Mark Bell's Power Project - Barbells DON'T Build Athleticism: Strategies For Developing Speed, Strength, & Power - Fred Duncan || MBPP Ep. 1099

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

In Episode 1099, Fred Duncan Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about strategies for developing speed, strength, and power, why the act of "Play" in training can be productive, and how being dogmatic with barbell movements isn't going to build more athleticism.   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜 ➢https://nadsunder.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order!   🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎 ➢https://emr-tek.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Become a Stronger Human - https://thestrongerhuman.store ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/JoinUNTAPPED ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/ ➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

For whatever reason, there's just some people that are springy and poppy and mobile. They have a level of movement efficiency and coordination that the average person just doesn't have. Let's go back to Patrick Mahomes for a second. It looks like a lot of what they're doing is play. That goes back to the ecological dynamic framework, just constantly allowing the athlete to problem solve. A lot of people really feel that if you're trying to develop an athlete and you're

trying to develop some explosiveness, a lot of Olympic lifting is where you're gonna be able to garner some of that. They're not on the high force end of the spectrum and they're not on the high end of the velocity spectrum. So they're a little bit more in the middle. I don't have any problem with them. They are simply GPP.

Any barbell exercise, any weight room exercise is a means to an end. It's not the end itself. So people that get too caught up in sumo deadlifts or barbell back squats or Olympic lifting, they're losing sight of the overall picture, which is can the athlete play their sport? No, I'm liquid or you're good to go. You're gonna raw dog it. Nice. I like it. Yeah. We don't like protection either. Nobody does. Going raw. All right, Fred, welcome to the show. Thank does. Going raw.

All right, Fred, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming out all the way from Buffalo, New York. Not too far from your hometown. I really appreciate it. I think you have a lot of great content on Instagram. That's what caught my eye. And I was like, you know what? We gotta get this guy on the show and we gotta figure out,

you know, how can people be more athletic and what are some keys to, I guess, like building some athleticism? It is hard to figure out sometimes because it does seem like there's just people that are like born with it. But a lot of times, even when you look into the history of someone who you think quote unquote is born with it,

they have like a decent history of some sort of athletics, you know, most of the time, almost every single time they're gonna say, oh yeah, I played soccer for six or seven years, or maybe some sort of background. But for whatever reason, there's just some people that are springy and poppy and mobile, and I'd like to dive into some of that

with you today. I guess first off, like what's, what are some of the commonalities that you've seen with athletes that are maybe just a little bit, or maybe they're predisposed to being maybe a little bit better off than the next guy? Yeah, so I think what you'll notice over time is that really great athletes make exceptional things

look just easy and kind of effortless and fluid. So if you're watching the NFL, you see a guy jump up and make a one-handed catch, it looks almost effortless, but you know that that's an extremely difficult thing to do. So they have a level of movement efficiency and coordination that the average person just doesn't have.

So they're able to use movement to solve problems in their sport, on the field, wherever it is, without really having to think about it too much. And so that's like this whole difference between the conscious brain and the unconscious brain. Most movement would resign in the unconscious brain. So you're not thinking too much about it. Then when we start coaching people,

we start giving them all these cues, right? And it becomes so analytical and they're thinking constantly. And then that's when you see like really awkward, stiff movement. And so like, how do we get them to become competent without having to think too much? Because that's what those really great athletes do.

They just do, they just do it, right? The other thing I would say is that, obviously from a genetic standpoint, there are some people that have what they would refer to as like a speed gene, or there are people with different anthropometrics that give them better leverages, or they're more elastic than others. There was a really interesting study on Werner Gunther.

Are you familiar with him? I am. The famous shot putter. Yeah, if you can look up some clips of him, everybody will know who it is right away when they see him. What was the name? Werner Gunther. It's like the most famous clips on Instagram.

Everybody has- Six foot eight, like 300 pounds. Yeah, and he's just like hurdle hopping and bounding. He's just an absolute freak. They did a biopsy on him and they found what a high proportion of type two or fast twitch fibers he had. Then they also biopsied him after he retired.

And what they saw was that there was a reduction in the type two fast Twitch. And they started to shift more back towards type one. And so we see how there he is, just an absolute unit. We'll have to show you after the show, but there's a thing over there from Cal State Fullerton. My friend, Andy Galpin did a muscle biopsy on me. And I'm so disappointed that it was after I was retired

from powerlifting for a long time, but I basically have the type two muscle fibers of a rhinoceros. I surpassed the rhinoceros by like 20% or something like that. So again, I wish they would have tested, you know, during when I was still training as heavy, but that was, I think,

like there's not a lot of testing that's done that's like this. And who knows what this guy's history was, but I'm open about performance enhancing drugs. And so Andy Galpin's like, this is the first time we've ever really studied the muscle tissue of somebody that's been on anabolic steroids for a long time.

Yeah, I mean, it's invasive, right? So that's why you're probably not gonna see very many studies done like that. I can imagine. I mean, and you have, again, you gotta get permission and you have to go through. I think he was almost like 70% in the tissue they studied at least Fast Twitch.

And so that's like, again, not everybody can necessarily even reach that level, but it also does show you that your training can enhance it and can influence it a little bit. So he actually may not have been the genetic freak that so many people assume that he was. Again, I don't know, but to see it drop off the way that it did after he retired, I'm sure that there are people

that had a higher proportion than him. So there is a genetic component, but then all we can do from a modifiable standpoint is we could train and we can try to recover from our training. So yeah, typically you'll see great athletes, they're extremely efficient movers, they make the hard look easy,

and oftentimes they have, you know, a predisposition towards whatever traits or qualities that sport requires. So Usain Bolt was just exceptionally elastic. You know, he literally, the ground was a springboard. He just- Tall and strong. Yep, he just got off and on the ground so quick.

We just really haven't seen anybody else like that. But then there's guys like, I was a big Kobe Bryant fan. And Kobe did have a good vertical and he obviously was an exceptional athlete, but he wasn't necessarily as like freakishly gifted as like LeBron James. Or even Jordan.

Jordan was a pure mutant. Right, so a lot of Kobe's was just through work and just dedication and trying to squeeze out every last bit of juice that he could from his genetics. So like I said on a post before, like genetics loads a gun and then training will fire it. So you can't control who your parents are. That would be the only way that you could go back

and change those genes. All you can do is train. So the problem sometimes with looking at how the greats train is that you aren't one of those people, you know? So- Might be despite themselves. Oftentimes it is because they can get away

with poor programming. Sometimes it's also just a mental capacity of like they are, they're building like a lot of mental resilience by doing A, B, and C, and maybe those things aren't necessarily optimal for the field. Right, and like, so I grew up wanting to be Arnold. It never happened.

I did his workout. Hey, those arms are looking pretty damn good though. They're not, they're not nearly what I thought I was gonna be, and I was like, you know, doing 20 sets of chest. And I did everything he said to do in his encyclopedia of bodybuilding. That side chest pose that he has

where his chest is just like. It looks like a fucking balloon. It's insane. His waist is all tiny. And I'm like, why don't I look like this? Well, guess what? You're not Arnold. You know, that's what worked for him.

And it was a great learning experience for me and I tried it and I did everything he said in that book. Did you ever talk to him and be like, bro, let's go on. I worked the Arnold Classic one year and I met him but I did not blame him for my lack of chest and- Dude, I tried and tried and nothing took. Yeah, I guess, you know, we end up in this kind of category

of like nature and nurture, right? Like I've been hearing like more recently, especially when it comes to track, they're like, we haven't really improved much, you know? And they talk about the finite amount that we have improved like in the a hundred meter. I forget exactly what the differences of times were, but I know that like Jesse Owens ran

a pretty goddamn good time and it was a million years ago. And then they talk a lot about the track and they talk a lot about the footwear and just how these athletes are getting faster. And you're like, are we getting better through like the training that we have or is it more like just technology pieces are getting better? That's an interesting point. I mean, and you look at flow, Joe ran a 10, four, nine, that record still hasn't been touched. Now I made a video on that and everybody got angry because they were like, so it

wasn't wind legal and she never got drug tested. And there's all, you know, look, I didn't hand her the metal. I didn't time it. I'm just telling you that was, it's still the record. Um, Usain Bolt, nobody really has been close to his. I didn't hand her the medal. I didn't time it. I'm just telling you that was, it's still the record. Usain Bolt, nobody really has been close to his. It's, you know, again, there is that genetic component where there's just gonna be some people

that their body really aligns with being able to execute that sport skill. What I would say is that our training has improved so that maybe we're bringing up a lot more people to like a really high level. Doesn't necessarily mean that all of those people are going to supersede whoever like the greatest in that position.

Yeah, I agree with that. That is actually an interesting statement. I haven't heard anybody have that spin on it. I think somebody one day will beat Flojo's record and somebody will beat Usain's record, but it's going to take the right specimen and the right person to do it. I was gonna make a bad joke.

I was like, whoever's gonna break Flo Joe's record is gonna have to have some set of balls on them. Oh, you guys are terrifying. I mean, that'll do it though. Yeah, she's used to smoke everybody, unbelievable. Like it's not even, it's not even, and there's again, there's nobody today that's running that. Now, again, there's gonna be a lot of asterisks around that,

but it's the record. So, you know, yes, I think that training has advanced, but I also think that there's an over-reliance on tech and data today. And often what I say is that the reliance on tech, you start to overvalue everything that you measure, which leads to blind spots in the things that you don't measure, right?

And that's like the centerpiece of what a black swan event is. It's the most important things would be the things that you aren't looking for and the things that you can't see. And so we take all this data, we take all the data from technology and we focus so much on it

that I think that we leave a lot of blind spots around it. You're looking at the paperwork, you're looking at the data and saying, hey, you shouldn't play for the next six minutes of the game because you took too many jumps. And it's like, this is the last six minutes of the game and it's the finals. So I should probably be on a damn core, right?

Right, like it takes, you know, I like to think of coaching as an art and a science. And it takes like the art away from it where it's strictly just becomes data. And again, that creates, when you're just focused on that data, you assume that that data is evidence and you then overvalue it and you start to create risk asymmetries

in the things that you aren't measuring and the things that you aren't even looking for. And then people coach less, right? Because we have all these people now that are being hired because they can run a force plate or because they're familiar with tech but they don't actually know how to fucking coach. So there's all these sports science guys, right?

But at the end of the day, you're not working with a force plate, you're actually working with a person. So are you able to actually work with a human being, which goes far beyond their data on a force plate? And I think that's what's missing in a lot of circles today too, is that we aren't good communicating sometimes with athletes, being able to connect with them.

Like I would rather talk to my athlete, see how they're feeling, see how the movements feel, then hook them up to a force plate all the time, right? Like it's just one is building relationship and being able to actually have an open communication with that person. And the other one is just like relying on a number. And so I think we're too reliant on that.

I think we've gotten away from coaching, which I think is really important. I think a lot of times, you have this vision of how you're gonna train people and what it's gonna be like. And you might be anxious and fired up and excited. And you're like, I'm gonna teach these kids how to like deadlift and do these different things.

But then you start to realize the logistics of the whole thing. Like the one kid's there, you know, 15 minutes early, the other kid's a couple minutes late and so on, right? And then so you start to kind of think, well, maybe like realistically, maybe I need to train these kids differently and maybe I need to actually talk to them

and see what's fitting them and what feels good. And that's what you mentioned to me with the warmup that you had me do. You're like, yeah, just everybody that I put through this, they just said they felt better when they did the workout. And so that's what we do. I mean, sometimes it's those really simple things that have really meaningful impact

and you only find that out by actually listening. And that's why I think it's important to let your clients or your athletes have skin in the game because they are as much a part of the process as you are as the coach. So I have really good relationships with all of my athletes. They feel very comfortable saying anything to me. So that way we can go into every situation

with both of us being very transparent, honest, you build So that way we can go into every situation with both of us being very transparent, honest, you build trust that way and that's what leads to good sustainable coaching and development over time is building that relationship. Are we able to, I'll say simplify what athleticism is based off of like maybe listing out pillars of athleticism, you know, to help coaches or maybe even athletes focus on certain things when it comes to their training. So I think when you, the way that I phrase it is that sports are the ultimate contest of movement. And when you break down movement or you break down an athlete, typically we're gonna look at, okay,

what are their bio motor abilities? You know, their speed, strength, stamina, skill, suppleness. You could throw power in there if you wanna break it up even more. And then you'll look at each sport and like each one might require a little bit more of one than the other. Like an offensive lineman might be more strength-based

and then you'd say a soccer players, there's gonna be more of an aerobic component there. But you're gonna look at those biomotor abilities, although I suggest that you don't just look at them in a vacuum. Then you have to look at their ability to, all of those require some kind of coordination as well. And then you have to look at the actual sporting skill.

So like the technical aspect of the sport, technical, tactical, and then psychological. So all of those things have to blend for you to make an athlete. But at the end of the day, all of those things like speed, strength, power are just expressions of force. I mean, even your aerobic conditioning is, is an

expression of that in some capacity. So really what we're looking at with an athlete is how efficiently can I help them, can I help them move and to feel good while they move so that they can have the most efficient movement possible to best express their sporting skill, whatever that skill is. The capacities that we build in the weight room hopefully transfer to that,

but we can't even say with certainty that they always do. And like we talked about when you are warming up, you have great strength, right? But can you effectively utilize that strength in movements with higher velocity? Not everybody can. So at some point, we now have to shift our focus. The focus is not increasing your strength anymore.

