Huberman Lab - Jeff Cavaliere: Optimize Your Exercise Program with Science-Based Tools

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

My guest this episode is Jeff Cavaliere, MSPT CSCS, a world-class physical therapist and Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist. Jeff has coached athletes ranging from novice to professional and has taught science-based physical training protocols to tens of millions of everyday people via his enormously clear and actionable online programs. Jeff is a true expert on proper resistance and cardiovascular training, injury prevention and rehabilitation and has extensive knowledge on proper form, posture, nutrition and supplementation. We discuss how to best design and optimize a physical training program to achieve your specific goals. We also discuss how to build and leverage mental focus during workouts, when and how to stretch, pain management and enhancing workout recovery and sleep, and how to personalize your training and nutrition program over time. Jeff’s knowledge and science-based approach ought to benefit everyone in reaching their desired fitness, aesthetic and overall health goals. For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1 (Athletic Greens): https://athleticgreens.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Supplements from Momentous https://www.livemomentous.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Jeff Cavaliere, Physical Training (00:04:33) Sponsors: AG1, LMNT (00:08:38) Tool: A Fitness Plan for General Health (00:13:27) Tool: Optimizing Body Part Training Splits (00:20:12) Two-a-Day Training (00:22:33) Cardiovascular Conditioning, High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) & Skills (00:28:24) Tool: Mind-Muscle Connection, The Cavaliere Cramp Contraction Test (00:35:05) “Muscularity” & Resting Tone (00:41:31) Tool: Muscle Recovery & Soreness, Grip Strength (00:50:39) Sleep & Sleep Position (00:57:24) Active (Dynamic) vs. Passive Stretching, Timing & Healing Muscle (01:07:23) Tool: Jumping Rope (01:12:56) Internal & External Rotation, Upright Row vs. High Pull (01:24:27) Back Pain Relief & Medial Glutes, Body Pain & Origins (01:37:39) Tool: Properly Holding Weights & Deepening Grip (01:43:54) Tool: Physical Recovery, Heat & Cold Exposure (01:47:19) Tool: Record Keeping for Training Performance & Rest Time (01:51:47) Nutrition Principles & Consistency, Processed Foods & Sugar (02:00:15) Tool: “Plate Eating”: Protein, Fibrous & Starchy Carbohydrates (02:11:25) Training in Men vs. Women, Training for Kids & Adolescents (02:18:05) Tool: Pre- and Post-Training Nutrition (02:26:30) Intensity & Training Consistency (02:29:53) AthleanX, Jesse Laico & Fitness Journeys (02:38:27) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous Supplements, Instagram, Twitter, Neural Network Newsletter Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac Disclaimer

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, an Emma professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff Cavaliere holds a Master of Science in Physical Therapy and is a certified strength and conditioning specialist. He did his training at the University of Connecticut stores one of the top five programs in the world in physical therapy and sports medicine. I discovered Jeff Cavaliere over 10 years ago from his online content.

His online content includes information about how to train for strength, how to train for hypertrophy, which is muscle growth, how to train for endurance, as well as how to rehabilitate injuries to avoid muscular imbalances, nutrition, and supplementation. I've always found his content to be incredibly science-based, incredibly clear, sometimes surprising,

and always incredibly actionable. It is therefore not surprising that he has one of the largest online platforms for fitness, nutrition, supplementation, and injury rehabilitation. Jeff has also worked with an enormous number of professional athletes and has served as head physical therapist and assistant strength coach for the New York Metz. Again, the content that Jeff Cavaliere has posted online has been so immensely useful to me over the years that I was absolutely thrilled to get the chance to sit down with

him and ask him about everything from how to train in terms of how to split up the body parts that you train across the week, how to integrate strength training and endurance training, when to stretch, how to stretch. Indeed, we talked about nutrition, we talked a bit about supplementation, we talked about how to really avoid creating imbalances in muscle and in neural control over muscle. It's one thing that's really wonderful about Jeff is he really has an understanding of not just how muscles and bones, intendons, and ligaments work together, but how the nervous system interfaces with those.

We talked about the mental side of training, including when to bring specific concentration to the muscles that you're training and when to think more about how to move weights through space and think more about the movements overall. I'm certain that you'll find the conversation that we held to be immensely useful and informative for your fitness practices and also for how you mentally approach fitness in general and how to set up a lifelong fitness practice. One that will give you the strength that you desire, one that will give you the aesthetic results that you desire, one that will set you up for endurance and cardiovascular health, basically

an overall fitness program. I really feel this is where Jeff Cavaliere shines above and beyond so many of the other PT's and fitness, so-called influencers that are out there. Again, everything is grounded in science, everything is clear, and everything is actionable. And while we do cover an enormous amount of information during today's episode, if you want to dive even deeper into that information, you can go to ATHLEANX.com where you'll find some of Jeff's programs. You can also find him at ATHLEANX on YouTube.

There you will find videos, for instance, like how to repair or heal from lower back pain, something that I actually followed directly long before I ever met, Jeff, has over 32 million views. And that is not by accident is because the protocols there again are surprising and actionable. They relieved my back pain very quickly without surgery. So I'm immensely grateful for that content. And it extends into everything from again, hypertrophy endurance and straight training and so on. Again, it's ATHLEANX.com as the website, ATHLEANX on YouTube,

and also ATHLEANX on Instagram. The Uberman Lab podcast is proud to announce that we've partnered with Momentus Supplements. We've done that for several reasons. First of all, the quality of their supplements is exceedingly high. Second of all, we wanted to have a location where you could find all of the supplements

discussed on the Uberman Lab podcast in one easy-defined place. You can now find that place at livemomentus.com slash Hubertman. In addition, momentous supplements ship internationally, something that a lot of other supplement companies simply do not do. So that's terrific whether or not you live in the U.S. or you live abroad. Right now, not all of the supplements that we discuss on the Hubertman Lab podcast are listed, but that catalog of supplements is being expanded very rapidly, and a good number of them that we've talked

about, some of the more prominent ones for sleep and focus, and other aspects of mental and physical health are already there. Again, you can find them at libmomentist.com slash Hibberman. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health.

I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With athletic greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need, and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to atlettagreens.com slash huberman and claim a special offer.

They'll give you five free travel packs, plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3 is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health, even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3. And K2 is also important

because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body, and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com slash uberman to claim the special offer of the 5 free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are an element and those are sodium, magnesium, and potassium, but it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function,

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If you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement.lment.com slash huberman and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. Again, if you want to try element, you can go to elementlemente.com slash huberman. And now, for my discussion with Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff, such a pleasure for me to have you here. I'm glad to be here. It's amazing.

I have a long time consumer of your content. I've learned a tremendous amount about fitness, both in the weight room, cardio, nutrition, things that I've applied for over a decade. So for me, this is particularly meaningful. And my goal here is really to ask a bunch of questions to which I'm interested in the answers, but also for which I know the audience is really curious about. So one of your mantras is, you know, if you want to look like an athlete, train like an athlete.

And I think that's something really special that sets aside what you do from what a lot of other very well-qualified people do. And in terms of the use of weights and resistance, whether or not it's body weight or weights in the gym or pulleys versus cardio, you know, in terms of overall health, aesthetics and athleticism, is there a way that you could point to the idea that maybe people should be doing 50% resistance training and 50% cardio, maybe it's 70-30, maybe it's 30-70. Here I'm talking about the typical person who would like to maintain or maybe even add some muscle mass, probably in particular areas for most people, as opposed to just overall mass, although we'll talk about that later.

And people want to maintain a relatively low body fat percentage and being good cardiovascular health. What's the sort of contour of a basic program that anybody could think about as a starting place? I think it's like a 60, 40 split, which would be leaning towards weight training, you know, strength and then, you know, the conditioning aspect be about 40%. So, if you look at it over a course of a training week, I mean, five days in a gym would be a great task. Obviously, not in the gym, it could be done at home, but three days, strength training, Monday,

Wednesday, Friday, conditioning, Tuesday, Thursday, you know, two days. It's a pretty easy roundabout way to split that up. Of course, depending upon training goals, and as you said, the aesthetic goals, like that will shift dramatically. But if you want to see the benefits of both, that's probably the effective dose for string training and the effective dose for conditioning

at the bare minimum level. Again, being a much better performer, and conditioning wise, you're gonna want to do more than that. And in terms of the duration of those workouts, what's your suggestion? I've been weight training for about 30 years, running for about 30 years, and mainly for health,

and have found that if I work hard in the gym or at resistance training for more than 60 minutes or so, it's very hard for me to recover. I start getting colds. I start getting weaker from workout to workout. But amazingly, at least to me, if I keep those workouts to about 10 minutes of warm-up and 50, 50 minutes or so of really hard work for resistance training, and I keep the cardiovascular work to about 30 to 45 minutes, I feel great.

And I seem to make some progress, at least some place in the workout from workout to workout. Yeah, I mean, those are good numbers because those are kind of numbers that we usually preach. We try to keep our workouts to an hour or less, if possible. Now, depending upon the split that you're following, if you're on a total body split, there's just going to be more that has to be done in a given amount of time. And again, if you're training primarily for strength, that could prolong the workout because the longer rest time is in between sets.

But in general, when you're not focused on that one aspect, but the overall health picture, then you can get the job done in under an hour. And again, I always say on top of if you want to look like an athlete, like an athlete, is you can either train longer, you can train hard, but you can't do both. And I really believe that the focus for me, I have a busy life, I have a lot of other things that I do believe are not. And it's like, I want to go hard,

and I want to go get out. And I find that my body also responds to that. And I think a lot of guys' bodies respond to that. And particularly, as you start to get older, I think it's the length of the workout that actually causes more problems than the intensity of what you're doing, particularly if you're warmed up properly, like you said.

I've found personally that my warm-up has had to become more of an integral part of my workout than it ever has before. I could get in the gym when I was 20 and I'm going right over, I'm doing the one set, two sets, I'm ready to go. And I never do another workout, warm-up set for any of the other exercises I do the rest of the day.

That's not true anymore. And I found that, as long as I'm willing to sort of give myself a little bit of a warm-up, the intensity is not what bothers me. I'm very much in control of the weights that I use and it doesn't bother me. But if I start to go pretty long, I start to feel achy or I start to have problems. So again, depending upon age, that also plays a factor in the length.

But again, I think everybody can achieve on a standard program, can achieve the results that they want within an hour. In terms of splits, you mentioned splits. And so for those who aren't familiar with this term splits, it's really, which body parts are you training on which days? Seems like almost everybody follows a weekly workout schedule although the body, of course, doesn't care about the week. There's no reason thing that once every seven days

or twice every seven days make sense physiologically, just the body doesn't work that. But that's the way life is structured. I've seen you discuss three days a week whole body workouts. I've heard of splits like a pushing one day, pulling another day, legs another day, a day off, repeat. There's so many variations on this. What are some general themes that we can throw out there?

In order to avoid the huge matrix of possibilities, you have some wonderful content that points those. We will capture in our caption show notes. We'll link out to some of those that are different ways to design splits. But in terms of giving people a logic of how to think about splitting up body parts, what's governing the split?

What are the rules and the logic that dictate a split? For me, the first rule is, will you stick to it? Right? Because there are split, I don't particularly like full body splits. I was actually talking to Jesse about that the other day, like, I don't necessarily like to have to train everything. Now, of course, the volumes will come down per muscle group. But if you don't like to do that,

and you actually don't look forward to your workout because you're dreading having to do everything and feeling maybe too fatigued by the time you work out, so over, or the fact that those generally do take a little bit longer and don't fit into your schedule. I don't care how effective the split is. A split not done is not effective. So you need to find one that fits. So maybe you go into an alternative option like a push pull leg, as I mentioned. And that could be done either one cycle through the week, on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, split,

or it could be twice in a week, so you're actually training six times where you repeat it. You know, pull push legs, pull push legs, or however you want to do it with either a day off and between the three days or at the end of the six days. And again, that actually impacts your schedule. I've broken that down before where it's, you know, if you put it in between the three days,

it's good because you're giving yourself an extra rest day in between, but it starts to shift that day off every week as we wrap around. So for those guys that were choosing that seven day schedule out of convenience in our heads, you know, it starts to mess with that off day. So others like to just keep it predictably let's say on a Sunday and train six days in a row.

But that's a better way to maybe group similar muscle actions together, which I think I definitely prefer that because if I'm going to be training, pulling movements, at least there's a synergy between them and I feel like I'm looking to achieve one goal that day. And then, I mean, quite honestly, you can go back to the bros split days.

And those still work effectively. There's a reason why they worked in the past. I think that science shows that there's smarter ways to do them these days. You can come back and hit a related muscle. So you could do, let's say, biceps on one day and then come back two days later and do back, realizing again, synergy between the

exercises there your biceps are going to be restimulated again. So you can figure out ways to make that work. But the thing that I think is effective there is that tends to be one of the ones that people like the most because they can go in, they get their pump, they feel good. It's pretty solely focused on one muscle group. Is that the definition of a bros split one? One muscle group a day. I see. So it's very much geared towards strength

and aesthetics, really maximizing chest one day. Probably more aesthetics than strength. Yeah, you're just the bro. For the bro name. Yeah, but again, like, you know, in here I am a science guy and I can appreciate the benefits of a bros split, especially because again, like what,

to what end? You know, who's, who's, goal are we, are we trying to achieve here? There are, are ours, you know, like what to what end? Who's, who's goal are we, are we trying to achieve here? There are, are ours. You know, like, I mean, if, if I'm applying my standards and my goals or even like athletic ideals, but they just want to get in shape, then it's perfectly fine to do a, to do a bros split in that instance,

if you're sticking to it again, and you're seeing the results that you want to see from it. But they're able to, you know, really keep their focus on one muscle they get to focus on. It'll look a lot of times people struggle with the way of an exercise feels until their second or third set. They don't have that proper set of ability to lock in on an exercise. Spending a few not only sets them the same exercise, but then doing another exercise with the same muscle group helps them to dial in a little bit better and get more out of their training.

Yeah, that raises a really interesting and I think important question. Early on when I started resistance training, which was when I was 16 in high school, I got in touch with and I was learning from Mike Menser. Me too, though. It's interesting. That's crazy. And Mike was very helpful. Very, very helpful.

We got to be friendly. So I just read his book. I didn't get a chance to buy. Well, I, I back then, no internet. I, you know, I paid by Western Union type thing to send him some money. For the back of the magazine. And then he got on the phone with me. And my mother at the time was like, why is this grown man falling in the house?

And he gave me a very straightforward split, which was shoulders and arms. One day, he had to be taking two days off, and then training legs, and then two days off, and then chest and back, et cetera. And that's a variation of a pro split, too, where you're sort of breaking them down that way, chest and back, or chest and thighs, you know. And he worked very well for me.

I probably would have, because of my age, I think, and because I was untrained, I think it, largely untrained, I think it would have grown on many different programs, but it worked very well for me. I eventually just just made that in every other day, things, shoulders arms day off, legs day or two off, because if you hit legs right, at least for me, I'm not training the next day.

