 The only easy day was yesterday. Hey! Get your heads up and get your eyes open. Stop trying to hide from the pain. Heads up, eyes open. Welcome to The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday, the official Navy SEAL podcast. In training, when you push yourself to the limits, there's always a risk of injury. In the special operations field, this is even further magnified. Today we speak about the fundamentals of fitness and injury prevention with expert Don Kessler, a man from the highest levels of competition. He's on the ground every day, helping special warfare trainees perform their best and has some solid advice. Let's get started. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us and speak about what you do for NSW. First, let's talk a little bit about you for a minute. 40 plus years of physical fitness background with athletes varying from high school students to Olympians. What do you think uniquely qualifies you for your specialized position that you have at NSW? Well, I started out as a hospital corpsman after getting my master's degree in physical education. And this was during a Vietnam time. And I eventually got stationed at the U.S. Naval Academy and working as a hospital corpsman there, I moved into athletic training as my profession. But I had years of experience in the military going into that. And I loved it so much that I decided I was getting out of the military to continue on in athletic training. So I went through, again, working in high schools, colleges. I worked at the Olympics or worked with U.S. soccer. So there were many different variations I went to. And when the time came to retire from college athletics, I didn't feel like I should stop. And so I contacted some people in the NSW community that I knew and said, I think I could be some help or benefit to them. And they said, we agree. They thought that my experiences would be able to help teach some of these people some of the things that we do in athletics, but also that we should treat the NSW people as division one or professional athletes. How does the training that you do now specialize from the typical sports medicine that you've seen earlier in your career? My job in the medical side of Bud's training is that I'm to do the functional rehabilitation. So we have three physical therapists that work with us that will work with the initial part of an injury and I'm to functionally get them back into full action. And they call it the BRIDGE program, taking you from the very simple things of coming out of an injury or a post-op and getting you back to able to do the obstacle course. So that's what my job is. It's unique among any of the programs that we have in that I have to know what are the things that they ask of the students, both CLN SWIC, to make it through the training. And so my functional rehabilitation is built towards what do you need to do to pass or what do you need to do to pass through Hell Week or the tour? So it is very similar to a lot of other athletic training, just a different kind of end game, so to speak, in terms of what their capabilities need to be. It's like with any sport, and I used to tell the students that I would have as athletic training students that you have to look at the team you're working with and know what is required of them in each thing and even watch people coach them and decide if I'm going to rehab them, what am I doing specifically for that sport? If it's a thrower, if it's a swimmer, if it's a runner, I need to know specific things I need to do to get them back to full rehabilitation. And so what I did was spent about two months just watching what they did in training and say, all right, when I go to do my rehab, these are the things that I'm going to need to incorporate in the functional training to get them back to full 100%. Is there differences because of the loading that these guys are under a lot of times with heavy packs? It seems like to me that's one of the differences between training for a marathon or another body weight endurance sport versus the types of things that these operators do. They carry a lot of gear. Would you say that that's accurate? In the early phases of training, the heavy gear is just moved from one place to another. It's not something that they're really training with. They will eventually step that up and move that up until then they get later phases. But most of the problems we run into are things that involve endurance, whether it's a run, whether it's a swim, whether it's an obstacle course, and we have to get them ready to be able to handle those and repeat those over and over and over again. Do you see that the injuries that you typically see are, like you just mentioned, are a result from maybe a too sudden of an increase of exercise volume? I would say there is certainly an increase in volume. Some people come in trained too much for it already and any addition that is made to their training puts them over the edge. The people who are peaking slowly have less problems and that's what Bud's prep does and that's what Beau does is to try to peek you and bring you along slowly. Most of that works fairly well. Many people come in way over trained and become stale, as they say in athletics, and therefore start on the down slope even though they're going to slowly start increasing what they have been doing. I think it would be helpful if maybe you kind of unpack that a little bit talking about the progression of the scale or intensity. You're talking kind of about like peaking in terms. Do you mean condition or wear on the body? Can you maybe unpack that a little bit? I would say more than anything else from injury-wise, it's the wear on the body. On the physical therapy side, 60% of the injuries that we see on a daily basis are stress fractures. 