn't work. That is their fundamental hypothesis. They'll never say that. But I'm like, if you have knee pain and you do this thing and your knee pain goes away i don't really give a fuck what the mechanism is i can come up with 1500 just so episodes just so stories but my athletes know 100 that when they do this they can return themselves to sporting games so guess what for me that's n of one test retest share my mom

explains why people are moving the way they move, explains high level physiology and high level performance. It predicts future movement behavior and we can all communicate on it. Why? Because it's a pushup. It's a squat. It's a deadlift. We all speak English. Your corrective exercise language is Esperanto. It's classical romantic Italian. Like, what are you doing? Everyone knows this other language. Let's use that other language. So when we were able to sort of shift back away from these corrective exercises, which by the way, all share two things. They're either isometrics or they're tempo. That's it. So if you look at any corrective exercise movement on the planet, you're going to be like, oh, you're going really slow or stopping to help someone feel. I'm like,

that's what we do in weightlifting. That's what we do in the gym. I slow you down and work on your isometrics. So, but when we saw that people were, the other thing that happened is that people were training so hard all of a sudden, they were getting super stiff. They were getting super locked in. And the tools that we had, the little squishy ball you roll on, didn't do anything, right? We had to kind of create a language and tools to actually serve the athletes we were working with. And then, again, people are clever enough to appreciate what works and they reject what doesn't work. So here I am, 10 years plus, and it still seems to be working. And all I do is, look, look, it's just a model.

It's not, I mean, it's a model I developed. But what I want you to appreciate is that all I do is go out every day and try to break the model. So I watch Travis's athletes lift, or he sends an athlete a picture or video. I just apply my model, and it helps me understand. And he either gets something out of it, or he doesn't. So just keep credit for that. I got to give him credit. I got to give you credit on something like this dude transformed our whole

gym with one. He's already said it, but he was rolling. I didn't want to stop him, but I got to say now he did the whole, make sure that we were doing movements with our hip in extension. So we started, um,

not, but you know, and he said, well, that's why you do the, um, split squats. However, a lot of people, like he told me, they perform the split squats incorrectly, like they'll lean over. So you're still not in extension. But anyway,

when I, when I applied that one overall too, I did this universally. Everybody now does movements in extension and back injuries have gone. I might have had one in the two years implementing that one movement. Just credit there.

There's no science, bro. There's no science. It worked. There's science. I have a lot of data. I have a lot of data that will say that you're right and whatever they're saying is wrong. I'll compare my data with the elite athletes any time over their little piss ant research

with a bunch of scrubs from some college. So there you go. What's key here is that oftentimes we talk about research and science when really what we're talking about is math what we're talking about physiology right i'm like look this the science is how the physiology of the body works right all we're doing is hey what set of tools to come back and prove that the math but all we're talking about is math like you were like i was like hey you just need to carry the one and you're like oh got it and you said because you already spoke the math but you didn't need science to prove that we

do this squat on tuesdays in the month starting with oh for five reps and that's the problem i think i know the science but i did not know that you know no one had told me that and so nowhere in science will tell you that that's why guys like you are so far ahead of research. And so don't be idiot because there's no research. Well, you're a fool. I'm glad. Keep, no, nevermind. Keep doing that and I'll keep winning. So. That's right. And we'll see it. And also it's okay. You know, there's been some research around. So I got the idea from voodoo flossing originally. I saw early compression from Dick Herzl and I was like, this is gene. Yes. Brilliant. But then I started taking his thing and iterating on it. Right. Then I was originally i saw early compression from dick herzl and i was like this is gene yes yeah brilliant

but then i started taking his thing and iterating on it right then i was worth louis simmons and started duct taping hamstrings and i was like oh i think i have an idea to reapply this change the stimulus a little bit change the band a little bit right voodoo flossing is born and research is now coming out the voodoo flossing way for it works wow 10 years later meanwhile i'm like well it's it's you know we don't solve all problems but it's just another great tool that athletes will quickly develop affinity for because it helps them solve a problem or it doesn't right right and that's suddenly it's not like all tools are equal that's not true heavy front squats are not the

same thing as Smith machine hack squats. They're just not the same, right? So it's not like, hey, your tools are good. All tools are good. There's better tools and worse tools for sure. To fix your problem though. Fix your problem. But underneath this is I really try to be agnostic. What's so fun about my job is that I am 100%. I have strong feelings about the best way to train and prepare because I'm a coach and I have an ego and I love exercising. But if I'm working with the England national soccer team, their strength and conditioning coach knows how to prepare his athletes better than I do because I'm not working with that.

