The #1 Muscle for Athletic Performance, Pain-Free Training, & The Truth About Perfect Form - With Dr. John Rusin

27:08They are the cornerstone of all health, performance, and physicality. They are the central line of tension and stability at every lower body directed pattern. And they're also the potentiator at upper body patterns. They are the force transducer of any rotary or lateralized planes. They are the shit. The glutes are everything. If we're not training glutes directly, if we're not training glutes in compound patterns, if we're putting emphasis on glutes during single leg work, also bilateral squats and hinges, we're just doing ourselves a disservice. And it's for the men as well. It's not just for the ladies.

27:43You heard it here that the glutes are for the men because that gets you to where you wanna be in terms of your strength, in terms of your muscle and the physique. The physique goals are there too. Okay, so now we're opening up this compartment, which is especially in, well, things are changing, of course. Many more women are training. Yeah. But the emphasis tends to be lower body, right? Especially the glutes. For men, men, we've been doing this for quite some time. And, you know, there's this phenomenon. It's a meme skipping leg day, right? And that's changing, fortunately, but still the emphasis on the glutes.

28:18And so what you're saying is men need to start training like girls. I wouldn't go that far, but I would bring the pendulum swinging from stereotypical women to stereotypical men somewhere in between. We all know the stereotypical male meathead. He's going to go in there. He's going to be bench press on Mondays. He's going to skip legs on Wednesdays. He's going to hit a back session on Fridays. And then on Saturdays, of course, you're going to hit a full arm session. And then they skip the lower body. And even if they are doing lower body, it turns into piss poor squats, half ranges of motion with the bar on your back always, or it turns into machine work.

28:52And there's really nothing that trains the posterior chain directly. This is a huge mistake. On the opposite side, you do see an overemphasis on lower body directed work with the women. But I would say that that is an outlier. Most women are going in and they're going to be cardio heavy, they're going to be mobility heavy, and usually they are going to be dabbling in strength training, not really investing in progressive strength training. that has been changing over the last three to five years because we do see a trend in females going through resistance training, but it's not like females are out there powerlifting.

29:23That's not quite where we're at right now. But if you bring both of these things together, we just need to be training more well-rounded, no matter if you're a man or a woman or whoever you are. Well-rounded training leads to better gains across the board, but it leads to longevity in your training career. It leads to longevity and health in your life, orthopedically and systemically. And if we can just simply train well-rounded, I think that we would be better off altogether. You know, the name of the game is health. And if you can train in a well-rounded way, you allow yourself to get to the next year, get to the next decade, to be able to physically thrive forever because you are able to withstand a lot of those stresses out there and those challenges out there that you don't necessarily know that are coming.

30:05Amazing. So train like a human. Train like a human. Exactly. We call it the six by six protocol. Every human out there should be doing squat, hinge, lunge, push-pull-carry patterns. Those are the six foundational movement patterns. And then on top of that, that's your human movement system. We need physical characteristics. That's power, strength, cardio and conditioning, mobility, hypertrophy, and athleticism. If you have the six patterns, the six characteristics, you put those things together, you are going to be unbreakable. This is so good. And of course, you cover all of these and put together protocols with all of these in the book?

30:40Yeah, probably too many. We deep dove in on the programming sessions and we wanted to allow people to go in and match three day a week full body or four day a week upper lower splits, five day a week regional splits, but then also splice in different things like pain prep and then mobility protocols. So people can actually like plug and play all these different things together to create their basic solution for their unique health needs. Amazing. I want to ask you specifically about athleticism. And I haven't talked about this on the show before. Medicine ball. This is one of those things that I utilize every week, several times a week, doing various exercises, whether I'm throwing against the wall, slamming to the ground.

31:24What do you think about medicine ball exercises? They're great. They're great because we can start to tap into the rotary planes. We can get lateralized. We can have unilateral emphasis. those are all characteristics of being athletic and also we can display power at a low level of load so medicine ball is one of these tools that i think that i got introduced to 20 years ago and it was like only the functional training gurus were using that stuff but all of a sudden we think about trying to redefine how we train power and how we train athleticism this is one of those key tools i think when it comes to athleticism specifically body weight's the king it's always going to be the king.

