The Peter Attia Drive - #131 - Beth Lewis: The Art of Stability: Learning about pain, mitigating injury, and moving better through life

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Beth Lewis is a former professional dancer and a self-described “educator of movement” who has an unmatched ability to assimilate information and customize training plans from multiple training systems. In this episode, Beth takes us through how she identifies problematic movement patterns and postures to help individuals relieve pain, avoid injury, and move better within all types of exercise. She explains how movement is in fact a trainable skill and provides suggestions for what people can add to their exercise routine to benefit their health and longevity. We discuss: Beth’s “way of no way” training philosophy [4:45] Beth’s background in dancing and how she ended up in New York City [7:30] Beth’s transition to fitness coaching and how her training philosophy has evolved [12:45]; Functional Range Conditioning and scapular mobility [21:50]; An overview of Postural Restoration Institute and Peter’s squat assessment [35:30]; The important connection between the ribs and breathing [39:45]; The role of sitting and external stress in chronic muscular tension [42:30]; The important role of your toes, minimalist footwear, and toe yoga [44:30]; Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS) [48:30]; A different view on knee valgus [52:45]; Is there such a thing as “bad posture”? [56:30]; How Beth identifies an issue, addresses it, and keeps clients motivated [58:45]; Lifting weights, the Centenarian Olympics, and dancing into old age [1:11:00]; The importance of the hamstrings versus abs [1:21:15]; Benefits of rowing, and why everyone should add it to their exercise regimen [1:27:15] Different roles of concentric versus eccentric strength [1:35:15]; Flexibility and high-intensity interval training (HIIT) [1:39:40]; Training versus playing sports, and the best type of activity for kids [1:43:00]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/   Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/bethlewis    Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/   Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/   Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content and health and wellness. Full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe.

Now without further delay, here's today's episode. My guess this week is Beth Lewis. Now before I get into who Beth is and what we talk about in this episode, I want to take a moment to explain something which is probably more than any episode we've done recently and potentially for the duration of this podcast, this is a subject matter that I felt absolutely needed to be covered in video. And the reason for that is the concepts that we discuss, which pertain to body movement, are very difficult to understand if you don't have the lingo down pad. So when Beth talks about the difference between scapular protraction and retraction, yeah, if you know what those mean

and you can follow along listening, that's great. But I suspect many people can't. And it's much easier to understand what's going on if you can actually see what those things look like, which is actually easy to do in the middle of a discussion. So during this interview, we shot two videos. The first is the interview itself, which is going to be helpful, I think, to see all of these things that I talk about.

And this video is going to be available to everyone. The second video was shot after the interview, but an hour later, when we actually went in the gym and demonstrated many of the exercises that built on the conversation from the podcast, now this is going to be available only to the subscribers. And you can learn more about that at pdratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe. Of course, both videos will be available on the show notes as well. Now if you enjoy the video and find it helpful, we'd like to hear from you because we are really on the fence about how much value video ads in general to a podcast. I think there is certainly an argument that can be made that more video is better than less,

but it also comes at a greater cost, both financially and just in terms of the logistics. So I do think I'd like to hear from people and they might say, yeah, this is absolutely worth all the pain in doing this. Please do it versus, yeah, just reserve it for the ones where it really adds value versus not. It doesn't matter, just stick with what you're doing.

Okay, onto the episode. Beth received her undergraduate degree in dance performance with a master of fine arts from the University of Georgia. A few years later, she was hired by a professional dance company just outside of New York, and she spent about four years touring the world as a professional dancer. After she left that stage, she moved to New York City full-time, where she could really begin her craft and she dove into health and wellness, which is kind of a vanilla term After she left that stage, she moved to New York City full-time where she could really begin her craft and dove into health and wellness, which is kind of a vanilla term when you get

to understand the extent of her knowledge. Now I've met Beth and I'll talk a little bit about that at the beginning of this interview through some people that I've come to respect a great deal, but it also became clear to me within a short period of time that Beth was sort of in a league of her own in terms of her ability to assimilate information from multiple systems and then also to customize it to any given individual. So it's the ability to kind of look at a person, see what their movement patterns are, see where their potential for injury is and or they're already arrived at injuries and

then look to comprehensively build that. So Beth is someone I've been involved with on all matters that pertain to strength, stability, and it's just been something I've wanted to sit down with Beth for a long time and get into that. And in this podcast, we talk about her journey and we talk about movement, how much of it is conscious versus subconscious. We talk about things like posture. We talk about a number of systems that she incorporates

into her work, things like postural restoration institute or PRI, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, DNS, a system called FRC, functional range conditioning, integrated kinetic neurology. We go through all of these systems and what she has learned from them and how she, the way I describe it is, how does she extract what is useful and discard, what is useless from each of these things. I could probably go on and on, but again, I think this is just one of those podcasts that if you have any interest in living a better life, moving better, being more connected to your body, I think you'll get something out of this. And hopefully the video will also provide an even greater level of knowledge that allows

you to take it to another level. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion with Beth Loos. Hey Beth, do you have any idea how exciting it is for me to do an in-person podcast for like the first time since, probably February? Yeah, I'm sure it's kind of weird, right? It's been kind of interesting just to be around you for the past four weeks, five weeks. Yeah, you were really stuck in the thick of it. You've been back here obviously in SoCal

for, as you said, four, five weeks. But I think you were going crazy in New York for four months. It was a bit of an adventure with COVID. And I'm stuck in a very small one bedroom, SoHo walk up, which is beautiful when you're just sleeping there, but when you're quarantined there, it's a little more interesting. So it was nice to get a little fresh air with my dogs and just be. You weren't just sort of quarantined there in the normal way. You had to basically lead 10 to 11 hours a day of workouts remotely with your clients.

You were teaching a rowing class on your row workouts remotely with your clients. You were teaching a rowing class on your rowing machine in your apartment. I mean, it was, you got more out of 500 square feet than anybody. More like 350 square feet if we're going to be real, but yeah, I had to completely revamp my work situation. And I went from being on my feet 10 to 12 hours a day to being essentially a desk worker, which was an interesting shift, but I learned a lot from it. Yeah. Beth, I've described you to people as probably one of the most remarkable physical specimens I've ever met and you just have a unique

ability to kind of do what Bruce Lee did in martial arts, not to put too much pressure on you. Great thing to say at the beginning. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is basically be agnostic to form or to discipline, but what Bruce Lee talked about when he created Jit Kundo was to extract what was useful, discard what was useless from all disciplines into this agnostic bucket that really served only one purpose was fight execution. And similarly, your breadth of knowledge, and at the same time, your total lack of being

wed to one system in movement, in training has led you to come up with something that has no name. And again, Bruce Lee referred to Jude Cundo as the way of no way and without form and all these other different things. In many ways, that's just sort of what you do. And that makes it hard sometimes for people like me who like to label things and say,

well, wait, does this fit in the DNS bucket? Is this FRC? Is this PRI? And you're like, no, no, no, no, no. It's just, it's what's gonna work right now. So how did we meet? So Michael Straumsness introduced us almost two years ago. like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I never wanted to live in New York, but that's another story. I was an athlete as a kid. I was a gymnast. I was a martial artist. I played soccer, I swam competitively,

and I danced from the time I was six until I still think I danced, but definitely retired. I was also a musician. I was a drum major of my high school band, and I wanted to dance. I actually was in school initially to be a secondary education's fan-ished teacher, believe it or not. And I decided my junior year, this was not a good thing for me. And all I wanted to do was dance. And I had a guidance counselor,

I was like, you need to just dance. So I transferred and changed my major in my junior year. I have a BFA in dance performance from the University of Georgia. I moved to Atlanta, started in fitness. I worked at a gold gym, and in this little place called Carter'sville, and I got hired with a dance company that was based in Connecticut, but basically New York, and I started touring internationally with this company. And I did so for about four years, And then I decided it was time to get off the road. I was actually in my early 30s by then and just decided to make New York my home

and it has been for a while now. So for people like me, frankly, who don't know a lot about dance, when you say dance, do you mean ballet? I am trained in ballet, but this is more, it's more physical theater. The company's called Palovelis. It was founded in the 70s. Basically, these scientists from Dartmouth made this dance technique up called weight-sharing.

It's very athletic. It's mostly a men's company, actually, traditionally four men, two women. In my particular company, we created shadow work, so it's physical theater, but it's very physical. So a lot of acrobatics, a lot of rolling around, a lot of partnering, and it's actually quite similar to the way I teach to lift weights. It's about sharing the load and working with the weight. It's a pretty cool company, definitely, we're checking out. So more contemporary, more physical theater.

And during this period of your life, how much of your ability to do the things you were doing were just based on natural ability, obviously, you're naturally pretty gifted, versus being quite astute and dialed in to the science of what was going on. I remember certainly in my late 20s and early 30s was when my immortality started to vanish. I trained so hard growing up, like I couldn't hurt myself. You just couldn't be hurt in your teens and 20s, no matter how dumb you were. By the time you're in your late 20s and early 30s, like if you're not doing things correctly, it catches up. And I can only imagine with the stress of what you were doing, even all of your gifts couldn't protect you. So what was the balance of just raw athletic talent versus very specific, well thought out steps? It's interesting because with dance, it's very in the moment and that company in particular

is an improv-based company. Wait, wait, wait. You mean you guys are improv-ing when you're doing your shows? No, not when we're doing shows, but when you're making work, it's all based on improvisation. So it's a lot of intuition. It's a lot of, I mean, there's definitely like a training time where you're learning how to work with each other and basically not fight with each other to make the movement happen, but a lot of the coolest stuff we came up with was all based on improv.

Wow. Yeah. So you're dancing how many hours a day at this period of your life? So we created a work from the ground up that's actually still touring. So we were in the studio initially for eight months, eight hours a day, five days a week. And then once we started touring, I actually found touring much harder

because you were on an international flight once a week and living in hotels and living on red wine and chocolate doing a show every night, eight shows a week. So it was just the different stress, it's a different challenge to your system. So I actually found touring much harder because I would wake up and I would be like, where am I?

