Welcome to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyons show where cutting edge science meets innovation and practical application for everyone. Dr. Jordan Shallow is a chiropractor, strength and conditioning coach, performance consultant, as well as the founder and CEO of Prescript, a resistance training certification program that focuses on aggressive progress. He’s worked with and continues to keep athletes from those in the NFL, NHL and UFC in the game and injury free. I have so much respect for him and his knowledge. He is truly one of a kind. Join me in this conversation with Dr. Jordan Shallow.

 Jordan Shallow. Dr. G. I’m so excited to have you back in studio. I think we should do this every year. Yeah, it’s been about a year, hasn’t it? It has been. Well, it’s changed. Yes, a lot has changed. What are you up to now? Traveling, working. Yeah, working out just more the same, everything but nothing.

 You do a lot and I am so excited to have you on. Here’s why. I learn so much from you. You are a chiropractor. You won’t maybe say that, but you are also really well known for movement, biomechanics and really getting the best of the best up to speed. NFL, what are the other ones? NBA, hockey, you name it. I’m a baseball, hockey tennis, UFC, Olympics, yeah. I mean, really low on the totem pole.

 Really subpar athletes. And because of your work with the highest level, you’ve had to really tune your skill. And there’s a lot that people like me in the general population could learn from. I mean, we just did some warm ups that we are going to be putting up on YouTube and I had never thought to do a lunge that way.

 Please talk a little bit about what it is that you do for athletes. Yeah, it really comes out of problem solving, I think. Biomechanics is just a tool to solve movement problems. And a lot of times with athletes, it’s actually more simple than working with general population. Because you at least have an understanding of something that they do really, really well, like repetitive movement patterns and things like that. So if you kind of take a principles-based approach and be like, “Okay, if I understand what the body has to do or what it can do, what it’s capable of from the level of nervous system or like joint mechanics or muscle mechanics, then I can kind of find a safe mode. Like, “All right, when was the last state that this machine worked properly? And let’s try to revert it back to safe mode.” If I can get them to touch home base every now and then. And this is true for the best athletes in the world as it is for the NARP population. I didn’t say it. You said it. And it’s– ongoing joke, guys. For me, it’s just like it’s just it’s following a set of principles to sort of reset movement quality. Movement quality. What– I think a lot about this from a medical standpoint, this idea of muscle span, muscle-centric medicine. Because the physical body– you said something I’ve never heard before.

 And it wasn’t a swear word. It was physical empathy.

 I had never even heard nor had I thought about it consciously. And basically, Jordan is an expert in getting individuals to perform the movements pain-free to the best of one’s capacity. Is that fair to say? Yeah. And yes, you talk a lot about muscle as a sensory organ system. Talk about the neurological system. But this idea of physical empathy, I think a lot of the listeners are thinking about– maybe they’re not professional athletes. Maybe they are just getting into fitness. Maybe they’ve been injured. And how does one begin to think about injury prevention? Because you created a system course thing called “prescript.” I’m assuming that it’s before you get injured. How does one think about physical empathy and what do we do about it? For me, the term “physical empathy” came out of training athletes that were just a ridiculous structure. Some former NBA guys that are 7’3″, household names, 7’3″, 420 pounds. You have to look at the tools in the gym differently when you’re dealing with a human that big. I remember after– I’m not going to name his name, but you guys can probably fill in the blanks on who it was. After working with this basketball player, I went and grabbed a few plyo boxes.

 I made myself 7’3″. I’m like, “I don’t know, 5’11”. I’ll never say I’m 6’11” because you’re always catching the neck for that. So I stacked up some plyo boxes and stood on them. So I’m like, “Okay, this is roughly 7’3”. And everything, the entire landscape of the gym changed. And I was like, “Wow, I don’t know what it’s like to move as someone who’s 7’3”. What are the challenges? What are the obstacles? What are the constraints? What are the biases?

 We see this in various capacities from the super tall, in some cases the super short. Working with athletes in Cirque du Soleil. There’s some gymnasts who are really, really short. There’s a different interaction with gravity. That got me thinking about, “Well, that idea at large is actually really potent.” And for the coaches that we work with through our education system, that’s something that we need to instill is the majority of people who get into some form of health and fitness, manual medicine, conventional medicine, they’ve usually been on the leading edge of their physical development throughout their entire life. As you eclipse these physical and mental developmental milestones as a teenager, you played sports, and then you got into maybe lifting weights, but you’re always on this leading edge relationship with your skeleton’s interaction with gravity.

 It’s really hard when you work in the exercise prescription field more specifically to make good decisions around movement prescriptions without really understanding this person’s relationship with gravity. One of the things that you need to tap into, especially when you’re dealing with the general public, because it’s very obvious that certain exercises might be different for someone who’s 7’3″ or someone who’s 4’10”, 4’11”. Those are what we would call like end tails of a distribution, rather like a bell curve. But what about someone who is 40 years old, who’s never trained before, who is not necessarily overweight, but is never really trained, who doesn’t have that interaction with gravity? And a lot of that, you talked about the term using muscle as a sensory organ. Muscles are the second most abundant sensory organ in our body next to our eyes. How does that even work?

 For us, people that just really simplify it for me. If I’m to simplify it, to anthropomorphize the neuromuscular physiology of muscle as a sensory organ, I would think of it almost like a motion capture system, where if we were to, let’s say we wanted to make you and I characters in a video game, in some simulation world. Can I be taller? Sure, yeah. But what we would have to do is, in the way that it’s currently done, they do this a lot in sports. We work with baseball, consult with a handful of teams in major leagues. Baseball is famous for the technology of motion capture. You see this a lot with golf and performance science around golf and analyzing swings and things like that. So everyone probably knows motion capture from film. So if you’re, we talked really about Lord of the Rings and Smeagol. So Andy Serkis, the actor, would probably on a sound stage somewhere in New Zealand or Orlando, wherever they do it. And he wore this suit.

 You guys can all picture it. It looks like it has little ping pong balls taped all over it. Muscles act as our primary input into our transmitter, into a central process of our brain. So muscles have, we think of muscles so often as these vehicles or conduits of motor output. We lift things, we throw things, we catch things. But just as much as they are these conduits from motor output and exerting force, they are simultaneously and equally so a receptor, a receiver transmitting the position of the body in space to the brain. So the term proprioception gets thrown around a lot. And we can dive into the technicalities between proprioception and mechanoreception. But proprio receptors, there’s actually three of them in the body. And what, when we’re talking about proprioception and kinesthetic awareness and like our sixth sense, what we’re technically should be talking about is the fact that there’s organs within the muscle that are relaying this information like a motion capture. So obviously motion capture suit. We have all these little ping pong balls all over the suit. We have the skin suit, all the little ping pong balls, all the really high res ones, they’re all in our muscles. We have some in our skin. We have four of those in the mechanoreceptors. But the meat and potatoes, the really the high powered ones and technically this, like the ones that transmit that signal to the computer fastest, those live in the muscle. Right. So when when we’re starting to think about physical empathy, it’s like, well, how do those which are automatically reflexive, if you will, like they they they’re not voluntary motor output is voluntary. But the meaning you think about your bicep, you contract your bicep. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So like when we think about the sensory input, it can be as a byproduct of voluntary, but it can also be a byproduct. If you like push me, I’m going to react in a certain way. And that reaction to not fall over is is a pure reflexive byproduct of the fact that my muscles are sensory organs. That’s so interesting. It’s not right. If you were just sitting there doing nothing, your skin might sense wind or change in temperature. Right. That’s a sensory component of skin. I’m assuming. Yeah, there’s there’s four. Okay. Light touch, deep pressure, skin stretch and vibration. And they never run single handedly. Okay. They always run together. And muscle is what what is that primary?

 So there’s there’s three appropriate receptors, technically. So what you what we just described there are mechano receptors. And this is a lot of we try to bring this to like the general population. When we think about like foam rolling, right, we think about like Theraguns or we think about Kinesio tape. And we understand that the subcutaneous would be the technical word or like you said in the skin. When we understand that the little transmitters in our skin suit that relay back to the brain that help our brain create this motion capture image of where we are in space. Right. Like I can’t see my hand. I know exactly where my hands are. Right. Because actually I have a lot of sensory receptors, actually the most sensory receptors in my hands, disproportionate to their size. So we actually see this mapped in the brain quite well. And so like the lips, hands and face are very concentrated with these subcutaneous sensory receptors. So that’s why we have like a lot of dexterity and the dexterity, like the ability for a pianist to play, you know, so many notes with often fair and coordinate. Right. That motor output, the ability to do that is actually driven by the hypersensory system. And the better the motor output is usually preceded by more sensory input. Right. So when we think about the subcutaneous mechanoreceptors and we think about foam rolling and taping and all of the like the prehab modalities that we’re seeing, a lot of times they’re ill defined as far as what the actual mechanism is. So someone might take a look at. Yeah. Should they foam roll? Yeah. And it’s you know, there’s there’s a very human element to this that I think people miss because science can and has to a lot of times control out the human element. Right. Fundamentally. I mean, a lot of times making things reproducible or making things reproducible in science doesn’t make them replicable in real life. Right. So most often not. Yeah. So but we need that. Right. We derive a lot of principles from from conventional scientific methods. But when we think about foam rolling, we think about the conventional modalities, go theoregon foam roll, kinesio tape, cupping, I believe, is another fairly common one.

