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Episode: #748: Pavel Tsatsouline and Christopher Sommer

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 03:21:06

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode

features segments from episode #55 "Pavel Tsatsouline on the Science of Strength and the Art of Physical Performance" and episode #158 "The Secrets of Gymnastic Strength Training."Please enjoy!Sponsors:Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://helixsleep.com/tim (25–30% off all mattress orders and two free pillows)1Password easy-to-use and secure password manager for individuals, families, and businesses: https://1password.com/tim (14-day free trial)Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[05:10] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:14] Enter Pavel Tsatsouline.[06:34] Pavel's background as a world-class trainer.[07:07] Considerations while customizing a training regimen.[09:40] Strength-building principles over equipment.[10:36] When in doubt, train your grip and your core.[12:57] How to grease the groove.[16:08] How not to strengthen the "core."[18:53] Approaching training as a practice.[21:16] Prioritizing strength — the "mother quality of all physical qualities."[23:57] The most counter-productive myths about strength training.[27:14] Pavel's hypothesis for the science behind hypertrophy.[28:01] Deadlifts, kettlebells, and the most common mistakes with both.[29:31] People who exemplify success to Pavel.[30:09] Calmness is contagious.[32:31] Enter Christopher Sommer.[33:23] Defining Gymnastics Strength Training™ (GST).[37:08] Types of strength that most non-gymnasts will not have.[41:10] Biggest mistakes made by those who self-teach handstands.[46:10] Top exercises for identifying weaknesses in strength and mobility.[56:47] The problem with focusing on muscular fatigue when training.[1:05:03] What is a pike pulse and why does it matter?[1:07:45] On kipping pull-ups.[1:11:16] Identifying solutions to pain.[1:18:38] The Jefferson curl.[1:23:06] Why weighted mobility work needs to be approached with a different level of intensity than conditioning work.[1:28:09] If someone is 35 years old, a former athlete, and has never done gymnastics, what's a good exercise and what should be avoided?[1:33:31] 3-5 joint mobility exercises for getting strong.[1:38:52] Preferred way to work on shoulder extension.[1:44:40] A good goal for those seeking to improve mobility.[1:46:15] Yoga handstands vs. gymnastics handstands (aesthetics vs. gold medals).[1:54:20] Coaches who have impressed Coach Sommer the most.[1:55:49] The story of Dmitry Bilozerchev and Alexander Alexandrov.[2:00:36] Differentiating immature athletes from mature athletes.[2:03:43] Training for success.[2:08:43] Describing the systematic approach to GST.[2:16:58] Exercises to avoid for the first six months of GST.[2:18:27] Breaking down the muscle-up.[2:23:59] Understanding the purpose of using various grips.[2:31:28] How Coach Sommer mentally preps athletes for a big competition.[2:41:13] Questions Coach Sommer would ask a gymnastic coach before sending children off to train with them.[2:45:36] Questions Coach Sommer would ask a gymnastic coach who trains adults.[2:47:44] Balancing stretching and training time.[2:52:52] People who exemplify success to Coach Sommer.[2:58:16] Most gifted books.[3:01:04] Morning rituals.[3:05:02] Coach Sommer's billboard.[3:10:12] An ask for the audience and parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

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00:04:23 Speaker_03
That's 1, the number 1, password.com slash Tim. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:04:55 Speaker_03
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:05:09 Speaker_03
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:05:19 Speaker_03
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:05:31 Speaker_03
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes. Because my goal is to encourage you to yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:05:44 Speaker_03
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:05:54 Speaker_03
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, You can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:06:12 Speaker_00
First up, Pavel Tsatsulin, world-renowned strength coach, founder and CEO of Strong First, and the trainer who brought the Russian kettlebell to the West, kickstarting the kettlebell revolution.

00:06:26 Speaker_00
You can learn more about Pavel's school of strength at strongfirst.com.

00:06:33 Speaker_02
I used to be a PT training instructor, physical training instructor for Spetsnaz, the Soviet Special Forces, and my education was in sports science. And I did, over the years, train a number of high-end units in the West.

00:06:48 Speaker_02
I've been a subject matter to the U.S. Marine Corps, to the U.S. Secret Service, to U.S. Navy SEALs and others.

00:06:55 Speaker_02
My methods are used officially by some very high-end military and counter-terrorist units in two countries that are main allies of the United States.

00:07:05 Speaker_02
So what I do is I take methods that perform very well in very rugged environments, and I take these methods and I apply it to other environments.

00:07:16 Speaker_02
So if somebody decides, I just want to change my life, I want to get stronger, I want to have a better game of tennis, I want to succeed in a given sport, I take the same methods that have been tested by operators at war, and I bring these people the same methods.

00:07:32 Speaker_02
If you look at a typical person, and how do you get them stronger? Let's say that you have a four-cylinder engine. What the person would do is they would make that six-cylinder engine. But before you're firing in two, now you're firing in three.

00:07:46 Speaker_02
But if instead what you do is you learn to fire in all four, So, there are ways of training a nervous system to engage your capacity so much more fully.

00:07:56 Speaker_02
And if you look at high-level performers at light body weight in some fields, let's say a very high-level martial artist, somebody very skinny, breaking a stack of boards, or a very skinny guy like Lamar Gant, that lifting five times his body weight.

00:08:10 Speaker_02
So this is so much about the concentration of mental force. And for your listeners, I could give a very simple example how you can do that in your gym. Let's say that you perform, try it with the simplest exercise possible.

00:08:23 Speaker_02
Try it with a dumbbell curl or a barbell curl. Because I know your sissy's out there, you all do that. And so let's say that you're going through your curls and things are suddenly starting to get tougher.

00:08:37 Speaker_02
So when they suddenly start to get tougher, I want you to just crush the dumbbell or the barbell or the kettlebell, whatever it is that you're curling, just white knuckle pressure.

00:08:48 Speaker_02
And what you will see is you're definitely going to be able to get several more repetitions out. I'm going to give you two more techniques in addition once you have practiced that.

00:09:00 Speaker_02
Then on the next set, in addition to crushing the bar on the way up, also contract your glutes as tight as possible. Like somebody's going to kick you in the butt, very, very tight. So you just crunch a walnut.

00:09:13 Speaker_02
And at the same time, tighten your abs as if somebody is going to kick you, which somebody might. So if you do that, if you do these three things, if you contract your glutes, contract your abs, contract your grip,

00:09:27 Speaker_02
Everything that you do, absolutely everything, is going to be greatly amplified. And this is just a small example of the skills of strength that I do teach. They call me the kettlebell guy.

00:09:41 Speaker_02
They call me the father of the kettlebell, which I appreciate very much. I did introduce, together with my business partner, I did introduce the kettlebell to the West. And right now the kettlebell has become mainstream.

00:09:53 Speaker_02
But what I'm really all about is about the principles, the underlining principles of strength training, the underlining principles of power generation.

00:10:01 Speaker_02
And it doesn't really matter what modality you use, whether you use the kettlebell, the barbell, your body weight, whether you're arm wrestling, fighting, lifting rocks, it really doesn't matter. So I am not about the kettlebell.

00:10:14 Speaker_02
I am about the principles that make you strong. What I have done is I have reverse engineered the way the strongest people move naturally. And I have brought it to the people.

00:10:25 Speaker_02
I've shown to people how to move in this manner and how to shave off years and if not decades of training to progress to a much higher level.

00:10:34 Speaker_03
You once mentioned to me in a casual conversation, I called you for some type of training advice, or it might've been via email, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you said, when in doubt, train your grip and your core. Could you elaborate on that?

00:10:47 Speaker_03
Because I think it's not advice that many people have received.

00:10:50 Speaker_02
There is such a thing as called irradiation. So the phenomenon of irradiation, what it really means is if you contract a muscle, the tension from that muscle is going to spill over to the neighborhood muscles.

00:11:02 Speaker_02
So for your listeners, I'd like to try this. Make a fist. You're probably going to feel tension in your forearm. Now make a tight fist. You're going to feel tension in your biceps, triceps. Now make a white knuckle fist.

00:11:14 Speaker_02
You're going to find that tension is going to spread into your shoulder, your lat, your back, and so on. Okay, folks, you may relax now. The same thing happens. So certain areas of the body have this great overflow of tension.

00:11:25 Speaker_02
So the gripping muscles are amongst them. Why? In part because they have such a great representation in your nervous system, in your brain. And as for the abs and as for the glutes, that has a lot to do with creating your intra-abdominal pressure.

00:11:41 Speaker_02
So what does this mean exactly? Visualize your muscles as speakers. and visualize your brain as the gadget that plays the music, whatever it is these days, iPad, iPhone, whatever, and record player, doesn't matter.

00:11:56 Speaker_02
And the amount of your pressure in your abdomen, the intra-abdominal pressure, that's the amplifier, that's the volume control. So by increasing the pressure in your abdomen, it's like you're turning up the volume. and vice versa.

00:12:11 Speaker_02
So when you're trying to stretch with increasing your flexibility, if you see somebody they're trying to do a split and you see the person is creating high intra-abdominal pressure and that just increases the tension of the muscle.

00:12:25 Speaker_02
Instead what you need to do you need to completely release and let go and bring it down. So for strength, we'll do the opposite. We have special techniques where you increase that pressure and maximize your power.

00:12:39 Speaker_02
Those are just a couple of the different ways we can increase your strength. And that's what you've seen in my certification. FYI, I am no longer with that organization. So my company today is called Strong First.

00:12:51 Speaker_02
SFD certification, that's that same curriculum that you have learned back then.

00:12:55 Speaker_03
Just to touch on two points and then we're going to jump into more training and ask about how you would rank certain aspects of what people would traditionally consider perhaps fitness.

00:13:05 Speaker_03
What would you recommend as good methods for developing the grip and core or abdomen for those people listening if they wanted to take a simple protocol and perhaps experiment for the next few weeks? Is there any

00:13:19 Speaker_03
basic approach that you might suggest for those two things?

00:13:22 Speaker_02
It can be done in conjunction with a full-body training regimen that uses, let's say, kettlebells, climbing ropes, and so on. But if it is not, then what I recommend that you do is you get some grippers.

00:13:35 Speaker_02
So the company is called IronMind.com, and they carry hand grippers. One thing you need to understand is these are not those little sissy plastic grippers you get at store. These are heavy-duty grippers. They go up to 365 pounds.

00:13:50 Speaker_02
There's a couple people in the world that have done that. They also do have resources on how to do that. But even without reading how, I can tell you how to train.

00:14:00 Speaker_02
So get yourself a couple of grippers, use their chart, their recommendations that IronMind offers. start training them in the manner that I refer to as grease the groove.

00:14:11 Speaker_02
Grease the groove is a highly simplified training methodology that's been derived from Soviet weightlifting methodology. So in a nutshell, this is what you do.

00:14:20 Speaker_02
Throughout the day, every day, whenever you feel fully recovered, so you have to have at least 15 minutes of rest between sets, you know, maybe 30, maybe even more, is you're going to do a set

00:14:32 Speaker_02
and you're only gonna do about half the repetitions that you're capable of. So for example, you picked up a particular gripper, you start squeezing it, you probably could do it 10 times, but you only do five when you put it down.

00:14:46 Speaker_02
Let's say you later on pick up a grip that's a little heavier. Maybe you could do three reps with it, but you do all one. And in this particular manner, you accumulate reps and you keep going and going and going.

00:15:00 Speaker_02
And everybody tells you that's impossible to get strong in this particular manner. Yet science and experience shows that this makes you strong. This makes you strong fast. This makes you strong in a safe manner.

00:15:12 Speaker_02
You can apply this particular methodology. Again, I call it Guru Siguru, to any strength exercise or any strength endurance exercise.

00:15:21 Speaker_02
Just to give you an example of its effectiveness, my father-in-law, former Marine, at the age of 64, started following this routine. He was able to do about 10 pull-ups at that point. In several months, he was up to 20 when he tested.

00:15:34 Speaker_02
And he could not do that many as a young jarhead. So you young bucks out there, you can definitely get this done. So this is how you guys are going to train your grip with these grippers. Carry it with you throughout the day.

00:15:46 Speaker_02
You're not going to get sweaty. Just whenever you feel like it, just take it out and squeeze. As for training your abdomen, there are many different methods of training the abdomen. But you have to abide by the following rules.

00:15:59 Speaker_02
You have to keep the repetitions to five and under, no more than five reps. Anything more than five reps is bodybuilding. And you need to make a focus on tension, make a focus on contraction, as opposed to on reps and fatigue.

00:16:15 Speaker_02
Just to give you an example of the plank. The plank is a kind of a fashionable exercise in the core training circles. And by the way, we don't use the word core. That's wrong at first. Why don't we use the word core?

00:16:25 Speaker_02
Because people who use the word core, they do things we don't like. We don't like at all. So we just say midsection. So the plank. So traditionally, they would put you in the plank, and you were supposed to stay in this plank for a couple of minutes.

00:16:40 Speaker_02
And what's happening is you see this poor person who cannot even assume the proper posture to start with. And then as fatigue sets in, other muscles, wrong muscles, start kicking in. The back starts arching, the butt starts shooting up.

00:16:53 Speaker_02
And what you're doing is what Greg Cook calls putting fitness on top of dysfunction. And what we do instead is if we do a plank, we call it the Hearthstone plank, we would do a plank for no longer than 10 seconds.

00:17:07 Speaker_02
And when you do the plank, you try to contract everything, absolutely everything. When I showed that... Everything hitting the shins, your forearms, your neck, everything. Everything but your neck and face.

00:17:18 Speaker_02
Everything below your neck, you're going to contract. It's not for folks with high blood pressure, heart condition. And that's true for pretty much any type of training. But for everybody else, it's an extremely powerful tool.

00:17:30 Speaker_02
So you get down on a plank, you make fists, okay? You contract your abs, you contract your glutes, you contract your entire body.

00:17:37 Speaker_02
You pretend that somebody's walking in a walk by and kick you in the ribs, which again, somebody might, at least in my course. And Andy Bolton and other top powerlifters do like Todd this technique.

00:17:48 Speaker_02
They swear by this because this is the abdominal training for strength. This is not just some nonsense that you do cranking out the reps. So to sum up your abdominal training, find whatever abdominal exercises that you like. It can be the plank.

00:18:02 Speaker_02
It can be some kind of a setup. It can be something from your book, The 4-Hour Body. It can be something from my book, The Hardstyle Labs. It can be something else. That's not important.

00:18:13 Speaker_02
As long as it's a good exercise that's been recognized that it does work. And three times a week, do three to five sets of three to five reps. Okay, folks, just remember this. Three to five sets of three to five reps. Focus on contraction.

00:18:30 Speaker_02
Don't focus on fatigue. Don't focus on the reps. And I promise if you do these two things for several months, you work your grip in this matter, you work your abs in this matter, everything that you do today is going to be stronger.

00:18:44 Speaker_02
I don't care what it is. It's a bigger deadlift. It's a tennis serve. It makes no difference. You're going to be stronger.

00:18:51 Speaker_03
And in the case of the midsection, and we're working with the plank, if people decided they were going to keep it simple just so they can remember it and do three sets of three reps three times a week, let's just say Monday.

00:19:04 Speaker_02
For the plank, let's do just three sets of 10 seconds. Got it. Three sets of 10 seconds three times a week. Yes. And try to contract everything below your neck. If you want to be strong, you need to keep your reps at five and under.

00:19:18 Speaker_03
at five reps or under is what you're really working on, I'll get out of my depth and into yours pretty quickly, but the sort of neural pathways and the recruitment of motor neurons and sort of firing capabilities and so on?

00:19:31 Speaker_02
Pretty much you're gonna have a high level of neural adaptations. You're also going to build some muscle as well. So you're gonna build the high threshold motor units as well, but it's not a bodybuilding protocol.

00:19:41 Speaker_02
You'll build some muscle, but it's not really the end goal itself.

00:19:46 Speaker_02
You're trying to avoid the fatigue, you're trying to avoid the burn, because whenever you start experiencing the burn, that's from something called the hydrogen ions, that leads to a whole lot of problems for you.

00:19:58 Speaker_02
So one of the problems is it interferes with the command that your brain sends to the muscle to contract. And another problem that it creates, these hydrogen ions literally are destructive.

00:20:09 Speaker_02
So if you leave them around the muscle for too long, they really start destroying your muscle. So just keep those reps under 5, 3 to 5. Don't worry about getting bulky. You're not going to get bulky. It's not going to happen.

00:20:22 Speaker_02
And approach your training as a practice. So this is another very important point, Tim.

00:20:27 Speaker_03
This is a super important point.

00:20:29 Speaker_02
No, I'm glad you're bringing this up. I hate the word workouts. The word workout does not exist in the Russian language. We talk about a training session or we talk about a lesson. We never talk about a workout.

00:20:40 Speaker_02
Just think of what does the word working out, what do you envision? Sweating and grunting and... Let's see how much I can punish myself and drain myself. So the goal is not to get stronger. The goal is just to get worn out.

00:20:56 Speaker_02
And there are simpler ways of doing that, right up the mountain, okay? So, no, the idea here is practice. Strength is a skill and as such it must be practiced.

00:21:05 Speaker_02
And if you approach it in this manner, not only are you going to get stronger so much faster, but you're going to truly enjoy your training process. Training should be something that should be enjoyed.

00:21:14 Speaker_03
So when people think of fitness, and particularly non-athletes, I think that there tends to be a very scattershot approach and there's a paradox of choice challenge that they have where they're fed a lot of recommendations from many different people.

00:21:27 Speaker_03
and they have strength, not necessarily muscle gain, but just getting stronger. They have hypertrophy, so increasing their muscular size, for lack of a better description, endurance, flexibility. How would you rank these in order of priority and why?

00:21:42 Speaker_02
Tim, as long as the person has the required mobility and symmetry, the priority is always, and health, the priority is always strength. Strength has to be first. So the first step that you do is you assess your mobility.

00:21:57 Speaker_02
You find a specialist who can do that. FMS would be a recommendation of mine. The Ray Cooke's FMS. Functional Movement Screen. Functional Movement Screen is going to find out how mobile you are and also how symmetrical you are.

00:22:09 Speaker_02
So as long as that is dialed in, that is in place, you have to get strong. And strength is the mother quality of all physical qualities.

00:22:18 Speaker_02
And that's not a statement by me, that's a statement by Professor Matveyev, the father of fertilization, one of the greatest sports scientists ever. And greater strength increases your performance in absolutely everything.

00:22:32 Speaker_02
So you can see, of course, being stronger is going to help you in, let's say, punching somebody hard or lifting something. But how is that going to help me if I'm, let's say, a triathlete? How is that going to help me if I'm a marathon runner?

00:22:45 Speaker_02
It is going to help you in several different ways. One is the perceived level of exertion is going to go down.

00:22:53 Speaker_02
Several years ago, Norwegians did a very interesting study where they put elite endurance athletes, some were bicyclists, some were runners, on a pure strength regimen. That's four sets of four reps of heavy squats.

00:23:09 Speaker_02
It's about as pure strength as it gets. And in the end of the study, not surprisingly, all these guys were stronger. They could jump higher and so on, but they were not impressed with that. That didn't matter to them.

00:23:21 Speaker_02
What did impress them is they ran faster. Their race times went down because strength just makes, enables everything else.

00:23:31 Speaker_02
If you're trying to, let's say, lose weight, being stronger is going to help you do that because you're going to have a bigger furnace, you're going to train yourself much harder on the exercises that are fat loss exercises.

00:23:43 Speaker_02
So it really doesn't matter what it is that you're trying to achieve. Strength is the number one attribute you need to address. And that's why my company is called Strong First.

00:23:55 Speaker_03
One of the things that I love about you, Pavel, is that you say what you mean and mean what you say. There's a degree of clarity that I envy.

00:24:01 Speaker_03
I might include it for people, but when we did our sound check, I asked you to give me an answer so we could test the audio, what you had for breakfast, and what was your answer? And that was it. That was the sound check. I love the simplicity.

00:24:16 Speaker_03
Now, speaking of simplicity and also undoing the confusion that a lot of people suffer from, what are the most counterproductive myths or misconceptions about strength training that come to mind?

00:24:29 Speaker_02
Well, the number one, Tim, I guess, is the idea that you have to go to failure every time you train.

00:24:35 Speaker_02
I can tell you one thing that the Soviet weightlifters, I have done a very thorough analysis of the Soviet weightlifting methodology through the 60s, through the 80s, the glory days, and I found that they

00:24:49 Speaker_02
typically did 1 third to 2 third of maximal repetitions per set. So what does it mean? If let's say that you're using a weight that's your 10 rep max, 10 is all you could do if you push yourself very hard. They would do 3 to 6 consistently.

00:25:06 Speaker_02
Now, you probably ask yourself, OK, I'm not a weightlifter. And what does this Soviet stuff from the 80s have to do with today? Well, two things.

00:25:16 Speaker_02
First of all, even though a person who is not a lifting athlete is not going to train exactly as a weightlifter or powerlifter, Nevertheless, the methodology has to be derived from the sports because these are specialist strength sports.

00:25:30 Speaker_02
So they just have to be adapted to your needs. Second of all, this particular Soviet methodology is still superior to this day. This is very interesting, but you keep hearing about all these new world records set in the sport of weightlifting.

00:25:44 Speaker_02
Well, if you compare the world records of today, to the world records of the 80s, you will see that in most cases the records today are inferior to records in the 80s. How can that be?

00:25:57 Speaker_02
They accused people of doing drugs and they changed weight classes twice since the 80s. Of course, it's so wonderful. I'm so happy that today nobody does drugs anymore. It's just terrific.

00:26:12 Speaker_02
If you look at the lifts performed by Soviet lifter Yuri Kvartalian in 1980 at the Moscow Olympics, these lifts have never been exceeded. These lifts have never been approached. So this particular methodology does work extremely well.

00:26:29 Speaker_02
It's still the best methodology, period. Later on, the Soviet powerlifting team adapted this methodology for powerlifting with tremendous success. They dominate.

00:26:39 Speaker_02
The same particular methodology has been adopted to body weight training, kettlebell presses, and so on and so forth. So it's the same thing that can apply for everybody, because this is principle-based training.

00:26:51 Speaker_02
So the major misconception is that you have to go to failure. If you just overcome that, and if you make it a habit to do 1 3rd to 2 3rd of the repetitions that are possible, and do more sets instead,

00:27:07 Speaker_02
you're going to make much greater progress, you're going to do much safer, and folks, you're going to enjoy your training.

00:27:13 Speaker_03
How does the approach shift if your focus is maximal hypertrophy?

00:27:19 Speaker_02
If you're after maximum hypertrophy, it's Molly. So they figured out in the Soviet Union that there's a direct correlation between volume and hypertrophy. So you just pretty much have to do more sets.

00:27:33 Speaker_02
You're going to have to do more sets in like 60% to 70% of your max range. And a whole bunch of sets of five and six, just many of them. and your rest periods might be compressed a little more. But that's it.

00:27:45 Speaker_02
If you do that, do this a couple times a week, many sets of five or six, don't even worry about how many, just keep going. Don't kill yourself, enjoy yourself. Eat more, you're gonna get bigger. It's unavoidable, it's just as simple as that.

00:27:59 Speaker_03
Would you consider the, and please disagree if this is not the case, but if you had to pick one movement for strength, longevity, would the deadlift be that movement, or is it not possible to choose one movement?

00:28:12 Speaker_03
How would you try to answer that question?

