 Welcome to the 21 Convention Podcast. My name is Steve Maeda and today we have a very special podcast for you. It was actually shot at the 21 Convention in Tampa, Florida, and today we have a co-host, Skyler Tanner, also from Austin, Texas, and he will be interviewing Bill DeSimone as well as Dr. Doug McGuff. What they get into here has to do with only what a friendship can actually propel in a conversation. We talk a lot about the paleo lifestyle, the developments happening in the world, exercise, fitness, and the overall idea about being the ideal man. 21 Convention, 2014 here in Tampa. My name is Skyler Tanner. I am your special guest host for this podcast with me to my right is Dr. Doug McGuff, who had a great talk today, to my left Bill DeSimone, who's been training people about as long as I've been alive. Yeah, as long as I've been, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been based on talks yesterday. So what we're going to do is, kind of as a point of interest, 10 years ago, roughly, I had the honor and kind of privilege of sitting kind of as a bird's eye view, fly on the wall of these two talking about some stuff at a different high intensity training conference. And here we are again, 10 years later, not much has changed and yet so much has changed. So what we'll do is we're going to kick it off because today Doug talked about stress and how he handles it in the ER and you'll find a link down in the bottom. And we're going to talk about what Bill's going to talk about tomorrow, which I'm sure you'll find a link down in the bottom here. And so Doug, kind of give us a 30,000 foot view of what you talked about today for the viewers out there. Well, I wanted to give and, you know, I was sick of talking about hit. And I also thought that it was so well represented here. Sure, better talks than I could give are going to be given. So what else can I talk to these poor guys about? You know, I got to be in an ER doc. But I've listened to an educational lecture that these two guys had given on the cognitive processes of functioning when the shit hits the fan in the ER. And maybe this is something these guys could really get into is just seeing what the process of when you're in a really stressful situation, how to handle it, how to not freak out, and what the cognitive tricks are for being able to function well in a high stress environment and get out of it without damaging your psyche or damaging yourself in the process. And in all that review of what you kind of built up to putting together, were there processes that you're using that you didn't that you kind of had in process put together throughout your career and then realized, oh, this is represented in the literature or something else. Yeah, this was not a de novo thing on my part. Like nothing I've ever done is a de novo thing on my part. I've always kind of just picked it up from other people and the same is true here. You kind of go through this process of learning how to do it just by doing it, doing it wrong for a while and really feeling the stress and then gradually getting a process of learning how to do it without feeling so much subjective stress. But I listened to a lecture that was given on a podcast called EMCRIT, which is an emergency medicine critical care podcast run by this brilliant guy named Scott Weingart. And he interviewed a guy that's currently a medical student that used to be a para rescue PJ for the Air Force on just the cognitive processes of operating in high stress environments and how they use stress inoculation and different techniques, different cognitive techniques to function in these high stress environments and then applied it to the profession of emergency medicine and critical care. And I realized, I do that and I do that and I do that. It's like, oh, now I got names for all this stuff. I can give a lecture about it. So I stole a lot of it in other words. Well, that's, you know, it's funny you mentioned that stealing a lot of it. In Doug's talk, he references a TED talk all about how depending on the posture you take, you can actually affect, acutely affect the hormones that are expressed just being very tall, being very, very big. Our testosterone's going up. Our cortisol is coming down and we're feeling very, very, very good about ourselves. But there's another TED talk I heard recently that was all about kind of the, it was a reconsideration of what is original means. Like this idea that people are inventing things de novo out of the blue from nothing is really probably not happening too much anymore. The idea that you're not inspired by something else and that there's someone twiddling away in a lab inventing something purely out of inspiration with no point of reference whatsoever is we think about that as being original. But most of what we consider original is not that at all. This idea of invention without inspiration just doesn't happen. You're trying to fix something. You've been inspired to fix something or to better your own processes. So the fact that you just reconfirmed that is really relevant to the talk. I think it applies. Just beforehand, we were talking about your master's thesis and how it kind of came to fruition at the same time as a paper that was published by five Chinese PhDs on exactly the same topic. You all came to the exact same conclusion at the same moment in time. And I think throughout history, parallel discovery happens. And it's not because anyone's stealing from anyone else, which is what people in the Hitfield never can understand. But that we're all thinking and we're thinking about problems and we all have come up through the same era with the same cultural influences and with the same data points to operate on. So it shouldn't be a surprise that parallel