 Each one has a little story and we like we like the stories because they kind of make sense if you don’t think about it. Right. So cupping, you know, you’ll see the irritation in the skin. People are sort of walking around with like pepperoni slaps all over them for a few days. And it’s like something about what do they say? Something about toxins in the blood. It’s like, I hope not. Because that’s really dangerous. Blood is that toxic. But it or the kinesio tape. Oh, it’s like lifting the layers of the skin. Sure. Maybe there might be some benefit to that. Or foam rolling is breaking up scar tissues. We have like these little stories that we attach on to like the potential mechanisms. But when we we dig into the neuroscience, you see that likely what they’re doing is they’re just stimulating some of these mechanoreceptors. They’re kind of like they’re creating awareness. They’re they’re they’re sending a transmission to the central processor that’s not there. Now, those are usually transient and they’re really the good meat and potatoes are in the muscle itself. So subcutaneous might just be a bit of a band. It would still useful. You know, it’s undeniable that we went to a gym right now. And someone said, you know, I enjoy foam rolling before I work out. I could sit there with research and go, well, you know, this study proves that there’s no performance increase and there’s a performance detriment. It’s like, that’s maybe one study on one person on one day. But the person who goes to the gym because they like the feeling of foam rolling and then works out like that. That is a vector is such a positive push forward. And I think a lot of times when we don’t understand things mechanistically, we don’t understand how to dose them. Right. So that’s true of any drug. And that’s why I think these modalities are that they’re telling to us that we’re that we’re running a low resolution motion capture when people really tend to them. So someone might come to me and be like, and this is true at every level. I really like, you know, foam rolling my hamstrings. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, sure. Have you tried the other modalities and have you tried stimulating some of these deeper muscular sensory receptors? Because it tells me that the lights are off. It tells me that the receptors are down and we’re running a low resolution image and they tend to this. So it’s like, well, let’s not pull that away from them. Let’s let’s start to enter in and really flood that brain with more stimulus to that area. But the real meat and potatoes is going to be in the muscle itself. And would that be one reason and this concept of skeletal muscle as a sensory organ system? Obviously, it is an organ system for strength.

 Hypertrophy is we’re going to talk about that, but certainly strength and there’s the metabolic benefits. But this sensory part, I thought was very fascinating because what I think that we care about, at least I know that you care about this, is injury prevention or return from injury. Yes, there is that performance aspect, but this idea of how does someone live well long? How can they be able to maintain high physical performance without getting injured? Or for example, me, I really like to train. I’ve been extremely limited due to my hamstring and hip.

 My question is, could someone get by without ever focusing on training skeletal muscle from that sensory perspective? Because I have watched some of your warm ups that you do with some athletes and Matt and I, my producer, we were going through some of your training drills and you were throwing. What was he doing, Matt? He was like throwing something against a wall. You know, whereas I’m going to go, I’m going to warm up and maybe onto clam shells or something silly. How important is that sensory component for injury prevention and maybe even optimizing for muscle mass? Right. Yeah, that’s a really good question. And there’s a couple of ways we could take this. I think first understanding that there’s isolation of muscle action, which is like, I’m going to strengthen my bicep. I’m going to voluntarily, like you said, just contract this under some sort of resistance. And I’m going to do that in some sort of progressive over stimulus over time. Right. So that’s like covers the motor output. So that’s isolation of muscles action. Right. My bicep, you know, it flexes my elbow. It does some stuff with the wrist and the shoulder, but primarily as far as most people concerned, flexes the elbow.

 But there’s also this idea of integration of muscle function, right? Which is the sensory component to that. Right. So when we’re looking at exercise, we want to have sort of this continuum of dosing exercises from isolation and muscle action, which will be movements that are usually more externally stable. Like, you know, we talked briefly about like the difference between squat and a leg press. Right. If I’m trying to grow my legs and I have a relatively novice client, the squat might pose too many constraints. Right. The spine is unstable. The pelvis is unstable. We just can’t really coordinate this movement. Again, being physically empathetic to someone who doesn’t know how to squat. Right. We look at squats as people who have been on the leading edge of our physical development is very easy motor pattern. You know, we show pictures of baby squatting and it’s like it’s kind of a false equivalency. It’s not necessarily fair to the person to project our skill level on them. So we’re really trying to challenge that muscle from a motor output standpoint. Something like a leg press would be much more suitable. Right. But over time, the integration of muscle function becomes paramount. If for nothing else is a tool of load management, which is like we dig into biomechanics at its core. That’s what biomechanics is. It’s load management. When we look at injury prevention, the only thing we really have is our ability to sort of aggregate load on particular muscles and understand that the performance is going to be our number one proxy to progression. When we stop being able to progress and their performance depreciates, then it’s like, hmm, maybe we’re pushing too hard. If I’m doing a leg press and like a hack squat and a back squat and a safety squat bar, those are very taxing movements. Right. So I might be under recovering. Introducing now this other end of the spectrum of the ice or the integration of muscle function. So some of the lunging that we did today, some of like the single leg hip drills, that is going to take the load ability away, but it’s going to take the sensory input and ramp it all the way up. Now, you should explain kind of what we did. It’s not all about strength and hypertrophy and performance. Right. There’s kind of this ability to move well that I think is at least it’s been lost on me for a really long time, for example, these little injuries. And so I had you take me through some exercises in particular. We did a lunge and I want to talk about, you know, as the listener is at home thinking, OK, how can I think about skeletal muscle in a way that I can be fit my whole life? They have to be able to learn certain movements appropriately. Right. There are things that they have to be able to think about. Right. Yeah. No, definitely. And I think I think first off, like as a heuristic, you know, it’s hard to speak. It’s so broad, but I think this will help. One of the things that we discussed, we were talking a little bit about posture and I think it’s worth to first create a fork in the road for those listening and have an honest conversation with themselves and be like, what is my interaction with gravity? Like, what is my relative strength and body weight ratio? That’ll that’ll first determine where these conversations go and how to really choose exercises effective for you. Why? So the external environment is a variable that we don’t really consider a lot of times. It comes back to this physical empathy thing. Right. So you and I, we have a different relationship with gravity, someone who might not train, someone who might be overweight, looking to sort of start a weight loss or a fitness or a weightlifting resistance training journey. If they aren’t honest about their relationship with gravity, some exercises are far out of reach and that we don’t, we often prescribe them without thinking about that relationship without approaching them with that empathy. Right. So things like lunges, you know, that’s, that’s a really difficult exercise for someone who doesn’t have a favorable strength, the body weight ratio, right? Like, you know, say someone who’s been resistance training for a long time can squat two times their own body weight, right? Have a bar on their back, squat down, sort of butt to the heels and back up. A lunge to that person is very different, right? It’s like us walking on the moon. Right. Like it’s with the strength they have relative to their body weight, a body weight lunge is different. But the body weight exercise and how often that just mass prescribed to people at home workouts. That’s someone could be weaker. A close friend of mine coined this term, Kyle Baxter, brilliant.

 Some people are weaker than the forces of gravity acting on them. Right. So if I woke up every morning and my strength was, was met with my absolute load. So like for me, if I’m squatting 700 pounds and then I want to wake up every morning and I have 700 pounds on my back and when I go to the grocery, I have 700 pounds on my back. I’m going to start to adopt a posture that’s that has that that’s responsive to this interaction with gravity, right? This gravity that combines under a mass of this bar on my back. So I think it’s really worth, you know, if you guys are listening to this and you’re trying to create a workout plan, it’s like I need to understand my relationship with gravity first. And, you know, it’s a gradient, obviously, but you can kind of in this context, we’ll bucket it into weaker than the forces of gravity. You’re new to training because the way you should look at the gym is almost like a chessboard. Right. So a chess and a checkers board are the same board. Right. What’s different? The pieces. Right. So when we look at the gym, it’s the same equipment, but the pieces, the people in there are different. And how we move the different people depends on, you know, what type of piece. So if you’re a novice to the gym, your focus might want to be at the very first using more machine based exercises. Pat Davidson. Right. High ground training. Yeah. I will use the word stability as the English language. That is the proper word to use. But it’s interesting because the guys that are very respected in this space also respect, you know, you and Pat Davidson. So, I mean, it’s going to be onto something. Yeah. And it’s you, we’re all pointing at the same thing, right? Yeah. He’s standing on one side, calling six. I’m standing on the other side, calling it a nine. But I think it’s really useful in understanding the principle of like what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to, and this is really easy. And I like the analogy because we start off and everyone is not everyone, but those who are on the less favorable side of the strength of body weight ratio, who have a different relationship with gravity. They’re like a checkers piece. And what do you do with checkers? You make little jumps, right? There’s no intricate L shapes and castles that do things and horses that do things. But when you make those jumps across the board, which means, you know, get a couple of exercises that as Pat would say, I believe you would say high ground, I would say highly externally stabilized, have a broad basis support. And just for you guys who don’t know what that is or haven’t listened to the podcast with Pat Davidson or the podcast that you did with Pat in your own pod, it’s basically a lot of contact. So one is very stable. Yeah, broad basis support. So stability as a concept and training is ever present. It’s what is our center of mass and what is our basis support. So for those who, again, less favorable side of the strength of body weight ratio just getting started, we want to find movements that have more of that external stability, broad base support, a leg press would be a great example. Because a leg press, we can titrate down to below our strength of our body weight. Yeah, it’s interesting because people usually start with body weight exercises and some people have weigh a lot more than the 10 pound leg extension that someone would do. Would that be fair to say? Yeah, and that’s a really stark contrast to see the difference. Like that is your body will go into a vigilant state due to the like, I’ll speak at a technical level. I’ll bring it back down to kind of terra firma. Your body prioritizes or optimizes for a few things, right? Like walking and breathing primarily not falling over being a big one. That’s where biped ambulatory creatures. We walk around on two legs, very unique property of humans. Not my kids, but we’ve optimized for that biomechanically, neurologically. And a lot of in that optimization of becoming biped is moving a lot of muscular contractions to the side of the autonomic. It’s pushed over here. It’s taken care of for you. So you can worry about your taxes and everything else. You don’t have to consciously contract to stay upright. It’s very different than quadruped animals, which is like the majority of things running around. So we’re optimized for not falling over. When we start people off and with this dogma, this paradigm of like, oh, you know, body weight squats or back squats, or this is the king of the sector, whatever. It’s you’re putting people in like a vigilant state where their autonomic nervous system takes over and optimizes for not falling over. Right? So you’re going to get a ton of compensation that you can’t equate for because you’re not being physically empathetic to the person who is weaker than the forces of the body. Who is weaker than the forces of gravity acting on them. Right? Where a leg press allows you to titrate down to their level and actually provide a stimulus where they can, they don’t have to be reactive. Their autonomic nervous system doesn’t take over to make sure that they don’t fall over under this ridiculously relatively heavy load. Right? Yeah. And what I’m hearing you say is that universally prescribed for a beginner, I am also guilty of this is to start with body weight. And you are also saying that someone could be weaker than the gravity around them. And that body weight for that person is going to, for lack of a better term, amp up or amp up the nervous system to become hyper vigilant, kind of turned on more. And they’ll compensate using potentially the incorrect movements, even on something simple like a lunge. Is that accurate? Yeah. And the cool thing about this, I find it cool, is visually and subjectively, it can look exactly the same. And this is where we have. This is very important for people. Visually and subjectively, like if I’m looking at someone do something, like I’m, you know, I’m a subject to them performing an exercise and we have two people of different strength and body weight ratios. Someone can in a vigilant state compensate to go through a squat pattern. That’s probably the easiest. And two people can do it of similar anthropometry, similar size and shape. But one, be on the leading side of the relationship with gravity, strong, well trained and someone being new. And they’d be recruiting entirely different muscles. Right? So it looks the same to me, but the internal state of how that movement is being performed is entirely re-strategized for the hyper vigilant weaker than the forces of gravity. Right? And this is where you to answer your original question about like, you know, how do we use biomechanics to sort of like live this long and vital and healthy and injury free life? It’s like, you need to understand that. You need to understand that. Look, just because I’m looking at someone perform something next to someone else in similar, similar shape, maybe you’re looking at something that’s not, you know, a little bit different. You know, shape, maybe different size, but, you know, I watch the, you know, the joint angles. I go up, that looks like they’re squatting just like this professional weight lifter, crossfitter, whatever. If we don’t understand that, like, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a, there’s an engine running a computer that’s operating to optimize not for performing the movement, but for not falling over during the movement. You’re going to be loading tissues that you don’t equate for. What would be an example? Give me an example. Oh, sure. Let’s go with the single leg movement we did today. Right? So on the YouTube channel, we’ll see you next time.

