Jocko Podcast - 495: Look. Is Your "Check Engine" Light On? . With Human Performance Specialist, Rob Wilson.

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

>Join Jocko Underground< Get "Check Engine Light", by Rob Wilson >> HERERob Wilson is a Human Performance Specialist with over twenty years of manual therapy, coaching, and education experience. Rob's work spans a variety of avenues in the field of health and human performance. This includes multiple trademarks, the creation of global seminars and curriculums, and the research, development and implementation of best practices in human performance.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 495 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. So in the teams, back in the day, we had a, we had a saying. The saying was rode hard and put away wet. Have you ever heard that before, Echo Charles? Is it just, did you hear it from me or is it, is it something civilians would say is too? It's a horse racing reference, if I'm not mistaken.

There you go. You're probably right. Well, I never knew that until you just told me. What I thought it meant was like, as a team. guy and your gear and your equipment and as a human just rode hard and put away wet makes it just go hard not worried about the future we didn't care about anything long term we didn't care about injuries we didn't care about diet we didn't care about downtime we didn't care about rest of recovery we didn't take breaks we didn't stretch we didn't warm up we didn't cool down we

definitely didn't sauna an ice bath we ate burgers and drank beer and we kept going and kept going and getting after it and that's fine when you're 20 but when you're 20 years old you're really not that good at being a seal because you don't know enough yet you don't have the experience you don't have the understanding you don't have the skills the prime years you have to have both brawn and brains and you can't get broken along the way. And the war helped us figure that out. We couldn't have guys just being broken and getting broken.

We had to get smarter about our primary weapon system, which is our bodies. And then incorporated in that primary weapon system is our minds. And so progress was made. And the next generation is taking much better care of themselves and their performance, they're stronger, faster. and smarter than we were.

And it was good to see that transition. I saw that progression of maintenance and upkeep for our military members over the last few decades. And like I said, a lot of it I got to see firsthand. We started to bring in specialists. We got athletic trainers. We got nutrition experts. We got rehab doctors.

And we had charities, like not just from within the military and the government, but we had charities, the Navy SEAL Foundation, took a bunch of this information that we had learned over the years, and they turned it into the Warrior Fitness program that takes SEALs who have been rode hard and put away wet for a long time for decades and get them back in the game, both active duty and retired, which has just been a great program. I've had a bunch of friends that have gone through that. It's awesome. Well, with a background in human performance Rob Wilson has helped about 600 of these retired and active duty seals heal up and get back in the game. And he just wrote a book. And the book is called Check Engine Light

about his lessons learned from this experience. And it's great to have him with us here tonight to share some of those lessons with us. So Rob, thanks for coming out, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Before we jump into the book, because we're going to jump to the book, the book is just knowledge. It's just a bunch of knowledge. And I can, as I would read each part of it, you know, I would thread my own memory of either myself or someone that I knew and how, like I said, that idea of rode hard and put away wet is a real thing. And guys used to get out of the teams and they were just in really rough shape. And so we're getting better at it. Thanks to guys like you that have been investing in in the team guys but uh before we jump into the book let's get

some background on you so so where'd you grow up what's the deal uh virginia beach virginia yeah how'd you end up in virginia beach for your dad navy or something no actually my parents are retired police officers so i was born in buffalo new york so coldest of the cold there was work opportunities for police officers my mom my stepdad at the time decided to go down Virginia Beach, went through the police academy, became police officers. So they were both cops and VB? Yeah. Okay.

And then was there veterans in your family, like people that had served? For sure. Both my grandfathers were Korean War veterans. My mom's dad was an infantry medic in the army. He went in young. The story from my family is that his home life, was pretty terrible. He got a waiver signed and went to Korea when he was 16. Check. Yeah. Yeah. As you might imagine, that changed him forever. I mean, I can remember talking to him about it all

the way until he died. And then my dad's dad, who's also passed, was in the infantry, in the army. And then his second deployment to Korea was a ranger. Two Purple Hearts, one of witches hanging on my wall. Jack. Legit. And so as you're growing up, what are you into as you're growing up in Virginia Beach? Surfing, skating, lots of martial arts, played baseball by force until I was about 13. My mom was like, you need a team sport.

You got to learn how to get along and work with other people. Retrospectively, she was correct. But I didn't, I wasn't my thing. I like, I respect it, but it's not my, not my jam. I just wanted to do martial arts and surf. That's really all I wanted to spend on there. What about Mount Trashmore, Virginia Beach? Yeah, spent plenty of time there running up and down stairs and flying an occasional kite, if I'm being honest.

And so what was your surf? How old were you when you started surfing? 10 or 11 maybe. And how often would you surf in the wintertime? Yeah, until probably until the last few years. Once I turned 40, I was kind of. of like, hmm,

it's got to be real good for me to put on a hood and gloves and boots. Yeah. And Virginia Beach, it's not like epic either. Like maybe once a year.

Bro, I was stationed in Virginia Beach and I, I was stationed at Virginia Beach. I surf, you know, I've been surfing for a long, long time.

I grew up surfing. And I was in Virginia Beach for two years. And I did two deployments in the two years, but so I wasn't around a lot. But I had my boards and everything.

I never, went serving one single time in Virginia Beach. I would like go check the waves and just be like, no, I think I'm not going to do this right now. But you are just committed as a kid. Yeah. And yeah, I was committed. The thing about Virginia Beach and the surf there is if you want to be a surfer in Virginia Beach, you have to be an amateur meteorologist.

Because it's so fickle because we're right up against the Chesapeake Bay. So the wind changes constantly. So you could wake up in the morning and the report says like three to four feet pretty good. You're like great. And then the wind changes and it's basically like gone. Just gone. Yeah. And so what martial arts were you into?

Judo. Well, first I was like a Chuck Norris karate kid. With the flex jeans. Whatever? Remember those things? Yeah. Hell yeah. That was.

So where did you, where does your parents take you? For martial arts. So there was a tidewater. judo club, which had, I believe, Mike Storm and Cindy Storm, which they were a U.S. judo federation legit club. Leo White, who was an Olympian. And then, Sensei Don, whose name I can't, his last name, I can't remember. But I can see him clear as day.

Sensea Don the legend. Sensei Don the legend. He was a big dude. I remember him just being like, he was the instructor of all the instructors who it was no, unless you really got it. So he wouldn't like placate you with like a fun fall. He'd be like, no, you don't have it yet. So what year was this that you were trained in judo?

This would have been started probably 88, 89 maybe. Good. This is pre-UFC. There's no jiu-jitsu in America yet. No. Barely. No. Other than in the garage up in Torrance.

But other than that, there's no jiu-jitsu. So if you were early in on the judo, then you're early in. Yeah. I still have my U.S. judo federation card. Did you compete? So did you compete? I did as a kid.

I competed. And how'd you do? Virginia state champion. Heck yeah. That's freaking legit. And then did you see wrestling and be like, oh, cool. I tried it. I tried it for a little bit.

I had trouble with the rule set and also the weight class that I was in. So it would have been in seventh grade when I was wrestling. So just in middle school, junior high and the guy in my weight class was I didn't hit puberty yet he did but we're in the same weight class so the strength differential between us was significant and he used to just kick my ass all the time that's weird even though you had all that judo under I didn't know how to I didn't know how to transfer it I really didn't I really didn't know how to move it over there was rules that were just different yeah that I just didn't know how to deal with how filled with regret are you

now that you didn't wrestle horribly. Thanks for breaking it up. So, and then what did you get? Did you get into other things as well? Didn't you say you did Muay and whatnot back then too? Yeah, so I did judo probably from maybe when I was seven or eight until I was 13. And then by then I was really obsessed with Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee's philosophy.

So I was reading, I don't know how many times I've read the Dow of G. at this point in my life, probably 50 times I read it through. I was like, man, I want to get exposed to this where there's like, you just figure out what works for you.

Did some asking around. There was only one place. I mean, there weren't that many places on the East Coast that taught G. Kundo at the time, but there was one in Virginia Beach. That was Frank Cucci, who was a former seal.

Yeah. His place, which was called functional defensive concepts at the time. Now, Link's Academy offered Gekundo, Kali and Cilat,

and Maitai when I first started there. Oh, he wasn't in Jiu-Jitsu yet? It wasn't even around. So then 95, maybe. I remember he got his blue belt from Pedro Sauer. Yeah.

And that was like, whoa. Like I'd never even, I didn't even know what was going on. And then... Yeah, when I moved to Virginia Beach, I went and trained there. I went and trained at... And Frankucci's super cool.

and so I trained there for again I was gone a bunch when I was in Virginia Beach but I trained there and and Gustavo Machado as well but Gustavo Machado showed up while I was he opened his academy when I was there but yeah Frank and there was a bunch of studs at links to a bunch of really good guys and this was in 98 okay so I forget what belt Frank Cucci was at that time I don't really remember but you know he definitely had a lot of good knowledge and stuff like that so it was a cool place to train. And it was cool because they were training you know, Muay. They were

like early in on MMA. Yeah. Which was cool. Yeah. I saw, I don't even know how this how this game to be. At that time of my life I needed some like male figures who were strong. I had a little bit of an anger problem. That place

had a pecking order that was very clear that I was at the bottom of. But maybe when I was 15 I saw a Valley Tuto. event that was at a like a school gymnasium in Richmond, Virginia. I had no parent there that I remember. My mom let me tag along with the fighters. That was the first time I saw someone get knocked out in person.

And that was the moment I realized anybody can get got. Because the guy who got knocked out was like the toughest human being I knew. And one mistake. one little moment of error and it was done and I was like oh it might not even matter how good you are you just might be in the wrong place at the wrong time so that was like a lesson for me like self-defense wise like okay yeah you best not to be running in your mouth yeah you know don't be there so what so are you doing this all through high school yeah this was your focus 100% and what was your plan after high school did you want to become a fighter

No. Actually, in high school, me and a good buddy of mine were seriously considering buds because that's what we're around all the time. One of the guys I, young guys I trained martial arts with and we were like literally fighting with each other, swimming, running, lifting all the time. That's all probably until the end of my senior year is what I thought I was going to do. I thought what changed your mind. I had like this severe hip hippie face and it was like a really hard turn. Was it what brought you there? Was it music? What was it? I don't know. I tend to have kind of a, my disposition is somewhat, I wouldn't say have like a hippie-ish disposition, but I definitely have like fluid interest.

So it's like once my interest shift, I'm a hundred miles an hour. in that direction. Some of it was like getting into meditation and more spiritual stuff. So did you, I'm trying to figure out your route. Did you go like martial arts and then all of a sudden you're like, well, meditation is a part of martial arts. And then all of a sudden I'm listening to like the little gong in the background.

And then I'm doing incense in the room. In a matter of words. Yeah. interested in the psychological side of martial arts. So I was reading, you know, Book of Five Rings and reading about Zen Buddhism. And, you know, I have a book still called the spiritual dimension of the martial arts, which is like on the other side of the warrior path, what is all the spiritual aspects. I burned to that book.

But I started studying that stuff. and I just was in a little bit of a phase of confusion. I really wasn't sure what I was going to pursue. I was being a bit of a bum, to be honest. I was being a little bit of a bum just kind of floating. Did you smoke pot or anything like that? Yeah. Yeah, but that was not quite at that time yet.

Did music have anything to do with this? Did you like start listening to The Dead or something like that? No, I can't stand there grateful to that at all. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So I was just unsure of my landscape. I was being a bit of a surf mom. Wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Had a lot of different interests.

My mom gave me the boot when I was 18, which was totally necessary. And probably one of the best things ever happened to me. She was like, oh, well, your choices are. Join the military or go to a university. like you're not going to just lay around on my watch like you're a grown man you know I was 18 she was like you're a grown man like you got to figure your way out in the world take a take a hike so where'd you go i went to my buddy's house down the street his parents were leave i don't know like his parents left him

in care of their family home and they went and so it was like me and another 19 year old dude with a two-story house to ourselves so needless to say we took perfect care of it never had a party we were it was just it was a mess and did you go to university i did end up going to old dominion university which is a norther good old o d u went there for a couple years um i almost went to o d u because i was in virginia beach and i needed to go to college but i the other school i go to was university san diego and the j jihitsa out here at the time was like kind of crazy so i came back out here to train yeah but i mean otherwise it would have been o d u and oh well yeah and what did you study i studied uh psychology but primarily foreign language

so i was a russian language student and i took four years of russian all through high school and two years in college so and i had a lot i still love love language when i have the opportunity to speak russian i still like to do it i'm way rusty compared to them but have you thought about going over there to train To Russia? Yeah. Not presently. Might be a little funky right now.

Yeah, but I respect the work ethic of the people. Yeah. Oh, they're for sure. Freaking hard workers. So then what was it? So you go to school. Did you get a degree? No.

So what did you do? What was the next move? Well, the next move was to get my girlfriend at the time pregnant. Check. And go, oh, man, I got to earn a living like right now. And for me, unfortunately, historically, one thing that would have to happen for me to get my shit together when I was a kid was things around me would have to get busy, chaotic, pressure, and then it would bring all my focus to bear and I would do well. And I realize this in retrospect that I would wait until the environment became chaotic. And then I actually feel better often when things are worse.

like oh I know exactly what has to be done now yeah yeah I like that too not a good long-term plan they're like chaotic things yeah it's not a great it's not a great way to bring stability to your life but I know this about myself now so I was like man what do I really like to do and I was brought up in a household where like fitness was paramount health was like normal you know we were eating like chicken breast and broccoli and like we ate really clean in our house it wasn't it's not like We didn't have cookies in the cookie jar, but like our household was clean. And were you lifting and stuff as a kid?

Oh, yeah. Probably, I mean, formal exercise of probably like calisthenics and stuff as soon as I was in martial arts. I mean, we were doing judo push-ups like until the cows came home. And that was an environment that was in your house as well. Your parents were lifting.

Oh, yeah. My mom earned her pro card and bodybuilding when I was 15. And then- Nothing but chicken. broccoli around these points. Oh yeah. She hated competing but love training. Now she's like my mom still lifts a ton and is like retrospect. She's like a crossfit and that kind of stuff was around when I was young. I would have done that. She's like a hated walking on a stage and she's like a love lifting. So I was around that all the time. So you start so you got a kid on the way. Yeah.

You realize you got to make a living. You got to pay for your girlfriend. You got to pay for a kid. what do you do? Go to massage therapy school. I was like, how can I get into the health field? Got it. In a trade school. Because I honestly hated academics. I don't much care for being told what to do still.

I love learning. I read a ton, but I like to do it on my own terms. Again, sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. So I went to massage therapy school, and I was like, I know this is an inroad to helping people with what I care about. So as long as I can remember, I had, I was like taking my buddies to the gym.

Hey, wow, man, I want to, you know, I want to get strong. I want to like look good in a T-shirt, whatever. I want to paddle better. I'm like, come to the gym with me. I was like, man, I want to get into something with physical fitness and health. Went to massage therapy school, learned a ton about anatomy and physiology. I love learning about anatomy and physiology. so I dove into that, got into pain relief work,

myofasher release. It took it really seriously. Was it like an athletic type school or a hippie type school? It was a hippie type school for sure. But the thing, the great thing about the school I went to is the Casey Riley School of Massage Therapy. So Casey is Edgar Casey, who is like the very famous psychic from the last century.

I can't remember what years he lived. but pre-World War II for sure. And that part of it's not my jam, but there was a ton of holistic thinkers and health people. And in the spa, the health unit that was there, because that was a big part of his thing, there were all these manual therapists of all kinds who were in that space.

And there were some people who had been putting their hands on human beings, athletes, people with chronic disease, people with chronic pain for 20 or 30 years, which is pretty hard to find at that time, early, early 2000s. And I got to be mentored by some really knowledgeable people on how to use your hands to relieve pain, increase range of motion, improve performance. And I chased that down as hard as I could. I read everything I get my hands on.

I'll take a mentorship from anybody who would let me talk to you. to them and ask them questions. You know, I hounded my peers and my mentors constantly. How long is that school? Nine months. Okay. Yeah, the,

the basic, like, put your hands on people. And then when you got done, what would you do? Like, what do you open a shop? Do you start going to people's houses to get work?

What do you do? Yeah, you can do that kind of stuff. One of the buy-ins at that time when manual therapy wasn't quite as accepted as it is now. Now it's like physical therapy, are putting their hands on people way more.

Then, you know, whatever that was, 25 years ago, it wasn't as common, especially for men. So you'd be like, well, I'm going to work in a spa environment, at least part-time, and do, like, people on vacations, massages, which I didn't, I don't want to say I hated it. I still learned a lot.

I tried to take advantage of every opportunity that I had to learn, even if I didn't totally like what I was doing, I still thought, I tried to think there's something to be learned here. Like if this is what I have to do right now to make money, what can I do to make this a learning opportunity? So that was kind of a mindset that my mom especially always was like passing. Like if I'd be like, I hate doing this.

You're like, well, but where's the opportunity? Sure. Where can you get from this? So I learned a lot about communicating with people, talking to people about health in ways that still serve me now because you're in a massage therapist in a spa for the most part

you're touching people who are naked and the trust in that situation has to be extremely high so okay how am I going to communicate with this person whose hand I just shook for the first time that they're going to go in a room with me and it's going to be safe

and so that started to help me understand okay how do I communicate with people not just with the words I'm saying but how do I carry myself how do I introduce myself to a stranger and then maybe have to talk to them about something that's personal and potentially even like intimate

like I'm going to see more of their body than anybody else other than maybe their spouse so if I find some health thing I have to bring it up I'm obligated to say something. So learning how to deal with those kind of situations and navigate discomfort and speak in those scenarios, looking back, that was a really formative time for that specifically.

