Barbell Shrugged - Why Good Athletes Fall Apart in Competition

Episode Date: February 15, 2017

Performance Anxiety. It's a thing. Even the best athletes in the world fall victim to it. You put in the work, train hard, and hit the numbers you need to hit in order to be a contender. But when game day comes, something shifts. You question your capabilities, or tell yourself "I don't want to mess up or do bad".     It turns out there is a big difference between saying "I don't want to do bad today" and "I want to perform my best today". That may sound like some feel good nonsense but the truth is, our inner game plays a huge role in how we show up- in competition, in our relationships, and in pretty much all aspects of life. This week we traveled up to Venice Beach, CA to meet up with Mark England at Paradiso CrossFit. Mark is a language ninja and we dive into how the language we use directly effects how we think and perform.    Mark has some valuable information to share in this episode and has some real world examples of how we can develop the high level mental toughness (or as he puts it "mental finesse) to perform at our best.    We are excited to be offering something special for Shrugged fans in this episode. Mark runs a company called Procabulary. Whether you’re looking to build better relationships, achieve your peak performance goals, or establish a strong financial future, Procabulary provides the tools that support and empower you. The whole Shrugged team has gone through the course, and we have seen amazing results and highly recommend you consider investing in Mark's knowledge.    Use the Promo Code: "BARBELL" at check out to get $100 off the "Core Language Upgrade" Course   

Mental toughness is like a gear in a car, in my opinion. And sometimes it's a much better idea to apply a softer, more finesse-based approach to a situation. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson and Kenny Kane. And we have traveled up to Venice Beach. And we're across at Paradiso. We're hanging out with Mr. Mark England. And, yeah, I'll say it. I was debating.

My wizard, uh introduced us and uh does that mean your wizard no fellow wizard um my wizard oh your wizard yeah yeah is it your wizard too all right he's a he's the most authentic wizard that i know i'm not a wizard he's a wizard soon to have a wizard's cloak. Perfect name for him. Yeah. Have you met many wizards that aren't authentic? Or they're lacking in authenticity? When the entirety of someone's being was built to be a wizard, you know.

So there's those kinds of wizards, and then there's everybody else. There's the wannabes. And he's one of these. There's the wannabes. We have four one of these. There's the wannabes. We have four listeners. Daniel. What's up, Daniel? I just want to say hi. All right.

Yeah, so today's show is something I've been really looking forward to because we're actually not that far off with the wizard talk because we're going to be talking about language and the power of language and the power of language in the inner game, what's going on in your head, how you're communicating with other people, and how that impacts everything in your world, including your workout, if you're a competitor, if you compete, if you coach. These are all very important stuff to know. And little did I know just three or four years ago,

before I started looking into some of this stuff, is a lot of the language we use is completely disempowering. It's not helpful to us. And it creates a world where Mark talks about a lot of conflict. So I know a little bit about what we're about to go into because Mark has created a program called Procabulary, which our entire team at Barbell Shrug has been going through. And I would say we're about two weeks in and everybody's getting phenomenal results in a lot of different ways.

So make sure you listen to this entire show. It may sound like we're on a different track than normal, and we are, but you're going to love this. Yeah, I tend to think what we're going do is is more like a like a mental toughness episode and being mentally tough uh just like being good at crossfit it's a skill and it's a learnable skill and we're gonna learn some some tactics on how to make being mentally tough a whole lot easier today mental finesse maybe mental finesse yeah mark yeah Mental finesse. Yeah. Mark. Yeah. So, uh, your story, you were an athlete at one point. You are an, what are we all athletes? I don't know. I think Doug and I

decided on the way up here that we're no longer athletes. Actually athletes. We train every day. Does that count? Yeah. I mean, you, you come from a athletic background. At one point, it's a better way to say it i'm soft now yeah um softer and happier i'm not sure how that works out but uh yes it um i wrestled in high school and got introduced to brazilian jiu-jitsu in college in 1997 and fell in love with it i by out of the curve, man. Yeah. There's a big difference between pinning someone and submitting someone. Doug, you train.

Totally. There's a world of difference there. So I fell in love with the sport. Choke a people is way cooler for the record. Way. Way cooler. Way cooler. Way more practical applications to the real world. Significantly.

Yeah. I'm not trying to hold anyone on their back. I'd rather just choke them unconscious. Get the thing done and move on. So the first practice I fell in love, stuck with it, got introduced to Thai boxing, and blended those two things together, as people do, and got into MMA.

And that was my thing, man. It just turned me on on every level. Graduated college, and I had the opportunity. It was either one of two things were going to happen. I was going to go pro MMA. I was fighting amateur. Go pro. Every athlete's going pro.

Right, right. I was going pro when I was younger yeah yeah um it's true that's like that's the mindset that that we all start with right it's like we're gonna go we're gonna go pro and there's no plan b right there was no plan b yeah there was only two plan a's and both of them revolved around that. It was either stay in Virginia and go pro or move to Thailand for a year and train, come back and go pro. So I chose Thailand, went over there and fortunately and unfortunately had had a career-ending injury. I blew my knee out and had a surgery over there and had a significant inflammatory response, which was all emotional.

And the whole thing stopped. So I'm a stranger in a strange land and very little support except for my poor girlfriend who just you know just wanted to move over there and start another life instead of dealing with a bitter broken boyfriend which is what she got and that got me on the path of looking at how I had gotten myself in that situation in the first place and then remediating it I thought that fighting had cured me of all my fears. Quite wrong. What it had done is it prepared me for the journey ahead of examining my fears.

Because when all the fight stuff stopped, and all the tough guy stuff stopped, and all of my old insecurities about myself resurfaced, I was terrified does not cut it. And yeah, eventually I started, I ended up living 10 years total in Bangkok, or excuse me, in Thailand, five in Bangkok, and then another five on an island. During my time in Bangkok, I was a PE teacher at an international school. Very cool elementary school, great gig. And so I had four months paid vacation every year and some disposable income. So I said, okay, I'm over here. I'm all broken up and I've got resources. Now what am I going to do?

So I started going down to a spa on the island of Koh Samui and doing these physical detox programs where you would go and you would not eat for seven to ten days, take these intestinal tract cleansing pills and shakes and stuff, and really shut down your digestive system. What that does, amongst other things, is it gives people a certain amount of clarity to reflect on themselves. Is this an enjoyable process? Enjoyable is an opinion. People, just like a lot of the CrossFit stuff, people like the outcomes more so than some of the hardcore training because there's pain involved, and there's pain involved in that. I kept going back down and doing these programs and

eventually I had a conversation with a man that changed the trajectory of my life forever and he ended up being one of my mentors in this work. He said, hey, I'm doing this talk on emotional health and well-being tonight. I think you should come. And he said that in such a way where it just reached inside of me, and he was about 62 at the time. It just reached inside of me and poked that sore spot. So I said, okay, I'll show up. And he talked about language. He talked about how it influenced us,

how our stories influence all different kinds of responses in the body. He went into stress responses and perspective and identity. And then he asked if there was anyone who was having a problem of sorts. This one girl, she raised her hand and said, what's going on? And she said, well, you know, I had a breakup four years ago, and I'm still angry about it. He took her through the story. At the end of the story, tears, angry, upset, crying.

Took her through the story again, made two adjustments in the language, and now she's sad, no tears. And this is very obvious, very obvious that she's having a personal transformation. Third time, one more change to the language, now her perspective is, you know, the guy was kind of weird and it was never going to work anyway. I'm glad it didn't work out. So, I saw that and I knew that what he was talking about applied directly to me. Stood up, went to the internet cafe when they used to have those things, and downloaded this PDF on what he was talking about. It was called Emotional Freedom Technique at the time and started working on my own story.

I saw progress, success. I felt it and went and got trained and then went down and started working at the spa as a counselor and stayed there for five years and did a lot of sessions. This is really interesting. You experienced a devastating setback. Yes. It was career ending. Like this one thing happened that changed their trajectory.

My worst nightmare. Yeah, and this is actually, I think you went through this, and then there's so many athletes and coaches that are listening now that they've experienced maybe injuries that put them out for a few weeks, a few days, you know, or, you know, months. And that's devastating. But, and, and the emotional trauma that comes with that and the, the, the head games that happen sitting at home, not able to train or go in a gym and having to sit there and

not be able to do anything. Yeah. Yeah. FOMO. And I used to laugh at FOMO by the way. And now, now I, it's a real thing. Yeah. And it's really cool to talk to you who basically suffered the ultimate setback because it was basically game over. Whereas I think a lot of people struggle with this, just having to sit out every, you know,

for a month or something. So it's pretty cool to hear this because if anyone knows what it's like, it's definitely you. No one's going to be able to argue that it's not, right? That's true. I was talking to Doug before we started and I pulled out my old jujitsu gi, went into class for the first time in 19 years. Not this Sunday, but the Sunday before. I had four stripes on my white belt when I hung it up. Took the stripes off. I'm like, these are worthless.