 We will see what is attempted to be a single leg. Right. But it’s, you know what? I think it’s, I think it’s a really good use case for people to see, right? To all accounts, very well trained. You’re in better shape than 99.9% of the population. But even you can still not understand your relationship with gravity, right? And this is where understanding the role of muscles, the sensory organs comes in, right? Because you don’t, you’re not aware of some of these positions because you haven’t trained your muscles like that same glute that does the clamshell that is just primarily worried about the motor output of abducting, kicking the leg off to the side. Real like Jane Fonda Sunday morning special. I’m dating myself a little bit, but it’s like, you know, but when the foot’s on the ground, now the glute is only contracting as it feels the center of mass deviate away from the base support. Now it’s like very reactive. We see the leg kind of like, you know, like oscillating in space and you’re trying to like, most people would say they’re trying to keep your balance. I would say that you’re, you’re trying to stay stable. And what’s happening with that? Like really rapid, what’s actually happening in the hip when your knee is kind of shaking around people won’t experience this. If they try like a single leg hinge, what you’ll see is that, you know, like all my ankles are unstable or my knee. It’s like, no, it’s not that right. That the foot is sitting there with a lot of sensory receptors going, where is this leg going? Because the hip isn’t tuned, isn’t trained with that input of the rapid stretch that that would lead someone to being unstable. It’s like, oh, I’m shifting a little bit this way. And then the muscle contracts and then it overcorrects. And this is, it’s a process called neural polishing or neural sharpening. And I do this a lot and I have an awareness because I do it a lot. And for me, the nice part about this type of training, this training on the end of the spectrum of integrating muscle function and polishing that reflex from like that hip. That’s trying to really just keep my leg over my foot, right? Over my base of support is that becomes more efficient over time. I don’t have to do that as much. And I think in one of the things that I’m sure we’ll get into in a little bit, I think that’s a good thing. And one of the things that I’m trying to get into like warm up and prehab is it’s about doing less. It’s about additional over subtraction or addition by subtraction. Right. And so to answer your question about what is an example of two people doing an exercise that looks sort of the exact same as we can both go through the hinge and you’re like, okay, G’s foot’s there. Her hip joint is there. Her other foot’s on the ground. Her hands are approximately this far from the ground. Her toe on the other leg is approximately this far from the ground. If we’re trying to describe a single leg, RDL for those of you following along home and then I can get in the same position. And then I asked the million dollar question, which is, and this is where it becomes important. And this is where I think a lot of the, you know, the science may run astray is I have to ask the question of where do you feel this? Because I know muscles, a sensory organ, right? So if I’m trying to relay, if I’m trying to understand the relationship with gravity, I need to know what muscle is. And then I can kind of reverse engineer then go, okay. So for that, example, when I go on one leg and I hinge and I can do it barefoot, you know, no heel elevation, anything like that. I feel it in my glute, right? I feel it on the side of my hip where you did it. You felt it in your hamstring, right? Everything. I always feel it in my hamstring. And that’s so telling, but to me, and it’s like, you know, we can watch you squat and we can be like, well, this squat should be a more quad. It’s like, no, it’s not. You’re in his vigilant state. You’re, you’re fighting this, this, this ghost in the machine of gravity. And you don’t realize that, yeah, your squat can look like mine, but I’m going to load more quad and more adductor where yours, given the way that your body is, is interacting with gravity is going to load more of the hamstring. So it’s not a hamstring strength issue that you might be having. And it might actually be a hamstring overuse, but it’s not because you’re overusing it from doing, you know, Nordics or hamstring curls. It’s all the times you don’t realize you’re using it, right? And that’s where biomechanics becomes a real tool of load management. It’s about equating for all of that, like dark energy that you’re using when you don’t realize you’re using it. And this makes the idea of designing a program really challenging for someone who is not a professional at understanding, okay, well, there’s a million different programs out there. How do I, I’m a 40 year old person who’s never trained. Where do I start? How do I do it without injuring myself and kind of progressing? Right. I think fundamentally we need to return to that first question. What is your, what is your relationship with gravity and like, be, have, have an honest take on that. And basically how would you ask that to someone? Oh, it’s, I could tell objectively, right? Like are you, are you out of shape? What is your history? And I think regardless of your discipline, and even if you can try this on yourself, take a detailed history on your, your movement, right? Like, have you ever had any injuries? What was the onset? What was the mechanism? What’s, you know, palates it? What for, for folks? How does it progress quality radiation site time? I mean, frequency and sensitivity, all of those things. Um, friends, nobody should ask themselves those questions. I’m just kidding. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. But if you are a doctor or someone who is maybe evaluating patients, yes. Yeah. And I think that’s, and it’s something that’s often lost regardless of discipline, right? From the personal trainer to the chiropractor, osteopath, PT, DPT, physician, it’s like getting a movement history. That’s where you’re going to get quote unquote, a diagnosis. So like, you know, usually by sizing someone up quite literally, like how tall are you? How much do you weigh? You know, what’s your lean body mass? What should be, it’s a ballpark of your strength to body weight ratio. That’s going to terraform the environment for us. Because like someone like you, lunges are going to be a great tool out of the gate. You have the relative strength in, you know, in the glutes, in the hamstrings, in the adductors, in the quads to, to support that. We need to fine tune it a little bit, but that’s all of a sudden on the table as like a skill that we need to practice. But to someone else who doesn’t answer that question or is imposed that question, who is, has a less favorable strength, the body weight ratio. That’s like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube with a desert eagle to your forehead, right? Like that is such like a, it’s such a ridiculous skill. Cause you even said, as we were going through it, and I found it interesting as it’s so often the case when we start to really cue some of these positions that highlight the ranges of motion that are built within an exercise. And that’s a fundamental key to building a good program is understanding like, where is the vegetables I can grind up in the spaghetti sauce? And what does that mean? It means like we can spend a lot of time on the front end doing like rotator cuff exercises or clam shells or core work and planks and all this. But the goal long term of building a really effective, efficient exercise program is understanding where these movement qualities of like, you know, whether it’s hip stability, I’ll use the term or, you know, we talked a little bit about the lower trap and we did some dips earlier. It’s like, how can we start to pick up some of these like prehab focused, oftentimes scapegoated weaknesses or instabilities or inefficiencies in range of motion that are so often bottlenecking people. And not rather do them in isolation in some sort of warm up although that can be useful in short term. But we can sort of look at exercises with a little bit more depth and clarity. The example I always use is, you know, if I if we walk out of the studio right now and you were like, you were upstairs or whatever and you were like, you just yelled, ah, animal. I’d be like, like, it could be literally millions of things. Oh, her kids are home. But it’s just like, it’s just not enough. If you just yelled, ah, there’s an animal, there’s not enough detail. Right. So if I’ll use the example of this, the Sydney funnel web spider is the most venomous spider in the world, I think I’m not a zoologist, but I’m pretty sure that’s the case. I’ve been to Australia enough times and but it’s small, small, it’s creepy. A common house spider is completely benign. You see one, let it let it live. You’re fine.

 When you look at categorizing spiders and you look at like the kingdom, the file in the class, the order, info, order species, all that.

 There is six levels that you go through until they’re different. Right. But when we when people look at exercise, they just go muscle group modality. It’s a barbell hamstring. The modality being the barbell and the muscle train being the hamstring. But it’s like we’re not ever bottlenecked by that. And in building a good exercise program, it’s really about how can I work around the bottlenecks that are going to slow me down from progress. Right. So when we looked at the dip, for example, a lot of people would look at that and categorize it by like, oh, it’s a body weight. Tricep. Right. That’s like saying it’s it’s it’s an animal. It’s like there’s not enough detail. It’s not enough detail to actually incite meaningful action. What it actually is, if we’re to look at like the movement source code, like the ones and zeros is, yes, a bilateral upper body movement. So we’re using both arms at once, which is going to be a little bit more stable than using one arm, which is usually allow us a little bit more output. It’s body weight. So that titrates it down a little bit. But there’s also this like great movement property of internal rotation of the shoulder. It’s the most if I think about it like that, I’m it’s the most internally rotated I get in order to get into that position. I need to have a certain movement at the shoulder blade and I need a certain accommodation for that movement at the at the rib cage. So it’s like when we start to classify movements with more depth, we get a lot more clarity on how to act. So that is the listener at home. I’m mostly thinking my dad who’s 74. Hey, dad. And he is going, wow.

