 All right, we're going to go ahead and get started here. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Movement Coaches panel. Very excited today to be moderating this panel. I just want to start by welcoming you all to the Ancestral Health Symposium, the event where good health is more than merely dying at the slowest possible rates. And an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but only if you have good aim and a strong throwing arm. Let's have a round of applause for Todd Becker for opening the event. Thank you. Thank you. Strong opening, Todd. Now I know who turned the AC so low in this room. So today is, well, this panel in particular, the Movement Coaches panel, has a special place in the AHS ecosystem. I've been coming to AHS for a long time. I started volunteering here at 2014, and I'll introduce myself in just a second. But this Movement Coaches panel has a special role to play. And really, AHS is a beautiful, free marketplace of ideas. We talk about powerful ideas that impact our health here. And ideas are very powerful things, but an idea without action doesn't do anything. We need to act on the ideas that we have. And that's where I see the Movement Coaches come in. So the role of the Movement Coach is to get people to take action on the powerful ideas. They know they need to take action about. And to do that consistently, how do we implement what we learn here at AHS into our life? How do we create good habits and practice those habits consistently to receive the benefits from those actions and behaviors? And so everybody on stage here now is a Movement Coach and is involved in doing this in one way or another. At this point, I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself as the panel moderator. My name is Stephen Louie Brands. I know many of you from past AHSs. I've been attending this event since 2014 in Berkeley when I was a volunteer. I've been the volunteer coordinator since 2015. So I lead the volunteer team and then have been a presenter since last year, leading movement sessions, and now moderating this panel. So I'm very excited. My career is as a personal trainer. I actually am a fitness manager. So I lead a team of 16 personal trainers, all very talented in their own right. We train out of the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, California. And my life is training. I live for this stuff. And I've made it the keystone not only of my personal habits, but my career as well. And that's who I am. I look forward to getting to know all of you more. And now I'd like to take a moment to introduce Julie Angel. Hi, Julie. Hello. Would you like to introduce yourself to the group? Yes, hi. Thank you for having me here. This is the first time at this event. So I'm not like Stephen. Movement is not the keystone, which may sound a bit weird for someone who's sat here as a movement coach. So I'm very multi-passionate. And I rediscovered a love of movement, age 35, when I was doing a practice-based PhD documenting parkour in the UK. So being around people who move all the time inspired me to move, even though I was too shy to try for about six months. But then fast forward 17 years later. And now I'm a movement coach. I'm still a documentary filmmaker. I'm an author. I'm an artist. And I just play and mess around a lot. And there are some other really interesting things about you. For example, you have the world's first PhD in parkour. Is that right? I do. It's a real thing. So this was done at Brunel University in London. And it was coming from a visual anthropological lens in terms of understanding parkour in terms of the physical, mental, emotional, political, social. And it came down to how to overcome obstacles, how to do it creatively, how to find out who you are and see who you are in that moment. And basically, you can allow the world outside your door to become a playground. And that made movement accessible to me. That made movement inviting. That made movement playful. And that made movement creative. And also, it meant I could do it anytime, anywhere. And I'm lazy. And if you give me things like, you need this equipment. You need this thing. You need this membership. You can only do it between 5 and 7 PM on a Tuesday. I'm like, nah, it doesn't work. It doesn't work for me. But yeah, it's a real thing. Oh, I'm looking forward to asking you a lot of questions about that. For now, let's go to Jared. And Jared, would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. Is this working? Here we go. Hi, my name is Jared. And I started when I was, I don't know, 14, training in my house because the energy in my, I had great parents who were just had a, it was like really a not healthy environment as far as growing up. And they did the best they could. But working out for me was a way for me to meditate, to get away, to kind of reconnect to myself. And so I started in my room before school at 14. And it's taken me on this amazing journey of training with Ido Portal who trained Conor McGregor and working with high level gymnastics coaches and working with people, going to train with the team at MoveNet. And so I've been all over the world training with a lot of amazing coaches. And for me, I was always looking for cutting through a lot of the junk to find what's the truth and what people need. And so I started out as a trainer and it kind of took me on this path to helping people heal from injuries and digestive issues and pain profiles. And it's just been an amazing journey. And so I've been through the full range of everything. Now I want to share that with people because I think there's so much information out there and there's so many things that you could do. And when people look for information, it's like trying to take a drink of water from a fire hydrant and you're just overwhelmed. And it's my passion just to help people. Right on. And then next up, if you know AHS, you know our next speaker. This is Daryl Edwards. Daryl, hello. I feel like you need no introduction, but could you please introduce yourself to the group? As I don't need any introduction, I'll hand the mic over to George on my left. Well, I started to move when I was a few days old. And well, in all seriousness, I am a recovering physically inactive individual who loves sedentary behavior. And I've struggled for most