00:28:14 Speaker_02
If you were to choose one movement, Tim, yes, I would choose the deadlift, or I would choose the kettlebell swing.

00:28:20 Speaker_02
Obviously, the kettlebell swing is not something you can compete in, and it's not going to give you the same satisfaction of lifting having weight.

00:28:27 Speaker_02
But those are the two main full body exercises, the full body expressions of power that will go such a long way for you for longevity, strength, just the quality of life.

00:28:41 Speaker_03
What are the biggest mistakes that people make with the deadlift, whether that's technically or in programming, what are the biggest mistakes?

00:28:49 Speaker_02
Well, Tim, I think the very big mistake is because they think, okay, I have picked up things from the floor. This looks so simple. It's not an Olympic lift. Therefore, it's very simple. So I'll just start piling on plates and start training.

00:29:02 Speaker_02
The deadlift is a very technical lift. Even if you're just a recreational lifter, you owe it to yourself to learn to deadlift correctly. That's as simple as that.

00:29:11 Speaker_02
So I say that's the primary mistake and that mistake goes for every exercise that people do out there.

00:29:17 Speaker_03
I would highly recommend people check out your book with Mr. Bolton. Yeah, the dynamite. Yeah, really very, very dense. Shifting gears just a little bit, dense in the best way possible, no fluff.

00:29:29 Speaker_03
I'd love to shift gears and just ask you a few questions about sort of your philosophies and your thinking, not so much the highly specific training questions, but when you think of, for instance, the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind for you?

00:29:42 Speaker_02
Tim, I am fortunate enough to know many successful people. And I think that what separates them from the rest is the CEO of Strong First, Eric Ferrall Hart, he put it very well. He says, balance with priorities, balance with priorities.

00:30:01 Speaker_02
So Eric, yourself and many others are fortunate to know, they exemplify success for me. What are the habits that you've observed that allow people to have balance with priorities?

00:30:12 Speaker_03
What are the things they do that other people don't do?

00:30:16 Speaker_02
Or maybe the things they don't do that other people do? Well, I think one is calm. These people are calm.

00:30:22 Speaker_02
Because people who are hyper, they get so trapped in their reactive modes, they get too trapped in the everyday minutiae of their work and their existence. So they just do not pause and they do not think.

00:30:36 Speaker_02
Again, Eric has a great quote from a Vietnam-era seal, which says, calm is contagious. Calm is contagious. So when the person is calm, then he or she has the time to meditate, reflect, set the priorities, and set the balance.

00:30:54 Speaker_03
That certainly holds true from what I've seen. And the opposite, of course, is true. It's hysteria.

00:31:03 Speaker_02
He's just chasing the tail. Absolutely. Chicken little. This guy's following. Yes, everything is urgent.

00:31:13 Speaker_03
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentus.

00:31:19 Speaker_03
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00:31:28 Speaker_03
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00:31:54 Speaker_03
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00:32:01 Speaker_03
Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed support and or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out.

00:32:12 Speaker_03
Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's live momentous, L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off. And now

00:32:31 Speaker_00
Christopher Sommer, a former U.S. national team gymnastics coach and the founder of the Gymnastic Bodies Training System, known for building devotees into some of the strongest, most powerful athletes in the world.

00:32:46 Speaker_00
You can find Christopher on Instagram at ChristopherSommer1. Coach, welcome to the show.

00:32:56 Speaker_01
Thanks, Tim.

00:32:58 Speaker_03
I am excited to finally have you on the show. We've had so many conversations in the last month or two, and I've been so impressed with the subtlety and nuance of the training that you do.

00:33:11 Speaker_03
So I've been very eager to have you on the show to explore all things gymnastics and gymnastics strength training related. So thanks for making the time. I look forward to it. And I thought we could start with just some definitions.

00:33:25 Speaker_03
So what would you or how would you define gymnastics strength training, GST?

00:33:30 Speaker_01
In a nutshell, gymnastic strength training I define as high-level bodyweight strength training.

00:33:37 Speaker_01
So, none of the training that we do for world-class performance or the acrobatics or technical gymnastics, just purely the strength, joint prep and mobility components.

00:33:48 Speaker_03
And one example of what not to do perhaps, or how gymnastic strength training might differ from the aesthetics that some people, I'm not going to say compromise with, but shoes.

00:34:00 Speaker_03
We were talking about doing a pike handstand press or holding that position. And the example, feel free to correct my recollection, but was of how a lot of folks kick their hips way out to counterbalance instead of doing what?

00:34:14 Speaker_03
What would the gymnastic strength training version of that look like?

00:34:18 Speaker_01
Good example. So what we see, and this is kind of getting into some handstands, some skill training, but handstand done correctly is a reflection of physical preparation that athlete either has or does not have.

00:34:32 Speaker_01
So if they lack strength, if they lack mobility, then of course their technical handstand is going to lack refinement.

00:34:39 Speaker_01
So in terms of that pike handstand, if they lack middle trap, if they lack lower trap strength, then they're going to try to counterbalance by really arching the chest out, sticking the butt way back behind them. Oh, goodness.

00:34:53 Speaker_01
Not even sure how to describe it, like a pike and an arch at the same time.

00:34:57 Speaker_03
Sorry to interrupt coach, just for people who I realize I should have probably defined some terms myself.

00:35:01 Speaker_03
So pike for people who are not familiar with this, the easiest way to visualize it if you don't have any background with that is imagine you're sitting on the floor.

00:35:09 Speaker_03
It's kind of like PE class legs straight and together bending at the waist towards your toes. Is that forward bending forward towards your toes?

00:35:19 Speaker_03
And so if you were to imagine you're sitting down with your legs out in front of you, hypothetically at a 90 degree angle, and you put your arms up over your head, let's just flip you upside down so you're in a handstand position.

00:35:29 Speaker_03
That's effectively what we're talking about.

00:35:31 Speaker_01
Exactly what we're talking about. To hold that, because center of mass is way out in front of the body then, in order to hold that, the traps are what's responsible to keeping the back and the shoulders straight. So if you're not strong enough,

00:35:43 Speaker_01
And some people say, well, it's just skill training. Well, everything builds upon everything else. So we've got Olympics coming up. People are going to be pumped. They're going to see our Olympic team.

00:35:54 Speaker_01
They're going to see the other monsters around the world competing on rings. And they're, I want to do that. And they're going to jump right up.

00:36:02 Speaker_01
I've got friends who are former SEAL Team 6, and the first thing they did is jump up, and of course they failed utterly, and then they come see us. Because it's like anything, you know, you don't jump right into calculus.

00:36:12 Speaker_01
You learn to count, and we learn addition, we learn subtraction, yada, yada, yada. With enough time and enough layers, enough progression, then we get to advanced math. So advanced ring strength, same deal.

00:36:23 Speaker_03
I remember we were talking not too long ago about the importance of pacing when you're dealing with connective tissue, tendons and ligaments, which is something I'm not particularly well-known for in terms of patience and pace.

00:36:37 Speaker_03
But I've noticed that many of the guys who say do outdoor bar workouts, some of which are very impressive.

00:36:44 Speaker_03
physical specimens will jump up on the rings and they'll be doing, I'm not sure what they would even call them, they're kind of like what would be looked at as like a typewriter on the pull-up bar when you move back and forth from one arm to the other.

00:36:56 Speaker_00
That side-to-side pull-up.

00:36:57 Speaker_03
That side-to-side pull-up. And they're like, I was feeling fine, coach, and then suddenly my, you know, I tore my bicep, I tore my pec, and it was fine until it wasn't. What are some, if you look at the...

00:37:10 Speaker_03
muscles or types of strength that most non-gymnasts will not have, even if they consider themselves reasonably athletic, what would be on that list? And we already mentioned one, which is, say, mid and lower traps.

00:37:23 Speaker_03
And of course, I would like to think I came to the table with kind of hat in hand, because I recognize how hard a lot of this is, but the more I practice it, the more I'm astounded at how unprepared my body is for these movements.

00:37:36 Speaker_03
I mean, as someone who has done a lot of pulling from the floor, for instance, who has a decent deadlift, I would like to think. I was just astonished at how weak my mid-back was. It was just, it blew my mind. It was completely flabbergasting.

00:37:50 Speaker_03
What other muscles or movements do you find normals just cannot perform even if they view themselves as athletic?

00:37:56 Speaker_01
For the lifters, the one that always jumps out at us is their lack of shoulder extension. So if I'm standing upright and I lift my hands forward, that's flexion and I can go all the way up until my arms are overhead.

00:38:09 Speaker_01
If I'm picking my hands up behind me, that would be shoulder extension.

00:38:14 Speaker_03
Right. So just to paint another picture for folks, like if you stand up and then interlaced your fingers behind your tailbone with your arms straight and then tried to lift them up towards the ceiling, keeping your back straight.

00:38:26 Speaker_03
So the shoulder extension.

00:38:28 Speaker_01
And what we find is, you know, and a lot of what we'll get sometimes from people as well, I don't want to be in the circus, I don't want to be an acrobat, I'm not interested in skill training, I want strength.

00:38:39 Speaker_01
And what they don't understand is if you want to achieve world-class levels of performance, technically, that comes first from having a solid foundation of physical preparation, which means correct range of motion, good mobility, good connective tissue.

00:38:53 Speaker_01
So shoulder extension becomes so, for example, a lot of people fail, they can't do muscle-ups because they can't do shoulder extension.

00:39:01 Speaker_01
They think in their head that a muscle-up is a chin-up, a little bit of transition that they don't understand, and then a dip.

00:39:08 Speaker_01
What really happens is we do a pull-up, we get our hands to our chin, and then the elbows pull back behind the torso behind them, and there's their shoulder extension. If they can't do shoulder extension, now they're stuck.

00:39:20 Speaker_01
And they've spent all this time working technique and doing rep and doing rep, and what they're doing is they're treating the symptom, not actually the problem.

00:39:28 Speaker_03
So just as some background for folks, the way that we connected was I, at 38, finally decided, enough is enough, I've been fantasizing about trying to learn gymnastics in a structured way for 20-plus years, much like my postponing of getting a dog for 20 years.

00:39:45 Speaker_03
It's just like, why did it take me so long to do this? And I was in Venice, I'm gonna give these folks a shout-out. There's a CrossFit gym there named Paradiso CrossFit, and...

00:39:55 Speaker_03
love the folks who run the gym and I would go there to train because they would let me use chalk and do all the things that a lot of gyms will not allow me to do. And I met a gent who was doing a bodyweight workout.

00:40:05 Speaker_03
He's the only person doing a bodyweight only workout. And he suggested that I follow Gymnastic Bodies on Instagram. So I started following your company on Instagram and saw older

00:40:18 Speaker_03
let's just call it middle-aged men, sort of my demo as it stands right now, who had started from scratch doing impressive things. And I had used age as my crutch and excuse for not pulling the trigger in the last few years.

00:40:32 Speaker_03
So I reached out to Rob Wolf, who was kind enough to introduce us. And then we've collaborated in this experiment that we're currently doing, which is roughly 90 days

00:40:44 Speaker_03
with a handful of goals that we'll get to, but I want people to understand how we connected. So, I'm in the middle of training right now.

00:40:51 Speaker_03
I have to say, I feel better than I've felt with the exception of a little bit of elbow nonsense that is not from this specifically. It's a recurring thing. I feel better than I have in years. Well, that's good to hear.

00:41:02 Speaker_03
Just from this little bit already, we've got... Just from the little bit that we've done. And the follow-up question to that is, when people are training for handstands at home, so self-taught, What are the biggest mistakes that they make?

00:41:17 Speaker_01
Well, they won't like the answer. This is a little bit of national team coach attitude coming out. People tend to want what they want when they want, and that's fine.

00:41:26 Speaker_01
If I'm looking for mediocre to average results, if I'm looking to really do best effort, I've got to back shit up and I've got to take care of my business. And for most of the adults, it's going to be they have severe compromises in their mobility.

00:41:42 Speaker_01
Their shoulders don't work well. Their hips don't work. Their knees don't work. Their elbows are shot. Their forearms are tight from all the desk patrol. Their calves are like piano wire from sitting all the time. We won't even talk about hip flexor.

00:41:57 Speaker_01
Their scaps don't move. Their scapula have no motion. They can't protract. They can't retract.

00:42:02 Speaker_01
Their spine is locked in just a flat or kyphoid so they're hunched over their lower back It's continually arched and they're just kind of frozen in this position and then they want to try to move their body Now the common one that we get from people as well.

00:42:20 Speaker_01
These are extreme ranges of motion These are artificial ranges of motion and actually these are your natural range of motion Problem is they quit using it And so it just atrophied. We're not doing anything special.

00:42:33 Speaker_01
We're just, we have to recreate that natural range of motion first. We've been doing, gosh, I don't know now, maybe since 2006, working with the adults.

00:42:43 Speaker_01
And the thing that just, we keep having my nose rubbed in it over and over and over again, every time I think I have it down. I find I need to take it further, it's just the complete other lack of joint prep and mobility they come to the table with.

00:42:55 Speaker_01
Even your own case is an excellent example. We haven't done anything advanced yet. We're doing all basic, we're doing fundamental stuff, and you're already feeling better than in years.

00:43:06 Speaker_03
Well, I think a lot of it has to do with two things if I'm trying to self-diagnose. The first is identifying musculature and motor patterns that I simply had not developed properly previously.

00:43:20 Speaker_03
Even if I had a passing familiarity, like, well, let me frame this in the form of a question. So, can you define what the hollow position is, why it's important, and how How do most normals do when they do a, say, hollow body rock?

00:43:32 Speaker_03
Maybe you can explain that too.

00:43:34 Speaker_01
Most people, when they think of abs, they think lower ab, they think upper abs. They're not going to think about obliques at all, and they're not going to think transverse abdominis at all.

00:43:44 Speaker_01
So, lower abs are easy, upper ab easy, obliques, okay, they understand the sideways, they don't understand how obliques wrap around into the lats, into the lower back. Okay, that's fine.

00:43:54 Speaker_01
But transverse abdominis, they're like, excuse me, was that English? They don't have a clue. And that's what supports the body when it's in a straight body position.

00:44:03 Speaker_01
So, for example, ab rollers were, we don't use them in our program, but just as an example, ab rollers were getting a bad knock that if you do an ab roller, you're gonna hurt your lower back. Well, yes and no.

00:44:16 Speaker_01
You'll hurt your back if you're doing it wrong, if you're arched in your lower back. So, for definitions, if my lower back is arched, I'm in anterior pelvic tilt.

00:44:26 Speaker_01
If I'm the opposite movement and I'm kind of my tailbone tucked under and my lower back is flat, that's posterior pelvic tilt. Well, when my body's horizontal, then my back is supported when I'm posterior pelvic tilt.

00:44:40 Speaker_01
If I'm arched, it's unsupported by the musculature and I'm hanging by the disc.

00:44:45 Speaker_03
Which is true for a ton of exercises that we do. If I feel it in my lower back... almost universally when I send you videos the feedback is more PPT posterior pelvic tilt. It should just be a mantra.

00:44:58 Speaker_03
Yeah and for people who need a way to visualize this because I realize a lot of this vocab is new and coach feel free to interrupt at any point but an easy way to think about and remember anterior pelvic tilt

00:45:09 Speaker_03
is imagine that your waist is the top of a wine glass. If you have anterior pelvic tilt to the front, you're going to be pouring wine out the front of that glass, basically out of your belly button.

00:45:21 Speaker_03
And if you have posterior pelvic tilt, you're tucking that tailbone, you're going to be pouring wine basically down your sacrum, you know, down the back of your body. It's just an easy way for me to remember

00:45:31 Speaker_01
That is clever. I gotta say, 40 years of national team and I've never heard it described that way.

00:45:37 Speaker_03
It may be our go-to definition. You know, I can't do the gymnastics. I'll have to stick with refining my definitions. Although, I am making progress with the fundamentals. Yes, you are. I'd like to talk about the assessment that we did.

00:45:50 Speaker_03
So, I flew out to a great gym, Awaken Gymnastics in Colorado, and we met up.

00:45:55 Speaker_01
That's our GB master affiliate. We only have one in the world. Awaken in Denver is our number one GB affiliate. They're the best at what they do.

00:46:03 Speaker_03
Yeah, it's a fantastic gym and we did quite a few hours of various assessments. If somebody wanted to try to self-assess or videotape themselves to have say someone qualified in gymnastics assess them.

00:46:17 Speaker_03
If you were to do an 80-20 analysis like which movements or exercises give you the most data? Most bang for the buck.

00:46:26 Speaker_01
Let's see, so what, we went over with you, we checked hanging leg lift. Hanging leg lift automatically is going to tell me dynamic range of motion.

00:46:34 Speaker_03
Is that right? That's like on a stall bar, you don't want to be free swinging.

00:46:38 Speaker_01
Well, it could be, you know, most of them, you know, whatever, they can do it.

00:46:41 Speaker_01
It'll, to my eye, as soon as I see it, or our staff's eye, they're going to know right away whether or not that person has adequate, it's going to tell us your core strength and it's going to tell me hamstring flexibility. That'll do that in one.

00:46:53 Speaker_01
Bridge. Bridge is a huge one for adults. That's been one of our, we have a thoracic bridge core stretch series. That's been one of our best selling products. That's what I'm doing this evening. Yeah, yeah.

00:47:05 Speaker_01
Notice, notice guys that Tim's real happy right now. That'll change in just a few.

00:47:09 Speaker_03
Yeah. What characterizes, this is a really important question, what characterizes a good bridge?

00:47:14 Speaker_03
And for people who are thinking of bridge, I mean, it's imagine you're laying on your back, you put your palms down by your ears, let's say, feet flat on the ground, and then you go up into an arch. Now,

00:47:24 Speaker_03
I was extremely surprised and found it quite hilarious how bad my bridge was. I mean, terrible.

00:47:32 Speaker_01
In the assessment, but... By your standards, yes. By what I see on a normal basis, yours was medium.

00:47:38 Speaker_03
Medium. It was like a D plus. It was like on the verge of passing. But I realized, despite all of my many years of wrestling, where we did tons of bridges, almost all of my bridging comes from bending at the low back, right? So, my lumbar bend.

00:47:52 Speaker_03
Which is a huge issue.

00:47:54 Speaker_01
Yeah. So, what is a good bridge? Little background. So, the lumbar, the lower back, is not... Designed to have a ton of movement in it a big arch your thoracic spine your upper and your middle back They're designed to have a lot of movement.

00:48:08 Speaker_01
They're designed to rotate your lower back is not but when most people do their bridge work They're so compromised now even back up a little bit more there They're so compromised in range of motion their upper body because they've been hitting the weights hard.

00:48:22 Speaker_01
They've been doing just a lot of high-intensity training Now, to preface that, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that at all.

00:48:30 Speaker_01
If you weren't one of God's gifts when you were born, you've got to do something to make up the deficit. The problem is, when they do all that weight training, they're not doing it in balance and maintaining their mobility.

00:48:42 Speaker_01
If they had, they wouldn't have the issues that they ran into. So if all you do is strength, strength, strength, strength, strength, then you can always tell someone who has their, they're the curl king and they're the bench press king.

00:48:52 Speaker_01
They come in and they're hunched over and their elbows don't straighten, their arms don't go behind them at all and they're like, you know, my shoulders are killing me.

00:49:00 Speaker_01
most of the time what we found is, yeah their shoulders are completely effed up, I agree, but their biceps are crazy tight also, and that bicep runs up through the front of the shoulder, and it's manifesting itself as a shoulder issue.

00:49:13 Speaker_01
So, kind of all these come together, long story short, to cause them a huge problem being able to get into a proper bridge, which It should be all upper body, no lower back almost at all. But people are doing the exact opposite.

00:49:28 Speaker_01
They hurt their lower back and they say, man, these bridges are dangerous. No, the bridges aren't dangerous. Doing them half-assed and wrong without vetting your sources of information is dangerous.

00:49:37 Speaker_03
I found it incredibly as someone who's had a, basically a frozen thoracic for God knows how long, ten years.

00:49:47 Speaker_01
Sure, we were worried about that. I remember, we're like, hmm, I wonder how well we'll work through this.

00:49:52 Speaker_03
Tim has the upper body mobility of a Lego figure. What are we gonna do? So, but just the progression of doing... And of course, people should look for visual references, and I'll point them to a bunch of... I'll point them to a bunch of resources.

00:50:03 Speaker_03
Exactly, they're on all our courses. And I'll point them to a bunch of resources in the show notes, but can you walk through the checkboxes? Because I know we've done this even recently.

00:50:13 Speaker_03
The concept, I don't know why this didn't even occur to me, but of helping to take the lower back out of the equation by elevating the feet.

00:50:19 Speaker_01
Elevating the feet, yep. And elevating them as high as necessary. Some people are so tight that they basically start in a handstand. And it is what it is, right? The main thing that we try to always hammer with students is they're always in a hurry.

00:50:34 Speaker_01
I've got to get it right now. Even our conversation, you remember way back when started that way. And I was like, dude, if you can handle it, we need, we need to change gears here. We need to go slow now in order to go fast later.

00:50:45 Speaker_03
Well, you said if you want to be a stud later, you have to be a pud now, I think were your words.

00:50:49 Speaker_01
Yeah. That, that sounds like a smart ass remark. That's a good one.

00:50:54 Speaker_03
I wrote that down.

00:50:55 Speaker_01
I've corrupted you all your great podcasts and I've corrupted you.

00:50:58 Speaker_03
So what are the other check boxes? So let's just say they get the feet up and they're like, okay.

00:51:03 Speaker_01
Feet elevated to the point where they're not feeling dress on the lower back. Now it'll depend on pressing strength also.

00:51:12 Speaker_01
If they're very weak in the shoulders, then they're gonna have to start from the handstand and work their way down, but we'll assume they've got feet elevated. Hip high or higher if necessary, doesn't matter a bit.

00:51:25 Speaker_01
Then from there, we're gonna work on, most people are gonna be up, they're gonna have bent elbows, so we're gonna work on straightening the arms. No matter how close they are, they could be wide.

00:51:34 Speaker_01
It'd be wide, yeah, because, gosh, I had one special forces guy that came to me years ago, tough, tough guy, first name Mark, and he had gained 80 pounds of muscle. 80 pounds of muscle. Oh yeah, he was just like, holy moly, and he was just a beast.

00:51:51 Speaker_01
But he had completely effed himself up, because all he did was gain strength without mobility.

00:51:57 Speaker_01
And athletically, unless my sport is just purely lifting, unless I'm a powerlifter, unless I'm an Olympic lifter, then maximal strength is not my sole criteria for being successful.

00:52:09 Speaker_01
In fact, usually the strongest athletes in the weight room are not the best athletes on the field of play. In fact, I don't know a single exception.

00:52:18 Speaker_01
There may be one there somewhere that someone can share with us and let me know, but I've been around the world. I won't say as many people as you know, but in 40 years of world-class gymnastics, I've met a ton of people. I've never seen an exception.

00:52:34 Speaker_01
He couldn't even hang on a bar anymore with his arms straight without hitting his head.

00:52:40 Speaker_03
Wow.

00:52:40 Speaker_01
You think your shoulders are tight and pull a mark and he was like, coach, what can you do for me? For once I was at a loss for words, which is rare for me. I think you're screwed.

00:52:49 Speaker_03
And so what did you do with him in the bridge? Was he just stuck?

