Barbell Shrugged - You’re Probably Squatting Too Much w/Dr. Ray and Larry Gaier - Active Life Radio #23

Starting point is 00:00:00 what's up everybody welcome back to active life radio on the shrugged collective network today i'm joined by dr ray gorman and larry geyer and we're going to be talking about should you be squatting why are be squatting? Why are you squatting? How much should you squat? Maybe squatting in fish oil isn't the fountain of youth after all. We're going to dive into it on this show. Before we get to the show, what I want to remind you is that the show is brought to you by our friends at Organifi.

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Starting point is 00:01:25 It's Active Life. If you're out there dealing with aches and pains, your knees hurt, your low back hurts, you've been dealing with the pain and just working out around it. I put it in air quotes. You're working out around it. You don't have to do that anymore. I know people have told you you're too old for this. People have told you that you just have to get used to it.

Starting point is 00:01:48 Find a new hobby. Do something different. You shouldn't be lifting weights anymore. Stop playing that sport. You're too old for this. All that kind of stuff is bullshit. We want to talk to you. We want to help you.

Starting point is 00:02:03 ActiveLifeRx.com slash shrugged. Let's get the conversation going. Now let's get to squatting. I have Larry right here in studio with me, and we have Ray coming to us from Nevada. By the way, for those of you guys who don't know, it is Nevada, not Nevada. Right? Well done. What's up? Hi, Larry. Hey, I had no idea about the Nevada thing. So, yeah, well, that's why I'm here to educate. You say it wrong every time we present. Thanks for correcting me all those times.

Starting point is 00:02:33 Well, listen, here's the thing, right? We tell people all the time. If you learn one new thing each day, you're ahead of the game. So Larry won the day already. Larry already won the day. All right. See you guys later. Yeah. Bye-bye. All right. So let's talk about squatting. I'm going to come out and just kind of get us going on this topic and then we'll hear you guys thoughts on it and how people can better modulate what they're doing. I believe there is a massive, massive, massive, massive

Starting point is 00:03:02 overemphasis on squatting and especially squatting heavy and when i say squatting what i'm talking about is bilateral two feet on the floor in the same position going through full range of motion at the same time from the ankles up to the hips i'm not talking about lunging step ups things like that because frankly I think most of you guys are under utilizing those movement patterns. Although if you start doing them too often, they can be overused as well. So let's just start from here. What is the purpose of squatting? Larry, as you see it, what is the purpose of people squatting in the first place what is the value that it brings i mean to be able to get into positions is valuable right so if you just look at how it's used um i mean traditionally like how we evolved i mean we just drop to either go to the bathroom or like sit and work with on the floor with something. But

Starting point is 00:04:06 the purpose of it with respect to training now, I mean, why do people start squatting when fitness started? I mean, the only reason fitness started in the first place is because we don't have to catch our food anymore, right? That's why we practice fitness. We don't have to conquer cities and catch food. What you mean by that is essentially they weren't doing specialized exercise back in the days of the spartans because their exercise was their training yes so they were probably practicing skills right uh but they were getting all the fitness they need just to live so now supermarkets are here and we have to do fitness and when we had the luxury of time to do fitness it became apparent oh maybe looking super big and jacked

Starting point is 00:04:48 is cool right traditionally the biggest strongest dudes are the ones who are uh the most dominant socially so let's just do that and then it occurred to someone one day that uh to get really big legs you can just move up and down because you feel it in your legs when you do that so let's just add a ton of weight to this and get super super jack jack legs well okay we'll get to you in a second on this on this ray as well but i don't i actually don't think that the reason why people squat is to get big legs i think they can do that faster on something like a leg extension machine or a prone hamstring curl machine which i have big problems with in general from a joint health perspective but i think that to get jack, they can do that.

