SPEAKERS

Jordan Shallow, Dr Lyon

Dr Lyon  00:01

Welcome to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon show where I believe a healthy world is based on transparent conversations. In today’s episode of The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon show, I sit down with the very large Dr. Jordan shallow. He’s a chiropractor, strength and conditioning coach, performance consultant, as well as the founder and CEO of prescript. Medical Director for House of athlete co host of his own radio show. Jordan is a former chiropractor at Apple world headquarters in California as well as the former head strength and conditioning coach for the Stanford University rugby team. This guy is a beast of a human he is also one of the most intelligent performance coaches that I’ve I’ve actually ever had the opportunity to sit down and talk with. He spends the majority of his time consulting with professional sport teams on integrating training and rehab models, as well as a consier clinician clinical strength coach with athletes in the NFL NHL UFC, if you go ahead and look over at his Instagram, you will see all the things that he’s doing. He’s truly incredible. And in this episode, we talked about a few things. Number one, how traditional approaches to training may be suboptimal. How stimulus and stress impact the body versus weight and force. And most interestingly, when does athleticism develop our athletes created or born? I hope you enjoy this podcast, it would mean so much to me. If you do, rate, subscribe, share it with a friend. It helps bring visibility to these incredible practitioners that we have on let’s dive in. I’m super excited to bring on thesis as one of the sponsors of the podcast thesis is the world’s first customized nootropic company and what are nootropics nootropics are nutrients found in nature or the human body that enhance cognitive function, like focus, energy or mood. I did a fellowship in geriatrics and ran a brain cognition memory clinic that was part of my job. And so when I saw a thesis, and their compounds that they use, I actually had dinner with their founder dan. He spent years looking at the data, reviewing the meta analyses and choosing compounds and putting together formulations. testing them with large data collections and people you can go to take thesis.com/dr Lyon, go and take their short quiz I did but you’ll take their quiz they’ll send you a starter kit with four different blend recommendations to try over the course of a month. And again I have tried a lot of nootropics This is a very special company with very unique blends. For the listeners of my podcast thesis is offering 10% off your first box to get your own customized thesis starter kit go to take thesis.com/dr Lyon, take the quiz, use the code Dr. Line at checkout. If you want to leverage your own neuro chemistry, this is a great way to do it. A special thank you to one of the sponsors of the show. And that’s timeline nutrition. And I especially love their products because they have something called your urolithin A in it. As we age, it’s really important to understand that the human body becomes less efficient in some ways. And oftentimes when we think about efficiency that changes we do think about the health of mitochondria. Mitochondria are the energy generating components in our body and they can become damaged making it harder to produce energy urolithin A is in Mito pure. This is a science backed product. It has decades of peer reviewed published science which is why I’m so excited to be part of the timeline team, especially as it relates to muscle centric medicine. They have a beautiful product line that’s a low sugar, non GMO gluten free choices. You can mix your Mito pure berry or ginger powder which is great if you have any digestive issues into your smoothie. They also have a Vanilla Protein Shake that has mitopure again this is a compound in it called urolithin A and the majority of individuals do not make this compound and it has a very positive effect on the mitochondria. I like to think about it as kind of exercise in a bottle timeline is offering our community 10% off your first order of Mito pure, go to timeline nutrition.com/dr Lyon and use the code Dr. Lyon to get 10% off your order nuts timeline nutrition.com/dr Lyon, use the code Doctor line you’ll get 10% off your order. Jordan Shallow.

Jordan Shallow  05:00

Let’s go with that.

Dr Lyon  05:01

Okay. It’s such a privilege to be able to sit down with you.

Jordan Shallow  05:05

I appreciate that. I think you’re gonna see what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna put me at a disadvantage out of the gate. You’re going to over promise and I’m going to under deliver.

Dr Lyon  05:12

Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, you are I only choose people to come on my podcast that are larger than myself. Yeah. So basically just you hit the weight limit. We’re all good. The height limit? It’s totally right.

Jordan Shallow  05:25

Yeah, it was actually I saw sign outside the door it’s like at least this high to go on the ride. I was like, oh, that’s like I’ve ever been to a podcast like that before. That’s interesting.

Dr Lyon  05:31

Well, welcome to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon show. I’m really excited to have you on and here’s why. Okay, is you Well, number one, your chiropractor, which I don’t even know if you are practicing chiropractic care, that you would say that you are. But what’s so unique about you is that you have a lot of book knowledge and a ton of clinical experience as it relates to strength conditioning, all kinds of athletic performance. Unique.

Jordan Shallow  05:59

Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really look outside of what I enjoy. So I guess why that doesn’t, especially if you like, pocket me as a chiropractor. I guess it’s a little bit different, but it’s the only thing I’ve really known. And it’s why I got into it. So that’s it. I think it’s what it should be.

Dr Lyon  06:18

I’d love to hear a little bit about your backstory.

Jordan Shallow  06:20

Sure. Yeah. Okay. No, so I guess like where the social media career thing sort of started, I went to the University of Toronto, graduated their kin degree kinesiology and then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, went to chiropractic college there. At the time, I started consulting with local university, San Jose State University while I was still in school. So that was 10, 10-12 years ago now. would work like offseason, Pro Day prep, combine prep for kids going into the NFL Draft. Finish up my finish up my chiropractic program in 2015, started working at Apple’s world headquarters. So as a chiropractor, corporate, apples were world headquarters in Cupertino took on a role at Stanford University as a strength conditioning coach. So I was working at Apple and Stanford. And then I opened two practices in the Bay Area, one in Mountain View, California, and the other in Dublin, California. And then started a podcast and fitness education company around the same time,

Dr Lyon  07:25

So, you had a lot of downtime.

Jordan Shallow  07:26

Yeah, especially. I had to spend a lot of time in traffic in the Bay Area. That’s one thing I don’t miss. But yeah, so then I did that. And then 2017 I was doing guest lectures and education spots, usually once or twice a month. And then I thought, well, California is getting expensive. I was living out of my car at the time.

Dr Lyon  07:46

That’s when I met you. I think

Jordan Shallow  07:47

yeah, it was that you I was living out of my car. When I met you.

Dr Lyon  07:50

I had no idea

Jordan Shallow  07:51

before runner out behind the sushi restaurant in San Jose was my home, You know what, this is lame. I was getting booked for like, two three weekends a month at that point. I was like, I wonder if I could stretch it out. And just go from guest lecture to seminar to symposium to conference or whatever and just stretch it out and see how long I could go on the road. So sold my car packed up all my things throughout or sold when I could throw it when I couldn’t and then yeah, I hit the road and I had maybe three months back to back and I was like well worst case after my three months I’ll move back in with Mike and Louise shallow back in Windsor, Ontario, Canada and that’ll be it and sure enough after my first weekend I got contacted like Hey, when are you free again? And then that next weekend it was two people next weekend after that was three the next thing you know I was on the road for the better part of four years straight never had a home just Airbnb I think I have I have to have a record for most amount of Airbnbs

Dr Lyon  08:52

is there like credits for that?

Jordan Shallow  08:53

No, which sucked! I actually got cancelled from Airbnb.

Dr Lyon  08:56

Oh my god

Jordan Shallow  08:56

My airbnb account the account is…

Dr Lyon  08:57

you know what that means is you probably left it messy.

Jordan Shallow  08:59

No, look, I paid the cleaning fee. Can we do the whole podcast just on this? I’m paying $700 And I didn’t cleaning fees. I mean, like you left the dishes out cancelled. Don’t even get me started. But yeah, so I did that for three and a half, four years. Just kind of worked on the education company on the on the side during the week and I would present in person on weekends.  moved to Toronto for a bit moved to the Middle East for a bit just moved to Miami took a job as medical director of House of athletes. So now my more my in person focus is clinical with professional athletes, primarily NFL, American football players. And we do a combine prep as well. So it kind of comes full circle kind of got me into it 10-12 years ago, so my day to day now is mostly as medical director of House of athlete. So I’m in the clinic a couple hours in the morning, work on my computer, I do some admin stuff. And then we kind of run the education platform on the side.

Dr Lyon  09:53

And when you’re doing education and you’re working with these athletes, is it chiropractic care or is it strength and conditioning is Is it? Is it just making a better more bionic human?

Jordan Shallow  10:03

Yeah, I don’t, I’m not. I guess like, everyone who hears this if they probably have an axe to grind with like chiropractors and like, you’re definitely justified in that. It’s part of it. Like I think the, like spinal manipulation is something that is a cornerstone to chiropractic treatment. And it’s broadly used by a lot of different a lot of different different subsets and sub disciplines, like osteopath and PTs, and even some medical doctors and orthopedics will use it. It has a place I think, not many people really understand the mechanism of correction with spinal manipulation. And so they use it haphazardly. And that’s sort of like their, their one tool. So I wouldn’t say by the conventional standards that I practiced as a chiropractor, especially dealing with like, high level athletes, a lot of what we do is on the gym floor, like I would say, if the job title, I haven’t checked LinkedIn recently, but if there’s a job title, like applied bio mechanist, that would probably be applied by a mechanist problem solver. That’s probably more how I operate. Okay. But yeah, I always have like a little soft spot in my heart for chiropractors, because that’s kind of how I came up. But there’s such an easy scapegoat in manual medicine. Like when I travel around, like, oh, like, what do you do for a living, and I’ll just, I sometimes don’t have the time, or the patience to be like, Oh, I’m a chiropractor, because it’s just like, they’re always so inclined to tell you the bad story. My neighbor went to a chiropractor, and now he’s a paraplegic. Because like, well from the chiropractor, you know, he got in the car, I said, like, then what do you Why are you doing that? Why? So I just tell people, I’m a drug dealer, and they just don’t ask me questions. it’s easier they get it. Okay, yeah.

Dr Lyon  11:50

When you are working with these athletes, what is the kind of way in which you work with them? Because I want to get to ultimately get to the point of where we’re talking about stress and stress to the nervous system, how that all plays a role. So I’m curious as to how you would build out kind of, you know, at a high level, right, it doesn’t have to be deep in the weeds, just how you are working with these people. And

Jordan Shallow  12:14

yeah, I mean, like, and I think why I gravitate to sort of that impromptu title of applied bio mechanist is that the biggest thing that we’re looking for is load management, right? Like biomechanics for the longest time was like these two dimensional stick figures, right? freebody diagrams. It’s always taught by like, the most boring professor in every kinesiology program, and someone takes it as an elective. It sucks. It’s a bunch of math, but it’s not how it works, right? Like we don’t move through two dimensions, right, we move through four, we have like the tri planar model of like, sagittal plane, frontal plane and transverse plane, there’s like flexion, extension, abduction, adduction, internal external rotation, but we also have the dimension of time, right, which is plays a huge role, especially when we’re dealing with like athletes of that caliber. So ultimately, the process is centered around load management, like understanding their response to stress, right, stress and load can kind of be seen not load is stress, but not all. Not all stress is low. Okay, if we follow that train of thought,

Dr Lyon  13:09

got it

Jordan Shallow  13:10

So yeah, I mean, it depends. A lot of times at the level that we get our athletes out, like very far along their athletic journey, like these kids have been playing football since there are four right Pop Warner up through high school into fairly intensive college programs, and we kind of pick them up there and see them into the league or guys who have been in the league for a long time. And at that point, it’s really it’s a numbers game more than a lot of people realize. So we have really good statistics on injury rates per position. So like linebackers are more likely to succumb to like shoulder and labrum tears and wide receivers, would, they’re more likely to come to succumb to ACL issues and hamstring issues, then linemen and linemen are more likely to succumb to what’s called the Liz Frank fracture, Jones fracture. So we really look to the numbers first, and kind of see like, what is the probability but almost like Moneyball it a little bit like what are the what is this? What is the stress of this position going to? Cause? Where are the weaknesses in the system? So that’s like a really good starting point, where if someone who doesn’t have a pre existing condition now, are you going to find an athlete coming out of a four year college program that doesn’t have a pre existing injury? Few and far between? And honestly, the ones that you do find are usually the ones that have the longest careers. So if you can stay healthy through your college program, that’s probably the number one determining factor to the length of your career, the NFL because you have kids coming out of Alabama or a&m, the Stanford the new name and Oregon, all the big schools, and they’ve already done an entire career, right, the four years there, they’re massive kids that you know, that’s not like what it used to be. You have a lineman coming through at 300 plus pounds.

