Mark Bell's Power Project - Muscle Recovery Guide - How To Relieve Muscle Soreness, Tightness & Recover Fast (Science Based Tips) - Jordan Shallow || MBPP Ep. 1060

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

In episode 1060, Jordan Shallow, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how to relieve muscle soreness, tight muscles and faster recovery in this Muscle Recovery Guide Follow Jordan on IG: https://www.instagram.com/the_muscle_doc/   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!   🍆  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 POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   🩸 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 ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/untapped ➢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 & Get Podcast Guides, Courses and More ➢ https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

What do you think causes stiffness? When we think of muscles, we think of output organs, things that do stuff. Muscles are our primary sensory organ. We zoom in and we go, oh man, this lacrosse ball. It's like that person might even have a visual disturbance. Maybe if we put that person in front of a mirror and they could actually see themselves, they could improve their mobility. What does a mirror do?

It's just giving that feedback? Yeah. You can start to see, oh, I know where I am, so I know where I need to go. Have you seen cold therapy be of benefit to some people? Yeah, I find that really interesting. So yes. Something like red light,

where does that fall into this scheme of things? Test and retest. Hey, my mobility is better after I do red light. Amazing. Are you good at it? Yes. Well, you probably are missing an opportunity where you could be really using that time,

better leverage in somewhere that might actually improve other aspects of your recovery that you're not paying attention to. Power Project family, we've had some amazing guests on this podcast like Kurt Engel, Tom Segura, Andrew Hooperman, and we want to be able to have more amazing guests on this podcast. And you can help it grow by leaving us a quick rating and review on Spotify and iTunes. If you're listening to the podcast, just go ahead and give us a review. Let us know how you dig it and help the podcast grow so we can keep growing with y'all and bring you amazing information. Enjoy the show. All hell breaks loose.

Yeah. Oh my God. Still waiting for my steroid thing to turn into a heroin addiction. That's been like a decade. So I think we're good on that front. It might morph still. You gotta be cautious. If I want to lose weight, I feel like that would be probably less side effects of DNP or the same side effects of DNP. I got a question for you here.

You're a doctor. Oh, boy. I'm hoping that you got some answers here. Can't wait to disappoint you. What do you think causes someone to be tight? What do you think causes stiffness in the body? What do you think causes stiffness in the body? Like maybe for most people, I think when they wake up first thing in the morning, their body is kind of tighter than it maybe was when they were exercising the day before.

So where does some stiffness come from? And then where does someone's body just deciding that it's going to be much tighter than somebody else's body? These are multifactorial issues. So, you know, something like metabolism, nutrition, hydration, all of those things could definitely play a role. As it enters into like the physical preparedness space, muscular tightness, so far as it's a limiting factor to exercise, it's essentially mediated system at the level of what's called the cerebellum. So cerebellum, if you look at like the lobes of your brain, so kind of like breaking away from a normal paradigm of like, oh, a muscle is like short, therefore it's tight, right? We think of this as very mechanical two-dimensional

system. I sit all day, my hip flexors are short, therefore X, Y, and Z, where it's like, like your body's just complicated. And it's almost as if when we look to approach the body, it's the same way we look at approach the phone, like a cell phone. We all put our iPhones right now. We know how to use applications and download applications and all that. But when the phone breaks, you realize that you have no fucking idea how the phone works. And then you go to an engineer, you go to Apple. A genius.

A genius. Yes, aptly named, I'm sure. Well, they know more about it. But the guys who actually are manipulating the software, writing the software, whatever. Even at the hardware level, it's complicated. It buys a lot like that, where there's a reductionistic model that lets us be very comfortable operating the apps every day. But it's like, when we ask a question like that, it's like, okay, what happens when there's a bug in this software? It's like, well, fuck, that's like a bit of a loaded question.

So the technical answer is there's a region in your brain called the cerebellum. It's your movement brain. And so to kind of, you know, to landscape the brain a little bit, you sort of have like these like four lobes of the brain. You have like your frontal lobe, your temporal lobe, your parietal lobe, your occipital lobe, which kind of makes up the brain. the brain like your frontal lobe your temporal lobe your parietal lobe your occipital lobe which kind of makes up the brain if you're like thinking your head about like a comic book brain sitting in a vat somewhere those are the four things that you're probably thinking of and then there's a brain stem so midbrain pons and medulla if you think medulla you're probably thinking about water boy the medulla oblongata so right off of you can find a brain for us there andrew

yeah that also works too and then so the cerebellum is just off of the brainstem underneath like the cerebrum underneath these four lobes in this part of the brain is what it it mediates a lot of things like rhythm coordination timing and one of the things it mediates is super interesting as for this conversation is tone now tone we might think is like a desired training outcome that's kind of misunderstood like you want to be a little bit less fat and you want to have a little bit more muscle but tone has like another definition like the clinical setting of like how stiff you are are you on high tone or low tone would kind of be a way we would say someone who like muscles feel like this they're on relatively high tone so

there you go you have a couple additional structures and what we were talking about there's like a hippocampus and an amygdala in there and post-central gyrus. But what you're looking at at the bottom, sort of that, they say it's a walnut-shaped projection off of the back of the pons in the midbrain, the cerebellum there. I've never eaten a walnut that looks like that and probably wouldn't if I saw one. But that's the cerebellum.

So the cerebellum has three components to it. Now, we are very visual creatures by by design right so if you were you have a dog you have a dog yep is that really small white somehow that scared the shit out of me when your wife was here earlier i was walking by like ah i was just like yeah edible like i love dogs and but dogs are not visual creatures right they don't map their environment with their vision they map it with their sense of smell. They're very olfaction driven, right? But if you think about human beings,

we're very much visual creatures. Our visual acuity is probably one of the higher, when it comes to apex predators, one of the better ocular systems that we have or optic systems that we have. Peregrine falcons, snow owls, things like that might be a little bit better, but some animals can't see shit at all.

Like a moose. Like a moose, exactly. They're running off of different systems. Now, this could be the entire episode, but I think it's a really useful conversation to at least attempt to understand because the human body is very complicated and it's under no obligation to make sense to anyone. As long as you're cool playing the apps on the phone that's fine but like

if you want to start fixing things you got to know the inner workings of it so that cerebellum really breaks down into three functional subsections so there's a spinal cerebellar track a cerebro cerebellar track and a vestibular cere tract. Now, I'm going to glaze over two pretty quickly and get to the one that most often highlights the interventions we use to help improve mobility. I think you're talented, by the way, just so you know. Thank you. I appreciate that. I can't fly drones or edit videos, but I could talk about neuroanatomy. You tried to say that you weren't earlier, but I think you're talented. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's going to go on my LinkedIn profile later. Mark Bell thinks I'm

talented. So the three functional subcomponents of the cerebellum are the vestibular cerebellum, the spinal cerebellum, and the cerebrocerebellum. So the cerebrocerebellum basically talks about how your body maps the external environment through motor patterns. So if we think about the cerebrum, which if we're looking at this image, is basically everything above the brainstem and the cerebrum which if we're looking at this image is basically everything above the brain stem and the uh the cerebellum so all of the the pink stuff the blue stuff and the green stuff for those of you following along at home we have a part in our brain it's called pre and primary motor cortex where we hold motor patterns right so motor pattern i think of like a zip folder right so when my media guy tells me something it's like i'm going to send you a

folder and it's the file is a bajillion, trillion gigabytes. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. Like, I don't know what that means. And it comes in this thing. It's a zip folder. And so I got to click it and then it unzips.

And then I have this massive folder that was sent through the interwebs. I feel, I can't say internet around you. And so that is a motor pattern. Now, for someone who is an athlete, who's done something a bunch of times, they have these things that they can do with their eyes closed because they've done them so many times. These exist in this cerebro-cerebellar tract.

So we have another tract, the vestibular cerebellar system, which uses the inputs from our eyes and our vestibular system, this thing in our inner ear, our balance center. So if you spin around a bunch of times, you feel dizzy. That feeds into the cerebellum the same as a cerebral cerebellar. So we're getting real-time footage of what's going on in front of us. We have this calibration tool of this altimeter, this movement gyroscope in our head mixed with what we're seeing. That's one message into this system. So we have a message into our system of what we've done before. We have a message in our system of what we're doing right

now. And then we have a peripheral system, which is gathering a ton of information from where our body is in space. That's the spinal cerebellar tract, right? And so the spinal cells between these three tracks, what the cerebellum does is we can think of it a little bit like this room. is we can think of it a little bit like this room. If this room was the body and we wanted to illuminate all corners of this room and do it in a way that's as energy efficient as possible, right? We wouldn't use like the ridiculous studio lights we have here. These are serving a different purpose. Like if you've ever been in a place where the power has been cut off, but there are backup emergency lights that are super, super bright. Those lights' purpose is to illuminate every square inch of

that room with as little actual source light as possible, but they're super inefficient. There's a reason you don't run the emergency lights all day. We kind of put these like whatever halogen, LCD, tube lights, fluorescent lights all over and they kind of illuminate. If we wanted to do it really effectively, a handful of candles strategically placed in here would give us enough visual information that we could navigate this room with confidence, right? If this room was completely dark, we wouldn't know where to go. We would walk very slowly.

I'd be like, oh, we'd all just sort of be doing this, trying to gain some insight about our external environment through other means that's not our primary way of mapping, which is visual, right? So if we think about the cerebellum as like a dimmer switch, and that could go between candles in the corner of every part of the room, illuminating the room, to emergency lights on the ceiling, the best, most efficient way to do it is to have these candles sort of all over the room. And this is where the spinal cerebellar tract comes in. So if we think about like, I think of motion capture to make this analogy. So if we think of like Gollum from Lord of the Rings or making a character on a video game or an athlete into a video game,

we're going to take them to a motion capture studio. We're going to put this like Lycra suit on them with a bunch of little polka dots all over those polka dots are transmitters and then the central processor is the receiver so what you're doing is you're getting this real-time information about where adjacent structures are in space as you move that's why like andy circus the actor that played golem in lord of the rings can go on the sound stage somewhere in orlando somewhere and make it look like he's in middle earth right we paint this on the spinocerebellar track that. Now this is where a lot of like more popular nomenclature, more common verbiage might come into play. Mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors. Proprioreception is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but oftentimes misunderstood. So when we look at

the spinocerebellar tract, so just to kind of bring everyone back up to speed really quickly, we have the cerebrum of the brain, the four lobes of the brain, the three parts of the brainstem and the cerebellum. Our conversation today is about the cerebellum and how it interacts to create an internal motion capture system. It acts as a dimmer switch. The whole point is to know where the body is in space. That's what makes it sort of like our movement brain. It needs to know where we are before we know where we're going. Kind of a profound statement.