discovery does happen. Right. And just to total aside, the thesis he's talking about resistance training in the brain will link to that bigger paper also down here as well. It's going to be a 14 page linkage fest. But Bill, I'm going to kick it over to you. Bill hasn't had his talk yet. No. And I probably should have spoke before, Doug, because mine isn't as heavy. So it's going to be quite a come down. You've got to come down. Thanks. I guess, well, don't bless it. We'll take it up with Anthony. But this will be the second time you've spoken at the 21 convention. Yes. I did 2009 or 2010 or so. Right. And previously you spoke all about, you kind of gave a general overview of your congruent exercise. Actually, I gave the first five chapters of congruent exercise. There you go. Before I wrote them. Oh, wow. So I had given a talk earlier in the Luke Carlson in Minnesota. And I was given a talk now for Anthony. And I didn't want to do the same thing. And I'm sure I've seen enough repeats and packaged presentations that I know you can get away with it. But it gives me, selfishly, it gives me a chance to rethink the material I'm dealing with. So I threw the previous presentation away. And I came up with what turned into the first five chapters of congruent exercise. Which he very courteously put online as an hour and a half YouTube. But that is the first five chapters, almost verbatim. The only thing I added in the book was the specific exercises and beginning and finished position of the exercises. But actually I used the fact of having to give the presentation to try to repackage the material. One of the things you said to me many years ago was, as a matter of fact, So let me just say, when I first put Momentum Exercise out in 2003, Doug, Greg, Fred, Han and a couple of others, I sent them the book. I didn't know these guys. I was part of the Super Soul Guild or I wasn't part of any of the formal groups. And Doug went out of his way to call me and said, great book. He pointed out a lot of things I knew back in my head. I just didn't relate them to what we were doing in the studio. And getting to my point, you must have really teased the material out. And that's true because those anatomy and biomechanics books are not written for the sake of lifting heavy things in the gym. Yeah, I think it would be more accurate to say is that you pointed out things that I was embarrassed that I didn't work out for myself. I mean, I took anatomy. I mean, I had to memorize all these origins and insertions and function, but I never... And I think it was because I had so much bodybuilding, muscle and fitness, and nautilus, bullshit crammed in my head that I could never actually just look at the raw data of the anatomy and the functional anatomy. And I really was embarrassed that it's like, wow, this guy knows his shit. I mean, he knows his anatomy, and this makes perfect sense. And why have I been doing this this way this whole time? Ironically, the exposure to some of this way back was when I was going through my graduate work and some of the leveling courses I had to take before that. You know, we're in kind of a kinesis course. And it's sort of like they're going through all of these things, and they're saying many, like, you know, here's impingement at 90 degrees, the shoulder rotation, and then the scapula has to turn and all the other stuff. But there's never the following conclusion of, and here's a contraindicated movement for, you know, but they never go that far. They just sort of stop like, just the facts, ma'am, rather than here's the application of that information. So I was kind of like, you're stopping the game short. Like in school, they're stopping the game short. They're not taking it as far as it could be for applicability, which is... Well, and it's even worse when you get to the various personal training certifications, because I'm not an academic guy. I don't have the green exercise. I did get NSCA certified twice, and I've been a certified a couple of times. And in the textbooks, the biomechanics and anatomy sections, they're pretty good, but they don't do that. So they're pretty good in the front of the book, and then they ignore it in the back of the book. And every trainer I know who's ever taken those tests, they memorize it to get through the test. And then, you know, people doing upright rows and various things that are so clearly contraindicated from the raw material. And before we move on, I just want to say that it was Doug, Greg, and Fred Hans' genuine interest in the material that gave me instant credibility with anybody remotely interested in it, which I have always appreciated. Because they didn't know me. This was before the days of affiliate arrangements and phony testimonials and phony message board posts. It was all genuine interest on their part. It was the cyberpump days. Kind of, yeah. But it was all genuine interest on their part. You know, Greg, well, he called me also, and we got to be very friendly, but he point blank would tell people buy this book from this guy in New Jersey. And Fred had a message board at the time that he allowed a lot of space to be given over the discussion of this particular work. Both pro and con, but overwhelmingly pro. And again, this was before people were manipulating these things. You know, you were blatantly paying somebody to mention my book or put a link up or that stuff. Yeah, there wasn't 80 pages of copy for this with all of these testimonials. No, no, no, no. You really had to dig to get to it. So is this an evolution of your thinking? Kind of the talk today or the talk tomorrow about? The evolution is in, you know, the material is material, shoulder, spine, and it is. It is what it is, period, end of story. But how to present it becomes the issue. So