of my adult life to have a love affair with exercise. And I realized that that love affair was often very fleeting. So I had lots of kind of one nightstands, very brief dates with movement and with exercise, but that wouldn't persist. And it was really a hate affair rather than a love affair. I used to work in a very sedentary environment in technology, sitting for most of my day. And encountering health issues, I realized exercise was something that was mandatory, that movement was medicine, and that's something that I certainly coin and it is very special to me now. The most important aspect in relation to movement for me is to reach out to those who feel exactly the same way as I do about movement. Many of us are told about the benefits of exercise, about the benefits of movement and physical activity, but that isn't good enough. That really isn't good enough for many of us. Most of us have to re-engage with our inner child and re-engage with this love and passion for movement that existed for most of us as children. And that's what I hark back to. That's when I most enjoyed movement. Apart from the time when I'm on the dance floor as an adult and I experience the same sort of pleasure. So the primer play method is really about creating an environment for myself and those like me who want to fall in love with movement again. And last but definitely not least, we have George Dagger. George, take it away. So yeah, my name is George Dagger. I see a couple awesome deep squats in the front row. A few years ago in 2016, I led a deep squat session. Nothing revolutionary. People have been doing it for a while, but it's cool that we get to see that right here live. I'm a chiropractor and a strength coach and my movement or play or whatever we want to call it, journey started at a young age. I was blessed enough to be adopted in a loving home in Canada. And my dad got me into hockey and figure skating and all that stuff at a very young age. Later on, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. This has been over 10 years ago now, which got me thinking about movement outside of the arena, whether that's a hockey arena, any sports arena, whatever it is. It got me looking into research around environmental enrichment, play. It actually got me into these conferences. I've watched my father move from being a pro volleyball player to, he was an engineer, teacher, all this other stuff, to now hanging out in his bed. And when we get him out in the living room, I go in and I pick my dad up. I put him in the wheelchair and I take him to the living room. So movement for me, there's so many benefits outside of it being for me. It also benefits the people that I love around me. So it has changed my why. And I hope to share that with you at this panel, but mainly through the workshop that I'll be delivering with my wife tomorrow. So we'll talk more about that, but yeah. Now, George, can you tell us about your socks? These are cool socks. They're fun. So one of the guys that I work with created these socks. I guess this guy is Austin Matthews, place for the Toronto Maple Leafs, but he's from AZ and he's really good at goal scoring, really amazing at moving within the rink. And yeah, I thought it would just bring another face, light it up a bit. Love it. Great, so at this point, I want to talk about movement style. And I'm really curious how you all work with clients and what your process looks like. How would you describe your training style or movement style? Who inspires you? Where do you take inspiration from and draw knowledge from? And how can we get to know you as coaches a little bit? Let's maybe start with Julie. Okay, I'm sat next to you. So I primarily work with women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. And I love doing that because number one, I've been my own guinea pig number one. I know what it's like to go through the journey of just being sat for a long time. I was sat down for 20 years before I then started to move a little bit and kind of going through life. You don't realize you start to collect these different layers and it's not until you're invited into a space where you feel safe to kind of move and you feel welcome that you can start to meet yourself and kind of re-initiate that relationship with movement. So a lot of the women I work with in this midlife chapter are also going through the roller coaster of perimenopause and menopause. And as we know, like there's very little research done on women in those categories. The fitness world doesn't really speak to those women. There's been a really amazing work being done, especially now by people like Dr. Stacey Sims. Her book next level is kind of, I believe gonna be a legacy kind of game changer for the other half of the population. So as someone who was kind of the only woman in a lot of movement sessions that I went to, I kind of know what that feels like. So in terms of my approach, I'm always just like find your movement joy, like create your own movement culture because unless you do something that you love, why would you keep going back to it? Because then you're just in a self abusive relationship with yourself. So you're more likely to do something if that's where you find your joy. And for some people that could be, you like things hard and fast and loud. Maybe you like a team, maybe you like a group, maybe you like to be social. I'm quite introverted. So I like maximum three to six people. And that's a big day of moving with friends. So I like to move on my own. I like to maybe train with Jared or do those kinds of things. So find your joy. And for a lot of people like, they want some like hard physical pain even. And that's their joy. Other people want slow, soft. They want the yoga room or the Pilates. And there's no right or wrong, but it's just knowing yourself in how you move. And then it gets down to like, well, what's the dosage? What's gonna work in your life? I don't believe in any kind of copy paste approach, even though you have the principles of, this is what works for most people, most of the time. Again, it comes back to, if you're not doing it consistently, why would you expect to gain the benefits for it in your life? Otherwise it's, you know, it's Darryl's one nights down. It's kind of like, oh, I did, I don't know, crossfit for a week. And then