If you think about it, you need to be able to map your internal environment. So the cerebellum has three functional subsystems. This is literally for the purpose of people taking notes. And this might be a little bit academically constipated, but bear with me because it's super useful to understand this. Your cerebellum breaks down to three functional subcomponents of your vestibular cerebellum, your cerebral cerebellum, and your spinal cerebellum. Your vestibular cerebellum, like I said, inner ear and eyes, this helps get real-time information into the brain that helps feed our computer, our motion capture system of where we are in space. Our cerebral cerebellum is where we've been in space,

how we know to manipulate. Something that I would use, an example I would use is a free throw. If I close my eyes and take a free throw, I'm not going to, because I don't have that. Like that's a, that's a dusty old zip folder in the back of my, you know, parietal low pre and primary motor cortex. But some people, you know, Steph Curry, no look path eyes. What do I need fucking eyes for? I got this system. This system is my backup all day, every which way and twice on Sunday. Now we get into theocerebellum where this is tapping on those peripheral nerve receptors, right? And they come by two major forms and the mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors. And this is where I think the conversation gets really interesting is because when we look at what free nerve endings or what stimuli affect the free nerve endings in mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors, it's very, very specific. And it's funny to me that in the industry we're in, people don't actually lean on the underlying mechanisms more because it's really profound. Like if I were to say recovery modalities in a gym or like rehab tools, you're probably going to see things that either apply light touch,

deep pressure, vibration, or skin stretch. That pretty much just summed up the entirety of what the rehab market pain management looks like. Whether it's compression sleeves, which are giving you a little bit of skin stretch, giving you a little bit of light touch, those are free nerve endings. That's a key. That's a lock that lives in our subcutaneous system, in our skin. Mechanoreceptors live within our skin. The only key that turns this lock is the presence of something stretching the skin, right? Or in the sense of a deeper pressure receptor, they're obviously a little bit deeper in the skin. So when I go and actually stimulate that,

the lock is a little bit further in and I feel that. What I'm doing is I'm starting to put some of these Lycra suit dots of my peripheral motion capture system, I'm trying to put them back online. Most people who lack or have injuries have an issue in perceiving their internal and external environment. And muscles are sensory organs. Skin is a sensory organ. So we have the spinal cerebellar tract that feeds in these four specific, and it's not as if they act in isolation,

right? They act very much in unison. Everything has a component of stretch to it. Even if I do this, my skin has just stretched. But what if I hurt my shoulder and I can't get my arm overhead? Well, I'm not actually getting some of that feedback. I don't know how to map my shoulder in that position anymore. I don't know where I am, so I can't know where to go. And then the trepidation I'm left with, we experience through mechanical pain or nociception. As we move to the next layer,

and the reason I'm stacking these the way I am, I'll explain shortly, is when we get to the proprioceptive layer, which is something that, again, is broadly misunderstood, there are two to three primary proprioceptors. And proprioception is something that we try and train through various degrees of success. The two that are the most popular that I think are the most impactful are the Golgi tendon organ and the muscle spindle. Now, Golgi tendon organ, some people may have heard of. You had some exercise physiology background.

And that's like the receptor that tells us the onset and magnitude of stretch in a tendon. Now, the most prolific by sheer volume, by the number of actual receptors in the body is actually the muscle spindle. And this is where people kind of deviate away or deviating in your thought process can be difficult. Because when we think of muscles, we think of output organs, right? Things that do stuff. That's what we think of muscles. Muscles are our primary sensory organ organ and it's by this utility or by this mechanism sorry of a muscle spindle that makes them so so if we think about a muscle like a bicep you know it's really simple to just think about like the tendon to the two tendons with a

belly in between sort of two heads and we have contractile units that are called extrafusal muscle fibers and then we have sensory units which are interfusal muscle fibers. And then we have sensory units, which are interfusal muscle fibers. And those interfusal muscle fibers don't necessarily contract. What an interfusal muscle fiber does is, so if I have my extrafusal muscle fibers like this that are connected from tendon to tendon in the spaces in between

that aren't connected to the tendon, we have sensory receptors wrapped around. Think of like a finger trap when you were a kid. And it's not until the onset and stretch or the magnitude of stretch initiates that- Everything's a circular pattern, right? Exactly. So that's what stimulates a onset or stretch. So like, you know, we talked a little bit on the live about like a single leg RDL. One of the issues you might have is kind of where this was like, this is cool. So you watch someone do a single leg RDL and you watch their foot kind of

like do this. And they're trying to like, oh, my ankles are weak. It's like, well, hold on a second. What if I just did that? Now it's stable. It's not the foot's problem, right? It's not how we, it's not about the tissue tolerance of the foot. It's about the applied force from the hip. So when we're seeing someone trying to like catch their own foot, keep their center of mass over their base support, what we're seeing is like really rapid onsets of uh stretch and relaxation reflex that comes from these muscle spindles in between so what happens is as we perceive a stretch like oh i'm falling over i'm falling too much that stretch then sends a reflexive signal back into the contractile unit

and it's like trying to calibrate i always always think of like any space movie where they just have like those little, those little air blaster things. And it's super like inaccurate. And they're like, Oh, I'm trying to, I'm trying to, to, to, to land on the thing. And it's like, okay, that's almost what your muscles are doing. But the contraction is starting by the sensory input in, which is fundamentally different than a normal strengthening exercise where we go, I'm going to do a bicep curl. We have a motor pattern for that. Pre and primary motor cortex goes, I'm going to depolarize this symphony of muscle contraction and do this. My wrist has to do something or not do something, my elbow, and then I have to control the rest of my skeleton. So I do that. That muscle contraction started here, right? When I stand on one leg, the muscle contraction that's happening, that's

creating this little like interstellar trying to land it over the midfoot, that's starting at the level of the muscle. That's training the sensory component, that muscle spindle. And that system can be polished and we can train that. Now when we do that and we polish it, we're lighting little candles all over the body, right? polish it we're lighting little candles all over the body right so now we're super efficient when people don't have this and they're constantly just being you know dragged to the center of the earth and they don't have a an idea of where they are in space we don't have those candles everywhere so what do we do is we turn on the big lights upstairs and we put them on high tone right right? And that's why people get globally tight.

And they can get globally tight or they can get locally tight, and it's all centrally mediated. It's mediated by bringing together these three systems to create an internal motion capture system. So athletes will be really good at all three of these. Some people can get away with two. And we have redundancy systems in our body for this all the time. Some people, if you watch them walk and, say, close their eyes, they're going to start to walk more rigid.

And part of it is they don't want to run into things. But someone who, like, I can wake up and go take a piss in the middle of the night. And I can, like, Ben Johnson that shit. Because I know I've done that trick so many times. It's pitch dark. I can fucking flat out 4-4-40 to the bathroom. But why? Because I have that system in our brain.

I have that cerebro cerebellar system, that motor pattern in there. So I don't need my eyes. And frankly, I don't even need the peripheral inputs. I get them. But that's what makes a really good athlete, a really good athlete. You're like someone like Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, commonly cited as the best athletes of all time. Their peripheral sensitivity can allow them to learn these skills so much faster and their visual acuity will allow them

to map their environment in real time. So when we look at tightness, and we look at things that are palliative, right? We zoom in and we go, oh man, this lacrosse ball. It's like that person might even have a visual disturbance. That person might have, you know, and maybe if we put that person in front of a mirror and they could actually see themselves, they could improve their mobility. I know that to be true.

You can see mobility improve with something like as simple as caffeine, right? Because caffeine is just going to start to sharpen a lot of these pathways, right? So you're going to start to see these transmissions, which is happening at the brain, allow for mobility to be improved with a simple supplementation. What does a mirror do? It's just giving that feedback? Yeah. Yeah. It allows you, because if you don't have the proprioception, that's a really good question. If you don't have the proprioception coming from the muscle, but if you can augment it with your primary system, with your visual field, you can start to see, oh, I know where I am, so I know where I need to go, right? And this is the

thing. And it's funny, anecdotally, as I've been studying this over the last decade and a bit, I got into powerlifting. And I remember the first time I squatted at Boss, I had a five, six, yeah, maybe like a 550 squat coming out of a commercial gym. Moved out to California, heard about Boss, trained at the Was Gold's gym down there in Santa Clara, and then went into powerlifting at Boss Barbell. It was the first time I ever squatted without a mirror in my life. I realized I didn't know how to squat. I realized I didn't know how to squat. I only knew how to fix my squat because the muscles didn't have to become sensitive

to my position because I was so reliant on that visual field, that vestibular cerebellar system. But now, and as powerlifters, they always do that thing where they turn the other way in commercial gyms and look at all the weak peasants. And it's like, they might not know why they do that, but it will throw them off, especially the better they get,

the more sensitive they are, right? The more you, the more you would optimize, the less capable you come at adapting. So that when we talk about tightness and I'm sorry to shoot up to it, but I really think it's an important concept and it's a really great question because it's a centrally mediated process. But when we see things that are palliative, and this is where I want like a takeaway to be, that's great. Like if some, Hey, the foam roller like works fucking right. Have you tried a Theragun? That's vibration. Have you ever tried like taping it? That's skin stretch. Have you ever thought about wearing sleeves or cuffs or something like that's just a little bit of additional skin stretch. All of these things. But have you thought about visualization? Have you thought about watching

video of yourself after you've thought about doing this for a little bit in front of a mirror, right? Visualization, the cerebro cerebellar patterns is a, there's a really, you know, Have you thought about watching video of yourself after? Have you thought about doing this for a little bit in front of a mirror? Visualization, the cerebro-cerebellar patterns, it's a study that's often cited, but there's a cohort of basketball players. I don't know if you've ever heard of this research where one went out onto the court and shot for two hours and they did a two-week intervention. One went out and visualized and the other didn't do anything there was you know a relatively insignificant difference between those that went out and visualized shooting versus those that didn't now the reason i think that was the case was these were people who already played basketball they had this they had the proprioception they had these motor pad and they were just polishing them and i think two things would have happened one if you took a non-basketball cohort

who didn't have those those skills or weren't, you wouldn't see those. You'd see a remarkable difference in the people actually going through it. I think that doesn't get mentioned, and I think it feeds into this model really well. and had them shoot for six hours. Now they're getting fatigued. Now the shot accuracy is worse. They would probably do worse than the visualization group, right? So it's about deploying better tactics and strategies if we understand mechanistically what it is that's actually causing the tightness.

