Barbell Shrugged - To Have Strength, You Need Mobility: How to Improve Performance and Reduce Injury and Pain with a Mobility Practice with Dr. Grayson Wickham — Muscle Maven Radio Episode #7

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

From the age of nine when he received a copy of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding as a gift, Dr. Grayson Wickham has been fascinated with movement. He earned a Bachelors of Science, majoring in exercise science and kinesiology, and received a Doctorate of Physical Therapy at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He is a physical therapist and a certified strength and conditioning specialist, working with everyone from NFL, MLB, professional tennis players and professional CrossFit athletes, to those that are just touching a barbell for the first time. Grayson is known to experiment with different types of systems and movement philosophies, trying to find the most effective ways to optimize movement, while decreasing pain, and increasing performance. He’s based in New York City where he runs his online mobility coaching practice Movement Vault, and teaches mobility and movement workshops all over the world.   In this episode Ashleigh talks with Dr. Grayson Wickham, a physical therapist, strength and conditioning coach, and founder of Movement Vault, about mobility: the difference between mobility and flexibility, how to recognize and address your own imbalances and weaknesses before you become injured, and how to implement a thoughtful and sustainable mobility practice to improve general movement, pain and injury management, and performance. Minute Breakdown: 0-14 Intro to Dr. Grayson Wickham and what Movement Vault is, why he is fascinated with human movement and imbalance, how lack of mobility can affect other areas of our life 14–28: How to get the most out of our mobility practice; how not to waste your time in the gym. Should you foam roll, and what is foam rolling actual doing? What does tightness in a muscle actually mean, and how and why d o we want to override this signal our body is giving us? 28 -36: The difference between mobility and flexibility; why mobility is generally more important; the differences in mobility and flexibility between men and women. How much mobility and flexibility do you actually need? How do we identify mobility issues within ourselves ? 36-48: When is the best time to practice mobility and the ideal amount of time to dedicate to it? When shouldn’t you stretch, and can you overdo mobility work? 48–1:05: A discussion of the most common mobility issues across the board and how to begin to address them 1:05: The ways in which movement, mobility, and proprioception is affected by unnatural man-made environments and protective items like sneakers ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/mmr-wickham ----------------------------------------------------------------------   ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Hey everybody, welcome to Muscle Maven Radio. I'm your host, Ashley, aka The Muscle Maven, and today we are talking all about movement and mobility, and how to create a smart program for yourself for improved performance and decreased pain and risk of injury. So I'm talking with a physical therapist and strength and conditioning coach, Dr. Grayson Wickham, and we talk about the differences between mobility and flexibility because sometimes those are used interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. And we talk about why mobility is so important,

how much mobility and or flexibility you actually need. Sometimes even for type A people, it's a case of more not necessarily being better. We talk about how to assess your own mobility or lack thereof and how to be aware of any imbalances or weaknesses and then how to incorporate a mobility practice into your life regardless of your starting point and what your current fitness program is so if you're like me and you notice that you do have some imbalances maybe some mobility issues and that can mean hyper mobility tooility too. Sometimes we have too much flexibility and not enough stability. So that can be an issue. If you have any nagging

pain anywhere, I mean, if you don't, then good for you. I don't know. I don't know anybody who doesn't have any issues, but, uh, you know, and if you're like me and you sometimes feel overwhelmed about where even to start, like you only have maybe so much time in the day for fitness. And a lot of us would rather spend it learning cool tricks than on quote unquote, boring mobility stuff. So if you feel that way, this is absolutely the episode that you need, because look, we all know that sometimes the stuff we're avoiding the most is the stuff that we need to do the most. So Grayson is the founder of Movement Vault, which is an online program and a resource for doing your own at-home mobility work. He puts up new video content

literally every day, taking you step-by-step through different practices that address all the issues, all the hotspots you could ever imagine. He actually walked me through a little bit of a mobility practice before we did this interview, we met up at CrossFit Virtuosity in Brooklyn. And I know this sounds like a cliche, but honestly, the next day I felt sore in parts of my glutes that I didn't even know, like were parts really, I mean, I, uh, I was feeling some like glute med soreness that I never feel when I squat and I do have activation issues. So being able to connect with those parts of my body, it was really kind of, um, exciting. So I'm really, I'm really looking forward to actually spending some more time on mobility work, moving forward and really exercising that mind muscle

connection. Because even people who love working out as much as I do, as much as I assume you do, we can get a little complacent. We can get a little lazy, even within our own workouts. We can just switch to autopilot a little bit, go through the motions a little bit, maybe not focus on the fundamentals and those basic important concepts as much as we should. So I think that this is a very informative little reminder and a wake-up call for all of us. So I hope you enjoy the episode, but first I want to tell you about another little project that I recently underwent, tracing my sleep and my recovery with Whoop. Now, you guys have probably heard of Whoop already, or you're at least familiar with

tracking devices like Whoop that help you keep track of things like your heart rate, your sleep, your steps, your calories, all that kind of stuff. Whoop is positioning itself as something a little extra because it focuses on your level of recovery using metrics like heart rate variability and sleep. So you put this little bracelet on, you set up your membership, you get your app, the whole deal. And it provides you with daily data that is updating all the time on your heart rate during workouts, during sleep, all the time, your heart rate variability, your sleep data, including deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep, how often you woke up and a lot more.

And the more information you put into the program, like when you put in your workouts, your perceived rate of exertion, how you feel all that, it can provide a more clear picture of how ready your body is to undergo intense stress. Like maybe you have a max output workout that you're planning or a competition or something. So if you're a health nerd, which I'm assuming you are, because you listen to this podcast, you know about the importance of heart rate variability, right? Which is basically the distance between your heartbeats and it should vary. Ideally, it's not supposed to sound like a metronome. It's supposed to be varied and the more varied it is, the better. So reduced heart rate variability is associated with anything from stress to heart disease to

decreased performance. So tracking this obviously for athletes is a no brainer, but I honestly use a whoop for tracking sleep mostly because that's been a challenge for me for a long time. And I put off using a tracker because I just thought that tracking it would make me more paranoid and make my sleep even worse. But I reached a point where I figured I need to suck it up and actually pay attention to what's going on rather than just complaining about it. I found whoop super user friendly, and it gave me information that in some cases validated what I knew already. Like if I have a drink or two, my sleep is actual garbage, but it also told me stuff that I didn't know, or that I maybe was a little bit unclear about, like the fact that maybe I get

on average a little less sleep than other people, but my levels of deep sleep, my levels of REM sleep, those important cycles are on point. And I'm actually recovering better than I might have thought based on my own self-perception of how much I sleep, just because I know that it takes me a while to fall asleep. So maybe it's less about I'm not getting quality sleep and it's more about just adjusting when I go to bed, right? So I'm learning things. I'm learning as I go. And in a world where we have access to so much data at our fingertips, I just think

that this is a cool resource just to add to your toolbox. It's great if you're training for a specific event, if you need to peak and taper and you need to really pay attention to how your body's responding and recovering, it's great for baseline testing. You don't necessarily need to keep it on all the time forever, but maybe for certain periods of your training program. And I'm not a huge tech person and I actually found it really easy to use and helpful. So that's a pretty honest review if I say so myself. And Whoop is generously sponsoring this podcast. They're even more generously offering my listeners a discount.

