Barbell Shrugged - Training NFL Athletes, Increase Recovery by 75%, and Neurological Training for Odell Beckham Athleticism w/ Christopher Knott  — Real Chalk #52

Episode Date: December 4, 2018

Innovation is the name of the game, and Chris Knott is at the forefront. As a former professional baseball player, Chris started learning about the role the brain plays in recovery when he didn't want surgery on his pitching arm. He's so good at what he does now that he's sought after by household-name athletes like Odell Beckham, Jr. Chris' approach to injury prevention and recovery looks at the body as a whole, and doesn't stop when the pain goes away.   It's not a one-size-fits-all methodology either — Chris uses his in-depth understanding of physiology to identify each athlete's unique weaknesses, and works to change the necessary stimuli to target them.   You know how Real CHALK episodes go: we drop a lot of knowledge, we talk a lot of sh*t, and we flip the scripts on a whole bunch of common health and fitness misconceptions. We also tell it like it is and say the things no one wants to hear (like if you have to ask if you can make it to the CrossFit Games, you can't).   Do you know why muscle stim isn't actually effective recovery? Turns out the Soviets are smarter than we are and if you're a habitual foam roller, you're most likely doing it all wrong. Want to be a trainer for pro athletes? Chris has some straightforward advice for you: don't. He also has wisdom to share about creating a positive culture in a gym, what recovery should actually look like, and why the proven method is probably not the best one. And have you ever wondered how your trainer feels about your bench press goal?   We get brutally honest about clients, coaches, and the reality of the fitness industry—while also explaining a ton of acronyms you can use to impress your friends. Check it out!   - Ryan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/rc_knott ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please support our partners! @bioptimizers: www.BiOptimizers.com/realchalk for $177 package, 37% off   ► 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    

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Real Chalk Podcast. It's Tuesday, hopefully your favorite day of the week. Today's episode is going to be brought to you by BioOptimizers. You guys have heard me talk about these guys a few times. Their products are digestive enzymes. It's probably the reason that you are not getting bigger potentially when it comes to your supplementation. A lot of people are taking tons of different supplements out there, pre-workouts, post-workouts, proteins, BCAs, different little things. And I think that the digestive enzyme little market is like extremely, extremely underutilized. And a lot of people don't know anything about it, including myself. So most of the time, a lot of you guys are just absorbing or trying to absorb tons and tons and

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to really believe in it. And it's one of those things that I'm really, really stoked on. Now, let's start to talk about this episode that we have going on right now. I came to New York City. I'm actually currently still in New York City, and I got to meet up with an old friend, Andrea Ager. I knew Andrea before I even owned a gym, before I had this podcast, before I had all these things. And we were working out in downtown Los Angeles at a time when CrossFit was just bigger than life. It was the coolest thing in the whole world. And we shared a lot of just amazing times that just will never be like recreated because CrossFit is just in a different time now. And it's not something that you can recreate anymore. I feel like there's just too many gyms.

There's too many different things going on. But it was like the heyday and it was just like – it's almost like watching a black and white TV and seeing something that was like really amazing for your parents and they look back and they're like, oh, man, I can't believe it was like that. And that's kind of like how our dynamic was back in that day. And all that mattered. All that mattered was competing and going to Whole Foods and working out

again in the gym. And just all these insane things that like made up our lives and who we are at this point in time. So she means a lot to me as a friend because she was there for a long time, even before I had anything. So I mean, it's a it's a really important podcast to me. I really wanted to just kind of dig into her life and see how much different it is now than when it was then, all the things that she's up to, all the things that make her happy at this point, and basically just kind of see the differences that have been going on over the years. So she actually has kind of the same story where she was all about competing like me, and now she has other things going on in her life,

and we just kind of reflect on the positives and the negatives and this and that. And she used to live in LA and now she lives in New York. So there's some cool little dynamic there. And I think this is a great episode for everybody who just kind of wants to get some good gratitude in their life and feel good about things. So without any further ado, here we go. Andrew Ager, I hope you guys love it. Let's go. All right, Chalk Nation, it's Tuesday, which means it's time for another episode of Real Chalk. Sitting down here, actually standing up here. We're at Solace in New York, the Strong New York event. It's a little bit wild in here. You guys can't hear it, but it's going down. I'm hanging out with Christopher Knott. He is an

ex-Division I athlete, personal trainer, and then now he is traveling pretty much everywhere with NFL athletes, doing rehab, and doing kind of his own spin on getting you stronger, whether it's mentally or physically, right? Absolutely. Yeah, we've got to treat everybody the right way. He has a very interesting take on all these things that make us better at being athletes. So I'm really excited.

I haven't asked him too much because I didn't want to know too much. So we're going to get into a couple things. Currently, right now, you are the trainer for a couple different big athletes. Yeah, we have quite a few athletes, primarily through the NFL, but out here in New York right now with Odell Beckham Jr. If you guys don't know who that is, he has the blonde hair. He works out with the Giants. Is it blonde? Is that what it is?

It's blonde on top. On top. Yeah. But he's black, so it looks very interesting. Yes, it's dark on the sides, big old dark beard. Oh, yeah, and the beard. I forgot about the beard. My whole family is enormous Giants fans. Okay.

So the fact that I'm even here talking to you about anybody on the Giants, they're all super excited to hear this podcast. Yeah. We had a good time. Got to meet Shaquan the other night. That dude's going to be a rock star. Already is, but he should have Rookie of the Year, in my opinion. Yeah, he's got some tree trunk legs.

That's cool. Yeah. I'm sure you've met. What's some of the most impressive things that you've seen someone do in a training session? In a training session? I mean, Odell's a freak of nature. He really is athletically. But what a lot of people don't know about him, he's incredibly smart, very cerebral. And like this offseason, as we were getting his, his leg back from the fracture

and and everything this past season, I was doing a lot of the rehab side, the neurological side. But then he decided to partner with the head track and field coaches there at USC, working on running form, explosion, some lot of other things, and he's already incredibly gifted and fast, and yet getting that level of training was pretty remarkable, and seeing him go through some of that and the way he pushes, the way he drives, I mean, when he's focused, it's unbelievable. So, yeah, I feel very privileged to get to know him behind the scenes and beyond just the typical media stuff that people see.

He's very misunderstood. He's a great guy, great heart. But, yeah, just the intensity that he puts forth is unbelievable. That's cool. So how do you originally meet these guys, or how do they find you? 100% word of mouth, honestly. You know, anyone that wants to say, oh, I want to get into this because I want to train professional athletes. I would probably first say don't. Most professional athletes are not going to be your bread and butter. I mean, the gym, like my gym back in Colorado, that's my

main job. And then being able to take care of these guys on the side is bonus but yeah do a good job get your foot in the door everyone needs to kind of have that lucky opportunity to kind of get known for the first time but then what you do with it that's up to you so if you didn't get called back if other guys you know don't tell you about other guys then it's not going to happen and so anyone can get lucky like you might know a guy growing up or you know hey i knew odell from high school and he knew me and so i got my start but you still need to do a good job because if your wall's not full of multiple guys pictures then if you only train like one or two guys you might be one of those trainers just got lucky

where there's a lot of good trainers that are amazing trainers and no one will ever know their name just because they never got their shot but then you also have the other side especially with this whole social media craze and and you know everyone looks like an expert nowadays uh online my dentist has a social media yeah it's and she like i mean good for her she's super hot she's like the hottest i've ever seen but like hey hot dentist hell was just like, man, everybody has social media now. And it's like. See, I would go to that dentist because I hate the dentist. It really is the future.

I'll show you her. She's incredibly attractive. That would be helpful. That's like my least saying. It makes going to the dentist very easy. There you go. But yeah, you have to be able to have one guy tell you about the next guy, tell you about the next guy. And that's really how I proliferated because in the same way, like, I don't have, you know, NBA guys for the most part because I just – they don't know about me.

And, you know, but, yeah, NFL guys do. And so, yeah, a lot of it's just word of mouth. And that's how it's gone from there. So that's good because we can just put us right into this next segment. So when someone finds you, they're looking for something specific, right? Or maybe they heard about something specific that you do, which I don't even really fully know yet. So I'd like to really get into that and kind of like hear what your bread and butter of your training is. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Um, we started a little bit and I was like, no, no, stop. I want to know. I want to know i want to know later yeah um you know initially guys don't call me up because they're like hey i need to get bigger

faster stronger i mean everyone everyone can do that if you're a trainer i mean hopefully hopefully and um this kind of goes to actually towards one of my pet peeves in the train world is you know um well super bowl 50 for example i had 23 denver broncos that was a big year for me um you know i got von miller and six other guys ready for the super bowl um i can't take credit that von miller is so awesome right von miller was always going to be von miller and it's a big pet peeve of mine when we have these trainers that might get lucky by getting to work with just this physical specimen who's already going to be awesome. And really your main job is don't screw them up.

I feel the same way about CrossFit athletes. Someone says so-and-so is the best coach in the world. I'm like, so-and-so got the best athletes in the world to just come to him, kind of. Yeah, and then it becomes perpetual. If I put my gym in the middle of L.A. or Miami, it's packed out. But because I love Colorado, I want to stay in the mountains, I don Miami, it's packed out, you know, but because, you know, I love Colorado. I want to stay in the mountains. I don't want to be super huge in that respect. You know, guys just don't want to, Hey, let's just go to Colorado Springs. You know, they just want

to be in LA and Miami. But if you happen to be an average guy that gets the first guy and really the camaraderie, I mean, it's one of the things too, that, um, you know, I'm fortunate to, uh, get to go hang out with guys like, you guys like Louie Simmons at Westside Barbell. And Louie is so open with his knowledge and helping people out. Other people can replicate. Does he have a place in Colorado? No, no, no. I know he's in Ohio.

Yeah, Ohio. So when I go back to Ohio, I get to help out. I've done stuff with Ohio State Wrestling and some other things in Ohio. Matt Brown, my former UFC guy, just moved back to Ohio in there. So Columbus is kind of a strength mecca, of course. So whenever I get back to Columbus, I always try to stop into Westside Barbell. But, you know, Louie's such a great guy as far as, you know, such an open book. Yeah, very smart.

Amazing to listen to. But the biggest thing is how many years of experience. And, you know, I always say that, you say that innovation has no peer-reviewed studies. When you do something groundbreaking and then you get all the traditional doctors and therapists that really just want to stay in their own little pocket of the world, they want to say, you know, show me the research. And I'm like, well, it's innovation, right? We take scientific principles.

That's a really good point. Yeah, and then we try to go forward. But, I mean, Dr. Andy Gallopin is a great example of someone that is both in the research world but is also doing it right and he himself just talks about you know i would rather have someone that has 20 years of experience of trial and error and has a thousand test subjects and has worked with people at the top level than some college guy that has five test subjects of mediocre athletes that we just did a six-week study for. Well, one, you can take anyone with a very young training age and get an adaptation. Does that mean it's great?

But take that person and take them from high school, put them in the NFL, work with somebody for literally 10 years and see the transformations. Now you're actually getting some good data, some research so yeah it's it's uh it's frustrating but going back to the the trainers that you know might get lucky with a handful of guys but then those guys talk and they bring other guys but my point with louis sims though was was the atmosphere because that's the one thing that i appreciate about the crossfit, everyone can talk about it's either good or bad or whatever. No one can, um, deny the fact that they have created an amazing culture. And that's what Louie has done at Westside Barbell is created such a culture of competitors that you literally show up. And if you know, like you have to get strong, I mean,

people break PRS all the time because they're like, Holy fuck, I'm here. And if I don't do something, and so just that alone. And everyone in there is going nuts, right? Yeah, it's unbelievable. I mean, I think my bench that one day was like, it was a crazy, like, but it wasn't because I was like, oh, here was this really cool training technique. It was, I don't want to look stupid in front of these guys. And all of a sudden, you hit new numbers. And the competitive environment that he's created and the just, hey, you better do it or just get the heck out. I think he was saying on one of his – I saw it maybe on a YouTube or something

that, like, 90% of the guys in there can squat over 1,000 pounds or, like, something insane like that. Or he had 10 guys in there that could squat 1,000 pounds or something insane. I was like, holy shit. Yeah, I don't know if it's still this way. I know a while back if you were – like, Louis will allow any kind of athlete or whatever to come in and just, like, see know if it's still this way. I know a while back, if you were, like, Louie will allow any kind of athlete or whatever to come in and just, like, see, check it out. He's, again, he's an open book.

