The Joe Rogan Experience - #365 - Kelly Starrett, Glen Cordoza

Episode Date: June 7, 2013

Kelly Starrett is a coach, physical therapist, author, speaker, and creator of MobilityWOD. His new book written with Glen Cordoza is called Becoming a Supple Leopard.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Showing my day, Joe Rogan podcast my night. I'm mixed. What are you doing? Is that your new mix? I have to explain. You are not a DJ, you fuck. No.

Kelly, how are you, sir? I'm good, man. Thank you very much for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. Absolutely a pleasure. Forrest Griffin recommends you. That's good enough for me. And your book is fascinating.

I started looking into your book, and as I was telling you before the podcast, I've been having some back issues myself. I have like a bulging disc in my neck. The name, Becoming a Supple Leopard, where did you come up with that name? A couple ideas. One is I have some tactical friends who are scary, and they're always stiff and messed up. And he told me, Kelly, the leopard doesn't stretch.

And I was like, well, that's good. I'm glad you're using that leopard defense because, A, you're not a leopard. Two, you don't know how a leopard feels. But then I started thinking about it. A leopard can sort of attack and defend at full physical capacity. You don't see the leopard activating its glutes or warming up or prepping. It's just awesome. So why the hell don't you have full physical capacity?

Why are you in pain? You know, the resting state of the human being should be pain-free. You're designed to be 110. What's going on? Why is that? It's because you suck at moving. And you're a human being. You make a ton of movement errors.

No one ever gave you the software for your beautiful hardware. You know, you're beat up. You take some injuries. You eat like crap sometimes. That's a big one, isn't it? The software for your beautiful hardware. That goes with the mind as well. Like, just managing being a human.

It's difficult. It's not that easy. Well, who says it? The software for your beautiful hardware. That goes with the mind as well. Just managing being a human. It's difficult. It's not that easy. Well, who says it should be not an easy skill? So the bottom line is that we've been sort of sold this horrible mess that you can just get on the treadmill. You don't even have to think. Bullshit. You are a very, very skilled human being. That skill takes work, probably work every day.

So meaning that you can't just get on a treadmill and be a healthy person with no pain. Like you have to do physical, real physical work. You have to do real workouts. Well, I think we've moved beyond. I think everyone knows you need to probably put the time in under some weights. You probably need to breathe really hard. What we're really talking about is being a skilled human. Can you do everything that a human being needs to be able to do?

Yes or no. Can you squat down with your feet together like you're in Thailand having is being a skilled human. Can you do everything that a human being needs to be able to do? Yes or no. Can you squat down with your feet together like you're in Thailand having dinner? Yes or no. If you can't, you don't have flank or range of motion. Why not? That's why you have plantar fasciitis. That's why you tore your Achilles. This is why you have back pain.

So the thing is that you should be very, very skilled in your thinking, very, very skilled in your – and cultivate the practice. Three hundred and fifty years ago, Musashi writes the book of the five rings. He says your combat stance is your everyday stance. And you're like, wow, that's so deep. Where the short sword goes, your belly needs to be firm. He's talking about your core, you know? From your feet to your knees, you need to be able to create tension.

He's probably talking about torque and having your feet straight. So we're not the first people to take a crack at it, but we are the same people who've made the same mistakes over and over again, and you should be skilled, and we don't teach the skill. You've been spending your genetics, and then you wake up one day and you've herniated a disc. You're like, what the hell happened? So your skill in movement, like you need to know how to stand. You need to know the correct posture.

Is that what you're saying, like that kind of thing? Look, my life's work as a dream as a child was not to lecture adult men about posture. Like this is not the apex. But it turns out good standing position in yoga is called Tadasana, right? You should know how to do that. Yes or no. And it's also the setup position for the deadlift. The problem is that it's hard to kind of understand what positions need to be in. What is full range of motion? Finally, we have a language and that language is the modern language of strength and conditioning. If you can press and pull and roll,

language is the modern language of strength and conditioning. If you can press and pull and roll, you know, we, you know, you hear the debunked, thinking about the old strength coaches, say like bench press, it ties the shoulders to the arms. And you're like, what the hell does that mean? Well, it turns out if you teach kids to create torque off of a fixed object and explain what the purpose of that is, you need to be skilled. Well, then it turns out in guard, you can create torque off of any position. You can grab the shopping cart and be in a stable shoulder position. So it turns out that the posture that we adopt day to day, like right now are

you in a good position or a bad position? Horrible position. I'm always in a horrible position 24 hours a day. That's right. So is it okay to be unconscious and a zombie and turn your abs off? You've already scared him so much that he'll never work out for like the next month. He's not going to work out now. You're freaking him out, man. No, I just have this thing every time. I know I slouch.

My whole life is slouching. If I sit like this, it looks like I'm trying to show off my delicious boobs. But you should. That's how you should think. I know. This is how you want to be healthy. Just tell the world, here's my delicious boobs. I don't like it. But I've been doing that lately, man.

And I'm telling you, there's been a bunch of different things that I've done lately that have mitigated my back pain. But one of them is I've been really, really cognizant of my posture. For like the first time in my life, I have a horrible slump. And I just didn't think it was no big deal. I thought it was like, so I don't like standing up straight. What do I give a fuck? But I didn't think it had like health repercussions. I didn't think the damage it could do for your discs.

Well, let's look at it. So you get away at it. So, you know, you get away with it. You're a pretty good athlete. You have been an athlete your whole life. You know, you're black belt. You know how to train. You take care of yourself doing these things. And all of a sudden, something's not working, right? And the type one error that we make as humans is that, hey, I've always done it. And I could be the best in the world. I know so many gold medalists and so many world champions world record holders who have terrible positions and bad mechanics and pain they're still the best in the world so if you can't use that I'm the best in the world excuse the issue is are you optimized are you in the best position possible for you or we maximize your potential

comma we use pain as a lagging indicator I wait till I have pain swelling numbness and tingling loss of range of motion then suddenly oh, oh, I have a problem. That's like driving your car around until it blows up and then being like, I should put some oil in. Yeah, I know I fucked up in not getting regular massages. I know I fucked up by not doing enough yoga. I know. I know I fucked up. No, no, no.

That's not – this is the problem. Really? Yeah. So massage is great. It helps you downregulate, take care of your tissues, having someone – It's a really good idea, right? It's a great idea. And stretching?

So, but the problem with stretching, we'll talk about that. Stretching doesn't work. Stop stretching. After you work out? Stop stretching. Well, how do you get really flexible? Well, we take a systems approach that doesn't include the word stretching because stretching has sort of been co-opted by thinking about lengthening your muscles.

So, let's take your neck, for example, right? One of the things we look at is, you know, is your spine in an optimal position? Yes or no? And what we see is that if you're rounded in your thoracic spine, we'll get that little hunch, right? Which is easy if you're texting or sitting all day long. Your head ends up a little forward. For every inch in front of your center of mass your head is, it's plus 10 pounds. so your head weighs 11 pounds plus inch it's another 22 pounds eight okay so it's super it's super thin there's not a lot going on so let's so extrapolate that out so running 400 meters it's 330 steps right that's 330 loads if you look at sort of the the flexion

load moment on your neck extrapolate it out times four so in one line is that your nervous system isn't optimized. This is – the physiology of the human being is no longer debatable. We know what the best position is. If I put your head in this position, I can decrease your force production instantaneously. When did everybody sort of come to a consensus on this? Like when did people really start understanding like real physical training and how do you correct bad posture and issues like what you're talking about?

Is this like fairly recent information? I would say this is very recent. And the reason it's recent, when the book come out, right, when we start Mobility WOD, the issue is that for the first- What is WOD? Workout of the Day? Is that what it is? The idea is like-

All those CrossFit fuckers and their acronyms. Hey, we'll do thrusters later. It's cool. Thrusters? Look, the bottom line is- We kept- The guy who's got a book about being a supple leopard and then he wants to do thrusters. What is this show?

Fill in the blank. I'm from San Francisco. If you just say that to people. I lived there as a child. It's a great town. Confed Thrusters. Okay, buddy. Settle down over there.

Sorry. I don't remember where we were. He's a grown man. We were talking about how long this information has been out there. So look at what's happened with the onset of the internet. We have literally kind of hit some kind of threshold where for the first time in real time, we have the best practices, test, retest, being shared, platforms. Coaches are talking to strength coaches, talking to nutritionists. Let's use your own show as a model.

Look at the people you've brought on, right? Experts in their fields, legitimate. And for the first time, we start to kind of tie in these very disparate systems. Suddenly nutrition guys are talking to gymnasts, talking to physios. And we were able to connect the dots in ways that we wouldn't. I mean 2,000 years ago, the yogis figured out that putting your arms over your head didn't align the chakras it put the shoulder into a stable position you know and so it's not like we haven't taken a crack at the human condition before but for the first time we can sort of integrate the fields

well it turns out that that that shoulder position is the same position you should have your shoulder if you're pressing or if you're a young gymnast blocking it's the same shoulder the the motor control and technique has been worked out for us because humans are obsessed with performance they're obsessed with lifting heavier weights and going faster when we start to kind of underlie the physiology and match that up with the principles now like look if you go into any any gym on the planet people are front squatting and running and Olympic lifting and swinging kettlebells. I mean my mom brags about her deadlift PR. She has an artificial knee.

You know what I mean? Like cats are sleeping with dogs. Your mom has an artificial knee and she does deadlifts? Who doesn't deadlift with an artificial knee? Why not? That's a big gangster. Right, and she's gluten-free, right? And gluten-free.

That's right. I could eat your grandma. No, you can't. I want to definitely get to the gluten issue. That's a very controversial issue. No, it's not controversial. I mean amongst a lot of people. Maybe not to you, but amongst a lot of people it is.

So the issue is suddenly we can tie these fields together, and because we have the way to share the information, and then we also are – maybe you've noticed we're in the center of a human epoch, of a certain renaissance. For sure. Like look at the MMA movement. People are like, hey, I should probably learn how to fight and rule and the self-empowerment. I'm not going to have a pension. I'm going to have a 401K. I'm going to manage it myself. Oh, it turns out I'm responsible for my own health care.

Like the center of responsibility has definitely shifted back to us. The nutrition information is sort of distilled down and shifted back to us. Like you can start making better decisions about your life and realize you have to because no one else is going to do it for you. Right. And I think we're, we're, we're in a culture of people waking up. And for the first time now, people are engaged in real strength and conditioning systems. They are front squatting. They are working hard. I mean, I think in a Pavel and it was like one of his first books, he, there was a, uh, he was a Brazilian, uh, fighter who did the 10-minute snatch test with a kettlebell, and he almost killed him. And it took him like 10 minutes or something, right?

And he waves about it. Now I have 14-year-old kids who can do that in four minutes. Wow. So the work capacity model is out. So everyone now is realizing, hey, I need to work better. I need to work harder. I mean, everyone shows up super fit now, right? They really do.

I mean, everyone's got pull-upsups and they're working hard and doing Tabata Mm-hmm. We've done really good job, but we're not still telling people what the best position is We're not we're not kind of connecting dots because we can get away with a write a lot of bad checks Until we get injured right and then you you're the reason I think the reason we're having good success with the book and with With our our video stuff and that I'm going to see you either because you're broken or because you're losing. And both of those things are the same conversation. And one of the, I think the real problems is that this information has been mired in the injury prevention, you know, do this and you won't get injured. But you're like,

I'm not injured now. I feel great and I'm the best in the world. So why should I give a care? Now we can start to say, hey, by the the way this conversation is about where you're dumping torque we can't get into good guard position where you're bleeding force on the wall where you're you know and then we start having that conversation and it turns out that the shoulder is the shoulder so if you start to understand the principles of movement you understand what we're trying to do in the gym then you can start to translate that stuff instantaneously to whatever sport you're doing so it's more of like a physical intelligence sort of an idea that you're trying to impart physical intelligence like moving correctly? Well, it's moving correctly. So think about position.

Position is a skill. Can you do all the things? Like if I ask you to keep your spine flat and reach over and grab a case of beer, can you do that yes or no? Like I don't need a bunch of tests on your lumbar spine to look at instability. Do you know how to brace? Can you get into a good position and maintain that stability? Or let's something simple. Like we used ankle range of motion before,

because people are getting blown up running poorly with these new shoes, right? The flat shoes. Motherfuckers. Those new shoes are no good. No, they're amazing, but you don't have flank range of motion.

Your feet are weak. You run like a duck and you don't know how to run. How rude, first of all. Jesus. I mean, the royal you. I understand what you're saying. What's happening is that we have… I can neither confirm nor deny.

What's happening is we've got to basically say, you know, if position is a skill, do you possess the motor control? Do you have the skill, the technique to be able to do this? Yes or no? And then also do you have the biomechanics? And the problem is we've gotten pretty good at the motor control. We're figuring that out. But people's biomechanics are wretched. And the difference is the reason we have WOD at the end of our name, Mobility WOD, is it takes some maintenance.

You should, A, know that you probably take 10 minutes a day to work through your crap. Well, just you need 10 minutes of preventive maintenance on the car every day you know you gotta put gas in you just the way your nutrition is sort of dialed in the course of the day you develop a practice of 10 or 15 minutes some basic maintenance and then that allows you to deal with the things that are up front like hey my neck's killing me my back's killing me i have these problems or it's just go hunting so we look at Kobe tears his Achilles. How much did that cost him? What's that cost his team in revenue?

What about A-Rod or Lady Gaga tears her hip? Oh, Lady Gaga. She had to refund $30 million. Those other guys are guys. Those guys are guys. You don't understand. It feels like Lady Gaga could just roll out there and they'd still love her. $30 million hip, $30 million is how much she had to refund. Damn, that bitch is powerful.

Powerful Lady Gaga. $30 million if, $30 million is how much she had to refund. Damn, that bitch is powerful. Powerful Lady Gaga. $30 million if you hurt your hip. What's the word if you hurt your hip? Not that much. How much does your back pain cost? Right. I think the real question is, you know, it's a human. What's causing these issues?

Well, it's a human right to know how to move. There should not be a physical therapist. And let's be clear, I have a clinical doctor in this thing. I should not be standing between you and knowing how to move more effectively and you and knowing how to fix it. This stuff is so simple. It's a human right. That's what we're trying to do, spread the word. When you see some people that have like ridiculous natural intelligence with their bodies, and that's what I'm calling athleticism.

There's a natural intelligence. And it's much like some people are just way better at doing whatever, singing. Some people can just fucking sing. And some people just know how to move their body. But other people, man, there's some dudes, like, you just can't teach them certain things. Like, I remember when I was teaching

Taekwondo, there was always these kids that would just learn everything so quick. And there was always some people that, for whatever reason, their body just didn't move right. 100% right. Now, when you see a guy like that, how do you correct that? Well, the real issue is at what point do we start to develop skills in kids, right? Right. What's that athletic language?

Okay. It's not about recess. Think about you're wired to move correctly as a human. So my daughter, age 11 months squats like west side style like she does right because it turns out all the natural all the conduits are there right you still got to run the wires through the conduits and that's why we get kids who came out of fighting some kind of martial arts early on kids came out of gymnastics early on some kind of movement system dance they all move better right right and that was because there were some basic primary shapes that we taught kids.

And then all of a sudden you have this language onto which you can sort of layer athleticism. But suddenly there are some kids who figure it out early on, and it shouldn't be a happenstance. Like every kid should know how to jump and land. So how about this? ACL injury rates in kids under 12, up 400%. Wow. Don't you think we should have cured that?

Is that because of more competition? Is it just because of poor movement? I think we don't teach kids how to move. I think we expect that this is a natural thing. Kids sit. People injure themselves though in athletics. I mean, I've torn two ACLs and it wasn't because of bad movement. Okay, fair enough. So let's take all the orthopedic injuries on the planet. Right. Let's divide them into a couple categories. The first category is pathology. Something wrong with you, right? You have kidney infection or Lyme disease, right?

There's something sketchy going on. One of my wife's friends' mothers had back pain, constant back pain. They'd seen her. Everyone was treating her for back pain. Turns out she had spinal cancer, right? She had metastasized cancer. Wow. There's a pathology there that happens once in a while.

And that's why you're like, hey, dude, you're my training partner. Something's wrong with you. Go get checked out. This is our physicians. We handle pathology beautifully. The second is catastrophe. Sometimes I work with every branch of the government, all the tier one assets, they're going to be parachuting downwind at night and land on a stump and break their ankle. You're going to get swept and have someone, some fat guy roll into your ACL. That's going to happen. Right. Those are 2% category problems. The 98% is totally preventable. It's you working in bad positions until you spondy, until you tear your labrum. Right.

That's it. And it's also fatigue. Fatigue causes your body to buckle under you occasionally, causes you to have poor form. That's true. Fundy occasionally causes you to have poor form. That's true. So the issue is can you maintain a position under the duress of cardiorespiratory demand, right? I heard you say a couple times you're like CrossFit.

You know, like give me a fighter because the expression of being able to hold these shapes and fight and wrestle under huge metabolic demand and cardiorespiratory demand is what makes fighting really good. And people have really done a good job of taking the conditioning off the table now. These athletes are so conditioned, right? But if you lose position because you're breathing hard, because you're under metabolic demand or load, right, or you're stressed, then what you see is you see incomplete training. And the whole point of the training is to exceed your capacities so that you can maintain the robustness and fluency of your positions so that when it comes time to dance or do what you need to do, you can do those things. And you don't end up giving position. So you're saying that understanding human movement and understanding how to do anything correctly sort of will lead to an improvement in athleticism across the board. 100%.

One-to-one. So if you walk like a duck, let's just say this. If we take a pole in this room. How about Tim Sylvia? Do you know who Tim Sylvia is? No. Tim Sylvia is a former UFC heavyweight champion, a great fighter, just a big giant dude. But he always had like a pigeon-toed thing going on.

Okay. So I think that was – is that a genetic thing or is it just – Well, genetic is in his mom walked like that and his dad walked like that and he patterned like that. So in the NFL, for example, they won't draft you. Dude, you wear flip-flops. There's a culture of wearing flip-flops. What happens to your ankle if I take away your capacity to flex your ankle? You're not going to be able to walk through the ankle. So what do you do? You walk around the ankle. So this is the mechanism for bunion. If that navicular bone starts to collapse and you see that foot collapse down, then that's a tell.

It's called a pathognomonic tell for ACL injury. In fact, the NFL scouts look for that fallen navicular drop, the navicular drop, and they downgrade you because they think you're more likely to tear ACL. So what is it called again? Navicular drop. Navicular drop. The navicular bone is flat on the ground. Well, it totally seems like you'd be more likely to tear your ACL. It looks like your knees are kind of going in towards each other all the time.

No kid, every child is born with flat feet, but no kid actually has flat feet. And what ends up happening is it takes a couple of years, the arch is developed, we see it in round two. But it turns out that your ankle works best when it's straight up and down, walking straight. So the problem is that when you walk with the foot out, you can still create a ton of torque, you miss stability, you can kick people really hard, you can run really fast, but as soon as that leg comes behind you then what's happened is that your hip is in an unstable position, you've added a little twist into your knee, your ankle is collapsed and you're starting to dump torque so that that back foot if you're pushing off that back foot to kick

someone or hit someone you've lost a little force there. It's a little force bleed, a little force dump. So imagine that you walk pushing off that back foot to kick someone or hit someone, you've lost a little force there. It's a little force bleed, a little force dump. So imagine that you walk around like that position with your feet turned out and you take 10,000 steps a day because you're an average person. 10,000 steps. So just do the math on that. 70,000 steps a week. Quarter million steps a month. Three million steps.

And suddenly you've practiced this foot turned out position. The jumping and landing with your feet turned out is not okay. That's the mechanism for so many of the acl injuries all the foot injuries and is it preventable yeah your first thing is your coach is like hey stand with your feet straight if we test you right now how'd you jump up from a like a from the bottom position you know up onto your feet if your feet were out i can sweep you so easily right if your feet are straight you have options you can cut left you cut right you can jump but if you If your feet are straight, you have options. You can cut left, you can cut right, you can jump. But if you turn your feet out, you lose this position. Right.

So I can also look at your hip function. So if I turn your feet out and your knees come in, right, that's what happens. You shut your hip musculature off. So it's not that you have a weak hip, but your hip is functionally muted. You basically put yourself into a mechanically bad position. I lose hip function, which means I lose power. So it's not a genetic predisposition. It's a training early on that was incorrect.

Practice, practice, practice. So I was at Disneyland with my friend. And my friend's family is like, this girl's walking like a duck. I mean, we've talked about it. You know, he's like, oh, my God, what do we do? You know, do we see an orthopedic surgeon? She's looking for dick. That's what that is.

Just cutting a big, wide path. She doesn't want to close it off. Conservative girls will close it off. They'll deal with it pigeon style. But you're not thinking that through because women are generating more torque in that position. They're just letting you know what's up. Do you want to be loose or do you want to create torque?