I'm terrible. Let's just put this thing on fresh. Go in there. It was Sunday morning at the Mixed Martial Arts Institute in Richmond, Virginia. Shout out Rick McCoy and the team. And they're all purple and brown belts. And I just got smashed, wiped all over the floor, walked out of there. And that's exactly what I expected to have happen.

Yeah. And now all my friends, the guys I used to train with, they're all black belts. They all have their own schools. So watching that transpire from the sidelines, it's like watching all your best friends go out with your girlfriend and stay out with her. It wrecked me, man. It wrecked me in the most perfect way. I couldn't have scripted a better beginning to myself because I wasn't happy. I was not happy. I lost my first MMA fight. My second fight, I won.

And I remember this like it happened yesterday. We're at the farm, my family farm. We're having dinner. My roommate, Matt Krause, is there. And I get up from dinner. This was on Sunday, having won on Saturday. And I remember walking out the screen door and this sense of dread, of everything's the same, nothing changed came over me.

I was convinced that once I won a fight, I would be a different person. And I was like, oh, my God, this stuff's still here. And so we mapped out the language of what that stuff is. Man, I resonate really deeply with this. And it's funny that you talk about like how everybody wants to be a pro i was a post-collegiate runner um sub-national class at best but i tore my plantar fascia in the spring of 2000 at the time i was running an athletic position at UC Davis and like I was going to the Olympic trials. I mean, that was, that was the route. And then I heard a pop coming around a

turn. I'm running a fast 200 and I mean the devastation, it really took a couple of years to sort of like work through that. But the catalyst that wound up becoming was a cornerstone of the life that I've since created. And it was a conduit for me to start things like stand-up comedy. We started something called Dream Chasers. But I needed that. If it was an injury that was going to keep me kind of playing or on the field or on the track in this case I don't know if I would have made such a significant change but the whole thing took some time but it was a conduit to a different a different path that

I'm entirely thankful for now grateful yes I agree I resonate have you had many much feedback from other athletes who've suffered experience something like that that says this transformed my life for the better now it informs my coaching right like 100 and my training methodology that we use at our gym and just the the mindset focus yeah. Because it gives a broader framework and it deepens the context, which is a greater platform to connect with humans and get people's best. And that doesn't mean, like, it's funny,

we were talking about the hard and soft nature of mental toughness prior to the show, whether it's a finesse game or it's a force game. And we have a former Navy SEAL at the Jim Marks, he was SEAL team five. And he talks endlessly about like that, that ethos amongst the SEALs that hard, hard, hard, yet at the same time now, since he's retired, his perspective is evolving considerably gone, man, if we had turned that into elements of finesse, as we're talking before the show, and I know that we're going to go that way and learn from you, but meaning that

rather than forcing everything, there's a, there's a sort of different layers to look at what the, what mental toughness is, how it's defined and how it's applicable to your human experience, athletic experience, and certainly coaching experience. So I'm real curious. I don't want to jump right now, but that's like I'm so fascinated. As a coach, this sort of journey that you took, like how is that? Talk to us a little bit about mental toughness because I feel like we could really dive in and go deep there with what the mental toughness framework is, given the sort of story and the work that you've done over the last, gosh, it's 20 years now. 20 years.

Yeah. Yeah. 10 years full time. Yeah. It started the path, presented itself 20 years ago. Mental toughness is like a gear in a car, in my opinion. that started the path, presented itself 20 years ago. Mental toughness is like a gear in a car, in my opinion. And sometimes it's a much better idea

to apply a softer, more finesse-based approach to a situation. And vocabulary, we focus very intently on the language people use. And if someone's using a lot of conflict language and they're always in that gotta go, gotta be hard, gotta be successful, because if I don't, then these people won't like me I won't get the the the accolades the support the the community respect and that's the only gear that they have I know that gear firsthand that that's a road that's a rocky road and it usually leads off a cliff technically speaking there are three components to that language.

It's called conflict language. And if you guys are on the course, it's negations, projections, and soft talk. And many, many, many, many people use conflict language and those three pillars of it unconsciously all throughout the day to cause themselves excessive amounts of stress and basically problems of all sort, which keep them stuck in that first gear of go, go, go and tough, tough, tough. As I was going through the course, I recognized that a lot of what's happening is just building in efficiencies and communication and in thinking.

Removing things like a lot of negations and soft talk and some of removing things that they're like uh like a lot of negations and soft talk and some of the things that are in the course feel like as as i'm going in becoming more aware of my own language what i say to others and myself i i see those things as speed bumps it's like geez i can just pull these speed bumps out of the out of the runway and all of a sudden I can go fast but there's no uh there's no nobility in having speed bumps in your mind that's a fascinating point um and and a lot of people think that there is there's a lot of nobility in having problems and suffering right there's not I agree there's not and I and I bring that that up because that's where I used to operate from. Myself included.

Yeah, if it's not hard – if it's easy, it's not noble. And I don't – of course that's installed by the parents at some point. Let's go – hold on. Look here. Sorry. I want to get – Dive into Mike's problems here. I'm going to go talk about my mom.

Hopefully Betty's not listening to this. Mark, I want to hear – My mom problems. I'm going to go talk about my mom. Hopefully Betty's not listening to this. My mom doesn't listen to this show. I want to hear more about that, like that sort of character value-based system on suffering. In comedy, if you study comedy or the history of it. Self-deprecation wins. Well, there's two sort of theories. There's the Aristotelian, which is the theory of incongruency, and then the Platonic, which is pain, other people's pain primarily.

And so there's a narrative in the human DNA that understands universally, despite language, pain. So that is a unifying sort of connection. And so that's a platform often to create comedy and or laughter. I mean, just as a philosophical abstraction. But I want to hear more about that. Mike, you tripping out right now? No.

No, we're good. Yeah. I was just thinking about pain and suffering and philosophical thoughts. Okay. Go for it. It's his own world over here. Yeah. So on that,

let me hear about that a little bit more because that's really interesting because I know that's confrontational. Who listens? Who watches the show? People who very much, like the thing that binds the people who follow this show

is what's happening in here. Hey, we're going to get together two o'clock and suffer together we're going to do a 14 minute suffer and then we're going to do a 12 minute suffer and then we're going to do a max effort suffer and that is in like i see you i see you might speak a little different language but this suffering thing we all know what that feels like and now we're now we're getting closer via that so it's uh well that's kind of so to me that's kind of like that's positive suffering we're going to intentionally make ourselves suffer and that's bringing us together as as a community as a tribe or whatever

you want to call it um one thing that that i've learned learned from you in the vocabulary course is that you could have you could have an intention with with what you're saying that is the exact same as saying it a different way and create a bunch of suffering for yourself that you don't want so i could i could come in here and say like you know i don't want to do bad today or i could say i want to do well today and those are those are trying to convey the same thing that i want i want to do well and not do bad not doing bad and doing well are kind of the same thing but you know this is a you mentioned negations. This is a negation versus an affirmation. And so if I say I don't want to do bad or poor at the workout,

then now I'm thinking bad, bad, bad, poor, poor, poor. And now I'm beating myself down and I have anxiety about, like, not messing up and not being judged and not having people not like me. If I say I don't want to do well, then that's, like, that's a positive thought. It builds me up. It builds, absolutely builds. It makes me not worry so much. And it's a totally different game.

And so with the concepts that you're laying out, that you laid out in that course that our team's been going through, just recognizing those little concepts and then catching me, catching myself in my own head or dealing with teammates or my wife or whoever, knowing that I'm inadvertently using conflict language and it's creating conflict internally or it's creating conflict between me and the other person, unintentional conflict, of course, we're not trying to create conflict, it just happens. And so knowing how to phrase things correctly can automatically eliminate stress and anxiety and worry where I didn't realize

that was the case before. One of my favorite quotes is from Abraham Lincoln and he said, any man can endure suffering. If you want to test his character, give him power. And the first part of that, any man can endure suffering. Most people do, and they create massive amounts of it for themselves by accident because of the way that they're thinking and speaking. Conflict language, it's, you know, you mentioned parents earlier. Language is an inheritance, and it definitely builds momentum. And when we talk about language in the course and in presentations and things, we talk about the mechanics of language.

