How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan

25:25And we do that up to about two to two point two to two point three meters a second, until we can no longer do that. So we start walking, we walk really, really slow. And if we start increasing our speed, you'll find that you'll almost self -organize into the speed that feels really nice for you. If you were going for walk, you would self -organize towards your most efficient or your most stable velocity for that walk. And if you don't not thinking about it, you will self -organize towards your most efficient mechanical solution as well. That it might be flat foot, it might be right up high on your heel with massive amount of dorsiflexion, it might be a little bit lower on the heel.

26:06But that's all contingent upon your individual structure. How your foot is built, how it coordinates with your knee and your hip. If you're not thinking about it, we typically will self -organize towards what is most efficient, most stable for us. And then as we get faster and faster and faster, you'll feel that that stability and that inefficiency starts to walk a little bit and you can no longer walk. And what do we do then? To get faster, we actually have to transition to a totally different gate pattern. We start to jog. Because with so much instability and efficiency that that pattern just begins to break down.

26:50And we start to jog. Let me back up just a little bit. So if you were to walk with, let's say, your 80 -year -old neighbor and you're doing a walk with her, that's probably going to be pretty taxing for you, pretty un -economical, pretty inefficient. Because you have to shuffle a little bit, you're walking so slow, you're probably going to be bent over a little bit. But if the neighbor went in, you just continue to walk, you would speed up to your most efficient pattern. So within all of these gate patterns, there is almost like an upside down you, where you start off really inefficient, unstable, as you get faster and faster and faster, efficiency increases, stability increases, and you keep getting faster and faster and faster.

27:32Stability goes down again. Efficiency goes down again before you have to transition to a different pattern. So jogging occurs somewhere around 20 % of your maximum of the sprint speed. So whether that's 1 .8 to 2 .2 meters per second. And then we start to jog. And eventually, we can't jog at that speed anymore. So we have to transition to a different gate pattern and we start to run. And that's kind of what we were doing yesterday, in fact. You know, we spent some time running. Now, it's important you ask me about kind of heel strike and where we are within the foot. We're thinking about the same thing throughout.

28:11And that's just to move from here to there, as efficiently as we can. Understanding that we will typically, as I said, self -organize towards our most efficient pattern. And the only time we actually think about doing something different than that is when somebody outside tells us to do something different. And messes up the efficiency most of the time. So for me, it's like the big queuing, and we talked about this yesterday, right? We said flat foot contact. And if you think about being flat foot contact and all of the different things that you do, all the different gate patterns you do, the velocity is what determines where in the foot you actually will contact.

28:49So if you're walking and you're thinking flat foot, you'll actually go heel strike, you're roll over in your toe off. And if you're sprinting as fast as you can, you're thinking flat foot contact. You will actually plan to flex slightly just part of ground contact, and you'll contact the ground more towards your toes and you will, if you're just walking or running a jogging. We should clarify for people, dorsiflexion is when your toes come close up towards your shin. You're narrowing that angle between your foot and your, you know, front lower part of your lower limb, and planter flexion is the opposite pointing the toe.

29:24I think attempting to go ballerina in point, but hopefully, unless you're ballerina, you're not getting all the way down. To get to your initial point as well, it's like how many of us were taught to sprint up high on our toes when we were kids? Like we all were, right? Upon your toes, keep your arms at 90 degrees and get really really tall. And that's totally opposite to what we should be doing. Yeah, sometimes kids when they run when they're real little, you know, like three or four, like when they're just running around the house barefoot, they'll like run on their toes. So what you're basically saying, if I understand correctly, is the speed should dictate a foot strike.

30:03Okay, I think that's a very important point for people who are interested in running or already running. The speed should dictate the foot strike that unless there's a problem to resolve that a coach has told you you need to resolve and how to do it, you shouldn't be thinking about heel striking or toe striking. You should be thinking about the speed that you're trying to cover the distance. And if you're thinking about anything, just think about being flat. Just think about being flat and the foot will take care of itself due to the velocity. Let's talk a little bit more about body position and running mechanics.

30:40There may be no hard and fast rules to this, but where should my eyes be? You know, I've heard, oh, you want to be looking, assuming I'm not in a race against anyone, I'm, you know, heading out for a run. It doesn't matter which duration. Does it matter where I place my vision? In sprinting 100%, I feel like the longer the distance is, the less it probably matters because the velocity is so much slower. I feel like when you're, if you're going out for a jog in its 10 minute miles, you're probably looking pretty much straight ahead of you. You know, and if it's a little bit darker and maybe you're on a rocky surface or something or a little bit uneven surface, you're looking down a little bit.

31:20But it doesn't seem to really have a systemic effect on how you move, but it does when you sprint because obviously your body's going to follow your eyes. So if you're running down the track and you're sprinting as fast you can and your eyes creep up and you start looking up, then the chin is going to follow that. And you just start this extension pattern in the entirety of the system. As soon as you lift your chin up, you get into more extension through the ribcage and the spine and then the lumbar and everything gets extended. You end up standing up. So more arched back in upright posture for those aren't familiar with flexion and extension.

31:57Unless we say otherwise, if we talk about flexion, we're talking about assuming the dreaded sea -shaped position that everyone seems so good at these days, collapsed toward their midline versus extension where your chin is up and away from the chest and your upright posture. And if the eyes come up first, you're going to end up in what's known as a hyper extended position. It's too much extension. We're really what we want the eyes to do is just come with the rest of the torso. So how I, the cue that I use for the sprinters, is allow your torso to determine when the chin and when the eyes come up, not the opposite way around.

32:32Because if the eyes come first, the chin follows and then we get this disconnect between the head and the thorax and the pelvis and there's just too much extension. We end up kind of just pushing our way down the track rather than bouncing. Yeah, there's a wonderful movement in yoga that's helped me a lot in my weightlifting. Over the years, I did a little bit of yoga when I lived in San Diego because they had good yoga classes where they have you do this kind of ragdoll hanging over at the waist position. Looks like a Jefferson deadlift for them for the gym rats or the Olympic lifters rounded lower back.

33:04And then they have you stand up from that position, but you deliberately start at your lower spine and unpeel yourself from that folded over position, never letting the head lead. But so basically like a chain coming up from the spine and then the head moves last. I mean, it's moving the whole time, but you're looking straight forward last as opposed to what you're saying where you lift the head first. That's been tremendously helpful to me in movements in the gym, which I think have helped me a lot like glute ham raises where you're essentially in that position and you come all the way up and then you go into a hamstring curl or a dead lift.

33:45Or any kind of movement where we're going from torso bent forward to up, I remembered it moved the torso first and the head last. And I'll just say in my own experience, the strength increases that come from doing it that way as opposed to moving the head first and trying to then pull the weight up. It's remarkable. Yeah. You are all so much stronger than we think if we engage the motor neurons in the proper sequence. Yeah. So I think that's what you're referring to here. 100 % okay. Do you use a question for you when you were first taught how to squat? You told to look at the ceiling or up in the wall.

34:23Yeah, I was told the weight will go where my eyes go. Right. But now I now I where did that come from? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, some of the most useful things that have been told to me over the years that made a tremendous difference would be like this again borrowed from yoga is or brought it into the gym. Then when I talked to proper, you know, people like proper biomechanics folks like yourself or Kelly Starathe go, yeah, of course you have to move your spine and torso before. But one of the most useful things for the squat and for the deadlift has been because it's very difficult to think about many things at once, especially when you're on pulling or trying to squat heavy loads is to move my chest and my hips at the same time together so that you don't end up doing the dreaded good morning back raise followed by standing up.

35:14Right. So moving them in unison. So thinking about my chest and my hips moving at the same time, that's been tremendously helpful and tends to put the head in the right position. And the other one is oh, right, when deadlifting to not think about pulling the weight off the floor, but rather pushing my feet into the ground while driving back. Yeah. You know, and these little things end up making a huge difference. Not just in terms of the amount of weight that you can pull or squat, but the safety of the movement is just so much more stable to drive the feet into the ground. And you think, why did I was like trying to pull away off the ground?

35:48All I have to do is like push my feet hard into the ground and hold onto this bar and boom, you're up that easy. It's wild how we pick up bad habits. It's also wild how quickly those bad habits can be resolved. So in keeping with that back to running, I believe that everyone can and should run most everyone. There's certain people who can't run for, you know, various reasons, but but that people who can walk very likely can run. And I'm becoming more of a believer with every moment I spend with you that sprinting is more valuable than jogging. That sprinting is more valuable than any kind of distance run.

36:29And I'm going to offend a lot of people, but I love long distance running. So I'm offending myself. Yesterday, we didn't sprint, but we did a lot of skipping. Let's talk about skipping. And yes, I'm talking about skip, skip, skip, maloo. This, okay, this thing, I'm not gonna sing the rest of that. Skipping is such a natural movement for people, most people. And it feels so damn good. And it's actually a bit more taxing than people believe. And I came out of that workout skipping yesterday from skipping yesterday, feeling like my hips were nice and open, tons of extension, my posture is up. I feel like I grew an inch.

37:13I was strong in the gym this morning. I just feel incredible. What is it about skipping? And why do you have sprinter skip so much? And why isn't, why aren't more people talking about skipping? And yes, we were returned to to gate stuff. But I think we have to talk about skipping. Yeah. Yeah. First of all, we skipped a lot because the reality is you could not sprint. And that is the reality for almost everybody because we stop sprinting when we're whatever age. Some people stop sprinting at 15. Sometimes some people it's 20. But very few people are actually sprinting through their 20s. And on next to nobody is sprinting through their 30s.

37:54So we know that the movement of sprinting or running fast, and we kind of know what this does and why this is good for you, right? We know that yeah, we're moving our body intensively with intensity. It's probably something we should be able to do for as long as we possibly can. But we can't. Because typically we've still got pretty good engines into our 30s and 40s and 50s. But we don't have the bodies to be able to handle the stresses and the forces that this engine could put into the body. So our tissue and our joints just is not able to handle all of these forces. If you were to go out and sprint yesterday, even if we did, you know, we ended up warming up for how long and hour and half warm up.

38:40If we did a, let's say a real proper warm up, we warmed up for 30 minutes. And then I just said, Andrew, I want you to sprint as fast as you possibly can for 50 meters. That's not going to end well for most people. Maybe you could get through it yesterday, but for most people that wouldn't end well. You end up with a pull or a strain or a couple days of just feeling not well. Because we just don't do that. We don't have the tissue capacity to be able to handle that anymore or the joint capacity. You know, there's so many people, they have to run really quickly somewhere and they just didn't know that they had to do it or they're playing backyard basketball or football and they tweak a hamstring or tweak a calf or something even worse.

39:15Happens all the time. We just do not have the tissue capacity anymore to handle those forces. So what do we do instead? And I typically recommend two activities. One is running up hills. There's a lot less stress on the tissue and the joint system by sprinting up a hill than there is on sprinting on a straightaway. But second, I think more important is actually skipping. And I'm with you. I don't know why we stop skipping. I think it's associated with only child -like behavior. But that's like saying jump rope is only associated with child -like behavior. And I'm a big believer in skipping rope.

39:51We'll talk about skipping rope. But I think that's it. Yeah, I mean, maybe this conversation or this portion of the conversation could be titled, you know, what's normalized skipping for adults. Absolutely. It felt awesome. You can cover a lot of ground quickly. Heart rate gets up, but not to an outrageous degree. You're not sucking for air. But it does feel a little silly if you're not on a track. But you've mentioned what's the longest distance you've ever skipped? 10 miles. Did you get some funny looks? I got a few. Nice. And you're a real tall guy. You're six, three. So you can't really hide very easily.

40:31That was in the park. So there wasn't a lot of people. But I skipped for 20 minutes every morning on the roads. I get a few hunks. That's okay. They could be hunks of approval. Could well be. Yeah, or something else. But you think about it. Like it's you you're actually taxing the coordination patterns and the tissue and the joints in pretty similar ways as if we were going to sprint. We're working on pushing the knee behind the hip, getting into this knee behind butt pattern. This hip extension pattern, which is so important. And I know this is a topic of conversation that you had with Kelly when Kelly was on here.

41:06The importance of getting your knee behind your butt and finding and searching for opportunities to do that more often because we lose that so easily. So skipping allows us to do that. Secondary to that is the coordination aspect between how we coordinate the flexion extension at the ankle, the flexion extension at the knee and the flexion extension at the hip. And we do that in a very similar way as sprinting where each of them stiffen at this time that is considered throughout the entire of the system. Where it's just like the spring. The leg acts as a spring. Where if you think about when we jog or when we run, we're kind of running on our ankles and knees a little bit.

41:49We don't feel like we're really using our hips when you're running a 10 minute mile. It's all that's a lot of stress through the foot. It's a lot of stress through the calf. So by the way, I'm not anti -running or anti -jogging, I jog and I run and I still do all that stuff. I'm not saying now stop doing all that and just go and skip. I'm just saying find some opportunities to also skip because skipping where Ashley can tax the system in very similar ways as pretty high intensity sprinting. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor AG1. AG1 is an all -in -one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens.

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43:41Now, I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren't sleeping well or enough on a consistent basis, everything suffers. And when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improves markedly. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is, how breathable it is, all play into your comfort, and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs.

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44:40When I get home, I just find that I sleep so much better because of that mattress. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixleap .com slash Huberman. Take that two -minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 20 % off on all mattress orders. Again, that's helixleap .com slash Huberman to get up to 20 % off. I want to hover a little bit on knee behind butt. So knee behind. Shout out, Kelly Starrette. If you think about this, folks, knee behind butt means into extension. The hips are opening, so to speak. I know in yoga, they say hip opening means a different thing, but hip extension generally means posture is more elevated, chin away from chest, generally.

45:26You could get knee behind butt with your chin down, but it's tougher. The sternum comes up, naturally puts us into external rotations. I think thumbs out to the side, like the fawns, as opposed to inward. Then you think about the typical sitting, standing, walking, jogging pattern of everybody, especially if you're a commuter, doesn't matter if you're on a subway bus, car, or otherwise, or plane, you're folded in. What I'm starting to realize is that knee, knee behind butt, ankle elevated, sternum up. These are the hallmarks of locomotion. It's interesting that walking, jogging in particular seems to follow this forward folded, almost falling forward kind of thing.

