Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 262: The Best of 8 Unique Fitness Disciplines

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

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day to promote my health. If you want to cover all your bases with a high quality protein, creatine post-workout or the ancillary micronutrient health stuff like greens, powders, and multivitamin, I encourage you to go over to legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code Danny. That'll save you 20% on your first order and you'll rack up points that you can use the same way as cash every time you use the code and you'll also be supporting the show. Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in this episode, we'll be going over what I like to call the best of the best. We will be reviewing eight

fitness disciplines and attempting to pull tips, tricks, and tactics from what each one of these specific disciplines and the practitioners and athletes who practice them, right? What these are all so good at generating. Suffice to say, what adaptations are these unique schools of fitness good at generating on a highly likely basis? If you do this, you'll get this. And what can we learn from the best of the best who do them? The eight schools of fitness will be covering our powerlifting, CrossFit, bodybuilding, Olympic lifting, distance, endurance, and obstacle course racing, sports performance, suffice to say strength and conditioning, fighting and grappling and dance slash rhythm, AKA dance, ballet, et cetera. I looked at these specifically because there's a lot of crossover, no matter how you slice this, but eight was about

as thinly as I could slice this without getting too much crossover. For example, I did include OCR obstacle course racing in with endurance training slash slash endurance athletes because I just couldn't have it exercise, um, and kind of pillars of physical culture before, like many of you have done powerlifting and bodybuilding or Olympic lifting and CrossFit hard to do one and not at least dabble in the other, right? Like you're somebody who competes in Olympic lifting would, would laugh at the training protocols of somebody who does Olympic lifts and CrossFit because they're, they in that how one trains to compete in an Olympic lift is very different from how one would compete in like, say, the CrossFit Games. So the percentage of training going towards one avenue would be quite a bit different,

but there's a ton of crossover. So we're going to start first by examining the powerlifting school of weightlifting and resistance training and talk about what it is that I believe they do so well. And the first thing I have highlighted, I have two points here, is the power of the little plates. Power lifters really understand micro progressions and progressive overload at its most basic and kind of foundational level. What I mean here is this, to get to a 400, 500 pound deadlift, a 300, 400 pound squat, a 200, 300 pound bench or so, okay, some respectable male powerlifting numbers are what I'm throwing at you. I'm I, this might be, but that might be nothing for you. That might seem insane for you. I'm just saying like, those are respectable numbers for somebody, my size,

who's powerlifting, um, to get to those totals on those lifts, you can't just add 45 pound plates to the bar. You know, eventually you're going to have to start making small and incremental changes to the weight that's on the bar to achieve the outcome of greater strength. And that unfortunately diminishes over time. So you'll go from your, let's say you start deadlifting a hundred pounds, you'll get from 100 to 200 purely based on cleaning up your technique, learning a little bit more about the setup of the lift and the execution and just practicing it. But to get from 200 to 300, you need to usually practice it a lot and incorporate a lot of programming and some recovery principles to

get from three to 400, you have to take it to a whole nother level. And to get from four to five, you're really operating on a tighter margin unless you're just one of those really gifted strength athletes. And to get there, it takes, with each hundred pound chunk, you're looking at probably a longer time period to get there, assuming everything stays the same. So it'll take you longer to get from 200 to 300 than it did from 100 to 200, and so on, kind of up that line. And you do that with increasingly smaller plates. You get from, you know, 100 pounds to 200 pounds with 25 and 10 pound jumps usually. But at the higher levels, the five pound and two and a half pound plates come out a lot. And I think we can stand to learn

quite a bit from this particular thing that powerlifters do so well. Because a lot of what discourages people on their fitness journey or whether they're trying to compete in any of the other line items we're going through today is they get frustrated when progress stagnates or slows or even just grinds to a halt completely and abruptly. And one of the things that I've always admired about the powerlifting community and the way in which that sport is trained is there's always a workaround. If you're hitting it like sticking point on a lift, there's a way around it. So it could be a board press. It could be a box squat. It could be a block pull, right? If you're having a hard time breaking a plateau, there's different schemes of periodization that

people will deploy. There's so much that can be done to overcome getting stuck because again, you're just really, really doing these three lifts, which we'll talk about in a second when we get to the second point. I give them a lot of credit for being able to lean into the micro progressions and make small incremental progress year over year on the basics, because I think that is the central kind of framework for developing fitness in almost any avenue. The second thing, the second school or the second piece with which the school of powerlifting seems to excel is with simplicity. And I highlight this because if you really think about it from a foundational level, the bench, squat, and deadlift

