The Peter Attia Drive - #365 ‒ Training for longevity： A roundtable on building strength, preventing injury, meeting protein needs, guidance for women and youth athletes, and more ｜ Gabrielle Lyon, Mike Boyle, Jeff Cavaliere

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:16.540 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:21.520 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and

00:00:26.720 wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely

00:00:31.660 important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work

00:00:36.960 is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content

00:00:42.700 and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of

00:00:47.940 this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price

00:00:53.200 of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership,

00:00:58.000 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to a special episode of

00:01:06.580 The Drive, another round table conversation devoted this time entirely to strength and conditioning.

00:01:12.580 My guests this week are Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, a fellowship-trained physician in geriatrics and

00:01:18.580 nutritional sciences, founder of muscle-centric medicine, and author of the New York Times

00:01:22.900 bestseller, Forever Strong. She runs a clinical practice in Houston and continues to publish

00:01:27.880 research on skeletal muscle health and metabolism. Jeff Cavalier, a physical therapist and former

00:01:33.880 head strength coach and physical therapist for the New York Mets, who parlayed that experience into

00:01:39.940 his incredibly popular YouTube channel using an injury-smart approach to make athletic training

00:01:46.060 accessible to literally millions. And Mike Boyle, a pioneering strength and conditioning coach now in

00:01:52.180 his 43rd year. Mike popularized NFL combine training in the 1980s and spent the 1990s with the Boston

00:01:59.160 Bruins and opened the first for-profit strength and conditioning facilities in the U.S. He was also

00:02:05.340 part of one of the Boston Red Sox championship winning team. In this episode, we discuss the critical

00:02:10.500 importance of strength training for longevity, how muscle mass, strength, and power protect

00:02:14.360 healthspan as we age, the participation gap in strength training, and why closing it is crucial

00:02:18.980 for lifelong health, injury prevention, metabolic resilience, plus the barriers that keep most people

00:02:24.320 from getting started and staying consistent, the importance of building a protein-centered diet,

00:02:29.420 how age, activity, and metabolic health drive, how much protein and carbohydrate each individual

00:02:34.900 really needs, resistance training across peri- and post-menopause, including tendon care strategies,

00:02:40.700 and why good programming matters, single leg training versus heavy back squats and deadlifts,

00:02:46.660 the risk-reward calculus that led Mike to swap most bilateral lifts for unilateral work,

00:02:52.720 reverse lunge mechanics, and other knee-friendly lower body substitutes that still let you load

00:02:58.700 heavy and grow stronger, the exercise graveyard, why unsupported chest flies, Cuban presses,

00:03:05.180 and other classics may be more risk than reward, and what you should be doing instead, early sports

00:03:11.500 specialization myth for kids, why variety in sports at a young age is still valuable and necessary to

00:03:18.380 becoming a lifelong athlete. So without further delay, please enjoy this roundtable conversation

00:03:23.140 with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, Mike Boyle, and Jeff Cavalier.

00:03:31.960 Lady and gentlemen, thank you so much for all making the trip out to Austin. Been looking forward

00:03:37.820 to this one for a while. As some listeners might know, this is our second version of a roundtable,

00:03:43.580 but unlike the first one where I had interviewed the three guests multiple times previously and they

00:03:50.120 were very familiar to the audience. All three of you are people whose work I'm very familiar with,

00:03:54.680 but I've never had the privilege of sitting down with you one-on-one. And as much as I would have

00:03:58.120 loved to have done that first, I think it would have stood in the way of doing this today.

00:04:02.440 So before we jump into what we're about to talk about today, which is all things related to

00:04:06.760 resistance training, I want to just ask each of you to maybe give the non-bio version of who you are

00:04:13.720 and as such, why I think you're a great part of this. Let's start with you, Gabrielle.

00:04:17.380 Certainly. My name is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, and I'm a fellowship-trained physician in geriatrics and

00:04:23.460 nutritional sciences. I did my fellowship at WashU, and at the time, I was very reluctant to

00:04:29.260 doing geriatrics because it can be a very arduous and sad experience. But I was fascinated by the

00:04:37.480 nutritional research side. There was a moment we were working on a study looking at body composition

00:04:42.080 and brain function. And I really took to one of the participants, and I imaged her brain.

00:04:48.880 And at her mid-50s, she looked like the beginning of an Alzheimer's brain. And in that moment,

00:04:54.160 muscle-centric medicine, which is the concept that I practice and founded, was born. And it's really

00:04:59.400 that skeletal muscle is the focal point of all our health and wellness. I'm an author, wrote a New

00:05:04.920 York Times bestseller called Forever Strong. I continue to do research and work within the space.

00:05:10.940 And you see patients?

00:05:12.040 I do see patients. I have a medical practice. I do see patients. We actually just submitted a

00:05:17.040 paper that got accepted for publication on sexual function, the relationship between sexual function

00:05:22.360 and muscle mass.

00:05:23.320 Okay, cool. Mike?

00:05:25.080 Michael Boyle. I'm a coach. I've been a coach. This is my 43rd year actually coaching. I was lucky

00:05:31.260 enough to bounce right out of college and into a college job. I started out as an athletic trainer.

00:05:35.500 When you said to be immodest, I think I invented training for the NFL Combine, at least there's

00:05:40.760 a book that says I did invent training for the NFL Combine in the 80s. I worked in the

00:05:45.400 NHL for the Boston Bruins in the 90s from 90 to 99 while I worked at BU because strength

00:05:50.240 coaches were basically part-timers at that point. Worked at BU for 30-something years, opened

00:05:55.960 a business for profit, strength and conditioning, probably the first one in the United States in

00:06:00.180 1997. Then in 2012, I left BU where I've kind of always had more than one job. I jumped over

00:06:07.900 to the Red Sox for two years and was able to get a World Series ring out of the Red Sox

00:06:12.220 in two years and then realized that that was not very conducive with being what I really

00:06:16.440 want to be, a good father and a good husband and was like, okay, I'm done with pro sports.

00:06:20.680 So now I coach still, coach my son and his friends. I have a son who plays college lacrosse.

00:06:25.360 I'm still actually functioning as a personal trainer, I guess, in some cases and as a strength

00:06:30.800 and conditioning coach in some cases. So I'm more than anything, just a practitioner.

00:06:34.820 And what type of clients do you see now? What's the range?

00:06:37.660 The range is 11 to in their 80s. That's our client range. We don't take kids till they're 11

00:06:43.220 because we really don't want them in the gym before that. And we'll take them as old as we can

00:06:47.820 get them, but I think the oldest right now is 89. That's actually my son's pediatrician,

00:06:51.780 just turned 89, retired last year, believe it or not. Dr. Leder had still been working

00:06:56.020 all those times. We have a couple of three-generation families of which he's one.

00:06:59.820 We have him, we have his kids, and we have his kids' kids that are all training in the same

00:07:03.500 space.

00:07:05.040 Good. There are a lot of things I want to talk about that are embedded in there,

00:07:07.780 so we'll come back to it. Jeff.

00:07:09.840 Jeff Cavalier. So I'm a physical therapist by trade, moved out of the clinic at an early stage,

00:07:16.420 got a great opportunity to work in that role for the New York Mets, which was a dream come true

00:07:20.800 for me because I was a diehard Mets fan growing up, presented the dream job. And from there,

00:07:25.820 piggybacked into how could I continue this education of athletes on a broader platform,

00:07:31.480 was well aware of the power of the internet at that time, so I started a YouTube channel,

00:07:36.200 which by luck, beyond just my family members subscribing early on, I got a few others that

00:07:40.120 did along the way. And it piggybacked that into a broader message, which was, okay, now it's not just

00:07:45.880 about training athletes and empowering athletes, but how do I empower people who want to be

00:07:50.020 more athletic, feel more athletic, move more athletically in daily life, not just in where

00:07:55.200 they're getting paid a paycheck. So that became my mission really from that point. Now, beyond

00:08:00.860 having to sort of maintain a certain level of consistency because I want to practice what I

00:08:05.840 preach, I also have two young boys. I started late. I'm 40 years old. I have twins. And now I

00:08:11.880 feel like I got to make sure I can keep up with them when they're ready to have me be able to run

00:08:15.560 and play. So I have a lot of motivation to keep doing what I'm doing and stay in the shape I am.

00:08:19.880 But I believe that it requires having an understanding of injury, training around injuries,

00:08:23.960 because no matter what, as we get older, things do start to break down. And I think you have to

00:08:27.900 have strategies to be able to push through that and train around that. And I think that's where

00:08:31.980 my big strength is as a PT to provide that background to help people do that more readily.

00:08:37.300 Okay. Let's start with a question that probably has an answer, although I actually am a bit

00:08:41.880 embarrassed to say I don't know the answer. So I'm wondering if one of you guys do. Do we have a

00:08:45.760 sense of what percentage of people in the United States do not practice resistance training?

00:08:52.360 Well, we know that 50% of Americans are not training or doing any kind of exercise. From

00:08:58.100 the research that I've read up until recently, it's probably 70% do not meet the criteria for both

00:09:05.660 activities.

00:09:06.260 70% in total then, or you think it's 70% of people who are doing some form of exercise?

00:09:13.200 I believe that it is 70% of people in total.

00:09:15.900 Got it. I can't even fact check that. I mean, that's hard for me to imagine, but I can believe

00:09:20.040 it.

00:09:20.280 I think it's lower if you're talking about resistance training, because we were talking

00:09:23.380 about-

00:09:23.480 You would say lower than 30% would do resistance training then?

00:09:26.100 Yeah, because I think 20% of people belong to a gym. If we look at home gym stats aren't very

00:09:31.040 good in terms of people, the home gym person who actually has one and uses it is probably

00:09:35.380 more unicorny than we think they are. And so if you start looking at that number, 20%

00:09:39.980 have a membership, 50% of those people use it, which now brings us down to only 10% of

00:09:45.100 people in the United States are actually in a gym. And then you look at that and say, what

00:09:48.620 percentage of them are resistance training? Maybe now we're down to 5% because you see

00:09:53.700 a lot more hamster wheel people who are just walking on a treadmill or walking on a stair

00:09:58.020 climber or whatever it is. So I would think the numbers are pretty low.

00:10:01.160 We spoke a little bit about this, but we have digital statistics that actually show people who

00:10:06.140 have signed up to train with our programs, let's say either be at home or at the gym,

00:10:12.040 the percentage of people that make it through our programs is only 20%. And that's very high

00:10:17.280 industry standard.

00:10:18.000 That's twice the industry standard for digital.

00:10:19.260 Right. Which is usually like 10% or so. So those are people who showed the commitment,

00:10:24.520 made a purchase, put their hard-earned dollars behind it, have everything they need. I would think

00:10:28.740 in terms of the tools and sets and reps and what's supposed to be done, and only 10% will

00:10:32.980 finish a program. So that's a pretty remarkable statement on why people can't. I think there's

00:10:38.880 a lot more of a desire to do things, but the ability to actually follow through is where

00:10:42.780 I think we're having our hardest time.

00:10:44.300 So it might be then, Gabrielle, your stat is 70% of 50, be the reciprocal of that 30% of

00:10:50.120 50-15. It might be that our range is somewhere from 5% to 15% if I were going to sort of triangulate

00:10:55.600 between these three data points. That's kind of a hard thing to digest if you're asking

00:11:00.540 the question, and I've never been shy about my thesis, which is of all the pillars that

00:11:05.920 we have to embark on improving our health, whether it be changing our nutrition, improving

00:11:10.020 our sleep, taking the medications and supplements that can be actually quite important. I just

00:11:14.940 don't see any evidence that anything trumps exercise. Just purely from an actual lifespan

00:11:19.900 perspective and from the standpoint of reducing the risk of chronic disease, when you then

00:11:24.720 layer in the benefits it has on quality of life, I mean, it's just sort of a no-brainer.

00:11:29.460 So what do you think, and Mike, I'm going to start with you because you've been at this

00:11:33.640 the longest. What do you think explains the disconnect between the fact that we have this

00:11:39.880 incredible tool that will lengthen your life, improve the quality of your life, make you

00:11:46.500 look and feel better, and yet 5%, 10%, at most 15% of people engage in it? What are the

00:11:53.460 barriers?

00:11:54.180 I think the biggest barrier is just life, lifestyle, kids, jobs, people thinking. You really have

00:11:59.820 to commit to, is it getting there early? Is it going there after work? Whatever it is,

00:12:04.260 it's adding hours to your day. I think that's probably the biggest barrier. In some ways, I

00:12:08.640 guess that's economic. People don't have the economic freedom to say, hey, I can devote. That's

00:12:13.440 why I laugh sometimes when I hear people talking about hours per week of exercise and hours

00:12:17.780 per week of cardio. I just kind of snicker in terms of, if I can get someone to do two

00:12:21.960 hours a week, so I like your guideline more of, I think you said 75 hard minutes, and I'm

00:12:26.580 like, 75 hard minutes now is realistic, but even 150 minutes, some of the guidelines are

00:12:31.560 crazy, and then there's a lack of awareness. You don't know you're losing the battle until

00:12:36.460 it's too late. That's what we see in our business. We see people coming in and you think, wow,

00:12:40.300 thank God you got here now at 50, or thank God you got here now at 55 because the end

00:12:45.020 for you was going to be bad. I'm not saying this to flatter you. I've been following you

00:12:49.080 for a while, and you're getting the message out in a way that it hasn't gotten out before

00:12:53.400 because the message before was geeky or niche-y or whatever it was, but it wasn't this, hey,

00:12:59.160 this is really good for you, and this is going to make you live longer and live better.

00:13:04.520 It's double bonus, right? You want to live longer, but who wants a long, shitty life?

00:13:08.760 Excuse me. I don't know if we're not supposed to swear, but-

00:13:11.120 We swear. Don't swear.

00:13:11.880 Okay, good. Okay. But do you know what I mean versus looking at it and saying, hey,

00:13:15.400 I would like to live longer, and Jeff and I talked about this. I've experienced 50 to 65,

00:13:20.000 and trust me, it's not fun. The decline is rapid, and the decline is significant, and

00:13:25.720 I think if people, like, if you don't wake up by the time you're 50, you're going to be in

00:13:29.000 real trouble by the time you're 65.

00:13:31.140 Gabrielle, how much of a difference do you see between men and women on this front? Not from this

00:13:35.020 standpoint, not from the economic standpoint, but from some other barrier to entry. Do you see

00:13:39.560 differences between men and women who are new to resistance training?

00:13:43.180 I do, and the first thing that I want to say is you're absolutely right. There's nothing

00:13:47.240 more important for maintaining health and wellness than taking care of muscle health,

00:13:53.060 whether it's strength training, mobility, resistance, but skeletal muscle health is really

00:13:57.560 what we're talking about. Where is the disconnect from men versus women or people in general?

00:14:03.560 Part of it is cultural. We live in a society of comfort. It's very easy to take the escalator

00:14:11.400 or take an elevator. When it comes to nutrition, we all have to eat, but we don't all have to

00:14:16.320 move. I literally could sit at my house, order my groceries, Amazon Prime everything, and I

00:14:21.600 never had to take more than 300 steps. For women, typically, strength and strength training

00:14:28.380 has not been the focus. And we know that. I mean, even just from a standpoint of walking to the gym,

00:14:35.400 you're starting to see it more. I really do feel like we are on the precipice of women recognizing

00:14:41.140 the importance of strength and muscle, especially with new conversations around menopause and more

00:14:45.880 potent conversations, but they're busy. And the other aspect of that is there are self-imposed

00:14:53.000 limitations. A woman would look at a 40-pound weight and go, I can't lift that. But she would

00:14:57.980 look at her 40-pound toddler and go, I'm going to lift that, and then I'm going to carry my groceries.

00:15:02.600 I got it. And that's really where I think that we can change the disconnect is re-educating the

00:15:09.300 importance of muscle and then also changing the cultural conversation.

00:15:13.840 Obviously, you're really fit. Has resistance training always been something you have enjoyed?

00:15:17.960 Did you grow up doing it? Or was it something you kind of came to in your 20s or beyond?

00:15:22.860 I grew up doing it. By the time I was five, I was riding 10 miles on a bike.

00:15:26.660 With the conversation around children, if we teach them good habits now, then we don't have to

00:15:32.100 have them spend a lifetime outgrowing old habits because we're not raising children. We're raising

00:15:37.780 adults. And yes, I have always trained.

00:15:41.520 So I'm in the same boat, and I suspect that's true for all of us. And so one of the challenges that I

00:15:47.120 know I have that's a bit of a blind spot is when I'm talking to patients are perhaps representative

00:15:52.020 of the real world, which is people who are like, I don't enjoy the feeling. I'm sure you've all

00:15:58.160 heard this. I don't like the feeling of lifting weights. It hurts. I don't like that. I can't tell

00:16:05.060 you how many times I've heard that. And I appreciate the honesty, but I can't relate. And it's hard when

00:16:10.240 you can't actually relate to what your patient is saying. I can relate when they complain about having

00:16:15.800 to watch what they eat because that's a struggle I would have. But I truly can't relate to that. So

00:16:19.940 do you think that that's a function of having started early? Or do you think that there are

00:16:24.940 literally just, just as we have people with different eye colors and different heights,

00:16:29.800 there are truly differences in genetic hardwiring that would speak to an individual's appetite for

00:16:35.900 that kind of discomfort?

00:16:37.260 I actually think it's the latter. I think there are some people who are more inclined to enjoy that

00:16:42.100 type of stress. It doesn't matter how much I run. I do not enjoy the stress of running. I don't enjoy

00:16:47.420 how I feel. I don't enjoy the feeling I get in my lungs when I'm sucking for air. I'll do it because

00:16:52.520 I know I have to. There's no enjoyability about that. Training hard and lifting weights and pushing

00:16:57.600 myself to the utmost level of effort, that's always been something I actually kind of enjoy. And I think that

00:17:03.360 it can be learned, though. You can get better at it, just like I can learn the discipline to continue

00:17:09.080 to push and run when I don't want to. So after doing it for a while, when you start to see results,

00:17:14.840 the results actually might become motivating enough to go like, well, there is a trade-off here. I'm

00:17:18.840 seeing the trade-off. And I think that's when we were talking about before about people, the start

00:17:24.120 being the thing that's stopping people is that the perceived level of what they're going to have to

00:17:28.880 do is usually bigger than what they have to do. I've mentioned before, you can build a great body

00:17:33.860 on six exercises, literally. The row, squat, deadlift, bench, pull-up, curl, done. You've got

00:17:39.840 everything you need. You don't have to complicate it. If you keep trying to get stronger at those

00:17:43.300 exercises, now you might get bored to tears, but you can build the prerequisite foundation to get

00:17:48.580 a better body. But people want sometimes to complicate it in their heads so that they have an

00:17:54.280 easier out because it makes it a little easier to say, yeah, I don't have time for all that.

00:17:58.420 We liken it to, I've known a few people in my life who've wanted to start businesses and like,

00:18:03.260 I got this great idea and I'm the gung-ho, they want to do it. And then they get caught up in,

00:18:07.840 I don't know if I should set up an LLC or if I should do it as a corporation. I want to get my

00:18:12.720 business cards. I can't figure out my logo. Right. They're doing all that stuff. And they never take

00:18:17.480 the step of actually just starting what their service is going to be. And they never get going.

