Music. Nation podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Steve Nosworthy. The views and opinions of guests on this podcast are their own and may differ from my own. But as always, I try to be respectful of other people's opinions, even when we might disagree. My guest today is Dr. Stort McGill. Dr. McGill is a professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and a world-renowned lecturer and expert in spine function, injury prevention, and rehabilitation.
Dr. McGill has written more than 200 scientific publications on the topics of lumbar function, low back injury mechanisms, and the investigation of tissue loading during rehabilitation programs. He's received several awards for his work, including the Volvo Bioengineering Award for Low Back Pain Research from Sweden and is a recipient of the Order of Canada, the second highest merit award in the nation.
Dr. McGill has been an invited lecturer at many universities, has delivered more than 200 addresses and 70 keynotes to societies around the world. He has written four books and contributed 32 chapters to others. He's sat on the editorial boards of many journals in the physical medicine and rehab space and recently has appeared as a guest on other podcasts with Andrew Huberman, Peter Atiyah, and Mark Bell.
As a consultant, he has provided expertise on assessment and reduction of the risk of low back injury to government agencies, corporations, professional athletes, and sports teams of all varieties. Most recently, he accompanied Team Canada to the Paris Olympics. When Dr. McGill agreed to join me for a conversation, I was determined to not simply recreate other interviews he had done, by asking him about the causes of low back pain.
Rather, we delved into his career, his personal and professional philosophies on health and fitness, and he shared several inspiring stories about both professional athletes and regular people that he has worked with, and how he derives deep satisfaction from helping people change their lives. And yes, I felt compelled to ask him about his iconic mustache. Let's get to the interview. Um, so you guys up in Northern Ontario, you've been hit with two major snow storms.
Uh, and, and I was, I was just kind of wondering, cause I mean, you're a little bit older than I am. I think you're 67. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, I was just wondering there, there's a lot of 67 year olds that wouldn't climb up on top of the roof and shovel off a, a meter or so of snow. Um, what is it like, what is it that you do to keep yourself going that, that you feel confident that you can meet the rigors and the demands of living in the great white north?
I think it's just a, uh, a view of life. I mean, I've, I've trained, uh, since I was, uh, 15 in the early days, it was to, uh, uh, be a better athlete and, and train for sport and probably look a little bit better. Uh, but these days it's to still maintain capability, uh, and that we all have a little bit of miles on our bodies now. Yeah. And, uh, it's even more important now. My, you, I don't know if you want to get personal about this, but you said, what, what do I do?
Um, in the old days I would strength train almost exclusively. And once in a while I'd go for a run or whatever and think about cardiovascular things. But now these days, yes, I still strength train, but only a couple of days a week. I do much more mobility work now to look after a few of the specific injuries, shall we say. Yeah. And more cardiovascular as well in the winter.
If it's not a blizzard like it is today, I'll go for a ski or do some of the recreational things if I'm not digging out or digging out neighbors, which is what the rest of my day is going to be. And the other little wisdoms that I've picked up, and I don't know if you would say the same thing, I've learned that if I have to work hard, don't do the same thing two days in a row. And that keeps me training and adapting positively rather than accumulating more pain and stress, shall we say.
So little things like that. I certainly drink less. I eat better. As a consequence, I think I'm sleeping better as well. But maybe it's just not being at the university and dealing with the challenges there every day that keep you up at night. Yeah, the psycho-emotional. Anyway, would you say the same thing about as you gain a personal wisdom, you learn your body and training and physicality. It's non-negotiable.
I totally agree. And especially like in this age where so many of the conversations that are happening, are focusing on not just longevity, but my point is that it's great to live a very long time, but you want to be capable, right? And you can use the word fitness. You know, that word by simple definition would be having capacity to meet a demand, right? You're fit to do something.
But for me, and maybe I should ask you first since you're the guest, the change in your training philosophy, was that something you feel like you were forced into as you got older? Or was that more of a conscious choice of my priorities has shifted, my understanding has shifted, or maybe you've just lost the zeal to lift hard, lift and be super strong. And, you know, if you share yours, then I'll share mine when you're done.
Well, I would say all of the above. As I was approaching 60, I'd had a fairly demanding role at the university. I ran the whole, well, two spine labs and the research clinic, and I was department chair for quite a number of years as well.
And I reached the point where i realized i'm a glorified computer operator when i started i i was my first appointment was 1986 our lab didn't even have a laptop computer yet and uh it was uh not a physical job but it was a job that was always moving and uh then as computers became more uh involved in virtually everything that we did. I found I would walk to work and that was by choice. I owned a home right on the edge of campus for the reason of walking to work every day.
But I would sit and I would become achy. And I thought, this isn't what I signed on for. So when I was 60, I retired, not to stop working, but to stop that lifestyle. So that was a conscious choice. And at that time, I thought, all right, now let's really become as healthy as I need to be. So I stopped drinking less and eating better. I didn't have department meetings and university functions to go to several times a week, which I was going to before.
