Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1017: Max Schmarzo- Strong by Science

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin speak with Max Schmarzo of Strong by Science. Mind Pump recommends The Jordan Harbinger Show with Mike Posner. (2:43) Nothing will check your ego harder than hearing yourself talk for the first time. How everyone starts somewhere. (4:54) The losing battle of the scarcity mindset. (7:11) The two schools of thought when it comes to force production. (16:21) The aesthetics of movement: The concept of motor unit synchronization. (22:05) How it’s not the sport that matters, it’s the movement that matters. (26:16) Does Lebron James really perform poor squats?? How general fitness is not the same as athletic fitness. (31:59) The power of big data is in the granularity. (35:35) How it’s about making things applicable. (43:30) Why ideas are stupid, actions are awesome. (47:25) The importance of data to cater to your athletes. (50:07) The concept of percentage of drop off. (53:01) What are some effective ways to maximize/improve your length-tension relationship? (1:06:25) Breaking the myths behind isometric training. (1:17:57) What protocol does he recommend for a given athlete to improve their glute development? (1:23:21) The act of being ‘engaged’ when you perform an athletic movement. (1:27:07) The role of the CNS to your performance and overall wellness. How your coach acts as your ‘check engine light’. (1:29:45) The science behind why our body crumbles from too much excess high intensity training. (1:41:04) Why there is no such thing as biohacking. (1:47:25) Featured Guest/People Mentioned Max Schmarzo (ATC/CSCS/MS) (@strong_by_science) • Instagram Podcast Website Cory Schlesinger (@schlesstrength)  Instagram Matt Van Dyke (@vandykestrength)  Instagram Chase Phelps MS, RSCC (@_chasephelps)  Instagram John Brenkus (@johnbrenkus_)  Twitter Paul Chek (@paul.chek)  Instagram Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: MAPS P.E.D. $60 off until Sunday, April 28th at midnight **Code “PED60” at checkout** April Promotion: MAPS Split ½ off!! Code “SPLIT50” at checkout The Jordan Harbinger Show Ep 168: Mike Posner | 31 Minutes to the Other Side of Fame Force is King - Strong BY Science How does the length-tension relationship affect hypertrophy? - Medium Resilience Code: Home The Weird Power of the Placebo Effect, Explained G-Flight - Strong BY Science Exsurgo Strategic Resource Use for Learning: A Self-Administered Intervention That Guides Self-Reflection on Effective Resource Use Enhances Academic Performance Neuromechanical coupling in the regulation of muscle tone and joint stiffness. Applied Principles of Optimal Power Development - Strong BY Science Intro to the Glute Layering Model - Van Dyke Strength StrongbyScience Podcast | Chase Phelps, Stanford | Ep. 1 Mind Pump 955: John Brenkus- 6x Emmy-Award Winning Creator, Host, & Producer Of Sport Science Adaptive capacity - Wikipedia Mitochondrial reactive oxygen species enable proinflammatory signaling through disulfide linkage of NEMO Mitochondria as source of reactive oxygen species under oxidative stress. Study with novel mitochondria-targeted antioxidants--the "Skulachev-ion" derivatives. Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You science buffs are gonna love this episode. Yeah. Max, Schmarzo, Justin, how did you know about this guy? I found out about him actually from our boy Corey Slesinger. And actually, I went into all of his information,

was like, wow, this is one of the only people out there that are putting out great information about, you know, force production, and then also like isometric training. And so this is stuff that I've been diving into personally and he does a really good job of explaining all of this and the importance of that in your training. This is a really good episode. I mean, I had a lot of fun talking to them now.

I would definitely rank this as like a higher level of learning, so for maybe like the average listener, it's like, I think that we were speaking on a different level of training than we normally would. I think the personal trainers are gonna love it. I think trainers are gonna eat it up. I think trainers are gonna absolutely love it. Even the average consumer, I think it's trainers are gonna love it. I think trainers are gonna eat it up. I think trainers are gonna absolutely love it. Even the average consumer, I think it's a good listen,

but I definitely think that we were talking at a little bit higher level in this conversation, which is I think good for us every once in a while is to bring somebody on there. You're definitely gonna learn something on this and he does it just a great job of communicating it though. So I thought that anybody will get good value out of this for sure. Yeah, I really like this guy,

but anyway, you can, he has a podcast called Strong by Science. You can find him on Instagram at Strong underscore by underscore science. And his website is Strong by science.net. And before we get into the episode, remember, we just launched a brand new maps program our most advanced hard core program.

Today, Maps, PED, which stands for Performance Enhancing Design. This program is for all of you, work out, fanatics, all you maniacs. We have good recovery, dialed in nutrition, good sleep, you've been working out for a long time consistently. And you wanna see what you're capable of. You wanna challenge yourself.

You wanna see what your upper genetic potential lies. What can you squeeze at your body? This program will do it for you. Anyway, it's brand new, so it's on sale. $60 off through Sunday, April 28th. Here's what you do. Go to mapsped.com, M-A-P-S-P-e-d dot com, and use the code p-e-d six-zero, p-e-d sixty, no space for the discount.

If you want to check out our other maps programs that may be more appropriate for beginners or intermediate or other types of goals, just go to maps fitness products dot com. Hey guys, look, one of my favorite podcasts besides Mind Pump is the Jordan Harbinger Show. I love that podcast. Jordan is an amazing interviewer. His podcast is one of the most downloaded podcasts in the world. Anyway, a recent episode where he interviewed Mike Posner and Mike Posner talked about fame. In fact, I believe the title of the episode was 31 minutes to the other side of fame. And he kinda talked about the negatives associated with fame and, you know,

mind pumps growing, I'm getting recognized a little bit. I'm nowhere near the fame that Mike Posner has, but I can kinda see what he means a little bit and it was really interesting. Anyway, I have Jordan here with me right now. That episode was crazy. How was it interviewing him? Yeah, he's great.

So he went from, I think he got super famous to me. It's like 22, 23, you're working with like, freaking Kanye and Big Sean and Jay-Z. Like, this is crazy fame that you don't get at that age normally. And he grew up in my hometown where we don't have famous people from Troy, Michigan. Like, we just don't.

And Tim Allen was like the last one, you know what I mean? And now my poser, and it's crazy to see because he was like, I'm gonna be famous, I'm gonna be this big important guy in the hip hop scene. And now he's like Tom Hanks from Castaway with a crazy beard, he's walking across the United States, super nice, donated all of his stuff, like lived in a van for a while.

And it's all because he lost some people in his life, but also he was working with like a Vici, right? We had like $100 plus million and was, I don't know, 27 ended up killing himself essentially. And then his father passed away and it's like, wait a minute. If fame gets you that, there's gotta be more to it. And I know people, when I go to the gym, they're like, hey, I heard you on my pump.

But you guys are like gym gym, gym-based celebrities. So. But it was a great episode because you can hear the, the, the meaning that he's searching for and it has nothing to do with fame and in the world of social media and people seeking out followers. I thought it was a very, very smart episode and again, I always love listening to you. So make sure you go check out that episode. Again, it's 31 minutes to the other side of fame,

the Jordan Harbinger Show, great podcast. So without any further ado, here we are talking to Max Schmarzo. I just bought a mic for our podcast. We started our shit like, well, like a junky ass headphone. And I got it. And I'm like, it's one of the blue birds. I'm like on top of it.

I'm like, I'm stuck in there. Like, basically kissing the mic. Well, we started in Doug's living room. Yeah, a little fold out chair or fold out desk. We're right around each other and Doug would hang blankets up on the walls to make the sounds, you know, so it wouldn't reverberate or whatever.

I was doing mine and my girlfriend got issues. It sounds like, you know, I'm listening to it, you know. It hurts my ears when you talk. It hurts me, it hurts 830 at night. It's a nice babe. And I go, oh shit, so I'm listening to it, you know. It hurts my ears when you talk. It was 830 at night. It's this babe. And I go, oh shit, so I literally drive to Best Buy. I call up my, my, my, my career, I was like, hey, what, what might do I need?

And they're like, anything that's over a hundred bucks, probably a bluebird. And I'm like, okay. I come home and she was, you really bought a mic. I'm like, well, you said my voice sounds horrible. She's like, well, it's trying to be, you know, constructive in the criticism. And I'm like, no, you said my voice hurts.

Like, I probably need some problems. She kind of felt bad, but I was like, no, like, that's helpful. It's real. I first got really pissed. I was like, you know, like, I'm trying to build something here and you say my voice is shit and we're six episodes in. And then suddenly it's like this very egotistical response. I'm like, I love her to build something here and you say my voice is shit and we're six episodes in and then suddenly it's like

this very egotistical response. I'm like, I love her to death, but you're like, I'm working hard, don't say that. Then I stop and I'm like, fuck, she's right. Like, she's always right. Yeah, there's nothing like, nothing will check if you go stronger, in my opinion, than hearing of recording of yourself afterwards.

Like, you hear yourself talking, like, oh yeah, I sound like an idiot there. I sound like an asshole there. Why am I talking that way or whatever? Okay, I gotta let my, I'm so annoying. That, take my ego, bring it down a little bit, get myself better. The thing to make me feel better,

anytime I'm like doing an online thing, I'd go Joe Rogan's first podcast. Yeah, and I watch it on YouTube. I'm like, I'm okay. Yeah. I haven't done that. Have you seen it? Oh, it's bad Oh, it's hilarious. Now to mention he had like 20 years of TV before that too. So it's like I do the same thing

I was like, okay, we're gonna be okay Yeah, like it's weird filter of like the snowflakes going on and the whole thing's disaster I'm watching. I'm like, okay, all right. I'm not sure I get it, but that's pretty bad. Everybody starts somewhere. What were we talking about earlier before we, just the bravado in the, in the, oh, start string conditioning.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What were we talking about? Let's go back to that. So, to preface it, I've worked on kind of two different worlds. You have that string, when I say S and C, I'm typically talking about non-private sector. I use that kind of synonymously. Yes, there's strength conditioning in the

public sector, but that's how I've grown up. So if I start saying SNC, that's what I'm referring to. In the strength conditioning SNC private sector world, you're providing a service. And so a lot of a service that you provide, it's not a tangible product. And so you get a lot of people who are, and this isn't anything against it, but nature of the beast really promoting a lot of rvado behind their own product. And what we were talking about earlier was, you know, I'm cool with people stealing my ideas. I'm totally okay with you taking my book and sharing it to 90 people. I prefer not 90, but maybe cut your friends and whatnot. And my biggest kind of sign of excitement we had to success was the fact that we saw one of our books, I want those websites where you rip it and share it. Because we were like, that's awesome.

People are, they care enough about our book to rip it and share it. And that means you guys are reading our information and like it, that's awesome. People are, they care enough about our book to rip it and share it. And that means you guys are reading our information like it. That's a good thing for us. So what happens is in the S&C world, you're not making a tangible product. Right. You're not making like for our exergo company, the company I work with for our technology. Well, I know if you like our product, if you buy it or if you don't buy it.

It's pretty straightforward. If you don't buy it, we go out of business. But in the S&C world, it's a salary-based world. And so there's a lot of, oh, that's mine. My program's the best. If you steal mine, you steal my ideas because someone can work really hard and get a higher salary because of their methods,

their ideas, and then if someone else is to take them, they maybe feel infringed upon, and as if they should be getting some piece of that pie. And that's the unfortunate nature of anything in the service world, right? If you go to the four seasons, you go to, like a really nice hotel, everyone treats you nicely. It's not like the four seasons is calling the high-it

and being like, hey, you guys still are const the air service. What are you guys doing? We put the water bottles in the room and the men's on the bed. But in the SNC world, we get really mad. And we go, oh, that's my idea. Only I can have a program like that, or only I can teach it that way. And that, you know, has to come back to me.

But really, that's an unfortunate way of looking at it because it's... Your city mindset. Yeah. Yeah, it's constrained a lot of it. And I just actually wrote a blog on this. I haven't posted about it, but it's you look at how things grow and develop.

If you look at natural evolution, it's about the environment. So I could give you guys any program, and your environment is contextually different than mine. Right, you don't work with the same people, you don't work with the same age group, and if you work the same age group and same athlete, those kids or athletes come from a different background.