60% are stress fractures. And so we have to slowly build them up and if they do get a stress fracture we have to again start at ground zero and build that up slowly. So that's what I mean by that with prep students, they start them doing a little bit of running and try to increase that as time goes along and try to make it go faster. When they get to here, again in basic orientation, again it starts a little bit slow trying to show you what you're doing and doing it once in a while and increasing it as you get into first phase you will then have everything thrown at you every day and then when you get to hell week it runs on 24 hours a day. So it peaks, the progression does that gives them the ability if you're doing this right to be able to handle that peak but some people come in too high already or they try to do extra beyond what is needed to be at that phase and then it's too much for them when they add more. So is there a difference between what the SWIC recruits are seeing versus the SEAL recruits in this process? The SWIC and SEAL will start prep together and do everything the same in prep. They will do bow together and then after bow they will break off into their branches. The BCT that the SWIC people will do will be a little bit modified. They won't be doing quite as much quantity but they will still be doing the same things that the SEAL people are doing. So again it's the same exact training they keep right on up until they break out and then there's just a slight variation as to the quantity that is done. You've mentioned the term bow a couple of times can you tell us about that, what that is, what that means? Bow is basic orientation. So when the students come from prep in Great Lakes they are all started out in basic orientation and it's a slow process of trying to learn what is required of them on a daily basis for their swims, for their runs, for the obstacle course, for their barracks inspection, personal inspection. It's a watered down advanced part of what's going to happen in the Hell Week or the tour or any other phase and so they slowly as the weeks go by will increase the intensity of what they're doing and the quantity of what they're doing. Okay, let's roll back maybe a few weeks or months in this kind of process. I'd imagine part of the reason why your voice will be so helpful here is being able to have these recruits hear you before they arrive and go through this orientation process. This is I think the kind of the jewel of being able to talk to you. What do you think these recruits should not do when they're preparing for their PSTs before they even arrive? I would have to say it's almost like getting ready for a track beat. You don't want to be training for a marathon to be able to do a one mile race and the same thing goes with preparing to go to basic training and then to go to prep and then to go to bow. If you're trying to do the amount quantity wise and the intensity that you're going to need further down the road you're going to break down beforehand. So it's important to remember there are requirements to pass the PST shoot for what you need to do to be prepared for those requirements and not worry about what you need to do to get through Hell Week in that the amount of mileage you need to put in or the amount of lift you need to put in or the amount of swimming you need to be in is nowhere near the amount that you're going to need later what you need to be able to do well at what you're going to do at a lower level but by being prepared to doing something at an upper level won't necessarily make you better and may break you down when you get to that upper level. I think that's a really important distinction to make because we've talked with a number of people through this process and there's a sense of continued reflection on the documents and the guides that have been well vetted and written for recruits through this process I think that there's a tendency especially coming from a very high performing collegiate background all these people are athletes to want to push, want to push, want to be the best want to be the top and I'm hearing that continuously don't push to the point where you're hitting your limits follow the measured approach the crawl, walk, run approach that's kind of been echoed by a few different people so it's good to hear that from you too it seems like the guides that are available for people and the training programs that are available for people are designed for your success they're not necessarily for the lowest people on the wrong to be able to get through there was a measured approach for a reason and it's not only just to get people in the right condition but to prevent long term injury. Absolutely right the people that I end up seeing for medical treatment are usually those people who have pushed too hard and that's why I was brought in because they felt that in the past if you were dropped because of medical reason many times you were left by the wayside and never really could get back into what was going on and they found that many of these people were some of the best athletes that they had and they just overtrained and they had a freak accident and got injured and what we wanted to do is take that out and say hey we want people like that we want people who will push themselves but let's give them a framework to work in and rather instead of just going crazy and doing a lot to say here's the measured amount you need to do to get better and that's what we have honed over the years to say I know exactly what it takes for you to have a fracture to get back to running full and I know how many weeks it takes and how much intensity I have to do at each one and if you add more to that you're probably going to get injured again and I've seen it time and time again as it is with the people who have followed the pattern and I'll just say with stress fractures we've dealt with stress fractures I've had 148 guys I've used the Alter G which is a gravity assisted running and of those people all of them have passed only 6 people were re-injured which is about 4% and the history with stress fractures is that if you've had one it's the best predictor of getting another one and you have a 40% chance of being re-injured if you've had a stress fracture so we've been able to hone that down to about 4% which is amazing I'm going off on lectures