32:02Being able to dominate your body stepping and moving through space, again in rotary, unilateral, and lateral planes of motion, that is going to be the name of the game. But the other tools that we really like are kettlebells, awesome, landmine, bands, and then when it comes to body weight, that's still going to be the king. But athleticism isn't just Olympic weightlifting. Athleticism isn't just doing a super aggressive depth jump into a vertical jump. it's being able to actually train and move like an athlete and i think that there's a little bit more of a conversation there on what an athletic trait actually is because it gets very confused today we got people talking about hybrid athlete well there's nothing real too athletic about power lifting or going out and running a marathon both are amazing strength and cardio based goals and skills to have but athleticism isn't either one of these there's nothing athletic about that Athleticism is moving your body through space with tempo, with agility, with symmetry, with smoothness, with articulation of movement skill.

33:03That is how we would train athleticism. But many times you have to wrap your brain around it's not going to be super heavy. Maybe it's not even going to be super fast, but it should be articulate and it should be a skill that is full body in nature. That reminds me of Luca, right? It's not necessarily fast, but he's an incredible athlete. Of course, yeah. He has things that you just cannot teach. But athleticism is something for the average person that you can get better at. But most people, when they get to 30, 35, 40, they just quit when it comes to their power and athleticism. They're like, I'm just deep diving in on strength and muscle because that's all I heard that we need to do.

33:40And that's a huge mistake. You know, probably age 30, 31, we start to have power reduce as the first physical characteristic that we lose due to quote unquote, normalized aging. that can be reduced just by moving athletically. But what I don't necessarily recommend for people right away is to go, hey, I need to move like an athlete. I need to train athleticism. I'm going to jump into rec basketball after 20 years of not playing and I'm going to go full court and I'm going to go balls to the wall on this thing. Don't necessarily do that. Train the trait and then translate it back into sport or function.

34:13I think we just need a re-exposure to even like 20 or 30 minutes a week across the span of your program, just these exposures into moving like an athlete again. Yeah. So would this be prehab if we're, again, we're, if that's our aspiration is to play a particular sport and we haven't been doing that thing for a while and we want to be able to perform at it, just say there's a lot of explosive movements off of one foot. Should we start training, you know, one foot movements, bounding that kind of stuff to kind of build our body to be able to translate? Yeah, you need to callous the system. There is definitely science behind the transference between, hey, we're going to stress the body in a certain way in the gym, and then hopefully it's going to stand the test of time when we actually get there out into a reactionary sport, something like basketball.

35:00But there's not a direct correlation between these two things. But you're always better off trying to prepare the body for performance than you are just hoping and praying that you stay healthy, doing an activity that you're not ready for. Yeah. So what would you define prehab as? Prehab is anything that you're going to be doing with a more direct and acute approach. So at Pain-Free Performance, we're going to prehab during the six-phase warmup. We're going to prehab on off days that are going to have more of a mobility and an activation and a corrective exercise realm to the focus of that training session.

35:30And really, prehab is anything that we can do that allows us to put more concentrated efforts on busting weak links. What is the weakest link that's holding you back? What is the place that needs to be strengthened? What is the pattern that needs to be strengthened? What's the skill that needs to be improved? So we can then translate it back into function. We can translate it back into the gym and hopefully the rest of our daily lives. Amazing. Amazing. I want to go back to the medicine ball. And I don't know if this has ever hit anybody like I'm going to say it, but medicine is in the name. All right.

36:05And just thinking about why was it named this? And I think, again, movement is medicine. And it's this incredible tool where we can get all this dynamic movement, these different inputs, potentially, you know, whether, again, it's like doing something explosive or I was just training with my buddy, Lewis Howes and his trainer. And one of the things we did was a split squat. So we had a foot up on the bench, holding the medicine ball and the leg that was on the ground is jumping and we're coming down, but coming down and moving right into a rotation. right so it's just like all of this and but it's being fluid right it's not i'm not trying to jump as high as i can or you know but it's like being able to come down to the ground and like go right into that rotation with some with this kind of grace and you know so what do you think about that i get that exact exercise sent to me by every like uh general fitness client that i have that is also a golfer because they see that on the pga tour of all the golfers doing that exact exercise right now.

