 Welcome to The Dr. Gundry Show. So on this episode of the podcast, we're gonna talk about the simple things that you can do to keep yourself motivated to achieve your health goals and the five things that might be holding you back. We're gonna dive into how you can help diversify your child's athletic development while allowing them to stay a kid. And this is so important. You all gotta tune in, listen to this. If you've got kids and you're worried about them and their athletic development. On today's show, we've got Brett Bartholomew. Brett is a keynote speaker. He's a performance coach and consultant. He's a best-selling author of Conscious Coaching and founder of the Performance Coaching and Consulting Company, The Bridge Human Performance. So his experience includes working with athletes both in the team environment and in the private sector along with members of the United States Special Forces and members of Fortune 500 companies. Brett, welcome to the podcast. Thrilled to have you here. Thanks, Dr. Gundry, thanks for having me. So Brett is a fellow Nebraska Omaha Un who now lives in Atlanta, Georgia. One of my other favorite towns where I spent a lot of time. So how did a good old corn husker get into the business of motivation? Yeah, so I certainly don't want to bore your listeners but the long story short is, so when I was 15 years old, I was a competitive athlete and a lot of my friends at the time had kind of taken a wrong turn, gotten into a lot of fairly hardcore drugs. And this was by predominant social circle at this time in my life. And during this period, my parents were also going through a divorce. So I had turned to what I knew at the time, which for me was training and sports and just really got into a, it became a little bit of a control for me that anytime I dealt with a negative emotion or any kind of anxiety, I'd just go train or do something that I thought was positive for my body. Unfortunately at 15, I didn't really have a whole lot of great information as it pertains to training or diet, nutrition, anything like that. And so eventually what became, what was a hobby turned into an obsession and then a compulsion. And I probably went through a figure spell of depression at the time and training was just my outlet. Well, one day I was running around the bottom of my high school because you could run a couple of times around it for it to be a mile during those beautiful Nebraska winters, as you well know. And I had blacked out and I'd gone to see a doctor and the doctor said, you have basically created so much internal damage due to malnutrition, overexertion, just things that I was completely blind to because I'm sure you remember those silly fads where everybody was eating low fat, no sugar added. And that's what all these magazines told me to do at 15. And I didn't have any information to kind of combat that. So I was eventually put in an eating disorder hospital of all things to help me regain that weight. The sad thing is Dr. Gundry in that hospital, they focused very little on underlying causes and more so on the symptoms. So you were put on the eighth floor of a hospital weighing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Your blood was drawn every morning at 5 a.m. For the first two weeks, I was not able to shower because they thought the initial shock of hot or cold would send me into cardiac arrest. And what should have been this really kind of, positive, helpful place to help people get back on their feet was really a power dynamic, ego-ridden kind of battleground for a lot of the nurses, the doctors, the therapists and just a lot of unhappy people that were there. So long story short, you go into this place where you have all these specialists, all these subject matter experts but they know very little about human beings. So all they do is focus on what they see in front of them rather than the person. And unfortunately that kind of treatment cost some people in that hospital their life. They were not able to get better. They were not able to kind of fight through that. And I eventually met a therapist who convinced my parents because I was a minor at the time that this probably wasn't the best treatment option for me, that my issues were a little bit more behavioral, especially dealing with just depression and anxiety and the changes that were going on in my life. And I remember when I got out of that hospital, I was 15, Dr. Gundry and a nurse at the time. As I was walking out and said, you'll be back. And I remember I looked at her and I thought, how weird is this? And I said, you know, you're right, I will be back to speak to all these people that you couldn't help. You know, and so I just remember right then I made a conscious decision that I knew for me to save my own life or to get in better health, I had to learn proper diet. I had to learn proper nutritional habits. I had to learn proper strength and conditioning because I lost a significant amount of lean mass. I also knew that I wanted to study psychology fairly in depth because it really wasn't a subject matter or a certain kind of recipe or magic bullet that was gonna help folks like myself or others in the hospital who was understanding what made them tick and their failure to do so put me on the path to try to solve that problem for other people. Yeah. So yeah, you're right. I know that actually the hospital you're talking about and it's interesting, I have a lot of patients who describe who have had eating disorders or who continue to have them. And they basically tell me that these are training grounds to perpetuate the eating disorder that you actually learn tricks on how to perpetuate your eating disorder rather than the other way around. Yeah, I mean, without a doubt, I mean, literally the hours that you are kind of, you have to sit in a day room that probably isn't much bigger than most folks listening to this, their living room. And there's plexiglass windows in which you're under continuous observation. Now I don't know if it still looks like this. I'm 33 now, it's been a while. But I remember if you were fidgeting, if you were standing, if you were doing anything, they would wrap once on the glass for a warning. If you did it again, that was twice because of non-exercise thermogenesis. You did it a third time, you either made a drink of meal replacement, you