And I developed this idea, which I've called the biblical training week. And I use the word biblical because every major religion has a Sabbath, which is a day of rest. And biologically, psychologically, it is so important just to have one day per week where all of the systems adapt. So you've stressed them, and now you've ensured that positive adaptation. And it just works. and two days a week, I'll strength train two days a week,
I mobility train two days a week, I'll train cardiovascular. But. I still work a rural physical life in the winter. You've already mentioned clearing snow in the summer. I'll spend a few days splitting firewood for the following year as an example, meaning that that checks all the boxes. So I'm free that day to choose. I may go for a swim or a bike ride or a ski
or whatever. And as I've already mentioned, part of the other rules that go along with that is don't do the same thing two days in a row. So that formalizes this biblical training week. And I wake up in the morning with my day planner and I write down what is on the docket in terms of training. And I write it in my day planner. So I ensure that I get it in. And I have to tell you, Steve, I feel really, really good.
Do you think that the feeling really good, do you think it was because you perhaps you have maybe a more well-rounded approach do you think it was adding things that you were missing or or de-emphasizing things that were maybe stressing you beyond what your capability to recover or repair was was whatever that level was it was both yeah and And, you know, just to go into my story, like I just turned 60 this year and, you know, I think I mentioned to you last
year when you and I were talking that I, when I was 50, well, it was 2020. So I was 56. I had both of my hips replaced within five weeks of each other. And, you know, it turned out I had a bilateral cam deformity in my femoral heads. And so by the age of 56, I was essentially bone on bone and had been that way for quite a long time. And so for me, you know, adopting a more well-rounded approach to fitness and certainly the exercise component of that, it was kind of forced upon me.
Because if I was just given my nose and I could go wherever I wanted, I'd tend towards the speed and the strength stuff. You know, I, I played basketball and volleyball when I was in high school, college, even after college. Um, I was a sprinter, I was a jumper. And so put me in a gym and guess what I want to do? I want to do heavy, hard and fast. Not that I was ever like a super strong guy, maybe above the average, but you know, I wouldn't enter a powerlifting or a
strongman competition by any means. Um. But strength feels normal to me. Speed feels normal. It's hard for me to slow down. For example, it's hard for me to get on an elliptical machine and just cruise for 30, 40, 50 minutes. And part of it is my mind is just screaming at me like, you know, you have to move faster. You have to move faster. But when I had to deal with the impact of the hip, and really it was two resurfacing procedures, not traditional replacements, Um.
That time of my life, it, it basically took me 10 years to come to grips with the fact that this was an inevitability because I kept trying to fix everything. Any way I could think of from, you know, chiropractic to stretching mobilization. I did stem cells and PRP. I did all kinds of things. And every six months I had to give up something because my pain was too great. My mobility had gone. And by the time I opted to have the surgery, I couldn't stand for more than two minutes at a time.
And this was 56 years old and four years ago. And now I'm to the point where, like, quite literally, those surgeries changed my life. And unfortunately, two years later, I had major shoulder reconstructive surgery for rotator cuff tears, bicep tendon tears, cartilage tears that I'm assuming came from many years of being an outside hitter, a power hitter, playing volleyball at a national level.
And so I was kind of forced into it. But, you know, the more I learned as a functional medicine practitioner and obviously try to apply the things that I teach to other people in my life, the more as I get older, I see, logically, I see the need to have this more well-rounded approach. And so I'm kind of interested in your thought process and how you settled in on, of all the different things that you could have chosen, how did you settle in on the mixture of things that you're doing? I think.
Uh that's uh an interesting question and i would have to answer it it was a combination of my personality and my academic training so obviously uh i was well aware of the role of movement in health every single system in your body requires movement for optimal health and function right not too much and not too little so this we know uh but it's also my personality to if i know that i try and put it into action uh there are people who know it and don't put it into action.
And there are people who don't know it and put it into action and are probably non-optimal in the stress that they put on their body. And they end up with non-optimal health, shall we say. So, yeah, that's my answer. Science plus personality. And i'm i'm curious because here we are now i i we both have celtic genes yeah i i know the hip structure uh i know the cam deformity uh you know i'm hip replaced as well yeah and uh i strength trained uh probably too heavy and too deep for those
hips that i was given and uh look where we both ended up. Yeah. Um, and that teaches you a wisdom too. Yeah, it certainly does. And, you know, I think this is one of one of probably many complaints that I have about people going, say, to the Internet and fitness influencers that. And I think that, well, it's part of a larger problem, because when we think
about fitness, we have we have an idea of what that means. And, you know, somebody might go, well, fit are the ultra marathoners because they can run 50 miles at a time. Or fit is an Ironman athlete because not only do they run, they swim and they bike as well. And to somebody else, it's the winner of the CrossFit Games, you know, the fittest man and the fittest woman on earth.