at colleges and universities to talk about that to try to help them with what we're doing but that's what we're saying we have done this, we have seen this we have a measured approach as to how much you do and the word we try to get at you beforehand is don't wait to get hurt to do this measured amount do the measured amount beforehand so we can bring you along gradually through the training throughout the cycle so for the people that don't have a world-class rehab facility whenever they're in the earlier stages of training is there anything you can say to them about comparing the type of pain that's causing injury versus the pain of your muscles burning can you speak to that a little bit? well, again looking at most of when to stop I guess most of the people we've had are athletes of some sort whether they're swimmers or water polo players ice hockey players they have an idea from high school training or college training about what I need to do to get in shape and there is that soreness when you start getting in shape but after that it never should be a real soreness, you should say hey I got a good workout but you never should be getting sore that the next day I don't think I can do it if you're doing that and you're getting more sore each day then you already started over training and that's one of the best things that we're trying to say is that yes there should be a breakdown but there also has to be recovery you just can't keep pushing every day although you can do running one day swimming a day, biking a day almost like a triathlete and say hey that will get me there I'm part of my body a chance to take off but I'm still working towards the end and that's the approach we push with the patients who are already injured but certainly is necessary for the people who are just starting out so let's say you're earlier on in this process maybe you're six months into training for your PST and maybe you sustain an ankle injury or you determine that you maybe might have stress fractures I'd imagine it's very important and even more so later on in the process to be able to maintain your engine your cardiovascular capability through an injury is there anything you can recommend to people that might be quote nursing an injury early in this process to be able to keep their fitness level up instead of just drowning out? Absolutely we always keep the conditioning when we have somebody who is injured and again we'll use stress fractures as an example because it's one of the most prevalent injuries that we see those people even if they are injured in our crutches they are working out and their workout for aerobically will be sitting in the seat and doing an upper body arm bike or they'll be swimming and eventually if they're off crutches we may have them biking and changing the speeds and resistance and things like that so they're constantly doing aerobic conditioning and then we will eventually take them along to what the phases of running is concerned but if they had an upper body injury with swimming say or the obstacle course again they're on the bike and they're pedaling way or if they can run they will run so they will constantly keep their aerobic base going all the time but we have to work to the specifics of what their injuries are and rehab that injury and then incorporate that into their fitness once they're capable of doing it yeah so it seems like a little bit of that can be done with common sense on your own if you're in the early stages of this training process do something that you can do and try to keep the intensity level going absolutely except for the one machine that we have is gravity specific everything else is something that you would have in the basement of your house a bicycle a medicine ball some dumbbells there is nothing that I use in the rehab that involves anything complicated at all and have stations set up that people will be doing squats or they'll be doing lunges or they'll be doing hamstring curls they will be doing planks they will be doing sit ups dips, pull ups there's constantly things that they can do that involve no special equipment at all and that's what we try to teach them is that you don't need to have big heavy weights of 400 pounds to be able to get through this you need to move your body weight and be able to push that through what is required of you if you could be the voice in a young recruits ear who sees these really quote macho characters who are almost beyond superhuman doing things that people would love to be able to do with their bodies they're strong people obviously there's a focus on strength that I think maybe is a little misplayed I think a lot of the most successful candidates are endurance athletes like I've heard from other people maybe you could maybe summarize a little bit about that kind of philosophy that people have need to be the strongest people on the block to be able to make it through this program is that true or maybe you can give some information there I would say in the eight years that I've been here there are certainly many seal operators who are pretty big, strong, intense but not to the numbers we see on movies or TV shows now that our average guy to be able to do what he has to do is an endurance athlete and I had an operator one time tell me he needs to be able to carry our heaviest weapon 10 miles he doesn't have to carry 10 weapons one mile so they don't need to be that big and that strong to do it they have to be big enough and strong enough to move things and move themselves with heavy backpacks and stuff but the heavier they are themselves the more chance they have of injury and the more difficulty they will have trying to get over the obstacle course or trying to make four mile runs so they have to get strength but again, more than anything else they need endurance the activities they call for and are posed the most strain on are going to be the tour and hell week and it's difficult to make it through if you're too big so I guess maybe if you could be the word of wisdom for these young people to kind of instill some discipline into