00:18:21.960 And I think people do the same thing in terms of fitness. They make it bigger and they make the

00:18:26.180 commitment larger so that they can almost have a safe landing spot to be like, yeah, I just couldn't get it

00:18:31.540 going. So it's our job to educate them as to how simple it can actually be. Simple being what you

00:18:37.040 need to do. But I think the commitment to actually showing up and doing it, that's hard.

00:18:43.060 Mike, what percentage of the people that walk into your gym are coming to resistance training

00:18:48.180 for the first time?

00:18:50.000 I'd say 50 if I was guessing. Some of them were high school athletes and have some basic relationship

00:18:56.000 with strength training. What percentage of them are approaching intelligence strength training

00:18:59.900 for the first time? 100%. So most of them are coming. We're going to party like it's 1999.

00:19:05.420 Like people come in and they kind of look at us like, what are you doing? And I think that's where

00:19:08.600 when you're talking about people saying the discomfort, my first thing would be like,

00:19:11.580 what discomfort? There shouldn't be any discomfort. If you come in and start working with us,

00:19:14.920 my whole goal, I say to somebody, you should get out of bed the next day and be like,

00:19:17.980 I think I worked out. I felt okay. I always tell everybody everything's gauged on how you,

00:19:22.000 if you get up in the morning and you're crippled, I suck. I did a really bad job.

00:19:25.780 You should not be uncomfortable at all. This is slow and steady wins the race. 1% better,

00:19:31.620 however you want to look at it. And if we can just layer, like I always think I'm a big

00:19:35.340 attendance guy. If I can get you to show up two days a week for a year, you'll be remarkably

00:19:39.640 different. And you might not have ever had balls to the wall or go to failure. We would have done

00:19:44.820 none of that, zero. And yet you would look at somebody and think, wow, like if you came into our

00:19:50.160 place, everybody looks younger than they do. I am a hundred percent certain, not just of the

00:19:56.540 longevity benefit, but about the physical change that people undergo. Because I'll just show you

00:20:01.400 people and say, yeah, that guy's an 80 year old two-time cancer survivor. And people would be like,

00:20:05.600 he is? And I'm like, yep, they look different. And they all look different. They all look younger.

00:20:10.520 Again, what is that? Is it hormonal? I don't, I mean, not a scientist. I know that it works and I know

00:20:15.720 that it doesn't have to be hard and it doesn't have to be uncomfortable. So let's talk about an

00:20:20.240 example of somebody that walks in. So somebody walks in, they're 50 years old. Let's pick a

00:20:24.300 male to start with, but we're going to do many case studies today, I think, because that's how

00:20:28.080 people I think can sort of connect. My goal is to make sure everybody listening to this can identify

00:20:31.920 with a person, theoretical person we're going to talk about. So 50 year old guy comes in, he's done a

00:20:36.820 little bit of the trade at his health for wealth thing. He's been working himself to death. He's had some

00:20:41.540 health scare. He went to the doctor's office and they told him your blood pressure is really high or

00:20:45.360 there's something going on. Or he's just sort of confronted his own mortality. He's lost a parent.

00:20:49.540 That's a big wake up call for somebody in their fifties. Played sports in high school. That was

00:20:54.020 about it. So doesn't really do much of anything now. And somehow has landed himself in your gym.

00:21:00.660 Maybe he saw Jeff on Instagram and he was like, that guy looks incredible. I got to do something.

00:21:07.300 What he's doing sounds cool. So how do you interview this guy? How do you find out what his goals are?

00:21:13.440 And then how do you create that show up attendance pattern that's going to make sure he can give you

00:21:18.380 a year of whatever it is, two days a week? The show up attendance pattern is a big thing. And

00:21:22.940 that's, there's a really good book called Never Lose a Customer Again. We approach our business much

00:21:26.640 more like a restaurant. Unreasonable Hospitality, I think is the Will Gradar book. And you know,

00:21:30.700 we try to train our coaches. We refer to them coaches more than trainers, way more in the customer

00:21:36.680 service skill because we realize that we want to get the person to come back. That's the goal. Get them to come

00:21:40.760 back. Get them to get through the first workout and come back. We don't interview people. I don't

00:21:44.620 talk to people about their goals. I look, I think your goal is to not be the sad sack of shit that

00:21:49.700 you are right now, unfortunately. And we just want to get you going. So it's like, just get them on

00:21:54.460 the conveyor belt and carry them through. This is the one thing. And I, one of the things I wrote in

00:21:58.760 my notes that CrossFit did well, they created community. You need to create community where people

00:22:04.160 are comfortable. One of the problems that we had was people would say, I can't go there. It's all

00:22:07.780 athletes because they come in and you know, just from a marketing standpoint, there's jerseys all

00:22:10.780 over the place. And it looks like a place where athletes train, but 65% of our business are people

00:22:15.740 like us. But just getting them to be comfortable in that environment and getting them to show up

00:22:19.720 again. When we tell everybody, if you've got new people in your group, you should text them that day

00:22:23.940 and you should text them the next day. How was it? How did you feel this morning? We're trying to build

00:22:27.920 a relationship because it's relationship marketing. Know, like, trust, all the things that you read

00:22:32.580 about. Get them to know you, like you, trust you, want to come back, want to be part of it.

00:22:36.520 And then we can take care of the training part. But the training part to me is relatively easy.

00:22:41.420 It's the getting that person to be consistent and to come. And all I want, I call them check

00:22:46.240 the box clients. I just want to check the box clients. If you check the box, which means I got

00:22:50.200 to Mike Boyle's twice this week, you will get better. You will feel better. Say a little bit

00:22:55.600 about the programming. The programming for us, very assembly line-ish. I always talk about the idea

00:23:00.580 that it's a recipe and not a menu. So no one gets to pick what they want to do. You come in,

00:23:05.500 this is how the cake is made. It's in this order. This is what you get. Don't like it. Go someplace

00:23:10.700 else. Go to Planet Fitness. You can make your own cake. You want to come here. You do it the way we

00:23:15.240 do it. Everybody form rolls. Everybody stretches. Everybody does their mobility work. Everybody

00:23:19.680 does dynamic warm-up. Everybody throws medicine balls. Everybody does some sort of power training,

00:23:24.680 plyometrics, not really actually, some sort of jump training. Then they'll go and they'll lift.

00:23:29.680 The lift takes 36 minutes. Then they'll go and they'll do some type of conditioning work.

00:23:35.400 We'll start really, really, again, really easy. Try to give them something that's very achievable.

00:23:40.180 Don't get them particularly tired. Then boom, out the door. They're in and out in an hour.

00:23:44.620 Hour door to door.

00:23:45.520 Yep.

00:23:46.100 Okay. 36 minutes of that is the actual resistance training, but obviously everything that's leading

00:23:50.940 up to it and on the back of it is, I mean, that's clearly training as well, right?

00:23:54.000 Right. I think honestly, for the older client, more important, we always talk about the first 15 minutes

00:23:57.880 is more important. Getting people to roll, to stretch, to start to deal with their tissue

00:24:01.900 limitations because most everybody that comes in has something. No one comes in healthy. No one

00:24:07.340 comes in and thinks, so I have nothing that hurts. Progress is made by advancing weight,

00:24:12.820 advancing reps, advancing sets, jumping higher. Mostly by advancing weight. I mean,

00:24:17.600 if you're going to look at it the simplest way, it's just try to get them because again, females,

00:24:21.560 right? You're just trying to get them to engage in progressive resistance. I always think when someone

00:24:24.720 said, I've been doing the five pound dumbbells for the last year, I'm like, oh, you're only

00:24:27.760 wasted like 50 weeks. Our thing is just get them to pick up something that's a little heavier.

00:24:32.420 We try to figure out ways. Could be isometrics, could be eccentrics. We try to vary it because

00:24:37.540 with our adult clients, we're in the entertainment business a little bit in terms of we've got to

00:24:41.760 keep it interesting. Like you said, you can do six exercises, but we have to figure out are there

00:24:45.480 14 different versions of those six exercises that we can do to keep somebody not thinking they're

00:24:50.720 doing the same thing over and over again. If we get one complaint, it might be that we do the same

00:24:55.460 exercises a lot. It's kind of like, yeah, because we do the good ones, but our adults don't touch a

00:25:00.020 barbell. Okay. I was going to ask you, are there any things that are off limits? They don't barbell

00:25:04.600 bench press. They don't barbell deadlift. They don't barbell squat. No one squats anyway. That's

00:25:09.060 another whole conversation, but almost all of our lower body stuff is unilateral. We'll do goblet squats,

00:25:13.920 basic stuff with people that are really deconditioned because we need them to be capable with two legs

00:25:19.160 before they're going to be capable on one leg. But people were really smart and really safe.

00:25:23.120 And I think that's what you want to be. If you want to keep people coming back,

00:25:26.720 I think you can be really smart and not be really safe and you can be really safe and not be really

00:25:30.540 good. And the mid ground is where we want to operate. So Gabriel, what's the biggest thing you're

00:25:35.960 thinking about when a patient is in your practice and they're coming along well on many of the other

00:25:41.860 lifestyle adjustments. Let's just assume this is a person who's a lifelong cardio rat. So they love to

00:25:48.520 run. They run two marathons a year. They've been running forever. They've got some nagging injuries

00:25:54.040 though. As you know, a runner, especially a female runner, the probability that her proximal hamstring

00:25:59.980 isn't just torn up is pretty low, especially if she's had kids. So now her pelvis is tilted a little

00:26:07.020 bit. How do you make the case to her? Because she's lean, doesn't need to lose weight as though that's

00:26:12.700 the thing that matters. How are you making the case to her that this muscle centric approach

00:26:16.980 matters? Well, she's going to want to be active her whole life. And the healthier her skeletal muscle

00:26:23.680 mass is, there seems to be somewhat of a disconnect. People talk about strength and then disassociate it

00:26:31.640 from mass. But I believe, you know, and I have patients like this in the practice that are very lean,

00:26:36.840 have always been runners. But we'll see their glucose creep up. We will see an increase in

00:26:42.980 visceral fat. That can be course corrected by addressing skeletal muscle mass. When you just

00:26:49.820 think about if this woman, I'm thinking about one patient in particular, she's around 60, she runs 100

00:26:56.160 miles. She's an ultra. Her body composition was not nearly as good as it is now, just by adding in two

00:27:05.440 days a week of resistance training. We added in two days a week. We pulled back on some of the

00:27:10.160 mileage. She's able to move more weight. I mean, in this girl, hey, Sharon, she listens to your

00:27:15.360 podcast, as a matter of fact. She is incredible. By pulling back her training and increasing her

00:27:21.580 weights and being very specific about, obviously, I don't program, but we work with coaches that

00:27:26.920 program. By changing up the movement patterns, she was able to really increase her lower body strength,

00:27:32.520 but also improve her labs, improve her fasting insulin, her glucose, and her triglycerides.

00:27:39.200 And so do you think that that's purely a function of having a larger reservoir to put the glucose

00:27:45.840 into? Or do you think that it also speaks to the insulin sensitivity? Does it even make sense to try

00:27:51.840 to disentangle those two? I think that the larger reservoir is important for a number of reasons.

00:27:56.580 The metabolic component of muscle, as we all know, muscle is the primary site for glucose metabolism,

00:28:02.260 also free fatty acids at rest. However, it enables her to have more dietary flexibility,

00:28:09.880 because when we think about nutritional sciences and we think about triglycerides, insulin, glucose,

00:28:15.180 what we're really looking at is the health of skeletal muscle. Metabolic syndrome, the markers of

00:28:20.560 metabolic syndrome are the markers of healthy skeletal muscle. Does her activity improve insulin

00:28:25.780 sensitivity? Yes, but her running is, she's going to be very insulin sensitive as is. But it's really

00:28:31.700 that metabolic component of having healthy skeletal muscle mass, from what I believe.

00:28:38.860 So Jeff, you're working with people a lot of times at the opposite end of the spectrum.

00:28:43.520 People are coming to you often because they want to have 7% body fat. And it might be that they're an

00:28:48.380 actor and they're about to do a role where they kind of have to look a certain way. Alternatively,

00:28:52.620 it might be an athlete who probably doesn't need to be at 7% body fat, but might want to be at 7%

00:28:59.300 body fat. So you're kind of dealing with the other end of the spectrum. Is it safe to say that these

00:29:02.580 people that are coming to you are so long on motivation that that's not really an issue anymore?

00:29:08.420 When your goals start to become 7% body fat, I'm assuming that you're probably not 35 or 40 with

00:29:14.540 aspirations to be there. These guys are usually coming in 12, 13, 14, 15% body fat, desires to

00:29:21.920 want to get leaner for whatever those reasons, like you said, whether it be a role or I always tell

00:29:26.160 the athletes, they have to be very conscientious of not falling in love with what they see in the

00:29:31.280 mirror because ultimately they're not getting paid to look that way. Unless they're, I mentioned

00:29:35.340 sometimes we work with WWE athletes who do get paid to look a certain way and perform at a certain

00:29:39.860 level. But the people that have to be conscientious of what level of body fat they are so that they

00:29:46.100 have a certain role, I mean, they're usually pretty good at being able to dial in. They've

00:29:50.960 oftentimes done this multiple times before too. So they've done this and had a history of being

00:29:55.300 able to get down there. They just don't have an ability to sustain it. I think that it's always

00:29:59.620 going to be achieved through nutrition. That level of look is a nutritional consistency. It has

00:30:05.160 nothing to do with training. It has nothing to do with exercise you're doing. It doesn't matter

00:30:08.420 what split you're following. It doesn't matter. Any of that. All you have to do is be able to remain

00:30:12.120 very consistent with nutrition. And the level that you're able to get down to is just a reflection of

00:30:18.120 how many sacrifices you're willing to make. You want to still drink a couple of times a week? That's

00:30:22.040 fine. You're going to have to bump it up a notch or two because you really need to be able to make

00:30:28.000 some cuts. Now, I do not believe, I don't do it myself. I do not make sacrifices to the point where

00:30:33.780 I'm eating boiled chicken and broccoli, steamed broccoli. I don't do that. I eat meals that

00:30:38.180 are good meals. You saw what I eat. I can eat a meal that anybody else can eat. But I'm very

00:30:43.900 disciplined in not straying from those meals. And so your ability to kind of stay that way

00:30:48.680 is going to determine how low you're able to get and how low you're able to stay.

00:30:52.580 I always say, if you're eating, let's say, five times a day, and that's a seven-day week,

00:30:56.340 it's 35 meals. If you can stay 90% or above, you don't have to be perfect. If you can stay 90% or

00:31:01.980 above on those meals, you're looking at three meals in a week that aren't perfect.

00:31:05.900 Now, I'm not saying go hog wild and go down to Buffalo Wild Wings and start eating everything

00:31:10.600 you can, saying that they just aren't perfect meals. Your body almost completely ignores those.

00:31:15.780 It just overlooks it. You keep going and the consistency overrides that and you're able

00:31:19.980 to get to levels that you weren't able to achieve before. But people can't sustain it because either

00:31:25.020 they make it too difficult or, as I said, it is actually difficult because getting yourself to the

00:31:31.900 gym for one hour, five times a week, two times a week, whatever that might be, even the 36 minutes,

00:31:37.960 that's one level of commitment. It's what you do in the other 23 hours of the day that determines

00:31:43.100 your look because that is the nutritional responsibility that a lot of us don't have

00:31:47.560 the ability to manage well.

00:31:49.220 How well do you think that's understood? I mean, I'd say that for all of you. This is a question for

00:31:53.340 everyone. When someone looks at a person and says, look at that man, look at that woman,

00:31:58.200 look at how jacked they are. Do you think that the average person appreciates the role of nutrition

00:32:03.840 in that? Or do you think most of them assume that person must be spending 12 hours a week

00:32:08.620 lifting weights?

00:32:09.880 And sorry to jump in, but it's such a sore spot for me. People always think exercise first.

00:32:15.820 In my experience, they always think exercise first to the point where I have people that will say to

00:32:20.080 me, if they see my abs or something, they'll say, oh, what exercise did you do for that?

00:32:24.300 You know, they pat there. Usually it's big belly that they're patting.

00:32:26.880 It's not an exercise.

00:32:28.760 I did less of this exercise. I did the reverse curl.

00:32:31.740 Fewer sets of that, more of these, pushing yourself away from the table. No, I don't

00:32:34.860 think they have an appreciation for it at all. Their instinct tells them it's exercise, it's

00:32:38.800 movement.

00:32:39.620 Would you guys share that sentiment?

00:32:41.620 I would totally agree. And what's so fascinating is the data supports also the synergistic effect

00:32:48.080 of resistance training activity and a calorie control diet, which people could connect the

00:32:55.060 dots that it is not simply training. But to be fair, training is the most potent stimulus

00:33:00.580 to muscle. But you cannot, what do they say? You cannot out train a bad diet. That's true.

00:33:08.680 I feel like you could when you were 14. When I was 14, I did train six hours a day. I mean,

00:33:16.900 I was running 13, 15 miles every morning before my workouts. And all I did was eat, but I was like

00:33:24.480 a garbage disposal. Breakfast was a bowl, not a bowl, a box of Froot Loops in a large Tupperware

00:33:30.520 bowl. You could put the whole box in the bowl. It just didn't matter. But something changes when

00:33:34.520 you're 20 and you can't do that anymore. When you're 13 and younger, you're very anabolic.

00:33:40.920 The balance between what drives muscle changes as we age. When you're young, you're very driven

00:33:45.720 by insulin. For example, my daughter who is five, she could have five grams of protein. She doesn't

00:33:51.960 need to have a meal threshold of 30 to get an anabolic response. Because when you are younger and

00:33:57.540 you are still growing, you're very anabolic. After you are done growing, you want to shift from the

00:34:04.360 insulin usage to the stimulus, which then now exercise becomes much more important.

00:34:11.000 Oh, I want to talk about that. So I'm going to come right back to that, but I want to hear Mike's

00:34:14.920 point on nutrition and then come back to that because that's actually a very interesting question.

00:34:19.100 I think about it in a simpler sense. We go from being extremely active to extremely sedentary.

00:34:24.360 Suddenly you get into your 20s and you get a job and you're commuting and maybe 10 hours,

00:34:29.260 you might be sitting on your ass, 10 hours a day, every day. And then you might go to a bar with

00:34:32.960 your friends after. And I don't think people sense the shift. They think our problem is that

00:34:37.060 the shift is happening and then people don't pick up on it until it's too late. Suddenly you look down

00:34:41.940 at yourself and think, oh my God, what happened? I gained 40 pounds and I'm in horrible shape

00:34:47.080 and I'm completely sedentary. Then they think, oh, I have to do something about this. But then they

00:34:52.460 tend to revert back to whatever information they might've had and think about what's your relationship

00:34:58.580 with exercise in high school. If you're not an athlete, you have a terrible relationship with

00:35:02.240 exercise in high school because it's something that you're made to do. It's not fun. You probably

00:35:05.680 don't understand strength training. You go to the gym. I saw a great presentation one time at a

00:35:10.640 seminar. I forget it. Someone did it in New York and they brought in, they said, I'm going to bring

00:35:14.020 in the most important person in fitness. And they brought in a woman who was a member and had her

00:35:19.040 do a half hour talk. And she talked about just having the money to join the gym and learning how to

00:35:24.220 train. She said, I followed this pretty girl who seemed to know all the machines around. She said,

00:35:28.560 and I would stay like two machines behind her. So she didn't realize that I was following her,

00:35:32.800 but I would watch what she did. And then she'd move two more machines and then I'd do what she did.