train every muscle in the body. Now, do they train them optimally? No. Do they train them optimally for hypertrophy or bodybuilding? No. Do they train them optimally for hypertrophy or bodybuilding? No. Do they train them optimally for Olympic lifting outcomes, CrossFit outcomes? No. Would they be good for sports performance? Almost certainly no, not at least in the sense of would it optimize for any of those outcomes. But from a general population standpoint, you cannot convince me that if we got 200 million Americans to bench, squat, and deadlift three times a week following a dynamic undulating periodization model, meaning we take the very sedentary, very overweight American population and say,

on Monday, you're going to bench press three by three, squat three by eight, deadlift three by three squat, three by eight deadlift, three by five on Wednesday, you're going to bench three by 12. You're going to squat three by three, and you're going to deadlift three by five again. And then on Friday, you're going to bench three by five. You're going to squat three by 10, and you're going to deadlift three sets of three. And you just do that simple program. You do those three lifts. You just kind of flip the reps around a high day, a moderate day, a low day. And you do that and do exactly what else you're doing. It'd be remarkable, in my opinion, the health outcomes we generate from that. I think we'd have a huge increase in muscularity, muscle mass, functional strength,

reduction in pain, assuming these lifts are being done correctly. This could be subjective pain. This could be like, you know, nonspecific back, anything from like a nonspecific back pain to a unresolved hip pain that might go away with better strengthening of the glutes. You know, there's so many things that you would stand to help that drive either pain or kind of negative health outcomes. Obviously you have more normalized blood sugar from increased muscle mass and contraction of tissue. You have a better mental health from increased muscle mass and contraction of tissue. You have better mental health outcomes associated with exercise oftentimes. So, so many good things would happen. And if you were to really want to just make it as simple and approachable as possible,

you'd want to use as few movements as possible. And one thing that's remarkable about powerlifting and the bench squat and deadlift is they do train every muscle in your body. Like I said, not optimally, not perfectly, but with those three, you're training damn near every single muscle. And if you just got really strong at them, you build a good amount of muscle, you'd have a lot of strength, you'd have a lot more bone density and all those other positive health outcomes. So I give powerlifting a lot of credit for really doing a fantastic job of analyzing and looking at micro progressions as a means to make long-term progress and really

leaning into the power of simplicity. The second discipline that I'd like to unpack and see what we can learn from, and you can take this into whatever it is that you're doing. You can obviously learn from this if you're doing bodybuilding or sports performance, or your goal is specifically fat loss, which you could pretty much use any one of these as long as you're in a calorie deficit. But I really particularly have enjoyed in my experience with powerlifting, those two specific tools. So moving now to CrossFit, one thing that I've really appreciated and learned from in studying the CrossFit community and the way they look at things is how well-rounded they try to be. And I do think that people who compete in CrossFit might be a little bit, you know, it's challenging to maintain a ton of health when you're competing at the highest, highest,

highest level of sport. I'm not saying these people are unhealthy. I'm saying, but like for optimal longevity and for not getting injured sake, you know, and having balance, you know, all of these at the most competitive level might be a little tricky, but CrossFit seems to be, in my opinion, this is the first thing I'd like to highlight, uh, the most well-rounded and the most likely to drive a diverse, positive, functional health outcomes because it incorporates elements of gymnastics. It incorporates elements of aerobic training. It incorporates elements of anaerobic training, and it incorporates Olympic lifting. So very technical with Olympic lifting, right? Very

aerobic with things like distance running, very anaerobic with things like sprint work, specifically on like the assault bike, lots of sprint work on the assault bike and the rower, lots of anaerobic weightlifting, bodybuilding and powerlifting style things show up in CrossFit from time to time. But there's also a lot of unique lifts that you kind of see mostly just in CrossFit, but you do a bunch of different shit. And I think you got to give CrossFit a ton of credit for helping to drive a lot of different adaptations in the people who engage with it. So much at like so much is lost with, with people in different communities where they have to micro focus. Um, meaning, you know, you're never going to be the best Olympic weightlifter in the world. If you're trying to be a bodybuilder, vice versa,

