Weights and Plates Podcast - #62 - Pain, Tweaks, and Injuries: How to Overcome Training Roadblocks

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

Pain and "tweaks" are an inevitable part of training. If you live an active life, both in and out of the gym, then you will eventually tweak something and experience pain. You might even (heaven forbid!) get injured, and require rehab. So learning how to deal with pain while continuing to train and get strong is a very important part of the training process.   Pain is a complex experience, as much psychological and emotional as it is physical. Through their combined nearly four decades in the gym, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent have learned how to train around tweaks and injuries, and rebuild confidence under the bar after they happen. One key is exposure without danger. Once you understand that you can still move and do something productive in the gym, even if you are experiencing pain, then you can start to find ways to train at a level that encourages healing without risking further aggravation or injury. And the accumulation of these experiences, of training just at the point of discomfort but not danger, helps you to rebuild trust in your body and train your brain that your body is capable of being strong and functional in and out of the gym.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Hello, sir. Hello, sir. What's going on? what's going on? Well, yesterday I was, uh, I was outside and, uh, I was throwing the wiffle ball. This is a little thing that I do. I've got a, uh, I throw wiffle balls sometimes in my front yard. Um, I've got a little strike zone. It's like a little PVC frame with a metal, you know,

metal plate in the middle of it. It's my strike zone. my strike zone and uh you know it's just a good way to blow off some steam throw for five ten minutes or if i'm hanging out with my son i'll throw a few wiffle balls while he's playing and i can pretend like i'm greg maddox or whatever and uh yesterday i was throwing uh i don't know i was throwing a little bullpen, and I maybe threw 50, 60 pitches. And then on a inside fastball, a little two-seamer, I tweaked my right hip flexor. Okay. You know, I just planted,

and I turned, ripped one in there, and I felt something go... Outside of the gym. Outside of the gym. Yes, that's right. That's right. So, you know, if you think about the pitching motion, there's, you know, a lot of rotation that happens in your hips. And so that, that for, for a righty like me, that right hip flexor gets stretched.

Every time you throw the ball, you plant your left foot, your front foot, and then you twist and turn and throw the ball. So there we go. I had a, uh, a tweaked hip and it hurts pretty good. You know, anytime I externally rotate my hip, um, or if I just sort of like stretch it laterally in either direction, it pinches, it hurts. Ouch. And, uh, that's what we want to talk about today is, um, you know in life, sometimes shit hurts and you're going to have to deal with it. You have to learn how to deal with it in training and outside of training, too. And guess what, people? Because I'm talking to you.

You're not in control of this shit. Oh, yeah. You are not in control of this shit. That's right. You can minimize or maximize how much pain you're in through things that you do, but you don't get to decide whether something just stops hurting or not. You have no control over that. That's right. That's baked into the cake. You know, some of you have shitty backs, knees, hips, hands, thumbs, random shit, right? Back and hips are the most common ones that I deal with, and knees would be next.

Then shoulders, you know, I'd say knees and shoulders, depending on the person. But back and hips are probably by far the most common because we're bipeds, you know. Our backs are in compression all day, whether we're sitting, standing, or walking. And, you know, thousands and thousands of movements there, right? The vertebrae are extending and flexing thousands of times a day, you know thousands and thousands of movements there right vertebrae are extending and flexing thousands of times a day you know so most of us have disc herniations not all of us get symptoms though so you know i probably have disc herniations i don't have back pain at the time where is let's see my engineered wood i'm going to knock on that um because i am not that is not

me being a braggart uh i have a 39-year-old back. I could probably start hurting when I have a 45-year-old back, 50-year-old back, 60-year-old back. Rip never had back injuries until his late 60s. Then he said, when you have a 65-year-old back, any degree of movement in the vertebrae can easily cause pain, and you may not be able to see it when you're coaching somebody. And he meant in person when he says coaching. And, you know, now we're talking about, you know, older adults there, you know, so that's, you know, we're going to break this down into components. But the key message that I want to send out now, because I'm dealing with this quite a bit, is that you don't get to control whether something hurts or not.

That's right. You don't have hurts or not. That's right. You don't have control over that. That's nature. But you could have not thrown the wiffle ball. Maybe your volume was too high. No. Oh, no, wait a minute. High volumes, that's a good thing.

Never mind. High volume cures erectile dysfunction. Makes your dick bigger. Right? Yeah. Go do 25 sets of 10. Just need more volume. And it's better than Viagra.

You stay harder longer. You add about six inches to it, you could be a porn star, you know. More satisfied. Yeah. And it cures hair baldness, too. I mean, shit, let's not stop there. It cures baldness, you know. It makes the blind see again.

I mean, volume is the miracle drug for everything you know yeah yeah let's yes let's all all all praise i mean i'm constipated today maybe i need to do 16 sets of 10 you know yeah yeah well how many sets of 10 did you do last time or i mean if you want to do five you can do that too just do 50 sets just do more yeah more of them look man my tonnage is high I did so much tonnage today. Oh, bro, my tonnage. With the pink dumbbells. Oh, my God.

I've never once bragged about my tonnage. I've never even considered whether or not I said a tonnage PR. You know, it's not a PR. It's bullshit. It's not a PR. It's bullshit. Yeah. I used to, just for the hell of it, sometimes, it's not a PR it's bullshit. It's not a PR it's bullshit. Yeah. I used to,

uh, just for the hell of it. Sometimes like early on in my coaching, I would calculate like weekly tonnage for some lifters and, um, I, but never for myself. And then I realized at some point, I was like, well, I've never done this for myself and it's never really mattered. And it has not driven any meaningful programming decisions so uh you know what's what's the point but um yeah okay so yeah we we digress a little bit we're gonna shit on volume in another episode and probably another one after that at least you know once every other month we gotta shit on volume of course but my point is you know there are some people that uh are like well you know you could have avoided this movement or that or this caused that.

Like, oh, you know, it's the pitching that caused that. No, no, no. And it's easy to think that because that's what happened when I felt it, when I felt the strain. That's what it is. It's a strain. It's a grade one mild muscle strain. It's a pull. That terminology is not complicated enough.

We need to get Will Morrison on here so he can help us make up some better words. Well, I mean, I think that's what our friend Double D, Dr. Darren Deaton, would say. Yeah, let's get him in here. It's a grade one strain, you know, which is basically the same thing as a muscle tear. It's just on a spectrum, right? It's like the muscle gets stretched to the point where there's some sort of intramuscular damage. Uh, but you know, whatever, it doesn't matter. But, but the, going back to my point though, is that, um, oftentimes when somebody tweaks something, whether it's in the gym or outside of the gym, it happens doing something.

Not always. Sometimes you just wake up and shit hurts. Uh, sometimes you sneeze and shit hurts. Sometimes you bend over and tie your, your shoes and all of a sudden shit hurts. But, but sometimes you are doing like a movement or an activity or whatever, and something pops or pulls or whatever. And it's easy to think like, Oh, well that was the thing that caused it. And it's easy to think like, oh, well, that was the thing that caused it. No, I don't think so. I don't think so. The human body is much more complicated than that. And, you know, it's hard to really find a reason or a cause for something in a lot of cases. The point was, I use my body a lot. And I'm also 34. So I'm not a spring chicken. I'm not old, but I'm not young either. And, you know, sometimes muscles get pulled in a direction

they don't want to be pulled in. And they don't have the elasticity that they should for whatever you're doing in that moment. whatever the case is, it happens. And, um, there's nothing you can do from a preventative standpoint to avoid that, you know, like you could just avoid moving your body, right? You could just do nothing, but then you're going to have other problems. Your shit's going to hurt for a different reason, right? Avoid breathing. Yeah. Stop breathing. You don't want to pop a rib. No. Breathing too hard.