So as coaches, it can give us and it can open up our view, no pun intended, to a lot more strategies rather than just being like, foam rollers are dumb. It's like, well, they're dumb if you think that they're breaking up scar tissue. But if you understand mechanistically how it affects the peripheral nervous system in this case and how the peripheral affects the central nervous system, you can be like, well, no, they're not dumb. They're a part of a much larger picture, right?

They're one of nine sensory inputs through a spinal cerebellar tract, which is one of three major inputs through the cerebellum, which then has to feed into the rest of the four lobes of the cerebrum, midbrain pons and medulla, right? So it's complicated, but it's really worth understanding, even at the very least of going like, hey, you know what? Maybe more is better, but more variability. Our brain loves variability. It loves new shit. And I think if we can understand very specifically what those underlying mechanisms are, we can just go specifically what those underlying mechanisms are, we can just go, okay, let's just apply a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit of this. And it might be outside of the way we conventionally think about it, but that's mechanistically how these things happen. Sorry. That was awesome. That was amazing.

If you're someone that's taking supplements or vitamins or anything to help move the needle in terms of your health, how do you know you really need them? And the reason why I'm asking you how do you know is because many people don't know their levels of their testosterone, their vitamin D, all these other labs like their thyroid, and they're taking these supplements to help them function at peak performance. But that's why we've partnered with Merrick Health for such a long time now, because you can get yourself different lab panels like the Power Project panel, which is a comprehensive set of labs to help you figure out what your different levels are. And when you do figure out what your levels are, you'll be able to work with a patient care coordinator that will give you suggestions

as far as nutrition optimization, supplementation, or if you're someone who's a candidate and it's necessary, hormonal optimization to help move you in the right direction so you're not playing guesswork with your body. Also, if you've already gotten your lab work done, but you just want to get a checkup, we also have a checkup panel that's made so that you can check up and make sure that everything is moving in the right direction if you've already gotten comprehensive lab work done. This is something super important that I've done for myself. I've had my mom work

with Merrick. We've all worked with Merrick just to make sure that we're all moving in the right direction and we're not playing guesswork with our body. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at merrickhealth.com slash power project and at checkout enter promo code power project to save 10% off any one of these panels or any lab on the entire website. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I guess, how would something like, you mentioned how other things can kind of play into exactly what you were talking about there, like myofascial release, and maybe it's not actually myofascial release, but it's doing something and somebody rubs something on somewhere and it feels better. So we do like at least have something on somewhere and it feels better. So we do like,

at least have some people noticing that it feels better. Where does something like red light, where does that fall into this scheme of things that more on the mechano transduction side? Yeah. I mean, best of my knowledge about red light therapy, that'd be more mitochondrial and cellular energy.

So to what degree that would bottleneck your ability to move um it could be something as i don't know if uh would red light emit heat probably not i don't think those things it emits some heat yeah not a lot not like an infrared or something like that yeah so i think to what degree and look there might be conditions out there that are bottlenecked by that level of specific cellular metabolism. We're in that case, and how do you find out? Test and retest. Hey, my mobility is better after I do red light.

Amazing. Then what we can infer from that is if red light's mechanism of correction is somewhere at the level of cellular metabolism or ATP production in the mitochondria, however that science shakes out, then that was an underlying cause, right? If that's a variable that we're testing against, and we test against it, and it improves, and you know what? Maybe the whole fucking hypothesis is wrong, but what are you left with? You're left with someone who feels better and moves better. Great. That's what I'm after. I like trying to be right, and I only know this stuff because I think it allows me to more consistently be correct. But being correct is not about passing a test.

Being correct is about getting my athletes to move better. So if they tell me something, especially high-end athletes, professional athletes who do this for a living, I'm immediately looking for the mechanism. They are right until I can prove them wrong. And why would I try and do that? They're so hypersensory that it's like, okay, there's a mechanism here that we don't understand, right? The caffeine thing. Like I went down that research because someone was like, yeah, I'm way more mobility when I do caffeine.

I was like, that's why. I mean, I've never not trained with caffeine. So like maybe I'm stiff as a board and it's been caffeine this whole time. There's something like mushrooms I know, you know, drastically probably improves someone's mobility. Yeah, you know, this is not medical advice. I mean, I get pretty limber. I get pretty loose when I'm on a few grams. So there's, but it was literally that,

like when people hear things, I think we're quick when we don't understand mechanisms to discount things rather than like, hey, let's include this, but let's try and figure out mechanistically what is the principle that's driving this adaptation to occur. Have you seen cold therapy be of benefit to some people? Yeah, I find that really interesting. So yes. And it's one of these things, like I look at cold tubs almost like I look at Turkish get-ups, where it's like, once you're good at them,

you probably don't have to do them, right right like if you have all of the integrated mobility and coordination to do a turkish get up and you're like hip extension then doesn't overload your shoulder upward rotation and all that because at the end of it you could be left with this like compounding layer exponential just being in a shitty position as well and they don't be that effective second you can do it's like, is there much benefit to doing with a 135 barbell? I don't know. If you're Chris Duffin and you're good at it, then fucking rock on, man. But like, I can't do it, so I don't. What I see a lot, and this comes down to almost like, it's a principle that's been kicked

around a lot in the strength and conditioning world. Paul Aquin had a crack at it. I think Thibodeau has spoken about it in the past. But you see a very clear divide when you work with athletes. And I would look at it, and I think historically this has been documented by others who run into this problem where it's like, what are the main neurotransmitters that drive these people? Like you have some people who are like, kind of walk into the room, big game, what's up? And you got kids that are like hype, hype, hype. And sometimes you need those people

to come down. Now the hype, hype, hype guys, you put them in cold water. Okay. All right. This. And what I think is happening that I don't think gets discussed often, and this is just like a theory. So don't crucify me for this, but there's this idea called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which is essentially, if we think about breathing, breathing is an extension of both autonomic and voluntary. It's the core of almost any meditative practice. And what makes it so unique is that our ability to tap into something that's autonomic. Now, we can't, at least I i can't tap into other autonomic pathways right like our norepinephrine epinephrine pathway or adrenal pathway of like fight or flight acute fight or flight i cannot replicate the state consciously of someone walking in here with a

revolver i can't right sorry is that too real? David seems nice. And I feel like- Lock the door. I feel like he's got us though. Oh, yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah, he'll be fine. Okay.

Yes. Okay. But I can't replicate that, right? Like that's autonomic. But breathing is almost as really unique gateway into the autonomic nervous system. So when we think about our breathing cycles, inhalation and exhalation, they are paired inextricably to inhalation and exhalation. So what I mean by that, or sorry, autonomic, let's back up.

Inhalation and exhalation are paired to parasympathetic and sympathetic. So if you've ever gotten really good news on something, like you just got accepted to school or your thesis has been approved or your dissertation, you got your, whatever. Exhalation, parasympathetic. Homeboy rocks up with a snub nose. Inhalation, sympathetic, right? Now, so we know inhalation to be even, and this is where the study of HRV comes in. So respiratory sinus arrhythmia comes into the study of HRV. Is if you have a lack of variability in this like heart rate variability you lack these spikes in

over time basically in not necessarily inhalations and exhalations but you the what we're really assessing for is the delta the number of changes that we've made from your highest high to your lowest load when it comes to variability? So what I think when it comes to athletes is there might be some benefit from recovering from a neurological perspective to get sympathetically driven people into a more parasympathetic state. But there's some guys that are super chill. So there's almost like two camps that i see here like there's a guy who i never put in the cold tub but throws med balls before the games but there's a guy who doesn't need to throw med balls in the game his whole he just springs around his feet barely touch the ground all day that guy might get in a cold tub on a recovery day

right because he's up and we need to come down, right? Where some people are like, you got a guy, we've got some Russian cats in the NHL that like, you know, they're just asleep, but then you put them on the ice and they're killers, right? So you're just like, does that guy need to go to sleep? Do I need to force him into this practice of exhalation-driven parasympathetic nervous system activations? Probably not. I'm probably going to need an acute catecholamine response prior to him actually going out on the ice. I need to bring him up and teach him how to come up more where it's like, I got the jackrabbit kid coming in, bouncing off the walls. He's the guy fucking with the music and he's like, all right, that kid's gonna, and you put him in, right? You put homeboy from the old country in there and he's just like, yes,

Russia. And I was like, he's fine. He fine he doesn't need it right so it's a super interesting conversation that i think doesn't get had enough like we look at research it's resurfaced now we've known this for years back when i was a strength coach at stanford almost 10 years ago we pulled the cold plunges out of some of our athletic facilities because of the negative effects to hypertrophy this has been well documented for time why it's recirculating on Instagram. Now I have no idea. But I think there's undoubted benefits for people that it's beneficial for. I think what people lack is exclusion criteria.

