WHOOP Podcast - Dr. Jordan Shallow, performance coach, chiropractor, and competitive powerlifter talks injury prevention, maximizing the value of your training, and breathing as a gateway to the autonomic nervous system.

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

Powerlifter Jordan Shallow, aka "The Muscle Doc," discusses the ins and outs of his sport (6:49), why controlled breathing is so important (9:30), the process of dropping 30 pounds for a weigh-in (15:44), understanding the difference between strength and stability (24:09), how to dislocate a shoulder (26:43), what he's learned from various injuries and how he's recovered without surgery (33:11), flexibility vs. mobility (41:20), breathing as a gateway to the autonomic nervous system (52:09), what heavy lifting does to his HRV (53:38), why his athletes have "parasympathetic days" instead of rest days (58:25), optimization vs. adaptation (1:21:19), and why we should strive for allostasis instead of homeostasis (1:23:12).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world, to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve.

What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? And now that we've just launched all-new Woopstrap 3.0 featuring WOOP Live, which takes real-time training and recovery analysis to the next level, you're going to hear how many of these users are optimizing their body with whoop and with other things in their life. On this podcast, we dig deeper. We interview experts. We interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. How can you use data to improve your body? What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the

Whoop Podcast. Whether it's skill acquisition and support, whether it's, you know, motor learning or strength output or stability or any sort of adaptation you're trying to make, you're making that change at the level of the nervous system, right? So being able to utilize your breath and understand this variability and heart rate as a marker, albeit in a multivariate system, I think is really interesting. What's up, folks? On today's episode, my guest is Dr. Jordan Shallow. Known as the muscle doc. This dude is strong. 749 pounds squat, 441 pound bench, deadlift 755. He's won a bunch of powerlifting competitions. He's a chiropractor, strength and conditioning coach, and he works with many of the world's best athletes. Jordan and I discuss what it's like. to participate in the sport of powerlifting, including how athletes attempt to set new personal

bests each time they compete, how injuries happen and how your body recovers, as well as the major injuries he's had and what he's done to bounce back. How mental focus is a key aspect of building strength and muscle, and plus how Woop has helped him better understand how to manage his breathing to better control the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of his autonomic nervous system. Jordan's got a lot of layers here to his knowledge. I try to really unpack those in our conversation, and I think you're going to find this very entertaining.

Without further ado, here's Jordan. Jordan, thanks for coming on. Yeah, man, thanks for it. This is not what I expected. What, Wup HQ? Yeah, just, I don't know. I don't know what I expected. Boston, I was expecting like an old like brownstone sort of building.

This is very like, it's very kind of Silicon Valley. Yeah, we've got a tech vibe around here. Yeah, no, I dig it. The sit stand desks and the, you guys have like a foosball table in here, too? No foosball table. Okay, all right, good. But we have a gym. Did you see that?

I saw that. I respect that. Yeah. Well, let's start with the fact that you're really strong. So we've got, we've got some stats here. Best lifts in competition, 749 pound squat, 441 pound bench press, 755 pound deadlift. I get those right? That's it.

Nailed it. So how did you get into power lifting? happenstance Yeah I played hockey my whole life Did you always have like a big build No So it wasn't obvious that you were this strong

No Not like growing up was kind of a run Like ninth grade I was like 5-1 Oh really? Yeah I was little mite man I think it was that's probably a big driver It was like you get thrown in the lockers

By your sister's friends enough times And you're like I gotta put it off to this Okay so you got bullied a little bit Yeah but like like a good Like a good bullying Like a wholesome bullying Like we need more of this bullying. Okay, it was a motivation.

Yeah, no, it was great. I played hockey growing up in Canada as you do. As everyone does. Yeah, I could skate before I could walk. Yeah. And that's like not an exaggeration. And I'm just always kind of worked out in the off season to like prepare for the season to come.

And then that just sort of evolved into like when I got into grad school, gave up the hockey dream and was like it was just a way to manage stress. I just kept sort of lifting, eating, training the way I was. And then without the hockey six, seven days a week and the bus trips and all that, like, you started to put on some size.

And my first patient when I got into clinical practice was probably one of the best, if not the best power lifter, like modern powerlifter. And I would work with him out of his gym, which then became my office like a year later. And so how old are you at that time? Oh, geez, 25. Yeah, 25, fresh out of school. And you are, how old today? 29.

So this is just four years ago. That's it. So in four years, like how, okay, 749 pound squat, four years ago, how much could you squat? Oh, geez, I don't know, maybe a little over five. Okay, so that's a lot of ground you made there. Yeah, yeah, I mean, just having a good coach, man. Like, the guy has had every world record at the 110 and 100 kilo class, so 242 and 220. Wow.

Yeah, so just accelerating the learning curve, like training with them day and day out. Like a lot of it, I think was just the environment. you show up every day and him and my other training partner were both world record holders and did you know like squad bench press deadlift were the things you wanted to get really high weight

at like at what point did you decide I want to be really strong at these things I want to do well in competitions after I did my first competition my first one was kind of like I thought I was going to get blown it out of the water it was like a local meet in Santa Cruz it was called the Surf City Open

was June 18th, 2016 Surf City Open's got a kind of nice vibe. It's not a powerlifting vibe, though. I think that's where maybe I could do my first deadlifting. It was really, yeah, it was really strange. It was a small gym called Santa Cruz Strength. It was great.

I enjoyed it, but like, I rocked up and I'm like, oh, I'm going to get smoked because I just got used to, like, keeping up with the Joneses, right? Like, my two training partners are, I mean, leaps and bound stronger than most people in the world. So, like, I'm going to get blown away. And then I ended up winning by a sizable amount and won, like, best lifter and all that. I was like, oh. And walk, I mean, for someone who doesn't know anything about,

about this like what does an event like that even look like sure yeah so power like the sport of competitive powerlifting is essentially squat bench and deadlift you take three attempts at each in that order so like we go by you go squat then you go bench then you go deadlift yeah so we'll go like all three squat attempts all three bench attempts all three deadlift it's a full it's like waiting at the DMV with strong people like you just kind of sit back and like calling number 17 and you just like go up there they got the bars loaded and you squat it so you have three attempts usually in a sending weights. And you're trying to do it once?

Yeah, so each one is just once. So, like, I squat. My first attempt is just one rep. Second attempt is just one rep. Third attempt, just one rep. Okay. And will you try to increase each? That's the goal, yeah.

So you want to open with something like conservative, build confidence, like something you can hit, something you've done in training. And then second and third attempts, you start to push the envelope. So you'll actually try to lift something in competition you've never lifted before. That's the goal. You save one rep maxes for the platform. Yeah, you keep that shit on the gym. Yeah, no, it's fun. man like it's it's good energy it's everyone's supportive like it's not one of these sports like

alpuccino can't come into the warm up room and give me like the best for any given sunday speech of all time and i go out to pull a thousand pounds yeah she's not gonna happen right so it's like it's very strategic it lends itself to people that are very calculated like it's training style if you can control a lot of your variables when it comes to like recovery when it comes to things like yeah you can actually get fairly close and like you know relative percentages of load that you should train up for submaximal resistance training and then that way you accumulate enough fatigue and volume over training cycle that you can then as you adapt through that SRA curve you can actually predict with hopefully good accuracy that third attempt and it be

heavier than anything you've lifted before right and so you do the three reps of the squat yeah and then you immediately go to the bench press or you get some time yeah you get some time right because it's it's me you're probably a little like tired after that right or yeah you got to Or you amped. You got to strategize the day, man. You see the guys who are, like, you know, rocking back and forth in the chair all day. They're kind of like bugging out. Yeah.

You can't last that all day, man. Like, that's a rookie mistake. It's like you got to be stop of fingers. When you're under the bar, that's when you wake up. Because it's long because there'll be. I like that. You got to control your adrenaline. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. And you're heart rate to some degree. You don't want to just be amped all day. Yeah. And you see guys, like, hit the caffeine hard. Like, pre-workout, like they're pretty much just blowing Hollywood rails of it. And you're just, you're just,

You're going to be not okay for a long time, man. Guys just doing eight balls. Yeah, pre-workout, man. That's not chalk in that bowl. That's just, no, it's insane. And the things that people do and they don't understand, like, the basics of, like, physiology and how to control, like, sympathetic comparison. That's what got me into a lot of the whoop stuff.

Yeah, well, honestly, like, and as weird as that sounds and, like, as, like, you know, native advertising as that is, like, once I got onto the research of, like, respiratory sinus arrhythmia and using the pair. Because my thing is, is actually when I execute lifts coming down. Like, I get so amped up in that split second. Like, you throw the Johnny Cash on it, it's time to party. And then it's like, how do I actually activate parisempathetic in that state? Like, I go too high.