And then, I'm not doing much of anything athletic the next day, and chest back and repeat and so on. And the reason I found that helpful is I almost always recovered between workouts. The six day a week program of push, pull, legs, push, pull, legs. To me, seems excruciating from two standpoints. One is at least with my recovery abilities or lack of recovery abilities. I can't imagine coming back feeling fresh. And the other one is if I'm in the gym more than four days a week, I really start to fatigue about the whole psychological experience of it. Whereas if I'm in there three or four days a week, in other words, if I put a day off

in between each workout, I really want to be there. And I get in there with a lot of fire. And I'm also doing other things on the off days. So I think that I love that you mentioned the split that you'll stick to and that you can bring the intensity to because I think that that's really important. I sometimes hear about two a day training. I've done two a day training twice in my lifetime,

both times I got sick two days later. That's correlation, not causation. But is there ever an instance where two a day weight training makes sense for the non-drug assisted typical recovery ability person? I actually, I think it makes sense in some scenarios, but it doesn't make sense practically for a lot of people's schedules. So like, if you could break down, let's say you were going to do even a, you know, some version of a total body session, or maybe like you're going to do an, you know, a, some version of a, of a total body session,

or maybe like you're gonna do an upper lower split, right? You can do an upper workout and do the anterior chain or the pushing portion of that in one session and then come back and do the pulling session later on at night if you had the opportunity to, the thing that you benefit from there is the freshness of focus. Again,

something in my head is sacrificed by the time you get towards the latter half of whatever workout you're in. To the same point you may be for, when you start to approach that 50 minutes an hour mark, you are either losing focus, you're losing energy, you're losing contract liability, you're losing something. And if you're relegating whatever it is, the polling portion of that to the end of that workout, something suffers. So that, okay, and that, if you realize that's happening, then maybe you switch them up the next time you do the workout where the polling portion of the upper workout goes first, and then the pushing goes later. So you're at

least not just continuing that cycle, but at the same time, if you were able to kind of split them up, you get a chance to kind of take a break, you can have that freshness of focus again, and you could actually get a better effort in, because again, I think effort drives the results. So if the effort is not compromised, then you should be able to do that. But systemically, is that a problem? And I think that it is a problem for a lot of people. It's just hard to, it's hard to rev the engine up a lot of times the one the day. You know, you warm that thing up once, it's like that car in the winter. You get it going once, you're lucky. You got to drive at the rest of the day.

But you put it in the garage and try to start the next day. It's a problem. So, young people can get away with a lot more than older people could. I've never had a strong recovery quotient, but if I stick to this one day off in between every once in a while, two days in a row, training maybe because I have to travel and I want to make sure I get all the workouts in kind of thing, I seem to be okay. I like your example of warming up the car, spoken like a true East Coast, East Coast, or those of us from the West Coast.

I took a moment there, but we folks from the East Coast and the Midwest get it, and certainly from Europe. In terms of the mixing up of cardiovascular training and resistance training, same day, different day, which one should come first, which one should come second, if one main goals, again, everyone listening has different goals, are, most people would like to either maintain or gain some muscle. I don't know many people that want to lose muscle. But maintain or gain some muscle, usually in specific locations on their body.

Most people would like to be a bit leaner or a lot leaner. There are a few people out there that are either naturally lean or don't want or actually just want to gain weight. But assuming that people want to get leaner, put on some muscle or maintain muscle and want to have a healthy heart and a healthy brain, which basically requires a healthy cardiovascular system. How would you incorporate cardiovascular work into the overall weekly regimen?

So again, I think that the bare minimum is probably twice a week in terms of cardiovascular. If you want to have some semblance of cardiovascular conditioning, but I think most people who actually need it more or want to pursue it more than that are gonna need more time to do that. So at some point, it can't just be relegated to a day off or a day off from the weight training workouts. So at some point, it has to occur on the same day. And in that case, I just like to put it

if that is you're not your primary goal, but you're looking more for just the overall picture, the aesthetics you mentioned, putting muscle on in certain areas, then I would put it at the end of the workout, because you don't want it in any way compromise the weight training workout. And as we've sort of referenced a couple of times already, the intensity of those workouts is important. And we know there's a strength component to those workouts. Also, that is going to be a helpful stimulus for growth.

So the conditioning, the cardio, that stuff done prior to any training, you know, straight training workout is likely going to impair your ability to perform at your best. So unless it's just done for a quick little warmup in the beginning, but then it's not sustained long enough really to be a benefit for cardiovascular conditioning. So I just like to put that at the end,

realizing that even if my effort level is lower or my output is lower, if it's still placing a demand on my cardiac output to get that conditioning effect because I'm fatigued, it still has a demand on my cardiac output. So it's still achieving its goal, but it didn't interfere with my main goal of being able

to increase my performance in the gym. Got it. And in terms of the form of cardiovascular training, I've seen you do a number of, I have to say, very impressive, high-intensity interval type work. So burpy type work or push-ups with, you know, with crunches mixed into them. Anyway, people can see your videos, I didn't describe those in the best way, but rather than on the treadmill or out jogging

for 30, 45 minutes, is that because you prefer higher intensity, higher heart rate type training or is it because you live in cold Connecticut and you don't wanna be out jogging on the roads in the middle of winter? Well, I think all the above, I mean, those are factors from a personal level, but I think that if you are,

if we could blend function across these realms and not have such a delineation between, this is my way of training and this is my conditioning, but figure out a way to blend them together, I always think that you've got a better opportunity to get that more well-rounded result. And I like to kind of mix up that straight conditioning work and also some of the footwork drills.

Like we have some high expectations for guys that come into our programs like to just do some footwork drills, like ladders. Like ladders or line drills or something. And you know what happens? People become intrigued and interested. Like I never, I haven't tried this since high school, you know? And they become interested in just the challenge of it.

And as we become almost distracted by the challenge, we're now like finding ourselves conditioning, you know? And I always think that's an important part that sometimes you gotta draw people in to show them what they might be interested in. And from the output or the effect of it, I just think that when you're able to blend some of some, you know, still maintain some of that strength training into the exercise.

So as you mentioned, let's say I'm doing some kind of a push up or a burpee. I mean, there is, there is an anaerobic component to that that is going to be helpful, that then rather than just walking or just jogging. Not to say that that isn't an effective means for strict cardiac conditioning. It's one of the ways that we've had for centuries, to do it, but I just think that if we can blend it, then it becomes maybe a little bit more interesting

and you get some of those crossover benefits and it doesn't become so segmented in terms of what we're trying to do. I love the idea of bringing some mental challenge and some desire to improve a skill while conditioning. That's not something that I've thought of before and it's simply because I've overlooked it but it makes sense because my sister who's reasonably fit, although I'm always trying to get her to do a bit more, she always asks me what should I take? And I believe in supplements, some for certain people in certain instances, but I keep telling her, you know,

the behaviors are going to, and nutrition are gonna have the greatest outsize positive effect. And she loves things like dance classes and things or kickboxing, these kinds of things. Which, so it makes sense that if you can hook somebody on the conditioning aspect or the skill aspect and kind of trick them into doing more cardio.

And so to speak, that's terrific. Also, the neuroscientist in me just has to say, forgive me, that anytime you're engaging that two sets of motor neurons, the ones in your brain, the upper motor neurons, and the ones in your spinal cord, anytime you're engaging those upper motor neurons, which are for deliberate, well-controlled action,

you're doing a great thing for your brain in terms of brain longevity. So I'm now I need to incorporate some actual skills into my training. Going back to weight training a bit, one of the most important things I learned from you so over the years was that when training to increase muscle size, to really think not so much about moving weights, but more about challenging muscles.

I also heard this from my friend Ben Pekolsky, who's a very well-accomplished, he was a bodybuilder now, he's into other aspects of fitness, teaches fitness, but don't move weights, challenge muscles, unless you're trying to power lift or something in that sort, which I'm not, immensely helpful. But the other thing that I learned from you that I combined with that was this idea that certain muscles will grow better and get stronger much more easily, maybe even will recover better because of our ability to contract them really hard. And this, what I call the cavalier test, which is, at least if I compare a phrase,

the, so for instance, if I can, it's always the bicep isn't it. Let's use the calf or the bicep. If you can, if you can flex your bicep to the point where it hurts a little bit, like it almost feels like a cramp or a cramp, or you can flex your calf to the point where it really cramps up a little bit,

almost feels like it's nodding up. That's a pretty good indication that you're going to be able to stimulate that muscle well under load if you're doing the movement properly. And that's the feeling to actually aim for each repetition, maybe even throughout the repetition. For me, this completely transformed my results.

And this was, I think maybe five, six years ago that I first heard this from you, body parts that for me lagged behind that I thought maybe genetically weren't going to work for me immediately just started growing, right? And I was getting stronger and stronger. And I thought, this is really something so much so that I've dedicated a portion of my research along with in collaboration with another group to try and understand what's happening in these upper motor neurons in the brain that can engage the muscles even more. And that it's not just about progressive overload or putting a pump into the muscle, that

it's really, this mind muscle connection is a real thing when it comes to predicting results and that you can get better at it. So forgive me for paraphrasing your incredible content around this. It made a tremendous difference for me and a number of other people that I've passed that along too. But what can you, first of all, how did you arrive at that? Because we hear about the mind muscle connection, but I really heard it first from you.

How did you arrive at this kind of cramped test, the Cavalier test, as I'll call it? It's always weird when people name things after themselves in science, but other scientists can name things. So there is now officially the Cavalier test, as I'll call it. It's always weird when people name things after themselves in science, but other scientists can name things that. So there is now officially the Cavalier test is whether or not you can cramp the muscle in the absence of load, just flexing it. So the point where it hurts a little bit, that would be a good indication that you could grow that muscle well. How did you come up with this? I mean, it just, honestly, it's something that made sense to me because during my workouts,

even as a young kid just starting out, like I always wanted to know what is it working. You know, a lot of people ask that question more suddenly, you think, like, what is this supposed to work? And a lot, and I don't know if you've ever noticed, but like when people ask that question if they're being trained by a trainer, and the trainer is saying, well, just do this, do this exercise, and they'll show you how to do it. But then they'll say, but what is it supposed to work? Where am I supposed to feel this, right?

People, it did just inherently ask that question. A lot of people will. I was one of those that did that, and I asked that question, not because I knew what I was doing, but just because I don't know. I wanted to know what was supposed to be doing the work. Once you do that, and you start to seek that out, and say, okay, well, the bicep is what's supposed to be doing the work. Once you do that and you start to seek that out and say, okay, well, the bicep is what's supposed

to be doing the work, then I wanna make sure the biceps doing the work, right? So then I would just sort of really tweak the movement to make it do more work or feel more uncomfortable or get a stronger contraction knowing if that's supposed to do the job. It wasn't until PT school that I'm learning, oh, well, you know, flexion of the elbow is the breaky-alice and the bias and the bias that's

responsible for supination. Like you start to I learned other components of it. But all I wanted to know was to bring my arm up in a curl. What is supposed to do the job? So I would seek out ways to make that happen better. And when I was able to do that, I could feel the stronger contraction. And I just I don't know what I just I was no visionary. that, I could feel the stronger contraction. And I just, I don't know what it was. I just, I was no visionary. I just felt like I knew that that was going to be better for me. If the muscle I was trying to grow was being stressed more effectively.

So when I was attempting to do this across different exercises, I would notice that what I could do potentially on a curl with my arm is up, you know, where you asked me to flex my bicep at that position, I couldn't do if I was doing a concentration curl, or I couldn't carry over to a cable curl. And that shouldn't really change, right? Because the function is still largely the same. There's still elbow flexion, there's still supination.

Like, why am I not able to do it there? And that's when it sort of clued into me that, like, you're my muscle connection on not just your mind with one muscle, but on every exercise matters. And it varies from exercise to exercise. And even if you don't gain muscle size from doing that, although I think it's very hard not to, especially if you're not used to doing that, there's a term I like to call muscularity, which is a difference, right?

It's the level of sort of resting tone in the muscle. That improves dramatically. You can learn how to just start to engage that muscle better. The muscularity, the resting tone of that muscle is harder, it's more at attention, it's more alive. And it's all driven from being able to connect better neurologically with the muscle that you're trying to train. I've talked about a lot.

Inefficiency is really what you're trying to seek in movements when you're trying to create hypertrophy. When strength is your goal, efficiency of the movement is what you're looking for. You're looking to have muscles tied together and work well efficiently, the chest, the shoulders, the triceps to get a bar off of your chest during a bench press. You're not looking to make it a very inefficient

leverages for your chest to try to grow your chest in a bench press. You're trying to let the whole package come together for a greater output. But when you're trying to go and create muscle hypertrophy, or even this muscular area that I talk about, you need to seek ways to make it feel more uncomfortable. If you don't feel the discomfort, then you're doing something wrong. And I struggle to this day on certain muscle groups to still do that, even knowing what I'm trying to work, and knowing with the goal of everything I'm preaching here. It's very difficult for some muscles and for certain

people to do this on certain muscles, but as you mentioned, practice does help. And the more you become consistent and deliberate with what you're trying to do, the more of a result you actually get. It's a couple of really poor boys I'd like to delve into further. First of all, my hunch was always that the muscle groups that grew most easily

and that I could contract hardest without any, the first time I did the Cavalier test, got 10 out of 10. We give it a 10 out of 10 scale. It could just isolate those muscles, cinch them, grow them easily. I mean, there's certain why parts I don't want to say which ones because it doesn't really matter. That I always felt like if I just did push-ups, they would grow and these muscles are far away from any of the muscles They're supposed to be involved in pushups even though I like the thing. I'm doing pushups correctly You'll tell me if I'm if I'm not But some of that I think is genetic and some of that has to do with the sports that I played when I was younger

So I swam I played soccer I skateboard. Yeah, and then later I boxed and so The muscles involved in those sports were always very easy to engage later when I went into the gym. So I guess at perhaps a call to parents, having kids do a lot of dynamic activity seems like it might be a good idea. The other thing is, this issue of muscularity, I am so glad you brought that up. There are, I have to imagine, a large number of listeners who don't want to get bigger. They don't want to take up a larger clothing

size. They don't want to take up more space. In fact, some of them would like to take up less space, but they want that quality that you're describing, which is that, you know, oftentimes you hear more in the, here I'm stereotyping a bit, but with kindness, you know, you hear up from women who are having weight training to say, I don't want to get big often. Sometimes they do, but the most, most women that I've helped weight train, we're talked about weight training, say, I don't want to get there, I only get toned. Right.

And I think what they're referring to is this quality of muscularity. 100%. This idea that at resting or at close to rest or anytime someone reaches out and grabs a glass, that the muscles almost look like they're kind of twitching underneath the skin. And yet it's not saran wrap skin anatomy chart type skin. So this thing of muscularity or resting tone has a physiological basis. I think it's how readily the nerves are communicating with the muscles. And you're saying that by learning to engage the muscles more actively, the resting tone or muscularity can improve.

Have you seen that both in men and women? Yeah, oh yeah. And do you think this is something that takes upkeep maintenance or that once you develop that muscle, you can just kind of let it coast? So I think like everything it requires upkeep, user lose it, I do believe firmly. But like I think that everything it requires upkeep, user lose that I do believe firmly. But I think that the development of the connection

is gonna be harder than the maintenance of the connection. As I said, I still struggle to this day for myself with unnamed muscle groups, also. But there's just certain areas that are harder for your brain, for whatever reason, to just develop that connection at that type of level to create that extra strong contraction. But I think that with proper dedication and focus, I'll go right out and say, you know,

CAHPS is one of the areas that I don't necessarily have a great connection with. And I also obviously must not care so much because I don't put in the time and effort to create that connection as I could. So I think what might happen is, you know, yeah, there could be a struggle there, but then with struggle comes disinterest. You're like, well, screw it. I'm a calf not.

I'm not going to do anything about it. So I think if you put the required effort in the time and repetitions that you will develop that and once you do develop it, it's gonna stick around a lot longer than it would had you not invested any time into it at all. You know, not requiring as much of that. But I mean, I don't know, like, you know, you mentioned now when you train,

it's like you're, you're just, this is just part of how you train now. Like you're going hard, you're trying to, you know, really forcefully contract. You're not just moving the weight, I say, from point A to point B, but you're trying to contract the weight through that range. That is a mindset that I try to put into

what everything I'm doing, unless, of course, I'm focused on a strength exercise where I'm just trying to lift a greater amount and use all the muscles together. But when the goal is in efficiency for hypertrophy, I am really trying to create that contraction. And it's just part of my training. So, I guess that for consistency sake, as long as I'm training is happening, if I get away from training, that's not happening at all. But even there, I probably

another embarrassing admission probably will mindfully do it throughout the day, even when they'll wait in my hand, you know, in certain muscle groups, whether it be my abs or my arm or my shoulders or something, I'm doing something just to sort of engage the muscles. And I do think that some of that sort of, uh, uh, a name practice actually helps by time you go back into the gym. You just kind of keep that, you keep that, that, that connection going. Well, it certainly obeys all the rules of neuroplasticity, the fire together, wire together mantra,

which is the word to my colleague, Carla Schatz, hold true for all aspects of neural function, including nerve to muscle. So these flexing throughout the day, or the deliberate isolation of contracting a muscle throughout the day is without question engaging neuroplasticity. And if you were to do fewer of those repetitions,

you're gonna get less engagement of the nerve to muscle connection. I can say this with a smile and with confidence because one of the first things all neuroscience students learn is about the neuromuscular junction. Cause it's a really simple example of where the more times the nerve fires and gets the muscle to contract, the stronger that connection, get receptors or brought there,

et cetera, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of mechanisms for the topic of another podcast, but basically that practice throughout the day makes total sense and works. And there's no, believe me, there's no science behind that in terms of the application of it. You do it when you catch yourself doing it

at the time of time, but it is definitely something that's easily done discreetly and you wind up doing it. You do it when you catch yourself doing it, you know, time to time, you know, but it is definitely something that's easily done discreetly and you know, you wind up doing it. I actually, I think in a recent video, when I did talk about growing your arms by just improving, you know, improving the connection, not that connection itself is applying any load or, you know, resistance that's significant to create overload for growth, but it's the development of that connection that I then take back with me growth, but it's the development of that connection that I then take back with me into the gym at a more effective level that takes every exercise I do there and makes it more effective. That's a sharpening the blade, so to speak.