So you mentioned, you know, I don't want to do bad versus I want to perform well today. Or, you know, I don't want to rush in there and not warm up and then get injured. So what did I just make a picture of? Rushing in there, not warming up, and getting injured. And if I think about that for two and a half hours in that same process before I go into the gym, I've just created a mosaic of problems and issues of what I want to avoid. And then there's a cascade of events because of that,

because language influences us in methodical ways. I was a teacher before I got involved in this work. And what I've concluded is that a large part of people's problems and issues simply comes down to an education issue. It's a lack of education issue. 99.9% of people's education about language comes down to spelling, grammar, and definitions, none of which address how language influences our imagination, our feelings and emotions, and how we breathe. And if we summarize vocabulary, what it does is we solve people's

problems, we help people solve their problems, and we help people achieve their goals. It'd be like coming into a gym and all you learned was those are barbells, those are dumbbells, that's a squat rack, and you learned what the tools are and have no fucking idea how to use them correctly. That's exactly right. Talk about wizards. Abracadabra. I say this in almost every presentation because it's such a good way to intro the conversation of the mechanics of language. When I say abracadabra, almost everybody goes straight to magic or Steve Miller Band or

something like that, right? There's more to it than that. Abracadabra, and by all means, look this up. Abracadabra is Aramaic. Aramaic is one of the languages, the two languages Jesus spoke, and it was the language that the Old Testament was written in. And it translates to, with my word, I create, or with my word, I influence. I prefer the second translation. With our words, we influence our imaginations, the pictures and mental imagery we make, our emotions and feelings, how we feel, and other areas of our life.

Breathing. We talk a lot about breathing. You want to get techie for a second? Yeah. Yes, please. Okay. So conflict language, the three pillars, negations, projections, soft talk. I can break that down later if you want. We're going. Yeah. We definitely should. Okay. Okay, cool. When people use those, when they use conflict language, they activate and maintain sympathetic nervous system response or stress response. And when someone goes into a stress response, they're breathing up in their chest.

It's known as shallow breathing or labored breathing or coastal breathing. And if someone stays in that stressed state, breath trapped up here, I mean, you guys are coaches, you guys are super, super, super deep in this world. What happens when someone, when their breathing is trapped and they go out and they start swinging barbells all over the place? What's bound to happen? Well, not only are they going to run out of breath sooner,

but their movement breaks down. Exactly. Yeah. movement breaks down exactly yeah the opposite of conflict language is architect language so people use that consciously to have the kind of conversations first and foremost with themselves about themselves in a certain kind of way and then with other people what would you say to somebody who who has never heard the voice before? Their own voice? Yeah.

I don't know of anyone that hasn't. I don't know. Okay. Is this a wizard thing? What's going on? Go for it. The voice inside their own mouth? Don't worry.

It's in there now. The voice wasn't speaking to me, which meant I was out of the loop. Now it is, so it's fine. Doug just went like this. He went back and forth, and he was like, I like sandwiches. That voice, that one. There's an antidote to conflict language. I'll talk about this and then how we came up with this.

It's important. The antidote to conflict language is architect language. I'll talk about this and then how we came up with this. It's important. The antidote to conflict language is architect language. When people use more of that, they have better conversations with themselves about themselves and the world they live in and what they deserve to do and how to go about doing it. They have better conversations with other people. They create the kind of emotional endurance, psychological and emotional immunity goes up. They breathe more in their stomach. Their body is more relaxed. They perform better. They recover better. There's a laundry list of benefits. And how did we come to this? When I moved down to the island called Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand,

I was a counselor at that detox facility. And so they had, at the time, it was the spot for detox in Asia. A lot of people came from Australia. It was very busy. So I did thousands of sessions sitting and paying very close attention to what people were saying and how it was influencing them. What words were people using to describe their problems? And what happened when they what happened when they did? And then what happened when we took out this word and put in that word? And I started making mental

notes and those mental notes turned into notebooks and then my genius business partner Adam Chin, shout out to him, he comes along 2014 and I'm like, dude, look at this. He comes from a sales training and personal development background, like a prestigious one and he said, this is excellent, excellent material and we can make make it better, and we've got to do this, this, and this. We shook hands, and Procabulary was born September 2014, and yeah, the stage is set. We're going to have some very interesting, very interesting years. Yeah, we're going to take a break in a minute. One thing I want to mention is I am friends with somebody who's worked with you, and then he's in turn worked with me going back and removing, reframing situations to think about them differently, like you're describing the work you've done with people.

And one of the things I noticed is afterwards, like for months afterwards, more energy, less stress, better sleep, actually needed to eat less food. Interesting. Yeah. So there was a lot of things that the work we were able to do actually accomplished a lot as an athlete. I love hearing that. Yeah. So, like, I move better, eat better, and all that. It was almost like an automatic change where things that were challenging for me before,

like eating well all the time, became automatic and easy. And I've been doing this for 20 years. So no matter how long you do anything, there's still challenges. So a lot of things that I thought I was going to have to do hard for the rest of my life all of a sudden became automatic behaviors. And that was really nice. So I imagine if for someone who's

been working at the health and fitness thing for 20 years, like myself, if somebody's only been doing it for a handful of years, it could be massively beneficial to them too. So I'll take a break. I want to get into the different components of what you teach. Let's get nerdy. Yes All right, welcome back to technique wad today we're talking about technique and progressions for strict pull-ups All right, so if you watch the episode 180 of barbell shrug

81 181. 181. I even did this one time and I didn't remember from last time. So episode 181, which I was closer on this take, last time I said 179. 181, a barbell shrug. We talk about shoulder health and pull-up strength and all the related topics around that. So today obviously we're going to talk about the technique behind pull-ups and progressions. If you can't do a pull-up, have to get to a pull-up, and then if you already can do a single bodyweight strict pull-up, we can talk about how to make it harder and how to get stronger and kind of go to the next level. That way you can get on to muscle-ups and other advanced gymnastic skills. So as far as technique, there's two things you have to be able to do. You have to be able to get into a good starting position and a good finish position.

And then, of course, you have to eventually connect the two. So if we go to a good starting position, Mike has a good grip on the bar where ideally he's his. If you look at his wrist, you can't really see it from the front probably so well, but his wrist is all the way over the bar like this. He's not just hanging on his fingers like this. He's kind of flexed at the wrist just a little bit and his knuckles are over the top of the bar like this he's not just hanging on his fingers like this he he's kind of flexed at the wrist just a little bit and his knuckles are over the top of the bar that way the bar itself the bar itself is actually right below all of his calluses and he has a better grip on the bar in that position okay and then also you'll notice that his thumb is all the way around the bar as well having

his thumb all the way around the bar makes where he has a better grip on the bar and he's less likely to lose his grip and fall just like that so have your thumb all the way around the bar and then also if mike hops back up there no time okay you can see mike has his feet slightly out in front of him that kind of automatically puts him in a hollow position where his abs are turned on and his ribs are down. I'll go and do it wrong for a second, put your feet behind you. See with his feet behind him, he's not in a terrible position here,

but you can see his ribs are kind of popped out and his back is maybe slightly hyperextended. Mike's actually holding a good position here where he's squeezing his glutes and his ribs are not in a terrible position. See if you can do it worse. Go ahead and do like a half a pull up. There you see a lot of people doing a pull up like that,

where they're kind of making that C shape where they're hyperextending their lower back. They're popping their ribs way out. And they're kind of scorpioning. See the scorpioning. Get over here. Yeah. Dude, that was my favorite game for so long, Mortal

Kombat. I played the shit out of that game when I was like 12 years old, and Killer Instinct, that game was the shit too. So if you scorpion your feet behind you, kind of in this position here where you're bending your knees and you're popping your ribs forward, that's not a very good position to be in. It's okay to go into kind of more global flexion where your hips are forward, you're in full hip extension, you're squeezing your butt and your ribs are down, but once you break and you kind of end up in this position where I get more range of motion out of my low back, that can be very hard on your low back and it doesn't give you very good pulling mechanics

with your upper body either. So you don't want to go into that position. So what you do want to do, if we rewind just a little bit, hop back up, Mike's going to have his feet slightly out in front of him and by having his feet out in front of him, it kind of turns his abs on a little bit, pulls down his rib cage, and then from there, you can see he's in full shoulder flexion, and when he initiates the pull, he's going to pull his shoulder blades down and back, and then pull himself all the way up to the bar.

There you go. Good. And if he, there you go, so go ahead and hop off just for a second. So you see as Mike's pulling himself up, he's more in that globally extended position, which again being globally extended is okay with your ribs down and your butt turned on. That's one style. He wasn't hyperextended with his legs behind him like we just mentioned. The other style is to stay all the way hollow throughout the entire movement. So if he does the other style where he keeps his feet out in front of him keeps his ribs

down that's the other style for doing a strict pull-up being in that fully hollow position the entire time so go ahead one more time we'll talk about the final points of performance okay feet out in front ribs down fully extended or rather flexed at the shoulder, elbows locked all the way out straight and basically he's in a nice solid position here. If you can hang on that position for 30 seconds you're probably good enough to progress some other parts of the pull-up if he hops down. So I like to be able to test that position first, make sure you can get into a full dead hang position and be in a proper position.

