#748: Pavel Tsatsouline and Christopher Sommer

24:35There's a degree of clarity that I envy. I might include it for people, but when we did our sound check, I asked you to give me an answer so we could test the audio, what you had for breakfast. And what was your answer? Coffee. And that was it. That was the sound check. I love the simplicity. Now, speaking of simplicity and also undoing the confusion that a lot of people suffer from, what are the most counterproductive myths or misconceptions about strength training that come to mind? Well, the number one, Tim, I guess, is the idea that you have to go to failure every time you train. I can tell you one thing, that the Soviet weightlifters, I have done a very thorough analysis of the Soviet weightlifting methodology through the 60s, through the 80s, the glory days.

25:22And I found that they typically did one third to two third of maximal repetitions per set. So what does it mean? If let's say that you're using a weight that's your 10 rep max, 10 is all you could do if you push yourself very hard. They would do three to six consistently. Now, you'd probably ask yourself, okay, I'm not a weightlifter. And what does this Soviet stuff from the 80s have to do with today? Well, two things. First of all, even though a person who is not a lifting athlete is not going to train exactly as a weightlifter or powerlifter. Nevertheless, the methodology has to be derived from these sports, because these are specialist strength sports.

26:07So they just have to be adapted to your knees. Second of all, this particular Soviet methodology is still superior to this day. This is very interesting, but you keep hearing about all these new world records set in the sport of weightlifting. Well, if you compare the world records of today to the world records of the 80s, you will see that in most cases, the records today are inferior to records in the 80s. How can that be? They accuse people of doing drugs, and they changed weight classes twice since the 80s. Of course, it's so wonderful. I'm so happy that today nobody does drugs anymore. It's just true.

26:47And so if you look at the lifts performed by Soviet lifter, Yurik Varbanyan in 1980, at the Moscow Olympics. These lifts have never been exceeded. These lifts have never been approached. So this particular methodology does work extremely well. It's still the best methodology, period. Later on, the Soviet powerlifting team adapted this methodology for powerlifting with tremendous success. They dominate. The same particular methodology has been adapted to bodyweight training, kettlebell presses, and so on and so forth. So it's the same thing that can be applied for everybody because it's just principle-based training.

27:28So the major misconception is that you have to go to failure. If you just overcome that, and if you make it a habit to do one-third to two-thirds of the repetitions that are possible and do more sets instead, you're going to make much greater progress. You're going to do much safer. And folks, you're going to enjoy your training. How does the approach shift if your focus is maximal hypertrophy? If you're after maximal hypertrophy, it's volume. So they figured out in the Soviet Union that there's a direct correlation between volume and hypertrophy. So you just pretty much have to do more sets. You're going to have to do more sets in like 60 to 70 % of your max range.

28:14And a whole bunch of sets of five and six, just many of them. and your rest periods might be compressed a little more. But that's it. If you do that, do this a couple times a week, many sets of five or six. Don't even worry about how many. Just keep going. Don't kill yourself. Enjoy yourself. Eat more. You're going to get bigger. It's unavoidable. It's just as simple as that. Would you consider the, and please disagree if this is not the case, but if you had to pick one movement for strength, longevity, would the deadlift be that movement or is it not possible to choose one movement? How would you try to answer that question?

28:51If you were to choose one movement, Tim, yes, I would choose the deadlift or I would choose the kettlebell swing. Obviously, the kettlebell swing is not something you can compete in and it's not going to give you the same satisfaction of lifting heavy weight. But those are the two main full body exercises, the full body expressions of power that will go such a long way for you for longevity, strength. Just the quality of life. What are the biggest mistakes that people make with the deadlift, whether that's technically or in programming? What are the biggest mistakes? Well, Tim, I think the very big mistake is because they think, okay, I have picked up things from the floor.

29:32This looks so simple. It's not an Olympic lift. Therefore, it's very simple. So I'll just start piling on place and start training. The deadlift is a very technical lift. Even if you're just a recreational lifter, you owe it to yourself to learn to deadlift correctly. That's as simple as that. So I say that's the primary mistake and that mistake goes for every exercise that people do out there. I would highly recommend people check out your book with Mr. Bolton. Deadlift Dynamite. Yeah, really very, very dense. Shifting gears just a little bit, dense in the best way possible, no fluff. I'd love to shift gears and just ask you a few questions about sort of your philosophies and your thinking, not so much the highly specific training questions, but when you think of, for instance, the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind for you?

30:19Tim, I am fortunate enough to know many successful people. And I think that what separates them from the rest is the CEO of Strong First, Eric Ferlhart, he put it very well. He says, balance with priorities, balance with priorities. So Eric, yourself, and many others are fortunate to know they exemplify success for me. What are the habits that you've observed that allow people to have balance with priorities? What are the things they do that other people don't do? Or maybe the things they don't do that other people do? Well, I think one is calm. These people are calm because people who are hyper, they get so trapped in their reactive modes, they get too trapped in the everyday minutia of their work and their existence.

31:10so they just do not pause and they do not think. Again, Eric has a great quote from a Vietnam era seal which says calm is contagious. Calm is contagious. So when the person is calm, then he or she has the time to meditate, reflect, set the priorities, and set the balance. That certainly holds true from what I've seen. And the opposite, of course, is true. hysteria is just chasing the tail absolutely chicken little this guy's falling yes everything is urgent just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by momentous momentous offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories including sports performance sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more.

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33:06And now, Christopher Sommer, a former U.S. national team gymnastics coach and the founder of the Gymnastic Bodies Training System, known for building devotees into some of the strongest, most powerful athletes in the world. You can find Christopher on Instagram at Christopher S-O-M-M-E-R 1. Coach, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim. I am excited to finally have you on the show. We've had so many conversations in the last month or two, and I've been so impressed with the subtlety and nuance of the training that you do. So I've been very eager to have you on the show to explore all things gymnastics and gymnastics strength training related.

33:56So thanks for making the time. And I thought we could start with just some definitions. So what would you or how would you define gymnastics strength training, GST? In a nutshell, gymnastics strength training, I define as high-level bodyweight strength training. So none of the training that we do for world-class performance or the acrobatics or technical gymnastics, just purely the strength joint prep and mobility components. And one example of what not to do perhaps, or how gymnastics strength training might differ from the aesthetics that some people, I'm not going to say compromise with, but shoes.

34:37We were talking about doing a pike handstand press or holding that position. And the example, feel free to correct my recollection, but was of how a lot of folks kick their hips way out to counterbalance instead of doing what? What would the gymnastic strength training version of that look like? Good example. So what we see, and this is kind of getting into some handstands, some skill training, but handstand done correctly is a reflection of physical preparation that athlete either has or does not have. So if they lack strength, if they lack mobility, then of course their technical handstand is going to lack refinement.

35:15So in terms of that pike handstand, if they lack middle trap, if they lack lower trap strength, then they're going to try to counterbalance by really arching the chest out, sticking the butt way back behind them. Oh goodness. Not even sure how to describe it like a pike and an arch at the same time. Sorry to interrupt coach, just for people who I realized I should have probably defined some terms myself. So pike for people who are not familiar with this, the easiest way to visualize it if you don't have any background with that is imagine you're sitting on the floor. It's kind of like PE class, legs straight and together, bending at the waist towards your toes.

35:53Is that forward? Bending forward towards your toes. And so if you were to imagine you're sitting down with your legs out in front of you hypothetically at a 90 degree angle and you put your arms up over your head let's just flip you upside down so you're in a handstand position that's effectively what we're talking about exactly what we're talking about to hold that because center of mass is way out in front of the body then in order to hold that the traps are what's responsible to keeping the back and the shoulders straight so if you're not strong enough and is it some people say well it's just skill training well everything builds upon everything else.

36:27So got Olympics coming up, people are going to be pumped. They're going to see our Olympic team. They're going to see the other monsters around the world competing on rings. And they're a, I want to do that. And they're going to jump right up. I mean, I've got friends who are former SEAL Team 6. And the first thing they did is jump up. And of course they failed utterly. And then they come see us because it's like anything, you know, you don't jump right into calculus. You learn to count. Then we learn addition, we learn subtraction, yada, yada, yada with enough time enough layers enough progression then we get to advanced math so advanced ring strength same deal i remember we were talking not too long ago about the importance of pacing when you're dealing with connective tissue tendons and ligaments which is something i'm not particularly well known for in terms of patience and pace but i've noticed that but many of the guys who say do outdoor bar workouts some of which are very impressive physical specimens will jump up on the rings and they'll be doing, I'm not sure what they would even call them.

37:27They're kind of like what would be, uh, looked at as like a typewriter on the pull-up bar when you move back and forth from one arm to the other side to side, side to side pull up. And they're like, I was feeling fine coach. And then suddenly my, you know, I tore my bicep, tore my pack and it was fine until it wasn't. What are some, if you look at the muscles or types of strength that most non-gymnasts will not have, even if they consider themselves reasonably athletic, what would be on that list? And we already mentioned one, which is, say, mid and lower traps. And of course, I would like to think I came to the table with kind of hat in hand because I recognize how hard a lot of this is.

38:06But the more I practice it, the more I'm astounded at how unprepared my body is for these movements. As someone who has done a lot of pulling from the floor, for instance, who has, you know, decent deadlift, I would like to think. I was just astonished at how weak my mid-back was. It was just, it blew my mind. It was completely flabbergasting. What other muscles or movements do you find normals just cannot perform even if they view themselves as athletic? For the lifters, the one that always jumps out at us is their lack of shoulder extension. So if I pick my, if I'm standing upright and I lift my hands forward, that's flexion and I can go all the way up to my arms or overhead.

38:46If I'm picking my hands up behind me, that would be shoulder extension. Right. So just to paint another picture for folks, like if you stand up and then interlaced your fingers behind your tailbone with your arms straight and then tried to lift them up towards the ceiling, keeping your back straight. So the shoulder extension. And what we find is, you know, and a lot of what we'll get sometimes from people as well, I don't want to be in the circus. I don't want to be an acrobat. I'm not interested in skill training. I want strength. And what they don't understand is if you want to achieve world-class levels of performance, technically, that comes first from having a solid foundation of physical preparation, which means correct range of motion, good mobility, good connective tissue.

39:30So shoulder extension becomes so. For example, a lot of people fail. They can't do muscle-ups because they can't do shoulder extension. They think in their head that a muscle-up is a chin-up, a little bit of transition that they don't understand and then a dip. What really happens is we do a pull-up, we get our hands to our chin and then the elbows pull back behind the torso behind them and there's their shoulder extension. If they can't do shoulder extension, now they're stuck. And they failed to spend all this time working technique and doing rap and doing rap. And what they're doing is they're treating the symptom, not actually the problem.

40:05So just as some background for folks, the way that we connected was I at 38 finally decided enough is enough. I've been fantasizing about trying to learn gymnastics in a structured way for 20 plus years, much like my postponing of getting a dog for 20 years. It's just like, why did it take me so long to do this? And I was in Venice. I'm going to give these folks a shout out. So there's a CrossFit gym there named Paradiso CrossFit and love the folks who run the gym. And I would go there to train because they would let me use chalk and do all the things that a lot of gyms will not allow me to do.

40:38And I met a gent who was doing a body weight workout. He was the only person doing a body weight only workout. And he suggested that I follow gymnastic bodies on Instagram. So I started following your company on Instagram and saw older, let's just call it middle-aged men, sort of my demo as it stands right now, who had started from scratch doing impressive things. and I had used age as my crutch and excuse for not pulling the trigger in the last few years. So I reached out to Rob Wolf, who was kind enough to introduce us. And then we've collaborated in this experiment that we're currently doing, which is roughly 90 days with a handful of goals that we'll get to, but I want people to understand how we connected.

41:26So I'm in the middle of training right now. I have to say, I feel better than I've felt with the exception of a little bit of elbow So nonsense that is not from this specifically. It's a recurring thing. I feel better than I have in years. Well, that's good to hear. Just from this little bit already. Just from the little bit that we've done. And the follow-up question to that is, when people are training for handstands at home, so self-taught, what are the biggest mistakes that they make? Well, they won't like the answer. This is a little bit of national team coach attitude coming out. People tend to want what they want when they want.

42:02And that's fine if I'm looking for mediocre to average results. If I'm looking to really do best effort, I've got to back shit up and I've got to take care of my business. And for most of the adults, it's going to be they have severe compromises in their mobility. Their shoulders don't work well. Their hips don't work. Their knees don't work. Their elbows are shot. Their forearms are tight from all the desk patrol. Their calves are like piano wire from sitting all the time. We won't even talk about hip flexor. Their scaps don't move. Their scapula have no motion. They can't protract. They can't retract.

42:39Their spine is locked in just a flat or a kyphoid, so they're hunched over. Their lower back is continually arched, and they're just kind of frozen in this position and then they want to try to move their body. Now, the common one that we get from people as well, these are extreme ranges of motion. These are artificial ranges of motion. And actually these are your natural range of motion. Problem is they quit using it. And so it just atrophied. We're not doing anything special. We're just, we have to recreate that natural range of motion first. We've been doing, gosh, I don't know now, maybe since 2006, working with the adults.

43:19And the thing that just, we keep having my nose rubbed in it over and over and over again. Every time I think I have it down, I find I need to take it further. It's just the complete other lack of joint prep and mobility they come to the table with. Even your own case is an excellent example. We haven't done anything advanced yet. We're doing all basic, we're doing fundamental stuff, and you're already feeling better than in years. Well, I think it's, a lot of it has to do with two things if I'm trying to self-diagnose. The first is identifying musculature and motor patterns that I simply had not developed properly previously.

43:57Even if I had a passing familiarity, like, well, let me frame this in the form of a question. So can you define what the hollow position is, why it's important, and how do most normals do when they do a, say, hollow body rock? Maybe you can explain that too. Most people, when they think of abs, they think lower ab, they think upper abs. They're not going to think about obliques at all, and they're not going to think transverse abdominus at all. So, lower abs are easy, upper ab easy, obliques, okay, they understand the sideways. They don't understand how obliques wrap around into the lats, into the lower back.

44:30Okay, that's fine. But transverse abdominus, they're like, excuse me, was that English? They don't have a clue. And that's what supports the body when it's in a straight body position. So for example, ab rollers were, we don't use them in our program, but just as an example, ab rollers were getting a bad knock that if you do an ab roller, you're going to hurt your lower back. Well, yes and no, you'll hurt your back if you're doing it wrong, if you're arched in your lower back. So for definitions, if my lower back is arched, I'm in anterior pelvic tilt. If I'm the opposite movement and I'm kind of my tailbone tucked under and my lower back is flat, that's posterior pelvic tilt.

45:10Well, when my body's horizontal, then my back is supported when I'm posterior pelvic tilt. If I'm arched, it's unsupported by the musculoskeletal and I'm hanging by the disc. Which is true for a ton of exercises that we do. If I feel it in my lower back, almost universally when I send you videos, the feedback is more PPT, posterior pelvic tilt. It should just be a mantra. Yeah. And for people who need a way to visualize this, because I realize a lot of this vocab is new. And coach, feel free to interrupt at any point. But an easy way to think about and remember anterior pelvic tilt is imagine that your waist is the top of a wine glass.

45:50If you have anterior pelvic tilt to the front, you're going to be pouring wine out the front of that glass, basically out of your belly button. And if you have posterior pelvic tilt, you're tucking that tailbone, you're going to be pouring wine basically down your sacrum, you know, down the back of your body. It's just an easy way for me to remember. That is clever. I got to say 40 years of national team, and I've never heard it described that way. It may be our go-to definition. You know, I can't do the gymnastics. I'll have to stick with refining my definitions, although I'm making progress with the fundamentals.

46:23Yes, you are. And I'd like to talk about the assessment that we did. So I flew out to a great gym, Awakened Gymnastics in Colorado, and we met up. That's our GB Master Affiliate. We only have one in the world. Awaken in Denver is our number one GB affiliate. They're the best at what they do. Yeah, it's a fantastic gym. And we did quite a few hours of various assessments. If somebody wanted to try to self-assess or videotape themselves to have, say, someone qualified in gymnastics assess them, if you were to do an 80-20 analysis, which movements or exercises give you the most data? Most bang for the buck.

47:03well let's see no so what we went over with you we checked hanging leg lift hanging leg lift automatically is going to tell me um dynamic range of motion is that right that's like on a stall bar you don't want to be free swinging well could be you know most of them you know whatever they can do it'll to my eye as soon as i see it or our staff side they're going to know right away whether or not that person has adequate it's going to tell us your core strength then it's going to tell me hamstring flexibility. That'll do that in one. Bridge. Bridge is a huge one for adults. That's been one of our, we have a thoracic bridge core stretch series.