I don't think they're thinking like that, man. You don't have to think about it. That's the problem. It needs to think about that. This kid is like... So my friend is like, hey, what do we do? I'm like, well, have you asked your daughter not to walk like a duck?

Because it turns out you need training and coaching. And this is why you have training partners. And he's like, hey, what do we do? I'm like, well, have you asked your daughter not to walk like a duck? Because it turns out you need training and coaching. And this is why you have training partners. And he's like, hey, Eva, can you make your feet straight? She's like, sure, Dad. And the problem was fixed from then on. Wow. But so a guy like Tim Sylvia, who's in his 30s, do you think you could fix that? Like if you got with Tim, is it too late?

No, well, here's the deal. My wife has this great saying. She's like, make a better decision. She looks at me and she's like, that's a bad decision. So it's not – I have a hard time believing that the way that guy's frame is. Like Tim was a great fighter in spite of his genetics. So what you're saying is how do I optimize my genetics? How do I take the best athletes in the world and make them better?

And this is the revolution we're in right now. It's not just about injury prevention. Right. I know that if I put you into a better position where you can squat more, jump higher, cut harder, punch harder, kick harder, chances are that sort of aggregates into better performance, right? Well, imagine if it's someone jumping down from a wall with a hundred pound pack in Afghanistan. Do you think that that's a good position or bad position? Or if I have to sprawl or get up and change directions for my officers, this is the same deal. The problem is we don't sort of connect the dots.

Look, Daniel Coyle wrote this great book called The Talent Code. Have you guys read that? It turns out skill is a complex biological phenomenon. That's it. So what ends up happening is that when you practice a skill, and we know it takes 10,000 hours, a million reps, right? A child has to do something 6,000 to 10,000 times before it becomes functional, right? The key to adult learning is repetition.

You've heard all of this before. Well, it turns out that when neurons that fire together wire together, what happens is that Schwann cell, that oligodendrocyte comes in and myelinates that pathway. So practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. So who you are right now is who you're going to be under stress, who you are right now. So why wouldn't you start cultivating a better position all the time? Because it's free money, right? And it starts to show up. The greatest thing about competition, especially fighting, is that we're going to find out who you are. We're

going to find out what your conditioning level is. We're going to find out what your skill is. We're going to find out where you go mentally when it gets tough, right? That's the point of why we train and why we fight because it helps us self-actualize and see the problems. When we start turning this all into performance, and it's got to be measurable. We can measure that. I was having a call today on the way in with one of my Tour de France cyclists. Unbelievable, phenomenal athlete, right?

His foot was a little stiff in the ankle and his knee used to wobble. And you think, oh, that's not good. Would you imagine if I was walking and my knees wobbled every single time or i kicked you every single time your knee wobble right well turned out his ankle was stuck and i showed him how to free up his ankle and guess what his wattage went up and he won the tour de suisse so it's not an accident his ankle was stuck stiff oh just stiff just needed to be worked out imagine if you um it's not you know and it's not just stretching, right? Think about your calves, for example, they take tons of abuse, right? Running, it can be upwards of what, five, six times impulse body weight. Think about kicking. So if your Achilles is straight up and down, it's designed to pull straight up and down. What happens when that ankle collapses a little

bit? Now your Achilles is off axis, right? Pulls laterally. This is the mechanism for the Achilles rupture is that I take this very powerful tissue loaded sideways. Well, not only is it, am I likely to injure myself, but that tissue doesn't work very well, gets stiff. So if I just pull on it, you know, let me just stretch. Oh, that didn't change anything because I'm just pulling on the kind of contractile features. We're not dealing with the stiffness of the sliding surfaces, the fascia, or it's a muscle stiff, is the joint capsule. You just have to start thinking in a systems approach. And the thing is, it's stinking easy. We use jump stretch bands on the cross balls.

This information has just been like kind of kept in this dark closet. You know, oh, I have knee pain. I can rear naked choke 17 people and fight and do all these things, but I don't know what to do with my knee pain. That's ridiculous. You're an incomplete athlete, incomplete human. So what do you do to people that are fucked up like that? Like when God comes to you and he's got knee pain, you just correct the way he moves?

Well, that's the first thing. And the reason we all have to go after movement first is that the movement often, if we correct your movement patterning and then the gym, it's not just about getting stronger, fitter. It's about perfect practice, like the formal language of movement. just about getting stronger fitter it's about perfect practice like the formal language of movement like the gym is like the best expression of modern human ballet right it's the formal but we are freestyle dance battlers that's what we do but if you can speak this I don't like where this is going freestyle dance powers answer you can't keep me down the issue is that one is how do I how do I

make the invisible visible how do I take a guy like that I is how do I make the invisible visible? How do I take a guy like that? I can see it. I'm really good. You can see it. And pretty soon what's going to happen is honestly if you pick up this book, and I'm not trying to pitch this thing, but you can see it. You start to get the vision, and it's so bad. You can see how people are moving.

You go to the Olympics, and you just watch the Olympics, and you're like, that guy could go faster. Why is his knee wobbling? Why is that shoulder incomplete?? So first thing we do is we prioritize the movement. Can you correct the formal language of that? So, because especially in a pattern that I've done a billion times, like let's take my Olympic rowers, right? These Olympic rowers have pulled 30 or 40 strokes a minute for 200 kilometers a week for as long as they've been rowing. It's insane, the patterns. So how am I going to break that pattern?

Am I going to mess with them? No, that's your coach's job. Your coach teaches you technique. My job as a strength and conditioning coach or as the training partner is to give you a new pattern in this very formal language called front squatting, swinging kettlebells, doing the basic language, finding the problems, addressing the problems, addressing the problems, practicing the movement. And guess what? Every single time our athletes can put it back into

the field more effectively. So what you're saying essentially for the layman is when you're doing something like rowing, it's a very specific movement. So you essentially provide movement in the opposite direction or like if you're pulling, pushing. So here's what you're doing. We've basically confused people because there's all of these movements, right? But mainly the spine has a few shapes. It needs to be able to pick something up with my spine braced, right? Which is straight, straight up and down. Straight up and down, braced correctly.

Okay. You probably need to be able to do a somersault, don't you think? Forward roll? Yeah. That's a full language, right? So that's a globally flexed position. Can do that yes or no right if we had you do that we would see that you had a little dead spot in your thoracic spine where it's stiff right we're not getting good rolling um if i was gonna you know swim or block a net you know a ball at the net

as a volleyball player we'd see the same thing you need to be in that globally flexed and globally extended positions do you have fluid fluency likedo Portal, great thinker about this stuff. He's like, what do you mean you can't roll backwards and roll off your back? Like that's how you fall a lot backwards. So why haven't we taught people this basic tumbling skills? Oh, that's what gymnastics is. So your spine only does a couple of very serious things, you know, and we can, we can make some nuance changes, but that's the basic language. The shoulders have a couple of basic laws that when your shoulders are in front of your body right from your from your hands up to your head they

have a stable position and that position is external rotation it's trying to break the bar you know all these cues screw your feet into the ground is a cue to create torque and stability at the hip what turns out if you understand the you understand the movement principles, then when you're in these shapes, you're climbing, you're in a bad shape, you can always create a stable position or a position where you're going to generate the most force. Practicing that in the gym and also making it easy to understand because when you're fighting, it's hard to see where you're giving away torque and power. It's hard to see how your limited hip function, right? You're missing hip flexion, like bringing your knee to your chest. You can't do it.

How do we know? Well, that's the mechanism for hip impingement and torn labrum and all the problems we see. But if I ask you to squat, can you get into the bottom position of a pistol, for example, right? That basic shape. It's not an accident that the sazen, like the kneeling position, like a lot of people can't kneel. That's a full range of motion of your ankle you know that these are the basic shapes the formal languages of movement fighting gymnastics all of these things people have worked this out yoga and so you don't need to do yoga if you lift heavy weights and you understand

what you're doing if you're putting your arms over your head and snatching you probably are doing muscle snatch or swinging a kettlebell. Chances are you understand yoga without understanding yoga. You don't need to do yoga. I think people do yoga for other stuff too, right? Well, this is also – we've got to get into this. They do it for their head. Girls' butts. Girls' butts.

But dudes do it for your head. You think girls do it for girls' butts? Yes, they do. That's awkward. They want to build their butt up. That's what he said. It's weird how it never works though, isn't it? Strange.

It never works. We have to be a skinny fat girl. A skinny fat girl to do yoga? Let me tell you a story. They want to build their butt up. That's what he said. It's weird how it never works, though, isn't it? Strange. Never works? We have to be a skinny fat girl. A skinny fat girl to do yoga? Let me tell you a story. Oh, please do. I was in Australia with my family. We were staying at the Byron Bay.

I don't know if you've been there. It's beautiful, and there's a spa, and my wife's like, hey, there's a yoga class. You should take that, you fat guy. It'll be good for you, and it'll be entertaining for them. So I show up. There's like 20 girls already in their yoga costumes. And the woman sees me and she looks at me just like, look at you and you're like, fuck this girl, this guy is huge. He's going to be inflexible. He's going to take up all my resources. But I understand what the stable

shoulder position is in any sport, in any platform, because it's the same shoulder. We understand the physiology. Can you get into that shape? Yes or no. Can you make your spine stable? Yes or no. Right? Punching is the same thing as being a downward dog, basically. Punching is? Well, I mean, you're like, you know, just like, do you understand what the stable shoulder position is before you unload? It's the same thing. Right?

Are you organized? Are you in a bad position when you punch? In some punches, like especially uppercuts and hooks, you're in a very weird position. Weird position, but can you express the full physiology? So there is a good position. So the issue is if you're limited range of motion, let's take Forrest, right? You know he's got a bad wing, right? He's missing some range of motion on that shoulder, right? Some things he's been working on for a long time, right?

He got dumped in a bad shape. The question is that limits his movement language down to very few he has a few ranges he's very effective in and some ranges where he's not very effective in sorry for us i'm giving away the keys to the castle here but uh how to be force griffin in a bar fight but the real issue is that if you have one of the basic archetypes for the human being is you should be able to put your arms straight up over your head uh-huh rib cage down armpit forward right as if you're holding a dumbbell over your head, right? Kettlebell gives you a little bit more breathing room, but can you hold two 55 pound

kettlebells over your head? Yes or no. That's full range of motion, right? But you need to be able to be stable here and stable here, still overhead, stable here, stable here, stable here. So what happens is if I have full range of motion and I train in these formal ways of creating torque off these objects, right? I'm swinging kettlebells. I'm breaking the bar. I'm bench pressing. I'm pressing.

I'm doing push-ups, all the things we do. Then that gives me movement possibilities where I can still be in a tenuous position and still generate force. So I see what you're saying. So being able to press overhead is equally important to be able to press sideways. That's right because it helps me know what the stable shoulder position is, and that gives me options. Is it really possible to generate the exact same amount of strength through the entire range of, like, kettlebells extended 90 degrees? No. But we can still know what the stable position for the shoulder is.

So you strengthen it as much as you can. Well, and we will. But there's always going to be gravity and leverage. Yeah, right. So, you know, the front rack, for example. And listen, the good coaches like Dan John, great coach, says something like, hey, you should be able to pick something up off the ground. You should be able to carry it around and put it over your head.

That's pretty elemental. Right. Well, picking up off the ground, deadlift, that's a basic archetype. Reaching into the crib, grabbing my baby, picking up the keg. Someone is jumping on you in guard. They wrap their legs around you where you're in standing position. That's a deadlift. Yes or no.

So can you do that? Right? Picking something up is the kind of this hang position. This is one of the archetypes of the shoulder, which is what Kimura when you're not, I'm just a crappy fighter, but I get it. So do I have full range of motion on my shoulder? And if I don't in this position, I'll compensate because I'm a human being. And now my shoulder is forward and now I'm in a bad position.

So what ends up happening is that I start fighting and organizing and joining forces. Like Chuck Liddell had that. John Hackleman, he called me up one time. He's like, oh, my shoulder is killing me. I'm like, well, you can't punch with this totally internally rotated crappy position forever and not expect your shoulder to ache, right? And how did you fix it well you start restoring his range of motion cleaning up the movement mechanics in this other formal thing called training and then that allowed him to express better mechanics when you start to see the breakdowns and it's it's part of it like how do you make the stimulant

adaptation for the stimulus for adaptation to get become a better human being to be a more effective athlete to train we put our kids under load like my daughter deadlifts she deadlifts 20 pounds eight she's she's a monster my second daughter lifted my uh we actually have a 200 pound stone that's awesome in the front yard and the boys have to be able to pick that stone up during date my kids it's the first step. Wow. Wow. That's the first test. Then there's an intellectual writing test.

To take her on a date, they have to pick up a 200-pound rock? Seems fair to me. Dude. Can I try? That seems like she's going to have issues. You can try. Men have tried and failed and tried and died. I'll just say that.

All right? That's hilarious. 200-pound rock. Man, I don't know if I could pick up a 200-pound rock. Of course you could. That shit has got to be really hard to do. No. But is it shaped like? I think that's hilarious so 200 pound rock man i don't know if i could pick up a 200 pound rock of course that shit has got to be really hard to do no but is it shaped like i think that's important smooth round so wait how old is she she's eight yeah it should weigh a lot why would you want to let your eight-year-old date somebody who the fuck is going to be able to pick yeah that's true that's messed up that's true so good point it's very good point right so

it's got a good point we have to we have to use a little external load to teach people shapes. That's why you can do boot camp and never learn how to move and still move like crap and still get injured. Look, I mean, the Army has a million non-combat related orthopedic injuries every year. This is my shout out to all my kids in the military who listen to this podcast because there are a ton of them who listen to you. Right. Eighty-five percent of Marine Recon retire in full disability. Why? Because they have, it's not just the IEDs.

It's because we're putting kids in bad positions. We don't train them for these basic shapes, basic iterations of how to protect their body. And we don't do the maintenance. You can't be a Marine, carry a hundred pound pack in a bad position, be dehydrated. Your body is going to get stiff. So what do you do about that? Well, we know how to fix it. You know how to re-optimize reclaim the positions so you're saying that guys that don't even get wounded in combat wind up being debilitated just because of

injuries so we're saying because they move poorly at load or they just move they were they do fast so who taught you to run me yeah i don't remember it's probably a long time ago right that's the problem you just figured it out and we were like good you can run and you're either fast or you're slow you know do you believe in running on the toes or do you think you should run heel first because i know there's this i'm so happy about this so the debate is i'm so happy you're happy if you take your shoes off right and run around here naked right just happens in this show every now and then you got to run around naked. No one will heel strike.

It's true. Why is that? Because it hurts. Oh, weird. So you mess up the laws of biomechanics, and you get this feedback that you're in a bad position. So you stop heel striking. So every single person.

Now, let's just take the animal of the human as like an evolutionary machine. You've been evolving for 2.5 million years. Over the last 10,000 years, you really haven't changed. It's been evolving for two and a half million years. Over the last 10,000 years, you really haven't changed. It's the same. You're a little fatter. My femur's a little longer. It's the same body 10,000 years ago. Do you think, and keeping in mind that you're designed for adaptation, right?

You can suck up bad diets for decades and then it blows up in your face, right? Right. I know world champions who like eat little chocolate donuts and smoke and they're still world champions. Especially Thai guys, right? Especially these freaky Thai guys. Let's be honest. Dude, they got to get hammered, smoke cigarettes, and kick your ass.

And they can because they're – look at their little bodies. Sting like little knives and bamboo sticks, right? I lived in Thailand for a month as a kid and was terrified of every little skinny Thai guy. I know. It's a very interesting style of fighting they developed if you look at the the actual martial arts like in in a uh like an isolated form muay thai is one of the best ever if like you mean their grappling is not as good as a as a grappler but the real muay thai guys are awesome and neck manipulation as well like what a lot of people don't realize is there's a lot of wrestling involved in that. So look at that.

I go after your nervous system, right? I jank your head back. And guess what? I own the head. I own the body. The bull goes where the head goes. That's not an accident. No.

Like Anderson Silva is the master. That's right. He pins that shit down. And people don't even realize he ragdolls really strong guys with that. I wrestled in high school as a terrible wrestler. and I had a coach who wrestled at Iowa. And he would get my head against his head, and then I was like, okay, take my lunch money, get my girlfriend. I was over. And a guy like Silva figures that out as part of his fighting strategy.

Maybe he's conscious of it. Maybe he's not. Maybe he has a Zen master who's like, control the head, control the world. Well, he's awesome at everything, but he's also awesome at that. He is awesome at everything. And a lot of that is he's that genetic guy who figured it out early as a kid. What we need to do then is be able to go back and say, what are the conditions that made him? How do we teach kids not to work harder, right?

But how to teach kids the skills of being a human. If you want to mandate and get rid of diabetes and obesity, mandate an hour of walking in schools a day. But PE isn't about dodgeball. It should be, but it really should be about teaching the skills of jumping and landing and lifting things up. Physical education. PT. What it used to be called.

Here's the language. Here are the skills. You have to read and write to be able to get out of second grade. You should also be able to demonstrate that you can keep your back flat when you pick up your backpack. It really is funny that it's the one thing you're allowed to fail out of second grade. You should also be able to demonstrate that you keep your back flat when you pick up your backpack. It really is funny that it's the one thing you're allowed to fail. Right. That's cool.

You're totally allowed to fail. That's cool. You know what a noun and verb is. You don't have to put them together. It's cool. You don't have to read. It is kind of amazing that no one really cares if you ever get good at any sport. You can get right through school without any proper use of your body at all.

That's funny. So that crazy PE teacher guy who made you climb the rope. You just have to show up. You have to show up. And you just dress, right? Yeah. So the humans are designed for adaptation. You're designed for survival.

You can take the scratch and keep going, right? And you know this because if you've ever been in a fight, yes. Did you feel anything in the fight right away? No. It's the dirty secret about fighting. You feel things afterwards, right? You know? I mean, why would Forrest Griffin keep fighting

with people using his face as a punching bag, right? This is my question to him all the time. He's like, well, I don't feel it right. Well, he's an animal too. But how about John Jones? That's a perfect example. After his last fight, his toe had been completely torn and like rotated sideways and he didn't even realize it.

Until he was talking and he looked down and saw it right and then he blacked out and then he sat down and you know he kept the interview going it was amazing so here's the deal you're you pain the pain pathway in the brain is the same pathway as a movement pathway so when you're moving you do not get the pain signal you just don't hear it because you're in constant motion because you're in motion and you when your your brain's not hearing the pain signal? So by the time pain is punctured into your consciousness during movement, we have a serious problem The brain is like whoa, bro

And this is why everyone who knows who's ever Exercised you lay down at night and then you start to relax and down regulate and chill and all of a sudden like your knee Starts throbbing. What's wrong with this bed? I twist my knee was brushing my teeth What's happened is you're not moving if you've been been waking up in the middle of the night because your back is killing you, your neck is killing you, what's happened is you've stopped moving. You've stopped flooding the brain with that movement signaling. And all of a sudden, you're just getting the pain signaling. You're getting the raw, unattenuated signal in the back of the system.

So that's one of the problems. The second problem is that you maniacs have spent your lives practicing being in pain. So maybe really the best athletes can just suffer worse. We know, like, those athletes who can suffer, like, they can work harder than everyone else. They can generate more water than everyone else. They can just put their – They get through fights with broken hands. Well, and then that's the third piece, that once the adrenaline is going, you are not going to feel it.

So we can't use that pain as a signal that you're in a bad position because you'll always override that every single time. I mean, who's the Gracie grandfather who's like, I just watched him tear my arm apart. And I was like, well, big deal. You couldn't feel it. I'm sure you watched it. But you feel a lot of shit, man, like left hooks to the liver. You always feel those.

Those fucking hurt, man. They shut you down. So it's so bad pain, right right that you can take a shot to the face but it's interesting that people go for the liver shot why because it punctures through that little that little wall right yeah and when do people feel pain the first round or they start feeling pain in the sixth or seventh round or they're wherever the fifth round or whether they're starting to really break down starting to get fatigued there's time for that stuff to so leg kicks as well that's another thing thing. You fucking feel those, man.

You feel those. Truth. Truth. A little shin to the. Wham. You feel those, dude. Those you feel. It doesn't matter if you're moving or not.

You know, Glenn is the. Glenn Cardoza is here. He's the co-writer. He's the guy. Glenn. Glenn. He's the guy who helped me corral the brain and took all these photos. And Glenn has this thing where he walks around the house with his pants pulled up really high and it's awkward at first until you understand he's a

he feels like he gets stressed out if he can't just kick you in the head spontaneously it feels like the genes are limiting him he gets a little stressed out right right he see he's actually wearing stretchy jeans i used to wear those chuck norris jeans that had the gusset built into the crotch i wore those bitches. Well, yeah. You could move, right? Those Chuck Norris action jeans. How many pairs? Have you ever blown out a pair of pants moving?

