Welcome to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, where cutting edge science meets innovation and practical application for everyone. Today, I sit down with Judd Leinhard. I have to tell you, Judd, who is a former army ranger and a expert in speed training and athleticism, he himself is a former lineman, that’s right, collegiate lineman and trains and has trained multiple athletes, including children. I have to say to date, this is one of my favorite podcasts. Here’s why. I think in this conversation in longevity and wellness and muscle, we talk all about strength, hypertrophy, force and power. 

I didn’t know that we were missing critical components to athleticism and longevity that can be taught in childhood, like tone of the nervous system, like mobility and stability and ways that we move our bodies through flow and things that we can do, for example, protocols to do if you are 

sitting all day. This episode was so eye-opening, I would just encourage you to listen to this whole thing through. Now, please join me in conversation with Judd Leinhard. (Upbeat Music) 

Judd Leinhard, welcome to the show. I’m so excited to have you on and I wanna tell you why. Number one, you live an athletic and an athlete’s lifestyle. And I don’t know exactly how I found you, but I’m always looking in so fascinated with this idea of how do we train to our ultimate capacity and how do we prevent injury? 

And then finally, which is probably why I’m so selfishly excited to have you on is I wanna talk about children and children training, which you do better than anybody. So welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, I’m so excited to be here. 

Now I’m gonna give you some statistics, which is not, these statistics are not gonna be shocking to anyone, primarily not you. 75% of children and adolescents don’t meet the baseline physical activity recommendations. And I was looking, I think it’s 60 minutes, five days a week, gross. An hour, basically. That’s crazy. Think about it, children and adolescents, this is the time where you are bonkers. You have so much energy. If you’re a parent, I’m a parent. I can’t keep up with these kids. It’s mind boggling. They don’t even meet 60 minutes, five days a week. Okay, I got more for you. 

The other thing is physical activity and there’s some data here. So this is Avery Fagenbaum, and he is obviously like the goat in this space when it comes to producing literature on youth

and adolescents and athletics. He says that physical activity declines starting at the age of do you know it? Well, you know it, because you saw the prep sheet. Six years old. That’s insane. 

I thought that was kind of a tie. I was like, there’s no way this can be right. I was actually shocked by that. Shocked. And you and I were chatting before the show started that children and adolescents are so different when it comes to testing. We have a ton of data in middle aged, later life adults. We have very little, if not, I’m not aware of any muscle biopsies with healthy youth. Are you? No. So we basically. 

You don’t know what’s going on in the inside of the muscle. We don’t know. And then before we kick this off, one of the most important aspects, and you know, if I were to think about who is a population I’m most concerned about, it’s our youth. 

You know, when people are in their 40s and 50s, I love you guys, but you know, get yourself together. And you have the opportunity to get yourself together. Yes. But if we do not do deep and meaningful interventions for our youth, they don’t have a chance. Yes, completely agree. 

You know, a lot of years spent working with kids and it’s, you know, an emotionally and physically formative time. It’s an obvious statement. And there’s little things that we can do that will make a huge impact. Why children? Why are you concerned and interested in training? And by the way, you know, if someone were to look at your Instagram, you work with athletes, you know, kind of like spans the gamut. But I do know that you are very interested in the youth and why. So it’s one of those things that I was very blessed to be put in a position that I didn’t originally want to be in. And I think it’s very common. But once I got in it, I understood how big of a blessing it was. So the owner of Acceleration, a speed training place, you know, offered me a job and it came down there. Where was that? It was in Austin, Texas. It was a long time ago, like 13 years ago. And, you know, got a chance to start when I, the population at the time was mostly middle school kids. And at the time I was very uncomfortable with that because I was used to, you know, I just got out of the Rangers and I was a college football player and personal trainer. And what positions you play in college? Middle linebacker. And so I just wasn’t comfortable, especially, you know, middle school age kids, wasn’t comfortable. And it was the biggest blessing that has ever happened to me because the bonds that you form with them, the important role that you can play in their life and the longitudinal time that I can stay with these kids, you know, a lot of these kids, you know, when I first got there, we would kind of limit it at age 11 to 13. And then we backed it off to age nine moving forward. So some of these kids I got to train from age nine and I still train them, they’re 25 years old now. And just to see them

develop and to see the development of, you know, child after child after child and all the struggles they go through and the specialness of that population, the things that they deal with emotionally, physically, biomechanically, how they don’t respond the same way as adults, how they need to be trained different than adults. I mean, it’s so fascinating. Again, 13 years ago, you fell into this position of speed training, right? So was, and I don’t even know what speed training is and why would someone speed train? You talk about hypertrophy, you talk about it, strength, okay, but speed training? So, you know, there’s a myth, you know, a lot of myths out there that you can’t train speed. People like to say that because they don’t want to train speed. And, you know, sprinting is, you know, biomechanics sequencing patterns. There’s an art and a skill to speed training and it can be trained and enhanced. And is that from say, so you mean from a sprinting perspective? So if someone wants to get faster, we’re not talking about quick feet moving in a lateral position, right? You’re talking about going from point A to point B. Yes, but all kinds of speed. You know, change of direction of speed, you know, acceleration, which is, acceleration is both speeding up and slowing down. It’s just a change in the rate of velocity. So acceleration, top end speed, everything that encompasses speed and athletic performance, but we are known for linear speed and enhancing that. And obviously there’s limits. You can’t train and change the average person into, you know, Tyra Kill or one of these guys, but you can definitely, everyone can get faster. And usually when they come in, you know, we do, you know, high speed filming analysis and we hear them come up to machines. So we kind of see what’s going on. And within the first couple of sessions, we can find a couple of things that are easy fixes that will have an immediate impact on how fast they are. Hmm. Yeah. You know, you said some really interesting that we can’t train children the way that we train adults. Tell me what that means and what age do you think is too young for kids to start training? Well, there’s no age that’s too young. It depends on what type of training you’re talking about, how intense and the nature of the training, because children are learning from a very early age, they’re sponges. So in some regards, they pick up and they learn way better than adults, just like they do with language, right? So sprinting and athleticism is a language. 

And, you know, on the foot side of this, not to digress too far, but you know, I got so used to training kids for speed. When the adults started coming to me for speed, I had to really understand how hard it was to change what had been wired into them for so long. Whereas kids, their neuroplasticity is, you know, there’s so much more agile mentally that they can really learn a lot faster. But the thing is with kids is they have a naturally shorter attention span and you have to make it a game for them and you have to keep the instructional blocks much shorter. So there’s an art to it. And when the instructional blocks– For a long, like 30 minutes? No, I mean, I’m talking, well, it’s an hour session, but within that hour session, we’ll have, you know, four to five, three to five minute blocks of instruction, broken up by one to two minutes of play, but then you have to design the play in a way that is still beneficial that will still teach them what I’m trying to teach them, but it’s kind of disguise display.

So it really is an art to effectively train children. What was, you know, when you think about training children, what are some of the most important things like as parents listening that our children should be doing? Because again, I would guess that more myths exist with childhood training, and maybe we should even kind of highlight just a handful of those first. And before we move into, you’ve been working with children for over 13 years now. 

So what are some of the biggest myths? 

So adults are focused on losing weight. So a lot of times they superimpose the diet that they’re trying to do onto their child, and they have different nutritional needs. You know, like every child should control their sugar intake, but they’re more focused on, so if you have an overweight child, they try to put that child on a calorie restriction and make food a punishment, just like they unsuccessfully do with themselves. 

They’re afraid of too much protein intake, even for children, because the myths have been put out there that’s hard on the organs and things like that. That’s a whole other topic that you know more about that than I do. So nutritional myths are the first hurdle. You know, they think that certain supplements like creatine are bad for their children and things like that. 

And then the next one is they don’t keep exercise fun for them, and they put too much pressure on performance outcome rather than consistent practice and preparation. 

You know, there’s a lot of it’s psychology, so you have to, every criticism you have to give a child as far as improvements go, I call it sandwiching, you have to start and end with a positive. So you have to build them up consistently and end every session with a positive outcome mentally to keep them motivated to coming back. So it’s just a different approach with children. And then, you know, the biggest one that we’re gonna talk about is the myth that children shouldn’t weight train, which is absolutely insane to me. And the fact that it still persists like it does in this day and age is criminal. I know, and you know, especially when we think about the barriers to entry, so we know that most children are sedentary, and if we are not in these moments of growth, so right now there’s a handful of critical moments where, you know, their bone is building, their musculature is developing. Hyperplasia at that age can happen. Yeah. So, yeah. You mentioned it, let’s hear about it. You know, hypertrophy versus hyperplasia, cells get bigger versus cells multiply. So hyperplasia can happen both with fat cells and muscle cells,

other cells as well. But children, both good and bad, during certain ages, it’s known that they can experience hyperplasia. And adults too, when it reaches a certain level maybe in a certain circumstance, it’s much more rare. So like if your child is predisposed to things that, like overeating and being sedentary, their fat cells can actually multiply. But this converse is true, like weight training at that age could result in more muscle cells and denser muscle tissues. Yeah. Yeah, so you get an extraordinarily crucial age to expose children to resistance training for a number of reasons. And, you know, I’ll just say that my children, we were talking, are three and five. And you better believe they have their own pink and green kettlebell. Yeah. And you won’t know it’s so crazy. I have 35 pound kettlebell and I think I have a 35, 

what Matt, like 45? And then like a 60 I think, but yeah. You better believe that my five year old has no problem. She’s my five year old weighs 42 pounds. She can easily lift her body weight. 

No problem. Kids tend to be extremely strong in relation to their body weight. Like a lot of kids can climb a rope with no feet, no problem. Very few adults can do that. 

And here’s another thing, and this is very controversial on my part, but kids nervous systems are designed to protect them. Very rarely will a kid hurt him or herself lifting weights, especially if it’s a weight that they’re picking up off the ground. A kid will pick something up with what we consider atrocious techniques, especially with hinging patterns because they bend over and round their back, something that would definitely hurt an adult. And I’m not recommending your trainers encourage this, but I’ve rarely seen a young child hurt themselves picking up a weight. 

It’s like a protection mechanism within them. And we’re very worried about the, it doesn’t, you don’t need to be a doctor to understand this that the whole stunt your growth and growth plates thing is a traumatic acute injury. It is not stress on the bone over time. And if we’re talking about 

peak impact force, the running and jumping and landing and rolling they do have much higher peak impact forces than lifting weights. So the peak impact force risk and the growth plate risk is complete nonsense. And I cannot believe that hasn’t been dispelled by now. It has in the scientific community. It has, but again, it takes over a decade for anything to get to the boat, which is exactly why I had you on here. 