If you use the code shrugged, when you buy, you get 15% off. So head to whoop.com. Worth a shot in my opinion. If you do, go ahead and use it. Or if you're already using it, send me a message on Instagram at themusclemaven. And let me know how it's going for you. I really want to know. I mean it. I really want to hear how you guys are using it. So that's it. Time to learn about

mobility with Dr. Grayson Wickham. And I hope you enjoy the podcast. All right, Grayson, you are on the shrug collective podcast, muscle Maven radio. Welcome. All right. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me and making me go to Brooklyn because I never do this. It's been kind of like a little bit of a walk down memory lane because even though we're at CrossFit Virtuosity here in Brooklyn and it's a different location, but I used to come here back in the day when I first lived in New York, it was like 2009. And, um, there was like one CrossFit gym, one or two CrossFit gyms like in Manhattan. And I would come to CrossFit Virtuosity and that's

where I like learned to do horrible, painful Metcons. So thanks for bringing that back to my brain. Yeah. Yeah. That's the OG, uh, 2009 CrossFit. So I feel like pretty OG, like I think did CrossFit start in like 2000, I think it was like 2007 that it was like really a thing. Yeah, I think, you know, I don't know the actual year, but yeah, that's when it was starting to, you know, competitions were coming into play and for sure. Yeah, so I'm like, I can be like a relative OG, I'll call it that. But all right, well, let's get into what you do because you just walked me through just like a brief introduction to some of the stuff that you did. And I already, honestly, I mean, of course, now we're sitting in chairs and like undoing all the good work that we did but I feel better because I have um you know some mobility issues as does

everyone else in the world and that's why you started your company so can you just first just tell us a little bit about like your background and who you are yeah so um my name is Dr. Grayson Wickham I'm a doctor of physical therapy. Um, also a certified strength and conditioning specialist. Basically I've always been kind of, uh, fascinated with, with movement, but it was kind of, all right, I had these different kind of paths that I took, you know, early on. I always tell the story of getting, uh, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding when I was in third grade. All got that book.

Yeah, that huge Bible, huge black and white pictures. Doubles as a weapon if you need it. Yeah, weapon and a doormat, so many things. But my dad was always into lifting, and so he took me to the gym, and so I was kind of in that body like, bodybuilding-ish type style. Never huge, you know, super jacked or anything like that. Tried to be, but not enough protein shakes, right? As do we all.

We all just try to be super jacked, just like Arnold. Yeah. So then, you know, I kind of fell down the path of, you know, at one point, you know, I had an injury. And, you know, I went to a physical therapist and, um, she, she was kind of struggling with me now that I look back and know what I know now. Um, I eventually went to another one, uh, physical therapist and, uh, she was able to help me even more, but, uh, just kind of became fascinated with, uh, movement and, um, you know, kind of recovery pain. I'm, I'm a super, you know, fitness health nut as well. We can kind of maybe go pain. I'm a super, you know, fitness health nut as well.

We can kind of maybe go down that rabbit hole as well. But just always been, you know, really fascinated with movement. And so, yeah, kind of eventually went to physical therapy school. You know, did my undergrad in kinesiology as well as exercise science. You know, was doing personal training as well as exercise science. I was doing personal training as well. And then, yeah, I went through physical therapy school and eventually kind of worked in a bunch of different settings from inpatient rehab, working with stroke patients

as well as patients that have spinal cord injuries as well as outpatient. I was working at a facility down in Miami at one point called Bomberito Performance. Shout out to Pete Bomberito. And so that facility focused primarily just on pro athletes. So we were working with really high-level NFL and MLB guys. Tell us secrets about famous athletes right now. On the spot. Do it. No, So there's, there's not a whole

lot of secrets that can be delved out, but that's cool though. I mean, it's cool that you had such a range, like you were dealing with like really, really intense, acute injuries. You were also dealing with pro athletes who had their own kind of set of problems. And now you're dealing with normal people like me who just can't move their bodies properly. So it's a nice, it's a nice range. You get your, you know, you get a lot of experience that way. Yeah. It's, it's good to see all those data points. Cause it's, you know, it's super sexy to be just working with pro athletes and that's fun. Um, and they kind of have their own host of problems and issues, but you know, until you really see kind of that full gamut, um, you, I guess you don't get a full snapshot of kind of the human movement as it is

in civilization today. Cause that's, that's a huge piece of the puzzle is kind of how we're, how we're living as humans today. So how did you transition from physical therapy to starting movement vault? Uh, basically, I moved to New York City about four years ago. From Miami? Yeah, basically from Miami. I was kind of bouncing all around doing some kind of traveling for a little while. And so then I started working at a clinic here just to kind of get my feet wet. You know, big wet. Big city, New York, I don't want to jump right into the deep end right away. I started working at a clinic here. Eventually, I started my own physical therapy practice, Lux Physical people and really looking for patterns, I started seeing kind of the same patterns to a certain extent.

Obviously, there's always those outliers. But what it came down to is people were coming in with tight muscles and tight joints, right? So they lack what we call mobility. And so after a while, these tight muscles and tight joints end up causing stress and compensation in other areas of the body. And so, you know, after a while, this stress and compensation can, and most likely will lead to injury someday. It might not be tomorrow, next week, next month. It could be five years down the line. Um, but it's, it really comes down to, all right, we know that

these tight muscles, tight joints, lack of movement is causing the issue. Why aren't we trying to be proactive with it? You know? And that's where I guess healthcare, you know, we could, we could go on the rabbit hole of why healthcare is wrong. We're trying to fix the problem instead of preventing it. Um, and so yeah, after seeing all these patterns, it's like, all right, I want to, you know, I'm teaching, you know, my patients and the athletes that I work with kind of the same, relatively the same thing, obviously, you know, no one's, I'm not teaching everyone the exact same thing, but same principles. Um, and so I started teaching workshops kind of in the tri-state area to reach more people. And then it was kind of like, all right, how can we

really, you know, reach the world? And so that's, that was kind of like, all right, how can we really, you know, reach the world? And so that's, that was kind of the genesis of movement vault. And so, um, yeah. So you're trying to hopefully reach people to address some of these issues before they need to see a physical therapist. Yeah. So you're creating a new job in hopes of making your old job obsolete a little bit. Yeah. So it's, it new job in hopes of making your old job obsolete a little bit. Yeah. So it's kind of like basically, yeah, trying to put myself out of business for the most part. That's an interesting business model. Yeah, I appreciate it, though, because it's true. I mean, with with health and fitness, with the diet industry, with the medical community, the health community,

it's all about wait until something fucks up. And then how do you put a bandaid on it or how do you fix it after the fact instead of trying to be proactive? And there's there's something about there's something human nature about that, too, because as human beings, we tend to look at it that way. It's not just we can't just blame like big medicine on this, too. Like we you know, we're young and we're working out and we feel strong and we feel invincible. And we just kind of and then you might notice a little nagging injury or maybe this isn't working out so well. And you're like, I'll deal with it. I'll sleep when I'm dead. I'll fix it when the problem comes.

Cause it probably won't. And then you hit your thirties like everyone does. And you're like, oh shit. Now I actually have to really take care of this. this and I have, and you, it's like almost like a switch that happens at a certain age from purely performance based to longevity health. And then performance kind of almost comes in second, but it's an interesting evolution that I think happens to a lot of athletes. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I always like to say that, um, as humans, we don't want to have to do something until we have to do it. Absolutely. Yeah. It's totally human nature, but we can work against that in order to not be immobile nightmares. And that's what you're trying to do. A hundred percent. I mean, really the number one reason that you will see, at least

in the, in the United States, that a person will go to their primary care doctor is due to low back pain. And it's, the statistics are crazy with low back pain. Um, uh, there was a study that said that showed basically 80% of the population in the United States will experience low back pain in their life. And this is not just like a small little ache. This is significant enough to see your doctor. Um, and the craziest part is that out of those 80%, 90% of those 80 will then experience it at least one other time. So at least two times. So it's like, once you get low back pain, that sucks, but then you're most likely going to get it again, which really sucks. And there's probably a certain percentage of those people that it's just chronic. Like you're just kind of always feeling a little