But to actually be on Louie's competitive, like, team that he's coaching, I believe, like, one of the prerequisites was he had to squat 800 pounds as just a baseline. So he's already getting a cream of the crop, people who are already, you know, got a few screws loose and then taking it to the next level. But at the same time, that's harder. I mean, if you have a guy who's already squatting 800 pounds and you want to put 50 pounds on his squat, that's amazing. Whereas if you take a high school kid that can, you know, squat his body weight and say, oh, he went up in his squat 50 pounds. I mean, you don't get a pat on the back for that.

Yeah. And we have so many. Right. And we have so many coaches that are like, yeah, look at my guy. He was running a 5'6", 40. Now he's down to a 5'2". I mean, it's like, all right, come on, guys. Let's up the ante just a little bit.

So if I have someone that has worked with a lot of professional athletes and has really seen significant change repeatedly, now I know that what they're doing has merit to work with the entire population and that's what really we do at our facility back in colorado is is everything that i'm doing with my professional athletes at the end of the day is always still an experiment because you're always trying to find that little extra edge and then what works and then what you do repeatedly works because everyone has their nuances but if you can do it repeatedly and you start to see a system as to why then you can bring that back into your facility and say, all right, this is going to

work for all of us, you know, cause we, we know it worked at the highest level, not just in some college study with a couple of freshmen that are still learning how to, you know, get their hormone levels up. So with you specifically, you're doing more of this mental stuff, right? It's actually more on the neuro side. Yeah, that's because, again. So you were getting into, like, before we started the podcast, you're like, okay, so if someone gets injured. Yes. There is the structural damage, and then you were about to say the stuff that I wanted to hear. Okay.

Yeah. So from first me being an athlete, I had my share of injuries when I got into college in the traditional bigger, faster, stronger. Um, you know, that led to my imbalances, which led to my injuries, which led to doctors who say, we want to do surgery on you and me saying, I don't want surgery. So then they say, well, any doctor that says that's the one thing I do is surgery. Go try physical therapy, traditional physical therapy, and Hey, grab this band and do this stupid exercise for your shoulder really wasn't working. So that took me back to the anatomy books and said, well, you know, I, well, just my particular injury, I was, you know, rotator cuff,

I was a pitcher. And so, uh, they were like, Hey, I do this band exercise for the rotator cuff. I'm like, well, if I'm throwing 85 to 90 mile per hour fastball, these four little muscles aren't fully like that that that can't be it to slow down you know this momentum so but what about this see how the scapula's ankle here and what about all these muscles and all the way down here and aren't my legs important and so when i started to look at the body as a whole all of a sudden i started to treat my body as a whole next thing i know i was able to pitch again the problem was was that even when i was bigger faster stronger of their coaches um in the weight room

i'm throwing without any pain and i'm back on the diamond i had lost about five to seven miles per hour off my fastball and no matter how much stronger i got in the weight room it was not coming back so i'm like obviously this is not a strength thing it's not a pain thing so just from common sense i was like there's something in my brain that's saying, don't throw any more dummy because last time, bad things happen. That's what led me back to neurology. Then as I was going through all the different other professionals from chiropractors to PTs to athletic trainers and strength and conditioning guys and you name it, none of them really had a good answer for me on the neurological piece. How is the brain guarding and protecting still, even after the

trauma of the injury? Because all these doctors, they just want to look at the physical trauma. Like, you tear your knee. Oh, we're going to give you number I. Yep, we see the damage. We're going to surgically repair that damage. And then the PT basically just works on the trauma from the surgery. But none of them go back to, why did you get torn up in the first place? And not only did you have compensation that led to the injury, but now you have additional compensation from the trauma from both the injury and the surgeries. And no one's addressing that. And so. So that's what you do.

That's what I do is we had to find a solution to how do we actually start to look at this neurological component. And then we got into some more of the science. I mean, when I first started, people thought I was working just like on stroke patients, because back then when you said I'm a neuroscientist, they were like, Oh, you're working on brains. And yeah, it's so there was a whole process on educating people like, no, I just wanted, I just wanted my athletes, um, to get healthier. I just want to be able to take that athlete that, you know, if we have a football player with a high ankle sprain, they can be out for a good six weeks, even more. Um, I can get them back in. Like if someone injures themselves on a Monday, I can have them back by that Sunday's game. Wow. And, uh, a lot of it has to do with getting all the muscles turned back on neurologically

speaking so that they can absorb force and then keep that trauma out of the joint where they were getting injured um is there a maintenance phase to this so like let's say you like are you doing something similar to like muscle activation technique and like art kind of mixed together so the um yeah it'd be great to talk about some of the similarities and differences so um mat for example will um do a they're they're probably the best when it comes to the applied kinesiology you know they put you all these weird positions and they can test and really finite you know which muscle groups are shut off and then they'll use basically isometric techniques to try to turn them back on and there's actually some new people

again there's nothing new under the sun really right um it's just packaged a little differently but um using various isometric techniques they can get those muscles to in essence waking up um the i'm wondering though like how long that lasts for and that's the problem um it's kind of like when you get that chiropractic adjustment you feel awesome on the table and you go right back to your sport and then everything falls back out of place and we can talk in in um, this is where I always want to be careful because usually people get in a conversation where they start to say, hey, this is my thing, this is why I'm awesome and everyone else sucks. And that's another one of my big frustrations with trainers and therapists,

anyone in their profession, because everyone really wants to look at, you know, it's really more of a fear base. Like, here's my little piece of the pie in the training world, and I don't want to lose it. And if someone else is better than me, then I've got to somehow either prop myself up and tell everyone else. My big thing was everyone obviously has a job, right? We still have PTs. We still have chiropractors. So they obviously know something that's good for us.

There's a piece of the puzzle that they have. And so I wanted to look at both what were they doing well, but more importantly, what weren't they doing? But everything does evolve. You evolve you know what i mean like you're saying like innovation doesn't have peer-reviewed journals yeah eventually like i think some of these jobs will be gone not gone completely but they'll be minimized they are and that's the hard part is um i feel like there's a lot of stuff now like physical therapy wise that you can if you're smart enough you can be doing on your own yeah that's the whole thing. I'm actually right. We don't have to get into that too much, but, like,

I'm really into the neural stuff that you're talking about right now, like mentally, because I don't know if you know too much about me, but I was a great CrossFit athlete for a long time, and the only reason I stopped is because my left knee, some doctors tell me is bone on bone. Some of them tell me you have enough where it should be okay. But I just have this pain in my left knee, like literally constantly. And my hips are totally shifted. Like I could pull up my shirt right now and you'd see like my hip angle. You see how crooked it is? Yeah, you're rotated. Yep. And like there's a bunch of stuff going on

there. But I know if I could level this out, I would still crush because like mentally I'm there, everything physically feels good. But, like, my left knee, like, even, like, just grabbing my right leg is easy. This one stops right there. Oh, gosh. I can't even pull it up. Man, too bad this wasn't a visual podcast. It would do, like, 15 minutes, and you would see a dramatic increase in range of motion.

We'll have some fun a little bit. Those are the types of things. So for those of you out there who can't see what I'm doing, I can pull my – well, I can bend my right leg into my right hand and then pull my heel to my butt but my left leg if i bend it it gets stuck at about 90 degrees and i can't even actually reach to grab it so we could talk about things that you would do to maybe fix something like that and maybe that'll be a good representation of what you do yeah absolutely yeah no we'll have some fun with that um basically so if if we were to compare because you're asking about like mat art that kind of stuff um the mat is going to you

know do all their muscle tests find out all right which muscles are shut off and then they're going to do their isometrics to kind of waken those back up but it's only going to waken up to the capacity that you already have and the guarding mechanism is still there because the um the mat approach is in just like dry needling on those types of things. They're working on reflex arcs, and they're not really communicating with the full central nervous system. So just like I tell people, you can't retrain like touching a hot stove. I mean, yes, you can use some mental techniques and all that. But ultimately, that reflex, when you touch a hot stove, you don't have to think about it because that doesn't go all the way up to the brain that's just a reflex arc

just going to the spinal cord and back what we're trying to do is actually um rebalance what's called the alpha gamma loop and as that goes all the way to the brain down or you know and back up so that we can change the motor pattern and how you're physically moving. And we're trying to do it under load and at velocity. Because that's the other thing. It'd be like if we have an NFL guy saying, my knees hurt so bad, I can't even do a pistol squat. I can't even squat my body weight. You know, in a matter of minutes, we can get him to squat his body weight.

However, if he says, great, my knees feel better. Can I go back and play on Sunday's game? Well, not yet, because the amount of force that your body has to take in the middle of that game when you're a 230 pound linebacker running at you know 20 some miles per hour that's a ton of force and so our strength levels also have to be able to withstand that and the brain is always perceiving that amount of force so let's say you get up to 50 of that and your brain says, I don't want to do anymore. Guess what? Everything shuts back off. And then now you're susceptible to that injury. So that's the, um, you know, it's one thing to feel good in the moment saying, all right,

my muscle is activating, but it's another thing to say, can I use my muscles at, um, at velocity and with a high level of force. So to be able to do that neurologically, we have to, in essence, trick the brain into thinking that you're under that high load which we're going to now magnify how your body wants to cheat and compensate it becomes visibly visibly present then we can actually work on the motor pattern and here's the really cool part when you are training in a traditional sense like just think regular movement in a gym the neurological response at developing that motor pattern is firing at a rate of two times a second so we've all heard the story you know

it takes 10 000 hours or 10 000 repetitions to whoever came up with that because there's a whole other problem with you can do 10 000 repetitions something and do it all wrong and now you just really suck at that so that's a whole thing we have to talk about um but uh then if you let's say you are doing it let's say we're teaching someone a skill like you know it's the same reason why most of my athletes i don't actually do olympic lifts in my training because the high level technique the amount of time it takes the risk of injury all of that and when we can say look i can get you freakishly strong and we can do plyometric work and do it with much safer means and all that. So if we can get the desired result without, but we have so it's such a linear, like, well, this is how I was always taught. This is what

my strength coach did. And so guess what? That's what I do. We have so much regurgitation in the field as opposed to just common sense. Um, doesn't mean it doesn't have its place. Um, you know, there's other coaches that do a fantastic job with that, but for us, um, if I'm going to teach a motor pattern and the rate of that development is at two times a second and just one little tidbit for every one repetition that you do incorrectly, you now have to do three just to get back to zero, just a baseline. So that's why it's really important just in our regular gym goers. If you want to get stronger, if you want to go and get better at lifts, cause any lift in and of itself in that particular moment, I wouldn't call training. That's just skill acquisition. Just like learning how to throw a curve ball, right? Learning how to

swing a golf club. It's just skill acquisition. So your body's learning this. And if you go in there and just be like, Hey, I'm just going to throw on some weight and your form is completely horrible. Well, guess what? That's, that's what you just replicated. That's what your brain just figured out because the brain doesn't know right or wrong. It just knows what you repeatedly tell it to do. So it's really important that yes, I mean, there's going to be times with max effort work and stuff. We're going to have breakdown, but again, those are the tests, right? The, the max effort work to show a breakdown is so that you can see that breakdown and then say, oh, that's what I should be doing now in the rest of my training is to work on those weak links. Not just, hey, I can't squat, but you know what? I'm just

going to squat over and over and miraculously figure out how to squat. And that's what we see even up into the D1, even in some of the professional levels. Even people who are smart do that. Yeah. It's unbelievable. You just want to fucking squat. You're just like, yes, I just want to squat.'s very very hard to get someone to go backwards right no matter who they are even myself like i've had times where i'm like well no fuck that i want to lift today like i really want to get a workout in i only have so much time or whatever and i think all of us you know are victims of the higher level you go almost the harder it is because you know i do this. And especially when you get to professional level athletes, they're so just God-given talented to begin with that they can display, even when they're doing bad things, they can display way more than the average person can do on a good day.