going to be the best Olympic weightlifter in the world if you're trying to be a bodybuilder, vice versa. But in CrossFit, it is important to develop multiple different avenues of fitness, and I think that's something that they've done extremely well. Specifically, going on to point number two, specifically in the cardiovascular range, I think I've really admired the use of both low impact sprint work and higher impact, oftentimes endurance work. CrossFit gyms, boxes as they're often called, are certainly not strangers to having their clients slash class attendees go on short jogs or runs. Not every piece of cardio is done on a machine in CrossFit, which I kind of like. I also like that when they do use cardiovascular machines, they do a really good job of leveraging their strengths, particularly lower impact machines like ski ergs, rowers, and air bikes or airdynes that you can really sprint on that don't put a ton of pounding or loading on the body.

So this allows CrossFit to really like dive into high level aerobic, um, work where a little goes a long way and still have their athletes recovered enough for longer distance, low intensity work, even things like running without being totally beat to shit all the time. Uh, because they're not going out and running sprints on a track out of nowhere. You know, like I think a lot of people do funny stuff like this where they're like, I'm on a bodybuilding program and I'm going to start running sprints. And it's like, do you know how hard it is to recover from actual sprints compared to like sprints on an air bike? Cause there is a big difference. Let me tell you. Uh, and the third thing, the third thing that I think we can learn from the CrossFit community

that I absolutely love is the core training. They do a lot of hanging core training, hanging leg raises, toes to bars. There's a lot of anti-extension work in the form of various planks. There's a lot of sit-ups and extensions. I think that the CrossFit community has done a really good job of promoting spinal resiliency through their programming protocols. Now, do I think they do a perfect job of keeping every single weightlifter that goes through theirs back perfectly safe and technically sound on every lift? No, I don't. I know that CrossFit has limitations and I know it's certainly not the quote unquote safest form of exercise, but I make a pretty concerted effort on the podcast to frame all of these different disciplines as substantially more positive than

I have in the past, where I think I got a little bit campy and a little bit myopic about, hey, you know, I think this is the best. And if you put me in charge of a government office that could have the power to specifically create some type of national resistance training program, it probably wouldn't look like CrossFit. Okay, I'll give you that. But I think these guys do a really good job at a few things that we can all learn from and take with us on our health and fitness journey. I think many people could use greater diversity in the adaptations they train, specifically the aerobic adaptations, which a lot of people don't take seriously, especially in the body composition space where most of the, like the bodybuilders

have really figured it out. Like you don't necessarily need to do a shit ton of cardio to get lean. Most of them will, especially when it comes to competition prep season, but off season bodybuilders, uh, is even natural bodybuilders are able to maintain a tremendous amount of muscularity, look very, very lean and good without doing a ton of cardio. And a lot of people in the general population just think that to be that lean, not even stage lean, just generally off-season lean, they got to do a ton of cardio. And it's because they've got the diet down. But CrossFit does a really good job of deliberately and specifically including, I think, aerobic training with a design on hitting on the zone fours and fives and also the zone one and two, specifically two.

zone fours and fives, and also the zone one and two, specifically two. Okay. When we also highlighted, of course, that they do a phenomenal job of having core training that trains the core in multiple planes to, you know, extend, to flex, to flex and extend lateral flexion, core stability, anti-extension rotation. All of those are featured there. And I think all of us would stand to benefit from that kind of inclusion. Moving on to the third school of training, this is bodybuilding. And I think bodybuilding specifically can be communicated in this context as people who are bodybuilding or training with the goal of developing a physique that resembles somebody who could, does not have to, but could compete and win a bodybuilding show. I use that stipulation to say that this is not somebody who just wants to be a little bigger, or this is not a school of training for somebody who wants to

put on a little size. This is like specifically somebody who says, I want to build a physique that is in accordance and kind of meets the standards of the current judging criterion of my gender's specific, uh, you know, competition standards. Like if, if bodybuilders should have a trim waist and big quads and strong lats and, and, you know, a big chest and, and these are muscles, or if a bikini competitor should have big glutes, rounded shoulders, nice thighs, a trim midsection. I'm trying to meet those standards. A lot of people train like this. It's one of the most popular training modalities, especially for young people. And many people take it all the way up to the competitive ranks. And one of the

things that bodybuilders do extremely well, I have three points here for bodybuilding. What's going on guys, taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. You can join either my Home Heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells, or Elite Physique, which is a female bodybuilding-focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength, as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back.