00:52:54 Speaker_01
We, he couldn't even, that's, this was hanging on a bar. We, we couldn't even get an operation. It was impossible. What we would do with someone like that in Mark. So you're, you're more, so guys, just, just to give the audience some, some feedback.

00:53:07 Speaker_01
I went into Tim's assessment expecting medium, medium, and Tim was much more mobile, much more athletic, much more well-prepared than I had anticipated. So.

00:53:19 Speaker_01
I had spent a lot of time putting a custom program together for Tim that because he did so well in his assessment, I had to throw the whole damn thing away.

00:53:28 Speaker_01
Because basically, he was too advanced for what we had assumed he was coming to the table with. Someone who is crazy compromised, we're going to have to sneak up on it. We're going to have to get in there and we're going to have to first do pec minor.

00:53:41 Speaker_01
We got to loosen up pec minor. We got to get in there and we got to work on the bicep tendon. We got to get the bicep tendon going. We got to work on Forearms get forearms loose. We've got to break the scaps. So there's some motion there.

00:53:53 Speaker_01
We have to do all of that It's not high-intensity work, but it's got to be done.

00:53:58 Speaker_01
And as you heard Tim say the body thrives on it It's like a tonic for the body the body feels so much better because it's what the body's supposed to do A lot of people don't care for it because it's not the high-intensity sexy work, but it's that Fundamental work that makes the high-intensity sexy work

00:54:17 Speaker_01
possible later. Not only possible, but safer. That's a good point because we had, I think one of the questions that people asked, Tim asked for questions on Twitter, you know, what would you like me to ask Coach Sommer?

00:54:29 Speaker_01
And some of the people came back with, you know, I know someone who's a gymnast and they're just beat the shit. And my answer to that is simple. They weren't my athlete. They weren't my athlete, huh? We don't train through pain.

00:54:42 Speaker_01
As a national team coach, for a long time, physical preparation was always our number one priority. We built the physical structure first. Because if you think about it, it's kind of silly.

00:54:53 Speaker_01
And we see this a lot with people who are getting into weightlifting, they're crossfitters. They're Olympic lifting and they're enthusiastic, they're excited, and they want to get that weight on the bar.

00:55:03 Speaker_01
They're trying to build technique with a flawed range of motion, which of course gives them effed up technique and it doesn't work, and then they get hurt. Or you hear someone, oh, I changed my shoe and I blew my knee.

00:55:14 Speaker_01
Seriously, your knee is that tight that because your heel of your new shoe is a fraction of an inch higher or a slightly different angle that your knee blew? In our training program, we call everything, you need an optimal surplus.

00:55:26 Speaker_01
You need an optimal surplus.

00:55:28 Speaker_01
range of mobility, range of motion, you need an optimal surplus of strength, you need an optimal surplus of stability, you need what you need to perform and a little extra for when things go south, not if things go south, when things go south.

00:55:44 Speaker_01
And if you're just riding the edge of what you're capable of, And they hope, oh, nothing will go wrong. I hope nothing will go wrong. Oh, it is going to go wrong. Absolutely going to go wrong. And so you prepare the body for that ahead of time.

00:55:56 Speaker_01
So when it does go wrong, it's like, ah, that didn't hurt. I didn't get nothings injured. Moving on, next turn.

00:56:02 Speaker_03
Well, one of the questions that you've asked me multiple times when we've been going over different workouts, and I would mention, for instance, I felt it in my bicep. Like, I felt an extreme stretch in my bicep.

00:56:14 Speaker_03
So, for instance, there's a movement that we've been calling a German hang. A lot of people would call it skin the cat, perhaps. Very similar where you would hold on to, say, a bar or rings in this case.

00:56:25 Speaker_03
And I'm gonna simplify this, of course, but tucking up, going back, in between the rings and then hanging down with as little of a pike at the hips as possible. Nice flat back, nice straight hips. Exactly. And sort of palms facing towards the ground.

00:56:42 Speaker_03
And I was saying, I really felt an incredible stretch in my biceps more than in the shoulders. And your question would be, and this is applied to different body parts, where did you feel it in the bicep?

00:56:50 Speaker_03
This is getting back to the not training through pain comment. And could you describe why... You're like, if it's in the middle, I don't really care. And same for, like, the abs. Like, we can smash those all day long.

00:57:04 Speaker_03
If it's at the attachment points, though, then I wanna know about it. Or we're gonna dial it back.

00:57:09 Speaker_01
So, why is that? I'm gonna sneak around to it.

00:57:12 Speaker_01
So most people when they do their training, meaning well and I'm not slamming anyone by any means and the only reason that we know this and are able to share is because all these years I've been doing this I made the same effing mistakes that they make.

00:57:26 Speaker_01
We just survived my stupidity and learned how to do better. It's the story of my life. Story of all of our lives, right?

00:57:34 Speaker_01
I used to tell my athletes, there are stupid gymnasts and there are old gymnasts, but there are no old stupid gymnasts, because they're all dead.

00:57:42 Speaker_01
But most people, most beginners, they want to base all their training off muscular fatigue, which is a problem. It's problematic because muscle tissue regenerates about every 90 days. About every 90 days.

00:57:56 Speaker_01
You know, from end to end, all the cells, everything's done in 90 days. Okay, that's well, that's fine. But connective tissue takes 200 to 210 days. So we have a huge gap.

00:58:08 Speaker_01
So if I get in and I'm just sitting on, I'm not a big fan of beginners training to failure, simply because their structure isn't mature enough yet to handle it safely.

00:58:20 Speaker_01
And by mature, I simply mean enough productive, well-structured hours under their belt.

00:58:26 Speaker_03
Particularly if it's in new ranges of motion, right?

00:58:30 Speaker_01
Particularly if there's joints. If it's a muscle belly, like you said, if we're doing core, we'll beat your core down all day long and I'm not worried about it a bit because it's just muscular fatigue.

00:58:41 Speaker_01
But as soon as we get joints involved, everything changes and it's actually really easy for people to verify because they can think back over all the injuries they've had over their training career, you know, in their athletic career, playing around with the kids in the backyard.

00:58:54 Speaker_01
The vast majority of those injuries are all joint-related. Almost always. It's extremely rare for someone to have a muscle belly injury. It just doesn't happen.

00:59:04 Speaker_01
Yet their training, especially in the beginning, is all skewed just towards muscular development, not connective tissue development. And that's where they get into trouble.

00:59:13 Speaker_01
So when they come to us, the first thing we like is for them to spend... Is it going to be boring? It is. You know, 210 days, we're talking six, seven months of Dial it back, guys. Dial it back.

00:59:25 Speaker_03
And I think that it's important to emphasize, too, that dialing it back, it means that you're not rushing, but it doesn't mean you won't experience a lot of progress, if that's fair to say.

00:59:35 Speaker_01
I think that's crazy fair to say, and you found that yourself.

00:59:39 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:59:39 Speaker_01
But what happens is some of them, we run into this, maybe you have also, is we get some people who are addicted to the rush. They're addicted to the adrenaline rush. They're addicted to laying there in a pile of sweat.

00:59:51 Speaker_01
You know, they want to do the sweat angels. They want to crawl out of the gym. And the problem with that is if you're a world-class athlete, you can't do that because I have to be back in the gym the next day and train again.

01:00:03 Speaker_01
I can't afford to destroy myself or the special operations guys we work with. We've got to be able to do both. They've got to be operational. and increase their performance through their training, but they have to go hand in hand.

01:00:15 Speaker_01
And so it's only in beginners that we see they think somehow they can cheat time. It can't be done. I mean, connective tissue is going to take 200 to 210 days. There's no supplement. You can't paint yourself blue. You can't dance under the moon.

01:00:29 Speaker_01
There's nothing you can do to speed that up. It's going to take what it takes. And so, we work as hard as we can within those parameters. If there's joint pain, we shut it down. Your elbow is a good example. Years ago, pushing too hard.

01:00:44 Speaker_01
Now, if we tweak that elbow a little too much, it flares up on you. We'll repair it. It's going to take time, but it takes much longer to repair it than it does to avoid it in the first place.

01:00:54 Speaker_03
Yeah, for sure. And just a couple of notes, and then I'm going to swing back to the diagnostics, you know, how people can assess.

01:01:02 Speaker_03
But another conversation, you know, topic that came up, I think I'm sure I brought it up at dinner once, was the use of anabolics or any type of growth agents.

01:01:13 Speaker_03
And the point that you made, which makes perfect sense, is that would just increase the likelihood of having

01:01:21 Speaker_03
connective tissue problems in gymnasts because the muscular strength and growth would outpace the development of and the adaptation of the tissues.

01:01:30 Speaker_01
Completely would backfire, huge backfire. Where students make their greatest gains in strength is to be able to do dynamic plyometric work and straight arm ring strength. Those are your two biggest bangs for the buck.

01:01:44 Speaker_01
What we have learned the hard way that's different, the main difference between working with young developmental athletes and full-grown adults is the order in which we need to present the material.

01:01:55 Speaker_01
As a young athlete, I can do all physical components at once. I can do plyometric, I can do straight arm, I can do their mobility, bent arm, it doesn't matter a bit. I can do it all at one time.

01:02:06 Speaker_01
but an adult who's now fragile from years of making a living, sitting at a desk, day in, day out, as they get a little older, kids get bigger, levels of activities drop, drop, drop, drop, and they're compromised.

01:02:19 Speaker_01
We have to build these things in a different order. We have to first go rebuild mobility, then we have to rebuild core, by core I'm talking not just abs, but obliques and lower back.

01:02:30 Speaker_01
Most adults, a lot of their lower back pain isn't lower back related, it's oblique related. We have to go in and we have to correct that. Then we can worry about regular strength.

01:02:40 Speaker_01
Once those things are done, then we can get to the moneymaker, which is their dynamic strength.

01:02:45 Speaker_01
But with an adult, especially a strong adult, who's been athletically inactive, so they've been doing strength training, but not out moving, doing sports, being active, you know, outside of their conditioning.

01:02:59 Speaker_01
Or, let's say for example, all they're doing is squats.

01:03:04 Speaker_01
and they're very linear in the path of their knee, and there's no meniscus work, there's no MCL work, there's no ACL work, then they go outside, they play a little softball, we hear it all the time, yeah, when I was playing softball, I blew my knee going around first base.

01:03:18 Speaker_01
Really? How many kids blow a knee running around for a space?

01:03:22 Speaker_03
I mean, the supplemental knee exercises that look wacky as hell when you first look at them that you've had me do, and maybe we can show some of this to people in the show notes.

01:03:31 Speaker_03
Even in the span of three or four weeks, I've seen a huge difference in knee stability improvement because I haven't ever performed these types of targeted movements before.

01:03:41 Speaker_03
Coming back to the diagnostics, we talked about the bridge, we talked about the hanging leg lifts. Are there any other movements? Shoulder extension will be huge. Shoulder extension would be sitting on the floor.

01:03:54 Speaker_01
Sitting on the floor, sitting in that pike that you described earlier, hands touching behind them. And then without letting the hands move, trying to scoot the butt as far forward away from the hands as they could.

01:04:07 Speaker_01
Just that one movement right there is going to let us see, going to show me their scapular health. Can they protract? Can they retract? It's going to tell me how tight their pec minor is. It's going to tell me how tight their bicep is.

01:04:22 Speaker_01
And it's going to tell me how tight their brachialis down by the elbow is. Oh, the brachialis.

01:04:28 Speaker_03
Yes, your favorite. My good friend, the brachialis.

01:04:31 Speaker_03
And also just, and this relates to kind of daily living, a lot of people who have back pain, myself included, quite a few years ago, if you're wondering if you have a tight pec minor, you can just Google pec minor and figure out where it is, but basically think right under the clavicle.

01:04:43 Speaker_03
Get a lacrosse ball, you know, go on the wall and try to roll out your pec minor with a lacrosse ball. And if you have back pain, you don't always fix that back pain by just focusing on the location of that pain. That's a good point.

01:04:57 Speaker_03
And you start addressing the pec minor and a lot of that stuff is alleviated. And I want to throw one thing out there just for people who might be interested.

01:05:04 Speaker_03
And that is, I think part of the reason I seemed or was better prepared for the assessment than I would have been otherwise is that I started doing

01:05:15 Speaker_03
really just one thing, one type of new exercise, which was compression strength training in that pike position. And did that for just maybe two times per week prior to doing the assessment as I was traveling.

01:05:31 Speaker_03
And for people who are wondering what this is like, if you really want to feel humbled as I did, I was traveling, I was in Columbia. a very close friend of mine, almost got to professional rugby in New Zealand. He's a beast.

01:05:44 Speaker_03
I mean, athletically, a.k.a. beast, extremely strong, extremely fast. He's always going to be one of the top performers in the gym when he walks into a weight room. And he saw me doing pike pulses.

01:05:56 Speaker_03
And so I'll explain what this is to folks, because he was kind of laughing at me, and he's like, what kind of Jane Fonda bullshit are you doing here, you know? I love that name.

01:06:04 Speaker_03
And I said, all right, big guy, you're such a tough guy, let's see you do these. So for those people who are interested, so you're sitting in this seated pike position we're talking about, right?

01:06:13 Speaker_03
So you're sitting on your ass on the floor, the upper body perpendicular with the floor, and your legs out straight in front of you, and point your toes. kind of tense your quads to push the back of your knees into the floor.

01:06:25 Speaker_03
Then reach forward and stretch forward as far as you can, get your fingers out on either side of your legs as far out as you can, and then just try to lift your heels off the ground, keeping your legs completely straight, and just pulse it up and down, like, eh, three to four inches, maybe, if you can manage that.

01:06:39 Speaker_03
And just do, try to do 30 of those. And my, my buddy... could not lift his heels off the ground and just fell over laughing. He's like, yeah, okay, those are hard.

01:06:49 Speaker_03
But that compression, if you think about the range of motion that most people train for core, they're doing sit-ups or maybe they're doing hanging leg lifts up to like an L-sit. So their legs are getting up to kind of parallel height.

01:07:03 Speaker_03
Well, that last 90 degrees, and especially the last like 45 degrees where you're bringing your thighs towards your chest, is so hard. I mean, I had zero strength there prior to doing just a few weeks of this stuff. It just amazed me.

01:07:17 Speaker_03
And for those people also, we were talking about the transverse abdominis. Coach, feel free to veto this, but I think it's also nicknamed the corset muscle if you're trying to think of what they might look like as it wraps around the abdomen.

01:07:28 Speaker_03
So if you cough a lot or laugh a lot and get really, really sore, it's very frequently often engaging that transverse. But...

01:07:37 Speaker_03
Let me ask you, so you mentioned CrossFit, you mentioned a couple of things, you know, the drenched in sweat, doing the Sweat Angels. What are your feelings about kipping movements, like kipping pull-ups?

01:07:49 Speaker_01
Another eye had to open that can of worms.

01:07:52 Speaker_03
Well, I was asking a mutual friend, I won't name him, and I said, what should I talk to Coach Sommer about? And he said, hipping pull-ups, he'll lose his shit.

01:07:58 Speaker_01
So I said, okay, I gotta ask him. We started, I was the original gymnastics guy for CrossFit way back in the early 2000s and ended up leaving.

01:08:08 Speaker_01
I was there before there was the first CrossFit affiliate, when all there was was Glassman working out at that little gym in Santa Cruz.

01:08:16 Speaker_01
left just because to do GST right, like anything, a dichotomy that I always find curious with people, especially the CrossFitters, is they will be so on point with dissecting everything they do in terms of their Olympic lifting.

01:08:33 Speaker_01
You know, my pull is here, my pull is there, my knee was a quarter inch this way. I mean, they're just methodical.

01:08:39 Speaker_01
And they don't bring, and I shouldn't say just CrossFitters, but then they, other people, they don't bring that same degree of attention to detail to their body weight work.

01:08:50 Speaker_01
So one is supposed to be meticulous and one is somehow just supposed to be thrown together, yet they expect the same quality results. So if we look back in the day, CrossFit, you know, their lifting was nothing by national standards.

01:09:03 Speaker_01
Now they get people who are qualifying to go to nationals. Fast forward all those years in terms of their gymnastic strength training and they're not even remotely close. They don't match a national team.

01:09:15 Speaker_01
They don't match a state level athlete, let alone a national level, let alone an international level. They're not even in the same ballpark. And part of the issue is because The kipping pull-ups were a huge big deal. It was a moneymaker.

01:09:30 Speaker_01
You know, I'll be straight out, I'll piss some people off, but it was a moneymaker.

01:09:34 Speaker_01
As advertising for a program, they could bring someone in who's never been able to do a pull-up, have them hold their chin by the bar and let them fall, hit the bottom of that movement, bounce back to the top, and the person's eyes light up and they're like, you know, this is the best effing thing ever.

01:09:50 Speaker_01
I've never done a pull-up in my entire life. Oh my God, oh my God. And they're pumped. What they didn't realize is that this person has compromised basic strength and compromised shoulder flexion. They don't have mobility in their shoulder.

01:10:04 Speaker_01
So they're hitting the bottom of that movement with multiples of body weight. So they weren't strong enough to do a regular pull-up. So now we're going to drop them on connective tissue with multiples of body weight. That's got to go somewhere.

01:10:15 Speaker_01
So it's going to force that shoulder to open further than it can handle. And I'm going to bounce off that connective tissue like a trampoline back to the top of the bar. And then to make to pour salt on the wound.

01:10:26 Speaker_01
Now I'm going to do a shitload of reps at the same time. I'm just going to crank on it. And they were getting people who were coming in and, you know, cross it with, there's no proof there's out of that, you know, bullshit, bullshit.

01:10:36 Speaker_01
You got, you guys can live in a dream world all you want. It was blowing people up and

01:10:41 Speaker_01
Now, the good thing, though, and to their credit, you know, it took time, there was a denial, no, it has nothing to do with it, but now we're seeing a recommendation of, you know what, guys, we gotta start getting some basic strength built first, some basic mobility, and then at that time, kipping pull-ups, absolutely, there's nothing wrong with it, they're healthy, they're good to do on a healthy shoulder joint with a good foundation of basic strength, but a beginner doing kipping pull-ups, really, that's insanity, that's just pouring gasoline on a fire.

01:11:09 Speaker_03
So kipping then is the finishing addition. It is not the starting element.

01:11:15 Speaker_01
We started working with adults. So our first, we do seminars all around the world. You know, we spend a lot of time doing hands on and our very first one we did, I don't know, 2007 or so.

01:11:27 Speaker_01
And we've got all these people, we've got all these beasts here and they're strong and tried to do my entry-level plyometric work on some floor work with them. And the stronger the athlete, the faster they went down.

01:11:42 Speaker_01
Knees, lower back, ankles, on baby stuff. Baby stuff. I mean, we're not talking anything hard. We're talking about standing in place and with knees straight, being able to bounce down the floor using just your calves. No way.

01:11:55 Speaker_01
Their tissues couldn't take it. They hadn't done anything like it. Or we had 15 minutes on the schedule, for example, how bad mobility was. We had 15 minutes on the schedule to stretch. Nothing hard, nothing intricate, nothing intense.

01:12:09 Speaker_01
Just an easy, basic stretch. Get them loosened up for the day. That stretch took an hour and a half to complete. It was an hour and a half, Tim. It was an hour and a half. There were bodies lying everywhere.

01:12:22 Speaker_01
It was like I was in Vietnam or we're filming a war movie. I turned to my staff, I'm like, what the fuck am I supposed to do now? They failed warmup. They failed warmup.

01:12:32 Speaker_03
Now, in fairness, this stuff is really, you would look at it and just like my friend who's like, what is this Jane Fonda bullshit? And I'm like, hey man, why don't you try this for 10 minutes? really taxing.

01:12:44 Speaker_03
I mean, uh, I remember doing one of the stretching routines, which I'll note, I think is, is might be of interest to people, is I'm hitting each once per week. So there's one that is front split focus. It's a very hamstring focus.

01:12:59 Speaker_03
There's one that is bridge focused and another that is middle split, adductor and middle split focus inside the thigh. And the point that you make is doing this twice a week will not double your progress. It will cut it in half.

01:13:12 Speaker_03
So you're only really hitting each of these once per week. I mean, there are different daily limber protocols, but I remember doing, at the very beginning of one of these workouts, I believe it was, oh no, it was absolutely the front split workout.

01:13:27 Speaker_03
a shit ton, for me, a shit ton of calf raises.

01:13:31 Speaker_01
I remember you moaning about that.

01:13:33 Speaker_03
Like different foot placements. It's like, okay, 180 calf raises later of different variations. I was like, okay, and I'm only three minutes into this. in our long stretch sequence.

01:13:45 Speaker_03
And I know we're bouncing all over the place because I want to give people kind of a buffet sampling of how this training differs.

01:13:50 Speaker_03
But one of the reasons I respect the programming that you put together and the nuance that you bring to this is that the observation then is, and correct me if I'm, or you can elaborate on this if I'm missing something, but a lot of the hamstring flexibility issues or limitations that people perceive are at least in part due to lower leg.

01:14:10 Speaker_03
Absolutely. Issues, including the Achilles. Huge amount of them. Yeah, including the Achilles.

01:14:15 Speaker_03
So you, in this particular progression in the beginning, you're engorging and then stretching the insertion point basically around the heel and then again at the knee and working your way up to the hamstrings and there's a...

01:14:29 Speaker_03
An athlete who's been on the podcast, Amelia Boone, one of the most successful obstacle course racers in the world, and she's basically pointed out the same thing, and she said, yeah, you can take someone who's really inflexible in their hamstrings, have them roll out their feet with, say, a lacrosse ball or something like that, and all of a sudden, they gain two inches in their descent with the hamstrings.

01:14:48 Speaker_01
It's all connected. We found by accident, so we never intended this, and we just...

01:14:54 Speaker_01
Part of what maybe helps people understand the layers of complexity that I approach training with is that, for years, my bread and butter was to produce best athletes in the country. That was my job.

01:15:08 Speaker_01
In order to have a job, I had to produce some of the best athletes in the world, and we had to do it from scratch. And so it becomes an issue of, one, an injured athlete is no good to the United States.

01:15:20 Speaker_01
It doesn't matter how talented he is, how strong he is. If he can't go out on the floor with the USA on his chest, we can't win a medal with him, so he's gotta be healthy.

01:15:30 Speaker_01
And then the second caveat that goes with that is that we're trying to find a way to make the best better. Because these athletes are already the best on the planet, and you're going head-to-head with other athletes who are the best.

01:15:46 Speaker_01
So then, how do you find a way to make something which is almost already perfect even closer to perfect?

01:15:53 Speaker_01
And if you do what everybody else is doing, right, without kind of going out into the jungle, if you will, into Indian country and learning new things, then you can't get a leg up on your competitors.

01:16:05 Speaker_01
Now if we go, we have PhDs who come through on this and that and we always give them major shit. Major shit. Cause the way people think the world works is that they do their research.

01:16:16 Speaker_01
They write about it, they publish it, we learn about it, and we implement it with our athletes. That is not how the way the world works. The way it really works is you've got high-level, world-class coaches who are super bright, decades of experience.

01:16:31 Speaker_01
Just my last senior athlete alone, I had 16,000 hours into training Alan. 16,000 hours spread over 12 years. What is Alan's last name? Bauer, Bauer. So yeah, you guys got to celebrate Alan.

01:16:43 Speaker_01
He, uh, OU just, uh, won national NCA championships again, major blowout by the, uh, largest margin in NCA history. Wow.