00:35:36.900 And then you just realize like, this is how people are learning. We all learned to exercise

00:35:40.960 somewhere along the way. Somebody created kind of that initial imprint on us. And most people's

00:35:47.440 initial imprint is really bad. What I learned to do when I was in my teens was just moronic in terms of

00:35:54.160 the way I would look at it. Now I would tell everybody, and that's why I say the reason I say the

00:35:58.560 everything conceivably wrong that you can do. And I have all the orthopedic maladies to show for it.

00:36:05.240 What do you guys do? Do you guys have nutritionists in your business that also help people when they're

00:36:10.920 also trying to lose weight in addition to improve strength and other metrics?

00:36:15.100 We've tried a whole bunch of different ideas and none of them have ever really stuck, to be honest.

00:36:20.140 We still have another one going right now. One of the guys that works for us is trying to do

00:36:23.460 nutritional consults. And truthfully, we've never found one that we felt really was sticky that a

00:36:29.800 lot of people would do it. But we deal in the most basic nutritional information that we can with

00:36:34.340 people in terms of, hey, we want you to hydrate better. We want you to eat more protein. That's

00:36:39.580 why I said, that's why your message is great. Like your book is perfect. It's like, okay, if we can

00:36:43.180 just get people to eat not even more protein, nevermind eat protein. We still have people say,

00:36:47.720 what's protein? Adults who don't really even understand. Again, we're so sometimes up here

00:36:53.060 and then realizing that our consumer is somewhere, even our intelligent consumer is way down here

00:36:57.720 with these incredible, you said disconnect. I had disconnect written down, incredible

00:37:01.720 disconnects, incredible misconceptions. I have women, well, I don't want to start lifting because

00:37:05.660 I don't want to get too big. And I'm kind of like, trust me, buddy, that is not what we're worried

00:37:09.660 about right now. But they're still trying. Right. Exactly. You're trying like hell and you're

00:37:13.200 whatever, 125 pounds or something like that. 110. 110. You're killing me. But you know what I mean?

00:37:18.560 You're killing yourself in the gym to build muscle. It's not easy to do. It's not easy to do for

00:37:22.620 anybody. It's not easy to do for males. But we see too much steroid use. And then we see too much

00:37:28.220 responders. Like you look at NFL guys. I mean, I think there's people that are way higher responder

00:37:32.860 levels than other people. And I think we look at responders or we look at like when I was a kid

00:37:36.940 coming up, I was looking at people taking drugs, but I didn't know they were taking drugs. I thought I

00:37:40.740 could look like, I can remember I'd go to bodybuilding shows. I can remember looking at

00:37:43.680 Boyer Co. and thinking I can look like that. And Frank Zane, I can look like that. And then

00:37:49.120 suddenly in my twenties realizing that these guys were taking drugs and that was why they

00:37:52.820 looked like that. But I spent years frustrated. Why don't I look that good? I'm doing all the

00:37:57.640 right stuff. So I think that's why these things are good. Trying to get people to see reality,

00:38:03.440 I guess. Jeff, you talked a minute ago about five meals a day. Double click on that a little

00:38:08.240 bit. Most people think I thought I'm only supposed to have three meals a day or sometimes just

00:38:11.820 one if I'm intermittently fasting. So talk about the five meals per day.

00:38:15.360 I know a lot of people that intermittent fast and actually do well with that. The thing that

00:38:19.020 I think why more people do better with more frequent meals is simply because they tend to

00:38:24.740 get hungry throughout the day and they don't have good management of hunger and then therefore

00:38:29.780 portion control. And they don't have willpower to sort of wait to that next meal. If they are

00:38:36.140 hungry in the mid-morning and they have nothing pre-planned or prepared for a snack, they'll just

00:38:42.420 go into the kitchen at work and just start picking and grazing. And that's where a lot of the calories

00:38:47.860 throughout the day are consumed, not in those three main meals, but in the grazing that happens

00:38:51.780 because they can't make it to the next meal. So I just found that it's been easier, especially

00:38:55.740 from the athletic world. These guys want to fuel more often. So they want something in between

00:39:01.060 their main meals. But in the world of just the regular individual who wants to be more

00:39:06.340 disciplined with their nutrition, it's easier to actually program in two additional snacks,

00:39:11.920 nothing big, but just snacks in between that I always think should still focus and center around

00:39:16.960 a protein. Because again, I believe that protein should be the cornerstone of every one of our meals

00:39:21.160 and snacks because we don't get enough. That's enough just to keep somebody, A, probably more

00:39:27.280 metabolically stable to get to the next meal. But also it starts to teach them the willpower to do

00:39:32.780 it. So if you're sitting there, you ate breakfast, it's eight o'clock, and then now your next meal is

00:39:37.520 at, let's say, 12 or 1230. When it's 10 o'clock, if you get hungry and you have a snack there, you

00:39:44.240 don't have to get through four hours of willpower that you don't have right now to get to that lunch

00:39:49.060 time. You only have to get through two hours. And of those two hours, you weren't hungry the whole

00:39:53.240 time anyway, only that last half hour. So you're teaching yourself willpower over the course of an

00:39:57.740 hour and a half. I actually have dropped back a little bit to where I'm not necessarily doing

00:40:01.600 five meals in a day. Now I'll maybe do four, but I have easy willpower. Walk me through a day in the

00:40:06.180 life for you, not on a day when you're here and traveling. So you're at home, your first meal is

00:40:10.100 what time? It depends on weekend or not, but usually 730, 8 o'clock. And what is that meal?

00:40:15.340 Usually it's oatmeal, egg whites. My oatmeal, we call it pumpkin oatmeal. Like it's oatmeal,

00:40:20.900 it's walnuts, it's Splenda brown sugar or brown sugar, if you don't care about the calories in

00:40:25.900 it. Whipped cream, put whipped cream on top. Pumpkin, I mix inside it. It's good. Like it

00:40:30.840 tastes good. And it's something that I actually enjoy. If it wasn't, I could never just eat boiled

00:40:34.360 oatmeal for the rest of my life. And then egg whites, because you're just trying to cut the

00:40:37.940 calories. You want the protein without the total calorie of the egg? Yeah. Although I'll mix in like

00:40:42.840 just at the hotel here, I'll eat eggs, just the prepared eggs because they're there. Because I have my

00:40:48.060 egg whites and I keep them frozen egg whites. I don't have, like I don't want to start cracking

00:40:51.840 full eggs to put into. I'm a little bit simplistic when it comes to my nutrition because I know what

00:40:55.640 works for me, but I have no problem with mixing one or two full eggs. I think you should, people

00:41:00.240 should. And then I'll have milk with that or I'll have protein shake along with that. So they're not

00:41:05.400 small meals either. That will take me through. Now I'll actually go to lunchtime. In the past,

00:41:11.280 I would have had another small snack. I'd have some pretzels and jerky or something like just

00:41:16.240 again, some protein and then some carbohydrates. Then I'll go to lunchtime. At lunch, I'll have

00:41:21.040 either, it's funny because I'll either have a grilled chicken wrap with vegetables and yogurt.

00:41:26.980 That would be my preferred meal. Some fruit, that would be my preferred meal. Or I'll have cereal

00:41:31.760 because I am still a cereal addict and we have lots of cereal choices, but I try not to choose

00:41:37.600 the cinnamon toast crunch that my son prefers. And I'll have something else, but I'll have cereal and

00:41:42.280 yogurt. How much protein are you getting in that meal then? I'll have usually

00:41:46.060 protein shake there too. So I have my protein shake, that's 30 grams plus the yogurt, another

00:41:50.840 eight to 12 grams. And then in the cereal, a little bit more milk too. So I get enough protein

00:41:56.360 from the meal. It's just a little bit less preferential in terms of where the carbs come

00:42:00.100 from. I don't really get crazy about the carbs. I just try to pick lower sugar carbs. I try to be a

00:42:05.200 little bit more selective when it comes to that. And then you do an afternoon snack around three.

00:42:10.220 Then afternoon snack would be the same type of thing as whatever the first snack was.

00:42:14.500 I like jerky. So I'll have some jerky, just pick at it. And again, some type of

00:42:18.860 crunchy food, just like a pretzel would be easy for me to have a handful of pretzels.

00:42:23.500 Then I will have my dinner. Well, actually before that, I have another protein shake after I train.

00:42:28.740 So if I train- And you train in the afternoon typically?

00:42:31.340 Randomly, I'll train at five before I finish up work randomly. But most often than that,

00:42:36.300 I wind up having my shake and then I'll go train at night, like late, late, late at night.

00:42:41.920 I think we have an input into the sleep issue.

00:42:44.960 We do have input into the sleep issue, but I'm not having, I could fall right asleep after my

00:42:48.420 dinner. The issue for me is that when I get home, my kids have been waiting to see me all day.

00:42:53.820 I make myself available to them. We play, we run, we go in the pool, whatever it might be.

00:42:58.800 And then they go to bed a little bit late. We have a busy household, so four dogs. It gets a lot to put

00:43:03.400 everybody down, but I go to bed around nine, nine 30. And then when I finally get to the gym,

00:43:07.880 it could be 10 30. So now I'll go and I'll train. I don't like to train on a full stomach. I hate

00:43:12.680 the feeling. So I'll opt to have my dinner afterwards. But that does mean that the dinner

00:43:17.260 could come at 11 30, sometimes even 12 o'clock at night. And that is not recommended for everybody

00:43:22.460 listening. But like, I also do think I could dispel the myth though. I do not believe in the

00:43:27.220 don't eat after six at all. I don't believe in that at all. Your body, especially if you're carrying a

00:43:32.840 good amount of muscle, which is why we want to, can utilize those calories, can utilize that protein,

00:43:38.180 can utilize those carbs throughout the day, provide whenever they do come in. And I don't think that

00:43:43.000 just magically eating after six is the death knell to having low body fat. That's not part of my

00:43:48.060 equation. The only part of the equation for me is I could get like, it's a little late in the day to

00:43:52.500 be eating there. Yeah. It might be impacting your sleep more than anything else. It's clearly not

00:43:55.760 impacting your fuel partitioning. No. And I've been blessed to have the ability to hit the pillow and fall

00:44:01.580 asleep within minutes and stay asleep because I don't sleep very long. I sleep five, six hours,

00:44:08.420 five to six hours. But my quality of sleep is usually very high. I don't wake up. I don't wake

00:44:12.320 up at all. I wake up when the time to wake up in the morning. So I want to kind of go back to what

00:44:16.740 you were talking about a second ago, because it opened the door towards protein in kids. But before

00:44:22.240 we do that, maybe just for people listening who have been maybe not paying attention to some of this

00:44:27.460 stuff, we've all been talking about elsewhere around protein consumption. What type of guidance

00:44:31.620 are you giving your patients on protein? Is there any difference between men and women? And are you

00:44:35.420 differentiating it based on age? Age, yes. Men and women, no. When we talk about protein, typically

00:44:41.360 we talk about one thing, but it's 20 different amino acids, nine of which are essential. We actually

00:44:47.460 eat for those nine essentials. There is a lot of nuance around protein in general. Each of those

00:44:53.420 amino acids do something different. For example, leucine, which is, I know, our favorite amino

00:44:59.800 acid, is critical for muscle, for muscle protein synthesis. But something like threonine is important

00:45:07.080 for mucin production in the gut. I suppose I should start with why are we eating protein? We need about

00:45:12.080 250 grams a day. We recycle much of that. We don't eat that. A portion of that, probably the largest

00:45:19.340 portion, maybe 75% of that goes towards visceral tissue for turnover and maintenance. Maybe 25% of

00:45:27.460 that goes to muscle. But we have to continue to get these essential amino acids so that we can

00:45:34.220 maintain rebuilding and repairing, which the efficiency of that changes as we age. Anabolic

00:45:40.060 resistance, protein efficiency decreases. That is one reason why we need dietary protein, just to maintain

00:45:46.100 the tissue integrity and the structure. Women and men do not need, at this time, from what we know in

00:45:51.920 the literature, a different amount of protein. It's not sex-specific. It's body weight-specific.

00:45:57.800 The minimum amount of protein I would ever recommend would be 100 grams, at a minimum. Men or women,

00:46:03.760 that would be the starting place. Because if you are, say, a 115-pound woman and you are following the RDA

00:46:12.100 at 0.8 grams per kg, what is that, 45 grams of protein or so, that's not enough. Part of the failure

00:46:17.860 there is that we have to recognize protein is different amino acids. And so when we talk about

00:46:23.620 muscle health, we need to get enough leucine to support muscle health. And that is probably,

00:46:30.480 the recommendation is two to three grams a day. It's probably for optimal health around eight or nine.

00:46:36.060 How do you get folks to think about that? Because now all of a sudden you get into

00:46:39.840 dramatic differences in terms of protein source. I don't really think we should go down the PDCAS

00:46:44.980 pathway necessarily for everybody today. But just in terms of understanding that foods are created

00:46:50.320 different. So you can look at an ingredient label of something that says 30 grams of protein. You can

00:46:55.180 look at another thing that says 30 grams of protein. But they don't list out the amino acids. They don't

00:46:59.640 tell you that this one has more leucine or more methionine and this one doesn't. But there are certain

00:47:04.440 themes that we know. We know that dairy-derived protein, beef-derived protein, and egg-derived

00:47:12.060 protein seem to have the highest amount of the right amino acids, or let's just say the more

00:47:17.900 important amino acids. So when you're saying to that person, hey, I want you to eat a minimum of

00:47:22.080 100 grams per day, does it come with the caveat of assuming you're getting your protein sources here?

00:47:28.300 What you're pointing out is protein quality. There are plant sources of protein and there are animal

00:47:33.800 sources of protein. And just from hard, fast biological numbers, we consider a high-quality

00:47:39.460 protein to be eggs and dairy, fish, chicken, any of the animal source proteins. The lower quality

00:47:46.720 proteins would come from plants. When we educate our patients in the practice, we have them choose. And

00:47:53.620 we really don't focus on plant proteins as a source of protein. While they do have amino acids and

00:47:59.640 certainly a combination is wonderful, we like to focus on plant foods for fiber. Let's say we take

00:48:05.860 out soy, but we really want to focus on high-quality animal source foods because, listen, it makes up,

00:48:13.220 let's say it makes up 30% of our diet. Nearly 100% of our calcium, our bioavailable iron and zinc,

00:48:18.660 selenium, come from these animal-based foods. And while we talk about protein, we should also

00:48:25.600 talk about nutrient quality. Whether someone decides to get their protein from plants or animals,

00:48:31.440 it isn't just about protein. It is also about those nutrients of concern. For women, like bioavailable

00:48:36.880 iron. For kids, bioavailable iron. Nutrients that primarily come from animal sources, I just think are

00:48:44.320 really important. And again, nothing wrong with plant-based proteins, but we eat plants for fiber

00:48:50.160 and phytonutrients. Presumably, you have some patients, as I do, who are vegetarians. And in

00:48:55.120 some cases, it's ethical, religious, whatever the reason is. What are some of the things that,

00:48:59.700 and let's go one step further and let's go, most vegetarians will at least be able to consume the

00:49:03.820 dairy portion. But if you have someone who's vegan and who is purely looking at animal sources of

00:49:09.720 protein, how much of an uphill battle is that?

00:49:11.680 The challenge is the carbohydrate consumption. So I was listening to what Jeff was saying,

00:49:15.680 and he was absolutely right. He could have, you were saying that you have maybe 100 grams of carbs

00:49:19.940 and you have no problem with it. I mean, you probably calculated it in your head, but yeah,

00:49:23.520 I can do that, yeah. For someone like him who is super active, he is able to dispose of those

00:49:29.140 carbohydrates. But a normal person, our carbohydrate threshold, if you calculate the disposal from skeletal

00:49:35.040 muscle, organ systems, it is not much. It is about 40 grams in a two-hour period.

00:49:40.600 Anything above, say, 40 or 50 grams in a non-exercising adult will result in a robust

00:49:48.680 insulin response. We do not want that. We do not want to be utilizing insulin to help support glucose.

00:49:54.180 We want to use activity or have the health of our skeletal muscle be able to balance that.

00:49:59.720 And I suppose what we're talking about is carbohydrates. And unless you are highly active,

00:50:04.140 like you are, then we also have to think about the carb portion of this. And designing a diet,

00:50:10.860 typically for us, we think a lot about a one-to-one ratio of protein to carbs at a meal,

00:50:16.280 depending.

00:50:17.320 Yeah, which is, let me think about that in myself. That's pretty tough. You have to be pretty deliberate

00:50:21.880 about withholding carbohydrates. I mean, I'm probably eating a gram of protein per pound of body weight,

00:50:27.560 so it's not like I'm skimping on protein.

00:50:29.140 But you're metabolically healthy. And that goes back to this hierarchy of how we determine protein.

00:50:33.600 Yeah, I think you have a longer leash if you're active.

00:50:36.400 Absolutely. When we make protein decisions in the practice when we're designing a diet,

00:50:41.200 it's age, it's activity, and it's metabolic health. If you are metabolically healthy,

00:50:46.620 then you can tolerate, there's no problem. Carbs aren't the enemy. But once we find out someone

00:50:52.640 is metabolically unhealthy, which you can see from blood work, you don't change your protein amount.

00:50:56.500 Because as you restrict calories, you keep protein the same or higher, because you must protect lean

00:51:01.800 tissue. And also, it's better. I mean, we've seen this in the data.

00:51:06.600 What about overweight patients? Let's say you have a patient who's, let's say it's a man, 250 pounds.

00:51:11.760 And I know we're going to talk about body fat, because I'm actually super interested in what

00:51:15.180 you have to say about that. But let's just assume you did a DEXA on this guy. You don't need to do a

00:51:19.040 DEXA, by the way. You can look at him. You know this guy's carrying way too much fat. But the DEXA

00:51:23.320 just gives you some numbers. The guy's 40% body fat. So when you're trying to tell him how much

00:51:28.340 protein to eat, are you doing it based on an ideal body weight? Or are you doing it based on his 250

00:51:34.780 pounds that he's carrying around? His target body weight.

00:51:37.200 Okay. So you're going to say, I'm targeting for you 16% body fat. Let's calculate how much lean

00:51:42.240 tissue you have. What would be your ideal body weight at 16% body fat? And that's what we're going

00:51:47.120 to target you at. Yeah. Okay. I want to totally pivot and talk about something that you already

00:51:52.340 brought up, Mike. And this speaks to how these round tables get totally messy, because I'm not

00:51:56.440 done with nutrition. I want to come back to it. But I don't want to forget this idea of unilateral

00:52:00.920 lower extremity training. So this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. So I grew up,

00:52:06.380 and apologies for people in the audience who've heard me talk about this, but this is just context

00:52:09.460 for you. I grew up, powerlifting was one of the things I did on the side. It actually wasn't a sport.

00:52:13.200 I mean, I, boxing was my life, but I became hooked on being in the gym and the gym I belonged to

00:52:18.000 was a dungeon. It was an old man dungeon, two stories underground with no windows.