bit of back pain and that's your life now. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's the thing. I mean, people are so, like you said, they're just used to it. They're like, this is my life. You know, it's, you know, it's not stopping me from totally moving, but you know, I've got, this is part of being older or I'm not 21 anymore, which I've always fought against that because I have friends who maybe have taken less good care of themselves. Not going to name any names. And they're like, well, you know, I'm like 34. So like my back hurts. I'm like, excuse me. No, don't, don't like give in like that so early. Like you were a young person. I don't think even for older people, I don't think we should just, it's a foregone conclusion that you're just going to feel aches and pains all the time because

you're not 21 anymore. Like I refuse to accept that. I think that we have a lot more control over our health and how we feel than that. So no one should use that as an excuse being old. I use that in quotes because I do not consider 34 old. Yeah. Especially 34. I mean, that's just, you're just, that's just, that's the age group that I'm in. So I just, that's what I'm shouting out right now. I'm 35 as well. So yeah, I'm in that age group and yeah, I mean, that's, that's the thing. It's like, that isn't the norm, you know, obviously as we, our human body, you know, progresses in life, um, we're going to have certain, you know, kind of bumps and bru daily body maintenance and, you know, taking care of our body and not just kind of sitting at desks all day, kind of withering away into a ball of tightness and then exactly then, um, Hey, it's like life is so much better not dealing with that low level pain. You know, you're able to play with your kids to a higher level. You're able to,

you know, crush it in the gym better. You're able to be a better employee. It's just so many benefits. Absolutely. So talk us through a little bit about what exactly Movement Vault is. If someone's like, oh, I want to have more mobility, let me check out Movement Vault. Like what is this? What do you do? Yeah. So Movement Vault is, again, kind of going back to the proactive piece and seeing all these different patterns out there in patients, in just human life. We essentially, what we do is we offer a new 15-minute video every day that helps people all over the world increase their flexibility and mobility. That's a lot of content, like literally new every day. Every day.

How long are you going to keep that up? So for, you know, as long as we can, yeah, for sure. And that's the, yeah, so we film a lot of content. It's like, and we hit different areas of the body, you know, and different routines. We've got two what we call flow days a week where we hit kind of the whole body. You know, we're working on an app right now, which is going to kind of change the game. We're not going to let out too many details, but that should be releasing here. Um, spring, late spring of 2019. That's a year, right? Yeah. That's very soon. Okay. Yeah. So eventually, yeah, we help people move better. And what it

came down to is when I was going back to the story of the genesis of, of movement fault, um, you know, looking at all the information out there, there's a lot of good information out there, YouTube, Instagram, um, you know, even other companies, but there's also a lot of fluff out there and there's a lot of techniques and, you know, quote unquote stretches that essentially, you know, without getting too critical is just going to be a waste of time. And so if somebody wants to dedicate this 10 to 15 minutes on their flexibility and mobility, which is then going to, you know, have exponential benefits for their life, you want to make sure this stuff works. And so when I started, you know, looking around and looking at some of these other programs and again some of this content,

there just wasn't anything out there that kind of encompassed the whole picture. There's some stuff out there on foam rolling. There's some stuff on there on maybe some passive stretching and really, again, packaging it up so that you're doing A, B, C, D in the correct order and not just maybe doing B, D, C, A, because order matters as well. So just delivering something that's really going to help people move and feel better. Yeah, and I think also the fact that you're, like you said, you're laying it out in the right order, you're walking people through it is important because just because you have access to the information doesn't mean you can

implement it properly yourself. Some people, well, all of us really, especially at the beginning need to be coached and walked through how to do things properly. Like, you know, people don't, or shouldn't go on Google and be like, let's learn the snatch and like read an article about how to do a snatch and then go into the gym and do it. Like, you need a little bit more guidance than that. So I think that that's another reason why this is important. Like, if you've got these videos, they're visual. I can, like, sit in front of, you know, my phone and, like, go through it while you're going through it. And I think that's important.

Okay, so I want to talk more details, but first I've got to ask a question. And I've heard this answered a couple different times. But is foam rolling good? Is it useful? Should we foam roll? Yeah, so that's a great question. The short answer is yes, it is good. The long answer is if that's all you're doing, yeah, again, it's better than doing nothing, but that's only one piece of the puzzle.

And you can do it improperly. Yeah, you can do it improperly. You can be spending too much time on foam rolling. So that's huge, huge points for sure. A lot of people are maybe not doing it the way that they should, number one. Maybe they're doing it too long. So I guess we'll break foam rolling down, right? Like what does it actually do? Um, people think that foam

rolling or the cross ball work or this quote unquote muscle and fascial release work that they're physically breaking up muscles and breaking up knots. And that's what we used to think, you know, back in the day. That would be nice if that was happening. Yeah, right? Just going to break this. Oh, all my horrible scar tissue is gone. Yay. Yeah, it just disappears. You just roll on something.

And that's what we used to think as therapists as well, that if we're working on a patient, because we do manual techniques on the patient, that we have to just dig in there as hard as we can. That patient's got to be like sweating because of the pain. But research has shown that it literally takes thousands of pounds of force to actually cause deformation in a fascial layer or muscle tissue. And there's just no way that, A, I'm even going to be able to do that with my hands if I'm working with you one-on-one, or B, you're going to be able to do that with a foam roller.

You basically have to run over me with a car, which will break up the fascia and will also kill me. Yeah, 100%. Okay, got it. And so really what, so when you're foam rolling and doing this lacrosse ball work, these muscle release, fascia release techniques, there are things happening. And so like what is happening? And so what it comes down to is we're, we're creating an input to what we call your central nervous system. So just to break it down,

very basic central nervous system would be considered like your brain, spinal cord, and all the nerves that run off your spinal cord to innervate your muscles. And so we're sending an input to those muscles via the, again, the foam roller lacrosse ball. And then that input's going into your central nervous system. And then it's going to create an output back to that muscle to create some relaxation. Okay. And we call that decreasing tone in the muscle. So essentially, if your mobility issue is due to increased tone in a muscle, you foam roll that lacrosse ball. It can, obviously,

if you're doing it correctly, decrease that tone to open up your range of motion, aka to make you less tight. So is increased tone just tightness and overuse of a muscle? Is that what that means? Yeah. So basically it can happen for a couple of different reasons. Um, you know, a bunch of different reasons actually. So yeah, basically increased tone is that there's a low level activation going on to that muscle. So if we think about a muscle fully relaxed, it's, it's going to be at a certain length, right? But then if we, if we contract that muscle that, you know, kind of the definition of a contraction is to shorten it, um, depending on what kind of contraction it is. Um, so it's going to physically shorten that muscle, which is going to decrease the length that the joint can

move, AKA create a tight joint. Okay. And so basically we have voluntary, voluntary control for the most part of our muscle contractions, right? Like if I want to bend my elbow, I just think about bending my elbow, my bicep contracts, boom, it happens, the muscle shortens. But then there's certain times where the central nervous system basically just does it on its own. Now why does that happen? So it creates a low level activation in a muscle, which then creates a shortened muscle, which then decreases the amount that that joint can move. And that comes back down to the central nervous system. And we always like to say that the central nervous system remembers everything from when you were two up until you're, you know, for worse. Right. Exactly. Yeah. One hundred and two. And so it could be, you know, an injury that you had when you were five. It could be just all the the sitting that you're doing at your desk. It could be due to stress, acute injury to acute injury.

Yeah. And so essentially your nervous system is trying to protect yourself. And so we use the hamstrings, for instance, a lot of people tend to have, uh, tight hamstrings. And so, you know, your body, you know, if you hip flexion and the ability to bend over, which then happens is your low back has to compensate for that, which then can over time lead to stress, injury, kind of that compensation piece that we talked about before. But what's happening there is why is your hamstring tight? It's because your nervous system thinks that when you bend over to pick that up, that you're basically going to get injured. So it's putting the brakes on your movement.

