Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Jordan Shallow on Chiropractic for Weightlifters

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Chiropractic is a controversial subject in the fitness community. On the one hand, some people claim it can fix all kinds of aches, pains, and ailments ranging from low-back pain to indigestion, headaches, brain fog, and more. On the other hand, some say that chiropractic is a pseudoscientific discipline run by greedy charlatans who provide absolutely no value beyond the placebo effect. And if you poke around on the Internet and there’s plenty evidence of the latter, what with the myriad Internet “gurus” who use their “Doctor of Chiropractic” credentials to mislead people into thinking they’re medical doctors and thus experts on anything and everything related to health and wellness. What’s the real story though? Is chiropractic a science or a sham? Well, that’s what prompted me to invite Jordan Shallow on the show. Jordan’s a licensed chiropractor but also a high-level strength coach and competitive powerlifter, and in this interview, he helps shed light on the pros and cons of chiropractic, how it works, why people use it, and how it can and can’t benefit you, and more. 7:41 - What is a chiropractic? 10:21 - Point of adjustments 13:43 - Golgi tendon reflex 22:02 - How do you find a good chiropractor? 25:30 - What are Common Issues ? 35:08 - Mobility / yoga at home 39:37 - Stretching Properly 42:32 - Exercises to improve stability 49:00 - Whole body exercises 54:50 - Stabilizing positions 1:04: 41 - Find your work Mentioned on the Show: Legion Athletics Triton: https://legionathletics.com/products/supplements/triton/ Clinical Athlete Website: http://www.clinicalathlete.com/ Jordan’s Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rxd-radio/id1197955534 Jordan’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_muscle_doc/?hl=en Jordan’s Website: https://themuscledoc.com/ Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Most people's injuries happen when their strength outruns their stability. That's like a fundamental principle to a lot of this stuff is where people that put the cart before the horse, they realize that stability is the governing factor of output. So if you really want to get stronger, it's about expressing the strength you have, not trying to beat your head against the wall and just load more weight. have, not trying to beat your head against the wall and just load more weight. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. I am Mike Matthews, of course, and this time we're talking chiropractic. This is a controversial subject,

particularly in the fitness community, because on one hand, you have people who claim that chiropractic can fix all kinds of aches and pains and ailments ranging from low back problems to indigestion, headaches, brain fog, and much, much more. While on the other hand, you have people who say that chiropractic is pseudoscientific and it is just a sham run by greedy charlatans and it provides no value beyond the placebo effect. And if you poke around on the internet, unfortunately, there's quite a bit of evidence of the latter. What with the myriad gurus out there who use their doctor of chiropractic credentials to mislead people into thinking that they are actually medical doctors and thus experts on anything and everything related to health and wellness, which of course segues into many pills, powders, and PDFs for people to buy. So what's the real story here? Is chiropractic

a science or is it a sham? Well, that is what prompted me to invite Jordan Shallow on the show. Jordan is a buddy of mine and he's also a licensed chiropractor and a high level strength coach doing work at Stanford University, as well as a super strong dude. He's a competitive power lifter who can deadlift more than I could ever hope to deadlift. And in this interview, Jordan helps shed light on the pros and cons of chiropractic, how it actually works, why people use it, and how it can and cannot benefit you and more. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something

of mine, specifically my fish oil supplement Triton. Now, Triton is a high-potency, high-purity, 100% re-esterified triglyceride fish oil with added vitamin E to prevent oxidation and rancidity, and natural lemon oil to prevent the noxious fish oil burps that we all know and hate. furthermore triton is made from sustainably fished deep water anchovies and sardines and is molecularly distilled to remove natural toxins and contaminants so if you want to optimize your mental and physical health and performance and reduce the risk of disease and dysfunction then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Triton today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast to check out and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops

or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.legionathletics.com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show. Thank you. Продолжение следует... Thank you. Jordan, welcome to my little podcast, man. Thanks for taking the time. No, man. I appreciate it. This is a long time in the works. Good to hear from you. Yeah. I missed our last because I had a cold, but here I am. Living where you live, man, I'm not surprised.

Yeah. I mean, knock on wood. I don't think this table is really wood, but I'm knocking on it. I think I had a kind of a half of a cold. If I can get out of the winter with just one actual cold, no flu or anything else, and my kids really nothing, then I'll take it. Yeah. Chalk that up as a win, especially when you're living in the middle of some polar vortex right now.

Yeah. So my wife got sick first. I'm drinking a bottle of water and she's like, oh, don't drink from that. I'm like, oh, cool. Here's a test of my immune system, I guess. The easiest way to get sick, share food or beverages with someone who's sick. All right. So anyways, getting to the point, we're here to talk about chiropractic, which I'm excited to talk about because it's something I'm asked about fairly often, but I'm pretty ignorant. I'm not anti-chiropractic. That's kind of a trendy thing I feel like in the fitness space, probably mostly due to the various fake doctors around the internet. You know, the chiropractors who try to pretend like they're MDs and then just give a bunch of stupid advice about all kinds of stupid shit. However, I do see a chiropractor here and there. I have felt like it's good for maintenance and I

understand a little bit of the basic underlying theory of it, but I'm pretty ignorant. So that's why I was excited to talk to you because you're a smart dude and you are multidisciplinary. You're not just a chiropractor and you also are coming at this from the angle of a strength athlete, a strength coach. You're very interested in things that work. And that's how you make your living. Like you wouldn't be in the position you're in if you couldn't make athletes better and help them fix their problems. And so I thought it was interesting that you chose, even that chiropractic is in your repertoire, I think a good place to start the discussion would be what is chiropractic exactly? So I mean, chiropractic from a pure definition standpoint is the Latin word for of the hand, right? So that in itself gives you a bit of an umbrella to operate

under. And then legally, the umbrella is is equally as broad and ambiguous with a lack of regulatory oversight, which leads to the fake Instagram doctors kind of getting away with the nonsense that they seem to perpetuate. So yeah, chiropractic is a form of manual medicine. You could lump it in with kind of classic osteopathy and you'd put it in with more modern physical therapy. But because you're given so much legal latitude, it does have a lot of definitions based off the interpretation, the skill set, and technically like the motivation of whoever the practitioner is, right? Chiropractic colleges, I believe there's 17 in the United States, two in Canada, one being English speaking, one being French. Basically, their job is to prepare you to pass the national board exam. So whereas if you think of like maybe

conventional medicine, like an MD program, a lot of the vetting for an MD is done prior to getting into medical school. My sister being a surgeon herself, her process of getting into med school was much more, let's say, egregious or difficult or trying than it was me getting into chiropractic college. The problem with that then becomes you're left with the vetting process occurring in the public court of opinion, not necessarily behind the closed doors of an administrative process that's vetting applicants for school.

So with a lot of student debt and no real guidance from a business standpoint, chiropractors are sort of thrown out into the wild west of medicine. And a lot of times they take and find the path of least resistance that will make them the most money, which is where a lot of the fundamentals of the basis for the crap that gets perpetuated, a lot of that is just survival instinct as a means of keeping the lights on and keeping the family fed.