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community. Back to the show. Taking a little break from the action here to tell you about our amazing partner, Seed. Seed makes the best probiotic supplement on the market, bar none. I'm very confident with that because I think that the probiotic space and the gut health space in general is filled with people who have no idea what they're talking about or who are looking to make a buck. This isn't to say your gut health isn't important. In fact, it's probably one of the most important and most intriguing developments we have seen in modern medicine and modern physiology. Our relationship with our guts is critical. It's crucial. And taking care of that by eating a lot of

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you can do that, but it goes a long way. It's the best probiotic supplement on the market. I absolutely love it. And you can use the code Danny15 to save. Back to the show. Hey guys, taking a break from the action to tell you about one of our favorite new sponsors, Underdog Fantasy. If you're like me, you love sports. Sports was actually how I got into fitness in the first place. And one of my favorite things to do when I'm not working out or working with my clients is watch and engage in sports with my friends. Underdog is the best fantasy sports app out there for best ball and for pick them. If you like football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, WNBA, UFC, boxing, Underdog has something exciting for you. You can bet on your favorite teams. You can bet on your favorite players in the easiest

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or watching sports. I love underdog and you can go to the app store today, download underdog, enter the promo code Danny, and they will match your first deposit up to a hundred dollars. You'll have a blast playing underdog all season long. Back to the action. One of the things that bodybuilders do extremely well that we all could benefit from in our fitness journeys, regardless of whatever outcome here, again, there's a lot of crossover here. I specifically selected for crossover. Unilateral work. Bodybuilders do an incredible job incorporating unilateral work. Now, I think a lot of people think of the word unilateral as meaning, okay, this unilateral

exercise means it's done on one leg. Lunge is unilateral and a squat is bilateral. Unilateral does not mean one leg. I get that a lot. Unilateral essentially means one side or moving one object per side of the body compared to two sides working together to move a single object. For example, I think you could put it on a spectrum and say that a barbell bench press is more bilateral than the dumbbell bench press, which is more unilateral because each arm is moving a single dumbbell versus both arms moving a one single barbell versus like saying, oh, well, you know, it, everything has to be done one side at a time. A lot of times I think you can break it down this way. Bodybuilders will opt for dumbbells to train

each side of the body in concert over a barbell because of the expanded range of motion capability on something like, say, a flat press. I think that would be an example of optimizing for unilateral joint function moreover than saying like, oh, it's a single side at a time exercise. I think that this is something that bodybuilders do extremely well even with other tools like cables. So it's a little bit more than saying, yes, they do a lot of unilateral exercises. It's also saying that they have determined when and when it makes the most sense to go bilateral and when it makes the most sense to break it down into a more unilateral, more isolated version. I give them a ton of credit for that. That's in the

name of building symmetry, of course. Another thing they do extremely well is they tend to have a very good functional understanding of biomechanics and what muscles are being loaded the most in which movements. And they can do this very intuitively. A lot of people who practice bodybuilding are extremely cerebral and intelligent, and they can actually do these math equations for you using physics. Some people are that into this, and it's really impressive. And I've had the opportunity to learn from a number of them. I think it can get a little bit convoluted, and we can kind of lose the forest for the trees and get a little complex, but good things in life are

allowed to be complex. But bodybuilding tends to help a lifter and an athlete develop a tremendous mind-muscle connection and a tremendous capacity for intramuscular coordination, which is really contracting the target muscle, and intermuscular coordination, getting muscles to work together in concert to complete a movement. Bodybuilders really understand what is being trained and what movements really well and really intuitively, but they also tend to know the science. So something you can really generate from bodybuilding is a tremendous sense of physical self-awareness. I think that is tricky to cultivate when you're not training in such an isolated and developmental fashion. The last piece about bodybuilding that I absolutely love is there's a lot of longevity.