47:38That's been one of our best-selling products. That's what I'm doing this evening. Yeah. Yeah. Notice, notice guys that Tim's real happy right now. That'll change in just a few. Yeah. What characterizes, this is a really important question. What characterizes a good bridge? And for people who are thinking of bridge, I mean, it's imagine you're laying on your back, You put your palms down by your sort of ears, let's say, feet flat on the ground, and then you go up into an arch. Now, I was extremely surprised and found it quite hilarious how bad my bridge was. I mean, terrible. In the assessment, but...

48:10By your standards, yes. By what I see on a normal basis, yours was medium. Medium. It was like a D+. It was like on the verge of passing. but I realized despite all of my many years of wrestling where we did tons of bridges, almost all of my bridging comes from bending at the low back, right? So my lumbar. Which is a huge issue. Yeah. So what is a good bridge? Little background. So the lumbar and the lower back is not designed to have a ton of movement in it, a big arch. Your thoracic spine, your upper and your middle back, they're designed to have a lot of movement. They're designed to rotate.

48:47Your lower back is not, but when most people do their bridge work, they're so compromised. Now, even back up a little bit more, they're so compromised in range of motion, their upper body, because they've been hitting the weights hard. They've been doing just a lot of high intensity training. Now, to preface that, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that at all. If you weren't one of God's gifts when you were born, you've got to do something to make up the deficit. The problem is when they do all that weight training, they're not doing it in balance and maintaining their mobility.

49:19If they had, they wouldn't have the issues that they ran into. So if all you do is strength, strength, strength, strength, strength, then you can always tell someone who is there, they're the curl king and they're the bench press king. They come in and they're hunched over and their elbows don't straighten. Their arms don't go behind them at all. And they're like, you know, my shoulders are killing me most of the time what we found is yeah their shoulders are completely effed up i agree but their biceps are crazy tight also and that bicep runs up through the front of the shoulder and it's manifesting itself as a shoulder issue so kind of all these come together long story short to cause them a huge problem being able to get into a proper bridge which should be all upper body, no lower back almost at all.

50:03But people are doing the exact opposite. They hurt their lower back and they say, man, these, these bridges are dangerous. No, the bridges aren't dangerous. Doing them half-assed and wrong without vetting your sources of information is dangerous. I found it incredibly therapeutic as someone who's had a, basically a frozen thoracic for God knows how long, 10 years. Sure. We were worried about that. I remember we're like, Hmm. We'll work through this. Tim has the upper body mobility of a Lego figure. What are we going to do? So, but just the progression of doing, and of course, people should look for visual references and I'll point them to a bunch of resources in the show notes, but can you walk through the check boxes?

50:48Cause I know we've done this even recently, the concept, I don't know why this didn't even occur to me, but of helping to take the lower back out of the equation by elevating the feet elevating the fee. Yep. And elevating them as high as necessary. Some people are so tight that they basically start in a handstand and it is what it is, right? The main thing that we try to always hammer with students is they're always in a hurry. I've got to get it right now. Even our conversation, remember way back when started that way. And I was like, dude, if you can handle it, we need, we need to change gears here.

51:19We need to go slow now in order to go fast later. Well, you said, if you want to be a stud later, you have to be a pud now. I think were your words. Yeah, that sounds like a smart-ass remark. That's a good one. I wrote that down. I've corrupted you. All your great podcasts and I've corrupted you. So what are the other checkboxes? So let's just say they get the feet up and they're like, okay. Feet elevated to the point where they're not feeling dress on the lower back. Now, it'll depend on pressing strength also. If they're very weak in the shoulders, then they're going to have to start from the hands hand and work their way down.

51:55but we'll assume they've got feet elevated. Hip high or higher if necessary, doesn't matter a bit. Then from there, we're going to work on, most people are going to be up, they're going to have bent elbows. So we're going to work on straightening the arms. No matter how close they are, they could be wide. Could be wide. Yeah, because gosh, I had one special forces guy that came to me years ago, tough, tough guy, first name Mark. And he had gained 80 pounds of muscle. 80 pounds of muscle? Oh yeah, it was just like, holy moly. And he was, he just a beast, but he had completely effed himself up because all he did was gain strength without mobility.

52:34And athletically, unless my sport is just purely lifting, unless I'm a power lifter, unless I'm an Olympic lifter, then maximal strength is not my sole criteria for being successful. In fact, usually the strongest athletes in the weight room are not the best athletes on the field of play. And in fact, I don't know a single exception. There may be one there somewhere that someone can share with us and let me know, but I've been around the world. I won't say as many people as you know, but in 40 years of world-class gymnastics, I've met a ton of people. I've never seen an exception. He couldn't even hang on a bar anymore with his arms straight without hitting his head.

53:17wow you think your shoulders are tight pull a mark and he was like coach what what can you do for me for once i was at a loss for words which is rare for me i think you're screwed and so what did you do with him in the bridge was he just stuck we he couldn't even that's this was hanging on a bar we couldn't even get in a bridge that was it was impossible what we would do with someone like that and mark so you're you're more so guys just just to give the audience some some feedback i went into Tim's assessment expecting medium, medium. And Tim was much more mobile, much more athletic, much more well-prepared than I had anticipated.

53:55So I had spent a lot of time putting a custom program together for Tim that because he did so well in his assessment, I had to throw the whole damn thing away because basically he was too advanced for what we had assumed he was coming to the table with. Someone who is crazy compromised, we're going to have to sneak up on it. We're going to have to get in there and we're going to have to first do pec minor. We've got to loosen up pec minor. We've got to get in there and we've got to work on the bicep tendon. We've got to get the bicep tendon going. We've got to work on forearms, get forearms loose.

54:27We've got to break the scaps so there's some motion there. We have to do all of that. It's not high intensity work, but it's got to be done. And as you heard Tim say, the body thrives on it. It's like a tonic for the body. The body feels so much better because it's what the body's supposed to do. A lot of people don't care for it because it's not the high intensity sexy work, but it's that fundamental work that makes the high intensity sexy work possible later. Not only possible, but safer. That's a good point because we had, I think one of the questions that people asked, Tim asked for questions on Twitter.

55:04You know, what would you like me to ask Coach Sommer? And some of the people came back with, you know, I know someone who's a gymnast and they're just beat the shit. it. And my answer to that is simple. They weren't my athlete. They weren't my athlete. We don't train through pain. As a national team coach for a long time, physical preparation was always our number one priority. We built the physical structure first because if you think about it, it's kind of silly. And we see this a lot with people who are getting into weightlifting, they're CrossFitters, they're Olympic lifting, and they're enthusiastic, they're excited, and they want to get that weight on the bar.

55:40They're trying to build technique with a flawed range of motion, which of course gives them effed up technique and it doesn't work. And then they get hurt. Or you hear someone, oh, I changed my shoe and I blew my knee. Seriously, your knee is that tight that because your heel, your new shoe is a fraction of an inch higher or a slightly different angle that your knee blew? In our training program, we need to call everything, you need an optimal surplus. You need an optimal surplus, range of mobility, range of motion. You need an optimal surplus of strength. You need an optimal surplus of stability.

56:12You need what you need to perform and a little extra for when things go south. Not if things go south, when things go south. And if you're just right in the edge of what you're capable of, and they hope, oh, nothing will go wrong. I hope nothing will go wrong. Oh, it is going to go wrong. Absolutely going to go wrong. And so you prepare the body for that ahead of time. so when it does go wrong it's like ah that didn't hurt i didn't get nothing's injured moving on next turn well one of the questions you've asked me multiple times when we've been going over different workouts and i would mention for instance i felt it in my bicep like i felt an extreme stretch in my bicep so for instance there's a movement that we've been calling a german hang a lot of people would call it skin the cat uh perhaps very similar where you would hold on to say a bar or rings in this case.

57:02And I'm going to simplify this, of course, but tucking up, going back in between the rings and then hanging down with as little of a pike at the hips as possible. Nice flat back, nice straight hips. Exactly. And sort of palms facing towards the ground. And I was saying, I really felt an incredible stretch in my biceps more than in the shoulders. And your question would be, and this is applied to different body parts, where did you feel it in the bicep? This is getting back to the not training through pain comment. And could you describe why you're like, if it's in the middle, I don't really care.

57:38And same for the abs, like we can smash those all day long. If it's at the attachment points though, then I want to know about it or we're going to dial it back. So why is that? I'm going to sneak around to it. So most people, when they do their training, meaning well, and I'm not, I'm not slamming anyone by any means. And the only reason that we know this and are able to share is because all these years I've been doing this, I made the same effing mistakes that they make. We just survived my stupidity and learned how to do better. It's the story of my life. Story of all of our lives, right? I used to tell my athletes there are stupid gymnasts and there are old gymnasts, but there are no old stupid gymnasts because they're all dead.

58:18But most people, most beginners, they want to base all their training off muscular fatigue, which is a problem. It's problematic because muscle tissue regenerates about every 90 days. about every 90 days, you know, from end to end, all the cells, everything's done in 90 days. Okay, that's well, that's fine. But connective tissue takes 200 to 210 days. So we have a huge gap. So if I get in and I'm just, you know, I'm not a big fan of beginners training to failure simply because their structure isn't mature enough yet to handle it safely. And by mature, I simply mean enough productive, well-structured hours under their belt.

59:03So I have nothing to do with it. Particularly if it's in new ranges of motion, right? If they've just. Particularly if there's joints. If it's a muscle belly, if we're like you said, if we're doing core, we'll beat your core down all day long and I'm not worried about it a bit because it's just muscular fatigue. But as soon as we get joints involved, everything changes. And it's actually really easy for people to verify because they can think back over all the injuries they've had over their training career, you know, their athletic career, playing around with the kids in the backyard, the vast majority of those injuries are all joint related.

59:35Almost always. It's extremely rare for someone to have a muscle belly injury. It just doesn't happen. Yet their training, especially in the beginning, is all skewed just towards muscular development, not connective tissue development. And that's where they get into trouble. So when they come to us, the first thing we like is for them to spend. Is it going to be boring? It is, you know, 210 days. We're talking six, seven months of dial it back guys, dial it back. And I think that it's important to emphasize too, that dialing it back, it means that you're not rushing, but it doesn't mean you won't experience a lot of progress.

1:00:11If that's fair to say, I think that's crazy fair to say. And you, you found that yourself, but what happens is some of them. We run into this. Maybe you have also as we get some people who are addicted to the rush. They're addicted to the adrenaline rush. They're addicted to laying there in a pile of sweat. You know, they want to do the sweat angels. They want to crawl out of the gym. And the problem with that is if you're a world-class athlete, you can't do that because I have to be back in the gym the next day and train again. I can't afford to destroy myself or the special operations guys we work with.

1:00:44We've got to be able to do both. They've got to be operational and increase their performance through their training, but they have to go hand in hand. And so it's only in beginners that we see, they think somehow they can cheat time. It can't be done. I mean, connective tissue is going to take 200 to 210 days. There's no supplement. You can't paint yourself blue. You can't dance under the moon. There's nothing you can do to speed that up. It's going to take what it takes. And so we work as hard as we can within those parameters. If there's joint pain, we shut it down. You know, your elbow's a good example.

1:01:18Years ago, pushing too hard. Now that, that, if we tweak that elbow a little too much, it flares up on you. We'll repair it and it's going to take time, but it takes much longer to repair it than it does to avoid it in the first place. Yeah, for sure. And just a couple of notes and then I'm going to swing back to the diagnostics, you know, how people can assess. But Another conversation, you know, topic that came up, I think I'm sure I brought it up at dinner once was the use of anabolics or any type of growth agents. And the point that you'd made, which makes perfect sense, is that would just increase the likelihood of having connective tissue problems in gymnasts because the muscular strength and growth would outpace the development of and the adaptation of the tissues.

1:02:07completely would backfire, huge backfire, where students make their greatest gains in strength is to be able to do dynamic plyometric work and straight arm ring strength. Those are your two biggest bangs for the buck. And what we have learned the hard way that's different, the main difference between working with young developmental athletes and full-grown adults is the order in which we need to present the material. As a young athlete, I can do all physical components at once. I can do plyometric, I can do straight arm, I can do their mobility. Bent arm, it doesn't matter a bit. I can do it all at one time.

1:02:43But an adult who's now fragile from years of making a living, sitting at a desk, day in, day out, as they get a little older, kids get bigger, levels of activities, drop, drop, drop, drop, and they're compromised. We have to build these things in a different order. We have to first go rebuild mobility. Then we have to rebuild core. Core, I'm talking not just abs, but obliques and lower back. Most adults, a lot of their lower back pain isn't lower back related. It's oblique related. We have to go in and we have to correct that. Then we can worry about regular strength. Once those things are done, then we can get to the moneymaker, which is their dynamic strength.

1:03:22But with an adult, especially a strong adult, who's been athletically inactive, so they've been doing strength training but not out moving, doing sports, being active, you know, outside of their conditioning. Or let's say, for example, all they're doing is squats. And they're very linear in the path of their knee. And there's no meniscus work. There's no MCL work. There's no ACL work. Then they go outside. They play a little softball. We hear it all the time. yeah when I was playing softball I blew my knee going around first base really how many kids blow a knee running around first base I mean the supplemental knee exercises that look wacky as hell when you first look at them that you've had me do and maybe we can show some of this to people in the show notes even in the span of three or four weeks I've seen a huge difference in knee stability improvement because I haven't ever performed these types of targeted movements before.

1:04:17Coming back to the diagnostics, we talked about the bridge. We talked about the hanging leg lifts. Are there any other movements? Shoulder extension will be huge. So shoulder extension would be sitting on the floor. Sitting on the floor, sitting in that pike that you described earlier, hands touching behind them. And then without letting the hands move, trying to scoot the butt as far forward away from the hands as they could. Just that one movement right there is going to let us see, going to show me their scapular health. Can they protract? Can they retract? It's going to tell me how tight their pec minor is.

1:04:55It's going to tell me how tight their bicep is. And it's going to tell me how tight their brachialis down by the elbow is. Oh, the brachialis. Yes, your favorite. My good friend, the brachialis. And also just the, and this relates to kind of daily living. A lot of people who have back pain, myself included, quite a few years ago. If you're wondering if you have a tight pec minor, you can just Google pec minor and figure out where it is, but basically think right under the clavicle, get a lacrosse ball, you know, go on the wall and try to roll out your pec minor with a lacrosse ball. And if you have back pain, you don't always fix that back pain by just focusing on the location of that pain.

1:05:33That's a good point. And you start addressing the pec minor and a lot of that stuff is alleviated. And I want to throw one thing out there just for people who might be interested. And that is, I think part of the reason I seemed or was better prepared for the assessment than I would have been otherwise is that I started doing really just one thing, one type of new exercise, which was compression strength training in that pike position. and did that for just maybe two times per week prior to doing the assessment as I was traveling. And for people who are wondering what this is like, if you really want to feel humbled as I did, I was traveling, I was in Columbia, a very close friend of mine, almost got to professional rugby in New Zealand.

1:06:21He's a beast. I mean, athletically, extremely strong, extremely fast. He's always He's going to be one of the top performers in the gym when he walks into a weight room. And he saw me doing pike pulses. And so I'll explain what this is to folks because he was kind of laughing at me. And he's like, what kind of Jane Fonda bullshit are you doing here? You know, and I love that name. And I said, all right, I'd like, all right, big guy. You're such a tough guy. Let's see you do these. So for those people who are interested, so you're sitting in this, this seated pike position we're talking about, right?

1:06:50So you're sitting on your ass on the floor, the upper body perpendicular with the floor and your legs out straight in front of you. Point your toes, kind of tense your quads to push the back of your knees into the floor. Then reach forward and stretch forward as far as you can. Get your fingers out on either side of your legs as far out as you can. And then just try to lift your heels off the ground, keeping your legs completely straight and just pulse it up and down, like, I don't know, three to four inches, maybe if you can manage that. And just try to do 30 of those. And my buddy could not lift his heels off the ground and just fell over laughing.

1:07:24He's like, yeah, okay, those are hard. But that compression, if you think about the range of motion that most people train for core, they're doing sit-ups or maybe they're doing hanging leg lifts up to like an L-sit. So their legs are getting up to kind of parallel height. Well, that last 90 degrees and especially the last like 45 degrees where you're bringing your thighs towards your chest is so hard. I mean, I had zero strength there prior to doing just a few weeks of this stuff. that just amazed me. And for those people also, we were talking about the transverse abdominis. Coach, feel free to veto this, but I think it's also nicknamed the corset muscle if you're trying to think of what they might look like as it wraps around the abdomen.

1:08:05So if you cough a lot or laugh a lot and get really, really sore, it's very frequently often engaging that transverse. But let me ask you, so you mentioned CrossFit, you mentioned a couple of things, you know, drenched in sweat, doing the sweat angels. What are your feelings about kipping movements, like kipping pull-ups? I had to open that can of worms. Well, I was asking a mutual friend, I won't name him, and I said, what should I talk to Coach Summer about? And he said, kipping pull-ups, he'll lose his shit. So I said, okay, I got to ask. We started, I was the original gymnastics guy for CrossFit way back in the early 2000s and ended up leaving.