46:22I'm not trying to beat up on jogging because I also like to jog, but I wonder if minute for minute, skipping would be a much better activity than jogging for people who want to elevate their heart rate, all the standard general adaptations that occur with exercise, improved insulin regulation, etc. Do you think for that person who has not skipped in a couple of minutes is the way to do it, or should they skip for a lap and then walk a lap? What would be the way to break into this? Yeah, I think probably the worst thing to do is go out for a 10 -mile skip. Don't do that. I think we start off with like a 30 -second skip, 30 -second jog, 30 -second skip, 30 -second jog, or 30 -second skip followed by a 30 -second walk.

47:08The difference is, you'll feel this, right? If you think about when you skip, and we talked about this a lot yesterday, I was asking you to be expressive. Express yourself. Think about what your posture is and how you're holding yourself. You don't really feel, you don't seem to think about those things when you jog. You just jog, and as you said, you kind of closed and small and short, and you're just trying to get through it, right? The heart rate gets up to whatever it is, and yeah, you get some good exercise. But skipping, here's your opportunity to truly express yourself, be big and free and open and bouncy and rhythmical.

47:41All of these things that were at one point in our lives pretty important to us, and we lose. And that's what that's what we get from sprinting, right? The best sprinters are the ones who can express themselves truly maximally, like totally let go. And it doesn't have to be like massively powerful, like the skips that we were doing yesterday were what we call low -antletude skips, where we're just sort of skipping back and forth. But you're still asking you to be tall and expressive and swing and be stiff on the ground. And I feel like, like there's, as I said, there's so many different benefits to this, whether it's just being the plyometric benefit, whether it's the facial benefit, whether it because this is such a cross -body, coordinated aspect, there's all sorts of brain benefits to that, as you know.

48:31It's just, there's so much more benefits to skipping than there is to just jogging. So the on -ramp for me when I talk to people about the benefits of skipping is just to put it in their jogs. So while I was talking to you, one of your photographers yesterday and he said, how do I do this? I usually jog and I'm going like 10 -minute mile pace. So when next time you jog, just go for your jogs, go for about a mile or so when you're doing a typical jog. And then just go back and forth between skipping and jogging every 30 seconds or so. And I guarantee that you will feel better with every skip that you do, every single one because there's this, again, the self -organizing, coordinated aspect to it where you start feeling a little bit more bouncy, a little lighter, a little bit more coordinated, a little bit more rhythmic, which feeds your jogging.

49:20So for me, that's probably the best on -ramp is just to work it into your current jogs. And then from there, start getting a little bit more powerful with it, a little bit more expressive with it. Now we start driving the thigh up and back and get again a little bit more hip extension. So being, you know, now we can start talking about skips for distance where you're trying to say, okay, from here to that tree that's 50 meters away, how many steps do I need to take to get to that 50 meter away tree? So doing things like that. Yeah, I'm fascinated by activities, both physical and mental, that facilitate the transition into a more difficult activity, physical or mental.

50:01I started to think about this when I started working on my book in earnest. It's very hard to just jump into riding, but I noticed that if I did some drawing, listen to a lecture while I was drawing, and I do anatomical drawings, very easy to transition into riding. I enjoy drawing. I'm not trying to accomplish much with it, but it's a very natural activity for me, and just very easy to drop into a deep groove for riding for hours. And then I started talking to a musician friend of mine who he's a songwriter, a very accomplished songwriter, and he does the same. And then I saw a post from Joni Mitchell that she would paint before she would sing.

50:42And I think these transition activities that are natural for us that don't feel as constricted by distance over time, or you know, sometimes I put my drawings on social media, but they're really for me, every way of kind of thinking about the biology from a circuit standpoint. It is very personal and kind of abstract. As you talk about skipping, it seems a little bit the same, where you know, skipping, we're not necessarily trying to become the fastest skipper in the world, or beat our yesterday's skipping time. We're just trying to skip with more, as you said, more expression, more enjoyment.

51:16But perhaps it sounds like indeed, it can help transition into a faster gate with what we're doing for jogging or for running or transition us right into sprinting. And I think that these transition points for physical and mental activities are very important because these days there's so many tools and protocols that you know, dare I say. And people start to feel like, oh, I have to do all of these things. How would I do this? How am I supposed to meditate and get sunlight and do it? You know, I already exercising a ton. Now you want me to skip. The way you describe it is completely different.

51:52It's saying, no, you're still doing your cardio, quote unquote, but maybe you do your zone two cardio and you incorporate some skipping, which will make your zone two faster for you. Or your high intensity interval training more, you'll feel more pliable, more explosive. That's part of it. I think step one is incorporating in. So you can actually be comfortable skipping. And step two is now, can we add a little bit more speed force velocity to that skip where it becomes in and of itself a workout where you're skipping as hard as you can for 50 meters and walking back and doing that 10 to 15 times.

52:27Is that would you consider that a solid workout for skipping? 100%. That would be a great skipping workout. Skipping 50 meters, walking back. Yeah. Doing that 10 to 15 times. Yeah. Because that's that is safe. If you warm up, I'm not saying go out and do a maximal effort to skip for 50 meters without doing a warm up. Do a good warm up first that includes some low amplitude skips and maybe some jogs and some stretches. Do that for 10 to 15 minutes and then do some maximal amplitude skips for over 50 meters. That's a great workout in and of itself. Like a lot, a lot of really beneficial plyometric work being done there.

53:03Let's talk about concentric and eccentric aspects of running and skipping. So folks concentric generally associated with the lifting phase, although sometimes it's the pulling phase if it's a pull up and then eccentric would be the lowering phase of some movement. In running, where's the concentric? Where's the eccentric? For the uninformed, if you could just tell us. While in running, concentric is pretty important because most of running is pretty concentric dominant. You're on the ground for quite a long time and you push behind your center master quite a long time in striding and sprinting which are the two faster gates.

53:39So you've got walking, jogging, running, striding and sprinting. Striding and sprinting, which is upwards of, so striding, you think about being 75 to 90 percent or 80 percent to 95 percent of your maximum sprint speed. That's what striding is called striding. And sprinting is anything above that. We actually, it's purely, truly maximal. As we said, these are different gate patterns entirely. Those sprinting and striding is almost entirely eccentric. Entirely. You're breaking, it's all breaking. It's all breaking forces. It's how well do you handle those breaking forces? If you do not handle those breaking forces well, you're not fast.

54:22And concentric, any concentric force ability or concentric force capacity is just not a differentiator at elite speed. In fact, it seems to be reverse. So we did a lot of testing through the 90s when I was up in Calgary. I was working for the Caini sports center in Calgary starting in 1994. So it was there for a long time. And we were, we had, you know, because 27 different national teams were based there. And all of the University of Calgary sports teams were also there. We could test out the Yin Yang for hundreds of athletes every single day. And one of the things that we tested was, was concentric, isometric, any eccentric force capacities and which ones actually related to being actually good at your sport.

55:08And almost every single sport, the concentric force capacity, and you pick the one, whether it's peak, whether it's rate of force application, whether it's time, time to peak, concentric force capacity just did not at all differentiate between the elite performance in that sport and the sub elite performance in that sport. But eccentric did all across the board. I'm absolutely struck by this stride comes before sprint thing. And I'm remembering back to, to cross country where they say, we're going to do a stride workout at the end of a run. We get back to the track at school and they do some strides.

55:45And I'm just chuckling to myself because I always would tell myself in subsequent years, you know, okay, I'm going to sprint, but I'm going to sprint at, you know, 50 % of my all -out speed. So I always think of all -out speed for me as somebody's chasing me with a syringe filled with poison. And I've got to get away. Okay. That's all -out speed. I don't want to die. So 50 % of that, 60, 70, you know, I'm measuring it subjectively. I'm not doing this by heart rates or anything like that. And indeed, and anytime I've done 100 % all -out, like in my mind imagining someone trying to try to really take my life and I'm running all out.

56:23I end up with this lower back thing because of, you know, you get hurt. But striding sounds like something that people could work up to. How do you know after doing the skip workout that you described that you're quote unquote, ready to stride and start doing a stride workout? And I should mention that these workouts, because we did one yesterday, you finished them feeling great. This is an aspect of exercise that I think most people don't talk about unfortunately that this leave it all on the mat. You know, you take every set to failure in the gym or you're, you know, these long runs where you're just shredded.

57:00They're not great for teaching people how to be healthy because people are exhausted afterwards. They're tired. They over train quickly. And then people say there's no such thing as over training. It's like, yeah, if you can sleep all day, eat all day and your profession is to do this. But there is such a thing as having a stressful life and wanting to be healthy and exercising and trying to incorporate that in a way that feeds the rest of your life. And I think these workouts that we did, the workout we did yesterday, excuse me, left me feeling, you know, posturally, energetically, mood -wise, feeling great.

57:34I slept great last night, felt great this morning. I had a great workout in the gym, as I mentioned earlier. So I want to encourage people to give us a try. And in doing that, I want to give them a roadmap. So a warm up of 10 to 15 minutes, 50 meter or so skip. Could they do it on long, dirt or concrete? Does it matter? No, it doesn't. Great. Yeah. If you've got a really flat grass, perfect. Okay. But if you don't and do it on concrete, no problem. Okay. So basically no cost to this except a little bit of time and attention. 10 to 15 of those are you have 50 meters out, walk back, repeat after a walk.

58:11Anything you need a little bit longer recovery than the probably 90 seconds that takes to walk back. Take it. It's kind of a big deal. The quality here is a term, the permanent factor. As you said, you're not trying to get really fatigued from plyometric work. This is a plyometric session. You want to be kind of fresh going into each one. And that's going to take, you know, for most people doing a maximal skip over the course of 50 meters. It's 90 seconds is about enough. But if you're really explosive and you're a really good skipper, it might be three minutes. That's fine. As you said, you want to feel good at the end of that.

58:45You don't want to be beasted at the end of that. Now, if you can do it where you're, if we transition, say from the skips and you can stride really well and if you can stride really well, maybe you can sprint really well. Really well. That doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't be tired at the end of the session. But the quality of the movement has to be the governor there. Not the capacity. I got to get the work done and I don't care how that work looks or what it looks like. I just got to get it done. No, with high intense work, with sprint work, your governor is always the quality of the work.

59:20What does it look like? What does it feel like? It's a lot like resistance training in that way. 100 % always quality. So how does one transition into striding and what does that look like? This is saying, okay, I'm going to sprint, but it's not a sprint because I'm going to hold back a bit. But how do you hold back and still have the expressive part because the expressive part is a little hard to describe in words. But yesterday you were encouraging Rob and I to get us tall with our posture as if we were being pulled up by a string from our heads. And it has a profound psychological effect. And then you just feel your body opening up and natural movement.

59:55You don't have to think about coordinating the hand lift. It's just you're in like this full bowing out. It's really wonderful. If we describe the difference between all of the gate patterns just through the amount of space that you take up on the planet. So when you walk, it's a small space. When you jog, you're taken up a little bit more space. And when you run, it's a bit more space. When you start to stride, it's more space again. And then when you sprint, you're up here and you'll be maximally expressive. So just think about it from that perspective. The other part is jogging and running typically happens behind your center of mass.

1:00:32You crash onto the ground and you push back. You have this propulsive phase. There's not a lot of a break of breaking phase here. There's a long propulsive phase that happens with the foot pushing back behind the center mass. Striding and sprinting happens in front of the center mass. There's actually a longer eccentric phase where you drive a lot of force into the ground. It's in front of the center mass and then you propel yourself off. And it's a very short propulsive phase. So think about it that way. So it's bigger, shape, and it's primarily more in front. And it's also as I said, and this is important, you can't sprint.

1:01:10And most of the people that are listening to this cannot sprint. Are you telling us to not sprint? No, no, I'm what I'm saying is you do not have that strategy available to you. Most of us, like everybody who's listening to this, almost everybody will be able to walk. And if you can walk, as you said, you could probably jog. And most of the people on the planet can walk jog. And maybe they can run. Most people on the planet can't stride. They can't get any faster than 75 % of what their capacity is because they will. They just can't do that anymore. If you're a kid, you can do that. You can run, you can, you can stride along all day.

1:01:46But you get to a certain point where our tissues and our joint systems and we just do not have the capacity to run that fast safely. And we definitely don't have it when we're sprinting. And the difference here is when you're striding, it's essentially a pretty simple traditional spring mass system. The body acts as a spring. Just what is 50 % on the front side, 50 % on the back side, you hit and you bounce off, you hit and you bounce off. Where sprinting is a little bit different. This is the work of Dr. Ken Clark, he's a good friend of mine. He published this in I think in 2018, 19. It's called a two -mass system.

1:02:25Where the body is not acting as a spring. There's a secondary mass of the shank and the foot, which can contribute to up to about 8 % of the total force through contact. So this elite sprinter is hitting the ground so hard that so there's another mass that's added to the spring. And that's what I'm saying, that's not available to you because you can't move your limbs fast enough. And you don't have the range of motion that's big enough to be able to get that sort of velocity. There's a dozen players in the NFL that can do that. Every elite sprinter is actually a sprinter. Most every other athlete and most every other sport can't actually sprint.

1:03:05They're just they're operating a spring mass. They don't have that secondary mass because they can't move the limbs fast enough. When Dr. Peter Tio was on this podcast and elsewhere, he talked about one of the major causes of death. Mostly in older people is they'll fall. They'll be mobile. They'll catch some sort of infection related to contact with the bed or post surgical lack of circulation. And that's what takes them out. I was shocked to learn this. I thought it would be a heart attack or cerebral vascular disease or that instead. But that led to this whole notion that I think is gaining more popularity nowadays that part of longevity is maintaining things like grip strength, one's ability to jump and land, and jumping and landing is eccentric control.