Starting point is 00:05:25 I think that the squatting is more of a performance identifier for people. They feel like I can squat big weight and it also looks awesome on Instagram. Got it. So you're saying the purpose of the squat is to squat. Well, potentially that's what we're going to get to. Right. So right, right, right. Where are you at on that? Well, I think that what squatting has evolved from into kind of a functional pattern perspective has then become dominated by an ego

Starting point is 00:05:54 perspective meaning we've made it very clinically important in the pt world and that's translated into the strength world of functional fitness, to say that everybody needs to squat. You need to squat to get up and down off the toilet. You need to squat to get up and down off the couch, up and down off the floor. And where I think we got lost with that was I've never seen anybody need to squat with 225 pounds of load on the back to be able to do those things. So now it becomes.

Starting point is 00:06:26 Ray hasn't been in the room and I've taken a dump before. Clearly. Well, so you would only have to do the eccentric with the two 25. If everything went well, you'd be getting up with only one 55 or whatever it is. These days continue. Ray,

Starting point is 00:06:42 I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I apologize. Now I think it's kind of become this this over trained not well adapted from a volume perspective training modality that that really we we look at from a pattern dominance so can you can you break can you simplify that can you just break that down into simple terms yeah which which part what you just simplify that? Can you just break that down into simple terms? Yeah. Which, which part? What you just said about overemphasizing the squatting pattern dominance. Right. So we think that squatting is only emphasized when we're bilateral heavy.

Starting point is 00:07:20 We're not considering knee flexion cycles, hip flexion cycles. When we do things like rowing, wall wall balls other movements that are squat patterns and even though they're not heavy they take a different toll on a joint and go ahead right sorry and what what tends to happen is somebody starts squatting they they get the powerful feeling that squatting empowers um and then we start to see kind of this volume go out of control and we don't have this balance of other things that can kind of keep us in check. So I think we skipped two steps ahead because now we're talking about

Starting point is 00:07:53 the musculoskeletal repercussions of the kind of like strength imbalance from incorporating squatting like this. But I think we need to back up a step and talk about why it's in the program at all in the first place as it is, right? Like, so for sure we need to unpack, Hey, what happens when we squat too much? But I think we skipped over, why is it there in the first place? Does that make sense? So, so I think that the best way to do that would be to start with a, what's a healthy amount of

Starting point is 00:08:19 weight that somebody should be able to squat because we talked about what they should not be able to squat. And I made a post the other day on Instagram, on the active life or X account, it talked about, look, you're probably strong enough. If you train regularly, you're probably strong enough in the things that you train, which means that you are finding yourself in a deficit of things that you don't train. And every time that you retrain something that you already have competency in the opportunity cost of doing something else is huge because you're not doing the other thing. that you already have competency in, the opportunity cost of doing something else is huge because you're not doing the other thing and you already have diminished returns on the things that you do. So for example, what I wrote up was when it comes to squatting, if you can

Starting point is 00:08:55 back squat your body weight, you're probably good. And people were like, well, how old, what if I'm 75 years old? What if I'm 25 years old? And my answer is, yeah, if you can back squat your body weight, you're probably good. And I think that a 75 year old who can back squat their body weight is pretty good. Can I ask you another question? Of course. So we're creating this, we're creating this metric of like, got it. If you can do this, that's serving as some sort of diagnostic for how you're doing in general? No. Okay.

Starting point is 00:09:27 No. So I hear what you're saying. You see what I mean? Like, is that even an appropriate diagnostic for your general fitness in the first place? I think it is in some ways because only because we need to be able to measure something. And I hear what you're saying, right? The studies will show that your better opportunity to measure the likelihood of longevity is just, can you get off the ground with minimal points of contacts and no wobble and then get back down to the ground without minimal points of contacts or wobble. So then it becomes a question of, well, if that's the measure that we've seen to be efficacious over and over and over again, who cares if you can go down and up with one 35, one 55, one 65 on your back. I'm with you. What I'm, what I'm describing is that if you're going