And I think the exclusion criteria can be something akin to behavioral. And it's almost like anything. It's like, are you good at it? Yes. Well, you probably are missing an opportunity or you're paying an opportunity cost for going under this practice where you could be really using that time, better leverage in somewhere that might actually improve other aspects of your recovery that you're not paying attention to. you were talking to Jesse about it too a little bit yesterday, but there's a side of fitness that's like the functional side of fitness where they'll look at, I guess, athletes with some lean body mass or athletes that use resistance training. And there's a belief that doing that will actually remove an athlete's athleticism and make them slower, make them not as springy, will take away

from their ability to be fascia driven is what some people call it. Have you heard of this or no? No. Then you've never worked with a real athlete. You've never worked with a real athlete. Now, I'm curious, like what is it? Like, what do you think? You've never worked with a real athlete. If a fucking puddle can make this guy slow, he's not a real athlete. Are you joking me? The best athletes I know can tie one on and still fucking run a four two, right? Like it's just, I'm sorry, whatever fucking, you know, equestrian you're doing is not a real athlete. And look, that might be true.

So like, and look, there might be application to that. If you have someone who's reverted to the mean of physical ability and they are not an entail outlier performance, then that might be true. But what is consistently true at the entails of high performers, which I would call athletes, because that's a meaningful conversation, is what do you define as an athlete? Like, does the soccer dad who does CrossFit three times a week that his coach calls an athlete before a WOD, is that guy less springy after a cold tub? I don't know. But does it matter with his 93-pound muscle snatch? No, it doesn't.

You're not an athlete. By my definition, what an athlete can do is can learn motor skills really quickly right i i think of this my sister has two kids and i was in australia she lives in australia and i was in australia uh maybe six months after she had her daughter it was her first child and i have no real exposure to toddlers i don't have kids myself she's the only sibling i have i don't really have any cousins. It's just me, her, my mom, and my dad. And I remember like, what do I do? And then she was like, do what all parents do. There's an iPad.

I was like, brilliant. Look at me go. And I remember watching, I don't know. My sister is like savant level smart. And my brother-in-law is also brilliant. So I'm watching this. And I'm watching her go through the iPad. I was like, holy shit, this is nuts.

This thing's a robot. This is wild. I don't even know. Where was that app? Can you change my settings? Like it's been a little bright. Can you turn it down? And then I flew back to Tampa Bay in off season.

I was working with a running back for the, he was with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the time and like freak, freak athlete. And I gave him a drill that was relative. Well, not relative. It was absolutely complex. And it was complex just because it's like early off season. I'm trying to manage load. I don't need him doing something heavy. I need him a drill that was relative. Well, not relative. It was absolutely complex. And it was complex just because it's like early off season.

I'm trying to manage load. I don't need him doing something heavy. I need him thinking. I gave him an exercise that may have taken, I don't know, a mortal couple months to master. He mastered in three reps. And I saw the look on his face. And I remember thinking like, God, this is just like my niece. And it's like what he's doing is learning motor skills really quickly. If the idea that you're going to drop someone in some Wim Hof shit and they're not going to be as,

look, there's a difference between clinically and statistically significant differences. So you might be measuring in, and I don't know what the study is, but if you're measuring some sort of in vivo elastic response to a tendon or some sort of collagen type and trying to equate that to someone who's been doing something for 15 to 20 years at the highest level that has a genetic predisposition to being particularly built for the sport they do. And you think puddle water is going to fuck them up?

Like you're not working with real athletes. Oh, I think that it wasn't that the cold plunge is going to mess with the athletic performance. It's resistance training. So cli-strength training, like training with, like doing squats and deadlifts and like. Oh no. it wasn't that the cold plunge is going to mess with the athletic performance. It's resistance training. So, like training with, like doing squats and deadlifts and like, like flat footed training. So the thing is,

well, I think the same principle applies if you work with a real athlete. Now, the best athletes in the gym tend to sit next to the coach on the bench. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that good athletes can't move well. I think the best athletes have ultimate variability, which means any task, especially as slow and relatively controlled,

like I think of ice hockey players, for example, because the sport is so fast. I want to interject something real quick. A lot of times the guy that sits next to the coach, he barely made the team. And he made the team because he's proficient in the weight room. Everyone sees how hard he works. like amen for this guy let's let's bring him aboard and he's jacked so it's cool yeah but he doesn't doesn't know how to play yeah the sixth man has always got like 18

sharps like all right let's go put in the goon squad fourth line guy we need a bit of muscle on the team but i you know to cause to say that the training makes them slow it's like no what will probably make you slow is increase in body weight, but an increase in lean body mass. And this is a study called anthropometry, which gets super, super interesting in sports science. I think will be at the forefront of sports science in the next decade is in order to understand volume and intensity and really load in a training program you actually need to really monitor body weight and you can look at prize horses and how much decreasing their body weight even marginal amounts to their body weight i don't know 1300 pounds how big's the fucking Clydesdale right you drop a couple pounds off that's going to be something that links to their performance so you know if you want to have the conversation have the conversation and putting on putting on weight for sure. You got more lug around. You want to go out there with a 20 pound rucksack on if that 20 pound rucksack is a vest or is it pecs and delts, it's like that might not be effective. So there's always going to be a sensory input perspective.

How like how unbelievably sensitive he must be under a barbell, right? Like he could tell you if a floor is on level, he could tell you if his shoelace is untied, he could tell you, he could probably fucking count the rivets on the knurling of the bar on his back. Right. And that comes from, it doesn't come from him necessarily being in environments where he's training the sensory input and, but these two things are linked. In early stages, we had a question in the live about if you're trying to improve someone's stability in something, it's like sometimes the answer is put them on a leg press.

Because the motor output you're getting is actually feeding some afferent sensory input into that muscle that's just focused on motor output. They're never closed off. So I just think if you're working with someone and you think weight training is going to make them slow, not that athletes don't think that and not that it's not important to accommodate your training program to make sure that your athletes psychologically feel a certain way and accommodate the potential underlying physiology to make them better. But that's why it's called coaching and not programming, right? So there has to be a way where you can learn how to, and a lot of the times is getting results, right? Getting the results you need through implementing the sensory things that they might like that might not be more output

driven or more consistent with what we would look at as conventional weight training, but being able to show them through controlled interventions of specific exercises and going like, look, this is moving the needle in a meaningful way for you. How do you feel, right? So yeah, athletes will proclaim that and that they're not wrong. To proclaim that the underlying physiology

is something with a bunch of words, mechanistically, myofascially, whatever, is just, that's a that's a reach that you just can't make like you can't substantiate that claim with any sort of principles based you know biomechanics or neurophysiology or neuromuscular physiology you just can't make that claim you can state anecdotally that athletes do feel that way that's fine i know broadway singers that don't like to train because it feels like their neck gets tight it's like okay that's fine dude like yeah you're hypersensory and we need to understand that we need to program accordingly but it's also you know we need to understand the long-term benefits of keeping an athlete robust and in the game to

collect enough data to continue to be sensitive at the sport that they play. Where does athleticism... Andrew has a young boy, two years old, right? He's three now. Oh, he's three. God damn. Time to be flying. Yeah, Andrew's got a young son, and I think a lot of people listening probably want to kind of know, like, how do you

assist somebody to become athletic? Not like you're trying to make a Division I athlete or anything like that. But where does athleticism come from? Oh, yeah, that's a really good question. Doesn't it come in our developmental years? Doesn't it come from like if you don't have it by the age of X, then you might not ever really be able to catch up with it?

Yeah, so if you could look at it, you know, we spoke about skill acquisition earlier, and I think this is probably as, this is an apt analogy as I think you could make. Like if we were trying to do either of you speak, you speak Spanish. You said, yeah. Do you speak another language? I can barely speak English. Right. Bless.

Right here with your brother. Thank you. And it's just, you know, it's not so much that physical skills have a unique propensity. Obviously, anthropometry, like height and weight and those things play massive roles in your success as an athlete. You know, whether it's something more specific like a fiber type or twitch fiber bias, fast or slow or something like that. Or it's, hey, you're 6'11", and both your parents are trees. It's like, all right, what the fuck do you think you're going to play, right? Like, have fun on the basketball court.

But to think that athleticism trends like any other skill that you learn, it's no different. I think it's just there's a window for that cognitive associative autonomous phase to start, that it starts closing, which can make things a little bit more difficult. But it's nothing unique to athleticism as a skill or set of subskills. It's just more unique or more broadly unique to skills itself. Right? Like if you, sorry, your son, does he speak Spanish?

He barely speaks English right now. He just like communicates with like a couple sounds here and there. Okay. Are you going to he speak Spanish? He barely speaks English right now. He just communicates with a couple sounds here and there. Okay. Are you going to teach him Spanish? I'm going to try to, but again, it's just like I don't use it that much myself. So it's just like one of those things that he might pick up on a couple words here and there. But yeah, I don't know. We'll see.

Well, if you were to want to teach someone a second language, you would want to do it younger. And whether it's piano, whether it's violin, whether it's Mandarin, whether it's, you know, a physical motor skill, these things, the fundamentals, the cognitive phase starts when the brain is developing the most. And if you can lay a foundation of that cognitive, the associative autonomous can come later. So it's really like the musical analogy probably trends best for most people it's like you know i i have a little bit of a music background but if i were to learn the notes as they are represented on a treble or bass clef right so like f-a-c-e or e-a-d-g-b-e or

whatever the hell it is um i would look at that and go okay i know this as sort of the corpus of the musical story right these are the the notes that get played sort of the corpus of the musical story, right? These are the notes that get played. These are the tones. These are the octaves. These are the sharps, the minors, and the flats. If just knowing that alone at a young age where I can start to adhere that to memory, and I started playing piano when I was quite young, so I'm pulling that from the third grade, and I play guitar a little bit here and there but nothing at a theoretical level if you can get into the cognitive aspects which kind of play into what we talked about which like can you start putting them in variable positions where they're getting a lot

of input i'll ask you a question and i'm assuming i'm going to get a very consistent answer if you were to go into a lab and and you know make a kid with the sole purpose of being a professional athlete what is the first sport that undoubtedly, if this is, I'm Steve Harvey and this is a Family Feud question, and we go survey says, what is the sport that you are going to put your son and or daughter in to make sure that they have the best chance of becoming an athlete? What's the sport that everyone's going to say?

