Undoctrinate Yourself - #6 - Rua Gilna

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Rua Gilna is a practitioner in the sphere of human movement optimization and rehabilitation. With almost two decades of experience in the field, Rua is dedicated to staying at the bleeding edge of the research as it pertains to physical fitness, athletic performance, injury prevention, and biomechanical remediation, and collaborates closely with health professionals across physical therapy, optometry, dentistry, and psychiatry among others. Find Rua on Instagram @TheBiomechanist @ thebiomechanistTo learn more about his new program, Infinite Athlete, visit https://buafitness.com/infiniteathlete

Hello and welcome back to the Undoctrinate Yourself podcast. Today I have a very special guest for you, a longtime friend. And honestly, in my opinion, a polymast. But I'm going to let him introduce himself because he has his hands in so many different worlds that I really want him to share a little bit about what he does. And then we're going to dive deep on some really amazing science of biomechanics and movement and exercise and all things related to movement. And I think he's going to blow your mind.

So welcome Rua Gilna. Hey guys, I'm Rua Gilna. You guys might know me as the biomechanist or from my work with Bua Fitness. Yeah, I ruin things for everybody. And then eventually we put them back together and make them good. But we're going to talk a lot about kind of the sacred cows and the fitness industry, the wellness industry, the connections that aren't being made in interdisciplinary integration and how these things can really help people, kind of where people are falling through the cracks.

what I do professionally is I do a lot of personal training and I work with the posture restorations, two principles and I work a lot of people, different neurological issues, disc issues, joint issues, everything from professional athletes through to people with things like Parkinson's, Huntington's Disease, and everything in between. So it's a pretty wide gamut that it actually runs. But this is what people should know

is that the principles are the same for everybody. If you have a problem, it's not a unique problem. the way we address it, assess it and everything else, is going to be, I'm not going to say algorithmic, but somewhat standardized as should the approach be. We'll get into that as we go along, because I don't even know how to explain what I do most of the time,

to be honest. I know, exactly. Once you get into the meat of, like, actually, you know, the assessment. Exactly, it can totally depend on the person. But I think it's really important insight, too, that there is some form of, like, a loose algorithm that you can follow when you're assessing people, because it's also, it can be quite isolating when people have issues.

They can feel very alone and, like, you know, people can't figure out their problems. Doctors have problems figuring out what's wrong with them. And sometimes a diagnosis can be helpful in that context within the context of medicine. But within the context of the work that you do, I think it's great because there's like a lot of core tenets that make a human, a human. And if we understand those and how that relates to posture, movement, breath and all of these things, then it can be, you can just really build a strong foundation for physical health. Yeah. And you kind of mentioned the diagnosis there as well. Well, diagnosis can be super helpful.

It can also be a prison for some people. They can kind of identify with that diagnosis. And I see that a lot, especially in joint issues, disc issues, soft tissue tear issues. People look at that and they're like, well, this is who I am now. This is what I've got going on. Instead of, even when you look into the research, there's not a lot of correlation between, you know, end outcomes and initial presentations on scans, findings, et cetera, or even symptomology. So a lot of times we have people who are identifying why I have a herniated disc so I can't do X, Y, and Z. when in fact, most people are walking around with some form of discarniation or protrusion

or something going on there and don't even know about it. So a lot of times the symptomology versus diagnosis tends to be a little bit maligned. And yeah, that's a huge thing we can talk about. Yeah, I think that's really important. And a lot of people, like you said, can fall into this trap of their diagnosis and it becomes like a limiting factor. And so it can both provide comfort and also be a major limitation. So there's like.

The language we use is so important. It's very important. Yes. Totally. Totally. And I think a lot of people can use also that as a crutch. And then also like the diagnostic criteria for a lot of different issues can be so. Well, a lot of symptomatic as opposed to.

Exactly. It's like you have these symptoms, therefore you have this issue. Yes. As opposed to why do you have these symptoms? Yes. That's a dangerous, dangerous thing to do. It actually says nothing about what caused the issues to begin with. It's just a fancy description.

Yeah. Correct. Which unfortunately as well, a lot of people who are in the medical system and they've been kind of rolled through it a lot, they'll understand that the fact. the fancy description they've been given is just a descriptor of symptoms and nothing to do with underlying root cause at all. Exactly. And then, of course, that really negatively impacts the treatment process because now you're treating the symptoms. That's exactly. Exactly. Great. So, I mean, I think this is a great introduction. So maybe we can just dive in a little bit. So

Rura said that he works with PRI, Poster Restoration Institute quite a bit. And maybe we can just introduce by talking about what is posture because I feel like there's a lot of misconceptions. Let's talk about, yeah, the posture restoration should, first of all, is probably the biggest influence on how I train, and they don't specifically cater to trainers, but if you go in there and take your stuff and you're intelligent person, you do a lot of work, you can go and apply it.

So what posture is, what posture isn't. What people think posture is, is holding yourself in a given position. First of all, there is no good posture to be stuck in. If you're stuck, you're stuck, and that's a bad thing. It's going to limit options in terms of movement, in terms of, we get into all the other stuff later. but let's just say in terms of movement for now. Now, if you're a lucky person, you might have no symptoms and no, no problems about whatsoever your whole life,

or at least none that you can feel, or that you can sense. But posture is not a position. Posture is literally a description of the relation of joints to other joints and other other appendicular structures. That's it. So we can talk about posture and say the relationship of a humorous to a rib cage, a scapula to a rib cage, that's posture. So people who say posture doesn't matter. That's like saying orthopedics don't matter what. whoever. It's absolutely insane. Of course, posture matters. Now, that said, the idea that we're

going to hold ourselves in this position, which is very prevalent in the fitness industry, if you look at how people lift, everything's a big arched chest up to protect the low back, that's not helpful. What we need most people to have is the ability to get to and then out of all normative ranges of motion that human can do. If you can do those things, chances are you can have a lot less issues. Again, just because you're limited doesn't mean you're going to spontaneously combust. This is not a nocebo situation here. We're going to say, oh, my God, if you can't do this, you're going to die, you're going to explode. No, but your likelihood getting injured in certain activities is definitely higher. Your power transfer is probably lower.

If you're a runner, your gate efficiency and stride efficiency is below. It doesn't matter what you want to do. You're going to suck out it much more. If you don't have the ability to use these reciprocal alternating motions, get to and from normal range of motion. A very simple practical salient example will be, can you get shoulder flexion? Can you get an arm overhead without using a rib cage together there. If you can't, you probably suck at overhead pressing. You're probably sick at overhead activities. You're probably not a good climber or not as good as you could be. Take your pick from anything overhead. It doesn't matter. Whatever you want to do, putting high shit on shelves. It's not going to be fun. Yeah, maybe so, like you mentioned,

posture isn't holding yourself in a specific pattern. So that brings up the really important point of like the PRI approach is really to rewrite the unconscious patterns in the nervous system to allow the body to then select those as the most efficient pathways. Exactly that. So this is kind of, again, a misconception about what PRI does. Everyone thinks it's an orthopedic, muscular-focused institute. It's not at all. They introduce things that way so that people have something to anchor the algorithm

to you and anchor the approach to that already fits their current existing model. But at the end of the day, I've seen guys come in with arms the size of legs. Like they have a, you know, tree trunk 20-inch arms, you know, competitive bodybuilders. And I put them in certain positions and ask them to do like an, a tricep exercise, just a regular elbow extension, like a five or seven pound dumbbell, and they can't do it. Just because you have a large muscle, it doesn't mean that muscle is neurologically efficient

in all positions that we need to be, to be an athletic, variable human who can do all those movements. I know it sounds like word salad right now. The TLDR version of it is you can be big and strong, but if your brain doesn't know how to use your muscles in concert efficiently, you're not going to work well. It's that simple. All the sum of the parts can be actually less

on the whole. You know what I mean? That's what you've seen. A lot of people are not picking on any particular sports, but bodybuilders are a good example of being muscular focused as opposed to movement focused. I mean, if you're going to be an athlete, and all humans should be athletes to an extent, whatever that means to you. You should be able to go check the mail. It should be able to climb, run, jump. If you're 70, you should still be able to run. Obviously, accepting crazy medical issues. But there's no reason we should get to that point and be completely falling apart the way most of us are. And we all have an example of some of our life who's a little bit older, who's super fit and healthy and as an example to everybody else. Again, we can't control everything, but we can

stack the deck in our favor. And when we see people, I know I'm going a bit of tangent here, as I tend to, but when we see people, particularly that geriatric population, take a fall, you always see them fall forward and sideways because they can't add up the femur. And that goes, bringing a leg across midline. And that goes back to, if you don't have this variability, and eventually the risk may catch up to you. So it is. That's pureized whole thing, again, is it's movement patterning via the brain. We'll get that when things are sensed to be safe and sense to be efficient. When the fitness people grab hold of anything, they tend to fucking ruin it.

I'm a little curse, right? Yes. By the way, otherwise, it's going to be a long day. Yeah, they tend to ruin. Everything they do, they latch onto it and they bastardize it in a monkey see, monkey do situation. That's what we've seen with some of the pureized stuff when the fitness people grab hold of it. I'm saying this as a primarily fitness person, by the way. but I'll see people do in 1990

and with their heels up on a bench. In 1990, it's the teacher feet how to interact with the floor. It's not about using hamstrings, but they're just looking at it through the lens of, oh, hamstrings work here, therefore is the hamstring exercise. That's not what it is.

It's an exercise giving us propioceptive feedback, enough things touching the body and the body applying forces similar to how it should be when we're standing. And they would progress that from an isometric and just a muscular hold in different contexts to then eventually get to a standing alternating movement

and now all of a sudden we can start bringing levels of athletics or weightlifting or performance. And again, a slow level and then build back up. People screw it up is they go, okay, I did it in 1990, okay, can pass the movement tests. Let me go do a max squat. It's fucking stupid. That's like saying, okay, I understand how backflip works. Let me go backflip on the concrete now. Oh, it didn't work.

That's weird. Darwin has a warranted for these people. It blows my mind every time the leaps of logic people can make with this. oh, the thing I did for 30, 90 seconds didn't change every single thing about how my brain works and every pattern has happened. So odd. It's literally a different movement if you change muscles involved. So of course it's going to be take a while to build back up, you know? It's silly. Totally. Totally. And I know like, because I've worked with Rua extensively on my own postural, you know, imbalances that I've had for a long time. And I, just for some backstory, I had a lot of knee pain

when I was a kid and through high school. And I always thought it was just because I was obese. and like I was just screwed and going to have knee pain forever. But with working with Rua, I found out that I was basically stuck in this extension pattern and we'll get into what that means. But essentially my knees were hyper-extending all the time and had some issues with my pelvis dumping forward, feet flat. There's like this pattern that you can identify in a lot of people. And so essentially I'm like always falling forward when I was, you know, younger.

And so we basically, he prescribed me specific techniques to do to undo those learned motor patterns and learn new patterns, but it happened in a progressive way. So it's not like, like he said, you're not progressing just straight to like a standing under load because something that, yeah. He's going to default to what once those threat perceives and if you're losing heavy weight, it's threatening. Yes. Anybody who's ever been under a very heavyweight, we'll tell you it's very threatening. We're going to revert to what's deemed to be safest and deemed to no sufficient because your body wants to be lazy and doesn't want to die. Those are its primary mandates. Yes. So, I know you kind of, you already hinted at it. What we do is we take

these things, these new patterns, and we integrate them into exercises. It's not that you shouldn't be weightlifting, but you shouldn't be doing resistance training. Everyone should be doing resistance training. And I know you've had Gabon here before Gab Lyons as well. I 100% agree with her. Evan should be building muscle mass. Muscle is the one of the biggest predictors of all-cause mortality. If we can have more muscle mass, we reduce that all-cause mortality. That said, we can overdeveloped muskature. Now, it'll probably still help us in terms of all-cause mortality, but it may not help us in athleticism or may not help us help us in quality of life later for athletes or someone like to do a little movement. I would just have that little granular difference between the

two. I 100% agree with yeah, we need to build muscle mass. Everyone does. We're under muscles. But we can be a little bit smarter about it. We've like the fitness industry is a young industry. It's very, very young. It's very, very anti-intellectual. It likes to just completely ignore everything that's not the sacred cow of how things have been done. I've talked with this a little bit before, you know. I've done drug-free bodybuilding. I love powerlifting. those are two of the worst sports for humans to do if they're trying to be athletic, healthy humans. And people sometimes get pissed off me about this.

The fitness industry owes a debt of gratitude to those two sports because they are essentially the foundation of the whole industry. But I've never met an athlete who said, you know who I want to move like? Powerlifter. And I guess it's not me riding on power lifters. They're dedicated athletes to work their asses off. But Joe Normal, who goes to the gym,

has a little bit of back pain and wants to lose some weight, gets strong and look good naked. He doesn't need to be walking around with a pelvis dump forward, arched back like this in a couple years, and have blown out shoulders and blown out knees, which are just standard and power lifting. And again, it's just the sport is lifting or pushing

people to the maximum for a single rep. The risk versus a ward for a gen pop person, it's just not there. Like, the ward's not there. So why are we training people that way? It's zero sense. Same thing for bodybuilders. They look fantastic, hard work. I've competed there before. It's great. But I did not feel good.

Like, I was walking around at 205 pounds of 5'10, jacked lean, I felt like a rhinoceros. I didn't move well. I couldn't move well. I was getting out of breath when I shouldn't. I'll get into all the why of that later. Again, there's nothing wrong with building muscle mass. What we can do is we can do that in a way that is conducive towards the pheasism instead

of detrimental to it. And that's the evolution. It's the next step the fitness industry has to take. And the steps and all the bits there, they're in the literature. But just we haven't caught up the literature quite even close. And you know that from every field, basically. Totally, totally. A lot of times it really takes quite a bit of time to get science into practice. And I mean, it can be a major disservice for sure when we're thinking about,

especially in fields that are interacting with people and influencing their lives directly in medicine and athletics. But actually speaking of athleticism, would you be able to just give us a short definition of what, for you, what does it mean to be athletic? 100%. So I've revised this in my head a million times. And I end up with this very simple, very simple explanation. To me, athleticism is not the ability to generate power, because again, we can use the power lift. They can generate a lot of power. Can you generate, preserve, and transfer power well and efficiently?

That's it. Simple, right? How are we going to measure that? Can you get it from bottom left, the name is top right hand, for example? That means we have to have some level of rotational competency. Right now, it's easy to say. It's not easy to do because we have to do things like dissociative sternum and sacrum, create pressure, differentials and pelvises and rib cages and that sort of stuff.

And what I always like to say about this is, again, if you move back into the kind of fitness realm, people talk about bracing and squeezing and, you know, ValSalvo maneuvers for a squaw, like squeezing against the belt or whatever. If you ever played any sport, nobody fucking knows that. Nobody goes, let me go for this, don't get it. Okay, I'm going to go for this over-cuit. We're going to lose all our speed, all of our last, the city, all the power output, all the transfer.

Sure. You might get good power generation, but is it ending up in that hand? Is it ending up in the bat? Isn't it ending up in the ball? No. It's been fucking wasted. We're absorbing into soft tissue, into bones, into joints and actually just into tiring ourselves out and limiting our own movement. It's just we want people to be reflexively athletic. And that's a very, very big thing. That's the thing that people miss a bit of PRI. The end goal is not to have someone pass table tests. It's when they wake up in the morning, they have the ability to pass those table tests across the board. they can go and do their activity with better efficiency and safety than beforehand. It's not, oh, never lift weights, never go back to your activity. It's, I want you to be fully functioning human being. That doesn't mean you're 100% symmetric. It means a human being who can get out of positions, get into positions. You can create mirrored asymmetry on both sides and get out of it. That's it.

That shouldn't be a contentious thing to talk about, but people get very much in their feelings about it. Usually without any significant logic and it ends up being like ad hominum stuff. but I like that. That's fun for me. Yeah, it's fun. I mean, it's very easy to destroy those types of arguments, or just completely ignore them because it's not worth your time to engage. Depends on the mood. Either way, yeah.

Yeah, either way. But yeah, so I think that's really important insight. And so with regards to PRI and with regards to your work with clients, what kind of people that do you typically see coming to you? Is it mostly people in pain? I'm sure it's a wide range of types of people. Could you, like, expand on that a little bit? Oh, absolutely.

Like, let's to say this week, for example, I'm looking at my calendar. I don't mind me. Sure. Looks I have a head like a calendar. So this week I had, one of my clients actually just last night, I helped him with his back issues. He's a professional MMA fighter.