I had no idea. And that's kind of what got me out of it. I was like, yeah, I'm tired of waking up, not knowing where I am. So explain to me what your body looked like when you left that and started in New York, were you totally lean, emaciated and wasted because you could barely keep weight on, given how much you were moving around, or was that an environment where you actually had to work to keep your weight down because of the

strength, the mass ratio that was needed to do the acrobatics? Definitely had to keep my weight down, but actually it wasn't so fixated on it because of number one, I was younger and just traveling all the time and dancing all the time, you really didn't have to worry about it too much. I was definitely, I had less mass. I was pretty skinny by the time I finished touring, no butt, no legs. I mean, definitely stronger than most, aesthetically than most answers would look like, but pretty skinny compared to what I am now. Yeah. So you get to New York, do you have a sense of what you want to do other than not travel?

Not a clue. I was basically like, oh, maybe I'll try the Broadway thing. I did a couple of auditions like this is definitely not for me. And I actually did a pretty intensive yoga teacher training. and I actually did a pretty intensive yoga teacher training. It was like a month long, eight hours a day, five days a week, very similar to what I'd come from, and started looking for training jobs. Because before I started touring, I actually had a quite successful business in Atlanta, training and teaching group fitness.

It just kind of seemed like the natural fit to go back to that, but it just, I wasn't content with the regular gym setting. So I was definitely looking for something. So I started teaching, once I finished the teacher training, I was teaching 25 classes a week. I was training a good, Julian people a day, work in seven days a week, just trying to make it in New York.

Yeah, you're like the James Brown of trainers. You're like the hardest work in women in New York. Yeah, you're like the James Brown of Trainers. You're like the hardest working woman in show business. Yeah. It's crazy. I love it. Number one, the hustle's real in New York. You have to live that for a while, and it's kind of hard to get out of that.

A bit. I get to have it. We're working on it, though. Yes, I know. The week has been tricky. We are. I think I've had more downtime this week than I've ever had in my life. It's good.

So you were basically, are you sort of freelancing for lack of a better word at that point or you sort of wed to one gym that you're working out of? I was wed to one gym and then I was working, I was teaching group fitness there and then I was teaching group fitness at a couple of other studios. It's kind of the group x way in New York, like you work all over the place. That kind of came to a halt. I got involved with a rowing studio that was just opening, it's called City Row. So I knew nothing about rowing, but it was right across the street from my gym. And all I could think was, yes, I can start running around like a crazy person

and just walk across the street to teach class. So that was pretty much the end of my running around. So it was that gym and then city row. And that was it for a long time. All right, so at that point in time, what is your philosophy and how are you dividing your gym time? You've got obviously these group fitness classes. your philosophy and how were you dividing your gym time? You've got obviously these group fitness classes. I assume that's what people now see

in an orange theory fitness or a Barry's boot camp type thing. And then how much of your gym time is that versus one-on-one with a person, strength training, powerlifting, et cetera? I was probably doing eight, nine sessions a day, privately, and then teaching one to two classes a day. Okay. So what was your, as far as the private stuff, what was your philosophy at that point in time? Where were you, what was your North Star? How did you guide people? Basically do no harm. Just try to keep people as safe

as possible and make it as pretty as possible. Try not to load people too much and just keep them safe. What was your knowledge base at that point? Just general strength and conditioning. I went to Exos, which is a center they usually train a lot of professional athletes. They do a lot of combine training. I did all of their mentorships, actually. So basically it turned into like basic movement for a lift and then some sort of energy systems

development work, pretty basic. And just trying to keep people as safe as possible. When I think back on my sort of strength training, careers, not the word I'm looking for, I think just trajectory is probably the right word. I'm amazed we don't get more hurt with how unstructured it is and the way we teach people how to do things where you can cause a lot of damage.

Back squat, a deadlift, an overhead press. These are things that frankly speak to the resilience of our species that we just pretty much always do these things biometrically incorrect. And then we load ourselves repetitively, repetitively, repetitively, for the most part, people cannot limp through it. So what percentage of the person you've become today, were you at that point in time? No, like 30%. Okay, wow. So, which is probably still pretty good, right? Yeah, he has. Everyone got strong enough and no one will get hurt.

So what was sort of the first thing that began, or at least put you in the path to where you are now, which again, I've sort of built you up maybe in a way that you're uncomfortable with, but having this sort of completely integrated systems approach to, wow, there are all of these different philosophies that we've got. I start to integrate into how we get people to move and then how we load them. Right. I think when I first started training, I remember thinking, I didn't understand why people

couldn't do what I could do. I didn't understand why certain things were hard or impossible. Can you give me an example? Like, why can't someone squat? What is limiting them from being able to squat? Because you've never not been able to squat perfectly, right? I know that I've never been able to squat perfectly, but I've always been very movable and good balance

and relatively strong and I just didn't understand and I wanted to understand what was limiting someone. So I would see all these accommodations and conversations happening and things that were just impossible and learning issues. Like why can't that person learn what I'm telling them to do? And my kind of frustration, not with them, with me not being able to help them, led me just to really diving into a lot of continuing education. So I actually left the gym that I was at, and I went to another gym which was more like a true strength and conditioning setup.

The gym I was at prior was more like a spa setup. I wanted to learn more about lifting. I wanted to learn more about Olympic lifting, powerlifting. Had you done any Olympic or powerlifting yourself until that point? I had a mentor that I worked with at my first gym who was really into powerlifting and he taught me a lot of the basic lifts and I was just kind of naturally good at some of them

but I wanted to know more. So I started working a gym called Soho Strength Lab downtown. Anything that has lab in it is gonna be awesome. I agree. There's this place here called swim labs in San Diego. I'm just gonna make a plug for them. Yeah, yeah. Freakin amazing. Yeah, best swim school. That's awesome. It was a really good place for me at the time. I learned a lot from those guys. They were very smart, very attuned to strength and conditioning. Some pretty talented Olympic

lifters coming out of there., some strong dudes and women actually. So it was good for me to be there, but I also wanted to be kind of on the physical therapy side of things. So I started working one day a week in a clinic, and that's how I was introduced to functional range conditioning. So went to the cert, was just like, wow, it opened up so many doors for me of why some things could be challenging, how if we don't have a lot of proprioception and awareness of where our body can go in space, motor control that it won't go there actually. So that was kind of my first situation with really diving into continuing education past just a regular strength and conditioning start. Well, I definitely want to come back to FRC. Your comment about squatting is an interesting one.

I started squatting when I was about 13. I think I've told you the story. You know, I just kind of got in with a bunch of older men, like, they seem like older men there in their 30s. When you're 13, they seem like they might as well be a hundred who took me another wing and just got me powerlifting and I think when you start somebody that young and you're around these monsters who are squatting six seven hundred pounds You just you grow and you do that thing

But I remember always being amazed and feeling these I say something you did Which is I would try to teach somebody to squat and I actually had no idea how to do it in other words I could teach somebody who had the natural ability which means, which means they didn't need me in the first place, but anybody who didn't have either the ankle flexibility, the hip flexibility, the balance, this stability, all these things, I couldn't do anything. But I could never understand why. And it's funniest thing about two years ago when I met Michael, maybe it was a little over two years ago, Michael's tranceness. He did something that it was like the biggest aha moment I've ever had, which is he said,

have you ever met a person who on their back can't do a perfect squat? And I was like, that's so much easier. If you lay anybody on their back, you can put them into a perfect squatted position. So why is it that everybody laying on their back can be in a perfect squat? And I'm talking perfect, the hip flexion, knee flexion below everything is perfect. But under the load of their own body weight,

very few people can do that. And you start to realize that's the stability piece. If you can't even stabilize the weight of your own body, there's no way you're going to be able to load yourself. So for me, that was this moment of holy cow. There's a whole world here I've never considered understanding. So what was the first thing you saw in FRC, which maybe we should take a step back and explain what FRC is after you maybe explain the first thing you saw. I want to spend some time understanding this because it's one of the many systems you now bring in to what you do and how you coach.

I think the biggest thing was you can't go where you don't know. So if you're working on in-range joint control. Explain what that is. So we like to live life in our mid-range. So it's very comfortable there. We're very used to being there. But if you think of overhead flexion, your in-range would be way back here, but you probably have more than that depending on a lot of situations. But if you're so used to going just here over and over and over again, and you're really able to go here. This is the area you don't know or the area you can't control. And their whole thing is control yourself.

So it was interesting to me, you don't think about if you don't use it, you lose it. Our brain, our central nervous system is quite a lazy one. And if you don't kind of remind yourself where your in ranges are, you'll stop going there. Digress, for a moment to tell a story about the first time you exposed me to this. Do you know which story I'm going to tell? I have no idea.

It was doing a tricep kickback and range. And... And... With how many pounds? Well, you went to the dumbbell rack and you got a five pound dumbbell. And I remember you walking back to me and I was thinking, I wonder what she's going to do with that other than like I would open.

Yeah, like I it wouldn't even hold the door open. Like what could you possibly be doing with a five pound dumbbell? And then you had me get down on my hands and knees. And maybe we'll even demonstrate this exercise afterwards because this podcast will be accompanied by a great video. But you had me do basically what amounted to a tricep kickback but at end range. So full shoulder extension company with scapular retraction depression. And I think I got to seven reps before my triceps seized and I couldn't do anything.

Right, right. I just couldn't imagine that that muscle, which ostensibly is strong in its mid-range, could be so weak and deconditioned at its end range. Right. I mean, you have to think you're in maximum stretch on the opposite side and you're having to control that length with the regressive side, the opposite side. And it's your weakest at your in range. Yeah, just show people the position. I mean, from a explain all the terms you just said. So we talked about scapular position. Yeah, retraction and then depression shoulder extension. And then you're adding load onto that with elbow extension.

Yeah. And again, with five pounds. With five pounds. So most people, I do that body weight first and they're like, I should feel pretty good about myself. Yes, totally, thousand percent. I was so annoyed by that. And then the next day, I went to the eight pounds and you were like, you're such an idiot.

Now you're doing it incorrectly. Right, because when you're working in range, you have to actually hold in range. If it drops out of it, then you've lost it. And to really get in touch with the mechanical receptors, like you have to be on in range. It's a stimulus that your brain wants. It won't fire to it.

It won't pay attention to it unless you're actually on in range. So one of the things that you started talking about the first day we ever met was you were very attuned to scapular mobility, which resonated with me because I have very, as you like to put it, gooey. So gooey. I just like the gooeyest scapulae, if that's the plural word for it. When did you start to recognize the importance

of that scapular girdle? Because again, I don't think a lot of people walk around thinking about this and thinking about the pathology that results when a person can't control it. Well, the cool thing about your scapuses are super movable and they sit right on the thing about your scaps is they're super movable and they sit right on the back of your ribcage

and they kind of guide where your shoulders should go and they guide where your ribcage should go. So when you are in scapular protraction. So show people what protraction is. So protraction would be a reach, which we're all made to do. So we have these beautiful rounded ribs at the back. You have these triangular bones that sit over them. And as you said, they glide up and down.