Gymnastics. Gymnastics, right? And we all know that. Why? Because it's giving them the cognitive psychomotor skills to be just inherently aware of an ever-changing external environment. And that's really what, that is a big part of athleticism. It's building that sensory system at a time where they're just able to learn some of these skills. It's very hard to, now people get into gymnastics later in life,

but most people's equivalent neurologically, as far as complexity goes, of getting into gymnastics later in life is actually just getting into conventional resistance training. Where people, and this is, I think, an interesting moment if you work with people in the physical space. Most people who got into what we do for a living have always been on the leading edge of that cognitive physical development. We've always been eclipsing these milestones. Probably everyone in this room has been the 99th or 100th percentile, like off the charts in physical ability as a young age. And when it comes to trying to superimpose your experience, your lived experience as a human athlete on this planet with someone who's not been on that? How many people are willing to open up their wallets in a commercial gym or online for a program or advice for them to start

their journey, if you will, into athleticism? And we don't see the gym as athleticism because we've all been in scenarios where the external environment is changing 100 times a second. So our ability to process how relatively minute a change that could occur during a set or a repetition is just so trivial to us. But that's like taking me and being like, all right, Iron Cross. I'd be sitting there like Vince Vaughn in old school, trying to like, I can't fucking joke. That's insane to me. Or like, all right, high degree of difficulty, triple inverted front flip.

I was like, dude, I'm going to crack my skull open and break my fucking neck. That is to someone who was always maybe, as a coach that works with us, Kyle Baxter, I just love this phrase. For people who are weaker than the forces of gravity acting on them something as simple as a lunge or a hinge oh my god a hinge is like the highest degree of

difficulty now we look at it and go i don't really get it like just shoot your hips back and like bring your chin away from your tailbone or whatever your cue is that's like you know some russian gymnastic goes like i don't get this you just tumble a bunch of times. I don't fucking know where anything is, dog. It's nuts out here. I'm spinning. I'm throwing up. It's crazy. There's an issue with people who get into the industry always being on that leading edge,

that almost unquantifiable edge of their physical and cognitive development. They don't understand the interaction that most of their clients have with gravity. And when you can start to be, I mean, the term I use is like physically empathetic. Like, hey, I don't understand, but it must be difficult to be able to navigate your exercise selection. The way you look at the gym starts to change, right? So at this point, I forget the initial question, but something to do with building athleticism at a young age, I would just expose them variability, right? What do you see best with, uh, you know, if you look at some of the best athletes, uh, if I'm not mistaken, I'm pretty sure Patty Mahomes could have gone pro in baseball as well. If I think so. Yeah.

I played basketball as well. Right. And what is building that it's variability. And now do you need to be like, wow, we're going to do this. We're going to do gymnastics for this much. And that's what gymnastics provides you. It provides you variability or variable exposures through different planes at different velocities at different intensities with different level of coordination and rhythm and timing and all that. But I think it's equivalent. And I like where the conversation is going with the longevity space as they refer back to this.

It's like the importance of play. Play can be very useful as it's non-specific novel variability, but at a certain point, Paddy's got to play football, right? At a certain point, John Tavares is actually a better lacrosse player, so I've heard, than a hockey player. He's the captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs. At a certain point, John has to pick hockey. So specificity does also matter, but when we're talking about young age, variability is really going to be the key. And that's why gymnastics is a really good catch-all because it allows for that ultimate variability right like you see i saw carlos alcaraz the other day he was at an indian wells tournament if i'm

not mistaken he was dribbling a soccer ball carlos alcaraz the number one ranked tennis player in the world yeah but you think it helps to know where your feet are like this guy was out there like fucking pele like he was just dribbling this thing. I was like, wow. And he probably grew up in like a small town in Spain. He probably played a lot of European football growing up. And that definitely led. So variability, exposure, frequency, all of these things. And guess what? This is the same thing when it comes to cognitive development and learning, right?

Math, music, art, science, you know, everything. That's why people make their kid listen to fucking opera music and shit. It's the variability. Oh, you get to hear everything. It's like, yes, that's what we're here for, to experience all that is that we can experience. So, you know, without getting too metaphysical on it, that's really what we should be after when we try and introduce athleticism

to anyone really, but it's that window of time where cognitive and physical development are most open to us to be receptive to. You're probably wondering, why am I wearing these glasses? Well, it's because I'm being bathed in blue light. And blue light isn't necessarily bad. There's blue light in the sun.

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the description as well as the podcast show notes oh i do want to say though um just so adults don't lose hope i've seen like adults like get into grappling or because grappling is very variable or get into you know adult leagues in terms of likeball, even though it's people don't look at that as much of a sport. But I've seen some people get very good at these things, but spending time with it over a long period of time. So it's like, don't think that if you weren't an athlete since you were a kid or playing a sport since you were fucking five or six years old, that you won't be able to develop a decent level of athleticism if that's what you're trying to do now. It's not too late for you to develop a decent level of skill in whatever you're trying to do. You also might have some amazing traits that you never even expressed before because you didn't do athletics maybe when you were younger. Yeah. And that's where I think just general

physical preparedness, you would talk about traits traits like quite literally genes don't express until you've reached a certain threshold of stress and that's both you know psychosomatic and also physical so it's like yeah you could be latently an athlete genetically and that's much harder conversation to parse out but you do see that right now you know then it's where i think specificity is going to really rule the or specific variability as a kid you can almost get away with infinite novelty because all new experiences are novel and in this case they're also specific to what they need which is something new but as you get older it's like well you might want to have a little bit more of a concerted effort but i would just i would look almost less at the science behind resistance training

to guide your information around frequency, volume, intensity, and all that. I would look more towards the science behind how is it that I'm going to learn faster, right? Like if I'm 25 years old or older, which I am now, I would, the supplement stacks I'm reaching for are like choline, GABA, glutamate, right? These are things, vimpocetine, like these are things that I'm reaching for because I need supplements to help me learn skills. Now, mind you, I've gone to a decently high level of athleticism in a sport that was like

very multimodal, multivariant and played hockey. And now I'm back to resistance training, but keeping that system sharp so that when I am out on the field with, you know, athletes I I train with and I do need to jump on a box or drop down, I'm not like, god damn. Because these are skills that I need to learn quickly. So I need the brain to be malleable and not turn like too plastic in this case. So I would consider everything that you do as learning when you're an adult who doesn't have a strong background in this. And I would move all of my efforts towards that. The way I set up my training program, the frequency of it,

the intensity, the reps and reserve, the supplementation, the nutrition, I'll be like, what's going to help me learn better? Because that's what you're doing. You're really learning at that point. And you're trying to offset this window that has since narrowed from when you were a child. You still might have legs day, but you might do like walking lunges or something that's going to maybe express some more movement than just a squat or leg press maybe. Yeah. The external environment dictates the internal demand. I think walking lunges for you and I are relatively commonplace and relatively easy, but feeling the world through someone who doesn't have that same relationship with gravity,

that's such a good place to start. And then how we talked earlier about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the nervous system to follow, how people will draw to that and what the benefits they'll take out of expressing gait cycle under resistance with a bit of perturbation with dumbbells in your hand. I couldn't think of a better exercise that like is really the precipice of athletic movements before we start getting into like Olympic weightlifting and things like that. But yeah, walking lunges should be an absolute staple in everyone's program, whether advanced or not.

But if we look at athletic lunges for us, I want to get bigger legs, bigger glutes or bigger adductors or bigger quads. I'm going to load it a little bit different. Like I'm going to, you know, maybe I do it with a barbell because I have less variability in that, you know, that perturbation of the dumbbell in each hand. I don't have to worry about my arms being tired or maybe I use straps when I use dumbbells because I'm really trying to push muscular challenge. I'm going to set a ton of constraints on the new person to be like, no, no, no, we're here to practice the skill. We're here to learn before we load.

Yeah, I think a lot of times in the weight room, people haven't really thought about the weight room being a practice or lifting being a practice. And you're seeing now there's more of a marriage between movement and exercise, movement and lifting. Whereas before it was like there's yoga, Pilates, and then there's like bodybuilding, powerlifting, CrossFit, right? And it seems to be separate. Do you think this is kind of a, do you think this is a good thing? Like some of the knees over toes movement and some of these other things that we're seeing, you think that these will have pretty positive outcomes to get people maybe think outside the box a little differently? Yeah, I think we're systematically moving towards understanding mechanisms at scale, which is like, it's tough. Most people just want to pick

up the iPhone and use it, right? Like it's not everyone that wants to bring up pictures of the brain and try to explain how it is this stuff actually happens. But I think we're way further along. The idea that 10 years ago that I could be on a podcast like this and do, like, a little neuroanatomy lecture just never happened before. Like, no one would give a shit. So I think collectively we're moving towards that. I think one of the things that we need to always keep in mind is looking at things mechanistically and then looking at exclusion criteria. Who is this good for? There are cases where particular popular ethos or ethos in training are not applicable. And we really need to be clear when we're coming out with these systems to make sure that if you're going to

come up with a system, you need to have exclusion criteria. If you're going to come up with a principle, you allow people to self-select for whatever system. And that's why I think principles are really useful, but they're also complex. So if we look at, you know, I think if we can begin to teach people the notes of human movement, we can start to be very, very specific. So like, that's why I think warming up, warming up took a lot of flack for a long time. I see Desbound over there, K-Star, really changed the game. But what he did was he's exposed so much variable stimulus to people who just never had anything.

They were output, output, output, and they wondered why their output wasn't moving. He closed that safety pin for them. He allowed the sensory input to start to drive motor output. What I think we can do is where I hope this trends to is I can walk into any gym at any point in 10 years and go, Hey, retract your scapula. And that's taught like one plus one.

Cause that's a, that's, that's a, that's like, Hey, uh, F sharp. Oh,

okay. Okay, cool. Yeah. F sharp where that's the note. And now if we follow the skill acquisition process through from cognitive associative to autonomous, the associative is like, I say scapular retraction,

and what happens is the shoulder blade moves back. That's the association to the prompt and the action, right? So that's where I think, that's where I see the most amount of benefit. Now, how do we get that to market? It's not flashy, right? Like, you know, I think, and I don't know Ben well, I actually don't know Ben at all, just through his account. That's where I see the most amount of benefit. Now, how do we get that to market? It's not flashy. I think, and I don't know Ben well, I actually don't know Ben at all, just through his account. I think if there was a principle to apply, that's not a terrible system.

