Mike Boyle's Secrets to Being a Successful Coach

[00:00:00] James Breese: Strength Matters 

[00:00:01] James Breese: Media, 

[00:00:02] James Breese: video, print, podcasts. 

[00:00:04] Josh Kennedy: This is the Strength Matters Podcast. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for tuning in. Please make sure to subscribe and review. We really appreciate all your comments and feedback. With me, as always, is my trusty sidekick. I've called you sidekick this time, James, and co host James Breese

[00:00:20] Josh Kennedy: how are you doing, James? I'm 

[00:00:21] James Breese: very well, thank you. Startup like you. How about that, mate? How about that? Exactly. 

[00:00:24] Josh Kennedy: Yes, we have, we have a fantastic guest. Uh, today is a legend in the strength and conditioning world. I don't use that word very often, but I think it is appropriate. In this guy's case, he has over 40 years experience in the field of elite athlete preparation, working with both males and females athletes from every professional league, a highly sought after speaker in the areas of strength and conditioning, athlete rehabilitation, and personal training.

[00:00:49] Josh Kennedy: His first book, which I am a huge fan of, Functional Training for Sports, has been described as the best book written on the topic. And his latest book, which I'm on chapter six of, uh, at the [00:01:00] moment, uh, Designing Strength Training. programs and facilities takes these concepts a step further. Described by Dan John as the coach that coaches need.

[00:01:09] Josh Kennedy: It is a pleasure to welcome Mike Boyle to the podcast. Mike, how are you 

[00:01:12] Mike Boyle: doing? I am doing great guys. Thank you very much for having 

[00:01:15] Josh Kennedy: me. No, thank you for, uh, for taking the time. I know we sort of just managed to get this podcast in before you become incredibly busy. Uh, so thank you for taking the time out to, uh, to jump on the podcast with us.

[00:01:27] Josh Kennedy: Um, what we'll jump, jump in straight away and say. In case our listeners have been living under a rock for a long time, uh, could you just tell them a little bit more about yourself, how you got into the industry, uh, your background and did you always want to be a coach or did you want to be an athlete?

[00:01:42] Josh Kennedy: What was your sort of area? 

[00:01:45] Mike Boyle: Well, I think we all wanted to be athletes and then realized my career was ended by lack of size and lack of ability. A lot of people in the sports world, when you're not big enough or good enough, it's very [00:02:00] difficult to continue. And the good thing was I, my desire to be a better athlete led me to training.

[00:02:07] Mike Boyle: And I start, I tell these stories often, but I was probably weight training in my basement in the early 1970s, honestly, with a little Joe Weider, 110 pound set and a bench that my father had bought me, you know, wall chart tacked up to the wall. And I went to college with the idea that I, you said, you know, I want to be a coach.

[00:02:31] Mike Boyle: I went to be an athletic trainer because I didn't think I didn't want to be a coach per se. Strength and conditioning coach and even really personal training didn't exist, strength and conditioning coaching didn't exist. None of these things were even considerations at that time. And so I went there, studied athletic training, but as I was in college.

[00:02:53] Mike Boyle: The strength and conditioning field started to kind of percolate a little bit. And suddenly there were sort of the boy deputies of the world. And there was somebody, [00:03:00] wow, somebody's paying this track guy to teach the football players how to lift weights. And my thought process was, wow, that would be amazing.

[00:03:07] Mike Boyle: Imagine being able to combine all these things that I like, I like. I like weightlifting or strength training or whatever we were calling it at that point in time. I really like sports medicine and I grew up in a coaching, uh, house. My father was a high school teacher, high school coach. So I've been in this and then I ended up at Boston University.

[00:03:27] Mike Boyle: My dad was a Boston University alum and is in the Hall of Fame there for football, the American football. And, uh, And his, uh, one of his teammates was actually the athletic director at that time. I got hired as an assistant athletic trainer and very quickly thought I'm going to be the strength coach at Boston university.

[00:03:47] Mike Boyle: And I basically quit my job and volunteered as the strength coach. I just literally walked across the street, the street across the hall into this little weight room that had a couple of Nautilus machines in it. And uh, [00:04:00] Power rack and a bench press and kind of sat down and appointed myself the strength coach.

[00:04:07] Mike Boyle: Probably 1983. That's amazing. 

[00:04:10] Josh Kennedy: Yeah. Crazy how the industry has changed that you could back then you could just walk in and, you know, basically volunteer yourself as a strength coach. I can't imagine what the, uh, you know, criteria are, what the interview process is now, if you 

[00:04:20] Mike Boyle: wanted to do that. Yeah, with me, they, they just thought I was crazy.

[00:04:24] Mike Boyle: They were like, you're quitting your full time job and literally go across the hall and sit down because at that time I sat down probably with a yellow legal pad of paper because no one had a computer. No one had a cell phone. And somehow I don't, I don't even really know, I mean, I guess we probably typed programs at that time, if I'm thinking about it.

[00:04:48] Mike Boyle: And so somewhere along the way, as in, as in typewriter typed program, typewriter type, exactly. So when people ask me, it's really funny because I, again, I've done a [00:05:00] gazillion podcasts. And people will always say things like, Oh, what's the greatest innovation you can think of in strength and conditioning?

[00:05:05] Mike Boyle: And I'm like, absolutely. The computer exactly. James laughing because that's me. The left mean it's like, like computers, the computer. When I was in college, it was a computer room and the computer probably took up as much room as my house. And it could do anything like it could basically like add, subtract, multiply and divide.

[00:05:26] Mike Boyle: I mean, it was, you know, the computer that was in that room was. Way less sophisticated than my iPhone. Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:05:34] Josh Kennedy: I think it was not a computer, but I remember, um, our first computer games console is something my dad had was the Atari that went, 

[00:05:40] Mike Boyle: yeah, yeah. Beeps. Spectrum was with the ball. Yeah. They crossed the screen.

[00:05:45] James Breese: Yeah, he had the spectrum as well. And I remember, I remember like the first ever PC, like the window, I was, windows, something or other. And I was excited every day to go and learn how to type. Cause it was like, I think it was Mavis Beacon teaches typing. And that was my thing. And I was like learning to type one by [00:06:00] one.

[00:06:00] James Breese: So I wasn't like doing this finger like this. I like, I wasn't doing this type stuff. 

[00:06:04] Mike Boyle: I've hunted and pecked all my books. I still can't really type. But I'm really good at sort of hunt and peck typing and I can get by, but I have no real typing skills. And my mother was a stenographer. So my mother was a great typist.

[00:06:20] Mike Boyle: Thank God. And so she would type all my papers when I was in college. Cause that time you'd had to, You had to have typewritten. You must have had to 

[00:06:27] Josh Kennedy: do a lot of typing though on the typewriter for your, for all your programs. 

[00:06:32] Mike Boyle: Well, no, they weren't very sophisticated then. It was Stone Age. So brilliant. 

[00:06:40] Josh Kennedy: As I said in the, um, in the, sorry, James, were you gonna?

[00:06:43] Josh Kennedy: No, carry on. In the introduction, Dan describes you as the coach, that coach's need, which I think is a lovely quote. Um, what in your, Opinion makes a good coach. I 

[00:06:58] Mike Boyle: think what makes a good coach [00:07:00] probably more than anything, one of the things we talk about, it's the interpersonal skills is what makes good coaches.

[00:07:06] Mike Boyle: I think we far overrate the science and periodization and all this other shit and far underrate the ability. I remember someone asking me one time because I was succeeding and at that time I shouldn't have been succeeding in strength and conditioning because I didn't look like any other strength and conditioning coach.

[00:07:26] Mike Boyle: I was relatively average looking. I was 180 pounds. I wasn't on steroids. I wasn't super big. And I said, I think I, it's the fact that I can get people to do what I want them to do is what sets me apart from everybody else. So I could look at someone and say, Hey, here's what I need you to do. And here's why you do it.

[00:07:45] Mike Boyle: And I could get at that time, professional athletes, college athletes, but just kind of march along with me. I think that was that interpersonal skill. My father, as I said, was an educator and was really good with people. Yeah. [00:08:00] And I developed, or I don't think I developed, I guess I learned those people skills from watching him.

[00:08:05] Mike Boyle: My father was one of these guys. And, uh, one of the things I always said, I was always hesitant to talk about my father and I don't know why, cause I guess it felt like bragging, but when my father died, died very young, 60 died at my age, 63 or four, I forget, but his wake, Literally when it was supposed to at that time, they had wakes, they were two to four and seven to nine for whatever reason they, they thought that the family needed a break in between to go and eat dinner or whatever it was.

[00:08:30] Mike Boyle: My father's wake went from two to nine for two consecutive days, never stopped having a line out the door. And when they drove to bury him, it looked like a parade in the town. People literally lined the streets watching. That was the kind of impact that he had on, and this was all kids. I still meet people today.

[00:08:48] Mike Boyle: Now, my father would be a hundred. I still meet people who went to the high school and it's, I love it with my kids because my kids never knew him. You know, they never knew their grandfather and people would just rave about [00:09:00] what a great guy he was and how he was the reason that they went to college or he was the reason that they didn't get in trouble or he was the reason.

[00:09:08] Mike Boyle: So I grew up in a situation where I saw somebody of great influence yet a really, uh, common. I wrote an article about him called an extraordinary ordinary man, because he was, I mean, he had one job his whole life. He was, he worked at the same high school the whole time that he was there and never in some ways.

[00:09:28] Mike Boyle: I had one coach told me and I took it as a compliment that he said, I'd never amount to anything that I had. I had no drive. I didn't want to leave Boston university. I didn't want to go to the NFL. I didn't want to go here. And I thought. You know, my father worked at the same school his whole life and I, everybody really looked up to him.

[00:09:45] Mike Boyle: So I thought I can, you know, in the same place forever. And if I'm good, I'll be good. Yeah, 

[00:09:54] Josh Kennedy: absolutely. Absolutely. Do you think, do you think you've always had a good eye for, for movement? Or is [00:10:00] that 

[00:10:00] Mike Boyle: developed over the years? I don't think so. I mean, I, I, I guess, but I think it's been developed. I've been very lucky.

[00:10:05] Mike Boyle: You know what? I've had a good eye for looking at the person's paper next to me who was smarter than me. I'm a good. And honestly, when I very first got into the field, I started to look at sort of. All right. You know, they were kind of the meatheads and I, I mean, I felt like, okay, it's pretty easy, you know, squat bench, press power clean.

[00:10:26] Mike Boyle: I get that part. But then when he started, I, I gravitated to the track and field guys, to the Don and the Gambetta's and Brett McFarlane, who's since passed away. These were the guys when I'd go to conferences, that's where I'd go sit and listen. I didn't want to go listen to another strength coach talk about, you know, You know how to squat again.

[00:10:43] Mike Boyle: I was like, okay, I get that pretty well dialed in, but I was attracted to the track and field people. And then I was attracted to the sports medicine people. Cause that was my background. And so I think. The ability to have that sports medicine [00:11:00] education and to then realize that one of my first mentors was a guy named Mike Woycik, who ended up being a longtime NFL strength coach, but came from track and field background.

[00:11:10] Mike Boyle: He was a thrower and I was really influenced by him. So I started to, I guess I just started to pay attention. I started to look and think. I've always had a good analytical mind and be able to look at things and think, okay, that was, that doesn't add up. And then I'd be able to see somebody else. You know, you guys said great cook actually introduced us, but I can remember the first time I saw Greg speed or gray speak.