It's how can we best utilize your strength to increase your power or your rate of force development? That becomes more of an important aspect of your training. Andrew has a young son and he wants to turn him into a mutant. He wants to put him in the laboratory. What are some things we could torture Aurelius with? Like honestly, what are some things

that you would encourage a parent to kind of show their kids or demonstrate to their kids if their kid is interested in sports. Number one is just expose them to as many different sports skills and movements as possible. Build that movement library or literacy so that they are able to utilize any kind of a movement to produce a solution to a motor task.

So, and again, the broader that is, the more of a foundation they have in terms of movement, the better it's gonna be in the future. So like, if you look at somebody like Patrick Mahomes when he plays, he's doing a lot of things out there that you don't see people do very often. Well, how do you build something like that? How do you build creativity in an athlete?

You have to build it through play. You don't build it through rigid drilling of the same things over and over. Now that doesn't mean that there's no merit in that. You have to practice your skill, but at the same time, you have to have the ability to go off script sometimes and play with movement a little bit. And play is when kids learn the best.

It's when anybody learns best. So you think about if you gave a little kid an iPad or a phone, how quickly they can figure out how to use it. If you gave a six-year-old that's never used one before, an iPad or a phone, not only can they not use it, but they get visibly frustrated by their inability to use it. This damn thing, You blame the device.

Yeah. That's what you do. Part of it is because they're not as curious as the kid. And part of it is because they're not viewing it as just playing around with something. And they don't like to make mistakes. They want the results right away. Of course. The young kid learns by making mistakes. They're curious. They're just going to fuck around with the phone and figure it out. by making mistakes, they're curious. They're just gonna fuck around with the phone

and figure it out. So the problem with early specialization and all the sport skill work that kids do today as we move away from play, we move away from exploring movement. We gotta cut way back then, because we gotta really, I gotta whistle and we gotta real regiment.

He's not allowed to go down the hallway without doing ladder drills. That's just the way it is. Yeah. I hate the letter. And I specifically said ladder because I've been hearing a lot of coaches dislike it, but anyways, it's fine for coordination with younger kids. But I want to touch upon one thing that you did say, like, let's go back to Patrick Mahomes

for a second. I believe that he's been with his strength coach for a really long time. I don't wanna say like I heard like eighth or ninth grade or something like that. And at least in videos that I've seen, who knows exactly how someone trains specifically, but in videos I've seen, it looks like a lot of what they're doing is play.

It looks like a lot of it's very tedious and there's all that stuff too. But it looks like because they've been working together for so long, it looks like they understand that creativity is such a huge part of his game. And I've seen clips before where they've shown Pat Mahomes almost get injured on a particular play where he got yanked down in some weird position

and then they can go to like video footage of him training through some of these odd, awkward positions and stuff like that. So what are some of your thoughts on that? I have, I would say that I have two schools of thought on that. My first would be that those make for good videos. And I don't think it's a crazy reach to take that stance.

Like I think, you know, being exposed to some of those movements could potentially make you less likely to suffer an injury. And at the same time, I don't believe that they're one-in-one. Because- You can't connect the dots that specifically. Again, I think it makes for good content. I think it's a nice idea.

But I think that when you throw the competitive event into the equation, so you throw in the emotional aspect, the psychological aspect, another person hitting you, the force, the velocity, all of those things combined, I think it gets too far away from that drill that you did in the gym. It can be a little absurd. Again, I can't, none of us could prove that, right?

So this would simply just be my opinion based on, sometimes you see an athlete do something that they've done a million times and nothing happens. And then they do it one time and they tear an Achilles, they tear an ACL. The movement didn't necessarily change, but something changed, right? Whether it was an accumulation of fatigue over time,

whether they were overly stressed, because when people are stressed, they do not adapt and recover from their exercise as well. So maybe we did expose them to all those movements, but they had poor sleep for the last three nights and their girlfriend broke up with them and they got hurt. Right? So it's like, I think you should explore movement.

I think that's important. I think they should be comfortable in a lot of different joint angles and positions. I don't know if that's necessarily a vaccine to what occurs in the NFL, just because of how high those forces and velocities are. But again, I do think it's beneficial for them to experience different movements.

And also if the athlete enjoys some of what you're doing. So if the athlete enjoys throwing the ball off of one foot, then maybe you let them throw the ball off of one foot and they're right-handed, but they enjoy throwing with their left here and there. It's like, why not let them explore and play? Would that be something that you do with some of your athletes?

Do you try to bring in stuff that like, I thought, I've always felt this is a valuable, uh, lesson from Westside Barbell was from Louis Simmons, where we did such a wide array of exercises that sometimes he didn't know where you were in terms of like what it meant to lift a particular weight on a particular exercise. And I think maybe there could be some value in some sport where I say, hey, you know what? I want you to do this exercise, but we're gonna do it totally different today.

Today you're gonna do it with a sled behind you and so forth. And now Andrew and I don't know like what's a good time. You know, and so now we're more playful, we're having more fun with it. And you're like, all right, next time we're gonna see if we can kind of improve that. And it gets more serious maybe over time.

So I incorporate play with a lot of the younger athletes but we like, I might take it to the extreme. We have like a basketball hoop, we have footballs in there, we have different and in between some of our strength work, I want them to get away from their sport. I want them to do something different. So whether they're throwing left-handed

or they're guarding each other one-on-one or they're playing a pig, like they're doing something, they're having fun. In terms of the drills being different, I think again, there is value in leaving it open and letting them problem solve a little bit. So there was, I'm not super well versed in hockey, but there was a hockey player who I believe

they called him the Magic Man. I don't wanna mispronounce his last name, but he used to play in like felt boots. And the way that they structured his training was like, they would do some of their drilling and then it would just be open play. And the boots that they played in,

he had to adjust the way that he would skate because it wasn't as easy to stop. So he started to develop his anticipation skills more. And again, his coach was very big on just not intervening all the time and letting these kids just kind of figure things out on their own. He eventually went on to have a really good career

and be called the magic man. And people would say he did things that they had just never seen before. And then you look at what Brazil does with soccer. They play this informal game where they don't often wear shoes, where they're sometimes playing like on really hard surfaces. They have no like age range.

Like a young kid could be playing with 25, 30 year olds in this game. And it's not necessarily being coached all the time. That's a place that produces some of the best soccer players in the world. You look at America, we have skill coaches, we have travel teams, we have the high school team, but we don't actually have anything like that, right?

So if you're not playing with shoes, that's gonna alter the way that you play a little bit. Or if you're playing on a harder surface, or if you're playing with a harder ball, if you're playing up in age, you have to play different. You have to anticipate things differently. So when we look at any movement or any sport, everybody goes through a,

what's called a perception, cognition, action cycle. So they have to kind of perceive the environment around them. You have to think about it, and then you have to act. Elite athletes do this faster than non-elite athletes. So their ability to read, anticipate and make judgments, they do that faster than non-elite athletes. Some of that might be genetic, I'm not really sure. I don't think it's an area that's been studied really well,

but I think part of it too would be having experiences where they don't have somebody telling them what to do all the time. And now it becomes you figure out what you have to do. So, you know, the adaptation is just you change the environment and the organism adapts, right? So for the hockey player, he changed what he was skating in. It forced him to try to read the defense

a little bit better. So the soccer players again, well, shit, this really hurts barefoot, right? So I'm gonna have the defense a little bit better. So the soccer players again, well shit, this really hurts barefoot, right? So I'm gonna have to play a little bit differently. And you start to build that literacy in different movements, anticipation and skill. So I think it's important for people to break out

of the really static drilling that they do all the time and the over coaching and still work in periods where it's just fun and it's play and we let them problem solve without us intervening all the time. Do you guys think that there could potentially be like a, um, like concern for lack of intention when it comes to play, right? Like, cause typically if there's a structure of some sorts in training, it's like, okay, we have some intention for the day or whatever, but if it's play,

how do you still keep an intention on something that's just straight up fun? Well, I think the point is that you're not trying to do that. I think, I don't remember that- You're almost like not trying, period. Yeah, and so it doesn't, it's not work anymore. You know, I think back to before I owned a facility, my favorite thing in the world to do was to train.

When I owned, opened the facility and I'm there all the time and it's my job, it is no longer my favorite thing to do. It doesn't mean that I don't keep it in my life and that I don't have periods of time where I like it, but it used to be the highlight of my day. And sometimes now it's like the lower part of my day. It was everything to you at a certain point.

I mean, growing up, it's like when I'm just watching Stallone and Arnold, John Claude Van Damme, and like that was all I wanted to do. If I could go lift for three hours, that's all I wanted to do. If I could go lift for three hours, that's what I wanted to do with my free time. Then it became a job and I still like it. And I like, I'm gonna go to the gym, people are gonna ask me a lot of questions.

Or if I'm in my own gym, sometimes I just wanna get the fuck out of there because I'm there all day long. And so it became more work, whereas before it was just play. And there was a researcher that said that children learn a lot, they learn a lot faster during play

than during a lesson or when somebody was like leading the play. I forget the exact statistic, but it was a lot faster. It would take a lot less repetitions of something for somebody to learn during play where they're actually curious than when somebody is trying to teach them something.

Yeah, anyone that has a parent, they slip up one time and they say MF'er or something, they say, they curse or whatever it is. The kid will a lot of times just pick that thing right up because more things are caught and not taught. But meanwhile, you taught your son to be polite to his sister or something like that, or not to hit his, and he just does it all the time. But he picks up the one F-bomb that you dropped.

Yeah, they're always listening, and kids are a little bit smarter than you give them credit for. So I grew up as a tennis player, so I initially wasn't. Initially, I played football and baseball and I was very good at both of them, but I hated having a team because I was pretty athletic.

So I was pretty skilled at those sports and they meant a lot to me. So like I bought Arnold's encyclopedia from a garage sale and I was lifting weights when I was like 11, trying to get better at those sports. When you're that age, you have kids that sit in the fucking field and pick grass, right? So I would come home and we would lose games

and I would just bitch and complain. And it got to a point where my mom was like, if all you're gonna do is complain about your teammates, why don't you just play a sport where you don't have any teammates since you're so great? And then you don't have anybody to blame when you lose. So- What a great mom.

That's amazing. Yeah, I mean, she's funny. So she was playing tennis at the time. She's like, why don't you come out and play that? So I tried it. I picked it up relatively quickly and I did enjoy that. I didn't have to rely on anybody else. So in my, where I grew up,

we didn't have a ton of really great players. So it got to a point where if I wanted to continue to get better, I had to go to a prep school. So I- And your stepdad is one of the greatest coaches of all time. He wasn't there yet. So he came a little after. I wish I would have had him earlier

because I wouldn't have been training like Arnold for a sport that requires a lot of acceleration. Was anybody telling you like, you can't body build and like do tennis? No, nobody in that sport even lifted weights back then. I mean, it was like, can you think about back then like Pete Sampras? Andre Agassi did a little bit,

but for the most part, that was not a thing yet. It was in football, but a lot of other sports hadn't really adopted strength conditioning yet. So everybody kind of just thought that I didn't need to do it, and they just thought it was kind of weird. The reason that I liked lifting weights is because I sucked at it.

And it was the only thing, like I could play any sport. You put a sport in front of me, I could play it. I was never, and I'm still not, a great lifter. Ironically, I make a lot of videos about how you don't need to Olympic lift, and it just gets all these people super angry. Cleans and snatches, bro. Yeah, and they hate me.

I'm like their number one enemy. But those were actually the first exercises that I ever learned. And those were the ones that I was actually best at, probably because there is more of an element of coordination. And I was a relatively explosive athlete. But in terms of like the traditional barbell deadlift and barbell squat and barbell bench,

I was never that good at it. And so I had friends who were really good at it. I just couldn't stand how shitty I was at it. So that was like another reason that I wanted to do it. But anyway, I went to a prep school in Florida and when I was there, we would go to school for two hours and then we would play for six. And then I would go and lift weights after.

In that one year, I probably got better than I did in the previous four years, simply because I played more. And we had to play matches more frequently. And during a match, you don't have a coach. So you said play, but you mean play tennis. Yes, yeah. But I was playing matches versus at home,

all we did was drill, and I didn't have as many people to play against. So I went to Florida, every Thursday we would have to play best of five, every weekend I would have a tournament. So I've been given constant opportunities to play and problem solve and lose and figure things out. And so that's what I think we're missing

in a lot of sports today is we don't let people make mistakes, we don't let them learn from the mistakes. Like we're constantly trying to correct those versus looking at them as opportunities to improve and to get better. Yeah, getting your ass kicked is a great way. Is that something that happened when you started going to that prep school?

Oh yeah, I mean, you're like, you go from your town where you're the absolute best. And I was pretty good. I mean, I could have gone pro if I would have decided to stay there. I played against some people that ended up being top 10, top five players in the world. And I belonged on the court with them.

But there were definitely were some periods where like you realize you got a lot of work to do. But that's where you would learn, right? That gave me more insight into what I needed to do than beating people in my hometown. That did nothing for me up to a certain point. Andrew, who was the guy that we had on the show who had that different approach to Jiu-Jitsu?

Oh yeah, Greg Souders with the ecological approach to Jiu-Jitsu. So you think about Sean Strickland. They say that he spars every day leading up to a fight. That goes back to the ecological dynamic framework of just constantly allowing the athlete to problem solve. Now this doesn't mean not to drill though. No, no.

