 Welcome to the 21 Convention Podcast. My name is Steve Maeda and today we have a very special podcast for you. It was actually shot at the 21 Convention in Tampa, Florida. And today we have a co-host, Skyler Tanner, also from Austin, Texas. And he will be interviewing Bill DeSimone as well as Dr. Doug McGuff. What they get into here has to do with only what a friendship can actually propel in a conversation. We talk a lot about the paleo lifestyle, the developments happening in the world, exercise, fitness, and the overall idea about being the ideal man. 21 Convention, 2014 here in Tampa. My name is Skyler Tanner. I am your special guest host for this podcast. With me to my right is Dr. Doug McGuff, who had a great talk today. To my left, Bill DeSimone, who's been training people about as long as I've been alive. Yeah, as long as I've been, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been based on talks yesterday. What we're going to do is, kind of as a point of interest, 10 years ago, roughly, I had the honor and kind of just privilege of sitting kind of as a bird's eye view, fly on the wall of these two talking about some stuff at a different high intensity training conference. And here we are again, 10 years later, not much has changed and yet so much has changed. So what we'll do is we're going to kick it off because today Doug talked about stress and how he handles it in the ER and you'll find a link down in the bottom. And we're going to talk about what Bill's going to talk about tomorrow, which I'm sure you'll find a link down in the bottom here. And so Doug, kind of give us a 30,000 foot view of what you talked about today for the viewers out there. Well, I wanted to give and, you know, I was sick of talking about HIIT. And I also thought that it was so well represented here. Sure. Better talks than I could give are going to be given. And what else can I talk to these poor guys about? And, you know, all I got being an ER doc, but I've listened to an educational lecture that these two guys had given on the cognitive processes of functioning when the shit hits the fan in the ER. And maybe this is something these guys could really get into is just seeing what the process of when you're in a really stressful situation, how to handle it, how to not freak out, and what the cognitive tricks are for being able to function well in a high stress environment and get out of it without damaging your psyche or damaging yourself in the process. In all of that review of what you kind of built up to putting together, were there processes that you're using that you didn't, that you kind of had in process put together throughout your career and then realized, oh, this is represented in the literature. Yeah. This was not a de novo thing on my part. Like, nothing I've ever done is a de novo thing on my part. I've always kind of just picked it up from other people. And the same is true here. You kind of go through this process of learning how to do it just by doing it, doing it wrong for a while and really feeling the stress, and then gradually getting a process of learning how to do it without feeling so much subjective stress. But I listened to a lecture that was given on a podcast called MCRIT, E-M-C-R-I-T, which is an emergency medicine critical care podcast run by this brilliant guy named Scott Weingart. And he interviewed a guy that's currently a medical student that used to be a para rescue PJ for the Air Force on just the cognitive processes of operating in high stress environments. And how they use stress inoculation and different techniques, different cognitive techniques to function in these high stress environments and then applied it to the profession of emergency medicine and critical care. And I realized, hey, I do that, and I do that, and I do that. And it's like, well, now I got names for all this stuff. I can give a lecture about it. So I stole a lot of it, in other words. Well, it's funny you mentioned that stealing a lot of it. You were ripping on it. In Doug's talk, he references a TED talk all about how, depending on the posture you take, you can actually acutely affect the hormones that are expressed, just being very tall, being very big, our testosterone's going up, our cortisol is coming down, and we're feeling very, very good about ourselves. But there's another TED talk I heard recently that was all about kind of the, it was a reconsideration of what is original means. Like this idea that people are inventing things de novo out of the blue from nothing is really probably not happening too much anymore. The idea that you're not inspired by something else and that there's someone twiddling away in a lab inventing something purely out of inspiration with no point of reference whatsoever is we think about that as being original, but most of what we consider original is not that at all. This idea of invention without inspiration just doesn't happen. You're trying to fix something. You've been inspired to fix something or to better your own processes, so the fact that you just reconfirmed that is really relevant to the talk. I think it applies. Just beforehand we were talking about your master's thesis and how it kind of came to fruition at the same time as a paper that was published by five Chinese PhDs on exactly the same topic. You all came to the exact same conclusion at the same moment in time. I think throughout history parallel discovery happens and it's not because anyone's stealing from anyone else, which is what people in the Hitfield never can understand, but that we're all thinking and we're thinking about problems and we all have come up through the same era with the same cultural influences and with the same data points to operate on, so it shouldn't be a surprise that parallel discovery does happen. Right. Just to total aside, the thesis he's talking about resistance training in the brain will link to that bigger paper also down here as well. It's going to be a 14-page linkage fest, but Bill, I'm going to kick it over to you. Bill hasn't had his talk yet. No, and I probably should have spoke before, Doug, because mine isn't as heavy. So it's going to be quite a come down from... You've got to come down. Thanks. Don't bless it. We'll take it up with Anthony. This will be the second time you've spoken at the 21 convention. Yes. I did 2009 or 2010 or so. Right. Previously, you spoke all about... You kind of gave a general overview of your congruent exercise. Actually, I gave the first five chapters of congruent exercise. There you go. Before I wrote them. Oh, wow. So he had... I had given a talk earlier in the Luke Carlson in Minnesota. And I was given a talk now for Anthony. And I didn't want to do the same thing. And I'm sure I've seen enough repeats and packaged presentations that I know you can get away with it. Yeah. But it gives me... Selfishly, it gives me a chance to rethink the material in Bill. Yeah. So I threw the previous presentation away and I came up with what turned into the first five chapters of congruent exercise. Which he very courteously put online as an hour and a half YouTube. Yeah. But that