The other position is to be all the way chin over the bar at the top of the movement. I like to put a bar right down about collarbone height. That way, for someone who's never done a pull-up before or they're maybe just not very good at pull-ups, they're not very strong and they have trouble in that top position, they can just walk up to the bar, set themselves in a perfect position where again, they have that perfect position with the hand where their calluses are all the way over the bar, the bar is all the way to their collarbones, their chin is over the bar, they have a neutral neck, they're not like doing this thing where they're reaching and trying to hold and the bar is actually like way up here, okay?

They're in a good position all the way at the top and then of course his feet are on the ground right now what he can do at this point is just try to lift his feet up off the ground and put his feet out in front of him just like we did that hollow position just try to hold this this hollow position just like that the whole time you know easier said than done if you're a brand new to pull-ups like me like, you've never done pull-ups before. So those are the two places I like to start. Make sure you can do a perfect hang position and a perfect chin over bar position. If you can hold each one of those for 30 seconds then you're probably strong enough to start

working some of the other progressions for pull-ups which is what we're going to talk about next. What I like to do with people that can't do a full pull-up with their body weight is to not just throw them on a band. I think everyone's relatively comfortable scaling with a band and putting a band underneath your foot and whatnot, so we're not really going to talk about that here today. We're going to talk about other ways to scale pull-ups.

Ring rows is another way that people tend to scale pull-ups. There's a lot of value in that. You work some of the same muscle groups, obviously, but it's more of a horizontal pulling pattern where i'm pulling front to back rather than you know vertically so today we're going to do kind of a modified ring row except we're going to do it with more of a vertical pull so if we look over mike and you can set the rings up right around chest height and then you can put your feet on a box where with your hips as low as possible see mike's still going to be pulling in you know

a pretty vertical fashion you can see at the bottom it might be might be hard for him to get all the way into full full full flexion but he's getting pretty close you know you probably make some adjustments with the rings and the height of the box and and uh change that positioning around to maybe get that last few degrees of range of motion where instead of only getting to about right here you can get all the way overhead. But for the most part I actually really like this. It's something that you can put into a Metcon relatively easily. You know most gyms have enough boxes and enough rings to where you could you could set that up and and have you know a large group class at a CrossFit gym, throw those in and you could be doing sets of 10

or 15 or 20 in a workout relatively easily depending on your population. So that's a good place to start. Another way that I also like to do it that's a little bit more difficult but has its set of benefits is to put a box right behind a pull-up bar and or a barbell. In this case since all these pull up bars are pretty high we used a barbell. And then you can see Mike's putting the top of his foot on the box and then he's getting all the way up onto his toes as he gets all the way to the top. So he's hanging all the way down. You can see in this case he actually gets all the way to in that full overhead position and then at the top at the top it's a little bit it's a little funny at the top if you've done this before depending on your exact setup but like in this case it's hard for mike to to get all the way

to top without having to like kind of push with push with his leg a little bit and reach which is kind of why he's like reaching with his chin a little bit and the bar rolls a little bit and reach, which is kind of why he's like reaching with his chin a little bit. And the bar rolls a little bit too. So it's not a perfect setup but I do think there's a lot of value here to this type of drill. Obviously Mike doesn't do this drill very often because he doesn't need to but as you get used to it then it becomes a good way to practice pull-ups with just using a percentage of your body weight by having just your feet on the box where you can actually hang all the way vertical in a in a separate fashion

that you can't really get putting your feet on the box out in front of you which was the first drill that we showed you all right the next exercise that we're going to do in this progression is to move on to an eccentric pull-up which basically means that you're going to do just the down portion of the pull-up and you're gonna go nice and slow while doing it. So Mike hops up to the top either by jumping on a box, there you go, hop all the way up to the top, he's in that hollow position and then he takes, usually will go between you know five and ten seconds on the way down, something like that, or in some people's case you just say just go you know take as much time as you need go as

slow as you possibly can and you know in their case they'll go as slow as they can but it only lasts five or ten seconds if you can't do like a ten second eccentric can't at least do one ten second eccentric then you probably don't need to do you know you know three three sets of five eccentrics there's probably still a little bit too too much load for you quite yet. You might want to still do the majority of your volume as rep work with all the other scaled variations and or doing, you know, bent rows and other non-pull-up variations that still make the same muscle group stronger. So if Mike hops up there, what I like to do is do like a two or three second hold at the

top, get a good hold and then do like five or ten seconds on the way down, nice and slow. And then at the bottom as well, try and do like a two or three second hold. There you go, beautiful. So what you'll find is that a lot of people, they will be here and then as they go down they'll accelerate and then they'll kind of just fall off at the end and they won't control the last little bit of the range of motion they'll kind of just fall all the way through fall on the ground then hop back up and then kind of like that. Perfect.

So, if you see your people doing that, it's either an effort thing, a coaching thing, as in they just don't know they're not supposed to do that, or something. And then if you go over there and now they're fully aware of exactly what they are supposed to be doing and not supposed to be doing, and they still can't do it, they're just not physically strong enough, then again, you might want to regress them back to to one of the things that we discussed earlier in the video all right so obviously if you can do a couple of eccentric pull-ups then you're well on your way to doing you know just strict pull-ups for reps hopefully so that's the next variation that people probably relatively familiar with so just go and knock out a few

strict pull-ups there you go so feet out in Beautiful. See he's not reaching with his chin. He's pulling his, he's pulling the bar underneath his chin. Beautiful. So fucking jacked. Look at him. If you want to add a little bit of weight to your pull-up a couple of ways, you can always just put a med ball in between your legs and do it like that. Watch him jump. He hadn't thought about this until just now. Oh, nice job. Oh, no. It would help if I didn't grab the center. Okay. If you want, you can just have a partner give it to you. Just like that. Partner, give it to me, baby. Give it to your partner. So you can do that same thing.

It's a massive four pounds. Four zero forty pounds. Forty stones. As I drop the ball and it bounces. Or you can just if you have dumbbells dumbbells work pretty well too. Again they can just cross their feet. Cross your feet there you go just set it in have dumbbells, dumbbells work pretty well too. Again, they can just cross their feet. Cross your feet. There you go. Just set it in there just like that. And you can actually do that with relatively heavy weight. It makes it a lot harder to be in that hollow position,

but it definitely adds some weight to your pull-ups. I didn't grab any kettlebells, but you can just hook your foot underneath the kettlebell kind of like this. Kind of like that. And just pick up a kettlebell as well that works pretty good and then if you obviously if you actually have you know a real weight belt where you can actually you know put it around your waist and you know strap up some real weight that's the better way if you're gonna actually put on you know 50 100 150 200 pounds on a way to pull up which people can do so So something to shoot for. Or you do the Andrea Anger deer pull-up.

Or if you have a very heavy stuffed hunting decoy deer, you could put that between your legs and try to headbutt it on the weight. Turn it around. So that's how you can add weight to your pull-up. Also, there's no reason to get stuck in just doing a regular pull-up all the time. There's many other variations of pull-ups you can do.

Obviously, you can do a chin-up where your palms are facing you. If I want to demo one chin-up. There you go. I'm actually a really big fan of chin-ups, as I mentioned on the show, because being palm toward you like this, it makes you put your elbow in front of you, and it makes you be very externally rotated especially Especially at the top of the movement you're all the way here which puts you put your shoulder In a much more stable position being externally rotated while in full flexion, so I really like

To do chin-ups with pretty much any of our athletes that way They're not stuck just doing regular pull-ups all the time I think there's a whole nother set of benefits to doing the chin up also if we're going to use a hanging with that that supinated grip and in that fully flexed position on the bar i think you you get a little more range of motion by being with that grip position so if you watch mike hop on the hop up on the bar like that, hanging hollow like that. You can see that he's not actually all the way at the bottom. He has a little bit of an angle there.

This is a good drill for guys like Mike to do that are just a hair out of being able to get into full flexion. They can just hang in that chin-up position and treat it like it's its own separate mobility drill. So I like that a whole lot. Other variations, you know, you can just be creative with it and maybe grab, you know, right here and right there and do a pull-up on an angle like that.

