Mike Jolly (Concussion, Neck Strength and TBIs) - Episode 895

This episode is sponsored by Bubs Naturals, yet another company that I track down to bring on as a sponsor because I myself love their products. They are offering you, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast, a 20% discount. But before we get to that, I do want to highlight a few of the products that I use myself. Firstly, collagen. I am about to turn 50 and so my hair, my skin, my nails, not really a big concern when I was younger, definitely a lot more of a concern now.

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And finally, if you want to hear more about their products and Glenn's powerful story, listen to episode 558 with co-founder Sean Lake. This episode is sponsored by Inside Tracker and what makes me smile is before I even started my podcast seven years ago, when listening to other wellness conversations, Inside Tracker was always the company they recommended for comprehensive blood work.

Well now in 2024, they have begun to offer a brand new first responder panel, which will cover nine biomarkers hitting several of the pillars of health that affect us in uniform. Stress, heart health, metabolism and gut health. Now after a very simple intake form, a blood draw, you will get the results sent to your computer, smartwatch, phone, not only detailing where you are on the scale from poor to optimized, but also tips on how you can improve each of these markers.

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So to sign up or simply learn more, go to insidetracker.com and for the first responder panel, the easiest way is to Google Inside Tracker first responder panel. This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 511. I wore their uniforms back in Anaheim, California and have used their products ever since.

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And if you want to hear more about 511, who they stand for and who works with them, listen to episode 580 of Behind the Shield podcast with 511 regional director Will Ayers. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast as always my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show college football player, stunt man, professional wrestler, coach and the creator of the Iron Neck, Mike Jolly.

Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics from protecting our youth athletes, the relationship between a strong neck and concussion, the application of this product in the first responder professions, jiu jitsu, the world of aviation, TBIs and CTE and so much more. Now before we get to this incredible conversation as I say every week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.

Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of almost 900 episodes now. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them. So with that being said, I introduce to you Mike Jolly. Enjoy. Well Mike, I want to start firstly by saying thank you to Robert Sherman.

He was the gentleman from Iron Neck that I originally spoke to and he generously sent me the most recent Iron Neck 3 Pro. So I want to thank him and thank you for that and also to welcome you Mike Jolly to the Behind the Shield podcast today. Thanks James. Well I hope you enjoy your Iron Neck and if you want a video FaceTime session with me, I'll gladly take you through your first workout.

Brilliant. Well yeah, I did the phase one and then I'm actually going to switch to the phase one combat athlete program that you guys have because that's exactly what I do now. I get murdered by younger, stronger people at the moment. I remember when I was doing some high school coaching for wrestling at Santa Monica High School. You know, and I was in pretty good shape.

It was a while ago and there's this big huge offensive lineman decided to want, he wanted to wrestle and I'm teaching him double leg takedowns. This is how you do a double leg takedown and I was just being the dummy, right? But he was just a big monstrous guy. Of course he broke my rib right away. You know, these young kids, I mean, he was just like wham, all your weight on me, boom, oh, broke my rib. Okay, great. Well, I'm done with that now. Yeah, no, absolutely.

I had a young guy, strong guy in Jiu Jitsu. We weren't even sparring. We would just simply do it in a drill and something in his mind made him think that he was trying to win the UFC championship belt and he freaking cranked on the other thing. He had a body triangle and he cranked it down on a choke and I felt my ribs separate and I'm like, oh, fuck. And this is like, you know, a year ago at 48 years old. So yeah, that was fun kind of rehabbing that for about three or four months.

I had a similar experience. I was doing a commercial for United Airlines and they hired a bunch of college football players, you know, UCLA, USC, you know, to be in the commercial. And it was a pretty cool commercial. What they did, we were playing in the mud, in thick mud. So they brought in water trucks, they watered the field down, they put up a rain screen up above and they were dumping water on that with fire hoses. So it was pouring through, dripping through.

And they hired a semi-pro football team to play against us. And the semi-pro football team, like your guy, decided that they could probably be discovered on a United Airlines commercial and make it to the NFL if they could show how good they could play on the commercial. We're going half speed. They're going full speed and we're like, guys, you better tone it down. And they didn't. So then we said, okay, we're going to go full speed now. And they quit after three plays and walked off the set.

And the producers had to go over there and say, no, no, no, come on, they won't do that anymore. Well, they need to play ball too, right? So anyway, we got it worked out. The same kind of thing. It's funny how people react in different situations like that. So I drive, I think it's just over 30 miles each way to Gainesville to train in this gym. And this happened at this gym, but this was an anomaly. But that is exactly it.

I think a lot of older men and women are like, oh, I don't want to do Jiu Jitsu. I don't want to get hurt. And I always tell them, you just got to find the right gym. There are gyms out there where they're just very professional, very controlled, very few egos and you can roll somewhat intensely and still come away without, as we're going to talk about, a screwed up neck.

But there's other gyms I've been every single freaking session I come away with sore ribs, sore neck, and it just makes you not want to return again. Yeah. No, no, I get it. Exactly. So, well, I want to start at the very beginning of your journey. We got some interesting kind of parallels in our lives, but tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings.

This was born in Eugene, Oregon, which I didn't go to University of Oregon for college. I went to UCLA. So that did not make my dad very happy. He was getting his master's degree at the University of Oregon. Both my mom and dad graduated from Oregon. Anyway, raised in Portland most of my life and one sister, three years younger than me, a very normal childhood, very happy childhood. Never can complain. My parents were great. My sister was great.

It was just, I hear all these bad stories about childhood and sometimes I feel a little bit guilty because mine was pretty cushy. We weren't by any means wealthier or rich. We were pretty mostly lower middle class. You're a professor of salary trying to make a living. It's not easy, especially back then it was pretty low. But yeah, it all worked. It all worked. I got a scholarship to UCLA at a Wilson High School in Portland and went down to UCLA and had a good five years there and graduated.

What about sports? As you progress through middle high school, what were you playing? I was playing basketball in grade school and then in seventh grade I started playing Pop Warner football, seventh and eighth grade. Then I got to high school and no more basketball. I wanted to wrestle. I had never wrestled before and I just loved it. It just felt right.

As a freshman, we had a really good wrestling program at Wilson High School and as a freshman, I was on the freshman team for about three weeks and then the coach brought me up to the varsity team and said, look, you can still wrestle freshmen, but I need you to train with our state champion. We had a state champion, Wayne Snotterly at 178 pounds and I was weighing right about that.

I started training with Wayne and working him out because the coach wanted him to work out with a bigger, stronger guy. We had some good wrestling matches until I injured him about a week and a half later. I mean, it didn't make any sense. We were wrestling full speed and he got injured. The coach looked at me and said, well, I guess you're starting now. I'm like, what? I don't even know. I've only been wrestling for four weeks of my whole life, four or five weeks.

Anyway, it was kind of baptism by fire. Then when Wayne came back, what I did was I cut weight. The only time in my life that I had to cut weight. I could cut weight to go to 168 and challenge at 168 because I could beat that guy. I wrestled at 168 most of the rest of the season unless the coach wanted to put me someplace else. He made me wrestle heavyweight a couple of times to, you know, trying to beat the team and just lineups how they match up. It's sort of interesting.

Then football, played freshman football in high school. Then on my sophomore year, made the varsity. I went both ways and got some city honors and all that. The next two years got all state honors. I love defense. I was recruited to UCLA as a defensive lineman and played defensive lineman for two years. When Coach Donahue called me into his office, he goes, Mike, you have white man's disease. We're moving you into the offensive line. I went, what? Coach, I was 300 pounds.

I ran a 4,840, but we had guys that were a lot faster than that on the D line. Anyway, he goes, yeah, I'm putting you on offense. You'll be my pulling guard. I was like, oh my gosh. Okay, whatever. Because, you know, defense is way more fun. When you sack a quarterback, that's a high. You don't get that high often on the offensive line. Yeah, when you flatten out a linebacker and stuff like that, it feels pretty fun, but you don't remember that.

You don't remember that like you remember a quarterback sack. So I finished up my career there, playing offensive lineman. Now, I want to get to the physicality of wrestling into football, but before we do, it's always interesting, especially when I'm talking to, for example, some of the special operations communities. A lot of them have done an individual sport and a team sport. Now, of course, wrestling, you're on a team.

When I was a martial artist, I was on the team, but I was there on the mat on my own. When I did field hockey, which is what I played back in England, that was a team sport. So if I screwed up, everyone was affected. What were the things that you pulled from the individual sport and the team sport that maybe served you later in life? I need these glasses on. That's a great question because we had my football team at Wilson High won seven games in three years.

So we just, you know, we just that we weren't good. We just weren't. It didn't matter how good I was or someone else on the team was, you're going to lose. So I loved wrestling because it was an individual sport. It all was all about me. If I could, if I did a great job, awesome. I won and that was great. And if I didn't, I lost. It was my fault. It wasn't anyone else's fault. So that individuality of being on a wrestling team was great because, you know, I went to the state and did all of that.