Now, as far as the tactics of the job itself, there is nothing like putting your hands on another human being to learn how their body works. I mean, jujitsu, you find the same thing. Like, you really get a sense

of what the body can and cannot do because you're manipulating it. In manual therapy, the intention's just different. So I want to know, how can I get the system to change behavior

based on how I'm manipulating it? And manual medicine is really, really old. It's probably some of the oldest medicine on earth. So I dove into, like understanding things like guasha and bone setting and not that those things what's guasha i never even heard of that washah is a chinese um scraping technique so they would use like jade tools to scrape the skin what's the what's the what's the grenling grassden that's the modern so instrument assisted soft tissue manipulation my oldest daughter was a ballerina and like she would

I don't know if you've ever known anyone that was a ballerina, but that is a psycho endeavor. Like, it's crazy. And she had more injuries from ballet than my other daughter had from gymnastics and wrestling. So, like, yeah, but that's where I, we had to, these little, like, tools. She would have these tools,

and she would just be, like, freaking grinding out her shins and her feet and everything else. Yeah. So that, that grassed in stuff is like the modern incarnation. There's a little more science behind it now. and we can be a little bit more specific and like the beveling, the angle of the beveling on the tool is very precise

and the dosage. So the tactics of it, I became obsessed with relieving pain, understanding pain, how to restore movement, the psychology behind pain. And then I had the chance to work with everything from guys in the teams at the time,

all the way to, having clients who had like Parkinson's and were terminally ill and go into their home on a regular basis almost until they died. And then having that kind of breadth of interaction with human physiology, but direct interaction, not just a book, but to go touch somebody twice a week for three years who has progressive Parkinson's. It's like you really learn what the nervous system is about. So massage therapy is odd of an introductory. point as it was and as unexpected as it was gave me a lot of insight that is still really valuable like today so when you're heel-hooking somebody sorry I couldn't resist man I mean when I

started jujitsu other than having been exposed to martial arts before you know when people are new to jiu jitsu one of the first barriers is they're not used to touch oh yeah being touched for on. I was really accustomed to touching people, one from martial arts, but I was also doing manual therapy all the time. So, like, being really close to people, I was, I could move right through that and just kind of get to business. So how did your career progress? Did you eventually do your own thing? Or did you continue to work in like a spasner and then do stuff on the side? I continue to do some just because, you know, I did what I needed to do to make a living. but one early realization I had was that manual intervention is not enough.

You have to change movement behavior. So people have to have something that they can take away and change their behavior. Otherwise, you'd be the best therapist in the world. If you see a client one hour a week, basically they have 167 hours left in the week to screw it up. To screw up what you just did. So if there's no plan, they don't know how to move differently. They're just chasing your tail. So I started looking into movement therapeutics and coaching and more serious exercise training.

I got a personal training certificate so I could start teaching people. And then I got into the CrossFit world in about 06. And then in Virginia Beach, there wasn't even a CrossFit gym yet in 06. Then 07, my now wife, Tommy Gill. Tommy opened up CrossFit Virginia Beach. with Peshirwood, former SEAL. Okay. And I started coaching there.

One thing led to another. I started coaching full time at CrossFit, Virginia Beach. I moved my therapy practice full time into an office in the gym. Oh, that's squared away. Yeah. So then I was really early in the therapeutics side of CrossFit. And along with that, you know, if you're in a CrossFit gym, coaching, and doing manual therapy in Virginia Beach in 2007, 8, a lot of your clientele are military. And of that military, lots are seals, right?

Lots of guys were picking up CrossFit at that time. And when it ended up happening was you'd have conversations, guys would have a little scratch, little, little Nick, a little something bothering them. Like, well, why don't you come in and I'm outside the wire so we can have fully open conversations about what's actually happening. And there's no one. I'm fine. Yeah, exactly. Right? That's the mantra.

Yeah. Right. But there's no one for me to report to. Yeah. And if somebody does want to know, well, I'm, I'm under a medical board. So I have to be brought in by a federal judge. Right. They have to petition me.

so everything's completely closed and protected so guys could be like actually dude i think my labrum and my hip is torn but i'm gonna go i have a deployment but i am going on yeah and you know what man other than all of the sort of obvious sides of it like warrior culture wanting to be with the team i don't want to be the guy who doesn't do his job there's also if i don't go my next promotion gets delayed and that's going to affect the financial health of my family. If it was me, I'd do the same. I have to be honest. So I get it. If I knew it was like, okay, I'm going to go. I know I can grind through this. And on the other side is a pay raise that changes my family's life for the next five years. I'd go. So instead of going in, reporting and having that delay, guys could come to me,

find solutions. Now, during all that time, coaching CrossFit started coaching other athletes who were using CrossFit often improperly to train for their sport. And so I started deep diving into strength and conditioning more seriously outside of the realm of CrossFit. But having a CrossFit gym gave me a constant living lab where I could see what work, try things on lots of different types of athletes. And then probably 08, I wrote a cold email to Kelly Starratt before he was, you know, New York Times bestseller, most famous physical therapists in the world. I read an article he wrote in the CrossFit Journal about tight hamstrings called Hamstrung. I think I read that article too. Yeah. And he put his email and I was like,

huh, man, this guy knows a lot about moving around and crossfit in sports and putting his on people well that's what I'm doing maybe I should connect with this dude so I sent him an email like hey man I have this client that I'm bumping into a little problem with what do you think he just sent me back his phone number and was like call me and that was whatever that was you know freaking awesome 17 16 years you got something like that so ever since and so then where did it progress from there just to get us up to like where you are now yeah so came next Um, traveled around teaching breath control for quite a long time. So I got into the breathing side of things.

Again, because Pika GWa, I was working with a lot of guys in very rapid training and deployment cycles. Guys would come home, have a lot of trouble downregulating. Honestly, transitioning in time zones was a major challenge on during training cycles. So I started to look into breath work because I'd studied yoga. in college and was like, oh man, this stuff calms you down. I know about some of the physiology. So I started using that to help guys basically chill out, get to bed more easily, regulate the nervous system, saw some gaps in how it was being taught in the performance environment, built a curriculum with Brian McKenzie at that time.

So I partnered with Brian McKenzie. I traveled around the world a couple times, Australia, New Zealand, all over Europe, all over the states, presented at the UFC Performance Institute, a couple times, worked with some pro fighters, lots of people in different sports, kind of bringing breath control, science, and application into modern terminology. and then parted ways with, you know, those guys that I was working with doing that, that breath control work, you know, it was just time for me to move to something different. And I wanted to zoom out a little bit. That brings me to my current post, basically, where I'm probably the last three years, who I've worked with most is naval special warfare, active duty operators and veterans. And that's through Virginia High Performance, which was founded by Alex Oliver, former SEAL, and then the Navy SEAL Foundation.

So those have been my primary clients for the last three years teaching this check engine light. How did Alex Oli get started in it? Like what was, how did he end up like a look, I opened a gym too. I actually opened a CrossFit gym in 2007, you know. But what was his, you know, and mine was more because we had an MMA gym and I was a jihad. too junkie. I kind of still am. But, you know, that was kind of my, how I ended up with a gym.

How did he get, how did he end up with a gym? My understanding, and I'm going to get this, hopefully get this really right, is that when he was in the teams, he noticed that like he was beat up, getting broken. His teammates were getting beat up, getting broken. Like, we hadn't done 20 years of this intense of conflict. So nobody really knew how much it was going to cost. And he saw, you know, basically in his words, saw his brothers getting smoked, just getting crushed by the demands of the job and help stand up most of the modern practices

in Naval Special Warfare, human performance. So those changes of bringing people in, a lot of that, if you pull on the thread long enough, you get back to him. So that's while he was active duty, was starting to work with organizations both within the Department of Defense and professional human performance organizations privately to figure out best practices for guys who are still going down range. And then notice like, man, nobody gets a hard reset. There's never a time when guys can step away, but still be among peers and just have a real

hard reset of the system. And so he created the Continuumission program, right, which is. And this is while he was. still in? Continue missions after. So we got out, I want to say 15 or 16. I couldn't be sure. But got out 15, 16, and then opened Virginia high performance.

Soon thereafter, founded continue mission with the sole purpose of providing a holistic hard reset to operators. And that facility is about 150 meters from the front door of my house. and they opened in a parking lot where I walk my dogs every day and I was literally walking my dog and saw the gym door open and was like, huh, what's this place?

And walked in and shook hands and was like, oh, hey, cool, I'm a coach. What do you guys do here? Oh, you're coaching? Sweet. And then at the time I was still working. So that was just random? That was just random. Damn, dude.

Serendipity. Very nice. Yeah, some would call it fate. Yeah. Jack. And yeah, that was probably seven, eight years ago. And then he and I just developed a friendship. I mentored the strength and conditioning staff there for some time.

That was a pretty young, the first team there was pretty young strength coaches. Not a ton of experience working with guys in the community. Didn't really know how to bridge culture gaps from sport to dealing with guys. guys in the in the teams and I kind of helped I mean we had like a monthly whiteboard probably what's the big difference there like if I like when if I trained some college football team strength and conditioning and I roll in and I'm going to start working with seals what's what are you telling them to help calibrate them properly well first of all you're always out you're always on the other side of the fence so it doesn't matter how many high

five's you get, how many good works you get and how many hugs when they see you, guys that have gone through selection together, and especially if they've warded together, love each other in a way that you can't possibly know other than your family. Simple as that. You're not in the club. It's okay that you're not in the club. You don't have to be in the club. Don't act like you're in the club. Don't dress like you're in the club. Just be you. Offer what knowledge you have that can help them get better at what they care about. And otherwise, shut up. And that seems to work out pretty, pretty well. And in addition to that, you'd better look like, at least look like you challenge yourself on a regular basis. And even better.

Actually challenge yourself on a regular basis. Otherwise, nobody will be outwardly rude to you, but probably the buy-in and the respect you get will be lower. And that stuff matters. Is there anything specific from like the, and I guess it would depend what type of sport athlete you were dealing with. But is there anything specific when you, would you start talking somebody that coach strength and conditioning in football or strength

and conditioning wrestling or strength and conditioning in what basketball and now we're doing strength and conditioning for the teams what is there any major like glaring hey listen you treat you you you you you aim for this in the athletic world but you aim for this it's a little bit different is there anything specific like that from like the actual exercise that you're going to do well the first thing is that most of the guys if we're talking active duty especially most of the guys are injured may not even consider their injury and injury and you might not know about it until it presents itself so it's not like um going to the premier league where or the NFL where there's a lot have known, oh, that's so-and-so. He's, you know, he's sprained his left ankle four times,

and we have all the history of it. It'll be like the fourth session with a guy who's been in the teams for 12 years. And then you have him doing exercise. He's like, oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you, I had a really bad PLF, and there was a compound fracture of my fibula on that side. And I can't flex my last three toes anymore. And you're like, okay, well, that probably would have been good to know before I wrote plyometrics in your workout. Yeah. So the way that you, the philosophy or the general framework is like, you can't just throw, throw guys in, oh, we're going to, I'm going to write this eight-week program that

looks perfect on paper and we're just going to, I'm going to brush my hands and go, da-da, at the end of it. You have to know that there's lots of unknowns under the surface and be really adaptable day-to-day, a lot of times. And that the, again, we're talking about active duty, the demands. of the job are so high, not as reported by the operator, but on paper, the demands of the job are so high that guys don't need you to kick the shit out of them in the gym. It's like, I was talking to a coach yesterday and I was like, he's pretty new. He's a couple years into working with guys. And I'm like,

do you know the force profile of like a hard opening on the spine? And he was like, no. And I'm like, four to 11 Gs. That's like no bundle. That's just standard. Just standard. That's four to 11 Gs. I'm like, do you think this guy needs to back squat? Probably, probably doesn't.

Like, it probably doesn't need more stress on a spine. So it's like, okay, you get somebody who does a tandem bundles course for eight days. If you don't understand the force profile and the amount of fatigue and the amount of alertness and vigilance that stacks up, And then you're like, oh man, you've been gone 10 days. Let's kick it into gear. You need to pay the man. Yeah. And then what's a what's an operator going to say?

Okay. Let's go. Let's go. Like not going to back down. All right, fine. Because nobody's going to quit or say they can't do it. So you have to be an advocate when you're a strength coach and a special operations environment. You have to be an advocate for them.

Go, okay, man. So just so you know, you started that training cycle with, we'll call it 5,000, You've spent $4,600. This workout that you want to do cost $1,000. You don't have $1,000. We need to save money until your bank account is a little more flush, and then you get to spend again. Yeah, that's good.

Those are the kinds of things I was wondering, and that one actually makes sense because no one, it's almost like being a, you know, fighters before a fight, you won't hear them say like oh i got a bad left knee right now like they're not going to say that well as a team guy you're just not going to say that ever ever you know like i'm not going to advertise this weakness to everyone it's not happening so we're just going to gut through it like you said and yeah if you if you if you have so many programming some psycho stuff that's you'll just gut through it and get you know a worse injury from the whole thing um so at some point you decided

how long ago did you decide you were going to write this book um um um you know, it's kind of funny. The book told me that's how I feel. Like I didn't wake up one day and be like, ah, I mean, I've wanted to write a book. I like writing. I really enjoy writing and I've written for some periodicals, but I was teaching this curriculum.

And then it started to occur to me. I started to have this like little nagging feeling. Like there's a little voice like, this is a book. And I was like, nah, no, like the resistance like that, that Stephen Pressfield talks about. I was like, nah, this isn't good enough to be a book. You know, and then it was like, this is a book.

And it just kind of kept nagging at me. And I was like, all right. So I sat down one day and wrote the first chapter almost in its entirety in one broad brush. Just like, it came out, like vomited out. And I was like, oh, maybe this is a book. So I wrote the first chunk, like the first section of the book. in less than a week for sure. Oh, yeah.

Almost as it stands now. And then my daughter actually went to college for proof, not proofreading. She's an English major with a technical writing major. Oh, yeah. So I asked her to proofread. I was like, hey, can you proofread this? I think I'm going to send it out. And she was like, first of all, she called me and she was like, dad, I'm so glad this doesn't

suck because I was really scared because I haven't. really written anything that you've read anything you've written before i was like please don't suck you know because my daughter's really honest and she would tell me like this is bad go put this away somewhere you know um but yeah i was like maybe this is a book so i i shopped it around and you know that's a whole a whole thing under itself um but uh took two and a half years for it to be from the time I sat down and wrote the first words to this moment, which the book comes out today. Today. Two and a half years.

Jack. Well, let's get into the book a little bit. I'm going to start off with this. I'm going to start reading a little bit of it. And I'm going to read a section from the Ford, which was written by Kelly Star, who already mentioned, who's a great dude. And that's such a cool story that you were just like a random dude that emailed him. And he like, yeah, here's my phone number.

Give me a call. We'll talk to this issue. So that's the kind of dude he is of I've Bumped into him and and shared stuff with him over the past and he's always been just a super cool guy and here's what he writes Part of the forward here he says we're now in the third wave of human performance if you're gen if you're a Gen X kid like me You remember the first wave defined by malt nut power bars and first gen heart rate monitors back when we still believed you could outwork the competition spoiler you can't The second wave came crashing in with the rise of YouTube fitness. Suddenly, you didn't need to buy Olympic lifting shoes out of someone's car

like it was a drug deal. Training sophistication exploded, so did fitness tribalism, tech fetishism, and unfortunately, diminishing returns. We leveled up, but got lost in the weeds. The question became, how the hell are we supposed to do all of this? The third wave is about integration, simplification, recalibration. It's the return to context, nuance, and and sustainability. It's the long game. And Rob Wilson is its poster child. It's a freaking pretty epic intro.

I would like to, we could probably spend a whole show talking about before the first wave. Just go back to Joe Wheater's super weight gain formula. Go back to Peck deck. Metarex. Metrics. Yep.

Was it metrics or Metorex? I think it was metrics. I think it was metric. It was the most disgusting. Dude, I had metrics when it came in two bottles. Like one was called base and one was called something else. And you mixed them together, one scoop of each. It was base and I forget what it was.

But you had to combine them. Like to activate it. Yeah, it was like originally designed for cancer patients. And it tasted like it. Oh, metrics was? Yeah. I used to put mint oil. Like what?

What mint extract no yeah drip mint extract and straight sugar into it yeah straight just straight sugar I mean I was like 20 years old what

yeah sugar gonna you're gonna kill me dude taste good gotta solve that problem yeah problem solved mint mint freaking metrics back in the day yeah you could go through all those things

and the other thing cool thing is if you go back far enough you go right back to where we are you know you still see guys lifting heavy swinging kettlebells back in the day like the whole thing like you could go back far enough where you get back to current time oh yeah yeah um all right so getting into this a little bit prolog lessons from high performance in a fascinating study research and i'm only reading

like little sections of the book in a fascinating study researchers compared personality differences among non-athletes professional athletes and champions using the big five personality inventory the big five is reliable cross-cultural statistical analysis that includes five personality domains, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. An easy way to remember them is the acronym Ocean. The highest predictor of championship performance, according to this analysis, low neuroticism. This trait refers to an individual's tendency to have negative emotions.

People who score high in trait neuroticism tend to be more emotionally volatile, are more likely to experience anxiety and depression and have trouble dealing with stress, especially if it's unexpected. The highest performers showed low neuroticism, even when compared to other professionals in the same sport, who already have lower averages, average levels of this trait than the general public. This means the highest performers were the least affected psychologically by negative information from their environment, or if they were affected, they bounced back rapidly.

being extraordinarily low in trait neuroticism is what allows the best of the best to hit the mark in stressful high-stakes situations instead of being ruled by panic and doubt if it is a super it is a superpower for sure but not without its downfalls so I read all that I was kind of like oh yeah and then I got to this line it is a super power for sure but it's not without its downfalls often lower threshold issues slip on of the radar and don't set off any alarm at all. This is great when it comes to saving lives and winning gold medals, but does not alert these individuals to cumulative threats to health and performance longevity.

In other words, it's not a single decapitating swipe of the blade that shuts things down. Down, it's death by a thousand cuts. No community better displays the incredible upsides and downsides of being forward-focused than the special warfare group I've had the opportunity to work with over the last few years. no group of people on the planet are tougher and more tenacious. However, there's often a steep price to pay for them on the other side. Many of these men and women have medical rap sheets a mile long, career-long habits of going till it's broken and then going some more, take an indelible toll on the body and mind.

And that's exactly what I opened up with, like that idea of, hey, we're just going to keep going. And actually, the really funny thing is medical rap sheets a mile long is a good thing. the bad thing is when I was in and you'd look at someone's medical record after 20 years and it'd be like four pages and like just standard medical stuff because they didn't tell anybody about anything so I think we're getting better about that there but then but then um this idea of the check engine light how'd that come to your brain yeah so um actually so that's the name of the book that's the name of the book yeah so check engine light is this.

