Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 29 - Dr. John Rusin: Warm Ups, Movement Patterns, Bands + More!

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

In this episode we sit down with Dr. John Rusin.Dr. Rusin is a sports performance specialist and injury prevention expert that has coached some of the world’s most elite athletes including multiple Olympic gold medalists, NFL & MLB All-Star performers, and professional athletes from 11 different sports. Dr. Rusin has also managed some of the most successful barbell sports athletes in the world including world record-holding powerlifters, CrossFit Games athletes, and IFBB professional bodybuilders and physique athletes. His innovative pain-free performance programs have been successfully used by over 25,000 athletes, which has gained him the reputation as the go-to industry expert for rebuilding after pain, injuries, or plateaus. Dr. Rusin is also the founder of the Pain-Free Performance Specialist Certification (PPSC) that has certified over 1500 personal trainers, strength coaches, and rehab pros from across the globe in his methods over the past two years.Support the Show.

Guys, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. Today we are sitting down with Dr. John Russin. Dr. Russin has been a force in the fitness space for quite some time as both a writer, content producer, coach, and educator with his PPSC certification. Today I'm pumped because we're talking about warm-up structure, how to utilize bands in your training, overrated movements, underrated movements, just talking shop. So this is going to be a really, really enjoyable one for lifters and coaches alike. So sit back and enjoy the episode with Dr. John Russell. John, man, how are you doing? Doing okay, doing okay. You staying

safe out there for the most part, keeping your hands clean, washing everything? Oh man, I'm in day 54 of the isolation life in Wisconsin and two kids at home, 10 and four has been a challenge. Being grounded, not being able to travel and run the pain-free performance specialist certification has been a challenge, but we're all safe and we're making do. So, you know, that's a silver lining. Nice. So I'm actually familiar with the PPSC. Now, granted, I have not done it yet, but it's on the list of things I'd like to do. But I'm very familiar with your work. We spoke off air about how I'd run into you on T Nation many years ago, some of your written work, but you're kind of a big deal in the space now.

And could you just, for anybody who's not familiar with your journey, talk a little bit about how it is you got to where you are today? Yeah, you know, it's too kind, a big deal. I don't know if I'm a big deal, but I'm definitely somebody who has been working hard in many different areas of the fitness industry over the last 14 years, that's for sure. But I think like many coaches out there, I started off as an athlete. I was a Division 1 baseball player. And then I was lucky enough at age 20 to get my first job as a sprinting conditioning coach at my alma mater. And things really progressed quickly from

there, ended up moving out to Southern California, really specializing in high-end sports performance, usually working with the demographics centered around baseball and around football, about 95% of my demographic for about five years there. And then one thing led to another, trained Olympians, trained professional athletes from basically every single big time American sport, and then moved into barbell sports, you know, things like powerlifting, things like bodybuilding, CrossFit competitors. And now over the last number of years, kind of found my niche in the industry, which is really more general fitness, health, and longevity focused.

And that's really what the education drives towards, what my programming drives towards, content development, and everything over the last about four or five years, really with demographic of my clientele being mainly general fitness population. And honestly, man, I love it. You know, coming from one total polarized opposite end of the spectrum, which is the top 0001 percenters in the entire world, you know, gold medalist Olympians, all the way to people that are looking to look, feel and function their best to live better lives. You know, it's a it's a wild ride. But I think that if you do good work, if you get results, and you take care of people care of people, it's a journey that is very authentic, but it's also a journey that is

worth taking to try to find out where you can best help society. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think you do something quite well that a lot of people in the space struggle with, which is articulating and distilling some of those concepts that you've learned and kind of polished from working with higher level athletes and people at that highest level and making them digestible for, you know, your average Jane and Joan, your fitness enthusiast, somebody who's just looking to perhaps improve their physique or maybe their performance. And one of the places I've noticed that you do this in a way not many people do is with regards to preparing for a workout and in regards to warming up. And I've seen you touch on this many times and it's quite layered, particularly in some of the ways I've

seen you present the importance of warming up. Could you talk a little bit about some of the ways that you like to not only warm up yourself, but have clients warm up or the way you program warm up so that people can optimize performance. For sure. But you know, one of the things that really holds professionals back in terms of content development today in the industry is the inability to simplify a very complex method, complex system, or complex training technique. And that's something that I struggle with too. I spent 10 years in higher education to the point where I've written research, doctoral dissertations, all this shit.