[00:11:35] Mike Boyle: And I thought, wow, this guy gets it. He's thinking at a different level than a lot of the other people that I've seen for first time. I saw Stuart McGill speak. I had the same sensation. Wow. This guy gets it. And the ability to, to, I would say if this, you know, if I got to run college, the ability to recognize people smarter than you and then immediately steal their stuff.

[00:11:59] Josh Kennedy: We've been stealing [00:12:00] off a lot of people because there's definitely a lot of many, many, most people I would say, James, are smart. I don't know. So as you say, yeah, Mike is absolutely Mike Stuart McGill. I think, I think we had Stuart McGill on the podcast four times over the years or five times. 

[00:12:16] Mike Boyle: Yeah. I love Stuart.

[00:12:17] Mike Boyle: No, I just remember sitting, I was sitting in the front row at a seminar. I was one of the speakers and he was one of the speakers and I was excited to hear him speak. And I grabbed a seat right in the front and I sat there and I remember thinking, wow, you know, and I always thought about staff. I said, oh God, I'm going to go back and everybody's going to be mad at me because I got a list of 20 exercises we're not doing anymore.

[00:12:40] Mike Boyle: We were doing all kinds of different crunches. In my mind, you know, after listening to Stu was like, okay, we're doing everything wrong. And then I'd get back and say, guys, we're doing everything wrong. And everyone was like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, what I mean is I just spent two hours listening to this guy.

[00:12:54] Mike Boyle: That's smarter than all of us. And he said, we shouldn't do this stuff. [00:13:00] Therefore, we're not going to do that stuff. And that was sort of the evolutions of our program. As we went along, was this consistently looking for people that were going to be better in an area than we were. And then going and watching those people.

[00:13:17] Mike Boyle: I did that years ago with Mark Verstegen. And I can remember going to, to then what was the international performance Institute, uh, down in Bradenton now IMG academies. But when Mark was there, it was ball, Terry tennis. And then they had contained inside that what they called international performance Institute that Mark ran prior to athletes performance prior to XOs.

[00:13:39] Mike Boyle: And I just remember watching him and thinking, wow, they're doing some really cool stuff. We have to figure out a way. to incorporate that into what we're doing. So I think the cool thing about our programming now is that it's at a really high level of evolution because we've been evolving it for 40 years.

[00:13:57] Mike Boyle: We've been consistently looking at [00:14:00] what, what would be best practice, whether it was best practice in physical therapy, or whether it was best practice in speed development, whatever it was, and then saying, how do we incorporate that? Into what we're doing in a way that makes sense. We didn't know the idea of, you know, we're not throwing out the baby with the bath water.

[00:14:17] Mike Boyle: We're not throwing our program away. We're simply saying, is there a way, you know, can we improve our warmups? Can we improve our plyo drills? Can we improve what we're doing from a medicine ball standpoint? I remember, you know, at IPI, they had a huge market at a medicine ball wall built the medicine ball wall.

[00:14:33] Mike Boyle: And I'm not kidding was probably, I'm going to say it was 80 feet long and 20 feet high. At one end of the building, this poured concrete wall and they were doing all these throws off the wall and we had tried medicine ball stuff because I had listened to the track guys and everybody talking about medicine balls, but we were outside like kind of throwing him and then chasing after them.

[00:14:54] Mike Boyle: And this, you know, guys didn't really like it. Guys thought it was stupid. You know, the further I throw it, the [00:15:00] further I have to go get it. You know what I mean? It was like, this is dumb. And then I started to realize. And that's one thing that's in, you know, we talked about that in the new book and that was in the first version of the book.

[00:15:09] Mike Boyle: Medicine ball walls. The ability to throw the ball with velocity and have the ball come back to you was just so sensible. I just remember looking and thinking, I can't believe we're not doing that. We've got to figure out how to do this. 

[00:15:23] James Breese: Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting what you say about the idea of being interpersonal and making, keeping it simple, almost like giving a simple stupid, like one of the things I see time and time again is that particularly in today's field, there's a lot of people have access to a lot of information and they go down the science and information route.

[00:15:41] James Breese: But they don't work on that interpersonal skills. You know, from all years working with athletes, they're social beings. They want to be part of a team sport most of the time. They want to be interactive. They want to be able to communicate. And if you can't communicate across efficiently, no matter how much you learn or dive into the research and seeing what's going on, they ain't going to get it.

[00:15:58] James Breese: And they're not going to buy into what you're trying [00:16:00] to do. And I think we call it bedside manner here. in the UK, I think you need a good bedside manner. But the ability to break things down and communicate things really simply, and that's what we're trying to do, even with, like, some of the stuff that you do, and I think you do, you know, fantastically well at taking this stuff from Stuart McGill, all these other guys, um, who are out there as well.

[00:16:20] James Breese: I mean, you have to make it simple and it applied. I think obviously your main target is. is athletes. We're working mostly with aging athletes. So we have to take your work a little bit sometimes, right? Okay. What's going to work here for the aging masters athlete and how can we apply it appropriately there?

[00:16:33] James Breese: So it's, it is great. It's great how you take that stuff and we can read that and go quickly. Okay. That's how he's doing it with them. Okay. This may or may not work here, but what you deliver and what you speak, particularly in the new book as well is. It's practical. And I think that's a really important thing.

[00:16:46] James Breese: I don't care what the science says half the time. It can work great, but if it doesn't relate within the coaching room on the coaching floor, no one's ever going to get it right. And that's what I think you do really well is you blend the two together. That's what I'm trying to say. 

[00:16:58] Mike Boyle: I honestly, you're right.

[00:16:59] Mike Boyle: I [00:17:00] think that's what we do really well. I think that's what, what we've done really well over a long period of time. Because as you said, I think, and again, our problem, our problem in the field, there's a lot of problems, but one of them, and I always in my presentations, I have these different, the different guys, you know, and one of the guys is the scientist guy who, I mean, he's brilliant, but he can't communicate.

[00:17:24] Mike Boyle: And then there's the bodybuilding guy, you know, who just, I mean, he's jacked. He looks unbelievable, but he can't communicate and got to be able to get like for us. I'm always looking now. I want people with that look athletic and have great communications skills. Yeah. We tend to, and I've said this a bunch the last couple of years, if I, if someone is applying for an internship or says, I want to come and help you out, if they say I'm a bodybuilder or I'm a powerlifter or an Olympic, I'm an Olympic lifter, I consider those to be drawbacks, not [00:18:00] benefits.

[00:18:01] Mike Boyle: And years ago, everybody in the field would have probably identified themselves as one of those groups in strength and conditioning. And now I look at it and think, gee, I need an athlete. I need ideally a team sport athlete with really good interpersonal skills. And then I can teach them the strength and conditioning stuff.

[00:18:20] Mike Boyle: Is not tremendously complicated, but getting a communicator, I always say, you know, someone, someone who likes people versus someone who likes working out. Well, that's the other thing. Some will say, well, you know, I want to go into this field. I really like working out. And I'm like, yeah, that's a shitty reason to go into this field just because you like working out.

[00:18:35] Mike Boyle: If you said, I want to go into this field because I really like helping people, I really like seeing people improve. That's where it would be significantly better. Mhm. 

[00:18:47] James Breese: I agree. It's interesting the way the way we approach it here in developing coaches in house here at Strength Matters, for example, is I'm, I've, well, we've coined this term called the T shape coach where I'm looking for like coaches who have a breadth of knowledge, right?

[00:18:59] James Breese: But they go [00:19:00] specialist in certain areas. So I'll give you a classic example is, you know, the breadth of the top of the top of the T as we call it, they have basic knowledge in health and fitness. Great. Everyone has that and they can specialize in certain areas. They know some basics about nutrition and lifestyle habits.

[00:19:12] James Breese: Behavioral psychology, you know, that's kind of the right hand side of the tea. Then the left hand side of the tea, I want them to know a little bit about business. Not everything, not enough to be dangerous with it, but they understand what we're doing with the business compartment. But then on the eye shapes of the team, we all want to specialize in different areas.

[00:19:27] James Breese: So for me, for example, I'm passionate about strength training. and cardiovascular development. Those are my two areas of speciality, right? Josh knows a little bit about what I do with that. You know, he knows enough as well, but his Josh's areas, their nutrition and lifestyle and fat loss, right? So when I'm developing, working for coaches, I'm looking for them to specialize in these little areas, but have this top of the T breadth of knowledge to compliment each other.

[00:19:49] James Breese: But I'm with you. Like I look at powerlifting and body lift bodybuilding as. When we're talking about longevity and health span for most of our clients, right? Powerlifters and bodybuilders don't fit that bill most of the time, [00:20:00] unfortunately. And people have, like, crapped all over me most of the time for saying that sort of stuff, but they just don't.

[00:20:05] James Breese: You know, bodybuilders know a lot about fat loss, doesn't mean they're healthy. And the same with powerlifters and getting strong. And also, like, my thing is, like, we want aging athletes. who are mobile and fast still. I know, I know speed declines and power declines over age, but I want to make them and prolong that thing.

[00:20:20] James Breese: I don't see many fast power lifters. I don't really see many, you know, fast bodybuilders in that, in that sense. And it's, it's that kind of like knowledge that you're right. It's funny, right? What works for you guys. And it's, that's a whole different crowd. And we're definitely not as part of that crowd 

[00:20:33] Mike Boyle: anymore.

[00:20:34] Mike Boyle: Well, and that's, I think that at least where I read it was in range with Epstein, he talked about I people and T people and you need your eye people. Stuart McGill is my eye person. Yeah. When it comes to core training and low back pain, I need to have that guy, you know, great cook is my eye person when it comes to evaluating movement.

[00:20:54] Mike Boyle: I need for me to be a good T person. I need to identify who my eye people are. [00:21:00] I think that's a really big key to being successful. So that's it. And you're right. I mean, that's what we're looking for, but like for me, you know, if I'm thinking that T is made up, like, you know, it's almost like for me, maybe the T is a little bit slanted in terms of, I want to slant towards the interpersonal side, because I feel like any knowledge can be backfilled.

[00:21:21] Mike Boyle: Mm hmm. But I'm very fun. I used to quote all the time. I said, I can make you smarter. I probably can't make you nicer. It's true. And I'm probably as I'm not going to be able to change that. Yeah. But if you said, oh Mike, I don't have a really great life. I have one of our best coaches, Courtney uh has pretty much no background in any sports science at all.

[00:21:43] Mike Boyle: She played two sports in college, cross and ice hockey and she has interpersonal skills coming out her ears. And she's one of the best people that we have, but if you put her on the board and say, I'm going to ask her a bunch of complicated questions about strength and conditioning, I [00:22:00] don't think she'd probably do great.

[00:22:01] Mike Boyle: Yeah. A pretty rudimentary explanation. And she'd be able to say, well, this is what we do. And here's how we do it. Yeah, I would say, you know, internal combustion. I can drive a car. You don't understand the process of internal combustion. I could not explain to you really how the car works or like what the carburetor does or any of that stuff, but I'm not at all hesitant to drive.

[00:22:27] Mike Boyle: I don't ever get in the car. Wow. I really shouldn't do this 'cause I don't understand the workings of the engine. 

[00:22:33] James Breese: I, I love that. Sorry. Sorry, my Karen. Sorry I interrupted. So. 

[00:22:36] Mike Boyle: No, no. I said, you know, so it's like, I think that's a big part of where we need to be in the field. We have so many people who understand all about the engine.