them on maybe self reflection of what really is needed to get through what kind of advice would you give for people in terms of taking a look at themselves and seeing what should be their goals and such in terms of their physical fitness I think their goals should be what their PST is first what do they need to do to pass the PST and do well do you need to be really strong, have a heavy bench press or a squat to do it I don't think so and that is the first objective they have a need to pass that and do well with it which is going to include speed and endurance and some strength but it's not going to be an over amount of any one of those as they move further down the line in their training they're going to ask more of them and the more of it will be more endurance than it will be strength so be very careful of not trying to do too much of one thinking it will carry over into one of the other fields of swimming or endurance running knowing that that is one of the many measures and so what happens with push-ups after a while of Hell Week especially I tell them the only time you really need neck exercise is when you get to Hell Week the strength you're going to need is on the obstacle course climbing over that doing, climb up the tower things like that and that's what I put in my training is what what are some parts of the obstacle course because that's something I know you're going to have to do outside let's make sure that you have the strength and endurance to do it in here and then I'll let you go to the opposite course and do one obstacle how'd you do that and we move them along like that so none of it has involved that hey I need to get your bench press up or your hand clean up or anything like that I don't do any of that at all we work on muscles that are not even shown in most strength things they're shown mostly in rehab because that's what's injured most of your shoulder, glutes, hamstrings things that people it's not glorified they don't see it but when a seal breaks down a seal instructor breaks down those are the things that happen and we say to them wow if you'd have done this way back when you probably wouldn't need this shoulder operation as a 30 year old operator Pitt was involved in some big studies there and I looked at all the injuries that the seals had and I saw well a lot of these are the same as what these guys are getting in our training if I show them this now hopefully it'll carry through their career that they'll do that twice a week and be able to keep from being an operator because we take care of the seal and swick instructors too and the injuries that they have which are much worse now because they're in an operable condition are the same exact things that the kids get other than stress fractures most of the guys have gotten smart enough they're not running much anymore or they know exactly how much they need to run but that's where you look at and see Are there any we mentioned stress fractures are there any other major issues that you see with people coming quote off the street when they enter into buds that you would like to maybe kind of nip in the bud or along the lines in the guide that you would like to address I would say shoulder and back are two big things and the shoulder is the rotator cuff very few people do much of it they really only think of it with the throwing injury but the rotator cuff is very important in all the things that you do because it stabilizes your shoulder before you do any exercise and it's not shown in a weight room as an exercise it's going to make you look big and strong because it's three tiny little muscles that are underneath the deltoids that nobody sees but if they go and they always go first because they're very small and very weak then you can't do anything else or you dislocate your shoulder you tear your labrum and it can all be prevented by doing some rotator cuff exercises and they are simple exercises we call them the T where you take dumbbells light dumbbells and lift them in the front and the side and the back external rotation exercise we're relying on your side and bring your arm up and one exercise for the super spinatus which is called the empty can and those exercises are done as a preventative thing but they are the base if you don't have a good rotator cuff you have difficulty in the obstacle course boats overhead, logs overhead all those things but also in bench pressing every year in football when springtime come around and everybody's trying to do their maximum weights I would have football players with shoulder injuries and most of it was rotator cuff from trying to bench press and build up those muscles but do nothing for the rotator cuff and I would just back off on how much they were lifting work on the rotator cuff and they'd get better and then we could increase the weight so it's important to keep that as a basis all the time that I have a strong rotator cuff and it's not more than 15 pounds it's needed I mean it's a very light weight that anybody can have in their basement to do four simple exercises for strengthening for that the other is the back one of the most common injuries not only in our environment but in society in general and people will want to do all kinds of exercises and involve bending over and twisting and lifting which are the worst things that you can do for your back people who have disc injuries people who have stress fractures of their back are usually from bending over and lifting something without getting your feet underneath you almost like a squat to pick it up and so if you do those as exercise as prevention you're actually doing the worst thing you can do because that's what injures you so it's more important to do the tiny little muscles that are around the spine that you can strengthen just by doing planks and you can do a front plank and a side plank and a back plank and all variations you can do it for time there are all kinds of ways you can do it but those strengthen the core muscles around your spine and then you can start doing sit ups and extensions only if your core is strong