Dr Lyon  14:55

Why do you think it’s so different now?

Jordan Shallow  14:56

Money? I mean to call a spade a spade, that’s what it is. more at stake. Right? There’s there’s more pressure that starts at the bottom right? If you have a kid who shows prospect at seven years old, and it’s likely now that you could get him in front of the right coaches, and have the right strength conditioning, the right team around them that you can, you can really groom an athlete from a young age because that’s where athleticism starts, like athleticism and motor motor development, are they run in parallel timelines with cognitive development. And as you as you know, they not even they don’t even just run parallel, like they intertwine and actually improve each other. So that’s, that’s what you’re getting now. Like, the the new student athlete is way more students than we’ve ever seen before. Like we have athletes coming out of Princeton athletes coming out of Stanford. And, you know, we’ve had kids opt out. I’ll go work on Wall Street.

Dr Lyon  15:46

Wow.

Jordan Shallow  15:46

Yeah, so it’s really interesting, but it’s not by accident. It’s not by happenstance that there’s the student athletes are more students than they’ve ever been. But they’re way more athletic than they’ve ever been. Those two things are intertwined.

Dr Lyon  15:58

.Wow. So again, it is almost like making somewhat of a superhuman, or at least you’re having this genetic potential. Would you call it genetic potential or physical potential? Perhaps?

Jordan Shallow  16:07

Yeah, Yeah. Both? I mean, I think all physical potential is genetic, but not all genetic potential is physical.

Dr Lyon  16:13

Wait, say that again? So hold on. Yeah. Yeah, cuz I mean, I only have one neuron, right? Yeah.

Jordan Shallow  16:18

Resilient. I mean, the lot of it is, you know, there’s so much it’s so multifaceted. But there is you when you are in a room with a really good athlete, I would say the number one genetic pre determinant to a good athlete is not necessarily I think, technically, by the research, it might actually be skeletal cemetery. But from on a boots on the ground, like on the gym floor in the clinic, it’s probably going to be the ability to learn, right? Like we work with some pretty high end. NFL players, I’m not going to name I’m not going to name names, but I have my sister had her first kid Pippa two and a half years ago, and I am not a kid.

Dr Lyon  16:56

Is that why you don’t want to come over for dinner?

Jordan Shallow  17:00

I default to not talk about kids, I just put my hands out here. But so it’s the first time I’ve ever really had exposure to and I’d like couldn’t get out of it. Because it’s family. I was like, Oh, okay.

Dr Lyon  17:11

Meanwhile, I invited Jordan over for dinner I’m like Jordan. It’s like instant birth control. I have a three year old and he’s only 2

Jordan Shallow  17:18

I’m good I should have brought the wife at the town. But no, so I remember watching and it happened within the course of maybe a few weeks, I was in Northern Australia visiting my sister. And we had to come back for what’s called pre OTA training, which is like training we do prior to organise team activities, which is like training camp for NFL players. So I’m around this thing

Dr Lyon  17:40

Your niece, Pippa.

Jordan Shallow  17:42

yeah, her. And, and I’m watching her like, play with the iPad and like, figure it out. And so I’m like, watching her learn. And then I remember we had to use a running back for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, give me a little bit of a breadcrumb for the sports fans out there. And I was, we did an assessment, and we’re kind of going through and like, alright, well, I think we should land on this exercise, I think we should practice this skill. In the gym, I think this will have like high correlation to the issues you’re having and the positions you’re having them in. And you watch it and like have fairly advanced exercise. And you could watch him and I just thought of my niece. I’m like, Oh, I get it, he can just learn really fast, right? Because the number of variables this guy has to cycle through during during a play is innumerable right, it’s literally incalculable. So when we give what we think to be a lot of variables in the gym, he needs to just learn that really quickly, right? But his baseline level of input for computation is so high, because he’s got 11 guys trying to rip his head off, or whatever it is, that I give him a med ball and put them on one leg, it’s like at first he’s a little like, Whoa, what is this, this is a novel stimulus. I mean, it’s novel to him, but specific for me going like this is the adaptation we need to make. And that’s really when we, when we dive deep into mechanisms and how the nervous system plays a role in motor learning, stress management, load management, it’s really just learning skills is really the fundamental basis of it and their capacity, the genetic potential is the speed or the cadence and the frequency that they can just learn. And you know, whether it’s memorizing a phone book, or in this case, like memorizing and repatterning movements really quickly, that that is the that is the genetic potential. Is it a bit the ability for an athlete to learn?

Dr Lyon  19:26

Wow, so the genetic potential is not necessarily initially physical. It starts

Jordan Shallow  19:31

with the software before the hardware without the hardware.

Dr Lyon  19:35

Do you see that when, like, these kids, they’re, they’re coming in earlier, right? So if someone hadn’t been trained, do you find that they have, like, catch up to do for example, if they weren’t young and they hadn’t been placed in the sports could they catch up?

Jordan Shallow  19:52

It’s no not to the level now because our net is catching so many kids at a young age that show promise and abilities to excel in motor learning that I mean, if you look at the European football soccer model, yeah, you know, they’re getting these kids four or five years old, right? No different than, you know, the speculations around the Chinese Olympic team or something like that. I think we’re at the point now where our talent identify a talent identification, or just accessibility to sport on the whole, is really putting it so that the net is so broadly cast that we’re picking up talent at a really young age, and we’re expediting the motor learning process and hitting these motor learning milestones with such enthusiasm that I don’t think if you’re a kid in a college program, and you haven’t stepped foot in a weight room, I unless you’re an absolute anomaly, and I honestly can’t even think of one at this day and age, there were some back in the day, but I would say the standard of athleticism is so much higher now than it was say, like 20 years ago, that I really don’t think, you know, it would be like me attempting to it literally from Not, not a complete carryover, like the neurological pathways, but it would be on par with me trying to learn Arabic, Chinese Farsi right in the next year. That would be like a college kid coming in who doesn’t train trying to make a run at the NFL. That’s how far behind you would be

Dr Lyon  21:17

Gosh, and did you have some kind of aha moment where you, you just have this flash of insight that there was this CNS input or motor learning input that started earlier? People don’t talk about that right?

Jordan Shallow  21:32

I know, it’s difficult. It’s difficult. I think a lot of it right now is extrapolation from first principles. Right, where the industry seems to trend across the board is extrapolation from research. Right. And I think I think principles are going to find you much further and will probably inform where to explore with research, but I think a lot of people are tentative. A lot of people are tentative to look into neuroanatomy and neuroscience because it’s complicated, right? Once you have memorized and rope learned your last insertion in origin, you’re like, Oh, I know everything. It’s like, the bicep inserts of the radial Appa neurosis or whatever, like I know. And then all of a sudden, you have this like, elephant graveyard of anatomical terms that you haven’t been looking at your entire career. Because you just don’t go there. Right? You can just the the central nervous system. And to a large degree, the peripheral nervous system. I think the where the conversation is going to head we’ll have to address the difference between the two is it’s probably the right way to frame it. The peripheral nervous system and central nervous system is you just have to you have to develop a whole nother lexicon, right. It’s such it’s such a difficult thing, even phonetically to say some of the words, so we just go at it smoke bomb. So a lot of people have been doing this for years, they just go, Well, you know, the central nervous system, and they don’t. And they run away from the conversation. It’s like, Hold on, I have a question. But how but why? Like, what are the actual, like neuro physiological mechanisms that we’re referring to when we talk about, you know, CNS fatigue, when we talk about learning, like, what are these pathways we’re using to learn movements. And I think a lot of times, we take for granted the complexity that leads to very simple tasks, right, like off there. Before we started, we were talking about, like watches, like really fancy watches have this complex movement, right? So they can have hundreds if not, like 1000 pieces within a single watch face, right? Like a Richard Mille is ridiculous. 45 millimeter watches have 1000 moving parts. And at the end of the day, it still tells you the time, but people who are in watches like wow, that’s so sophisticated. I’m gonna buy on RM because, because what it’s 330 like gives a shit right? You still gonna check your phone? Yeah, but it’s the it’s the it’s the simplicity born out of complexity. That I think is when we start to look more at the nervous system. From a first principle standpoint, you can really start to like, oh, yeah, cerebellar function and the three sub components of the cerebellum. All of that sounds really complicated, but it’s just, it’s the working parts. It’s almost like this is the analogy I’ll use is like when when we’re training or we’re in rehab, or an athlete, your hamstring will talk. It’s, a lot of people have been just negating the actual mechanisms, like when I have a German Shepherd is 10 years old. And nine years ago, when I got him, I couldn’t, I couldn’t dare leave the house. Because I’m such a dog person, he would bark and then he would cry, and then I would cry, and I would just come home. So I like I would just, I’d stayed on the floor for like, the first two weeks I got this dog. Like, I’m gonna get nothing done. I was ordering groceries to the door. I was just living on the floor with this dog. And when, after a while, my dog learned that barking open doors, because I would leave he would bark and I would just immediately just run back sobbiing

Dr Lyon  24:39

trained very well.

Jordan Shallow  24:40

Oh yeah he’s my German Shepherd. He’s brilliant. He’s way smarter than me. But he learned that, that that response, so he was like, Okay, if I bark the door will open. Now. We’ll go a layer deeper than normal analogy, because the normal analogy is like, Oh, silly dog. We know how doors open. It’s like, do we though, because what if you forgot your key inside? If you don’t know how a door opens a locksmith no has the door knows how a door opens, right? A locksmith can come in with a pick set and move the little tumblers within the barrel and disengage the mechanism and then open the door for you. Right. So the nervous system allows you to be a locksmith. I think like most strength conditioning and rehabilitation right now, we’re sort of like the guy in between the dog and the locks go, Oh, silly dog. It’s like, okay, that’s silly dog common is on par with like, oh, the nervous system. That smoke bomb, it’s like, you really got to when you start to look at rehab modalities, and you start to look at return to play protocols, we start to look at exercise progressions, regressions, adaptations, optimizations, you really need to know it down to the level of the mechanism. And a lot of times that mechanism is going to be driven here we allocate mechanisms a lot to the external to the structural, like, Oh, this is breaking up this this is improving circulation. This is, you know, whatever it’s like no, no, that you’re you’re thinking to, to structural, you’re thinking to tangible, you’re thinking about stuff that makes sense to you, in like your physical world, like the nervous system. Isn’t that two dimensional stick figure drawing, right? Your nervous system almost works like lightning, where it’s not, you know, it’s not the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, like a freebody diagram. It’s your nervous system is constantly, trying to find the path of least resistance, right? Evolutionarily. We’re energy conservation, monsters machines. So we need to understand look, where are what are our predetermined biases and movement? How are we going to default? What is our safe modes that we’re going to move in? And how can we leave a trail of breadcrumbs for someone to start to default to a different way of moving so we can underload certain tissues and overload other more capable tissues? So yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot and I but I think it’s, it’s, it’s sad that it’s a lot, right to me, like I get sad when I get accused of like. And I don’t say that this from a bad a bad way or anything. But I think it’s it’s an opportunity for the industry to like, start to pay more attention to the nervous system, because an application is very simple. But the level of complexity that’s needed to progress through these these, these principles fast, it’s a lot, right. Like if your phone broke, you wouldn’t be at all surprised if you go into Apple. My phone broke, did you try turning it off and turning it on again, like that, like, Well, that’s all we could do for you. It’s like, No, it’s It’s complicated. Right? And, you know, the we can’t even replicate human movement yet. Right. Like, if you look at machine learning, they’re having a hard time replicating responsive human movement, because it’s really complicated, right, this thing can has more computational power. I don’t mean, I don’t know where Boston speakers? Well, it’s just like, from a moral perspective, like, we can process so many variables so much faster, and come to a more sustained conclusion, at least from like, motor pattern standpoint than a computer can without a doubt.

