 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. So our boy is here today. We did it live. People that are not in our forum, this is something that we're going to be doing. You missed out. Going forward with our forum. Oh, get in there now, because we are going to be providing way more of these. This is just a way that we're giving back. It doesn't obviously cost you guys any more money or anything like that. Once you're inside of our forum and have access, you'll have access to this. And we've partnered up with some of our doctors that you guys have heard on the show before. And Jordan Shallow happens to be the first one who's just a biomechanic expert. Probably one of the most brilliant. Oh, he's fucking amazing. Was he a coach over at Stanford, right? Yes, for the rugby team. But he was on their live answering questions, and we're going to implement that on a monthly basis for our private forum. But he was here. He didn't have anywhere to go right away afterwards. So we're like, hey, let's throw you in on a quaw. Yeah, come in on our Q&A and answer some questions. So we picked some questions we thought he would answer best. The guy is smart, sometimes hard to understand because he's so damn smart. So we did try to translate some of the stuff, but you... He needs a translator. He's like Beast from X-Men, 100%. He's the blue monster dude with the glasses. That's really smart. But anyway, so the first half of the episode, the first 60 minutes is introductory conversation. We talked about his hike with Ben Pacolski up to like 12,000 feet or something like that. So imagine this, you got two behemoths of men hiking in waist-deep snow up to 12,000 feet. I want to be like the guy behind the counter REI when they're like trying to buy all their gear. Yeah, yeah, right. I was like, you're gonna go where? Are you sure? I did ask him about what Pacolski gave him pre-hike because I know Pacolski's like a mad scientist. We speculated that he might have some of the four-sigmatic cordyceps in there because I know he's a four-sigmatic fan. Because cordyceps are incredible for increasing stamina and endurance now. The best source of cordyceps that we know of is from FourSigmatic, one of the companies that sponsors us. If you go to FourSigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com forward slash mind pump and enter the code mind pump, you'll get a massive exclusive discount. Then we talked about telling people what they want to hear and then giving them what they need. You gotta kind of trick them sometimes. We're talking about going viral the good way, not the bad way. We're talking about the pendulum of the fitness industry and how it swings. And then we talked a little bit about ButcherBox. I can't believe he didn't know about ButcherBox. Right, I know. He didn't get as much meat as he does. I'm so excited. I know I'm gonna get him on it for sure because that guy does put down the calories. He's gonna eat him out of business. Now, he's at 275 right now and he's trying to push over 300 before. Oh my God. So he will need ButcherBox. ButcherBox is gonna love him because he's gonna be getting the biggest package. He's a straight grill. He's gonna weigh as much as the beef that comes in there. But ButcherBox is giving away right now. I don't know how long I'm gonna have this promotion for. Free bacon forever. No joke. For life. It's such a bold statement and I love it. I believe it's just this month they're running that. So I believe it's just this month and they're gonna end that. Because I think they did this last year and they had to shut it down because it got so crazy. If you go to ButcherBox.com forward slash mind pump, you'll get the free bacon for life. $10 off your first order and free shipping. And then also what's going on with Jordan Shallow here at our facility? He's got John Meadows with him, right? So him and John Meadows are hosting a seminar here. It is Friday, July 20th from 10 to 4 p.m. at the Mind Pump Studio. So Mind Pump headquarters in San Jose, California. You guys can find that on his website at themuscle.com forward slash store. He also right after that heads down to LA. So if you're down in the Southern California area, Saturday and Sunday, July 21st through the 22nd, he's in LA at the ultimate performance gym. So again, find that at themuscle.com forward slash store. Excellent. Then we got to the questions. The first question was can cracking or popping your joints like you when you crack your knuckles cause arthritis or damage to the joints? It was awesome to hear. Yeah, who better than to have a chiropractor. Give us the 4-1-1 on that. The next question was are there any exercises or tips for strengthening the ankles? This person broke their ankle about eight years ago and now just rolls their ankle all the time. What is the problem? The next question was are BOSU balls and stability balls or things, good tools for building knee stability? A lot of myths. Really good conversation. A lot of myths there. So we had to kind of uncover those myths. Debunked. Finally, one of the most ridiculous pieces of fitness equipment that we've ever seen. We had some fun with that part of this episode. Also, this month, MAPS Anywhere, which is our MAPS program designed for absolute minimal equipment. All you need are bands and maybe like a stick for tension. Basically you can do these workouts anywhere. That's why it was named MAPS Anywhere. Half off, the whole program, 50% off. We've never done this before. All month long, MAPS Anywhere, half off. We also have MAPS bundles. Now bundles are where we take multiple MAPS programs and put them together for specific goals. The most popular bundle we have is the Super Bundle, which is a year of exercise programming. In other words, enroll in the Super Bundle. You have the next year all planned out for you with your workouts and it changes from phase to phase, month to month, program to program, your body progressing the entire time. You can find the bundles and you can find the 50% off MAPS Anywhere on our website, mindpumpmedia.com. So you were telling us earlier about climbing and doing stuff like that. I don't want to, I'm not gonna throw it out there because I don't know if you want to tell anybody. No, no, no, it's fine, yeah, yeah. Are you, is that something you do? Are you into like going high altitude stuff? Fuck no, no, it's just, man, it's just a challenge. Like I think we've all, and I don't want to say transcended it as a way that like we figured it all out when it comes to weight training, but I think we figured it out that it's not the only thing. So Ben Pakulski and Alex Vallada, we, I don't know how we got it in our heads that we wanted to try and climb Kilimanjaro. So Alex- That sounds like a Ben Pakulski idea right now. He tried to convince me to do a Spartan race and I'm like, I don't know right now, dude. But it comes down to like, it's just, I mean, life is really hard. Like, and you, once you finish, and once I was finished with school, I was like, fuck, this sucks. I just want to go back and play in the sandbox. But for me, it was like, because we just got off, I mean, I'm fucking burnt red right now. Because we were- You're embarrassed. Yeah. We were about like, I think we were just shy of 13,000 feet yesterday. So we climbed Cloud Ripper in the, in Bishop, California. How's your stamina when you do something like that? It's, so it's funny- Because you have so much muscle- It's 275 right now. Yeah. So I would assume that because you have some more muscle, you have, you require more, more, more blood, more oxygen. And if you haven't trained that way anyway, it's got to be kind of exhausting. Yeah. So I mean, I've been doing like a strict regimen of cardio the past couple of months while actually gaining weight. Cause I'm going up- Are you wearing your gas mask while you do that? Yeah, elevation training mask, bro. Get at me. I just like doing Bain impressions. I'm really good at it, man. Like, that's- But yeah, so we, we did a climb. I just like it because it's, it's just a challenge. And it's funny because you get to see how people, their personalities come through when they're challenged, right? Like that's basically what character is. And very, like three of us are all very different. Like Ben comes from bodybuilding, I'm powerlifting and Alex Viada is like, he's a kind of a mix of everything. Like super jack, super shredded, super strong, but it also does like double iron man's. Like he's fucking crazy. And you see how each person's personality comes out on the hill. Cause like Alex led the way, he was our tracker, very technical. He had his, he had his like hiking poles. And I went, fuck man. I showed up in literally a beater. Like you can see my tan line goes all the way up to my shoulders. Cause I'm like, I don't know. I'm going to fucking get the guns out of this one. Dude, could you imagine seeing this guy in Pekolski up in the fucking high altitude? There was two. Like fucking Sasquatch. I could even move past him. We just came across two people and they're both like, I think they kind of laughed. Cause like, oh, they're never going to fucking make it. But it was funny. So Alex, very, then his personality is very technical. He's very intelligent, like extremely, extremely intelligent. And he led the way and he was like, you could see every step was calculated. And that's how we, that's how he goes through life. And you put him in the challenge and that's the expression of kind of how he operates. Ben is, you know, he's very conscious driven. He's very mindful. Mindful, yeah. That's probably the best way to describe him. Very disciplined. And you could be very supportive. And you could like, so it was Ben in the back, Alex in the front, like fearless leader gunner. Ben is just like, come on, who raw guys? Like, we got this. And I, you kind of get to look at yourself and go like, all right, how do I respond to this? And it's just like, head down, don't say a fucking word and just go. Which is totally your personality too. Yeah, that was, it was funny cause it's like, I feel like that's very preliminary in development, right? Like trying to just work hard and sort of smart. Here I have Alex leading the way. He's probably, at that particular endeavor is the best at it. Like he, he'd made it at the top and he was like guiding us through, dude. I was waist deep in snow at 13,000 feet wearing fucking like under armor shorts and hiking shoes. Oh shit. Yeah. Like it was real. Abdominal snowman. Yeah, sure. That's, that's probably the best way. Abdominal. Abdominal. Abdominal. You got them abdominals. Freudian, Freudian slip. My bad. Show me your abs. But yeah, so it was just, to me it was just like the brute force is a very preliminary way to get through things. And it's like seeing their other two approaches is like definitely looking to adopt more more of that sophistication like Alex has or more of that mindfulness like that. Now, knowing that you went with a guy like Pekolsky, did he give you anything to increase like oxygen, you know, uptake or, or like Cordyceps for example, is something that I like to use for stamina. I'm assuming he gave you something like that. Cause I know Ben probably woke you up in the morning with a shake of stuff. What he had, so he actually did this keto. He's in the middle of this 30 day keto thing. Oh my God, that's keto to do this. Yeah. So it was extra crunchy granola. Like it was, well it wasn't cause I don't know if that's a carb or not. But it was, he had this like, oh, what was it? It was fucking, it got me, it kept me going. It was like a, it's a type of carb that's big in the keto world. You guys might know it. I don't, it starts with a Y. It's like a, it's like a super starch Yohimba or something. No, no, no. Yucca, yucca something. Okay. So it's what I could derive. It's like a very complex oligosaccharide that won't spike your insulin essentially. So that was like kind of a, like a Ben thing that I was like, all right, and put up just put your hands in your stuff. You just take it. You just go slam it down. I don't want to know why it's wrong if I don't take it. So I'm just going to take it. But no, other than that, I actually read before that beats, beats are supposed to be good. So I had some of those and that was by my own, kind of by my own research. Yeah. I would go like beats, cordyceps, of course, carbohydrates. And he, if he had the carbs beforehand and he was keto leading into it, that would have made him very sensitive to the carbs. So he probably got some good stamina out of it. Yeah. I mean, considering you guys are so big and you did that, like, you know, that's pretty fucking, do you get sore after shit like that? Because it's so many reps and so different from what you used to doing. Yeah, totally. I mean, again, did some work, but I think the thing like you mentioned in the beginning is you can't train for that kind of elevation. You can't train for that kind of, that decrease of partial pressure of oxygen and again, having a bit more muscle mass and requiring more of that to have oxygen while you're utilizing the muscle. It was like my hands would swell up and but just being at elevation. And the nice part is like, I mean, I'm 275. I've been as high as 285. So being out of breath isn't a new thing for me. So it's almost like the incredible Hulk thing where they go like, oh man, what's your secret? It's like, oh, I'm always angry. So we'd stop at like 12,000 feet and now it's like, how are you doing? I mean, winded obviously. Like some of the gain was really acute. Like the grade was really like, it wasn't rock climbing, but you were scrambling a little bit. How long did it take you guys? Oh, all told. Let's see, we started at like 8 a.m. and we got off around 4, 4 p.m. Oh shit. Did you just bring snacks? Yeah, yeah, I do. Well, that's the thing, man. I brought three meals of beef and rice. I couldn't even touch him. Fuck no, dude, the sharpest rock seemed like the best idea. I was like, oh, well, if I die, I'd die. I was crazy, man, but like the appetite, like being at that altitude, like really messes with you. None of us, because that was kind of the reason for this trip was like, let's see how we respond. Because you can be the best athlete in the world, put you at altitude and you can get altitude sickness. The only way to train for it is to train in it. Yeah, and I think it's, I think a lot of it's vestibular. Like I think a lot of the, because I look at it almost like sea sickness or motion sickness where it's like, there's something with that partial pressure of oxygen that plays with like the vestibular cochlear apparatus in your kind of, in your inner ear. But luckily we made it to about 12, 5, 13,000 and we were fine. You know, Kilimanjaro is just under 20. That's about 19, 19, 5. How are you gonna prepare for that? Just more. Just more. Yeah, like, so the hard part with