00:52:23.300 And I didn't realize how lucky I was at the time, but this happened to be like the powerlifting

00:52:27.000 epicenter. So you basically just had a bunch of middle-aged men who were machines. Everybody could

00:52:34.540 bench press two times their body weight, squat three times their body weight, deadlift four times their

00:52:38.740 body weight. That's what I grew up doing. I was like, we bench, we squat, we deadlift.

00:52:43.200 And we do it really, really heavy. Not surprisingly over time, I started to get injured. I injured my

00:52:49.540 back by the time I was in medical school and kind of decided, I don't know if this is worth the risk

00:52:54.800 anymore. Like, I don't really see that I need to have four plates on my back squatting anymore.

00:52:58.920 And almost through necessity had to discover single leg training. So I want you to say more about

00:53:05.860 that experience, help somebody. Cause I have patients who really can't believe that you can

00:53:12.620 achieve optimal lower body hypertrophy without a barbell on your back or without picking a barbell

00:53:19.520 up off the floor. Yeah. Which is amazing. I had the same background as you. I got into competitive

00:53:23.660 powerlifting in college because I was no longer an athlete and I was looking for an outlet and it was

00:53:27.840 like, okay, I'm good at lifting weights. So started competing in powerlifting, started hurting myself,

00:53:32.980 back problem, shoulder surgery, athletic training background, get to college as a strength coach,

00:53:39.080 start to see the same things. I've got athletes with back problems. Everybody's back problem

00:53:43.460 seems to come down to one thing, back squatting. Every kid. During the deadlift, we were the old

00:53:48.140 school like squat bench power clean because that was the football mentality at that time. But the

00:53:52.920 people with back pain, it always related right back to back squat. We started to look at that and

00:53:56.860 think, okay, if we're doing something that we know is hurting 20% of our population,

00:54:01.440 should we continue to do that? For a while we had to because the football coaches mandated it. But

00:54:06.020 when I got to the point where I was kind of fully in control, I said, we're not going to do this

00:54:09.420 anymore. And then we went the unilateral route. Sorry, when you say football coaches, are you

00:54:14.100 saying even at the level of the NFL? At every level, the football coaches, they want to know how

00:54:18.300 many guys can bench press 400 pounds and how many guys can squat 500 pounds. It's still a very old

00:54:22.500 school mentality. It's getting better. NFL level is getting much better. Is the bench still in the

00:54:26.600 combine for anyone but a quarterback? Everybody's still benching and still benching 225 as a strength

00:54:31.680 test. They do an endurance test for strength. We could talk about the foolishness of the combine

00:54:35.340 too, but that's another. The same combine that you helped develop? The same combine that I helped

00:54:39.320 train people for. Yes. I always tell people it's like getting a copy of the SAT and all you got to

00:54:44.020 do is cheat. Got to practice the event, practice the questions. You know the answers, practice,

00:54:48.020 you'll get good at it. We developed that thought process, but we started going just down this

00:54:52.660 unilateral rabbit hole. But then you start getting into the biggest thing that people have to

00:54:55.900 understand is when you get into the bilateral deficit research, you're stronger on one leg.

00:55:00.180 You have more strength capability on one leg than you do on two. It's so interesting. Sorry to

00:55:04.460 interrupt you, Mike. It's so interesting how difficult it is to appreciate that when you're

00:55:09.200 not doing unilateral exercises. People don't try it. And then it's very dogma oriented because we've

00:55:15.040 all grown up around the squat poems and all these things about, you know, king of all lifts and all this

00:55:19.840 bullshit that people spout. And I'm always spouting the anti of that. But the reality is we started

00:55:26.340 seeing when we first started testing is what happened was one of my assistants, this guy,

00:55:30.060 Jeff Oliver, who's been at Holy Cross for 25 years said to me, if we could test you one legged

00:55:34.360 strength, would you stop squatting? And I was like, yes. So then we said, okay, let's try to figure out

00:55:38.820 how we test. So we started making up these half-assed one leg squat tests, you know, doing rep maxes in

00:55:44.540 different split squat variations and things. But when we did it, the results blew us away in terms

00:55:49.220 of- The difference between sides blew you away? No, the ability to be stronger than we were or as

00:55:54.840 strong as we were bilaterally blew us away. So we had guys, the first year I did it with my hockey team,

00:56:00.240 2000, maybe six or seven, somewhere in there, everybody could split squat what they could front

00:56:06.380 squat, same amount. So if I did a back split squat test, everybody that could back split squat 300

00:56:11.120 pounds was a 300 pound front squatter. Everybody that could back split squat project out to a 400

00:56:16.080 pound max was a 400 front squatter. Right across the board, it was exactly dead even, one leg to two

00:56:21.280 legs. And then people would say, oh, that's because they're using their back leg. They were trying to

00:56:24.400 come up with all these rationales for why it wasn't. But the numbers were just glaring. Then we went to a

00:56:29.760 split squat test and we had one kid who did 240 pounds for 20 reps, which, you know, if you bilateraled it

00:56:35.940 out, it's 480 for 20. He's a 200 pound hockey player, 190 pound hockey player. They just,

00:56:39.880 the numbers started to smack us in the face a little bit. And then you start looking at the

00:56:44.220 bilateral, like you look at the grip strength research, bilateral deficit, right hand plus

00:56:47.940 left hand will be more than combined two hand. They've done it with leg extension. They've done

00:56:53.040 it with a bunch of different things. And what they realized, I think this is my own theory, but

00:56:56.660 we neurologically know that we are unilateral. If I said to you, try to dunk a basketball,

00:57:01.760 I'm going to guarantee you right hand. I'm going to jump off one foot. You're going to jump off your

00:57:05.140 left foot. You're going to hold the ball in your right hand. Everybody here is going to do it except 10% of us

00:57:08.880 are lefty. So 10% of us are going to grab it in our left hand. But everybody knows if I say to you,

00:57:13.800 throw a baseball, I always say to somebody, if I say throw a baseball, everybody knows how to throw

00:57:17.020 it. If I say throw two baseballs, somebody would think, I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to do

00:57:22.360 this right now. We understand neurology and then we deny it when we start strength training because we

00:57:29.240 want to deny it. And I think it's actually limiting. I think I've said to people, I think I spent a lot of

00:57:33.460 time probably making people less athletic. You think that you did that in the past?

00:57:37.660 In the past, yes. Because we had some of our super elite NFL wide receiver type guys would be very

00:57:43.080 resistant to really heavy back squats and deadlifts and things like that. And they would always,

00:57:47.400 they were like, cats, I don't like it. I don't like it. It makes my back so I don't feel right.

00:57:50.260 And what you realize is you were probably dampening their nervous system a little bit because

00:57:54.180 the analogy I always use, if you think like the mountain, the guy from Game of Thrones,

00:57:58.240 he was an Icelandic basketball player, decent mid-level Icelandic basketball player.

00:58:01.860 When he became one of the world's strongest men, he was a worst basketball player. And I can remember,

00:58:07.060 I went to, used to go to powerlifting meets and I'd look at the powerlifting meets and I would be like,

00:58:10.520 nobody here looks athletic. No one. And then I'd go to an Olympic lifting meet and I'd be like,

00:58:15.840 ooh, these cats are athletic. They can jump and they can sprint and they've got big traps and big

00:58:19.860 asses. So they looked more like what I wanted my athletes to look like. Whereas powerlifting,

00:58:23.820 it was sort of like a semi-mobile refrigerator imitation, you know, just people lumbering and even little

00:58:28.540 people lumbering around. The little people lumbered just as bad as the big people.

00:58:31.340 And then you go to a track meet and go watch the sprints and the jumps. And you're like,

00:58:35.080 wait, that's what I want. That's what I'm trying to get everybody to. So I became a big Charlie

00:58:41.600 Francis guy in the nineties. You start looking at this and saying, okay, let's look at how the fastest

00:58:46.700 people in the world, the people that jump the highest in the world, what are they doing for

00:58:50.080 training? And again, you started to see more unilateral work, unilateral plyo work, unilateral strength

00:58:55.960 work. So it was sort of this rabbit hole that I just went down and never came back from.

00:59:02.460 It's interesting. Charlie Francis, of course, a lot of people will sort of just have a negative

00:59:07.280 thought associated with him because of the association with Ben Johnson. But I don't

00:59:10.700 think a lot of people realize his coaching genius. Can you say a little bit more about Charlie who

00:59:14.960 sadly passed away, I think due to cancer, kind of young, right?

00:59:17.920 Yeah, kind of young. I know luckily one of the guys I said, someone said that anybody you've never

00:59:21.860 met in the field that you would have liked to have met. And I said, yeah, I wish I had met him at that

00:59:25.420 time. But when you think about, he developed world-class sprinters in Canada, almost all of

00:59:31.240 them from Toronto, greater Toronto area. The probability of doing that is really, really low.

00:59:37.460 And so you think, and he was so far ahead of his time. If you read Charlie Francis' training system

00:59:41.040 right now, it was originally published as Charlie Francis' training system. Then after he got in

00:59:44.120 trouble, they republished it as training for speed. So it's the same book. You can just get it on the

00:59:48.320 internet. But he's talking about recovery, regeneration, massaging. This book was written in the 80s.

00:59:52.860 You would read it right now and think, my God, this thing was written a month ago. He was using words

00:59:58.120 that I hadn't even seen yet. It was the first time I encountered even the word. That's when we started

01:00:02.820 to do massage work with our athletes. That's where we started foam rolling because we realized we can't

01:00:06.720 get massage done for every single athlete, but we can get everybody to foam roll. And he was always

01:00:11.300 talking about tissue quality and tissue resets. And they would bring therapists to training camps that

01:00:16.820 they were doing. And it was so forward thinking. I mean, imagine now, well, 45 years ago, right? I

01:00:23.820 guess. 35 years ago, whatever it was, it was a long time ago. And he was so far ahead of the field,

01:00:29.740 frighteningly, to the point where it still encouraged people to read his stuff. Now, I started reading,

01:00:34.120 I read everything he wrote. I read Speed Trap, which was more about what had happened to them

01:00:38.240 in the process. And then I read this, Angela Sejenko, who was one of his sprinters, wrote a book. I read that

01:00:42.460 book. I just read everything I could consume about Charlie Francis to see, you know, is there another

01:00:47.100 little nugget of something that I'm missing? I guess from the track and field thing, I never looked

01:00:51.800 back. I never looked and said, I don't care what powerlifters are doing. I don't really, I care what

01:00:57.060 Olympic lifters are doing. I really athletically. And then we started to look at rehab and we realized

01:01:01.720 that from a rehab standpoint, it was all unilateral and it was all what they were calling functional and

01:01:06.320 it was all what they were calling closed chain. And suddenly, to me, it all made sense. It all came

01:01:10.580 together for me at that point in time. So we've been doing that for 30 years.

01:01:15.900 So Jeff, in your world, training people the way you are, what are the exceptions to those rules for

01:01:21.600 you? When are the times when you're saying, or are you saying, no, I still see that the risk reward

01:01:28.260 trade-off for someone in a certain position is there for a barbell back squat or a sumo deadlift or

01:01:35.420 something like that. How do you think about that?

01:01:36.900 I think that there's always the argument of, see, a lot of times, especially in Mike's world too,

01:01:42.180 when people come to him, they've already learned bad mechanics for squats. So they're bad squatters

01:01:47.460 when they come to them. So they're already demonstrating habits that are going to totally

01:01:52.380 break down their body by continuing to pile more and more weight on. I think when you can intervene

01:01:57.140 with somebody at an early age and teach them biomechanically how to squat better, which Mike and

01:02:02.820 have discussed before at length, it's not easy to really dissect that lift. It's a complicated lift.

01:02:08.100 There's a lot of moving parts. So you have to be willing to spend a lot of time with that person

01:02:11.660 to teach them from the ground up. In those instances when you can, I think you could probably

01:02:16.180 teach somebody how to squat more safely. That doesn't take away the fact that if you can do it

01:02:21.380 and not have to load that way, and especially as we talk about the aging population,

01:02:26.140 then the benefits might still outweigh the risks in terms of, it's just better to single leg squat.

01:02:30.140 But I think that you can probably teach that lift, but you have to be willing to teach that person to

01:02:35.160 either unlearn the bad things that they've already learned, or if they're starting out early, learn

01:02:39.340 how to do it more properly. And you could do it in stages too. You can, by squatting to a box,

01:02:44.320 you can biomechanically fix a lot of people's issues because having the target or the safety net behind

01:02:50.140 them is enough to sort of get them to actually move in a better way. But you don't want to train that

01:02:55.740 way without ultimately going to a freestanding squat if they're going to be ultimately playing

01:03:00.520 sports and needing to do something like, let's say, an offensive lineman coming off the line.

01:03:04.320 But again, I'm actually in Mike's camp in terms of the value of single leg training. We do so much

01:03:09.440 single leg training with AthleanX because I believe that it's not just the unloading that we get from

01:03:15.760 the single leg squat. It's just, as Mike said, how we're wired, how we're actually preferred to move.

01:03:21.540 And I took some shit along the way because anytime you pick up a leg from the ground,

01:03:27.080 it's functional training. And then all of a sudden that was a cool thing at one time. It's not a cool

01:03:31.080 thing anymore, but you do pick up your leg. And yes, that's functional for a reason. So I think doing

01:03:36.860 lunging and step-ups, we built a whole program with the Mets around step-ups and lunging because

01:03:42.280 we knew how important that was. And then again, we did other forms of bilateral lifting. We would do

01:03:47.240 trap bar deadlifting to clean up some of the issues that people had. I always say that if you want to

01:03:53.020 learn how to squat, take a dumbbell, hold it between your hands or a kettlebell, and just let

01:03:57.820 the dumbbell, the weight go straight down to the ground. It will put you biomechanically in almost

01:04:01.680 a perfect position because you're just letting the weight drop straight down your center of mass.

01:04:05.940 That's a great tool for teaching people what it's supposed to feel like. But when you then go put the

01:04:09.720 bar on their back, as soon as they don't have thoracic mobility, all the things that they're lacking

01:04:13.840 start to change that dramatically. You think it's the same exercise because you're going straight up

01:04:18.180 and down, but it's a very different exercise because now when your hands are up and again,

01:04:21.980 thoracic extension is more required, they don't have that and the whole system gets thrown out of whack.

01:04:27.200 So it's done. It's still done in certain circumstances. And you're always going to still

01:04:31.340 encounter people who, I don't know, Mike, you might just tell them to go to a different gym, but

01:04:35.060 there's going to be people who will insist that they still have to squat and they want to learn how to

01:04:40.500 do it and do it more safely. And I think having the willingness or the ability to still coach them

01:04:45.600 through that is important. But because of guys like Mike and because hopefully stuff that I talk

01:04:51.140 about, people are less reliant on those as the only things that they can do. I'm a little conflicted,

01:04:57.340 less so now, but I think up until about 18 months ago, I was still squatting and deadlifting regularly,

01:05:01.880 though with much less weight. I was never going below five reps and frankly targeting eight to 12 most

01:05:07.100 of the time. And my rationale for it was the following. I viewed it as an amazing audit of

01:05:13.520 my chain. So I filmed every set. So I have a tripod in the gym. My phone would sit on it from the warm

01:05:19.000 up set to the last set. Every set was filmed and my recovery was watching the video. The truth of the

01:05:24.220 matter is, despite that, about one in every eight workouts, I just screwed something up and I would

01:05:32.160 spend the next four days in pain. And I'd be sitting in the shower, running hot water on my back.

01:05:38.920 Was it anything catastrophic? No, not at all. I got my erectors just flared up. It wasn't the end of

01:05:43.180 the world. But what it said to me was, people watching us might be offended by the statement,

01:05:47.880 but I'm getting old. I'm getting old.

01:05:49.520 You look great for 25. Come on.

01:05:51.380 As I think all of us would agree, the name of the game when you're old is never getting out of the game.

01:05:57.000 There's nothing more devastating. It's one thing to get injured when you're 20.

01:06:01.280 You're going to be back. But if a 55-year-old, nevermind a 70-year-old, if a 55-year-old has to

01:06:07.140 take a year off because of some devastating injury, it's really difficult to come back.

01:06:13.340 And so I very sadly decided that the risk that I was going to do something dumb, and actually,

01:06:19.820 I'll tell you the straw that broke the camel's back, I used to do a lot of tire flipping.

01:06:23.920 So I used to have this 450-pound tire and my absolute favorite activity was there were different

01:06:28.720 games you would play. So you would love the gamification of it, right?

01:06:31.040 It's like, how many times could you flip it? How long did it take you to flip it 25 times or

01:06:34.860 something like that? And so when I moved to Austin, I didn't have my tire because it was out in San

01:06:38.720 Diego. So of course, I had my assistant call and find a guy who could find the closest tire to 450

01:06:43.520 pounds. We found one that was 407 pounds. The guy delivered, he's like, what the hell do you want

01:06:46.820 this thing for? I start flipping it again. And my friend, who's a really awesome PT, was watching

01:06:51.600 me and he goes, have you ever hurt yourself doing that? And I said, never. He goes, you are in a

01:06:56.080 remarkable amount of lumbar flexion right now. And I would just be careful. The lumbar spine does not

01:07:02.680 like to be in this position when it is that loaded. And I was like, you know, he's right.

01:07:06.760 I can absolutely see how under fatigue I could just do something too much. Sorry for the ramble,

01:07:12.800 but the point was I basically decided as much as I love this exercise, as much as it's a great audit,

01:07:18.640 I'm learning. I love the idea of critiquing my form between sets. I just decided the risk reward

01:07:25.380 trade-off wasn't there for me. Do you think that's a mistake? Do you think that I should have

01:07:29.460 stuck with it and made other modifications? Because you have these options, I don't think

01:07:34.580 there's a compromise in the benefits you're getting from single leg training. Like I said,

01:07:37.620 there's probably more benefits that you're getting from that. I'm right in that same boat with you.

01:07:42.040 I spent probably from 35 to 45. I have bad knees. That probably comes from my flat feet,

01:07:50.500 but wanting so badly to not have to squat because every time I did, it would kill. My knees the next

01:07:57.300 day would be horrifyingly in pain. And my low back would ultimately wind up taking on that same brunt.

01:08:02.640 I know exactly the same spot you're talking about. But yet I kept telling myself, but you have to squat.

01:08:07.860 You have to squat. It's just what we do. We have to squat. So I would try to get past the point of

01:08:14.060 the things that were bothering me. And then I would ultimately go back under the bar and squat again.

01:08:17.920 Until I, through what Mike and others said, it's not a requirement to get what I'm trying to get

01:08:22.700 out of it. I'm trying to hypertrophy my legs. I'm trying to get stronger hips. I'm trying to stay

01:08:26.500 injury-free. And so my favorite exercise at that point became a reverse lunge. So I'll do it with a

01:08:33.180 barbell or I'll do it with dumbbells. Honestly, it's a little easier with the barbell because I don't have to

01:08:37.240 worry about the grip of holding the dumbbells. So reverse lunge, meaning you're starting in a

01:08:40.620 standing position and you're doing a step back. Step backwards, step backwards. I've seen a great

01:08:44.220 video on this where you emphasize how wide you're stepping out. That's the thing. And this is where

01:08:50.400 some of the functional training stuff comes up. Oh, it's a balanced exercise. That's not a strength

01:08:54.500 exercise. It's a balanced exercise. It's not a balanced exercise. If you can't keep your feet wide

01:08:58.560 enough, all you have to do is just step back and out. You'll maintain a wide enough base where you still

01:09:02.540 have support. And then it's a strength exercise. I remember where I was when I watched that video.