Right. And it's like utilizing breathing strategies to get you back down so you can actually focus. Because, like, aggression is great when you're 16 and you're, like, squatting in the high school rate room. But, like, you really got to focus it when there's, you know, 740 pounds on. your back because like one wrong move one deviation of that combined center of mass and you in the bar and you're you're fucked just in terms of your you could get injured or your body either way like like you're not going to make the lift or yeah you just yeah and like i've done not a few times under heavy weight like i've torn some stuff off the bone where it's like i i've been to engage like

two to to up and the execution was off and like it's it's high stakes poker man like if you you you miss an attempt you misgrew something and it's like applied for greater than tissue tolerance that's an injury right so if you start applying forces to tissues that shouldn't be tolerating those forces like peck jumps off so have you gotten injured in a competition before never in competition only in training and how bad was it who bad uh so it was my last bench press before flying over to australia to compete two years ago i tore my peck 60% off the bone oh my god rep set to so it was my it was my previous one rep max of 200 kilos so 4 440 41 and it just

41 that's pretty serious yeah I read to the outsider it would seem that way it was my weakest of the three lifts felt good last session and then just misgroved it two two amp and when you say misgroved it what exactly is you just saying that

sort of abstractly or is that no no that's quantifiable yeah like I mean if you think about the peck major like the main head of the peck major goes from the sternal head into the humorous right yeah it's exactly where you want to hit it off the chest. Yeah, because you don't want, unlike bodybuilding where the whole goal is like putting tension across fibers, you want to actually evenly disperse tension across as many

fibers as you can. So it's not a peck exercise when we bench pressing competition. So that's really interesting. So if you're trying to bodybuild, you're trying to isolate muscles to make those muscles more attractive or more defined. And in what you're describing, you actually want to distribute the weight across a lot of different muscles because that's going to amplify the amount you can lift. Yeah. Yeah. It's integration versus. is isolation. Yeah, interesting. People are predisposed

that the bench press is a good peck exercise for whatever reason, but it's like... You can actually engage a lot. Yeah, and it's when we think about it, the peck's action as you move towards origin insertion

is flexion adduction and internal rotation. Yeah. So a misgroom is pretty quantifiable when you look at the level of eccentric load in extension, abduction, an external rotation.

If your elbows are too flared out, that's too much stretch on the peck. Yeah. So like muscles are weak and they're fully lengthened and fully shortened position. So if you're adopting a fully lengthen position of the peck under 200 kilos that's where it's weak it doesn't have the tolerance in

that tissue to manage that applied force that's literally the equation for an injury fascinating okay so let's go back to this competition so uh how does how does the final score work we add up your total your best squat your best bench your best deadlift okay so so being good at squatting's the most important because you can get the most weight or no no i mean i can deadlift more than i can squad. Yeah. It depends on leverages.

Some guys are big benches. Like, if you only lift that matters is your total, right? And it's the strategy.

Like, you know, you can lift heavy weights in your garage and no one gives a shit. What if can you show up on the day and put it together when some guys breathing down your neck?

Like, it's... That's fun. Yeah, no, it's fun. It's got a nice vibe to it. If you get in the mental side of things, like, because you can, like, put in attempts and watch people like, oh, he's going to do this on a second.

Like, maybe we should do this. And it's just like, it's a mental chess game and for people who aren't ready for it. So are there times where you'll see a guy, you know, drop the ball, so to speak, on, like, that third rep? And then all of a sudden, you know you only need to hit a certain weight and you'll just dial that in. Yeah, depends. Because, like, I'm curious how much of it is you're trying to hit these PRs that you've never done before versus win the competition. Competition's paramount.

But it's like there comes a certain level of confidence when he misses the lift. sometimes like you'll just lay it on the line like you want to leave no doubt if you can if you can like really step on the throat and drive home a point then you do it yeah but you better make damn well if you call a heavier attempt the more than what's required for the win you pick that shit up and how unknown is it like when you show up to what's the last event you competed in uh boss of bosses year ago in california and when you show up to that and you look around the the mat so to speak like do you pretty much know everyone is. Everyone. Okay. Yeah. It's, there's no like

Dark Horse in the building. You don't have much data on this person. Rarely, man. Big warm-up set. Yeah, no. Rarely are you looking around. Like, you know,

you can almost hand up the trophies in the parking lot, but the only thing that makes the difference is guys who get in their own head. Like, someone misses an opener, like what should be an easy first rep on a squat,

like your first attempt at your squat, and you watch them just lose their head. Huh. And then they bomb out. So if you miss all three of, one of your lifts you're done yeah you lose yeah there you can't make up that kind of ground are you allowed to go down what's up no oh that's interesting yeah so whatever you open with you got to either you got to if you miss that on your first one you have to attempt it on your

second you miss it on your second you have to take it you can't you can go up if you want to like you can miss an opener and i've seen it like guys will miss groove a rep and like no no i got it i'm gonna i'm gonna take my plan second attempt anyways but there's no going down have you ever done that missed your first and hit your second yeah Arnold's um so i took third in the Arnold's, the Arnold Classic in Australia. It was my third meet. And it was a two-hour way in. I ate a piece of cantalote while my flight from New Zealand.

So what's a two-hour way in? So we weigh in by weight class. So, like, I compete. That meat I competed at the 242 class. So it got down to 242 pounds. And, like, I walk around usually around 270. Oh, so you cut weight. Yeah.

Yeah. So the last thing I ate was on the air, New Zealand flight from Auckland to Melbourne three days prior. It was a piece of cantalope. And then so, like, Like, you weigh in. Dude. Yeah.

That's. So you weigh in, do you weigh in the night before the morning off? Two hours before you start competing. So the morning off. So you hadn't eaten anything? No, not for like two days. And you'd have some caffeine or something? Like, I think you'd be a pretty delirious.

Once you, once you weigh in, go for it. Like, I just. So you ate after that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like being. And what would you eat? Anything easy, digestible, carbs for like protein powder, cream of rice. Pack that because it's hard to find in Australia.

some berries maybe some fats but like a lot of it like you kind of go for it it's it's not ideal it's not like how you would look at sports performance but if you don't if you don't hit the weight class but it makes you so competitive right like I am big for my weight class like coming into the 242s for me is difficult but it's worth it because at the end of the day it's all between the years you push people around kind yeah like there's definitely there's a there's a presence in the warm-up room like it's you know people are like you're constantly watching what other people are doing like and you can see guys just lose their head like these guys lose it in the warm-up room now where do your goals go from here what's the next stage I just want to keep competing man

like you just like competing and are you keep are you still getting better uh yeah that's the goal um the hard part now is with work making a big transition and my life being out of a suitcase and living on the road like training can be quite difficult like when i put up my best total i was living in california i was working in every job i had was in a gym whether both my offices were in a gym and then obviously like strengthening with stanford i'm in a gym all day so training was very accessible but now it's like i'm in i'm in four cities in the next six days yeah let's talk about your lifestyle so you're you travel all the time you've told you told me you don't have a home You don't have a, you know, a postal...

I got a P.O. Box in Michigan. Okay, P.O. Box in Michigan, which is potentially just a random state you chose, or you spend more time? My parents live in Windsor, Ontario, so it's right across the border. So if I fly into Detroit, I can, like, stop off at my P.O. box and, like, grab my bills once every six months or so. But, yeah, I've been on the road for, like, a year and a half now, nonstop. And describe what you're doing? So I started a company called prescript.com three and a half years ago, business partner mine in California.

He's an Olympic weightlifter named Jordan Jinta. Went to chiropractic college together. And we started an online training platform alongside our podcast, what's, yeah, three and a half years ago. And it's since evolved more recently in the last 18 months. Part of the arm, or one of our main arms of the company is education based around optimizing sport performance, looking through the lens of injury risk management.

So I've developed curriculum and teach, mostly my biggest contracts are private gyms so private to the trainers that I teach my curriculum to so Good Life Fitness in Canada so 375 clubs and I go around teaching across Canada for them

they're level two and level or sorry level three and level four trainers and then there's a gym called Ultimate Performance which is like a studio personal training gym with the 13 locations like Hong Kong Singapore, Amsterdam, Dubai where else am I

on London, Manchester, L.A. So I teach a lot for them, private contracts, develop a curriculum, kind of piece together the holes, and standardize the approach for their personal training department. And then on top of that, we hold coaching certification courses to kind of teach individual PTs outside of this company how to look through that lens of injury risk management while still looking to optimize sports performance. So for someone who is pushing your body at the level you are, injury prevention is also kind of a funny

it's a funny place to be coming at it from right like what are some of the key ways for someone who's trying to get more athletic who's trying to get stronger like how should you think about injury prevention yeah i think a lot of people their blind spot starts with assessment and i think that's where we've fallen short as an industry in the past like 15 20 years there's been good i would call them good

honest attempts at making a systematic approach to assessing an individual but I think with a lot of blind spots with what we've developed and how I implemented in my training kind of being like hopefully proof of concept to a certain degree like there are days when I'm prepping for a meat and I'll get off I mean one of my best squat sessions I've ever had

was I was off 14.5 hour flight from Melbourne to L.A. Uber straight to Golds Venice you know bars that bend like pool noodles and I think it was like 5 by 5 at 585 within 45 minutes of being an off-plane in LAX, but with what we teach, it's not a system, like it's a system's way of thinking, like understanding how applied biomechanics

interfaces within the depths of itself, but how that entity of applied biomechanics interfaces with the bodies as a whole, right? Like understanding stress as an aggregate and teaching how to pre-screen at every session and get real-time data on how people are moving, both subjectively and objectively. So that's kind of where we saw a big hole in what was going around in the market, around functional assessments.

So we systematized a way of systems thinking, and we sort of challenge people to come up with their own gold standard of functional assessment. And that's what we teach to trainers. So what would be encompassed in a functional assessment? Sure. Active range of motion and then range stability or strength. So active range of motion, that's like also. sorts of different movements. How far can I go? Yeah, to a certain extent. I mean, function is a word that gets tossed around a lot, right? And I think in the last 10, 15, 20 years, like, it's kind of bastardized, but like understanding that the shoulder, hip, and spine,

act of these hubs of stability in the body and that there's an integrated function of how each one of these is meant to work, like how these muscles move in integration and in system and then interface with the other hubs. So I think, you know, there are, and I won't name names, but are like fitness companies that sell things based off quote unquote functional training but it's like well what is function right like is function just the task at hand i think fundamentally as human beings like function derives a lot from walking and breathing like i think that is the base level code of human function it makes us independent to other animals other animals cannot break apart breath cycle and gate cycle right so i think understanding how muscles have an action that's like

training isolation origin to insertion but how they also have a function an integrated purpose in which to stabilize the joints that they cross. So like a bicep, for example, like without getting too abstract, the bicep has a clear action, flexes the elbow, supernates the wrist, and the secondary flexor of the shoulder. But the bicep has a function of glenohumeral depression. It works with the labor room to help give us depth and stability of our shoulder socket. Right. So how is it then we start to integrate methods of training to stabilize the function of the

bicep? And then it doesn't have to be like, you know, your physical therapist, yellow therapy, and, you know, waving your arms around stuff. Like, it can be woven right into a training program. I can pick a bicep girl variation that trains the function of the bicep, not the action of the bicep. So it's playing this orchestra, maestro, like putting pieces in the right place.