1:03:56My mom's turning 80 this year and she's fortunately in very good health. My dad's already 80. He was on this podcast and for anyone that saw that he's clearly in very good health. But I worry about them. And I worry mostly about a step down off a curb, a step going down a stairwell that is not controlled and then a slip and then a fall and then the break and then the immobility and then the sequence that Tia and others have referred to. Would skipping be a good activity for people in their 60s, 70s or 80s to undertake carefully as a way to learn eccentric control? Because I'll be honest, I've seen some wonderful inspiring videos of people in their 70s and 80s jumping off of boxes doing pliotype work in the gym.

1:04:47I don't know many folks in their 70s and 80s who are going to embark on that. But you can skip kind of small skips and you can do larger skips. You can skip anywhere. It's free. If you approach it carefully, you probably don't even need a trainer. There's some videos now of you having us skip. Here I'm like inspired to start a skipping movement with you. For all these reasons, you don't even need a piece of equipment. You can do it barefoot on grass if you couldn't afford shoes. 100%. What are your thoughts on folks who are in the 60s and up club skipping? Yeah, I think it nailed it. I think that is so important.

1:05:30That eccentric control or the eccentric capacity is the one that we really lose. The ability to handle ourselves eccentrically is just we don't do that work anymore. Everything that we do is concentric in nature. It's not just elite sport, I said before, that the differentiator is always in the eccentric force capacities in elite sport. Also, in us, in GenPOP, we lose the ability to apply eccentric force, whether it's fast or maximal. So 100%, I think it's so important. My dad was an elite athlete when he was younger and has probably averaged four days a week running for almost his entire life.

1:06:17Good for him. Yeah. He's 78. In 2019, he ran the New York City marathon. He ran 502. He's at 74 or 73 years old. He doesn't do that anymore, but he still runs four days a week. He runs about 20 to 25 miles. Two of those days are skipping sessions. Where he walks 30 seconds, he skips for 30 seconds, and then he strides as fast as he can, as fast as his capacity will allow for 30 seconds. And then he walks, and then he skips, and then he strides, and he walks. And it's so key. It really is. For me, the ability to express yourself maximally through running, and I'm already said, I don't feel like most people can do this.

1:07:05I don't know if there is a better single metric to, as a measurement for whatever word you want to use here, vitality or health, than the ability to safely express maximal speed of, as you as an individual. Like you choose the O2 max, you choose all of these different things that you might come up with. I don't feel like any of them are as good as the ability to just run maximally. So let's start with that. If we feel like that is important, and you can argue whether it's the most important or the 10th most important, we know it's important. If we know that's important, how do we get there? And as you said, I think skipping is the way.

1:07:48So I'm on board with the skipping movement. Let's get everybody skipping, because it is, as I said, this is your ability to be climetric to work on those eccentric force capacities, and move in a way in which you can actually express yourself again. There's this peculiarity to anything related to health and public health, in particular. For instance, a colleague of mine at Stanford, Dr. David Speagle, he's our vice chair of psychiatry, and he and his father actually founded this area of psychiatry, which is basically hypnosis for the treatment of trauma, for pain relief, for smoking cessation.

1:08:25And they're tremendously good data to support it as a practice. It's actually approved by the American Psychiatric Association, one of only four, I think, behavioral things, EMDR, cognitive behavioral therapy, hypnosis, and I think there's another. In any case, the problem, it's called hypnosis, and people hear hypnosis, and their mind goes to barking and squawking like a chicken on a stage. This is why we refer to deliberate respiration as opposed to breath work in our studies, our clinical trials on that, which David and I published, etc. And it's not euphemism. The issue is the name is a separator often, and that's a shame when there's a practice that's very valuable.

1:09:11Yoga -needra, non -sleep deep rest, right? I have tremendous respect for yoga -needra, and all of its really creators said, but the language is a separator. I'm sorry. And there's a public health mission that, to me, is more important than the naming. Just say that, and I'll take the heat for it with no guilt whatsoever. Skipping, unless it's skipping rope, has this connotation of childlike activity. Let's just be honest. And adults doing childlike behavior, while not necessarily a problem in its own right. I mean, look at all these adults with social media accounts acting like children, and the children acting like adults, different discussion entirely.

1:09:59But what if we were to give it a different name, not with the intention of pretending it's not skipping, but to relieve people's guilt and shame about doing it? Is it bounding? Bounding is a little bit more nondescript for most people. I'm having this conversation with you openly in public here, in front of many, many people. To illustrate a couple of points, one is that the name, oftentimes, people are like, I'm not going to skip down the street, but there's so much value to this that I think would be a real shame to lose the opportunity to have it wake out to many, many millions of people because it's called skipping.

1:10:38Yeah, it's plyometrics. It's plyometrics. Great. Love it. And it is a, like, bounding is left to right. So you left, right, left, right, left, right. Bounding is really, really difficult. Extremely challenging. Skipping is a regression from bounding. So if you can't bound, if you can bound, great, go and do some bounding. Chances are if you can't sprint, you can't bound. Like it's really, really hard to do real true, you know, high quality bounding. We can all skip. So look at it that way. This is plyometrics. This is just your most simple and probably for most people, your most effective means of giving your body a plyometric activity.

1:11:24How else can you do that? And you're jumping onto the box and not plyometric. That's all concentric. It's basically useless. It's a waste of time. Let's find eccentric things to do. And what is your best eccentric or the one that is the simplest, the one as you said, we spent an entire childhood doing. It's familiar to us. There's something innate in this. There really is skipping. So just think about it as being a plyometric. I'm going to do my plios today. And by the way, this isn't something that I've just made up. There is not a sprint group on the planet that don't skip. Every single sprinter skips every single one of them because of the the importance of this specific gate pattern.

1:12:08It's really important. I love that. Thank you. And you also saved me from trying to find a name that, you know, plyometric. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors function. Last year I became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics and tests for PFASAs or forever chemicals.

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1:13:22And I should say, by taking a second function test, that approach worked. Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test. The problem is blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by function simplicity and, at the level of cost, it is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, you can go to functionhealth .com slash huberman.

1:13:53Function currently has a weight list of over 250 ,000 people, but they're offering early access to huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth .com slash huberman to get early access to function. One thing that people will immediately realize when they go out and skip when they do their plyometric skipping, that's a little bit hard to understand just from hearing us have this conversation, but just trust me on this. There were the two things that are very surprising and immensely positive, at least two things. One is this expressive component and the way it reshapes your psychology and your mood.

1:14:28I want to set that aside, but make sure we return to that. The other is the cross -body coordination of movement, the fact that one knee is back toward the bottom, one side in the opposite arm is raised up, just naturally as you skip this is just, in fact, if you're wondering now, oh goodness, do I actually know how to skip? That occurred to me a couple times yesterday, because I had many cameras on me. I still remember how to skip. I'd been skipping the night before in preparation. I didn't know we were going to skip, but I've always worked some skips in if nobody's looking. I'm a skipping private guy.

1:15:04Until now. Until now. Now I skip with pride in public. Plymatcher. I will. Plymatcher in public. That's right. But one thing that was interesting, I would think, okay, we'd get back after walking, I'd think, okay, we're going to skip again. How do I do this? It's basically, I would think about lunging, kind of a fast lunge out, and then automatically we'll put me into that motion of skipping. But this cross -body coordination is incredible for purposes of motor neuron coordination across the body for the facial component. Can we talk a little bit more about cross -body coordination? Because I'd like, at some point, to talk about sprinting a little bit, because even if people aren't going to sprint, this idea that when we're sprinting, we're not just turning over our legs faster.

1:15:48Of course, the arms are pumping, but the arms and legs are coordinated in a very interesting way. The forces are actually running like an X from a cross from one shoulder down the leg and from the other shoulder, which is going to sound very complicated people, but you'll explain it. So cross -body coordination. When we walk, we do this. Some people don't. They're kind of robotic. Yeah. But most people flow their arms as they walk. If we were to put a camera above the earth and look down and everybody, you would see this very distinctly at every single gate, starting with walking, we rotate. So the pelvis rotates up and down and forward and back.

1:16:31So it oscillates and un -delays. And then the shoulders counter -oscelate and counter -un -delay. So the shoulders go forward and backward and up and down. Just pay attention to this next time you're out for a walk. You can feel your hips going backwards and forwards and also going up and down. If it didn't go up and down, you'd trip yourself every step. And the shoulders do the same. And then you have a spine, which is this column of a bunch of different pieces that connects the shoulder to the pelvis, which also rotates, side bends, and flexes and extends. The whole system is this big torsional system, this cross -body system.

1:17:07And some people take maximum utility of this system. And you can see it. Like some of the best move or some of the best sprinters, you just watch them. You can just see how they wind up and they coil into every single step. And they just use this cross -body coordination so effectively. And as you said, some others are just, it doesn't seem like there's any rotation going on here at all. What looks better to you? Who looks better? It's the ones that are using this effectively. That look, okay, that just looks better. I don't know why necessarily, but that looks way more athletic. Well, think robot dance versus somebody who really knows how to move their hips and shoulders in coordination.

1:17:46We'll talk about dance a little bit later. You have an interesting relationship to music that I think is very relevant here. We'll get back to that, but I'm seeding the conversation. But yeah, it's when the shoulders and the hips are moving in unison, it's like magic. It really is. Yeah. It really is. And just feel this when you walk. Like when you go out for your next walk, just try to pay attention to what your shoulders are doing and what your hips are doing. You start thinking, am I getting my knee behind my butt when I'm walking? And what does that feel like at my hip flex or my quad? And as I do that, what's happening with the opposite shoulder?

1:18:19And is that getting wound up and is that coiling properly? Am I taking advantage of these extremely innate, extremely natural movement tendencies that we all have? Or have I because of the way in which I've lived or some of the things that I've done or maybe even some of the things that somebody has told me, tried to be really square and linear with everything I've done. Because think about it, right? When we're taught to run when we're younger, any excessive movement outside of in a straight line has been told to us, that's inefficient. You're wasting energy. You're bleeding all your all your force, not understanding the actual bi -mechanical mechanism of the pelvis, the shoulders and the spine that connects them and how we are actually built to rotate into bend.

1:19:09And that's not to say, by the way, that more is better. Everything is an inverted U in this world almost. There's a goaly -lots effect to this. It's what is right for you. Some people will use this torsional system extremely effectively and there'll be a lot of it and some will be a little bit less, they're a little bit more linear and they'll still be good. That's all dependent upon their own individual and unique structure. They're morphology. They're genetics, how they're built and how they're born and what they do, what they do with it as they age. But the bottom line is we are all rotational beings and we need to try to find ways to take advantage of those rotational forces rather than to constrain them.

1:19:51It's one of the reasons why I really dislike this anti -rotation terminology that's come into many of the exercises that we do in the wayroom. This exercise is about anti -rotation. Why do you want to be anti -rotation? We are rotational beings. Your anti -excessive rotation, but not anti -rotation. So I feel like that just as you were saying before with skipping, that's the wrong terminology for me. And that's just sending the entirely the wrong message to everybody about the importance of us being a rotational being. Yeah, naming matters. It does. Especially in exercise and anything related to dare I call it wellness.

1:20:36Anything mental health, physical health and performance. The naming matters because it can take people's minds off track from the major point. It can be a separator, as we mentioned before, in the best case, it can be an aggregator. I have to wonder with people walking around looking at their phones all the time. Are they losing the cross -body coordination? Snuck in, because to one talk at South by Southwest. I got a ticket. I got a pass. I don't mean I snuck in. I mean, I went there for just one talk the other day. And I was walking through the hallways. This is a big meeting. Tons of people.

1:21:15And it was incredible. Everyone was walking looking in their phone. Now, of course, there's a program that's on an app these days. So you're saving paper. So that's good, right? But it was remarkable. People were like walking and reading at the same time. So I don't want to make more of this than we have data for, but this can't be good. This can't be good. I think that's a really good point. I haven't thought about that, actually, but I think that's a really good point. I have a rule when I'm walking that if I have my phone buzzes and I want to pick up my phone, I stop. I stop. I get out of the way of all the other walkers.

1:21:49I push myself up against the building and I look to what's on my phone. If I feel it's important, and then I start walking again. I just despise people who walk and look at the phone at the same time because that's what you see. You see this unnatural constrained, overly flexed posture. And if you spend too much time doing that, I don't think you need data. You know, that's not good. It's not good to walk that way. That's not the way we're supposed to walk. Again, it's all about coming back to let's express ourselves. Let's understand what our bodies are supposed to be able to do and find ways to continue to have that ability as we age.

1:22:25This isn't it. Let's talk about expression through movement. And let's use the extremes as a starting point. I find that useful in any kind of scientific conversation. You take the extreme outcome. So the person who is trying to take up as little space as possible chin toward the chest folded in, thumbs toward the midline, so called the internal rotation, eyes down, trying to make themselves small. I don't need to spend another five seconds explaining all the psychological phenotypes that's associated with and the way it makes us feel. Now, of course, it's possible to curl up in a small ball and think amazing things about the world in oneself, but generally those things are not happening at the same time.

1:23:11Let's think about the other extreme. And let's talk about him. Hussein Bolt. It's also be a fun opportunity for people to learn a little bit more about Hussein. Let's start there. What is so special about Hussein Bolt besides the fact that he's still the fastest man in the world? And what about his willingness to express himself? Do you think contributed to becoming the fastest person in the world? Not just feeling great that he's the fastest guy in the world. And therefore, who wouldn't feel great? Yeah, Hussein is unique. If we look over the history of some of the elite male sprinters, there was a time.

1:23:51When I started getting into the sport, the way to be as an elite male sprinter was hyper -focused, hyper -intense. If you think about Mowgreen stalking behind his blocks and licking his lips, getting ready for this, he basically is going to war. And it seemed like so many of the sprinters were trying to encapsulate this kind of feeling, like sprinting is, eh, it's macho, it's ego, I'm coming here to knock you out. And then Hussein came along with the exact opposite. And I think, you know, he's out there having fun. He's, as I told the story about Jody a little bit earlier, right? She was for a long time.