And that was that was a lot of fun on the and it was also a team and it would come down to heavyweight a lot. Right. It was like we were in the city championships. It came down to heavyweight. My coach, he would not let me pin a guy until he gave me the thumbs down signal because he didn't. He just he wanted me to get a workout. Right. And so so I went I was going out to the mat and it was it was for the city championship. We won. We won the city. And he grabbed me.

He goes pin him as fast as you can. I said, OK, all right, coach. I'll pin. It's like the first time you ever said that. So it was kind of fun. But yeah, that that that individuality of a wrestling and just being just you and having the confidence to go out on that mat and rely on yourself and have you on display. You're not hiding in the offensive lines growing up. No one even knows you screwed up because you're buried in that that big, you know, you know, scrimmage pile of all the bodies.

No one knows. So that individuality, I think it makes you stronger. It demands a little more than if you have teammates around you. But the team aspect teaches you so much about teamwork and leadership and and, you know, working together. I mean, offensive linemen, especially out of any football team, they have to work together in unison or the play doesn't work unlike any other sport there is.

Those those five offensive linemen and tight ends there, that sixth offensive linemen, you have to work together and you and you have to really trust each other. So those are the two aspects. And I think when you combine them, boy, they're great, especially for linemen. If you combine wrestling, you know, with with offense, offensive line. Oh, man, the best offensive defense linemen were wrestlers. And you know, it's just it was a great opportunity to do both.

One of the things I do now when I hire people, you have to be an athlete. You have to understand what leadership is, what teamwork is. And or you have to be in the military. You have been athlete or in the military. And usually guys are in the military where athletes when they were in high school. But if you weren't in the military, you better be you better be a good athlete, you know, with team experience, not just not just, you know, individual experience. Now what about physical resilience?

I heard you on the underground strength podcast. And you know, we would obviously you were talking somewhat about neck strength and concussions. But overall resilience when you went from wrestling, how did that serve you in the football uniform? Well, that was great. What was what wasn't great was coming, for example, UCLA, I wrestled two years there till Title nine, killed the wrestling program at UCLA. Freshman year, we went to the Fiesta Bowl, played, played Arkansas in the festival.

And so I came out in January of the wrestling team. Now, they'd already been practicing for eight weeks. And you're in no shape to wrestle after you play football. Not I mean, you football's five, six second burst, two minute rest, five, six second burst to, you know, it's that kind of thing. So you come out and you just get killed.

But boy, the other way around when you've been wrestling and you know, you can stay lower than everyone else and you can get left, you can get leverage on everyone else. And I mean, it's just and you're in great shape, your body's used to going and going and going and going. You condition hard, you lift hard, you on the mat, just wrestling with other big guys, throwing each other around. I mean, your balance gets better. Your coordination gets better.

You can tell a wrestler on a football field, if you look at the Office of Defense and Line linebackers, you can tell if they're wrestling just by how they move, how they carry themselves, their quickness to react to them, the reaction time they have. Wrestlers get very quick at reacting because if you can't react to your opponent, you're going to get beat right away. So that reaction time, you know, helps out. But wrestling certainly helps football. Football does not help wrestling very much.

I know in Jiu Jitsu as well, when someone, when you roll with someone, you probably tell them when they even walk in, but certainly when you roll with them, when they feel like they're double the body weight that they are and they're an immovable object on top of you. Okay. You wrestled, didn't you? Yes, I thought you did. It's incredible the way that they're able to just, you know, the base is insane. Right. Right.

I mean, right away, you know, I've got guys because I'm, you know, I'm six, five and I'm big. And so for some reason, people like to just try to push you around. Right. Big guys just try to push around and mess with them. But they try to pick you up. And if you're a wrestler, they can't pick you up. They think they can get behind you and pick you up. No, because we know how to just deaden our weight, sink down and it makes it impossible.

But, you know, that's the kind of thing you're talking about. You know, right away, oh, this guy, this guy's a wrestling background, obviously. Now what about neck conditioning back then? I mean, one of my instructors where I train, he's got a little thing that's called fifth limb, fifth, yeah, fifth hand jujitsu, I think it is. But you know, we think about the hands and the legs, but you watch the wrestlers, your head, your neck is another appendage that you use incredibly effectively.

So when you were actually wrestling, what conditioning were you doing that back then for the neck? Well, we bridged a lot, of course. I mean, that's what we did. We bridged. I would have some of the 100 pound wrestlers, you know, sit on my back or on my stomach while I was bridging so I could add that extra weight. But you'd be bridging and you'd be rolling around on your neck. One of the things, though, you're always rolling around on your neck. You just sit there bridging go like this.

No, you were rolling around and moving, which was really great for the neck muscles because they're all diagonal fiber direction to get full contraction. You know, you have to tip your head, it's lateral. You have to rotate it around and that certainly worked the muscles out better than a four way neck machine. Now, when I was in high school, there was no neck training in football at all. We didn't even have a weight room per se. We had a little universal gym. It was just ridiculous.

But in wrestling, we were obviously working out the neck. We got to UCLA on the football team. You know, we'd sit there on all fours on the football field and you put your head up against the guy's thigh and you'd push against the thigh and you'd push against the thigh. Then you'd hold your head down and you'd arch up and then you'd grab your face mask and you'd pull down. But again, it was just very linear. No rotated resistance of any kind at all.

We know that 85% of concussions happen from rotary acceleration to the brain. So if you picture a football helmet, you never get a direct hit. It's just straight on. Never. It's going to glancing blow. It's always a glancing blow. And it's that glancing blow, that rotation that starts twisting the brain and it starts that brain rattle. And that's not a very good situation to have. That's how you get concussed. So the neck training, four way neck machine just doesn't do it.

It doesn't and it allows you to cheat a lot too. But that's why the iron neck is a great way to train your neck because it uses all those rotational resistances. So I did sports science in university, but then met a girl overseas. She was actually English as well. And she was a seamstress and a costume set designer in a drama school. So I ended up auditioning with no acting experience whatsoever. And I still will say I'm probably one of the worst actors that walks this earth.

But I got into drama school, ended up spending a year there. It was terrible acting, but I got into stunts. And then ever since then for the last 20 plus years, I did stunt man alongside being a firefighter. I know that you did political science in university, but talk to me about drama and how that ended up forging the first part of your career as well. Yeah, it was theater department at UCLA is closed.

You're recruited to get to get to get that did and it's a big deal to get into the theater department. But one time a year, the kids that are in the master's program for directing, they do one act place. And on the one act place, it's open auditions to anyone on campus. And we me and my buddy were walking by coming back from polycyclic class on North Campus. You're walking by the theater department and there's this big sign one act play auditions. You know, now big arrow. My buddy, let's go.

Let's go try out. Let's go try out. So what the hell? Right. So we walk in there and we try out. It was for a William Inge play, very serious play about prisoners on death row. And you know, I tried out and the part was an emotional part. And I got it. I got this part. And it was in between spring ball and, you know, and summer. So I had this I had this time that I could actually didn't have to be a football practice. So I did it and I fell in love with it. It was just so much fun.

So that got the acting bug into me. And then I wanted to take more classes. So I went in to the theater department during, you know, open enrollment. And I said, yeah, I'd like to send up some classes. And they said, you can't sign up for classes. You're not you're not in the theater department. You know, we recruit to get in here. I didn't know any of that then. That's when I found that out. Oh, really? But, you know, but, you know, I have pre enrollment. I'm on the football team. So what?

It doesn't matter that you're on the football team. So I said, OK, so I went and I talked to the chancellor. So Chuck Young was a big supporter of the football program. And we had a pretty good relationship. So I went and talked to Chuck and Chancellor Young called them up. He said, go ahead and go back tomorrow and take any class you want. So I walked in there the next day. And of course, they they said, oh, hi, Mike. Yes, you can sign up for any class you'd like to sign up for.

So I got a minor in theater, which is kind of fun. I would have got a major, but I couldn't do the big plays that you have to do three times a year because of football, obviously. So that kept me from getting a major. But I got a minor in that. And that got the acting bug in me. So my senior year at UCLA, my fifth year at UCLA, I actually got an agent and I you know, it was just a freak, a fluke, met this woman at a party and she said, oh, yeah, I'm an agent.

I told her about, you know, my acting and I'm an agent. And you know, she goes, I'm with writers and artists. You should come by the office and sit down and talk and you can audition for the for the agency. And I said, OK, but everyone in LA is an agent. If you're not an actor, you're an agent. Right. So I'm like, OK, whatever. So I go back. I call up my my friend who's really dialed into Hollywood and I said, yeah, I met this this lady named Jenny Raymond from writers and artists.