is the first five chapters, almost verbatim. The only thing I added in the book was the specific exercises in the beginning and finished position of the exercise. But I actually used the fact of having to give the presentation to try to repackage the material. Like one of the things you said to me many years ago was... As a matter of fact, so let me just say, when I first put Momentum Exercise out in 2003 or so, Doug, Greg, Fred Hahn, and a couple of others, I sent them the book. I didn't know these guys. I was part of the Super Soul Guild or I wasn't part of any of the formal groups. And Doug went out of his way to call me and said, great book, point out a lot of things. I knew it back in my head. I just didn't relate them to what we were doing in the studio. And getting to my point, you must have really teased the material out. And that's true because those Anatomy and Biomechanics books are not written for the sake of lifting heavy things in a gym. Yeah, I think it would be more accurate to say is that you pointed out things that I was embarrassed that I didn't work out for myself. I mean, I took Anatomy. I mean, I had to memorize all these origins and insertions and function, but I never... And I think it was because I had so much bodybuilding, muscle and fitness, and Nautilus bullshit crammed in my head that I could never actually just look at the raw data of the Anatomy and the functional Anatomy. And I really was embarrassed that it's like, wow, this guy knows his shit. I mean, he knows his Anatomy, and this makes perfect sense. And why have I been doing this this way this whole time, you know? And ironically, the exposure to some of this way back was when I was going through my graduate work and some of the leveling courses I had to take before that, you know, we're in kind of a kinesis course. And it's sort of like they're going through all of these things and they're saying, like, you know, here's impingement at 90 degrees, the shoulder rotation and then the scapula has to turn and all the other stuff. But there's never the following conclusion of, and here's a contraindicated movement for... Yeah, but they never go that far. They just sort of stop like just the facts, ma'am, rather than here's the application of that information. So I was kind of like, you're stopping the game short. Like in school, they're stopping the game short. They're not taking it as far as it could be for applicability, which is... Well, and it's even worse when you get to the various personal training certifications because I'm not an academic guy. I don't have the green exercise. I did get NSCA certified twice and NSCA certified a couple of times. And in the textbooks, the biomechanics and anatomy sections, they're pretty good, but they don't do that. So they're pretty good in the front of the book and then they ignore it in the back of the book. And every trainer I know who's ever taken those tests, they memorize it to get through the test. And then, you know, people doing upright rows and various things that are so clearly contraindicated from the raw material. And before we move on, I just want to say that it was Doug, Greg, and Fred Hans genuine interest in the material that gave me instant credibility with anybody remotely interested in it, which I've always appreciated. Because they didn't know me. This was before the days of affiliate arrangements and phony testimonials and phony message board posts. It was all genuine interest on their part. It was the cyber pump days. Kind of like that. But it was all genuine interest on their part. Greg, well he called me also and got to be very friendly, but he point blank would tell people buy this book from this guy in New Jersey. And Fred had a message board at the time that he allowed a lot of space given over the discussion of this particular work. Both pro and con, but overwhelmingly pro. And again, this was before people were manipulating these things. You know, you were blatantly paying somebody to mention my book or put a link up or that stuff. Yeah, there wasn't 80 pages of copy for this with all of these testimonials. Oh, no, no, no. No, you really had to dig to it. I mean, it was. So is this an evolution of your thinking? Is this an evolution of your thought today or the talk tomorrow about... The evolution is in... You know, the material is the material. Okay, shoulder, spine, and it is. It is what it is, period, end of story. But how to present it becomes the issue. So for instance, a moment on exercise, I flip through it now and I say, yeah, it's pretty good. But then I realize, wait a minute. I've been lifting weights for over 40 years and I've been studying this, you know, moralist bodybuilding from the 70s and I've got multiple certifications. If I think it's pretty good, it has to be over the head of some 20-year-old who's just trying to figure out what to do in the gym. And feedback from my non-fitness friends was... You lost me. So it took me about 10 years. Well, in between, I did a few presentations for Bo Reilly and each of those was an attempt at making the material a little more accessible. And then almost 10 years later, I came up with the congruent exercise, which I was trying to be a little more topical because I did talk about kettlebells, I did talk about various functional training. And again, I was trying to make it a little more accessible, which it must have worked to a degree because that has sold dramatically more than moment on exercise. And part of that is being available on Amazon and being available on Kindle. But so tomorrow, the next thing... I did this in reverse. Moment on exercise is like the super technical computer guide. And then maybe congruent exercise was sort of like the idiot's guide, too. And then hopefully the next one will be the thing you actually buy and people actually read. And you actually can see it in a bookstore and have some people go... Some people carry it in the gym or bring it to their basement where they're working out and flip through the page and say, okay, this is how I do this, okay, I got it. You read... Dr. Darn has been very helpful also, but you read... He's been very helpful in understanding how the book field works. And he told me a few years ago, unless you're already a celebrity, you're not getting a book field. And you know what? You look at every pop fitness book, it's the same template. Usually like a bust shot of whoever the author is. And then you have a lot of glossy pictures and then you have a chapter on motivation and then you have a chapter on diet and a million recipes and then you've got the picture, the glamour shots of the exercises and then you've got the routines. It's the same book. You just write out the name. That worked when Darden wrote the new hit, too. That's almost kind of when he wrote the new hit. Because it was a major publisher. It wasn't Teenation or whoever published his last book. It was like that. There's a bust on the front, all the model shots. There's a little bit of history of hit. There's all the exercises laid out, some routines, and then like a diet at the end. That was the one he wrote