But then it plays with your mind thinking that, oh, I did something good to get here when a lot of times they get there not because of what they did but despite what they do. And so that's where going back to beginning people don't know about me to say hey chris make me bigger faster stronger beginning because if they're not injured they just think that whatever they're doing is working for them and one of the hardest lessons that i have to give to my professional athletes is you know what this was a long time coming now that you have this injury and to get them to believe that they can actually be better is pretty yeah and then it goes into thing because there's a level of of hard work but anyone that has gotten to a high level of sport knows that the higher you go the more time

the more volume the more everything has to go to get to that next level and there's always that do i really want to so i've actually said no to a lot of meaningful guys um the past two seasons because i kind of just got tired of just flying all over and being a fix-it guy. I want guys that are truly serious about stewarding their potential. And that's where, you know, I have conversations all the time with my guys, like, what is greatness? You know, it's not this feat of like, oh, I, you know, I had 10 seasons catching 1,000 yards at least. And, you know, it's not about the stats. It's about, okay, God gave you a certain body.

This is what you have. How well did you steward it? It's about the journey of where did you start and where did you finish and how much were you able to get out. To me, that's more about greatness than just some kind of stat or I hit a number or whatever. There's a lot of great basketball players that attribute to that stat right there, like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James right now.

They just have, like, long careers that are like yeah like they didn't really get it i mean i don't think lebron's ever really been injured but kobe didn't have any injuries for forever yeah and i just think that's really impressive especially in basketball where your knees are just getting jacked the whole time yeah but then look at uh prevention is obviously the key, right? LeBron spends a million dollars a year supposedly on his health care. I mean, it's nice when you can do that, but it just shows that it obviously has to be a priority. And these guys, their physical body is their business. And if they don't learn how to treat it as such, then, yeah, it starts to fall apart, and then eventually they won't get paid.

I was listening to his podcast. LeBron James was just on Tim Ferriss and he's doing the podcast like in an ice bath. Here you go. And his trainer is on the podcast also. It would be a great one for you to listen to. And they talk about different things that they do and how big nutrition is in their thing. And,

and like, yeah, like you don't know he's in the ice baths like midway through, like you hear him like getting out. Right. You're like, Oh man, he's like really taking this serious.

I mean, obviously he should, but it's just a testament to the high-level athletes and how far they'll go. I can only imagine what that guy's day is like. And he's like, all right, I'll do a podcast. I'm just going to go in the ice bath while we do it. Yeah, it is. They realize they're a priority, and you work around me, not the other way around. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.

But go ahead. So, gosh, there's so many tangents and fun things going on. So I really want to get into, like, some of the testing that you do. So let's just take my knee as an example. Like, what's something that we would do? So if someone's out there right now, they're like, all right, I love what this guy is talking about, but what is he actually doing? Okay.

So there are just levels of baseline neurological information. So with a lower body injury, the first thing we're going to do is understand that both the SI joint in the pelvis and the distal tib-fib down in the ankle are unique joints. If you look at the anatomy, there's actually no muscle that crosses the joint plane. It's just ligament. In case you guys look up SI joint, that's sacroiliac joint, just in case you guys want to Google that. There you go. Yep. So where the sacrum and the, the, uh, the ilium come together, um, you have some massive ligaments, um, but no actual muscle. If you look at the, uh, again, the anatomy just,

we'll just take that example. Um, all the musculature actually runs from the spine down or from the femur up, but nothing actually crosses over there. So there's nothing to actually turn on or activate. So if the SI joint is structurally out, again, the chiropractor can adjust it, and you can get a neurological stimulus. However, we have to support that if that has an issue because of the amount of neurological information that's sent back up to the brain. And so literally, if you're out there running, jumping, landing, cutting, and those joints are unstable and the brain says, hey, I don't like how this feels, we can literally do manual muscle tests to show how much the leg will shut off.

So we have this technique that we do to rebalance, and then we also can support that so um both just a simple piece of athletic tape um above the malleolus on the ankle to compress the tib fib or like um you know an si compression belt uh what that does is it's it's kind of like a cast on a on a broken bone like if imagine if you were like had a a broken leg and you decided to run on it every day and you wonder man how come this fracture is not healing well duh what's happening is is all that force is still there, and it's not allowing it to heal. So what do you do? You put on a cast. Does the cast heal it?

No. There's no inherent healing properties of the cast, but what does it do is it keeps force out of the area so that it can heal. And so what we would do is compress either the tip fib or the SI, and now those ligaments get a chance to heal and rest. So that's like kind of baseline phase one. Now, we have some proprietary technology that also helps us. I was talking earlier about the two times a second as far as motor pattern development.

So we have some technology that allows us to send neurological information at a rate of 500 times a second. And that's part of the genius and why we can get guys back so quickly is that once we ascertain a compensation and we're working to rebuild a new correct motor pattern we can rebuild that pattern 250 times faster than what i could do with traditional exercise this is with a machine yes what's it called so um you actually have it with you yes i actually i've got one with me so i always travel um with one um and um so i'm i was fortunate um to work under um a guy by the name of dennis thompson who is the founder of the arp wave system and then uh garrett salt the arp yes what is that

what is the arp um i've heard of this before i may have even yeah there's there's the there's this airy mist of what is the arp because um it's almost a cult fad right now because you've got very few practitioners that understand how to use it correctly. A lot of the NFL teams, you know, they'll get their hands on it because everyone loves gadgets, right? Yeah. But if you don't, a gadget is nothing more than a tool. You can go into any gym and, you know, if someone hurts himself in a squat rack,

is it the squat rack's fault? Well, no. So we have to understand how to use it, and that's a big misnomer. I feel like I've used it before. Okay. Yeah, because then we have another gentleman who I work with, Garrett Salpeter, who's in Austin. And he's come up with another device. His company is called NuFit, and they're similar.

But we can go into some of the history of why it's very different because most people are like, oh, I've done STEM before. Most of when you first pull it out, it's going to look like a traditional STEM unit. And just quick note on that, I would never use any American typical STEM unit ever. And the main reason is, again, if you look at our American medicine, we're such a structure orientated education that if someone says, like in your case, we're talking about the knee, if you have a PT using a traditional stem, they're going to say, oh, your knee hurts? Let me throw it on your VMO and your lateralis, and we're going to just stimulate the crap out of your quad,

and you're going to somehow miraculously heal. Well, it doesn't work that way, and when you don't get results, people are like, oh, this thing sucks. Well, no, there's a couple problems. Number one is that when you look at neurology, so the Soviets understood that the human body works off direct current. If you look at your brain waves to the essay note in your heart to, you know, how does, how does a cut on your arm heal, right? And that signaling everything in the body is direct current. So if we want to communicate with the brain, with the body, we have to communicate on the same frequency, the same wavelength, the same understanding. I always joke to say, you know, if you want to learn French,

it's really hard if you keep showing up in Chinese class. You've got to show up in the right environment. So traditional STEM is based off alternating current, which is about as smart as you sticking your finger in a light socket. What happens, and this is anyone listening right now who's ever done STEM, I can tell you everything you've done, which is you lay on a table, they say, where does it hurt? They put it on the muscles surrounding that area. They start to turn it up and say, all right, how can tell you everything you've done, which is you lay on a table. They say, where does it hurt? They put it on the muscles surrounding that area.

They start to turn it up and say, all right, how much can you take? And it starts zapping you. The muscle starts to contract because the brain's saying, dummy, I don't like how this feels. So it immediately goes into a guarding mechanism, which is where we get the muscle contraction. And then you say, okay, that's high enough. And then you turn on the interferential where it comes on, off, on, off. You go zap, relax, zap, relax.

You lie there for 20 minutes. You get up and you're like, okay, I think I feel better because you did massively increase blood flow to the area, which is positive. But I always ask people, whenever you decide to do anything, always start to ask better questions. And one of the questions should be at what cost? Okay. So you zapped it for 20 minutes, you increased blood supply and you completely fatigue the muscle. Like ask someone to go to a wall, push into a wall as hard as they can isometrically for 20 minutes straight, and then let's see how much you can bench press. You're going to be exhausted, so you're not going to get the same display.

So the muscle is now completely exhausted. It says, fine, white flag, I give up. Guess what? Three hours later, you go get some food, all the metabolites come back, and you go right back in the guarding mechanism that you had previously. On top of that, you just created more compensation because you just zapped yourself that the brain goes i didn't like that for 20 minutes and they wonder why we don't really get any true results from traditional stem so the soviets started to use direct current modalities understanding that

this is how we communicate with the body and everything has to start with the control center first and how does the brain interpret the information the problem was was the soviet technology because of the um just the endothelial layer in your skin and just the resistance um uh the bioimpedance resistance uh through the skin they were like burning the skin and it was excruciatingly painful very few of the soviets could handle. And so, you know, that obviously was not going to fly over in America. Well, the creator of what is now the ARP wave device, who at the time, it was before ARP wave existed, he would say that he got lucky. He stumbled upon this waveform that happened to be harmonious to the body. And that became the patented background biphasic waveform of the ARP system so Dennis Thompson being a smart gentleman he was very

similar to me just he's just decades ahead of me as both age and and experience he was trying to do the same thing realizing that if we could figure out a way to eradicate muscle spasm which is really when the brain wants to guard and protect, we can both heal faster because we can absorb force again, and we could also increase performance. So he spent all of his time... And change motor patterns. Well... If you're telling it to...

If you're... Because like right now for my knee, for instance, if I'm going to do something but my muscles won't react... They won't let you because they're guarding and protecting. You have to change that motor pattern, correct? Yeah, so if they didn't guard, then I'd be able to move my knee more. Exactly, and that's why we'll show you today, within a matter of 15, 20 minutes, we'll get you more range of motion because we will literally start to change that motor pattern.

And that's exactly it. At the end of the day, all of sports, all of movement comes down to two simple things. Your body's ability to absorb and generate force. If you jump off a block and land, that force has to go someplace. If your muscles aren't doing their job to lengthen and therefore absorb that force, that force will now go into the ankle, the knee, the hip, the back, and that's where we get our pain. That's where we get our damage.

And then look at the hamster wheel. It's, oh, you tore your knee, MRI, surgery, rehab, and then no one ever goes back. And then you can say, hey, I feel better. I've done my proverbial six months of ACL protocol rehab. You go back and jump off the same block again, and guess what? You tear your knee all over again because we never took care of why couldn't you absorb force.

So by able the, I'll try to fast forward this. So Dennis met the creator, saw the genius in the technology, said, I can really use that. It basically took the Soviet technology and turned it into a way that we could apply it without having all the negative side effects. And then Dennis came up with all of the protocols, the original art protocols, on how do we ascertain where the alpha gamma loop disruptions are so we can actually pinpoint. So for your knee i might be working down on your foot i might be up on your hip who knows the brain your brain knows where it's guarding protecting but everyone wants to say oh the problem is your knee because that's

what you can't move so we're going to work on your knee i guarantee the knee is not the problem that's just where the problem ended up so that's where again a lot of people will get this system wrong because they want to use it like traditional STEM. And then they say, oh, see, I didn't get my results. Well, because they're not looking in the right places and they don't understand the neurological mindset as opposed to the physical mindset. And that's what we have to change. And we've spent a lot of time trying to reeducate that. The other thing, it is still hard.