She said she's an agent. Oh, my gosh. She's one of the best agents in town. Seriously, you met her. How do you meet her? Anyway, to make a long story short, I was doing a play, off campus play. It was Desire Under the Elms. And there was a scene in that play that was where I beat up my girlfriend. So I go and I go into writers and artists and they set up a theater in the round. And she came with me and performed the scene in the round. And there was it was probably about a 20 foot circle.

And we were in the middle. But, you know, we go through this this this intense scene where I'm where I'm beating her up and she's bawling and crying. I'm screaming at her scene ends. And all the chairs that were in the circle. We're flattened up against the wall. The people had just slowly pushed the chairs back and their backs were up against the wall because it was intense. Right. And I'm a big guy. I think I think they got a little bit intimidated. But they signed me up the next day.

So I had a decent agent. I mean, a really good agent. And yeah, they got me. They got me some good parts, but the stunt work was a blast. They'll give actors an opportunity to do your own stunts if they think you can. If they think you're going to hurt yourself, as you know, I mean, you're a stunt man. So you're hoping that they say, no, you can't do your own stunt. I mean, that's going to give you more work. Right.

But if they think you can do it without injuring yourself, they'd rather have you do it because they can show your face, you know, while you're doing the stunt. But yes, that works. I love stunt work. It gets back to wrestling, right? And football, it's so physical. It was funny. I've told a few actors a story. When we did the drama school, there was a showcase, you know, and you think it was like three cities. And we each did our monologue.

And the rest of my fellow actors were good actors, but they weren't very physical human beings. And I was more of an athlete, less of an actor. And I did a monologue from the Falklands War. And it was this guy that basically now it's funny that, you know, years later, I end up working in this kind of arena, but he had PTSD. So he's kind of seeing demons and even throws a couple of martial arts kicks. And so at the end, I had this guy said, I'm with William Morris again.

I'd heard that William Morris was kind of a big deal. You know, we love what you did. Yeah, just a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. But he goes, I'm not the person who would be in this group that you would fit. So let me know when you get a role and we'll get the other person to come watch. Well, in London at that time, you couldn't get work without an agent. You couldn't get agent without work. So that ended up being the kind of thing. So but what I ended up doing was the live stunt.

So I never did the film and TV stunts. I worked on films and TV as a really a glorified extra, to be honest. But the the live stunt shows were amazing because you were the actor and the stunt man. You were everything in those and it was live. So, you know, if you screwed up, act the wrestling, it was on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool. I had a Boy Scout troop. I was Scoutmaster for years. Really enjoyed it. I have three boys are all Eagle Scouts.

And we had one one summer we decided to put on a stunt show. So we raised money. We bought an old car. My assistant Scoutmaster was was trying to break into the stunts in L.A. and he was pretty good at it. So we built a big tower. We jumped up. I mean, the parents came. We did this little show. But we rolled the car. It was a big deal, you know. But it was so fun. The kids had a ball. I mean, the kids loved it. A lot of fun. Amazing.

Well, while we're on this subject, then, because I know we're going to transition to the sports side and firefighting. But when I look back now, when we get to the CTE conversation, but even just your next strength and flexibility as a stunt performer, I've probably taken tens of thousands of hits over 20 years of doing live shows. And so you think about, again, that concussive force when you're whipping your head around.

Have you had interactions with the stunt community and how they've received Iron Man? I have not. I have not had any interactions with them at all. I'm hoping that they're using it. It just depends on where they work out. Now, if they work out at martial arts studios, which I know a lot of them do, most of the martial arts studios in the LA area have Iron Man. Then they probably are using it. I mean, it's important. I mean, they're taking big falls.

I was doing a, I did a series called Dirty Dozen and it was in Yugoslavia. It was on Fox. It was right after, it was on Fox. It was back in the early 90s. And it was actually a pretty good show. We filmed it at movie of the week pace, meaning that we took 10 days to film an hour instead of an hour episode instead of six days to film an hour episode. So we spent a little more time filming that. But it was cool because it was in Yugoslavia. It was World War II.

We were pulled out of prison because I was a big strong guy, supposedly. I was a sharpshooter and I was a driver. I had all these great job descriptions. I was always saving the day on the show. But so, you know, it's just like the same Dirty Dozen that was done in the movie format. You're pulled out of prison. You're going to work for us for the rest of the war. And if you make it, then all charges are dropped and you get an honorable discharge. Great. We'll take it. We get out of prison.

But anyway, we did a lot of our own stunts. And I did some really fun stunts, but there was one stunt. These guys in Yugoslavia, James, they were. They were gnarly stunt guys. There were no airbags in Yugoslavia. You jumping off a roof, you're jumping into cardboard boxes and they would set the cardboard boxes up. So we had this. We were on top of this eight story building. And my job was to run really fast and stop at the edge so they could cut, you know, and it's not that would take over.

They get cut. They would be running to him and jumps off the edge. But he's jumping into boxes and it was only three levels of boxes. There are four by four boxes piled on top of each other, just empty. And they just they just fly down and they just land on it and just go boom. And man, it was nuts. But they were. So you're going to appreciate this. You're going to really appreciate this.

So one of the one of the one of the episodes I volunteered to stay behind the Germans are coming up the road. I'm going to stay behind with my sniper rifle and I'm going to take them out so that the rest of the team can get to the helicopter and get out or get to whatever we do. It was just some trucks or something. I don't know. Whatever our escape route. So I'm there and I hold them off as long as I can, you know, with my sniper rifle.

And then my job is to run across this huge field and catch up with the team. Well in Yugoslavia, they use real dynamite. They don't use flash bangs, none of that bullshit. It's real dynamite. So and it's old school. It's a board, it's nails, it's a battery. You touch the battery to the top of the nail, it shoots the spark down to the stick of dynamite and the stick of dynamite goes off. So they had the track, a hundred and fifty foot track set up, you know, on the camera to follow me.

And I'm sprinting across the field and the stunt guy or the bomb tech who I really, really trust because there's a lot of explosions in this stupid show. But he would set those those those pieces of dynamite off. I was as I was running by and he would pick me off the ground, which was really fun for a big guy to get picked up off the ground and just thrown. It never happened. You're like, whoa.

So I would get blasted off the ground three or four feet through the air, ten feet shoulder roll, pop right back up. Just like MMA, you know, in wrestling, shoulder roll, shoulder roll and get back up another piece of dynamite go up. Boom. And it would throw me. I got thrown like ten times running through this scene. It was so much fun. When I was done, I was like, I really hope they didn't get that. We have to do this scene a second time, you know, but they got it the first time.

But you know, it was such a kick. It was such a kick. I loved that. Did you ever watch the film Tropic Thunder? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. So I think you realize. No, no, no, I wasn't in it at all. But firstly, I think it's funny how some people got offended by Robert Downey Jr.'s character when his character is literally highlighting the racism of old Hollywood. That's the whole point of that character.

But secondly, as a stunt person and then hearing some of the behind the scenes sets from my stunt friends and, you know, Captain Dale die and some of these other people, you realize there's so many hidden jokes in there and some of these things that people are laughing at like, no, that really happened on this film. As you said, they use real dynamite, for example. Yeah, yeah, the real dynamite. That's crazy.

So I know that you found yourself in the construction industry on the underground strength podcast. I heard you talking about when when you transitioned out, that was kind of the beginning of the process. But prior to that, when when did you start thinking about the potential of a device that was actually going to strengthen the neck and what was some of the the injuries or issues that you were seeing in athletes that spurned your thought process in the first place?

So I've got a little worried about CT. Offensive linemen tend to have more CT than any other position on on the football field. The reason is every single play offensive linemen are banging heads, right? I mean, Dr. Robert Cantu at the Brain Institute in Boston, he proved that in one 80 yard drive, an offensive lineman can have 20 subconcussive blows. And we have to separate a concussion from a subconcussive blow. The subconcussive blow is a mini concussion.

That's all it is that you just keep playing through and you don't even realize that you get it. Sometimes you do realize you get it, but most of the time you don't even know that you've gotten it. But those subconcussive blows are far more nefarious than a concussion because no one really understands that you're getting it and they're building up and the damage that they're doing to your brain. They just don't get that part. So a strong neck will prevent that from happening.

And so I was worried about some of the guys I played with had turned to major drugs and ended up in prison and ODing on drugs. But why are they ODing on drugs? It wasn't because they were a drug addict. It was because they couldn't live with what was going on in their brains. They had to stop that noise from happening. I mean, Mark Twonay, you know, we were in the same recruiting class at UCLA. And then he was on the D line and we were on the D line together for two years.

And then I went to O line. Well, he ended up going to Dallas. He ended up winning three Super Bowls there. He was a great family man, great community guy. Six months after he retired, he killed himself with drugs in his driveway, in his car. Six months. And he just couldn't live with it. But back then, no one really knew anything about CTE. No one knew what was causing it. And it wasn't like when Junior shot himself in the chest so his brain could go and get analyzed.