But we have this tendency when we start to set our own goals to look at what someone else is capable of doing and then think that we have to model our training after that and we have to be that. I've certainly fallen into that many times in my past. And I'm trying for myself, especially now as I get older and I'm dealing with some limitations that I didn't have to deal with in my youth.
I'm trying to make sure that I focus on this idea that whatever level of fitness I want to achieve should be, it should be a highly personalized thing. And maybe it should start with, well, what are my goals? What is really important to me? And so again, as you were putting together Stu's mix of things that seemed to work for Stu, did you have an active thought process where you sat down and thought. What am I trying to achieve here? The answer is yes.
And it came partly from some of the experimentation that we've done over the years. People might think this is rather oblique, but I was involved in my consulting with several professional sports teams and professional sports. And the example I'm going to give is the combine. In other words, in the NFL, the players who are drafted or are going into the draft go through a combine, which is a set of tests in which they're scored and they are ranked for the draft partly by.
Now, let's hope that the exercises chosen have some content validity in terms of performing well and having some resilience, not getting injured in the NFL. Well, I also was involved in the basketball combine and also in the NHL, some of the tests that they'd done there. Now, you mentioned the hallmark of fitness in many people's minds is a cardiovascular measure. So a marathoner, a triathlete, and I think it was co-opted, the definition of fitness, by the physiologists to mean a high VO2 max.
Right. Well, isn't that interesting? In the NHL, many years ago, one of the tests was how far can a player run in 10 minutes? So a surrogate of cardiovascular fitness. Kind of like a Cooper mile test or something like that. Now, let's go back and look at the demands of playing in the NHL. It is a 45-second anaerobic blast. You get off the ice, you rest for two or three minutes, try and recover your heart rate down, and then you go again.
In other words, as it turned out, the players who put the most pucks in the net had a low VO2 max, but the longest horizontal jump distance. In other words, explosive power. But they also had the ability to recover their heart rate very quick. And I remember one Russian player who I thought really taught North Americans how to train for hockey. And this was a consult in the NHL, and he had a back injury.
And his team medics were telling him, you should ride a bike to maintain your fitness for hockey while you're rehabbing your back. And he looked at me and he said, when they put bike on ice, I ride bike. I don't ride bike. And it was such a beautiful demonstration. And when we look at the NFL battery of tests, the record holders for the various tests very rarely make the NFL as a player. So what is the validity? And as I came to learn, NBA basketball probably has the most.
Content valid set of tests. And, uh, we would measure, um, uh, rebound performance, for example. So do you think vertical jump has a high correlation with a rebound scores? Well, in our studies, it wasn't the most dominant, um, uh, um, test. Uh, and you would enjoy this as a, as a volleyball player, it was actually a wingspan, tip to tip with the arms out to the side. Um, but also for rebounds, it was, and the strength coaches will go bananas on me. Now it was weaker hands.
So now my hypothesis was it was a bit more finesse with the hands. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So anyway, um, I'm using these examples as how I converged myself, looking at the demands of a sport and then letting that inform how we're going to measure a person, can they meet the demands, and we're going to train what they. Cannot meet but is demanded of them.
So that is a broader concept of fitness, And can we build a body that is comprehensive in those abilities to meet the demand of, in those examples, their sport? But now we're talking about your and my patients. Are we working with them to really understand their life and what the demands are? And that's a full spectrum, full physicality, full psychological and social demand. And are we helping them choose the most optimal approaches to gain that capability? Yeah.
Now that's life. And, you know, I think that's a wonderful analogy, and I'm certainly not the one who coined the phrase that sport or life is sport, right, or the sport of life. There are certainly physical demands that are placed on us these days. And, you know, modern society has changed a lot. Sitting is the new smoking, as they say, and so many of us are, you know, kind of chained behind a desk. You know, I obviously when I was practicing as a chiropractor, I was on my feet all day long.
But when I transitioned into functional medicine and then went virtual, you know, this is this is what I do. And, you know, now that I have done podcasting and all that kind of stuff, I'd spend the vast majority of my time sitting and in my office situation. It's, you know, living full-time in an RV and traveling around the continent. It's hard to implement like a standing desk or a walking desk strategy.
And so I have to try to compensate by taking periodic breaks, getting outside, maybe swinging a kettlebell, doing some air squats, and then making sure that I either get to the gym or get outdoors to do something physical. And, you know, Stu, the first two years that my wife and I traveled full-time in our RV, I had an Olympic barbell and about 300 pounds of bumper plates and kettlebells and a 25-pound medicine ball. We traveled with that all the time.