And at that point in time, I was able to utilize all that knowledge and give it to my high performance athletes because they've been around coaches before. They have a high knowledge of the way their body functions. But I remember like, you know, 2013 is when I started writing articles. I had to simplify and I had to make sure that people that were reading and were watching and were listening could take action upon the things that I know that could help them. And really, it's been a crazy journey the last six years to take something that is deeply rooted in the research and in the science and trying to make it very simple, very effective,

very applicable for literally anyone that doesn't know the difference between their bicep and their tricep. But the thing that I've been focusing on really over the last decade is human performance preparation, whether that be an athlete, the last decade is human performance preparation, whether that be an athlete, whether that be a general fitness consumer, whether that be somebody coming into bridge program post physical therapy or rehabilitation. And I really look at this as being a major opportunity to actually increase the way that somebody is able to function in their day to day, but also get a compounding effect of positive action and a step-by-step approach to habituation of actually having daily body

maintenance of you being self-sufficient in the way that your body functions. So this has come a long, long way over the decade. But really, I look at a phasic approach to warming up or physical preparation. And we call it the six-phase dynamic warm-up sequence. The six different phases are really coupling and they are dependent on one another. And really you can look at it as a holistic approach, a well-rounded approach to what somebody should be doing on a daily basis just to take care of their body, whether that be as a standalone, whether that be before the training session, or even something that you would do after a training session to feel better. But I think that when people hear

six phases, it's like, oh my God, six different things I need to do before training. We try to have efficiency be the factor that we hone in on. So this should take anywhere from about six to 10 minutes a day. So efficiency, effectiveness, that is what's made this six-phase dynamic warmup sequence really take off to the point where it's been used by hundreds of thousands of people all across the globe effectively over the last six years since we've been teaching that. No, I love that. And I think even just from an anecdotal standpoint, I myself sometimes struggle with going through a inefficient warmup because I'm ready to train. So being able to get all of those things really, really, really refined to a point where you can fit it into six to 10 minutes

is certainly going to want improved performance. But I'm sure you've seen this and you can riff on this a little bit because I love to hear what your two cents are on it. But I'm sure that you've seen a proper warm ups good for performance, but also for mitigating some of those nagging training injuries that tend to pop up for most people. For sure. You know, that's my specialty, pain free performance. And I started out my career being like, hey, the only reason to warm up is so we can squat bigger, so we can be more explosive, we can sprint faster, we can jump higher. It was all about performance metrics. And there wasn't anything wrong with that, but it was far from optimal.

We're living in a totally different day and age today, though, because we're dealing with chronic pain and injuries, systemic diseases at epidemiological levels. So the things that we're doing in the warm-up process or a daily maintenance program, these are things that need to really be honing in on factors that are going to be protective of the human body and also its physiological functions. So my number one right now for being able to prepare somebody's body before a training session is to help mitigate the risk of otherwise preventable injuries, pain responses,

or generally feeling like crap and performing crap. So there's certain things that we can do in order to manipulate the body's positions, the way that it's feeling, the way that it's functioning, to really put our people in the best position possible to, again, get that pain-free training effect when we actually start the weight training session, or the cardio session, or the conditioning, whatever it may be. You know, there's certain base things that are known to be effective, both anecdotally and by the research, and these are things that need to be done. And really,

it all starts with having a more blueprint-based approach of knowing why you're doing what you're doing, but also having the flexibility to fit in what you may feel like you need that day. So these six different phases, you can think of them all as buckets. Each and every phase is distinct from one another. And really, the way that you plug and play into these six phases is going to be dependent on the individual. It's also going to be depending on how that individual feels or what you have planned for that training day. But I think that just simplifying six different techniques out and being able to choose and classify those techniques even for lay people it really streamlines the entire process because the mistake that people will make with the warm-ups is they do absolutely