And that didn't kill him the first time. So he shot himself a second time in the chest. Think about the pain. But he wanted this to go to go get dissected and go get looked at and studied for, you know, the future protection of future players. I mean, so you're looking at all this thing and you're going, wow, why didn't I get concussed? Well, how come? What was the difference? Because on the football team at UCL, there were a lot of concussions. But I never got concussed. Why?

Well, I mean, it came down to I have a big, I had a really big strong neck. Maybe that maybe that had something to do with it. So then I started doing some a little bit of research on it. So I was into this little research a little bit before my construction job ended. And that was sort of the catalyst to say, OK, now I'm going to really get check this out and really figure it out.

So when I went and visited Dr. Robert Cantu, he told me that they were doing a study with thirty five hundred high school athletes in Colorado, all different sports. And they were they were trying to figure out if a neck strength would prevent concussions at the end of that study. They proved that for every one pound of neck strength you add to your neck, you have a five percent less likely chance of being concussed. Now, that's huge. One pound strength is nothing.

I mean, think how think how fast you could add a pound of strength to your bicep. I mean, you know, it's just a pound. It's hardly anything at all. And when you're a young kid and you got a bunch of testosterone falling around, you know, we go into these high school programs and they put on neck strength so fast and they'll build, you know, an inch and a half to three inches of circumference in three months and the next strength through the roof. And then they just don't get concussed.

Now we can't say, oh, we can completely concussion proof someone. We can't do that, obviously. But I'll tell you, James, well, these high school teams left twenty five concussions the year before after training all summer with the our neck. They have zero to five. Some of them have zero just because these kids have big necks now. I mean, when you and I, you know, when we played in MMA, we were talking about this for before about how the heads of weapon. This was the fifth hand.

Right. I mean, I use my head as a weapon in wrestling for sure, in football for sure. I would use it to just had a helmet on. I thought I was protected. I'm going to use my head to destroy people and beat people up and and try to hurt people. And that's just that's how football was back then. And you know, so anyway, we've got to strengthen our next to do that one pound and extra use using our neck for a week and you'll add five pounds of next strike.

So it was, you know, it's pretty simple to do that. But to get back to your question, after I had that conversation with Dr. Ken, who the study had finished it, they'd only been into the study about a year and they wanted to go at least two and a half years with the study. So I went ahead with the assumption that he was right. The next strength did prevent concussions. And with my own empirical experience, how my neck was wrong and I didn't get concussed, I took that as OK, that's what it is.

I'm going to figure out a way to do it. Then I get I then I lose my job. And then I said, OK, now's the time to do it. Let's go. We had some money saved. We had to try to start this company and get it going. And so my wife and I made that decision. And you know, she jumped on board, too. And we worked really hard, got that thing designed and got it out there.

But that was, you know, that's the impetus behind, you know, me getting going, knowing that people were dying of CTE, knowing that people were doing drugs. Louis Sharp. Great I mean, she's what a great guy. Louis Lewis and I played together UCLA. He was my right tackle. I was the right guard. Louis six, seven, you know, good three hundred and twenty pounds. Really good athlete. Played with the Cardinals for 16 years.

Lewis and his family got on a raft in Cuba and escaped from Cuba when he was just a little boy of like three or four years old. And you know, Lewis turned into a major drug addict. As soon as he retired, major drug addict. Why? Because he has CTE. He's just hear stuff in his head all the time. He was he's he's out of prison now. And he spent a lot of time here in Arizona in prison because of drug drug charges. And he was well loved in Arizona.

I mean, he spent his whole career with the Cardinals, the whole career, did a lot of good stuff in the community. But it's just such a nefarious disease. It's just it sneaks up and it just destroys lives. Well, I think what's sad as well, I can see in my mind now images of one of the Arizona. I don't know if he's a sheriff or what he was, but you know, the the program where they've got the addicts out in chain gangs and they're breaking rocks.

And it's the polar opposite of what we actually need to do when it comes to mental health, you know, and for our profession, CTE, especially in the military, you know, that's a big part. And there's a lot of the seals that have had on. That's a compounding element. You know, then you add trauma, real trauma, childhood trauma, what they saw in combat, etc. And you add sleep deprivation. And these are all preventative elements that we can improve. Like next strength is a perfect example of that.

And until we stop looking at, you know, I mean, even Aaron Hernandez, that was a horrendous ending. But, you know, oh, my gosh, they look at it and go his brain was a was was jelly. You know, that's that's probably where a lot of that came from. And excuse what he absolutely but we can, you know, OK, well, can we learn from this and therefore stop preventing it?

What I want to put to you before we kind of go down the kind of journey that your neck has gone on an observation that I've made coming from a country where we don't really forge a high level of athleticism in our schools so much. You have a lot of high school kids, even college graduates that then go on and they keep playing football rugby, you know, whatever the sports are. And there's public leagues and local leagues and all that kind of stuff.

What I saw when I first came to the US was a lot of like I would say Uncle Rico's, you know, that that could have, would have, should have been if it wasn't for my MCO ACL, you know, slap tear, you name it. And as we've gone through and I've listened to a lot of high high level athletes, high level coaches, my observation is and this isn't all the people, but there's a real danger when it comes to our youth athletes of squeezing out performance from them at the detriment of their wellness.

And that's a line that I think gets blurred sometimes. What's your perspective of winning with a young person versus making sure that we're overseeing their longevity and health as well? No, that's a really good statement. You know, brains are more susceptible to damage the younger you are. When I see kids on a Pop Warner football field and they're, you know, they're barely three feet tall. What is the point? What are you doing?

What's going on in your brain to think that that's okay to have these little kids running around tackling? There's just no reason for that at all. I mean, there's a great deal of guys in the NFL that didn't start playing football until they were in seventh, eighth or freshman in high school. And one of the reasons that they complain, if their bodies aren't beat up and destroyed, they just haven't had that much wear and tear on the body. But we have to protect, we have to protect the kids.

You know, the NFL has made great strides in helping with awareness that, yeah, you don't need to tackle all practice long. You don't need to go full speed all practice long. You don't, you're going to tackle this way. We're not going to use our heads any longer. You're not going to hit a guy when he is completely defenseless, even if it's in the body, so his head snaps and we're not going to go helmet to helmet with a defenseless player. We're not going to do that anymore.

They've recognized that they were sort of forced into it. You're forced into it by the potential lawsuit from the NFLPA and former players and all of that. And they got the settlement to help cover it, but they lead the way. They do it. It filters down into college and then it filters down into high school and filters down into youth sports. I mean, that's how it goes. So they've led the way. Practice at UCLA, when I was there, it was two and a half hours long.

We had 18 periods and I think that 14 of them were full speed contact. I mean, just full speed contact. So he plays in a football game. Does it offense run back then? Maybe 65. So, but in practice we'd run 400 full speed contact drills. It might not be a play, but it might be one on one and you're just beating yourself up. And on top of that, we had a garden hose on the field. And this is not a joke, James. I know, I'm an old guy.

Yeah. We walked, you know, we had to walk through the snow up a mountain all the way to school. And then on the way home, it was up a steeper mountain. This isn't one of those stories. This is the truth. We had a garden hose on the football field. One of them, 110 football players out there. It's LA. It was hot. August, smoggy and hot. Who cares? It's going to make you stronger. And if you were good, you got to run over there and drink out of a garden hose. Now what do they do?

They got Gatorade stations, tables set up all over the field. Anytime you're thirsty, anytime you need water, you can leave your drill and you can go get a drink. And you know, it's how it should be. Right? We ran, we ran a test. We had a three and a half mile test when we got to school after summer and we ran it at four o'clock in the afternoon, right in the middle of rush hour, right along Sunset Boulevard was half of the loop.

Super smoggy back in the early seventies or late seventies, early eighties. And they didn't care. We thought, oh, that's going to make it tougher. Go that water. That's going to make it tougher. Get hard all day long. That's going to make you tougher. We get to the game. All of a sudden there's all the Gatorade and all the water. Oh no, drink it. It's really important for you to drink this, you know, so you can, you can perform better. But it was, it's, it's that, it's that mentality.

It, it, we, it's, you know, it's filtered down. It's filtered down. It's getting better. The hitting is completely a lot less now. I mean, in high school, they hardly hit it all anymore, which is great. They just, the form tackle, they tackle up. But the thing that a lot of people don't realize is girls' soccer, number one concussal sport in America. A lot of hitting in girls' soccer. No, there's not a lot of hitting in girls' soccer. What's the problem there? It's the bobblehead effect.

Girls' anatomy, they have a longer neck than men do. They just do. Anatomically, they have that longer neck. They have a weaker neck than men do because anatomically, they have a weaker neck. And they're, they just have this bobblehead going on. So they're running around the soccer field. They trip, they fall. Their head's going to snap and smack into the ground. They're going to get concussed. They, they body blow, body blow, body blow. Their head snaps.