1:08:44I was there before there was the first CrossFit affiliate, when all there was was Glassman working out of that little gym in Santa Cruz. Left just because to do GST right, like anything, a dichotomy that I always find curious with people, especially the CrossFitters, is they will be so on point with dissecting everything they do in terms of their Olympic lifting. you know my pull is here my pull is there my knee was the quarter inch this way I mean they they're just methodical and they don't bring and I shouldn't say just crossfitters but then they other people they don't bring that same degree of attention to detail to their body weight work so one is supposed to be meticulous and one is somehow just supposed to be thrown together yet they expect the same quality results so if we look back in the day crossfit you know their lifting was nothing by national standards.

1:09:40Now they get people who are qualifying to go to nationals. Fast forward all those years in terms of their gymnastic strength training, and they're not even remotely close. They don't match a national team. They don't match a state-level athlete, let alone a national level, let alone an international level. They're not even in the same ballpark. And part of the issue is because the kipping pull-ups were a huge big deal, it was a moneymaker. I'll be straight out, I'll piss some people off, but it was a moneymaker. As advertising for a program, they could bring someone in who's never been able to do a pull-up, have them hold their chin by the bar and let them fall, hit the bottom of that movement, bounce back to the top.

1:10:24And the person's eyes light up and they're like, this is the best effing thing ever. I've never done a pull-up in my entire life. Oh my God, oh my God. And they're pumped. What they didn't realize is that this person has compromised basic strength and compromised shoulder flexion. They don't have mobility in their shoulder. So they're hitting the bottom of that movement with multiples of body weight. So they weren't strong enough to do a regular pull-up. So now we're going to drop them on connective tissue with multiples of body weight. That's got to go somewhere. So it's going to force that shoulder to open further than it can handle.

1:10:56And I'm going to bounce off that connective tissue like a trampoline back to the top of the bar. And then to make to pour salt on the wound. Now I'm going to do a shitload of reps at the same time. I'm just going to crank on it. And they were getting people who were coming in and, you know, crossfit, well, there's no proof. There's da, da, da, you know, bullshit, bullshit. You guys, you guys can live in a dream world all you want. It was blowing people up. And now the good thing though, and to their credit, you know, it took time. There was a denial. No, it has nothing to do with it. But now we're seeing a recommendation of, you know what guys, we got to start getting some basic strength built first, some basic mobility.

1:11:31And then at that time, kipping pull-ups, absolutely, there's nothing wrong that they're healthy. They're good to do on a healthy shoulder joint with a good foundation of basic strength. But a beginner doing kipping pull-ups, really? That's insanity. That's just pouring gasoline on a fire. So kipping then is the finishing addition. It is not the starting element. We started working with adults. So our first, we do seminars all around the world. You know, We spend a lot of time doing hands-on. And our very first one we did, I don't know, 2007 or so. And we've got all these people. We've got all these beasts here and they're strong.

1:12:08And tried to do my entry-level plyometric work on some floor work with them. And the stronger the athlete, the faster they went down. Knees, lower back, ankles on baby stuff. Baby stuff. I mean, we're not talking anything hard. We're talking about standing in place and with knees straight, being able to bounce down the floor using just your calves. No way. Their tissues couldn't take it. They hadn't done anything like it. Or we had 15 minutes on the schedule. For example, how bad mobility was. We had 15 minutes on the schedule to stretch. Nothing hard, nothing intricate, nothing intense. Just an easy, basic stretch.

1:12:48Get them loosened up for the day. That stretch took an hour and a half to complete. it was an hour and a half tim it was an hour and a half there were bodies lying everywhere it was like i was in vietnam or a film in a war movie i turned to my staff i'm like what the fuck am i supposed to do now they failed warm-up they failed warm-up now in fairness this stuff is really you would look at it and just like my friend is like what is this jane fonda bullshit and i'm like hey man why don't you try this for 10 minutes and then it's really taxing i mean uh i remember doing one of the stretching routines, which I'll note, I think is, is might be of interest to people is I'm hitting each once per week.

1:13:33So there's one that is front split focus. It's a very hamstring focus. There's one that is bridge focused and another that is middle split, adductor, middle split focus inside the thigh. And the point that you make is doing this twice a week will not double your progress. It will cut it in half. So you're only really hitting each of these once per week. I mean, there are different, daily limber protocols. But I remember doing at the very beginning of one of these workouts, I believe it was, oh no, it was absolutely the front split workout. A shit ton, for me, a shit ton of calf raises with a different - I remember you moaning about that.

1:14:11Like different foot placements. It's like, okay, 180 calf raises later of different variations. I was like, okay. And I'm only three minutes into this. An hour-long stretch sequence. And I know we're bouncing all over the place because I want to give people kind of a buffet sampling of how this training differs. But one of the reasons I respect the programming that you put together and the nuance that you bring to this is that the observation then is, and correct me if I'm, or you can elaborate on this if I'm missing something, but a lot of the hamstring flexibility issues or limitations that people perceive are at least in part due to lower leg issues, including the Achilles.

1:14:50A huge amount of arm. Yeah, including the Achilles. So you, in this particular progression in the beginning, you're engorging and then stretching the insertion point basically around the heel. And then again at the knee and working your way up to the hamstrings. And there's an athlete who's been on the podcast, Amelia Boone, one of the most successful obstacle course racers in the world. And she's basically pointed out the same thing. And she said, yeah, you can take someone who's really inflexible in their hamstrings, have them roll out their feet with, say, a lacrosse ball or something like that.

1:15:20and all of a sudden they gain two inches in their descent with the hamstrings it's all connected we found by accident so we never intended this and it we just part of what maybe helps people to understand the the layers of complexity that that i approach training with is that for years my my bread and butter was to produce best athletes in the country that that was my job in order to have a job i had to produce some of the best athletes in the world and we had to do it from scratch. And so it becomes an issue of, one, an injured athlete is no good to the United States. It doesn't matter how talented he is, how strong he is.

1:16:00If he can't go out on the floor with the USA on his chest, we can't win a medal with him. So he's got to be healthy. And then the second caveat that goes with that is that we're trying to find a way to make the best better. Because These athletes are already the best on the planet, and you're going head-to-head with other athletes who are the best. So then, how do you find a way to make something which is almost already perfect even closer to perfect? And if you do what everybody else is doing, without kind of going out into the jungle, if you will, into Indian country and learning new things, then you can't get a leg up on your competitors.

1:16:42Now, if we go, we have PhDs who come through in this and that, and we always give them major shit. major shit because the way people think the world works is that they do their research they write about it they publish it we learn about it and we implement it with our athletes that is not how the way the world works the way it really works is you've got high level world-class coaches who are super bright decades of experience you know just my last senior athlete alone i had 16 000 hours into training alan 16 000 hours spread over 12 years what does alan's last name bauer bauer so yeah you guys gotta celebrate alan he uh oh you just uh won national ncaa championships again major blowout by the uh largest margin in ncaa history wow that was well as of this recording very recently yeah that was just uh this oh goodness the weekend of the uh 15th i think we're scheduled here to come out sometime in may but yeah very very big deal but to go back to the other.

1:17:46So we're looking for an edge. And so we don't know why some things work. We just know it works. And I started getting notes from therapists around the world. For example, therapists are taught that they should have a neutral spine. You should have a neutral spine. I was getting people from around the world, they were writing me, but athletically, I'm sorry, I'll be direct, but neutral spine athletically is the biggest load of horse shit I've ever heard in my life. You can't run with neutral spine. You can't throw with neutral spine. You can't climb with neutral spine. I can't swim. I can't do anything with a neutral spine except lay in a box, dug in a hole, and they get ready to bury me.

1:18:24I mean, that's the only thing I can do. There's nothing athletically I can do with a neutral spine. So we know just automatically to produce athletes, we're not going to do a neutral spine because torso-wise, there's only two movements. I can go from an arch, snap to a hollow, or I can be hollow and snap back to extension to the arch. Those are the only two movements the torso is capable of athletically. Everything else is a variation off that. We can add rotation with some throws and some this and that, but that's all there is. So we spend a lot of time building power for that. And these therapists around the world started taking our really gentle introductory work and they trained it on themselves first.

1:19:04And I'm like, you know, just real similar to what you said, Tim, you know, I feel better than I have in years, coach. I feel better in years. And this is completely different from what I was taught in school. Maybe we could use an example that we've discussed before, which was a new movement for me, which is Jefferson curl. Yeah, they're having some fun with that. So we look at Jefferson curl right now. So it wasn't that many years ago that if you squat it below parallel, it was heresy. It was heresy. If you went below parallel, the knees couldn't possibly adapt to it. You're just going to blow your knees.

1:19:35Your kneecaps were going to just pop off the front, right? It's going to be shrapnel. knee shrapnel but everybody accepts now that you know what there is nothing wrong with the body being exposed to its natural range of motion now do you have to build it up gradually yes obviously you do but jefferson crow falls into that so gosh how do we explain jefferson crow i'm gonna give it a i can give it a shot yeah you'll be better at this would be a good this would be a good exam review for me anyway so jefferson curl is a gradually rounded stiff-legged deadlift that's the simplest way to visualize it so if you're looking at an athlete from the side doing a jefferson curl they will most likely be standing on a box holding on to an olympic barbell right in front of their hip slash legs so it's just like the very top of a deadlift position but when they start the descent and it's elevated so that when you have plates on and whatnot, there's room for it.

1:20:36But when they come down, they're going to tuck their chin and then vertebra by vertebra round their back down all the way into the bottom position where the objective would be, or one of the objectives would be to get basically your wrists to the front of your toes or at least in a perfect world. If you're advanced enough. Yeah. In a perfect world and of course doing this very gradually with supervised attention from somebody who knows what they're doing and then reversing that and again going from this vertebra by vertebra rounding up until you end up in that top position and then repeating is that a fair description fair description yeah the easy is just think of it as a string of pearls and we're just curling one pearl at a time we've been having some fun with that one we have done jefferson curls i I don't know, 12, 15 years now.

1:21:28Expected standard is body weight for us. Note to people listening, do not try this with body weight right out of the gate. No, don't. Don't. So for example, one of our senior students in Australia in his training, physical therapist has his own clinic doing really well. He tried it with just the empty bar, you know, the 20 kilo bar at first. Trashed him. He dropped all the way down to, I think a kilo or two, right? Which is completely fine. And we'll talk about why in just a sec. And then he built up. And last time I checked with Mark over the course of, I don't know, I'm forgetting, there's too many students.

1:22:00But around 12 to 18 months, he built up to either three-quarter body weight or maybe up to full body weight now. And back feels better than it ever has. But the key there is people got to understand is that this was a gradual process over 12 to 18 months. It wasn't just go, we've got a very good, I'll throw Quinn out. I'm going to butcher Quinn's last name. Quinn's a PhD in physical therapy. Quinn Hina does some really good work. How do you spell his last name? You had to ask me that. We can get it for the show notes. Yeah, we'll get it for the show. We chat a lot on Facebook and that. And Quinn likes to stir the pot, if you will, you know, stir up some shit.

1:22:42He's experimented with Jefferson Crow himself for, I think, going on about three or four years now. And feels wonderful. He'll toss it out. And so one of the things that will always be come up is, you know, the McGill experiments, where they would take connective tissue from a pig cadaver and put it under such and such amount of strain. And if we put it in this position with this much load, it snaps. okay and everyone runs around and it's the sky is falling the sky is falling oh my god oh my god don't bend your spine stay neutral what everyone kind of missed the big elephant in the room was the pig was fucking dead the tissue was dead it can't adapt it's dead it's no longer living and it wasn't exposed to very gradual loads so that there could be progressive adaptation which is what our bodies are really good at they kind of overlooked all that so if i take this completely unprepared tissue and I do this to it, it'll break.

1:23:37So some very interesting discussions right now. And obviously everyone's fine. You know, we've, we've got athletes doing great, adults who are doing wonderful. And the physical therapist will come around simply because it's healthy. Now they've got to understand, and other people who are listening should understand also, is that our weighted mobility work needs to be approached with a different mentality, a different level of intensity than conditioning work. Because connective tissue has one-tenth the metabolic rate of muscular tissue. It heals slower, it adapts slower. So you have to kind of come to the table with a very patient attitude or as I consider myself, I'm extremely impatient naturally.

1:24:19But I've learned in order to get what I want and to go where I want to go, I've had to learn to be patiently impatient. And if I give into the urge, then I get hurt, athletes get hurt, we fall apart. And we, you know, nationals and Olympic trials are every four years. Nationals are once a year. And you don't get another nationals. You don't get another Olympic trials if you blow it. You've got to be on point that day. So it teaches us. And our environment was actually a blessing because it's very much practical. It's very much results oriented. There's no room for opinion. I think, I feel, I prefer.

1:24:55It works. It doesn't work. It produces results. It doesn't produce results. You are the best in the country. You aren't the best in the country. I mean, it's very clear. It's very clear and it can't be argued with. And that was actually something when we segued into kind of the fitness world, if you will, where you come out of national team and then everyone knows who the studs are. In the fitness world though, everyone's proclaiming they're the stud. Everyone's proclaiming they're the national champion. There's nothing to support it. There's no results. There's no great athletes. There's no great abilities that have been generated.

1:25:30There's just the marketing. And that was hard to wrap my head around because a national team that doesn't exist. You can't go to the Olympics and the guy who talks the loudest gets the medal. I have the loudest voice. I'm champion. I think that's national politics right now. Oh, wait no never mind different podcast i did want to ask you how your visit to the white house but i figure we'll save that one we'll save that for another time yeah tim went to the white house last week guys so i'll pick his brain for you later so i i interrupted but yeah you get to the fitness world and another one of the differences that you pointed out for me which i really liked was that in uh the fitness world it's exercise and diet whereas in your world it's always been eat and train or train yeah eating train what the people are trying to do and and i'll throw a little a little blurb in here we have an outstanding nutrition program the guy who who wrote it former seal team six when he started but it's back in the day he was like 140 145 and then jeff got all the way up to 220 just shy of 225 all with muscle and his waist was the same size as to when he was thin.

1:26:40He looked like two Vikings, two shoulders on top of his body. He came walking out. I was like, what the fuck? It had been a couple of years. What the hell did you do? It's these basic nutritional concepts that we teach. But what we try to do with adults is they're trying to stay ahead of a bad diet through exercise. They're trying to outrun a bad diet and it can't be done. It can't be done. And then what happens is if they somehow find this crazy combination of massive amounts of cardio, and they can kind of keep their weight in check a little bit, and then they stop that cardio, they immediately start gaining.

1:27:19Weight gain, weight loss, all of that should be separate from your conditioning. You know, you've got to get your nutrition dialed in. If your nutrition's dialed in, your body's going to find its natural, healthy weight that it's going to operate at. Now, if you want to be the giant muscle guy and that's not your phenotype, which is your body type, you know what? Tough shit, deal with it. You know, it's not going to change. You're not going to change your phenotype. You're not going to change your body's genetic expression. Okay. That being said, you can maximize what your potential is. Well, we hammer through to our students as you're not responsible for the hand of cards you were dealt.

1:27:54You're responsible for maxing out what you were given. So who knows what your strengths will be. Maybe you'll be more endurance. Maybe you're going to carry easy muscle mass. Maybe you're a max strength guy. Maybe you're very skill oriented. It doesn't matter. Maybe you're very explosive, but whatever it is, you know, make the most of it. So on that point, and then I want to come back to, I want to ask you about, I think it's, I wrote this down during our assessment, Tony Faye, quote, no routines, end quote. That's all I wrote down. So that's a cue for a story. I believe that you told me that we'll come back to.

1:28:27Does that make any sense? Or is that just like a cryptic 3am note that I wrote to myself? I don't know, but the - You got to stay away from the wine, dude. Never, never. In vino veritas. We'll get back to that. Oh, I kind of know what it is. I think I can actually queue it up. The basics? Yeah, well, we're going to come back to that in one second. The question I want to ask first is one that came up a lot from listeners of this podcast, which was, and I'm going to create sort of a composite of these questions, but like if someone is 35 years old, let's just say, former athlete, does basic gym work, diet is okay, not terrible.