And the way that it does that is to create a low level, um, activation in that hamstring, which then makes that muscle tight. So that's why using those, those muscle release, fascial release protocols with the foam roller and the lacrosse ball can send an input to tell your nervous system, hey, everything's cool. Let's relax the muscle. And that's why a lot of times when you foam roll, again, if you're doing it properly, you will see that increase in muscle length. But that's a temporary thing because as we know, like I can go to a massage therapist or I can come into the gym and do some foam rolling and I feel looser and more warmed up and like I can move in a better range of motion. And then I come back to the gym the next day and

I'm right back where I started. So how do we, how can we start to kind of enact like lasting increased mobility? Is this just doing movement vault stuff for 15 minutes a day? Like how much do we have to do? I feel like I get overwhelmed because I've got this much time every day to work out. I, we all have goals, whether it's CrossFit or powerlifting or whatever our sport is.

And I sometimes feel like I don't have enough time in the day to do the mobility stuff that I have to do and get my workout in. I feel like it's a losing game. I'll go in there and I'll foam roll my glutes so that they feel better. Then I'll do a workout. Then the next day, it's like nothing happened. How make me feel better? How do I fix this?

First thing, it's like we've got to flip that losing game thoughts and flip it into a positive perspective. But kind of going into the mobility piece, yeah, it just comes down to what kind of techniques and protocols are you using? So I always tell people it's kind of like with anything in life. Like if you're doing the same things expecting to get different results, then you're crazy, right? Um, and if you're doing the same things over and over and over and you're not seeing improvements, then you have to, you have to question those, those protocols and techniques. And so again, foam rolling is, is good to a certain extent, and it's only one piece of the puzzle. So what we do, you know, what has shown to be the

best, give the best results is to a start with a muscle fascial kind of protocol. Um, not always, but sometimes, and to decrease that tone in a specific muscle. And then after, and it doesn't take a ton of time, you know, as long as you're doing it correctly, one to two minutes, maybe tops per, per muscle that you're trying to target, um, is needed. And then we'll go ahead and we'll stretch out that muscle, not in a passive way, but in an active way, we'll stretch it out and then we'll, we'll create contraction around a joint. And so what we're doing is we're creating what we call end range of motion stability. And so that, that way we're not only opening up a specific range of motion, but we're getting strong at that end range of motion, which over time is going to, you know, increase again, that end range stability, which is going

to create lasting changes. Cause that's the key is we want to create lasting changes. So if we're not, you know, if we're just going in there and we're foam rolling, I always make the analogy. It's kind of like typing up a paper. So like creating something, right? You're on your computer. You're typing up a paper and typing up the paper part. That's just kind of like the foam roll piece, right? Like you've got all this good information and you're like, yes, I made this.

And you just foam rolled. You're like, yes, my shoulders are open. And, um, and then you don't press save, right? You don't press save on the computer. You come back. Yeah. You come back the next day and it's not there. You start all over. So same thing with the, the foam roller and the, the stretching and the activation piece is such a critical part that it's literally like the save button for your movement. So it's that contraction at the end range of whatever the movement is that's creating the sort of strength and mobility in that range. And that's what carries you on to like, you can build on that and save it for the next day. Right. So what I'm hearing is like,

you can roll it out, stretch it out, warm it up, feel good in that range. But if you're not doing that sort of mind muscle connection contraction piece as well in that range, you're not going to build the strength that is required to, you know, have less pain, have proper movement in that range, right? Yep. Yeah, exactly. It's the, the activation cause really when it comes down to a movement is it's movements active, right? So we, we are, when we were doing kind of our, our mobility stuff down on the map before we started here, we kind of touched on like the differences between flexibility and mobility. I don't know if I'm jumping the gun here, but that's good. Yeah, that's good. So like, you know, everyone's like, Oh, I want to be so flexible. And yeah, that's

cool. You know, maybe to do like a cool Instagram post or a van dam splits or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Right. It just, it looks cool. A little, a little blood sport. Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite movies, by the way, I don't know what that says about me, but it's definitely in my like top five. Nice. That's classic. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Um, dude, yeah. Like sitting on the, what do you think? So good. In the hotel. Yeah. Amazing. Just like getting that, that focus. But, um, but yeah, so like flexibility, you could essentially think about as, you know, it's, it's the big piece of that is it's passive, right? So I always tell people, you know people a visual is if you're laying on the ground and I come up to you and I physically grab your leg and you're totally relaxed and I see how far I can bring your leg up in what we call straight leg raise to kind of see how, quote, unquote, tight your hamstring is, that would be flexibility, right? So it's kind of like this passive way of checking how much a joint can move or how much that muscle can move.

But mobility is really how much you can move actively. And so really at the end of the day, you know, if you're going out there and you're snatching or you're squatting or you're doing a muscle up or you're doing a pushup or you're just running, you know, doing anything in life, really, your body doesn't care how much passive flexibility you have, but it cares how much range of motion you can control. And that's where that active, you know, end range contraction and not only end range contraction, there's also, you know, end range contraction. And not only end range contraction, there's also, you know, a bunch of different contraction protocols that you can use, even eccentric contractions. And then even just kind of focusing in and really getting all the muscles around the

midsection activating really does, you know, numbers for the, what we call distal mobility as well. I think it's an important point to just reiterate here about how being thoughtful and mindful about how much flexibility and I guess even mobility you need for both your sport and also for a healthy, pain-free life. Because we, again, as humans and as people who are into fitness tend to be like, well, of course we want to be as strong as possible. We want to have some of us are like, I want to have as much muscle as possible. I want to have as much flexibility as possible. So you somehow want to be this like superhero that can do the splits, have an insane amount of muscle and also be able to like deadlift a billion pounds, right? And all of that's great. It's a nice fantasy. But we want to be a little bit realistic in terms of what do we need?

For our sport, if we're a powerlifter, do we need to have a gymnast's flexibility, or could that maybe hinder us? And I'm a runner. Do I need to go to the gym and lift weights as much as possible to try to look sexy and have big muscles? Is that going to help what my goals are? But, but I think it's worth kind of thinking about too, like how much flexibility, and I would imagine probably mobility is obviously a different story, but how much do you need to live a healthy, pain-free, easy moving life, right? You don't

necessarily need to push the flexibility side as much as maybe people think, right? Yeah. So, I mean, again, you know, making that difference between flexibility and mobility in my mind, you know, if someone's, it's all about mobility, right? Like, so I even just take out the notion of trying to be flexible because there's, there's plenty of people that they're what we call, you know, looseyy, and we call their hyper-mobile. So their joints, the muscles around their joints, and even their ligaments around their joints are just super loose, and they can't create that stability around that joint. The tension maybe that's needed, right? Yeah, the tension, exactly, and that can lead to injury.

That's why specifically we were talking about general differences between males and females. You can never have an absolute, obviously, but there's general differentiating factors between the two genders. Females, just from a biological perspective, they have to obviously give birth someday, maybe. They have certain components about their anatomy, you know, wider hips, etc. But they tend to be a little more hyper, hyper mobile. So they they have a lot of range of motion and quote unquote flexibility, but a lot of time lack that, that's why if you see a lot of times in the gym a female athlete squatting, maybe more so early on in their career, we'll see those knees cave in. And same thing. I've seen that on myself many times. Yeah, it happens. I'm like, I can get ass to grass, but my knees are going in.