Yeah. I mean, it's understandable. I would say the only critique really that beyond that of it's understandable, but it's not okay. And I guess the criticism is there is a better way. You don't have to be a fraud. You don't have to be a quack that I see a chiropractor every few months or so, once every few months when I go to Florida to visit my family and I don't get that vibe from him at all. He doesn't try to sell me on weird shit. I mean, I don't know. It feels good when he adjusts where he's like, oh yeah, this is a little bit out and then he'll adjust it and it just feels better. I'm like, oh, well, that's worth something. I haven't looked into very much beyond that. Is there a long-term value to that? But it's worth something. I think it's a good

segue into adjustments, right? So that's obviously what most people are going to think of when they think of chiropractors. What is actually going on there? What is the point of it? You know what I mean? There's two, there's an answer in principle, and then there's an answer in practice. And the answer in principle is, I don't know if we know. And that's like, if you're going off research, if you're going off of very much just, well, I don't want to say evidence, but definitely research, like evidence exists on three pillars, empirical evidence being conventional research, peer reviewed journals, things like that. But then experience of the clinician and also value of the patient, right? So I wouldn't say there's strong research that really points us in one direction of a mechanism

of correction that we can sort of hang our hat on. But I've adapted kind of a theory that has an internal logical consistency. So the best answer I can get, and this is the lens that I look at it through, I can say, all right, Matthews, we're going to hit a bicep curl or something. You can voluntarily flex your bicep, or we're going to do quad extensions, you can voluntarily flex your quad. If I said, flex your multifidus, I'd be really interested to see what you come up with multifidus is a muscle that spans vertebral segments in the spine that you don't have any control over so it's it's a weird thing to kind of conceptualize that there's muscles in the body that you don't have voluntary access to and again a working theory that I've sort of developed

honestly it was a lot of my work in the corporate sector that forced me to burn off a lot of the dead wood in the chiropractic i'm going to air quote philosophy and come up with maybe a more pragmatic explanation of the mechanism of correction so imagine there's a muscle that goes from one bone in your back to the next that you have no control over just like muscles in your arm or your leg they have stretch reflexes they have muscle spindles they have golgi tendon organs they have an ability to stretch and contract albeit involuntary and out of your control. They still do that. I think as an intrinsic protective mechanism to the spinal cord, this very precious cargo that's housed within these bones that makes it somewhat unique to the rest of the bones

in our body, that in lies the sophisticated protection where it's like if bone one and bone two start moving too far apart and there's a muscle that's sort of acting as a guy wire. And I'm oversimplifying this by referencing just the multifidus. But you know, if you think for a second that the best way to herniate a disc would be to flex forward, laterally flex, and then rotate, right? So imagine two points on adjacent bones, and the distance you're creating between those two points. So knowing intuitively that is where we might be going too far into the weeds here, but that's where the annulus fibrosis, like the posterior lateral aspect of the annulus fibrosis, which is what encapsulates the disc

tissue that goes into the spinal cord when we herniate or sequester a disc or slip a disc for common parlance, that is the position in which the pressure of those adjacent bones will be pushing that disc tissue into the weakest point of the annulus fibrosus. But at the same time, that'll create the most distance in the muscles that go from bone one and bone two that are adjacently flexing, laterally flexing and rotating away from each other. So a lot of times what's happening is those muscles reactively go into spasm as would any other muscle that operates with muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organ reflexes. So like, that's essentially like what a muscle cramp is. If you get a cramp, it's not like, oh, go eat a fucking banana or some shit. The research on cramping usually shows that like in isolated muscle groups, there's some sort

of aberrant firing or patterning between the Golgi tendon organ reflex and the muscle spindle. Just to interject those people listening who don't know what the Golgi tendon reflex is, do you want to explain that real quick? Yeah. So like muscle spindles are going to help muscles contract and Golgi tendon reflex are going to help muscles relax, right? So the Golgi tendon organ reflex exists at the end range or at the end of muscles as they go into ligaments into their respective bones. Think of like static stretching. That's sort of what you're activating to relax a muscle. And again, I'm air quoting a lot of this just for the oversimplification.

But when you're stretching, you're not necessarily changing the structural length of muscle. You're downregulating the neurological perception of length of that muscle, which is like a really important distinction to make. And you're doing that via activating this Golgi tendon reflex. And it's also, it plays a role, right? Antagonist muscle groups in the body, right? So if one is flexing, the other is relaxed. Yeah. So, and that's the nice thing about voluntary control, right? Like if I bring my bicep to a fully shortened position, my tricep is in a fully lengthened position, right? So that's that agonist antagonist relationship. But with the unique nature of like the leverage positions of the muscles of our spine, we don't necessarily

have antagonists to some of these muscles. So the way I look at it is at some point during your day, you've created some sort of aberrant distance between vertebra one, vertebra two, usually stemming from an instability of honestly, it usually the low back so like low back or core instability and i'm very specific when i use the word instability and not weakness and then those muscles are tasked rather with keeping adjacent position as a means of protecting the spinal cord when people throw out their backs it's not muscles that they've trained in the gym like it's not their lats it's not their glutes it's not their rhomboids or their middle traps it's just like this diffuse sort of non-specific non-loclocalized. It's like you have an ability

to feel that muscle, but not an ability to control that muscle. So I think an adjustment is basically an external means of activating stretch reflexes between two adjacent vertebrae that are going to sort of down-regulate that perception and that tone of the muscle that's gone into spasm for whatever reason. And that would be by moving the positions of the vertebrae, like back to where they should be. So that's what I have a problem with. Selling the idea on alignment, I think is maybe a little bit facetious and misleading. Every correction is attempted to be made at the neurological level. So we reverse engineer how movements

created and we go back to like the motor planning centers of the brain that go through the ventral spinal cord, out in through like the peripheral nervous system, and then cause a voluntary contraction, and then sensory feedback loops back. So like when the muscle contracts, the muscle is one step away from the peripheral, which is one step away from the central, which is one step away from that motor planning part of the brain, I believe it's prefrontal cortex. If you're trying to get to the nervous system, a lot of times from most other places in the body, starting at the level of the muscle is starting one level closer to the nervous

system. But when it comes to the depth of some of these muscles, like multifidus, intertransversary, rotatories, like your erectors to a certain extent, and your transversospinalis group, all these independently controlled muscles, you don't necessarily have the ability to stretch and contract like you would a bicep, tricep, quad hamstring, some sort of agonist antagonist relationship. So in order to activate the requisite reflex to get that perception to downregulate and to not have tightness, you need to make a rapid shift in the relative position of one vertebra versus the next where the origin and

the insertion of one muscle exists in respects to another. So I think that as a means of framing it will actually leave people getting adjusted less. It's not about knowing how to adjust. I don't have a license to adjust. I have a license to know when to not to. And I think that's a really important way of framing approaching spinal adjusting as a means of treatment. In short term, depending on the demographic of the patient, it can be extremely helpful depending on what it is exactly you're adjusting. But I think long term, if we're looking to make levels of the changes of the nervous system, we need to start thinking muscles first, because they're going to give us a little bit more direct access to the nervous system. So even from an adjustment approach, I'm still looking at the mechanism of correction happening at the muscular level by means of accessing the nervous system.