01:09:07.240 And I went to the gym that day and I was like, I've never thought about taking a wider stance.

01:09:12.800 I mean, I added 40 pounds. Right. My second big tip on that exercise is

01:09:17.080 as you go down, I call it like screwing yourself into place, but you're really not. You just take

01:09:22.440 a little bit of a rotation towards the front leg. So you're just taking a torso. You take it a little

01:09:26.740 bit over the front leg. It will basically stabilize that front leg a little bit more. And again,

01:09:31.140 with enough contact, I think when we're doing those reverse split situations, it's about 75%

01:09:36.880 on the front leg or so. Yeah. About. Yeah. So, I mean, you still got 25% going back on that back

01:09:41.800 leg and that's enough to support you and make sure that you're not falling all over the place.

01:09:46.620 That is my favorite way. And I recommend for people all the time to do that.

01:09:50.000 Lunging forward is fine, but people that have knee issues like myself, that doesn't feel too good

01:09:54.100 either. So it's like, why not do it this way? Because this is a safer way that has less orthopedic

01:09:59.720 issues for people. You can be pretty heavy. Again, if you're going to use a barbell there too. So

01:10:03.880 that's my favorite substitute. And since I learned that there were other things I can do

01:10:07.900 and not compromise whatever it was that I was chasing at the time, I have since backed away

01:10:12.560 from that. You can ask Jesse every now and then I'll go back and try again. And inevitably in a few

01:10:18.220 days, things start clicking in my hip or things that didn't pop or click before. I do believe that

01:10:23.200 there's a path away from that. For you, before I want to talk about your patience, but personally,

01:10:28.720 because we're all telling personal stories, what have you changed in your training,

01:10:32.560 resistance training specifically as you've aged, as you've increased wisdom, whatever the case might

01:10:38.520 be? I wish I could say I get less hurt. Before we started the podcast, I said that I had a right

01:10:43.800 torn hamstring. Proximal or distal? It is proximal and quad fem, which is very unusual.

01:10:50.620 Glute, mead, and glute min. I love to overachieve. I thought it was a great idea about eight years ago

01:10:58.980 to keep up with my husband, who my husband was a former SEAL who's now at Baylor. I thought we would

01:11:04.100 do a 50-hour event and I was not physically capable or prepared to do that. It's just another Tuesday

01:11:10.940 for him. And I tore my left hamstring on a sprint. Since that time, I think that it changed my ability

01:11:19.620 to squat. I kept going back to the squat. I am not able to do that at all now, but that changed

01:11:26.360 probably, I don't know, six months ago. I stopped squatting six months ago. I also found out that I

01:11:31.460 had hip dysplasia. All of these injuries, all of these patterns, which, you know, as I think as

01:11:36.160 someone who is listening or watching this, if something doesn't feel right, you talk about

01:11:39.960 taking that wide step back. If someone is doing something that people will say, okay, this is a

01:11:44.840 squat pattern, but it doesn't feel right to you. I had been squatting in a much too narrow position for

01:11:51.380 someone that has hip dysplasia. And so I ground out my hip. I'm somewhat stubborn for those people

01:11:57.140 that know me. I just kept doing it because I believe that we should squat. Needless to say,

01:12:02.180 I'm now in a position where I am doing only single leg movements and really trying to pull back,

01:12:08.440 probably be doing some PRP for this now new injury. And I say that all about someone in a roundabout way

01:12:16.240 that as we age, like you said, Peter, the worst thing that you can do is stop. And I think about

01:12:21.140 Doug Patton Jones's work, the catabolic crisis model. This isn't a catabolic crisis, but a catabolic

01:12:26.880 crisis model is when you're off the table, you lose muscle mass and strength rapidly. And that

01:12:31.880 continues per decade. So my training has changed dramatically. I do more high intensity on, say,

01:12:39.760 the bike or the airdyne versus any kind of long, slow, steady state, which I would love to get back

01:12:44.620 into. And then also the lifts. So you're able to do high intensity stuff on a bike with a high

01:12:49.360 hamstring tear? Well, this is new. This new tear just happened. I got my MRI back two days ago.

01:12:55.480 Got it. I won't be able to. When you're recovered. So let's just say we're sitting here in nine months.

01:13:01.500 No, no, I'll be recovered before then. All right. Very well. When you're recovered,

01:13:05.380 how is it going to change what you do going forward? And how will that impact what you modify in terms of

01:13:12.180 your patients? Because I think all of us are practitioners here and therefore we're students.

01:13:16.820 We do a lot of self-experimenting. We make a lot of mistakes on ourselves. That gets us curious about

01:13:22.560 what's the lesson here? How do I make sure that my client, my patient doesn't make the same mistakes?

01:13:27.760 What are you going to change and how is it going to impact what you tell patients?

01:13:30.660 Definitely. It doesn't have to be these big lifts. We don't all have to squat. And for me personally,

01:13:35.760 having to deal with that prior to injuring my hamstring, just recently, I was starting to do more

01:13:40.800 unilateral work. And I will go back and also just being much more particular about form.

01:13:46.300 I think as lifelong exercisers, we can compensate a lot. People that are somewhat athletic compensate

01:13:54.040 very well. I think I have to hold myself to a much higher standard. Otherwise, I know I will

01:13:58.520 continue to get injured. And also I want to add in more zone two. It's so funny you say that. I remember

01:14:04.580 a trainer and I can't remember who it was, but he was showing me videos of some incredible

01:14:10.340 athletes doing workouts. And he was just pointing out all of the horrible mistakes they were making.

01:14:15.780 And he goes, they're not great athletes because of how they're training. They can get away with

01:14:21.980 training that way because they are such great athletes. How much did you see that, Mike,

01:14:26.340 when you were training pros?

01:14:27.300 I literally just wrote down the better the athlete, the better the compensator. That was a note that I

01:14:30.620 just wrote.

01:14:30.900 Masters of compensation is what we used to call them.

01:14:32.380 Yeah. I used to look at these guys and think like, my God, it's amazing what they can get away with

01:14:36.900 at that level. But I want to go back to the adult because it's really funny, the squat thing,

01:14:40.600 because I wrote an article one time and I forget what I called it, but it was basically about

01:14:43.820 slamming your hand in a car door. I said, if you substituted slamming your hand in a car door for

01:14:48.020 squatting and then had the same conversation with yourself saying, hey, I just hurt my hand. I slammed

01:14:52.740 it in the car door and I can't wait till my fingers heal up because I'm going to go back and slam

01:14:56.400 my hand in the car door, right?

01:14:58.140 That's what you'd be saying to me in the shower every eighth workout.

01:15:00.800 But we've all done that.

01:15:02.100 Exactly. And that's why I wrote the article because people do it all the time.

01:15:04.840 And you just realize that if you just, and that's where being rational and substituting

01:15:10.120 something really stupid.

01:15:11.300 Although in fairness, the analogy is more like this. The analogy is I love slamming the car door

01:15:16.560 because I love the noise, but I like to also reach in the car when I'm doing it. And normally

01:15:22.320 it's fine, but on every eighth slam, oh, I might edit the article for that and say, okay, even if it

01:15:28.180 was only every eighth time you did it, would you go back and slam the car door eight more times?

01:15:32.880 You wouldn't. You would be like, no, that's absolutely stupid. The risk reward doesn't

01:15:37.040 work. But for some reason, squatting has such a visceral attachment in strength and conditioning.

01:15:42.720 And that's why, I mean, people, you should go look at some of the old YouTube comments

01:15:45.500 about me, the things people were saying about me were unbelievable. You know, and I was kind

01:15:48.600 of like, I'm just telling you.

01:15:50.100 It's religious, right?

01:15:50.940 It's religious. It's absolutely religious.

01:15:52.660 An exercise like the clean doesn't have that type of religion because I think

01:15:57.280 functionally, again, everyone can relate to the squat. The squat is something we do every day,

01:16:03.020 every time we get out of a chair, every time we go to the bathroom. So I think there's the

01:16:06.100 attachment.

01:16:06.480 But your point, Jeff, sorry to interrupt, is a very good one, which is people are confusing

01:16:10.900 a goblet squat or effectively a sumo deadlift with a goblet, which is, it's all the same hip hinge.

01:16:18.740 They're confusing that with this. This is the unnatural part, I think.

01:16:23.820 We teach everybody to goblet squat. We teach everybody to sumo deadlift. But I always tell

01:16:27.040 everybody and people like, well, you know, you got to be able to go to the bathroom. I won't use

01:16:30.900 the indelicate. And I said, yes, but you're not going to piggyback someone in and take a shit.

01:16:35.160 Like that's not how it's going to work. You don't have to be able to do that. Like in order to be

01:16:38.520 able to use the bathroom, you only need to be able to bodyweight squat. So once you can bodyweight

01:16:43.220 squat, you're good. Let's do unilateral stuff for loading because, and this is where we get into

01:16:47.800 adults versus athletes. Like I was, people say, what's an adult? What's an athlete? I'm like,

01:16:51.340 an adult has a job that does not involve playing sports. And I was doing this presentation for

01:16:56.460 Perform Better. I was writing it up. One of the things I said, you know, pickleball players aren't

01:16:59.180 athletes. People that are adult recreational athletes, they're not athletes because if they

01:17:03.760 get hurt, like you said, you get hurt at 50 or 60, it's really debilitating. You don't heal.

01:17:09.460 Even the rate of healing, you're seeing that now. The rate of healing is totally different. I look at my

01:17:13.740 son and his friends. They'll get hurt. And two days later, they'll be like, oh, I'm fine. And I look

01:17:18.320 at them and think, I'd be six months crippled if I did what you did. And people don't see, I always

01:17:24.380 say life is this gradual transition of filet mignon to beef jerky, right? And I'm in the beef jerky stage

01:17:29.820 of life, firmly in the beef jerky stage of life.

01:17:32.280 I'm thinking I'm in a New York strip at the moment, just getting a little firmer.

01:17:36.720 But you know, you think like you're getting crustier and a little bit more salinated and

01:17:41.180 just, you're not what you used to be. And I actually posted a thing on my Instagram. They

01:17:44.580 say the number one cause of injury in old men is thinking they are young men. And that's why when

01:17:49.400 you get into, should they squat, should they death? I always say no, because I wrote down ego.

01:17:53.340 The problem with that is when you start letting people do these things, you then have to become

01:17:59.020 the ringmaster in the circus. So for us, we just eliminate the events. Like, nope, we're

01:18:03.640 not doing those events because I'm not going to be able to figure out, well, you can squat

01:18:07.660 and deadlift. You can't squat and deadlift. You can't. It's like, no, if nobody squats

01:18:11.600 and deadlifts in our adult program, then we're just better off. And again, by professional

01:18:17.020 athletes, I had one guy in the Red Sox who squatted, insisted to me after I really fought

01:18:21.600 with everybody about it, every single guy except one.

01:18:24.380 What position?

01:18:25.060 Pitcher.

01:18:25.860 A pitcher?

01:18:26.280 Pitcher.

01:18:26.640 Like a real, John Lester, he was, I mean, he looks like a linebacker. He looked like

01:18:30.580 Brian Urlacher. He was like, no, I have to do this. The rest of the guys were like, oh,

01:18:34.180 I'll do the whatever. I'll do split squats. I'll do whatever you want me to do. But in

01:18:37.920 that situation, I was like, okay, our college kids, we have to squat, squat. So if you

01:18:41.780 came in, someone came in the gym that day and they were like, I get squatting. They were

01:18:45.040 like looking like, oh my God, like there's a defector in our midst here. And I was like, no,

01:18:48.800 he has to squat. He's got to go back to college. He's got to go to his college weight room

01:18:51.540 in his college program. Those kids squat because we want them to be able to go back to school

01:18:56.060 and be able to participate in the program the way they're supposed to participate.

01:18:59.740 I feel like people don't appreciate the nuance of what you're saying. I feel like it can easily

01:19:03.240 be turned into Mike thinks no one should squat. And what you're saying is, no, there's a threshold.

01:19:09.280 There's a risk reward trade-off. I completely agree with you. This idea, like if you're not

01:19:12.980 getting paid to play a sport, you have to reconsider how you're treating that sport.

01:19:18.500 But it's also not as if the alternatives are sacrifices in terms of what they're delivering.

01:19:24.180 That is the problem. Like I always talk about, people get on me because I have what I call

01:19:29.040 the iron graveyard. There's a few exercises that just belong in there. And one of them

01:19:32.900 for me is the upright row. It's a garbage exercise. You could tell me, no, there's no

01:19:37.140 bad exercises. That's a bad exercise.

01:19:39.020 Talk about it.

01:19:39.620 So the upright row is done the way that old school taught how to do the lift. You hold the

01:19:43.740 barbell and you lift it up here, up under your chin. Your elbows are much higher than your

01:19:47.640 wrists are. You've got lots of weight usually on the exercise. So fully pushing your arms

01:19:51.940 down to internal rotation. The funny thing about that is that that position is literally

01:19:56.060 the test as a physical therapist that we would put somebody in to try to see if they have impingement

01:19:59.860 in their shoulder. We would put them in this position, push down. If it gets a lot of pain

01:20:03.200 in there, likely something's getting pinched, supraspinatus tendon, something. Why am I doing

01:20:07.600 that exercise? When? Not because I dislike the exercise. I never got hurt on it. I never did.

01:20:12.720 I've done it for years. I've done it for 40 years. There's always the outliers like we talked

01:20:16.060 about before. But what I can just simply tell you, I just want you to drop your elbows lower

01:20:20.600 than your wrists. I want you to do something called a high pull. I want you to go this way.

01:20:24.080 But doing that, now instead of internally rotating the shoulder, I'm externally rotating

01:20:27.700 the shoulder. I'm still working my delts. I'm still working my traps. I get zero sacrifice

01:20:32.200 of what I'm trying to do the exercise for in the first place. And I eliminate the part

01:20:36.340 that I don't like, that I don't care if you haven't gotten hurt this time, but ultimately

01:20:39.900 doing it over and over and over again can potentially cause a problem down the road. Even just

01:20:44.200 the potential of it. I'm not saying that you can't get injured on any exercise. You can.

01:20:47.900 But on this exercise, I'm lowering the risk and not sacrificing the benefit. I think when

01:20:52.300 Mike talks about squatting, the fact is if you can do something that's giving you a better

01:20:57.940 or even equal benefit, and it takes away some of those downsides to the exercise, especially

01:21:04.880 as the population who's performing it is less appropriate to be performing the exercise

01:21:09.580 and more appropriate to be doing the alternative, what's the whole point?

01:21:13.860 It makes me think about how do we re-educate people? Because we've all suffered from these

01:21:19.460 narratives of you have to squat, you have to deadlift, and it's just similar to nutrition.

01:21:24.460 Do you think that there's a way, if I can ask, do you think there's a way that we re-educate

01:21:29.080 getting to our youth potentially so the younger that we can educate, the less likely we're going

01:21:35.560 to have adults in their 50s having to have serious injuries? And then, Mike, you wouldn't

01:21:41.040 have to have this conversation about no more squatting.

01:21:43.460 No, I think we're doing it right now, actually. I mean, these things are really, the ability

01:21:46.980 to mass produce this and to have people hear it and see it is something that we weren't really

01:21:52.260 able to do before. I talk about the fact, when I was a kid coming up, I had to wait for

01:21:56.420 the new Strength and Health to come out to the newsstand. I mean, I waited. I visited the

01:22:01.160 newsstand daily.

01:22:01.440 We lived by these magazines.

01:22:02.760 Loved it.

01:22:03.240 I waited for Strength and Health and Iron Man. I would walk into the store and I would

01:22:06.300 say, did those magazines come in? The guy would be like, nope, they're not in yet,

01:22:09.500 because that was our only connection to the training world. And now you think you've got

01:22:14.480 14 million subscribers or something like that on YouTube. And I had someone ask one time,

01:22:19.560 they said, what's the greatest thing you've seen, or the greatest change in strength and

01:22:22.580 conditioning? And I was like, the computer. And they're like, what do you mean? I was like,

01:22:26.320 there was no computer.

01:22:27.580 Such a good point.

01:22:28.100 So you start thinking, we've got this ability now, podcasts, YouTube, we can educate people,

01:22:34.160 but our problem is that we copy dumb people. There's too many dummies on the internet and

01:22:39.740 not enough people. I've taken a little bit more in my old age to kind of calling out the

01:22:43.260 bullshit. Sometimes I'll just say on Twitter, that's a bad take. Because if you don't, then

01:22:48.540 people get to establish themselves as experts, because this is the loudest voice situation now

01:22:52.880 in terms of who's going to influence. And now there's a lot of AI. Like if you look at Twitter,

01:22:57.580 it's got all these AI things going that are showing people. And sometimes I'll just write

01:23:01.160 total garbage and I'll just click and send the reply because I'm like, it's total garbage.

01:23:05.560 This is shit. It shouldn't be on the internet. It shouldn't be anywhere. So, but I'm going to be

01:23:10.220 that, I guess. I'm going to probably-

01:23:11.720 We need that.

01:23:12.460 I'm getting close to the grumpy old man stage. Like when your grandfather would say inappropriate

01:23:16.380 things at meals, I'm like, I'm inches away.

01:23:20.360 Jeff, give us a couple more things in the graveyard.

01:23:22.980 Cuban press for the same reason, which is when the elbows can, you know, the arms come down and

01:23:27.900 then press from there. It's kind of an unnecessary adaptation that we don't need. What else do I

01:23:32.360 have in the graveyard? The chest fly. I put the unsupported bench fly in the graveyard simply

01:23:37.400 because of my history working with pitchers and knowing how susceptible the shoulder capsule can

01:23:42.460 become from chronic overstretching. And then we apply a load in that position at the same time.

01:23:48.460 Whereas a fly machine would be safer because you're not loaded.

01:23:52.800 Much safer. And we'll do a floor fly. The floor fly, we're getting the eccentric overload. Matter

01:23:57.340 of fact, the benefit of a floor fly is that you're going to have the safety net of about here on the

01:24:01.360 floor. And I could use a heavier weight. But if I'm doing the exercise because I like the eccentric

01:24:05.780 overload I get on it, I can actually apply a little bit more weight, a little bit more eccentric

01:24:10.360 stress to the chest. Because the benefit of the exercise is the stretch of the exercise.

01:24:14.520 So I can apply a heavier load, but in a much safer, and again, my shoulders aren't going to be vulnerable

01:24:19.660 there too. But again, because it's an Arnold favorite and it's an Arnold classic, and I believe

01:24:25.500 he tore his pec once on the fly. So it's like, was his favorite, but it did have repercussions for him

01:24:30.900 too. It's not something that I believe you can't reproduce the benefits of in other ways. Again, nothing

01:24:36.720 is in my graveyard that doesn't have an alternative that's equally good. The only reason why I would

01:24:42.060 ever throw an exercise into that category is because there's something that could be done

01:24:46.360 that just eliminates some of that risk that's just as good in terms of delivering what it's

01:24:49.900 supposed to deliver. So yeah, I mean, it's not an extensive graveyard, but people are very vocal

01:24:54.260 about their favorites when one finds their way into that graveyard. And you have to sort of explain

01:24:59.440 your way out of it.