So if I'm the trainer who just heard all of this from you, and now I'm going to try to take that back and figure out how to use that for my client, right? What am I, like, I understand how you just connected all those dots, right? And I understand how you just described the Bicep has these three different functions, right, that are beyond what maybe before I would have thought of. How do I know that I'm now applying the systems thinking correctly? Sure.

So, assessing or understanding, I guess, fundamentally, that strength and stability are two separate adaptations. Okay, so that seems pretty fundamental. Yes, that's base level code. And that's something that a lot of people are overlooking because it's very easy to sell someone a product to strengthen a muscle of stability, right? like I can sell you a band and tell you to strengthen your rotator cuff, but the function of your rotator cuff is not to externally rotate.

Infraspinatus and Terry's minor, when we move them from origin to insertion, they create a muscle action or a joint action of external rotation. But when we integrate that into movement, like say when we're going through a bench press, like a closer grip bench press, but there's a lot of torque and rotation through that, like around that sagittal lane. Then it's like the rotator cuff's job is no longer to rotate and exert force and be strong. It's to resist force and be stable. So that's the fundamental difference between strength and stability.

Strength is exerting force and stability is resisting force. So assessing for range of motion, doing what's necessary to improve range of motion at these hubs, the shoulder and hip primarily. Spine plays kind of a different game because of its fundamental neurology, like there's muscles and spine we can't voluntarily control. So it's assessing for range of motion at the hip and shoulder. Do we have full range of motion? If no, how do we then subdivide the shoulder into functional subcomponents to improve mobility? Right, and that's where your phone rollers come in, your bands, you're stretching, all that stuff. Like mobility, mobility was the frontrunner for a very long time.

You saw that with the rise of CrossFit and a lot of, a lot of people essentially that do what I do and really just pushed this direct correlation between an improvement of mobility and a decreased likelihood of injury, where it's actually an inverted bell curve. Like I had a patient in San Francisco who could squat 970 pounds, but couldn't touch his toes. equally as likely as my Cirque de Soleil a performer who I could fold up and put in the overhead compartment of most 737s right so hyper but that guy can't squat both of them are equally as likely to succumb to injury right oh okay so that's the thing it's like everyone has this broad spec approach to just improve mobility and then your likelihood of injury goes down it's like no no no there you

improve mobility to get into greater positions of structural instability and then you train stability as a separate adaptation so when you said improved mobility there you meant that that both of those subjects you just described, the Cirque de Soleil and the really strong squatter, they both have a high level of mobility. No, they have a high likelihood of injury. They have a high likelihood of injury. Only the Cirque Salé guy has high mobility.

Yeah, okay. So they're both missing a piece. He's missing mobility to get into positions of instability. Like, if I want to dislocate your shoulder right now, I just put your arm over. You said that in a threatening way. Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, it takes. It takes nothing more than a smile, really, if you know the mechanics of the shoulder.

Like, it's very hard to do that with your arm at your side, right? Like, I could break your collarbone or, like, separate your C joint. But, like, they actually dislocate your ball and socket of the shoulder. I just need to get your arm over your head. Arm over your head, and just a little slight tap from posterior day from the back to the front. Gone. Really? Yeah, oh, it's easy.

It's, yeah, I'll show you after. Okay, give me. Yeah, if anyone ever goes through your wallet or something, it gives you a hard time. But it's understanding that, you know, when we get into this overhead position, it's structurally unstable. And that is the perfect opportunity, the perfect environment to train functional stability, which means actually utilizing the function of the rotator cuff to resist force in place of that structure that was no longer giving us support in that position. Got it.

I get the feeling that you've been able to really dial it in in a lot of ways for people. I hope so. But the question I'm also asking myself is, like, how many layers deeper you do? describing this than the average trainer too right like i imagine quite a few layers deeper and so it's like how do you surface some of this up too for like do you think there's a mass market message here that's easier to digest yeah yeah yeah understand stability is my biggest thing because if you understand stability you can quarterback from this center point like that's a lot like there are days where man i just don't have it like i was i did bahamas to houston houston to l a l a to melbourne

Melbourne to Sydney in one go. That's a lot. That was two and a half weeks ago. And like, dude, I got off the plane, man, and, like, I went through, like, I'm at the point where my range motion's quite good. I start with my stability assessments, like handful of drills. Like, whether it's, if it's lower body, like, do a walking lunge, do a single-leg RDL, do a hip airplane.

See how you can, if you can't stand on one leg, don't squat with two legs. As, like, a general rule. Like, let's relieve, let's make this boiler plate. That's a good rule to follow. That's an interesting rule, yeah. Yeah. So it's like, because, you know, if we're standing on one leg, we think of stability as a separate adaptation it's like stability is predicated off basis support and center of mass right so to progress and regress we either limit our base of support and or deviate our center of mass than to regress we broaden our base of support and we centralize our center of mass right so that's how it works as a different adaptation where everyone's like oh you have weak glutes or weak core or weak rotator cough they add strength and it's like well that's quantifiable but you're adding resistance to build strength but it's like this is because we don't understand that limiting a base support and

deviating a center of mass is a way to elicit a different adaptation of the body. So there are drills that I go like before every squat in deadlift session, you will see me do walking lunges, Bulgarian split squats, single leg RDLs, hip airplanes. Without weight. Without weight. Yeah. Because it's like, again, if I can't manage my own weight and like resist the forces as I purposely deviate center of mass outside a limited base support, I have no business loading extra physiologically because I know any support that I'm going to be getting, any stability that I'm going to be getting is coming right from my structure from having now just a broad base of support, right?

So now it's like, well, what is structure? Well, that's your meniscus in your knee, your discs in your back, your ligaments of your SI joint, right? So pre-screening for our ability to functionally buffer these applied forces, that's the takeaway message. It's like every time I see a personal trainer,

put like a band around someone's knees and have them like crab walk across or monster walk or like do like the Jane Fonda Sunday morning like hip abduction shit because someone told their client that their hips or glutes were weak it's like it just has my head in it's like it's your it's speaking the wrong language right you speak another language i don't come on really you got one nothing all right geez okay let's let's let's let's go road here now my wife speaks five languages oh jesus so what she doing with you i know that's a good question what does she

speak uh so she speaks um english farsi french italian and spanish okay this actually this doesn't work because she speaks all three the Latin-based languages that I usually use. So imagine we spoke French, right? And we were like, hey, I get the idea of being able to speak French, but I don't speak. Yeah, no, I mean, they kind of, in Canada, they kind of make us learn it.

But you learn it to the point, like once I learned how to say, ma'am, can I please go to the bathroom in French class, that was it, I was done, because I just left and I never went back. Yeah. But imagine we both spoke French, right? And we were just, we were going to go to Barcelona or San Sebastian for the day, somewhere in Spain. if we're going for the day

we're not going to Rosetta Stone Spanish Latin-based language we can order lunch and get on a train so we're tourists right now this analogy like Barcelona is you're a tourist to physical activity and speaking the wrong language is applying strength at these hubs of stability

right it's strengthening the rotator cuff it's like yeah it works if you're just there for the day like if you're just in the gym for the day sure but if you want to be a permanent resident it's like all right man we're moving whoop headquarters to barsa tomorrow you're going to rosetta stone that bitch like you're going to get you want to be fluent in the

language you're trying to speak in the body and that's where a lot of people right now aren't physically literate in the adaptations they're making when it comes around these hubs when it comes to training around these hubs of stability because they're training strength not stability as you've gotten stronger what's been the biggest learning for yourself through that lens programming programming because this is once you can start to end up I'm stealing this from a friend of mine, Ben Pekolsky. Once you can qualify a stimulus, then you can quantify it, right? Because this brings me to the same starting point of neurological readiness,

these same positions of strength and stability before every workout. Like, I won't load a bar until I can do 10 walking lunges without my other leg touching the ground. 10 single leg RDLs without my foot touching the ground. Like, until I calibrate for my stability first, my strength is a moot point. So I know now that. So that's the qualify piece before quantified. Yeah. Now my reps and sets matter, right? Now my programming, my percentages, my RPE scaling, my undulated or block or, you know, Bulgarian methods, whatever I'm using to periodize, now all that matters, right? And it matters because you've engaged these muscles beforehand, because you've primed your body. Why does it matter?