So thank you. There’s a really great paper and it’s called, is muscular fitness associated with future health benefits in children and adolescents? And this was a systematic review and a meta

analysis of longitudinal studies. Again, children are not biopsied. And here’s what they found. If you are a parent, listen up because it’s much easier to settle in on good habits than it is to break habits in your 40s and 50s and beyond. 

A high level of physical fitness in childhood and adolescence is associated with lower body mass index. Well, we don’t really care about that, but you know where this is going. Lower skin fold thickness, they’re leaner, lower insulin resistance, lower triglycerides, lower cardiovascular disease risk score and higher bone mineral density. And that’s just a handful of the things that they looked at. 

So if you were to pick one activity, you know, you were to think about, okay, so the parents are thinking, how can I encourage my child? So if we were to think about, I’ll just selfishly think about my five-year-old. This girl is so naturally athletic. We have her in jujitsu, she’s in swimming, she practices on her brother who is three, it’s a terrible thing. She’s doing kettlebells with us and weightlifting just because she’s seeing it. Would that be a time to, you know, I had Jordan Shallow on the podcast and he talked about how when we see athletes that are great nowadays, that they have begun their athletic training, I don’t know, five years old. Yes. So if I want my child and I want what she wants to be an extraordinary athlete, let’s just say, right? I’m just making this up. 

What should I do for her? 

So this is a great question. 

And there’s a fine line between starting the athletic development young and specializing too young to create burnout. And the Soviets did a lot of things wrong. One of the things they did better than us was the GPP focus for a long time, so general physical preparedness. Even athletes, they wanted to become elite athletes later. They didn’t start out with too much of the training in one specific area too soon, so more general in nature. And then even when they became elite athletes, there were breaks in the year where they would back off and it’d be a more general physical preparedness. So even if your child is a tennis player, I understand the urge is to have them on the tennis court for eight hours a day. Maybe, well, not maybe, definitely it’s better to have them on the tennis court for one hour a day and another hour in the weight room and another hour doing some gymnastics, basic gymnastics and body weight training and

things that are fun to keep them varied and interest and healthy. That’s just the psychological aspect is very important. 

Parents tend to push the kids too hard, too soon in a way that doesn’t keep it fun for them. And then that’s one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is they don’t push them at all. They don’t push them to try new things. They don’t push them to encourage them in a positive way to push past that discomfort barrier so they get used to understanding what it really takes to excel at something. Do you think that that’s trained? Do you think some children are more psychologically minded to be physical in nature? Because again, you’ve seen many, many children. Absolutely, some kids just have a higher pain tolerance. 

It’s an attribute, right? Something they’re born with. It is. And so some of that basically is nature and it’s just a natural attribute. But a lot of the kids never even know and find out because the parents just don’t expose them to the different things. Do you think that that’s one reason why children are becoming more sedentary because maybe we’re just softer as a culture? Yeah, and they’re modeling the behavior after the parents. A sedentary parents can have a sedentary kid. And you don’t have to be the master coach. You just have to bring your kid along with you and let them see you model behavior. 

And if not, if you’re a parent that is sedentary, then you have to get them in something where people aren’t. If you’re laying around watching TV all day, they’re gonna do the exact same thing. They’re sponges. And we already know that nearly 75% of the pop, 50% of Americans don’t even exercise. 

We’re laughing, right? Because we keep a fit crew here and then 75% don’t even meet the recommendations. 

So we have to do something. If you were to pick, let’s say, 

when you think about some of the most important things, you said something very interesting, that the nervous system, does the nervous system develop before the muscular system or is it kind of in tandem? Do they know?

So in my experience as a trainer, I’m not a scientist. This is just what I’ve observed as a trainer and things like isometrics. We can look as the kid pulls on a non-moving object before a certain age. After a certain age, when they pull, the force output stays fairly consistent. Now I’ll have little peaks and valleys in it. But when a kid pulls on it under the age of, definitely under puberty, but in some kids reach this sooner, when they pull on something that doesn’t move, their nervous system will peak to a certain point and then plummet. And I swear it’s a self-protection mechanism. And I feel like their brain does not want their nervous system to fire too fast or too hard because it’s trying to protect these tissues that are very supple and nimble and mobile, but can’t maybe protect them as well as they could once puberty hits. So it’s a self-regulating factor, but if a child can learn to start to tap into their high threshold central nervous system ability, that impulse at a younger age, I have seen it have carry over. So when they hit puberty, they’re light years ahead of the other kid. So what would be an example of that? So things like depth jumps. So have a kid get on a platform, jump off and stick the landing. 

Things that would kill an adult. You know what I mean? We’re all fangringing right now. Like the neighbors would see me let Levi, my son jump off like a five foot ledge and like, And how old does Levi? He’s eight now, but he was four at the time. And sometimes he would eat it, but he never hurt himself. I’m like, he’s learning how to absorb force and produce force and he’s helping the central nervous system. I didn’t even bother explaining that to him, but I’m like, I just said he’ll be fine. And like kids that like, when you look at kids, they’ll jump out of trees from like 10 feet in the air and land and they won’t hurt themselves. I mean, every once in a while it happens, but if they can do that, they can pick a kettlebell off the ground. I would never have a 40 year old adult jump off an eight foot platform ever. Unless they were highly trained. But things like jumping down, rolling, falling properly, 

max effort lifts, not usually with like an amortization phase, like a back squat. Wait, what does that mean? Like when you go down the eccentric and you have to overcome the eccentric to produce the concentric. Like you have to come down and squat, stop it, go back up, but more like a deadlift. So like you picking something that doesn’t move and you just have to pick it up off the ground or like a push up, you’re starting on the ground and you put like a little plate on their back and you see if they can lift it because if they can’t lift it, they can’t lift it. 

And it’s max effort lifting. And a lot of kids in the country and stuff would do this while I was thinking they climb trees, if they can’t get it, they can’t get it. And nobody looks at that and thinks it’s dangerous. Right, what do they call that? They call that what, farm strong or something?

Yeah, I mean, seriously, like a kid would carry implements around all day that were very heavy or climb trees. And since it’s a tree, it doesn’t register that that’s dangerous. But if it’s a pull up bar, then all of a sudden it’s different people’s minds and this is dangerous. That child is weight 

training. It’s like a good child should be weight training and they can’t get it everywhere they go. Yeah. You know, like suitcase carries, carry your dog and put them in something like, you know, like wrestle a calf to the ground. An alligator, yeah. It’s all of those things. And that’s all high level CNS output, close to max effort that you cannot sustain. The thing that drives me crazy in physical education, I hate to call it that because it’s a joke, is they focus way too much on cardiovascular development at that age at the expense of neuromuscular development. And when you say cardiovascular development, do you mean that they are just putting them in a track and they’re jogging around? They’re literally trying to teach them how to maintain their weight through exercise. Wow. Through aerobic exercise. And like, I almost had a fit when I walked in one day and on the physical education, think about how complex physical education, that term physical education can be. And they’re literally having the kids run around the gym and get popsicle sticks to see how many popsicle sticks they can get an hour. Like an hour of just jogging. And most kids, they don’t need that much cardiovascular activity because they’re supposed to be getting that through play anyway. Do we know how much they quote need? I don’t know how much they need, but if a kid’s active most of the day, their heart rate should be fairly high, so that zone two cardio, they should be getting that throughout the day anyway. It’s more older adults that kind of need more of that for heart health. Kids like more in high intensity interval training, which not like the boring type that we do, but literally sprinting down a basketball court, stopping, taking a break for a few seconds and going the other way as part of their play. When you look at kids play tag or at the swimming pool, really what they’re doing, think about how cool it is. I’m sorry, I’m all over the place. Let’s say you’re going to the swimming pool. This is the best thing a kid can do, and it’s like the worst thing an adult can do. Because when kids go to a swimming pool, they have races under water, they build their CO2 tolerance by holding their breath, they compete and build confidence. Adults go to a swimming pool, they sit down, they drink, they get too much sun exposure, they gossip. Like it’s two completely different experiences and they’re both in the same environment. So things like chasing and playing tag and holding your breath and building confidence like that in all spectrums of development are crucially important. Thank you to Timeline Nutrition for sponsoring this episode of this show, Timeline that makes Mitopure, which is one of the most thoroughly researched products that I have come across in over a decade of peer reviewed published science. This is where it gets really interesting for those following a muscle centric lifestyle. When you increase the health of mitochondria, you improve muscle function and overall wellness. In adults, 40 plus Timeline, which makes your lithium A, has been shown to increase muscle strength and endurance without changing activity. Now, let’s say you’ve been doing resistance training your whole life or you’re just getting started today. Timeline Nutrition can help. It is a beautiful product line that includes Mitopure Berry, Ginger Powder, things that you can mix into your daily smoothie. I personally use their soft gels. It’s great when I’m on the go. And Timeline is offering our community 10% off your first order of Mitopure. I could not recommend a product more. Again, try their starter pack, feel it for yourself. I have been using Element for years. I find it really hard to drink water and get the minerals that I need. And let me tell you, I feel it. Whether it’s cramping or fatigue, Element has been my solution. It is a zero sugar electrolyte drink mix

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I’ve devoted my life to studying the human body. And in all my years of studying and practicing medicine, the biggest learning that I’ve had is, you guessed it, one size fits all approach does not work, especially when it comes to the brain. Focus is something that I’ve always looked to optimize for myself and my patients. Now this brought me to one of the sponsors of the show, Thesis. Thesis is the world’s first customized nootropic company. Now nootropics are nutrients found in nature or the human body that enhance cognitive function. Things like focus and energy and mood. Thesis has formulas that I have never seen before. And for me personally, I love clarity and motivation. I cycle through them. I use them when writing my last book. I’m using them from writing this book. And they understand that everybody responds differently to nootropics due to natural variations in brain chemistry. The good news is they have leveraged years worth of data collection. Thesis has made the process of finding your perfect blend simple. All you have to do is go to their website, take a short quiz, they’ll send you a starter kit with four different blend recommendations to try over the course of a month. In addition to customization, Thesis also offers a free consultation with a wellness coach, which is amazing, to optimize your experience and dial in your favorite formulas. Thesis is offering 10% off your first box. To get your own customized thesis starter kit, go online to takethesis.com, slash Dr. Lyon, take the quiz and use the code Dr. Lyon at checkout. It’s really fascinating to think, and I can only just compare this to my daughter, my son is three, so he’s still really little. He’s just trying to keep up with his sister. But we have many parents that are listening to this or even parents, aunts, grandparents, and thinking about the children in their life. You see children do that naturally. 