like, okay. And people say, oh, it worked great. Like, okay, well, are you doing it now? Like, no, okay, well, it didn't really then maybe fit. So it's just about finding the right fit. And I'm kind of like a sponge. So when you said like, who are the people that inspire you? The thing that came up are, I live just north of San Diego and there's a lot of older women who surf. And I go down to the beach and I'm not a good surfer. And there are days when I've stood there and I'm just like sizing it up. And I'm thinking like, gosh, it looks too big. I'm always thinking, oh shit, it looks too big. And my friends are always going, you surf bigger than this, you'll be fine, you'll be fine. And I watch and I look and so many times an older woman will come up next to me and she'll just lean in and she'll have really sparkly eyes and she's just come out of the water and she'll say like, you don't know whether you should do it, do you? And I'm like, no, I don't. I don't know if I have any business being out there. I don't know, I don't know. Because there's no same wave, there's no standardization. There's all this adaptation, there's all this resilience. There's all that, do I wanna be stoic and should I just push through? Or like, no, I need to be humble to this. But those women in the 60s and 70s who are out surfing every day, or not every day, but regularly and they have a sparkle in their eye, they are my coaches. They are the ones who I aspire to because I want to be them. I want to be not restricted to do the things I love as I age. So I'm always like, okay, how do I prep for that? What am I doing in my everyday life? So that's a population that I love, love, love working with. Now you also work closely with Jared. What's it like working with him? Jared's amazing. That's a great answer. So what was interesting is, as I said, I was kind of like guinea pig number one for all of the methods that I use. And I'm a pirate, I'll just like say, okay, well, I take these principles from Parkour. I take this from MoveNet. I'll take this from ZHealth. I'll take this from Oxygen Advantage. I'll take this from Original Strength. Like you don't need to be a purist and you can respect all your mentors and all your teachers. And what was amazing is Jared actually started my coaching journey. So Jared, as you can see, he presents the very strong, healthy individual and he's silly strong and he's trained with all these elites. And Jared phoned me up one day and said, will you train me? I was like, you're taking a mick? Like, seriously? Like, why? Like, that's really strange. But, and it was this combination of I think, and especially having been immersed in the Parkour world for so long is that movement is emotional. There's an emotional component to how we move and a lot of coaches never talk about that. But if you don't address how movement can bring up fear, suspense, thrill, it's frightening. So you're not just moving your body, you're moving your emotions and it's an emotional process. So anyway, I did, I trained Jared and we had a really, and I would set you some really nice challenges and things to do. So, but working with Jared's amazing because he has a health background, he has a health and nutrition background. And we can only train to our ability to recover unless you want to be stuck in some kind of negative feedback loop. You're not going to get stronger unless you're recovering. So I was in midlife and my hormones were all over the shop and working with Jared really gave me the foundation and bedrock. So before you were saying to like, do you feel cold in this room? I'm like, no, I feel good. If you'd asked me five years ago, I'd have been like, no, I'm really cold. I'm really, really cold. Well, let's hear from Jared himself. Jared, you mentioned Portal in your intro. Can you tell us about some of your inspirations? Who do you draw on? And how does that show up in your movement coaching practice and what kinds of things do you do with your trainees or your coachees? Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I feel really lucky to have found a lot of fascinating mentors. And I think that's my gift in my course is like when I see someone who I like like Wim Hof. I went there 10 years ago and spent 10 days with them in the mountains. When I found Ido Portal, I went to Israel and spent two weeks multiple times training with him. Like when I find people, I go and search them out. And I feel lucky to have spent time with all these amazing people. And when you ask me who's my inspiration for how I teach my training and how I train, it's my son and he's six. And I always say this because my son is six. He's never done a hit workout. He's never done a CrossFit class. He's never trained or anything in his life. And he has full capability to do whatever he wants. He can run, he can jump, he can climb, and he does it in a playful manner at any moment like that. And when you see most of these people who I went to go train with, they're training four, six, eight, 10 hours. It becomes this obsession. And my son does it with play and joy. And so the people who I work with, I'm working with people who have digestive issues, who have pain and injury. And it's clear that health is more than just how you eat and how you move. There's other aspects because we're social beings, we have relationships, we have stress, we have a nervous system that we have to regulate. And that's what I teach, that I teach people how to regulate so that they can begin to heal. And for me, my son is a huge, huge influence on that. And my question when I'm training people and what influence is how I train is what's your why and what's enough? Because I grew up in bodybuilding in the gyms and I have friends who are hitting deadlifts and you got a deadlift three times your body weight and front squat two times your body weight. And at some point, I think there's a point of diminishing return. And so when I'm working with your average folk who are just being alive and dealing with the stresses of life, it's what do you need to do the things you want to do? And when you can do that, just maintain it. But we have this belief that, you know, like the commercials come on that if you're not sweating at five AM someone else is, you know, like all this stupid messaging that doesn't make sense. And