He virtually, I worked with him, and then I was in Colorado recently and I managed to catch up with him while I was there. He just won a championship fight last night. But he'd been off for essentially a year. He couldn't fight because it was back pain. Wow. I'd been through the physical therapy mill,

all the stuff three times a week, whatever, nothing. All the stretches and ice and heat and manual therapy can think of took us one session as pain was gone. And then we progressed, progress, progressed. We still have a way to go in terms of progressing the essence. But we went after three or four sessions in the in person, we progressed to a basic fainting condition program, went back and just smash a shit of the guy, TK out him in the first round.

Amazing. I'm not taking credit for the man's athleticism or martial arts capabilities. He's phenomenal athlete already. We went from a year off and unable to come back. and you know when we're talking about a competitive fighter you have a limited window in which to make your mark and make your money and be a champ and he's a young guy

it's so for me having the fighting background it's so nice to be able to give people what I didn't have and what I needed back then so that's a big thing for me then let's see it so that was Saturday Friday I had actually someone that you referred to me who had gas gastric reflux

and his acid reflux is almost gone wow that's amazing like one session. Wow. Like we didn't want to recall in one session. Then I had someone with a complex respiratory pain thing on Saturday evening. I had a collegiate baseball guy in the afternoon.

Like it's just, it's a, it runs the gamut. It really does between like chronically injured, people with brain injuries, TBIs to professional athletes and everything in between. Sometimes I'll have like some of my jitza guys are here. The times it might be just like a referral and it's like it's literally just a stay-at-home mom who's got. ankle issues and you know she tried to sort them out for years it just it's a wild gamut I love it though yeah it's a very interesting totally but the principles of assessment and progression are the

same for everybody it's just about how far you want to go with it and and what the demands that have been put on your body and how complex the issue you have is that's it that's the only real difference and i'm not saying everybody fits neatly into a little category or bucket but i also really despise the ambiguity that is in the fitness industry of this well everybody's body is different yeah everybody's body is different and there are some people who are very different but the vast majority people have pretty similar issues and that's going to hurt someone's feelings i don't really care typically when people you know get upset about this sort of stuff i'll ask them how many people do like a full body movement assessment on like why don't do that i'm like then you don't get to have an

opinion if you haven't tested hundreds and hundreds of people why do you have an opinion on the movement capabilities you're just eyeballing it amazing nice empirical evidence there Yeah, totally. I mean, there's a lot of wisdom that comes with working with people. Like a lot of times it's easy to intellectualize things if you're just learning from a textbook or, you know, even just taking a course. But once you start working with people, you see patterns emerging. And then that really builds your ability to be able to connect dots between different people and come up with solutions that could be across the board helpful in a lot of cases, which is super helpful. You mentioned something about manual therapy. And it reminded me that I always remember when you talked about manual therapy with me and my,

my partner Keith when we were first initially coming to see you. And I really liked your perspective on it as like kind of an addition, but it's not really a long-term solution. And if you could just explain why, I think that would be very interesting for the listeners. I think it's important at this juncture as well to say that I don't specialize in acute injuries. Chronic long-term injuries are what I'm very good with. I can help with acute injuries, but there are people who are better than me at that. So in that context, what I'm saying is sometimes the mind of therapy can be super helpful in acute injury. It's not my thing. When you're doing miniaturphyry when you're getting someone in there working on the tissues, replacing appendicular structures,

whatever you're doing. It doesn't matter. What you're primarily doing is changing position and you're inhibiting muscles. When we're making things long, other things short. You're inhibiting something, giving something leverage. But the problem there is there's no motor pattern being developed associated with that. So manual therapy on its own as a treatment, it's like me saying, I'm going to learn piano for you. Yeah. And I'm over here. I'm playing I don't play piano. It's beautiful. I don't. I have absolutely firm our hands. So I'm playing piano here beautifully. And then I'll go, your turn. And you're like, you keep playing it. And it ends up with this kind of like, and again, I'm not trying to throw

any profession under the bus here. There's a lot of professions and people always having to rely upon them. My whole thing and the whole thing of PRI, and this is one of the things that drew to me, is they wanted to be self-sufficient and be able to just be done with them. You want you to be discharged as a patient or as a client. Now, very often we have something go from rehab and they want to go to strength conditioning, I tell them, hey, you don't need me for rehab anymore. If you want to stay for us and see, that's fine, but let's delineate that pretty significantly so you know. Yeah, it just, it blows my mind so often how people get stuck in this physical therapy wheel

where they're getting ice, stem, physical therapy assistant to exercises and maybe a little bit of manual work and they never get better. I have yet to see a single human, and I say this with all the hopes that I never do, where in a single session we can't make specific, measurable, empirical change to movement qualities and abilities. And also subjectively sensed as well. They get up and they're like, oh wow, this feels different without queuing, without me priming them to say anything. I feel like this is a fractal also of like modern medicine in some ways. I recently heard somebody say this.

I can't quote, I can't quite remember who the quote was from. But they're basically saying like when you go to a doctor, you're seeking like a treatment. but if you go out to dinner with a friend and they say they're treating you, you assume they're paying. So it's like if you're going to a doctor, it's almost felt as if they're doing the work for you. They're giving you the solution and you have to do nothing. That would be beautiful if that actually works. Unfortunately, in the real world, that's not how brains work. And that's again, that's another thing kind of that the fitness industry, not just a fitness industry, sports in general don't understand how motor potting happens.

Like how movement engrams are queued up, how like if I see this microphone, my brain cues up every single thing. I could do with the microphone. I could pick it up, I could throw it, I could talk into it, I could fiddle the knobs, I could throw it through the window, and then your brain goes, okay, cool, that's great. Which one of those is the most appropriate task? Do that one. That's it. That's what the brain does things.

If it doesn't have a list of appropriate tasks or a list of different strategies to accommodate those tasks, then just does the only thing you can do. And that's the same thing with movements, same thing that sports, like there are those those assholes, lucky people who just look at something once and nail it. Those are people who chose the parents well, didn't have. head trauma, didn't have emotional trauma, and they were built to be athletes. And I'm not hating on them much because I have a big leg up in terms of genetics with competitive athletic parents, but they tend to have this survivorship bias in terms of how they present things. If you do this,

you'll get this. That's just not how it works. You're born an athlete. Now, if you're a born athlete, you can fuck it up and become unathletic, but you cannot become genetically athletic. It's not fair life. That doesn't mean you can't become super authentic, but there are some people and they will just be born with a greater potential for thaticism, whether that's neurological, like just resiliency. We talk about the individual differences in bodies when you have the facets in a joint. You have certain people, for example, who have less or more facets in a joint, which will give them either better mobility across that joint or better stability across that joint. So if you have someone who wants to be competitive power lifts, the more facets they have in a joint,

the less likely they are to rupture or injure that joint with a lifting heavy load, they're going pretty shitty of yoga though. They're not going to be swanning around the stage in, you know, production of the nutcracker. It's just not going to happen. And those are the things that, again, the fitness industry is just really bad at identifying. And it lies about them all the time. You know, yoga and dance give you lung, lean muscles.

No, genetics give you lung, lean muscles. I can't turn a zebra into a unicorn. I can't throw a horse into a zebra, the different animals. The way you're built is the way you're built. Now, we can make you the best, most beautiful, amazing version of that. But we can't change what you are. and that's an unpopular opinion like you know you see someone i want to look like this guy well you're not you're like it's not going to happen i use myself as example one of my clients

asked me if i bench so much how come i don't have big pecks first of all fuck you that hurt i'm like i'm like second of all because my peck insertions are just i have like a four inch peck but it goes from here to here it's all this it's never going to be it's never going to be a big thick basketball peck. Like one of my buddies, he's just got these like half basketballs in his chest. I'm stronger than him, but he's just got crazy pecks. I'll never have that because I'm not genetically built out. I still outperforming in the most sports, even just directly benching. It is what it is. Mm-hmm. There's also an important distinction that maybe a lot of people don't make when they're thinking about their goals with regards to athletics is like aesthetics versus functionality and like

what your actual goal is because some goals are going to be more sustainable than others and actually allow you to reach them versus something that's very superficial. You may not actually stick with it because you don't really have the motivation at a deep level. And especially if it's something that's very superficial and is very difficult. Yeah. I'd rather someone have a program that's not super difficult that's very adherable. The only program that's any use to anybody is one that's adherable. So I have some clients and they do 30 minutes three times a week and they get bigger and they get stronger because they go in there like a sniper.

They're so focused for that 30 minutes and they get out. It doesn't have to be as horrible, super technical thing. I tell everybody the first week or two you do anything with me, it's going to be the most pedantic, annoying week or two of training in your life if you've already trained because you have to unlearn all the shit

that you do wrong. If you've never trained, you're going to be like, what's the whole fuss about? This is easy. That's all it is. Like, I always laugh. I always laugh about all this stuff.

It's very frustrating when you see the direction the industry goes consistently. It's like a fucking, the entire industry has ADHD. It's like, what's new? What's shining? like, ooh, here's a Swiss ball, or here's a, here's like a massage ball.

Okay, here's a vibrating massage ball. All right, cool. I was in a, when it comes like form rolling, SMR, all this sort of stuff. If you look at like the mathematics involved of the force necessary to deform scar tissue, for example, deformed fascia, you basically break your leg before you did it with actual SMR. So everything we're getting is the neurological change. The same people will then tell you that neurological change will have nothing to do with moving patterns. Like the fucking, yeah, there's no concern.

consistency or logic within the industry in terms of which you and anything, it's an absolute sham. And the people who speak the loudest are usually the least prone to actually examining their own statements and biases. I tell everybody, if you have a problem with something that I say, cool. If you have a mechanistic explanation or research, I'm down to this. I'm always open to changing my opinion.

If you're not open to change your opinion, fuck off and don't talk to me. But don't try to discuss something. That's fine. but that works in relationships as well it's not just in you know it's not just in work or fitness or anything else there's no point discussing anything with anybody if you're both set your ways already what i can do to see who yells loudest who gets frustrated fastest absolutely i also see a fractal of that again in medicine where it's like we're kind of distracted with the new shiny things and we're completely ignoring the basic foundation principles of being healthy oh my god like getting outside getting good sleep you know making sure you're eating a nutritious diet

moving your body. I think we maybe discussed it recently personally. They're trialing like weight loss shocks for like six or seven year olds. Instead of being like, stop feeding them so much and get them fucking moving. Like talk about missing the forests of the trees. Why are we're not doing education programs for parents and schools? Schools in particular, there's like a very big, that's a very big opportunity for improvement there.

If we can teach the schools or teach the parents, the teachers, the kids, how to actually eat well and that sort of stuff. And before we get into like the economic. of things and why sometimes it's difficult to eat well, we could still be having them do more physical activity in school. Yep. Absolutely. Make it a habit from the get-go.

And I mean, the school lunches and some schools offer breakfast, too, it's like literally donuts, garbage, fried food, like trash. And so like in that way, it makes sense. Oh, we're not teaching them how to eat healthy because, yeah, it is. The kids get the monkeys all the time. Uh-huh, apparently. And I mean, it's also addictive stuff too. So, and it also kind of numbs you out to the nuances of like real food.

the flavors of real food because you're just used to these bold like sugar saltable yes sugar and fat in the same food you see in nature yes it is it is it is i'd love to so we have a lot of topics we want to cover so let's get into something because we can just keep going on tangents like every time we hang out where it's always like hours of conversation and it's endless so but i really like to talk about um something that really blew my mind when i first started working with you which was that there's like these different fractal patterns in the different parts of the body that mirror each other and they both also directly influence

each other as well. So would you be able to illuminate some of those and like how they kind of work together? So this is one that people have disagreed with me and argue with me so many times about this and yet again it's presented in the literature. Some of the stuff has been talked about like early 1900s

and stuff like the greatest anatomy like I have only older greater anatomy. We talk with this stuff. But when it hurts feelings, people tend to just ignore literature. Excuse me. So let's say like the foot. The arch of your foot, the dome of your foot, will typically mirror the arching of the pelvic floor, which will mirror the arching of the thracic or respiratory diaphragm, which will mirror the arching of a hemipallet of the mouth. So everyone's like, that's insane. Like, first of all, it's not that insane. Literally one thing that's connected. So of course, applying torque or torsion to one side will have a knock on effect. Second of all,

of course it will. It's just like if you actually look at mechanistically, let's say for example, someone with an anterior pelvic tilt, right? As you have anterior pelvic tilt, for those you don't know, if this is my pelvis, this is not sponsored by fresco,

I promise. If I would tip the fresco logo to the front, this is the front of my body, that's an anterior tilt, tip it under, posterior tilt. So if you're spilling it at the back, spilling it towards your posterior,

then anterior front, back. Okay? If we do an anterior tilt, what we'll see also is the back will arch to keep her center of me. mass backwards. As that happens, the ribcade will get circumferentially bigger. You guys see those bodybuilders, the power lifters again, I'm not shitting on you, but it's necessary to look big

sometimes is to have a big rib cage, okay? When we do that, because diaphragms are like every muscle, they're not infinite length, as it gets circumferentially bigger, the diaphragm, which lives inside the rib cage, gets stretched. When you inhale, it can now no longer descent. So then your choices, I've talked with this before. The choices are either don't breathe anymore, which we call Plan B, or a very short-term choice, or find new way to breathe. And we do that neck breathing. It becomes SCMs, upper traps, and this big elevation of the rib cage. Now, what's going to happen with that is obviously be flattened out a thoracic diaphragm. What we're also going to have is we're going to have a system that's not now driving pressure

down on a pelvis. So what should happen when you inhale is thoracic diaphragm, a respiratory where diaphragm drops down, pushes organs, visceral intestines, all the good stuff down, then we have the pelvic floor, which drops down in concert with that, to allow them to not to stand forward. As you exhale, they come back up. Right? That's what should happen, the ideal person. Now, when we have the person whose diaphragm is flat, they're big and long, that will be accompanied by a pelvis that rolls forward and externally rotates each hemipelves as well, which will basically flatten out that pelvic floor. Now it could no longer ascent.

Right. Now, some people are gone, I don't fucking care. I don't give a shit about diaphragms. I feel fantastic. All right, cool. This is how I sell this to everybody. This is real, though, I promise.

If you like good orgasms, your pelvic floor needs to work. If you want good orgasms, that means your drastic diaphragm has to work first. What's up, folks. If you don't like good orgasms, we have nothing to talk about. I don't understand what's coming from as a person.

fuck you. I hope you're having a great asexual life. Evolution has a warrantier of you. I don't know what to say. I'm sure someone's getting insulted out. I'm just joking, though. So yeah, you'll have things like someone's got a pelvic floor dysfunction.

They might have incontinence when they sneeze, when they run, a lot of pressure, particularly postpartum for women, for men as they reach their 30s, 40s. And I've seen some athletes I've worked with in their 20s. Not anyone I've mentioned before, before he yells at me. it's not someone who

talked about already today otherwise that M.A. fighter is going to be so mad at me it's not you I'm telling them

but other athletes I've worked with in their 20s who are big weightlifters and they have pelvic floor dysfunction so bad that they have erectile

dysfunction and like that's the point where all the guys listening are going like what? I'm like yeah if you want

good erections your pelvic floor needs to have appropriate blood flow and not be stretched long all the time so also So just the mechanics of sex,

if you can't tuck a pelvis and then untook it, you're probably not getting it done the way you should be getting it done. I don't want to get too much to be that, but you're probably not doing a good job in what you should be doing. Or at the very least, not a very efficient job. So I will say there. But we have this long tangent done.

We have this long thoracic diaphragm that can't drop down, this pelvic floor, they can't drop down. As that happens, we'll get that external rotation of the femurs. And what that will do as well is the drive weight, the center of mass will go forward, basically, as the rib cage comes up like this, and the weight will shift to the toes allowing the arches to collapse.

So it's not just a magic fucking connection. We can go muscle by muscle, joint by joint, and talk about the relationships between these structures. It's not just a super magic crazy thing. And that's kind of what I would like people to understand. As we talk about, for example,

this SCM connection as they pull up, that's going to change the hemipot of the mouth because it's going to change how temporal bones move, how the spinoid bone back hip moves. and talking about fractals. If you pull up a picture of a sphenoid, a sphenoid, which is like a bone back in here, looks the same as a palace.

