WHOOP Podcast - The Science of Strain: Dr. Andy Walshe discusses physiological and psychological stress and how it affects performance

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Dr. Andy Walshe sits down with Kristen Holmes for an in-depth discussion on stress and strain and how it affects your body. Dr. Walshe has spent his career at the cutting edge of human performance. He is the co-founder of The Liminal Collective, a global community united by passion for human performance, and is the former Director of High Performance for Red Bull, where he helped Felix Baumgartner jump to earth from a helium balloon in the stratosphere. He discusses individual response to strain (5:55), hidden stress (8:05), the benefits of stress (11:34), how our mindset is based on a survival mechanism (15:50), how strain fuels improvement (21:38), cognitive strain (24:31), the importance of creativity (33:07), and how creativity equals courage (36:10). 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

what's up folks welcome back to the whoop podcast where we sit down with top athletes scientists experts and more learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak what you can do to unlock your own best performance i'm your host will omid founder and CEO of whoop where we are on a mission to unlock human performance on this week's episode we're diving deep on the science of strain this episode is the culmination of our three part the science of series, where we've examined the key elements of sleep, recovery, and finally, strain. The series demystifies these core concepts, answers common questions, and debunks myths with some of the leading experts in the field. You can check out our episodes on the science of sleep

and the science of recovery at whoop.com slash locker. Now, to explore everything about strain, our VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, sits down with Dr. Andy Walsh, one of the world's leading experts on strain and stress. Dr. Walsh has been at the cutting edge of human performance. He's the co-founder of Liminal Collective, a global community united by passion for human performance, and his former director of high performance for Red Bull, where he helped Felix Baumgartner jump to earth from a helium balloon in the stratosphere. Before that, Andy designed a performance program for the U.S. Olympic ski and snowboard teams

and also worked at the Australian Institute of Sport. Kristen and Andy discuss how our body responds to stress and strain, both physical and mental, why we need to gain a better understanding of underlying strain and how you might not be aware that your body is taking on strain, how your body responds to threat and perceived threat, and how everyday factors in your life might actually generate a threat response from your body, the connection between human performance and creativity, and how to keep a performance mindset under stress. This is a very, very good podcast. As a You can get 15% off a W-W-M membership.

If you use the code, Will, W-I-L, and without further ado, here are Kristen and Dr. Andy Walsh. Andy, so thrilled to have you on today. Hey, Kristen, it's absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me in. When we started off on this track of trying to do a science of strain podcast, I was like, we need to look no further than Dr. Andy Walsh. I was like so pumped to get this conversation going. going, just having admired you and just having had the privilege of personally kind of seeing

you engage your craft. You've been a real inspiration to me. So I'm excited to be able to facilitate this conversation and get some of the good work that you've done over the course of your life out into the world and hopefully help folks understand how to think about, you know, stress and strain. And from a physiological standpoint and psychological standpoint, I think this conversation is really illuminating for a lot of folks. So I'm excited to dig in.

No, you're way too kind. Way too kind. You have, you know, truly sat at the intersection of sports and science and performance and have just literally devoted your life to developing a greater and understanding of human potential. I love for you to share kind of what set you down this path. You know, what were your early inspirations? I think, yeah, for me, it was, you know, kind of a classic passion for, it started with passion for sport, and I got involved in sport.

sport coaching, funnily enough, trained as a sort of human movement degree and sort of human performance, but that really set you up back in my old days as a phys ed teacher was one of the primary paths you could take. The human performance, science world wasn't really mature at that point.

Shit, I can't imagine you as my like gym teacher. That would be wild. Well, you know, the best part about that is they don't let you go straight to gym teachers for the secondary. They start your kindergarten. So one of the most profound lessons I had in human performance was they gave me a 34 and 5 year olds kindergarten for four or six

weeks. I can't remember how long it was, but it was one of the most traumatic and aggressive learning moments of my life. But that's where it started. Talk about, oh my God. Literally and literally those kids had my number day one and it was all I could do to bring it back and I didn't actually bring it back. I just survived.