They should glide up. Yeah. But when you get that good reach, you get a nice retraction of the rib cage, which allows air to go into the back of your rib cage, which I could talk about that relationship for hours. But it gives you more of a three. It helps with breathing. It gives you more of a three dimensional It helps with breathing. It gives you more of a three-dimensional can assist with a position in particular, breathing exercises I should say, but it assists that three-dimensional breath, which is so incredibly important for stability,

but also kind of guides where your shoulders should go, extension, flexion, all of it, because your scaps move accordingly. So what muscles play a role in that and why do most people have the inability to control it? Because one of the first things that you start having people like me and others do are cars, which we're going to spend some time talking about, just as a way to start having people understand what that mobility cycle is. Cars to teach you where your scaps are. Step one is to know where they are,

and then you can figure out what you can do with them. But a lot of people don't even realize, because they can get stuck for a lack of better words on the packier ribcage, and you can, if you don't use it, you lose it. So you can kind of lose a sense of awareness of how they can move or even if they can move. I don't think I ever thought about it. I mean, I'm someone who had, I think above average kinesthetic awareness, I always played a sport that involved my upper body.

So it was either boxing or swimming or something where you'd think I'd be a tune to that. No chance. Never gave it a thought. It can be a couple of things. It can be a stress response to hold them in retraction. So they're kind of loaded, retraction elevation. If you don't have great load tolerance in your hands and wrists,

these guys will always try to help you out and that kind of becomes your new normal. And it can impact breath, it can impact gate, it can impact shoulder mobility, all of it. Cars number one, I want them to know where their in ranges are and what their scouts can actually do with minimal accommodation from head, rib spine. Can you show people a scapular car and tell people what it stands for? Cars stands for controlled, particular rotations. That is a movement that you learn in functional range conditioning.

So basically, you're trying to make the biggest circle you can with minimal accommodation. So head trying to stay as still as possible. Ribs not going along for the ride., ribs not going along for the ride, spine not going along for the ride. And also for me, it's maintaining breath. If you're having to hold your breath or hyperventilate to do a scap car, we got some things to work on. Yeah, and when we started them, we were doing them in squares because the coordination for me was so low. Circles are hard, because you'll see sometimes when people

don't have the ability to control it, they'll go circle jump, circle jump. They'll kind of skip over this, I call it like a neurological hiccup. They skip over a range that they're not used to being in, because the brain's like, uh-uh, uh-uh. So I like to start in squares first, because they're easy to visualize,

and they're very easy to control. So it's like step one, step two, step three, step four. And then you're trying to get that circle to move consistent. Right. So it's elevation, protraction, depression, region, and you will not change one thing at a time. Nice and smooth, coordinated. change one thing at a time. Nice and smooth, coordinated. And when that gets easy, we then do it under load, which is really hard.

Yeah, so then you make it more closed chain and closed chain, meaning your hands aren't free anymore. They're more, they're closed. Yeah, so for people to understand, open chain is the hands or the feet are on air. Closed chain is on the ground or on the wall or something. I try to get people to close chain as quickly as possible, so I'll put them on the wall

to be less load because I want their fingers and their hands to be experiencing load because they should all the time. But it's tricky when you start adding load or adding speed, your strategies show up. Elbow start bending, spine start moving, head start moving. So now you're getting pretty deep into the FRC world. And what are some of the other things you're bringing back into the gym from FRC? And actually, before we do that, give folks a bit of a background on FRC and its use application.

I think that's the one that was formed by the Canadian chiropractor, right? Dr. Andrea Espina, he's a chiropractor. They have a whole system, functional range system. So they have a soft like a manual therapy, part of it, and then kind of more of the strength application of it. The biggest thing was like using isometric input to remind your brain of where you are or what you can control.

They also do pales and rails, progressive angular isometric loading, which basically means you're putting isometric input into stretched stuff. And then the regressive side is actually owning what you've just stretched. So give it a little bit more of an explanation of those things. So the way they set it up, or the way the system would set it up, is you would hold a stretch. Let's say hip external rotation. You would find your in range of hip external rotation, hold it for two minutes, get the system to kind of accept that you're holding the stretch, because you know when you're on an in range of a stretch, initially you're like, no, you have to kind of accept that you're holding the stretch. Because you know, when you're on an in range of a stretch, initially, you're like, no, you have to kind of give yourself time to calm down and accept the stretch.

From there, you would do an isometric input at various intensities. A isometric meaning force without movement. Exactly. Force without movement. So you would push into that stretch and you actually feel more sensation to the stretch. So it's really great when you're working in that capsule full of mechanoreceptors. It's great for communicating to your brain like, okay, I can actually be here and work here and own it. Right, so be there, work there. And then the rail, regressive angular isometric loading, would be moving in the opposite direction

to pull you into more stretch. And if you're truly on your in range, it ain't moving at all. So it can be quite frustrating and it's hard to pull into your in range, but it basically gives you the opposite side tissue to own your stretch. So let's also put each of these down as things will demonstrate when we get into the gym. I can certainly remember a few times that you had me do these and they're hard. You just don't feel like you have a strength and coordination when you're at that end-rage to then go and act.

Super stressful, absolutely. You do get a temporary mobility gain after that, but it has to be practiced for seems like forever to make it happen, just like with anything. So, I mean, FRC's one of its stated goals is sort of developing greater movement, obviously, in mobility. Yes.

Is it more of a PT slash rehab school of thinking, or is it more of a performance-based school of thinking, or is it more of a performance based school of thinking? Performance based, I would say. I mean, the functional range release, the manual therapy part of it is more of obviously a PT. I've actually taken a couple of those courses just audited to check it out. And it's basically the same kind of like you're holding the input because all input is stress and you have people push into it and then relax.

You're basically teaching them where tissues are by having them isometrically push, which is pretty interesting. It can be insanely helpful for increasing proprioception. So what did you see when you started bringing FRC back to the weight room? I mean, clearly better controlled movements, more coordination. Absolutely. Did you meet resistance? I mean, from people saying, come on, I just want to do my dead lifts and do my bench press.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. A lot of tall talking. There's a whole life tall talking, convincing. You don't do that with me. I'm pretty accepting of pretty much everything you put forth. Yeah, for sure, for sure. For sure.

Sometimes. At that point, I'd been training my clients for so long that they're like, that did another thing and she's just trying stuff, which was great. Mostly in the sweet room setting, I was using cars and then isometrics to get people to experience fields, if you will, before we would lift. Doing some pales and rails at the end, because it's not good to do pales and rails before you lift, because I tried to do that. I tried to max out once after doing pales and rails and I nearly died. I was like, goo, essentially, just kind of neurologically fried, because it's a lot. It's stressful on the system. I'm really big into educating why we're doing this,

trying to make it accessible. So people were doing it. I had some people that were like, I'd be like, well, I don't really want to try anymore. But it went well. It went really well, actually. So another one of these sort of schools that you've integrated is something called the Postural Restoration Institute, PRI. How did you come in contact with PRI? Same idea working in the clinic and just kind of doing a ton of research. Just went to a course and wanted to check it out. First course I went to was actually a pelvic course which crazy because I had no idea what they were talking about at all because it's more designed for PT's and caripractors. Some strength and condition coaches use it but it's mostly for in the clinic

type things. But I just kept taking courses. I've taken to have feeling taken all the primary courses. I've been to their advanced integration and a ton of secondary courses, actually. What's the overall philosophy of PRI? So they put people in patterns. So they say basically your liver is on your right side. So you're going to naturally have more diaphragmatic compression on the right side. So we're going to tend to kind of spin towards that in times of stress, and it creates different

deviations in movement. So it makes you quite asymmetrical, and it can create pain and discomfort. Basically that would be a left AIC pattern, if you're really kicked to the right. In a left AIC, they would say that your your left rib cage is kind of stuck in external rotation, and your left side of your pelvis would be an interior tilt. Right, so if this is, if I'm looking at you and this is my right side, the left side is tilted a little bit more forward. Yeah, which makes your right leg more of a standing leg and your left leg more of a swinging leg.

Right. And again, so I always knew most people preferred to load the right leg if they're standing. Anybody can try this at home. Just notice, anytime you're standing there, you're going to preferentially want to stand on the right side. I assumed it was a dominance thing, but when I met you, I remember you saying it's probably more to do with, we get more compression from the liver on that side. I do see it. In most people, I kind of assess, I do see that they prefer their rights. I do. And I'm a left. That's right. You're a lefty. And one of my kids is a lefty. So I'm looking forward to seeing how that turns out. But yeah, it'll be interesting. All the lefties out there, I'm curious,

is to whether when you catch yourself, you're right side loading. The whole idea is because you're on that right side a lot, especially in times of stress, that you're going to get more repetitive injury on the right, and the left side just becomes kind of weak and almost useless. Do you remember the day we met? So that's January of 2019, some miserably cold New York day. Do you remember what my only complaint was? Right SI. Right SI joint was just and elbows right elbow. Yeah a little bit really it was that right SI that on some days Didn't bother me and I could deadlift like a beast and then on some days

I just couldn't deadlift as heavy as I wanted to and that was was sort of it. And I really, I thought other than that, everything was fine. Right. And then we did your squat assessment. Yeah. Yeah. Should we include the pre and post photos in the show now? Please, I think I have it on my phone. Okay. What did you see? In your squat assessment, I saw you standing

on your right side. I saw actually a dent right above your elite crest from the compression on your right side, I saw actually a dent right above your elit crest from the compression on the right side. I saw a left scapular hike and you were spinning out slightly to the left. Which is remarkable to me given how, quote unquote, well, I thought I could squat. I could squat deep. I had total balance and control, but it's when you showed me the picture from behind that I was shocked.