01:16:54 Speaker_03
That was the, well, as of this recording very recently.

01:16:57 Speaker_01
Yeah, that was just, uh, this, oh goodness, the weekend of the 15th. I think we're scheduled here to come out sometime in May, but yeah, very, very big deal. But to go back to the other, so we're looking for an edge.

01:17:11 Speaker_01
And so we don't know why some things work. We just know it works. And I started getting notes from therapists around the world. For example, therapists are taught that they should have a neutral spine. You should have a neutral spine.

01:17:25 Speaker_01
I was getting people from around the world and they were writing me, but Athletically, I'm sorry, I'll be direct, but neutral spine athletically is the biggest load of horseshit I've ever heard in my life.

01:17:35 Speaker_01
You can't run with neutral spine, you can't throw with neutral spine, you can't climb with neutral spine, I can't swim, I can't do anything with a neutral spine, except lay in a box, dug in a hole, and they get ready to bury me.

01:17:46 Speaker_01
I mean, that's the only thing I can do. There's nothing athletically I can do with a neutral spine. So we know just automatically to produce athletes, we're not going to do a neutral spine, because torso-wise, there's only two movements.

01:17:59 Speaker_01
I can go from an arch, snap to a hollow, or I can be hollow and snap back to extension to the arch. Those are the only two movements the torso is capable of athletically. Everything else is a variation off that.

01:18:10 Speaker_01
We can add rotation with some throws and some this and that, but that's all there is. So we spend a lot of time building power for that.

01:18:19 Speaker_01
And these therapists around the world started taking our really gentle introductory work and they'd train it on themselves first. And I'm like, you know, just real similar to what you said to him, you know, I feel better than I have in years, coach.

01:18:32 Speaker_01
I feel better in years. And this is completely different from what I was taught in school.

01:18:36 Speaker_03
Maybe we could use an example that we've discussed before, which was a new movement for me, which is Jefferson Curl.

01:18:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, they're having some fun with that. So, we look at Jefferson Crawl right now, so it wasn't that many years ago that if you squatted below parallel, it was heresy. It was heresy. If you went below parallel, the knees couldn't possibly adapt to it.

01:18:57 Speaker_01
You're just going to blow your knees. Your kneecaps were going to just pop off the front, right? It's going to be shrapnel, knee shrapnel. But everybody accepts now that, you know what?

01:19:06 Speaker_01
There is nothing wrong with the body being exposed to its natural range of motion. Now, do you have to build it up gradually? Yes, obviously you do. But Jefferson Crowe falls into that. So, gosh, how do we explain Jefferson Crowe? I can give it a shot.

01:19:22 Speaker_03
Yeah, you'll be better at it. This would be a good exam review for me anyway. So Jefferson Curl is a gradually rounded stiff-legged deadlift. That's the simplest way to visualize it. So if you're looking at...

01:19:38 Speaker_03
an athlete from the side doing a Jefferson curl, they will most likely be standing on a box, holding onto an Olympic barbell right in front of their hips slash legs. So it's just like the very top of a deadlift position.

01:19:52 Speaker_03
But when they start the descent, and it's elevated so that when you have plates on and whatnot, there's room for it. But when they come down, they're gonna tuck their chin, and then vertebra by vertebra, round their back, down,

01:20:08 Speaker_03
all the way into the bottom position, where the objective would be, or one of the objectives would be, to get basically your wrists to the front of your toes.

01:20:16 Speaker_01
Or at least... In a perfect world, if you're advanced enough.

01:20:18 Speaker_03
Yeah, in a perfect world. And of course, doing this very gradually, with supervised attention from somebody who knows what they're doing.

01:20:27 Speaker_03
and then reversing that and again going from this vertebra by vertebra rounding up until you end up in that top position and then repeating. Is that a fair description?

01:20:38 Speaker_01
Fair description. Yeah, the easy is just think of it as a string of pearls and we're just curling one pearl at a time. We've been having some fun with that one. We have done Jefferson curls, I don't know, 12, 15 years now.

01:20:50 Speaker_01
Expected standard is body weight for us.

01:20:53 Speaker_03
Note to people listening, do not try this with body weight right out of the gate.

01:20:57 Speaker_01
No, don't, don't. So, for example, one of our senior students in Australia, in his training, physical therapist, has his own clinic, doing really well. He tried it with just the empty bar, you know, the 20 kilo bar at first.

01:21:09 Speaker_01
Trashed, then he dropped all the way down to, I think, a kilo or two. Which is completely fine, and we'll talk about why in just a sec.

01:21:17 Speaker_01
And then he built up, and last time I checked with Mark over the course of, I don't know, I'm forgetting, there's too many students, but around 12 to 18 months he built up to either 3 quarter body weight or maybe up to full body weight now.

01:21:30 Speaker_01
and back feels better than it ever has. But the key there is people gotta understand is that this was a gradual process over 12 to 18 months. It wasn't just go, we've got a very good, I'll throw Quinn out, I'm gonna butcher Quinn's last name.

01:21:46 Speaker_01
Quinn's a PhD in physical therapy. Quinn Hina does some really good work.

01:21:51 Speaker_03
How do you spell his last name?

01:21:53 Speaker_01
Oh, you had to ask me that.

01:21:55 Speaker_03
We can get it for the show.

01:21:57 Speaker_01
Yeah, we'll get it for the show. Uh, we chat a lot on Facebook and that. Quinn likes to, um, stir the pot, if you will, you know, stir up some shit.

01:22:05 Speaker_01
He's experimented with Jefferson Crowe himself for, I think, going on about three or four years now, and feels wonderful.

01:22:11 Speaker_01
And he'll toss it out, and so one of the things that'll always be come up is, you know, the McGill experiments, where they would take connective tissue from a pig cadaver,

01:22:22 Speaker_01
and put it under such and such amount of strain, and if we put it in this position with this much load, it snaps. Okay, and everyone runs around and the sky is falling, the sky is falling, oh my god, oh my god, don't bend your spine, stay neutral.

01:22:35 Speaker_01
What everyone kind of missed, the big elephant in the room was the pig was fucking dead. The tissue was dead. It can't adapt. It's dead. It's no longer living.

01:22:44 Speaker_01
And it wasn't exposed to very gradual loads so that there could be progressive adaptation, which is what our bodies are really good at. They kind of overlooked all that. So if I take this completely unprepared tissue and I do this to it, it'll break.

01:23:00 Speaker_01
So, some very interesting discussions right now, and obviously everyone's fine, you know, we've got athletes doing great, adults who are doing wonderful, and the physical therapist will come around simply because it's healthy.

01:23:11 Speaker_01
Now, they've got to understand, and other people who are listening should understand also, is that our weighted mobility work needs to be approached with a different mentality, a different level of intensity than conditioning work.

01:23:25 Speaker_01
because connective tissue has one-tenth the metabolic rate of muscular tissue. It heals slower, it adapts slower. So you have to kind of come to the table with a very patient attitude, or as I consider myself, I'm extremely impatient naturally.

01:23:42 Speaker_01
But I've learned in order to get what I want and to go where I want to go, I've had to learn to be patiently impatient.

01:23:49 Speaker_01
If I give in to the urge, then I get hurt, athletes get hurt, we fall apart and we, you know, nationals and Olympic trials are every four years. Nationals are once a year and you don't get another nationals.

01:24:00 Speaker_01
You don't get another Olympic trials if you blow it. You've got to be on point that day. So it teaches us, and our environment was actually a blessing, because it's very much practical, it's very much results-oriented. There's no room for opinion.

01:24:15 Speaker_01
I think. I feel. I prefer. It works. It doesn't work. It produces results. It doesn't produce results. You are the best in the country. You aren't the best in the country. I mean, it's very clear. It's very clear and it can't be argued with.

01:24:30 Speaker_01
And now that was actually something when we segued into kind of the fitness world, if you will, where you come out of national team and then everyone knows who the studs are. In the fitness world, though, everyone's proclaiming they're the stud.

01:24:45 Speaker_01
Everyone's proclaiming they're the national champion. There's nothing to support it. There's no results. There's no great athletes. There's no great abilities that have been generated. There's just the marketing.

01:24:55 Speaker_01
And that was hard to wrap my head around, because a national team, that doesn't exist. You can't go to the Olympics, and the guy who talks the loudest gets the medal. I have the loudest voice. I'm champion.

01:25:04 Speaker_03
I think that's national politics right now. Oh wait, no, never mind.

01:25:07 Speaker_01
Different podcast. I did want to ask you how your visit to the White House, but I figure we'll save that one. Yeah, we'll save that for another time. Yeah, Tim went to the White House last week, guys, so I'll fake his brain for you later.

01:25:17 Speaker_03
So I interrupted, but yeah, you get to the fitness world, and another one of the differences that you pointed out for me, which I really liked, was that

01:25:26 Speaker_03
In the fitness world, it's exercise and diet, whereas in your world, it's always been eat and train.

01:25:34 Speaker_01
It's eat and train. Yeah, eat and train. What the people are trying to do, and I'll throw a little blurb in here, we have an outstanding nutrition program.

01:25:45 Speaker_01
The guy who wrote it, former SEAL Team 6, when he started, but it's back in the day, he was like 140, 145. And then Jeff got all the way up to 220, just shy of 225. Solid muscle and his waist was the same size as when he was thin.

01:26:04 Speaker_01
He looked like two Vikings, two shoulders on top of his body. He came walking, I was like, what the fuck? It had been a couple of years. What the hell did you do? It's these basic nutritional concepts that we teach.

01:26:16 Speaker_01
But what we try to do with adults is they're trying to stay ahead of a bad diet through exercise. They're trying to outrun a bad diet. And it can't be done. It can't be done.

01:26:27 Speaker_01
And then what happens is if they somehow find this crazy combination of massive amounts of cardio, and they can kind of keep their weight in check a little bit, and then they stop that cardio, they immediately start gaining.

01:26:42 Speaker_01
Weight gain, weight loss, all of that should be separate from your conditioning. You know, you've got to get your nutrition dialed in. If your nutrition's dialed in, your body's going to find its natural healthy weight that it's going to operate at.

01:26:54 Speaker_01
Now, if you want to be the giant muscle guy and that's not your phenotype, which is your body type, you know what? Tough shit, deal with it. You know, it's not going to change. You're not going to change your phenotype.

01:27:04 Speaker_01
You're not going to change your body's genetic expression. That being said, you can maximize what your potential is. What we hammered through to our students is you're not responsible for the hand of cards you were dealt.

01:27:17 Speaker_01
You're responsible for maxing out what you were given. Who knows what your strengths will be? Maybe you'll be more endurance. Maybe you're going to carry easy muscle mass. Maybe you're a max strength guy. Maybe you're very skill oriented.

01:27:30 Speaker_01
It doesn't matter. Maybe you're very explosive. but whatever it is, you know, make the most of it.

01:27:35 Speaker_03
So, on that point, and then I wanna come back to, I wanna ask you about, I think it's, I wrote this down during our assessment, Tony Faye, quote, no routines, end quote.

01:27:45 Speaker_03
That's all I wrote down, so that's a cue for a story, I believe that you told me, that we'll come back to. Does that make any sense, or is that just like a cryptic 3 a.m. note that I wrote to myself?

01:27:54 Speaker_03
I don't know, but the... You gotta stay away from the wine, dude. Never, never. In vino veritas. We'll get back to that. Oh, I kind of know what it is. I think I can actually queue it up. The basics? Yeah, we're going to come back to that in one second.

01:28:07 Speaker_03
The question I want to ask first is one that came up a lot from listeners of this podcast, which was, and I'm going to create sort of a composite of these questions, but like if someone is 35 years old, let's just say,

01:28:20 Speaker_03
Former athlete, does basic gym work, diet is okay, not terrible. They feel reasonably athletic, but they're not competing in anything, certainly. Have never done any gymnastics. What would good goals be for such a person?

01:28:38 Speaker_03
And what would bad goals be maybe at the same time?

01:28:40 Speaker_01
Well, that without question, bad goal would be for them to jump right into kind of full body weight, straight arm strength, for example, a back lever. which doesn't require a ton of strength, but they love to do it because it looks so cool.

01:28:56 Speaker_01
It's kind of like their first thing they can do that, you know, wow, look at me. The problem is, is that it puts them in extreme load while in shoulder extension.

01:29:07 Speaker_03
So let me, can I paint a picture for people? So back lever just to create the image and coach correct me if I'm wrong. Imagine you're laying on your stomach on the floor,

01:29:17 Speaker_03
arms by your sides and then you turn your hands palm down so that your thumbs are pointing out away from your body and then you lift your arms off the ground as high as possible with your arms straight and then place a bar in your hands and then lift your body off the ground.

01:29:34 Speaker_03
Off the ground and kind of hold yourself there.

01:29:36 Speaker_01
Sure. Body would be horizontal. Yeah. And what they don't realize is that when the shoulders are in shoulder extension like that, is that the biceps are under maximum stretch. So it's not a problem to do with being strong enough.

01:29:51 Speaker_01
The bicep is too loaded, and they're going to tear a bicep. For a young adult, not a problem at all. And we're lucky. We have a lot of people who use our material. But some of our material, coach, you're too conservative. Coach, it's a new world.

01:30:05 Speaker_01
Coach, we don't have time. I had someone who was 21 or 23 once. Coach, I don't have time to take my time. I'm already 23. Okay. All right.

01:30:14 Speaker_01
I think you're misreading this, but they want to jump right into their strength training and they do well, but they don't do the mobility work. So it wasn't last year. I think it was the year before.

01:30:23 Speaker_01
I think maybe the street workout community, five of their top guys around the world snapped biceps. These are crazy strong guys, right? I mean, we see them. These guys are beasts. They're doing one arm chins. They're doing this and that.

01:30:35 Speaker_01
They all snapped them on back lever stuff. because the mobility wasn't in line. Now, we all know when you're young, you can get away with a lot of stupid shit because the body heals so fast. Luckily, right?

01:30:48 Speaker_01
I certainly wouldn't have survived being 21 if it wasn't that the case. But as an adult, the structure is mature now. And I think maybe a better way to look at it is people think I'm getting older, ligaments are breaking down,

01:31:04 Speaker_01
tendons are breaking down, joints are getting brittle, and actually that's not the case, because if we go back in time when you were a little guy, when I was a little guy, when all listeners were a little guy, we ran around like madmen, right?

01:31:16 Speaker_01
It wasn't, oh, today I'm going to ride my bike three miles. It was, sun was up, go jump on my bike and I'm gone all day. And I'm running, I'm jumping, I'm climbing, and we're just being crazy little guys.

01:31:27 Speaker_01
So we had this huge matrix of activity that the body is used to. Then we hit high school, and for most people, that's our first exposure to structured athletic training. Okay? And the body does well with it.

01:31:40 Speaker_01
Now, the mistake is thinking that the body did well solely because of that structured athletic training. What they're overlooking is all that activity, that matrix of activity that occurred for those years prior to that.

01:31:54 Speaker_01
Then if they're a high enough level athlete, structured training might continue into college. I'm You meet the cutie, right? You meet the love of your life. You get married. Suddenly I can't go play basketball every night now.

01:32:22 Speaker_01
Okay, so we do this and that and a little at a time, our levels of physical activity outside of conditioning are dropping down and they're dropping down a lot. Then kids come. All right, well, there's another huge chunk of time gone.

01:32:36 Speaker_01
Then before you know it, you're 30, you're 35, you haven't been doing hitting the gym very often. There's certainly not a time for just playful activity or doing sports or this or that on a regular basis for most people, right?

01:32:50 Speaker_01
And they spend most of the time hunched over that desk. Now, the body wants to be healthy. It wants to be healthy. That's your prime example. We feed it the right movements, in the right dosages, and it blooms, it blossoms.

01:33:03 Speaker_01
It's like weeding and watering a garden, right? The body wants to be healthy, but we have to do it in the right dosage. And so, for example, those street worker guys, they hurt themselves because it was the wrong dosage.

01:33:13 Speaker_01
They wanted to go too hard, too soon, without the mobility. So for an adult to come back around answering that question a long way, 35-year-old, very first thing we got to do, we got to fix joints. We got to repair joints.

01:33:27 Speaker_01
We got to get that range of motion back.

01:33:29 Speaker_03
If you were to look at all of the adults that you've dealt with, let's just say 35-year-olds, if you had to pick, and of course this does not cover all the bases, but if you had to pick, say, three to five movements or exercises or stretches for addressing the most common deficiencies, like getting those joints back into play, what would some of your selections be?

01:33:51 Speaker_01
So just for joint joint, I think we'd put Jefferson Curl at top of the list. Because remember, we have multiple sections of the spine, right? We've got the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar. That's going to come through also into glutes.

01:34:04 Speaker_01
That's going to go down into our hamstrings. That's going to hit our calves. That's going to hit our Achilles as well. So for one, that's a lot of bang for your buck for one exercise.

01:34:14 Speaker_01
Even if that was all you did, right, and you just did Jefferson Crow, a lot of aches and pains are going to go away because of that. Next one was tough. It's always hard to boil it down. Boil it down. We took care of Pike. We've got to get extension.

01:34:29 Speaker_01
We've got to get some thoracic extension. I'd throw elevated bridge in there if arm strength was sufficient to handle it. If not, we can scale it down to some weighted work with some bars or some barbells, either some dowel with a plate.

01:34:44 Speaker_01
We've got to get shoulder extension in there. Because what happens a lot, a lot of the conditioning we're exposed to is all front delt heavy.

01:34:52 Speaker_01
It's all anterior delt, and pecs get tight, the anterior delts are getting tight, and we start pulling our own shoulders forward, we create our own impingement. It doesn't matter, you know, so I'll do more exercises, I'll do more exercises.

01:35:06 Speaker_01
Well, no, you're just making it worse. What the problem is, is there's not balance in the shoulder joint. There's no retraction, and it's easy to tell. What does their posture look like? What do we see with everyone now?

01:35:17 Speaker_01
They've got that, what do they even have a term now? Texting neck? Kind of that turtle forward, distended forward.

01:35:23 Speaker_03
It's like the Wall-E powered down look, I guess.

01:35:26 Speaker_01
Yeah, and you know, the scary thing there, and again, we have some PTs who use our stuff around the world with a lot of success, and they're the ones who come in and educate us for, we'll say, you know, we've noticed this, and they tell us, they teach us, well, to the limit we can, because we're not professionals.

01:35:42 Speaker_01
But to the limits we can, they start teaching us the mechanics of what is really going on. So we have a very good student, Wesley Tan, who runs one of our affiliates.

01:35:52 Speaker_01
He's a full-time osteopath in the UK, who runs another one of our GB affiliates, Forma GST. And Wesley's the one who taught me that there's a point coach where if you abuse the body, it's not going to come back.

01:36:08 Speaker_01
And so, for example, you see some older adults who are extremely hunched forward, neck distended forward, chin up because they're trying to see where they're going.

01:36:18 Speaker_01
And it's not that they have bad posture and they could fix it, it's that they can't fix it. Because the vertebrae are rectangle.

01:36:27 Speaker_01
And if you spend, after spending years of hunched forward like that, it compresses the front edges of that rectangle till it becomes a trapezoid. And that doesn't come back. Once that happens, it's done. It's over. It's done.

01:36:40 Speaker_01
Same thing happens with the muscle bellies. So people will get frozen shoulder or impingements in this. That is, if you're not using the muscle belly, the body doesn't want to support it, because muscle tissue is expensive.

01:36:52 Speaker_01
And by expensive, the body looks at it, it's expensive to feed, it's expensive to maintain. For example, your body isn't a painting.

01:36:59 Speaker_01
You can't get to a certain degree of muscle mass, mobility, athletic ability, endurance, whatever you want to say, and then just stop. and have it continue to exist like a painting you did.

01:37:11 Speaker_01
It has to be maintained, because if you're not using it, it costs too much resources for the body to continue to keep it. So it's going to start breaking it down. That's why you get a few days, right?

01:37:23 Speaker_01
And then you start losing strength, you start losing mobility, you start losing wind. easiest physical attribute to build? Endurance. Simple. Super simple. Endurance is what? Endurance is simply strength repeated over and over at a lower load. No big deal.

01:37:40 Speaker_01
That's a six to an eight week process. Simple. No problems at all. Mobility gonna take some time. What's the easiest one to fix muscular strength?

01:37:50 Speaker_01
No problem at all So for it, it's super important then that we we use that muscle mass because if it's not being used You're not only gonna lose the size of the muscle mass The body's gonna start doing deposits of collagen on it and it's gonna start shrinking that muscle belly on the traps For example and going back to those older adults.

01:38:08 Speaker_01
We discussed it's gonna shrink until a lot of it is connective tissue on the edges and Now, what people need to realize, and they don't, is that when they see an adult who's hurting, right?

01:38:20 Speaker_01
They're older, they're shuffling, they can't pick their knees up, their hips are frozen, they're hunched over, their neck's displaced. They weren't that way when they were younger.

01:38:30 Speaker_01
This is all the result of inactivity and poor progressions in their exercises, and it didn't have to be. And then they need to take the next step of connecting, is that if it happened to that guy or that woman...

01:38:45 Speaker_01
it can sure as hell happen to me also if I go down the same road that they went down.

01:38:50 Speaker_03
Returning to the shoulder extension, because I noticed in our assessment that I had terrible shoulder extension and I had kind of accepted it and written it off with stupid reasons like, well, you know, I've done too much deadlifting, I had too much huge slabs of muscle in my back, I can't do shoulder extension.

01:39:05 Speaker_03
It's like total horseshit. I mean, especially... I did notice those huge muscles massive slabs of muscle. Yeah, the imaginary lat syndrome that I have.

01:39:14 Speaker_03
And, I mean, that was just blown to smithereens when I met... Let me make sure I get his name correct. It was Paul Watson, is that right? Oh, yeah, big Paul. In New York City, who's gigantic and extremely flexible.

01:39:26 Speaker_03
So as soon as I hung out with him, I was like, okay.

01:39:28 Speaker_01
You know, let people know Paul is, what would you say, six feet, 230?

01:39:33 Speaker_03
I mean, and just, he's about 40, I want to say, and just probably walks around at 6% body fat and can do a flat, like, chest-to-ground pancake, no problem, can do dislocates with a weighted dowel or a barbell, no problem, with all different types of grips, which I can't do at all, even though I'm making progress.

01:39:51 Speaker_03
The shoulder extension, what is your preferred way to work on shoulder extension? Is it the sitting down, arms behind you, scooting the hips forward? Is there something else you would add to that mix?

01:40:02 Speaker_01
Well, we have to sneak up on that one a little bit. So sometimes we can't even work shoulder extension at first if the elbows are deconditioned.

01:40:12 Speaker_01
So if brachialis, just inside the elbow, is weak, if the insertion of the bicep tendon is weak, then when the arm is extended as they stretch, there might be some discomfort. So, if that's the case, we have to give that time to adapt.

01:40:27 Speaker_01
So, you know, that's one of the questions I ask is, how's your brachialis feel? How's your bicep feel? How's your elbow feel? Because we never push through pain.

01:40:34 Speaker_01
I mean, you can, you can, but have you noticed that the guys who push through pain, they've got a shelf life of somewhere between two and four years.

01:40:46 Speaker_01
And then the body is so beat up and so painful and so chronically injured that it's just easier to be a fat slob sitting on the couch and have at least my pain drop than to try to continue pushing through and being a stud.