three books ago? I think that's right. The Fat-Loss, Super Fat-Loss solution, one that he just had. The whole school. And then the one right before that. Not just because he's coming tomorrow, but because he liked, especially like all three books. Because he's throwing himself in it. He's not writing from the third person anymore. He's throwing a little behind the scenes stuff that I think all of us suspected, but you didn't really know with all the sanitized stuff we read in the 70s and 80s. I thought that new hit, I will blatantly say, I ripped off the look of it for what turns out to congruent exercise. Because the pictures were clear. There wasn't a lot of clutter. It was bullet points. He's had to do this exercise. And then he had chapter stuff. And so I blatantly owe his designer. I owe his designer something. That's really great. We'll come back to that. We've got to go to commercial break. We'll be right back. And we're back from commercial. So, Doug had a good question for Bill about his first book about moment arm exercise. Which is what was the sticking point for so many people reading the book? Was it physics? Was it physiology? Well, you know, first it wasn't... I'm not a professional writer. So this wasn't an assignment. I didn't have a market in mind. I had injured myself. And this was me working out over really four-year stretch, me working out what happened and what I preferred was a disconnect between exercise and biomechanics. And so basically I rebuilt my own process of working out. And then I realized from all my notes and sketches and diagrams, wait a minute, I have something here. But I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was a commercial book. I didn't know if it was an academic book. So I just put it together and had it spiral bound in that book. And of all the ones you've written, that's my favorite one. When it came to me, it has this little note scrolled on and it's like, please read this, tell me what you think. And I was like, holy shit. It was so cool because you were living through your thought process. You were thinking on paper and I was like, my god, why didn't I ever... Why am I so damn stupid? I never thought of anything. Not at all. But... Mr. Emergency Medicine. That's right. But I was working my own things out. I had these notes here. But guys around my age who had also studied the Mencer and the Norse literature from the 70s, every one of us got it right away. Read it and said, I know exactly what you're talking about. When you get to our age, the crows start to come home to roost. Shit you did in 1975. All of a sudden becomes a problem in 2005. And when you're my age, stuff you did this morning will haunt you later tonight. Not the way 20 years. I just got off that wooden roller coaster at Bush Gardens and I was like, man. I was gonna feel all that. Now what's also if you... Also everybody our age with our reading experience read this and said, boy, you really kind of poked holes in a lot of Norse theory. You didn't come out and say it, but it's in between the lines. And now, and fortunately for me Ellington Darden got in touch with me when he read it. He said, boy, I really liked it. And I was sweating it out because I knew what I... I knew where my head was at when I was writing it. But I didn't want to write it that way. And he said I especially liked the first five chapters of science. Well, the first five chapters is where I say, here's what we used to think. Right. And I was pretty much a direct quote from those books. Here's the old ballast dog mind. I didn't say that, but that's what I led it right up to. So I must have phrased it right because I'm really not doing this to make enemies. Right. That was strictly working my own thing out. But anyone... It was a brave book too because in that time, I mean a whole super slow thing was that it's a pretty high peak of religiosity at the time. Probably, right. It was like, you know, guys, I blew out a bicep tin and doing a super slow curl. Yeah. And again, I didn't want to... Just in general, I don't want to critique other people's work. Right, but... But that is what I was looking for. For the first time ever, it said you know, just going slow isn't going to fix everything if the biomechanics aren't right. I tried not to say that exactly that way. Like I said... If anything going too slow with the incorrect biomechanics drags out the whole process and might make it more likely, you know? So I found, though, that for instance, the NSCA crowd dismissed it. They had no interest in it. Why is that? Why do they... Because they didn't have the frame of reference of the Nautilus and the Hit background. And they weren't interested in objectively... I'm sure they got bored really quick. But they weren't interested in objectively saying biomechanics says how the shoulder works. So we shouldn't... You know, one thing about the Hit influenced community is right or wrong, whether I agree with them individually or not, or butted heads with them individually or not, they do care about this stuff. Oh yeah. To a fault, but they do care. You try to engage NSCA people or ace people, whatever. They're interested in... A lot of them are interested in the trappings of working out. But picking apart, gee, do you really think you should put the shoulder in that position? That's not... It's just not on their agenda. Yeah, it's like... I made this point, this is a total aside, but one of the speakers that the... It's not a total aside, I'll bring it around. Dave Asprey, who spoke at the 21st Convention, he had the conference a couple weeks ago, and I was trying to explain what a biohacker was, and I finally came up with this pretty little Venn diagram of the quantified self-folks up here who won't get out of bed in the morning unless they can track something. How many steps I'm going to take, how many bowel movements I'm going to have, and they're going to put it into a black box and turn it into some sort of metric of how healthy they are, or if they're moving in the right direction, if they're thinking well, and then there's a whole component that will get you to speak on well, number one, any human involved kind of measures inherently lossy and fuzzy and, you know, two seconds here, two seconds there, it's like taking doing labs of blood. If you let something oxidize just a little longer, it's going to give you a totally different readout. And then there's the life extensionist people who are waiting for the singularity when humans and machines come together in one, and they're the least healthy people on planet Earth because they're waiting for capital S science to make capital M magic and let them live for eternity. And then the health and fitness folks are filling out the final third, which is like the NSCA type people are like, we like working out. And well, are you measuring anything? No, we just like working out. Like it's for its own sake, they enjoy it. And so you get some people, and the hit would almost be like if you took the quantified self-sphere to some degree and overlaid it with the health and fitness folks. So they care about components of