It's a simple analogy that describes in one fell swoop that there's indicators that let you know something requires further investigation. That's it. And I think

when I work with guys who are in the special operations community, one of the shortcomings of communicating the idea of self- care is that culturally it's completely oppositional to the idea of mission service team. Mission service team. Where's me in there?

Me taking care of me first is the opposite of those things. So how do you reconcile the need for self-care with those core principles? and that is there are appropriate situations to ignore the check engine light and keep driving. No question about it.

But it's not free. And if you don't tend to the things that require maintenance, eventually performance will decline or you'll experience catastrophic systems failure. Yeah, just to give

you a like quantifiable fact about what you're saying in the teams when you get done with like a training mission or a mission you take care of team gear first then platoon gear then your personal gear and then you and if you get caught like we're over here cleaning boats and getting them maintained and echoes like over there taking a shower like we will beat the shit out of him. That is a mortal sin to put yourself and your, your person above the team and the platoon and the mission. That's just the way it is. So you are taught that and it is beaten, beaten into your head. So you're even more right than you know on that one. And then the other,

the interesting thing, so I've been, I've been using this analogy of a, of a check engine light for years. And where I, I've only used it on the, on the, um, mental health side. And, and, and I've been using this analogy. And basically what I would say is, listen, when a guy needs a break, it's just like a check engine light. If you're driving down the road and the check engine light comes on and you keep driving, what happens? You destroy the engine. You can't drive that car anymore. If you're driving down the road and the check engine light comes on and you pull over to the side and you get maintenance and you fix the problem, you can get right back out on the road and you're going to have a long-term use vehicle. But if you ignore the problem, it's going to be devastating.

And this comes from like actual combat trauma of guys that are breaking in the field. And, you know, I learned this from, well, I learned it from from David Hackworth and Dick Winters, who was, you know, Dick Winters, World War II Band of Brothers. And David Hackworth is Korean, Vietnam. And I read their books. And they both in different ways explain that if you had a guy that was like going to break, And one of the things is so classic, because people say, how do you tell when a guy's going to break? And Dick Winner's in one of his books.

He says, if I saw a guy with his head and his hands, I knew I needed to get him off the front lines. You know, you see a guy doing this. Like, get him off the front lines quickly and you get him a couple days back in the rear. You know, hey, we need you do the logistics run. Go back to the rear and pick up our food and spend the night back there and make sure we have everything and then come back out. They'll be good to go. But if you keep them out there, you're going to break them. And then the analogy that David Hackworth used was he said everyone's got a cup that they're filling up with stress and different size cups.

And some people have bigger cups. But when their cup overfills, if you let it get overfilled, they're done. And so you have to get them in a situation where they can empty that cup. So I really like the idea of this check engine light that you put into this book. And I think it's something that will awaken people on what they need to pay attention. to. You say this in the book. Fast forward a little bit. In my two plus decades of as a health and performance professional, one thing is become exceedingly clear. We are often disconnected from the things that drive our health and performance until they reach critical mass of dysfunction.

Just like ignoring the check engine lights, exactly what I just said. We beat up our bodies, neglect to give them proper attention and maintenance. And then when the system's malfunctioned, we blame our bad joints, our weak hearts and our unlucky genetics or whatever else comes to mind rather than our own failure to care for ourselves. Boy, I had to put a star by that one because this is, you know, I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership, which is like, it's my fault. And this is such a perfect example of an echo and I were talking about this earlier today of like, oh, well, I, you know, I can't do this move anymore in Jiu-Jitsu because my knee hurts.

Well, is that really your knee? Or is it just that you haven't, you know, strength in the knee, you haven't become more flexible, you haven't drilled that move so you can you can get the repetitions in to get the body used to that or is it just your knees fault it's like all day long man we blame it and and you know the classic thing is we're getting old like people people use that and this is something I've talked about is I've been in situations where I felt I felt like I might lose a movement one of them was muscle ups, I moved to a house where I didn't have a big garage and I just couldn't do muscle ups. I didn't have the headroom to do muscle ups.

And I was living there for about 18 months. And, you know, I'd still did a bunch of pull ups, did still do dips, did ring pull ups, but I couldn't do muscle ups. And then I finally got back to my real house with a big garage and I had my rings up and it was time to do muscle ups. And I was like, oh, I could do like one. And part of my mind was like, well, you know, do, well, A, well, you know, you're getting a little older now. No, don't accept that.

Or, hey, you know, maybe you're just not strong enough. No, it's just like, you need to do them. And so you just go and start, you got to be humble enough to go, oh, can't do muscle ups right now. Cool. Need to bring them back. I had the same thing happen. I had an arm injury. Couldn't straighten my arm out.

And I couldn't do overhead squats for like a year. And when I went, when I finally my arm got healed. up enough, it's time to start doing overhead squats again, PVC pipe was hard. And it's like a part of your brain goes, well, you know, how important is it really to do overhead squats anyways? I mean, do I really need to have, I've never done one in the field before. I've never done one on the judicious mats before, never done an overhead squat. Have you ever done an overhead squat before? Like when you weren't in the gym doing overhead squats? Well, probably not. Well, so it's really easy to surrender that position.

especially when your ego is saying, well, you know, overhead squad is stupid. You know what I mean? Your ego will tell you that. Instead of being like, no, you're actually just weak at it and you need to rebuild because you haven't been able to do them for a long time.

And so that the idea that you hit on here, which is we will just make excuses to stop doing what we're supposed to be doing is ridiculous. Yeah, and I mean, I have really, there are some things that are not within our control, genetics. We're genetically who we are. If you got long arms, they're probably going to be long. If you got short arms, they're going to be short, right? And that bench is going to be fire.

Yeah, you're going to have pecks for days. It's amazing, right? Burpees, got them. Right? But focusing on the uncontrollables does nothing to help you in any domain and health is not an exception. So let's say you do have whatever genetic marker, da da da da da, da, da, da, it's like, okay, well, what lever do you have to pull on that will change that? Oh, none, but you can eat vegetables. Can you not? Why don't you do that? And what's interesting is, even if that's not the answer, starting on that path helps you gain experience that will minimally let you know what doesn't work. you'll start to learn, you will develop the skill.

The skill domain or developing skill in any domain is actually the doing of the thing. It's not any different in practices that we need for health. You have to do them. All the stuff that works must be done. Got to do the thing. Here's another, again, this is just such an important thing for people to understand.

Small problems left unattended to beget larger problems. If you don't rotate your tires, your tires will wear uneasily. Unevenly, when your tires wear unevenly, your steering starts to pull. As your steering pulls more, your struts, shocks, and brakes wear out faster. Compensation moves its way through the whole system. Before you know it, more things seem to be going wrong than right. Now, it's an additional burden to get to work and pick up the kids from school. What was once a small crack in the ice spreads throughout the whole pond.

Of course, not every small problem becomes catastrophic, but the purpose of of maintaining your vehicle isn't just to prevent it from breaking down. Staying tuned in to how your vehicle is running also means it'll work if and when you need it to perform. And this is something we've probably all heard a thousand times. Oh, you know, I had a, I sprained my ankle and I didn't get it fixed, but now I was like walking funny and then it spread to my knee and now my left hip is all jacked up. And that stuff happens on the regular if you don't pay attention to it.

Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things I realized probably mostly in the last five or six years is when it comes to health related or performance related things, that there was some tacit understanding that I had from the environment that I grew up in or the environments I was exposed to. What are the things that you should pay attention to? And often many of the shortcomings around recognizing the indicators wasn't because necessarily people were lazy. Some are. Or it wasn't because they were dumb, although some are. Right. But it was mostly because people never had the opportunity to systematically develop the skill set that helps them look.

They just don't even know how to begin looking. And so we're fed lots of data, but do you even know how to look? Yeah, and that's another good point is another reason why people miss it. And you pointed out in the book, I'm not sure what I'm going to say it now, but you also have a little bit of a boiling frog scenario where, you know, you got some little nagging thing that you don't really pay attention to it, and you just grow accustomed to it instead of going, oh, wait, my shoulder shouldn't feel like this, echo Charles.

You get your wings a little bit, you know, jammed up a little jammed up right now. We're working through it, though. We're working through it. But there's sometimes people go, oh, well, you know, it's really minor, and so they don't pay attention to it. And then it gets worse. And now when they go to repair it and put in the effort, it might be too late. Or at least it's going to take a lot more work. So you've got to pay attention to these little things.

And if you're not aware of what your body's doing, next thing you know, you look up and you're like, wait a second, I can't, you know, lift this over my head anymore. Yeah. Well, you know, one person whose philosophy has had some serious influence on me for sure the last 10 years is Jordan Peterson, right? One thing he says is conflict delayed is conflict multiplied. That's a truism across all domains. So it's the same with your body. If we just try to put it in a shelf somewhere, it doesn't mean it goes away. It just means we're not dealing with it right now.

and that thing will fester and probably become worse. Yeah, yeah. Fast forward a little bit as we walk down the road toward disease dysfunction and reduced well-being. I'm not sure I love that statement. It's kind of factual, though.

As we walk down the road toward disease dysfunction and reduced well-being, they're often signs posted all over the place, but we just don't realize it. A tiny loss of movement capacity here and a little more breathlessness there doesn't seem like a big deal and probably won't capture our attention.

We just get used to it. just as we can expand our tolerance of stress and discomfort such as through exercise we can reduce it through a lack of awareness and exposure what becomes comfortable and typical for us from day to day may not be what's best for us over the long haul and very often it isn't yeah you're and I think echo you were talking about this and you address this in the book as well that you have a great line I forget what the line is but I have it marked out we'll get to it but whatever you're doing becomes what you're doing and if you keep doing dumb or not just dumb things but if you if you have this habit almost sit there and slouch and

look at my screen all day and your head is forward like that is what your body will become yeah that thing that's what it's designed to do become what you choose yeah and if you choose to stand up straight with your shoulders back and be strong your body will be strong yeah but you have to you have to give it the freaking guidance. Yes. It will follow your guidance. It will. To bring up Kelly again, he says, your body is like an obedient dog.

Just go where you tell it. Be careful what you're telling it. While the automotive analogy is one that helps you more clearly understand what happens if you fail to address issues, there is a key difference. If you don't take care of your car, you can get a new one. You have but one body. You're stuck with the consequences. as if you're driving for life.

It behooves you then to become a better driver of body and mind. You are obligated to know the basics of your own maintenance. Learning to properly tune yourself so that you can fire on all cylinders for as long as possible is potentially the most important skill set that a person can develop. Although health and biology are far more complex than any automobile, caring for them doesn't have to be complicated. In the coming pages, I am going to outline a concise framework that will help you learn to pay attention to your body by showing you how to build a performance, longevity, dashboard,

made of key performance indicators. This will help you continually collaborate or calibrate your perception of your internal stare over time so that you can use your indicators to become a better driver. Sorry, your internal state over time. You'll learn to build a toolkit as well

so you can address issues when gauges on the dashboard, get your attention. Ultimately, you'll gain skills that help you tune your body and mind so that all of the component parts that influence performance longevity can work in harmony to help you feel and perform your best for as long as possible.

We had a harmony hippie sneaking out. He's still there sometimes. He comes out. He still is one with the universe. And again, I'm not going to read the whole book, but you have this, the way the book is laid out, it's a resource. And you actually explain in the book how you could use the resource, but you have questions that you ask at the end of each chapter. self-reflection questions.

For instance, here it says, can you think of a time when you were forced to ignore a warning light from your body? What was it? Why did you ignore it? Did you get back to it later? If so, what did you do?

So there's a lot of very introspective parts of this book that is asking someone to like, hey, take a look at yourself and ask these questions. And those things are really important. One thing that I do is, you know, I log down what I do for a workout every day.

But when something's wrong, I just write it down. Like it'll say back tweaked, you know. And that way I can go or shoulder tweaked or right arm tweaked or whatever. Or like, hey, hurt really bad right arm. You know, so I have those things. Because otherwise, you don't know how long you've been injured for. At least I don't. I'm like, when did that happen?

And also I can look at my numbers and be like, dude, what is wrong with me? Like, for instance, I have a little bit of a tweak back for a little bit. And, you know, I can't like all of a sudden, like, Wait, wait, your squat just dropped off. Like, no, you were into, oh, okay, back tweaked. I should take more detailed notes, but forcing yourself to write down what's going on, it allows you to understand better what's happening. It helps.

For sure. For sure. One of the things, one of the words you use is key performance indicators and you've got these two different, so, you know, tracking. This is the, I work with a lot of companies. I have a consulting company and, you know, KPI is a huge part of it, key performance indicators. two types of KPIs, lagging indicators and leading indicators. What are those to you? Well, lagging indicators come after the fact.

Leading indicators come before the fact. And so, you know, that's kind of like, you know, in military terminology, right, left of blast, right of blast. So do we, what are the things that happen before a given event where we can create relationships with the likelihood that this thing will or will not happen? So that's leading indicators. What are the things that often come before this? So like for you, if you tweak your back and you have a history of that, then you go, oh, man, when we play a lot of closed guard before for two weeks, that's when my back starts to get tight. Then if I couple that with a lot of back squatting, man, that's when my back tends to fry out. Oh, now I have a relationship.

So now I know that close guard, heavy close guard volume, it could be a leading indicator for my back hurting. It doesn't mean don't do either one of those. It could mean now that I know that they're potentially connected, maybe there are some stretches that I do after that training. Maybe there's some additional warm up I do before I back squat. Maybe I change how heavy I go when I do this. It just changes the approach. It doesn't mean do, don't do. not zeros and ones.

And then lagging indicators after the fact, right of blast, you can use that. Sometimes they're negative like, oh man, I didn't know these were connected. My back just hurts now. That's a lagging indicator. That's a negative example. It can also be, I change something. And now was there an impact on the thing I tried to change? That's also a lagging indicator.

Right? In the company, it could be bottom line. It could be keeping personnel. right there's lots of different ways lagging indicators can be used when they become negative is when it's the only relationship we have with the event it already happened and now i'm in the moment of oh shit something i didn't want happened and i don't even know why is it lagging indicator if i am weaker is that considered a lagging indicator it could be it could be so if you're weaker talking about the specific example yeah like or or i'm you know i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm

can normally do this many pull-ups and I went and worked out and I didn't do as many as I normally do and I'm like oh because to me I'm like oh you know what you need some rest bro like do you need to take tomorrow and eat some steak and then you know like do some mobility work or something for sure it could be um sometimes the the type of indicator it is is just where it is in time and what you may or may not want right so lagging indicators aren't necessarily negative by nature. So let's say you made a conscious decision for to use less energy

for pull-up strength. You're like, I'm going to just, I'm going to use this cash for something else. I only have so much time in the gym. I'm going to let my pull-up numbers slide a little bit because I'm focused on something else. And you get, you get weaker, quote unquote, right?

This doesn't mean it's bad. It just means the expected outcome occurred. That's it. You know, you got a bunch of stuff in here about the ability for us now to collect data on ourselves, whether it's wearable, what, wearable, wearable, heart rate monitors, whether it's apps about what, you know, you can take a picture of your food and it'll give you all the macros that you have and all this stuff.

And there's a lot of data that you can get, which is obviously, you know, part of our KPIs, This is part of our measuring of what's happening in our world. You do say this, though, and again, I'm fast forward and through that section, but beware the data trap. More reliable and valid indicators are important for describing the mechanisms underlying aspects of health. Health, the tracking of sleep and heart rate variability are two common examples. On the other hand, too much focus on data can not only cause you to mistake the forest for the trees, but can lead to a kind of performance neurosis, broadly speaking, especially in those who may be more vulnerable. So I had friends that were wearing a whoop strap and that thing would tell them that they

were tired in the morning and then they would be tired. Interesting. Yeah. I was going to make a whoop strap that just said you're ready to destroy the world. Sounds right. The jaco strap. Always ready. There's no digital readout, right?

It's just like embroidered letters in red. It's just a red, a black bracelet with red letters. Yeah. It is crazy how like, you know, that will happen to people. They'll think, they'll be told that they're tired. They'll be told that this, whatever, and they will take that on board and it will impact their performance for sure. Yeah. Those like whoop and aura, those things can be helpful, but they're some of the most misused tools and all of fitness.

And it's kind of a bugaboo with me, the way that they get used. And sometimes the way that they advertise what it is that they actually do. Like no whoop or any of that stuff can tell you if you should exercise today or not. There's way too much context. I can tell you if you should exercise today or not. Yes. You should. But the question is in what way, at what intensity, with what tools for how long?

So there's a lot of room for play in the way you exercise where you still don't get a zero for the day. For sure. And so that concept, which is later in. the book which is this idea of tuning is about what are the nuances that are in between zeros and ones but and this happens a lot with special operations that I work with guys will look at their HRV they'll start looking at their HRV and they'll be like my HRV's low well I feel awesome that happens two days in a row I feel awesome this says I'm not ready fuck this thing it doesn't work and they toss it which is a shame because that data could potentially

help them if used correctly. But if you use it to tell you how you feel, that is not the right way to use it at all. I determine how I'm going to feel. How you like that? Yeah. Yeah. Fast for a little bit.