I mean, it was so clear how much I favored my right side in that squat. And you had later, you talked about some right knee pain, but yeah, it was pretty interesting to watch that spin out. It was very clear on you. So, tell me about the ribs, because boy, if there's another thing that you just hammer into people, it's the ribs. It's your center of mass. Respiration is one of our constant stresses, because you do it 20,000 plus times a day. And if you have the same strategy for dealing with

respiration, whether it's a big vertical inhale or a big vertical inhale that's asymmetrical or holding your breath, it's it hasn't an impact on you. So putting you in making sure that your breath can be wide and three-dimensional and easy is vital for creating good, efficient, coordinated movement. Now, for some people, their first exposure to even the awareness of the breath is yoga or maybe even Pilates. If you meditate, for example, if you do Vipassana meditation, we use the breath as a object of focus.

But it's not taught. I mean, in other words, it's not a forced breath. It's just you're breathing naturally. But for me, I think Pilates, which I did a couple of classes with my wife back in the day and actually found it quite interesting. I could just never make the time for it was sort of my problem. I distinctly remember the woman that was teaching me

sort of putting her hands on my back and just sort of having me breathe into her hands. And that sort of resonated years later when we started doing some of this stuff. And I was like, oh, okay, that's interesting. And of course, by that point, I'd already been really exposed to DNS, which in and of itself was just an incredible experience to be able to then learn how to breathe into my pelvis. But these things are not mutually exclusive. You can breathe wide and deep and create the right structure within the rib cage, correct? Yes, because when you take a full inhale, your diaphragm

descends, which you have two diaphragms. They both descend. To reverse engineer it, the more productive your exhale is, the more productive your inhale is going to be. When you exhale, your ribs should go into internal rotation. So inhale, exhale. But if you exhale and they stay put and you go to inhale again, you only have one way to go and that's up. And what does that person look like? How does that person show up to you? It could be very subtle, but usually an anterior tilt, a bilateral rib flare, retracted scapula, sometimes the forehead head. And what type of symptoms do they have? What's their problem? Where do they struggle? Plantar fasciitis, knee pain, hip flexor discomfort, anxiety, lower back pain, shoulder pain, all the pains.

I mean, not all of them, but one of those or two of those or more. It's kind of amazing how numb we can become to certain chronic tensions, that sort of consistent nagging trap tightness that you almost forget is there until it's finally under control. You can finally put your shoulders back down. They can unload. Another constant stress is gravity. How are you working with or against gravity? If you're not breathing well for a lack of better words and if you're not dealing with gravity well, that has a high cost.

You're having to hold this and you're going to have that loading all of the time. So what do you think is the root of that problem? I mean, there's probably some anthropologists who could speak to this, but presumably our ancestors never did more than they needed to. They would have conserved energy. They didn't want to fight gravity more than they needed to. So presumably, we evolved in an environment that didn't promote the movement patterns we have today. Would you buy that? I think that external stress has a big thing to do with it, not sleeping well, staring at a screen. Your eyes are always fixed on the screen, so you're missing out a lot of the peripheral parts of

vision, which is stressful, because you don't know what's going on around you. A lot of people think that just the sitting part, which the sitting part is rough. It's never good to be in the same position all the time, but I think it's more of your eyes are always fixed. You're worried about meeting a deadline. That's interesting, because I would have said, oh, look, the root cause of this is sitting. You're saying that's just probably one of the components of it. It's sitting plus a lot of chronic stress as opposed to acute stress because I suspect

our ancestors had tons of acute stress. Tiger is there. This guy's going to kill me. Probably not a lot of worry about, as you said, mortgage payments and divorce. And footwear I'm guessing too has played a pretty harsh role in this. I got to think that going from a minimalist pattern to a heavily supported pattern has altered our attachment to the ground. It goes back to that whole thing if you don't use it, you lose it.

So if we're never experiencing load through the toes in the forefoot and you're never feeling your feet, so to speak, you're going to lose that with the squishy heels. You're going gonna kick back. I've literally seen people just standing there and their toes are just popped up because they don't even know their toes exist. What gave you the evil idea to start doing that toe yoga? Actually, I got that from FRC, actually.

They do it as a part of their morning routine and it's funny because it is so hard and I assist a lot of FRC certifications to watch these people try it for the first time. Their brains are about to explode. And they're like holding their breath and squeezing their fingers. And basically how well is your brain able to communicate with what your feet can do? Was I in the top 10 worst initial? I wasn't great. But did I how bad was I? Most people trying it for the first time that I've never really tried it aren't great. So yeah. Maybe just

using your hand as though your hand is your foot and assuming your thumb is the great toe, go through the assessment. The whole idea is you want to keep all four bases of support with this would be my heel and then lifting all five of them up. And can the AB duct, but that's huge because a lot of people are like, all right. So can the AB duct number one and can you without changing these guys, so no curling, can the great toe go down and then also can the lateral forego down in the big guy up with minimal ankle movement, just to see if they can't dissociate. And something as simple as that, you could make the case that if you're not doing that,

your feet aren't fully connected to the ground. Shows how well your mapping is. If they can't move, if they can't dissociate, you probably aren't using them when you walk. They're just like fingers. They dampen stress. They dampen force. You've got people that are, when you're walking, that force is one time your body weight, but as you start running, that increases, and as you run faster, that increases more.

So, it's just a bunch of just pounding. Yeah, I think I'll never look back. I mean, I don't own a single pair of non-minimalist shoes now for exercise, if not for anything. And I just can't imagine not exercising barefoot or with a minimalist shoe. And making that transition a couple of years ago, what a difference it's made to be able to really start to experience my feet. I mean, I took it to a whole level for a while. I was using toast base for 24.7. I had the toast base was you could wear during exercise. I had the ones that you would use to stretch out your toes when you were just

sitting around. And it was a big transition for me. I mean, I don't know why. I don't know, again, if that's just a normal pattern for someone who's now crammed their feet into shoes for so long. Tight shoes are a big, I see that, you know, Morton's neuroma, just the tight squeeze. You're not using them anymore. So your brain's like, cool, I don't need to think about them anymore. You may have made the example. It's sort of like imagine you had a glove on your whole life and then you took it off, but you really had no ability to move your thumb in a different way from your fingers, how limited you'd be, and your ability to

transmit force to the outside world and resist force. People don't think about their toes and their feet until there's a problem. Above your waist is two-thirds of your mass. They're basically supporting that mass all the time and pushing youth or space. So actually the way we met was through Michael, which I alluded to, and Michael met you through DNS. Yeah, I was at, I think, exercise two when I met him January, a couple of weeks

before I met you actually. Talked me about then your foreign to dynamic neuromuscular stabilization. I never did a deep dive into DNS. The positions were great. I love how you use your developmental patterns from three months to walking. I love kind of reverse engineering that and putting people in some of those positions. I think it's great. I love the talk about developmental, just skills and how we lose them as we start moving around. I have three kids and my youngest is three.

And I'm sure my other two did the same thing, but I didn't have an eye for it. But now that I've been into DNS for two years watching my three-year-old move is like being at a DNS seminar with the world's best teacher. He is like a little prodigy. I just can't believe it. I just can't believe how innately these kids load perfectly and move perfectly and do so efficiently. Like you watch him get up from a position without using his hands, just rolling his load from the greater trochanter down the femur over to the knee and boom, he's up and it's like he didn't even miss a beat. And you just think the fact that we are born with that neuromuscular control is so humbling, is so remarkable, is such a testament to evolution,

and to think we flush it down the toilet by the time a kid is six years old. Right. They're missing out on the chance to roll around on the floor anymore after they go to school. That's what we're designed to do. Move around efficiently, and then once you stop, it stops. It's amazing when you look at people as adults and think, how did we possibly come from kids like that? And I guess for people who don't know much about DNS, at some point I will absolutely be doing a dedicated podcast to that as well. But basically it came from a school in Prague

that initially I believe was interested in understanding how kids with cerebral palsy could be trained or retrained to move By going back and teaching them developmental steps that they missed based on what kids without CP learn So it started out as really a PT school that said hey kids with CP Missed this step from a neurologic standpoint, and that's what's completely impaired their movement pattern as adults, what if we can, as kids, train them to do, the kids without CP do, and from there, of course,

it then morphed into weight. We could, this is a school of thinking that can help people without CP. And so through that lens, I've found it to be just remarkable. But again, going back to the way I sort of introduced you, most people I interact with are practitioners of one discipline. They are very steeped in X, very steeped in Y, or very steeped in Z. You don't claim to be the world's expert in any of these things, but you like to borrow

from all of them, including many we won't get to. So now, fast forward to where we are now, which is you're the interloper who's taken from these systems, and you and I have had many discussions, and maybe you'd like to share, there are aspects of each of these systems you actually don't find particularly helpful. Is there any that stand out that you're like, for the work I do, I don't think this aspect of PRI or FRC or DNS is helpful? I don't think you're going to offend anyone. I know you're worried about that.

I like to look at the human that I'm working with. And sometimes doing cards is not what they need. They might need more distal control, more distal load tolerance. They might need just to control their ribcage. So then and they're hyper stress and I call them hot with anxiety, they might need to just lay down and breathe to kind of tap into that parasite with that oxide that PRI would give you. Sometimes people need to be upregulated. So doing a higher intensity pale and rail would be great. But nothing's a one-size-fits-all because we're

all so different. Yeah, I remember you once talking about most people are of the mindset that a knee valgus is a no-no, and we want to do everything we can to avoid it. Maybe explain to folks what a knee valgus is. When you're doing a lunge, for example, the knee would cave in towards your midline. Right. I think for most part, people knee would cave in towards your midline. Right. I think for most part, people would agree we'd like to minimize that. But you don't take a purest view of that.

Your view is not that knee-valgous is evil. No, I say train knee-valgous because it happens sometimes. And if you have someone with a chronic knee problem or discomfort or pain, let's put them in that position and teach them how to own it because that might be part of it. Your brain's number one job is to keep you safe to protect you. If every time you go into valgus, it doesn't feel comfortable, that could be a part of the problem. So train knee valgus because it's going to happen in life.

You're going to bend down to pick something off the floor and your knee is not going to be perfectly in line with your hip and your second toe. It's going to happen. So if every time that happens, there's pain or discomfort, let's figure out why and see if we train it if it's less discomfort.