Starting point is 00:10:06 to be somebody who wants to be able to do more than simply live long and get to your end day, but you want to be able to do things like work on the farm. You want to be able to carry things up and down the stairs. You want to be able to wrestle around with a friend or get into a fight and be able to get out of it. I believe that there is a value to having the ability to produce force with both legs from the bottom of a squat to the top of a squat. And what I wrote up was just that I think if you can do your body weight, you probably can do enough because now we can start measuring how fast can you move your body weight? Can you it like if we put you on a tendo unit for example i'd rather see you be able to move a weight at maximum speed than be able to move more weight cares i'm a really really big fit and ray

Starting point is 00:10:55 if you're trying to jump in sorry i'll be done with this the one thing that i just want to caveat real quick is i think it's important that we distinguish the goal of training. Right. Right. Like in between the athletes, if somebody's training for fitness, if somebody's in the weight room and their alignment, there's definitely going to be different demands and different percentages that are going to be relevant. Yeah. But I think we take the alignment and we take all those people out of it because right now what we want to discuss is the,

Starting point is 00:11:21 the everyday person who's listening to this. And then we could certainly at another point discuss the athlete and determine whether or not there's more efficacy to them going heavy. Because I think that there's an argument to the contrary there as well. And it'd be an interesting one to flesh out. And anyway, in terms of what's actually happening, they're just an extrapolation of the normal population,

Starting point is 00:11:38 just with different considerations, different intensities and different degrees. But what I love that you're trying to, that you touched upon is squeezing every drop out of what you can do with less, right? So instead of how much can I move now, it's how heavy and how, how much force can I create with less? Like how heavy can I make this thing feel, right? How heavy can I make a 10 pound dumbbell dumbbell feel well it's how much power can i really produce yes right i know strength and power are different the thing is though do i like what's the end goal and what do i need the strength to grind slow for like when when outside i want you guys to think about this because this is definitely going to challenge

Starting point is 00:12:22 your your beliefs it's going to challenge what you've been told. It's going to challenge what you've been doing for the last few years. When outside of the gym, are you ever going to have to grind it out from the bottom of a squat to the top of a squat outside of the gym without a barbell in your hands? There is no time that I can think of in your life, in nature, in anything in which you're going to have to get up from the bottom of a squat position and just grind it out. I don't see it happening. And if the best answer is, well, we're going to be able to create a neuroendocrine response because we start at the bottom of a squat

Starting point is 00:12:56 and now we have to grind it out under load, well, there are other ways to create a neuroendocrine response that have less downside to the joint structures and the soft tissue structures than standing up with a close to max load on a back squat or a front squat. Yeah. And I think getting people, it all comes down to a goal of conversation for me when I'm, when I'm asking people, why are you doing what you're doing? Um, if somebody's goal is that I want to be healthy for, you know, we're getting into midwinter here. I want to be healthy for ski season.

Starting point is 00:13:30 And you're eating the shit out of yourself with a heavy squat cycle during ski season to keep in your legs. Are you really making yourself stronger? Or are you making yourself more susceptible to injury because now you're going into ski season to keep? I think that we look at this from a in-season, off-season perspective. Off-season is the time that we can train strength. It's the time that we can train to generate power. In-season is the time where we need to train to protect ourselves. And if we can start to look at it through the lens of, is what I'm doing in the gym driving me closer or further away from the goal,

Starting point is 00:14:11 then I think you could start to get people to make the decision easier on what they really need instead of what Instagram has told them they think they need. Well, I also think I'm with you on on that i also think the part of it becomes intoxicating right and this is the mindset of it that we talked about wanting to get into it is intoxicating you know if you if when you start squatting you can squat 95 pounds and then you end up squatting 135 and then 185 you're like i want to get to 300 i want to get to 400 like you just you you feel so much more empowered because of what you're able to do with that weight.

Starting point is 00:14:49 The reality though, and in my opinion, at least is even while you're able to make those gains before you hit that really what I would call terminal diminished returns, which means like you're now grinding for small percentages and you even might test in six, eight, 10, 12 weeks and be weaker than you were six, eight, 10, 12 weeks ago because of the way you've recovered and peaked and all that kind of stuff. Before you get to that, as soon as your returns start to slow down, my belief is there are other things that you have not trained at all or extremely minimally from which you can garner huge returns right away.