That's interesting. I haven't heard that before. So again, this is me just being ignorant, had always been told whenever I had asked chiropractors I've seen in the past, it was more about the alignment and just getting the vertebrae in alignment. It's interesting that you're using that to help certain muscles chill out and help positively impact the body in a muscular and neurological way, as opposed to keep bones perfectly aligned all the time. That was something I never quite understood. I was like, well, I mean, even if I just laid in bed all day, I'm sure whatever you just did in my spine is how long until things are misaligned again? And then do I just keep getting adjusted forever? And I know that, I mean, you know this, that I think one of the practices out there that gives chiropractic a bad name is that never ending

treatment plan. Basically, like I knew people when I was younger who would go to the chiropractor every single day to get adjusted every day, seven days a week forever. If you run a good business, you don't run a good practice necessarily. Because I think being a strength coach, like pain is easy. Performance is hard, right? Like if you set the virtue to increasing performance, you'll get pain, no problem. Like you'll get rid of pain in a visit or two, honestly, within beginning a session to the end of like an initial visit, you can get rid of pain. Like pain is just a perception. Perception is so easily manipulated. Basically, it's like you don't pay a plumber to bang on the

pipes, you pay them to know which pipes to bang on. So if you hold people to like just their highest virtue being out of pain, more often than not, that should be easy and it should be quick. Just because you are out of pain doesn't mean you're high functioning, right? I think that's a false equivalency that people make. Pain is the last symptom to appear and the first one to go away. Like just because you're not in pain doesn't mean you're functioning at 100%. But it's then understanding, okay, what is the true function of, in this the spine or you know as i work with my athletes what is the true function of the hip what is the true function of the shoulder um and i think that's where like the word function like you glass over like you've heard it like bosu ball and trx and all this

nonsense has been selling you on this idea of functional training without picking up a textbook or cutting open a dead body to really understand like, how is this meant to work in network with the rest of the body? That's where people should be setting their compass to when it comes to treatment. I think when you set it to pain, you can draw out this course and justified treatment, especially if you're selling them on this very suggestive model of alignment, where it's like, dude, I don't care how you move when I move you laying face down on a table. I care how you move with like 700 pounds on your back. I care how you move like through 100 mile an hour fastballs. Like if you can tune

everyone with that mindset, like that performance is the highest virtue that even if they don't attain it, setting them on that path is a part of your treatment. They'll eclipse pain no problem if you're focused on function and performance first. Yeah, that makes sense. Two questions. One, in your work that you do with high-level athletes, how do you use it in addition to all the other things that you do with them? And then what about for the everyday person? Is there value in like, so if someone's sitting there listening, I can see someone sitting there listening going, okay, so when should I consider seeing a chiropractor? And why two different questions, but those are my next two questions for you. You know what, man, a lot of people have a hard time with the fact that if you're in a situation

where like, you know, say you get and I'll use the word because I find it very predacious. But like, if you're duped into one of these, these you know three times a week for the rest of your life and your kid has scoliosis and everyone gets x-rays then you reap what you sow man like you should not be vetting your health care practitioners the same way that you pick diners in a city you've never been to you know what i mean yeah you know if you're yelp chiropractors deserve yelp patients and if you want to be lumped in in that clusterfuck then then by all means, go ahead. You get what you put in. People just aren't willing to put in the work. If you have a problem, usually your problem is you don't know enough about something. So if you don't know

enough about or don't take the time to be diligent in vetting your healthcare provider, then yeah, you're going to end up in the office of someone who's just trying to keep the lights on. That's my advice to people is like, how do you do that, though? How do you find a good chiro then? Great resources. I'm part of a network called clinicalathlete.com. So clinical athlete is owned by a friend of mine. His name is Quinn Hennick.

So it's twofold. I have to pay to be on there. And then every time that you brings on a new practitioner into the database, he actually personally vets them with an interview. Clinical athlete is just that, right? There are clinicians who are focused on performance-based. And think of it this way, like if an athlete is like a high-tuned Ferrari or something like that, and a general population person is a four-door sedan, it's like if you have the skill set to operate and improve a high-tuned car, changing the oil on a Civic should be relatively easy.

But if your skill set is only that to which you, changing the oil on a Civic should be relatively easy. But if your skillset is only that to which you can change the oil on a Civic, you can't necessarily extrapolate that skillset out to the Ferrari. I always encourage people, because on the outward, a lot of people who come see me, like who are general population patients of mine,

like a friend will tell me, oh, go see him, go see him, go see him. And they kind of take a look at me and they think of the general bone cracking model and they go, I don't want that guy anywhere near my spine. Like I don't want him jumping on. Which right, rightfully so man, at first glance really want to work with me either. But I just think like the vetting process. And for those listening, Jordan's a big boy and he looks intimidating. I put a lot of the

onus back on the level of the consumer. Not that I think chiropractors are innocent, but I mean, if we could see a shift in the market, like free market is going to dictate how people run their businesses, right? As long as these guys are making, honestly, like I know guys in the Bay making millions of dollars a year off rackets like this. As long as people keep showing up, they're going to keep doing it. So the vetting process for me is I always look for someone who's performance-based. Think of like having a fat personal trainer, right? Like I don't want to have someone whose body's in terrible shape to work on my body, my performance, right? So it can be difficult because the model has been set in place for so long. So for a resource I send most people to,

and I have no affiliation, like I pay just like everyone else. But it is the best consolidated resource for ethical clinicians. And it's not just chiropractors either. Like I think, at the highest level, there's very little difference in experience and treatment protocols when it comes to physical therapists and chiropractors and osteopaths. Like I think all three of us when especially when you're dealing with like athletes we all sort of gravitate towards the same method of treatment short answer that would be the best way i would go about it is go to clinical athlete and look up who's around you and then don't necessarily worry about discipline because it's not about and even with like friends of mine who are pts and osteos it's it's not about the

like the initials after the name right it's about the integrity of the name that precedes it so it's we don't care if so and so went to pt school so and so went to osteo it's like we care about the outcome and the performance of the patient and that should kind of be the end of the infighting it's when you start to hear like oh kairos you know whatever kill people and all that it's like that's low rent like that is a straw man argument. That's an ignorant statement from people who are worried about the wrong things. That's great. Not heard of clinical athlete. I pulled it up while you're talking and checking it out. And I think my browser's blocking. I'm assuming it's the map. I'm using this browser that blocks everything. So I'm assuming that