While I do think many people think of bodybuilding as hellacious blood and guts, screaming and groaning, garbage form lifting, I find it tends to be very far from that. I think that most bodybuilders, both natural and enhanced, tend to have longer training careers than powerlifters and CrossFit athletes and oftentimes Olympic lifting athletes and even runners that compete or train with the same level of intensity. Bodybuilding is high volume and it isn't penalty free. You'll put a toll on your body training to build muscle. But I tend to find it really paves the way for long, meaningful training careers because of the systematized approach to optimizing for recovery. Bodybuilding is the one kind of thing here in particular

that is more about the recovery than it is the output. And that you go to the gym to break down the tissue. And then with bodybuilding, you go home and you really dial in the nutrition to repair and recover and to build as much as possible or to get as lean as possible while keeping the muscle. And so there is a long-term longevity-based recovery-based mindset here that I think is really, really valuable and that a lot of these other schools and disciplines don't leverage to the unfortunate detriment of the people who practice them. Okay, number four is Olympic lifting. And the first thing that comes to mind immediately when I think of the Olympic lifters I know and my own experience with Olympic

lifting, both teaching it and executing it and performing it is it's really, really technical. Much like powerlifting, you're not doing too many lifts. You're doing lifts and then iterations or smaller kind of broken down versions of those lifts to put it succinctly. But it's very, very technical and you can drill just a part of a lift. You can drill the same lift over and over to make sure that you're in the perfect position or you have the right rhythm or the right pacing and the right timing. And a very limited library of exercises expands quickly into a number of drills and different things all boiled down to and in the name of being

technically proficient so you can move the most weight possible in the least amount of time with the lowest energy demand. Now, another thing, the second point that I think Olympic lifters really, really succeed with compared to other disciplines is their recovery when they do total body training. Now think about this. Every time you do a snatch or a clean, you're training probably more muscles than even something like a deadlift or a squat. And imagine the way a bodybuilder or a powerlifter squats and deadlifts. If they did that every single day, it would really take a toll on them. Same thing with CrossFit, with those volumes and those protocols. I don't think you'd want to be a CrossFitter squatting and deadlifting every day, even four or five days a week. Same thing with bodybuilding, same thing with powerlifting.

Olympic lifting and Olympic lifters do a fantastic job of grading exposure and using percentages of their one repetition max often to train well below their maximum output levels so they can perform these lifts three, four, five, six, sometimes even seven days per week, which I know sounds a little crazy, but there are plenty of lifters who compete in Olympic lifting who are on a platform pulling and moving a bar five, six days a week easy. And so it's within that kind of programming and that essential attention to detail at the percentage of one rep max level, that really granular level that allows them not to overdo it.

And I think we can learn a little bit from their obsession on technicality and being able to really recover well session to session by using pretty definitive metrics to gauge how close they're getting to their maximum output. We'll talk a little bit more about those kind of tactics in a second here when we get to number six, sports performance. But before that, we'll talk about number five, which is endurance work, which I think can essentially be divided into distance running. Okay. Uh, like marathons, half marathons, ultra marathons. I put endurance work in here because that can include things like, um, various competitions that might be team-based, uh, like crew. Uh, and then I also included in this category, OCR obstacle course racing, like, like Spartan race or high rocks or tough mudder.

A lot of people compete in these things year round. And I basically thought about this and broke it down into the four G's. What I think these, these particular athletes and disciplines cold debate are the four G's grit gear, get up and go and grip, uh, and grip specific to OCR. But let's talk about grit first to compete in anything long distance or to do anything challenging for time, including something like an ice bath. Uh, you have to have grit and yes, it does seem to be at least for me and many people that after about an hour of endurance exercise, things start to become physically a little less demanding because of the release of endorphin. Yes and no.

It does, but it also isn't so much that you're going to feel particularly comfortable running exponentially after you've run for one hour. It's really not that simple. And it's, quite frankly, not that comfortable to engage in a long distance exercise. And that is why it requires a good amount of grit to be an endurance athlete. And I think that is a mental component that this discipline develops very well. This isn't to say that the other disciplines don't. I think all of these disciplines develop substantially more grit than sitting on your ass. But I really admire the grit that endurance athletes cultivate through training and years of training. And I think we can

borrow that for life. I also think we can borrow it for fitness. Something else I think they do fantastically well, the second G is utilize gear. Any endurance athlete could tell you a bunch about their shoes, why they selected them, everything down to their socks, oftentimes their shorts. And well, I'm certainly no glutton for consumerism. When you compete at the highest level, everything matters, including to the level of your gear. And I'm often asked questions about footwear for lifting, clothing for lifting. And I do think that you have a little bit more of the ability to be loose with certain training disciplines and training goals and training programs than you would with like a distance program where you might need not just a lot of equipment, but specific equipment. But I do think you can learn a lot from being equipment oriented in your training. And that could be something like supplements, which might not think you think of as equipment, but it could be an analog to better performance. I really think for weightlifting, it could be