actionable data or certain truths, but the shoulder will, you're going to impinge right here unless you've had your AC joint sought off for some reason, you're going to impinge here. And so it's kind of funny that way though that there are a number of people who they're so wrapped up in the qualitative feel of training that they care nothing for the nuts and bolts of it. Well, feel is a very persuasive phenomenon. I'm going to bring this up tomorrow. I'll get people to say, oh, I did do the kettlebell class. It's a great workout, right? Why? Why is it a great workout? Well, you breathe it heavy, you're sweating, your muscles hurt the next day. All right, I get it. I get it. That is very persuasive. Your muscles burn. Why don't you come over and wax my car? Exactly. And there's this huge disconnect between the feel and what it means or what's really happening there. And whether it's kettlebell classes or... Why grip chins? Just feeling the tip of your scapula digging into your latissimus and thinking, oh, that's for what? Right, exactly. The feel in the neck side is very... In fact, you're bulldog with a bone question about J-Rex 10 years or so ago. Yeah. What was that? I can remember it clear as day because it goes like this. Because Bill's talking about biomechanics, this and that, and you're interviewing him and he's telling this really long, kind of compelling piece about this, that, and you're like, that's really, really great. What do you think about J-Rex? And then, because that was the hot thing, like Johnson had just released the J-Rex volume one of three something. I forget how many volumes DP went. Actually, that was funny because there is a small amount of literature more recently that indicates when tissues contract, it's not like everything on that linear path starts sliding towards one another. It's almost this portion and then this portion. Not that you can affect the hypertrophy as much as there's this almost regional boxcar effect to the sarcomeres. There's a little bit here. There's a little bit here. They're all in retention, but it's sort of like collapse, collapse, collapse. But I think it's a bit of a reach at this point to say, so then that then justifies breaking the rep up. Oh, totally. No, I'm on board with you there. I just think it's interesting. Having said that though, J-Rex 21, it was Darden's 21. It's stage reps at one point. And old body build magazines are 21s or rips in half. Whatever the mechanism is, it's very compelling. Sure. Because let's face it, you go stale and you can get eight reps and you can't get nine and then instead the next time you do one and a half reps with that and whoa! I got that depleted feeling again. I'm pumped, holy cow. So not to be anti-science, but it doesn't matter. It's like it's an interesting component. Yeah, the feel is very compelling and stepping back a second, if it keeps you motivated to train, great. Great. Being a trainer, not an academic, I don't have to justify everything I do with a direct link to research. I have a framework I work around, but if it keeps a person interested, great. And it doesn't hurt, of course. It's a bit like what Ryan Hall, who's a friend of ours who has a facility in New Orleans and an exercise physiologist says to people, how long do I have to do this until you die? You're not going to go stale. You're not going to stay on the same routine forever and so picking kind of best, even if benign, even if it's all up here and the change is just for the head, so what? Doug, you talk about why didn't you think about it. Actually in your bulletin one you had one line in there about where you actually, I think it was about where they actually needed a camp. And the line you said was when you're doing a bench press if your pectorals are exerting can display less torque as your arms coming together then doesn't a compound exercise by definition bear? Yes, and I took that kind of ran with it. That was one of the things I went when I blew my biceps and triceps out. I went back to the NSA biomechanics and I went back to that line. I said, you know, there's something there. That whole book was by and large an embarrassment because it was that stage of training and trying something new and it's like you're watching the tide come in and you measure and you're like, oh my God the whole city is going to be under water in a week and then you go write a book about it. That was the first bit of your work I had read because coach comes in so coach John Coleman was my mentor he won three national championships in American football in Mexico City of all places. Very interesting guy and I think he was an assistant coach under Bear Bryant during the Texas A&M days and you go, do you know Doug McGuff? No. Here's his book reader. All right. So I'm reading the book and the thing was there was a sense of excitement but there was also a sense of the further you got in the book it was clear that you were recognizing that this was a tide coming in scenario. There was a tonal change in the middle of the book that went from and how you could figure out kind of the perfect rep speed based on the fact that you went too fast or too slow pain increase but about five or six seconds you could kind of suss out that middle ground which to me is like cracking the armor. That was my first experiment with excommunication too. Back in those days it was like 10-10 and it was like I'm really not seeing any clients that can put forth a good effort and go any slower than seven seconds. I just did not see in it and then all of a sudden I broke my foot racing my bike and I'm like well let's find out where force really does become an issue and it was a lot faster than what was being advertised at the time. It just popped in my head I gotta tell you that moment arm exercise and your discussion of scapula humeral timing changed how I reduced shoulder dislocation. Oh wow. And because Talking about NER. Your shoulder gets dislocated the humeral head comes out of the glenoid generally falls forward anterior and the popular techniques for doing that are incongruent and use a lot of mechanical force to do it and if you can get the person comfortable and you can get them to relax all the muscle spasm and you just put them in appropriate scapula humeral timing it just because a shoulder dislocation it's busy you saw the video and it's like oh my god it's just that shit in here and a patient comes ooh ooh ooh shoulders out and it's this big muscular guy and you're like oh crap you gotta start an IV you gotta get a monitor you're gonna have to do conscious sedation and knock them out and then put it back in but I'm now about 20-22 shoulder dislocations under my belt with no sedation no analgesia, no nothing just sit and relax and just get it in the right scapula humeral timing and it so sorry sorry you kind of putting them and gradually actually rotating them into the scapular plane and just letting it kind of fall back on its own beautiful I'm interested in it, it works and there's actually a guy that has created a whole a guy in Australia has created a whole website shoulderdislocation.net guy named