And then I realized that it was just too cumbersome to keep slinging that stuff all around from Dallas or Texas to Newfoundland. And so we decided that wherever we were, we were just going to join the gym, even if it was for two weeks. And it just so turns out that our lifestyle, we're in several places in Canada and the U.S. For sometimes two, three months at a time. And so we get a chance to get into a rhythm and try to maintain our fitness that way. But going back to this idea of...
Of combine testing should reflect the rigors and demands of the sport. If we look at life as sport, what are the demands? If I were to sit down, if you were to sit down with somebody who's not an athlete per se, but they're interested in not just longevity, but functional capacity, what I call aging independence, being able to get up and down off the toilet when you're 90 years old and not have to have someone shower you and dress you.
What do you think are the fundamentals? Like, what's your personal philosophy? Maybe yours is going to come more from data than it is just from your own musings, but I'd like to hear your musings. What do you think are the demands of aging when it comes to this idea that life is sport and we have to maintain, we have to train for that? I'm i'm wanting to make sure i interpret your uh question correctly sure um, well let me start and correct me if i'm going down the wrong path here. Living life.
Robustly means we're going to cross the line once in a while and we are going to get a little injury or it might be, pardon the language, but it might be just a shit happens kind of a situation. You flip on ice, you crack your pelvis. And, uh, you know, that, that can be really devastating, uh, for some people or you fall down the stairs or whatever it is. As we accumulate these injuries, it takes a piece out of your ability to do
what you once did and found easy when you were 16. So. Where I'm headed with this, for people like you and I, we have to do a very thorough assessment of that person's history and measure where they are struggling and where are the impediments to them living the life that they currently are demanded and really want to live.
Uh so i guess my answer really is that assessment guides us every single time on what fitness means for that particular person and how we're going to get them as capable as we possibly can in the limitations of their injury history and their surgical history disease i hate the word disease, but shall we say non-compromised health mechanisms. Anyway, am I headed in the right direction with that? Yeah, you are. And I guess maybe this falls into that domain that you hate, which is generalizations.
But I would imagine that individual circumstance aside, there are certain fundamentals that most of us should be maintaining maintaining and training our capacity and as we get older and you know there there would be a certain need for baseline mobility a certain need for baseline strength a certain need for vo2 max you know you don't have to be you don't have to have a vo2 max of you know 75 um to just live life in general but flexibility mobility
even agility you know you mentioned falling down breaking the hip. Like we know that one of the big things that allows people to avoid tripping, falling, and breaking a hip is, is a simple thing like foot speed. Being able to adjust your position as your brain senses, okay, I'm going down, can you adjust your position and catch yourself? So you need speed before you need the strength to prevent the fall.
And so in my world, in my mind, which is not always a great place to be, I'm always thinking about what are the fundamentals? Because with the clients that I interact with, I see a wide range of people who are absolutely willing to embrace physical activity and exercise as part of their health journey, so to speak, and others who they've never really exercised before and they don't know where to start and they're not even sure they want to do it.
And so how do we boil this idea down to these are the fundamentals? Now you can listen to, you know, people like, uh, Peter Atiyah, for example, who's last year or so has been talking a lot about grip strength and farmers carries and hang time. And, uh, Andy Galpin talks about, uh, you know, knee extension tests and the quality, uh, or the correlation between quadriceps strength and longevity and that kind of stuff.
So I'm trying to get, for myself, in talking to my clients, I'm trying to develop a set of basic guidelines that if you're not going to go beyond, you have to, these are the minimum standards you must meet if you expect to be healthy and well in the future. Do you want me to riff on that a little bit? Absolutely. Okay. Stop me from talking. There's one thing that I would add. I thought that was a good list. The cardiovascular, the mobility aspect, plus the strength.
Plus, you also mentioned footwork there, which is also very important. So the two things I would add to that, and it's a broad category, but it's called movement competency. Is the person aware of how to move without creating real stress concentrations at a location in their body? A stress concentration results from posture and movement.
So if they have, well, my area, obviously in the low back, and every time they tie their shoe, they get a little uncomfortable trigger in their back and that can set them off for the rest of the day in a very negative way. Can they tie their shoe in a way that doesn't replicate that trigger? Well, for most people, if they put their foot up, don't sit in the chair and tie your shoe, but put your foot up on the seat pan of the chair.
So now you're in a lunge position, but the key is to take your hips down to the target, meaning close to the heel. So if they. Let's say the left foot is on the chair, push the left knee way past the toes and bend the stance leg, right knee. Now the hips are right down at the heel, if their hips will allow this. And now they can tie their shoe without stressing their back and setting themselves up negatively for the rest of the day.
So there would be an example, we call them movement hacks or spine hygiene, shall we say. But it's a way to reduce stress concentrations that now gives them a pain-free capacity for the rest of the day. So movement competency would be one. And the other thing that came to my mind listening to you was real risk versus perceived risk. What is the real risk of Steve when you were playing volleyball and lifting heavy and that kind of thing? Now, I'm just guessing.