1:29:03They feel reasonably athletic, but they're not competing in anything. Certainly have never done any gymnastics. What would good goals be for such a person? And what would bad goals be maybe at the same time? Well, that without question, bad goal would be for them to jump right into kind of full body weight, straight arm strength. For example, a back lever, which doesn't require a ton of strength, but they love to do it because it looks so cool it's kind of like their first thing they can do that you know wow look at me the problem is is that it puts them in an extreme load while in shoulder extension so let me can i paint a picture for people so back lever just to create the image and coach correct me if i'm wrong imagine you're laying on your stomach on the floor arms by your sides and then you turn your hands palm down so that your thumbs are pointing out away from your body and then you lift your arms off the ground as high as possible with your arms straight and then place a bar in your hands and then lift your body off the ground off the ground and kind of hold yourself there sure that'll work body body would be horizontal yeah and what they don't realize is that when the shoulders are in shoulder extension like that is that the biceps are under maximum stretch so it's nothing it's not a problem to do with being strong enough the bicep is too low and they're going to tear a bicep for a young adult not a problem at all and we're lucky you know we have a lot of people who use our material but some of our material you know coach you're you're too conservative coach it's a new world coach uh we don't have time i had someone who was 21 or 23 once coach i don't have time to take my time i'm already 23 okay all right i think you're misreading this but they want to jump right into their strength training and they do well but they don't do the mobility work.

1:30:58So it wasn't last year, I think it was the year before, I think maybe the street workout community, five of their top guys around the world snapped biceps. These are crazy strong guys, right? I mean, we see them. These guys are beasts. They're doing one-arm chins. They're doing this and that. They all snapped them on back lever stuff because the mobility wasn't in line. Now, we all know when you're young, you can get away with a lot of stupid shit because the body heals so fast. Luckily, right? I certainly wouldn't have survived being 21 if it wasn't that the case. But as an adult, the structure is mature now.

1:31:32And I think maybe a better way to look at it is people think I'm getting older, ligaments are breaking down, tendons are breaking down, joints are getting brittle. And actually that's not the case because if we go back in time when you were a little guy, when I was a little guy, when all listeners were a little guy, we ran around like madmen, right it wasn't oh today I'm going to ride my bike three miles it was sun was up go jump on my bike and I'm gone all day and I'm running I'm jumping I'm climbing and we're just we're just being crazy little guys so we had this huge matrix of activity that the body is used to then we hit high school and for most people that's our first exposure to structured athletic training okay and the body does well with it.

1:32:17Now, the mistake is thinking that the body did well solely because of that structured athletic training. What they're overlooking is all that activity, that matrix of activity that occurred for those years prior to that. Then if they're a high enough level athlete, structured training might continue into college, graduate, time to get a job. All right. I'm still, you know, I'm young, right? Hormones are pumping. I'm going to go to work and then I'm going to go play basketball with the guys in the evening. I'm going to hit the gym, this and that. That goes good for a couple of years, right? I'm getting by, having fun weekends.

1:32:51Weekends are full. Then you meet the cutie, right? You meet the love of your life. You get married. Suddenly, I can't go play basketball every night now, okay? So, we do this and that, and a little at a time, our levels of physical activity outside of conditioning are dropping down, and they're dropping down a lot. Then kids come, all right? Well, there's another huge chunk of time gone, then before you know it you're 30 you're 35 you haven't been doing hitting the gym very often there's certainly not a time for just playful activity or doing sports or this or that on a regular basis for most people right and they spend most of the time hunched over that desk now the body wants to be healthy it wants to be healthy that's your prime example we get we feed it the right movements in the right dosages and it blooms it blossoms it's like weeding and watering a garden, right?

1:33:42The body wants to be healthy, but we have to do it in the right dosage. And so, for example, those street worker guys, they hurt themselves because it was the wrong dosage. They wanted to go too hard, too soon without the mobility. So for an adult to come back around answering that question a long way, 35-year-old, very first thing we got to do, we got to fix joints. We've got to repair joints. We got to get that range of motion back. If you were to look at all of the adults that you've dealt with, let's just say 35 year olds, if you had to pick, and of course this does not cover all the bases, but if you had to pick say three to five movements or exercises or stretches for addressing the most common deficiencies, like getting those joints back into play, what would some of your selections be?

1:34:28So just for joint joint, I think we'd put Jefferson Curl at top of the list. Cause remember we have, we have multiple sections of the spine, right? We've got the cervical, curl thoracic and lumbar that's going to come through also into glutes that's going to go down into our hamstrings that's going to hit our calves it's going to hit our achilles as well so for for one that's a lot of bang for your buck for one exercise even if that was all you did right and you just did jefferson curl a lot of aches and pains are going to go away because of that next one was tough it's always it's always hard to boil it down boil it down we took care pike.

1:35:05We've got to get extension. We've got to get some thoracic extension. I'd throw elevated bridge in there if arm strength was sufficient to handle it. If not, we can scale it down to some weighted work with some bars or some barbells, either some dowel with a plate. We've got to get shoulder extension in there. Because what happens a lot, a lot of the conditioning we're exposed to is all front delt heavy. Right. It's all anterior delt. and pecs get tight, the interior delts are getting tight and we start pulling our own shoulders forward. We create our own impingement. It doesn't matter, you know, so I'll do more exercises.

1:35:42I'll do more exercises. Well, no, you're just making it worse. What the problem is, is there's not balance in the shoulder joint. There's no retraction and it's easy to tell. What does their posture look like? What do we see with everyone now? They've got that. What do they even have a term now? Texting neck? Kind of that turtle forward, distended forward. It's like the Wally powered down. look, I guess, something like that. Yeah, and you know, the scary thing there, and again, we have some PTs who use our stuff around the world, a lot of success, and they're the ones who come in and educate us for, we'll say, you know, we've noticed this, and they tell us, they teach us, well, to the limit we can, not because we're not professionals, but to the limits we can, they start teaching us the mechanics of what is really going on.

1:36:24So we have a very good student. Wesley Tan runs one of our affiliates. He's a full-time osteopath in the UK, runs another one of our GB affiliates, Forma GST. And Wesley's the one who taught me that there's a point, coach, where if you abuse the body, it's not going to come back. And so, for example, you see some older adults who are extremely hunched forward, neck distended forward, chin up, because they're trying to see where they're going. And it's not that they have bad posture and they could fix it. it's that they can't fix it because the vertebrae are rectangle. And if you spend, after spending years of hunched forward like that, it compresses the front edges of that rectangle till it becomes a trapezoid.

1:37:12And that doesn't come back. Once that happens, it's done. It's over. It's done. Same thing happens with the muscle bellies. So people will get frozen shoulder or impingements in this. That is, if you're not using the muscle belly, the body doesn't want to support it because muscle tissue is expensive. By expensive, the body looks at it. It's expensive to feed. It's expensive to maintain. For example, your body isn't a painting. You can't get to a certain degree of muscle mass, mobility, athletic ability, endurance, whatever you want to say, and then just stop and have it continue to exist like a painting you did.

1:37:48It has to be maintained because if you're not using it, it costs too much resources for the body to continue to keep it. So it's going to start breaking it down. And that's why you get a few days, right? And then you start losing strength. You start losing mobility. You start losing wind. Easiest physical attribute to build? Endurance. Simple, super simple. Endurance is what? Endurance is simply strength repeated over and over at a lower load. No big deal. That's a six to an eight week process. Simple. No problems at all. Mobility, and it takes some time. What's the easiest one to fix? muscular strength.

1:38:27No problem at all. So it's super important then that we use that muscle mass because if it's not being used, you're not only going to lose the size of the muscle mass, the body's going to start doing deposits of collagen on it. And it's going to start shrinking that muscle belly on the traps, for example, going back to those older adults we discussed. It's going to shrink until a lot of it is connective tissue on the edges. Now, what people need to realize, and they don't, is that when they see an adult who's hurting, right? They're older, they're shuffling, they can't pick their knees up, their hips are frozen, they're hunched over, their necks displaced.

1:39:04They weren't that way when they were younger. This is all the result of inactivity and poor progressions in their exercises, and it didn't have to be. And then they need to take the next step of connecting is that if it happened to that guy or that woman, it can sure as hell happen to me also. If I go down the same road that they went down. Returning to the shoulder extension, because I noticed in our assessment that I had terrible shoulder extension and I kind of accepted it and written it off with stupid reasons. Like, well, you know, I've done too much deadlifting at too much huge slabs of muscle in my back.

1:39:41I can't do shoulder extension. It's like total horse shit i mean especially notice muffs those huge massive slabs of muscle yeah the the imaginary lat syndrome that i have and i mean that was just blown to smithereens when i met let me make sure i get his name correct is paul watson is that right oh yeah big paul in new york city who's gigantic and extremely flexible so as soon as i hung out with him i was like okay you'll let people know paul is always six feet 230 i mean and just uh he's about 40 i want to say and just probably walks around at 6 % body fat and can do a flat like chest to ground pancake, no problem.

1:40:19Can do dislocates with a weighted dowel or barbell, no problem with all different types of grips, which I can't do at all, even though I'm making progress. The shoulder extension, what is your preferred way to work on shoulder extension? Is it the sitting down arms behind you, scooting the hips forward? Is there something else you would add to that mix? Well, we have to sneak up on that one a little bit. So sometimes we can't even work shoulder extension at first if the elbows are deconditioned. So if brachialis just inside the elbow is weak, if the insertion of the bicep tendon is weak, then when the arm is extended as they stretch, there might be some discomfort.

1:41:00So if that's the case, we have to give that time to adapt. So you notice that's one of the questions I ask is how does your brachialis feel? How does your bicep feel? How does your elbow feel? because we never push through pain. I mean, you can, you can, but have you noticed that the guys who push through pain, they've got a shelf life of somewhere between two and four years. And then the body is so beat up and so painful and so chronically injured that it's just easier to be a fat slob sitting on the couch and have at least my pain drop than to try to continue pushing through and being a stud.

1:41:38It's so common and it's also unnecessary. For example, and I don't get this one. I don't get this one a lot. I'll bring it because there's a lot of people and don't get me wrong, I really like weightlifting. I think the Olympic lifting is sweet. There's a lot going for it. I think the way that it is approached here in the States is not as efficient as it's approached in China, for example, or in Russia. So for example, in both of them, before there's any weight at it at all, they build complete mobility throughout the body. They can straddle their legs, chest on the floor, sit with legs together, pike.

1:42:13They've got bridge. They have all these basic mobility. Incredible ankle flexibility and mobility. We talked about this. Is it related to Cloakoff? Yeah, and especially, exactly. If you watch Cloakoff, people should watch this guy. Check out some videos. Oh my God. He is such a beast. But what they also need to do is not just watch the weight he's putting up, right? They need to watch his warm-up in the training hall and look at how amazingly flexible and mobile he is. Now, what's important to understand is at a world-class level, right? At a world-class level, resources are limited. Energy you have for training is limited.

1:42:51The amount of time you have for training is limited. The amount of time you have for recovery is limited, right? You have to maximize these things because you're going, it's one thing to be the best stud in the town. It's another thing to be best stud in the state. Another one in region, another one in the country. Completely different animal to be the best in the entire world, to be the best at what you do out of billions of people. We're talking livers of difference between the very top guys. So with all those restrictions and all those parameters in place, if the best in the world are stretching their ass off in order to get stronger why aren't you agreed not you personally put me on the spot coach no no no you as in all of us as in all of us right and what will happen is people just kind of get blinders on they want to watch the technical they want to watch progressions what did you do for this and that and then they'll blow off the mobility work that they do early not realizing that the mobility work was the gold nugget they were looking for.

1:43:57They just didn't brush the dirt off in order to see that it was gold underneath. They just thought, ah, it's just another rock. Who cares? No, it was the gold. That was the sweet and they missed it. So if we're looking at, again, this 35 year old former athlete, maybe never was super competitive, but he has kept in decent shape, maybe does some form of exercise two or three times a week in terms of a understanding that the mobility and working with j curl elevated bridge shoulder extension etc is going to be those are going to be ingredients in the recipe in their progression to gymnast of some type not even gymnast or i would say functional human being functional human being right because if you don't train i'd like to you know point out people we don't train gymnasts we do gymnastic strength training but i don't have i just got off the phone with our olympic coach today kevin majica right we had a great conversation but guys, regardless of how good you are at rope climbs and plunge and this and that, I wouldn't hold my breath that Kevin's getting ready to give you a call and say, he's going to be on our team this year.

1:44:57You know, I saw your rope climbs and you are kick ass. You are the one for us. We got a uniform waiting here for you. We're departing for Rio in July, man. Be ready. Pack your bag. It's not going to happen, guys. So, you know, we're athletes. Functional human being covers it all. So, let me just jump to the The punchline question, which is, let's, so we look at, if I wanted to give someone a stretch goal to inspire them to train consistently, right? So the mobility might not be enough, but if I wanted to give them a light at the end of the tunnel, so I'm like, I know this shoulder extension stuff is going to be very unpleasant, maybe not super exciting, but this is the objective.

1:45:37This is what you might be able to do in three, six, nine, 12 months from now. The back lever we've talked about is not necessarily a good goal because you might think you have the strength and perhaps you do, but you don't. They'll definitely have the strength, almost without question. Right. But they don't have the mobility. So, you know, snap goes the bicep. There's a nasty surprise waiting in that box. What would be a good gymnastic strength training goal to have or goals? Just as context for people who are wondering, after trying to do my best to survey the landscape and figure out what might not be the stupidest goals, I wanted to, you know, I'm not saying those are the best goals, but I decided, okay, well, strict press handstand, which we can define in a second, seems like a good one, and it just seems like a sweet thing to be able to do.

1:46:25And then front lever, and then flange. Lever, straddle planche. and then straddle planche. Exactly. So we can talk about what each of those are, but would the press handstand, for instance, be something that incorporates the strength and the mobility and all these pieces? If you had to pick one. You had to pick one, that would be the one. That'd be the one. Because it's going to have all strength, all mobility, balance, agility, everything rolled into one movement. Do you want to take a stab at, what does a perfect press handstand look like in your mind? Perfect press handstand. So I'm just trying to keep it simple, right?

1:47:00bend over, hands on the ground by your toes. And they can be put your palms on the floor so they're just in front of your toes, shoulder width, leg straight, leg straight. Okay, now if they needed to bend, we could, but we're talking about perfect world, right? And then hands on the floor, shoulders directly over the hands, and then no jumping, using just the middle back, just the traps. Because everyone thinks traps, traps, traps, and they think traps just for shrugging. Well, your traps are a huge muscle. They're a huge muscle and they don't just lie in the top of your shoulders. They're in the middle of your back and down towards your lower back as well.

1:47:37They're a giant muscle and they're capable of a huge amount of power. And when you fix those, a lot of shoulder pain goes away, a lot of lower back pain goes away. But go back to our other, hands on the floor, shoulders over the hands, using that middle back, those traps, pull the hips up on top of the shoulder, maintain that flat back position. Then we continue on with lower back, finishing the legs up to the handstand. So a couple of things that make this particularly challenging. So one, obviously you need to have the flexibility in the hamstrings and everywhere else. Mobility. You have to have the mobility.

1:48:13You have to have the compression strength, like we were talking about, doing those murderous, embarrassing pike pulses, which look like they should be easy and they are not. You're bringing your legs basically to your chest in that last 10 to 12 inch range, really challenging. and then i think where you see a lot of people online do this incorrectly at least from the standpoint of having the objective of gymnastic strength training right because there are all sorts of ways you can cheat with this stuff to make it biomechanically easier but if we're trying to do it strictly and why why do it so maybe this is a nice thing to throw in because people say well it's just a matter it's personal taste coach it's personal taste you do it this way because you prefer this form.

1:48:57No, we do it a particular way because this is what builds the most strength that's transferable to other activities. For example, this will continue. So who have I pissed off so far today? I've pissed off CrossFitters. I'm going to piss off yoga right now. So I once had, and I like yoga, don't get me wrong, but their approach to handstand is flawed. They want to go bone on bone. So they want to have their shoulders depressed. So they're bone on bone. They want to have pipe shoulders. Shoulders can elevate. So if I'm standing upright and I elevate my shoulders, that would be like me shrugging my shoulders to my ear and then doing the opposite is the other direction.

1:49:40Well, when we do a handstand, and if I describe it this way, it's going to make sense, right? I want muscle and connective tissue to be doing the work. I don't want bone grinding on bone. That's not a recipe for longevity. Not going to work. But the easy one is, is they'll say, well, there's a yoga handstand and there's a gymnastics handstand. And my answer to that is, well, you're almost right. There's a gymnastics handstand and there's a fucked up gymnastics handstand. Those are the only two there are. Here's how we evaluate it. A gymnastics handstand, right? Done with nice flat back, nice hand, all being a smart ass aside, right?

1:50:16We're going to look at it just from a purely practical viewpoint, which one leads somewhere. So if I do a yoga type handstand with that arch and the flex shoulders, I'm not going any farther than that. I can work on duration. I can do some other things, but I'm not going any further. If I do a gymnastics handstand where it's flat, now I have nice range of motion in the shoulders. I have strength through the middle back, through the traps, right? I've got good core strength. I've got good compression strength. Now I can move on to good press handstand work. Why? Well, we want to get stronger. That in turn allows me to go on.