[00:22:44] Mike Boyle: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. And they're probably shitty drivers. You know, they're out cracking somebody and then think I could explain to you exactly, I know exactly what was going on in the, you know, inside. I'm like, it doesn't really matter. That's relevant. 

[00:22:58] James Breese: It's absolutely, I can relate to that on [00:23:00] so many levels because luckily enough, like I'm fortunate enough to have been, um, so I was a police officer in London for quite a long time and I was in the police equivalent of top gun for driving.

[00:23:12] James Breese: So I was a big part of that. How many weeks courses I did like four to six months worth of courses at a time. Did we ever learn about the inner workings of the car? We've taught how to drive it. That's exactly what we did and how to drive it fast and how to drive it safely and communicate at the same time.

[00:23:27] James Breese: I come back to my, my degree was French and German and in computer science. I didn't go into the sports background here. So what I found was like, as I was learning, man, I got given, Pavel gave me a book, a copy of Gray Cook's movement book. Right. And I opened it for the first time. And I was like, I don't understand a single word of this.

[00:23:43] James Breese: I looked at it like, I don't understand it. This is too complex. I just kept trying to figure this out. And I realized the more I found of red stuff, the stuff I didn't understand. But I had to make it simple for me to understand. And I thought, well if I can't understand this, and I'm really passionate about this, how is Joe Bloggs on the street [00:24:00] can be able to understand it too?

[00:24:00] James Breese: So that's been our mission all the time. Same as you, with Dan John I love as well, how he keeps things simple. How do we dumb it down, not in a bad way, but like how do we take something that's extremely complex and simplify it into just a few words, or sometimes like you say in your, in your work, getting people into positions where you're doing very, very little coaching.

[00:24:19] James Breese: They're just doing it without you saying anything. Right. And that's kind of my whole process and thought process trying to build is get that idea, find smart people, make it easy to understand, and then apply it. That's practical in the weight room or wherever Whatever it may be, but communication, I think, out of anything from my time in the police, like it was the communication skills you had to learn, because if you didn't learn it properly, you get a punch in the face, quite simply.

[00:24:43] James Breese: And as Mike Tyson says, if you get, you know, everything's easy to get punched in the face, right? And it's, um, it's one of those sorts of things that you don't get the communication, right? But that's what people connect to. And the more you can. Get connected with people, the more they'll buy into your philosophy and then you can get them better results and get them to where they want to [00:25:00] get to.

[00:25:00] James Breese: So we're fully behind the idea of communication being more important than degrees. Oh my gosh. And I think our term that we use as well is that we have a policy here at Shrink Matters stolen from the, from the New Zealand All Blacks as in no dickheads. So hashtag no dickheads is our policy. We don't work with anyone who's a dickhead.

[00:25:15] James Breese: We don't have any people who come into the company as a dickhead, like anything here. So fortunately Mikey passed the no dickhead test. So there you go. Congratulations. 

[00:25:23] Mike Boyle: I'm a big believer. I always said, you know, it's, I love legacy. And I actually talked to star struck. I was actually in London and I met James Kerr, who was the author.

[00:25:33] Mike Boyle: One of the few times I went to somebody and said, Hey, can I take a picture with you? And, uh, and I got him to take a picture with me because. I love that's one of my favorite books because I, you know, it's a book all about rugby. That's not at all about rugby. Exactly. You can just read it and put, just pick your word, soccer, hockey, whatever word you want to put in.

[00:25:56] Mike Boyle: Just keep thinking that word as you read the book and [00:26:00] everything will be the same in the book as you go through. 

[00:26:04] James Breese: It's brilliant, isn't it? I guess it's, and we've had, we've had, we've had Nick Gill on the podcast a couple of times as well. Nick Gillie's a brilliant lad to have and speak to. And it's, it is, it comes down to those three core concepts of humility, excellence, respect, right from the book.

[00:26:16] James Breese: And like, that's a big thing for us is that humility factor as a coach, you know, what I'd say, I'm looking for humility. That's the first thing I'm looking for because without humility. You're never going to embrace new concepts, new ideas to develop and move forward. And then you're not growing the respect of other people around you.

[00:26:30] James Breese: So I love that book. It's one of my top 10 books, I think in the, in ever in terms of coaching development too. So it's, uh, it's a good recommendation for those who haven't read it. James Kerr legacy 

[00:26:39] Mike Boyle: for sure. Yeah. And it's funny, Nick, I got on the phone with Nick for an hour, one time, cause he just contacted me out of nowhere.

[00:26:44] Mike Boyle: He said, Hey, you'd have an hour to get on the phone, but that's the humility, right? The is about. Not caring, you know, how old somebody is, what sport they're in. It's just looking at someone and saying, I, [00:27:00] and I mean really selfishly, right? I think you'd have something to offer me that, and I would love to, to take you up on that offer that you didn't make it.

[00:27:11] Mike Boyle: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. But , that was absolutely, um, international Performance Institute. I knew one of Mark's. assistants. Daryl Etto was a friend and a casual friend at that time, but I knew him enough. And I just said, Hey, can I just come down and be a fly on the wall and sit around and watch the workouts? And he was like, yeah, it should be fine.

[00:27:32] Mike Boyle: I don't think anybody will care. And I just, we flew down, it's a beautiful, at that time, you know, Bradenton, Florida, it's a beautiful area. And I thought, eh, if it's bad, I'll go to the beach and I ended up spending days just sitting there again with my little yellow legal pad, writing notes and having little conversations with myself about things that I thought we could do better.

[00:27:53] Mike Boyle: But it's that ability to continually do that, that will separate you out. Yeah. Yeah. I 

[00:27:59] Josh Kennedy: think [00:28:00] so. I think that's something. We found when we go to conferences that a lot of coaches don't actually do. Someone like, let's say Perry, he always goes to other people's talks to try and learn, which is, we always try to as well.

[00:28:14] Josh Kennedy: But, you know, there are, I'm not going to name any names, but people, you know, they'll do theirs and they'll, they'll be off, uh, you know, not, not listen to other people. I think that's one great thing about yourself, Mike, that you are, you're always wanting to learn, as we just said, humility, you know, um.

[00:28:29] Josh Kennedy: Wanted to expand your knowledge, not afraid to, you know, admit when you are wrong and change, like when you mentioned before about taking everything out your program when you'd watch Stuart McGill. I think that's, you know, sets you apart in this field because, um, You get a lot of backlash sometimes on Twitter, don't 

[00:28:47] James Breese: you?

[00:28:47] James Breese: Mike, Mike, Mike, I'll tell you this. Let me tell you this, Mike. Sometimes I just go, I make myself a cup of tea or coffee. I'll go on Twitter, look at you on Twitter and I'll enjoy five, even sometimes 20 minutes of seeing the crap [00:29:00] that you get. It's, it's so entertaining. So thank you for that. Like it's, it's a pure entertainment.

[00:29:05] James Breese: I don't know how you must, you must, I'm hoping you see it the same way as entertainment. Sometimes I'm drunk when I 

[00:29:10] Mike Boyle: do it, which is not good, but I'm not enjoying a cup of tea. No, but I look at that and think, and that's what I don't understand with people that whatever back and forth banter, that's learning, teaching.

[00:29:27] Mike Boyle: And for me, it's adopting the current method of teaching and learning. I look at people when I'd be like people, I, that drives me crazy when people say, Oh, I don't do the social media thing. I look at people and I think, you know, cause again, I'm 63. I'm not young. I think you're a moron, right? It's like saying, you know, I'm still walking to work.

[00:29:48] Mike Boyle: I don't, I didn't get a call, you know, at this stage of the game, you're like, Nope, I'm not doing that car thing. I'm going to walk. You think this is progress. I'm not going to fly. I'm going to take, you know, you could say you guys [00:30:00] could take the boat probably still to America. I think that would probably, but most of you would prefer a plane.

[00:30:09] Mike Boyle: And I look at that as when people say, you know, I don't, I don't do the Instagram thing. I don't do, I don't do Facebook. And I think, It's like you're attesting to your own ignorance and bragging about it and I just don't get it. TikTok Mike! I'm not, I've resisted TikTok, I'm not. If I could figure 

[00:30:30] Josh Kennedy: out TikTok.

[00:30:31] Josh Kennedy: I know, I don't understand it either. James, you know, you know 

[00:30:34] James Breese: TikTok? I don't understand. So, Mike, Mike, this, this is, this is so funny, right? So our si our si This is off a tangent by the way. Yeah. Slight tangent here now. But our sister co, we have a sister company called Cricket Matters. So, like, my specialty, my gift that I wish I had when I was younger, I'm done properly, was I was a, I was a, I was trying to become a professional cricketer and I didn't make it 'cause I wasn't.

[00:30:51] James Breese: Good enough, you know, the usual thing. So you go to different routes, but I'm back now playing again. Uh, it's like I'm playing international. I just played an international this week against [00:31:00] England and like for over 40. So I'm in my, I'm a master's athlete now. Right. So I'm playing with this. So we set up this company, this side company called cricket matters, like just to train cricketers because cricketers are the most poorly trained athletes, I think on the planet.

[00:31:11] James Breese: They haven't, they're like, it's only become professional last. Really last 15, 20 years, but there's no S and C. There's nothing like in the world of baseball, right? And I'll pick your brain at a separate time. So I thought, do you know what? Some of the cricketers need to learn some of this stuff because they're still doing the same old crap.

[00:31:25] James Breese: They're loading cricketers who throw the ball, like ball a ball with heavy barbell back squats. They've all got back pain. They're blowing the discs out. They've got stress fractures, you name it, right? So I'm like, no, solve this. I'm done. No one's doing this. I'm going to sort this out. Let's post a couple of videos on TikTok.

[00:31:38] James Breese: The reach is phenomenal. Like it's, I've gone from naught to like 5, 000 followers in the space of, from nobody who knew me essentially, but whatever happens, if you post something that people like, it just goes completely viral. So in all honesty, I can't recommend the video, just simple little videos of a how to or demonstration that's going to blow up someone's mind and it'll go reach and the reach is incredible.

[00:31:59] James Breese: So I, I 

[00:31:59] Mike Boyle: [00:32:00] highly actually encourage you. My daughter's in the other room and she started my Instagram for me. And I may get her to. And maybe I'll make the move to tick tock because I can't, it seemed to me to center a lot around kids dancing in the beginning. And I'm thinking it did at all. So I could not see myself dancing on camera in order to entertain.

[00:32:21] Mike Boyle: I mean, 

[00:32:21] Josh Kennedy: to be fair, there's still a lot of dancing on there. I have to say, but there is more and more. Personal trainers, athlete, et cetera, on TikTok, but yeah, you'll see a lot of 

[00:32:31] James Breese: dancing. I generally think with your, with your, obviously your reach and connections and your database, I think you grow very quickly and I think you'll reach a wider audience, particularly the young.

[00:32:43] James Breese: Let's put this way, you know, the younger crowd and maybe not know much, but that's basically most of the time. So obviously massive tangent, but I, I, I resisted and then I can now see the power of it. And I could also see the most important thing is the return on investment, the time putting onto it and bringing it back into the business in [00:33:00] terms of financial, but also.

[00:33:02] James Breese: Imparting knowledge and, and driving conversation about certain things. So it's, it's led to more awareness and more people trying new things out. So I, I can't recommend it enough in that aspect. 

[00:33:12] Mike Boyle: I gotta think about that. And I've thought run, because I did that with Instagram, I was not, I thought, again, Instagram was again, my daughter and her friends sharing pictures sunset, you know, whenever they did that day, what, what they ate.