it's like the day that you lose the ability to do something, you lose freedom to pick up your kid, to go wakeboarding, it's a sad day. And it's only until that day do you realize how sad it is that you've lost something. And I spend most of my time helping people to recover what they've lost. So when it comes to how I help people move and all that, it's what do you need to have a happy life? Is it you just like to garden? So you train to garden, you know, but we train to leave it all in the gym and then we have nothing else for life and it doesn't make sense to me. So I think it's about balance. And the last thing I'll say to what Julie said and Daryl and like, to me, the fitness and movement world has become like old school kung fu movies. My kung fu is better than yours and we have to battle it out because like there's this like ego thing, it's all good. Find what you like and do more of it. If you lack something, fill in the gaps. I think we can find happiness and joy and balance anywhere, so yeah. Daryl, what are some ways that you find happiness and joy and balance in your movement practice and bring that to your trainees? Trainees, I like that word. I suppose for my own journey, personally and as a coach, I remember conducting my first sessions with my clients and my clients would show up late. They would be clock watching throughout the session. There'd be a permanent grimace on their face and one of the best things that happened to me was one of my clients saying, if you think this is so much fun, Daryl, why aren't you doing it with me? And I'm like, yeah, you're right. You're right, actually. And from that moment, my life changed because in terms of inspiration for me, my inspiration is my sort of like six, seven, eight, nine, 10, up to about 14 years old self who played several hours a day who relished spending time with my peers outdoors and hated when my mother called me back in for dinner. Because that's all I wanted to do at that period of my life. And I recognized that for many of my clients, they wanted a very similar experience. And so my working out ethos became a playing out ethos. And my no pain, no gain became a no play, no gain. And so with that client in particular, we started playing games together, the entire session. And he would come early for the session. He would ask me at the end, why are we finishing now? I was having much more fun as a coach. And I recognized that play was something that was missing from my approach to movement as a coach. I recognized that I was play deprived and I was seeking play in all of these harmful arenas. You know, whether it was going out drinking, you know, whether it was playing poker, you know, there was all of these playful antics which weren't, they weren't really playful at all. So that was when I switched on to incorporating more play in my life as a coach. And then I found clients gravitated towards that. So clients would come to me saying, oh, you're that play guy, you're the guy who just loves to play. I've seen you in the high street doing crazy stuff. I want to do crazy stuff like you. And I realized that I needed to stop appealing to what I deemed to be the elites. So I wanted to be elite mover. That's what I wanted. I wanted to have a black box gym in London with maybe 10 members and that was it. And people would beg, borrow, steal, do whatever to try and join this gym. That's what I was attracted to initially, leaving my former career. Then I realized there were so many people who do not have access to experiencing what movement can do for them. And all they can see around them is what they can't do. There's a reason why people love to spectate movement. It's because they recognize, I can't do anything like that. And that's why elite athletes get paid millions of dollars, millions of pounds. That's why people watch the Olympics. Five billion of the planet will watch the Olympics to watch a few hundred athletes perform. Some of them will decide that they will move more on that basis, but the majority of them don't. So I wanted to, I suppose just to end this, I wanted to impart to my clients, what can I do to make you want to participate rather than spectate? What can I do to make you focus on what you can do and what you can achieve rather than you trying to aspire to be somebody that you will never will be? And that I think is extremely important. Thank you. George, you flew a long way to be here. Not quite as long as Darrell, I don't think, but still a long way up in Quebec, right? That's where you're from? Toronto, but Canada's Canada. Toronto, sorry. Americans in their geography, right? It's all good, it's cold, so we're getting that benefit. Can you tell us about your training philosophy, training style? I know you've been influenced by hockey culture quite a bit and also being a chiropractor. Can you give us an introduction? So I started skating at probably the age of three, figure skating, then jumped into hockey at the age of four and then named the sport. Me and my dad were up on the road everywhere playing, right? So I was really blessed and privileged to have that opportunity and a dad that could do that and value that. And then injuries start happening, right? Hockey, contact, sport, life, whatnot, hurt my back and then started investigating the back, met a lot of cool people, some that you probably know, but got into chiropractic, did some research and some residencies in the states and rotations around primary spine care. And then life happened where my mom was diagnosed with a tumor in her spine and we were in Brazil walking on the beach and it was wavy and my mom was walking as if she's drunk and in the medical world they call that ataxic gait. At that time I was still in university, I didn't know what that was, I just knew that wasn't normal. So we went and we saw a bunch of healthcare practitioners and then finally reached out to my buddy whose mom is like a world renowned doctor and I was like, hey, what's happening here? Can you take a closer look? Got an MRI, turned out she had a growth in her t-spine that was a budding against her spinal cord and two weeks later she went and she got surgery and if she didn't get surgery I don't know what condition she would be in here today, right? So from a health standpoint I started appreciating like the simplicity and