It basically is the same structure, but like miniaturized. This chamber and this chamber are interrelated, and they're also in August one another. Same as up here. The flat bones, the tempo bones, look like your scapillar, which just rotated back, which look like your ennominate bones

at the side of your hips. We're just chambers and diaphragms, creating, that's all we are. We're basically like meat balloons tied together with the computer. very sexy description it's a very sexy description people are tied together as a computer but most people's computers are missing the adequate software to actually make them run appropriately that's all the air intakes are fucked and who builds PCs will enjoy that one that's so helpful and so you mentioned something about

well that triggered me to want to ask about like pressure generation because I know it's something we talked about extensively and you mentioned also the relationship between the diaphragm dropping and the pelvic floor dropping and you're basically massaging the internal organs. So could you talk about that a little bit? So we talk about lymphatic drainage. Yeah. We talk about waistpart removal. We talk about peristaltic action chewing. We talk about our parallels. Chewing is peristaltic action. We're causing contraction on one side, releasing the other side. Compression, decompression, compression, decompression, decompression, depression, decompression. Nobody chews on both sides. They're like, like, this. That'd be

fucking weird. If you do that, you're weird, sorry. Or you're a horse or something. Even though horses do the whole like circular. Yeah, they like circular. Yeah, go go see somebody. I don't know what your problem is. Um, so we have this like back and forward compression action. We should be getting, it's very easy to envision that when we chew. That's what should be happening of ground reaction for us when your heels at the floor. We should be as one heel hits the floor, dropping to that side and bringing our center of mass over that, which will give us a compressed thorax. The rib and hips will move together on the other side and expanded thorax. That will give us a peristalysis, like a chewing type motion in the intestines.

We're pushing pumping, like pumping, basically. We're pumping fluids. We're pumping food through there. If you have IBS, diverticulitis, crones, any of these issues, reflux issues. If you can't pump, if you can't tuck, if you can't get out of these big extension patterns, you're probably going to have more inflammation, more issues than you should. Talk about waste removal. We could talk about cerebral spinal fluid pumping.

These things are important. I know you've got a way further down the list, but Parkinson's. Yeah. This Parkinson's is the inability to pump. The ability to oscillate, and I know somebody's going to get real insulted by that. Parcars Parkinson's is a basal ganglia disease, similar to Huntington's,

where we have dopamine symmetry. Now, I'm not going to comment on the underlying causes of Parkinson's. There are many, but I work with Parkinson's patients. You know this. And what they typically see in Parkinson's patients, which is very interesting to me,

is that when you give them a rhythmic activity, they actually lose their symptoms. So we have Parkinson's people, they play music. They can still play the music. They can still sing. they can still dance, they can ride a bike. In fact, they can even emulate somebody else's gate.

If they watch somebody else walk, they can typically do it with no tremors. What we should get, if you're a normal healthy human being, is when we walk down the street, my brain goes, okay, swing the right leg, a little high five, okay, left leg, a little high five, because you have dopamine asymmetry, right? It's giving you a little micro reward for each movement that you make. Now, when the dopamine becomes symmetric, when neither side has given this reward, now we have hesitation.

Neither side has an impetus to move first. When we have extrinsic sources of rhythm, that's gone. We don't have to make that decision anymore because we know what we should be doing. So when we talk about the inability to pump, the inability to oscillate, the inability to vibrate, I genuinely mean this. If you're a big, rigid, stable human being, you're physiologically, emotionally, cognitively and neurologically rigid as well. Rigid things will break.

If you're a lucky human being, you may never have any follow-on issues from this. But mostly aren't that lucky. It's usually a long enough time scale before something comes up. Again, I'm not trying to do this to no Cbo anybody and make them think they're going to spontaneously combust. We've got to play things and kind of weight the deck in our favor. Make as many things as we can in our favor so that as we approach late life, end of life,

or for some people, they don't even get to push out that far. They start having these issues quite young. So we've got to do what we can to vibrate. And what are we even like vibrate? Oscillate, be loose. Hussein Bolt is one of my favorite athletes of all time, right? not because they we give a shit about sprinting. It's kind of cool.

But you see that guy walk up to the start line. He is so relaxed. He doesn't have a care in the world. That is what an athlete should look like. Look at the best athletes of all time. You see, you know, it's a little to Mike Tyson, right? Mike Tyson can be rigid when he needs to be. But when he... Oh, yeah, he can create so much force and power to be so rigid and explosive.

Then afterwards, and he's just moving, he's... That, that, that, that, loose. Look at LeBron. I know that. Now some people of LeBron hitters. Look at MJ. Look at Jordan. The man was exposed to be loose.

Just being stuck in a rigid position to go back to power driftsers' bodybuilders. That's why they're not athletic. If power lifters could get rid of that rigidity and then bring it back just as fast, they'd be the best athletes in the world because pound for pounds are probably the strongest. Them in Olympic lifters.

But that's not the case. We need to be able to dismiss rigidity. And again, without being hippie-dippy and ambiguous about it, physiological rigidity has not gone at hormonal effect. that will give us cognitive and emotional rigidity as well. I say it's quite a bit of experience of having my head messed with TBIs and concussions and stuff. So I know those times which kind of actually took us later on in the thing, but it's very relevant.

Yeah, it's very relevant. And I think it's super interesting to think about the relationship between psychological or mental rigidity, emotional rigidity and the physical body too. And I mean, you can also think about it from the context of like the nervous system is innervating all of your, you know, your muscles. that are facilitating your movement. So if you have a nervous system that's not able to be flexible and come up with new patterns or new ways of thinking psychologically, that's going to be also reflected at the nervous system and just your peripheral nervous system

because it's all the same. So I think that's also interesting. I think there's probably a genetic component too, which we've talked about before, but just people's ability to make new neural connections and generate new patterns. Like some people, I'm sure we've talked about this before, but like some people will learn really quickly like when you're doing PRI with them,

they'll see the results like very quickly and they'll stick. Makes my life so easy. Yeah. And then other people, it's like you need more and more repetition because their nervous systems are just maybe from traumas, maybe from physical or emotional traumas. Like for one reason. The threat is proceeding so high. Yes, exactly.

Just kind of like, oh. Yes, exactly. So are there any techniques or tools that you've, I don't know if we've talked about this before actually, but anything that you've used that can help expedite that process and people who are more, like have more stubborn nervous systems? There's a couple of things. I think the biggest thing is, and this is going to sound like the least helpful advice ever, is to, instead of coming into this, again, this is why I talked about kind of the

muscular focus that some people have on this. Excuse me. Don't go into with the, I have to work hard. I have to feel this muscle. Instead, though, I have to sense. I don't like using ambiguous terms. I have to sense this. what I'm told to sense. I have to find a way to sense that, a position where I can sense that.

And then I have to surrender. That's it. I have to surrender to this feeling that this is not what I'm supposed to be doing. Because what you're supposed to be doing, what you're used to doing, what's comfortable and what's home to you is likely contributing to your issues. So you have to lean into novelty. You have to perturb your current patterns. And that means very literally stepping outside your comfort zone. It means getting there and is surrendering, succumbing to the new sensations, the novelty, not trying to create this rigidity and protect yourself. Let yourself fucking wobble. But I see someone doing a technique and they're, I'm like, great, great, you're not trying

to over-secure yourself. Your brain is not saying, this is so unsafe, you have to stop. So for some people, I think you probably will see me do with a couple people that you see me work with. I'll start off and I won't give them the whole technique in the first show, no chance. I will give them one component of the technique. From the first technique, I teach some people, especially those who are like, more neurologically fragile or physiologically fragile, I might take 35, 40 minutes to teach them one

technique and I'll build it up in small pieces and they feel safer and better and safer each time. If I try to get them to do all at once, it'd be a cluster fuck. They just wouldn't be able to do it. They'd get pissed off. They wouldn't have that sense of success as well. They would automatically distrust me. They would distrust themselves, the technique. We have to make people feel safe when they see any medical provider. I'm not a medical provider directly, but I do obviously work perimenically. That feels safe when they're working anybody. It's just that simple.

If you don't make someone feel safe, if you don't let yourself feel safe, you're not going to do well. Doing this stuff in a very busy gym can be super tough for that reason. If someone has like TBIs or is very neurologically fragile, that's why I'd rather have someone in a living room where they're comfortable lying in the floor. They feel a little bit silly,

but they don't feel judged by all the random people watching to do the thing. Totally. I actually think this is a really nice bridge into talking about like nervous system regulation and like parasympathetic versus sympathetic because like I think you kind of alluded to that just now that if you're stuck in a more sympathetic state whether that's from like some trauma that you experienced years ago or something that happened recently or you're in a crowded gym and you feel judged or whatever like you're not getting into that more parasympathetic state in your nervous system and that's going to impair your ability to like actually invoke learning and

memory at like a neuromchemical level. So how I describe this to people I work with all the time and we can talk with the different binaries in the moment but when we get into an overly sympathetic state, which the modern world is perfectly designed to put us into. It's not, you haven't failed. If you're stressed out all the time in the modern world, you haven't failed. Your environment is out to get you. We have like all these invisible lions everywhere. But we talk about motor learning, we talk about changing a long-term pattern. If you don't feel secure, if you don't feel safe, if I'm being chased by a lion or a tiger, learning a new skill is not top of my fucking brains list. It doesn't give a shit. Okay, cool. You want to do calculus? Tiger's going to

fucking eat you. You know what I mean? Like, it's not the time. We have to be in a position where we're safe to learn. That also accounts for emotionally safe as well. I don't know how many different learning environments I've been in where someone's being a fucking asshole. And immediately people just tune out. We have to engage people at a level where they feel safe to ask questions. They feel safe to be wrong, but they don't feel a judge for that. And again, this goes far beyond what we're talking about here. It goes to martial arts. It goes to dance. It goes to music. It goes to relationships. You can't let so, you can't put someone in a position where they feel uncomfortable and unsafe being wrong.

And now I'm not talking about being fucking soft all the time. And, you know, oh, my God, here's a participation trophy. But it's like, there's a balance we can strike between being always striving for excellence and always striving for this. And when people fail or don't do things well, giving them a learning opportunity, being constructively critical, you know. I think it's a balance that in many areas now we've lost as a society. Now it's like, oh my God, you're excellent.

You're a wonderful fucking rock star no matter what you do. And it's just not the case. Yeah. I mean, we need motivation as individuals to actually go and do new things and make accomplishments. And actually that ties in with like the dopamine and norpenephrine system too, which is super interesting. Like there's these patterns that keep emerging across different domains of life. But with regards to sympathetic activity, I think it's super interesting to think about you mentioned the extension pattern earlier. We didn't name it as such, but basically the pelvis dumb forward, the flat feet, the knees hyper extended and the rib cage flared and how that relates to being an

over sympathetic state. So I'm glad to write that one back up because I just make a note to talk with binaries, right? So this is a big conversation and definitely someone's going to watch this and go, they're going to be crossing the arms going, nope, shut up, I don't care. We could talk about the parallels and binaries and how things are related. Let's make it real simple. Compression, decompression, right? On a compression side, we have exhalation.

The body compresses when you exhale, right? If anybody argues with that, go playing traffic. I don't know what I'll tell you. It gets smaller. We're not inflating. We're not decompressing. We're compressing as we exhale. We're pushing the air out of the ball,

out of our meat balloons, okay? Decompression is going to bring us up. It's going to bring us to extension. It's going to bring us bigger, okay? We can go away further. Compression is stance. It's weight bearing. It's accepting gravity.

Decompression is overcoming gravity. It's swinging. It's exploding. It's pushing off. We can go further than that. Compression, exhalation, stance is parasympathetic. It is relaxing the nervous system. Decompression is exciting the nerve system.

It's arousing us. It's using our fast-toothed muscles, potentially. Great. If you can understand that conversation, you know how to do movement. I'm not being an asshole there. I'm not being like blaze or facetious at all. If you understand that, literally,

we can break everything down and you're moving towards a standing posture or accepting gravity or weight compression or moving away from it. That is every multi-joint movement in every sport. And all you have to do is break down the sub-components of those two phases, identify what someone doesn't have,

give them efficiency there, slowly, incrementally, then load it and whop-up. Everyone's doing great every sport. That's it. It sounds really easy to say like that. But that's why we do all this testing

and go through things and, you know, somewhat algorithmically progress people. But when we talk about, and again, I know someone's going to piss off with this, let's talk about, for example,

why someone could be in a position of extension and that's giving them sympathetic activity because don't take their word for it. Again, first of all, go to PubMed, it's your friend. Second of all, we have someone who's got, and this is not the only presentation, but it's the easiest one to talk about, someone who's big bilateral ribcage, neck breather,

they're going to get a lot of air into the top of, or into the bottom of the lungs, rather as opposed to the top of the lungs, specifically because the posterior media stina, the bit of your back that should basically puff out when you inhale, which hopefully you guys can see here, if I inhale, yeah, that's fine. It's easy to see there.

Back goes, that's a posterior media stina. Okay, if you've got a pair of scapulate wedged in there because you've got good posture, then you're not going to be able to expand there, so it's going to push everything forward. The idea that we talk about yogis and other breathwork and they talk about breathe into your, I can't tell air where to fucking go.

Air responds to physics. If it responded to me, I would fart into my hand and have it chased down people who said stupid shit to me. It's not how it works. So we can only create systems of pressure that direct air we need it. When we're in this position, we're going to get usually a lot of belly breathing, which is not diaphragmatic breathing.

That's a whole different thing we can talk about later. Or a lot of elevation. When we get that, we're going to get a higher oxygen uptake compared to carbon dioxide because we've got different alveoli concentrations, different areas of lung. We're also going to have a cadence and volume of inhalation. It's a little bit too high. So typically what we get is either clinical or subclinical, very, very often subclinical respiratory alkalosis.

We'll get a little bit too much oxygen to blood, a little bit, not enough carbon dioxide. And what we're going to get with that is random fluff just came from somewhere. Anyways, look at WISers looking around. Random fluff loaded in. When we have this clinical respiratory alcosis or subclinical, we're going to get less dissociation

of oxygen from the gloom. So you go to your doctor and like, and I found this, by the way, and I was powerlifting and doing bodybuilding. I'd walk up stairs, fit, strong, resting heart rate in a low 40s, sometimes high 30s, and I'll get to the top of the stairs in New York City. I have to do somebody, like,

right not to show I'm out of breath what the fuck I'm cardiovascular fit and strong and muster I don't understand why I'm out of breath the best way

to think about it is you're in Canada with American dollars you have all this auction but you can't spend it again I didn't make this up look up the bore effect B OHR

I think it's like Neil's Boar brother fucking a bunch of overachievers the whole family really are but they talk about the association curve

that's why you get that pulse ox you got 90% auction but you can't use it It's floating around and what's happening then is because you can't use that and you're exerting yourself, you try and breathe in more and it becomes this vicious cycle. That's something similar to what we see in a panic attack.

You know, some overbreeds, overbreeds, overbreeds, and get to the point where the pH comes to the level where they can't re-associate much oxygen in all. What do they do? They breathe into a bag to resirculate carbon dioxide and lower the overall pH of the blood. And all of a sudden, they're getting better. Again, that's obviously an oversimplification, but I don't get too much into the weeds on the blood chemistry side of things. but that's how we can get stuck in this kind of constant threat of constant state of threat. Again, the literature also reports that we have circulating higher levels of cortisol

during those sorts of events. A lot of people, it's a chronic event. So they get stuck in this idea of I have to breathe more because I can't breathe. So they have this low-level threat going on. There's people walking around and just by virtue of how they walk, move, and breathe, but like low-level hypervigilance, PTSD-type symptoms, the rate to go fly off the handle a little bit sooner than they should. And I say it as having been one of those people, you know, I go off the handle.

I'm like, that was an overreaction. I know what I'm doing it. It's an overreaction, but my brain is sensing this threat. I didn't even know that I knew something in the background. That's the whole problem with it. It's a background threat. And the way again, I like to kind of outline this people is if I grab like a torch, so I shine this torch in your eye and you're having a great day, you'd be like, stop.

What are you doing? Stop. All right. Stop. Cool. Now, if you, if you're, just crashed your car on the way here and stepped in dog shit right before he got in the door and then tripped and fell on your face and I shine that torch in your eyes, you're going to lose your shit like a shit collector with amnesia. It's going to be ridiculous. And that's what happens

to a lot of people is they have these background threats, background stressors. They don't realize they're happening that's changing their overall ability to deal with other stressors. And people are just unhappy because of it. Yeah. And we know stress is cumulative, like all different forms of stress, whether it's from a physical injury, whether it's from a fight you had with your spouse, whether it's from past traumas. Yeah, exactly. These are all summative. And at some point, it's like, it becomes like sort of a feed forward loop, a vicious cycle. And you have to make an intervention at some point in that, you know, kind of, yes, yes, at some level the brakes need to be put on and something needs to change. Otherwise, you're just going to be burning yourself out

completely over time. As you dive into polyvagal theory, it's how like nervous system works as well, by default will ramp up. We have to put the brakes. Like, it's not, it's not like a go wild. am I not just relaxed by default? We're ramped up by default. We have to put the brakes on. That's an active thing you have to do. So it's important to understand that as well. Some people are like, well, I just do what I do. So why should I have to do that? Because you're literally, it's your foot wants to put the pedal to the metal at all times. And the nervous system goes, yeah, we don't have to do that. It's not necessary. But if you're constantly in that level of threat, first of all, you've got nowhere to go when the foot actually has to go to the metal as well.