My daughter, for example, we have a curved treadmill in the garage. She’s just on there, she’s just sprinting. Yes. And it makes me think, do they inherently know, obviously it’s not conscious, do they inherently know what they should be doing? Oh, I firmly believe so. 

The default for young kids is always to max effort everything. And we’re always trying to quote, pull them back and pace yourself. And my least favorite thing to hear is like, hey, stop running. No, please, never stop running. You know what I mean? I feel like, what’s the stat? Like over 18, 95% of people will never sprint again to their end of their life. And then like we use sprints as punishment. Like whatever you do, encourage your kid to sprint, even if they fall down and bust

their nose or knock out a tooth, God forbid, don’t tell them to stop sprinting. Like I got it, there’s levels to safety, but this constant slow down, stop running, don’t jump, don’t tumble, don’t let your kid out, just sit there like a bump on the log like we’re doing. We’re trying to wire our kids in to be sloths and that’s not what they wanna be naturally. Yeah, and also what you’re saying with this hyperplasia of musculature, I think that there’s this continuum, this spectrum. So we talk, everybody talks about lifespan. Okay, we already know what that is. And then you hear a conversation about health span, whoopee doo. And what I actually think is it’s a broader conversation. What it really comes down to is muscle span. Absolutely. The length of time we live with healthy skeletal muscle in which we can move weight, move our bodies against force and gravity in a meaningful way. 100%. 

And this is the thing with muscle. 

There’s a lot of things that go into lifespan, 

how socially active you are, your metabolic health, 

things like that. But muscle, when you think about it, your emotional health, it impacts all of those other things. So you know more about the metabolic benefits to having muscle than you can speak on that for days. 

And then the orthopedic piece. So if you don’t have muscle, you’re not as stable, you don’t have the proprioception, you will fall and break a hip and then you become sedentary. And then you’re socially isolated. And then your diet degrades and then you don’t get the sunlight. And it’s like a cascading effect and it can be rooted back mostly to muscle. Yes, and I bet you, I’m just throwing this out there, but it probably, I suspect we set up ourselves in childhood. Absolutely, 100%. Have you ever seen that? It’s funny because science takes so long to prove things that we just inherently know. You ever see somebody that has nice legs and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t really work on my legs.” Well, how do you, well, as a kid, I was a soccer player. Oh, I love to do this. And it’s like, it’s always a kid, I would do this. And it’s from a young age and you just see it and we know it and we’re just waiting for science to prove what we already know. Here’s something that I’ve seen in my, I agree with you a thousand percent. And here’s something that I see in clinic is that those patients that were very active in their youth that even for whatever reason,

do not have a favorable body composition now. They’ve lost muscle, they have gained body fat. I put those people on a good nutrition plan. We connect with a great trainer who’s focused on hypertrophy and strength. So yes, there’s this continuum. 

Make sure that their hormones are together and it is like a switch that flips. It’s, you know, the satellite cells and things you referenced, right? Those don’t go away. Those are still there. And then when you think about something that children, so we could say, we’ll safely say that at any 

age, children should be sprinting, should be lifting weights, should be doing body weight stuff. They should be doing tumbling, jumping, doing anything and everything that they can within safety, right? Absolutely. Fair to say. 

At five, it’s maybe a little bit more structured, like they can take a class. My daughter can do jiu-jitsu, she can sprint, she can lift things, probably doing natural speed training. Her nervous system is now encoding these behaviors. 

Do you find that there is a time that kids really, that there’s almost a differentiating time? Again, because you’ve seen children, is it 13? That it’s almost like a division, like at 13 when hormones are now increasing to testosterone, that is the time that we have to make sure that they take action. 

Yes, at that point, it’s almost too late. I mean– Tell me what you mean by that. This is important for people to reframe and think about it. So there’s a myth that kids, first of all, it’s getting dispelled directly, that kids can’t get stronger until they go through puberty because they don’t have testosterone, but there are so many things that have to do with muscle strength and bone density and athleticism that has nothing to do with your androgens. 

Yes.

Forever, they thought that a kid could not see progress. I have seen it firsthand that that’s just not true. I didn’t know that that was a thing, that children, that they don’t think children can get stronger or see progress. Oh, I mean, yeah, they just don’t think that it’s, they think it’s pointless, they think it’s dangerous to have kids lift weights on this pointless because they can’t gain muscle without testosterone. Well, women don’t have testosterone, but very little, and they can still gain muscle. Yeah. And it’s, a lot of it is independent of hormones, insulin sensitivity, insulin’s the most anabolic thing in your body, like keep your kid insulin sensitive. And just a reaction to strenuous activity, and it’s not just about muscle size. And then the strength is a hard thing to measure because the kids’ limbs are getting longer. So even if their muscles are producing more strength, they might not be able to move more weight because it’s just on a longer limb for right now. Like adults don’t grow limb length. So we can predictably see if a muscle gets stronger by how much weight they can use. But if a kid’s muscle gets stronger, but that lever gets longer, they can’t move more weight, doesn’t mean the muscle’s not stronger. 

So sometimes a kid will get slower in adolescence because their limbs get longer, and it takes a while to catch back up to that. So they can’t turn their levers over as fast. So there’s just so many variables there, 

but it’s just, it’s extraordinarily important that kids are resistance training at a young age. Do you think that, is there an age where we have to begin to think about 

this many days a week? So for adults, for example, if you were to say a 30 to 40 year old, okay, well, those are kind of different ages, right? Because 30, you’re still pretty robust, but let’s say for a 40 year old, 40, 50 year old, you would design a program that would be what? To start, three days a week, Ideally three days. hypertrophy, three to four days a week. But as little as one day a week does have benefit, but ideally three days a week, mental. 

But for a child who has not been through adolescence, and then we’ll get to adolescence or even in adolescence, 

is there, is it almost, they should be lifting weights every day? So here’s the, this is not what people think. It’s actually opposite, okay? The more advanced you are, the less frequency you need or can handle. Wait, say that again. The more advanced you are in training age, and the older you are, the less frequency of intense training you need or can handle. I totally agree with

that. So kids can literally max out if you were gonna have them do this on a squat every single day, and it would not, they would be able to recover from it. It would not affect their central nervous system because their central nervous system literally cannot produce that much of a charge yet. Whereas once you go through puberty, they’re more likely to get hurt, their central nervous system starts putting out a huge vault, right? Basically a huge charge, and they can actually start to hurt themselves, and they can actually start to over train. You literally almost cannot over train a child. I mean, that’s fascinating. When you think about the central nervous system, is there a way that we would have a measure by proxy? How would we be able to tell if the nervous system is being stressed? So it’s one of these things that’s very highly contentious right now because when they directly measure central nervous system recovery, it shows that the central nervous system recovers very quickly. But we know that not to be true based on what we see in our field. So they know it has something to do with like glutamate, and cortisol doesn’t go down, and you have so much dopamine and release that your serotonin then can’t get up, and adrenaline. So they don’t know if it’s the actual central, the neurons themselves, or the byproducts that have resulted that need time to clear. So I wanna caveat that first, because some people listen to this, but they may be study geeks are like, “Well, studies have shown this central nervous system recovers very quickly.” And I understand that. But we know as professionals in our field, that if you’re gonna max out on a sprint or a jump, and your athlete is over trained 

with the high intensity stuff, it’s gonna take seven to 14 days before they can peek again. Wow. Whereas muscle tissue, you can crush a muscle, four days later, that thing’s probably ready to go. And there are variables person to person, muscle group to muscle group. But to get back to your question, very simple ways to test it, the carbon dioxide tolerance is CO2 tolerance, very cheap, easy way. And just buy a grip strength tester, very simple. Also, more subtle ways, more qualitative ways like quality of sleep, are you waking up? Do you go to sleep really fast, but then you wake up in the middle of the night? That suggests your cortisol stays level throughout the night, and it keeps waking you up. Now, if you’re just tired and you crash and you don’t wanna get out of bed in the morning, that’s probably more peripheral. You’re just very tired. But if you fall asleep easily and you keep waking up, or you can’t feel like you relax, or you can’t get your heart rate down, or your brain fog, those are all signs of your central nervous system needs a break. And do you think that, and it would be very, and what I’m hearing you say is that it would be very difficult to get a five or six or seven year old to that point, right? Physically. Physically, right? No, because emotionally, if you’re emotionally pushing and abusing your child, they will become over trained in a hurry. But if they’re having a good time and they’re just doing it on their own, literally a kid can squat, you know, the Bulgarian system for adults where they squat in the max every day, like it’s a known thing they have to go through that’s called a dark period, where it’s a year and a half of over training your central nervous system, where you’re miserable to get to the other side. Can they be more effective at that? Yeah, so that’s why very few people do it. A year and a half? It’s not necessary, whereas kids can literally max out, a kid can go and sprint, like on the playground, they’ll have a period where they race each other. Yeah. And they will literally race full speed every single day for two months or until they move on to something else.

And the kid doesn’t come home and be like, “I can’t focus.” They just doesn’t happen. Where if as an adult did that, with a fourth or fifth day straight of doing one, even one max effort sprint, they would be completely fried neurologically. Their reflexes wouldn’t be as good, their grip strength would be down, their broad jump would be down, quantitative measures. And the first thing an athlete does is, after they’re prepped, I’ll have them do a grip strength test or a broad jump. And if it’s more than 10% off their norm, it’s like, “Well, you need to back off today. “I don’t care how you feel, “your performance is telling me you need to back off day.” And that, would that be for more of the, I mean, listen, we live in Texas and Texas takes their sports very seriously. I’m like, “What state am I in?” You’re laughing, you know, it’s true. Yeah, so she’s like, it’s so true. I mean, they’ve got the training programs for these six year olds or whatever to go into the, and I mean, it’s just crazy. 