yesterday was the climb was, the climb was difficult. But the descent is, the climb is hard on your CV, like your cardiovascular. The descent is hard on your, like on your joints, on your body. So, fuck man. We made it to like this, this like, we kind of lost the trail out of the start. Like, fuck, did anyone see a different trail head? Like we started like trending off course a little bit. And then we intersected with this, with the trail we should have been on. And then it kind of went into one up to the green or brown lake. And then we went up around green lake and then up into Cloud Ripper. And then there was an old lady there with her dog. So it immediately kind of gave us like, she was mid-60s. And it kind of immediately gave us some perspective like me and Ben are like, stop being a pussy. Yeah. And then she's like, oh, morning gentlemen. And she's like, oh, you guys took the hard way up. I'm like, oh, fuck yeah. All right, wicked. We're gonna take old lady route on the way down. Fuck it's sweet. So we keep going and then she passed us and we end up at the lake. She's playing with her dog. I was like, fuck man. All right. It's because everyone gotta sack up your fellas. Let's go. And then so we get to the top and it's just crazy silent. Like I've never heard a lack of noise like that. Like it was, and especially in California, like things that are that aesthetically pleasing. There's a lot of people. But it's hard to get to. So those same lot of people are usually pretty lazy. So it's like, it's differently going to Santa Cruz boardwalk. I'm like, oh, that's nice. If you took the 20,000 people out. Did you have the energy to take some shots? Did you take any? Yeah, we took a couple. You know what? I think there was a collective thought of like, we're doing this for us and we're not doing this for social media. Good for you. Yeah. And it was cool like to be around people who like. Agree with that. And we just, and it was an unspoken thing. We're like, hey guys, we're gonna keep this off social media. Like we just kind of like enjoyed the time, like normal people or I don't even know if that's considered normal anymore. Right. But anyways, on the way down, like, oh, fuck yeah. We're at the, we're at the impasse. We're going to take old lady way down. Dead tired. I've eaten shit a few times. Ben took a great, like a couple tumbles. The last two miles, the old lady walked two miles on a drainage pipe. What? It was a fucking 18 inch drainage pipe. For two miles? For two miles on the way down. Literally. Wow. So here we're thinking like, oh, fuck yeah. We're got this geriatric trail on the way down. This fucking old lady walked two miles up on a drainage pipe with her dog. And that was the easiest way. So I was on the way back down and it's like. So are you going down the drainage pipe? Yeah. We commit, because we're thinking like, all right, this is gonna be like a couple feet. And then like we go around a corner that it's like just smooth trail all the way down. It was a fucking drainage pipe all, and we're talking like 30 foot drop on the right side. Like you're looking at 70% grade jagged rocks, 30 foot drop to the bottom if you slipped off this drainage pipe. Dude, like it was a level of like mindfulness that like is dire consequences. It's kind of had to be that. It's kind of cool that happened to you though. Oh yeah. But it's like, I probably would have fell 10 times more. Or I mean it didn't fall at all. I probably would have felt like 10 times over if I was just on a regular trail because I was just throwing my legs in front of me up to that point. But it's like, all right, you got to find another gear here and you need to be very present for the next. I was just gonna say, nothing makes you present like that. Oh yeah. I did a hike in Kauai and there were definitely whole periods of parts of this trail where you have to be entirely focused on what you're doing. You can't think of anything else. And it's at that moment, you don't really have a time to be afraid because you're just kind of focused. Afterwards, you start to process it all. And it's that, what do they call it? Type two fun? Where after you're done, you're like, oh shit, that was awesome. But while you're doing it, it's like. You don't want to be a part of the Nepali coast forever. That's a real trail. Are you talking about the Kalao trail? Yeah, yeah, we just got back from Kauai. I got back from Kauai and got in a car and then went to Bishop. Oh shit. Oh wow. Yeah, it's been traveling like crazy lately, man. But yeah, that high altitude training, the adaptations to altitude happen pretty quickly. So if you train at altitude for like a week, your body adapts pretty quickly, but the adaptation goes very fast in the opposite direction. So fighters learned this the hard way where they would go train at altitude, then they'd come back a week before the fight and they'd fight and they wouldn't get that much of a carryover. It literally lasts like a day or two. Explain why you wouldn't train with an elevation mask because I know there's gotta be people listening. Elevation masks, the adaptation you get from elevation mask is you may strengthen your diaphragm or your ability to breathe in, maybe. But it doesn't reduce the, it doesn't improve your blood oxygen rate. You're not carrying your red blood cells. You're not increasing the number of them when you do it. So it's not at all like training at altitude. Yeah, it's increasing. It's like sucking in harders, what you're doing is restricting your breathing. Yeah, it's decreasing the total amount of air you can breathe in, but air is an oxygen, right? 60% of air is nitrogen. So the oxygen is such a small component. So it's relative versus absolute volume, or ratios that you're dealing with. So, I mean, the original stimulus that they thought was increasing your aetheropoietin, right? Yeah, EPO. Yeah, but it's like, there are better ways to do that if that is your end goal, right? So I think, yeah, it's just another fucking, it was just another gimmick that came out. I just think the aesthetics of it made it really appealing. I don't know, that's so funny to me that that would make it appealing, like wearing a mask on your face when you're working with it. It does make your workout harder. There's a market for making your workout harder. You can invent something that does nothing beneficial, but make your workout harder. That's a good point. And people will buy it because, oh, fuck. Dude, that workout kicked my ass because while I was working out, I got this fucking new machine. Why'd you just put duct tape over your mouth and go work? Okay, so have you guys heard about, and this is new to me, and this is a weekend with Ben Fakalski open your eyes to both. Shit. Taping your mouth shut when you breathe? Wait, while you breathe? No, sorry, when you sleep. Oh yeah, I've seen that. Okay, sorry. I was fucking blown away. Actually, I was with Ben when he got introduced to that. Right. So we were at PaleoFX, and they helped us sleep apnea. Yes, they brought it over, and it's like this clear plastic that goes over your lips, and it gives you like this little hole to kind of barely breathe through. Dude, that freaked me out. I feel like guys buy that shit for their girlfriends. Like, no honey, it helps you, trust me. Put it over your mouth. I can't talk then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you want good sleep, right? Yeah, put it on your mouth. Just buy a ball gag like a normal. The fuck is wrong with you? No, but I did notice the adaptation really quickly. Like what Bishop was about, or we stayed in Mammoth Lake, which is about like 8,000 feet of elevation. And dude, the first night I was trying to sleep, it was like breathing through a straw. Like it was, but you woke up the next day and you're like, oh, okay, all right, yeah. This feels all right. Oh, interesting. Then you go up to the top. Well, you know that carryover, I mean, I know more red blood cells isn't gonna make you necessarily stronger, but when you're lifting, especially if you're a big guy, those little adaptations can definitely contribute to better lifting, better working out. Sure, man. I mean, I would've loved to have been able to track like hematocritic in a transient period of time to see what the adaptation is. Cause it's just, I mean, if you guys ever heard of Bjorn Reese, Mr. 60. No. So Bjorn was like a, he was a cyclist before like Lance got popped with doping. So the reason they called him Mr. 60 was his hematocritic levels when they tested him were religiously around 60%, which is like the viscous, like the viscosity equivalent of like having maple syrup in your veins. Oh. Cause he was on the dope cell, like he was on the EPO. He was injecting himself on the EPO, like running syrup everywhere. Yeah, it's crazy. You just wonder how much, like how far you can push that. But then also like relatively. And get a heart attack. Yeah. And that's the risk, like the risk benefit ratio for something like that. But I definitely noticed whatever, and I'm assuming that's what the adaptation was, was more, or maybe an increased carrying capacity of the red blood cells I already had. But man, it was night and day from literally, and upon intended from when I went to bed to when I woke up, that eight hours of just being at that elevation, totally different person. Yep, yep. That's interesting. Any habits that you picked up from Ben since you hung out with him? Anything, do you turn you on to? It's more the process that, and with him and Alex, it's more the process of like how they think and the levels in which they think is pretty neat. Cause I think if you, if you can gain skills that allow you to think deeper within a vein that you already kind of know, then you can actually use those skills of depth of thought and apply them laterally to different concepts, rather than the most people trying to be, and we've talked about this in the past, where most people are trying to be a mile wide, but they're an inch deep. I think if you can go a mile deep on something, you can start to transfer, like that's renaissance, like that's Da Vinci, that's, you know, he's an artist, he's a poet, he's an inventor, but it's cause he's can, if you, I'm reluctant to use the word master something, cause that's a, mastery has become like the Bay of 2018. Like it's just a fucking overused buzzword. But if you can really try and dig deep and that's where these guys go. And like I get, I get accused of being like overly complicated with things, like unnecessarily buying details. I know, part of it is when people look at me, they think I'm stupid. So I'm like, all right, I'm going to throw a 17 syllable word at you. And then once we've got that, then I'll start. So this is, this is a critique I have for you that I really believe that I can totally relate to this that we have this, you know, for someone meets you, they see your big buff guy right away. They're going to think you're a dumb guy, but you don't, I think you, you cover that within the first five minutes of it meeting me. I mean, once you, once you meet you for five minutes and you talk, like you're not dumb, they're for sure you're not dumb, like you're good. So I think if you just start like that and then you kind of shift to like this, you dumb it down a little bit after that, then I think you can earn that, you can still keep that same respect level. I just think with the internet, it's like I'm always having a first impression, right? Every time someone comes across a YouTube video, it's like, I need them to know that this isn't a YouTube fitness channel, right? Like that's not the goal of this. This is a little bit, and because the thing with me, and this is a little bit of an aside, I don't, if you have the skill set to tune a Ferrari, you can do an oil chain on a Corolla, right? That's within your depth of your scope of practice, where it's like someone who can only do an oil change on a Corolla can't tune a Ferrari. They can't scale up. So for me, it's like if I can, like if I can take someone from a, you know, a 600 pound bench to a 700 pound bench, you want a bench 135? All right, kid, give me four weeks. That's right, that's right. That's kind of thing where it's like having that ability to scale down is always easier to scale up. But there is a certain level of, I'm reluctant because I don't really believe in the word emotional intelligence, but there's, and the ability to read a room when people are starting to gloss over with the anatomy stuff, like, okay, the hip bone attaches to the knee bone. Got it? All right, let's move forward, shall we? So, yeah, it's. Well, the thing I appreciate a lot about guys like Pekolski and, you know, people like Greenfield, even Ben Greenfield is, it's not so much about, and I love hanging out with guys like that because they're not talking about what to think as much as it's just how to think. There's a difference there. And I think people of that caliber, it's the way that they think that allows them to dig deep into different subjects and to be open-minded about different things. And the thing about any field, I don't care what field you're in, the longer you're in it, there's like a curve where you feel like you know everything and then you can stay in it longer and you start to realize you don't know shit. And then you start to stay in it longer and then you start to realize like, whoa, there's a lot more, some of that weird stuff or whatever. Like I'm gonna start digging into that because I feel like I covered all this other stuff and it just gets deeper and deeper and deeper the deeper you go. I think it's just how you source your information too. Like they exist very much in the realm of like the esoteric where the majority of people who pursue more information are looking for like the checklist, seven habits of highly successful people. It's like, are you, and this is like, I have a big sticking point and we always end up on the topic of podcast culture. Just like the books that are coming out, like the four hour this and this. And it's like, that's, and I think that's a distillation of very intelligent people. But it's like, I wanna read the books that these people read, right? Like I don't wanna fucking read, how to become a billionaire in three easy steps because that's not applicable. I wanna know the intangibles and where you like who you read that inspired you to come up with this. And I don't wanna just read these three steps. And it's like, well, yeah, no. Yeah, but you as a thought leader though, and it has to know, you need to know that you're the minority with that thought process. You gotta know that as a thought provoking business leader now that, and that's something that we are challenged with all the time. It's one of the hardest things about this business right now is keeping that integrity and because I think we all believe the same way