and those simple things which involve 15 pounds at the most and or your body weight will prevent most of the other injuries that we say so focus a little bit more on some of the less glamorous exercises it seems in support of the bigger body parts and muscle groups that's a very good point I think a lot of people totally miss on how many times we've seen people in the gym doing curls and doing bench press and these are the quote strong guys in the gym and then next you know right there on crutches or the shoulder so basically we've started kind of from the top and we're working our way down by talking what I just did about shoulder and then the core the next would be your legs which would be most of the people will spend it doing squats or lunges or something that's going to be working on their quads and do very little for their glutes and their hamstrings and again it should be a balance there should be a balance of the percentage of strength from your quads to your hamstrings and we see this with problems with hip injuries later on and again just like the shoulder we may see it as a strain of the muscles in the hip or we may see it as a labral tear which again is cartilage in the hip just like in the shoulder or we may see it that you may have sciatica nerve problems things like that because of poor position now because your quads are so much more dominant than your hamstrings and so again I've seen this with all sports throughout high school and college was the emphasis is on I need to have this strong quads and yes you do but if the ratio becomes such that you have a 5 to 1 ratio in many cases let's say you could squat 500 pounds I'm sure we could hardly find anybody that could curl 100 pounds with their hamstrings so again that's why I say it's a 5 to 1 ratio and when you work out I mean when I'm running and doing something explosive that ratio has to be 1 to 1 if my quad strength is 5 times what my hamstring strength is where do you think the injury is going to happen and where do we see this in the NFL and baseball what is the major injury you see that they say oh we have a hamstring and no one understands why we have it well I can tell you if your leg is extending with a 500 pound force and you only have a 100 pound force to slow it down to keep it from hyper extending after a while it's either going to fatigue or it's going to be overcome by that strength and so that's what we need to think about is yes you need to do the quad work but remember there's a balance a front the back and everything we do when the shoulder is what I talked about yes you can do bench press but you also have to do the posterior part of your shoulder here yes you can do squats and lunges but you have to remember I have to do some hip extension work I have to do some hamstring curls to try to balance it out and get the ratio better this can even prevent some things like the runner's knee because again you're so quad dominated that in a true running form you should be more glute dominated and if we get those stronger and get that explosion it's supposed to be the biggest strongest muscle in your body well there's a reason for that because it's supposed to be one that explodes to drive you forward and so you want to strengthen those glutes and strengthen the hamstrings to balance it out if you don't you'll have knee problems so we see that also so in terms of maybe the lower extremities ankle, knees and such a lot of that seems to be just volume of training wear and tear or is there any preventative maintenance that can be done there there is preventative maintenance and again if you look at many athletes from their knees down they haven't done anything they may do some calf raises that's usually common they're straight leg calf raises and they've got a barbell on their shoulders or they have leg press and they put their feet out there and that's all they do and that's good in most cases but in reality it only really helps the gastroc right and there are two muscles that are in the lower leg that are combined and that's the gastroc and soleus and the soleus attaches below the knee and so you actually have to do the exercise bent leg also so we teach that yes you want to do the straight leg but you also need to be seated with the weight on your thighs and do calf raises that way so you involve the soleus and the soleus is really the muscle that you use more for running because your knee should be slightly bent as you're running you really don't get to full extension of your leg until the very last push-off okay so you need that soleus in there most people don't do that at all and also with their stretching they don't do a stretch they may do the straight-legged stretch but they won't do with a bent knee and you need to stretch one straight-legged and one bent because again their attachments are above and below the knee but not only just those because again now we've emphasized the back of the leg we have nothing to the front or the side and that's again where we see a lot of problems with the stress-related problems is that the anterior portion where your anterior tib is lifts your foot up and toes when we're running in soft sand there's a lot of that going on and they have difficulty with boots even lifting that up high enough and so they start using that a lot so you need to do some anterior tib raises and again it's not a lot of weight it's a thousand foot strikes per mile so you need something you can do a lot of repetitions with now I can't tell somebody go out and do a thousand reps of that but you need something with resistance whether it's your hand whether it's a towel whether it's a band and get sets of 20 sets of 50 that you're doing that motion and so we get to the ankle instability when we are running in soft sand or on the beach and you're stepping something you have to have the ability to be able to handle all the different directions because your ankle is going to do it so that means you have to do an inversion and eversion and again if you use your towel your hand or again a resistance band and go through those