Cunningham and it's called the Cunningham technique now that is really the Desimone technique I'm like dang yeah we're gonna be back from commercial with more exciting news about the Desimone technique and we're back from commercial so Doug, am I right in kind of describing what you're trying to do is you now have a new website talking about what you call fitness medicine it's been titled on there that's what the web designer made out of sorry so are you gradually trying to take on more consulting type stuff trying to expand I'm just trying to monetize that sort of activity of a hobby gone wild a little bit better than what the body by science.net just to kind of keep fanning the flames of keeping the book in the sub 5,000 range on Amazon because that now results twice a year a nice little royalty check comes along and just kind of keeping it alive I just don't want to let it just peter out so that was there but this is more to engage people in phone consultation and if you need help setting up a facility or business advice and doing that sort of thing equipment selection you've been on a podcast lately so it seems like that might have been helpful getting into kind of spreading out yeah I mean you do one of those you got to clear out the email I got the email scheduling software kind of like okay clear that slate get ready and then bunch of phone consults and stuff will come in so you know it's interesting about keeping it alive though Skyline was talking last night there's a franchise I think it was based Tennessee or so 7 minute workout once a week in a small studio a piece of equipment where you can do a light press a chest press a roll and then there's like a multi piece computer tracked with vibration plates that's part of the 7 minutes and they're trying to franchise basically your model plus a vibration plate it's like dumb and dumber you can't have a workout in 6 minutes 7 minute abs that's funny and it's right because we're kind of talking about there seems to be a move towards trying to I don't know what there's something about a sweaty underground nasty gym that's just like like a lot of if you've ever trained in a power lifting gym it could be bad for your back when it's all said and done but you feel like you're 10 times stronger just because of the environment but it's simultaneously like get like a clinical if you're appealing to the public these people don't know what they're doing they're dressed appropriately there are computer monitors so I can see how they can sell that 7 minute workout idea to a number of people well I guess we'll see I think we're ripe for a backlash yeah well there's that and plus but I don't know that the clinical you know I don't know they're going to the dentist's office for your workout how well that works I think people consumers still even though they may say well I have to do this for my osteoporosis I have to do this for my joints they may say that but I still think it's got to be it can't be overly clinical experience you know my my place looks like somebody's living deliberately I deliberately do not have rubber mats on the floor and cindy block walls it's deliberately a carpet and some you know pictures of whatever on the walls a paint job because they still have to voluntarily show up you know one two or three times a week and if it's you know you know the dentist the dentist's noise and everyone's all buttoned up I haven't seen that work I think you get close you can get as like the khakis and like the colored shirt like you almost like a golf pro which is pretty much my attire right and it's funny that you kind of so do those battle robes you still have those battle robes I do they tear up your carpet they don't okay first of all my equipment will never wear out because people use it on the control right so the battle I looked at the so much stuff in fitness the hype is so over the top you can't help like again in the hit influence community the hype is so over the top you can't help but really lash out against it sure but this may be you know one or two valid uses for the piece sure so with the ropes I don't have there people slamming the rope and throwing the rope and all that stuff playing tug of war with the rope they do like an alternating sort of a wave so each arm is doing this and it's in a rhythm and I do it for 30 seconds and you know the last 10 seconds I tell them go faster so it's like a set and there's no weight pushing back on them so it's a little bit of a metabolic workout for the upper body I don't have to worry about it pushing there you know I don't have to worry about whether they go back too far because when they stop the rope stop but that's the only thing we use it for one exercise and I have a lot of stuff in the studio I have to do one exercise we have a piece like that at our rosedale facility that it's a we call the 360 actually pretty good manufacturers at this point you see it's just that's a 360 it's a 360 it's almost like calling any tissue Kleenex you just say that's a 360 and it's got three pistons on it and it's meant to be like used for all the upper body stuff it's just concentric resistance we kind of use it like it's a self limiting exercise like 30 seconds let's go and then so they're able to exert very high intensity motorists start dropping out and they start slowing down they inherently are self limited nothing's going to fall on them and it's like alright now let's go do the real work you felt like you've been worked out now let's go do a pull down on the internet now let's go do this it's something for their head at the beginning of the workout you know in all of this stuff too like again I wasn't part of super slow gilder and if you can fit it in a half hour and it's not harmful why not you know because as we as everyone's come to the same conclusion a lot of things work sure yeah well here's the biggest conclusion is everything works because skeletal muscle is the most plastic adaptive tissue that is ever on the face of the earth that's why there's so many different opinions about how to do it because it all works because it's adaptive tissue well that plasticity I've always kind of told clients and you can kind of either confirm or deny what I tell them I go this is why most injuries are not muscular it's like connective tissue in nature or the joint itself it's because the muscle tissue is so plastic it's rare that like the bicep tour in the middle yours was the tendon that's the tendon at the end like nobody's caring down the center there are a pack of ulcers interesting I say nobody I'm being slightly exaggerating but it's rare slightly but power lifting injuries you see a lot of where they evolved the pectoral right in the middle I wonder if that's natural or like supported like the shirts that give them like the elastic power I used to work with an orthopedic surgeon who did a talk for me and he had I forget who it was there was a power lifter in the early 90's with a bolster spectral and he had done the surgery so he had power lifting pictures of him and they had surgery pictures of him and it was the interesting thing is when you bear it