You've got a real problem then when you're under real stress. And that's super sad because life is not nice and it's not fair. And a lot for a lot of people and they have to deal with all these stresses when they already have these underlying stresses they can't manage. You don't have the tools to do. Yeah. That's why I get pissed off with this stuff though because people take other people's health into their hands and completely disregard the responsibility that comes with it.

Absolutely. I just had like an image of zebra and lion coming to my head when you're talking about like balancing being stressed versus relaxed and like how if lions are laying down in Savannah and you know, the zebras are just grazing. nearby because they know that the laying down lions aren't dangerous. Yep. Once the lions are up and hunting, that's one is the zeperson is going on. Exactly.

Yep. So they know when to relax, one not to relax. I think human beings, like we have a particular problem because we're so aware of our own mortality, whereas other animals aren't. And so that does create this, like, kind of low-level anxiety behind everybody's, like, greatest fears. Well, it's also from, like, from both the physiological and a psychological perspective, we fucking ruined ourselves.

Like, I would argue, I'm not saying we should go and do this, but I argue we probably peaked around hunter-gatherer and agriculture ruined us and i'm not the first person to say i agree yeah but when we look at again i'm not saying it shouldn't get educated the education system it's like in your most important developmental emotionally cognitively and physiological years you're stuck sat in a seat being told to shut up yeah that's it's insane and we expect to have fully functioning humans as adults like it's mind-blowing it is i mean from what i understand the current education model was really based off of like training factory workers yeah pretty much so like making automaton's that just do what they're told really well and not like creating healthy sovereign

humans yeah i think it's a Rockefeller i was going to say i thought i thought was a whole myth of yeah it would be interesting to actually learn more about that because it's just insane that we just kind of grandfathered in all of those old ways of doing things and we haven't updated it because we've talked about kind of uh the fitness industry and health industry far behind the research yeah the education and I know a lot of teachers, this is not against them. They don't have the facility or the autonomy that they're allowed to actually go and use the modern, like up-to-date kind of teaching methods. Yeah, they aren't given the resources.

So, so much better. Absolutely. Yeah, they aren't given the resources. They aren't given the liberty to kind of teach in the way that they feel is best. Particularly in this country as well. Like, yeah, they have like just don't have resources. It's unbelievable. Actually, I think a lot of that started with like the No Child Left Behind Act

and all the standardized testing where it's like, we now have to train specifically everybody in this very specific way to be able to pass these tests so that we get more funding as a school.

And then it's weird to me as well as a foreigner than, okay, no what we're going to do is we're going to try and turn it into people by the time to get to college. Yeah. I said,

well, first of all, not everybody goes to college. Second of all, it's too late. Like, it's too late to talk about emotional development

and rounding out your character when you're 19, or whatever. Yeah. Like, your best years for rounding out your character are gone.

Not to mention. I know somebody's going to watch that depressed. I can't change. You can't. It's just harder. Sure. Yeah. Especially if it's like very novel things.

And I mean, we're also aren't taught any of the major life skills that you need to actually survive on your own as an adult. Like how to cook, how to maybe grow your own food, how to do your bills. The money of the powerhouse of the cell. Yes, it is. Everyone knows that. I forget. No one knows anything else about it. But everyone knows that.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, oh, that's just a whole tangent. But there's a question I wanted to ask you before I forget. and that is so you see a lot of people coming in with similar patterns and you can approach them in similar ways or different ways depending on what's going on with that person. Do you have any insights about how people get stuck into these patterns? Are there any specific like head injuries, for example, can be one? Anything else like that? We'll get the head injuries in a minute.

That's a whole kettle of fish right there. Honestly, again, that's kind of what I was alluding to the school thing is that when you have someone and you basically put them in ecstatic position, and this comes back through our very first conversation, being stuck in a posture, holding good posture. Don't tell your kids to do that. Just leave them the fucking alone. You put someone in a seat for 10 years, looking straight ahead. You rob them of three-dimensional movement.

That's what you do. And that's that in itself. That will screw most people up. Then you put them in a city. You put them in a city where they sit in a subway, they face forward. They walk between buildings that hem in their visual field. They're constantly under a barrage of noise and vibration.

They don't move. They don't climb. They don't rotate. they don't walk on uneven ground they don't have to deal with any physiological stressors unless they want to and we talk about humans wanting to be lazy I mean we couldn't fuck them up more if we tried

unless you literally immobilize people that's about again on the matrix they put them in like the tubes or they're like kind of egg sack things and brains that's basically the only way we could fuck it up more because we're during those developmental years we're just not expressing any sort of movement

and not to use the old adage but if you don't use it you lose it that's it. Like, we can go further than that and say when we talk about one of the reasons we have people who are 90% people who are right-handed is an embryogenesis. You unfolds from the right diaphragm first. And you kind of go that way. On top of that, the left side of the body is sensed by the right quarters of the brain.

The right side of the body is sensed by the left and right cordes of the brain. That's why a right-side stroke will usually cause more damage than a left-side stroke because we're still getting some feedback as well. There's more than that. We're gravitationally heavier on the right side. We have the liver over there. You've been extra lobe to lung over there. We have higher attachments to the diaphragm, the ribs up there.

Like, there's a whole bunch of different reasons we're going to have that preference towards that right side. Even if you're left-handed, you have a preference towards the right side neurologic. Mm-hmm. And so that kind of is an inherent asymmetry that's present that can become exacerbated under conditions of like immobilization. And if we're going to try to break it down to simplicity, again, this is oversimplicity, but we're using for the sake of discussion, the right side,

tends to be stuck more towards stance, left side towards swing. The right side tends to be able to get more parasympathetic, left side sympathetic. Now, we won't be able to do both on both. Then you get some people who are very athletic, who've been expressing strength and power and that sort of stuff, or just their environment pushes them there. They'll get stuck in swing on both sides. And we talk about, and just kind of the fitness people are watching this, to kind of being, just do a little callback.

If you're in a swing phase on both sides or explosion phase, for example, if you're squatting with a big archback, I mean squatting is the kind of prototype for this. If you squat down and you want to jump off the floor with an archback, how do you do it? Anyone watching this? With the big arch back,

the way most people teach you out of squat, try then jump after that. You can't. Not in any way efficiently. You have to be able to compress, to bunch up to anterior pelvis, to coil a spring to then uncoil it and get the reward of that explosivity.

And this is the problem with a lot of fitness stuff, but it's not just, to fitness stuff. It's the way we live our lives. We don't, like, I'm not saying go fucking walk bare foot up a mountain, but like if you have the opportunity, you probably do. If you can't do that, okay, cool, we can do interventions of fitness and a movement that are going to help you get the same effect.

But yeah, if you can be outside walking up a mountain, you're bare feet and it's nice and grassy and uneven and not too rocky because you cut your feet. If you don't have big thick pads there, go fucking do it. Like, again, I don't like to lean too much into the ambiguity and the hippie side of things. but yeah, go fucking touch grass. That's good idea.

Highly recommend. How does, so how do the head injuries play into this? Because, so I personally, I used to do horseback riding as a kid and fell off quite a few times. I never had like a diagnosed concussion or anything. But I've been working with you on some like facial asymmetries and the super common thing that we can talk about as well. But what is the role of head injuries in postural imbalances? So I deal with a lot of TBI people, traumatic brain injury, go, concussions, that sort of stuff. I don't talk a lot of better at my social media

because what I don't want to do is give people that nocebo. Yeah. So if you are watching this, if you may hear my dog snoring and snob from the mirror. If you are watching this, don't try and diagnose yourself with this stuff. Don't be a dumb ass. Don't go, oh my God, my face is broken and going to go fucking,

no, just don't. Go talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about. The other people I haven't talked about it, someone comes to go, I think my neck is on backwards or something absolutely ridiculous, you know. So what they'll typically see in a lot of people's when we see a concussion is we'll see a jaw that has moved significantly wide of center line.

We'll see a left eye at squintier and typically a bit lower. Typically. There are other ways to present that's by far the most common. The TLVOR is don't get hit the fucking head if you can avoid it. But having been through that,

I have had 5 TBI's on a cervical spine trouble almost like the quadriplegic when a 17 as well. Also don't recommend. From gymnastics, you'll see that that shift and again i don't get to the mechanics of the shift because it's just going to confuse the shit everybody yeah it's again this is not coming from p rye directly it's not coming from me this has been noted in like osteopaths in khenocytop's in clinical therapy in physical

therapy in grace anatomy for 100 plus years this is not oh we're saying this happens is that this is a this happens there's tons of documentation shut up go read a book touch grass read a book tldr um we're building a list here yeah exactly just grass read a book learn to exhale that's a pretty good actually list for everybody what this does I cannot overstate and I know some of the clients I've worked with

and watch this and they'll understand how people react to it is very different how I reacted to it was to become hyper-vigilant and I wouldn't say violent but I would say I had a very, very short fuse and it was very helpful for me as a competitive fighter because I'd be like, okay, I'm ready to go I'm always ready to go

You're not big of the Avengers and the hoax like the secret is. I'm always angry. Very helpful. He probably had a facial torsion. Oh, I did. You've seen the Goonies? Yes. You know, you guys?

That was essentially me. I know I showed you the picture before. My jaw was like way over here. Left eye was like squinty down here. It looked like I was constantly slightly surprised. This is the whole thing. Now, this is where this gets difficult. The treatment for this will be different for every person.

I don't like doing the whole, everybody's different shit. But it should, for me, start with non-manual work and we should always escalate with the least invasive, least costly intervention first. And this is again where I differ

from some people who talk about this stuff. They want to jump into visual and dental immediately. I'm like, when and if necessary only, and that'll be determined by testing. But before you can get to that part, what this does to your brain, to your mind, to who you are as a human, is fucking horrible. I cannot state how unhappy I was for 20%

20 plus years, which is probably why I'm a crotchety asshole now, or that could just be cultural and familial. I'm not really entirely sure, me honest. My little sister is definitely better adjusted than I am, but it's kind of what you'd hope for. When Ron Ruske, the director of PRI, when he put the, you made like a makeshift mouth guard to give me molar contact, to let me sense, there's that word again, sensing as a skill. And then he had me hold my left molar to get contact there because I couldn't get them to touch and do particular PRI drills to basically reorganize

some of the cranial bones. Yes, skull bones move. If you don't believe it, go read a book. Always have to put that in there because someone always comes in the comment, skull bones don't move. Oh. Again, you have access to the internet.

Maybe you're a desk skull. You have access to the internet, but you don't know how to use it. So that's read book, how to exhale, touch grasp, learn how to use internet. I know. I can't.

I can't turn off the troll. Yeah, when Ron put the thing in the mouth, he had me doing these exercises, I was like, all right, cool, let's see how this goes. And you have me walk up and down the room after doing that.

There's like 70 people in the room. And all of a sudden, it's going to sound like I'm over exaggerating it or whatever else. I didn't really think it was going to make much difference. I was like, oh, maybe someone moving better. Maybe it'll stick better.

Yeah. Definitely. I had a healthy, skeptical attitude. Fuck. All of a sudden, I remember my visual field changed. All of a sudden,

like, I felt my peripheries come back. I was walking in the room and I was doing my best. I got the biggest rush of emotion I've ever had in my life. Wow. The only thing comparative to that, I'm sure I'm going to alienate somebody saying this, if you've ever taken a lot of mushrooms and you have that, oh shit, I'm connected to the universe moment, that's sort of what I felt like, but like more intense and shorter.

And it was like I got teleported back to my own body. I could sense things again. I was inhabiting my own body. Prior to that, it felt like I was kind of like a, not an observer, but like I was somehow not in charge of what happened. my part of my sympathetic nervous system was rerun in the show my amygdala more than anything else

I'd imagine because everything was sense of threat and I just wanted to cry I just wanted to cry so fucking hard I wanted to cry more then than we did when most of my people my family died it's like shit I feel like the biggest egg sale the biggest weight off my shoulders ever happened

wow and I had understood before that that I was emotionally disregulated I tried acting classes and done a lot of that sort of stuff and every self-help what you can think, a little bit of therapy. And those things definitely helped.

They definitely helped. And I've seen people prescribe those when they have TBIs, they just get over it. But we can't underestimate the physiological contribution to emotional cognitive disturbance. My ability to process information

came back so much faster. My ability to motor learn came back immediately. Again, not the same level as before, I will say, but like still very, very high. Change my entire life overnight. I became a person who could just relax again. and was just happy.

I hadn't been content, really happy for more than a couple of seconds in 20 years. I would like, me and martial arts team went to the World martial arts championships for breaking. I think it's third and fourth in under 200 pounds. I think I was like 150 at the time. I was like, eh.

I'm my first degree black belt in making sure on Kung Fu, the youngest black belt in the world was like, eh. You think if you end up chasing something that makes you feel something, you just don't feel anything. In relationships, it's like, guess it just doesn't get better than this. like everything just fucking sucks.

Not to be too morbid and morose and depressing but if you're in that TBI cycle that can be your life. I've got a couple clients that say no other people don't go that way. They go withdrawing. They're deer in the headlights.

Everything frightens them. They go flight, full flight. I've had to cook people like that as well. But please, for the love of God, if you work with people brain injury, stop telling them to just get over it. It's all in their head, literally. Because they're a physiological contributors

to this stuff that really will change things have done well. For some people, most people I've worked, if not everyone, has needed some sort of dental work. They've needed some sort of device to help them feel and sense appropriate occlusal contact, teeth contact. Unless there's not teeth and not magic. What's happening there is they're now able to inhibit and turn on other muskature in the face to allow temporal bones to move to allow pumping, which brings us full circle. We have to be able to alternate and inhabit different things. When the paranasal sinuses change over dominance, everyone knows what circadian. rhythm is your 24-hour cycle, underlying that you have ultralian rhythm, and almost nobody knows

that exists. Your ultradian rhythm is basically the cyclical dominance of sympathetics and parasympathetics that corresponds to paranacal sinus dominance that cycles every 90 minutes to four hours depending the person. If that doesn't happen, if you're not cycling between those two, cool, you're fucking stuck, and you're almost always stuck in that sympathetic dominance, which is stress. if you're a highly stressed human being. Yeah, sympathetic dominance is not a fun time. When I do some of the basic breathing work, even people without TBIs,

I've had, I probably assess three or four hundred people in the last seven or eight years. I've had at least 30 of them say, oh my God, I feel high. Just from breathing. And that level of feeling high, I'm not talking about like, you know,

being baked and being cognitive useless, but that level of like, ah, that's how you should be feeling all the time. My now wife and I, we were in, Spain a couple years going, not going to get to blame here. She's going to kill me for saying this. The car happened to get scratched. I won't get into the while. It wasn't really her fault. I wasn't driving, but the car happened to get scratched. I think they charged my credit card like three or four

thousand dollars when she was distraught. She goes, oh my God, so I'm like, I don't fucking care. I was like, I have insurance. It's going to cover it. We're going to get the money back. It's a temporary thing. It's not a big deal. She was distraught. Prior to my TBI or TBI. A TBI like you know symptom resolution i would have flipped my oh my back i can go i would have yelled the dude to the car place i may have yelled generally not at her because i never directed it at people really um i would have direct a lot of inwardly for sure but yeah i was like oh okay it's gonna be fine and so to this day when like anything big happens she's always somewhat phased and like surprised by like shit will hit the fan and i'll be like i can elevate and escalating and get up there

I want choice. Now I'm like, okay, I can meet that challenge if I want to. And actually, side note to that. Talking about perception, sense and everything else, someone else has done TED talk on this and I'm doing her a disservice, but not remembering her name. But your perception of a stressor changes your physiological response to that stressor. It changes whether or not you get blood vessel dilation or constriction. It changes your blood pressure response. So even if you can't and don't have access to someone to help you manage the physiological problems that put you in that hypersensitive state, your perception, which you can stop and reframe, will change your physiological response to the stressor. Now, if someone punches you in the face,

probably don't sit down and be like, that's a challenge. The challenge is smack them back, or get to safety, whichever way you're going. But in non-real threatening response times, like, you know, you may have an argument as friends and you say some shit that pissing me off. I don't go, oh, I'm going to clobber you with a giant mic. I go, let me just take myself there this moment and see, am I being unreasonable? Anybody who's in a relationship, that's a very good skill to have, especially when both of you have it. I'm very lucky my wife does have that skill where, you know, if one of us is being a little bit too much, we both go, hold on a second. And we go, we're being silly.