I've had some novices do that. Look, just become a breatharian. Remember those ones? Just imagine breathing. You don't actually need to breathe. No, just as long as you eat quarter pounders from McDonald's, you're okay. You don't remember this. This predates both of us, actually, but because of my years and years of academic education, I was exposed to the concept

of breatharianism, which was big in the early 80s. This is actually a thing. Oh my God. Oh yeah. I thought you were just taking the piss, as they would say. No, no, no, no. I was not taking the piss. This existed in the early 80s. The guy's name was Wiley Brooks. And he, I don't know if it was. Wiley. Let me, let me look this back up. Let me breath in. Wiley Khan Brooks. No. So it wasn't that they didn't breathe. You know, the not breathing part was me taking a piss. What they were saying, what he was claiming was that you didn't need to live off anything but air. Humans can live just fine by replacing food and sun. No, by replacing food with the sun and the passive inhalation of cosmic microdust. And then they caught him eating quarter pounders from McDonald's.

That's amazing. That's amazing. And then he said, they asked him, why do you advocate people only eat double quarter pounders with cheese meals and drink Diet Coke? And he said, because they're the only things that are not radioactive, which are probably the most radioactive things. You ever let a McDonald's hamburger sit for a year? Oh, my God. I saw that in my dietetic internship. So the gentleman that ran the kitchen was a health nut. So it made the kitchen part, the food service management part of my internship more interesting because he was into dietetics, you know?

Yeah. Usually or not, you know, a lot of the time they're there to manage to manage kitchens and sell food you know in the hospital or provide food to the patients in a costly cost-effective manner you know it's not you it's usually not a super health nut or somebody that's you know super into this you know but and there's more and more rds taking that job you know but in this case it was a guy who was not an rd he was a he had a management background and he was really into health and fitness so he had a mcdonald's uh chicken sandwich i think sitting on his desk for like a year and a half and it looked identical to like a fresh one oh man but wiley brooks says

it's the only thing that's not well it wasn't a double quarter pounder with cheese i guess i fucked up you know he should have let that sit royale with cheese royale quarter pounder with cheese. I guess I fucked up. He should have let that sit. Royale with cheese. You know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in France? Royale with cheese. What do they call a Big Mac? Well, Big Mac's a Big Mac. It's called Le Big Mac. Le Big Mac. There was actually a show. I remember it. Maybe I saw the pilot.

I don't even know if this got picked up. Maybe it ran for a season or something. There was some like shitty like sitcom, teenage sitcom in the 90s. It was basically like a copy of Boy Meets World. But the premise was it was like called like Teen Angel or something. these two guys were hanging out and, uh, like high school kids and they're just hanging out like playing video games or whatever. And then one guy sees under his friend's bed, there's an old cheeseburger like that. It's like still in the wrappers, like, bro, dude. And, uh, he's like, I'll give you five bucks if you eat it. He's like, okay. Oh, this is the nineties, right? Five bucks is, you know, you can buy some things with that. Well, anyway, so he eats the burger and he dies. Holy shit. comes back so he comes back to the this is the the show starts

with like that so that happens he dies and he comes back and like hangs out with his friend as his guardian angel so he's dead but he's like you know looking over his shoulder so this kid goes through like you know typical teenage problems and, you know, his friend is supposed to be his guardian angel. It's so ridiculous. I don't know why that popped in my head, but well, yeah, it didn't, it didn't make it very far. Yeah. Needless to say. So injuries, right? Injuries, pain. Well, we're talking about pain here. You know, what's an injury? You know, there's a lot of ways to define an injury. To me, it's, you know, like a broken arm. That's like a serious injury, you know? Broken leg, torn, you know, torn pec, you know, that

makes all the bruising, you know? Sure. But like, you know, my back hurts. I tweaked my back. I mean, I guess it's an injury but the injury is a broad term so it's like there's various levels of severity you know like what i or i really want to kind of start this is let's start with you fucking people that have had something hurt since as far back as you can remember you had a bad back in high school you had a bad hip or a knee in high school, right? Guess what? Lifting doesn't cure that, but neither does physical therapy, quote-unquote.

Neither does chiropractic in a lot of cases. In some cases, lifting makes things go away indefinitely. That does happen sometimes. That's not the rule, though. That is the exception. That happens less frequently than things hurt less often or less severely that tends to be what happens you know you're not going to cure a bad back you know you're not going to get pain free you're going to be pain free longer you know but you're not going to be pain free forever you know it's going to be less shitty your bad up back is

going to be less bad and less up as a result of getting the surrounding muscles and connective tissues stronger and you can insert whatever joint you want in there. Sometimes these problems require surgery and that's a different topic that we'll probably touch on something. Yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there in a little bit. Well, so here's how I think about it. I don't like to use the term injury for this. I don, if, if we've got a very minor injury, like I would not call what happened to me yesterday in injury. It's not an injury. Um, and here's why the way that I think about it, my unscientific term, uh, is a tweak is something that hurts and causes pain. Uh, it may, causes pain uh it may it may impede your ability to uh function in the gym a little bit but it's nothing you can't work around an injury on the other hand is it it causes a disruption in normal

function of a joint right i mean because we're talking about orthopedic injuries typically, but, but, you know, it causes, it causes a disruption in normal function of joint. So like if I tear my shoulder, then, you know, I can't raise my arm overhead. Okay. I don't have the shoulder flexion I used to. That's an injury. Okay. It's an injury because it's definitely going to mess up my training in the gym, but it's also messing with my normal everyday function. So that's kind of my line for what I call an injury. Anything less than that is a tweak. And there are bad tweaks.

You know, you can hurt something in your back that hurts real bad. You might walk with a little bit of a limp for a couple weeks. That would be a real bad tweak. And you've got little tweaks like what I experienced, right? This is going to go bit of a limp for, for a couple of weeks. Um, that'd be a real bad tweak. And you've got little tweaks like what I experienced, right? This is going to go away in a few days, probably, um, based on, on previous experience, but, but the function is not really impeded. And, um, you know, I'll give you an example. So yesterday I also had to squat. I had volume squats were on the menu. Oh man. So I gotta, I gotta walk downstairs. Oh, my hip hurts. This sucks. Okay. Well, the first thing I do is I go and I start warming up for the squat

and immediately I noticed that, well, you know, when I'm performing a squat with proper technique, you know, in the way is described by the starting strength model, then I'm fine, right? It does require some external rotation of the hip to squat, but not an extreme amount. And so I get in there, I start squatting and I'm fine. There's no pain whatsoever. It's really just for me, it's twisting, it's rotation and it's a dynamic, like a powerful movement that causes pain, like throwing a ball. Okay. So I'm just not going to throw a ball for a few days, but I can squat. And I got in there and I warmed up and I just, I was a little more, I was a little bit more cautious than normal. I was paying attention

as I was warming up to see if there's a load at which things got worse. It didn't. So I just carried on as normal. I'm fine. Okay. So that's definitely a tweak. It did not impede my function in the gym whatsoever. I still was able to train and do exactly what I wanted to do. Um, it just had to be a little bit more cautious. Okay. And, and I think that one of the things about training that's really important is that it's, it doesn't just prepare your body and make your body more resilient. It also prepares your mind to handle these situations, right? When you have a lot of training under your belt and you've learned how to train through tweaks like this, small ones and

big ones, and even, you know, heaven forbid, maybe you've even had to train through some injuries or train around some injuries um and do rehab well you learn in that process that your body can do more than you think it can and you're capable of working around things and actually being useful even though shit hurts and that that's a very, very valuable thing. Most people that I know that have, you know, quote unquote, bad backs, especially older people, I can think of a handful of older people, everybody, you all know them, right? You all know someone like this. They have a bad back and when they hurt their back, there's something happens, you know, they get back spasm. Like I said, you know, they're on the toilet, they're tying their shoes, some mundane thing. When they throw out their back, quote unquote, they're laid up in bed.