01:25:00.760 I want to talk a little bit about kids. So I have three kids. They all love playing sports.

01:25:05.700 One of them in particular has taken a real love of baseball, the youngest. So he just turned eight

01:25:10.620 about a month ago. I grew up never playing baseball. It wasn't a sport that was particularly

01:25:15.100 popular where I grew up. I have to say, I have become obsessed with baseball. I can really fully

01:25:20.940 understand how people can get obsessed with this sport. It's not just the numbers and the data.

01:25:25.320 There's so much art in nuance, in learning about all these different pitches and how they hold the

01:25:32.440 ball and all this kind of stuff. Okay. But we live in a world now, it seems, where coaches want kids

01:25:38.560 to specialize earlier and earlier. And I was a little bit surprised at the end of his

01:25:44.500 seven-year-old, they're playing three seasons a year, by the way, in baseball right now. So you've

01:25:49.020 got fall ball, spring ball, there's this little summer ball tournament. And the kids are playing

01:25:55.640 one position now. Most of the kids have a coach, a coach outside of, like a position coach outside of

01:26:01.860 the team. My intuition is that just doesn't make sense. Tell me what you guys think of that.

01:26:07.400 Do you have a soapbox available for me to jump up on? One, I always say follow the money. If you look

01:26:15.220 at most of these people that are telling you that kids need year-round sports are people who are

01:26:19.500 making their living from year-round sports. If you look at what most professional athletes are doing,

01:26:23.740 they're not doing that with their kids. If you look at what most coaches are doing, they're not doing

01:26:29.180 that with their kids. What you usually find is some entrepreneur who has developed Joe's baseball

01:26:34.380 and he needs income year-round because he doesn't have Joe's baseball and lacrosse. He just says

01:26:39.500 Joe's baseball. So as a result, they start telling you, they start giving you that early specialization

01:26:44.360 myth like, hey, you got to get started early. And if you get started early, you do better. And if you

01:26:48.520 get senior, I just saw somebody, Twitter the other day, somebody said, scouting starts now at 10U.

01:26:53.520 This was a woman who runs a softball development program. I said, no, that's absolutely bad information.

01:27:00.220 They start using words like development and exposure. The reality is if you said,

01:27:04.360 I have an eight-year-old who really likes baseball, the number one thing I would tell you is make him

01:27:08.100 do something else besides baseball. My daughter was a full scholarship ice hockey player, very,

01:27:12.280 very good player of the year in the Women's Professional League. She had a scholarship when

01:27:15.320 she was 15 years old. I didn't let her play in a summer tournament until she was 13.

01:27:19.200 And people would say all the time, can Michaela play in this tournament? Can she play in that

01:27:22.820 tournament? I'm like, nope. And they're like, what's she doing? I said, she's going to go to the lake.

01:27:26.020 She's going to water ski. She's going to be on the swim team. She took up diving one summer because

01:27:30.060 they needed a diver. And she became the U12 diver because the guy started throwing herself off the

01:27:34.820 diving board and said, oh, she's fearless. I'll teach her to dive. And I was like, how many hours

01:27:39.080 will you take her for? And he's like, oh, a couple hours a week. I was like, awesome.

01:27:42.840 We made her do that. We made her play soccer. She did judo. She was state judo champion when she was 12.

01:27:48.500 The kids that are better athletes do better in the long run. You end up with, there's a whole early

01:27:54.380 succeeder phenomenon that we deal with. And early succeeders, generally, they won the genetic Olympics.

01:27:59.220 They generally tend to be from groups that develop earlier. And they will tend to be ahead

01:28:04.380 when they, for us, from in my years, it was the Greeks and the Italian kids. They always matured.

01:28:09.240 They were the ones that were shaving in junior high school. And they were much better in junior

01:28:11.800 high football than the rest of us were because they weighed 190 pounds and we weighed 130 pounds.

01:28:17.220 You just look at that and think that's not going to have any bearing on the end. You have to look,

01:28:21.760 this is the literal marathon versus sprint argument in terms of you've got to look at this and think,

01:28:25.900 this is a developmental marathon. And the kids who sample tend to do better. Like your kid loves

01:28:31.120 baseball now, but you don't necessarily know that that will be my son loved hockey. He's playing

01:28:36.260 college lacrosse. He was playing baseball and lacrosse at the same time.

01:28:39.880 And do you feel this way even if the kid is themselves wanting to play all the time?

01:28:44.340 Would you sort of force the kid?

01:28:45.780 Yeah, I forced my daughter. My daughter was hockey only. She was, that's all I want to do.

01:28:49.820 And I said, I don't care.

01:28:50.760 So she was not thrilled about the idea that you weren't letting her play in a summer tournament.

01:28:54.120 Yep. Angry at times with me. Fights about why can't I do this? Because she knew she could go

01:28:59.560 and be the best player. And I said, I don't care if you're the best player when you're 12. I care

01:29:03.280 if you're the best player when you're 18. Being the best player at 12, I'm not getting any ego

01:29:07.080 gratification by going to this tournament and realizing that you made the 12-year-old all-stars

01:29:11.800 or something like that. So yeah, we had fights. We had fights about soccer. I made her play her

01:29:15.660 14-year soccer. And the specialization thing, I always think up to 12, broadest sampling possible.

01:29:22.580 The more things they can possibly do, the better. Because we're trying to develop general athletic

01:29:26.860 attributes. You'll see the kids in hockey that played soccer because they're kids that can pick

01:29:32.040 up pucks in their feet. My son picked up lacrosse really fast because he played baseball and he played

01:29:36.120 hockey and he understood the whole idea, oh, we score, there's a net, I can catch things extended.

01:29:41.040 All that stuff made perfect sense to him when he went to lacrosse. And lacrosse ended up coming

01:29:45.820 together. But if you weren't sampling, you don't know. You just think, I always say, and this is a

01:29:49.760 terrible analogy, but I'm going to use it anyway. I said, if your son came to you and said, I really

01:29:53.280 like cocaine at this point. It's the only thing that I want to do. You would be like, no, we're not

01:29:57.740 going to do that. Right? But suddenly, because you- You have to do a little heroin. You have to do a

01:30:02.440 little meth. I mean, you have to- I would like you to drink a few beers. You know what I mean? If you

01:30:06.000 substitute that- Just because they want to do it doesn't mean it's right for them. Right. If you substitute that for

01:30:08.480 baseball, I like absurd analogies, but I think you see the absurdity of that and you think, yeah, you love

01:30:14.180 baseball, that's great. But you should learn to swim. And you really should learn to do some sort of sport

01:30:20.160 that involves your feet. You know, you should play soccer. I think kids should do some sort of combative

01:30:24.860 sport is really good for kids because you should learn what it's like. The instructors when my daughter

01:30:29.460 was doing judo were Ronda Rousey and Kayla Harrison. What are the odds that you go to the best judo school

01:30:34.220 in America that is 15 minutes from your house and that's who's teaching the classes in judo?

01:30:40.780 So my daughter can still say that, you know, she was taught by Ronda Rousey and Kayla Harrison.

01:30:45.960 Having to go out on a mat and fight another kid, I mean, fight's the word, I guess,

01:30:49.780 is really good for a 12-year-old girl. And that feeling, I remember her looking at me the first

01:30:53.260 time like, sorry, I can't come out. Like, you're on your own. You better figure it out. And she did.

01:30:58.120 Sampling is the key. And specialization, if we can think of the worst possible thing you can do for your

01:31:02.840 kid, it is to let them specialize. Even if it gets to the point where they think, dad, I don't like

01:31:07.060 you. You're mean. You're not a good person because you're not letting me do what I want to do. You've

01:31:11.560 got to look at them and think, that's why I'm the parent. That's why I'm in charge. Soap box down.

01:31:15.760 I will say that our kids are both in gymnastics and jujitsu. My daughter hates jujitsu and she excels

01:31:24.340 in gymnastics. And we chose gymnastics because it allows for her fine motor skills, all of this

01:31:31.960 development, very young, and also the development of her musculature. She loves it. And we know that

01:31:37.620 the healthier, fitter, and more active these kids are, the greater their metabolic health as adults

01:31:43.320 is. But to your point, what we see is, I think in the U.S., we see a lot more injuries

01:31:48.540 than in other places because of this always having a season. And from a standpoint of longevity,

01:31:56.500 definitely, again, make our kids do the same thing.

01:31:58.980 I don't know why we haven't stopped and questioned it a little bit sooner because it's not like

01:32:03.280 injury rates are going down. So we're playing more and getting injured more. That's what we've

01:32:07.720 seen across all levels of sport. Mike and I were discussing the Achilles tendons and the rash of

01:32:13.960 Achilles tendon injuries, or at least it seems to be in prominent players. But a lot of it has to go

01:32:19.080 back to the repetitions and the mileage. And one thing that Mike brought up that I thought was really

01:32:23.620 interesting was the way the style of the game is played now, let's say basketball, there's so much

01:32:29.380 more because it's really come down, chuck up a three, go down, chuck up a three, come down,

01:32:32.620 there's a lot less of that inside game going on. The game is faster and they run more. And there's a

01:32:37.880 lot more mileage. How many miles extra was it?

01:32:40.020 200 more miles a year per team.

01:32:41.940 Right. Because of just the way the style of the game is played. And they're not all linear miles.

01:32:46.360 They're start, stop, start, stop, start, stop. So there's a lot of cumulative stress on

01:32:50.240 the Achilles tendon doing that. Again, on top of the fact that as teenagers, they were playing all

01:32:56.460 year long too. Not like it used to be when Larry Bird was playing, when he played his season and he

01:33:00.960 probably went home and did something completely different, just shot around a little bit. So

01:33:04.780 we need to start looking at these extensive seasons and these multiple seasons per year

01:33:10.120 because it's not changing. It's not helping. If it was helping, we wouldn't have all these

01:33:14.360 athletes being injured. Things are worse now than they've ever been.

01:33:16.880 Say more about the Achilles. That is the injury I personally fear the most at this point

01:33:22.500 because I play with my kids a ton. So it's usually soccer and baseball that we're playing.

01:33:28.920 And especially with soccer, I'm always worried, is this going to be the day when despite all of

01:33:34.000 the training I do, despite all the jumping, despite all the multilateral training I'm always doing,

01:33:39.820 I don't know what it is. I think I've just seen so many of them. It's the injury that keeps me up

01:33:44.880 at night. I'm just literally diving for a soccer ball and ping. It's the beef jerky injury.

01:33:51.080 What is the protocol? How do you think about maximizing the odds of survival?

01:33:57.300 Rolling and stretching, one. I'm a huge foam roll and stretch person. I think everybody should

01:34:02.040 be rolling. Everybody should be stretching. Everybody should be doing stretching.

01:34:05.420 Specifically, you're talking about the soleus. You're talking about rolling all the way down

01:34:09.080 onto the tendon. Yeah. Okay. So you're talking about calf. Calf and then doing, you know, just

01:34:13.960 ankle mobility work, basic ankle rocks. And then now it's really interesting because this is where

01:34:17.360 you talk about dogma. All of a sudden the front foot elevated stuff is becoming popular. And when

01:34:22.900 you think about from a preventative standpoint, it makes perfect sense. We were always told that you

01:34:26.820 have to have your whole foot on the ground. Like that's the correct technique. If you're on your

01:34:29.980 toes. When you say front foot elevated, do you mean like toe on a plate? Yeah, like toe on a plate

01:34:32.800 kind of thing. But initially when I first saw it, I was like, I don't get it. And then a physical

01:34:37.420 therapist friend of mine, David Gray, was like, yeah, well, if you want to get your foot engaged

01:34:41.280 and you want to get your gastroc engaged, it just makes sense to put your foot on there. And that's

01:34:45.600 where some of the stuff, it always goes back to when I wrote functional training for sports and

01:34:49.460 they asked me to define it. I said, functional training is training that makes sense when you

01:34:53.020 think about things. So that's why when you're talking about flies, like flies don't make any sense to

01:34:56.360 me. I said, unless you're a professional face slapper, I don't know why you would do flies.

01:35:00.540 Still probably better on the pack deck.

01:35:01.720 We don't do that. Like I look and think, I don't know why you would do that. Maybe if you went to

01:35:06.000 University of Florida, like if there were certain things where you might be required to perform that

01:35:10.500 action. But from a hypertrophy standpoint, there's a lot of reasons to do it. There's something you

01:35:15.340 must be getting out of that movement that you can't get out of that movement. Yeah. Well, I mean,

01:35:20.620 you look at the amount of abduction that you're getting. So any press, any dip, any pushup, it's all

01:35:25.160 limited to about this range of motion. But if I can actually open it up even further and get more

01:35:29.740 stretch, we know the benefit hypertrophy wise of applying stretch to a muscle. But that's an

01:35:35.800 exercise where you are also entertaining and range shoulder mobility. And then again, excess stress on

01:35:42.320 the anterior capsule. So like, so it's like if you're a bodybuilder, if you're in certain sports

01:35:46.200 where the aesthetic matters. Right. It could be a difference between first and second place if

01:35:50.060 you're a competitive bodybuilder, but that's not my world. And I think that at least educating people

01:35:55.240 about what those risks might be is at least an important first step to having a discussion of

01:36:00.140 whether they should do it or not. And again, if I can provide an alternative for them where I think

01:36:03.340 you could get additional benefits without the risk, then why do it? What else do you think is

01:36:08.160 important in the playbook of minimizing the risk of the Achilles injury? When Mike said mobility,

01:36:13.420 I think ankle mobility is something that no one pays attention to their ankles. We don't try to

01:36:16.940 mobilize our ankles at all. I think that tight calves are common in people and they don't really ever

01:36:23.500 address them. And it all starts at the ground. Everything starts at the ground. If you have any

01:36:28.640 compensation, if you lack ankle mobility, your knee is going to pay the price for sure. Because the

01:36:33.420 knee, I always say the knee is like that consequential joint in between the hip and the

01:36:37.180 foot. And it's just reacting to what's happening above and below. And the poor knee, my knees in

01:36:42.820 particular, like they got beat up and they never really were to blame. All they were trying to do is

01:36:47.140 just hinge back and forth and they couldn't do a good job because they were being betrayed by

01:36:50.600 flat feet and weak hips. But I think if people pay more attention to strengthening their hips

01:36:55.400 and to mobilizing their ankles, you can feed that chain up and down. And if your calf isn't tight or

01:37:02.840 if your ankle is more mobile, then there's less of that tension being placed down through the tendon

01:37:08.360 itself. You're already doing it, taking a step forward in terms of decreasing your risk of actually

01:37:12.500 snapping that thing. And in terms of strengthening the calf, do we think the soleus or the gastroc plays a

01:37:18.580 greater role? Do you need both? Do you need to have both knee bent and knee straight?

01:37:22.260 We always focus on both. A lot of people will always talk about the gastroc specific strengthening

01:37:28.200 with the knee straight, just because it's the one that gives you the better contraction. But I don't

01:37:33.760 care about that. I care about making sure that all the muscles in the body are strengthened. So we'll do

01:37:37.940 equal amounts of seated versus standing calf raises. So if you're doing three sets in a day of

01:37:42.500 standing, you're doing three sets seated as well. So every time we program calf training, it's

01:37:46.340 seated and standing together. I don't think one versus the other is more responsible for the

01:37:51.120 tears. I think as a group together, our ankles are lacking mobility. And because the ankles are

01:37:56.320 lacking, we've talked about like in sleeping. In sleeping at night, your feet are down, especially

01:38:01.920 if you keep those blankets tight at the end of your bed, they're down quite a bit. And you're spending

01:38:06.580 six, seven, eight hours in that position. You're not doing yourself any favor in terms of encouraging

01:38:12.380 mobility of the ankle and flexibility through your calves. So we need to be much more aware

01:38:16.780 of those areas and do more work towards that. And again, that's more work that people have

01:38:21.160 to do. And when you're talking about from the very beginning, when we're saying, what

01:38:23.940 do I have to do to be in shape or what do I have to do? Sometimes you have to own little

01:38:28.000 mini parts of your program because specific to you, they're important. So for you, this big

01:38:32.920 fear of that Achilles tendon tear, which I'm right there with you, I think it's a devastating

01:38:36.800 injury that will take you out for quite a while. That would be part of your program

01:38:40.920 that you have to add another five minutes of mobility work for your ankle and do that

01:38:45.780 three, four times a week to make sure that you're doing something about it. That starts

01:38:50.000 to add up and people start making choices and their choices are kind of cutting all the little

01:38:54.160 stuff because that's not going to really, no one's going to see my ankle development.

01:38:57.680 They want to see my arms or my chest or something. So we're going to do more work there. But when

01:39:02.480 you make those decisions to cut those little parts of the program, those are the ones that

01:39:05.680 usually keep you injury free.

01:39:07.260 Speaking of single leg, the difference between doing calf raises with two feet versus single

01:39:13.660 leg, that was one of the most profound eye openers for me was the difference in strength

01:39:18.380 and how much less weight you could do one leg at a time. It's not half the weight. There's

01:39:23.960 some sort of interesting compensation when you're doing it two legs at a time.

01:39:27.500 We've started adding that back into our adult program. We never put calf work in. And then

01:39:31.180 suddenly we started thinking, I remember trying to do some calf raises and I was so sore and

01:39:35.200 I thought, my God. But again, you realize it's kind of a use it or lose it scenario where if

01:39:40.560 you're no longer sprinting and jumping, then that flexibility, the mobility of that complex and

01:39:47.200 the ability of that thing to absorb force. But the other two things, one, avoid doing it if your

01:39:52.080 calves are sore because if you look at both Tatum and Halliburton had previous calf strains that

01:39:56.860 they were playing with, ended up with Achilles tendon tears. And I think sometimes, I'm a meme guy,

01:40:01.680 there's a great meme yesterday. And the guy said, the doctor was like, how much does that hurt?

01:40:05.040 And he said, oh, the usual amount. And the doctor said, the usual amount is zero.

01:40:08.920 So you've got to be able to look at that and realize that it shouldn't hurt at all. If you're

01:40:12.700 thinking, oh, my calves, my shins, they're sore. That's indicating to you that you were doing

01:40:17.800 something that wasn't kind and that now you've got to give that enough time to recover so that that's

01:40:22.640 not sore anymore. And I think sometimes we get into the kind of hard guy stuff. I tell everybody,

01:40:28.660 I wrote an article one time called Does It Hurt? And I said, it's all about the idea that does it

01:40:31.840 hurt is a yes, no question. If I ask you, does it hurt? You can only answer yes or no. And any

01:40:35.960 equivocation is yes. Well, after I warm up, yes. Or only yes. And I always do that with people when

01:40:42.420 they start qualifying. I'm like, yeah, that's a yes. How much does it hurt? Bench press, after I warm

01:40:46.600 up, it doesn't hurt at all. That means it hurts. But you're using that then as a sign that says,

01:40:51.460 I need to understand why it hurts. It's not, you don't train. It's, we need to figure out what's

01:40:55.800 going wrong. What's your movement pattern? And figure out what Jeff was alluding to,

01:40:59.200 like, you know, upright rows and rotator cuff. Like, what is it that's making your shoulders

01:41:03.100 sore? What's the movement that's aggravating? For some people, like we find that standing,

01:41:09.940 you know, people, it's functional. Standing cable pressing is the one thing that everybody can do

01:41:14.160 that doesn't hurt. So if we have people with shoulder pain, they stand and cable press because

01:41:17.720 it's the one thing they can do that doesn't hurt. And I don't care whether people think functional,

01:41:21.760 non-functional, you can label it any way you want to label it, but I just know I can get you to

01:41:25.420 press pain-free. And my goal, that's my goal all the time. I want to be able, you can look at me

01:41:29.720 and say, I can do that. And it doesn't hurt at all. Then I think, okay, we can build off that.