And we've also gotten, I get a little judgmental, but I feel like we're getting softer and softer. That's one of the reasons why I actually love your podcast because you talk so much about just like you got to go through pain, right? If you want something to change, you really have to just go after it. If you don't learn how to go through that, then if everything were easy, there's no stimulus for the brain to even want to change. And now we've got all these therapies. And everybody would be a fucking badass right exactly and i kind of like it that way because it differentiates me from someone else that's not willing to work um and it it becomes a level playing field because that that is the one thing so um we can get into statistics on like in the the typical nfl guy

that's just that freaking nature and the soviet's understood that one of a thousand people were going to be just that god-given freak nature. If we know that 4.5 million participants start up high school football every year and you just do the math and the percentages, and if there's 1,696 positions in the NFL, if you think about it, roughly 1100 are going to be there because they're just God-given freaks of nature, which only leaves about, you know, 500,

just shy of 500 positions to work for it. However, it doesn't mean it's not possible. So we don't want to kill the kid's dream of, oh, the statistics say you probably won't get there. It's like winning the lottery ticket. Well, no. There's plenty of people who are willing to put forth the earth. The difference is they might be at 95% of their potential, where someone else in the NFL that can already be great is still only at 75% of their potential,

which is scary, but that's kind of my message to them in saying, how great do you want to be? It's not just about, hey, can you get more yards? Can you win more Super Bowl rings? But literally, let's start every year. What does it look like for you to be that much better and that much more? I want, like with Odell, that's the thing. The legendary aspect, and he just wants to go out there and i mean he's the ultimate competitor um and that's where he gets misconstrued because you'll see that competitiveness come out in some of his you know just the uh but i mean imagine it's it's like i mean i rented a car and i'm driving here in new york and part of me loves the aggressiveness drivers but then when you're

just stuck in traffic and you can't go anywhere, it doesn't matter. You could be driving the coolest car ever, but it's frustrating when you just can't go. So anyways, that's another tangent. But yeah, you can tell I really love him, and I want people to understand him better. Anyways. I've always liked him. Yeah, getting back to potential. But not everybody likes me either, so maybe that's why. You know what?

There's so many quotes on like, you must be doing something right if people are hounding you or doing something. I think so. I think so. I'm fine with my reputation. It's fine. Yeah. So I guess it goes back to the hard work. I would say a lot of people just, they would much rather, you know, misery loves company is the saying.

So they would much rather have everyone be miserable with them. There's so many miserable people in the world. Oh, my gosh. It's so bad. Yeah. And that's why my heart is, I mean, to be honest, you know, healing people, getting them stronger, that's the easy part of our job. Creating a culture, creating, and I would say recreating because getting back into that what does it mean to hard work and that's why again the one thing that i would i try to learn

is most from the crossfit world is culture right and that's why i was going back to louis simmons culture how do we really um inspire people to want more for themselves and not just be handheld it's like and i tell every even young kids that walk into my gym, I say, look, I'm not here to make you anything. This is an opportunity. Whatever you do with that opportunity, that's on you. Okay. So I just want to give you the opportunity so that when you go to that, that end of your road, whatever that might look like, you don't look back and ask that horrible question. What if, what if I could have done something more? What if I could have prevented that injury? What if I could have trained smarter? You can't teach that shit, though.

Like, I have people every single day on my Instagram message me and be like, how are you so motivated? Or like, do you think I can make it to the CrossFit Games? These are my stats. And I'm like, if you have to ask someone on Instagram if you can make it to the CrossFit Games, you're not fucking going to the CrossFit Games. No. You should be in the gym working out right now or like. Or not give a fuck about what people say.

Well, yeah. Or your stats. Yeah, you shouldn't be asking anyone anything. I never asked... If I ever asked anybody anything, they'd be like, bro, you're...

None of that's happening. No. You know? But... When people come into the gym, right, how many people, you know, day one, hey, your gym's really cool.

Okay, tell me more about yourself. Well, I want to get leaner. I want to get some more muscle mass. I want to get stronger. i want to get some more muscle mass i want to get stronger i want to you know you hear that from 95 or higher percent of the people that walk into a traditional gym and you you nod and you say okay that's that's nice like yeah everyone and tomorrow they go to mcdonald's well i mean but when we hear all those and we say, all right, are those your goals?

And then we try to reeducate them to say, look, for us, none of those things are actual goals. Those are just byproducts of you being better. Because if I'm actually a good trainer doing my job and I've given you the correct environment to get better and you're putting forth the appropriate effort, shouldn't you be getting leaner? Shouldn't you be getting stronger? Shouldn't you be getting stronger? Shouldn't you be getting healthier? Naturally. So the goal is not, hey, I want to run a 4-3-40 or I want to be able to bench press 225, 25 times. Like those aren't goals.

If you just show up, get better. I mean that's one of my highlights is like everyone wants to look for the new fad, the new like greatest and latest. But you know what? A mediocre program done consistently over time will always beat the best program not done at all and and i say that all the time i literally talk about that all the time especially because everyone you know thinks that someone's program is better than someone else's i'm like yeah the best program is the one that you do and that's that is the one thing and i've fallen in this trap as a trainer because you know i can nerd out like the next guy and i always want to know like how to help and it comes from a servant's heart right i want to serve like anyone that listens that says i want to get

in this field you're not going to get in this field thinking you're going to make millions of dollars this is not you have to have a servant's heart right you have to be there to want other people to be better so people don't truly understand that either i didn't understand that when i was in college going to exercise physiology i remember my coach well my my exercise physiology teacher also was my weightlifting coach because i was on the weightlifting team at university of utah okay the utes and uh we had this huge weightlifting team which was awesome we traveled all over the place. And he's a professor now at somewhere in Massachusetts, I think. His name is Mike Waller.

I hope to God he's listening to this. That would be awesome. But he literally – what were we talking about? Shit. Just the servant culture. Oh, the servant culture. He was like, oh, you better be in this. Don't be in this for the money.

I'm telling you, like, you're not going to make any money money and i'm like yeah oh he's just kidding you know i'm sure there's like some decent money in it you go on google and you look up like how much strength coaches make in the nfl and you start to realize that there's only like 32 yeah 32 of them and then you're like okay that job's pretty hard to get and i just was like no i'm gonna be fine i'm gonna be fine and i opened my gym and this and that and i was like holy shit i don't make anything and then you get some entitled trainers that work for you. And if they knew, I'm like, there was one time I was just like, I paid you more than I paid myself this month because that's just what the gym needed. Cause the gym needed new equipment.

The gym needed this, the gym needed that, blah, blah, blah. That's just being a business owner and going after it. But you start to create your own brand. And once you make a brand, then you start to make money and but you know not very many people are good at making their own brand yes i would agree um but i'd say you have a brand behind yourself right now especially if you're getting called by nfl people well and that can go away you next thing i don't rest a lot on that in the sense that um yes it's cool yes i mean my uh the super bowl 50 year was kind of a breakout year for me as far as being known in that in the league um but that can go away overnight guy nfl guys are

fickle any professional athlete is fickle for the most part um you're their best friend one day the next day they don't even know you so you don't and i mean it sounds harsh but you know what it's it's relationships and people forget the, these guys are young too. And they're, they're put in such a spotlight. Um, but when you're talking about a kid right out of college, I mean, I didn't know which freaking shoe to put on coming out of college. It's like, they don't. So that's why I say you can't expect to come out of college and say like, this is how I'm

going to make my money. No, it's, it's just life. So that's why I say you can't expect to come out of college and say, like, this is how I'm going to make my money. No, it's just life. So it can go away in a moment. And so I still look back to my facility because that's the community I'm in, and that's where it's at. When I give back, I opened up my gym because I wanted to offer to my high school kids the same opportunities that I give to professional athletes and try to do it at an affordable cost that was kind of my first kind of message or like mission statement if you will um and we're still working on trying to create the culture of them seeing the value that they have because we see it like i mean i when i grew up i was like oh my gosh i would have

lived at this place and these kids nowadays we don't have that i mean that's how everything is you get older and you're like shit yeah i really really should have listened to that. I wish I had that. Health is wasted on the youth, unfortunately. So as we get older, I'll be turning 42 this year. I didn't even know what rehab was until I was like 30. I was like, oh, wait, I can use a lacrosse ball? I could do this and I could do that. I can actually work on myself and I probably wouldn't have felt a lot of things I felt.

Oh, gosh. I mean, I could go through the list of all my injuries. I mean, I had fractured back. I've got torn meniscus in both knees. I've got dislocated shoulders. Um, you know, the list goes on and on, but I've never had a surgery, but for the first 10 years out of college, I felt like a decrepit because I had to figure out how am I going to fix myself? And that's really my education in those 10 years was more than anything I ever learned in college. Um, yeah, cause I was literally like, couldn't do anything, but at almost 42, I can put up more numbers now than I could when I was back in college and I'm healthier doing it. Um, and that's really what I, you know, bring everyone else. And my whole point was, is that

if I can figure out how to fix guys and I can teach them how to not be injured in the first place what do you think that's going to do their performance it makes the performance enhancement that much easier so that's where the system comes in but back to business I mean I would say this is the first year I realized oh I haven't actually created a business yet I've created a whole bunch of more jobs for myself. So anyone that wants to do a business and say, I want to start my own gym, realize that if you just say, Hey, I'm a really good trainer and I'm tired of working for the man. So I'm going to just do this better and do it on my own. Well, now you become not just the head trainer, but you're the manager, you're the custodian, you're the guy who pays all the bills. You're, I mean, there's

all this other stuff that you're like, holy crap. And if you don't know anything about business, that's even harder. And then you realize, okay, I've just created more jobs for myself. But until you can get your gym to the point where if anyone walked in and said, this place is awesome, I want to replicate what you do over in my city over here. Can you give me like an operations manual on how you do it? Until you can get it. So it's whether you do this or not, but I always say that if, if your gym is in a position where you could franchise it to somebody else and they could run it like you do, you still haven't created a business yet. And to be honest, that's what I'm working on right now.

It's because the hard part is, is like, if I were to get into an auto accident and die tomorrow, my gym, unfortunately kind of goes away because everyone wants what I do and so much stuff is locked up into my brain. I'm still working out. How do I get this on paper? How do I teach my staff this? And that's where, if you're going to work for me, you know, I'm very picky because it's like, I'm going to have to invest in you to get out this information. That's making me think about so many things right now. Oh gosh. Because I hire people all the time and I'm like, all right, here's what I'm thinking. Here's what I know.

I've been doing this for X amount of years. Here's what I need you to convey to others. And then, like, they just don't grasp it. And I'm like, you're fired. Next person. You're fired. Next person. And then, like, and I keep going through all these people, and there's just always, like, it's like a girlfriend.

It's like there's just one thing off, you know? Like, I'm like, you're so good, but if you just had this one thing, I would love you so much. I wish firing that would be a lot easier. There's a lot more cost to that. Oh, gosh, yeah. But that's how I feel about most of my employees. I mean, not every single one. They're going to listen to this right now and be like, you dick.

My coaches are – actually, my coaches crush. It's more of my desk staff or assistants who kind of help me with things that I just really need help with. Or sometimes I'll ask trainers to help me with workouts. I'm like, hey, can you write a couple workouts? Let me just see if you could write a week of workouts for me. And they have to to learn. And then you have to go through those mistakes too. And I look through it and I'm like, no, I can't use this. I just can't.