the complexity that could occur from something very simple, if not seen and then from the other side I started working with hockey and baseball players that have back pain because of what they do for a living. They get paid to perform and if they can't perform then they can't provide for their families. So on one case, my mom's not a pro athlete but my mom's like an amazing person that provides for my family in a very unique way. On the other end I'm working with guys that literally provide for their family in another way, right? So to me both of them are elite and then you got me who's average because I'm not like a pro athlete and I'm not what my mom does, I'm like just somewhere in between. So early on I realized movement can literally be medicine on both ends. One can be performance medicine and the other could be potentially like life-saving medicine. And if I learn how to appreciate the details that others might skip over or the details that people think might not be important, I could help but all that hinges on me listening to the individual. So I guess what really motivates me these days is a lesson that my dad left and he never really spoke much but he lived his message to the point where you could literally read it just by watching him and this is where this whole move greater than talk message came from was from my dad. And in a day and age where we could argue about what's right or what's wrong, I think if we listen and we actually practice the lessons that people share and apply what we apply and leave what we doesn't work for our life depending on our geography, then we could help a lot more people. So yeah, basically my inspiration is life experience, whether that's professionally or personally and learning how to bring those together to literally help an individual or a group of people move. Yeah. Thank you. Now I'm gonna jump at the opportunity to answer my own question and tell you a little bit about my practice and my movement style. I found traditional martial arts at 12 years old. I knew from having watched Kung Fu movies and Jackie Chan that I wanted to do martial arts training that that was something really cool. And my mom wasn't so sure about that idea so I ended up having to find my own karate school to go to which I found through a friend of a friend and I was off the races, loved it and actually ended up starting teaching Pee Wee Karate lessons when I was 13 and then I've been involved in coaching movement pretty much ever since, not points. I'm from Oakland, California where I grew up. Bruce Lee is a big hometown hero. That's where he was based out of and he has this great quote. He says, take what is unique, sorry, already messed up the quote. Let's start over. He said, take what works, add what is uniquely your own and discard the rest. And I think that's great advice and it's advice that I try to live by and so I've incorporated that into my martial arts practice which I've since let go up to some degree and kind of expanded into other areas. And now at this point, I think my main focus as a trainer is to get everybody, as many people on board, the movement and training habit as possible. Time moves relentlessly, right? We cannot stop time and time is going to go by no matter what happens. And for those of us that are consistently engaged with the training habit, as time goes by, we get a little bit better than we were yesterday. We get a little bit stronger, a little bit healthier and we are on an upward trajectory. And if we're not engaged consistently in the training habit, as time goes by, we get a little bit older and our health starts to go down a little bit and entropy starts to happen and we're on a downward trajectory. So if I can inspire anyone in this audience or anyone outside of this audience to consistently engage in training a movement on a regular basis, we can shift from a downward trajectory to an upward trajectory and I think that's everything. So I really invite all of you to see how many people in your own life you can get on board the training train, so to speak. And let's see how many people we can get on that upward trajectory. In terms of the actual tools that I use, I'm very minimalistic. So I'm very inspired by classical gymnastics, lots of body weight exercises. I don't believe in loading up a heavyweight squat. I think you should take a leg away and do it on one leg instead. So that's kind of a window into my training philosophy. At this point, I wanna mix up the order a little bit. And Daryl, one of the things that I've learned from you actually and that I love, and I repeat this frequently to people, is that movement is medicine. And so can you tell us what you mean by the phrase movement is medicine and why is that important? A huge part of my work involves exercise physiology, which is the science of understanding the impact of physical activity on ourselves, on ourselves and the way we think, the way we feel. And the evidence suggests that movement, physical activity is probably one of the best interventions available to us. So small doses of movement daily can reduce the likelihood of all cause mortality by up to 50%, which is pretty much better than anything else in the literature. So being armed with that knowledge and being able to apply that to individuals with many chronic conditions, I mean, unfortunately most of us are having to deal with something, right, whether it's physical or mental. And I think we could make a huge step forward if we actually became more prescriptive about the movement practice we impart to people. So I feel too many people, I think we're almost going too far the other way. We have one size fits all, yeah, this is what you should be doing, this is the best thing you can do. Or it doesn't matter what you do as long as you do something, to the point where you can say, no, actually I can help you, you're insulin resistant. If you do this type of movement at this intensity for this duration, we can manage your blood sugar. We can remove your dependence on insulin. If you're dealing with cancer and having therapeutic treatment, we can use movement to help you whilst you're having radiotherapy or taking, having chemotherapy or managing all of it or managing fatigue, for example. If you're dealing with multiple sclerosis and you're losing the ability to manage