Yeah, you're standardizing your approach, right? Rather than just arbitrarily, like, rolling around on the turf part of your local gym with a foam roller. Like, it's bringing you to the same starting line for every session. now your programming matters right and that's the thing like and that's the one thing I learned from getting injured was like you know I sort of saw the the objective

the objective improvements I was making by becoming more subjectively stable in these exercises I'm really on to something here like making these like leaps and bounds and strength and I was funny I've interviewed so many like high performers or athletes who have talked about

having some kind of a breakthrough from injury is that it sounds like something yeah adversarial growth it's probably one of the best research things around sports psychology yeah and that's yeah i mean there's there's an opportunity to be found if you look for it right and i know a lot of athletes who never recovered from that mentally right and like it's it's part for me it was just i was concerned after i got injured because of my role in clinical practice like here i am someone who's trying to tell people how to not get hurt and i i was bruised man i was bruised from my wrist to my pelvis. It was just black where I tore my peck. Same with my quad. So it was just, but I now work

with, I mean, I had a guy come off the U.S. Open and was supposed to play a high level player and he had a torn pack. So next thing you know, I'm in L.A., my phone goes off halfway through the open and he's in flushing. And he's, hey man, like I hear, you're the guy. And he says you had the experience. Yeah, he sends me a video of his peck tear. I'm like, that's adorable. And I sent him a picture of mine and goes, we got this. Like if I can rehab like no surgery, nothing like that. If I can rehab that, you can go back and play tennis. So, yeah, it was good because a lot of what you start to realize is what you're really training is the psychological. Like you mentioned studying phys.

And it's like, yeah, physiology is great. But, you know, psychology trumps physiology every day of the week, especially when you deal with high-level athletes, right? Like, you just got to get them in the right head space. Well, totally. I mean, once you can get to that level, a lot of it's psychology. Now, I've read that you got in a terrible accident when you were 25. This is four years ago. You got hit by a car while you were riding a bike.

Yeah, good times. And you said it's the best thing that's happened to you. Why is that? It's what first kind of, that was my first real injury. Like, I was riding my bicycle to the gym, and I got hit by a 91 Chevy Suburban. And dislocated my shoulder, torn, labrum, separated AC joint, like, brutal. Wow. But, yeah, it just, it taught me at first.

first-hand experience. Like, I always tell people, like, when you're a coach, when you're a trainer, when you work in sports performance, when you work in rehab, like, I always ask people, like, tell me what peanut butter tastes like, right? And, you know, you got the odd-bill peanuts, like, oh, thanks, bro, I appreciate that. Or, like, tell me what blue looks like, right? And you can't, like, it's a sense. And in a lot of ways, kinematic proprioception is their sixth sense.

So I have now, like, an upper hand, not an upper hand, but I have experienced those senses. and then when I try to, I have an easier time maybe bringing to light or verbalizing or sharing an experience when it comes to rehabilitation because of the injuries that I've had. Because you've gone through it. I've gone through it, yeah. And never had a surgery. Like, I mean, my left labrum of my shoulder is a hood ornament for this 91 Chevy Suburban for a chick who could barely see her over the steering wheel.

And she teabone me going, I don't know, 40 or something. Now, no surgery. Is that something that has been important to you as a concept? Do you not really believe in surgery? Or was it like a gray area? Could go surgery? Could not go surgery? Would other doctors have said you should have gotten surgery?

Yeah. I mean, with the labrum and the bicep and the peck and the quad. Okay, so just. Yeah, I'm not against surgery. Like, you know, I've sent out some of my best lifters for surgery. So it's understanding how to create this gold standard of functional assessment, right? Understand how to look in real time and test and ranges of motion from a mobility. standpoint and then in those end ranges test stability and then superimposed strength the strength

of your client or the athlete you're working with and go okay what's the dissonance here how how much stronger are they are stable has their strength outrun their stability how much room for improvement do we have from a function or looking through a functional lens because the goal is to always out function bad structure right but the problem is again as an industry up till this point we've struggled in standard a gold standard or gold standard functional approach for an individual so what are we with a gold standard structural assessment what's that MRI x-ray c t right like i could i could i could i could i could i could i could i could i could i could i could i could have a few disc bulges so what you should see my spine but it's a you if you if you look at the function and how to improve the

function of the spine you can out function bad structure like if you look at the research behind the you can out function bad structure yeah i like that concept that's the one that's it and that's you know what if people understood that piece like because that'll with confidence allow you to delegate properly right i can with confidence say look man like your bicep is retracted two centimeters off the bone you're going to have to go in for surgery right or it's like oh man my infraspinatus is frayed okay that's fine why are we applying so much force in the inferspinatus let's work on thoracic mobility scapular stability inhibiting internal rotation stability of the posterior shoulder then all of a sudden we don't diverge or converge force into this one tendon part of the rotator cuff

we can start to split it up and we get the shoulder to function properly right so it's because that we're so we're almost held hostage by the structural assessment of an MRI like it's damning language this black and white superimposition of your bones and soft tissue that just tells one side of the story you know you said this concept of your your has your strength strength progress beyond your stability. What would be like a very practical measurement of that or example of that?

Sure. I mean, I know guys like in squat 400 plus kilos that they can't do a single leg RDL and you watch like if you do like a single leg Romanian deadlift or like a single leg deadlift where it's like one foot on the floor, one hip extended, just watch someone's foot. Watch someone's foot just sort of like shake

and try to like catch this hip that's not stable. Now imagine that ground force. That same thing has happened when they're under load, but they don't have the function through the muscles trained properly at the level of the hip, this hub of stability. Now, that reverberation, that oscillation, that calibration, trying to find the center of mass over the base, the limited base of support, now that's going into the structure, right? So that's a clear example.

That's a very good example. Yeah. That really crystallizes the concept for me. Because you've got someone who theoretically is really strong, or not theoretical, they are really strong but they can't stand on on one leg and squat right and so your point of view for that person especially from through the lens of injury prevention where this has started is that person's at high risk for injury especially probably in the hips and you need to focus on building what would it be mobility around the hips different types of exercises where would you go with that what's

it depends right mobility i'm the trainer now and you're teaching well that's the thing like it's simple it's not easy right so mobility is only required if we can't get into positions of instability now mobility work is more common in the shoulder because we have greater access to range of motion right the ball and socket of the glenomero joint allows for a greater range than anywhere else in the body long story short you can get your hand over your head you can't get your foot over your head right so like range of motion at the hip is a lot less so for lower body stuff stretching sure for in some cases yeah like if i don't have the mobility or freedom of movement to get like a single leg RDL, like a single leg

Romanian deadlift, into a position of instability with a deviated center of mass and base support that I'm going to have to stretch. And the nice thing about the hip is that the SI joint works through all three planes. You just stretch through all three planes. Like it doesn't have to be complicated. So in that case, literally for your friend who can

squat a lot, you can't do the one like RDL, a lot of it's going to come back to flexibility. Oh, see, now you're throwing it flexibility. The flexibility is passive. Mobility is active. Right. So it's going to be... Didn't you say stretch? I think of stretching as something that leads to flexibility. Is that an unfair jump?

It's semantics in the way we look at things. I would say flexibility is more passive and mobility is more active. We want to improve his active range of motion. Okay. If you're stretching, wouldn't you be improving both your mobility and your flexibility? Or through that lens, are you only improving your mobility? Well, mobility is something that we look specific to structural stability. So it's about interfacing.

So here's the, I mean, it gets a little complicated. Without a whiteboard, we might lose some people here. Like, you don't want to stretch or mobilize into position of the exercise. Like, say that again. You don't want to stretch into the position of the exercise. Okay. You want the mobility piece interfaces with the stability piece. So you want to stretch into positions of instability of the hip, right?

So it's like a lot of people will just sit in the bottom of a squat. It's like, that's great. But that's not actually the point. point, right? Because that person who can't do the one leg RDL, we know he can stretch into the squat because he can do 400 kilos or whatever in the squat. So that person needs to stretch in a different way. Yeah, into the position of the single leg RDL. Why can't he get into that position of instability? Right. So that's like, okay, something like a pigeon stretch or a couch stretch or a frog stretch, like stretch through all three planes. Think of like a Z and X and a Y

axis that our s i joint moves through contemporaneously right there's it's called an instantaneous axis of rotation sure so it's like with my shoulder it's like i can flex my shoulder without rotating it i can rotate my shoulder without flexing it but at the level of the hip and the s i joint there's a reciprocal motion because of the way the two in nominate bones of the pelvis articulate with the sacrum so it's like if you if you're tight in one range you're going to be tight or at least by a consequence of being tight in one you're going to have issues in all three and it sounds funny for me to say it doesn't have to be complicated after like to have to really complicated.

Yeah, make it complicated. I get where you're coming from. I think the piece I'm trying to understand is this difference between flexibility and mobility. Active versus passive. It's just active versus passive. Flexibility would be how you move when I move you. Mobility would be how you move when you move yourself. And as trainers in the scope of practice, we worry about mobility because we want to keep hands off as much as we can, just from a legal indemnification standpoint.

So, because here's the thing. like so flexibility is uh you're you know you're helping me stretch my uh quad or something yeah or whatever right and you're like lunging into me and it's how far i can go yeah uh mobility is i'm doing it myself yeah exactly because here's the thing like the mechanism of injury is going to be what dictates the mechanism of correction right because tightness is not a structural thing it's a neurological thing right and as there are if there's a manual thing therapist who can have an effect on someone else's nervous system, like, I could jam my thumb into parts of your shoulder right now and you'd give me the keys to this place. Like, but as, as much as,

like, I'm probably capable of having an effect externally on your nervous system, I will never hold a candle to the ability of your own nervous system to have an effect on itself. So that's the idea. Like, with flexibility in me stretching you, it's like, okay, I'm having an external, there's an external stimulus being applied. But it's like, if I, if I, I can put you in the right position and have your nervous system take the wheel. Now we can really start to make change. So there's a related phenomenon which I've always found interesting, which is this concept of the degree to which you focus on your muscles when you're working them, right?

This whole concept of mind muscle connection. Oh, I love that. Go, go please. Okay. So this idea that you can be working your muscles, but if you're not thinking about them, you're not getting the same benefits from them. And if you're thinking really actively about the exact thing that you're doing and the engagement with that muscle, that you can in turn have significantly more benefits from it, do you buy that or not? I would say that 99% of people have a muscle mind connection driven by an eFerrant, not driven by an a, or driven by an a ferrant, not an eFerrant.

