2717: Pain Isn't What You Think w/ Dr. Jordan Shallow

28:29But why do things like foam rollers consistently quote unquote work? Because you're increasing the precision of their sensory data. What is a foam roller? What does it do? It applies deep pressure to tissue, right? Why is that useful? It's like, well, we have these things called mechanoreceptors, right? Like the fact that we have this argument and I don't know where you guys stand on it, but when we look in like, look, foam rollers work, you know how I know? Cause my client goes, I feel better with a foam roller. And I go, okay, I need to figure out why that's true. Right. Not sit there and tell them they're dumb.

28:57And I have all these degrees. Right. But when you look at this model, it makes so much sense. It's like, okay, a foam roller. And let's just pick off the big ones. Theraguns, foam rollers, kinesio tape, cupping, all of these. Massage. Right, massage. All of these things, they trigger. And like to your point earlier about corrective exercise, everything we just listed has a neurological correlate, something in the nervous system that flips a switch, that tells our brain that this experience is happening and what it feels like. So foam roller, deep pressure. It's one of our mechanoreceptors. Theragun, vibration, one of our mechanoreceptors.

29:38So there's Pacinian corpuscles, Meisner's corpuscles, Ruffini endings, and Merkel's disc. It's like the technical, don't even have to worry about it. Just know that in the layers of your skin and some of your bone, vibration, skin stretch, deep pressure, and light touch. Those, why do people like wearing compression shorts or compression sleeves or whatever, or the spandex, whatever the fuck. That is why. because it provides a light touch sensation that increases your precision weighting. So here, if I have sensory data where my body is in space, which muscles can do that, and this is why when we see people using, you know, single leg exercises and things like this, yeah, that will increase the precision weighting.

30:18Muscle spindles are really, actually the most potent, right? And then we have a prediction we're trying to make. If I have more precise sensory data and I have a really good understanding of my prediction that I'm going to make, all of a sudden we've learned really, really fast. And that's the goal. So that's how we can kind of use this model to, I mean, in the case of the original question, to unlearn pain really fast. Do you think, because I've made this speculation a few times on our show, more than a few times, and I'll tell you a story that I've said a few times on the show. Again, I had this woman that I was training, early trainer.

30:55We're doing a tricep press down with the cable. and um you know i'm probably i've only been a trainer for like four months at this point and she's doing a press down and she lets go of the cable weight stack slams she's like ah what happened i got hurt i'm like i'm freaking out because i'm a new trainer okay where's the pain and she's like pointing and it's like and i didn't realize like that's your tricep like you felt it burn a little bit but she had never really felt that before and it freaked her out and then i had this crazy realization that advanced lifters and athletes, they have a different relationship with that kind of pain.

31:35An advanced lifter is going to go train and definitely inflict more pain and suffering on themselves than a beginner, but they don't perceive it the same. In fact, oftentimes we love it and we go after it. Do you think exercise changes just broad spectrum relationship to pain? Oh, absolutely. So here's, and this is, I'm currently writing a book about this very topic. So thank you for like the off the board. You guys are just like, this is why you guys are you though, right? When we talk about changing perceptions, what rules the airwaves? It's really right now, it's two things. It's meditation and it's psychedelics.

32:16Like in my world, when I look at these problems and I say, okay, who's writing literature about this? Who's writing studies? And there's good studies about, like, I don't know. Maybe no one wants to incriminate themselves on the air. I was going to get real high before this podcast, but I decided not to. But, like, look, we're comfortable. I feel like I could come in on Mars and we could probably do this. But, like, what are they saying about, like, mushrooms and ketamine and all these? What does it do? It changes. It absolutely changes your perception. Right. Holy shit. Yeah. Like, I don't know, go to the sphere, go see the dead with John Mayer, and do it on two hits of LSD.

32:56Like your perception, something's going to happen. Something will change. Your perception will change. But it's changing your mind, right? When you think about meditation, you look at, you know, even from like a long-term meditator, if you're doing an fMRI, like what it does to the gray matter of the brain. It's changing your mind. Action changes your world, right? So when we think about this equation again, where we have sensory data, and then we have these prior experiences, and we have these normative values, when we look at practices like meditation and psychedelics, they're sort of playing in these normative values.

33:36They're playing in these prior experiences. I don't know if anyone's ever sent it on shrooms, but it kind of rinses your priors. It doesn't allow you to, because one of my favorite quotes of all time, and it's very like, it's ethereal, but it actually speaks to the deep science of this is you don't see the world as it is. You see it as you are. Right. And it speaks to this idea that your prior experience paints your reality. When you take these drugs, essentially what they're doing is they're taking your prior experiences and going, you don't get to draw from these anymore. And then you're like, holy shit.

34:07I'm just getting pure sensory data. Right. Creating new pathway. Creating new pathway. When you exercise, it changes the sensation, right? And like the one thing that we have to start respecting, and look, we have to start respecting. What a stupid thing to say. The one thing that I think is really cool about exercise is that muscle is a sensory organ. Yeah. Right? First, like if we looked, we talked about mechanoreceptors. We talked about nociceptors. So nociceptors, mechanoreceptors, and proprioceptors. So proprioceptors are almost twice the speed, which means the signal relayed from a muscle to the brain gets there almost twice as fast as those that come from the skin, which are almost twice as fast as those that come from nociceptors.

34:51So it's like here when we have this equation of our perception at large, and it doesn't just change our perception of pain. Like, look at what exercise can do for depression. Oh, yeah. Because we're shifting. We're giving this more data. You see the latest study? One and a half times more effective than therapy or, yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, and I'm sure if you pair them together, but why is it? It's because you have a practice that's changing your mind and you have a practice that's changing your world. Right. And that's, that's what, that's what movement does. Right. It's, it's, if you don't, if something doesn't fit, if there is a prediction error, right.