And it might have been crossing the line with a heavy deadlift that your hormones just ran ahead, that big Y chromosome, and you thought, I'm just going to squat this no matter what, rather than abandoning the lift because all your buddies are there watching. Um, but I'll tell you now, the biggest risk I have is a slip and fall on the ice. And I almost had two of them this morning, walking the dog. There's, there's ice under where, particularly where they've just plowed. And, uh, so yeah.
If you're in a warmer climate and you stumble and you're older. Do you have, and to get to Andy Galpin's point, do you have the hip flexion power to get the leg out in front of you because to arrest a fall, the base of support has to run ahead of the center of mass. Physically, it's the only way to arrest a fall, but that requires hip power. So, okay, say the person is losing the footwork ability because it's hip power. All right, well, how can we do that? Do they have shoulder wherewithal?
Could we do a Roman chair hip flexion power training? Or is it just simply a matter of starting standing on one leg and doing knee circles with the other leg? Maybe it's ballroom dance class. Maybe it's a little Tai Chi. I mean, you know, it's endless, but the optimum still remains the optimum. And a really good clinician will have the ability to measure what that person needs, understand their real risk, and mitigate it with the very best training program for them.
So, again, I get right back to, you know, I wonder why people come and see me. Because on the internet or anywhere else, there's nowhere where McGill is out there advertising to see patients. And yet, I'll wake up in the morning and there may be a couple hundred emails there from around the world requesting appointments. Every single one of them has failed. They failed. Uh, no one has addressed their real impediments and, and they're still in pain.
And, and when you see their dossiers, when they come, they've seen a dozen different people. So those are the people, uh, that come and maybe I'm biased, but I have to get to the level of individuality to sort them out. If they were easy and they could be fixed by generic approaches, they would have been great. I'm, I'm so happy. Um, but you see, it's my bias. It's, it's the people who come and see me. They are the, the challenged ones, nor do I want to see non-challenging people.
I, I, I should never see them. They, they should, there's, there's plenty of physios and all kinds of health professions that can deal with them. But anyway, there's probably a natural selection bias and why I have some of the opinions that I do.
And, you know, that's analogous to my experience as well um and you know it goes back to what i was saying about the blessing and the curse of the internet and these fitness influencers and and just the the immediate access to so much information which by its very nature has to be general it has to be and you know for better or for worse there are a lot of people that have nominal problems that can find general inflammation information applied to themselves and it ends up in a good result.
But, you know, like you, the kind of practice that I have on the functional medicine side, it's the people who've seen six, seven, eight other doctors for whether it's a gut issue or head injury or autoimmune problems or blood sugar issues or whatever the case is. But, you know, as you're talking, I was reminded of a story and I'm sure you'll remember this. So I would love you to tell it here.
It was a story of an older lady who was at a crossroads in her life that people were telling her she has to go to an assisted living home. And if I remember the story, the details, you had her up on stage in, say, an auditorium, and there was a bunch of physicians present, and you examined her. And made some very simple recommendations that changed her life.
And I think this is a beautiful illustration of the individualization, but also capturing this idea of what's important and what we need depends on what's important to us, what our goals are, and our status and station in life. Do you remember the story I'm talking about? I don't want to give too many details because we're doing a way better job than I am. Well, I do, actually. It's a very emotional story. but I think I told that on Peter Atiyah's podcast.
Yeah. Do you want a quick summary of it? Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's a beautiful story. Yeah. I was at a medical facility in Europe and occasionally I will get asked, would you come and see a few patients in front of our medical staff? Because they want to see how you assess and how you go about things. And we'll bring on three people and you get 20 minutes with each one.
Well, that's a terrible time constraint for me because I very rarely can, well, of course I can watch a person walk up and I've got a pretty good hypothesis, right? But to be thorough, it usually takes longer than 20 minutes, but this was a 20 minute experience. I'd just seen, I think it was a strength athlete, like a rugby player or something. And then they brought up the next person. And it was an older, I was going to say an elderly person who was probably two or three years older than me.
But anyway, she came onto the stage walking with great trepidation. And, but you could see the emotions. She was stooped. She was defeated. Her head was down. Just if you look at a clinical psychology textbook for depression. That is the demeanor that she was showing. So I didn't need a survey or a questionnaire to understand, was this woman depressed? She gave it away in her movement. The great American dance teacher Martha Graham used to say, movement is the window into the soul.
And if you can't see that, brother, you're in the wrong profession. Anyway, so we could see all of this as she came up. And I said, well, tell me your story, Steve. She never mentioned her back pain. And she said, well, and to cut to the chase, she said, when I sit on the toilet and try and get up, my therapist has told me that I'm going to fall and no one will find me for the next day. And who's going to feed the cat? You know, and she started to cry.