They don't make any contact, but it's just snapping. I mean, some of the worst concussions in NFL have been from, from a wide receiver going up to make a catch, you know, and then he gets, he gets hit in the midsection and his whole body snaps and his head snaps. The guys concussed that he's knocked out. And there was like, how could that happen? It's a snapping. If we can prevent the head from reaching the end of the range of motion, it's the end of range of motion. We can prevent it.

Then we prevent the snapping. And if we can prevent the snapping, we prevent the brain from flying across inside the skull and smashing onto the other side of the skull and then rattling the coup, counter coup that the neurosurgeons are always talking about. We prevent that. And all of a sudden you don't get concussed. If you have a strong neck and you can prevent the snapping.

But girls soccer, the most concussed sport in America, they need to strengthen their necks and it's not just about hitting. It's not, you know, and football has, has done a lot. I mean, they've taken all that back and it's not just, it's good for your whole body. You know, it's good for your whole body. I have two knee replacements. I have two hip replacements. What do you think that was from? Golfing? Yeah, no, it wasn't from golfing. At least I can still golf, but it wasn't from golfing.

It was, it was from football, just pounding and pounding and pounding away. So the fact that we're, we're, we're saving the bodies of all these kids. That's great. The fact that we're starting to protect their brains, you know, that's great. A lot of kids have, have gotten CT in high school now in high school. You know, they're, they're just to the point where they can't even read anymore. They can't learn. So I think that, you know, there's been great strides. We need to do more.

And I think that, and I know I've invented the iron neck and, and you know, whatever, but here's the bottom line. I tell everyone I know that has a daughter in soccer, you have to strengthen her neck. You have to, you have to, you have to, if you don't, you're going to, it's going to come back later and it's going to be, it's going to be a problem. You got to do that. Why they don't hit. And then I, I give them my spiel.

I had a buddy I was working with, um, and a real estate development company has had a daughter and was a great athlete, played soccer, got a, got into Princeton because of her soccer abilities. Uh, you know, they don't, they don't get four rides in the Ivy league, but you know, you get basically a half scholarship to get in or more to get into the school. And then you're on the soccer team. She couldn't make it because she couldn't concentrate and she couldn't read any longer.

She had CTE already. And it's cause of soccer. And I told him so many times, I even taught him how to do it with his hands. You know, I mean, he wouldn't take an iron neck for free. It just, it just makes me sick when I think back on that and we just have to strengthen the necks. It's just, it's just like, it's just the dumbest thing in the world when, and I know I'm just rambling here and I'm going on a little rant. I've apologized, but it drives me nuts.

It drives me nuts when people say, oh no, the next fragile can't work out the neck. No, it's if you break your neck, you know, you're going to get paralyzed. Just fragile. You can't work it out. And like, watch a watch NFL game, watch college game. What happens to the head and neck during that game? They get thrashed. They get beat around. They get smashed into the ground. Helmet to helmet contact, just crunching blows. Well, that's okay.

But you're, you're afraid to train it in the gym with it, with a strength coach that could guide you through it. It makes no sense at all. None. And it's, it's, you strengthen every other part of your body. They worry about the knee joint and they, and they should, they should worry about the knee joint and they worry about the Achilles tendon. You know, we got to make that strong so it doesn't snap. We've seen that happen this year several times.

Yeah. You worry about those different joints to strengthen them up to protect the player. This is part of the core. It's just that it's the top part of the core. It needs to be strong. It needs to be massive. You're, you're, you know, like we were talking, your head is a weapon.

Aaron Pico, MMA fighter, um, California wrestler started using iron neck when Doc Kreese, who was a strength coach at UCLA after he left, when Carl Durrell got let go, started his own clinic in Marina Del Rey and he had a bunch of athletes working out with him. And Aaron was a freshman and he was a little tiny guy. And you know, we started him on our neck right off the bat. And this kid, this kid developed into this huge neck.

He's a great MMA fighter and super strong and he's been carrying that old iron neck around with him forever. Um, but you know, he came up to me after he'd been working out on it for a long, long time and in a very threatening way told me his head was now a weapon. You know, like this, my head's a weapon now. I'll kick your ass with my head because my neck is so strong.

But um, you know, that was a, that was, you know, that was one of the things that got our neck going because he worked out with Nick Kersen. Nick Kersen is a great strength coach for MMA fighters and Nick Kersen got on the Joe Rogan podcast and Joe asked Nick, Joe's neck was bothering him. He asked Nick, what do you do for, what do you, what do you do for necks? And Nick Kersen was like, Oh, we have this weird thing you put on your head. It's the weirdest thing ever.

And he looked like a dork when you put it on your head and you're doing it. And anyway, the producer found it online and, and then, you know, we reached out to Joe and Joe had me over and I got to work him out and he, he filmed it and it was, you know, it really helped out the growth of the company. But um, you know, the next strength, it's so important. There's no excuse not to ever train your neck. There's just none at all.

Just a regular person in a car, a lady coming home from grocery shopping or whatever work, she gets re-ended. Her neck can be jacked up forever. If it's strong, I'm not talking bulky ladies out there watching this. I know trying to get your neck bulky, but it can get a lot stronger. My wife has a very slim, sexy neck, but guess what? That neck is so strong. You cannot believe how strong it is. So there I'm done. I'm done rants. No, no, I like rants. Trust me. That's what my podcasts are long.

Um, going back to the, uh, the, the combat side, the, the, uh, the amount of head trauma when I was in LA, I worked for Anaheim fire for a few years. That's how I came across Rolke ultimately who connected us. So I want to give him a shout out massive fucking neck that guy. Um, but, uh, I've trained in a shoot box who was in LA, um, just for a short time. I think they were full about a year and that was full on fight club.

Like I had broken nose, perforated, you name it, just had the shit kicked out of me by people bigger and stronger. Learned how to, you know, learned that wasn't the world's biggest pussy, but didn't really learn a lot of techniques because, you know, as you know, when you're going full belt, you're not really learning technique. It's more survival mode or just, you know, red zone fighting.

But what I've seen, um, you know, had Greg Jackson on, for example, is a lot of the MMA gyms now are like we were saying in football, they're doing a lot less heavy sparring now. That's going to be a lighter sparring pad work, those kinds of things. Of course they're going to have sessions where they go heavier, but just like you hit on with the number of heavy, heavy training sessions you had, now it's pulled back a lot.

And I think that coupled with the proactive element that we're going to talk about of training so that you can protect the neck. Also we've just, we've evolved and it's sad because the fire service hasn't, when it comes to the, the amount of hours that these firefighters work and they're less, you know, the little sleep that they get, we're killing them through that way as well.

I'm trying to get them to understand that we need to evolve the same way as for example, the NFL has, because you know, we're in a ring in our hands. Oh, why are we, you know, why are so many dying? Well, you still work in 56 hours a week and then mandatory overtime and you're under wondering why they're getting sick and all that stuff. Cause sleep deprivation mirrors CTE. It also breaks down the neurons.

So um, with that being said though, I want to just, before we get to the actual athlete side, when I look at a lot of younger people and the, we are in a weird to blame, the parents is the blame because our generation invented the tablet, the cell phone, all these things. But a lot of these kids have this forward head carriage. Now they have the forward shoulder carriage, athletics, you know, neck resilience aside, talk to me about posture.

Have you seen a lot of, a lot of positive impact when it comes to simply returning a young person's spine back to where it should be? Absolutely. And we call it tech neck or tech neck. So tech neck is basically someone sitting at a desk all day like this, looking down at a keyboard, looking down at a screen and then text neck is, you know, kids walking around with their phones in their hands, their heads down all the time.

It elongates and stretches out the neck erectors, uh, spleen is capital spleen and cervix just get all stretched out, even a little bit of sternocleidomastoid in the back section. And you know, it's terrible posture, terrible posture. It affects shoulders. It affects your back. Uh, it needs to, it needs to get fixed. One great thing about the iron neck is it does that. So when you, when you think about a lever, right?

So if you got something attached to a lever and you're pulling it this way, that whole lever has to remain rigid. It has to, cause you're getting pulled this way. Well that's the basic principle behind our neck. You put it on your head and you're attached to a cable machine or you're attached to the bungee cord and you're getting pulled in that direction. Your whole body, your whole kinetic chain has to resist that. You have to have good posture.

And all of a sudden, if you start using that, even if you're doing this during the course of the day, you're going to have good posture because those muscles now have been tightened up and it's, it's all the way around, which works well. You know, whatever, whatever, whatever's away from the attachment point, you know, those muscles are working. Now I go this way, then, you know, the muscles on this side are working, et cetera. So it's, it's really important to do that.

Um, I was going to say something else and I'm, I just lost my train of thought about the posture. Oh yeah. So we have, we have corporations, companies that put iron neck in their break rooms. They're hanging on the wall in their break rooms. Why? Because they're, they're people are like this all day long and they come in and they, they know now if they put the iron neck on and they work out with it, they just feel better. They get a blood flow immediately, a blood flow to your, to your head.