35:28It means the sensory data you're getting does not match your, your, your prediction of the world. You can do one of two things. You can change your mind or you can change the world. And muscle, and it sounds like so weird in a stupid clip, but like muscle has the ability to change your world. It has the ability to change your perception of you in the world because it changes the sensory data. There's two primary modes of sensory data in the body. One is the eyes, obviously. Like if anyone, you look at the neuroanatomy of the cerebrum, like the big part of the brain, we have an optic lobe that's literally a part of the brain dedicated to one sense.

36:03right like i don't think a bat would have an optic load right there's no need for that it doesn't have eyeballs that work like ours now if you're a peregrine falcon sure yeah you're seeing a mice for a mouse from like a mile up what is our second most potent sensory data source in our body it's our muscles i don't know a second oh yeah and like so there's muscle spindles golgi tendon organs and joint capsules these are what are classically known as our proprioceptors It gets a little bit tricky because the word proprioception gets misappropriated a lot. We kind of use it haphazardly to talk about our kinesthetic sixth sense of awareness.

36:42Like where you know where you are in space. Right. But proprioceptors are a specific group of three free nerve endings, which are your joint capsules, your muscle spindles, and your goal of your tendon organs. And when you're training, you stimulate them. Right? One of the keys to muscle spindles, which I find interesting, is one, I guess there's two really important things that I find interesting. One, they are, of the proprioceptors, the most abundant. right so they are the most abundant sensory receptor and they actually attach to what are called intrafusal muscle fibers so a muscle fiber has the contractile element which is what's called extrafusal which attaches tendon to tendon and when it shortens and lengthens we get sort of concentric eccentric movement at a particular joint but in between along for the ride like imagine the space in between my fingers those are intrafusal they're not contractile they don't attach the tendon they're just kind of like sensing what's where are we going oh where are we going the muscle spindle wraps around the intrafusal muscle fiber so that's constantly relaying and the trick of it is like you ever do like shoulder press and kind of see your bicep kind of like flex a little bit as you're pressing because the bicep has this like oh hold us the sensory yeah yeah and that's all so the the stuff that's pushing that's extrafusal that's that's divorced from our sensory perception.

37:57What we feel in our muscle is this spindle that attaches to these fibers in between what's contracting, and they can cause the muscle to contract and relax. This is the neuromuscular physiology of how our spinal muscles keep us upright, right? It's not like flexing our bicep where we can do it voluntarily. All of our positional postural, your erectors, your multifidus, all of the deep spine muscles, They're all autonomic off of this loop. Is this why sometimes you could tap on a muscle like your quad and it'll flex a little bit? It's a reflex. Yeah. So that would be the Golgi tendon organ reflex, right?

38:29So that particular pathway is called the alpha gamma motor neuron reflex. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. But here's this thing where it's like, okay, we can change our perception by giving our body greater sensory information. Our eyes are one thing. Look, there's research coming out about Alzheimer's and hearing loss. If you lose X percent of hearing, you're 90-something percent more likely to get Alzheimer's. But it's like, oh, yeah, sure, because you're dampening the sensory input. Sensory input drives motor output. So when your spine reflexively contracts to a position, it's starting with the sensory input first.

39:18So our whole perception, we have our eyes, which yes, are going to give us a lot of sensory data, but our muscles are a wealth spring. And we look at them like, you know, they're an output organ. It's good to be strong. When you watch exercise prescription for the elderly, it's like, oh, we got it. We're missing the point. We don't need to do four by four back squats at the heaviest we can do for a 55 year old woman. It's like, no, no, we need to treat that muscle like a sense organ. because sensory input drives motor output, right? So to answer your question in hopefully a little bit more of a pointed fashion, yes, absolutely.

39:54Exercise should be and is kind of getting tossed in the mix of like things that improve depression or PTSD or just general health and wellness. But it's technically true. And the reason why is it provides you with way better sensory data. Well, we look at the brain and we say, oh, that's the seat of consciousness. This is where your thoughts come from. But we don't, people don't realize that the extension of the brain is the body. Oh, great. So the body is a part of the brain in essence. I mean, you see this with like phantom limb syndrome. You cut your, people lose an arm and they feel it there and it feels painful because the brain hasn't processed it's gone yet.

40:34So it's an extension of the brain. So if the body is unhealthy, you can have physically an unhealthy brain, but the brain also loses that sensory. So you bring up the fuck, man, you guys are the best. Thank you. Because so go back to the 19th century, Rene Descartes. Does everyone recognize the name? Yeah. What does, do we remember? So Rene Descartes was like a philosopher, one of these really influential figures. So he came up with the idea of dualism, right? He also, ironically enough, Descartes was also the one that sort of outlines the opposite of what I just talked about. Like I was like, hey, look, we don't see the world as it is.

41:11We generate it in our brain and our brain sort of pops up this conscious experience. Descartes said it was a complete opposite. So Descartes missed a lot because one I think as big as misses was Cartesian dualism. The separation of mind and mind and body. Now, here's what I'm proposing is the real dualism isn't between the mind and the body. It's between the mind and the brain. That's the real dualism. We can separate that. And what's the difference? And this is where exercise becomes so exciting to me is the difference between the mind and the body, the mind and the brain is think of you guys.

41:44It's been a long time since you've been poking around on the back end of mindpump.com or mindpumpmedia.com. I would imagine there was a time where you guys were probably, you know, WordPress or early days, right? When I met you guys, you were probably like someone had admin access. It was probably Doug. What up, Doug? Shout out, Doug. That's actually a very sore subject right now, bro. we got hacked and we lost it yes bro our facebook stuff has been down for two weeks i got a number whose username i got we'll talk after i got a guy wife's high up we'll talk he saved our ass

42:20but yeah we get your point what was the what was the website you know what did we do it's like we used a back-end editor right drag and drop and now it's way more robust right like you go on squarespace with ai and all this like but none of us would confidently say we know how to work websites right no but we know i can know how to drag and drop shit right like yeah okay so there's a user interface the brain is complex right it's endlessly it's the most complex thing in the no universe without a doubt like we we we know we know enough about it to know we don't know anything about it right we know more about alpha centuri than we do about the the inner workings of the brain.