Stressing out the knees a little bit, those meniscus. Who needs those meniscus areas? But we see this out on the field as well. Like, for instance, you know, adolescent athletes, right, female adolescent athletes, the number of ACL injuries and tears, you know, kind of in the 14 to 17 range is extremely high just because they don't have that stability. And so when they're cutting on the field, you joint is just being tweaked and torques creating around the joint, the tears happen. But going back to your question about how much mobility does somebody really need, there's two answers there. Everyone should definitely have a certain amount of mobility per joint,

no matter what they're doing in life. Um, because if they are say a powerlifting athlete, you know, the demands for that sport is going to be different than say, if they're, you know, a basketball player or if they're a runner. Um, but you know, we all live life, you know what I mean? So like, even as we're, how much we're dedicated to our sport, whether it's we're on that elite pro level, or we're just in, you know, an amateur or just regular person kind of having fun with it. Um, you know, we need to be able to move in our day to day. So there's kind of like a baseline mobility that each joint should have. But again, kind of going over to the sports

specific, yeah, a gymnast is, you know, hopefully you're going to have more and their sport's going to demand more mobility, say than a power lifter, which, you know, doesn't have to get, you know, have these super end ranges in the shoulders, specifically the shoulders, right? Power lifters. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I guess another question then will be, because pretty much all of us, I don't know anybody who doesn't have some kind of like nagging tightness or mobility issues, or I feel tight, or I can't quite move my shoulders this way when I want to do this movement. Like everybody's got their issues, right? How do we as regular lay people who are not professionals at this, how do we know if our mobility really is lacking? How do we know if I have a tight low back, is it a hamstring issue?

Is it a quad issue? Is it a hip issue? Is it a shoulder issue? How do I even know? How do I even start to approach that issue? Is the answer just do movement vault all the exercises and you'll just sort yourself out? But like, how do you kind of, how do you pinpoint maybe where the actual issue is? Yeah. So, I mean, I guess without

plugging movement vault too much, but so I mean, really, um, so really there's, there's kind of certain techniques that really in how we at movement fault is approach this is we work on everything so as long as we're working on everything you know essentially eventually everything's going to work well but with that said like you just alluded to everyone does have their own anatomy their own experiences in life their own previous injuries their own day-to-day movements that they're doing for their job, et cetera, which create certain tight muscles, tight joints, certain aches, pains maybe in their body.

So everyone has that area that they maybe need to spend a little bit more time on. And so it's kind of like two ways to go about it, right? So the first way is to seek out know, seek out a skilled physical therapist, clinician that can literally take you through, assess your body, find out the areas of your, you know, which joint, which kind of muscle, which area you need to spend more time on, and then hone in on those areas. With that said, you know, that physical therapist is going to take you through, you know you through hopefully if they're doing what they should be doing

a movement screen, looking at each individual joint and finding the areas that you need to focus in on kind of like we did a little brief piece of that before we started our movement but then say with movement fall we actually

take you through a bunch of different what we call self-assessments so that you can basically self-assess yourself and try to figure out which areas you might need to focus in on a little bit more. You might have a hunch yourself. Like when we were doing the stuff before, you said my hip feels kind of tight. And so usually people are relatively good indicators and they kind of know what areas they need to work on. But with that said, more guidance, whether that's, you know, using a program or going to a skilled clinician can definitely help you. Because it can be a little bit more complicated.

Like I know that I have maybe some issues with like firing my glutes and I've got always sort of this low, super low back left side issue. But just because like, say your left, your low back hurts doesn't mean that it's your low back that's doing, it could be your, it could be glutes or it could be something on the opposite side of the part of you that's hurting. And like there are, it is, your body's complicated body's complicated right so it it isn't always super clear exactly what the issues are but i guess like you're saying that's why you see a professional but also having a more holistic approach so if you are kind of dedicating this this specific time in your fitness practice to mobility eventually these kinks are hopefully going to get worked out right okay yeah 100%. Okay, so another question that I wanted to ask,

and this is playing off the sort of flexibility versus mobility thing, because there's always kind of do's and don'ts online about when you should stretch, when you shouldn't, when it's a good idea, when it's a bad idea. And I guess, again, if we kind of get rid of the idea of flexibility altogether and focus more on mobility, this becomes less of an issue. But, you know, people hear that you shouldn't really stretch or do, um, static stretches before you maybe lift or do a workout because you don't want to kind of stretch out these muscles and loosen them up and then like put them under load. Right. But what you're saying with the work that you do with movement vault is this is the kind of stuff that actually is very good to do before you work out because it's sort of like priming the movement and the muscles. Can you talk a little bit about that and kind of when you should be doing this work?

Yeah, totally. So, you know, if we look at research, research shows that exactly passive static stretching before an athletic endeavor, such as weightlifting, sprinting, et cetera, et cetera, can actually increase the risk of injury and can increase, or I should say decrease athletic performance. So when you look at that standpoint, it's like, yeah, why would we want to passive stretch before a workout? And so what we do with mobility is we don't do any passive stretching at all. We always tell people that, hey, passive stretching, obviously not before the workout, you know, passive stretching is better than doing nothing at all.

But if you've got that 10 to 15 minutes that you're going to use on a mobility stretching routine, we've got to make sure that we're, you know, doing bang for the buck stuff and making sure that we're going to get the best results out of that. So we don't do any passive stretching. We will stretch out a joint in a passive nature, kind of like we did out before in the 90-90 position, and then we'll activate muscles around it. So just like you referred to, we're creating activation around a joint and not only kind of waking up those muscles and, you know, kind of increasing the length actively in those muscles. We're creating that connection between our brain and those muscles, even, you know, even increasing blood flow, you know.

So we're obviously we're not doing any kind of heavy lifting. We're increasing that contraction, getting that blood flow going. And so, yeah, basically a solid, well thought out mobility routine can actually take the place of a warmup and or fit in a huge piece of your warmup. You know, there might be some movement specific pieces that you want to do in your warmup as well. But, um, yeah, a hundred percent passive stretching. Um, Hey, we say don't ever do it. Um, definitely don't do it before a workout. Um, but active stretching, it's kind of like active stretching quotations marks, right? Um, so activation before workout, priming your nervous system, priming those muscles that

you're just about to use. And not only that, it's opening up the ranges of motion that we talked about so that you're able to get into better positions, you know, with whatever you're doing, whether that's sprinting again, snatching, squatting, et cetera. I will say the hip work that we were doing down there was definitely a warm-up like it's it's working your muscles like i feel like even just doing 15 minutes of that kind of stuff every day is kind of a workout in itself honestly like i feel like like i feel like if i did that i'd feel like i accomplished something for the day honestly so yeah yeah it's it's uh you know some of it's hard that That's what I'm saying.

It's not just like, Ooh, this is a nice little stretch. Some of it feels great. And some of it is actually quite difficult. Yeah. It just comes down to that. Um, you know, really anything in life that's going to be beneficial is not going to be that easy. Yeah. Yeah. And like you said earlier too, when we were going through this is just like pretty much any movement practice that you could possibly do. The effort that you put in is going to be reflected in what you get out of it. So you can half-ass your way through any workout, any stretching practice, anything, but that's what you're going to get out of it too. So, but I think even more so with this, because so much of it is about that mind muscle connection and that activation, like, you know, and I mean, I guess

it's the same, like I think about yoga, but like you can kind of sit there and sort of grimace through it and be like, okay, when is she going to tell me I can move into a different position? Or you can like really try to breathe through it and connect and like do the best that you can. You're going to feel differently at the end of both of those two scenarios, right? Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. You just, I mean, if you're, I mean, there's certain days where you come in and, um, Hey, you're just, whether it's sleep stress and you kind of just put in that 50% and that's what your body needs for that day. But if you're, if you're really trying to put everything into it, you same with any kind of workout, but can you overdo a movement practice? Like you're saying you put up a 15-minute video every day that people can go through with you and do it, and that can be a part of anybody's fitness practice. If I was like, well, I'm really tight, and I've got the time. I'm going to do this 30 minutes a day.