Is there an age that, so is there an age that that kind of starts looking at CO2 tolerance? Would it be six too young? I mean, where do we think about? I wouldn’t worry about measuring the central nervous system until you get to puberty. To puberty. You know what I mean? So it seems that as, when puberty happens, everything changes. The thing that I would start at a younger age is, this is crazy that people think you can’t do this, is teaching your child to regulate their central nervous system. Teaching them breathing methods to bring themselves up the neural toning, breathing methods to bring their neural tone up and prepare them, breathing methods to bring their neural tone down and help them relax and recover, both in between workouts and in between sets. So there’s ways to breathe in between sets. I call it intro workout breathing to where you can really bring your nervous system tone down and help you recover and then extend the duration that you’re able to be intense during that workout. We can teach children this. I really feel like weightlifting belts should be everywhere. And hear me out here, because you can put them on very loosely to where it’s not tight. And you can teach your child to breathe, braced breathing to where they try to put pressure on that weight belt all around and teach them how to brace while breathing. Teach them how to like diaphragmatically breathe. And we can teach our children breathing. We can teach our children gait. We can teach our children to hold their tongue on the roof of their mouth and nasal breathe. We can teach them all these things that will extend to the time when they get to adolescence and the central nervous system becomes an issue. They’re already prepared to help themselves recover. My kids are real bummed you came on this podcast because guess what is going into the Amazon cart today? Give me your top three, because I’m gonna try this. I hope you’re around when the kids come home because we were doing it. Your top three drills. So if you were to pick three drills that the parents are listening here that have younger kids, would it be the belt? Would it be, tell me, take me through it. The belt’s a great way to do it. And we don’t care what age, right? My daughter’s getting a hot pink one with leopard. Yeah, so something that’s loose enough that you can put a finger or two in between so it’s not already tight. And it’s easier to just have them, tell them something internal cueing and external cueing for children external cueing, which I mean by that is don’t try to get your body to do something. Give them a task to accomplish that gets their body to do that thing. So if the belt is on, it’s like, hey, pretend like the belt is about to fall off your waist and while breathing produce pressure on all sides of that belt so they can breathe into the

back of their pelvic bone. I think Andy Galpin was, or I got this from, dude is a genius and you know. Don’t tell Andy that. Andy has been on this, he’s a very dear friend. Make sure you edit this part out. No, I’m kidding. But I mean, a lot of people, they can’t put pressure when they brace into the back of their thing. They have to rely on like hyper extension in their bones, where they like try to draw their abs in, but they don’t understand it’s a belt, right? And teaching our children brace breathing. So I’ll put a squat belt. People think I’m crazy, like why are you having this kid squat with a lifting belt? I’m like, it’s not so they can lift more weight. So they can feel and breathe. Yeah, so I’ll have them. It’s a cueing. Yeah, so it’s cueing. So without me having to talk their ear off, which I’m talking ear off right now. No, that’s why you’re here, brother. If you came here and just sat here and was quiet and I was doing the talking, man, I’m telling you, everyone would be turning this off. So I’ll have them put a weight belt on really loose and gobble a squat or whatever version of squat they wanna do and go down and hold it and I’ll tell them to breathe in the bottom position and try to keep pressure on the weight lifting belt. And then they learn to not have to hyper extend their back to stabilize their spine. You know, as much back injury happens through hyper extension as it does through flexion. Just teaching a kid to brace properly is enormously important. So number one, you have two more to go. I would say gait is very important. So walking patterns, teaching them how to walk properly, proper walking strategies from step to step. I don’t even know how to do that. Do you know how to do that, Matt? I always say pretend like you have laser beams on your toes and make sure that the laser beam is pointed on your big toe, pointing in the direction you wanna go. And when they land, they’re gonna go heel to the outside edge and then roll to the inside edge and just practice that gait. Do you have videos on this on your– I don’t. 

Get on that. And then without fail, if you look at somebody that doesn’t have a butt, look at their feet. Their feet are always turned out. Turn outwards. And then that has a cascading effect. Then their arches collapse, it produces valgus pressure on the inside of their knees, so they have knee problems. Then they have hip joint problems. They get tight hip flexors because certain muscles are having to stay contracted that shouldn’t have to to stabilize that inappropriate movement pattern, things like that. And the question everybody wants to know, and that’s only a number two, so teaching gait, can someone without a butt get a butt? No matter what? Absolutely. Doesn’t matter the age. Absolutely. I’m just asking for a friend. 

Gait patterns, and basically though, this is also what you would imagine anyone who has a body should be doing. But we can start it young so that they don’t have, because you look at the kids, they’re very well proportioned in general. They don’t seem– Yeah. You ever see kids squat down, it’s like perfect. Yeah. Yeah.

But they also don’t seem to have awkward movements. I never go, and not that I’m looking at kids’ butts, but I, you know, I mean, I see my kids’ butts all the time. They are very proportioned, and every, seems like every child is built that way, and we almost train out of it. We– D-train out of it. D-train out of it, we change our movements. 

So, it’s the symptom of our society through sitting, is it’s the four things that work together. So strong glutes and strong abs, they help pull the pelvis into a neutral position here. But then tight hip flexors, and an overdeveloped lower back, will pull the pelvis into anterior tilt. So when we sit down all day, and we don’t use our glutes, we get tight hip flexors, weak glutes, weak abs, and it’s just this perfect storm of an anterior tilt of pelvis, and it just cascades down everywhere else. 

So teaching a kid to maintain a neutral pelvis is very important. So teaching posture would be the third one. How to stand with proper posture, you know? But now you’re cheating, because we said nasal breathing. 

Oh, was it? Remember, we were talking about breathing. Oh, through just breathing? No, no, I didn’t know. I just wanted to know the top three drills that we were gonna do. Oh, for breathing. No, no, doesn’t have to be for breathing, but I don’t know. 

So we have the brace, the gait, and then the, what was the third one? Oh, posture, teaching proper posture. Okay, tell me, okay, and I could teach my five-year-old, or do they already naturally have perfect posture? 

They might vary a little bit from child to child, but a lot of it, and their confidence in social situations, if they wanna make them so small, or they feel like they have to lift their chest, 

will affect posture over time. And also the nature of our schooling, where they’re sitting down. Yeah, what do we do about that? Is there, you know? I can do about it.

Better get to work. Better schooling, just– But it’s not gonna happen. And I do worry about this with our kids, because they’re sitting for hours a day, and then they get their 30-minute break. Is there something that we could do to teach our little kids, hey, honey, when you have a bathroom 

break, I want you to do this? That’s a great question, so isometrics. So teach your kid to put their hands on their chair, and lift their butt off the chair and hold it, and that’ll loosen up the neck, you know what I mean? So they don’t get that forward head posture. So just hands on the bottom of the chair, and hold your butt out of the chair, and then try to hold your feet off the ground, you know what I mean? And it’s not enough movement to where the child will get in trouble in class. And then reciprocal inhibition, so if you isometric pressure in one direction, it’s gonna help relax that muscle. So sitting there and then putting pressure against their hands, and kind of lifting up against their hands like this, and that’ll work the abs and the hip flexors. And if you can track the hip flexors actively, they’re gonna wanna stay more relaxed. So it’s the same like when people get on a flight, and my athletes, I’m like, hey, while you’re on that flight, with your seatbelt on, I want you to do isometric hip thrust into that seatbelt. And that’s just gonna help relax those hip flexors. It’s like little tricks, and same with people that drive a long time. So, you know, chin tuck into your seat back. Everyone listening is like, “All right, it was my chin tucked. I know I’m doing it.” So isometrics are huge when you’re forced to be sitting for a while. So if you can’t move, contract, even if the joint isn’t moving. So you have to like dig your heels into the floor back towards your butt, even if they’re not moving. So you get an isometric hamstring contraction. 

So I love these top three drills. You’ve got the brace, the gait, and then isometric movements. I, you know, this is gonna be really fun to teach my, I mean, it’s gonna be really fun. Because again, I’m always looking for ways to 

set my kids up to be okay in this environment. And if this one thing that I want people to get from this podcast in particular, is that I’m not worried about the older adults. I’m not worried about midlife. You guys know what to do. Yeah. 

They know, you know. 

If you’re listening to this podcast, you know,

but our kids, we are going to indoctrinate them into a immobile, metabolically dysfunctional life. The other thing is the reasons we exercise. If you look up the definition for physical fitness, it’s gross. It’s muscle strength, muscle endurance, cardiovascular endurance, and flexibility. That is their definition of physical fitness. Physical fitness is so much more than that. They leave out power and mobility. Mobility is not flexibility. Being stable in different body positions. It’s not, mobility is not flexibility. Mobility is not flexibility. Tell me the difference. So mobility is to be being able to control your body and your limbs through different ranges of motion. So being able to be stable. Yoga is not flexibility. Yoga is mobility. You know, if somebody is relaxed and you’re pulling on, like, I don’t know how true this is, but I’ve heard doctors say, when a patient is passed out, no matter how tight their hamstrings are, you can take their leg in. Yes. And it’s so, so the mobility’s there, the flexibility’s there. It’s just the neural toning that their body is sending them because they know that they should not be in that range of motion because they’re not ready for it. So it’s a neural tone. So mobility is very important. I don’t care if you stretch, which mobility has a stretching aspect to it, but become very mobile. Learn how to be stable and support loads over all kinds of range of motion and reduce base of support and standing on one leg and unilateral. Reduce, Matt, ground contact. Reduce kind of contact time. You know Pat Davidson? Yeah. Pat was on, love Pat, and he talks all about ground, grounding. And when you reduce the base of support, I mean, you definitely are pushing someone to become more physically capable. 

So exercise like bench press, squats, and deadlift, people view those as the foundation and this is where I differ. It’s very controversial. Those are performance exercises. Those are measures of performance. The barbell, bench press, back squat, and deadlift are performance exercises. When a kid comes in, I might teach them to hinge or squat maybe. Usually I put them on one leg, I reduce their base of support, and I start to work on their proprioception. Wow. I will teach a single leg RDL before I’ll teach a double leg RDL. Because once they get that single leg down, the double leg is easy. 

And if a kid is, sometimes they come in and they have to do it for school, I’ll teach it the bilateral one first, but usually I teach reduce base support. I slow everything down. 

I don’t want to hold positions. You want stability before mobility. You don’t want to stack performance on top of dysfunction. Those are two tenets. Okay, so stability before mobility. And when I think about mobility, and then you’re gonna have to teach me about stability, when I think about mobility, I think, I’ll just make this up, it’s a goblet squat where you’re going, you’re descending and you’re very mobile, you can get to the bottom. And I think that that’s kind of mobility. Yes, and then flexibility be somebody’s laying in the back and you can just push their legs into that position. That’s flexibility.

And then where does, you said stability first. Now then where is stability and mobility kind of fallen? How are we training those aspects? Sure, so before you try to get an extreme amount of mobility, make sure they are first stable and in positions leading up to that and can hold it for a certain amount of time. And then have them hold stable positions and produce mobility off of that. Give me an example of that. So like a lunge position, and they hold the down lunge position and then they have to do an overhead press and like reach back behind their head from that stable position. Or they’re holding a lunge position or an RDL position and then they have to like open their chest up to the wall. So stability before mobility. Like if they can’t control the range of motion, they should not be doing the range of motion. And is this why we see adults get injured frequently? Yeah, so here’s the thing with adults, they know to warm up inherently, 

and they should know, I think they– They do? I know. 