Squatting down? Yeah, definitely. On stage, I've done it before a couple times. Awkward as that. Pretty awkward. These are designer jeans. They're so designer that I can't move functionally. I can't move correctly.

It's like wearing an exoskeleton. And so you start moving poorly, right? You don't, you don't hear the signals you're designed for adaptation. So the issue is that you can like kids with damaged motor control systems have a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, right? That's what it means. If you have CP as a kid, if the part of your brain doesn't work, the motor control part, yet those kids walk around fine. They're cognitively totally intact. They're totally bright geniuses, but they just have this one part of their brain doesn't work. But those kids walk around fine. They're cognitively totally intact. They're totally bright geniuses. But they just have this one part of their brain that doesn't work. But those kids figure out.

They turn the foot out, collapse the ankle, becomes stable. They let the knee come in like a valgus knee, like a torn ACL knee, becomes stable. Internally rotate the hip, boom, becomes stable. Overextend the back, becomes stable. Internally rotate the shoulder. These are kind of the body's secondary positions of stability. That weird posture that they develop. It's a position of mechanical stability. And what we do is we...

Wow. And it's because they don't have full control of their body. That's right. So they adjust and that's the position they adjust to. They default to this stable position, which is exactly the position you default to. Can you teach someone who has cerebral palsy how to be stable? No. Well, they're already stable. The question is that we know they're going to wear out their knee.

They're going to wear out their hip. It's the same set of problems we see with people who jump and land wrong at speed. The same people when you see a bad front squat for going wrong, right? When the knee comes in, the back overextends, the hip impinges. This is the exercicio, the exercise, the training is the, basically the exaggerated reality of what sport is and or movement in life. You know, so if you're, you're holding your baby and your shoulders forward, this is a feel stable, but this is the position that a lot of my tactical athletes have to spend time in their weapons in this position, shoulders forward. So it turns out if I'm missing my internal rotation on my shoulder,

because I'm designed for internal rotation on my shoulder, because I'm designed for survival, my body's got a backup plan for me. Boom, shoulder comes forward. I can still fight. I can still move. But this is why my shoulder starts to ache. It's not working. Look, my pec doesn't even work like a pec anymore, right? It's destabilizing my chest. I'm living off this front delt. That's how I tore my biceps tendon. So what ends up happening is that I get away with it for a while until I can't or until I have catastrophic injury or I start to get stiff in that position. Then when I go put my arm over my head or do something bad, you know, I get, I get hammered on it. That's interesting because, uh, you know, in a lot of positions, the correct defensive position puts you in a very

awkward place. Like the way your, your body's rotated, the correct, correct defensive position, especially, you know, for kick kickboxing, you're all hunched in and your shoulders are pressed to your chin. That's okay. I can still be stable here. So look at this position. One arm forward, that's not bad? No, no. But look at my shoulders. I can still create a stable

position. What I'm trying to get at is that there's some techniques, especially martial arts techniques, where they require these crazy movements, like wheel kicks, things along those, axe kicks. So, but the issue is, you know, is that done under high load or is it done under high speed? So like punching, for example, and jumping if I'm wrong, right? I typically start in a very stable shoulder position.

Hands are up protecting the face, right? And I can punch as hard as I can. The shoulder is mechanically very stable here where I can transmit a lot of energy from my shoulders, from my hips. But then the arm unwinds, right, for this moment. And what happens is it unwinds. I create a little capsular slack, which allows me to create high impulse speed, but not a lot of force.

So in being smooth with the movement, you develop more power because it's faster and it torques in and you've got a lot of extra snap going on. What I'm saying is that this isn't a very stable position at the end for my shoulder, but I don't have to be in a very stable position. If I grab you then in this position, what happens? This is a very different thing. Then you turn and twist. That's right.

So why is it that you're grabbing a gi or shirt you come into this position well it turns out this is a stable position for the shoulder right that grip incredibly stable you do that judo right you got that hand in there that guy gets you here and this is this flexion external rotation what we're saying for folks who are listening to this on itunes kelly's just basically showing um like your your hand in your fist like sort of sideways in front of you. And that's a very stable position. If you were holding a bag of cat litter, this would be the position I want you to show yourself.

Two hands. Cat litter hold. And you're holding it up to your mouth. The cat litter bag of death. I don't know why you would be doing that. But if you were doing it that way. Same position. Or if you're holding your baby, right?

Right. No, I don't hold my baby like this. That's fucked up. The front rack baby position. The kid will be like, put me down, you freak. It's the Saturday Night Live where he spikes the baby. Don't do that. I want to ask you this before I forget because I think it's really important.

When you were talking about people with awkward movement, what do you do for someone, say, that didn't do any athletics as a kid and then they're 30 years old and they want to try jiu-jitsu and they really don't know how to move right? There's a local MMA school in our neighborhood. And one of my friends is a sambo fighter and teaches it. And these kids come in and they're like, this is going to be awesome. And he's like, oh, Lord, you can't even absorb force in this position.

So he ends up teaching the fundamentals of movement, which look a lot like can you squat, yes or no, right? Ask kids to get in a good position of wrestling and guard, you know, like what is this position? So what we have to do is give people the context and the language cues to be able to express that in that form of fighting. So fighting is sort of the high – so, for example, I can say things like, you know, your shoulder isn't normal unless you can jerk. So for those of you who don't know jerking, it's in the Olympics, everyone knows jerking.

But in the Olympics, when you're putting your arm over your head, you stop because your triceps get weak and you drop down underneath the bar. So if you were picking up something really heavy, like a log, you know, you would jump it up and then drop underneath it and stand back up. So that's the jerk in the Olympic lift. But what I'm teaching you to do is be able to create a stable shoulder and lengthen from both sides at the same time. The same thing you would do is if you're pushing someone and had to create distance away from them. So I grab you, I push like in, like, you know, in football and I have to create distance. You have to be able to kind of express this complex movement. And the problem is we jump people into sport and hope they do it without having any of the tools to be able to functionally, maybe they might even have the range of motion to do that.

And they definitely don't have the motor control to express that. And kids who figure that out, because they, you know, if you ever did a, uh, like a backbend, right. As a kid, that turns out to be a globally arch position, right? That's where your spine should be able to do. And it turns out you're teaching kids what the stable front rack position is, which is the position where they would Olympic lift or create shoulder position or this protected head position, right. Or I'm grabbing you is the same expression as climbing a rope or doing that back bend, back roll. So it's just all about stability in these positions. Do you have the fluency, the language of the human movement?

And the key is that you're seeing your shoulders, this very complex system. You're like it has a rotator cuff and a labrum and i don't even know what that is but it has one right but your brain is wired for movement it's not wired for musculature it's not wired for you can't test a manual muscle test your brain is wired to move so it's let's this this phone right right do you need to understand the technology behind the crystal and how temperature affects battery life and how the interface of the software affects. No. I do if I'm high. Okay. It's true.

I do it all the time. I want to know what the fuck's going on in there. I'm like, this is crazy. Who figured this shit out? I can take your phone apart. I can take it apart by 4 p.m. Get your toe. So the issue is you need to be a master using the phone.

Right. You need to turn it on and off. You need to move your apps around. That's all you need to know. Right. Your body is so complex that you don't need to know the engineering. It's nice. Someone needs to know the engineering.

You need to know the operation, and the operation is brutally simple. Well, it's really fascinating, the idea of physical intelligence, and it's fascinating that it was always called physical education. I think what you're saying makes a whole lot of sense, and even more so than teaching kids sports. Yes. Like teaching kids to use their body first is probably the most important thing before they even engage in sports. The Russians and the Chinese figured this out, didn't they?

Those motherfuckers. Those Russians. Motherfuckers figured it out. They figured out a lot of shit, man. Kids need bell bells. They figured that shit out. Right. So they did figure it out.

They figured out this front rack position is the stable position, right? Putting your arm overhead in the snatch, stable position. Of course they figured it out because we're human beings and we're obsessed with figuring it out. They figured out this front rack position is the stable position, right? Putting your arm overhead in the snatch, stable position. Of course they figured it out because we're human beings and we're obsessed with figuring it out. Olympic lifting has been around for 100 years, maybe, right? A little more. Do you think how many people blew out their shoulder learning the technique? And then all of a sudden we figured out what the best technique is. And now we live in an age where you can go on the internets and figure out how to Olympic lift from the best Olympic lifters.

People are showing that out. Watch it on your phone. It's amazing. internets and figure out how to Olympic lift from the best Olympic lifters. People are showing that. Watch it on your phone. Yeah. So people show up now at the MMA studio and they know a lot about MMA, right? And they're fit and they like, and that's because we're starting to see best practices come apart. People are, are, are kind of coming together in, in systems approach, right? And the nutrition is dialed.

You know, you talk to the average person who takes care of their body and they're like, yeah, I'm gluten free. And I drink, I put MCT on my coffee. What about it? You know what I mean? Like that's, that's me, dog. That's right. Cause it tastes better. It does. So, but you're right. I think the question then is where do we, yeah. Can you take a guy who's 30? If you're teaching them a sport, like say if you're teaching them a martial or something like that, should it almost be required to teach them how to move first? Well, we – it would be nice. At some point though, don't you do some conditioning every single time you're fighting at the end of wrestling practice or fighting practice? Not jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu, you go over drills. Then when you're done with drills, you just go to war. What are drills?

They're just going over the technique. There's no – the technique. And the technique has been worked out about what the position – the position is. I'm saying there's no lifting weights or anything like that. Oh, there is. It's your body, right? How much – let's just say one of my NFL coaches that I know, he's a strength coach, right? He's like, how much pressing do my guys need to do in the season?

All they do is out there and press, right? So we take young gymnasts. One of our kids at our gym was a formal national champion gymnast at UCLA. She is a machine, and she understands innately what some of these really good positions are because she's been doing them her whole life. So now I take that skill set, throw it into a sport, and she's a monster. So the question is, what's the best way to create these athletes with this ready state where then they can start picking up sports? Can I remodel people?

You betcha. I've done it a thousand times. We take people who are the best and we make them better. We take people who are not the best and we break them into world record holders. We take people who are injured and messed up and we set world championships. The testing ground for this information is at the highest level of sport and performance that's how we test it then we take those principles and drills and we build has to be able to scale from the injured athlete to the olympian from the mom and dad to the kid to the fighter it's all the same so what you're essentially

saying is that people who are not fit and not not well-rounded in their athleticism are successful if they're fighters, especially in spite of their ability, their physical ability. But enhancing that physical ability and balancing would – they would take them to the next level. That's right. So we look at someone, you know, why is that foot flat? Well, it's because no one ever made an Olympic lift or practiced jumping around or consciously said, when you jump up from the bottom position, you know, out of guard, jump up, I want you to hit and screw

your feet into the ground. So the key is how did I develop these skills? And I can do it in my laboratory, which is the gym, because the gym isn't just about working harder, right? You're working out. It's not about working out. It's about reintroducing the skills. So let's take my, some of my tactical guys, right right the ninjas I get to work with they go in and

clear a room they're taught to have feet straight because they need to sweep from side to side and they need to have movement options right just watch Oh dark 30 it's legit or active Valor's guys walk in feet are straight they can clear the room side to side they can move so if I come in and one of my foots turned out well I can't turn So if I come in and one of my foot's turned out, well, I can't turn, my sweep is off, right? Where am I sweeping my weapon? If you jump and land and you sweep from where my legs, when my legs is turned out, I can't move as efficiently on that. So how do I develop that practice? Because when I'm cleaning a room with terrorists or in the middle of a fight,

the last thing I'm thinking about or should be thinking about is my foot position. That happens automatically. That's why we do so many drills. But in kickboxing and Muay Thai, there's a lot of times when you're in really awkward positions, and that's where you're supposed to be. How about kickboxing when you have to stand sideways? There's a lot of times when you're throwing front leg techniques. You're standing very awkward. So don't confuse the formal language,

because my body can twist and contort. If we teach rotation, for example, right, we don't spend a lot of time teaching rotation because it happens. We spend a lot of time training the resisting of rotation. Yet when it comes time, if the athlete is mobile, right, they can twist and resist that twist. So you end up in these bad positions. And my goal is to create a movement library with as much capacity in that as I can so my athletes are positionally strong. They can be strong and stable and generate a lot of force in those bad positions because you're going to be in bad positions. So how about this?

So let's stay in good positions if you can. But if you're in bad positions because you do so many good positions, you'll have more strength. That's right. And you'll be in a more optimized position. So even in awkward movements like wheel kicks and front leg side kicks where your body is completely twisted you're still gonna have much more stability that's right and you still won't compromise because we're still assuming that you can do everything that a human should be able to do so full range of motion meaning so but but that's nebulous so because people are like what is full range of motion i don't know what nebulous is uh no uh unclear. Do you know what nebulous is? I thought it was like something to do with space.

Like the ceiling. So if the idea is... Just Google it. Sorry. Is it that stuff inside the throat where it feels like cauliflower or like a brain? No, that's warts, bro. In the form of a cloud or haze, unclear, vague, or ill-defined. Nebulous.

There we go. Like a nebula. Yeah. Like the girl nebula. Full of space. So, you know, I don't even know where we're going now. Well, we're just talking about athletes. We're talking about teaching people movement.

So if you can create a library of human movement. Library of positions and mechanics. Then what ends up – you teach this formal language. Then athletes have the capacity. They can be in these shapes. So what I was going to say is the physiology is known to us. So if you're missing range of motion in your shoulder because most of us are. Why? Because you live in this environment.

You're designed to be able to create torque and you on your little laptop all day long these bad positions and so you end up getting stiff your body adapts to exactly what you threw at so if your nutrition is crap it's going to be look like that and reflect that right the the animal reflects the reality i had this great uh pt instructor pediatrics instructors like muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs you just have to to have the will. So what I'm saying is – That's what posture is all about, right? Well, posture is about are you in a good position? I'm in the fucking will to stand like this all the time.

Right? Oos. Oos. This is what – Brian, you've now coined this. This is look at my delicious breasts. I know. It's perfect. It sucks.

I'm in so much pain right now. It's the perfect way to describe it. So look what you've done. Sitting, for example, is one of the most – You're teaching someone who will never learn. He's not going to listen to you. Well, I think my injury is honestly it happens once or twice a year. I crash at somebody's house.

You sleep in a weird position. And they have too many pills. It's usually older black men. But no, and I'll wake up because I have been drunk so much that my neck is like this. I've been sleeping like the whole night. That can be called Saturday night palsy. People fall asleep on their arm. Oh, yeah.

And they kill a nerve, and they actually end up with long thoracic nerve damage. Whoa. I think I got that. Like for long term? You sleep through that. You wake up with pins and needles. Your body's freaking out. But if you pass out in a bad position, that's why you put people in the recovery position.

Not only for the vomit, so they don't numb their hands. Wow. So what I'm saying is – we'll get back to the shoulder in a second. You've adopted a sitting position right there. Right. That's wise. It's basically laying down. Yeah.

I'm trying to lay down as much as possible nowadays. There's three positions that help you stabilize your back in standing. One is that your butt squeeze sets a position of your pelvis relative right and you can hear this cue squeeze your butt overhead right put your toes in the air the gymnast will say if your butts not squeeze you're not a good position you can tell I love gymnasts most of them what a great most of them are 12 that's oh the ones that are older than that, dude. Don't have to go there. So butt sets your position. I assume you're not taking advice from 12-year-olds on how to move.

I just assumed it was a 30-year-old. At least 18. I'm thinking dirty over 30. That's what I'm thinking. Hey. Hey, I'm not the one who spent all the time in Thailand. Sorry. I'm sorry.

My apologies. So if your butt sets your position in your pelvis, right, and you squeeze your butt. Can you squeeze your butt right now? That's awkward. Don't do it. You're not going to last more like in your pelvis, right, and you squeeze your butt. Can you squeeze your butt right now? That's awkward. Don't do it. You're not going to last more like 10 seconds there, right? So it's impossible. The second stability system is your abs.

And I'm talking about your trunk. It's the whole core, right? The whole system, the sleeve. All of that integrates to create high intra-abdominal pressure and stability, including your pelvic floor, right? Sphincter to belly button. Well, the reason you ki and shout is to create intra-abdominal pressure so you can stabilize the system maybe you not me you sound like i use magic bro when i'm ki and i'm magic you throw fireballs in my mind so

the third thing is that we create we screw the feet into the ground right this torsion of kind of creating grip through the through the like the same kind of grip. Do you go towards? No. Externally rotate, right? So that's right. Wax on, wax off was teaching what? Steven Seagal always throws in the same position.

Screwing the light bulb in. Look at the way he runs, son. Look at the way he runs. You ever see him run? That's a perfect example. Pull up Steven Seagal running. It's a perfect example to see if Kelly can fix the way Steven Seagal runs. And this is no disrespect to Steven Seagal. Steven Seagal is an excellent martial

artist. He's very good at Aikido. I mean, he was one of the first Americans to teach in Japan at a legitimate, respected dojo. Now, Aikido, they figured out to throw people, you're winding the shoulder up into what position? This external rotating position.

Yeah. And then you have a tremendous amount of power with that as well as with judo. Same positions. Grabbing a hold, getting yourself in a position. Look at him running. Tell me what's wrong here. Everything is wrong. There's a lot wrong there.

We taught him how to run. He's got the hands. Okay, look at this. Look at how he's running. Actually, it's not bad. He's running on the ball of his foot. I've seen worse. Is that why he looks weird? Let's back the hands. Okay, look at this. Look at how he's running. Actually, you know, it's not bad. He's running on the ball of his foot. Oh. I've seen worse.

Let's back that up. Now he's getting older and he's getting overextended. Oh, he got full of fat. This is a different movie. This is a guy who started to get stiff and fly around and play a little bit too much music. Everybody talks shit about him, but the dude is a legitimate martial artist. He knows a lot about martial arts. I wanted to be a Navy SEAL cook after I saw one of his movies.

Lyoto Machida legitimately takes advice from that guy. Everybody thinks it's bullshit and they think I'm just trolling. Lyoto Machida respects that guy enough to take instruction from him and to listen to him talk. Why wouldn't he? I mean, he figured a lot of things out. The key is a lot of us don't have sort of the meta cognition or meta awareness. I want to see if he runs on his toes, though. I need to see that. Ball of the foot. So let's tie a couple conversations together. Ball of the foot-cognition or meta-awareness. I want to see if he runs on his toes, though. I need to see that.

Ball of the foot. So let's tie a couple conversations together. Ball of the foot is good. Ball? Yeah. So let's be clear. Okay, let's see how he's running. There is either running or not running.

He's hitting heel first, man. Yeah, but he's got his breast out. He's hitting heel first. No way. No way. It's not bad running. Okay, look at this. His arms are a little crazy.

That guy is flat-footed when he's landing. He is running terrible, and you're crazy. Flat-footed when he's landing. He is running terrible. You're crazy. Flat-footed is okay. What's not okay? Flat's okay. Ball of the foot strikes first. That's not okay.

That's okay. Oh, that's okay. There's some variation there. That's not what he's doing. Well, it's hard to tell. I'm talking shit. It's not hard to tell. He's moving really fast.

I'm talking shit. I mean, it might have been the ball of the foot first. Here's what I would think. It's his hands. His arms are hands. The arms are arms. That's less efficient. What's going on there?

What's all that about? Unstable. Unstable. So unstable. And that's what he's his hands. His arms are hands. The arms are arms. That's less efficient. What's going on there? What's all that about? It's unstable. Unstable. So unstable. And that's what he's looking for. Well, he's all like, that's how he uses his Aikido though. He's all, he's like whip-like. Oh, so you mean practice makes it permanent? Is that what it is? He practices that a whole bunch and that's the only way?

So even when he runs, he's got that sort of whipping motion going on with his arms. That kind of makes sense. That totally makes sense. So when we teach people to run, we say, hey, pretend like you're grabbing two chips. Right. Put your shoulders in this position. This external rotate position makes your shoulders stable. It creates stability in the head. What you'll see is that people run. How are you carrying your

chips, man? Chips. Like, you have two potato chips. Don't crush the chips. Two of them. Imagine that you're grabbing something else, and you want to be gentle. Right. Can you say my name like Coco? I don't understand, like, put your elbows tight with the chips. No, my name like Coco I don't understand like put your elbows tight no no this is this I should be running you just you just hold it on the chips this is how you'd run and protect those chips so where is hidden hands going across his body so

how much force is he giving away all that so if my hands coming across I got to stop it it's right heavy load I want to minimize that when you see kids run with their elbows out mm-hmm right like r2D2, that's a test that C3PO runs with his arms out. Yeah, what is that? R2D2 doesn't have arms. I'm just letting you talk to him. Don't try to test me. Just seeing you're here.