Dr Lyon  27:42

the central nervous system. Is there a way So number one, as it relates to training and stress recovery, and fatigue, which I want to talk about all those things that central nervous system fatigue, I think isn’t discussed often. You deal with extremely high level athletes, the elite of the elite, how does this translate over in importance for say, a fitness person? Or, you know, I was gonna make a mom joke, like the NARP. But

Jordan Shallow  28:10

The what?

Dr Lyon  28:10

the NARP, the normal athletic real person?

Jordan Shallow  28:13

I don’t know what that is.

Dr Lyon  28:13

Yes, you do.

Jordan Shallow  28:14

I definitely have never heard of that before.

Dr Lyon  28:15

Yes, you have. Anyway, the normal, athletic real person.

Jordan Shallow  28:19

I mean, stress is all relative, right? So I don’t see I don’t see it being any different. It’s just they’ve made way more adaptations of the task they can perform. And the relative stress of those tasks is just it’s all the same. Right? So I guess the number one thing that I would start with, in bringing it to the, I feel like is a bad word. Well,

Dr Lyon  28:38

then it’s not about word so. Okay, how about they didn’t I mean, I would consider myself a NARP. So

Jordan Shallow  28:44

I don’t think so.

Dr Lyon  28:45

It’s a yeah, just the new and just a normal athletic person.

Jordan Shallow  28:52

Okay, I would start with understanding that recovery is a byproduct of load management. Number one, I think that is where people are getting misled. And that’s where the simplicity really starts.

Dr Lyon  29:05

What does that mean?

Jordan Shallow  29:06

It means all the recovery modalities you can think of right? So let’s start with the mainstays right now like ice and heat, right? Cryotherapy isn’t infrared saunas, and like, look, there’s a place absolutely. But understanding that real stress management is like you’ll never you’ll never be able to infrared sauna yourself out of too much velocity work in a week, right? You’ll never be able to out cry out yourself from too many sets of heavy back squats, right? So there’s the real stress management, real recovery starts with exercise programming. Right? And I think we’ve moved towards we simultaneously move towards these recovery modalities. While we’ve also moved towards technology to tell us how our how we’re progressing and how we’re feeling. Those two things have happened simultaneously are things on our wrist things on our finger Things strapped to our chest are now making more of our training decisions for us. And at the same time with the rise of all these fitness wearables, we’re also seeing a rise in recovery tools. I think anyone who’s been following the industry any NARP out there would even agree that that’s been those those

Dr Lyon  30:15

Alright fine we won’t use that term

Jordan Shallow  30:16

I like it, I don’t want to get in trouble. Like they have like an organization. We Didn’t you notice and I think anyone agreed those two trends have been rising precipitously, simultaneously, right? fitness wearables and recovery tools, but it’s like, they’re externalizing something that’s internal. Right? And like, I’ll never let something on my wrist help me any good athlete and even the NARPS out there. I’m going to try and use this term. Oh. Can we get a NARP count? Like a little thing? Never. So I Yeah. If we look at like these, if we look at the wearables, and if we look at, like, if I had some app on my phone, any athlete out there even a normal, athletic, real real person,

Dr Lyon  31:00

An athletic person

Jordan Shallow  31:01

if we were to grab someone on the street, and we’d be like, hey, when have you ever had your best workout? It’s always like, oh, man, I like just got off a plane somewhere. And like, it’s never it’s never,

Dr Lyon  31:17

nobody ever.

Jordan Shallow  31:18

Are you joking? Me? Every good athlete. When you ever you hit a PR? It’s never personal circumstances. I didn’t think I was gonna get that. But x, y and Zed. Is that? Are you? Are you are you so far off that you can adapt?

Dr Lyon  31:30

Are you kidding? No. Oh my god. When I just saw you in Miami, I just gotten off the plane. I saw Steffi worked out oh my god, no, I was like, oh, man, I gotta do these long, broad jumps with her brilliant,

Jordan Shallow  31:41

but like that’s I think that’s the thing that a lot of people will defer their workouts because a score on their phone or thing from HRV or whatever, which is great. Like, don’t get me wrong, there’s a place. But just as recovery tools have risen to be the superlative thing in recovery. Training, preparedness has also been like these metrics of training preparedness have also risen at the same time, where both of those are a moot point to a data to a data point, they are moved to a data point that no one pays attention to, which is performance. Performance is our number one proxy and how we make decisions. And this is like the oldest trick in the book from a strength coach perspective, like strength coaches used to have what’s called like a dynamometer, right, a grip strength measure. And they would just get a baseline reading before someone just came in the gym. That was a reproducible test that was standardized that they could do that. All right, what is your output today? Right? So performance, I think is and look, it’s complicated, right? You need to have an eye for it. You can definitely overshoot and undershoot, but I think at the level of the pro athlete, then they have the resources, money and people around them to do that. That’s really where it should start. And it’s so it’s so it’s the Richard mill. It’s so sophisticated. There’s so much under the hood, but the end of the day, it’s still reps and sets, right? Like we’re not I’m not making up exercise, it’s but it’s understanding like, look, there’s a there’s a sophistication that allows it to be so simple, right? It’s it’s it’s the notes we’re not playing that make the biggest noise. And I think that’s where a lot of people feel the need to overcomplicate things. And look, I overcome well over complicate the theory. Absolutely. I will sit here and talk neuroanatomy theory until I’m blue in the face. But I’m doing that here. So when I’m on the gym floor, the application is simpler, right, you can start to see the actual mechanisms, you see the tumblers in the barrel start to disengage. So you can start to open up these doors and start to make these adaptations really quickly.

Dr Lyon  33:31

And the, for the for non professional athlete, when they think about going to the gym and and figuring out how they’re going to train. You think that the one thing is that perhaps they’re overtraining or not recovering well enough?

Jordan Shallow  33:48

Okay, this conversation, I would say they’re under practicing

Dr Lyon  33:51

What does that mean?

Jordan Shallow  33:52

Right? Okay, so we can look, we can bucket exercises on let’s let’s not bucket and let’s put them on a spectrum. So there’s gradations in between the two, let’s let’s look at exercises that are more skill based. And exercises that are more output based. So things that are more output based are usually like machines, a lot of external reference a lot of base support, it really is leg pressing a squat, right, very similar patterns in the way we go through like knee, hip and ankle movement. But the difference is one leg press is high output because we don’t need to worry about a lot of extraneous muscular contraction. I’m sitting in a chair and I moved my legs don’t need to worry about positioning my spine or my pelvis or my hips or anything like that. I can kind of just sit back and just push, higher output. Squat higher skill. Now this is where there’s like, a divide of base level ability to learn. We need to we need to be able to address someone’s base level ability to learn and are they even in a position to be receptive to motor learning? No, there’s a concept and a friend of mine callbacks are sort of coined it so I’m gonna kind of give him a shout out. If someone is weaker than the forces of gravity acting on them. They are always He’s going to be in a vigilant state that makes motor learning difficult. Right? So an analogy I’ll use is think of a chessboard. So a chess board and a checkers board are played on roughly the same. Whatever, right? 12 by 12, square, whatever it is. But the pieces mean different things. Right? They move differently across the board, when we’re dealing with someone who might be like weaker than the forces of gravity acting on them. Like I’m not and this is difficult for because there’s is there another word for NARP because normal, athletic real person, I would say is, is a very small subset of the population. Right? So when we deal with purely rehabilitative settings, and we’re dealing with people who are weaker than the forces of gravity, like who’ve never played a sport, and it can be hard, and especially in like podcasting and fitness circles, it can be really hard to be physically empathetic to someone in that position. Where it’s like, you. You don’t know. I mean, did you grew up playing sports?  I did.

Dr Lyon  35:52

What do you play? At what age? I mean, I don’t know if you call it sports, but I ran track. Did soccer, dance, gymnastics

Jordan Shallow  36:00

hand, foot coordination is a whole nother level. Besides, it’s a whole nother conversation. But you don’t know what it’s like to be weaker than the forces of gravity acting on you. So your center of mass just like, how would you define center mass center of mass is the point in which all the forces acting in and on your body are equal? I was pretty good. Okay. Can we write that down?

Dr Lyon  36:23

I was just thinking pregnancy center of mass

Jordan Shallow  36:25

Yeah, I was not thinking that. So if someone’s center of mass is, so I think of center of mass like fire, right? Like, fire can be very dangerous, it can burn you. But if you know how to wield it, you’re very dangerous, right? Like, if we look at really good athletes, you know, in this day and age, we look to combat sport athletes, right? Mixed martial artists are probably some of the more capable athletes because they have to learn so much. Right? Like someone who’s into jujitsu, for example. There’s so many permutations, there’s so much sensory input and motor output happening simultaneously. And you know, I always get this my friends that are into jujitsu, I’m not a fighter, by any stretch of the imagination, I can use your strength against you. I was like, No, you can’t, you can’t use my strength, you can’t use my strength against Yeah, you can’t use my deadlift or my squat or my bench press against me, you can use my center of mass against me, right? They can wield my center of mass, if you’ve ever read the book, The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin.