So this is one of my core tenets is the warmup is lightweight, high reps, fast speed, right? All right, so this is the tenets. We’ve got lots of, by the way, Judd, this is amazing. We have lots of tenets here. I gotta make these protocols easy. What are we doing for warmup? And no, I didn’t realize that everybody had to warm up. So this is, children really don’t need to warm up. Yeah, I noticed. Maybe that’s why I’m wearing it all the time. I have them warmup just to practice their movement patterns but they go out and sprint off the couch and be totally fine. Why is that? Because they’re still in their natural state. They’re still in the state we should be in. You think that we could maintain that child life really? Kelly Starlett thinks so. Supple Upward, I mean, that’s kind of his tenet is, if you work on tissue quality and health and control your natural tone, then you should be able to jump off the couch and sprint down the street and not hurt yourself. 

I’m not there. 

Talk about this warmup. What do we have to do? So we all inherently know that force is what makes us and breaks us. What I mean by that is to generate muscle strength and size, we need to have some kind of force. But force is also the thing that hurts us. Now what goes into force?

Speed and acceleration or low in acceleration rather, mass times acceleration, right? So we know that when we warmup, we need to reduce the mass, which in our case is just the load. Like we don’t start squatting 500 pounds, right? But what they will do is they’ll take the barbell and they’ll squat to a full range of motion very fast for all the high reps with the barbell. So they’re forgetting part of that equation. Who is that? Adults. Listers, runners, you know, like they’ll, so they don’t control the acceleration piece of force. And the acceleration is the one that’s really the one that determines injury. So when they go through, they’ll do very fast light reps. It’s like, no, maybe a moderate load at a very slow speed because then you’re controlling the other half of that equation, which is acceleration. 

I see, it’s so fascinating. And this is the tenants of the warmup. Everybody should be warming up. And what I just want to reiterate here is that we are looking at low. So we were looking at for the first tenant of the warmup, for Judd’s tenants of the warmup. Slow. 

Slow and moderate weight. Slow, moderate weight and play with range of motion. And slow can be so slow that it ceases movement altogether and literally becomes an isometric hold. So people have joint pain. I say, go to where it hurts, that joint angle and hold it until it stops hurting, you know, and then increase it. And if it doesn’t stop hurting, you know not to progress past that joint angle. But so like, my knee hurts. So I’m like, okay, your knee hurts. Now start to lunge very slowly. Where does it start to hurt? And they’ll tell me, I’m like, we’ll hold that position for 30 seconds and tell me if it’s still hurting. Sometimes they say yes, and then I’ll have them back off. Sometimes they say no, and then I say, okay, now go one inch deeper. Now does it hurt? And they’ll say yes. I’m like, we’ll hold that. And if they do that for two minutes, their muscles will be fried, but they’ll get a full range of motion with no pain, just like that. Wow. And is that just, is that, you know, due to disinhibition or WMI? A little bit, like their fibers and their tendons probably aren’t fluid and healthy. So when they go to that, it takes a little bit of time to relax everything and not get those pain signals. But that is your brain also telling you you’re ready to go on a bigger range of motion or handle a bigger load. So slow, so it’s really slow controlled. Yeah, so like my math method thing is like, you know, slow, flow, go, grow, show. All right, tell me about that. Sounds like something else, but. It’s the same thing. That’s just the first part. And I don’t call warming up either. I call it movement prep, you know? And this was one of the reasons I was also very excited to have you on. You are the founder of something called the MAS method. That’s M-A-S-S. And again, this is a performance-based workout program dedicated to improving movement, athleticism, strength, and speed. 

Now, set the stage for our MAS method. So it’s just a way to simplify very technical sounding things that elite athletes have had access to for a long time. And the very good coaches know that isometrics and very slow movement is a great way to quickly prep an athlete and to

increase their proprioception and their body awareness, activate their central nervous system. So the slow is just, even if you can move through that range of motion, you’re gonna do it very slow and under control and you’re gonna practice the pattern very slowly. And then you’re gonna go onto the flow and it’s really just sequencing. So there’s human sequence patterns that are common across sports and activities from the ground up. So how your leg is internally rotating, how your hips are moving first, how your scapula starts from retracted to protracted, how your arm starts from externally rotated, internally rotating. So it’s just a flow from the ground up, the sequence of the movement. And is that the same for any movement? So for example, it has nothing to do with limb length or I don’t know, retroverted pelvis or any of those other things. The degree to which you do it might vary based on your natural anatomy, but the basic tenets hold fairly true across a surprising breadth of activities. Even sprinting and squatting, when you extend the hip, the femur should internally rotate as you extend your hip in a squat. A lot of people don’t know that, like very good squatters know that. So you’re gonna start as you’re gonna go down, you’re gonna externally rotate your femurs and external rotation. As you come up, you’re gonna experience internal rotation of the femur and that is not valgus claps, so it’s two different things. So sprinters too, when they strike the ground, their femur and their hip is gonna internally rotate as their foot pushes through the ground and they’re gonna toe off from an internally rotated position. So if you see people sprinting and when they toe off behind them, their toe was flailed out to the side, that is a huge biomechanical error that needs to be addressed immediately. So that’s one of the things we do, I’ll film an athlete run from behind them and if they toe off and their toe’s pointed out to the side, I know that’s one thing I need to address. 

But specifically across all throwing, hitting patterns, it’s a very similar, whether you’re hitting a golf ball, throwing a football, throwing a punch, it’s a very similar pattern across many different disciplines. And that is important to know for a tenant of a warmup, or it’s just important to know, it’s just the second kind of component to, as we’re thinking about structuring a movement method. Is that where kind of that comes in? In my opinion, it’s a great way to prep an athlete very quickly to exercise. So both mentally, neurologically, and physically is a flow pattern, a sequence pattern, ground-based sequence pattern. And can you give me an example, would that just be a sprint, or what would that be? It’d be, so you start out slow, slower, so from the slow you start with a slower flow. And then it’s more of a unilateral ground-based where you’re pulling on something and you’re rotating your limbs in and then you’re disassociating your lower and upper body. So your hips will move first and then you’ll kind of leave your torso and then you’ll bring everything together and as you do that, and they’re called my flows, I have like a flow series. Interesting, okay, you do have a flow series because we all want to know what this is. There’s an infinite amount, but I have 13 that are kind of standard to help people and they’re just included in every workout in my app. But I just standard flows for people, so they don’t have to guess. Kind of like a yoga-esque movement or lots of rotation. It’s more of a rotational, when you look at it, it’s gonna look like a rotational thing, but like, you know, I’ll see trainers. How do you feel is really good. And they have them doing this, and that is not a flow. That is not a natural thing. But when you look at somebody throw a baseball, their whole body doesn’t move

together, right? They’ll point their back leg, even a punch, they’ll point their back knee, drive off the inside edge of the plant leg, their hip bone will point to the target first, they’ll create tension and torque here, and then they’ll release that into the target and finish here with an internal rotation. And it’s common across so many different sports and activities. And a lot of people, they just don’t know how to do that anymore. They forgot from the time they were a child, and just wiring that back in, and it’s just a really fast way to prep the body. And it’s like great for the core and the abs and the hips. I love it, we’re gonna, Matt, we’re trying this. We are trying this tomorrow. What’s next? What is the next? So GO, which is just more like performance-based exercise. So it starts out, it’s almost always unilateral in one form or another. A lot of times it’s body weight, so like a single arm ring pushup, a single arm– Wait, I have to think about this. It’s very complicated. Because when I’m thinking about GO, I’m thinking about exactly what you said, squat, bench, deadlift. So to me, that’s the GRO, and what I mean by GRO is size and strength. Okay. Okay. So what you were talking about is, again, I think that there’s these tenets of stability. And so you were talking about exercise choice as we develop in a unilateral, because unilateral strength is probably, unilateral strength would ultimately equal bilateral strength, right? Yes, unilateral will increase bilateral. But most of the activities we do in day-to-day life are unilateral, in a version of unilateral, which is cross pattern, which is push and pull at the same time. Or this side is extending, and then this upper side is extending. So extended here, extended here, which would mean flexed here, flexed here. So it’s a cross pattern, either side to side, one side is pushing, one side is pulling, or up to down in a diagonal, which is that oblique sling you hear people talking about. All of that is cross pattern, which is a version of unilateral. So that is under the GO category. There are athletic movements that transfer, have a high transferability to day-to-day life. Like what? So things like push-up variations to start with. And I will flow through the GO as well. This is great. So variation meaning wide grip, or wide angle close. Moving, like, you know, single arm bench press with a dumbbell, single arm overhead snatch, 

single leg box jumps, hopping, bounding, things like that. That’s more to go. And you want people to learn or gain ability to do those things again. Yes, so people think that they can no longer do plyometrics, because they think of plyometrics as like box jumps. Yeah, it’s terrifying. But plyometrics can be like a band assisted hop, where you put a band that kind of helps you out and you just hop on the ground and that increases your bounce. 

And you can do that with single leg activities too, or just like skipping side to side. Anything where you’re bouncing is technically a plyometric. So plyometrics can be for anybody. You just scale it up or scale it down. And you think that that’s a necessary component? A crucial component. And it’s not included in physical fitness. It’s not, no. It’s not in my training program. Carlos. If you just do the things that you list, muscular endurance, muscle strength, cardiovascular flexibility, you’re a generally healthy adult. But then you’re not very nimble or agile. And then what happens is, since you’re not very nimble, one misstep, acute injury. And

then you’re laid up for six months and who knows what’s gonna happen over that six months. You know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean. 

The components that are missing are, because this is like a first language to you, you got this. But for the rest of us, I’m actually, this is very eye-opening for me personally, and I know for many of the listeners or viewers, is that we think about muscular health as muscular endurance, strength, 

but we’re not thinking about this idea of being nimble and agile. 

So sequencing, proper patterning and sequencing is crucially important. Having a bounce, which means your tendons can store and release energy. 

Power, being able to move with speed, run up a flight of stairs, jump up off a couch and grab something, everyday power in our lives. Catch something that falls down, the ability to absorb load. 

There’s so many things about athleticism that are just not metabolic conditioning. So that’s far beyond cardiovascular health. It includes that, but it’s also how strong your mitochondria, how bigger your mitochondria, like things like that. How fast can you process lactate, things like that. Like how can you use lactate? What’s your lactate threshold? What’s your VO2 max? That goes beyond cardiovascular health. Yes. And I think that way, and it was interesting to hear your reaction to this plyometric, to this bounce is crucial. It’s yeah, it’s the most neglected maybe. I mean, it’s again, I interview experts all the time and I had not thought about this plyometric and we used to do, so my dad in his mid 70s, he should be doing some kind of movement beyond his tai chi and lifting weights. We need to begin to think about this plyometric component, this go component. And do you think about this as injury prevention or do you think about this as how do we increase our muscle span? How are you thinking about? Injury prevention and also like health span. Okay. You know, because first of all, the most important thing is muscular strength and size, but people already do that to some extent. Yeah, and I agree with you. I think muscular strength and size. So I don’t wanna get the impression I think this is more important than strength training. Strength training is crucial. Right, I mean, you have to be doing that. It’s like brushing your teeth. Yes, exactly. The biggest neglected piece is the balance in plyometrics. Yes. Being able to absorb and produce force quickly.