Who's going to feed the cat? and you know just showing how it wasn't about her it was about the love for her cat and this was the biggest thing in her life okay i better pay attention yeah anyway so i said could you uh someone bring out a stool and that's our simulated toilet would you sit on the toilet now i'm being dismissed and i can just feel it with all the surgeons and highfalutin medical people in the audience that this is a bit, I'm sorry to say this, but it's a bit beneath them.
Show me your pain. And, uh, so, uh, I, I watched her sit on the stool, just plopping total collapse, no idea of how to eccentrically control her body to avoid painful stress.
And then I said, okay, could you stand up off the toilet now imagine her feet are in front of her her knees are together and she's trying to use momentum to get off and then as she starts to get up her legs collapse just as andy would say she didn't have thigh strength uh uh didn't know how to use her hips etc so i helped her to make sure she didn't fall and when she was standing i said um well they didn't know baseball in this particular country, but I said, let's try this style of squat.
And I know some of your people won't be able to see this. They're listening, but I'm going to make my hands big. So there's a big V between my thumb and my hands. I'm going to stand up, put the hands on the front of my thighs and run my hands down my knees so that my kneecap is now between my thumb in my hands. I'm going to wrap my hands around my knees. And then at that point, I had to correct her. Center of mass over her base of support and some of the positions of her body.
So how I did it was I got her knees over the balls of her feet, meaning that her hips had to be way behind her heels, which forced her upper body to lean forward a fair amount. And she was humped up like a camel, full spine flexion. And I showed her lift your tail or pardon me, ma'am, but stick your bum out. She got a little giggle out of that. And, you know, it's easier if because I have white hair, I can get away with some of these things. And again, it's a coaching style that you develop.
If I did that, if I was 25 years old with black hair, I probably wouldn't have gotten away with it. So, you know, again, the whole milieu is something that you have to be aware of. So a little bit of teasing and cajoling works in certain situations. So lift your tail, stick your bum out. In other words, gain a neutral lordosis for people like you and I. I said, do you have discomfort or pain? She says, no. I said, good.
Stand up. And right away, she went into spine flexion and lifted herself with her back. And I said, okay, well, let's repeat. Slide your hands down your thighs, knees over the balls of your feet. This time, hollow your low back, and I want you to keep that, but we're going to enforce it just a little bit. And it was just tricking her. I said, you're a leaning tower. Push your toes down and lean forward. Now show me your beautiful tricep muscles. And I just tapped the back of her
arm to show her where those were. Now, push off and hold. Now, pull your hips through. And I kept my hand on her back and she did a perfect hip hinge. And I said, how was that? She says, oh, that was fine. I said, good. Now let's sit down on the toilet, reversing that pattern. I didn't tell her now. She simply, I didn't coach. She just ran her hands down her thighs and placed her behind on the stool.
And I said, good. Now stand up. remember her knees were together and she couldn't do it and i said humor me spread your knees apart and pull your feet back underneath you good now suck up some air be a peacock lean forward through the hips and pull your hips through and she did the most competent squat and i never said another word and i looked out at the audience and uh all of a sudden their attitudes went from arrogance and something that was beneath them to holy hell.
I just saw competence change. And I didn't say anything. And she did it again. And she did it three times, up and down off the chair. And then she looked at me and she had a big smile on our face. And I said, what's up with you? And she said. By the way, part of the story I'd forgotten to tell you is, remember, she couldn't feed her cat, but the therapist had said, you must leave your home. You now have to go into a patient care facility. That is a heavy psychological issue.
And she looked at me and she said, I don't have to leave my home, do I? And I said, no, you don't. Now, that's when the clinicians, there was a few tears in their eyes. And all I did was teach her the principles of weightlifting 101. One, no one had ever gone back to teach her what every lifter, competent lifter knows. And it was just movement competency. I didn't strength trainer. It was a hundred percent movement competency and showing her how, and that changed her life.
So I think that's the story uh that you were uh thinking of and uh yeah absolutely absolutely competency which is so uh rare it seems these days and i i have a feeling it might be getting rarer although there are a number of clinicians who are dedicating themselves to really getting their chops up in, you know, pushing, pulling, squatting, lifting, lowering, carrying, all of the subcategories. And then, you know, if we're going to add athleticism, oh, footwork, I should have added in there.
And then it would be throwing, climbing, you know, some of the animal movement things. Oh, it's beautiful to watch and understand how to coach some of that. Yeah, and just to dovetail off the animal. May I just say, Steve, sorry to interrupt, but I used to dismiss Tai Chi when I was younger. I thought, oh, give me a break. I have now learned for the right person, the footwork and the flow of Tai Chi and how to control the center of mass and whatnot.