motions and use your pronious longest use your posterior tib muscle those are muscles that again we don't require any extra equipment we don't require any more time any more resistance it's just a matter of getting those repetitions and the last thing I'd say is that one of the exercises I have to do with our stress fracture guys is to just throw a towel out on the floor and curl it up with your feet just like you'd be curling up with your hands and your toes because the muscles that flex your toes are running up the inside of your leg and they also support your arch and so if I strengthen those and get those used to repetitions that will make it that I might not have as much difficulty running in soft sand and boots and also prevent plantar fasciitis too so I mean there you know we've basically gone from the shoulders down a lot of simple little exercises that balance out things that you're already doing those are the preventive things that we see are neglected and they end up being the things that get injured I think that's a really good summary one thing I think that would be helpful if you covered yes is the reason why a lot of these bigger muscle group movements are predominately focused on in a lot like you said football strength whatever because they're impressive numbers and they're measurable where it's like a lot more difficult to maybe do some of that type of measurement with like the exercise you mentioned about curling a towel with your feet what ways can people measure these types of movements really simply maybe you can talk to that a little bit and it leaves in using objective measurements in the lifting that we do and I want to know exactly how much somebody is lifting and what they need to be as I feel over 46 years of doing this knowing it takes this amount of strength to be able to prevent that as a rotator cuff if an athlete you can't do 15 pounds you're probably going to have problems so I know that if I'm starting with five I know where I need to get to and can make those do that and that's why we ask for repetitions instead but you can't even push that a little bit and again trying to get as objective as possible say with the towel curl exercises you again start out and they get easy and you're doing 50 of them then put a book on it build it up and if that gets easy put your boots on it and pull it in or put a cement block or something on there that makes it more difficult but again you're going to do 1,000 foot strikes per mile during some of this training you're going to be running 6 to 10 miles a day so you need to prepare yourself for that now again I'm not asking that you do 1,000 to 6,000 but you need to be doing sets of 20 sets of 30 so that your body at least knows what to do and you can start strengthening those muscles great a lot like we talked we've mentioned that there's not a tremendous amount of equipment that's required for you to be able to hit your PST number and come into Bud's right and we talk about endurance being very important can you talk a little bit about footwear I think there's some trends out there for barefoot style running shoes and or running barefoot and sand all this kind of stuff but they won't have that option when they get there they will just be boots there's no and the boots they get were the ones that everybody's issued we can't even change the style after they're into second phase so the footwear that they're going to wear I would tell them not to train in that and it'll it'll throw off their mechanics and it's more important to have good mechanics and run properly and I would say more towards the barefoot and that you'll have a better style and then as you add shoes as you add boots your body you don't have to adapt to that but I certainly don't recommend people going barefoot who haven't run barefoot before again with anything you now add a new exercise it's a shock to your body and again I want to add steps of how many repetitions or how many days a week I do that and it's a matter of adjusting for your body to the stresses and new stresses that you're adding to it and I think in that I've been doing it for about six years watching these guys run and we've got all these stress fractures and again it probably best again to get them early or to get them up a prep and I'm not moving to Chicago I can tell you that right now I moved from New Jersey here 13 years ago and there was a reason but you know when I was trying to get them ready they had to be able to pass their four mile run out of the line as you said didn't matter about push ups pull ups sit ups they had to pass their four mile run if they didn't pass it no matter what we did rehab they were out so I'm going like how do I make them most efficient I know the stress fracture guys I know that they've got to wear the boots I know it doesn't matter if I put an orthotic in it or not it's going to be in the ocean wet and sandy that's not going to happen those pants and I know it's always a four mile run and I know what the time is 32 minutes then 31 then 30 so how do I know that when I'm teaching them to get back to running I'm making them the most efficient that I can they're broken for whatever reason how do I know that if I do this and make them better they can so at that time a tour group came through Alberto Salazar I don't know if anybody's familiar with him at all he's been working for Nike and has taken the US and the world's best distance runners and worked with them and Alberto was coming through and it just was timely that I'm about that same time scratching my head going you know I can get the limp out of somebody I can make them stronger but is this the best they can be with what they have and so I posed that to him and I said you know I don't really know that and again having worked athletics for over 40 years you know this is the most efficient way and he goes well I coached that we'd never beat the Kenyans if we didn't take care of everything including technique and diet and sleep I said wow I'd love to learn and he goes come on up and see so I went up to Nike at his invitation