Dr Lyon  37:19

Okay no

Jordan Shallow  37:20

He talks about this and push hands, tai chi, and it’s really interesting book because he knows a lot about like, the learning side from like, the cognitive and mental development side because he was like a chess prodigy. But he, he then starts to talk about how this related to physical movement and I didn’t really understand all the book learning stuff. But once he got into like, push hands, tai chi, and it was all about center mass, I knew exactly what he was saying in the technical terms, in the same way he knew about the cognitive relevant in the technical term. And that the same thing, right. So when we’re dealing with general run of the mill people, I think, to kind of circle back here, we need to first ask ourselves the question, Are you weaker than the forces of gravity acting on you? Right? Because if you are, we need to just get your strength to body weight ratio to a point where now we are open to learning, because if not, you’re vigilant. We see people walking on the sidewalk with their feet flared out, and their spine extended. Yes. And all they’re trying to do is not fall over. That’s what that movement strategy is. Therefore, it is an autonomic process of increasing extensor tone, getting a ton of sensory feedback, because they’re essentially falling on their face. It’s like Buzz Lightyear like he’s not, he’s not flying, he’s falling and stuff. That’s people walking on the street who are weaker than the forces of gravity, right? They, they don’t delay knee extension, and they kind of have this hard heel strike. And they kind of walk with this purposely wider base support to be more stable. So that’s like, rule number one, when we’re in the gym, and we’re looking at assessing someone and looking at prescribing exercise and going like, Well, how do we manage load? It’s like, well, what is this person’s capacity for load? Because in the case of someone who’s weaker than the forces of gravity acting on them, walking down the street is a stress, right? Because for me to walk down the street and adopt that movement strategy, that would be me holding a 200 pound sandbag, right? Because if we kind of want to work out some hypothetical math, what would it what would it take for me to autonomic or automatically adopt that gait cycle posture, right, with a big extended spine, and then the feet flared off to the side and sort of the wattle and the delayed knee extension, or the no delayed knee extension and all that? Well, it would probably take me holding something really heavy here that would make the combined center of mass of me and the object I’m holding so much further ahead of my body. So watch out so much further outside of my bases support, that that would be the posture I would adopt. Right? So then you got to realize that look, you know, I’m all for step counts, but step count 10k steps for someone who’s weaker than the force of gravity. It’s like, you want to grab a 200 pound sandbag and walk around Lower Manhattan for 10,000 steps. So that is a fundamental thing of beginning to create a common denominator for load management is What is gravity doing? And I don’t think a lot of people pay attention to them a lot to be walking for say, Alright, let’s see how you bodyweight squat not realizing that a bodyweight squat for someone weaker than the force of gravity acting on them is the equivalent of like, you having a bar on your back and me like 300 Sparta kicking you in the spine and pushing because you’re already falling forward, and we’re taking anything on your back and pushing you forward even more. So that’s like thing number one. And I’m trying to try and keep looping back to make sure we answer the question is, are you weaker than the forces of gravity acting on you can you control your center of mass, that’s like, meta principle number one center of mass is probably the most under valued and overlooked concept of resistance training, period. So if we’re not paying attention to that out of the gate, we are not putting ourselves in a position where we can actually be open and responsive to motor learning, because our autonomic processes that really just stop us from falling over, will override our ability to learn, because it’s like, I’m not learning this, because I’m going to die, is what our brain sort of says. So it just sort of shuts down the ability to create efficient motor patterns and create requisite muscular contractions to perform exercises that we want to see in the gym. So meta principle number one, then we kind of get into, okay, you’re stronger than the forces of gravity activity. Great. Now we need to see what do you consider what is a skill that you’ll fail technically, and what is things that we can train from an output perspective, now, I think the industry can get lost, or, you know, combining industries or conflating industries, like let’s take the rehab world, which might be very heavy in the skill, focus stuff. And then let’s take like the more general fitness, group, exercise class bodybuilder, whatever world over here, which might be to focus on high output, right, so we need to have a marrying of the two. And this is true of there’s very few cases, and I don’t like to speak in absolutes, but there’s very few cases where this model doesn’t hold true that we’re going to do some practice. And we’re going to train some output. Alright, so the practicing of skills is all going to be relevant to how quickly you can learn and what skill level you’re at. Right? You don’t want to practice something too difficult. Because you’re never going to create, you know, the skill acquisition, you’re never gonna close the loop on that skill acquisition process, which is cognitive, associative, and autonomous, right? So when we look at, like, let’s say, a squat, for example, the squat, I would say, for 99% of people in commercial gyms is a skill that needs to be practiced, that we should not be approaching anything that begins to look like failure, rep speed, the speed of your repetitions, your concentric phase, your squat should probably stay fairly similar in a learning phase, right. So if you’ve been squatting for less than two years, I would say, make sure that you’re treat this like practice. Because if we look at learning skills, like practicing, and rather than training, we can lose that one more rep mentality that grind it out and go look, yeah, that’s great for the leg press, where we minimize any sort of collateral where it’s, it’s an exercise that’s suited for higher output, but you’re likely going to be inhibited by the position of your spine, the position of your pelvis when you’re squatting before the the ability of your adductors or your glutes or your quads to keep turning over, you know, muscular contraction. So you’ll run into a technical barrier first, which is great. But let’s not push and practice bad practice. Let’s look at this as a skill that we’re going to practice and like any any skill, like if I was trying to, like learn a new song on guitar, I wouldn’t sit there every Sunday and just play for 12 hours. I’d like alright, I’ll play for like 35 minutes a day, six days a week, right? Because if I played for 12 hours on Sunday, I’ll play for like an hour good. And then by the time the eight hours hit, Flight of the bumblebees has turned into Smoke on the wall, just like well, I’ve lost. There’s no point, right? So that’ll increase frequency of practicing skills. And then we just need to monitor local and global fatigue caused by training output, right? Like you don’t need your quads, your hamstrings, or adductors, or glutes to recover as much if we’re not pushing them to a muscular failure, right. So if we’re practicing these compound movements that make us think, then all of a sudden, we can revert back in 24 or 48 hours and practice those exercises again, right. So if we look, just that alone is a great model of managing load, because, oh, I don’t have to take these things that are high in muscular high demand and muscular contraction. And, you know, train them into the ground like no, I’d prefer if you didn’t, right, so the thing that allows you to really push muscles and create the stimulus necessary to generate or stimulate hypertrophy, let’s put you in an environment where you can do that. Right. So I think that’s a really good framework that a lot of people miss is like, hey, find your skill level. Some people their skill might be a counterbalance while holding a weight out here, right? Because that helps shift their center of mass backwards so they can actually get a little bit more range of motion. It’s like a, like a training wheels. It allows them to create a more upright spine and load into the knees, hips and back. But find the thing that’s right at the threshold of your ability to perform and practice it. Right. If you’re really good at it, move on. and practice something else that will obviously be going into specificity of different subdivisions within fitness. But general fitness, I think having a skill component is going to expedite the motor learning process and it’s going to make your output exercises that much stronger again

Dr Lyon  45:13

thank you to insidetracker for sponsoring this episode of The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon show head on over to inside, like inside your body inside tracker.com/dr Lyon. And as you are hearing with my conversation with Jordan, how important overall health and wellness is, again, you know, just as it is with training, it is like that with your blood, you really need to know what is going on and people age and perform at different rates. The data is critical, how are you going to get it, you’re going to do your blood work, so head on over to inside tracker.com/dr Lyon, you’ll get 20% off their entire store, you’ll get a daily action plan, which is incredible, personalized guidance on the right exercise, nutrition and supplementation for your body. Again, for a limited time only get 20% off the entire insidetracker store. If you are interested in performance, if you’re interested in weight loss, you should know what your hormones are doing, you should know what your thyroid is doing. These are critical markers that you can test rather than guests and execute based on the result. So head on over to insidetracker.com/dr lyon for 20% off. I’m grateful to first form for sponsoring this episode of the show and much in line with our talk about muscle. We couldn’t get away with talking about muscle without talking about joint health. And that is why I’d recommend you heading on over to first form.com/dr lyon and check out collagen. So collagen is very important for joint health. And, you know, anecdotally I hear a lot of patients do very, very well on a combination of taking collagen, protein, and fish oil. Together, I think that this can be very beneficial. And first form collagen contains 50 milligrams per serving of Derma vol which is a Phyto nutrient rich complex and that enhances and helps maintain levels of elastin in the body. Collagen is critical building structure we know while elastin is responsible for that elasticity head on over to first form.com/dr Lyon, check out their collagen they have different flavors. I think that this is really great for joint health and also skin it is low temperature processed. I use it it mixes very, very well. I know that you’re gonna love it. You knew you were talking about the kind of duck walk. And that could be at any age, right? So someone who maybe wasn’t physically fit, you would see them walking down the street like that. And who knows, maybe they’re in their 30s. Right? You’d mentioned how that they’re in a hyper vigilant state. Do you think that that physical movement will create stress and I don’t mean stress by load capacity? I mean, like the experience of stress feeling i This sounds a little nebulous, like feeling more stressed because you are so hyper vigilant.

Jordan Shallow  48:08

Yeah, it’s chicken to the egg. Right? Is it? What led you to the point of being weaker than gravity? Was it an aggregation of non physical stress? I think at a certain point stress is that it is an aggregation. So I don’t think it’s if you’re looking at a flight of stairs when the escalator goes down, it’s a different experience to your day, if you could just run up and down a flight of stairs, no problem. Like, you know, your cell phone bill got whatever and your mortgage company’s a new thing and you’re late for work or you’re driving to Fort Lauderdale Hollywood airport, and someone rear ends you on the highway. That happens, but if the escalator was broken, and I was 400 pounds, and I was not strong. So yeah, I think I think there’s situations where that’s the case, but I likely think that there’s that’s just a that that would be more of a symptom rather than a cause.

Dr Lyon  48:56

Okay. Thank you for that. And the other thing is you were talking about fatigue. Right. And I’m really curious, as, you know, when an individual do they fail muscularly first, or do they feel central nervous system fatigue first.

Jordan Shallow  49:10

So it depends on the exercise, right? Like, undoubtedly, there’s going to be a point where, like, I use the term path of least resistance earlier, like I can put someone on a leg press, and if you’re not good at a leg press, which is it happens, right, we can see people like try to bias their adductor and a leg press, which means their knee comes in, and they’re trying to extend their hip using their adductor magnus and rather than using their glute max and quad, so it’s like, but once you’ve done enough leg pressing, and it doesn’t take a lot, you can learn the skill of a leg press. It’s like a low threshold exercise as far as skill is concerned. So when you compare that to like a squat, it’s like, well, a squat is gonna break down technically much sooner than a leg press will, but it doesn’t mean that we there’s still not potential to practice and I’m still not going to like cue someone’s foot position or something to maintain that. So that that question is really more contextual based on of the person and the exercise, but it allows you to like, what is your spectrum of movement. And I think being able to index exercises based off of that is super useful, too. Like we think of an index. Like a phonebook is like a classic case of an index where, you know, if I need to find a person, I’ve got a white page on, when you find a business, I go to yellow pages, so there’s subdivisions with that index already. So a lot of times, we just use exercises. And we just add weight to them. Like, oh, I’m just gonna add five pounds this week, or 10 pounds next week, and then I’m going to do eight reps, and then 10 reps, then 12 reps and then back down. It’s like, okay, and then look don’t get me wrong, that’s great for a lot, that’s really good for those people that need to play checkers, you need to make jumps and be stronger than the force of gravity acting on you go with that until it stops.

Dr Lyon  50:45

So you’re saying like, that’s kind of like the average person. Right?

Jordan Shallow  50:48

Yeah. But I want you to look at exercises differently. And I don’t want you to think from like a stress perspective or a load perspective, that it’s just weight. Right, our body doesn’t respond to like this idea of progressive overload should really be reframed as progressive overstimulus. And overload is a byproduct of the constraint of the movement. So like, for example, this might land you’re familiar with, like the big three core movements, yes. Right. So it’s the curl up the side plank in the bird dog, where if we look at those exercises closely, we see that the curl up is like a sagittal plane flexion extension drill for the lumbar spine. If we look at a side plank, it’s a frontal plane movement, right? So we’re like trying to stop the pelvis from moving through the frontal plane. And then the bird dog is a transverse plane movement, right? So if I have a knee here, and hand here, my body will want to rotate through the transverse plane. And I’m going to stop it from doing that. So we have an anti flexion, extension drill, curl up anti lateral flexion, drill side plank, and we have an anti rotation drill, bird dog. So we can kind of take this now that we’ve got this like big, sort of the big book of core exercises, but it’s like, imagine, where are you from?

Dr Lyon  51:55

Originally?

Jordan Shallow  51:56

Yeah,

Dr Lyon  51:56

Chicago.

Jordan Shallow  51:57

Okay. So imagine going to Chicago and just taking everyone’s name and just putting it in a book. But with no organizational system? I’d be like, All right. How do we find Lyon? Lyon? Not lions Shallow, no S, not Shallows Right that that down!