So when I take that program, and I apply it now to this new environment, that environment itself acts as a stressor. Like, if you think about that program as a living organism, that program now has to adapt. It's tested. Right. It's tested. It has to grow. And so what, you know, you take from me and now apply it to a new environment, it becomes innately yours

because it's contextually fitting your situation. And so when people get really upset, oh, you took my program or you took his program, well, it's not gonna work unless you put your own twist on it to fit the environment itself. And that allows for a lot of really, and I think it was social media's helped a lot, all these ideas and exercises and programs to really develop and grow because you see people who

are, whether the coach wants to or not, taking that idea and applying it to a different athlete, and they might go, oh, you know, that exercise is great, but we need to add a band here or, you know, change the foot placement here because they're not at that level. And just like how evolution works and where the environment changes and then we have to grow, that program goes into a new environment. It has to change, it has to grow. So that's how all these ideas begin

to build, grow and come to fruition in different forms and fashion. You have the right understanding of it because the other way of thinking is very dinosaur and it's never worked ever. We experienced the same thing when we invented the printing press. When the printing press was invented before that, the people who had the books were wealthy

because books were extremely expensive. It took thousands of hours to write one book. Everything was done by hand. Not very many people read as a result of that, and so they had gatekeepers for information, which was either the nobles or the church. The printing press gets invented, and now the control of that information is no longer belongs to a few people. And what happened is a result of that. You had the Renaissance, you had the Lenman, you had the spreading of ideas, the first top-selling book was the Bible, but the second one was Marco Polo's Travels,

and was about this wild adventures going around the world. And people became greatly improved. Today with the internet, with technology, if you're still holding on to that old, scary city mindset, if it's my idea, not only is it wrong, because it's a losing, not only is it losing battle because good luck. Everything that can be free will be free. That's a fact. But also it's a losing ideology for success anyway. It's just not going to make you successful

anyway. The people with your idea of like, I'm going to spread this information because it's the right, it's good. People share it, that's great. And I'm gonna keep doing this. The truth of that is it's gonna elevate you anyway. Yeah. Rather than trying to protect and hold on, those people tend to disappear into the dustbin of history.

They're gone. Nobody thinks about it anymore. So the reality is that's the right way to think from a business standpoint even. Yeah, the most, the best way to be selfish, to be selfless, like it's just a fact. And when people be really, and it's a good thing too, actually, because if you think about, you know,

how we survive as a culture, each other helping each other, and if you want to survive, if you can get with a good group of people that help you, you know, it might be selfish because you want to survive, but you got to be selfless for them to actually want to help you. And a cat talk about that too is that you brought the printing

Paris, and this is a great example, right? There's no such thing as disruptive technology. It's how you use the technology that makes it disruptive. And so you see a lot of people who say, oh, you know, that program, this program has to be the best. No, no, it's how you use that program that makes it effective. It's how you use technology. Social media and NATELY, like Instagram, isn't anything special, right? It had started off with a bunch of people taking pictures of food. That's what I did. And stupid captions to see people

like it. And then it grew into this disruptive platform of sharing information effectively. Just like how we see that in the printing press example, printing press, it's a great idea, but when people realize I can share knowledge quickly because of it, now it has that individual use in it, it becomes disruptive. And so I think we see in our S&C environment or any fitness world is we have people who get upset

because they have an idea and they want to hide it for themselves and they think as if someone else can take that idea and make it just as disruptive as their own. But that's like saying, hey, you know, I'm gonna use the same colors Michael saying, hey, I'm gonna use the same color as Michelangelo used, and I'm gonna draw a great painting. That's not really how that works.

Exactly. And again, that's the right attitude. And it is very interesting. It's almost the easier we're able to share things with each other. It's almost like a clear filter. And what I mean by that is you have this explode, like the bottleneck is always how fast we can share information and what barriers there are to share

that information, is it expensive? For example, in the past, if I want to start a radio show that reached two million people a month, it would have cost me a lot of money. I would have had to write connections. I would have had to say certain things, because otherwise my corporate sponsors would allow me on the channels

there was a limited bandwidth, but that bottleneck has opened up dramatically. So now the bandwidth is so massive that we can all share stuff. So what does that allow for? Well that allows for a lot more ideas, a lot more bad ideas, but also a lot more good ideas. And so far what ends up happening is the more ideas, a lot more bad ideas, but also a lot more good ideas.

And so far what ends up happening is the good ideas, believe it or not, start to kind of win because of their own merit. Whereas before, it was about which ones were saying what the corporate sponsors want. It's you didn't hear nearly as much. And so I'd like to talk to, because you're such an extremely knowledgeable person

when it comes to fitness information. When it comes to fitness and the way we apply fitness, there is no doubt a lot of bullshit that's out. There's a lot of stuff out there that's just, it's just not true, it's not accurate. But there is a lot of stuff out there that is very accurate and a lot of it is old stuff, old wisdom that we're starting to rediscover.

Something that Justin talked about a lot on our show that I know you are just extremely informed about is how we apply force, tension, isometric, how those things can contribute to things like performance and athleticism. Yeah, and this is one of those things where I keep trying to refine the message of it and really like present it in a way where people can understand because it's one of those things that it's hard to communicate it.

It's hard to communicate how to properly channel this force. What is force? What are we talking about here? What are the physics of training? I think that a lot of times we try to hit topics and this this kind of gets me down the rabbit hole And I know you're the perfect person. I read your book You know forces king and it got me excited again about you know somebody else that really gets like how to present this to somebody You know your average gym goer for instance

Yeah, it's Unfortunately, I didn't pay attention in physics. I'm learning. And so I literally have on my desk, it's kind of funny. A physics for dummy's book, next to quantum mechanics. I don't understand either of them that well. Okay. It's like, it's too much.

It's like a good, but I give it a try. Yeah, but in short, everything we do, if we remember, thank you, Newton, for figuring some stuff out for us, he put it very simply in three laws, but has to do with force. Our ability to move is about force. And I think what happens is we have two schools of thought. We have one school of thought where we only think of muscles that work in isolation, and we think of force in terms of, can I do a really heavy leg press or knee extension and we make the assumption that's going to carry over to our goal.

So if your goal is to run really fast, it's a little more complex than doing a really heavy knee extension or leg press. And there's another school of thought where it's like, oh, let's just ignore physics. Let's talk about art. And both paths kind of get you in the same spot, but I think they're telling the same story from different angles. And what I mean by that is if we look at force,

it's the ability of the muscle itself under the given load to exert a physical property in the ground that being forced through different mechanisms, your joints moving, your fascia, your tendons, and all that interacting to propel you in a direction. So we talk about force. Force has a context in regards to how much time it's being applied.

So the time interval away, if you're running, you don't have that much time with your foot on the ground. And it's also in regards to the direction. And so if we think about force in regards to time and those constraints, then we start to understand, I need to do these specific exercises in a specific time frame with a specific kind of intent to mimic that of the sport or at least get close

to transferring it to my goals. And the second aspect, the direction and the direction and application of the forest has to do with the skill. How well timed are your joints? How well synchronized are they so that when you hit the ground, your force that you're applying isn't the right direction that you want to go at. And so- So there's no waste. No waste, exactly.

The waste of energy. And it's because, for example, whenever you see engineers try to create like a faster car or a better working elevator or anything, the biggest problem that they overcome is how can I get all of this or most of this energy transferred over and minimized the loss? Because there's always energy loss, how can I minimize that?

So an example would be like a thermos that's able to maintain your liquids that are hot because it's not transferring the energy of the heat outside of the cup like a normal cup would. And so now you get to conserve most of it. And so in this case, like what you're talking about is, how can we get our force to, how can we maximize that transfer of force and not waste it in other directions or for other things? Exactly.

And so you have the way I break it down is two parts. You have the mechanical engine, right? Your machinery, your muscles, the quality of the muscles, your tendons, and then you have the art or synchronity of it where it's how well can I apply all that together. And the example I use is if you watch a great sporting movement, they're always aesthetically pleasing.

There's something to the eye. We're like, wow, that was really cool. That's a good point. And another example I say is you never see a bad touchdown dance. Right, these guys are awesome dancers. And another example I say is you never see a bad touchdown dance. Right. These guys are awesome dancers. I mean, Odell Beckham is hitting Michael Jackson dance moves in the end zone. The Ike shuffle, I mean.

Yeah, amazing. And what you make you think is, well, he has a great machinery, but he also is able to control all the parts in that machine to make a beautiful movement. And that's when you see something fluid, but yet with a lot of force. If you've watched like LeBron James go for a dunk, there's something aesthetically pleasing in our mind that we see where all these muscles are firing properly.

And at the same time, he then jumps through the roof and dunks on someone. God, that's so, I've never thought of that. That's why sports are so beautiful, right? Well, the aesthetics of movement, why do we, for example, we talk about this on the show all the time, why do we consider what we consider to be aesthetic to begin with?

When you look at a human and you say, oh, they look pleasing to the eye, well, because it's reflecting fertility and health, at least that's what it's supposed to. Now, we pervert it, of course, with plastic surgeries and all these other things. But it exists for a reason, like, for example, a hip to waist ratio, a woman that's considered

most attractive regardless of size and weight, also strongly correlated to successful childbirth. But I never considered the aesthetics of movement. Why do we consider some move? Like you can see people dance, and some people dance and like, that's ugly. They're still dancing, but it doesn't look as good. That person dancing looks beautiful.

Why? And it's because it's communicating to us efficiency. It's got to be communicating to us efficiency. Yeah. 100%. So you watch little kids play sports, and I have a younger sister. I went to all our basketball games. I got progressively more enjoyable to watch because it becomes less clunky. And what that is called in the body is called motor unit synchronization. And so I'll take a step back to explain what that means first.

Your mind is connected to your muscles. And it has these nerves that go down and communicate to these muscles and the nerves themselves that communicate with the muscle and the brain is called the motor unit. And there's a lot of these motor units that control how we move. So, when I lift my leg, I have certain units in my quad, firing my muscles until I'm, hey, it's time to contract.

What happens is, as we do things that are more intense, we have more motor units, more of that muscle needs to fire. And it becomes really difficult now to have to coordinate all of these motor units in a way that is efficient to produce a movement. And so when people say that guy has great rhythm in a scientific world, that's the same thing I say. And that guy has great motor unit synchronization. And so we're so often battling the art and the science.

It's the same thing. Oh, right. Oh, that's rhythm. Oh, that's also motor unit synchronization. And so we have what we think are a clash between art and science, but really it's two different ways of defining the same thing.

And so when you look at developing, you know, like you said earlier, for us, or adequate expression and efficiency, we wanna have the machinery, the muscles themselves to actually be able to do the movement, the, we call it the physiological potential. Right, if you were to work optimally, you know, how much can you actually move, how fast can your cargo,

that's the potential, but then the guy behind the wheel actually determines how fast it will go, right? So that's the potential. But then the guy behind the wheel actually determines how fast it will go, right? So that's your synchronization. Are you good at shifting gears? Can you weave in and out of lanes? And so the same thing happens with the body, the potential being the muscles, the synchronization being how all those muscles are orchestrated through the mind, reflexes and all that other kind of fun physiological stuff to produce what we call rhythm in the art world or Motor unit synchronization and the kind of the science world This is this is brilliant on my last set of training clients always I used to always say make it look pretty

And I know most of them would chuckle and not get what I met But that's exactly what the way I always wanted them thinking is don't just do the exercise to get through the reps, think about making it look pretty as you go through it, and that's so important. I think sports to me is the greatest expression of that. I think it's so, and especially when you see it in a group setting, when not only are you doing it with your own body, then you're now starting to synchronize it with other bodies all together. It's one of the most beautiful things to watch.

It's an interesting thought too. I had always been drawn to movement in the aesthetics of movement, but I didn't know, well, that's just another way to look at it and define it is like, wow, that was a beautiful display of power. And the way that they were able to move was astounding. And if you break it down to that,

as far as like what has to happen to produce that, that's why it's so like beautiful and that's why we respond to it. And so in terms of like athletics, and you mentioned with kids and you know trying to work on, you know, continually progressing that, you know. What have you found as far as a process there, works best within, if I have, say, a nine-year-old, and I just expose them to sports, and I don't want to throw the whole kitchen sink at them. What have you found within the kid population

is probably the best approach? I'll be opinionated on this, but probably not horribly educated. like within the kid population is probably the best sort of approach. I'll be opinionated on this, but probably not horribly educated. So take it with a grain of salt. Sure. I think we need to expose them to wide variety of sports. Obviously, there's a lot of research behind that. But at times, I think that it's not necessarily the sport that matters.