There's nothing wrong with that. Anywhere that you can grab where you can pull yourself up and down is a great spot to do a pull-up, in my opinion. You don't have to be even. You could grab one bar here and another bar that's higher. It doesn't necessarily matter. The more more variety the better for the most part another one that i like i think some people call these commando pulps where you got you grab the bar this way and you go shoulder to shoulder there you go beautiful uh you could always just throw one of these little v handles. You know, these are common if you have like a cable machine

at a globo gym or something. You can just throw that over like that. Woo! That's speed, boy. There you go, beautiful. Then you might have to go side to side still. There you go. I actually really like V handles

and or any time you get some parallel bars. So if you have real parallel bars or the rings are actually a very good choice as well. Any time your hands are in front of you like this, it's more likely that your elbows are going to be in and you're going to be out of this kind of elbows out internally rotated position. It puts you externally rotated in front of you. So so again it puts you in a better shoulder position you're less likely to beat up your shoulders when you're doing pull-ups of that type obviously you can always do strict pull-ups on the rings as well and there's a million different variations you

could do just set the rings not a lot of people talk about this but you want to set the ring from the point of your finger to the to the tip of your elbow that's called your cubit and that's how wide the rings should be. So if you're ever setting the rings as far as width, that's where you want to put them. As far as variations, you could just not think about it at all and just pull and just see where you go and there's nothing wrong with that. Perfect. Or, you gotta wiggle your legs as much as possible. Or you can try and intentionally

keep your arms like this where the rings are flat towards you, your palms are towards you, or you can go even or you could intentionally keep them out. They're all, none are necessarily better than the other. They're just fun variations to play with. Rope climbing is always a good idea if you do a strict rope climb. Without using your legs is obviously going to be good for your vertical pulling strength, but if you have a rope, you can always just do kind of like towel pull-ups i don't have grip right now i literally i haven't done pull-ups in so long my grip is done today okay all right mike couldn't

do a pull-up on the uh on the little rope and so we found an actual athlete to do it for us so liz is going to make mike feel real bad i hope can you do there we go. Oh, like it's nothing. She can crank out like 10 of these. How do you do that? Well done, good job. Don't leave CTP hanging. Yeah, I wouldn't give her one either. All right, thanks Liz. All right, if you want more variations of pull-ups, watch episode 181. We talk all about pull-ups. If you want more Technique WOD videos like this one, you can go to barbellshrug.com, click on the Technique WOD tab at the top of the page, and there are more videos like

this in the library. We'll see you another day. Try it again, Mike. Oh, he just needed motivation. Join the conversation every week after the Oh, he just needed motivation. us, guests of the show, and some of the biggest names in strength and conditioning. So, go there and leave a comment now. Oh my gosh, wow, that's so cool. Yay, that's so awesome. Did you like this video? If so, subscribe to our channel and share this with your friends. And if you want even more free, awesome resources to help you reach your fitness goals,

plus some updates that we only share over email, head over to barbellstruck.com and sign up for the newsletter and we're back talking about pro vocabulary and you just got a prime example of not pro vocabulary how to do it wrong that's called low vocabulary low vocabulary is there a bro vocabulary oh there's definitely a bro there's low vocabulary flow vocabulary. There's vocabulary. There's low-cabulary, flow-cabulary. Is there a ho-cabulary? There is, Doug. Yeah. We're going to learn about that after we turn the recording off.

That's lunch talk. That's lunch talk. I think we should have that one over scotch. One of the things I'm interested in is, in addition to the ho-capulary, but as a coach, how to integrate ho-capulary into my coaching. But honestly, we got really philosophical there. But as a coach and a gym owner, I mean, one of the things I'm really interested in is the evolution of physicality,

but, like, getting between people's ears. And so, like, how do you – and Doug and I were talking about this just a second ago. Like, how do you see this integrated into, say, a coach's perspective so that that way their clients can experience that? Yeah. How do you use it? What do you do? Yeah.

Very good question. In coaching, like coaching in a box like this, projections are more or less off the table unless there's a personal issue going on. What is very much on the table in almost all coaches' vocabulary are negations and soft talk. So when you are giving instructions to someone, and as a former elementary school PE teacher, one of my biggest challenges in that job was to take 20 kindergartners and first graders and second graders at a time, get them with all of their equipment, get them over to the pool, which was across the street, get them dressed out, they all swim, they survive, they get their stuff and get them back. So what I got very good at before I got into vocabulary

is delivering clear, concise instructions and knowing when to pause. Because as far as the instructions are concerned, you want to tell someone what you want them to do. And that's where affirmations come in, speaking in the affirmative. Pick up the bar, set your stance, do this, this, and this. And then wait for that instruction to register. And the more feedback and experience a coach has with their clients, their students, they'll learn to read the signs,

the cues of when the people that they're coaching have gotten it. So my advice is to speak, tell them what you want them to do, what the proper instruction is, take out any maybes and likes and possibles and coulds and I guesses, and then, so say what you're going to say, say it succinctly, and then pause. Okay? So the understanding that happens in the talking, the registry of it happens in the silence. Here's an example.

I was at an open mat in a yoga studio. And this is in Richmond. This guy was a specimen. One of the most flexible people I've ever seen. Ripped, striated, a master of his craft, and had a practice to match. So he walked the talk, and he was giving instruction to one of his students,

and he said, we just wrote a blog post about this, I think that you might want to think about maybe doing this. And his indecision translated directly to his student. And yeah, she looked up at him. It was a bit of an awkward situation. Instead of saying, do this, stretch out through your fingertips, this is what will happen, and then pause. And then let her put it in place in her mind and then express it out through her body. So you're suggesting in that example, by the way he was phrasing it originally,

by saying, I think you might want to maybe do this thing. Like it doesn't convey confidence that he really knows what he's talking about or that he he really thinks that's the right thing to do he'd be much better off that was soft talk yes and then he would be better off using solid talk which would be you know the best thing for you right now is to do this absolutely then they go okay this guy's no knows exactly what he's talking about i feel like i i feel like i should go do that thing because i'm so confident that he's confident in what he's talking about. I feel like I should go do that thing because I'm so confident that he's confident in what he's saying.

Yes. So leave out the I think you might maybe soft talk and just be firm and confident and direct with exactly what you mean and say, go do this. That's the best thing. 100%. Yeah.

Very well said. Yeah. So that was the soft talk, solid talk. You mentioned a few other things. You mentioned the negations and affirmations. Can you clarify what those two things are again? Sure. So negations, some of the negation keywords, don't, won't, isn't, shouldn't, haven't, not.

I don't want to have an argument with you today because I don't want us to get off track. So when I say that, what have I just made a picture of? Just getting off track right away. What have you made a picture of? Ready to get in a fight. Yeah. Them's are fighting words. Yeah. Accidentally. And you mentioned this earlier, Doug. There's a saying, and we've all heard it, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Okay. There's a little more to that saying. Needs to be stretched out a bit. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. There's a little more to that saying. It needs to be stretched out a bit. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and bad planning.

And conflict language, that's the bad planning. So I want to have a quality conversation with you. I want to coach my students, my members in a certain way, and yet I'm not getting the results that I want. Okay. I'm having these problems. Why is that? A large part of that comes down to the language that they're using. Yeah. So we have soft talk, solid talk, negations. I use this example in almost every presentation because it's such a good example. Language, it influences us in very powerful ways.

I was coaching this young man. This was about five years ago. I was brought in. So we do half of our business in performance athletics, half in corporate environment. I was brought in to do a language audit for a sales team up in Calgary and then coach their sales force. And I was having a one-on-one coaching session with this guy. And this is what he said. And this is what he did. Okay. So there's two chairs in the room about from me to Mike. I'm looking at him. He's looking at me, and he said, Mark, I can't keep focusing on my past. Like that. Behind you. But he didn't know we did it. Okay. Unconscious. Unconscious.

Influence, language, abracadabra. And so, of course, I saw him do that. I'm staring right at him. And I said, hey, you know, you just turn around and look behind you? And he goes, really? I said, yes. And then also the mechanics of it, language, imagination, emotions, breath response. So I asked him, I was like, did you see anything by chance? He had to stop and think about it. And he said, yeah, I saw myself in chains. Okay. So don't do your,

don't do your clean, don't do your clean and jerk like that because you don't want to, you don't want to blow out your back. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, we were talking about this during the break. People that practice vocabulary very, very often come back with the feedback of i'm saying less and getting more done yeah and that's important that's important for that's important for uh coaches and and and and box members because anything that's a labor of love has an emotional cost to it and keeping people's emotional endurance levels high is a very very smart thing to do so we can see the thing through whether it's a and we haven't touched on goals much here whether it's a five-year goal a 10-year goal 25-year goal you got to have gas in the tank to see the thing

through and the thing that the thing that catches people and derails people it's it's the everyday thinking muhammad ali another great great quote it great quote. It's not the mountain that we climb that wears us out. It's the pebble in our shoe. That'll do it. I can't keep living like this. Yeah. I guess I might want to join a gym one day. You guys come into contact with a lot of people that are not in the CrossFit world as well.