They have to lay on the couch for like three days. Right. Okay. When that happens to me, it sucks. It hurts, but I'm hauling firewood and I'm, you know, picking up 60 pound sacks of chicken feed and hauling them around. Uh, I'm lifting weights still. It, it, it doesn't really slow me down very much at all. Um, and that's a, that's a combination of my training, which is strengthened my body. And it's also the training that strengthened my mind to know that I'm still capable of doing things. So it's, you know, it's not a small thing. No, no. And the longer you do this, the faster you recover from these things. And the less stressful it is psychologically.

What I've noticed when working with people with pain, which, by the way, is going to happen, it is not abnormal. It is normal. Right. Yeah. yeah shit hurts you know yeah some of us get lucky and shit doesn't hurt very often you know i have problems with elbow tendonitis i had hand tendonitis i had a hernia at one point and uh what else did i have i had knee tendonitis that had nothing to do with lifting i was just a sedentary pile of shit so i had to start walking. What else did I have? You know, I tore an adductor when I was squatting wrong. So that was lifting related, but I was squatting. That's an injury. Yeah, that was an injury. That was an injury. And I got coaching

and here I am, you know, I haven't had that happen again. Knock on my, well, that's real wood there, I think. But this idea that, you know, especially for people that have been in pain before, this is where it's a real problem. If you've had pain before and you think that you're going to find a way to make the pain go away forever, you are setting yourself for failure, frustration, and annoyance. And I see it all the time. I get people, they have a good, nice, linear progression, and everything's great. And then their bad back tweaks out, right? And it has nothing to do with lifting. It has to do with having a bad fucking back. And those tweaks are going to happen periodically.

And they probably would happen more if you didn't train. However, I run into this scenario where the lifter who is now in pain is now fixated on the pain. And that's all he or she thinks about, nonstop, thinking about the pain and trying to will it to go away and trying to use all these different modalities and silly bullshit to try and make it go away. Because now the focus is, I have to command the pain to go away. And the irony of it is, and a physical therapist taught me this, one that I heavily disagreed with on exercise at the time. Now we're more in line because she's relaxed over the years.

But when she was a new therapist, she was on the squats are bad for your back. Her deadlifts are bad for your back. Squats are bad for your knees, all that bullshit, right? But one thing she did teach me at that same point in time was stop looking for the fucking pain is what she told me. I had neck pain. And she's like, stop looking for stop looking for it leave it alone pretend it's not there because if you start fixating on it it gets worse and she's 100 correct and i've seen this i've seen people stay in pain for a year because they're so fucking stubborn and controlling and if they seek control over that which cannot be controlled that they drive themselves crazy and delay the fucking

healing because of their insane and unhealthy need for control. Right. Yeah. I've heard, I love this little saying, treat the issue, not the tissue. Exactly. That's one, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's hard to talk to people about this because, you know, the fundamentals are fucked up. You know, number one, there's this idea that you have control over things you don't actually have control over you know right yeah we lift to minimize the frequency at which we get pain we lift to minimize the severity when it does happen you

know what's funny is you know i think of some people off the top of my head that i've had to deal with this on they get into pain it goes It goes away. They get stronger. It comes back, goes away. They get stronger. It comes back. And then you notice that the pain is going away faster each time, but yet they're just fixated on the fact that they're even getting pain. So therefore, the lifting must not be working. And it's like, what standard are you holding yourself to?

This idea that you will never hurt again, that is not a reasonable standard. Therein lies the fucking problem. It's like you took three weeks to heal the first time and the third or fourth time, it took you two days. How is that a degradation, you know? And you had the pain, the same pain for weeks before you even trained. Right. Remember that. Exactly. Exactly. Well, so, you know, the thing is pain is a very complex experience it's not i think a lot of people that don't have a background in anatomy and physiology um they haven't out they have sort of a an overly simplified idea of what causes pain so they have like a very structural understanding

of pain like i you know i'm hammering a nail and oops, I missed and I hit my thumb. Okay. There was a, what did they call it? A noxious stimulus to the tissue of the thumb. You hammered the shit out of it. Okay. And then there's a, you know, an impulse that goes to your brain and says, ow, action, move your thumb. Right. Okay. Um, yes, that does happen. Right. Obviously, you know, everyone's touched a hot stove or hammered your thumb or whatever, jammed your toe in the floorboard. Okay. Well, that's one type of pain, but a lot of the pain that we encounter as coaches is stuff that's much more nebulous, right? Back pain is the perfect example, uh, because it's often generalized, like my back hurts and I get it too. You know, my low back hurts. It's not like,

no, no, it's not like L4 hurts or my right spinal erector hurts, or even, you know, like this area hurts. It's just my lower back hurts. Okay. Well, it's a very different thing than like, I smashed my thumb. My thumb hurts where I smashed it. Right. Uh, so there's something else going on. Uh, we also have things like referred pain that are very common. So, um, a lot of people get sciatica, which is just a, that's not a thing it's it's just a a description of symptoms of pain uh that basically some insult to the lumbar spine causes the nerve roots to get inflamed you know some aggravation happens and then there's pain that starts shooting down the leg down the sciatic nerve right and sometimes people feel this in their butt like deep in their butt or it goes down the back of their hamstring or they feel it in the back of

the knee sometimes all that and then even down into the calf right um that's referred pain because it was it was coming from somewhere else but so where you feel it is not the problem and you'll see these people i was one of them years ago i you know, foam roll my hamstrings and my glutes and I'd have the, my lacrosse ball, you know, make sure I massage my piriformis and, you know, massage the shit out of it. And it never gets better. It never gets better. Sometimes it gets worse when you do all that. Well, that's because it wasn't coming from those areas anyway. Um, but the point is like there's pain is a complex experience and there's another element to it, which is the emotional element. And this is the biggest thing that has changed in my own life pre-training versus after training is when you basically, when you anticipate pain,

because you've had an experience that caused pain, then it gets worse. Okay. So like I have a bad back. I hurt my back really bad before and it really hurt. Now I'm afraid to use my back because if I do that, it might hurt again. And guess what? Your back starts hurting just because you think it's going to hurt. Yeah. There's psychosomatic shit going on here. Absolutely. And so, you know, pain is a complex experience. That's, that's what I'm trying to get at here. And it's, it's, it's, there's many components that feed into it and your, your mind and the way that you perceive pain is a huge component. Don't underestimate that. Last thing I'll say on it is I remember somewhere, our colleague, Dr. Will Morris mentioned this and I thought, you know what? He's so right. You know, in the experience I've had coaching, I've noticed this too. He said something to the effect of people that get to adulthood without ever having played a contact sport or some very, you know, very physical, you know physical athletic endeavor,

like skateboarding or something would work, or you played football or soccer or something. People that make it to adulthood that never had that experience often confuse hard effort and fatigue with pain. So training, they perceive as painful. You know, they do a heavy set of five squats. They're like, oh, that hurt. I was like, no, it didn't hurt. That was just uncomfortable, but they don't know the difference. And so, you know, those, that perception was,

you know, for a lot of people is rooted deep in childhood. You know, you start learning when you're a little kid, but if you never have those physical experiences as a little kid and you make it to adulthood, you just, you have no idea what you're feeling. Exactly. And, you know, it's a hard road for those people, you know, it's going to be, it's going to take a long time to build that skill because they didn't get it as a kid. No, that makes sense. You know, if you haven't had to work through it and you've gotten hurt for the first time it's quite devastating and that was me i didn't really get seriously hurt as a kid or a teenager uh i got hit by a car while on a bike at a stop sign so it was a car that was breaking