too. I remember when we were first doing like our lead magnets and sales funnels, it's like, fuck dude. How do we get these people's attention because we have something really good for them that we can provide and we know we can help them and change their lives. But we know damn well that we've got 15 seconds in this little feed. It's like, that's one of the hardest things to do. Well, yeah, because I mean, you don't wanna be the fucking Mike Chang, six pack abs thing. But if that gets your attention, it's the old bait and switch, right? If get them in the back of the van, then we're fucking good, right? That's kind of the old, but it's just the hard part is I think but I think the big problem is whether it's opportunistic or people like I would be one thing, I'd almost have more respect for people that are putting out these books that if their goal is all right, easy sell. People don't like to learn, right? Every time I hear someone reference like stoicism and there's some Marcus Aurelius Instagram quote, it's like, okay, let's take a step back. You can read Marcus Aurelius and put this out but that's the idea of like thoughts and actions. Like I would rather read someone like Primo Levy. Like you wanna talk like someone who embodies the tenets of stoicism in real time, courage, justice, temperance. You can work these things into his own life and then purvey that. I would learn and I would suggest that majority of people would learn from reading an experience like that than reading like actual like just Marcus Aurelius or reading these checklists for your life success and all this stuff. So I just think there's such an echo chamber of personal self-help and Instagram entrepreneurial shift where it's like, all right guys, let's peel this a layer back. Let's go a layer. But you know what, one thing that was, I mean, a huge paradigm shift for me years ago, I started to realize that because I would see this ridiculous shit in our industry but then you look at all industries and you see a lot of ridiculous shit and you get angry and you think, why are you guys selling people this stuff or why are you saying what you're saying? And you would get angry, but then you realize it's that's what the people want. Like here's a quote, I'll read you a quote from Thomas Sowell who's one of my favorite economists of all times and this applies to our industry but he's using it because he is an economist and he talks about politics a lot. And he says, the fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it's also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy. So when we look at our industry like fitness and we look at all this bullshit that people are putting out, why is it all, why are they putting it out? Cause this is what people want. I wanna lose 30 pounds in fucking one week. I don't wanna do any work. I don't wanna do any, I wanna take a pill or just tell me one thing to do that's gonna change my life forever that's gonna be super easy. And so that's what they keep getting. They keep getting a bunch of bullshit and it's like, it doesn't sell to say the other thing unless you can really make, unless you can really appeal to the psychology of the individual or start to get them and understand the why and that's a tough, that's a long deal. You also have to look at the emotional side of it too that if something triggers you where it fires you up or pisses you off and it changes your emotional state, you have to ask yourself, what is that inside of me that causes that? Because it's normally rooted in some sort of insecurity. You touched on it a little bit ago that you've got this chip that you gotta come off really, really smart and that's, brah, I'm telling you right now everybody in this room knows how brilliant you are but really what that is is your own insecurity of feeling that way. And the more that you get comfortable with that and understanding that and then learning how to, okay, yeah, that's how I feel and that's what justifies me doing this but is that the best approach and do you have the ability to rethink that and put something out different? That's really challenging to do. It takes a lot of experience, maturity, open-mindedness to be able to look at yourself and go like, this passionate feeling I feel about this even touching on the Stoics, like there's good stuff in there and I think that if you have the ability to read it, digest it and then apply it in real world, I think that there's some value to that. I don't think it's something that you knock, I just think that and that feeling that you have to wanna knock that, I think, again, that's rooted in your own insecurity of looking at another really brilliant mind or intelligent people that are putting out information. So I'm always about like, okay, whenever I feel like this, feel really passionate about it, stepping back and going like, oh, fuck, okay, is this, am I getting trapped and stuck in my own, my own insecurities, my own beliefs and it's limited me from growing beyond where this current level that I'm at right now. It's tough. The problem I have with the quote that you mentioned is the market that we're in and all markets do this because every time you're selling something, you're selling a solution but first they sell you the problem. Right. That's the issue that I take up with, like, when I see these fuckers come up, we've cracked the code. I think you might know who I'm talking about. It's like, really, really you and your 14 inch quads cracked the fucking code, get the fuck out of here. But it's like, you're creating a problem and you're instilling, it's fear mongering and this is whether you're selling some bullshit fucking body program on Facebook or whether it's your Wolf Blitzer in front of a 20 foot fucking hologram on CNN. It's predatory and that's what I don't like because it's fear of the unknown and if you get educated, you liberate yourself. You do and I do believe that you have a responsibility to present things with integrity and with accuracy and with honesty but I also believe that there's a massive responsibility on the side of the consumer because the reality is the power is in the numbers of the consumers. We're the ones that drive it. We're the ones that drive the market because look, tomorrow, if everybody today stopped following all these stupid pages, they'd all disappear and the market would change and they would try to deliver what people are asking for. One of the things I love most about the age of information that we live in is I'll tell you what, you've been in fitness. How long have you been- It's so different today than it was 15 years ago. Bro, it's so different. People as much bullshit as there is out there today, people are a lot smarter than they were 20 years ago. 20 years ago, I used to have to sit down and convince women that if they did a fucking weight training exercise, they wouldn't look like Doreen Yates the next day. I had to sit there and convince them. Today, way less of that conversation. I mean, just something and it's so basic. Our business is an example of this. To the average person who's on the outside looking in and you look at our quote unquote social presence right now, we look like we're still a small business. But when we meet and we talk to some of these people that we're picking on right now that sell a lot of this bullshit, they've got millions of followers. Our business is doing two, three times the revenue because we're taking care of our people and that shit gets out nowadays. And we're in a different time. See, 15 years ago, you couldn't Google search Yelp real quick and find out all these reviews and stuff. So you may be able to pull, you may be able to gimmick people and pull some shit off for one or two dumb people. But even those dumb people, they go through it, they find out it doesn't work for them, it's bullshit, they get hurt. Whatever the case may be, they go right away, they get out there and they put that shit out there and that travels and that eventually poisons a business. Three years ago, we did an episode when we first started on the myth of the small meal myth. And what I mean by that is like the extreme, like I gotta eat eight times a day to burn more fat and build more muscle. And we did a whole episode on why that was a myth. And it's completely, I mean, this is 100%, like today, three years later, it's totally accepted and not a problem. Three years ago, we did that episode. Do you know how much pushback we got from people? Telling us that we were full of shit and that's everybody knows that that's super effective and it's the best thing to do for your body. And we're like, actually no, there's zero science supporting eating six to eight times a day. Have you guys looked at your statistics outside as far as conversion rates outside the United States? Cause this is something that I've started to notice is that the fitness industry and the market in the United States is much different than in any other countries. Like I can go to Australia for a month and like I can sell out seminars across the country. And I can charge a decently high price for it. In the States, I could do one for free and like no one would show up. I just, America, this is the most competitive market for fitness by far. It's just competitive. You also appealed to that market, just like we appealed that market cause you say fuck a lot. Is that what it is? You know, what if we said that we're a cunt? Yes, that's a big one. They love that. They love us out there because we, I think we are like that, you know? I think every other market other than the States can draw a difference between notoriety and credibility. And I think that's the biggest thing. And that's what you touch on with the followers. It's like, yeah, you can have social capital all you want, but if you can't transfer like transfer that to revenue, then you're not worth shit, right? So I think in the United States, like if I had, you know, half a million followers, 500,000 followers, I would be able to sell these seminars out where it's, they look at the initials, the work experience, the information that I put out in other countries before they look at how many followers cause that's, how was it described? It's consumer trust. It's a personal stock market. That's what the following is, right? So what are you trading at is essentially the equivalent of how many followers you have. That's consumer trust in the market in the United States. That's how I look at it. So that's the hard part is how do you build a high converting following, right? Like how do you have that thousand real followers? Impact people. But how do you blow that out? Cause some people, like how do you blow that out to a million followers, right? Because you were trying to sell them. The question is, do you even need to? But just, I mean more is always better. That's not true. See, I disagree with that. I think that, I mean, I remember telling the boys when we first started and we were, you know, we kept talking about how we were going to see this hockey stick in one day. We're just going to go viral and blow up. And I was scared to death of that because we didn't have the systems in place at that time. And sure we could, if all of a sudden the mind pump went to a million listens per episode, you know, and just quadrupled real quick like that overnight. Well, yeah, the business dollar wise would quadruple where we're at right now. But then I would look at it like, oh shit, well, we don't have the things in place to capture, to retarget, to keep to grow, to keep growing that. That could have been a hundred million dollars that only ended up being 10 million dollars. But do you think people that make that acute hockey stick spike are worried about that in retrospect? I don't think they're worried about it, but they should be. But would you rather have to deal with an ex post facto than not deal with it at all? So I would rather deal with it. Cause here's the thing, if once you do, in this business, if someone comes across you on the internet or podcasts, whatever, you really only have that one or two times to capture them and then you're fucked. So if you come in and my website isn't dialed in, I can't answer your question, my customer service is terrible that way, your program isn't legit, like if all these things are shitty, they come in one time and that's their experience. Even if you evolve the business later on and you get better, they may never come back again. I think the point you're making is there's nothing wrong with the hockey stick of growth if it's, if you're prepared and ready for it. And most, many times people aren't. And you end up getting, here's the other thing too, is like- You're still focused on the spiking part. Here's the- Check it in me, yeah. The algorithm, can I hack the algorithm for Instagram or YouTube or all these ways to gain followers? When it's like- Imagine if you could snap your fingers and make everybody fit and ripped all of a sudden. Would they be in the same position as if they took time to learn their bodies, grow, work with their bodies, learn nutritional? They wouldn't be in the same position. They might look fit and ripped, but there's not. Now with business, you see a lot of businesses crumble under their own weight because they'll, for whatever reason, something about them goes viral and they fucking disappear because they didn't learn anything because they didn't have the time to do so. But I mean, like speaking in the space of podcasting and influence and having like a, what was it, the Ferris put up something about some kind of mackerel fish he eats or whatever the hell. And fucking Whole Foods sold out across the country. Here's Whole Foods, whose supply chain is probably on par. Like once Bezos take over, you know the supply chain is on lock, right? And they fucking sold out. Do you think the mackerel company's gonna have, fuck. We're done. It's like, no, right? You guys have Vincent on the show, Matt, right? So when Rogan had that kick today in the dick cup, just sitting there, like how many fucking units probably flew off the shelf? He guarantee you back order. Oh, you can definitely make the argument that it's a good problem. You could definitely make that argument. But it's a better problem than never growing. Sure. But I'll tell you what, let's say we exploded within the first six months and then we get called by Rogan or someone big and they're like, come on our show. I don't think we would have done well. I don't think we would have been ready. You know what I'm saying? And then that would have, I think most of these kids that you see explode on social media aren't ready. They're not ready for a real business. Not one that's gonna last 20, 30, 40 years. Sure, they're ready to collect revenue. Sure, they're ready to buy clothes from China, put their logo on it and sell it for two times the price and make a couple