1:24:33She didn't connect herself with the activity. There were two separate beings. She was doing something that no, she no longer really connected with. And Hussein, they're like this, like he was really expressing his entire being in the way in which he went around about this task of sprinting 100 meters of sprints in 200 meters. And I feel like that is such an important piece, with all sport and probably within all things, if you can connect your entire way of being with the thing that you're spending most of your time doing, chances are you're going to be really successful at that thing. And if you look at all the other sports, right?

1:25:13It's the ones that you can tell, they're just really confident in who they are in what they do, how they express themselves. And whether, and that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be, you same bolt and playing around at the line and doing things like this and jumping around. Does he always like that? Does he always know when he was a kid? Oh, no, he's a kid. He's a big kid. He still is. He's just a, he brings this really child -like intensity to things. He's still intense. He still, he wants to kill you. But he'll laugh in your face just before he does it. I love that about him. But that's not everybody.

1:25:54That's not every elite sprinter. I coached a guy named Andre DeGrasse for a while who won three Olympic medals in 2016. I remember him coming right behind you saying both in that, in that famous 200 meters where they were smiling at each other. Andre is very quiet, very kind of tightly, kind of just down here, very insular on his phone, not really living life, kind of lived life down here, very closed. And that's the way in which he performed. That's the way he practiced. That's the way he trained. That's the way he competed. He didn't feel like he had to be up here and bouncing around, jumping around because that was not him.

1:26:32And there's one thing that Andre is famous for. He's now got seven Olympic medals. I don't know how many big races Andre has won outside of the Olympic games. But he's got seven Olympic medals. He really stands up when it matters because he is connected with who he is. He knows who he is and what he brings out to the performance arena is connected like this with that. Where others, and the biggest example that I know is a Saffa Powell. So if anyone knows, doesn't know who a Saffa Powell is, a Saffa was you saying Bolt before you say Bolt. A Saffa's ran sub 10 seconds in 100 meters 99 times more than anyone else in history.

1:27:18He's by all intents and purposes one of the greatest male sprinters of all time. He's a legend. He's had a world record. I think he's had set two world records. He's an incredible sprinter who's choked at every single major championships has ever been. He's always folded. And he does that because he feels like he came up in the era of MoGreen. You know, this animal thing, this being really, really super intense. So Saffa tried to be that. That didn't work for him. And then Bernard Williams, who's kind of jumping around and playing around a little bit, that's that became a thing for a while. So Saffa tried that hat on.

1:27:57That didn't work either. And then Usain came and Usain is playing with the camera and bringing his personality out. So Saffa tried that hat on. Guess what? That didn't work either. So there's this, yeah. Usain brought this almost, yeah, it's okay to be to jump around and to dance and have fun. But it's not for everybody. If that's not who you are. And I feel like that was an important thing. If I was coaching the Saffa, man, Saffa, just be you, man. Like you're relaxed. You're on jetagrass before on jetagrass came along. You're just cool and chill. Just be cool and chill, man. Just be that. Just bring you to this performance and you'll get a lot more out of yourself.

1:28:43But to get back to your question, Usain just gave everybody, I think, the permission to have fun. That's why we do this thing. It's to have fun. And if you're not having fun, then why are we bothering? It's so interesting. And his name comes up so often now. And I'm grateful to have him as a close friend. But you know, I've had hours upon hours of conversations with Rick Rubin about why certain musical artists just have that thing. And it doesn't matter if you're talking about Tom Petty, Joe Strummer, Johnny Cash, Adele. It's just you ask about all these different people. And it's the answer is always the same.

1:29:24It's they know how to be themselves. In that moment, and people will say, well, it's a constructed where his Rick will be like, no, this is why he likes to work with artists early on. Like a lot of the hip -hop artists he worked with, a lot of the punk rock music artists he worked with. They were just being themselves. They had no success prior to their, you know, like LL Cool J sending him a demo tape. And so there was no self -awareness or there wasn't enough self -awareness to hinder their expression. They were just being them. And that's always what explodes people to immense success. Now there's something to be said for ignorance.

1:30:06There's something to be said for ignorance. And there's something of a gravitational pull as a as a spectator or a listener to the artist, the athlete, the musician who's just being themselves. And we know we can detect at an unconscious level when it's not real. There's one of the things I love so much about podcasting or at least a very blessed to be in the early -ish cohort of podcasters. I wasn't in the first cohort like the Dan Carlin's and the Rogans when I came in early enough that none of us really knew what to do except just be ourselves. It's that now it's changing. There's a big flood of commercial, you know, entities in podcasting.

1:30:46And some of those are good and most of them are not, frankly, because they're not real. They're more like a new show it's produced. It's like it's not real. The person on camera and off camera are very different. But I can tell you that Joe Rogan off camera, that's Rogan. And I was thinking about really expressive people in different domains to compare more or less to this example that you're describing with Usain. So Rogan, I'd rather Muhammad Ali, big, boisterous personality, huge attractor to him. It was not a construction. He might have honed it as part of his craft, but clearly that's who he was.

1:31:22He's a fast talker. Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson. Very different. Yeah, but that's him. Right. You know, right. And everyone loves Mike Tyson because it's very clear that that is Mike Tyson. Jal Michel Basquiat. Yeah. You know, this, like even just the size of the paintings and the way he worked and the physicality of it, he was Haitian. I'm going to get back to this kind of nationality thing a little bit later. And then we had on here the great Josh Wateskin, who was the subject of the movie The Search for Bobby Fisher and his whole strategy and chess that he learned in Washington Square Park of creating chaos on the chess board.

1:32:00This game that everyone considers very, very linear and very, very constrained in his, he liked to create chaos because Washington Square Park, especially in the 80s and 90s chaos, you know, drug dealers and crime. There's people doing it pretty much every activity there. And on and on. Right. You know, I think that when people are just being themselves, this is what you're saying. And this is what Rick has said over and over. You know, that essence piece is so magnificent. And not just to see, but it involves humankind. It really does. And so when you work with an athlete or for the listener, who's trying to figure out, well, like, who am I?

1:32:44Does it work in reverse meaning? And I believe that movement can actually teach us who we are in addition to allow us to express who we are. And I'm not going to say that skipping is the only way to do that. But it was very interesting yesterday to notice the transitions in my state of mind as I got permission from you to, you know, go bigger, get bigger, stride bigger. And we were the adults on the kids playground. In my mind, behaving like kids, but it is transformative, I think, to move differently makes you feel different. And when those things line up, I think it's what you're talking about.

1:33:28Yeah. I think it's a brilliant question. I really do think it's, it's everything in sport. But I think as you said, just when you zoom out, it's not just sport. It's all everything. And I feel like so often in sports specifically, people like me steal the essence away from the athletes because we have our own preconceived ideas of what this, that what you should be doing should look like. And it's my idea, but it's not your essence. And it's not your idea. And I always feel like we should be coaching towards what the athletes best solution is, not what our best solution is. I've got an athlete I'm working with right now who's super gifted.

1:34:16She's a two -time Olympian. She's got Olympic gold medal in the relay. And she's been coached for a long time to move in a way that does not align with her essence. It does not align with what she is good at. And what will that do to you over the course of time? It's obviously going to negatively affect your confidence. It definitely negatively affects your the way you move because you're moving in a way that just doesn't align with you, whether that's psychologically, emotionally or physically, biomechanically. So this is a tall, elastic, expressive sprinter who's been taught to be really small and compact.

1:34:56And accelerate with really short, choppy steps. And she's lost the ability to even understand who she is anymore in this sport. So my objective now is try to reintroduce herself to herself. What was it that got you into this? How did you move? Why were you really, really good at this? Let's reconnect with that. And the challenging piece with that is how do you understand what that is? Especially years, if you've been being taught a certain way, that is not in alignment with who you are, whether that is sport or anything else, it's really difficult to reconnect with it if you don't have a really good guide.

1:35:37Because so often those guides, and it's that's whether it's a coach or a music producer, will screw them up. Not purposefully. They're coming at this from a very optimistic standpoint, a positive standpoint. I'm trying to help you, Andrew. This is what I think. These are my experiences. This is my subjective view. This is how I see you doing the thing that you're doing. And that's based on my history, rather than where it should be. And that's based on your history. And that's the difference between a Rick Rubin and many other producers. And it's the difference between elite coaches and sub -elite coaches.

1:36:15You always start with the person. What is the unique ability that you have? What is it that you have that makes you better than everyone else? What is it you have that really that you want to show everyone? Let's connect with that. Let's show that. Let's build all of our training around that. Let's have all of our conversations around that. I'm remembering the example from that documentary last, the last dance about Michael Jordan. Some of the description of the Chicago Bulls coach, encouraging Dennis Rodman, who in the 90s was A's and 90s. First of all, very few people had that many tattoos who weren't in prison or in a niche music community.

1:37:05Dennis had a ton of tattoos. He had earrings. He died his hair. He loved to party. He was wild. And his coach understood that it was part of his reset mechanism. And you don't put a bulldog in a race with a bunch of gray hounds. And you don't have gray hounds tug a rope with a kettlebell on the end. I know this is a bulldog owner who loves all breeds of dogs. So he gave Dennis permission to party. What no professional coach would probably do. And it brought out his ability to play. Incredible rebound or incredible player all around, but famous for his rebound stats. So this thing of who am I? How do I express myself?

1:37:49I think the authenticity piece is so key. Like if you're a nice person being a jerk in your sport is probably not going to work. But if you enjoy competition in your nice person, then it seems like there's a place for that. And I wonder whether or not a big component of all of this and discovering it for people that are going to try plyometric skipping and these sorts of things to try and better understand themselves and express themselves, which I think would be a wonderful thing to come from this discussion is the trying to shut down the self conscious part, the self critic. Do you think the best sprinters are also not thinking about anyone else?

1:38:29They're just enjoying themselves or at least are they feeling the sprint more than they're paying attention to their form as a like how does this look? So I'm thinking about it. I'm on the track with you. I'm going to run or skip. And I can either just feel where it's more expressive or I can try and show you that it's more expressive. Two very different things. One that's a there's a self conscious awareness piece, the showing you. I'm going to show you this as opposed to just doing it for the feel of it. Is that the distinction? Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. One really good example of this in the sprints world.

1:39:10And I think you were there for this is 2022 World Championships in Oregon. Yeah, I was there. And no allials won the 200 in an American record 1931. And that was for me like that's the epitome of just being so lost in what you're doing that you have no idea what you're looking like. And he's just maximally expressing his everything that he's got. And he bounds across the line. I said, man, that was beautiful. Like I've never seen that. It was so beautiful. Like totally lost in flow. And that it doesn't happen as often as many who don't work in sport think it does. Not every single performance is a flow performance.

1:39:54But if you're lucky, you'll get one or two of those in your career where you just lose connection with everything that you're doing. You just wow, what happened? And in fact, every time that a sprinter sets a personal best, I ask him, what was that feeling like? I don't know. No idea. I don't know. I don't know how that felt. I just ran. So all of these things that we talked about, all of these incredible coaching cues that I gave you to think about when you were doing this, you forgot them all. So I just ran. I just ran. And almost always that is the answer to that. I just ran and I just connected with it.

1:40:36And something in the background, you know, we were able to one of the ways I'll bring this home a little bit more maybe practically. So we train 20 to 25 hours a week. And my goal each day is not to say a lot. Like I want the athletes to kind of find a way through things and I will encourage them and guide them and sort of facilitate this discovery. But often we'll talk about different things. And if they're struggling with something, I'll give them a specific cue. And over the course of time, we build, you know, this library of different things that the athlete thinks about, or the different cues.

1:41:15And then my objective coming into more of a competitive season is to try to align these cues with an emotion. What I call, what I call mood words. So for example, when an athlete is accelerating, they're on the ground for a little bit longer than when they are upright. Because they need to actually propel themselves forward. They need horizontal force. They need the ground to push themselves forward. So they push and they push or they drive. So cues could be drive. It could be push. It could be power. It could be polyethys forward. It could be all of these different things that are around power.

1:41:51But for me, the mood word that really expresses this better than anything is pressure. I want you to feel like you're applying as much pressure through the first half of this race as you possibly can. And the second half of the race is the exact opposite of that. So we talk about things that we do technically. Knees up, thighs up, step off the ground, be vertical, be expressive, be tall, all of these different cues. But really, what we're trying to get to is freedom or peace. So that's what a hundred meters sprint is. It's 50 meters of pressure and 50 meters of peace. So I try to align these mood words with these coaching instructions.

1:42:34And then all the athletes need to think about is this emotion with this mood word and all the instructions come along for the right. That is the goal. And that is, you know, going back to something we talked about quite a while ago now, probably one of the things that I love the most around a hundred meters is this dichotomous relationship between pressure and peace or power and fluidity or violence and rhythm. All of these things that are opposing ends of the spectrum that every single elite athlete regardless of the sport can come together perfectly. If you can have the power, but if you don't have the peace, good luck.

1:43:16You can have the peace, but if you don't have the power, good luck. No chance. It's always both simultaneously. So it's yeah, that's the that's the that's the massive challenge in this sport. And going back to to NOAA in 2022, that world championship final in the 200 incredible. That's maybe the best example of that I've ever seen. Yeah, amazing, amazing race. Really was. Really filled blessed to have been there. And by the way, folks, if you have never been to a track meet, it's per for many reasons. It's one of the most wonderful things. First of all, it will give you an example of what real coordination is all about.

1:43:58And I'm not talking about physical coordination, although that too, you'll be watching the pole vault. And then you'll shift your eyes to the right. And there'll be another event starting right as the pole vault ends. And then another one, it's a beautifully orchestrated event done properly as they do in Eugene and elsewhere. The other piece is that nobody goes to track meets unless they love track, although hopefully a few people are not familiar with track will try it. And so every the the amount of spirit there is incredible. And there's also, I don't know, that there's a lot of identification within individuals there that even if you've never seen them run or anything, you pick up on the different on the different personalities of the runners and the jumpers and the throwers.

