Modern recovery has become crowded with devices, claims, and protocols. This conversation brings the practice back to a calmer question: what is the body being asked to adapt to, and is that signal precise enough to be useful.
Transcript grouped into clickable timestamp sections. Each marker opens the original YouTube video at that moment.
Welcome back to the Flex Diet podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase muscle, increase performance, improve body composition, all without destroying your health in a flexible framework. today got my buddy Rob Wilson on the podcast and we're talking about just a wide variety of stuff from music to movement patterns. How to know what are some standards for strength and conditioning especially for a newer mixed martial arts BJJ etc. I originally met Rob through the art of breath that he was teaching for Brian McKenzie through shift adapt many years ago. I got to sit down and chat with him afterwards which was great. Learned a ton from him at that point and wanted to get him back on the podcast because I really like the creative uh thought processes and the time and effort he puts into everything here. Uh, make sure to check out his brand new book called The Check Engine Light: Tuning Your Body and Mind to Achieve Performance Longevity. Uh, this is published by Victory Belt with a forward by our good buddy Dr. Kelly Starret. So, Rob Wilson is a human performance specialist, educator, coach, author. Now, spent more than two decades working at the intersection of breath, movement, performance, resilience, and long-term health. As I mentioned, Rob is one of
the key educators behind uh the art of breath. Uh he has worked with tactical populations, high performance organizations, just a ton of people in the background. Uh also helping with the curriculum at Altus and just a really cool guy. You probably have not heard of him, but he's one of those guys who kind of stays a little bit more in the background, but has a ton of really great stuff. Uh, so make sure to check out his links, his book, and everything else. We'll put them all down below. If you want more information from me, you can hop on to the newsletter completely free. We send you cool fitness stuff related to all the the topics we discuss on the podcast here uh directly to your inbox and try to make them as entertaining as possible also. So, just go to the link below and you'll be able to sign up completely free. So without further ado, here's our wide-ranging conversation, Mr. Rob Wilson. Welcome to the program, Rob. How are you doing, man? Good. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you. Yeah, thank you. We got to hang out. It does it seem like the older you get, like the faster I just lose track of time now. Like I think the last time we saw you, you were in the Twin Cities doing the Art of Breath teaching that I went to, which was great. And that was 2018. It was like eight years ago, which doesn't seem like it's that long ago. I know. But it it's funny because
whenever now I see like I'm an 80s kid. Yeah. I was an 80s kid and now I see like great classic movie or like now like some of the younger athletes and stuff that I'll work with, they'll be like, "Oh my god, I love this classic grunge." And I'm like, "Oh my god, classic grunge. Oh my god." And I'm like, "What do you listen to?"like, "Oh, Allison Chains." I was like, "Oh, man. That was like new when I was junior high at high school." And they were like, "Wow, really?" I was like, "Yes. Yeah, I'm officially old." Yeah. I just put up a post the other day that this is March as we're recording this. 1994 Sound Garden Super Unknown and 9-in Nails Downward Spiral both came out on the same day. And I remember listening to both those albums. Yeah. because they used to have like release days were like the same. And I remember listening to both those albums once I finally picked them up and just being blown away about how different comparatively in styles and everything they are from each other and just how varied the music was at that time and how a lot of that was new and obviously Nin Snails had been around for a while. Song had been around for a while but both those albums were probably one of their biggest ones to date. It's this weird comparison of the two things and how there's a lot of innovative music now still, but yeah, how now people are like, "Oh, yeah, that's that's classic stuff." It's
like, "I remember when that was new." Golden age of hiphop, too. Oh, 100%. Early publicity, DC Boys, Tribe Called Quest. Yeah. A lot of good stuff came out in early to mid 90s. Yeah. This is just old man talk though. I know. 25 or 30 years from now, our kids are be well back in 2025. 2026 in the day. Yeah. Just the It's just the way the clock works. Yeah. Side note, we'll get into the topic of the day here, but any good bands music you're listening to right now you like that are modern? Just anything somewhat newer or what have you been listening to a lot? doesn't have. Yeah, I listen. So, I tend to shift themes in times of year. There are some things that are pretty stable, but over the winter, I tend to listen to a lot of jazz. Oh, cool. A lot of classical. Like my sort of school work or like thinking music lately is listen to a lot of Bill Evans, Yousef Days. Of course, there's Miles Davis, Felonius Monk or TS Monk. Yeah. So, Monk, also Chad Baker, so that stuff's kind of playing in the background. Classical actually really like a pianist called
Valentina Lasita. She's Ukrainian. Okay. But she has a really good album where it's all of Shopan's etudes and it's just like a really incredible virtuoso piano playing with a lot of feeling behind it and it's really really well recorded and so then but as I get into spring and summer it starts to warm up I start listening to a lot of hip-hop and reae because okay tends that music tends to give like drive a lot of energy. I get a lot of energy from it. So, I'll get into like I'll start listening to like Fuji Bontton and I'll listen to like' 9s underground hiphop and yeah, I just kind of get in the mood. Right now, I have a playlist on Spotify that's just like a it's called like boxing playlist and it's all just stuff you want to jump rope and punch a heavy bag to. It's it's just such it's like the vibe of it is so good and like there's just a lot of drive to the beats and the the tempo of the the lyrical delivery. Same thing with with Ree as it gets really hot. Reae will take over all of it. Like reae will just be on constant all summer. But yeah, that's that's where my head is. Fall is all grunge, but like we were just saying, I'll I'll be in Sound Garden and also Chains and Nirvana and Tulle and
Tool is really more like alt rock, but still, yeah, I'll kind of as things start to get darker and heavier, then the music gets darker and heavier. Yeah, I have a very musical taste and what I listen to in the course of any day can can shift wildly based on whatever my current mood is or what I want my mood to be. Yeah, that old school one if you like jazz and hip-hop is Guru's Jasmaz. Great album. Oh, it's so amazing. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. and just so upbeat and positive with just the amazing delivery and just everything about it I think is just so cool and hard to I don't know anyone else that's done anything similar to that there probably is I just don't know of it yeah DJ Premiere is all time he's so much amazing work yeah and side note if you like metal and jazz together the earlier stuff from a New York band called Canderia is really good. Like the process of self-development, I think it was like 2005. They had everything from rap to jazz breakdowns to metal and it sounds like it'd be horrible. And you listen to it and you're like, "What is this?" And like the third or fourth list and you're like, "This is amazing." Feel like I've heard Kanderia somewhere before. I had some buddies that I grew up with who were like intense musicians and you know I was
hanging out with them all the time and the singer of the band they were in was pretty not pretty an extremely gifted musician. Could play anything. Could had perfect pitch. Could hear notes. You play him a song. Hey Chris, how do you play this? And he'd be like play it again. Oh, okay. So crazy. I know. and he used to listen to a lot of like Prague jazz. He got me into like Chick Korea, which is Chick Korea played with Miles Davis in like the [__] Brew era and that sort of jazz fusion and then that's where I think I've heard Canderia and I don't remember now. I'm going to have to look it up. Bands like that. uh Mishuga. Yeah, some some there's some good stuff out there. Yeah, Sleep Token fan. I'm brand new to Sleep Token. I just I can't remember where I heard on somebody's Instagram story or something and I was like, what's that? And I'm just starting to dabble. I'm just dipping my toe in the water for Sleep Ten. I think I'm a little bit behind. They they have quite a few albums out, right? They have a couple. Their last one was good, but definitely more mellow, a lot more clean vocals and stuff. I liked it, but I think their previous one was better. Just the the range of his voice.