 I only know upper body, lower body, push, pull, hinge, squat. Right. How does someone even think about planning something out? Is this a skill that someone could learn that they could do? How do they do that? How do you even conceptualize it? Because the more you know, the more confusing it sounds. I think there’s there’s two levels to the more you know thing. The more you know, it should lead you to a point of like being able to take action and then you can go into knowing more and that actually paralyzes you from taking action. Right. So there’s a happy medium in there where, look, training is a lot like philosophy. It’s not meant to be written down. Right. It’s meant to be done. It’s meant to be like discussed and actually performed. So I think tracking is actually a really good place to start. But prior to that, you need to optimize for enjoyment. That’s like a it’s like a bit of like a less than technical conversation, but it’s actually the most technical conversation. I’ve had a lot of clients who know that they need to work out or think that they have to work out. And in a lot of cases, they’re right. But forcing them into the gym every day is just not going to work. They’re you know, they’re they’re they’re actually the stand up comedians. I have a friend of mine who’s who’s gone through this process. It’s like he just he’s two all over the place and you put him in a gym and have him wait for 45 seconds in between. So first. So what we did is he went and he goes on to play paddle ball. Now, now he loves pickleball, whatever the little tiny. It’s like ping pong, what you stand on the table. Now he wants to go back in the gym to get better at this. We optimize for enjoyment. Right. So that’s like thing number one, which, you know, you can learn all of the mechanics and biomechanics in the world. When you work with real people, you have to optimize for that. So that that’s like priority. Number one, you’re going to you’re going to you’re getting into this endeavor with enjoyment in mind and sustainability in mind. Second is going to be frequency. Right. One of the number one things is going that it’s really going to push progress is accumulating some sort of volume and like, which means like just doing more obviously, it’s such a simple thing we apply these big terms to. So if you have like three days a week to train, it’s probably best to do a full body lift every single day. Right. And then that evolution can go from full body. And this is like a useful, heuristic to follow. It can go from full body, which you’re getting like the volume, like the number of reps and sets in throughout the week through like multiple days. So rather than having like an upper body day once a week, you kind of get this like micro dose, if you will, upper body stimulus multiple times a week. Then as you get better at some of these skills and we’ll zoom in on each one of these, we’ll zoom into a training day to see what this looks like. You can then go from a full body workout to an upper body, then lower body, then alternate. Right. You’ll be able to have you have a little bit more work capacity in the muscle. You’ll have less bottlenecks in the skill. So you’ll be able to perform some of these movements closer to like a point of meaningful failure, which means like the muscle you’re trying to target is the bottleneck. And then you can move from like an upper body, lower body to something like a push in a pole in a leg day. Right. So that’s like a good heuristic to look at and be like, well, how much time do I have sustainably that I can reproduce this training week again and again and again and be realistic. And when you have that heuristic, then it’s like, OK, let’s build a training day.

 The warm up piece is always a prehab or whatever the preferred nomenclature is, is is a little bit contentious. And I think rightfully so because it’s really contextualized. What do you mean? So, yeah, the warm up, there’s there’s just two sides of the aisle. It was like, no, you shouldn’t warm up. You just like do the exercise that you are going to do and just do like lighter sets and go into heavier sets. OK, I think that’s a really good goal. Right. Like Kelly Sterett famously wrote a book called The Supple Leopard. And that’s the goal. Like, you know, you kind of just get up and go. But there’s there’s a road map to achieving that. And the best way to look at it is is exercises are actually skills. Right. No one no one patronizes or no one bats an eye when Kevin Durant goes out and warms up for 20 minutes for a basketball game and works on these small micro qualities of the game. And he’s actually a really, really great example. You’ll do you see seven foot tall. He was like a six to guard and he like spins on one leg a lot and they’ll dribble and they’ll pass. And just to practice the art of dribbling and passing, these are the best athletes in the world. When we go to the gym, we’re just like, just go. That is an expression of someone not being physically empathetic. Right. When I hear that, I go, you aren’t thinking of the experience of someone who doesn’t interact with gravity like you do. Right. Like you sure you and I can go into the gym and we can pull up so you can go to get to that. Some people’s training goal is to do one bodyweight pull up. And you think that, you know, it would be like me sitting down at a piano without knowing the keys like, where’s middle C? I don’t I don’t know. I’m completely lost. And so when we go in and we formulate a warm up, a lot of times you can go general to specific. And if you want a really good general warm up, get on an assault bike for five minutes and breathe through your nose. You’re going to get because it’s just about generating heat. It’s about generating heat primarily. Yes. That’s great point. Let’s start there. Like the most of the efficacy of warm ups in research is about increasing the core body temperature. Not necessarily mobilizing the shoulder. It’s just in right. That’s so that is that is different. Yeah, no, the shoulders, the hips and the spine, the ribcage and the pelvis and as well as the central nervous system, all of these things can be optimized for what they’re about to perform. And I think if we again, we have to deploy some physical empathy here and be like, OK, you know, we can sit down in the gym as the equivalent analogy would be like first chair violinists. And we know how to strum all the notes and we know how to read theory. But you got to realize that if someone’s first learning how to play the violin, it starts with with musical theory. There’s a cognitive phase to skill acquisition. Right. So in a lot of times when you’re when you’re new to training, think of like, think of what you’re actually doing is either like learning a language or learning how to play an instrument and don’t be so caught up in in applying resistance training research, which is obviously useful at a certain point as so far as your skill level intersects with the applicability of said research. But think of it like learning an instrument. Right. It would surprise zero people if I was like if you came to me, you’re like, I want to learn how to play the guitar. And I’m like, well, what do you think is the best way to do it? You probably go, I think I’m going to play 20 minutes a day, five days a week. Yeah, you’re going to learn much quicker than someone that goes, I think the best way is to sit down on a Sunday for eight hours and play until my fingers bleed. It’s like, well, you know, you’re not optimized for learning. And I think if you’re in a situation where all of this could sound overwhelming.

 Change your reference point to I want to learn how to train. Right. And then that when you apply like almost a pedagogical principles of how people actually learn and you respect that movement in the gym is a skill that is comprised of many micro skills, just like Kevin Durant, the basketball and the and the passing and the dribbling and the layups and the dunks and the pull up jumpers and all that. He practices those before he plays because skill acquisition is a process. There’s a cognitive phase which could be our warm up. Right. If we’re trying to learn like today, like, you know, we did a squat variation. So if I was to organize a lower body session for you, I’d be like, OK, wow, like this, the single leg hip, I’m going to use the term like single like hips abilities a little bit. You know, I’m not seeing an expression of a trained understanding of where her hip is in space. That’s going to be tough. That’s going to lead to a lot of compensations and squatting. And, you know, your hip hurts when you squat. I wonder if these two things are related. So it’s like we’re about to sit down at the piano and I’m going to be like, hey, here’s a scale. I want you to play the scale first. Right. It’s some sort of pentatonic thing. Just rip through. OK, great. And that’s the cognitive phase, right? It’s like you’re sitting down, you’re looking at the music and you’re going, OK, this is the notes in between the lines. These are the notes on the lines of treble clef, bass stuff, all that fun stuff. And then so that’s the cognitive we’re learning. And then the warm up when we look at training like learning, the warm up is understanding some of those, you know, more elemental movement notes, like ability to internally rotate your hip, rotate your trunk or flex your trunk or extend your trunk or laterally flex your trunk, which we did today. It’s like these are do we need these notes? Just like we need the notes on the sheet. Then as we move into our workout, now we start to look at like, well, now we’re we’re associating, you know, we’re going to take that that side bend from like the little plank variation we did in the beginning of the workout during the warm up, like learning that movement and we’re going to apply it. We’re going to apply it to that walking lunge. Like, hey, remember when we were doing that one, I need you to shift a little bit to the side. Just like we did in isolation and now we’re integrating in that associative phase. And then then we start to look at these more complex movements like squats and deadlifts, which in the grand scheme of athleticism is not that complex, but it’s. You do have to do it right. Is that what you’re saying? It is complex to the to the person who you’re not being physically empathetic to. It’s not complex for us, but I don’t know. It’s complex for me. I still can’t get it right. Right. And but all you’re missing, all you’re missing is the base colors, right? All you’re missing is some primary movement. You’re you’re an artist relative to the paint analogy. If we think of like hip internal rotation.