Yeah, certainly obeys the laws of nerve-to-muscle physiology. One to just touch on a couple of things. If the goal is to challenge muscles and one is dividing their body into, let's say, three or four day a week split or so or maybe up to six, how do you know when a muscle is ready to be challenged again? I've heard every 48 hours is protein synthesis increases and then we'll get into this and then it drops off. But frankly, if I train my legs hard, I can get stronger from workout to workout or at least better in some way, workout to workout, leg workout to leg workout, training them

once every five to eight days. If I train them more often, I get worse. So whatever that 48 hour to 72 hour thing is somehow my legs don't obey that, but you know, or maybe something else is wrong with me, but I'm sure there are many things else wrong with me. But how do you assess recovery at the local level, meaning at the level of the muscles? We'll talk about soreness and getting better, stronger, more repetitions, etc. And then the systemic level, the level of the nervous system.

And I'd love for you to tell us about the tool that, again, I learned from you, which is actually using a physical scale, because it turns out, this is that it will let you to what the tool is, but that tool is also actively being used for assessing cognitive decline and cognitive maintenance and cognitive function in people with Alzheimer's and dementia.

It makes total sense. It makes total sense. I, all right. So regarding the, the, the first part of the question, like, you know, how do you, how would you kind of dictate when a muscle is recovered? So I do think that what you're experiencing is totally real.

That different muscles recover at different rates. And I've always been so fascinated by this concept. I've talked about internally with my team, but I feel like what we really need, the holy grail to training is going to be when we're able to crack the code on an individual basis when a muscle is recovered, and that is going to dictate its training schedule.

And the fact that you might have a bicep that could be trained, via a pulling workout, or regular bicep that a kid workout, forget the split at the moment. You might have a bicep that's able to be trained that can be trained again the next day, and then the next day,

and then maybe you need a day off after that. But like, in that, that can vary from person to person, for sure, and it can vary from muscle to muscle in that person over the course of time. As you mentioned, because the systemic recovery is gonna impact all those muscles anyway, but let's say you're systemically recovering,

every muscle itself is going to have a recovery rate. And I think what's fascinating is that when you talked about before, we like to train in this week or we have like the way our mind looks at training, well, if that was the case with the biceps, that biceps is a slave to the rest of your training split. You know, where it's like, well, why does it have to be also at the end of every eighth day or, you know,

or whatever, when it might be spawned better to something much more frequently. And your legs are also being thrown into that mix. There's a Mike Menser concept where he's like, training one set and be done for 14 days. I mean, there's such variability between muscle groups and you're linking them all together. I think that coming back and using muscle soreness as a guideline for that is one of the only tools we have in terms of the local level.

We don't really have, being able to measure, let's say, CPK levels inside of a muscle would be amazing at a local level to see how recovered that muscle is, but that becomes fairly invasive, at least to my knowledge, it becomes fairly invasive. So, what are our tools? I mean, I think that at the basic level, that's the one that most people can relate to and easily identify and then use that as a guideline. If you're training when you're really sore, it's probably not a great idea. And it's probably a good indication that that muscle's not recovered.

But at least hearing what you and I are saying here might be a comfort to the person to say, yeah, it is possible that it's not recovered. Just because 48 hours is the recommendation. And just because research points to muscle protein synthesis, needing a restimulation, well, maybe not.

Maybe you're not necessarily there yet. And for that muscle, you're not there yet. So it's all really interesting stuff. But as far as the systemic recovery, I think there's a lot of ways people talk about resting heart rate measured in the morning, all different kinds of court temperature and things like that that might become altered

in a state of non-recovery. But grip strength is very, very much tied to performance and recovery. And when I was at the Metz, we used to actually take grip strength measurements as a baseline in spring training all the time. Now, obviously, as a baseball player, you're gripping a bat, you're pitcher, you're gripping a ball, like, you know, having good grip strength is important. And so if we've noticed, if somebody had a very weak grip, it's just a good focal point of a specialized training component for the service every day

with those guys. No, in spring training, we do sort of a baseline entry level measurement and then we would measure it throughout the season, maybe once every two weeks or three weeks. The idea there was to manage a recover, measure the recovery. I just gave it away. To determine overall recovery, your grip strength is pretty highly correlated. So we have found that with one of those scales, those old fashioned bathroom scales at like a bath and beyond or whatever you can get, which by the way, almost impossible.

I believe Justin and I were searching for the last scale to put in that video. And we almost couldn't find one because everything is like digital and everything. You know, this I'm looking at the old fashioned dial controls. It's like an old Mac and Toshba speakers. There's a there's a huge market for them and old phones. I have to keep your phones now in 30 years. The lame phone now. Really worth a lot of money. So, you know, I wound up finding one and it's a great tool for just squeezing the scale with your hands and seeing what type of output you can get. I think we all can relate to this when you just visualize, imagine the last time you were

sick or just try this the next time you wake up in the morning. When you first wake up in the morning, you're still groggy. Try to squeeze your hand. Try to make a fist as hard as you can. You're going to sit there and create your fist because to make a fist as hard as you can. You're going to sit there, anger at your fist because it won't contract as hard as you know it can. You don't have the ability to just create the output. And that is because in that state,

you're still sleeping, you're still fatigued. You're not even awake at the whole level at this point. Well, that is still an actual phenomenon that happens that, you know, a lack of recovery or lack of wakefulness or whatever you want to say is going to lead to a decreased output there. So when you start to measure that on a daily basis, you can get a pretty good sense of where you're at. And I think when people start to see a drop off of 10% or even greater of their grip output,

you really should skip the gym that day because I don't think there's much you're going to do there that's going to be that beneficial, even if it is the day the train legs or whatever day it is. I love this tool. It's simple, it's low cost if you can find such a scale. I guess you could also find one of those grippers that, and you can do this in a very non-quantitative way, but better would be a scale where you could actually measure how hard you can squeeze this thing at a given time of day.

It draws to mind just a little neuroscience factority in the world of circadian neurobiology. One of the consistent findings is that in the middle of your nighttime, you know, the weight people up and they'll say, do this test in the laboratory, they use a different apparatus, they'll wake people up and they'll say, do this test in the laboratory. They use a different apparatus, but it's essentially the same thing.

And in the middle of the night, grip strength is very, very low. And, you know, mid-morning grip strength is high. And as the body temperature goes up into the afternoon, grip strength goes higher and higher and higher and then it drops off. There's a circadian rhythm and grip temperature. So you probably want to do this

at more or less the same time each day. If you're going to use it, but I think it's brilliant. And in its simplicity and its directness to these upper motor neurons because that's really what it's assessing. Your ability, again, it's about the ability to contract the muscles hard. If you can't do that, you're not going to get an effective work. Yeah, and they also, I mean, they're certainly more sophisticated tools to us as a PT that we have hand-grip dynamometers.

We can measure one side at a time too. I'm not really, I'm getting a little bit blinded by the fact that both hands are squeezing into that scale and I don't get really a left, right comparison. But even at that level, that could give you a little bit more detail but that comes with a cost of pretty expensive devices. But if it's, listen, if you're an athlete, the $203 hundred bucks it costs to have one of those

would be well worth the added investment. Well, and I'm sure some of our listeners will want one too, because there are a lot of tech geeks out there. Not tech industry geeks, but people like tech gear. What's it called again? It's a hand grip dynamometer.

One grip dynamometer. Dine, dynamometer. Set up, set up. By Jeff with the great East Coast action and by me in a terrible botched at West Coast version. Thank you. We'll put that in the show notes also. I think recovery is key.

We always hear about sleep. You grow when you sleep, and incidentally, your brain stimulate learning when you're awake, obviously, but the reordering of neural connections happens in sleep. This is why sleep is the way to get smarter. Provided you're also doing the learning part. This leaves a way to get get smarter provided. You're also doing the learning part. The sleeves are way to get stronger for you're also doing the training part. You've had some really, you've put out interesting content over the years in terms of even sleep position. One of the major changes that I made to my sleep behavior is to not have the sheets tucked in

at the end of the day. And I'll tell you this had a profound impact on several things. First of all, my feet have always been the pain of my existence. Bro I'll tell you, this had a profound impact on several things. First of all, my feet have always been the pain of my existence. Broke them a bunch, skateboarding. And I noticed when I'd run, I'd get shin splints. And then I started to notice that my feet sort of, you're the PT. They were kind of floppy.

And as if I was pointing my toes slightly all the time at rest, if I was, and I realized that, based on listening to you previously, that my sheets were wrapped tight, not hotel tight. Right, right. One thing in the hotel. It was getting a feeling. And I started releasing the sheets at the end of the bed.

Yeah. And I also started doing some tibialis work. Yeah. Front shins work essentially. Changed everything. My back pain from running, my shins once disappeared, my posture improved, although my audience will tell me that it still needs improvement. There are always five or ten people that want to sit up straight.

I've actually had chairs sent to our mailing address. Very nice chairs. So I'm trying there. But this is fascinating, right? The position that one sleeps in. I fortunately have never had any shoulder issues in Akam wood, but maybe you could just talk to us a little bit about sleep and sleep position for sake of waking position and movement.

This, I think, is a very unique and very powerful way to think about sleep. This podcast has done a lot of episodes about keeping the room cool, getting sunlight in your eyes, etc., how to get into sleep. But you've talked about physically what positions might be better to sleep in. So please, please enrich us. Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, some people's opinions of that type of content is that you know, you sleep in the position that's most comfortable so you ensure

that you're sleeping. Oh, great. I understand that. We all want to sleep. That's the goal when we put our head on the pillow is to actually fall asleep and wake up in the morning and not know what that'll happen unless you had a dream. But beyond that, there are certainly physical components to sleep that. That is why a lot of times people wake up and say, like, you can incur pretty serious injuries and sleep. People will wake up and have like a shoulder that did not bother them at all, be humming the next day or even for weeks after

because of the one sleep position they put themselves in in a prolonged way and they happen to have a deep sleep even through the discomfort. That can do actually some damage. So it's understandable that the body can incur some strain and stress if you're sleeping in the wrong way. One of the things I say right out the bad is sleeping on your stomach doesn't really have many benefits.

You're putting yourself into a position that is, depending upon the orientation of your mattress or how many pillows you're using, but you're basically putting yourselves into excessive extension of a lumbar spine, which for most people isn't very good. If you're a disc patient, I guess that might be helpful, you know, for relocating the disc, but I mean, for the most part, your hands are then usually not at your sides, but

they're up under your arms. So you've got them into sort of internal rotation up over elevation in your head. It's just not a great position. You also have to crank your neck from one side of the other in order to breathe, or you're going to be your face down straight into the pillow. So I would skip that one. There's some people that are total belly sleepers. And I would just say, listen, I don't think that is the most healthful long-term way for you to sleep. Try to adopt a different position. Sleeping on your side oftentimes is also brought along with that. The legs and knees coming up towards the

chest, prolonged hip flexion. Listen, we're doing enough of that during the day. We don't need to do it right now. We don't need to do it like 10 hours or 8 hours or something at night like that. You know, and it just is reinforcing, you know, and as we said too, you know, let's say you trained that day. You're just reinforcing muscle shortening overnight, where the body is healing and trying to create some changes in your body. One of the reasons why I recommend stretching or static stretching prior to going to bed. Let people don't really want to do it at that point because it could take 10 minutes, 5 10 minutes depending on how many muscles you have to stretch.

But it's good to try to establish this longer length temporarily, prior to going into a state where you're going to be not moving and recovering and creating new changes in the muscle. So, you know, that kind of, I don't say it doesn't rule out the side sleep. Or the side sleeper could be very, very helpful for somebody that has apnea or, you know, other conditions. So again, it's not at all or nothing approach, but it's just something that you need to pay attention to. When you are on your back, like you were talking about,

and your feet are wedged underneath a tight sheets at the end of the bed, and most of us, unless we consciously are pulling them up, don't prefer our beds to have really loose sheets at the end of the bed. It's hard to make a bed in the morning. Right. So it's like you're going to want to have them tight. Well, I'm saying, as you experienced, you're going to have these prolonged planar flexion that's going to likely lead to

shorter calves over time because you're lacking all that length for that long period of time, that you could have if you just loosened up the sheets and allowed your feet to just, you know, hang out where they are. Now, the resting position of the ankle is not endorseive flexion. It's going to be still in some player affection, but not being driven down and pulled down into that position. And I think what happens actually is people who get uncomfortable that way, even in their sleep, will shift away from that by turning either onto their stomach. So there's definitely an impact of the body position and sleep and figuring out the best way that you can still sleep, of course, and get your rest, but have a mindful eye towards

what is doing to your body and choose the one that's least abrasive to your body is the way you should go. Terrific. And again, it's really helped me. And I'm a big believer based on good science out of Stanford and elsewhere that as much as we can be nasal breathers and sleep, we probably should be. I don't know if you've done any content yet

about taping the mouth shut with some medical tape. But the benefits of nasal breathing and sleep are pretty tremendous, but it takes a little bit of training. What people do and the training is very simple. It's a little piece of medical tape. So again, a topic for another time. I'm glad you mentioned stretching. I was gonna ask about stretching a little bit later,

but let's talk about stretching. When's the best time to stretch for particular types of results? And maybe you could define some of the different types of stretching. So you just mentioned a little bit of, what do you call it, light stretching or, okay, I'm completely naive here on stretching. So let me just say I can think of stretching where I hold the stretch and really try and lengthen in air quotes folks. I don't want the PT's jumping all over. I don't know what it is, but nutrition and the PT's online are really, they've got pitch

forks in both hands. That's a recent evolution, I think, for sure. And not the nutrition as much, but the PT's have become a little bit angry these days. I see. Well, I always say, with feelings of powerlessness comes aggression. Remember that, folks. So in any case, they're stretching where I'm trying to consciously lengthen, again, an air quotes the muscle.

I'm not yanking on the limb or bobbing up and down. Maybe you could define the different types of stretching for people. Maybe give us some rough guidelines about whether or not to do it cold or warm before training after training, et cetera. So yeah, there's obviously there's a lot of different types of stretching that you can get even to, you know, P and F stretching and things that are a little bit more, you know, niche, but like in general, the two basic forms of stretching are active stretching and passive stretching. And you're, you know, your dynamic work and your passive stretching is done with the

goal of trying to create an increase in the flexibility of the muscle. So whether you're actually increasing the length of that muscle, more so what you're doing is increasing the resistance of that muscle to want to stay at a certain level of flexibility. So when we can sort of take the brakes off and allow that muscle to allow us more range of motion, we're inherently in increasing flexibility without necessarily having to increase the length of that muscle. That is usually done at a time far away from your workout, because they have shown where this type of stretching

done prior to an activity. And it could be like a structured activity like lifting, or it could be a little bit less structured, like competing in a sport in a spontaneous type way, that there is a period of recalibration that is needed after doing this, because you're disrupting the length and your relationship with the muscle

that causes you to not necessarily be able to rely on these, I've talked about before, stored motor angromes in your mind in terms of, this is the pattern for how I swing a golf club say. And now introducing a little bit of flexibility or added flexibility or range because of the stretching I did before, it takes maybe a whole or two or three to match up again.