Dr Lyon  52:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jordan Shallow  52:13

But yeah, so we have this organizational structure, we need to understand that framework for exercise, right? Because a lot of our progressions in movement should be progressions in complexity, right? Or complexions, or progressions in load ability. So, for example, like bird dog curl up side plank, we don’t want to add weight to a bird dog, we make the bird dog more difficult by changing an exercise that is also within the transverse plane from a resisting force standpoint. So let’s take let’s stick with bird dog, how would I regress a bird dog? So well, you can’t really make it lighter and like put a bunch of bands around people and hanging from a squat rack like, no,

Dr Lyon  52:46

that would be weird.

Jordan Shallow  52:47

It would be weird. But someone I guarantee you, you do a dead bug. It’s the same thing. But you have a broader base of support. And you have a less deviation of center mass. So your spine is supported by the ground. So now that transverse plane intent that you’re resisting against is less by proxy of the exercise, not by we’re adding lesson or adding more or taking weight away, right? We’re changing the, the environment of the movement. So and again, that’s like looking at it from a mechanistic perspective, where we’re like, hey, the mechanism of this exercise is anti transverse plane, right? Very remedial anti rotation drill. How do we progress it? So well, what about a bear crawl that’s a little bit more dynamic, right, we have a center of mass, it’s deviating outside of a base support. So it’s going to be more dynamic, more difficult, more transverse plane resistance, then a bird dog, which is more than a dead buck. And you could get as abstract as like a single arm dumbbell row, which is like super low down the load ability spectrum. So when you deal with someone, and you’re organizing exercise, understanding what their range is, from skill to output, right, and being able to go in, and almost in flux, and be able to go in and out of these and be able to touch them and then just monitor performance. Bar speed is a great indicator and you don’t need an app on your phone to tell you something was slow, right? Slow is slow, and fast as fast. We all objectively know that, right? So I think like ownership over analyzing your own performance, or from a coach’s perspective is like, Have some faith in your ability to like, look at enough reps to be like that was good, that was bad objectively or subjectively based off of qualitative criteria, like understand what tissues are being loaded, then you can understand what tissues need to recover.

Dr Lyon  54:24

Do you think that the training, education kind of supports that or is this meaning like, is this something that is commonly thought about commonly taught to healthcare professionals?

Jordan Shallow  54:39

No

Dr Lyon  54:39

Okay.

Jordan Shallow  54:40

Next question. It’s tough, because again, like you let, okay, here’s a here’s that here’s an example.

Dr Lyon  54:48

Okay.

Jordan Shallow  54:49

Have you seen the AI that generates art?

Dr Lyon  54:53

No, what do you mean? Stephan?

Jordan Shallow  54:57

Stephan, have you seen the AI bots that are trying to generate art .Oh my guy All right, it’s hilarious it’s like you can and this just goes to show you how far off we are from robots taking over the earth because it’s like you can type in I don’t know like you’re typing like starry night right and it’s like the blue with the thing, the van goh piece and it’s just like an a amorphous green blob and you’re like us brilliant. It’s but it’s science trying to portray art like the research or evidence base? No, I’m gonna say research base because evidence is more than evidence right evidence the pillars of evidence being evidence based, create, you know, it’s going to be patient values, and it’s going to be professional experience and it’s going to be best practice and literature but so the research base when I watch them put together exercise prescriptions, it’s just like it’s literally I see it in my brain my brain doesn’t even see like they’re the organization other like day one is this In this day two is to be on the interior and like like what are you talking about? I literally just see the a amorphous blob on the AI generator. It’s like no, no, there’s there has to be a sense of of a enjoyment like let’s start there. Like let’s zoom out the all the way out to the stuff that matters. Because as much as I’m in the applied biomechanics, business, I’m in the people business, right? Even at that level of athlete like if I don’t have lil babies new album on like, I’m not doing my bicep curl, trap, whatever. So that’s, that’s really when we look at research. If you’re an academic institution, you’re going to have to be going off of what’s printed. Right. And then we’ve kind of seen where that’s led us astray, in all facets of healthcare, is health sciences, not on the especially applied biomechanics and load management in these more nuanced subdivisions within like manual medicine is not on the leading edge. And there’s not much motivation to be although I think there should. So yeah, if you go to like for me, like I didn’t learn any I learned really in depth anatomy chiropractic called cadaver lab daily cutting up and dead bodies, which is great love that. It’s visceral. If you stick it sticks with you.

Dr Lyon  57:06

And it also smells.

Jordan Shallow  57:08

Yeah, Yeah. Can be pulled pork. Yeah, the formaldehyde. Ah, yeah,

Dr Lyon  57:15

the reason I asked that question is because you had mentioned all these wearables. And so it’s almost like they’re, you’re externalizing all this data? And I’m just curious is, is that data also improving the way people think about training? The way that people think about recovery? The person at home? Who is not an elite athlete? Are they getting smarter or training is there ways in which they can improve above and beyond? What perhaps, they’ve looked at in the past?

Jordan Shallow  57:44

That Depends, like people are busy lives. So like, I don’t want to important

Dr Lyon  57:44

You don’t say, yeah.

Jordan Shallow  57:50

I don’t want to impart this on anyone, because like, I could just like, sit around all day and think about the stuff that I write some of it down, like, that’s kind of my whole life. But I understand like, that’s all well and good, but I got three, I got three mouths to feed, it’s like, Dude, I got it must be different. But so there’s, there’s a critical mass where it’s like, it is a wearable, useful. A wearable not going to teach you much about training. But it’ll be a reminder, right. And a lot of times, people just need to be reminded, and I don’t think there’s a negative to that. But there’s a glass ceiling that we might be running into at a certain point. And I think there’s a natural evolution of people’s getting exposure into whatever fitness is for them. So like, I would be a little bit more like human and less robotic neuroscience and be like, I think fitness wearables are a net positive, because it’s a it’s a reminder for like, oh, at least, you know, a step count as potentially arbitrary is that could be it’s still movement that if that wearable wasn’t there might not be getting measured if it was measured, manage that or not. So the wearable thing is tricky, because, you know, promoting and it’s the same thing with the recovery modality market at large, like promoting that this is exercise and promoting that this is recovery. It’s like, No, it’s not like, you know, oh, you burned 800 calories today. It’s like, was I smoking methamphetamine? 800 calories, that’s insane. We know that. But if it’s like the gold star that someone needs to work out again, the next day, it’s like, alright, yeah, like, I’m totally cool with that, like, you know, as long as people are, like bow happiness, I think is the number one indicator of longevity. And I don’t have a research paper to cite that. But I

Dr Lyon  59:28

But I think that’s very astute. Yeah

Jordan Shallow  59:30

Yeah it’s just you, you’ll be around, you’re rounded enough to know that, like, Look, I know a bunch of people who are very obsessive about this whole thing. I know some of them, it’s their job to be that their body is their career and their livelihood. But I know people that dropped out of heart attacks at 35 that have all this they get their blood work done. They get all this and this is like have you enjoyed a day in your life? Are you just constantly like bringing your portable scale around and weighing everything so like, you know, big picture? Do what makes you happy.

Dr Lyon  59:58

Okay I like that!

Jordan Shallow  59:58

I think that yeah, it has To be that, because I think it’s hard to be able to go in flux from the deep science and the stuff that matters, because we get lost with Instagram posts and thinking that the deep science is the stuff that matters. Like, no, it’s interesting to talk about, but at the end of the day, it says doesn’t mean anything. It’s just reps and sets,

Dr Lyon  1:00:14

just reps and set. I think I should make that into a bumper sticker.

Jordan Shallow  1:00:19

Please don’t.

Dr Lyon  1:00:22

And hats. There’s lots of hats in it.

Jordan Shallow  1:00:25

That would really set the tone.

Dr Lyon  1:00:28

what about the concept of central nervous system fatigue?

Jordan Shallow  1:00:31

Okay, so

Dr Lyon  1:00:33

if you think that that is valuable.

Jordan Shallow  1:00:35

No,

Dr Lyon  1:00:35

okay.

Jordan Shallow  1:00:36

I don’t I don’t think so. It’s usually like in my brain, when I think of central nervous system fatigue, I think of like, a neurotransmitters are the currency of the central nervous system. So there’s some sort of depletion of those neurotransmitters, or like cofactors, that will lead to uptake of those neurotransmitters like I don’t, I don’t look at that. Any more, I don’t give any more weight to that as a principal than I do anything else that aggregates as a stress, because ultimately, the only thing I’m concerned about is performance. That’s the that is the number one thing that is the most useful metric. That is my number one training rehab KPI is performed

Dr Lyon  1:00:36

for everybody.

Jordan Shallow  1:00:39

Everybody’s for its performance, it because it is the summation of inputs and outputs. It’s the summation of of stimulus and adaptation, that’s what you’re going to get is performance. Is performance improving, is it not? Okay, if it is not, we are doing something wrong. Let’s go through the the laundry list of things we can take if it is, okay, we can we want to assume and at certain stages, a lot of times I think we are we’re improving in spite of what we do, not because of what we do, but can we make predictable improvements? When we run into issues when performance starts to depreciate?

Dr Lyon  1:01:48

Let me ask you this, do you think that there’s benefit to quote just maintaining, not necessarily improving, so for example, someone who, I don’t know, is a parent of three children, and they still want to go to the gym, three to four days a week. And they don’t know what to do, but they want to go and workout and they’re probably not improving performance, or maybe that’s handicapping them. And they should be really working with a trainer and figuring out what the reps and sets and what the, you know, hat and, and bumper stickers should be

Jordan Shallow  1:02:22

right. That’s tough. I mean, I’m so maybe this is old age, but I’m so inclined to lean into the human answer and away from the scientific answer. Yeah, I would say, yes, I would say yes, it’s okay to maintain now. You know, I in my own personal life, and how I deal with things like there’s you’re either progressing or you’re falling back, right, because the Earth is still spinning, and you’re still getting older, and we’re all gonna die. So you better do something

Dr Lyon  1:02:46

Ah depressing.

Jordan Shallow  1:02:46

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a ride for sure. But like it, that principle still applies. But how, how applicable is that principle in like, a normal normal person, like when I say normal, aren’t in the health and fitness industry, like someone has a nine to five with kids, like, that’s gonna be really difficult to apply that. But I obviously think like, in situations where we can, because the opposite is also true. And this is, I think, a really good point to bring up, look at myself, patting myself on the points,  Doing a great job! really, is the idea that when we optimize optimization and adaptation are on a on a sliding scale. And I think a lot of people, especially the emergence of health and fitness information at scale, which is great, but people end up over optimizing. And they realized that adaptation is a skill, like adaptation, learning how to adapt as a meta skill, because it is the meta skill of learning,

Dr Lyon  1:03:39

Wait, What does that mean? Over optimizing

Jordan Shallow  1:03:40

over optimizing? Okay? So like,

Dr Lyon  1:03:43

uh-Oh, you’re shifting. So this is like, oh, we need to get a standing.