Travis knows exactly what his athletes need in that moment. My job is to come in and make his life easier, to restore the positions, to make the shapes better, to put out fires when they tamp up because we're just human. And suddenly, to your point, what we've tried to do is I don't have a plan. I'm like, take my plan, stop doing your plan, do my plan. I'm like, take my plan, stop doing your plan, do my plan. I'm like, here's how my water integrates and seeps through your strata and will help you solve your problems. And that's why I keep being invited to the big dances because I'm like, Hey, how come you can't see this? What's going on with that? And then I turned

to strength conditioning. I'm like, you're never in these positions or boy, you don't eat protein or Hey, you're super stressed. And it's the same thing over and over again. And I'll tell you what, man, I am not, I could not get a job doing anything else at this point. I'm unhirable. This is all I want to do for the rest of my life. And thank God I have some friends who are nerds. Yeah. I think that skill is something that I i it makes me unhirable in a way as well when you can walk into a gym and you can just walk down the squat racks and and you you can see the two things on each person that they need to get better at and how you can assess them i mean granted many of these things are from the positions that you've you've taught over the

years um is is the coaching age just as important as training age for coaches just to have the reps to be able to get in and in a way because of where we're at in the industry right now where everybody can put their one minute video up and i don't really care to hate social media or any of that. But becoming an expert seems to happen quicker, whatever it is. But developing that coaching age in the same manner that you develop a training age, like how long does it take for a coach to be able to go from day one to be able to walk into a room and assess 15, 20 people at a time and know how to help them? It's such a great question and really important right now because, you know, the first time I had this brutal epiphany that I didn't know shit about shit was I flew down to assist Mike Bergner in his early weightlifting seminars. And he didn't know me, but one of my friends said, hey, there's this young physio student who, you know, has some talent and he should, you should let him come down. And he's into CrossFit. So I come down, I sit on a friend's couch and I just

show up early. I move barbells, I fetch him coffee, just anything to watch him coach for two days straight. That's what I did. I got to watch a master coach straight. Right. But I remember he had 10,000 skill transfer exercises, assistant transfer exercises where I was like, holy shit, I'm never going to be this competent ever in the history of the world to be as good as him. Right. It's going to take a lifetime. But suddenly I snapped into, oh, okay. I understand what position he's trying to do. I understand what's going on. So I understood sort of the master key underneath that. That was helpful. We're seeing now, and actually Greg Glassman talked about this, and I know we're running out of time. But when we learned early on, and you mentioned this with Adrian and I doing a lot of

play and a lot of experimentation, a lot of alchemy and rejecting things. We had a lot of experience. And as a young coach, coaching basic gymnastics, basic kettlebells, basic dumbbells, basic barbell movements, plus having a little bit of experience, I was able to pick up a lot of things that I wouldn't see if I was doing one-on-one training and 24-hour fitness. The problem now is that our beginner athletes, our beginner coaches are much more competent than Travis was 15 years ago, right? That's the goal. Yeah, that is the goal. But they don't have any experience coaching. That's the problem. And you cannot ever short that process. So what I say is, hey, start coaching. And guess what I do? I want all my coaches or all my athletes to start

coaching each other at an early age because now they're part of the feedback process. They're part of the coaching process, part of the identification process. And those athletes who go on to become master coaches have felt it, seen it, and been practicing. So they're not just showing up and are passive participants. They are active participants in understanding what our intention is and what we're seeing. And that's what we have to do. So I think you're really onto it because it's so easy to be like, I can just take Travis's shit and steal one of his ideas and put on the internet and get rich. Right? I mean, like that's how much information you put out there, comma, I don't understand anything of what's going on. That's going to take a minute. That's okay. It's okay to take a minute. It is okay. And it's a minute you need.

It's funny that you said about having your, your athletes coach each other. Like I'm even having my current athletes, the one, let me go ahead and say it before my ones who've been with me almost a decade to they're working with my, my sons, like, because I don't want to coach my sons because I know me. And I don't want to be that to my son. I don't want to ask him when he gets home how to go. I don't want to be – I piss at you for being a sissy or whatever. I don't want that.