But it's funny enough, I reflect on the tools that I use. used for that group and many times now working with executives and CEOs, I use exactly the same tools. So there's something there that's sort of stuck. But yeah, I think it was that passion, growing up in Australia, obviously given the accent, the idea of just really sporting culture, sporting nation, and just learning about how to coach it. I wasn't that good at anything, classic, you know, I was sort of a sort of jack-of-all, master of none. And, but in spot I loved. And then certain learning how to coach and then getting through the coaching angle into the science of performance.

That's where the original inspiration started. What's your take on? I think a lot of folks, I think as a society, we tend to shy away from stress and anxiety. And this is actually something that you and the teams that you're involved with at Redwell Stratos and AIS and the various Olympic teams that you work with. I mean, you're actually trying to, I mean, you have personally developed groundbreaking scientifically rooted experiments and experiences designed to actually put people under huge amounts of stress. So, you know, I guess as we think about this from, you know, the top level elite, you know, performers and kind of distill it down to, you know, the everyday Jane Joe and other, how do we think about this concept of stress and strain and anxiety and how do we use that to our advantage, I guess? Oh, great question. And to be very fair, as you know, we're still learning a lot around this. But I think the key is sort of, well, a couple of key principles that we sort of anchor these training evolution. on and we've, as I said, we've learned a ton.

The first is that everybody's response is very specific and very unique and very individual. So, you know, one person's horror show is another person's luxury, you know, it's a delight. It's a delight. And so when you see many of our training evolutions and you see us throw them on stage for stand-up and you see us, we have them chased by bear and all that crazy stuff we did, it's fundamentally us for a group of individuals trying to come at them with so many different ways of creating so that we get the individual response from everyone. And so that's why we use

those multiple approach and those sort of training blocks where we focus on this. We know it can be trained, you know, putting people through programs with incrementally and progressive stress, layers of stress or strain on them, and with a lot of education, which I think is always key. You see a body's ability to improve and they're ability to improve and adapt. You've got to learn what it does for you and how you respond in that situation. What's your reflection on that moment when things are challenging? And as you learn that, you're sort of diving into the bigger picture, which is another grounding principle for us.

You're really developing what they call interreception or fundamentally self-awareness. And whether it's a technology like the wood band, whether it's just, gosh, I notice I'm feeling really nervous or scared or anxious at the moment, whether it's higher levels of blood markers and brain markers, all of that fundamentally is giving you more feedback. to where you are potentially on that sort of performance response curve, the classic New York's Dodson curve. Where am I on that?

And what we're trying to really teach you there is can you start to pick those triggers up earlier? Before you get to a point where, as you know, so much stress or strain on you that it actually impacts performance, can you start to recognize, oh, I'm starting to get to that place? And the more you do it, the early you start to recognize it. And then, of course, we're at that point trying to put, you know, give you. tools and training and education to develop it.

And then I think the final thing we've learned, which I think the public's well aware of, particularly given the last 18 months of the COVID crisis, and all it entails was beware of the non-obvious stresses. Like we've seen for many years where, of course, if we take you out and physically challenge you to the edge or we put you in a box of snakes and terrorise you that way, you know, obviously we see a big spot. Yeah, yeah, bang. Shocker.

But what we've seen in Spanish, a lot of reasons, some stuff came up recently for some government programs we're engaged with was on the day off when the young talent and the young operators in this case were getting on social media. We actually saw higher cortisol and blood marker readings on stress stress. And it just goes to show, one, there's obviously a cumulative effect of the physiological training that have gone before, but also just those things that aren't as obvious

the sort of, you know, the news, if it's got really bad news on the channel and you're watching that, all these things can combine. So taking a holistic approach, I think, as well, it's really important and understanding how you respond in all those situations. I love how you bring that up. I mean, you know, it's the entire basis for whoop strain, you know, is that it is entirely personal, you know, and then threats on your cardiovascular system are actually not obvious, you know, as you said, like they're, and sometimes not trivial, you know, And when we think about just a fight with a spouse or a partner or, you know, just the rumination that might occur after a really hard day at work, you know, that will accumulate strain on the system. And we're really proud to be able to quantify that. And I think to your point, like to give people insight into how they're coping and dealing with the myriad of external stressors, you know, that range that are not just, you know, the moment where I'm running from the bear, but, you know, the moment where I'm having to deal with a really hard conversation with.