and the first thing he did he sat me in front of a computer and said watch these high speed films and then talk me through what they were doing and then he showed me foot plate films of how the foot was landing and then we went to Galen is the 10 time 10,000 meter champ of the U.S. and Silver medalist and 10,000 meters in London and only the second time he ever ran the marathon got the bronze medal in the last Olympics so he go not a bad runner I guess he's done something right with him and he's coached him since he was in high school and so he had Galen on the treadmill and went absolutely you know here's what he's doing here's what I'm watching here's what I'm coaching here's what I'm trying and it was like some of the things that happened and so that night I stayed up there for three nights I'm a runner myself I've been running for over 50 years and tried one of the things on myself and it's like wow that feels a lot better and it's like wow that's right next day tried something different and I kept feeling better with it and so I got back and I started doing research on the medical side to say alright if I'm more efficient to make me faster so started looking at each thing on research-wise I went through about 200 research articles and said when you break them down individually yes they do and so started putting that together and so I started teaching my guys who had stress fractures and the first thing I remember was an ice hockey player from Brown University had bilateral stress fractures and you watch him run on the treadmill and he went oh my god he looks like he's still ice skating you know it's like one of these all over the place had trouble doing what I call the faster program and he got better he even said to me like my legs would always get tight as soon as I started running my shins would and I don't feel that at all it's like oh that was a good sign and eventually he got and got out and running he ended up passing going through Howick and everyone else he said he knocked three minutes off his four mile time and now is on the teams on the east coast he's been there for a couple years because he's been doing this for about two and a half years and that's the background that I come from I have never really looked at that and started looking at it and as you would think with stress fractures it was swimmers water polo players ice hockey players and we always used to say hey it was bone density and yet we do bone density tests and calcium tests and vitamin D and everybody be within normal limits but you look at these guys and watch them run to evaluate the first time and he went oh my gosh no one's ever shown you how to run because you didn't need it to be a good ice hockey player but you're not a good runner so I found out keeping track again over all this time over 75% of the guys who got stress fractures are from sports that are non-running sports and you know already name it if you're a soccer player football player lacrosse player you could still get it most of the time it's from over training I actually filmed the guys for 15 seconds from the side and 15 from the back and watched the mechanics and then we sit down from the app and go over each of the six things and we've had great success with it and the whole point is again not over training when I start training back again I don't ever let them even do a four mile run they do intervals where they're doing 30 second intervals short recovery and do that for three miles maybe or they're doing minute intervals that we're trying to build up their strength and their aerobic capacity but not trying to just do mindless miles and that's what I see kids do is to get ready for the PST or to get ready for the four mile run I'm going to run eight to ten miles a day and that'll be easier yes it'll be easier but you won't necessarily be faster because you never worked on the mechanics and you never worked on the speed and power that you need to do to be faster if you didn't use more muscle fibers to go faster you can't go faster I don't care if you ran 20 miles you're not going to be a fast miler if you didn't do speed work to be that fast so that's what we try to teach so I'll just as a wrap up that's much too long yeah no no I think you touched on a very important part it's where I got a rebirth at 68 years old to say wow you know this is something that's untouched why just because you learned how to run when your kid didn't mean you learned the best way to run actually the command sold that 100% of the guys would run they said well it's better than the rest and we had guys who weren't injured and weren't passing the four mile run they asked me to work with those guys for a while and all of them passed again just doing simple mechanics and doing shorter distance but faster and a short recovery in between intervals as such and you know everybody made it so again something that should be pushed earlier to say do some intensity get some short recovery so that you're still pushing the heart and do that intensity again and you'll do a lot better than just doing multiple miles of you know the slow easy job yeah so in summary if you had the ear of somebody who's going to be entering in this process in 15 seconds what would be the quick elevator pitch to this kid that's going to enter the process so I'd say balance front to back quads to hands shoulder and endurance think of yes I need strength but I need to be able to do it multiple times for a long period of time and so it's more important to have that endurance factor to get through the early part of our training later on as it become a seal they become specific but right now they need to be able to make it through the training and the training involves endurance are there any resources available to these potential candidates to prevent this type of training guide and there are also some rehabilitation exercises that are shown on videos that they should be able to understand and be able to apply all these techniques well we're out of time thank you so much for joining us it's been really really helpful good