But so they're getting to – and I'm working with them as they work with my sons, identifying movement deficiencies. And it's been so cool. Matt Weininger, you know, he's and Morgan, they're fighting over who's going to coach my sons. Yeah. I love it. I know, but they've both done really well. I'll just say, you know, part of this I understand because I work with the all blacks and the all blacks are responsible for their, their program from start to finish.

So the coaches towards the end of the week, they've made a game plan, communicate to the athletes. The athletes coach themselves. And by the end of the week, coaches are there just to support the athletes. Athletes run the program. They know what they need to do. They know what they want. They don't turn and look for approval.

They own the process. And that means that we have to do a better job investing responsibility, getting out of this patriarchal model. The athlete knows what she needs to do in the gym. Travis is there to support her and help her when there's uncertainty, not to dictate the entire process. Totally. That was awesome.

We're going to have to, it's going to take a second for us to get there. We can do it. We are human beings. We have thumbs. We're fucking savages. We have thumbs. i think it's hard it's hard we can type things we're eliminating we're eliminating handwriting as we speak i'm gonna predict something i think that there'll be two words no two phrases that

will be stolen from this very podcast is going to be positional transference and movement transference. Those two things will be stolen from you like all the other things. So just FYI, all of you coaches taking this stuff, I'm calling you out as we speak. So if you take these after me calling you out up front, wow, wow. Don't talk to me. So anyway. I would say you got to give everyone credit twice, then you can steal it. It's fine. There you go. Twice. I try to always give credit. I know you're so good at,

and I just want to say as, as we wrap up, one of the things that's so amazing about this group and you, Travis, cause I have the most experience in your coaching is how you're so transparent by where you know what your associations are, where you came from. And it only makes you a more credible, rad coach. Because you're like, look at my friends. Look what I learned. Look at this person. Versus trying to hold yourself as the expert, stealing everyone's

stuff. If you're a young coach out there listening, it's okay to say, man, I totally love this guy over here. Shine the light on everything you think is rad, integrate it into your own and give association. It will only make you a more credible person. Right. I'm by no means perfect, but that's something I struggle with so hard because there's so many smart people

that we talk to on this show. I feel like I'm the dumbest person in the world. I'm just this like culmination of thousands or hundreds of hours of talking to people that are the best at what they do in a specific subject. And then I go to try and help somebody and I go, well, go talk to Kelly. Don't you have Kelly's number? Can't you text him? Like call Lane Norton. I don't know. It's nutrition. Go. Why would you ask me? Just text by Lane. It's fine.

That's what makes you an expert. Yeah. Like call Kelp. And I don't know it's nutrition why would you ask me just text by Lane it's fine that's what makes you an expert call Galpin I don't know I know somebody that knows we have like this library of hundreds of hours of education in this field it's incredible the jokers who try to pretend that they know everything

are the biggest farces in this industry. Like there's nothing wrong with saying I'm not a nutrition expert. I am not a physical therapist. That makes you much more credible to be honest, to be like, I don't know. Go ask Kelly. I'm not a physical therapist. I don't know how to get your pinky toe better. I don't want to. I want to get your quad super strong. That's what I do. So nothing wrong with that. No, I agree with that. Um, yeah, one, 100%. I really appreciate that. And you know, it's the iteration and the synthesis of this. We're really going to, we're going to make process. One of the things that I hold up and I think I might've stolen it from Paul again a long time ago was when people get super like aggressive, I'm like, well, let me see your work. I'm like, oh, I can't see any of your work on the

internet. So that's a red flag for me. You're not transparent. You go behind the door, you shout everyone else's shit. I'm like, oh, you're treating or come up with your ideas out of your garage, which is powerful if there's a lot of superstars in your garage. I also want to see what teams you work with. That's right. I want to see what teams you work with. That's right. I want to see what teams you work with. I want to see what organizations you work with. I want to read what books you've written. I want to see more than your one minute diatribe about why you don't agree with me. And I'm not saying that I'm trying to swing my penis around and be like, look how big my penis is. What I want you to see is- That's cool too.