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 The leg lengths, everything is totally different. It seems it’s almost nearly impossible to say, you know what? You are doing it correctly. You are actually moving the muscles that you’re supposed to be. I mean, it just, it is in my mind and maybe I’m just over complicating it. Very confusing. I think as the complexity and the variation in presentation scales, so does the range of normal. But how would someone even, I mean, we think that we know what a normal squat looks like, but leg length is different. Pelvis is different, right? If they’re, and then we pigeonhole people to move a very particular way. Is that the way? I think that we need to move the mile marker. I think we’ve built a very, we’ve built musculoskeletal hypochondriacs. Human beings are unbelievably resilient, right? And I think, you know, what we’re talking about is better. What we’re talking about is, you know, we’re optimizing for perfect, but I think optimizing for one, enjoyment and optimizing for better is always the goal, right? We are so resilient that we have, we have so, we have such a margin for error and resistance training that I think goes broadly disrespected. And because it’s easier to make a point about saying binary, this is good or this is bad. And I may be guilty of this sometime in this hour, but it’s, it’s definitely something where, you know, we’re so resilient that we get to try again. In a lot of cases, like resistance training is unbelievably safe. It’s unfathomably safe. Totally. If you are someone who is worried about, you know, getting injured in the gym and you’re making decisions that have some sort of fear from, you know, and I think everyone tries, everyone who’s done a dispense information on training is trying to, trying to help undoubtedly. But if you have like a female daughter who’s 13 and she’s playing, you know, some level of competitive soccer and you’re not losing sleep every single night about that, about the risk of her getting injured, but you’re worried about, you got to understand relative risk. That is, you want to tear an ACL, be a 15 year old girl to play soccer, right? That is way more risky than being, than going into the gym training. So I think giving yourself some freedom, right? To make, to make the not best decision and improve on that. And I think tracking much like nutrition, tracking your workouts is a great place to start. And it’s, and it’s not something. Are we tracking strength or are we tracking reps? Are we tracking? All of it. Sets everything. Right? Like, cause think of it this way, you know, you deal, you deal in nutritional space, right? Are you just tracking macronutrients? Are you just tracking protein, carbs and fats? It’s like, well, depends on the complexity of the issue, right? Like if I have someone who’s like, you would know if you got your blood worked on. But I’m getting better. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. Not really. Like when we, so it really depends on how complex the issue is we’re trying to solve. Right. And I think a lot of the conversation around resistance training is it’s about the tactics used to win an argument are different than the tactics used to solve problems. Right. So you need to, as you filter through information, because I think there’s, there’s heuristics that I think people should, if they listen to this in, in the pursuit of health optimization, I’m always trying to remind people when they digest content like this, that understand that you’re, you know, we’re five men around and blind men around an elephant. Right. So as you listen to me talk about resistance training and try and hopefully give some principles that can be extracted. 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 The individual is going to do so far. We know they’re doing core and we know that they’re tracking. What else do they have to be doing? And also the other thing that you said is don’t worry about injuring yourself, get the job done and understand there’s flexibility in the movement. And also you brought up something that I don’t think anyone ever has is that body weight exercises might be challenging. Those are the things that I’ve taken away so far, but I do want you to talk to that 40 year old woman who’s never trained. Sure. I think another good box to tick is in a lower body session. We’re going to try and get something that replicates the gait cycle. Now don’t let that term scare you run away with you. I want you to do something single leg, right? There’s going to be properties of moving on one leg that are oftentimes under trained. Now, again, we need to go back to zero. We need to go back to go. Do not collect $200 and ask yourself the question of does a, you know, does a walking lunge, is that a favorable movement for you based off your strength of body weight ratio? If go collect $200 and can continue on. So I think that’s a really good. So our options there are, you know, walking lunges or stationary split squats. And then we can start to be like, well, I’m, it’s interesting. And that’s before just a general squat or anything else. Absolutely. Because it’s like, again, that’s a squat would, if we go back to the motor learning and we talk about like, you know, the, uh, cognitive associate of an autonomous, I have a colleague of mine, Killion Hamilton. You’re brilliant. He runs a course on this. The squat is, is something that’s meant to be autonomous, right? Like autonomous means something you can do without thinking it’s coordinated, right? Like, you know, if you watch, let’s use the music analogy, like if I’m watching someone learn how to play guitar or learn piano and they’re in the cognitive phase of like, okay. Uh, every good boy deserves fudge, F A C E right on the line in between the line. And then they’re learning to go, okay. So C is here.

 C that’s associative. Right. And you’re not going to put, you know, some sort of Mozart symphony and C minor in front of them and where they need to be like that C needs to be autonomous where they can go and go, okay. Cognitive associate of autonomous. I can look at that circle on that line and go, there it is. I don’t even think so. It’s like, and this is, this is a really good proxy, I think for people who have a trainer or they’re working out is, is queuing is something that’s really telling. Cause I think what we should be focusing on, like if you have a trainer or you work out with someone and they’re constantly like the squat, we’ll stick with this. Cause it sounded like a universal, uh, that people can attach to you. It’s you need to constrain movements rather than cue them. So if you’re doing a squat and I’m telling you 13 things during the movement and I find it’s vital that you do all 13 of these things, I’ve picked the wrong movement, right? I’m going to put you on a leg press. So I don’t have to cue that much stuff. So it’s like, if you find yourself in these positions where you kind of need to be like moved around a bit, it’s like, okay, just change the exercise to something less complex. Right. Cause there’s, you’re not at that autonomous fate. We haven’t built some of these underlying movement qualities so that this can be autonomous, right? And autonomous in a way that’s loading the tissues we want to load. So single leg over, over, if you can’t stand on one leg, don’t squat with two, right? I think that’s, I don’t think I was that stable on one leg. Terrible. Well, no, cause But I mean, is this all true? You’re, cause you’re really interesting use case, because if we understand stability from a physical, like what it means from physics, not even biomechanics, you’re relatively short. You know, relative to me. Now, I should be more unstable. Like you’re, you’re a Porsche going around that turnpike and I’m a Jeep Wrangler or something based off of the physics of those two objects with a broader base support and a higher center of mass. The Jeep should flip over. You’re a Porsche that can’t keep the wheels on the ground. Right. So you’re actually, your center of mass is closer to your base is important. Right. If, if I wanted to push someone over, I would get low first. Why? Cause I’m getting my center of mouth. I’m becoming more stable. Right. So yours is actually a like, I’m not alarming again. We’re dealing with exercise, but it’s, it’s your, your relative instability to your structure is actually not cause for concern, but it’s cause for opportunity. It’s like, wow, like G. You, this should be easier for you given like the, the, the physical specifications of this movement for you. And it’s more difficult if we can start to get you better on one leg and do those lunges that we did and do those single leg hinges and work on, you know, bulk areas or, or whatever. And that would be the best way to progress or even to be able to be stable in my school. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Because what we’re doing then is we’re tapping into that sensory component of the muscle because you are on one leg. And when we are, this sensory component, the muscle is fascinating. When you were talking about warming up and doing the foam rolls and doing all that stuff, you’re, are you technically warming up the muscle or are you warming up the brain? Yeah. Yeah. The peripheral, the peripheral, the central nervous system, right? So, but it’s very telling. And I think this is, if you’re someone who gets some sort of relief, transiently, I’m sure of foam rolling, amazing foam roll, there it goes.

 But now you’ve opened up a window. The real, the, the, the sensory component of the muscle is going to be part of the resistance training of the single. So when you’re standing on one leg, so let’s put together a warmup for you. Like this is literally what I’m going to write in a spreadsheet. You like foam rolling. I would suggest a certain, a few places, always a key if the takeaway, if there is one, if you’re ever looking at some sort of like myofascial release, I’m going to foam roll. You know, let’s say like the iliotibial band, the side of the thigh, move your leg around, right? A lot of people just kind of oscillate back and forth, like they’re rolling a pizza, right? You want to actually change length of tissue. Well, I know I’m going to change like the, my quad, if I flex my hamstring, right? So rather than just sticking on one point or rather than just rolling back and forth on the side of your leg, stick on one point and then actually flex. Cause now you’re getting input from the muscle. But does that mean that you’ll be better able to perform the action? Even though let’s say I’m foam rolling and I’m going to go and I’m going to try to do these walking lunges where I’m continuing extending this gait cycle.

 Will I be able to become better at it just by cueing up my brain? Yeah. Cause you’re, you’re taking those transmitters, right? And you’re giving, it’s like you’re, you’re putting a spotlight on them. You’re, you’re, you’re rereading. Cause it is controversial, right? This foam rolling, this KT tape, all this stuff. And I think it’s a matter of understanding the mechanism, right? It’s looking at it from first principles and like, uh, we love looking at things from a structured perspective. And I think that’s one of the axioms that really leads us to stray and injury and rehab and prehab. Like people love looking at like, Oh, it doesn’t break down scar tissue. I was like, yes. And we, that’s, that’s not the debate. The debate is, does it work? Right. And it’s like, I mean, the foam rollers wouldn’t be as prolific if there wasn’t a mechanism. So rather than just kind of like looking through this paper towel roll and being like, Hmm, the only way this could work is if it breaks up scar tissue. It’s like, well, actually the tensile strength of scar tissue and research is shown to be like far more resilient. And if it did, you’d have way more problems on your hand. You’d probably break your femur, but it’s like, okay, well, hold on a second. Well, don’t throw it out. The way it wouldn’t be is so prolific. It wouldn’t be an average gym across the world if it didn’t, if it didn’t do something. And I think we like looking at the structure of that cause like breaking it down. It’s like the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system. Don’t play those games more complex. And then the single, like everyone should do some kind of single like movement. Would a lunge be enough or should they do how many do we have to choose variations in the movement? Oh, sure. That’s a really good question. As we’re building out, I’m thinking to my dad, he better be training because right now all he does is bands. No offense. He does live in Ecuador, but, um, if he’s going to be doing walking lunges and we say, you know, I call you and I say, um, Jordan, is that enough for him? He’s doing his core. He’s choosing, I don’t know, he’s doing some planks. Now he’s doing walking lunges.

 I mean, is that going to be enough? Whatever you’re picking as an exercise has to be progressable in some fashion by some stimulus. So a lunge can be enough for now, but so here’s the thing. And this is where I think we can reconcile a lot of camps in this because some people are very like anti warming up. Some people are very anti like anything that’s not just challenging the muscle as a motor output component and rather than a sensory input component. And I think there’s a place to all come to the table and be like, look, if you lack some of the let’s call the motor skills and a motor skill can just be a range of motion to have an ability to control the range of motion. If you lack that and we can find an exercise like a lunge. Lunge is great because it expresses so many different of these intricate range and you don’t even know about just kind of do it. Okay. And keep whole foot pressure and you’ll be okay. Right. They get our, our, our margin for error on improving physical qualities is quite large because the human, the human organism is quite robust and thank God for that. So it’s like if you just do lunges and, you know, again, preface strength, the body weight ratio, if it’s not like a super challenging movement for you, given your strength and it’s, but it’s a little bit unstable when you go to swing that leg through, you’re like, get a little bit, then do those and then do them until you get better at them. But then it’s, then now what we have is like, well, we’ve unlocked this like bilateral or unilateral movement pattern, right? The split stance position. And it’s like, you know, we need to have scalability of load. Now it’s like, you know, do it with dumbbells, right? And now we can, now we can do Bulgarians and do it. Bulgaria, we don’t have to, there’s a lot of discussion about, you know, as, as we build programs and think about it, that you have to change. It up, confuse the muscle. Do you have to do any of that stuff? This is a really good question. And the axiom that I like to follow is, you know, first you have to look at strength versus hypertrophy. Because it’s progressable. Because if we’re talking about progressive overload and I do want to get to the other components, if it’s whatever we have to do for upper body. But if I’m doing a lunge and I’m going to progress, I mean, I could progress for probably years, whether it’s tempo, right? Tempo, weight, et cetera. Yeah.