for instance, in moment arm exercise, I flip through it now and I say, yeah, it's pretty good. But then I realize, wait a minute, I've been lifting weights for over 40 years, and I've been studying this, you know, marvelous bodybuilding from the 70s, and I've got multiple certifications. If I think it's pretty good, it has to be over the head of some 20-year-old who's just trying to figure out what to do in the gym. And feedback from my non-fitness friends was, you lost me. So it took me about 10 years, and in between I did a few presentations for Bo Rayleigh, and each of those was an attempt at making the material a little more accessible. And then almost 10 years later I came up with the congruent exercise, which I was trying to be a little more topical because I did talk about kettlebells, I did talk about various functional training, and again I was trying to make it a little more accessible, which it must have worked to a degree because that has sold dramatically more than moment arm exercise. And part of that is being available on Amazon and being available on Kindle. But so tomorrow, the next thing, like I did this in reverse. Moment arm exercise is like the super technical computer guide. And then there's maybe congruent exercise was sort of like the idiot's guide too. And then hopefully the next one will be the thing you actually buy and people actually read. And you actually can see in the bookstore and have some people go, what I really hope is that people carry it in the gym or bring it to their basement where they're working out and flip through the page and say, okay, this is how we do this, okay, I got it. You know, you read, you know, Dr. Darden's been very helpful also, but you read, he's been very helpful in understanding how the book field works. And he told me a few years ago, unless you're already a celebrity, you're not getting a book deal. And you know what? You look at every pop fitness book, it is the same template. Usually like, you know, a bust shot of whoever the author is. And then you have a lot of glossy pictures. And then you have a chapter on motivation. Then you have a chapter on diet, a million recipes. And then you've got the picture, the glamour shots of the exercises. And then you've got the routines. It's the same book. You just write out the name. Well, you know, that worked when Darden wrote the new hit too. That's almost kind of when he wrote the new hit. That's almost the same template because it was a major publisher. It wasn't T Nation or whoever published his last book. It was like that. There's a bust on the front, all the model shots. There's a little bit of history of hit. There's all the exercises laid out, some routines, and then like a dive in the end. That was the one he wrote three books ago? I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. There's the fat loss, super fat loss solution one that he just had. Right, the bike I break through, the old school, and then the one right before that. Okay. Not just because he's coming tomorrow. Right. But I actually liked, especially like all three books. Because he's throwing himself in it. He's not writing from the third person anymore. Right. He's throwing a little behind the scenes stuff that I think all of us suspected, but you didn't really know with all the sanitized stuff we read in the 70s and 80s. Right. I thought that new hit, I will blatantly say I ripped off the look of it for what turns out to congruent exercise. Because the pictures were clear. There wasn't a lot of clutter. It was bullet points. He's had to do this exercise. And then he had chapter stuff. Right. And so I blatantly owe his designer something. That's really great. We'll come back to that. We've got to go to commercial break. We'll be right back. Dr. Doug McGuff, who had a great talk today. To my left, Bill D. Simone, who's been training people about as long as I've been alive. Yeah, as long as I've been based on talks yesterday. So what we're going to do is, kind of as a point of interest, 10 years ago roughly, what was the sticking point for so many people reading the book? Was it physics? Was it physiology? Well, you know, first it wasn't, I'm not a professional writer. So this wasn't an assignment. I didn't have a market in mind. I had injured myself. And this was me working out over really a four-year stretch, me working out what happened and discovering what I would prefer to as a disconnect between exercise and biomechanics. And so basically I rebuilt my own process of working out. And then I realized from all my notes and sketches and diagrams, wait a minute, I have something here. But I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was a commercial book. I didn't know if it was an academic book. So I just put it together and had it slightly bound because I didn't know any... I remember getting that book. And of all the ones you've written, that's my favorite one. Because when it came to me, it has this little note scrolled on it. It's like, Big Merman, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, please read this. Tell me what you think. And I'm like... It was so cool because you were living through your thought process. You were thinking on paper. And I was like... One exercise. And I have a lot of stuff in the studio I have to do one... These things. Why do you think all of a sudden hard work is in vogue? I mean, it's just this kind of brain sort of picking it out of my life. All of a sudden you're in the turn of the 1800s with health food. And then I'm forgetting the name of some of the guys in the late 1800s with these like full-on, you're going to be barefoot, you're going to be naked, you're going to be training. I'm a renormic fan. Yeah, I'm a renormic fan. That's right. That's right. The lion.