million dollars really quick. Well, you can see by the decisions they have to make after that too. Like they're always trying to recreate that viral sort of product that just doesn't exist. Like it got you there, but you didn't have any systems or any kind of business behind it to actually like capture those leads. I just think, yeah, that viral is always niche. And then your typecast, it's like, 100% dude, we know people and look, I know people in social media, I'm not gonna name names, but who got really popular doing crazy wild, you know, insane shit. And guess what? That's all they can do now. They can't do anything else. How do you convert that? And how does that last for 15 years, 20 years? Well, you gotta start with a broader base. Like one, this is gonna sound really weird, but Ed Sheeran, his illegal downloads for the one album surpassed Michael Jackson's Thriller for the all-time most illegally downloaded album. Wow, I did not know that. But if you think of his skill set as a musician, he's never came out in a single genre, right? So his base is so broad, that, wow, all this net Sheeran, I don't give a shit, right? And I enjoy his music, but his music is so different. It appeals to so many people. It took a while for him to build his base, but his base is so broad now. And that's the same thing with fitness, is like, if you're bench pressing chicks or like doing backflips and deadlifts and stuff, it's like, guess what? When you try to branch out into our space and deal in more, maybe thought-provoking topics in fitness and more depth and detail, we're already here, right? We can branch from the central point, because I think it's funny, because I forget what I was listening. It was one of these lacrosse ball foam roller type people who sell you nonsense, right? Like they sell you accessories rather than giving the education and the tools to assess your own body and just implement accessory movements into your training, where it's like they use the phrase and it really stuck with me. It's like, we're creating products that liberate people. It's like, you know how you liberate people? Whether it's fitness, fuck yeah, fucking right. And that's a drove me nuts, because I'm not gonna name names because it just came to me who it was, but it's like every time, there's some trumped up lacrosse ball and you're, or a Thera gun. And you wanna fucking, you wanna deal with scar tissue? Put a three quarter inch jigsaw blade. That's the only way you're gonna change the fucking actual structure of that muscle. Every time you got a wine cork at the end of your fucking Dremel, you're not doing shit, but they can sell it because they sell you a fucking problem and they give you the solution, right? And it's bullshit. And they'll tell you that they're liberating. It's like, no, you're fucking not. You're keeping them under the hammer and sickle. You're not teaching them anything. It's such a hardwired formula to sell a product, which is something that, again, like bringing it back to the consumer, that's a over hill battle for us trying to be educators to overcome. Well, sure, because you're selling them on the problem and you know what your problem is? You're fucking stupid. That's the problem. And I got a solution for you. You can tell your listeners that they're gonna buy shit. We don't say it like that. I'd rather convert a higher percent of a lower amount of people. I'll shut 100%. And I think the people you convert are the people who are gonna be smarter enough to realize that they don't know it all. Just realize this, if you have a problem, it means you don't know enough because if you did, you wouldn't have that problem. That's really the bottom line. I don't care what your issue is. I don't care if it's fitness, health, your life, your marriage, your work. If you're in a situation where you're like, this sucks, this is a problem, realize you just don't have the right information to solve that problem. Or you have the information, but you don't have enough information to learn how to implement it or the wherewithal or even just the guts to do it. All of which is just a level of ignorance. But then you're telling people that they have to take responsibility for themselves and get good luck selling that in this world. Actually, it's funny you say that. There is this change in the culture that I'm starting to see. I mean, I really follow things like politics and you look at some of the things that are now popular on YouTube and videos and articles people are reading. There is this shift in the culture right now where that's starting to become cool. It's starting to become cool to tell people to become more responsible for themselves, to be the change you want in the world. That's something that's starting to resonate with people and I think it's because we've been sold the other bill of goods for so long that leads to like, shit, what do I do? Life feels like there's no purpose. And so I feel like that old message, that old wisdom, starting to come back a little bit, it feels that way at least. Yeah, yeah, but so are high top sneakers. It's ebbs and flows, man. It's like, what are we gonna say? High tops is never one out of stuff. Well, I'm talking to dad socks over here. But it's like, and this is the thing when you start to look at the cyclical reiterations of ideas over time, it's like are we just, who's going to be the poster boy for like what Gandhi said that before like, be the change you wanna see in the world? All right, is Peterson the new Gandhi? Is that the 50 year iteration of this from 1947 to liberation of India and the Commonwealth and the UK to Peterson fucking what, 60 years later? I think it was Michael Jackson's band, The Mirror. Oh, is that what it was? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How was that one? The change. But yeah, so for me, it's just like, then you start to see patterns of this and then okay, is it just gonna fall the wayside again only to research? That's interesting that you say like ebbs and flow because I've always looked at it like a pendulum thing, right? So I guess you're right. I mean, it swings one way, we go super extreme and then it's like, oh fuck, this is killing people, this is not a good idea. Get a little bit of a rebellion to that. Yeah, right? And then we come back the other way, then we'll probably go to that extreme and then come back again. And I think in the arena, in the fitness arena, there's no more concentrated market of that pendulum effect to ying and yang like that in such a short period of time because it's like, it's just hyper extremes. Like we talked about earlier, like, you guys are at paleo effects, like where would have that been 20 years ago? Yeah. Right? But now it's too far, rain and in, rain and in, rain and in, holy fuck, what's going on? Please put shoes on. Why are you burning that shit? What's going on? Why are you eating? Like, that's the way I look at it now, where at some point, at some point it'll centrate, but then at some point it'll veer right again. I don't know, just constantly. It's definitely swinging hard that way right now. It's crazy that we, I remember we went to paleo, what, two or three years ago, the first time. And I remember walking in there and it's being like, it's so opposite of a bodybuilding convention. But also the same. But so same, so much the same. Very, very similar. You know what I'm saying? You traded out the pre-workouts and the stringers for, you know, blue blockers and Jesus sandals. Like it's literally- And bone broth. Yeah, it's the same thing, but different. It's really unfortunate because I, and I believe there's a little bit of good in all of it. You know what I'm saying? There's something to take from all these different camps I just don't understand. But I think I want to believe that people like all of us and the message that we all kind of shares, I want to think that that's going to become more popular and people are going to get wiser. I just, I think it was easier to fool people 10, 15 years ago. Any time, any time throughout human history when information has become more accessible to more people, we've made incredible advancements. Now that doesn't mean along the way bad shit happened and there was a lot of pushback. But for sure, I mean, the internet is, it's like the printing press, but times a trillion, you know? I mean, when the printing press was invented, you got to understand, the only people that had access to information were nobles and the church and the way you got your information was through what they said to you, because they were the holders of this information. They were the gatekeepers and so through their voice, imagine how long it took like cities to get on board with shit that was like stupid or bad ideas like back in the day. So it would take like a year for it to travel from like one side of the country to the other side of the country. The original best selling book of all time was after the printing press was Marco Polo's books on his travels. And that must have blown people's fucking minds to read this book about these weird people living across the world and animals and what the hell is going on and maybe things are a little different. And it's largely believed to usher in the renaissance. Now we have the internet where, holy shit, man, I can access all of the recorded information that we've ever had throughout all of human history for almost free. That's insane. The problem that we're having is that there is that curation. I was here. Your information is being curated. Well, this is what we talk about. So I believe in the future you're gonna, that's what you're gonna need to be able to do. And we talk about this on the show all the time that, you know. You're gonna need rings and reviews. You will need to look for the opposing argument in everything that gets sent to you. If you don't, you gotta be very careful because if you, and that's- It's a marketplace for information just like anything else. Because you like this, you like that, then all of a sudden you're being fed all the things you already like and all the things you already agree with which we know how dangerous that can be. Well, not even just being fed it, your ability to find a counterpoint, if that counterpoint, because it's all privatized, right? Like the biggest publishing house, it's not Gutenberg, it's Zuckerberg, right? That's it. So when he- Oh, it was a Berg. He's, okay. We're not gonna go down there. Okay, we're gonna ray that in, yeah. But like, you know- I'm not trying to- Wait, you're just trying to get it. Just the last name! Why? You're like, you know, what do you see? You see like, what do you see things like YouTube, you know, taking down videos of, you know, and I have patients that work and they tell me about the landscape of the political culture within the company and it's like, they're very proud of it, but some of that pride might be based in ignorant conscientiousness. Yeah, in bias. Right, yeah, but bias isn't, I don't think it's a bad thing. They're not able to discern bias in novelty, which is something that I think a lot of people have a hard time differentiating with. It's like, you're just hardwired if you see something different to just have a latent because it's like, oh, that's new, right? But I think if these are the, if they're going to lengths to override the human experience online and not be able to give you or withhold the information of some sort of counterpoint, I really think that that's a scary process. I think that's always been a problem, but I think it's less of a problem, far less of a problem today than ever because there are so many channels and ways to deliver information and things can go viral and they're almost impossible to control. It's very difficult now to control information. If something pops out, like information, look it, look it, here's a good example, okay? A company like Uber or Airbnb would never, ever, ever, ever be allowed to exist had they not existed because of technology faster than people could try to put a lid on them. They would never be allowed to exist. There's no way in hell the taxicab fucking cartels or the hotel cartels would ever allow those businesses to flourish. The problem was they flourished, it's like, again, because of technology, they exploded faster than anybody could fucking figure out what to do about. Now they're trying to put limits on them, good luck. And that's how all, look it, when 3D printers go fucking live, like just wait till 3D printers are cheap and very advanced. Try to control guns when you can print your own at home. Good luck, it's not gonna happen, not gonna happen. And this is with everything, so is it a good or bad thing? Here's the way I look at it. If mankind is destined to succeed, it will speed up that process. If we're destined to fail and implode, it will also speed up that process, it's up to us. I'm a firm believer in let us do what we're gonna do, let us be free, let the information come out. So far it's been a fucking great thing. I just think, we're all speaking from a place of when we look to get educated on topic, we'll go down the necessary rabbit holes to find the education. I think the majority of people, their news is just curtailed for them and presented in their things you might like on YouTube. So it puts them on their own echo chamber, exactly. So I think the issue comes down to the individual, it comes down to the consumer, whether it's a consumer of fitness products or a consumer of information. It's doing the due diligence, but like you said, with fitness, it's like give me that pill, give me that thing that's gonna fix me in 30 days. And it's that same mindset, which is the base of the market. Whether your market is a news channel based off sensationalism, or whether you're selling a fucking joss or size or whatever the fuck is. It's the same thing, right? That's in the question. I know, it's actually, it's speeding up. Oh, we have questions. Yeah, we do. We'll get to that in a second. It's speeding up the process. I'll give you two more examples, okay? You look at the gay marriage. This is a great example. In 2008 was so unpopular that if you campaigned for gay marriage, no way you would have won office. In fact, Obama and Hillary Clinton both campaigned and in their campaign said, no, I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. Four years later, four years later, you would not get elected had you said that. That's within four years. Look at marijuana legalization. The fastest public swing we've ever seen in a topic like that to the point now where we have the president of the United States who's a Republican, literally saying, I will back federal decriminalization of marijuana. Movements like this used to take decades. Like the women's suffrage movement, decades. Civil rights movement, decades. Now it's like five or 10 years. And this is technology. It's gonna speed up very fast. That's why I think these, so when I see these people doing things like we see in our space as far as all the gimmicks, like it used to get me mad. It doesn't make me mad anymore because it puts a grin on my face. I'm like, that's lots of opportunity for people like us because it may be a little bit slower process for us right now, but we're in this for a long, in the long haul. And those people might make it quick to a million dollars and make that quick buck. But eventually what happens is the people that go through all that they find out, it's a gimmick. And that just like you, they just takes them, they have to fuck up first. You're smart enough because you've done the research. You're willing to do the homework. You know what you do when you wanna- Educate yourself. They're not smart enough to do that. So they buy into it. They buy into it. They find out it's bullshit that they spread that. Here's a good example. Look what Amazon did. Like in the past, 10 years ago, if I wanted to buy a supplement, I would go by the reputable looking brand or by the athlete that was, you know, on the cover of the magazine that was selling it. Today, I don't give a shit about any of that for the most part. I'll go to Amazon and I'll look at the fucking ratings. Oh, 175 ratings, five star. This is a good one. I think I'm gonna buy this one and take it. Will you though? Will you? You're more conscientious than that to put it in your body based off the public opinion. Oh, I'm talking about the average person. 