I'm going to do this 40 minutes a day. Is there a tipping point where you're like, you know what, maybe just you don't need to, diminishing returns at this point? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Great question. So, I mean, if it was up to me, you know, movement full would be like hour-long videos. Yeah. But I just know that, A, people, we just don't have that much time, you know. I can nerd out on this stuff for a couple hours a day, no problem. But, um,

you know, we found that the sweet spot is kind of that 10 to 15 ish minutes, um, or it's really kind of like 15 to 20 minutes more accurately. Um, but we do have, you know, people that do, you know, multiple videos every day. Um, as far as like too much, you know, it kind of depends on where you're at, what your movement practice is. Like if you were a total desk worker, right, you're sitting at your desk for 10 hours a day, you've never really done anything fitness-wise, and then you just, you're like, whoa, I heard about this program, I'm going to try it, and you do four hours of it straight, then that's probably going to be, you know, your body's going to say, Hey, what's going on here? Um, so there's, there's always like a grain of salt to be taken, but movements movement, you know? So, and we're not doing any crazy heavy lifting, you know, like high impact stuff. Yeah. You're not

doing, you know, one rep maxes back to back to back, you know, it's going to jack up your nervous system. So, yeah, you can get away with quite a bit because at the end of the day, you know, really it comes down to like evolution, like why we even need to do mobility in the first place. You know, we've evolved so much as human beings, obviously, over the years, right? Like thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And we've always had to move, you know, it's literally in our DNA to move. We had to, if we didn't move your, your dying, you know, whether that was, you know, protecting your cave, um, from the next person that wants to take a cave over or getting food or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. And it's like, we had to physically move our body and it's in, in such different ways, right? Like exploring all these different ranges of motion, you know, pulling things out of the

ground, climbing up things, lifting things and all these different, again, ranges of motion. And then all of a sudden, and so we've slowly evolved, you know, through these, this time. And then all of a sudden, boom, globalization, technology happens. Sitting on your ass all day. And then, yeah, we've got these. Happening very quickly. Yeah. So quick. Right. And it's awesome because we can achieve things that we never did in the past, right. With technology, globalization, uh, we've got electricity that

is just, I mean, even the simple, the lights, you know, like we don't have to create fire. Um, it's an amazing thing, but the thing with technology is it made things so easy, so quick that again, we're just sitting at our desks. Yeah. Shell shocked. Yeah.. Yeah, we haven't adapted to it. And so we have these tight areas in the body, and basically we have to offset that. And so kind of going 360 back to that question, you have it in your DNA to move. So you can do a movement, an hour, two hours of movement, as long as you're listening to your body. Obviously, if your body is, you know, telling you signs, you've got numbness and tingling, burning, any sharp pains, you know, definitely cool off a little bit. But, yeah, your body is meant to move. So just being smart and mindful the way you would with any workout.

Just pay attention to how you feel. And if you, you know, sometimes you go into the gym and you're not feeling it. And then five minutes in, you're like, Oh, thank God I came. I'm like really feeling it. And then sometimes 10 minutes after that, you're like, no, I'm still not feeling it. So you need to pay attention to what your body's telling you and act accordingly, I guess. Yeah. A hundred percent. Okay. So I want to ask you about what, and I know that this is again, very, uh, dependent on about what, and I know that this is, again, very dependent on the individual, but I know that you also see patterns and we all have some overarching issues. So I want to talk about some of the issues that you see the most.

But first question, I just have one quick question that's random, and I just want to know if it's true or not, because I think this is like a weird internet myth or something. But going back to the flexibility thing and the splits and like the human body and what it's capable of, is it true that pretty much everybody is capable? Like if you told me do the splits right now, I can't do it. Right. But if I was like unconscious, if I was like fully unconscious and you could like rearrange my limbs, is my body physically capable of it when my brain isn't turned on and giving

those like danger signals to like stop and contract and don't do it. Like is any human body capable of moving in that range of motion? So basically yes. So yes and no, I'd say a huge portion. Again, if you've got like some, you know,

traumatic injury early on or you have, you're kind of like an outlier and you have some anatomical differences or a huge nervous system condition, then yeah, that's going to impede you. So yeah, when you're unconscious, you take out... It's a really creepy visual, I know. I'm thinking like if somebody was basically like ragdolled unconscious and we were trying to get them to do Jean-Claude Van Damme splits. Like just because it's I guess what it's highlighting is the the just how much your brain has control over. Like you're saying like some movements are it seems like they're automatic, but your brain does have a lot of control over preserving your safety. Right. But when your brain is taken out of it, your body is actually capable of doing

some really gnarly things. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. When you're unconscious, it's taken away that nervous system piece. Right. And so it's, it's taken off any of those breaks. Right. Um, so that would be definitely a kind of a, again, creepy, but weird. It's an experiment that none of us want to do, but I guess that's the, the, the question was because people, I guess when you like, you know, you go online and if people are trying to do like flexibility programs, not mobility, but flexibility programs, like get due to splits in 10 weeks kind of thing. And a lot of the preface of some of these programs is like, anybody is capable of this. You need to like put in the work and the time and like override your brain's desire to not have you do this because it's dangerous, essentially.

You know what I mean? Yeah, 100%. Anyway, okay. So, yeah, but you basically answered my question. Like most cases, like in a creepy situation where your brain is out of the picture, like your body actually can move in all these ways. Yeah, and we look at it from like early on, right? So if you look at infants, so we're talking one, two, three. Crazy flexible.

Yeah, nobody taught that child how to squat. Or put a seat behind its head and stuff, yeah. Yeah, you're changing a diaper and same thing. You can get those legs way out there into a split. Right. And so the nervous system is so early on at that stage that it hasn't experienced life and the trauma and the civilization that we live in. And you even add in the fact that when you start wearing these cushy shoes, we're sitting X amount of hours all day, and then everything starts to add up. Okay. So now that that weird question that I had to ask you is out of the way. So talk to me a little bit about some of the, like the, the issues

or the challenges that you're seeing sort of over and over again, like what are the, when people are either coming to you as a, as a, for physical therapy or just what you're seeing through working with clients with movement vault, like what are some of the like overarching issues that people seem to have? Yeah. So a lot of it, again, it comes down to this issue of just the, the, the demands of civilization. So it's so many people are at that desk, you know, and you know, there was that study 2000 and I want to say it was like 10, maybe it was 15, 2015, that meta-analysis that basically said sitting is the new smoking and correlated all these different major health issues with sitting. Essentially just sedentary, static positions. And it's not even just the desk, too, because it's the desk and it's the car and it's the going home on the couch. It's everything. Like, I know that the, these studies too, are saying that like no amount of

like, if you go to the gym and crush a CrossFit workout for an hour every day, it does not offset the fact that you're sitting, you know? So it's not, I mean, work is a problem and the, the kind of environment, the working environment that a lot of us have is a problem, but it's also the other, you know, 18 hours of the day when you're also sitting, you know, so yeah. Yeah. Somebody would actually add up the amount of time that they're either not laying down or sitting at a desk. Like you said, like 30 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. It's literally like you can count it on your hand. And that was the craziest part of the study is they, um, you know you know, they looked at those other factors saying that, yeah, doing that hour of CrossFit or running is great. You definitely still need to be doing that

stuff. But again, it doesn't offset it. But as far as issues that I'm seeing, it's all related to, again, you know, this sedentary lifestyle. so we're seeing just the, really, if you, if you break it down, the inability to connect and activate certain muscles. And that's not to say that, you know, your glutes don't work or cause you hear that a lot, like your glutes don't work. Well, how are you walking then? You know? Um, so there's definitely varying levels of being able to activate a certain muscle specifically in specific ranges of motion. So like you might be able to contract. So we'll use that glute example that that's like the, the thing that everyone hears. I went to my, you know, we'll just, we'll throw physical therapists under the bus sometimes.