1:50:49If I'm in the mood and I want to do more, I'm going to more advanced one-arm handstand work, pirouetting work. All those things are out results of a proper, nice straight line handstand that you can't do with the flawed approach. It's not aesthetics. It's being practical because we don't do anything in gymnastics, right? That's just purely aesthetics. Why do we do things a certain way? It lets us generate more power. Why do we want more power? Let's us get more air. It lets us do more flips. Let's us do more twists. Let's us do harder things on rings, which means more points, which means more gold medals.

1:51:27And let me throw out a couple of observations and you can correct me if this is wrong, but like one of them, an example of something that people might think is aesthetics. There is an aesthetic appeal, but it's a side effect and not the reasoning behind it would be a strong point in the toes, right? A strong point on the legs. so you see a lot of people doing handstands and i was guilty of this certainly and they have kind of uh what i heard what one acrobat called tofu feet they're not fully dorsiflexed like they're not pulling the toes back to the knees which i think looks terrible also pretty common in yoga but they don't have that and they don't have a strong point and so they're at the very least their quads and their adductors aren't really fully engaged they're loose and so they're they're leaking energy in all sorts of directions and it makes i like that leaking energy yeah that's a very good description and it makes i think i probably stole it from pavel tzatzulin but the but it was a good buddy pavel's a good friend of mine i like pavel pavel's pavel's great and the what is the consequence the consequence there are consequences one of which is you're wasting energy so you're not going to be able to train as efficiently number two is you're not going to develop the proper balance and alignment because you're going to be flopping all over the place and having to correct more so than you should so that just that pointing has a huge impact on your ability to train the handstands like a really strong point and the other point i wanted to make is because i've of course in the attempt to try to work on this in the past which failed and i've made a ton of progress in the last few months but when doing it solo i would watch videos online and of course not all videos are created equal and you would see people and preach the choir on that and you would and you would see people doing a press handstand but they would planch really hard right so you would in other words you'd see people they put their hands flat on the ground in front of their toes and then they shoot their head really far forward so their shoulders travel if you were to drop a plumb line like a string with a weight on the end from their shoulders it would hit the floor say like eight inches in front of six eight inches in front sure exactly and then they go up into the handstand and they have this arch in the back and maybe their feet are pointing straight up and what does that look like it looks a lot like what was the gold standard in sort of muscle beach venice or santa monica like 19 circa 1960 40 1950s 1940s 1950s but that's going to place a lot more structural strain on the spine so then if the what does the proper version look like i mean roughly right your ears are roughly in between your shoulder blades or in between your arms yeah in between your arms fully shoulders extended up or not extended what am i looking for here pressing pressing down through the ground and keeping the hand the shoulders directly on top of the hands for people who want to just do a little experiment obviously do it do it safely but i was blown away the first time that someone showed this to me.

1:54:23If you do a normal, say, kick up to handstand on the wall, just the way that everybody does it, you're kind of flipping up and you end up looking away from the wall. There are a million ways to do it. Let's say you do that. And then instead of doing it the way you've always done it, before you put your hands on the ground, you start with your arms overhead in the position that you want to assume on the ground and shrug your shoulders up as high as possible, trying to get your deltoids to the size of your ears, maintain that position and then go up. And the stability is just a world of difference.

1:54:52I mean, it's night and day. It's a completely different movement. All right. I have to ask this because a million people asked since we're on a roll here, we've already checked off yoga. That's true. And I have to come back guys. I like everything else about yoga, except your handstand. So only a small amount of hate mail for the handstand. Some of the coaches and doesn't have to be in gymnastics, but it certainly could be some of the coaches who have impressed you the most. I took down in between like my bouts of hands shaking and like accidentally getting chalk in my mouth doing the assessment.

1:55:23And like when I could bend my arms and do something, I took these cryptic notes. I wrote down one name, which was Alexander world champion, male and female. Does that ring any bells? You know, I've been extremely, extremely fortunate in my career I have uh just a multitude of friends who are world and Olympic champions world and Olympic team members world and Olympic coaches and for a long time you know I just kind of because if that's your environment day in day out it just kind of becomes your norm right and then after a while you kind of stop and think like one day I was I was at a competition and I was visiting with some friends of mine and I came back and my oldest daughter was maybe around 12 at the time.

1:56:11She was like, oh my God, you know who you were talking to, dad. And I said, well, yeah, sweetie, I know they're my friends. She says, that was the Olympic champion and that was the world champion. I said, yeah, I know, babe. I know. She's just like, oh my good God. Well, Dimitri Belosirchev is a good friend of mine. And Dimitri won worlds in 83 at 16 years old 16 years old just unbelievable he won again in 87 what a lot of people don't know is in between there dimitri obviously russian dimitri had a car accident and broke his left lower leg between the knee and the ankle in 42 places oh 42 places so basically you know as powder they put him in he's unconscious he's on the table and he's he's covered up and they're getting ready to remove his lower leg.

1:57:01They're going to, you know, taking it off. And the surgeon pulls the towel down, the sheet down because he's prepped for surgery. I mean, he's out and he sees it's Dimitri. Now, this is Russia, right? In the early 80s. you know, it's not warm, friendly Russia. The doctor immediately like, holy shit, I am not cutting this leg off because the surgeon who takes Dimitri below Zerchev's leg off is probably going to lose his hands shortly thereafter also. You're right. national hero. So they save his leg and Dimitri comes back from it and wins worlds in 87. Goes to 88 Olympics, does great medal, gold medals.

1:57:40Well, Dimitri was lucky enough, we're at different training camps than that. Dimitri was my roommate and Russians are Russians, it takes a long time for them to warm up to you. So it took, I don't know how many years, but we started getting along real well after some years and you start sharing some stuff. I'm like, you know, Dimitri, because his leg is trashed. His leg is trashed at the Olympics. I said, Dimitri, you know, how? How the hell, dude? He said, yeah, only that's for a few seconds. I can do anything for a few seconds. I said, well, I don't know, dude. Well, so it's just great, right?

1:58:13So he's, you know, a legend in gymnastics. We get together with a room full of world and Olympic champions who are Russian. They will all defer to Dimitri. He's that big a legend. And this is in a room full of massive ego. Yeah, there's no shortage of confidence here. And if Dmitry's in the room, they treat Dmitry awesome. It's a very, very cool thing to see. Well, we go forward. We had a world champion from the Russian on the women's side who won worlds. And Dmitry's coach, Alexander, was responsible for training both of them. So Alexander's the only one in history who produced a male world champion and a female world champion.

1:58:53He's the only one. And Alexander right now is down coaching the Brazilian team. What is Alexander's? Is that his first or last name? I always screw up all the Russian pronunciations. All my Russian friends are going to laugh because they're totally used to me butchering this. But it's like Alexander Alexandranov or something. Got one of those. Alexandranov. If I'm with my Russian friends, I just say Alexander and everybody knows who I mean so I don't have to embarrass myself. What do you think allowed him, made him? Makes him him? Yeah, exactly. What makes him different? What makes him him is the ability.

1:59:27So it starts with.

1:59:57Depth of knowledge. to recover. Now, there's a lot of people who talk deload, but way back then, right, the training, if you visit with Dimitri, right, it's always, Chris, it's mathematics. It's all mathematics we do. To them, you take these correct pieces, which would be like doing the correct numbers. That creates your equation. If you put the equation together correctly and then you solve it, there's your answer. And your answer is the physical preparation at the end in a successful competition. So Alexander is great, great at knowing we're going to just be consistent over this training block.

2:00:32So, you know, an Olympic cycle is four years long. So we're getting ready to finish this Olympics, right? And then the next cycle starts. So it could take, for example, to get someone to 75, 80 % of their genetic capacity with a good coach, a good world-class coach. It's going to take three to four years. It's going to take three to four years just to let the body grow, adapt. Do you think that's also true for training an adult? I do. Okay, great. All right. Now that's a healthy adult. So if they're severely compromised, so to get through our whole curriculum should take three to four years. If they're severely compromised and we have to do damage repair.

2:01:20We've got to heal some injuries. We've got some chronic things because what's a chronic injury? A chronic injury is simply an injury that you kept abusing until it became semi-permanent. That's all chronic injury is. It means you slammed your hand in the door and it hurt. Your response to slamming your hand in the door to hurting was to keep slamming your hand in the fucking door. You kept slamming in the door and you say, God, my hand really hurts. What should I do? What should I do? I said, well, quit slamming your hand in the damn door and it will get better. But people, they don't think that way.

2:01:50They're just like, well, I, but I really, really like doing this. And we get people coming to us really beat up because we're taught no pain, no gain. Well, we flip that around. We say no brain, no gain. We're not talking about the pain of fatigue. The easy way to know the difference between fatigue and injury is simply the sharpness of the pain. So for example, and it's some experience also, if you're feeling pain, right? And maybe it's from a core workout and you stop, you're doing hollow body rocks, whatever it be. It doesn't matter what you're doing, sit-ups. You stop. If it's fatigue, it's immediately going to start to lessen.

2:02:25As soon as you stop, the pain starts going away. If it's an injury and you stop, it's immediately going to begin increasing. That's your oh shit moment. That's, oh, I screwed myself up, right? And so you kind of have to ride that. We want to work to where the body is working, but we don't want to work so hard. It's like for a long time, it was a big thing for people doing kipping pull-ups to take pictures of their hands being raw and bloody from their rips. They were looking at it as a badge of honor, you know, that I worked so hard. And in the short term for that moment, yeah, they worked really hard.

2:03:02Now I looked at it differently. I looked at it as like, you stupid shit. What are you going to do tomorrow now? right there's no amount of work you can do today that could offset the amount of progress you could have made throughout a properly structured week it can't be done you see that you see that with kettlebells a lot too i remember i remember when i was really deep in kettlebell training it was yeah you take yourself out for god knows how long you rip all your calluses off but they mean well they mean well we tend to use two terms with our athletes we have immature athletes and mature athletes.

2:03:37And it's not an age deal, it's an attitude deal. So an immature athlete is someone who wants what they want right now. A mature athlete is someone who's willing to do what needs to be done now to get rewarded for it later, delayed gratification. And it's the mature athlete that in the long run always comes out on top. They're always the ones with the greater longevity and the greater success. The other ones, the immature ones, they're really talented. They may stay ahead for a while, but eventually you're going to get so dinged and broken and beat up that they have to step aside. And the mature guy and the mature athlete or woman, right?

2:04:16They're, they're just doing their thing day in, day out. It's like writing a book that has 365 pages. And if I ask you tomorrow, Tim, go home tonight and write me a book with 365 pages. You're like, Chris, you've lost your fucking mind. But if I say, Tim, I want you to write me a page, a single page every day in a year we've got a book with 365 pages and if you picture that that thickness of a novel that's a lot of pages there but if I look at that thickness of a single page it's so thin that it seems negligible that it doesn't even matter it's like why did I bother well it's it's the consistency that adds up over time that's where you see you see these great athletes got to understand they see you see a world-class athlete that did not start training yesterday this is a multi-year process well also i think that there's a behavioral modification and a component of this which you know if you wanted to dig in the research is supported at this point which is doing each day less than you feel maximally capable of it's a fantastic sort of positive reinforcer and this applies in sales this is what ibm did way back in the day when their sales force was slaughtering the competition, they had the lowest quotas in the industry because they wanted their salespeople to be unintimidated to pick up the phone.

2:05:38So we could substitute intimidated to pick up the phone with intimidated to go to the gym or start a session. You could also apply it to writing. Leave a little in the bank, right? Leave a little in the bank. I remember there were two examples offhand as it applies to writing. A friend of mine was very, very consistent, prolific writer. and he said, my key is every day I write less than I feel capable of. And a guideline that I was given was two crappy pages per day. That's all you have to do. Two crappy pages. And sometimes you overshoot that and you have a great workout and you're feeling, as you put it, froggy, right?

2:06:08You're feeling fantastic and you just blow through it and set a bunch of PRs, but you didn't go into the workout with the pressure of having to achieve PRs in every exercise. And Hemingway, maybe not the best life model, but was a prolific writer. Still a stud. And he would end mid-sentence. He would end still feeling like he had more to say in a specific paragraph or sentence so that he had a place to pick up the next day. So on the point of consistency, and actually I want you to finish your last thought because I totally hijacked the conversation, but you said it takes three to four years to get them to what percentage of their genetic?

2:06:48This is ballpark 75 to 80. this is just an example to people because the body will not let you run at 100 won't do it won't do there's not enough optimal surplus that we mentioned earlier three to four years to get to 75 80 it will take me another three to four years another three to four years to get to about 90 another three to four years and then after that it will take me another three to four years to get to about 95%. And that's me riding herd on them. That's my standards, right? Because remember, it's easier for me to maintain that immaculate standard because I'm not the one feeling the fatigue right now.

2:07:33It's very difficult for a world-class athlete to train themselves. And it doesn't do a world-class coach any good to have all that knowledge in his head. It takes a partnership, right? It takes both of them working together to create this great athletic animal. But the interesting thing is that another three to four years, you get to 95%, and as soon as they ease up, the body drops back down to that 75, 80, that's where it likes. Now, to build back up won't take nearly as long as to build it in the first place because the structures are already in place, nervous systems are already developed, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.

2:08:05But that's where the body's comfortable. So as far as adults are concerned, does a 35-year-old need to be able to produce at 90 %? no they don't do they need a 95 no they're they're not full-time professional athletes they don't they don't have time for that can they produce at 75 80 yes they can and the interesting thing is is will that put you on the olympic team no absolutely absolutely not are you going to be close to it no but will it put you being better than 99 out of 100 people around you absolutely absolutely it will put you there and if we put a percentage on that that means that just by being consistent putting some years consistent years of training and that puts you in the top one percent of the human population in terms of physical ability that is not a bad consolation prize no it's not and i want to underscore the consistency point because i've always been an intensity guy right i mean for the most part because that's my default mode okay and uh you It served me well.

2:09:13And everybody's, right? Yeah, it served me well. But there's a point where the sword cuts both ways. You sent me an email recently. I'm going to replace the name just unless we decide to... I was going to say, or maybe take out the profanity just in case. Yeah, I'll take out the F-bombs. Dear you, lazy bastard. No, that's not how it starts. Because I want to talk about older students who have picked up gymnastics. Okay. Yeah. So there are a lot of people who are rightly, I think, or naturally skeptical of the ability of say a 35, 38, 40 plus year old to acquire the skills that are associated with people who start when they're five, six, seven years old.

2:09:51So I'm going to replace the name with Frank. Okay. So I was having a hell of a lot of trouble with Tuck Hops. And to just explain that I fully plan for everyone listening to put a lot of video examples in the show notes, So you'll have visual references for a lot of this, but tuck hops, it's a great exercise. And there are different ways to practice this, but a tuck handstand is instead of having your body ramrod straight from your hands all the way to your pointed toes at the very top, you're basically bringing your knees to your chest or rib cage while you're in the handstand position with your feet still pointed, but your heels kind of touching your ass.

2:10:30Is that a fair description? I agree with that. Yeah. And I was having a lot of trouble with range of motion. I just couldn't get low enough. And so coach sent me an email, which was, you know, Frank is one of my senior students. Here's a video of him working his tuck handstand compression. While it's not exactly the same exercise, this does provide a nice visual example. Now, the part that stands out for me is what follows the video. Because I watched the video and I was like, okay, that's pretty solid. and you said he started roughly two years ago out of shape weak and rather pudgy on his first workout i believe that he failed three times 12 seconds bent hollow body hold and there are people on wheelchairs that are stronger than that yeah and i'm probably going to get the not going to do this exercise justice but i mean a bent hollow body hold is effectively like imagine if you're in a crunch position on the floor, right?

2:11:21And then you put your arms. Just kind of pick your feet up like you were going to do a sit-up, except don't sit up. Shoulders up a little off the ground, feet off a little ground, and then just try to rock back and forth. That's it. So he failed that, couldn't do three sets of that times 12 seconds. Couldn't do it. Not a chance. Fast forward two years and he's a beast. Now there were two points. There were two points here that really left a mark on me. So the first was he's very consistent. Okay, we've talked about that. Here's the part that I really liked. So he never rushes through exercise and every time he gets stuck on a progression and is not able to break through that particular plateau, he simply drops all the way back to the first progression and begins working his way up.

2:11:59So I want to try to illustrate this because this is a really, because most people, myself included, will just bang their heads against a wall with the plateau movement. Let's take the press handstand, which we've been talking about as a great kind of bang for the buck objective because it incorporates so many different elements and attributes you need to develop. what would a series of progressions like four or five progressions for that look like and does it literally mean that if he couldn't get through movement five that he would drop all the way back to number one or would he go back to number two and number three he'd go right back to number one okay now he might go to he might not start with the very week one programming uh you know three by one rep he might drop back to uh week 11 where we provide the programming where it's five by five and just demonstrate mastery that next workout bump but basically what he's doing is if he failed on that exercise that means there was a chink in the arm or somewhere there was a hole in the preparation there was some deficit that had been overlooked or some part of the body that had not yet super compensated.