01:41:34.400 What people don't understand too, is that it's okay to go through periods of restriction

01:41:39.020 to a single movement like that, a standing cable press, to actually allow the shoulder to heal

01:41:44.940 to a point where you actually could get back to doing other variants of the press if that was

01:41:49.640 your desire. I told you a story myself where I had a, I have a labrum tear and I had an inability

01:41:54.740 to do any type of pressing. I had to restrict myself simply to a variation of a crossover that

01:42:00.820 wasn't even a pure crossover, but just something that I could do where I could actually pull in a

01:42:04.680 little bit and then cross over my body. Because that was the only thing I could do pain-free,

01:42:08.460 but I could still work my chest in a way that allowed me to do something. I also knew that I

01:42:13.840 could do something completely different, like I could horizontal row. By doing that, I'm getting

01:42:18.220 shoulder movement in a way that was different. It's almost like the specialization in sport,

01:42:23.200 not just doing all chest stuff, but trying to actually attack the chest through a different

01:42:26.920 way by still looking at the shoulder joint. And I would do a lot, a lot of rowing, which probably

01:42:31.780 was good just posturally to balance out some of the imbalance I had in the shoulder, but also to just

01:42:36.660 give me more joint range of motion in the shoulder. I'm getting all this extension.

01:42:41.320 The combination of those two things got me to a point where my shoulder doesn't, knock on wood now,

01:42:45.840 but my shoulder doesn't hurt. I can actually be able to go in and go back to pressing,

01:42:50.140 again, in a smart way, with dumbbells. I don't barbell bench press, but I do it with dumbbells.

01:42:55.920 And I have none of the pain that I had years ago when that was going on. So it's okay to understand

01:43:01.800 that this is a long game and you might want to take a step back and stay with the exercises that

01:43:07.120 don't cause pain and allow yourself a chance to be actively mobile to still recover at the same time.

01:43:13.900 Instead of sitting on the sidelines, like you said, it's just not a preferred choice. That's not

01:43:17.960 going to turn out well. Sort of pivot and talk a little bit about strength training women across

01:43:24.120 the transition from perimenopause into menopause. Do you have any experience with that? I'm guessing

01:43:29.700 you do. Mike, you must just by the fact that they're coming in. So start with you, Gabrielle.

01:43:35.380 What are you noticing is the most important things as women are making the transition from

01:43:40.560 perimenopause straight on into menopause? The first thing is don't wait until they start to

01:43:45.800 feel that their body composition is changing. The fitter they are going into perimenopause

01:43:50.460 and menopause, the better they're going to be both metabolically and just activities of

01:43:55.420 daily life, everything. Those women seem to suffer much less. When hormones are changing,

01:44:01.240 I think what I end up seeing is that maybe sleep is poor. One of the signs of menopause is this

01:44:08.280 frozen shoulder. So if someone is a candidate for HRT, we do certainly believe in that or menopause

01:44:15.140 therapy. When it comes to training, in the literature, I haven't seen huge evidence or

01:44:21.920 a variation evidence that good training, it's not sex specific. There is not something specific

01:44:27.960 for women that needs to happen rather than following good foundational principles of strength

01:44:33.600 training, hypertrophy, and cardiovascular activity.

01:44:36.900 So you don't say, hey, now that you're making this transition, we have to alter your periodization

01:44:42.960 or change the amount of time you're spending doing one form of training, say cardio versus

01:44:47.540 resistance, or even the number of reps you would do. We're not changing any of that stuff.

01:44:52.160 I don't. One of the things that we do look at though is if they are at risk for injury for

01:44:56.360 tendons or joints, we do see that that changes. But then once we treat them, I do not see a reason

01:45:03.280 to change. Good programming is good programming. Progressive stimulus is progressive stimulus.

01:45:08.480 No, it was great because when I read your book, it was very reinforcing for me because where I'm

01:45:12.620 getting that question more and more now from our female clients, just because of people like you

01:45:17.240 who are talking about it more, people are more comfortable than talking to us about it.

01:45:21.840 It's exactly that. It always comes back to strength and conditioning. Get stronger,

01:45:25.720 get in better shape, get them to challenge themselves more with weights and not be content.

01:45:32.440 Females are very, there's an ego component that's absent in females that is very present in males.

01:45:37.500 Like males will look at, you know, if I looked at what Jeff did, I might think, oh, I'm going to

01:45:40.780 try that. Females just don't have that. They're just very internally driven. And sometimes that

01:45:45.480 will cause them to underachieve in the weight room because they're not worried about being top

01:45:49.480 dog. They're not worried about who lifted the most weight. It just isn't.

01:45:52.040 Makes them better snipers, you know.

01:45:53.800 I believe it. It makes them better clients. I would do nothing. I have a lot of really elite females

01:45:58.180 that are great hockey players and lacrosse players and stuff. And they're the best people to train by

01:46:02.040 far because they don't have a lot of the extra baggage sometimes that the guys have.

01:46:06.300 They're just way more compliant. They just listen to what you say. They don't argue with you. They

01:46:10.320 don't worry about what Jeff is doing, but encouraging them to continually get stronger.

01:46:14.860 And we would look at it as conditioning versus cardiovascular workout. That's just kind of

01:46:18.420 how we always use the term, but pushing them to do more intervals, pushing them to do, I want more

01:46:24.080 aggressive intervals. So you might call it a VO2 max workout, but I want to get that. Like,

01:46:29.500 I love the Andy Galpin's idea. Like Andy Galpin's thing was like, hey, you just want to get your

01:46:32.840 heart rate up really high once a week. I think that's a really good concept. And starting to just

01:46:37.780 get people to think, hey, get your heart rate up. Wear a heart rate monitor. Don't be afraid to push

01:46:42.220 your heart rate to X, whatever that is. And don't be afraid to be out of breath or get off the bike

01:46:48.240 and feel like you want to land the floor kind of thing because we're big assault bike, airdyne people.

01:46:53.000 I think it's the most efficient way to hit your cardiovascular system with what I would call

01:46:57.340 no orthopedic costs. Like I can kill you on the bike and nothing bad is going to happen. Even like

01:47:01.940 you were saying with the hamstring, I'm going to bet you can going to be able to bite that hamstring.

01:47:04.740 I'm planning on trying it later today.

01:47:06.100 And then you'll be perfectly fine because you're not weight bearing and you're not getting a lot of

01:47:10.120 aggressive hip extension and a lot of aggressive hip flexion. And you can probably torture yourself

01:47:13.980 on there for a long time without having any negative effects. But the biggest thing, like I said,

01:47:18.820 with women is just getting them over that I'm going to get big so I don't push myself kind of thing.

01:47:23.540 And so it's funny, I film a lot of my women and ask them to talk about how much they weigh

01:47:27.680 and how much weight they haven't gained. So I have two of the best lacrosse attackers on our

01:47:32.180 U.S. team that are in their mid-20s now. And they've been here for five years and they've gained

01:47:36.840 no weight. They're stronger, they're faster. But females gaining lean mass is really difficult.

01:47:41.660 You have to really be a super responder. And usually I always say apples end up like apples,

01:47:46.280 oranges end up like oranges. It's not like suddenly one day the apple is going to wake up and

01:47:50.240 the next day they're going to be an orange. If you're an ectomorph, you're an ectomorph.

01:47:53.540 You will get the occasional really mesomorphic female where you do think, oh, wow, she really

01:47:57.780 does respond to weights. But they're rare. They're super rare.

01:48:01.620 So Jeff, what about you? What are you seeing in women specifically that you're training,

01:48:05.140 especially during that transition through menopause?

01:48:07.920 As Gabriel pointed out, the training specifics are pretty much the same. What applies,

01:48:12.360 what is good, smart training for men is equally applicable to women. The only thing that I would

01:48:18.040 say from a PT standpoint, biomechanically, there are some differences in terms of something

01:48:22.820 called a Q angle, the angle of the hip or the femur coming down to the knee. It does create a lot

01:48:27.940 more valgus at the knee for women than it does for men. So I think you just have to be aware of those

01:48:33.420 things. So when you're doing certain activities, you want to be able to coach better in terms of

01:48:38.140 being aware of positioning. So like the tendency for a lot of women when they jump is to land in a

01:48:43.640 much more valgus knee state, which could put more and more stress. We're not fearful of them blowing

01:48:48.160 out in a training session. But as we talked about before, that cumulative stress of every time you

01:48:52.460 land, you're getting more and more stress on the MCL or the ACL. That would be something that you'd

01:48:56.960 want to coach around and make them aware of because you could strengthen that. You could work on

01:49:02.160 biomechanically improving those things, put a band around their knees and have them jump that way and

01:49:06.180 land that way. They're learning how to activate their abductors and their hip. That is probably

01:49:10.320 something that isn't even really a requirement. All men could benefit from that, but it's not an

01:49:15.500 additional requirement because we're not dealing with the same biomechanical angles. Also, because

01:49:20.640 of hormones, women will have more laxity of hormones at different times of the month that will make

01:49:26.440 them susceptible to different stresses. I think you just have to be aware of the education side of it

01:49:31.700 and coaching through that. But as far as the exercises, the programming, we also found that women

01:49:38.020 just tend to be much stronger than men in terms of their output pound for pound. And given the differences

01:49:43.160 in sex, they're able to proportionally push more weight, especially with their lower body

01:49:47.160 than men can. Much stronger. Have you found that too, Mike? The women are incredibly strong in terms

01:49:52.280 of their output and strength comparative to men. I haven't really thought about it in terms of

01:49:57.440 pound for pound. The one thing we found is that they're much stronger in their upper body than they

01:50:00.880 think they are. That's the one thing that we've seen is that we've got women doing weighted chins

01:50:05.220 with 45 pounds for five. What? Wow. 45 for seven is the best I've seen. 45 pounds wrapped around her

01:50:12.480 waist and she's doing seven chin-ups. Yeah. Alex Carpenter, who's one of our- How many men can do

01:50:16.500 that? In our gym, we really emphasize it. Most of ours. Wow. Sons did 90 for two the other day.

01:50:22.180 He weighs 180. A bunch of kids on his team. We really push. We push pulling. That doesn't sound

01:50:26.320 right, but we emphasize pulling. We like to push pulling. I'm leading the league in redundancy.

01:50:31.320 I want to come back to something you said at the outset, Mike. You were talking about kids.

01:50:34.340 The youngest you train is 11. You drew a hard line in the sand. How come?

01:50:40.200 I always say I don't want to be in the childhood stealing business. I think there's some people in

01:50:43.520 our industry that are in the childhood stealing business. I think kids should be kids and they

01:50:47.820 don't need a strength and conditioning coach when they're seven, eight, nine, 10 years old.

01:50:52.260 They probably need a playground and a bike and a swing set and a slide. There's a lot of things that

01:50:58.220 kids could be doing that are way more fun than being in my gym. We actually drew the line at 12

01:51:02.620 initially, but the sports brackets are 11, 12. When we realized that we drew the line at 12,

01:51:08.160 people then started coming and wanted to bring a team. Suddenly, it was kind of like, well,

01:51:12.200 we'll take Peter, but Jeff can't come because he's 11. Eventually, we kind of bumped it down. Then we

01:51:17.900 just resisted bumping it down more because I don't want to run a kinder gym kind of program. I don't

01:51:22.760 want people running around. I don't want birthday parties. That's not what I'm looking to do.

01:51:26.960 So we just said 11. I think at 11, you're going into middle school. You can start to understand

01:51:31.940 that there may be some commitment involved in terms of, hey, if I want to make a team,

01:51:36.080 I'm going to probably have to learn to work at this thing and I'm going to have to learn to train.

01:51:39.940 And it's a very good, if you kind of look at long-term athletic development models that

01:51:43.720 11, 12 is a good learn to train age to get kids in and get them kind of oriented to,

01:51:49.160 hey, here's how you do the exercises. And we're very learn to train oriented at that stage. I tell

01:51:54.820 our coaches all the time, I don't care if any of these kids get stronger. I could care less.

01:51:58.080 I really care that they're good lifters. If they've been here 10 weeks and by the end,

01:52:01.800 I can look at them and think, wow, they can goblet squat and they can sumo deadlift and they can do

01:52:06.340 a clean and they can do a chin up and they can do a pushup, then mission accomplished.

01:52:09.720 I mean, all of that is fantastic, right? And again, it still flies in the face of what many people

01:52:13.620 would think, which is, oh my God, an 11-year-old lifting weights? It's going to stunt their growth,

01:52:17.960 Mike. Aren't you crazy?

01:52:19.380 I literally wrote that down. It's funny. That was in my notes in the beginning,

01:52:21.960 but the misconception stuff, we're still dealing with the stunted growth thing. And you'd brought

01:52:26.220 up New York Times, but New York Times did an article where they tried to pull the string on

01:52:30.080 that. Where did the stunted growth thing come from? And it actually came from a study. The only study

01:52:34.100 they could find was on Japanese forced child labor. The kids who were forced into child labor tended to

01:52:40.580 be smaller than their age-matched peers.

01:52:42.740 Who were malnourished.

01:52:43.700 Right, exactly. Malnourished and not working at eight in a factory. But yeah, you still have doctors.

01:52:48.860 They talk about growth plate stuff. There's no growth plate damage evidence. There's

01:52:51.920 none of those things are there. And then you talk about gymnastics, Gabriel. I always tell

01:52:56.420 people figure skating and gymnastics are 10,000 times more aggressive than anything that we would

01:53:01.640 do in the gym. I'll get myself in trouble, but I always say organized child abuse, right? I mean,

01:53:05.440 it's not even good for kids when you look at what they're trying to do with these young bodies,

01:53:10.140 because you need, I always think you need little people that rotate. And that's the key to those

01:53:13.480 sports. You look at that and then you think, what we're doing in the gym, okay, hold 10 pounds,

01:53:18.380 squat up and down, and that's going to be bad for you. But spin around three times and land

01:53:22.780 is okay. That's physics denying, science denying, where you look and think, no, I can show you the

01:53:28.400 physics of that is way, way worse.

01:53:30.880 So what are the things, and this is a question for all of you, because y'all have kids. So we

01:53:35.000 haven't pushed any of our kids. Our daughter just decided at some point she wanted to start lifting

01:53:37.900 weight. So that was great. But our boys kind of like to come in the gym with us and we just sort of

01:53:42.680 play goofy games with them. So I know you're friends with Jocko and Leif and they have this

01:53:47.980 fun little card game that they play where you, have you seen this game? So it's basically like

01:53:52.940 you designate what's a spade, what's a heart, what's a diamond, et cetera. Like you pick an

01:53:57.020 exercise, like this is a pushup, this is a burpee, this is a sit-up. And then obviously if you flip it

01:54:01.260 and you get a 10 of that thing, you do 10 of them. If you get a seven, you do seven of them.

01:54:05.540 Usually they'll just come in the gym with us and play that game. And this is the problem with boys.

01:54:09.840 They want to one up each other. So once one of them goblet squats, this amount of weight,

01:54:14.960 the next guy wants to go to the heavier kettlebell and the next guy wants to go to the heavy kettlebell.

01:54:17.920 And actually I do get a little worried because I see their form deteriorate. They go into what I

01:54:22.780 call turtle back. So they go from lumbar extension, they start getting into lumbar flexion. And I'm like,

01:54:28.380 guys, enough. What advice would you have for trying to help little boys who want to start lifting,

01:54:35.180 but you just want them to develop the form?

01:54:36.940 It's really funny because if you were to ask them to jump onto something or to even to walk

01:54:42.900 upstairs two steps at a time, their form usually is going to look quite good when it's just a

01:54:49.140 naturally occurring activity that they're doing in their life. When you then say, hey, let's do this

01:54:53.780 as an exercise. Let's do something called a step up where we step up onto a box or let's even do a

01:54:57.840 pushup. The pushup, if they were to get themselves off the floor, it would probably look a lot prettier

01:55:01.600 than it does when they ask them to do a pushup. Their ass is up in the air, their shoulders are wide,

01:55:06.220 they're kind of moving in all different kinds of segments. So to me, it's this disconnect. It's not

01:55:11.480 that they lack the athletic skills or the strength to do what it is you're asking them to do. They

01:55:17.320 lack the awareness of what it is you're asking them to do. When it's packaged as an exercise,

01:55:21.980 they're sort of like, I'm not really sure what that is. So it's our responsibility to kind of make

01:55:25.900 it seem easy to understand and tell them where they're supposed to be feeling it. The number one

01:55:30.980 question that people ask when they were starting out an exercise program, not just kids, anybody,

01:55:36.540 when they do an exercise, surprisingly, this is what we all do. And we are so passionate about it.

01:55:41.460 What am I supposed to work? What am I feeling here? When am I supposed to feel this? And to me,

01:55:45.080 like, well, where do you feel it? They want to know because they want to know where, okay,

01:55:48.980 because if I'm not feeling it there, what do I have to do to get it to feel it there?

01:55:52.240 Kids need to learn the proper form and biomechanics of how to do the exercise. Again,

01:55:56.840 I think they possess a lot more athletic skill and natural abilities than we give them credit for.

01:56:01.680 And when we just have them start doing exercises, it breaks down. So take the time, do the exercises

01:56:08.320 right. Who cares about the weight that's in their hand first? Start with body weight and then have

01:56:12.560 them learn the mechanics of that. As I said before, with that little drop squat, the drop squat is where

01:56:17.840 they can actually add weight and learn better than it could be if they were trying to learn a body weight

01:56:22.380 squat. In this case, that actual implement would assist them in learning how to do it properly

01:56:26.620 because it's going to take their center mass straight down. So the form is everything when

01:56:31.460 it comes to kids. And when we've worked with kids in the 11 and 12 year old bracket, that's what we

01:56:35.640 try to focus on is learn the movement, go slow, don't speed through it, go slow. Speed is something

01:56:41.760 that usually breaks down in any attempt at good form. So learn the movements and then we could always

01:56:46.840 speed them up and we could always add weight. But if you don't learn the form, you're going to

01:56:50.420 basically set up a foundation that's going to ultimately crack, especially if they get away with that

01:56:54.880 for their teen years. And now they're in their 20s. And then really now that competition starts

01:56:59.680 to kick in and competing with your buddies and then things get really ugly.

01:57:03.520 And are either of you guys doing sports specific training for these 12 year olds? For example,

01:57:07.940 if you've got a 12 year old who's a pitcher versus a 12 year old who's a basketball player,

01:57:12.320 are you having them do different exercises?