that's where the list would be. Cause I was like, where's the list of people? But I think, I think that's what it is. Yeah. You just go in there, you put in your set. Yeah. Now it finally opened full screen. Yeah. That's cool. So that's awesome. That's a great resource. What type of common issues are out there that for everybody listening, where you would say, who can benefit from that? Who should go right now to clinical athlete? Would you say anybody who just wants to perform better in the gym? And again, most of the people listening are not athletes and maybe amateur athletes, but you know, most of the people are just everyday people who want to be in shape and they go to the gym,

they lift weights, they do some cardio. How would chiropractic, like what would be your recommendation? People like that just shell open with my thought on it has always been, I like to be preventative and proactive in general i'd rather put a little bit of work in something consistently over time to not have a major problem later and so i see i think he started in rolfing been doing what he's been doing for 30 plus years and he's gotten a couple degrees and he's now just a multidisciplinary sounds similar to what you were talking about seems like he's now just a multidisciplinary. He sounds similar to what you were talking about. It seems like he's kind of developed his own approach to things based on all the stuff he knows. And I see him once every few weeks and all of us, there's something wrong with our bodies, period. Nothing's perfect, especially if you've been using it. So I find it helpful. I find that

I've learned some areas of my body, some issues. I have a bit of hypermobility in my SI joint, some areas of my body, some issues. I have a bit of hypermobility in my SI joint, bicipital groove on my right side tends to get a bit sticky. There are just things that he works on that make my workouts better. So I'm like, yeah, that's enough for me. Yeah. So I think as far as like who would benefit, I think if you're in the gym and, you know, two, three times a week, regardless of how serious you are about it, if you're trying to stay fit, trying to stay healthy, longevity, all that. I think that's the exact population that would get the most out of it. When I deal with professional athletes, I'm flying very close to the sun. Peak performance, we're talking like strongest guys in the world, cross-discipline,

like the best athletes in their respective sports, they're teetering on a brink. You're just trying to make sure they don't end up with a speed walk. It's a risky endeavor, but at lower levels, it's actually very calculated if you know what you're looking for. The biggest pitfall is people always end up with the gold standard of structural assessment because they can't find someone who can tailor a sort of this bespoke gold standard of functional assessment based off of the person that's right in front of them, right? So what I mean by that is most people first thing out the door is x-ray or MRI, which is going to be your gold standard structural assessment, the superimposed black and white image of your spine or your shoulder, your hip, where it's like, well, why don't you see how the thing

functions first? But again, it comes down to that definition. It comes down to function. Most people, unless they're performance-based based they don't necessarily know how the shoulder is meant to function how is this meant to work in network with the rest of our body so we sort of we hang we sort of hang our hats are we it's a bit of a cop-out i think a lot of times to go down the structural route and then look at like okay we'll see here you know you have some fraying in your supraspinatus that's why your shoulder hurts well did you check like his active range of motion did you check his stability did you check like grip strength overhead maybe we can just out function this

potentially damaged structure and that'll get us above pain threshold if people aren't really burning the candle at both ends and really putting the foot through the floor when it comes to training those are the people that can actually derive the most benefit from a very accurate and concise functional assessment that comes with it a plan to improve function right that's all we can really do right like once you get into the realm of indefatigable structural damage it's like you need a surgeon because we don't do structure we should and we should master function so that's kind of how i look at it like i think most people should at least get an idea of like you know you know your bicipital groove you know your si joint hypermobility like that is good

information to know and it's even better information to know if you have a plan that goes to counteract it right yeah and you know i don't in particular Again, I see a guy who's competent, smart, good dude, and seen him several times now, and he's happy with the progress that's being made. So I guess we'll see where it goes from there. I've asked him, hey, should I be doing anything special? I was doing some yoga and I was like, I don't want to take hours a week to do these classes. They're fun and all, but I have a lot of shit I have to do. And so there were a few of the poses in particular that seemed to best address the issues that I was having, particularly with my hips, internal and external

rotation was really imbalanced in between both my left and right sides and bicep or groove stuff. Cause I had some biceps tendonitis. So I don't know, maybe a year or so ago, I was like, yeah, I like these poses. I'm just going to do these. And then I added a couple others and it's like a 10 minute routine every day. And it actually has made quite a big difference, particularly because my hips are at least the function is better now than it was before. And I've noticed that in my squatting and deadlifting. So that's what I do every day. So we'll see, I guess, where it goes, but I agree with you that I was hoping that, okay, it's good to get some treatments, but what else can I do? Is it just come get treatments

forever? Or, and I can hear people thinking they're listening. Well, what if they can't afford necessarily to like, maybe they could afford to do a few trips, but they couldn't afford to see somebody every other week or every month until the end of time. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, it's a predatory model and a lot of it comes down to, I mean, one of my favorite sayings in just life really is don't explain with malice what can be explained with ignorance. I do think people think, chiropractors think that they are helping people and to their knowledge, the best that they know how to, that's what they're doing. I think the projection of snake oil salesmen, you know, there's people out there who know

that they're being sort of insidious in their approach. I talked to some of these people and you know, it's, it's like the George Costanza, like, it's not a lie if you believe it. And like their hook, line and sinker, man, like you listen to him talk and like, what, what did I bump my head and what fucking rabbit hole did I just end up in? This guy actually thinks that like adjusting C1 is going to like cure polio or some shit. It's just, but he believes it, man. Like one of the biggest insults that I can get is like, oh, I believe in chiropractic. It's like, that's fantastic. I, what I do exists outside the realm of belief, right? Like I want it to be objectively. And that's why I base my metrics off performance.

Like I don't worry about pain. Nowhere in my intake form am I worried about a verbal analog scale out of 10. What can't you do because of this? I can't put my shirt on. Okay. I want you to do these drills and the next week you can put your shirt on. We're going to change the drills to keep it progressing. Okay, cool. At no point am I worried about, does it hurt to put your shirt on? So you couldn't do it. Now you can do it. It's like, that's progress. A lot of it, you fall into the trap of like people are compassionate i think is on the whole and chiropractors know different the issue is not maliciousness it's ignorance they just don't necessarily know because they weren't taught

maybe that bone out of place structure first model has you know gone or should be gone the way the dodo bird i mean the adjustment element of it should just be part of the overall service, but not the only service and not the hammer for every nail. Yeah, I mean, it's in the education, man, like the dogmatism. I mean, I've almost got kicked out of every academic institution I've ever gone to.

That's from preschool, grade school, high school, undergrad, and grad school. Because my fourth grade report card reads like the temperament of an angry 65 year old man like questioning everything very like critic criticism to the point of cynicism where i don't buy this philosophical approach to practice right like we're literally and i went to probably what i would consider the best school in america forward thinking chiropractic integrative therapy but even then like i do i'd America, forward thinking chiropractic integrative therapy. But even then, like, dude, I'd still have classes called chiropractic philosophy.