I mean, you wanna do a little bit of both, right? You married the two together. I think we've just gone too far in one direction. I see. Because I think there's still confidence that comes from the drills, right? How much transfer do they have? Like there was a study that looked at

just taking a basketball shot and then taking a shot when there's a defender. It ends up being almost a completely different shot. How much time you spend on the ground, how they're shooting it. So, you know, how much does just taking an empty shot by yourself transfer to when you're in the game? I don't know.

What I would say is that the shot where you're just in the gym builds confidence in your preparation, that you believe that when given the shot, you can make it. And how valuable is that? It's extremely valuable. So I think that that matters, right? Like building that repetition over time to give you confidence to know that when you're in the game,

you can make it, but I don't know if it's, you know, the exact same thing. And I think that's what makes Strickland so difficult to fight against is people always say that they don't really know what he's gonna do, you know? And I think that's because he's relying on seeing what they do to determine what he's gonna do. And he's a master at being able to figure that out

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Throbbing. Vainey. Let's get it. I'd break the table. Let's go back to this Olympic lifting. Spark up some controversy here a little bit. Yeah, I guess a lot of people really feel that if you're trying to develop an athlete

and you're trying to develop some explosiveness for nearly any sport that a lot of Olympic lifting is where you're gonna be able to garner some of that. I've always felt it just to be weird in general for people to get too married to any particular types of exercises because it's my belief that you can get so many results so many different ways and so for me I would be like well

It would be cool if you knew how to do a snatch. It'd be great if you learned how to do some front squats um, but in my own experience of teaching people those kind of movements and but in my own experience of teaching people those kinds of movements and in teaching people powerlifting, how difficult it was just to get someone lined up correctly for a deadlift, which seems like the most basic of exercises was extremely challenging. And then you do end up with a time commitment. And I know some people like, well, that's lazy coaching

and so on and so forth. But again, I do think that there's a lot of ways to end up with a very explosive athlete and they don't always have to include Olympic lifting. What are some of your thoughts on Olympic lifting? I think it's an amazing sport and I enjoy watching it. Like I said, those were the first exercises that I ever learned.

I think that people become too dogmatic in their approach and they don't question things over time once they become comfortable with a certain method or a certain style of training. So when I think about these exercises, they're a little bit more technical than some of the other ones, but they're also, they're not on the high force end

of the spectrum and they're not on the high end of the velocity spectrum. So they're a little bit high force end of the spectrum and they're not on the high end of the velocity spectrum. So they're a little bit more in the middle. So for somebody that wants to maximize every bit of training, I would rather do the exercises that are going to maximize those bits, right? So the force isn't gonna be high enough for it to be a true strength stimulus.

And the speed and the velocity of it aren't gonna be high enough for it to be a true speed stimulus so it's kind of just like that gray zone in the middle. But people that love it, that's you're arguing with their emotional alignment. So you're never gonna change their mind.

It doesn't matter what you show them or what you tell them. The only way you would change that is if you somehow change their emotional alignment. I don't have any problem with them. They are simply GPP. So for any athlete, any barbell exercise, any weight room exercise is a means to an end. It's not the end itself. So people that get too caught up in sumo deadlifts or barbell back squats or Olympic lifting, they're losing sight of the overall picture, which is can the athlete play their sport? Like all you have to do is do whatever they need you to do

that allows them to do what they do and to do it over the course of a season. That's what's most important. If that means you wanna use Olympic lifting, that's great. Do you have to use it? No, and we've shown that. There's plenty of coaches that use them and plenty of coaches that don't use them.

And I think that right there kind of makes the determination for you. If you're comfortable using them and you really enjoy it, knock yourself out, use it. They do take a little bit more time to teach. They are a little bit more difficult for people with injuries, right? So if you work with people long enough,

you have a facility long enough, you're gonna people that come in that have multiple shoulder surgeries, that have broken their wrists, that have injuries where you're gonna have to be able to work away from some of your favorite exercises, just use whatever you feel is best for them. Because again, at the very best,

these are gonna provide indirect transfer. They're too far removed from the sport to have any true direct transfer. They're going to improve some of your biomotor abilities, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna become better. And so what I tell my athletes is that we use the general means to develop general capacities or general development that we hope leads to changes in their technical skill.

But I can't guarantee that, right? I would hope that if we got a little bit stronger in your lower body, I would hope that you could accelerate a little bit better. But at the same time, that acceleration is gonna require, can you express it efficiently, right? Can you operate in the force vectors where we need you to operate?

Can you do it quickly enough? It's not a guarantee. So don't get too married to any form of training. I think that was one of the most important things that Buddy ever taught me, was that none of the stuff in the gym matters that much. The sports skill is what matters the most. Everything else there is just there to support it

and to feed it. But the minute that you start thinking that your job in the weight room is more important than what's going on in the field, you've fucked up and you've lost sight of what your job really is. He's referring to Buddy Morris, legendary strength coach in the NFL for many, many years and university at Pittsburgh. And then has tie-ins with, I mean, the tree of other coaches that have trickled down from

Buddy Morris include like James Smith and Coach House. And I mean, they all sort of know each other. They all share information together. And so they're all people that maybe some people have been listening to the show for a long time, might've heard some of those names. Yeah, and Buddy was a major influence for me because I met him at probably about 19 years old.

Okay, so at 19 years old, I had already been reading bodybuilding stuff, I had been reading Elite FTS, I had been reading Charles Paul Quinn. Then you meet Buddy, and anybody that's ever met Buddy Morris or talked to him, you sit there for 20 minutes, you hear him talk, you're like, what the fuck? This guy is like a wealth of information.

So at 19, you know everything. So I was pretty convinced that I had a real handle on this shit. One conversation with him and I'm like, holy fuck, I don't know anything. And at the time I was going, I was about to go to law school and I did actually go to law school for a year, but I met Buddy and I was like, this could be a job.

I never really thought that it could be a job before, but I also realized how little I knew. And so I wasn't a hundred percent sure at the time. I did end up still going to law school, but I'm sitting there in class and we're reading these fucking boring, dry cases. And I'm thinking in the back of my head that this guy is in a fucking sleeveless

walking around a field, telling guys to sprint and jump and squat. And like, here I am underlining, oh, case, you know, this for, I'm like, oh, fuck, I don't think I can do this. And so I was like, what do I need to do? But he's like, gave me this case of old Russian phys ed articles. And he's like, start here.

And I was like, okay. And that was my introduction to it. But I wouldn't be where I am today without that because I think most people today, they get a little bit of knowledge. They don't have a mentor. They start to make some really definitive statements. People start to listen

and they believe that they're an expert. Well, I was humbled at 19 and I have continued to know since then that I'm not an expert because there's this guy that's been doing it for 45 years now that still learns every single day that, well, I'm not there. So if I'm not there, then I'm definitely nowhere near being an expert.

So again, it's humbling and it taught me that I need to keep learning every single day that that never stops. But really I feel bad for people that, that didn't have an opportunity to have somebody like that, that could be like, that's bullshit. And this is, you know, this is what you actually need to do. And to have that every step of the way has been huge for me. How about for coaches today, like that don't have that interaction

with an amazing coach, right? Like there's a lot of information coming from those that don't also have an awesome mentor. It just seems like there's, could be a lot of bullshit, right? So like navigating those waters, what advice do you have for coaches coming up now? I think if you're one of those waters, what advice do you have for coaches coming up now? I think if you're one of those coaches, I think you need to try to seek out information

from a mentor. And I always recommend that people start with the books that I mentioned earlier. Like you need to read Zatorsky, you need to read Verkhshansky, Dr. Yeses, Charlie Francis. Those guys set the stage for all of us to continue in this field. And even if some of the stuff that they talk about, even if we studied it more,

even if it hasn't held up over the course of time, a lot of it has. And if you don't have that foundation, you can't just skip to the end of the book and expect that we're gonna think that you know what you're talking about. Cause the majority of the time people don't. There's a lot of really generous coaches

in strength conditioning. And that's because they're passionate about the field. There's a lot of people that are willing to talk to you for free and there's some people that are gonna charge you. That's okay. I have paid coaches to have phone conversations with them so that I can learn. That is part of your job as a coach.

Try to learn, try to get better, buy the books, take the course, email between coaches, reach out to them, offer to pay them for their time, but you have to hear from them if you want to position yourself as an expert. Otherwise, honestly, you're just bullshitting. And it's very easy to tell the people that are bullshitting because they never have any mentors.

They never learned from anybody. They don't credit any of the greats. They just pretend like these are all their original ideas. And those are the people like run from those guys because they're gonna flip flop all the time on what they believe. And the people that change their mind too frequently, they show you that they don't think critically enough

before they make a determination about something. That's why they're always changing their mind. And then the people that never change their mind, well, they're just dishonest and they're not committed to learning and evolving and growing with whatever their field or their passion is. So there has to be a little bit of give there. Like you have to be open to learning

and open to changing your mind, but you can't just be hopping on every new fad and you need somebody there to keep you honest. So for me, that was Buddy. So for somebody that doesn't have a mentor like that, reach out to coaches that you admire. I promise you that there's a really good chance they're gonna respond and they're gonna talk to you.

Yeah, a lot of times, what you mentioned earlier about people, they start to talk with a lot of confidence because the feedback they're getting from social media maybe and then they think they're validated and now they are continuing to share that information. But maybe in the background, they're not really continuing to learn.

They're just kind of in this little echo chamber. And something I've noticed with some of the figures that you see, they don't really usually work with anybody. It's usually just kind of like them. And you're like, well, I don't really know. And they might look great and they might perform well and they might be able to do a lot of things, but you're like, well, it's working for that person,

but I don't think they have like a pedigree of a lot of people behind them. That was really the whole reason that I even started to post online a little bit and the reason that I started to have seminars. I have said before that I don't believe that I'm anywhere near Buddy, James, Charlie, Dan Path.

These are guys that have forgotten more than I know. But there are too many people online that aren't working with anybody, that haven't studied under anybody, and that really don't know what they're talking about. So I felt like I could either sit and complain about where the industry was headed, or I could at least try to combat some of that with decent information, decent seminars, decent content, and point people in the right direction,

which is why I have numerous posts on the books I recommend, on places that you can go to learn, people that I've learned from. I would say like every other post, I'm crediting a coach or a sports scientist who helped me learn. And that's been, I think, eye-opening for some other coaches online

because then they go and read their work. And it's like, they see that there's a lot more out there, but there's so many people that teach seminars that literally, like you said, they don't work with anybody. And I didn't even feel, so the first seminar I ever spoke at was the Elite FDS Learn to Train. And I had a column at Elite

that I had been writing for about a year or two. I was so proud of that column because growing up, I was reading Elite all the time. And I thought that these were like gods, these guys that wrote for them. You wrote for them and Buddy Morris wrote for them and Ed Cohen. So I went to that seminar to speak

and John Meadows was speaking, Buddy Morris, Ed Cohen was there, Steve Goggins was there. You're like, I have nothing to say. I was like, just forget my part. I was like, holy fuck. And then you see all these massive motherfuckers in one room and I'm like, I'm out of place. I'm in the wrong place here.

And I don't ever get nervous for public speaking or anything like that. That was like the first time where I was before my presentation, I was like, oh shit. I better bring it because I'm in a room full of giants. And I ended up going up there, I felt like I gave a pretty good presentation.

John came up to me after, I was like, I loved it, that was great, we had a talk. I saw like just how humble all those guys were and just how dedicated they were to just their passion, their field. And that like inspired me to keep going on the path that I was on. I'm like, I'm doing something right

because the people that I respect the most think that I'm worthy of at least sitting there and listening to a presentation. So I still coached a few more years before I ever taught another seminar because I still coached a few more years before I ever taught another seminar because I still felt like I need more hours before I'm like teaching somebody about coaching. I mean, that just makes sense, right?

So, but then, yeah, it's like, you're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem. Like at some point, you need to get out there a little bit because there's too many people that aren't coaching anybody. And so that's when I made the change. It's an interesting industry. Cause like sometimes you're like,

well, that guy only coaches like one person, right? Like a friend of mine, Joey Carbone, his one guy that he coached was Kobe Bryant. You know, so like sometimes you only need one coach, but, or you only need one great athlete, but it is hard to figure out. It's almost like listening to someone who's maybe not in tremendous shape about bodybuilding.

But if that person has the knowledge, that's really what matters the most, right? But then it's easier to critique and be like, well, that guy's not really in that good of shape. How is he able to get all these other people in shape? And I just think you see the same thing with strength and conditioning and coaching. You're gonna have to start somewhere and you're gonna have to have confidence to speak. And I think that's an important thing.

So I wanna encourage people to start to talk, but also have some of your ideas thought out and think like what value are you providing? And then also be really open to criticism because we don't really know, we don't know what causes one thing. Like we could sit here and you and I can analyze a bunch of people and they could do a bunch of box jumps

and there could be a bunch of things that we didn't think about when they were doing their box jumps. We didn't think about how they were getting down from the box and maybe most of their gains came from their landing and we just never even thought of it. So it's very difficult and then also there's like selection and certain people gravitating towards certain coaches

where we always look at like Charlie Francis who had Ben Johnson. It's like sometimes without the athlete, you know, putting the exclamation point on it, it's more difficult sometimes to buy in, but it's easy to buy in when someone has all these fancy athletes, but that does not mean they're a great strength coach.