It helps with headaches. It helps with waking up. You know that after, after lunch, you come in there, do a little iron neck workout literally for one minute and it just helps. It just gets blood flow and it gets your posture back. I mean, I have a standup desk at home. I have a standup desk at work. That also helps to get your posture up, especially when you raise the desk up.

So you're actually looking up like this at the screens and not, you know, not down like this at the screens, but yeah, it's, it's so important posture and, and you know, there's a, the younger you are, the worst that it is. I remember when I, I owned a gym in Pacific Palisades for a long time. It was, it was called pro trade. It was a great gym. It was just private trainers and the clients and all of that.

And I had one client that brought his daughter in and she had the worst posture, just the absolute worst posture you could just, she just walked around and this is before cell phones. She walked around like this all the time, you know, and she was tall and she was embarrassed about being tall. And, and her dad said, look, Mike, whatever you got to do, I want her standing straight up. So, you know, we did a lot of work and I did back then I would do hands on neck training.

You know, hand on the head and maybe pushing it. I do rotate. They have to rotate back and forth. I'd hold their chin so they had to rotate, but that really helped her posture out. And then I did a lot of upper back work, a lot of work on the scapula and the rhomboids and you know, in about three months she was standing pretty much straight up and you know, she's got a really, really good job now. You know, and you know, she had confidence.

She looked confident, she didn't look like she was scared to walk into her room, but yeah, it's, it's important. Absolutely. Well, I want to get to the application and the tactical professions in a little bit, but before we do talk to me about the size and weight of the original prototype and then walk me through how it's evolved.

Okay. So so I mentioned that, you know, right after I lost that job, I invented the iron neck, literally James in one week I had it on my head and I was using it and it worked. It was like, okay, this works. But how did that happen? Well, I started off with a 33 pound block of aluminum and I have some really, really close friends that own a machine shop in Torrance and they do spark back then they were doing spatial parts and now they do a lot of space X parts and all of that.

So I walked in there and I sat down with Danny and George and I said, Hey guys, I want to build this thing. And I, and I, I drawn it all up. I have a drafting table because you know, I'm a developer and sometimes I do my own plans for homes. So I, I, I drafted it up three dimensional drawing. This is what I want to do. And I want to, can we just do it out of, out of aluminum?

So we started with this 33 pound block and we milled it and we turned it and you know, because the center hole is oblong outside was perfectly round and literally, um, on Friday I walked in there on a Monday and they sent me back and said, look, it has to be to a thousandth of an inch every measurement. So we can put it into our cab machine and you know, this, this big machine computer operates it.

And it was the coolest thing that walk in there and watch this machine, you know, holding the holding the block of aluminum and all these bits and pieces come in and just drill it all out and make all the holes. So then I, I, um, went to an upholster shop and I got a band, a Velcro in a post and I had that thing on my head and the truck was on there roaring, roaring around the outside. That was over 13 pounds. Now to me, 13 pounds was nothing.

Try to get someone else to put 13 pounds in their head. Even in the NFL. It's funny because I mean, women aren't going to do it because no way, although my wife just recently stopped using her 13 pound iron neck for the brand new 3.0 model. Cause she, she just loved how it felt. She got used to it. She just liked it, but she's using the brand new model now. Once in a while I catch her using the old model, but she says it's really comfortable.

You know, actually it was, but it's still 13 pounds, but my rationale was that a Navy seal helmet with full on night vision gear and all the apparatus that they put on it was 13 pounds. So you know, when I went down and installed down in Coronado in San Diego for the Navy seals down there, they didn't care. 13 pounds is great. It's the same as their helmet. They have that weight on their head all the time. So it just depends on who was looking at it.

Now a physical therapist, I'm not putting that on anyone's head. And I don't blame them. You know, especially you come out of some kind of a neck rehab, you know, neck surgery, you don't want that on there. So that was the first iteration. The next iteration was to take that and just do a spine of aluminum and do injection mold top and bottom. We're also trying to cheapen the price. It was over $800 to build that first on our neck.

I mean, you know, it's a commodity in some weeks, it'd be more because aluminum was up that week. It just depended. So I wanted to get the aluminum down. So that was the spine. That was seven and a half pounds. So we had the spine and we had injection mold, a lot of bolts and metal parts on that one. Then we went to another iteration where we got rid of almost all metal and that got down to about three pounds. And now the new one, the 3.0, just under two pounds.

All injection mold works great, more comfortable than anything we've built. Plus, we have a haptic response in the disc breaking system now. So you know that you do three clicks for rotational resistance or four clicks or five clicks if you're stronger, depending. I mean, you can figure it out. Or it was just trying to figure it, you know, just doing it and saying, oh yeah, this feels about right. It was difficult to do that and try and keep the price down. But anyway, that's where it started.

13, now we're down to two. So in the Jiu Jitsu school that I'm in now, religiously, every warm up, they do a load of exercise. You go on your back and you always leave your head off the ground and you do, you know, look up and down, left, right, ear to ear. And that alone, I literally went to my wife out recently. I think we were on a cruise and I took my smart white shirt and I went to button it and I couldn't get it around my damn neck anymore.

And I, as you can see, I'm not exactly, you know, I'm not the role. But yeah, that alone. So I know that it will. And I haven't really had any touchwood, any neck issues at all. But then I start using the iron neck. And you know, I'm aware, obviously, again, it's still, you know, specific planes that I'm doing even on a warm up in Jiu Jitsu. But now I'm seeing the application.

I'm seeing, you know, again, all the different directions that you can turn under resistance whilst you're wearing the iron neck. And then I'm looking at my career wearing this massive fire helmet. I mean, if you've got the full leather, I forget how many pounds is, but I think you're scraping, you know, heading towards 10, especially if you've got some door chocks and other things strapped to it like a lot of us do the big shield.

Yeah. You know, and then I've got a friend, Dave, who started using the iron neck. He's a helicopter pilot. He was British military and now he's in Canada doing the kind of EMS transport stuff. And he was having neck issues and he actually bought an iron neck and said it's helped him immensely. So what are you getting as far as feedback from these professions that wear helmets with your product? Great feedback. I mean, let's start with Formula One racing and NASCAR.

They got helmets on all the time and then motocross helmets on all the time. And you know, they weigh a lot. They're in a high collision sport and they all love iron neck. Love it. It's really benefited the drivers quite a bit. Air Force. The Air Force Academy or the Air Force loves iron neck. They've done two studies on iron neck. And I love that when my tax dollar actually does something worthwhile and they did two great studies, one out of Luke Air Force Base in Arizona.

That's where the newbies come out of the Air Force Academy and that they're a pilot. They come to Luke to learn how to fly up 16s and F-15s and all of that. That's where they're trained. So I was at TSAC, NSCH-TSAC, Strength and Conditioning Show. And I did a presentation and there's an Air Force guy standing there and he's watching. He came up to me right afterwards and he said, do you think it would help with my fighter pilots? They have really bad necks.

And I never thought that fighter pilots would have bad necks. Right. But yeah, pull four Gs at takeoff. F-16 fighter pilot, four Gs at takeoff. Cold neck. No warm up at all. And you wonder why their necks are bad. James, the worst necks I've ever seen in my life. United States Air Force fighter pilots. Their necks are so jacked up. So anyway, I go to Luke, Air Force base. I meet with them, take them through a couple of workouts.

We donate a couple of our necks to them so they can start training these guys. Developed a couple of different exercises for them because their seat is like, it's about right like that. This is how they sit. So they're like this and they're pulling all the different Gs at that angle. So what I did was I took a weight bench, matched that angle, and then I took the iron neck and I built a little 18 inch cable. And on the end of that cable, I put a one pound fishing weight.

So now what they had to do was they had to go ahead, trying to stay in frame here. They had to go ahead and sit at this angle. They had the one pound fishing weight hanging there. And then like a hula hoop, kind of, they had to get that fishing weight spinning while they were at this angle. It's not easy. So you got the weight spinning and now you're at this angle. And then I'd say check your six.

And then they'd have to keep it spinning and they'd have to look up and over and look out of the roof and check their six, see if there's another fighter plane coming, chasing them in dogfights or whatever. But that really works well. And a lot of times at the strength and conditioning shows, because all these young guys, you know, think on the old fart, right? We said, look, if you can beat Mike, how many rotations with the weight in one minute, you get a free iron neck.

So during the show, you know, they do it. We count them, you know, they'd be like, you know, whatever. So funny. Then the last day I would do it. I try to beat everybody and I can. I mean, it's like things going so fast you can't. I mean, I've been doing this for, you know, 12 years. I should be able to beat everybody. You know, even at 64, I should be able to beat everybody. But you know, it's funny, but it's a great workout. It's a great workout and it's a different.