01:57:14.940 Nothing. I always say sports specific training is bullshit. It's absolutely nonsense. Baseball is

01:57:20.160 sports specific training. Like if you want to go get better at baseball, then go play baseball.

01:57:24.880 I've trained guys in every major professional sport and it's at most 80, 20, probably 90, 10. 90%

01:57:32.660 of what we do is the same. 10% of what we do is different. And that 10% is totally irrelevant to

01:57:37.380 a 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 year old. It makes absolutely no difference.

01:57:41.560 That's really counterintuitive. I would thought that, I mean, God, if you're a pitcher, you've got

01:57:45.800 to be taking more care of the rotator cuff than maybe the guy who's the hockey player, for example.

01:57:50.720 Right. That would be the 10%. Literally like the 10% with baseball would be that

01:57:54.160 shoulder care stuff that you might not really worry about with your hockey players or your

01:57:58.240 football players. That's where your difference in programming would be like that one spot,

01:58:02.100 rotator cuff. But with kids, like I always look at it and think you shouldn't be a pitcher. You're

01:58:05.780 not a pitcher. You're a baseball player and you might end up being a catcher. You might end up

01:58:09.820 being a shortstop because Nomar Garcia Parra, Nomar Garcia Parra went to Georgia Tech and tried to

01:58:15.200 kick on the football team. Yeah. And he loved soccer. He married me a ham. He's a huge soccer fan.

01:58:20.080 He told me one time, I used to train him. He said, I would absolutely be playing soccer if

01:58:24.100 I didn't live in the United States. He said, but I realized the best use of my athleticism

01:58:28.360 was major league baseball. And that playing in the MLS would never have given me the type

01:58:32.940 of career that I would have had major league baseball. But most every great athlete that

01:58:36.700 I've seen was a great multi-sport athlete. But we've got this self-fulfilling prophecy

01:58:40.840 now of specialization where people can now point and they'll point to Tiger Woods or somebody

01:58:46.020 and say, oh, Tiger Woods specialized. And it's like, you can find me one specialist. I can find

01:58:49.740 you a thousand generalists who all have achieved, but you'll continue to use the specialist as the

01:58:56.120 example because that's what you want to believe. We as achievement oriented people, for you to be a

01:59:01.520 great doctor, for you to be a great doctor, for you to be great at YouTube, that's what you got to do.

01:59:05.600 Kids, it's the polar opposite. For them to be great at something down the road, they probably need

01:59:09.720 this super broad based skill set. The base of the pyramid versus the height of the pyramid,

01:59:14.500 the bigger the base, the larger the height. If you build an obelisk out of the gate,

01:59:19.000 you're probably not going to accomplish much. You mentioned Carl Crawford. He didn't get those

01:59:24.440 scholarship offers for three different sports because he started playing at 18 or 17. He

01:59:28.940 obviously was playing all those sports at a young age and developing all those athletic skills to

01:59:34.080 where he could select the one that was most appropriate for him, either financially or...

01:59:38.160 And he was just the best. Some of this is genetic lottery. Carl Crawford could do a standing

01:59:42.360 backflip at 230 pounds. He's still the most athletic person I've ever seen, but he would have

01:59:47.840 been that in any number of sports. I don't think, you know, it's just the fact that he chose baseball

01:59:52.040 and that's what's interesting in terms of people say, oh, you look at the Europeans, they specialize

01:59:56.960 in soccer. And it's like, yeah, because they don't have the choices that we have over here. We've got a

02:00:01.180 lot of opportunities that maybe aren't present in other countries. So people will cherry pick

02:00:05.500 because they want to support their thesis. But to me, the more important thing is virtually no kid

02:00:11.660 is going to be a professional athlete. My interest is in how do you use the interest in sports first

02:00:18.180 to fuel the spark that says lifelong activity is an important pillar of health. Second, how do I make

02:00:26.000 sure that when you are done playing sports, which for most people is the end of high school,

02:00:30.600 then there's a narrow subset that'll say, well, actually it's the end of college.

02:00:34.000 And then there's virtually nobody who's playing sports after that. Because to your point,

02:00:38.400 pickleball with your buddies on Sunday, that ain't sports. So we all stopped playing sports

02:00:43.520 pretty young and yet we are going to need to train for the rest of our lives. I think that's the thing

02:00:50.720 that I'm still trying to better understand is how do we use youth sports as a tool to set you up to

02:00:57.460 be an athlete for life where the sport changes to life? I think that's the difference in terms of

02:01:04.000 using it to teach life lessons. They say sports can build character or it can build characters.

02:01:08.820 Do you have to use it to build the kid's character? And sometimes that may be saying,

02:01:13.520 you're not just going to get what you want. I get it that you just like baseball, but

02:01:16.340 we're going to play soccer in the spring because we think you need to be exposed to more things.

02:01:20.400 And the kid learns that lesson because sometimes they just learn this micro focus really early on.

02:01:26.840 And then later on when they don't achieve, they think, oh, if I wish I'd done more things,

02:01:30.760 I wish I'd sampled more. I wish I'd explored more. I think it's looking at the real body of

02:01:34.720 evidence versus looking at the evidence that's presented to you by the person who's trying to

02:01:39.680 get your money, which is what usually happens now. The issue I think though, is that where we're

02:01:44.560 going off track is that the coaches and the parents of these children are overemphasizing the importance

02:01:51.540 of what it is they're actually competing in to the point where, why do you think we have,

02:01:55.620 you said because of money that we have all these additional leagues throughout the year,

02:01:58.480 but it's also because everyone thinks their kid's going to be a pro. They're not.

02:02:02.360 And they don't want their kid to be left behind.

02:02:04.080 That too. And it's, there's all these social pressures behind this. That is what's feeding

02:02:08.340 the problems that we see and also taking away from the fact that this is introducing lifelong

02:02:14.140 habits to them to the point where it's degenerating something that should be very positive into

02:02:18.840 something that becomes at worst destructive. You're overdoing something and you're actually a lot of

02:02:23.920 times also making a lot of these kids hate athletics by the time they're 17, 18, 19.

02:02:29.340 That's another issue, which is, I can't tell you the number of people I met who grew up collegiate

02:02:33.980 swimming who cannot stand swimming. And it's such a shame because swimming is, while it's not good

02:02:39.980 for bone density, it's pretty much good for everything else. So by itself, I would say it's

02:02:43.900 not the only exercise you should do, but boy, if I think about, if there's one exercise I could insert

02:02:48.620 into everybody's life, it would be some amount of swimming. Somebody who swam through high school

02:02:52.380 and college, they're like, I could never do it again. It was my best sport. I went to the first

02:02:56.320 swimming meeting at Springfield College. Coach, I still remember, Red Sylvia, famous division three

02:03:01.040 coach. The first words out of his mouth were the first practice is at. And I was thinking,

02:03:06.300 he's talking per day here, right? They're swimming twice a day. They're swimming before school and

02:03:09.820 after school. And I sat politely through the whole meeting like this and nodded and went to the football

02:03:14.900 meeting and tried out for freshman football because I was like, there is no way I'm going in the pool twice a

02:03:18.800 day. It was the end of my swimming career. And now I have terrible shoulders. I can't stand swimming

02:03:23.840 because it hurts. When you're talking about becoming a lifelong athlete, for us, so again,

02:03:29.120 our kids are four and five. They train with us. They might not be doing the same lifts, but we let

02:03:33.580 them play with a kettlebell, pick things up, put them down, and we let them run. We let them do things

02:03:39.360 that they would physically be able to do without a lot of cueing. And as I just think about some of the

02:03:45.120 data on tendon health, we know that the earlier people start, the better and more resilient those

02:03:50.600 tendons are because they're not starting later in life, not getting injured. And I just think,

02:03:55.600 again, it's just a great place to start. The earlier, the better, which is a bit counterintuitive

02:03:59.960 because we've heard all of this information on how kids shouldn't lift weights or train. And maybe

02:04:04.800 it's not a standardized training program. They're in there. They're doing stuff with us like every day.

02:04:09.920 If you think back to the last five years, you're obviously all in a constant state of learning.

02:04:16.640 Is there something you have changed your mind on? Something significant that you've changed your

02:04:21.180 mind on? And not just changed your mind on, but it's changed the way you behave, the way you help

02:04:25.780 other people. I'll start with you, Gabrielle. This is a big one. I don't think body fat percentage

02:04:30.540 is nearly as important as we think it is. I think that it is going to be somewhat of an outdated

02:04:36.920 metric. I believe that intermuscular adipose tissue, this IMAT, is going to be much more

02:04:43.880 predictive of disease. And this came from, I interviewed on my podcast, Melanie Cree.

02:04:48.620 We were talking about PCOS. And I'm thinking metabolic PCOS, what is the body fat percentage

02:04:54.080 that's going to change the outcome? And she looks at me and she goes, Gabrielle has nothing to do with

02:04:59.260 body fat percent. It had to do with their intermuscular adipose tissue. And that I think is going to be an

02:05:05.680 upcoming theme. It's much more specific to insulin resistance and these metabolic outcomes that we

02:05:12.040 care about. And commercially, obviously it can be measured quite easily with CT scans and with MRIs.

02:05:19.360 To my knowledge, it's very difficult for DEXA to approximate it. That's right.

02:05:23.400 Is ultrasound viable? Obviously you wouldn't be able to get whole body, but you could sample the

02:05:27.220 quads. Yes. That would probably be the canary in the coal mine is if you're accumulating muscle in

02:05:31.400 your quads. Yes. And I think it's also very difficult. I guess we're accumulating fat.

02:05:34.900 Yes. Very difficult to test. MRI seems to be where a lot of the data is. We're not there to measure it.

02:05:41.020 But this is something that I think we are going to see so much more of. And we're all focused on a

02:05:47.180 muscle-centric approach. And for the last 50 years, it's been all about obesity. And this is the same

02:05:52.480 thing. It's almost that we're looking where it's obvious, but it doesn't mean that that's where it's

02:05:57.740 effective. I really agree with you actually. And I think pharmacologically for what it's worth,

02:06:03.020 I think that's the next frontier. So I think what the GLP-1 agonists have done over the past five

02:06:08.120 years with the introduction of the third and fourth generations of those drugs, the first two were

02:06:12.740 largely failures. But because of how successful the third and fourth generations were, we're really at a

02:06:17.960 point where I think people can see that you can address the crisis of overabundance from a nutrition

02:06:24.320 standpoint. But what people realize, the new problem that is yet to be undressed is sarcopenia.

02:06:30.340 When I'm looking at what's at the leading edge in the frontier of biotech right now, it's all around

02:06:37.900 anti-sarcopenia drugs. Now, of course, we have another great drug that works against sarcopenia.

02:06:43.300 It involves holding iron and eating certain types of foods. But if where billions of dollars are being

02:06:50.380 invested is any indication of what people realize is the next frontier, I think people are waking up

02:06:55.520 to the idea that it's not enough to solve the adiposity problem, you must address the sarcopenic

02:07:03.300 problem. Yes, I couldn't agree more. What about you, Mike? What have you changed your mind on?

02:07:07.940 I'm glad you gave me a head start to think about this. You know something? Digestive health. I had a

02:07:13.060 bowel resection done nine months ago. So they took a foot of my colon out. And I realized,

02:07:18.200 I actually did a really good presentation for our staff called You Don't Know Shit,

02:07:22.020 because I think that's the most neglected area of health right now because we don't want to talk

02:07:25.740 about it. It's uncomfortable. And until you experience it firsthand, you don't realize how

02:07:31.500 important fiber is, how important water is. Chronic dehydration seems like a, oh, it's a big deal,

02:07:37.300 but it's really not a big deal. But it suddenly is a big deal. I liken it to, it's like you have a

02:07:41.440 dumpster your whole life that's out in the back of your house and it just gets emptied all the time.

02:07:44.820 And then suddenly one day you realize they can't empty the dumpster anymore. Like I'm in trouble.

02:07:49.620 And that's us. Like we're worried about our muscular system. We're worried about our nervous

02:07:52.600 system. We're worried about our endocrine system. And our digestive system is just this thing that's

02:07:56.740 supposed to be this dependable system that's just going to take care of us forever. And then suddenly

02:08:01.140 in our fifties and sixties, it starts to fail and we don't want to talk about it. Like I was in the

02:08:06.300 hospital. I was sick. And then the guy was like, this is major surgery. We've got to take foot of your

02:08:10.600 colon out and put you back together again. I won't go into the gory specifics, but

02:08:14.820 it made me realize that, I mean, I take a fiber supplement all the time. I put fiber in my

02:08:18.640 shakes all the time. Now I look at how much fiber is in everything that I eat now. But you start

02:08:22.600 about protein numbers. Look at the fiber numbers. Our people are way more fiber deficient than

02:08:26.780 protein deficient, but they're going to suffer the effects way down the road and it'll be too late

02:08:31.640 for them to realize. So if I would say to anybody, I'd be like, drink more water, eat more fiber

02:08:36.160 because you don't want a bowel resection.

02:08:39.000 All right. What about you, Jeff?

02:08:40.440 Breaking the rules, I have a couple, but personally, I think I have two twin

02:08:44.600 nine-year-old boys. And so in the last five years, they've gone from four to nine, which

02:08:48.940 for a dad is the phase where mom was definitely the favorite for the first four years. And then

02:08:54.260 I sort of step in and become the fun guy. So I've realized through their interactivity with

02:09:00.440 me, number one, to appreciate things I didn't appreciate before. In the first half of my adult

02:09:05.480 life, I was so focused on professionally achieving whatever I could, whether it be working for the

02:09:10.800 Mets or then starting this business and really going all hours of the night to try to build a

02:09:14.600 business. Not that I just still don't do that, but I really have learned to better prioritize my time

02:09:19.240 with my kids to the point where it's difficult for me to make travels out to do podcasts because I

02:09:24.040 really try to be around them. And I've learned to appreciate because they're on the spectrum.

02:09:28.640 I've learned to appreciate their wins every day. So it's like, wow, I don't take anything for granted.

02:09:34.000 That's a thing that I am so grateful for that I've been able to benefit from because if I think if the

02:09:38.960 situation was different, I probably would just continue to work, work, work the way I did.

02:09:42.420 But I think from a professional standpoint, kind of oddly, one of the things that I think is really

02:09:47.100 overlooked is balance training. And I think that it's an area that people are going to probably

02:09:51.680 have to spend a little bit more time focusing on because like we just talked about digestive

02:09:55.820 health, like it's another one of those things that's going to get worse as you get older for a

02:09:59.620 number of reasons. Number one, your reaction times will get worse. Number two, your proprioceptive

02:10:05.720 sense is going to get worse, which is essentially your sense of body position. Number three, your

02:10:11.520 strength is going to get worse as we talked about inevitably decade by decade. When we consider what

02:10:16.840 all that leads to ultimately falling, we talked about these fears. I don't have the fear of falling

02:10:22.600 right now. I'm sure if you don't have the fear of falling right now, we have the Achilles tendon stage

02:10:26.220 right now. But 20 years from now, 30 years from now, our biggest fear should be falling because when you

02:10:31.040 do, you're likely going to live a pretty difficult end of your life and it might lead to a much faster

02:10:36.280 end of life. I think that actually training balance is another one of those things that's going to have

02:10:41.320 to get kind of sectioned into that five minutes of extra work that you're going to want to have to do

02:10:46.240 for yourself. And the most important thing when you're training your balance, even if it's just simple

02:10:50.360 standing on one leg and drawing an alphabet with your other foot, is to close your eyes. Because I think

02:10:56.280 that when you don't close your eyes, you're actually one-dimensionally creating an environment

02:11:00.700 that's not actually what we're going to face. Most people fall in the dark because they don't have

02:11:04.780 that visual feedback to correct. By the time you send that signal down to your ankle to make an

02:11:09.140 adaptation, it's too late. If our reaction times are delayed too, it's going to be even worse.

02:11:13.600 So it's just a thing that I think people that are already older should start working on because

02:11:17.320 as a skill, you can improve it. And as somebody who is looking down the line here and seeing things

02:11:22.980 change, including my eyesight, which used to be so perfect up close, that changes. I know all these

02:11:28.300 things are happening under the hood. Making a dedicated effort is something I think people

02:11:31.960 should probably invest some time into because it's well worth the investment for that long-range

02:11:36.780 safety. I think the theme here is, I think we would all agree in the gravitational pull of aging.

02:11:42.980 Despite the fact of what some of the popular biohackers might have you believe, none of us are getting

02:11:48.760 out of this alive. I would bet each of us can remember what it was like, what it was like to

02:11:52.840 be 10 years younger, regardless of whatever age we are today. But this idea, if I could take what

02:11:58.840 you're all saying and impart one thing to a listener, it would be, you do have a choice at the rate at

02:12:05.240 which this glider is going to come down. The glider will come down. Gravity always wins. But you can

02:12:11.580 train to reduce the rate of decline. You can train to reduce the rate of decline. It won't happen by

02:12:19.260 accident. The training you have to do has to be specific. It's not obvious or intuitive that you

02:12:25.800 should do some of these exercises. A lot of the things that you guys have talked about today are

02:12:28.580 exercises I just love. The front foot on a plate, on a 45-pound plate, putting the front foot up there,

02:12:34.120 going into a lunge, taking a plate and doing little twists. The amount of stress that that puts

02:12:41.000 on the proprioceptive capacity of that front foot is insane. What a dumb looking, unsexy exercise that

02:12:47.940 never shows up in the mirror. And yet, what a phenomenal exercise. I'm with you 100% on all of

02:12:53.900 these sorts of balance drills with eyes shut. They're frustrating. It is frustrating to be on

02:12:59.100 one foot with your eyes shut. Third layer is turn your head when you're doing that. Oh my God. The way

02:13:04.240 you feel and you don't want to do things you suck at, but you kind of have to do this. I don't know.

02:13:09.440 I just hope that people realize that ignoring it won't make it less likely. It's a relatively

02:13:15.560 small price to pay. You're not asking people to be in the gym 12 hours a week. Last I checked,

02:13:20.680 some of us choose to be in the gym or exercise 12 hours a week, but that's probably because we're

02:13:24.740 weird and we do that just like other people might enjoy watching TV. But yeah, if someone could give

02:13:30.340 two great hours a week, it breaks my heart that there are people who don't do it for whatever reason,

02:13:36.260 for whatever belief system that says it's too late or it's too hard or I'll do it tomorrow.

02:13:43.800 So guys, I really, really appreciate this. I don't know where the time went because we didn't

02:13:50.300 actually cover a single thing I had written down, which is okay because I had good stuff written down,

02:13:56.960 but I thought we talked about good stuff. So I'm incredibly grateful for all of you making the trip

02:14:01.140 out here. I only wish we had another three hours, although we'd have to take another bathroom

02:14:05.820 break or something. So thank you all for coming.

02:14:08.420 Thank you. A pleasure. Honestly.

02:14:10.020 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. Head over to peteratiamd.com forward

02:14:17.560 slash show notes. If you want to dig deeper into this episode, you can also find me on YouTube,

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02:15:02.080 medical condition they have, and they should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals

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The Peter Attia Drive - September 22, 2025

#365 ‒ Training for longevity： A roundtable on building strength, preventing injury, meeting protein needs, guidance for women and youth athletes, and more ｜ Gabrielle Lyon, Mike Boyle, Jeff Cavaliere

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