42:57But the mind, like we know our conscious experience, we know our theater, right? We know what comes, we know this like global workspace that kind of pops up. And the study of consciousness, if you ever, you know, need a rabbit hole to go down, it's really interesting. But when I think about movement, I think about movement, like the interface between the mind and the brain, where I can just go like, hey, do this. And the brain conjures up the compute, and it reformats the aspect ratios and it changes the resolution. All these ones and zeros are high. No fucking, I barely know enough to make this analogy, right?

43:31I know less than nothing about the inner workings of a computer, right? But like, I know enough about the brain to be like, look, the neurological correlates to a lot of this are really complex. I just know when I put this input into the conscious theater, I get this output. So it's like, when we understand movement, movement is the user interface. and it's such a seamless user experience. I'll give you an example, like just to kind of understand how our body offers up the seamlessness of our reality. Like if I touch my finger to my nose, those two sensations happen simultaneously. They shouldn't.

44:05We know they shouldn't, right? We know the distance it travels, it takes a travel period, it should, but I'm making a prediction and my body just offers up. Like if I were to - What an interesting point. Did you ever make, anyone have a concussion? I'm looking, I love how I look at you. You're the concussion guy? That's the concussion guy. Are you telling me he's the brain damage? Okay. How did you manage it? Who's the guy? How did I manage it? I should ask someone who was around who was conscious of what happened. But I mean, they just get back on the field back then. Oh, so it's football. So it's football.

44:33Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they sit me out. I mean, that's really all the entire protocol. But the mechanism was football. Yes. So you got hit. You got hit and lights out. Yeah. By multiple players at the same time. It was pretty bad. Fuck. Okay. So one of the things, if you ever Google search symptoms of a concussion, right? So there's a mom out there listening or someone plays football or whatever. You're going to see like a laundry list of stuff you'd expect. Headaches, what's called photophobia, like an aversion to light or sensitivity to light. And at the bottom of the list, on every list, there's something called impaired visual saccades.

45:06So a visual saccade is like if I were to take, I mean, let's take someone without, have you ever had a major? Okay. So if we were to take a high speed camera and we were to record your eyes, what we would notice that three to five times a second, your eyeballs are darting around. That's that's a saccade. So when you have a concussion, those saccades are slow. But like. Wait, you're telling me that in a normal brain, my eyes are darting around three to five seconds. My conscious experience should be like the Blair fucking witch project. Right. I think about if this is just a camera doing this and I'm seeing a conscious stream much in a way that if this was a direct representation of reality, then I would feel this the same.

45:46I would see you guys in this weird, shaky, kind of cracked out. Again, this is and not to bring up drugs, but like when you take shrooms, everything starts to get a little bit fuzzy. It's like, oh, we're removing that layer that allowed. Right. Because our cameras are darting around all the time. right so it's the way we like how we generate our perceptions are so fast i've gone so far i feel i actually forget your original question but it's yeah but the ride's still fun keep going you know what i'm saying no but like i just i don't think we we we really respect like we can talk about exercise in a vacuum but if we don't understand how it fits within our actual consciousness but i think when we when we look at it in this framework things have a place that's right right They have a foam rolling has a home now, right?

46:36Because foam rolling isn't wrong. It's like, well, hold on. What paper towel roll were we looking at right and wrong through? Oh, does it break up scar tissue? Like, what year is it? What are we doing? It's 2025, right? So it's, I mean, for me, like, exercise as so far as it improves. And this is where the audience is, right? Do you like taking a thing? Because I feel like you're this kind of guy. Like you'll take something and you'll see lots of anecdote, maybe some data. And you're the guy to go, instead of saying that's dumb, you're like, let me figure out why this is working. Like acupuncture.

47:13Why is acupuncture working? Why do some people say it relieves pain? Why do we have some data to support it? It sounds like you did that with foam rolling. Are you like that with different things? Do you look at something and go, okay, obviously lots of people are doing it. What's going on? Yeah. Look, I wasn't. Like when we first met, I think I was, and that may be true of all of us. Like, you know, I think we've all kind of grown up a little bit. I just, you just can't one just, okay. How do I answer this question? Yes. I really try and dig down to the neuroscience behind it. Right. Like, cause when we start looking at, you know, anything I listed off, right.

47:48It was very anti-percussion tool when I first started because the claim seems so ridiculous. I think the way they explain it is what gets in their way. That's what I think. Like you explained to me acupuncture and you say it's chi and I'm like, whatever. But I had a surgeon that I was training who goes, well, you know, there is referred pain. Like what? Yeah. Sometimes this hurts and this is actually happening over there. He's like, maybe that's what acupuncture is kind of working with. I'm like, okay. Wish somebody would have said that to me before. Yeah. Trying to see things mechanistically I think is, and really focusing on the nervous system mechanisms behind it.

48:19Like the cupping one jumps off the page cause it's like, okay. Yeah. And I remember what we were talking about before we were talking about dualism, mind and brain, and the user interface doesn't really matter. But like cupping is, it's so, I have a friend, his name's Kyle Rogers. He's a pitching coordinator for the New York Mets and he has this quote that I love. He goes, it makes sense if you don't think about it. And it's fucking all the time. And cupping is like that because it's like, I don't know, there's a bunch of bruises there. Yeah, you're getting a bunch of hickeys. Right, yeah. It's like, it must be all the toxins.

48:44It's like, man, I know people who do some drugs and even there, I live in the Tenderloin now. It's like, even those people aren't pulling toxins out. but what is but like look it it works yeah right so after whatever olympics it was where phelps was swimming like a fucking pepperoni pizza it's like okay well how does it work what is the neurological correlate to it working well when we look at the subcutaneous mechanoreceptors and we see that hey skin stretch is a really potent signal sensory data to the brain i bet that has something to do with it that's right i think we get stuck in a very analog mechanical representation of the body that negates the potency of the nervous system you know what you sound like you sound like someone that's worked with a lot of people uh yeah i think when you know you know why that's you know if that's the truth because whenever i talk to scientists or data you know people who've never worked with people they can get very narrow then when i talk to really smart people who've also worked with a lot of people you hear it sounds like what you're saying which is like let's figure out what's happening here let's explore all the different options because I've worked with enough people to know things are interesting they're much more interesting than we think my job's not to be right my job is to help people I think we use and much this has been weaponized a lot of things social media as cliche as to talk about is one of the reasons why and I think everyone starts this way it's like they try and figure out they try and use research to figure out why people are wrong rather than using principles to figure out why they're right right I think that's that was a fundamental shift for me right it's like do I want to go down and without I don't want to cast shade or dispersion god knows I've done enough of that on this show but it's like I don't I don't want I don't care dude like I'm tired right at the core of it I'm just I'm too tired to fight anymore but it's like what is right in our world right right is helping people.