That's cool. But I need to understand where you're understanding the primacy of your work right and what you'll suddenly be is i'm like oh travis how many national titles do you have holy crap yeah just add another one i know you just added another one so my point is i'm like well you know you can be really transparent and also show your work and that's what I want people to do. I want to show their work because I'm like, man, I really appreciate where you're coming from. But this is super hypothetical. And I haven't seen the application. And it's the application.

The highest calling of science is to improve the humanities. Right. To get better science. All of this works if Travis wins more national championships. No. It puts more people on the world team. The rest of it doesn't matter. I want to leave the world better than I found it. I don't know about you guys. You will, Don. You will. I know Travis has to go to practice, but I have to ask you, as you are raising children and as our youth as a country continue to get more and more unhealthy and you have your

nonprofit with stand-up kids, how do we take the information that's in your brain or that we just talked about for the last two hours and actually get kids to understand basic structures of human movement and health? And I know it's a massive question, but how do we take all of this and make fitness cool so that people want to do it and actually take all this information and preserve it and give it to the youth so that we can solve problems that are of grand or have grand on scale? Quickly, first of all, where are kids living with their parents? How do they train? We should get families to train together.

Second, people are in parts of their communities, their neighborhoods. That's our functional unit. Third is the schools. Fourth is, you know, colleges and club sports. So if we start in those terms if everyone in america had a kettlebell and had some basic could do it just get up and swing and press yeah we've cured a lot of things and what we're seeing is we just have a we have a culture that isn't physically literate and i'm not talking about fitness i'm just talking about being

physically literate that's actually exactly what i was talking about how do we make literacy of movement matter to kids? Well, again, is it working? No. So where do we go? Well, elementary school. Why can't you, you know, you have to be able to hang from a pole. President of elementary school.

Presidential fitness test. Except. What happened to it? We zhuzhed it up a little bit, right? You got to be able to, you know, we zhuzhed it. We just, we just make it a little bit more skilled, not just measuring physiology, but putting skill in there so that we can incorporate kids who are heavy we can incorporate kids who don't have resources at home this may be the only place so that's that's how we untangle this gordian knot we have to go where kids are first

yeah i i gotta go but i'm gonna leave by saying you might be the coolest human i've ever met i am honored to know you and like that's the first time I've ever said it. We're not sure if you're sure. The world of Bellies for Kelly's Day is definitely better now. Well, Kelly, where can they find you? We've got to wrap this up. Matt, why do you even have practice today? You just won the national championship.

Give the kids a break. Let them go out for a night. They're in college. They're quarantined. I have to take them food. They're not working out. You should quarantine them with the volleyball team is what you need to do and reward them for their efforts. If we weren't recording, I would tell you some cool stuff about their quarantine,

but I don't want there to be... The volleyball team is there. I can't give any incriminating evidence, but hey you. All right. Kelly, where can they find you? We'll wrap this up. Kids, we are at the ready state. Come check us out. We're with tons of stuff. And if you wanted to see how we think and what we're going to see, even start at the socials. We really try to show our association and show our thinking every single day over and over and over through thousands of posts. So come, come, come check us out. And really,

if you want to go find anyone in this podcast, you'll begin to start to figure it out. I really appreciate you guys. And Travis, you're, you're such an influential coach to me. I really appreciate it. And really,

and there's Doug, I really appreciate you guys so much. Absolutely. Coach, coach Travis, go to practice. Where can people find you? Mashley.com.

And you can come find me at this dorm where I got to take quarantine meals. That's how cool I am. All right. See you. Doug Larson. You bet. I'm on Instagram. DougLarsen.

Kelly, great to see you, buddy. Great to see you. Come on. I'm Anders Varner. At Anders Varner, we are Barbell Shrugged. Barbell underscore shrugged. Get over to BarbellShrugged.com forward slash DieselDad. That is where all the dads get strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood,

fitness, and get into Walmart. Three programs on the shelf. San Diego, LA, Vegas, and Palm Springs. Get into the pharmacy. We're on the shelves. Come and hang out with us. We'll see you guys next Wednesday. That's a wrap, my friends.

Make sure you get over to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. Save 20% on the green, red, and gold. Also, make sure you get over to Leaky Gut Guardian forward slash shrugged. Use the code shrugged to save 10% on Leaky Gut Guardian and the podcasts, the YouTubes. If you're a dad, get over to the Diesel Dad Dojo on Facebook. Life is so good. Four podcasts a week coming at you. We'll see you guys Friday.