What are you talking about? Philosophy? Like, yeah, it's a crazy fucking story, man. Like the guy who founded this thing, there was a janitor who was deaf and then he adjusted his neck and then he wasn't deaf anymore. It's like, man, that's up there with like the dude living in the whale for two days or whatever the biblical jam is. You know, but it's like, here's the thing. It is that insidious., that's up there with the dude living in the whale for two days or whatever the biblical jam is. You know, but here's the thing.

It is that insidious. That's real. Like, D.D. Palmer and B.J. Palmer, there are crazy eccentrics. But I think to throw the baby out with the bathwater because of that, I think, is a pretty negligent approach. It's an unsophisticated approach. You guys bled your first president to death. You know that?

Medical doctors in the white house george washington died of hypovolemia he got sick and so they cut him and then he died it's not like we're gonna throw away conventional medicine because if people did some crazy shit right so no i think like doing away with an entire field of manual medicine is really necessary because the guy who founded it and the philosophy that resonates from that, because it's only been like, I don't know, 100 years or so since the field sort of came into its own thing. It is justified in some of the scrutiny, but I think those of us who are just kind of looking forward, just try to transcend the bullshit,

understanding full well people's frustration, that even their frustration is founded in just ignorance, really. Yeah, that makes sense. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness, Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness.

What are your thoughts on mobility stuff, yoga, things that people can do at home? Again, I'm just thinking with people who could, maybe they can't afford to see a chiropractor, even a practitioner who you would endorse, or there isn't one available in their area? What are your thoughts on that kind of stuff? And again, for most people, it's probably going to be either to reduce pain or prevent pain or to improve function or maintain function. One takeaway from this for anyone listening, this is like resonating with them, maybe understanding what tightness is. so i think the idea like mobility has been sort of the buzzword du jour since the kelly star red and the crossfit world sort of took over the fitness space right probably about i don't know eight years ago or so i think it sets people

up for like a false sense of hope like mobility is not the answer mobility is a stepping stone on the way to the answer so it's an integrated model based off of mobility stability and then strength right where most people look at it just as a spectrum of like you know the big guy linebacker can't touch his toes but he's really strong and then like the nimble yogi fold himself in a pretzel can't do a push-up kind of thing like that's how we exist on this spectrum but it's not a spectrum it's sort of like a three layer of n diagram think of like three spinning plates on sticks and in the middle is stability like mobility is great but if we can't control n ranges of motion where we're structurally unstable with function then you're equally as likely to get

hurt i have power lifters i work with who squat over a thousand pounds and getting in and out of vehicles is hard for them. I also have people in Cirque who I could literally fold up and stash away in the overhead bin. Performer and the thousand pound plus squatter are actually both equally as likely to succumb to an injury. It's not this direct correlation between increased mobility and decreased pain and decrease of injury prevention. It's an inverted bell curve, if you can imagine that. So the super flexible and the super inflexible actually both succumb to injury at equal rates. So it's about figuring out based off assessment where towards that the fringes of that inverted bell curve you begin to trend to and then what are the strategies to implement to bring you to center where that

risk is low and you're at the bottom of that bell? So I think a lot of people, if you are immobile, sure, stretch. But understand that you're immobile for a reason. Your body's limiting you to getting into some of these end range positions because it's uncertain of your ability to functionally stabilize in structurally unstable positions. Like let's take the shoulder, for example. If I try to put my arm all the way over my head, and let's take the shoulder for example if i put my trying to put my arm all the way over my head and let's say a full overhead position is 180 degrees from a neutral shoulder hand at your sides let's say my shoulder mobility was only afforded me like 130 degrees it's like okay there's a reason my body's inhibiting me this last 50 degrees

so i can stretch into that position like say say I go, I want to do a shoulder day or a chest day. And so I stretch and stretch and get my hand in the overhead position. And for two minutes of the day, I can get my hand there. So what do I do? I put dumbbells in it and I start to load. Your body's freaking out. Your nervous system is like, wait, what the hell are we doing here? And why do we have all this weight? It's like, we can't manage this. I mean, what I usually have people do is sitting there at the chair, like even if you're listening at home, arm at your side, elbow at 90 degrees, make a fist, squeeze as hard as you can. Take a mental inventory of how hard you can squeeze in that position and then put your arm straight over your head as high as you can and then do it

again. Where is it that you can exert the most force in that grip? 95, 98, 99% of people report arm at the side, but the muscles of grip are dictated by the muscles from the medial epicotyl. So basically your elbow and down. So why is it now the position of the shoulder is dictating how much force we can exert? In a neutral position, arm at your side, you have a lot of structural stability. The two composing bones or the two comprising bones of the shoulder, the humerus and the scapula, have a lot of articulating surface. It feels very stable from its structure. You lose that when you go into the overhead position. So if you don't have the requisite functional stability to sort of make up for what you're lacking in structural

stability in that position, your body's going to limit how much force you can output and over time limit your ability to get into that position. As a general takeaway, I don't want people to think that just because they stretch what's tight, that'll be the problem. You need to stretch into unstable positions and then stabilize those positions. So like, let's make this really like. Yeah, I was going to ask, how do you do that? Then what are the key factors in play here?

So I like the idea of specificity. Like I do look at corrective exercise prescription, a pharmacological intervention, right? So like, I don't want to take my mom's statins or whatever, because I don't need it. So as a general rule of thumb, let's say someone has tight hips. Okay. The hips are a ball and socket joint that moves through three planes of movement. Let's stretch. Fine. I'm okay with stretching. Into external rotation. So that's through one plane. So that's something like a pigeon pose. Extension of the hip, which would be something like a couch stretch.

So you kind of cover all three planes from a mobility standpoint. Then I want you to stabilize. Stability from a fundamental, like a physics standpoint, is basically you have a base of support and a center of mass. So when you're standing there with two feet on the ground, you have a pretty wide base of support. Now, what if you stood on one leg? Well, now you have a limited base of support. So something like a single leg Romanian deadlift, where like you just try and hinge and have your torso approach the floor as your back leg that's going into extension approaches the ceiling at the same rate. So keep a neutral spine,

see how well you can stabilize. You'd be astonished at how poorly people operate on one leg, even though as they walk around all day, they spend the majority of their gait cycle on one leg. That is how you appraise gait cycle is hip function, right? So if you get someone to do a single leg RDL, you're basically taking the isolated functional assessment of gait cycle and putting it under a microscope. And then you're seeing like the isolated functional assessment of gait cycle and putting it under a microscope. And then you're seeing like, okay, because this person is very unstable in this position, that instability still exists from a functional standpoint. It's just being made up for by structure. But guess what gets hurt when you're squatting? Guess what gets hurt when

you're deadlifting? Your structure, right? Structure is your SI joint. Structure is your lumbar disc. Structure is your hip labrum. hip labor structures your medial meniscus and lateral meniscus of your knees so it's like imagine if we could own those positions when we when we put the function under a microscope and we could build that function to a point when we are in structurally stable positions we know we have the functional stability to buffer any force to keep it out of the structure so i can use use the, like the single leg RDL is pretty much, its goal is to use the glute med, which is your primary lateral stabilizer, to stabilize the hip, lateral stability of the hip. That's all you're really looking to do. If you don't have that, but you can hide that dysfunction in a squatting pattern,