Oh, this is what he's trying to do, that golf swing thing I remember it again. Like, this is what he's trying to do, that golf swing thing that I remember again. Like, it's not remembering that every component, like I have to bend my right wrist back 10 degrees and then I have to bend my elbow and I have to break. Like, your body stores these patterns for motor efficiency. So, and when I have to start matching up

that stored pattern with what's feeling new because of the increased range, I can impair performance. And again, it could happen even a gym workout where you're talking about your first, second, set, third set, where maybe the repercussions aren't as big because I'll just do a few extra sets. But in performance, if you screw up your first three rounds, you're playing on a PJ Tour and you shoot, you're six over after three, you're done, you know?

So I think it matters there. As far as the dynamic, so we relegate that, as I mentioned, towards the end of the day, when it's not going to impact performance, but even maybe have the additional benefit of creating the feeling of length or the increase or decrease in resistance to this length. At a time when I know my body is going to try to tend to heal and heal shorter, never longer, but heal shorter. So if I can introduce a little bit of that extra length or decreased resistance to that length, it's a better time to do it.

So I think it promotes a better recovery. If I want to do... Sorry to interrupt. It's stretching later in the day because I'm intrigued by this concept of heal shorter. So part of the healing and recovery process means a shortening of the muscles. This is the tensing up and sleep. Could you elaborate just a bit on that and then sorry to break your flow,

but then to continue? No, just basically what's been shown is that when the repair process muscular repair from let's say strength training during the day, the repair process usually results in a muscle that is slightly shorter, rather than increased in length.

It's just that muscles prefer to sort of ratchet their way down into that contraction and then maintain that more comfortable length tension relationship. So when you're sleeping, it tends to err on the side of shorter rather than longer. When ideally, we don't really want that. We want to maintain as much of that length because with more length, we actually have more leverage. That muscle has more leverage to contract. If it was all the way contracted, you really can't have us, we know generate much force in a muscle that's already maximally contracted.

So, I think we want to do something that whatever we can, whatever little weapons we have in our arsenal that could allow us to do this prior to sleep. And again, it's just making a conscious choice to do it at a time of the day that makes a little bit more sense. Dynamic stretching is really not done for that purpose of trying to create any type of feeling of, or increasing the potential length, as you said, of the muscle, but more so, the readiness of the muscle to perform. And, increasing, exploring the ends of that range of motion in a more dynamic way, so you're not hanging out there and disrupting that length tension relationship, but just sort of touching the ends of those barriers so that when you feel movement again, it feels looser, it feels more ready.

And obviously the same time warming up, blood flow, all the benefits we get from just warming up in general. So that's the series you've probably seen a bunch of times, but like legs, swings, and butt kicks, and walking lunges, and all type of touches, toe touches, all those kind of drills, those active stretching drills or you know, lunging with rotations of the upper body to try to get some of the thoracic spine involved too. Those are the drills that people will do prior

to training that are both excitatory in terms of just the nervous system but also helpful for just the general warm up the body because the blood flow, but from a muscle ready in this standpoint, not impairing the performance while at the same time exploring the increased ranges, because as you know, the first toe touch you do is not as high as the last toe touch you do. For me, it doesn't even include the toe. The shin touch, the toe touch, a temp. Right. So like, you know, those are going to improve with each subsequent rep.

And I think that's what people actually, like when you can see those actual changes from rep one to rep seven, you just feel ready. You feel more alert and ready to go on your workout. So the dynamic type of stretching, and I mentioned earlier on, you know, like, what I've had to do to sort of increase my warm-up focus, you know, I think that's more of what I try to do these days.

I try to be a little bit more alert to the fact that, you know, my body is not ready. When I was working with Antonio Brown, I remember like he would spend 20 minutes, 30 minutes on all dynamic work. And I've never seen anybody spend that long on their dynamic work, but like he said, he just didn't feel right and ready to go unless he did a lot

of that. And I mean, you know, his dynamic stretching routine would be a workout for most everybody, you know, it's crazy how much he did. These pro athletes are amazing. And you've had the great fortune of working with and improving their abilities. But I can only imagine, because I also imagine he's pretty strong in the gym also. I mean, you know, it always amazes me the guys that make it to that level no matter what sport they do. They're so gifted in everything, you know, like David Wright used to make me laugh all the time

with the meds because no matter what I ping pong, you know, like anything, because of his hand that coordination, like anything, you know, great at, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I on, you know, even though it's a ballistic move. And he wasn't, I have to admit, I, you know, if you listen to this, he's gonna wanna kill me, but I was better at him than jump roping, one of the only things I could do.

And then I gave him about five days, and he completely blew me out of the water to the point where I could never keep up with him anymore. He made it look effortless. It's like that's where the athlete in someone comes out, no matter what they pick up, they're good at it. And I think that when you see guys like this in the GM like their strength levels tend to be pretty damn good

and their abilities, their coordination, their everything just tends to be good at that level, you know, and it sort of made me why those guys can go pick up a golf club and go shoot 72, you know, and having never really played, you know, they're just naturally good at whatever they do. Yeah, I have a couple. I'm smiling because I have a couple really close friends who did a number of years, some several decades in the SEAL teams. And I don't know that their skill level at everything is so high as you're describing for athletes, but their level of competitiveness is beyond.

I ocean swim with one. There's no chance that I'm going to, you know, out swim, Pat, ever, ever. He actually goes back and forth sometimes just to check up on me, which I appreciate. Thank gonna, you know, out swim, Pat, ever, ever. He actually goes back and forth sometimes, just to check up on me, which I appreciate, thank you, Pat. I'm in the round yet. But in addition to that, you know, we could play horseshoes and it's like this switch that just flips on, like he's gonna murder the horses.

And a very nice guy, right? In general, they tend to be very nice, but the level of competitiveness is kind of unreal. They're trying to beat themselves, they're not even trying to beat you. That's right, I'm not even in the competition. You're not even fun. They're trying to beat themselves. They're not even trying to beat you. That's right. I'm not even in the competition. You're not even there.

Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Now it feels bad. That were worse. It's true. It's a remarkable thing. I'm glad you mentioned jump roping. I used to skip rope for warm up for boxing.

Yeah. I was timid like three three three minute rounds or something like that. But I I'm glad you brought it up because Skipping rope is something that Obviously has a cardiovascular component. There's the conditioning component. There's timing and and it is kind of interesting Right, you can it's frustrating when you don't get it I'm especially a whipsy on the air if you're using proper rope I'm just curious if you could just give us a quick

Skipping rope one-on-one. Do you like to see people jumping with both feet and toes? Well, we'll link to a video if I a video if there was one and I missed it. Do you like to see people doing high knees? Do you like people basically like shuffling? Do you want to see people doing double dutch? What do you want to see people doing over time? All of the above, maybe not the double dutch, but all the above. I mean, I think that that's the cool thing about it, right? Like once we sort of master the skill because for all of us, that first jump with the two feet going together is a challenge, because you just got time that rope, you got time to jump, and then we get bored as we often do as humans, we get bored of what we can do, and we want to take on new challenges. So then it becomes one leg at a time,

or then it becomes side to side hops, right? And all of those things are beneficial, I believe, neurologically, to enhancing the ability to do the skill as a whole, but also just because I'm such a believer in training in all three planes. So, like, just doing straight up and down versus now I can do frontal plane side to side motion, and then I can even do small little twists or corkscrews to call them. It requires a different, you would know more better than I do. It requires different neurological patterns to be able to coordinate that because you're changing the orientation of your body and space. So it's not just that I'm changing the exercise, but I'm changing how my body interprets that

exercise because what's happened into my body and space. So I love whatever people wind up doing, but I am amazed. There are people, I just started following this young woman on Instagram who is like, I'll give her a plug out. I think it's like Anna Skips or something and she is ridiculous. Like I watch her and I'm like mesmerized of what she can do with the rope. You know, it's like, is an extremely athletic endeavor.

Believe it, when it gets to be at that level in the speed and the the precision, in the, you know, in, you know, I think one of the goals that you want to be able to have is to where you're feeling as if you're almost effortlessly dancing without a rope. Like where you're just bouncing off of the ball of your foot.

And it's an important skill to learn too, whether you go back to run, or, you know, or run or even jog, right? Just like more casual running. Learning how to land is so important. One of the drills that people should try is like try to jump on your heels. So just stand up, pull your toes off the ground

and just jump from your heels and land on your heels. You'll feel it in your jaw. You'll literally feel your jaw rattled when you land on your heels. There is no shock absorption capabilities in your jaw. You'll literally feel your jaw rattle when you land on your heels. There is no shock absorption capabilities through your heels. Meantime, a lot of people land on their heels a lot when they run.

And your body's not built to absorb the forces like the ball of your foot could. It's really built as a spring. And the foot is, to me, as a physical therapist, the foot has always been one of the most, you know, you talk about having bad feet. I have bad feet. I have flat feet.

It looks like I got flippers if I took my shoes off, like I like, like, I'm wearing scuba fins. There is no adaptability of that foot to the surface. You know, when it's completely cave, then flatten like that, the job of the foot is to be adaptable. Well, there is, maybe there is some adaptability because it's so floppy, but at the same time, at some point, that critical junction when you're going to then step through

and you need to be able to push off, the foot has to actually change in the mid-foot itself to become a rigid lever, as they call it. You're going from a mobile adapter to a rigid lever. That rigid lever literally locks up the mid-tarsle joint to become solid so that you can push off of it with leverage. If you lack that capability, all those stresses that are supposed to be born by the foot go up into the ankle, into the knee, into the hip, into the low back. So learning how to land and start to train your body to experience ground reaction forces the right way,

is so critical to all other function and all their disability up the kinetic chain. And jumping rope is like one of the best ways to learn how to do that. Great. I own a jump rope. I love doing it in the morning while I get sunlight in my eyes.

It's actually a protocol I picked up from Tim Ferris, who mentioned, because, you know, listeners of my podcast, you know, I'm like a broken record with Get Sunlight in your eyes, even through cloud cover. It's just sets your sleep rhythms and your waking rhythms, the yada yada on and on.

But sometimes they be kind of boring for people and I want to get them off their phone. So jumping ropes also just a great way to wake up. So jumping rope can be a the cardio workout, the 15 or 30 minutes. Definitely. I mean, there's sort of that hybrid that we were talking about before of like, you're not necessarily dropping down to the ground and doing burpees, but I just look at it as a more athletic endeavor because of the coordination involved than just simply walking or jogging. And it's not much of an equipment requirement.

Very minimal cost. You could even use a rope or something if you... Although, we even instruct people that you use no rope and just pretend. You know, and just move the arms. Right, and just slightly zero. You're never going to hit the rope, which is good, but you know, at the same time. So you're never going to know if you're doing it wrong,

but at least you can move through the... and get the same benefits through the feet. I love it, I love it. I told myself before sitting down with you today that I wasn't going to focus on specific exercises because there's such a wealth of incredible content that you put out there that people could just put into YouTube or elsewhere and arrive at the proper way

to do a chin or a dip or for whatever purpose. But there's one exercise in one particular motion that I'd like to discuss for a moment, because I believe that learning about this cautionary note from you is one of the reasons that I've maintained steady training for 30 years with no major injury, knock on wood. And that's the upright row. One thing that whether or not be weight trainer or not, I'm gonna show this podcast and you're just starting to be beeped this out or no. Oh, I do.

How do you get beef about that? No, no, no. We always get beef in any social media platform where we put out, but like, no, I get some from it, but I'm fully prepared to defend myself. So, but here's the reason for asking about this. I never really cared much for upright rows. It's not an exercise I tend to do,

but one thing that's apparent in all my colleagues in every child I see and every adult I see is that almost everybody is an inward rotation now. So folks think, if you stay, I think I learned this from you also, if you stand up straight and then you just point your thumbs out like a thumbs up but you're just point your hands are down, you're pointing your thumbs straight out. Ideally, they would go straight out. Most people, the thumbs are going to be pointing toward one another because most people are starting to look somewhere between a non-human primate and a melted candle.

You know, bent at the hips, et cetera, from too much sitting. We're all sitting. We're an inward rotation. But I learned from you that the upright road compromises some important aspects of our shoulder mechanics and could be actually sort of a dangerous movement in some ways. I'm sure there's a safe way for people to do it.

But so I've always made it a point now on the basis of this advice to a not to upright rows, but I wasn't doing them before, but to really strive for external rotation on things like bench dips, on a number of different things. Whenever I can, I try and go into external rotation and provide, you know, without looking like an idiot walking out with my palms facing outward. Please tell us about internal external rotation. The upright row is one aspect of that, but why this is so important, not just for weight training, but as in terms of posture and mechanics and not looking like a melted candle or partially melted candle. I'm happy to talk about it because I love the shoulder as a joint.

I think PT's tend to fall in love with certain areas. And the shoulder is one of the cool areas for me. It's like the foot is, but the shoulder has the most mobility in the body of any joint. But it's also got the least stability, right? There's always that trade off of mobility and stability. So your stability comes from, you know, certain muscle groups.

And one of the ones that the only muscle group that actually externally rotates the shoulder is gonna be the rotator cuff, okay? And unless you are devoted to training through external rotation and exercises that are going to externally rotate the shoulder, you're not training that function. And it's so easy for us in everyday life, especially those that aren't training, to not ever

really undergo any of those stresses that could be beneficial to counteracting what happens freely and naturally, which is internal rotation. So when you think about the imbalance created just by nature and how we live our lives, internal rotation far, far, far outweighs external rotation. So you need to address it. And the reason why you need to address it is because you need to normalize those biomechanics to the shoulder if you want their long-term health.

And one of the functions of the shoulder is to raise our arm up over our head. And with we do that from an internally rotated position, we're going to have a higher likelihood of creating stress inside that joint. Funny thing is, I talked about before my PT brethren can be somewhat angry these days. I don't know what happened, but fairly angry.

They want to discredit the existence of something like shoulder impingement, which I don't know how. I mean, certain studies, look at it, we all read studies and we, studies will say one thing, one thing, we all read studies and we, we, studies will say one thing one day, potentially conflict entirely in a different direction. Some studies will point to the non-existence of a, of a, of a shoulder impingement. Meanwhile, we have thankfully digital motion x-rays that will literally show the impingement occur in real time, in real function.