[00:33:24] Mike Boyle: And then Kevin Carr one day came and said something about Instagram. And he said, yeah, Marco and I, his old partner, we have 25, 000 followers on our Instagram. And I was like, you have what it was like? Yeah. Our movement is medicine. 000 followers. I came home to my daughter that day and I said, set me up an Instagram.

[00:33:45] Mike Boyle: And she's like, for what? I was like, I have 131, 000 now. Yeah. Wow. And again, with zero people I say, Oh, you know, you're doing a great job with organic growth. I'm like, yeah, I guess. I have no idea how it's, how it's working, [00:34:00] but it's, 

[00:34:02] James Breese: it's, but you'll tend to find it's like, you know, I'll just, just this guy, this, this is massive for anyone who's listening in.

[00:34:06] James Breese: a massive time. I love it. I love the actual question in a minute. But no, but it's, but it's, it's one of those things where like those, those videos you do, if you, you, you speaking with your team staff meetings or like you and your car, that's perfect. Honestly, people who know about it will find they'll just watch it because it's a longer form format.

[00:34:24] James Breese: So there you go. That's my little tip for you today. I love it. There we go. Let's get to the real questions. I love this. 

[00:34:33] Mike Boyle: Yeah, we're happy. We're almost three quarters of the way through. If you guys haven't asked me yet, we should 

[00:34:39] Josh Kennedy: probably get some questions in. Uh, I was, before we went off on a random TikTok, uh, tangent, I was leading onto when I was talking about being humble and learning, blah, blah, blah, and changing your mind.

[00:34:48] Josh Kennedy: It was leading into this. What I'm about to say now, um, breathing and core work. I think that's been a big, uh, sort of how you change your mind. I guess you sort of, uh, you realize that you were wrong in the past, [00:35:00] which is very. humble of you. Um, like I interviewed, I think it was back in 2015, I interviewed Patrick McKeown on the podcast and I thought his work was fantastic and really, really fascinating.

[00:35:12] Josh Kennedy: And then did absolutely nothing with it. Did we James? We just sort of went, yeah, that's cool. And then we did nothing with it. Then we started to introduce a bit of nasal breathing, you know, to try to improve oxygen uptake, you know, carbon dioxide tolerance, et cetera, et cetera. So we were sort of scratching the surface.

[00:35:26] Josh Kennedy: And it was only really, I think when we did your core course online, that we were like, we sort of clicked exactly like you did and went, Hmm, we should probably start doing this properly. And cause it makes such a difference, you know, when, how you train the core. Can you talk about how your approach and sort of attitude to, to breathing has changed your and informed your core 

[00:35:47] Mike Boyle: training?

[00:35:49] Mike Boyle: Well, first I'll say, um, I feel like you in some ways, cause I feel like we're still not anywhere near where we should be yet. But we've drastically changed in terms [00:36:00] of, and I was lucky enough. I was on Patrick's podcast and he did our podcast and they did a staff meeting for us. And the basic idea is that when I first started out, I thought the whole breathing thing was dumb, truthfully.

[00:36:13] Mike Boyle: Cause I, everybody right, right from the first smack, you know, you start crying and you're like,

[00:36:22] Mike Boyle: And then I, you know, I would make jokes like that all the time. All my clients are breathing. I don't think I need to teach them. I don't have any dead clients. I know I had a million one. It all appear even more ignorant now than they probably did at the time that I was using them. Because then I started to look at eyes, Sue Falsoni.

[00:36:40] Mike Boyle: I still remember came one time and spoke at our staff meeting and she started out her talk and sued. She's I love Sue. She's just a brilliant person. And she said something to the effect of the diaphragm is my favorite muscle in the body. And I just remember I sat there and went, Hmm, [00:37:00] the diaphragm is a muscle.

[00:37:02] Mike Boyle: Like I thought of the diaphragm, like, as like, it's a thing, not really a muscle, you know, kind of like a lung is a lung. A liver is a liver diaphragm is a diaphragm. And then she starts explaining how the diaphragm works. And how the dome descends when you, uh, you know, when you're inhaling and, and I'm like, wow, this really, this is a muscle.

[00:37:27] Mike Boyle: And then that just started to lead me up. And I start looking at the anatomy of breathing. And you're realizing, okay, when I exhale, the, the, the dome is basically ascending and you, it's kind of very, um, counterintuitive, right? Isn't it? Incongruent, I guess you look at, it's counterintuitive, however you wanna look at it.

[00:37:46] Mike Boyle: Like, okay, it doesn't really make sense. But then you start realizing, okay, when I really maximally exhale, the muscles of exhalation Are my deep abdominal muscles. They are [00:38:00] the, what, you know, when I try to completely evacuate my abdominal category, what I end up doing is getting this great contraction of my deep abdominal muscles.

[00:38:09] Mike Boyle: And then I started thinking, wait a second, we've got to, because in the past, before that, in core training, we were telling people things like, you know, fire your transverse, squeeze this, do this. And again, all very well intentioned. You know, we were sort of. we were wandering around in the science of this room that we didn't really have, you know, we probably, I guess it would be more like we were wandering around, you know, with a blindfold on in that room.

[00:38:32] Mike Boyle: Yeah. Well, it's like, you know, brace or draw in or what? Yeah, exactly. So we were like, brace, draw in. And then we argued about brace versus draw in. And then when we started thinking, wait a second, how about if we just said exhale and really think, you know, and then you get into. Understanding exhalation, pursed lip, exhale, and you know, you go back to your day, you know, um, in Epstein's book in range, he talks about undiscovered connections.

[00:38:57] Mike Boyle: You start to discover the connection in [00:39:00] respiratory therapy of pursed lip exhale. Now in respiratory therapy, they've been talking about pursed lip exhale forever. Uh, those of us in the training world were completely ignoring them. So suddenly we're thinking. Wow. What you inhale through really matters.

[00:39:13] Mike Boyle: You know, you've got a piece here that was made for inhalation and you know, it's got hairs in it to trap dust. It produces nitrous oxide. It's all this really cool stuff that happens. And then, you know, we've got these other muscles that help us to maximally exhale. And then we wonder, and we've got these other muscles up here, scalenes and traps and all these things that are accessory inhalation muscles that we probably don't want to use.

[00:39:40] Mike Boyle: And then you start watching somebody who doesn't breathe well, and you kind of see them and they're like, and I remember I was watching a guy on, on one of the news channels one time. And I thought, my God, this guy's he's near death because he was talking and I could see his necktie going up [00:40:00] and realizing this guy probably has terrible headaches and terrible headaches and all these other kinds of maladies going on that could literally be solved.

[00:40:09] Mike Boyle: If someone said. I'm going to teach you how to box breathe, right? But so I guess, I mean, we could literally spend the whole podcast on breathing. Yeah, the basic idea for us was that we realized that we were going to do better with isometric holds and we were going to do better if we let those isometric holds contract, um, pair themselves up with exhalations.

[00:40:37] Mike Boyle: Yeah. So when I'm thinking, I mean, when I want a core contraction, what I tell somebody is I want a maximum exhalation. I want you to try to exhale for five minutes or five minutes, five seconds. Sorry.

[00:40:53] Mike Boyle: It would be really good if you could do it for five seconds. And it [00:41:00] drastically changed what we were doing from a core training perspective, because suddenly, and I, and I think, I think there'll be more turns of the wheel because I think one of the things with Patrick's work is I don't think Patrick has simplified it enough yet.

[00:41:15] Mike Boyle: I think, cause you know, he sent me a breathing book and massive, I mean, a massive, brilliant, but. Way too much information. And, and I think that's grace movement. You know, you look at grace movement, same thing, massive book, too much information. And what we realized now is we need sort of the, the reader's digest version of the cliff notes version of these books where someone said, okay, I'm going to try to scrape out all the other stuff and just leave the good stuff in.

[00:41:43] Mike Boyle: And I think. Every time we get that's like Sue was able to do that a little bit. Sue Falcone did a really nice job. Her book. I can't think of the name of her book right now. Um, her rehab book, but I said chapter eight was breathing and her chapter eight was worth [00:42:00] buying the book for because it's that chapter because she did a really good job of that.

[00:42:04] Mike Boyle: Okay. I'm going to boil this down. No pun intended to, uh, to the real essentials. And, and that's what I tried to do. I rewrote that core chapter is probably the longest chapter in my new book. And I, you know, you're trying to, to again, compress the information and make it really understandable. And I actually used it the first time I used this analogy.

[00:42:29] Mike Boyle: But I, you know, one of the things, because now we get into people who are there, uh, I call them the anti anti-rotation people, , and, which I said, actually that was one of my 

[00:42:40] James Breese: questions actually, that was, that was 

[00:42:41] Mike Boyle: pro rotation. I think if you're anti anti-rotation, then you're pro rotation, but mm-hmm. . When you look at those people and you realize, wow, now there are people who are saying, Your anti rotation exercises are bad and it's.

[00:42:53] Mike Boyle: It just shows their complete lack of understanding. And they say, you know, people are supposed to move it. I'm like, we get it. Um, we're [00:43:00] not, we're not asking someone to become a statue. We're just looking at what the muscles do. And I use the analogy of, um, rope on a sail. And I said, the sails useless without the rope, right?

[00:43:13] Mike Boyle: I mean, the other, the sail would just be flapping around in the breeze. If you did that, that's. That anti rotation effect in terms of there has to be a controller. And yes, we realize that that controller may move, may expand or may contract. But ultimately, if we look at what our core muscles jobs are, they are to be controllers.

[00:43:34] Mike Boyle: They're not primarily movers. If I think about, you know, again, you're talking about cricket, but you know, if I'm, if I'm going to throw something hard or fast, It's going to come from hip internal, external rotation, and I'm going to have to control my trunk is going to be now a

[00:43:54] Mike Boyle: decelerator as I try to control that rotation as I move through. Because if I didn't, and I always say to people, [00:44:00] if you watch somebody throw and they couldn't decelerate, you know, you talk like the fast bowler and cricket, the arm is continually would spin forever. You know, it'd be spinning. Okay. Ran out of energy and it slowed down.

[00:44:12] Mike Boyle: Now it's at your side. It doesn't. Right. You know, your, your, your muscles in your back, the muscles in your core, the muscles in your rotator cuff, they function as a decelerator to change the acceleration that you created. So you're creating this acceleration, you know, off of your back foot through your hips.

[00:44:29] Mike Boyle: But now, as you're transferring what the core does, I always say the core is a transfer station. Take that incredible rotary ability that you created with your lower body and then transfer it into your upper body. And it can't do that. If it's, you know, if it's Gumby, if it's just floppy, right, it has to have a stiffness to it.

[00:44:51] Mike Boyle: And I, and literally an anti rotation control, right? Cause you're going to produce them. The majority of the rotation is going to be produced in your hips. And then the control mechanism is going to be [00:45:00] coming through your core. And so I just get, so that's where I, you know, Twitter, I get aggravated with people arguing and you don't, you're showing me by argument that you don't understand the topic.

[00:45:13] Mike Boyle: And so if you don't understand the topic, stay out of the argument, don't. Don't just say something stupid to me about, you know, David Weck and, you know, coiling or, you know, I don't want to hear that. Yeah. Sorry. I got, I got, it's fine. I, 

[00:45:31] James Breese: I was, I, I, I, I, I had a, I had the. Privilege, I think is the word to say that, uh, I went to David Weck's facility in San Diego a while ago and he introduced me to that and I wasn't quite sure, for two hours, I what was happening.