But I think there's some underlying principles where I've had athletes come to me and go like, oh, I saw this knees over toes thing. I was like, no, absolutely not. In your case, you're too acute post-op ACL, you're too this, you're too that. And it's like, you know, there are, there is a massive people, there's a massive market of people who need to be excluded for, who actually need to learn how to move with their knees behind their toes. Not over, not parallel, actually behind. So it's like, how many systems do we need to make until we extract out the core principles? I don't know, but I think that's where we're headed. So I'm positive with, especially guys like Ben, who have really moved the needle in a positive way that we're moving towards that. Now, will the general public ever understand? I don't know. If I become a senator or president, maybe. I'm not from this country. That'll never happen. But I think that'll be what it takes to

learn it like you learn one plus one and that physical competency, that, that physical, uh, awareness. I think that that'll be the only way, but we're definitely trending in the right direction. I want to quickly add in, um, when it does come to the knees over toe stuff, there's a bunch of regressions, right? So like when a lot of people think about that initially, they think of like a split squat with the knee going deep in front of the toe. Right. Um, but there's a lot of regressions before an athlete even gets there that are set up within that. So it's like, yeah, it's, it's something, if you just had a surgery or you're having knee pain, you don't go towards the thing that's going to cause you the most amount of like

discomfort and pain. You start with what you can do with your pain-free range of motion. Um, but I want to, I want to ask you this and there's a video I sent Andrew, uh, since you've do with your pain-free range of motion. But I want to ask you this, and there's a video I sent Andrew. Since you've worked with so many different athletes, so many professional-level athletes, Mark sent me this video recently. I was wondering what kind of trends you may have noticed with athletes' abilities and their structures. And we'll play this video, and maybe we can put the sound on and probably have to restart it.

But I wonder what you think about this, but also what you've noticed with structures. So you want to play it now with the sound? Yes, let's play it with the sound on, and probably have to restart it. But I wonder what you think about this, but also what you've noticed with structures. So you want to play it now with the sound? Yeah, let's play it with the sound. Got to hit the sound button. Classic. Right, if I got it done. Can you guys read that?

Part two of the Superpower Series is continued with wide infrasternal angle individuals. These athletes may not be the most springy, however, they are typically very strong and more muscular muscular based movers. Don't get me wrong, that's not to say they're not good athletes, just utilize different strategies. While there's a time and place to train these athletes to be more gazelle-like, they may not tolerate high volumes of plyometric activity like their narrow ISA counterparts. Also, in opposition to narrows, they'll thrive and oftentimes want to train with traditional high-intensity exercises.

Make sure to dose them with these movements in order to continue to maximize their superpowers. What are some of your thoughts, Ronny? Yeah, so I have a lot. Just observing different body types, I guess. He's saying triangle kind of downward, somebody having kind of a V taper versus a triangle like upward where their bottom base is a little wider. Yeah. So talking specifically about the subcostal angle or the infrasternal angle here, it's very mechanical in the way we'd look at it. Like if I were to, for example, like what he's describing is, so a narrow ISA would have the physical properties

of this can as it is now. Now the wide ISA, which she was highlighting in that video, would be something that carried the physical properties of this can if I dented it. So if I dented this can and it was like smushed, if you will, technical term, this can no longer rotates well. We'd agree if I put this on its side and it doesn't rotate well, which is kind of what he described. What does this can now do well? I can probably flex and extend this can really well a lot. So, you know, I think there's something that we need to respect and it's

structure indicates function. It doesn't dictate function. Position dictates function. So if you look, cause I can pull up a bunch of athletes that don't have that structure that do carry with those traits. So for example, you see this in bodybuilding a lot. And sometimes it's at the top performers, they're anomalous. So I'll use a bodybuilding example as it might resonate, but I'll use a few more. Are we familiar with a vacuum?

So vacuum, the abdominal vacuum thing. So if we think about a conventional bodybuilder and how they carry the internal pressures of their abdomen and thorax a conventional bodybuilder has a lot of compression between their shoulder blades so you could say like their their upper part of their back is compressed and their lower aspect of their anterior is expanded right that's like the bodybuilder gut now if you if you watch a classic physique competitor do a vacuum, is this possible? Can you pull stuff up? Can you search a guy named Steve Lorius?

This is Chris Bumstead. Okay, so leave him on the side for now because I'm going to show you a range of expression and actually what makes Bumstead so unique and actually what makes him who he is in his particular field. One of many things who was the other name steve steve lorius steve is s-t-e-v-e-l-a-u-r-e-u-s well lorius lorius okay lorius steve lorius bodybuilder l-a-u-r-e-U-S, I think, glorious. Let's see if it helps find us, Steve.

Yes. Okay, great. So if you pull up, Steve, now I want you to notice where you can, the differences in structure. And this is bodybuilding, so this is relatively remedial as, you know, it doesn't require a ton of sensory. Okay, so can you pause that there? Okay, great. Can you toggle back and forth between Chris's video and this? know it doesn't require a ton of sensory okay so can you pause that there okay great can you

toggle back and forth between um chris's uh video in this so obviously we're paying attention to the bottom ribs those are very narrow right so if we can go that over to um bombstead we can open it up real quick well what ends up happening is like look bodybuilding is by all accounts a very sagittal plane enterprise which means a lot of just flexing and extending, right? Now, the problem with having what they refer to as a wider infrasternal angle is you're setting a particular advantage for some muscles. So, for example, I have quite a wide infrasternal angle. When I squat and deadlift, my obliques get fucking massive. Like, my external obliques here are quite large still.

And I don't power lift actively as much as I did anymore because I have this, like these ribs that are always kind of up and out. And it's this big barrel rib cage. That's something I would have to be mindful of. If I went into competitive bodybuilding, I might because of the mechanical advantage that my external obliques are at, given my structure, I might opt to not have that part of my skeleton be constantly like under

load because the muscles will grow accordingly and I'll have a big waist. What makes him the best is he's actually anomalous in the way he should be shaped. If we're thinking about classic physique, can you go back to Steve? The rib cage that rotates better is going to have a more concentric orientation of the obliques right so he's going to have this small waist the thing that chris has that most people who are built like him have is he has this tremendous ability to work like the smushed can but not

succumb to any of the negative effects of having a big waist so if we think about what a vacuum is right a vacuum is okay where does it go where did where does your stomach go the pressure went into his upper back why do people practice their vacuums on the floor because when i lay on the floor gravity pulls the contents of my medial spine and my chest cavity and separates the space between my shoulder blades passively so why people pass it or do it on the floor is because there's a place for that pressure to go and then when they stand up they're like oh fuck i have to do this in gravity now. It's really tough. So you see some people progress to like holding onto the kitchen sink when they

vacuum. Why? Because it allows them to push their shoulder blades away and it gives that place a pressure or that pressure a place to go. Kind of push the back out. Exactly. Push the back out. So what makes him unique is the fact that his rib cage is of a structure that allows him to put on a tremendous amount of muscle with sagittal plane movements, which are more loadable, which through the pecs and his delts, he can just do all of these major bodybuilding exercises. But for some reason, whether it's exercise selection or execution or his breathing mechanics, he doesn't succumb to this larger eccentric oblique hypertrophy, and he has a really small waist and can win.

When we talk about structures in sport, I think just looking at ISA is really, it's short-sighted as far as how much anthropometrics matter. And this is some research that's done by Aaron Wellman and Chris McClellan. Aaron Wellman is now the performance director for the New York Giants, and Chris McClellan is the performance director for the Florida Panthers. They've gone so far as to measure the weight of the axial skeleton using this anthropometric measuring system, compare it to how much does the skin weigh, how much does the lean body mass, how much.

So when you do a DEXA scan, you'll do like a three-model fractionation, which kind of gives you how your weight distributes through three. What Chris and Aaron do is they do it through a five model fractionation. And part of this process in measuring the skeleton and what they've found is that you can actually find structural, almost hard stops of like, you know, in the NFL, for example, which is where they do the most of the research,

is you can see, because it's not just about the rib cage you start to see what is the actual shape of someone or of the people who are the best in the world at their sport so like let's take a cornerback for example a cornerback needs to be able to rotate really quickly now it's less about this structure at the rib cage that we're looking at here. Obviously, Steve would be the better at rotating of the two just based purely off that factor alone. But it's a little bit to what you were alluding to. A cornerback in the NFL has a shoulder to hip ratio of minimum 1.6, right? Which means like you're dealing with if you're going like bitrochanteric measurements at the hip joint and you're looking at bichromial joints at the AC joint, and you're going across, if you're going to be, and this is really useful information if you're looking at, like, scouting.

Like, if I'm looking at combine kids, and one kid runs a faster 40, but he doesn't measure up quite literally to the anthropometry or what we see at the highest level constantly year in, year out, as a minimum, right? Like, the number one safety comes out of Alabama this year. We worked with him for his combine prep. And you want to talk, I didn't measure him because we didn't have to because he's going number one anyways.

But one of the reasons he does, it's more global than just ISA. So ISA, it's a biomechanical system that allows you to predict particular biases given someone's structure. Now, you got to be careful because some of the best people don't carry those structures. And so it's like you always have to use performance as your proxy.

You can't just rely on some, oh, you're wide, you're narrow, therefore you're this, you're that. DK Metcalf, right? Are you fucking joking me? Like what a unit DK Metcalf is. Now he's probably built, he's 230. He's probably built more like a wide,

but he can sprint like a narrow. Now he sprints a little bit mechanically different, but sprinting a 10, 300 meter at 230 is almost unheard of. That's insane, right? He's probably heavier than Bolt who's 6'6", right? And he's doing it off the tail end of's insane, right? He's probably heavier than Bolt, who's 6'6", right? And he's doing it off the tail end of a season, right? So, you know, structure only indicates function. It doesn't dictate function. Can we expose people who can learn fast to better positions that will

dictate function? Yeah. And that should be the goal. Now it's just another data point in collecting. Yeah. Like what the fuck? Four bags of candy. What an absolute specimen. Yeah, like what the fuck? Four bags of candy. What an absolute specimen. What's the difference in when you were looking at this literature? Did you notice anything different in how much a skeleton weighs? Because it can't. I'm just thinking in my head, it can't vary that much, but maybe it does.