It's refreshing. It's very refreshing. And I'm glad that I can hold up my part of bargain, too, because I've told her this, if she had met me two years earlier, I wouldn't have been able to. And there's no way our relationship would have worked because I would have fucked it up entirely. It wouldn't have been on her. Totally. I mean, having the ability to pause in any sort of situation and really respond instead of react is so crucial. And it directly relates to your ability to, you know, get out of sympathetic or between the two poles of the nervous system instead of just being stuck. I know we've got like a long tangent here talking about emotional cognitive abilities

and stuff. But it's all links. Yeah. You can't divorce one from the other. And this is why when I see people in these big extended positions all the time, I feel sorry for them. And that's not me being an asshole. I feel sorry for them because I've been them. I've been that person now. I was a more complicated, more screwed up version than that.

But I know how good you can feel. And if you've never felt athletic, and I know a lot of people have never felt athletic, it's fucking cool. It's like having a secret superpower. And I say in sleigh to everybody, but I've competed in five, six sports internationally. I picked up jiu jiu-jitsu this year,

and you've seen me five. I'd win almost almost everything. And I had a client this week who's on my online program. He just took up, actually the jih Tjitsu class this week as well, but he took up something, he said doing cycling. And he was doing something gardening. He said, it's kind of weird. I'm going to mess it up.

I would quote him verbatim, but I don't remember exactly what he said. But he said something along the lines of, I was just intrinsically able to kind of figure out the best way to do it, and it felt good. He's like, I've never been able to do that before. I'm like, cool, the program worked. That's what you want. when you have all the abilities, the brain will self-select the best one.

And there's this idea in some realms of fitness industry. The brain just self-organizes. That's correct, but they're missing a crucial, fucking huge pillar of that idea. The brain self-organizes based on currently available strategies. You can't. It's like saying, okay, I'm going to self-organize. I'm going to move to France. I'm going to just automatically speak fucking French.

No, I've got to learn French first. I have to learn very simple French first and then conversational French then it'll hopefully eventually be float. This idea that the brain will just self-organize is fucking stupid. Otherwise, why do we have singing coaches? Why do we have sports coaches?

Why do we have sports coaches? Why do we have coaches at all? The brain is self-organized into things. Once you show it to you once, I should be able to do it. That is such a fallacious misstep that has been popularized recently. Thankfully, it's kind of like a flash in the pan

or at the very least, well, I've blocked a lot of people involved and talking that shit because I just couldn't deal with the constant arguing with no actual merit or mechanistic explanation or research. It was just always devolved to ad hominem. So if the brain was self-organized things,

then we would have no partial issues. We would have no chronic use injuries. We would have no, I mean, just very simply fallacious on the face of things. It doesn't self-slect based on available current strategies. If you want to do something fucking different, we've got to teach you something different. Mm-hmm.

It reminds you one of those, training my dog, you met Bowser. Bowser is great, right? If you give him a stimulus, he'll pick it up pretty quickly and learn how to react to it based on what happens after that stimulus. I have helped so many people train their dogs because just the basic understanding of simple stimulus and response goes so far. Most people don't even understand it themselves.

If you want a given response, there has to be a particular given stimulus. There could be a broad variety of stimulus that work, but the more specific the response you want, the more specific and pedantic the stimulus. this one have to be as well. Sometimes when teach people on your exercise, like, why are there so many details to this one? It's like very simply so you don't fuck it up. That's it. The more I constrain this exercise with you have to sense this, feel this, do this, the more I know you're doing it right. That's simple. But initially you're thinking about 12 things. Then what we do is we move away from muscular sense. And again, this is where people in the PRI side of things,

they fall off this. They don't go the whole way to the end. They do the primary PRI courses. and the primary courses are phenomenal. The very orthopedic mind, very muscles and bones minded. After that, talk much more about neurological integration and sense and that sort of stuff.

It goes far as the tertiary stuff that's mind-blowing. But again, don't quote PRI on this. This is my interpretation of what they say. But if you go from the primary through the tertiary,

you'll see that primary orthopedic, bones, muscles, do you feel cool? Secondaries, I'm asking you, hey, we're going to put this busy form or the outside of a heel on the floor. you sense the weight on that while keeping these other things. Cool. Now I know you have the muscles involved

because we've created like a macro for it. There are further macros beyond that which we talk about internal pressure sense. So for example, a level one and don't try and use this if you don't understand it. I'm just trying to give a broad understanding of this. A level one having someone in a position that should be feeling a hamstring.

Do you feel a hamstring? Yes, fantastic. I know you can find a hamstring there. We can develop muscular strength with that hamstring there or some level of competency and sensation. Cool. Level two, we'll put them in a different position. I'll go, okay, do you have this and this?

It might be a hamstring and internal oblique on that side. Cool. If you can feel the outside of a heel and internal oblique, I know based on the position that you have to be in, that your hamstring has to be short, whether or not you sense it. And that's how you move from consciously managing. If you break it down to the four grid, you know,

unconscious incompetence. Yes. I'm fucking her up, but I don't even know I'm fucking interrupt, which is most people when it comes to movement. Conscious incompetence. I know I shouldn't do it like this, but this is out I'm doing it. Conscious competence. If I concentrate, I can do it.

Unconscious competence and mastery. That's how we make, that's how we kind of bridge that gap of this crazy detail, heavy, pedantic things to making someone an athlete. Is you give it to them in stages. Level one. Do you feel hamstring? Cool. Level two, do you feel lateral heel? Level three.

Do you feel the compression from an acetabulum on a femur providing ground reaction force and gravity. Cool. If you feel that, I know you have everything else I want to have a competent stance on that. Now, that's not a one-day progression or discussion. That's how I turn someone who's kind of stiff

and not naturally athletic into someone who's very athletic. Again, they are ceiling maybe lower than someone who's that natural athlete. But I can turn anyone into someone who's athletic, anyone, if they shut the fuck up and do it at the toll and then communicate back and forward as well. Yeah, that's super encouraging. And I think athleticism is something that everybody should strive for at some level

because it just makes you able to navigate the world more efficiently. You can play. Yeah, you can play, exactly, which is so missing from culture today in general, like at all levels psychologically and physically. Yep. There's a great anecdote, which I love to. I'm going to change the name because I'm going to insult someone otherwise. We'll call her Sarah.

That's not her name. But when I was in, when I was 18, 19, I think, I was working my first gym job. So I'm doing it's like 20 years now. I'm old. I remember all my friends knew how to drive I'd never learned how to drive yet and remember this this girl you edit that out

you got to edit that out right? Sarah I'll put a bleep in yep, yep, thank you this girl Sarah about her name can't believe you with that so she went past a driving test first time and she was such a nice girl

so lovely dumb as a rock. I remember thinking, holy shit, it didn't even occur to us if she's going to fail. Like, so many people have

such self-limiting beliefs based on what other people have showed them, told them, or something that they have told themselves. We have these narratives and when it comes up to that something to fit in,

I can't do it, I can't be that. I could never. Insane. Yeah. Insane. And again, I'm going to look at my lovely wife.

When I was starting, obviously I have martial arts experience, I've done a lot. And I said, hey, I'm starting to jit-sue. soon. Do you want to come with me? I kind of, she's watching, she's going to yell me again.

As a perfunctory thing, I kind of ask her, hey, do you want to join with me? Assuming she's like, no. And she started with me, and she was going very religiously for twice a week. And she's getting really good. She actually even managed to choke me out one day. Wow. That was the highlight of her month, and I got her back. But yeah, no, she's getting really, really good.

And because she didn't give herself a narrative of I can't. And so many people... I can't, it doesn't matter what it is. I can't learn that. I can't do that. I could never. To quote Lao Tzu, the journey of a thousand miles begins in single step. And time passes whether or not you try to do the fucking thing you want to do.

So just go do it, go try whatever, learn anything. Coming back to that, you know, everybody's body's different, but we're not really. Humans aren't that different. Anything a human being has, anything 99% of people have capability to do, you have capability to do. Whether it's cognitive, emotional, intellectual, or physical. Now, it may take time, it may take a lot of work. Your ceiling may be lower than some people's. You're sitting maybe higher than others.

But anything that you really, really, really want to do if you fucking commit to doing it, it can be done. And that was my realization of the, I'm not going to say a real name this time, of what I call the Sarah principle. Don't give yourself a fucking self-limiting narrative. Just don't do it. Because if I had done that,

I'd still be emotionally just messed up. I'd still be in pain from my joints. It didn't work because my neck didn't work. I just don't do it. Yeah, and that whole, I feel like that whole mindset is reinforced by, again, our education system where it teaches you if you fail like you're bad, like this is unacceptable versus like this is a learning experience you're using to be better in the future. In business, you fail fast and often so if you find success. In sports, you fail fast and often in education, it's not the case. Yeah, exactly.

It's so discouraged. Fail, fail. Fail hard, fail often, fail fast. And from each failure, you try and learn something. and then you won't keep failing. It doesn't matter what it is. I can't tell you how many people have had for weight loss, for example,

and they fail, they fail, and they fail, and they fail, and finally, something clicks and you're shit. I've started to apply some of the things, and it's actually kind of getting easy. Should it be this easy? I was like, yeah, you know, everything should be easy.

I mean, your training program should be relative, and I'm saying it should be like an absolute cakewalk, but shouldn't be leaving fault. She must not be named, decided we have some sort of an announcement. Damn you. It's an advertisement now. Yeah, we put these kind of limitations on ourselves

and human beings are predictive in nature. Everything we do, we talk about the, like, the microphone, okay, predict all the different things I might do to then self-select. That's one. When you give yourself a narrative outcome before you've tried something, that predict nature kicks in and we will fail. Like, I don't know anybody who's been, I'm sure someone find a great, obscure example, but the stomach exception of the rule.

When we predict we're going to fail at something, we usually succeed in that prediction, which is failure. And that's not saying if you always go, okay, I'm going to succeed. You're not always going to succeed. But you're going to yourself the chance to succeed. Like, it drives me fucking wild

when people identify, or clinicians identify people as their injury. Oh, I'm a, I'm a TBI guy. No, you're a guy you've had a TBI. Correct. You're not your, like, you're not your fucking injury. You're not the sum of that. And that's very, very dangerous and can cause, like, a lot of nocebic actions that can cause people to, like, we just live in that position and never try and get out of it.

Yes. Is it as a roadblock. Yeah, the language is super important. Actually, we had a family friend who passed recently that had MS, but she always referred to it as my MS and not like the MS or something. The MS I suffer from. Right. Like, she identified with it so closely. And I think that's partly because, like, she got a lot of attention and care from other people because of her illness and, like, not having that identity would have been scary for her.

also life's not fucking fair. Yeah. In the ideal world, we'd all be getting that care and that love and that affection that humans crave and need, regardless of not with any issues. But it is genuinely scary for a lot of people thinking, what if I don't have the issue? I've had some people who have had to send them to consult with one of the psychologists that I work with. I'm like, hey, you're sabotaging yourself.

It's a very delicate conversation obviously. If you're watching this and feeling attacked, this is not directed at you. But if you are feeling attacked, is there a reason for that? it might be might not be i'm not i'm not being judgment here we can't say i am i'm not an obese person i'm a person who has weight to lose weight a person who has weight to lose that's it you're not an obese person that's not who you fucking are right it's a condition you currently have which you don't always have to have it's not saying it's simple it's easy it depends on the issues i'm not a person with oh i have a i have a bad back no you have a fucking back you have a

back you don't know how to use typically you know for accepting crazy structural deformities like i've had clients with eight disc fusions in their spine go to no pain and performance again like if you have a bad back what the fuck are you doing to make it better like don't accept that limitation and that's not saying go crazy and do stupid shit it's fine a qualified professional to help you with that to appropriately assess and then systematically and incrementally progress. That's key here. The one, or the two words rather that I say to my clients all the time, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, the only two things I ever want you to remember, graded exposure, any new stimulus, build it up and build up your competency slowly. It's not a sprint, it's a

marathon. That's what people stop themselves getting hurt. It doesn't matter what you're doing. You can do the dumbest shit in the world, even, for example. The dumbest shit. There has no mechanical sense to do it. I'm probably mostly okay. It needs to keep. cut me if you use greater exposure. You might have caused some long-term issues. You might eventually get injured. But yeah, you'll really extend how far you can do that dumb shit for. Yeah, it's so true.

The mindset piece is so key. And there was something I was going to ask you, but hopefully it will come back to me to kind of escape my mind. But there's a lot of things I still want to talk about. And we also kind of mention them briefly. But the whole dental and vision piece, I think, is super interesting and not discussed very much with regards to like so for example you don't go to see a psychiatrist and they don't assess your dental and vision like yeah if you have anxiety problems they don't check and see oh your

glasses are over prescribed you know what's funny is actually i was working with the psychiatrist in the city for a while lovely guy and i talked him about this stuff and he actually started referring his anxiety patients to me for respiratory work amazing it was beautiful yes all of a sudden they had to use a lot less meds they felt a lot better they moved a lot better and he was getting better therapeutic outcomes. Like really good, really good work in fitness, in health, and anything wellness-oriented has to be interdisciplinary. I would love to sit here and say that I have the answers to everything. This is not the fucking case. And anybody who has the brass balls is here and say they have to answer to everything is a fucking liar. They're either a liar or they're an idiot.

And there's no exception to that rule. Nobody has the answers to everything. There's not a single profession that can take care of every condition. I work. with some of the people at SUNY on optometry. I work with some of the guys that are at the top of the AAPMD on dentistry. Obviously I work with the PRI folks on the physical therapy aspect. Work with some phenomenon manual therapist. Again, I talked about manual therapy earlier being a good adjunct. It's not necessarily always a good solo treatment. A lot of these things have to happen in concert with motor learning. If I give someone for example, if I get the exact mouthguard the need from

I work with the guys up in the Hinden Center in Suffer in New York. They're fantastic. Howie and Jeff. If I give someone the mouthpiece they need to resolve a lot of their oral facial symptoms and their neck symptoms and stuff, but I don't give them any more

tasks to do with that, it's not going to fucking work. And it may actually make them worse. Same thing for the visual stuff. And we talked about kind of fractals earlier. So we could talk about, I don't want to get too much into it because, again, people will mess this up. That misquota. But we can imagine

the motors or those lateral heels that there's no rain stance that it's okay to compress. If we only get really juicy with it, we could talk about globes, right? We could talk about circular objects. Your globe here, right? It's like the head of a femur in a socket. He's pointing to his eyeball. Oh, yeah? Okay.

Just in case that people aren't watching. Okay, yes. So my globe is my eyeball, which is analogous to a large extent the head of a femur in an acetabulum, a socket in a shoulder socket with a glenum and a humorous. Same thing. It affects how we move. Your visual perception, here's a fun one for everybody. Your perception of your visual periphery will precede abdominal contraction in stance.

I'm not saying that. That's clinical work saying that. Clinical paper saying that. Your visual system hits your brain. We could just make the argument that the eye is part of the brain, the eyes are the limbs of the brain, basically. That way, it will precede pretty much everything else and be way differently versus everything else.

So visual prescriptions can be a real problem of someone who's the wrong prescription. If you're watching this or listening to this and you wear very focals or bifocals, fucking get rid of them. Get rid of them. You're giving conflicting information to your brain. Yeah, maybe handier to not have to change your glass in two things, but it's really going to mess up your system for most people. If you're not optometrist watching this, also, I encourage you to, you to, you

work with a manual therapist or someone who knows how to do testing and test someone who wears very focals versus when they wear just regular glasses. Yeah, just get two sets of glasses. It's okay. It's not that big of a deal and it's going to be worth it. You talked about this before and actually we've experienced this as well. My partner had an overprescription and it really was making him overactivated. Can you describe like the mechanism behind that how that can happen, like how it can make you more sympathetic by having an overprescription and for like near-sighted? this. Before even say that, there's one thing I would like to say, which is going to definitely upset some optometrists. I prefer a stand-up optometric test, a stand-up refraction, which a lot of

optometrics don't we do, versus sit-down one, because sit-down one puts us in a position where we're locking on SCMs, and upper traps and some of the neck musketure, which all this already can mess up our prescription a little bit. Totally. If you don't, if you're an optometrist or somebody who's in the visual field and you don't think that there's any difference in a stand-up optometric test, and he sit down one, go to PubMed, because there is documented differences. I'm not saying it, I'm not making it up, the research is there.

Go have hurt feelings somewhere else, that's fine. Cry quietly in the corner, it's all right. Or learn, get better like the rest of us want to do. I'm not trying to shit on optometry because I've worked with some phenomenal people there. But on almost every profession, there's people who just don't want to move forward. Yep.