And that's one of the limitations I'm off on a tangent here but like those types of x-rays or that type of floraoscopy that we have nowadays like gives us such insight that we never have before because we're taking static x-rays or someone laying down on a table. You know what I want to see what happens when he actually raised my arm up over my head in function and they in the tools now exist to do that. exist to do that. We see that the problems occurring because in order to get normal mechanics and free up the joint maximally inside, you need to externally rotate as you raise the arm up. So if your muscles aren't firing and they're not necessarily as strong as the internal rotation bias that pulls them in, you're asking for trouble every time you do that. Well, this exercise is literally putting you in elevation and internal rotation. And if you were to walk into a PT office and someone said, I think he's got an impingement, will you diagnose him? There's a test call as a Hawkins

Kennedy test. And I would put you in the position. I know we're not visible at this point through the podcast, but I'll put you in this position here where I have your arm elevated and your hand pretty much under your chin pushing downward on that to create that internal shoulder rotation. Pretty much the exact position that we're in when we're holding a bar in an upright row. Some will say, we'll just don't go so high, go only up to the level of the chest, but you're still in this internally rotated position. The thing that I think frustrates me the most about the exercise is that I have an alternative. And the alternative does the same thing in terms of helping the muscles grow by simply fixing

the biomechanics to the exercise, but just allowing the hands to go higher than the elbows. So instead of the elbows being higher than the hand, which drives you into internal rotation, if the elbow is lower than the hand, the hand being higher here, I'm an external rotation. And I could do something called a high pull and still get the same abduction of the arm and still get the same benefits of the shoulders, the delts, and the traps without having to undergo any of the stresses that would come from

the somewhat awkward movement of an upright row. And for those listening, we'll put a link to a short clip of what this looks like, but basically what Jeff is doing and tell me if I'm describing this incorrectly or correctly, Jeff is taking your two thumbs and pointing behind you and, right. And, you know, so elbows up kind of near the chin and pointing behind you, like, go ahead it that way, like somebody directing the airplane, like come back, come back, come back, yeah. Uh, I forget what they call that. I think it's called semiforin is the action of like where they

direct the planes or something, the flags or whatever. Someone will, of course, tell me I'm wrong about that too, which is why I say these things because I like, I like being they direct the planes or something, or the flags or whatever. Someone will of course tell me I'm wrong about that too, which is why I say these things, because I like being told what the correct answer is. In any case, so this replaces the upright row and probably does a number of other important things as well. Yeah, well, again, listen, I, without naming names or programs,

I mean, that when I got involved, and when I got involved in, in, um, athlete and excellent, I first started, you know, my online presence, there was a very, very, very popular, uh, program that was out there that I just for fun. I wanted to, as a PT, this is the, the, the nerdy things we do, but I wanted to evaluate the, the workout structure. And I went and I looked at every rep over a course of a week. And there was something like, you know, 890 repetitions

or something done. And zero of them were dedicated to external rotation of the shoulder. So if you think about it, I mean, yeah, it was a very popular program that was done by a lot of people. There was no, there was no focus at all, no dedicated focus towards creating a balance to an action that

is so predominant. And remember, it's not just because we sit with that posture, but the fact that our chest can internally rotate, our lats can internally rotate. There's like muscle, other big muscles that participate in things that we do every day that will further internally rotate the shoulder. The only weapons we have for external rotation are those little rotator cuff muscles and three of them, actually, three of the four. The job is to actively and consciously train them through the boring exercises.

You've seen them with the band. You anchor a band to a pole. You stand with the band in the opposite hand. If it's anchored to the pole on my left side, I've got the band on my right side. And you see people where they kind of rotate their hand towards the back. Again, kind of what you were saying,

but at a lower elevation, taking the back of my hand and trying to point it to somebody behind me. Well, you know, that is one of the ways to train the muscle. It's just one function of the shoulder, external rotation of the shoulder. And you need to do it. And again, it's not that if somebody was doing ways to train the muscle. It's just one function of the shoulder, external rotation of the shoulder.

You need to do it. Again, if somebody was doing more external rotation work, could they absorb the upright row better? Probably because as they elevated the arm, they probably have a little bit more of a contribution from the rotator cuff to what one of the functions is to centralize the head of the humerus inside of the glenoid, you know, the capsule. So as it rises up, it stays central as opposed to migrating up because the deltoid likes to pull up.

So if the rotator cuff has some ability to counteract the upward pull of the delt, then it can maintain a more healthy relationship with overhead movement. So just realizing that that that that functions only gain through doing these exercises, you know, we we wouldn't probably have dedicated more time there, but the rotate the upright row might be better absorbed by that person because they have a little bit more strain. But again, why? Because if you have an exercise that does the same thing for what you're trying to do musculally to build the muscles that it affects, why wouldn't you just do it where you can still see,

actually pick up more repetitions of external rotation. You know, so you're getting none of the harm, all of the benefits, I see zero reason to ever do the upright row. And people will argue, this is the way they argue that, I've done this for 30 years and I've never hurt myself. And I always say, yeah, yeah, like, I listen, the goal is to not hurt yourself ever. So, even if you, it's sort of like, you know, the championship game, you know, you might

play the game of your life, but if you lose, you lost. And when you get into the end of the, you know, the record books, you're still lost. So even if you had the game of your life, you lost. I don't care if you do it for 30 years, no pain. You're still doing it. And there's no pain. I'm giving you an option that's going to give you the same results and the exercise that you're seeking. That's why you're doing the exercise without the possibility of having the bad outcome come from it. So, you know, I get a little bit, you know, defensive of the of the move. But I feel like it's like, why would you do that you do that? No, it makes sense.

Being able to train for a long period of time and feel good, no, I'm proud to say, and I don't have the kind of genetics where we don't have a lot of impressive athletes in our family tree or anything. There's some fit individuals, some less fit individuals, but I really believe it's about putting in the work consistently over time.

And the more often you can wake up, not in pain, the better. And so, I think that being an external rotation as often as possible is good. This is actually a good friend who's a yoga teacher told me. This is also a problem with the yogis, all the downward dog stuff. For those listening, you can think of inward rotation

as like thumbs down. Just like thumbs down, inward rotation isn't bad, but less thumbs down, more thumbs up as external rotation. So for those just listening, maybe that gives a visual. The more exercise you can do in external rotation, the better it seems on average. I'd love to chat with you just a little bit more about biomechanics.

And this is a personal thing that, again, your content really helped solve for me. One is, I thought I had lower back pain, but I had sciatica. So badly that on a few trips, I worked trips years ago when I was doing a lot more international travel. I mean, it was hard to stand up sometimes.

I mean, really excruciating pain. I didn't want to take medication. I wanted to do back surgery. In the end, it turns out it wasn't a back injury at all. And one of the things that helped fix it was this, just learning about this thing called the medial glute. And you had a video that said fixed back pain and then you quite accurately say that some back pain

isn't really about the back at all. And had me do an exercise or allowed me to try an exercise where I lay on my side and essentially pointing my toe down, the top toe down, almost like pointing a toe down, and then would slowly lift the leg up while pointing the toe down. Maybe I got it, you're correct, you're right. And then holding that, and there's a muscle that sort of sits at the top of the glute, it kind of peaks out every once in a while. You can feel it there with your thumb, which is I think you had push back on it a bit,

creating that mind muscle link again, and there with proprioception, the actual feeling of a muscle literally with a limb. We know, based on the neural circuits for movement, that enhances the contract availability of a muscle. So, like, if you touch your bicep, you literally can contract it more strongly. And this makes total sense, based on neuro-muscular physiology. So, it had me do that repeatedly. And I started doing that in my hotel room, and the pain started to disappear.

And then it came back again in the afternoon, so I did it again in the afternoon. So this is something I did for three or four days, and lo and behold, a back pain's gone. I handed this off to my father, because he liked me, has a slightly lower right shoulder. I think our gate is probably thrown off by this as probably genetic thing. Who knows?

He handed it off to somebody. You know, it turns out that we don't suffer from back pain. And in fact, now I don't suffer from rain pain because I was doing this exercise which I think is helping my my medial glute. Two reasons why I raised this. One, I know a lot of guys who have the right side sciatica because people to keep the wallet there

is one idea or left side sciatica. There are a lot of people male and female who think they have back pain when they don't actually have back pain. And the other thing is that Is about a general question about biomechanics or statement about biomechanics I had a fulfilling that a lot of what people think is back pain or knee pain or neck pain or headache or shoulder in is actually The consequence of something that's happening above or below that side of pain right and

something that's happening above or below that side of pain. Right. And this is a whole landscape of stuff related to PT and recovery and pain management. But maybe you just educate us a bit on this and why this works. What is the media glued? Why did it make my so-called back pain disappear? And how should people think about pain? And I'd like to use this as a way to get into a little bit deeper discussion about pain and recovery.

Sure. So this is definitely like a big cornucopia PT stuff here, but like, and this is what I love. So first of all, that video, that is, it's my proudest video that I have. And the reason being is that I, it's helped so many people. Like we get comments on that video every day.

I don't even know how many of you just got an out 30 some on million or there's a lot of views. Well, we will link to it. There's a lot of views. And quite honestly, it was a little bit of an afterthought video in terms of its origin. I think that that day maybe Jesse was having some problems or something like that, a little bit of low back pain and I showed him and it helped right away. I was like, well, we can make a video on it because this will help people, not everybody. If you have a real disc problem, it's not gonna help

because you're not changing the structural problem that's there. But as you said, a lot of people don't. And even disc issues, a lot of them are not operatives. So you'd wanna try these things first. As far as what you sort of experience, sometimes that glute media is really tightened down and that's again from poor biomechanics

up and down the canaicane. It can actually press on the sciatic nerve and give you what they call pseudosciatica, you know, where it's not like you're making it up. It's not like you're not feeling that pain over that same sciatic distribution, but it's not caused you're making it up. It's not like you're not feeling that pain over that same sci-ac distribution, but it's not caused from a disc. It's not caused from something mechanical.

There, it's caused by the fact that this glute medias has posturally become a problem for you or weak because you don't train it and you need to address it. So unlike any other muscle in the body, there are common trigger points in common areas where the muscle will become tightened or painful or spasmed. And you can basically apply pressure to these areas to and then sort of thread that muscle through the pressure by pushing down through there and then contract in the muscle, which

is why you go through that action of, you know, I think we call it toe stabber, but like stabbing down and lifting up and stabbing down and lifting up, taking that glute medius through its function. So that is basically kind of working underneath the downward pressure of the finger. And that tends to help you to almost, you know, need out what might be that trigger point. And that's why people can see immediate relief there because once the trigger point lets go, it feels like, and that's what the comments are in that video, like, my God, I couldn't walk, I've been on my hotel floor, I did this and I'm fixed.

And meanwhile, then, you know, it could come back because your body is like, wait, I like being more like this, this is how I've been ingrained to be. So it might come back, but then when you do another round of it and another round of it, and then finally it starts to say, all right, I'm not gonna do that anymore. Kind of eases up and you can relieve yourself

of those trigger points. You can do that up and down the back. There's other people that get that and that, sort of inside their shoulder blade, that same type of cramping in another area. But once that takes place, well then the job that I think people have is like become educated that, you know, the glute medias is different than the glute

maximus, you know, like their functions are different. You know, you have to work on not just extending the hip, but also abduction of the hip, external rotation of the hip. Same thing as in the shoulder. And this actually segues nicely into the whole concept you were talking about. Like the body is like a mirror image. The hip is like the shoulder, right?

The ankle is the wrist, the foot is the hand. Like they're, they're, they're, the knee is the elbow, they're two hinge joints. They function that way. Well, with the shoulder, you've got that mobility that comes from having all that freedom of motion, but the stability is lacking. Well, the same thing with the hip, like you've got mobility, but if you don't fully stabilize

it by training all of the muscles of the hip, and if you don't strengthen the external rotation of the hip, then you're going to have issues. Like, it's that biomechanically going to work the same way. If you think of the body as a series of bands pulling in different directions at different levels of tension, you're being pulled into one direction of the other just by the balance of tension from one weak area to one dominantly tight area.

And you need to make sure that you can sort of balance this out in order to eliminate some of the adaptations and compensations that happen. So what I say when we look at sort of the body as a hole, most often wherever you're feeling the pain is absolutely not to blame. There's not the blame. It is somewhere above or below as you hint to that. You're talking about the knee is my favorite example of it. Whenever you have knee pain, tele-10 a night is, which I have forever, I've had a bad bad case of the tele-10 a night is where squatting

is very difficult for me. It's not the knee. The knee is literally a hinge joint that, there's a minor rotation in capabilities in the knee, but it's a hinge joint that, there's a minor rotation in capabilities in the knee, but it's a hinge joint. And it's being impacted by the hip and the ankle and in the foot. As I said before, how critical the foot is,

if you thought of the knee being the middle of a train track where the femur down your thigh and your shin down below your knee where the train track would happen if the foot collapses at the bottom. All of a sudden that train track on the bottom gets torqued just a little bit. Well, who's going to feel that the most? The area where it's torquing which is at the knee.

So the stresses are going to be felt there, meanwhile the problems with the foot or the problem is the ankle. People that are chronic ankle sprainers are almost always going to wind up having back pain because the ankle sprain causes weakness and malout adaptations in the ankle that then gets connected through the chain because now once I distort the ankle and the shin, now the knee is trying to maintain its ability to hinge smoothly so it torques on the femur to do that. Well, the femur is now inside the hip joint pulling on the pelvis and the pelvis is at a whack

So it's really it's really as fascinating like it's one of my favorite things about how the body works is like how it Interconnected it is and how one little thing somewhere causes repercussions somewhere else and The easiest way to find out what your problem is is to say okay I know where my symptom is but I got to find someone who can help me find the source somewhere else because it is going to be usually either above or below. Mostly usually below because it usually translates up to kinetic chain, but usually it's going to be below where the real source is. Some people with low back pain usually have hip issues, weaknesses, tightness, flexibility,

issues, it's almost always below. When you get into really high performance athletics, though, it almost works the other way, where we have pictures who can't, I mean, I'm always fascinated by guys that have Tommy John issues, you know, in their elbow, right, pictures. If you can't externally rotate the shoulder, that would be talked about again,

the ability to get your shoulder back into external rotation. Well, your arm has to get to a certain position for release of the baseball. If it can't get there because you can't externally rotate the shoulder to get there, then the elbow has to sort of torque more in order to allow the arm to get back further. It will try to take some of that motion from a joint that's not really, again, another hinge joint, really capable of doing that. So it starts to stress that media elbow ligament

to get a little bit further back because the shoulder's not working. And that just ultimately places to stride on the elbow. So when you see a guy that has pain that floats around, a picture that floats around their arm, all that is is sort of this balance of compensation. Once his shoulder elbow starts hurting, then he can't do the range from the elbow.

So he tries to dig a little bit further back in texture rotation and then the rotator cuff gets inflamed. And then he feels that's inflamed. By the way, during that time period, it takes some of the strain off the elbow so the elbow feels better. Then he decides, okay, now I got the extra rotation, but I'm getting too much of that. So now I start straining the elbow again,

and it keeps going through this cycle. So your body is very smart, and it's gonna compensate every single time. It's gonna find the compensation, but there's no guarantee that that compensation doesn't leave you with a whole host of other issues. Yeah, it's fascinating. And another lifetime I would have gone and

been a PT, although it sounds like the community among PT's online. I don't know what they listened. There were people, but it's like, yeah, scientists and neuroscientists can get into pretty intense battles. You know, coming from the academic community, you know, the etiquette is so different online because I always say, you know, I think in person, people would probably behave a bit differently. So your hand and say hello. Yeah, you say your hand and say hello. And, and there's also, look, I'll, I'll just be very direct about this. There are a lot of people online for whom their only content is pointing out the misunderstandings or alleged flaws of other people. There's like the, it where it's like that bulk of their identity, which to me is sort

of a sad existence. But, you know, there's always more to gain by thinking about what's possible and what's new and what's good, but you know, teach their own demise or win. I mean, questioning what's out there is healthy. Sure. Normal is great. It actually sparse conversation. But as you said, some people's existence is solely to find things to, you know, nag about and not actually with the goal of being to advance advance anything but rather just to, you know.

Yeah, in the world of science being skeptical but not cynical is encouraged. But I would say that the longer that somebody is in a career path, it's certainly in science or medicine and they realize how hard it is to, you know, to do various studies. Once they publish a few studies, generally they sort of get a better understanding of how the various things are done. In any case, another along the lines of pain and pain relief and misunderstandings about the origins of pain in the body,

one of the great tools that I picked up from your content, which is benefit, I know a huge number of people is I think I used to hold weights sometimes in the tips of my fingers as opposed to in the meat of the palm of my hands. And I had elbow pain. And I always thought that I felt it most on tricep exercises and pushing exercises. And I thought I was doing those exercises wrong. Turns out I, toward the end of my pull ups or my bicep work, I was letting the weight or the bar drift into my fingertips. And the mere shift to making sure that my knuckles were well over the bar or that the weight was really

in the meat of my palms has completely ameliorated that for reasons that you point out and maybe you could just share with us why that is. You have this kind of finger pull exercise. Usually when someone says pull my finger, it's like a bad middle school or elementary school joke. Pull this one, say push your finger. Yeah, like a bad middle school or elementary school joke. But you're, this is what they push your finger, right?