out really what happened with this or that injury it is usually a lot more about the biomechanics and the position you were in than it is about exactly the manner in which you were doing it sometimes it's a combination of the two but you got to get in a pretty bad orientation to really bring that kind of harm on yeah I'm thinking of some of the injuries I want to refer to tomorrow these are so such gross injuries like guys doing barbell step ups like why you would do that I don't know doing the barbell step up and falling off the bench in the front of your channel bench pressing and missing and crushing their jaw and their throat these are not even to the level of was it the joint or was it the muscle they're just such gross mistakes that even those fundamental anatomy or biomechanics should tell you oh this is going to be a problem be careful here because we walk into a gym and touch a barbell or a machine or a kettlebell well it's interesting too because there's a level of respect not paid to a lot of exercise I mean if you watch the lack of physical nature in which a lot of these people even if they're strong guys lift like Pavel Sotsilin has a saying where he talks about I wouldn't say it's entirely false but I mean where do most of our clients get injured away from the gym doing something that that you're looking at like something they don't respect like I'm reaching in the back of my car for my purse and I pulled my shoulder you know and it's like why did this happen I've lift all this weight I go because you don't lift weight back here in this terrible compromise position and you thought you could just lift up your giant ass purse and it would everything would be okay and so there's an element of if nothing else that comes out of it is this idea of perhaps again to a fault is respecting what you're doing you know if you're internally you're slowing down you're being forced to pay attention to the process a little bit more and you increase your margin of error just especially when you guys are getting stronger and stronger and stronger that's definitely a helpful thing now then the question becomes does that even matter in the face of all the weight if you're really really strong as you talk about you'll work up to some level then your joints start hurting you gotta back off and do it all over and kind of figure out that middle ground which is kind of what led you into writing the body blade book that went nowhere but it's still a lot of good ideas out of that it was a little too far ahead because I wrote stuff about the body blade I included the rope in there and again a couple of things each of these devices are not complete 100% useless there's one or two things they do really well and frankly wanting to figure out what those one or two things are is really a marketing call on my part because when I opened up I had just weight training machines just nitro and dumbbells and such and invariably someone come in and they have a treadmill and I would watch into the typical hit response to that question eyes glaze over so I said ok this is not a good idea so I got a handful of cardio argometers and then oh you have functional training equipment no but chew gone so finally I said ok forget this so now I have a I have a body blade I have ropes I have A of everything so now the answer to the question is yes I have it yes I have it we're going to do it the way I decide we're going to do it but yes I have it and now it's no longer a thing so that really stems from like a marketing concern because I never thought that that hit approach of giving the prospective client a lecture why what they just asked is stupid I didn't think that was a winner I just didn't intuitively didn't work for me it's interesting I've always kind of taken the stance of you don't go into a steakhouse asking for pizza I've used that analogy many times right but at the same time I get your point where it's a situation because when I worked at champions all those years ago invariably the people paying for personal training would do that come in they'd grab their silly blue towel and they'd get on a bike or on a treadmill and just do it until coach is ready to train them it was almost like getting up and brushing their teeth in the morning it was the thing that they had to do before they worked out and then when you remove some treadmills all of a sudden they knew it didn't do anything for them it wasn't a real workout but all of a sudden they were just like where did they go why can't I do them anymore it was just some weird twitch in the back of their head in commercial places like that there's just so much ritualized behavior going on and I think a lot of people do it it's so imbued into our public consciousness that that's a good thing to do it's like recycling isn't it you know why is that good but you know I think right it's all 9 makes me feel good and that's what I'm going to do well that's funny too because I was floating that question when I was selling the ARX and I was like I really like doing my cardio well why do you have to do cardio because I have to do cardio and I have to do my workouts behind it and finally her husband is like she likes doing stuff with her friends and I go okay that's cool you can use this and do more of that like as soon as I understood why she wanted to do it and I wouldn't even bother picking at the question I wouldn't even butt heads on the question I was just trying to find her motivation why she thought that she needed to do that and we're in Austin fortunately people are going to go out and do that anyway the strongest damn foundation you can go do whatever you want with it not everybody is so lucky to have that infrastructure like in New York in health clubs you would coach be ready for when the person asks if you have a pool invariably it's very interesting whether it's New York health clubs or even I find it in the studio even though people want to make a change in their own behalf this change starting working out is going to improve their life and it's going to be better for them but it's still a change that's got status quo and so they look for and I'm deviating into sales think or marketing think but they look for any reason not to upset the status quo so people would come in and say do you have a pool and if you didn't oh thank you I really wanted a pool and so one sales guy and he turned around to them and said they were off the hook that's right they don't have to make this change and so one sales guy turned around and told everybody listen oh how much do you swim and then most of them were going to say oh I don't swim I just thought it would be nice to do and then you can steer it the way you want so it's very interesting that even though this is I don't think you have to convince any consumer that there are benefits to exercising regularly whatever the modality is you don't have to convince them they know but it's still a change in routine or their comfort level even though it's an unhealthy comfort level and it's only going to benefit them oh do you have a boat soup? well you don't really need I really want to work