2:13:11So basically we want people to go through when they're in training to just be super simplistic. We want their training to go through a period of overload where whatever they're doing is kicking their ass. Okay, it's hard, it's intense. And then without changing reps or sets, right, we want the body then to go into a period of load where that same amount of work, that same load, same exercise, same reps, same sets feels moderately difficult. It's feeling easier because the body's gotten stronger. And then where people always cut it short, where they undermine themselves here is they don't go into underload.

2:13:51So to be super simplistic, underload is where, damn, I'm just not feel like I'm working very hard. You're moving the same weight. You're doing the same reps. You're doing the same sets, right? But you're just, you're just cutting it short. What people tend to do is they want to ride that razor's edge. I did this much today. I'm going to do more next week as that typical five pounds on the bar. Okay. Well, that's great. You know, if that was the case, I remember my first way to pull up workout. I was excited. I was excited way back when I was a teenager. I came home, I did my five pounds. I pulled out my calendar, did five pounds.

2:14:23I'm going to do a pound every week. I I'm going to be pulling 1 ,500 pounds in a year, man. I'm world champion. I'm world champion in the making. Linear doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. So what happens is that you hit that point of where you're maxed out currently. And then you got to step off. And we got to give the body a chance to accommodate. So for example, you mentioned Rob Wolf. Rob is a good buddy. Rob's super sharp. For those of you who don't know, he's a nutrition guru. Check out his stuff. ROBB for people. ROBB. Yeah, he's got two Bs there. Well, Rob is a high-intensity guy like you, Tim.

2:14:59And so I shared with him the year Allen won national. So national champ, imagine you've defeated the entire country. There's one champion and you're it. Everyone, you kicked their ass. Unbelievable feeling, extremely awesome. Well, that year, I didn't change anything on Allen's conditioning the entire year. Not a damn thing. I didn't change an exercise. I didn't change a rep. I didn't change a set. Not for that entire year. So you mean that for the progressive resistance purists out there, there might be another way? But remember, he wasn't a beginner at this point. Because a beginner, it wouldn't do any good if I can do a wall push-up inclined on the wall.

2:15:46I mean, Alan was strong. He was already doing hollow back presses. Rope climbs were for maintenance of healthy elbows, yada, yada, yada. but for that year I didn't change anything all that changed was workout that took an hour got to the point where it was taking 40 to 45 minutes at which point do your stretch and get out because the less time you're in the gym the better okay because it's less wear and tear on the body think of it when I hear what you mentioned you know people who love to be high intensity okay it's cool but the analogy that comes to mind is someone who wants to be high intensity all the time.

2:16:21It's like having a new set of tires. Every time you come up to a stop sign, you don't gradually break. You slam those brakes hard. You skid to a stop. Every single stop sign. How long is that pair of tires going to last? It's going to wear out pretty quick. And now the body's not like tires. It can rebuild itself as long as you don't put it too deep into a hole or physically break the structure, damage the structure beyond repair. As long as you show some degree of care, you rebuild yourself but if you keep getting to that stop every single day maritime is not if it's guaranteed so let's throw out a couple of i'll use another automotive metaphor let's switch gears and i will ask just a couple of questions that i think people would love to hear answers to the first is someone listens to this they're extremely excited to do gymnastic strength training and maybe they go out and they're like sampling different things from all sorts of different places and you know of course i have no business i should say with full disclosure i have no business association i'm not getting any kind of affiliate anything from you i just i'm a real fan of how you train so i think people should check out your training programs but what exercises should people not attempt or just remove from consideration for the first say six months of gymnastic strength training probably i would say muscle ups the issue becomes There's nothing wrong with the pull.

2:17:50There's nothing wrong with the dip. The shoulders will adapt relatively quickly. You know, they'll get up on rings at first and they're shaking. And that's simply because the stabilizers aren't used to the load. That'll adapt within, you know, two weeks, four weeks. They'll be fine. The issue they run into is because their shoulder extension is weak. They can't get the elbow behind the torso. So instead of doing a dip with body weight, now they're trying to do a tricep extension with body weight. completely different animal. Their elbows can't go. Their elbows are trapped at their side and now their hands are in front of them and they're just trying to press themselves up.

2:18:25Of course, they're just trash and their elbows. Now, some people, okay, we do see it. Some people have incredible joints that you can just pound and pound and pound and pound and pound. Nothing happens to them. Run them over with a car, right? All you're going to do is hurt your car. Everyone assumes they're that guy, they're that woman. The reality is you're not, guys. You are not that person. If you were that person, I would see you at training camps right now, or you would be a celebrated professional level athlete. So accept the fact that you're human and those are not your joints. You can't take that approach and have longevity.

2:18:59It's not going to happen. Okay. So muscle ups go out. Muscle ups go out. Now, how do they get around the muscle up? How do they get? Because their elbows hurt. They can't do a slow. We need to build strength. We do they get around? They do the kipping muscle up. Okay. Well, that gets me on top of the rings, but where I get the benefit of muscle ups is through that transition as I'm going between the pull-up through my chest up above. That's where cross is. That's where plange is. That's where Maltese is. That's where all advanced ring strength is. It's that strength. When you see a gymnast, right?

2:19:35When you see him this summer at the Olympics, right? And we're just as an aside, guys we've got some podcasts coming out for gymnastic by sorry tim competing with here that's all right and we're going to talk some training right with some of our olympic guys and when you see them you are uh you're going to see this massive musculature and it didn't come from push-ups and it didn't come from dips it came from that advanced ring strength they do so if you're doing a kipping muscle up and you're going from below the rings to on top of the rings and it's gone you just skip the most beneficial part of the muscle up look on you wasted let me ask a related question because of course every four years i watch gymnastics i love watching gymnastics as do a lot of people and they go holy shit if i can get arms that look like that by hanging from a bar for an hour a day i need to start hanging from a bar how much of i know we talked about the rings how much of the musculature in the upper arms biceps specifically comes from straight arm work versus some form of bent arm work?

2:20:33Excellent question. So the majority of the massive biceps they see is going to come from the straight arm work. So for example, when the guys would, at that level of training, at that level of strength, rope climbs, for example, my guys had to do a triple on a seven meter roll. All rope climbs are done with no legs. Okay. In GST, we do ropes without legs. We get some people say, I know the rope is used for transportation. As soon as they take out the escalators in a mall and they put ropes in in place of it, or they take the elevators out and they put ropes, I'll buy that argument that we use a rope for transportation.

2:21:11Until that happens, a rope is used for getting freaking strong. Right. That's the point of having a rope. So they would, in five minutes, they would do a triple on a seven meter rope, get in the back of the line, do a double on a seven meter, get back in the line and do another, and that'd be about five minutes worth of work. Okay, now for them, what we did notice, and a lot of people missed this, we're going to do two things here at once. So for the maximal strength component of it, it's the straight arm work, Maltese work in particular, right? It just blows the body up. And people listening, don't just go into your garage and try a Maltese on your rings.

2:21:48You can, you can totally, because I don't think Maltese will hurt you. Maltese won't hurt you, but you're landing on this concrete on your face underneath the rings is probably going to hurt. Maltese won't. It's the sudden stop at the end. That will be uncomfortable. Now, what we found out with the guys, though, is, you know, we did over the years, the weight vest, the heavy-weighted rope climbs, pull-ups, nothing put better mass on a biceps secondary from the ring strength than high-volume rope climbs. Nothing. Nothing blew them up. Now, Now, the key though is for everybody listening, if you go and you jump right into ropes right now and you haven't built a foundation of rows, pull-ups, multi-plane pulling, then get to rope climbing, right?

2:22:31You're going to give yourself a raging case of elbow tendonitis. Yeah, your elbows are going to just disintegrate. Like anything else, you got to pay your dues. But if you go through the proper steps and you're prepared to do rope climbs, there is nothing because the bicep is an endurance muscle. That's its job. Now, it can do this, but its primary function is not to, how much can I do that heaviest load for one rep? Its primary function is go out and kill something, pick it up, and carry it a long ass way back home. That's its primary job. That's its primary job. So it just blossoms from high volume work.

2:23:10Now, the key is, is that it's got to be high volume with a reasonably high load, which on the rope climbs is body weight. But we've got to build to that. Two things that I'll throw out there just because people might find it interesting. So the first is you can build extremely muscular biceps. This is not gymnastics related, but with purely straight arm, heavy pulling in the deadlift combined with, let's just say you had one day of heavy pulling. and by heavy, I mean two to three reps like to the knees, kind of like the Barry Ross protocol in the four-hour body. Sure, I like Barry Ross' stuff.

2:23:45No eccentrics, you know, drop it. And then let's just say you do that on Mondays and then on Fridays or Thursdays, whatever it might be, you do high rep kettlebell swings, two-armed kettlebell swings. You can get really, really muscular arms without doing any bent work whatsoever. Also, when we're talking about - I'm easy enough to switch that high rep kettlebell work to want to throw a rope climb on Friday. If you're advanced enough. If your elbows are bulletproof enough, which mine are not. As an example for folks, like I've done plenty of rowing, but here's the difference though. When I have a parallel grip, if you're like, I can bullfuck that.

2:24:21I can do bent rows of the barbell with 225 pounds and whatever. And you think that you're the king of pulling. If you don't do a lot of parallel grip work or fat bar work, and then you go to a thick rope, you're in for a surprise. Maybe we should touch base on the difference real quick between the various grips. Yeah, please. Okay. So guys, in terms of GST specific strength, if you're doing just pull-up work, your parallel grip is by far going to have the greatest return on investment simply because that parallel grip hits the brachialis so hard down in the elbow. The reason we need that is when you climb a rope, you're going to have more of a parallel grip.

2:25:05You do that parallel grip pull-up, obviously you're developing that. When we're on the rings, we're on top of the rings, right? Because we always, everything is aimed for eventually getting onto the rings to build strength. So when we're on the rings, we need the grip turned out past parallel. Now, back in the day, Greg Glassman, Greg is the, you know, he's a super bright guy, founder of CrossFit, but he just didn't understand why we would turn the rings past parallel. He thought it was just aesthetics. Coach, it's just aesthetics well the problem is if i'm on the rings and i do a dip i do a muscle up i do whatever and i straighten my arms and i don't turn the rings past parallel now coach i apologize for interrupting just for people to visualize this so let's just say you're up on rings and you're doing dips and you're in between the straps what and correct me if i'm wrong here coach but when you get to the top that means top of the rep arm the top of the rep and your arms are straight that the rings themselves out slightly.

2:26:06That's right. So instead of having the rings parallel pointing straight ahead or turned in, which is what most were turned in, they would be at say 10 PM and 2 PM or something like that. Exactly. And it will vary as long as they're out. The reason is, is what's the weak link in straight arm strength is the elbow. The weak link is the elbow. And what a lot of people will do is we've had people who were taught, Well, elbow pain is just part of doing ring strength. No, it's not. Elbow pain is an indicator that your ring strength is effed up and you need to do better programming. And it hurt for a reason.

2:26:39I took you off track there just because I wanted people to visualize the proper thing. So you were saying to Greg that when you get to the top, you know, the issue is it's not just aesthetics. When you get to the top. It's not aesthetics. You've got to turn past parallel so that the brachialis is activated. it. There's a reason that after all these years of CrossFit being on rings and doing thousands upon thousands of kipping pull-ups and dips and all this stuff that there are no iron crosses unless they're a previous gymnast. There's no homegrown CrossFitter who has an iron cross, homegrown CrossFitter who has plans or a malt because right from the beginning on those very basic movements, they didn't turn past parallel.

2:27:18They didn't turn the rings out. The brachialis wasn't trained, the brachialis is what supports the elbow when it's straight. So if it never got trained, they can never move forward into the money-making exercises. So that's why in those parallel, those pull-ups, if we use a parallel grip, and it's easy enough to do some, just do a set, do a nice parallel grip workout, and then compare the soreness that you feel on the inside of the elbow from fatigue compared to regular chin-ups and regular pull-ups. It's night and day. then then we would do chins and then pull-ups so the other exercises to remove if any so we have muscle-ups back lever yeah muscle-up back lever and you would add to that list you know yeah this one is a little unfortunate and i don't know that it's so much of a removing as uh deprioritizing yeah a cautionary tale it takes time to rebuild connective tissue and it's connective tissue through the ligaments and the joints that generate power through the body when they're doing plyometric work.

2:28:24There was a rash of Achilles ruptures when there was a couplet done of, so they were doing deads, I believe, with 225 pounds, and then that was coupled with box jumps, and they were doing that for round. There's not a problem with either one of those in isolation. the problem came when he was in a competitive environment with most of the adults right were in their their later 20s and in their 30s you know the typical people who are working out and because it's a race the box jumps turned into jumping down also which turned into rebounding a plyometric off the floor because i got to get these done right i'm in a race so they had pre-fatigued the Achilles with the deadlift and then went into the plyometric of the box jump.

2:29:11Nothing wrong with either one of them, but in combination, took some people. I think that there were like nine ruptures that year, which is, you know, one, okay, it happens, right? Ivankov had his Achilles. He was one of the leading guys we were looking to from Russia. Ivan Ivankov, former little champ. He was the top guy that was favored to win the gold at the 96 games. His Achilles popped walking across the parking lot. Now, is it because walking across the parking lot is a dangerous thing and we should all avoid parking lots? No, it just happened to be the last straw and it had been damaged prior to that, which a long story short, you went back to the front split series.

2:29:49That is the very reason that there is that high rep calf work there to promote Achilles health because connective tissue, the tendons in that do not have their own blood supply. They get fed, they heal, they strengthen then through the muscles moving around them in gravity, that's what flushes the area. So if we only do very high, high intensity, low rep work, there's not enough blood flow for them to be healthy. This isn't mine. A friend of the Bulgarian Olympic coach for the 70s and 80s is a good friend of mine, a genius, genius at programming. Ruman makes me look like a tottering idiot who should be sat in a corner and no one talked to me.

2:30:28What's his name? I can never pronounce Ruman's last name. You guys can look him up. Bulgarian Olympic coach for the women, 70s and 80s. Ruman. I want to say our bastardized American spelling is R-U-M-I-N or N-A-N. Sadly, Ruman had a really heavy accent. So a lot of the American coaches, they didn't want to take the time to talk to them. But I was a linguist in the military way back when. So accents, not as good as you, Tim, but accents don't bother me. And he was an older gentleman. I would keep this guy up late so many days in a row he'd be Chris I gotta go get some say huh it's okay just one more question this is just one more question room it's one more so our knee series that we do came from room and the one that oh no kidding yeah that I've been doing with the skiers directly from room inside squats yeah he saw Alan when he was eight and Alan was incredibly powerful at eight years old just just unreal and uh he was getting too powerful for his frame at that age you know About eight, we're starting to hit a preliminary growth spurt.

2:31:27And the woman gave me that knee series. And it was about a week, week and a half. You know, his knees weren't hurting. They were starting to get slightly uncomfortable. Ruman showed us that. Boom, knee issues gone. Never again, nothing with knees, ever. Wow. We could talk for hours and hours more. But I want to be respectful of your time. And we can always do a round two sometime if you have the willingness and if the audience wants more. but I do have a couple of questions before I get into some of my usual rapid fire that I'd love to ask. Do you still have some time to chat? You've opened a can of worms.

2:32:00I'll talk training all night. All right, here we go then. The next question is from one of my listeners, and it's quite simply, how do you mentally prep your athletes for big competition when you're down to that, you know, you go to the nationals or any competition, but specifically big competitions? How do you, and by prep, I mean mentally prep, the day of. Is there anything in particular that you do? It starts with repetition. So we talked a little bit about training. So in a nutshell, we'll come back around, we'll fill this out. So in the preparation prior, successful repetitions, it takes a certain number of repetitions to lead to competence, and it's competence that leads to confidence, and that's what leads to a successful competition.

2:32:49so as Americans we tend to be in a rush be in a hurry we don't want to take a lot of reps we want to get something we do it correct a few times and then we want to bump on completely different from the Chinese approach completely different from the Russian approach where they'll literally do hundreds of repetitions before they move on to the next drill and then they're not upset about it because I understand it's a process. As Americans, we're always looking at it. It's both a good thing and it's a curse. One, it's a good thing because it forces us to be so creative. We're so hard charging. We get so many things done.

2:33:26Physically, sometimes it kind of works against us because we don't give the body and the nervous system a chance to stabilize. So if you want to be confident at a competition, you have to pay your dues and prep. Example, and that's mentally and physically. For example, 72 Olympics. I was talking about this with Dmitry Belozarchev, my friend, world and Olympic champ. So in 72 Olympics, Olga Corbett was, by all accounts, going to crush everyone at the games. She was going to crush everyone. In training, as they went back and the Russians went back and they reviewed all her training, she had over a 98 % hit rate on her routines.