you know, a partner or, you know, a child or this COVID crisis, you know, being thrown out of routines. I mean, all of these things create stress in the body. And I think, you know, the more kind of enteroception, the more awareness we have of what those modulations look like, the more we can start to exert some control over our own physiology. And I think that's, I think that's, you know, very much the basis of a lot of your work is really how do we actually gain control in these stressful moments? How do we get ourselves back to a baseline where we can have clarity of thought where we can, you know, make the right, you know, good decisions, you know, how do we not get to a situation where we're compromising our overall health and wellness? So what are some

of the techniques? I mean, let's talk about Felix real quick. You know, I think this is a really good example of something that's never been done before, this feat of extending the bounds of kind of what's possible for humans. I mean, there must have been, you know, and this is obviously an extreme example, but we can hopefully kind of abstract from that kind of what it means for just a normal person, but, you know, dealing with that type of stress. So talk about that mission and then just the physiology and the psychology and how to deal with arousal levels and, you know, some of the techniques potentially that you deploy to kind of help him, you know, have the clarity of thinking that I need to be able to respond and react in extremely

dangerous and risky mission. It was an extraordinary project. We were privileged to be part of that whole journey there. I think you sort of named it there at the beginning. I think the first step for people is what's your relationship to that, that challenge in front of you? And I think you and I spoke in past about this, you know, sort of a couple of occasions is, I think the first thing, you know, specifically with Felix, but anybody is like, sort of think about control as sort of a fleeting, you know, idea that versus the idea of how do you put yourself in the mindset or the framework that this is not a threat versus the challenge, you know, it's a growth mindset you may hear used or it's it's recognizing that stress can.

be beneficial. You know, it helps us get up in the morning. It helps us, it helps us perform at our best. You know, many athletes, as the audience is probably aware, they pump themselves up before the big moments because they're trying to lift, they're trying to move themselves up and prime themselves for that high level performance. So, obviously, particularly with Felix's case. And then not just Felix, I think, if you see some of the clips and the journey, the whole team, there's a couple of hundred people on the ground, the whole organisation was struggling with this idea of something that's never been done before, over budget, you know, the classic things. Then you sort of bring it down to the core, the bigger team and they're, so they think

about the media group and all their processes and they're anchoring on this thing being a success or, you know, heaven forbid something goes wrong, you know. And then there's the core team of us, which were involved daily with sort of helping him get together. And that's the classic thing. He wasn't comfortable in many cases, you know, and it was well documented. He spoke to it, the idea of first the suit itself. It's getting in those, you know, pressure suits. It's, it's claustrophobic. And it's just, you're just not used to it.

And then, and so, and then as him as a, and again, one of his reflections to us was he was also suddenly gone from a sort of athlete that had been very, as a base jumper, kind of himself and a camera person, you know, doing their thing to, he was the focus of a couple hundred person team of the ground, of which there were many of the Apollo and Mercury engineers and scientists. there were people from the Air Force, the government, and, you know, the whole. And I think all of that brought together, as we talked about,

this overwhelming sort of idea that things were out of control, or he could not bring his best self forward. So I think, you know, and with Mike Javeh, who was helping us with that program at the time, that he, they worked on this idea of sort of stress inoculation, which just sort of goes back to those five or six principles we spoke to begin with. So recognizing what triggered him, increasingly exposing him to the, to the, to the, as take in this case, the suit itself

and putting him a longer one minute, two minutes, three minutes, five minutes. And then the tools around the back end, which I think, and then those fundamental tools were, yeah, there's first and foremost, this is an opportunity. How do you want to be remembered? We had this. So just reframing. Reframing. And the conversation was as simple as in 40, 50 years, you'll be sitting on your porch.