Like I went to my physical therapist and they said, I, you know, my glutes don't work. But the thing is, is, you know, your glutes can activate maybe well in a certain position, but then if I change the position of your hip, say your hip flexion or maybe even demand of your upper body, that can actually change the way that your, your glute is activating. So like say your glute could work very well and create a lot of stability, you know, at the top of the squat. But once you get down in that hole, you know, your body, for whatever reason, again, individual to you might not be able to create that stability, the knees cave in, et cetera. Um, so losing the, the, just not having the ability to activate specific muscles and, you know, so hey, glutes are one of them, you know, specifically the, the stabilizing

glutes. Cause you've got three glute muscles, just the kind of anatomy review. You've got the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and the gluteus minimus. So we're talking about the, the glute muscles on the side of the hip, the, the medius and the minimus, um, people definitely, um, you know, lose, not lose, but they just, they struggle. They're not using it as much because they're sitting all the time. Exactly. And the upper back, that's a huge piece because we are at that computer so much. It's called your T-spine, so your thoracic spine or your upper back. We're just so hunched over, you know?

It just feels so much more comfortable. It does. I've been looking at your great posture this entire time. I'm like, I can't do it. And that's the thing. It's like we don't have to be super just erect this whole time and just super stiff. It's, it's all about movement. It's like changing positions and it's okay to slump over for, you know, a few minutes for sure. I mean, that's just part of moving. Our back should be able to flex. It should be able to extend, but it's all about switching it up. And I always tell people, cause you know,

people always ask what's the best position to sit at your desk in to work at? And there are better positions, but there really is no magic bullet. There's articles out there and there's so-called ergonomic experts that say, you should exactly sit like this. But really it comes down to the best position is the next position. So it's constantly switching it up. Like I'm dealing with my legs, I cross this leg over. Then two minutes later, I'll cross the other leg over. Or I can even just adjust my position here.

I can do a little side bend right to left. I can extend, flex my back. Stand up for a minute. Stand up. And then once you add that standing desk, there's so many more variations. I can stand like a split stance. I can stand kind of in a more like wide-legged. I can balance on one leg for a little bit.

So the hips, the front of the hips for sure definitely a tight area for a lot of folks just from that sitting. I think just shout out to all of my fidgety people because I always used to think that it was like a character flaw that I cannot sit still. And like if you go to the movies with me and I'm just like fidgeting all the time. But first of all, that's great for your neat, right? You're like non-exercise, the kind of thermal if you want to like burn calories and like whatever. It's good to kind of always be like fidgeting. And also it's good in a situation like where you're sitting all the time. Cause I do that. I mean, everybody has, is working on a laptop or working on a phone these days, no matter what your job is. Right. So I I'm guilty of this too, of hunching over and looking at my

phone, but I have a standup desk, but I don't stand at it for eight hours. I'll stand and I'll kind of like fidget around and stand on one foot and stand on the other foot. Then I'll go sit and then I'll go sit on the couch and then I'll sit on the floor because I can't sit still anyway, naturally. But I think that is indirectly helping me because it doesn't let me kind of be in one position and get stuck in that one position all day. Right. So embrace your, your fidgetiness, embrace that natural tendency to want to like move around and go somewhere else.

And even for your creativity and your like mental ability to focus, it's good to be in different places, right? And kind of move around a little bit. 100%. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I always like to say, literally exactly like you said, be that fidgety kid. All the time, fidgeting. Everyone has those fidgety kids in class.

It's like, stay still. It's like, actually, no, that's probably not the best idea. Yeah, you don't. Embrace moving around a little bit yeah any any static position for too long your body just again it's in our dna to move so whether it's standing perfectly straight up if you're not moving not a good thing if it's sitting on the couch not a good thing um again there's better positions to be in than others but yeah um so you you we touched on like the idea of um foam rolling and fascial release and massage and stuff like that being there's benefits to it but it's only one part of kind of a toolbox right when you're going and getting like a deep tissue sports massage

like is that again just sort of like the foam rolling part, the typing up the essay without pressing save? Because what do you, what do you, you know, you go and it feels amazing and you feel good and it's getting in there and it's warmed up and it feels good, but you're not going to go home and like try to activate your upper back muscles after that. Like, is it doing anything? Is a massage doing anything? Yeah. So, I mean, it kind of depends on like what style massage you're getting. If you're just going, if you're going to like a massage therapist or a, you know, a licensed manual therapist, um, you could, you know, there's different style of techniques, like a Swedish

massage would be more kind of like a lighter general. No, I'm talking about like the getting in there. You're just like digging into that. Which feels amazing. But again, I feel like, and I would do it if I had, if money wasn't no object, I would do that at least once a week. Like I love that more than anything, but I'm thinking like, is this really actually over time contributing to my mobility or my like lack of tightness and muscle pain? I don't know if it is. I know it makes me feel good the day I get it done, but I don't know if it's really doing much more than that. I'd say from a feel-good standpoint, you know, I mean, just having it feel good, that's... I guess that's worth it.

Yeah, I suppose that's true. That has some benefit, but, like, if we're looking at it strictly from a movement, mobility, flexibility kind of standpoint, you know, if you are... So that kind of goes back to, you know, when we used to think that we were deforming muscle and tissue with our hands. So we've got to really dig in there. And again, research shows that we don't need that much force. And so what happens is if we're actually, we find one of these quote-unquote trigger points or knots, and we are, say as a practitioner, because I do manual therapy as well as a physical therapist. If I'm really digging into that area, like as hard as you can, and you're like,

you're barely holding on, you're sweating, like, you know, gritting your teeth, like mild tears coming down. You've, you were about to like tap out on my arm. Um, then your nervous system actually detects that as a threat. And so what happens is you want, basically what you're trying to do is loosen up that muscle, right? But then if I'm digging there so, so hard, your nervous system detects it as a threat, then in some cases, extreme cases, you can actually get more tight there because your nervous system's like, hey, what's going on?

We're really going to pump the brakes on this motion, if not just really not do anything. So really, you know, I've found through my practice and, again, looking at the research that sometimes it's a very low level of input from the foam roller or from the lacrosse ball or the thumbs of your massage therapist that is needed. And so I like to tell people, I mean, it's okay to be like in, you know, discomfort, but if it's actual pain, if you're feeling any pain, numbness, tingling, burning, um, that's too far. And if we had to like quantify it on, you know, the pain scale, zero, no pain, tens, the, you know, the most pain. You know, if you're anywhere in kind of that seven to ten, that's most likely too much for you.

So kind of keeping it in that moderate range is kind of what we're looking for. Okay. That's really helpful, actually, because I know, and again, I know a lot of people who have this kind of type a fitness personality or thinking like, yeah, I got to go balls to the wall. It doesn't hurt. It's not doing anything. So that's actually, I think that's very helpful for people to, to understand, um, what percentage of the videos and the, the work that you're putting out on movement vault is using, um, other tools like lacrosse balls and foam rollers and how much of it is just like your body? Because I mean, what we went through today, obviously we didn't need any

other equipment. And I would imagine that you probably, it's probably pretty minimal, right? You don't really need the extras. They're good to have sometimes, but yeah, not a, not a, um, so the way we programmed it with movement ball specifically, but even just outside of movement ball, you don't, you shouldn't really need a ton of tools. So we do utilize the foam roller. We do utilize the mobility ball or the lacrosse ball. Every now and then we'll utilize like a PVC pipe or, you know, we always tell people if you're at home, you don't have a PVC pipe, just grab a broomstick, which is always good to see those Instagram pictures with people doing their movement ball routines. They got the broom going on.