No, I mean, you could be a terrible strength coach and have a ton of great athletes. The whole point is that you have great athletes. And so they can mask your poor programming and your poor exercise selection. And I have trained some athletes who, no matter what I did, they got better. And they got better at a rate like twice or three times

what other people might take them to do. And so those are the ones that open your eyes a little bit because it doesn't take a lot of effort on your part. It's like they show up and they're just better. So I've had, again, I've had some pro athletes who, it's like every single session, they almost seem to get better. And then I have people who,

it's like every session, almost nothing's happening. We could be running a virtually identical program or very similar. And it just like you're squeezing progress out of this one person and the other one just shows up and they get better. So that's why I always say, when you're looking at the coaches that you admire,

don't just look at their athletes. That's the thing that I care the least about. Yes, I want to know that you coach people, but I'll be able to tell that by reading your work and listening to you talk about training, because number one, you'll acknowledge that you can't possibly know anything, everything. You'll acknowledge that things change over time,

so you are open to being wrong, but I'm most interested in how you view the training process and how you make decisions based on that person. So that's what I liked the most about Charlie Francis is I could read his book and get an idea about why he made the decisions that he made. I'm not using it to copy his volume. I'm not using it to make the next Ben Johnson.

I wanna understand the thought process behind why he chose 95%, why he chose this volume, why he chose that rest interval. The problem that a lot of people have is that they look at science as a binary true false, right? And we got into this whole issue a couple of years ago when everybody said, trust the science. That's the least fucking scientific thing in the world.

Science is actually about not trusting the science. It's about being skeptical of ideas. It's about rigorously trying to refute ideas. Not just- I feel like saying amen. Not just accepting them. Again, that's anti-scientific. So how can we look at things that we believe to be true

and then try to tear those down and push the field forward? So again, it's not true, false. It's something that you're constantly reevaluating. And so I like people that are open enough to acknowledge that this is what I believe now, but that could change. And this is what research shows now, but that could change. And this is what research shows now, but that's very likely to change. I mean, you could look at almost anything in science,

how it has evolved over time. So you don't just look at it right now and say, this is it. You look at it and say, this is what we believe today, but that's probably gonna change in the next five or 10 years. So as long as you're open and willing to change with it, then I'm interested to hear what you have to say. Lastly, I would say, I recommend that most coaches not only read, but write.

Reading is great, but writing forces you to be able to put your thoughts into a clear and concise manner. Everybody can read something and not really process it or understand it. But if you have to write an article for somebody so that they can read it and understand it, that's the next level to truly understanding what you're reading or what you're listening to

on a podcast. I prefer reading because again, it forces me to think. And then I like to write articles because I have to be very concise. And if you can't explain it to somebody well, then you don't really understand it well enough. So I also suggest that not only are you reading and listening to the people that you like,

but try to write it down and try to see if it actually makes sense. And it'll actually help you conceptualize it a little bit. I love what you're saying right there because it's easy to kind of say something in a sentence, maybe sneak out a paragraph that sounds halfway decent, but it's hard to have multiple paragraphs and to really have a fully formed idea

that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And then even when you look back and read it, you might be like, eh, I don't know how right I was on that. I think that shows that you have mastery of it. And I also, when you work with younger athletes, high school or college, you will get some that are gonna ask you why.

Can you explain why you're doing something to them? If you can't, then you probably don't understand it that well and maybe you shouldn't even be using it because you don't know why you're using it. So I think that's been really helpful for me. Writing and also at times working with a younger population that keeps you honest and will ask you a million questions that you have to answer without using

like rate of force development and all of the like technical jargon that we like in strength conditioning. Athletes don't give a shit about that. Can you make them better? Can you explain it to them in an easy enough way for them to understand? Then they'll trust you, then you implement it after that. Can you make them better? Can you explain it to them in an easy enough way for them to understand? Then they'll trust you. Then you implement it after that.

How often have you like blatantly been wrong? Like where an athlete just, you know, you're like, Hey, hey, don't do it. And you're like, Oh, you kind of did that better than, seems to happen sometimes with extraordinary athletes where they have this like genius about them in some particular way. Yeah, I mean, I have tried to move further

and further away from that. Definitely early on in my career, I was probably getting in the way of more athletes than I should have been. Like over-coaching, hovering, maybe a little too much. Over-coaching, too much volume, focusing too much on the wrong things. I made an endless amount of mistakes.

And part of that was like, I would watch Buddy coach all the time, but you have to understand that watching somebody else coach their guys doesn't mean that that's how you coach your guys, because you don't understand what happened before, after. You don't understand how they arrived at that point. So the only way that you figure that stuff out

is just by literally getting in there and doing it. So you have to get on the floor. You have to coach people and you have to fuck up. It's the greatest teacher that you're gonna have. And you have to be able to move on from making a mistake, which I'm totally okay with because I'm very aware that I'm never going to get everything right. And that as long as I take that approach with my athletes, they trust me and they know that

even if I do make a mistake, that I'm going to try to correct it. And so if I get a client that has an injury I've never heard of before, I need to learn about that. And just me reading about it doesn't necessarily give me the knowledge to really help them with it because now I'm gonna try to implement some of those things, but I'm gonna make mistakes and that's where I'm really gonna learn from it.

So yeah, I've had an endless amount of time where I picked the wrong exercise or I picked the wrong drill or I moved somebody up too quickly or I'm too slow or we do too much volume or something. And I have probably had a negative impact, but I've tried to correct that. I can't remember who it was exactly. Maybe it'll come to me later, but we had a conversation with somebody. And what he was saying, if you want to be a really great coach or a really great trainer

in today's day and age, get really, really good at social media and marketing because that's going to put you at the top because you're going to be on top of people's feeds. So along the lines of what you were saying about putting out paper or writing articles and that sort of thing, what's your opinion on putting out content for people to consume? The irony is that I really, I don't like the content but I understand that it's a game. And I understand that in order to get good information

to people, you have to play the game a little bit. So my goal was not to create content. My goal really was just to run my facility and help my athletes get better. Once I started recognizing all of these people using social media to reach people that I didn't have access to, and they were giving them poor information,

that's when I recognized I need to play this game a little bit. Now, at the same time, in order to get, you think about what gets views on social media, controversy, some form of entertainment, like is it funny? Does it elicit some kind of an emotion from somebody? And then lastly, and least popular is probably,

is it educational? Those posts don't do all that well, the educational ones. Those are the ones that I really like. But in order for me to get those seen, I probably have to play a little bit in that controversy, funny, emotional. And say, here's why ladder drills suck. Sure.

And that's an opener, and now you have conversation about it. Right, and so if that's how I can get people in the door, great. If somebody came to me though, and they're like, I wanna be a great coach, I would not say make content. Absolutely not.

Go coach. After you've coached for a little while, go coach a little bit more, and then you can think about making some content. At the same time, please somewhere along your content acknowledge that you've only been doing it for X long, or this is the population that you work with, or not to try to extrapolate everything that you're doing

with everybody else on social media. So the content to me is a double-edged sword. I, it's not my favorite thing in the world, but I do like that it has exposed me to people that I never would have met before. I've been able to connect with coaches all over the world. I've had the opportunity to coach athletes that I never would have met before,

all because I did post content. So from that aspect, I think it's really valuable. But I also believe that there's way too much bullshit on social media. And I don't watch much on social media. Like I make my posts and then I'm done. I'm not really interested. The people that I wanna hear from

are typically not posting that much on social media. So the people that I wanna hear from are typically not posting that much on social media. So the people that I wanna hear from, I might have to call. Like Buddy Morris is not posting on social media. Every once in a while, he might comment on one of my posts. And somebody's cutting up some clips of him talking at like a seminar or something I saw more recently. Yeah, and I have done that too,

because he's been such a great mentor to me that I want other people to be able to experience what I got to experience firsthand. So I'm always gonna put up clips of Charlie Francis and Buddy Morris, because without them, there's no me. And so I need to make sure that people don't forget where this all started. You're trying to get healthier

and you're probably eating chicken for every meal or the same beef cuts for every meal. And trust me, I know how good some cuts can be. You can make anything taste good, but Good Life Protein is the place that you want to go if you want to start adding some different types of meats into your rotation. They got pecania, they got chorizo sausage,

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and at checkout enter promo code power to save 20% off your entire order. Or if you wanna save even more, use promo code power project to save an additional 5% off your build the box. Again, goodlifeproteins.com link is in the description as well as the podcast show notes. These guys have prescriptions and recipes for everything. It's kind of amazing. I remember I tweaked a hamstring and then

somebody sent me like this Charlie Francis protocol for hamstring. And it was like, you would like wrap your leg, and had like what percentage, how tight you would wrap the leg and how long you'd wrap the leg with heat versus cold versus, and some of the information has changed since some of those times, but I was like, holy shit. And then the exercise progression over a couple of weeks,

but there was like literally every detail was in there. Well, back then you didn't have the staff that you might have today. So if he was working with an athlete, he was doing their strength training, he was doing their stretching, he was doing their massage, he was doing their track work.

So you have to wear multiple hats and really you just have to figure shit out. I mean, so that's where those protocols tend to develop. What I would say now is we have more information. So we were talking about isometrics earlier and have you looked into the isometrics very much just in terms of like rehab and tendon health? A bit, yeah.

Okay, so for those that haven't, what's really cool about isometrics is, so first they're the least damaging of the three contractions. So that means that they can be done more frequently. But when a tendon gets injured, it undergoes something called stress shielding. So if you think about a highway, and you think if there's an accident in the middle of it,

and those cars just stay there. What ends up happening is traffic flows around it. Okay, so that's what ends up happening to an injured tendon during your ballistic exercises when it's injured. Over time, right, like now we start over-stressing the area around it, right, and we're not allowing the middle part of the tendon, the injured part, to actually heal.

Where isometrics come into play is they induce something called stress relaxation or creep, where as the duration of the isometric increases, the tension on the outside starts to decrease and we start to get tension on the injured part of the tendon. That starts to rebuild and repair the tendon. That starts to realign the collagen.

Then we can talk about how, okay, it also increases the stiffness of the tendon. So not only could it be useful in rehab, it's also useful in performance because you want a relatively stiff tendon. So the tendon attaches muscle to bone and it's unique because at the bone section, it has to be a little bit more like stiff.

At the muscle section, it has to be a little bit more compliant. Whereas a ligament is bone to bone, just you want it stiff at all times. What's interesting about that is that's one of the reasons why men and women have different injury histories and different injury rates. So women have more estrogen, progesterone and relaxin. That requires, what that ends up happening

is that they have more laxity in the ligaments, which is why you see them be at a much higher rate of ACL tears. Testosterone actually can make tendon stiffer. If a tendon is stiffer than the muscle is strong, you get more muscle pulls. So that's why men are more likely to pull muscles and women are more likely to tear ligaments,

like at a much higher rate. So again, we use the isometrics also from a performance standpoint because we do want some stiffness of the tendon. That is like sort of our bridge for, we know that a stiffer tendon, somebody's potentially gonna have an increased rate of force development.

And that's like the separator in a lot of movements in sports. So we would like to enhance that ability. So I think it's really cool research that's out there. There also was a really interesting study by Keith Barr where they put a rat in a boot for three days and there was no injury at all to the tendon. And what they found was that after three days,

the tendon started to develop tendinopathy just from lack of movement. So that's how impactful immobilization can be. Not only is there gonna be a reduction in muscle, you're actually gonna start to cause deformation of the tendon. And so, you know, just working around it isn't always the go-to move.

Like at some point we actually have to start stressing the injured part of the tendon. So I think isometrics are really cool. That's something I've been trying to learn a lot more about. All of this is subject to change. We could learn more. We might find that there's another method that's a little bit better.

But as of right now, that's where a lot of the research seems to be heading. Sounds like super fascinating because as you're mentioning some of this and you're mentioning, you know, you're basically staying in a position for X amount of time. And if you think about, you go and you had a day,

your normal day and then you lay down on the couch and you go to get up and you have like that stiffness just sort of sits in your body, right? And so it kind of got me thinking, I'm like, wow, I bet you that if I did some of this, I could get out like some of the little creeks and some of the little areas of tension by doing exactly what you're saying,

where you're providing more blood flow and maybe you're getting some of those areas to regenerate. My right knee, I just have a little something that's bugged me for, I don't know, 20 years or so. Just, you know, you just deal with it. I mean, I squatted over a thousand pounds with it, but it's something I could probably get rid of if I was to try some of what you showed me today.

I did the isometric lunge into an eccentric and just did one rep. It was like 30 seconds hold and then 15 seconds lowering and it was brutal. Yeah, so that's the EQI, eccentric quasi isometric popularized by Verkoshansky and SIF. I believe they talk about it in super training, but then again, there's more recent studies on it now

and the different morphological changes that it has in regards to the muscle tendon unit and actually developing work capacity of the tissue too. But we're also strengthening disadvantageous positions. You know, you think about when people lift weights, often they skip the ranges of motion that they're not strong in. So this is where we can use isometrics

because we can put them into some of those positions that aren't gonna feel as unsafe, right? Because the load may not be as high and we're using it almost like to teach that those positions are safe, that you can reach them and to build strength in that specific joint angle and in that range of motion. So that's another area that I think

that they're really valuable is being able to teach positions to people. But yeah, when something hurts, I'm gonna try to get them to do ISOs as quickly as I can. And then we try to move on from there. Once I feel like, okay, we've done enough there, we start to try to layer in some faster velocity movements. Do you work with some people that are just,

like they're not athletes? I do work with some. Yeah, I used to they're not athletes? I do work with some. Yeah, I used to work with a lot more people that weren't athletes. That was, that's how I got started, but that wasn't necessarily my goal. My goal was always to kind of work with athletes,

but I've gone back and forth. There's pros and cons to both. There's, it's meaningful to be able to help somebody who is gonna need your help for the rest of their life. But then at the same time, I think if you do a good enough job with athletes and they know, if they think that you know what you're talking about,

you might actually also have them for the rest of their life, assuming that you did a good enough job. But yeah, the goals are just a little bit different. And the athletic population typically tends to be a little bit more motivated and they tend to have more specific goals. So for somebody like me that is really interested in like the intricate details of training and how small adjustments can affect different variables,

I enjoy that. Whereas, you know, somebody needs to lose weight, you eat less, right? If they need to feel better, we probably just need them to move a little bit more. I mean, some of the things are very, very simple. And a lot of the times it's more a psychological game. So can you convince them that it's worthwhile

to eat less or to move more? So I didn't wanna play as much of that psychological game anymore, even though when it comes to rehab, that essentially becomes all psychology too, because the guy that coined the term stress, Hans Selye, he said that the most stressful thing for the body is uncertainty. So you think about rehab, it's full of uncertainty.