nothing to warm up and they just head into the squat rack or they spend 45 minutes walking on the treadmill then they spend another 30 minutes foam rolling every nook and cranny of their body then they stretch every single muscle and then they go oh man I need to leave the gym and they never actually trained. So the warmup turns into wasting time and not actually eliciting the training effect. So we need to be efficient. We need to be effective, but we also need to know what constitutes each and every one of the six phases so we can get in and out very quickly. So are you, I don't know if those are proprietary, but can you share some of those six phases? Absolutely, man. You know, my entire career

has been about giving free content, paying it forward. And I pride myself in giving more free content and better high quality free content than people actually put on sale on their sites. So really the six phases, let's go through them one by one here, and then we can break down based on your questions. Phase one is soft tissue work, a.k.a. foam rolling. Phase two, we have stretching. Phase three, corrective exercises. Phase four, activation.

Phase five, a foundational movement pattern. And phase six is central nervous system activations we're trying to prime the brain to perform explosively so you got some degree of potentiation towards the end but you've got quite a bit of your traditional uh warm-up quote-unquote warm-up work at the beginning and i think what a lot of people will do is they'll you already hit on it they'll key in on that perhaps aerobic portion and maybe they will spend an exorbitant amount of time foam rolling the nooks and crannies, but they don't do any work to actually potentiate performance, particularly with that neuromuscular activation or something to kind of ramp up.

They just do a little bit of a warming up. They hit the foam roller and then they jump into the squat rack. Would you say that that potentiation work really makes a big difference for most people in what you've seen? For sure, because I think a lot of people go in and they try to key in on things that will relax them before they train. So we're thinking about like extended soft tissue work, extended static stretching. There's nothing wrong with these things, but they need to be sprinkled in. So I recommend for phase one, we're thinking about one to two minutes of foam rolling that is very targeted on a single area of the body, not everything, just one thing.

And then whatever you foam roll, you should be doing some movement-based stretching on that in phase two. Then by the time you get to phase three, we're starting to feel like training. So we're starting to do some global movements. Phase four, really getting that mind-muscle connection going, activating, producing internal force. And then by phase five and six, it should truly feel like training to the point where you have your heart rate up, maybe a couple beads of sweater going on your forehead. And then by the time you get to phase six, you are working on almost power production, something that is fast, something that is twitchy, something that excites the brain. So we can almost overperform when we actually get in to the

training session, feeling our absolute best. But many times I see that people skip phases four through phases six, and they prolong phases one and two. But it is really important to realize that the six-phase dynamic warm-up sequence approach, it is dependent on all of these different factors creating a symbiotic environment for human potential performance. So one thing without the others is really useless. You know, you think about foam rolling alone, basically useless. Stretching alone, basically useless. Even doing central nervous system activation work, it's not going to be as optimal as if we did all these other steps. So I think that the way that we think about it is you take a step-by-step approach up a staircase.

And by the time you get to that six-step staircase, you're ready to go in and train. You're mentally, emotionally, psychologically, and physically prepared to do the best that day and also try to mitigate that risk of injury. I think that's fantastic. I think that's fantastic. And one of the things I think it really speaks to, and this is coming from somebody who's done a lot of education from a lot of different quote unquote camps, is you've kind of collected the things that work best from each camp. You know, you're borrowing from the mobility camp. You're also borrowing from the bodybuilding camp with activation and then from the strength and conditioning camp with potentiation and combining what all of these realms do best into one really concise warmup. So that's awesome. And honestly, it's something I'm going to probably

focus on doing a little bit better as a workout from home. Something else that you've always kind of been big on, and it's on a poster in your gym. And I think it's really critical that we talk about it because a lot of people think of exercise in terms of movements or muscles. But one of the things I've always recognized to be kind of on brand for Dr. Russen is thinking about things in the sense of patterns. So there's some patterns that I think you have hanging on your wall that are push, pull, hinge, squat, lunge, and I believe carry. Why do you classify movements into those categories? And do you think that that's a great way for people to really look at, hey, these are the things that I need to train if I want to be a functional, aesthetic, and type of body that can actually perform? Yeah, that's a great question.