Like all the performers are good from metal to slight jazz here and there to hiphop to Yeah. and his delivery on multiple chorus lyrics is just a little bit different each time. It's Yeah, it's I love them. I think they're amazing and it's cool to see them go from like no one hearing of them to becoming like super popular. So, I always like that. Wring it down. There you go. Let me know. in the area sleep token. So I know you've been busy doing education stuff around around the world now. Tell us about that. Yeah, you know, so I've been traveling and teaching for a while and like you mentioned earlier, we met when I was teaching art of breath and that's how I catapulted myself into not just athlete direct athlete work but and to coach education. And so in the last three years, I uh I've been presenting a ton behind the scenes working with people in the special operations community, whether it's direct with operators themselves or with performance professionals that work with that community. So I've been speaking privately both inside and outside the wire for for a few years. And then more recently even I've gotten
more and more involved with Altus. And of course I'm wearing an Altus t-shirt. And if there's any like human performance or health professionals that work in the performance space who are not familiar with altus, then I would highly encourage you to crawl out from under the rock living under and check out the work of Dan Path, Steu McMillan, Andreas Beam, and Kevin Tyler. And that that group and that network of coaches around Altus is in my very biased opinion like the the pinnacle of of coach education and in the last year Altus has developed a masters in strength and conditioning and I've been fortunate enough Stu McMillan and Rich Clark who were the masterminds behind that and Rich is the dean of the school um brought me in to help mentor the students and then since then that has grown and spoken at several apprentice coach programs for altis. So that's gotten me in front of coaches, more and more professional coaches who are post-graduate level coaches. And then even more recently, I've been doing work educating coaches on specifically jiu-jitsu. So, I've been working a lot with elite jiu-jitsu competitors over the last eight years, but
quite more frequently, quite a bit more frequently in the last five, working with a specific team, which is standard jiu-jitsu, which is in Rockville, Maryland, and the head coach there, Greg Sers, is a good friend of mine. And so I've been working with various athletes on that team and starting to identify some some gaps honestly and what we know about working with those athletes because up until recently it wasn't a truly professionalized sport. Yeah. Just kind of everyone's off kind of doing their own thing and yeah high level amateur sport until probably the last two years. And most sports like if you want to be like whether it's on the medical or on the SNC performance side, there's some pretty clear frameworks that coaches operate within. Like we understand the breakdowns of the skills that like if you're going to be if you're going to work in hockey like you understand there's some consensus on like what are the basic chunks of skills required to be a good hockey player. What attributes can be developed that support those skills? How do those attributes affect the players tactically, technically? How do they contribute to or detract from likelihood of injury? How is the game changing? What is the athlete psychology?
Those things have been pretty widely explored because hockeyy's been a professional sport for a while. NFL, for sure, there's tons of data and information. MMA, it's better because of the UFC Performance Institute, but for jiu-jitsu, it's basically zero. Like I could tell you what are the expected performance parameters for elite players at different weight classes. I couldn't tell you which ones are most predictive of performance outcomes because we don't we just don't know. Everything is a guessing game based on coach biases. But if you're in the NHL and you play a certain position, we know what are the ranges of capacity in different attributes that you probably should possess just to punch your ticket to the game. At least the bare minimums. Yeah, the bare minimums, right? Hey, what do you need? We don't know any of that stuff for jiu-jitsu. And it's mostly argued over based on people's opinions and there aren't even good frameworks yet for describing what we need. So that's a project of mine as I'm going through some graduate education and I'm wrapping all my sort of thesis around developing some frameworks like do we even have clear categories for aspects of the sport that we can where we can come to some consensus and say yeah here
are some stuff that everybody should be able to do and then here's how you train for that in the skills and then here are the S and C attributes that support it. Everybody can kind of figure out the details differently, but there's not even clear categorizations of stuff that everyone should be able to do. So, that's really something I've been quite focused on. I would say last six, nine months and I was actually just in Dublin, Ireland last weekend presenting uh on that information specifically. What does it mean to be sports specific in the context of of grappling and jiu-jitsu? So, fun stuff. Is that more on the the strength side or the the conditioning aerobic side or is it all of that combined? Are you looking at both or? Yeah, all all of it combined to some degree. We didn't get super granular other than a specific question being asked, but it was more like what are the fundamental context clues for this sport? What are the So I'll give you an example would probably be easier to to claim it or to explain it. So in all grappling there's clinching, right? Which is basically when athletes grab each other's body and try to hold each other still. And you watch wrestling or you watch MMA, you see this happen all the time. People grab each other's necks, trunks, and shoulders in an effort to move each other around or
hold each other still. In jiu-jitsu, there's lower body clinching, and that's very unique to other combat sports. There's lower body clinching where, and this happens to some degree in MMA, but not nearly as much, where players use their legs to hold on to each other's legs, to hold on to each other's torso, or to hold on to each other's upper bodies so that you can immobilize the other person or break a limb or strangle them. All right. Well, everybody knows that you have to be able to like hold on hard, but like that's kind of duh. If you watch it wrapped around another person, you go, "Oh, you have to hold on hard." That's not the same thing as going, "Okay, lower body clinching is a skill that's required. What are the attributes that support that fundamental skill that e emerges over and over in this sport? No matter what weight class you're in, no matter what gender you are, it's a fundamental emergent property of jiu-jitsu, modern jiu-jitsu. What are the things that we should consider? And like the ones that I propose are you have to be able to clamp. So you have to be able to squeeze with your legs. That's both adduction and then contrateral flexion extension of the hip. So you have to be able to do both of those and to some degree at the same time or alternate between them very
quickly. All right. So that's clamping. We have to be we need torso like axial control. So you have to be able to rotate on the transverse plane laterally flex and extend the spine in combinations as the game unfolds. And then you have to be able to pummel legs. You have to be able to consistently work your legs into different positions which requires a lot of dexterity and agility and mobility. And so I have proposed that. Okay, here's the things that you have to some degree to be able to do this thing. What's the hierarchy between these three? And then if we and this is still a conversation that's ongoing. It's just one that I'm trying to propose. Okay, if we all can come to some consensus that this is a reasonable framework, then what exercises can we start to choose that will support these attributes that are time efficient and adaptation effective. All of that, if you're in human performance at all in any other sport, is like duh. Yeah, that is not sophisticated or really advanced thinking. That's stuff that if you read any textbook on any other sport and how to train it, that's how it's broken down, right? What's your
sport? What's the step you have to be able to do? What are the physical qualities needed to do it? Duh. None of that work has been done in jiu-jitsu, as I mentioned earlier. So, this is basically the starting point for the conversation. So, when I was talking with these coaches in Dublin, we weren't even at like what's conditioning should what should conditioning look like? We're not even that level of detail yet. We're still at like do we all agree on the stuff we need to be able to do and general ideas for what we should call it because it's not standardized yet. It's just like it's used very very contextual language like the guard. And it's like well okay it's the guard but what does that actually mean from a physical attribute perspective? The guard is something that serves a function. But what's happening with your body when you do it because if we can't clearly discuss those things then nobody knows we can't get to the bottom of what exercises we should choose. Right. So that's the level of conversation. And I don't I'm not saying my framework is right. I'm just proposing. Yeah. So that we can have a discussion because I could have it wrong. But right now if you look on the Instagramosphere or in the internet of things mostly which is proposals for exercises right people start with exercises that they often feel like mimic the demands of sport. They don't start with demands
of sport and then select exercises that support. And it's just backwards logic in my view. Right. Yeah. Do you include like the different components of like grip in in that also? Yeah, grip is definitely a factor and this actually this is something I was discussing both with coach a couple coaches and with some elite level competitors recently a coach and what's funny is like when you look at so there's no real research on jiu-jitsu specifically but there's tons of research on Olympic judo Olympic Greco Roman wrestling they've solved a lot of these problems so there's some analoges and when you look at the research Arch there on grip. What you do find is that there's a clear correlation between grip strength, but even more essentially grip strength endurance and and level of competitor. What's not clear is what came first, the chicken or the egg. So, is it that somebody's grip gets stronger and then that that's high high enough in the hierarchy that it catapults them into the next level of competition? Or is it that you develop a strong grip by constantly grabbing onto humans that are resisting you? And so, the more you do that, then they're sort of like that's your ticket to the game.