It's lovely stuff, but stupid me years ago didn't appreciate it because I was too young. And it was beneath me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that that type of professional bias and arrogance is not certainly not unique to the medical community. Right. There might be more blatant examples of that. But I, you know, I remember and this is, I guess, a somewhat similar story, but early in the days of when CrossFit first became popular.
I remember watching a video of Greg Glassman, the founder, and he was he was. In a seminar and he was talking to people and he was talking about a lady that he had, he was working with who was elderly and he was making the point that, um. The physical needs of a grandmother compared to a young athlete differ not in kind, but in extremity, right? Meaning we all need to be able to have a movement competence in certain positions, squatting, hip hinging, reaching, overhead stuff, that kind of thing.
And he told the story about how he wanted, he sent, I think, sent a letter to her medical doctor, could have been an orthopedist, saying, hey, you know, Mary Jones, I want her to do some squats. And the answer came back as, you know, heck no, right? She's too old. She can't squat. And so he went back and said, well, how about chair sit to stands? And the orthopedist was, oh, that's okay. Which, which is you and I know it's the same movement. It just has a base of support.
And, and it, it betrays that, um, it betrays the blind spots that we all have. I mean, I have blind spots because I'm trained a certain way. I have a certain body of knowledge. I'm trained to think a certain way and I don't know everything. And I don't know what I don't know. And this is my eternal quest as a clinician to become a better clinician year after year is to start becoming aware of the things that I don't know and then evaluate, like, should I know this?
Because if you find something that you should know that you don't and you realize you don't know it and you should, and you don't fill that hole, then are you really truly the best practitioner that you can be? I think what you're talking about is what I would call the path to mastery. And it's something that you never fully achieve, but it guides your path. And it's exactly what you said.
Keep developing your toolbox for interventions keep developing your ability to assess and understand the impediments in that person's life and why they are not being successful, uh it it it never ends, I think there's a certain personality and mindset that, like, I hate and I love the fact that I don't know everything. Well, it keeps you on your toes and it allows you to look forward to learning something new tomorrow.
But, you know, look at the challenges that are there now that we did not have. Let's even go back a hundred years ago. And, you know, consider a cooper, a person who made barrels. They spent their whole life learning how to make a good barrel. And they could become masters at it. Think of electricians. When I started at the university, digital instrumentation really didn't exist.
We used tape recorders to record all our analog signals of EMG and, you know, the electrocardiogram and all the biophysical signals that we would measure from people. And then we got a digitizer and then those signals could be digitized and put in the computer. And then we had to write software code now to do the analysis that the old analog, you know, the integrators and differentiators and diodes and whatnot that we used to wire.
And then this whole world just exploded on the dexterity that we would have in those signals. However, it took a real commitment for us to learn all this new technology. So that was my challenge as a young scientist. But now the Internet has just propelled this. And my point in this story is it's very difficult for someone to become a master. You will be a master in something now. If it's computer-related, for probably six months, and then it's replaced by another technology.
So the challenge to become a master is even more difficult. And then when you look at, you know, my life, I have to go and find a 12-year-old to show me how to do something that's new digitally. They are the expert, and they will be an expert for a few months. And if they don't keep up. The new 14-year-old will have to ask the 12-year-old. So the challenge to becoming a master now, however, I will say that this body hasn't changed for thousands of years.
And the mastery of movement, understanding and competency, et cetera, that isn't going to change uh so i hope more people are working on that path to mastery of understanding that whole. Yeah absolutely um in in that last monologue there you mentioned electricians um i know that when you were young i believe in high school um i think you told me this story before but apparently your school's guidance counselor told your dad to tell you to go into a trade because you weren't too
bright. You weren't academically gifted. What was going on in life at that point? I mean, clearly you're brilliant, man. You're so academically accomplished. And just listening to you, you're insightful, incisive, and books and articles and peer review journals and on and on and on and on. What was going on in your life that they couldn't see that back then? That's a hard question. I don't think he said, he spoke to my father and he
said, yeah, McGill is not, uh, academic material. Go to trade school. And I, and I did, I enrolled in plumbing school at George Brown in Toronto. And I would have been very happy, Steve, being a plumber. I still enjoy that physicality and ability to build things now. However, I was a goofball. I was something that no one could figure out. And even my old college roommates and whatnot, they would say, wow, you're the rowdiest quiet guy we've ever met.
And they could never pin me down. Am I absolutely stupid or am I a wild man or am I a quiet studious type? Because, you know, I'd read something or I'd study something and then I'd go absolutely berserk on something else. It was just my personality. I guess I couldn't sit in school. It was torture for me to sit. And, you know, I think in three or four of my textbooks, I have a dedication. And the first person, well, that I mentioned is Mr. Colucci. Mr. Colucci was a high school teacher of mine.