 But I don’t know. Do I have to confuse the muscle and change that up or do I just? I’m going to start high level. Okay. You have to optimize for enjoyment, right? There’s, you know, I was a competitive power lift for years. So I’m the type of person who can go in and just train, you know, primarily move the needle on three exercises for a decade and I’d be okay with that. But you got to understand, be physically admitted. So the answer is no, you don’t. For strength or hypertrophy. So it’s two different conversations. I know I’m waiting to get to it, but we got to finish the program. The axiom is for hypertrophy, you need progressive overstimulus and you need to understand the progressive overstimulus encompasses progressive overload, right? So I really prefer the term progressive overstimulus for hypertrophy and general resistance training because it takes into account, you know, increasing the density, like taking shorter rest periods, increasing the overall volume throughout the week, adding an additional training day. These are all levers we can pull. Rather than. Is one more important than the other? It’s one of the negligible at this stage in the conversation. But if you’re trying to get stronger, you need to have progressive overload. Load is a very reproducible medium of stimulus, right? So that’s why majority of you’re trying to get stronger. You have to increase load. Okay. Right. Right. Makes sense. I want people to follow the action of progressive overstimulus. There has to be progress. Getting stuck in the rat rays of progressive overload can lead a lot of general population people astray. Yeah. Right. Because it’s like there’s a, I hope you guys are listening, listening up. Jordan is a little hard to follow because actually he looks like a meathead, but he’s very intellectual. And what he’s saying is everybody just repeats progressive overload as if load is the only thing. And it is reproducible. It is about stimulus and there’s multiple ways to create an input or a various variation in the stimulus, which is not just progression of the stimulus. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we do tend to progressive overload and it would be useful like if we’re going to go back to the program and try and build this out from that point. We’re waiting. Waiting.

 The last thing I would want to do is I would rather create confusion that has people ask better questions and think I’m giving them all the answers because I think the space is a bit, but it’s just, you know what, it matters to me because the scope of this, of getting it right, will change medicine hands down. If we can prescribe exercise. So I don’t want to add to the noise. So it’s like I apologize for it being a little bit of a rabbit. It’s confusing where, you know, as Joe Rogan says, we’re chimpanzees with universes for brain. So it is, it is confusing, but I think it may be confusing is the wrong word. It’s complex, right? It’s confusing too. So if I were to add to that, it’s like, I think that just like, oh, the one end of the spectrum is like, Hey, let’s do something single leg of some capacity to your ability for lower body to really kind of get that pelvis moving, get the ribs moving. And then we, you know, really exaggerate that gate cycle expression and all that comes with it. And there’s a bunch of technical stuff we could talk about that we’re not going to another thing. I went the other end of the spectrum. I would look at the isolation and muscle action I would have, just as I would have the gate cycle expression of integration of function, I would make sure that there’s one exercise a week in the early stages where it’s highly externally supported. Leg press would be a great example for building out that lower body that we load, you know, safely and efficiently to muscular failure with minimal constraints, right? To really touch the other end of that spectrum. So, you know, are the lunges going to be the thing that really build hypertrophy or hypertrophy the muscle of the legs in the early stages? Probably not, not as effective as the leg press, but does the lunge create, does the lunge offset some of the movement quality that the leg press over time have done in isolation will, will leave us with? Yes. But does it also free up, you know, us our ability to transition into something like a back squat, which could be like kind of a marriage of a marriage of both where it’s like we have an unstable environment where, you know, we’ve mastered the lunge, we’ve increased some weight. We do it more often. We feel good. Well, you know, we’re really building our overall strength in an environment that’s really stable in the leg press. You know, I start with the progression of squatting. It’s like a counterbalance, water goblet squat, then front squat and hard bar. Now, care which one I do. I do because again, it’s it’s it’s complex, but I prefer most people start with a variation we looked at today, right? If you’re new to the gym, putting a bar on your back is usually not a good idea and not from a not from a danger perspective, right? I like a lot of fear mongering around axial load of the spine, putting a bar on your back. I’m not necessarily worried about the bones of your spine. I’m worried about how you’re that vigilance of the nervous system and how your body is going to react to something pushing you forward. What are you concerned from?

 An autonomic perspective, are you concerned from a feeling of stress perspective or just concerned from a movement quality perspective? Concerned because the majority of people are loading tissues day in and day out that they don’t realize. Loading the majority of people are going to come in and to fit your case study there. That person you described is going to have tight calves, tight hamstrings, tight low back. Right. And because all of those muscles are acting to hold them up, they’re falling forward. They don’t have a good relationship with gravity. So the last thing I want to do to someone who’s falling forward is put a bar on the back and push them forward more. Right. We’re forcing that vigilant. Which is probably the thing that people always do when you’re starting out. Let’s do a back squat. Yeah, back squat. No physical empathy. Do I love this concept. Does it matter if it is a leg press? Would one have to isolate the muscle group? For example, you said unilateral movements, then choosing something that you could load where the person is going to execute well.

 Could it be a hip thrust? Could it be, you know, what would some of those examples be that would be able to meaningfully load the body? Right. So when we look at like leg pressing patterns that closely replicate the squat, one of the reasons I like that is because it’s going to it’s going to be very economical in the sense of movement at the hip. Right. So one of those movement qualities that I’m like hiding into this is like a general heuristic that we’re not going deep into is internal rotation of the hip. One of the things about the hip thrust that wouldn’t necessarily in my mind categorize it as the same level of a leg press of just you know, we’re not talking about hypertrophy of any specific muscle group. We’re just talking about bang for buck exercise selection that has, you know, a high threshold of stimulus, but also has a lot of desirable attributes as we move. Which would be what? Right. So internal rotation of the hip and position of the pelvis. How would would the leg press put? Oh, yeah. OK. You have to. So I see when we. So think of it this way. Like if if I throw a punch, I there’s a tremendous amount of rotation happening at my shoulder. Some people might look at this as just the expression of like flexion of my shoulder, but to the equal degree that I’m flexing my shoulder, I’m having the same amount of rotation occur. So when we look on to look at the research, right. And we want to talk about like, hey, let’s train for longevity. And let’s talk about, you know, training to stay pain free. The number one deficient range of motion associated with low back pain, which is the most common presentation of of any musculoskeletal disorder by the CDC for like ever, by the way, yeah, forever, forever. Maybe they should update it. I don’t know. Well, I mean, they wouldn’t have if they could update it. It would means that people were solving this problem, but they’re not efficiently solving the problem. The number one associated deficiency in range of motion that strongly correlated with low back pain is the lack of internal rotation at the hip. It’s multifactorial. A lot of times your pelvis is in a good position to internally rotate the hip. And wait, wait, before you stop, how does someone so someone is thinking about their hips right there, but they put their hands on their hips and you’re talking about that. It’s a lack of internal rotation of the femur. Yeah. Yeah. And is that on movement or is that, for example, I’m just sitting here. Right. Do I have lack of internal rotation? So we could test it passively. We could test it active assisted. We could do it active and active resistant. Right. If you don’t have access to it sitting here passively, they go over to like, come across, like, crank it. Okay. Definitely not going to have it. But it’s like if we can start to find exercises that control for this without your say so. And this is where, like, you know, we could sit at the beginning of a workout and be like, hey, hip internal rotation is really important. Right. These are X number of drills to do to improve hip. What are they? The thing we did today, the standing single leg. I love that. I love it because it’s it’s such it’s an expression of that movement quality. It trains the muscles to be sensory organs. It it makes you aware of the adjacent position of the pelvis and the femur. Then one of the major intersections of force transfer in the body. Right. And like press for everybody, then. Oh, everybody. Okay. I’m sorry. But listen, I want to make sure because we only have 20 more minutes. But not I want to hit everything. Great. I’m here for it. So much to hit. Yeah.

 The next exercise I want to finish the programming piece because I really want to get to the idea of strength and hypertrophy. Got it. And where is this continuum?

 Because I have personal questions. Right. And Matt, you’ve got tons of questions.

 What are we doing to finish out?