50:42Right. Right. So I think going down the road of just regurgitating research is like, okay, cool. I have a job to do. Right. I have someone who's paying me to get them better, not paying for them to get them smarter. Right. Or to be right. Like a fundamental, like my day to day, like my practice when I'm working with like basically just one person at a time now, that's what, that's my focus. And that's just everyone's focus at the end of the day and you see like the the spiteful resentful smart trainer it's like dude you gotta you gotta reorient what success is success is helping people success is being of service like it's not like and i felt this way at a school like you know paid a bunch of money learned some stuff wrote a test passed it wrote another one passed it and i was like right um so where's all the money where's is this where i get the money now and everyone's like fuck you nerd like you're not worth shit And then you kind of have to go through and, you know, you try and be right for long enough.

51:38And then you realize like, well, right is the is results at the end of the day. Right. So the science can help inform it. But like there's nothing worse than someone who goes, I'm data driven. It's like, oh, God, you'd be data informed at best. But like you're here to you're here to be of service. And whenever you're right, you're just fucking servicing yourself. It's like it's really just it's a bad MO. Yeah, I think I think I love that approach. not because all things are valid. So I'm not one of those people either. It's like, if it works, it's good. It's like, okay, yeah, okay. You do energy healing.

52:11I don't know if I necessarily, but I do think looking at things and saying, okay, there's a lot of anecdote here. It's been around for 100, 200, 5 ,000 years, sometimes a thousand years. What's happening? And is this something I can use? Is this something I can work with to try? One of my favorite examples of this for me was, you know, when I started dating my wife, she would get these migraines. And she had this like, this little bottle of green oil that she got from, she used to travel Cirque du Soleil. I love this for you. I love that he's met with the final boss. And it's like this, you know, it's like Ben Gabe in a bottle, right?

52:52And she would put it on her temples and be like, oh, it makes the pain go away. And I'm like, you know what? And I'm like, that oil isn't penetrating and reducing inflammation. You would say that? I wanted to. Okay. You are smart. You are smart. Wait a minute. I know what's happening here. You put it on your skin. It creates this cooling sensation. Your body's perceiving the pain differently. And so you don't feel it. And so that was a group. For me, that was like one of those experiences where I'm like, this is why. Because instead of being like, no. Like, why does this work? Why is this working?

53:22Why do people do this? And then that helps me be a better coach. Helps me be a better trainer. And not sleep on the couch. And not sleep on the couch. Most important. but i but i but i think training and working with people i'm so glad you still do it because i think it keeps you good do you remember the last the last thing that you really shifted your opinion on or last like paradigm shattering thing you had yeah getting into cognitive theory like getting into like i need a framework because you made you brought up something really interesting like and it's a good guardrail to put up for people it's like i'm not open to everything yeah because and here's the problem with that like i you know we we work in the education space and one of the things that i have to talk a lot of people down from is this idea of being a forever student i if my fucking house is on fire i don't want a forever student firefighter oh you know every day is an opportunity white belt mentality like you get up that fucking ladder you you go get my shit.

54:20Okay. Like get me the fuck out of here. But it's like, but cause one of the things you have to realize is that the value in this field is solving more complex problems faster. And I think when you're able to put guardrails on things that are efficacious versus not, you're able to really concentrate and minimize the opportunity costs in your approach. And this is where you end up. Like for me, now I'm at a point where I get really complex cases and I take them on. I get one client a year, two clients a year. I will not work with more than one person at once. And because the value I can provide for one person is to solve a really, really complex problem really quickly.

54:58Right. And that starts with being able to separate the wheat from the chaff with like, hey, look, yeah, but we could do 90 minutes in a hyperbaric. But in an hour and a half, I think I could probably move the needle a little bit more. Right. 90 minutes, four times a week. OK. And you have a white. And it's like, OK, no, no, no. So there is an experience of professionalism and knowledge base in the empirical that allows you to be very effective. Of course. Because I watch people who are too conscientious. It's like at the end of the day, I look up at the wall with all the diplomas. I go, I ain't that a bitch.

55:31That's my name. That's my name on all those pieces of paper. That's why you're here to see me. And it is a fine line to walk between, hey, the green oil thing does this or the crystals and blah, blah, blah, versus like, do you want to get better soon or like whenever you want? Like, you know, because I'm here to do a job. Do you have other people you work with? Because you're working with these really complex cases. So do you work also with functional medicine practitioners or people that do gut testing for some of these cases? Because I can imagine sometimes some of these problems are multifaceted.