They want to do what's always been done. Yep. The best way, I'm just going to use an analogy for this as well, because it gets complicated with the eyes, especially. The best way is imagine I'm making a set of orthotics for your feet. Because a set of glasses or set of contacts, they're orthosis for an eye. In the same way, a mouthguard is an orthosis for teeth. In the same way, instead of archers or inserts or put into your shoes,

they're orthosis for feet. All these things are doing is giving us a change in sensory perception. That's it. The eyes just happen very heavily weighted. Imagine I've got some of the low back pain. They've got a constantly arched back and then put them instead of high heels. That's what giving someone the wrong set of glasses is going to do. It's going to type with the capitalist muscles in the eyes.

It's going to immobilize this phenoid, the temperal bones won't be able to rotate. Muscles will be locked into place and unable to have that variability, that oscillatory capacity, the ability to vibrate and just move. And they'll lock them again neurologically, physiologically, motor cognitively. The emotional cognitive side of things, by the way, some people are a little more resilient in that side than others. Some people won't feel a massive effect. But if you're really locked up, everyone will feel the effect.

Everyone. If you're listening to this and you're like, I feel fantastic. I'm happy for you. Great. Not everybody wins the lottery. Some people do. Some people can do fucking everything wrong, everything wrong, and still succeed. We see that in every walk of life.

There's some musicians who just fucking suck. Make millions of dollars. Some actors who are not going to mention anybody particular, but I've got one who I just love to. And we're just trash. Yeah. But millions of dollars. Same thing.

We shouldn't judge things on survivorship bias. We should judge things on if I can take the person who's worst at this and get can go high level. That's the template we should be using. When it comes to the fitness realm, you'd see that with like the old Eastern European weightieston blocks and the Chinese type of training, where they take thousands of athletes and how they identify the natural

athletes, if they beat, not literally beat them, but they throw a training a lot of them so hard that someone survives. And then they go, well, they train like this. It must be the best way to train. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. They took the people who were just mutants, who would train and survive that, the block that was designed to break people. And they identified their elite level athletes who were born that way

and maximized their potential. Everybody else fell apart. They were broken. They were injured. They were ill. Let's not base everything on what we can do with our best people. You can take an athlete and you can take an athlete and I picked him for a reason because a lot of training that I see from him from his, I haven't seen anything

for a while, but it's a very questionable technique, right? It doesn't matter. LeBron James is going to be a Bronn James no matter what you did. That was sealed in high school. Unless he had a freak accent, he was always going to be a phenomenal professional basketball player because he was born to be an athlete. There are people like this. We should not use what they do to dictate what people who are not born that way do. It's fucking stupid on the face of it.

Yeah, totally. And I think that also plays into just like aesthetics in general. Like, you know, like you mentioned earlier, I want to look like this person. So I'm going to do what they do. And it's like that there's no way that's guaranteeing you to get those results. It's also completely fallacious on the face of it. We talk about yoga, lung and lean. It's like I'm saying, I want to be good basketball, so if I play basketball, it's going to be tall and black. No, I'm going to be in the NBA if that happens. It's just fucking silly. Self-selection.

And I purposely, you know, exactly that. Yeah. I purpose to use that example because it's fucking ridiculous in the face of it. Yeah. Of course, it's not going to change my race. I'm not going to get taller, unfortunately. You know, it's not fair. But no, yeah, people self-selecting things are going to be great at.

And then they succeed there. And it was like, oh, my God, you succeeded because you did this. Right. They were going to do that from fucking day one. It's like someone who got elder dynol syndrome or ligamentous laxity. It's like they're so flexible because of the yoga. No. Yeah.

They got good at yoga because they have ligamentous laxity genetically. Yes. I've trained clients who are contortionists. And again, I'm not calling them out. But what they do to be successful will not work for me. They will not work for that power lifter with the extra facets and the joints. No matter what he does will never be a bendy person. That's okay.

He's a rhinoceros. That's a giraffe or some other such fucking comparison. Right. I want to talk about flexibility because I think it's super important. There's lots of misconceptions there. But just briefly about vision, can you also have somebody that gets locked up if they're under prescribed or not wearing a prescription? Or does it only, okay. Yeah.

It's, yeah. You can have any rich way. I typically prefer someone usually who's underprescribed rather than overprescribed. There's also a problem whereby what your eyes like and what you like versus what your nervous is like to different things. So this is where having someone who knows manual testing, if you have a comment. complex visual case, the ideal acuity, the clearest picture that you see may not result in the best testing. And that's a big disconnect. We always, we always typically, I don't want to speak for an entire professional, I'm not a part of what I typically see if people are just for

acuity because there's the driving liability probably. Exactly. And the best, the best optimist in the world, they know, I've talked to some of them. They know that the eyes affect the rest of the system. Yeah. But that hasn't filtered down to the profession as a whole just yet. and I've been so just genuinely lucky and grateful that I've managed to work at some people just in random optometrists who understand that but still a lot of people don't and same as some physical therapists and podiators

understand okay this foot this insert will affect the rest of the body some of them don't I've seen so many podiatric inserts which have made people worse I would say a solid 95% of them that negative effects upchain wow 5% I'm like oh my god marry this person find this guy give him like a MacArthur Grant and a hug

and a high five for me yeah Cool, great. Amazing. Yeah, we need more of those like stand out. We need more objective testing of any chain or anything. I mean, I'm not saying this in a bad way, need more accountability. And we need more patient advocacy so that I can go and see someone after getting this like foot inserts, this orthotic.

And they go, okay, well, we have objective testing measurements here and the worse from this insert. Acutely, I take it out, they go away, put it back in, they come, okay, we. We can make sure it's this, right? We can test and make sure it's that. Cool. Go back to that person and let's work as a team to get this working for you. That's what we need. We need interdisciplinary integration.

We need professions that are so not afraid of interacting with one other. They're not afraid someone's going to steal and, you know, take this client because we need all of them. There are enough hurt people, sick people, unhappy people. People are just not moving well and feeling well. You can all fucking work together. It's not that complicated. It is complicated, but it's not that hard to not be an ass. Right. And I think the goal ultimately for any health care or adjacent providers should be to like put themselves out of business knowing that they never actually will.

Exactly. Yep. And that's the amount of people that need help. But something interesting that I thought of when you were talking about like, put a therapy and good sex. The end is the end goal is discharge. Yeah. There you go. If that's not a sound bite, I don't know what it is here all night. There you go. We'll clip that one for sure. I was just thinking so when you're saying about like doing objective testing and and as a way to track progress, I was thinking of this. teacher that I've been following a lot lately, Dr. Jack Cruz, he's a neurosurgeon, rather, and big into like circadian health, but he talks about how in medicine and in all systems, like proof of work should be the gold standard. Like, if something works, then you keep it. If it doesn't work, you get rid of it. There's no, like, I mean, I think this is also where, like, the insurance model comes in, where it's like all this liability. A whole long discussion on its own. Yeah. And so,

like, the money aspects of it become more important than the actual proof of work. Yep. And I will say there are people who are like the hangar had to be evidence-based, right? And yeah, you get the eye roll. Yeah. The problem with those people in my experience, and I'm not trying them all the same brush, but most of them that I've outlined with who specifically outlined themselves as being an evidence-based person won't read new evidence. Sure. But they won't read things that conflict with theirs.

They want a custom-made study to say exactly what, you know, oh, they did they want like a level of specificity which is just impractical and illogical and just. fallacious on the face of things. Instead of being like, okay, here is a study proving this mechanistic connection. Here's a study proving the outcomes based on this intervention. Like, well, it doesn't say exactly this. I'm like, well, you're being a fucking dickhead now. So don't be a dickhead.

If the person is getting better outcomes than you, the only question you should have is why. The first one is why, second one is hell. That's it. It shouldn't be, well, I disagree with your methods. Fuck your methods. If they're getting better outcomes consistently than you, why? have. That's it. You can put your ego away somewhere else because when you're dealing with anybody else's health or wellness, it's not about you. It's about them. Totally. And I mean,

the whole evidence-based label is also, like, completely negating certain types of evidence. So, like, there's more evidence than randomized controlled trials about very specific questions. Yes. Like, your clinical experience is a form of evidence as well. I will note the vast majority of people who I've met and interacted with who are evidence-based have almost no experience. Yeah. But maybe for two years. Like, let me tell you about my experience. It's very cerebral. Yeah, and I'm like, cool.

Without being a dick, how many people have you seen with this condition? Well, none. Then shut the fuck up. You don't have experience. You have an opinion. Exactly. That's okay. You can't say in my experience, you've literally zero experience.

Exactly. Yeah. Again, to kind of play devil's advocate on the other end, we have people who just have make this bat-shick connections and like have no mechanistic explanation or no, seemingly to me, at least, no logical connection for what, they're doing. Like, look, I flicked your kneecap and now you're better. Like, I think we could probably meet somewhere in the middle of like, again, accepting a mechanistic explanation as opposed to a double-blind

RCT. Yep. You know? Totally. And I mean, we can also use empirical research and empirical evidence to inform hypothesis generation to do the R sequence. Absolutely. Yeah. And I feel like that's not very often engaged because there's certain levels of evidence that science kind of looks down on for whatever is there or another. Anecdotal evidence is seen as like an absolutely joke. And it's like, but when you look at outcomes over a, like if you have, for example, any procedure it's not working. And let's, let's talk about, I don't want to get it wrong.

Was it, I think it was ACL tears. Oh, yeah. One grade of ACL tears. And they found that do it like, they've been doing this obviously for a long time. They found that doing a sham surgery had the same outcomes as the actual surgery. Yeah, I remember. So what fucking point do we say, why are we doing the surgery? Right.

Or can we at least narrow the criteria, maybe to a higher grade of tear that we would do the surgery? Maybe it's only a complete tier, a grade three tear, or we do that surgery. But why are we doing a fucking surgery? We literally have a significant amount of data. And obviously, I would like to see the data replicated, but saying that a sham surgery is as effective. But we're still charging people $50,000 to the surgery and doing it. That's probably why they're doing it. But this is what I'm saying.

People say their evidence base and they'll talk with this. I'm like, well, the evidence is fucking right there. Don't do it. Mm-hmm. If you're evidence-based and you're afraid to read in your research, you're not evidence-based. You're a coward. I think there's some quote about like if a man's opinion conflicts with his or like requires him to get his paycheck or whatever relies on his opinion, then it's like he's going to always see a certain outcome.

And that's a big problem in healthcare space. I were talking with this in the fitness realm. I was saying the barbell backscots are probably the most over-prescribed exercise that there is. And of course, people came out of me or whatever. almost all of them were like, well, we just use barbells in our gym. I'm like, well, do you think of a vested interest perhaps in the barbell? Also, they also avoided every single technical question. I asked them, but the mechanics of the squad.

That's an aside. But I wasn't even saying squatting was bad. It was saying that specific implement, most people don't have the ability to do it in a good way. And of course, we go to ad hominems because you're like, well, people have been doing it forever. I'm like, yeah, I'm asking any commercial gym, asking people who have been doing it and exercise forever, how many of them got hurt? The numbers will surprise you, benching. Most people who bench a respectable amount relative to the body rate and have been doing so for more than five to ten years have an injured shoulder.

Usually right. We're not getting into the way of that, but if we don't look at these patterns again, that's all anecdotal evidence. Sure, of course, we could describe and conduct a research study for that. But that's valuable anecdotal evidence. Everyone who bench presses a certain way starting to get shoulder injuries. Hmm. At what point do you reevaluate? maybe not to be necessary to get rid of a bench press,

maybe a technique shouldn't be old-school power after technique for someone who's not an old-school power after. Yeah, I think exercise selection is super important depending on somebody's goals. Like, a certain exercise is going to be more appropriate. And actually, we can get into that in a little bit. Maybe I want to talk about like unilateral versus bilateral lifts and what the benefits of doing some unilateral work could be.

But first, I really like to talk about flexibility and why it's not like optimal to be the most flexible you can possibly be. Okay. I'm going to start that off by actually telling another anecdote, if you don't mind. Sure. I think you might have heard this one before. So I was in a room, a little bit pre-COVID. I used to run the training department for a big chain of gyms. We had like 23, 24 gyms. I had like a couple hundred staff. I like 50 or 60 people in the room, each of whom had a minimum experience of five years to be hired. So minimum, 320 years experience in the room, probably significantly more than that, probably closer to four or 500 years of experience.

And I started off by saying, hey, we're not really going to spend much time on. stretching and flexibility because that's a giant fucking waste of time. And I can see people huffing and puffing, you know, throughout the room. Like, a handful of them to fair out. A couple of people being like narrowed eyes and like, where's he going with this? But most of them know me well enough to go, okay, if I said it, there's a reason for it. But then I realized that I probably should spend a bit more time because not ever have been to the previous selectors in the series.

And I said, okay, let's just address that one head on. Hands up here, stretches to clients and almost all the hands end up. My great. hands up here who's ever seen someone get significantly more flexible after puberty from stretching. Zero hands. Like great. Questions. I can see a lot of people go, oh, I've been wasting everybody's time.

Yeah, you have. That's okay. Recognise it. Move on. It's not saying stretching cannot accomplish flexibility changes, but it's saying, like, if you go into really, really long extreme stretching, that's a whole different thing. and we talk about 30, 40, 50 minute held stretches where we're going to get sarcomere stacking and developing.

That's a whole different thing, right? Still not optimal for most people. If there's someone who needs super physiological flexibility and your post-puberty, you might have to go to that very painful route, but you're going to eventually give yourself ligamentous lactate. And that's the real problem. That's where we can get the issue.

More flexibility is not better. I say it's someone who has ligamentous laxity in a number of areas from years of gymnastics and breakdancing and fighting and stuff. It just causes instability. ligament's job is to check unnecessary or unsafe movement that's it so if you want to just embrace

unsafe and unnecessary movement I mean that from a force that goes back to being athletic a force generation preservation and transfer standpoint it's not that it's necessarily you know unsafe to have a joint in a particular position

but if there's force and load involved it may be unsafe to be there right that's all so yeah more flexibility is not always better and also how people go about flexibility he's often ass backwards. I used ass there for a reason. I had a pair of clients here a couple weeks ago.

Lovely pair. It's mother and daughter. The daughter actually does. It's usually super nice. Mother's a sweetheart. And I was telling him, we're actually very stretches. It's a giant waste of time.

And of course, it's the face is crunched up like, this guy's an idiot. Well, I may be an idiot. It's not because of this. So I said, okay, cool. I'm just going to show you real quick. I was like, can you switch your toes?

I was like, no, I'm not even close. I'm like, great. So I took her pelvis, exhale, and learn how to move the pelvis backwards, you took your toes in 20 seconds. And she's like, I've been stretching for 30 years. I'm like, great. Which would you rather do more of?

Stretch, or not have to stretch at all and just be able to do it or stretch for another 30 years and hopefully it works. It's like, well, obviously, they're not having a stretch. I'm like, cool, great. Stretching is not mechanical for the most part. It's not that something is mechanically limited. The brain puts the brakes on,

it brings us full circle again back to what we were talking about earlier, based on perceived safety. That's it. So if I try and swing my arm back as far as I could and my brain wasn't involved, it's actually how it dislocated my hip, that's a whole different thing. Because I was literally asleep when it happened.

When you start to swing your arm back and your brain didn't put the brakes on, you'd tear a bunch of shit, maybe break something. So your brain puts the brakes on via the Golgy tendon organ and says, don't touch the hot stove. Okay? When a lot of people have muscular tightness,

they actually have long weak muscles. I use hamstrings as an example there, because most, not all, people who have tight hamstrings actually have long, weak hamstrings, and that mother who couldn't touch her toes actually shortened her hamstrings to allow her to get further into her hamstrings, which sounds oxymoronic. But if the brain senses that the muscle is too long and further stretching puts it a risk of tear, it puts the brakes on and says, no more for you, done.

By shortening that muscle, then there is slack left. Then we can move throughout that motion. And that usually happens with appendicular structure movement. rib cage, pelvis, head. That's it. So you manage your pelvis and immediately, this is why I like this stuff,

immediately the change happens. I'll put it out there. The entire mobility industry is a fucking joke. And I'm sure I'm going to hurt someone things with that. But if you can't make someone more mobile in 30 seconds,

you probably can't make them more mobile. Now, again, we're accepting people with crazy neurological issues. But you've seen it when I work with people. You've seen me in person do it. Someone can't do it. And I don't tell them what to expect. I don't tell them, hey, you're going to have more rotation now.

They go, what about now? They're like, oh, shit. I went from like nothing here to like a nice sweat patches too. That's fun. To like 90 degrees of humoral abduction. My shoulder just moves now. That's weird. I'm like, cool. Let it be weird. That's fine. Let it be novel. Live in that new weird thing. It does like this idea that we have to just stretch and stretch and stretch. And doing it before exercise is just fucking stupid too. Again, the research shows that it's going to reduce power output for the most part. There's also really not a whole lot large body of research showing any sort of benefits from it. If you like doing it, cool.