Brock and chair, maybe a grand kid on you or a relative, a young, you know, a young admirer on your lap, what's that story going to be like? So, you know, what do you, what do you want to say? And it's not that I was successful. It's how do you want to frame? I came up against this challenge. Did I, did I find it was just beyond me? And I learned this about myself. Was the challenge going to teach me? And he chose to say, hey, no, this is a challenge that I feel like I can overcome. And he went public with his personal challenges in that space, which I attributed to this day. He was very brave in that moment. And then, of course, it's like, okay, as you're moving along here, what are those things that are in your control? What are those things that you can actually take care of?

And in any of these never been done before, high stress, high risk situations, you've got to let go of the rest. If it's not within your control, you can only change that perspective that, okay, Anything that comes up that is threatening or challenging, change it from a threat to a challenge, can I then learn something about myself by taking this on? And it could be, in many cases, I'm not up to the task. That's okay. At least you're teaching it as a learning moment.

So the next step there is that, okay, can in that moment then through the breathing techniques, the visualization, the compartmentalization, all those classic psychological tools, can I give myself room to pay attention to what really matters? focus on, you know, improving basically the, assessing the situation for what it is versus jumping to assumptions. And over the years we've learned, as again, many people are pretty familiar with, in the absence of information, human beings typically jump to worst case scenario. It's kind of a survival mechanism, you know, if I don't know what's coming, the unknown can

be threatening. So, all right, no, let that out. Don't try and invent a future that you may not or may not happen, you know, what can I pay attention to right now that's really critical and help me? So that gets you into that process of just thinking through versus kind of jumping to false conclusions. And then finally, and that's done a lot through training, all right, that's putting you in a tough situation. Okay, capsule fire. What happens here? All right, check, check, check, check. And those checklists that you see in all the movies become really critical steps in working the problem versus reacting. And that's the final place. That puts you in a situation to respond, you've reframed, okay, something to learn here, you're decreasing that

threat response, you're paying attention to the critical information and then you're in a position to make the best decision versus just jumping to some action. And trust me, just so everyone's aware, it doesn't work perfectly every time for everybody. I still, yeah, we've been studying this for years and if, you know, the kid comes out at you and you're tired and screams at you and you scream back, you suddenly recognize, oh, my God, I just jumped right to the end. So that's sort of, that's a process we went through with Felix and the team there. And it was just, it was the whole organization too. It wasn't just, just him.

For folks who, you know, aren't physiologists and might not understand, can you just talk a little bit more in depth about, you know, perceiving the situation or the task as, you know, challenging to that very difficult and kind of what's happening mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually even, you know, so people can start. to recognize when those moments are and then, you know, and then those five steps that you outlined is kind of exactly how you get back on track, you know, and I love that. And I think that's an amazing kind of, you know, set of tools that people or kind of a framework people can use to kind of get themselves back into that challenging. But, you know, if we think about our

life, like that happens all the time across the day, you know, is we're faced with just tasks and situations that we literally don't have the skills to maybe execute, right? So we get into that very we perceive that task then is really difficult we have the anxiety and uh you know so maybe just kind of talk about what that looks like in in real life and and how how practically people can apply those tools yeah yeah um well i think you know again we can get into all the different neuroscience and and and sort of physiology of it but i think the classic thing that we found for most of the even the best performers in the world is just breaking it down to their response what so okay let's reflect back you know that person cuts you off and

traffic and you're running late for the meeting. What did you do? And I screamed, yelled, whatever. Okay, wheel it back. What's happening? Well, if you slow that whole thing down, and that's what we do in the training, we slow it down for the beginning. We say, all right, we're going to incrementally put a little bit more pressure on you and slow that process down. So, okay, so as you know, the heart rate will kick up. The sort of flight, flight, freeze response kicks in, you know, adrenaline pushes you start to you know the body constricts the heart you know it's forcing blood to the center you get that pit feeling you know the you know the pit in the stomach the shortness of breath a kind of your focus funnily enough your focus gets

very narrow you start to bring in you sort of lose the discriminatory or peripheral vision so and and and you may sweat you may feel clammy so what we're trying to do is sort of say the because, okay, start to watch that happening because that's a sign fundamentally that whatever is in front of you that's coming at you, whatever that challenge is, is important to you for whatever reason. It's important for you from a classical or evolutionary biology perspective from a survival, but it may be just, hey, this speech I'm about to do in front of the board of directors or, you know, as a young athlete or a young performer of this first piano recital, it's important to me. So I can.