100% because that's curtailed. That's just as if YouTube is taking down counterpoint videos. Amazon is rising this public court of opinion and presenting this to you. That's people not doing their homework, right? I think there's some, but that's the thing. There's way more information in that rating. There's more information in the rating that I can look at my Uber driver on my app than there was in some agency that said that this person is safe or if I go to a restaurant and oh, it's got an A rating versus I go on Yelp and I see but it's got three stars because they said that there was a cockroach in their food or whatever. Like it's definitely, the problem with markets always has been an information problem. How fast can information travel? It's always been the issue because by the time information gets around, people have gotten screwed. Well, isn't it like how people knocked Wikipedia when it first came out, right? Yeah. I think it comes down to publication bias though. If I have a nice, and I've had some nice meals, I'm not going to go, I don't think Thomas Keller needs a pat on the back. If I'm going to go to French laundry, I'm not going to give him five stars. It's the fucking guy who like didn't like the waiter because he was Italian and, you know, he got pissed off with the pineapple and his pizza and all of a sudden, but it's, and that's what I think is a big issue is the publication bias, right? Like, cause, and what, you know, if I'm in a small, if I'm in Bishop, California and I need to place, which was the case yesterday, sure, yeah, fine, fine, whatever. You know, if I need to find pancake somewhere, I'll go down that route. But if something's going in or on me, you better believe I'm not, I'm not leaving that, that verdict subject to the public court of opinion. Cause people, especially disgruntled people, there is no more entitlement in this country than someone who's pissed off and has spent money. It's true. So it's like every, There's that in the incentivize other business owners. They have to rate and review in order to then receive rate and review. Yeah. Well, don't even get me. I mean, being a small business owner in the Silicon Valley and dealing with Yelp on a next to daily basis. Oh, you know what the next level of that's going to be, right? The next level of that is going to be, you're going to go to a business and rather than looking at random strangers who, who rated that business, you're going to connect through Facebook or whatever and see all the people that you know, that have gone there and what their ratings are. And that'll be way more, that would be even another level of accuracy. I would appreciate, like, I have a friend of mine. He's my movie critic. If he likes a movie, I don't go fucking see it cause he's got shitty taste in the movie. So I know that I could at least interpret that. Cause you know him. Exactly. There's a lot of value in that. I knew exactly all the, all the people that are connected to me, what they like or didn't like. Exactly. That would be, that would be more trustworthy than just random, 500 people. Adam likes this hotel. It's probably super fucking expensive. I'm going to be like that, right? But super plush and comfortable. Yeah. Questions. Let's do it Doug. This clause brought to you by OrganiFi. For those days you fall short on getting your organic veggies or whole food nutrition, OrganiFi fills the gap with laboratory tested certified organic super foods to help give your health and performance the added edge. Try OrganiFi totally risk free for 60 days by going to OrganiFi.com. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com and use a coupon code MINDPUMP for 20% off at checkout. What I was going to ask Jordan was Ben and his ketogenic diet and how that's been going. And if he knew that if he was using ButcherBox or not and if you're familiar with ButcherBox yet. Both questions can keep it real short. I have no idea and I have no idea. Oh yeah, okay. So ButcherBox is cool. It's grass fed and grass finished beef that gets shipped to your house. And it's like, they cut out the middleman. Super quality. So you get a wholesale prices for like triple A quality type meat. Super dope. It's like a subscription model and they eliminate the middlemen and it's super, super cool. You would actually really like it. Yeah, I was going to say it was all fair. I was probably going to pick your brain with that. I'm putting it back lately. Well, you know what we'll do? What we'll do is we'll give you the code. What is the code Doug? Is it just mind pump? Yeah. ButcherBox.com. Do they forward slash mind pump? All right. Why don't you use that Jordan so you can get our discount. All right. What a friend. I got to eat, right? So. No, no, you'll like it. Bro, we'll make so much commission off of him. This guy. I want to cut of that. That's bullshit. Yeah, we don't make commission off of him. So it doesn't really matter. We should have done with him. But you save a bunch of money on it and you get bacon for life, bro. Oh, yeah. You get life bacon. Well, the nice thing about that is your life might be pretty fucking short. You've got a lifetime supply, but he's got three months, Tom. Bro, they just started that promotion. I'm like, oh, my God, that's like the best deal ever, right? Fucking bacon for life. I'm sold just on that alone. Exactly. Bring on the questions, Douglas. I don't have a microphone. Oh, he doesn't got a mic because we're going with four and he didn't have to read himself. Yeah, all right. First question is from TomJ18. Can cracking or popping joints, such as cracking knuckles or neck, cause arthritis or damage to the joints before you get into this? We got to start with the professional cracker. We got to start with him. Well, here's the deal. Thanks, bro. That's what my diploma says. Yeah. Whack him and crack him. I feel like we should say something before he does because he's obviously this is his realm of expertise. Now my understanding when a joint makes a sound where it pops, it's like pulling a suction cup off of a mirror or a window where there's pressure that's being created. You pull it off. That fluid goes into the space that you created. The air comes out or the gas comes out and it creates a pop. So that's all that's kind of happening. From my understanding, when a chiropractor does this to your spine or your neck, and I think it might have been you, Dr. Shalala, that told us this, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, when you're adjusting someone, it's allowing you to move and articulate small areas or small parts of joints that weren't moving. They were kind of frozen. And that release of the ability to move and off all the muscles. I used to think it was just air in the joints. I used to think it was air in your. It's a gas. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's what I thought. Let's hear it, dude. OK. Yeah. Did you see the back of your head with that way you rolled your eyes in? No, no, it's because you called us Dr. Shalala. No, I was very, no. Dr. Shalala is my sister. I don't know if this is me working right now. My bad. No, no, you're good. I just think it's such a common misconception. It depends on the joint, too. First off, the arthritis thing is no. From the research I've read, based on longitudinal studies, go to an old folks home, ask them how many people have arthritis, show your hands, how many people crack their knuckles their whole life, show your hands. You're not going to see that correlation as direct as your mother would tell you when you're five years old, crack your knuckles saying you're going to get arthritis when you're older. Now, the physiological effect of the popping, especially in the spine, was just kind of the realm of chiropractic dealing, although we do adjust extremities, which I think is a little bit more. Extremity adjusting is actually more physical alignment as it pertains to the adjacent position of two bones and the function that they're going to have as they work kind of symbiotically together to go through like broader ranges of motion than the actual spinal adjusting, where I think spinal adjusting is way more, the popping is almost a, it's kind of contemporaneously. It occurs in simultaneous with the actual effective mechanism of correction, where it's not, the pop doesn't necessarily mean good or bad. It just happens sometimes. Yeah, I think it's more so activating a stretch reflex and understanding kind of the neuromusculature of your, the spine itself, like when, you know, the multifidus would probably be the most widely used, even though that's kind of fairly rare. Like if I said rotatories or intertransversary eye or some of these deeper layer, deeper layer, seventh layer back muscles that are innovated by part of your spinal cord that you can't consciously control. If I said flex your multifidus, you can't do it, right? You can put yourself in a position. No, you're doing a Kegel, just a Kegel. You can put yourself in a position where that reflex loop of that dorsal spinal nerve can activate that muscle. The problem is when the adjusting, the cracking of the back and neck is when you crack your own back and you rotate it, you're using large muscles to create an end range and then you're creating an imbalance where you're actually biasing a relative motion, a counter motion between two of those adjacent vertebra when it's passive and I do it, it's completely inert and that stretch reflex is activated without being. So you're trying to activate a stretch reflex and now by the way, when you are doing these adjustments, is there research that shows, cause I think I read something that shows that there's a localized pain relief that happens from, it's almost like your body's relieving or releasing pain relievers at the site of the adjustment, almost like when you foam roll and you feel immediate relief from what are they called? No-C receptors that get activated? Yeah, no-C receptors, but I think to the proprioceptors and stretch reflexes, it's basically, whatever the intervention is, you're more or less from a functional sample, you're trying to have an effect on the nervous system. Always. But think of the locus of motor control. It's prefrontal cortex creates this motor pattern. It gets put out through spinal cord, through ventral spinal nerves. So if I said flex your bicep or flex your quad, that's ventral spinal nerves through the front of the spinal cord. Then there's a reflex sensory input loop through and then you kind of have this like a posterior column that's gonna calibrate for proprioception and position in space and then- So it's feedback to the brain. It's feedback to the brain. So, but if it goes brain to brain to muscle, muscle pulls tendon, tendon moves bone, ligaments stabilized position of bone, why would I then start with bone when I can go right to muscle, right? So when I address extremity issues, I can, you know, you have hip issues, I'm gonna go right to the muscle first because that's the, it's one deviation closer to the nervous system than the bone. There's no osseous neural- You're taking out the middle, man. Yeah, there's no osseous neural junction. It's my own neural, right? So if I can get access to that nervous system and the perception of that nervous system from the muscle, then I'm gonna try and do that. So the way I think about it too is like, and I'm gonna use a very simple muscle. People can understand, because I mostly understand what you're saying, but it's very complicated. And some people listening right now, right now might be like, what? Okay, so I'm gonna use- Shit, should I pop my knuckles or not? I don't fucking- I'm gonna use a very simple, simple base, like the bicep, like sometimes people would come in and hire me and I'd work out with them and they'd have a sore, the front of the shoulder would be sore. And I'm just gonna sit, you know, I'd have to do an assessment and all that, but then I would establish like, oh, you have some inflammation at the bicep joint or excuse me, the bicep tendon, which goes over the front of the shoulder. Perhaps. Stretch out the bicep and many times, immediately they would have a little bit of relief. Now the way I would, the way I think about it is, the bicep might have been tight due to poor function, for maybe it was overused, whatever. It's in that kind of constant state of tonus that might be happening from the central nervous system. That stretch gets the CNS to relax a little bit and that's why they feel a little bit of pain relief. When you go deep into these deep, deep muscles that are, like you said, layers and layers deep, muscles that we can't really consciously control, getting them to stretch and move, like good luck doing that, especially if you're locked up because you have poor recruitment patterns, then you go see someone like you who, besides all the other things you do, because just adjusting someone, I think it's a small piece of really what you do, but the adjustment gets those muscles to move a little bit and stretch a little bit, which tells the central nervous system, chill the fuck out for a second and they get the pain relief. Am I doing it justice? Am I explaining it in a way that- Yeah, yeah, basically these muscles that we're trying to affect are, they're there to protect your spinal cord, right? Because they just run from bony prominence on, like