Yeah, this is fascinating. This is because it just shows again how intricate the body is and how responsive or over-responsive it can be to something so little. And what you're talking about is that when you grip a bar where there be through a curl or where there be through, and this is mostly pulling exercises because the tendency for the bar is gonna be to fall out of your hand, not like with

a pushing exercise where you're pushing your hand into the bar. So on a bench press say, that bar can drift just by gravity, doing its thing or fatigue of the hand grip strength, can start to drift further away towards the distal digits, right? Through those last couple knuckles that we have on our hands. And though our hand can still hold it there, the muscles are not equipped to handle those types of loads.

And that can start at a very, I'm not gonna say light, but like, you know, it could start at, you know, dumbbell weight, you know, 40 pounds, 30 pounds, you know, even 25 pounds or something depending upon the overall strength levels. But then when you start to apply it to something like your body weight with a chin up, right, because that's natural for the bar to somewhat kind of float down towards your fingertips. And it actually is a little bit easier to perform the exercise with that

sort of like false script little hook grip at the end because you're not going to engage the forms into the exercise. You're not going to start pulling down. But at the same time, while it could help you to perform them better by getting the back more activated, if you have weakness in these muscles, because it's not a thing that happens to every, it's not one of those upright road type things where I think this is happening to everybody. This is happening to people that have these inherent weaknesses in this, in this, in these muscles.

You, or haven't done enough of the gripping in the, in the meat of the hand, you know, for long enough, but it starts to put that stress on these muscles that are ill-equipped to do this, and to handle this, and it starts to, it stress on these muscles that are ill-equipped to do this, and to handle this, and it starts to, is particularly on that fourth finger, which is part of the muscle we call the FDS, a flexural digitorium, that is just too much for it to handle. And that comes all the way down and meets right at the medial elbow, right on that spot

that you can say feels like someone's niphing you right in the middle in that medial elbow. And medial epiconidolitis, or they call it golfer's elbow, is something that a lot of us deal with in the gym. It's one of the most common inflammatory conditions people get from the gym. And it all comes from this positioning of the dumbbell or a barbell or hand on a pull-up bar over time. So the easiest thing to do is just grip deeper so that what you're doing is you're using more leverage from the palm to encapsulate the bar or the dumbbell or whatever.

And you're not putting that pressure really distantly right on that last digit because that's where that FDS muscle is most strained. So, you're just almost eliminating that from the equation. And it's one of those exercises that the load can exceed its capacity pretty quickly, so that like, you know, maybe it's only capable of handling 30 pounds. And then when you're doing a chin-up and it goes and it drifts so far, that it's, now you know, let's say you're a 200 pound guy, you've got, let's say, a 100 pounds through one arm and a 100 pounds.

This is simple, simplified math that obviously is offset by other muscles. But a hundred pounds through one arm, a hundred pounds through the other one, a hundred pounds off of a muscle that can handle 30, is not going to take many repetitions to strain it. And you're going to feel that maybe by the time that sets over, or certainly by the time that workouts over, or the next day you wake up, you've got that notable stabbing pain. Whenever someone feels that the best thing would be to determine, okay, what exercise would I do when I'm pulling, and where the bar could have drifted deeper, they're further from the meat of my palm into my fingers and figure out a way that deep in that grip. When that happens though, the best thing to do with most of these inflammatory conditions

is not do any of that stuff for a little while. Not ever just for a little while. There's always things that you can do around it. I'm not saying ever do I say like don't go to the gym or don't find something you can do, but I'm saying that particular exercise that you feel the pain on while you're doing it. Never a smart idea to do that exercise when it's inflamed. If you are doing exercise and it hurts hurts you probably shouldn't do the exercise because another you know, you know reason For the variability of exercises there there's so many other options that you can do that will train similar muscles

Or even the same motion and not cause that stress so I mean a cable a cable curl would be much easier to do that on Then let's say a chin up where you don't have the control over the weight, like you do by moving a pin on a stack. So I think that that is a common thing that people find and the best thing to do is just figure out how deep are you gripping that bar, you're going to find out, oh my God, I didn't realize that because it was just, even though you might start a set in a good position and it drifts away as you go. Yeah, I think that's what was happening to me and I'm very conscious of this now. Again, for me, it's, I haven't had this elbow pain at all. That's great. You know, very fortunate. So again, a dead

of gratitude to you. Never. I thought there's some roll in my elbow, basically. And I thought maybe it was tennis elbow. I don't even play tennis. So there you go. Other aspects of recovery and variables for recovery, I think you and I both put out content about the use of cold and I think we can summarize it by saying, yeah, it does seem like cold water immersion immediately after hypertrophic strength workouts might be a problem, but a cold shower is probably not a problem. What about heat? Do you personally use heat and cold? Sauna's hot, you know, hot baths, hot compresses, and by you, I mean, you personally and athletes that you coach or people that you coach,

what are your thoughts on the use of heat and or cold? Well, I think, you know, it might just be an inherited practice from the days of, of, since Babe Ruth, and in baseball, we used a lot of cold following performance, just because the idea would be, there is some, especially pictures, there is some inflammation that is abnormal.

The arm is not really designed to do what they do, especially at the speed that they move it and everything else. So we would use ice as a pretty standard practice after that. But not a lot of heat, you know, and it'll use a lot of heat. And of course, from the recovery or the healing aspect, that actually becomes rather personal preference they've found now after, let's say, the first 12 to 24 hours, where you're really trying to control information of what you know might be an injury.

But then it can kind of shift the personal preference because the heat can bring blood to the area also. And then the cold has its sort of anti-inflammatory effect. So there's a balance between which one's working better for you. So there's really no standard anymore for heat or cold in that way. But from a standpoint of like post workout, healthy status, I

haven't used much heat or cold in terms of what we do. You know, we cover the topic of the cold showers and to try to dispel the myth of the, you know, even people saying that there's giant testosterone releases and you know, all kinds of stuff that, you know, listen, we hear all kinds of things because people want, like, I think the idea of just turning the water cold and being in it for 30 seconds and then all of a sudden, magically growing three times your size isn't treating a lot of people. And that's why they ask these questions because they're like, that would be a hell of a lot easier

than going to the gym and training and hard. But I'm always fascinated by some of the stuff that you talk about. In fact, we started to talk about some of the stuff in terms of cooling and what it can do on performance. And that was, you know, like, there's some untapped territory there that I think you're finding out about. Well, we fun would be to bring the cool mitt technology from Stanford.

This is Craig Heller, my colleague, Craig Heller's lab at Stanford. It's done really important and amazing work in this area, but then it moved on to some other things. He's also working on Down syndrome and he works on a number of other really important topics that scientists often do. But I have access to this coolment technology. No relationship to the company, by the way. We'd love to come out to your facility and we can do the blind type studies.

Like a blue blocker test. Exactly. Exactly. And and see how that goes in with somebody advanced as advanced trained as you. That's probably the best thing to do. So content for the future. Yeah, I think heat and cold are kind of staples in the PT world and I does seem like people use them slightly differently, but they are they are kind of the macro nutrients of recovery there along with sleep. I do have a question about precision of record keeping. Do you keep a training journal? Do you recommend people keep training journals? Are you neuratically fixed to cadence of movement? Are

you looking at the, do you have a buzzer going off or night when it's 90 seconds rest is it 90 seconds rest I confess I have my slow workouts and my faster workouts and they scale with whether or not I'm training heavier with longer rest or whether or not maybe midway through a workout I'll shift over to doing higher repetition lower rest this is kind of my crude way of keeping time but I'm not you know will be just to kind of watch time, but I'm not, you know, will be just to kind of watch the clock, but I'm not, neurotically fixed to the buzzer. Nor am I on social media during my workouts,

which is actually a way to really improve workouts is to just not be on social media. Yeah, I can't claim that I'm not guilty of that. Sometimes I am on social media, but sometimes I'm trying to post something while that's different. It's your profession. It's your profession. But I mean, I, I, I, I'm not, I'm not necessarily, uh, chain to some sort of protocol in terms of how I do.

I think by this point, I've been doing this a long time. And not only is it something I've done for a long time, but it's, it's a passion of mine. It's something I really enjoy. So I probably inherently have the ability to stick to these guidelines in terms of rest time to know what I lifted, you know, even six months ago on a lift and how it felt without journaling it. But I recognize the value it has to a lot of people. It goes back to that whole, my muscle connection idea that we talked about in the beginning.

Like, there's a lack of awareness for all aspects of training, especially maybe isn't like your interest level. And we're talking you and I from a position of interest. Like, this is what we do. We enjoy just how our bodies work and understanding how they work. Some people don't care.

They just want the end result. But journaling and keeping track of that raises awareness to where like, oh my God, I have been on Instagram for the last seven minutes and I was supposed to be back at my next set in 90 seconds. Like, there is a training effect of that. You know, if you're training for metabolic overload, you've blown that opportunity because you have, you opportunity because your rest time was very important to that protocol working as it should. If you were training for strength, maybe the extra few minutes doesn't matter so much

when you get back on the bar, you might find, I mean, you might find that it's a better response for your body to rest even longer than you've been told three, four minutes, five minutes. And so that way maybe it helps, but I think that anything you can do to increase your awareness of your performance and also give yourself some objective goal.

Whenever we have an objective goal, it's a lot easier to actually obtain it. When you're just there to get a pump and you're just there to lift how you feel that day, you have to be incredibly disciplined in all other aspects of your workout in order you feel that day. You have to be incredibly disciplined in all other aspects of your workout in order to make that effective. And I've done that too.

I've actually been able to do that too. But again, the level of repetitions I've accumulated over the course of my life in the amount that I read about this stuff. And I think I'm able to get away with that. But I think more often than not, what I'm doing is not journaling, but journaling in my head, exactly what I think I'm able to get away with that, but I think more often than not, what I'm doing is not journaling, but journaling in my head exactly what I think people should be doing

and that is getting a specific effect from what you're trying to do. It's not so haphazard. You know, you want to get a specific effect, just like any other experiment that you're doing. You're doing an experiment on your own body with your own ways, which to me is one of the most empowering things someone can ever do. When they get bitten by the bug for exercising and training, and I like to use word training either rather than exercise because there's a purpose behind it, but when they get bitten by that training bug and they start to see actual changes and results, you

know, empowering that is because we can't really control that many things in our life, unfortunately. And so there's some things that happen to us that we really wish never happened. And those are not something that we can do anything about. But this is one thing that we can do our best to we can't avoid disease entirely. We can't predict when we're gonna die. We can't do those things,

but we can certainly decide to show up into the gym that day and get a workout in or go for a run or do something. And by doing that, you're giving yourself, I think, a better chance of the higher quality of life. So, anything you can do to increase your awareness of it and keep you on track with that is like I'm endorsing fully. Couldn't agree more.

I couldn't agree more. The, there's a topic, it's sort of a dreaded topic, but I think it's an important one, and that's the topic of nutrition. And rather than again, to specific meal programs, which would take hours and probably wouldn't even manage to scratch the surface even with hours, we could talk about principles around nutrition. What are sort of the themes that you think people should keep in mind when thinking about how to eat generally. And pre-training and post-training are too particularly sensitive times for most, or times that people want to know a lot about,

you know, what should they before training or can they train fastage? What should they eat afterwards? But just in general, what do you think are some axioms of nutrition that really hold. And I ask this, not because there's a lot of debate about this, but because you've been around this space a long time. And you've seen what works for you, obviously, but for other people too. What tends to work, what tends not to work?

And how should we think about nutrition? I mean, you've touched on it a bit, but like, nutrition can be a touchy subject for people. And I understand where that comes from. I've talked about before the, there's a dogmatic tendency to nutrition, and there's a reason for it because it's an area that people struggle with.

More than anything else, and the reason why people struggle with nutrition is because the commitment is extremely high. You could start a workout program and actually get to the gym three to five times a week. That's five hours, based on how you and I were discussing it before. Well, what about the other 23 hours of each of those days?

There's opportunity to eat incorrectly or unhealthily every one of those hours. People's opportunity to eat incorrectly or unhealthily every one of those hours. People wake up in the middle of the night to go eat. There are things that you can do that can cause amazing amounts of damage to your longevity in the 23 hours, not the one hour, the 23 hours. So when people finally figure out a way to make that work for them, it's very passionate. And I understand their passion. I do. I put out, so my approach, my approach is like, I've always been sort of a low sugar,

lower fat guy. I made the mistake of going no fat years ago and I paid for it. I was like in college. And you know, back in the day, we were the same age, you know, we read all the magazines and that was what we have in our internet then. So we were reading magazines and the recommended path was to go low fat.

It helps you to become hypochaloric very easily because the density of the calories in a gram of fat versus a gram of carbohydrates or protein is nine versus four for the carbs and protein. So if you're cutting out grams of fat on a daily basis, you're quickly cutting out calories that allows you to get leaner. Well, of course, as everything, I mean, I, if the little is good, then a lot is better. So I would cut all of them out or almost all of them.

And at the age of 22, 21, I'm like standing at a stop at a bit University of Connecticut, waiting for the tram to come and bring me to campus. And I couldn't even open my eyes because the light was blinding to me. It was normal sunlight. It was blinding to me. The photosensitivity I had, you know, learning later on after a few more courses that I took there in biology, you know, how, how, you know, necessary fat was for the development of healthy cells, I realized what was going on. And not to mention other stuff, skin was bad, hair was falling out, all kinds of stuff.

So I think that the approach to decreasing fat so it's not excessive, because again, how calorically dense it could be in having lower sugar. I'm a firm believer in sugar is really pretty toxic and something that we would all do better getting rid of a lot of it. That is the best approach for, I believe, again, in my opinion personally for the overall big picture because though the people can take exclusionary approaches to nutrition

and taking carbs out or eating only fats and proteins, or again, I'm not saying it doesn't work for you. And if it's the first thing that actually allowed you to gain control of your nutrition to the point where you actually saw results and got to a healthier way, then I always say then do it, then do it, but just make sure it's something you can do forever and doesn't bring upon other repercussions. But I think that non-exclusionary approaches to diets are the most sustainable for the rest of your life.

And all I'm interested in from a nutrition standpoint is something that's sustainable. So when I preach what I preach, I've been doing this since I was 15, 14. You know, people say like, how's he get so ripped? How's he get? I have been doing this for four, since this is for how many years? 30, 30 years, 30 years. 30 in clean, low sugar. Yeah, 30 years.

You know, and in the beginning, it was a slow shift I had to make whereas like, I went from the worst diet in the whole world. I was, even when I was 14 years old, my breakfast was, I talked about this many times, but like, enemies, I would eat enemies, you know, donuts. And, and those long road. Yeah, those are like a strip. Yeah, and I crumbed.

They even took the whole out of the donut. Yeah, the crumb, the crumb, the crumb, the exact, why would you, why would you delete the middle of the donut? There's, you know, the crumb, the crumb donut there. I would eat donuts. I can taste it in my, I don't like sugar very much. Over the years, I've lost my appetite for sugar. Right, but as you talk about the end of it,

and so I can literally smell and taste the frosting. And to me now it's disgusting, but back then it might have been appetizing. You would probably have like really good information on this, but like my ability to actually remember, I know, and they've said smell is very evoking of memories, right? So there's a, smell is unlike the other senses

because there's a direct line literally from our sense of smell to the memory centers of the brain. It doesn't have to go through any intermediate station. Okay, so, you know, my ability to actually recall the exact taste of all the stuff that used to love is enough to satisfy me to not engage in those things now. It's crazy that is. I almost get my fill to remembering because of these strong senses of memory of what it

was like. I used to taste so good. Okay, that's good. I had it. Fantastic. Well, that's, we know the neuromodulator there. That's dopamine. Your ability to get the dopamine release

from the thought of something. Most people, when they get that dopamine release, it causes a triggering of the desire for more. Right, people think of dopamine as pleasure. Dopamine, there's a great book called The Molecule of More. I didn't write the book, unfortunately, but someone else did.