I recommend that you try it. It's a little different than, you know, just working with the bands and working with a cable and weight stack. But yeah, so those groups with helmets. Yeah, I mean, we've seen great effects on all of them, especially the fighter pilots. They did a study with a squadron out of England, which would rotate into the Middle East, a two year study using the iron neck and it improved all of the fighter pilots necks. Pain went away. Range of motion came back.

Flexibility came back. All those good things happen. Blood flow to the neck. Now they have them on flight decks, on aircraft carriers, just on, you know, regular old landing strips. They'll have an iron neck out on the on the wall. You just throw it on just for one minute. Get the blood flow before you go jump into your plane and take off. You know, of course, if they have the time to do that, but it really helps.

And a lot of football programs when you're going out to the field, you use our neck to warm up before you go out there. You're going to start hitting, you know, get that neck, those neck muscles warmed up. Firefighters is one group of people, one profession that I have worked hard to try to break through, to try to get in. We've gone to a couple of shows and we've just never we've never got the buy in from the firefighters. And it's something that I never understood.

And since you're a firefighter, maybe you can you can educate me on this. But it's like, I don't know, I just I just it's probably my approach. I just couldn't get through. Never had any buy in. I know we have some fire departments that use it. Some do. But I've tried to work with Orange County. I had connections in Orange County and I couldn't get them to buy into it. There's a few problems that we have in the fire service. Personally, I mean, I worked at Anaheim, which is in Orange County.

And actually, I have to say, Northnet, where Rolke does a lot of his training, that is one of the few places I've truly seen fire departments, surrounding departments come together and they train together there. They've got great, you know, they go into each other's cities and cover each other. I mean, it really does work well, but that's because they train together in the central location over and over and over again. But a lot of the fire departments are very fragmented.

And sometimes the city thinks they're better than the county or vice versa. So that's one issue. We don't have this network, you know, where everyone's saying, wow, there's this thing, Iron Neck, Newcom, foundation training, whatever it is, you guys need to do this. This is incredible. The other thing is there's a real push against innovation, which sounds insane in a profession where we could die. But there is. And the fire helmet, which people hate me talking about, but it's true.

I've got in my background, you can see over my shoulder there, that is the the patent for the American fire helmet. And I think it's 1937. And that's the one they still hang on. It's heavy. It's cumbersome. It's it's shit, for lack of a better word. And then they will ridicule the European helmet, which is actually far more advanced. It's lighter. It's more ergonomic. So that's the other thing.

There's this real kind of blind, you know, it's the way we've always done it element to it rather than looking at themselves as a tactical athlete, looking themselves as a seal, an S.A.S. member wanting the very best in their gear, in their performance, in their rest and recovery. And that's where the disconnect is. So that's probably why you're seeing resistance is do we need it? Absolutely. We need it. You know, our neck injuries are one of the biggest things that puts our guys out.

And it makes perfect sense. You know, we go from zero to 100, we put all this gear on. It's not just the helmets, all the shit sitting on our traps, too. And then we breach, we pull ceilings overhead and stuff falls on our head. And, you know, it's it's a real toll on the neck. But unless you look at yourself as an athlete, unless you're thinking about your longevity, they're not putting two and two together.

Now, obviously, now where I am outside the fire service, looking in, trying to disseminate this information as a stuntman, as a martial artist, as a firefighter, it makes perfect sense to me. But hopefully people's eyes will start being opened wider and wider and they'll realize that, yeah, well, we ask you, especially if we keep using outdated equipment, then you absolutely need to strengthen your neck. Yeah, I mean, tactical athlete, that's what they are.

I mean, they should just look at the evolution of the football, football equipment, the football uniform and pads over the last 35, 40 years. I mean, it's changed from these giant pads. I mean, I had these giant, huge pads. We had, you know, we had material that didn't breathe, just didn't breathe at all. So we had cut off shirts, you know, for the summertime. And I mean, now look at the pads are really small, but they do a lot better at dissipating blows to the body, right? A lot better.

So the fabric breeze and it's lighter, so people are faster and quicker now. It doesn't make any sense because they are athletes and you would think that they would want to evolve like all other sports are and, you know, improve. I mean, I'll bet you, I mean, if they had competitions, you know, and I'm sure they do, but I mean, if they had competitions where you're climbing stairs as fast as you possibly can, you don't want to have the lightest uniform possible. They would get there.

You know, but this is life and death. It's just life and death when you walk into a burning building that you have a strong neck. You don't want to get knocked out in a burning building, obviously. So yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe you can shoot me some contacts and I can, I can reach out to some people in Orange County and, you know, we can see what we can do and help some, help some guys out. Yeah, absolutely. Well, certainly Anaheim. That was where I worked, so we can start there.

One other area I want to hit before we go to some closing questions, which is also extremely important. I tore my back about nine years ago now in the fire service. I thought it was going to be a possible career ending injury. It was a three ligament tear. I mean, I couldn't even get out of bed, couldn't put my shoes on, couldn't pick up my son, nothing.

And ended up going through the route of PT, paid out of pocket for chiropractic and stumbled across this thing called foundation training, which is an incredible movement practice that is, you know, preventative as well, but also for back pain, back injury. And it's a movement practice. It kills me when I hear people going into surgery, young people, because they hurt whatever.

Now, some of them, maybe that's what they need to have done, but I would argue probably a lot just aren't aware of how powerful the body is at healing when given the right movements. Talk to me about neck pain and some success stories of people that maybe were going into surgery that were able to rehab using your device. Oh my gosh. I mean, we sell, like I said before, about 80% of our next certain people that have neck pain that have are trying to avoid surgery.

They're doing everything they can to avoid that. And the our neck fixes their neck. I mean, it's funny. I used to go to chiropractors to get straightened out, right? Pop, pop, pop, pop. Our neck does it automatically. You never have to go to a chiropractor again. Now, we have chiropractors that use our neck. Some chiropractors are really good and they want to strengthen their clients and get their clients back to their normal selves and off of using them.

But I think that I mean, I know there's several people that have called up and asked, oh, my doctor says I need surgery. I need this. I need that. Would it be safe to use our neck? And we say, yes, it will be. You start off slow. You control how much weight you are going to resist. And the band, if it goes 25 pounds, it can only be one pound. You can just step it out barely and just start moving your head around with one pound of resistance and maybe two pounds and three pounds.

But you would be amazed if you have chronic neck pain. If you start using those muscles that you haven't used in years and you start getting blood flow to those ligaments and the tendons and the muscles and start stretching those out a little bit and elongating them and building range of motion, James pain just goes away. It just literally goes away. Here's a good story. Mike Clark, he was the Chicago Bears strength coach, NFL, obviously.

And I'd spoken at the combine on concussion prevention and neck strength because back then when I was speaking, they didn't believe it. How could neck strength prevent a concussion? Your brain's inside your skull. That doesn't make any sense. How does that even help? So I'd have to take them through. Your head snaps. Your brain flies across your skull. It rattles around. You can dissipate that blow, blah, blah, blah. So some of them kind of bought into it.

The more I spoke, the more they bought into it. But Mike Clark could not move his head. Old football player, great strength coach, great guy, just a really good personality. But he walked like this. He turned like this. And after he heard me speak one time, he came up and he said, OK, I want to try this thing on. I get it. I'm kind of buying into what you're saying. Let me feel how it feels. So I put it on his head and gave him about 10 pounds of resistance. And he was resisting it.

And I said, OK, Mike, try to look left and then try to look right, even if it's a half an inch. So he starts, you know, and right away, blood starts flowing into his neck. Immediately, things start warming up. And James, I'm not joking. I'm not joking. I'm not exaggerating either. Pretty soon, he's moving his head this much. You know, not all the way. But I mean, he's got some range of motion going on that he hadn't had in years and years and years.

And he came back about two hours later and wanted to do the workout again. OK, we'll do it. We'll do it again. But, you know, you're going to get a little sore tomorrow, you know, working out this much because I don't care. I could move my head. I am so happy. Here's a guy that had contemplated surgery over and over and over again over the years to get rid of pain and to get his range of motion back. And all of a sudden, he's using our neck for the first time in one day.

Pain's going away and range of motion is coming back and flexibility is coming back. And then it's funny, he had this, he had an old truck. And I saw him, I don't know, two years later, maybe three years. He goes, he came up to me, he goes, Mike, you know, the best thing about your iron neck is. And I said, no, Mike, what's the best thing about my iron neck? I don't have to turn my whole body and get up on the seat of my car to back my truck up. Because I can just go like this.

I can just turn and I can look out the back window. And I laughed and I said, Mike, you know, they do have new cars with backup cameras now. And you wouldn't have to really worry about that at all. But no, he loved his old truck and he wasn't about to sell it. But yeah, so we have had stories like that. The doctor said I was going to have surgery my next great now. I don't have to have surgery. You know, I don't have to go to the chiropractor anymore.