And this is kind of the key idea of the book, the performance longevity dashboard organizing indicators. And this is where you get into the M3 model. The purpose of the M3 model is to help you organize the innumerable signals from your body that you have to contend with at any given time into digestible categories. The M3 model has three categories, mind, movement, and matter. Let's talk mind movement and matter. Yeah, so mind movement and matter are simply buckets from which you can draw indicators

to put on the dashboard, right? So I have this primary way of organizing information, which is the performance longevity, dashboard, right? So performance longevity is being awesome for as long as possible at whatever it is that you care about. That's performance longevity. That sounds way better to me, by the way, than just being around on earth existing. I want to do awesome shit and enjoy life. I want to be able to participate. That's performance longevity. Then a dashboard is, you know, it's an instrument panel, right? It's an instrument cluster. It's an array of gauges and indicators that give you both right now information and what might need attention in the future in order to keep the vessel

running. So is there one indicator on a dashboard? Negative. There's a bunch and you play all of that information against each other in order to get a broad picture of what's happening. Same thing for your mind-body system. You don't want to have one like HRV tells me or my heart rate tells me. But what is the big picture that's being painted by all of these? Those valid, reliable, accessible indicators that make up that dashboard are innumerable. There's so many, especially now with all the wearables and all the data we can get, it's a constant state of overwhelm for people. High performers, especially especially when overwhelmed with information will by default disregard and focus on task because

that's what creates performance. Not because they're dumb or their meatheads, but because focusing on task outcomes is what wins. So in order to make this palatable and actually relevant, usable, meaningful, I categorize these into mind, movement, and matter, which are just buckets from which you could draw indicators and or tools that would go on your dashboard or your toolkit. I give some examples, but the specifics of those depend on the person. And that's kind of how the, well, that is how the book is broken down. And the quick definitions you give mind is the collection of our internal thoughts, feelings,

and perceptions. Movement is the navigation of your body space and time. Matter refers to your biochemistry, your molecular health as measured through biomarkers found in blood work. So those are the three big buckets. And, yeah, again, not to go too, that's crazy with the metaphor of dashboard. But it's like you had, you know, three different screens you could choose from what you were going to look at. And these are the subject headings that you have.

And then, of course, once you've got your dashboard and you're getting readings out from your dashboard, you've got to have tools to work on wherever there might be issues. and that's the next section. And a couple examples here, whether it is prayer and meditation for the mind stretches to keep pain and stiffness at bay or a reliable way to improve your nutrition, upkeep, and repair of your body, and mind is your responsibility just like it is with your car. Then you talk about tools and what is important about tools. One of the things that you lay out, they have to be robust, reliable, and repeatable.

Those are the three R's for your tools. explained on those a little bit yeah so that concept the that R3 robust reliable repeatable that's originally from my good friend Mickey shook so Mickey runs Kerry trainer which is a personal defense course right he teaches pistol rifle to civilians right so the right way to use those items in defense of your your life and Mickey uses this to talk about how should how you should select the tools you carry on your person or the systems that you build around those.

And I train and work with Mick a lot. And the more I was around him and I heard this, I was like, man, this is applicable to health. This is just how you select stuff you work with, right? This is a great way to break this down. And so robustness means things that are hard to break. right? That's what robust means like a hoolly for example right like impossible so robustness can refer to the material and when we think about picking a tool that you're going to use to upkeep your health often we might go oh this scientist really likes this and recommends it um this one is

affordable at Walmart but we don't think about like will this stand up to my household right I heard that there was a double randomized placebo backflip trial from Harvard about this leg massager 9,000. But we don't ask like, will it work in a household with like three dogs and four kids or will it get destroyed on the third day? So that's part of robustness. But robustness also means the system that you use to deploy it. Are the systems that you have in place easy to break down? Like if you have a sleep routine, is it 14 steps long? And then if you travel anywhere, it completely breaks down and you can't sleep for shit. Are you precious and fragile? Or do you have a four-step sleep routine that you can do at your house, but also

anywhere and will produce reliable outcomes, right? So that's robustness. Reliable means consistency over time. So if I can identify the outcomes that I'm trying to achieve, do I have KPIs in place that let me know, am I actually getting what I want out of this tool? Is it producing for me? Or am I just doing stuff? Now, when I had a gym and still now, when I see people like rolling out on foam rollers and stuff, and I got nothing against foam rollers, but I can tell most people have no idea what it is they're trying to achieve with the time that they're using for that item, in which case

they will think foam rollers don't work, which they don't if you don't know what you're trying to achieve and how to measure it. Or it's doing this thing and then suddenly be surprised by sort of not getting the result they want. Right.

So reliability, consistency over time, and outcomes, right? So robust, reliable. And then repeatability has to do with the user? So do I know how to reproduce? Do I have the skill to use this tool that I've selected, right? If we have tool first and skill second, that's a real problem, right?

So I have to know how to use this thing. So again, the leg massager 9,000 sounds awesome. It's got a one inch thick user manual. What's the likelihood that I'm going to be able to repeat that? You know, I've done some consulting with like tech companies, like health tech companies, and they would want to know things like, okay, if we take our, this sort of relaxation meditation device into the collegiate setting. Is it viable?

And one of the things we figured out with a particular device is a seven minute meditation actually takes about 13 minutes because you have to make sure it's plugged in. You have to get to the app. You have to decide which meditation you're going to do. It explains to you what the meditation will do. You have to make sure your Bluetooth is on. If your Bluetooth is on, you have to make sure not too much other shit is on at the same time or else it won't connect. So it's all these steps. It's not repeatable. So how will you expect

a 19 or 20 year old to use this scientifically proven device, which sounds awesome when you read the study because the studies they produced were like miraculous. But functionally, the skill was not repeatable enough to get the outcome. So these are, if you're an expert in a domain, robust, reliable, repeatable is tacit. You will pick things that don't break. You will pick things that get the outcome that you want and you will develop a repeatable skill set. When you're not inside your domain of expertise, though,

it's easy to fall prey to outsource information and biases and cognitive fallacies because you don't know where to look. If you have a framework for picking tools, then you can use it anywhere. And another thing that you talk about in here is proximal distal, which is a long way of saying, like, hey, having the tool at close range when you need it. And, you know, you have the, like, you know, how many, speaking of foam rollers, I probably have seven foam rollers. I got one in my office.

I got one in my bedroom. I got one in my gym. I got one in the living room. Okay. So that's four. But like, that's the reality because if I'm doing something and my back is feeling weird. or my legs are freaking domed out, which is highly likely.

Then you're like, oh, like rolling out for 30 seconds or a minute right now is actually gonna feel pretty freaking good and I'm right here and I have it, or I have like dumbbells in my bedroom. Why do you have dumbbells in your bedroom? Well, as we know, you know, sometimes you gotta get that pump. You gotta get that little something. Do a couple, do a couple thrusters with, you know, light dumbbells.

I have 25s in my bedroom. They're just there. They're just there. I keep a kettlebell in my kitchen. There you go. So having these tools that are close by is advisable. And proximal to distal or near to far is also about what tools you're going to decide to rely on the most in your toolkit. Right.

So proximal tools are the things you're actually going to have access to with enough frequency to make a difference. So if you have the best massage therapist in the world, because you need help with your back getting stiff, but you can only see them once a quarter. That's distal. It doesn't mean it doesn't help you. It doesn't mean don't have them. It doesn't mean they're not good.

It just means it's far away. So for the other 89 days of the quarter, what's the tool that's close that's going to help you manage that? You better have one. Otherwise, you'll go there, get a great massage. And then it will just be a downhill ride until the next time you see them. Jack.

Fast forward. We get into the bones now here, mind. Not too long ago, I asked my friend and legendary track and field coach, damn, Faf, am I saying that right? Paff. Paff. What he believes is the greatest limiter of performance on game day.

His answer, emotional challenges, especially those intertwined with family relationship stress. That's right. It wasn't nutritional, imperfection, faulty training sessions, or even injury. It was emotional disruption, brought on by relationships. That tells you the importance of the mind.

I mean, how many good athletes have you seen fall apart because they didn't know how to pick a girlfriend? Yeah. Yeah. You know? I mean, I know I've seen it. I've seen the most talented, freakish people who just couldn't get their shit together inside.

And it didn't matter how strong they were, how freakishly talented they were. They couldn't get their mind right. Freaking head case. Yeah. It sucks to watch. It does. You just want to shake people like they like,

you're so talented. Stop this. You talk about the triune brain. Am I saying that right? Yes, sir. Triune brain. And this is the autonomic, emotional and cognitive layers of the brain.

Yeah. The autonomic nervous system is further subdivided into sympathetic nervous system. and the parasympathetic nervous system, and you gave you gas and breaks, which is a pretty cool way of you breaking it down. I've never seen it breaking down that way,

and boy, was I appreciative when I saw it. The parasympathetic nervous system is rest, digest, and recover. Yes. That's your breaks, and these are things that are happening, right? The other side, the sympathetic nervous system is fight, flight, freeze, and fornicate, which I was not aware of.

aware of yeah so we're talking about brief me on that one so what you got to do is have dumbbells yeah so these two aspects of the autonomic nervous system are working all the time this fight flight freeze we everybody probably has heard fighter flight freeze is also there and then fornicate is there because what we're talking about is brain stem deep feedback loops in chemistry we're not talking about what makes you feel good, you know, when you're flipping through the back channels of Instagram. We're talking about actually what's happening on like the circulatory level. So that's the autonomic nervous system, brain stem, deep, subconscious, physiological

feedback loops. Yeah, dude. I have a dog and like the dog's just going, he's going to get after it. Yeah. Like as far as the fornicate thing goes. I mean, that's just, but like there's no emotions. No. He's not like, wow.

she's pretty. He's like, no, that's a girl dog and I'm going. Yeah. You know, this is like. And that's what is meant by physiological arousal is upregulation of the autonomic nervous system into the sympathetic. So sympathetic and parasympathetic aren't like toggle switches, right? We, we tend to use these phrases or these descriptors like rest digest or fight, flight, which are the ends of the spectrum of that behavior. but there's a whole gamut of arousal states that are in between there.

So it's not like a toggle. It's more like a dimmer switch that's sliding back and forth. And those gas pedal, brake pedal conditions are relative to each other. Like not every time you push on the gas pedal, does it go all the way to the floor? Sometimes it does, but sometimes it just eases from nothing to 10 miles an hour. Every time you touch the brake pedal, you don't slam on it. You might pump it. You might squeeze it.

It'll depend on the conditions, right? And then it gets into the emotional layer. And just throwing this out there. Fear, probably the most powerful emotion there is, helps you avoid bodily injury and death, but can be extrapolated to truly scary things like public speaking. And I never made that connection before of like, hey, like that is the same emotion.

It is fear like it keeps you alive, but it also makes you afraid of things that you shouldn't be afraid of. Well, at least in my opinion, you shouldn't be afraid of them, right? You don't have to be afraid. You don't have to be afraid. There's no true threat to your life.

And then you say, again, fast forward a little bit, feelings aren't free feelings. They have energetic costs in the most literal, metabolic chemical sense of the word. Chronic emotional distress has known negative effects on physiology such as elevated blood pressure and dysregulation of that stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline. Anger, for example, is immobilizing emotion. Feelings of anger can drive

you to alter something in the environment with swift action. Anger hits the gas pedal to get you moving. That can be a powerful asset if you see something as unfair, unjust, or ethically wrong, and use anger in the form of outrage to attempt to change it. It can be detrimental, however, when you smash down the psychological or the physiological gas pedal because the person in front of you is driving slower than you think they should. Anger is necessary and powerful. as is compassion, as is hunger. But when misappropriated, these powerful states cost you dearly. If you can become more aware of how you relate to your internal state and have indicators

for when things aren't firing in a way that serves you, you can change it. So these things can cause problems, like being emotional freaking. 100%. Yeah. Well, I mean, you talk about the idea of detaching, right? And so what is that? That's stepping back from the. bubble and going hold on a second.

Is this what I want? Is this necessary? Is this helpful? So anger is real, powerful, necessary. There are for sure times in my life where anger, I used it very appropriately to stop something that was harmful to others, right? Where you have like righteous outrage. No, that will not happen in my presence.

And I'm already doing something about it. right that's a good use of anger it can also be horribly misappropriated and um a story that I tell a lot is this this this um this event this was a couple years ago um I went to the laundromat my wife has these like vacuum seal things for the for like storing blankets over the winter right so we can like use them like little filing cabinets so winter came she was like hey, I need you to break these open, take them to the laundromat because I don't want the washer getting all beat up with these comforters. No problem. I'm going to go with a book and be by myself for three hours at the laundromat. No problem. So I go washing stuff. Everything's

good to go. I'm on the phone with a buddy talking jiu-jitsu, snapping blankets out, folding stuff. And then I'm on maybe like the last blanket or so and I snap the blanket open and men's underwear falls out onto the folding table, which is not mine. And I don't know if you've ever felt the heat that comes from in between your shoulder blades. And it immediately came up over my whole face. I couldn't hear my buddy on the phone anymore. Like he might as well have been underwater. And I was basically looking at the whole world through a toilet paper tube.

Like I was just thinking like, who's head am I going to remove today? You know, luckily, I recognized what was happening, took a breath. and this self-deprecating thought came, which was, Hey, dummy, you're at a laundromat. This is probably the guy who used the dryer before you. Not only were there no other indications that anything unsavory was occurring in my household, my wife is the most uncomfortably direct human being I've ever met. So if it was over, there would have been, you know about it.

There was no, it would be no ninja trickery. It would be like, you now suck. We are done. Have a good life. It would be like a meat cleaver coming down. So I had a good laugh about it. But in that moment, I told myself a story.

I had an emotional response to it, which was rage. And all of my physiological capacity came to bear in probably less than a second. Like I was about to fight a bear. Except I was in a laundromat looking at essentially a piece of fabric. Some other dudes underwear.

Some other dudes underwear. And that is an example of physiological costs of an emotional experience. Now, not every emotional experience we have is that intense, but imagine if you don't have the gas pedal smashed down to the floor, but if you just have like high idle anger for like 10 years. We know. This is not Rob Wilson's opinion that things like that are directly related to things like high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems. Does it mean if you get angry too much, you're going to die of a heart attack?

No. But it means if you do, you make it more likely. And you probably don't even know that you act like that until there's a systems failure, like you have a relationship failure, or it turns into a coping mechanism. That costs you even more and you're far down the line and then you go, oh shit I got to start doing something about this instead of that you can have markers in place, right? And some of those are internal markers right things like breathwork and meditation Those kind of things can help but social markers right like the old joke like how do you know if you're in a bad mood your wife tells you Like social markers are important you start noticing that people react differently towards you it doesn't mean that the story they tell themselves about you is true not necessarily but it could be an indication for you to do some introspection and go how am i hold on detach how am i actually acting what do i really feel like and is this what i want right um last but not least you got the cognitive layer hitched on top of the more primal driving forces that

cognitive layer of the brain. Cognition, technically speaking, is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and senses. It includes functions like attention, language, learning, memory, and perception. Cognition is taking information from the rest of the physiological system and making sense of it. And you get into the executive functions here, working memory, delayed gratification, inhibitory control, creative cognitive flexibility, and problem solving, and task switching. So this is like, you know, our brain that what we think of as our brain. Exactly.

Exactly. And then this is a dance of how the layers of the mind interact. No one component of a system network operates independently. There's a vast interconnectivity, overlapping function, and even redundancy. So these things are all freaking playing off of each other too. All the time. So not only does bottom up influence, but top down. So there's circular causality.

These feedback loops are. constantly influencing each other. And that's why habit forming and taking ownership is so important. Because if you become conscious of these types of things and their relationships within you and how they affect your relationships with other people and the environment, then you can change. You can literally change your stress physiology by changing your behavior and what you're thinking all at the same time. but you have to choose it and then you have to act it out

it won't just like magically land on you one day like a fairy and then life is better you have to become aware of it which is part of the cognitive layer and then take action which is literally making your body do different stuff

in situations yeah a huge one on this when I teach detachment is like it's the leading indicators that you really have to become familiar with because if you've already lost your temper like you don't go mid stride of temper loss and and pull yourself back in most of the time. Sometimes I guess people could do that, but you really need to pay attention to the leading indicators.

Also because if I lose my temper and freaking stab echo in the neck because I'm mad, well, and then I go, you know what, this is just my temper. Like that doesn't really help me out too much. Too late, right? Well, and you know, when people are in recovery for addiction, this is one of the things is identifying triggers. and then rewinding those triggers sooner and sooner and sooner and sooner

until you don't even put yourself in the environment where the triggers exist anymore. Yep. Right? That's another thing I talk about is the exact same thing, but like if I got a problem with Rob and like every time I talk to Rob,

he gets me irritated and he's always bringing up things that we should do that different direction that I want to go and it's frustrating to me. So when I'm going into doing a meeting with you, where we're going to talk about some project that we're working. on, I've got to like preemptively say, all right, dude, this is Rob. You know he's going to say some shit that's out of line.

You got to keep it in check. You know, don't, don't overreact. I got to go into the meeting with that attitude. So it's the same thing, like paying attention to what situation you're going into. You know, what I found interesting is people who have sustained high performance, either in a single domain or across multiple domains, figure that stuff out naturally. You look at like a really good example, I think from MMA is GSP, where he's really good at identifying the fear response way early.

And then having this conversation with himself, which was, this is what happens. This means I'm getting ready. And he started to change the label of that fear response way before stepping in the cage. And so when you can realize that, now you can take, now you have time to take action on your own behalf like ah and then here's the ritual here's the routine that i put in place that lets me uh deal with that well i was at ufc i was coaching someone cornering someone and and

uh gsp was fighting and he's cut in wait so everyone's cut in weight and everyone's in the same kind of sauna and the same we're in a spa of some big hotel right and you know everyone cutting weight is just completely miserable and dude gsp just look like the most professional champion that was doing his job that had no emotion about it that was you know and i mean it you know it sucks like you know they're weighing him like i'll get back in the sauna and no one wants to go back in the sauna like not one single person wants to go back in and he's just like they're like got to go back in you know they're like eight more minutes and he just gets up like they just told him hey uh you know go have another scoop of ice cream he just walked you know no factor comes back out lays down just

he that guy was a champion for a reason that's the things that you're talking about And I mean, now you look at him and I don't know him, but he seems like a pretty happy dude. Yeah, yeah. Like he's on the other side of that life. And for the most part, at least from what you can tell publicly, seems pretty fulfilled. Yeah. And is like enjoying life. So pretty awesome.

Yeah. Back to the book. No topic is more evident of cross talk or more relevant to modern life than stress. As biological organisms, human beings are designed to experience and respond to stress. ideally and ideally be better prepared for it the next time. That can mean muscles getting stronger because you lift weights or it can be better coping strategies when a family member dies. The long-term cost of stress is referred to as allostatic load.