Well, it's about muscle to bone ratios. And that's where these guys are so brilliant. I got to shout out again, Aaron aaron wellman and chris mcclellan and if you look at the teams that they he's aaron wellman's just gone back to the giants and chris mcclellan has taken over the florida panthers who ironically the first year make it to the fucking cup finals like their success leaves clues like these guys are next level operators so shout out to them one of the things they found and it's super interesting i advise anyone to look into their research is it's about muscle to bone ratio. So muscle to bone ratio is where we can actually risk profile people for injury.

And the interesting thing that they found was that it's based off of race. So there's different carrying capacities. Smiling already. He goes, yeah, I know. I know. I'm better. Like, fuck you, too. Like, what is this? What is this? He's recording on his phone. He goes, yeah, I know. I know. I'm better. What is this?

He's recording on his phone. He's so excited. I know this. I was in the study. Unbelievable. So it's like they studied me. Might as well just give us a double bicep pose at this. Watch him say that white guys are better though. I'm not going to say when have I ever said that.

This isn't a competition of who can play a a ukulele better like some white guy shit oh my god are you done being the best okay sick fucking guy unbelievable what a humble brag okay all right so what they found was we're an inferior and that's actually kind of true no it's about carrying capacity right so football especially has this romanticized you got to get bigger you got to get bigger you got to get bigger it's not exactly the case for some people and like i've dealt with some athletes who their risk profile is so that they need to get bigger to not be hurt right i went through a major league baseball team uh this off season and did some consulting with them kind of peripherally and i was like hey you look at all of your your players with the most soft tissue injuries they are people who are abnormally light or abnormally

heavy and a lot of that figuring out the abnormalities, at least in this research around football, has to do with a muscle-to-bone ratio. So when you can measure the axial skeleton through this anthropometric screen that they do, which is using various calipers and measuring tapes and special tools to start to measure shoulder width and hip width at these particular landmarks,

what you see is, and I don't want to butcher it, but I think this is as close to the real numbers, an ideal playing weight for a Caucasian player would be something to the effect of 4.5 kilograms of muscle per kilogram of bone. So we extrapolate the math out on that, and you need to make sure that you're calculating for muscle and not just lean body mass. So that's where that, if someone of that ethnicity,

if a white dude starts carrying more than that, the likelihood of soft tissue injury is going to go up. And I want to say the next group was Polynesian and then African-American would be the highest. Something that you could be comfortable at, and comfortable meaning relatively safe given the muscle-to-bone ratio. It's somewhere upwards of 5.2 kilograms of muscle per kilogram of bone. So there does seem to be – You can basically hang more muscle off of the skeletal frame that's larger.

Yeah, and that's the thing though. But it's not all Polynesian, Caucasian, and African-American frames are the same. So you have a lot of guys in the league, wide receivers that are African-American that are just playing too heavy. And we see soft tissue injuries like hamstrings or adductors or groin sprains or calf strains. But more seriously, what you'll see is Achilles and ACL. And one of the leading factors, and this is a really interesting concept, I think, for people to help understand when we talk about load management, we need to consider the relatively constant but still variable unit of measure of someone's body weight. And the comparison i make when we think about the

accumulation of fatigue especially through a season like that in a sport like that is if i were to if we take this room right and we have we're trying to calculate the surface area or let's say we're trying to calculate the volume of the room a lot of times when we calculate the workload in a program it's volume and intensity. How many dimensions do you need to calculate the overall volume in this room? You need three, right? You need the length of the wall, the width of the wall,

and the height of the ceiling. So when we think about training an athlete, we think about accumulating, like, oh, we have GPS data or catapult to see how much they've run. And we have how fast they moved on a tendo unit, or we're looking at force plates, or we're looking at their total tonnage in a week. It's like, okay, we kind of put all this together.

We have kind of intensity and volume. We're trying to figure out overall workload. It's like, hold on, we're missing a dimension. You have to be considerate of the size of the thing doing the work, right? So it's like a lot of people are sitting here trying to calculate the volume of the room, just going like, well, how heavy was it? How many did they do? It's like, well, you're just looking at the surface area of the floor, right? That's like, how long is the wall? How wide is the wall? It's like, well, that's two dimensions. That can only give you the surface area. So you have to consider the weight of the athlete and how they distribute that weight from skeletal mass or muscle mass to bone,

because that's going to give you the height and that's going to allow you to actually calculate the volume. Now, this is where the comparison I think really draws weight, no pun intended, is if I didn't increase the length of that wall by a foot, the surface area of the floor in this room scales linearly. If I increase the height of the wall by a foot, the volume of the room scales non-linearly. That's how fatigue works in athletes. So the recoverability demands of someone being a pound heavier, that's a non-linear expression of their demands of recoverability in their program. And it's something we don't pay attention to. Jerry Rice always said, you don't have a long career, have a light career. And there was something to that. Now he didn't know about any of the research.

This has only come out recently, but it was an intuitive predisposition to where a lot of people are going to spend time looking at statistics because that, you know, we can look at things in the gym biomechanically, but if we're not paying attention to the weight of the damn athlete, biggest rock, we can turn over.

You see it a lot. And if you guys track throw football, there's been some, you know, some ACL tears and some soft tissue injuries some really prominent players and if you watch them like yo so-and-so looks good this year it's like hey it looks a little too big too jacked and that's the thing that we have to equate for because every extra pound is a thing that has to be moved while we're training while we're running right while we're on the plane or on the bus or in the hotel, this is something we carry with us. And that allows for a metaphorical understanding of this extra body weight, scaling the recoverability demands non-linearly. You know, later just had

an awesome night. You got dinner or you just came back from the gym and it's time for that fun time. But you look down at your willy and well it's not working the way it should where's that blood flow well that's where joy mode comes in and i can read you these ingredients right off the bat because they're all natural ingredients l-citrulline arginine nitrate panics ginseng root and vitamin c the thing about joy mode is you just slip this baby into a little bit of water drink it in 45 minutes later when you're getting ready to go to the pound town, you will be ready to rock. And you know what I mean by rock. Joy mode's really awesome because there's a lot of things that people promote as far as sexual wellness tools, but there's a lot of weird ingredients in there. These are all natural ingredients that's going to

help your own production of blood flow. Stick it in some water. 60 minutes later, you're going to be able to stick it into something else. Joy Mode's your way to go. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at usejoymode.com slash powerproject. And at checkout, enter promo code powerproject to save 20% off your entire order. Again, usejoymode.com slash powerproject, promo code power project links in the description as well as the podcast show notes how would an athlete kind of know if they should downsize like how would they feel like if an athlete's feeling good with the amount of muscle they have on their frame what's what are the signs like it's just wear and tear like overall get

contact horizon h-o-r-y-z-e-N. Talk to Aaron Wellman and Chris McClellan, and they will come out. They measure teams all over the league. So if you're in the league and you're listening to this, you probably know who these guys are peripherally. So we do the measurements down in Tampa. We have guys that are trained up in measuring the skeleton, putting it into this sort of an algorithm over time

where we look at soft tissue injuries. It's just using big data to predict injuries based off of skeletal mass to muscle mass. You also might know by maybe getting hurt. Maybe you keep having these lower leg injuries and you're like, man, what is this? And now if you're hearing this for the first time, maybe you're pretty big in the upper body and you're lugging around some extra weight. I think what you're saying, I think, kind of blows the lid off of a lot of things. What comes to mind is people talking about non-functional training, non-functional movements, which I don't believe there is any non-functional movements for the record.

But I think sometimes people think that bodybuilding might be a waste of time sometimes for athletes. And basically what you're saying is sometimes it could be, because in some cases, some of these guys might be making themselves a little bit too heavy, and it might be negatively impacting their sport, their career. Yeah. I mean, the hypertrophy side, as so far as the scale is concerned, is always going to come down to nutrition. I could train someone like a bodybuilder and leave them in a deficit and they'd be a better athlete by the pure virtue of being five to 10 pounds lighter. And we all know that exercise is trivial when it comes to caloric expenditure, right? At least anything resistance training that looks like bodybuilding training in the gym. So I just think it's understanding that body weight is a massive rock. And in some cases, it's probably the trump card when it comes to big rocks

as we're talking about athletes. So really, it's like, can you manage nutrition, number one, as a tool of managing body weight? Can you manage the inputs that then are going to dictate the outputs? Because if they're too heavy, then yeah. I mean, if you go through something with a little bit less mechanical tension as a training style with the same nutritional intervention, will someone be likely to grow more with bodybuilder style training? Absolutely. So if you have a control group of one person does an off-season that's mostly bodyweight, dynamic, calisthenic, plyometric, things like that, that don't carry with it the same stress demand on the muscle tissue itself to require it to grow and adapt and respond by potentially adding more

weight to the scales, then yeah, by that control group, then the non-bodybuilding group might do better. But if you controlled for total deficit and you just had someone trained as a bodybuilder, but you also had them at a deficit, depending on how high a risk profile they were, right? Because if they're only a few pounds over, maybe that's not as big a deal. And maybe the more sports-specific plyometric calisthenic body weight training might be better.

But if someone is 30 pounds over and their risk profile's through the roof, like if insurance companies got a hold of this info, they wouldn't be getting a policy. Then that person would probably be better off doing anything to get their body weight down and so if that's it's all i think the intervention changes based off of your proximity to your optimal sort of green loading zone from a muscle mass to skeletal mass ratio because i think at the outer periphery it's about getting your weight down it doesn't really matter the metric why you do it because what's really going to move the needle is going to be in your nutrition.