But what one question I have is at what point does additional grip strength no longer help? Right? So you whatever if I once I get to 70 kilograms, is that strong enough for my weight class? And then anything more than that doesn't necessarily help me unless I have a very specific tactical reason. And these are again these are normal types of questions we would ask in any sport, right? Oh yeah. correlation is this causation. And then you would have maybe a pool of data to look at or a research project to do. None of that exists in my sport yet. So, we're just we're borrowing analoges very often and then making assumptions. And this is actually something that came up in the seminar around sport specificity is being careful with redundancy, right? Because sometimes in the sport, you're getting so much exposure, especially to something like grip, really easy to blow up flexor tendons. Yeah. Sometimes when you just add grip on grip, it's like a sport that's has a lot of jumping in season, you're like, well, let's do let's keep the pio volume the same. And it's like, well, how long do you think like the calccanial tendon will just continue to be compliant with that kind of overload? And the same thing happens with bicep tendons and flexor tendons is like, you
know, if you've ever had tendinosis, tendinosis in your elbow. Oh yeah, it sucks and it takes forever to go away because you have to grab stuff in life. So these are all open-ended questions. I don't have perfect answers to them. I'm sure some people train grip really intensely, get no tendonitis, and it helps them. Some people never train it and probably should because they're not strong yet. Who and when, at what level? All I have right now are like my best guesses based on my own work, which is obviously insufficient to make strong claims from. But my goal with all of it really is just to try to open up professional dialogue with strength and conditioning coaches who happen to be working with jiu-jitsu players as well. So exciting times. As you can tell, I get I'm like going off on tangents about it because it's something really passionate about. No, it's cool. Like I did a a grip product with my buddy Adam Glass who's been a grip competitor and competed at Mighty Mitts and all over the world and stuff. And our initial thought was we created it as like a platform for any grip athlete or jiu-jitsu or whatever. Like here's the basic patterns you should know. Here's how to to train them. And what I've realized is we probably goofed up the marketing 100%.
Like no one wants to do the the because we would look at all these sports and we're going like you said like some of the jiu-jitsu people were really good in a crush grip but like open hand pinch grip or if you're doing ghee no ghee if you have to grab the ghee this way or they were horrible at any of those other positions because everything was just like that. and we saw all these gaps in these different sports and thinking about it now and again I'm like probably just redo it and make it specific to one sport and you're probably telling them the similar things again and like your comment like for some people yeah your crush drip is probably a rate limiter and you need to work it for other more advanced people it might be the inverse like you have so much work in this position you need open hand position flat position you know deviation like you're missing those other compon opponents and even simple stuff like like we call like a monkey grip where your thumb is on the same side and your hand is bent because a lot of times you're not grabbing people like this. You're using your whole hand to like rip people towards you and stuff too. Yeah. That happens in Muay Thai quite a bit as well. Yeah. They're especially when they're wearing 12 or 16 ounce gloves, they're essentially like you're hooking on to the person's neck and head. um a friend of mine, Sean Yarborough, he was a um professional Muay Thai fighter and won some some pretty awesome titles in Thailand. It's crazy when you shake
Shawn's hand. The owner side of his hand is like it's like a huge is huge. It's just like a big giant piece of meat here that is not in most people's hands. And I asked him once I was like, Sean, like what is this? And he was like, "Oh, this is He's like Tai's tie fighters have this. is from doing this on all the time and like grabbing people and trying to hang on to them when you your hands are basically inside of a mitt like Mhm. you know, when you're wearing a boxing glove, a 12 or 16 inch boxing glove, you're just like this all the time. So, all you have is this motion. So, yeah, it's just having a claw. Yeah. It's funny that you brought up that idea of like a a rate limiter. And I think that's the thing is you have to know is is this a developmental athlete? if they're a developmental athlete and I can progress their grip strength and it helps them move up the chain like it gives them access to a skill set that they wouldn't have had access to otherwise faster. Great. When I work with elite athletes, especially some of these guys who are doing, it'll be 510, 10 tens, 100, but we're talking six and a half hours of live grappling training a week. That's a lot. And I mean, all that time is against live resistance. So grabbing onto bodies like that all the time at an elite level where the athlete can
produce a lot of force. Some of those guys I'm like, let's do more handstand type inspired work. You have Yeah. where everything Yeah. opened and stretched and the elbows extended. So we can get all those sort of barticular tissues with or even like we could even say triarticular completely at their end ranges in ways that they wouldn't get exposed to otherwise because now it's been 15 years of just constantly squeezing the [__] out of their hands. But that's the game though, right? That's the Yeah. play in the performance business. It's just that in other sports there's data to look at and there's there's coaching history, right? So even if there's not great data if you're in baseball or hockey or rugby, you can like and nowadays you could message somebody on Instagram and say for sure. Yeah. I noticed you've been doing this for 35 years. Like you've been trying. What's your experience been? Jiu-Jitsu is so new that sort of we're all playing like Guess Who. And so my hope is to take some things that I've learned from from other sports or access that I've had to other high level professionals and start bringing some some more systematized thinking into the sport that I like so much. And the sport that I like
not only to to do, but I like to work with that athlete population. um as well. Yeah. A couple big ones for extension we found, I got this from my buddy Adam also, is if you've ever played with the eagle loops, they have little loops that go down through each hand and they go back to a single point. And so you can wrap them around just this part of the hand. So, if I'm looking at my hand in the side, instead of having to be completely crushed, I can have this part be extended and I can get a huge extension load pulling through the fingers. Like rock climbers use them a lot. And then I've done like spiraling movements with that, like a high cable point from a split stance where you start maybe palm down and you end palm up. So you're adding those movements in as this is pulling tension on the entire basically this part of the fingers. And you can go pretty heavy on it. Obviously you got to go slow. You don't want to dislocate your fingers and all that kind of stuff because if you look at the amount of load they're normally running through the system like this. Oh, just put a bunch of extension rubber bands on your hands. It's like I I haven't found that does much of anything for athletes in sport where they're generating high forces. That's that's very like kung fu or like karate that like feels very traditional martial arts to me.
Yeah. In a good way. In a good. Yeah. Where they were training these sort of like very specific like ironclaw Yeah. make their fingers like really ridiculously strong. Yeah. And the other one we did is we took loops. Is that what you said? Say again. Eagle loops. Yeah. They're from Iron Mind. Ah, okay. Yeah. All the crazy cuz I do grip stuff. So all the crazy grip people have just an infinite amount of weirdo toys for every little intestable movement. I'm sure you blob. Yep. Sax and bars. All that fun stuff. And the one we've done lately, which I haven't seen anyone do, is I was at my buddy Adam's house and we're like, how do I get high force extension of the hands? Because you can only go so far with rubber bands and all that stuff. And so we figured out is I took like an old 5B protein container. You stick your hand in the middle and then go into extension and then you can start loading the bottom of the container and to pick it up that way. So, you're putting all your hands out equal distance in extension loaded in order to pick it up because again, how are you loading the like how do you load the bottom? I just stick light weights in the bottom of it. Oh, really? Or you could do sand in the bottom? Yeah. Like change plates. You're just like dropping change plates in there and sticking your hand and Yep. And we've been putting a magnet in the bottom and sticking magnets on the bottom because I can't get any bigger plates in the top.