your gait and your balance, we can apply a movement prescription that can assist for you. So much of my work now involves people who are dealing with something really, really serious and struggle to find the time, the motivation, the energy, the desire to move. But when you layer that with a medicinal benefit, a prescriptive benefit, Hippocrates, for example, used to use the right scripts to his patients which involved movement. Do 20 squats, do 10 press ups, whatever that would have been in his day. But that's how prescriptive I feel we should be. And that's why I believe in the mantra movement is medicine. Great, thank you. Yes, I think he prescribed calisthenics outdoors in the sun. So he has some sunshine. And also, if you're in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you're still in a bad mood, go for a never walk. So that's what he said about, that's what Hippocrates said about mental health. So, yeah, I mean, it is really fascinating that pretty much, Julie was talking about perimenopause and menopause and that there isn't much research out there. In terms of physical activity, there's a significant amount of research available managing the menopause. So, for example, one of the issues may be bone mineral density loss. For example, you lose, estrogen falls almost to zero. Your bones weaken as a result. That's a medium term, long term, side effect of becoming menopausal. But if you do weight bearing activity, if you significantly add load to activities, you reduce the likelihood of that decline, you reduce the likelihood of fractures, you improve your ability to stay well and healthy. So, yeah, I think most of us, whatever we're having to deal with right now, whatever we have to face in the future, using movement as a way to shield us for much of life's maladies is a really important and I believe an essential approach to applying movement to one's life. This next question is for Jared. A lot of your work has revolved around pain in some capacity. And I'm wondering if you can talk about that a little bit. My question is, how does the body use pain to communicate? How do we interpret those pain signals? Great. So one of my mentors who I studied with, and part of my journey in this has been coming from a place of like, I was sick. So when I was young, I was an athlete, I played basketball into college, did triathlons, I did all the things. If you looked at me, you would say, oh, that's a healthy guy. Meanwhile, I had a lot of digestive issues, issues with anxiety, issues with sleep, all kinds of things. There was this underlying thing that was there. And so when you're in that space, you're always looking for answers. And again, like I said, I travel around looking for people for those answers. And I went to the Amazon, I went all over the place looking for someone to help me. And ultimately I met a man who was, I think at that point in the 70s, so he had been around the block for a while. And I went in to get help because I was going to get colonics every month because this lady told me that that would be a way that I could get healthy. And I went in and did a session with him and I'm this badass trainer from LA who works with celebrities and all these people. And he starts talking about organs and the liver and the kidneys and spleen. I thought he was speaking another language or talking in tongues. And I felt kind of ashamed that I didn't know what he was referring to. I felt really dumb. And he helped me to learn how to heal myself. And then I always looked to my elders for wisdom. And so I spent the next 10 or 15 years with him learning his philosophies. And one of his was that we should never be in pain and we should never be sore. It's an indication that our body is out of balance unless you've been in a traumatic accident. So obviously if you fell out of a second story building or you were in a car accident you're gonna have some trauma. But for a lot of people that I deal with they're not sick and then over their life something happens and they become sick. Whether that's an autoimmune issue, a digestive issue, something happens. And he told me that when your body is in pain it's the way it communicates. So your body communicates through pain it's just whether we're willing to listen. And a lot of people see pain as an inconvenience. And essentially what they do is the check engine light comes on they take some duct tape and they just put it over the check engine light and they don't deal with it. And ultimately your body will keep coming back. And so this is an example of a client who I worked with I flew to Connecticut to help this man and he was going through prostate cancer and his numbers were elevated and he was gonna go through radiation and we did an intake just to talk to him and see what was going on. And he was 65 at the time, 30 years prior he was diagnosed with gout. So there was already a digestive issue at hand, 30 years prior, could have been emotional because he had a lot of trauma from childhood, could have been his eating habits, all the things. So he had this thing, he didn't listen, he took a pill, he chose to ignore it. And over time if we don't fix it, it comes back. So pain is actually the way our body speaks to us and is really important information. And so my view is we should never be in pain and we shouldn't be sore. I think a lot of people out there measure the quality of their leg day by how funny they walk the next day, right? Are you saying that that's not actually a measure of an effective workout? I think it's crazy. I think it's crazy. And we're at an ancestral health symposium talking about ancestral health. And the way I look at it is if I was back in those days and those times and I was so sore I couldn't walk or run, I'm a liability. I'm a liability to myself, to my family, and my tribe. So to think I'm gonna go into a gym and crush my legs. It just doesn't make sense. And to me as a trainer, I remember when I was just new to training and going through all the protocols. And back then NASM was like the premier training certification. They came out with the foam roller. This was a shoot 20 years ago. And I would be on that thing all the time. I would do a heavy leg day and then I would be sore in half the foam roll. And now that my digestion is fixed that I feel like I'm in balance, I