And it's a great book. And it's really about how dopamine, we think it's about pleasure, but it establishes craving. So you're able to satisfy that, and it's a very adaptive thing for you, because you are indeed very lean, and that's one of your kind of hallmark things, and as a professional who does this in the public space,

that's important when people are out there talking about getting lean, and you look at them, and you're like, maybe you need to do the protocols. It's a huge advantage. But yeah, I think that it sounds like you cultivated practices around avoiding certain things. Yes, yeah, I mean, but not, you know, avoiding certain things that I think are easily avoided

if you realize that there, I mean, I think that we have enough science and literature out there to prove that the altered path is a better path. You know, I mean, I feel like if I was just doing it because I wanted to be lean, I'm not quite sure it would have held for so long. Well, and we have a guest that whose episode has been recorded for this podcast who runs an eating disorder clinic at the University of Pennsylvania medical school studies binge eating disorders and aurexia OCD and and he will go on record and obesity and he will go on record saying

that these very highly palatable processed high sugar foods of the sort that we're talking about donuts and so forth that they are actually dangerous right That there are elements of the way that they engage neural circuitry. He's a neurosurgeon that reshaped the brain in dangerous ways. And those are his words. And I thank animals. Yeah, it's not just animals. I mean, I think not just animals, right? Yeah, they're coming out for us with what? With donuts. Yeah, they can't catch us. They can't catch us. That's the truth, right? In any case, so in terms of what you do eat, how do you structure that?

In terms of when you look down at a plate, you've done these, describe this before, but I think it's just a beautifully simple description because I think a lot of people don't want to do calorie counting and all this. How should people think about what to eat? So yeah, I have what I call plate method, and it's just simple because it works for me. And again, if you're struggling with real eating issues,

these mechanisms become admittedly less effective because you're having maybe you have emotionally triggered eating, and you can't stop at one plate. I mean, you could get the plate right, but if the portions are out of control, plate has the dimensionality of height. I can't do it.

Or multiple plates, you know, like second and third plates. Right, or plate, right? Like then, you know, all these things could be challenged, but what I would I say is when you have your plate, then you just simply look at it as like a clock, right? And if you just make a 920 on the clock, so one arm goes over to the 9 and one of the arms goes over to 20, well, then you're basically, you're going to take the second largest portion of that because you're going to make a line towards 12 o'clock, too. And the largest portion is

going to be your fiber's carbohydrate. So that's the green vegetables, right? So whether it be broccoli or brussels sprouts, or asparagus, or pick your favorites. Like those are the ones that give us a lot of the micronutrients we need. They're the ones that are generally accepted as more healthy. And they're also going to provide the fiber.

That's going to be both beneficial in terms of its impact on insulin and also just through filling you up, right? And then I take the next largest portion of that and I devote that towards protein. And I think it's really important, especially for anybody active, the more active you are, the more you embark on trying to build muscle, you're gonna need to have protein every meal.

So I have that. And again, we're talking cleaner sources of protein, but you'll never find boiled chicken on my plate. I ditched those days when I was 16 or 15 or 16. I realized after reading those bodybuilding magazines that maybe the low fat things stuck for too long, but the no fat things stuck for too long. But the boiled chicken and steamed broccoli thing, that ended quickly for me, because I'm not going to eat this forever.

So I'll have some sort of fish or chicken, but it will be cooked in a way that's, like, you know, it's got maybe some sauce on it, it's got some, maybe it's tomato sauce, anything, just just making a little bit more palatable and interesting without blowing the value of the meal. And then that last portion is where I put my star-tube carbohydrates. And again, that's the part that some people say exclude them entirely because they're not healthy or they don't work for you or they're not beneficial

long-term. For me, it's been a godsend. And I do think I'm like most people. My body craves those carbohydrates. I choose things like sweet potatoes, which is my favorite, or I'll have rice, or I'll have pasta, I'm an Italian, so I like pasta. And I will have those things, I'm not excluding them,

but I don't put them in the portions that you would generally find. You know, my wife and I will go out and we'll go to the restaurant sometimes, because we travel quite a bit, or used to at least with baseball too. There's a cheesecake factory ever where you went and I love cheesecake factory but like the way they structure meals is it's all rice on the bottom and a little bit of chicken

on top and I mean it's a plate full of rice that you wouldn't find me make a plate that way. I'm going to just devote that portion of the plate to the starchy carbohydrates. And so it gives me a little bit more responsibility in terms of portion control because those are the foods, again, probably dopamine driven that are most easily overeating. I always ask the question, what's the last time you eat 10 chicken breast at a meal? Like you're getting sick of it after maybe two or three. But you could eat a whole whole lot of carbohydrates, starchy carbohydrates because they're just so satisfying.

And I think those triggers, as you said, they want more, like that's what happens, right? You just keep it. Even when you're feeling full, you want more. And that's the biggest danger to carbohydrate. So if you can develop some sort of discipline around them, then you can still enjoy them. If you can't develop that discipline for

whatever reason, then maybe they do become something that you have to work yourself around or adopt a different eating style. And as I said, I'm never to the point where I'm not trying to be dogmatic in my approach. I'm always trying to say, this is how I do it. And I'm a believer in it, just like everyone else is believer in their method. But I'm open to the idea that something that works for you and gets you to a healthier weight and a sustainability, like that is good, that's good for me. Provided it doesn't introduce other issues.

Yeah, something one can do consistently. That's something I picked up from you over the years. What can you do consistently? And for me, that also meant when and how can I eat, what can I eat consistently that will also allow me that also meant what when and how can I eat, what can I eat consistently that will also allow me to be alert after lunch so I can actually get some work done. Yeah. Or eat, I like to train faster to the morning, but I don't do any long-term fasting. It just so happens that I'm fine doing water and caffeine in the

morning and training in the morning. And then I eat my first meal afterwards. It's just, but I get carbohydrates at night. so my glycogen is restored. I think carbohydrates are wonderful. I just don't eat them in excess. So to me, I feel like when what you describe is a very rational, literally balanced approach, and obviously there will be variations for people who are dealing with obesity or diabetes,

or I've got friends that are on the pure carnivore thing. I have friends that are vegan, and it's always impressive to me You know, I've got friends that are on the pure carnivore thing. I have friends that are vegan and It's always impressive to me when somebody can Stick to anything consistently These except when they're sticking to just poor behavior Because that's there's nothing impressive about that. Well, I think that that's very helpful Because I think there's a for the typical listener of this podcast, you know, the online content that people see,

the battles are very confusing. They're distracting. Because people really think, oh, there's a right way and a wrong way. And it sounds like the way that one can eat consistently over time that's healthy. Certainly fewer processed and sugary foods, I think almost everybody can be able to do so.

Yeah, almost everyone agrees on that, right? So I think it is, it's's calorie manipulation through some other method, right? So even, even intermittent fasting, like, you know, like you said, like that could be, it's for people that are grazers. Like if you are a grazer and your real problem is portion control over the course of the day, but you can respond to a rule that says, no, you're eating between here and here, that you can obey that rule.

Well, you're not gonna be able to graze during the times that you might be doing additional damage. So, sure, there's other hormonal benefits that people will talk about from that approach, but from a longevity standpoint and habit forming standpoint. If it's fixing the habit that you're breaking too often by eating throughout whenever you feel like you walk by food, it's good. And it works. And again, it's, you know, people can, we'll tell you you can probably eat whatever you want to eat as long

as you're eating within those, that window. But I think the more responsible people who are practitioners of that will say, no, you still want to avoid process sugar and things like that. So, and that's just a mechanism of eating not really a diet, right? But like it's, I think that people, I hate to be as basic as it sounds with that, but it's for the exact reason that if it's that 23 hour day phenomenon, that's like, you know, you said you're impressed, it is impressive. You know, it's so hard to control all of our behaviors and food being one of the hardest,

you know, the biggest temptations for people, you gotta learn how to control that for so long and then do it day after day after day, whatever that mechanism is that works for you is impressive. And I'm a believer in it. I think that's how I feel. I just feel like people need to be able to be given some reins

to be able to find what works for them. Well, I love to eat. And one of the beauties of weight training is I feel like I can eat plenty for my age. And I'm not as lean as you are. But I'm happy with where I'm at. I could always do better. With each year, actually, I'm getting better, probably but I'm happy with where I'm at. I could always do better. With each year, actually, I'm getting better,

probably because I'm eating cleaner, probably because I also have someone to cook for me now. And we were like, and we like, and we like, I have that too. And we like healthy food. And so I'm very fortunate. I don't think we have any packaged food in our home. We even started making sourcrout at home.

I don't make it. She makes it. Well, my wife actually, she turned me on to a tip that I actually shared with the whole channel, which was like, you can, you can go to, we have a student Leonard's around our big grocery store chain around us. And they have a catering department. And, you know, they're often used for catering big parties and, you know, big tubs of, of, of grilled chicken, but like really good grilled chicken. Again, not the boiled chicken, but, and big tubs of grilled chicken, but really good grilled chicken, again, not the boiled chicken,

but big tubs of sweet potatoes. And we'll get a bunch of those and show go over and show get them, then she'll sort of arrange them on plates and put the plates in. And I'm okay with repetitive eating. I think more people are probably okay with repetitive eating than they think.

I think that when you actually break down how many different breakfast varieties, like variations do you have three, two or three? Two or three? Yeah, that's the most right. So like, I think when people do, there's more variety for dinner probably, but like, even there, you're probably eat five different types of dinners, you know, over the course of, you know, a week or a month. Well, you know, if you have that ability to identify the things that you like, and

again, no plan is going to work if you're eating stuff you don't like. It's not going to work forever. Nothing will. You have to really enjoy what you're eating. As long as these these variations of this meal are something that you really enjoy and there are limited versions of them, their reproducibility of that is simple, you know, it will take some time. But if you're fortunate enough, in our case, to have somebody who can prepare it for you, now that's even part out of the equation. It just makes it very simple. But I do think when you tally up all the costs of medical care that are spiked by having poor nutrition, and you then offset

that by what it might cost you to invest in a faster strategy like this catering trick or whatever it might be. You'd be best off figuring out a way to maybe reallocate some of your money to preparing this because you know how important it is to your long-term health and longevity. If you can figure out your nutrition issues, if everyone listens to this podcast can figure out their nutrition issues, this whole world will be different. That is like we want one of the largest sources of disease and pain and discomfort because people

really struggle with nutrition. Yeah, and it's a huge problem. I mean, the OVC, it is an epidemic in this country. It's very, very serious. Also, a lot of highly processed foods are more expensive than healthier foods. When you really break it down, even the better sourced high quality foods are right there on par less than the processed foods for sure.

But, a couple other questions as it relates to training, because I think that one thing that a lot of people wonder about and maybe we could do this in kind of a true false method first just to get through some of these 50 all of it at right at least. Exactly. Men and women should train differently. The science of it will say false. And again, not not to generalize, but kind of the point you touched on earlier today. I do find that casually interested women in training will migrate more towards certain types of fitness, like kickboxing, like dancing, like, you know, low-rest circuit type.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, and I think again, whatever is that you're going to engage in regularly is what you should do physiologically. No. And I think if we can get more women to feel more comfortable in the gym performing the same exercises and the same in receiving the same training benefits and working on progressive overload. And like, yeah, we've hit the holy grail. But I think that it's that it's a big bridge that has to be gapped still because there's just some reality to listen. There are very, my wife is a perfect example of this, living a very complicated, busy life.

We have two young boys, they're twins. And her attention and focus is there. And it's like, she doesn't do this for a living like I do. And if she can get a decent workout and she's happy, but she's not necessarily working on her deadlift PR. And so I think that that would help her and serve her in the long term

to work on increasing her PRs in different lifts and building her strength progressively. But in her life right now, it's not necessarily in the cards to have the time to focus on that. So would you then discourage this other thing that she might find interesting? Like some boxing, there was a little,

I don't remember the brand, but like one of those punchable boxing stand up things, and she enjoys it, you know? And, you know, like anything to get you moving is going to be preferable, but I don't think that necessarily physiologically there's a difference. You start weight training pretty young. Yeah, I messed around with my brother because he was older, he was four years older, so I was kind of messing around with ways probably 12 or 13 with a five pound dumbbell.

Okay. Yeah, you hear that young kid shouldn't work out with the weights. because he was older, he was four years older. So I was kind of messing around with ways probably 12 or 13 with a five pound dumbbell. Okay. Yeah. You hear that young kids shouldn't work out with the weights. I don't know what the going as standard is now. They say, you know, shuts down long bone growth or growth plates, you know, this sort of thing. You've got two young boys, adorable kids, by the way.

Yeah. One of the things that is very heartwarming is to see you're in great shape, you're extremely bright. You know, you're craft, you know your craft, you love your craft, you work with Jesse who we'll talk about as well. Which is great, you know, that there's a camaraderie there

having great teammates as part of a business or to work out with this just makes life better. Let's just be honest, I'm grateful to have great teammates for the podcast in my lab, of course, as well. But to see your boys and your dogs and the whole picture, you know, it's a, you know, I'm sure it has a lot of contours and complexity that we don't know about and shouldn't know about, but it's a beautiful picture.

And will they wait, train? I've seen the videos of one or both of them hanging from the box. These kids are natural. I'm telling you that. I wonder where they get it from. I don't even encourage it. I'm not gonna be the dad who's sitting there saying, let's go somewhere.

Yeah, we got our two days here. I'm not gonna do that, but they have a natural interest in the gym. They just sometimes like to be out with daddy. So they'll come out there and I of the two of us, my wife and I will be the one who has a little bit more of a longer leash to let them explore things because I was a dummy at times too and figured out best through the mistakes.

Daryngery. In neuroscience, we call that one trial learning. There you go. These guys are going to be masters of one trial learning because, you know, they'll go grab, you know, the bars of my, the handles of my jammer. Yeah, that's there because it's at a lower level to them. And they're swinging around, they're doing pull ups on it naturally. Uncoach nothing from me.

One will walk out to a deadlift bar, stand over it naturally, never saw me do it, stands over there and this goes, er, he's trying to pull it. So there's a definitely an inclination to liking the gym. And I will fully support that. But of course, body weight will be good for quite a while. So what age you think is reasonable for kids to start exploring a non-body weight? I think around 13.

I think around 13. Once puberty, I think it's OK to start to. There's so much, I would even say, for people that are later in age who are just starting out, learn with your own body weight first. There's plenty of resistance to be had by learning how to command your body in space. So if you have never trained before, you're going to get very stimulated by doing lunging and reverse lunging, even learning some of the proprioception around movement through

space, pull-ups, chin-ups, pull-ups and chin-ups are challenging for even people that have had 20, 30 years of experience in the gym. So there's a lot of stimulus to be had by body weight and jumping straight to dumbbells or barbells is actually doing yourself a disservice. You can learn better command of your body in space so that when you go back to the bigger lifts, you're gonna have an easier time

sort of progressively loading them and building up that foundation of strength. I'm not saying that you have to become a master calisthenics athlete before you can touch a barbell. That's not even true. I'm just saying, there's so much capacity. Kids are going to be doing this anyway. And really, just if you look at general play, they are jumping, they are lunging, they

are climbing, they are pulling. Like that's what they do, you know? So why, I don't know where the avoidance of structured training is for younger kids. Again, provide other using body weight, maybe less ballistic movements or something like that, things that are certainly overloaded movements. I think we should encourage kids to do more. There's a lot of obesity and kids on the rise also, and that is incredibly disconcerting to me.

I hope it doesn't come from the advice of some that say, well wait until you're older to start doing something. Like, that's a way worse trade off than engaging in something smart now. We used to get kicked out of the house when we were kids. Totally. My mom would kick us out. Right. I don't know.

I had a huge pack of boys that lived on my street, you know, but we'd get kicked outside. Like literally, you're not allowed in the no television. There were video games, of course, but we were kicked out of the house. We had to go play. First of all, skateboarding soccer, and then we'd find our trouble.

But to post training nutrition, we're the same age. Years ago, I was sort of neurotic about the idea that I had to ingest a certain amount of carbohydrates and proteins within two hours, then it was 90 minutes of training. I confess, if I train hard, sometimes I'm talking about the resistance training,

not the running, but the resistance training, 60 to 90 minutes later, I'm really hungry. But there have been days when I just skip and then the hunger passes, and then later I eat more on my eat twice as much later. That's just the way sometimes schedules go. But what are your thoughts in terms of the nutrition science, the training related effects of the post-training meal? Is it something that you try to get?