So, rewinding, you were talking about squeezing the butt earlier. We're coming back. So, the issue is do you know how to run? Right. If you take people's shoes off, they run the same way. People were designed for evolution. That means you probably have one running pattern that you would do slow and fast.

You wouldn't have one running pattern that you would do slow and a completely different moving pattern that you would do when you sprint. You would be able to cycle up and down. We know what the injury running rates are. You can't heel strike. Every kid is born with their heel flat on the ground, not in tight shoes. So running is running the way you would run barefoot. So you can get away with heel striking if you're running on soft surfaces. Why do you have to run on soft surface?

Right. Yeah, right. If I can make all these conditions, if I have my $150 shoes and my inserts and I run on a soft surface or a treadmill, then I can run like this until I can't. Right. You should be able to run. You're designed to be 110 years old when you're designed to be pain-free for that 110 years. That's it.

So when you start to wear a hole in your kneecap because you've been heel striking, and that heel comes down, the whole quad loads, knee comes forward, creates a ton of shear, you wear a hole in your kneecap, and you see your doctor, and your doctor's like, you should stop running. And you say things like, well, you know, you're the worst doctor ever. You're not allowing me to express myself through my running. This is BS. Well, and that's the same thing. Well, the doctor's saying something very reasonable. Hey, you're moving like crap. You've destroyed your body. Something's got to change. How did that, that heel striking happen

because of a shoe design? That's right. Correct. That's a hundred percent right. That is so strange. If you really stop and think about that, how many people run like that? Heel down first and all came about because of a shoe design. Check this out. Kids don't heel strike until about the first grade. No kid under the first grade until Christmas heel strikes. They all run beautifully. Then they go home at Christmas break and half of them ask for a heel strike for Christmas.

And what happens is they've started sitting long enough. You know what sitting does to your body. Travel feels wretched, but it's okay for our kids to sit eight hours a day. We talk to all the coaches who coach young kids, and they all say the same thing. They're so short in the hip. They all move like crap. We have to undo the sitting from the day before we can even get any work done. We also start to shorten their heel cords.

So we make this joke about Chinese foot binding, right? It's archaic but you're designed with your feet flat on the ground and then what we do is we start to systematically lift that heel up like the shoe i'm in has a four millimeter drop or three or four millimeter drop that's still a high heel shoe it's not flat so if we look at some people's nikes or some of these other shoes they have upwards of a centimeter and a half which is basically a high heel shoe. So we're walking around shortening the heel cord, which means I take away your ankle range of motion.

And suddenly you start to figure out, oh, I can walk with my feet turned out a little bit. It makes my ankles more effective with this shortened heel cord position. If I take that body and I said, okay, here's a stable young kid with a brilliant spine, right? Young, we're doing gymnastics and I just can't the whole thing forward a centimeter and a half from the bottom that projects out over the the spine of the kid maybe two centimeters three centimeters to the whole kids center masses forward and because you're a human being you'll just compensate for it so we start to adopt these patterns the same patterns that if I'm texting in

this crappy position my my upper back is rounded. That means when I look up. So if I look at like a simple position, like if I just kind of round and text, I pick my head up, my head's naturally level because my eyes are going to always get to the horizon line. But if I sit up, look what position my head is in. Right. I didn't change my neck position. I changed my upper back position. Right. So now I'm having this kind of car accident in my head is in. Right. I didn't change my neck position. I changed my upper back position.

Right. So now I'm having this kind of car accident in my cervical spine, my neck, where I get lower cervical flexion, upper cervical extension. And not only does this wear out discs and cause osteophytes, but it's less effective position when you take a shot to the head or you need to generate force. Your body prioritizes that nervous system above all other things. And you know this, when you injured your back, how stoked were you to have wild sex? You still want to have wild sex, but you weren't stoked, right? Because your back hurts so bad. You injure your nervous system. My athletes go down. I got like, it

takes me, it's going to take me two days. If it's just a stupid spinal fault, a little tweak two days to turn the whole thing around. I've lost two days of training. Most time it takes a couple of weeks, right? Before you start feeling like you want to drive force again. Three weeks. Now you're behind, you're behind all of my other athletes. Tweak your nervous system for real. Have your leg go numb. Your body is shutting you down because it's such a primary threat to who you are as a human being. You have a brain to move you through the environment. So you can interact with your environment. That's the whole reason that the nervous system developed in the animal to just reproduce itself. You can feed, you can fight, you can run away. When

you trash that nervous system your body prioritizes it in a big way. In fact cognition, all of the higher-order thinking the human being has been, it's called the neocortex, has been bootstrapped on top of the movement brain. So it's not an accident that like, hey, I have a meditation practice and a movement practice, right? I have to be a really good thinker. I have to also train hard. Well, it's because these systems are totally integrated. And to disintegrate them, to get away from the movement and just go be a piece of meat on the treadmill or the elliptical machine does human beings a disservice.

So that's saying essentially that really brilliant people who don't take care of their body are brilliant, again, in spite of the fact that they're not reaching their full potential. The engineering is so good. But what about the amount of time that it takes to develop skill as opposed to the amount of time that it takes to spend doing physical training? Like teaching someone a martial art, for example. You only have like four days a week to train how many days a week would you train this guy in or this gal in in physical movement and how many days would you let them go to kickboxing class or go to

jiu-jitsu class the the idea here is that those aren't disparate separate systems that's the same movement right like but it's not in a lot of positions like rubber guard there's there's triangles there's a lot of like weird you know positions where these are these are very odd positions with your feet tucked under people's chins and pulling on your foot sideways you know but it's but it's really not that weird if you if i teach you like we're not doing pull-ups i'm teaching you to create a stable pull off of the bar right right? That's what this is. I don't think you quite get what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that the amount of time that it takes to get awesome at that, the amount of time to get that shit laser sharp is repetition in the technique over and over again. I totally got it. But you're saying it could be better still. I'm saying that the skills I'm teaching in the strength conditioning, as a side effect I become fit, as a side effect I become become fit. As a side effect, I become stronger. I should integrate and support 100% of the training you're doing on the other side.

The problem is we're like, oh, this is my training. This is my conditioning and strength work. It's the same work. And then what ends up happening is that you'll have a stronger trunk. You'll be able to generate force from these worse positions. You'll be able to recover more quickly. Skill takes a long time to develop. So what we're asking is, you know, are you skilled?

Where are you going to put your eggs in the basket? You should probably be skilled in all of your movement and that all of those movement skills translate in. How many times do you need to – people definitely get this messed up. The most important thing to do to get good at a sport is your sport right that's people are you know like if you're going to be a fighter you better do a lot of fighting right then i just need to do enough strength conditioning to fit in the holes like if you do if you go fight right and wrestle and fight and do all the things your conditioning is pretty stellar you probably don't need to do a whole bunch of extra conditioning

because you've just did that on the ring all you have to do is fight a bunch of people once and you understand how conditioned you need to be. But I do need a systematic way to uncover your limitations. And that's why today we're going to deadlift. And so some of the things we do even three times a week or twice a week is enough to sort of recover or uncover the positional missing so I can see it. How do we make the invisible visible? Well, one thing is that these master coaches can see you fight and be like, that guy's really good. I don't know what it is. And let me give you an example.

My, I have a six-year-old daughter we call Bear. She is the most legit human being I've ever met. And she's wired the way I dream about being wired as a kid. Like she's just like, she, and so there's this old school Olympic lifting coach named Mike Bergner, who is the man. He lives down in San Diego. He's been Olympic lifting longer than dinosaurs. He saw Caroline move at an early kid. He's like, you will send me Caroline. She will live at my house in the summers.

She is an Olympic champion. How did he decide that? Well, she stands forward. She creates a lot of torque automatically. She's organized well. Her head's balanced right. She moves in the same way that your coaches would walk down the hall and be like, hey, you play soccer, kid? You should play.

Or someone grabbed you because you do these things. So what I'm saying is we've got to keep developing these skills and uncovering the problems because if you just fight all the time, you're going to end up looking like a fighter and you'll adopt these positions. And it's hard to sort of systematically uncover the problems because if you just fight all the time you're going to end up looking like a fighter and you'll adopt these positions and it's hard to sort of systematically uncover the problems so they come back to the shoulder if you're going to be in a wretched position but you're missing range of motion you don't have the control and the positioning you will sacrifice position in that bad position and that's where you start to get injured because you get dumped on your shoulder that's where you're generating torque that's where the guy breaks your grip because you're in these untenable positions and you're compromised in those untenable positions. That's very fascinating. How would you figure out how to schedule the time?

Would you say what would be most important? Most important is skill. And then right after that would be strength and conditioning. So would you limit it to like one out of four training sessions like say if you only had four training sessions a week one out of four three of them should be or let's divide them up and let's give me give me two give me two 20 minute sessions and how would you organize it would you do like the really hard physical training like the first day of the week and then do the other three days skill or would you do the other the opposite well i think that is the length that's the conversation between your coach and you where and that's really why you need coaching right so what

i'm thinking getting at is should you be exhausted while you're learning the physical movements no well when you do skills when are you best learning those skills when you're totally exhausted when you're fresh right so if we're going to do high value pieces where i'm teaching a skill i want my athletes pretty fresh in there, right? I've got to look at the volume. This is the art of coaching. My job, especially as a strength and conditioning coach and physical therapist, is never to enhance the strength, the fighting, or the sport of my athlete. So if you're blown up and you can't fight, then what am I doing, right?

There's also skill to learning how to train when you're exhausted. And that's one of the reasons why some people like to put guys through physical training first. Different idea. And then take them through skill. Totally different. Skill contests. What do hackleman do? Rolling and wrestling, right? Row 500, have a fresh guy beat the crap out of you. It's a good idea. It seems like it's not a good idea, but it's a good idea. It's a great idea. And then do it again and have another fresh guy beat the crap out of you. It also teaches you how to keep your shit together when you're falling apart, when your body is physically falling apart. It teaches you how to at least conserve enough energy and distribute it to know like, OK, we can't go full blast right now.

But we can go – I can go right now at 40 percent, full clip, and then in 30 seconds, I'll be back. So in my gym, my laboratory, there is always some stimulus load combination where I'm going to exceed your capacities. Right. Is it going to be so heavy or so long or so many reps or so you're going to be breathing so hard that you start to break down. And the job is to spend the time at the margins of those experience. Right. So to not go fully in where you're not in control of your body and you're going to get hurt. Well, I mean, is that, is that how you're going to be successful? No. If I blow myself out, I'm going to get hurt. Well, I mean, is that how you're going to be successful? No. If I blow myself out, I'm going to get my ass kicked.

I agree 100%. But why is it that there's a lot of meathead thinking when it comes to that? Because – You're supposed to just fucking keep going, pussy. Pick it up. Meanwhile, your legs are malfunctioning. By the way, pussies are awesome. We should really take that word back.

Yeah, it's a weird thing, right? If you call me a pussy, you should be like, thanks, man. I'm a pussy. Pussies are awesome. No kidding. It is a weird thing. How did that ever get to be bad? We start saying Sally. We're changing it. We're taking the word pussy man. I'm a pussy. No kidding. It is a weird thing. How did that ever get to be bad?

We start saying Sally. We're changing it. We're taking the word pussy back. It's the same with dick. It's the same with dick. Girls love dick, but they don't like a guy who's a dick. It's basically the same thing. That's why we say cock.

That guy's a cock. Well, we're so weird with that. You're right. I've held on to pussy the whole time. So we need to be skilled. We talk about training age. It takes a long time to know your capacities. It takes a long time to know your capacities. It takes a long time to know yourself as an athlete, to have a coach know you. That's the balance.

That dynamic between trainer and athlete, between coach and athlete. I think what you're saying too is you keep saying trainer and athlete, but I think what you're saying really is applicable for just human beings. And I think that's one of the most important aspects of teaching a kid young some sort of sport like giving them sort of a sense of how it feels to move your body in competition so 100% right like you have to be stressed yeah we have to put you if you don't ever compete or fight or perform music like stand-up comedy is the same thing as fighting. It's the same thing as competing. Like stimulus is the same.

Mental state is the same. Conscious. I've got to stop you right there. You don't think so? No, it's not even close. You don't think like being aware of the room and what's going on? No, no, no, no. It's not even remotely near as scary.

It's not even remotely near as dangerous. It's not even remotely near as chaotic. But here's the thing. When you're in stand-up comedy, you can essentially control the entire situation. It's not remotely near. It's dangerous. It's not remotely near. It's chaotic. But here's the thing. When you're doing stand-up comedy, you can essentially control the entire situation. If you're prepared and you have your material together, you can control the entire situation. Oh, doesn't that sound like exactly what you're trying to – You don't always control the entire situation in a fight.

It's scary. I agree. But don't you try to train, control as many things as you can control? Yeah, sure. You try to keep all your ducks in a row and get your conditioning together. But if you're fighting a bad motherfucker, you're in for some danger. There's no getting out of that. In stand-up comedy, what's the worst thing that happens?

You don't laugh. The ideas are completely different. For a lot of people, they have this weird thing. You don't think the mental state is the same? You don't think the street game? No, absolutely not. It's absolutely not. Because you can think about a lot of other things before you go on stage.

I can pal around with friends. I can joke around with people. I've competed before, and I was in a world of my own before you go on stage. I can pal around with friends. I can joke around with people. I've competed before and I was fucking, I was in a world of my own before I went out there. I knew that I can't have people talk to me. I don't want to see, I'm visualizing what I'm going to do. I can't be having like little bullshit conversations and then go out there and fight

because you'll get kicked in the face. It's a completely different thing. I don't mean to go loose, relaxed. You get good at it. You know how the fucking thing works. You just get out there and do it. Well, okay. So pull that aside.

Let's say that you got loose. You've got tons of reps. But performance is performance. And the idea though is we should put kids in these stressful situations to teach them about their own heads. They should sing. They should learn how to compete because they find out about where they break down, what their mental – that's part of the reason we do sport in the first place. To learn how to compete. I think it's the worst people to be around are people that never learned how to compete.

Because they also don't learn how to lose. They don't learn how to learn that you need more to learn. Like you could be fucking amazing at chess but not even know how to play Go. And someone brings this thing out and you're like, what is this fucking thing? You get your ass kicked and go. You've got to know what you know things and you don't know things. And the only way to find that out, to really find that out, is through competition. To really be told, boom, you just got crushed at this video game.

You don't know how to play this shit at all. Let me hit you back on it. So if you're really funny with your friends and someone's like, you should be a comic, and you start speaking, you're not really a comic until you stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and do it right you're not really a comic until you get banned from the comedy store that's when you become a real comic okay they ban you at least once you i was banned twice so if you're uh if you're a kid though or uh you know you at some point if you're a musician you never play yeah i think i hear you 100 you you must put yourself through some stress to figure out what to do when it happens because otherwise it's an overwhelming amount of stimuli and energy and adrenaline.

It's hard to manage. Do you watch the tapes of you performing comedy afterwards? Sometimes I do. I listen to them more than I watch them, but I do sometimes. So some of that's after action. Some of it's you're pro and you're really good at it. But what about do fighters look at their tapes after they fight? I think a lot of them do. Yeah, a lot of them. Because there's a lot of data there. This is my most stressed out self. I got to see what I did when I was tired

and getting my ass kicked. Like there's a lot of data there. Yeah. Without a doubt. Yeah. And I think a lot of guys look at videos of their training as well. And that's very beneficial. There's a lot of times you realize that you're doing something funny and you didn't realize it. Like you know, like I know what a guy looks like when he's really good at Muay Thai. I know how he moves. But if I looked at myself, I'd be like, oh, I'm moving kind of goofy. I would be able to see in a video just through training,

like little errors that you can't see while you're actually doing it. So I feel like let's take this back to the pain. Let's spin it back to common stuff, right? Do you have an understanding of what your process is with your spine? You're talking to him? He doesn't understand shit. Trust me. Do I understand?

No. So what ends up happening, it's like fighting and fighting, getting the same result over and over again. Twice a year I get my ass kicked. I'm good. Thanks, man. Twice a year I get my ass kicked. I'm good, thanks, man. Twice a year I get my ass kicked, but I'm not really paying attention to the details. What I'm telling people is that we can resolve a lot of crap. Is that beer?

Apple cider. What is it? Cider. Oh, cider. We can resolve a lot of the crap. We can take a lot of the crap off the table. I thought it was an energy drink. Sorry.

No, no, no. We take a lot of crap off the table. I apologize. I drink. Sorry. No, no, no. We take a lot of crap off the table. I apologize. I'm an asshole. Twice this week I've done that shit. Sorry I've lost. If you can make the invisible visible. So one of the things that I want coaches and athletes to understand is that it's hard to

see some of these tendencies. It's hard to see some of these things in the gym. If I expose you to some of these movements, I can tell where you're giving away force I can tell you're being inefficient because the hip is the hip whether you're kicking or squatting it's the same similar position so you think you could enhance someone's like kicking and bunching power even like a guy who's like really good yes yeah I mean we I have I have I have met only a couple people who have been what I consider in the 90 percent, like who are just wiring and not a lot of efficiency left to be gained in the system. And I'm not talking about skill. You still got to train.

You still got to be conditioned. You still got to show up and perform. But I'm not saying this is a done deal. But harping back to our kids thing, how do we create this ready state or this kid with a set of skills? So my daughters swim, right? This one teaches them so much about positioning. They do gymnastics. They swim.

They do a ball sport. Like this is the language. But also there's some formal movement training in there. That's in the gymnastics. The formal movement training in the swimming. We have to create a language and archetype so that kids can understand whether they're aware of what the shoulder needs to be doing at age they still know how to turn the ipad on and off yeah that totally makes sense you know because i'm not a very good athlete at all like i'm a black belt in taekwondo and a black belt in jujitsu but like i don't know how to do other sports like i don't i don't do

them well i can't ice skate like you put me on some ice skates i fall you put me on some skis i look retarded well that, that's about training. But it is. It's about my whole life. I didn't do any sports. All I did was martial arts. So my body developed that way, and it knows how to move that way. But if, so, I mean, there's nothing natural but ice skating or skiing.

My kids can fucking skate the shit out of it. They're spinning around behind me. My two-year-old learned how to fucking ski like that, dude? I'm all awkward and shit. Two, plastic, figuring it out. My posture sucks. Look at the neuroplasticity of the brain. When does it become difficult to pick up new skills? When you're old and fucked up

like me. Especially with bad motor patterns. It's hard to undo the BS. So if you tell me, hey hey i have this fighter who this way does he goes and we tie i mean i drive past with ice cream getting my ice cream for my kids drive past that mma school every single day people in there that's probably pretty great all around healthy fitness breathing hard gonna feel great sort of things right and tell what you break so let's just say that you have a lot of imbalances, especially when you're doing boxing.

There's so much left side. Your left side gets like literally 50% more work than your right side. That's 100% right. So my golfers who turn one direction for a living, the fighters who lead with the left a ton, that shouldn't be a surprise. I should start looking for more dysfunction on the left side, stiffness on the left side. The hip doesn't turn as effectively on that right side because I'm punching off it over and over and it gets stiff.

So if you can understand the positions, you can program to it. And that's sort of the second half is that sometimes people's biomechanics gets messed up. Your tissues are just stiff. Your joint capsule is stiff. You physically can't get into the good position because you're doing it a lot. Then what do you do about it? And so if we give people the basic tools, they can turn it around.

It's weird how like you'll have one side that's like tightened up. Like you'll be able to throw a kick with your right leg and it's just real smooth and easy. But then when you're left leg, there's like this herky-jerky. Like it's awkward. It doesn't turn over all the way. So if I watch you squatting, I'd be like, that's the side that's all messed up. Right. You'd be able to see right away.

I'd get into a pistol. I'm like, oh, look at that hip. You can see it. So the formal language of strength conditioning makes things easier to see. If you recognize that left side to right side and try to mobilize that position, right, address all of the systems and you're moving correctly, well, chances are you can probably fix it without even doing that squatting. The squatting makes it easy to see. It also builds efficiency in the system. You know, it's also weird when you practice something left hand, it actually shows you, there's actual data to show that you get better with your right side as well.

Like there's something about practicing opposite handed in certain things that actually allows your mechanics to improve with your dominant hand. It's because it's called deep practice. Yeah, I've heard that with throwing. Pitchers who throw with their left hand, it actually improves their right-handed pitch. Because you're so conscious of the thought patterning and how it feels. You've thrown a million times with your right hand. You throw snowballs at me.

You're not even paying attention to me. You're watching over here, right? But all of million times with your right hand. You throw snowballs at me. You're not even paying attention to me. Right. You're watching over here, right? But all of a sudden, your left hand is fucked up. Right? The left-handed. I'm that way with pool. I can play the shit out of some right-handed pool, but I get it in my left hand, and I

barely know how to move my arm. I've been playing pool all my life. My right arm is loose and fluid. My left arm is all fucked up, and I can't get it to go straight. It's amazing. Practice. Go to the shooting range. That is what it is.