Now, does that mean you would let somebody deadlift heavy with a valgus? Not necessarily. It depends. I'm not having a lot of people max out. Let's be real. And things get ugly when you max out. But if you're lifting at 65, 70, 75%, I think they should be pretty. I really do. Deadlifting is a sport. And I think they, unless you're a power lifter and most of the people I'm working with or not,

when I max out my heaviest deadlift, it was not pretty. It was ugly and I trained for things to be pretty. But if you're just training someone in the gym and they want a deadlift, keep it to a dull roar. Keep it conscious, pay attention, and keep that is technically sound as you can. So how much of movement do you think is,

or should be conscious versus should be subconsciously? And I guess let's start with two types of movement do you think is or should be conscious versus should be subconsciously? And I guess let's start with two types of movement. Let's start with basic movement, walking, grabbing something out of the cupboard, etc. And then let's talk about something very advanced like a deadlift or pick your favorite sport. I think that movement everyday life should be as subconscious as possible. A lot of people that are in pain or discomfort or worried about hurting themselves have this really big, bracing strategy in their trunk. And that doesn't leave a lot of space for things to go wrong.

Things going wrong, meaning like you're dog running in front of you or lights turning out that could be very broad. But to create a person who is reactive and adaptive and resilient, so to speak, they have to be able to respond to different changes in their environment. So if you're so fixated on making things so conscious, that space is out the window. So opening a cabinet and grabbing a cup should be pretty subconscious. You should have enough trust in your limbs for your midline to reflexively load. So your nervous system doesn't have to think about that so much. Now, most people when they do that are doing it subconsciously, but what if, as you evaluate

them doing these things, you realize their movement pattern is unsafe and is going to leave them susceptible to injury. How do you take them from subconsciously doing something incorrectly to subconsciously doing it correctly? Being very conscious about it. If there are muscles around their spine are quite loaded, like meaning they're an extension, I would have them work in a way to unload them, to give them a little more space because this has a high cost. Things are working. My posture isn't the best. I've always

noticed this. What is it about posture? And what does it tell us? Oh, there is no bad posture. That's my biggest fat fever, actually. And every person that I do an assessment on, the first thing is he's, oh my posture. I'm like, what's wrong with your posture? There's nothing wrong with your posture. Yeah, I know. I love how you love this thing. All right, let's talk about posture. Okay, the only time it's bad postures

when you don't have another option. If this is your only option, that ain't great. If this is your only option, that ain't great. You should be able to move all sorts of ways and have options because that's when things go wrong, when life presents you something and you don't have that tool. So training people in different postures is very important, exposing them to different postures, allowing their midline stability to be reflexive and not brace and not brace on one side, being able to load and unload accordingly. So how does one translate that to something like, okay, I'm sitting at a desk and I'm

going to be typing for a while, is the idea that one should vary their position from, you know, I'm here, I'm here, move it around. Like, what's the sin? Is the sin staying in one position for as long as possible? Yes, I think get up and move. I do more computer work now that I ever have, especially since COVID. And I'll find myself, because you can post a section just kind of turns off. You forget that you're supposed to actually move.

So it goes back to that whole thing. If you don't use it, you lose it. But what about certain things like, for example, don't we know that too much looking down is going to create unbelievable cervical strain? I don't know if I can answer that. I honestly don't know if I can answer that because there has been studies where no, it's just like saying, if you're dead lifting

with a flex fine all the time, there has been studies that it doesn't create any problems, but you would have to do an assessment to see the full picture of the human to see. What do you think makes that difference? Because I agree with you, there are two people that can have the exact same movement patterns and yet one gets injured and one doesn't. And what do you attribute that to?

What could explain those differences? How they tolerate load. And is that genetic or is it a function of these other stressors in their lives? I guess it could be genetic, but I would probably say more environmental. I don't know if I can answer that 100 percent, but if I had to make a guess, I would say more environmental stress. How are they tolerating load? Someone might be able to really tolerate load well like this for whatever reason.

So how do you then incorporate that into what you do? So when you see somebody and you assess them, how do you know if what you're seeing is a problem versus an adaptation? There's no way to answer that. Like it's kind of one of those things which came first, the chicken or the egg. All I can do is address what I see. So if I see them standing there and their response to gravity is to be here, then I would want to give them a different option for that. This is not bad, but it could be causing them discomfort.

So let's see if we give them a different option if that gets them out of discomfort and makes them more adaptable. I also do a lot of visual and vestibular testing, just to see. Obviously too much of that is out of my scope of practice, but if they have a glaring vestibular issue, I'm gonna train head movements to make them more responsive.

And I guess part of it could also be what they're presenting with symptomatically. I mean, when I showed up and met you, I was complaining of right SI joint pain, and then my movement pattern matched why I would have that pain. If I had shown up with the exact same movement pattern, but no pain whatsoever, would you have taken me down the same path of correction? However, would you have taken me down the same path of correction? Probably to some degree, because you had less stretchability or mobility on the right side of your ribcage, so I would want to give you that option. Do you remember sort of the general path you took me down?

How did we sort of address that issue plus the scapular gooeyness, which were probably my two biggest issues, right? We did a lot of breathing work with you. We still do. A lot of compressive work. Because you were presenting with a pretty significant bilateral rib flare. Like that was your strategy for deadlifting, for life, for walking down the street.

And I like how you say it that way. I like how you describe it as a strategy. It's funny, too. It's making light of it. Because you know how much I love talking about objective and strategy and tactics. So it's like, I have a strategy. Everyone does. I'm going to flare the hell out of my ribs, not just on one side on both sides.

Make it real hard. That is how I'm going to get through the day. So when I flare those ribs, I'm going to go into much more lumbar extension. Right. You have a history of with your surgery and that could be maybe part of the reason, an apprehension thing. You're afraid maybe to let those unload. So my QLs, which are these big muscles in the lower part of your back, they're locked and loaded. Locked and loaded. 24-7.

Ready for anything. And that's not uncommon. Uh-uh. There's a lot of people that go through life, locked and loaded in the QLs, ribs flared. Mm-hmm. Anterior tilt of the pelvis. Yeah. High cost.

Limits variability. Yeah. High cost limits variability. Yeah. It's so interesting to me, because to go back to my favorite, the scats, it impacts your gate. You can't swing your arms anymore when you're like that. So then you can't move the ribcage to load the leg, and it changes a lot of things. How long does it take to typically unwind that type of a pattern in somebody? Long time.

It can make it a hard sell because people will feel better once they start to learn how to either load things that need to be loaded or unload things that need to be unloaded. They'll feel better, but it takes a while to kind of stick, so to speak. It can be frustrating, for sure, because it's a process. How do you motivate someone to do this? I mean, you've worked with many of my patients. I want to have you working with many more of them. And you're right, it's a hard sell.

There are a lot of people who are like, that's not for me. I got my trainer. We do really fun stuff with boxing myths and body weight stuff and TRX and we do our thing. Three times a week, I don't need to meet Beth and do her silly exercises. Yeah, it feels good to crush it. I mean, it feels good when I crush it.

I love it. The jumping around heart rate going through the roof. Like, that feels good. But if that's all you do, you're limiting your options, and you're not efficient while you're doing it. When things have a high cost, they either break, or it just makes it much harder. So what is your strategy then for communicating to people the importance of this, or do you not do that and just say, look, you're not in the position of trying to explain to people the value of this. It's either they're going to see it or they're not.

And the ones who see it, you're going to guide them and the ones who don't. They have to wait until they get to that point in time. I mean, I educate the best I can. I'm very real. Why has it happened? I mean, I don't want to use anybody's names, including those people who have spoken publicly about you. But what do you think it is?

There are some people who, the moment I introduce you to them, it's like love at first sight. There's an immediate connection and they immediately respond to what seems like a reduction of pace, what seems like 25 steps backwards. What do you think are the traits common to people? And I would put myself in that category. I mean, I basically stopped doing any bilateral hip-hing for six months. I didn't do a deadlift. I didn't do a squat. You had me doing only very light split leg movement for six months. I mean, it was kind of infuriating. I remember. I'm so pissed. But I believed you. There's something I don't know what it is. Like I think I just believed. I think there's just little, you can see little improvements.

Oh, my feet don't hurt quite as bad as they used to or I could, I'm always reassessing and taking photos of everyone. I want people to see. And even if it's this much, I'm like, but we're going in the right direction. If it's done right, it's going to be this much at a time. If you see vast improvements, it's just not going to stick.

That's just not the way we work. So I'm always taking pictures of people. I'm always, it's very subjective. My feet feel better and I ran another, an extra half a mile and I had no pain. That's a win. Like you have to point out the wins. Yeah, I'm trying to think back. I mean, I think at some point clearly my right-ass

I joined Stop Herding. In fact, it's been so long. It's hard to even remember what it felt like. That's a win. That's a huge win, but I'm trying to think what it took to get there. I remember for me one of the wins, and this will be hard to explain,

but it's the first time you hit me lay on my back, so knees are up, feet are flat. This was you trying to get me to contract my left hamstring. Do you remember this? Yeah, I think so. So it's basically, so knees up and it's contract. Push and pull. Push and pull with a pelvic tilt.

Without losing the tilt. Without losing the pelvic tilt. And I couldn't do that. You would want to fire ads to make it happen. Yes, and then my pelvis would flip the wrong way. And it's like, why can't I control this left hamstring? And that was really weird. And I was like, oh, I'll never be able to do this.

You might as well ask me to grow an extra foot. And then one day it just happened. It might have not been that long. It might have been like a month later. It was like, oh my God, this is so easy now. Because I think when we first started doing it, there was an aid. We put you on a plate. You put me on a block. Does it assist for a posterior tilt? Right. And now it's like, oh my god, like I can do that.

Blindfolded on the flat ground, it's so easy to find as you like to put it to find my hamstrings. To me, those were some of the things that said, oh my god, these really little things they start to work. The people that are successful, like you, pay attention when they practice. It's hard to pay attention, especially to the same thing all the time. When for the longest time, it will turn on and turn off and turn on and turn off and it can be so frustrating for sure. But having that control over your body, you have to pay attention to control it. Having that control over your body, you have to pay attention to control it. Well, I definitely am looking forward to working on

kind of creating a cool curriculum around how to teach some of this stuff with you because as you know, this centenary in Olympics is sort of my obsession. And I think honestly, unless you're training for the Olympics or your professional athlete, whose livelihood depends on what you do here and now, everybody should be training for the Centenary Olympics. What other sport matters? That's why you should exercise. Yeah, then being the best person who's in their 90s, who can crush everything, and everything should be an extrapolation backwards from that kind of begins with all of these

things around strength, stability, movement, control, all of these systems. I think one of the things that you've discovered through COVID is you can do a whole lot of this remotely. I can. It is so funny because I have so many requests on social media for online training. I was like, no way. Uh-uh. And then COVID hit. I was like, sorry guys, it's shut down. And I started doing 10, 12 virtual sessions a day. It was such a learning curve and it was so challenging. So what did you learn?