Am I saying that right? You got it. The accumulation of stressors in the mind and body is not simply a psychological event. Chronic stress perpetuates activation of the hormonal and autonomic, and autonomic stress physiology, and if not given the opportunity to reset, can result in predisposition to illness, increased mortality,

and most certainly reduced performance and quality of life. Again, this is just a huge part of this book is this idea of paying attention to your dashboard and seeing what the stress is doing to you. Exactly. Because some stress is good and too much stress is going to be bad.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like a bank account, right? I mean, you got to spend. Yep. But you got enough cash You go through some of the some of the indicators how to pay attention to those indicators then you get to the tools right Mindfulness mindfulness meditations and therapies involved turning attention inward to foster awareness of the thoughts feelings and behaviors that you maintain and how they may be affecting

Feeling states of your body do you do this do you do meditation? Breath work. Yeah, I've done tried lots of meditations and but you're not addicted to it you don't do it every day I use it as needed now it's I have an integrative practice so I'm doing breath work when I'm working out it's some in some way a part of jiu jitsu it doesn't mean I'm not doing like the hickson like sh shh shh necessarily while I'm trying to cross-collar choke somebody but it's a it's something I spent a lot of time studying and teaching. And so it's completely integrated into my approach for health.

Now, with that said, there will be periods of time, whether it's a day or a month, when I have some specific outcome that I'm looking for, where I'll sit quietly and do some specific breath work or some specific meditative practice. But currently, I don't. Um, check. Yeah. There's only so much time in the day. Yeah.

Yeah. A good quote in here, you got rest is not idleness. It turns out that setting aside time to allow your mind to wander can help you reconcile experiences and emotions to make better sense of what the heck is going on in this existential mess called living and breathing. Echo Charles is a big proponent of rest. You know, um, just a quick comment on that. So that rest is not idleness. that's actually a concept coin by Mary Helen Emerdino Yang, who is a neuroscientist.

Yeah, and you give her the props in here. Yeah. I didn't give her the props, but you did. Yeah, I just want to make sure. And that idea of taking time away for psychological and physical rest in it not being idleness, I think is important, especially when we talk about high performing people again. And an interesting anecdote that I'll offer is there was. A guy I was working with who was going through the program that we talked about earlier

through the Continuum Mission program, a lot of trouble with sleep. Couldn't really get a handle on sleep hygiene because he's having trouble negotiating the specifics with his spouse. And I just recommended, hey man, he just gotten promoted. So he was active duty, a lot of new stress overseeing a team. And I was like, take your dog for a walk for like half an hour and let your dog lead the charge. Don't make it a work dog and like heal next to you until release. Let your dog smell whatever it wants to smell and you just follow it around. No phone other than family or work can get through,

but put it in your back pocket and just walk and do it for the next week. And when I see you again, let me know what happens. And he was like, he pulled me aside and was like, what the fuck is this voodoo? And I was like, dude, your brain just needs some time to organize. all the stuff you're trying to reconcile right now. Like you have a family and you just got promoted and your active duty and you know,

you have all this strategic stuff you're thinking about. Like, why don't you just give your brain some time to like build the spider web, you know? So it's not just a fun adage. The actual practice of it will move the needle for sure. Yeah. Take that dog for a walk. When I used to train jihitsu seven days a week,

which I can't really do right now. But because I'm traveling or whatever, but when I used to train all the time, then I'll soon I'd go on a trip and I'd be gone for like two weeks and I would come back and I'd be better. And I used to say that my mind would gel, like the ideas, the concepts,

whatever I was working on, what kind of gel. So the mind needs a little bit of a break sometimes. Echo gives it plenty of time. Plenty. Chilling. Beginer's mind, as cliche as it may seem, Old dogs learn new tricks keeps those dogs young in mind. Exposing yourself to novel situations,

especially in environments in which you are unsure of the outcome, forces you to stretch your knowledge, your emotions, and as it turns out, the physical structure and chemistry of your brain too. We're hearing a lot about this. You've got to keep learning stuff. You've got to keep learning.

And, you know, of course my bias here is to jujitsu. I don't know if there's like another single thing a person could decide to do. As long as the training environment is well looked after. that could hit as many of the high notes for the stuff we're talking about. I don't know if there's another practice

that can do it where you always have to be learning. You have to deal with your stress. You have to learn how to emotionally regulate yourself. You have to know when it's time to push the gas pedal and when to hit the brake pedal. You have to be able to organize your body. If there was one thing, I'd be like, go find a good Jiu-Jitsu school

where the instructor is knowledgeable and responsible, training partners look after each other because you're going to make a ton of friends you're going to get fit you're going to use your brain how long you've been training for jiu jiu jitsu eight years nice yeah fully i'm fully addicted was your first day

like were you like what was it eureka i found it the first day as soon as my feet touched the mat again i had the feeling like when i was a kid i was like oh i didn't realize how much i miss this i love this i was like oh because i had

a decision point where I had to either pick doing CrossFit or do martial arts. And I was like, well, this is in my early 20s. I was like, well, I did martial arts a lot. Let me try something. Wait, why did you have to make that decision? Money. Because I was young with a young kid. And I was like, you could either, you could only afford to do one.

If you only afford to do one or the other at the time. And I was like, well, I've done a lot of martial arts. Let me explore this fitness side of things. So that's kind of interesting because I've always found that you can work out. You don't need no money to work out. You know what I mean? You don't need any money. And the other thing about working out is you don't need anybody.

You just need you. Yeah. Whereas Jiu-Jitsu, you need a place and you got to have a training partner. Yeah. For me, it was about being in the environment. Like, I wanted to be in the training environment because I wanted to train. I wanted to move towards training people. Sometimes I look back and go, man, I should have started that.

You know, that would have been 18, 18 years. ago. I'm like, I had another 10 years on the mat. But yeah, as soon as I stepped on the mat again, I was like, oh, it's home. Walking in, I could smell the shin guards, like the sweaty shin guards smell. And I was like, yes.

Like I, I'm one of the few people probably. Like, actually, I'm like, okay. I'm comfortable here. Great. Here's one of the, one of the, one things I don't like about jujitsu. You got a section of your outdoor activity. Actually, you do need on these guys. Some study shows as little as 50 minutes of outdoor time per day can improve

cognitive function, especially for those who are already vulnerable. There's sometimes where I'm going to train jiu-jitsu and I'm like, damn, it's a nice day outside. I know, wish I could just train outside, you know, but you got to get outside in other ways. That's why we run. Surf. Surf, absolutely. That's why we surf. But yeah, being outside. My wife actually noted in the last couple of years she was like man you're in a really good mood way more often yeah on it's surf season like when it's in season and you're surfing a couple times a week I was like ooh maybe I should be going for a walk every day yeah it's a real thing it's a real thing next chapter is movement and you know clearly movement is pretty obvious um but there's some

things that aren't so obvious markers and just to go to the book here markers like grip strength speed and the ability to get up and down off the ground without using your hands. All leading indicators of fall risk are well-known links to all-cause mortality and can be helpful indicators on your movement dashboard. I think those are things that we know, but this was an interesting point that you brought out. Why do we move? Why does any organism move? Biologically, there are two reasons to move away from threats, things that are potentially harmful and may limit its chances to produce offspring and to pursue opportunities, things that keep it alive and improve its chances to produce offspring. That's a pretty pretty big pretty fundamental breakdown of why we got to move.

When it comes to preservation of movement, many people aim to simply continue to perform to the narrow task demands of the life they are accustomed to. But it's not it's not the expected and the well practiced that gets us. It's the slow degradation of capacity that makes us vulnerable to challenges we did not anticipate. If you have exactly enough money coming into pay, your bills every month with nothing left over no savings is that financial robustness of course not if your car suddenly needs repairs or you need a new washing machine you will go broke it works the same way when it comes to managing the movement capacity of your body more over most people don't have a real sense of how much is in the account until there's no more money

better to build a reserve of capacity a savings account so if you are if you are called upon for more whether for emergency or enjoyment you can meet the those demands with vigor. And this is the quote that I was said I had lined out. The human body is an incredible machine capable of continued adaptation for better or for worse. This is the well-trained dog. Your body's a well-trained dog.

It's going to do what you kind of told it to do. And this is a point that comes up a lot with guys in the teams, right? If you spend five, 10, 15, 20 or more years, essentially turning your torso into a turret then guess what it gets good at being a turret that's not free your rib cage is supposed to move quite a bit and often with guys they don't even know that it doesn't move because they can still execute the demands of the job well very well but then when something unexpected happens my shoulder doesn't do that anymore right and then you realize like oh man I can't put my hand behind my back.

And it's like, how are you deploying a parachute? It's like, well, I'm taking my other hand. This is a real story. I'm taking my other hand and grabbed my wrist. And I'm shoving it back there until it gets close. And then I turn and I fling it. And then I grab. And that's how I'm deploying my shoe. And I was like,

check. Okay, well, that's not okay. So let's reel that in. But those narrow task demands getting good at them could be that kind of example, but it could also be somebody's slow progress towards decrepitude where they can move a little less and a little less

and a little less. And even when we do things right, Sisyphus is still pushing the ball up the hill all the time. So know what's happening. That's the theme, right? Know what's happening. And then make sure that you exercise your body in ways that expose you. You got a section here called Check the Rig. When I was first developing the curriculum for my check engine like class, I bounced some of the core concepts off my friend

in veteran New York City firefighter Felix. Manjarez. In addition to his regular duties, Felix is the FDNY Health and Fitness Unit Instructor and a training coordinator in the office professional development. We were discussing the standard operating procedures for caring for the many pieces of equipment that firefighters use in the course of their job, helmet, flashlight, portable radio hand tools, and so on.

This gear check or checking the rig ensures that things work how they must, when they must. What I found interesting is that the firefighters check their gear every day, but have no system in place for checking in with their own bodies. A fact that Felix and others in the department are working to change. Like most of us, these firefighters have an implicit assumption that their bodies will just work how they think they should until they don't. So yeah, we don't have our own little maintenance protocol for the body. You don't have anything to wait to check it.

We don't. And, you know, when I talk about this particular topic, and that's actually what I'm discussing with the guys this week is I use the example of a function check, right? Yeah. A rifle, right? And that's the basic. Everybody does it. It's on autopilot. So when I ask guys like, hey, everybody in here knows what a function check is, right?

And I usually get the like, oh, this fucking guy, look, you know. And then I'm like, great, what is it? And the guy's like, put it on safe, you know, the bolt to the rear. And I get like this like, eye roll. And I'm like, okay, cool. Everybody knows the steps. I'm like, do you do it when you're already downrange and it's time to go live? Like, guys are like, no.

You don't? When do you do it? Oh, beforehand. I'm like, you do? Why? Well, because we want to make sure it works. When we're down there, I'm like, hmm, do you do that with your spine? your shoulder no it's just an assumption yeah that that thing will fire because it's so adaptable

if you develop a function check for your body it doesn't have to be complicated but you should have one yeah and you go through some of these things that you got shoulder flexion hip flexion overhead pressing squatting um yeah and and look you go and i'm i'm breathing through them but you give kind of points of performance what to watch out for kind of you go through the what these function checks would be yeah for your body and again I'm going through like the house the book Can you try new things the greatest sign of movement literacy and longevity isn't necessarily being good at things in a narrow groove you're worn your into your nervous system no matter how well you pers Perce per per per's perceived specific capabilities or

ranges or capacities of ranges it isn't passing a range of motion balance or agility tests either perhaps the greatest sign is whether or not you can try and learn new things. And I thought this was just cool, something that I need to do more often because I'm a creature of habit. And so I just do the same things over and over again. In fact, I've always had that problem. Like with working out, like my workouts will just be like repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat,

repeat for months. And that's not good. I know it's not good. And then so I'm trying to now incorporate. And also to not feel like the goal of today is to beat my last workout. because that's kind of a you got you just walk into the you walk in there's like one target on the wall like you're going to shoot at that target so the last workout is the last target I'm going to shoot that target again classic classic right like classic mistake instead of being like like oh no you know what

I'm going to do today do you know the most random thing and we're going to go for it and I need to do more of that because I get in the habit and I follow my own habits and you know I do audits so I'll do like where I will try a specific program. That's totally new. So for about 18 months, I was doing Greg Walsh's stuff, the Wolf Brigade. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the Mace Work, Heavy Kettlebells.

I did that for about. I've got Wolf Brigade Maces. They're awesome. They are. They're great. And Mace Work is fun. Yeah, they're, they're, it's, man, those things are. And boy, well, those guys, man, those guys,

they're, like, when you watch him in his videos, like he moves so mechanically. And I always feel like I do, I do not move that mechanically. Yeah. There's some ups and downsides to moving that mechanically. I think it can be right under some circumstances, but really good performing athletes often exhibit high variability, but really consistent outcome so that they get the same outcome over and over and over again.

But there's slight changes based on their level of things. fatigue and the environment and those kind of things. But I did Greg's work for a while because I wanted to explore that and I got some good results. And then I needed something different and I wanted to change it up. A year is the minimum I'll give to explore a program though. I did about 18 months. And then lately I've been doing more like track and field based work. So sprint prep work and med balls and reflexive eccentric work.

And some of that's inspired by, you know, friends I have in track and field. And so, you know, just Warner-Gunther videos? Just watch those and just figure out what you're going to do with your life. Yeah. That dude is an animal. I mean, if you watch javelin, like if you look at any javelin training, you want to talk about super athletes, javelin throwers are insane. I felt pretty good about myself. I work with an organization called Altus quite a lot, which is probably the best track and field training organization in North America.

for sure. It's run by a friend of mine. It's do McMillan, but the first time I went to their facility in Phoenix, I saw some Olympians and some world champion, 100 meter, 200 meters, long jumpers. And the sound of them on the track is like, the only thing I could think was like, I suck at everything. I mean, these guys, they hit, they're punching the track with their feet and punching their feet hard in fractions of a second over and over, and it's so consistent and smooth. But when you hear their feet, you're like, oh, my God. Like, you watch it on TV and it just looks all flowing and nice,

but you're on the track and it's like, wha, whack, whack, like someone's smacking the track with a paddle or something. It's crazy. But I've been drawing from their work a lot in a year and a half. I'll probably change it again. Um, some of the tools you talk about stretching, obviously, you know, uh, that's a huge part of it. Um, and then you get into some of these, like the, the formal movement market again. Like, these are just people that have programs out there. Yeah. Uh, the Feldenkreis method. Yeah, Feldenchrist. Oh, man. Moshe Feldenkris is somebody who you would really dig. So Moshe was an Israeli-Ukrainian engineer. First non-Japanese black belt in judo.

Studd. He wrote a book that I'm reading, re-reading right now called Higher Judo Ground Techniques. And it's from early part of the last century. You go in there and you're like, oh, triangle, pretty old. Scarfold, pretty old. right Ezekiel choke hmm that's been around for a minute

well there's people doing heel hooks in like the pancreation times like straight up so yeah breaking legs ain't new but Moshe Felden Christ was also a rehabilitative expert so he was and you find this a lot old school like strength and conditioning fixing the body

combat sports is a trifecta that you see over and over and over again but Felden Christ method Yeah, it's one. Um, you got Pilates, you got the functional movement screen from Gray Cook. And you got becoming a supple leopard,

of course, by Dr. Kelly Starrett, which was a book that I have. And, uh, functional range systems by Andrews. Spina,

spina. Andrea Spina. Yeah. And then Ido Portale. Um, so you, you, you offer,

you know, commentary on these things just, options that you got and to keep people moving. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, formal movement systems are just standardizations for movement patterns that you can use to organize indicators and create tools. Yeah, there's got to be some, I think they do a better job now in the teams of like, how flexible was this guy when he was 20 years old and okay, now he's 24, now he's 28, now he's 32. Like what does he need to work on? Because otherwise, you know, like you said,

we're just acting like a turret. You're not touching your toes. And we don't want to touch our toes. So we're not going to touch our toes. But then guess what? At some point, you've got to bend down and grab something and you hurt your back or you whatever, blow out your hamstring. So, all right.

Last section of the book or the last one of these things that you, the last, last of the dashboard is matter. The third and final category of the M3 model is matter. beneath the surface layers of our bodily experience are biochemical compounds that give the human body form and structure these chemicals and molecules combine to produce cells tissues organs and structures that produce the symphony of life the hippie just posted up again the symphony of life behavior performance and disease that we experience everybody knows the first step to becoming a professional athlete is to choose the right parents it's not the only thing that counts but

as Big Wave Surfing legend, Laird-Hamilton says, there's chickens and there's hawks. You might not be able to turn a chicken into a hawk, but you can make a super chicken. Yeah. Freaking accurate from Laird. Direct quote. Yeah.

So this is really, you start talking about some of the readings that we're going to get, and this is you talk about the biomarkers, you talk about getting people's blood drawn. I mean, when I joined the Navy in 1990, like getting blood work wasn't, even a thing. I don't think I'd never even heard of it.

No. And now you can get it really easily done. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot easier. What gets done and for who and when is still a little tricky. But outside the wire, guys go and get deeper looks. And some of that stuff's important, man, because you can catch things early.

Like, people don't think about in that field, you expose a lot of heavy metals. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of lead exposure. Oh, yeah. You know, even if didn't even, and they're not talking about downrange, we're talking about training,

like tens of thousands of rounds, like sometimes per week. Oh, yeah. Right? It's a lot of lead exposure. It's insane. It's insane. Yeah.

And once you get this blood work, I'm going to fast forward a little bit to some of these tools that we have. Sleep, the foundation of biological health. We have outpaced our biology with a flood of artificial stimuli. The most obvious being light.

It's not that other, it's not that people in the past never stayed up late. Fires in candlelight allowed for nighttime activity. But today we live in perpetual daylight of our own making, one that disrupts the very system designed to regulate our sleep. Meanwhile, the digital world keeps us engaged long past the point of fatigue. I really like that sentence. You're tired, but you stay awake. Whether through doom scrolling late night emails or the endless availability of entertainment, we are no longer. We are no longer just ignoring our biological signals.

We are actively overriding them. That's pretty scary. And you also go on to say that sleep deprivation is torture. The title list section is not hyperbole. Prolonged sleep deprivation is so severe that it has been used as an interrogation technique. It's difficult to study the long-term effects of sleep deprivation because when, because there are ethical limits on deliberately keeping people awake to observe when their systems begin

to fail. Um, obviously we do like five and a half or six days and, uh, this in seal, basic seal training. It's pretty tiring. That's the word. Uh, and different people have like different reactions to it. You know, I was always a person that didn't need a lot of sleep. Very, very lucky. This is probably the only genetic.