Jordan Shallow  1:03:47

No, you don’t need me standing. Because then the hands start going, Oh, these cameras look really nice. There’s a prevailing market and it’s the same fitness wearable market. This is a this is fitness, wearable recovery boots and infrared this and buckets that you go in cold water or whatever, which is like like that we could dive into like, respiratory arrhythmias and all that stuff. But is it really going to be the thing that kind of sets you over the edge? It’s like no, a lot of times you’re building a fragile state, right optimization, not a patient like optimized when you can but adapt when you have to. And I think that’s where people lose it is like oh, I need to have this before I work out or I need to have ten out I need to do 10,000 steps and it’s like no, you go to bed go to bed like it’s 10 o’clock at night you’re I can hear my neighbor upstairs pacing the logo, get my steps and I was like, I’m going to shoot you through the floor if you do not go to bed because the going to bed is probably going to be better for you than hitting these arbitrary landmarks. So you end up in a position with like, you know, excessive morning routines and, and supplementation regimens and training regimens that put you in a very fragile glass box and if something goes wrong, the whole thing is built up on House of Cards and it it all topples over. So I think like, and if you have to hardwire that into your programming, it’s like, look, I’m going to wake up once or twice a week and train at 5am. Why? Because it’s going to break my dependency on these things, right?

Dr Lyon  1:05:14

I love that. I actually really love that.

Jordan Shallow  1:05:17

it’s a very, it’s a very dangerous, I won’t say dangerous, dangerous. It’s not like someone putting a nine millimeter in your mouth. But like it can. It’s just a very counterproductive narrative, and I hate the word narrative. But conversation that’s being sold at large to justify the wearing of x, y, and Zed or the taking of x, y and Zed supplements, this is like, Barney sorts it out, like you’re gonna be okay. And like no one’s there is a small fraction of the percentage of people on the planet that are going to really benefit from hyper optimization. But even then on their best day, something can go wrong. And there’s

Dr Lyon  1:05:52

Totally

Jordan Shallow  1:05:53

but it’s like, it’s it’s like

Dr Lyon  1:05:56

think about a military. Those guys. I mean, listen, I had one guy and his use a pair rescue and we’ve had a bunch of seals, obviously, in our chain, things are not perfect. In fact, if they were be shocking, yeah. But we still have to perform.

Jordan Shallow  1:06:10

And I think it’s more about the Delta than the peak in the valley. So the lowest point doesn’t matter, the highest point doesn’t matter. It’s the distance between the two points. So if we look at like, and you could, you could almost run a parallel conversation between like performance, and like parasympathetic and sympathetic, or even like, those who are more fat adaptive, or those who can tolerate carbs, like it’s, you know, if you’re a Keto person, and you’re only eating, like, primarily fats, and protein, you stay away from carbohydrates, and you end up with some level of like, intolerance, you can’t really go in flux from like, being able to maintain a particular body composition or maintain lower states of inflammation in any particular diet. So if you’re hardcore in keto, and you don’t ingest, like a lot of like starches, or I don’t really know what their deal is, but let’s say it starches, that sounds right, yeah. And then you ingest some of that all of a sudden, like, you’re on the shelf for three weeks. And he’s like, Oh, I mean, my stomach’s really big. Whether it’s like, Well, what was the point of your thing, right, where you have someone who can’t tolerate fat for whatever reason, or on the flip side, if you have someone who’s very sympathetically charged, right, like very high, like high tone athletes, and you have someone who’s going to be more parasympathetic, right, sort of like the gardener in the war, and the warrior in the garden

Dr Lyon  1:07:18

totally,

Jordan Shallow  1:07:19

that if you map all those people on like, hey, this person’s highest highest here, but they’re only the lowest lowest here, and their delta is the space in between that on the graph, and you took someone whose highest point wasn’t as high, but their Delta, their range, I’m able to go from high to low from carbs to fats are sympathetic to parasympathetic. And the speed by which you can traverse that that delta the difference between those two points, it’s the space in between and the velocity, you can move in between them that matters. Not so much the highest peak of that.

Dr Lyon  1:07:49

That’s bri, I mean, I had never thought about that.

Jordan Shallow  1:07:52

It’s just, it’s a meta relationship that we see all the time, right, where it’s like, the people need to be in the hyper optimal states. But then those are never the people that win, right? It’s the people who have an ability to like, like, you see it in the most its the smallest expression of athletic movements like fighting is like UFC mixed martial arts is basically, it’s static, overcome by dynamic, and be really rigid, please don’t move me. And then all of a sudden, I see an opportunity, I need to be very fluid, like I think of the scene in the Batman movie, where he’s like getting Morgan Freeman to make his like wings. And it’s just like a tarp. And you put electric current through it, and it goes rigid. That’s athleticism, right. But that what you’re seeing there when someone can like, have their arm almost broken and needs to be completely relaxed when someone’s trying to rip their arm off their body. And then all of a sudden, they see an opportunity to like your sweep out a leg or something like that. So they have to be like very, like static. And then they need to be overcome with dynamics, and then they need to be very explosive. It’s not the most explosive guy that wins fights. It’s not it’s the person that can go from the most relaxed to the most explosive, as fast as possible, right? It’s not the most relaxed guy that wins fights. It’s not the most dynamic guy that wins fights. It’s the person that can go from static to dynamic in the greatest range of the fastest velocity.

Dr Lyon  1:09:10

Wow do you This is like, more of a hypothetical question. Do you think it’s like that in life?

Jordan Shallow  1:09:15

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think training is a really good microcosm, because it’s physical learning. And the outcomes are so tangible, because we can look at people learning skills and objectively and subjectively be going like that looks better. And that is heavier, that is faster. And we can and the best part is you can teach it, and it’s okay, this is gonna get you want to get metaphysical on the number one principle and like, we haven’t talked about this yet. The way you teach someone how to go there, is teach them where they are. And that’s, like, you want to open that book and be my therapist. I’ll tell you, my childhood, but it’s, that’s the number one thing when we want to we have someone who’s like no longer hyper vigilant say they’re stronger than the state of gravity. We want to ascend their ability to learn skills or or ascend there, the hierarchy of skills to learn, and we want to expedite that process as fast as possible, we need to have them be aware of where they are in space. And, again, it’s the Richard mill. It’s the complexity of the nervous system that leads to the simplicity of the application, it’s, we look at the central nervous system primarily, there’s like a part of our central nervous, it’s called the cerebellum, like this walnut shaped projection off of the posterior aspect of the brainstem, three components of the cerebellum and the whole, the cerebellum, like you’re moving brain, right? So rhythm, coordination, timing, tone, like people that are ever worked. I don’t know why it’s because maybe because I used to work with construction workers, but like, I always think of like a construction worker come in manual therapy, and you put your hand in their hip, and it feels like this. This person is like, smoke four packs a day, like oxidative stress, you know, the center of mass, they’re not super, super strong. And it’s like they’re on high tone. It’s the brain is contracting, everything, everything is rigid, they have no range of motion, they’re super stiff. You know, historically, we looked at that and go, Oh, that’s a local tissue level problem, stretch it and boom, roll it or whatever. There’s something. And it’s a well, no, because it’s all it’s all centrally mediated. Right? So the cerebellum kind of enters into this conversation of going, Okay, how do we then what are the principles by which people learn? Right? Well, they need to know where they are first, right? And we can kind of tie this back to the skill acquisition model where it’s like, do you play an instrument?

Dr Lyon  1:09:15

Definitely not.

Jordan Shallow  1:09:15

Okay. So like guitar, right? So you have six strings on some guitar, there’s E, A, D, G, B, E. So I need to know, if I’m looking at sheet music, I go, Okay, I want to play an F note, I look at it thing. And then in between the first two lines, I’ll just circle and I look at that and go That’s an F, in between the two lines. If there’s a circle in between those two lines, that’s an F. But I haven’t made a sound yet. I just know this thing. I just know the circle equals F and I go, okay, that’s called, that’s a cognitive thing. I know that when I see it, then there’s an association that’s made, I go, Okay, I’m gonna put my first finger on the first fret of the E string. And then I’m going to hit the string and no one pitch me on that, but it’s F. I know associated that right and then when I’m playing Smoke on the Water Flight of the Bumblebee, when I see little circle, I can just autonomically go bop my finger right to that first fret, right? So that’s like, but I need to know where it is first, and then I need to know where it needs to go. Right. So cerebellum takes care of that. For us, like we have these three sub components. One is the stimulus cerebellum, the spinal cerebellum, and the cerebral cerebellum. Spinal is the most interesting. So maybe we will end there if Can I do this?

Dr Lyon  1:12:34

Course!

Jordan Shallow  1:12:35

Okay, put on a pot of coffee. This is like this is the probably like the most fun thing to conceptualize, because we take for granted how complex movement is. And if we really start to look at the ones and zeros, we can like, wow, we can hack. And I hate to use this word on a podcast, especially a fitness podcast, because I don’t want anyone call me a biohacker.

Dr Lyon  1:12:55

Well, it’s not technically a fitness podcast,

Jordan Shallow  1:12:57

okay. It’s a medical  Yes. Okay, with a chiropractor. But you can look at movement when you start to look at this, like the ones and zeros of movement, right? So we’re really looking at, like command line movement source code, when we start to look at this, because there are things that we do all the time. Like, I just scratched my head. Why did I do that? Right, but I did it. And we just take it for granted that why did that happen? But there’s reason why that stuff happened. So if we look at, like motor learning, and sort of pertinent to this conversation, cerebellum, posterior aspect of the brainstem, three major components, vestibular cerebellum, cerebellum, cerebral cerebral, let’s start with the Cerebro Cerebro cerebellum kind of has two major components, it has a component that tells us where we are in space, and that component that tells us where we’re going. So anyone who ever uses the word like motor pattern, right? So motor patterns, I want you to think of like zip folders on your computer. So if if someone is sending me like a very large video file, they’re going to compress it, they’re going to send it to me, I’m going to unzip it, and I’m going to open it on my own. So this like five gig video doesn’t take four days to send over an email. Right? So that’s like we have those in our brain for every activity we can imagine. Like an activity we’ve performed or activities we’ve seen, like for me like a backswing, I have to go I usually go home once a year to some other friend’s bachelor party and they make me golf and it’s the worst three hours of my life, but I’ve done it the last like seven years, I’ve maybe played 100 and so many

Dr Lyon  1:12:59

There you go. How more friends do you have that are getting married  back to the top of new york.

Jordan Shallow  1:14:27

like dude, I that was my, that’s my limit. But somewhere in my file folders in my cerebral cortex, in my pre and primary motor planning areas in my brain, I have these old dusty folders and every year I I like dust them off, and I go, Okay, we got to we got to depolarize this series of events, and that’s my nine iron and my driver, my putter, whatever. And so that’s one part. So the cerebral cerebellum gets input from your cerebral cortex, which has all of these motor patterns which are heavily influenced by things like visualization, just like Chicago University of Chicago.  years ago did a study about the power of visualization, improving sport performance, we looked at three cohorts of basketball players to ours, one group went out and shot, the other group went out visualize shooting, and the third group did nothing they were control. And then after the testing was a two week, a two week study, after two weeks, it wasn’t really a 25% increase in those that were shooting a 21% increase in those that were visualizing. And something like a zero point, whatever, like a non statistically significant improvement of the other group. It’s like, just visualize not actually going through it. And that’s polishing that file. Right, that’s, that’s uploading new iterations into that Dropbox folder in your brain into that compressed zipped folder. Now obviously, if you can go through the process of recalling it and putting it back and recalling it and putting it back, you’re gonna get a little bit better, but that’s not nothing, right? That’s not a, that’s not a marginal improvement. The other part of the cerebral cortex or the Cerebro cerebellum, sorry, so we get the input from the cerebral cortex, we also get input from thing called mechanical receptors. This is gonna be really important, because we have four major mechanical mechanical receptors. So we have pacinian, corpuscles, misers core muscles, Ruffini endings, and Merkel’s dis. Collectively, they’re responsible for relaying transmissions of vibration, deep pressure, skin stretch and light touch. Those are like the major ones, right? And but like, let’s unpack that, because that’s think about going and getting your head Kinesio tape on like you Yeah, okay, but you’re I want to royalties check when a company finally gets on board with this. There’s a bunch of different proposed mechanisms of correction of Kinesiology Tape, right? If any of you watch the Olympic Games, people are kind of covered in it, especially the London Games, the volleyball players were mummified. And we have a nerve ending that free nerve ending in the skin that transmits to the cerebellum. And collectivise is within these three subsystems, and allows us to create almost like think of a motion capture, that’s a really good way to look at what the cerebellum does, like being on a soundstage, somewhere in LA, and they’re trying to make avatar Lord of the Rings or something like that. And there’s an actor that’s like Andy Serkis and Gollum. in Lord of the Rings, for example, he was wearing like a lycra suit, and a headband with a bunch of little like ping pong balls all over it. And then it fed into a central processor. So Andy is standing on a fake rock in LA, but the computer picks up all of this relative, these relative data points, creates an avatar and then just skins it with the character that he wants. So it doesn’t look like him. But it moves the way he’s moving. Right? Our brain does that. Our brain needs to know where we are in space and true. When we start to talk about exercise of skill true, like mastery of a skill, and it’s so hardwired into the language, but we don’t see it is like being able to do it with your eyes closed. And we’ll talk about this in more detail.