56:03Yeah, I am lucky that the clients that I'm working with now are taking their they take their health very seriously. So the networks that I fall into, I am the movement guy. I'm the rehab guy. They already have the other. Yeah, they got all their bases covered. Now, obviously, different levels, different devils. But like, yeah, if they don't have it, there are adjacent fields where I'm just going to dish the rock where it's like, let's get let's get blood work. That looks weird. I do nervous system stuff I do movement stuff I do exercise stuff I need you to go here hey this looks off okay I need you to go to a rheumatologist this looks off I need you to go to an endocrinologist this looks functional you know it's it's it's an interesting and I do have some people kind of in my network that I trust in that space but that's like oh that's a broad yeah yeah and it's it's you know and like I'm lucky in a sense that I've been able to do this as a chiropractor right like people every time someone introduced me like oh this is so-and-so he's working with us he's doing x y and z they're like well like what is he the chiropractor and they're like and but like they they don't even get the r out before they're like already explaining the yeah yeah but he came from like so functional you know i think there's such a utility and i think the concentration of people who really get the integrated system of systems of the body are found in functional but man there's a lot of other stuff it's wild out there i know it's fucking wild i love how you brought up chiropractic because that space too makes me i've been to chiropractors do you like lift your arm up and then do you like gluten press it down yeah oh yeah it's called muscle testing these are my people i've come to spread the good word you're such a you're such a deep thinker do you ever do you do you think that it could be a problem for you do you do you just think a lot and sometimes think yourself into spins just for yourself no okay because the guard the guardrail for all deep thought again it comes down this idea of what is the value of anything it's to allow you to move quicker okay right so like i my it made me to a fault because i move really fast like some physically quite literally but to me it's you know about any subject the the the the practice of introspection or deep thought is so that you can move faster, not move slower.

58:23Right. So if I run into, because like you, if you don't know enough about a subject for me, I'm going to have a hard time making a decision. The wrong decision is worse than finding the right decision in too long a time. Right. Right. So for me, speed is everything, right? Right. Speed actually changes something called the Andromeda effect where speed actually changes your perception. It's a bit like this. It's this cosmic thing. But my thing is I know that if I'm looking too much into something, if it starts to slow me down. Right. So and whatever that looks like in whatever arena, whether it's my personal life, relationships or business, just make a decision.

59:05Right. Because it's the old like in what in 20 years will be wrong. And in 20 years after that will be dead. Right. So for me, time is the learning opportunity. So I try to make sure that, okay, is the deep thought slowing me down? If yes, then keep moving. Do you still use adjustments on people or is that right? Okay, so I don't want to laugh that off. Feet and ankles, very often. I would say feet, ankles, feet, ankles, and ribs. because for me the things that are really going to because the automaticity of ventilation and locomotion yeah that's going to be where the foot just articulating those little joints are so hard unless you have somebody and oh yeah for sure especially at the level of like the t-spine and ribs because again it just comes down to those autonomic loops of like i can't everyone quick contract their multifidus like it ain't happening dog right but if i can change relative orientation I'm changing that the the the sort of the tone and perception of those muscles in space.

1:00:07Sure. But I'm not if I can do it with movement, I'm doing it with movement because the thing that really scales and you learn this when you look into like we talked earlier about the muscle spindle, the muscle spindle, not to get too neurosciency, but it's composed of what's called a nuclear chain and a nuclear bag fiber. and these do two things. They, one, signals to the brain or the spinal cord, the nervous system, the onset of the change in length and the second signals the magnitude, right? And that's where load comes in, right? So we can actually get, like, I remember once there was a powerlifter named Andre Milanichev and I was at a meet once and he was deadlifting like eight something, 800 and 81, 400 kilos, 881 pounds.

1:00:52but it was actually like 883 and a half pounds because they had loaded like a small change plate on the other side and how do you know it's it's like it's like putting a it's like putting relative to what's on the bar it's like putting a potato chip on and he like second the weight went down he goes to the other side looks it's like you know all in russian yelling at everyone's like there's more weight on this side like it makes you sensitive to your environment like you can feel the differences in weight. For me, it's just like when you train for a long enough time, you train that sensitivity.

1:01:34That comes from getting stronger. That's where a lot of people lose the plot on all this. Instability, change in muscle length, BOSU balls. The nuclear chain, the nuclear bagfires, the magnitude of the change in length. If I put someone on a BOSU ball, It's like, well, hold on. What am I perturbing here? There's no progression. But if I put that same split squat now as like a Bulgarian split squat with a dumbbell in the opposite hand, now we can continually drive the adaptation of the sensitivity of that muscle spindle because it changes, it responds to magnitude. And weight can offer you an increased stimulus, which then you can continue to adapt to.

1:02:14So that's a key feature in this program. And where I think resistance training really should take its place as something that can change people's perception, like meditation, like psychedelics, resistance training when it comes to sensory data. Because it's like, well, what about Pilates? It's like, what about Pilates? And no dispersion against people who do Pilates. But one of the things that I consistently do when people reach out, like, oh, my girlfriend or my boyfriend or my mom or whatever, does Pilates and they still have this. It's like, okay, so, but they love it. They lost a lot of weight.

1:02:50Great. Now the thing that they use as their resistance is lighter. So they're progressively underloading because they've lost 30 pounds doing Pilates. They're on the box with the springs and the reformer, but there's less of them to move. So they're actually moving further away. Like you have to start using resistance as it not just a means of progressive overload, but it means a progressive overstimulus. Yeah. Right. Adaptation. Yeah. Addressing the adaptation process. Exactly. And you can take it all the way down to like what is the mechanistic unit of change that's driving this, right? So we go all the way down to the level of nervous system.

1:03:22We go, oh, there it is. That little fucker responds to the magnitude of the change in length. This is why the best rehab, the form of exercise that tends to be used is some form of resistance training, whether it's with bands or body weight or a person or weights. It's because it allows you to progressively adapt. well and because there's an interesting thing and because body weight is a tricky one because it's non-standard unit of measure right and you got to think about people's relationship with gravity it's something that we never really take into consideration because we've always been stronger than the forces of gravity acting on us like i don't know at my best i could probably squat a little over three times my body weight imagine dealing with someone who can't do a body weight squat dude i'm neil fucking armstrong this world is the moon to me compared to their experience of gravity, right?

1:04:08Like there's the autonomic nervous system and the way that we call on these muscles without our say so. Someone has tight calves, tight glutes, tight hamstring. It's like, that's the autonomic nervous system reacting to their meat suit in space, not having the strength to be held up. So there's a lot of nuance in understanding like how motor learning takes place based off of someone's relationship with gravity, but machines, right? Machines can be a good way because it's like we need to find the integer scale less than their own body weight if i put a leg press with 30 pounds versus like oh no everyone has to learn how to squat it's like taking someone who's 40 pounds overweight and teach them to learn how to squat is like giving them a rubik's cube and then taking a snub nose revolver and putting it in their mouth say go ahead go ahead learn how to fucking do the little colory square thing while you're you're in a state of high arousal right so it's it's you know there's just the the again it comes down to the nervous system, like understanding or starting to shift our focus away from muscles under a microscope, right?