So what does that mean? So that means you've done stuff so many times that that that's how you feel it, that's what you feel it should be done. right like if I I people who claim they have a mind muscle connection I'm going to I'm going to trivia them okay where does it originate where does it insert what's the blood flow supply what's the innervation what's the function so people have a mind muscle connection but it's a bad one well if they have a muscle mind connection like they've done bicep curls arbitrarily and they feel their bicep working but it's like do you know what the full strength curve or the full force curve of bicep is do you know what part of that curve you're working on that

exercise like do you know what the secondary muscles of elbow flexion are that you're trying to purposely disadvantage. So let's zoom out for one second. Do you believe this concept that if you're thinking about it correctly, it can make it more effective? Well, it's, I don't think it's the thinking about it. I think you just pick better exercises and you understand how to apply force. You understand how to superimpose resistance profiles of exercises with strength curves

of muscles. So if you're really thinking, yeah, 100% because that comes down to, that question is essentially, if you're thinking about how you're training, does exercise order exercise selection and exercise execution matter it's like yeah you bet your bottom dollar it does right but if you just sit there and go like god love biceps i love them so and you're just thinking about like a bicep but you're not thinking of like okay is this bicep exercise being trained in a full like a midrange part of the strength curve is it being is the apparatus we're using uh congruent or redundant with other exercises that we've done or like yeah if you're looking at the mind muscle connection through that way

then absolutely it makes a difference. If you're just sitting there going, oh, this is, like, look at these things go. This is incredible. And it's like, no. Because like, well, what if you go even a step further? I mean, we're talking about people who are focused on exercise. What if you're someone who's staring at your cell phone while you're doing it or watching TV? You're not even thinking about the fact that you're doing bicep curls.

Yeah, no, I think your neurological output and input is a capacity. It's a finite resource, right? And I think if you're trying to signal as much stimulus as you can, and that's all it really is. It's like you're just trying. Signaling stimulus. Yeah. Then if you, that signal is divert.

Like, think of it this way. If you're going to send a text message and drive, I don't condone it. Put your windows up and turn the radio off. Because your body's keeping an inventory whether you're here or not. Like at a cocktail party when you hear your name. So, sorry, your point there is, okay, if you're going to add a stimulus, take some others away. Yeah, exactly. Like, if you're going to divert your attention away from the road, you don't realize that, you know,

the sound of traffic going by with the windows up and the latest, like, J.B. song on the radio is actually whether you're cognizant of it or not is distracting your attention right so yeah if you're like on the phone doing bicep curls there's you're you're dipping into that well of neurological output and input and you're you're you're allocating some of that resource to paying attention to the phone call have you read the book the art of learning by josh white i haven't okay he's the he's the he's the guy who is the kid in searching for bobby fisher right the chess player yeah really impressive chess player and then he he went on to become a Brazilian

Jiu-Jitsu champion, right? As you do, naturally. And his point was that he wasn't actually a super gifted chess player and he wasn't actually a super gifted fighter. He just was really good at learning. Anyway, he has a lot of interesting concepts. But in the book, he describes this moment

where he, I think he tore his bicep or he heard his shoulders. He hurt one arm about a month before the competition. and he would go to the weight room and he would work the other arm and the whole time he would think really, really hard about the blood flow not just in the arm he was working but having that blood flow go to the other arm

and sure enough by the time he had recovered he had no muscular atrophy on the other arm and the doctor said it was amazing do you buy that as a concept? Yeah well I mean it's I don't buy the fact that he was thinking about it as a concept, I buy that that is a fundamental truth in weight training, that there is a reciprocal strength balance that can be done by training unilateral movements. It has nothing to do with his belief. It's not a religion. It's

physiology. You can write a cool book and you be a good chess player. I don't really care. You could say this woo-woo stuff because like you do jujitsu, but it has nothing to do with the fact he thought about it. That would have happened devoid of him thinking about it because that that particular principle from a neurological perspective is pretty hardwired. That's pretty well-founded. And if you're working one muscle, the buddy muscle is going to catch up. Yeah. Or at the very least, not slow down. Like, that's pretty well founded in basic neurology.

So if I just did bicep curls on one side, my left, like, let's say I'm just doing bicep curls on my right side. My left side's going to get bigger? Well, what's the metric of progress, right? Like, strength and size are two different adaptations. Is it metabolic or neurologic that we're going for? I think you're going to create a metabolic environment that will suggest more growth on one side or the other. You see that with Unilat.

You'll see that with arm wrestlers, right? They're going to have better development on that side they're using because they're going to spend more time like a metabolic duress or under the pathways that signal muscular hypertrophy, right? Well, I played squash in college and like, you know, that you're just using one arm right the whole time. And so, like, I have bigger forearms.

Exactly, yeah. You know, my stronger right shoulder than my other side. I think from a rehabilitation perspective, perspective, like you'll see this a lot with strokes, right? You'll see this principle being utilized in strokes when people lose part of their ability to function on one side of the body. You're like transient, excemic attacks or things like that. So neurologically maintaining strength is going to be different than metabolically increasing size. Not that either of those systems are mutually exclusive, but there is a pretty sound principle of that reciprocal divergence of that

neurological output to maintain strength. You've got a lot of really interesting concepts. I mean, I feel like it's almost hard to unpack them in an hour on a podcast. But it also brings me the fact that I'm thrilled that you're on Woop and getting value out of the product because you seem like a super smart guy who wouldn't wear it if you didn't get value otherwise. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, what first sparked my interest was going down the HRV route and like this idea of understanding respiratory sinus arrhythmia and like how sympathetic and parasympathetic, basically controlling your breath

is a way of controlling your autonomic nervous system, almost in the way. way like, have you ever had a concussion? I think I've had one. That's probably a yes. If you have to go, I think so, it's like, yeah.

Well, it's like the first thing, if you ever get like your bell rung or you get like knocked out, the first thing you do when you wake up is you realize there's some asshole with a flashlight looking in your eyes. Right? But it's true because like the eyes are kind of the gateway into the brain or the brain stem at the very least,

right? They're looking for accommodation in light one side of the other and astagmus and things of the sort. But breathing is almost just as eyes are gateway to the brain. Breathing is a gateway to the volunteer or the volunteer. autonomic nervous system, right? Totally, totally, 100%. And that's going to be, like, that's the driver.

Like, I'm not a, I'm on the fence about the whole central governor theory. Like, if you've read Endurr by Alex Hutchison, like, he talks a lot about that. But you can't discount that we, whether it's skill acquisition and support, whether it's, you know, motor learning or strength output or stability or any sort of adaptation you're trying to make, you're making that change at the level of the nervous system, right? So being able to utilize your breath and understand this variability in heart rate as a marker, albeit in a multivariate system, as what we think to be now, a strong marker of resting sympathetic state with a lower variability in heart rate or a greater parasympathetic state in a higher variability, understanding that as an adjunct to quantifying your stress of your training, I think is really interesting. So when you do a really big lift day, will you see?

a lower HRV the next day? Yeah, over the next couple of days. Yeah. And how many days a week are you actually hammering your central nervous system a lot? Because here's the thing. I mean, you also travel a lot, which is like an interesting. I think what we're missing right now, HRV is almost, it's bearing a lot of resemblance to the cortisol, almost to the point of being redundant because you would imagine you drive

a lot of stress from like a neuroendocrine standpoint. So from the neurological perspective of driving stress and sympathetic. that stress and having a lower HRV score having a almost a redundant corollary to cortisol being spiked as a as a consequence of that stress remember like maybe 10 years ago like cortisol was all the rage and people were only working out for like 45 minutes it was like a big polyquin thing and everyone was like oh like you don't want to drive stress and then everyone was like wait a minute maybe it's kind of like maybe it's the it's a necessary evil like maybe that's exactly what we need like we need challenge to grow right yeah so i think HRV right now is missing

understood in the hands of egghead researchers because at the first time of trouble they're pulling back it's like no man and as an athlete how close to the sun can i fly well it's really interesting that you you have that point of view because when i was first doing research on hrv i remember some of the earliest medical studies were on um olympic power lifters using HRV to figure out how much they should lift because these guys, and this is going back, I think almost to the 80s, these guys would get hooked up to electrocardiograms in the morning, take an HRV reading, go crush themselves in the gym, and the next day they would want to see their HRV actually was a lot lower than the previous day because it was a sign that they had put a meaningful

amount of stress on their bodies. So in whoop terms, you would have had a green recovery and then you would have had like a red recovery. And they would wait for their HRV to come back up before they would go back to the gym and hammered again. So it was almost like a real-time adaptation based on heart rate variability. Now, we do a lot of this sort of automatically for you today with recovery and incorporating other things like sleep. I think those guys will get beat by someone who doesn't care so you think that well to unpack that yeah so i think that's that's that's my you this is the 80s yeah this well that's the thing right and i don't think that's changed like oh you think this well if i'm a strength coach and i know this from working at the strength

like the collegiate strength conditioning level in NCAA like if i if i'm using this as an adjunct right and i'm looking at this purely through like i just want to cover my ass man like i obviously don't want these kids to get hurt because like i don't really care not I don't care about the record. It's my stats are man-games lost, right? So if the research says something along those lines where it's like, you know, if the HRV is low, then like don't train hard.

It's like, okay, like I kind of have to follow that. But understanding with like some internal logical consistency, it's like, no, we're trying to drive stress. Like if you look at like Bulgarian method, the Bulgarian method of Olympic weight training, like when it comes to Olympic lifting, the high frequency of high intensity programming that they used to use, these guys were training out the best athletes in the world.