on a boat soup I used to find people would come up and they would blur it out what is the cost and I would watch a reception and say it costs $40 a session oh thank you something's wrong here so one day someone comes up what is the cost and I go I say oh let me get you a fee schedule have you worked with a trainer before and I wasn't being deceitful I was just trying to get past that question I was going to give it a tell what cost because buried in the question is getting off the hook like we talked about before have you worked with a trainer before and invariably that got the person talking about whether they did or they didn't and what problems they were having and now the question in their head can I afford this to how can I afford this again because you know what they don't know the vocabulary to say how is this going to help me so they fall back on what does this cost because it's an easy no and they don't have to make any changes we're going to take a quick commercial break we'll be right back we're back from that commercial break so we're hit guys and inadvertently kind of the whole rest of the industry is now latched on to high intensity in some form or fashion maybe defined differently than we would use it but they're definitely calling it that rather than trying to find out how little can they work depending on the swing totally in the opposite direction how much hard work can we do not just work but how much really ridiculous hard work the crossfits these things why do you think all of a sudden hard work is in vogue I mean it's just this kind of brain sort of picking out a lot of wild all of a sudden those of us who have been attempting to just work really really hard for a really long time now all of a sudden everybody else wants to work really really hard too even if they're defining it differently Bill? I don't know I want to think those are cultural like guys but I don't think there is no I think it's just the fetish nature of the exercise industry I think it's just it's turn the next thing it's just it's turn now in the literature side of things the pendulum is really swung towards high intensity and finding out how brief and what the minimal effect of dose is so in the scientific field they're really swinging our way and they've swung so far our way I'm just waiting for the backlash and the pendulum to swing in the other direction why all the hard I think a lot of it probably spawns out a crossfit it's done a beautiful job of tapping into the 30 to 40 year old yuffy mentality of johnny quest and you know they're not going to know what johnny quest is that can't be it that can't be it but just that whole you know special forces that's funny because url on the core with his movement idea I think he actually has something there as far as trying to change physical education in america or anywhere for that matter and I picked up in graduate school was really interesting this idea of not like being strong to be being good enough in your body to be useful in other things rather than just being a walking sculpture and actually in the physical education literature there's a backlash against like sports based physical education because kids can opt out so early and they learn nothing about how to move they don't even learn the game because if they can get tagged out in the first thing they're not comfortable in their bodies they're just out big movement in the 50s and 60s that was very much like move nat in elementary and middle school physical education I mean I remember when I was in middle school they even had a book about it called toughen up and it was all these kids monkey bars and doing the human flag and all this sort of stuff teaching the human flag to kids that's crazy and that just gradually fell out of vogue and now I can't imagine it was in my talk earlier when I was saying we're in a highly competing environment and so these kids are always clicking the dopamine button it's no surprise that boys sit in class and they just go oh my god it is so boring but I can remember 15 minutes of recess you had your lunch recess and you had two intermitten I was eight nine years old 15 minute recess I go out scream like a kid and I could sit for the next two hours and pay attention like that was all it took and it just hopefully it swings back in that other direction you know when I was a kid we had the president's physical fitness test twice a year that still existed when I was in high school but I haven't heard anything of it now actually in my kids school they had a presidential fitness award thing last year they did away with it because it was you know encouraging competitivism and wasn't fair to the kids that weren't as athletic and in turn that was discouraging the less athletic kids from participating how do you tease out that data and be like clearly it was the presidential fitness program that made this kid get a D in math there's no data it's just political correctness gone wild the high schools in my town part of their gym they have exercise machines, cardio machines so it is more fitness based than sports based but it's just like corporate fitness the top guy is a fitness guy they can justify the corporate fitness that guy top guy leaves and the accounts come in it's gone it's gone what do we use the square footage for get rid of it it's the top guys preference I guess it's funny you can see that in places you think should actually be on board with this we were as a company trying to get in with St. David's the hospital in Austin there and we're trying and they built this beautiful 2000 square foot fitness center for their people kind of adjunctive to their Mackenzie physical therapy clinic and the things like that cobwebs like nobody's using it at the rate that they thought it would be used and it always blows my mind how many times I'm driving across town and I drive past one of the hospitals and all the nurses are outside smoking just like a litany and then there's the guy of course whose drug is IV out to he's out there smoking I don't know one of the things that came away from my graduation about health education is you can't just rationally present things to people you can't just be like here is the interpersonal like dare to keep kids off drugs doesn't drop the car from the crane now I remember what I was going to talk about drop the car from the crane and it crashes if you're high and you get a car wreck and all the kids go cool they don't get excited about that and health and fitness simultaneously you have a whole slew of people who need it and they can't be reached rationally they need like structural changes to their lifestyle or they need some amount of I'm going to say community intervention perhaps too strong a word but being able to facilitate getting over some of those hurdle excuses like you're talking about in a marketing sense but we in the fitness industry kind of have not we necessarily in this room but the fitness industry in general they have the sort of highest shiniest fruit I use this analogy I go if you're under an apple tree and you're hungry what do you do? you reach up and you grab an apple