don't get sore. I do multiple things. I'll train with anyone. I'll go for runs. It doesn't show up the same. And so when I work with people with knee pain or hip pain or help them to not have surgery from hip pain, you can clearly see that there's underlying conditions going on within the system that are showing up on the outside. So yeah, I'm not with that. Well then that begs the question. How do we tell if we have had an effective workout? Can I quickly interject? I know we should all be singing from the same hymn sheet on this panel, but I certainly disagree strongly in relation to we shouldn't be sore. Should we be chronically sore, persistently sore? No, no, we shouldn't. Should we be smashing it every single time in the gym? No, we shouldn't. But part of muscle sore and the sore doms, the laid onset of muscle soreness is the adaptation response. So part of muscle soreness, breaking muscle fiber, breaking muscle tissue, actually enables our bodies to become stronger. Part of building bone density and weight-bearing activity, there are micro-tears in the bone where basically microscopic breaks when we're performing weight-bearing activities which elicits this response, this growth response. So some muscle soreness is certainly useful. The acute inflammatory effect of muscle soreness actually promotes a longer-term anti-inflammatory benefit to us. And that's one of the reasons why that aspect of the post-exercise response is helpful to us. So avoiding all muscle soreness is not advantageous to us. The physical stress of exercise is what elicits the benefit. So my question, and this is to everyone on the panel, feel free to jump in, how do we know if we've had an effective workout? I guess the first question that I would ask is what do we define as a workout, right? That is playing hockey a workout, is playing baseball a workout, is being part of the walking club in the morning a workout. For me, I will recover from a walk, right? So I'm like, I don't really feel anything. Do I want to feel something? Is that my goal? Or do I not want to, right? For someone like my dad, I like to bring this back because it's kind of real, and everyone here is real, so I'd like to connect them on a real level. My wife and I got married in 2019, and I travel back and forth a lot. So over that time, that last year, my dad was walking less and he was sitting more. And during that time, I literally saw his posture change, and more importantly, in my opinion, was his ability to walk decreased tremendously. So this is what I could have done. I could have done the same mistake I did with my grandfather eight years before he passed. I took my grandfather to the gym, right, because I'm really excited. And he was, you know, in his late 80s at the time. And I put him on a leg press machine, right? And everyone could judge me because that's a very bad machine, because squatting and closed chain is better, and you should never do leg extensions because that's really bad, right, because all that's bad. But I put him on the leg machine because it was comfortable for him to sit. It was higher, and he could push, and I put the pin on five pounds, and he was smiling and he was doing reps, right, reps. The younger version of me, right, was like, hey, zhiddo, zhiddo means grandfather. I'm like, zhiddo, we could do more. And he's like, yeah, I can. He doesn't care about the gym. He doesn't care about the leg press. He's there because his grandson is taking him to get to spend time, right? I'm taking him because I want to help him. So I probably put up the weight of maybe 30 pounds. We hammered out some reps, okay? Next day, you know, he's feeling great. Next day I come and visit him, couldn't walk, right? So the younger version of me made a big mistake. The load that I used was greater than his capacity to recover. Now he recovered, right? Because humans are resilient. We cover from lots of things. But in hindsight, I look back, I'm like, now he has fear avoidance of the gym and that exercise. And he won't go back. It'll take me a lot more to pull him back, right? There's younger individuals that they go do something, they break their arm and shit really hits the fan, pardon my French. And then they want to climb the tree again. They're not that fear avoidant, right? That's not everybody, but generally. So whenever I ask about people's recovery or people's experience with movement, the depends question is not fun and it's not sexy, but I really have to ask who am I talking to and who's asking for help. So that's my little answer. Julie. Yeah, I'm completely on board with George's approach. And I think what's important to say in all this is that our movement, whether you call it a training, whether you call it a workout, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a part of your life and it's the same emotional, physical being that is doing that movement or exertion who also then needs to go and pick the kids up from school, who then needs to go and do the shopping, who maybe needs to do the housework, who needs to like pack up the boxes because you're moving house next week. So the kind of how do you know when it's a workout is enough or too much has to be taken into the context of how is that affecting the rest of the life you're living on that day. And maybe you do do too much one day and you realize like, okay, I need to kind of dial it back. And it's this adaptation. So when I have women who come to me and say, I really want to get back in shape and I want to do this and I used to do triathlons and now I don't do anything and I feel weak and I've lost my confidence and I have horses but I'm too scared to ride them and I used to ride horses and I used to jump across rivers and never think twice. And I say, okay, what does life look like at the moment? Well, this is my job and this is what I do and then we're moving house and then we're doing that. And it's like, might not be the best time to train for a triathlon right now. Just saying, you know. But we can do a whole bunch of other stuff that's going to maybe give you energy rather than deplete energy. And so it's kind of looking at overall this training, this movement, these workouts don't exist in a vacuum. And I remember like, as Jared said, he's kind of a deep researcher and you went and did like really intense parkour