Starting point is 00:15:32 And even in a specific world, I believe the generalist went. Does that make sense? Totally. The back squat to me is like the word fuck. It's like a hot, cheap, cheap fast thrill and compared to solving really complex like musculoskeletal problems it's easy it's just an easy win and it's it's easy to coach compared to the things that really really kind of build the kind of generalist that you're talking about

Starting point is 00:15:58 right and it's it's sexy and easy to sell so everyone's on it well and so and the counter argument to that because i I've heard it, especially since I made that post the other day, I probably got like, I mean, we don't really get hate mail, but we kind of get like, you're threatening everything that I believe in and stand for. So go away. And I'm like, yeah, look, that's good. Let it challenge you. If it doesn't, if it doesn't change your mind, keep doing what you're doing. But if it makes you think great,

Starting point is 00:16:22 the thing that we get is if you look at CrossFit as an example, because I do believe personally that CrossFit is the best thing that has come around since people started lifting weights to help the general human be a healthier version of the general human. Now it's our job as a, as a community of whether you're in CrossFit or not in it to evolve it, to say, okay, well, these are the things that worked really, really, really well. These are the things that could use improvement. How do we improve upon them? It's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's saying, how do we do a better job of this?

Starting point is 00:17:01 And I think that anybody who is an elite level power lifter would agree. Yeah, dude, my knees hurt. My back hurts. Like it's just generally speaking, if we take a sample size of that population, they're not feeling good day to day. Some are, there's going to be an outlier who is most of them who are not on steroids. Put that out there as a caveat are experiencing some aches and pains day to day. That should tell you that when you reach a certain level of ability to perform a given movement, it's no longer healthy for you. So the argument that we receive is, well, if I'm a CrossFitter, I'm still doing a thousand other movements. I'm just squatting too. So how is it that squatting is being so villainized by you? Like

Starting point is 00:17:46 I'm doing other things. And my answer to that is there is more that you're not doing than what you are. And, and that's kind of, I want to unpack why they're not doing those things, what those things are that they could be doing and how they could start. That's where I want to take this now going forward. I love it. I mean, if you just consider the difference, it's like primary education, right? Like after a while, how much does taking what you learned from kindergarten to 12th grade and just doing more and more and more and more and more of it serving you? If you get out of PT for a shoulder reconstruction and you do your banded external rotations doing 20 x the volume is not just going to eventually no longer be of service but it might actually hurt you especially when you

Starting point is 00:18:31 turn into 30 x the volume because you have a different version of it right totally and i'm not bashing there's no bashing against classic pt no it's it's like once once pt has its returns done it's done go ahead ray jump in well I also think that the way that we view squat cycles can be a little misleading. The one thing that I'm always trying to educate coaches on is changing the way that they explain squat cycles to clients in that a six-week, eight-week, 12-week squat cycle is really a microcosm in the long game. What do you mean? So I'm less concerned with somebody going from 135 pounds to 155 pounds in a six-week cycle. Got it. Than I am with somebody being able to continuously train strength gains over two years.

Starting point is 00:19:21 Or 20. Over 10 years. Yeah, exactly. So if you can start to shift the mindset away from these big fights in short-term games and celebrate small wins that are actually consistency of training, you can start to get people who don't quit the gym because of aches and pains, who don't squat five times a week because the two times that were programmed they didn't think was enough for them who don't stay after class to do a metcon after just squatting and now we can start to actually solve the problem that's happening in gym simply because i think we're not explaining the importance of why we're doing what we're doing. So then how do people start? I mean, let's say

Starting point is 00:20:08 this. I believe that as soon as we ask a large audience of people to squat less, less weight, less often, less volume, all of those things, reduce your intensity, reduce your frequency, reduce your volume of bilateral squatting. I would go as far as to say, I don't believe you really ever need to load a bilateral squat. If you can back squat your body weight, that's just, that's where I'm at. Um, I can see the reason to get to your body weight for people out there who are like, well, I can air squat up and down over and over and over again. I believe that the postural gains of putting a barbell on your back are going to be more valuable

Starting point is 00:20:48 than simply being able to go down and come up with that weight, if that makes any sense. The ability to create a static spine while the hips move, I believe has value in itself. And without loading the spine with weight, I think that it becomes difficult to do that.