That is that's some strength nerd [__] to do right there and I Yeah. I'm not I'm making notes on all this stuff right now. This is awesome because my limiter sometimes was just because I do a lot of compression stuff. One of my goals is to pick up the 175 pound inch dumbbell. And so part of that is getting the thumb to stop the rotation, getting all that stuff. But as you said, there's only so much specific work you can do before you start developing all these other issues. So the fastest way then is going to be contra specific. If I bench press a lot, I should probably do some rows, right? That kind of thing. But how do you get loaded extension? And so that was a way to get loaded extension with weight where you're holding that extension against a force the whole time. So that's been fun to play with. And it's easy. It's almost more like a a rehabby type thing. But again, it's it's fascinating to me how physiology is wired where you don't sometimes need a ton of the contra specific stuff to see a huge effect from it. Also, it's not a one: 1 ratio at all. Not even close. Well, it's just the novelty effect. There's Oh, for sure. There's novelty for sure. Yeah. Sometimes, and I'm not saying that to diminish it in any way. Oh, no. like that's really powerful sometimes just to like give the system like you said that's contradictory and unexpected and I I especially what I really like about the that extension in a tub or a bucket is that there's endrange isometric load
through the tissues. So rather than just like doing some kind of like stretching, you're you're asking for a lot of activity, right? There's really that's really high neural drive. Yep. In the opposing action, which I think is really really important and and very often missed in like whatever you want to call them like balancing exercises is it's not a sufficient enough stimulus. No. To actually give it a contradictory effect. It's just or people go so overboard that there's interference with volume and stuff, right? But I like the idea of like low volume, very high specificity, high intention, high neural drive. Not any different than if you have a sport where there's a lot of mid-range knee flexion. Yep. be finding oppositional spaces for that with like very purposeful for example like straight leg Jefferson curls with a with toes and just putting all those tissues through like their deepest end range under a lot of tension. Yeah. Because a lot of with high level athletes is you may not get the biggest bang for your buck with specificity anymore. You get it with transfer and just like in the case of BJJ just keeping them on the mat so they can do the specific practice
whether even with high-end sports like NFL and NBA is notorious for this later in their career like a lot of people like Jordan and people Carl Malone all those guys figured out that yeah training does enhance my performance but it allows me to perform at a higher level for a longer period of time too. the more you can just keep it together and not get injured, the more specific practice you can get, the longer career you can have, all those things too. Yeah, I agree. And I think sometimes on the SNC side and some of this is like the pressure of the culture and being really obsessed with with measurables. It's like ha like either feeling like you have some obvious clear direct effect on performance or being able to measure it because the stakeholders want to know why they're paying you. So there's ego of the coach or the stakeholders want some clear like what percentage exercise improvement did you get that made them better at this and it's like I wish it worked like that but it doesn't help them. How about especially at elite levels there's just too many factors at developmental levels high school college early college that there's a it's a lot more linear but once is post end of collegiate Olympic professional there's so many things that
are contributing to the end performance outcome that if you're a SNC your performance professional a bunch of what you're doing is just managing the attributes they already have. You're like, number I just want them to not be or feel worse. Yeah. Then if I can get them to get into habits that keep them practicing, like that's actually going to be what will yield performance benefits. But it's just not it's not as fun to tell a head coach like, "Well, listen, I'm not sure exactly what it is. like if you want a number for what I'm contributing here, I can't give you one. It's like that doesn't sound that great at a budget meeting. Oh yeah. And that's my good buddy Cal Da said all his new programs he tests out on track and field and swimmers and basically anything that's timed because I know if we made them faster or not. He's like my hockey players. It's it's so much fuzzier than that. Like yes, you want transfer, but it's not as simple as oh a timed event. Like if you're doing 100 meter dash or run or 200, 400, whatever, you know, if you did better or not. It's very linear, but you start getting into Dan John calls them the fuzzy sports. It's like, who knows? And it's just a lot of that is just qualitative. Yes, there's some performance data, but in a team setting, there's so many variables now to contend
with, it's hard to figure it out. Yeah. It's and this something that Steu McMillan and I have been talking a lot about is just like the complexity that there's so many things that are moving dynamically all the time and their relationships to each other are are changing that it can be very very difficult to pin down causal factors except in retrospect. Yeah. after the fact and and usually those are wrong and we use them to justify like oh it think it was that thing that I did. It must have been that I put whatever be stance rotational RDL's back in the program that cleaned up their thoracic rotation and so therefore more slap shots or whatever. It's like no maybe it was just that the other teammates were opening the net more. It's like we don't or what combination on what game we just don't know. Yeah. Um on that would you agree that gate and running is probably the best proxy for strength training performance that is most likely to transfer. Meaning if I did an exercise for this is for me personally and I' Cal's talked about this too and they walk away from that exercise worse. Ah that makes me nervous. Like I may be able to get them stronger. I may be able to justify that movement to the coach
but I I'm not convinced I made them a better player on the field. I think I might have made him a worse player on the field. Then again can change depending upon the day and all that kind of stuff too but I don't know. To me, that's like the best proxy I found to see is it going to transfer in terms of an acute setting when you're trying to set everything up without running 16 24 weeks and trying to figure out what happened. Yeah, I think it can be. I some sports I think it's probably more transferable than others. And again, like for sure with something like in field sports, I think it's like that's a pretty easy Yep. predictor. I think that's a really powerful proxy, especially skipping, bounding, dribbling, right? Those kind of striding, those sort of sprint precursors I think are very tend to be give a lot of clarity and predictability in sports like grappling, surfing, skating or tactical. Tactical might be still there. It can be tough because I tell you want to see some some pretty ugly like sprint or like jog mechanics then ask most combat sports athletes to run fast or I think of hockey players is what I thought of right away. Just like so just so much stiffness and they're like don't really move very much. But what I have found and I've been
doing more and more of is using fundamental pio and gate work with athletes to encourage a lot of healthy trunk motion and shoulder girdle trunk axis coordination just for health. doing it doesn't mean like this person didn't win the championships and now their arms are timed better and so now they win the championship. But what I have found is that sort of openness and looseness helps them feel better. They just for sure feel better in their body. And an elite grappler that I work with quite often, his name's DeAndre Corby, one of the top 10 guys in his weight class in the world. Um he's not a sprinter. He's never going to have to sprint. He doesn't have to bound in his sport. It's all like squeezing a lot of high output isometric activity. But we've in the last year put more and more like just sprinkles on the ice cream cone of basic track work, pogos, dribbles, bounding work, and just getting him to like let his upper body move. jumps with a medball where getting really big because everything in grappling it's contra specific too because you're all like exactly it's contra specific so it's this like okay I have to get loose and open and rhythmical and so I found that that's been a really
strong indicator of his like thoracic health and like those movements have been a a really powerful inclusion in his programming. I gate I'm kind of I'm a little bit and not as much now, but I used to be very gate biased just because I came up doing physio work and so I would look at like whatever Leon Chaita's work or Yeah. Vladimir Yandas. Yep. Upper cross, lower cross, all the names for everything and Yeah, exactly. It's not perfect, but it gave me a beginning frame of reference. Watch people walk forwards, watch people walk backwards, moving laterally. And so I think gate can be for general population especially. It's very enlightening. Oh yeah. Go to an airport or a mall, it's like I want to throw battery acid in my eyes. It's so bad. If I It's I have this picture on my phone. I'll send it to you after. Yeah. Take a picture. I was in the line at the pharmacy the other day. I was in the line at CVS and I was picking up some medication for my dog and there was an older woman and she was in front of me in line and I normally I wouldn't do this but I was just like so amazed. I was like I take a picture of this and show it to my wife. You can't see her face or anything but she's standing. She's very small lady. I would guess she's 4 feet eight maybe. very small
woman in stature and her entire like thorax was displaced laterally from her pelvis. Whoa. I'm not even kidding. Had to be If you drew a line through the center of her, if you dropped a plum line through the center of pelvis and a plum line through her like T5, they would have been offset by I would guess at least three inches. It was pretty significant. And her her kyphosis was intense. I'm like, there's no way this lady feels good. Yeah. So, she was completely displaced and then folded folded forward and twisted and made me think either she has a congenital issue, which might have to do with how small she is and st um or she had some kind of structural trauma. Yeah. is an injury or some kind of pathology that's compressing her. I wanted to like tap her on the shoulder and be like, "Can I help you?" Like, yeah, I know. Like, I just want to help you do some stuff just to like move around and like there's no way the quality of her life is being optimized in that kind of shape. But at the same time, I was completely amazed that she was like clearly ambulatory. Yeah, she's there doing her stuff. She's there. She didn't have like a