I don't have to go to the physical therapist anymore. And, you know, one of the things sometimes I think and I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but sometimes I think that physical therapists don't really want to use iron neck because it's new or whatever, but also because it fixes things. And they cut off their food supply, right? I mean, it's like, OK, now you're fixed. You don't have to come back and keep working, working on the stuff that I the stuff that we're doing.

You know, chiropractors the same way. But you just it's so important. It prevents a lot of surgeries, a lot. I think it is so important. I didn't have surgeries. Didn't take drugs more than I mean, barely like a handful of days. The painkiller when I first hurt my back and then I was off completely. And initially it was just PT and Cairo. Then I added this foundation training. And and the theory makes so much sense.

You know, and I always you know, I was more analytical being an athlete, exercise physiology grad, you know, OK, why did I get hurt? No, I just want to get out of pain. What happened? I was doing what I thought was all the right things. But when you realize that the spinal column and as we sit here now, we are literally sitting on our tailbones, you know, talking to each other in a chair, you know, that's that's a skeleton absorbing the the the mass of the body.

But when you put that column of strength or that muscle around, it takes the pressure off those nerves and things don't hurt. And if you look at the founder of that, his MRI, his back looks terrible when you look at the structure. But he's completely pain free and strong because he's built it around. And this is why it makes so much sense with the iron neck. I forget what they say for every degree of, you know, forward or backward tilt.

You know, you add X amount of pounds to the weight of your head and God forbid you put a helmet on. But if you simply put it back in the alignment and add that column of strength around the neck, it makes complete sense to me that the pain will go away. Yeah, because it becomes very, very light right off the bat. And that's one of the good things about you talking about foundation, kinetic, you know, open or closed kinetic chain. It's important that we do both, right?

I do iron neck on top of a bozu ball upside down. So it's very unstable. So it's an open kinetic chain exercise. And I'm fighting that at the same time having, you know, being pulled to the side and going through the entire workout. It's a great way to work it out. And I encourage you to do that to take your bozu ball, flip it upside down, get on top of that thing and do the iron neck. It's intense. I like to do it on a vibration plate too. It's amazing the difference.

You stand on the vibration plate and you do the whole iron neck workout. You're like, wow, that's something. Since you're into, you know, jiu jitsu and MMA and all of that, blindfold yourself. Give the end of the bungee cord to your workout partner and have him go around. When you're blindfolded in your jiu jitsu stance, have him go around very quietly and just jerk you from all different angles. Run around, pull you.

But sometimes I'll let the cord go loose and I'll sneak around in the back and you're in your stance. I'll have a boxer shadow box, right? There's shadow boxing, MMA guy shadow boxing. He's in his stance. He doesn't know where I am. And all of a sudden, wham, wham, wham, wham, wham, you know, and he has to react, react to the force because we need to teach the neck to also react to the force.

When you're using our neck, just like when you're using a, when you're sitting on a bench doing a chest press, you're not, you know, you know, you're doing it. I'm not reacting to a delinement coming down and I have to react back and push him off because I'm dealing with this guy over here. We want to, we want to, we want to quicken the reaction time.

So when you're blindfolded and you don't know where the blow to your head and neck is going to come from, then you're reacting to it and it quickens it. But the open kinetic chain, closed kinetic chain exercises are really good for that foundation for strengthening that whole core of the whole trunk. Brilliant. Well, I want to throw some quick closing questions at you before I let you go. And obviously we'll make sure everyone knows where to find Iron Neck.

The first one I love to ask, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend? It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated. Well, I like to read novels. I'm rereading right now, Hunter Red October, because it was such a great, you know, as a Tom Clancy's first novel that got recognized and broke through. But oh my gosh, it's just such a great novel. He gets into all the bits and pieces of all the different things. But that's what I'm reading right now.

I've probably read it twice before. But, you know, once in a while you just have to go back to something you love. And, you know, you let 10 years go by, you forget enough that it's still exciting to read. I do, I'm trying to think of the time management book I just read. Oh my gosh, I can't think of it. Shoot, maybe I can find it on my phone. But there's a time management book that I just finished reading and it was really good.

It was more for a leadership role and how you time manage, not just about tasks, not just writing a bunch of tasks down, you can task, task, task, but, you know, looking at the bigger picture of everything. And if I'd known this question was coming, I would have looked it up, but I'm not going to waste your time trying to find it. But yeah, I do, I do like to read leadership books and, you know, time management, kind of things like that, and try to, try to improve on that.

Brilliant. All right. Well, then what about movies and documentaries? Any of those you love? I just finished Arnold on Netflix. That's a great documentary. You know, there's three different parts and each part is, is, is different. One, the first part is all about bodybuilding. The second part is about his acting career. And the third part is more about his political career. But it was fascinating. And, you know, he addresses everything. He addresses his failures. He addresses his successes.

You know, the interesting thing though, the whole movie, you know, I'm wondering why if there was a reason he couldn't mention it, but Predator is one of my favorite Schwarzenegger movies. And it was never mentioned. Ever. And I can't, if I'm flipping through channels and Predator's on, I'm stopping. I don't care where it is. I'm going to stop. I'm going to finish the movie. And it was never mentioned in the whole documentary. And it kind of surprised me. And it sort of, it sort of stood out.

But it made me want to run to the gym and start lifting. After you watch the first segment, oh, you're just like, oh, I can go lift. I want to go lift. That's how I get rid of stress. I go to the gym and I lift weights. It's, it's, you know, if I don't do that hard, at least twice a week, I, I just don't start. I don't feel good. And I need to do that. So, yeah. So Predator. Yes. Yes. That documentary with Arnold was really good.

I have been watching the World War II documentaries on Netflix, the ones they recolorized. Pretty cool. My grandfather was, you know, ran away from home when he was 16, joined the Navy during World War I and, you know, was in the Navy his whole entire career. And he, he was an inventor. He holds over a hundred patents. And he's invented some pretty amazing stuff. Most of it was when he was with the Navy. Most of the stuff that he invented was when he was with the Navy.

So I love watching those World War II documentaries. He was a propeller expert. So he, he, he, he hand carved the propellers for Spruce Goose. And then Skorsky called up the Navy and they said, Hey guys, I have this really cool thing that can take off straight up and land straight down. You're going to love it for your ships. But I got a problem with the propeller. I need Carl Jolly to, you need to loan him to me. And I swear you guys are going to be really happy with this.

And my grandfather, he hand carved the back propeller for the helicopter. They couldn't figure out how to carve that so it stabilized the helicopter. So World War II movies, World War II documentaries, I've always been very interested in. A lot of things that my grandfather did are in those movies. And he, so after World War I, they were trying to figure out, wouldn't it be great if we could have planes on a ship?

That'd be awesome, right? We could just drive our ship wherever we wanted and then the planes could fly off and they could attack. That'd be great. You know, we have aircraft carriers now. They were, they were practicing flying the planes into nets. My grandfather invented the whole hook system, hydraulic hook system that catches the planes and slows them down on an aircraft carrier. And he was one of the pilots flying those planes into the nets.

So, you know, he had a reason to do that because that wasn't very safe, right? But yeah, he did a lot of cool stuff. Tiny Tim missile systems. So the first plane launched missiles. He invented those too. So he did a lot of cool stuff. So I like watching World War II documentaries. I'm so glad I asked that question. That's a hell of a story. Well, I'm sure people listening are intrigued about the Iron Neck. Would love to probably reach out to you as well.

So where are the best places to find the product and videos about it? And then also people if they want to reach out to you specifically. Sure. So our website has a lot of great information. It has videos depending on what you want to get out of Iron Neck, what your job is, firefighter, MMA, someone just with a bad neck. So that is iron-neck.com. It's just iron-neck.com. And you can reach out to me just Mike at iron-neck.com. If you want to send me an email with some questions either way.

And then, of course, we're iron-neck on Twitter, iron-neck on I guess it's on X now, iron-neck on Facebook and on LinkedIn. It's just Mike Jolly at LinkedIn. And I have a pretty robust site. I have over 20,000 followers on LinkedIn and probably 95% of them have something to do with sports or MMA or physical therapy. It's all about neck strength and training and all of that. So when I post stuff, usually it's pretty decent. I'll probably take some snippets of this and post it on LinkedIn also.

Absolutely. Well, I want to just say thank you so much. Thank you to Robert again, but also thank you to you. I mean, I love talking about the subject matter as it were. And obviously what you're doing with the iron-neck is incredible. And as I said before, I mean, there's three different communities I belong to that would benefit from this immediately. But also, I mean, it's all the other stuff. It's the human stories.

It's learning about your granddad, I think, that makes these conversations so interesting. So I just want to thank you again for being so generous after a very busy and important day you had prior to this interview. And coming on the Behind the Shield podcast. This was the most important part of my day right here, James. The most important part of my day. I mean, this is my passion. Don't get that wrong. That's work. This was more important.

So thank you very much for having me on. It's been a lot of fun. Have a great time.