01:41:01 Speaker_01
It's so common and it's also unnecessary. For example, and I don't get this one, I don't get this one a lot. I'll bring it because where there's a lot of people and don't get me wrong, I really like weightlifting. I think the Olympic lifting is sweet.

01:41:13 Speaker_01
There's a lot going for it. I think the way that it is approached here in the States is not as efficient as it's approached in China, for example, or in Russia.

01:41:24 Speaker_01
So, for example, in both of them, before there's any weight added at all, they build complete mobility throughout the body.

01:41:32 Speaker_01
They can straddle their legs, chest on the floor, sit with legs together, pike, they've got bridge, they have all these basic mobility.

01:41:40 Speaker_03
Incredible ankle flexibility and mobility. We talked about this.

01:41:43 Speaker_01
Is it related to Klokoff? And especially, exactly. You watch Klokoff. Demetri Klokoff.

01:41:49 Speaker_03
People should watch this guy. Check out some videos. Oh my God.

01:41:52 Speaker_01
He is such a beast. But what they also need to do is not just watch the weight he's putting up, right? They need to watch his warm-up in the training hall and look at how amazingly flexible and mobile he is.

01:42:05 Speaker_01
Now, what's important to understand is at a world-class level, right at a world class level, resources are limited. Energy you have for training is limited. The amount of time you have for training is limited.

01:42:17 Speaker_01
The amount of time you have for recovery is limited, right? You have to maximize these things because you're going, it's one thing to be the best stud in the town.

01:42:25 Speaker_01
It's another thing to be best stud in the state, another one in region, another one in the country. Completely different animal to be the best in the entire world, to be the best at what you do, how to

01:42:37 Speaker_01
Billions of people, we're talking livers of difference between the very top guys. So with all those restrictions and all those parameters in place, if the best in the world are stretching their ass off in order to get strong, why aren't you? Agreed.

01:42:55 Speaker_01
Not you personally. Put me on the spot, coach. No, no, no. Now you, as in all of us, as in all of us, right? And what'll happen is people just kind of get blinders on. They want to watch the technical. They want to watch progressions.

01:43:08 Speaker_01
What do you do for this and that? And then they'll blow off. the mobility work that they do early, not realizing that the mobility work was the gold nugget they were looking for.

01:43:20 Speaker_01
They just didn't brush the dirt off in order to see that it was gold underneath. They just thought, ah, it's just another rock, who cares? No, it was the gold.

01:43:26 Speaker_03
That was the sweet, and they missed it. So if we're looking at... Again, this 35-year-old former athlete, maybe never was super competitive, but has kept in decent shape, maybe does some form of exercise two or three times a week.

01:43:41 Speaker_03
In terms of a understanding that the mobility and working with J curl, elevated bridge, shoulder extension, et cetera, is going to be, those are going to be ingredients in the recipe in their progression to gymnast of some type. Not even gymnast.

01:43:55 Speaker_03
Or functional human being.

01:43:57 Speaker_01
functional human being, right? Because if you don't train, I'd like to, you know, point out people, we don't train gymnasts.

01:44:03 Speaker_01
We do gymnastic strength training, but I don't have, I just got off the phone with our Olympic coach today, Kevin Majica, right? We had a great conversation.

01:44:11 Speaker_01
But guys, regardless of how good you are at rope climbs and plans and this and that, I wouldn't hold my breath that Kevin's getting ready to give you a call and say, please come and be on our team this year.

01:44:20 Speaker_01
You know, I saw your rope climbs and you are a kick. Ass, you are the one for us. We got a uniform waiting here for you. We're departing for Rio in July, man. Be ready. Pack your bag. It's not going to happen, guys. Functional human being.

01:44:35 Speaker_01
Functional human being covers it all.

01:44:37 Speaker_03
So let me, let me just jump to the punchline question, which is let's, so we look at if I wanted to give someone a stretch goal to inspire them to train consistently, right?

01:44:47 Speaker_03
So the mobility might not be enough, but if I wanted to give them a light at the end of the tunnel, so I'm like, I know this shoulder extension stuff is going to be very unpleasant, maybe not super exciting, but this is the objective.

01:45:00 Speaker_03
This is what you might be able to do in three, six, nine, 12 months from now. The back lever, we've talked about, is not necessarily a good goal because you might think you have the strength, and perhaps you do, but you don't.

01:45:12 Speaker_03
They'll definitely have the strength, almost without question. Right, but they don't have the mobility, so, you know, snap goes the bicep. That was a nasty surprise waiting in that box. What would be a good...

01:45:24 Speaker_03
gymnastic strength training goal to have or goals. Just as context for people who are wondering, after trying to do my best to survey the landscape and figure out what might not be the stupidest goals,

01:45:38 Speaker_03
I wanted to, you know, I'm not saying these are the best goals, but I decided, okay, well, strict press handstand, which we can define in a second, seems like a good one, and it just seems like a sweet thing to be able to do.

01:45:48 Speaker_03
And then front lever, and then straddle planche, exactly. So, we can talk about what each of those are, but would the press handstand, for instance, be something that incorporates the strength and the mobility and all these pieces.

01:46:02 Speaker_03
If you had to pick one. You had to pick one. That would be the one. That'd be the one.

01:46:06 Speaker_01
Cause it's going to have all strength, all mobility, balance, agility, everything rolled into one movement.

01:46:14 Speaker_03
Do you want to take a stab at what does a perfect press handstand look like in your mind?

01:46:18 Speaker_01
Perfect press handstand. So I'm just trying to keep it simple, right? bend over, hands on the ground by your toes. And that can be, put your palms on the floor so they're just in front of your toes, shoulder width, legs straight. Leg straight.

01:46:33 Speaker_01
And now if they needed to bend, we could, but we're talking about perfect world, right? And then, hands on the floor, shoulders directly over the hands. And then, no jumping, using just the middle back, just the traps.

01:46:46 Speaker_01
Because everyone thinks traps, traps, traps, and they think traps just for shrugging. Well, your traps are a huge muscle. They're a huge muscle, and they don't just lie on the top of your shoulders. They're in the middle of your back.

01:46:57 Speaker_01
and down towards your lower back as well. They're a giant muscle and they're capable of a huge amount of power. And when you fix those, right, a lot of shoulder pain goes away, a lot of lower back pain goes away.

01:47:09 Speaker_01
But go back to our other, hands on the floor, shoulders over the hands, using that middle back, those traps, pull the hips up on top of the shoulder, maintain that flat back position, then we continue on with lower back, finishing the legs up to the handstand.

01:47:25 Speaker_03
So a couple of things that make this particularly challenging. So one, obviously you need to have the flexibility in the hamstrings and everywhere else. You have to have the mobility.

01:47:35 Speaker_03
You have to have the compression strength, like we were talking about doing those murderous, embarrassing pike pulses, which look like they should be easy and they are not.

01:47:45 Speaker_03
You're bringing your legs basically to your chest in that last like 10 to 12 inch range. Really challenging.

01:47:53 Speaker_03
And then I think where you see a lot of people online do this incorrectly, at least from the standpoint of having the objective of gymnastic strength training, right?

01:48:03 Speaker_03
Because there are all sorts of ways you can cheat with this stuff to make it biomechanically easier.

01:48:07 Speaker_01
But if we're trying to do it strictly... And why do it? Maybe this is a nice thing to throw in because people say, well, it's just a matter. It's personal taste, coach. It's personal taste. You do it this way because you prefer this form.

01:48:20 Speaker_01
Now, we do it a particular way because this is what builds the most strength that's transferable to other activities. For example, this will continue. So who have I pissed off so far today? I've pissed off CrossFitters.

01:48:34 Speaker_01
I'm gonna piss off yoga right now. So I once had, and I like yoga, don't get me wrong, but their approach to handstand is flawed. They want to go bone on bone. So they want to have their shoulders depressed. So they're bone on bone.

01:48:49 Speaker_01
They want to have pipe shoulders. All right, so shoulders can elevate. So if I'm standing upright and I elevate my shoulders, that would be like me shrugging my shoulders to my ear. and then doing the opposite is the other direction.

01:49:03 Speaker_01
Well, when we do a handstand, and if I describe it this way, it's gonna make sense, right? I want muscle and connective tissue to be doing the work. I don't want bone grinding on bone. That's not a recipe for longevity. Not gonna work.

01:49:17 Speaker_01
But the easy one is, is they'll say, well, there's a yoga handstand and there's a gymnastics handstand. And my answer to that is, well, you're almost right. There's a gymnastics handstand and there's a fucked up gymnastics handstand.

01:49:29 Speaker_01
Those are the only two there are. Here's how we evaluate it. A gymnastics handstand, right, done with nice flat back, nice head, all being a smart ass aside, right, we're going to look at it just from a purely practical viewpoint.

01:49:42 Speaker_01
Which one leads somewhere? So, if I do a yoga type handstand with that arch and the flexed shoulders, I'm not going any farther than that. I can work on duration, I can do some other things, but I'm not going any further.

01:49:54 Speaker_01
I do a gymnastics handstand where it's flat. Now I have nice range of motion in the shoulders. I have strength through the middle back, through the traps, right? I've got good core strength. I've got good compression strength.

01:50:06 Speaker_01
Now I can move on to good press handstand work. Why? Well, we want to get stronger. That in turn allows me to go on if I'm in the mood and I want to do more, I can go into more advanced one-arm handstand work, pirouetting work, all those things.

01:50:22 Speaker_01
Results of a proper nice straight line handstand that you can't do with the flawed approach It's not aesthetics. It's being practical because we don't do anything in gymnastics, right? That's just purely aesthetics. Why do we do things a certain way?

01:50:38 Speaker_01
It lets us generate more power. Why do we want more power? Let's us get more air. Let's us do more flips. Let's us do more twists Let's us do harder things on rings, which means more points, which means more gold medals

01:50:50 Speaker_03
And let me throw out a couple of observations, and you can correct me if this is wrong, but, like, one of them, an example of something that people might think is aesthetics, there is an aesthetic appeal, but it's a side effect and not the reasoning behind it, would be a strong point in the toes, right?

01:51:06 Speaker_03
A strong point on the legs. So you see a lot of people doing handstands, and I was guilty of this, certainly. And they have kind of, uh, what I heard one acrobat call tofu feet. They're not...

01:51:18 Speaker_03
fully dorsiflexed, like they're not pulling the toes back to the knees, which I think looks terrible, also pretty common in yoga, but... they don't have that, and they don't have a strong point, and so they're, at the very least, their quads and their adductors aren't really fully engaged.

01:51:32 Speaker_03
They're loose, and so they're leaking energy in all sorts of directions, and it makes... I like that, leaking energy.

01:51:39 Speaker_01
That's a very good description.

01:51:41 Speaker_03
And it makes, I think I probably stole it from Pavel Tsatsoulin, but the... I mean, Pavel's a good buddy. Pavel's a good friend of mine. I like Pavel. Pavel's great. And the... What is the consequence?

01:51:50 Speaker_03
The consequence, there are consequences, one of which is you're wasting energy, so you're not gonna be able to train as efficiently.

01:51:56 Speaker_03
Number two is you're not going to develop the proper balance and alignment because you're gonna be flopping all over the place and having to correct more so than you should.

01:52:05 Speaker_03
So just that pointing has a huge impact on your ability to train the handstands. Like a really strong point. And the other...

01:52:15 Speaker_03
point I wanted to make is, because I've, of course, in the attempt to try to work on this in the past, which failed, and I've made a ton of progress in the last few months, but when doing it solo, I'd watch videos online, and of course, not all videos are created equal.

01:52:28 Speaker_03
And you would see people... And I've preached the choir on that one. And you would see people doing a press handstand, but they would planche really hard.

01:52:37 Speaker_03
So you would see, in other words, you'd see people, they put their hands flat on the ground, in front of their toes, And then they shoot their head really far forward, so their shoulders travel.

01:52:46 Speaker_03
If you were to drop a plumb line, like a string with a weight on the end from their shoulders, it would hit the floor, say, like eight inches in front of their heads.

01:52:54 Speaker_01
Six, eight inches in front. Sure, exactly.

01:52:56 Speaker_03
And then they go up into the handstand and they have this arch in the back, and maybe their feet are pointing straight up. And what does that look like? It looks a lot like what was the gold standard in sort of muscle beach...

01:53:07 Speaker_03
Venice or Santa Monica, like 19... circa 1960s.

01:53:11 Speaker_01
1940s, 1950s.

01:53:12 Speaker_03
That's right, 1940s, 1950s. But that's gonna place a lot more structural strain on the spine. So then, if the... What does the proper version look like? I mean, roughly, right? Your ears are roughly in between your shoulder blades.

01:53:26 Speaker_01
In between your arms.

01:53:27 Speaker_03
Yeah, in between your arms. Fully shoulders extended up or not extended. What am I looking for?

01:53:33 Speaker_01
Pressing, pressing down through the ground and keeping the hand, the shoulders directly on top of the hands.

01:53:39 Speaker_03
For people who want to just do a little experiment, obviously do it, do it safely. But I was blown away the first time that someone showed this to me. If you do a normal, say, kick up to handstand on the wall. just the way that everybody does it.

01:53:51 Speaker_03
You're kind of flipping up, and you end up looking away from the wall. There are a million ways to do it.

01:53:55 Speaker_03
Let's say you do that, and then instead of doing it the way you've always done it, before you put your hands on the ground, you start with your arms overhead in the position that you want to assume on the ground, and shrug your shoulders up as high as possible, trying to get your deltoids to the sides of your ears.

01:54:11 Speaker_03
Maintain that position, and then go up, and the stability is just a world of difference. I mean, it's night and day. It's a completely different movement. All right, I have to ask this because a million people asked since we're on a roll here.

01:54:23 Speaker_03
We've already checked off yoga.

01:54:25 Speaker_01
That's true. And I have to come back guys. I like everything else about yoga except your handstand. So only a small amount of hate mail for the handstand life.

01:54:32 Speaker_03
Some of the coaches and doesn't have to be in gymnastics, but they certainly could be some of the coaches who have

01:54:38 Speaker_03
Impressed you the most I took down in between like my bouts of hands shaking and like Accidentally getting chalk in my mouth doing the assessment and like when I could bend my arms and do something I took these cryptic notes.

01:54:51 Speaker_03
I wrote down one name, which was Alexander world champion male and female does that uh-huh ring any bells?

01:55:00 Speaker_01
You know, I've been extremely, extremely fortunate in my career. I have just a multitude of friends who are world and olympic champions, world and olympic team members, world and olympic coaches.

01:55:14 Speaker_01
And for a long time, you know, I just kind of, because if that's your environment day in day out, it just kind of becomes your norm, right?

01:55:21 Speaker_01
And then after a while you kind of stop and think, like one day I was at a competition and I was visiting with some friends of mine and I came back and my oldest daughter was maybe around 12 at the time.

01:55:34 Speaker_01
She was like, oh my God, you know who you were talking to, Dad? And I said, well, yeah, sweetie, I know, they're my friends. She says, that was the Olympic champion and that was the world champion. I said, yeah, I know, babe, I know.

01:55:45 Speaker_01
She's just like, oh my good God. Well, Dimitri Belozerchev, is a good friend of mine and Dmitry won Worlds in 83 at 16 years old. 16 years old. Just unbelievable. He won again in 87.

01:56:02 Speaker_01
What a lot of people don't know is in between there, Dmitry obviously Russian, Dmitry had a car accident. and broke his left lower leg between the knee and the ankle in 42 places. 42 places. So basically, you know, as powder.

01:56:18 Speaker_01
They put him in, he's unconscious, he's on the table, and he's covered up, and they're getting ready to remove his lower leg. They're gonna, you know, taking it off.

01:56:26 Speaker_01
And the surgeon pulls the towel down, the sheet down, because he's prepped for surgery, I mean he's out, and he sees it's Dmitry. Now this is Russia, right, in the early 80s, so, you know, it's not warm friendly Russia.

01:56:42 Speaker_01
The doctor immediately like, holy shit, I am not cutting this leg off, because the surgeon who takes Dmitry Belozerchev's leg off is probably going to lose his hands shortly thereafter also. You know, national hero. So they save his leg.

01:56:55 Speaker_01
And Dmitry comes back from it and wins worlds in 87. Goes 88 Olympics, does great medal, gold medals. Well, Dmitry was lucky enough, we're at different training camps than that. Dmitry was my roommate. And, you know, Russians are Russians, right?

01:57:11 Speaker_01
It takes a long time for them to warm up to you. So it took, I don't know how many years, but we started getting along real well after some years. He starts sharing some stuff, and I'm like, you know, Dimitri, because his leg is trashed.

01:57:21 Speaker_01
His leg is trashed. He had 88 Olympics. I said, Dimitri, you know, how? How the hell, dude? He said, yeah. Only does for a few seconds. I can do anything for a few seconds. I said, I don't know, dude. Well, so it's just great, right?

01:57:36 Speaker_01
So he's, you know, a legend in gymnastics. We get together with a room full of world and Olympic champions who are Russian. They will all defer to Dmitry. He's that big a legend. And this isn't a room full of massive egos.

01:57:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, there's no shortage of confidence here. And if Dmitry's in the room, they treat Dmitry awesome. It's a very, very cool thing to see. Well, we go forward.

01:57:59 Speaker_01
We had, um, a world champion from the Russian on the women's side who, uh, won worlds and Dimitri's coach, Alexander was responsible for training both of them.

01:58:09 Speaker_01
So Alexander is the only one in history who produced a male world champion and a female world champion. He's the only one. And Alexander right now is down coaching the Brazilian team.

01:58:22 Speaker_03
What is Alexander's, is that his first or last name?

01:58:25 Speaker_01
I always screw up all the Russian pronunciations, and all my Russian friends are gonna laugh, because they're totally used to me butchering this, but it's like, Alexander, Aleksandrnov, or something. Got one of those. Aleksandrnov.

01:58:36 Speaker_01
If I'm with my Russian friends, I just say Aleksandr, and everybody knows who I mean, so I don't have to embarrass myself. What do you think allowed him, made him... What makes him him?

01:58:44 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly. What makes him different?

01:58:47 Speaker_01
What makes him him is the ability, so it starts with...

01:58:53 Speaker_01
depth of knowledge, to have enough depth of knowledge that you can look at an athlete and plan what you need to be doing four years from now, eight years from now, and then reverse engineer all of it to today.

01:59:07 Speaker_01
all the training cycles, the strength, the deloads. It was from Dimitri that I for so back in 83 Dimitri was the only gymnast I think today probably one of the only ones who every fourth week was a deload week. Why?

01:59:21 Speaker_01
To give the body a chance to recover. Now there's a lot of people who talk D-load, but way back then, right, the training, if you visit with Dimitri, right, it's always, Chris, it's mathematics, it's all mathematics we do.

01:59:32 Speaker_01
To them, you take these correct pieces, which would be like doing the correct numbers, that creates your equation. If you put the equation together correctly and then you solve it, there's your answer.

01:59:43 Speaker_01
And your answer is the physical preparation at the end in a successful competition. So Alexander is great, great at knowing We're gonna just be consistent over this training block. So, you know, an Olympic cycle is four years long.

01:59:58 Speaker_01
So we're getting ready to finish this Olympics, right? And then the next cycle starts. So it could take, for example, to get someone to 75, 80% of their genetic capacity with a good coach, a good world-class coach. It's gonna take three to four years.

02:00:17 Speaker_01
It's gonna take three to four years just to let the body grow, adapt.

02:00:22 Speaker_03
Do you think that's also true for 30, like, training an adult? I do. Okay, great.

02:00:28 Speaker_01
Now, that's a healthy adult. So if they're severely compromised, so you know, to get through our whole curriculum should take three to four years. If they're severely compromised and we have to do Damage repair. We've got to heal some injuries.

02:00:44 Speaker_01
We've got some chronic things. Because what's a chronic injury? A chronic injury is simply an injury that you kept abusing until it became semi-permanent. That's all chronic injury is. It means you slammed your hand in the door and it hurt.

02:00:57 Speaker_01
Your response to slamming your hand in the door and hurting was to keep slamming your hand in the fucking door. You kept slamming it in the door and you said, God, my hand really hurts. What should I do? What should I do?

02:01:07 Speaker_01
I said, well, quit slamming your hand in the damn door and it will get better. But people, they don't think that way. They're just like, well, but I really, really like doing this.

02:01:16 Speaker_01
And we get people coming to us really beat up because we're taught no pain, no gain. Well, we flip that around. We say no brain, no gain. We're not talking about the pain of fatigue. The easy way to know the difference between

02:01:28 Speaker_01
Fatigue and injury is simply the sharpness of the pain.

02:01:32 Speaker_01
So for example, and it's some experience Also, if you're feeling pain, right and maybe it's from a core workout and you stop you're doing hollow body rocks Whatever you be it doesn't matter what you're doing sit-ups you stop if it's fatigue It's immediately gonna start to lessen as soon as you stop the pain starts going away if it's an injury

02:01:52 Speaker_01
and you stop, it's immediately going to begin increasing. That's your, oh, shit moment. That's, oh, I screwed myself up, right? And so you kind of have to ride that. We want to work to where the body is working, but we don't want to work so hard.

02:02:07 Speaker_01
It's like for a long time, it was a big thing for people doing kipping pull-ups to take pictures of their hands being raw and bloody from their rips. They were looking at it as a badge of honor, you know, that I worked so hard. And in the short term,

02:02:22 Speaker_01
for that moment, yeah, they worked really hard. Now, I looked at it differently. I looked at it as like, you stupid shit. What are you gonna do tomorrow now?

02:02:32 Speaker_01
There's no amount of work you can do today that could offset the amount of progress you could have made throughout a properly structured week. It can't be done.

02:02:41 Speaker_03
You see that with kettlebells a lot too. I remember when I was really deep in kettlebell training, it was, yeah, you take yourself out for God knows how long, you rip all your calluses off.

02:02:51 Speaker_01
But they mean well, they mean well. We tend to use two terms with our athletes. We have immature athletes and mature athletes. And it's not an age deal, it's an attitude deal. So an immature athlete is someone who wants what they want right now, okay?

02:03:09 Speaker_01
A mature athlete is someone who's willing to do what needs to be done now to get rewarded for it later, delayed gratification. And it's the mature athlete that in the long run Always comes out on top.

02:03:22 Speaker_01
They're always the ones with the greater longevity and the greater success the other ones the immature ones They're really talented.

02:03:28 Speaker_01
They may stay ahead for a while But eventually you're gonna get so dinged and broken and beat up that they have to step aside And the mature guy, the mature athlete or woman, right? They're just doing their thing day in, day out.

02:03:41 Speaker_01
It's like writing a book that has 365 pages in it. If I ask you tomorrow, Tim, go home tonight and write me a book with 365 pages. You're like, Chris, you've lost your fucking mind.

02:03:52 Speaker_01
But if I say, Tim, I want you to write me a page, a single page, every day. In a year, we've got a book with 365 pages. And if you picture that, that thickness of a novel, that's a lot of pages there.

02:04:06 Speaker_01
But if I look at that thickness of a single page, it's so thin that it seems negligible, that it doesn't even matter. It's like, why did I bother? Well, it's the consistency that adds up over time. That's where you see these great athletes.

02:04:22 Speaker_01
Got to understand, you see a world-class athlete that did not start training yesterday. This is a multi-year process.