And they were hammering themselves. ring because I think at the world class stage you got to understand it's epigenetics right it's like you're you're not dealing with a regular deck like you can understand like that that your genes put a bullet in the chamber and your training pulls the trigger some people just don't have the bullet in the chamber like they don't have the genetics to withstand that like and I think that's the hard part in quantifying things or the mindset too and that's because it is mentally exhausting for your body to be in that state run down now You may be right that the Olympic power lifter of the 80s gets killed today,

but I think the secret is you still need to peak on the given day. Sure. So in a lot of ways where whoop has been, I think, really effective for someone of your mindset, who's like, to your point, trying to fly close to the sun, and you're trying to hammer it, and you don't mind if you have a low recovery when you go big on a day, you still want on the day of a competition to be, you know, all things being equal, you want to be peaking on that day. Oh, sure. You want to have the high heart rate variability. You want to be well recovered.

And so for a lot of people on who are comfortable hammering their central nervous system, it's been refreshing to see that it can hold them back at times when they know that they need to get to that end goal. They need to taper. They need to get to a peak state. I think the biggest understanding is it's about creating a delta. That's like parasympathetic is not, it's not a lack of sympathetic. it's a different system all together like when I program for my athletes like they don't have rest days they have like parasympathetic days like do undergo activities that actually stimulate the parasympathetic what's a parasympathetic day in Jordan's like wake up sunlight within 50 minutes of waking up you're going for a walk you're reading contrast infrared sauna cold plunge like getting that breath control because it's like it sounds like a fun day yeah but it's you know what I um I'm a friend of mine Fernando as he's an Olympic weightlifter down in Miami

and I've never seen human beings don't move like this like Olympic Pan Am champ like he's unreal like he'll go to Tokyo for Brazil and you should see him in a Russian bathhouse you should see this guy sit in like a plunge pool like you should see him sit in a 200

it's training because he's training at Delta he's training when he's in the gym like he's turned the fuck up like sympathetic is drip but when he's in the bathhouse it was part of his training on Tuesdays and Sundays he's in there like it's training because he's training it's almost like it's almost like a concept of metabolic flexibility like introducing like a ketogenic diet phase so you can actually better utilize carbs

so you can have this flexibility of processing fats as a fuel source and processing carbs so creating that delta between the two systems it's the same thing with me and using like a match like using whoop to measure hrv it's like right now i'm going low because in march when i hit the platform again that green's going to mean so much more because that value is going to be like in such contrast to the stress that I've driven. So I know that recovery and that adaptation into the green is going to benefit me that much more on the platform. That's really interesting.

Now, for people listening to this who are more your every day, right, that people who work out three, four, five days a week, maybe, they're stressed in their daily lives. What are recommendations to you from you to them to drive parasympathetic? Like, what are all the different systems that you like to do to drive sympathetic? for me the simplest one's breathing right and it's like there's a huge now where you do meditation or unpack what's breathing right like and that's the there's like a weird emergence of like I think podcast culture is a lot to do with this like there's a weird

emergence of like meditation and everyone's a shaman like half my friends are in fucking Peru getting ripped on ayahuasca it's like whoa you guys you guys are just drug dealers now but like no it is whatever I mean it's it's almost like pain it's almost like a perception like it is what it is to you like for me it's training like i don't conventionally meditate in the sense like i don't have an app which seems so timetrically opposed to the whole point of meditating to me like i haven't quite understood that yeah but it's like it is it's control like i really like cold as a means of like like i remember being in i was in maui three years ago before i got into any of this stuff just as like you know i just finished my first power lifting me and i really know anything about it and i remember

jumping off a boat and I thought I was going to freeze to death. It's like dude I'm from St. John's Newfoundland where there's usually like icebergs in the water 24-7 and I'm in the middle of the South Pacific and I'm like yeah and it's like dude I'm not in control right it's like if I'm not in control of my breath in that situation it's like I'm between sets like all I'm doing like before I do a big lift it's a huge inhalation it's a huge sympathetic drive right well reading about that guy Wim Hof really got me interested in the cold. Right.

Are you familiar? I'm familiar. I'm smiling. That's just, you know, it's a thing. It's, I just think, yeah, that system, sure, whatever. But do you think it's BS his whole thing or do you buy some of it? I think it's messing people up. Well, look, I don't do the breathing piece of it.

But the idea, the mindset behind it I like a lot, which is that if you can make yourself, if you can make your body more comfortable in the cold. and become comfortable in these uncomfortable environments, which is really the core essence of his spiel. That's a good thing. 100%. And by the way, that in a lot of ways, like, changed me over the last 12 months because I now, 100% of my showers are cold.

And it just changed my, you know, my mindset around it. Yeah. I think, I mean, I'm a big, like, from a, like, a psychological perspective looking at, like, the hierarchy of needs. Like, people make decisions based off where they're at in that Maslow's, hierarchy of needs and i think we live such comfortable lives yeah that's a good way to think yeah that we're never faced with anything primal so for me like that's what i like about training because like when i train and you know there's 700 plus pounds in your back it brings you to that base level survival

thing like you just like primal yeah like just like when it's cold man like i couldn't imagine the stress around in this joint like i run a small operation and i rip my hair out and like i had it told to me i think it was was it Elon musk or maybe he was quoting someone else that owning your own business is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. I was like, yeah, a lot of days, it's like four of the morning. I've been like waiting for some airport lounge to open so I can answer 17,000 angry emails. But I could imagine like in your situation, like having exposure to something that, like being able to control yourself in that state and like, oh God, it's so cold.

I think having the discipline to just be like, all right, this is going to suck, but I need to do it is like the same thing of walking into the war room and everything's going like belly up. whoop, HQ. Yeah. And when shit goes bad, like, you see,

you know, you see the guy, the red light losing it. It's like, that's the same guy that jumps off the boat in Hawaii and can't control his breath, right?

It's like, Ryan Holiday has this quote in, obstacle is the way. He talks about, like, astronauts in space. And it's like, it's like being at the controls

versus being in control. Right? A lot of people are idling at the controls where when you implement a practice like that, you're actually in control. Yeah. Right. So I think that's like a fundamental piece

that a lot of people are set to benefit from when it comes to driving parasympathetic and so how do you use cold yeah shower contrast i really like contrast like going to like get in a sauna yeah and then go right into something like i mean i'm lucky in the sense that i travel a lot and you know the water off the golden gate bridge is really gold so if i'm in san fran like i'll go train in s f and i'll just go right down to the water and you get so right after your workout you'll go to the water depends right because now there's research base across that fuck it up a little bit yeah it's almost like the same principle based like of utilizing antioxidants around your training because it's like you want to drive that

metabolic stress um so i'll do it on off days or on days where i'm not necessarily concerned about the adaptations driven in the gym um yeah just it's a priority do you think it's good to do sauna or steaming after weightlifting um i don't know if i know enough about the reason or i don't know enough about the research on that um so no opinion no opinion yeah i i i but cold probably not good probably that's pretty well we actually pulled the plunge pools if i'm mistaken out of one of our weight rooms at stanford a few years ago the plunge pool to be fair is a little more intense that's a little more engaged yeah what do you think about ice baths it depends on how they're being used if they're being used to put a video off on instagram then no

if they're actually being used in purpose for like a training protocol like to drive because that to me like i'm not okay i think we misappropriated the mechanism of correct with ice and like oh it's vaso constriction and it's like it's like no no no it's not if we don't throw the baby out with bathwater sure but it's not how the correction isn't happening at the level like on a metabolic level right causing that vaso constriction and centralizing your blood flow it's happening at the neurological level of driving such a sympathetic stress that your body then needs to control right I think people were just looking at it through the wrong prism for the longest time and then they're like oh well now it's useless

it's like well maybe metabolically perhaps redundant or counterintuitive to the goal But if we pull the nervous system to a higher regard, perhaps that benefit is going to derive, or that adaptation of that system will actually supersede any degradation at the metabolic level. Separate from sympathetic or parasympathetic, do you like it as injury prevention? Like just the concept of after every game or every practice, I'm going to go sit in the ice bath for 10 minutes. No. No, I don't like it for injury prevention. Because I think after every game, no.

I think all you're doing is potentially masking and, like, masking. an issue like if there's an inflammatory response local to a like a pitcher right if there's an inflammatory response happening it's like you need to ask yourself why right like reducing the inflammation every time is not is not the is not the fundamental cause is to it's not the answer right it's a band-aid in a lot of ways so it's like if you don't have the right amount of hip flexion or the right amount of torso rotation or trunk rotation or external rotation of your shoulder and your pitcher has to hit that ice bath just to get the inflammation down it's like what happens after, you know, 162 games, 68 games, whatever they have, 62, I think?

62. Yeah. What happens? Then you're going into a playoffs with a guy. Now all of a sudden that shoulder that used to ache for five minutes and you go on the ice bath isn't getting better, right? And you got to go into the postseason with a guy because you were like, oh, just put them in the ice.

It's like, that's where the applied biomechanics comes in. Why are we applying so much force to tissues that can't tolerate it? Right. Why didn't we preemptively strike this rather than reactively respond to this? So I think a lot of times it gets, it gets. put in place of sophisticated thinking based around the fun like by just not looking at the core essence of injury risk management prevention i i think that's true of a lot of adjunct therapies man like compression boots and things and it's like why don't we look at the base level code like this

thing here doesn't have a good camera like my iPhone doesn't have a good camera it takes good pictures how there's still i can still got to hire a kid with a dsLR to come do my media stuff but i have like this thing shoots in 4K what's the difference like this has really good software yeah right and that's how we need to look at injury risk management it's like the hardware it's like the hardware like let's really try and update the software as best we can huh that's a good analogy for it uh where are you at on uh all these super low carb diets oh um it depends it depends on what what realm of performance we're talking because i think from a cognitive standpoint it can be super beneficial um say you're an executive who does a

exercise as much as he or she wants to or you've got a busy lifestyle you don't get to exercise so much as you want and you're trying to lose weight yeah i think there's benefit to it like i really see like i purposely put my like i'll do that with my travel i mean if i if i have like if i go off the rails on sushi and then have to fly across the atlantic i'm going to have feet that blow up like water balloons right well i mean travels you know eating on planes is really just not a good thing yeah So, like, I'll go ketogenic into that day. Like, I don't think, like, if you're not necessarily worried about performance, I'm not saying go full-blown carnivore, but I think there's absolutely a benefit.