1:44:48And it's really special. Check out a track meet if you can. You won't be disappointed. You won't be disappointed. And I don't work for you. I say track. Do you work for big track? No, actually, I'd go. I buy a ticket like everybody else. This notion of pressure and peace, you know, it brings me back to this thing about these transition activities like for songwriters, even her so skilled, Joni Mitchell or us referring to earlier, Tim Armstrong, having these transition activities, trying to get into one's craft and the pressure and then it opens up into peace. And I feel like anytime Rick is talking about working with musicians and I was like, how did it go?

1:45:33It's in the studio. It's like they work super hard. They work extremely hard. And then it's always the story I always hear is, yeah, in the last two days it all came together. Right. Because they set real deadlines. And I think this is why deadlines are important. This is why writers and artists who have no deadlines oftentimes don't do as well. And maybe athletes as well, that the pressure piece of getting everything organized around an activity. And then the nervous system just kind of takes it. Yeah. The commonalities here are fascinating to me. Maybe we all could approach our exercise that way too.

1:46:11That it's okay to be rigid, rigidly attached to detail at the beginning, but the goal is peace in the final minutes of it. Right. Yeah, I think that's a good way of looking at it. Yeah. I think, you know, more than that, if we zoom out, I feel like, you know, society or the way in which we think about exercise now has become detached from why we actually started doing the things to begin with movement. Right. We fall in love with finding our way around the world through moving our bodies in space and time, doing whatever, whether that's hiking or playing a sport or whatever. And then we finish school and we get a job.

1:46:54And now we don't really move anymore. That becomes exercise. And we go to the gym and we exercise. And I feel like that's so many degrees removed from why we actually do the thing. I feel like we don't ask ourselves, is this what is really serving me? Or is this what everyone else is doing? So I'm just going to go along with it. And for me, like, I let's wait. I go to the waiting room. I do that four or five days a week. I skip every single day. I run like three or four days a week. I do some boxing. I move my body. I play. I do as many different things I can, I can do, includes hiking. And I feel like that's what we should be doing.

1:47:34I'm asking myself, what is it that I want to get out of this practice? Is it I want to go to the gym for 45 or 45 minutes a day and get as strong as I can or as big as I can? Whatever. And if that is it, great. But I need to ask myself that question. I don't feel like many of us are asking that question. And for me, we've alluded to this a couple times now is, what's important about moving as we're aging and being connected with that and having the ability to continue to be able to express ourselves maximally over the course of our lifetimes. That isn't developed in a waiting room. That's developed by doing those things.

1:48:15You might appreciate this. If you were looking for good movement, would you go to a waiting room or a skate park? Definitely do a skate park. 100%. Because the movers are so much better. The movement there is, wow, this is incredible. Don't you want to be able to do that rather than do a squat? There's some made up exercise that somebody's told you is going to do this and this and this for you or do a deadlift or do a bench press. All these made up things. And as I said, those things can be good. Can be fun. Can be interesting. Can be important. But what really is most important is can you still move your body?

1:48:54Can you express yourself maximally for as long into your lifetime as you possibly can? And people, I feel like they have to ask the question whether the thing that they're doing is exercise. Is it actually leading to that? And in most cases, I think it's not. I came up in parts through skateboarding. That was my main focus in high school. Up until about mid -high school and I got into other things. It's skateboarding, everything you're saying is especially true. The personality matches the way they skateboard level of aggression, level of technicality, personality. I mean, sometimes there's a mismatch.

1:49:32There's the every vert skateboarder, big ramp skateboarder now will attest. Everyone from Tony Hawk, because I've a kid named Jimmy Wilkins, who does everything faster, bigger, with more technical ability than anybody has ever seen. He's a absolutely remarkable addition to the sport and a super nice kid. His mom is a ballerina. Oh, yeah. Amazing. And he's got very loose hip joints. He actually guides the board with his knee back knee, like so he can do a lot of things with no hands that most people have to grab to do. And his dad is an orchestra conductor. So if you were to make up a story about a highly technical, powerful, precise athlete, it would be Jimmy Wilkins.

1:50:24He's one X games. He's astonishing to watch and so much fun to watch. So skateboarding, it's very apparent. But then I was trying to think of some daily activities. So getting away from sport and exercise for a moment. And I was just thinking in my own life, like if you wanted to understand my mom, you just have to see her gardening. The way she moves about her garden, the way she tends to it, she loves gardening. It's like her greatest, I don't know if it's a greatest joy. It's one of her great joys. And so if you could just see her gardening for 10 minutes, you would understand her as a person.

1:51:04Completely. It's amazing. And I think she's a very good gardener, but it's not that the garden isn't the point. It's how she moves about the garden. And I think that's true for certain people how they cook, certain people how they dance. And I was going to say, you know, if you want to understand people at a wedding or a party, just when the music comes on, you get a lot of insight into people's personality. And the best is always that like older guy or gal or couple that look like they're just kind of sitting there like turtles. And then they get up and they're like, oh my goodness, they can really dance.

1:51:32Or they're just enjoying or just enjoying it completely, even if they're not great dancers. So let's talk about music and dance for a second. I think we can't avoid this any longer. Your Instagram handle was maybe still is finger mash. I thought that had something to do with sprinting, but I learned right before we sat down that you're you're a reggae DJ and you grew up around that. And sprinting has a lot of Jamaicans in it. What's the deal? Educate us. How much of how you understand athletes and how they move and people generally in the general population, how they move relates to your understanding, kind of music and rhythm because this pressure piece, right?

1:52:17I mean, like that's a great song. That's think I explicitly, truly understood the connection until in hindsight. You know, because when you're doing it, you're just doing it, you're just living your life and you're not really thinking about it. I'm doing these things. They have creative, probably similarities, but I'm not really understanding those. You know, I'm not thinking about them. You know, I started it. I started DJing in 1984.

1:52:51So level of vibes, shadow level of vibes, it still goes on to this day level of vibes level the vibes level the vibes level the vibes of my old DJ partner, Tuller. Yeah. And it's yeah, absolutely. Like it's I was an artist as well. So when I was in school, everyone figured I would just be the artist. Like I was an okay athlete, but not great. I wasn't good enough to go into professional sport and make money. It was just art. That was it. I went to art school and I figured out, you know, this just isn't serving me anymore. But the entire time I'm doing this music thing and I'm doing this sport thing.

1:53:25And I think all of these creative outlets are just all coming together. I've always been sort of a creative coach. And I think like this is how I actually got into sprinting is I was a soccer player. Most of my most of my friends were sprinters. Most of them, most of those sprinters, because I was based in Calgary. There's a big Jamaican population there. So most of them were Jamaican. And I just got into sprinting through that. So is I feel like as I said, it wasn't an explicit connection that I understood at the time, but in hindsight, I can see, okay, me being a DJ, an understanding rhythm and putting things together and how putting these things together influenced other things less than maybe the people that I'm playing the music for.

1:54:14That really served my coaching ability. 100%. 100%. As did my art. It's really interesting and hindsight to look at those things and look at those as you say these, call them the transition events and these other things. The other skills that, you know, masters in some of the domains have. What athletes nowadays, which athletes are you excited about because they seem to have this essence we don't want to make them self -conscious, but that you're like, wow, like there's really something there. Yeah. Who are you excited about? Intract specifically? Yeah. Well, any sport. Sure. It's, I mean, honestly, I'm not a massive sports fan.

1:54:57Like I don't watch a lot of team sports. In fact, I watch no team sports other than soccer. And I watch soccer because, you know, that's the game I play. That's the game I thought it played. It's your team. Manchester City. And so who's the greatest soccer player in the world in your mind for you? Like the one that not necessarily the one that everyone agrees is the best, but. Well, Messi is the best player. And I think most people would agree that little Messi is now playing for Inter into Miami is maybe even still at the age of 35 or 36 the best player on the planet. Just because of his expressive.

1:55:27Just the way in which he plays this game and expresses himself is just perfect. And in fact, this is a really good analogy to discuss what you're talking about here because there's there's in the goat debate, the greatest of all time debate. There's two players that come up in soccer. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Maradona is no longer in the mix. No. And Pele is no longer in the mix. It's these two. Okay. Ronaldo is 40. And Messi, I think, is 36. And I'd say probably if you took a poll of all of the millions of people that have an opinion on this, 45 % of them are so would say Cristiano Ronaldo in 55 % is that close?

1:56:0455 % was saying Messi. But both of them are so authentically themselves. It's crazy. Like Cristiano Ronaldo was perfect. Like he is the perfect Greek God. He's 40 years old. He's about 5 % body fat. He's big muscular, powerful, fast. He's shine. He shines. He literally doesn't shine. He does. And he plays that way, right? And he's just got a certain personality that he brings to the field. And Messi is just like this. Just glides around and just elusive. And you can't see him. And he's over there. And just the things that he can do with his feet and the ball and the interaction between his feet and the ball.

1:56:45It's just, that's incredible. And for me, I align with more of the Messi. I just love the creativity that a player like that has. Or in a little bit more up to date, maybe, you know, Steph, Steph Curry, like changed the game of basketball totally. While or through being authentically himself, he's totally changed the league. He's changed how everybody plays basketball and how and everybody will play basketball forever and more. So yeah, it's, it's, I really, really appreciate incredibly beautiful and authentic movers. I don't like sport, but I love the movement part of it. Yeah. It's the son of an Argentine.

1:57:30You know, my dad's first generation immigrant to the United States. I, I really put myself to shame by not being a huge soccer fan, but I've got cousins that you'll listen and watch at the dinner table and you couldn't distract them of an atom bomb when I off the United States and his kids, you know, such such an interesting sport because of the this notion that different teams and different players play it differently. Right? Like the Brazilians, like the rhythm to their game versus that, you know, Argentines are considered a little bit more traditionally more rigid among South Americans. Yeah, more rigid and a little bit more aggressive as well.

1:58:08More stiff upper lip. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. They take them, Argentines take themselves very seriously. I can say that as a half of Argentine. Yeah. We're taught to take ourselves seriously as people. And at the same time to enjoy life, but to take ourselves seriously. Yeah, I think there's a lesson in that too, right? Brazilians have been the most successful national soccer team of all time. And you know, like you just said, you don't know the soccer fan, but you know how Brazilians play soccer. Everyone knows how to play Brazilians. They play soccer. They dance and they play. And it's just this thing, you know, it's a party.

1:58:37It's a party. Yeah. And that's how they play. And everyone kind of knows how Argentina plays as well. You just said that. You know the soccer fan, but you know that. Nobody knows how England plays. Right. England haven't won a World Cup since 1966. They haven't won a major title since 1966. Even though this is where the sport originated from, everyone knows how Germany plays. And how Germany has always played. There's a way. There's a German way of playing football. There's a Brazilian way of playing football. There's an Argentinian way of playing football. There is no British way anymore. So I think there's something in that, right?

1:59:10Like if there's a connection where every single person that comes up from the age of four years old, they know the way in which everybody in this country plays. Oh, okay. I get that. And we're all on the same team and all contributing to the same system in the same way. We're in the UK. It's so disparate that no one understands it anymore. I'm just soaking this in because my mind immediately goes to like art. One of my favorite movies is The Movie Baskia about Jimmy showbaskia, not the documentary. The cast is like Gary Oldman, David Bowie. He's a Dennis Hopper at Christopher Walken. It's just an unbelievable cast.

1:59:49And the fact that Baskia was part Haitian, New York in a time when New York was pretty gritty and brought that together in his art. It was like one part graffiti, modern art, and had this kind of tribal component that people made more of than they probably should have. And you could say the same thing about Andy Warhol, or about Chuck Klois, or about, you know, when people are just being themselves, but they're also taking their ancestry, and they're taking their personal history, which includes their ancestry, and they're putting it into their art or their sport. Spectacular things happen. So along those lines, this is a somewhat controversial topic, but I'm just going to go right into it because I think everyone wonders about this.

2:00:34I'll say this directly. Why are there fewer white strength and speed champion athletes? In fact, if you hang around track and field long enough, you'll hear that's the third fastest white woman. That's the second fastest white guy. People are using very specific language, but we could put it differently. Yeah, a lot of faster makings.

2:01:03What's the deal? Is it genetic contribution to fiber type? Let's also talk about calf belly length, which turns out to not be about calf belly length at all. What I'm saying there's people with, quote unquote, small calves tend to fast runners. What's the deal? And I realize why this is a controversial topic, but it's like so obvious because that it's almost silly to avoid it this way. How can you not have the conversation? Let's have a conversation about it. It's obvious. So what's the deal? Well, as in all things, when we're having discussions around topics like this, it's both nature and nurture.

2:01:42Sure. It's primarily in this case, nature. If you don't have the genetic capacity to run fast, you won't run fast. Sorry, you just don't. You don't have enough type two fibers. Whatever it is proportionate type two fibers. It could be limb length. It could be joint structure. Typically, faster people have tighter, smaller joints. Typically, faster people have longer tendons and smaller muscle bellies. Typically, faster people have more type two X fibers. Typically, faster people are slightly taller. So all of these contributing genetic factors, if you do not have those things, and then that's not even talking about some of the hormonal factors, some of the endocrinological factors, some of the neural factors that we may not even understand yet.

2:02:25There's all of these genetic determinants that play a part in what you are able to do. So first and foremost, we have to, yes, that is a fact that almost every single statistically, almost every single human being that's ever ran sub 10 seconds is a black athlete from, you know, evolutionarily from maybe say West Africa. Let me ask you, sorry for interrupting, but I think it has a white person ever broken the 10 second mark in this meter. There's been a few. So it was first Christoph LeMetre, I believe in 2017 or 2018 was the first white athlete to break 10 seconds. And then there's been, I feel like this probably five, maybe six Asians now who have broken 10 seconds.