And how often does someone need to change? So let’s say someone’s traveling and they can’t get to the gym, let’s just say. You can always get to the gym, but let’s say, I don’t know, the flight was delayed and you just can’t get there. These are things you could probably do in the airport and something that you could do every day, right? To be, no matter what. And if you do these things with this slow warmup, this flow, this go, are you able to maintain performance? And at some point do we become less needing to do this like warmup situation? 

Yes, potentially, but also the warmup, the stability practice and the flows have value as far as training value, not just preparatory. So practicing the sequencing and the pattern is gonna keep your core healthy and your hips healthy and mobile. So it’s more than just a movement preparation. The bouncing, things like that, very low volume, low frequency can have a huge impact. So if you, you know, it’s something like you get a ledge at six inches high and you just time yourself and see how fast you can jump up and down off that six inch ledge 20 times. And you do that three times a week. And it’s literally a minute and a half of training. It will drastically improve your foot health, your ankle health, your knee health, your hip health. Are we training barefoot? That would be ideal, but. I mean, okay. What are some other really overlooked kind of elements to adult training? 

Some of it’s the same is the breathing and being able to control our central nervous system and aid in our recovery. So bring down our cortisol levels. So we both know how powerful cortisol is and how it can be a good thing if it’s healthy. But if we can’t control our stress levels and our cortisol levels, it’s gonna hinder our sleep. It’s gonna help her know. So learning techniques that we can do, like meditation, it sounds fufu, it’s crucially important. I know, I am getting back into it. It’s tough for me. It’s probably tough for a lot of us. Learning to tone your nervous system, to activate your parasympathetic system is incredibly important for adults. And I know that doesn’t sound like training, but it should be considered part of our training regimen. 

Yeah, I also really appreciate this conversation because we’re now not just talking about metabolic health. We’re actually talking about youthful athleticism and aging athleticism. 

And that is definitely overlooked. I’m guilty of this and really thinking about

other additional things that if you are doing the basics– It doesn’t take very much either. It doesn’t. And we are not, if you were to give me an example of what does this addition look like? You gave me the example of someone should be training three to four days a week for strength and hypertrophy. 

That’s a no-brainer. It’s like brushing your teeth. You layer on the warmup, which is amazing, which I’m not doing. And then the flow patterns, which we’re gonna be able to see what you’re doing on that. Go to your Instagram and we’ll link some of those. And then the go pattern. That is in addition to a baseline strength training. Is that right? Yes. Is that how, am I thinking about 

this in a way? Yes, but there’s carryover. So the go stuff does have benefits to your strength. Like doing a single arm pushup will help increase your core strength, your chest strength. And it is considered a go pattern. Doing some form if you’re able to of broad jumping will increase your muscular strength in your lower body. Could anyone try that? If I was, could someone just try anyone listening to this? Would that be a safe exercise to try? Broad jump? Yeah. No. 

(Laughing) I would dive lots of ideas. I would start by jumping up a couple of steps of both feet and practice the landing because the impact won’t be as hard because you’re jumping up so the landing’s not. And then practice easy low box jumps where you’re not doing it to exhaustion. It’s 

not trying to get your heart rate up. You’re practicing that movement pattern. And then like an easy squat jump where you just jump up and you practice the landing. Like start with that. Broad jumping is a very athletic and demanding thing to do. Okay, so you gave examples of that. 

And then the other, we’re kind of at the third thing. Is it really important that it’s a unilateral pushup? So you have unilateral pushup, single leg RDL. What are some of the other exercises that just, you know, a handful if people are thinking, okay, well, you know, 

what should I be thinking about? So it does not have to be unilateral. I prefer unilateral because it has such a benefit to core and hip health. And that’s something that adults struggle with is the anti-rotation abilities that’s gonna help you, the anti-extension abilities. The unilateral is gonna carry, it’ll improve your QL strength and your oblique strength and your oblique sling. So no, it does not have to be. If it’s ground-based and you vary the velocity of the movements, add some power element to it, or it has a total body nature, like a pushup is a total body activity. But don’t go in there and just try to rep out as many pushups as you can. That’s not the point of this. It’s to get the perfect pushup. So I have this thing I call the one minute pushup where they start up and they take 30 seconds to go down. And then they hold it for 10 seconds at the bottom and they

come up for 20 seconds. They just do one of those every morning. And you’ll be amazed by how much better your back feels with one minute every morning, a one pushup every morning. I love that. 

Everyone listening, you guys should try that. I’m gonna try it. One perfect pushup a day. One perfect pushup. And you would be astounded by how difficult that is because you don’t get any momentum on the way up. So I first got it, so years ago, I read about what like Russian martial 

artists would do, and it was a 10 minute pushup. They would literally five minutes down and breathing so they can learn to control their body when they’re breathing hard and five minutes on the way up. And I struggled to do more than a two minute pushup. So I tailored it back to a one minute pushup because most people can do that. And it’s the perfect pushup. So it’s ribs in, abs tight, glutes squeezed, chest pointed towards the ground, spine neutral, not like head up, just trying to rep out because everybody just wants to know how many pushups you can do. Like, well, how good is your pushup? So like for kids, when they come in, I’ll have them do a pushup. I think it’s criminal that we have our kids bench press before they get good at pushups. Do we? Absolutely, it’s crazy. In middle school, they start benching with a barbell, which is insane to me. Because they don’t have the motor control or because they don’t have the stability to do it? Barbell is a perform, Barbell Bench Press Grade X, it’s a performance, it’s a highly technical lift. It is, we just don’t realize how technical it is to do it appropriately. It’s open chained, so they’re having to control it. And what does that mean, open chain for them? Well, open chain is like the end of what you’re moving is not stabilized, you know, which open chain isn’t bad, but it’s– What would be a closed chain? A pushup, just your hand is on the ground, you know? 

So, and there’s no core involvement in a bench press, like high level bench press competitors will disagree with me, but most people just lay on their back and start pushing, whereas a pushup, the entire chain has to work together to produce force. So what I’ll have them do is I’ll come in, I’ll have them start on the ground and put their hands on the ground and slowly start to produce force until everything starts to move slowly and I’ll cue them on the way up, you know, ribs in, chest down, head neutral, glute squeezed, dig your toes into the ground. I’ll have them like start to, you know, internally rotate their, on the way up internally rotate their humerus, like all the little subtleties that make for the perfect pushup and I’ll get that kid to do one perfect pushup, you know? And then you worry about getting the 50 perfect pushups until a kid can do 50 slow perfect pushups, they should not be on a bench press. 

That, and was the, would the same be for an adult? Absolutely, there’s no reason for most bench press, most adults to bench press. And I love the bench press, it’s just a performance exercise and it’s– Yeah, it’s a universal bench day on Monday. It’s insane. And the same dude, if I cue him to a perfect pushup, not some of these garbage pushups, a perfect pushup, they

probably won’t be able to get 10 pushups. And then if someone is saying, okay, Judd, well, pushups are exciting, but, no rep. But am I going to actually be able to put on mass? So if someone is thinking, okay, I want to use the bench press to build my chest. 

A pushup, because I suppose it would be difficult to do this progressive overload would be, you wouldn’t be able to put on the same mass, right? That’s a common myth. So I always say you don’t advance past the pushup, you just advance the pushup. So there’s a lot of ways to advance a pushup, as simple as putting a band around your back. So it’s a band-resistant pushup, to doing a one-arm pushup. And then you can progress the one-arm pushup to where you’re holding a weight plate as you do a one-arm pushup. You can literally make the pushup so hard there’s not a single person in the world that can do it. You know, to where Bruce Lee was doing it off two fingers. You know what I mean? You can make the pushup extraordinarily hard. Like I’m not plugging my program, but in my program, I value pushups. Well you’re here because we want to learn about your program. So in my program, I value pushups so much, there are literally 30 variations of pushups in my program. And I’m not saying you don’t bench press, but what you can do is, you can do far less bench press, and add in pushups, and get the same benefit. Far less bench press, and probably less injury. Oh, for sure. So first of all, bench press is such a difficult and complicated exercise. Bicep tears are a risk, pectares are a risk, elbow and wrist injuries are a risk. The barbell is– Tendonitis, definitely. It’s not a natural, the barbell is not a natural implement. That’s also what makes it great though, because we can load it up with a lot of weight, but it’s not a natural thing to move. So what we can do is, we can build a robust system with far less volume of the lifts. So when you think, think about a guy on chest day. First of all, it’s insane that we have a chest day. We have a day– Lots of fronting, string tank tops, fake tan. We have a day dedicated to mainly our pecs, and a little bit of delt and tricep. And an entire day dedicated to that, which is insane when you look at the way we move in general, that we’re taking an entire day and dedicating it to something that has very little impact on our overall athleticism. Now, if you’re a construction worker, somebody working outside and you’re doing all that anyway, and you go in and you have a chest day, more power to you. But if you’re walking like a duck, and you have hip pain and back pain, and you’re taking one day out of your training microcycle to do chest, what are you doing? No wonder you don’t have time to do this stuff. I’m sorry if I get upset by this, but it’s asinine. It’s like, man, why are you taking a day and doing chest? You have so many other things you need to be working on. And you can make your chest look great. It just incorporate it with everything else. I am so happy to hear that you guys have been getting your blood work done, most likely. Because arguably we know that nothing is more important than staying on top of your health responsibilities. Right now, there is more talk than ever on hormones. And you know where you are at, and the only way to do that is to get your blood work. And I’m so grateful to our sponsor, Inside Tracker, whose service I use myself to test my own hormones. They offer 10% off Inside Tracker subscription in any plan. Just head over to insidetracker.com slash Dr. Lion. Let’s face it, to live your healthiest, longest life possible, you have to get your blood work done. Most people put that off, but that is not a champion mindset, and you are here to get it done. And by the way, let’s say you’ve got an ora ring or an Apple watch, and we all know you’ve got DNA. Inside

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What’s another myth? I mean, I think this is a really eye opening conversation for people. What’s another myth or something that people really don’t think about? And when I say myth, I always, again, I always thought about squat, bench press, deadlift. And now I’m learning that I could probably get stronger, have better core, feel better if I can just do variations of bench press. Muscles don’t– I mean, push up. Well, this could, any exercise, muscles do not know load. They know tension. So they do not know how much weight is on the bar or how big the dumbbell is. They only know the tension they are experiencing. And there’s a lot of different ways that we can go and get a muscle to experience tension, namely lever length. So if you can make the lever long enough, you can create an enormous amount of tension in a muscle that cause it to grow. So you can build your legs with no external load whatsoever just by manipulating speed and lever length. Single leg pistol squats, most people can’t do them. Dudes can squat, 400 pounds can’t do a pistol squat. You can build your quad and leg size by just doing body weight pistol squats. Wow. So that’s another one is like, do you think we need load to build muscles? No, we don’t, we need tension. And load is only one tool in that. It is a valuable tool, but it’s a tool.