Dr Lyon  1:17:46

What would what would that be?

Jordan Shallow  1:17:47

Yeah, like, behind the neck, like behind the back pass? Or like,

Dr Lyon  1:17:50

I think I’ve mastered driving, but that’s like not Yeah, let’s let’s not.

Jordan Shallow  1:17:55

But so here’s so cerebral cerebellum is reliant on taking in this mechanical receptor activity. So think of these mechanical receptors, like little leads on our own suit. Rather than having like a lycra suit on we have our skin, right. So it’s always there, we have these mechanical receptors that are giving us input into our cerebellum, and allowing us to go into central processing and be like, hey, you know, I’m not looking at my heel right now. But I know it’s there. Right? If you’re watching the World Cup, you think they’re looking down to the ball? No, they know it’s there, right? Because a lot of that is tactile, not all of it, and not the most important pieces, but that sensory input is so important. So those mechanical receptors feed into the cerebral cerebellar pathway. So we have kind of an amalgamation of hey, where are you? Where are you in space, right this very second, Merkel’s despisers core bustles pacinian, corpuscles and Ruffini. Attic, and they feed up into the cerebellum. And the interesting thing is the speed by which they transmit, it’s transmitted like 34.352 point, or sorry, 35 to 75 meters per second. Just like those at home might not be familiar with like those relative speeds. At max velocity, Usain Bolt is likely running 17 meters per second, right? Because if he does, logically, if he does 100 meters in less than 10 seconds, right, but he’s not running the first 3040 50 meters, that is max velocity. And when he gets max velocity, like 60 or 70 meters, it’s probable that he’s running 70 And maybe even faster. So these things are going to your brain faster than Usain Bolt. On an interesting side note, if we had these four mechanical receptors nociception the idea of pain transmission to the brain, no pain is very complicated. Pain science is very complicated. But pain has a lot of redundancy backup. So the idea of mechanical pain sort of pertinent to this conversation nociception breaks down into fast pain and slow pain, fast pain, probably two to 20 meters per second, slow pain point five to two meters per second, which means if I put my hand on the stove, that transmission is getting sent to my brain slower than constant mechanical receptor activity to my brain, which means our body really wants to know where we are Want to know where we are more with more importance than wanting us to know that our hands on the stove, right like that pit up pain that we feel like we feel the heat before we feel the pain, which is crazy. And that’s like that just goes to show you how important it is for us to know where we are. And that’s not even the most. That’s not even the fastest transmission of a sensory input into the brain because we haven’t even talked about the muscle yet, which is like where I think we should let most of the time in the conversation. So are we ever dealing with the levels of inception, cerebellum, three components, cerebral cerebellum has cerebral cortex, which has your files of where are you going? Right? Where are your dropbox folders? What are your motor patterns? What are your golf swings, your tennis swings, your bicep curls, your calf raises all that, that stays there? Where are you going to go? simultaneously getting fed in with mechanical receptors? It goes, where are you? Where are you right now. So we know how to adjust your position to go to these places. Right. So that’s Cerebro cerebellum. The stimulus there cerebellum is a is a pathway that mixes in your eyes and your inner ear apparatus. So your vestibular apparatus in your inner ear, like your your true Balance Center, helps you keep your eye fixated on a target while you execute a movement. golf swing. Classic example. You need to look down while the rest of your body looks this way. Do you remember you brought up driving? Do you remember learning how to drive?

Dr Lyon  1:21:17

Yeah.

Jordan Shallow  1:21:18

Do you know the story? I have one.

Dr Lyon  1:21:21

Mine’s not a very good story.

Jordan Shallow  1:21:22

Oh mine’s terrible. So I was driving a parking lot on Riverside Drive with my mom, she would take me three or four times a week after school. And I grew up in like pretty ghetto neighborhood. Sorry, it is what it is. And four o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe she got off work pick me up in our Chrysler Sebring convertible. And I would I remember doing a lap. It’s probably the third or fourth time we’ve gone out my mom’s like very mom, like, you’re gonna be doing this or till 20. And you’re not going to drive on roads until I’m dead. And then we did a lap and I saw this car in the car. There was two people, and there’s a bunch of cars parked wherever. And I like just paid special attention. The Subaru. They’re like teenagers in their 20s. And I do a lap and every time I do a lap, they have less clothes on and I said, Oh, this is the worst thing ever. And then sure enough, like well, the time like the sixth lap, there’s just an ass cheek. You’re with your mom, too, which is like, Oh, I can’t even watch. Like movies with sex in it. I can’t I leave. I’m 32 years old. Like it’s just too straight. So I pulled out into the road. I was like, I’m out. I choose death. And I pull out. But I remember this because it makes me now as like I learned about this and I apply it in training. I think about the vestibular cerebellum, because I remember what happened when I pulled them to Riverside Drive. And I was checking my blind spot. But as I check my blind spot, I shifted into oncoming traffic, because I didn’t have an ability to associate my head position with move into my body, which is actually a huge cornerstone of athleticism, right? Our ability to gyroscopicly move our body around our head and our head around her body is like a fairly unique property to visually oriented animals. An owl. Amazing like you ever see someone hold like a and they do this. I’m so glad that you’ve got that reference. Yeah, no, totally. the owl thing. It’s quite excuse me, I have a three year old. What do you think we want? Right,  Brilliant. I love it. I’m coming over/ That’s called ocular reflex. So that so in integrating vision, right? A lot of times we’re too dependent on vision for learning. It’s our crutch because we’re such visually dominant creatures, which is great vision can be a great tool, but it’s a better master. For example, I learned how to squat when I was 15 years old.

Dr Lyon  1:23:24

What does that mean? It’s a bad it can be a good tool, but it’s a better master.

Jordan Shallow  1:23:28

So I learned how to squat when I was like 15 years old. But in any commercial gym. And this is probably a good takeaway for the my NARPS out there.

Dr Lyon  1:23:35

Never go live that down. That is Kara’s fault. Kara taught me that word.

Jordan Shallow  1:23:39

Okay, I’ll blame it on it. Yeah, that sounds like her.

Dr Lyon  1:23:40

Yeah she taught me that word.

Jordan Shallow  1:23:44

So I learned to squat in a commercial gym. And if you’re listening to this, and you train in a commercial gym, to keep this in mind. So I learned to squat in front of the mirror, all squat racks in all commercial gyms across the world. And I’ve been to all of them face to mirror. And I was like, I thought I was pretty good. And like could squat a decent amount of weight. And then we moved to California, I started training at a powerlifting gym, no mirrors, mirrors. And I realized for the longest