2:03:18Everybody else, and that's close to 200 are black. And of course, there's the nature component too, which is if you come from a country where sprinting is a popular sport or soccer is a popular sport or, you know, distance running is a popular sport, then there's going to be a selection bias. 100%. Yeah, 100%. So we're taking those into that. That is that I would say that the gen, if you don't have the genetics, good luck. You're not even in the room. The genetics will get you in the room. Once you do in that room, whether what that nature is, what that upbringing is, what that environment is, that is going to determine what you do with your genetics.

2:03:57So for example, a massive percentage, and I don't know what this is, but it's big. A massive percentage of the athletes who have ran sub -210 in a marathon come from the St. Louis district in Kenya. Like it's very, very high percentage. And part of that is not only their genetics, but the environment in which they're growing up in. Every single person that they know is a marathoner. Every single person they know are running in excess of 100 miles a week. Every single person they know, you know, these are all of the things that that we need to do to be this, right? So they're seeing that from the day that they're born.

2:04:38So for sure, environment really matters. What you do with that nature really, really matters. But if you don't have the genetic capacity to begin with, you just as I said, you don't have any chance at all. And as you said, like Jamaica, sprinting is massive in Jamaica. I guess really, really important. If I would encourage you to do one thing, go to Champs at one point. If you like track meets, this is the best track meet in the world. Champs is the Jamaican high school national championships. And it's in Kingston. And it is incredible, absolutely incredible. The stands are packed. So there's 45, 50 ,000 people.

2:05:12It's loud. It's noisy. It's boisterous. And kids are just killing themselves trying to beat each other. It's just an amazing event over the course of three or four days. Go to the last couple days of Champs and just watch that. You just see, I understand why Jamaicans are so fast. This is the environment in which many of them are operating within as they come up. And this is like, this is, you know, I talked to, so I'm a good friend with Donald and Bailey. Donald and Bailey was a 1996 Olympic champion. He was a world record holder in 100 meters for a while. He was up Jamaican to send. I grew up in Jamaica until he was 12.

2:05:48He moved to Canada in 1981, which is the same year that I moved to Canada. So we've talked about this a lot. And he said, if, you know, if you do well at Champs, you're set. You're going to do really well as a professional sprinter because there's nothing that has more pressure in it than actually competing well at Jamaican high school national championships. So understand what that environment does for the ability for your typical Jamaican athlete to succeed at higher levels. And all of those pockets, you know, pockets like this exist all over the world, whether it's in Russia, whether it's in Kenya, whether it's in West Africa, whether it's in, you know, right now we're seeing some interesting things in Norway and some of the endurance sports, right?

2:06:31So it's for sure. Nurture is really, really important. But genetics gets you in the room, what you do in it within that room. That's that's up to you in your environment that you create. It's so interesting how these different cultures shape the future of a sport or an endeavor in China. Kids are highly incentivized to learn a lot and test a lot in math and sciences. And they're really big on neuroscience in China. I think these nature nurture questions are super interesting. It sounds like Jamaica is still churning out a lot of excellent sprinters. Because of the huge numbers that are fed to the sport and can be, you know, essentially grow up, their nervous systems are shaped around sprinting.

2:07:13Yeah. Couple that with any number of different features. And we were talking about you talked about short calf bellies, right? This is the this is the fear of every bodybuilder, right? They they want long calf bellies. But short calf bellies make people faster and better jumpers, not because the calf is short, but because because the tendon is long. Okay. Essentially, we've got, you know, each muscle is really a muscle tendon unit. And if you've got a longer tendon relative to your muscle effectively, you're a little bit more plyometric. You can store and release energy a little bit more effectively than somebody who has a shorter tendon and a longer or bigger, fatter thicker muscle.

2:07:53So we want really, if you want to be fast, you want long skinny tendons and small little muscle bellies. So, you know, so what serves aesthetics sometimes doesn't necessarily serve the sport and vice versa. So if you had to pick one, you'd want to be able to jump and run faster. Would you? Sure. I mean, I don't I'm not going to get yeah, I mean, I suppose that having very short calves would be weird, but who wouldn't want to run faster or jump higher, you know, for all sorts of reasons, just be so much fun. Yeah, absolutely. I don't have a lot of hops, but it's actually a time to talk about knees over toes guy, Ben Patrick.

2:08:33He fought a lot of adversity to encourage people, including a lot of exercise physiologists and the people who do rehab from various aspects that, you know, putting your knees out over your toes is okay. Cut a lot of heat, but I think the fact that he's so skilled at jumping and dunking and backbend and landing and backbends and things that sort puts them all the shame, frankly, I think most people understand now that that Ben is really onto something with this. One of the things that he's a big proponent of is a lot of eccentric loading, but also not being afraid to get that knee way out over the toe.

2:09:13What is the deal with running form as it were? Is the idea that if you can get your knee higher, you can stride further, and then when we talk about knee back toward butt, how far back are we supposed to like kick our own glutes when we when we stride? I mean, what is a proper running stride or is it going to vary by structure? Well, that's that's a big question. Yeah, like explain that in five seconds. I'm just kidding. But you know, for those of us who want to run a bit faster, do some some stride work. Should I be reaching with my front leg and pulling myself forward on the ground? 100 % not.

2:09:50Please do not do that. And I shouldn't be just quickening my turn over of a jogging stride. So that's part of it. First of all, let's start at the start and understand that the way you move is going to be governed by the things that you are moving. So how you move is governed by the stuff that you've got. So you cannot move in a way in which your body will not allow. So if you have a certain structure of your joints or a certain mobility structure or a certain genetic makeup or a certain stiffness or a certain muscle fiber type, all of those things come together. They all coalesce to start a governed your motor strategy.

2:10:32So the last thing that I would want you to do, Andrew, is to copy you saying both sprinting stride. Because you're saying both of six foot five, two and 15 pounds. He's a little bit more dynamic than you. He's probably got slightly longer to kill his tendons than you. He's probably got tighter, smaller joints than you. He's probably a lot more elastic than you are. He's probably a little bit more coordinated than you are. So why would I want you to try to copy that? So my job, first and foremost, is to understand how you should or how you could move based upon the constraints that you have based upon what are known as your action capabilities.

2:11:13So your force capacity, your mobility capacity, all of these things that make up who you are, your height, your weight, your joint length, your joint ratios, all of these different things, your limit ratios. So first, it's understanding that we are governed by the stuff that we have. So we should never be trying to copy someone else, first and foremost. Number two, is then we should have some sort of understanding of what is the common way to do a thing. And then we can probably simplify this. We kind of know a little bit about how we, what a model looks like for a back squat. Or for a deadlift.

2:11:54Or for you choose your exercise, we kind of have a model for that, whether that's a mathematical model, or whether that model was based upon the average of a bunch of elite movers, we can't, okay, we can't understand what quote unquote optimal is mathematically. But we also have to understand that we are not math. We are biological beings that will all move in slightly varying ways, depending upon the stuff that we are moving. So yes, we look at that model, but we also look at what we've got. And we try to find somewhere in the middle that serves us. So in sprinting, and in probably in most activities, we try to identify like what are the non -negotiables?

2:12:37What are the rules here? Like in squatting, we know what the rules are, right? We don't want to bend to one side. We don't want to overly flex our spine. We don't want to and truly rotate our shoulders. We don't want to have knee valgens where our knees come in and touch each other. We don't want to have super wide feet. We don't want to have internally rotated feet when we're squatting. All of these things that we know that we don't do, they govern the things that we can do. So in sprinting, we have something similar. We don't know as much about sprinting as we do. And some of the more, or maybe the less complex movements, more discrete movements, like a squat, like a deadlift, like a powercling.

2:13:15The sprinting is coordinated. It continues. It's rhythmic. So it's a little bit harder for us to actually study. But we do know that, as you said, one of the things you said was high knees. And most of the elite sprinters converge upon similar positions when their knee is super high. And that knee gets up to about waist height, like just almost belly button height when they're running as fast as they can. So we know if we want to be fast, we've got to try and bring our knees up. And we talked about that before too, right? The difference between striding and sprinting and jogging and running. We're jogging and running happens behind the center mass and striding and sprinting is in front of the center mass.

2:13:53So maybe first and foremost, we think about bringing the knee up. Knees got to be a little bit higher. You have to think about being in front. We know that for sure, every elite sprinter sets up a very stiff spring on the ground by being very, very strong and stiff and rigid through the foot ankle complex. So you have to be stiff on impact. So think about the analogy that I give all the time is if you think about you're a boxer or you're boxing and you're hitting a heavy bag, what would you do with your wrists and your fists? You'd squeeze it and hold it rigidly. Because if you didn't, it would really hurt.

2:14:31And if you try and hit it as hard as you can, you want it to be, you have to be squeezed, squeezed. It's the same thing with sprinting. Because the force is by the way, you're pretty similar. An elite boxer hits a heavy bag in somewhere in excess of five times their body weight in less than 300s of a second. It's exact the same as sprinting. An elite sprinting is in excess of five times their body weight in less than 300s of a second time to peak force on ground ground contact. So knees are up and we're very stiff on the ground. And the third thing is if you do not have an effective hip extension pattern, you just can't move well.

2:15:09Never mind, run fast. You have to have the ability for your need to come behind your butt. Now that's a hard thing to define. It's a hard thing to quantify. People ask me all the time, like, what do you mean? Like, what is a good pattern? If I talk about the hip extension pattern and the importance of that, it's not just range of motion. So that's the one that you alluded to is, you know, how far behind. Well, the further the knee gets behind the center mass, the more the range of motion is not just that. Because in sprinting when you're upright, especially, you want to almost limit the amount of time that the knee travels behind the butt.

2:15:46Because they're longer than the knee travels behind the butt. The longer you're on the ground, the slower you are. So range of motion for you or for me or for Rob or for anyone listening, for running is going to be very different from a no -aliles or an Andre de Grasse or a Usain Bolt. But this the qualitative aspect of all of those things is still really important. And the way in which I judge the quality of a pattern is kind of five fivefold. Do you have the force capacity to be able to extend your hip? Are you strong enough? Can you actually get your knee behind the hip? And many people just can't do that because they're not strong enough.

2:16:24Do you have the velocity capacity? Can you actually move your limb fast enough to get it behind? Do you have the range of motion? And most team sport athletes, you know, if I'm going in and talking to coaches who work in team sports, that's the big that's the low hanging fruit that they just don't have the range. So number three is the range. Number four is the control. And if you're a kid, if you're a 14 -year -old, you probably don't have the control of that pattern. And five is can you do it over and over again? Can you actually repeat it? So when we're looking at the judging of a pattern, its force, velocity, repeatability, control, and range of motion is those five things.

2:17:01So that's, you know, that's a long answer to what I could talk about for literally days is what are the things that we're looking at for sprinting? The ability to get the thigh up high, the ability to contact the ground really aggressively, and the ability to get the thigh or the knee behind the hip with high quality. What are your thoughts on skipping rope? Yeah, I think the ability to coordinate, flexion extension at the ankle knee and hip is really important. So you're coordinating the movement pattern of both the ankle, at the knee and the hip, and coordinating all of those in space and time.

2:17:37And the ability to do that as we've talked about is one of the things that we lose as we age. So skipping is one of those things that can quite simply work on that cord and the aspect. What I see too often though is people skipping incorrectly and skipping only through their ankles and not really doing a lot through the knees and the hip. And they just sort of plan of flex, or torsiflex, plan of flex, torsiflex. So they just push up on their toes and they come off where we need to understand that plan of flexion or going up onto your toes is in dynamic movements, a reflexive movement. It's not a volitional movement.

2:18:09It's not a movement that we should be thinking about or trying to control. Always you'd be thinking about is just bouncing. As if we're bouncing on a trampoline, just bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, and actually keeping our foot as stiff as we can. Just like skipping for me, I just equate it to hitting a heavy bag over and over and over again. You can't do that if you're on your toes. You want to be on the balls of your feet, like right on the base of your toes. And then you say a lot easier to just bounce. Think about it bouncing. So I think it's a great activity from that perspective is sort of just teaching how to coordinate the, what's called the amortization of all of the joints of the lower body.

2:18:53And then as far as how to do it, what to do it, I just feel just do it. You know what I mean? I just do it with heavy ropes, do it with light ropes, have fun with it. I think there's probably too many times they were constrained by what people like me say to do, what is right. Just have fun. And just just just you know, find a way in which to express yourself and enjoy the movement. If you love jumping rope or hopping rope, go do that. Just make sure that you try to understand what doing it well looks like or feels like so you can do it well. I like to put on an album and skip for the album and then somehow just let the music when I feel moved to skip different faster high knees or something like that.

2:19:33Yeah. Because then there's like this external coach slash rhythm. It's something I like. I'm not thinking about too much. And then next say, I know I've got, you know, 35 minutes of quote unquote cardio done with a piece of plastic. I don't know. Something very satisfying about doing that. I don't know why. Not long. It's a, yeah, I see you can probably tell I'm getting more and more interested in things that drawn more aspects of the nervous system, mind and body, rectus size. Because while I love the jam, I think it can be too linear and too rigid. Yeah. And I think it leads to rigidity in one's thinking.

2:20:12And that might come as a surprise to a lot of people think, Oh, you know, it's all, you know, all these protocols have to be done. You know, there's a fundamentally correct way to do most things like get morning sunlight in your eyes. But if it's five minutes or seven minutes, depends on how bright it is and that what time of year, I mean, you know, I feel like the biology is flexible. Yeah. And learning to go by feel can be very, very helpful. Yeah, I think we lose that too, right? We've got to remember, you know, principles are few in methods of many. There's many ways to do different things as long as they align with the principles.

2:20:45Just think about what the principles are. And then just be creative in choosing the methods that work for you. Yeah, this is where peer reviewed science, unfortunately, can't measure every variable. Yeah. You know, people say, well, like what have there been a study comparing, you know, five, 10, 15, 20 minutes or 30 minutes of morning sunlight, you know, because you're lucky if you get a hundred subjects, you got to pay those subjects, you got to get them to come in, you're tracking sleep, you're, you use 10 ,000 lux in one group and, you know, control light in another, I mean, you just don't have the option to work through every variable in anything.