And I think that sometimes there's this misconception that it's like, oh, John created these six foundational movement patterns. They are original to him. They're proprietary information. That's bullshit. What they are is a human developmental sequence. should be able to do and what a human being should be able to develop from the time that they're born up to the time that they've mastered their own body to the point where they've started to get onto two feet and actually locomote their bodies through space, aka walking. So this is called the normalized developmental sequence. And there's hard neurology on this. There is a very, very

predictable pattern in the way that we progress through these patterns and master these patterns so we can ultimately become human, bipedal beings. And the six patterns are squatting, which is a bilateral stance, hinging, which is a hip hinge, lunging, which is asymmetrical single leg stances, pushing and pulling at the upper body. It could be done overhead or it could be done horizontally. And then you have this carry pattern, which is asymmetrical single leg stances, pushing and pulling at the upper body. It could be done overhead or it could be done horizontally. And then you have this carry pattern, which is essentially not carrying dumbbells across the gym. It means locomoting your body through space. So it's actually locomotion. And then when you mix in degrees of rotation into all these patterns, that is essentially what a human being should be able to do. But the reality of today is many of our human movement systems have been deactivated. We've had learned disuse of multiple of these six foundational movement patterns. And then we sit around and we wonder why our shoulders are aching, why our backs hurt, why our knees are cranky. It's because we have lost the ability to essentially move like a human should be able

to move. I quite like that. And of these patterns, and I'm sure because you've worked with so many people, what is the one that you think gets neglected the most in conventional training? Oh man, that's a loaded question because there's so many that we do see neglected, but I do mention the number one neglected movement pattern in the gym for people is usually that asymmetrical single leg training. So things like lunging, things like split squats, things like a kickstand stance, doing lower body directed work. The reason that people tend to neglect single leg training is because it is hard as hell. It will increase your heart rate.

It will make you sweat. It will literally burn up your legs and it will do it with 10 pounds in each hand. So it's very humbling at the same point in time. But the reason that this is still neglected is that people will have a hard time with a couple of different components that really the single leg stance biases, which is balance, which is agility, coordination, and being able to dominate your body dynamically moving through space with a smaller base of support. So yes, it's very hard. It hits it really hard. And people simply skip over it because we like doing inherently easy things.

Yeah, no. And I think it's interesting because if you've worked with people, particularly in even the powerlifting and bodybuilding space, you'll notice that the biggest holes in their training could likely be remedied by increasing the amount of single leg work that they do. Would you say that's the truth? Absolutely. And one pattern is not better than another. The questions that I always get is like squat versus split squat. And it doesn't have to be a versus thing. It doesn't have to be a competition. As I mentioned, these are components that everyone should be doing. And honestly, when I start working with a new client, I go through an auditing process of what they've been doing throughout their training career. And the number one thing that I start with is making sure that they're hitting all of these different patterns. But the reality of today is that even people that are

highly active in the gym, people that are quote unquote fit, they are neglecting two, three, four of these patterns. And they're really gravitating towards, you know, doing glorious things that boost ego as much as they do things that are really tough and hard to build back up from square one. Many times it's something called the reverse engineering process. We not only have to build these patterns back up, but we have to mentally take away all these barriers to entry before we can actually positively reactivate some of these human movement patterns that may not have been done in the last two decades. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social

media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah, no, that's huge.

Another thing that I've always kind of liked that you do, and this is something that not a lot of people in this space do, particularly see it in the powerlifting space, but it's the use of variable resistance, like bands and chains. What kind of caused you to gravitate towards bands and chains? And it's kind of funny because everybody and their mother is going to have a bunch of bands after the end of this COVID-19 thing. And depending on how quickly they can get back to the gym, perhaps they'll choose to implement them in their more traditional training. So I guess the first question is, what made you gravitate towards those and what is the utility of them? And then a follow-up would be, if people have bands,

what would you say they should be potentially looking to leverage their ability to help them perform with? Oh, this is a great question because I think I get it 20 to 30 times a day on Instagram. Hey, why aren't you using bands on the bar? Why not just add another plate? And I'm like, oh, I'm answering this question again for the 30th time today. And I know tomorrow's going to be 30 more questions. So very common question. I didn't gravitate towards accommodating base resistances like bands of chains. I was almost just dropped into that's the way things are done early on. You know, one of my biggest influences was at University of Buffalo, a strength coach that I was one of my mentors early on was essentially like the West side for athletes