they run from bone to bone in your back, from vertebra to vertebra to your back. So if one vertebra moves through a plane of motion relative to its other too far, whether it's flexion extension or lateral flexion of rotation, like the majority of people that come into my office, it's never a good story. Like when I get the very stereotypical, like I threw out my back thing or I slipped a disc and it's like, all right, sure, but we don't have time for that. But it's what's happened is they've moved in a position usually in all three planes of motion at once. I was leaning over to pick something up, I twisted to the side and then I rotated. It's like, okay, there's a muscle that's getting stretched. Each time you move that. And what it's accounting for is, if this bone one moves too far into bone two, in the middle of bone one and two is a spinal cord that we really would like to go through life without impacting cause what we like walking and controlling bowel and bladder function. So these muscles are like, the second they've perceived that stretch, fuck, don't move anymore. Yeah, so it's like, you need to, you know, just like, wow, that's interesting. So is that when you, when someone comes in complaining of slip disc or whatever, is that more common that it's more related to that than it actually is? Well, to correct me if I'm wrong, Jordan, but many times, you know, slip disc or bulging disc, many times they're asymptomatic. Yes, thank you. Okay, fuck it best. So I hope if someone's listening to this and they know someone that has a disc issue, cause people wear disc issues like a fucking scar, they carry it with them. Like a badge of honor or something. Yeah, and it's like, oh, sorry, I can't slip disc. Like dude, what? Like we're just walking upstairs. Like what are you talking about? I wonder how many people would have a slip disc if you just MRI'd everybody. You probably find- 25%. Yeah, and out of that 25%, how many of them would actually feel pain? Oh, it'd be 25% that are asymptomatic. But here's the thing. So no symptoms. So if we think of it, thank you. If we think of it, then think of it this way. Okay, so very common place to herniate disc. I'm like the subtitles. So a very common place to herniate disc is in your lower back, right? So most axial force, we don't have any ribs. You know, if your core is weak, you're not gonna have any functional stability, air quoting functional. So often you'll see either at the apex of a curve, so L3, or at the convergence of a curve, L5S1. So where like, you know, the sacrum bends one way, the lumbar spine curves another, the thoracic spine, and so on and so forth. So what'll happen? So imagine a nerve leaving a spinal segment through vertebra to innervate a motor, like function, right? So superior gluteal nerve innervates the gluteum medius, right? Which is a lateral stabilizer of the hip. What do you mean by it leaves it? It prioritizes that? So out of that particular spinal level, and I wanna say it's L4, L5, L4, L5, I'm gonna have to brush up on this if someone call me out if I'm wrong. I think you're right. So if that nerve leaves and goes to that muscle, so we're talking purely about the gluteum med, which is a lateral stabilizer of the hip. It's the nerve that controls that muscle. Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it. What happens if we think that gluteum med is a muscle of stability, it has to stabilize the hip. It's not a muscle of strength. So every time you get a hip circle or a booty band or do something like that, you're not training the function of that muscle correctly. Anatomically, based off origin insertion, resisted abduction and external rotation will in turn, based off of your anatomy textbook, that'll be the action of the glute. So we're getting it stronger, cool. But so say the output of that nerve is 100%, right? And in a non-pathological, your disc is exactly where it should be. In a perfect world. In a perfect world. But you're training either so you're not training your gluteum med at all or you're training it with this resistance where it needs to be stable. The actual function because you're training it to be strong and not stable at best is say 50%. So give an example of that. Sure, okay. So if you're using a hip circle to do like monster walks with and you don't have low back pain, you're really only training that muscle, the gluteum med, let's hypothetically 50% of what it's capable of. That's because of the adaptations are very specific. So to use another example, if I train my bicep to hold the weight stable for a long period of time in this isometric contraction, most of the adaptations can be isometric. If I train it to curl and extend, I'm gonna get some isometric strength but not max out. I'm not gonna maximize its adaptation. Kind of. Well, I guess the point I'm trying to get at and this is a bit of an aside is there's a difference between strength and stability as it comes to stimulus adaptation, right? Like you speak Italian. I do. Okay, so if I put you in like Barcelona, could you order lunch and get on a train? Maybe. So sure, Latin based languages have, there's a carryover, there's a crossover. So a lot of the research on like, and I'm gonna use the GluteMead specifically because it is so inundated into fitness culture and buying accessories in these games. Right, I'm glad you're going this direction. Yeah, so Glute Strengthening is a huge market because they think that's the ticket to like low back pain and all this stuff. But wear for everything. Yeah, exactly, which I think is dumb because the GluteMead works more around a helical axis, a round a Y axis where gravity comes straight down. So the bicep is a great example because that works directly in opposition to gravity. It has a necessity to be strong. So if we think about it, if Sal didn't work out, so not working out and then having back pain. So the heaviest thing that you have to lift is your own body weight. And then you just wanna get back to a baseline of normal. That's the equivalent of Sal going to Barcelona, ordering lunch, getting on a train. He's not fluent, he's not physically literate in the analogy, but he can get by. But now imagine Sal is Sal, right? Sal's pulling 500 pounds, beltless, no strap in the garage. He's trying to get jacked as fuck. He's exactly, that's the anabolic factor. That's the equivalent in the analogy of him moving to Barcelona and having to live there. You need to speak the right language. If you're pursuing like progression in a gym setting or progressive overload, if you're extra physiologically loading your own body, you need to make sure now that split between the stimulus adaptation starts to matter. So a lot of the therapeutic interventions, even if it's a well-trained college age male, it's like, all right, well-trained my ass, right? Well-trained compared to anyone in this room, they're not trained at all, right? So going back to the disc example, so if we're not training the function of that glute properly, and now we have a ceiling of 100%, we're only training at 50, then you slip a disc, like actually herniate or have a bulging disc or sequestration of that fluid outside of the annulus fibrosis, then let's say the function now or the ability for that muscle to transmit force, right? Goes from 100 to 70. Relatively speaking, because you've only trained 50% of the actual function of that, because there's some carryover if you know Italian and you're going to Spain, there's some carryover to building resistance against ability, but now you've dropped 30% here, your 50% function goes from 50 to 20, somewhere in that range is your threshold for pain. I would rather take 100% of 70 than 50% of 100, but it's just people cross that threshold, they see a black and white on MRI and they go, there it is, then that's the issue. It's like, no, no, no, it's the dysfunction. We can fix the function and we don't have to worry about the structure, right? So that's how I look at it for something like a bulging disc where it's like figure out where the function is going wrong. And that's the most common one I see because people don't understand because you don't have to, you can't sell. No, and people think of it like a broken bone. It's not a broken bone. It's not like having a broken femur where you got to let the femur heal. Again, you could literally MRI, you could image 100 people, you're gonna find a good chunk of them are gonna have herniated or slipped discs and a good chunk of those people aren't gonna have any symptoms whatsoever. And then you get people with pain for no apparent reason whatsoever. It always goes back to dysfunction. Unless it's an acute injury, chronic pain is typically just dysfunction. But the problem is we don't have standardized gold. The majority of people don't have the facilities in which to standardize assessment for function. People have tried, but it's so hard because you can't see it. It's too individual, isn't it? Exactly, but you need to understand the core tenants of biomechanics to really be able to apply it across the board. Just with training, right? Like you need to understand the different loading parameters that people are gonna be capable of, right? And understanding that the scale for someone in this room, and that's why my practice has become so niche to athletics, is understanding that here are the core tenants, but here's how we scale out the stimulus to have an effect on the nervous system of someone that can squat 900 pounds, right? So it's being able to walk that fine line. Like the majority of people, like if you had a 600 pound client and you were even the most inept personal trainer in the world, you could get that guy to lose 100 pounds, right? Just based off of like, you could food pyramid the guy. Like you go back to 1995 food pyramid him and you'd still be able to get to lose 100 pounds. I take someone- But take someone from 6% to 5% body fat? That takes someone in this room to do it, right? So that's the thing. All right, so the next question is from Brady Cherise. Any exercises or tips for strengthening ankles? I broke mine about eight years ago, so I'm super prone to rolling it. Like to go on long hikes and runs a few times a week, but inside of ankle and Achilles feels very inflamed when done. You know, it's funny when people say I broke something and so now I'm super prone to hurting it. I think what people think that they, or what they feel is because it's broken, the tendency to hurt it again because it's been damaged is much higher. The reality is because it broke, first off, something caused you to break it. It may have been a bad recruitment pattern, maybe not, but after you broke it, you definitely weren't using it in its most optimal way because it was in a cast or whatever and then you were healing, you were probably walking funny. So now you've created just bad patterning which makes you more prone to injury. Yeah, but you don't really think that a broken ankle is coming from a bad pattern. It could be or it could be something else. So you're thinking along the lines, like I break my ankle playing a sport and because I have a bad recruitment pattern, my foot didn't strike the ground the way it should have struck the ground. Or I was in a stable somewhere. It's trauma that just came in. Or even the ability to react to stimulus, right? I mean, I have a friend of mine, Corey Schlesinger, is a strength coach for the men's basketball team at Stanford and you should see some of the stuff he's doing with like, and I'm not a flow guy, right? Like I'm not a primal movement tumble, get the fuck off the ground. But he thinks, but think of it like, I think of things like the rate limit, what's your bottleneck, right? Like, so I look at strength like an equation, right? Like if my squat is a value that's expressed of the strength of my quads, the strength of my hamstrings, the stability of my core, the strength of my upper back, what a lot of people do will just the work inside that equation, right? Like, okay, I'm gonna isolate my quads to get them stronger and then that should appreciate the strength of my squat. But I look, the way I program for people is what's gonna be the multiplier on the outside of that equation? With what little I know about math is you solve for the brackets first and then you times out from outside the bracket. So we can solve inside all we want, but if this multiplier outside the bracket isn't one, again, it's just like the this thing. I would rather take 100% of a cumulative 85% of relative muscle strength within that movement pattern than try and focus on, I'm in front squat, I'm in RDL, I'm at my hamstrings big, I'm at my quads big and then have a blown SI joint that puts my multiplier to 0.5, right? So what Corey does, yeah, which is really interesting in sports, like you almost said it like, you know, kind of shit happens, right? Shit happens in sports. Well, he'll have his basketball players do calf raises on his other players' feet, barefoot. So like getting that reactive stability to, it's not so much what happens when you roll this ankle is how much can you stabilize on the other hip on the drop of a hat? So like, dude, we just, you don't think I've rolled my fucking ankles walking up that goddamn hill? Like 10 million times, but I trained so much unilateral hip stability and we had this kind of on the Q and A earlier on the Facebook live where it's like, I think so much of that rehabilitation after a break because once you damage the structure, it's the same thing. Like I got hit by a Chevy Suburban like five years ago, I got T-Bone in the middle of an intersection, I had to mel Gibson lethal weapon to my shoulder back into place in the middle of the street. Yeah, but I mean, you guys know rotator cuffs enough to know that we can regain function, we can regain structural integrity through improving the function. The ankle's totally different. Contract your anterior tallow fibular ligament. You can't do it. If you broke his ankle, I likely that one went. So rather than wearing locally as the integrity of the foot, worry about how we're setting the trajectory of the ground forces for that foot to absorb force in the first place. Totally because what Western medicine sometimes tends to do is they'll look, oh, your knee hurts, we're just gonna look at your knee and it's like, yeah, well, it could be from your hip, it could be from your ankle. With an ankle issue, I would look to the hip and I would look at the foot. Those are the most mobile places that are more proximal to the ankle but are not the ankle itself. So if your hip, if you have a weakness in your hip, if your hip can't stabilize laterally, does it rotate well, whatever, and you go to make a turn or cut or whatever and that hip isn't strong enough or stable enough to support you, it goes right to the next joint and if your ankle's not strong enough, now it goes to the joint