It's the movement that matters. And what I mean by that is we might play, oh, go play basketball, go play soccer, go play lacrosse, and innately in that sport, there are going to be variations in movement. The best movers I've come across are people who dumbed gymnastics. Right, because that is essentially one of the most full-body awareness kind of sports you have where you have to walk on a balance beam. So, you're understanding your coordination, you got to control your upper body. I think sport by

nature isolates movement and constrains the movement within the sport itself. You know, I'm not going to try and do a back flip playing basketball. It's just not going to happen. Nor will I do that in baseball or soccer. I'm not going to try and control myself hanging from something in any of these sports either. We have to understand that a lot of athletics that we do are ground-based, right? All the way on two feet. But I think there is some benefit

to really just challenging movement itself. And I think the purest form of movement has been gymnastics, which is why it's one of the oldest sports that we've had, or means of physical activity, just for the sake that it does encompass so many different aspects of the body, and how we put the body through different, again, movements, not skills. I don't want to call them skills, you can shoot a jump shot, that's a skill, doing it cartwheels of movement. Right, right. I would agree with you.

I'd say wrestling is probably up there also. Well, I manipulate your body with gymnastics. I think one of the most important things is the ability to do something so erratic and fast and decelerate to this most controlled point. And I think the carry over to that in sports has to be one of the greatest things, right? When you look at all sports about like you know, basketball, soccer, all these in the greatest things, right? When you look at all sports, about like you name basketball, soccer, all these, in all different directions.

Right, you'll see some of the greatest athletes has this ability to explode in one direction, gather themselves, stop, and then go the other direction. In my opinion, I don't know a sport that challenges that greater than gymnastics. Nothing running down a track as fast you can, hitting a horse, spinning a thousand times And then landing it on your feet to a dead stop in a perfect form like what other sport challenges at that level I would say none right

It's a pure control and would you would you agree that that's probably one of the greatest carryovers into sports? I do so I've dealt with a lot of wrestlers and they'd all beat my ass But they're really not the best athletes And what I mean by that is in gymnastics you run and jump still and I've dealt with a lot of wrestlers, and they'd all beat my ass, but they're really not the best athletes. And what I mean by that is in gymnastics, you run and jump still. And wrestling, you don't. Not at all.

We did a lot of testing on jumping. I was at Iowa State, and I worked with the wrestlers, and we tested this. They got great wrestlers there. They're great. That's some of the best in the world right there. Some of the best dudes, they're awesome guys too, and they invite me to go play basketball.

And I mean, great guys, they shot a couple shots over the hoop Nothing against them like they're all so and They're the real deal when it came their sport, but when it came to jumping and running If you've ever seen a wrestler jump they go typically their butt almost touches the floor Yeah, and so what happens is there's, to go to a little science of it, it's called a length tension relationship. They play this sport of wrestling, where you're in such long muscle lengths.

And you need to be strong in these long lengths because you can get out of that position, right? You're wrestling someone, if you're stretched out, you can't just be up. I know I'm done, because my arms extended, but you need to be able to perform in those extreme situations, and life we don't. Right, and gymnastics that you're talking about,

it typically is still compact. Right, you might have some things, yes, they're extremely flexible, don't get me wrong, but they don't have that same under pressure of another physical being pushing you at a long muscle length. The length is more for aesthetics, and their performance is compact

when someone jumps, they're quick, explosive, rapidly off the ground, they spin, they twirl, they're fast. Resilvers get in these really long positions and have to find a way to get the hell out of it. And so it's very different when you start looking at it and you know, from a scientific standpoint, because now we start looking at, like I mentioned, length tension relationships

and to break that down. That is, when your muscle's at a certain length, it actually can get stronger at those lengths. And it can have an optimal length at which it produces the most force. That's why you see LeBron James when he runs and jumps for a dunk. The amount of knee bend that he has is very small. It doesn't bend all the way to the floor and jump up because for him, he's played so upright

that the length tension of his muscles, so again, how long they are at a certain time when he's hitting the floor, it's optimal when they're actually, you know, not very stretched because he's, you know, pretty extended with the leg and his quadriceps are. And he's refined that process. Yeah, so neurologically, he's refined that. So you have to speak to you remember was it just last year where he got crucified for his squats. Did you see that? I did. So speak to that, because I know there's an audience listening right now that's probably connecting to that right now going like, oh man, he does terrible squats. Explain that.

So there's a couple of things involved there. One, when you're dealing with a guy worth $300 million, we're gonna put him in a position that he's probably not gonna get hurt. So I get that first and foremost, my safety standpoint, where someone's like, oh, if we're gonna squat, let's keep him high. But for my athletic development standpoint,

there's also a reason for that too. Right, LeBron James is very strong naturally. You look at that guy in high school, he's not weak, right? We're not gonna ever say that about LeBron and that's never gonna be an adjective we use for him. So he has what is a very high level of base strength. His machinery, his contractile properties, his muscles are probably naturally of that of someone who's trained multiple years. And so he has a very high genetic base. On top of that, when he's doing

some of these squatting patterns, whether you agree or disagree with it, that there is scientific reason to say that if you're doing a quarter squat or you might put someone in a more specific position that where they're going to produce force in the movement, it's going to have greater carryover. And so the example I give is if you look at a lot of people who do track, they're typically very upright and they run upright.

And if you've ever seen those YouTube videos, the guys jumping over the hurdles, their knees don't bend very far. They hit the ground, they're really elastic, and that kind of goes in the physiology where now you have the tendon acting as a spring to propel them upward. It's elastic recoil.

But then you take them in the weight room and you have them do a full squat. Oh, that guy's not very strong. But if you have him probably do a partial squat, they're going to be very strong. And what it's saying is, well, two things, one, if I were to train him in a full squat, at the bottom, if all he can lift say is 200 pounds, but halfway up, he can lift 400 pounds. And that halfway and above is critical for his performance, is lifting 200 pounds, going to ever overload that portion that needs to have 400 pounds overloaded.

No. Right, and so there becomes this weird paradigm of, oh, you know, in general fitness, we see full squats, full squats, full squats. And that's great, but general fitness isn't always full squats, full squats, full squats, and that's great. But general fitness isn't always the same as atleast. Wow. Elite athletics, there we go.

I can only get that out. Right, as at elite athletics, close enough. And so, we kind of see these worlds conflict. I think it caused a lot of confusion for people who are either just average gem goers and they want to get better And they watch Instagram and they go oh, you know LeBron James only has squats Yeah, well he has a reason behind it And just like a reason you might want to squat full because it might have more hypertrophy in the legs

Which is better for your aesthetic goals? It might help you mobility wise and your hips a little more for your longevity goals No one said performance and longevity went hand in hand. They don't. No, in fact, no, they don't, they're almost directly conflicted. Yeah, elite athletes are not the healthiest people in the world.

They're extremely specialized at what they do and they're very, very, very good at what they do. It's no different than getting into a car that is the fastest quarter-mile car in the world. Try driving that to work and see how much you enjoy driving the car to work. It's the same thing. You talked earlier about the art side, which is the appreciating the aesthetics of movement. And oftentimes we talk about just appreciating the aesthetics of the human body. And you talked about the science side and how there's been a chasm between them. How do you bridge that gap? How do you try to

bridge that between the two? It's tough, but they're not conflicting. That's my biggest preach. It's always going to be from the coach. Data information technology is just going to be there to augment the coach's decision. It'll never override a coach's decision. There's no way a series of numbers, non-contextualized to a person, is ever going to be more intelligent than a person who's worked with someone, looked at them in the eye, and has seen how they move and knows their name. And so what I mean by that is we need to stop looking at it as two things that are mutually exclusive.

It's really just how can I help the art side more by giving them more contextual information to make better decisions? It's just like a marketing campaign. You don't just go on this street and say, oh, you know, everyone buy my product in this yell and hoot and holler and come back in and go, well, did anyone buy it? Right, you go, okay, I'm gonna send a survey monkey out. I'm gonna see how many people opened it.

I'm gonna see how many people clicked to visit our website. I'm gonna see how many people got to our shopping cart. I'm gonna see how many people purchased and how many people purchased again. So now you have reach, you have engagement, you have potential buyer, you have buy, you have retention. Right. Now let's take that same idea, kind of mold it. So it fits our environment of, you know, athletics and sports science. And I want to say, okay, I have an athlete here and I want to measure his jump height. I want to say, okay, I have an athlete here, and I want to measure his jump height.

I want to measure certain biomechanical properties. All that's doing is giving me context to that person. So I know if one day he comes in and we measure jump height every Monday, for example, and he comes in one Monday and he jumps four inches less. I go, you know, what'd you do this weekend? Oh, you know, my knee's kind of bothering me. Now that gives you quantifiable information,

but it doesn't stop there. You say, okay, your knee's bothering you. Let's get you to CAPT or someone. And now you have where they were, where they are, and where they need to get back to. So we're not taking, and this is a quote from my dad works in big data. He works with Hitachi Vantara. He's like, there's CETO of data analytics. He says, very firmly, the power of big data is in the granularity. And that means that it's not

all the information that you collect, that's important. But it's certain pieces of all that information that become very important. And so if we can start to now say, okay, I have an individual who comes into my place, whether it's private sector, whether it's college, SNC, we now have a profile for that person of, you know, this is how they move, this is how they jump typically. And if they deviate, we have a check engine light. And so the way I describe it to people is if I asked my girlfriend how she's doing once a week, I'd be in a world of hurt, right?

I love Kelsey, that's my girlfriend, love her to death, I always use her as an example in this. But what I mean by that is when we are with a relationship with other humans, we always contextualize how they're doing. And the example of Kelsey, if I come home and say, how you're doing once a week and she goes, I'm okay. Well, okay means not good.

I'm probably, I'll know. Nothing. Yeah. Everything's fine. Everything's just okay. But maybe a hat, and let's say I asked on Friday, but Monday I left my dishes out. Tuesday I forgot her as her birthday.

You know Wednesday I forgot to make dinner, and I asked Friday, and all I see on Friday is I left a book out, and I go, oh, she's upset because I left a book out. But I don't have context to how she was in those other days. Great analogy. And so I wanna give, I wanna get a lot

of a little bit of information. So a little bit a lot, is what I say, not a lot a little. And another, that's how humans work. I'm sitting here talking to you guys, I look at you, and I'm seeing how you're responding because humans are always processing. Now how can we make this environment of data fit the humanistic side of how it can help us make these decisions better.

I might see and look at a human and go, they're not walking right. But I know what right is and what not right is. I can measure these deviations and not to go on a huge rant here and I apologize for it if I do. But we look at the human body. It's a complex system. And what I mean by a complex system, and the easiest way to explain it

is a lot of shit's going on. That's the non-scientific way of saying it. What happens is one plus one doesn't equal two. One plus one can equal four. And so when we look at our body, we wanna have the ability to measure different systems. So in the body, we have different systems. We have our emotional, psychological, we have like our neurological, we have the muscle,

we have our aerobic. And essentially, if we can start to understand certain systems and what normal is and then what a deviation is, then we can begin to act on it. And so our body is basically really, it's really good at living. It only cares if you have kids and die. Right, that's why you walk with a limp after your hurt and you don't walk normal again. It's a waste of energy to get you to walk normal. We're not made to walk normal.

We're made to walk good enough. And so, I want to know if I'm dealing with someone who's trying to optimize their goals, I don't want good enough. I want, you know, their best way to get there. And so, if I'm looking at the body, and I say, oh my goodness, look, you're resting heart rates really high today. Oh, I feel fine, you know, I feel good.

Well, I know, okay, they might perceive that they're okay, but their physiology tell me it's not okay. Maybe their HRV, which is called heart rate variability, which is a reflection of their autonomic nervous system, and to give a really short screenshot of that, it's the autonomic nervous system, it's kind of the check engine light for your body. If that HRV is low, which is an indicator of

the autonomic nervous system under stress, then I know maybe that person can't train as hard as they like. Maybe if they didn't sleep as much, their energetic capacity is lower. And so we have all these things that go into making up the human body. And then what happens is we don't,

someone doesn't just kind of spray an ankle, they spray it or they don't. It's a phase transition. They went from healthy to hurt. Our body is very similar in nature, right? You go, oh, I'm sick all of a sudden. You don't go like, oh, you know, I'm kind of sick. I'm, you know, 75% sick.