Go shoot with your right hand. It's amazing. Go shoot with your left hand and see how bad you are with your left hand. That's terrible. But it looks so gangster. Just be shooting something. I don't even want to use my right hand, son. So some of our ninja friends tried that.

They went like the Paris you guys, and they're like, you know, they just like the Paris you guys they're like, you know The oh, like they just empty down and they're like they can't hit anything They're like if someone shows you a puzzle like this, you're pretty safe. Yeah, unless he's like right in front of you Yeah, they miss a lot those guys. That's a problem, right? That's a problem. Look what this position is. Check this out solid as fuck Right. Well, what position is that? Well, that's the rope climb positions So what's our joke? So if your head is neutral and I'm controlling the area, there's my lock off position. X-ray rotate, X-ray rotate, X-ray rotate. Boom.

Right. And I can reload. I'm right in here. I can see what's going on around me. This is how the queen waves. She waves in that same position. Why? It's stable.

You can wave like this all day. She goes like that. No, she doesn't. She gives you knuckles. That's like, bitch, I don't even have to turn my fucking hand around. We call this the backhand high five because you can backhand high five someone. It's more stable and it's sanitary. She really waves like that.

That is rude. Unless you poop on your hands. Rude. Wouldn't you feel like, first of all, you'd feel so fucking lucky that you were the queen. I mean, who gets to be the queen? You didn't go to school for it. You can wave all day like that. You're just the fucking queen. Try it. Everyone

at home, wave like this. You should feel so lucky. You're all stable. In a second, be so rude. Now, wave like this. Wave like this and you're going to be tired. It feels unstable and weak. You should be so happy for the queen. You should be bowing. You should be so happy. You should be blowing kisses. Check this out. If you grab, you know, drinking with your pinkies up, right? We say pinkies up. What is that really a cue to do? Yeah, that's what it looks like. It looks like a girl's about to give a guy a handjob.

Here, take this. So if the sprinters run with their hands out wide, right, with their fingers out. Right. Because it creates stiffness to the elbow. That makes sense. What's the extensor stuff or Tony Blauer's extensor? Like if you have extensor power, if you put the hand out, you create stiffness. Well, that's what you're really doing with the pinky. So people have figured it out over and over again.

That pinky's out creates stiffness. Next time you're drinking high tea with the queen, put your fingers in. You'll be all shaky. Fingers out, legit. That's interesting. You know, it's such a fascinating thing, like learning how to stabilize and put the human body into the optimum position. And thinking of that as something – in education, think of that as something that can be taught to people. Oh, it has to be observable, measurable, and repeatable.

If you work with me and we get better, the only way we can measure it is we can measure wattage and poundage and output. Do you move fighting positions? That's right. We can measure it. And if if it doesn't improve that then what the hell are we doing let me ask you this so if you were allowed to organize uh children's athletics in schools and i will be education are you really what do you what's the plan like what do you what would you do once you got in there would you just teach kids proper ways of movement I mean would it require one-on-one with kids no no no and here's the deal is that we've somehow mystified all that so and you we've gutted yours we've gutted your school my kids school gets nine out of ten stars we live in Marin County

it's dope school that's a beautiful place it is beautiful we live in Santa Fe and and it's nine out ten stars but she gets a half hour of PE once a week like nine out of ten stars that's she gets a half hour of PE once a week. Like 9 out of 10 stars. That's okay. She comes home and she's like, Dad, we did dodgeball today. You would hate it. I didn't learn anything.

Bam. They're allowed to do dodgeball, though. I like that. We're trying to take that shit away. No, but that's called recess. Dodgeball is not teaching skills. So what we teach is this really rudimentary stuff. Can you, and there's some basic archetypes

for the, for the body. Can you bend over and pick something up? Right. Can you squat correctly? Right. Can you learn, can you run correctly? Boom. Can you lunge? I mean, those, those are the basic shapes of the hip. So let me ask you this. If you, if you had a guy like Tim Sylvia, again, we established a great fighter in his thirt, and he has this way of standing with his toes pointed in. Why did he figure toes pointed in? What did that allow him to do? Create even more torsion off of the ground.

So when his toes are in, he can create even more grip and torque in those basic shapes. He's figured out that that toe-in position allows him to be more stable and functional. So how would you fix that, though? What would you have him do that would correct something like that?

The issue is, is he doing that because that's the only reason, only way he can move? And boy, if he didn't have full range of motion in his hip, for example, that's the problem. So as soon as you give, if you teach athletes, and they're doing their skill. Wait, hang on. If you teach skills, because this messes with people's minds. If you're a skilled athlete and you're training and doing all the drills and all the things, if I improve your range of motion, you instantaneously use it. You'll suck it up and use it. And I did this with like some fighters' hips.

They were in guard. I gave them – showed them how to mobilize and I mobilized them into better positions in guard. And literally, they ended up in a stronger position because they used it right away. I gave them showed them how to mobilize and I mobilize them into better positions in guard and literally They ended up in a stronger position because they used it right away So hands in internally rotates you and puts you into an unstable position Well, you just said I just started thinking about it If you point your toes forward it does open your hips up a little bit It allows you to create a little bit their grip if you stand up and see how stable you are

It's a right position with your feet turned out. That's not a good athlete. Louie Simmons, best powerlifter on the planet coaching, he would choose athletes to be like, oh, look how my guy's walking with his feet straight. He's going to be a good athlete. Wow. And how simple is that?

Walk with your feet straight. If you're listening to this, tomorrow, wake up and walk with your feet straight. So any guy who has his toes, or any gal who has their toes pointed forward, it's not, they can turn it out yeah well just sometimes sometimes they're and so we go upstream we look at his pelvis if he's in a bad lower spine position then that's the only position he can get his in if his feet if his pelvis is overextended so one of the things that we've got to teach people is what do you prioritize

first we prioritize nervous system for the reasons we talked about, which includes the relationship between your pelvis and your spine, which is the best position to kick in. I was just looking at a great tennis player, and he's just completely straight up and down, organized, toes pointed in the net, or he slams the ball. It's because he figured out that was the most efficient position. So if we organize the hip, what we see is that if your trunk is disorganized and people out there have a ton of shoulder pain, if you're rounded through your upper back, you cannot control your shoulders effectively.

You lose power, you lose position, you lose mechanics. For example, we teach, I work with a lot of pitchers. But that's how a lot of guys punch. But that's how a lot of guys punch. That's fine. A lot of guys punch like that. Is that like an optimal, it's different, you think? Glenn, pick up that mic, Glenn. Is that on? Yeah. Tell me what you're talking, you're a fighter, you know.

Let me just say first that punching, so fighting is not necessarily the best expression of human movement, right? Okay. But I need to be able to go in and out of these positions. And I can still generate force from this position. But if this is the only position I can be in, then my shoulders are going to be compromised. Oh, okay. So you're saying that not doing it occasionally is fine. That's right.

It has to be. Go ahead and swim or jump off something. You're going to have to be. You need that capacity. Right. I'm not asking people to walk around like ballet dancers or deadlifters in this formal position. That's the best way to teach the principle.

I thought you were saying was never go into that. No, that's ridiculous. I need to be able to come in in that position, out of that position. Right. But if I'm stuck and I have one choice, which is that position, then I've limited my capacities, I've limited my abilities, I've limited my options. Right. So if you jump and land and your knees come in, you can't go any lower.

You can't, you can't dip any, you can't change directions. You can't jump higher. Right. So when someone says a guy's pigeon toed, oh, he's got poor genetics, that's incorrect. I would say that that's incorrect. So even though that like families will have be pigeon toed, it's really just them watching each other walk and choosing to walk It's the mirror neuron. It's the thing. I never even want to consider that

Watch kids walk exactly their dads. I always thought it was a genetic thing What about he figured out if he walked in so so what about flat feet though? So flat feet is a genetic condition is it? It's not? Why is it flat? Because my mother has it and I have it. I have it. A lot of people have it. I have it. It's like the clap, the flat. So here's the deal. But I mean I can move on the balls of my feet.

I move on the balls of my feet well. That's not the problem. I bet. I've always. I've got a hundred bucks. I have never seen, I've never not been able to create an arch in someone. So how do you train an arch? The system, the whole body obeys these basic principles.

Right. That when my foot's on the ground and I create torsion through the hip, the whole system winds up and becomes stable. So for example. I see what you're saying. You say I have shitty posture of the feet. Yeah, right. So if you squat or run and you collapse your arches, is that a win? No, that's a fundamental breakdown and patterns that take long time to change. It takes two years to turn over all the connective tissue in your body, all your fascia, two years. So if I screw my foot into the ground, then the

mechanics, the fascia, the arch, the bony structures pick up the arch and the whole system becomes more stable. So if you take your middle finger put it over your pointer finger on your right hand that's and put put it down that's your ACL in the front got it uh-huh ACL so your ACL comes in that's anterior anterior cruciate ligament attaches into your tibia right if I externally rotate that thing right anchor down no it becomes stable XO externally right so what it winds up and becomes stable. What happens when I turn your foot out? Okay. So if I'm like this and I externally rotate, BAM! The thing becomes tighter.

Right. If I turn your foot out and move that, what happens to your ACL? It unwinds and becomes more slack. Right. If your knee comes in, what happens to your ACL? It unwinds and becomes more slack. So the question is, what's the your ACL? It unwinds and becomes more slack. So the question is, what's the best position to create the most force? And that's usually a lot more straight foot. I have a little breathing room in there because I can move around and I'm adjusting to the universe.

But we know that when the foot starts to turn out past that, I can measure your hip function. I can squeeze your knees in. You can't create any torsion in that position. And it exposes you to more injury because your mechanics start to fall apart, including the structures of your feet. Wow. So what do you do to get a guy like me who's had flat feet for his whole life? How do you get me to...

High heels. What do I think? High heels? What color? Red. You got a picture of me? Am I shiny? You're so trashy, dude. Am I glittery? What do I do? Girls don't want red roses. Am I a dirty bitch? If I was a chick, though, come on glittery. What do I do? Girls don't want red roses. Am I a dirty bitch? If I was a chick, though, come on, seriously. What?

No bullshit. Red glitter? No, I would like you in a blonde wig, I think. Pink lipstick and red heels. So are there any specific exercises that develop? Yeah. Okay, what's the best? Punching. Punching?

Jumping and landing, screwing my feet into the ground, squatting, teaching deadlifting. That's why it's so easy to teach these very formal movement principles under high load. And I reinforce the drills that people do. So this is, I think, a good case. Think about when you were in high school how many drills you did before you were actually allowed to scrimmage. College, it gets worse. Like you do drills, drills, drills, drills, drills, drills, right? And if did before you were actually allowed to scrimmage. College, it gets worse. Like you do drills, drills, drills, drills, drills, right? And if you're lucky, you get to scrimmage.

So what that really is is practice, practice, practice, practice. Well, let's just take the practice idea down. Not did you complete the task, yes or no, but were you in the best position possible, yes or no? Well, the coach has this discreet amount of time to get something done it's hard to teach the basics yet sometimes we have to we still teach elbows into kids right when they're blocking because we don't want to get their arms take taken off well it turns out when we do air squats or squat for example warming up we teach to keep the arms in because it becomes the default motor pattern so this is my stable position it's also funny that that's in a dominant position

wrestling i mean it's essentially double underhooks. I mean, you're getting a guy under like this. You can control the body clamping down like this. And what are you doing? You're creating external rotation, torque off of both those things. Instead of being up here like if you have overhooks. That's why when a guy has double underhooks on you and you have overhooks and you still flip him, you must be a bad motherfucker. There must be a big disparity in the grappling.

Well, either that kid is really – he's got his positions. Like John Jones will do that shit to people. He'll double overhook people and then send them sailing. But that guy's timing is unreal. He's insane. Right. It's physical intelligence. Physical intelligence.

And some of that is the train, train, train, train, train. It's also his form. He's got a very strange body. I mean, he's a very, very strong kid, but he's 6'4", 230 before he begins his cut, and long as Texas. He's long as fuck. So he's doing shit and getting, like, leverage. You just can't compete with that shit. It's too hard in certain positions.

Who says position before submission? Doesn't that sound familiar? Everybody. What is position then? Well, it's leverage. It's being in the right spot. Which is what? Take it further.

Depending on where you are, it's the correct technique that's been assumed after hundreds of years or decades or whatever it has been of testing and competition. And it changes all the time. It matches the physiology. It matches the best position for the body in that shape. That's what it is. It sort of does, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's an awkward position, but it works to get a guy in a – him in a vulnerable position. Like there's a lot of submissions that are very odd angles.

I understand. Like how about like guillotines? Like that's a fucking weird angle. But how are you still creating torque there? A guillotine is more powerful if your shoulder is back in a stable position like Kelly said versus being out here all off. Yeah, I guess guillotine is not a good – you know what's a great one? No, that's not a good one. Let me give you an example.

I was thinking of clock jokes, but I'm like, no, that's actually kind of the same thing. How about a real example from my firefighters? We've got firefighters listening out there. A real example from my firefighters. We've got firefighters listening out there. One of the dirty tasks of the firefighter is to pick people up off the ground after they've fallen off the toilet. Right? And one of the guys at our gym is the medical examiner for San Francisco.

So he goes around the world and picks up dead people. That's his job. Right. He had a 350-pound woman die on the toilet. She falls between the toilet and the wall. I love it. He's still. So the question is, can that guy get into a perfect position to pick that woman up off the ground? Yes or no? No way. But what he can do is he can optimize his positioning as he tries to deadlift that dead body up, right? What about my first responders carrying people down the stairs?

Like you can't be in a good position with a stretcher down the stairs, but they know how to protect themselves. Stay straight. Do they do the best that they can because that's the positions that have been reinforced. So the same thing happens. You start to adopt these fundamental understanding shapes because they just become rote and they also happen to match the physiology. Well, you know, I disagree with you, but then in practicing the techniques, now I agree with you

because there's like certain shit. Like I was thinking about guillotines, but the choking arm is this arm and essentially that's exactly where it goes. It goes into that kind of a position. I mean, it's an awkward, especially if you do the Denny Propagos. Denny Propagos loves this grip.

Jake Shields likes this grip too, where your palms are facing outward. So what's that allow you to do? Create a ton of torsion. Let me explain this to people if you're watching on iTunes. If you're a right-handed choker, your right palm is facing outward and your left palm is facing inward as you do the choke. It's a weird, odd position, but what it does is the way it sets the bone up on the neck.

It's perfect. It's like the perfect, but it's odd as fuck. That's an odd as fuck feeling to have your hands like this in this weird position. But if you get that, it's incredibly strong. But I was disagreeing until I saw this. The physiology is the same. That's it. What Kelly is saying is if your shoulder is in a good position, then you're stronger from that position.

So if you've got a guy in a guillotine and your shoulder is forward, your shoulder is rolled forward, you don't have as much squeezing power. You don't have the same amount of leverage put into that versus if your shoulder's back and then you get your chest over their head, right, and collapse it and you're able to get that. That's a more stable position. That's a better position. So a person with a comprehensive understanding of how the human body should move like you, when you could actually probably accelerate their ability to pick up skill. 100%.

And I'll tell you, like Forrest Griffin is a ninja about his own systems. Like he understands, hey, I lifted heavy on this day before I trained. I start sleeping in my bedroom. I have to be up. I'm going to fight at 11 o'clock. He starts shifting his sleep patterns. He's up at 11. He's exercising at 11.

All of those things are the same language. Do I have – can I do the basic maintenance on myself? Can I do the basic diagnostics on myself? How do I measure these things? That's the embodiment we're talking about. And what's happened in the world now for the first time is that we have the convergence of these systems. And it's all there. It's really remarkable.

So, all right. I have an injury. I have a back injury. I have a disc in like C6 or C7 that's all there. It's really remarkable. So, all right. I have an injury. I have a back injury. I have a disc in like C6 or C7 that's bulging. It's been way better over the last couple months because I took off of jiu-jitsu. But all the other things that I do don't bother. The only thing that seems to bother is jiu-jitsu. What can I do besides trying to stand straight?

I've been doing that. I'm working on my posture. It helps. So we get the pain out of your nerves. So the first thing is we've got to get people out of pain. I'm totally out of pain. I've been doing that. Fucking working on my posture. It helps. So we get the pain out of your nerves. So the first thing is we got to get people out of pain. I'm totally out of pain.

I have zero pain. The only, when I wake up in the morning, I'm a little stiff, but I take lacrosse balls and I bridge on lacrosse balls and I roll them. Who started that?

Where did you hear that? I found it online. Is it you? Is it your idea? Was it? Congratulations, or thank you rather. I should congratulate him.

I have a jet with a lacrosse ball in the back i um well that's listen man i've read about it on some uh fitness forum i don't even remember but i didn't get a credit given to you so thank you because that has helped me so much it's painful as fuck but i love it it's like a beautiful pain because i know the relief that it's going to give me how do do you know a tissue is normal? This is a good question. It doesn't hurt when you roll a ball. That's right, at all.

It doesn't hurt. You start to compress my bicep, I don't freak out. You're compressing my bicep. It shouldn't feel like beef jerky and it shouldn't hurt. So if you push on a tissue and it hurts, it's not normal. This is how I can prove that your system works. My left side was where I got injured. I have this weird left tweak.

And it's nothing, it's not serious. Right. I have this weird left tweak. And it's nothing. It's not serious. Like right now I have zero hand pain, nothing. But when I get up in the morning, it's very stiff. And sometimes when I move forward, I can feel it. When I take the lacrosse ball and I bridge and I roll it up, I don't feel shit. I mean it's relaxed. It's loose.

Everything feels like it moves good. And I always do it right before I train. But I always do the left side. So the other day I did the right side. The right side isn't even injured. And I was like, ah! My right side was so fucked up. It was more fucked up than the side that has a disc injury.

It was all knotted up. Trying to stabilize that side? Trying to stabilize. Trying to compensate for the left side being so fucked up. One of the problems I have is that people have made this like voodoo well your left foot is off and so your pelvis is yeah what is that about it's misplaced precision like we measure all these it's bull first you ever talk to a rolfer that hits you with that they want to rub your ribs to straighten your toes out this is this is a little look here assistant look i understand the connective tissue

web like all my fascia kids out there this is a this is a little known fact about kelly starrett i got married when i was 25 to a girl i dated in college we should be playing music while this is going on she was a rolfer don't do the hulk theme man that's when the hulk walks away i married a rolfer by accident nothing wrong with rolfing no no no get me wrong well so the key about understanding that is that it's one it operates on one system and that's that connective tissue fascia system yeah it doesn't teach you how to move, does it? No, it does not. Does it work on the joint capsule? No. Does it work on the muscle stiffness? No. So the reason rolfing didn't cure squatting knee pain cancer is that it's still incomplete because

it doesn't still resolve. You have to teach people to move first and you have to take this approach. When you're on the ball, you're working on the soft tissue, but you're also working on the rib joints. You're also working on the thoracic joints. So what happens is that you're stuck stiff because your T-spine gets stiff. That's what happens. You start to improve that mechanics. Your head positioning changes. The whole system upregulates.

I have been in surgeries where they have literally – like they look at a guy's knee and the knee looks like a bloody cave. Like there are stalagmites and stalactites and there are boulders in there and there's blood and there's no ACL. And the physician is like, what the hell? They pull out rocks and it pops out and everyone laughs. Well, it turns out that guy doesn't have knee pain. So the issue is that you're designed to be ridden hard and put away wet. You are designed when you just get a picture. I know so many world record holders and so many world champions who

have herniated discs that are asymptomatic. They just don't hurt. You'll recover that thing. What you've lost is the, the, the right to be in shitty positions. You've sort of kind of given up that right. You've used your get out of jail free card and now you're going to be more positional sensitive. As you open up that thoracic spine and heal that disc, one of our friends told you. How does it heal the disc though? If I just stand up straight, it'll heal my disc? Well, the discs heal over time. They're poorly perfused, which is a reason why you can't be inflamed all the time and run around. You've got to set up the conditions for healing. But theoretically, you can't regrow an ACL or a bloody bone, but you're designed to heal until you die. So the real question is, how are you optimizing that healing situation? I have this little formula. Right lifestyle means you're dealing with your stress. You're getting enough

sleep. And the people out here know they don't get enough sleep, sleep less than six hours a day, you can be 30% immune compromised, and your fasting blood glucose is up. It's elevated. You're pre-diabetic. Like you had plus 30 pounds on you instantaneously. If you have right lifestyle, sleep, nutrition, hydration, you're doing all those things, plus correct movement, you should be pain-free and continue to get better. So we take that, our athlete Silva, right? Who's 30 years old?