care. So I feel like I want to bring my best forward. So then that, you know, that process can escalate and escalate and escalate. And what we're trying to do is understand for everybody where that escalation gets you fired up enough to be, you know, I'm focused. I'm on task. I'm on point. I'm ready to go. Yeah. Versus, oh gosh, I'm frozen. I don't know what to say. And so I think that process through all our training evolution is we walk you up and down that curve. We walk you from the beginning where you feel a little stress, a little, pretty comfortable, pretty relaxed. I've got this, I've got this, to, wow, I kind of got this, but it's starting to get real, to, oh my God, I don't have this anymore. It's beyond my capabilities.

And we just keep passing you back and forth on that spectrum. so that you start to get more and more acutely aware. The interception, as we spoke about, of when you're getting to that point where your sweet spot is and where you're just below it and where you're just on the edge and above. And that's where the idea of the training, say the breath hole training we did,

the free diving, sort of surf survival courses we do. You literally are holding your breath, I'm good, I'm holding my breath, I'm okay, all right, it's getting hard. And eventually you get to a point where you, oh my God, this is really hard. I have to breathe, yeah. Right. So again, we try and teach you that whole process

is just an example or a metaphor for any of the situations that you're in, and then people can sort of recognize it like every system in the human body, back to the physiology of the adaptation, you only improve when you're right on the edge of stress. It needs a little stress, you know, it needs a little challenge all through it.

So your brain, like the rest of your body, will adapt. So we try and get you to put you to put it. play in that sweet spot where you've just got it, but maybe don't have it, but it's not a horrible and terrifying experience. And that's when, again, the technologies really help because we can watch, we can observe, we can measure, and we can, and we can back up your gut, which is usually pretty good, and say, okay, maybe, and then over days of training where it gets interesting and for the public listening and then the listeners, it's kind of like that cumulative

stress of just a really rough time at work, it creeps up on you. It's not as obvious. So we can actually say, hey, before you even recognize it or you haven't been paying attention, you're up. So what can you do to bring it back? I hope that answers your question. But that's kind of the process of thinking. I wanted to talk about this because I know we have a lot of members on our platform who, you know, might experience strain on our platform. Like the higher the strain, generally speaking, you know, next day you'll have a lower capacity, right? Because you're depleted the tank through various forms of stress and, you know, the next day, you know, your body is going to have to recover from it, right? So, but I think a lot of people think that just

their training, just what they're doing in the CrossFit gym or, you know, on the ski slope or, you know, wherever their training arena is, is the only thing that is going to impact next day capacity or next day recovery, which obviously isn't the case, as we outline, right? It's these all these stresses, right, that accumulate in sneaky ways across the day. that are going to really influence our capacity tomorrow and how in developing these set of tools that you outlined and kind of learning to master those tools, you know, on demand, you know, give us the ability to, you know, kind of mitigate that negative stress accumulation, I think, over the course of the day. So I think it becomes really powerful when we start to map the data

to, you know, what's actually happening in our life and we can start to pinpoint where we might be going wrong and how to get back on track faster, you know, and I think that's where data could be super helpful. Absolutely, because I think we've seen it over and over again that we get some of our highest biomarkers, neurophysiological markers on stress or strain after a day of just sort of, so they say we put them into stand-up comedy. You know, you take someone and put them on stage and challenge them to make the room laugh, you know, boom. You know, their numbers can be way higher the next day than if we have them running around in the gym and lifting weights and training hard because that cognitive stress, that threat, that perceived threat that they have on themselves