How many times have you heard people say, yeah, well, I'm thinking about joining a gym. I might do it. That's almost every time. Almost every time somebody's not training, that is how they say it. They don't ever say, I'm going to get started on Monday. And if they do say that, they're there on Monday usually.

Exactly. But if they throw a maybe in there or a probably, then it's not happening. Yeah. So back to the negations and affirmations. So practically in the gym, you basically want to focus on what you are trying to do and not either in your head talking to yourself or when you're coaching athletes or coaching your friends or whatever. You don't want to be telling them to avoid doing bad technique.

You want to tell them to do good technique. So instead of saying, like, don't let your knees dive in. You want to say knee over toe or knees out. You want to say don't be on your toes. You want to say be on your heels. You want to say don't let your butt pop up. You want to say keep your butt down. You want to focus on the thing that they're trying to accomplish.

I said this on an episode I did months and months back with McGoldrick and Alex where I was talking about technique. And one of the things that I pointed out was that you always want to focus on basically what we said, where you always want to focus on the thing that you're trying to do. Because we even said this in the car on the way up here, and I was referencing my one-and-a-half-year-old. If I tell him, you know, don't kick your toys, the assumption that I have in my adult brain is that by telling him not to kick his toys, he knows the right thing to do. But he doesn't. All he hears is kick. And so that makes him focus on kicking more toys, right?

Or whatever he's doing. And so in the gym, you tell somebody, don't be on your toes. Well, that presupposes they know exactly what they should be doing but if they're a beginner they don't exactly know what they should be doing like you know what they should be doing if i say don't let your butt pop up i know exactly what i want them to do but it's an assumption on my part that they know what to do at that point they don't know always and so you need to tell them what to do by focusing on what they should be doing it's so much easier for them to actually

accomplish what you intend for them to accomplish. 100%. 100%. Two things I'll mention on that note. We work with parents. And a lot of times they say, I hate repeating myself. Okay. And as a parent, you know that you're going to be repeating yourself. What they're talking about is that they hate repeating themselves in negation, telling their child what they don't want them to do. Don't talk back to me. Don't get your clothes dirty. Don't fall down and hurt your knee. So the parent is making all of these worst-case scenario pictures in their mind because of the way they're using their language,

and then they share that language with their child. Language is an inheritance. It's interesting to think about it their language, and then they share that language with their child. Language is an inheritance. It's interesting to think about it that way, and it is. And then the child makes those pictures, and then there's conflict. There's a disconnect in what I want them to do and what they are doing. And then I get mad, and I think it's their fault. Yes, that's quite common and um the second point i forgot okay it happens um i was saying this to someone the other day i i view

coaching as a constant process of re-education which i tell somebody like when i first started coaching you know years and years ago i would tell somebody something one time and then later on I'd see them not do the thing that I taught them, and I'd be like, don't you remember when I told you that like six months ago to not do that thing or to do that thing in this case? I remember what I was going to say. It's on those lines. We do an exercise. I was just filling it in while you thought of your thing.

You helped me out, man. Get me back on track. Team effort. We do an exercise in our presentations where I'm ordering, you're the waiter, and I tell you I don't want a cheeseburger, and I can't have gluten, and I don't want pasta, and I will never eat a salad, and you should not bring me ice water. And do about 15 or 20 of those. And then I'm sitting there expecting something to happen

and you're like, you're going to say what? What do you want? What the hell do you want? You're soft-talking the whole thing. Then it's murderous. Then it's just murderous. Murderous. Murderous language.

It's so annoying. But that's a very good point. If you say that to a waiter, again, kind of like I just said, if you say that, in that example, you can't assume he's going to know what you actually do want because it's just ridiculous for anyone to assume that he would know what you do want. But we often do make that assumption with other people in other situations.

Very often. Like, don't fucking yell at me. Like, okay, well, maybe they know in that case, okay, well, don't yell means talk normal. Still, them's fighting words. In a lot of situations, people don't know what you actually want. In the waiter example, it's obvious that how could they know what you want. So that is a great example. Yeah, it works.

It gets the point across really quick. Another thing we do with soft talk, we get some people to write out their goals and then put five pieces of soft talk in there. So by 2020, I guess I'm probably going to be 25 pounds heavier with hopefully lean muscle mass, and I guess my clean and jerk will be excellent, perhaps. And it's just that cognitive dissonance. You can't have that kind of directness, and it just highlights it really well. If someone told you that was their goal, you'd be like,

I guess I'm not accomplishing that. That's for sure. There's no way that dude's doing that. Exactly. And back to application in the gym, I personally, now I have spoken exclusively in the affirmative for six months. That was about four and a half years ago. I thought to myself, I want to see if I can do this. So I monitored every single thing that came out of my mouth all day, every day, from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep. It is possible. I do not recommend, negation acknowledged, doing that when people start learning vocabulary because it creates a lot of stress.

You turn into a language Nazi. Nope, nope. That's just, it's rough. But that was a negation. Sometimes I like it. Nope, nope. That's just, it's rough. But that was a negation. Sometimes I use them. And when I use them, I hear all of them. Sure, sure. And back to that point, is that I like negations.

I like using negations consciously for contrast. So if I'm giving instruction about what someone's doing in the gym and I'm using 80% affirmative and then I observe that using a couple of negations, so about 20, 80-20 rule to help them understand what not to do, it's very valuable. What we're talking about is the unconscious use of negations like the waiter analogy, which is scarily more accurate than not. Yeah. Yeah, when I used to do the technique quad videos, I used to, as a tactical technique teaching tool,

we would always do kind of like, I guess at this point, we call it like a negation sandwich kind of where it's like you tell them what to do, and then you tell them what not to do, and then you again tell them what to do. Love it. Love it. It's conscious. It's conscious. It's strategic. Go for it to do, and then you tell them what not to do, and then you again tell them what to do. Love it. Love it. It's conscious.

It's conscious. It's strategic. Go for it, man. That's great. That way they see what they hear, and you show them what to do first, so that's the first thing they see. And then you frame context around, okay, well, you don't want to do it this way because you'll get injured this way.

And then they go, okay, now I know why it's important. And then you go, okay, and then that's why we do it correctly this other way. And then it reinforces what to do at the end so what to do what not to do and then what to do sometimes when i get uh uh my arrogant coaching shirt on i'll we all got them yeah but this is candy so it's a thick sweatshirt with a big jacket man i'm staying warm today we're in la and.A. And you're a typical SoCal guy. I'm so SoCal. It's funny when you're talking about— It's like it's 50 degrees.

Got to get the park out. When you're talking about ordering the food, the waiter example is like, well, that's just like pretty much going to any restaurant 40 feet from here. Oh, yeah. They're at least used to it. So sometimes when I find myself a little bit exhausted or tired or I'm coming into the space frustrated, frustration for me as a coach is often my own projection about people like bypassing the process towards a metric. So they're like they're going for something without actually functioning in the moment and processing the movement well so in my frame when i get frustrated like that i'm like basically you could do this knees in back rounded all up on your toes if you're an asshole or you could and then i would do the the the jujitsu example provide something else now

and it's funny because i feel like you know i'm calling my own self out when i'm listening to you talk and i i generally have a positive construct but when i'm i do notice that when i get tired i will off my own projections because i value the process and I want people to experience being in their bodies as they're going and then also being active in the process with me trying to coach them having them experience this like fully and getting everything out of it and so that's a that's the thing for me and sometimes when I start you know if I put a couple sessions together I'm like look motherfuckers you know and it gets to that point where I'm just like you know the negative is how i frame things and it's funny that you're saying that because i think most coaches can sort of empathize there's also like coaching fatigue like if you if you're doing it for a minute

there's a point where you become very masterful at the same time you can get a little exhausted when you're seeing the same things over like really but i guess that's the that's the thing you just mentioned projections and that's kind of kind of the last tactical tool in your bundle here. You probably should speak to this more than me, but there's projections and then there's reflections. Yeah, you guys are nailing them. We took the course. I watched all your videos, which I really think are crazy valuable. I use them every day now.

I can't not use them is actually kind of where I'm at. Yeah, you can't unknow it. Yeah, I can't not know it. That's right. Plato's Cave Allegory. So, what's up? So, there's no going back. Google it.

Plato's Cave Allegory. Google it. But Google it backwards. It'll be easier. Plato's Cave Allegory is fantastic. The latest K.L. is always fantastic. So projections and reflections, what are those and how do we use them to? Great question, Lars and Doug. Go for it.

Projections, it's the art and science of delegating responsibility for what we create for ourselves onto other people and other things. We've all heard them. Anytime you hear an argument, they're almost always present. If you ever want to deep dive, turn on Jerry Springer. So, yeah, I've done that. That's interesting. That would be really fun to do. I never even thought about that.