things like chalks, straps, lifting shoes. CrossFit has a lot of gear, a lot of specific equipment that being technically proficient on and staying up to date on will help you actually extend your career. So I think that gear is something that these endurance people have really paid close attention to, not just to get an edge, but to recover from what's ultimately really grueling. And I think we could all learn from that. The third is the get up and go. So one thing that I like about endurance training is no matter where you're at, you can usually just get up and go find a treadmill. You can find a stair master. You can find some local bleachers. Obviously you can just get up and go for a run or a hike or find a trail. And I love the get up and go component of this kind

of training in this training discipline. And I think it's really hard to emulate with the more technical, um, challenging, uh, resistance training modalities specifically specifically but i love the get up and go and then specific to ocr the fourth and final g would be grip i think that grip training and grip strength is something that is of particular interest to men um there's a lot of statistics that get thrown around about general reductions in male grip strength compared to say 40 50 60 years ago it appears that males are experiencing a rapid reduction in grip strength compared to say 40, 50, 60 years ago. It appears that males are experiencing a rapid reduction in grip strength, which is tightly correlated with testosterone and fertility. And so, you know, men are oftentimes, uh, you know, posed with the

question of, Oh, where's my grip strength at? And, and, you know, you'll see a lot in the gym with gals, they have a hard time gripping and holding onto the barbell when they're squatting and lunging and hinging and deadlifting so much weight that the lower body muscles outpace the grip muscles. So they have to use straps. And I'm not saying straps are bad. You got to rock with what you got, especially in bodybuilding where you're stronger in the target muscle than the gripping muscle. But OCR competitors tend to develop tremendous grip for their events and have tremendous relative grip to body weight ratios so they can hang for a long time. And I think that's a good general fitness practice to be able to be quite strong at hanging and having

good grip strength translates well to a lot of different things. Moving on to the sixth school sports performance, which I think could be specific to athletes who are training to compete in a sport like baseball, basketball, football, et cetera, or coaches who are coaching in that context. And what do these disciplines do well? Well, one thing I know they do well for sure, and this is from friends of mine who work specifically with teams at high levels, like Dr. Ramsey Nigem. He's been on the podcast. He was with the Sacramento Kings, currently with the Kansas Jayhawks, probably the best division one men's basketball programs out there, maybe top five, if not the top program. And they really are big on data. They use bar velocity. They use jump parameters to measure athlete readiness. They use total tonnage. They use GPS data. They

really look at a lot of different stuff to determine the demands that are being placed on these athletes. And while I totally think this would be overkill for most people, I think getting to know your data can be really valuable, whether it be scale, weight data, calorie intake data, data from an advanced wearable like an Apple Watch or a Whoop. These things can be really helpful. And the sports performance world has definitely shown to me just how value data can be. The other thing they are really good with, the second piece, is the training tech. They have bigger budgets typically at Division I and professional athletic programs that allow these particular coaches and coaching programs to usually be at the cutting edge of equipment access. And there's some pretty amazing tech out there that are available for

athletes at the highest level that might not be available to you, but you can look and see what technology is within your budget. Like I mentioned before, even a wearable, which aren't really reliable for calorie particular data, but they can be great for encouraging steps or for logging cardiac output. I think they're really good for displaying heart rate data. Lots of different things, but tech and even home equipment, for example, you can stay up to date on stuff like that. These sports performance programs are always on the cutting edge with tech. One thing that I think they do fantastically well, and this stands above the rest, specifically for fitness adaptations is their third and final one

is the use of plyometrics. So plyometrics are often bastardized in the body composition, like bodybuilding slash just looking good community as a way to burn calories and do quote unquote hit cardio. But plyometrics aren't really designed for that. You see plyometrics refer to exercises designed to increase plyometric strength and power or ballistic strength and power. And this is that quick twitch hop springy kind of jumpy twitchy fitness that we see with athletes and sports performance is one of the only places you'll see plyometrics programmed appropriately to drive these adaptations. And I think all of us could benefit from having a little bit of