really does push them high and high into the right. And it's a funny thing. That's what I think people don't recognize or it's less obvious again that when you, obviously when you train really hard in the gym and you do your workout that obviously there's a physiological and cognitive strain when you just go pure cognitive, like sit in front of a computer all day. And there's even research that shows if you play aggressive games of chess or play chess for a few hours on one day, the next day your physical performance actually drops. So you can see it all tying together. And I think back to our original premise, it's learning how you react, respond, what's good for you. Maybe one day has pressure, a little bit more strain, a little bit more strain in

the classic periodised model, and then the final day you back right off is the best way for you to train. Or maybe for you, it's a little bit of strain one day, recover the next, a little bit of some people in some of our programs we may push you through crazy amounts of strain for 10, 14 days and then let you really come down. And they're all showing you different versions of the same thing and you're learning and growing. But you've got to be aware. And that's where the technology allows you to make better decisions than when you don't, you know, kind of just, just winging it. Because as I said, the obvious stuff is clear to most people. That's the not obvious threat of, you know, day-to-day life that sort of creeps up, aren't you?

What have you seen kind of happening like structurally in the brain, you know, after these really deep and tense periods of time where you're putting a lot of stress on folks? Like, we'd be remiss not to, you know, kind of talk about it because it's so interesting that you have those data. Well, yeah, no. And let's say the data was, you know, for us was really enlightening, but also just added more to the confusion because, again, the specificity of everybody that went through it. But what we did see, and just to recap the process was we did really.

deep dive, functional MRIs, neuroscans, CAT scans, EEG, QEG scans, along with biomarkers, gut biome, we measure everything to these four unlucky female individual athletes. And then we took them out and dropped them in the middle of the desert in the Kimberley and Australia. They were with, you know, some operators who then dragged them through the dirt literally for a week or two or crafted, a lot of education, but pushed and pushed and push. the edge of what was possible and then at the end we re-scanned and did all the retests and and we saw we saw structural changes in the brain with that 10 day 10 12 day immersion which again i think a lot of

the research pointing to the plasticity of the brain now is reinforcing the idea that it you put an individual in the right training in the right way with the right frameworks around them the brain does adapt and change now do we know exactly what changes caused what effect in the brain night, no, no chance in hell. At least I didn't, and the expert at the time, Dr. Martin Paulus at UCSD, even he said, look, it's shifting, but we're still at the early days of understanding how. But when you put that with, oh, my God, it changed my life.

I feel like a different person. You get this qualitative reinforcement of something happening in the brain. And I often say, the science will catch up to probably what the body knows. But what we do see is that, like we, again, back to. the principles of all this whole conversation. We put you in a situation. We expose you to stress. And these were elite. So they'd been through a lot before. But this was a very sort of high level program. They adapted and overcame daily and sometimes didn't overcome, but they were under a lot of stress. And at the end of it, they recognized more about themselves. They understood where they

were on those curves. And we always get the feedback that, you know, now compared to that, I'm ready for everything. So we've also shifted their baseline. We've given them a way to reflect upon a time when things were really changing and they didn't have all that took to get it done. Everything seems a lot easier after that. And so there's a perspective shift. Again, it's really important.

And there's a lot to be said for that. And I think all of these things together are the sort of very raw way we try and help and understand these people. But yeah, it was a fun project at the time, especially. to run up with that group. So for folks who can't get dropped in the middle of the desert or jump from space, what are some things that just folks who are not in these kind of typical high performance environments? Like what are, what are some of the things that they can do to kind of create this Hermesis or the stress on the system that will actually help improve their

resilience kind of longer term? Like what are some simple things that they can do potentially daily? That's a good question. We kind of reframe it. Of course, you can always Pick hard things. Like cold, high, you know. All those things are an opportunity to practice, but it could even be, I want to do this thing with my, you know, like you say, with an individual I've been putting off this conversation for a long time. It's a hard conversation.