were fed intervenously or some other punitive treatment was in. It was just a very interesting negative kind of place where you're absolutely right. More people learned the art of subterfuge there than they did any kind of healthy coping mechanism for a long-term behavior change. So fast forward and where did you take that? How in the heck did you get into coaching elite athletes or elite executives? Yeah, sure. So after that, I knew that again, I had to rebuild my body. I had lost a significant percentage of lean mass. And so the way I wanted to do that was not bodybuilding or not anything like that. I had, being a former athlete, performance was always top of mind. I even boxed competitively for United States Golden Gloves and Olympic amateur tournaments. And so I was always on a performance track. You grew up as a young child in Nebraska in the shadow of the Cornhuskers wanting to play football and baseball and think you're gonna be a pro. So I went to Kansas State University, got my undergraduate degree in kinesiology. Again, with a focus more so on performance. My master's degree was on motor learning. I've always been fascinated with how the elite of the elite learn the skills that they do, whether that's a neurosurgeon's fine motor control or whether that is an American football player being able to cut and change and spin 360 degrees. It's just always fascinated me how we become so talented at human movement and how we can do that under various constraints. So after my graduate degree, I had interned at a company that really specialized in the off season training of elite athletes. Later on, it also partnered with companies like Google and Tesla and the Mayo Clinic. So you had a lot of crossover opportunities in one day then to work with some elite major league baseball players, NFL players, major league soccer. And then in the morning sometimes you'd even work with Google execs or people that were really trying to get bring performance elements into the healthcare setting because we know that elite athletes have access to so many integrated services that the general population doesn't get access to. And so it was this company's goal to kind of bring that into healthcare systems and corporate scenarios. So that was really kind of where I got to own my craft in that degree. Also worked in collegiate athletics for a while but that was the pathway. Interesting. So right now we've got an epidemic of because of our devices all we do is sit. And we have a sedentary lifestyle and I am never gonna be an elite athlete. So how do you translate looking at these super elites who have the best equipment, the best handlers, the best everything, how do you bring that down to the housewife watching this or the young father watching this? Yeah, you bring up a good point, Dr. Gundry. I think for me it's always about proactive sustainability, finding what you can do and interweave with your lifestyle and also being able to identify pillars. So if you think of movement, mindset, nutrition and recovery, we have some pillars of wellness there. And movement doesn't have to be going to challenge yourself at some intense boot camp or some athlete-like training scenario. It can just be making sure that every day you take a walk with your partner. It can be incorporating movement into any aspect of your life. So I think that's one thing people have to do is remove these absolutist barriers of what it means to move and quit thinking of exercise but literally using our bodies as they are designed. So we push, we pull, we squat, we hinge, we run, we jump, find a way relative to your lifestyle that you can find these movement categories and integrate them. Even my mother, being able to talk to her and say, mom, I know you're gonna sit down, you love movies, you love this and who am I to tell you any different but at least make sure that you weave these five things into your daily kind of lifestyle and that could be standing up and sitting down out of the chair multiple times. That could be, we put a foam roller in her living room so she can make sure to roll out and address dense tissue and just getting her moving. And then mindset, nutrition and recovery, mindset is just again, removing these kinds of mental barriers. Like what is it that is keeping you from being able to do these things? What is it, is it even if it's stress or anxiety, getting people to take a moment, focus on their breath, focus on what their ideal day does look like or creative problem solving, just getting out of their own way and really promoting some form of self-awareness because as you know, Dr. Gunnery, we often make mountains or molehills into mountains and think, man, I have this, I have this. No, you've got to schedule it. It's your primer for the day. Nutrition, you're the expert in that, right? Everybody's got to be able to identify certain gaps and to be able to bridge those gaps. It's a very confusing time for a lot of people as you well know. And finally, recovery. Recovery is just taking care of your body and promoting therapeutic, just overall wellbeing, whether that's making sure you get enough sleep if you don't get enough sleep, how can you structure naps throughout your day? Can you incorporate some form of massage, just making sure that that's accessible? So, you know, I've lectured on this. I have actually written a lot of my patients a prescription for a dog. And some of my patients have actually brought that prescription back framed and said it was one of the greatest things that it was the best prescription a doctor had ever written for them. And, you know, I think you're right. I own, we own three dogs. One recently passed away, but a dog is probably one of the best motivating tools to make you go do something you probably did not want to do. And that is take them for a walk twice a day. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Dr. Gundry. And that's something that my wife and I commit to both really working for ourselves and not having that kind of official start or stop to the day can sometimes mean that our work hours bleed over into various periods, even weekends and what have you. But we do have a commitment to each other every day that we're gonna walk the dogs in the morning at night. We have two rescue teams as well. So that makes me smile here and about, yeah. And that's a phenomenal recommendation spot on. And I actually even have a patient that walks their cat. So when I hear that, you know, oh no, I'm a cat owner. Well, apparently you can walk your cat. I had a cat in medical school and the cat went for walks with me. So, oh well, it can be done. Little known fact, everybody. There you go. All right. So what you're saying is my exercise activity should not be reaching for the refrigerator handle and doing presses with the refrigerator handle. Listen, I think that's okay as long as you're doing some other things in conjunction with that, right? And I think, yeah, you make an excellent point through your humor there too. Like people too many times focus on what they're doing wrong and then they get downtrodden and that's okay. We need to be self-critical. We don't wanna develop a soft society that is exucilating. But you know, I think that's something that also gets people stuck is they feel like they have to be perfect. You know, I do this for a living. I'm not perfect because it's about continuity and it's about being able to make sure that, again, it's proactively sustainable and it's not something that is just off the rails where it's, you know, there's no way that you could possibly follow it and be perfect every time. Yeah, you know, in my first book, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution and in my upcoming book, which is the longevity paradox, how to die young at a ripe old age. In both books, I've got a small exercise prescription part of which I learned from Jack Lane. And I was lucky enough to know Jack when he was alive. And Jack used to say that there are only two exercises that a person needs to do to work all muscle groups. Now, that is squats, deep knee bends, and either push-ups or planks. And I think you'd probably agree with that in terms of working every muscle group. So what I've asked people to do, and I want your feedback on this, is you have to brush your teeth twice a day, hopefully. And while you're brushing your teeth and you ought to be doing it for a minute at least, just do deep knee bends while you're sitting there brushing your teeth. You're not doing anything else. And it took me, I would say, several weeks for that habit to get ingrained. You know, sometimes I go, I'm too busy to squat while I'm brushing my teeth. And then I go, no, you're not too busy. You're standing here. So give us some hints on how do you motivate me? How do you motivate our listeners to squat while they're brushing their teeth? Yeah, so it's a funny thing. Motivation is temporary in nature, right? We could all do an activity or an exercise right now or I could show a movie clip and we'd all be motivated. The problem is, is motivation doesn't stick. You know, the best chance you can alter somebody's behavior over the long term is really figuring out what drives them and there is a distinction between the two. A drive really is kind of intermingling between our limbic system and our prefrontal cortex. So most people, Professor Antonio DeMascio at USC says that people typically have these subconscious influence that let them to bond, acquire, defend or learn. So everybody's got to have some unique thing that really they know they're gonna continue this activity because it provides some sense of pleasure. Well, for most people, as you know, exercise or being more active, especially if they're a little out of shape doesn't bring a whole lot of pleasure. So the next step is I try to really alter the environment. And so to your point exactly about the squats while brushing your teeth, Dr. Gundry, we have a little bench at the foot of our bed and I'll actually do that very thing. I'll either do a hip flexor stretch or I'll do a squat or even if I'm on the phone with a friend, I'll do some form of step up. By having that in the environment, it serves as not only a subconscious cue but also an accessory and a partner in crime that allows me, okay, I have this here, I can do this. Another one is a lot of people get plantar fasciitis especially if it's been awhile since they've done activity. So I keep a lacrosse ball right underneath my sink. And if I'm not squatting or doing anything like that, I'll roll out the bottom of my feet, the plantar fascia, as I'm brushing my teeth. Because I know otherwise I may not do that and I'm teaching athletes how to sprint, jump, cut and I'll just take a beating. Another example that I gave early on is from my mother and father, I have bought them both foam rollers that sit right between the lamp and the couch. And I say, listen, I don't need anything crazy but just out of one show, if you're watching a 30 minute show, get down and roll out your low back, your upper back, your quads. So I guess my point is Dr. Gunnery is you try to remove these barriers by altering the environment. And that could just be somebody putting a water bottle and like on their counter. So the first thing they do in the morning when they wake up is drink water and hydrate. What can you do in the environment to make it easier for you to adopt these behaviors? It's what behavioral scientists refer to as nudges. And I think that's the critical piece there. Does that answer your question? Yeah, no, I think that's great because we're at that time of year now where everybody has either got their gym membership on January 1st or they've purchased a piece of equipment and that piece of equipment is now being a towel rack or a clothes rack and you look at it. So I think the motivation piece in all of this is so important and there's been a lot of talk actually in the last week about the study that I'm sure you're well aware of that men who can do 40 push-ups are going to live a whole lot longer, better than men who can do 10 push-ups if you follow them from middle age. Now, there's been a lot of pushback about that study that doing push-ups has nothing to do with actual health. You're just strong. Well, I beg to differ with the people who are pushing back and I have a lot of studies in the upcoming book The Longevity Paradox that exercise muscle mass actually changes your gut microbiome to a gut microbiome that will keep you alive, believe it or not. And so I exercise actually to make my gut bugs happy and it sounds crazy because I may not be very happy doing that exercise but I know they will be. Well, they control everything else. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to buy that. No, they do. That's exactly right. They control everything else. We just learned today. We know that the gut microbiome talks to ourselves, talks to our mitochondria and there's a new paper out today that certain gut bug text messages actually change altered genes of humans. And it's actually really exciting the epigenetics of it. Absolutely. I think that is an incredibly intriguing and emerging part of the literature that I think most people don't even have access to. And part of that is the fault of the researchers as well because we have to get better. We've lived in the information age long enough that really what separates the world class from everybody else I think is now being able to do something and communicate with that information in not an overly simplified way because you have to be very careful of that but we have to get better at knowledge transfer. Otherwise, people never get this information and that's where a lot of pseudoscience starts to occur, right? They get very confused and then they shut down and they don't wanna deal with anything and we start right back to step one. Yeah, the pushback I've seen on the internet on Twitter about this particular study is, well, that's ridiculous. There's no evidence that I should do 40, have the ability to do 40 pushups and that'll make me live a long time. There may be an association but association is not causation. And in your line of work, people point to professional athletes and you and I both know that in general, professional athletes do not have a long lifespan. Yeah, they're definitely not all healthy, that's for sure. High performing does not mean healthy and vice versa. So how do you, so take me through, how do you help a professional athlete and then transfer that to me? Yeah, so I'm of the opinion that if you have a body and we all do, that you're an athlete, right? I think that we look at people that compete and in large parts professional athletes are really in the entertainment industry. If you look at the television and the money and all this, but human beings by nature are primed for athletic movements, barring some kind of unfortunate circumstance or birth defect or anything like that. We all have the capability to again, push, pull, squat, hinge, run, jump, throw, are very survival dependent on these movement patterns. And so the issue is just like anything else, if you treat your body, it's funny, most people treat their homes and their car better than their body. Yet this is not something you can ever trade in for a new lease. It's nothing you can go shop around for. And so I think from my background in motor learning and even the work that I'm doing within my PhD now, you just continue to show that we've got to continually groove these patterns if we want to reduce the amount of resistance or issues we have. So how I'd start with you is even though I might have a pro athlete that squats 300 pounds, Dr. Gundry, I'm not worried about you doing that. You might, again, squat to the chair. You might squat with a light kettlebell. You might do any of those things. We might get a TRX or a suspension device and how you do rows. So the movement patterns stay the same, Dr. Gundry. We just kind of adapt them to your own physiology, your fitness level. And the same thing with the reps, the sets, the time under tension. The goal is it to leave you buried on the ground because then the next day, how are you ever gonna continue that behavior? So minimal effective dose, if I could say one word, that's finding the minimal effective dose and hitting these things allows us to continue to do it in perpetuity. I'm glad you brought up TRX because I'm a big fan of that system. We actually have one in our suitcase that we travel with. For those of us who don't know, what is a TRX? Yeah, so it's a suspension training device, which if that is jargon as well, you just wanna think about this as something that you can loop over a fixed object, whether that's a beam, whether that's a tree. Now don't go out and do this to any tree in your yard. I don't know, anybody is listening. You secure it to a secure, strong structure and it allows you to use your body weight as resistance. And so there's two handles, there's a loop over that secure platform or structure, whatever you have access to, and you can do rows, you can do push-ups, you can even put your foot in the loop and do some single leg squats. And then for anybody out there that's dealing with knee injuries, hip injuries, low back injuries, anything that really is causing you a lot of pain, the nice thing is it can also support and take off some of your body weight. So some of you that maybe haven't been able to squat for years, possibly due to arthritis or an old injury, you can actually reduce some of the body weight you're gonna absorb by holding onto these handles and it'll allow you to perform these movements, which that's great. I've worked with an obese gentleman who's 450 pounds and just had tremendous pain getting up and out of the chair and by the help of the TRX, we're able to get him into these patterns and a reintroduced movement into his life again, and that creates positive associations and then changes their behavior over the long term. Yeah, and the TRX that we have just flips over a door and then you close the door and it has to be a good lock, I mean a door that locks well. And yeah, so we can go to any hotel in the world and flip it over a doorknob and have our own gym with us. Yep. So working with all these folks, how did that prompt the writing of this book? Yeah, so what I learned is that I could write the best training programs, I could mix in the best exercises, we could do all these things, but by and large the effectiveness of any programming or anything I did with anybody was really relying on communication. How well did I connect the dots for them with what we're doing and why we're doing it and not speaking over their head in some technical jargon, but being able to really what I do in the book, I call it the 3R method. You have to research, relate and reframe. I need to know what matters to you. What are your goals? What are your obstacles? What's the language that you speak so to speak? Then I'm gonna tell you what we're going to do but how that relates to everything that I know matters to