No, he's a bit older. Who? Anderson? No, no. Tim? Tim Silva. Tim Sylvia. Oh, sorry.

Tim Sylvia. Yeah, Sylvia is, I think he's like in his late 30s. Okay, so one of the things that I'm interested in is how do I extend the careers of these great athletes? Because it takes a long time to become a good fighter. Young kids in their 20s are genetic monsters. They metabolically super fit, freakishly talented and fast. But by the time you're sort of in your 30s, you have fought a lot. You have a lot of experience, but that's when your body starts

to break down. But you're really good when you're 34. You're really good when you're 35. Why have you been fighting for 25 years? You're a soldier. You're a Tour de France guy. You're a powerlifter. How do I extend your career? How do I optimize your positions? Because you can do it until you physically can't do it anymore, right? Until you decide that I'm too slow or I'm not worth the training versus taking out because my neck hurts or my back hurts. And we're having this luck.

We're being able to extend guys' careers because we resolve their positions. We get them into these better lifestyles where they're not eating the gluten. They're drinking more water. They're sleeping better. A lot of MMA fighters is just damage, just damage to the body. That's 100% true. Like that sport is going to accumulate some trauma. But if I know how to kick correctly, let's just say, then when I kick you, I turn the leg over.

One of the things that happens is the hip ends up in a more stable position. Let me ask you about a guy that I know that just retired recently, Shane Carwin, who was a great fighter, really beautiful guy, just a really friendly, brilliant guy. He was actually an engineer before he ever got into MMA. And he had to retire because of back injuries. He's got stenosis. And he's started to have an impingement on his nerves. And he's got stenosis and he's uh started to uh have an impingement on his nerves and he's had a couple of operations and uh he feels that a lot of this he got during football the heavy collisions so completely so now he's stenotic and for those of

you don't know what stenosis is it means you're extension sensitive if you put your butt back like a cheap stripper not a classy stripper. Hey, easy. We don't judge on this show. I'm not judging. Because when I'm in that position, I'm the biggest stripper in the room right now. No one's cheap. That's right. Nothing cheap. I'm just going to college.

Okay. So when I overextend my pelvis to the lumbar spine, what I'm doing is I'm closing off those facet joints. I'm locking down bone on bone. What is the facet joint? It's the weight-bearing doorstop of the spine. So at the bottom, is that what it is?

Well, it's in the back. So what happens is if I take your elbow and slam it into extension over and over again, right? Eventually, you can handle that, but after a while, boom, that starts to hurt, doesn't it? You jam me into extension. That's one of the problems with jiu-jitsu. You're always getting arm barred. That's right. Always getting arm barred. You get serious arm problems. That's right. Always getting an arm bar and your arm gets pissed.

Serious arm problems. That's right. So it's the same thing for your back, except the problem is that your back is set up to take billions of oscillations. So it doesn't happen overnight. And sometimes you're going to get dumped on your head, and that's called sport. That's that catastrophe. Now, let me ask you this, though. When you see a guy that gets a serious back injury and then goes through surgery, do you think that's a mistake?

Not always. Not always. No, not always. How often is it a mistake? Well, if the guy is moving poorly, still is moving poorly, we don't have to address the reason why he's had that problem. It's not just catastrophic. You just didn't get crushed one time, dumped on your head. Like you can get dumped on your head and herniated disc.

That's not your fault. But the stenosis happened you know, happened. So he's saying, hey, it happened, these high collisions. What position was his back in when he collided in these other kids? We teach chest up to tackles, right? Right. Yeah, kids can't perform some of these basic squats. And so they overextend in this shape because they don't have this language of keeping the spine straight.

And they basically end up defaulting to this bone-on-bone position. Okay on bone position in all fairness though he's getting hit from the side by fucking gorillas this is this is not as simple as you know a guy having poor form oh but it's a lifetime of this right so why is he's playing football the other guys fucking slamming into each other i mean that's chaos so position matters more so i mean you i i have a bunch of kids in the NFL. I agree. It does if you can control the situation. But sometimes you can't. When you're a football player, you've got dudes coming at you on the side. Do you think it's that one shot that takes them out? Or is it the repeated shots that makes it more expensive?

I think that happens a lot, though. You've got to take that into consideration when you're talking about 300 men who can run, you know, they can do the hundred and what like four seconds you know this these are giant freak athletes freak athletes who also like a fracture their backs yeah just blocking right what about let's scale it down because we see kids in high school have that stenosis i mean you're obviously the expert in this physical movement thing but i think you gotta take into consideration the physical trauma of 300-pound guys running at you. Well, I think this is what he's trying to say is if you're having that drama in a bad position, then it's going to have higher consequences. So if that person – I guess that's true.

If that same person, say, for example, understands how to squat, understands how to deadlift, understands the proper organization of the spine. Right. And then that motor pattern is ingrained, right? So that's just a part of their wiring. And then they go out on the football field and they're hitting in those good positions, their chances of getting injured are a lot lower than say if they've developed these bad positional habits, right? All the running overextended.

So I'm overextended. So I'm overextended. Now every time I get hit, boom, now that's the bone on bone collision. But there's also times where they get scissors. Sure. Where one dude goes high and. That you can't control. And that's there's also times where they get scissored. Sure. Where one dude goes high. That you can't control. And that's a lot of times how guys get really badly injured. Yeah, and that's fighting.

That's like Bo Jackson, right? Absolutely. Just stepping wrong. I mean, you can control that, right? So you can mitigate that by being in a good position or training your body. But there are unusual and unique moments that you can't control, which is sport. That's athletics. Which is sport.

But I'm just saying that in defense of Shane. If I grab him, oh, yeah, here's the deal. This is the key understanding. No one is being an ass here. Everyone's working to the limits of their understanding. No, no one's saying you are. No, no. Wait, I'm saying.

No one's saying. I don't want to be an ass. I want to make sure that people understand what I think is that people are working at the limits of their understanding. I want to make sure that people understand that I think is that people are working at the limits of their understanding. We have burnt athletes at the stake of performance that we didn't understand all the ramifications of. You got the job done. We lived on the clock. Let me use an analogy for you.

I learned this from you. This is one of the – From me? Yes. This is one of the, swear to God, guiding forces of my life. Don't hang tough. Okay. Fear factor. No.

This guy had to eat like a foot long horse cock in like an hour. Okay. That never happened, but go ahead. Uh, there's, well, hang tough. He had to eat something. So you, that guy's eating and he's making jokes and you're like, Hey bro, watch the clock. You, uh, it was like in the best of fear factor to watch the clock, watch the clock.

You're trying to help him. You're coaching him. coaching he's making jokes he's flirting with the girls he's in and he swallows the last bite at the last second and uh you're like sorry bro you timed out and the guy freaks out yeah i remember that dude yeah i was trying to tell that guy i know what you're doing but you can't do it don't do it don't fucking waste your energy talking and having fun i'm like you got a lot i I've been there before. I've seen a lot of people eat dick. It takes some time. It takes some serious fucking time.

And you think you take the first couple of bites. You're like, I'm fine. Dude, you got five minutes to eat that whole dick. It's not that easy. Gobbling dick. You got to watch the clock. You got to manage the details. You also have to have chewing endurance.

That sounds so crazy, but there's shit like livers and kidneys. Kidneys is a perfect one. Somebody tells you, hey, I'm going to make a bet with you. Listen, you want to make some money? Tell a motherfucker he can't eat a kidney, like a cow kidney. Tell him that he can't eat it in an hour because he's not going to fucking eat it. Just make sure he can't have any water. You can't wash it down with shit.

You just have to eat it. It's not happening. Okay? It's not going to happen. It shouldn't happen. You know how I it down with shit. You just have to eat it. It's not happening. Okay? It's not going to happen. It shouldn't happen. You know how I know? I'm an expert on that. I know.

I know. I've seen a lot of people. I've seen PAs do it for $100. I've seen contestants do it. You can't eat it. It's too hard. You're chewing the shit out of something. It's like you're running uphill sprints with your jaw.

That's what it's like. That's right. It's like you're wrestling Corellon with your jaw. That's what it's like. That's right. It's like you're wrestling Corellon with your jaw. Can't train for that. The kidney is insurmountable. You have to control what you can control. Right. So you learned that from me?

Got to control the clock, bro. So let's say that I'm teaching kids to do like a – not a whizzer but like a – Suplex? Suplex. There you go. kids to do like a what's like a not a whizzer but like a you know suplex suplex there you go and uh if i don't teach kids to get stiff and brace against that the same way we teach our young throwers we teach them to arch as hard as they can well the arching hard they can is me cranking on those those joints over and over this pattern was set up from him in high school

in middle school billions of reps accelerated under big loads with 300-pound guys, accelerated in the ring. So could we have extended his career long enough? And more importantly, I want these fighters to finish their careers and not be disabled. I want them to finish their careers and have some aches and pains, and, hey, they tore their ACL, but they shouldn't be disabled. The same thing with our firefighters, the same thing with our kids in the Army. You know, in your 40s, you should still be able to train. You should still be able to pick up your kids.

And what we're seeing is that that guy has rung the bell on his back, seriously, because maybe he played pro ball and had some unfavorable things. How do we maximize his positions? Brian, what the fuck are you putting on the TV? Buffalo penis. Buffalo penis? Yeah. Oh, everyone's so happy.

Okay, stop, Brian. Stop, stop, stop. This everyone's so happy. Okay, stop, bro. Stop. Stop. Stop. This is goddamn Ustream. Okay, this isn't your house. We can't just be showing that shit. I don't even think it's legal.

Buffalo penis makes me gag all the time. I forgot what I was going to say. Fuck. What were we just talking about? Where were we at? Where did you do that? How do we extend the careers of our best athletes? And when they're finished, how do we do it?

So I love, I mean, you should be able to wrestle your whole life, right? Oh, Jesus Christ. Are you crazy? Can you do the jiu-jitsu? What, old guys don't do jiu-jitsu in Brazil? Yeah, you do, but you've got to flow roll. Those old dudes, they do jiu-jitsu, but it's a different thing. You only roll with guys that know what's up.

You can't just pick out this hungry kid this is my friend Yoshi is 63 years old and he's a black belt under John Jacques Machado and he's very technical but he's a little guy he's a Japanese man he's 63 years old and he's only probably a hundred and forty five pounds at the most he's not a big guy and he'll find the guys to roll with he He's smart now, but he's, you know, he's going to do a different kind of... Does he move really well? He knows jujitsu very well. I mean, he's a... John Jock Machado doesn't give out any fake black belts. If that guy's giving you a black belt, you're legit. So if Yoshi's a black

belt, he's a real black belt. His movements are, you know, he's just smart. He doesn't want to tax his body. He's 63 years old. So when he rolls – like if the shit came – the shit hit the fan and he had to choke you to sleep, he could choke you to sleep. But he doesn't want to have to do that every day at 63 years old. You know what I mean? He wants a flow roll. He's lost some of the tissue tolerance. Yeah. I think.

We're in an epoch. Retired. He's retired. I mean what is retirement age? So 35 usually is typically what? What's retirement age for people? For like people who work at the post office. Is it 65 or is it 55?

Yeah, it's like 65. It used to be younger and they extended it. Was it like 59 at one point or am I making that up? It's going to be so bad now. Yeah, I think it's longer now because people's health. Yeah, well, I'm talking about just people It's going to be so bad. No. Yeah, I think it's longer now because people's health. Yeah. Well, I'm talking about just people in general who retire from jobs, and this guy is going in there doing jujitsu. Physical practice, master.

Young man. Takes care. But also look at some of the – The management of training opponents is very important. That is important. Yeah. Those young kids shouldn't be – you can ask a lot more. It's not bad at all. Young kids I 100% trust.

What it's all about is not rolling with yahoos. Not rolling with anybody who doesn't know what they're doing. They dive on shit that doesn't really work. They just land on your ankle or something. Just cranking on limbs for no reason. Grab your fucking wrist and trip spinning around. We have a technical term for it called hanging on the meat. We see those kids all the time.

They do the same thing. They also get really excited about tapping you too, which is like settle the fuck down. Like you're trying to tap someone too hard. You're not in a position where you're really effectively utilizing that technique. You're squeezing the shit out of it in a bad spot. Like you're actually wasting effort because all that guy has to do is survive that, and then you're done. You're done you know you're done you're not gonna all he has to do is get through this one squeeze just count to 20 don't tap and then dominate you yeah and flow flow rolling like you said is an art in and of itself right so and it's

an art of trust as well as is flow kickboxing you know you know that as much as anybody which is way harder to control strikes and impact impact. You see the times. You have to be skilled. So I spend a lot of time in Thailand, and they don't spar at all. No, it's all pad work. It's all pad work. It's all clinch work. So like 50% of their training is clinch work, like you were saying earlier.

I mean, not a lot of people realize that. Very underrated grapplers. Oh, huge. I mean, most of my grappling comes from Muay Thai, and then I'll go in and wrestle with Division I wrestlers, and that all applies. The trips. It's just off-balancing.

You watch a guy like San Chai, fuck around. That guy. Yosem Klai. Yeah. All those guys. Bukow. Oh, shit. That guy has incredible trips.

Well, because of Bukow, they outlawed clinching in K-1 because he was just dropping fools on the head. And because of Alistair Overeem, too, they wouldn't allow the double hand. Yeah. Because he would grab you. He's so strong. He's a fucking gigantic powerlifter, dude. He gets a hold of that double hand.

Just boom. Dude, but what we're saying. Those thunder knees are coming. With the sparring, you watch the Thai spar, no knee pads, no nothing. And they know what's up. Yeah, they're tapping each other, man. Yeah, and it's super relaxed. And when you can find a training partner like that, it's a beautiful thing.

Oh, my God. You will progress. You'll meet, you're like 2 o'clock, you want to meet at 2 o'clock, and you both know that neither one is going to do anything stupid. It's quality numbers. Quality numbers. You're able to get in some quality numbers. And then you develop those.

Quantity. Yeah. Then you develop those instincts where you don't even know you're doing the movement until it's already over see and this is what's brilliant really with kelly system for example let's take the squat like if you understand some of the underlying principles of the squat what he's talking about poor in cordova creating torque creating stability right you see that same rules applied in juj-jitsu or in fighting, right? So you know when you throw a cross, you turn your foot into the ground.

All that is is a mechanism of stability, right? You're just creating stability through the hip so you can transfer that force up through the ground, through your body, out through your hand. So if you're practicing that in strength and conditioning, right, say we're practicing a split jerk or a squat or whatever it is, we're able to practice those mechanics so then when you go into your sport, fighting, whatever it is, it's transferable. All of a sudden you see it.

Even windmills. Exactly, exactly. But it's all the same ideas. Now throw in the fact that these guys have cultures around massage and sleep and these weird recovery things. And getting jerked off. Oh, ties are big on them. Right? Nico Chan, Pero Pero.

They don't fuck around, dude. So check this out. Let's go here for a second. One of the problems that we have with athletes who are in a very sympathetic state, right? You're fighting this training. It's a very high sympathetic state. So your sympathetic nervous system is up and going. You're in this fight or flight kind of pounding. We measure this with heart rate variability in our athletes. We can put a heart rate monitor on you in the morning. When you breathe in, your heart rate accelerates. When breathe out, it decelerates. Kids who are not

recovering, their heart rate stays the same. Boom, boom, boom, they're driving. You lay down at night, you're just, you can't turn off. I know good coaches who've worked with like NBA players, the only way that NBA player can come down after the game or from training or practice is to smoke a bowl and roll out on the foam roller. And that really is about tricking the body into accessing the parasympathetic nervous system. It's not an accident. I think some of those cultures around physical cultures have some of these things built in about bringing you out of that sympathetic state and bring you into that parasympathetic state, which is about adaptation recovery. So that's that state where you can. So, I mean, how weird is that, that, that, you know, getting a handjob in a Thai place after you fight

is really also about – It's relaxing. Oh, it's relaxing. So guess what? You start to recover. You sleep better. Yeah. Right? So there's a whole – one of the things we are – how are we systematizing that?

How do we give people their access to their diaphragm? So one of the things that I'm interested in right now is some of my ninja, like special forces guys, come back from the GAN. They've been in long deployments. If you call them ninjas one more time, you're officially Mike Goldberg. I don't want to say who they are. Scary guys. That just sounds like something Mike Goldberg would say.

Their testosterone comes back, and their testosterone is really low. Their testosterone is like 170, which is that of a nine-year-old man. Man, that's high. Nico Champagne. Coco. He's all drained so if you if if these guys are caught in this sympathetic outflow state right they're just that you know the the dirty secret of pro sports is ambient like that is such a dirty secret of guys getting on the on the bus back up from after plan they

take an ambient all the soldiers surviving start, they take an Ambien, all the soldiers surviving, start sleeping, they take an Ambien, they take two Ambien, they wake up and take another Ambien. Like this is how they're trying to sleep again. So we start measuring all of this stuff, yet we're in bad position. So if I'm overextended, which is where most of us are living, where most of us are living in this overextended position, not this uber flexed, your lower back is overextended. Your upper back is slightly flexed. And this is like when you're sitting up in the car, when you're standing with your feet turned out, your pelvis is dumped forward a little bit. When you are in a bad

position of your spine, your body doesn't work very well. The whole thing, just like in your bad position of the foot, you can't kick as well. You can't move as well. Well, the same thing happens with the musculature of your trunk. So that if you're in an overextended position, your pelvic floor doesn't turn on, which means you can't create as much intra-abdominal pressure. This is why you see overextended women exercising and they pee when they jump. They do double unders and pee comes

out when they're in that bad position. Who are these women? It's not pretty. I've got a website for you. It's a genre. Overextendedpeer.com. Dick Carty in my mouth. Don't go to olympicliftingprolapsevowel.com.

Don't do that. I've been there. Too late. But also the same thing happens. Your warnings are in vain. So when you're overextended through your pelvis, your pelvic floor doesn't turn on. When you're overextending your rib cage, your diaphragm doesn't't work very well and so you start doing this breathing in their neck and so i don't have good access to your your diaphragm control because it's just in a bad position so you start making vo2

compromises right you're not putting out the same vo2 your breathing is inefficient that diaphragm has attachments onto your psoas like the whole system starts to get away why because you're in a bad position. So in that sense, it's, yeah, that's really interesting. Look at where the Muay Thai guys take the shot. Are they here? No, they're really straight up and down, right? Breathing out, managing that breathing, because it's that clench is so aerobic. And then in that sense, it's actually very important to never overextend yourself.

It's never, it's important, especially during training, to extend yourself to the brink, never overextend yourself, never get yourself in a position where you're using shitty form. Well, that's going to happen automatically. It happens because it's called training. And your coach is like, that was shitty. It happens because you're improving. That's right. The practice of that, learning with your left hand, you made a ton of errors, you integrate, you're making ton of errors. You integrate. You're making major feedback. How do we give you more feedback?

I want you to make errors. If you do it more than once, it's practice. Right. That's the difference. What's up, brother? Yeah, sure. Whatever you got there. You got more of those ciders?

Ciders are delicious. Those are goddamn awesome. I brought you a bottle of champagne, too. Oh, thank you. That's what we drink. I had cider in England and in Ireland. Those are the only times I've ever had cider. They love it over there, man.

They say, you want a cider? I'm like, I thought we were drinking. And then they give you a cider, and you're like, oh, shit, this is delicious. And it gets you fucked up. You're still thinking of Zima. That gave you the bad cider rap. Let me tell you something. I fucking drank Zima until the day they pulled it out of bars.

I didn't give a fuck. I remember I was at the improv and John Henson. Remember John Henson from TalkSoup? He was like, I can't believe you're drinking Zima. I was like, God damn it, John Henson. I enjoy a fucking Zima. I'm going to drink this Zima. I'm going to do it with pride.

I'm not scared. The bottle was like a little bottle of Miami Vice. It was Art Deco. It had a black label. I know. I'm telling you. That's what gave it a bad. Remember that ad?

I'll have a Z-Mint to please, I believe. I didn't give a fuck about that ad. That shit tastes delicious. Mark's hide... Ads don't confuse me, okay? That's why I get mad when people get shitty with advertisers. Listen, man, that is one of the easiest con games of all time. That's three-card money for blind people, all right?

And you're getting mad. You're getting mad at advertisers. How dare you? They are weeding out sheep. If you can't figure out that if you buy that car, that girl will not fuck you. If you can't figure that out, then you deserve to lose every penny your stupid ass figured out how to squirrel away. That's Macklemore popping tags. It's true, right?

You never see the fat person on a McDonald's commercial. That's what I'm talking about, dog. You don't get excited about that car thinking this girl's coming. You brought up something that we're starting to see is that culturally there's this shift going on where some of the big corporations, some of the best thinkers are not saying – they're saying like, hey, stop blaming the corporations. Like it's not McDonald's fault. It's your fucking fault. We don't train kids. It certainly is that.