When am I gonna come back? Am I gonna be as good as I was before I got hurt? Can I still do this? So this whole time that you're trying to restore function of tissue, you also have to restore their thinking. You know, you have to change the way that they view the injury and the body part and make sure that they're thinking, you know, you have to change the way that they view the injury and the body part and make sure that they're confident.

And I learned some of that through the biopsychosocial model of pain, where, you know, you stop looking at humans as cars with just parts, and you actually address the fact that there's a person attached to that car. And then I started to read something called predictive coding, which is essentially the human body kind of predicts what's gonna happen before it does.

So, and this is a hypothesis, so again, not 100%. But if we think about it from the brain would be like at the top of the hierarchy. So in top down processing, your brain makes the determination about what's occurring in the world. It gathers data from sensory information. If you touch something, whatever. Those, and that's bottom-up processing.

Those two things meet, and then a determination is made. So somebody that has chronic pain, they start to expect that they're always gonna be in pain, right, because it's nonstop. There's also a bidirectional relationship between sleep and pain, right? So the more pain you have, the less you sleep. And we know that the less you sleep,

the more pain that you're gonna have, right? So somebody with chronic pain is typically gonna have poor sleep, which is only gonna exacerbate the issue. But so then they just end up in this world where they just believe I'm just gonna be in pain all the time. So even it gets to a point where you could do an MRI

and see that there's actually no issue in their tissue, but they still have pain when they do these movements. That's because they've created a model in their brain of what they expect to happen. They expect pain. So therefore their body actually is going to perceive a threat and provide pain as a response. You would break that by creating

what's called a prediction error. So it becomes my job to show you that you can do X without pain. So I have to find ways to violate your prediction and show you that, no, you're actually okay. Right, and so that's been really meaningful in the rehab of athletes as well, because again, it strips you back down to,

nothing matters more than the human being in front of you. Like you cannot forget that. You could be the greatest coach in the of you. Like you cannot forget that. You could be the greatest coach in the world. If you can't connect with the athlete, you can't get them on board psychologically, it doesn't matter. So that's why I started to look into

some of the psychological aspects of training as well. I'm super excited. I think they're doing a biopic on John Madden. And I think that'll be really cool because, I think I think that'll be really cool because you know I was I think I saw that Nicholas Cage is gonna be the actor. I don't know what part of Madden's life they're gonna cover because there's so much to cover right. He was actually an NFL football player and he was an amazing coach of the Raiders and he's got to 100 wins faster than any coach in the history of

NFL football. He was just amazing but like like, I think he was amazing at like, I'm sure he was amazing at the X's and O's. Like, I have no doubt he was probably like a savant of some sort. But he seemed like the, like, the intangible things, like, of just being like a good people person and just being somebody that is a good mentor. Like we were talking, like, how do you identify like a good coach? One of the best ways to identify a good coach, and this is full proof works every single time, is to communicate with somebody that they coached.

That person, their eyes will light up. Their whole demeanor will change because that person meant so much to them. That person like changed their life. It was a huge mentor, a huge part of their life. and you'll hear how excited they are, you know, in their voice when they're talking about this person. So I think there's so many different coaches out there, there's so many different styles, you know, you got like the Bill Belichick and you have, you know, people like Madden and so on and I

think understanding that you're dealing with a human being and how do I communicate? How do I get the best results? Everybody saw the Gary Brekka results that he got with Dana White. And some people were like, oh, I think it just, you know, Brekka used TRT and used these GLP-1 and things. And maybe, maybe he did, but he's the only guy in the history of Dana White's life

who got through to him that way. You can't discredit that. That's great coaching. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, talking to the athlete is gonna tell you everything you need to know about the coach. And so I've always said, I don't necessarily care what you do with your athletes.

If you're getting them better, then you're doing your job. And I'm not gonna tell you how to do that any differently. That is your only job as a coach. And so I think it's great that there's so many different programs and systems and methods, as long as our athletes are getting better, I'm happy. And that's all that I really care about. And yeah, the different coaching styles, you know,

again, I really liked Kobe Bryant. So I liked, and I really liked Tom Brady a lot. So I think about what Phil Jackson used to do for those players, right? He used to give them books that he wanted them to read. And the books would be based on, you know, their personality. And so being able to, again, shift your own thinking

for the individual person is really important too. And so Bill knew how to get Tom to do what he needed to do. And that doesn't work for everybody. I think Belichick maybe was a little bit more strict and stringent than some of these other coaches. But yeah, I think he really understands the game of football really well and what he needs to win. So like what the players that he needed

and the role that they need to play. But not everybody is willing to do that, especially in today's NFL. I think personality has become a huge issue and the individual over the team. especially in today's NFL, I think personality has become a huge issue and the individual over the team. And part of that is probably just social media, right? Because you're the business now, not really the team.

I mean, you know, it's about you, you're following your endorsement deals, are you dating Taylor Swift? I mean. Some of these guys say something wild on Twitter and it like affects the whole team, you know, the next week going into the game or something. Yeah, like, so it's not,

it's no longer really even about the team. And then fantasy football, like it has become so much about the individual that I think it's probably a lot harder to be a coach today than it was in the past because how do you manage all of those personalities and make sure that they all understand that the goal is everybody in this room

and whatever our outcome is. Like that's what matters most, not your endorsement deals. What does that look like when, because you're saying like you just basically need to show an athlete like you can get through this movement without pain, right? It's kind of, it's frustrating because I had back pain for a really long time. And when somebody would say it's like kind of like a mental thing, I'd be like,

no, it's not. Have you bro? Yeah. Like I can't put my shoes on, man. Like this hurts really, really bad. Uh, it was low back, right? So maybe in that context, like what, like, how are you coaching somebody through that and getting through and having that

breakthrough where it's like, hey, you have everything you need, like it's not what you think it is anymore. Yeah, so it's important that you don't, you're not dismissing their pain and you're not telling them that it's not there. So this is where you have to be a good communicator with the person. Essentially what you're trying to tell them

is that there's hope. Like there is hope for you to be out of pain. And just because you're in pain today doesn't mean that you're always gonna be in pain. And even if I get you out of pain, it doesn't mean that you're never gonna experience pain again. There are people that are born with a genetic disease

where they don't actually feel pain. They die very young. So we also have to change the way that we frame pain as it's not necessarily always the end of the world, right? It's, you know, sometimes it's there as just like a little bit of a warning that you need to adjust what you're doing. But so for you, I would need to know the movements

that cause you pain. And then I have to find a way to slowly introduce you to them that don't cause pain. So I had somebody come to one of my seminars that always had knee pain when they ran. So she wanted to work with me afterwards. So what I just tried to do was how can I introduce running where she won't have knee pain,

and then we can start to build a model of running in her brain where she doesn't experience pain. I think we started with 20 or 30 yard tempo runs, but slower than traditional tempo. 20 yards, 30 yards, it would seem like nothing to somebody running at a slower speed, but we would run, walk, run, walk. I think we maybe did 400 yards of volume

that first session, no pain. Okay, that's our first step forward. Okay, now I have to remind her that we just had a session that you ran and you did not have pain. I need you to actually sit and think about this. I had a young athlete come into me, he was in high school and he had been referred by a ortho and a PT for low back pain.

And he was losing feeling in his leg. Essentially what the ortho said was like, okay, we've done everything we can, we could do PRP, which they're happy to do because they charge you a shit ton of money for it. Or just try this guy is like a last resort. I heard him speak at a seminar. So he sent him to me.

And the first time he came in, we didn't do any training at all. I talked to him for one hour. It's the only thing we did. His mom emailed me that night and said, he actually feels a lot better and he feels hopeful that you can help him. She emailed me the next day and said that he had less pain

that day than he normally had been having. I hadn't touched him or had him do a single thing yet. I talked to him for one hour about the potential that training could have, the potential that changing his mindset could have, and that this isn't a life sentence, that we're gonna figure it out and I'm gonna provide you some kind of hope

that we can get better than this. Now, I'll be 100% honest with you, I had no fucking clue what was wrong with them. I've never seen somebody that's 17, 18 years old that was fully healthy go in a sideline position and not be able to lift their leg up. At first I was like, shit, I might've bitten off more than I can chew here.

So what my thought process was, well, what can I do with him? Okay, I moved him up against the wall, I lifted his leg up and I had him try to control it eccentrically. We could do that. That's where we start. I went through a process like that with every single thing

that we did initially in the gym. What can he do? I'll help him do it. We'll go from there. We'll build on that. Eventually it got to the point you would come in, you would see him, you would think he was just training like everybody else,

using the same exercises. And now, again, like I still, and I still work with him, I still tell him, this doesn't mean you're never gonna have back pain. That's life. There is pain in life. And as long as you're an active person, there is a chance that at some point,

you're going to overdo it, right? So explaining to them that you're like a cup of water, and at some point you pour too much in there and it spills over. And everything in your life is stress. Your family, school, exercise, no matter what, they're all stressors, right? And your body doesn't necessarily differentiate

between these stressors. So we have identified too, that during like high stress periods during school, he's more likely to have some back pain. Once you know that, you're not as scared about the back pain. And so I still to this day deal with back pain. When I was young, I was so afraid of missing time playing my sport that the pain used to be debilitating and it used to last for two weeks.

Once I started to understand biopsychosocial model of pain and I stopped catastrophizing my pain and realizing if I miss a couple of workouts, who fucking cares? I'll come back, I've done this a million times. It shortened my period of pain without any drugs, without doing anything else to like four to five days, without doing anything other than changing

my mindset about it. So that's been very helpful for me. So if you're somebody that's dealing with pain, again, this does not mean you're not feeling it. And it doesn't mean that you couldn't have something wrong with you on imaging because we all do, but it doesn't always mean that it's pathological. And it doesn't always mean that it's gonna cause pain.

So that's why there are studies that show that MRIs of low back pain actually lead to worse outcomes because now you have told this person that there's something wrong with them and that it can only be fixed with surgery or that there's a issue that is just there. And it's really hard for people to break past that. Being able to handle the stresses of your day,

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for only 65 cents a night. On top of that, you're gonna receive a free pack of no strips as well as a bedside tin. Again, that's at hostagetape.com slash power project. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. That's the word that people need to be cautious with is the word fix. You know, it means something's broken.

Like I gotta, oh man, I gotta get this fixed. It's like, well, maybe you gotta get it checked out, maybe to learn more information. And that information can then, then you can kind of figure out how to proceed. But I think a lot of times people will get, they'll get tests done and they won't really think about what their action is going to be based off of what the doctor might say. You know, so if you're going to get, let's say, you take sleep apnea as an example, if you were going to do a sleep study, then the only thing that would make sense

is that you are already agreeing to what they find in the test as being, you do have problems with your sleep and that CPAP and A, B, and C are the steps to get out of that situation, maybe weight loss or whatever it might be. You're already halfway agreeing that if the outcome is negative, if the outcome is bad,

that you are agreeing to work on trying to make it better. But I think a lot of times people will just get like, oh, I gotta get an MRI for my ankle. And they'll get the MRI for their ankle, but then they won't do the proceeding followup stuff. They're just like, oh, I got a third degree, whatever. And you're like, or they'll mention it seven, six, eight years later.

And you're like, well, I don't know. You know, like you can probably work on it. You probably fix it. I mean, we all have little things that might slow us down or little things here and there, but for the most part, I think you have to be ready for that outcome and you have to be ready, like what are you gonna do about it?

Yeah. Yeah, there was, I forget what year of the Olympics, they imaged the spine of a bunch of athletes and they found either like high 40 or 50% of them had herniated discs or some sort of pathological finding and they were asymptomatic. Now, if one of those athletes the next day were to slip, fall and hurt their back and go and get the MRI

and show a herniated disc, they're gonna be told that they- That's it right there. Right. Even though before they were totally asymptomatic. And so that's why, again, you have to be very careful with the imaging and your wording around the imaging so as not to fully put blame on whatever is being shown in that image, just like when they look at hockey players,

I think the majority of them have some kind of hip labral tear without any pain at all, right? But if the average person were to go in there and they were to say, you have this labrum tear, you need to have surgery, you're gonna have arthritis, right? And they fill you up with these ideas that without surgery or without drugs,

you're kind of screwed. That's a life sentence for these people. And so it's just like, even when I get hurt, I don't even want an MRI. That's like the last thing on earth I want because I don't wanna see how fucked up everything is. Like I already know that if you were to look at my spine, it would probably look like shit right now.

And I partially tore this tricep and I'm like, I don't want to get looked at. I don't want to know. I'll rehab it. I'll get myself to a better place. But because even with all I know, it's still hard to overcome the thought behind, oh, something being broken inside you.