Okay, now let's go, let's take the flip. You want to worry about performance. Sure. You're a high-performance athlete or you want to get results. I think intermittently, depending on what energy system your sport exists in, intermittently using ketogenic diets to improve the threshold in which your body actually utilize this carbohydrates for fuel can be beneficial right so think of like a marathoner the old adage is like oh we're going to eat like 700 grams of carbs and pasta the day before it's like

okay sure you do that and you let me know around like mile 13 how like how how your legs are feeling I think with it being the obvious answer being yeah yeah you need carbs as a fuel source if you're going to run a marathon it's like yeah on the day for sure like same as like you want to be recovered and all that but I think in training like imagine doing a six week block and creating that delta we sort of draw that or drew that comparison between sympathetic and ketogenic dieting versus carbohydrates and having that

metabolic flexibility and that large delta between those two values and your ability to go in flux quickly between those two systems I think for an endurance runner it would be wildly beneficial to be able to push like imagine you start tapping into your glycogen stores liver and muscle

at mile 17 because you've been exerting past a percentage heart rate for a certain number of of minutes or miles what if you could push that what if you could use a ketogenic diet to push okay you start tapping into glycogen stores at mile 10 then in the off season what we do is we actually do a six week block all ketogenic now you're going to utilize better utilize fats as an energy store now you're going to be able to use fat as a system of of energy further into the race before we start operating in that relative percentage in which we have to start using glycogen as an energy

store right so it's like okay rather than you know using fats up to mile 10 we can utilize fats and ketones up to mile 14 now your reserves are protected i like that framework a lot which is like you're training your body actually to use foods more efficiently right and i i kind of had the opposite experience where i went on the paleo diet probably for like six months this was maybe like four or five years ago and i i lost a fair amount of weight which I didn't really need to lose got super cut felt pretty high energy but things like alcohol caffeine made me go totally sideways and when I ate God forbid I had anything that wasn't paleo or like you know perfectly in this lane like if I ate bread if I ate like a bagel I felt so horrible

like I couldn't think you know and I was just like God do I want to live like in a world in which my body like is this you know non resilient to the things around me and I eventually just you know well I mean most good things have operated under like a biphasic response right like initially when you went paleo you probably felt like shit like first couple weeks because like you're just driving a different system it's like your your body's forced into like this acetylcholine neurotransmitter system where it's so used to like dopamine serotonin and it's just like you probably were hungry but you're looking at your calories going like I'm eating like you know 300 grams of fat a day there's no fucking way of hungry but it's there's a difference between hunger and craving you're

craving that neurotransmitter dump of eating carbohydrates right it's just to me like the bifasic response it's understanding how it comes in waves so it's like a bifasic response means you're going to see an initial decrease in performance it hopes that when that we start to ride that wave and make adaptations that when we reintroduce the fuel source it can actually peak again so six months is a long time right and I think that's what gets that's what gets lost in it it's like what's what work for you now what work you before. Yeah, maybe do it for like six weeks. Yeah, and that was what a lot of the research showed was somewhere around the six week mark.

Yeah. Yeah, because the carbon. That makes sense to me, by the way, six weeks being the right amount of time. Yeah, I mean, you can watch it. You can monitor, like ketones in your blood and you can monitor. So if you're trying to get ready for a competition, how much time back will you try to introduce like a keto six-week thing to then be able to peak, right? Because isn't that the idea? Yeah, well, for me, it's different.

Right. Think of the energy system. What do I need carbs for? I'm lifting one thing once, right? It's not a metabolically driven process. Like your body through gluconeogenesis will replenish muscle and liver glycich into a certain relative percentage. Now, depending on the weigh-ins, like if I need to put on body weight after weighing in, it's like all systems go.

I'll eat anything in front of me, roughly speaking. But I think that gets lost in strength sports. And you start to see like the death of like the old fat power lifter. like you don't see that anymore all the guys who compete with it's like you can march them across the bodybuilding stage because it's like you know the eating a bunch of carbs for your energy it's like what energy exactly for the one rep you're yeah it's heavy sure but we're not tapping into the energy system that requires carbohydrates as a driving fuel source so it's like as long as you have enough stored muscle glycogen which your body takes care of anyways it's like so you think

because there's been an evolution in the way people think about dieting um you know power lifters now actually look a lot more like bodybuilders because they just recognize that that extra weight is unnecessary. Whereas in the past, the person who won the deadlift might have actually been a little heavy set. Yeah, I think to a certain degree it depends on the weight class. But yeah, like you look at 275s downward, like the 275 pound weight class down, like everyone is.

You have to be in pretty good shame. Like, because it's, there's, there's carryovers, right? And you increase muscle cross-sectional area, that muscle could potentially do. more work and be stronger. Sure. Right. It's the same with bodybuilders. If you look at bodybuilders now,

a lot of them are quite strong because they understand that you can actually drive more of those three pillars of hypertrophy if you have more if you have more horsepower. So I mean, I know plenty of bodybuilders like, you know,

are deadlifting in the 700s in deep into their off season. Just like deep into my off season, you'll find me doing bicep curls and lap pull downs and seated rows and trying to train more like a bodybuilder. Because once I switch systems

into strength that my volume drops off, it's like almost like I'm trying to peak my size as far out from a meat because I know once my intensity starts to rise, my volume starts to drop, my accrued muscle muscle also start to take a hit. But it's like, let's get in the offseason bigger. So when I cut down, every time I cut down to 242, my body composition is remarkably better than it was the last time I cut down because my off season was focused deep in the off season on improving body composition. How much of your point of view on this stuff has evolved

over four years? Like literally you've had like fundamental shifts in the way you think about it versus how much have you just been sort of layering on top of things? Because you've got enormous depth here. Yeah. And I'm curious, like, how much of that is just accumulated through layers or whether you thought one thing and now you sort of think another. It's hard, right? Because, like, you want to keep an open mind.

But research seems to be driven by primacy and recency. The first research on a topic and the most recent research on a topic is seems to be where people like to hang a lot of their hat on. It's almost like someone feels like they have an upper hand on you if they've read the latest research. it's like all right well that's not evidence like there's if we look around like there's no squirrels in here doesn't mean squirrels don't exist right but if we were to look at a research study based off number of squirrels in this room it would be zero right so that's where i think having the reps and the different lenses like between the clinical experience seeing it i saw 250 patients a week when i was working corporate right then having the athletic experience of playing numerous sports at high levels that having um the experience in dealing with high level athletes and then having the strength coach lens to look through that to me I think it fortifies my position on things like it's almost like that yeah

go ahead change my mind kind of thing because it takes a lot I think where a lot of people um their malleability and pliability around their points of view with incoming research just shows to me that they don't hold value their evidence of their own experience because for me evidence based well not to me evidence based is is yeah best best gold practice or gold standard practice and research like an empirical evidence but it's all also experience of the clinician or coach and it's also value of the patient or athlete. I would say more layering on top of it as I dig deeper and a lot of it is just exposure to higher level athletes like as I get to work with like you know you can always kind of interpolate

from these high performers downward it's hard to extrapolate from the general public out right it's like you start to see some of the outliers when you start to deal with the fastest and the strongest and the most powerful and it's like whoa okay like these this is it's not the limit yet but this is something different like it's like you like I talked about Fernando like to see him train or like you know have a couple tennis players I work with like to see like something move that fast

like your body doesn't have a place for it like your brain what would be an example of something moving really fast I would say like Fernando Reyes is a friend of mine in Miami like when he he's a super heavyweight Olympic weight Olympic weightlifter and you know when he's putting 500 pounds over his head

and you just see how fast and how mobile and how stable he is like how powerful he is it's like it's just incomprehensible like you look at that and you go i've never seen something that big move that fast it's terrifying huh but it's like or like you say both or something like that like you just see someone and not the limit but someone on the edge of the limit of human potential and you get to like work in that arena and start to like be like a jane good all like sitting back and observing and like you just from that you can you can bring back to earth a lot of different concepts and apply them to people.