37:10It's like, well, why are pro golfers doing that particular exercise with rotary motions at the medicine ball and also single leg work? Because that's what function is. And when it looks at trying to rotate on a single leg with a unilateral emphasis, that's the definition of athleticism, maybe minus the step. But when you think about something like that, it's beautiful because you have to accelerate a medicine ball. But when you don't necessarily throw it, you have to decelerate it. When you're talking about athleticism, especially for health and longevity, it's not all about this ballistic work, ballistic power, concentric power.

37:47It's really about being able to harness into force, decelerate force, and being able to protect yourself in that way. So deceleration and being able to rapidly stop and be able to have positions that hold up against your mechanics, that's going to be key. But a lot of the medicine ball work that we do are ballistics. I would say 50 % are that. And then the other 50 % are actually holding onto the ball and doing something like a throw and not actually throwing it because then that trains the decelerative properties that are the opposite of the acceleration properties. So you're talking about like what we used to do with like our siblings were like fake throw the ball.

38:23Exactly. Exactly. Oh man. So this goes back to shout out to Luka Doncic again. And, And as of this recording, we've got a new version of Luca. He's been training. He's looking lean and focused, but he is arguably the greatest in the world at deceleration, right? When we talk about athleticism, the ability to decelerate is one of these capacities, again, that we can train. And you just mentioned how important it is if we're talking about functionality, being pain-free, athletic movement. It's not just the go, go, go and the ability to accelerate. It's also the ability to decelerate. So with that said, what are some things that we can do to train deceleration?

39:04There's a lot of drills out there that get poo-pooed on. You know, you think about things like agility drills for 40 plusers, or you think about bringing out the agility ladder for people that aren't necessarily trying to go to the NFL combine. And people go, what muscles does that train? You know, how does that get me jacked? Well, it's not all about that. But being able to actually step through space or take a number of steps through space, that's going to be huge. There's certain kettlebell drills that are naturally decelerative. And that's why we move into that tool as a number one functional training tool for athleticism itself.

39:38Because every time that you move a kettlebell, whether it be a swing, whether it be a snatch, whether you're moving it across your body, there's an acceleration and then there's a natural deceleration. And just because of the shape of the force plane, it is a centripetal force plane, meaning a semicircular. that's allowing us to actually have more rapid deceleration capabilities with less load needed and this is something that we utilize hugely you know the same thing could be said for the land minus that same force profile and that's why these training tools just really stand up to the test of time but for my clients we're going to work on body weight agility we're going to work on athletic movement with multiple steps and then we're also going to utilize kettlebell and landmine almost every single time.

40:20And this tends to be a priority for people too. We use it in a training program that is going to be more well-rounded with a blend in something called a primer. A primer is called a power primer in our system. And essentially we're priming the brain into utilizing new skills. We have a little bit more of a power emphasis, but we have acceleration and deceleration both being trained and we're moving our bodies fully through space so we can learn a new motor skill. The more diverse we can be in terms of our motor skills and our spectrum of movement, the more resilient we are going to be against pain and injuries.

40:52Amazing. You mentioned the landmine a couple of times. Can you describe what that is for people that are listening? Yeah. Think about putting a barbell just on its one side. So you can either put it in these special things that they have on a squat rack that is a landmine holder. So one end is down in contact with that thing or on the ground and you're holding the opposite collar. And just by doing that, you create the most functional training tool on earth, which is the barbell. And people go, yeah, I love the barbell. Well, try the barbell with one end down on the ground. It totally changes the game.

41:22So the landmine is something really interesting that we utilize a lot too, because a lot of the people that I work with, they don't necessarily have gold to gym at their disposal every single day, but they want to have diversity in their exercise selection and also being able to challenge their movement patterns. The landmine allows us to be able to have like a poor man's machine for many of these different movement patterns. All of a sudden, because the one end of the bar is down on the ground, we have natural stability from that. And because that bar is grounded and we have it in our hand or on our body in another position, we have natural compression that happens at our shoulders or at our lower body.