You want to talk about like a chicken versus a hawk? Like, I'm chicken all day long. But I was like an owl when it came to not needing sleep, which was a huge advantage because that could kind of make up for some of my other shortfalls. Like I know you were talking earlier about the guy that's now running the, uh, the Virginia high performance, hell high performance.

Virginia high performance. I don't know if we're saying his name, but anyways, I went through buds with him. Dude, that dude was a hawk. Like he was just an absolute stud at everything. Uh,

and so the only way I could keep up with guys like that was just like, oh, I just could go to work earlier and work harder. That's kind of, what I did. But talking about sleep here, you talk about a bunch of things that will help people sleep. You also talk about this was something I'd never heard before. Sleep latency. The time it takes to transition from wakefulness to sleep is a critical but often overlooked measure of sleep health. Ideally, falling asleep should take 10 to 20 minutes reflecting a well-regulated sleep drive

and circadian alignment. Extremely fast sleep onset under five minutes may indicate chronic sleep deprivation while prolonged sleep latency over 30 minutes can suggest poor sleep hygiene hygiene stress or circadian misalignment understanding sleep latency offers insight into overall sleep efficiency and nervous system regulation making it useful tool for assessing sleep quality i've never thought about that before i never really heard of it yeah i mean so sleep latency is you know like you just said it's this transitionary period where the brain is going from the state of wakefulness into light sleep first, which there's two, there's light sleep one and light sleep two, and then into the first cycle of deep sleep, which is our longest opportunity for

like tissue healing and basically cleaning the brain. Well, those transitionary phases affect the quality of the sleep architecture in that deep sleep cycle. So sometimes we assume that because we've had loss of consciousness, then everything that comes after that is just golden and it's not like that at all that those the step down basically dropping the gears in the system is really important for being in the right gear of sleep for the right amount of time and getting contiguous exposure especially to that first cycle of deep sleep now does it mean if you have like one night of one or two nights of i was really really tired so i fell asleep my and my latency was really short that

everything's broken. No, it doesn't mean that. But if you find that you've tracked your sleep for nine months, and no matter what the conditions are, you drop into sleep in two minutes, something is awry that may require further investigation. Same thing on the other end of the spectrum. Got to check that dashboard is what I'm thinking.

Exactly. Well, and I mean, that's, you know, when you have a dashboard and an indicator light is flashing, all it means is look over here. That's it. Doing a freaking assessment. Exactly. That's all we can surmise.

We don't know the whole picture just because the check engine light is flashing. It just means it's flashing. So look. Then you can decide, is it just a sensor problem? I'm getting a false positive. Or do I require further investigation?

The only way you can make that distinction is by looking. So that's everything in the book wraps around that idea. Look. You got a bunch of sleep, you know, advice on what's going to help you sleep better, whether it's the light that you're exposed to, the temperature, the nutrition, you know, when you're eating, those kind of things. You got the ups and downs of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. Do you drink? Rarely.

Have you ever drank a lot? No. It's not my bad. Wasn't your jam. Nah. And so just a lot of really good advice on sleep. And then, of course, exercise does not solve all of life problems, but it sure helps to, but it sure seems to help with most of them, including sleep.

Yeah. I, you know, if I don't get to work out for whatever reason, it's like I can always feel like I don't want to sleep as much as I. Yeah. I got a good training session in this morning before I came here, like a 90 minute. I was like the bike at the hotel had puddles under it and I was like this is going to be a good day like I'm everything's going to go well and I'm going to sleep well tonight and I knew like I knew based on how that went I was like I'm good now that's what I'd like to hear man uh talk a little bit about

naps the classic power nap I'm a fan of I'm a fan of the power nap you you advise a 30 minute power nap I've always liked a shorter power nap than that. Yeah, that's just like the average of the data. I like shorter to 15. For me personally, it's the sweet spot. It's called a, we call it a puppy nap in my house

and I get harassed and harangued for a puppy naps. Oh, your wife is like, oh, sleeping again, are you? Oh, yeah. What doesn't matter? My wife is a hilarious person. She could roast anybody.

You could possibly think. of. And so she, uh, she calls it puppy naps because I religiously fall asleep on the couch in the afternoon. And my dog is like alert to all the preconditions. And she's like, you, she's like, I watch him. He'll be like, oh, do puppy rolls in with you? Yeah, he's going to come. He sleeps by my feet. Yeah, he's going to come in. And I mean, he's not a puppy anymore. He's like six, but she was like, he knows. So are you going full like kind of pre-planned siesta scenario? Sometimes. Sometimes I will. That hasn't always been a realistic part of my life, but I work from home most of the time unless I'm on travel. So especially if I have like a high psychological workload, I'm working on some IP or developing a contract or something like that.

I'll set a timer and for 15 minutes and just and I can shut down. I have a gift. So I could go to sleep during this podcast. If I really wanted to, I could sit back and call it. close my eyes with the headphones on and everything. Just call it. And just be like, I'm out. And then you be like, yo, you need to leave. Like, we got to get out of here. Yeah.

Serves me sometimes. Yeah. Others not so much. I was always, again, that was another thing. Like when I, when I can sleep anywhere and like, if I don't have anything to think about, I can be like, boom, shut down and get it done, you know? Yeah. Um, fast forward a little bit.

Muscle mass. Stronger people are harder to kill and are just more useful in general. That's coach rip, rip a toe starting strength. Got to love him. Absolutely. Um, body composition isn't just, if I see echo's like perking up over. He's all fired up. He's like, wait, what?

Oh, we're talking about freaking muscle mass. Someone say deadless. Did somebody say deadless? Someone say curls. Can someone say easy curl bar? body composition isn't just about maintaining a healthy range of body fat equally important is having strong healthy muscle tissue sarcopenia am i saying that right sarcopenia or age related muscle loss is a normal part of staying alive for a long time doesn't seem like much of reward for

staying alive does it not only does skeletal muscle offer the more obvious physical benefits of being able to move around the world with more strength and vigor but it also yields new and surprising benefits to our biochemistry that are important if we want to feel and perform our best for the long haul. While it is normal to see muscle mass steadily decline with age, gonna protest that? Echo Charles. Let's just say it's debatable sometimes. Check. Working hard to keep as much as possible is a Sisyphian burden worth pursuing. You got Dr. Gabriel Lyon calls calling muscle our health insurance policy. So we're lifting. Lifting. We got to do resistance training. Yeah.

While lifting weights is the most efficient and effective way to gain strength and muscle. There's a muscle building activity for everybody, whether it's body weight, calisthenics, barbells, kettlebells, Pilates, or Jiu-Jitsu class. We're in the game. Resistance. That is resistance. And you go through how each of one of those can be utilized, whether it's calisthenics, whether it's kettlebells and dumbbells, barbells. You talk about eating for muscle mass and body composition, protein. intake, the rule of thumb

for daily protein intake is one gram per kilogram of body weight, although women and anybody in their 50s or beyond who wants to maintain or build muscle mass may require more. That's the word on the streets. That's my first time hearing that. Yeah, that's from Dr. Lyons' work.

So she just said straight up, if you're a little older, you need more protein than these young folks do. Oh, because he got less testosterone or something? that's to be honest that the specifics of that biochemistry is outside my wheelhouse but we're just i yeah i my best understanding at present is because there is less anabolic activity so having more a higher volume of protein coming the system boosts anabolic my understanding of the biochemistry on that particular topic is mulk and steak yo let's go uh a new steak was

We've got aerobic, a section here on aerobic health, you know, energy, the different energy pathways. And then measuring, how we're measuring these oxygen delivery, resting heart rate, heart rate recovery,

and then the tools that we're going to use. Steady state, Zone 2 training. Zone 2 training is performed by exercising at an intensity that maintains your heart rate at approximately 60 to 75% of its max. Now it says the, common recommendation for general population is an hour to an hour and a half or to two hours

per week while aerobically adapted might need more. What do you think about that? Is that enough? You got Peter T. in here as well. Yeah, I think, so this is my experience or my understanding based on the data that I've seen, the people who know more about it than I do, and then my own personal experience is the amounts that are given are based on broad generalities in the general population. I think if you really want to know how much you should do, you should measure and you should see where do you stand in the first place and then implement a plan and then re-measure and decide if any more than that is worth the squeeze.

So for me, I did a V-O-2 max test at Old Dominion University. You can pay like $125 or something like that. A lot of exercise phys labs at universities can do this. You go in, you pay some money. They put you on a metabolic cart, right? So you have a gas exchange monitor going on while you're either cycling or running on a treadmill. You go through usually some kind of ramp test where you're increasing wattage. They look at gas exchange, heart rate, rate of pressure.

perceived exertion, and then you get a score, and then the score puts you in a percentile for your gender and age group. Mine was good. So mine was 46, and they said 46 for a guy who's 6-3, 240 pounds to be moving that kind of air is pretty damn good for my age. And I was like, okay, I feel good about that. Now, I'm doing a little bit, I'm only doing two days of Zone 2 a week. which is probably 60 minutes, but I'm trucking. I'm putting work out, probably in the fall.

I'll test again for me to do 180 minutes a week. The ROI is not there. Yeah, what do I care? Like, I'm good. I'm in the,

like, I'm in 85th percentile for a 44-year-old man. There's so much other stuff I would rather do. So for me, with the time I have in my life, it's like,

do I want to not train jiu-jitsu in the morning to go do to ride on a bicycle yeah hell no it ain't you know uh you talk about hit training and then you talk about low intensity again there's so much information in here get the book so that you can um so that you can you can actually understand this stuff rather than just the introduction i'm giving um section three tuning the human health is not a state It's a practice. And that's MC Schraefel. That's right. Got one right.

That's a miracle. Nice. Tools can be indicators. Indicators can be tools. You may have noticed that some of the items I talked about in section two can be used as both indicators and tools. If and when you find one of those things, you've got yourself a keeper. One example could be sun salutation from chapter five in the function check section. I talked about how sun salutation be used as a litmus test for daily movement.

You might find that if you practice it with diligence, it will be a way for you to gain access to new ranges of motion too. I like that idea. And Echo Charles and I were talking about it before you got here because I mentioned that you had this sun salutation, which is kind of like a burpee in a way. Because I started off by saying we were talking about different, like getting down on the floor and getting back up again. Yeah. When you were a kid, you didn't even think twice about it. You always lay down and get up. Like lay down and get up.

It didn't matter. And then Echo was saying like, yeah, I know if there was a pen underneath this table and you were like, hey, can you grab that pen underneath the table? And he knew he was going to have to like get down on his hands and then like lay down and reach underneath. There was, you know, it was a thing he had to think about. It was one of those things. And when you're a kid, you just don't care. Like, oh, get that pen. You're there.

So I was saying that some of the things that's good as. as a like a life thing to always be doing is getting on the ground and getting back up again. 100%. And so I started with a burpee. I was like, yeah, you know, just doing a burpee, you're getting down on the ground, you're getting back up again.

But then I was like, yeah, but if you actually go down there and now you do a couple movements while you're down there to stretch out and then you come back up, you're basically doing this sun salutation, which is a yoga move. Yeah.

And then you use that, not just to say, well, how do I feel when I get down and get back up again, but also I can expand my range of motion because it's a stretch that you're actively doing. Yeah. Well, so two things. One, this is one of the things that I, another thing that I think makes jujitsu in particular so valuable is you're getting up and down from the ground so much.

Echo and I said the exact same thing. We're like, that's, I said, that's one thing about jihitsu. Like you're on the mat, you get up, up, up, down, up, down. And while you're doing it, you have to manage other stuff. Right? It's not at your own pace. It's like something will happen to you if you don't do it. So I think that's really a major benefit of jiu-jitsu being comfortable on the floor.

But as far as sun salutation goes, not only are you getting up and down from the ground, but you're dealing with some cardinal shapes of the human body, right? So you're reaching overhead. You're looking up while you reach overhead. So you have full global extension of the body. Then you have to fold forward. You compress yourself. So touch your toes.

knees or whatever, right, but you're folding forward. So can you flex your spine? Can you do a lunge, which is hip extension, which hip extension is like one of the cardinal predictors of low back pain. So hip extension. Then you have down dog, right, which is can you support weight with your arms over your head? So down dog is like the top of a dive bomber push up. Then you have up dog, which is the opposite, the bottom of a dive bomber, right? So your hips are on the floor and you're extending your hips and your spine. So can you open the front of your body? Then you have a lunge again,

so you repeat the other half on the other side of the body. And you combine that with the rhythm of breathing. And not only do you get a sense of those ranges, what you also get is your ability to connect those shapes together smoothly. So when I transition from down dog to up dog, or I transition from a lunge to an updog as I change these shapes and I connect them together.

How smooth does that happen? Does it feel fluid and graceful or does it feel like I'm digging through mud? And that might change over time. And it also might change based on what is your experiencing in life currently. One thing, so for me, this has been a personal practice for probably 25 years. I rarely miss a day of sun salutation. And how many do you do? two to four and how long do you spend in each like stretch position one to five breaths

depends on what I'm feeling going on there like do I need to have a better like do I should I believe that that that thing's protesting I'm going to spend two more breaths here and go what's the total time allotted per day for sun salutation in the morning seven minutes check my general habit is brew coffee while coffee is brewing. I do sunsuitation, so it's totally accessible. But I found that it's a great monitoring system. So I figured out when I was tracking my sleep for a while that I have a direct connection between the quality of my deep sleep

and how stiff my low back is, regardless of any other input, travel, type of exercise, hydration, deep sleep for me is directly connected to lower back stiffness. You go through a section here, spring cleaning challenge as an audit, and you talk about using a formal challenge as a sort of spring cleaning for your body and mind

can provide you with interesting types of critical feedback. And then you talk about how to come up with a, you know, with a challenge that you're going to do, decide what the challenge is, make it an actual challenge, say it out loud to at least two or three people who care enough about you to hold you accountable, plan a time and a date, when this challenge will occur,

stick to it. That's actually the part of the challenge. And then choose what to choose for challenge. What am I avoiding? I really like the prompt of like, what do you not like doing and make that part of the challenge? What don't I want to do?

What causes internal friction for me? Where do I really need to grow? That is awesome. So that means echo Charles, you're not allowed to do bicef curls for challenges. Womp, won. Oh, and you know I had to read this section. And systems are greater than discipline.

All of this dashboard and toolkit stuff sounds nice, but are you supposed to put together, but how are you supposed to put together feasible units of action in the real world? If you browse social media or watch YouTube, you may have noticed a trend towards discipline. There's no shortage of characters telling people to tighten up and get disciplined.

On one hand, I get it. This is a natural balancing of the scales and wayward behavior that accompanies that some perceptions of modern Western culture instant gratification has not been good for us at large, and personal responsibility must be a core part of the answer. This same philosophy gets misdirected towards failures in health behavior. That is a wholesale misunderstanding of the problem in my experience. Doing it because you're supposed to is the attitude of people who already did it.

Discipline, strictly speaking, is obedience to rules, whether those rules were self-imposed or administered by an authority. The life cycle of discipline requires mental energy to not break the rules, and then, that energy is, like all energy used by people, finite. When I talk to individuals who seem disciplined, I usually find two things behind the curtain. First, the most rigid among them are engineers. They have proclivities that drive them toward higher degrees of conscientiousness. Second, and more important for our broader discussion, they have systems in place. The fittest, healthiest people I know organize their lives so that they are pushed toward habits that

create outcomes they want. They wake up in the morning. The running shoes are by the door with the socks. They're going to wear already stuck inside them. They don't buy a family-sized jar of peanut butter and then stare at it hoping they don't eat the whole thing. They just don't buy the peanut butter in the first place. Building systems can help you track on, building systems to help keep you on track,

works on a micro level like putting a foam roller near the bed, but it works on a macro level, too. Coordinating strategies for mind, move. and matter on a larger scale, starts to build a lifestyle of performance longevity. So there you go. There's a lot of these characters out there. I've seen them.

They're out there talking about discipline. So Jocko. It was nice talking to you. No, good stuff. And, you know, clearly peel back the, what do you say, peel back the curtain on me.

And I've already talked about some of the systems that I have in place in my life, which is really, if you really break it down, my whole life is one big system of, you know, making things easy for me to be disciplined. I have a gym in my house. I have mats at my house. I have a gym at my gym.

I have mats. I mean, I obviously have a jiu-jitsu. I have family members that all train jiu-jitsu. I have an ice bath. I have a sauna. I have a foam roller in every room. I have dumbbell, you know, so I've done all these things that you're talking about. And yes, all those things make discipline almost unavoidable.

Exactly. In many cases, it's almost unavoidable for me. And, you know, I was saying this the other day, like, I don't, I like working out. I like doing jiu-jitsu. Now, look, do I feel like going to train every single day? No, I don't feel like training every single day. Of course, there's days where you're like, dude, I do not want to go train today. But I know 100% I will feel better when I'm done.

And I have experienced that enough that it compels me to just go, oh yeah, I don't feel like training right now. But I know in an hour and a half when I'm driving home from Jiu-Jitsu, I'm going to be so freaking stoked. Or I know when I get done like I'm taking a shower after going surfing, like I know I'm going to be so stoked that I went surfing. Same thing with working out. Same thing with everything.

But yes, developing systems is a good way to, to overcome your lack of discipline. Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, having systems in place doesn't exclude the necessity of discipline, but starting to think about how to organize your environment, like you were just saying, in a way that moves you towards discipline behavior.

It won't even feel like discipline. I think often when people hear discipline, what they think is like this rigid fight with myself that I constantly have where there's always internal friction that I must be at odds with when I pursue health. In the health realm, this is how it gets presented often like, you don't want to do this, you got to go. You know, you better do it. And it's like to some degree, yes, but also, you know, like I've been helping my sister reclaim some of her health. And it's like, buy a kettle bell.

put it in your living room. When you see it, lift it up. Lift it up. And then it doesn't have to become a thing with a special time. And before you know it, you're doing 100 swings a day.

Now you're doing 200 swings a day. And you're doing 500 swings a day. And that kettlebells, it's not even heavy anymore. And then this happened with her over the last year. And then yesterday she texted me, I just went and got a gym membership.