I'm 100% sick now. And so what we look at is all of these parts that make up the human body, are they deviating to moving up and down from their baseline? And is that an indicator that this person's under a certain type of stress that as a coach, I can avoid compounding it. Oh, if they don't jump as high, but they feel great and they're just sore from yesterday's squat, maybe we do light aerobic activity. So we still get some work in, but we get the right work in. Well, when I appreciate, too, and Corey, I went to his facility and had the same, like I had the same experience where

I haven't seen strength conditioning coaches really consider all those other variables and to be able to test like you mentioned HRV, also neural feedback and things like that that you've actually incorporated into your facility and programming, it sounds really, really comprehensive and like you could get lost in the weeds. How do you simplify that and present that to your athletes?

It's about making things applicable. Right, and so I start with one thing, if I were to, in this situation, I work at a private facility for people who aren't aware. It's a massive facility. Yeah, talk about that. Lots of really cool stuff. It's called Resilience Code Down Inglewood, Colorado.

40,000 square feet. We have three medical doctors on staff. Dr. Pressmax, our founder, the guy is probably the smartest person I've ever met in my entire life. We do functional medicine. We do biomarkers, so blood work. We have all the way to QEG neurofeedback, so that's measuring your brain waves.

We have full imaging, serenetxtore, we have a biomechanics lab, we have performance psychologist, we have vestibular otinurgasm. Neurgasm. A vestibular ocular motor therapist, we have an IV infusion therapy clinic or recovery clinic. Three chiro is five soft tissue practitioners,

full laboratory for biomechanics and movement screening analysis, and if there's anything we don't have. Disney Land for athletes. Basically, do you guys have a celery juice bar? We do have a red shirt diet tissue on staff. So we have meals ready for you whenever you're in diet training. Yeah, it's a salad juice. I heard something.

It is. I don't have our salad juice. I'm glad you don't. I'm so stupid. Anyway, get to it. No, no, I get you. I know where it's coming from. But for sure, Disneyland for athletes.

Yeah, and the way I look at it is, let's just make it simple. You know, I have all these resources at my disposal as a sport scientist. To when I review this data, I'm working with a coach. And how do I act as a check engine light? I'm not going to solve their gastrointestinal problems. I don't want to. But if they tell me they're bloating and they have stomach issues, I know who to call.

If they have a bum knee, I know who to call. If they have a very low HIV where they're fatigued, I know who to call. If they have a very low HIV, we're there fatigued, I know who to call, talk to their trainer. Hey, you know, this guy looks very tired. We actually had an example of that while I was going through someone's data. And I looked at it, it was a night before, it was like at 9.30 at night,

I'm not sure why I'm doing this at 9.30 at night, but I'm a nerd and that's what I do. And I go, oh, that looks really weird. Call the trainer and said, hey, your client looks like he might be really tired tomorrow. He was training early in the morning. So I know if I was going to make it in time to catch him to, you know, adjust it. I said, hey, you know, I'm kind of going on. I showed up the morning and I go, hey, where's your client?

And I go, oh, he came in, he called in sick. You knew right away. And I was like, oh, I was like, chalk one up. Okay, we'll take it. But the idea is, I'm gonna sit in here trying to know Shredamus and look into the crystal ball and trying to say, oh, you're going to do this and do one of that because the human body

doesn't work that way. It's probabilistic. There's a probability something might happen, but it doesn't guarantee it's going to happen. So let's just make it very simple at first and act as a check engine light. And for people who don't have access to this stuff, because I get this a lot, they go, oh, Max, I don't have all the toys.

Cool. Do you know your athlete's body weight right now? You know, on a 1 to 10 score, how would they sleep last night? What really easy things can you do? What pieces of technology can you find that's affordable for you, that you can then apply to your training to not just help, you know, oh, I want this guy to jump faster, run higher, but I want to get more information on the individual I'm working with so I can provide the best service possible. Now, a lot of times too with coaches

and trainers, especially those that have worked with people for lots and lots of years, there's a certain level of, we'll call it intuition, which is, in my opinion, just the accumulation of observations over years, and you start to develop a sense of if somebody's doing something right or if they're moving well or if they're doing okay, and we call it intuition, but reality, I think it's just compiling all information,

developing an opinion over that period of time. When, at what point or how do the coaches incorporate that? Like if I'm a coach and I'm watching movement and I don't necessarily have data and analytics, but I'm like, you know, he just doesn't seem to be moving as nicely as he normally does, or that it doesn't seem as aesthetic. How do we take that and then incorporate that into our training,

or at least in a way that we can measure even? Yeah, I think the way I'm taking one step back is that every time you want to measure something, we want to be minimally invasive. I don't want this to be a separate ordeal. I want this to be a part of your training. How can I make whatever test I deem important for myself as a coach, a part of training? Is it a range of motion tests I wanna test daily? Great, put that apart of your active mobility. Is it, you know, a jump height? Wonderful, put that at the end of your warmup.

Is it a bar speed? Put that at the starting set of your working for the squats or whatever you're using. So firstly, it's understanding in your environment, where does that best fit? Then it's understanding where does environment, where does that best fit? Then it's understanding, where does that test fit categorized or categorically, where's it fit organized wise? I'm not so worried.

Where the hell do I put it? Okay? Yeah, I can't speak worth a damn, I apologize. I'm gonna do the right. And so, where do I put that in regards to my organization? Is that the, you know, neuromuscular system? Is that someone's autonomic nervous system? Is that their central nervous system?

Is that their general movement, some people might call it, which is where you might say, oh, that guy's hips internally rotating a little more, maybe he's tight. And then what actions do I get out of that information? So every bit of data data you want to collect, you want it to be actionable. Ideas suck. Ideas are stupid. Actions are awesome. We want to have an action out of this, not just an idea. And so when we're looking at, for example, you're saying, let's say I have a client come in and this person comes in and they just want to be generally healthy. And like you're saying, they don't look like they're moving well today.

It's not hard to have a coach's note on your pad, to say one to 10, how old they move today. So now you're quantifying your own subjective analysis. Oh, that's a seven. That looks like a five. What were you yesterday? And you might not realize it, but maybe three days ago they were a nine,

two days ago they were an eight. One day ago they they were nine, two days ago, they were in eight. One day ago, they were a seven and a half, and today they're a four. And all of a sudden, you go, oh man, I can see that happening over time. How can I next time when it goes to seven and a half, make sure it doesn't get to a four? How can I intervene proactively

to make sure that my client is getting the most out of what I'm providing. A little while ago, I read an article that really blew me away and it was on the placebo effect, but everything that goes around that, and one of the things that they talked about in there was the study where people did these 23-and-me genetic tests, and it was a study, so they gave people wrong results. And what they found was their subjective experience matched what their genetic tests told them that they were supposed to feel, but even taking it a step further, their physiology started to match it as well. So if somebody received a test that said, you know, you have genetic

markers for immune system issues. What they found in some of these people's are immune system started to become depressed as a result of their belief of what was going on. How do you remedy that when you're training all these people and you have all these metrics and you start communicating these metrics to your athletes, how do you remedy the potential that you may be influencing them with the data itself and you may actually be causing the changes in the performance. No one said you got to tell the athletes anything.

Okay. Right, I'm being very honest. You keep in a blind oftentimes. Yeah, and some athletes are very invent, oh, how did I jump? Oh, good. He's really great. Yeah, he did excellent.

Yeah, yeah. Right, but what you're taking is you're taking information to help you make decisions. You're not taking information to always help the athlete decide because you're the one who's educated in that area to provide guidance for them. And so what I mean by that is if you marked their movement at a seven,

that person doesn't need a no, it was a seven. You know what you're doing great. Oh, you know, however you want to keep that positivity rolling. And meanwhile you're changing the workouts and the reproach and all that stuff. And you can tell them sometimes, hey, you know, I sat down and reviewed your information

and it looks like you're a little tuckered out. You're a little tired. What do you got going on in life? Oh, you know, I took this new night course. I'm trying to learn this. Now you have information that otherwise would not give you. So data is now acting as this medium through which you can communicate better.

It's acting as a medium which you can act more proactively on. Okay, how can I adjust this? And it's Actions and Medium now for client profiling. So, okay, I have a client's profile. I know where they were. They want to, they get hurt for, they don't want to get hurt, but they do get hurt.

Well, they can come back to you because they know where they were and they want to be back to that level. And you have that information that profile on them to now give them, hey, you know, you jump this high, you ran this fast, you moved like this and your flexibility was this. Let's measure your baselines again. Oh, this is what's a little bit off and let's work towards getting that. So now you have, it's like that concierge customer service you go to, you know, the four seasons, oh, oh, Mr. Schmarzo, you know, you requested two water bottles,

and I feel great, it's two water bottles, it's nothing great for them, but for me, it's like, oh, they're really taking care of me because they know my name, and they knew I flew in from Denver, and then X, Y, and Z, you know, they know it might be late, so they gave me a meal voucher or something. Excellent, yeah. Excellent, no, I appreciate that.

So I want you to, I want you to do think like this for a second because I know right now I've got a ton of trainers that are listening to you right now that would probably kill to have a facility, to have all the tools that you have access to. But I'm a new trainer. I'm only like two years in. I work at some generic chain, big 24-err fitness,

LA fitness type of facility. And I get, you know get people that are athletically minded or they're a high school kid wanting to get better at basketball and stuff. What tools would you give them that you would tell them in their facility with what they're constrained with? Like, how would you coach that coach to help that kid?

Oh, I'm gonna be really biased on this. All right, that's here. So disclaimer, I am affiliated with the company, but we make portable and affordable sports science technologies called X or go. And if you're looking for athletes, and you want to have something that measures quite a bit of data at a very easy use of affordable price,

Lulu, the size of your iPhone, they're really easy to carry. It's G flights, right? The G flights, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that measures your jump height. It can measure your contact time, so how long on the ground for, but they're mobile, so you can do how high you're doing a push-up. How high you're doing a step-up jump.

And we've developed all these Excel spreadsheets that just based on this one device, you can develop an entire profile on someone. Oh, very cool. And so there's things called force velocity profiling. To make it simple, think of it as a load velocity Profiling how and in terms of velocity think about jump height because you know velocity to take off velocity dictates how high you jump Thank you sur Isaac Newton for that one right to the impulse momentum relationship And so if I know how someone jumps and I know what load they jump at

We've actually done some back work and we looked at some of Carmelo Bosco's old research. He was a great Italian researcher and we put together some profiles that just based on how high you jump with certain loads you can determine what quality someone's deficient in. Are they really strong but they don't move something fast? Do they move something fast but they're not very strong. Are they well balanced? Where do they fit in that spectrum? Oh, interesting. And so not to get too nerdy, but I'm going to dive into a little bit. The way it works is as a linear relationship between how much, between the weight on the bar and the velocity.

So if I go from body weight, say, you know, 20, 45 pounds to 90 pounds, 280, if I plot those all on an X, Y graph, X being the jump height and Y being the load, from point to point, the relationships basically linear. I have data on people who've done five jumps, and there are squared, which tells you how linear something is, is .999. It looks like it's made up, if I did it. Yeah, it's like, it's super perfect. It's really good. And what that's telling you is now you have the ability

to understand you can project first off how much weight someone can possibly lift. You can then understand, offer that, what loads they lift at certain weights relative to their body weights, that can be indications of strength speed. So strength speed is moving a heavier weight a little bit faster or speed strength, which is moving a lighter weight a little faster. And are they within the percentile range they should be? And this is all built into this. Yeah, do you have an assessment? Procal? Yeah, we have all these free Excel sheets that auto populate for you.

Oh, that's dope. And so it's not in the end of the book was this 15 years ago. I know, man, we're re-bro. And it's on our website. It's on our exergozendesque. And you can go there and it has tons of assessments. So we have those assessments for the jump height ones. We have asymmetry assessments between legs.