[00:45:44] James Breese: I think that's the best way to describe it. I'll, I'll leave it at that. But it was a, it was a, it was a fun two hours. I'll put it that way. 

[00:45:50] Mike Boyle: And the interesting thing, and I said to someone the other day, he has, there's something in, there is something to what he's saying, but it's not what he [00:46:00] thinks it is.

[00:46:01] Mike Boyle: Because it's not, I mean, I was watching one of the running videos and he was talking about how he'd invented a new way to run, and I was like, running is pretty standard over the last however thousands of years, you know, it's like, you're probably not reinventing that at any time in the near future. Well, and, and the fact that you think, okay, I just figured out how everybody should, everybody's been doing this wrong.

[00:46:27] Mike Boyle: And, and I figured it out. It's like, uh, those kind of moments. I wish, I hope someday that I would ever have a light bulb moment like that, where I realized that. Wow, guys, I, you know, I, I cracked the code. I figured it out. We've been doing this wrong the whole time sort of thing. And it's like, eh, I don't know.

[00:46:44] Mike Boyle: Although actually, I guess I did, but I did that in double leg squatting. So maybe I, I feel like I had that. Well, 

[00:46:50] James Breese: it's, it's funny you say that double leg squatting, because that's kind of like this, everything, what you've been saying ties in nicely here a little bit. So like one of the biggest light bulb moments for me into my early career [00:47:00] in the mid 2000s was, and this is just me personally, I wasn't reading any of this stuff.

[00:47:03] James Breese: I was just like, You know, the internet was around, but it wasn't as what it is today. But me personally, I found that whenever I put a barbell on my back, everything hurt. Yet all the advice was for me to get faster, stronger and play better was to load more weight onto my back and squat more. So I, I followed the herd, uh, and I got hurt a lot.

[00:47:24] James Breese: I had back pain a lot. Funnily enough, I got slower. I got all these different things. So I just made a constitution because, you know, I'm, I'm not, I ain't doing it. I'm taking back squats out of my thing altogether because me personally, it hurts. I'm getting injured. It's a waste of time. But everyone was like saying all this stuff.

[00:47:38] James Breese: It's like, no, keep loading. Keep doing it. You know. And in, in today's world, like in cricket, you talk about cricket and the ability to rotate, you know, to resist rotation, anti rotation. I'm seeing cricketers load heavy barbells onto their back, onto their shoulders. And, and they're not doing any of the, you know, we can talk about training for into here for folks to look how to come home.

[00:47:57] James Breese: But in essence, what I'm seeing is like, [00:48:00] you know, similar, similar to pitchers in baseball, they're loading heavy weight, they're compressing their spine, they're compressing everything in their shoulders and they're internally rotating. So they have, they're trying to bowl and pit and throw the ball hard with internally rotated shoulders like this.

[00:48:11] James Breese: Everything's all gunky and they're trying to throw it as fast and they're breaking down all the time. Yet they're still loading in with heavy barbells on their back all the time. What was the light bulb moment for you? When did it, when did it, when do you realize, hang on a second, because I love your quote, like is it's like most back pain issues in your, in your facility are caused by the barbell back squats.

[00:48:30] James Breese: What was the light bulb moment for you when you found that out and started thinking about that in depth and go, no, I'm taking it out. 

[00:48:35] Mike Boyle: In truth, it was a series of light bulb moments. So the first light bulb moment was a Gary Gray chain reaction course. And Gary taught functional anatomy and that was a light bulb moment because I remember sitting there thinking, because he's talking about the idea that basically that origin insertion anatomy was silly and that it was stupid that they taught us that and this was 90.

[00:48:59] Mike Boyle: So [00:49:00] for me, I, you know, when I was first introduced to the thought process, someone said, you really got to go listen to Gary Gray talk and I went to Phoenix and I sat for three days. And I walked away and I was like, this guy's right. Like, this is crazy, but he's right in terms of, because I remember he got up there and he said his demonstration was simply when you put your foot on the ground, every muscle does the same thing.

[00:49:27] Mike Boyle: They all decelerate flexion. Everything is working together. When you push off the ground, every muscle is creating extension. There are no, you know, you don't have flexors and knee extensors and knee flexors and hip extensors and hip flexors. He said, you just have this sort of, and you think about it, you have this beautiful concert that's occurring where everything works together.

[00:49:49] Mike Boyle: And I went back and again, this is why I've never been afraid of change. So I went back and I get rid of my leg extension, my leg curl, my leg press right away. Boom. I went to the student recreation people. I said, you guys want another leg, leg extension, leg curl, [00:50:00] leg press. I just opened up enough room for another squat rack in my place and get rid of a bunch of this, you know, no quote unquote non functional stuff.

[00:50:09] Mike Boyle: That's what he's really talking about function. This is how the body works. So that was kind of light bulb number one. Then you start to really, when you say, okay. I understand functional anatomy. Then you start to look at the functional anatomy of the core and you start to realize, well, wait a second. You know, when I started looking at like, you know, some of the Yanda stuff and the idea of subsystems and the fact that, hey, wait a second, you know, my adductors are actually pelvic stabilizers and my glute medius is a pelvic stabilizer and my quadratus is a pelvic stabilizer.

[00:50:36] Mike Boyle: And then I realized, wow, from a core perspective, Everything is drastically different when I've got one leg on the ground. And then you start looking at sport and saying, well, wait, and this is just being simply analytical. How often am I doing things where I'm pushing off the ground simultaneously off of both legs?

[00:50:55] Mike Boyle: And you're thinking, Oh, really not, not very often, [00:51:00] much more time spent. On one leg when I watch every sport and the ambulation and all these things. And then the back pain thing. So it was a series. It was like dominoes, dominoes, dominoes. And then I've got all these American football guys and everybody that I have has back pain.

[00:51:17] Mike Boyle: It all relates directly to back squat, every single one. And then I started, you know, we play with front squats and belt squats. And then eventually I get to this point of thinking, uh, Well, you know, I love the one-leg stuff, but I can't figure out how to load it heavy enough. Then we get to the sort of rear foot elevated split squad, and I always say of all people, it's Joe DeFranco.

[00:51:39] Mike Boyle: Like the, the guy who pushes me over the edge in unilateral training is a guy who's never been a proponent of unilateral training, like Joe. And Joe in his day was like a meatheads. Meathead, right? Mm-hmm. and, and he's showing some guy split squatting, 240 pounds. And now I'm thinking, wait a second. And then, uh, if you have, have you ever run across Robbie Bork?

[00:51:58] Mike Boyle: Who's Irishman's [00:52:00] really super. I love Robbie. Robbie interned for us twice actually. And he's a genius level guy, but you know, he starts talking to me about bilateral deficit and he's like, you really need to go back and look at this bilateral deficit research. So again, it's like just domino, domino, domino.

[00:52:16] Mike Boyle: And so we just. We're literally rolling with it in terms of, Hey, we're going to try this heavier split stance stuff. And then we start seeing, wait a second, our guys are handling ungodly amounts of weight relative to what they supposedly could handle in a bilateral back squat. And so, You, you go from being kind of a science denier to looking at it and saying, wow, I understand what they meant about bilateral deficit and now I'm seeing less injuries.

[00:52:46] Mike Boyle: And now I'm seeing, you know, more function, more relation to injury prevention. It's just, you know, it's like, you've got to see, you know, you're, you're going with like your check marks on one box checks, you know, checks and balances. If you want to look at it and you're thinking I got like a hundred checks over here on my, you know, on my [00:53:00] bilateral side, my unilateral side.

[00:53:02] Mike Boyle: And the only one I can find over here on the bilateral side is that's the way we always did it. Kind of thing. There's nothing else. So it was not ever that, you know, aha, I figured it out thing as much as it was this gradual process of being overwhelmed with Um, I guess, you know, in some ways, you know, I'm, I'm getting overcome with the confirmation bias because it just keeps coming at me over and over again.

[00:53:34] Mike Boyle: Then I started talking, people would always ask me about research and I'd say, you really need to research the bilateral unilateral thing. So guys start doing studies and all the studies. Start saying the same thing where at least every study says at least equal, usually better no matter what they look at and they compare somebody doing a lot of program to a bilateral program.

[00:53:57] Mike Boyle: The worst case scenario is that the [00:54:00] results are equal and in general, the results would have were better and almost every study that's been done. So then you're thinking and then you're like, okay, I cannot get people hurt and I can get minimally the same. performance benefits. But if I really believe in this idea of function and functional anatomy, I'm getting far more for that than I was.

[00:54:22] Mike Boyle: So it's just, you can just having this overwhelming stack of evidence. 

[00:54:28] Josh Kennedy: And in terms of your, your single leg training, rear foot elevated splits cuts, obviously they were you go to, but you've started to move away a little bit away from those now. 

[00:54:35] Mike Boyle: We have, because what we realized is that after a while, people just, it was a very task orientation.

[00:54:43] Mike Boyle: I need to do more weight in this exercise. So, you know, I said it was like scissors, you know, people started getting better at pulling with their back leg. They were figuring out ways. To move more weight that weren't really what the original intention of the exercise [00:55:00] was. The original intention of the exercise was for someone to be really, I used to say like an outrigger on a canoe, your weights really concentrated on your front foot and your back leg is strictly there for balance.

[00:55:11] Mike Boyle: And instead it became this two legged thing where people would say their back hurt or their backside hip flexor was sore. And I thought, that's not really where we want it to go. So we started going to more skater squats, more, uh, true one leg squats. And then I run across Alex Natera's stuff. Which, and this is the beauty, like it, for me, it never stops.

[00:55:32] Mike Boyle: It's like the hits just keep on coming because this guy, Daz Drake, Daz Drake is a personal trainer in England. I don't know him at all, except to have communicated with him over the internet, but he writes an article basically where he's linking my book and Alex's research. And somehow I end up with that article.

[00:55:50] Mike Boyle: I don't remember how, maybe he sent it to me. I'm not sure, but I started looking at Alex's stuff and I'm thinking, wait a second, way, way more validation for [00:56:00] what we're doing from a unilateral perspective. And I start to communicate with Alex and ask him questions and. So we've just, it's, uh, it's the continual sort of motion of this going down the rabbit hole.

[00:56:15] Mike Boyle: And right now we're, we're so far down that we're probably never coming up. But what, 

[00:56:21] James Breese: why, what, what, these are questions you, why is the barbell back squat so controversial? Like, I don't understand it. Like I look on, maybe I'm sold. Maybe I'm the believer of the barbells, James. People power. Yeah, true. But it's, but I'm 

[00:56:34] Mike Boyle: saying it now.

[00:56:34] Mike Boyle: It's, it's the sacred power. Literally. It is the sacred power of strength and conditioning. And, and if you think, again, if you go back to that power lift or Olympic lift, if you go back to Mo, most of the people who were the influencers prior to maybe people like me mm-hmm. were bilateral people.

[00:56:52] Mike Boyle: Bodybuilders, powerlifters, Olympic lifters doing things bilaterally made perfect sense for them. If you bilateral squatted, you could develop [00:57:00] symmetrical legs. If you bilateral squatted, you could be a good powerlifter. If you bilateral squatted, you could improve your clean. They weren't performance people.

[00:57:08] Mike Boyle: But they were the influencers. And I think when you start to take the influence away from the influencer, they tend to really fight back. It's like that three stages of an idea, right? You know, you go through that three stages of the idea. And, you know, it's, you know, first, you know, people are, um, you know, first they laugh at you, then they violently oppose you.