2:34:10That meant she was almost perfect, almost perfect. When she went to the games, she had a major meltdown. Now, the question, of course, raises, how was it possible for someone who was this perfect for this long in training to go to the competition and just fall apart? As they dug into it, they found out the error was not in physical preparation. The error was in mental preparation. So as Olga was cranking at home, she was the one who decided when to go. Coaches waited on her. Judges waited on her. Everything was structured on her. She was very comfortable. Okay. She didn't start till she was ready.

2:34:49Equipments she's ready for, lighting she's ready for, mags familiar, everything is good. When you get to the worlds and you get to the Olympics, judges don't give a fuck if you're ready or not. When they raise that flags. Yeah. It's brutal. In fact, to give everyone a little taste, the warmup gym is not there. The warmup gym might be 10 minutes away, or it might be a 10 minute walk, a five minute walk down this concrete hallway. So you go and you warm up, you walk down this hallway, right? And then your ass waits there. And then the flag goes up and you got to go to a hundred percent within 30 seconds.

2:35:25You got 30 seconds to be on the equipment. Massive hit. Yeah. Massive head game. So they went back and they found out that olga's problem was that everything had gone her way She controlled too many variables Too many variables and it there was they were too easy. They were too accommodating And so what they did is the russians changed their training just to screw with people So if i'm coaching someone right and it's gonna there's gonna be a mental component I'm gonna fuck with them All right, i'm gonna tell them and not not in a mean way, but all right, you're up And then walk away leave them waiting you know let them get antsy make them go when they're not ready make them do a cold set okay don't let any and everything you can have a crowd of people around them trying to mess with them any and everything and I will also say it's much harder for women than it is for guys simply because women are more caring and nurturing than guys a guy goes out to compete and he's worried about one thing he's worried about kicking ass okay the girl goes out there and she's worried about kicking ass also, but she's also worried about not wanting to let anybody down.

2:36:29Are they going to be disappointed with me? Are they going to like me? She has this whole range of other emotional burdens that a guy doesn't give a shit about. They just don't care. I've seen girls who are just amazing in training and get out there. And just because they have this other load that they place on themselves that guys don't have to deal with. And the way you handle that in training is we just have to get more reps in. I got to have more reps and do everything you can to put them in a situation to where, for example, 2004, I was doing some of the prep. I was doing some of the floor and the tramp and helping with Volv and doing the physical preparation for a girl we had trying out for the Olympics.

2:37:09She did not make it. Did not make it. You had to be top six. She was ninth. Okay. And Carly, fantastic girl. Great girl. Their approach though for mental training, I thought was flawed. They brought someone in and, you know, I won't say names. I'll just, I'll just say that I disagreed. And it was, it was a very, they were trying to be really, really positive. So, you know, 30 ,000 square foot gym, big giant yes signs everywhere. Yes, you can. Yes, it'll be great. Yes, it'll be wonderful. And the reality is it's not going to be wonderful. It's going to be stressful. It's going to suck. When you are in a competition at that level, the pressure is crushing.

2:37:46It's a physical pressure that you feel on you and you still have to produce performance at a world-class level. And the only way to handle that is we have to try to replicate that in training, right? So that the pressure is not going away. The error that was done with Carly was trying to downplay the pressure. I would say do the exact opposite. Do the opposite. You should go to the training, to the competition, and hopefully competition is less pressure than what you go through in training. Now, that's not going to be true at Olympics and such, but at most things, it should be the case. It should be the case.

2:38:21So mentally, if you're scared, let's say, if you're feeling unconfident, if you're feeling threatened, uneasy, your preparation was flawed. It brings up an anecdote that I heard from Paul Levesque, better known as Triple H, the professional wrestler, who's also an incredible business executive for WWE, but he visited Floyd Mayweather. And he visited Floyd maybe an hour before a huge title fight for a championship belt or to retain his belt. And at one point, Paul said, you know, I'm going to leave. I don't want to interrupt your prep. And he goes, why would you interrupt my prep? He goes, if I'm not ready now, nothing I do between in the next 60 minutes is going to make me ready.

2:39:05Yeah, I love that attitude. Yeah, feel free to hang out. He's just walking, watching basketball. something and it also you brought up this seal team six members and so on earlier i mean that's i think a great example of a parallel track right in the sense that they very much want to sweat more in some cases bleed more in training so that they can avoid dying in real battle so the simulations are extremely brutal and intended to be sort of along the lines of i'm not really up on my ancient name pronunciation, but I think it's Archilochus who said, we do not rise to the level of our hopes. We fall to the level of our training.

2:39:43So making the conditions equivalent. My buddy would tell, they're so well-trained, no stress. Now how in the world you can be in 145 gunfights and not feel stress when you're heading out to another one? He just, yeah, fall asleep on the helicopter. Yeah, I'll do my thing and get back on. I was like, seriously? He's like, oh, yeah, I mean, gosh, just another day in the office. Holy moly. So on the day of, assuming you've done the requisite preparation, you've conditioned them to perform well under stressful circumstances. Changed nothing. Changed nothing. Changed nothing. Where people fail, this is an important lesson, not just in competing, but in everything.

2:40:25So a lot of people psyched themselves out of doing as well as they could have by prematurely comparing themselves to the people around them. Instead of just go out, take care of your business, do your best and see where it falls. If you're going up against the best who's ever been born, you're not going to beat them. There's not going to be a miracle. The sky's not going to open. God's not going to reach down and bless you with extra athletic ability. It's not going to happen. So you just ignore that. You go out and you just stay in your own head, do your thing. Now, psychologically, people handle it differently.

2:41:02Some people, we had the same chemistry on Olympic teams. Some people like to be left alone. You know, let me go do my thing. You know, they'll come together for the team, but then when they're prepping for their set, you know, they got to go off on their self. There's other guys where they feed off that interaction, right? They want people coming around and getting them pumped up. And then there's all in between. None of them are right and none of them are wrong. It just is what it is. And it's important to just deal with who you are. Same in training. There are some people who thrive on multiple training per day, right?

2:41:35And they just blossom. They do awesome. There's other people who have to train just a few times a week. It doesn't matter. There's been Olympic champions who trained both ways. It just depends on what your body does best with. I'm very curious to hear the answer to this. This was from a, I think it was a, it might've been a mother, I think it was a father who said, what questions would coach summer ask a gymnastic coach at a nearby facility before sending his own five to 10 year old off to train with them? Yeah. And I went through that. So I did, I didn't coach my daughter. I didn't coach my daughter.

2:42:10I wanted to be dad and, uh, I didn't get involved. Were there things I would have done very differently? yes but her happiness in the process was more important to me than her success and she was state champion but that was more important to me than stepping in and making sure everything was world-class love I didn't want to go there first thing I would do if I'm reviewing someone because everyone have you noticed that the bell curve is reality right the bell curve shows that there there's a huge majority of people who are average there's a few who are at the top and there are a few are at the bottom.

2:42:43But if you talk to someone, you've never met anyone who says, yeah, I'm in the middle of the bell curve. Every fucker you talk to is exceptional. Every single person, right? Every person is another millionaire in the making. They're going to win the voice. They got Academy Award. It's coming. Nobody says, yeah, I'm average. And it's the same thing with gyms. So the first thing I would do is look at a competitive record. How have they done and at what level have they been successful? So are they successful at a local level, at a state level? How have they done in terms of regionals? How have they done in terms of nationals?

2:43:17Are they on national team? How consistently have they been on national teams a year in year out? Was it a one-time deal? After I look at that, the very next thing I'm going to look at, I'm going to look at injury rates. How healthy and successful are these athletes? How would you find that data? Would you just ask them point blank? if they're a world-class coach they're always going to be straight with you the only people in my experience who talk shit are the wannabes yeah that's consistent in everything that i've experienced in everything i i had so 2003 uh yeah it's 2003 i'm at a training camp and paul hahm has just won the world championships he's just won worlds and alan is a little guy we're we're at a training camp and Paul's coach Stacy Maloney is there and we're at a technical meeting and it's on roundoffs, it's on roundoffs of all things.

2:44:12And so Stacy comes and he sits down next to me. Says, Chris, what do you think about this? Now in my head, I'm thinking, who gives a fuck what I think about this? You just won world championships. I want to know what you think about this. But he asked my opinion. I don't say I'm not going to be rude to Stacy, but in my head, I'm thinking that. So we talk about it for a little bit and then Stacy gets up and he goes around the room visiting with other coaches that he respect and he wants their opinion and then he he makes his own opinion that he had just won worlds it would have been so easy for him to be kind of aloof and snooty and arrogant you know i'm this and that but the point is that that's the reason that stacy won worlds that he was a coach of that caliber because he was always open to learning more he never said i know everything right and like you said i've never met an exception It's the ones who aren't at a high level who think, you know, I know everything.

2:45:02There's nothing left to be learned. And it's just not the case. So I would check that. Check around, you know, talk to people. Watch the athletes in training. You know, they'll go and watch some workouts. How does the coach handle it? Is there a lot of tears? If it's a guy and there's tears in the workout, he's got a broken leg. And girls, you know, girls are girls. I live in a, I've got two daughters, a wife. Even my dog is female. Now, there's tears here constantly. This is part of being female. So if it's an occasional tear, no big deal. But if there's a lot of crying all the time, there's a problem.

2:45:37I'd move down the road. But if they're happy, now doesn't healthy doesn't mean a free-for-all? Healthy and happy doesn't mean indulging. You know, there should be structure. There should be accountability. But it should be pleasant. You know, kids or any athlete, adults as well, will either live up to the standard you set or they will live down to the standard you set. Just kind of go ahead and try to get a feel. Is this a place where you are? Is the competition record as good? Is this an environment that I'm content with my child being in? If you get a good feeling, okay. As an adult, if you were assessing a gymnastics coach for yourself and you could observe a workout, let's just say you could only watch the warm-up.

2:46:21Excellent. What would you look for to be there or not be there? Or what would the characteristics be? Do they take the time to warm up the joints or do they jump right into work? Do they actually take time to mobilize? Are they doing stall bar work? Are they doing Jefferson curl work? Are they, are they loosening up their wrists and their knees and their ankles? You know, they loosen in their back before they get going. Are they doing some type of pre-strength? Are they doing lower level strength elements to get the muscles warm and firing before jumping into the hard work you can tell a lot from how a program warms up no that's why i was asking and great question yeah there's i mean there's a movement that also from an evolutionary standpoint makes a lot of sense just like we're talking about the biceps and high capacity for volume the ql walks which you introduced me to which if you really want to have people laugh at you this is a great move to do although you had mentioned and this doesn't surprise me at all that you've seen high level power lifters using doing this that's where that's where i got it yeah holding on to kettle bells kind of with a goblet squat type of grip so what this looks like folks we've already talked about this seated pike position so you're sitting on your ass legs together legs straight so basically keeping your legs completely straight if there are other elements please let me know coach technical points but basically you're like walking your ass cheeks yeah one cheek at a time doing a speed walking sitting down yeah that's actually the that's a great description that's exactly what it looks like and ql refers to the quad i would screw it up yeah quadratus lumborum yeah quadratus lumborum which is sort of like the grand central of all sorts of muscles and fascia in the back and it's incredible how much that loosens up my entire lower back and hips doing this very very simple ql walk i'll pick up gosh sometimes three four inches just from loosening up from those first.

2:48:18Yeah. How long should a proper gymnastics warmup take? And one more, which is warming up the joints. Are there any specific movements that hit the shoulders from any angle or perspective that would indicate a better warmup for gymnastics strength training than others? It would depend on duration, duration of the workout. So if you're in there for an hour, I'll preface it. Say you're in for an hour, I would say probably 10 to 15 minutes is reasonable. Now, at the same time, if I have significant mobility deficits, then perhaps the majority of the workout needs to be mobility work. It could kind of shift, possibly as high as a half hour if I have a multi-hour training coming up.

2:49:10it's complicated enough, and we've tried this over the years, there are enough things to address that should be addressed on a semi-regular basis that you can't really get everything into a single warm-up. You're probably going to have two or three variations. You know, if you do an advanced work, you're probably going to have two or three variations in order to get to everything. Like, for example, ring strength before a good hard ring strength. It's very nice to do TheraBand series for the shoulders. Different shapes and pulls and circles and all these things with Theraband are really great for warming up the interior of the shoulder.

2:49:46On other days, do I need to do that as much for shoulder? No, it might be more weighted shoulder work is appropriate for other days. Is it necessary to do all of them at the same time? Most of the time, no. We have one senior student, really, really good. Matt started training with me in his late 40s. He's now 52. beast, press handstands, planges, front levers. I had 52 ridiculous shape. And he went through a period where just for shoulders to feel better, he did every shoulder prep. We had all our integrated mobility. Our courses are set up very unusually where for our introductory courses, adult students come in, alternate an exercise with an integrated mobility because we want them 50-50.

2:50:34So we found if I told people how important stretching was, they always blow me off. But if I required it, do a set. Before your next set, you have to do this stretch. Then back and forth, and we just had great results. So Matt's is a crazy maniac. Still skateboards, still water skis. Those is GST. And shoulder would get a little finicky. So he just did extra mobility, and it just fixed his shoulder right up. I was introduced to an exercise by a master's CrossFit competitor, actually, that really helped with shoulder, I would say, warm-up more than mobility, but for pressing exercises, even in GST, including any type of hand balancing or handstand work, which you have to have a decent amount of grip strength for this.

2:51:23But I was very skeptical of this, even as someone who's done a lot with kettlebells. I've never been a huge fan of the bottoms up work with kettlebells, meaning. Ah, yeah, it's got it flipped up. You're gripping it by the handle, the bell on top. Exactly. But I was like, you know what, screw it. I'll try it with a lightweight. And I started with, say, whatever it is, might be like 15, 16 pounds. And I've increased that. I use 35s now, but a little bit of chalk goes a long way here. But you would basically swing it up to a clean and then press it overhead. and then you just do rotations. So I'm doing like side to side rotations and it's incredible how well that activates the smaller musculature.

2:52:04Struys the shoulders. It's wonderful, isn't it? Oh, it's great. We didn't do them with kettlebells. We'll do them with light dumbbells. So basically, guys, what Tim's is trying is just take a dumbbell, push it up overhead, turn the thumbs, externally rotate it just a bit and then just do outward circles. keep a flat back shoulders open no arching doing for time one to two minutes you know just good gracious wonderful warm-up and then you know something we didn't address and i'll throw it in just real real real quick i know i know we're running out of time but some people who are experiencing shoulder issues in terms of mobility i'm not going to do with the shoulder or necessarily the bicep but sometimes it's because the lats are so strong and tight and so that's an issue that i have absolutely exactly a lot of and because and a lot of the lifters too because those those lats are working hard you guys are moving some serious weight and those lats are of course working and if there's not corresponding mobility going with it it's real easy for those lats to kind of get chronically contracted lose their mobility so a lot of times you get in there and just stretch the heck out of that lat automatically get relief on the shoulders okay coach i am going to do a couple of rapid fire, then a couple of closing questions.

2:53:16And then maybe, uh, I mean, you and I are talking quite a bit these days, so we'll consider doing a follow-up and I definitely want to share sort of the results of our experiment with people also. So we'll certainly be in constant contact, but the first rapid fire question is, and the answer doesn't have to be short, but it certainly can be when you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind for you and why? Well, it's not Obama. It's not Obama. This, all the people off out there, I know someone I have admired for years and years is Tony Robbins. He would be very high on my list.

2:53:49I tend to be very eclectic. I'm not trapped just in athletics. But what I found in terms of business, arts, politics, it's all the same. When people get to that level of success, they all have the same attitudes. They bring the same tools and attitudes to the table. and I found it surprising that I could sit down with you Tim and visit I can sit down with special operators and visit I can sit down with uh you know world-class ballerinas and dance and artists and that I just did this weekend visit with a world-class artist and we all you would think there's no common ground there but there is common ground because what's required to achieve success in all of those requires the same skills you got to be consistent you got to master the basics you You got to be patient.

2:54:39You got to constantly reinvent yourself. Look for a flaw hole in the preparation. Fix it. Move forward. You also have to be very observant. And I think part of training yourself to be observant is asking questions. And being willing to hear the answer. Definitely. That's why you take a bunch of people who are the best at what they do and you put them in the room. Generally speaking, they're going to get along just fine. Absolutely. Now, why Tony Robbins? I mean I'm a huge fan of Tony Robbins he's been on the podcast and I have tremendous amount of respect for him but I want to just hear your reasons I like that I firmly believe especially in the US I firmly believe that if someone isn't as successful in any arena you toss it out whether it's professionally personally in your life financially if you're not as successful as you would like to be or making progress towards that ________ б Thank you.