 You know, Sarah in Arkansas, who’s never lifted away. OK, so we’ll do a warm up. We’ll integrate it with sort of our higher skill movement. So maybe our warm up for her is some sort of like if there is pain, if she likes something, foam rolling, stretching, whatever. Cool. Yeah. Let’s go right into like. And this is important when we do warm ups and when we trial and error this and have fun, be creative with it. Like training to me is like such a creative expression that people just they they they they doled out to someone to just tell them what to do. It’s like if you really enjoy trying and look and optimize for enjoyment. So if you enjoy following a program, do that. But so we’re going to have her if she likes say she likes foam rolling the I.T.B. It’s like, OK, great. Let’s get that leg moving while you do it. Let’s then stand up. Let’s go through some walking lunges in succession. It’s really focused on some of the things we talked about. I then want you to go into like your most unstable movement. So I want you to practice the skill of squatting. Right. So, you know, for her, it’ll be heels elevated, counterbalance. And if you’re not on like the favorable side of gravity, maybe we do it supported with like T.R.X. strapped or something like that. So we elevate the heels. We push that center of mass back. Then we can go into some sort of single joint exercise. Maybe we do like I prefer for most people, I think the seated hamstring curls are really great place to start. What would be another example? Would a leg curl be one? So the seated hamstring curl poses a unique position of the femur and tibia that’s like promote. It’s like this idea of spaghetti and the spaghetti sauce. Like I think it would be if you have the choice between the two, I think it’s a really good tool. One, it follows a lot of favorable hypertrophy principles. You’re training the more length and position of the hamstring. But it also could be a position where we promote more tibial internal rotation, which is often lacking and it leads to ankle mobility issues and knee issues when we’re deficient in it. So rather than focusing on some smaller muscles, I think that’s a really economical way to keep your toes up to the ceiling, kick yourself in the butt. We’re off to the races from there. We’re going to hop on the leg press. I want to get to a point where we have at least one set where you feel like you couldn’t have possibly done another rep. Right. And that I want like the hamstring curl. Same thing. I want you to train to failure on that. I want you to train to failure on the leg. How heavy should they be loading? That’s that’s a million dollar question. Right. And that’s where the tracking and that’s where that’s where that comes in. Right. Like how do you how do you create a macro nutrient calculator for everyone that tells them what their base will matter? The metabolic rate and the total energy expenditure as you try it. Does the scale move? Does it not? OK, we’re going to adjust accordingly. So then, you know, then that’s a pretty solid base. You could look at some lower extremity stuff. I think direct calf training is a great way to get some movement through the foot and ankle. I like doing that. How? Oh, calf training. Is that important? I think calf training. So a lot of people complain of ankle mobility issues. Now an axiom that I like to follow. Another one is where there’s a lot of bones. There should be a lot of movement. I don’t do any calf. Matt, do you do calf training? I did. Yeah. Why? No one ever thinks of that. Again, it’s a movement quality thing. Right. I’m trying. I’m going to talk about calf raises. That’s it. Right. So seated calf raises to me. Like, OK, when we talk about sensory input, our feet have a ton of sensory input. And a lot of times they’re nerfed by the shoes that we wear. We sort of walk around in this very padded environment. We’re sort of like, you know, we’re muting the stimulus into our feet. And, you know, there’s a lot of potential motion through the foot that we lack. So, you know, most people focus their energy on ankle mobility. I don’t have enough ankle mobility to squat. Well, it’s like, OK, the ankle is on any of those things. I probably should. The ankle is only one joint that’s caused by the talus and the tibia primarily. It’s two bones. There’s not there’s way more. I would rather you focus on foot mobility. So kick your shoes off at the end of the leg press and go to a calf raise machine. If the gym allows you to just try to do your calf raises barefoot. I love that. I’m going to start doing that. It’s just, you know, we need to optimize for movement quality first. So by doing that, it’s going to help me. You’re going to mobilize the foot. You’re going to decrease stress on the tibia. When we’re dealing with runners that talk about shin splints, you talked about bunions. A lot of that comes from an inability to move through the through the feet. Right. I thought it was just genetic. No, some part. No, it’s a lack of internal rotation. We see. So we’ll see bunions with our really fast runners, like our four, three, four, two, mid high or mid to high four to 40 guys, 100 meters sprinters, sub 10 guys. They have six toes. That bunny is sticking out because they’re they’re producing, absorbing and transferring force all on that big toe. That’s why the bone changes. Bone lays down just like muscle does. So lower body, we wrapped it. OK. And how many days a week? So I would if you can dose that and you might pull one of like the hamstring curl out. If you can dose that one to two times a week. Love it. While again. I love it. There’s a lot we understand that there’s lots of it’s very complicated. But again, this is a really good way for thinking about it that I I personally haven’t thought about. I don’t think other people think about it in this way because

 you are not looking at muscle as a strength organ. You are looking at it as a sensory organ and then everything else fits around that model. And I think when in the here’s the real here’s the linchpin.

 When you focus on or when you pay attention to not even focus, when you just pay attention to it, you’re going to see a an objective increase in strength from a subjective interpretation of the awareness of that muscle. Right. So in a roundabout circuitous way, I am focusing on motor output. And a good proxy is, look, when you go through these drills like we went through today, you’re going to see a rapid spike in your your strength because you’re just in better positions, positions dictate function. I actually felt better. And we I mean, I actually felt better. Yes, I never leave the gym. I usually am kind of in pain. So but there’s a good way to book in this once that stops, once your exercise is like, hey, I’m getting really good at this single leg stuff. It’s like, OK, we can we can scale the dose back and then maybe we put in another machine. Maybe we put in a squat. Right. So like that performance is a really good indicator. That’s our canary down the coal mine. Like when you start locking in those lunges and locking in those single legs, then I’m like, hey, we’re going to introduce actions. We’re some hinging now. Like hinging my hamstring. Yeah, no, you’re right. You have the subjective marker that tells me that we can start to introduce more load to that hit because I know you’re not going to move vigilantly. I know you’re going to move with intent and load the tissues that I want you to load now.

 And the last and you know, everything, well, how do we know if you’re loading vigilantly? I would say my answer would be if you are loading the wrong tissue that you shouldn’t be. Would that be right? I mean, you’re not you’re loading vigilantly when you’re compensating or you’re not contracting the muscle you’re supposed to be. If you’re not autonomous in the movement. OK, great. Right. Like if it doesn’t feel good and that’s where like the sensory component comes in. It’s muscle that’s telling us that we feel good. It’s where we’re landing that center of mass. Right. We’re stable throughout it. If you don’t have that feeling, you’re auto correcting the entire time.

 It’s fascinating. Are you writing a book on this? Yeah. A secret. Yes. I mean, I’ve written three already. I know. But you’re writing another one. Good. Good.

 Upper body. Yeah. Next thing. Great. And is that all we did that day or we’re doing other things that day? No. I mean, what we’re going to do is we can start to mix and match. OK, like a bit of a capsule wardrobe of lifting upper body. Great. OK. Single arm rowing movements. Really economical exercise. So single arm dumbbell row to single arm machine. This is going to do. I do machine or dumbbell. I don’t know. Do you have a history of low back pain? If yes, then maybe go a machine. You’re going to get that rotate rotation or anti rotation component. You need the shoulder blades moving. You need a lot of rotation through the through the. So you said one arm row machine or dumbbell.

 But you want a rotation when you’re doing it. I want the shoulder blade to move with the rib cage to stay fixed. OK. Right. And I want. So you’re going to get a ton of oblique. You’re going to get a ton of like transverse playing core. You’re going to. So, you know, someone who might. Why don’t you pick that? Because of the economy of it. How many different things are at play in this movement? So I don’t need to worry if I can get someone to pick up, you know, half their body weight in one hand. I don’t need them to do a bird dog anymore because it’s like, well, now we’ve we’ve equated for this movement quality of trunk rotation. Right. And so what would otherwise be a very remedial exercise? And we’ve now built the strength far past this threshold of a quadruped bird dog exercise. Right. So it’s again, the vegetables and the spaghetti sauce. I’m not optimizing for muscle growth early days. So someone wouldn’t have to do a bird dog if they can do a one arm row.

 You don’t really. Yeah. I mean, that’s that’s that’s kind of the idea. Now, not to say that these are are written off entirely. No, no, because you’re talking about efficiency. Right. Exactly. So I love the one arm row for that reason is that it just creates this massive moment of rotation at the trunk that is hard to replicate while also training the extended your shoulder rotation movement of the scapula. So it’s a really to me, a really efficient exercise. Then we’re going to try and get it to the overhead. Now, that’s going to look a lot different to a lot of different people. Right. So the overhead could be pull ups. I think if I’m to like and I’ll try to do this efficiently.

 If you have a machine and I think that the best machine, in my opinion, mine to build a gym, I’m going to have I’m going to have as many of these as I have squat racks, the assisted dip and pull up machine, to me, is one of the single best pieces of equipment ever made. Right. So I haven’t used that in years. It is. It’s just it’s just an express. It’s a full expression of the shoulder that’s going to that’s going to really pick apart and get those what I would call like the inner valence mechanics of the shoulder working. Right. So shoulder is it has like a nucleus. If we think about it and kind of like a model like, you know, the nucleus would be the diaphragm. So the upper extremity really starts at the diaphragm. And then the diaphragm interacts with the rib cage with the direct attachment to it. And then the rib cage interacts with the shoulder blade. And then the shoulder blade interacts with the humerus and the arm. Right. So we have like the nucleus. We’re driving like a boar diagram for the chemistry friends out there. That’s the diaphragm. Then we have a rib cage, then a scapula and then a humerus. Pull ups and dips. They take this outer valence and they solve the diaphragm. They can solve all the way into the diaphragm. Right. So rather than focusing on, you know, breathing drills, which again, highly contextualize, I can get my shoulder into maximum internal rotation and hyper extension and maximum flexion and rotation. And then I need my scapula to accommodate and I need my rib cage to accommodate to do that. And I can titrate my own body weight to the point in which I can express these movement qualities without vigilance. Right. And these are really on off switches for people. So like you asked a really good question. How do we know if we’re moving vigilantly with the squats? That’s kind of tough. Do you feel stable or not? Can you do a pull up? Can you do a dip? These are very like off on like one zero type scenario. And people also say that oftentimes they will have rotator cuff problems or shoulder injuries, right? Especially someone hits 40.

 You know, Sarah hits 40 and she’s in, I don’t know, she lives in Arkansas and all of a sudden her shoulder hurts. Right. Can she still do that? If you tie, so the pain and injury one is tough because we first need to understand there’s a difference between pain and injury. Pain science is unbelievably complicated. Injury particularly is referencing tissue damage. If there’s tissue damage, there’s going to be a sliding scale of pain. Our goal, if there’s damage tissue damage structure, is to out function that structure. How can we use movement and our ability to compensate to bypass loading that tissue more? A lot of times a rotator cuff is a scapegoat because we’re lacking movement somewhere else. Right. And then one of the one of the things that injury prevention really one of the is that what pre script stands for?

 Yeah, pre script is an evolution. It’s like an ordinance or a law or something that comes before. So it’s like, well, how do we prepare movement quality so that we can continually progress? Well, I don’t want to get sidetracked because we only have 10 minutes. I wish we had longer. The overhead press or the overhead movement. So that’s not a press because it’s a pull. Right. Presses would probably be our furthest progress. Probably at mass scale. Aside from doing them potentially on a machine, I wouldn’t say most people go down that avenue right away. If the dip is interesting and we cover that on YouTube because I would have again, I haven’t done dips in years. I’m going to start.