guy. So we were using dynamic effort work. We're using bands and chains, you know, before it was really cool to do so. And that's something that is stuck in my programming for my clients and my athletes really over the last 20 years. And I really love the ability to go hard, to go heavy, to work extremely high intensities, but all being done safely without the repercussions of pain or injury in the process. But let's break this down very simply before we move forward on this. If you have banded accommodating resistance, the term accommodating means that essentially a band by itself or a band attached to something like a machine or even like a barbell, it will offer a changing resistance through different aspects of a range of motion.

Let's take squats for an example. Say the squat bar is on your back, and then you have bands attached to the bar on either side and then anchored down into the ground. As I squat down and I get to the bottom aspect of that squat, the bands will lose their stretch, and it will offer less resistance. But as I move up further away from that ground back up into a standing position at the top of that squat the bands will stretch more and more and more and that will add more resistance totally to the bar so there's many ways to use banded accommodating resistance but simply put it challenges different aspects of ranges of motion in different ways. It has the ability to add less resistance to a range of motion, maybe the more vulnerable positions, and it actually adds more resistance to the safer and stronger positions.

And this is something that chains do as well, but they're just not as prevalent, especially through commercial facilities. But simply put, we can really go hard and heavy and stay a little bit safer in the positions where we are the most vulnerable. And that's one of the things that really drives me towards utilizing a ton of accommodating resistance, not only in our warmups, not only in our power and strength work, but almost every aspect of somebody's training program, because it's really the best of both worlds. You can stay safe and you can train extremely hard with them. Yeah. The ability to kind of truncate how you apply resistance to that strength curve, or I guess you could say through that range of motion so that you kind of end up overloading

movement sometimes where they're strong or supporting them sometimes where they're weak. That's pretty fantastic when you consider that most people want to train for a long time and they probably want to minimize that cumulative wear and tear. So what are some exercises? We talked about squats a little bit. What are some exercises that you quite like to apply variable resistance to? And then maybe give an example or two of the ones you like. quite like to apply variable resistance to, and then maybe give an example or two of the ones you like. Yeah. You know, even before that though, you think about the properties of bands, you know, the properties of the elasticity, you know, we forget sometimes that our muscles and our bones aren't made of iron. Our muscles and our bones have elastic properties. Our soft tissues have elastic properties. So really getting deep down on this, it's almost a more natural way to train in terms of the way

that we can generate tension, generate force, and dynamic movements. But I mean, the exercises are absolutely endless. I could sit here and say 5,000 different exercises because really we have to look at the use of bands as a tool that can be applied to almost every single type of exercise. Squat, hinge, lunge, push, pull, carry, banded isolation work for the shoulders, the glutes. You know, the sky is honestly the limit. But, you know, calling it what it is, another reason that i've stuck with bands over the years and it's something that we actually manufacture and sell on our site is because they are cheap as fuck you know you look at buying a barbell that's three four five hundred bucks you look at buying weight plates it's a buck and a half per pound even if now it's 25 per pound because you can't

get any weight but that's true you know you look at band, you could go to your sporting goods store and you can get a band for under 10 bucks. So the barrier to entry of having somebody being able to use something that's going to help them train more effectively or even get them to train at the gym or at home, that is a very cheap investment. And I've gone so far in saying is that every single person that is training, you should have a band, you should have a band pack. It should be in your gym bag. And if you don't have these things, probably you're not too serious about your health and your fitness.