Do you sometimes train people with this in mind? And do you think like, maybe just give them a little bit less sets, maybe give them a little less reps, so the time under tension is almost like you're running away from hypertrophy protocols intentionally, but you can still strengthen them. And then on the flip side of all this, you can have them kind of loosely power lift, maybe in an 80% range, 85% range. So you're not lifting too heavy, but to maybe increase some bone mass. Yeah. You won't appreciably increase bone mass to really move the ratio in a meaningful way. But I think you stumbled upon something that's super meaningful is if I know if someone is out of a higher risk profile and I know the nonlinear expression of recoverability,

understanding how that third axis of their body weight as stacked up to the volume intensity of the training program, what detrimental effects that has to recoverability by both adding more stress, right, being a 360 pound rather than a 330 pound, that's just more stress to the system. But it is also going to be an understated metabolic deficiency and recoverability if your body mass is too unfavorable, right? Like if you're overweight, your hormone profile will be so that you have a more difficult time recovering, right? So there's those things to consider as well. So I think what you touched on there is super important. If I have an athlete that I know to be out of range, I might pull a few sets and reps out of a program within a week because the sets and reps that they were doing, understanding the load of

the body that had to do it is probably the equal equivalent stimulus and still works within the range of recoverability that I'm looking for for that athlete until I can get them down. So that is a consideration you would make is again, but it's as simple as like, well, how does that come down to this person's interaction with gravity? Right. So that's like a fundamental principle. And yeah, if I got a guy who's 30, 40 over and he's in a risk profile, that's super high, I'm going to adjust the training. It's almost like this guy comes in every day and he's like the equivalent of being hung over every day it's like yeah man like we're going to scale a few back we're just going to touch this and get out because you know you might be in a position where you're compromised we understand that it's acute metabolic environment that happens after you know bout of drinking alcohol but we

don't really respect it when we deal with you know less than favorable skeletal mass to muscle mass ratios and less than favorable body compositions as well. And it's not as acutely detrimental, but it's the chronic negating of that as a factor that leads to a cumulative effect that could be a net detriment, just like training someone too hard after they got smashed the night before. All right. So I have a quick selfless question because I do have my DEXA stuff. So what do I, because it shows how much my skeleton weighs, it shows all that. So how do I figure that calculation out for myself?

That's a behind enemy lines thing. That's a horizon thing. Oh, really? So you can't just do a multiply? No. Oh, shit. No, no, no. Yeah, because what you've done, you have to take a five fractionation model. So a three fractionation model of a DEXAxa or um a bod pod which would be a two

fractionation model doesn't give you nuts data to parse it out okay yeah because then it's going to come down to muscle mass to bone ratio we have to measure how wide your clavicles are versus how wide your hips are versus the depth of your pelvis and yeah there's it's it's fairly rigorous but what i love about it is to me it's almost like i think like a richard mill watch right these ridiculous million dollar 45 millimeters you know swiss movement the whole nine yards and at the end of the day it just tells you the fucking time right like and most of the guys i know and one of my dudes has three of them and he still checks his phone i go what time is it and he's like porky pig he's got three rms on his wrist that he's fucking pulls out his iphone but what i love about it is is and this is kind of an auditing tool i have for sports science interventions like

one of my favorite tools that we've come out with in sports science that's used daily is like a catapult or gps like what an awful idea figuring how much these people are actually running what i love about this at the end of the day the data is so simple right no matter how many inner workings and how many measurements we take, the applicable measure is like, hey, bring it down like 10 before next season. That's where I think, to me, it's a consistent sign of good data when the action items are very simple.

Because people will hear about the complexity. They'll be like, well, I don't know. I got to go talk to these guys. It's like, yeah, the body's complicated. And between the three of them, they have four PhDs. Yeah, go talk to these guys it's like yeah the body's complicated and between the three of them they have for two of them they have four phds like yeah go talk to them but because and the action item is so simple i think a lot of times we look at sports science specifically and it's not unique to sports science but there's this idea of security through obscurity where

it's the interventions are like so obscure it's like oh man there must be like some crazy stuff it's like no the craziest stuff is the simplest stuff that's why we like rm that's why we like aps and pat text it's like wow the the movement is so complicated but at the end of the day this thing keeps sick time and that's what we want for athletes so that's like you know when we get into the the nerve like the neuro anatomy shit and the and the data and looking at spreadsheets and measurements and specificity. And it's like, well, yeah, because at the end of the day, it's like, we just want to win in the column. Right. And that's where I, that's where I really like thrive off of dissecting stuff to that level. It's like, what does it all mean at action? The simpler the action, usually the more

complex the underpinning mechanisms are. Gotcha. What you do, is it more of an art or a science? are. Gotcha. What you do, is it more of an art or a science? I don't know. That's tough. I think, I think the, Oh, that's, I've never been asked that question. That's a really good question. More of an art or a science. I think the art comes from paying attention over time. It's pattern recognition. Like if, if 93% of communication is nonverbal, that the words I learn are only 7% of it. And the rest of the data that I'm learning without consciously knowing I'm learning builds the instinct that allows me to make better decisions faster as a coach. So I think that's where being in a room really helps. And that's where I think you, from an online perspective, you know, most of the time a pro athlete in the off season is going to

want to be face to face, right? And the reason that is, is because they inherently know that you're communicating and making decisions off of the collection of all of the 93% of the data that they're giving you. They don't know they're giving you, that you don't know you're learning, but that you're reacting to that more than the 7% of what you hear. So I think the art is understanding the science so well that the communication becomes the only thing that matters. Fuck yeah. You got anything, Andrew?

Yeah, I don't want it to spiral too far out of control. No, just because, you know, we were talking about functional training and like somebody will like not want to do machines because like, oh, that's going to get rid of my functional strength or whatever it may be. I'm not seeing it too much often. Maybe it's just because of like the, my feed's different now, but a lot of people will start looking, they'll go down like the biomechanics route and they'll start seeing and only doing like optimal training, right? They won't do a squat because it's not optimal or they won't do this or that. Do you think there's a

detriment in like learning too much about like biomechanics and that side of things i think that's where application is always like the great equalizer right like performance is always your proxy being right is being big being right is being fast being right is being strong being right is being healthy right like i don't like i don't care about these these mechanical models if the guy's the you know you know, if he's a fucking shem, right? Like, I just don't care. That's not right. Is he a shem?

Shem, yeah. You have no friends from New York? That's a New York thing. I don't know. I've heard it before. Yeah, it's just like, I don't know. You're a putz. You're a fucking shem.

I don't like it when you say fucking putz. I don't like that. Shout out New York, for real. But it's like. I see what you're saying. Like, LeBron James isn't going online and, like, fighting with people about his feet no and that's the thing it's like he can perform like a motherfucker so he doesn't care and it's it's a it's a classic sign of like hubris and like i hate to bring up the dunning kruger effect because i i find it a little bit overstated

but it's like i just think that when you get into it there has to be a two things. One, how complex the system we're dealing with actually is, right? And if you want to understand how to use the apps, that's fine. But know your fundamental limitations. If you want to try and work at a level of engineering, then you have to crack the case open and really accept the fact that you're going to have things that exist in your brain paradoxically. And you're going to have to reconcile that. in your brain paradoxically. And you're going to have to reconcile that. There are thoughts that I believe that I know to be true that have an exact opposition in my own brain

with another thought that I believe and know to be true. And that's just part of complex systems. And the body is the most complex system. So I think a lot of people are wanting to be coaches and it's very easy to like listen to something like this and be like, oh, like you're overcomplicating. It's like, okay, like use your apps, go play Bejeweled and leave you the fuck alone man like i'm trying to fucking fix shit over here so it's yeah yeah so you need to one accept the fact the body is endlessly

complicated and what we even claim to know is people who crack open the case is maybe five percent of what there is to know and that's ambitious and then the other thing you have to affect is like the other thing you have to respect is athletes are sensory monsters. We see them through the lens of motor output. But what we're seeing is that is a transparency put over their sensory perception. And how they perceive the world is different than the way we do. And I think that's really hard if you haven't lived that. And it's very hard.

And even on the other side of that, it's very hard to perceive how someone who's always been weaker than gravity, how they perceive the world. So it's like a little bit of physical empathy, I think, goes a really long way. And so when you realize those two things, that we maybe know 5% if you've dedicated almost two decades of your life to it. And the other thing is, you don't know what it's like to move as another person. You have no idea what that experience is. You realize that right is probably off the table, right? And the best we can do is better. And what we're looking for is better is, are we stronger? Are we bigger? Are we faster? Right? So I think that's, do people know too much? No, I don't think you can ever know too much. I think you can do too little. And I think that's where for me, it's like, I'm always, as much as I talk and I talk pretty much for a living, I've done a hundred orders of magnitude more in real life. And that's why it makes talking about it easier because these are things that I've done in real time with people in real life. So I think, yeah, there's no such thing as overthinking. It's just underdoing. You have courses and stuff like that. How can people learn from you?

Yeah. So Prescript is my education company. I started almost a decade ago. So Applied Biomechanics, Functional Anatomy, www.prescript.com. I recommend most people start with the level one course, but you can book a call to talk to one of our academic advisors to see where our course curriculum best fits where you're at and where you need to go. Where can people find you?

Instagram at the underscore muscle underscore doc. That's, yeah, I don't know. We're on YouTube as well. Podcasts, RxRadio. I think it's under my account. It's the YouTubes. I can't say interwebs and YouTubes normally because of you. You watch too much of my stuff.

It's been a ride. It's been a while. I think I met you at the cage back in 2017. Oh, wow. Yeah, animal cage. Yeah, animal cage. It's been that long, yeah. Animal cage. Yeah. So it's been that long, however long that is. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for your time. I think this is one of the more informative podcasts that we ever have. Wow. That's crazy. That's awesome. Thank you. Yeah. It was unbelievable.

I think one of the most profound things you said is the body doesn't have to make any sense. And that's where we'll leave it for today. We'll have you back on the show and talk a lot more about that. That's where we'll leave it for today. We'll have you back on the show and talk a lot more about that. But I'll be thinking about that one for a while because you think that the body has to be this particular way for this person to function this particular way and to be able to do this particular thing. And we're proven wrong time and time and time again. Yeah, we don't know anything. Strength is never weakness.

Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.