so it wasn't like you know an insane accident and that scraped up my shin and that you know rattled me a little bit you know i've eaten shit on rollerblades a few times, fell off bikes, you know, but yeah, right. Nothing crazy. I'm trying to think I got in fights, you know, a few fights, but I was not in any type of pain that required, uh, attention to the, uh, to the ailment, you know, in the form of rehab of any sort. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm not saying you need to be like catastrophically injured to benefit, but, but, you know, like if you, uh, you know, like, yeah, rollerblading, right. Okay. So if you, you do active things as a kid, you're kind of falling your ass or falling on your face or both scrape your knees up. And, um, and, and you start to learn the difference between like, oh man, that hurts versus like, you know, you're wrestling

with a, you know, your dad or whatever. And like, you're really tired and like, you know, your, your lungs hurt, you know, hurts when you breathe because you're just so fatigued. You know, there's a difference between those two things. And, but some people just don't get that. They, they just, they have no physical practice growing up of any kind. And, uh, you know, they never rollerbladed, they never skateboarded, they never, you know, played tackle football in the backyard or whatever. Um, they never got poked with sticks out in the, you know, hiking in the woods. And so that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, no, that, that makes sense. Um, I didn't have a, uh, an injury that required rehab,

you know, and until I was 28 running my linear progression on coach because, hey, I looked at the picture. I watched the video. I must be doing exactly what they're doing, right? Wrong. You know, this stuff is not as idiot-proof as you want to think it is. You know, lifting is technical. And I got hurt, and I lost control of my my body and I had to rehab the adductor. You know, that was my first experience with a serious injury.

And three months later, I tore the other one. I got coaching, I fixed it, but then I didn't realize that, Hey, wait a minute, you know, it gets heavy. And then I get form creep again. You know, I didn't know that at the time, so I wasn't getting coached to the heavier ones. And I did the same stupid thing again. Now I was a real dumb ass real dumb

ass because there were warning signs i felt the pain for a couple weeks leading into it and kept training through it and it's one thing to train you know it's so subjective there's things that i've trained through and they settled down you know in the process of doing that but this was something that just kept getting tighter and it was obvious that it was trending in the wrong direction you know and it was over a series of workouts so right you know for a lot of people it's common sense not to do that uh you know i have that mindset of a competitor you know where like well i want to get away with it because i want the pr you know i don't quite have that now because of that experience but you know i had it then and uh you know, I paid for it.

You know, I had 10 months where I couldn't squat heavy, but my deadlift went up and I needed to because I was under trained. Anyhow, I digress. The point is that taught me to work through that. And in that experience, I also, you know, had the hernia that got aggravated during that time. And then I had a bone bruise because I was catching my cleans in my hands, you know, just doing it wrong, you know? And I learned how to catch him, catch him on my shoulders, but you know, bone, bone shit will last, man. You might have that for a year, you know? I got that, uh, benching in high school. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. It was anything, you know, cause I was holding the bench in my deep in my palm. I wasn't stacking it over my,

the eminences of my palms. Like I was supposed to, yeah. I remember that just, yeah. Months. That just hurt. I couldn't take out anything over like 185 cause it was just, it hurts so bad. Dude, it's terrible. It's fucking terrible. But, um, yeah, just a bunch of shit at once. So I had to make up for lost time, I suppose, you know? And, uh, you know, the years and the thing is about the ad doctor, you know, I was dealing with a friend who was also in suppose, you know? And, you know, the years, and the thing is about the adductor, you know, I was dealing with a friend who was also in pain. You know, she, what did she tweak?

I think it was a lat, you know? And the difference in both of our responses was dramatic. Like this lady kept fixating on the fucking injury and trying to will it to go away. She tried to take control of the healing process. You can't take control of the healing process. You can do things that have a good chance of

accelerating it, but you don't get to decide when it's done. It finishes on its own, has its own timeline that it works on, and you have little control over that. It's obviously better to do some things versus others. Generally, if you rest and do nothing, it will linger longer or heal fucked up. Generally, if you move it through a proper range of motion and rehab it properly, provided it's not something that requires surgery, it will heal efficiently and over a shorter period of time than if you don't do anything. But you don't get to control the timeline, you know, like the idea, you know, when a therapy PT would say, oh, six weeks, six, three months, one month, what do you know, throw timelines at you? You have no fucking idea.

You know, these things have a mind of their own and you might retweak it, you know, sneezing, you know, like you just, so the thing is that's how she was reacting, you know, just massage, chiropractor, rehab exercises, all this shit. And it just kept taking forever. And meanwhile, I'm over here, barely able to walk and not saying a word, you know, I just, I just zoned out and I'm like, let's just go about my day, walk normal, keep my motor patterns consistent, try to squat what I can work up, up.

It's hurting again, go back down for 10 months. And then suddenly it was just kind of gone. And I did a meet, you know, before the whole year passed. And I remember her saying, she's like, you just, I forget that you're hurt sometimes, you know? And this is something, I don't know, you know, if it has to do with being a competitor or what, some competitors are big babies about this. I don't know if that's what it is, but like anxiety, right? Anxiety under the bar, you know, it's, I can maybe count on one hand how many times that's actually been an issue for me. Usually it's not.

Sure. You know, I can just kind of, from a young age, even in swimming, you know, like I just was a natural at channeling that to use it as productive energy, you know. And I learned in my master's, you know, there was a few things that, you know, I learned in academia that were pretty valuable, you know? And I learned in my master's, you know, there was a few things that, you know, I learned in academia that were pretty valuable, you know, and one of them was that you have two types of anxiety. There's cognitive, you know, what's going on in your brain, you know, what you're thinking of, and then there's somatic, and that's the anxiety you feel physically. And there's, you know, you can use that productively or it can be very destructive. You know, you can psych yourself out in a competitive situation, or you can use that productively or it can be very destructive. You can psych yourself out in a competitive situation.

Or you can use that energy to compete at a higher level. You can express your peak performance using that energy. And that's something that I've always just kind of done. And learning about it academically was interesting. I was in a sports psychology class. And I'm like, well, that's interesting. And I try to contextualize it. And I'm like, well, I do that.

That's pretty cool. I got like, well, that's interesting. And I try to contextualize it. I'm like, well, I do that. That's pretty cool. You know, I gotta be good at something people, you know, I'm not that fucking strong and I'm not that big, but there's a couple of things I could do. And that's one of them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've noticed this in, in the lifters that I've handled on the platform that, you know, some of them, just, you know, some of them, you have to calm down because they get super worked up and you've got to sort of like be the calm thing be the calm energy in the room so every time they come to you every time you interact with them you're just like you're just chill and i really try to control my energy not get too loud not get too hyped up not not walk around too fast

because they feed off of that. And other people need kind of the opposite. They need to kind of get fired up. And then there's some that just can get locked in, just right in there. And they're super chilled or relaxed, but then it's sort of like they step on deck, between on deck and stepping on the platform.