So think about how insane this is. We spend most of our day sitting down and then we go to the gym. I’m speaking mainly to dudes here. And then we lay down to do our chest. Wait, what are the ladies doing? They’re doing the same thing. Ladies don’t work their upper bodies enough. They will spend an hour and a half on glutes and then they have rounded shoulder blades. I don’t wanna pick on the ladies, but work your upper bodies more, it’s important too. 

And they’re petrified of getting big muscles. So they don’t lift heavy enough. Not anyone listening to this podcast, nobody listening to this podcast is afraid of getting bulky. Fair, right? I would also, that fills me up. We know that is a myth that is deeply dispelled here. Yes, here it is. Getting this out to the world. So they literally think that if they lift more than 80% of the one rep max, they’re gonna look like a bodybuilder. 

And it’s like, this is not gonna happen. Still trying. And the dudes think that if they do cardio, they’re gonna lose all their muscle. You know what I mean? If they break a sweat, all their muscles are gonna go away. Immediately. Immediately. I can’t do cardio, I wanna keep my gains. I’m like, you’re insane. Anyway, so they go and they do upper body. Think about this, and they lay down. They lay down and they do flat bench press, the universal stress, they lay down and they do incline bench press. They lay down and they do their flies. And then they go on a machine and they do their dips. They either lay down or sit down for an entire workout when they just got done sitting down all day. And then they go and they do their legs. And for the dudes that squat, more power to you. That’s good. A lot of times it’s very common for me to see a dude go through an entire leg day and never stand up to do his legs. He sits down and he does his leg press. He sits down and he does his leg extensions. He either sits down or lays down to do his leg curls. And then he’ll go over and like sit down and do like adduction or something. You just did an entire leg day, you didn’t stand up. But what is that? Just to be on the flip side of that, so? 

Everything starts with the ground. 

So firstly, develop kinetic chains. So ground-based, be standing up for as much of the stuff as you can. And is that so that you can become more athletic or move better or it’s just the way that the body was designed to get into that? All of the above. And also the core. It’s a term we all use, but it is very important. Do things that force you to incorporate your core and have your core involved in everything. Because in the real world, it doesn’t matter how much you can push like this. If your core can’t handle it, you’re not gonna be able to do it. And in the real world, you

don’t get the advantage of laying on your back and pushing on a weight very often. You’re standing up, you’re pushing, so your core’s involved. You’re driving through the ground, so you have to produce force through the ground. A lot of times it’s a cross pattern or contralateral, so you’re pulling while you’re pushing. And we don’t understand how it doesn’t transfer to the real world and it doesn’t. I see Jim Bros all the time and none of it transfers to the real world because they don’t know how to activate their core. They don’t know how to drive through the ground. They have these big pecs and it’s useless. 

Big pecs, no calves. Not saying anyone in particular. But do you think that there are particular movements that everyone should be able to do well? So we know that there is the pushup. What are some other movements that we have to do well that will translate in a meaningful way? So body weight walking lunge is something that seems simple and most adults can’t do it. They cannot do a proper body weight walking lunge. Does it have to, does your knee, let’s see, does your knee have to extend forward? So we are not talking about up and down. I mean, is your knee, it is a lunge lunge. Yes, you have to be able to step forward and catch yourself on the ground with proper pattern, absorb the force, letting your knee come forward, letting your hip flexor open, letting your back knee drop fully to the ground, loading that glute and knee appropriately, keeping the knee stacked over the foot so there’s no valgus collapse, and then pulling yourself up and forward out of that motion. It’s just a very crucial universal thing that very few people could do. It’s astounding. 

What else? 

Or is that the big one? That’s like glute activation. Like use your glutes. Like a lot of dudes that can squat a lot of weight and other stuff and then I have them do a bridge or lay on their stomach and try to activate their glute when they’re raising their knee. They can’t activate their glute. Everything is taken up the hamstring and lower back. So learning how to use your glutes is another one. Like glute bridging on a regular basis. Yes, I did something right. And we do that because as you’re talking, I’ve just had major injuries. 

I really injured myself sprinting and I have voles my hamstring. My CNS was blasted. I was training for a 50 hour event and it was on a long stride.

And I just popped that sucker. It happens. It does happen on that long stride. Now I had to really go back and everything I do is we work on walking lunges. We work on rotations. We work on glute bridges till the cows come out. I mean, it’s just like hip thrust forever. Copenhagen planks, reverse planks and single leg reverse planks. Extremely important. Yes, I hate those the most. I hate those the most. 

Anything else? Lunging and push up so far. I would say different forms of pull ups or being able to hang from your weight. Can you even hang with your body weight? Can you just hang for a minute? And that’s safe. Anyone could do that, yeah? No, I mean, if you have shoulder injuries or neck injuries or spine injuries, bad spine injuries, even the decompression, but you can do adjusted hangs so where your feet are on the ground and you just squat down and the squatting motion will have a little bit of tension and you can build into a hang. But if you’re generally healthy, you should see how long you can hang. And is that for grip strength or is that for some other indication? Well, it’s gonna be grip strength but it’s gonna go down the chain and it’s gonna work on your serratus strength and your scapular strength and it’s gonna see if your spine can support the hyperextension. You know, if you’re hanging, I mean, do you have the shoulder mobility? It’s gonna work on your shoulder mobility because if you don’t have it, when you’re hanging, your chest will be pointed towards the ceiling. And when you say mobility, 

again, is that in, that’s not just a hang, is that in an active motion? 

Well, so a hang would be not necessarily an active motion but you’re having to be in that range of motion under strain. So the flexibility part of that would be if you’re laying on the ground and somebody just takes your arm and pushes it into extension, right? The mobility is you’re hanging and your body knows it’s under tension. Will it let that joint go through that range of motion? That’s a great question. That’s a fundamental difference. So you don’t have to be moving but it has to be under tension. Has to be under tension. And do you have to engage that, the scapula as opposed to just letting it completely? Well, you can do scap pull ups. Those are great. It’s where you like let it and then you just depress your scapula. I mean, that’s a great scap pull ups are great but you don’t have to, I probably would incorporate that. 

Anything else? Am I missing anything else? I mean, everyone’s mind is blown right now. I know there’s so many. There’s so many. But again, we’re just picking for the people that are hearing this stuff for the first time because they are hearing, at least on my podcast, for the first time, much of these very tactical movements that are very specific in these concepts.

I just feel like I threw a lot at people and I don’t wanna overwhelm them. They’re like, there’s no way I can do all of this. And I just wanna reassert people that you can just pick a couple simple things from each category and do them for a very limited amount of time, two or three times a week. You don’t need to dedicate a lot of time to any of this. And five minutes a day. Yeah, it may be even less. Yes, absolutely. Well, the one minute pushup is one minute a day. Yeah, and so the thing is you have to analyze, 

diminishing returns. So are you doing something where your volume of that one thing is so much that you’re no longer getting out of it the time that you’re putting into it? So a dude goes in on a one day and a chest day. I’m not picking on two sheets in chest. I like to do chest days too. Oh, come on, look at this guy. He’s like 260 pounds. He’s doing chest day. But you don’t need 30 sets on chest day. Like the last 20 sets of that chest workout probably added 5% to your gains or whatever you’re trying to go through. It’s just a waste of time. And I know the pump feels good, trust me, we all like it. But that’s why I have the show in at the end of the workouts. That’s your pump period. 10 minutes, get a pump, go ahead. Like pumps are good. But I mean, you don’t need to do 50 sets for strength. Like literally studies show as few as five sets above 90% of your one rep max can result per week, can result in strike gains. Right, five sets, right. Might not be optimal at five sets around 90%, your one rep max. You can gain strength for a long time. Optimal is more like 15 sets, but that’s still only 15 sets per pattern. So 15, I’m sorry, not sets. 15 reps. Reps. So you can do 15 reps of squats a week in gain strength. And that’s crazy, that’s one squat day. Yeah. Reps. Exactly, I would divide that into two and do two sets of three twice a week of a variation of a squat, the Westside barbell thing. I look up prelopins chart, he does great on the volume and load, it’s very accurate. What is it called? Prelopins chart, it goes over volume as compared to load percentage. Is there something that someone has to do after the workout? Is there a cool down? Is there some kind of retrain your nervous system so you are prepped for the next thing? Yeah, it’s nervous system. It’s not physical cool down, it’s get your breathing back. Immediately get your breathing back. So box breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, there’s a lot of different techniques, but get your parasympathetic system going as soon as you can. Everybody wants to get that protein shake in right away and that’s great, but that can wait a little bit. Get your breathing back, start to recover immediately. What if someone is listening to this and going, you know what, I didn’t work hard enough to get my nervous system amped up, right? Would someone know? I mean, I think, you know, let’s say someone is training, but they’re really not, let me ask it a different way. Should someone train to the capacity where it is essential that they have to recalibrate their nervous system? And if they are not, then whatever it is that they are doing might not be as effective as we need it to be. No, because you should not be there every, I mean, you should always work on your breathing. Whenever you’re not having to perform somewhere when it’s just a relaxed state, you should always be training your breathing to try to be as parasympathetic as you can, right? And I can talk about this really quickly, but there’s, I do undulating neural loading, which is there are certain days where the load on the nervous system will peak, but then I purposely taper it back down. So I’m not

loading my central nervous system very much every single day and you should not actually. And you can work very hard and not load your central nervous system. You can go on a very hard five mile run. That is not as taxing on your nervous system as two one rep deadlifts. Or even a max out sprint interval on the air done. Seriously, like you can train your metabolic system very hard and be very tired and not tax your metabolic system. That is a core principle of mass method. So you can figure out a way to work very hard every day, but you shouldn’t, but you should have recovery days and mobility days and relaxing days, but you need to vary the strain on your nervous system throughout the week. And that, this is a overarching theme. That is what everything is built on in mass method. Like I pay attention to body part splits and modalities of training. Everything is the first thing I question is on my microcycle, which for most people is a week. It’s when in this microcycle, on this day in my microcycle, what am I supposed to be doing? Is it a high CNS day, a moderate or a low? 