02:04:30 Speaker_03
Also, I think that there's a behavioral modification and a component of this, which if you wanted to dig in the research is supported at this point, which is doing each day less than you feel maximally capable of.

02:04:43 Speaker_03
It's a fantastic sort of positive reinforcer and this applies in sales. This is what IBM did way back in the day when their sales force was slaughtering the competition. They had the lowest quotas

02:04:55 Speaker_03
in the industry because they wanted their salespeople to be unintimidated to pick up the phone. So we could substitute intimidated to pick up the phone with intimidated to go to the gym or start a session. You could also apply it to writing.

02:05:09 Speaker_01
Leave a little in the bank, right?

02:05:10 Speaker_03
Leave a little in the bank. I remember there were two examples offhand as it applies to writing. A friend of mine who's very, very consistent, prolific writer, and he said, my key is every day I write less than I feel capable of.

02:05:23 Speaker_03
And a guideline that I was given was two crappy pages per day. That's all you have to do. Two crappy pages. And sometimes you overshoot that and you have a great workout and you're feeling, as you put it, froggy, right? You're feeling fantastic.

02:05:34 Speaker_03
And you just blow through it and set a bunch of PRs, but you didn't go into the workout with the pressure of having to achieve PRs in every exercise. And Hemingway, maybe not the best life model, but was a prolific writer.

02:05:47 Speaker_01
Still a stud, yeah.

02:05:48 Speaker_03
And he would end mid-sentence. He would end still feeling like he had more to say in a specific paragraph or sentence, so that he had a place to pick up the next day.

02:05:56 Speaker_03
So, on the point of consistency, and actually, I want you to finish your last thought because I totally hijacked. the conversation, but you said it takes three to... What's up with that, dude?

02:06:04 Speaker_01
You hijacked my thoughts.

02:06:05 Speaker_03
So, three to four, three to four years to get them to what percentage of their genetic?

02:06:11 Speaker_01
This is ballpark, 75 to 80. This is just an example to people, because the body will not let you run at 100%. Won't do it. Won't do it. There's not enough optimal surplus that we mentioned earlier. Three to four years to get to 75, 80%.

02:06:25 Speaker_01
It will take me another three to four years, another three to four years. to get to about 90%, another three to four years. And then after that, it will take me another three to four years to get to about 95%. And that's me riding herd on them.

02:06:46 Speaker_01
That's my standards, right? Because remember, it's easier for me to maintain that immaculate standard because I'm not the one feeling the fatigue right now.

02:06:56 Speaker_01
It's very difficult for a world-class athlete to train themselves, and it doesn't do a world-class coach any good to have all that knowledge in his head. It takes a partnership.

02:07:05 Speaker_01
It takes both of them working together to create this great athletic animal. But the interesting thing is that another three to four years you get to 95% and as soon as they ease up, the body drops back down to that 75, 80, that's where it likes.

02:07:19 Speaker_01
Now, to build back up won't take nearly as long as to build it in the first place because the structures are already in place, nervous systems are developed, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. But that's where the body's comfortable.

02:07:31 Speaker_01
So as far as adults are concerned, does a 35-year-old need to be able to produce at 90%? No, they don't. Do they need at 95%? No, they're not full-time professional athletes. They don't have time for that. Can they produce at 75, 80%? Yes, they can.

02:07:52 Speaker_01
And the interesting thing is, will that put you on the Olympic team? No, absolutely, absolutely not. Are you going to be close to it? No. But will it put you being better than 99 out of 100 people around you? Absolutely. Absolutely, it will put you there.

02:08:10 Speaker_01
And if we put a percentage on that, that means that just by being consistent, putting some years, consistent years of training, and that puts you in the top 1% of the human population in terms of physical ability. That is not a bad consolation prize.

02:08:26 Speaker_03
No, it's not. And I want to underscore the consistency point, because I've always been an intensity guy, right? I mean, for the most part, because that's my default mode. And, you know, it's served me well. And everybody's, right?

02:08:37 Speaker_03
Yeah, it's served me well, but there's a point where the sword cuts both ways. You sent me an email recently. I'm going to replace the name, just unless we decide to... I was going to say, or maybe take out the profanity just in case.

02:08:50 Speaker_03
Yeah, I'll take out the F-bombs. Dear, you lazy bastard. No, that's not how it starts. Because I want to talk about older students who have picked up gymnastics and... Okay.

02:09:01 Speaker_03
So there are a lot of people who are rightly, I think, or naturally skeptical of the ability of, say, a 35, 38, 40-plus-year-old to acquire the skills that are associated with people who start when they're five, six, seven years old.

02:09:14 Speaker_03
So I'm going to replace the name with Frank. Okay, so I was having a hell of a lot of trouble with Tuck hops. And to just explain that, I fully plan for everyone listening to put a lot of video examples in the show notes.

02:09:28 Speaker_03
You'll have visual references for a lot of this. But tuck hops, it's a great exercise.

02:09:34 Speaker_03
There are different ways to practice this, but a tuck handstand is instead of having your body ramrod straight from your hands all the way to your pointed toes at the very top, you're basically bringing your knees to your chest or ribcage while you're in the handstand position with your feet still pointed, but your heels kind of touching your ass.

02:09:53 Speaker_03
Is that a fair description? I agree with that. And I was having a lot of trouble with range of motion. I just couldn't get low enough. And so coach sent me an email, which was, you know, Frank is one of my senior students.

02:10:05 Speaker_03
Here's a video of him working his tuck handstand compression. While it's not exactly the same exercise, this does provide a nice visual example.

02:10:11 Speaker_03
Now, the part that stands out for me is what follows the video because I watched the video and I was like, OK, that's pretty solid. And you said you started roughly two years ago out of shape. Weak and rather pudgy on his first workout.

02:10:24 Speaker_03
I believe that he failed three times 12 seconds bent hollow body hold and There are people on wheelchairs that are stronger in them.

02:10:32 Speaker_03
Yeah, and I'm probably gonna get the not gonna do this exercise justice but I mean a bent hollow body hold is effectively like imagine if you're in a Crunch position on the floor right and then you put your arms

02:10:47 Speaker_01
Just kind of pick your feet up like you were going to do a sit-up, except don't sit up. Shoulders up a little off the ground, feet off a little ground, and then just try to rock back and forth.

02:10:56 Speaker_03
That's it. So he failed that couldn't do three sets of that times 12 seconds. Couldn't do it. Not a chance. Fast forward two years and he's a beast. There are two points here that really... left a mark on me. So the first was, he's very consistent.

02:11:09 Speaker_03
Okay, we've talked about that. Here's the part that I really liked.

02:11:11 Speaker_03
So he never rushes through exercise and every time he gets stuck on a progression and is not able to break through that particular plateau, he simply drops all the way back to the first progression and begins working his way up. So I want to...

02:11:23 Speaker_03
try to illustrate this because this is a really, because most people, myself included, will just bang their heads against a wall with the plateau movement.

02:11:32 Speaker_03
Let's take the press handstand, which we've been talking about as a great kind of bang for the buck objective because it incorporates so many different elements and attributes that you need to develop. What would

02:11:43 Speaker_03
a series of progressions, like four or five progressions for that look like?

02:11:48 Speaker_03
And does it literally mean that if he couldn't get through movement five, that he would drop all the way back to number one, or would he go back to number two or number three?

02:11:57 Speaker_01
He'd go right back to number one. Now he might go to, he might not start with the very week one programming of, you know, three by one rep.

02:12:08 Speaker_01
He might drop back to week 11 where we provide the programming where it's five by five and just demonstrate mastery. Then next workout, bump. But basically what he's doing is if he failed, on that exercise.

02:12:24 Speaker_01
That means there was a chink in the arm or somewhere, there was a hole in the preparation, there was some deficit that had been overlooked or some part of the body that had not yet supercompensated.

02:12:34 Speaker_01
So basically we want people to go through when they're in training to just be super simplistic, we want their training to go through a period of overload where whatever they're doing is kicking their ass. Okay, it's hard, it's intense.

02:12:48 Speaker_01
And then without changing reps or sets, right, we want the body then to go into a period of load where that same amount of work, that same load, same exercise, same reps, same sets feels moderately difficult.

02:13:02 Speaker_01
It's feeling easier because the body's gotten stronger. And then, where people always cut it short, where they undermine themselves here, is they don't go into underload.

02:13:14 Speaker_01
So, to be super simplistic, underload is where, damn, I'm just not feel like I'm working very hard. You're moving the same way. You're doing the same reps, you're doing the same sets, right? But you're just cutting it short.

02:13:25 Speaker_01
What people tend to do is they want to ride that razor's edge. I did this much today, I'm going to do more next week as that typical five pounds on the bar. Okay, well that's great.

02:13:35 Speaker_01
You know, if that was the case, I remember my first weighted pull-up workout, I was excited. I was excited way back when I was a teenager, I came home, I did my five pounds, I pulled out my calendar, did five pounds, I'm gonna do a pound every week.

02:13:47 Speaker_01
I said, holy shit, I'm gonna be pulling 1,500 pounds in a year, man. I'm world champion, I'm world champion in the making. Linear doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way.

02:13:57 Speaker_01
So what happens is that you hit that point of where you're maxed out currently. And then you gotta step off. And we gotta give the body a chance to accommodate. So, for example, you mentioned Rob Wolf. Rob is a good buddy. Rob's super sharp.

02:14:10 Speaker_01
For those of you who don't know, he's a nutritional guru. Check out his stuff.

02:14:14 Speaker_03
R-O-B-B for people.

02:14:15 Speaker_01
R-O-B-B. Yeah, he's got two Bs there. Well, Rob is a high-intensity guy like you, Tim. And so, I shared with him... The year Alan won national, so a national champ, imagine, you've defeated the entire country. There's one champion and you're it.

02:14:34 Speaker_01
Everyone you kicked their ass. Unbelievable feeling, extremely awesome. Well that year, I didn't change anything on Alan's conditioning the entire year. Not a damn thing. I didn't change an exercise, I didn't change a rep, I didn't change a set.

02:14:51 Speaker_01
Not for that entire year.

02:14:53 Speaker_03
So you mean that there, for the progressive resistance purists out there, there might be another way?

02:15:01 Speaker_01
But remember, he wasn't a beginner at this point. You know, because a beginner, right? It wouldn't do any good if I can do a wall push-up inclined on the wall. I mean, Alan was strong.

02:15:09 Speaker_01
He was already doing hollow back presses, you know, rope climbs were for maintenance of healthy elbows, yada, yada, yada. But for that year, I didn't change anything. All that changed was workout that took an hour.

02:15:25 Speaker_01
Got to the point where it was taking 40 to 45 minutes At which point do your stretch and get out because the less time you're in the gym the better Okay, because it's less wear and tear on the body think of it when I hear what you mentioned, you know people who love to be high intensity Okay, it's cool.

02:15:40 Speaker_01
But the analogy that comes to mind is someone who wants to be high intensity all the time It's like having a new set of tires every time you come up to a stop sign You don't gradually break you slam those brakes hard you skid do a stop

02:15:54 Speaker_01
every single stop sign, how long is that pair of tires gonna last?

02:15:57 Speaker_01
It's gonna wear out pretty quick, and now the body's not like tires, it can rebuild itself as long as you don't put it too deep into a hole or physically break the structure, damage the structure beyond repair.

02:16:11 Speaker_01
As long as you show some degree of care, you rebuild yourself, but if you keep skidding to that stop every single day, matter of fact, it's not if, it's guaranteed,

02:16:20 Speaker_03
So let's throw out a couple of, I'll use another automotive metaphor, let's switch gears, and I will ask just a couple of questions that I think people would love to hear answers to.

02:16:31 Speaker_03
The first is, someone listens to this, they're extremely excited to do gymnastic strength training, and maybe they go out and they're sampling different things from all sorts of different places.

02:16:44 Speaker_03
And of course, I have no, I should say with full disclosure, I have no business I'm not getting any kind of affiliate, anything from you. I just am a real fan of how you train. So I think people should check out your training programs.

02:16:56 Speaker_03
But what exercises should people not attempt or just remove from consideration for the first, say, six months of gymnastic strength training?

02:17:08 Speaker_01
Probably, I would say muscle-ups.

02:17:11 Speaker_01
The issue becomes there's nothing wrong with the pull, there's nothing wrong with the dip, the shoulders will adapt relatively quickly, you know, they'll get up on rings at first and they're shaking, and that's simply because the stabilizers aren't used to the load.

02:17:22 Speaker_01
That'll adapt within, you know, two weeks, four weeks, they'll be fine. The issue they run into is because their shoulder extension is weak, they can't get the elbow behind the torso,

02:17:33 Speaker_01
So instead of doing a dip with body weight, now they're trying to do a tricep extension with body weight. Completely different animal.

02:17:42 Speaker_01
Their elbows can't go, their elbows are trapped at their side and now their hands are in front of them and they're just trying to press themselves up. Of course, they're just trash and their elbows... Now some people... Okay, we do see it.

02:17:52 Speaker_01
Some people have incredible joints that you can just pound and pound and pound and pound and pound. Nothing happens to them. Run them over with a car, right? All you're gonna do is hurt your car. Everyone assumes they're that guy, they're that woman.

02:18:06 Speaker_01
The reality is, you're not, guys. You are not that person. If you were that person, I would see you at training camps right now, or you would be a celebrated professional-level athlete.

02:18:15 Speaker_01
So accept the fact that you're human, and those are not your joints. You can't take that approach and have longevity. It's not gonna happen. Okay, so muscle-ups go out. Muscle ups go out. Now, how do they get around the muscle up?

02:18:29 Speaker_01
How do they get, because their elbows hurt. They can't do a slow. We need an Indian to build strength. We've got to do it slow. How do they get around? They do the kipping muscle up.

02:18:37 Speaker_01
Okay, well that gets me on top of the rings, but where I get the benefit of muscle-ups is through that transition as I'm going between the pull-up through my chest up above.

02:18:47 Speaker_01
That's where Cross is, that's where Plange is, that's where Maltese is, that's where all advanced ring strength is. It's that strength. When you see a gymnast

02:18:58 Speaker_01
When you see him this summer at the Olympics, right, and we're, just as an aside guys, we've got some podcasts coming out for Gymnastic Body, sorry Tim, competing with you here. That's alright.

02:19:06 Speaker_01
And we're going to talk some training, right, with some of our Olympic guys. And when you see them, you are, you're going to see this massive musculature, and it didn't come from push-ups and it didn't come from dips.

02:19:18 Speaker_01
It came from that advanced ring strength they do. So if you're doing a kipping muscle-up and you're going from below the rings to on top of the rings and it's gone, you just skip the most beneficial part of the muscle-up. Gone. You waste it.

02:19:30 Speaker_03
Let me ask a related question because of course every four years I watch gymnastics. I love watching gymnastics as do a lot of people and they go, holy shit, if I can get arms that look like that.

02:19:41 Speaker_03
By hanging from a bar for an hour a day, I need to start hanging from a bar.

02:19:45 Speaker_03
How much of, I know we talked about the rings, how much of the musculature in the upper arms, biceps specifically, comes from straight arm work versus some form of bent arm work?

02:19:56 Speaker_01
Excellent question. So, the majority of the massive biceps they see is gonna come from the straight arm work.

02:20:04 Speaker_01
So, for example, when the guys would, at that level of training, at that level of strength, rope climbs, for example, my guys had to do a triple on a seven meter row. All rope climbs are done with no legs. In GST, we do ropes without legs.

02:20:21 Speaker_01
We get some people say, you know, the rope is used for transportation.

02:20:25 Speaker_01
As soon as they take out the escalators in a mall and they put ropes in in place of it, or they take the elevators out and they put ropes, I'll buy that argument that we use a rope for transportation.

02:20:34 Speaker_01
Until that happens, a rope is used for getting freaking strong. That's the point of having a rope.

02:20:41 Speaker_01
So they would, in five minutes, they would do a triple on a seven meter rope, get in the back of the line, do a double on a seven meter, get back in the line, and do another, and that'd be about five minutes worth of work.

02:20:51 Speaker_01
Okay, now for them, what we did notice, and a lot of people miss this, We're going to do two things here at once. So for the maximal strength component of it, it's the straight arm work, Maltese work in particular, where it just blows the body off.

02:21:06 Speaker_03
And people listening, don't just go into your garage and try a Maltese on your rings.

02:21:11 Speaker_01
You can. You can totally, because I don't think Maltese will hurt you. Maltese won't hurt you, but your landing on this concrete on your face underneath the rings is probably going to hurt. Maltese won't. It's the sudden stop at the end.

02:21:23 Speaker_01
That will be uncomfortable.

02:21:24 Speaker_01
Now, what we found out with the guys, though, is, you know, we did over the years, the weight vests, the heavy-weighted rope climbs, pull-ups, nothing put better mass on a biceps, secondary from the ring strength, than high-volume rope climbs.

02:21:40 Speaker_01
Nothing, nothing blew him up.

02:21:42 Speaker_01
Now the key though is, for everybody listening, if you go and you jump right into ropes right now and you haven't built a foundation of rows, pull-ups, multi-plane pulling, then get to rope climbing, you're going to give yourself a raging case of elbow tendinitis.

02:21:58 Speaker_03
Yeah, your elbows are going to just disintegrate.

02:22:03 Speaker_01
Like anything else, you gotta pay your dues. But if you go through the proper steps and you're prepared to do rope climbs, there is nothing better because the bicep is an endurance muscle. That's its job.

02:22:13 Speaker_01
Now, it can do this, but its primary function is not to, how much can I do that heaviest load for one rep? Its primary function is, go out and kill something, pick it up, and carry it a long ass way back home. That's its primary job.

02:22:29 Speaker_01
That's its primary job. So it just blossoms from high volume work. Now the key is, is that it's got to be high volume with a reasonably high load, which on the rope climbs is body weight. But we've got to build to that.

02:22:43 Speaker_03
Two things that I'll throw out there just because people might find it interesting. So the first is you can build extremely muscular biceps.

02:22:50 Speaker_03
This is not gymnastics related, but with purely straight arm, heavy pulling in the deadlift combined with let's just let's just say you had one day of heavy pulling.

02:23:01 Speaker_03
And by heavy, I mean two to three reps, like to the knees, kind of like the Barry Ross protocol in the four-hour body. No eccentrics, you know, drop it.

02:23:10 Speaker_03
And then, let's just say you do that on Mondays, and then on Fridays, or Thursdays, whatever it might be, you do high rep kettlebell swings, two-armed kettlebell swings. You can get really, really muscular arms without doing any bent work whatsoever.

02:23:24 Speaker_01
Also, when we're talking about I'm easy enough to switch that high rep kettlebell work to a throw rope climb on fried.

02:23:31 Speaker_03
If you are advanced enough, if your elbows are bulletproof enough, which mine are not as an example for folks, like I've done plenty of rowing, but here's the difference though.

02:23:40 Speaker_03
When I have a parallel grip, if you're like, I can pull fuck that I can do bent rows of the barbell with 225 pounds and whatever. And you've. think that you're the king of pulling.

02:23:50 Speaker_03
If you don't do a lot of parallel grip work or fat bar work, and then you go to a thick rope, you're in for a surprise.

02:23:58 Speaker_01
Maybe we should touch base on the difference real quick between the various grips? Yeah, please.

02:24:04 Speaker_01
Okay, so guys, in terms of GST specific strength, if you're doing just pull-up work, your parallel grip is by far going to have the greatest return on investment, simply because that parallel grip hits the brachialis so hard down in the elbow.

02:24:23 Speaker_01
The reason we need that is when you climb a rope, you're going to have more of a parallel grip. You do that parallel grab pull-up, obviously you're developing that. When we're on the rings, we're on top of the rings, right?

02:24:34 Speaker_01
Because we always, everything is aimed for eventually getting onto the rings to build strength. So, when we're on the rings, we need the grip turned out past parallel.

02:24:45 Speaker_01
Now, back in the day, Greg Glassman and I, Greg is the, you know, he's a super bright guy, founder of CrossFit, but he just didn't understand why we would turn the rings past parallel. He thought it was just aesthetics. Coach, it's just aesthetics.

02:24:59 Speaker_01
Well, the problem is if I'm on the rings and I do a dip, I do a muscle up, I do whatever, and I straighten my arms and I don't turn the rings past parallel.

02:25:08 Speaker_03
Now, coach, I apologize for interrupting just for people to visualize this. So let's just say you're up on rings. and you're doing dips, and you're in between the straps.

02:25:18 Speaker_03
What, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Coach, but when you get to the top, that means... Top of the rep, arms straight. Top of the rep, and your arms are straight, that the rings themselves... Gotta turn the thumbs out slightly. That's right.

02:25:29 Speaker_03
So instead of having the rings parallel, pointing straight ahead... Or turned in, which is what most people do. Or turned in, they would be at, say, 10 p.m. and 2 p.m., or something like that.

02:25:40 Speaker_01
Exactly, and it will vary as long as they're out. The reason is, what's the weak link in straight arm strength is the elbow. The weak link is the elbow.

02:25:49 Speaker_01
And what a lot of people will do is we've had people who were taught, well, elbow pain is just part of doing ring strength. No, it's not. Elbow pain is an indicator that your ring strength is effed up and you need to do better programming. For a reason.

02:26:02 Speaker_03
I took you off track there just because I wanted people to visualize the proper thing. So you were saying to Greg that when you get to the top, you know, the issue is it's not just aesthetics. When you get to the top. It's not aesthetics.

02:26:10 Speaker_01
You've got to turn past parallel so that the brachialis is activated.

02:26:15 Speaker_01
There's a reason that after all these years of CrossFit being on rings and doing thousands upon thousands of kipping pull-ups and dips and all this stuff that there are no Iron Crosses. Unless they're a previous gymnast. There's no homegrown.

02:26:31 Speaker_01
Crossfitter who has an iron cross, homegrown crossfitter who has plans or a malt, because right from the beginning on those very basic movements they didn't turn past parallel, they didn't turn the rings out, the brachialis wasn't trained.

02:26:44 Speaker_01
The brachialis is what supports the elbow when it's straight. So if it never got trained, they can never move forward into the money-making exercises.

02:26:54 Speaker_01
So that's why in those parallel, those pull-ups, if we use a parallel grip, and it's easy enough to do some, just do a set, do a nice parallel grip workout, and then compare the soreness that you feel on the inside of the elbow from fatigue compared to regular chin-ups and regular pull-ups.

02:27:10 Speaker_01
It's night and day. Then we would do chins and then pull-ups.

02:27:14 Speaker_03
So the other exercises to remove, if any, so we have muscle ups, back lever.

02:27:20 Speaker_01
Muscle up, back lever.

02:27:22 Speaker_03
Any you would add to that list?

02:27:24 Speaker_01
You know, this one is a little unfortunate and I don't know that it's so much of a removing as a deprioritizing. Yeah, a cautionary tale.

02:27:37 Speaker_01
It takes time to rebuild connective tissue and it's connective tissue through the ligaments and the joints that generate power through the body when they're doing plyometric work.

02:27:47 Speaker_01
There was a rash of Achilles ruptures when there was a couplet done of, so they were doing deads I believe with 225 pounds. And then that was coupled with box jumps. And they were doing that for round.

02:28:02 Speaker_01
There's not a problem with either one of those in isolation. The problem came when it was in a competitive environment with Most of the adults, right, were in their later 20s and in their 30s, you know, the typical people who are working out.