42:00So essentially we bring the stability components down or the stability requisites down and we have our ability to move fast and move explosively up. So this is the perfect scenario for somebody to be able to train power more safely and more effectively with a training tool that they're not necessarily putting two and a halves on and trying to PR with every week. Amazing. So you mentioned the implement with the squat rack. What about if we don't have one? Is there another way we can do a landmine? Yeah, you can put a weight, just a normal Olympic weight down on the ground, and you can put one end of the barbell into the hole on the ground, or you can just push it out into a corner of a room, or you can just stick it between two dumbbells.

42:38That's what we do many times. If we have a group training class going on, we're going to create landmine out of two dumbbells that sit like this. You put the end of the barbell right there and it won't move anywhere and you'll be able to do what you need to do with it. You don't need any crazy equipment with it. Just turn the barbell over on the side and get going. When it comes to energy and performance, it all starts with the powerhouse power plants of our cells called the mitochondria. Our mitochondria are so abundant, they actually make up about 10 % of our overall weight as adult human beings.

43:10We got a lot of mitochondria to run a lot of processes. Now we want to make sure that we're not gumming up that process of energy creation. And not only that, how can we add to it to create more mitochondria and more energy efficiency? Well, one of the most important components nutritionally has to do with these incredible minerals that carry an electric charge called electrolytes. In particular, something like magnesium, for example, is required to make new mitochondria. It's a process called mitochondrial biogenesis. The creation of new mitochondria depends on magnesium to be present. Pretty amazing.

43:48Plus, we've got this remarkable sodium-potassium pump that has a lot to do with the energy exchange going on throughout all of our cells. It isn't just about the mitochondria, of course. There's a huge data network that runs this amazing human entity, but again, it all works together. And those three electrolytes in particular are an important place for us to focus. And so we want to make sure that we're getting plenty of electrolytes from our diet. But today, more than ever, whether it's high-performance athletes, top CEOs, or just everyday folks looking to fuel their days and fuel their performance, supplemental electrolytes are one of the most popular things in the world.

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45:47Truly love Element. Head over, check them out. is drinklmnt.com forward slash model to take full advantage of this very special offer and this special gift. Well, since this is about pain-free performance, I got to ask you about, you know, we tend to think if we're just, you know, going through the motions that pain is a side effect, right? But you talk specifically that it's far more than that. It's really a warning sign, right? We just look at it as like, this is a side effect, but our body is giving us feedback. Let's talk more about that. It is feedback. And it's not always a red flag sign, but it's a sign that shouldn't be ignored.

46:25And any time that we're having something that's coming back in terms of biofeedback of a pain response, we should be paying attention to that. But I think where people go wrong as they go, hey, this set is really burning up my quads. This is pain. Well, that's discomfort. We're talking about pain being more elicited into the joints, sharper, more acute, something that you feel is going wrong or could be potentially injurious. You feel like that it may be, but it may not be. You know, pain science is a deep, deep topic that we could spend 10 hours on the podcast talking about. But essentially, we need to respect our movement system.

47:02We need to respect our bodies. And if our body is giving us some feedback, we don't just go no pain, no gain mentality and just push through because you're not a real man if you don't do that. We just need to be utilizing that data to make some smart adjustments to continue to train. There's no one really caring if you do a dumbbell bench press one day and then do a barbell bench press the next day. Your body doesn't necessarily know the difference, but it will know the difference if you continue to force feed certain exercises that do elicit chronic pain responses. And in that, that's where people tend to go down a bad rabbit hole of pain and dysfunction.

47:36Range of motion gets less, pain goes up, results plateau or revert. And that's when we lose our, our will to want to train hard. Yeah. So again, the spectrum, we've got no pain, no gain over here. You know, the, what is that? Was that Rocky three with Mr. T pain? We got that. And then we've got completely just, if there's pain, don't do anything. Right. And as you talked about, it's, it's in the middle here. And, you know, one other thing I want to ask you about, you got your 10 year old son, Cam here, you brought along, incredible athlete, baseball, basketball, judo. Is Cam doing some of this training?

48:16Cam is not doing training right now. He just turned 10, so he's not doing a structured training program. He will dabble in training with myself or my wife, or maybe some of his older teammates will come in and train and he'll go on with them. But we're not having him on program two to three days a week. We're not progressing different exercises. We're letting him have his sports and also just be a kid and play. I think that exposure to different movement scenarios is what he needs to do at this point in time. I think that age is going to be different for everyone in terms of starting a progressive strength training or a well-rounded physical preparation program.