We have, you can do push-up assessments, so how high someone can do a push-up for power. You can do a power calculator, which takes in your body weight and your load. We've had some collegiate baseball teams do, be very creative. They're doing like lateral jumps and looking at that being correlated to pitching velocity. And so it's kind of like this, almost like this open source tool. Beautiful. Yeah, it's awesome. And it's $399.

So $399. And for sports science tech, that is the lowest price you're gonna find. And it doesn't just so measure jump height, it measures how long on the ground for, and it measures something called your reactive strength index. And this is looking at how long you're on the ground for and how high you can jump.

And so it's looking at what's called elasticity. So how good are you at being a spring, our bouncy ball? Can you hit the ground and pop right back up? That's important for athletics, obviously. And so we have all these parameters built in, but then we have it all stored on an app as well. So if you wanna take the information and you just wanna look at, you know,

how much higher or not as higher they jump in today, compared to yesterday, you can do that all the way to, this is awesome, I'm biased too. So I went down to Oakland police department, I did a talk with them last, Christmas Eve, last Christmas Eve, on the way that came in at Christmas Eve, but thanks guys, came in, we brought the G-Flights, and it was the funniest story,

because the amount of competition it gets. So on our device, it has immediate feedback, it tells you how high you jump. And these guys, I'm like, I'll come try it out and they're kind of like, oh, we'll give it a go, and one guy jumps, and he jumps 18 inches, and another guy jumps on jump 16. Cause wait a second, on holsters is gone,

and takes it off. And the guy that goes grabs a new pair of shoes and they jump for 20 minutes, they're jumping. And when you have feedback, it becomes a form of biofeedback. So you know how it felt when you did your best. That's right. Right, so who here's done like jumping that? Exactly, you've done jumps before.

Yeah. And you've done by yourself and you're like, I have no idea how any of those 10 jumps were. Was that good? Was that good? But now you jump and you go, oh shit, that was, I have no idea how any of those 10 jumps were. Was that good? Was that good? But now you jump and you go, oh shit, that was two inches higher than my other one. What did I do?

So now you're ingraining motor patterns. And at the same time, you're jumping as high as you can. So the intent is 100% every time. So now your effort level becomes so much higher during the workout. You can see where that source to degrade based off fatigue. Yeah, and you can see, so then it gets really crazy. You open a can of worms with that one.

And now you can say, you know what? Forget sets and reps. We're never doing sets and reps again. We're doing percentage of drop-off. Right, when you start to decrease sets, when you stop. So how do I know if three sets, you for you, or you know, are sorry, three reps, you know, for you or five reps for you is what I need. And seven for you. But what I do three reps, you know, you or five reps for use what I need and seven for you

But what I do is say you know what just jump until you're 10% less of your best, right? And so you might stop and we'll stop right you might get three you make it seven you might get nine and so I programmed five reps Too much for you. I'm I'm pointing by the way for those of you Right not enough for the other two. So now we're not worried about, you know, sets and reps because sets and reps were traditionally made to accomplish something that we couldn't measure. We said, oh, you know, do five reps because that typically tires someone on enough at this point. Right. Well, let's just measure it. And now the value that gives the trainer is ridiculous. Because now you have value from A, you have a client, portfolio, or file, that you can

show potential clients. Hey, this is what I'm doing with people. I use data and analytics to help drive my platform. All right, it becomes now very, you can possibly charge more, but essentially you get the ability to show people. Look, I'm doing something other people aren't. Secondly, it makes the programming probably more effective, right?

Because now you have information that guide super individualized. Yeah, look, I can tell this week you're jumping not as high. I'll just take a little bit easier this week. And the client now goes, oh, how do you know that? Oh, because I have data on it. And lastly, it makes training fun as hell.

You're sitting there, and we've done it before in our gym. We're just, the whole workout is just jumping. And one day we're like, we're gonna break this number. And so we're doing all the stupidest things you can imagine. We're doing all this like post activation, potentiation stuff. So the goal is to jump the highest.

And you know, we started off by a couple of guys jumping up and down and all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, no. If I lift this weight heavy first, I'm gonna jump higher than you. See how guys bustied out, like, East M units and sticking them on their legs. And then, anyway, we can do to win, right?

And it's this level of competition. And that competition makes your 45 minute train session that much more powerful. It also will make the trainer better, because you talked about biofeedback, but I'll tell you what, there's also the feedback to the trainer where I look at this data I know what I saw that looked really good now. I see the data

That's why it looks so good Yeah, and now I can start to develop that intuition that you sometimes takes 10 or 15 years to develop How do we duplicate it? But now you can develop it in a short period of time because you can connect I experienced the other day I worked out at a gym that had these Kaiser, air, pneumatic type equipment where you type in the amount of resistance you want, but it's using air resistance. And then it shows how much speed you pulled with and how much force you generate. And I was doing some cable chops.

And some of the cable chops I felt like I was pulling harder, but I looked at the number and I wasn't pulling as hard as I did earlier. And so I could see that and know how it felt and start to mimic it. And before I knew it, my technique was getting better and better and better. So it's just like my rowing experience right now. I mean, I've got watts in front of me, I've got meters I've rode, I know my own perceived exertion that I'm doing and I'm constantly watching it and it's the same thing. Like when I hit everything right, you can see the distance I pull so much harder, the watts I generate,

and just because you muscle it really hard doesn't necessarily compute the same one. And that goes full circle to the initial talk about what we're talking about, something that looks aesthetically pleasing. Right. It's like smooth, it's fast and fast and smooth, kind of thing. If you're ever swinging a golf club, you know, if you swing as hard's like smooth, it's fast and fast and smooth, kind of thing.

If you're ever swing a golf club, you know, if you swing as hard as you can, it doesn't really go anywhere. It ruins. Right, and now you're starting graining, you know, what is good synchronization, what's good for them? And people, so I've got to debate with this before,

and they go, oh, Max, you know, but if you have someone jump as high as they can, they're gonna try and cheat. I said, well, I could cheat and jump higher, I'm sure it's hell, am. I'm gonna do that. But I don't know what you're talking about because the body is going to put you in a position

that's most biomechanically efficient. How are you good at producing force? And if you have to find a way to do it. You did it. Right, you did it. And there's actually some great studies on that too. There's a study that looks at how high people can jump and what kind of motivation is best.

And they had one where if you jumped a certain high, you got money. If you, someone would yell at you, I think the other one was, they told you how high you jumped or you had to touch something externally on the ceiling. And the one that was best every time was telling you how high you jumped because we are our, you know, biggest motivators. We can help drive ourselves. And when you start doing that, it now allows them to compete against themselves.

You're not worried about someone else. Right, if you're in a group of guys and you're all trying to jump high, you're cheering for other guy when he jumped higher. Now you're not like concern, oh, who's the highest jumper, but you're just concerned with being better and it builds a really nice camaraderie there too.

And sometimes the stuff that we're talking about right now gets a little lost with the average person because the average person is almost entirely motivated by I want to look better. I just want to look better. I really don't care about forced production. I don't care about how high I jump or how aesthetic my movements are.

I just want to look better. I want to build more muscle and burn more body fat. And the argument that we always make is that, this was an epiphany for me a while ago. I was going for a hike and I was getting passed up by people who are running up in the mountains. And every time that I'm a trainer, so I've been working with people for a long time

at this point. And I'm watching them run and it's just, oh, it's terrible. And I can see all the joint problems are going to develop and it's just horrible. And I'm watching them run and it's just, oh, it's terrible. And I can see all the joint problems are gonna develop and it's just horrible. And I remember thinking to myself, like, why do I never see anybody run really well when they're going out to work out and run?

And then I realized it's because none of them went out thinking to themselves, I'm gonna learn how to run really well. They all went out thinking, I'm gonna run until I get really tired. Like the whole purpose of this is just to get really, really tired. And then I thought, God, if everybody went out and said, rather than saying I'm gonna run to get tired, I'm gonna learn how to run really well.

We'd have a lot more fit people and people would be running a lot better and get better results. Same thing in the gym. People working out in the gym, they go to the gym thinking, I'm gonna hit my glutes, I'm gonna hit my quads, I'm gonna hit my back. So I'm just gonna go until they hurt versus I'm gonna squat as good as I can. I'm gonna do a lap pull down as good as I can.

It was, that was the epiphany that I had, and in my experience, people who practice exercise to get better at exercise and better with the form, they're the ones that have the longevity and the ones that get better results. Well, we've seen the way Plow Matrix has been bastardized. I mean, the same thing. I mean, nothing is like nails on a chalkboard for me as a trainer, especially a trainer

that loves sports and training athletes to walk in and see the client doing the jump boxes, fucking gasped in, you know, one foot's landing. Boom, you know, shins left. Oh God, I'm just like, I cringe inside. Like, if you're going like what if you're gonna if you're if you're goal is just to burn a bunch of calories just fucking make them dance around in circles or jump on a jump rope then if you're but if you're gonna do a jump box and teach them plyometries teach it right or else you're defeating the whole purpose of that. Yeah the risk versus

reward is just terrible with that when people treat it that way. You talked earlier about the optimal force you can produce having to do with the length intention relationship and how. How do you train that? What are some effective ways to maximize being able to generate force from the positions you want to be able to generate them from. Do isometrics play a role in that? Are you training just in that range of motion? Is it heavyweight? Is a lightweight with speed?

Like, what are the best, most effective ways to improve upon your length tension relationship? A lot of things you can do. And so, again, taking a step back and understanding why you want to do it firstly, and then understanding what modalities fit in. And so, we're talking about the joint range of motion that's length-titching specific to your sport. Let's look at your sport. Let's understand what those are before you make assumptions.

Secondly, you can do specific range work. And so, things like you mentioned isometrics are great, but isometrics are also very beneficial for multitude of other reasons we can get into after I answer this question here. So we're talking about joint specific movements and putting someone in a position that allows them to express and overload those positions based on their needs of that sport. And you can do that, again, when I talk about, there's no exercise that does it, they all do it.

Right, it is how can you get them in a spot in a safe position where they feel that they can exert it in a way that best fits them. And what modalities can you use? Maybe you're gonna use bands because you want them to accelerate through that movement. Maybe you're gonna take pins, like catches a safety rack on the squat and put them in a certain position.

So they're going to start from that position, generate and force and stand up with it. Maybe you're going to elevate the deadlift. So you're doing it from a mid-dye pole versus from the floor. All these things can be manipulated based on that specific need. And then you can add things like isometrics to really get into a joint specific position. I really like it too because it provides feedback to the person of this is where you want to be. There's a lot of interesting things with isometrics. They've shown things with if you're doing for long durations like in your glutes, it changes the cortical firing patterns in your brains, you have more

glute activation. They've shown things and it has a basically a 45-minute anal gzic effect. So if someone's dealing with with tendonopathy, so knee pain you can use it But that's again with the knee pain too. It's kind of cool. I'll get back on track. I promise They've actually found that with a lot of like jumpers knee. It's like knee pain They'll look at the knee itself and say oh look. It's actually healthy What happens is your brain has associated that movement pattern with the injury itself. And so there's been great studies. It's called Neuromachchanical Coupling.

It's the fancy word. It's how your brain talks to your body. And they've done studies where now if someone focuses on an external stimulus, like a metronome, they actually reduce the knee pain associated with a joint angle because the stimulus becomes external. And so you can do that kind of with an isometric. Now if you're holding, you have a metronome in the background. Now they're focused on an external stimulus. At the same time, they're holding a, you know, a tempoed isometric. Beautiful. That's fascinating. Yeah, because you have

the physiological causes of pain, but you also have the experience of pain. And sometimes, it's the changing of the association. Yeah, and it's funny because you're familiar with phantom limb syndrome. And the way that they solve that with the mirror box. Yeah. Yeah, and it's funny because you're familiar with phantom limb syndrome, and the way that they solve that with the mirror box. Yeah, that, I mean, very similar. Like the person feels as pain, there's no arm there, but as soon as they perceive themselves having a stretch out arm because of the mirror box,

pain goes away. I would assume it's a similar kind of thing that's happening with what you're talking about. Yeah, and so it's also interesting too. So if you don't even have the external stimulus, and you're just doing the isometric, exercise in general causes analgesic effects. So analgesic mean that it reduces the pain

in that area that you feel. So now if you have an isometric before you start your exercise and you wanna develop the association of pain not being there, well now you don't have pain while you're squatting. And so you can squat, not have pain, and you're developing the ability to disassociate squatting. And so you can squat, not have pain, and you're developing the ability

to disassociate squatting with pain. And now here's why this is for the general person, why this is so awesome. Because pain or the perception, and I think it's important I say this, the perception of pain, because that's really what it is, right? It's you perceiving that you have pain.