[00:57:29] Mike Boyle: Right. And then in the third stage, they, they act like it was their idea all along. And that's a lot of what we went through. Initially, people just said, Mike Boyle's, a loser. Like people would put , like YouTube videos, Mike Boyle's a pussy, Mike Boyle's, soft , Mike Boyle's ruining. I mean, literally people, I've had people say to me, you're ruining strength and conditioning.

[00:57:49] Mike Boyle: I've had people say to my face, you are ruining strength and conditioning you, and what you're doing is wow those people, you know, [00:58:00] I combine unilateral and bilateral now. Right. You know, and that's. Kind of in that stage two thing, right? Where, and then you see some people, Oh, I've done, you know, we've been doing unilateral stuff forever.

[00:58:13] Mike Boyle: You know, Mike will step ups the same person who was recording YouTube videos saying what a loser I was 10 years ago. Yeah. And now you're saying, yeah, I've been doing that all along. You know, Mike Boyle is not so smart. He didn't think up this stuff by himself and you can watch the evolution of these people, but there are some, when you look at it, it's very similar to how I think people would look at things like politics or religion.

[00:58:37] Mike Boyle: There are people who their beliefs are strong and they're very in something not scientific. Yeah. And I think that's, 

[00:58:49] Josh Kennedy: yeah. We always say, James, you know, don't talk about, uh, if you're at the dinner table, nutrition, politics, religion, kettlebells 

[00:58:55] James Breese: and kettlebells.[00:59:00] 

[00:59:02] Mike Boyle: Yeah. I still can't believe you guys have a royal family. I'm like, boy, these people, what is go, you know? 

[00:59:10] Josh Kennedy: Apparently they make some money for us or something. But I was going to say James, looking quickly, just looking back at like, Cricket, mate, your, your, your sport, that's, they're still kind of in the dark ages.

[00:59:19] Josh Kennedy: That's still be really heavy barbell 

[00:59:21] James Breese: back squats. It's honestly, there's a, there's a massive problem in professional cricket right now where fastballs, those, you know, it's like, like similar to pitchers who are getting stress fractures on their back, like literally, literally stress fractures time and time again, they're breaking down time and time again, because they're so 

[00:59:40] Mike Boyle: far behind in strength and conditioning.

[00:59:43] Mike Boyle: Exactly. They're doing what we did 30 years ago. That's exactly right. We were seeing that 30 years ago where guys, you know, you're thinking... Okay. Wait a second. You know, this guy's getting injured because of the training and then we come around. I mean, I've, you know, I've [01:00:00] been preaching for 20 years at least.

[01:00:02] Mike Boyle: Right. The, you know, the number one goal of training is to, you know, or decrease the incidence of injury. Yeah. The two goal of training is not to get hurt in training. Absolutely. 

[01:00:15] Josh Kennedy: We're saying like professionals, aren't we, James? Dude, the squat technique is terrible as well. 

[01:00:20] Mike Boyle: It's not like it's good. I posted that the other day because it's people are posting videos.

[01:00:27] Mike Boyle: And I'm thinking it's sad because they don't even realize that what they're posting is bad. Exactly. 

[01:00:33] James Breese: I know that that's, that's, that is the problem I'm seeing. And I, I'm, I'm trying my hardest. 

[01:00:38] Mike Boyle: Almost hopeless. Because if someone's posting a video of something that's bad for you and you're doing it badly, and the person who thinks That they're looking at it, thinks that it's good, like that's probably incorrectable.

[01:00:53] Mike Boyle: Yeah, 

[01:00:54] James Breese: exactly. And then, so, Mike, just kind of moving this segways on a little bit here now, like I love, [01:01:00] like one of the best things I think you've done to influence me in the last few years is introduce me to the work of Tony Holler and Feed the Cats. Um, I really like, you know, when you said, like, I remember, I think you did a talk with Perform Better sometime.

[01:01:13] James Breese: I can't remember when it was. I remember you saying that record, rank, and publish, right? That was like, like, like the a ha bold moment for you in terms of speed training. It was like, wow, that's so simple, but it's so true, but I want to tie this into speed training and how, like, talk about how you're developing guys getting faster in the weight room or like faster for their sports in general.

[01:01:32] James Breese: And tying it into the idea of. Heavy barbell back squatting, which I'm seeing a lot of people do as well. Like talk to me about how your process now is in terms of speed development for the athletes and like how it, how you combine, like say the flies, the timings, and also maybe with the weights. How, how is your focus?

[01:01:48] James Breese: What is your focus around that now? It's interesting. 

[01:01:50] Mike Boyle: And Tony's another example, you know, much like Stuart McGill or gray or whatever, of finding somebody who's doing something better than you. And you start thinking, [01:02:00] wow, this guy's writing a lot of really interesting stuff about speed development. He's a high school guy, but he seems to be having really good results with his high school kids with this.

[01:02:09] Mike Boyle: And so again, it's just another rabbit hole that I chased down. And again, I meet Tony, I bring Tony out to speak to our coaches at our facility. Uh, I introduced Tony to everybody that I could think of. I'm like, everybody needs to know who Tony Haller is and hear him talk. And it is that the simplest point one is that, that I thought of is we used to use speed work as a test.

[01:02:35] Mike Boyle: So we would go in the weight room and do. You know, lots of cleans and lots of squats and lots of other things. And we did kind of run some sprints, but it wasn't very, uh, there was not a lot of structure to it. And the reality was they weren't even really sprints because one of the things that we realized if you're not timing them, the athletes are not eliciting their maximum because you've eliminated the competitive aspect of it.

[01:02:59] Mike Boyle: [01:03:00] And when we suddenly bought a timer and put the timer out there. Everything changed incredibly because suddenly now people knew exactly where they were in the pecking order where there was no more perception of, Oh, I'm faster than this guy. It's like, no, you're not. He ran faster than you. Like his time was this.

[01:03:18] Mike Boyle: Absolutely. Therefore, he is faster than you. And you can talk to me about, I'm faster than him in the game, or I bet against you, whatever. He's faster than you. He may not look faster than you, but that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is we're timing your movement over 10 yards. He traverses 10 yards faster than you traverse 10 yards that produced an effect in our kids, particularly that I wasn't expecting.

[01:03:44] Mike Boyle: And kids started to get fast. Like my son is the perfect example. My son got fast. He was not, when we first started timing, he looked at me and, you know, I remember there were kids in his group that ran a one four and he ran like a one eight. He was like, dad, I'm slow. And I was like, yeah, [01:04:00] you're right. You are.

[01:04:01] Mike Boyle: But two weeks later, he's running one fives. And what was just happening was that he suddenly realized, well, you know, if I try harder and push the ground harder, I go that way faster. It's just this beautiful cause and effect relationship. And then you start talking and Tony's talking about one of the things that he had said was, I don't care if my sprinters lift, I only care that my sprinters sprint.

[01:04:25] Mike Boyle: And that led me down another thought process, because again, this is, you know, there's so many tangents here. But so I was a Ben Johnson versus Carl Lewis guy. Because Ben Johnson fit my narrative, right? Ben Johnson was my confirmation bias in terms of he lifted weights. He could squat 600 pounds. He could bench 365.

[01:04:44] Mike Boyle: Lewis on the other hand was a little bit of a, you know, a disdainful lifter. Like he did it because they made him do it, but didn't really like it. And yet, when you looked at their times, you know, if you study that race, which is probably the most studied race of all time. Identical. I mean, like, [01:05:00] you know, the winner was hundreds of a second ahead.

[01:05:03] Mike Boyle: And, you know, if you look at every split, almost identical, almost identical. And you think, wow, two almost directly opposite training approaches in the weight room to nearly identical. Results on the track and then you take again, you, you put your logical brain on and you think, wow, what do these guys have in common?

[01:05:26] Mike Boyle: What's the commonality? And you know, it's idiotic, right? It's the, the, the moment sprints, right? Both ran sprints. And they both did jumps and Lewis saying, I was a jumper who ran the a hundred. I was a long jumper that ran the a hundred and yet he was the second best a hundred meter guy in history at that time.

[01:05:46] Mike Boyle: And you start thinking, wait a second, this sprinting and jumping probably has way more bearing. You know, we're probably seeing, you know, we're just getting confirmation bias. We're just looking at Lewis and thinking, you know, he doesn't fit my narrative and I'm looking [01:06:00] at Johnson and he fits mine. So then I always, I have a video of bolt.

[01:06:05] Mike Boyle: Strength training in, uh, Jamaica and I always tell people just go YouTube Usain Bolt strength training. It looks like the YMCA in 1970.

[01:06:18] Mike Boyle: It's so bad, right? And you look and think, okay, he's on this absolutely abysmal strength program where they, I mean, just, if you, you'll laugh harder than you do right now, when you watch the clips, you will be hysterical. And I look at that and think, Oh, wow. You know, if I put him on my strength training program, I could probably make him the fastest man in the world, except.

[01:06:45] Mike Boyle: He's already the fastest man in the world, right? And you come back to, well, what's the commonality? It's sprints. So we start to realize sprinting is a training tool that needs [01:07:00] to be utilized all the time. So our guys, we sprint, you know, yesterday I had my son and his friends in, we sprint, you know, we do fly 10.

[01:07:06] Mike Boyle: So we do, we go from five yard fly, 10 yard fly, 15 yard fly, 20 yard fly. Other days we do resisted flies. You know, with, you know, sled sprints, different versions of flies. We're always timing and we're always sprinting two days a week. We do three to four short sprints religiously. So that, I mean, that's been, when I say quantum leap for us.

[01:07:29] Mike Boyle: Quantum leap, massive change in training to the point again, in the new book, we talk about facility design. Number one thing I said, the sprint area. Leave a big ass space empty, the longest straightaway that you possibly have and use it to sprint in. But whatever that is like ours indoors. Now we have a 40 yards, which means we can do a 15 yard fly 10, 15 yard fly in 10 yard sprint.

[01:07:58] Mike Boyle: 10 yards, that's [01:08:00] 25. We got another 15 to slow down, you know, so we've only got, that's, that's what we can do indoors and we do it a lot. And again, not super simple. We don't do, we do very little speed teaching, but guys get better at sprinting. Through sprinting, it goes back to like the car idea, right?

[01:08:20] Mike Boyle: Where you're saying you didn't really understand the car. There's a great book called Most Likely to Succeed. And in Most Likely to Succeed, uh, the author talks about, uh, bike riding. And he does a whole chapter on this. He calls it the bike analogy. And he said, if, if we taught bike riding in school, kids would sit forever in the classroom and they'd learn about derailers.

[01:08:39] Mike Boyle: And they'd learned about different types of handlebars. And they'd learn about different seats. And they'd do million and one things. But by the time you get down to class, kid would know everything about a bike. And no one would have ridden a bike. Right. And then when someone wanted to actually teach their kid to ride a bike, they would have taken their kid outside, put him on a bike and pushed him away.

[01:08:57] Mike Boyle: Right. And let him start, you know, turning the pedals and [01:09:00] wobbling and figure it out. And within 30 seconds or a minute, the kid could ride a bike. But if you pulled the kid off the bike and said, could you explain the derailleurs again to me? Was that a banana seed on there? Was that a piece of seed? You know what the kid, I don't know.

[01:09:14] Mike Boyle: I just know that I turned the pedals and I held on, you know, I had this kind of a steering wheel thing up front here and, you know, I was able to negotiate all that. And so we've gone very much to the, you know, get on the bike, the self organization route. Like we're going to get better at sprinting by sprinting.