at some point and under enough load, something of your structure will not have the tissue tolerance to manage that force. So it's not about taking the weight off the bar necessarily. It's about putting the force in places where the tolerance is scalable. Like the tolerance of your SI joint, roughly speaking, is not necessarily something that you can build to be resilient. You can build the muscles around it to be resilient so that the force never increases at the level of the SI joint. But the SI joint itself is, it's fairly hardwired as it comes to like its structural integrity. Yeah, that makes sense. What are some other exercises? I don't want to call them quote unquote functional exercises, be good. I'm saying there are some other exercises

that you are using fairly often to improve stability? I mean, the main points, I guess, for weightlifters, right? It'd be the hips, it would be the shoulders. I'll go real systematic for you because this is basically the outline of my book is this. So it's think of going to a physical therapist, going to a chiropractor and being told, oh, I'm sorry, you have weak glutes, right? How many people have heard that? You have weak glutes. So then they put a band around their knees and they start marching laterally around the gym or you have a weak core. That's another one. So you're doing the big three and you're doing all these curl ups and sit ups or you have a weak rotator cuff. There's a trend here. It's not weakness. It's instability. The shoulder, the spine,

the hip are hubs of stability, not hubs of strength. You can strengthen a weak glute. It doesn't matter. It's like, think of it this way. Like, I mean, I'm a 275 pound power lifter. If I start to improve my five minute mile, and then I'm wondering why my squat's not going up or no shit, right? It's a totally different system. It's a totally different means of adaptation. Like an adaptation has to be very specific to the imposed event. So I wouldn't be bewildered at that fact if I went running and my squat went down. But we're really flustered, especially as athletes where I build strength in a rotator cuff, I build strength in a glute, I build strength in a core by adding resistance is going through a range of motion and i don't see an improvement

of stability it's not weakness it's the problem it's instability it's a totally different adaptation it's not like people run and then think they're going to get stronger or squat and they think they become better runners it's equally as different as strength and endurance is strength and stability but what do people do booty bands hip circles fucking thera band rotator cuff crossover symmetry all this jazz which is like there's a place for it sure like don't get me wrong i think like low training age post-op building strength do you speak another language uh i'm learning german so i'm bissian of course you are okay german's tough imagine you spoke italian right you were italian and

we're like all right matthews let's hit up barcelona for a weekend it's like all right you know italian we're good we can get on a train we can order lunch we'll be sweet that's where building strength in muscles of stability work for the general population the general population are tourists to physical activity so So they don't have to be necessarily physically literate in their adaptations that they're making. They're just here for the weekend, right? You and me, permanent fucking residents. This is my mailing address, dude.

I live, breathe, and sleep this shit. That's like me knowing Italian, going to Barcelona, and then living there. I want to be literate and fluent in the physical adaptations I need to make. I need to speak the right language. Otherwise I'm going to get left behind. So understanding that at the level of the shoulder. So an example, kettlebell bottom underpress, kettlebell windmill, kettlebell windmill, stabilize the scapula using the serratus anterior, kettlebell bottom underpress when executed properly, stabilize the glenohumeral joint using the rotator cuff. That's your upper body body stuff if you can't do it because of mobility increase your mobility until

you can get to that position for the core planks reverse ghr sit-ups ab wheel it's about anti extension right it's not about doing sit-ups and flexing and extending the lumbar spine it's about resisting movement right that's the fundamental difference between strength and stability strength is exerting force stability is resisting force right so That's the fundamental difference between strength and stability. Strength is exerting force. Stability is resisting force, right? So it's a matter of understanding at each one of these levels, what is the goal I'm trying to achieve? What is the adaptation I'm trying to make? So, and at the level of the hip, single leg RDL, walking lunges, hip airplanes, those to me, if you can, if you can start to master proper execution of those movements and actually begin to create some joint stability at end range you're going to exponentially decrease the likelihood of

injury at all three levels of those joints because that's how each one of those meant to function the function of the core isn't to flex the lumbar spine it's to act as an anti-extender function of the infraspinatus isn't to externally rotate the shoulder. It's to stabilize the glenohumeral joint. The function of glute med isn't to abduct against resistance and build strength in abduction external rotation. It's to stabilize the hip laterally through gait cycle. So it's understanding that fundamental difference. Yeah, that's a fantastic point. I'm assuming even the everyday person would experience, if not increases in performance, they would progress better over time because their neurological systems wouldn't be okay with them continuing to load, I would assume, right?

So if you have more joint stability, there are systems, or if you don't have enough joint stability, I'm sure there are systems that basically where the body is doing everything it can to not get hurt. I'm sure you can force it to that point. Unless I'm wrong. I don't know what your thoughts on that. That's just me kind of rambling. Yeah. No, I mean, I think most people, when they train, they train in externally stabilized positions, right? So they're sitting on the preacher curl, they're laying on the bench press. So from an exercise programming standpoint, think of the law of conservation of energy, right? Like matter can never be created or destroyed, just transferred from one to another. That's how you should look at maybe organizing your programming. Okay,

if you understand the function of the shoulder, understand the function of the spine and the hip, you need to appease that function under load while you're training to a certain extent, whether it's fragmented, like think of the bench press. My serratus is totally inhibited when I bench press. Why? Serratus and rhomboids are opposing muscles. So when I retract my shoulder blades, my serratus is turned off, plus my scapula is being stabilized by the bench I'm laying on. So, okay, I'm not saying don't bench press. I'm saying at some point you need to integrate that proper shoulder function. You can't destroy that moment. You need to transfer, put in windmills, put in landmine presses,

put in something where you can actually integrate that upper rotation of the scapula, right? Most people's injuries happen when their strength outruns their stability, right? That's like a fundamental principle to a lot of this stuff is where people that put the cart before the horse, they realize that the stability

is the governing factor of output. So if you really want to get stronger, it's about expressing the strength you have, not trying to beat your head against the wall and just load more weight. Most people would seek to benefit so much more from increasing that internal stability than just trying to load the bar with more weight. Yeah, that makes sense. And what are your thoughts on more whole body exercises and how do they contribute to stability, like the squat or the deadlift? the bar with more weight. Yeah, that makes sense. And what are your thoughts on more whole body exercises and how do they contribute to stability, like the squat or the deadlift? No. So this is where I get a lot of pushback. Like the squat is not functional. The squat or the deadlift is not functional. They are economical means in which you can load a lot of weight.