Yeah. And it was like, she did some, she didn't like join a fitness monastery. I helped her build systems to make it easy for her to become disciplined. And what are the things that I can manipulate in my environment? And that can be with obvious things like physical exercise, but it can also be, you know, like when I decided like I'm going to write this book, I started to tell people who I knew would expect it from me,

who like were close to me that I would trust it and I cared what they thought. So that when they go, oh, hey, man, how's that book coming along? I don't want to look those people in the eye that I respect and go, oh, I haven't really been working on it. I want to go, I wrote another chapter, working through this section. I'm doing research on this. So that's the system that I put in place so that every time one of those people would ask me, I had something honest to say. And it would keep me on those really,

rough times where like some days you write and it's like a waterfall and it's just coming and then some days you type five words and you hate them and you erase them and you do that over and over for about 90 minutes and then the next day you come and you're not you're not always sure which one is going to show up but it doesn't matter you do it you do it and i put a system in place hey honey eight o'clock every night when we're done with dinner for the night i'm going into my office and i'm going to write for 60 to 90 minutes. And then it's setting up a system with your family, setting them a system with your work,

with your physical environment at home. And then like you said, it doesn't even feel like discipline because you've staged the relationships. You've staged the gear. Then all you have to do is your part, which is to take action. Do the manual labor.

Yeah. And I say that because like for me, writing is very, I'm not in some, intellectual state when I'm writing. No, I already know the words and I just have to put them on the freaking piece of paper in front of me. It's just typing. It's work. It's like typing.

Yeah. It's work. And that's the same thing with like, you know, working out on some days, you know, I'm not. I'm just doing the thing that I'm going through the repetitions because I am supposed to be in there doing the repetitions. That's not ideal. But that's the way it is sometimes. Sometimes I'm doing jiu-jitsu. It's like, yeah.

Labor. All right. I hope freaking this. dude does, oh yeah, here he comes. It's funny. You've got one of those rolls. When you peel back the layers on anything, eventually what shows up is work. Yeah.

A good friend of mine, he was, he worked in the factory. He worked for Andy Warhol in the 80s. So he mixed paint for Andy Warhol. And he told me when he got there, you know, he'd done a bunch of art stuff and wrote some songs and stuff. And he got there to work in the factory. And he was like, oh, shit. it's just labor. And he said,

that's the hardest he ever worked in his life was for a painter. Yeah. And that he's like literally we were just like mixing chemicals and like in like full coveralls and boots all day. And he was like,

and this is art. It's just work. That's he must have some freaking wild stories. Oh man. He lived in, his name is Robert Waldrop. He was in, lived in Manhattan in the early 80s.

when it was, yeah, like when it was a real cowboy town and he was like, yeah, you, I'd walk home at night and be like, oh, there's another car fire. Just like normal chaos there. Yeah, when I was a kid, I would go to, I grew up in Connecticut, Maine, but I would, I would take the train to New York. And it was like total chaos in the 80s, like insanity. And yeah, luckily, it's a lot nicer now. I say that some people go, I wish it would have stayed the way it was. but man it was not that great it was pretty bad now look is it getting overly you know

maybe a little too nice possibly but yeah cycles yeah i guess it'll it'll do something um chapter eight developing a personal health system and co so we talk about you know discipline coming from or be a system as being better than discipline well how are we going to put that system in place tuning the human it would be nearly and this is like the kind of what you were getting into raising your eyebrows as you were talking earlier tuning the human it would be nearly impossible to count how many times over the course of my career i've been asked questions like these which stretches are the best ones for me to do what breathing technique should i use what is the best way to put on muscle to which my answer answer would often be let's find out together

Fast forward a little bit. Developing an experimental mindset is about having the willingness to try things out and see what happens. And this is going back to the research of MC Schraefel, Shreifel. And they did an experiment showing that an experimental framework supports user autonomy and competence. And that participants develop health practices from the interventions that are still in use, long after the intervention is finished. That means an experimental approach to health and performance yielded better long-term results than the insertion of a standard protocol.

So instead of just being told this is what you're going to do, having this experimental framework was better. Why? Shrefer found that more participants took ownership over their own process and developed knowledge, skill, and practices that made them feel capable of, interpreting information regarding the exploration of their own health. When we go through the process of exploration, we find more meaning in the things we learn. This is true for all of life.

So why would performance, longevity, be any difference? So basically, just giving someone a program and saying, do this was a lot less effective than saying, all right, let's find out the best way to make this stuff happen. And just like any plan, when you're working with a team and you let the team come up with the plan, they're going to have ownership of that plan and they're going to be more engaged in it. And that's the same thing that happens here. Yeah.

And, you know, to use Jiu-Jitsu again. Let's do it. If you just had like the old 1980s like Cada and Jiu-Jitsu and you never rolled, you never had to prove what you knew against a live training partner, like how confident would you think you would be in real life? And what we found out was not very that if you don't train with live resistance, human beings, you don't actually know what you're doing. And that's because you have to figure out what works for you under those conditions.

And the only way to do that is to try stuff, reflect on what worked and what didn't. Now, does that mean you can't talk to people who know more than you? Of course not. You can say, hey, what was your experience? And then you integrate that with your own experience. And then what do you do? You try again. And what will happen over time is you will fail smaller and you will fail faster.

But there's no not failing with this stuff. I think with health in particular, people want a moment of utopia where they're all a sudden healthy. I'm healthy now and there's no more work to be done. Nothing works like that. You have to keep sharpening a knife if you use it. Now, if you let it get super dull and deformed, a lot more work has to be done.

But if you run it over a straw every day, then once in a while, you got to touch a stone. Same thing with skill with health. You have to try things on a regular basis. You have to tinker. You have to see what works for you. And then you will take ownership over your own process. Yeah.

Just to reiterate what you just said, you know, you say don't take your experience or anybody else is as gospel in fact a good habit is to look for ways in which your initial impression might be wrong or incomplete and then I'll close out the book with this what you say in this section here you say my hope for you after you engage with the material in this book is that it will become an integrated philosophy for how you think about maintaining your health that these concepts and ideas become so second nature to you that you nearly forget what they are called unless someone wanting to know how you stay so darn consistent with your health practices asks you about them. Don't become too anchored on any one example that we've explored. Ask yourself what is under the surface here. If there's a specific indicator or tool that works well for you and continues to do so over time, fantastic. But I do hope you'll keep, as Bruce Lee said, researching your own experience.

So that's what we got. Check engine light. And then it goes from there, it goes into a workbook. Now, is the book that just came out, because I have a printed copy from a PDF that you sent me, but the book comes out today? Today. Is the workbook included with the book? Is it a second document? Is it the same document?

How is it set up? They're bound together. Okay. So it's one big, giant book. And those are experiments that are specifically anchored to each one of the, you know, they're bound together. those categories of mind movement and matter. So there's three experiments for each. One, so you can try some specific tools from the book, but more importantly, to learn

how to experiment so that if you listen to Andy Galpin or Andrew Huberman or Rhonda Patrick or whoever else, and they recommend a protocol, you can go, how do I figure out if that works for me? What KPI's will I look at? How will I look at trends? Is this really a reliable and consistent method for me in my life? Is this tool robust? And then you might go, well, I do want to work on cardiovascular health,

but the way that they recommended it might not work for me under these conditions. What's the next thing I can explore? And now what you're doing is developing skill instead of going, oh man, she's supposed to be really smart. And I tried it and it didn't work. So I don't need to be aerobically fit, which is what happens, right? Oh, I tried this sleep thing that Huberman told me, and it didn't work for me this time. And so not only do I not think that this part of sleep is not important, but he's not as credible to me now.

And that's silly because none of those people, none of us people, know the individuals who are listening. Right. And so bring up my friend, Stu McMillan again, he says, an individual is not the average of individuals. So when we collect data, we're looking at statistical averages and means across time, but you are an individual and what works for you when it comes to the specifics is going to be different. And the only way to know is to try. Again, Jiu-Jitsu is another great example.

Like maybe you like a certain sweep from closed guard. exact way that you set it up might be different than me even if we both like it because we're not made the same you're more experienced we have different limb lengths so yeah yeah i don't know here's a cool thing to take home from that in jiu jitzu i always when i'm trying to explain to people like a move and i'll say there's 10 things that you have to do right to make this move work and i can only teach you five now there's certain moves i can teach you six of those things there's some moves i I can only teach you three of those things. But the rest of those, you got to figure out on your own.

And you got to figure it out by drilling it, trying it, and then upping the resistance and eventually going live. Because you know that you can't, I can't, the most articulate person in the world, there's some part of a move that they, no one can explain it. And plus, like you said, it's different for you because you got longer arms than me and you got less experience with this thing and more experience with that other thing. And you got this weird pain in your thing over here. So there's all these little adjustments that you got to make.

And oh, by the way, you have a whole different series of moves that set something up nicely, which you can use here. And so I can teach you five things. But then you got to work it. You got to experiment with it. And that's what I called it in your workbook. I was like calling it guided experiments. And then also you have like a systematic grading criteria and systematic surveys of how did the experiment, what was the outcome of the experiment? Because it's cool to like, oh, Rhonda Patrick said to sleep like this.

And I tried it. I didn't really like it, but I have no idea why. Because then you can't make an adjustment. Because it's probably because, oh, yeah, well, Rhonda Patrick said to do this at night. Well, you know, she doesn't know that my wife is doing the wordle thing at night. So even though I'm like, want to have the screen off, I, you know, my wife's over there. Okay, well, I didn't count.

Rhonda Patrick didn't know that about my wife, of course. That she did whirdle at night. So now I'm going to throw out her whole protocol. No, it's like, oh, oh, my wife does whordle at night. So, okay, here's the thing I can do. I can ask her, hey, when you do that, can you, can you do that on the couch before you come to bed? Oh, okay, cool. Like, what are the things that we can do to make these little adjustments?

And that's what the surveys and the log, basically is a logbook that you've got in the workbook that allow people to understand and track what these experiments revealed and then hone and adjust the protocols so that they're functional for you. Because everybody is different. and just like Jiu Jitsu arm lock for you is different for a Jiu jitzu arm lock for me and the defense is different for you, different for me. Well, the food that you eat and the zone two training that you do, it's all going to be slightly varied and we have to experiment to figure out how to modify and modulate our protocols so that they work and are idealized for us as individuals. Exactly.

And this is a damn good place to start with this book called Check Engine. in light, tuning your body and mind for performance longevity. So what's next? What do you got next? You're already working on the next book? Yeah. So I have a manuscript that I wrote about breath control. Okay.

That's probably two years old. Now, actually, when I was stalled on this book, I was, I was stalled for a bit. And then I was like, well, I don't know if anything's going to happen with this. But I was so in the writing headspace. that I just sat down and wrote, started writing this other book out. Probably I'll revisit and change it, but a specific area of expertise that I have is breath control for stress management and for sports performance. And so it's been a long time common. I've been teaching this probably 10 years in lots of different places, both in special operations communities and in martial arts communities. And I think, that there's a real opportunity in the performance and health environment for a lot of this very usable information to be made far simpler. There's even with the most educated people, often too much esoteric language, too much jargon, and it makes it hard for people to begin

and then experiment. So another cornerstone of this book will be. how to experiment with the things that are suggested for yourself. And that's a core component of my entire philosophy in health and performance is, I am not the arbiter of answers for people. My job is to help you make sense of what's happening and then to help ask better questions, to help design better and better experiments. I'm a guide, but I don't have a special tablet somewhere that lets me know the best way I still do strength and conditioning for some athletes, mainly high-level professional

grapplers. And every program I write is an experiment. Now, I'm careful because some of these guys have money, serious money on the line. So I don't do things where they will get hurt or at least reduce the likelihood. But this is a biological organism. I don't know what the outcome is going to be in eight weeks or 12 weeks. We start trying things and then we communicate and change and having flexibility and adaptability

and it being about learning is really the goal. For me, the biggest sign of success with an athlete I'm working with is they need me less and less and the problems they come to me with are more and more complex. And I'm like, oh. And more specific. More specific. We're going in the right direction.

This guy's asking me something that I gotta like, Hold on a second. I need to look that up in this textbook. I haven't seen him for five years. What's the, what's like the curve look like for grapplers? Are you want them a certain amount of strength? Is it aerobic capacity?

Like, what is your focus on? Um, so I organize it, uh, pretty uniquely. I think, of course, foundationally is conditioning.

I mean, every, I think strength is important, but nobody wants to die tired. And, just in terms of confidence when you talk about MMA or you're talking about grappling

conditioning is king you can have like the guy with the best bench press but if you can weather that storm and he gets tired smoke are you breaking conditioning up into like five minute rounds type thing or it will depend on the athletes experience to some degree if it's an

older athlete with a long training history and they have a good aerobic base to begin with I'll only prescribe them enough to maintain what they have. That's pretty rare. Mostly we're looking at Zone 2, and for us, we actually call that sale. So I work with standard Jiu-Jitsu quite a lot, so that's Greg Sauters. He's the most hated man in Jiu-Jitsu right now, but a dear friend of mine.

And he's hated because of the ecological approach. Yeah, he's in a iconoclast. I'm tracking, no. And I just was talking about this the other day because my daughter competed at a tournament or not a tournament, but WNO. Who's number one on Flo Grappling? And she's been doing a lot of ecological training. And so they were asking me about it. And, you know, I was saying that this is this is not an entirely new concept by any stretch of the imagination.

No. And we have been doing, what do they call it, constrained learning? forever echo charles and i were doing constrain hey get out of my guard hey if you pass my guard restart here hey you can only do the arm lock hey you know we've been doing this stuff for literally decades for decades we've been doing this um so i i think you know like anything it's kind of gotten a little bit a little bit crazy um and you can take it to an extreme and there's an extreme version of it where i'm not going to show you any moves at all that's like the extreme version would be Hey, we're just going to do Jiu Jitsu and I'm just going to play this game and I'm never going to tell you how to do anything.

That's an extreme version. I will tell you that I taught kids for a very long time and that is a very, it's a fairly effective way to teach kids. Hey, you're in between their legs. You've got to get out between their legs. They will experiment and they will try things and they'll do it very rapidly and they don't have any eagle and they don't care if they get beat. They don't care if they get swept. So it's no big deal. And they learn very quickly that way.

it's and plus they don't have the probably the cognitive capacity to remember put your left foot on the hip turn your spin your right like like calf towards the their back press down on your calf that's a lot for a little kid to remember where if you're like grab their arm and put your legs around it they can they'll remember that um or even better let hey if you can get your legs around just their head in one arm you're going to win okay they can try and figure that out but um so i I, the, the ecological approach to learning is not something that is brand new. I'm surprised it's so controversial.

I think it's controversial just because people like to argue about things or. Yeah, for sure. And have you had a chance to talk with, with Greg in person, like at an event or anything like that? I have not. He's like the nicest person and loves jiu-jitsu as much as anybody I've ever, like he loves it. Yeah, yeah. We'll talk about it forever, super generous with his. knowledge is completely open to be proven wrong.

You got to come correct though because the dude is insanely intelligent and super well read and watches a lot of tape like he knows his shit. But I've been working with his team for the last three years. DeAndre Corby, who just won the Sappatero, has been a strength and conditioning client of mine for five years probably. certainly one of the most disciplined human beings I've ever met in my life. I mean, he's going to Iiga worlds in a couple days. Nice.

And I'm like, hey, man, how's the travel? What's the travel rundown? And he's like, A, B, C, Diled in. He's dialed. He's super dialed. But when I work with those guys and we look at conditioning, you know, one of the projects that I'm sort of, that's like a side hustle, because I don't have enough to work on.

I like to have a side project is trying to develop a framework for needs analysis for grappling. And I think that's something that really hasn't been done for the sport officially yet. I think there's some good strength and conditioning coaches. They're doing a pretty good job. Like Stephen Sehoun is Australian guy

who does a really phenomenal job with mixed martial arts. Obviously UFC, PI. But when we're talking about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which is very quickly becoming a real professional sport. I don't see a lot of people in human performance doing a legitimate needs analysis for the athletes and for the sport and breaking it down to like what are the demands of the sport really, like posting, clinching, level changes. How do you communicate those demands to the athlete in the strength and conditioning environment

in a way that helps them connect that capacity with their skill? So like for us, we use things like force, flow, sail, squeeze, grind, regenerate, and we'll have blocks of training or days of training where that's the intention of the day. So if it says sail, sails use wind. So you know that's aerobic capacity is coming. And sometimes we have high wind and sometimes we have low wind. and that will express the intention of the session to the athlete because whether it's combat sports or combat, the personality types attracted to those things tend to be very similar,

which is whatever's in front of me, I will work as hard as possible at this thing and give 100% effort and grind it out every time. Now, personally, I would much rather work with that type of person and then rein it in. I don't want to be the cheerleader who's like, come on, do another rep. I'm not interested in that.

But speaking to the athlete about the intention of a block of exercise helps them know where to focus their effort. So when it's like, hey, I really need you to stay in zone two because that actually gets a specific training adaptation. It's not being you, it's not you being a wimp today to keep your heart rate between 145 and 155 beats a minute. It's because this gives us a specific outcome. And so then it's like, your job today is sale.

If you don't do your job today, then I know you're not doing your best. So your best is staying in this zone. And it's like, oh, check. So that's how we break up their training. And then we're also, Greg and I are working together on some case studies. And we're doing like using sports metrics. So bringing in like really, really basic sports. science to look at how it can influence skills training for high-level grapplers. So how do we use

things like HRV and sleep and levels of soreness and mobility? So subjective and objective metrics to inform how you organize practice. And how does that make sense practically? Not just what do the numbers say, but how does a coach who has to stand on the floor and make sure this athlete is ready. How can they use this to influence training decisions? So that's what we're working on right now. And that's like my fun side project is sport science and strength and conditioning for grappling because I personally love the sport.

Like it's probably the only thing I really watch other than the UFC or, you know, whatever one. And it's a really hard puzzle because it changes all the time. Yeah, plus because I've trained a lot of grapplers over the years and like different. I mean, just like who, what is that person? Like there are some people that have the natural cardio and the natural or this other person has the natural explosiveness, this other person. And so you got to kind of compliment their strengths, focus on their weakness a little bit, but you don't want to abandon their strengths because that's what that's their go to. Yeah.