Or the person cuts you off in traffic, whatever it may be. These are opportunities to learn about yourself first and foremost. So we sort of say, let's just begin there. Let's sort of say, let's pay attention to our response to these scenarios. And then back to what we talked about before, you're going to respond differently the person next to you. The way you respond is within, you know, the frameworks that you have. Now, can you change to that?

It stresses and bad stress is actually potentially a growth opportunity. And that's that sort of challenge versus threat. And all those things we spoke about. And then you can sort of think about, like, can you bring them to bear and practice them daily? Like, what are some situations that are just naturally occurring? You don't have to create anything. All right.

As I said before, you know, the kid comes in, screaming at you, you're tired, and you blow up. And you're like, oh my gosh, that's it. That was an opportunity to put that into practice. All right, let's pause for a second. Take that breath. You know, you know, you've got all the techniques around, again, on sort of mindfulness and all the breathing patterns.

So that works very effectively to bring your baseline down. But as for us, we typically just sort of start with that principle of where are the opportunities in your day where you notice that you've gone, you know, overreactive per se. or had a negative effect. And can you bring out then with, say, the technology is tracking it, making sure you're paying attention, are there things you're doing in your lifestyle

that are causing this to go higher? Sleep, you know? Let's go back to the basics, just get some more sleep, gets rest, recover, let the body regenerate when it needs a chance. Because, again, if you bring it back down to the base, you've got more bandwidth the next day. If you kind of keep stacking, eventually you're just going to stop. And I think then you can play with different,

You know, we like to play. And even for executives, it can be, you know, training scenario can be as simple as you have them all come together for a big meeting and, you know, you purposely turn up late, you're disorganized, you make sure if you're presenting the PowerPoint's all messed up. And you can see the blood boiling in the room, important people at the time. And you're like, pause. Let's unpack. What just happened?

I love that. Why did me messing up this old thing? trigger all that in you, so you got to that point of anger and frustration, could we have responded differently? And it's not that there was a right or wrong way. It's absolutely within right for them to be annoyed at me for wasting their time. But the reality is that it's that debrief and unpacking posts that teaches you how to rethink it the next time you face it.

And ultimately, if you boil all the things we've talked about down, we've just over the years for these performers created all these different ways of coming at them obtusely. with real high levels in many cases of threat and most cases of a perception of threat, but the body can't distinguish. And they've just seen it before. They've recognized it in themselves. They recognize their own. So they're kind of getting to that point of, okay, I'm comfortable in this space where things

aren't going to work out. And they bring that and then translate it back to their day to day. I think one thing that I love about all of your programming and just the way you think is this kind of notion of creativity. and you do an incredible job, I think, of talking about the need for creativity, and it doesn't mean that I'm the best painter or, you know, that I can play the piano beautifully. Like there's this, you have this kind of philosophy around creativity. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that and how it relates to performance.

Yeah, I think, again, it was, again, if you think about all the things we're discussing, most of what we're learned has come from the talent we're working with. We have a, you know, just the obvious. And it was an awakening I had when I took the role at Red Bull when I was working with the non-traditional athletes at the time, so to speak, the action, action sports. But it was that the best in the world, no matter where they are, in whatever craft they're in, redefine what's possible. They reimagine things in their field, typically,

in a way that's never been done before. And in the playing field, that's a competitive advantage. You think in basketball, I'm going to not go to the line, I'm going to start really developing my three-point ability. And that's sort of a creative exercise. Because that gives me an opportunity to get ahead of the curve with the competition. And obviously in the action sports and things like acrobatics, like freestyle motorcross or snowboard half pipe or whatever it may be, there's actual points to gain for the artistic

flair that you show or are serving in all fields of a never applies. So that awakening came to us that the best talent in the world is extraordinarily creative. they reimagine what's possible and it's really reserved for those game changes the people who redefine what's possible and if you take that like a serena venus williams or a michael jordan in the classic sense everything that follows changes because of their shift in how they approach the topic so that was the impetus and then we spent years wow i sat back and this classic you know the talent's teaching we don't train that at all how do we actually train you to do that can you even train And so we started on programs around understanding all the research on creativity, where