A couple of times when I've wanted to explore content, I'm like, okay, let's turn on some Derry Springer. Let's turn on Maury Povich. And I just listen to what they say. And sometimes they'll have just the most hilarious projections that you've ever heard. Another great story about it. Definitely want to hear this.

After I tell you what the tech is. Okay, so, and man, I can nerd out on the tech. Do it. Projections, what they sound like. Projection keywords, you, he, she, they. Mom, dad, people's first name. You never let me think for myself. He's always controlling me my mother makes me feel this big and so what i've got a friend she she commonly lives and dies by him she says

uh oh that comes from my mom yeah like i do that because of my mom. I'm like, okay. You're still doing it. You're doing it. Still doing it. Right. So it's assigning responsibility to someone who's not you. Yes. Or something that's not you. It's external responsibility delegation.

Masterfully said. You should teach this stuff. Totally. What it does is that it creates, as far as the mental imagery is concerned, it creates victim, perpetrator, pictures, and movies. So I'm the victim, and then an external source is the perpetrator, whether it's my mother or the government or the cop or the red light or the thing that I just tripped over.

And then I go into that stress response. So we keep coming back to this stress response. Why are people, you guys coach people. You guys see this all the time why are people why are people breathing so frequently in their chest why are people walking around with traps that are like bricks why is that happening part of that is because of the language that they're using and uh and projections are a big part of that projections are the most inflammatory they're so they're they're just extremely psychologically inflammatory it's instant blame if you're talking somebody it's your fault yeah i'm innocent i'm the victim you're the bad guy yep

instant fight yep not getting anywhere with that not getting anywhere um my to date my favorite projection story uh this was in Cozumel. I was coaching, working out of a hut. Loved it. This woman came in, and she sat down and said three things right off the bat. My husband ruined my life. He wouldn't let me see my mother. And he kept me stoned all day long.

So I'm thinking, fascinating. How did he do it? I wanted to know. Like, how did he keep you stoned all day long? Like, handcuffs and rolling the joints and light them and, you know, pumping the diaphragm? And so I asked her, I was like, how did you do it? If you could only be so lucky.

Sweetheart, you hit the jackpot and you couldn't even recognize it. You got to reframe this situation. Yeah, right. You're actually, yeah, be so lucky. Sweetheart, you hit the jackpot and you couldn't even recognize it. You got to reframe this situation. Yeah, right. You're actually, yeah, you're lucky. Can I have his number? I asked her. I was like, how did he do it? And this is what she did.

She goes, let's cock her head. So I had her write it down, which is something we'll bring up in a second. I had her write the sentence down because when it's on paper, then it's right there. And it's finite. And it's got a certain amount of squiggly things and dots and it's right there. Instead of being in here on this constant feedback loop. And then I had her take out the he, which is a projection keyword and put in the reflection. So when I walk in the mirror, or walk in the bathroom and look in the mirror, who do I see?

What do I see? I see myself. So reflection is the art and science of using my language to continually bring myself back to myself, look at what I'm doing and why, and then make adjustments to my behavior. Input, output. On a side note, this is important to note, vocabulary is not about right and wrong. We're very negation-acknowled to note vocabulary is not about right and wrong we're very negation acknowledged we're not about

right and wrong okay good and bad that's someone else's conversation that's way over there what we are about affirmation acknowledged is input output cause and effect and accuracy what we find consistently is that the more accurate someone gets with their, with their, with the way they're telling themselves a story, the more free they become, the more accurate their story gets, and the more empowered they become. More on that in a second. He kept me stoned all day long. We took out the he, put in I. I kept me stoned all day long. She read that, sat with it. Is that more or less accurate?

She said it's more accurate. And from there her other projection stories started to unravel. She walked out of there breathing differently, feeling better. Her blame level was way down. And what I've found after I'm pushing 400, excuse me, 4,000 individual coaching sessions, so each one of those is an hour, is that those three language patterns, they're at, it's either one of them, most of the time it's all three, they're at the core of people's worst case scenario stories about themselves, their problem stories about the world. One of those three components of conflict language. And simply writing it down, looking at it, and having the basic vocabulary training to take out the negation keywords,

replace them with affirmation keywords, remove the soft talk, and really take a cold, sobering look at the projections can, and quite often does, makes all the difference in someone going from not enjoying life to enjoying life. Sounds like a really cool exercise to do as a coach. Yeah. It's not something that I would recommend or I would try to do right out the gate. I'm usually somebody who like I like to apply things as soon as I learn them. Sure. And this seems like something I should obviously practice before I brought to an to an athlete is, okay, we see how this works. I may hear something.

I'm going to go back home or in my office. I'm going to write down what that person said and then practice the vocabulary stuff before I go in and try to implement this with anybody. It seems like you could get confused real quick. I mean, I think I would. Yeah, that's the best way to go about doing it. Let me learn about this. Let me contemplate this, apply some of it to my own story, and then work out from there.

Yeah, and something that, you know, some of us on our team have done, we've done vocabulary for like two weeks. Not like, we are two weeks in boom and uh into the course and in a meeting just two days ago people were calling me out on my soft talk and it's i think it's good to do it dang i do it all the time it's good to do it with other people so they can be on this train with you exponentially Exponentially better. Because, like, my wife is doing it as well. And, you know, we're calling each other out on it. And then helping each other notice what's happening with, you know,

my conversations with my mom and her conversations with her parents even and just how that's impacting things. And, you know, are you going to go to the gym tomorrow? And, you know know and then she's like oh well maybe I think okay and so it's like we've only been doing it we've been doing it less than two weeks and there's been big changes already it's it's fast it's fast acting and I think it had I been doing it only by myself I definitely would be getting results and the fact that we're doing it together is going to

make the process much more quick I'm really enjoying it what can an athlete do? Is there an exercise or can we get into how an athlete needs to talk to themselves or how they can talk to themselves

to be more positive let's get out of the coaching and more into how an athlete can treat themselves here. Yes. What are some of the scary thoughts that CrossFit athletes entertain, observe and entertain? I have like a hundred. I'd imagine it's similar categorically between beginners and advanced athletes. There's going to be slightly different settings where, you know,

beginners will come into a gym for the first time and they look around the gym like all these people are really fit and maybe I don't belong here and are they going to accept me and am I good enough? Am I athletic enough to be here? This is like a real gym and things like that. Whereas the more advanced athletes might think similar thoughts, but maybe like when they're going into a competition, like, am I good enough to go to regionals? Like, am I, you know, am I athletic enough to go to regionals? Am I strong enough to go to regionals? Or something along those lines. But I think most of it stems around people not feeling like they're good enough. A lot.

A lot. And or feeling like they're being judged from other people for not being good enough or feeling like they don't belong. Yeah, go ahead. I would say, too, if you've got some experience doing it, you can get into sort of the fixed mindset or the perfectionist trap. So you have an idea of like what you think you should be getting as a result. And, you know, your self-worth is sort of based on that.

So then that immediately can get people chest breathing and then stressed. Chest breathing. Before they're even. It's a thing. Before they're even starting a workout or hard piece and so part of that is there's a weird juxtaposition like people as they start to get familiar with the discomfort start to get more comfortable mentally and emotionally in that space and then that becomes a thing that starts to eat itself like you can identify you know what the pain is coming.

Versus when you're kind of a novice, you're like, oh, this makes me feel really, it's really hard. I didn't know that I could be so strong. And then it's like, oh God, I got to go there again. And I got to keep coming back and going there. And then that can become defeating for some of these people. So my advice for the beginners is simplify your thought process about what you're doing and why. So if they're having questions about, is this safe for me to be doing?

That's a question. And if I keep asking myself that question without answering that question, I'm going to keep asking myself that question. Answer the question. and write it down i mean yeah daniel's getting a cloak this this is a magic wand this is a magic wand write it down am i is this safe for me to be doing and write out the reasons why it is. The gym is world class. The instructors have had, and do your research, this many years of personal and professional experience in CrossFit. And what are my goals? Why am I doing this?

I want to lose some weight. How much weight? Build it out. Get specific and get clear. And talk about what you want in concrete terms. 1,000%. 1,000%. Answer those questions.

You mentioned, am I strong enough to go to regionals? Okay. Give yourself the answer. I'm strong enough to go to regionals because I can lift this, this, and this. And so that sentence right there, it stops the thought train of value questions. And if you're not strong enough to go to regionals, then reframe it where it's like, I need to be this strong to go to regionals. Superior.

Because you might not be strong enough to go to regionals yet. Yes. But frame it where, like, I can get to be this strong in 18 months. 100%. Or something like that. So regionals 2018, 2020, or whatever you think you can do. Superior thought process than am I strong enough to go to regionals. If I just leave that question unanswered,

then no wonder I'm slightly freaked out. Yeah. We were talking on the break a little bit about an exercise where we list out our deepest fears. The deepest, darkest fears. But I remember going into competitions and having a hard time sleeping the night before. And that's like the worst thing.