Hip function is gait cycle. It's an equal lesson evolutionary biology and biomechanics if you look at the study of like behaviorism there's the clinical behaviorists and then there's the ethologists the difference between the two is clinical behaviorists they looked at purely humans and cats and giraffes everything is just consciousness is just a vessel that creates output from input that's how a lot of biomechanists look at squatting look at deadlifting and they don't necessarily respect the environment where ethologists that's like kind of like your jane goodall's like go out into the environment and see how that affects the parameters of the load so i think for me when squatting and deadlift i'm not saying don't do them i'm not saying they're

not great exercises i'm saying as it pertains to actual function of the hips it's not functional function is gate cycle pure and simple like if you ask me what is the athlete that gets the most out of their hips you say well 100 there's no one that comes close to the output that this guy gets out his hips and i just think you know people put up like oh like the little baby or whatever that little ginger baby you know you know what i'm talking about it's like in the squat and then it's all labeled. It's like, fuck that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm so stupid. He's a stupid little fucking ginger baby. Like, it doesn't make any sense. He has 300 bones. I was like, dude, I got a big fucking head. But my head is not the third of

the size of my body. That is by no means an argument for squatting being functional. That's stupid. Or like the sagittal plane drive. There's some fitness industry people who claim that their terrible squat is based off their astronomically large, long femurs. It's like no one's legs are as long as you're proclaiming your legs to be. And they put up that little sagittal plane analysis, right? The little stick figure drawing. It's like, dude, this is a static two-dimensional depiction of movement that exists in three dimensions. All I can see really from that little drawing stick figure, the angles you drew to justify your shitty squat, it's a quantitative analysis.

It's like, okay, is your hip below parallel? Yes. Cool. What's the intention of external rotation and abduction at the hip to stabilize the SI joint, stabilize this more acetabular joint? There's something to be said about differentiating between physics and biomechanics. Like a lot of people think that they're talking about biomechanics, but they're talking about physics. So like the shortest

distance between two points is a straight line, but that's not how our body works. No matter how many little stick figures you draw. Biomechanics is like, have you ever seen lightning hit something? I have seen videos of it, but yeah, that's how our body works it's about the path of loose resistance that's how our nervous system recruits and it's like guess what man like if you haven't trained the proper function of your hips that path is not going through your glute knee i don't care how fucking strong it is that path is going to find its way through the si joint that path is going to find its way through the medial meniscus when your knee knocks in you can drive your knees out into band, but if you can't stand on one leg, you shouldn't be squatting with two. That's interesting.

I've not run across, maybe this is, again, just me being ignorant of these kind of things, but I'm really enjoying this conversation myself because you're just answering questions I've had that I've not come across great information on because I've come across a lot of stuff that you've mentioned, which is a lot of, it's what just makes the rounds on social media or the blogosphere. It really makes sense. I'm sold. I want to ask you after what I should, I mean, it could just be adding the few exercises that you mentioned, but I'd love to do it. And for no other reason than it just makes sense. And it seems like the right thing to do. And again, I'm all about being proactive, but I'd also be curious to see how it impacts my non-functional stuff that we do for fun. It's amazing how quick this stuff works without sounding like a salesman. And that will give you a logical reason as to why. If I don't train for strength, I can depreciate my strength very quickly. Why? Because it's very inefficient to have like the neurological capacity to lift what i lift

without like fucking blowing my own horn like you don't need to do what i do it's wildly dangerous it's wildly inefficient from a day-to-day level to like recruit motor units to that frequency and magnitude is entirely juxtaposed to efficient lifestyle you know you've probably experienced this like dude if you take three or four days off the gym, how much weight do you lose? To be honest, none really. Maybe, maybe a little bit. Oh man. If I take four or five days off the gym, I can lose eight pounds. Really? Yeah. I mean, I'll go from 275 down to like the high 260s if I take a few days. Wow. I mean, to be fair, I'm 195. I'm a little guy. I'm not that strong either. fair, I'm 195. I'm a little guy. I'm not that strong either.

The strategies I've had to lay down based off of the training I've done are systemically inefficient for my body. That's why I've approached diminishing returns. Your body is like actively fighting you at this point. Oh yeah. It fucking hates me. And rightfully so, man. I put it through the ringer day in, day out. But when it comes to stability, stability actually makes me more efficient. So stability is this really neat adaptation that once you credit the account, man, you can live off the interest. Interesting. Like my warmups now are so short. They're so short. Basically, can I get into an end range of motion? Can I get into there actively without having to stretch? If I can't,

I'm sitting on a flight from 17 and a half hours from Melbourne to Dallas a couple weeks ago weeks ago like i got off that flight i wasn't touching my toes so it's like okay single leg rdl is not going to be the first thing i do with the warm-up i'm going to stretch my hips get into that position once i can solidify that position own it stabilize it then i can load it done warm up when i first started i go through a round of static stretching i'd run on a foam roller i would use some bands do some pnF style stretching to get into these unstable positions, then stabilize those positions. This might be a dumb question, but what do you mean by stabilizing the position once you've gotten into it?

Think of the single leg RDL. If anyone's listening right now and it's safe to do so, stand on one leg and hinge. Try and drive your non-loaded leg to the ceiling while keeping that foot pointed to the ground the toe pointed to the ground and see what happens watch your foot just start to shake your plant foot just start to acute onset parkinson's just start to find itself and grab the floor you should get to a point where that should be locked in right like you should be able to resist force of your own body weight, especially if you're going to try to be loading weight more than your own body weight. And so that's stability. Like when you

do the kettlebell bottom under press, it'll be real obvious because you'll get to the top of the movement. And people will always report like, oh, my wrist is weak, because the kettlebell will go from that bottom under position where you're like grabbing the handle with the bell on top and then the bell will fall down and hit you in the wrist it's like it has nothing to do with your grip it's just you don't have enough stability in the shoulder to actually express the strength at your hand so if you scale the weight back go through that full range where you're stabilizing into that end range of motion with an unstable load like that's why you grab the kettlebell the way you do it's not so much since it's the deviation of the combined center of mass of your arm and the kettlebell outside of the base support which in that case is your shoulder so that's sort of how you can

always frame it what's my base support where's my combined center the more you can deviate the more you can elicit a stimulus of instability i got better at that when i was doing yoga actually because you know some of those poses were a bit difficult at first, standing on one leg and trying to twist around yourself. And yeah, I can attest to, I mean, I got better as I continued to do it and it positively impacted my training. And even those points of becoming stable on each leg individually, I didn't know exactly and how you've explained it, why that was, but I did notice. Yeah. I mean, yoga is good, but you're riding the bus, dude. You're not a control and everyone's going to the same place where I think specificity really matters. Again, broad spec stuff for gen

population. You're not doing yoga and you're experiencing pain. Before you go to a chiropractor, do three yoga sessions. See how you feel. If you're someone who's competitive in something and you need those adaptations to be specific and you need them to be expedited, go see someone who has the functional roadmap that can assess and then intervene very accurately, very specifically to your limitations and specific ranges that are limited, and then a progression of instability to stabilize those end ranges once you attain. That's great. I like that. Well, I mean, those are all the questions I had for you. Is there anything else that is kind of floating around that you wanted to add, or should we just wrap up? I just like to impart on people just to be

critical, man. Like question the shit I said. That's how I learned all this. I started my career working at apple world headquarters as a corporate chiropractor i was 25 years old fresh out of school with the only argument i had from being pressed with any of the bullshit i was espousing was this weird chiropractic meets god of the gaps theory where it's like well the adjustment works in mysterious ways it's like dude that doesn't fucking fly when you're looking at a barrel of like an MIT double PhD computer scientist, man. And they're not malicious. They're just inquisitive fucking giant genius kids that are like, yeah, but why? Yeah, but why? And I was like, dude, I'm getting grilled. I have no fucking idea. I had to burn off the deadwood that

I spent a quarter of a million dollars fucking learning and then rebuild up with what I knew, at least have this logical consistency. Be critical to the point of being cynical. Vet your resources. Don't get your information from 60 second red X green check fucking videos online. It's way more sophisticated than people get it. People will accuse me to overcomplicate things. It's like, no, no, no.