you. Whether that's you just being able to go home from work and play with your son or daughter without your pack tightening up or anything like that. I think it also involves some vulnerability on the coach's part. A lot of times people think coaches or professionals or experts of any kind. I mean, certainly people of your stature, they can think that you're infallible and it can be intimidating. So they may be a little bit nervous to give you information about what they've struggled with. So through the research, relate and reframe model, you get to know more about them. They get to know a little bit more about you and the why of what you're asking them to do. And then finally you're able to communicate that on a clear path. And so for me, communication is the winch pin for any kind of long-term behavior change no matter what you're trying to get people to accomplish. And we've typically thought of communication in today's society. There's all this motivational guru which is all good habits and positive thinking. It's not, it's the mucky situation of getting to understand a higher level of self-awareness, dealing with your fears, dealing with these things. And then also realizing that not everybody is gonna gravitate to the same kind of leadership or communication style. I mean, think about it, our culture today of horse conflict, right? Like nobody ever loses, nobody ever does this, everything's the greatest. And if it's not the greatest, you're not positive enough. I think that's a dangerous place to be in and you've gotta be able to figure out what makes people tick so you can really individualize that communication for them. So don't I get a trophy for just showing up today? I mean, come on. Today you do, because you're gracious enough to have me as your host. My athlete this morning does not. He showed up late and he got hell's fear and rest assured. Oh, okay, very good. So, you know, speaking of that, you're probably in a great position to help us understand this. Are we over-training our kids? Are we taking them to, you know, four different soccer, baseball, football, ballet classes every day of their lives? Have we stopped them from being kids? Yeah, I think it's funny that you say that because early specialization has really created this dynamic where kids now, instead of them really being able to acquire this large cache of motor skills, have now kind of just gotten into these repetitive patterns that we know through the research can lead to an increase of stress fractures and stress injuries. And not only that, you're making them less resilient to changes in the environment because they're learning less of these skills. You know, for example, if you have an athlete that let's say you're blessed with a very fast child and they're in track and field and they run the 100 meter and the 400 meter. Well, they're not getting exposed to anything in the frontal or transverse plane. And that just means side to side or rotational. And inherently that builds up some movement deficiencies that can carry on later in the life. You have to think about it, anyone listening as hardware and software. We wanna upgrade our children's software as much as possible in their early years. And that means you expose them to different skillsets and different environments. Really a child should not specialize in one sport or one activity until they're 16, 17, somewhere around there. Until that age, make sure, and there's research to support this as well, most gold medalists that have stayed healthy over the long-term and long-term is relative in the Olympic athlete side of things or multi-sport athletes in their youth. Now, with the exception being some cases in China and Eastern Europe during the Soviet bloc, but even then, Eastern Europeans, these children were placed in sport models where they were doing gymnastics and a lot of different skills. So, I'm glad you brought that up, Dr. Gundry, because it's a very dangerous and it's a sad thing too. You kind of get sycophantic parents that just pushed their kids into one track and it's harmful over the long-term. So, how do we motivate parents to not do that? To not do that. Golden question, right? And I think that too is, so when you think of the term buy-in, buy-in to me and why I titled the book, that is buy-in is trust and commitment, right? It's not just obedience, because people can be obedient and carry out a task and that doesn't necessarily mean that's gonna be done to a high level, right? The commitment side of things is where somebody carries out a task and they feel good about that. Well, as you know, most people only change their behavior if they feel like it was their own idea to begin with. One thing that was helpful on my end is, you know, I'll have parents that will see me work with professional athletes and they'll say, well, how do I get this? And they're surprised to learn, hey, this guy played three sports growing up. We're not out here replicating his sport. That's what he does 18 weeks out of the year. When he's training with me, we're strengthening the muscles involved with sport, but also just strengthening the prime movers, the same one that Susie Q and John across the door would do. You know, and so getting them to understand that your child is the ultimate investment and that while it may seem, and you brought it up perfectly early on, correlation and causation, it may seem like the two are not related at all. How can generalized training or we're playing multiple sports on Excel at one? And again, it's just like diversifying your investments. That's what I try to tell them. I go, you think about it, you've never put your eggs in one basket, you diversify. And it's the same thing we need to do with your child's long-term athletic development where diversifying their investments, they're learning different skills. Oh, and by the way, an 11-year-old is not half of a 22-year-old. There are physiological changes that are gonna occur in your child's life and you need to make sure that you're conscious of that. You know, since you were talking about this, I was on the plane back from Atlanta last weekend and there was a movie that was about elite athletes and I don't know if you've seen it, it was a documentary and it was what made these people tick and one of the persons was Jerry Rice and another one was Tom Brady. And