[01:09:30] Mike Boyle: And it's. Paid massive dividends. I would strongly recommend I've got a whole series of articles. It's actually all in that book too. There's a big section on speed, which is that, you know, goes into kind of Tony's ideas and how we've implemented them. A lot of what I've already said, but in more detail, and it gives us a better idea of kind of.

[01:09:47] Mike Boyle: What's fast, what kind of times you should be looking for, things like 

[01:09:50] James Breese: that. And that's, and that's go back to the beauty of this book. Now, I think for any, like most of the people we work with are experienced coaches. That's, that's, that's the one side of us. We got a lot of experienced coaches coming to us [01:10:00] and working with everyday people over 30.

[01:10:01] James Breese: That's, that's kind of the day they don't necessarily working with athletes. They're working with aging athletes. Okay. So that's the main thing here. What the book does really well is it's, it simplifies a lot of concepts into the stuff that we need to know practically and get it working. So like, for example, like it's all on the speed work.

[01:10:18] James Breese: What I love is the fact that like, okay, well in my head before, again, I saw one of your videos last year, two years ago, whatever, whatever it was, it was something you said. It was, I know it was you. Was it the loading parameters for sleds? Like I always thought just load more weight on the sled to make him run faster.

[01:10:33] James Breese: Like just load right. Nope. It was 150%, you know, maximum time thing, time based effort. I was like, wow, that is so different than ahead of the curve. Like, I was like, that's, that's amazing. That's like, that is, that is the light bulb moment for me. Cause I was just going heavier is better. Right. That's same as same as sled.

[01:10:51] James Breese: Same as sleds. Like just like load it up there. Just push as much as you want to. But no, it's not, is it? And that's, and that's, and there's the research that backs that concept up. And then now what you're doing, that was with [01:11:00] your, with your client, with your athletes as well, 

[01:11:02] Mike Boyle: right? Exactly. And that's what we're doing all the time.

[01:11:04] Mike Boyle: I mean, that's, that was, that started out with a guy named Cam Joss, who's now down at Auburn, introducing me to, um, J. B. Morin's work, who's a French guy. And, uh, You know, he's done a lot of research on resistant speed development, and that leads you to this other guys. Um, Piers Amazon, Matt Cross is a whole bunch of guys that have really studied this whole resistance printing thing.

[01:11:25] Mike Boyle: And they, again, steal smart guy stuff, right? Yeah. They've, they've figured out the idea that the maximum power output, the maximum benefit to that sled is when you hit that 150 percent speed decrement. And if you go beyond that, you may be losing some of the benefit. Now, again, my friend cam has also said he's not so sure.

[01:11:50] Mike Boyle: And he's playing with things a little bit heavier, but it's also that ability to experiment and to think, or you go back to the old [01:12:00] idea of you can break the rules once you know the rules. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I wrote an article called there's a reason there's a box actually, it's in, I think I could put that in the book too, because I put a lot of my, the, a lot of the new stuff that I'd written in the last four or five years I put in the book, but I always see the idea.

[01:12:15] Mike Boyle: There's a reason there's a box and you don't want to be an out of the box thinker. If you're not the master of the box, if you're the master of the box. Then you're free to be an out of the box thinker. But if you don't, you don't know the box, you got to spend more time. You know, it's the John Wooden quote, right?

[01:12:30] Mike Boyle: Um, basically, you know, you don't want to learn the tricks of the trade before you learn the trade and know the trade, right. And then learn the tricks of the trade. Yeah. You want to think outside the box once you really know the box and we have too many people in our field who don't know the trade, don't know the box, but they do know Instagram and tick tock.

[01:12:50] Mike Boyle: So, 

[01:12:51] James Breese: yeah, it's, it is funny that the, it is like, it's almost comical, like I feel like I'm just blowing smoke up your ass here now, but I'm, I'm [01:13:00] generally not trying to do this. It is literally the case of like, yeah. Me and Josh come up with an idea. We're thinking about stuff to change things. We go, Hey, this stuff doesn't really work with some of our clients and we've got to think of something better.

[01:13:09] James Breese: Then suddenly we find some work of yours that we haven't actually read before and it comes across, Hang on, Mike's been doing this sort of stuff already and he's figured some of this stuff out. And it's, it's, it's just, it's just fascinating how this kind of happens. And, and one, the light bulb moment we had, God, we've been doing this now a few years.

[01:13:23] James Breese: Uh, and we've always like, we're European, right? This, this is, this is what we see from when we record all the numbers and stats from around the world. When we work with Americans, they're stronger and more powerful than Europeans. Hands down, like that's what we tend to see around the thing. However, we have a greater aerobic capacity most of the time and we're more endurance based.

[01:13:42] James Breese: Doesn't mean we're faster, it just means we have more of a capacity in aerobic endurance because we're built for our, our systems. We have bike lanes, we have like, we walk everywhere. Those little things here. So what we, what we hated on was the idea of why are we always doing recovery when it comes to [01:14:00] conditioning on time?

[01:14:01] James Breese: When you see, you see like multiple athletes lining up and like, they're all, they're all different abilities, particularly when you're working with large groups, right? And we're like, well, this doesn't really work. Like, how can we make this better? So we went to a heart rate recovery method. And this is what we found.

[01:14:16] James Breese: We found that like, well, we used, uh, based on Maffetone's effort, you know, 180 minus your age was the math method for, you know, zone two, essentially, or like aerobic threshold work. We found that 160 minus your age. was the ideal kind of range of finding people's like recovery methods. And like, so we started playing around with it.

[01:14:34] James Breese: Anyway, we watched your conditioning thing like a year and a half ago or two years ago. We're like, yeah, we found that like about 120 is the right thing. And it was like, boom, that's an even simpler version of what you're doing with this. But when we personalize things, it's definitely 160 minus your age.

[01:14:49] James Breese: If me, I'm 40, like 120 is my thing naturally, but we find the high levels up as here's what people work with. It's like, why don't we just get on the phone with Mike and speak to Mike? We're having troubles now, Josh. [01:15:00] We'll just call Mike up and go, what's he figured out? What's he figured out and done differently?

[01:15:04] James Breese: But no one talks about that. It's funny that 

[01:15:05] Josh Kennedy: we came to the same conclusions. We 

[01:15:07] Mike Boyle: didn't know we were doing that. Yeah, that's that's like the M. A. S. stuff. You know, I look at you really I read the M. A. S. stuff and you realize most of the interval training protocols that you get recommended end up falling right in line with the M.

[01:15:21] Mike Boyle: A. S. recommendations. And I found that same thing. I was looking and thinking, wait a second. You know. You know, we're running whatever, you know, we're running 110 yard sprint and we're saying, yeah, we want somebody, it's going to take about 16 seconds. We want about 45 seconds rest. And then you start realizing, you start looking at, well, you know, 16 seconds to cover a hundred yards.

[01:15:38] Mike Boyle: What is that? You know, how many yards per second am I, it's right around what the MAS numbers are. You know, they tend to be predicted around, you know, around five, 5. 5. And you start looking at them. You know, that's almost exactly what we're looking at here. And you realize people already had this stuff figured out empirically.[01:16:00] 

[01:16:00] Mike Boyle: And that's what we did. I mean, we started, we were running with heart rate monitors, honestly, in the 1990s. And we started to realize, and again, this was where it was kind of dumb because we were using 120 because that was the theoretical 60%. I had read this Conconi called training lactate pulse rate or heart rate or something like that.

[01:16:21] Mike Boyle: And he was saying 60 percent and we had mostly 20 year old guys, you know, cause we were in college. So we were using 200 as kind of the base max heart rate. And then we were so 60 percent was 120. It was really logical. And then we always just, then we realized, well, gee, there's some people who do better at one 30 and there's some people that do do better at 10, but we still started to realize, you know, you've got that, that center point is one 20, but if somebody really, if it takes them, like we'd have some people, they'd get down to one 30 in a minute and it would take them to two minutes to get to one 20.

[01:16:54] Mike Boyle: Yeah. And I said, okay, you're going to start again at one 30. Cause you that, you know, [01:17:00] we're doubling your recovery time for 10 beats. Of recovery, which doesn't seem to make any sense. And then we'd look at them and think, and they're not struggling, struggled. Like if they'd done the next interval at one 30 and then they really struggled, I would think, okay, we made the wrong determination.

[01:17:16] Mike Boyle: We started to look at how, how it all worked. And then you started like, for me, it's completely formulaic. I can tell you when I do my interval work, my heart rate recovery is going to go up by 15 seconds every until if I do the same intervals, the same, like, so the other day I did mild repeats on the bike.

[01:17:34] Mike Boyle: Two minutes and 30 seconds. First recovery was a minute. I knew I could write down that my next one would be 115 and right about 115. I've had 120 again and I can write down. Okay. The one after that is going to be 130 because I'm going to add about 15 seconds of recovery printable. So I could literally write somebody's interval program without a heart rate monitor now and say, okay, first one is going to be, you know, maybe 1 to 0.

[01:17:59] Mike Boyle: 5. You [01:18:00] know, the second one is going to be 75. The third one is going to be 1 to 1, you know, something like that. And pretty accurate. And then you think about that in your common sense mind and you say, well, that makes perfect sense because obviously you'll recover better after the first interval than you would after the second.

[01:18:16] Mike Boyle: So if you're thinking, I'm just simply adding a little bit of rest after every. Following interval, when you sort of retro actively examine it, it's logical. We think, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. That's exactly how we should have done it. Yeah. But just doing it empirically from, you know, having guys run and looking at heart rates and recording heart rates.

[01:18:38] Mike Boyle: And, you know, we had the same thing in terms of outliers. We'd have guys, some guys could get to two to 10 to 15. Other guys could barely break one 80. I still remember I had this kid, Richie Brennan. And I used to, I mean, I berated him, I called him name. I was just not nice to him at all because his heart rate never got up.

[01:18:57] Mike Boyle: And I would just be like, you are so soft. You do [01:19:00] not push yourself. And then one time we made everybody do a punishment ride. So they had to ride 10 miles and, you know, it was 10 miles for time on the, uh, at that time on a Schwinn airdyne. And I looked and most everybody finished that right around 200 is again, college kids.

[01:19:17] Mike Boyle: Rich finished the, he finished the exact same time as everybody, but he never broke 180 beats a minute. And I was like, shit, his heart rate, his max heart rate is 180. Like he's been going as hard as everybody. He just has a deeper minute, lower heart rate. And I've been, I've apologized every time I see him.

[01:19:36] Mike Boyle: I, you know, he's in his forties now. Every time I see him, I still apologize to him. I'm like, you know, I'm really sorry. I called you so many bad names because you couldn't get your heart rate up. And then I just realized that was just because. You had a lower heart rate, 

[01:19:51] James Breese: but it's interesting to stick, stick on, on the mass stuff, like with the assault bike and everything that you're doing now, you know, that's the first thing I read.

[01:19:57] James Breese: Cause I'm a big fan of doing that aerobic speed work. Uh, [01:20:00] you, you, you talk about using RPM. We've, we've always used calories, which is interesting because a lot of our guys are remote. So they work around the world. We try and keep it as simple as possible. What's the something that can, they can understand calories.

[01:20:10] James Breese: So we just use calories. So we, we always say Whatever, you know, in their six minute test, they got, you know, 10 calories per minute. So we do 20 percent more. So again, try and do 12 calories in a minute, whatever it is. Yeah. So we always use calories to bring it out, but obviously you talk a lot about the 10, 20, uh, 2010 kind of, kind of method in, uh, using 110 percent and 120 percent based on all the two different things here.