I don't need to dumb this down. You need to smarten the fuck up if it means something to you. This is the requisite level of detail. If your body is a very complicated fucking system, right? So it's just, if there's no takeaway outside of like mobility, stability, strength, the difference between stability and strength, it just fit everything, man. Like be critical. Don't just buy hook, line, and sinker.

Even with the shit I said, poke holes in it. That's why I present now. I do a lot of my work just lecturing around the world. And I'll get on a plane and go wherever if it means I can come across a question I've never heard. Because that's what I want. I want better questions. I don't want to give people answers.

If that's how you're really going to learn, I just read a lot on Ryan Holiday's books. You can't learn that to which you already know. Just constantly appraise the shit you think you know and everything that comes through your windshield, man. Look at it hypercritically. Try and poke holes in it. And if it still fucking floats,

then you know that it's seaworthy. You know that idea holds weight. And then you go forward from there and try know that it's that it's seaworthy you know that idea holds holds weight and then you go forward from there and trying to build off of that yeah i totally agree and i think one of the issues that many people run into however is one there's a time factor right so let's say you have an everyday person who's busy they have a job and they have a family and they have other obligations and they have a few hours to give to fitness every week. And outside of that, you know, they maybe have a few hours they could give to educating themselves about anything. And then if they are someone who is conscientious in general, you know, they probably are also trying to weigh the priorities there. And to even

understand a lot of the things that you're talking about, it actually requires quite a bit of time and quite a bit of effort. I do agree. That's one thing you could just say, well, then fucking do it. We have very similar personalities. So I do totally understand where you're coming from. I just know having worked with a lot of people that one of the things that I would say as take someone like you with the amount of knowledge that you have, the next, like the God tier for someone like you is to be able to explain key concepts in simple terms that anyone can understand. And Richard Feynman's whole thing was basically the point of it was if you couldn't explain it in terms that an eight-year-old can understand, you don't understand it well enough yourself, and you need to be able to break it down to that level.

I don't say this as a criticism of you. I'm just speaking from having worked with a lot of everyday people who, remember, some people, maybe they're not great learners, and that could be for various different reasons. It could be IQ, it could be they had a terrible time in school, they don't like learning, or it could be they don't have good systems for learning. Like for example, jargon alone can be a huge obstacle that many people are not aware of that they don't understand even the proper definitions of the terms being used. They don't realize how important that is, so they don't really spend time in dictionaries or glossaries. They just try to come to their own understanding based on context, and then they completely misunderstand whatever it is that was being explained. Then when they go try to implement what they just incorrectly learned, they get

shitty results. I would say one of the things that a lot of the bullshit artists do well, and they do better than the people, many of the people who are true experts and who should be getting all of the attention is at least to communicate clearly. And they're usually better at selling, but they're also better at just telling people things they can understand. When somebody feels like they've understood something, it just makes them feel good. It makes them drawn to the people who make them feel good. In many cases, that is the bullshit. At least in the fitness space, that's definitely the case. A lot of the bullshitters are the better marketers and in some ways, the better communicators. Anyway, that's just me saying things, but I do agree with what you're saying. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect, right?

Most successful people are the people who know enough, but not enough to know that they don't know everything. It's humbling once you cross that abyss and you realize like, holy shit, there's so much out there. But again, it's like if you are ignorant to that distant horizon, you can say things with such conviction that makes it believable what alleviates anxiety is authority right so if you can speak from a pedestal of authority and to your point if you can say it in a way that makes sense to people then they're in hook line and sinker i you know i think they're and i've seen it in the past three or four years there is

an emerging market for deeper level thought process people are starting to get wise to the charlatans you're starting to get one place to the ploys and the tricks and the tactics so i think we're starting to see a higher caliber of just thinking starting to percolate its way through or start to rise to the top if you will so i mean i'm optimistic there'll always be a market for your draws or size or whatever the fuck or your shake weights sure but that's that's a high acquisition model man like frankly i don't want those people as patients i don't want those people as consumers or or readers i don't want to pander to that audience what my focus now is bringing it to people who can bring it to the end user like i

think i can explain it to someone with a high base competency who then with their skill set can bring that part, this information to more people than I could one on one. So if I can teach teachers how to teach trainers or teach curriculum, how to impart this on their students or on their athletes or on their clients, to impart this on their students or on their athletes or on their clients, I think we can get this information into the programs and into the lives of more people and hopefully start to have a positive impact that way. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I mean, that's just knowing who you are communicating to and what you're trying to accomplish. And based on that, your approach makes perfect sense. So, I mean, that's all I had. This was a great discussion. I really enjoyed it. Why don't we just wrap up with where people can find you and your work? I know you have a lot of seminars, but you're doing a lot of things. So what should people know about? Yeah. Okay. So podcast is,

if you enjoy the demented ramblings, we go even deeper. My business partner and I, so our podcast is rxradio. So rx, a posh VD radio on itunes and spotify on instagram it's the underscore muscle underscore doc doc i will be traveling ben pokulski and i have seminars in tampa and toronto so tampa bay is going to be the march 23rd 24th weekend and toronto's april 3rd at fortis east in toronto i will be teaching two continuing education courses for Good Life Fitness across Canada starting from May onward down to the rest of the year. First dates being in Bradford, Whitby and Toronto

with a dozen or so more dates to come close out the rest of the calendar year. Inquiries on private seminars, email jordan at themuscledoc.com. I think that's it oh exercise programming so i'm on a website called www.pre-script.com so this is kind of an integrated programming platform that it takes the guesswork of everything i just talked about out of exercise programming so we have a power lifting and olympic lifting vein of programming that my business

partner and i sort of drew out and preemptively planned with our library of video corrective exercises and movement preparation where people go wrong. So basically answering that question of, you know, if you don't have enough time, but still want to be proactive in your approach and put some of these theories into into practice. We sort of did that for you through our app and our online community with prescript so that's kind of their main players is rx radio on itunes spotify find me on instagram jordan rd underscore muscle underscore doc and then programming www.pre-script.com awesome well thanks again for taking the time jordan that was great i really appreciate it yeah man pleasure thanks for having me on. a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out,

it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscle for life.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. So please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And

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