what was really interesting, Jerry Rice was saying, look, if you did now the performance trials for the NFL, like who can run the fastest 40 yard dash, he said, and they started showing movies of Tom Brady in those trials and he said, and me, he said, we wouldn't have even been drafted if that was the measurement of success. And he says, you know, I would look at these sprinters and say, what doesn't matter how fast this guy can run 40 yards, how can he get to where the pass is going to be while avoiding four people? And he said, we got it all wrong on this performance business. So what say you to that? I say that's absolutely correct. You know, we have a little bit of colloquialism and amongst us professionals in the field where we say all these people love this speed kills, speed kills, we say, yeah, speed may kill but it's strength that matters. And here's the thing, strength is the foundation of all movement, right? Just like gut health is the foundation of really wellness, you think of that, right? And if it's our muscles that support our joints, it's our muscles that allow us to produce the force to get out of the chair to go to the mailbox to do these things. Well, here's something that might interest those of you listening, when an athlete cuts, let's say when, whether it's Tom Brady or Julian Edelman or whoever, I'm not a Patriots fan, I don't want people to come at me for that. But when they are sprinting and they cut or change direction, they can absorb up to six to nine times their body weight in that limb, whether that's the right leg or the left leg. Now, if they're glute, if they're hamstring, if they're quad, if everything is not strong and really buttressed by strong tendons and tissues, that's where non-contact injuries typically occur. And so you look at these things that absolutely, the 40-yard dash, Dr. Gundry, and I'm sure you know this, was really created because back in the day, they thought the best way to see who the person, the fastest person on the team was, was who could cover a punt the quickest. And the average punt in the NFL was around 40 yards. So the 40-yard dash, yeah, the 40-yard dash, actually you're right, it has a very low indication of one's long-term success in the NFL. You know what screening mechanism actually has the highest predictive rate of long-term success in the NFL? They're medical history. And after that, they're vertical jump because that looks at lower body power and lower body strength. So the bench press, silly, that's just a lot of tradition in there. 40-yard dash makes a lot of money, shoe companies and all this can then, who ran the fastest? But yeah, it's really, you've got to focus on holistic long-term athletic development and a robust skill set if you want to be able to build a strong foundation for the future. Okay, I used to joke that I can't learn much from a professional athlete. Kobe Bryant could never teach me how to dunk a basketball because I am height impaired. You know, I'm only five, I'm only five 10. Now, yeah, I know I probably could eventually, but what can I take away from you making an elite athlete even better and bring it down to my performance level? I think the key thing, Dr. Gundry, is having a plan. When these guys come and train with me, the first thing we do is sit down and of course we go over goals and all those things but much like a chef and a recipe and getting the right cooking temperature and ingredients, we really have to lay out a plan and say, here's where you're at, here's what you're up against, here is what is realistic. Because what most people don't consider is the context and the logistics of their plan. They just look at, okay, here's the exercises, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, but they never think worst case scenario. For example, the holidays, you know, people typically think, oh, I'm gonna go on this radical diet and workout plan during the hot, no, you're not. You're gonna be stuck in an airport. You're gonna be around a bunch of family members arguing about politics. You'll be lucky if you can get into the gym because it's so hectic. So maybe don't plan your toughest change, you know, to take place during that time, right? You have to schedule out the entire calendar year and say, all right, when do we know we have weddings? When do we have family trips? When am I up for my own budget meeting in my business? Whatever that may be. And then you have to strategically plan high and low stress periods where you can create a lifestyle where you can say, okay, I know this time of year I can probably hit this a little harder. This time of year I still need to be consistent but everybody thinks they need to be just at the peak all the time. Right now, if you were to come watch me train my NFL athletes, it's very early in the off season, very simple but not easy workouts. I think today we did a push-up variation, some pull-up variations, a squat. They do a lateral lunge and some med ball throws but maybe five exercises and that's it for today. You know, because I'm more conscious on them coming in and doing the simple thing savagely well than them doing a whole litany of things and leaving in a pool of sweat just for a temporary dose of dopamine. It's not gonna work. So that brings me to a quote that you use in your book and I use it all the time when the student is ready, the teacher arrives. And so, how do you know you're ready or better yet, how do you get somebody ready for the teacher? Yeah, I think that you can go through these kind of stages of change model. Remember when we used to talk about this in school, the pre-contemplation stage, the commitment. I think the biggest thing is sometimes people really aren't ready until, and I know this is gonna sound harsh, Dr. Gundry and forgive me, I think some people really truly aren't ready until they've failed. I think that, again, I think we've glorified success in this country and we haven't really taken stock of what a powerful teacher and motivator failure is. You know, failure teaches you so much more about what you're ready to take on and what you're ready to commit to than any level of success ever will. So this, you know, you're ready once you get to the point where you realize that the opposite of fear is not bravery. It's a love of that learning process of knowing that, yeah, I might fail, this may