plyometric strength. And something you could do is find a really reduced plyometric exercise, like a pogo or a broad jump even. And anytime you're going on a walk to once you're warm, once you're loose, occasionally do 20 seconds of polos or 20 ground contacts of pogos, or maybe a hide in like a lateral jump or a broad jump or a tuck jump, light plyos sprinkled in when you go on a walk and you'll build tensile strength in your tendons and tissues to give you a little bit more of a springy and twitchy quality to your fitness, make you a little more athletic. And there's a lot of value to that overall. Okay. Number seven, the school of fighting and grappling. Uh, one of the things I love here is

tissue resilience, something that I've learned a lot from talking to grapplers and watching the sport of MMA, uh, your joints get put into some pretty compromised positions. And when you don't have strength in those compromised positions or in those end ranges, it's going to contribute a ton of additional pain response. And you'll probably be substantially easier to defeat. You tend to be easier to beat if you're easier to pin. And all of these athletes, particularly in the grappling sports like jujitsu, have incredible mobility, but they also have a lot of mobility and unique ranges, end ranges where people typically tend to be weak or uncomfortable. And developing resilient tissue is, I think, really, really important. And I'm not saying that you go out and you just wrestle

and you go out and you just challenge people in the streets and go like, I need to build up my tissue resiliency. Let's go. No, I'm saying that these athletes expose themselves to challenging positions against resistance all the time that are outside of the kind of typical confines of regular resistance training and develop amazing, amazing functional mobility for their sport, which is to say mobility that allows them to be put in positions and not tap. That is the definition of a functional, uh, mobility more generally would just be, I can bend and extend through a full range of motion. It's like, okay, that's cool. Um, that's functional mobility for the average person. Functional mobility for a fighter is not getting tapped and being comfortable in crazy positions. And I think these guys do a tremendous job of allowing themselves to get

into those positions through drilling, through grappling, through fighting. And the way the body adapts is really remarkable. Another thing they have is tremendous calisthenics strength. I wanted to give a shout out to calisthenics as its own school, but I just couldn't carve out space for it. And I do feel that more people now are doing grappling as their primary exercise modality than calisthenics. But it doesn't mean it's not popular. I just think that it's maybe been usurped by things like Brazilian jiu-jitsu. But calisthenic total body strength with your own body weight, things like pistol squats, pull-ups, chin-ups, all these different levers, muscle-ups, all these crazy things.

I've noticed grapplers and fighters tend to have tremendous body strength, relative strength on those total kind of full body or even just body weight exercises. So things like burpees, muscle ups, pushups, pull ups, they tend to be insanely good at those just because of the amazing strength they have over their body. So number eight would be dance and rhythm. And I don't know how many people are aware, but like actually dancing and Zumba and all of these different things, like a lot of people do that as a primary fitness modality. I'm not just talking about things like hip hop dancing or ballet, but one

of the things that these athletes tend to do well, it's the one thing that I think we can really learn from them is they tend to spend a lot of time in their training without shoes on. And I know that might be weird to think about. We just spent this very long 36 minute episode unpacking seven unique kind of things we can borrow from each of these fitness avenues. And we get to dance and you tell me to go barefoot. And it really is because I think this is the most functional and applicable tip for you in your life would be to say, practice more of your movement when it's safe and possible without shoes on. I know that many dances actually require special shoes like tap dancing and ballet, but a lot of these athletes have incredible intrinsic foot strength and it's cultivated from years of training in these shoes or training barefoot. And we don't spend a ton of time barefoot. We live in these little shoes, these shoes, aka foot prisons, our whole life and don't develop that intrinsic foot strength. So I think that's something you can absolutely do and borrow from this community to live more fit overall. So hopefully you guys got

something out of this and you're going to deploy some of the tactics in powerlifting, CrossFit, bodybuilding, Olympic lifting, endurance training, sports performance, grappling, and even dance to make your movement and physical qualities improve over time. You can learn something from everybody. And I used to be a lot more cranky and snarky about what I thought was best until I realized the more I learn from different schools of fitness culture, the better my body feels, the better my clients are served, and the more uniquely we can put programs together based on all the amazing different schools within fitness. So I hope you found this one valuable. If you did, share it with somebody that you think will enjoy it. Leave me a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Please follow and subscribe

to the podcast if you're just listening and haven't yet. That makes a really big difference. I know a lot of you listen but aren't yet subscribed, so just hit that little button and I will catch you on the next one.