If you can't afford 20, 30 bucks to get a couple bands, then you probably don't care about the way that your body looks, feels, and functions. But the things that I have the best amount of success with band-only training, meaning that bands are the only thing that you'd be using not attached to anything else, is I love them for shoulder health and shoulder-directed work. staples in almost every single client's programming because it's really nice to get low joint stress on one of the most stressed out portions of the body, which is the shoulder with the bands, and also trying to drive in a ton of volume to support the upper back and the function of the shoulder on the front side. So I look at having three, four, five days a week where our clients are working in direct shoulder work with bands. And then for the big patterns too, I'll just call it what it is. I'm not a huge fan of throwing super heavy barbell only weight, straight weight on people's squat bench and

deadlifts. There's nothing inherently dangerous about it, but you mentioned the chronic wear and tear a couple of minutes ago. There's some truth to that. And if you've lifted long enough yourself, if you train enough clients and athletes, you tend to see the same things tend to happen. People just get simply banged up under heavy straight weight all the time. So the ability to somewhat manipulate, add a little bit of novelty, alter that strength curve with bands or chains, it helps mitigate joint stress and it still trains the muscles. It still trains the mind just as effectively. So the goal of functional pain-free training is to hammer the muscles, spare the joints in the process, and feel as good as you did leaving as you did coming in.

But I guess that's easier said than done many times. Yeah, it is. And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head when you talked about how these things become increasingly more obvious, the longer that you've trained or the more people that you've trained. It seems though that in many ways, the loudest voices now are people who just train themselves and have a large enough platform to kind of talk about what it is that they like. But when you've actually worked with people, you see very, very quickly how simply just progressing with increasingly more and more plate weight isn't always a recipe for good long-term success or progress. And it really seems to hit home on the big three, which kind of brings me to my next question, which is there are, to hit home on the big three, which kind of brings me to my next question, which is there are there.

I don't like to call exercises good or bad. However, in the kind of space of not trying to come across as too politically correct, you train enough people, you start to realize some stuff does apply a little bit more wear and tear than you'd like. Are there exercises out there that you think people should try to at least taper how much they apply that stimulus to themselves? Are there things that you think might be a little bit deleterious in the long run? Perhaps movements that we've become married to as a physical culture group that we just love that maybe in the long run might not be that great for our bodies? For sure, man. I think that there is this dogmatic thought that everyone has to do the same exercises, or you're not going to get strong, or you're not a man, or you're not going to get big.

And it's all kind of bullshit. When you break it down, it's like we should not be married to exercises. We should be married to the result that any sort of exercise can get an individual. So into that, individuality is very key. And even to that point, people doing the same exercise on paper are going to do them and execute them in totally different ways because we have different body types. We have different mental skill sets. We have different injury histories. We are different human beings. So I think that people have the ability to use any type of exercise. I'm not a huge believer that there's any real dumb exercises. There's ones that we don't choose to program very much because they're

not applicable or they're not appropriate to a vast majority of our populations. But I'm a pretty open-minded coach. Like I can figure out a way to use basically anything for the right person. That being said, the biggest mistakes that I tend to see made are the ones that come from dogmatic training backgrounds. I would say that kettlebell training is extremely dogmatic where you have to do X, Y, and Z exercise, or it's not real kettlebell training. Olympic lifting, if you're not doing the two key lifts, then you shouldn't even be Olympic lifting and you have to do them exactly the same as everyone. And then the one that is the pink elephant in the room, and it's many of the populations that I work with, is squat,

bench, and dead, only with the straight bar, only as heavy as possible, all the time, max effort until you break. These things, they're not inherently bad, they're not dangerous, but we have to earn the right to progress up these movement patterns and really earn the right to get to these exercises. Because essentially, if we jump 20 steps, we're not going to be prepared mentally, emotionally, physically to withstand the really huge amounts of stress that these exercises put on the body. Essentially, we're trying to perform on a foundation which is comprised of a house of cards. So we need to be able to kind of build these patterns from the ground up. And cool, you know, if you want a barbell snatch, get to the point where you have all the components so you can do that safely and effectively. You want to throw a bar on your back? Cool. Make sure that you earn the right to get

there by progressing up through bodyweight, through goblet, through front squats, and all these different derivatives. But there's one thing that is actually somewhat controversial. I honestly could only think of one exercise that I do not program, in which I've never programmed for any one of my clients, tens of thousands of clients over the years. And that is the burpee. And the burpee is pretty polarizing today because there's the camp that says, oh, there are no bad exercises, only bad applications. I can think about that. And then there's the camp that says like, no, this is inherently dangerous. People are going to get hurt on day one if they do this. I can't get behind that totally, but I've seen injuries as