But even if you are someone who loves to stretch, maybe don't do it so indiscriminately. Pick something that someone has helped to identify is actually tight. Yes. Stretch that. And then if we want that to stay off, this is the big one that screws you pull up, right? And again, we're going full circle, which I like. If I've had a problem my laptop, my computer, and I reset it and turn it back on and it's still there, do you think just keep it on resetting it's going to fix it, despite what? so many texts on the phone have tried to make me do for different issues. Like if you just keep pressing reset but never change anything in the software,

never changing it the hardware, no nothing's going to happen. We're just going to end up the same problem. So that's what most people are doing when they stretch. They're inhibiting a muscle, they're turning it off, lengthening and taking leverage away. But if that muscle is not playing a role in the system, something else has to take up that slack, no pun intended. Something else has to take that job and do it. In the case of the hamstrings, the hamstrings are long weak.

The low back will work for long people. the low back is long and weak the hamstrings will work. A lot less common, but it does happen. So we have to identify what the issue is turn one off and the other one on. We have to give the brain an option

if we want to self-organize. Now, full circle, self-organization needs input. It needs specific input. And then all of a sudden, oh shit, now that stretching actually can be beneficial because we turned off the thing that was too on. Now we can turn on the new thing.

make sense? People aren't, I'm just going to stretch everything. If you stretch everything, you may as well stretch nothing. Yep. Because you're kind of back to a net zero effect. Totally. Yeah. There's a lot. I mean, 99.9% of people who are stretching,

they're just like going through the motions of stretching every muscle equally, just doing things they've already seen, parroting it, and not helpful. If you look at it through the lens we talked about the binary phase, we're either moving towards stance, towards parasympathetics, or towards extension, swing, sympathetics. So if you stretch all the muscles in the articular chain that brings you towards one and then the other, it's just net zero. Huh?

Cool. You just wasted. You successfully wasted time is what you did. Again, I'm sure it's just some of the mobility coach who are like, well, I find that I don't fucking care. Right. Unless you have a mechanistic and or can, if you can get results better than 20 seconds or something like that, awesome. Now I want to hear from you. If you're like, well, my clients in six months, I'm like, shut the fuck up.

I have no interest in that. I don't. It's not practical. I've been doing this long enough that I've been through all the phases of like, this is the new thing. There is no new thing. There's no shortcut to motor learning, except for motor learning.

There's no magic bullet. There's no one exercise that's going to fix your back pain because it depends why you have back pain. There is no one movement that's going to get you big arms. That'll be a function of consistency, same as anything else. You should be consistent and you should be a sniper. You should be surgical in what you do. Absolutely.

I'm actually super curious with regards to motor learn. and like facilitating that process, an experiment, I think, that I mentioned to you before that I, not, I don't think any of us have done it yet. I was talking to Keith about doing it and maybe seeing how it works, but like using specific, like, pharmacological or small molecules to help facilitate motor learning. So like we know Lyons Main helps with neurogenesis and like psilocybin helps with spine formation to make new connections between neurons. I highly believe that there's a huge therapeutic potential space. I also think of the converse, I think there's a lot of antidepressants and perhaps SRI inhibitors,

and dopamine reuptake inhibitors we talked about, dopamine earlier in different patterns, and dopamine re-opetectin inhibitors, which are probably negatively and detrimentally affecting people's ability to motor, particularly people with TBI. Again, I do not have clinical,

I will say this, I do not have clinical evidence for this, I do not have a research paper of this. This is just my own suspicion. I suspect they are dampening motor learning pretty significantly. I do have some very much anecdotal evidence and it's a very short, small amount of it,

but mechanistically, it does make a little bit of the sense. Yeah, there's probably also something with serotonin system. Like you mentioned the SSRIs, but just anecdotally, Keith, my partner has had lots of issues with, you know, different imbalances that he's worked with you with and like pain in different areas. And we just noticed anecdotally that whenever we took MDMA in the past, like it's gone.

Like he feels perfect. Like energy is just moving through his body very easily. There's no restriction, no pain. So it's super interesting. it's super interesting as well when people talk about this stuff to me like and here's another one by the way I love to tell people that this is very much

parallel to that we both talk about well if someone has a mechanic to our muscle it can happen but it's usually not the case usually not and the one I use all the time is if you ever been in an area where everyone's drinking or doing lots of drugs

and there's no bathrooms around and you see a girl just drop down to a full squat to pee like at a festival or car or whatever. Ask same girl to do it sober. Most of them can't do it.

Because they're on depressants, which are depressing the nervous system to make them more sympathetic. It's not like more parasympathetic. If you can inhibit those sympathetics, all of a sudden people can just move. I'm not saying everyone should be drunk all the time, but they might move.

Depending on the level, they might be a little better. You know what I mean? I've seen it all the time. People, they can just like fold up in these positions like pretzels when they're drunk or under high. It doesn't matter really what it is ons a depressant.

and then so rope they can move, move like a brick. Wow, that's super interesting. There's also things like not alcohol, but like thionine, which is also gabberergic, so we could think about leveraging. Magnetium. Yeah, magnesium. Enough magnesium and you can get on a mild buzz. I don't recommend it for many, many, many reasons.

But, you know, people should be something in a magazine, particularly before sleep. Yeah, it's very athletic. Totally. I use the magnesium bisglycinate and I swear by it. I love it. It helps me like throughout the day, just feel like just more mellow. Yep. It's noticeable.

So I think there's lots of potential here to like leverage specific, you know, small molecules or supplements or pharmacologics that can really help facilitate the process in addition to doing the work, of course. Thankfully slash terribly, because there's money there, we're actually seeing some emerging research on the subjective MDMA and psilocybin and that sort of stuff. I'm not sure where it's going to go, if it's going to go in a positive direction, but we're going to find out the ketamine as well. Yep. Yep. So it's super interesting. I think they're all pretty new and like the research got squashed for so many years because of the war on drugs. but like we're starting to get new data now and you look at all the conditions i was talking

with feelings of all conditions of hypersynthetics yeah of like it's almost as if being sympathetic all the time and we talk about sympathics being uh analogous to extension it's almost that's not a good thing yeah we need to go be able to go back and forth if we're getting stuck in that poll it's just going to be i feel like that's what typically people describe as burnout yeah yep exactly that oh and actually speaking of that, so I don't think we talked about this earlier, but I would really like to make sure that we cover it as like nasal breathing versus mouth breathing and how that also plays into the whole sympathetic state. That's a long conversation in itself.

I actually like on the notes, you have mouth breathing changes the face shape, dental braces, negative impact the airway. Yeah, yeah. It does. So let's start off chemically first. Nasal inhalation will, first of all, it will moisten and cool the air, number one. So it will filter the air for you. So you can have less environmental allergies.

Also, it creates nitric oxide release as well. It also gives you a sense of inhalation, much more so than an oral breathing. As it goes to the turbinate, the hairs of the nose and stuff will actually give a sense of inhalation if you don't get through the mouth. So that will typically help people not over-inhale with the cadence, causing that cascade and talk about earlier. When you do that, that oral inhalation, it's a problem. It's a problem for so, so many people. I'm trying to figure out that the easiest way to even talk about this. When we have someone who orally inhales,

oh my God. There's enough data there when you look at the industry. Mouth breather's suck. There's a reason mouth breather is an insult, right? Exactly. There is. It's associated lower cognitive scores, lower emotional, emotional cognitive development.

We'll have, typically you get like retruted mandibles, retronathism they caught. You get crowding of teeth. You get pallets that don't fully form, or they don't kind of spread out, you get narrow faces. That's a good one. If you have someone who's had braces in their younger,

you'll see typically a narrow long face. Not always, but it's a pretty good predictor for the most part. And when you restrict someone's teeth and mandible and palate from expanding and spreading, you'll often force crowding because the bones are already there. Now they have nowhere to go. And conversely with someone who's prepubescent or sometimes mid-pubescent,

if you can get them to start doing oral breathing, I say nasal breathing rather, not oral breathing. Then you can often expand their palate. Far, far, like adult pallet expansion doesn't really work. You can get some, but it's not the same thing at all. And anyone who says it is is a liar. You can get some, but it's not the same thing. Because the sutures aren't fully formed and fully sealed pre-puberty.

But if you get a kid to that, there's a great book. I think it's Mu meets Buteco. Okay. Or Butteco meets you. I think it's Mu meets Butteco. that people can actually look up and buy that. I don't agree with everything in it, but it's a very, very good book to start

for people who have no clinical experience, no expertise in the subject, who have kids, who have environmental allergies, who have crowding of their teeth, who have narrow faces. There's a section for clinicians, a section for parents, and a section for kids.

It's like a $10-11 book. If you have kids who have environmental allergies, kids who are going to need braces or have been recommended palpable expansion, just get them book. It's 10 bucks. Even if it doesn't help you at all, it's 10 bucks.

And the narrow face and the palatal expansion also ties in with breastfeeding, right, as a baby. Yep. Yeah. So the absence of that can help, like, facilitates that crowding process and the narrowing of the face and the airway. And that actually drives mouth breathing because now the nose doesn't have as much space to bring in air. And on top of that, there's no, we haven't created a pattern where they need mouth breathe as much. Right. Because literally in that position as you're breastfeeding, you kind of have to nose breathe.

Yeah. So we're teaching them from a young age. it's an appropriate thing to be able to do. That's a good point. Yeah, that's a long conversation. I could talk about it, but someone who's really on the high end of dentistry, you'll be in a better position to kind of really dive in there.

But if I see someone mouth breathing, but if you know someone who's in agriculture, they'll tell you they know they're, they're sick or their animals are sick on the mouth breathing. Yeah. Like, it's a known thing from across the field, they're like, that one's take it out. I'm showing my rural Irishness there.

I couldn't own the farm. amazing. Yeah, and also so with the mouth breathing as well, like you talked about the bore effect in CO2 versus O2. Well, if your mouth breathing, you're blowing off more CO2, so that ratio is changing and you're creating that like mild alkalosis that's going to drive your sympathetic activity. Yep. We'll also get like more SCM, which more SCM and upper trap activation typically on an oral limitation, especially a force to them and an ascent relation. But it just drives, it just drives not having a real sense of breath. The word sense to me is a very important word. because I hate ambiguous hippie shit.

I really do. But sensing is a skill. If you can't sense how much of breathing, you're not good of breathing. If you're not good of breathing, you're doing that 23,000 times a day. You're not doing anything else other than beating your heart

which you don't really have conscious control over. If you're not breathing well, you're fucking up essentially in your entire system. Actually, to that, maybe we should briefly discuss belly breathing because we mentioned it earlier. But I think it's been trendy over the past decade or something.

so and it's just very anti-productive in a lot of ways. Yeah, I always struggle with this one because I don't want to shit on things that are well-intentioned. Right, I totally get that. And this is kind of where I'm like a very straight-down-the-line person. You know, I don't have a filter. Belly breathing is not good breathing. It contributes to a lot of the problem we've talked about.

It contributes to the idea that we talked earlier of this, the best for alcoholosis. From a mechanical perspective as well, it's probably easiest to envision that. body breathing can be like when the diaphragm is partially coming down or what diaphragm is coming down when the pelvic floor is not and what we have is we have an abdomen that's distending forward that's a diaphragm that's pushing or pressure that's pushing everything forward now if we go back to our meat balloon analogy if we have this expansion forward we also have posterior compression

anterior expansion posterior compression because every action isn't equal but opposite reaction so that's going to actually help drive you into that anterior pelvic tilt and that extension pattern which feeds back the whole way into our whole conversation earlier. So belly breathing will make you worse at essentially everything. Yeah. On top of that, I also suspect I do not again have data for this. I suspect it also probably increases likelihood of anterior herniation and posterior herniation.

Posteriorination because we're getting a lot of direct compression there on every inhale. And anterior herniation because we're elongating the abdominal wall, the transverse abdominals, the internal obliques, the rectus, and then having outward pressure pushing from there, well. So I would be surprised if eventually we didn't find a correlation between things like umbilical hernias and elongated abdominal walls. Again, from a very simple and obvious mechanistic analysis, it seems fairly like fairly related. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. On that note, actually my stepdad, he's had pain, he's in his 60s now, he's awesome. He's had pain since his 20s and his low back. You know, been to see every person you can think of like a couple of surgeries, all the physical

therapy and it's not me again ragged on physical therapists they just weren't using the right tools at the time um they're in spain so i don't see them that often i did one session with them like three or four years ago no pain since wow i saw him two years ago and he mentioned he was going in for ingramural hernia surgery groin hernia surgery he had four failed surgeries two on each side and they'd recurred again now i will state this i wouldn't have done this if it was an actively protruding hernia i can't touch that shit with the barge pole because we don't want to cinch that off and get some sort of necrosis whether that would happen, I don't know, but if it's an active protruding hernia, I'm not touching the barge pole, so it's at least internal again.

Because you could cause a lot of problems. So neither of them were actually out, but they kept recurring. I said two failed surgery to each side, total four surgeries. So he happened to mention he's going in for the surgery in a couple weeks, and I said, okay, call it. Don't call your doctor yet. Let's come with me. We did, in 45 minutes of work.

We're now two years later. Cancel. No pain. Hernia is resolved. Wow. No. This is not, oh my God,

I'm a magician. This is saying that proper regulation of internal pressure can solve a lot of problems or at the very least, improve them. That's it.

That's why I care about breath. And be like, oh, breathing stupid, don't be a nerd. It's always people, by the way, who have like room temperature

IQs to say that shit. People who have never read any literature who are not interested in being the best what they do. But you're like, get jack nerd.

I'm like, first of all, I'm better than you at sports shut the fuck up. Second of all, help if you're taking money from people to help them fucking help them that's it absolutely sorry but yeah no it's important and it's very common that people aren't interested in continue learning progressing with new evidence and data and being better belly breathing though

by the way i will say it was a move in the right direction because we were talking about breathing yeah like we were talking about breathing great we're starting to get there i just don't i just don't love it for the reason that one. Again, it's still a step to even be thinking about breathing. But it's not necessarily a great step. It's at least we're stepped into the realm. We're not necessarily what we need to be with that. Totally. So you talked about pressure generation and how important that is for, and pressure management for, you know, massaging your internal organs and also just for, you know, basic physiological functions of the body. And then so speaking of that, there are certain movements presumably that can support that or kind of oppose that.

And so I think that's where it's interesting to think about like unilateral movement when we're thinking about resistance training and how that can help support natural gait and pressure management. I think it's important at this juncture to say that there is no bad position that a human can be in. There's bad positions to be stuck in and there's inappropriate positions to load in. I think I remember had this conversation again with some of the people in the industry and they said, well, you know, it's generally accepted that you can't predict it. injury and I said that's fucking bullshit. You absolutely can't predict injury. I also predicted the two injuries that person would have in the next year. Almost to the month.

Wow. I was very happy with that because I'm an asshole. That's called Shadenfreude. But it's not that we agree at all that you can't predict injury. It's that we disagree in the specificity with which we can predict injury. Everyone will say, okay, if I get Joe normal to come into the gym and do bicep curls, we can't predict he's going to injure his back. everyone go, yeah, we don't have information to say.

All right, cool. What about if I have Joe Normal go ahead with the wall every time he does bicycle curls? Okay, we're going to say he's going to have an injury. Some injury. Cool, everyone agrees there. So we've already established you can't predict injury. Let's be ridiculous with this. What about Joe Normal has a little bit of swinging those curls?

No, we can't necessarily say he's going to get injured. What about if Joe Normal is using way too heavy form in a twisting, snapping motion? Almost every professional go, yeah, he's going to get hurt. The timeline, I don't know, but he's going to get hurt. So let's stop pretending we can't predict injuries. That's not. Where do we come from with that? Oh, the, you know, that.

Yeah, cool. So when we look at by that own movements, again, we're looking at the typical way they're taught is powerlifting methodology or bodybuilding methodology. Again, both fine sports and the run, right? Nothing to do with what everyone else is doing. I challenge someone to find me a single sport, really going to squat like this with the big archback.

find one sport other than powerlifting. You can say a limit lifting, but no, they don't even squat like that. They squat differently, so don't say CrossFit, it's not sport. It is a shut up. It's not sport. CrossFit is a collection of games. It's a collection of sport-based games. That's all it is. It's not a distinct sport into itself or onto itself, further.

Every other sport, you're going to come down a position where the pelvis took under. We're going to load heels, then we're going to explode up. That's what we're going to do. We're going to do that in either of bilateral stance. or an asymmetric sense. That's it. But either way, the idea that we should have

a static position through a phased movement is fucking insane. It's like if I got the shocks on my car and wedged them long and then go, oh, why the shock breaks when I went up up down that mountain?