caregiver. She was just there in CBS. And I thought, "Wow, the human body is so amazing at its compensatory capacity. It just never ceases to amaze me." And when you take that same compensatory capacity and then we expound that to elite populations where the genetic potential is extremely high, the psychology is uniquely motivated. The amount of crap that elite get away with where I think my foot would have blown up. How are you doing what you do like that? And they're usually just like, what do you mean? He's just they just found a way to solve the performance problem that works until it doesn't, right? And then it's like, hey coach, all of a sudden or this came out of nowhere. That's my favorite one. This came out of nowhere. I'm like, that did not happen yesterday. Like, yeah. And that's what's I won't say his name, but I was in we'll say Europe last June to work with a very high level tennis player. Guy makes millions of dollars a year because tennis you can see how much everyone has made and everything. It's very public at that level. Super nice guy. Everyone in this place, everyone was there wonderful. But to watch him walk and walk out and move onto the court, I'm like, oh my
god. But on the flip side, to see him play as well as he did with and I got to test him. I was there for 4 days hanging out with him from freaking 8: 00 a. m. to 10 p. m. at night. And so you get to do stuff. You do some body work. You get do all the testing, everything. You can see and have confirmation what his actual limits are because I'm there working with him. And then to see him play at the level he played at blows my mind. And but on the flip side, knowing that oh man, you're you're running the race car with it on red. Like at some point it's just going to blow up. And that's why we were there. He unfortunately got injured 20 minutes before I showed up. And so they throw him up on the table and back. And there's a bunch of guys in foreign language because English wasn't their first language. And I literally got off the flight, got all the way there, walk in, he walks out, hobbles, they throw him up on the table and they all look at me and point and go, "Fix him. And I'm like, "Oh shit." Yeah. But it's so crazy to see the the dichotoies on on both sides. And it's so hard with the psychology side, too, because on the athlete side, they're like, "I don't know. I've always been this way." And look what I've done. And And you're you're correct. Like, you've been able to do amazing things with what you you have, but at some point the engine's going to blow. Yeah. Well, and it's often in spite of, not because of. So, that's the thing I try to get across to
some of these elite performers that I work with as well is like, you've been succeeding in spite of your compensatory behavior, not because of your compensatory behavior. It's actually funny that you use the analogy of like an engine blowing up. Yeah. You got a book. Yeah. And that's the analogy. Yeah. Tell us about it. is this check engine light. Basically, for a good chunk of my career, mostly behind the scenes, I've been working with special operations community, individuals, groups, commands, and in the last handful of years, I had the opportunity to work as part of what's called the continue mission program or the warrior fitness program. And essentially, it's like a holistic hard reset for operating. So, It's run by my good friend Alex Oliver, Virginia High Performance, who's a retired SEAL and he got out and founded this program and essentially it's everything's paid for by a nonprofit. These operators come in for a month. They get nutrition based on blood work. So nicely customized individual nutrition and supplementation. All the meals are cooked for them by the way. So they literally just pick up their meals for the day. They have strength and conditioning twice a day. They're getting manual therapy. They're getting mindfulness training. They're getting hot and cold therapies. They're getting light therapy. It's an amazing program. My
role there is to try to take these sort of like insanely hardened, tough warriors and convince them that they should pay better attention to their health. Yeah. Which is oppositional to their the way they think. And using this analogy, this check engine light, which is basically like you were just saying, like, hey, there are signals long before the system shuts down that say like, hey, look over here. Something needs your attention. It doesn't mean you have to turn into like some kind of soft wimp. But you have to learn what these signals are, how to attend to them so that you can keep being awesome. Like I just I'm not saying you need to like become like a a watercolist who lives on a yoga retreat, smokes weed all day. What I'm saying is like if you want to be the best warrior you want, you can be for as long as you could possibly be that and have something left when you're done. Yeah. For yourself and for your family, then you have to have some system that's in place. And so basically the book based on this class that I've been teaching these guys for about three and a half years is that system. So how do you actually investigate what these signs are and start doing experiments? Because what will happen is if you don't pay attention and the engine keeps running hot, it'll blow up. Yep. And we don't always know how. Right. So the thing about the human body is
the symptom or the actual like failure mechanism doesn't always happen right next to the causal mechanism. It can spiderweb way down the chain in something that just happens to be an inherent structural weakness in the system. So that's like for example like lower back pain like the lumbar curve where it transitions between the sacrum and then again where it transitions to the thorax. Those are just structurally vulnerable in bipeds. And so those are areas that get hot from like a billion different things including like depression. Yeah. Big correlations. There's big correlations between pain. It's not always like my hip flexors are tight so my back is not always quite that simple. There's all kinds of other spiderweb components that add up to those things. And if you don't have some system that helps you monitor that stuff, then what will happen is you'll get surprised and you won't know why. And of course, that's how people like us make a living is we get brought in to help figure out what's the thing that needs to change so these people can continue to perform. But no matter how good a helper, professional, expert is, we don't like you went for that that athlete, that tennis player, you were
there for four days for whatever 14 hours a day. Once you leave, you're gone. Yeah, that was the issue. and he's there with himself now, right? So, and trying to train some of the other staff too of like and they were great, but like we we had an issue trying to get his left glute to fire. We couldn't figure it out. Had some back pain, whatever. And you could see on a test that like his hips were not working, like were completely shut down. So, it took me like a about a day to figure it out. Finally figured it out. You'll find this interesting. had a lie on his side, do a convergence test with his eyes looking left as we did some other stuff at the same time. Soon as we did that, like his glutes and everything would fire automatically. And I looked over to the physical therapist who's there with him 24 / 7, travels with the team, super nice, wonderful dude. And I was like, "Hey man, we got his glute to work." He's like, "Did you see that?" He looks over like, "Do it again." So I did it. He's like, "Oh yeah, I see it." So can you tell that it's better or not? He's like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Oh, cool." I'm like, "You want to know how I did that?" Because I'll tell you how I did it because I'm not going to be here. Like, I don't give a [__] I'll tell you everything I'm doing now because whatever. I don't care. It's like, "No, I'm good." I'm like, "What do you mean you're you're good? Don't you want?" Like, if I saw someone do that 10 years ago in my career, I would be like, "What the f did you do? Tell me exactly how that thing." But, and I asked him later because it was bugging me. And he's like, "Well, I don't do eye stuff." I'm like, "Well, this is I can show you how to do it in like an hour. I
can train you." You're a smart dude. Like, you know all the background stuff. But you do do athlete stuff. But you do athlete stuff and you're with him and you know that this is going to happen again. He's like, "Yeah, but I just do a lot of the the hands-on, the physical therapy. We don't mess with with eyes or anything else." And I'm like, "But what if it was a right limit? What if this happens before a tournament? He has to perform and you're the only one there." It's like, "No, I just I don't do it." And it it was it's weird to me how some people just have their box they live in. This is my box. I live in my box. And I'm okay with living in my box, which I guess is fine, but it it Yeah, it's kind of crazy because you've been around long enough to know anything can almost affect anything else. And so 20 years ago, I was shocked by all this stuff. And now I'm just like that was pretty weird, but okay, sure. Yeah, exactly. if it's a shift in gaze. You know, I've had that that kind of weird stuff happen where I can remember when I was did a lot more manual therapy where if you have a patient who has really acute cervical soft tissue pain and their their necks locked up, whether it's like motor vehicle direct impact or it's just chronic to try to do something that's very direct to those tissues can feel like threat to the system and often exac exacerbate it. For those people, you can't very often if it's really acute or they have migraine symptoms, you can't
move their head, right? Because the system it's too locked up. They're they just fight you. And so one of the things I figured out actually from I got the inspiration from Chaytow was learning how connected eye movement was to like sub occipital tissues that there was like there was pre-tension that could be measured on EMG with eye motion and sub oipital tissues. And so often what I would do is just put like fingertip pressure there just barely like just touch and then have the person start to move their eyes in different direction. You could feel those tissues, yep, contracting and like waves of contraction happening. And sometimes that would be enough to radi to like reduce threat in the system. And then you could go to other tissues on the cervical spine. See, I still have the Jedi hand. Yeah, that's good. or treating cervical issues. But you could get into those intervertebral areas and even if you couldn't make large motion, you could start getting eyes to move and you could feel the tissues start to just come down in tonus. Yep. Enough that they could maybe reduce symptom and and or accept a more robust therapy. And those kind of things are just like pretty amazing. I know I had mentors who knew all kinds of stuff, weird viscosmatic reflexes and things that