And sometimes you can do like you use a towel or something too, right? Like anything where you can have that sort of that tension. Yeah, towel. I mean, just getting creative with it. But, you know, percentage wise, definitely not every video we don't do. We don't have like every video routine doesn't have a muscle release component. But I would say, you know, just throwing out a number, maybe 25%. And even those, those videos that do, um, again, a well-designed mobility routine, you shouldn't have to spend, you know, even 10 minutes on a foam roller or lacrosse ball. It's like, you know, we'll focus in on, say if we're doing your, your shoulders, right. We're focusing

on the rotator cuff. We'll say the posterior rotator cuff specifically, especially in the CrossFit community. I see it's by far the number one injury that I see. Rotator cuff? Shoulders in general. Okay. But especially for the, more so on the male skew, but females as well, tight rotator cuff muscles. So if we're targeting the, the kind of the posterior rotator cuff, which is going to limit your overhead position, that's one of the muscles that will,

um, you know, just spending again, 90 seconds on each side and then rolling that lacrosse ball out of the way and then getting into the stretch activation piece, um, is huge. Okay. All right. So now for people who have been listening and are like, all right, I need to get in on this. I need to get in on the movement vault stuff because I can't move my shoulders. How does your program work? So is it, it's subscription based, it's you pay and then you have access to all of these videos. How does it work? Yeah. So essentially anyone can try it out for free. So we got a, we have a free seven day trial. Um, so we always tell people, Hey, check it out and see, see what we're doing and see how your body's feeling. Cause that's, that's the, that's the number one

kind of litmus test is like, Hey, we want to show you guys that we're getting results here. And that's kind of what we, what we, um, set out to do.. We get emails and DMs from people all over that, oh, we've tried this company and this program, and we really see the results. And so that's why we do it at the end of the day. So we always tell people to try it out, and after that it is a subscription model. So depending on when this episode airs, right now it's a mobile responsive website, so people can stream the videos on their phone, on their computer. But, again, depending on when it airs, we're working on our app right now and a total website redevelopment. And so currently it's $9.99 a month.

Stay tuned because we'll shout out a special promo for the Muscle Maven listeners here. That's great. Fantastic. We'll have a good promo code here to shout out once this episode launches. But there will be, yeah, basically our app and our website. We're doing really cool stuff now, but we're really going to be changing the game here once our new technology comes out. But we can't leak anything yet.

Got it. Okay. And it is organized to, like, you can go in and be like, well, I really want to work on shoulder stuff today. And you can search that way, right? So it's not just whatever today's video is. You can search and find what you need. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, you can, as it's set just whatever today's video is. You can search and find what you need. Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, you can, as it's set up right now, you can either, again, just like you said, follow along on the video of the day where you can hit, say, your hips and ankles or your T-spine and your shoulders. Or if you're like, you know what, I need to focus more time on my wrists and my neck. And we work on the feet. So we work on every joint too. A lot of people, they tend to want to just hone in on the shoulders and the hips. But you can make the argument that the big toe joint is actually the most important joint

in the body. And you're like, what? Big toe? I don't even work on my big toe or my foot mobility. But yeah, we spend time on foot mobility as well. So you can, yeah, you can use the filter video function, search out, you know, for specific areas of the body. You can search out for specific movements that you want to help prep for or work on such as, you know,

a snatch, a muscle up, a handstand running, squatting, et cetera, or what kind of tools you have. Um, and then again, we're going to have some really cool stuff here coming out with the app, which is going to be really cool. That's all I can say. You keep, like, teasing this thing now. When it does come out, we're going to have to do, like, a quick, like, social media thing so that you can explain all the, like, cool stuff that you can't tell us about now. For sure.

I know when I go home, I'm going to look up, like, the foot ankle stuff, and this is something that you can like help me with offline again, because obviously we could only get into so many of my problems this morning while we were going through stuff. But I think the ankle foot stuff is like you said, it's bigger than people think. Like I remember I think it was like a Marxist article or something I was reading because all of the sort of likeal natural functional movement stuff that he gets into but from wearing shitty shoes or just like overly um you know restrictive shoes our entire lives like our ability to even like move our toes and move our feet is terrible like you should be able to do like a toe spread and like move your big toe up and your little toe and like most people like I know when I take my shoes off I'm like what like nothing's moving I don't even know what you're talking about.

And I'm pretty good. Like I stopped wearing heels basically as soon as I moved to New York, like a decade ago, I was like, and we're done with the heels. Like I'm walking on concrete. Fuck that. Like I'm not wearing heels. Like I wear heels like once in a blue moon. And I try to wear like, I'm wearing chucks today.

Like I try to wear very flat shoes. I try to be barefoot all the time. And I still feel like my foot and ankle mobility is like a nightmare. So that's a huge, I think a big issue that people probably don't even realize they have. Yeah, a lot of people are definitely sleeping on their, specifically their foot, but also their ankle. And just like you alluded to, and Mark Sisson has talked about in the past, yeah, like, I mean, these shoes that I'm wearing right now, as the listeners can't see, I'm taking off my shoe here. And that's another thing, you know, barefoot training. And we spend so much time in these shoes, not only in cushy shoes, but if we think about the bottom of the foot, right,

it's very similar to our hand as far as the amount of receptors that we have, what we call peripheral nervous receptors. So they're picking up and they're detecting our environment. Now, so we're wearing our shoes for, you know, we'll say 14 hours a day, right? Just imagine if you wore gloves on your hands for 14 hours a day, what would happen with your sense of touch? Yeah. You just, it down regulates those receptors, and so we have less feeling. And so that ability to sense things in our environment is decreased.

And yeah, just like you said, on top of that, our feet basically conform to our shoe. Yeah. So if we look at those indigenous cultures that aren't, or just even cultures that aren't wearing shoes as much, their feet look a lot different than ours. And I started kind of in this barefoot training minimalist shoe style quite a while ago. And somebody definitely needs to progress into that. It's not like, all right, today I'm doing it. Time to do your 5K with no shoes on.

Yeah, totally. But, yeah, it's like having the ability to like articulate and move each toe is, is huge. Yeah. That's such a, that is such an interesting thing to think about the glove part. Cause like, imagine if you just basically wore gloves all day and then took them off when you like got home at night and to go to sleep. So when you're like not using your hands, cause it's the same with your feet, right? Like you're not going to wear your shoes to bed unless you're a real weirdo.

But if you basically were only bare handed, like at night, you know, how much that would change how you use your hands and how, you know, the information that you're taking in. That's really interesting. Yeah. Okay. So we're coming close to the end here because you have work to do. We could talk forever. Maybe we'll have to do a part two at some point, but remind our listeners where they can go to online to learn more about Movement Vault and wait breathlessly for the app to come out. So you can check us out. It's www.movementvault. So it's just movementvault.com.

Depending on when this airs, you can check out our app in the App Store. Just search Movement Vault. We're at Movement Vault basically on any of the platforms, Instagram, all that good stuff. Just sending the message out there, hey, guys, you got a body, and we need to do some general maintenance. We spend so much time taking care of our couch or our car or our dog. We spend so much time maintenancing our dog, which we should. I'm not saying don't. But we tend to forget about our body. And again, it comes down to not wanting to do

something until we have to do it, a.k.a. it's broken. And so, I mean, there's just so much more you can get out of life if your body's moving well. So, you know, just start caring for your body. Excellent, excellent way to end this off, be proactive and, uh, use it or lose it. And none of us want to lose it. So that's right. All right, cool. Grayson, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. If you give movement felt a shot and why wouldn't you it's free for the first week. Let me know if you have the same kind of success that I did

in that I discovered a muscle in my butt that I didn't know I had life-changing stuff. All right. Thanks again to our show sponsor whoop use code shrug to check out for 15% off your whoop device so that you can start tracking that old heart rate variability and sleep and recovery and performance. Why the hell not? All right. Join me next week. I'm talking to one of my personal mentors, although he probably doesn't know that he's one of my mentors, but he's a bodybuilding legend. He's one of the nicest and most thoughtful people I know in the muscle building community. His name is Ben Pakulski, and he's literally bursting at the seams with valuable insights about how to be your happiest, healthiest self. He talks about longevity. He talks about discovering your purpose. He talks about building businesses as well as building muscles. Um, and

you know, he's also bursting at the seams with biceps, but that's just icing on the cake. So he's a great one. Always learned so much from him. Uh, I hope you join me, make sure you're subscribed to shrug collective, leave me a nice review on iTunes so I can stick around. Say hi on Instagram at the Muscle Maven. Do all those things. It would make my day. And I hope you join me next week. Have a great day.