48:53But usually 10 years old is a little bit young. Anywhere from 12 to 13 is about the right time to start putting load on the kids. Awesome. And this is another great question, again, for people who have young athletes, you know, parents, grandparents, coaches out there. And there's this big transformation that just happened in our culture the last decade, really, with specialization in sport, right? So getting your kid in to get the advantage where they're training pretty much year round on whatever that particular sport may be. Maybe they're playing travel baseball and they're just a baseball player.

49:30And there's no, again, there's no textbook way to do this, but from your perspective and your experience and being able to work with all these athletes and also now again, having, you know, your son right here is an athlete. What do you think about specialization versus, you know, and the reason I'm asking this is I, I remember, um, this interview with Kobe Bryant and Kobe is very inquisitive whenever he got the opportunity, especially asking players who were doing things that he wanted to accomplish. So he was talking to Michael Jordan and he was asking about basketball because Kobe played when he was very young, obviously.

50:07And he said, so, you know, what were you working on when you were 12? And Michael Jordan was like, I was playing baseball. Yeah. You know, so what do you think about specialization? As a father, I get it when people want to go in and get a leg up on the other 10 year olds in town. I think there's an emotion to it. I think there's a biopsychosocial physical aspect of wanting to be the best. And perceiving that if I do specialize a child early, that they are going to get the leg up, so to say. It's just not true. It's just not true. We have over a decade of research and really good studies on the highest performers in sport.

50:46And over 94 % of professional athletes and Olympic athletes today played multiple sports before their 15th birthday. Oh, so you start talking about that in the wrong circles with your sports family, teammates, and all of a sudden people go, well, what I'm doing is the right way. Maybe, maybe not. But I look at it from a father, but also I look at it from a sports scientist and also a strength and conditioning coach that has been around the block. You know, we've seen high levels of success for some outliers, but we've also seen the vast majority of people that have a well-rounded training approach or well-rounded sport approach, especially early on, just be healthier long-term.

51:32We have great data on that, but also perform at the highest levels or get to those D1 scholarships, get to professional baseball, get to the major leagues or the NFL. Just because I think the correlation leads to the best athlete being the best athlete as soon as they do turn in and specialize. Not a whole lot of people know that I worked for the Chinese Olympic Committee about 12 years ago, and I was in charge of a couple of their athletes that won medals previously to prep them to win their next medal. But then I took over a couple of teams programs in terms of their youth development model.

52:05And that was a wild experience because all of a sudden you see the ultimate early specialization. They'd be going into elementary schools across regions, and they would be looking at potential for a four or five-year-old to be able to go into whatever sport. And then they pull them into Olympic Village, and they'd start specializing the kids at four or five years old. And then I would be one of the people at Village that would be putting programming together for five-year-olds, and they'd have a couple hundred of them. And the reality was I was also training the 25-year-old that had just won silver or just won gold in the previous Olympics.

52:42And yes, they made it through that athletic development model. But also thousands of kids had fallen off that. They got sent away from Olympic Village. They got hurt. They're no longer anywhere. And it was the strongest survived. I think that is absolutely inappropriate. We don't necessarily see the strongest surviving here in America. That's not the model that we run. But I have friends and I have people that we play baseball with that grew up in Dominican, grew up in Venezuela. And the model is very similar there as well. But it's a totally different scenario. That early specialization was to get out.

53:15We don't necessarily have that here in America. But what we do have is a lot of social pressures to want to be the best at earliest ages. But anyone who's been around the block a long enough time knows that who cares if you're the best 10-year-old? Nobody cares if you're the best 12 year old. Very rarely does anyone care if you're the best 15 year old. It gets serious at 16, 17, maybe 18. And we're now seeing in professional baseball that some of the best players on the face of the earth today didn't even have division one scholarships. So everyone develops at a different rate. But if you want to give your child the best chance to succeed in their sport, if you want to give their child the best chance to succeed physically in life, you need to be able to have them have more diversity in what they're getting out of their sports or even their activities.