It's like performance should always be the objective outcome, right? It should never be pain. So when I was in clinical practice, people will come to me because I'm in pain. It's like, I don't want our improvements to be hinging on a verbal analog scale. Well, you know, man, like, so how's your pain today? Oh, it's like a, it's like a nine out of ten. I have people tell me that. Like, I worked a corporate job in the Silicon Valley at Apple's headquarters, like right

across from Infinite Loop. And I would have some piss hand software engineer coming to my office. It's like a 10 out of 10. What happened? I was playing ultimate frisbee at lunch and it's like oh my god what if I punched you in the face what would your pain be then and it's like I don't want that as an objective outcome right because it's not objective at all it's subjective so it's like okay we can take this guy who went to ham you know between breaks and playing ultimate frisbee at lunch and then giving him like a strength

metric it's like okay we're gonna when you go into the gym next week go do an exercise like or like do an exercise you can do without any pain and then let's try and just improve that, right? So it's like using, and that's where the stability side gets lost on a lot of people because it's like, it is very subjective. I think if you've ever gone to the gym with someone like, oh, like, oh, that felt really heavy. It's like, well, it looked pretty good. Like, there's a subjective element to strength that stability doesn't have. Like, if you stood on one leg and we're all wobbly and like, it looked like you had some acute onset Parkinson's thing going on. And then it's like, if I saw that, you wouldn't then stand up from that single leg

RDL and be like, oh, that felt really good. It's like, no, like, dude, you'd look like you're like a stiff breeze would knock you over, right? So rather than taking improvements, subjective improvements of stability and then correlating them with objective improvements and strength, right? Like once a single leg RDL starts to get locked in, we go through that initial biphasic response. Then when you go back to actually deadlifting, it's like, oh man, like, you know, I put 15 pounds on my deadlift. It's like, yeah, because you can just converge the force to the muscles that need to be prime

movers and that the stuff in the background that has to stabilize your joints in those positions is allowing that to happen without any, without any governance. It's just like, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, that makes a lot sense. Yeah, so that's like the biggest thing is just, is having objective metrics to hang your hat on outside of the subjective metric of pain. Now, travel. Yeah.

What are your tips or tricks? You're on the road all the time. Sleep, when you can. So here's maybe an overarching principle that I like to live by because we've danced around this a few times. And it's like, and to your point about paleo, and I think the word optimization gets thrown around a lot. and optimization is great for machines

but it's adaptation is great for animals and like at the end of the day like especially in my sport it's about adaptation be really good at adapting like being able to adapt

I think is a way better skill than being locked into some optimized state optimized when you can but adapt where you have to and it's like with me and travel it's like how do like how do you adapt like for meals what do you do for sleep what do you do right and it's like having

It's like if I'm on, I mean, next Monday, I'll fly from Manchester to Dubai to Sydney, which is eight, a two-hour layover, then 12. It's like, okay, I have an alarm set on my phone already for flights like that. So every two hours, you drink a lot of water going in, so you can't fall asleep for too long because you're going to take a piss. Then you have alarm set to stretch, do an upper body 15 minutes, go for a lap around the plane, do lower body 15 minutes, you know, crank out some work, have it all scheduled. And it's adaptation, right?

And a lot of people that just get so focused on optimizing. Like, oh, like, I've got to take my magnesium at this time. And I go, like, where are my blue light? It's like, all right, man, there's no blue light in the jungle. Like, you're going to have to, like, that dog's going to have to hunt. And I think that's where a lot of people miss it in the current market. Which is, in some ways, like, a refreshing mindset, right? It's like, I'm, I know I'm putting myself through a pretty complicated lifestyle,

but because I'm willing to adapt to it and learn from it. and respond to it, I'm coming at the other end better and more resilient. Yeah, yeah, I think people like avoid stress is a bad thing. It's like, people like, oh, like you should take a vacation. It's like, from what? From what? From what? My, like, my whole life's a vacation. Like, what do I need?

Like, people are so, they just, they strive for comfort. They strive for homeostasis rather than allostasis. We really want to boil it down to the physiology, right? So allostasis is how do you, how do you make progress while pushing outside of your, your physiological normal, right? Where homeostasis, if there's one thing that deviates from, like, our body temperature is so unbelievably well regulated if you think about other systems that just exist in the world, like, it's better than the air conditioning unit in this place, right?

Because 90, what, 987 is kind of like a resting normal. If you're at 100, you're in like, you're probably in the hospital. If you spike 101, it's like you're admitted, like 103, you're looking at permanent brain damage that's what's a flux of like less than five degrees so it's like your bodies wants homeostasis but if you want change you have to be able to introduce stress strategically so you can undergo what's called allostasis so you can improve you have to incrementally increase the amount of stress you have to adapt to while still driving forward not like because your body wants that 987 so it does everything to stay there so it's like imagine

trying to push that vector your body's working against you it's like my body does doesn't want to lift 700 pounds. It's neurologically redundant and inefficient. You know, I don't have to be 200. If I stopped training right now, if I didn't train for a week, I'd probably lose 10 pounds. Imagine telling that. I believe that.

Yeah. Have you told that to a client, though? If you're a personal trainer, like, oh, yeah, I don't have to train for a week. I'll lose 10 pounds. Like, what the f f? It's like, yeah, because I've passed a point of diminishing returns, right? So I need to learn how to adapt to be constantly pushing that envelope.

Like your body's a bank you'd never do business in because your interest rates would be terrible. It wouldn't make any sense. You accrued all this. wealth all this currency and all this ability to adapt and your body just goes yeah we need more right so it's like for me with traveling and all that it's like it's it's prioritizing adaptation over optimization like there are days where i'm going to like you should check my sleep scores you'll get a laugh like i want to see a leaderboard a whoop leaderboard of like who's driven the strain harder we can

put you on a leaderboard yeah there's all kinds of leaderboards yeah i mean this is like a negative leaderboard because i think i average like there's you can sort it by top or bottom four hours and 13 minutes, I think, has been my average. And what's your age I'd be like? I haven't checked this week. Okay. But, yeah, like strain levels routinely in the 20s, like 20.6. And it's like, yeah, that's part of it, man.

Like, that's, but I'll still go to the gym. And when I, like, put up my post, it's like, yeah, I understand this is my recovery store. But I also understand that I have to do, like, a 4x4 at 85%. So. I think, like, I'll meet you halfway on it. Like, I buy that adaptability over optimization is, like, that's a growth mindset, period, right? There's nothing really to argue with there.

But I think at the same time, if you weren't doing all this travel and you did do goofy things like blue light blocking glasses, now with the place you are in your life, and I'm not saying necessarily the glasses, but like pick five things. like that uh i bet you could have the best performance you've ever had oh no doubt and that's the thing though like because right now i'm just creating that delta like i'm digging myself like there's no question to me if you got eight hours of sleep versus four hours of sleep like that you would be you could take your performance to another level and i'd get more out of that eight hours sleep that someone that's had an eight hours sleep their whole life oh that's true too probably right like where well i don't know actually if that exact example is true but to you that that's sleep would feel like a lot longer than the person who normally get seven or eight hours of sleep

for sure and it's and that's the goal man like you know this travel schedule and all that is just it's a necessary evil in the business that i'm in and like the long game is to stay in one place and like i've thought about it like my fantasy is a is a top story studio apartment in toronto a couple blocks away from fortis my favorite gym no one knows like go off the grid for like eight months and then just show up and to see what i can do on the platform but you should do that at some point yeah yeah once the business is set up and everything like the travel is no longer really a necessity from a business development standpoint like that will be the goal is to have a home base for like me and my athletes to train in and then we'll see what we can do because like all

I'm doing is staying in striking distance at the moment yeah I mean I've experienced versions of this as an entrepreneur which is a different analogy to it or a different stress analogy where it's like you know it took a while to figure out what's the business model or what's the uh what's the the the capital strategy oh we're running out of money oh like all these things right and like you know um having come out the other end of that successfully and now in a place where the business is growing quite meaningfully even though in relative terms there's more things that i'm responsible for my stress levels are so much lower because i can I was able to overcome these other things under this homeostasis of just incredible stress.

Like my baseline then was, you know, it was just survive, survive, survived for the longest time. And then when you feel like things are working, it just feels like the winds at your back. You know, even though the race that you're running is longer, the winds at your back. Yeah, I mean, there's something to be said about being the warrior in the garden, right? Yeah. Like, I think a lot of people are gardeners and gardens. And it's like, you know, you can talk about blue light blocking glasses and like Oshuaganda and all this stuff.

But it's like when the rubber hits the road, man, like, like, what happens in the dark alley at night when the guy pops out, right? You're a gardener and a garden, dude. Like, that, like, that dog's got to hunt. And I think that's where, that's where a lot of people miss that. They don't, they don't, they see the first sign of trouble. They go through the stuff that you've gone through. And, like, they just, there aren't resilient enough to get through.

it now all of a sudden you come back and like right now you're just chilling in a garden but like you the short is the sword is sharp like you're ready to go and i think a lot of people don't they can't endure that to come out the other side no i agree well look i mean you've got a fascinating point of view on life and uh and fitness and training and really all of it and i'm pumped to have you on whoop and uh and i look forward to learning more from you now where can people find you you know on the internet or elsewhere yeah i mean instagram seems to be like the main point of contact at the underscore muscle underscore doc um shoot an email jordan at the muscle doc.com uh we do a lot of our programming or all of our programming comes through www www pre dash script.com lectures all the courses all the seminars

are listed on that website so for the in-person stuff um inquiries we get a lot of those we're booking now into 2021 so 2020 2020 is fully booked um so for courses and things like that we'll be looking 2021 that's jordan at the muscle dock dot com have you written a book yet uh i have 65 000 words in draft but it's expanding like the universe i have 10 days blocked off at the end of the month to go to hawaii and finish it so that's the goal i feel like you've got a book in you that's gonna be yeah i look forward to that hopefully yeah i mean it's it was it had an initial framework but honestly every time I have a conversation like this, it's like, oh, there's another chapter.

And I'll go back and I'll sit down for two hours and write it. And it's like, okay, at some point it's just got to end. So hopefully next year, we're talking to some publishers at the moment, getting it out there in leather bound and all that. We're going to stay away from the ebook nonsense. But yeah, looking, going to be more on the applied biomechanics side of things. Hopefully you kind of be standard level reading for kinesiology programs. Sort of a textbook-ish format to it.

But not for the faint of heart, but it's going to be a passion project. that's, I've been working out for four or five years now. Awesome. Yeah, it'll be fun when it's, when it's done, if it's done. Well, good, man. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on, and thanks for coming on. Yeah, man. Appreciate having me.

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