They are just locked in. Our friend, Dr. Pewterter did an episode on his podcast, the psychiatry and psychotherapy podcast about the dorsal vagal system. And I'm not going to attempt to describe this cause it's, I'm just going to fuck it up, but he was talking about that exact thing. And essentially there are different states of cognition that we can be in. And there's like this sympathetic system that we can flip into when we get in that sort of fight or flight mode. And that's what happens when that anxiety just builds up and you lose your ability to concentrate and you lose your fine motor skills and good athletes find this kind of this edge in between like you don't want to be too calm mm-hmm but you also don't want to be so jacked up and anxious that you lose all your

ability to control right and so there's like kind of this like edge that you can walk and this it's actually kind of a different system that um uh has been identified i guess you could say i think we're talking about the same thing yeah same thing and anyway so yeah that but he remember him talking about like the way that you train yourself out of getting into that fight or flight mode all the time is exposure without danger, right? You need to expose yourself to slightly nerve wracking situations, but ones that you can handle because you've prepared yourself to handle them. And then the accumulation of a bunch of those situations helps you, helps train your brain to know like, Hey, look, um, yeah, this is more weight than I've ever done before, but Hey,

um yeah this is more weight than i've ever done before but hey you know it's this is 315 but i did 310 before that and it did 305 before that and it did 300 before that etc etc so you can always you can you can build this ladder of experiences which slowly push you just a little bit more into that outside of your comfort zone. And once you've done that a lot, you begin to believe that you can do the next step easier. And that's what's happened to me. You know, I still get butterflies when I take out a really heavy squat, if it's just that level has gone up over the years and the butterflies are not as intense as they used to be. Yeah. And, you know, you used to be yeah and you know you adapt to it and uh you know we could do a whole episode on that but um i think the theme here is that your mind can do a whole lot of damage uh to your training to your healing you know if you're

hurt right and uh it could also cause injury you know i noticed that when people are anxious going into a workout injuries have happened you know I remember noticing that my first year, not necessarily people I was coaching, but other people. And then a few lifters I've coached over the years, it's just, I tell people, I'm like, if you're too anxious to fucking lift it and you can't manage that, then you need to not lift it. Just, you know, take weight off if you cannot manage it, because I don't want you getting hurt under my bar. I might call you a pussy afterwards, you know? But my point is you need call you a pussy afterwards, you know. But my point is you need to learn how to work through that because that itself in itself could cause injury, mismanaged anxiety.

Right. You know, we'll save that for the other, the broader topic on that. But the main thing is you got to get control of your mind, people. You know, there's only, you have, there's a, you know, we're in the business of trying to get stronger. So we're trying to get from point A to point B. So in doing that, we get this illusion of control, right? But it's an illusion, right? Because guess what? 3.15 Monday, 3.20 next Monday, 3.25 the following Monday, 3.30 the following Monday, 3.35 the following Monday, 3.40. monday 3 35 the following monday 3 40 oh shit i

just got three instead of five what the fuck but you thought you were going to get five that is the illusion of control people you don't actually have control over this shit uh you have control over your decisions you know your decision to show up to load the bar up to sleep to not sleep to drink to eat alcohol to not drink alcohol to eat to. You know, there's decisions that you are making and you have most control over those, right? But you do not have control over what happens to you, you know, when you try all this shit, right? Right. And, you know, we're always trying to gain it. You know, we're humans.

We're trying to gain as much control over it as we can. We misrep. We try to figure out why. We try to make modifications. We change a variable, you know, and we move on, right? But we still can't control the outcome. We're trying to influence the outcome. I think that's a better word for it.

I don't want to get into nuance here, but the whole point is you have to understand that this thing you think is control is an illusion. You don't actually have control over the outcomes. You can influence them and maximize your chances for a given outcome, but you don't have control over it. You know, there have been times that I've, you know, went for heavy deadlift and the thought that I might get hurt has crossed my mind. But then I remember what I said earlier. I'm like, well, you better cancel that shit because it might actually fucking happen, dumbass, you know? And I've worked through that, you know, but there've been other times where like, you know, I had tendonitis since January. It's pretty much almost gone. It's down to my left arm now and it's mild. And I've had to change variable after variable to try and settle that down. And I've, you know, it's improved over time.

well, why does my fucking arm hurt? It won't fucking stop. I'm going to go get a massage, chiropractic, acupuncture, spend all this money, spend all this time. And, you know, those things have their place, people. But at the end of the day, I knew what the problem was. I'm like, I have tendonitis. There's too much stress being applied to the structure in some way. You know, I addressed the technical issues. You know, I started changing the way I did certain bicep exercises to minimize the risk of aggravating that. I changed how often I was stressing it with intensity. I adjusted the volume for when I was doing lighter weeks, so I did light heavy. And there was a series of other modifications that I made to what I was doing while still trying to push my goal, right? And, you know, none of those things controlled the outcome,

but they influenced it to go one way or another, right? So it's generally been getting better. So what I've been doing has been working, but guess what? It's still there, you know? I don't think about it. I'm thinking about it now because I'm talking to you about it. You know, it's an example of how this actually works, right? And you can't let it stress you out and have a fucking panic attack because

it's not going away as fast as you want it to. We live in an era of instant gratification. A lot of us want it. It's baked into the cake. We use smartphones. We can get information quickly. We can do a lot of things quickly. And then it's easy to get sucked into this path of wanting things to happen quickly that simply just do not happen quickly, people. And, you know, injuries are one of them. Well, yeah. And the whole field of chiropractic medicine or, you know, whatever, is built on that, right? It's the idea is like you walk in, they crack your back and then you go out and you feel good for about four or five days. So you got to go back and then do it again and then again and again and again forever, right?

Now, I understand there are chiropractors out there that do more than that, but they're the outliers in my experience. But it's easy it's an easy, it's easy. It's passive, right? The, the, the modalities that are the least effective in my experience are the passive ones where someone does something to you or you take a drug and it does something to you and you just lay back and let it happen. Um, those just don't tend to work very well in my experience. Um, they can be good in, in, you know, certain circumstances, limited circumstances. Hey, massage feels great. There's nothing wrong with that. You know, sometimes I get a massage feels

great, but it, you know, I don't, I don't pretend like it's going to make structural changes that are going to help anything. It just feels good. And there's nothing wrong with that. And, you know, I have some guys that have gone to a chiropractor when they tweak their back really bad and they'll go for a handful of times. Okay, fine. If that helps you, makes you feel better, great. But we also don't get stuck in this idea that I need my chiro or else I just can't function. No, all those things can be band-aids, you know, if you don't address the structural problem. You're just not strong, you know. Or you need surgery. Sometimes that's the case.

That's right, right. And the other thing, too, that's important here, this is more psychology, is that those are passive. Other people do them for you. Training is something you do for yourself, right? That's an active modality. It's something you have to go do. Movement is active modality. And I think there's, you know, yes, there are actual training does actually help things for a variety of reasons, but there's also a psychological

element, right? You're doing something for yourself, not letting someone else dictate. Exactly. How it's going to go. In defense of the chiropractors, and I'm going to probably help some of them get business, it's an X-rated story, but I'm not going to go into the details. But it's relevant to the discussion. A person I know, you know, I don't want to give it away. I don't think he listens to this podcast, but I know him and he's close to me. Engaged in a sexual act, nothing amoral or weird, you know, pretty normal sexual act, and he dislocated his jaw. And he went to a chiropractor

and the guy popped his jaw and he was fine, never had that problem problem again so it is known to work in certain circumstances so in this circumstance it did work it did work but uh yeah he dislocated his jaw i don't know if he actually dislocated he did something to his jaw where it hurt in the middle of the act and uh he went to a chiropractor they did their thing and it was gone. So it's not 100% bullshit. That's my point. To our earlier point, we don't know that the act caused the pain. That's true. Maybe it was already there.

Oh my God. Correlation is not causation. My mind is running wild with possibilities. No, yeah, I totally agree. Chiropractors definitely have their role. I look at them very similar to massage therapists. And I'm talking about traditional chiropractic, not your awesome, cool, one-in-a-million chiropractor that's out there that knows about barbell training. There are a few out there. But yeah, I kind of look at them, they're similar to massage therapists in my mind. They provide a service which feels good. And sometimes that's okay. Sometimes that's what you need to get over. You know, I got a couple of guys that are older guys. They're in their 50s, 60s.