Because I have this huge online community of people who follow the workouts that we do in the gym and financially it is what keeps me going yeah because the gym doesn't make nearly as much as i'd like it to so like the stress of giving someone else to make a couple workouts for me is like very stressful and to this day no one has ever made one besides me so anybody out there who follows my online program like no one has ever made what workout besides me that would be a good podcast challenge write the best workout if your workout gets chosen i'll come hire you that's a good interviewing process actually is really good wow i'm gonna get a lot of emails right now absolutely gosh this place just got quiet it's hard to think all of a sudden quiet I'm going to get a lot of emails right now. Absolutely.

Gosh, this place just got quiet and it's hard to think all of a sudden. It's really quiet. It's fine. Ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch.

Ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch. So. Okay. I can crank these levels up and then we can just talk a little bit lower and we're good. So it's almost like dimming the lights. Yeah, but we still have the same levels on the lower, and we're good. So it's almost like dimming the lights.

Yeah, but we still have the same levels on the thing, so we're good. Okay, so don't start doing the... So what are some of the things that you guys do for recovery? Are you guys doing anything interesting for recovery, especially with your NFL athletes? It's easier on them because I can do a lot more fine-tuning one-on-one stuff, which would be a different answer than let's say my gym for the masses um because i think most people think of recovery they think of like

i'm gonna foam roll for 10 minutes which is an abomination to the world and then or they're just gonna ride the bike for five minutes or they'll go for a walk for five minutes or maybe jesus maybe they'll do another workout at like a lower intensity right you know i mean there's a lot of things that people are doing for or ice ice baths, hot, just kind of depends on like what people believe in as far as what they think recovery is. So the hardest part is dealing with the, well, it makes me feel better. Most people's gauge, if something is good or bad is how do I feel? And they don't actually think more of a long term of what kind of adaptations am I trying to achieve, right?

If you, again, Dr. Andy Galpin, you know, he was, I think a while back, was showing some studies on, you know, ice baths right after a workout and how it minimizes hypertrophy and how, I mean, but... Minimizes hypertrophy, huh? Yeah, but there's pros and cons. The point that he makes, which is most everyone's point, is nothing is all good, nothing is all bad. I mean, yes, I'm not going to say, hey, let's go recover by drinking some cyanide. There are a few all bad things.

And those are things that need to be eliminated. You get some crazy stuff. I still remember the craze of how much weight could you squat while standing on a BOSU or like a Swiss ball kind of crazy stuff. I still remember the craze of, like, how much weight could you squat while standing on a BOSU or, like, a Swiss ball kind of stupid stuff. Oh, I saw that. I mean. And those, like, hoverboards. People were doing them on hoverboards.

Did you see that? Oh. Like, having hoverboard races with. No, they were, like, doing 315 back squats on hoverboards. Some NFL guy did it with, like, 400 pounds. Who else? You can be good and you can be stupid all at the same time. Yeah.

That's gosh. And my brain just went, I was just picturing, uh, you know, yoke carry hoverboard races. I forget who it was. It was someone really,

really famous. Did like four or five back squat on a fucking hoverboard. That doesn't surprise me though. And that's the kind of thing. That's a great example of you can just be so God given talented, but that i'm surprised we didn't have the hoverboard squat craze that came out from that because that's where we get it oh if if if von miller does it then that's must be what i should do as opposed to no von miller's von miller and he can do that matter of fact he could be doing even some other things to be even that much better you are still you let's let's work on

you let's be basic makeup yeah and you know so back to recovery yeah recovery um it's hard to say like what because it's we don't really do anything that's i would say cookie cutter it's always about where you at in your process which attribute are we trying to create adaptation for you know so what type of stuff do you do for OBJ? Oh, gosh. Just for recovery. So when we were in his... We hit performance enhancement a little bit.

We were in his rehab. I mean, if you actually look back through his Facebook, the OBJ Moore, whatever he's been doing, if you go back to the very first one, you'll see a quick snippet where he's laying in a bathtub with a whole bunch of wires attached to him which is something again you couldn't do with traditional stem but it was actually a recovery program that i designed for him that was a complete autonomic rebalancing protocol this is after a workout this was in between because we were at the time we we were doing typically four workouts a day.

Plus other types of recovery modalities based on where we're at and looking at the next day. Let me give a great example. What was the duration of each workout? Like 30 minutes or an hour? No. I always try to keep most workouts, as far as the main intense part of the workout, to an hour. Because then you start to get into cortisol release and other hormone responses afterwards. So this is where more,

it's not always better. It's always better to break it up. Huge on like three times a day. Like they, they kind of go off of testosterone levels. Yeah. I mean the Bulgarian system, where people talk about the Bulgarians.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, in various things and you can do that, but their workouts would, it was getting max out, get out and then snatch. And then later on they clean and jerk and then later on they squat exactly um and then you know they're also juiced out of their mind so

their recovery abilities and when you talk about being able to pick the cream of the crop right when you have a government who literally says i'm going to rip you out of your home because you seem like a promising athlete and we're going to take the top 30 people in the entire country throw you in this program and we're going to destroy 27 of you and then the three of you that actually make it are going to be world champs so if you want to sign up for that okay great go for it now um travis mash is great at saying hey don't throw out the baby with the bathwater i mean he's wrote written some i think some great programming uh using that saying that's where his squad every day kind of program came from was, all right, the mere mortals can do this too if you're smart.

We're not going to absolute maxes. We're going to daily maxes. That's why Brian Mann and his work really bringing to light velocity-based training I think is phenomenal. So if you have a gym set up or, again, if you're working more one-on-one, instead of working to a percent, we're always working to a velocity. Because as your central nervous system is either recovered or not recovered, it doesn't mean you can't work out. It just means you need to work out proportional to what you're capable of doing. So velocity-based training is a great auto-regulator in terms of that. So how would someone train for velocity training?

So you just need something that can measure velocity, like your typical Tendo unit, GymAware for the more expensive. It's kind of like the gold standard right now um of um have a tethered unit but anyone doing anything with a barbell so even your olympic lifts um you have to take another considerations um just because velocities are different even changing of heights like if you and i right now we're doing a snatch my velocity is going to be different than yours just because i have a longer travel um but uh knowing that the um what is shown in the research is that um once you find your velocity curve so let's say you started with um just using examples they were squatting some maximal weight and you're pushing as hard as you can which also shows the intentionality of training which I think is a quality that doesn't get trained in a lot in traditional

training. But let's say you and I are both at 50% of our one rep max. And we're thinking, oh, this feels really light. If you don't mentally try to put all your effort in the bar, you're not going to get out of it. So you're not actually producing as much force,

even for the same way. That's why you like, um, when I'm traveling if i'm at just some hotel gym and aisles i have is some dumbbells or something you can still get a fantastic workout if your intentionality um meets the challenge and you can still move light weights really fast anyways um as you go up and up the bar velocity is getting slower and slower up until your one rep max and whatever whatever that velocity is, you can actually plot that curve and start to see that,

Hey, when you are at 80%, your velocity should be right around here. Or, you know, and so, and then there's a fairly generic breakdowns of like, um,

you know, for, for speed training, if you will. Um, I'm going to say speed. We're not talking about sprint, like running training,

but, um, we're talking speed strength, speed strengths to be roughly right around 0.8, you know, to 0.95 meters per second. Once you start to go a little bit low that we're in an accelerative strength, you know, so down to like 0.5 and then anything from 0.5 down to 0.3 or even like 0.15. And again, shorter distance, like a deadlift is going to be slower than a squat. Um, you know, you're getting to maximal effort. So if I get my gym, um, when I'm working with our athletes, we try to never have any misses. And so, um, you know, if you're squatting and we're working up, you know, as soon if I know my guy's strength curve and let's say, um, he just drops below that 0.3 and he's down to

like 0.25, guess what? He's done. Because I know if he goes to that next weight up, good chance that he's going to miss. I would rather be able to save a little bit in the tank and to be able to go hard, more consecutive days, then get up to a point where you're missed. Now your brain goes, ah, I hate that miss. Now there's that bad motor pattern. Now there's also the mental aspects of it. Um, so again, now this is all tying together a little bit with what you do now. Yeah. So, okay. Let me, when i have someone new to my gym and a lot of times again the the hard part is is that most people step into the gym because of some insinuating incidents where it's like now i'm injured now i'm forced to stop now i'm forced to do something

different so they hear about us really from the injury side of things okay we hear about this guy chris he can help us with injury so they come in then we get to re-educate them and most of them stay and then continue to train with us because once we get them over the acute injury, they're like, I just want to keep getting better. So we transition them. But we tell them, like, when I look out at my gym, I don't see, you know, the squat rack and this and that and the other. Those are just tools. What I see is opportunities to send information to the brain. Okay.

They're just forms of stimuli. So it's not just, Hey, getting the squat rack and squat. It's, you know, everyone wants to focus on the reps and the weight. Okay. Those, yes, that's stimulus, but that's not the only thing, you know, what's the load and what's the velocity that you're moving, you know, what's your position, you know, just changing position, going from a, you know, flat feet to a heel lift, right. In an Olympic shoe changes the stimulus. Um, you know, the type of bar you use, right? In an Olympic shoe changes the stimulus. Um, you know, the type of bar you use, right, right here, I'm looking at, you know, a fat bar, a yoke bar,

rager bar, you know, that's going to change the stimulus. It's going to change the angles. It's going to change the perception of the brain and what's going on. But then also knowing like, what if this person's dealing more with the thoracic weakness where someone else is dealing more with the glute activation weakness. Someone else has no hamstrings. Someone else, you know, has valgus knee. Those are all bits of stimulus. And then you talk about, all right, what's your breathing pattern right before? What's your breathing pattern as you get set up?

What is your mentality? Which direction are your eyes looking? I mean, these are all now really minute details. Those are the things that I look for when I'm coaching. Whereas other coaches are looking for the much bigger picture. Most coaches are looking for, can you get down and can you get back up yeah and and they think okay great and we have a plethora of you know junior high and now high school kids thinking I'm gonna go to the next level and all their weight room coaches are go down go up and guess what whatever

muscles you use to do that are now getting stronger because they're under a load so you're thinking great I could put more weight on the bar and then all the coaches happy and they wonder why week six you blow out your ACL. And even though we have better gyms, better equipment, better doctors, better everything, what's happening to our injury rates? They're just getting worse. And these are the reasons why. People are trying to get too strong too fast.

Everything too fast. They want to get money too fast. They want to get strong too fast. Instant gratification. They want to be younger faster. People are Botoxing the shit out of themselves. It's like if you walk around where I live in Orange County, everyone looks like a fucking blow-up balloon in their face.

It's ridiculous. I'm like, I don't even know who you are anymore. You're like part human, part cartoon. Yeah, you're not people now that are losing their thoracic curve not because of iPhones but because they're lipstick out too far. And iPhones are actually, that's a good point. Like we're all getting crushed right now at this. Yes.

Anterior like shoulder, just like coming in, just crushing. And we're all just stuck here. It's like everyone who comes in the gym, they're like, what's they're like, I can't,

I'll never overhead squat. I'm like, Oh, you will. We just have to talk about a few things for a while. Yeah. So you can put your arms over your head. And then there's the,

well, isn't this the two week program to get me to do everything perfectly yes even though it took me years to get here yeah it is incredible cell phones are ruining the world i actually saw this really good thing with kelly starrett where he's like he tells everyone to like rotate their shoulders back and put your phone in front of you like this and he calls it like shavasana he's like shavasana arms up and then so like literally if you ever see me text i'm always like that i try to like always put my shoulders back pull my lats down and i like text that's i'm like in full snatch position before i do a text message there you go you know how they have like heads up displays now on cars

so you can just look straight ahead you need to have the like these holographic heads up texting displays. It's going to be like a chip in your eyeball. Yeah, I think eventually we're going to have some weird stuff like that. I just got the new XS phone or whatever. It's legitimately the size of a 13-inch MacBook. You walk past the store and it just drains

all the lights. Literally literally it's the biggest phone i haven't even used it yet because i'm too embarrassed to bring it out oh my gosh yeah mine's still all cracked up i think i think i still have like the five the five yeah no you are 42 yeah i love it my girls were texting me last night can you take down an old post man i wish they could listen now. They told you to take a post down? So when I first started, I'm still very social media illiterate. And some of my very first posts, honestly, were me doing musical.lys with my little girls when they were little. And I still have them down there.