And so the famous neuroscientist, Moshe Feldenkrais, he used to talk about, he would tell his patients that he was not there to fix them. He was actually just there to provide them with the tools to never need him again and to learn how to actually adapt to their own structure and how to become their own essentially problem solver. And I thought that was really interesting.

He has these courses called awareness through movement where he studied brain mapping and essentially it was either him or who he was studying showed that like when a body part gets injured in the brain, the map of it gets smaller. And so his whole process was on having people just do very, very slow, small controlled movements and trying to build cognition into it.

So that's where the awareness through movement, really being aware of small, subtle movements so that we can start to improve that brain mapping and make that body part bigger in the brain again. So it doesn't, you don't perceive it as being hurt. I really love what you guys are saying, because if anybody that's listening, they go to the doctor with or without back pain, the doctor will say something like, oh, you have degenerative discs and your back is that of like a 60 to 70 year old.

Because that's what they usually say. And for me, it's very similar thing. They said I had a herniated disc, I need surgery, all this other stuff. And I've been very vocal with my back pain and stuff like that on this podcast. So I get a lot of messages and people asking me how I did it or what I did and whatnot. And they will say the same thing like, Oh yeah, my doctor said, like I'm broken essentially. Right. And I've done a bunch of physical things to help repair my back a lot. Like not everything. I'm not going to say like I did everything, but I did a lot, you know, because it was like, it was my identity at one point. But the mental side of things,

the craziest thing I did was I started jiu-jitsu and I told nobody that I had a history of back pain. And then what happened? My back pain just kind of disappeared. But then I would tweak it and I'd either work through it or I'd take like a day or two off and I'd get right back on the mats. Recently, I really fucked it up. Like I was in a really, really, really bad shape to the point where, you know, rewind before Jiu Jitsu and I would have told you maybe I'm going to be out for three months or so. I had like a little scoliosis going on.

Like it was wicked. I got back within maybe a week and a half and I feel great again. So it's like, okay, what did I do other than just kind of like, no, we're just, this is what we do now. I kind of sucked it up, I guess. But in the moment when my back pain was at its absolute worst, there was no way I could have told myself that, right? So that's, it's really frustrating because I do hear people talk about this or that pain

and like that's their crutch, that's their thing. I don't know how to teach this. I don't know how to communicate this. All I can do is point to what I've been doing and what I did, but unfortunately like it doesn't quite like click for a lot of people. You know, the words are really powerful, you know, and we say, uh, everything hurts, you know, or everything hurts all the time, or I tried everything. I tried everything is like, now I just pushed the blame out to like, or even getting a verification that you do have

a specific thing, like, see, like I told you guys, like, you know, I'm not full of shit, like my back actually hurts, but as you're saying, you know, 50% of the people had symptoms, 50% of the people didn't have any symptoms. When I fell years ago with 1,085 squat, I intentionally went to a fake doctor. You know, I'm like, who should I go see?

And I was like, oh, I should see my buddy who's an acupuncturist, you know? And he's just right here in Davis. And you know, he, basically what he said, I was telling him, I was like, man, my ankle and my knee and like, it was just like, it was really swollen, it was hard to walk around, it was just, it was messed up for a couple months really,

but it was screwed up really bad for like a couple weeks. But when I talked to him about it and I said, it's like, hey, should I go get like an MRI? And he's like, do you have an MRI of the other leg? You know, do you have a previous MRI to go off of? And he's like would you agree with all the lifting that you've been doing that your knee and ankle both like are probably fucked anyway And I was like, yep, and he's like What are they gonna tell you that you don't already know? Yeah

Treat MRIs is kind of like blood work Maybe you should just get get that done on a regular basis to be like, I actually feel great. Let me see what it looks like. It wouldn't be a bad idea. I mean, nowadays people are getting like full body MRIs for cancer and stuff like that, which is, which is great. And then you do get to see, you know, the full body and now you, now maybe you could learn something and say, Oh my God, I, you know, did blow something over here that was this way before, right? Yeah, I think the doctors have a lot of power with their language.

And so I just like when they tell people you're bone on bone, you don't have any cartilage, you have arthritis, you're gonna have arthritis. We're all basically gonna have arthritis, okay? But what's the difference between somebody that has it and doesn't have pain and you that has it and does have pain? That's the more important question. And what do we do to move forward?

Right, and so exercise has been shown to increase, anti-inflammatory cytokines. So could exercise actually help your arthritis? Yes, it could. Could exercise be a detriment if you're going to an extreme? Absolutely, it could, right? But the devil is in the dose a little bit. So you have to be smart about your activity.

But telling somebody that, and the minute you tell somebody they're bone on bone and they don't have cartilage, they start thinking of what a bone on bone joint is like. And they're like, well, I'm bone on bone and there's no cartilage left. I'm essentially fucked. When is my joint replacement?

And it's very, very difficult to escape that. And so I think it would be better if we just normalize the fact that, okay, arthritis is kind of just a normal part of aging. There is a little, there's some associations between exercise, could it maybe enhance it? Could some surgeries enhance arthritis? I mean, sure, but how about we look at it like,

you've been alive long enough to actually have arthritis. Right, like you've been able to move and be active enough that there's a little bit of arthritis in your joint, but so what? You're still active, you're still moving, you're still here, right? So is it really, is it a gift? I mean, are you not grateful

that you're actually still able to move? And I think when you start with the joint replacements, it's like, okay, what happens after a joint replacement? You don't move, okay? And then when you don't move or you start shifting compensation patterns around somewhere else, now that joint hurts.

What do you do? You get another joint replacement. That starts like the spiral down a really, really bad path where you move less. We see that people move less when they get older anyway. And like I talked about earlier, after high school, most people are never gonna sprint again and they're not really gonna do anything explosively.

We actually, of course, as we age, we go through sarcopenia. So an age-related decline in muscle mass. But we actually lose power at a two times faster rate than we do muscle. It's actually, power is more correlated to activities of daily living than muscular strength is. Even though- Yeah, this is what I talk about all the time.

I mention it a lot and I don't hear other people talk about it that much, but strength to weight ratio, being just pivotal as we age. Yeah, I mean, strength is correlated with mortality. I mean, it appears that the stronger you are later in life, the less likely you are to die. This doesn't necessarily mean to rep out 405 on squat rack or anything like that.

It just means you should be a little pliable. You should be durable. You should be able to jump up onto a box and jump down the other side of it. I mean, if you were to tell a kid like, hey, jump up on this and jump down the other side, before you finish the sentence, they would have done it already.

Where older person go, wait, what do you want me to do? Cause they're a little hesitation. They're not sure exactly how they're going to navigate that. So the older person has self-imposed restrictions and limitations as they age. And then they start to adopt these different postures and patterns and they believe that they're not able to do those things.

So like Buddy Morris told me, if it's not trained, it's not maintained. The further you get away from those things, the less likely you are gonna be able to tolerate them. So they stop sprinting, they stop jumping, they stop doing anything fast. And then we look at like, what is one of the number one causes of hospitalization

or death in older people, it's actually falling, fracturing their hip. Because can you tolerate the surgery after that? Are you even able to get ahold of somebody? I mean, it's a huge issue for older people. Part of that falling, right, there's a little bit of aspect of deceleration, right? And again, this is where we see that reduction in power

and strength is actually pretty meaningful. Not only do we need the strength training to strengthen the bones, right? So that we maintain bone health, but the power can help you with, again, some of that, the deceleration, the catching yourself when you fall and being able to tolerate that. So yeah, I think, you know,

yeah, we don't talk that much about it because it's hard to get older people to wanna exercise and to wanna do things that they're afraid of. Whereas like you said, I have a one and a half year old kid, I have to tell him to stop trying to jump off of things that he like clearly is not ready to jump off of. You'd have to beg, I mean, if I have personal training clients

that are actually in great shape, that run all the time, put a 12 inch box in front of them and ask them to jump on it. This is what they do. They start thinking, right? Can I make it? I don't know if, right? And then like they'll do a couple of attempts

where they don't even jump. They're so afraid to jump up there. Okay, so maybe you start them on a six inch box and just show them, look, this is what's possible. But again, it's like we talked about with introducing sprinting to people. It's the velocity of the contractions that people really get away from and get afraid of.

And so you have to find ways to introduce it in a safe manner. That's why I do like box jumps with people because the eccentric component, the landing is stifled. It's not really that high. They don't have to tolerate that much force on that landing. And we can build meaningful wins by just showing them, hey, you jumped on a 12 inch box and you're fine.

Right, so that's like your, that's your floor. That's where you start. And then you try to build, you can do things like explosive med ball throws. And yeah, they don't need to be doing snatches and hand cleans, right? They could just do things like some faster running, some jumping, some explosive med ball throws.

That's perfect and still strength. And even a dynamic warmup, you know, some like leg kicks and butt kicks, some high knees, you know, whatever someone can handle, you know, but like small versions, even like, okay, you're worried about like jumping on the box. And there's a lot of valid reasons to be concerned about jumping on a box, especially if you're 70 and your skin is sensitive and now you cut your shin open. It's like, well, that could take months to recover from. When you're a kid, it's like recover from it pretty quick. Probably wouldn't even have a scratch on you

when you're a kid. But when you're older, there are things to think about, but maybe instead of jumping up onto something, maybe you're just doing pogo hops. Or maybe you're skipping some rope or something like that. Yeah, so again, you just meet the person where they are. Right, similar to what I did with that kid, what can we do?

Whatever we can do, that's what we're gonna do. And then you build on it from there. So that's where you have to be kind of pliable in your approach and be, you know, I don't make everybody barbell back squat. Honestly, I did very little of it this summer with my athletes. I don't make everybody do one thing.

It's like I look at each individual and be like, where are we currently? What can they tolerate? What can we do? Can you get your legs strong for sports without a back squat? Yes. Of course you can. So I use the belt squat a lot and I use split squats a lot.

And some people can back squat and tolerate it just fine. So we do it, but I'm not married to any of them. You know, I don't really care. I view it all as just a very general stimulus. What about giving athletes some things they're good at, just like these little underhand pitches every once in a while, just a confidence boost. Like let's say you're working with Andrew

and he's real proficient with squats and you're like, all right, Andrew, today we're gonna do, you know, a couple sets of squats, like just to kind of keep people up a little bit. Yeah, so I have an NHL player who before he goes to camp, if I think he's gonna PR, I'll let him PR on the bench. If I don't think he's gonna PR, we just don't do it. And he doesn't tend to ask questions why,

but I want him to go in there with some confidence. So yes, I do try to find ways to make sure that they know that they're improving and that they feel good about themselves. So, and then you might have to remind them, hey, you've never done that before. Hey, that was a PR. And so there's times where I put them in positions

to succeed. There's also times where I might put them in a position to fail a little bit. So like I said, like we can use it as a learning experience. I would not be using the squat for something like that. I don't want a lifter to fail a squat in training, especially when we don't compete on a platform. That's not somewhere where I would want to fail.

That's why I might use something more like the bench because I feel like there's less risk there involved. If we're gonna go for a max before camp, sure, we'll do it on there because who doesn't like to bench more, right? Like every guy is like- How much you bench. Right, it's more meaningful for them.

So yeah, I do often try to find ways to boost their confidence, especially before camp or practice or meaningful games. How valuable or maybe not valuable is hypertrophy? You know, I think it depends. I tend to view hypertrophy, you know, like I go back to these old textbooks and they're like a bigger muscle can produce more force.

Right? Then when you get to the aspect of speed and sprinting, it's about physics, okay? So the more mass somebody has, potentially gonna be slower, unless you've brought up their force enough. Force equals mass times acceleration. If you want to increase acceleration,

you either increase force or decrease mass. So could that person maybe stand to lose a little bit of mass? Could your offensive linemen or linebackers stand to build a little bit of mass? Could your offensive linemen or linebackers stand to build a little bit more body armor? Yeah. So I think again, it becomes dependent on the person and where they are in their training history,

their training age. I do think it's important in like GPP, GPP is when we're gonna care a little bit more about hypertrophy. So we're gonna start with that work. We're gonna try to build a foundation before we intensify a little bit further. And so, yeah, I think for most young athletes, they do need to gain some tissue. I think obviously there's benefits to that. I think you could get to a point though, where if you're just kind of gaining weight and the increases in your force output aren't,

aren't keeping up with that, then it could be a detriment. And maybe, I don't know, what are your thoughts on this? Like just like ISOing like an area, isolating an area, and really trying to pack on a bunch of mass on a particular area. Do you think that has value or are you kind of looking more like the, like let's get the person to do like a bent over rows

and dead lifts and pull-ups and benches and squats so they kind of build out the whole body rather than putting like a couple of LBs like just on like your arms or just your quads or something like that. You know, I still think it's gonna be like person specific and then task specific. So if isolating a body part helps in the sport

or if isolating a body part helps in rehab, I'm going to isolate a body part. If it doesn't necessarily have an effect in whatever the task is that we're training for, I'm not as worried about it. But yes, like younger guys want bigger arms. So- Confident, yeah.

Yeah, and I don't think that it detracts from our higher intensity work. So a lot of times they'll want me to give them like a cool tri-set or super set for biceps at the end of the workout. Knock yourselves out. Like I don't think that that's gonna create enough fatigue or damage that it's gonna limit our sprinting the next day.

Or if they want you to do some extra tricep work. And some of those accessory movements and building up some of those body parts are potentially gonna help in your more compound movements, which if those have a carryover, then okay, we would wanna build that up a little bit. So building the triceps to potentially help your bench press.