And they have bad backs, right? They have, I guarantee you, if we scan their back, then an MRI, actually a no in one case, they've got pretty significant stenosis, which means that, you know, I was talking about referred pain earlier. it means that the little bony canals that their their their spinal cord runs through and then exits out of in the in the vertebrae uh they're narrow there's like bony growth in there and those canals are very narrow. So that means that any insult to the nervous tissue,

if it gets inflamed for whatever reason, it has got nowhere to go. It starts swelling up and it starts pushing on bone and it just lights up their whole leg and their back and it sucks. Okay. Well, you know, traction force tends to help those guys and chiropractors have good tools for applying traction force on the back Or tension and whatever you want to call it pulling apart Okay, so they go to the chiropractor and it helps them get over those those the bad tweaks, you know in the in the first Several days of insult. That's fine I think the problem is when you start relying on those people for everyday Function, you know and when they become a crutch that you have to have or else you just can't

can't get along in life um not not a position you want to be in no no it's no fun um well you know so we've talked a whole lot about psychology and and not as much about like the science of you know good you've got enough of that shit people you You're being bombarded with that shit. There's an entire injury industrial complex within the fitness industry, you know? That's right. Yeah, exactly, right? I just mentioned MRIs, man. Oh, gosh. You know, you get imaging, and I've been in this situation many times as a coach. Someone goes and gets an MRI because it's, you know, indicated. It's, okay, we need to see what's going on here. And those reports are awfully scary.

You know, L4, L5, moderate to severe stenosis. L5 S1. Yeah. Right. You know, it's just, it goes down the list. Oh my God, I'm broken. It's like, no, dude, you've lived with that for probably decades. It's just that now we have a problem. So yeah, there's a whole

industry there that's not, you know, they're not invested in your function so much as like, yeah, anyway, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. But I think the reason... We'll do a rehab episode on the physical part of it and the movement part of it, which is probably double D or will, depending on who's available. Yeah, we can talk to someone more qualified to, to handle that. But the reason I talk about psychology is that the fact is that when you have a tweak, um, whether it's a minor one or a bad one, or heaven forbid, even you have an injury, it throws a wrench in your confidence, uh, that we described earlier. And it, it breaks that trust that you've developed with your body

and you've got to rebuild that. And the only way you can do that is through exposure without danger. And the degree of the tweak is going to determine how you approach that. For me, I had this very minor little tweak. It's just a hip thing. But I knew it could get worse when I squatted

because I had to do a bunch of volume and you know, a bunch of volume can aggravate things if, if they're, you know, if they're already pissed off. Okay. So, um, so I had to approach that with, um, a little bit of caution, a bad tweak. You might have to, you know, so like my, I had a guy recently, this is a younger guy, not an older guy. Um, he's got pretty shitty genetics for, for his back. Um, he's tweaked his back several times since we've been training and he did it again. This time was, uh, at his job and he was, he had to lift some really heavy equipment in an awkward position and he knew he was in an awkward position and probably shouldn't have done that. And then he regretted it afterwards. Well, um, so we started rack pulling, so we controlled

the range of motion doing it. So basically Scott, him moving his back, doing a very short range of motion with a rack pull. And, uh, he was feeling pretty good. So a couple of weeks after the initial tweak, he was rack pulling, let's say, I want to say 80 to 85% of where he had left off before the tweak happened. Okay. So decently heavy. And he tweaked his back again, kind of without warning. It felt good, felt good, felt good. And then the last rep, bam. Okay. So, you know, again, I don't know that the rack pull really had much to do with that in my opinion we were working in perfectly reasonable loads we weren't being super aggressive with coming back but now he's pissed off about it and he's a little anxious about it so in that in this case i i opted to take a slow long progression where i control his loads

and again we're gonna do the same thing we're gonna do rack pulls i have him doing rdls with very very light weights um and we might take six weeks to get back to the loads he was moving before if everything goes smoothly okay Okay. Does he need six weeks from a physical, you know, just purely can he do at standpoint? I don't think so. I don't think so, but his, he needs it mentally. Right. And so, um, that that's how you, you know, that's how he's going to get over these two successive moderate to severe back tweaks. these two successive moderate to severe back tweaks so you know your ex your experience is going so the level of tweak that you have is going to determine how this process goes and how you approach it but the point is still we're going to get him in the gym he's going to

move his back he's going to move some load and we're going to just gradually increase that load and again exposure without danger exactly and then you just work it back up and work it back up we won't go to the floor for six weeks probably you know not because he can't but just you know because that's again that that would be the danger part right keeping his back extended off the floor over a longer range of motion. That's harder. It's maybe a little bit more anxiety-inducing. But he will eventually. And, you know, sometimes you need surgery, you know?

Simple as that. You know, my girlfriend gets hip pain when she does any type of axial loading. She can't squat anything heavy. Front, back, overhead squats aren't happening. It's just more or less. FAI. Yeah, you knew it. Yep, FAI. Okay. With a torn labral tear that's about six years old now. And that's not, you know, she's not going to ever have a big heavy squat until that gets repaired or replaced, you know? And she's on the side of, I'm going to get bad enough until I get a replacement because I don't want to get the repair to get a replacement later. You know, I feel her.

So, you know, she can leg press really heavy, though. That's appendicular loading, different situation, you know. Load is on the feet, not on the spine. So we pushed up her leg press, you know. But, you know, there's no fancy rehab exercise to fix her torn labrum or get her hip to stop hurting when she squats. She just can't squat heavy. You know, she does the movement up to a certain point, and then she gets the intensity on her lower body from the leg press, and then she does a bunch of isolation shit that she,

oh, probably doesn't need, but, you know, she likes to do it. So, you know, you got to do things you like, I guess. Yeah. Training's got to be fun at some level. Yeah, until you're at our level, then everything fucking sucks. Right. I just want to get out of the gym as soon as possible. Yeah.

But sometimes you need surgery. You know, you have a torn rotator cuff. You know, like I get guys that try to work up their bench, shoulder starts hurting eventually, and the press starts hurting, then everything, upper body starts hurting. And you look at the problem, and I'm like, all right, technique's not the limiting factor. We've addressed all these things. Bro, go get a fucking MRI because that is a surgery that's probably worth getting. Now, back surgery is not worth getting. You want to avoid that at all costs is the general consensus on that. It's

got mixed reviews. It's risky. You don't want fucking back surgery. So I can see why you wouldn't want to get imaged unless you were considering that but like a shoulder that keeps coming back for years and years and years yeah go get that looked at a hip like you know i've had guys they walk in here and i could tell by their gait that there's something fucked up in their hip and then their back hurts doing warm-up sets and i know that hip problems can manifest as back as back pain you know back pain is a symptom of uh having osteoarthritis in the hips. I've seen it, you know. But then the stubborn fuckers will not get it looked at and delay this,

and oftentimes they're older. And I'm like, you know, you want to wait until you're 75? You've got a 65-year-old back that's hurting because of a 65-year-old hip, and you keep delaying this. Just apathy and stubbornness, you know. And something like a hip hip that's got a good prognosis you know most people that get hip replacements are better off than before they had the hip replacement you know but uh you know i just sit there and i watch and i'm like okay i

see all the classic movements you're kind of waddling you know and you don't even know you're doing it you know you're walking like your hips fucked up and then uh your problems on the squat typically lots of knee slide with these people because the fuck yeah i was about to say yeah you see a lot of knee slide vertical back they hit the bottom and things start moving around exactly the back angle gets vertical and it's not a matter of movement they can't get into that position because you got bone on bone going on and uh you know they either don't want to hear it they're you know surgery is a big deal i understand that but how many times you want to keep throwing out your back with, you know, a light deadlift, you know?