Like, what is it that has enabled you to become about as good as anybody out there virtually training? You have to be very clear with your words. For me, it was practice paying attention and practicing. You have to be very clear where you want them to be and what you want them to do and demonstrate. Now, do you find it? So I remember the very first time we did a virtual session, which was probably in March. Actually, it might have been April, because I remember thinking, I don't wanna do it, it's gonna suck, it's gonna be a waste of time.

But I was just also like in Beth withdrawal and I was like, okay fine, I'll do it. And I was like so pleasantly surprised at how efficient it was. It felt like 90% of what we had done in person. Do you think that's only because we had already worked in person and you you think that's only because we had already worked in person? And you knew me enough. Actually, no, I have so many patients now that I've never met in real life. It's interesting. Like so many. Probably now more than I've never met in

real life than I actually have worked with and put my hands on. And that might be increasing as a need. Yeah, totally. So, and do you find that it's just a vocabulary issue that the patients need to understand? Like, I'm trying to imagine how hard it would be to explain to somebody for the first time what protraction with depression of the scapula is. At least I had the luxury of always knowing what those words meant just from medicine, but that's hard stuff for normal people who don't have the lingo training. What I've found, because we have a pretty extensive exercise library now, is they'll

get the first kind of introduction with me as I'm doing our assessment, and then they can see the video. And I think it actually makes for better learning, because they've been exposed to it. They can kind of review the video and then feel it out for themselves. And then we'll check in in a couple weeks and it's like, wow, that's really cleaned up. I think it makes for better learning because you have to have more responsibility to do it on your own. Now, the other part of this is someone listening to this might think, well, do you actually do any real training with these patients?

My favorite story is the guy who, what did he decide? He was gonna pay you a thousand dollars for every inch you put on his butt. He did. And he did pay you. He did pay me. Three thousand dollars today.

Actually, too. I'm working on another, too. You're gonna get a couple thousand more dollars on his head. I hope so, hope so. I love that, I love that bet. That was the best one ever. I like to lift. I totally like to lift. I'm a meat-headed heart. So what are some lifts that you just think? Everybody, male, female,

thick, thin should be doing. I mean, you're a huge deadlift fanatic like you. Oh, yeah. I love to deadlift. We trap bar and straight bar every single week. Is there anybody who you don't like putting through deadlifts? A lot of people. Is it because they can't do it yet? For me, I love split leg work. I mean, I personally hate split leg work and I make myself do it, but it's so applicable to real life.

When you say split leg work, tell people what you mean. Split squats, walking lunges, single leg RDLs. You just get so much bang for your buck as far as hip stability and just kind of owning your movements as opposed to bilateral work when you could kind of wriggle yourself around. I think part of the single leg tragedy, I use tragedy kind of lightly, is it's like the tide going out and seeing

who doesn't have their bathing suit on. Totally. You really understand what's wrong. Right, right, absolutely. Your only is good on two legs as you are on one, I think. Yeah, so is it your goal to get everybody to be able to do a deadlift at some point? If they want to, yes. But you're saying you can get somebody with a bunch of split leg work,

you can functionally get them to do the same stuff. Yes. Yes. The whole thing is like how well can they do their work without holding their breath, and how well do they actually own that work? How much are their legs actually working? Because you can wriggle yourself around and use anti-gravity stuff and just like you do walking through life. So I want to see how, with how much integrity can you do that? Are things coordinating well together? Is it efficient? Can you actually breathe? That's important.

So what are some of the things, I mean, you've seen my list, I think, of 20 activities I wanted to be able to do in my 90s. And maybe not talking about what your specific events are in your Centenary and Olympics. What are some of the principles of your Centenary and Olympics? In other words, what is a 95-year-old Beth, either want to be able to do specifically or conceptually? I want to be able to be independent. I want to be able to walk to the grocery store and carry it all back, just like I do now. I wanna be able to walk upstairs. I personally wanna tell me to do a pull up and a push up.

Just one, at least. Dance is such a big part of my life. I wanna be able to keep up. It's not gonna be as pretty as it was now, but. Talk about dance. I mean, that's so much going on there. Like, and we have patients that you take care of for whom dance is their life.

They're in their 60s. They couldn't be in better hands because to be working with someone who knows the discipline and then knows what challenges lie ahead, what does it mean to be able to dance into your 90s? Because that's a whole new level of coordination and balance from just walking, right? Totally. It's just there's more variables, but I think just being able to recall what you've just learned cognitively is so good for you.

To be able to put your body in different positions, have those options, I think is wonderful. I have a couple, I actually have an 80 year old, and I make him recall choreography. Very simple. It's nothing fancy or flary, but it's like a jazz box. Step touch and I'll do it in different orders and make him recall it because I want him to think I want him to pay attention Do you make him do that thing? I do with the little colored little things I have to hit. I brought the blaze pods No, but I do play other like the switched on game that I played with you. Just, I wanna know that he can respond, and if he trips, great, he's learning at a not fall.

And then he has to recover from the trip. He's track, I'll have him do step tap ups on a short box, and then I'll call out a different number. He's got to change movements and like not miss a beat, making him be reactive and pay attention and multitask. Can balance be trained? Yes. So you can take a person whose balance is oh, so-so and make it better?

Yes. And preserve it, presumably? Yes, it's a top-down and a bottom-up approach, but yes. So say more about how you would do that. After an assessment, they might have a vestibular discrepancy and they need to be exposed to loading their vestibular system, because a lot of time, balance is basically, how are you dealing with gravity?

How well are you dealing with gravity? Or as you would like to say, what's your strategy for dealing with gravity? It's not a great strategy. I would do basic vestibular training with them. Is that some of the stuff you have me do where my eyes are closed? Yeah. Well, I would have them do, yeah, eyes closed to work Is that some of the stuff you have me do where my eyes are closed? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I would have them do, yeah, eyes closed to work,

proprioception of the lower leg, because you need for your lower legs to be adaptive and reflexive. Because I've always felt I don't have good balance. I feel like it's improved. Yeah, and I just feel like when I was in my teens, I badly sprained both of my ankles. Probably, it's a miracle I didn't tear all the ligaments, but I feel like they

got stretched to the point where like my ability to evert and invert my foot now is comical, dude, at the laxity of those. And I feel like from that point forward, my balance just never was the same. With injury, chronic pain, surgeries that can disrupt mapping, so it can really impact your proprioception. But part of my centenarian Olympics goals, like one of my centenarian goals is a balance goal, because I realize things that we can all do now, you just take for granted now, boy, when you're 90, no way.

I mean, everything naturally declines anyway. So, and that's what I tell my 40 and 50 something. I'm like, yeah, you're great now, but that's not gonna stay great. And the more you ignore it, the worse it's gonna get. I'm not saying we should all be standing there where there are as close for a whole session, but it's okay to check in. Oh yeah.

As you know, I'm pretty hard-nosed about this stuff because my view is the decline is nonlinear and I don't think the average person, especially if they don't have a great facility with numbers and mathematics. Most people don't comprehend nonlinearity. We're pretty good at understanding linearity. Huh, between the ages of 20 and 30,

this thing went up by this amount. It's going to go up the same amount from 30 to 40. We can comprehend that. But when you think about the physical decline, a person experiences from 20 to 30, and then 30 to 40, and then 40 to 50, most people are like, yeah, I kind of got a handle on that. And what they don't realize is that the rate of decline,

it's accelerating so dramatically. And what you do from 50 to 60 to 70 is amazing. Now, again, people who have been able to watch their parents age or have spent enough time around people who are elderly will realize that if you don't put an astronomical amount of work into it, the decline that occurs between 60 and 70 and 80 is from another world. It's interesting because I have a client named Barry. I'm just, I'm in love with Barry. 80-year-old Barry. Oh my God, I post them on my social media all the time. He can do six strict push-ups now. He's a badass. But when I met Barry, I guess three years

ago now, he couldn't get up and down off the floor without assistance. He was in so much discomfort walking around because he spent 50 years just working. Very successful, make him money, doing his thing. Trading health for wealth. I don't know. But Barry is an animal.

Like I have to tell Barry to stop going to the gym twice a day. But he puts so much attention into it and he does all my little like weird coordination things and balances with his eyes closed. But Barry is incredible and he's doing like, I call it the Barry get up, his get up variation and he can get off the floor from his back only using one hand touching the floor. That is so important. Right. And let's talk about that for a second because if you're a 40 year old and you can't do that, there's a problem.

So every 40 year old can do that. But that becomes so hard when you're 80. And it's important to also understand what the implication of not being able to do that is. There's a safety part of this. If you fall and you can't get up without someone assisting you, there's an enormous safety problem. If you live alone or something like that, let's put that aside for a moment and just talk quality of life. A big part of the centenary and Olympics, as we do this with our patients, is getting them to literally do the exercise, right? So you're 47 years old now, your kids are 12, 6, and 3, and now map forward, add 45 years to where you are,

add it to the kids, extrapolate how old the grandkids are going to be, and maybe the great grandkids. And it all kind of works back to this thing that says, when you're that age, what's going to matter? I know that when I'm that age, it's not going to be podcasting, it's not going to be working, it's going to be enjoying what's left of time with friends, family, and doing activities that I like and nothing else. And a big part of that, because I still have the luxury of having young kids, is kids play low. Kids play down. They're on the ground. You can basically be stuck in a rocking chair,

sitting back in the room and not being a participant with them, or you can get the doll, play in the doll house, get the Lego, get the trucks, and get on the floor. If you could get up off that floor using your own support, that's a huge difference because you're more likely to do it than if you can't get on the ground and get up. Because if you can't get up on your own, I just think you're gonna be less likely to do it. And I think if you're less likely to do it, you're gonna start to pull back

and distance yourself from those activities. Yeah, it's a whole like spirit thing too. So what do you think about these guys, these muscles here? Your abs, your sticks back, yours in particular? No, no, no, just in general. I mean, there are things, if you're a bodybuilder, there are things. It's not a big deal. Yeah, I noticed there's no abs.