So for me and my athletes, I view the bench press as like a full body exercise. We're going to use the floor and we're going to use our upper body, right? Cause any force you put into the ground, you get out of the ground. So we're not in a powerlifting meet. You're asking, come off the bench in my gym.

I'm using it as a general stimulus to develop strength or power. So we're using the whole body. Again, if I want the bench to come up, then I'm gonna probably isolate the triceps a little bit, isolate the upper back. That's what I have found to help that area. So I think there's a time and a place for it.

And yeah, like I said, confidence is huge. And so a lot of people like building up certain body parts. What do you think of some of these almost like crazier looking movements from like, I think it was J. Schroeder, former strength coach. They do like these movements and exercises that I guess they just like look dangerous. What are some of your thoughts on some of those movements and exercises?

So from what I understand, Jay Schroeder did a lot of really long duration isometrics and did a lot of shock method type training. So depth drops. And I think that he had an athlete for a very long time if we're talking about David Archuleta was like the main guy he worked with. He had an athlete for a very long period of time.

He had an athlete that really bought into a system and he had an athlete that he was trying to get somewhere that maybe that athlete didn't have the genetic predisposition to get there. And again, I'm just guessing here outside looking in. When you have somebody that's bought in, when you have somebody that trusts you, and when you have somebody that's like, hey, you know what, let's just try some shit

and let's see that if we can get results that maybe are atypical by doing atypical things. I think that's reasonable. I think it's not reasonable when you say, this is my system and everybody should do it, because it worked for this guy. So I think I've tried to read some of his work. I've looked at some of his programming

and I actually think it's really interesting. And I think that it's really cool. I've never spoken. It seemed like if you can handle it, it's gonna build up a monster. Theoretically, when you look at it, you're like, if this guy can tolerate it. I think he had a story where he said

that when he first met him, he had him like hold a pushup ISO for five minutes. And he's like, I'll be back. And I wanted to see if he can hold it. You know, again, what does a five minute ISO hold pushup develop? I'm not really sure. Maybe it's mental capacity.

Maybe he's thinking about it from a muscle tending unit standpoint. But I don't mind people that are willing to push the envelope a little bit, assuming that with that, they're kind of saying, hey, we're on like the outside of what's accepted, but we're trying things and we're trying to push the field forward a little bit.

As long as they're open about that, I think it's cool. I just think you need to open with that warning because if you don't, then people think it's the standard and they think that everybody can adopt that. And I think Marenovovich had some similar training methods and techniques and maybe some of those people are leaving out that there's probably still some basics and fundamental exercises that are probably still being done.

Yeah, and again, this goes back to content, what gets views? Something that's different is gonna generate a lot of views. Then the people that follow you are following you for different content. You have to keep providing that or they're not gonna keep following you. So then I think you get into this weird place

where it's like you keep trying to do different things and you get away from what you know works and what works best. And if they're really fringe things worked really great, we probably would all adopt them. That doesn't mean that there aren't people out there innovating, but for the most part, like what are people doing today that they weren't doing

in like the eighties, seventies, sixties? I mean, when you look at the Eastern block and all the stuff that they were doing complex training, they were doing contrast training, they were doing contrast training, they were doing eccentrics, they were doing isometrics, they were doing isodynamic, like all the things that, you know, look at the videos of Werner Gunther. He's doing pogo hops, he's doing bounding without shoes on.

All sort of just kind of gone in a giant circle. I remember like we do all of our warmup and our power speed drills without shoes on. And I've been doing that for 12 plus years. And I was like, yeah, there's not a lot of people doing that. This is like, you know, some, and then I see a video of Gunther doing it. It was probably like 40 fucking years ago.

And so it's like, even when you think that you're doing something that's a little forward thinking, there's guys that were doing it before you. So doesn't mean don't innovate and doesn't mean don't try things, but don't get caught up in this model where you're just constantly trying to reinvent the wheel when the wheel already works. What about like disruptors like the functional patterns guys? I'm sure you've

seen some of that come through. Yeah. I mean, I haven't, I haven't looked into their stuff enough to say that I have like a real definitive opinion on it. Again, I think sometimes you can be a victim of your own success. And when you have a newer idea and people attack you, you like back yourself into a corner and you become even more entrenched in your beliefs. Yeah, you dig your feet into the ground.

Right, and so then it becomes really hard for you to be objective, especially when your business rides on one model or one method. And so I think a lot of these things like the go-to and the functional patterns, I think that they are well-intentioned, but they make some leaps

that I wouldn't be comfortable making. And I think it's really easy to sit back and make videos on why there's injuries in the NFL when you're not in the fucking NFL. And I come from probably a different space because I see what Buddy goes through. And I understand that, like, I went and worked training camp with them one year.

There are players that came into camp that did nothing before camp. Okay, there was a guy that did a set of walking lunges with a single 20 pound chain on and then threw up in the garbage. That's how deconditioned he was. And then you have guys that love the sport, JJ Watt and Larry Fitzgerald that are conditioned year round.

Then the NFL has changed the rules a little bit. So coaches have less time with players. The NFLPA is all over this. Like they want less two a days, less contact, less practices. And so really the time that the coaches get with the players the most is during the year. What the hell are you gonna do as a strength coach during the NFL season with your guys?

Literally all you're trying to do is get them from Sunday to Sunday. On the field good, more so than like be worked. Right, you really can't work them that much. And so to sit and to make videos analyzing, oh, you know, these guys are getting hurt because they're, you know, look at the way their foot does this.

And, you know, to try to find all these biomechanical reasons why they're getting hurt, you're ignoring the larger picture here, which is that there's like a million things involved. And the guy who got hurt was at the titty bar till two in the morning. Which you don't know, right? And so it's like that guy could have made that same move

a thousand times and it was never an issue, but you're making a video about it because it strengthens the things that you believe and it helps you sell your product. So I don't veer too far to the biomechanical side of why people get injured, just because I also consider the actual person, I consider the stressors involved.

And I think that you can get too locked in on like a body part or a movement or, okay, well, you know, you lack this internal rotation. And so then this happens and this happens. Those are all leaps because the human body is a complex system and none of these things can be looked at without understanding that they all affect each other. And so, yeah, and one outcome doesn't always equal

on the same outcome on the other side. And so you could have lack of hip internal rotation and it could affect you when you run. I could have the same thing and it could not affect me when I run. Because what occurs during a dynamic contraction might be different than what occurs during a static range of motion assessment.

And so when there's that many variables at play and when there's that much complexity, I try not to take a hard stance. And so I think sometimes those things that you're talking about, they take too hard of a stance for me And it pushes guys like me away Versus me being more willing to listen to what they have to say I'm just like if you can't be more intellectually honest about everything then I'm not really all that interested

I want to have a serious conversation with you about your balls and I'm being serious here on this podcast We talked about a lot of things to help men improve the health of their penis because it's important and your balls have very thin skin. This is true you can touch them right now and you know it's pretty thin. Women do a lot of things to take care of their vaginal health and men we don't really think about the things that we put right directly on our balls like our boxers. A lot of popular brands out there have chemicals that are literally touching your balls. Think about this when you're directly on our balls, like our boxers. A lot of popular brands out there have chemicals that are literally touching your balls.

Think about this, when you're in the gym sweating, when you're at work sitting, when you're doing all these things, these things could be permeating into your scrotum. Things like BPA, phthalates, pesticides, incesticides, toxic dyes, toxic fertilizers, formaldehyde, all of which could lead to and could exacerbate lower testosterone,

erectile dysfunction, and potential infertility. That's why we've partnered with NADS. And NADS is made with 100% organic cotton and no toxic dyes. So instead of putting just anything on your manhood, it's a good idea to get your hands on some NADS. And Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at nadsunder.com.

That's N-A-D-S-under.com and at checkout, enter promo code power project to save 15% off your entire order. Again, that's at NADSunder.com. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Where do you usually start with people that you're working with when it comes to nutrition? I used to do a lot of nutrition.

I wrote a really short book on intermittent fasting because it really helped me kind of manage my body composition. And I was just really interested in the potential longevity and lifespan benefits with fasting. But to me, it came down to be, it's very basic. So I used to do a lot of nutrition consulting for people. And essentially what I found was that

we had weekly check-ins. Anybody that did the weekly check-ins every week lost weight, no matter what diet I had them on. They could be fasting, they could be carb cycling, they could be low carb, it literally didn't matter. If they checked in every Saturday with their weight, their photos, whatever, they lost weight. The people that didn't check in never lost weight.

So the people that were, the people that did check in were like excited because they knew they did the work and the other people probably just sort of fell off. And they're confronting reality every week. So you're not gonna lose weight every week, right? But are you sticking to the process? That's like, that determines whether or not that person is gonna have success.

Are they willing to be consistent and understand that this is a lifestyle change where it's just week in and week out. You're gonna have ups, you're gonna have downs, but you're gonna show up every single week. And once I really recognized that, I became less interested in it just because again, I really like diving deep

and I really liked playing with the numbers and I did some competition prep for people. That was more fun for me. His is like, can we get you to a level of leanness that is like insane and how do we do it? But the generic kind of just lose weight. Basically, it's like if you weigh yourself every single week and you write down what you're eating,

you're probably gonna lose weight regardless of what you do. And really research in nutrition is so difficult to complete and it's so hard to make any sort of determination from because there's so many other factors involved. Okay, Mediterranean diet, keto diet, but it's like, how do you control for all the other variables in it?

It's almost impossible. I would say too, like that better is better. So if you have like a quote unquote better diet, then maybe there's some performance enhancement that goes on with the better options. But we see athletes all over the place with how they eat and their diet and stuff. So nutrition, you know, being like directly linked

to performance, it's like, you know, obviously if you're gonna run like a marathon or something, there's particular ways you're gonna fuel for some of those things. But for somebody playing a game for two or three hours on a weekend or something like that, it doesn't seem like there's any like one particular style diet that reigns way above everything else.

No, and again, it's gonna be person specific, right? I mean, there's NFL players that will tell you that they only feel good on game day if they don't eat before. Marshawn Lynch, you see skittles during the game. And then guys like DK Metcalf say that they eat three to four bags of candy a day and they maybe have one meal

and he's 240 pounds of lean tissue. Then there's guys that need every protein supplement, every drug, every workout regimen, just to have the same amount of lean tissue that he has. So again, that's gonna come down to the person too. And you know, whatever is sustainable for them is I think most important. I think the diet that maybe I guess has the most research

on it in terms of just like health and longevity, probably be the Mediterranean diet. And again, I would say that's with a grain of salt because what does that even mean in terms of United States for actual Mediterranean diet? There's so many variables, but yeah, for the most part, if you don't eat like a child and you're relatively consistent, you should be okay.

And then, you also wanna make sure if you're an athlete, especially if your, if your food is like starting to impact other things and your food's a big problem. So if you are just like in general, you're fatigued a lot, you're having trouble sleeping. I mean, that's when you start, need to start to evaluate, Oh, maybe I, you know, need to not eat so late in the evening. Maybe I need a two hours to digest my food before bed and stuff like that. What are some things that you do with athletes

in terms of sleep? Is there a lot of conversation around that, especially because you're working with younger athletes and I imagine they're probably on their phone a lot and so on. Yeah, so I've had the Oura Ring since about 2018 and that has helped me gather a lot of useful data for myself.

I recommend it to a lot of athletes where they use the WOOP band, something. I don't think it's a necessity, but I think it gives you data that you can make like actionable changes from. So I start everybody with sleep because we know that sleep aids in recovery. We know that a lack of sleep

can actually increase your hunger and it can make you seek out high energy foods because body recognizes energy is low. Okay, so what are you gonna do? You're gonna want something that has high fat, high carbs. Okay, so it's gonna lead to poor choices. We know that lack of sleep actually is going to potentially increase the pain that you feel

and block the natural analgesic centers that you have in your brain. And so sleep is like one of those big rocks that I feel like you have to discuss with people. So for me too, I noticed that when my deep sleep is low, my pain is up. Okay, so if I have, again, I have a young kid, so when he doesn't really sleep at all,

he still doesn't. So everybody that says it gets better lied, but... Kyle They really did. My son's about to be four and he, yeah, still rough. Energy still through the roof. Insane energy. Aaron I mean, the only, I don't even know why I'm complaining because my wife breastfeeds and I clearly can't do that. So I'm not even really getting up with them in the night, but I still hear them get up. And when my deep sleep is just really low night after night after night,

those chronic nagging injuries that you have, you start to feel them a little bit more. So it doesn't matter. You could tell me to do every bird dog, every fancy rehab exercise in the book until I address that, it's not getting any better. So yeah, sleep would be number one. And with young kids, what I see is screen time late.

This is a, the young generation deals with a lot of anxiety and depression and pretty poor sleep habits. And probably some of that is attributed to the fact that when you're scrolling TikTok really late at night, that you have a lot of light being flashed in front of your eyes. You have a lot of content that's typically, in your face and that elicits some-

Emotional, yeah. Yeah, and so how does that make them feel? Or is it just like constant dopamine boosts, just like over and over and over? And then you have to turn it off and try to wind down and go to sleep. So I have that discussion with them. I'm like, look, if you can try to limit screen time

before bed, you're probably gonna sleep a little bit better. If you can try to not eat as close to bed, you're probably gonna sleep a little bit better. These things don't really resonate with all of them because they're kids, right? And they're gonna do a little bit better. These things don't really resonate with all of them because they're kids, right? And they're gonna do what they wanna do. If I can get them to have an aura ring or a whoop, and they can see when I have alcohol,

my resting heart rate is 20 beats higher per minute, all night long, I have a lower score the next day in terms of my readiness, my respiratory rate is up, my body temperature is up, and I don't feel good, but you see it with actual real data. It's more tangible. It's hard for them to ignore. So I do recommend that they get that just for that reason. But yeah, the strategies that I just try to give them

are less screen time before bed, less eating close to bed. And if they can do a round of just really slow, deep breathing, so just big inhales, hold it, and then really, really slow exhales. Anybody that has an aura ring or a whoop or a heart rate monitor, if you do that, like a 10 second exhale, you'll notice your heart rate drop, drop, drop.