54:03It doesn't always need to be the sport. Yeah. And there's something to be said. And thank you for that. That was amazing. There's something to be said for enjoyment. There's something to be said for passion for a thing as well. And not having the opportunity to experiment, to play, to try different things, you might not get the chance to find that thing that you really love and are connected with, you know? And so giving our kids the opportunity to have different exposures. and I'm a big fan of unstructured play, right? Just being able to just go play with their friends and just do stuff. And it tends to turn into competition one way or the other a lot of times, but just being able to play, have fun, experiment.

54:40And again, there's no right or wrong way to do this, but from what I've seen, especially if a kid really locks onto something, you can't stop them, right? And I asked your son when I got here and when I shook his hand, like, so which one is your favorite of, you know, judo, basketball, baseball? He's like, whatever's in season. It's a great answer because I know that he is just having fun and he's doing different stuff. And it's not about like, I'm supposed to be in love with this one thing. And if and when that happens, so be it. I know that you'll support him to the moon and back. But, you know, this is, we got such a great opportunity now to, like you just mentioned, there are some kids who are in positions like this is their way out.

55:27Yeah. Where we have the opportunity to, you know, have some more grace and just be there as a support system and put our kids in position to figure things out. I was growing up in a really unique household because my dad was an athletic director of 27 schools in the Western New York area, Williamsville Central School District. and he was the man in terms of being the athletic director. He knew all the coaches. He went to all the games. When I was born, I was right at the football field. I was at the basketball court. I was in the weight room and that's how I grew up. And I played every single sport because my dad, like a crazy person, would throw me in with the modified and the JV teams when I was like seven years old.

56:06So that's what I grew up doing. I grew up playing lacrosse and swimming and playing baseball and basketball, did martial arts. I did everything because everything was there because I was just there with my dad. And that was a different day and age. You know, that's 30 plus years ago. But I find myself as a father today going, that was the right thing to do. I came up, I played baseball, basketball, and football. And I excelled in baseball. And I took that to a division one level. And I did well with it. And I find myself trying to do that exact same thing with my son Cam today. But it is so much harder.

56:43You know, my mom and I will have these conversations and every time she'll bring up, hey, well, your dad did this with you. I'm like, hey, it's 2025. You know, the social pressures to fall in line with certain travel teams or certain early adoption exposure to different tournaments, things like this. It's hard because you want to be able to do the best. You want to be with the best players, but you always have to step back and go, hey, we're 10 years old. We need to be able to know that we're going to be great kids. We're going to learn how to compete. We're going to have fun. You're going to build mental and physical resilience by what we're doing here.

57:17And overall, you're going to develop as a human being and not just as an athlete. I think that we're losing that a lot with early sports specialization because you only play a season and then you specialize in that season with different kids. And it's all about me, me, me. How good can I get? And the thing that I took away from sports, playing all those sports when I was growing up, is that I had a team mentality. I had a team mentality that stays with me today because I run a team today. And I couldn't imagine my life without that team mentality, even in individual sports. There's still that team around you.

57:48You know, Cam does judo and he has one of the strongest teams because of all the kids helping each other out. You know, without the team, there's really nothing. I think we're losing that a little bit with this me-centric approach to early sports specialization today. You know, this is again, speaking to, you know, your unique qualifications and how life qualified you and hearing about your father and that exposure, I could see there's a legacy in this book. You dedicated this book to your son, but also the influence of your dad is in this as well. And so what does that mean to you? It's everything.

58:23We were talking before I grew up in Buffalo, New York. And when I graduated with my doctorate, my dad and I drove from Buffalo, New York to San Diego, California. During that drive, I was giving up jobs and making good money like everyone else in my class. And I decided to take a job for$19 an hour doing personal training in SoCal. And he drove me out there and he dropped me off. And I lived at a day's end off the highway in Mission Valley. And it was the cheapest rent I could get. And it was the best because, you know, that was him going, hey, go chase your dreams. And I do think he thought that he did expose me to enough to be able to go out and do something a little bit more unique.