2:21:20Even a dose response study of a drug, you can't account for nutrition and the drug and then people go, well, then how can we trust any of this? It's a, you know, standard science as it were, reduction of science is just one lens through these things. Yeah. That doesn't mean that people's experience is necessarily smarter than data. It just means that data have to mesh with experience and experience with data. Yeah, I think data can inform the decisions we make, but they are not the decisions that we make. We use that data. But what's, you know, it's, it's what's most important is how all of these data points, all this information comes together.

2:21:59You know, it's the, it's the relationships and the interactions between the component parts, which is more important than the individual component parts themselves. So we have to understand what those relationships are. That's the thing we need to focus a little bit on. I'd like to talk about weight training. What do sprinters do for their weight training? And if somebody like me is interested in becoming a faster runner, doing a maybe even sprinting some day, besides just doing skips and strides, what are some ways of doing exercises in the gym that can potentially facilitate our ability to move better outside of the gym?

2:22:35First, let's look at the kinetics of sprinting. Sprinting is only really, truly about four things. How much force you apply in the ground? How fast can you apply it? The direction in which you apply it and how heavy you are? And it's just those four things. How much force? How fast? Wish direction. What is your mass? So we need to, yeah, force is important. We have to be able to apply a certain level of force. But there's a threshold to this. Everyone says there's a big question and has been for a long time. How much strength, quote unquote, is enough in sprinting? Well, enough is it's the same question that we ask.

2:23:13We should ask in every task. There's a rate of diminishing returns on all of these capacities that we need that we require. Is spending an extra few years trying to get an extra five kilos to your power clean or an extra 25 pounds to your back squat as effective as a means to get faster than it would be if it's that you start skipping. Maybe do some more explosive work. Actually start sprinting a little bit more. So there's always this from a programming perspective is understanding where the athlete is, what they require, what they've got, where they are in the rate of diminishing returns on each of those capacities.

2:23:52So first, we have to understand that. Let me zoom out just a little bit. I coach Andre, Andrea, Andrea de Grasse as we talked about. Andre, when I started coaching him in 2015, could barely squat his body weight. Eight months later, he's three time Olympic medalist. Eight months later, he was one and a half years into a sprinting career. He'd sprinted for 18 months. He had three Olympic medals in the sprints, the 100 to the 200 and the 4 by one. He could barely squat his body weight. He could clean 60 kilos, so 135 pounds. He definitely couldn't bench a plate and a half. He might have had 145 pounds.

2:24:33Maybe super weak. But on the other end of the spectrum, Mrs. The Example that everyone gives, you've got Ben Johnson. Famously, Ben Johnson did the 600 pounds squat a couple of days prior to winning in the Tokyo Olympics in 1988, running 979. Obviously, that was there after taking away after he tested positive. So you've gone a one end of the spectrum, somebody like Ben Johnson, who applies incredibly, incredible amounts of force. And on the other end, you've got somebody like Andre de Grasse, who doesn't apply relatively any force, but does it really, really fast. So this gives you an understanding of the spectrum of capacities and abilities that humans have to do a task in almost infinite number of ways.

2:25:27So to get to your question, it depends on who you are and what you're good at and why you're good at it. There's not one way. When you've got a Ben Johnson, who can apply incredible amounts of forces, and that's one of the reasons why he's fast. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got Andre de Grasse, who's weaker than most high school girls, who's incredibly fast. Where does that leave us? That just tells us, okay, there's many different ways to do this, which is great. It's cool. That gives us, again, some freedom to better ask the questions about what it is that makes you and you're really good.

2:25:58Like, you apply a lot of force. Okay, let's lean into that. Let's try to improve your speed by, try to maximize your force, but what are you limited by? Okay, you're having trouble getting off the ground. You're not super reactive or reflexive. So we have to work some things into your program that's going to make you a little bit more reactive or reflexive. So maybe we'll do some jump squats, maybe we'll do some hurdle hops, maybe we'll do some more skipping. Maybe we feel like, okay, you've reached the rate of diminishing returns on your force capacity. You don't need to squat four plates if you squat 385.

2:26:33Is going from 385 to 405 going to make you any faster? No, not at all. So let's keep you with 385 and we'll just do some other things. So first and foremost, it's respecting the individuality of all things and understanding that there's not one way in which I can tell you do this because this is what he did and that's what's going to work for you. Now there is, as I said before, there's non -negotiables and there's rules to things. So sprinting is how you transmit that force into the track in a really fast period of time in the right direction. So the transmission of force is typically more important than the magnitude of the force and at least at the elite end, at least at the adult end.

2:27:20So transmission of force means how the amount of force that you put into the ground, how do you use it to propel yourself forward? So what are the types of exercises that maybe what would you think about if I said this is a force transmission exercise rather than say a force magnitude exercises? Is that something that appeals to you? Yeah, jump squat comes to mind. Jump squat comes to mind and he kind of like push clap push ups. You know the ability to like double clap or more. Yes, that's what comes to mind. I think that's pretty accurate. Olympic lifts is one that where a lot of people would say, yeah, Olympic lift, that's kind of what we're doing with the Olympic lifts.

2:28:06Yeah, like a cleaner kind of. I'm not, I don't do Olympic lifts, but from what I understand, you know, they're pushing off the ground to get the bar up. Yeah. It's essentially, can we apply high forces fast over a long period of time? So that's kind of, we do, we spend a lot of time looking at those types of exercises. Slide work. We don't do any sled work. We can get back to that if you if you don't. No sled work for elite sprint. We don't we do resisted acceleration work. So we'll sprint. We'll do some specific strength work where we're pulling you know, probably in excess of 10 to 15 kilos, you know, so 20 to 30 pounds ish.

2:28:46Do you use the parachute? That was a big thing. No, remember that? Yeah, I use the parachute 20 years ago. Absolutely, we don't know. We we we actually have a we have a piece of equipment called the power cord. We use that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's pretty good. I'm not on the 1080 sprint, which is this incredible piece of equipment that we use that we can really dial in the resistance down to like, you know, a half a kilo. That's it's beautiful. So we use that, but that's for different reasons. So the you talked about the weight room in in the in the population of athletes I work with.

2:29:18Maximum strength is at the rate of diminishing returns already. We don't spend almost any time working on that at a lower level of population. Maybe if you're high school kid or if you're in your 20s, when you're not super or if you're super weak, just by increasing your force capacity, so your ability to apply force, you will get faster. Because remember what the calculation is, amount of force, how fast direction and body mass. So it is important. It just becomes less and less and less important, the faster you get. So it's and then it becomes when it's less important, when the ability to produce a high magnitude of force is important, what is important?

2:30:00So then we're starting to looking at plyometric things. And probably most specifically, I'm looking at specific isometric stuff in the weight room. So let's look at the position in which we're applying in excess of five times our body weight. And that's when the foot is directly underneath the center mass. The foot is flat on the ground. There's about a 15 degree knee bend and there's about a five to 10 degree hip bend. So if you can you think think about that position? So we're pushing up against a movable bar or holding a very, very heavy bar on one leg with as heavy as we can, or as hard as we can, for somewhere between three to five seconds times three to four repetitions and we'll do like three sets of that.

2:30:49That's Alex Neteros work. He's one of the the premier researchers in what's called run specific isometric strength training. So it's getting strong in really specific positions to the task that you're trying to be come better at. So that's the primary one for me. Is that position where the foot is directly underneath the center mass? There's a little bit of knee bend. There's a little bit of a hip bend. And we do a lot of isometric work right there. And then I, and this is my bias, I do nothing bilateral at all. You mean parallel stance? Yes. No parallel stance. Nothing except occasionally if it is an issue, you know, with neural drive or whatever, I'll do some chat bar deadlifts.

2:31:34So some parallel stance chat bar deadlifts. I think it's a great exercise. I think that's difficult to do with a staggered stance. It's very difficult to do with a single leg stance, but you can load up some pretty good weight on a parallel stance chat bar deadlifts. And yeah, I feel pretty good. And you get a good feeling out of that. It's not necessarily to be able to or generate more force. It's more about sort of neural drive than is for anything else. Every single other thing that we do is in a staggered stance, heel to toe or kickstand, which is kind of the same sort of thing. There's a different terminology or split stance or a stance where the front foot is elevated or the rear foot is elevated.

2:32:16So we'll do as we've talked about quite a bit now, find opportunities to get the knee behind the butt. That's a really important position. Can we get stronger, faster, more control, more repeatability, more range at that position? One of the things I learned from you yesterday is, well, let's I'll double click first on this staggered stance. So this is one foot slightly in front of the other. I've been doing this with various lifts in the gym for a long time. I would say the exception would be if I'm belt squatting or hack squatting, I don't do that. But for everything else overhead presses, anything where my feet are in contact with the ground that is not on pull -ups and dips, of course, but curls, tricep extensions.

2:32:59And I make sure to vary the stance of one foot is in front for one set, one is in front for the other. Sometimes even in the middle of the set, I'll I'll switch them up after and I found that to be tremendously helpful for building course stability and a number of other things. And it sounds like it might help running gate as well. The other thing that you said yesterday that I think is really important, I've not thought of before, but now I'm doing is anytime you have a foot elevated in the gym to get onto the toe, front foot can be flat. Yeah, I think the ability to get off your first ray so before the big toe to bend and flex is really important.

2:33:35So for me, if that's important, I'm going to search for opportunities to do that as often as I can. So if I have an option to either flex the big toe or not, then we're going to flex the big toe. Now if you can't and many athletes cannot, you know, there's a lot of athletes that just cannot extend to that big toe or some athletes have bunions and just can't get over it. And that's okay. We can go onto the top of the foot, which is not the end of the world, but I look for opportunities like that. Like I look for opportunities to extend the hip. How can I work hip extension exercises into everything I do?

2:34:08How do I look at or do I look for full chain or full body force transmission exercises as much as I possibly can, ideally from the left foot to the right hand and the right foot to the left hand so cross body. So I'm looking for these long, fascial chains, the ways in which I can bring some function to the work that I'm doing in the weight room. Some level of transferability between the things that I do in the weight room and the things that we do on the track because frankly, most of the things that we do in the weight room don't transfer to the track. A squat doesn't really transfer. It's a totally different exercise, performed a totally different way at a totally different time, totally different weights.

2:34:51So the transference is very, very far. It's very it's not very nebulous. So I'm looking for ways in which we can find a way to transfer the capacities that we are building in a weight room directly to the track. And with respect to stretching, I'm thinking again of yoga because this is where the private for somebody done this where one would lunge. So front foot planted flat, rear foot up on the big toe if possible. The knee back of that rear foot or rear leg, excuse me, back behind the butt. And then the opposite arm raised above. That's that fascial sling that cuts across from, you know, anatomy, no, my clibber, control lateral across the middle line.

2:35:33And then essentially trying to learn to feel that line that goes all the way from one's big toe that's planted back across up the leg, across the pelvis, up the body, and shoulder to the opposite tips of finger. 100 % and it's if if I can add to that stretch, this is something that I really love Kelly about. You know, he's he's so much on, I need you to be in control of your body. There is a way to do this, but then it's up to you to find out a better way for you specifically. So you've done a great job without lining what the stretch looks like. Now what can I do with my body to actually make this better?

2:36:13Do I rotate to one side? Do I side bend to one side? Do I flex the hand as well as well as doing this? Because this will be a better stretch than that. So palm parallel to the ceiling. 100 % of the raised hand. Correct. If I push the knee back and try to push the heel on the ground and actually contract, if I rotate my pelvis underneath me posteriorly, like, you know, do a pelvic tilt underneath my well, well, that increase it. So it's always this explore, exploratory process. There is a right way to do things, but you are an individual. We're all unique snowflakes, right? We're all moving different ways and it's up to us to explore all of our uniqueness.

2:36:52Distant topic from the one that we're on, but one that I and I think a number of people are curious about is drugs in sports. Performance enhancing drugs. There's a new, potentially new sports league, track league, which is the enhanced games. Who knows if that will go through. But right now, using performance enhancing drugs, most performance enhancing drugs is banned in track. But because of the Ben Johnson thing, that was 88 Olympics, where he was like, John, just at the eyes and that, you know, it turned out he was taking windstrawl and he was stripped of his metal. And then the discussion is they're all using it.

2:37:37Some just get caught. This kind of thing. Are they using in the off season? How common is people usually say steroid use, but androgen enhancement, right? Because performance enhancing drugs could be drugs to lower the heart rate for the biathletes. They do that too, right? Keep your heart rate lower. You know, there's all sorts of drugs that are banned that are not androgen increasing, but yeah. But things like testosterone derivatives in the men and women, how common is it? Yeah. Now, not common at all. In fact, I don't know of any elite sprinter that I could definitely point to say that person is dirty.

2:38:20None. It was common. 60s and 70s, they stream the common. 80s, very, very common. 90s, when testing started becoming a bit better, much less common. 2000s, 2010s and 20s. I just don't know how much of it is getting done now or being done. Across the board, there are pockets. So we obviously know about Russia and what's going on with the Eastern block and all of the drugs that they've taken. That's been state sponsored. All of that is out there. We know that for sure, if you were an elite Russian athlete, almost certainly you were taking drugs. You didn't have a choice. You didn't have a choice.

2:38:56No one really knows now because Russia has been banned from all sports. So you don't see Russian athletes almost anywhere. I think there's a few sports that you do, but most of them now you don't see Russian athletes. But it's so hard. That's a part of the culture and has been part of the culture for since the 50s. That's what we do because everyone else is cheating. So this is what we do. So it's a state sponsored system. And I feel like there's a 150 or 160 something like that. Positive drug cases come out of Kenya over the course of the last decade. So you think, okay, there's something going on with Kenyans.

2:39:35Is that distance running? Distance running. And there I should say, because some people might not be familiar with this, with distance running or cycling, triathlon, it's probably not increasing androgens like testosterone, dihydrochestosterone, etc. It's probably things that increase red blood cell count ability to deliver more oxygen and fuel sources to the cells. EPO, these things like that. And this one in Kenya, I understand it. I understand the Russian thing as well. Like if you're a Kenyan kid, you're 18 years old, you've got some talent. An agent comes to you and says, I'm going to give you $50 ,000 and I'm going to support you for the first two years of your career.