And now they're like my oldest two are in junior high. And they texted me last night. Most of our friends are now looking at your Instagram accounts because i was posting some stuff with obj um the other night and they're like yeah my our friends are doing it and can you take down those posts because they're so embarrassing and they use this word i didn't even know what the uh some word that basically meant it was embarrassing so anyways well you could be like me you have like a naked handstand walk going dude i almost i almost did the same thing after i was like this needs to be a movement so sick all day i mean yeah here i am posting you know things with obj and you know some high

school kid with his cat puking is like getting you know more likes anything with a cat is a given that's true yeah really hot chicks or cats hot chicks actually dogs hot dennis and we're hot dennis i hope she's listening she listens to my podcast sometimes if you are i love you i'm kidding i know you're married but i still love you all right um i'm gonna come to la to get my teeth cleaned um let's leave people with a couple big tips that like maybe i don't know maybe like your top five top three like whatever you think is like very very important for everyone to know as far as how to be a better athlete and how to improve their performance in in your way versus like the natural way that everyone is used to looking at things like give them a little twist

things they can take out of this episode to say all right i'm gonna try one or two of these things um you know i'm getting yeah yeah um yeah without having all of our you know like a little fancy stuff i mean if we want to go back to some of the basics um you know again the average person with the gym i want to be bigger, faster, stronger, right? If you won, I would say there's nothing to get around putting forth the effort and being consistent. Consistency is the key. Number two.

What do you define as consistency for someone who wants to... Ah, shit. I know it has to be very specific. Let's just go with a football player. How many days a week do you think they should be working out? Because that's important. You know, the hard part is...

For someone who's already pretty good and needs to get to the next level, and they want to get bigger, stronger, faster. Because I know your answer is not going to be seven days a week, which most people think it is. Well, see... Unless there's skills to do on those other two days. I would say, because we have to broaden the definition of working out because what I say is, is the train is not just the hour you put in the gym. You know, training is now the thing that says, if you're really hungry about, I want to steward my potential.

I want to be the best I can be. So you set aside the numbers to say, all right, today, can I be better than yesterday? So everything starts to dictate. It's the thing that says, you know, especially for my younger guys and stuff, it's this thing that says you know especially for my younger guys and stuff it's this thing that says hey you need to recover so therefore you need to sleep so when all your buddies want to stay up late and go partying you're going to be making that choice to go to bed it's the thing that says everyone else is just going to stop and eat some junk well i need to fuel my body because i need to recover from my previous workout and i need to be ready for tomorrow's workout so i'm going to make this

wiser food choice a lot of it is people want some miraculous thing but a lot of it is just common sense and the people the gurus in our field they don't like that because they want to be some mysterious you know wizard of oz like they have some magic ingredient they don't and that's the thing even me coming up with my education i want to learn from everybody which is still a good thing and i still am but i'm no longer looking for that Wizard of Oz magic workout. Magic pill. Yeah. And so that's why, again, a Louis Simmons would say,

he would even say, I'm not the smartest guy, but I've done this thing, this program. There's probably even better programs out there, he would say. But my program, I've known it inside and out for the last three, four-plus decades. So I know how to manipulate that program, and that's how he gets such great results. But if you're trying to one program and you just said, all right, I didn't get my result in four weeks. So now I'm gonna do the next program to the next program, the next program you've, I mean,

for me, um, a single workout, uh, wave, um, is no less than 12 weeks. So how we do our programming is minimum of like 12 week blocks, because we're looking at all the different things that we want to build for those particular adaptations. And how many days are they in the gym? Um, are my athletes, my athletes minimum are four and most of the time up to six. Okay.

And then how many of those days are they working out at 70 plus percent effort? Again, depending on the training cycle. Um, I mean, again depending on the training cycle um i mean again we will have um a typical exercise can be i would say above um 83 up to 93 percent you know five to six days a week okay yeah um and that's like is that in season training kind of in snow you have that lower volume for out of season correct not lower volume but like we that's where we go back to more than 10 obviously

you're not going to no that's serious doms no so what we're doing um in season is a lot more of the velocity based work so um and that's something people don't understand too is um when i have i know people are trying to do hypertrophy in the middle of the season it's like yeah dude you missed out well actually but people need to think about that too um what gets labeled as hypertrophy everyone thinks like oh that's about muscle getting bigger as opposed to increased just you can do increased light volumes i mean we'll have days where it's just like in between you'll grab just, you know, um, five kilo plates and just do, you know, 30 lateral raises. So technically that's hypertrophy work. Now, no one's going to get super massive jack shoulders from doing that, but it still classifies as hypertrophy work.

But what is that? It's just extra volume. And, um, we'll do a lot of isometric work. Um, we'll do a lot of, I mean, we'll do like five minute isometric holds. We'll do a lot of, you know, things that work more on the connective tissue, tendon strength. That's really important. But in season, a lot of it is velocity based. And so they're working at submaximal weights, but with the accommodating resistance and the ability to maintain high velocities. Um, because, and here's the other thing when you're younger, younger can get away with a lot more, um, and realize that they need more time under the,

under tension. When we first started doing, um, or in testing out more of like Louie's stuff and conjugate system, um, my older guys were blown up, but my younger guys, we weren't getting the same results. And it just took me a little bit of time to realize it's like, they're just so young they need more time under the bar they have no motor control they have no all this other stuff so they just needed more volume and so they responded really well with hypertrophy type training um and they could recover from that and it wasn't a big deal and it's actually they can recover more because it's not all max effort work. The older training you go, the less, um, for example, increases in your one rep max squat, which are shown to correlate highly with sprint speed, vertical jump, that type of thing. However, once your training age gets up to a

certain point and you can already squat two to two and a half times your body weight, it's a diminishing return. And also the amount of time it takes to increase that one rep max, you don't have that, especially in the NFL when they don't really care how much I can squat, they need to be faster. They need to be able to jump higher, jump further, that kind of stuff. So having a squat base is important, but then realize that in the off season, it's like, all right, get into where they need to be. Then in season we want to maintain, but it's, I don't like the word maintain. You either getting better you're not it's you know so we don't maintain the system but now it's like all right what else can we still work on to improve which is we can do the explosive strength we can do that kind of work um and then we do a

lot a lot of recovery so going back to recovery recovery, um, everything like, you know, we'll do work on nutrition. I mean, part of what I do is I'm, um, I'm also, um, a certified phlebotomist in, in IV tech. So, you know, we'll do custom IV therapies. Um, we'll do, um, again, a lot of the, the neural recovery stuff, the big vitamins and stuff you're putting in the IVs. Um, it can be as simple as, is, uh, you know,-complex, glutathione, branched-chain amino acids, that type of stuff. We'll do, you know. BCAs in the IV?

Yeah, you can do. That's badass. Well, actually, the BCAs, that's an IM shot. But you can do, like, the glutathione push. You can do all the, you know, B vitamins. You know, if pre-venom, you know, just gettingom, just getting cold so they don't get sick. What's the absorption rate from something like that versus like taking a pill? Your pill?

It's a lot more. It's easily digestible because that's a whole other thing. I mean we have taken consideration all the gut issues people have now. That's a whole other thing. I'm getting very interested in that. I've been looking into that a little bit, but, uh, it's insanely interesting. Yeah. How like pretty much everything can come from that area is out of control. Yeah. You know, your nutritionist, they're big on how the guts, the second brain, you know, that's kind of becoming a popular phrase. Um, but it does affect quite a bit. And so that's one thing when I look at

someone coming in with healing, if I'm not getting a response, cause it is pretty straightforward. We can predict how quickly we can get someone back from, from injuries. Um, and so if I don't have, um, that prediction being hit, um, as readily as I would expect, one of the first things I look at is do you have an autoimmune issue? Um, because sometimes things get lingered, um, and the amount of inflammation that stays in the system because the autoimmune response, but then the brain, because again, it's systemic. So like for me, I mean, I've got torn meniscus in both knees, but I can still run, jump, squat, whatever. Cause I can, I know how to keep my muscles activated. Um, however, there'll be times where all of a sudden I'm like,

my knees just like blowing up with inflammation, what's going on. And it's not responding to my normal stuff. I'll look back and be like, all right, what's my gut health looking like right now? Um, sometimes it's, it's, uh, it's not, it's, it's simple. And as far as like understanding the connection, not so simple to take care of it. Um, but that's where you look at, you know, being a cesarean born, I was born with croup and so immediately was whisked away, um, in the ICU with antibiotics and all that. I mean, newborn baby. So it's like, you know, but that's just my history. So I got to deal with it. Um, yeah, you can go on a whole line on nutrition. Whole point is, is that all this stuff works together. You don't just be like, Hey, here's my great

weight training program. And I want to be a superstar. Well, again, you're more involved within than just how much weight are you lifting? Um, so, um, also look at, uh, timing. That's, that's another big point I'd like to make. Um, so we'll do soft tissue modalities. I'm totally fine with various, you know, there's some really great, um, massage therapists and practitioners, but timing is also important. It's not just about feel good. Um kind of timings are we talking about here? Here's an example. No more specifics. There was an NFL guy that I was talking with, I worked with previously, but then hadn't worked with for several months.

He ended up tearing his Achilles one game. That's a long recovery right there. Yeah, it is. It's difficult. Again, if you don't stay ahead there's ways we can help guys much faster with that but my concern for him was he didn't understand why um because it's obviously if you look at most those injuries most acl injuries most uh achilles type injuries they're they're non-contact injuries um this year right the the quarterback uh for san

francisco um because they caught that on view and everything so that kind of went viral watching him take a misstep and blown out his knee again that that can be really looked at from a neurological perspective and if people understood um how the brain interpreted that moment they would see oh this is why that muscle shut off this is why that force went into the knee this is why he was unstable um but you know my buddy with the achilles issue um what i didn't know and as i was going through like all of his regimen well that particular week he decided to get an additional massage on sunday morning before the game because he wanted to feel good and what i had to explain to him was that when he got that massage, all of a sudden,

when you lengthen the Golgi tendon and the muscle spindles, the neurological response slows down. And so, yes, you feel good. You feel all limber. And yet when he was doing his back, he's a corner when he was doing his back pedal and had to stop plant and cut and go in the other direction, his brain saying, Oh, it doesn't get the signaling that hey that muscle is lengthening and i need to now contract and go in the other direction and when he did that cut bam there it goes oh it makes me cringe and that's what's so it's the same thing there was um several years ago i know there was a big thing that came out from one of the crossfit game or there was a i think it was a crossfit games where they were doing like these like max effort deadlifts and then going right into like box jumps.

Yep. And they had, everybody was blowing them. Everyone was blowing them. And they wonder why it's like, do you really think that it was because the, their Achilles were not strong enough? And it's even not the Achilles it's what is the Achilles attached to? It's the fact that when you fatigue something and then you call upon it. that's why i say it's not just about strength we're so focused on how strong are you well you can squat a thousand pounds and then step off the curb and slip on a patch of ice and blow out your acl so it's not just how strong are you but can you turn it on at velocity and does the information work correctly so going to one of the tidbits where the isometric work or where we actually go into an extreme range of motion.