Starting point is 00:21:02 How much weight? I say stop at your body weight. If you're overweight, I say stop at the weight you should be at. Your goal weight, I think that it becomes difficult to do that. How much weight I say, stop at your body weight. If you're overweight, I say, stop at the weight you should be at your goal weight, if you will. But now to go further with just, I'll let you jump into one second. I think that as soon as we ask people to do that, the fear of I'm going to get weaker is going to climb into their mind. And now what we need to dive into is weaker for what? We like weaker for what? You know, if, if the goal of training, like you were saying right before was look awesome, naked and be able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, then were you able to do that

Starting point is 00:21:37 200 pounds ago on your squat and unable to do certain things because you haven't trained other things that you could have been training when you just maximize something that you enjoy. Right. So jump in now. And I think the clients that we work with can be a sample size of what doing less actually gets you. I think many of our clients, our one-on-one clients, are very skeptical of, well, wait a second, you want me to squat less and step up more. And in turn, you're saying my squat's going to go up. And the answer to that is yes. I think when a lot of people hit a plateau, the number one issue for plateauing and strength

Starting point is 00:22:26 conditioning is likely overtraining. And so if we can actually reshape the mindset and reshape the volume and reshape the recovery for the client, getting them to go through that period of time is almost like a massive deload, which then helps your training habits on the other side. They come out with more strength than they went into because they can actually access it. I think the point of that that people need to understand is there are other ways to improve the amount of weight that you have the capacity to squat that is not squatting.

Starting point is 00:23:00 And what ends up happening is you're not, first of all, you're not going to threshold all of your opportunities. So there's always something else that you can do that would supplement your ability to squat. If your goal is not just to have a big squat, then you don't need a big squat to do anything else. I, I, I, I've read so much of the research because this is one of those things that I actually valued a lot when I was a coach seven, eight, nine years ago. I'm like, you got to squat heavy. I have a video of myself hitting a 300 pound back squat for the first time. I was super stoked wearing a weight

Starting point is 00:23:34 belt, Olympic lifting shoes, you know, deep breath. Let's go, let's do this. And I no longer value that at all. Um, but the point that I'm making here is if I went to squat right now, I don't know what I'd be able to squat, but I imagine it would be, you know, two 25 plus, and I walk around about 160 pounds and I don't care to ever squat more than that. It just doesn't matter to me. And I could, maybe it's two 65, who fucking knows and who cares? Does that make sense? Perfect sense. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think it also takes us down the rabbit hole of, of chasing numbers and the variable that is most often overlooked when we chase numbers is quality. And we don't need to go down the rabbit hole of

Starting point is 00:24:19 how do you define quality movement, but I think that, you know, when you see it, um, and if you're embarrassed to put it on your Instagram, it's probably not good quality. And if we're hitting a squat that ends up looking like a good morning, which then dominates the game pattern. We're talking about a high bar back squat.

Starting point is 00:24:38 Yeah, or low bar back squat. Regardless of where the bar is, your body is going to take you through the path of least resistance for your strength, right? So if you're stronger in a hinge, you're going to figure out how to move that weight through a hinge. It's one of the reasons why people will miss that end range depth because they don't have strength there. So instead of going deeper, they shoot their butt back and their chest drops. Now, when we start to program strength work based off that non-quality one rep match, and we're over 90%, guess what everything's going to start to look like?