1:05:09The neuromuscular physiology. When I hear someone talk about actin, myosin, sliding filaments, like, what are you, what are you doing, man? Like you're, like you have to see the whole elephant, right? It's sort of that blind man and the elephant parable. And like the nervous system helps compartmentalize and really prioritize how we approach motor learning with every client like what is this person's autonomic nervous system doing because if we can't understand that we're we're we're shooting in the dark i have a i have a pro athlete question for you um have you seen um a change in like the types of injuries and things we're seeing since sports is always kind of evolving and i love watching the game i can just how how different it is today than 20 years ago what are you seeing from somebody who's rehabbing helping people are you seeing different types of injuries like or is the same stuff over and over like it's a basketball question i mean it could be basketball could be hockey could be i think injuries are look it's i mean even like for example like there was a time when we wore nothing but high top shoes in basketball and now we have changed because we saw what was going on with ankle injuries and that would be ridiculous to put your foot or ankle in a cast while you're playing and so like yeah but i mean how many what was how many achilles stairs we have last year well so this is why i'm asking that's exactly my point injuries i think injuries usually set people down the road of of more specific interventions which is wrong in my opinion like when because now everyone everyone every off season is like foot and ankle foot and ankle it's like variability because an injury is an injury is an equation right it's applied force greater than tissue tolerance.

1:06:51So when we start to notice, you know, whether it's ACLs or hamstrings or, you know, anterior talofibular ligaments or Achilles, people go, oh, this is the site of pain. This is, this is the injury. This is the tissue that's damaged. And so then all of their focus, like baseball has this hilarious thing called arm care. It's like, I have a lot of friends who work in the MLB of athletes that work in MLB. And there, if you talk to any strength and conditioning program and any major league baseball team, they talk about arm care, which is like, they're throwing 100 miles an hour. They're on a fucking shot clock now and you're doing more arm stuff?

1:07:30They're getting enough. So there's like, it's hard to pull yourself out of it and go, because one of the things I'm seeing with the emergence of a lot of sports science is that they're getting too hyper specific and they're worried about the tissue tolerance. or if we could strength arm care if we could strengthen the ulnar collateral ligament if we could strengthen the elbow flexors it's like why don't we focus on decreasing the amount of force we're applying there rather than the tissue tolerance right when i was power lifting i you know my knees hurt because power lifting and so i remember going into a pt clinic in the bay and someone puts a knee bar or a band behind my knee and says yeah i just want you to like kind of lock out your knee and at this point i was on i was like low 700s mid 700s and i was like hold on a second what do we what's what's this like oh like terminal knee extensions and i was i think i was i was still in school maybe i was just out and i'm like um it's just a question like the green band and like you you heard me say squat like 7 30 or whatever right like how is this doing anything but the idea is like oh we're looking at the injury through the lens of it wasn't enough tissue tolerance the tissue was intolerant to the load why don't we ask the question of why are we applying so much force to begin with yeah i think the hyper specificity when when we start seeing like a trend line in injuries achilles so what does off-season program look like foot and ankle stuff everyone's walking on ropes and doing foot drills and you know gate cycle this and it's like literally go for a hike go forget some variability and expression but not just through your foot and ankle but in the way your brain and your body have to react to these positions.

1:09:10It's like the answer in my opinion is it's not specific injuries don't require more specific interventions or preparation or prophylaxis requires more variability. Right. So we start to be able to disperse these loads across different positions, across different tissues, but everyone just like, I don't know, like if you're an owner of a team and your PT or you walk in and your PT is working with Halliburton or whatever, and not to throw, you know, obviously injuries happen and we can't really accurately predict and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, if I'm the, if I'm the strength coach and I'm doing a bunch of like variable movement stuff, someone goes, what the fuck are you doing?

1:09:49We have ankle injuries. Why aren't we doing ankle stuff? It's like, uh, okay. So we're going to go do seated calf raises now. It's like, ah, God damn it. So there's a pressure and there's a pressure from the athlete. Like, Hey man, I'm real worried about, like, I'm real worried about ankles, man. Like, what are we doing for ankles? It's like, I don't know, man, multidirectional stuff. We're going to throw some balls we're gonna jump we're gonna land we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna have variability but everyone just they get so tunnel visioned and so like gunshot oh because if something goes wrong and we didn't do anything into the ankles or if we didn't do our arm care so a lot of it is you know obviously it's it's it's fear but i think at the level of application it's it's it's a tendency to hyper specificity around these regions that are so commonly injured that's why injury rates and again, the games are faster, the seasons are shorter, there's more international travel.

1:10:39Early specificity. Early specificity, right, which would speak to this idea of specificity being the opposite of variability, right? So there's a lot of reasons that compound, but what I see in the field and, you know, strength coaches at that level, for the most part, I mean, you guys have had a handful of them on Schles' guy, but look at Schles' training, right? What does Schles do with these guys? It's kind of, you know, it's, he does some stuff where you're like, oh, that's unconventional. It's like, yeah, because the conventional stuff leads to all this other shit. Yeah. Right. So that's where I think there's a siren song to solve a problem in it.

1:11:12And it hyper fixates the focus onto the tissue tolerance. And it, and it, it really negates the bigger picture of why and how we apply force. So do you think it was a dumb idea that we went to, we traded ankle injuries for Achilles? I mean, do you think that's what we did by going high top over to low top shoes? I mean, it's tough to say if that was the catalyst. It's hard for me to imagine that the shoe, and I may get some backlash, has as much to do with it as the rest of the training. It may sound ignorant, but they are so strong that those shoes, those high tops like I wear, they're not stopping or slowing anyone down.