well on some of these poorly executed exercises. So I don't choose to do burpees because I could just find a different way to elicit the training effect without having the risk of injury, without having the soreness the next day, without having a five-year-old mother of four who's 50 pounds overweight have a heart rate of 209 and about to go into coronary attack. So there are different ways to get after it. I always say train smarter, not harder. And that's appropriate exercises for the people in front of you. If you dogmatize and idolize individual movements, the likelihood of you having a long, safe training career probably gets exponentially smaller as you those more advanced training modalities when it is perhaps you're either well-trained enough to really hit them hard in a space where you can recover from them instead of just saying, hey, this is my pushing movement. This is what I do. This is who

I am. I really like the idea of kind of earning that and working your way there. And I think that that's something that not a lot of people touch on. So really good point there. On the flip side of this question, right? Like, obviously, we just talked about exercises that might be potentially dangerous. And this is a question I love to ask people who've trained a lot of people. What are some exercises that you think just plain get overlooked as fantastic modalities to either plug into these patterns, replace some of these more dangerous exercises, or ones that you would just classify as being underrated? Oh, that's a great question. And that's something that I really focus on, even with my own training today. I get off on doing something that looks extremely simple, but doing it in such a way

that nobody ever thought it could possibly be that hard. The things that come to mind right now are the goblet squat. We get to the point where we do goblet squat challenges. So we take 50% of somebody's body weight. We hold it in front of the body in the goblet position with dumbbells. And we do 25 or as many reps as humanly possible. And that elicits one of the strongest full body training effects that I have ever felt or I've had my clients feel in their entire training careers. But oh my god, the goblet squat,

that's a rehab exercise. You can't go hard and heavy and actually get big and strong off of it. Yes, you can. The next one that I love that is actually getting more and more popular in the industry is the Bulgarian split squat, aka the rear foot elevated split squat. This is unbelievable. If I want to trash my clients in a good way, I will put in multiple sets of Bulgarian split squats in their training day. I'll have them do sets of maybe five to eight repetitions as heavy as possible with pristine form. I always apologize to my clients because their quads are crushed, their adductors, their glutes. Man, some people even feel it into their obliques.

Where they don't feel it is their lower backs or their knees. Awesome. Pain-free training effect. For the upper body, everyone's all about bench press, right? Oh, how much you bench, bro? I've gotten to the point where I've started chasing the functional meathead numbers of how heavy we can load a 6RM pushup. And we load them all different ways, all different hand positions, all different training tools, chains, plates, toddlers, weight vests, whatever I can get my hands on. We throw that in and the

pushup and the ability for those shoulder blades to move naturally with the hands on. We throw that in and the pushup and the ability for those shoulder blades to move naturally with the hands on the ground while keeping the hips and the lower body engaged. It is one of the highest yielding pain-free movements in somebody's arsenal, whether you're a strength athlete, whether you're looking to just get jacked and tan, anything. And then the final one that really does get overlooked is the row. We row a million different ways. We row a ton. We row four, five, six days a week for many people. And this is almost like adding a daily vitamin into your intakes for shoulder health. You know, you take something in and you reap the benefits of rebuilding your posture, your physique, your shoulder health, being able to train your core and your hips simultaneously,

connecting that pillar complex together. There's honestly nothing better. Those movements that I just mentioned, if you just goblet squatted, you just did pushups, you just did rows, and you just did split squats. And then if you threw in a hinge variation in there, an RDL as well, that is a complete program. And honestly, that's the way that many of my programs look. Those are the key constructs of what creates a human movement system that is strong, that is stable, that is resilient and able to withstand stresses. No, I love that. I've actually tried the goblet squat challenge, and it is quite horrendous.