Starting point is 00:25:17 So now we're not even training a squat pattern. We're training moving weight from standing up into whatever depth we're training and then standing it back. It just, it defeats the purpose. And look, right. If we can go back to your question of what are you guys doing this for? What are you training? Is your training so that you can be good at the training? I tell every single client I've ever worked with, both in person and online. I don't want you to be good in the gym to be good at the gym. I don't care about you being good at the gym. I want you to be good at the gym so you can be good at life. What are the things you want to be able to do? What is your training for? I'll give you my list. Easy. Six items. I need to be able to surf, fight,

Starting point is 00:25:59 have sex, sprint, climb, and jump. That's it. It's literally all I care about being able to do. That's where all the joy is. That's where all the adrenaline is for me. It's all there. That's where all the challenge is. So what exercises are you doing to serve those things? If you're doing something that's giving you a 53% carryover, but it's sick because you're really good at it and you can move a ton of weight, but you could find an exercise that would give you a 75% carryover and it's light and it doesn't look as cool. Easy choice for me, man. Right. Especially if it's less taxing on my body overall, I want to be able to move every day. I don't have to take three days off from my workout. And this comes down to priorities, right? So if you're somebody who's listening to this and you're like, I have knee pain, I was thinking about working with active life, but now

Starting point is 00:26:49 I'm not interested because they're going to just make me stop squatting. The truth is that we're not going to make you stop squatting. We're going to meet you where you are and we're going to provide you with the best possible way that you can do the thing that you do that we might not deem as being extremely health conscious for you, but scratches the mental itch of, I still want to do it. Cool. Totally cool. Yeah. We're not trying to project values. That's not what I'm trying to do. It's what we're talking to is the person out there who joined a CrossFit gym, the person out there who, you know, joined a commercial gym, who is looking online at what they should be doing to be fit so that they can live a happy, long life.

Starting point is 00:27:27 And they think they need to squat a lot because that's what they see the best performers in the environment that they find themselves in doing. You don't need to squat a lot. You don't need to squat heavy. You don't need to squat often. You don't need to squat a lot when you squat. That's the point we're getting at. Just two things there. Going back to the skiing example you know if i have somebody that says well the reason i'm strength training is to stay

Starting point is 00:27:51 healthy for skiing but i also want to get ridiculous to jack and build my squat my job as a coach becomes to say okay here's what i think and here's the sacrifices that you're going to be making trying to achieve both those goals but i'm with you my job is to help you get there safely so as safe as safely as can be with that as safely as possible understanding the risk the risk reward right right um the other thing too is i think we arbitrarily live on a seven-day cycle in strength training. And I've got clients that we squat every 14 days. And that's the volume that they need to sustain their profile. So it's not a, well, I need to squat twice a week or I need to squat every Monday. You have to be a little bit creative if you're going to start putting your body through these paddling decisions.

Starting point is 00:28:49 Totally. And I think that the other thing to go with all of that is how do you squat I talked about this on a podcast with Lance last week, if we put these up in the appropriate order, is how often do you squat specifically for the purpose of tendon health? Because people who tell me squatting is bad, you should never do it loaded at all, piss off. It's the best way to build patello tendon health. If you do it under the appropriate tempo, under the appropriate load, for the appropriate number of reps. If you do it under the appropriate tempo, under the appropriate load for the appropriate number of reps. If you're looking for what that load reps tempo is, Google heavy, slow resistance training protocols by Drexel university. It's the best way for you

Starting point is 00:29:36 to build tendon health that we've seen it be successful for client after client, after client, after client, after client. And you're not going to be able to get that in any training modality that's devoid of a closed chain eccentric contraction on the tendon. Right. Period. So piss off if you say there's no value to it. Now, I want to talk about what people can do instead. Because I don't want to just leave them with a podcast where we tell them what not to do.

Starting point is 00:30:06 So I'd like to bring Larry in instead of squatting for heavy weight. What are other things that people could do to improve the rate of return on the training that they're doing in the gym that squatting isn't going to get them? So we're talking about their squat pattern so what they could do instead of that yeah okay take any of the endless versions of even a unilateral squat right any step up in any direction any lunge in any direction, any lunge in any direction, find out what your body sucks at and get good there. Give them, give them three things to test so that they can determine the one that they are the weakest in, in terms of ability to perform. Take a box that's just above your knee height.