1:11:56I really think it's the big things. Like if you were to control a future where we kept high tops going and we had less of a hyper fixation and over specialization on these particular regions, I think the high tops really wouldn't be causing these issues. I really think it's the sports specificity is such an egregious offender. Because too often people who train people in sports try and make the gym look like the field. Emulate it. Yeah. It's like you see the Titleist hooked up to the cable machine and you're like, well, there goes your backswing. You're going to completely fuck up the mechanics or at the very least you're just going to overexpose the muscles you need.

1:12:41A lot of training is about variability. It's like, hey, let's find new positions, right? Let's learn. And I think that's a big thing. Like when you reorient your focus as a coach from training to teaching, you now have entered in one of the greatest constraints that you can put to load. And that's thinking. Thinking is a great, because they don't think when they're on the court. That's the whole point. That's why they're good. So I'm going to take them into the gym and I'm going to put them in positions where they need to think. And that will constrain load, allow them to recover and learn how to load nutrition.

1:13:08As I say, do you end up integrating a lot of these variabilities or are you solely mainly focused on the recovery portion or do you get to go through all of it? It depends on what stage, if I'm doing a post-op or I have someone who, you know, knock on wood isn't injured. Yeah. I like to use the words, and I don't necessarily love the word novelty. I love specific variability. Let's look at the challenges of your sport. Let's look at how you move. Let's figure out what you're not getting and let's give you some of that. Yeah. So, because your body is like, at least your nervous system, it's like lightning, right?

1:13:39Right. It's not your body doesn't take straight lines. It takes the path of least resistance. Yeah. So if I can expose you to certain positions and shapes, demands in the weight room that you don't get exposed to, I'll watch your nervous system use these shapes on the field that you otherwise didn't have access to. Yeah. Right. So it's really about giving them ultimate variability. So assess the game. What are the demands? What are the limitations? Do they have any issues like from a from a prior surgery or injury? what are positions they don't get into on the field and how can we give them exposure to those positions so we can learn how to load other tissues so in a game they're they're not going to think their brain is going to be like hey i can do this i can plant my foot way out in front of me i don't have to have my knee go over my toe like i always do in every exercise you watch like wide receivers are really egregious offenders of this they get taught how to run routes and their knees are always over their toes right real quick feet drills and all this stuff and it looks good for the gram but when you watch someone go to like stop and they go to stop using a forward shin angle it's like i mean again i don't like the idea of oh we know how injuries happen blah blah go watch just just youtube search uh wide receiver acl injury and it freeze frame the very second that the acl pops and the person springs up into the air the knee is over the toe because what does the acl do it stops the shin from going forward what if our foot was in front of our knee and our knee was behind our toe which is like one of the things about you know not again no dispersion but the knee over toe thing is you know it's a useful it's a former poliquin derived thing and buddy did really well with it but in specific instances i'm not going to do a ton of knees over toes with wide receivers who spent the last 10 years doing knees over toes i'm going to get their knee behind the toe.

1:15:30Because if you want to talk about stopping mechanics, this is a specific variant that you're not exposed to. When you go to stop on the field and your knee is forward, it's like, yeah, that's a lot of anterior tibial translation. But if your knee is behind your foot, like in like a front foot elevated split squat, which no one ever does, it's like, oh, well, now I have some exposure here. Now when I'm playing and someone goes to hit me, I can plant the brakes. Like a Kadarius Tony a couple of years ago when the Chiefs beat the the Eagles in the Super Bowl when he had that 61 yard kickoff return.

1:16:02He had one of the perfect expressions of this mechanic of like someone went to hit him and he just fucking threw his foot out in front of him and then pump the brakes. And literally, I don't know who it was, but someone on the Eagles was predicting that he was going to take up this space because everyone in the league stops the same way. And he jumped at him to tackle and he literally went right by him. And then he keeps on the run up the field. so things like that where it's like okay what positions are you always in what can the body do if i gave you this option would your brain take it on the field so we train it and you take guys like that and you get them to do a front foot elevated split squat with their knee way behind their toe they can't do it so they're not going to figure it out on the field so do you do you okay you see a play or move like that does the the door can you automatically go you want to see who the the trainer is that's training him and see huh no i don't know i don't i don't good for good for anyone yeah because like the thing about athletes like i always think bo jackson is all time yeah what makes an athlete an athlete can learn motor skills really quickly period that's what like that's my definition of an athlete so like when we go like aesthetic brilliance or genius yeah exactly it's savants they're six cents savants is what they are like kim peak rain man could sit down and read one page of the book with his left eye while his right eye read the other one he could read read a whole two pages in less than three seconds remember it's 98 is that real yeah oh Oh, yeah.

1:17:22I didn't know that. Yeah. Kim Peek, the guy that made Rain Man off of? Oh, yeah. I didn't even know that was based off of a real dude. Oh, yeah. Dude, he's amazing. You didn't know that? Yeah. Kim Peek is so key. There's savant syndrome affects less than 100 people in the world. This is part of my book. This is why I know a lot about savant syndrome. But Kim Peek is a mega savant. A mega savant. So he's a cognitive savant. When you watch Bo Jackson, you know, step up, hit it yard, and then fucking run a 4-2-40. You're watching the physical representation of that brilliance, right? This is a cognitive.

1:17:52Such a cool way to put it. Yeah. They're sixth sense savants. I worked with a tennis player that could turn over a 230-kilometer-hour serve. One day, we're in Bahamas. Imagine getting hit by that. So here's the thing. I'm at his house in the Bahamas, and his hitting partner didn't show up. He's like, hey, you're on the baseline. Oh, no way. I'm like, dog, you don't pay me that much. You pay me, too. You take care of me. And obviously, he can put it anywhere. So he blows it right by me. And I'm just like. And the thing that's so interesting. And we talk about sensitivity and we talk about muscles, the sense organ.