That will change your movement patterns. So when I'm a trainer and I'm training a client and they hurt in a particular position, that hurt is gonna make them move in a particular way that might not be optimal. And so if I can get that pain to go away with isometrics, I can get them to move the way, I can get them to move the way I want them to move

and then we can strengthen the patterning that's gonna be beneficial for the client. Exactly, so this all kind of stemmed from too. So Matt Van Dyke had wrote an I wrote a book about power development. And we had like a really small section there on Isometrics. And all we saw people are doing from the book was Isometrics. And him and I were like, oh my god, we spent all this hour on these other topics. And like we have like five pages on Isometrics that everyone's doing it.

So then I got to write another book. We actually do have one. We wrote a book on isometrics that everyone's doing it. So then I got to write another book. We actually do have one. We wrote a book on isometrics. And what's cool though is the fact that you can, it's so controlled. And what I mean by that is people, first off, you don't only have to do isometrics. Let's clear that out right now.

Other things you do, it's just another tool. But if you think about someone who needs to develop strength at a long muscle length, like hamstring tears typically occur when the muscle is very stretched. Well, I can put someone in a controlled position and an extended hamstring, so we're there pressing against an object

that's not gonna move. So it's a safe way to begin loading some of these more complex patterns. So now we're not worrying about, oh, if I do an RD out the bottom, are they gonna use their low back too much? Are they gonna cheat? Are they gonna get hurt?

Well, now I can just put in a very extended position and we can have them now contract for an extended period of time to then develop that length muscle relationship. Actually, you can lengthen the muscle itself, the fascicles become longer because you're in a longer position. And then we can apply that to that person's,

you know, whatever body part that is. It doesn't be hamstrings, it can be, you know, their arm, it can be for rehab, it can be for a peck, it can be for external rotation, all these things you can use it for. So, the way I look at it is, you know, sports science has been very specific in detail, and we dive into all these minutiae

because we want to get the nth percentile out But there's a lot of golden nuggets if you're working with general population out of that Things that you can apply at a very large scale to get a big impact to help your athlete So what happens is to isometrics because the muscles not moving just contracting There's a lot of tension on the tendon itself And it can actually cause the tendon to become stronger, help the remodeling process in a different way than traditional exercises might. And so it actually can help if you've been parodized for proper nutrition, you might

do, for example, a program with heavy, heavy ecentrics. You might do a program with isometrics and BFR afterwards. And then you might intervene with vitamin C and collagen to help promote an optimal environment for adaptation. Oh, that's a great combination. Holy shit. Yeah, that's a fantastic. Well, you just put together a phenomenal.

Yeah, and then you can mix in like green tea and you get the, you know, catatons. I can't say the word. Yeah. You know, ecgg's in there. And those guys, they all play a role in health and repair. And so now you're taking all this really specific stuff from science, and you're now applying it.

Someone who just has a bum knee, and they're getting the results that they otherwise would not get. The big reason why I love isometrics so much, for what you're talking about, is they're extremely safe in comparison to the other options that you have. They're very, very safe.

The injuring yourself from an isometric movement is much the risk of that is much lower than other things. And also the carryover. Now, you had mentioned something earlier, I don't want to gloss over it. And that's that they found that, you know, doing an isometric movement increases the ability to fire muscle fibers to activate those muscles.

Now we find great value in that in how we set up priming. How you prime yourself before you do an exercise. So if somebody has difficulty in, you know, in our lingo, feeling their glutes when they're doing a squat, one of the best ways to get them to feel their glutes is doing isometric movement before then get into squats all of a sudden, like, ah, I can feel my butt work now. Yeah, and it was also pretty awesome by that too, as you put someone in a split squat, for example.

Now they're in that bottom position for 15 seconds. So you're not trying to cue them for like this brief, you know, 0.5 seconds in the bottom. You have 15 seconds to sit there, look at their position, they can get down where you feel that. Oh, I felt that in my quads. Okay, well, maybe you actually drive through heel a little bit more backwards.

Let's see how that feels in the glutes. So now you're taking someone who's not well versed in a movement, you're getting them 15 to 30 seconds of exposure in the most difficult position of that movement. You can have their hands in a bar out in front of them if they need support to get up. You can put all these different modalities

to even make it more safe and easier to, I guess, safer, and easier to actually use. And then you can coach these positions as they're doing it. Someone's in a hit bridge, they're holding that top position for 15 seconds. Okay, make sure your chin's tucked, make sure your pelvis is here, and you can do it again. All right, let's try again.

Here's another 15 seconds. So we're not doing 15 reps, where the person might get really tired, and then you go, oh, did you feel it? They're like, no, and you're like, oh, you're tired. It's like, here's 15 seconds. Hold, squeeze, get you in that position. And like you said, now we're developing the mind muscle connection, which sports scientists don't like that word.

We like to call it post activation, potentiation, like the fancy word we use. Um, that's the thing, by the way, that's the thing about academia that irritates me is when they try to they don't like it means the same shit. That's okay. You can use the other words because you'll actually get more through to more people that way. I think 100% and that I don't want to go on a rant on that, but the biggest issue is like communication.

Yeah. One thing I found too, isometrics, just a preventative, so you had mentioned being in certain positions and being extended and being in a compromised position, but now you have isometrics where you can really communicate and generate force within that position. So then if you find yourself within that,

say in a sporting environment, you're a little more familiar and know how to maneuver through that. So that's one thing that I found great value when I was training clients as well for any kind of a sport. Yeah, it really gives you a nice groundwork to work from. It's safer in the sense that it's a great way

to introduce and exercise, introduce a position, let you see it develop some of the postural positions they want to be in. It's not going to get you to squat 800 pounds. There's a myth there too, right? We were going, oh, yeah. It's the secret method that's going to, you know, do that. No, it's not going to get you there. It's just a tool. It's a tool. It's a tool. And it's funny, the way I learned about this was through,

and this is why I think there's so much value in training special population, whether it be elite athletes or really old people, which is what I did a lot of. I trained a lot of really, really old people. Now I learned the value of a lot of what we're talking about because they couldn't do a lot of shit. So I would do this isometric stuff,

and then blow and behold, I'd be able to get them to do full range of movement through using these tools. And then I applied it to my average clients, my everyday clients, and they saw, you know, tremendous benefit. Why do you think, because I'm a huge, you know, muscle building historian kind of buff. I love reading about old strong man and, you know, some of the feats of strength they did back in those days before we understood what they were doing or why they were strong as they were,

they just kind of went... You see in sandals, everybody. They just went by feel. Isometrics was an integral part of their routines. And in fact, some of the first male order workout programs that you could order through the back of your comic book, Charles Atlas, dynamic tension. It was all isometric movements.

This was a very, very popular back in those days as a method of augmenting your training or amplifying your performance or building muscle. And then it fell out of favor. It totally fell out of favor. Why did that happen? So the history behind them is kind of, it's interesting and I don't want to get this wrong,

but from my understanding, it was Bob Hoffman, the Hoffman rack, it made it very popular and because he always pens in it, he claimed a lot of his progress came from isometrics with his athletes. They were taking some pharmaceutical advantages too, but he used isometrics from my understanding to kind of showcase that and hide the fact

that they might have been doing some other things. So accidentally isometrics gained this very large mystique of being able to produce these crazy results. And the initial research actually showed that. They'd show like, oh, a 300% improvement in strength in like two weeks. But the consumers of research didn't really read the fine print and that was a hand flexor of a certain position, so like your hand grip of a certain age group. And what happens was these isometrics research eventually

show that didn't really have that crazy progress. And so the consumers that we are were kind of like, oh, they're waste, they're done. Overpromised. Overpromised. That makes so much sense. Huge hype. And then a lot of research came out in the 90s and 2000s. Dr. Kubo, I think he's in Japan. I believe it could be wrong. But did a live research there with isometrics and tendons. And then we started looking at tenopathy, and that became more prevalent because our diagnostics got better, and then all of a sudden isometrics kind of came creeping back, but in this different way, right, it's not this promise to run fast

and jump high, but it's like, hey, this is a very good tool still that we totally forgot about, and it has many different benefits for very specific reasons, but when we use properly very beneficial. One of my favorite ways to use isometrics and one of my favorite aspects of isometrics training is that it doesn't tax the body high, like other forms of exercise. And so it's a great way to add frequency to your workout routine without worrying too much about overcoming your body's ability

to adapt and recover. So like if I'm already working hard and I'm doing great hard workouts and I'm like, I wanna do a little more to accelerate my progress. I know I can't throw in another workout. I know I can't throw in power, speed work because that's gonna overcome,

I'm already kinda pushing a little bit. But isometrics, there's a pretty, I can throw a lot of those in there without hammering myself too hard and just really speeding up my progress. And then the second part of it is it requires no equipment half the time. I don't need to have fancy equipment or even being in a gym. Well, to add on to that too, like there's, you know, a specific protocol to it in terms of like, I had noticed a lot of people will hold their breath

and then get lightheaded. And then there's also a certain purpose to holding it for a longer period of time versus a shorter period of time. Can you kind of go over the protocol? I will, but I do need to tell some andole in here. I do headfirst in Isometrics, I feel like anything I do, put out there. I do headfirst and isometrics. I feel like anything I do, promote, put out there,

I do myself. So we built this thing called the machine. And it was this wooden platform. I think I can read a machine. You're not creative with the name there at the machine. So we called it and it had like a PV metal pipe attached to it and chain links. And so you could adjust the height and you'd stand on. If you know physics, if you push down and push up, it's not gonna go anywhere. So it's basically this platform you could just drive into and do all this crazy isometrics. And so being a dumbass I am,

I tried doing twice a day, three minutes of total isometrics, so six minutes total, at the bottom position of a squat. I have never been in more agony in my entire life during a month trial. I did it every day. I wake up with like spasming legs and quads firing. I couldn't walk. Oh no.

You figured out how far you could go with it. It was kind of the limit, but it was great though, positionally for my squat. I got in very good positions when I was actually went back to squatting. I don't think you need to do the duration that I did. It was more a couple guys, but hey, let's make the machine.

Almost competitive. Let's see how long we can hold the bottom position of a squat for pressing against this, you know, chain link device. It has some old pictures of it on my Instagram, it's hilarious, but I mean, it literally was agony. So, yeah, I understand too that if you train in a long muscle length, which I was doing, and this is kind of getting to the question a little bit here now, we actually have hypertrophy development too. And we're actually having some breakdowns of the muscle when we're in that long muscle length.

And so I'm in the bottom of a squat. I was basically doing hypertrophy like work every twice a day, three straight minutes, which is probably why I was spasming in other agony. But then, and when regard to the actual protocol to actually get something a little more useful out of it, for the tendon itself, it's typically a longer duration hold for about 70% of your effort. So a lot of times people think,

I'm gonna go as hard as I can. No, go hard enough. And that's typically 70% ranges from, some people do a 15 to 45 seconds. And that's for tendon strength. Yeah, and then also positional, like the crazy studies for the cortical firing of the glutes, it's like a 20 minute protocol and all.

So I don't necessarily recommend having to do a full 20 minute protocol, Matt Van Dyke, the guy I work with quite a bit. He has a full, it's called a glute layering protocol. And it's all these different isometric exercises to help develop your glute activation for someone who's in the aesthetic world, who's actually seen a lot of like, you know, figure competitors buy it because they're using it for their glute development. And we didn't intend to have it be that way, but we get tagging a post and someone's doing like this glute, you know, circuit. And I'm like, well, it actually makes a lot of sense. So it's cool to see that science being taken.