Yeah. that are in the human body that I like I'm like you. I'd be like, "Hold on a second. That's what is this voodoo that you did with this thing that no that like couldn't be affected before? or we've been trying stuff for two days and then you got him to move his eyes laterally and then his hips changed and their functionality. No, I want to know everything you did because even if I'm not the guy, maybe I'm the guy who tells the guy. Yeah. Like, well, the guy who does the eye stuff isn't here today. Show me all of it. Let's record it. Then I'm going to send it to the guy who does that stuff so he knows what you did. Yeah. But I I agree that I think sometimes people are they get in their their box of comfort. And the other thing is if you try something new like that that's unfamiliar. There's a level of responsibility especially with somebody who's elite for sure. There's a lot of money on the line. Y and oh well if I do it wrong and it's like yeah but also like this is not just a paycheck. Like this is a human being who's like in pain and it's your job and is not playing by the way. Yeah. Who Yeah. And your job is to help them play. Yeah. And they're not. And you observe the solution and won't use it. I don't know. That doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah. And I get it. And you made me just as annoyed as you
were. I know. And it's like I get it. If everything's running fine. Yeah. Then don't f with it. Okay, I can understand that. Like, don't mess with the Apple Card. If it's all on track, all parameters are go. Okay, I can see that. I respect that. I get it. It's It's a lot of money on the line. It's your career. Cool. But when none of that is happening, it's like, okay, we're probably going to take a few more calculated risks here to try to get some stuff to go. obviously don't want to make it any worse or anything like that, but at that point I'm like, and it's hard because the athletes like, "Yeah, just do whatever because they want to play. They know what's what's going on and what's at stake, too." So, it's Yeah. And then you've got in those environments, you've got the agent. You've got the people who are trying to get the athlete under contract. You've got the staff that's around them. You've got all these other players that don't necessarily always understand what's going on either and that makes it tricky to navigate for sure. Yeah. The more stakeholders there are Yep. the more difficult it gets. Um, I've definitely had when you in the special operations community, there's like the assaulter level, which is like the athlete, and what they need and what they think they need and what their experience is. There's human performance, but then there's all the leadership, layers and layers of leadership that are deciding mission
sets, how those will get executed, when with what equipment, money, timing, how that is related to like largecale forces and intelligence and timing and much of it is unknown to even the people who are doing it until it's time to do it. So there's a lot of stakeholders and moving pieces and just like everywhere else as a human performance professional you can sometimes you can see like man like the solution to this would actually be something very simple done consistently and it's like well the place that they have to be to do it they're never there. Yeah. Well well I guess we're just going to manage this as best we can. So yeah, it can be a real challenge to to deal with those kind of things. Yeah. And a lot of times you have like you said the big thing too with those populations is also just logistics. Like I I like using technology. I use a dolphin. I use some other stuff. I think it's extremely helpful. But I also understand that when those people are deployed, they're not going to have [__] They're going to have like their hands to do some work on themselves and that's probably about it other than the things they need to do to complete the mission and everything else. So, it's I think sometimes people from the outside are like, "Oh, if they just had this or that or this or that." And you're not wielding a freaking red light on there's like you have to think about these things about limitations of
what's going to transfer. If you want to use stuff, you've got a twoe window or whatever. Great. Use whatever you want. That's fine. Get it to them to a certain point. I have no issue with that. But sometimes the solutions are just so outwardly unrealistic, it's it's mind-boggling. Yeah. And you think you get there's also like things that people don't think about like weight limitations. It's like how much [__] a person or a group is allowed and what are they going to give up to bring lights over? Whatever you tell them about the efficacy of red lights. Yeah. It's like, well, if they have to give up something that seems more clearly important in the hierarchy of [__] they need for deployment, they're going to dump that. Of course. Yes. Oh, and and who wouldn't? I would if I was in that position. Hell yeah. You do. No question. Like, well, can we get rid of the red lights and bring more bullets? Yeah. Because I'm thinking those are probably going to be more important. But then we could just ask things like, well, okay, well, what's the effect that we're trying to get from including this? And is there a positive redundance in or positive redundancy in some other modality that's already coming along for the ride? Yep. So that's that's where we start to look for like overlaps in interventions
is like okay well is this is really good for whatever mitochondrial density. It's like well so is riding on a stationary bike or one of the cardio is cardio. So it's like are they going to be doing cardio already? Was like maybe we don't need this so we can just it's like let's talk about effects and not modalities. That kind of brings it back to what I was saying about jiu-jitsu at the beginning is often people start at modality or exercise. They don't start with effect. And it's like let's identify effects first. What effect are we trying to have? And then okay, what serves that effect? Where is there overlap? What's the return on investment for each one in time and money? And then we can start you can start throwing stuff away. And I'm sure as you're aware at this this point in your career when like early probably first 10 years or so it's all it's like adding right. Oh yeah. Like me I see your bookshelf is just like adding. Then as you get past like the 15 year mark what you're doing is like taking away don't need that [__] anymore. That works for like I need that for like two people every two years. I can get that same job done with something else. And then you it ends up coming down to like really really basic stuff again that you just know how to use better.
So you know I think later stages of career tend to be a lot about pairing down and knowing where's their overlap and big bang for the buck. Yeah. I have this what it feels like a weird dichotomy of I want to believe in the next latest whisbang whatever thing and if it's got good research and even plausibility budget-wise or time-wise I test a whole bunch of [__] but I've also become very sorely disappointed in like 90% of it you know what I mean it's like oh but every once in a while there's just enough things that come through where you're like oh that was actually super useful. That's actually pretty cool. I'm glad I did it. But like vast majority of this stuff, I just find myself usually disappointed in it. Yeah. And I think like one thing that's like had that kind of a dichotomy for me is like recovery technologies. Oh yeah. The recovery is is sexy now, man. Come on. You got to get in the program. And I tell you what, if you put recovery on something and you get the right athlete to say if they felt better, you will make money hand over fist. Yeah. Mostly by people who purchase it who are not athletes. Yes. And then you find out like, well, that athlete just like uses it the five days a year they're at home. Yeah. And that's when they get their picture taken with it.
But I wrote an article recently called Recovery is not the goal, adaptation is. Yes. And it's like I get it because I'm sure the same was for you at at the beginning of our career time, which I think we're probably around the same age, right? You were like early 2000 to like Yeah, I did CSCS, started training people 2005, did a bunch of training early 2000s. So, yeah. So, at that time there wasn't much talk about recovery. No. Just sort of like do the stuff and then recovery is when you don't do the stuff. Yeah. And it got to like, hey, let's pay a little bit better attention. Let's define readiness, right? You have people like Vel Nodeses at Omega Wave who does he's very smart guy, great work that they've done at Omega Wave and start to Okay, we're going to make this a little bit more measurable. But now you have it all the way to like where in collegiate sports athletes have like whoop mind. Yeah. their recovery is 2% less than yesterday practice and it's like guys this is sports like sports is hard we're in season practice right now like whether it's like you're a collegiate wrestler it's like we need people to wrestle against each other or if you're a collegiate swimmer you have to race against your teammates in order to get like the psychology of racing against
another human. It's not the same thing as racing against the clock that you can't see. Yeah. You need teammates. And if you're not there because yesterday was an intense workout. And this kind of thinking has made it all the way into like the NFL. Oh yeah. Like sometimes you have free agents where load management is now like whoa. Okay. We had two hard practices two games in a row and it's like your job is to smash your body into other people's bodies. Like you literally wear armor. Yeah. In your sport because you smash yourself into other really large humans at like 20 to 25 miles an hour. like this is I'm not saying that we should not pay attention and just like have cart blanch on concussion, but also sports are hard and so the goal is not to recover. The goal is to adapt and sometimes in the process and like the meta process of adapting, you don't feel recovered for a while. Sometimes right before everything gets awesome, you feel like [__] But like if you and your performance sucks sometimes. Performance will suck a week, right? You know, man, I don't feel strong. Every I've know I've had this conversation with myself many times over the decades that I've lifted. Man, I suck this week. I feel slow. I'm I feel like I'm lifting in mud. I don't feel strong. What's