itself and then it goes to the ligaments and if those ligaments aren't strong enough, you tore something or you hurt something. I mean, I got blown away just by learning, Dr. Brink blew us away with how dysfunctional feet are on people nowadays. It's absolutely insane and how much of an impact that has on my squat. When I started working on my feet, I started feeling more stable in my ankles and it sounds obvious now but it wasn't so obvious then. I thought it was all about just my ankles. Something that I'll do is I'll walk on my tippy toes. I do tippy toe squats. I'll also get on the edges of my feet and I'll squat like this. I mean, is there any value to doing all those things? Do you think? I mean, it's just like, I like training fringe ranges of motion. Like I talked about earlier with training purposeful thoracic flexion in the spine. It's a series we've done on the Mind Pump YouTube channel where it's like, I know a lot of people are like, whoa, that looks really scary but it's so controlled. You know what's scary? Life is really sports. Fucking sports are real scary. Yeah, exactly. So I think we could boil this out to, we could take this down like a philosophy route as well, right? Like that is essentially stoicism. Like it's a stoic means of training your own body that's like put yourself in a position either mentally where things are really bad and then everything relatively seems okay. It's the same thing with building resiliency and strength in your body. It's like, train those end ranges of motion, be prepared for the unknown. Like Justin said, where just a quick one for me would be like when a joint loses its structural integrity it'll look to gain that and cast it like neurologically. Hey, we know something's not right. So with something like that I would just look to address some of the muscles that just like with adjusting, right? The idea of like, okay, I'm trying to bring together a stretch reflex because it's perceived a relative motion well past its physiological limitations Yeah, capacity is a good way to put it. Now, all of a sudden, whether it's a multifidus seizing up to keep L4 and L5 close together or whether it's the peronials that are seizing up to keep the relative position of the fibula onto the base of the first and the fifth metatarsal because that relative position has changed unless you again, you don't have to, you could adjust the ankle if it's indicated but you could address the actual muscles themselves because they're so superficial. Getting that neurological down regulation to say, Hey, there's no more threat. We're not in that position anymore. We don't have to stay chronically short because that rigidity leads them to being unstable. It does and it causes inflammation. When a muscle is in this kind of, you know, low level state of being, you know, activated because your body thinks that there's an issue there or is afraid to move that causes inflammation tense or flex any muscle all day at 25%. Just do that, clench your hand a little bit hold it all day long and see if you don't start to notice inflammation at your fingers and at your wrist. So with something like this, I would say, definitely work on strengthening the ankle itself for sure. Move it through ranges of motion, activate, you know create tension in those ranges of motion but also work on your hips, work on your ability to rotate your hips, work on your ability to abduct and adduct and, you know, extend because I feel like it's, when I've seen people roll ankles, it's usually coming from a lack of lateral stability in the hips. I'm, I can get like that. I tend to, I like to train so, you know straightforward sometimes that when I'll go finally remind myself like, well I should do some lateral stuff. I can feel like my, if I push this too hard it's not my hip that's going to get hurt my ankle. That's the weakest link. What do you think about things like then like kin stretch and doing like a combat stretch that's activated where so you get yourself in this you drive the knee all the way over the toe. Isometric kind of like tension that you're applying in the range of motion. Yeah, well it depends on if the bottle and that or the rate limit or strength or stability. If you're going to apply that PNF type principle where you're contracting in an N range of motion that contraction is not going to be evoking a greater stimulus of instability. It's going to be adding some level of resistance or isometrics. It's, I think it could be potentially damaging. And the reason I think this is because we have to go back to stability being appeased by structure and function. When you're in that N range of motion it's like, yeah, there is going to be a stretch applied to the function of the muscle kind of on trial. But with that you're also taking to N range a ligament or a tendon or a joint capsule or some sort of like some sort of articulating soft tissue or something like that. That's why I think stretching your low back is so bad. Or like the inversion stuff for people like hanging upside down with bands and like distracting people a lot. Well, you know why they like that because it's temporary relief, you know? Sure, but it's a positive feedback loop, right? Where the more you do it the more you're going to have to do it because you're not, you're not addressing the reason why those muscles are tight. That's right. You're bringing to N range these, so the problem I have with some of that N range contract 90-90 stuff like we were discussing off air is that especially with hips is like the issues are usually when the person is loaded on their feet. And if the intervention is not testing as close to that objective outcome as we can, i.e. you're laying on the ground with your knees on the floor rather than standing on the ground with your feet on the floor, the responsiveness and the neurological adaptation that comes with loading one foot on the ground as far as evoking instability is going to be so much greater than N range. Let's talk about that for a second because I'm somebody who I know struggled with internal rotation of my hips. In the 90-90, I mentioned to you with activating it and lifting my feet up off the ground was a, I told you game changer, you laughed at me. And so. Yeah, but you didn't stop lifting either. No, of course not. You did that and then you did that. Yeah, but I would like to hear what Jordan, because I know Jordan's probably not getting down in the 90-90, but if you were to give me movements or exercises that you think would benefit me if I lack internal rotation of my hips, what would that look like? Because he's saying standing. What would I be doing standing? Oh, so I mean, if we think, and this is the thing, it's not obvious to most people why we need internal rotation of the hip for bilateral loaded movements, like the squat. Why do we need internal rotation of the squat? It's, think of it more like an arc of rotation. It's a bit of a debate over it, isn't it? Kind of, but it's just a misunderstanding of when we need internal rotation. So think of a baseball player, right? Like a baseball player or a pitcher, for example. So pitchers are often diagnosed with GERD, right? Not a gut issue, but a general internal, or a glenohumeral internal rotation deficiency. They're not deficient in internal rotation. They're arc of external rotation. Their arc of rotation is retroverted, right? So if my bicep's stronger in the shortest position or the length of position or right in the middle? Probably in the middle of the shoulder. Sure, it's shortened. Exactly. Well, right in the middle from a length tension relationship. So imagine I'm trying to generate force through my shoulder when I'm pitching, but that end range of motion from the prime mover standpoint is to a point where it's stretching everything. Because I'm so biased in external rotation because that's where I'm starting when I pitch. If you take the majority of power lifters and get them to lay face up, their toes are pointing to either side of the room because they're biasing that external rotation. So when they're in that bottom position, so it's not so much improving, so it is in a sense improving internal rotation, but it's introverting the arc of rotation so that in the bottom of the squat, all our main movers that are gonna move us vertically are in a position to express strength through a ideal length tension relationship. So I think the main mechanism of correction with the 90-90, it's almost like when my mom used to trick me into eating vegetables by mixing it up in my spaghetti sauce. So it's, sorry, is that cultural frustration? No, no, you're good. Okay. When she used to make me eat my pineapple by putting it in my pizza. God damn it. It's the ability, so you don't need internal rotation in your hips until you're an extension of your hips. So a lot of people what they perceive as an internal rotation issue is actually a bias towards hip flexion, right? So if we think of when we're walking, when do we need internal rotation? It's when this hips in N range extension. So work on extension first, and a lot of times they're cleared up, but so the 90-90 position does have that hip in relative extension. The activation, it's not so much that it's building stability, it's more introverting that arc of rotation, which is in itself not a bad thing, but I think the interview, so your question was what exercises could I do? I'm glad you're getting there. I think something like hip airplanes or loading using the- Oh, like McGill planes? Those? McGill planes, like stand on one leg. McGill airplanes or whatever, the one where you're on the single leg and then you rotate? Yeah, so you're basically like, if you can't stabilize your own body weight with one of your hips, you shouldn't try to load more than your own body weight from both of your hips because you're reliant now on structural stability rather than function. So that structural stability- Or even like maybe Bulgarian split squats. That's a great example. Yeah, unilateral load, but then it comes down to which hand you load it in, because most people intuitively load it in the gait cycle pattern, which is going to be more the anterior oblique sling, but you want to do it in the actually the non-intuitive pattern, which is dumbbell in the hand of the side of the foot that's down. Right, right. So if you're doing a right leg exercise, you want to hold the dumbbell with the right hand. Yes. Okay, excellent. Next question is from Freaky Jake. This must be one of your friends, Jordan. He's into- He's not my friend. Are the bozu ball and other stability things a good tool for building knee stability? Now, before we rip into it, because I know we're going to, before we rip into it, here's what I like about stability balls in particular for beginner clients. So as personal trainers, and this is by the way, your entire routine should not revolve around a stability ball, but I would use them sometimes with beginners, mainly because it's a easy reminder for that person. Mine did like in 2002. To stay stable and tight when doing an exercise. That's all it is. People, when they tend to sit down on anything, or stand, they've developed this pattern where it's almost like their joints are supporting them and they're kind of just standing there and things are, they're not really being able to activate their bodies. When you put someone on a stability ball, especially a beginner, somebody in that super decondition, you don't want them to fall off. It almost, it's like a reminder, like, okay, I got to kind of stay steady and tight so I can do this exercise. That's where I see some of the benefit. Now we can rip into it. Okay, so there's a few things here, just about the way the question's framed, because it's talking about knee stability. Knee stability doesn't exist. It's structural entirely. That's right. So yeah. It flexes and extends. It flexes and extends. And then people are going to make the argument, well, what about the VMO? It's like, okay. So we got to draw a hard line between knee stability and femur stability, which will bring us, will circle us back to the gate cycle point that I feel like I've just been reiterating all morning. So both people, first, I think it's, this is emblematic of the conversation we had earlier about the pendulum and the fitness industry, where the middle line is education. It's understanding that if we can, we can implement a stimulus of instability by implementing unilateral loads. So all the stability you need to evoke for your body to be able to get strong, you can generate by altering your base support. Stand on one leg and do shit, right? So I think on one end of this pendulum swing, we have this resistance, this resistance market, where it's like, well, we can't stand, we can't sell people standing on one leg. So here, put a band around your knees and we're gonna, that's how you're gonna stabilize your knees. It's like, all right, we're missing the boat. There's nothing to sell if you tell someone to stand on one leg. Exactly, so on the other side of the industry, we have this extra physiological stimulus of instability that becomes nothing more than a parlor trick and skill adaptation, right? The transferability of someone who can stand on a boasty ball or stand on a med ball is not correlative to someone who can stand on one leg. It doesn't translate. It doesn't translate, but what does translate is ability to stand on one leg and then for the ability to deviate your own center of gravity within that limited base of support, like do a single leg RDL would be, because knee stability is ACL, MCL, PCL, LCL. And those things don't move. Those things don't move. You can't train them. They're inert. It's just structured. And I'll tell you what, stability balls and boasty balls, stability balls and boasty balls would definitely have a lot of carryover if the earth was made of stability balls and boasty balls. Now, we also got to draw a line of distinction between primary and secondary prevention. You take an aspirin, a baby aspirin every day and you haven't had a heart attack. Yeah, you're still equal likely from a primary prevention standpoint to have that heart attack. Afterwards, there is research to show that that baby aspirin could potentially help secondary prevention. So I think maybe some of the benefit, and I don't know if, and I remember seeing a collegiate female soccer study that had the boasty balls and intervention, I don't know if it had a positive or a negative effect on, because I think if- Well, it had a positive, I did read, I think I read that same study. And by the way, the reason why they used female athletes is because the rate of ACL tears in female athletes is like twice as high or something ridiculous. Purely morphology. The Q angle from the hip is going to set an inward trajectory of that female. So basically- And women have wider hips, you know, because