 What else are we doing for upper body? So we’ve done a row, a pull up.

 A dip. What else? I would get and a dip because it’s interesting. You are talking about training muscles, but you’re also talking about mobility and stability because the movements that you’re choosing seem to cause the scapulae to glide. They’re really engaging. In multiple planes. Yeah. I mean, the goal is to try and because biomechanics, we look so uniformly and just siloed into muscle mechanics. But there’s what’s called for simple terms, joint mechanics.

 Structure doesn’t dictate function, but it does indicate function. Structure doesn’t dictate function. But it does indicate function. My shoulder can only move a certain way because of the sliding surfaces that it’s comprised of. Right. So yeah, we’re trying to get you to end range. And that’s where a lot of the economy of these movements come from is because at the end range, I’m going to pull up. I’m going to have to use like a really under trained muscle of my rotator cuff to do an assisted pull up with one of those machines that help when I’m doing a dip. I actually one of the reasons I love dips is because one of the things it does is actually trains a unique property of the lat, right? Because it’s only dipped lats. Like, yeah, a lot of people when they get to the bottom, like, oh, no, like it’s bad for your anterior shoulders. Like, no, it’s actually really good for your lat, which is going to help protect that anterior shoulder. We’re going to be training it. So normally we do pushups before this, as you know, but we’re going to be, we’re going to start training that. Seriously. Amazing. Yeah. And again, it’s all about economy. It’s all about movement quality. It’s about, it’s about taxonomizing movement past just muscle group and modality. What do we have next? So upper body rib cage, rib cage. Now this comes by way of core. We talked about core a little bit in movement preparation. Get your spine and your trunk moving. Right. And then think of three plans. So, you know, the student McGill has this, the big three exercise, the bird dog, the curl up in the side plank. What do you see that for what it is mechanistically it’s moving the rib cage or in this case, not moving the rib cage through flexion and extension front to back. And then, uh, the lateral flexion or side to side or the transverse plane rotation. But it’s that model is all about not moving it. When we look at the rib cage and we look at the spine, we see a lot of joints. What’s the axiom? A lot of joints or a lot of bones, a lot of movement, right? So picking an exercise and this is like, this is where I think people should really embrace the creativity of exercise programming. It’s a ton of fun. Like it’s one of the single most enjoyable parts of my job. And it’s like, okay, I create an index now. So we have bird dog curl up side plank. This is an exercise. Do this at home. And then when you’re going through social media or you’re digesting content about fitness and you see core exercises, be like, what is this most like? Is it front to back side to side or is it rotational? And then start to put them all on a list. What’s a curl up? It’s just kind of like a sit up in a hook line. And then the third line, the third one was side plank side plank. Right. Cause each of those is one is front to back, the curl up, right? One is side to side, the side plank. Obviously that’s interesting. The way that they’re picking those with the spine. It’s a really good way of categorizing, but I, I challenge a lot of people to take a far more robust approach to their spine and far less of a fragile approach and be like, look, this thing is meant to move. So the drill we did today was one of my favorite. That was awesome. What is that called? It’s just like a side bend. It’s just a side bend on a bench. And all I’m thinking of is I’m not thinking necessarily about the obliques. My reference point isn’t muscle. It’s movement quality. It’s a movement quality of taking your ribs and taking your pose and just moving them apart, right? Getting those ribs to open up, right? Allowing for something that’s so autonomic. Our ribs move with our breath. Our breath is by definition autonomic. So when we looking to complete our upper body and really complete our session, looking at the rib cage and spine and being like, Hey, we have three planes of movement, let’s things that move front to back. And we think like rope crunch would be one rather than just doing a plank and resisting my spine for moving. I want my spine to move. I want to find these end ranges of extension. I want to find these end ranges of flexion. I want to find these end ranges of rotation. You have to train those, correct? Yeah. And again, it’s, it’s, it’s a movement quality thing. And notice I didn’t say rectus abdominis, obliques or anything. It’s all of them because these are the real bottlenecks to, you know, you’re, you know, we’re talking, trying to get to a conversation around strength and hypertrophy. You can’t have those conversations meaningfully unless you talk about movement quality first, because all of it’s going to be compensatory.

 We have five minutes strength and hypertrophy. Okay.

 I am a bit confused.

 Now the conversation is you can be stronger without a significant amount of hypertrophy, but then the question would be when you are training hypertrophy, you’re not necessarily getting significant strength. Is that accurate? Right. To a certain degree, like the, the two, the two circles in a Venn diagram, they’re not one, but isn’t that odd? No, because we just got to understand what’s adapting, right? One is a neurological adaptation. That’s highly predicated on skill, right? And one is metabolic adaptation. That’s, that’s highly predicated on tension. Right? Like, do you know Jeremy Lenneke? No, actually, we, you just actually answered the question that we probably spent three hours talking about. Oh, that’s rare for me to sum something really quick. We were talking about, and he is a world leading expert in blood flow restriction. Interesting. He was in Arkansas and we were, I’ll send you a couple of his papers. He’s an amazing, lovely person. He, we were talking about this idea of strength and people will say, okay, well, we know how we get stronger. We don’t necessarily know why we get hypertrophy. And I said, well, we’re not going to get hypertrophy. And I said, you know, probably for some kind of metabolic adaptation. And it’s like, yeah, but we don’t know. And you just said it beautifully. That strength is this neurological response and hypertrophy is metabolic. Yeah. We see this, like we’re seeing in the Olympics right now, right? Like, you know, there’s weight classes and sports that guys are, guys and girls are lifting weights far beyond my capacity. But why? How do people get stronger? How do they get stronger without getting bigger? Because we don’t need increased cross-sectional area to a certain point.

 Talk to me. I mean, that’s, that’s simple. How, well, let’s first, how are we measuring strength? Let’s start there because you know, there’s, there’s a lot of different, um, there’s a lot of different outlets that we’re looking at because, you know, are we measuring strength? Let’s let’s pick sports. Are we measuring it by like a powerlifting, like squat bench and deadlift? Are we measuring it? Um, is it more velocity base? Is it something like shot put? Like when you say building strength, like what are you, what are you? Lifting something heavy. Powerlifting something. Okay. Powerlifting. It’s like, yeah, those adaptations are going to be predominantly efficiently based efficiency based. So interesting. Right. And there, this neural neuromuscular connection, right? And is it neurologic? Is it, and also is the, the muscle, the fiber change? I mean, the fiber types would change, but we really look at fiber types. Typically from type one and you know, the variations of type two and maybe mixed fire fiber types, but it’s probably not a strength fiber type. Is there? No, I mean, it’s really going to be, when we’re looking at people deadlifting and squatting, heavy weight, what you’re really seeing is an efficiency, an efficiency to move through the pattern, like a, an unencumbered, uncompensated movement quality, primarily that then a lot of the adaptation is just going to be, you know, residual tissue building. Um, so like what are the bottlenecks? That’s maybe a good place to start. Like you’re going to be using like, uh, it’s, it’s a tough conversation to have without kind of getting too technical. I mean, it’s a, it’s, it’s a very, yes, it’s a tough conversation. But I just think primarily if we look through the lens of one is more neurologic and one efficiency and skill-based. Yes, you, I thought that that was genius. I got one. I answered one question succinctly in two hours. Uh, Jordan Chalo, I have so much respect for you. I hope that you will be a regular guest on the show. You’re brilliant. And I know that’s embarrassing for you to, um, uh, being complimented, but you’re very, very articulate and intelligent. And I think that your way of thinking about things, it’s very innovative and it’s not the same kind of dog chasing their tail. It’s how can we think about movement patterns? How can we think about the sensory input? How do we think about strength, stability, mobility, and you’ll be training up and, uh, certifying other trainers, which you have and do. Isn’t that right? Yeah. I mean, my goal is to, to, to just change the paradigm and it, cause it is all the same, like coming from like a more clinical sports med background, but also a strength and conditioning background, we’re also competitive strength athlete background, it’s, it’s all the same system. Right. And I think it’s the scope of practice of someone who works in prescribing exercise isn’t realized yet, like the problems that you can solve without, without surgeries or without anti-inflammatories, without drugs. And it’s like, you know, there’s, there’s a, there’s a lot of depth to how we’re looking at this and it’s a lot of, and I feel like this is like a good disclaimer to end on, like if I look, like if that book is on, you know, in your neighbor’s front lawn and I look at it and be like, Oh, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a brown rectangle, I’m right, but I’m not. But at the, my, the level of depth that I’m looking at it, I am, but as I get closer, I go, Oh, it’s a book. But then I get closer to again, it’s like, well, there’s actually words on the page. So if I looked at that and said, I don’t know, say, say you wrote like Jordan on the page or something like that. And I said, Hey, that’s Jordan. Or that says Jordan. I was like, no, it doesn’t. I don’t know. I’m just at the wrong depth. Right. So like part of what we’re trying to do is, is to allow people to create a high resolution image of the body, a big picture, right? What’s wrong with what’s hard about making big pictures, high resolution. It requires a lot of pixels. And then when you know how to zoom in and zoom out and you understand these things that there is no limit to the problems you can solve with movement, right? And it’s, it is complex. And if you’re listening to this and like, honestly, if you’re reaching that email me, Jordan, not the muscle doctor, I will literally write you a program because it’s worth it to me to apply these principles at scale. And it’s something that I think people, because it’s so mass produced because exercise programming is so just like, you know, eight weeks, this and the challenge or whatever. And those are great. Again, let’s optimize for enjoyment. Number one, like let’s not control the human being out of what we’re doing. And it is something that like, I find a ton of enjoyment in and the people, the athletes I work with find a ton of enjoyment in, and the non-athletes I work with have learned to find and be inspired by to get life, breathe, breath, breathe into them through exercise.

 Like there’s, there’s literally the scope of practice of movement prescription is, it will change the scope of medicine forever. If we understand how to create this high resolution big picture, Jordan shallow, you are leading the charge. We will include where to find you all of the things. I am so grateful for you. Thank you so much.