wrong with me? Then the next week I'm like, "Oh, PR." Yeah. And it's like, well, or two weeks later and I didn't know that that was coming. And it happens in skill, too, right? Like where you think like, man, I suck at this. And then there's a turnover where it's like if you really don't continue to give high levels of effort and to some degree intensity during those time periods. sometimes you actually don't give enough of an investment to see the adaptation curve occur. So that's where I think some of the wearable devices h have their use has gone ary plus I always want to know what does what is 100% recovered. I'm not sure how that quantification like how do you what's it in order to have a percentage of something all of it is like you can't say a fraction of a pi unless you know that a pi is 360 degrees right so what is 360 degrees of recovered what's the quantifiable metric for that and is it the same for me as it is for you I don't So, I don't think the people who make those products have those answers. I think that they're psychological tools to change people's behavior for better or for worse. I'm not saying that any of them are
nefarious or ill. It's a way to to try to simplify because the person wants to know is it a go day or not? And is like even readiness isn't that simple. Like I use a lot of Aura, Garmin. I've got the Mega Wave, the Otto system, like you name it. I've probably I'll have other we'll say nameless wearables. I won't say that were utter dog [__] that I don't even consider using anymore. And at the end of the day, I'm like, show me the research. Show me the actual measurement of the metric. Even if you're using omega wave DC potential, whatever it is, I want to know what the measurement actually was. Don't give me your aggregated score. I don't give two rats asses about that unless you can show me a piss ton of research to show it's useful and then but then the hard part is you have to understand if I'm looking at respiratory rate and aura versus temperature versus HRV like what are those things telling me but if you understand that it's super useful but then you have to take that and apply that on top of what is your philosophy and like you said at some point I want those metrics to probably go south especially in the offseason if we're really pushing you hard and we have the luxury of time because it's the off seasonason. There's probably going to be one or two weeks where I actually want to see your metrics probably drop because I know we're putting enough stress on the system to see that response and then we're going to get a rebound, super compensation, adaptation, whatever words you want to use for it on the back end. We don't have to be hyper worried. It's the offseason. You don't
have a competition coming in. We can apply more distress, but it just seems like everyone wants to simplify everything into oh, it's a good day or bad day. It's like, ah, doesn't work like that. And even so, in the program that I work with, they use the aura ring to track sleep. And people get fixated on the the summary scores. Oh, yeah. I was like, can I just be honest? REM sleep and deep sleep. And I lost two minutes of REM sleep last night. It's like I would disregard that the summary scores entirely. I really want to start understanding something like your sleep for example. I'm like go to the actual hypnogog and look at the times and the the shapes in those sleep phases and look at things like okay when you're in your first phase of deep sleep. Is it like you go into deep sleep and then you're kind of like hanging out there and you're in it or does it look like a hair comb? It's just up you're in and out. I'm like that tells you way more. And I so I gave this example. I I wore the aura ring for like I don't know three or four years and I got no hate for it. I just lost mine and decided to change I decided to change. I've used the Morpheus as of late by Joel Jameson. Yeah. Shout out to Joel. He's awesome. is great. And but the the aura ring, I had a thing where I this is something I tell in my classes a lot like I woke up one day
after what I thought was like a beautiful night of sleep. I woke up and I was like, "Woo, all right." Like I feel like a young guy, like I'm a goat today and I opened up my phone. I was like, "Oh, I wonder what my score is." Like I just wanted to see the correlation. Yeah. My sleep score was like 78. And I was like, "What? This doesn't match at all." So, I went to the second and third layer of data and it was like, "Oh, you fell asleep at 7: 30 p. m. and then you woke up at 8: 15 and you were up for two hours." So, to the Aura Ring, it looked like a sleep disturbance. Yep. But what happened was I fell asleep watching TV with my wife. Yep. For half an hour. And then I just woke up normally and I went about my business in the house, letting the dogs out, washing the dishes, and then I went to bed at a normal time and I woke up at a normal time. I got a little over eight hours of sleep and it was really good sleep and I I was like, "What?" And so then I I tell this every time. I'm like, "So I just took my finger and I slid my sleep time over." You change it to 10 p. m. and then went back to the main page and it was like, "Oh, never mind. Sleep score 92." And I was like, "That's why you can't just take it at face value. you have to go to the next layer because it these devices don't have they don't understand context. They're just they have a very limited set of tools that they're using to measure you. I'm like things like I'm like like you're uh
if it's cold outside and your hands get cold and then you come in and you do cardio and you use the aura ring to measure your heart rate, it's going to be really inaccurate because there's not very much blood flowing. I'm like there's all there's lots of like you say like that's a really good term these sort of rate limiters on these devices that you have to be conscious of otherwise you'll interpret the information they give you really poorly and then over time the exponential effect on your decision making is less and less adaptable instead of more and more adaptable which is what they're supposed to be for right yeah and Like sometimes like I like the ustress distress model. EU stress like especially if you're in season most your training should allow you to get the stimulus adapt be able to perform relatively in short order. You know offseason you might be able to do a little more distress training where it takes you a little bit longer to adapt. So I think people should have a model of what they want to do. But even within that, like there's a time and a place you can make an argument for if all your data is crap, especially with a competitive athlete. I may tell them, I want you to go train today and tell me how you do. And they're like, why? Well, all my scores are horrible. You told me look at HRV and look at that. I'm like, yeah, but today's a distress day. So, the goal is when the chips are down, when the time comes at an arbitrary time and date, especially if you're doing special forces stuff, can you still
perform? I'm not asking you to do this for eight days in a row. We're not trying to bury your dick into the ground. We're not doing any of that. But you you also need a skill set of when it's time to go. It's go time, right? And I think with a lot of the recovery stuff, it's like, oh, but I don't want to today or that. And on one hand, I agree. Like overall, yes. Will I flip days around? Will I try to make stuff? Like I did it today. Went to the gym to train. Felt horrible because I was in Vegas at a conference, got back late, just did some cardio. But I'll move that day till tomorrow. So, I just flip my cardio, my lifting days. No big deal. End of the week, everything the same amount of stuff gets done. I can accommodate readiness. But if you're special forces or you've got a game coming up on Saturday, you can't go up to the coach and go, "Hey, coach, my whoop score says it's bad. I'm not playing today, man." It's like it it doesn't work that way. Exactly. And I think at some level, everybody knows this. Of course they do. Yeah. So what happens with a lot of athletes too is they just they either become hyperfixated on the technology and it starts to negatively influence their psychology like we talked about or they just throw it away and disregard it entirely. Yeah. And then they go I don't want to know anything. And I'm like well that wasn't the point either. Yeah. Exactly. And it's like we got to keep the pendulum in the center a little bit more here where load management is is important and like you said there's ways that we can sort of tune exercises appropriately whether it's reps sets density exercise type like oh
man normally this is a high intensity day I want to make it a low intensity day I'm gonna save this high intensity day for another time. Well, that's possible. But also, like you said, sometimes it's just time to do work. And I would say for me as a hobbyist, as an aging hobbyist athlete, mostly what I do is to touch that dark places a couple times a year. I just put myself in the dirt on purpose to drive the system to fatigue and keep pushing through fatigue maybe for a week or two just so that I can go I I need to preserve the skill like you said. And that doesn't mean I'm going to go do a bunch of high skill. I'm not going to be like, "Wow, I'm really tired. I should not doing CrossFit today." Yeah. I'm not doing CrossFit or like dude I'm gonna do Snatchmax today. Yeah. But I'm going to go to jiu-jitsu and I'm still going to grapple hard even though I'm really tired and or I'm gonna still go for the run today or whatever just because I'm not going to go hurt myself but at the same time it's like sometimes this [__] needs to get done. Yeah. And I think that's a good use for like the concept two row or the assault bike or something that you can push hard on it. it's going to suck depending on what parameters you're using. It's probably going to be relatively safe. There's not a lot of eccentric load. There's not a lot of things like that. So, I think picking
your modalities is wise also. And then when I used to train more in person, like the thing I would go to would be car pushes because it would always suck. But you couldn't it's hard to get biomechanically out of place too bad. It it just doesn't move. Yeah. The neighbors would think you're all in insane. But that was like a good kind of go-to concentric only way. And people always felt the sense of accomplishment because they saw where the car started and where it ended. So for the work they put in, there's this like physical representation of what they actually did. And at the end, they're always like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, that was worth it." Like, "Oh, this was great." And you're like, "Well, we got to go back because I forgot the keys." Yeah. Get around the other side. Yeah. A car push is a great idea. Same same similar like sled sled. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, same idea. And the same it's funny that you bring that up because I'm just back from international travel and you know with that there can be some some lag for sure in the neurological effects and normally for me Thursday would be deadlift day and late as of late I have like a short-term goal of of going heavy and I'm trying to get within shooting distance of some prior periods. I'm never going to hit my one rep but all time, but I'm like, "Okay, I'm 45. I weigh a little over 230. I feel like if I can trap bar deadlift