Why am I now just hearing about these things? And my guess is that you had an experience or a collection of experiences where you were hitting a wall or you got injured yourself. There is always some reason why someone moves towards a more creative process. 

The athletes I was working with, I had to figure out a way to make them better when they were extremely fatigued with their CNS. So I had to figure out what was really taxing them and what wasn’t. And that caused me to do a lot more research in that field over the years. And then myself, training and beating myself into a wall where I wanted to work out every day, but it just wasn’t having the effect anymore. And I was getting injuries because I wasn’t paying attention to my recovery, 

especially CNS recovery. And the problem is a lot of people, they either hammer their CNS every day to where there’s a feedback loop where your body will just prevent you from doing that survival mechanism. Or they work out hard every day, but they never fully tax their CNS. It’s always a Metcon workout or what’s your wad, where they’re breathing hard, but they never do that one rep max effort sprint. They never do that one rep max effort deadlift. So they’re either missing it. They’re either into much of it or they’re missing it. Their CNS is always being taxed a little. It’s never being fully utilized. 

Basically, really, we think about this kind of an entrepreneurship and the most successful entrepreneurs or the most successful operators will be able to turn it on to the most extreme,

full force hyper-focus, but it’s very intentional. They also turn it off like that. So that goes into what I wanna talk about, about neural toning. We have to learn how to self tone when it comes to neural toning. Bring yourself up and bring yourself down using thought patterns and breathing techniques. So if you need to bring yourself up, purposely hyperventilate a little bit. That’ll tell you some, take shallow breaths, force exhales, build your CO2. And breathe upper chest. Upper chest, because that tells you, that gets you on. 

Don’t try this while driving, guys. Please do not. It’s probably on your own. Try this. 

Do something that requires accuracy and focus. That’ll get you turned on. Dial at your pupils. Give me an example. So bounce the tennis ball off a wall, make yourself catch it. Use a yo-yo. I like that. Now we gotta do something else. So you don’t know this, and we didn’t do this with you, but we do pushups before every podcast. Now we’re gonna do one arm and then bounce the ball. And this is increasing focus and neural tone. It’s basically what you’re saying is getting yourself in the zone. Yeah, it gets you more to the sympathetic system. The sympathetic zone. So another test is finger tap test. To test your CNS, like how many times can you tap your finger in a minute? Simple test, just time it. 

Pretty predictable. What do you do? Grip strength, because I have a grip arm. What do you do to get in that locked in look and zone? 

So here’s another thing. It’s like caffeine, right? We know that caffeine has a feedback loop on your sympathetic system. So if you drink caffeine too much, you’re gonna like, what is it? Your adrenal glands are gonna suffer? I don’t know, we’re doing these caffeine IVs upstairs. I have no idea what you’re talking about. So it just loses effectiveness. So you need a higher and higher dose, right? So it’s not just caffeine though. So people are just hyper-caffeinated all the time. Caffeine’s a great tool to use. We just abuse it in intense music. So auditory responses, okay? So we listen to this intense music throughout the whole workout and we become desensitized to it. And then when we don’t have that in caffeine, we can’t get ourselves turned on. Absolutely. So if you limit the use of intense music in caffeine, then they become more valuable tools when you need them. So you have that in your toolkit now. So if I need to get myself on, hyper ventilated chest breathing, listen to some intense music,

and then take a shot of caffeine and I’m on. But if I’m always listening to Pantera when I’m driving and I have a two hour workout and it’s intense, raging, it’s a machine start to finish, after a while it’s not gonna have the same effect. So what I will do is on my playlist or whatever, I’ll have an intense song that I listen to for the 30 seconds while I’m getting in my zone and I’m focusing and bringing the world in. And then after the set, I will put on something that’s like more low key. Frozen. 

(Laughing) That’s awesome. 

You know, some show tunes, I don’t know. The various show tunes. (Laughing) But just like to bring me back down. Yeah. 

So I call it Intris set neural tone or intro workout neural toning. Wow, and would you, I love that. Would you turn off the music? Would you, if I’m thinking about, okay, how is everyone gonna be implementing this? I love, you know, this kind of allows for a dopamine vacation. I mean, this is very specific ways to intentionally turn on your nervous system, your mind. Auditory response is 

huge. Visualization is another one. Okay, tell me. If you’re gonna do a set, visualize yourself doing the set before you do the set. You know, don’t just like snort pre-workout, bang your head against the wall and go grip and rip it. Like sit down. Yeah, that’s what that does, producer. I sit down. I draw my world in to really tight, really small world. I’ll look at what I’m gonna do. I’ll visualize myself doing it. I’ll get my heart rate up and then I’ll do it. It’s just very intentional neural toning. After the set, take the intense music out, you know, sit down, look around, just relax and then I’ll– Choles is on the, yeah, choles frozen. Focus on my breathing for a minute or two. You’ll be amazed at how you can extend your workout. That’s amazing. And then go into kind of box breathing or just chill. So during the workout, I’ll do more pursed lip breathing. So it’s a one second nasal inhale, a two second mouth and nasal exhale, focusing on pushing out evenly and a two second hold with no air. And then just repeat that. 

After the workout is when I’ll do the box breathing. And that’s normally just four, four, four, four. That is a tactical breath. That’s what the guys use in the military. Yeah. Swimming is a great way to build your CO2 tolerance. And that’s just breath hold. Breath, yeah, max breath hold,

breathing techniques like box breathing to build your CO2 tolerance. You guys don’t try some of this. Do not get all froggy and try some of this at home where you’re passing out, I mean, don’t do, I mean, that is not what we were talking about. 

Swim with a friend. So let’s say you do your normal cardio and you like to do intervals, a simple way to increase the effectiveness of that interval workout. Let’s say you run fast for two minutes and then you walk, right? During that walk, try to do the purse lip breathing for five reps at a time for 30 seconds. And then just let yourself breathe naturally for the rest of your rest interval. And then your CO2 tolerance and your fitness will build way faster than normal. How often would someone use these tools? Every time they lift, flip a coin, sometimes you have access to it, sometimes you don’t so that it maintains the novelty. Yeah, I mean, that’s a good question. Ideally every time, but that’s a lot to ask. So like whenever you can do it, the more the better, and if you want to be serious and be accountable and you’re not seeing the gains and you’re not getting stronger and you feel like you can’t recover, I’m giving you tools to recover. And the more you use them, the better you’re gonna perform. What about this whole mindset component? You’re a former ranger, won’t hold that against you. 

Joe, it’s just flying in hot. (Joe Laughs) 

Do you have to really hone that in or is there a natural aspect to what you’re doing where you are not necessarily having to dip into that tank? 

As far as the mental aspect is like doing each workout? Tree, I mean, listen, you’re trying to bring, 

and maybe I’ll ask this in two ways. So you personally, I think that you personally are you, you are bringing something new to the table, just like Kelly Starrett, just like many of the people on the podcast. So this is new information, creative ways of thinking about it. So there’s you as the entrepreneur, you as the subject matter expert, and then there’s you as this very athletic human, you played football, and then now continue to train athletes. Do you have to think, and people will say that those two things might be different, they’re not. No, there’s definitely not. Where you are taking yourself from a mentality standpoint in your work and entrepreneurship, you will then bring into the gym. And are you thinking about that? A lot of people have it and they don’t know

why, right? They have the it, and I’ve studied what the it is. And there’s several components to it. One is breaking tasks down into smaller attainable pieces. Don’t think about things you can’t affect at the time, because your brain doesn’t want you to excel, your brain just wants you to survive. So your brain will stack tasks on top of yourself, and I’d see people do it in Ranger School, where we wouldn’t be doing anything. We’d literally be eating our one meal a day with our boots off, and it’s like a breeze, like it should be pleasurable. And instead of just thinking about being in the moment, they’re worrying about what they have to do. Their brain is stacking tasks because their brain is trying to convince them not to do it, because their brain does not want them to excel, it wants them to survive. So when we’re fresh and we’re feeling good, the frontal lobe kicks in and we’re like, “I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that.” But as soon as we start to get really hungry and really tired and cold or scared, our brain kicks into survival mechanism, and it’ll start telling us all these things that are coming, and we start worrying and suffering when we don’t have to. So learn how to be in the moment and just focus on the next task. Like I never, whenever once walked 18 miles with a rucksack on my back, I only walked to the top of the next hill. And I just did that over and over, because everybody can walk to the top of the next hill. And I’m as mentally weak as anybody else. I just don’t think about the things that scare me. Not if I can’t do anything about it. So analyze, like I call it inside-outside-edge thinking, either be in the moment and immersed, or be out of the moment thinking big picture thoughts. Never be worrying about what other people are thinking or what you can’t control, because that is your mind trying to keep you from succeeding. Because with success, there’s always risk and discomfort. So our mind is not strong, our mind is not our friend. We have to control our mind, we have to make it our workhorse. 

I love that, it’s basically what you’re talking about. And it’s interesting, again, you’re a former ranger and my husband was in special operations. We are a very veteran-friendly podcast. As you know, I always try to, you might not know this, but part of our clinical practice is we support operators. Absolutely. 

And what you’re saying is very unique and common among the uncommon. 

Yeah, and they just don’t put it to words. A lot of them don’t even know how they do it. They just, they don’t, they’re like, I’m just gonna do it. Like screw it, let’s go do it. They don’t think, like I always tell people, when you go to the gym, don’t go to the gym, just put your shoes on and then just get in the car, fill up your water bottle. Love it. And then put yourself in a position where you have to tell yourself no. Like I’m sitting here at the gym in my car with a water bottle and my workout clothes and I have to actually get in my car and turn around and drive home and most of us won’t do that. We just stop before we start. If we just start, most of us will finish.

Like put yourself in a position where you actually have to turn around, tell yourself no and walk the fuck home. And no one’s gonna do that. I mean, you better not be doing that. 

I have to say, Judd Lionheart, 

your name says Lionheart. Yeah. 

It really flows. You are a strong, capable human and I think that you’re really going to excel in making our youth and our future way more athletic and way more thoughtful. I am so grateful that you spent the time coming up here. I just couldn’t be happier. We’re gonna link where everyone can find you and I’m hoping that you will certainly come back on the show. Absolutely, it’s a great experience and that means a lot coming from you especially. Really love your stuff and love what you do. Thank you so much.