be a struggle, but really talent needs trauma. You know, you have to have these struggles. These are the things that help you lead to understanding who you are, what you want. They give you clarity. I think, I mean, how many times Dr. Gundry in your career have you kind of recalibrated after maybe a simple mistake? It could have been something silly, but you realize that you just weren't really clear enough on where you wanted to go with a certain message or a certain initiative. And that little slip up brought you right back, laser focused and better than ever. Has that ever happened to you? No, never. I don't know what you're talking about. No, you're absolutely true. You know, what's that expression? A setback is just the start of a comeback. Absolutely. And I think that's very true. You know, Edison was always fond of saying, you know, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Love that. And I think that's very true. And, you know, in research, which I've done all my life, you know, in research, you're trying to prove your hypothesis wrong. You're trying to prove yourself wrong. And unfortunately, most of the time, you prove yourself wrong. And so that's what we all have to be ready to fail at all of this. It's very true. Absolutely. And I'm glad you brought that up because it just is, you know, if there were five reasons people really don't want to change and what, you know, you think about, well, they don't believe that it's truly needed. They don't think they need to change. And I know my father fell into that category for a while. None of my degrees, none of the people that I've worked with, none of the things I've done. You're right, it's that old adage. The expert is always out of town. My dad's never gonna listen to me with that stuff. But, you know, or they don't believe it's cost effective. Well, I don't wanna join a gym and I can't afford a home gym or I can't do this. They feel threatened or they feel uncertain either about their own abilities or maybe even perhaps about the future in general. And that kind of fear just kind of paralyzes them for lack of a better term. They think it's too much work or to your point, they just fear starting over. But that's the point. Prove your hypothesis wrong, take a swing, come back with renewed clarity and hopefully an emboldened sense of purpose and get back onto something that's more sustainable and enjoyable. Yeah, my wife who was a great runner made me take up running. And as I was learning running, I was always cognizant of the saying that runners have the hardest step in running is the step out the front door. And she also taught me that for the first eight minutes I will absolutely hate every step. I will curse, I will say, why the heck am I doing this? And then around about 10 minutes, of course, the endorphins hit in and you go, hey, you know, this is okay. But if I didn't have my coach, my wife teaching me that you're not gonna really enjoy this. I had shin splints and you're not gonna enjoy this for a while, but just show up and it'll be okay. And I eventually really enjoyed running. I still jog my dogs, they enjoy it. So, but you're right. You gotta be ready just to fail and it'll be okay. All right, so we've been kind of talking around diet. How does diet fit in your own coaching and performance work? Yeah, so I integrate my practice in with registered dietitians in the area. And so, you know, I try to always make sure that I stay within my scope of practice. So I'll be involved in those discussions. It's certainly stuff that, you know, I've studied and I've stayed up on, but we make sure that we surround our athletes or our clients, because when I say athletes, again, I'm referring to the executive athlete that may work for a large corporation or a professional athlete, we make sure that everybody's locked in and whether that's them going through some unique blood testing or them getting on, excuse me, any kind of specified plan that's unique to their needs. And then really integrating that with what I'm doing from an exercise standpoint. So a day, really that information is shared in a central hub or database. You have weekly meetings with their support system, whether that's physical therapy, whether that's the dietitian and myself. And we really make sure that we have this kind of open sharing of knowing where they're at with their fueling. Is it appropriate? What kind of symptoms, if any, are they experiencing? How does that coincide with their training? And we try to take as integrated approach as possible. You got a starting nutrition tip that you can share with our listeners. Oh, it would bore them to death, Dr. Gundry. It's simply drink more water. You know, I just think that I see so much even a 2% percent body or weight loss and fluids can lead to severe decrements of performance. And again, performance is relative for my athletes. That might be their vertical jump or power output. For the average folks out there, that could be an increase in joint pain, right? Like we need to be hydrated. Our muscles are mostly made of water. And so I think drink more water is the simple thing. And it's so, I know it bores people to death and they'd probably hope for something more. But it's a recurring issue. All right, all right. So when you set out to write the book, was it number one, hard? Number two, what kept you focused on actually getting this done? Yeah, absolutely, it was terrifying. I mean, as you well know, you said you had written two books. Actually four, actually five now. Oh, wow. Well, I know my wife has two of them and she was really excited. But yeah, absolutely. And so for me, it was terrifying just because I'm somebody that very much treasures interpersonal communication, the face-to-face, the interaction, sitting down and being non-kinetic is very difficult for me. So just keeping my butt in the chair alone was difficult. But I knew, listen, I'd given presentations to the effect of some of the themes of that book. And I knew the way it was resonating with audiences, it needed to be in a more formal, focused format. People needed a resource. We live in this technology-laying age where we're more connected than ever, but we're not very skilled at connection. And like I said earlier, it made me kind of upset and I'll use that term purposefully that people will try to talk to communication