400 for 10." Oh, yeah. That's great. I'm I'm pretty strong. And so on my way back to four like in like a sharp 410, not like a grinding 410, right? Yeah. Today normally would be my day to train that, but my nervous system like I can tell like I'm still I don't feel bad, but I'm not I'm just not quite back yet. So I was like, well, I still want to do something that's a strength stimulus. So I drugg a heavy sled around for Yeah. I don't know what I did today, maybe like a 100 yards of just a heavy sled pull pulling it behind me with some overcoming isos. So, I'm still having some some max neural drive, some sort of grind through a pushing motion, but okay, I'm not gonna if I'm on rep four or five of something that's decently heavy, I'm not going to get it get the speed wobbles and blow my back out for the next days. So, it's the same kind of thing. It's just picking right modalities, but it doesn't excuse me from effort just because I'm tired. Yeah. Do you find like I found like cold water immersion is great for that. It's like I try to do it most mornings. I've been doing it most mornings. I'm home since 20020. God probably like six years now. And the thing I thought would go away would be okay with enough practice, enough adaptation, like this will be super easy. There's still always that hesitation. This happened before I left
of like what am I doing? This is stupid. This is 38 degree water. this is [__] dumb. What am I? And you always talk yourself into it, but there's always that that hesitation that is still there. But I've come to realize that that's that's good. Like I'm training more the the psychological the mental aspect to push through and just something that's very as long as you're not an idiot. It's relatively safe to do. You're not loading your structure or whatever. So I found that those things do tend to transfer to the other things of like, oh, okay, it's really sucking now. I have a choice. Am I going to back off today or is it today I'm just going to hit the goal even if the RP is a lot higher, right? To kind of go the little more difficult route. Yeah, I found the same thing with with cold plunging. I'm I'm well beyond thinking of it as a recovery modality, but as a psychological training tool, it's it's pretty awesome, especially if you have the time and the resource. Like you have one at home. I have one at home. Um, it's an interesting thing to do with friends that have never done it before and they're always kind of like, "Woo!" Yeah. All right. So, we had a couple, maybe this is like a year and a half ago, we had a like a little winter solstice celebration at my house and I don't have a sauna yet. Me neither. It's on the list. I have a cold plunge and I have a big fire pit. And we had a bunch of friends and family over and we were like, "Okay, so what we're going to do is everybody get
really warm by the fire. Like get real close, warm up, and then we'll take turns and get in the we'll do cold plunges." And you can not do it at all if you I mean family time, right? But if you're going to do it, you decide how long you stay in. Yeah. And it was really interesting just to kind of go like if you build it up in your head before you get over there, you know, people like, "Oh my god, is it cold? How cold is it going to be? What's the water temperature?" And they get all in their head about it. It's a lot harder than if somebody just walks up and they just get in. Yeah. Just get in. Just physically get in and start breathing. It's like, I'm gonna breathe. And really you figure out like the first 30 seconds is the worst. Oh, by far. Yeah. And then you're you just if you let yourself you get into a place where you just accept that it just is like that. Now it's really fun when it's December and it's really cold out because you get out and outside is still cold. Oh yeah. Um and so everybody was cold. But we had a good time. would change and it was like a fun way to turn the calendar and everybody had this like this right of passage this initiation for the winter. Um I think it's something that we'll we'll probably keep doing. My cold plunge actually the pump took a bit of a [__] Oh. So I got to replace the pump. But I love doing it. I did it I was doing it every day for quite a while.
Yeah. I think it's it's helpful. And the one thing I one mistake I did make early on is I I tracked time a little bit too closely and had highly competitive people do it in a row. That was a mistake. I won't do that again cuz you get some of the people that are like lips are blue. You're starting to turn purple. It's like bro you're getting out. I don't know. I got it. He was doing four minutes. I'm going to do four third. I'm like oh [__] This isn't going to end well. You're gonna win, but you're also gonna die. Yeah. So, get out. Yeah. Don't Don't die at my house. Yeah. Sign a waiver before you got in there. Yeah. Cool, man. Well, thank you for all the info. Anything else I didn't ask you? I should have asked you or projects you wanted to chat about? I don't think so. Just been a fun chat with a couple of uh performance nerds talking. Yeah, we're like all over the place, but that was fun. Yeah, just conversation. That's cool. No. Yeah. Great. Tell us about uh the book, where people can find you, where they can pick up the book, all that stuff. Sure. Easy to find me on Instagram at the checkenine light. My book, you can find um the checken enginelightbook. com. Um my Substack, checken enginelight. substack. com. I'm trying trying to be very brand consistent. So everything I'm working on for sure you can see on social media and then as
I mentioned my my book and my other writing work is pretty easy to come across. Cool. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much for that and yeah, really appreciate it. I highly recommend I'm going to pick up a copy of the book and excited to read it and I think it'll be super useful for everyone to check it out and always love all the great stuff you're doing and thank you so much for sharing all of it. Really appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate you. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We really, really appreciate it. A huge thanks to Rob for coming back on the podcast. Always love chatting with him just where his brain's going on different things and just fun to talk to other people to get different perspectives even on stuff you think you know like getting different perspectives is always a good idea and you always leave, you know, thinking of a different direction you can go yourself. Make sure to check out his book published through Victory Belt. Uh I am in the process of picking that up right now and I'm definitely going to give it a read for sure. I'm sure there's a ton of stuff I can pull out of there and check out all his other great stuff. If you want more from me, like I said at the intro, check out my podcast here as you are. And then also check out the Fitness Insider newsletter. We'll put a link down below where you can sign up completely free and get cool stuff delivered directly to your inbox. As always, thank you so much for listening. Really appreciate it. If there's anyone you think may enjoy this podcast, please forward it to them. Tag
me on the old social media and Rob so we can say thank you for listening to this podcast. And if you have time, leaving us a review goes a long way to help us with the old algorithms in addition to the likes and thumbs up and downloads and whatever else the old algorithm enjoys right now. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. We'll talk to all of you again next week. A great little actress. Yep. And getting smaller all the time. This podcast is forformational purposes only. The podcast is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. You should not use the information on the podcast for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease, or prescribing any medication or other treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider before taking any medication or nutritional supplement, and with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this or any other podcast. Reliance on the podcast is solely at your own risk. Information provided on the podcast does not create a doctor patient relationship between you and any of the health professionals affiliated with our podcast. Information and statements regarding dietary supplements are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about
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Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
In this episode from Flex Diet, the focus is performance longevity and recovery. The details vary, but the larger principle is consistent. Heat, cold, light, breath, and recovery work best when they are chosen deliberately, scaled to the person, and repeated with enough steadiness to become a real practice.
Thermal stress is a language the body understands. Heat increases circulation, raises heart rate, and activates repair pathways. Cold sharpens attention, challenges the stress response, and can train composure. Light and movement add their own signals. None of these tools need drama to work.
The value comes from hormesis: a small, controlled stress followed by recovery. Too little signal changes very little. Too much becomes noise. The useful middle is where resilience is built.
94 minutes in the original conversation 125 views when Reacher discovered it
Recovery practices only matter when they help the athlete adapt to the right stress at the right time.
Performance longevity begins with listening for the body’s check engine light before small signals become injuries.
Sport demands should shape training. For jiu-jitsu, grip, clinch positions, and tissue tolerance need specific attention.
Cold exposure can become mindset training, but it should serve the larger plan rather than become the plan.
"The body adapts best when the stress is clear, measured, and followed by recovery."
Begin with the smallest dose that changes your state. That may be a shorter sauna (covered in detail here), a cooler finish to a shower, or a recovery session placed earlier in the day. Track the after-effect: sleep, mood, soreness, focus, and the way your nervous system feels two hours later.
Progress belongs to the person who can repeat the practice. A ritual that leaves you steadier is more valuable than one that proves how much discomfort you can tolerate.
Choose one primary signal per session: heat, cold, light, breath, or downregulation.
Keep the dose moderate enough that you can recover well the same day.
Let consistency carry the adaptation. Two or three well-placed sessions each week beat occasional excess.
"Recovery is not passive. It is the condition that allows the next adaptation to arrive."