2:40:17And this is what everyone does anyway. And we'll take the risk a little bit, but you can actually make something of yourself. Become a star, get a house, feed your family, do this, do that. That's a hard calculation for a kid to make. As it was in the steroid error and baseball, it's almost logical to take drugs at that point. No, these guys aren't testing me at all. So why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't Barry Bond's take drugs? Now, that's a different calculation for most of the rest of the world, whether it isn't these practices going on in Kenya with a lot of shady people to be honest with you. And I honestly, I do not see drugs at all in the sport anymore.

2:40:59There will be pockets of people, like for sure. There will be some dirt. There will be a few dirty coaches. There will be a few dirty managers. There'll be a few people doing some dirty things. But I'm very, very confident that the top people in all of the events are doing it clean. Very confident. That's crazy. I hear it. And I would not know the first, like I've been in the sport for a long time. I would know what to do, what to take, who to get it from. So when I look at, I look at, choose your athlete. I won't name any names. And you look at who they're surrounded by. I know those people well.

2:41:32How would they do it? I had no idea. No one really knows. Because the drug testing is pretty stringent now. It's really strong. It's hard. It's really, really hard. That's encouraging to hear, especially for young people who are watching Olympics. And it's a terrible thing that, with they were to think, oh, you know, they're all, they're all using. I think one good trend in the last few years is there's a lot more openness now in the fitness world. Because when I was growing up, of course, those like, Vainy, Bodybuilder people were, they were all just to the gills. And they'd say they weren't.

2:42:07But they absolutely were. And nowadays, if people are doing TRT or something, they say it. I've talked about it. Microdose every other day since I was 45, never before then. But I've relied on other things to keep testosterone in range. And I take HCG, maintain fertility. That's all checked out. But I'm very clear about exactly how much the internet has it wrong. It's 25 milligrams every other day, by the way. I'm staggered with 600. I use of HCG every other day. I said that early on because I was like, I'm not competitive athlete. I got nothing to hide. And I'll say that was it TRT? I'll say not really because my testosterone was in mid -7s.

2:42:45But I was getting fatigued a lot and bumping it up a little bit higher, which is what this has done has been great for me. But it's the people that lie, like the liver king situation where he looked at the camera, unfortunately, and filmed himself saying that he doesn't. And then he gets caught. It's like, blah. And then you've got people that are juicing really hard. And it's tricky in sports because or in movies, right? Like when an actor suddenly is like big and shredded and you're just like, oh, you know the telltale signs. It's probably not testosterone is probably oxandrolone or something a little bit quote unquote lighter.

2:43:20But there's nothing light about oxandrolone on your liver or your hairline folks. So but this is a bigger discussion. But I think it's important to just be open about it. Yeah. You know, because we want to see people run faster than ever before. We want to see people jump higher than ever before. We want to see people run marathons faster than ever before. And it sucks when we find out that they were enhanced and that was breaking the rules. What sucks more is the reputational damage that those things do for the people who are actually doing this well and clean, right? The 99 .9 % of the people are trying to do this the right way that are being colored with the same brush.

2:44:03Right. And that's what really frustrates me. It was really frustrating. I've coached one athlete in my career who tested positive. 2001 Olympic trials in Bob's blood. His name was Pavlage Ivanovich. He was at the time the best Bob said around the planet.

2:44:26So tested positive for mangelone. So Deca de Bruvone. Later it was shown that it came from his supplement. So if you remember, this was 2001. Oh, yeah, you could buy GHB at 90s and G and C at that time. Correct. Late 90s up until the early 2000s, there were supplement companies purposefully lacing their protein with steroids to try to sell more supplements. That's gracious. And there's studies that showed this. And they ended up, there was a group of athletes that all tested positive that sued this one company. That and you know, the company ended up just, you know, declaring bankruptcy and nobody got a sentence.

2:45:11Long story short, ruined his career, ruined his reputation, ended up taking his own life. So I've seen, and this is, you know, if it's just people from the outside just look at that and say, uh, just another druggy Bob saider. Just another druggy football player, just another druggy Sprinter. They're all on drugs. And they're not. They're not 99 .9 % of people are trying to do this right. Like they're good people, not making any money in this sport, especially in track and field. It's a different calculation, as you said in Hollywood or in the NFL or in baseball where the testing is significantly more relaxed than it is in track and field or significantly more relaxed than what it is in almost all amateur sports.

2:45:55Amateur sports almost impossible to be dirty these days. It really is. And if you just think about this, Trey Vom Bromell ran 997 as a high school kid. He was 5 foot 7 135 pounds. I think that kid was taking drugs. Of course he wasn't. So if you can run 997 as a 17 year old, at that age, why can't you run 97? Six, seven, eight years later after actually training and being in a lead program. Of course he can. You're saying Bolt ran 1984 when he was 18 years old. He ran sub 10 when he was 19 years old. Whirl class. Just a kid. Just a kid. Yeah. Like these, you know, you're still high school kids now running ridiculously fast times in the mile as well.

2:46:42In every single event, right? Every event across the world. And they're not assisted. This is one thing where I hear we're cutting between sport and we're talking about fitness. And you know, the reason I mentioned the age when I started TRT is that a, never occurred to me, didn't need it. I felt like I got great results until then. And I think the biggest thing is recovery. I think it helps. I do think it helps you recover better. No question, actually. But a real shame nowadays is that because of Instagram and people showing their bodies and this desire for people to get results more quickly.

2:47:21A lot of guys in their teens, 20s and 30s are taking testosterone when they don't need it. It does shut down sperm production unless they're offsetting that with HCG or something like that. And they may think they don't want kids now, but they may want them later. And some permanent damage can be done. And in addition to that, I mean, puberty is a very protracted thing for a lot of people. It's not like, oh, you know, you start puberty at 14 to 16. The brain's still developing. So we don't really understand how all that works. Not this Olympics, but prior to that one, there was a female athlete who tested positive for Deca.

2:47:58The Deca burrito. She blamed it on a burrito meat. And I remember hearing that. And I sort of facetiously said, and I'll say it again, not facetiously, like if she got caught for Deca, I hope she took Deca because to knowingly take a band substance and get caught and then band from the sport is one thing. But to inadvertently take a band substance as did this bobsledter and then get banned from your sport, that's a real tragedy for multiple reasons. That's what happened. It's dreadful. It is. It's absolutely dreadful. She just started competing again like last month. Rob and I were actually talking about this yesterday at the track.

2:48:43She's made the world indoor team for USATF starting next week, I think. It definitely happens. You know, we look at that and there's, yeah, they're blaming the burrito. They're blaming meat to whatever, but 100%. Why would you, you run 5K? Why are you taking Deca? Why are you taking Nangelo? It doesn't make sense. No, it makes zero sense. You're not doing that. Yeah. Like that is from the meat. Well, I get contacted a lot, probably not as much as other people do, by athletes at different levels, professional amateur, etc, asking about ways to improve testosterone, etc. I got great results all through my mid 30s until mid 40s and still with like Tonga Ali freeing some testosterone up.

2:49:25My blood charts told me that worked for me, may not work for everybody. Great. Fodogia, things like that. Things like that subtle effects, but meaningful, subtle, but meaningful. And then athletes will ask me, well, is it allowed? I said, you have to check with your organization. You just can't take something. You have to check with your organization. The thing I well aware of now is all the peptide use. Right. Peptides are really, really big and they're in use in the general population more and more. And it'll be interesting to see how those impact sport. I'm not aware of any athletes. At least not have come to me saying they take these peptides.

2:49:58But it's going to be interesting to see how that shapes sport. I think people overestimate how much these drugs contribute to success at the elite level. Because I mean, what you're talking about with these athletes you work with are just the hundreds and hundreds of hours of work to get a 1 % improvement in some metric. Or 0 .1 % or 0 .1%. I think people really overestimate it. Sure, if people just want to be big with a bunch of acne, yeah, you can do that. Big acne sterile. You can get that in the locker room, most any gym nowadays. Please don't do it. But to get half a second off your time.

2:50:47It's no drugs. No drugs. It's a thousand of hours of work. It is sleeping really well. It's eating really well. It's having a good, proper life. You know, there's no shortcut to that. There really isn't. You've got to get really, really fast to be fast. And this is even back in the drug era. You didn't take drugs to be fast. You got fast first and then you took drugs and I made you faster. That's how people did it. You don't take drugs to get fast. You don't go from 10, 2 to 10 flat or 10, 3 to 10 flat or 10, 2 to 9, 8. It doesn't happen that way. So it's now, it's for me, it's like the most important one for me is, are you training well?

2:51:29Is it organized properly? Are you sleeping well? Are you eating well? Are you taking whatever the good, clean supplements that you can take? And we take very, very few, by the way. And do you have a good social life? And then all of these things come together and interact in a way that feeds your purpose of running fast. That's it. Honestly, it says, as I said with Andre, I started working with Andre in 2015. He could not squat his body weight basically, three Olympic medals, 18 months after starting the sport. It can be done, which shows, yeah, okay, this is being done. That's awesome. And it points to the fact that more muscle isn't always the solution.

2:52:13Now, the things that keep coming to mind are the ability to put away self -consciousness, to use the body to express, to find oneself. And it's so interesting because I thought we were going to sit down and talk about running. But I think these are much larger. And if I may, more important themes, although people should definitely skip and stride and do ply metrics. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. I asked you this question earlier. Do you feel like there is a single metric that is a better determinant for overall health of vitality than the ability to maximally sprint? Now, not be fast, but to go out and actually sprint maximally.

2:53:06Think about all of the things that come along with the ride with that. Think about VO2 max. VO2 max in and of itself isn't important. It's a proxy for all of these other things that are important. The ability to sprint maximally isn't necessarily important, but it's a proxy for everything else. I can't think of anything else. And you're talking to somebody who's now working on grip strength because I was challenged publicly by Paul Saladino, the carnivore MD who now talks about animal diet. And people are starting to take him more seriously, by the way, because at first it was all meat. Then it was meat and fruit.

2:53:43It was meat fruit and some dairy. I do this. And I also eat vegetables. The guy has salad in his name, for God's sake. He's a friend. I'm friends with him. I'm friends with Lane. I'm friends with the tea. I get along with all those guys. But some of them don't get along with each other. I'll tell you that. But he challenged me to a grip strength contest, which actually was not grip strength. And he said, this is the marker of longevity. And he had a little bastard hung from a bar, switching hands for 12 plus minutes. In the rain. Now he had someone tallying off the bar, but that is a very impressive grip strength slash endurance score.

2:54:25As long as we're on this, I mean, this has become like kind of an online thing. People want to challenge each other with, hear my biometrics. You asked, what are the markers of longevity? Brian Johnson is big on these are my markers. Those have become controversial lately because it's unclear the markers were all collected at the same date. You know, there's questions about, for instance, it's weird that testosterone will be elevated, but not showing LH means you're probably enhanced. And that if he is cool, but people need to be very open. The nice thing about what Paul showed is he showed the full length video.

2:54:56Right. You have to show the full length video. Folks, Brian, I'm calling you out. Specifically, you can't post VO2 max and not show the actual ride and the read off the off the, you have to show video. People don't trust it anymore. And so the point here is is grip strength. Is it VO2 max? Is it your testosterone relative to free testosterone? It's all these things. Like you said, if I were to step back and say, is there a single physical metric? I think you got me. I think that the ability to run fast without blowing a gasket or injuring yourself in some way, run fast for you, would be it. And I did not think about that or, and I certainly would have said that at the beginning of this conversation.

2:55:46So I think it's a very important insight. And that if nothing else should motivate everybody to get better at it. And they can check out the video that we did. What you said earlier has become to me and will remain my goal. I think that well -being, physical well -being, mental well -being is the ability to exert, express pressure mentally and physically. Like sit down like, you know, to actually generate pressure around doing something hard that's, you know, takes an organization of mind and body. It could be a physical pursuit and then to feel peace from the better expression of that cognitive or physical or creative endeavor.

2:56:27I think this, this pressure piece thing is more than non -trivial. I think it's the essence of what I've been seeking my whole life, the ability to exert pressure and to create things that are meaningful. And then the ability to feel peace. I think is, well, it's yours. You came up with it. I'm just, I was applying it to specifically a task, a hundred meters sprint test. And you've taken it, that makes a lot of sense. I love that. Because you got to sleep at night, you got a train hard, 100%. You got to do your, if you're me, you know, formal education, and then you got to also relax and have a good time.

2:57:05Can you do it all at the same time? That's the, that's the key. Yeah. Can you structure your days in a way where the first two thirds is just pure pressure and be okay with that because you know there's peace coming because of some of the things that you pressure upon yourself? Well, I love it. And it's all, it's all yours, too. And I have to say, it's been years. I've been wanting to sit down and talk with you for a very long time. We run into each other at track meets. We do. And it's a real honor and pleasure. You've taught us so much, and there's much more. So I hope you'll come back at some point and we'll talk about other things as things evolve.

2:57:40Talk about sprinting. Talk about sprinting. And I'll do a dangerous thing, which is to say, if folks want to go to a track meet, I'll be at the track meets. And I'll probably be letting people know when I'll be at track meets. I go as a fan. I'm not looking for attention there. I'm actually there to just enjoy the incredible expression of the athletes, both physical and emotional expression. It's a real, it's a real beautiful thing. I'm really, it's not appreciated. I appreciate you showing up to those meets and talking about those meets. It's important for our possibly dying sport. So it's important that we get more people out to these meets and support track and feel the foundation of human movement.

2:58:24Well, you're a legend, as everyone says, in the sport and outside of it too. Thanks so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure and an honor. Thanks Andrew. Appreciate you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Stu McMillan to learn more about his work and to find links to resources that Stu provides. Please see the show note captions. If you're learning from Endor and join this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple.

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