Because you wedged them long, you dickhead. Of course they're going to break. Most people are wedging themselves long at all times. Now, one or bilateral movement, we should have the ability to load and explode.

Now, if I had a pair of dumbbells on my side, decided to squat down with the tuck pelvis, no big arch in the back. And then I jumped when coming off the floor, you have to explode. You have to extend and find all these additions. That is a perfectly appropriate time to do that. Not when the four or five hundred pounds is on your back or the heavy dumbbells in your hand. Now, there are times when it's appropriate to do that and have that extension pattern when we're on the ground as well.

But not what most people think. It's usually not low bearing positions. That's that simple. We talk about sports. I'm trying to think the best way to this again, we look at our binary of, are we low bearing, are we swing? We can take any single position. We can talk about, let's say baseball, right?

Grab the ball to pitch, I load back here, where's my leg? Or where's my weight? Cool, it's on this side. Is my weight on this side? No. Is my rib kid decompressed in this side, compress this side? Sure. Cool.

Stance, swing. As we come past here, this side compresses, a change load. This leg usually swings. Stance, swing. Beautiful. It's binary. we can break that binary down to as many fine slices as we want

if we zoom in a little bit but we can look at that as a binary same thing and say it by that or a bench press right we're going to do our big arch bench press here let's just talk with the range of motion as well really is just playing the pit stains there but whatever it's warm on here, shut up

I chose gray I was brave he's so brave so brave so amazing to be a hero, fun so barbell bench press the main power to do it okay again perfectly fine for powerlifting the goal is to lift the most weight possible and limit the range of motion we have to use within the rules.

Okay. For the average person, they're trying to either get stronger or look better naked. Right? That's what it is. So that position puts us in a position where the humorous is behind us at a pretty nasty angle that a lot of power of just can't even go to on their own. And it puts the peck in a very long position. Okay?

Very long position and a lot of load is a great recipe for a torn peck, especially when we're talking about one rep maxes are close. For the general pop, we want the highest reward. to the lowest risk strategy and one that will have the most crossover because they have an undefined long-term athletic goal. I want you to be able to go and do what the hell you want to do. If you're a professional athlete in one discipline, we're probably going to lead to that discipline a lot and then try not get you hurt. For general pop, I want you to look good naked and be good at stuff. That's it, whatever stuff you want to be good at. That means we have to preserve and develop those

abilities to get to those movements. So let's say, above bench press, cool. That big extension pattern we talk about you're just reinforcing that. That's why they all walk around in that big extension pattern and they all have tons of disc issues and pain. That and the huge lows they use obviously as well. So let's say we give rid of the arch, took a pelvis, put the heels up on a bench. Cool.

Now we've got a significantly greater range of motion. Pretty much double the range of motion. We're probably going to have a lower necessary weight. So probably injury risk is going to be down. But in terms of mechanical load, we can actually up the rep range now and we're opening the range of motion. So your ego might get hurt,

but we're still going to get great stimulation. And it's probably going to have a much bigger crossover into actual athletics because we're going through the full range. If you show somebody, for example, you don't go, they wouldn't go very, they go like two foot, like, what you fucking do? You have to get into the position, then unload, you know what I mean?

Flection, extension. Coil the spring, explode the spring. Powerlifting doesn't do the coiling part. And I'm not saying someone should drop and go. That's a whole different level of stupid. What we can do is the alternating movements. alternating, I would say there's a difference in alternating and alternating reciprocal, and I sometimes use me interchangeably. So alternating could be a hold one dumbbell here. If you guys can't see,

because you're just listening, I'm holding one dumbbell, I move the other arm and press, then I start moving the other one. That's an alternating movement. I really want alternating reciprocal movement. As you do one action with one arm, the other arm does the opposite action, because that's what happens. When you looked at baseball pitch earlier, as one arm winds back into humoral abduction behind me, the other arm comes towards the front into huminal adduction. As this pelvis tucks under, this semi-pelves tooks under, the other one tux towards.

As one posse-tails to the other, anterior-tilts. That's what happens in gaites. It's what happens in an athletic movement. It's what happens in every sporting movement that's actually a decent movement. And we can break down again, every sporting movement into phases of gait

when it actually happens and train those. That's a different conversation. But what we want to do there is we want to have them doing both ends of the motion. And again, there is an appropriate way to do it and an inappropriate way to do it. If I bring the dumbbell down to my side, am I overcoming the load or am I accepting the load?

I'm accepting it. I'm not trying to overcome it as it brings in my side. That's compression, that stance. It's parisynthetic. I say it's parisynthetics. As I drive it up and bring the other one down, that side is being involved in sympathetics. Cool.

We're also, literally, if you look at it, we're pumping a rib cage, pumping a pelvis, pumping a cranium. That's what we're doing. We're pumping. We're alternating, we're wobbling, we're oscillating. What the fuck you want?

want to call it. We're giving ourselves variability and we're going through it in a way that is directly comparable to the force vectors that will use an athletic activity, which is not the same thing you can say for regular gym training. Totally. I mean, it also will just reinforce proper or more efficient and functional human movement. You know what's really cool about actually, right? Is a lot of my clients hated the first two weeks. They're like, this is awkward and it's pedantic and it's weird and it's different and why does nobody else do it this way. And two, three months like holy shit I'm 30 40% stronger and every I know you know this yes 30 40% stronger in every lift every lift and like that's a couple of years of gains from all

people and you get a couple of months and the ceiling just doesn't come you can keep going and going and going and going for such a long time everyone's asked me how I dip with the 200 pounds like video me a while back like dipping with 200 pounds on me for like 10 12 reps I was like what the hell that's like I just relearned my dips all over again started a body weight just kept going and going going going my trading partner got to like, I think, £100 for 8 or 10. And he was, you know, struggling to do, he's a strong guy. He could, struggling to do like 30, 40 for four or five before that.

But when he went back to scratch and re-learned with better position, better form, I mean, the ceiling just isn't really there. It's just a slower assent once you get quite strong. Now, on top of that, you'll have people talk about, well, I've got these form Nazis, you know. Where to go with this one? This is going to hurt some of the feelings again. Like if you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough. How about you're a fuck idiot?

When we have a particular form to do any given exit. Now this is different. We'll talk about in competition. In competition, things change. I don't give a shit. Win. In competition to win. Win and be safe.

That's it. Outside competition in training, we're trying to do is push the level of which we can perform before we have form breakdown. Because when we have optimal form, we have, given what we talked about earlier, if the technique is good, we have optimal power transfer and efficiency. If we don't, we don't. That's simple. So if it's most competitions, we want to be as efficient as possible and safe as possible.

When we have inefficient power transfer, we usually also have unsafe power transfer. We're talking about near maximum levels. From a very simple fucking perspective, if we're trying to train biceps and you're swinging like a motherfucker, you're not training your bicep anymore. Right. So the targeted tissue is no longer getting targeted. So why the fuck are you doing it? Just stop. There is an argument to be made for stopping if your goal is a supertive. which you have size gain or strength,

and you're an advanced or moderately advanced training, there is a decent argument to remain, I know this will definitely annoy somebody, to stop as soon as the set slows down. Particularly if you're in season or if you're doing your S&C work on top of like a sports specific work. I'm talking about for fighters, especially that sort of stuff.

Your type 2 muscle fibers, your fast, which fiber is the most metabolically expensive and the most susceptible to fatigue. So when you slow down, the fibers that you're targeting are the ones that are done. Right. So if you're going to grind in reps, all you're doing is depression and shit of your CNS and you're using the muscle mass that's not going to grow, that's not going to significant

contributor to later date, like, or high-end output, which you want most people going to need. There's again, depending on the sport, there is a case you made for doing those grind reps. For most people, even train to failure as a waste of time. They, oh, no pain, no gain. Fuck that. I want as much gain with a little pain as possible. I want to be efficient. I think maybe half a brain wants to be efficient.

Some people crave that beaten up feeling. You know, I suspect part of the reason for that is they're so sympathetic. The only way to get parasympathetic is by beating the nervous system to submission. That's a good point. Then they can give themselves the excuse to rest afterwards. Physiologically they have to do because they're seeing as Tammatin's sympathetic. They're done. Yes.

Actually, that was something that I really learned from you and I enjoyed when you started doing my programming was that prior to that I was more so going to failure and doing more high load training and then we switched up to a more high volume. training style and always ending with like two to three reps left in the tank. And I basically had no soreness. I could work out virtually every day. And I get stronger. Yes.

Good results. Yes. Way less emotional cognitive load. You don't need the gym exhausting. You go like, oh, it's kind of fun. I thought you could do more. Yeah, totally. Do more tomorrow.

We look at like the hypertrophy stats again and the studies on it. Three, four times a week is typically the optimal hypertrophy. Optimal time is for muscle be stimulated for hypertrophy. So if we're talking about someone who's going to the max on every session, you can't do that. It's not possible. And then people are taking their cues from PED using performance and enhancing the drug using bodybuilders. You're not performance enhancing.

If you're not using drugs, that's not going to work for you. And we have some data to suggest that most bodybuilders are successful in spite of what they do, not because of it. Totally. And I have trained, apart from having my own competition experience, I have trained competitive bodybuilders before as well if someone wants to know with that. Yeah, the crazy thing about the PEDs is that. I mean, people associated...

They work, you about I'm watching you. Yes. But also, it's like you're gaining strength, but also their recovery is enhanced insanely. Oh, my God, yes. So it's like that's... Including your CNS. Yes, exactly.

So that's a major benefit that those people are having that you're just not going to get that effect if you're just going in drugless. And this is also no judgment on PDs. I really don't give a shit from use PDs. I've trained a lot of athletes who use PDs,

a lot of athletes who don't use PDs, especially obviously the bodybuilders and parallels, there's a lot of those who use PDs because they don't test. But you have... Here's the thing that nobody talks about. So the androgen receptors in the body tend to be a little bit higher, the higher up we are.

Talk about upper traps and shoulders. If you look at every juice head, you can see a lot, big upper traps, big cap, medial delta specialies, the big giveaway. Fantastic. So if you're using those upper traps and SMs for respiration, you're going to get a lot of hypertrophy there. And it's going to make getting out of that state, that high stress state, that out of those sympathetics,

even harder for you, even harder because the one muscle, we don't want to hypertrophy, that upper trap, obviously for aesthetic purposes, you may want to have perpetrators, but for breathing purposes, we don't want that to be taking over instead of the diaphragm. We've just given that carpalanche space to get as big as a camera. And now we've really fucked ourselves. That makes a lot of sense because, I mean, neurologically speaking,

the more, so the saying is like neurons that fire together, wire together, but the more frequently and often those neurons are firing together, the more ingrained they get into the system, and the harder it is to divert to a new pattern. Yep. And so when you're using the PEDs, very high loads and, like, a lot of like threat i guess more threatening environments then that's going to really lock those patterns in and make it very challenging i had that the rampant stimulant use whether legal whether

legal or otherwise yes like the recipe fucking disaster that's why i do rehab with a lot of body dollars i told you i had a guy is like 270 pounds like jack beyond belief couldn't do a five pound tricep because a long head of his tricep was so used to just being assisted by the other parts of the tricep and he couldn't depress his scapola whatsoever to save his life. He was almost having a seizure doing. It was amazing. Wow.

He had a fall on tantrum. Talk about perceived threat. He took the little ball where he used in between his knees, threw it across the room and stormed out, came back five minutes later looking like he cried. But that's how much perceived threat. Yeah. I have people do breathing exercise sometimes

and they will do everything but shut the fuck up and do it because their body is screaming at them, don't do this. And then they need it more than anything. They need step inside that comfort zone, but they just, the body doesn't want to do it yet. Mm-hmm. There's like an interesting parallel here too between like learning and memory in general and also how it relates to like the peripheral nervous system. But like so we know that during sleep, learning and memory is where like that's where that most of that is happening.

That's when you're most parismpathetic throughout the day. And if you're using a lot of stimulants or abusing stimulants, caffeine, adderol, nicotine, whatever it is, you're going to be stuck more in that sympathetic branch of the nervous system and unable to have the motor learning and have the neurogenesis and the new connections to be made. Yep. You'll be an unhappy person. And if you're sitting here listening to this saying, I'm not an other happy person. Okay, but you could be happier. Like, sorry, you're not a unicorn.

Totally. I think people at this point will probably be really curious what offerings you have and like how to work with you. You mean like the 5% of people I haven't insulted throughout this? I apologize. Keychorns are left here. I want to know. How do I work with Rua?

It's very, I'm not going to lie. It's very difficult to work with me in person nowadays because I primarily work from a home and in Jersey. and I'm almost booked up entirely for in-person. So I only do in-person for rehab nowadays or if it's a professional athlete referral and even then they have to know somebody you have worked with because it's too busy and I can't take everybody else on.

But what I do have is I have my infinite athlete program which is based around all these principles that we've just talked about. But it's broken down to very simple bite-sized stuff. There's like a lot of interaction. There's Q&As. We go through it all. There's video technique.

There's no like live one-on-one except for the Q&A. It's basically what it is. obviously a lot cheaper than working with me one-on-one. But you're in a small group of people. We've got private groups who discuss this stuff. We break it down. Everyone has their program, their goal, their diet. They're helped all these things.

And everyone's getting great results from them. They're all loving it so far. And I actually really enjoying it because some of the questions that come out in these live Q&As are just beautiful. People don't make it to live Q&As as well. They can like pre-s submit questions and catch the replays and stuff. But it's a really nice group of people, really supportive. And it's kind of cool seeing how they're all like growing.

and getting better at everything. It's very rewarding. But yeah, I honestly have been, I've been like kind of beta testing this since before COVID. So it's like three and a half, four years I started online training. I didn't want to talk much about it

until I had something that I could be proud of. So I went back to drawing more like six times. And finally this year, I was like, okay, well, it's time to put something out there that people want access to this level of integration of this sort of work into training, but also don't want to dive too deep into a profession.

level because it's a there's so many different facets of this obviously as we just talked about but they can go and just sign up and then I can take care of it for them and I work with them so that's amazing yeah I mean ever since I started working with you I was thinking about like how can this be scaled and like how can you affect as many people as possible because your work is so transformative and important and so I'm so happy you have a group container now and I also have a couple clients who joined and they're awesome yes they've given glowing reviews so it seems like a really awesome program people can find that. Do you have a website

or can they find on Instagram? They can find me on Instagram at the Biomechanist. And they can find me at my website, Bua, B-U-A, Fitness.com. Everyone always asks, why is it Bua, not Ruah? And then if people email me,

call me Bua. So Bua is the Irish word for victory. Oh, I didn't know that. Amazing. Obviously, Ruwa is my name, but yeah, Boo is the Irish word for victory. Obviously, for me, for me,

I speak Irish as well. So I'm like, didn't even occur with me. Like, oh, Rua, Bua, people are going to get confused. Oh, yeah, I always wonder. They all the time.

All the time. That's amazing. I'm also going to start, actually, this or next week, my YouTube channel, which is a little bit more long-form content. Amazing. The Infinite Athlete. Incredible. It's primarily going to be just this sort of stuff. It's not going to be me going to my one hour long rant about shit that I don't like.

It's going to be practical, helpful stuff and maybe some in-depth analysis of why things should be in a certain way, not the other. Incredible. And are you at Bua Fitness on YouTube as well? I am, yeah, yeah. But on that one, it's not really worth visiting me. Cool. Like, that Blue Fitness on my YouTube is I have like maybe one or two videos there. There is one video there that a lot of people would like, but most of there is private. It's all the private videos for my unlike clients in that infant athlete group.

Got it. So if people follow you there, they should expect some more long-form stuff coming soon in the next few weeks. Yep, exactly, yeah. Great. So, I mean, we covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you, anything final that you want to want to share? I would say the big thing is, let's go back to, we'll call it the Sarah principle and pretend like you didn't say the person's real name. Never happened. Just don't put limitations on yourself

in anything in relationships, in finances, in fitness, in life. Anything another human being can do. You're 99.99% same as everybody else. And that's not a bad thing. Everything's, oh my God, I'm the same, not a special unique individual snowflake. No, it means that anything somebody else did that you can also do it. So believe in yourself and don't give up. I mean that, like, especially saying that's my rehab people, right? Because having been through that road of, you know, being dysregulated, being in pain, having joint injuries, not being able to perform at sports, it really is transformative in a very negative way when that's taken away from you. When people don't believe that you can be better, you can be back to yourself again.

That is possible to get there and you can get your life back. So don't give up on that. there. Amazing. On that note, I want to thank Roos so much for being here. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and we'll be back next week with a new guest. So have a good one. Thank you. Thanks, guys.