Dr Lyon  1:24:07

unless you go to Mark Bell’s gym, he now has a whole lot

Jordan Shallow  1:24:11

the internets changed. But if you go to the powerlifting Gym, in this case, so when I went to boss barbell club, I, I was there and I realized really quickly that, oh, I never knew how to squat. I knew how to fix my squat. Right? Because I was constantly I was dependent on that visual crutch. I had no idea where I was in space. I needed the visual part because I couldn’t see where everything was by feeling. Right. So then we’ll talk a little bit on the last pathway, what that final and most important piece is, so I a lot of people are too visually reliant on seeing things without feeling things, right. So allowing the Cerebro cerebellum to like, visualize these things in your brain with your eyes closed. We will close your eyes and visualize Well, why because if you don’t close your eyes, you’re just going to use this and this is going to take over because we’re so dominant the vision is the only sense that’s embedded into all five lobes of the brain, right? Our occipital lobe is completely designated. So we have one lobe that’s completely designated division back here, the optic nerve goes straight from the eyes right down to the occipital lobe. And then in frontal lobe processing and cognition, and prior to lobe and temporal lobe, and cerebellum, they’re all embedded into vision is embedded into all of them. So it becomes really important. So that’s vestibular cerebellum. And the last one is spinal cerebellar. And mind you these are all aggregating together simultaneously in real time to give you a motion capture, to give you a playing avatar of where you are in space in your in your subconscious. So you can move voluntarily and involuntarily at the same time. So the spinal cerebellum is really its main purpose is to relay two things. And that’s going to be so we kind of use like nociception, up here, mechanical receptors here. And we have Golgi tendon organs and muscle spindles, right. And this is where I think when we talk about learning, and learning exercise and practicing skills, if we looked at muscles in this endeavor as sensory organs, we’d be way further along in our ability to adopt these models of training. And we would get way better results much quicker in practicing and learning these skills. Because a lot of times people like all muscles are done, they just move from insertion, or it’s like, no muscles are the the primary conduit of sensory input back into the brain, primarily the spinal cerebellar pathway. So when you think about the muscle spindles in the Golgi tendon organ reflex, they’re essentially, they’re very similar in the way that they’re stimulated. One is like the muscle spindles and then the muscle and the Golgi tendon organism, the tendon, and these two things are going to relay their transmissions off into the spinal cerebellar tract into the cerebellum, at large, at 120 130 meters per second, mind you putting your finger on the stove is 20 meters per second, right? So are wanting us to know where we are in space based off of like an assumption that a hierarchy can be created, based off of velocity of transmission. Like, I run into this problem all the time. satiation is like a really slow like thing, because forever no one ever died from not eating or from eating too much. That’s changing now. But you know, it’s like, yeah, we’ll get there, we’ll get there. And then 20 minutes later, like, Oh, my God, I’m gonna do that. But your body wants to know where you are in space right away. And muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organs are the primary thing that’s going to relate into the brain the fastest. So Mecanim receptors are great. They go into the cerebral cortex get related to the cerebral cerebellum, but we’re a lot of times people miss, and we’re half there. Stretching, people love to stretch, right? From a manual therapy, manual medicine standpoint, when something hurts people come to me go, what’s the stretch for this? And sometimes it could be x, y or zed Because Golgi tendon organs. Note, there’s different things static and dynamic and ballistic and all that. But what I want people to take away is, what should I stabilize? Stability is like a really, it’s almost like a taboo word, which it shouldn’t be. Our body has a wanting this do not fall over. We’ve a lot of autonomic processes ever since we’ve become bipedal like because we walk on two legs, and we’re one of the very few land creatures and creatures that do that. We have a tendency to want to topple over. We have a lot of autonomic processes that stop that from happening and allow us to be biped ambulatory. So when we think about stability, stability is essentially from a muscular perspective, it comes down to the muscle spindle. muscle spindles from a sensory receptor standpoint are the most abundant sensory receptor in the body. And a lot of people don’t realize that there’s 50,000 muscle spindles in your entire body. There’s like 600 muscle and that includes muscles in your face. So you don’t have any muscle spindles in muscles of your face. But like when you walk, for example, you have muscles on your lateral hip, and there’s no such thing as a stability muscle per se, because every muscle has this, this autonomic loop where they go, okay, you know, something is stretching, like let’s talk Golgi tendon organ really quick, like if I’m stretching my bicep. Alright, so my shoulder is going into extension, my elbow is going into extension and my wrist is going into pronation. My bicep tendon, if it feels a stretch, it will do like two things. Primarily, it will inhibit the agonist muscle the bicep itself, so it’ll like allow that to relax, and in loaded situations, it will activate or stimulate the tricep to contract. Both of those things are meant to alleviate tension on the bicep itself. muscle spindles work a little bit differently. muscle spindles have an anti or an agonist motor, an agonist inhibitory cycle, and they also have an agonist excitatory cycle, which means rather than stretching like a Golgi tendon organ, where we’re inhibiting the agonist or the bicep and activating the tricep, we’re inhibiting and activating the bicep. It’s an on off switch, right? So if you’ve ever seen someone, a really good example, is to get someone to stand on one leg and watch their foot. Just do this. It’s not that it’s not weak ankles. There’s not enough musculature in the ankles to make it weak or strong to any sort of meaningful any more meaningful way. What you’re seeing Seeing is actually the hip turning on these muscles turning on and off, because they’re feeling a bit of a stretch, think of a muscle spindle, like like a finger trap, right? So we have to like we have what’s called an intrafusal muscle fiber and wrapped around this fiber is like a finger trap that that finger trap that the actual device or the or the spindle spindles around and what’s called an inter fusible muscle fiber, these are non contractile elements of muscle, right? So, if I’m standing on one leg, and I start to fall over my piriformis, glute max, glute Meade, we’re gonna start to stretch, all of a sudden, this stimulates into the nervous system into the central nervous system into the spinal cord going, Hey, this is this is happening, what do we do? It’s like, well, that’s a muscle spindle, it’s stretching, we should probably contract it. So through a really quick feedback loop that doesn’t even go up to the brain, it goes right back into the muscle and goes, Oh, muscle is stretching, and then it contracts all of the surrounding, extra fuse on muscle fibers. Those are contractile island. So what you’re seeing with a foot that’s shaking, so Oh, you’re really, you’re you got really weak ankles. It’s like, no, no, you don’t have weak ankles that need to be strengthened, you have an unstable hip that needs to be stabilized. Right? So we need to be able to understand the components of center of mass and base support, put them in an environment where that’s a skill they need to practice, and it’s just at their leading edge of being able to overcome it. If someone can’t stand on one leg, am I going to load them up with a dumbbell in one hand and make them hinge? No, I’m probably just going to be like, Hey, here’s like a dowel, can you stand on one leg now, right, and then we’re going to slowly manipulate those two things. And what that’ll do is that will create an awareness that’ll send that transmission because there’s a muscle spindle loops back to contract or loops back to relax. It’s sending a signal up the brain saying, Hey, we’re doing this here. And then the brain goes, like what is here, where is here, and it starts to be able to put all of these little motion capture things in line with our mechanical receptors in line with our nociception. And be able to create a high resolution motion capture image of where your body is in space. And this will allow you to operate at low tone. This will allow you to be more efficient in the way you move and allow you to learn skills faster, because you know where you are. And that’s the fundamental, the fundamental components to motor learning is that knowing where you are and knowing where you’re going

Dr Lyon  1:32:06

do you think that these components, it’s so it’s so interesting, I’m sure Stephan is like, whoa, mind blown

Jordan Shallow  1:32:13

He’s like Oh, my God, let me go home.

Dr Lyon  1:32:16

Do you think that these things change as you age, as the muscle changes? Do these mechanical receptors change?

Jordan Shallow  1:32:23

Yeah, I mean, I don’t have hard evidence, but I would see like a plasticity, I would assume a plasticity not necessarily at the muscle, I would assume it would probably be more neurological first. Because it is it is learning it follows the tenants of learning. And when we see like, just like me, if I tried to learn, I was living in the Middle East for a little bit this year. And like, trying to learn Arabic, I was like, and I watched, you know, my friends, my friend’s daughters are both bilingual in French. And they have this pick it up like that. So I think it’s, it’s more of like a central plasticity type thing. If I had to make an assumption. I mean, to be totally honest, I don’t work with, you know, in NFLs. It stands for not for long. So like the oldest athlete I think I work with might be like, by age, like, early 30s. But I would assume that, indeed, in working with, you know, older in the 40s 50s 60s, that the process takes longer, but it it doesn’t take as long as people think because a lot of times, right, what we’re doing now and training like elderly populations, is we’re barking we’re thinking we’re going to open doors, right? We’re really not looking at the ones and zeros. We’re not we’re not writing proper exercise prescriptions, because we’re not writing proper lines of exercise code, right? We’re just like, oh, yeah, like, you know, having someone I remember trying to client who was six foot eight and was 73 years old. We’re just gonna talk a poster child of slip and fall. That’s it. Yeah, guys, center of mass is way too far from his base to support lives in a one bedroom place in Palo Alto doesn’t have to go up or down stairs ever. Like this is a concern. He drops, you know, broken hip fractured rib, he’s dead in fifth percent over dead inside of six months or a year. I think there’s a statistic. So it’s like, alright, well, he is unstable. Structurally. He’s a tree. He’s huge, right? So he has all of these forces. And this is where we need to look back is you stronger than the forces of gravity acting on him know, what are we doing? Just gotta draw. Right? We practice a bit of skills like that. I think his first squat variation was me holding his hands to a high box squat was like, Yeah, let’s sort that and then we put them on a leg press and drop that right down. So I think like anything that there’s going to be the age is gonna have a deleterious effect on our ability to learn. But I think if we understand the mechanisms by which we learn, we’re nowhere near with our current paradigms around resistance training across any population. At the point where we’ve optimized motor learning because we are not looking in the right place we don’t we don’t as at large in the market, or in the industry. Really go into the granular details, the mechanisms turning the tumbles to unlock these adaptations or writing the source code to to run higher level operating systems for movement, we’re just not there yet. So, yes.

Dr Lyon  1:35:04

Do you think it’ll ever be standardized?

Jordan Shallow  1:35:06

Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, it’s it’s always people that like, I remember reading like Charles Poliquin research as a kid. That’s what got me into doing, like what I do now. And he was talking about cluster training 26 years before the research on cluster training came out. You know, will there is the academic institution too big to topple over? Probably, I always think there’s going to be a validity for academics and a need for it. But with that, and I mean, you’re familiar with like the publication, system, machine, ruse input, any word you want to use? I think there’s still some net positive, I just think that Oh, okay. People will have to extrapolate from first principles. And for then people in academia to be like, oh, let’s explore this deeper. And then, like, Poliquin, did like a cluster training works. He’s like, Yeah, no, I’ve won like 180 and Olympic medals since you guys were researching it. So it’s, it’s, I think, in the, from what I see, it’s not being done, but with the results you get from it. It’s fairly predictive that okay, this might not be precisely the mechanisms at play, but we’re way closer than any other model that we’ve been using up till now.

Dr Lyon  1:36:17

Could there be one or two exercises that people could always do?

Jordan Shallow  1:36:21

Yeah, that’s a good question. I semi prepared for this question, I think lunging. Now, obviously, there’s like strength to body weight ratios can’t Are you strong enough, push yourself up? Like I and I’ve literally done this if I’ve reversed band lunge to people before, which means like, put bands at the top of squat rack can hold on to it. So as you sink down, and your muscle needs to do more work, the band’s making you lighter, essentially. So I think Lunges are great, because you’re by bipedal ambulation. Walking is like a fundamental rule book, or like safemode, like gait cycles, super interesting cascade of like muscular contractions and Structural Function, structural functional interactions. And it’s how we’ve evolved to move. So a lot of force production comes down to tenants of of gait cycle. So I would say lunging is just, let’s see what you got. It’s really like, it’s really pushing the outer limits of gait cycle, per se. And there’s different loading parameters and all that. But if I would say one exercise that people could probably do forever, it would be some unilateral lower body movement. I think Lunges are great because of the dynamic. There. You’re exacerbating gait cycle to a point where it forces you to learn that and appreciate that as a skill. Because you when you see people walking with their toes out and their spine extended, you realize that, oh, people can walk bad. That’s interesting. So lunging would be one. I will honestly I would stick with that. Then once we get to the rib cage, like there’s it’s it’s two variant based off of like structural presentation to give a broad base prescription, but I would say lunging would be the one I would recommend for sure.

Dr Lyon  1:37:51

I love it. That’s a great takeaway for people.

Jordan Shallow  1:37:55

You got one an hour and a half. But yeah, no matter principle is like, look at exercise, like learning, right? But it doesn’t all some of its work and some of its practice, practice some stuff that you’re bad at. Understand that you’re going to get better. You don’t have your training principles for that with those exercises, not be training principles, be learning principles you want to like learn how to learn read pedagogical research, learn how people learn, don’t learn how people train when you’re trying to learn, right, if you want to learn how people train, then apply that to this, excuse me to the stuff you’re training, right, your your leg presses or your quad extensions. And maybe one day, when you’re really good at that, you could probably train that to failure, and you could squat to failure and get them big legs or whatever. Right. But I think that if we’re trying to salvage this, I think, understand where in your training, you can practice the skills, increase the frequency, right and use the principle of interleaving. Right? I’m not going to cram for a test the day before, I’ll study little bits every single day, I’ll interleave those bouts of learning. Yeah, I’ve tried, I’ve tried to rein it in. Because I mean, I think if you understand or you can attempt to understand the the complexity. What makes this sophisticated is that the complexity, it drives more simplicity. Or like if you come down to Florida, and you watch me train NFL players, like you’d like I don’t get it. Exactly. That’s the that’s the best part.

Dr Lyon  1:39:15

You know, you’re taking these oftentimes not thought about concepts and bringing it to life for people. Because oftentimes when, you know, many people think about training, again, they’re just thinking about reps and sets, but they’re not thinking about the nervous system input, which seems like that’s, again, what you said the software before the hardware. So I think this is really valuable. I mean, the whole point of this podcast is to have transparent conversations of really interesting experts talking about things that are going to be very valuable,

Jordan Shallow  1:39:48

I hope. I hope we checked a little bit.

Dr Lyon  1:39:52

Jordan, thank you so much for coming on.

Jordan Shallow  1:39:54

Pleasure. Thank you so much.

Dr Lyon  1:39:55

Where can people find you?

Jordan Shallow  1:39:57

Instagram, it’s at the underscore underscore underscore or muscle underscore doc. Oh the education stuff WWW dot predash script.com via Rana talk shop, email me Jordan at the muscle doc.com. If you’re ever in South Florida? Just stopby House of athlete.

Dr Lyon  1:40:11

All right, I’ll put all these links in and thank you again.

Jordan Shallow  1:40:14

Thanks so much.

Dr Lyon  1:40:16

The doctor Gabrielle Lyon podcasts and YouTube are for general information purposes only, and do not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no patient doctor relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast YouTube or materials linked from a podcast or YouTube is at the user’s own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition. They may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professional for any such conditions. This is purely for entertainment and educational purposes only