And to the point of it being a truly total body experience, it absolutely is. You'd never think that by like rep 12 or 15 of a goblet squat that your upper back would have the sickest pump of your life. But it really is quite intense. And I think the same thing can be said of push-ups, right? Because we're so focused as a fitness culture on progressing the glorified bench press, we forget that the scapula end up getting pinned to the bench. So they don't move like they perhaps traditionally would, which is a freedom that they have in the pushup. And right now, one of the things that I don't want to call it humorous,

but I do find it in some ways ironic is we have a huge population of people who are benching, benching, benching, just getting absolutely crushed by bodyweight pushups. And I think that if you talk about the ability to progress all of these exercises long-term, they all really lend themselves well to incorporating different elements of whether it's stability with the split squat, core stability with things like the goblet squat, shoulder stability with the row. All of these are fantastic for progressing your strength and muscular performance, but they're also probably really good with carrying over and lending themselves to the other stuff that people tend to prioritize first. Absolutely. And you're right, man. People are so married to these exercises,

and it's always progressive overload of bar weight at all costs. Usually that kind of mindset ends up one of two ways. You get mentally and emotionally fatigued to the point where you quit training, or you go through a meathead deload, which usually happens to people, which is they sustain pain, injuries, and they are having to be forced to take time off. And then all of a sudden, the king, which is consistency of a physical practice, is right out the door. So we need to kind of step back a little bit. And we need to look at giving our bodies a stimulus that makes it better and not something

that only you want to do a glory ego ride through the gym on a day-to-day basis with. Yeah, I think all of that's huge. And I think anybody who's probably listened up until this point is like, okay, yeah, a lot of this stuff sounds like me. Because regardless of your knowledge level, we do fall back into behaviors that have kind of become habituated. And some of them aren't long-term, super, super healthy. And anybody who's made it this far is probably like, okay, I'm down. I like what this guy has to say. So where can they find more of your work? And then if you'd like to, I'd love to hear more about the PPSC because we do have a lot of coaches who listen to the podcast. And I think that this is something that has tremendous applicability for people who do want to just train gen pop or people who do want to train people at the highest level? It seems like there's a ton of versatility in these concepts. Well, yeah, thanks for that. And I'm proud to have a thousand articles for free on drjohnrussin.com. Literally use the search bar

for any exercise, any movement pattern, any type of training method. And I guarantee you that you'll be reading for a long, long time with gold standard resources. Now, we also have programs over on drjohnlesson.com as well. You know, the kind of programs that have been used and battle tested by tens of thousands of people over the years. And those are amazing because they're 12 week blocks of exactly the type of training that we've been talking about today. But I think the thing that sitting here in Madison, Wisconsin right now, unable to leave my house, has me having that FOMO right now the most about is the pain-free performance specialist certification. So over the last year and a half, we've certified over 2,000 coaches across the world from 45 different countries.

And this is not online. This is all in-person certifications. And we are weeks away from having our 2020 schedule reactivated, which I'm extremely happy about, because we have some of the best expert instructors in the world ready to go out and start teaching across the globe, hopefully very, very soon at this point in time. But the website for the pain-free performance special certification is getppsc.com. G-E-T-P-P-S-C dot com. curriculum, the syllabus, and then also the 2020 schedule will be emerging here pretty soon back into the public, which I cannot wait for. Somebody who's been traveling the better part of the last four years, being home for two and a half months, it has its pros, but it also has its cons because I love getting out there. I love meeting my coaches in person, being able to educate and

pay it forward to the industry. You know, it's my passion in life and it's something that I plan on doing forever. Well, I mean, it shows in the way you delivered all the information today, man. And, you know, that's something that I think as people develop an increasingly larger platform, oftentimes seems to slip away. But as somebody who's been following your work for quite some time, it seems that as you've grown and developed as kind of a force in this space, so has your desire to give back and help other people. And it's been an absolute pleasure having you on today. I'm sure you're very busy, so I'll let you go. But John, thanks so much again. And guys, remember, is it getPPSC.com, John? Exactly. Yes. Awesome. And hey, thank you so much, John.

Oh, I appreciate it. This has been great. Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks again to Dr. Russin for coming on the podcast today. It was a fantastic conversation. Again, I recommend looking into his PPSC certification, as well as heading over to his website and browsing through some of his blogs. John has some great content in the space, and I've learned quite a bit from him, and I'm sure you will too. If you enjoyed the episode, do me a favor and tag both me and John, take a screenshot and share it to your Instagram story.

It helps the podcast grow and it helps us reach more people, improve performance that much better. So thanks you guys so much again, and have a great day.