2:55:33It's our own fault. we have so many opportunities here that so much wealth of knowledge that a lot of times so for example when gb got started and there were two years a year and a half two years in the beginning where i was doing 18 hour days and didn't make a nickel nothing and everyone around me was like what are you doing well you know i've got plans for this and we talked about a little bit and they're like well you know if you need some extra money you could go get a job think about how much further ahead you'd be right now. But you have to have that vision. Once you have the vision, you've got to be able to put practical steps to it.

2:56:11And then everyone's good at that. I outlines, the people outline stuff all the time, but then can you stick with it? Because when you run your business, Tim, when I run my business, there's no one telling us what to do. We're the ones to monitor ourselves. This needs to be done. I'm going to get it done. And it's kind of that difference between letting someone else being in control of your life and you choosing to be in control of your own life. I know some people are going to get upset. You're coaching. I'm a single mom. It's this and that. I can't do everything I want to do. And I get that. I get that.

2:56:42I've been there. I've gone through that. I'm certainly not saying there are quick fixes because these fixes can take years. But I think if someone's willing to put the time in that there's so much opportunity and they're willing to do that for years, it's kind of a big, giant, blank check. A lot can change. You really have a lot of control. And so that was a message that, you know, and I didn't say it nearly as well as Tony Robbins does. And I am going to twist your arms so I get an introduction someday to Tony. That's high on my list. Yeah, well, I threw a little jam session for the people who are on the podcast.

2:57:15So both of you will be invited. Totally awesome. I'm so looking forward to that. But, you know, way back when, poor as could be, hadn't made national team coach yet, was just getting started in my coaching career. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. And here's this guy saying, you know what, just think clear, plan ahead and be willing to work. That resonated with me. You know, it's like, God, I just had this discussion with someone this morning. You're young, it's so challenging, it's so difficult to be patient. When you're 35 and you're starting to get back in shape again. and the hardest thing they need to do is they've got to, especially if they were a good athlete previously, you've got to set that attitude of having been a stud before aside because that body you have right now is not that stud's body that you had previously.

2:58:01It could be again, but it took time to build it the first time. It's going to take time to rebuild it this time or personally in your life, if things aren't where you want it to be, it's going to take time to build it there. I had this Olympic weightlifting coach, I think you guys would hit it off famously, especially if you were both a couple drinks in. She's dangerous. Very similar approaches. He said, you have a Ferrari engine and a Toyota Corolla chassis. That's another one of that. He said, you can't just slam on the accelerator and expect good things to happen. But yeah, Tony is very tactical, practical.

2:58:38And I apologize if you and everybody else can hear metal bowls being spun around. That's what my dog Molly does when she's trying to tell me that she's hungry. She just licks an empty bowl and sends it spinning. I'm like, yes, I get it. I know you're hungry. Being subtle. Yeah, being very subtle. What book or books have you given the most to other people as gifts? Ooh, it's not so much as I'm a big fan of Robert Heinlein. Oh, yeah. Science fiction. Stranger in a strange land. Yeah, just all of them. I come back to those over and over again. the theme of self-reliance. I came from a really, really humble, modest family background.

2:59:19And so I think that instills a hunger and a work ethic. It's a little bit kind of embarrassing, actually. It's a little bit of a Charles Dickens theme there. Frustration thing, things weren't where we wanted them to be or where I wanted them to be. And then how big a price, how hard are you willing to work in order to change it? one I'm enjoying right now and I'm just getting into it is uh the obstacle is the way oh yeah by Ryan Holiday very close friend of mine you're killing me dude oh yeah I'm just gonna hang out in your living room so I can meet all these people oh yeah yeah no you and Ryan would hit it off oh yeah that's a great book I actually this is a really small world so I actually produced the audiobook for that are you kidding me and you know when you were talking about preparing your athletes for the stress as opposed to painting it over with yes you can and positive psychology and really kind of sowing the seeds of their own destruction by doing so i was thinking about stoic philosophy so it doesn't surprise me that you're reading the obstacles the way which has become an extremely popular book among professional sports teams and coaches i mean the patriots seahawks they've they've all read this someone else that caught my eye who had read and that led me to it was Schwarzenegger oh yeah yeah yeah he's a gosh i mean comes to the states with no money in his pocket and then becomes world champion in athletics becomes a millionaire in business becomes a movie star and becomes a governor success in four different arenas in life oh yeah good lord oh he said he liked that book i was like well good enough for me yeah our arnold's uh he's an impressive unit wouldn't it so two things i know we're bouncing around here but two things that also astonished me when I interviewed him for the podcast was number one, I didn't realize in doing the research until I did the research that he became a millionaire before he ever had his first starring role in real estate.

3:01:12Yes, absolutely. And that gave him the ability to only audition, not out of financial necessity, but for the roles that he wanted. So you could say no. And that his highest grossing film of all time for him personally was Twins because no one wanted to make it. And so he took a cut on the upfront payment for the salary per se in exchange for back-end points that were abnormally large for the film industry at that point. Yeah, fascinating guy. Love that. Do you have any particular morning rituals? What is the first 60 minutes of your day? The morning rituals I'm supposed to do? No, the ones you actually have or don't have.

3:01:48I tend to find, as I've gotten older, because I'm in my 50s now, early 50s, as I've gotten older, I find that my, by far, My most productive times are early morning. That's when I'm sharpest, I'm clearest. I'll tend to get up, you know, pretty early before everybody else in the household is up. And I'll get... When do you get up? It varies. I'll get up somewhere usually between four and five. You know, it gives me a chance my girls get up in a few hours. It gives me a chance for that two, three hours of just clear thought. Maybe it's working on a project. Maybe it's a new manuscript. Maybe it's just, you know, I indulge some reading.

3:02:27The house is quiet. I do my best if after that girls head to school and then I get my workout in. If I'm consistent with that, then my rest of my day is usually pretty golden. Yeah, you've already won. I remember somebody said to me, if you win the morning, you've won the day. Still working on it. That's a work in progress. But I definitely agree with that. Do you drink coffee? Do you eat breakfast? Do you drink coffee? I went for years and you're always told I'm not a coffee drinker. I'm one of those few, I think, it just tastes like cough medicine to me. it's not me being virtuous it's just me despising the taste and it's funny because my wife is a big coffee drinker she loves it so she's got her gourmet grinder and all this stuff but for me no no way you know I found as I got older that I do best if I don't do breakfast I do best as I used to be heavy heavy protein and then after I got over 50 if I cut and this is me personally would it work for younger athletes who are training i doubt it it's bigger engine need more fuel but for me older it's slowing down i find that not doing breakfast reasonable lunch my protein sizes are so much smaller now mostly veggies have a good healthy starch usually it's rice or potatoes reasonable little protein there some fatter lunch wait do the same at dinner you know and i'm i'm done i'm good i'm i was amazed how much i was overeating just from habit oh yeah yeah eating by the clock i mean i've noticed the same thing for myself and i've been amazed how many people i've interviewed for this podcast who are the best at what they do who do not eat breakfast you're kidding really not that i was alone in the pavel you know his answer was coffee dim i keep it simple you know and then wim hof same story you look at former general all stammate crystal same story and it just goes on and on and on i'd say good third of the men specifically not sure if the female body responds as well to it although i'm sure there are intermittent fasting people out there who would say that women respond in the same way but very high percentage i'd say maybe a third of the men i've had on the podcast do not eat breakfast now specifically these are men probably over the age of 45 so i don't know i would imagine their diet has probably changed over time.

3:04:44And interestingly enough, if you do dig into the literature, there is, or if I want to be a nerd, there are data to suggest that as we get older, it is possible that we absorb protein more effectively when we have larger doses of protein less frequently. So having the - See, that is interesting. Yeah. That is very interesting because I find myself every once in a while getting a big steak. Yeah. you know once a week once every two weeks i'll go and i'll just get this massive thing of protein then i'm good for a while just very modest yeah so this like bolus of protein for like older women i think this i saw one particular study could have been an observational and i get no i doubt it if they're trying to standardize the protein amount but it was some large amount it was like 70 80 grams of protein in a single feeding was absorbed better than that same amount split over several meals in the day really fascinating stuff what would you put on a billboard if you could put a billboard anywhere what would it just what's on just what's on top of my mind right now yeah what top of the head doesn't have we're not looking for universal truth but just what's uh i would say probiotic probiotic probiotic we went i don't know if it was a history of i had to cut them out you know too much margaritas you know it's kind of funny you know as you get older it starts creeping in more and more and more but i went through a phase where didn't matter what I ate.

3:06:09Didn't matter what I ate. If I ate fat, if I ate low fat, if I ate veg, if I ate high protein, terrible digestion, just terrible digestion. And I happened to come across something that said, if you have da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, it might be a probiotic issue. And so through a good buddy, I had a laboratory grade. These particular ones were from Claire Labs. You kind of need a prescription for them, but they're a laboratory grade probiotic. I want to say it was H-A-I-R-E. Got it. No, I'm not paid by them guys. And they're a son of a bitch to track down because you need a prescription for them.

3:06:44Yeah. And I got to get them a health provider, but hooked me up in 12 hours. And so I, uh, I was like, holy moly. Cause I'd been uncomfortable for months. And in 12 hours, this took care of it. Contacted a buddy of mine who was, you know, great at nutrition. And he went over and said, you know, coach, you should go ahead and probably take, you know, two, four weeks and just really hit these probiotics hard and repopulate the gut. You know, years of too much margaritas, too much protein, not enough vegetable matter to feed the good bacteria. And so I was like, night and day difference. I bet simply because of that, I dropped eight pounds.

3:07:23Yeah, I bet. I mean, I'm currently taking VSL3 and a few other probiotics. But one of the points you made that I think is really worth underscoring is the vegetable matter and prebiotics. So providing the food that creates the environment in which bacteria that you want to grow can grow effectively, whether that's through foods where I think, you know, one of the ways I had this biologist tell me at one point, he said, I think slow carbs going to be vindicated because, you know, the beans and lentils and so on are vilified by paleo, but they provide the perfect vehicle for a, prebiotic environment that can foster the development of and growth of these various bacteria in the gut.

3:08:05And if not that, you know, if you're, if you are a paleo purist, you can also consume something like FOS, you know, fructooligosaccharides or inulin or any of these other things. But wow, I had no idea that you had that experience. Yeah, it was, it was shocking. Prior to that, I would have said number one supplement was emulsified vitamin D drops. How much were you consuming? Just out of curiosity. And of course, the amount you take depends on what your levels look like. It depended. Yeah. Just, just a little background there. So I was at, um, our winter national seven years ago, just kind of the environment, you know, national team, kids everywhere, middle of the winter, it's always in a February.

3:08:41And I would just get sick, really bad kind of bronchitis like sickness once or twice a year for gosh, decades. And at one of these, I was, I was half dead. My assistant coach is trying to run my athletes. He's doing his best, but it's not going real well. I'm trying to coach hanging over a railing. And I'm visiting with Rob Wolf later that night. And I'm just like, you know, this is ridiculous. And Rob's the one who tagged us at coach. You know, it's always in the middle of the winter. Try some vitamin D. I just started the liquid vitamin D. If we don't count food poisoning in Hong Kong, I've not been sick since.

3:09:17And that's quite a swing. You know, once or twice, pretty serious per year to nothing for seven. And the only thing that changed in that time was the vitamin D. So I'm pretty practical. If that was the one variable I changed and that was the result, well, boom, that's the doorstep I butted at. Do you have a particular brand that you use for that? I want to say, I've looked at it so many years, I just can't pick it up off the shelf. And I want to say it was biotest, perhaps. I can't swear about other ones. I just know I've always used that particular one. I've done gosh all kinds of different protocols from one or two drops a day it's like a runny Elmer's glue for those who haven't had it yeah it's the taste isn't you know anything to get upset at all my daughters when they were young disagreed they said what's the worst thing about it it's it's not bad at all we've done daily a few drops all the way up to once or twice a week with eight to ten drops, you know, and just mix it up.

3:10:15It just seems like, you know, as long as you're consistent, it almost doesn't matter. Yeah, so I'm guessing each of those drops is probably an IU and one international unit. Oh, gosh, it seems like, man, I'm tied to a computer right now. I'd go grab it for you. It seems like the dosage is surprisingly high in each drop. And, you know, I'm a big fan, especially as you get older. You've got to go get blood work. Anything else is guessing. Yeah, you need to get blood work, period. I mean, if you get your car checked out more often than you get your blood work done, then you need to rearrange your priorities.

3:10:47So last question, and this is where I'd like you to certainly, among other things, point people to where they can learn more about you and gymnastic bodies. But what ask or request would you have for my audience, for the people listening? Oh, okay. Very good. Actually, I love that question. I would like them to consider two things. I would like them to consider, where's the fire? Where's the fire? Where's the rush? Where's the rush? Why are they trying to accomplish everything, their current goals yesterday? Why not slow down a little bit? Not saying not to work hard, but why don't we just slow down a little bit, a little more reasonable pace, some more consistency?

3:11:26That would be number one ask. And then second one is mobility, whether it's my material, whether it's just the stuff that Tim posts for you, whether it's someone else's material. you know it's fine with me guys but we've got to get those bodies moving we've got to get natural range of motion back again that alone if we did the hierarchy what will increase quality of life the fastest for them is going to be mobility first then core then you know your more conventional strength your arms your shoulders yada yada yada and where can people find you online on social media, et cetera, what would you recommend as a next step for somebody who's never done gymnastics anything who wants to dip their toe in the water?

3:12:10First thing, go to gymnasticbodies.com. We have a special landing page for your listeners, Tim, with a nice discount for them. We have a nice introductory program. That's just gymnasticbodies, G-Y-M-N-A-S-T-I-C-B-O-D-I-E-S.com slash Tim. We got a nice discount there for you for a nice intro program. It's about a 24-day program, gentle introduction to kind of the language we speak, get started on some mobility, some great follow along videos for them, you know, kind of hold their hand, make sure they get started off on the right foot. It's been a tremendous learning experience for me so far. And it's only been, I mean, really a handful of weeks that we've been digging into this deeply, although we had some prep time and talking about it prior to that.

3:12:57And definitely guys, if you are like, ah, I'm so busy. I'm doing this, that, and the other thing. Take a look at the program, but at the very least, follow Gymnastic Bodies on Instagram. And every time you see a video from a student who seems to throw one of your excuses at the window, like, take a second. Admire what someone has done from scratch, like Matt, who you mentioned, who started in his late 40s. Because like one by one, if you just watch that Instagram account for a week, you will run out of excuses. very, very quickly. What about elsewhere on social media? Is there anywhere else people can say hi to you?

3:13:35Our Facebook page is jemassibodies.com. A little more proper there. My personal page, Christopher Sommer, S-O-M-M-E-R. A little more no rules there. And I'm not insane, but my interests are wide ranging. So if you come to my page, you're taking your chances, what I'm going to torture you with that day. It might be conditioning or it might be, you know what? I think such such as kick ass and I like it. So you're going to like it too. And you do throw up some ridiculous in the best way possible videos of just monsters doing some absurd, absurd stuff. I mean, the, who's the gent you sent me, you encouraged me to check this out.

3:14:14This guy who was going from, you were trying to explain the, let me get this right. I want to say plate planches that I was doing a while back, which are kind of like a front raise holding onto a plate with the shoulders super, super protracted and the massive posterior pelvic tilt. Oh, I sent, I sent you that clip of the world champ on rings. Yeah. I think you sent me of one of Van Gelder on rings. And then you sent me one of this guy on parallel bars going from hand. That was Van Gelder again. Okay. Going from the handstand to the, uh, the straight body planche. Just, Oh my God. Full body weight instead of, we do it with 10 or 25 pounds.

3:14:49He was doing it with full body weight. Oh my God. How do you, spell Van Gelder? So it's Uri. van gelder i think he's from netherlands if i'm remembering right former world champ uh v a n space g e l d e r just a monster oh my god oh such so just crazy strong and not i mean doesn't look like a small guy either i mean he's a big boy he's got like two people's back he has got a wide back yeah so people should check that out and i'll link to everything in the show notes well coach Thank you so much for the time. I know it's precious. And I think people will get a real kick out of this. And we crammed a lot into the talk.

3:15:31We did talk a lot. It was good. So I look forward to chatting again soon, which I'm sure we'll do. And to everybody listening, you can find all of the links to everything that I can track down, that my team can track down related to all the topics we covered, links to coach everywhere, gymnastic bodies everywhere in the show notes. That'll just be at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. all spelled out for our workweek.com forward slash podcast. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday.

3:16:08Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

3:16:45And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 1Password. I have been using 1Password for more than a decade. It is one of my favorite products. I met the founding team early on, love those guys, and I have made this product a requirement for everyone on my team.

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