59:02And it was definitely against the grain, but it was one of those trips that was like, it was a coming of the guard. It was like, he was also Dr. Russen, but he was like, you know, now you go do your thing as Dr. Russen. And that was one of the last trips I took with my dad because he died about eight months later, terminal cancer. But I always remember that because it was like, man, he drove the cross country trip with me and dropped me off and kind of said, Hey, go do your thing. And that was the most liberating thing of all. So when you talk about something like writing a 600 page textbook, you know, with the system that I've developed over the last 20 years, like my life's works in there, a lot of those experiences I talk about in the book, I try to make it a little bit more human than just the science of pain-free performance.

59:46And it's about all the different people that had helped me along the way, all my early mentors, those aha moments that I had, putting the readers into where I was at that time and saying, here's where the system comes from. It's not something that is just based on the science. It's based on my entire life's work. And I think that that brings it full circle for many of the readers and definitely our certified coaches out there that go, holy shit, we're all a work in progress and we will always be a work in progress and I will be as well. But I think the evolution of a non-dogmatic system of always trying to learn more and how to implement more and how to be more well-rounded and knowing very well that there's so many different ways to get out to a goal.

1:00:26But I think the number one thing is if you're healthy, you can go out there and do anything. If you're struggling with your health, nothing else matters. And if you can put health before anything else, you're always going to get to that goal. Amazing. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, man. Right now, and as of this recording, the book is available everywhere books are sold. It's a beautiful book. It's a beautiful book. And if you could, can you share what you want people to know about pain-free movement? Like what are they going to find in this book? You've got, when we're talking about training, you're showing people, you've got the photos, you've got the programs, you've got the education as well.

1:01:05Talk about that a little bit. I want people to just be able to have the confidence to go in and have a health centric fitness approach so they can unlock their goals, no matter what they are. And I think that if we can do that, we need the tools in order to achieve it. And this book gives them the goods. It gives them programs to follow. It gives them pain protocols to be able to get healthy. It gives them protocols to be able to build muscle and lose fat and be able to have longevity with their training. But also it shows them exactly what to do and why to do it. And we busted our asses and we did something very unique in this book.

1:01:41We QR'd over 400 different assets. So you can watch the videos and you can go through the programs and you can see me moving and my staff moving exactly how we want you to move as a starting point. And I think that's something that brings a book to life. You know, one of the struggles that we had with pain-free performance was this was coming off of the back of almost a thousand two-day in-person certification courses over the last 10 years of pain-free performance specialist certification. This is very tactile education. How do we bring it down into a textbook and not lose its essence? So I think that we needed to over deliver on the programming.

1:02:16We needed to deep dive into the education and the actionability of that education. But we also needed to make movement come to life. We need to watch movement. We can't just look at a picture. Absolutely. Can you let everybody know where they can pick up a copy and also follow you for more? You can pick up a copy at Amazon or all places books are sold. And you can check out more on social media at Dr. John Russon, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. And then painfreetraining.com is the site. Amazing. Man, I am so grateful for you and your life experience and life qualifying you to do things the way that you're doing them.

1:02:50It immediately resonated with me because I'm about that life too when it comes to actually doing the training and not just theory. I love the theory part, but I love to train as well. And so this deeply connected with me and I just appreciate you so much. Thank you so much. The one and only Dr. John Russon. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. Listen, it's incredible to have access like we do today and have resources like we do today because taking 20 years of experience and putting it into a book like this is just very, very special.

1:03:27and like I said, something that really resonated with me about our special guest is he's about that life and not just that, he's about that family life as well. Bringing his son here today was just really special for me. It really resonated with me and just to see the quality of the character as well. His son stood up at me, Lee shook my hand, looked me in my eyes and all the things but also just this joy that they both have this kind of childlike energy. And I'm just so grateful. I'm grateful that we have these incredible connections. We have access and education like this at the push of a button.

1:04:07That's why podcasts are so powerful and so easy to share. So I encourage you to share this conversation with somebody that you care about today to encourage them on their health and wellness up leveling and being able to do this together as a community. Of course, one of the best ways to share is to take a screenshot of this episode and share it on social media. Of course, on Instagram, you can tag me. I'm at Sean Model. I'm going to keep an eye out for it. And also tag Dr. Russin as well. He's at Dr. John Russin, spelled R-U-S-I-N. Show him some love. I'm sure that it would absolutely light up his day.

1:04:46We got some incredible masterclasses and world-class guests coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care. Have an amazing day. And I'll talk with you soon.