So it's a, it's a different puzzle for each person and and figuring out what the best way to maximize. And something I've always said is like, I can't grapple with you hard enough that you're going to get the benefits beyond just grappling. Like you need to do something else. Well, one of the other things that happens to in grappling is when you're new, you're inefficient. And so there's a lot of condition. But as you get more and more experienced, especially as you widen the gap of skill to most of the people relative to you, this might be different in a professional training room.

But often what happens is you get very efficient. You know your game. So you're not going to reach the same physiological thresholds that you will to get a training outcome as sitting on a bike. So being fit and being conditioned are not the same thing. Being conditioned means I can handle the demands of this environment so I can keep participating. Most grapplers who grapple often are very well conditioned. but then you put them on a stationary bike and you slowly increase the amount of wattage

and I blow guys up at like six minutes and they don't understand they didn't realize like oh man I wasn't using a very efficient energy source right and so and it's comfortable my my buddy Sloan just went to Thailand for like a few months to train Muay Thai and he's like a competitive grappler and he got over there he's like yeah when I first showed up there Like I know I'm in awesome.

I'm fit. I'm in awesome shape. But you start even hitting mitts or sparring and it's just like exhaustion. And then he came back. You know, his first like couple days back, he's like, yo. Like, you know, he's a great grappler. And he's strong as hell. And he's obviously in condition.

But, you know, he's like, oh, I felt tired because I haven't been grappling as much as I did. So you get that, you know, what you train in is what you're training in. Yeah. So. Yeah. And, you know, the other consideration with combat sports. athletes that's really similar to working with special operations community is the bottom of the pyramid that supports all of that is being healthy. And health is health emerges when you're

robust enough to keep doing all the other stuff on top of the pyramid. So it's like plenty of athletes are what I've started to call operationally robust but biologically brittle. So like I can get in there shut off all the noise and do the work. But getting sick a lot. Boy, I sure did get staff again. I got another fungus thing, having trouble going to sleep. My temper is coming back. My weight's a little volatile.

And so underlying that is this fragility. And what does that do? Does it mean you can't go out and win? No, it doesn't mean that. What it means is your opportunity. to keep winning are reduced. Right. And that's performance longevity.

There we go. Bring it back to the title of book. Does that get us up to speed? Yes, sir. If we're in Virginia Beach, where should we get ice cream? Oh, be free. Okay. Go to be free.

Be free. What is it? Craft ice cream. Be free craft ice cream owned by retired Navy SEAL, Chris Fettis. That's like the best thing I've heard. in a long time. Like, hey, I'm going to pursue my dream of making ice cream. So Chris and I are Jiu-Jitsu training partners.

That's how we know each other. We've been training together for eight years. We walked in almost the same first day. I swear to God, we shook hands, and I heard about ice cream immediately. And ever since, he was like making ice cream out of his garage, then had a little shop, then had a kitchen. and now has this like beautiful storefront. They have an amazing bakery.

Like he's doing really well. He's been doing a lot of, you know, he's talking in public. So probably people who listen to this will be familiar with who he is. And what a great dude. And to get out of the teams after all the shit he's done and been through. And then to make ice cream is pretty fucking awesome. Yeah. And people can find you.

Wilson health and performance.com. You're on the Instagram at the check engine light, and you've got a substack. Yeah. Check engine light. And then what about, what about Virginia health and performance? Virginia high performance. Virginia high performance.

What's their site? VHP mission.com. And, but that's not open to the public. The gym is not. No. Okay. But if you are an active duty or veteran special operations from any branch and you're interested, you go to the website and you're interested in the program, you can reach out to Ollie and his team through the website. Or if you're having trouble and you're from the community, you can reach out to me directly.

And I will make sure you get in touch with people who can help you. Friken awesome. And thanks to the Navy SEAL Foundation. Man, the Navy SEAL Foundation has done all kinds of stuff for me and my friends over the years and they are the driving force behind, you know,

making these things happen, I guess, paying for these things to happen. Great organization. Yeah, great, great bunch of people, the Navy SEAL Foundation. That's Navy SEALFoundation.org. All just awesome, awesome to hear about.

Echo Charles, you got any questions? Two questions. Oh, two questions. First one is kind of for both. you guys. What is Mount Trashmore? Mount Trashmore in Virginia, in Virginia Beach, there's a like a trash dump and they covered it with grass and there's a skateboard half pipe there, which in the 80s was kind of an iconic thing,

Mount Trashmore. But the trash is underneath. The trash is underneath. Yeah. This looks like a weird little mountain. Virginia Beach. The topography is as flat as this table we're seeing it. There's no, there's nothing, there's no hills.

It's the, one of the highest points in the whole city is like a 75 meter hill made out of trash. And it's called Mount Trashmore, a little tongue in and cheap. But it looks nice still. Yeah. Oh, it's great. Yeah. You just know. You just know.

You just know. You just know. Are people still skating there? Oh yeah. They redid the skate park. It's like really cool. I think they have a pool there. A couple different half pipes.

Uh, street skate. Yeah. Yeah. My nephew. When the, uh, when the, when the, uh, when the future. The Bones Brigade video came out, and it was at Mount Trashmore.

Lance Mountain tearing it up. It was, you know, very iconic in the 80s. That's old school. Yeah, it is. Lance Mountain at Mount Trashmore. Yeah. That's about as, that's about as Skatees as it gets. Yeah, well, if you were talking, Skatey's kid right here,

who's over here getting after it. Yeah. What's your second question? Echo Charles. How do you feel about chiropractic in general? Depends on the chiropractor So the I'm sorry

Yeah so I mean I guess that's what I'm starting with in general Because yeah I think you're right where Because they The initial or primary thing that I'm familiar with As far as chiropractic goes is them cracking your neck And your back sometimes your shoulders Your hips Maybe your ankles or something like this

But then I'll crack them ankles boy Talk to the chiropractor Yeah And then also then you go into other stuff like soft tissue, you know, like this like myofascia release therapy, which I actually really like. Yep. I actually like the backcrack stuff too. When I was young, I played football and every once in a while I'd get like a hit.

And then when I do jumping jacks, I would have to cough because it felt like my spine was like, I don't know. Yeah, hitting my lungs or something like this. And then I go to the carpenter and it helps. Yeah. or it cures it essentially. So it's like a chiropractor pretty good. And then, you know, this is when I was maybe 12 years old. And then, you know, life time goes on or whatever, you look more into it.

And then certain people are saying, oh, yeah, it's nothing. Oh, yeah, it helps. And you just don't know. So the founder of chiropractic, Andrew Taylor, still was a pretty nefarious character, actually. And so some of the foundational ideas of chiropractic. which is vertebral adjustment for central nervous system function are pretty well debunked. However, there are some skilled manual therapists who go through chiropractic because it allows them to obtain a license to manipulate people.

And some of those individuals are extremely skilled. Like I've met people who were like really, really good at neuromuscular therapy. and like truly helped me. And I've also met some people that basically hang out of a, uh, drive through window and do like a whack and crack on anybody who says like, you know, I got any little ache,

you know, whatever housefly landed on the left side of my neck and they're like, oh, vertebra or I have cancer. Let me adjust your vertebra or obesity. Oh, it's your sacrum out or it's like the answer for everything. I don't care what profession you're in.

If the thing you do is the answer for all that ails the world, then I don't trust you as like an immediate point. But chiropractic as a whole, like the foundational idea is pretty well debunk, but there are practitioners within that umbrella who do have valuable skill sets. Yeah. Yeah, I go to a guy name, I haven't been in a while. Chad Wells, he kind of knows all of our people. Yeah, yeah.

It's called, I think it's called like the league chiropractic, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, he's the one who introduced me to like real mild fascia release stuff. And I went in with my lower back jammed it up. Like I was out. Wait, this recent? No, no, no. This was like the, how do you say the introduction to the real deal? See what I'm saying?

And this is maybe like 15 years ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago. Anyway, I was out. I was like, brother, this is like a good six month. Oh, damn. Scenario. Oh, yeah, big time. So I went in. And he was like, yeah, we'll do a bunch of stuff.

He's like, you know, doing the cracks and stuff like that. I'm like, cool. And then he did the mile faster release. And it was like, boom, it was like, I wouldn't say it was uncomfortable, but you could, it was like work. It wasn't like some. Right. Presto, you're cured.

You know, it was like some stuff, some therapy, deep therapy. So I'm like, all right. And he's like, how does it feel now? I was like, oh, dang, it's actually getting better in front of my very eyes. Is I'm saying? He's like, all right, well, let's do it again and do it again. It took maybe like, I don't know, 15 minutes or so, which is kind of long for doing that, that stuff he did both sides and brought he cured it that day. I said bro, when can I go back to

training? He's like, well see how it feels tomorrow. I was like bro, tomorrow. I'm thinking like freaking two months from now, you know, after eight more of it. He's like, no, no, no, just see how it feels or whatever. And brought that thing was cured. Yeah. I was like, okay, this is like legit. So every time I get injured to the point where I'm like, oh yeah, this is going to be a long evolution. As far as recovery goes, I go to him. He cured every time. I've definitely had good. Well, Dr. Mick, unfortunately, he died. He got cancer, but he was a chiroprose. and a jit-to-black belt and just a freaking great dude but he would adjust everyone for free at my gym like it was freaking awesome but he he would always just hook it up and i would you know

i'd be like to have some weird neck thing or some weird back thing and he would he would handle it it would always feel good and then there was another guy you remember that guy named robert garcia bro he was early in and i got my arm straightened out excessively one time And dude, like he, same thing. Like before my very eyes was healing it, you know, 70% healed in one session. And he would do, he would do somewhere he would like hold here and then like press it down. I guess it's my old fashioned. But damn, that shit worked good.

And he, he worked for, I want to say it was Oscar de La Jolla. He was like Oscar de la Jolla's guy. And by the way, like he was. was part of that camp and part of that crew. And so, like, he didn't need to do anything else besides take care of that dude. But that's how good he was. He was so good that he could just heal you on the spot. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That stuff is good. Right on, man. Good info. Those are your two questions? My two questions. Cool. Right on. Awesome. Rob, any, any final thoughts, bro? Uh, no. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Good chat with you guys.

Right on, man. Well, thanks for coming out. Thanks for writing this book and sharing these lessons with everybody and really most important for me is thanks for all that you do to help out the boys so really appreciate it man my pleasure good talking to you you too and with that rob wilson has left the building leaving us with some good knowledge keep an eye on the dashboard of your longevity your performance longevity keep you're on the dashboard make sure you keep your your mind right, keep moving and keep the good fuel

coming on board. One thing I can recommend really strong when it comes to fuel. Sure. This jaco fuel. Hey, check it out.jofuel.com. We've got everything that you need. We've got protein.

We've got ready to drink protein. We got powder protein. We've got new flavors. We got root beer. Just came out. Root beer float. We got coffee and donuts, which, by the way,

my wife, Big H. Yeah. She says coffee and donuts is her favorite flavor. Okay. So, you know, we're just saying we got protein. We got energy drinks. We got hydration drinks. We got joint warfare for your joints.

We got super krill for your whole damn system. Time war. That's what we're doing. We got everything that you need. Joccofield.com. Check out joccofield.com. Somebody posted the other day a fake. They had a fake greens.

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And then you don't have to worry about it. You're a type of person, echo Charles, finger pointing at you. Yeah, sure. You're a type of person, this has happened to you factually. I remember it. You run out of this. You run out of freaking joint warfare. Yeah.

You run out of krill oil. No reason for that. That's why we got the subscription service. Go subscribe. We got what you need. Joccofield.com. Also, you can get it at Walmart. Wawa, vitamin shop.

GNC, military commissaries, Afees, Haniford, dash stores in Merrifern in Maryland, Wakefern, ShopRite. H.E.B. down in Texas, you might see a wall

of Jock Fuel down there. Meyer up in the Midwest, you might see a wall of Jock Fuel there. Wegman, you might see a pallet on the floor. Harris Teeter Publix you're going to see a wall grab something lifetime fitness shields and small gyms everywhere if you want to bring this amazing product into your facility email jf sales at joccoville.com and we got you covered also we talked about jihitsu today and

like simply put rob wilson said if there's one thing you're going to do in your life let it be jiu jitsu did he say that not exactly but he hinted at. That's the message I got. The message I got to. So we're training jihitsu. That means you're going to need a ghee. It means you're going to need a rash guard.

It means you're going to need some training shorts. Go to OriginUSA.com and get a ghee and training shorts and a rash guard that is made with freedom here in the United States of America from 100% American made materials. Also, also you can get jeans. You can get boots. You can get hoodies, t-shirts, boots. I already said that. Belts. belt wallets wallets

those boots are socks just kind of everything yeah everything those Chelsea boots yeah you like those yeah I gave them I gave mine to carry

yeah good for him I guess yeah well now they got black ones I might have to re-engage there's black Chelsea boots those are really good because you know a red or whatever what what colors that

yeah those like rust or something yeah kind of a reddish brownish yeah reddish brownish that draws a lot of attention you know what I mean for me I'm not used to that kind of attention based on clothing

so that's not really my thing but now that they have the black Chelsea boots might be able to hook it up OriginUSA.com check it out speaking of freedom discipline equals freedom look we wearing discipline equals freedom we're representing

where you can get the shirts and hoodies and socks a bunch of other stuff is jocco store dot com. New discipline equals freedom shirt, new one coming out, probably another four weeks I'll give it.

But it's in motion. Also, 4th of July, Independence Day shirt. It's coming out, or it's coming out in a day or two. Boom, check down on. Anyway, jocco store.com. Also the short locker subscription scenario. We like subscriptions.

You know what I'm saying? We like scenarios. We love scenarios. New design every month. You can sign up for that on jocco store.com. as well also Colorado craft beef and primal beef.com check them out you need steak you hear me say that today yeah we need protein we know that we got two forms of protein steak and milk go to joccofield.com get milk go to primalbeef.com or

Colorado craftbeef.com and get steak there you go you got all the protein you should be drinking what do you say you should have 12 grams of protein for every one group one gram of body weight you have Jeff. That's what we're doing, man. Look, we got beef sticks. We got jerky. We got just flank steaks, hamburgers, hot dogs.

It's all in there, and it's all freaking awesome. Awesome stakes from awesome people. Primalbeef.com, Colorado Craftbeef.com. Also, subscribe to the podcast. Also, check out Jocko Underground, where we can go off the rails a little bit because no one can keep us on the rails there. Yeah. You know, so it's just there.

It's $8.18 a month. If you can't afford that, we still want you to join us in the Underground. Email assistance at jocco underground.com. Also, we have YouTube channels. Also, books. Obviously, the book of the day. Rob Wilson, it came out today, today, which is, what's the date today? June 17th.

It came out today. June 17th, 2025. Check engine light. real good guidebook for your health, your mind, your body. So check it out. Check it out. Engine Light by Rob Wilson. Also, I've written a bunch of books.

Hey, Dave Burke has a book coming out. Good deal, Dave. Did you pre-order it yet? No. Okay. I'm assuming that he's going to hand deliver it to my house. Signed, by the way. So, you know, I don't have pre-ordered.

Okay. I guess that's how we support our friends. Tell them to drive to our house. Okay. And deliver us the thing that we're, you know, trying to have. Trying to get into the world. You think I'm off base on that one? Think you way off face.

Order a case of them. Good tip. For you and your family. Good tip. Need to lead by Dave Burke. Also, I've written a bunch of books. Kids books, by the way. Some people are surprised that I've written kids books.

Why is that? Because I look like a Neanderthal. Maybe. Kind of, yeah. Kind of. I think it's more than kind of. Can a Neanderthal write about children? Well, let's think about it.

Technically, Neanderthals had to have children. Yep. Crow-Magden man had to have children. And maybe, just maybe, they had some understanding of how those children could be moved forward and correct way in the world. So maybe if you get the book Way of the Warrior Kid or any of the books from that series, you'll be able to help your kid move forward properly in the world. Check those out. Also, Mikey and the Dragons. A lot of people say it's the best kid's book ever written.

Yeah, I could see why they would say that for sure. I know some people cried when they read it. Maybe, maybe not. I mean, hey, you know, I could see how that could happen to you. Then again, some people cry easier than other people. Yes, they do.

So check out those books if you want. Also, Eshalonfront. We have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. We have the muster in Orlando, but it's not until December. But these events sell out. So if you want to come to the muster,

go to echelonfront.com. Also, if you want to come to council, if you want to come to battlefield, if you want to go to the women's assembly, go to echelonfront.com. Also, if you want to have leadership training inside your organization to help you overcome whatever problems you might have through leadership,

go to ushonfront.com. We will handle it for you. Also, we have an online training academy. It's called the Extreme Ownership Academy to learn the skills of leadership, which will help you in every, aspect of your life. Go to extreme ownership.com for that. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families. You want to help Gold Star families. Check out

Mark Lee's mom. Mom and Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Also check out Micah Fink's organization, Heroes and Horses.org. Also, Jimmy May's organization beyond the brotherhood.org. And also, I talked about today the Navy SEAL Foundation. They've done a ton to support me and my brothers over the years, and they continue to do that to this day through things like you heard about today. So that is navy sealfoundation.org if you want to support them.

If you want to connect with us on the interwebs, Rob Wilson, he's at Wilsonhealth and performance.com. He's also got Instagram at check engine light, and he's got a substack, which is check engine light. And for me, you can check out jocco.com and then on social media,

I'm at joccoe Willink. Echoes at echo Charles. Just be careful, because that is a system that has been engineered to steal away your sleep from you. You know?

Just steal it away. So be careful. Thanks once again to Rob Wilson for joining us tonight. Thanks for sharing your lessons and thanks for caring, taking care of my brothers in the teams. Thanks to all the uniform personnel out there.

that sacrifice. Sometimes their lives, sometimes their limbs. They always sacrifice their time, and they often sacrifice their health, health to keep us safe. So thank you to all of our personnel out there in uniform, making those sacrifices. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement,

firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all other first responders. Thank you for your sacrifices to protect us here at home. And to everyone else out there, Just listen, your body ain't a rental car. It's not on lease.

You can't turn it in when it gets old. You can't just run up the mileage and upgrade to a new model. It doesn't work that way. You have one. So pay attention to the dashboard. Read the check engine lights and keep that thing maintained. That's all I've got for tonight. And until next time, this Echo and Jocko.

Out.