Right. And it's not the deadlift fault. Your hip's fucked up. It's pretty obvious. So I've seen that before, too. So like something like hips, knee replacements, rotator cuff repair, shoulder labor. Shoulders, especially with athletes. I've seen that a lot with people who are competitive in sport, baseball, swimming.

Oh, yeah. But, yeah, sometimes you need surgery. Don't be fucking stubborn about it. I can see it. If it's back surgery, you get a pass on that. I understand that. But sometimes you need surgery. And the sooner you get the fucking surgery, the sooner you can train again and train further than you are now, you know?

coach people that, you know, are interested in general strength training. Surgery is, it's rare. It's not like a lot of people need it. And I think a lot of people that think they need it because a doctor might've told them that probably don't. But there are cases where there's really no option. There's no other option. The good thing is that there's so many things that you can exhaust beforehand before you go down surgery route, right? So, you know, have you been coached? Are you moving correctly? Like that's, that's one thing we can rule out. Um, do you have good programming? You know, maybe it's time to get a coach to give you reasonable programming. Some people aggravate injuries that they could train around otherwise with shitty programming, right?

injuries that they could train around otherwise with shitty programming right they just gotta you know fix the programming sometimes just uh like you know i've had people with shoulder issues where we just kind of use a combination of close grip benches neutral grip benches incline press you know whatever we can they kind of work around the issue and they're fine uh do they need shoulder surgery well you know if they wanted to be a high level competitive athlete, then yeah, probably. But, but if they're just interested in general strength training, they can train around that problem. Even if the problem will never be solved without surgery. So, you know, I'll just throw that out there. It's, it's not as common as, as, uh, you might think, but there are definitely circumstances where there's no other option. Yeah. Sometimes you got to do it, but yeah,

it is rare. Um, yeah. So yeah, there we go. I, you know, there's so many different places we could take this topic. Um, well, I think we stuck primarily with the psychological today, which, which I think is appropriate, but yeah, in the future, I think we should definitely get on one of our colleagues that's an expert in this field of rehab and talk about that. Talk about what that process looks like, because it's super interesting. I've gotten to experience that being mentored by some PTs that are excellent, but I'm certainly not an expert myself. You know, I just get to watch from the sidelines. Yeah, I mean, we're in the business of working with, you know,

five, six, seven decade old backs and knees and hips and joints in general. And you have to troubleshoot these things. And it's not entirely complicated. You know, if we get Will on here, he is, you know, a whole spiel on that, you know, on how he believes physical therapy is a pseudoscience. His words, not mine. Although I don't disagree with him, for the record. Yeah.

But him and I did a talk years ago, and we might do another one. We were talking about this yesterday. And he pretty much described his field and explained that a lot of this stuff, most can manage you know if you have critical thinking skills and understand the human body you know sure you don't need a bunch of you know schooling on these cookie cutter modalities oftentimes that aren't working and the injuries are often healing as a function of time you know or you're being taught to bend your elbow again you know like yeah it's you know these people get way too much credit more credit than they deserve and they formulate opinions on things they have no experience with and you know as do many people in the medical business the healthcare

business you know you know doctors think they can fix your television set and then bill you for it you know they can they can fix your television set and then bill you for it, you know. They can fix your car, too. You know, they can help you with anything you ask them questions on, unfortunately. And, you know, the PT is kind of trending in that direction, especially in our realm. You know, we teach people how to move and how to move at, you know, very high levels of performance, right? So, you know, they want to make judgments about that without understanding any of it. You know, they're helping you, they're helping your mother bend her arm again. They're helping people walk again after a stroke. They're not getting people strong. You know, they're not teaching a squat. That's right. And a deadlift, you know? That's right. So, they're dealing with

clinical populations. Yeah. And yeah, very sick people, very detrained people. So, you and I don't deal with that. So, you know, I'm not going to take somebody who just had a stroke and walk them through that. I don't have a system or model in my head to refer from in that situation. I have a general understanding of it. But I'm not the guy you call for that. I'm not licensed to do that in a clinical setting. And that's fine. But, you know, I got a guy with a 60-year-old back that periodically hurts.

And it turns out that it's hurt him since he was 18. You know, I can work with that. You know, that's something we can work with. And, you know, the goal is to be less shitty at that point because a 60-year-old back will be a 61-year-old back. And, you know, if he lives long enough, it might be an 80-year-old back. And it's going to decline just like you're going to lose muscle mass. We're not living forever here, people. You know, the body declines.

Cars decline. Things get older, you know. We're trying to stave that off and improve the situation. I can tell you right now, my father and my stepfather, both similar age, when they were my age, back pain out the wazoo, man. One of them was a truck driver. My stepfather was a truck driver. He delivered beer, so he had to load his own truck, unload his own truck, put it away. He was just constantly lifting cases of beer all day. And before that, kegs, but most of his career was cases. And, you know, it doesn't sound like much, but when you have, like, you know, these 24-pack of bottles stacked up on top of each other,

and you're doing one after another, constant rotation of the back, because I'm sure, you know, they don't teach you how to properly use your back. They have that stupid OSHA chart, lift with your legs, not not your back but they don't really emphasize the problem with rotation so i'm sure there was a lot of loading and rotation going on with his body so his back you know the spine hates rotation you could get away with flexion with quite a bit of intensity but flexion plus rotation is where you start running into problems that That's the classic pick the lawnmower up with a lot of flexion and then twist and turn it and put it in the truck. Yeah, old rips are an example. But I don't want to go too deep into that just for another episode.

But what I'm trying to say is both of my stepfather and my father, you know, both worked in manual labor and both had bad backs in their early 30s. So younger than I am now. And meanwhile, I've deadlifted, you know, close to triple my body weight, and I continue to add weight to the bar year after year. I'm thankful I've been able to do that because, you know, some people get injured quite easily doing far less. But the point is, I think because I've done that, I have learned how to control my body because I think some of their injuries come from the things I just described, just poor movement patterns. But, you know, I've been able to get strong. I started doing this. I started squatting when I was 18, you know.

I started deadlifting when I was 18, but I just didn't do that one as consistently. I started consistently deadlifting when I was 28, 27, 28. And I continue to do it. Instantly deadlifting when I was 28, 27, 28. And I continue to do it. And I don't have those back problems that, you know, my male role models had when I was growing up. You know, pretty much every, I think every man I knew that was over 30 had bad back, you know, when I was growing up. And I know a lot of men over 30 now that have bad backs.