training for a while and rose to the challenge and you hit all the numbers and the goals but you were like an angry dad to your son. Sorry to say that. But remember you just saying like you weren't the father that you wanted to be because you were so tired. So our training does not exist in a vacuum. The workout doesn't exist in a vacuum. So even though the physiology in the science says you need this, you need this, you also need the rest of the day. And for me, those are the measures of is this working for you? Is it consistent? Is it sustainable? That is based on how is the rest of the hours of the day because there are way more hours of the day than there are when you are doing your training, doing your workout, doing your exercise. One thing you talk about in your work is this notion of strong resting and how that can help balance training with recovery and give you back some energy. Could you tell us what strong resting is? I will briefly. So we have this idea that rest is for the lazy. Rest is unproductive. Rest is for slackers, rest. Rest is not a productive endeavor. And what I realized my superpower in movement and strength is I'm really, really good at strong resting. I will only do movement that I love, that I enjoy, that speaks to me in some way. Maybe it's a challenge or whatever. But I know how to chill. I know how to relax. I know how to eat really well. I know how to lie in my hammock. I know how to say no to loads of things. So I only ever train and move relative to my capacity to recover. My training is based around my recovery and this lost start of recovery, this is the evolutionary mismatch. This is the point where people are, they feel lazy if they don't rest. They feel not productive. They don't realize when you are resting, that's the rebuild, that's the repair. I talk to people who don't even bother to have lunch. And I'm like, what happened to lunch? Like, what's this old school lunch thing? Like, you know, and I know there are people who are fasting and there's good things for that at some points. I know, I know, I know. But believe me, midlife women, you want lunch. You want breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. So, strong resting is this, art of recovery. And I'm just gonna let Jared add one more minute to strong resting because you speak from health. I just think from a place of regulating the nervous system, we've just gotten into a culture that's always moving. And you know, when you look at a dog who goes in the corner and sits to rest, he goes there and he just sits and does absolutely nothing. And when you have an adult or a human go rest, they're on Facebook, Instagram, emails and doing all the things. And so we're constantly spending money from our bank account and we're never really replenishing. You know, even you go rest and you watch a TV show or you read a book, like we just don't rest and recover enough. And our nervous system just takes a hit and from a healing perspective, when you're in that state of fight or flight, if a lion or a bear came in this room, my body will not prioritize healing. It just cares about me getting out of this room. And unfortunately, a lot of people are just locked into that state of survival. And it's the missing piece in what I do with my clients because I see a lot of people that are doing the cleanses, doing the detox, doing the diets, doing the this, doing the that. And there's this nervous system aspect that they're not accounting for. And I think it's the biggest part. And it's a huge piece. So resting kind of feeds into that. Thank you. It's time for us to wrap up. Could we go around and just introduce our movement sessions? Everyone here will have an opportunity to train with all of us at some point during the symposium here. And let's start with George. When are your movement sessions, George? So there's that welcome dinner tonight. So I'll be running a movement session just before that. So at five o'clock, I believe, because dinner's at 5.30. So whoever wants to join before, activate some Glute 4 transporters. I'm happy to facilitate that. And then I think you're also doing something on Friday at 4.15? Yes, and this is actually the, I'd say the better one, because my better half is gonna be part of it. So Friday at 4.15, we're running a workshop. So everyone's gonna be involved whoever comes to this workshop with my wife. She's really the star of the workshop. Yeah, like she doesn't need to be here, do any of this, but she has a real gift and I encourage everyone to be there because it'll be special. And Daryl, how about you? Get up, Stephen. So one of the things I love to do is to play tag. So I'll be running. Is it running now? Too late, mate, too late, too slow. So yeah, I'll be hosting a couple of sessions. One is Primal Play, which is more about the playful aspect of movement. Movement where we're playing games like tag and games that are reminiscent of what we did as kids and hopefully lots of fun. And the second is gonna be Animal Moves, where we'll be jumping like a kangaroo, crawling like a bear, and pretending to be lots of other animals in the animal kingdom. Thank you. That's Friday, five o'clock to 5.30 and Saturday, 1.50 to 2.20. And then Daryl will also be doing a talk, 9.50 to 10.30 on Saturday as well. And also, I think just before lunch, tomorrow and Saturday as well. Yes, and we can check the schedule too. So there's, if you go to the website, go to the conference section, there's a tab that says schedule. That has all the up-to-dates scheduling. You can check it there. Julian, Jared, you guys are doing a movement session together Thursday, 2.43 p.m. and Friday, 8 to 8.50. Can you quickly tell us what that's gonna be about and then we'll wrap? Sure, so we're gonna be teaching movement snacks, which is our belief that you just need these short movement snacks during your day that are gentle and revitalizing and work with the nervous system. There'll be some stuff on the floor, some nose breathing. It'll be very gentle and work on some mobility. And then we're also gonna be having a nap station. So if you wanna come take naps, we're gonna have a place. Yes! I'm gonna be strong resting so hard during this conference. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, everyone. Can we hear it for our panelists? Thank you. Thank you.