And it is also – look, there's nothing wrong with having corporations as long as the – even if the corporations are bullshitting people in that way with advertising rather, not lying. But it's also – it's us that are not accepting responsibility for our own diet and getting together and figuring out the same amount of time you spend pursuing your career. You should spend that amount of time pursuing your diet truth 100 consider your diet consider what you're taking into your body make sure you're getting the proper vitamins are you how much how many vitamins are you getting in a day how much phytonutrients how much water are you drinking how much sleep are you getting and if you think about all the other shit in your life like your career and your fucking score on starcraft you think about all that shit but you don't think about your body you're fucking up son but people

are taking um you know responsibility for nutrition sleep more so now you see it everywhere documentaries books whatever but what hasn't been done this is what you know what i've really taken from kelly is he's put movement on the table movement position as a skill what eating is a skill sleeping is a skill there's a skill you Eating as a skill, sleeping as a skill. You teach your kids how to sleep, right? You got to cry it out. You got to sleep. Drug them.

They fucking scream and shit. You got to drug them. Well, the fact is... Stun dart, that's what we do. Stun dart. Like you were saying earlier, Joe, like, oh, I mess around with a crossbow and I feel better. Like, everybody should know that.

But everybody knows now, like, oh, I should eat real food as opposed to industrialized food, right? That's just like common knowledge. Most folks. knowledge you know i mean but it's not common knowledge that you should roll around a lacrosse ball yeah or that i should understand that i should sit or stand or be in these better positions like they don't they don't get that yeah they're like oh i'm in pain they wait till something's wrong and then they go to the doctor and they're like oh you know do this and dude musashi's my whole right arm whoa yeah oh shit sure you know come on that's musashi versus a tiger when i was a kid man the book of five rings is one of the most important things i ever read i remember i

was reading it i was like in my mind i was like this guy fought with fucking swords listen to him yes he learned some shit that's what i mean like he was was he jerking off when he was like hey organize yourself be in a combat stance all the time so if you took massage you're a fighter and you take it you take massage he's word at it is your combat stance your everyday stance is that how you're standing when you cook eggs yes or no for me no i cook eggs naked with a hard on you that's a good position no no that's a good position. No, no, no, that's a good position. I'm not saying. I lean back. I cook eggs with one hand in my ear like I'm picking my ears.

It's a terrible combat stance. Musashi was a bad motherfucker. I mean, he wrote a lot of amazing things, and one of the most amazing things he wrote was the need for balance, the need for art, the need for philosophy, the need for calligraphy. Dude, he carved the oar on the way to kick Cogito's ass. Exactly. But what you're saying is it sort of balances that.

It makes sense. Because what you're saying is that you need to balance your body out. And what he's saying is your body is just a part of your whole. You need to balance the whole thing out. Your mind, your personality, everything. All of it needs balance in order to perform at your optimum level exactly so movement is the missing piece right so like nutrition sleep people get it people understand they need to be hydrated they understand they need to exercise

but do they understand what those good positions are do they understand what like if i have knee pain it's not it's not just out of nowhere. It's because I gave myself that knee pain through bad mechanics and bad movement. Unless I have pathology or catastrophe. Unless you have… Pathology or catastrophe. But take Kojiro. He was probably a better swordsman than, right? He fought with a long sword.

He understood how the long sword meant. I use this analogy for our really tall athletes. I'm like, quit fighting or quit moving like a little short guy. You're not. You're 6'5". so be like a long sword. But he wasn't integrated. He didn't bring mindfulness to all the things. Why are you practicing this training?

Why are you lifting weights? Why are you fighting? The whole point of this, ultimately, don't barf, self-actualization. That's what it's about. Yeah. No, it's not a barf word. It's a word that's been co-opted by people who are barf worthy. Yeah.

That's the problem. It's like people who are barf worthy yeah that's the problem it's like people who say spiritual i'm not religious but i'm spiritual well you know what that means to me run that's what it means run because you're about to get in a stupid fucking conversation about crystals someone's gonna tell you about you know experiences they've had my grandmother was there with me i felt her shut your mouth you don't even know what you're saying anytime there's a growing crystal and i'm usually it's crystals those crystals they pretend that they give you power yeah god damn it yeah you got i mean totally this is this whole conversation and literally the the people you're bringing on is saying what is the optimized self how much more capacity do i have

the the metaphor for saying the training what if I didn't ever fight or express this? But I should still be a skilled human when I pick up my kids or when I'm cooking or when I'm lifting my groceries. It's the same thing. In physio, we have this test. It's called the timed up and go. You'll like this. The tug test, right? Why are you pointing at him?

No, come on. Because he keeps pulling off the horse cock cock on the tv do it again if you if you uh if you you know you get out of a chair you walk three meters you turn around you sit back in the chair that's the test if you can do it fast you're not less likely to fall and kill yourself they can measure that okay there's a famous hammer thrower named litvinov who had a squat workout he did on Mondays. He would front squat 200 kilos for seven reps and then run 400 meters. Those things are scaled. What we have to do, it's the same thing, getting out of a chair, walking, front squatting, running, same.

Our thinking has to be integrated enough. This is Buckminster Fuller talking about integrated systems, right, mutually calming systems. It has to scale for my kids. What you need to eat is the same thing your kids need to eat. How you take care of your body is what your kids take care of their body. It has to scale up and down. I have to be integrated in all those systems. And if I don't, no wonder we see so much wasted effort with all the kind of BS problems we're

dealing. Let's take that off the table. We have a chance to get it right this time. I'm serious. I mean, this is the message of hope. But literally, you should be empowered because there are people talking about it and putting the information out for free. And if you don't understand how it's not impacting the quality of your life, you're, you're, you're leaving it on the table. No, I think you're making a lot

of sense. And I think this is the first time where this kind of information has been so freely distributable, you know, like using the internet, using Twitter, using YouTube videos. I know you put out a shitload of videos, right? How many videos did you put out? It's like 560. Yeah, and you just slammed them out there and people eventually took notice. I mean that's just how it goes when you have quality ideas. And that's the beautiful thing about this world is that all Kelly Star needs is one dude to find that video and say, hey, man, check this shit out.

And that dude sends it to another dude and he goes man I've been having a problem just like this and hey send that shit to Lenny and then boom boom boom boom boom and the next thing you know it just takes off like it's on fire you have Baz on not too long ago boss root you mean don't you call him bad fucking find you and look up my room he will liver kick the shit out of you his left side still good there's a he's a guy you could talk to because Boss has had some serious neurological issues. And guess what? He started using my stuff on his neck and he started sleeping better.

I bet he did. He figured it out. His right arm, he was talking about it on the podcast, is like his wrist all the way up. He lost amazing amounts of muscle tissue, massive atrophy, pinching of the nerves. And he's had two neck surgeries so far. And you know what, man? For a dude like that, like former UFC heavyweight champion, if a guy's an accountant and his arm turns into a noodle, it freaks him out. But a guy like Bas Rutten, that's got to be it.

A heavyweight guy that could do a one-arm pull-up. That's serious. He was an animal. That video of him, he's an animal. Animal. He was an animal. That video of him, he's an animal. Animal.

When he fucked up Koshaka for the title, when he fucked up TK, just teed off on him. Bas Rutten was like one of the best strikers in that day. He was one of the first guys to really incorporate like a high-level athletic striking style. Totally. He was the pre-Crow Cop. But even more mean. Dude, you've ever been slapped to the ear? And it was also the thing about Boss, he could take it.

Boss took it with Kevin Randleman. He won the title off his back. Yeah, the first time the judges got it right. And people say, you know, hey, he doesn't deserve that. Like Gene LaBelle called me up, right? That's the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever seen in my life. But Gene LaBelle is a grappler, and he's a judo champion. But at the same time, was Randleman trying to advance position? No.

Was he throwing strikes? Was he throwing strikes? No. I mean, I mean. Boss Rudin was fucking him up from his back. Oh, downward elbows. And he was trying to advance position, too. He was trying to sweep.

He was trying to get up. Randleman was just using his superior wrestling to keep him on the ground. And he took it. He took a lot of shots. A lot of people didn't. Here's the rub, though. He did not want to be there. And that's why a lot of people think that Randleman won that fight.

It's because Randleman put him where he wanted to every single fucking time. He just was unable to do anything other than keep him there. And Boss was throwing these strikes off the bottom. The question is, how effective were those strikes? And what dictated the fight more? Honestly, I say Randleman's wrestling dictated the fight more honestly i say random wrestling dictated the fight more because he took him down whenever he wanted to and he held him down whenever he wanted to boss fucked him up from the bottom but he only fucked him up from

the bottom because random got tired and this is where i think that judges need to start taking into consideration damage inflicted like you look at it you need to you need to be able to assess you know what i mean like you look at a guy what was the be able to assess. You know what I mean? Like you look at a guy, what was the fight? Like Cantman-Sanchez, for example, where it was a close fight, but you look at both fighters and Cantman looked pretty clean. You know, they had just been in a war, but Diego looked like Elfin, man. Not that Diego's a bad fighter, the guy's a fucking beast, obviously. But, I mean, the point is you've got to be able to take you got to be able to take into account the amount of damage done even if the guy's on the bottom like you see it sometimes

guy on the bottom is going you say it all the time guy's going for submissions who's attacking who the guy on the bottom is attacking you know yeah and in that sense boss rootin clearly won exactly no doubt about it and i i agree with that i think it has to be sort of an accumulative thing. And I also think we should take into account more what happens at the end of the fight. And this is going to sound stupid. No, this is how Muay Thai is judged. I don't give a fuck. No, listen. In Thailand, they don't even judge the first two rounds.

And people who have been in Thailand and understand Muay Thai know that they play music during the fight. Yeah. And during, yes, exactly. So as the fight progresses, that tempo increases. Yes. Right? And the idea is that as the tempo increases, they're going to increase the tempo of the fight.

They're going to fight harder. And that's a tradition. It's also based around betting. Yeah. So exactly right. But they don't even start judging the fight. And granted, the judging is pretty corrupt and not balanced. But the point is, they don't even start judging until the third round.

So these guys have fought for six minutes already, and the fight doesn't even start, according to the judges, until the third round. Right. Third, fourth, and then the fifth. So every subsequent round is judged higher than the fourth. And that's why it can't just ever be about who's the best physical specimen, who's training is most complete. This is why Rocky beat. It's Will. Right?

It's Will. And that's why competition keeps us in, especially if it keeps us in. Because what you're really seeing is let's get to the heart of the human spirit. More importantly, how do we take all the other BS off the table? Because if you're out because of your knee or your back, you can't explain. Well, we all know that one guy that's like super talented in the gym but can't put it together when he fights.

There's certain guys. Incomplete. Yeah, right. I totally agree. There's certain guys talented in the gym but can't put it together when he fights. There's certain guys. Incomplete. Yeah, right. I totally agree. There's certain guys that in the gym, they're the most frightening people on earth. And then something happens to them when they compete and they fall apart.

It's really strange. I know some guys. We all know some guys. Yeah, you all know that guy that just kicks the shit out of you. Everybody knows some guys. How do you... And we know some guys the other way as well

where guys that aren't physically talented but they're just fucking ferocious. And they find a way to win. And you you're like this motherfucker is fighting above his head where everybody's fighting 10 20 below their capacity it's like his expectations have been lowered so much by his own physicality that he goes in there saying i don't give a fuck i'm gonna fucking fight with what i've got whereas everybody else is like don't fuck up don't make a mistake like it's almost like he benefits from being the underdog. Yeah, I would say that. There's less pressure on the underdog.

All the fighters say that. For sure. They're like, I'd prefer to be an underdog because then all the pressure is on the guy that's expected to win. You're like, dude, all I got to show up. I'm not going to disappoint anybody if I lose because everybody expects I'm going to lose. And that's a subject that's been covered, psychological management. Totally. It's been covered much more than your ideas, which are physical movement.

Physical movement hasn't been discovered or really like attuned on the same level. I think it has been discovered. I shouldn't say discovered. I mean more like adopted. Yeah, integrated. People don't understand that how they squat will have a direct effect on how they punch. Like people haven't connected those dots. Like what Kelly was trying to say earlier about making the connection between strength and conditioning and like fighting, for example,

is that if I understand what the athlete needs to do when he's squatting, then I don't need to be a fighting coach to know that he's going to lose power when he punches. So I can watch you squat and I can tell already based on how you're squatting, say your knee is caving in and your ankle is collapsing and you have a shitty squat, right? Well, I can tell right away that that's your motor pattern. That's your default movement, right? So if you take that movement and you transplant that into a fighter, a guy that's throwing a punch, well, I can deduce that that's going to be the same motor pattern so it's easier to fix that movement pattern when you're squatting like okay let's

get you to understand the correct mechanics of the body while you're moving in a controlled environment and then hopefully over time that becomes ingrained this and then and when you throw a punch then it's like they start to make the connection. They're like, oh, shit. I tore my ACL because I was squatting with my foot out and my knee was caving in. That was my brain. When I needed to be in that position, my brain was like, this is your position. This is where you need to be. Does that make sense?

It has to scale. So if we look at the science of chronic pain, for example, the pain pathway, and this is important for athletes who are in chronic pain, especially people who are engaged in high contact sports. These bad positions get mapped with the movement pathway. So your brain starts to think, even if the pain stimulus isn't there, your brain starts to think, ah, you're moving this way. That's been painful for the last six months or last year. I know it's going to cause pain. So if I give you a brand new motor pathway in your brain, boom, I get this clean motor pathway. I'm able to get athletes out of painful positions.

That's like – I mean that's Chequionda thinking right there. I wanted to ask you about two things. We've got to get to gluten before we end this thing. And the other one is head trauma. You were talking about how the body has the ability to heal itself but it seems like it doesn't with head trauma is that the case head trauma is super gnarly right i i think uh you know what mma has done for you know decreasing head trauma for boxing you know i mean like it's i don't people understand like it's so much better i don't know if that's true is that really true look i support mma obviously more than anybody

but i think that uh that's actually been disproven. I think that there's concerns. Impact is impact. Impact is impact. It doesn't really – there's more possibilities in MMA to defend yourself than boxing, but impact is impact. So we have to mitigate that. Yeah, absolutely. So if we look at leaky brain and the inflammatory response and the quality of your tissues, how do I optimize those things?

Can I change that? Can I limit the damage? One of our friends who – his name is John Wellborn, played in the NFL for a bunch of years, part of that big brain study. And they basically went in, looked at his brain. Afterwards, they're like, you played left tackle. We can play in the NFL for 10 years. We can tell by the head trauma that you have. They took his tests and he, you know, he was like 99th percentile in analytics and like he was maybe 10th percentile in emotional IQ, right? Because of the brain trauma. Oh no, a big strong dude with shitty emotional skills. Weird. Well, we look at some of the NFLers guys, these head trauma guys.

Boxers as well. Boxers. So anterior pituitary gets damaged too in there. It's not just the brain that gets rattled. So suddenly I throw off the neuroendocrine axis. You're not making HGH. You're not making gonadotropin. You're not making testosterone.

You're not making sense. Your tissues start to fall apart. You start to lose your sense of self-identity. Bam! So can you optimize that? Well, you know, are there mouthguards that change some of the force? We're working with the University of Texas right now

on looking at concussions. Good luck with that if you get crow-copped. That shin to the dome doesn't mean it doesn't give a fuck what kind of mouthpiece you're wearing. That's accumulation of blows. But how many... Well, it's also, you know, we're seeing this higher impact of blows when it comes to kicks. And that has to be taken into consideration as well. There's some things that are happening right now with wheel kicks, with Vitor, with Edson Barbosa.

Edson Barbosa started it off. Terry Adam, right? Yeah, he knocked out Terry Adam. And then it was Uriah Hall. And then everybody was like, what the fuck is going on? And then Vitor. And everybody was like, what the fuck is going on? And then Vitor and everybody was like, what the fuck? And then God damn Junior Dos Santos

the first time he's ever thrown in a fight, he knocks out Mark fucking Hunt. So Bruce Lee was right. That shit works. That technique is a motherfucker. That's why when your pants are up in my kitchen, I know I stay away from you. The amount of force you could put on the end of that heel bone is insane.

What's awesome is it's a half-beat strike, meaning that the time it takes for the person to turn actually gives a flinch response where a guy's like, oh, shit. He doesn't know what it is. He doesn't think it's a kick. And what a perfect time if you're a young guy training MMA, practice this shit because people aren't used to it. This is the thing is they're trained to an MMA. Like it's been now guys are training pretty conventional. That's why you get a guy like Pettis or you get a guy like Vitor and Dos Santos. Those guys, I guarantee you. They're not even listening to their background.

They don't even throw kicks. Vitor throws so few kicks and all of a sudden he's got two head kick knockouts in a row. It's fucking crazy. So you have this thing that's disaster hard kick to the head. What are you going to do about it? So you're throwing, hey, I'm going to be an MMA fighter. I'm going to try to make a life as a professional fighter. I'm going to pay a price physically.

I'm going to knock down a whole bunch. Vitor really supports your ideas, man. I've got to tell you that, because Vitor is a fucking tremendous athlete. And he always has, man. I got to tell you that because Vitor is a fucking tremendous athlete. And he always has, man. He moves so well in every form. And look how quickly he's picking up this wheel kick shit. That's right.

One of our definitions of best athlete is who's the kid who can pick up the new skill the fastest. How fast can you learn a new skill? You see those kids that just be like – you show up. They're like the hobby sport kid and all of a sudden they're back flipping off the trampoline. And then they're better at you learn your skill? You see those kids that show up, they're like the hobby sport kid and all of a sudden they're back flipping off the trampoline and then they're better at you, your sport. So how do you create that athleticism? But also, I think one of the things that we're talking about with the gluten

is how do you measure lifestyle? How do you measure nutrition? Measure it by your T-cell count. Can you optimize those things? Can you optimize the healing response from being knocked out? Can I, you know, we have all this amazing supplementary medicine, right? A lot of guys, you know, go on the gear because they need to go on the gear, should go on the gear in their forties when they're starting to break down between them

and their physician. Are you in favor of that about testosterone replacement therapy amongst combat athletes? What I think – Mind you, combat athletes. Yeah, combat athletes. Because it's different. It's also damage to the pituitary gland. Well, I mean I think it depends. Like if you take, for example, you have a guy that's experienced, say he has been fighting for 30 years, right?

And he gets – now he has the same testosterone levels as a guy that's 20 years old that hasn't been fighting more than two years. Right. Then I think that, that's unfair, right? You know what I'm saying? But if you,

so it's just like so subjective depending on the situation. Well, here's what's weird. How often are they being tested? And what are their levels during training? And are they leveling off to a normal level

when they're fighting? And what the fuck are they doing during the week? The normal is being optimized. How does it is not optimized are they testing them throughout the training camp and then yeah i don't think so with some guys but that's how alistair overham got busted yeah because they randomly surprised this is this is yeah this is what my my friends who uh who know about these things say look they've never seen gear make a crappy athlete a great athlete it allows good athletes to train harder and to recover faster and get more work done.

And whoever does the most work and remains the freshest wins. That makes sense. So if I'm also looking at you afterwards and you're not making tea and your life sucks, are you kidding me? Like we have ways to manage it. It's never – That's a really cute romantic version of the idea. But the reality is it improves you drastically. It improves

your ability to perform work. It improves your ability to... I said that. I agree. It also improves your explosiveness. It improves your speed. It improves your power. It improves a lot of things. It's not... Hand-eye coordination? Being able to track a punch? Being able to track a ball? No, it doesn't do that. But if you already have those things,

it will make you better at those things. No, no. T does change the way you can okay i see what you're saying so because of the the the power and the the just the change in nervous system especially the the hyper hyper levels i really want to test off achieving hyper levels that some of these super outlets let's go to back to the pride days okay i'm not alleging that anybody did steroids but god damn it looks like a lot of people did steroids. People did steroids. And the people that were over there told me people were doing steroids.

Do I know people did steroids? I do not know that people did steroids. But let's just assume. Let's not name any nationality. Let's think about some certain fighters that just looked insanely jacked to the gills. They didn't even look fucking human. They would come out with veins on the tip of their nose and just be berserkers and fucking roar when they won. And you would be watching that.

You're like, that is barely a human being. Stomping heads. Shoving referees. Macho man. If you're an MMA fan and you have not seen Pride, you are doing yourself a disservice. I would suggest start with the Vandelay Silva collection because that is the quintessential

Pride fighter. And if you don't know who Fedor is, shame on you. How dare you? How dare you? Not the Fedor of today, before Christianity, the Fedor pre-religion. I think he always had Christianity, man. I think he just caught up to him. I visited Fedor, and I didn't see any of that. Oh, really?