You know, I get people hiring me that are younger than me with bad backs. So, you know, it's a byproduct of being a biped. You know, you walk and compress your spine all day. And if you develop bad habits on top of that and don't have strong connective tissues and muscles attached to that spine, it only makes the problem worse. That's right. You know, if you have a bad back, chances are it's hurt when you were a child or adolescent. And chances are it's going to continue to fucking hurt the rest of your life. But, you know, get strong and it'll hurt less, you know? That's right. And, and you'll be, you'll be useful when it hurts, you know, that's the thing. That's a good point you bring up. Cause I never, I don't really consider that when I'm talking about this, but you're right. It's not going to lay you up on

the couch for three days, you know, and you're, where you're useless. Like, you know, you can still pick your kid up. You can go haul shit out in your backyard, whatever you have to do. It's not going to slow you down. It hurts and that sucks that it does, but you know, you're, you're also not laid up. Um, yeah, I, I have one last thought, closing thought. I believe very strongly in this. I've watched a lot of people, uh, that I know personally, and I've also some of my clients that have unfortunately gotten injured. Sometimes it's just a tweak that in my opinion, they catastrophize. Sometimes it's an injury. Luckily, I haven't seen too many of those in my career, but it does happen. But anyway, they, they, they interact with the medical complex at some point because they need help that I'm not able to provide. Usually they need some imaging or something just to figure out what's going on so they can troubleshoot.

with doctors and other medical professionals. And then it's all of a sudden this sort of like, I've been delivered into the savior's hands. Like they're going to figure it all out and they're going to take care of me and I don't have to do anything now. And there's whatever the doctor says, that's it. It's gold plated. And my problem with that is not necessarily what the doctor says. Now, sometimes they say some really stupid stuff, but sometimes they say some reasonable stuff too. That's not my problem with it. My problem is I've watched people give up their agency going into the medical complex. They stop being the one in control of how things are going to go, in control of the rehab. Decision-making. That's right. And here's the thing. This this is the illusion your doctor doesn't give a shit like yes i think most

doctors probably want to do a good job but but they don't have any personal investment in your rehab they can't it's not them right it's not the same thing treating someone else as it is going through it yourself. And you are in control. You know, treat people that you interact with in the medical industry as consultants, which is what they are. You come to them, they have an expertise in a particular field and you're consulting their expertise and asking their opinion, which you will take under consideration. Okay. But, but the thing is a lot of them have a bedside manner where there's sort of like, I know everything. Here's what's going on. Here's what you're going to do. This is what you're going to do here. You're going to come back to me in two weeks after doing that. And we're going to do another one of these follow-ups.

Bam. No questions asked. Um, you know, unfortunately I've had plenty of interactions with doctors like that. Um, but, but the thing is they're not in control. They don't get to make that decision. You still have agency. You get, you get to control how these things go. Um, so in the same thing is true with your training, we can dial this all the way back down to a much more mundane level. When you have a little tweak, you get to decide how it goes. You can still go in the gym and try things out, start to move, start to feel, see what you can do, make notes, you know? And I think when you do that and you make a habit of that in your life, you're going to become happier and you're going also, you're also going to become more confident. And I think your outcomes

are going to be better as a result. It's a positive feedback loop. When you start handing over agency to other people, that's just a recipe for unhappiness, anxiety, etc. Just remember, you're not in control of the outcome, but you are in control of the decision-making, even if you are consulting with people who know more than you. That's right. The buck stops with you. You make the final decision. Most people in charge of businesses, a lot of them have no idea how the

production works or have a general idea, but they're not experts in how the production works. They know enough of it to understand what it is they're selling and manufacturing, distributing, et cetera, but they're not expert producers. But at the end of the day what they consult with everybody at every level of the business and then they make the final call based on the information that they have available right and you have to educate yourself enough on this thing you know like you're not a surgeon but you have you have to educate yourself enough on surgery to make sure you're not getting set up to get fucked up more and that goes goes with anything, right? Like with the stuff here, right? That's right.

Read what we're doing and then ask us all about it. You know, we have a bunch of rationale for you and we'll explain why we're doing what we're doing. That's a sign of a good, competent professional. But, you know, don't give up your power to make decisions. Do not do that. That is the worst thing you can do. And, you know, you're going to get what you put into that.

That's right. Yeah, so you are the decision maker. These people are your consultants. They work for you. You're the one who has to go under the knife. You're the one who's going to get the bill of some size. And even if you have really good insurance that covers that, same deal. Don't give up. You are the, you make the final call.

That's right. And it can be, it can be really tough when you're, you know, when you're in that situation and, uh, you're scared or unsure, you know, if something major happens. Um, but it's still true. Well, so yeah, that was a lot. That's a lot there. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, uh, our colleagues, uh, who are PTs have entire podcasts about this topic. Uh, so we could go in many, many other directions there, but hopefully that, you you know gives you some food for thought train your brain man train your brain yep you're more resilient than you think yeah what's this you know one of my advisors one of the things he's reminded us of in a class was that it's very hard to kill a human and it's true I mean outside of outside of pulling the trigger and shooting somebody, that's pretty easy, assuming you hit the person. But he said it's very hard to kill a human.

And I would agree with that, having worked in a clinical setting and seen some of the shit people get away with, you know? Oh, yeah. So you're not this fragile little piece of glass. You're not. And these injuries often feel worse than they do, just like a set of five squats that you could probably do for seven or eight feels worse than it actually is, you know. Pain sucks, and if you're not used to it, it sucks even more.

It's startling. It's stressful. It's anxiety-provoking. You know, it's not a fun thing. I'm not saying jump for joy when you get hurt, but it's not the end of the world, you know. And getting strong is going to set you up for less of it in the long run. But it doesn't mean you will never, ever, ever feel an ache or pain again. You know, we live in a world of mortality, you know, we're all going to die. You know,

things are going to run down and shit's going to hurt periodically, especially with age. So, you know, you still need to train, you know, that's, that's, if you listen to us, that means you have an interest in training. So that's what we're here to tell you. That's, that's our part. You still need to train, you know, you should still take care of your body and eat well, you know, you should try to sleep well, you know, there's lots of things you should be doing. But the broad answer here is pain doesn't mean you stop training, you know, you'll probably get pain again if you do. in fact more or what i've seen is you know people stop training for a decade then they're back ages 10 years and then it comes back you know uh yep so there's no escape in this shit

you know you're given a deck of cards you know and you don't have control over that you know if you were given a fucked up back uh you can make it you can make it less fucked up by getting stronger but you're not going to unfuck it you know you're not going to completely unfuck it in most cases there are cases where you know it never happens again because the person just lifts and that is great we love when that happens it's awesome to see but uh in most cases you're just improving you're taking a shitty situation to a less shitty situation to maybe a more optimal situation you know know, like, just depends. Depends on who you are. But you cannot change the cards you were dealt.

That is there to stay. And we're here to help you improve the situation and make the best of it. But we're not claiming we're fucking going to cure anything. You know, that's not what we do here. We can cure your weakness, you know, and make you less weak or maybe even real strong. You know, you might surprise us. Might squat 800. Hasn't happened in my gym yet, but it'd be cool if I had a completely naive motherfucker that worked himself to an eight squat, you know.

Hey, never say never. I mean, if that happened, that would be fucking cool. You know, I'm not a big powerlifting fan. If that happened, that would be fucking cool. You know, like I'm not a big power lifting fan. You know, I know I train people for meets and I like hanging out at the meets, you know, but I'm not a power lifter. I don't like competing in them. But, you know, I'm just like the rest of us. We're strength coaches.

You know, we like to see the extremes. It's like the circus, you know? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I would love to get some big naive motherfucker that works in some white collar job that has all this strength he never tapped into and then he just squats 800. yeah over the course of like you know time i don't i mean if he did it on the first day that'd be insane but i don't think that ever happens so yeah i think this is a good time to close out all righty let's do it thank you for tuning in to the weights and plates podcast you can find me at weightsandplates.com. My gym is located in

South Mountain Village, just south of the airport in Phoenix, Arizona. You should definitely drop by if you're in the neighborhood. I offer online coaching and consults on my website, and I have a couple other RDs that do as well. You can find me on Instagram. That's where I post most of my content. I have a little bit of YouTube now. I'm starting to post my workouts there, but you can find me on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana.

And the gym has a page that needs to be updated so bad. Weights double underscore and double underscore plates. All right. You know where I am at marmalade underscore cream. That's the name of my Instagram handle. And it's also the name of my audio production company, marmaladecream.com. I also do coaching jonesbarbellclubatgmail.com if you want to talk to me there. All right, catch y'all again in a couple weeks. Thank you.