we've got a machine through a partnership we had with some brilliant individuals to sort of go out and read all the research on creativity. The machine passed it down to key ideas and topics. And just, again, diving in and attacking the topic in the context of human performance was sort of fairly fresh at the time. And now it's evolved. and we've recently run a couple of projects where literally the top performers in the world are saying we want to think beyond the curve we want to think around corners we want to think

differently in the age of data analytics where every move is calculated we want to outthink what the what the data is telling us and so we're trying to invent it so and if you listen as i don't know if it's coach you might have to cut it from the podcast but if you even if you just watch the latest peter jackson special on the beetles at the they get back biography of them creating that Let a B album in 14 days, 15 days. And the camera was just rolling as they did it. You can watch that genius come through. But it's fascinating.

We still really don't know how. But we know a little bit more now how to create scenarios and environments support it. But it's a real exciting time to be in that's part of the human performance space. Have you seen when you do help people tap in to create, So like, you know, corporate executives or, you know, people who are kind of outside that realm, have you actually observe it manifest physiologically? Well, the paradigm we had to use goes back to the strain conversation. Creativity equals courage.

To put an idea out there, to go out and play the game or take that shot or do whatever it is that's beyond the normal or different to the norm, you've got to put yourself in a vulnerable situation. So what we actually learned was if we can train. you to manage that high-stakes, high-risk, high-threat performance, it then gives you room and confidence to try things differently because, you know, I'm going to learn from this. It may not be the smartest move I ever make, but I'll make this move and we'll see how this plays out.

And that creative endeavour, and if you look at high-level creatives, again, what we've seen is they're consistently putting themselves out in public-facing, non-public-facing, but literally their ideas and they put their passion forward. And hoping that, you know, it has some value or meaning to the rest of the world in some cases, to themselves, obviously. And that, again, we see, like, highly creative sessions, like, we're putting people through thinking, trying to get them to think differently, et cetera, et cetera, we see, like, the basic physiology, it's stressful. It's, it's hard. It really is challenging. So it's not as insignificant, as different as making them run up the mountain half a dozen times.

Yeah. But I think that like agitation though is is so good. You know, like I think it's everyone should kind of experience that I think, you know, almost daily, you know, because I do think that it makes you more effective in other areas of your life. You know, I think it lights up the brain in a way that it maybe doesn't expect. And I just have to believe there's there's something good happening from that. You probably know the mechanism behind that. But honestly, I would love to know the mechanism. What we could. We use these broad terms. We're shifting the perspective. We're opening the blinders a little, you know, a lot of our events where we bring the sort of performance community, the trainers and coaches together, is all we're doing is literally trying to shift a little perspective because they have the talent, they have the intellect, they know they're well better than us. But if we can broaden that, it's kind of like you can never unsee it.

And a lot of our conversations, as you and I've had, what I've had over the years, is about trying to help people see the world through those different lenses, see performance through the lens of artists, see training through the lens of a ballerina, et cetera, et cetera. You start to get, oh, my gosh, there's so much more to this than I originally thought. And then you see the spark come on. Oh, my gosh, that lights piece.

So anyway, that's sort of, you know, the degeneralities that we're playing in in this space. But it's an open field. It's open for anyone who's thinking about to get in there and try stuff. And then as, as you know, we're trying to democratize everything we learn as well. And as we learn and see stuff, or at least even recognize that we try to put it out there and then let the communities tell us, was it, did it fly, did it not fly? Was there any merit or not?

All right, that's shift if it was and try and improve on it. Andy, this has been such a fun conversation. Just truly appreciate, you know, all your wisdom and insight. and yeah I think I think folks are going to really benefit from from this conversation so appreciate you oh christin likewise thank you to you and the team and yeah just like you say if we can share some of what we've seen and learn how it helps others and that's a win so thanks for the opportunity and we appreciate getting the chance today thank you to dr andy walsh for coming on the wood podcast a reminder please subscribe and leave us feedback ratings review

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