So doing five to 10 of those before bed, or the ones that say, oh, I can't fall asleep, read a book, they hate reading, they're not gonna wanna keep reading. So bring a book in bed, start reading it, and my guess is you'll probably be pretty tired pretty soon and you'll go to sleep. So yeah, I address that with everybody, number one,

because I feel like if that's not in place, you're not even gonna recover from the training that we're doing as much. So does my training matter if you can't recover and adapt from it? And then there's probably studies and correlations between sleep and injury. Oh my God, yeah.

And I mean, there's been numerous studies that show literally by the hours that it decrease your risk of injury. Yeah, those car accidents and stuff too, it's wild. Yeah, I mean, and it also, I forgot to mention earlier, there Dr. Brian Mann, who used to write for Elite FDS, he was talking about a stint at a college he was at where the athletes were actually,

he had a bunch of athletes that were doing really well in their training and the next week they were supposed to do some max effort lifting. And what he was anticipating was that they were gonna do really well and set records. The next week that they came in, they did terrible. And he wanted to understand why guys were failing with like 85% of their max,

whereas the week before they were doing so well. I believe he referred to it as psycho neuroimmunology, but essentially what he found was that the guy, it was actually their exam week. And he found that the players were more likely to get hurt during exam weeks than they were during training camp. And again, it goes back to what we talked about earlier,

stress, right? The outside stressors are just as important as the stress inside the gym. You're only in the gym for an hour. You're out of the gym for 23. So what is happening outside of the gym, that has to be a factor in your programming and in what you're talking about with your people.

That's huge. You mentioned a psychosocial model. Is that from a book or is that who, where does that, where does that some of that come from? Cause it sounds interesting. Maybe people wanna check it out. Yeah, so I would look into the work of Peter O'Sullivan and Greg Lehman talks about it pretty frequently.

And then you could probably just come across some different articles and you can find predictive coding in some different psychology journals. They talk about it. It's not always in response to pain, but there are some journal articles about how it affects pain. I find it interesting that when we were talking in the gym,

your athletes are, they're very active. Like they're doing a lot of stuff. But I think that it might surprise some people with the amount of exercises that maybe are done in a given workout about approximately how many, like, you know, I guess like main exercises would some of your athletes be doing in a training session. So if we're talking about weight lifting exercises,

weight training exercises, during certain periods, maybe no more than two to three. And again, in my programming, the sprinting and the jumping and the explosive med ball throws become the main stimulus. And the weight training is simply there to support it or kind of just top off or polish the session. Earlier on, maybe in an accumulation block. So during the accumulation block,

we would have lower intensity runs and they would not like we wouldn't be doing max velocity, but the volume of weight training would be a little bit higher. So again, that accumulation phase is when we're strengthening the corresponding structures to make sure that we can effectively transfer energy during our

intensification phases or more explosive ballistic movement. So we start with a little bit higher volume, and then as we intensify, we drop the volume a little bit more, but the intensity of the speed work goes up and the volume of the weight training goes down. That's the only way that you could actually like blend the two of them

because the high intensity speed work becomes so taxing. You really can only do so much work outside of that. For someone like Andrew doing a jujitsu, what do you think are some things that maybe, you took me through some like warmups and stuff like that, but what are some things you think he could do maybe from like a, you know, outside of weightlifting and outside of the jujitsu mats

that would maybe benefit him? Yeah, I think that everybody would benefit from doing a lot of what we did today. So more of a dynamic warmup, implementing things like mock drills or skipping for height, skipping for speed, backward skipping, pogo hops of varying heights and intensity, and then different jumping.

Because again, as we talked about earlier, we do lose power pretty quickly as we age and people tend to avoid those exercises because they don't think they're good at them or they don't think that they can tolerate it. What I have found is that as my athletes get faster and we jump more, they actually get stronger without having to do as much weight training.

So if we can do that, which enhances the way that we move, which enhances the suppleness of our tissue, our mobility, because as you saw in the warmup, we do do a lot of mobility work and different stability exercises, and we get stronger and we improve power. It kind of like is a jack of all trades. I think most people would feel better overall

doing that than just lifting. Because just lifting, we get set in a lot of the same movements, in the same patterns, in the same ranges of motion, over and over and over again. Whereas when you start to explore some of the movements that we did today, you can vary them up over time. Like you can do the A skip

with a little bit more submaximal intensity, then you can do it up over time. Like you can do the A skip with a little bit more submaximal intensity, then you can do it with higher intensity. You can do a traditional skip and then you can do power skips. You could do the backwards skip. You could do some of the stretches that we did and then add a skip to them. So I would say that all that stuff does

is it gives you some plyometric activity at a lower intensity. So they're extensive plyometrics. They increase your heart rate. So they can be great for building a little bit of an aerobic base while also training power and exposing you to higher velocity movements in a safe, efficient manner.

It seemed like it'd be great for longevity too. And just like the strength of the ankles and your feet and somebody that maybe doesn't exercise a ton, but let's say you go out on like a hike or something like that. The navigate like a hike can sometimes be challenging. And if you haven't been out in a long time and haven't done stuff for your ankles

and some of these things, you could easily get hurt. And that's what we see. We see people that are older, they're like doing okay-ish, but then they get taken off their feet. And I think some of what you showed me today, I think it's just, it's all just great and simple movements that someone can incorporate that I think is gonna really help a lot of people with like longevity as well.

And then you just don't really see or hear much talk about those exercises except for athletes. longevity as well. And then you just don't really see or hear much talk about those exercises except for athletes. Yeah. No, and I think, you know, the nice thing is you don't need any equipment. You know, you could go and get an incredible workout without any equipment at all.

I could program that for somebody very, very easily. Even after the warmup stuff we did and some of the mock drills, how you just did a body weight, eccentric, quasi, isometric split squat. We could do a couple of rounds of that. We could do some of those long lever holds that we did for the hamstrings. Like you could get a complete and total workout

without having any equipment. You could do it outside. More people need to get outside a little bit. And you would be more likely to be prepared for any of these endeavors. Like you wanna play pickleball or you wanna go on a hike, right? All of those are just moving your body

through time and space, but not always in the exact same patterns that we get in the weight room. So again, weight room is like, are we strengthening tissue at just like this base level? But now it's the plyometrics or the other drills, the warmup drills are your bridge to more realistic movements that you're gonna encounter in your life.

And so I would encourage like that warmup, you could do that daily, you know, and I encourage people if you have a day where you just don't wanna train or you don't feel very good, if you just got up, you did some of that stability prep on the ground, you did some of those dynamic stretches, the hip swings,

and you just do some really light submaximal mock drills, you'd walk away from that session feeling a lot better. It'd probably be almost impossible to not wanna work out after that. Right, right. And you'd be sweating, your heart rate would be up, your joints would be moving, you would feel good. You probably would wanna go train,

but even if you just did that, that's a solid session. And that's not a bad place for people to start. I think the other issue is people think I need to go train for an hour. You gotta do something, you know what I mean? And so you're not always gonna wanna go in and do the same thing. And that's, you've been lifting a lot longer

than I have. So if I'm at, you know, 20 plus years, it gets a little monotonous, right? I mean, it's a lot of the same exercises. You can only squat, bench, do a leg press so many times, but then you start doing things like that and it's different and you can incorporate different ways. Like we didn't do any bounding today,

but you could do some bounding. You could do skater bounds or you could do bounds for height or you could do some maximal ones. And again, it's just a way, it's a change of pace for what most people are accustomed to. And I think it's, I just think it's important to break out of your normal comfort zone of what you typically do

and see what your body's capable of. Anything else over there, Andrew? Yeah, so with the, I guess I'll say like, if you are thinking about like a jujitsu specific type of warmup or whatever, one thing that I just, I don't really see too much of because, you know, when you're in the master's division the way I am, people will tend to just start sitting down on their butt.

So there's not a lot of level changes. So if there's a way to incorporate that in some of these warmups, I'm sure there is, but that would be huge for a jiu-jitsu practitioner. So what do you mean? You're talking more floor-based exercise? So no, what I mean is we're standing, and then it's like hit the floor, right? Like people don't do that, right? Wrestlers come in and that's why they wreck jujitsu guys because they've been doing

that since they were four years old. But an older guy, well, not gonna say older guy, but in an older athlete will typically not have that base, especially if they're like a master's white belt, right? They just got started. So that's not really taught. It's like takedowns is like very new to a lot of people. So if there's a way to incorporate an up-down movement or something to get people familiar with level changes, because that's something that has been, it's really hard for me to learn. But once I have... Basically saying to an extent like the training is kind of like that rather than big spikes.

Yeah. Yeah, so you think about, like I showed him earlier, a push up to start sprint. You could just reverse that. Yeah. You start up, you go down into the push up, push back up, sprint. That'd be sick.

You could do sprints where you start by laying on the ground, you roll over, get up in the push up, go. So again, it's playing with the same kind of movements, but just finding ways to incorporate what you do in your sport a little bit. So that's why I have people do like a half kneeling sprint or positions that they, a backwards half kneeling sprint. You might find yourself on one knee in your sport

having to accelerate. You might find yourself up, down, up in your sport. So again, being able to find ways, you could do a burpee into a sprint if you wanted to, or you could drop down, push up, and then do a broad jump. There's no real limit to what you can do, just really working with your own body weight. And again, what we talked about before

is it doesn't have to be what you always see other people do. Like jump training doesn't always have to be the exact same hurdle hop, box jump, vertical jump. Like you could take different implements in your gym and just try to jump over them, or just jump over them and rotate, or try to jump over them or just jump over them and rotate or try to jump over them with one leg.

There's no in stone rule that you have to do it this way. So play with the movement a little bit. See what you do in your sport and then try to just implement it in your training a little bit. Yeah, you were doing that bench the other day with the cables. It's like in between that,

you could easily do some type of jump. And then your heart rate's going, and then the exercise itself is like way more challenging. I was doing some sprints on the bike a couple of days ago. I did a squat on the belt squat and then did the sprint on the bike and then did dips. And the dips were like impossible, you know, and dips usually are like not super difficult for me,

but just breathing and being already pre-fatigued made it that much harder. And the other thing I would say about the bike, I should have mentioned this earlier. So for somebody that wants to get into sprinting, bike is a pretty valuable tool because like I had an athlete that he was running the 55 and indoor. He set a PR, went out to celebrate,

did a backflip off trampoline, hurt his ankle and his Achilles, mid season. I'm like, you fucking idiot. And so we couldn't sprint. We couldn't even do the warmup drills that I had you doing today. Okay, so what did we do? We used the bike.

I put the seat very low. I put the resistance very high. That was our acceleration work. Why? Because during acceleration, you have these larger joint angles and you have, again, more time spent on the ground, more force.

So we use that to train. We did eight seconds all off. Heavy resistance, low seat height, with like a good recovery. So we're training that aelactic system. We're also, you know, getting a little bit of specific work in for the quads. But again, it was the stimulus that he needed

because we couldn't sprint. If you want to do like more max velocity, you raise the seat a little bit, right? Because now the joint angles are a little smaller and you take some resistance off. Cause remember it's, we want to spend less time on the ground. There's less time to put force into the ground.

Did that until we could start doing just some in place POGOs, right? Just to try to reintroduce some of that on and off the ground work. Actually within two weeks went and competed again, ran his second fastest time ever. And we didn't sprint a single time. What I did do was raise the intensity of the lifting

because the intensity of the sprints wasn't there and we couldn't do any jumping. So again, we became a little bit more lifting dominant. We still did the work on the bike, but for people that again, maybe aren't sprinting, you get some faster work in on the bike is another good introduction to the speed work because at the very least,

you can start to develop the energy system that you're gonna be using during some of that work. Awesome, man, thank you so much. I think one of the coolest things that you mentioned was like that prediction error. I think that's something I'm gonna remember. And I think that that is just really interesting. There's somebody says,

cause I just, I have a lot of people that I help with certain things and they'll say, I try to help them with their language. I try to help them with saying like, you're always in pain. Like, are you actually always in, like literally always in pain? Like, let's discuss that a little bit more. And so I think, showing people where they might have some prediction errors, I think's discuss that a little bit more. And so I think, you know, showing people

where they might have some prediction errors, I think is something that could be really useful. Well, and what I like to tell them is, you know, why does the placebo effect work? It only works because you expect it to work. So that's how important your expectation is for your pain, for your movement, for your goals, literally anything. You could give somebody a sugar pill

and you tell them it's a pain pill and they feel less pain. And it's only because they believe in it. So how can we get you to a place where you believe what I'm saying, but you also believe you can be out of pain? And once we can get there, you're on the path to potentially having less pain. Where can people find you?

Typically just my Instagram, Fred underscore Duncan. I do have a website, www.fredduncan.com, but pretty much all my content is on Instagram. Awesome, thank you so much. Thank you, I appreciate it. Strength is never weakness, weakness never strength. Catch you guys later, bye.