Like, I'm not doing crunches and I'm not doing a lot of hanging knee raises and stuff like that. We're not paying any attention to my six pack. Yeah, I mean, do you need quick flexion or your gymnast? No. That rigidity can impact your ability to be adaptable and reflexive. I've actually been doing a lot of study with IKN, Integrated Kinetic Neurology, which they have a big top-down bottom-up approach. And their whole thing is to make a resilient, robust human,

how reflexive can you be. That's the whole thing, because inevitably, something's gonna go wrong, and you have to be able to respond. And if you have a bracing strategy, you lose variability. Things can't go wrong, because you can't handle it, and then that lessens your options. This is something that I think probably only on the last three months have I really started

to be more aware of and maybe it's just that you're doing more pointing it out to me, which is how often I do revert to bracing my rectus abdominis muscles. For pretty much everything, we've made some huge strides in your deadlift the past four or five weeks because of that. Just teaching you, you don't need to brace like you're picking up a car. It's only 275 penalty. When we're doing relatively light stuff, I'm hindering myself by overdoing it.

Totally, totally. When you have that much attention on your bracing, you can't think about your legs. But even this simpler stuff, we should probably do a demonstration when we get into the gym later today of the breathing exercises where my heels are up on the blocks. The difference of being able to do that... Posterior tilt with your hamstring. Yeah, to use the hamstring versus the rectus abdominis to tilt the pelvis is

Everything. Yeah, not saying that that's the only way that you would do that But that's a different option most people don't have that So I want them to have that every time you take a step and have to use your hamstring You should not have to tip into an anterior delt or you shouldn't have to brace You are so obsessed with the posterior chain. It's really, it's just such a beautiful thing. One of my favorite exercises that I've never done until I met you is kneeling curls. Oh, God.

So why do we do our curls kneeling as opposed to standing? Because I want to get a lot of bang for your buck at a bicep curl. I want you to have to use your hamstrings to keep you from falling forward, because they're loaded in the front. And if you're playing with scapular protraction as well, you're getting a lot of reflexive abtone. You should feel abs and hamstrings, literally. I love it. In fact, I kind of do it as a hamstring exercise.

That makes you feel so good. I actually taught you something. I know it really does. I do it as part of my hamstring loop. Right. It's great. Because I don't find doing biceps all that exciting. It's like one of those things that's kind of a chore for me. You laugh at my little skinny arms.

It's such a great hamstring exercise. I love a bicep curl. Can really assist with loading tolerance to help with shoulder pain and all of it, but if you're gonna do it you might as well Be in a good position to get more out of it Any other sort of general principle so Again, I'm trying to think of all my Bethesms. There's so many but your obsession with hamstrings is sort of comical Well, they help hold your pelvis in place I'm guessing trying to figure out how much of that was just specific to my pathology

or is that something that is generally a theme for most people? It took me a while to understand the why. And again, if it took me a while, I think it's going to take the average person a while. I mean, I could at least picture the anatomy of the pelvis here, the ischial tuberosities, the attachments of the hamstrings. And if you have no control over those guys, palvus is all the way over here. So how do you do this? Well, again, this is a great way to explain it. Peter's strategy is, flex the muscle in front,

shorten the muscle in front, and you lift up from the symphysis pubis, right? So you've got the pelvis wraps around here. You've got the symphysis pubis, right? So you've got the pelvis wraps around here. You've got the symphysis pubis as the attachment of the rectus abdominis. So one strategy to pick this thing up is shorten this muscle. That's flexing your abs.

That's always been my strategy. Oh yeah, but that makes it impossible to get a good exhale. Exactly, because where's the other attachment? It's to my zyfoid, which is in the middle of this ribcage, so that's strategy sucks. And then people are like, you have great posture though. Yeah, and you have nice abs.

Right. Fabulous. But how do you feel? Not great. And I always thought, well, my hamstrings are totally strong, but I had no control over them. That was a fundamental difference. I don't think I had weak hamstrings.

I couldn't on demand get them. And therefore, I was never accessing them when I needed to. And it's funny, like when we met, my deadlifts were basically quad dominant movements. Right. You would kind of slip your knees forward and scoot under it. Yeah. It's a good strategy if you're trying to use your quads and you don't care that much about your back. Right, totally. Yeah. Hamstrings. Hamstrings. Hamstrings. Obsessed. Hamstrings, toes. It's a thing. Yeah.

How many people that you work with are in sort of chronic real pain? Because I don't think that my right SI joint was constituted chronic pain. But do you have people that come to you that are really suffering from something significant? I have in the past and a lot of it is just kind of down regulating. You have to make space for them to make change. And if you're really hot, like I like to call it, you have to let them down regulate a bit. So just totally like neurologically. Yeah. Those are the people I'll have put your feet on the wall. Let's just start breathing. Yeah. You mentioned rowing at the outset. So you started teaching at City Row. I guess it's been them now three months. You've had me rowing. That's funny. I rode for

a year in college and I used to do a lot of work on an Urg. I think every human should row. But the funny thing is I, my technique was obviously not very good. I was getting by on a lot of brute force. And now that you've got me doing it correctly, it's much more difficult. Difficult maybe the wrong word. It's much more involved. It is much more involved. What stemmed your obsession with rowing, aside from the fact that city row was across

the street from you and started. Well, I had to do a lot of research for them to kind of help develop a program. So I tried to make like an apple version of rowing like very easy to follow, but the more I would practice, I was like, wow, this is really getting me to move backwards. A lot of people don't move backwards so they lose a sense of backspace. And that puts you in a great position to breathe in your backspace, to reach with your shoulder blades,

to actually use your legs to push. A lot of people that were in a pretty high amount of back pain, I put them on a roller and a lot of things cleaned up. Which again, is very counterintuitive. You would normally say someone with lower back pain should never be rowing, just like they should never be deadlifting, right? Yeah.

And maybe we should even do a little bit of that when we're in the gym later today, which is what is it about teaching somebody the correct sequence of events on a rowing machine? You want to walk us through what a perfect stroke looks like in recovery? A lot of it's about finesse. When do you grip?

When do you relax? You have to let yourself relax. And most of the stroke is actually relaxed. So coming from catch position, the in. Right. So catch you at the very front. It's like a wedge on a deadlift. Explain the wedge.

I love the wedge. I love the wedge. The smooth wedge. Not just a good salad. So it's basically the position that you get in before you stand up with the weight. So you want to wedge into the floor. So the wedge has tension. It's the preload is the way I think of it.

Yes. Yes. Starting catch the preload is the way I think of it. Yes. Yes. Starting catch position, you have the wedge, you drive back through your legs, you have a nice tight grip because you have to connect yourself to the machine. That's what makes rowing so different from the deadlifting is it's kind of a loose situation. You have to really grab this. So rowing would be easier if there was more resistance at the front. Exactly. It'd be easier to connect to the thing that you're tensing up against.

Exactly. A lot of people have a hard time with and the catch is feeling that tension. And a lot of times because they're losing segmentation of the mid spine and it's hard to create tension when you don't have anything to push against. It's challenging. From there you drive back, once your hands get right. So who's doing the work right now? Legs, legs, legs, legs.

So, it's 60% legs. Once you get about to your knees, you have to start relaxing there. When you say to your knees, you mean once your hands pass your knees. You have to start to relax the grip. The drive is the most finesse part. Once you start to get a little further back behind your knees, you start to open up the hips. And the hips is another 30%.

So it's like when you stand up from a deadlift, at that point, you actually have to really relax because a lot of people want to go here and they're missing the hip extension because you go into actual hip flexion there. So you have to relax, bring the bar in. The bar is the biggest mistake because people want to rip the chain.

It's literally 10%. It's nothing. It should feel like nothing. And then the hardest part is letting it relax and you following it in. So for me, the hardest part is actually keeping the abs relaxed and keeping the ribs down. Goes back to that overbracing thing. It's my strategy. I know.

I just see all about the rectus baby. I know. I just see. All about the rectus, baby. I know, hang on tight for dear life. But that's what causes back pain. Yeah, and it's funny. I remember when you had me start rowing, my QLs would seize up. Yeah, you would write me and be like, I'm dying. Yeah, my QLs are fried.

And again, it wasn't back pain in a sort of, this is like pathologic, but I was like, this doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel like I feel like I'm on my bike, I feel great. But on the rowing machine, I just felt like crap. I think the barefoot rowing. The strapless rowing, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. Strapless rowing and learning to relax my hands when I crossed my knees.

That was the game change with respect. At that point, the QL pain vanished. So when you actually can relax the grip, this stuff can relax easier, because your arms and ribcage have a direct correlation. So if you're hanging on for dear life, this stuff is just so tight. So you can't relax if you're hanging on for dear life. And that's what makes it counter-intuitive, because people just want to hang on so tight, especially when it's new. And that's what makes it counter-intuitive because people just wanna hang on so tight, especially when it's new. And I see so many people, they just pop on the machine and go 35 strokes for a minute.

It's crazy as possible. And they're like, my back hurts. I'm like, well, yeah, I bet. I mean, I remember when I used to row, I feel like I was always trying to like, fatigue my upper body at the end of each stroke, trying to basically gas my lower body and upper body as much as it was humanly possible on each stroke, which almost undoubtedly meant.

Because really, you should be gasping your lower body should be fried when you roll. Lower body and abs, actually. When you're doing heavy, heavy, almost power poles, I feel my abs more than anything. Because they are bracing your torso. Yeah, because all that, it has to fire more because it's more force. So these are your breaks. So your breaks have to work harder because there's more force back from the catch. So do you use rowing as, do you use it as a form of high intensity training with people?

I'll substitute it for deadlifting a lot. And what would be a typical workout? 10 strokes at a time. Once I have people I'm working with Jill right now teaching her how to row, we're working on just speeds. Nothing faster than 24. Let's see if you can stay coordinated from there. That would be step one.

You have to be able to keep that coordination because as soon as you add speed and power, things are gonna start getting ugly. I can't go anything faster in about 25, 26. Isn't that funny? Yeah, it's really frustrating. Right, right. After that, I'll start adding a little bit of weight to the stroke.

So we'll start looking more at watts or split time. See if you can keep your speed kind of low, but see if you can have a higher wattage. But I don't usually start working higher speeds for a while because coordination kind of goes out the window. And I want them to stay coordinated again because we're not doing like 2k time trials and we have like one client that's doing that, you know? And then you told me his time and then I was like, oh, I kind of want to do a 2k test as well. Oh, he sent me his 5k today. What did he go? I care remember his total time, but he kept a 149 the whole time.