Starting point is 00:30:58 The reason we do that is because we know that everyone's preoccupied with being below parallel. And I think it's valuable to be able to produce force out of there. Find a box that's just above your knee height. And if you're super beginner, super weak, see how many times you can step up onto it with your right leg at a faster up, slower down tempo in one to two minutes. No weight. We're saying no weight, no weight. Take a little bit of a break. Do the same thing on your left. For some of you who are super events, Dr. Ray, Didn't you have, did you have a crazy, crazy,

Starting point is 00:31:30 strong high level athlete who could squat stupid amount of weight and couldn't step up with the bar? Something like that. All the time. Right. So we had Keith on our staff. When we first started was back squatting 500 pounds. I couldn't step up with 95. Cool.

Starting point is 00:31:41 So you might surprise yourself with just body weight. If you're a little more advanced, grab a weight, see how many you can do. If you have that and that's a piece of cake, find a 10 rep max on each side. You might surprise yourself. Find a 20 rep max on each side. And that's just a step up. Easy day. Do the same thing for a lunge. Film yourself from the front with a standing normal front return lunge. Does your knee on the right stay perfectly over your middle toe when you do it on the left? Your left knee is all over the place. You have some hip opportunity there, right? Can you lateral lunge at all? Can you walking lunge and feel okay? There are tons

Starting point is 00:32:21 and tons and tons of ways to just easily, easily groove closing ankle, knee and hip and opening ankle, knee and hip at the same time. I think people would find the lateral lunge, the Cossack squat extremely revealing. Brutal. strength, you're going to gain so much control and so much carryover if you take what feels like a useless 10% range of motion that's even accessible or controllable to you and turn that into 20%. Just find everything. Your opportunity lies in the things that you're not good at. And the things you're not doing.

Starting point is 00:32:59 And the things that you're not doing at all. But at the same time, some of this is going to take ego sacrifice, leaving and leaving the gym and feeling like you left some performance on the table in that session. But realizing that you're making a short term sacrifice for a long term game. Not every training session is meant to make you feel not every training session is meant to leave you flat on your back and so if we can start changing that mindset

Starting point is 00:33:30 I think we can start changing a lot of people and I'm going to be totally candid in terms of expectations I'm going to give you guys a shining example in my opinion I have a client who is a healthy narcissist so he'd be happy for me to say his name on here his name is Bill Jagal you for me to say his name on here uh his name his name's

Starting point is 00:33:45 his name is bill jagel are you going you have first name and last name on him yeah man his name is bill jagel reach out he would love to this one we'll send it you would love to know that he's on the radio he's 60 years old four years ago four years ago he weighed uh somewhere between 280 and 300 pounds he couldn't even look at his shoelaces without getting a low back pain, much less bending over to tie them. Every time he got out of bed, his Achilles were screaming and he was doing that 95-year-old nursing home shuffle to go to the bathroom at 2 o'clock in the morning. Four years later, I have seen him in person three times a week, sometimes for four years. Bill is 250 pounds of fucking jacked. He is stronger than I am.

Starting point is 00:34:33 He is bigger than I am. Neither of us can remember the last time something hurt on his body at all. He has not touched a barbell except for using it as a landmine in three years. And he produces, he's more athletic. He's more energetic. He's stronger than he's ever felt because he's just moving more and more and more athletically. And we spent time doing all the non-sexy stuff that gets him positional awareness, the proprioception he was missing, the control he was missing. We find all the things he couldn't do and even make him a little bit more able to do it and the return is huge there is zero value at this point there's

Starting point is 00:35:11 for him to be back squatting bilaterally so two questions for you on that number one do you think if he if he had a bar on his back could he squat 250 today i would love to find out but he's still getting gains gains gains gains gains so I don't know what he's missing at this point. Okay. I don't want the politician answer. I want the, yeah, probably, or no, probably not. I frankly, I don't know. He has the range of motion to deal. So, so the second question to that is you did the, the, the, the counter argument to what you just described is, yeah, dude, but you work with this guy three days a week for four years. You're talking about 600 workouts that he paid you a hundred dollars for. Not everybody has $60,000 spent. So the question