they're hot. And that angle from hip to knee- Has something to do with birthing, I think. The ratio. Yeah, yeah, that's probably- My bad, my bad. Adam's fact checking for us right now. No, but because their hips are wider and that angle from hip to knee is a sharper angle, it places more stress on those ligaments. You want to strengthen your knee or you want to have better knee stability, get your hips and ankles more stable because those are mobile as fuck joints. The knee doesn't need stability, it's own stability is it's, what's the word, self-evident. It's got those- Yeah. That's it, it's got those ligaments. But like I said, with the stability ball, you put a client, a new client on a stability ball. I like doing that sometimes because it just reminds them to fucking stay tall and stay tight. You put them on a chair or a bench and it's like, I gotta keep like, fix your posture instead of tighten your core. You put them on a physio ball and they're like, oh shit, I'm gonna fall. So I better tighten things up. And that's where I see the benefit in it, but I don't see any benefit aside from that. But boy, there was a period there in personal training. I'll tell you. You can just push them a little in the low brace. Yeah, I'll tell you, in personal training, there was a period there where that's all, I remember when it happened too. It was like, we went from people using machines all the time to trainers were using bands and balls and one legged shit on dyna discs for every single leg. I really think that, and you said it real quick, but I think circling back to that, the single best movement that I've ever taught to do that would be a single leg deadlift. And I think, because you're getting both, do a barefoot too. Do a barefoot single leg deadlift. I feel like you're gonna get a lot of mobility, strength all the way from the foot, all the way up to the hip, which then in turn is gonna help protect or keep this knee stable like they want. For sure, but it definitely went too far with the stability stuff. It just got so fucking ridiculous people doing every single exercise on those things. So, you know, as far as knee stability is concerned, basically what we're saying, traditional exercises for the hips, the ankles, and unilateral movements, probably the best. Next question is from Clebsolius Rex. What's the most ridiculous pieces of fitness equipment you have seen? Yeah, God. I mean, it's low hanging fruit, man. I love it though. I mean, what do we got up here? Well, here, how about this? How about this? What are the most ridiculous pieces of fitness equipment you see that are actually machines and stuff? Yeah, how about in gypsum? These are two easy, right? The blades, the shake weight, jocin on TV kind of stuff. I'd rather pick apart some of the gypsum. Let's talk about machines. Core machines, loaded spinal flexion. Oh, that's, yeah. Oh, then just, yeah, like, you know, hammer strikes makes like the loaded, rotational oblique thing. And it's like, okay, clearly no one at hammer strikes. So what's wrong with that? Let's talk about that first. Sure, all right. So the obliques are, so there's, every muscle has a primary action, right? Which most people can surmise based off like, okay, I'm gonna contract my bicep. All right, elbow flexion. But it's like, it's, performance exists in, it's like a good lie. It devils in the details, right? So I think it exists in the peripheral, secondary and tertiary action. So with, you know, we're gonna take, for example, you're on your knees and then you're like rotating against the resistance of these pads on your shoulders. You guys know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the obliques. Made my core look awesome. Yeah. But the obliques are, well, first off, core doesn't need to be strong, right? And I fucking feel like a broken wreck because there's a difference between strength and stability. If there is one takeaway from this episode, that's what I want it to be. So the core is, it's, so I look at the body as three hubs of stability. And basically any pathology from a functional standpoint can be even structural if the goal is to out function, that bad structure is shoulder, hip and spine. Those are our hubs of stability. Those are gonna govern range of motion and strength output period, right? So the way I look at it from a core standpoint, well, that's the epicenter of our spinal stability. So that needs to be able to resist force really well. So not rotation, but counter rotation. Counter rotation. I think, okay, so there is a benefit in having adequate range of motion in trunk rotation. That's huge, because that'll affect how our hips have to compensate in kind. Especially for sports. Huge, right? I think that's a big underpinning in sports hernias is a discrepancy in trunk stability to hip mobility and hip mobility. But I think based off of the external oblique or the oblique machine, the external oblique is a lateral flexor to one side, to the same side, and it's a rotator to the opposite side, but also posteriorly tilts the pelvis, right? So these machines are just very uniaxial in a sense that it's moving around that Y axis, which is the only muscle that really does that is the transverse abdominis. Pure rotation based off fiber orientation. But again, it's not about shortening the muscle. It's about isometrically resisting force rather than exerting force. You want something to be stable and rigid when it needs to be to prevent injury, but I will, I'm gonna make an argument on the other side. I'm gonna disagree with you on one, not disagree with you actually. I'm gonna show another side to this and that's the aesthetic side, the muscle development side. If you're trying to build a muscle so that it looks good, nothing builds a muscle like full range of motion through shortening and lengthening. And so I can see the use in machines like this when someone's like, well look, I like the function part, like you're saying, I wanna have a stable core to prevent injury, but I also wanna develop the muscle so they look really cool. Developing muscles, you develop muscles better, more hypertrophy happens when you move them through the strength, the shortening, the contracting and the lengthening. And that's where I can see the benefit like if you're doing, people talk about the abs, the obliques, all the muscles around the core to stabilize the spine, but what if you wanna build muscles that pop out or show, well then you're gonna wanna throw in some of that other stuff because it's gonna develop more muscle, no? To an extent, man, I think if we can improve function, we can improve aesthetics, right? Beltless work, so this is especially with the external tape. So let's talk about some of the movements that we would do instead of that. The first thing that comes to mind for me is like a side plank, activate my glutes and then put, throw some movement in there. Yeah, I mean, landmine press, overhead, unilateral load, so test or even disadvantage some of those peripheral hubs of stability so that some of that force transfer of resistance as far as counter movement is now put on the spine, right? So loading, load a kettlebell overhead pressed in a split lunge position is gonna put a lot of demand of rotation. Depending on how you load your single arm dumbbell rows, you can set a trajectory for your hips to make your spine want to rotate and then use your external obliques from stopping that from happening rather than turning it into a very linear. Oh, so the anti-rotation, yeah. Exactly, so I think there's great ways to do it and fuck, I mean, you can be 200 pound dumbbells, we're rowing, like that's a heavy loaded exercise. That hammer strength rotation machine only goes up to 150 pounds and that's on a track. What a good point. Yeah, so I always think, I do agree, and that's something I differentiate. What's your objective outcome? And that's where I start, like I don't like running but if you come into my office and you want to run a marathon, all right, fuck yeah, let's get you there. If you want to go on stage, you want to be on the Olympia, all right, we can get you there. Cause that's the thing, cause a lot of people, they understand the functional part, they understand the importance of it, but at the end of the day, most people work out because they want to look better and so I like to tell people, you know, both sides of it, like, okay, here's the functional piece, here's the development piece or what's going to produce that look that you want. You got to kind of marry the two, but understand this, that you're right, with the core, it's about stabilization and that's very important. I mean, if you want to prevent injury, look, that's the most common area people tend to fuck themselves up and nothing will make you look shitty, like not being able to work out because you hurt yourself. Exactly, and that's a long-term bottleneck is going to be that injury, right? It is, but I also will say this, and this kind of goes in a little bit on your side, the most developed obliques and core muscles I've ever seen were on lean power lifters who'd never did a single crunch or sit-up or a rotation exercise, just from stabilizing themselves, being able to lift. Sumo deadlift, sumo deadlift, you want obliques? Sumo deadlift, so when you conventionally deadlift, and this is something that I have to talk to a lot to my lifters about, is when you conventionally deadlift, you're using your lats. Lats are crazy stabilizers of rotation of the trunk, so strong, right? And again, we're going down the rabbit hole of tertiary and quaternary action of the muscle, but when we're at a disadvantage already short in position because we're taking a grip inside the knees, now if the lats are disadvantaged in managing rotational forces and we're actually invoking more rotational force because if you have one arm that's longer than the other or you have a leg drive in your sumo stance that's stronger on one side, the fact that you're grabbing closer on the bar, there's more force outside your hands. It's a longer lever on the outside. Exactly, so that'll start, you see a lot of people start to helicopter with the sumo deadlift, that's trunk rotation. Well, I mean, you'll see a higher rate of oblique tears or high groin sprains in the sumo deadlift. I didn't even think of that. Yeah, that's brilliant. Now you say, I'm totally picturing that right now going like, oh, shit, what a great win in developing obliques. Yeah, so reinforcing the anterior oblique sling, which is the external oblique into the opposite side, high adductors, but if you don't have the function of that and you try to load a heavy sumo and that's what I'll see, guys, go from, the sumo puts you at an advantageous position from, you know, if force is work. Biomechanics. Yeah, if work is force times distance and we're cutting the amount of distance, then we can effectively do more work with exerting the same amount of force. So in that stance, everyone is, you know, from biomechanics, like you said, in a position where they could technically load more weight, but they get hurt because their lots are out of the equation and then the conventional deadlift, the lots are gonna rain supreme. We take those out. Now, maybe we've worked with the belt a lot, which we know to actually diminish the output of the external obliques. So here we have this muscle that's stand alone, now on trial, trying to hold up to your max or if not more than your max because of the biomechanics. Now I have a question for you, because we just got on deadlifts here for a second. Knowing the differences between the sumo deadlift and the conventional deadlift, do you see carryover for, let's say somebody, I like to pull conventional, that's where I can pull the most weight. Do you see carryover for me spending cycles, getting better at sumo deadlifts? Would there be some carryover there to help me with my main lift which would be conventional? So I look at it as a way to, if you're stronger in your conventional pull, I would say no. I mean, not that I'm averse to training it, it's just the majority of times it's, okay, do you want a hip injury or a back injury? Okay, you want a hip injury, sumo deadlift, you want a back injury, conventional deadlift. Eventually, that's where the reaper of injury is gonna rear its head for each of those lifts, respectively, so I think if you pull sumo, you should absolutely pull conventional. I don't think how regular that loading pattern is based of how we're meant to. Right, like how many other times are you ever gonna be in a position like that? Exactly, yeah. Pulling 400, 500 pounds. What would give you more carryover like to a conventional deadlift, a sumo lift or practicing that or something like a trap bar deadlift? Okay, so I think a trap bar deadlift would carryover better to sumo because sumo is a lot more quad dominant than people think because if you watch, it's not as fluid, if you watch a proficient sumo deadlifters, their knees are extended before their backs extended, which is rarely the case in a good deadlift. Your knees and hips should come to that triple, exact at the same time, where watch Yuri Belkin pull 927 off the floor, beltless at 227, he snaps his quad so fast, but it's the inertia of getting that bar moving that carries him through that n-range extension, right? So sumo deadlifting is if it's in your sport or if you're a taller athlete in like, if you're a taller basketball player using that as a way to hip hinge, that's not gonna increase the likelihood of injury by going through excessive loaded flexion in that position. Sure, use it sparingly, I think carryover wise, you're gonna see your conventional goes up, your sumo goes up, not necessarily your sumo goes up, your conventional goes up. I like to do it just for fun because I'll notice I'll get at one and then I'll have to practice the other one. And I also notice just from a use, like a wear on my body standpoint, like you said, if I push my conventional too long, my low back starts to get tired and sore, so then I'll go to sumo and then I'll start to have to deal with the hip issues. So excellent. Check this out, we have a lot of free guides, free, free resources and guides. Educate yourself. That's about flabby arm guide, flat tummy guide, we got a guide on hip training. You ain't gotta buy shit, just read it. All kinds of stuff, you go to mindpumpfree.com. You can also find us all on Instagram. Jordan, what's your Instagram handle? At the underscore muscle underscore doc. Some incredible nudes on that page. You can also find mine, mindpumps out. Sliden is DM. Justin, mind pump, Justin, Adam, mind pump, Adam and also, if you think putting pineapple on pizza is fucking stupid, make sure you let Jordan shallow know on his Instagram page. Bring it on. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. 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