And then this is best applied in the length and position or in the contract to position. Yeah. So it depends what you want. Yeah. Sports specific movement. You want to be in that range of motion. So think of it, where's that bottom position of that movement? Well, I'm going to generate the most force. Let's get you in that position. So you can then work almost called your rate of force development. You can pull really hard into this and you might only do it for three seconds. And that's working on how fast you can rev the system up and back down. How fast can I turn the muscles on? And you might

do that for oscillations. You might pull, relax, pull, relax, pull, relax, pull, relax. And you might do that six or seven times. So now you're doing maximal or borderline maximal efforts at that given position for six to seven reps, or otherwise you could never do that with the movement. And you also see how fast you can turn on and turn off that muscle. Now if we're going to lengthen position, that's more for the hypertrophy early stage rehab. That might be held for a longer time period for less intent. So for like the bikini competitor who wants to build her butt, she'd be better off holding

a long isometric in the length in position. It's what you're saying. Yeah, it's tough though for the glutes, right? Because there's not many exercises where you're loaded drastically in a length and position. But for any body part, I guess that's for any body part. I have seen people get a lot of benefit out of just doing the contracted position as well. Yeah, that's what I'm more familiar with. And they do that for a fire range standpoint. They can feel it. But if you had a setup where you're slightly lengthened and you're driving your hips into a bar that's and movable

Maybe that's more beneficial now. So like a hip thrust part midway through drive into it or like an RDL like that way Yeah, and hold for how long would you say that's a little bit longer duration? That's where I do that 15 45 seconds Not a two you know 70% yeah, we got we have right now thousands of competitors a bikini or chicks that want to build a butt right now, right now right now. Yeah, they're working up right now. Yeah, for sure.

It's the real deal. We've had people mess adjust online about like, oh my gosh, I did it from, I swear to God, I would again, I do the stuff I put out. I did it and I couldn't walk for a day. My ass was so sore. I did this glutillary model. Oh my, I didn't make it. It's

mats. It's van dykes. And my ass was sore as shit. I've done a lot of things in my life to work out. And I remember all I did was on the floor watching TV doing this. I got the next day. I was like hobbling the class. I called and was like, Matt, dude, you're really making people do this? What else you been doing? I'm like, my god. Yeah, what? Okay, just out of my own curiosity. Now we talk about isometrics, but when you're trying to intensify and increase, you know, tension throughout your body, like say you're doing a squat,

but you want to add more tension just intrinsically as you're going down through the squat. What do you call that? Yeah, pre-tensing, or some people call screwing themselves in, some people call it just engaged, that the way I like to look at it, is you wanna think of almost your body

as this big contracted spring that's being coiled at that bottom position so you can explode out of it. Now that doesn't mean bracing your stomach, like you can get a bowling or a cannon ball launched into it or something to punch you, but it just means being, I call it engaged, is the word I use, but being active with your muscles,

are your lats tight? Are your hands actually gripping the bar? Are your feet active? Are your hips and gait, your core engaged? So as you're going down, if you ever watched an elite lifter, they don't just free fall down. Like you watch a bench presser, who's an elite guy?

They take their time, but they're also, they're whole bodies tight and intense. And you've heard, if you've ever bench pressed heavy, you might feel your hips tighten up, right? Because your whole body's engaged, the same thing happens in a squatting and lunging, it's how do we get in those engaged positions? And now how do I get in a position

when I'm doing athletic movement to be in a similar kind of state? So they've actually shown you talk about death jumps earlier, like someone jumping off a box. That when someone jumps, guys who are well trained, they have a co-contraction around the ankle. So the muscle around the ankle and the front and the back fire, and they fire together, so it actually makes tension on the foot. So when they fire together, they actually actually thinking about two ropes opposing each other and they pulled it taught. And so when they hit the ground, the tendon is pretty stretcher,

it's engaged. So we can act like a rubber band quickly. And they've done this with EMG. So they have, you know, basically wires and your muscles looking at how they're firing. And so they show that, look, they're staying tight and braced before they hit the ground, their foot is very active, and their whole body is engaged versus just lifting it. And we see that a lot if you're in the general public, someone just doesn't exercise. They just kind of just do it.

Right. How do you have intent behind that? How do you get in some of those positions where you can really produce force properly? In the example I like to give, what you can test at your own at home is you can take something and put in your right hand and squeeze it as hard as you can,

but you have to keep the rest of your body completely relaxed and then do another rep but squeeze your whole body. And let me know which one produces a harder, squeeze strength. Yeah, it's because you're tensing the entire body. What's happening with that? Is that just a CNS able to send out a louder signal because it's sending out a bigger signal?

Yeah, this is a fun one. So, there's a school of thought where people really dive into fascia. Mm-hmm. And fascia is this connective tissue that enters winds throughout our body. The research is very much murky right now. And so some people think it's, oh, this interconnected interconnected web tightening to transmit forces more effectively. If you think about it, and from my standpoint, way I view it, is where our bodies anchor to the body, which is eventually anchored to the floor.

And so at some point in time, if you're not tensed, one of the anchors is on a relaxed system. So if we tighten our whole body, so we're initiating from the floor and ending with the floor, our body now joint by joint is engaged. So we're not having one of those joints being that relaxed joint, that's kind of that weak link in the chain. Yeah, I like what you're saying with that with your theory. And my, the theory that I think, with your theory. And my, the theory that I think, and I have no science background like you do, but I think the CNS, if a fire is a louder signal when it's being called to fire a larger signal. And so when a larger signal needs to be fired, I think the CNS is thinking,

okay, we need to generate more strength. This is more serious. That's what I, that's what I personally think. So I don't know what you think about that. Yeah, no, I agree. As with that as well. There's a lot of things going on. Does our nervous system deem this now as a threat? Oh, we have to use your whole body. Exactly. Let's turn it off. Let's mobilize everything. And so what happens, yeah, essentially is your body's getting these signals going out. And your autonomic nervous system, which controls your heart rate, your blood pressure. The way to think about it too, to break it down really simple,

your autonomic nervous system has two branches. This is really the simple way of looking at sympathetic, parasympathetic. Sympathetic mobilizes energy. It says, hey, buddy, you need to go, let's dump the fuel in the tank, let's get rolling. Parasympathetic says, hey, let's rest and digest. And so under a certain situation

where you're really engaging that sympathetic nervous system, your body's, the central nervous system's kind of the head commander and it says, hey, oh, no, a nervous system, we need to get energy going. And it goes, okay, hey, sympathetic nervous system, you're time to roll. Let's dump epinephrine. Let's really get everything rolling at high gear

so we can actually then have all things firing on full cylinders. Right, and for people who are like, is it really play that bigger role? Let me tell you, take caffeine and you're stronger. That is a 100% essential nervous system response. It has nothing to do with your muscles. Your muscles have changed because you took caffeine.

Yeah, and in terms of the most elite athletes you've ever seen, is part of the process being able to go from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic and be able to access that more quickly or be able to recover faster. So it's a little bit of both, and I'm going to give all credit to Chase Phelps. He's director of sports science at Stanford. And he worked with the Seals. And they had a thing where, again, it's awful. I'm not my experience, but Chase,

they had house raids and they could predict who'd be successful based on someone's HRV. And so what happens is if you get overly aroused, right, you have desensitization of the frontal cortex, and that's your decision maker. So now you become a megalobase, which is our innate reflexive thinker. And so we say, we see we do, we don't process.

And so if you're in an optimal realm for your state, for your sympathetic nervous system, sympathetic nervous system's good. It makes you know, your heart beats fast, you get energy, you're ready to roll. If you get too high, think of it as like an engine overheating, right? It kind of starts to rattle and shake and fall apart.

And so when you look at athletes, it also depends on how that person, what's their zone, what's their state to properly be in. And when we're looking at, kind of the complex system that has the body, it's not just HIV or sorry, sympathetic nervous system, bad and parasympathetic nervous system good or lots of sympathetic good, it's a mix.

And the example is too, you don't want over activation, this is from Chase's example as well. You don't want over activation of the parasympathetic and sympathetic. And what he means by that is you don't want to have the window open when it's cold outside in the heat on. So you guys have probably been on vacation and gotten sick like the first two days, right?

So what happens is your sympathetic nervous system is probably cranking. You go, oh, you have a ton of relax. Let's shut the window. You overheat. And you see that a lot people get sick when they go on vacation. It's because theoretically speaking, and this is for my understanding, is that we have an imbalance between our sympathetic and parasympathetic. So they have different tones that are produced. And so we're looking at athletes tying it back in. It's not necessarily about all this person needs to be here or needs to be there.

It's, you know, where do you fit as an athlete? Are you someone that needs to be on that upper end, on that lower end? It's kind of like that you curve and where you fit on it. And how well can you control that, right? John Brink has talked about that in the sports science. That was one of the things that I thought was really fascinating

when he talked about Travis Persona before he goes and does, you know, three black back flips in the air or something crazy and they measure his heart rate. And he's just like, yeah, cruising completely calm and collect. So heart rates different than HRV though. They do coincide, so to explain really quick, you guys have ever seen Like you know the beep beep beep beep beep beep for those guys who listen to the EKG or

QRS complex. It's called like I like to beep beep better Again science versus Bbbbb. Well one of those beeps is, you see that big spike, right? That is your R. And it's the R to R interval. So when that one goes and the next one goes, and if you actually look at a heart rate, it's not consistent. So if someone's beating 60 beats a minute,

well, that's on average, a minute. Your beat to beat interval actually changes. So you'll have one sooner or one later. And then actually, when you breathe in, it gets faster and you breathe out, you're actually hard, it gets slower. And it's this flux always changing. And so HRV is your heart rate variability.

So the variability between hearts beats. And so if you have more variability, think of it as more capacity and more wiggle room. So you have one fast, one slow, one fast, one slow, whatever. And then if the beat is the same, like a constant drummer. Boom, boom, boom, boom. There's an override, right? You're sympathetic nervous systems like,

all right, we are pumping our beat this fast. And so while they do go hand in hand sometimes, because as your heart rate increases, the interval is obviously decrease. But that doesn't mean your HRV always follows a one-to-one with your heart rate. That's interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah, that's fascinating. Science. Right. There we go. Interesting. Yeah, I found just as a trainer incorporating some type of a just as a trainer incorporating some type of a stress management, wellness, relaxation, protocol. I don't care what you want to call it, but some kind of an aspect of getting the person

to be able to kind of manage, you know, their sympathetic nervous system always correlates with faster fat loss, better muscle gain, and just better results overall. Yes, there's actually studies on this too, so it's really cool. So our body is awesome and it sucks at times because it doesn't really differentiate between different stressors. When you upset with your relationships

or you have work or you have poor sleep, poor nutrition, worked out too much. Those are all we called metabolic stressors. They stress the body. And what we want to do is find ways to reduce metabolic stressors that we're not intending to impose on ourselves. So if you think of our body of a, kind of like a bucket,

I'm still in this, it's an inflammatory bucket or a stress bucket, Dr. Jill Karnahan, Dr. Chad Press-Mac, talk about this quite a bit in there. All track brings this up as well. Is, you know, we have all these stressors going into it. And they actually have a study to take a step back that looked at athletes who are inflamed. If you're inflamed, that means you have a metabolic stressor.

There's Taekwondo athletes. And they train one, you know, both groups the same, the whole group, but they, you know, stratified them based on inflamed and not inflamed. And the inflamed group had less adaptations and strength, power, and aerobic capacity. Yeah, worse results. Yeah, worse results. Yes, exactly. Then the, you know, group that wasn't inflamed. And the idea is, well, if we have all these external stressors on our body, And the idea is, well, if we have all these external stressors on our body, right, then maybe we aren't able to handle what's going on adaptively like we should. And so it's called adaptive capacities, a fancy word.

And essentially what it means is how much stress can you handle? You know, what can your body really deal with? And so when you're talking about figure competitors, you're talking about strong man, you're talking about average gym goers, you're talking about you guys sitting in here and life and work, well, all those things add up, which is why having information as a coach, as a trainer, as an athlete, to act as a check engine light, to say, oh, man, you know, I am stressed out or I am, my HRV is lower than normal. Then we can act proactively to make sure we can get you back

into a state where you can handle a larger stress to get a better adaptation. So when people go, oh, my goal is just aesthetics. I don't need sports science. You know, that doesn't mean anything for me. I'm not trying to get that one end out of it and become better. Well, that concept still applies.