as this warm, fuzzy, sing-songy feeling when in reality, some of this is just understanding the role of conflict and the necessity of conflict and self-awareness and being able to understand why we feel certain ways that we do in acknowledging that. In the book, I reference the term athlete a lot, but the book's message is for anybody that deals with people. I think another thing selfishly that drove me to it is I had five publishers tell me verbatim, nobody will care about a book on communication from a strength and conditioning coach. And it was interesting because I learned a lot of what they thought of my field. They thought of us as kind of muscle-bound idiots that run around and yell at people when in reality, we have to work with some of the highest performing folks in the world. You're in ego-filled dynamic environments where you have to learn these pieces. And so when the book came out, number one in sports coaching and number eight in business and mentorship, it was kind of a little bit of a, I'm not a prideful person, but it just made me feel like, okay, we did this and hopefully it made a difference and let's get the message out there. And then also just knowing that again, it is a timeless problem, Dr. Gundry. How many times in your own practice do you see well-intentioned people or well-intentioned even advice get lost amongst poor communication or the poor, just an inability to relate and an ability to see the big picture. And so to me, I think we can always get better at communication. I wrote that book, I'm still miserable at it if you ask my wife, but that's the fun. You're a lifelong student. Yeah, so the question is, have you gone to Minneapolis and taken this book to that hospital and found that nurse? That's what I wanna know. Yeah, not yet, but believe me, it's coming, it's coming. And so I've been blessed to, I think I just last week I touched down on my 46th country speaking on the book and doing those things and I had an opportunity to speak at Microsoft and Facebook with that hospital, not yet, but I'm gonna get it done, even if I have to just go in there and be like, hi, I'm here to, I'm here to, I send a helpful message. I got a gift for you. All right, bye. Yeah, how about you? I have to ask you, what's your advice from somebody that has written almost five books now? What helps you stay focused? Cause I'd love to learn from that experience of your own. Well, believe it or not, I hate to write. It's hilarious. Surgeons in general, you decide to be a surgeon or an internist. Internists like to write 10 page history and physicals and surgeons actually like to write patient present and here's the plan and let me go operate on them. And it was kind of a joke where that's true, but I've been a speaker all my life. I was state debate champion twice in Nebraska and original oratory champion and Yale debate team. So I love to talk. And so I said, I'm gonna force my talk onto a page. I don't even like typing, but I, you know, I talk through and people, I think the, one of the reasons I've been successful is people can pick up any one of my books and it's like I'm sitting there talking with them. Yeah, that's a great gift. So, and I don't schedule a time to write. I know a lot of people are good. In the same way. It just, you know, I may end up writing at two o'clock in the morning and, you know, all those habits never worked for me either. I can certainly relate to that. Yeah, won't work. Okay, I told you when we started, we're gonna have an audience question before we sign off. So today's audience question comes from Abby and Abby asks, if my options for milk or organic grass-fed or A2 that's not organic or grass-fed, which is the healthier option for my kids? I talk a lot about this in the upcoming book The Longevity Paradox. Your kids are not baby cows. They are not calves. Cow's milk, goat's milk, sheep milk, buffalo milk is designed to make these animals grow rapidly because predation is what kills these animals out in the wild. And so the milk is loaded with what's called insulin-like growth factor, which is a growth hormone, and it's designed to make cows grow quickly. Your child is not a baby cow. And please, please, please, one of the things to help them the most is do not give them another animal's milk. I mean, if you think about it, this is not a race to get big. And so please don't give your children milk. They do not need the calcium and milk for strong bones. Two-thirds of the world cannot drink milk and they don't have a problem with osteoporosis. We do. So don't drink milk. And sorry, I grew up in Omaha and Milwaukee, Wisconsin and milk is king. I mean, it really is. All right, so that's my editorial comment for the day. Take it with what you will. All right, so Brett, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Fellow Cornhusker and now an Atlanta guy. This is great. Where can our listeners learn about you and your work and where do we find the book? Sure, the book's available worldwide on Amazon. So if you just type in conscious coaching or my name, Brett Bartholomew, it'll come up on Amazon. Kindle, hard copy, audible, all those kinds of things. If you're the type that would like to sample a free chapter, just go to consciouscoachingbook.com, very easy. You'll see some of the testimonials and insights and what the book is, what the book isn't, all those things. And simply put, if you're trying to follow me or keep up with my work, artofcoaching.com is the easiest. Again, that's artofcoaching.com. I'm also very active on Instagram, at coach underscore Brett B. So I appreciate your time as well. All right, well, good luck. And I can't wait to hear when you've been to your 70th country, but it's got to include Minneapolis. No doubt, no doubt. Thanks, Dr. Gundry. All right, thanks for being on the show. So that's it for today. Thank you for joining me on the Dr. Gundry podcast and we'll be back next week because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you. Exciting news, my friends. My new book, The Longevity Paradox is out now. Like The Plant Paradox, this will be a game changer in helping you live a long, vital life. So pick up your copy now at your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble or Amazon or my audiobook which I actually recorded this time and make sure you tell your friends and family about it.