Starting point is 00:35:54 becomes, could you get that same kind of response from somebody online for substantially less money? Yeah, I do it all the time. The only thing that changes is the amount of time it takes. So it might take them a little bit longer. It might, to get what he's gotten, yeah. Well, now the follow-up question is, how far into the four years did Bill go from,

Starting point is 00:36:16 I'm doing the nursing room shuffle, I have pain every single day, to I feel great. Eight months. Eight months. So maybe online online it takes somebody like him in his situation a year right that's going to point out bill is more than what he had ever hoped or expected he could do the win for him was eight months so now it's just

Starting point is 00:36:39 lottery collection and give them some perspective because i remember you talking about bill's deadlift when we first when we first started working with him. What did Bill deadlift when you first started working with him? I had him deadlifting a 25-pound dumbbell off of blocks that had him just below his knee. But what was he capable of deadlifting without you? He wasn't. He wouldn't even think about it. Didn't he pull a huge deadlift one day without?

Starting point is 00:37:06 Well, we trained it. Okay. To 400 pounds off the floor. Right. As a 60 plus year old man. Yes. Well, he was 58 at the time. 58 at the time.

Starting point is 00:37:16 Cool. Yeah. The cool little segue that I think we're hitting on here is how many people do you think are not starting at the gym because they're scared of what they're going to feel like after that first workout. And to me, that means that we have a beginning training overdosing problem. I think more people are afraid of how they're going to feel during it.

Starting point is 00:37:41 But yeah, either way, that's a good call. Um, but, but to Larry's point, he met Bill where he was at. Like, Bill didn't come in and day one just get smoked. Bill developed skill and resilience and recovery strategies through smart,

Starting point is 00:38:01 intentional programming that put him in a position to win. Totally. Right? Like, that's massive. That's where it all starts. Yeah. We got to write down another podcast to do is how sore should you be after your first workout? Love it. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. I got nothing more to add to this one. I think any more talk that we do is just going to muddily up, muddily it muddy. You said, you also said, you said you combined squat and pattern before into squatter. So you're fucking crushing it with new vocab today. Hey, listen, just because you can't keep up. Larry can't keep up with the vocabulary, so he's frustrated. Got it. All right. Well,

Starting point is 00:38:36 so listen, your take home point today, guys, is you're probably squatting too much. You're probably squatting too heavy. You're probably squatting too often. We want you to squat less weight, less often and less volume when you do it. And to your point, we want you to feel like you know what alternatives are. So frankly, I would, I'm always available as a resourcege is different than a step up because you need the back leg to support the eccentric portion as opposed to just the front leg. So it's more of a bilateral movement than a unilateral movement. A step up is a true unilateral movement if you're not cheating and driving off that back leg. And the Cossack squat is going to get you moving in multiple planes at the same time in ranges that you're unlikely to have much success with. And we want you to find the things you're the most deficient in and train those. We're also cognizant that you need to do stuff that feels good, that you enjoy, that makes you feel sexy

Starting point is 00:39:38 and awesome and jacked and cool. So every once in a while, mix that shit in. But it's the sizzle, not the steak. That's it. Turn pro. All right, Shrug Nation. I hope you enjoyed that episode of Active Life Radio on the Shrug Collective Network.

Starting point is 00:39:56 If you did, it would be a huge help for us to get the word out there. If you would head to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us an honest rating or wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us an honest rating. If you want to go bonus mode, please feel free to leave us a review as well. Anything that you listened to that you're interested in doing yourself. If you want to work

Starting point is 00:40:16 with an active life coach one-on-one yourself, head to active life, rx.com slash shrugged, fill out the application, and we'll be talking to you soon. Till then, turn pro. Bye.

Barbell Shrugged - You’re Probably Squatting Too Much w/Dr. Ray and Larry Gaier - Active Life Radio #23

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