You need rest. You got to come in relaxed, you know. And I look back on it and totally recognize that my mental game, I was just spinning. Spinning. And thinking of every worst-case scenario and just imagining what could go wrong and then i would replay that again and then i would go into it you know that would lead into another scenario

and and it was just i would spin out of control and so uh you know i don't know i mean that happened to me a lot after a while after competing for a certain amount of time i i definitely got over it um to a degree um but yeah what what are some ways to get past those challenges more quickly, maybe a lot faster than I did? One of the best ways to do that, Mike, in my opinion, and it takes an element of courage, 100%, is to write out our worst fears about ourself. And get them on paper. So, so again get them from your inner world put them put them on paper in your outer world so

you can look at them and judge them accordingly and are they facts is this factual information or are they just my opinions most people freak themselves out and terrorize themselves with opinions rather than facts. And I was talking to my mentor's son on the way over here. And we were talking about that in relation to some of his experience at college and his studies. And I recommended the same exercise and gave the analogy because we started the conversation with mental toughness. How does someone develop that? Well, part of it comes from using a certain kind of language for a certain amount of time

with a certain amount of emphasis or emotional investment. Architect language. Let me construct a winning identity about myself because identities are built. Characters are built, and they're built with words. And another way to develop mental toughness, dexterity, and flexibility is to identify what my worst fears are, externalize them, share them with the world, even if no one's going to read them. And read them and really question them. And I gave the analogy of venom, rattlesnake venom. So if I want to develop my tolerance to rattlesnake venom, what do I do?

Do I avoid it like the plague and wait until I get bit? Or do I take little bits of it and my body becomes more and more resilient? Okay. After a certain amount of time, I mean, you guys have been doing this. Anybody that does anything is going to get criticism and negative feedback. Okay. Never happened. Nope.

Ever. And let me guess, you've gotten more resilient to other people's periodic negative opinions of whatever it is you're doing, personal and professional. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. That's what we're going for. And that's me doing that. So, like I said, it's uncomfortable and it takes a little bit of courage.

That's me organizing my suffering that's me organizing and facilitating my suffering and when i handle that when i handle when i consciously go into what scares me or how i scare myself which is a more responsible way to say it and i do that on my own terms, I seem to have an easier time with life. Life gives me not more breaks. The universe seems to respect people that lean in. Yeah. Does that make sense? Makes sense to me.

Good. Yeah. So the way I think about mental toughness, if I can make an analogy between kind of mental toughness and physical toughness, and this is just kind of one silo of each one of those categories, those are deep, deep subjects, each one of them. But say you walk into a gym and you found someone else that's roughly the exact same strength as you, and you know how to do weightlifting, you know how to do snatches and clean and jerks,

really good technique, and the other person's never done it before, they have really poor technique well if you if you went over and tried to snatch 185 pounds and i did it effortlessly and the other person did it they didn't do it at all they they couldn't get it over their head or catch it on the shoulders or what have you um and that other person said well you're just tougher than me you're more physically tough than me i'd be like well there was nothing to do with it i just know how to do it correctly and i so with mental toughness and again this is a broad category but for this for this example you know right now we're learning the techniques of how to talk to ourselves correctly this is like good weightlifting technique but good you know conversational technique good um good thinking thought technique and if i can talk to myself correctly then it just simply becomes easier to

be quote-unquote mentally tough where i'm not really meant more mentally tough i'm just way more prepared and i'm and i'm i'm thinking correctly which means i don't have as much resistance like if i if i snatch 185 pounds with just dog shit technique it's gonna feel heavier there is more resistance there because my leverage is poor and the bar's not in the right spot and I'm not using the right muscles at the right times, et cetera, et cetera. There's more resistance in that case.

And so, again, if we bring it back to the mental side of things, if you're using conflict language, there's more resistance. And so it's harder to be as quote-unquote mentally tough because you're just doing it wrong. Yes. quote unquote mentally tough because you're just doing it wrong. It's, it's, yes, it's the essential, it's, it's basically akin to over-training, training, training, training. At some point in time, if someone is constantly sore and breaking down their, their musculature and they keep lifting, there's going to be problems.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I read, have you ever read Eric Wrighton's book, Resilience? No. It's a really interesting book. And in it, he identifies an aspect of resilience and mental toughness. And he talks about a very typical scenario for

people who coach others um and who are working on developing themselves he says you know often we identify our feelings and then actions come from those feelings and then from those actions we sort of formulate our identities and he said, you know, a proactive reversal of that can be very effective. In other words, choose an identity. From that identity, some actions can flow. From that flow of actions, you'll generate positive feelings. Now, within that, I also see a little bit of a trap, which is the forge it sort of mentality. But I like that one.

I'm talking to my students about mental toughness it's about you know clearly identifying what kind of person you want to be in the experience not as a effect of the result it's just who you are in the experience of whatever workout we're going to have them do to kind of deepen it and choosing that before we start um and then and then having a post-it and having a post-it while they're working out or they're like that's written down so then they're like what kind of person am i what are the actions that i'm going to take when things get hard and then at the end like there's a there's a very generous emotional reward for that i found when we use that sort of technique very end, there's a very generous emotional reward for that, I found, when we use that sort of technique.

Very much so. That's a great thing to do. Identify how I'm going to react, like you said, when things get hard. Yep. Dog pound. What am I going to do when those thoughts show up that are on paper? How am I going to dispel them? The definition of to dispel is to cast out,

cast out the negativity of. The definition of a spell, let's get a little bit magical. The definition of a spell, Webster's, is a word or a combination of words. Google it. A word or a combination of words of great influence. So the statements, I deserve to be here because. Powerful.

It has influence. By definition, it's a spell. I shouldn't be here because. Powerful. It has influence. It's a spell. Some spells need to be broken. I can dig.

Yeah. Let's wrap this up. Where can people find you you if they want to take the vocabulary course like we're all taking you know where do they need to go to do that

very easy to do that and we have a promo code for all of your listeners go to vocabulary.org click on shop

click on core language upgrade. Add cart. View cart. In the promo code coupon code box, enter barbell. It's a $300 course. You'll get $100 off with that promo code and a couple other emails and first names and last names, and you're in the course. And we put a lot of thought and consideration into the material and who's taking the course, because anyone that's going to have an interest in developing their linguistic skill sets for whatever reason is going to be busy doing other things.

They're proactive people. They're type A people. And so it's an extremely easy course to take. 10 to 15 minutes a day, 21 days, and you've got more information about language and its mechanics of how it influences you than almost, well, anyone does. You'll have more energy. You'll be more focused. You'll have better conversations, better conversations with yourself about yourself and what you can do, what you deserve to do. And that will radiate out into everything that you do. So we stand by it, love it, get great feedback. And yeah, it's a game changer. If you couldn't tell, we obviously think this is super cool we're all doing it and

we're really enjoying it and like i said earlier i can't not use the things that i learned in that course which means it's a damn good course so thank you for for letting us take that course like i'm really enjoying it my wife's going through it now with me too my pleasure a second time that's that's why we do this that's why we do this um like I said before, it's an honor and a privilege to be on this show with you all. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks, man. Appreciate you coming on the show. Is there anywhere else people should be following you, social media?

Oh, yeah. Okay, cool. Are there any pictures of you with your shirt off on the beach and doing a pose or anything? Give me six months. I'm a little bit fat right now. That's what Instagram is for, though. That's what Instagram is for. Procabulary 2020 on Instagram.

No booty shots on Procabulary 2020. Not yet. Yeah, we got to make, we'll change that today. Okay. We'll get some booty shots on there. Booty shots on the canal? Yeah. On one of the bridges.

They happen a lot. We can do my booty. Oh, man. Okay. That came out not bridges. They happen a lot. We can do my booty. Oh, man. Okay. That came out not anywhere like I – yeah. But it went in all right. I'm glad that out. That'd be crazy.

We're on Facebook. Procabulary, put that in. We'll come up first. And I would like to give a special shout-out to Kara Silva and Tyler and Ashley at CrossFit Pushing Weight. They're about to open a super gym in Richmond, Virginia. And if you're interested in CrossFit, you want to go check it out, or you're already a longtime CrossFitter, go in there.

They'll take great care of you, and they'll hope you get the results that you want. I'm proud of all of you all. Good work, and this gym is going to be huge. Super gym. Yeah, super gym. And we know Kara and Ashley. Yeah. Yeah.

What's up, Kara and Ashley? What up? Awesome. All right, thanks for joining us, and we'll see you all next week.