Yeah, dude. So when did he take that on? I don't know, man. It was definitely post. We worked on a book with him, and it was definitely post-book. You know what was stressed, though, that that guy must have been going through? Dude, he's carrying the weight of a nation. Yes.

And destroying killers. Killing monsters, by the way. How about they put Arlovsky away? Dude, and Fujita and Crow Cop. And Fujita, after Fujita fucking rang his bell. Oh, how about Frandleman's body sign on his neck? There's a book over there, Fringology. I mean, like, that's fringe.

That guy's outlier. Oh, well, you know what that guy was? That guy was bulletproof in the brain. his brain was just ferocious they called him the terminator that's how they all refer to him and what an interesting like study in not wasting energy too you never saw him with his face tensed up never saw my crazy little allies. It was always like really relaxed. It's probably because the guy trained eight hours out of every day.

Those guys trained hard. He was smart as fuck. Put it back into the realm of human performance. Let's say that you're actually eating right. Let's say you have a great coach and you're moving right and you're actually eating right and sleeping right and managing these things. Then your augmentation choices matter even more.

But we see people making – covering up bad lifestyle, bad nutrition, and that's the problem. That's my biggest problem with that stuff. Can you make a guy who doesn't have punching power – can you give him punching power or is that a certain innate thing? I mean I think – That's a big argument, right? Yeah, we've all met those guys that just have that – like they touch you, you're out power. It's weird. You never give a guy that.

You can't give a guy thunder, right? But you have – I don't know, man. And I've talked about this a lot with like fighter friends and coaches and whatever because you always know that guy. That guy that just has weird – there's a guy, Liam Harrison. He's a Muay Thai fighter. Probably not too many people know who he is, but everybody should. They know Muay Thai. I mean he's got that just weird I touch you, you're out power, right?

And I think a lot of it is, one, mechanics play a lot – have a lot to do with it. Like if you understand how to be in good positions and understand the transfer of energy through the ground, up through your body, all that stuff. But you cannot argue that there's just some of those weird guys out there. You can accelerate fast. Joe, you sparred with those guys where you just, like, you get hit by them and you're like, that shouldn't not have hurt as much as it did just now.

Nervous system fires. You ever see Lucas Matisse? You see that boxer, Lucas Matisse? No. He's this new guy. He's just KOing people left and right. It's amazing to watch him. What do you think about that, though?

Do you think some guys... I think it's a bone thing, for one. Just density? Yeah. They just got more weight? The size of fists. Some people have very large fists, like George Foreman. You ever see George Foreman's fists?

Yeah. They're like hams. They're like canned hams. Is that... There's also the, like, Tommy Hearns had this shoulder width thing. I think shoulder width has to do with leverage, and it has to do with the amount of extra travel that's

going on before your punch lands. If you have, like, very narrow shoulders, you're not getting as much rotation into your punch. But if you've got some Tommy Hearns type shit going on, by the end of that punch, boom! There's a lot of torque. What did the Russians do? They developed all of these skills.

We have a coach in our gym who's Russian who was plucked out of the Ukraine to be in a Russian swimming program when she was five. And basically they just trained her GPP, GPP, GPP, GPP. They identified her. What is GPP? General Physical Preparedness. They identified her. Who's GPP? General Physical Preparedness. Skills. They taught skills to these kids and then guess what? They decided, oh, look at that kid has huge shoulders.

He's going to be good at this. This kid is upright, has long torso, short legs. He's going to Olympic lift. This girl is going to swim. They start making decisions and it's serendipitous for some of these guys who kind of find their calling and find their skill set and they have hams for hands or maybe – Yeah, and I think it's like you said. It's just like you can still make the best athlete in the world better through good mechanics.

I can optimize you. I can take the slack out of you. It's interesting because it really always becomes a disproportionate battle because if a guy has perfect genetics and he's intelligent and he's disciplined and he hard working he's gonna beat the guy who's just hard working and has every time shit slow genes you know fucking we all know dudes you just especially when it comes to striking striking is when it becomes apparent there's something about jiu-jitsu that allows you to be technical and if your positioning knowledge is two or three moves ahead of the other guy and you roll long enough, it seems like eventually you catch him for the most part unless the guy is like really defensively minded. But dudes are helpless when it comes to striking. When a guy has that fast twitch muscle fiber and the good conditioning and the skill set, you're fucked.

And that's what people don't realize. Striking is just different. Like Roy Jones Jr. is a perfect example of that. What do you mean? When Roy Jones Jr. was in his prime, he had such incredible athleticism that it doesn't matter how crisp your boxing is,

you're fucked. So how do you think he could get everything? Do you think he just got knocked out and then he got older and his reaction slowed a little bit?

I wanted to talk to you about that because I wanted to talk to you about steroids because there's two things with Roy Jones Jr. I say this in all due respect I'm a huge Roy Jones Jr. fan fan but he changed the john ruiz fight it was in my opinion the

turning point because he went up to fight john ruiz and he fought john ruiz at heavyweight he was big he was like 200 pounds and then he dropped back down to fight tarver at light heavyweight and he looked like shit physically oh yeah he looked drained his musculature was deflated he had a hard time making that weight he dehydrated the shit out of himself making 175 guess what his all of his mechanics changed so we know this from our power lifters who I have a friend Jesse Burdick who's he did a leap total at 219 pounds and then six months later went up to 318 and power lifted there and when we there's a weight component when you have this natural weight

and all of a sudden you drop a whole bunch of weight, your mechanics and leverage changes. Your proprioception changes. Like the game is different. I have a friend who's – Mark Bell, great power lifter. His brother Chris Bell did the documentary Bigger, Faster, Stronger. So Mark was a heavyweight 275. So you're sort of adjusting as you're moving now because of this new weight.

That's how we learned it all. So Mark's now at like 242, and he had to figure out how to bench again. He's like, nothing was stable. I don't know where I am. And so we don't even think about that with our fighters. You're carrying all that weight, moving it around. So part of the game is, how about this? Part of the game is water management, right?

And if we look at just being dehydrated or just salt, being down, just total salts, you can slow that reaction time coupled with being dehydrated, coupled with challenges in the nervous system. You're not sleeping very well because you're stuck in weight. And then all your positions change. All your mechanics change. Your kicks don't feel the same. To change your weight class is legit. It's so hard to do. It really is.

It's really – and also, the elephant in the room is the gear. I think you have to – if you're in your 30s and you're gaining 30 fucking pounds, you're on gear. Okay? Let's just be realistic. Let's be realistic. Let's just say – You're doing it within six months.

Totally. What do you think the percentage is of pro athletes? Let's just be safe and say that. Lance Armstrong, fuck that debate sideways. Because now it seems like almost everybody. You'd think like 80%. If you're going to put a percentage behind it, what would you think? The global, like all sports.

I think, yeah. MMA might be like 80%. I think MMA is actually lower than I think most professional sports in my opinion. Because there's guys like Roy Nelson, guys like John Fitch. That are just outspoken against like, hey, you know what? Fuck that. And they've taken a stance and now they're not going to – And it's an honor and a valor thing as opposed to basketball.

Totally. Like it's combat. It's like, hey, you know – No disrespect to basketball. No, no, no, not at all. But like in basketball, you're not hitting another person in the face on purpose. I couldn't agree more. And I think that it's also there's a reality of the sport itself, the impact that you take over and over and over again.

And just in training where you're going to get the kind of traumatic injuries that almost don't heal naturally. It's a natural occurrence. Don't heal under the parameters of still have to train. I still got to get work done. I still got to. Yeah, you're absolutely right. How do I accelerate that? Dude, that's 100 this is the condition of the fighter is that they feel like they you

know in mma specifically you have so many variables that you have to cover so you're constantly you're you're constantly pushing to train every single variable all the time and it's very difficult like right so you're always over trained like i think most mma fighters nowadays are over trained and then they look for something like, hey, how can I recover so that I can fit all this fucking wrestling and boxing and Muay Thai and skills into a day session. Dude, I've trained for fights. I've over-trained.

It's fucking horrible. It's impossible to not do it. It's impossible. So how do we look around then and say, okay, I'm a fighter. This is my main thing. How do we look around and say, someone has invented this wheel already. What are the best practices elsewhere?

Well, I think with fighters, when I say it's impossible to not do it, what I mean is it's impossible to not do it if you're not approaching the whole situation knowledgeably with a heart monitor and someone who knows what the fuck is going on. And I think that's really what's important. But Joe, what's crazy about this, and this is what we're, because, so just a little bit of background. So like Rob Wolf, Paleo Solution, nutrition genius, right? Right. I was lucky enough. Great guy too. Great guy, yeah.

So I was lucky enough to be under his wing, strength and conditioning. Bacon aficionado. Yeah, exactly. But like what's great about what Kelly brings to the table is everybody knows, like all the fighters know, like, hey, I need to eat correctly. I need to sleep. I need to train. I need to do all this stuff. But none of them, and I guarantee this because I didn't know it, none of them understand like the movement blueprint.

Like, hey, what's the master blueprint? What are the key fundamental principles that I need to know to optimize movement function? So, for example, if I'm going to optimize my nutrition, I know if I'm gonna optimize my nutrition i know if i'm taking a paleo stance i know that i need to i need to get rid of gluten right i need to maybe in some situations lower my carbs or or um ditch dairy ditch dairy or both of them god damn it hold on hold on and and maybe you're human you can still buffer up sometimes so but people know this what my point is is like fighters know this but not a lot of people understand, hey, what's the movement blueprint? Like, okay, I'm in pain.

I know I'll be in less pain if I don't eat gluten, but why am I still in pain? Okay, we keep saying that without even explaining it. So let's get into that because we've got to wrap this bitch up in about five minutes. What's wrong with gluten? Gluten causes inflammation disproportionately for different people. Some people have a small reaction to it, some people have a big reaction to it. That inflammatory, constantly inflamed state, that means that you do not adapt as well. You do not recover as well. It's like always running a low-grade infection.

I had a chiropractor just tell me that. She was talking to me about an inflammation and she was recommending the McKenzie protocol. It's a bunch of different kinds of stretches test test retest kill the gluten Do you feel better? Yes or no? Did your times go better? Yes or no? I feel better except when I'm eating Good linguine with clams is one of my fucking weaknesses man Mostly Italian you can eat shit, too Sit down with a bowl of dicks. You can. Hey mom, this isn't gluten free.

You're dead. Who the fuck, Tate, was trying to tell me, you can have a little spaghetti squash. I'm like, how dare you. You're a fucking shitty spaghetti squash to lasagna. Who the fuck are you? What are you doing, my friend Tate? If you're eating right, you should probably be able to have lasagna at mom's house and not mess you up.

Sundays, right? What you should do is like have a day, right? Well, not even a day. Like listen, if you're at a wedding, you're at your daughter's wedding, you should probably eat the fucking cake. Don't be an ass. If I make you bread, it's homemade bread. Eat the bread. Don't be an asshole.

Everybody's on it like Joe. That's a unique event unless you have 365 daughters. Yeah, well, Joe, here's the deal. Everybody's on a spectrum, right? You might be on that one end, like Kelly was just saying, where you can eat it and not feel sweet fuck all. But you can be on the other end where you have celiac disease and you eat too much of it. You'll like – over time you'll back out. Same with alcoholics as well.

So how about this? We measure. We ask all our athletes to get a good blood panel. We have a company in our gym that's kind of started out of our gym. And we – like don't just take your cholesterol. We fractionate your cholesterol. We look at the inflammatory markers because suddenly you're like, oh, I'm gluten-free and I don't eat dairy. But I'm eating bacon every day.

And we saw people's cholesterol like triple, quadruple. It turns out like you're not actually – I'm not set up to run that much saturated fat and eat nuts. You poor bitch because let me tell you something. I fucking float through bacon like I'm a surfer on a bacon fat highway. It's OK. I have no problem with any of my cholesterol. There's a million dollars on this fight. It's cool.

Go right ahead. It's beautiful as I get my cholesterol checked and it's perfect and yet I'm floating on a fucking river of bacon fat. You handle it and the – Hanging 10 on bacon. But the key is how do you know? Well, you measure it. So you did – you said exactly what we need to be doing. How do we know what we know?

It's observable measure. I'm completely bullshitting. If I have bacon once every four weeks, it's a lot. I try to eat pretty clean. I try to eat only things that grow in the ground. I try to eat grass-fed meat as much as humanly possible. Who's that fighter who has a hunter for him? What's that?

Who's that fighter who has his own hunter? Cowboy. Cerrone. He has his own hunter for him? Is that who you're talking about? Tim Sylvia, again, is a big hunter. He eats on his own. Or Brock Lesnar.

That guy chokes out deer. Yeah. You a hunter? Do you eat meat? deer. Yeah. Do you, Hunter, do you eat meat? Oh, yeah. Do you go hunting? I don't. Do you ever eat venison? Yes.

Fuck. I have crazy theories about food when it comes to especially things that are fast. I think things that are really difficult to catch that run away from you, I think they're better for you. That's why they're so slippery. I think we figured out how to beat the whole fish thing with hooks, but try catching a fucking fish without a hook. And meanwhile, fish are nutritious as shit.

They're really fucking good for you. What if we're saying, you know what you eat? You're what you eat eats. You're what you eat eats. What is what you're eating eating? So if you ate a lion, you'd be super healthy? What do deer eat? They eat a lot of grass and leafy vegetables and delicious nutrients are in their protein.

You eat them and they taste so much better. It's concentrated vegetables right there. Africans eat flies. What's your question with gluten? They eat fly hamburgers. You ever seen that show? Yeah, and look at their eating system. That is the most fucked up thing.

They eat mosquitoes and flies, they'll take a bucket and they whip this bucket through a big cloud of flies and bugs until they get it at the bottom of the bucket and they scrape it into patties and make burgers out of it. But it's protein. I mean you're fucked. You're in Africa. You got to do what you got to do. That's right.

And the human being is designed for survival. My question because this is going to end really soon and thank you very much for doing this it's been beautiful we got to do it again for sure um the uh the the issue with gluten is it just our bodies are not designed for it is it had to do with genetically modifying the actual wheat itself which did happen in like the early 1950s or 60s i believe i forget which one but look it up i don't don't have time to Google. The people that were making wheat in this country, they sort of engineered it to be a stronger, hardier wheat. And that's when people started having real issues as far as like digesting it. Some people didn't and some people still don't. But for a lot of people, it's a big issue.

My kid is super sensitive. She won't eat the birthday cake. She'll eat some frosting. Your kid's a freak. I don't care if he talks to you. You're a goddamn alien. Jeez, rule. I just had a five-year-old birthday party at my house. Kids were eating cake like it was fucking going out of style. How dare you? How dare you lie to the children?

Hey, you're a terrible father. No, I'm a beautiful father. If your daughter got some real cake and you weren't around, she would go crazy. The problem is your teacher had a squat correctly. She would go crazy for the ice is your t-shirt had a squat correctly. I'm just teasing. I don't even remember what we were talking about. We were talking about gluten.

Here's the deal. You should never take our word for it. You should test and retest yourself. Don't take anyone's word for it. Go ahead and dump a bunch of medium chain triglyceride oil into your coffee with some butter and tell me if it doesn't taste better. Yes or no? Do you feel better? Do you have more energy in the day? Yes or or no this is the only thing that matters to us like you are your best experiment and you have the right to experiment yourself the whole life you know sorry but like you were saying with the lacrosse ball like you do that right and then this

is like the brilliance behind kelly's system is like you do it the test retest is immediate like oh my shoulder feels better immediately you really Really? Literally immediately. Like you asked earlier, what do you do about knee pain? And, and, and, and it's just like one, you correct your mechanics and understand what is the movement that's causing knee pain. And then two,

like, what can I do on a tissue level? That's going to improve the pain immediately. Like upstream downstream. You should, what is actually going on with the recall? What is the lacrosse ball doing? Like when the cross,

the cross ball, like what's like the technical explanation? uh has this material that absorbs your pain what's happening to souls you're you're such so it uh you are stiff you're you're improving the function and the congestion and the and uh the hydration of the tissues, one. Two is that you're undoing this stuck pattern of fascia. So you change that until it moves again. Three is that you probably get your ribs moving. Four is that you change your thoracic mobility. You change that orientation of thoracic spine and the whole system upregulates. You're in a better shape. All right, last question. What is it about gluten? Because I don't think we totally cover this. What is it about it that makes your body inflamed?

What's going on? It irritates the small intestine. It irritates it? Is it because it's a foreign thing? That it's not normal to the human diet? Is that what it is? It's like having a root canal festering your mouth. That's your small intestine.

But it comes in the form of spaghetti. Well, what do you have to understand? Gluten is just a protein, right? You're small intestine. Donuts are gluten? What the fuck, man? Fried in sugar. Bam.

Cat sleeping with dogs. I'm out of here. Waffles. Oh, my God. Waffles. The Belgian waffle at the... And even sometimes chicken because fried chicken is made with bread. You're in denial, Joe Rogan.

You will never go gluten-free because you just can't let go. It's like a heroin addiction. You're right. I'll never gloat. No, go gluten-free because you just can't let go. It's like a heroin addiction. You're right. I'll never gloat. You're like, convince me to stop smoking cigarettes. You will go low gluten, not gluten-free. I only have one cigarette a day. How many servings of gluten would you recommend in a week for a man like me of obviously robust character and strong genetics?

Luscious breasts. Was that the right word? The justification begins. Delicious. How much heroin can I have? Is it that bad? No. Is it a drug?

But it's a drug, right? It's not that bad. But like, look, if you're looking to optimize. Dave Asprey thinks it's a drug. He thinks gluten is a drug. Dude, it has an opiate effect in your body, right? It does, right? So it has like a similar effect, maybe not to the same degree.

But like, look, what you have to understand is, are you trying to optimize your life, your function, whatever, whether it be movement sleep whatever it is is listen is your money you're making your money from your body are you making your money from your body if you do why aren't you playing those corners like you really you're right you're like this if you're making your money from your body but most of the people you're talking to aren't but even for them optimization and and also there's a reward for that discipline. When you eat on Sunday, if you have a cheat day on Sunday, if you eat six days of good food a week and then one day you go off like a rocket. You're probably a human being.

Yeah. You're a human being. Or you might be The Rock. You go to The Rock's Twitter. He's got the greatest cheat days of all time. You can. But you can buffer a bunch of stuff. You should.

And you should live a life. Like Mark Sisson has some really reasonable ideas about this. He puts a little sugar in his coffee. He's like, you know what? My life is better when I put sugar in my coffee. Sue me. That guy is a pussy for the record. That's a compliment. That's such a nice thing to say about him. It is. It's a good thing. We already established that and that's how we're going to end this. We're going to go full circle. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. That was awesome. Kelly, you're a bad motherfucker. If people want to get Kelly's book, it is called Becoming

a Supple Leopard. Do you have a copy of it, Brian? You should put it up in front of the camera. Look at that. Becoming a Supple Leopard. Dr. Kelly Starrett, you are a bad motherfucker, sir, and I appreciate you coming here. Thanks for having me, guys. I hope we sell you some books because I really think it's going to help.

I'm so glad that you were the guy that invented the lacrosse ball because that thing, I'm telling you, has helped me more over the last couple months. Demons out. Anything of you. It's so hard to get a person to massage you that hard, you know? Yeah, and you're not going to get

a massage every day. You don't have time. Exactly. And you only know where your bullshit is, right? Exactly. Talk to me after this show. Glen Cordova.

Doza. Doza. Dova, Doza, whatever. Same thing. Change your name, son. It's not as catchy as the Mexican version. Hola, I'm Glenn. Glenn Cordova.

Same in the house, ladies and gentlemen. Shout out to Arish. Thank you, everybody, for tuning into the podcast. Thank you, Onnit. Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name Rogan. Save 10% off any and all supplements. And please follow Kelly on Twitter.

It is MobilityWOD, which is Workout of the Day. So Mobility M-O-D, or W-O-D. Excuse me. MobilityWOD on Twitter. And Glenn, what is your... You got a Twitter, man? No, I have like 15 followers. That's gangster as fuck.

Bitches. That's gangster as fuck. Do you have a Twitter? No, I do not 15 followers. That's gangster as fuck. Zero tweets. Bitches. That's gangster as fuck. Zero tweets. Do you have a Twitter? No, I do not, sir. I have a Twitter, but yeah. We'll be back on Monday with Bobcat Goldthwait, ladies and gentlemen. Bobcat returns on the podcast. Big kiss.

And we're going to work out something next week for Kevin Smith. We're going to go to his place and do his podcast. Holla. Brian, you want to come? Yes, of course you do. All right. He wants you to come too. All right. We'll see you guys Monday. Holla. Brian, you want to come? Yes, of course you do. All right. He wants you to come too. All right.

We'll see you guys Monday. Jihad. Praise Odin. Big kiss. God.