He came, he was a fullback for McMaster Marauders and a real bodybuilder. Oh, and he got so much respect from guys like me, and we would train with him in the morning. He was our football coach. He was my track and field coach. So the amount of time that he spent with me was way more than he actually should have.
And uh being a new phys ed teacher he also had to teach ancient greek and roman history and you know i paid attention in that class only because it was mr collucci and i would watch his beautiful beautiful physicality move and uh his stories uh. And because of who he was in the example that he led and the personal time that he spent with all of us who were interested in training, but all of the other subjects, Steve, that I hate to say this.
I remember learning mathematics and, well, I didn't learn, and the teacher telling us, well, let's introduce calculus as X tends to zero, la-di-da-di-da, and it was just gobbledygook. And it wasn't until I took my second or third calculus course at university where I thought, now I understand calculus. Really, all it is, is something varies with respect to something else. So the slope of the curve is the differential and the area under the curve is
the integral, the sum total. You got to be kidding me. Is that what calculus is? Why didn't they tell me when I was a high school student that when water flows through a pipe and you neck down the diameter of the pipe, the pressure goes up and the flow rate goes up? Easy as pi. I could understand that, but I never got it as X tends to zero.
So i i have to blame the system and and and my brain didn't understand as x tends to zero so it was just i tuned out and i would uh study things on my own and uh i i was going to tell a story about mr koluchi now and uh i can't talk about his physicality and yeah yeah anyway that That man had such an influence on me, and it was him, actually. So here I was leaving high school to go and train as a plumber, and he called up my mother.
He didn't need to do that, and he said, you know, I'd like him to come back to high school and play football, and okay, I did.
And a couple of uh university uh football coaches came around they wrote letters to me and uh one one or two came to see my mother actually and that's why i went to university and then i was a goofball again first year i got 60 or something it was it was terrible and uh second year uh i i I stopped playing football and, uh, I suddenly, I took a couple of physics courses and a math course and I had to work like a dog because I, I didn't finish with, you know, uh, upper high school mathematics.
And all of a sudden the world changed. I thought, you gotta be kidding me. You mean calculus is water flow in a pipe? Why, why didn't they start with this? And then all of a sudden, it came together. Mathematics only described the physical world. I never got chemistry, by the way. It still confuses me. There's too much memory work in that. But suddenly, biology, physics, mathematics. History, it just started to flow and come together.
And then I think by the end of third year, I won the gold medal for the top male student. This is at University of Toronto. And Steve, I wasn't even trying. I didn't even know that there was such a thing that existed. I wasn't asking for marks. I had no idea where my grades placed from my peers. This is the beautiful, I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's the beautiful thing when passion and intellect collide.
Well, yeah. And then I got lost one time and I found myself in the library looking at different books. And there was a book on the table, Biomechanics. i picked it up and started looking at it wow anatomical structure, A little bit of engineering, a little bit of mathematics, a little bit of how it all worked.
And then, you know, I went to biomechanics class and I remember the professor saying, well, when you turn a screwdriver, that's a torque and a force couple and you got a force running this way and one running that way. I thought, darn, that's a terrible explanation of what a torque is. It's a rotational force.
That's all it is. and uh you know and then all of a sudden yeah the levers in the body and the co-contraction and how that loaded joints and and what is efficient and what is non-efficient and uh you know i went to the university of of ottawa i applied for a master's degree in astrophysics and in biomechanics i was accepted in astrophysics which is planetary motion and all that sort of thing i was i'd read just on my own, some of the writings of Einstein.
And I thought, oh, okay, I can start to understand this relativity a bit. Well, really, really did I? I can talk about it. However, and also biomechanics, but I chose biomechanics because at this time I was into road cycling and the French Gatineau, north of Quebec, had wonderful cycling. So I went there to ride my bike, believe it or not. But I really got into biomechanics.
And then because of the professor who was my supervisor played on the university professor's hockey team and the league up there was really competitive hockey, but they recruited a few graduate students. So I was on this team and there was a player from University of Waterloo, Bob Norman, and I sat beside him in the dressing room after the game and he said, oh, have you thought of doing a PhD? And I said, well, yeah, actually I applied for a PhD at University of Waterloo in systems engineering.
And he said, oh, well, I'm just starting a spine lab at University of Waterloo. Come and visit. And I stayed at his house for three days. What a lovely man and what a lovely gesture. And I switched. And I became his first PhD student to graduate, actually. And then it just started from there. But isn't it interesting that in every single case, it was sport, when you think about it, that took me to the next level. And it was pure serendipity and dumb luck every step of the way.
Yeah, I was going to say, it's either serendipity or divine providence. Take your pick based on your worldview. Dumb luck and attitude. Dumb luck and attitude. There you go. Yeah. And I said, yeah, I'm into this stuff now. Yeah. And then I spent 32 years, 10 to 12 hours a day, every single day working on back stuff. Music.