02:28:15 Speaker_01
And because it's a race, the box jumps turned into jumping down also, which turned into rebounding a plyometric off the floor. Because I got to get these done, right? I'm in a race.

02:28:27 Speaker_01
So they had pre-fatigued the Achilles with the deadlift and then went into the plyometric of the box jump. Nothing wrong with either one of them, but in combination, took some people out.

02:28:38 Speaker_01
I think there were like nine ruptures that year, which is, you know, one, okay, it happens, right? Ivankov had his achilles. He was one of the leading guys we were looking to from Russia. Ivan Ivankov, former world champ.

02:28:52 Speaker_01
He was the top guy that was favored to win the gold at the 96 games. His achilles popped walking across the parking lot. Now is it because walking across the parking lot is a dangerous thing and we should all avoid parking lots?

02:29:04 Speaker_01
Oh, it just happened to be the last straw and it had been damaged prior to that, which a long story short, you went back to the front split series.

02:29:12 Speaker_01
That is the very reason that there is that high rep calf work there to promote Achilles health, because connective tissue, the tendons and that do not have their own blood supply.

02:29:23 Speaker_01
They get fed, they heal, they strengthen through the muscles moving around them and gravity. That's what flushes the area. So if we only do very high, high-intensity, low-rep work, there's not enough blood flow for them to be healthy. This isn't mine.

02:29:37 Speaker_01
Ruman, a friend of the Bulgarian Olympic coach for the 70s and 80s is a good friend of mine. A genius. Genius at programming. Ruman makes me look like a... Tottering idiot who should be sat in the corner and no one talked to me. What's his name?

02:29:51 Speaker_01
I can never pronounce rumens last name You guys can look him up Bulgarian Olympic coach for the women 70s and 80s our room in I want to say our bastardized American spelling is are you? Am I n or n a n? Sadly rooming had a really heavy accent

02:30:09 Speaker_01
So a lot of the American coaches, you know, they, they didn't want to take the time to talk to them, but you know, I was a linguist in the military way back when. So accents not as good as you, Tim, but accents don't bother me.

02:30:19 Speaker_01
And he was older gentlemen. I would keep this guy up late so many days in a row. He'd be Chris. I got to go get some, say hi. It's okay. Just one more question. This is just one more question, Roman. It's one more.

02:30:29 Speaker_01
So our knee series that we do came from Roman, the one that I've been doing with the skiers directly from room inside squats. Yeah. He saw Alan when he was eight, and Alan was incredibly powerful at eight years old. Just unreal.

02:30:43 Speaker_01
And he was getting too powerful for his frame at that age. About eight, we were starting to hit a preliminary growth spurt, and Ruman gave me that knee series. It was about a week, week and a half. His knees weren't hurting.

02:30:57 Speaker_01
They were starting to get slightly uncomfortable. Ruman showed us that. Boom. Knee issues gone. Never again nothing with knees, ever.

02:31:04 Speaker_03
Wow. We could talk for hours and hours more, but I want to be respectful of your time and we can always do a round two sometime if you have the willingness and if the audience wants more.

02:31:15 Speaker_03
But I do have a couple of questions before I get into some of my usual rapid fire that I'd love to ask. Do you still have some time to chat? You've opened a can of worms. I'll talk training all night. All right. Here we go then.

02:31:27 Speaker_03
The next question is from one of my listeners, and it's quite simply, how do you mentally prep your athletes for big competition when you're down to that, you know, you go to the nationals, or any competition, but specifically big competitions?

02:31:41 Speaker_03
How do you... And by prep, I mean mentally prep, the day of. Is there anything in particular that you do?

02:31:48 Speaker_01
It starts with repetition. So we talked a little bit about training. So in a nutshell, we'll come back around, we'll fill this out.

02:31:56 Speaker_01
So in the preparation prior, successful repetitions, it takes a certain number of repetitions to lead to competence, and it's competence that leads to confidence, and that's what leads to a successful competition.

02:32:12 Speaker_01
So as Americans, we tend to be in a rush, be in a hurry. We don't want to take a lot of reps. We want to get something, we do it correct a few times, and then we want to bump on.

02:32:25 Speaker_01
Completely different from the Chinese approach, completely different from the Russian approach, where they'll literally do...

02:32:31 Speaker_01
Hundreds of repetitions before they move on to the next drill and then they're not upset about it because they understand it's a process As Americans, we're always look now.

02:32:40 Speaker_01
It's a it's both a good thing and it's a curse one It's a good thing because it forces us to be so creative.

02:32:46 Speaker_01
We're so hard-charging we get so many things done Physically, sometimes it kind of works against us because we don't give the body and the nervous system a chance to stabilize

02:32:57 Speaker_01
So if you want to be confident at a competition you have to pay your dues in prep Example and that's mentally and and physically for example 72 Olympics Okay, and these are I was talking about this with Dimitri Belozarchuk my friend world and Olympic champ so in 72 Olympics Olga Corbett was by all accounts going to crush Everyone at the games.

02:33:23 Speaker_01
She was gonna crush everyone in training and They went back and the Russians went back and they reviewed all her training.

02:33:29 Speaker_01
She had over a 98% hit rate on her routines that meant she was almost perfect almost perfect When she went to the games, she had a major meltdown

02:33:41 Speaker_01
Now the question of course raises, how was it possible for someone who was this perfect for this long in training to go to the competition and just fall apart?

02:33:51 Speaker_01
As they dug into it, they found out the error was not in physical preparation, the error was in mental preparation. So as Olga was cranking at home, she was the one who decided when to go.

02:34:04 Speaker_01
Coaches waited on her, judges waited on her, everything was structured on her. She was very comfortable. Okay, she didn't start till she was ready. Equipments she's ready for, lighting she's ready for, matting's familiar, everything is good.

02:34:17 Speaker_01
When you get to the Worlds and you get to the Olympics, judges don't give a fuck if you're ready or not when they raise that flag. Yeah, it's brutal. In fact, to give everyone a little taste, the warm-up gym is not there.

02:34:30 Speaker_01
The warm-up gym might be 10 minutes away. Or it might be a 10 minute walk, a five minute walk down this concrete hallway. So you go and you warm up, you walk down this hallway, right? And then your ass waits there.

02:34:43 Speaker_01
And then the flag goes up and you got to go to a hundred percent within 30 seconds. You got 30 seconds to be on the equipment. Massive hit. Yeah. Massive head game.

02:34:53 Speaker_01
So they went back and they found out that Olga's problem was that everything had gone her way. She controlled too many variables. Too many variables, and they were too easy. They were too accommodating.

02:35:04 Speaker_01
And so what they did is the Russians changed their training just to screw with people. So if I'm coaching someone, right, and there's going to be a mental component, I'm going to fuck with them.

02:35:13 Speaker_01
I'm going to tell them, and not in a mean way, but, all right, you're up. And then walk away. Leave them waiting. You know, let them get antsy. Make them go when they're not ready. Make them do a cold set. Okay, don't let any and everything you can.

02:35:28 Speaker_01
Have a crowd of people around them trying to mess with them. Any and everything. And I will also say, it's much harder for women than it is for guys. Simply because women are more caring and nurturing than guys.

02:35:40 Speaker_01
A guy goes out to compete and he's worried about one thing. He's worried about kicking ass. Okay, the girl goes out there and she's worried about kicking ass also, but she's also worried about not wanting to let anybody down.

02:35:52 Speaker_01
Are they going to be disappointed with me? Are they going to like me? She has this whole range of other emotional burdens that a guy doesn't give a shit about. They just don't care.

02:36:00 Speaker_01
I've seen girls who are just amazing in training and get out there and just because they have this other load that they place on themselves that guys don't have to deal with. And the way you handle that in training is we just have to get more reps in.

02:36:15 Speaker_01
I got to have more reps and do everything you can to put them in a situation to where, for example, 2004, I was doing some of the prep.

02:36:24 Speaker_01
I was doing some of the floor, the tramp, and helping with vault and doing the physical preparation for a girl we had trying out for the Olympics. She did not make it. She had to be top six. She was ninth.

02:36:36 Speaker_01
Okay, and Carly fantastic girl great girl their approach though for mental training.

02:36:42 Speaker_01
I thought was flawed They brought someone in and you know, I won't I won't say names I'll just I'll just say that I disagreed and it was it was a very they're trying to be really really positive So, you know 30,000 square foot gym big giant.

02:36:53 Speaker_01
Yes signs everywhere. Yes, you can. Yes, it'll be great. Yes, it'll be wonderful And the reality is, it's not going to be wonderful. It's going to be stressful. It's going to suck. When you are in a competition at that level, the pressure is crushing.

02:37:09 Speaker_01
It's a physical pressure that you feel on you, and you still have to produce. performance at a world-class level. And the only way to handle that is we have to try to replicate that in training, right, so that the pressure's not going away.

02:37:23 Speaker_01
The error that was done by Carly was trying to downplay the pressure. I would say do the exact opposite. Do the opposite. You should go to the training, to the competition, and hopefully competition is less pressure than what you go through in training.

02:37:37 Speaker_01
Now, that's not going to be true at Olympics and such, but at most things, It should be the case. It should be the case. So mentally...

02:37:46 Speaker_01
If you're scared, let's say, if you're feeling unconfident, if you're feeling threatened, uneasy, your preparation was flawed.

02:37:55 Speaker_03
It brings up an anecdote that I heard from Paul Levesque, better known as Triple H, the professional wrestler, who's also an incredible business executive for WWE, but he visited Floyd Mayweather.

02:38:08 Speaker_03
And he visited Floyd maybe an hour before a huge title fight. for a championship belt, or to retain his belt. And at one point, Paul said, you know, I'm gonna leave, I don't wanna interrupt your prep. And he goes, why would you interrupt my prep?

02:38:22 Speaker_03
He goes, if I'm not ready now, nothing I do between, in the next 60 minutes is gonna make me ready. He said, you can... Yeah, I love that attitude. Yeah, feel free to hang out. He was just walking, watching basketball or something.

02:38:32 Speaker_03
And it also, you brought up this SEAL team, six members and so on earlier. I mean, that's, I think, a great example of a parallel track, right? In the sense that...

02:38:41 Speaker_03
they very much want to sweat more, in some cases, bleed more in training so that they can avoid dying in real battle.

02:38:50 Speaker_03
So the simulations are extremely brutal and intended to be sort of along the lines of, I'm not really up on my ancient name pronunciation, but I think it's Archilochus, who said, we do not rise to the level of our hopes, we fall to the level of our training.

02:39:06 Speaker_03
So making the conditions equivalent,

02:39:09 Speaker_01
My buddy would tell, they were so well-trained, no stress. How in the world you can be in 145 gunfights and not feel stress when you're heading out to another one? He'd just, yeah, fall asleep on the helicopter.

02:39:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, I'll do my thing and get back on, seriously. He's like, oh, yeah, I mean, gosh, just another day in the office, holy moly.

02:39:29 Speaker_03
So on the day of, assuming you've done the requisite preparation, you've conditioned them to perform well under stressful circumstances. Change nothing. Change nothing.

02:39:41 Speaker_01
Change nothing. Where people fail, this is an important lesson, not just in competing, but in everything. So a lot of people psych themselves out of doing as well as they could have by prematurely comparing themselves to the people around them.

02:39:58 Speaker_01
Instead of, just go out, take care of your business, do your best, and see where it falls. If you're going up against the best who's ever been born, you're not gonna beat him. There's not gonna be a miracle. The sky's not gonna open.

02:40:11 Speaker_01
God's not gonna reach down and bless you with extra athletic ability. You know, it's not gonna happen. So you just ignore that. You know, you go out and you just stay in your own head and do your thing.

02:40:22 Speaker_01
Now, psychologically, people handle it differently. Some people, we have the same chemistry on Olympic teams, some people like to be left alone. You know, let me go do my thing.

02:40:33 Speaker_01
You know, they'll come together for the team, but then when they're prepping for their set, you know, they got to go off on their self. There's other guys where they feed off that interaction, right?

02:40:41 Speaker_01
They want people coming around and getting them pumped up. And then there's all in between. None of them are right and none of them are wrong. It just is what it is. And it's important to just deal with who you are. Same in training.

02:40:54 Speaker_01
There are some people who thrive on multiple training per day, right? And they just blossom. They do awesome. There's other people who have to train just a few times a week. Doesn't matter. There's been Olympic champions who trained both ways.

02:41:08 Speaker_01
It just depends on what your body does best with.

02:41:11 Speaker_03
I'm very curious to hear the answer to this. This was from a, I think it was, it might've been a mother. I think it was a father who said, what questions would coach summer ask

02:41:20 Speaker_03
a gymnastic coach at a nearby facility before sending his own five to ten year old off to train with them.

02:41:28 Speaker_01
Yeah, and I went through that. So I didn't coach my daughter. I didn't coach my daughter. I wanted to be dad. And I didn't get involved. Were there things I would have done very differently? Yes.

02:41:40 Speaker_01
But her happiness in the process was more important to me than her success. And she was state champion. But that was more important to me than stepping in and making sure everything was world-class level. I didn't want to go there.

02:41:52 Speaker_01
First thing I would do if I'm reviewing someone, because everyone, have you noticed that the bell curve is reality, right? The bell curve shows that there's a huge majority of people who are average.

02:42:03 Speaker_01
There's a few who are at the top and there are a few who are at the bottom. But if you talk to someone, you've never met anyone who says, yeah, I'm in the middle of the bell curve. Every fucker you talk to is exceptional. Every single person, right?

02:42:16 Speaker_01
Every person is another millionaire in the making. They're gonna win The Voice. They got Academy Award, it's coming. Nobody says, yeah, I'm average. And it's the same thing with gyms. So first thing I would do is look at a competitive record.

02:42:30 Speaker_01
How have they done and at what level have they been successful? So are they successful at a local level, at a state level? How have they done in terms of regionals? How have they done in terms of nationals? Are they on national team?

02:42:41 Speaker_01
How consistently have they been on national team? Is it year in, year out? Was it a one-time deal? After I look at that, the very next thing I'm gonna look at, I'm gonna look at injury rates. How healthy and successful are these athletes?

02:42:55 Speaker_03
How would you find that data or would you just ask them point blank?

02:42:59 Speaker_01
If they're a world-class coach, they're always gonna be straight with you. The only people in my experience who talk shit are the wannabes.

02:43:08 Speaker_03
World-class coach. Yeah, that's consistent in everything that I've experienced.

02:43:11 Speaker_01
In everything. I had, so 2003, Yeah, it's 2003. I'm at a training camp and Paul Ham has just won the world championships He's just won worlds and Alan is a little guy.

02:43:25 Speaker_01
We're at a training camp and in Paul's coach Stacy Money is there and we're at a technical meeting and it's on roundoffs on roundoffs of all things And so Stacy comes and he sits down next to me He says, Chris, what do you think about this?

02:43:40 Speaker_01
Now in my head I'm thinking, who gives a fuck what I think about this? You just won world championships. I want to know what you think about this. But he asks my opinion. I don't say I'm not going to be rude to Stacey, but in my head I'm thinking that.

02:43:52 Speaker_01
So we talk about it for a little bit, and then Stacey gets up and he goes around the room visiting with other coaches that he respects, and he wants their opinion, and then he makes his own opinion. He had just won worlds.

02:44:03 Speaker_01
It would have been so easy for him to be kind of aloof and snooty and arrogant, you know, I'm this and that.

02:44:08 Speaker_01
But the point is that that's the reason that Stacey won worlds, that he was a coach of that caliber, because he was always open to learning more. He never said, I know everything. And like you said, I've never met an exception.

02:44:21 Speaker_01
It's the ones who aren't at a high level who think, you know, I know everything. There's nothing left to be learned. And it's just not the case. So I would check that, check around, you know, talk to people, watch the athletes in training.

02:44:34 Speaker_01
You know, they'll go and watch some workouts. How does the coach handle it? Is there a lot of tears? If it's a guy and there's tears in the workout, he's got a broken leg. And girls, you know, girls are girls.

02:44:47 Speaker_01
I live in a, I've got two daughters, a wife, even my dog is female. There's tears here constantly. This is part of being female. So if it's an occasional tear, no big deal. But if there's a lot of crying all the time, there's a problem.

02:45:00 Speaker_01
I'd move down the road. But if they're happy, now doesn't, healthy doesn't mean a free for all. Healthy and happy doesn't mean indulging. You know, there should be structure, there should be accountability, but it should be pleasant.

02:45:14 Speaker_01
You know, kids, or any athlete, adults as well, will either live up to the standard you set, or they will live down to the standard you set.

02:45:21 Speaker_01
Just kind of go ahead and try to get a feel, you know, is this a place where you want, is the competition record as good? Is this an environment that I'm content with my child being in? You know, if you get a good feeling, okay.

02:45:34 Speaker_03
As an adult, if you were assessing a gymnastics coach for yourself, and you could observe a workout, let's just say you could only watch the warm-up. What would you look for to be there or not be there, or what would the characteristics be?

02:45:51 Speaker_01
Do they take the time to warm up the joints? Or do they jump right into work? Do they actually take time to mobilize? Are they doing stall bar work? Are they doing Jefferson curl work? Are they loosening up their wrists and their knees and their ankles?

02:46:07 Speaker_01
Are they loosening their back before they get going? Are they doing some type of pre-strength? Are they doing lower level strength elements to get the muscles warm and firing before jumping into the hard work?

02:46:20 Speaker_01
You can tell a lot from how a program warms up.

02:46:23 Speaker_03
No, that's what I was asking. Great question. Yeah, I mean, there's a movement that also, from an evolutionary standpoint, makes a lot of sense. Just like we were talking about the biceps and high capacity for volume.

02:46:36 Speaker_03
The QL walks, which you introduced me to. Which, if you really want to have people laugh at you, this is a great move to do. Although, you had mentioned, and this doesn't surprise me at all, that you've seen high-level powerlifters doing this.

02:46:48 Speaker_03
That's where I got it from. Yeah, holding onto kettlebells, kind of with a goblet squat type of grip. So what this looks like, folks, we've already talked about this seated pike position. So you're sitting on your ass, legs together, legs straight.

02:47:00 Speaker_03
So basically keeping your legs completely straight. If there are other elements, please let me know, coach, technical points. But basically you're like walking your ass cheeks. Yeah.

02:47:09 Speaker_01
One cheek at a time. Doing a speed walking, sitting down.

02:47:13 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's actually, that's a great description. That's exactly what it looks like. And QL refers to the quadratus lumborum.

02:47:20 Speaker_01
Yeah, quadratus lumborum.

02:47:22 Speaker_03
Yeah, quadratus lumborum, which is sort of like the grand central of all sorts of muscles and fascia in the back. And it's incredible how much that loosens up my entire lower back and hips doing this very, very simple QL walk.

02:47:36 Speaker_01
I'll pick up, gosh, sometimes three, four inches. Oh, yeah. Just from loosening up from those first. Yeah.

02:47:42 Speaker_03
How long should a proper gymnastics warm-up take? And one more, which is warming up the joints.

02:47:50 Speaker_03
Are there any specific movements that hit the shoulders from any angle or perspective that would indicate a better warm-up for gymnastics strength training than

02:48:02 Speaker_01
It would depend on duration, duration of the workout. So if you're in there for an hour, I'll preface it, say you're in for an hour, I would say probably 10 to 15 minutes is reasonable.

02:48:16 Speaker_01
Now, at the same time, if I have significant mobility deficits, then perhaps the majority of the workout needs to be mobility work. It could kind of shift, possibly as high as a half hour if I have a multi-hour training coming up.

02:48:33 Speaker_01
It's complicated enough, and we've tried this over the years. There are enough things to address that should be addressed on a semi-regular basis that you can't really get everything in to a single warm-up.

02:48:47 Speaker_01
You're probably going to have two or three variations. You know, if you're doing advanced work, you're probably going to have two or three variations in order to get to everything. Like, for example,

02:48:57 Speaker_01
ring strength before a good hard ring strength, it's very nice to do theraband series for the shoulders. Different shapes and pulls and circles and all these things with theraband are really great for warming up the interior of the shoulder.

02:49:10 Speaker_01
On other days, do I need to do that as much for shoulder? No, it might be more weighted shoulder work is appropriate for other days. Is it necessary to do all of them at the same time? Most of the time, no.

02:49:22 Speaker_01
We have one senior student, really, really good. Matt started training with me in his late 40s. He's now 52, beast. Press handstands, planches, front levers. At 52, ridiculous shape.

02:49:38 Speaker_01
And he went through a period where just for shoulders to feel better, he did every shoulder prep. We had all our integrated mobility.

02:49:46 Speaker_01
Our courses are set up very unusually, where for our introductory courses, adult students come in, alternate an exercise with an integrated mobility, because we want them 50-50.

02:49:58 Speaker_01
So we found if I told people how important stretching was, they always blow me off. But if I required it, do a set. Before your next set, you have to do this stretch. Then back and forth, and we just had great results.

02:50:09 Speaker_01
So Mats is a crazy maniac, still skateboards, still water skis, does his GST, and shoulder would get a little finicky. So he just did extra mobility, and it just fixed his shoulder right up.

02:50:23 Speaker_03
I was introduced to an exercise by a Masters CrossFit competitor actually, that really helped with shoulder, I would say warm-up more than mobility, but for

02:50:38 Speaker_03
pressing exercises, even in GST, including any type of hand balancing or handstand work, which you have to have a decent amount of grip strength for this, but I was very skeptical of this, even as someone who's done a lot with kettlebells, I've never been a huge fan of the bottoms-up work with kettlebells, meaning... Ah, yeah, it's kind of flipped up, you're gripping it by the handle, the bell on top.

02:50:59 Speaker_01
Exactly.

02:51:00 Speaker_03
But I was like, you know what, screw it, I'll try it with a lightweight, and I started with, say, whatever it is, might be like 15, 16 pounds, and I've increased that, I use 35s now, but...

02:51:08 Speaker_03
A little bit of chalk goes a long way here, but you, you would, uh, basically swing it up to a clean and then press it overhead. And then you just do rotations.

02:51:17 Speaker_03
So I'm doing like side to side rotations and it's incredible how well that activates the smaller musculature.

02:51:27 Speaker_01
The shoulders are wonderful, isn't it?

02:51:29 Speaker_03
Oh, it's great.

02:51:30 Speaker_01
We didn't do them with kettlebells, we'll do them with light dumbbells. So basically, guys, what Tim's describing is just take a dumbbell, push it up overhead, turn the thumbs, externally rotate it just a bit, and then just do outward circles.

02:51:43 Speaker_01
Keep a flat back, shoulders open, no arching. Do them for time, one to two minutes. You know, just good gracious, wonderful warm-up. And then, you know, something we didn't address, and I'll throw it in just real, real, real quick.

02:51:57 Speaker_01
I know we're running out of time, but some people who are experiencing shoulder issues in terms of mobility have nothing to do with the shoulder or necessarily the bicep, but sometimes it's because the lats are so strong and tight.

02:52:09 Speaker_01
And so it's an issue that I have.

02:52:11 Speaker_03
Absolutely.

02:52:12 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly. A lot of, and cause, and a lot of the lifters too, cause those, those lats are working, aren't you guys are moving some serious weight and those lats are of course working.

02:52:19 Speaker_01
And if there's not corresponding mobility going with it, it's real easy for those lats to kind of get chronically contracted, lose their mobility.

02:52:27 Speaker_01
So a lot of times you get in there and just stretch the heck out of that lat, automatically get relief on the shoulders.