So picture doing a Bulgarian lunge for five minutes straight. So while you're in that, you're not just holding it, right? What we're actually, this is, this would be a tidbit of how you can apply this to multiple exercises. So we'll use the Bulgarian lunge, for example. When you're in that position, if I just said, get in the position, your back foot's rested up on a bench, right? Your front foot's out. You're in great position, right? Your front leg is at 90 degrees. And I say, all right, now you're going to be here for five minutes in that position. Most people pumping it out or just holding it. No, you're just holding it. So most people would resist the

ground by pushing their foot down. And therefore they're really performing a slight concentric contraction, meaning the muscles are shortening, and they're trying to hold themselves up as if someone was pushing them down, which is gravity. What we want to do is change that motor pattern, and instead of thinking push into the ground and resist the ground, we want to pull into the ground. So what would that look like if you can visualize instead of having your quad burning right because you're trying to do a leg extension instead engage your glute and your hamstring to do a leg curl so you're now pulling down which then because of reciprocal inhibition you're going to work on turning off or lengthening that quad so it can continue to absorb more and more force and then how that translates the motor pattern now see how that translates out into the field when i have to go and make that cut when my foot hits the ground in plants what i don't want to do

is immediately resist the ground because then when my knee is bending because gravity times my body is forcing that knee into flexion if my quad is is turning on, it's now shortening. And where is it pulling? It's pulling on the tibia and it's pulling on my hip, which is where, again, you're going to blow out that ACL if that translates that tibia forward, or we're going to have hip pain or back pain. Instead, the first thing that happens when I hit the ground is my, my, and again, all this should be subconscious, which is the difference being training versus the display of the training. training we do these five minutes or other things so we have the motor pattern that when my foot hits the ground i am now pulling into the ground my hamstring is active and so quick side note i'll talk about hamstring importance that's another big one that i think

is sorely missing in all of our barbell sports is just overall hamstring strength and leg curls don't cut it but if my hamstring strength and leg curls. Don't cut it. But if my hamstring can activate, pull into the ground, therefore inhibiting the quad from tightening. So now the quad can lengthen that quad, like a rubber band stretching can absorb the force. Once that force is absorbed,

it stops, turns from that kinetic into potential energy. Now we actually push off. All this happens at a split second at a time, which means the information to the muscles to fire correctly has to happen at velocity, which is the other extreme. So the Soviets understood if you want to get fast, you either train really, really fast or really, really slow. The in-between stuff, it gets muddled up. So one more example, if that's not clear, let's say we're doing an eccentric bench press. And people say, oh, if you want to get strong, do eccentric training. And people say, but you can't do it very often

because you're tearing the muscle and you got a long recovery time. Well, I believe that it's because of how people are doing it is a big part of the problem. If you wanted to do a, let's say you're doing a 10 second, um, eccentric bench press, instead of thinking, I'm going to count in my head and I'm going to hold the weight up, which means think about it. You're actually tightening your pec, tightening the anterior shoulder, tightening the tricep. Imagine pulling the bar to you for 10 seconds. So what is that going to do? You're going to activate your back, your lats. That's why again, people just bench press and get underneath the bar and start pushing away as opposed to even a correct setup, right? But engage your back, engage your lats.

Now start to pull the bar to you. What you're doing now is inhibiting that chest. It's starting to lengthen and open up because this is where the funny thing between science and experience, it doesn't make a lot of sense saying, well, if I'm not holding the weight up, wouldn't the weight just collapse to me?

Well, sliding filament theory is still just a theory, right? Sliding filament theory doesn't explain eccentric contraction. So again, there's, there's a lot of what ifs, but what I know is when we do like one of our exercises at our gym is we do a ton of altitude drops. So simply stand on a box, take a foot off, fall to the ground. And the key though, is we stick our landings like a gymnast that would stick their landing for that perfect 10, right? We want to see everything activate in the correct sequence and at velocity appropriately.

So if I see someone land and stick a landing, if they rebound back up, if their knees collapse in valgus, if their knees move forward, if they fall forward at the waist, those are all just signs of an inappropriate muscle now having to take the brunt of the force because the right muscles didn't do their jobs when we teach our athletes how to pull into the ground again activate the hamstring fire the glute sit back in the correct position all sudden they can absorb way more force and how do we know that because i can immediately move them up higher i mean we'll do i've had myself and some of the athletes, we'll be doing 60-inch altitude drops, falling off five feet in the air, just stick the landing.

And if you don't turn on the muscles correctly, things get hurt. So by seeing that and seeing how we can absorb force, immediately what happens is that translates onto the field, and they're saying, my reaction time's faster. When I go to make that cut, I can cut faster, they're not as wobbly and they're more balanced because that's another one of our tidbits is we never train balance. Balance, we say, is just a byproduct of your muscles working correctly. If your muscles can absorb force correctly, you'll just be balanced. If you have someone do like a one-leg RDL, if they're not pulling in the ground, if they're not, uh, working the muscles correctly,

they'll be unstable and off balance. So you don't train the balance. You train the muscles to work correctly, and then you just are balanced. So then when guys are pulling correctly, they can hit the ground, their brain responds appropriately, that force is absorbed. So now they can shoot in the other direction, uh, and their reaction time, their cut times, their, you know, their stability, all that just goes up. So that would be the example of how to train more neurologically speaking so that we can get the appropriate motor patterns. I think when you said people don't have really, really great hamstring strength and glute strength, I think that's like spot on. So like I have a physical therapist in my gym and literally she just talks about people's glutes like not firing like ever.

Right. And then I think that could be a product also of like weak hamstrings as well. So. Yeah. Our favorite thing. What are some big things that you guys do for that? I mean besides thinking about pulling. Right.

We do ton and ton of volume of glute ham work. I think a glute ham is so traditional and so underutilized. It's amazing. Like. Are you talking about like a glute hamstring machine? Well, both. So my gym um has the traditional you know ghd's um and we also have um like the west side of barbell uh glute

ham machines um which he calls the inverse curl uh we also have a whole bunch of poor glute hams which is just the flat on the ground like a nordic curl um you know you'll see people do all the time where like you know their knees are on the on a ground someone's holding their feet and they fall down and they just fall down they do a push-up back up and it's like are you doing a push-up are you trying to work your hamstrings and the problem is is that most people don't have the strength so even a traditional ghd people don't have most people do not have the strength to do it correctly so what happens is they the first thing you'll see is people that actually aren't doing a glute hand they'll just do a back extension, right?

And they'll use it like a 45 degree back. And you say, okay, no, start off flat. We're going to pull all the way up, actually utilizing your hamstring. Then they can't do it. So what they'll do is

they'll move the foot plate back. They need their knees on top of the pad, correct? Correct. Instead of behind the pad. Right. So they have to understand the history first.

The history of the GHD really was the Soviet gymnastics program where they would take a pommel horse. ghd stands for glute hamstring developer everyone thinks it stands for shredded abs that's right got it you know give me the med ball and start doing russian twists right yeah you know the handle on that side is great for the for them to rest their hand or their you know their their bag um but i always tell people that they're like i want to use some GHDs.

I'm like, you realize that that's a glute hamstring developer. I want you to understand that. You're not going to the GHD. You're going to the ABS. Exactly. Yeah. Looks good, though. You're going to use that from now on with your athletes.

Get off the ABS, get on the GHD. That's right. Yeah, get off your ASS, and then let's go to the GHD. Right. No, so what happens, you're right, is the knees need to be on top, and most people can't, so they have their knees far back, and so they're really fulcruming off their upper thigh almost to their hip, and then they're wondering why, okay, I'm not really getting stronger.

I'll tell you one story I had. Do you like people to go all the way down to, like, and then they're wondering why, okay, I'm not really getting stronger. I'll tell you one story I had. Do you like people to go all the way down to, like, 90 and then, like, maybe push off of, like, like if you're on a JHD, sometimes we'll put, like, a 45-pound bar there and then across so that you don't have to go, like, all the way down? So you'll, like, low, eccentrically load, then hit, you get to, like, that flat 180 degree and then hit the bar and then kind of push yourself back up and then repeat. Or do you like to go all the way down? All right. I'll give you, I'll give you, here's, here's one of my, here's one of my million dollar, but 5 cent secrets.

So if you ever get a chance to come to my gym, um, most of my equipment is, is custom. I've got a guy, I'll just give a shout out to bridge bridge built, um, out of, uh, Ohio, um, who, uh, builds all my equipment. So, um, one of the things I say is most gyms are not set up to hurt people. They're set up to help people just because it's more about, you know, Oh, this feels good. Right. That's why we have the, you know, the, the sea of elliptical machines everywhere, right. As opposed to just things that really work the body. So, um, in my gym, all of our regular GHDs you'll see under this monstrous, um, power rack really. And it goes, uh, above where we can, um, attach bands. And so what we do, um, for our younger guys or people that just

need to go. And the other thing, it's not even just younger guys. Um, I started another 300 plus pound lineman, um, two weeks ago at our gym. And these guys have tremendous knee problems. Why? Because they've always been big. And so they've never been able to do any kind of true hamstring work. Um, they're never going to be able to get into a regular glute ham. Um, and so they're just said, screw it. We'll just keep squatting. Then we'll just throw a whole bunch of knee braces on us and hope that our knees don't blow up. Well, with both the inverse curl from Westside Barbell and with this technique, I'm telling you, now we can even get 300 pound guys to do this and do it correctly. So take your GHDs, throw them under a power rack where you have a pull-up bar. Idea if they're higher, it's better, like the 9 to 10 foot. And then you can just attach bands, put the band, you know, grab it with your hands, put it behind your head.

So now you can keep your hips forward so your glutes are engaged. And that's the number one thing. If you watch most people in a GHD, they'll go down and they come up. And they'll lose their back curvature as they're coming down? Well, what happens is, is think about the concentric part. They shoot their hips up and their butt sticks up as they come up. Okay. Because this is the problem.

The hamstrings, remember, attach below the knee, but they also attach above the hip. So they work on hip extension. So the lower hamstrings have gotten work because most people have done, hey, I've done my regular leg curl. But the upper hamstring, as it ties in with the glutes for hip extension, it's a motor pattern issue. It's both a strength issue and a motor pattern issue. We have to get them stronger, but their motor pattern is to collapse the hip. And then we wonder why people can't extend and push off in their sprinting. And then when they can't extend and press off in their sprinting, then they use more hip flexion to pull the knee through and then they

overextend. And that's one of the most common ways that people will tear a hamstring sprinting. Are you still looking for them to come to 90 and back up? I mean, not 90, 180 and up, or do you want them to go past that on the way down? We do a lot of different variations. And again, think more conjugate style. You work whatever is your greatest weakness. So like for me, for example, I have a propensity more towards an anterior pelvic tilt. So I will actually go into intentionally a more posterior pelvic tilt, tuck in my glutes underneath, and then that puts my body in a little bit of a rounded position.

So my head will probably, instead of staying at, um, we'll say 180, I'll drop down to maybe like 165 degrees and then I'll come back up. But that's a very specific thing. Sometimes I'll be fully bent over if I want to work the lower hamstring, but that band is helping you come back up a little bit. So the band, so let's go back to our traditional. So our traditional GHD, right, your knees are on the pad, you're up vertical, you're going to go down to parallel, right, to the ground.

The hips stay engaged and therefore forward the whole time. But so that you can get the motor pattern and build your strength, we'll hang the band above, you'll grab it, put it on the back, you know, you're holding it with your hands, but we'll lock it into the back of the head so that people aren't turning into a tricep extension. And then as you're going down, as the exercise is getting harder, you're getting a little bit more band assistance. But then as you come up, the band is getting lighter. So it really works well for an appropriate strength curve. I like that yeah but now we can have uh younger

guys or even bigger guys that just need to bring that strength back up to a proportionate level now they can do the volume it's it's not i don't know why people don't do this more often i think of this because we do it with like pull-ups right how many people walk in the gym i can't do a pull up and if yeah and if you just grab a pull-up bar and try to yank at it all day long you're never going to get it yeah but you have to get into a rep range that you can start to build strength so you have to go sub maximal so what do we do we either use an assisted pull-up machine or we grab some bands right i'm in essence doing the same thing but just put it with a glute ham knowing the importance of the glute ham but the the i think the importance of the glute ham has been so either not understood

or devalued so we do all of our barbell lifts and whatever motor pattern you have let you know because everyone else talking about oh you're quad dominant well what does that really mean but that's a whole other conversation but whatever you're using is going to get stronger what are you not using and it's proportionally weaker and weaker so we do a ton so again in the in a pre-season program we do follow a bit more of a soviet model the soviets used to do anywhere from 400 to 600 repetitions per month of GHDs. I thought you were going to say per day or even week. I was like, geez.