but if you're in the fitness industry what do you do? you try to climb to the top of the tree and get that apple like inherently it becomes this incredibly complex thing overly complex thing right out of the gate for so many people if they can start it it's inherently unsustainable they crash they never go back this is the New Year's resolution cycle well and this is what we talked about eight years ago ten years ago which was where hit if it is a phenomenon say dropped the ball was by emphasizing how hard and how brutal the workout was and how big you can get but that wasn't what the general public that wasn't appealing to the general public the general public would have found appealing half hour once or twice a week that you know the real go do all this other stuff you'd rather be doing but the real yes early nautilus marketing and not even though it was marketing at the time was look how efficient we made strength training so we have more time to go practice go do your martial arts go do your sports and then somehow it got turned into it really seemed to succeed in spite of itself because I don't know if it was like this for the nautilus centers for you like it was for me back in the mid seventies when they just blew up everywhere but what you got from the community that was just clamoring like standing in line in the morning to get in it was like a nautilus center was like studio 54 or something you know it was like a big dude with a velvet rope just to get in kind of thing that was genuine though that wasn't manufactured like nowadays but it didn't come out of their marketing it came in spite of their marketing it was just like oh these things are cool looking and it's different and all the beautiful people are doing it so everyone wants to do it have nothing to do with their actual marketing approach it just happened organic anything about how much arthur made in spite of the fact he didn't have like non-competes with the people buying his equipment or like the darting to talk more about this but like sell these lines of equipment and it was like the agreement was like two lines it was like it eros away the people could get out of it in a very reasonable way and go off and somehow not do the nautilus method that whole thing I think my opinion is it was a black swan it was a magical time and place mixed in with you know a handful of geeks like us that were reading all the magazines and frustrated with what our results were and the whole casey theater thing and the personality it was just really a unique thing and ever since then people have been trying to recreate it I don't think the circumstances will ever be there for it to happen you know just there's so much information that you can have access to now that the ability to be paralyzed by analysis in that black swan instance is because you have a strong personality a very unique piece of equipment that though he wasn't reinventing the wheel per se I mean who was zander with the old resistance training equipment in the late 1800s I mean he wasn't reinventing the wheel just like paleo as a movement is not reinventing anything I mean you know gram maker of the gramcracker back in the turn of the 1800s with health food and then I'm forgetting the name of some of the guys in the late 1800s with these like full on you're gonna be barefoot you're gonna be naked, you're gonna be training I'm an armic fat that's right the lion and so that's exactly right who'd go off into the woods and need various cash well who's physical culture city is a town away from where my studio is. He lived to be 87 I mean he told it could be luck but that's you know of the time that's a really long lifespan now you know so that brings up an interesting thing because the zander machines were late 1800s right okay and and then World War I pretty much destroyed most of them and so you have few survived but they were predominantly in Europe World War I destroyed most of them most of the work but I got some you know reprinted books from the time and the same arguments free weights versus machines body weight exercises versus machine exercises it's the same arguments from the late 1800s to now it's 150 year old argument and zander's stuff as far as biomechanics physiology goes it's right there like Jones said if I knew about the equipment I would say it must have a lot of time moment on exercise I worked out the whole thing about the overlapping torque it's there it's there he talks about swan's law and how muscle torque varies over the range of a joint and then he talks about varying the resistance by where he's on the lever and I was like this is unbelievable and the same it's the same argument from then but even more so impressive when you read his stuff was how prescient he was in terms of realizing the public health implications and the effects it had on mitigating against disease and well his advertising at the time again some of the stuff I find online it's all health you know relieve these health conditions it's all that now in fairness though he also had massage machines and tapping machines and body rolling machines which I don't know about I don't know but it might have felt good it was way from the quantify because one of his arguments was and it was an argument in the sense that we have these arguments today there was more of an acceptance by the manual gymnastics people of his work it was like acceptance of each other's work but just you know I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do I'm gonna push each other's stuff but his thing was look if you're gonna have a person massage someone or do a manual resistance that person's fatigue is gonna interfere with how you chart that person's progress the person delivering the massage whereas if you use a machine you're quantifying what the massage is or the resistance and that makes sense in the physical culture kind of wars of Europe at the time invariably they all had a massage component they all had which is the weirdest thing so late 1800's you had the check method the sweetest method where we get sweetest massage and it was almost like physical culture boy scouts at a nationalist level it was really kind of strange but at the same time we still do some of that stuff today there's a great web article from I think he's an engineer or a scientist in XKCD is the web comic the comic title I think is like the inevitable march of time and it's arguments from 150 years ago about how nobody sits down to write a letter anymore all communications entirely too fast kids aren't listening to their parents it's the same argument for 150 years about what we say about like text messaging so and with the inevitable march of time sort of as it is we've come to the end of our hour I hope you all have enjoyed it Doug McGuff we've got this guy over here who's told us all about wonderful wonderful things don't build these some of course I know who you are but think about all you've learned today and all the lessons and you follow some of the links dig even deeper and I think you'll come to appreciate even more of what these two have been able to tell you today take care