02:52:34 Speaker_03
Okay, coach, I am going to do a couple of rapid-fire, then a couple of closing questions, and then maybe, I mean, you and I are talking quite a bit these days, so we'll consider doing a follow-up, and I definitely want to share sort of the results of our experiment with people also, so we'll certainly be in constant contact.

02:52:50 Speaker_03
But the first rapid-fire question is, and the answer doesn't have to be short, but it certainly can be, when you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind for you, and why?

02:53:00 Speaker_01
Well, it's not Obama. It's not Obama piss all the people off out there. You know, someone I have admired for years and years is Tony Robbins. He would be very high on my list. I tend to be very eclectic.

02:53:14 Speaker_01
I'm not trapped just in athletics, but what I found in terms of business arts

02:53:22 Speaker_01
Politics it's all the same when people get to that level of success that they all have the same attitudes they bring the same tools and attitudes to the table and I found it surprising that I could sit down with you Tim and visit I can sit down with special operators and visit I can sit down with you know world-class ballerinas and dance and artists and that I just did this weekend visit with a world-class artists and

02:53:50 Speaker_01
You would think there's no common ground there, but there is common ground because what's required to achieve success in all of those requires the same skills. You got to be consistent, you got to master the basics, you got to be patient.

02:54:02 Speaker_01
You gotta constantly reinvent yourself. Look for a flaw, a hole in the preparation. Fix it, move forward.

02:54:08 Speaker_03
You also need to be very observant. And I think part of training yourself to be observant is... I like that. ...asking questions. Right?

02:54:16 Speaker_01
So, I think that's why... And being willing to hear the answer.

02:54:19 Speaker_03
Definitely. That's why you take a bunch of people who are the best at what they do and you put them in the room. Generally speaking, they're gonna get along just fine. Absolutely. Now, why Tony Robbins? I mean, I'm a huge fan of Tony Robbins.

02:54:31 Speaker_03
He's been on the podcast, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him, but I want to just hear your reasons.

02:54:37 Speaker_01
I like that.

02:54:38 Speaker_01
I firmly believe, especially in the US, I firmly believe that if someone isn't as successful in any arena you toss it out, whether it's professionally, personally in your life, financially, if you're not as successful as you would like to be or making progress towards that,

02:54:57 Speaker_01
It's our own fault.

02:54:58 Speaker_01
We have so many opportunities here that so much wealth of knowledge that a lot of times, so for example, when GB got started and there were two years, a year and a half, two years in the beginning where I was doing 18 hour days and didn't make a nickel, nothing.

02:55:17 Speaker_01
And everyone around me was like, what are you doing? Well, you know, I've got plans for this. And we talked about a little bit and they're like, well, you know, if you need some extra money, you could go get a job.

02:55:25 Speaker_01
Think about how much further ahead you'd be right now. But you have to have that vision. Once you have the vision, you've got to be able to put practical steps to it. And then everyone's good at that.

02:55:36 Speaker_01
I outlines the people, outline stuff all the time, but then can you stick with it? Because, you know, when you run your business team, when I run my business, there's no one telling us what to do. We're the ones to monitor ourself.

02:55:47 Speaker_01
This needs to be done. I'm going to get it done. And it's kind of that difference between letting someone else being in control of your life and you choosing to be in control of your own life. I know some people are going to get upset.

02:56:00 Speaker_01
Coach, you know, I'm a single mom. It's this and that. I can't do everything I want to do. And I get that. I get that. I've been there. I've gone through that. I'm certainly not saying there are there are quick fixes because these fixes can take years.

02:56:12 Speaker_01
But I think if someone's willing to put the time in, that there's so much opportunity, and they're willing to do that for years, it's kind of a big giant blank check. A lot can change. You really have a lot of control.

02:56:23 Speaker_01
And so that was a message that, you know, and I didn't say it nearly as well as Tony Robbins does, and I am going to twist your arm so I get an introduction someday to Tony. That's high on my list.

02:56:34 Speaker_03
Yeah, well I threw a little jam session for the people who are on the podcast, so both of you will be invited.

02:56:39 Speaker_01
Totally awesome, I'm so looking forward to that. But you know, way back when, poor as could be, hadn't made national team coach yet, was just getting started in my coaching career. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

02:56:51 Speaker_01
And here's this guy saying, you know what, just think clear, plan ahead and be willing to work. That resonated with me. You know, it's like, God, I just had this discussion with someone this morning.

02:57:03 Speaker_01
You're young, it's so challenging, it's so difficult to be patient. Or you're 35 and you're starting to get back in shape again.

02:57:10 Speaker_01
And the hardest thing they need to do is they've got to, especially if they were a good athlete previously, you've got to set that attitude of having been a stud before aside.

02:57:19 Speaker_01
Because that body you have right now is not that stud's body that you had previously. It could be again. but it took time to build it the first time, it's gonna take time to rebuild it this time.

02:57:31 Speaker_01
Or personally in your life, if things aren't where you want it to be, gonna take time to build it there.

02:57:36 Speaker_03
I had this Olympic weightlifting coach, I think you guys would hit it off famously, especially if you were both a couple drinks in. But, uh... She's dangerous. Very, very similar approaches.

02:57:48 Speaker_03
He said, you have a Ferrari engine and a Toyota Corolla chassis. That's it. I love that. He said you can't just slam on the accelerator and expect good things to happen. But yeah, Tony is very tactical, practical.

02:58:01 Speaker_03
And I apologize if you and everybody else can hear metal bowls being spun around. That's what my dog Molly does when she's trying to tell me that she's hungry. She just licks an empty bowl and sends it spinning. I'm like, yes, I get it.

02:58:11 Speaker_03
I know you're hungry. Being subtle. Yeah, being very subtle. What book or books have you given the most to other people as gifts?

02:58:20 Speaker_01
Ooh. It's not so much as... I'm a big fan of Robert Heinlein.

02:58:26 Speaker_03
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Stranger in a Strange Land. Yeah, just...

02:58:31 Speaker_01
Just all of them, I come back to those over and over again, the theme of self-reliance. I came from a really, really humble, modest family background. And so I think that instills a hunger and a work ethic.

02:58:45 Speaker_01
It's a little bit kind of embarrassing, actually. It's a little bit of a Charles Dickens theme there. Frustration, things weren't where we wanted them to be or where I wanted them to be.

02:58:54 Speaker_01
And then how big a price, how hard are you willing to work in order to change it? One I'm enjoying right now, and I'm just getting into it, is The Obstacle Is The Way.

02:59:05 Speaker_03
Oh, yeah, by Ryan Holiday, a very close friend of mine.

02:59:07 Speaker_01
You're killing me, dude. You're killing me. I'm just gonna hang out in your living room so I can meet all these people.

02:59:13 Speaker_03
Oh, yeah, yeah. No, you and Ryan would hit it off. Oh, yeah, that's a great book. I actually, this is a really small world, so I actually produced the audiobook for that. Are you kidding me?

02:59:24 Speaker_03
And, you know, when you were talking about preparing your athletes for the stress as opposed to painting it over with yes you can and positive psychology and really kind of sowing the seeds of their own destruction by doing so.

02:59:38 Speaker_03
I was thinking about stoic philosophy. So, it doesn't surprise me that you're reading The Obstacle is the Way, which has become an extremely popular book among professional sports teams and coaches.

02:59:47 Speaker_03
I mean, the Patriots, Seahawks, they've all read this.

02:59:50 Speaker_01
Someone else that caught my eye who had read it and that led me to it was Schwarzenegger.

02:59:55 Speaker_03
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:59:56 Speaker_01
Gosh, I mean, comes to the States with no money in his pocket and then becomes world champion in athletics, becomes a millionaire in business, becomes a movie star and becomes a governor, success in four different arenas in life. Oh yeah. Good Lord.

03:00:14 Speaker_01
He said he liked that book. I was like, well, good enough for me.

03:00:16 Speaker_03
Yeah, Arnold's an impressive unit.

03:00:19 Speaker_03
So two things, I know we're bouncing around here, but two things that also astonished me when I interviewed him for the podcast was, number one, I didn't realize in doing the research, until I did the research, that he became a millionaire before he ever had his first starring role in real estate.

03:00:35 Speaker_03
And that gave him the ability to only audition, not out of financial necessity, but for the roles that he wanted. So you could say no, And that his highest grossing film of all time, for him personally, was Twins, because no one wanted to make it.

03:00:49 Speaker_03
And so he took a cut on the upfront payment for the salary, per se, in exchange for back-end points that were abnormally large for the film industry at that point. Yeah, fascinating guy. Love that. Do you have any particular morning rituals?

03:01:05 Speaker_03
What is the first 60 minutes of your day?

03:01:06 Speaker_01
The morning rituals I'm supposed to do?

03:01:09 Speaker_03
No, the ones you actually have or don't have.

03:01:11 Speaker_01
I tend to find as I've gotten older, because I'm in my fifties now, early fifties. As I've gotten older, I find that my, uh, by far my most productive times are early morning. That's when I'm, I'm sharpest, I'm clearest.

03:01:27 Speaker_01
I'll tend to get up, you know, pretty early before everybody else in the household is up and I'll get.

03:01:31 Speaker_03
When do you get up?

03:01:34 Speaker_01
It varies. I'll get up somewhere usually between four and five. You know, it gives me a chance, my girls get up in a few hours, and it gives me a chance for that two, three hours of just clear thought.

03:01:45 Speaker_01
Maybe it's working on a project, maybe it's a new manuscript. Maybe it's just, you know, I indulge some reading. The house is quiet. I do my best if after that, girls head to school and then I get my workout in.

03:01:55 Speaker_01
If I'm consistent with that, then my rest of my day is usually pretty golden.

03:01:59 Speaker_03
Yeah, you've already won. I remember somebody said to me, if you win the morning, you've won the day. Still working on it. That's a work in progress, but I definitely agree with that. Do you drink coffee? Do you eat breakfast? Do you drink coffee?

03:02:11 Speaker_01
I went for years and You know, you're always told, I'm not a coffee drinker. I'm one of those few, I think, who it just tastes like cough medicine to me. It's not me being virtuous. It's just me despising the taste.

03:02:24 Speaker_01
And it's funny, because my wife is a big coffee drinker. She loves it. So she's got her gourmet grinder and all this stuff. But for me, no, no way. You know, I found as I got older that I do best if I don't do breakfast.

03:02:37 Speaker_01
I do best as I used to be heavy, heavy protein. And then after I got over 50, if I cut, and this is me personally, would it work for younger athletes who are training? I doubt it. It's a bigger engine, need more fuel. But for me older, it's slowing down.

03:02:52 Speaker_01
I'd find that. Not doing breakfast. Reasonable lunch. My protein sizes are so much smaller now. Mostly veggies. Have a good healthy starch. Usually it's rice or potatoes. Reasonable. A little protein there. Some fat at lunch. Weight. Do the same at dinner.

03:03:09 Speaker_01
I'm done. I'm good. I was amazed how much I was overeating just from habit.

03:03:16 Speaker_03
Oh, yeah. Yeah, eating by the clock. I mean, I've noticed the same thing for myself, and I've been amazed how many people I've interviewed for this podcast who are the best at what they do, who do not eat breakfast. You're kidding.

03:03:28 Speaker_01
Really?

03:03:28 Speaker_03
Not that I was alone in the hinterland.

03:03:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah.

03:03:30 Speaker_03
Pavel, you know, his answer was, coffee, dim. I keep it simple, you know? And then Wim Hof, same story. You look at former General Stan McChrystal, same story. and it just goes on and on and on.

03:03:42 Speaker_03
I'd say a good third of the men specifically, I'm not sure if the female body responds as well to it, although I'm sure there are intermittent fasting people out there who would say that women respond in the same way, but very high percentage, I'd say maybe a third of the men I've had on the podcast do not eat breakfast.

03:03:59 Speaker_03
Now, specifically, these are men probably over the age of 45, so I don't know, I would imagine their diet has probably changed over time.

03:04:06 Speaker_03
And interestingly enough, if you do dig into the literature, there is, or if I wanted to be a nerd, there are data to suggest that as we get older, it is possible that we absorb protein more effectively when we have larger doses of protein less frequently.

03:04:26 Speaker_03
So having the... See, that is interesting.

03:04:29 Speaker_01
That is very interesting because I find myself every once in a while getting a big steak.

03:04:34 Speaker_03
Yeah.

03:04:35 Speaker_01
You know, once a week, once every two weeks, I'll go and I'll just get this massive thing of protein, and then I'm good for a while, I'm just very modest.

03:04:41 Speaker_03
Yeah, so this like bolus of protein for like older women, I think this, I saw one particular study, could have been an observational, and I doubt it if they're trying to standardize the protein amount, but it was some large amount, it was like 70-80 grams of protein in a single feeding was absorbed better than that same amount split over several meals in the day.

03:04:59 Speaker_03
Really fascinating stuff. What would you put on a billboard, if you could put a billboard anywhere? What would it say?

03:05:07 Speaker_01
Just what's on top of my mind right now. Yeah. What's on top of the head doesn't have... We're not looking for universal truth, but just what's... I would say probiotic.

03:05:17 Speaker_03
Probiotic.

03:05:19 Speaker_01
Probiotic, we went, I don't know if it was a history of I had to cut them out, you know, too much margaritas. You know, it's kind of funny, you know, as you get older, it starts creeping in more and more and more.

03:05:29 Speaker_01
But I went through a phase where it didn't matter what I ate, it didn't matter what I ate, if I ate fat, if I ate low fat, if I ate veg, if I ate high protein, terrible digestion, just terrible digestion.

03:05:42 Speaker_01
And I happened to come across something that said, if you got da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, might be a probiotic issue. And so through a good buddy, I had a laboratory grade. These particular ones were from Clare Labs.

03:05:54 Speaker_01
You kind of need a prescription for them, but they're a laboratory grade probiotic.

03:05:56 Speaker_03
How do you spell Clare?

03:05:57 Speaker_01
I want to say it was H-A-L-A-I-R-E. Got it. You know, I'm not paid by them guys, and they're a son of a bitch to track down because you need a prescription for them. Yeah. And I got to get them a health provider, but hooked me up in 12 hours.

03:06:12 Speaker_01
And so I was like, holy moly, because I'd been uncomfortable for months. And in 12 hours, this took care of it. Contacted a buddy of mine who was great at nutrition.

03:06:24 Speaker_01
He went over and said, coach, you should go ahead and probably take two, four weeks and just really hit these probiotics hard and repopulate the gut.

03:06:32 Speaker_01
Years of too much margaritas, too much protein, not enough vegetable matter to feed the good bacteria. It sounded like a night and day difference. I bet simply because of that, I dropped eight pounds.

03:06:46 Speaker_03
Yeah, I bet. I mean, I'm currently taking VSL3 and a few other probiotics, but one of the points you made that I think is really worth underscoring is the vegetable matter and prebiotics. So providing the food that creates the environment in which

03:07:03 Speaker_03
bacteria that you want to grow can grow effectively, whether that's through foods, where I think, you know, one of the ways I had this biologist tell me at one point, he said, I think slow carbs going to be vindicated because, you know, the beans and lentils and so on are vilified by paleo, but they provide the perfect vehicle for a prebiotic environment that can foster the development of and growth of these various bacteria in the gut.

03:07:28 Speaker_03
And if not that, you know, if you're, if you are a paleo purist, you can also consume something like FOS, you know, fructooligosaccharides or inulin or any of these other things, but. Wow, I had no idea that you had that experience.

03:07:40 Speaker_01
Yeah, it was shocking. Prior to that, I would have said number one supplement was emulsified vitamin D drops.

03:07:46 Speaker_03
Mm-hmm. How much were you consuming, just out of curiosity? And of course, the amount you take depends on what your levels look like.

03:07:51 Speaker_01
It depended. Yeah, just a little background there. So I was at our winter nationals seven years ago. Just kind of the environment, you know, national team, kids everywhere, middle of the winter. It's always in a February.

03:08:04 Speaker_01
And I would just get sick, really bad, kind of bronchitis-like sickness once or twice a year for, gosh, decades. And at one of these, I was half dead. My assistant coach is trying to run my athletes. He's doing his best, but it's not going real well.

03:08:21 Speaker_01
I'm trying to coach hanging over a railing. And I'm visiting with Rob Wolf later that night, and I'm just like, you know, this is ridiculous. And Rob's the one who tagged me and said, Coach, you know, it's always in the middle of the winter.

03:08:32 Speaker_01
Try some vitamin D. And she started the liquid vitamin D. If we don't count food poisoning in Hong Kong, I've not been sick since. And that's quite a swing, you know, once or twice, pretty serious, per year, too. Nothing for seven.

03:08:45 Speaker_01
And the only thing that changed in that time was the vitamin D. So I mean, I'm pretty Pretty practical, if that was the one variable I changed and that was the result, well, boom, that's the doorstep I butted at.

03:08:56 Speaker_03
Do you have a particular brand that you use for that?

03:08:58 Speaker_01
I want to say, I've looked at it so many years, I just can't pick it up off the shelf, and I want to say it was BioTest perhaps. I can't swear about other ones, I just know I've always used that particular one.

03:09:10 Speaker_01
I've done, gosh, all kinds of different protocols from one or two drops a day. It's like a runny Elmer's glue for those who haven't had it. Yeah, the taste isn't, you know, anything to get upset about. My daughters, when they were young, disagreed.

03:09:26 Speaker_01
They said, what's the worst thing in the world? It's not bad at all. We've done daily a few drops all the way up to once or twice a week with eight to ten drops, you know, and just mix it up.

03:09:37 Speaker_01
It just seems like, you know, as long as you're consistent, it almost doesn't matter.

03:09:42 Speaker_03
Yeah, so I'm guessing each of those drops is probably an IU and one international unit.

03:09:47 Speaker_01
Gosh, it seems like, man, I'm tied to a computer right now. I'd go grab it for you. It seemed like the dosage is surprisingly high in each drop. And I'm a big fan, especially as you get older. You've got to go get blood work. Anything else is guessing.

03:10:03 Speaker_03
Yeah, you need to get blood work, period. I mean, if you get your car checked out more often than you get your blood work done, then you need to rearrange your priorities.

03:10:10 Speaker_03
So, last question, and this is where I'd like you to certainly, among other things, point people to where they can learn more about you and gymnastic bodies, but what ask or request would you have for my audience, for the people listening?

03:10:24 Speaker_01
Okay, very good. Actually, I love that question. I would like them to consider two things. I would like them to consider Where's the fire? Where's the fire? Where's the rush? Where's the rush?

03:10:35 Speaker_01
Why are they trying to accomplish everything their current goals yesterday?

03:10:41 Speaker_01
Why not slow down a little bit not saying not to work hard But why don't we just slow down a little bit a little more reasonable pace some more consistency that would be number one ask and then second one is

03:10:53 Speaker_01
Mobility, whether it's my material, whether it's just the stuff that Tim posts for you, whether it's someone else's material, you know, it's fine with me guys, but we've got to get those bodies moving.

03:11:04 Speaker_01
We've got to get natural range of motion back again.

03:11:07 Speaker_01
That alone, if we did the hierarchy, what will increase quality of life the fastest for them is going to be mobility first, then core, then, you know, your more conventional strength, your arms, your shoulders, yada, yada, yada.

03:11:20 Speaker_03
And where can people find you online, on social media, etc.? What would you recommend as a next step for somebody who's never done gymnastics anything, who wants to dip their toe in the water?

03:11:33 Speaker_01
First thing, go to GymnasticBodies.com. We have a special landing page for your listeners, Tim, with a nice discount for them. We have a nice introductory program that's just Gymnastic Bodies. G-Y-M-N-A-S-T-I-C-B-O-D-I-E-S dot com.

03:11:51 Speaker_01
We got a nice discount there for you for a nice intro program. It's about a 24 day program. Gentle introduction to kind of the language we speak. Get started on some mobility, some great follow along videos for them.

03:12:03 Speaker_01
You know, kind of hold their hand, make sure they get started off on the right foot.

03:12:08 Speaker_03
It's been a tremendous learning experience for me so far and it's only been I mean, really, a handful of weeks that we've been digging into this deeply, although we had some prep time in talking about it prior to that.

03:12:20 Speaker_03
And definitely, guys, if you are like, ah, I'm so busy, I'm doing this, that, and the other thing, take a look at the program, but at the very least, follow Gymnastic Buddies on Instagram.

03:12:31 Speaker_03
And every time you see a video from a student who seems to throw one of your excuses out the window, like, take a second. Admire what someone has done from scratch like Matt who you mentioned who started in his late 40s?

03:12:45 Speaker_03
Because awesome like one by one if you just watch that Instagram account for a week You will run out of excuses very very quickly. What about elsewhere on social media? Is there anyone where else people can say?

03:12:56 Speaker_01
How do you our? Facebook page is jim assi bodies calm a little more proper there my personal page Christopher summer so mm er a little more

03:13:08 Speaker_01
No rules there, and I'm not insane, but my interests are wide-ranging, so if you come to my page, you're taking your chances what I'm gonna torture you with that day.

03:13:18 Speaker_01
It might be conditioning or it might be, you know what, I think such-such is kick-ass and I like it, so you're gonna like it too.

03:13:24 Speaker_03
And you do throw up some ridiculous, in the best way possible, videos of just monsters doing some absurd, absurd stuff.

03:13:33 Speaker_03
I mean, who's the gent you sent me, you encouraged me to check this out, this guy who was going from, you were trying to explain the... Let me get this right.

03:13:42 Speaker_03
I want to say plate planches that I was doing a while back, which are kind of like a front raise holding onto a plate with the shoulders super, super protracted, and the massive posterior pelvic tilt.

03:13:53 Speaker_01
Oh, I sent you that clip of the world champ on rings, Van Gelder.

03:13:57 Speaker_03
You sent me one of Van Gelder on rings, and then you sent me one of this guy on parallel bars going from the handstand... Van Gelder again. Okay, going from the handstand to the straight body planche, just...

03:14:08 Speaker_01
Oh my god. Full body weight instead of, we do it with 10 or 25 pounds. He was doing it with full body weight. Oh my god. How do you spell Van Gelder? So it's Yuri Van Gelder. I think he's from Netherlands if I'm remembering right. Former world champ.

03:14:23 Speaker_01
V-A-N space G-E-L-D-E-R.

03:14:27 Speaker_03
Just a monster. Oh my god. Oh, so just. Crazy strong and not, I mean, it doesn't look like a small guy either. I mean, he's a big boy.

03:14:38 Speaker_01
He's got like two people's back. He has got a wide back.

03:14:41 Speaker_03
Yeah. So people should check that out and I'll link to everything in the show notes. Well, coach, thank you so much for the time. I know it's precious and I think people will get a real kick out of this and we crammed a lot into the talk.

03:14:53 Speaker_03
So he did talk a lot. It was good. So I look forward to chatting again soon, which I'm sure we'll do.

03:14:59 Speaker_03
And to everybody listening, you can find all of the links to everything that I can track down, that my team can track down related to all the topics we covered. Links to Coach Everywhere, Gymnastic Bodies Everywhere in the show notes.

03:15:12 Speaker_03
That'll just be at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

03:15:26 Speaker_03
Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

03:15:36 Speaker_03
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

03:15:45 Speaker_03
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered. or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

03:15:55 Speaker_03
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

03:16:07 Speaker_03
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

03:16:22 Speaker_03
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 1Password.

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