No, but I mean per month. But if you ask the average NFL guy, how many glute hams are you doing in a season? Most of them will answer zero, or they might do it once a week. If that, and they'll get maybe like two to three sets of 10. What type of, how many sets and reps are you looking for usually? And you said conjugate style. Are you doing like heavy ones and then also faster ones? So conjugate.

Because that's how they do their deal, like the max effort and then the speed. Well, conjugate more means work on your weaknesses. It means vary things up because, I mean, the bigger thing Louie would talk about would be like the law of accommodation, right? If you do the same thing over and over and in your body's going to get adapt to it. So conjugate is, has less to do with, um, Oh, here's our max effort days. And here's our speed days. It's exercise. We're changing things up. It's the exercise variation. It's saying, Hey, we're, we've been doing a straight bar for a while. So now we're going to go to a yoke bar. We're going to do a cambered bar where, you know, we're going to go, you yoke bar we're going to do a cambered bar where you know we're going to go you know from you know there's so many the whole point is is you can change things

up so conjugate really more means changing things up as opposed to you know no monday has to be our max effort squat day and this day is our speed day and we have you know right that even the speeds can change even the the idea the whole point is is what do you need we'll go through phases where we don't do any speed work because that's not the adaptation we're looking for but then in season we'll do tons of speed work um so again people kind of get the louis template but they don't see all of us hot behind the scenes and they don't understand that those guys they're doing two to three lifts a day they'll come in for their max effort work but then kind of like the bulgarian system they'll come in do a warm-up boom yeah and it's the other workouts they'll come in do a warm-up boom yeah and

it's the other workouts they'll do more volume to build up their accessories and again the higher you go the more foundation you need and that's what we see most one of the biggest mistakes is it's like a pyramid the taller you want your pyramid the bigger base you have to have what happens is is that kids start off with a general program let's say we do a do a good job of getting some kind of GPP base, but then as they get more specialized, they spend more time doing this specific work, which is necessary, but then they forget about, I need a base to support this.

So now they have this tall building with no foundation, and then it topples. That's the hard part about being a professional athlete. You have to spend more and more time, and that's why, going back to your first question, how often do we train? Well, yeah, we are doing something almost every day, even if it means this is literally recovery. But to me, it's all working out because it's all about getting better. But within our list, we'll do a lot of what I call mini workouts, 20-minute workouts that are just accessory-based on your particular weak links that we just established from the previous primary workout.

And not puffing and puffing. No, not at all. Like a 20-minute AM wrap for CrossFit is what I'm saying. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. We don't do hardly any of that to be honest. Um, again, you have to look at the energy system. Now we do need a, um, a foundational base. Um, I have gotten a lot more into spine stability. Um, so many people have back issues and I mean, really your back is now the foundation of pretty much everything. And I would say I've devalued that, um, in my younger years. Um, and maybe it's taken me getting older and knowing that, you know, I fractured my back

in college. And that was one of my main things that, um, I mean, I, I had doctors tell me never squat again or else you'll paralyze yourself. Um've got uh two fractures and i've got multiple herniated discs and i can squat now more than i did back in college but i have to be very careful and i have to do a lot of extra work where someone else doesn't have to do the work that i have to because they didn't do all the crap stupid stuff i I did to get where I'm at. Um, however, it gives me an opportunity to really know the intricacies of that. Um, again, right, right now, a lot of the power lifting world is, is gravitating towards, um, Dr. Stuart McGill. Um, you know, kind of the foremost back expert, again, someone that brings both the science and

the experience into it. Um, so, uh, but taking care of your back is really important. And to do that though, it's not crunches, right? The back is meant to be more of a two by four while your limbs are moving freely around that. So, um, we do a lot more carries. Um, we do a lot more unilateral carries. Um, I've got farmer's walk handles that I built myself. Um, back in the day I used to be a single arm carries. Yeah Back in the day, I used to be a... Like single arm carries? Yeah, yeah. I used to fabricate back in the day. I actually do those in my gym all the time.

Yeah. We do like single arm kettlebell carries like up and down the street. Yeah. You can do them both. So some days you can have the bell up so you can work more on grip strength and shoulder stability.

Other days you go heavier. Yeah, we've done these too, yeah. Yeah. It's really hard though because everyone is so different with strength here, but almost everyone's the same here. They can all hold about the same. And then overhead, you have people dying. Right.

So, again, what does that do? It just points out different weaknesses. And that's why what I'm trying to design, I'm working on a program right now for the masses that I can create a template so that people can afford this. But the template has built-in ways so that you can ascertain your individual weaknesses for that given training cycle. And then you can now choose from different auxiliaries. So let's say you and I are working out and we say, Hey, today's our leg day. And so we're going to go and we start with our primary lift. But then from that lift, I noticed that my weaknesses are different than your weaknesses. So we shouldn't be doing the same auxiliaries and therefore it needs to change but that's the hard thing about owning your own gym

when you're trying to get x amount of people through so and you can't just if you charge one-on-one training right now you're charging personal training rates which a lot of people can't afford most right so the idea is is how can we still do this crossfit s kind of method where multiple people come in they're still together you still get the camaraderie, but they can differentiate and do what they need based on their individual weaknesses. So that's what we've been creating. So we have this whole template that shows percentage differences. So the average person, like, for example, you know,

your strict press should be roughly, you know, 65% of your bench press. And therefore, if all of a sudden i'm like i can bench press this but my strict press presses you know only 45 percent then oh my gosh i'm susceptible to a shoulder imbalance because my overhead strength isn't anywhere close to my forward pressing strength so we have this whole chart of kind of where your percentages to be and then uh also too for the primary lifts, which again, in that particular moment, if we're in the middle of our squat workout, I don't really call that training. That's the moment of our workout where we're a test. It's

like the pop quiz of the day. Once you have the pop quiz and you see, I got these answers wrong. Now that's what I go study. And so if, if I get to my, my max and my limiting factor was my thoracic cage, because I couldn't stabilize my spine, that's what I need to go work on. Whereas, you know, let's say you're going in, you know. So you have templates that will literally separate all this? That's what I'm working on. That's kind of my. That's going to be hard to do. It is.

It's a challenge. I'll be excited to see that when it's done. Yeah. And then the next thing is I need some really smart computer people to automate it. But that's where things are going. You might know some people. Yeah. Because then what we can do is combine.

I'm working with a company, hopefully, where all of our primary lifts will have an iPad with a Tendo unit already attached so that you can, again, change your, whatever weight you need for that day based upon speed. So again, it's a, it's a, um, it's an auto regulation. And then from that, uh, you can also say, all right, here's my weaknesses. And then here's now your auxiliary choices for that workout. And so everything starts to become more tailored to you, even in a group setting. Oh, that's super cool. That that's kind of like the ultimate goal. Um, so we can really get that out to the masses. Wow. That's really cool. I like that. Yeah. Especially with an iPad and you can just put it in your weakness and then it just tells you all these auxiliary things to do. That would be, that would be, that's kind of the hope. Maybe I'm giving away too much now. Someone's going to Bill Gates it. Someone probably already

has something similar to that right now in the app world. It's out of control. But, um, all right. So where, where else can people find you right now in the app world. It's out of control. All right. So where else can people find you right now if they wanted to reach out and ask some questions or maybe have you train some other NFL player that's listening to this show right now? So first place to start, our website, dunamisarp.com. That's D-U-N-A-M-I-S-A-R-P.com. They can contact me directly through my admin email. You answer all those? What's that?

You answer all those? I answer all mine. Pain in the ass. Yeah. Most of the time I will at least see them or I'll, you know, if they're general questions like, hey, what are your gym hours? Oh, yeah. Forget it. Yeah.

I'll pawn those off to my assistants. Which is amazing because they're on Google and you've googled the you've googled the place which has the hours and like everything is there right and you clicked phone number to call me to ask me for something that you're looking at right which means you're already in trouble like i don't have high hopes that you can squat well right yeah let's yeah let's work on i'm sorry. There's a lot of you listening out there right now that are like, that was me moving on. We have your website. Yeah. So really, really website. Um, and, uh, I mean, I'm getting a little bit better on, uh, Instagram again, Denomis ARP, or we have another one that I've done

that just started. It's going to be a little more educational. Matter of fact, talking about the hamstring ones, I went through a three-part hamstring series showing the poor glute ham as a standard, the glute ham, Rager GHD with the bands, and then the glute ham machine.

So denomisathlete.com or denomisathlete on Instagram so that's going to be more of our instructional do you have any YouTube videos you know I feel like you should eventually I don't know all you'd need is one NFL player to be on there and boom 100,000 hits I would think again I've got you know it can't be that hard I've got Odell and other guys on my Instagram and again cat puking is still winning out over me. I mean, I'm telling you that YouTube is the way to go. I don't have big YouTube, but Barbell Shrug does and other people I know who do.

And it's insane as far as what you're able to get from a good YouTube following. Yeah, I need help with that. and i feel like with the nfl players it's very easy so especially because someone could just google one of the players that you have whom is already very popular and you just come up every time you just be killing it that'd be the way to go for sure yeah i'll definitely again i'll be the first human i am not really the business guy i'm much better hands-on in the gym. Well, that's what connecting's all about. That's why we're here. Absolutely. I can help you out. Yeah, no, this worked out great. And you can help me out.

So is there anywhere else where anybody can find you? So Denomis is usually the... That's kind of my go-to. The first word for everything. Denomis.com. Denomis. What's the gym? Denomis. ARP. ARP. Yeah. Denomis ARP. Instagram. Denomisathlete.com. Yep. Alright, that's pretty easy. That's it. Yep. Accelerated recovery and. All right. That's pretty easy. That's it.

Yep. Accelerated recovery and performance. Cool. That's what we're about. All right. Well, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate it. That was one of my longest ones. It went an hour and 40 minutes.

Oh, gosh. I know. It's before you know it, it's over. That's crazy. All right. Well, thank you guys for listening to this show, and I hope that you guys check out all of his stuff online, and you guys could try out some of these movements that we talked about and take some of these tips home to make you a better athlete all around all right we will see

you next tuesday real chalk podcast ryan fish over and out fish over and out fish over and out fish over and out fish over and out fish over and out fish over and out fish i just want to say thank you to every single person who took time out of their day to listen to this podcast. There's so many podcasts out in the world today for you guys to listen to mine makes me a lucky man. I really do believe that. And I love you guys. Not only that, every time you guys write messages on Instagram, you guys send me a DM, you send me an email. I read all that stuff. I may not get back to every single one. I try my best, but I do read them all. I promise you that. If you guys do not currently follow me

on Instagram, it is Ryan Fish, R-Y-A-N-F-I-S-C-H. Or you can follow my gym, CrossFit Chalk, just the way it sounds. We're always throwing up videos for movement tutorials. I'm always putting up all sorts of different stuff on my Instagram. The more you follow me, the more you'll understand what I do. In reality, I'm just a fitness expert. I'm the guy who did all the work for you guys

so that you can just get all the knowledge, whether it's podcasts or programming or nutrition stuff. This is my life. I've been doing it for 15 years and I absolutely love it. And I'm just trying to get the word out as much as I can. So if you guys don't currently follow me, please give me a follow. And I hope to see you guys next Tuesday on the Real Chalk Podcast. I will be bringing the fire, ladies and gentlemen. I'll see you then.