1:18:23When he was younger, we were, we were at Wimbledon and we're in the locker room and Andy Murray comes up and he grabs my particular client, his racket out of his, his bag. And him, him and Andy are friends. And Andy looks at it and admires him. I don't get it. Like, why is he admiring your racket? And he's like, oh, they only make it for me. He was a top 10 player at the time. And I was like, okay, but wait, Andy's like one of the top four, right? you know, Djokovic, Andy Murray, Nadal and Federer. So they won't make it for him. And he goes, no, I'm like, okay, well, what's the deal? He goes, when I was 17, I was sponsored by this company and they sent me my rackets after I got sponsored and they sent me the wrong rackets.

1:19:04And like, I look over at his agent, the manager and he goes like, yeah, I was fucked up. I was like, what happened? He's like, I don't know. He like took a hit with his new, with his new batch of the racket he used and he just smashed it and walked off. He goes, tell him to send me my fucking rackets and you know the agent goes and picks up the racket he goes i don't know looks just like the fucking i don't know what you're talking about calls the company and goes hey he's tripping well he's always tripping like no he's not playing until he gets his rackets and the guy goes fuck and then the agent's like wait a minute what you know about this look we couldn't it was something about like a material or they change the difference so the guy flew in from japan brought it was kind of weird they brought four unmarked rackets and they said if you can tell us which one is yours, we'll make it for you forever.

1:19:49You want to know the difference in weight? Five grams. But here's to my point. That's so rad. The sensitivity of an arm and a shoulder that can feel the difference between five grams is the same arm that from a motor output standpoint is painting 230 kilometers to the T. Back to your whole point about the muscle. Sensory input drives motor output. That's so cool. But there's savants. There's a sensitivity to it. And I think there's actually, there's a deeper, this idea, and this is all cerebellar function stuff, and it'll be for another time, but like, there's a deeper idea to high cognitive output and hypersensitivity or hyposensitivity.

1:20:26Like, I think of the movie The Accountant. You ever seen that movie? Yeah, yeah. Oh, you haven't seen it? Mm-mm. Oh, great movie, right? But remember, so, you know, Ben Affleck plays a - Part two just came out that long ago. Yeah, but he plays, he'd be like a high functioning on the spectrum Asperger's type. He's an accountant, right? Which kind of fits the temperament of the accountants I know. And when he goes home at the end of the night, he turns on like a strobe light and fucking Ramstein music, and he takes a fucking rolling pin to his shins. You remember that? Yeah. And if anyone knows anyone or has anyone in their family who's on the spectrum,

1:21:03hypersensitivity, like that type of stimulus is palliative. Right. Right. Like I have friends who take Adderall to calm them down. what is your brain? It explains Justin's death metal at six o 'clock in the morning. But you get a, you get a cog, there's a cognitive uptick. You're on the spectrum. That's why. So it's, there's a physical correlation to that. And when we, when you look at athletes, like when you look at like the steps, when you look at the, you know, the, the, the MJs, you look at the, the people who aren't just good at their sport, but people that are athletes, people that can be good at anything.

1:21:34You go, Oh, you're that. They're the physical equivalent of that. They can learn. I love stories like that. have you seen that other time i mean what a cool story to see that like unfold right there it was wild yeah like i was sitting in wimbledon like in the locker room murray like jokovic walks in you walk out but it like that was like a aha moment of like you know because physically like dude's not super jacked right yeah but it's the sensitivity it's the integration well and you have you have such a level of appreciation for that than the average person would be like oh that's cool he could pick the racket right it's like you have it on a deeper level the understanding of his ability to do that.

1:22:11I've always loved, I know they've measured Barry Bond's ability to look at a ball as soon as, how quick he can see the threads in the ball coming out of a, it's so wild. When Manning broke his cervical spine, there's a couple examples that will just blow you away, just how superhuman athletes are. We talked about saccades earlier, being like a diagnostic for concussions, how they slow down. So they'll use these glasses they put on, they look like those Apple Pro glasses, and then on the screen, playing in front of the eyes as a dot that goes across the screen. And the dot is programmed to move in a particular pattern.

1:22:47And there's high-resolution cameras that are following the latency of the eye and following the dot. There's two athletes, one I won't name, but one is Manning. And these cameras have been used on all types of people with concussions. And you start to see as the neurological symptoms of the brain damage improve that the latency in the eye tracking the dot starts to go away, as you'd imagine. Two of the best athletes of the sport, Manning being one and this ice hockey player being another. The researchers, it was almost as if the eye was telling the dot where to go. There was zero latency. What?

1:23:32They'd never seen that in anyone without it. So they're testing him, trying to get them back to baseline. and they like all of a sudden have a day where they don't just go back to baseline which is some sort of latency and the ability to track zero and this is high speed cameras it's like it's we've never seen anything like it it's like it's like the it's like the retina is attached the pupil is attached to the dot there's a 0.000 millisecond latency and but these are why they're the best in the world oh yeah i mean that totally explains why that guy was just so brilliant at the game you know what i'm saying and and one of the things he was so great it was changing the play to seeing something coming before and then i'm over the right side and i'm throwing the ball over there like that's so yeah you see that in a clinical setting where he's quite literally seeing a different game than someone you know this is how i always try and sell this guy on becoming a sports nut is this like there's so many cool i like the science well that's right that's why i try there's so much deep great science with these athletes because it's the it's the greatest expression of the greatest humans that have this capability it's brilliance in a physical sense.

1:24:31Yeah. Just like you look at Elon Musk. No, that's why I love that analogy. Exactly right. We have these savants that are running around on fields and stuff like that. And it's just, I mean, look what Saquon Barkley did last year with that. I mean, that's like one of the most epic. Yeah, let me jump backwards over you real quick. Real time, like someone's about to destroy you and you have the level of awareness to shoot up 180 in the air and split over. It's wild. Jordan, it's always awesome having you on, bro. Yeah, dude. I really appreciate it. I have to take off, unfortunately. I mean, we could go on forever, and I feel like I just put the quarter in.

1:25:03Next year. Next year. No, I appreciate it. Come on, dude. Yeah, always a pleasure, man. Nice. Appreciate it. Appreciate you, bro. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Super Bundle includes MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, and MAPS Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs.

1:25:39With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time, this is Mind Pump.