Is it something that you think people should pay attention to? So that science has actually probably been the one that's changed the most in my lifetime, honestly, because I, again, were at the same age and I was falling for the same trap, you know, where I would really be focused on, like, I'm risking speeding tickets driving home from the gym. You know, you're like, I got an antibiotic window, you know, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious.

The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious.

The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious.

The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, serious. The big, five hours after training, you can still see the benefits of replenishment. A lot of that is just, I think there's a consistency element to it that just utilizing a post workout window or a post workout meal, even if it's within two hours or one hour, is just ingraining the habit of saying,

listen, I just did this activity. And now I want to replenish some of what I lost, the energy that I used to perform, the exercises that I did. And just getting into the routine, knowing that the engine is ultimately fed by what we put in it. And the concept of replenishing the fuel lost,

is still a concept that I think, again, different and mechanism, but still important in terms of fueling the overall performance. So, the pre-workout period of time gives us a chance to actually have a longer window because if those nutrients are obtained pre-workout, it's not like they're gone in that hour that you've trained. They're still there and available for your body to use. So, you know, I think it's important to get one of the two, you know, right, or at least make sure you're consistently having one or the two, or you might risk going through all

these periods of having no nutrition to support your efforts, not only will your workouts potentially suffer in terms of the output, but then you're also not providing your body any ability to capitalize on an opportunity to feed it and refuel and recover. So I'm not very dogmatic about what specifically to eat or post workout, but I do think you should have protein surrounding your training, whether that be ahead of time or after, protein could be a little bit hard to digest for some people. So if you do that pre-workout and then you're finding your workouts slogging because you don't feel good, then suddenly you put that after your meal.

But this whole concept of the urgency of time has thankfully been removed and we can just learn to eat a little bit more, you know, responsibly and drive more responsibly so we're not, you know, trying to rush home from the gym and risk killing people on the way. You know, I think it's, but I think it's great because I think that that was something that it just showcases a belief that people had for so long that has since been proven to be not that important. And there's a tip of the cap towards research in a good way where it's like, all right, I think we could all agree

that this isn't necessarily true anymore. And look at yourself and say, oh my God, I did that so often. I bet that one hookline and sinker, but then realize, okay, we could always make a change. And the good thing about nutrition is those changes can happen the very next time you go to eat, and you'll start to see the benefits of that.

So I'm not a big believer in that strict approach to pre or post workout. I mean, even as far as pre workout supplements, a lot of people don't take them. A lot of people don't like them, they don't take them, they're not necessarily even being used as the new, new, new, trit-of-side of the pre-workout. They're just more new used to fuel the workout. For me, it's water and some form of caffeine. Yeah, I mean, it's whatever, you know, again,

I think it's important, I do think it's important to maintain a high level of output. So if your pre-work on nutrition requires a stimulant in order to help you do that, or if your pre-work on nutrition is causing you to have a harder time, the train because you're feeling full or stomach ache or something else, then that's not achieving what you're trying to do. The ultimate goal is to still be able to perform at the highest level. So whatever your nutrition is required to allow you to still do that, that is probably the most important

factor of all of it. Great. I love the very clear and rational approach. Don't ingest anything right before your workout or near your workout that's going to make your workout worse. So even if it's so simple and yet you don't hear this because I think people will think, oh, they must have a pre workoutworkout. They must have a post-workout. Again, like, even if there are the benefits that are to be had from whatever's being suggested, it's gonna be easily offset by the fact that you can't perform at an output capable of driving

and change. So that would pretty much negate the fact that there, you know, there's no, you're not outweighing those benefits of whatever nutrient approach you took and it's struggling through your workout. Yeah, for me the best pre-workout is a good night's sleep, hydration, caffeine, music. There you go, I mean it's a pretty simple formula, it works. And then post-work, I do find I get quite hungry and want to eat quite a bit more.

Well, that's a natural response. The body is going to, and most people want to do that, and I think it should be fed. I work out, as, you know, again, a lot of my postings on Instagram will happen at 10 o'clock at night, 10, 30 at night, 11 o'clock at night, because I am actually training there, and that's where I'm taking those little breaks in between sets to actually film or post something, but like I then go inside a dinner.

So I'm eating at 11 o'clock at night, you know. It's not necessarily ideal. I'm not recommending that as a tool for anybody. I think it dispels one thing. I've never been a believer in kidney carbs after six. Yeah, that makes no sense to me. Zero. Based on all the new, all the science of metabolism

that I've seen. Right. I think as long as you can sort of like napping, I talked to Matt Walker, one of the great sleep researchers wrote, why we sleep, et cetera, you know, and has his own podcast about sleep, tremendous researcher, public communicator about sleep. And he said, you know, naps are fine podcast about sleep, tremendous research or public communicator about sleep.

When he said, you know, maps are fine, provided they don't interrupt your ability to sleep well at night. Right. Simple. Tell me when you sleep from 8 to 9 p.m. and then go to bed at midnight and not a problem. Other people, they take a 30-minute nap after lunch and they can't sleep at night. Same thing with caffeine is a little different because Matt would argue the architecture of sleep can be disrupted, et cetera.

But if you can eat dinner late, meat carbohydrates late, actually need carbohydrates at night in order to be able to sleep. Whenever I've done a low carbohydrate type regimen in the evening, I have a hard time following sleep, I'm just too alert. And so I eat carbohydrates in the evening to restore glycogen,

but also in order to make sure that I can fall asleep. I actually can, again, obviously it's already late at night by the time I'm done eating, but like I can fall asleep within 5, 10 minutes of finishing my meal, you know, because I do think that they have that same effect on me. But I'm never like, I'm not bothered by the feeling of fullness. I'm not unable to sleep because I'm feeling of fullness. But I do,. But I do like the fact that I feel as if I'm at least replenishing what was lost through my hard training. And I do like to back it up with a dinner.

I don't need to eat smaller amounts. Some people can't have that. But I will say after a hard leg workout, I don't have the same appetite that I do after let's say, you know, an upper body workout. It can really disrupt my whole feeling of well-being. You want to eat less after you train your legs? I do, yeah.

Oh, wow. I'm the opposite. No, because I just feel like I can feel sick to my stomach. You're clearly training harder. I've seen the way you train. You do train very intensely. Yeah, yeah. I think it's important.

I mean, I think that, again, it's that trade-off between if you're not going to train for a long period of time, then you're gonna wanna train harder. And again, I actually feel like contrary to what people might think as you age, you're better off training harder for shorter period of time. You know, it's always within the realm of safe training. I mean, I think that's what I like to think

is what I bring to the table, like an approach that's smarter, so I can train harder, you know, like not doing the dumb things I did when I was a kid. And with that, you know, trade off being a harder trainer, I think I get the results that I want because I'm able to really push it and then back off. And again, the meal feels like almost a physiological reward for the hard effort I put in the gym. Knowing that I'm also replenishing and setting the stage for the next day to be another successful day of training, or maybe not, depending on how many times a week I train. But yeah, I think that it's a lot less, it's a lot, I hate to say, but it's a lot less scientific than we want to make it.

And as it seems to be coming back often times, like the thing that works for you is really the most important thing because ultimately getting your ass in there and doing what you do is really the thing that provides the best benefit. Absolutely. And you know, there are many things that I would say, a hallmarks of Jeff Cavaliere,

but one of them is certainly consistency. You make it happen one way or another. Huge. I mean, consistency really is the determinant, and I know that that is the hardest part for people that are, and why people tend to look for the shortcut, because consistency is the part that becomes the biggest challenge. But if you could find, listen, if you could find the, I'm going to, you know, through what I've been trying to encourage here, is like, if you could find the nutrition approach,

if you could find the training approach, if you could try finding the training split, if you could try all those things that encourage you to want to go to the gym. Like you're locked in at the point where you said you actually look forward to going and doing your work out. No, I love it. Right. I look forward to, I mean, it's, No, I love it. I look forward to it.

It's actually this morning, one of our teammates for the podcast and I got to work out and halfway through, I just turned them and I said, I'll never figure out why that feels so good, but it feels so good. I just, I really enjoy it. And it lets, and I love to eat, and it lets me eat. And I love the way it makes me feel afterward.

I don't understand this concept of not enjoying the gym. Cardio is a little different. I always love the first 10 or 20 minutes of the jog. I mildly love the middle third, and by the end, I think this is the greatest thing ever. Why don't you do it all the time? And then that feeling evaporates before the next time I do it. Yeah, of course, you don't even remember either. Then you get on. You hit it again. Exactly. Yeah, I think if we had one gift we could give to everybody, it would be the love of fitness. If they could be stowed the love of fitness,

it would change the entire world. But I think when you hear things like this that like, hey, that will work and that will work too. And that this will work too. Rather than the dogmatic one way only approach, which could be to come discouraging for people. Then I think it becomes a little bit uplifting like, well, I've never tried that. I've actually never tried a total body split or I've never tried, you know, that style

of eating. Like, it becomes encouraging that you might want to explore. And then you might finally get locked in and say, I really like this. And then you're often running. Let's, uh, what I so enjoy about your content. I, we would be remiss if we didn't just briefly discuss Jesse. One of the great pleasures for me in watching your content and learning from it over the years is that you took on, you decided to mentor somebody.

Right. Jesse, and there's some poking fun back and forth between the two of you, which is very amusing. But I have to say it inspired me to do something early on in developing this podcast as I have a young intern who has helped me with some of the research and he's a budding. He's interested in science. He's about to go off to college, but he also got really into fitness. We watched the videos of you guys.

He was helping me get the Instagram content out early on. One thing that was just, it was such a pleasure to be able to pass along knowledge. And of course, I'm learning from him. This is always the way it works. We learn from teaching and we learn from students. But it's been great to see Jesse's progress. It's amazing. I've gotten to meet him in person just now.

And he has grown. He's changed physically. And I think that you mentioned a love of fitness. I think that in one of the best ways to be consistent is to take on the responsibility of teaching others once one has proficiency in something so Maybe you just tell us a little bit about how that's going. How is Jesse doing and Where where does he need a little more work? Where is he thriving? I'm impressed by the progress Well, we have I mean physically we can obviously see the changes, you know, the list of things to work on

or is immense. It's so long for him to continue to improve. But now actually, you know, in reality, Jesse, the story of Jesse was that I knew Jesse prior to starting even Athlean X. And in a matter of fact, I think the funny thing is the very first video that was ever posted on my channel was a video that he shot as,

I don't know, a 13 year old or something. And I said, can you just film this for a second? I was over there, you know, training members of the family. So he then off went off to college, went into film, realized he had much greener pastures at athlete necks instead of becoming the next to Scorsese or something. And he decided to come work with me. And the expectations in the beginning were just to edit videos or just to help with various aspects of my day to day that I don't think I was equipped

to really handle and grow the business anymore. So then look at by virtue of being in that environment, there's an interest. I think if I worked in a gym, I might become interested in working out. And though that might not a commercial gym, it's sitting right behind my office window, there became an interest in wanting to work out a little bit. And it wasn't even an intentional experiment, you know, to put Jesse there. I just thought that he's a very likable person. He has a very funny personality.

He's also the every man, you know, in some ways, you know, as I'm sure maybe you experience sometimes, like, I'm the guy that this comes naturally for me is what people will say, like, this is what you do for a living, like, this is what you, like, there's an element of disconnect in terms of the related ability because I do do this for a living. I can't deny that.

I do work with professional athletes, so like there's a level of interest in this above and beyond. But for him, he's just the kid who wants to train maybe if he rolls out of bed before 11 a.m. And, you know, doesn't have a date on Friday night. But that's the guy everybody can relate to. And watching him transform, and I love the fact that even the interest level, you know, was up and down. Like, it wasn't

a consistent for him because he was like, you know, part interested in them, maybe not interested for three months, and then interested in that. And I never pushed it on him. This is, again, this was no orchestrated experiment for me. It was just like, if you want to do this, then do this. And also from a standpoint of like, lending my helper expertise to him, like I said with my son, I'm not gonna force it on anybody. I don't wanna do that to anybody. I don't think that that's ever gonna spark that desire

for long term adoption. So he got more interested. He started to learn more about it. He watched just the videos that were filming. He films the videos that were filming. And he's learning through what I'm saying. He's becoming more of a student of the field. And I have to say his knowledge in the field has grown with the the growth of his physique. And he's put into practice some of the things that I say. He's put in practice some things. He hears other places and he winds up, you know, improving as he goes.

And he winds up starting to love this like he never thought he would. But it's great to see anybody grow and whether that be physically or that be emotionally or that be just in their career, it's great to see somebody grow. And I like to tease him, funny admission here. There are times when the jab is that I will throw at him or something that we might know ahead of time of what I'm going to say to him.

People will say, you're so mean to him. I can't believe it. You're that's so abusive. And like, dude, honestly, we laugh after it's over. It's good. We're good. You know, so, you know, of course, but like's. He's tougher than he looks is what you're saying. He's tougher than he looks. Believe me.

He's got the big beard. He's, he looks more manly than I do. I can't grow a beard. I don't, yeah, I mean, believe me. He's, he's totally alpha and I'm like, you know, quickly becoming, you know, the second, the second star of this show, but like, you know, he's definitely contributed and people enjoy his presence for sure.

Yeah, I certainly do. And I think that you, as you pointed out, he's a kind of a proxy and a template for everybody. We can relate to him because even though I've trained for many years, you know, it's been a struggle through graduate school postdoc, you know, it made it happen one way or another, but with more or less attention and admittedly through waxing, waning levels of motivation, although I'm fortunate that I do enjoy it. What I think is nice about it too, is that it's a realistic expectation that we set, I think.

In other words, you're showcasing what the journey actually looks like. And he's been on the journey for, again, devotedly for, let's say the last year and a half, but on the journey for, again, you know, devotedly for, let's say the last year and a half, but on the journey for five years, if I could make the gains that he did, starting when I started training at, you know, 14, 15, and you're saying, hey, by 20,

you're gonna have the strength levels he does, the physique that he does, the knowledge that you've gained. Like, that seems like a blink of an eye, now, looking back, you know, at 46 years old, I'm like, holy cow, like I think it took me 20 years, you know, 15, 20 years. So, you know, to just even start to get into a groove, for him to do it at a period of five years, it doesn't seem long, whereas there's people

that will criticize his journey, like, oh, it's taking so long, it's so like, there's such an instant gratification, you know, that people seek. Luckily, it's taking so long. And so there's such an instant gratification that people seek. Luckily, that's the minority. Most people are like, this is amazing, you know? But I think that it becomes very uplifting because not only is it relatable,

but the journey is real and people can appreciate that. Like, this is what will happen if you actually put in consistent hard work. And you'll watch him transform, go back and watch the videos. Like, we like to oftentimes throw back to videos where he appeared as, you know, smaller Jesse, but also shy Jesse, arms crossed, head down, not making eye contact with the camera, you know, to where now he's got his own skits and intros, you know, it's

like it's, it's, it's funny because the confidence with the, with the growth of physique came confidence too, which is great. So it's a pretty soon to be his world and we're all living in it, as they say. Well, on behalf of myself and all the listeners, I really wanna thank you. First of all, for the discussion today, I learned an immense amount. Even though I thought I knew your content well,

I still learned an immense amount. Many things we could deploy from when to stretch, how to stretch, the skipping rope. We talked about nutrition, we talked about heat, cold, training regimens, and what I love about all of this now that you've given us is that there's a backbone of logic, you know, and some consistent themes indeed about consistency, but the logical backbone I think is what will enable people to really show up to the table and stay there for training consistently over time. As you said, the gift of fitness is an immense gift. I can't thank you enough. I know you're an incredibly busy

human being with kids and dogs and a marriage and a pleasure. That's my pleasure. I'm happy I was able to make it work because I've been watching your stuff for a while and I really love the science of it, I like the way you think. And it's just, you know, it was a, I'm just really fortunate that I was able to do it. Well, I feel very gratified in hearing that and honored to have you here. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for my discussion with Jeff Cavaliere. I hope you found it as interesting and as actionable as I did. If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast,

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