Pretty impressive, because his 2k, he was about 141. He was like 654 was his total time. Yeah. That guy. I have people do a lot of single leg rowing too. I love that. Yeah, it's great. That's what I love about it so much because like, I'll do my zone two.

I'll stay on a rower for 60 plus minutes. But you can also work on strengthen power development, which is so great. I mean, if you can zone two on a rowing machine, you're very efficient. Yeah, but I've been rowing every day of my life for the past seven years. I have a rower here. I have a rower in New York in my apartment. I was teaching multiple rowing classes a week. I'm just always on it.

You got me doing it now. It'll never be as fun as a bike for me, I don't think, but... That's cool. It's just a different situation. Yeah. I'd love it for runners, though. Why do you think it's a good augment for a runner? Less load, less impact on the lower leg.

Just give them a little bit of a break, but also really, you know, work the hips. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about concentric versus eccentric strength within a muscle. I want to demonstrate a little of this when we get into the gym because it's also another fixation of mine. Obviously, you know archery and hunting or something I'm really interested in. And one of the things I've paid a lot of attention to in the field, because I'm always sort of thinking about, I'm out there and I'm doing something, what do I need to bring back into my training

to make this a better experience? And the two most obvious things are scapular protraction is everything. On the arm that's holding the bow out, the difference between the good archer and the great archer is the great archer is always able to maintain protection. So when this hand is back here, they can keep a relaxed arm with a protracted scapula. Now why is that important?

Because when you're pulling back to release, you have to have no slide back of the bow. In other words, you want the only thing that's being pulled is the release on the D-loop. Now, if the arrow is sliding back in the bow, by definition, it means the entire bow is slacking. So what that means is your scapula are coming back, your shoulder is going up. It was realizing, oh my God, once you start to break down in your shot sequence, once you start to get tired, you've lost the ability to keep that scapula all the way forward.

And that's a whole other issue. The second thing that I brought back is, and this is not just true of hunting, frankly, this is true of any sport, I think, especially if you like hiking and being outdoors or if you like being in an environment where it's not perfectly predictable, is eccentric strength matters if you can't stop yourself, you're hosed. And we focus so much on accelerating and on the explosion, which is the concentric, the strength as the muscle gets shorter. But very little about what type of strength is necessary as the muscle elongates. I always kind of equate it to like a sports car with no brakes. Go super fast, but that's not great if you can't stop yourself.

I'll see it a lot with big strong dudes. They'll do a body weight split squat and just crash to the ground because they have no eccentric control. That's a body control thing too. Just being able to control that descent. I was going to ask you that. If you are strong concentrically, is it really just a neurologic issue that prevents you from being eccentricly strong? Or is that a different, I mean, because I now very deliberately train

eccentric strength. So you have to think about what eccentric says. It's a loaded stretch. So if you don't have that stretch ability, I mean, that's going to be a big part of the issue too. This is one of your tests. You typically will have somebody do 10 body weight split squats where they take five seconds to go down Pause at the bottom and then they come up at normal speed. How many normal like 50 year olds can pass that test? Not many. That's a stark statement. Let's repeat what that is. Visibly starting in a split stance a lot of people can't even stand in a split stance without falling over or over-bracing. It's your body weight. You're not picking up a car. You

should be able to stand there. And then the stretch required to lower. You'll see a lot of people tip into a tilt because they want to avoid that stretch or they don't have it. And then to load it with your body weight, it's a lot. So they usually just end up crashing down to the floor. That's, I want to see how much midline adaptability they have, how much stretch they can get. Can you get your pelvis in a position? Are you locked and loaded? Do you have to hike your arms up to make the movement happen or using momentum? Or can you push down with your legs and actually own it and stand up and lower down with control. And I have some people that I've worked with that couldn't even be in a half kneeling

position without falling over. But the good news is everybody, this is all fixable stuff. Yeah, it takes time, but it's definitely for most people fixable. It just takes a lot of attention and a lot of time. Any other thoughts on sort of longevity when you think through essential movements? I think about eccentric strength being so important, balanced, being important. Where does flexibility fit into this for you? You take somebody like me who's really quote unquote inflexible, right?

It's not like I can do the splits or do anything outstanding. But I've seen a lot of people that can do the splits, that can't control it. Yeah, so how does flexibility fit into your world view around the centenary and Olympics? I think if they can control what they're doing, I think flexibility is relative. You view control as a much higher premium. Control and load tolerance, absolutely. So you're not disappointed with my lack of hamstring flexibility? No.

What I get more, like if you're doing a toe touch assessment, I'm more looking at higher spine segments. Which we're going to do that today. Yeah. I think that people should be able to touch their toes. And really, I mean, this is one thing I, both you and Michael have independently showed me and it blew my mind. You can touch your toes without barely requiring

anything of your hamstrings if you know how to access your spine. You should actually feel your hamstrings kind of working when you touch your toes. For years when I was dancing, I would just kind of kick back into my hips and hang out in my heels. I see only time I've ever had it back, discomfort in my whole life. Even deadlifting over 300 pounds, my back never hurt or was achy, but it was more from

just kind of hanging back on myself. I never felt a hamstring stretch, I never felt work. Until I figured I got a little more control of my spine. And once you really learn how to get good, lumbar, and lower thoracic flexion, you don't actually need very flexible, Lucy Goosey hamstrings to be able to touch your toes. Actually, I prefer you don't. Yeah, how big a role does hit play in your world?

I think that it should be done, but like 20% of the time. That much. Zone two, as far as like aerobic work, we definitely need more zone two. We don't do enough of that. And a lot of it's an attention thing. Sometimes, even for me, and I can sit and do stuff forever,

but some days are so much harder than others. I'm like, I don't wanna do this for an hour, or more, or whatever. It's hard to sit with yourself for an hour doing the same thing. You don't experience those feels whenever you do hit work, it's like exciting and new and you feel like you're going to die low level and that's exciting. I think that it can kind of enable that stress cycle. We have to crush it all the time. And I don't think that we necessarily need to crush it. I tell a lot of my clients and patients

that you should rarely feel like death. It's just not what it's about. If you're a power lifter, when I was training for that, I would feel like death a lot. And when you power lifted, you were a good squatter. No, I'm a terrible squatter. I'm sorry.

It's in my brain. So your deadlift is your lift? Mm-hmm. How was your bench? Not superb. Your deadlift was best then best. Yeah, and like my deadlift was so just beyond everything. I think I just felt more comfortable because if it wasn't gonna work, you just drop it. You know, it's like going to squish you. Why do you think your squat was, because you certainly have the biomechanics to squat? I do. I think it's a mental thing.

I would get over a certain amount of weight and just, it wouldn't happen. I would just give up. What's your take on sort of the difference between what we do, which is mostly training versus going out and playing sports? I think sports are fun, but I think they don't replace training. A lot of people would be like, oh, I went and played tennis today. I worked out and I'm like, no, you played a sport, which is fine. You have to be so reactive and it's so stressful when you're playing a sport that you're not

learning anything. And for me, training is about learning, paying attention and learning, and that learning will actually help you in your sport. It's also usually your heart rate so high, you're not getting that good aerobic foundation from it. It's just, it's stress, which is great. And we need stress in our lives, but that's not training. So I think about this a lot. I don't know why, because I'll never be able to do it, but I love to fantasize about it, which is like if you could revamp kind of the physical curriculum for kids, you could go into schools when kids enter pre-K. What

would you do different? How would you change the way we teach kids how to move? Have them play more. You think it's simply, you just get them away from the desk. Get them off the screens, have them play more. That's how we learn. You make a decision. It either works or it doesn't. And then you learn from that. And you either try a different way, or it's successful and you learn something. And then you repeat it. I think it's the same thing with play and working on movement options. I played all the time as a kid outside. Now let's get back to this genetic issue. You're obviously just sort of genetically predisposed to being athletic, having this great sense of kinesthetic awareness.

Do you have a sense of how much you could take somebody who's less genetically capable and just leave them in a natural environment by presumably keeping them away from some of the things that limit that, like screens and sitting and such, and have that be sufficient. I think once they're past a certain age, they would need training. I would think. Because you were kind of a hyper kid, right? Oh, yeah.

My parents would be like, go run around the house five times and then come back in. Because I would just bounce, and it was just constant. I grew up in the country, middle of nowhere. So I was always on a bike or swimming or climbing a tree and I was lucky to have that. My parents kind of limited how much TV we could have. I think we got like one hour a day or something. So I had the opportunity to play. And then I also played sports. I wanted to be involved in everything. And my parents would be like, okay, but you have to finish the season. Even if you don't like it, you have to finish the season.

The problem was I liked everything. So I ended up just playing, that's what I did a lot, which was great. A lot of people don't have that background or options. That's actually one of the questions I ask in history, like when I'm taking someone's history, I'm like, did you play sports as a kid? Because that can tell you a lot about what kind of learner they're going to be. Interesting. So you're saying someone who's got a really strong athletic pedigree might actually pick some of the things up quicker that you're talking about simply because they have the reps on learning new skills. I find that people that played multiple sports and just played as a kid. Usually people that are specialized, it can be almost harder. Their patterns are so wide. They live like they're playing their sport. Like I worked with a golfer and he looks like he's swinging a golfer.

That's his strategy. That was something actually, Michael, also, I remember explaining when we started working together, was my scapular issues were going to be harder to unwind because of how many thousands of repetitions they had in the various movements that I'd done. So how many times I'd taken a stroke and swimming just slightly incorrectly without the perfect scapular control? He's like, look, it's almost easier to take in somebody who's been a bump on a log their whole life. Because yeah, they've got a bunch of problems, but they don't have a whole bunch of ingrained movement patterns. They would have more like coordination issues, and obviously midline stability issues,

just because they've never used it. But someone who's especially repetitive sports, I see it in runners a lot. Yeah, running cycling, swimming, everything. Yeah, just, if any time you're doing the same thing over and over, you're gonna develop that strategy over and over, you're going to develop that strategy for lack of better words.

And that's how you live life. But that decreases options. Well Beth, it's been pretty awesome having you in SoCal this summer. It's been great. I guess you're heading back to New York soon and we'll get back to the hard work of getting everybody ready for the centenary in Olympia. Yeah, for sure. Thank you. All right, well let's go head into the gym and try to do some of the things we've talked about here so that people can get a better sense what we're talking about. Thank you for

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