You want to look better, you want to feel better, and you want to perform better. Well, all those stressors go into it. You look at like figure competitors, bodybuilders, they have to look great for like five minutes. They're on stage, and they are not in the best state to develop fitness at that standpoint. So much stress going on. So you want wanna find a way to put yourself in a state that can receive a stressor, that being the workout, because that's what we want to have develop. And then, you know, have that,

come to fruition and, you know, more muscle size and more aesthetically pleasing, before not sleeping enough. Our nutrition is low, and we have all these issues going on. Well, let's take you away from our body's ability to get those changes that we want to have. Yeah, and the biggest takeaway is, they're all stresses, and even your thoughts,

this is why one of the biggest things I think in modern times, we could talk about the easy stuff to measure, like sleep, diet, exercise, but you know, you're in traffic for an hour, you know, going to work. If you sit there and stress over it for an hour, that's going to be a stressor that's unintended, like you said, one that you don't necessarily need being thrown into your bucket. So why not change your perception of what's going on so that you can have higher capacity for other stressors? This also explains my biggest pet peeve with things like CrossFit and your high-intensity

group classes and the types of people that tend to gravitate and want those. In my experience as a trainer, probably 80% of the people that love the CrossFit class, that love the Orange Theory class, that love these high-tensi, are these adrenaline junkie type people that are stressed at work, they get up at 4 a.m., they work till 10 p.m. at night, they got their high performers, they push, they push, they get up at 4 a.m. They work till 10 p.m. at night, they got their high performers, they push, they push, they push, and then they need this next level of training to get that feeling, and they think that because they feel

that they're doing what's best for their body, but then they can't fucking figure out why they can't lose the 10 pounds and they're hammering away. I got, yeah, this is actually, I'm gonna go nerd on you really quick, but this is really cool and explain some of that. So, we've all dealt with clients or people who don't have high intensity work, right?

And they lose like a lot of weight the first four weeks and they go to shit the next seven, right? So the Russians actually dove into this initially. And the research, there's research papers on it. So people, you don't believe me, go look it up yourself. I always say, don't believe me, go read for yourself, form your own opinions.

Super-trained. Yeah, super-trained. One of them, but there's actual research, American research papers that aren't written in Russian. I'll talk about this. So we have a mitochondria. So we all remember back in old like cell biology in like grade school, we had to draw the pictures.

And the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. And so the mitochondria is what develops and produces ATP for the most part. And what happens is when it gets under lots of stress, it develops what's called reactive oxygen species. The mitochondria produce these reactive oxygen species. It taxes what's called our redox system. Our redox system keeps those guys in check. And so it's actually a really cool balance

because reactive oxygen species, when they're prevalent, they stimulate the redox system, things like glutathione, superoxide, dismutase, that's to break down all these oxygen species that come about. And the oxidants. Any oxidants essentially. And you have the signaling pathway

where if you have more reactive auction species, then your body has to make more redox systems. And when controlled, you develop a better and better immune system, better mitochondria, and so on and so forth. But what happens is if we have a high level of reactive auction species present, and we train really, really hard, we actually start to develop what are called unc coupling proteins. You know, on coupling proteins, make the mitochondria less efficient. And so what happens is per unit of ATP made, you actually burn more calories. So the mitochondria isn't this like stuck in stone kind of thing. It's a very flexible organism. And it says, yo, like, there's a lot of stuff going on. I want to limit reactive oxygen species.

So I'm going to have these on coupling proteins in. And the thing that drives the hydrogen gradient, which is between the mitochondria outside and inside membrane, which produces ATP, that proton gradient becomes less. So it takes more calories to get the same number of ATP would otherwise. The mitochondria actually get hot.

They begin to heat up. And so the theory is that if we keep imposing this demand that we can't recover from, you have the initial fat loss because you have a really increase energy imbalance. Energy imbalance, but what happens is these mitochondria have to work really hard. So they're burning a bunch of calories just to get the same ATP. But that system's on overdrive and it's like putting nitric oxide in your car. You can't drive on that. And so we're not doing time to recover. Now it begins to decouple. It's called metopathy, which is the mitochondria basically just dies.

It's a cytochrome C pathway and it's interaction with the endoplasmic reticulum long story short. It says, hey, the cell like blows up basically goes away. And so you actually lose and they and reticulum long story short, it says, hey, the cell like blows up basically, goes away. And so you actually lose, and they don't have the genesis like they would otherwise. And the idea, again, this is kind of the theoretical aspect, is that when we keep imposing over and over again, you get this chronic fatigue,

you get people who just get worn down, they become immunosuppressed, so they get sick. My good buddy's girlfriend is a high-intensity interval trainer. So she has to do as part of the class. She got sick for like a month and a half. She couldn't get out of it. And what had happened was she took on a new role where she was teaching more classes.

And she had more stress now because she had a new position where she were promoted. And then she got sick because all these things interact. So if you look at a very cellular level when it starts with this reactive auction species, which is arguably when the universal cell communicators because it talks about our metabolism and how things are functioning,

and this begins to signal our redox system, which is good, again, the glutathione, and all that fun stuff, and the oxidants. Very positive things can happen when controlled. If we just keep imposing it over and over and over again, it causes an issue and it's possible. Other things in this theory is about fatigue because the mitochondria get hot over and over and over again, it caused an issue and it was possible. Other things in this theory is about fatigue because the mitochondria get hot and they

think that heat is one of the biggest suppressors of performance. That's a different topic we can dive into, but that's maybe why people get tired quicker when they're in these fatigue state. Yeah, and you get all kinds of dysfunction between the hypothalamus, the pituitary, and the adrenals, and your body starts producing more and more and more cortisol, and eventually it starts to produce less and less cortisol. Testosterone, basically, it's pregnant alone, that cholesterol comes into the mitochondria membrane

and pregnant alone is developed and all that stuff, and it goes elsewhere to certain parts of the body and becomes different androgens and stuff. So if we start messing with the mitochondria, which is the first initiator of a lot of these pathways, there are theories behind mitochondrial deficiency and low testosterone and stuff. So if we start messing with the mitochondria, which is the first initiator of a lot of these pathways, there are theories behind mitochondrial deficiency and low testosterone and whatnot. Oh yeah. And the thing that makes me, first off, if your mitochondria is constantly exhausted, it's not just that you're going to be tired and have worse performance. That is potentially connected

to chronic disease and especially in including cancer. And so there's a lot of research going into the health of the mitochondria and what that means for either preventing cancer or killing cancer when you do have cancer. This is a big fucking deal. It's not just about athletic performance. The other side that makes me laugh is you have a lot of biohackers that know this. And they're like, oh, you know what I'm gonna do?

I'm just gonna inject myself a glutathione because now I'm gonna, this will fix everything. It's like, okay, there's definitely a whole, I'm just gonna write, coming on. Yeah, there's definitely a whole, a whole series of things that's happening and just giving yourself glutathione and antioxidants isn't gonna solve it.

In fact, in some cases actually makes things worse. So, first off, there are times you might do some glutathione, there are other times you might need it and there's issues with our absorption rate to the gut. If you're taking glutathione orally, you'll only get about 10% or something like that. So intramuscular injections and IV therapy has benefits also with NAD as well. Theoretically speaking, it might get broken down into NR, which is a precursor for N and A D, and then help the cellular members, metabolism, what not.

That's the science, partly. But biohacking, oh God. Um, ha ha ha ha. Ah, this is a personal beef of mine. There's no such thing as biohacking. It's, you wanna be healthy? Like that's not biohacking, that's called,

that's called wanting to live healthy. One of the better. And the issue is biohacking has been monetized. And so, oh, you know, if I take this pill, I can still do all this stupid shit I'm doing currently. No, like, no, first off, eat wide spectrum of foods. You're gonna get most of the nutrition you need. You might have nutritional deficiencies.

And you go see a doctor who will do a macronutrient panel, and you might take three to four supplements, maybe up to 10, but they're all reasonable and directed. It's not this, hey, I'm gonna biohack myself because I read that MCT oil, it doesn't have to have a long fatty chain transporter, the quarantine shuttle, so I guess my mitochondria fast is so I use more fat.

Well, it's like, why do you want, first off, why are you trying to do that? That's a different topic. But secondly, it's not educated in the sense that you're just applying without direction. Our facility at Eniglewood College Resilience Code does a lot of very in-depth biomarkers. It is done with a registered dietitian,

a neurosurgeon, and a full staff of support. It's not this rogue like, I'm gonna take X, Y, and Z here and there and and I'm assuming if somebody comes in and you're in your testing and you're like, oh, you're working out too much. You're not sleeping enough and your diet's poor. You don't go, we'll fix that with some glutathione injection. You said I'm saying that that's the that's the beef I have with it is it's so complex and explained some of it, a tiny bit of it, what we understand.

It's been extremely complex. Everything communicates with each other to think that you're going to take one step in that sequence, supplement with it and be like, that's going to fix my problem. Or even 10 steps in that sequence, good luck. Nothing is going to replace exercising properly, eating right, getting good sleep, and thinking about things properly.

Nothing. Nothing, no, never. And the way we do it is we had someone, for example, on an elimination diet because they had gastrointestinal issues. Well, we meet with a registered dietitian and say, okay, what days is he eliminating foods? And what days is he introducing new foods?

So for those who aren't aware, an elimination diet is where you take away foods that you think might cause some reactivity in your stomach and some problems. And then you reintroduce them because we're not trying to take everything away. We just want to figure out what you might be sensitive to. And if you reintroduce something that gives you,

you gotta shit your brains out, maybe that's not the best thing to introduce, the day you're working out. And so we sat down and said, okay, this is the individual's routine. I know they're in a caloric, possibly caloric deficit because they're in a specific diet. I also know they're introducing these new foods on these days. So when we train that person, maybe they're going to train them in the morning, introduce

the food that afternoon, take a day off so they have any reactions they can deal with at that day off, come back and train. We talk about if there were reactions, so now it's a very controlled environment, they're training, they're with a registered dietitian, they have reasons for all what they're doing, and it's guided, right? It's not this different like one guy

trying to handle all of it himself. I kind of know what elimination diet, I won't eat eggs anymore, and then I'm, you know, I'm just gonna eat cereal instead, and like, well, that's not really how that works. And you're not also figuring the root of why you went from being able to eat eggs to why now you can't eat eggs anymore.

If you don't solve that root, you'll end up on a carnivore diet for the rest of your life, like people who've developed such terrible food intolerances now that they, all they can eat is meat and they think that's the best. That's the best time. That's the issue too. It's like, okay, you broke the glass of your stomach. You need to try and repair it.

Don't just avoid stepping on the glass. And so a lot of things you see, it's like, here's the process of how we're going to introduce foods. Here's what we're going to find out. And here's how we're understanding it all. So if you look at like, we'll use like gluten for an example. And way it works, is that you eat gluten, you have glee add in which binds to a certain cell receptor, which releases called zonulin and zonulin stimulates myosin, light chain kinase, which is all happening inside these tight junctions of your gut.

And it pulls these tight junctions apart. So more things can seep through. And next thing you know, you keep doing that over and over again, it kind of becomes messed up and you have high presence of possibly IgG and depending on your genetics, the amount of ZionLin and how it gets released with that aspect which is still that comes in play. And I'll fit in.

But the long story short is, will you have this disruption? Fix that. Fix it. Fix it. Like don't just avoid eating. You just hear in food. You just explain by the way, leaky gut syndrome, which medical community

scoffed at forever, but now they call it, you know, what do they call it? The whole intestinal hyperperpremiability, which is hilarious. Well look, man, we could talk to you in a week, bro, if you get me going, we'll be here for the next five hours. But this has been an absolute blast, my friend.

Yeah, yeah. I appreciate you guys having me on. It's been fun. It's a great environment in here. It's a great what you guys are doing for the community. I appreciate it. And we really appreciate people like you, because like we say on our show all the time,

the space is filled with a lot of bullshit. But every once in a while, you find people telling the truth, doing it with good integrity, good intentions. And we think you're one of those people. We appreciate it. Yeah, we appreciate it. I appreciate it. Yeah, if you guys don't believe me, go look at yourself.

That's how I say, I taught for a while, and my big thing is, you know, don't believe me. Go read about it, because my sentence comes from 19 references, and maybe you'll interpret it differently, and that's totally cool, and just go and take ownership of what you're doing. Awesome, humble too. Appreciate it, thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance,

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