[01:20:33] James Breese: We, we haven't done, we haven't gotten into that route on that style. What we, what we tend to try and do is we, we work on extending it out. Not, not beyond what the athletes trying to do. For example, if in cricket, for example, you're running a three that takes you about 12 to 13 seconds. So, you know, you don't want to do much more than that, but we may extend it out to the 15, 16 seconds work.

[01:20:51] James Breese: Nothing more than that. Cause it's just, it's just pointless. Not, you know, we always start small and trying to extend that. Do you ever try and do things like that where you're extending it out or do you just keep it simple with a [01:21:00] 10, type thing? Um, no, 

[01:21:01] Mike Boyle: we do, we change it around quite a bit. Actually 10, 20, 20, 10.

[01:21:06] Mike Boyle: We do, you know why? Cause it's on the bike. Yeah, it's simple. They can press the button. It's all built in there. Yeah. And then we look at with that is what's the maximum distance you get during that ride. So, you know, guys would be like, what do I got to do? I'm like, well, you know, 2010, you got to be able to get 1.

[01:21:22] Mike Boyle: 2 miles. 10, 20, you got to be able to get one mile. That'll tell you if you're working hard enough. And then we'd give them recommendations, but we were doing it on RPMs. And initially we used to use just level, because if you remember the old day, Airdynes just had level level six, and it would be like 2, 6.

[01:21:40] Mike Boyle: But when we got the new assault bikes, they didn't have that. And then people were talking more in terms of RPM. So we switched over to RPMs and we also switched like we do, um, distance versus time a lot of the times. So, you know, I could say to you, ride 230 hard, or I could [01:22:00] say, ride a mile. If you ride a mile, you get rewarded by being able to stop sooner if you're under 230 and you get punished.

[01:22:10] Mike Boyle: You know, so if somebody good is going to ride the mile in 220, somebody bad is going to ride it in 240. The guy who's not riding as hard has to ride longer. And I always liked that. Whereas when we, when we used to do it by time, I'd have to watch everybody. Cause again, my slackers, if I said 15 seconds, Brent.

[01:22:27] Mike Boyle: That guy had kind of start coasting around 13 seconds, if I said 0. 1 and you can't stop till it turns over 0. 1, it's kind of like the record rank publish idea. You're incentivized to write it in 14 because you're going to get stopped a second sooner. Whereas if we just said 15, then you'd just go maybe 13 because you were a slacker.

[01:22:52] Mike Boyle: So I think there's again, a lot of, there's a lot of psychology and conditioning that we miss out on too, because again, what do we do? We listened [01:23:00] to endurance athletes who have no idea, totally unrelatable in terms of the average speed and power sport person. We end up with all these really lousy prescriptions.

[01:23:13] Mike Boyle: So. It's, 

[01:23:14] James Breese: it's inter, 

[01:23:16] Mike Boyle: I gotta, I might tell you, we probably one or two more questions. Uh, 'cause I probably have to, oh God, I'm so sorry. Say 

[01:23:22] James Breese: how long we got you for Mike. 

[01:23:23] Mike Boyle: I was late on an hour. We're at an hour and a half and I'm like, I actually have some stuff I gotta get back. I'm so 

[01:23:27] James Breese: sorry, Mike. We, we, we always, I, 

[01:23:29] Mike Boyle: because I was like, I could do this probably three hours.

[01:23:31] Mike Boyle: I used to look at, I'd listen to the Human podcast and I'm like, how did they ever talk for three hours? And then I'm looking. Okay, we're moving into, you know, the end of the second hour. Well, I think 

[01:23:42] Josh Kennedy: what I'll love to do, Mike, is when obviously when you are free later in the year, I'll next whenever that is, we'll get you back on because 

[01:23:47] Mike Boyle: do, yeah, I'll absolutely got million questions.

[01:23:50] Mike Boyle: Yeah, 

[01:23:51] James Breese: there's so And Al also as well, like Michael, on the separate thing and I'll Cricket Matters podcast. I'd love to get you on to talk about your experience with baseball, ba baseball players, and [01:24:00] particularly pitchers because like that's kinda our fastest growing audience at the moment. And there's something that's, yeah.

[01:24:06] Mike Boyle: Yeah, that'd be great. I love, I love talking at cause I think, you know, obviously if you look at like million dollar arm, there's, you know, there's a pretty good correlation between the fast bowler and the pitcher training perspective, 

[01:24:18] James Breese: huge. And it's massive at the moment. I can just not sport alone. Like they just, it's some of the biggest viewing numbers in the world right now for the women's cricket, for the, for the, for the women, for the.

[01:24:29] James Breese: For the women's game, it was 96 million pounds, so it's 130 million dollars, um, viewership deal I just did, which is one of the biggest female numbers in history, and it's at the amateur 

[01:24:40] Mike Boyle: level. It's typical Ugly American in terms of, we have no conception of that at all. Yeah, I think, I believe it is the most watched sport in the world.

[01:24:50] James Breese: It is, it is an Indian and that's, that, that's, that Mike is what I'm seeing. Like all my experience has been learning this, this craft of fitness, training, strength, movement, everything from the States. [01:25:00] And I'm realizing how that it's so archaic over here. I'm saying, and with the greatest respect for a lot of people, but they haven't traveled around to see things.

[01:25:07] James Breese: And like you said, You know, I followed Eric's Cressy's work for years. I followed your work and all these, all these guys are working things and what you guys have been doing 30 years ago, as you said, that's what they're doing right now. And it's, it's frightening. Anyway, we'll set up another game, but I 

[01:25:20] Mike Boyle: want, all we want to do is hire guys like you to be our bosses over here.

[01:25:24] Mike Boyle: So that's okay. I always say, you know, you get to be a boss in America is to have an English accent, English or Australian. Someone will make you direct your performance and you get to tell everybody what 

[01:25:34] James Breese: to do. Exactly. I'll remember that in the future. I'll send my CV out to people. 

[01:25:40] Mike Boyle: You should. You'd be shocked.

[01:25:42] Mike Boyle: There'd be professional sports teams pulling you in in a heartbeat saying, hey, everybody loves what they don't have. Yeah. Yeah. 

[01:25:52] James Breese: Yeah. And it's, it's interesting actually, because on the cricket side of things, there's a big push in cricket in the United States now because they've now realized the numbers and the money they're making in [01:26:00] India, and they're trying to bring it over to the US.

[01:26:02] James Breese: And again, what I'm seeing is, is American coaches who've never played the sport of cricket, who just don't quite understand it. And it is quite unique in terms of, it's not baseball. Because it's, it's, it's five days long. That's how long a game of cricket can be. And it's hard. And it's, and this, this is incomprehensible for Americans.

[01:26:20] James Breese: It is. And this is what I speak to you about. And they talk because I love, like, don't get me wrong. I'm with you on this now. I'm with you. Sport athletes, like hockey, soccer, all these things, you don't need to get them running hours and hours and stuff here, right? You don't. That's, I'm with you completely.

[01:26:36] James Breese: I'm from a background where I was a mountain guide, and like, I've come from a training background where I had to do a lot of Zone 2 stuff years ago. To enable me to keep going. That wasn't power. That was because I needed to physically build me up to that. So I've, I've come from a world where there was, I've always been doing zone two, like in a long, you know, in a funny kind of way, but I've also in a sport, which is power based and in cricket, you need everything because if you haven't got a good aerobic system, [01:27:00] you ain't going to last eight hours in a day.

[01:27:02] James Breese: But then if you haven't got speed and power, you're doing multiple repeat sprints time after time for time. Again, 

[01:27:07] Mike Boyle: it's crazy. Like I always look at, I think where we miss out is realizing that we're getting. The capacity is being developed via the game, and we don't give that. Exactly. Yeah. The other thing I'm realizing, uh, James with you is you are rapidly moving into the Fors Gump category with me in terms of, I realized that you're, you were like a policeman and a mountain guide Yeah.

[01:27:28] Mike Boyle: And you doing, you were driving and you're doing fitness work, and I'm like, maybe you just don't look old enough. I'm not sure, but you, you a whole lot into like French. I'm like, where did this guy come from? Where did you, where did you find him, Josh? 

[01:27:42] James Breese: Yeah, somewhere in deepest dark as well. It literally is.

[01:27:47] James Breese: It's honestly, it's driving me nuts. But this is the thing I'm seeing at the moment. It's like, like what I've known about Zone 2 and everything for a long time. Like, and I've, particularly the benefits for health. I've known this for a long time. [01:28:00] Why is it that so now, now is the buzzword of the industry zone two is that the buzzword of the industry and it's like, I find it comical that for so many years, you know, those coaches were like crapping all over zone two saying it has its place.

[01:28:11] James Breese: It's not, I've never said it was the right thing for like, can this, you know, power sports and I'm not saying at all, but in terms of a lot of people we work in terms of health, 35 plus, I think it's always had a big part. Why is it that when people are now only just starting to talk about it and like, come out of it.

[01:28:27] Mike Boyle: Has to do with, uh, guys like Peter Atiyah and Huberman because you've got some really good podcasts now. And Peter Atiyah has done a really, really good job of getting right out in front of people and saying, wait, you know, like there are those of us, non, like I'm not a doctor. You want to think in the U S people have a huge respect for doctors, probably too much some at some degree, but a guy like him coming out and saying, well, no, wait a second.

[01:28:54] Mike Boyle: Exercise is really, really important, way more important. And we're a drug culture [01:29:00] in America. I don't know about you guys, but we're going that way. You know, we always say, you know, the idea like in America, uh, the analogy I always use, it would be like, you know, if you were driving your car and your check engine light came on and you went to the mechanic and he was like, Yeah, I got duct tape here.

[01:29:18] Mike Boyle: I'll put it over the light. So you don't see it kind of be like that, that really isn't going to fix whatever's wrong in my engine, but that's what we do in America. You know, you go to them, you say, I have a symptom, I have this symptom. And they say, Oh, I have something that takes that symptom away. And you look and think, but, but isn't it a symptom like of a disease?

[01:29:38] Mike Boyle: You know, it just makes the symptom go away. Does the disease, does my underlying disease condition go away? No. You know, if I start taking a statin to lower my cholesterol, does my atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease disappear because I took the statin? It's like, no, but your cholesterol number comes down.

[01:29:55] Mike Boyle: It's kind of like, but isn't the cholesterol number symptomatic of something wrong with my [01:30:00] heart? We've got, so we're so ass backwards. In the U S that, and now people are just beginning to realize that. And just, there's more people. And as I said, it's, you know, again, um, I'm a, probably a bigger, a T a fan.

[01:30:14] Mike Boyle: Then I think you men can be a little all over the place, but they're raising people's level of consciousness. of the relationship of exercise. The other thing that brings the pendulum is that all of our information comes from pro sports, um, collegiate sports, those types of things where the zone two stuff isn't important.

[01:30:35] Mike Boyle: It's not all that relevant. And so as a result, then you have people in the fitness world, you know, we've got people, I just had someone come today and say, you know, I was at a wake for somebody. I mean, he died from being sedentary. And that was the, the, the cause of death. Was, you know, lack of movement. He just didn't.

[01:30:54] Mike Boyle: And so I think we're, we're, we're playing, we always play in this sort of [01:31:00] pendular environment where you never get anything to be in the middle. It's got to either be on one end or be on the other end. And now, you know, again, we had to kind of live through the CrossFit thing and CrossFit. You know, thousands and thousands of adults, you know, and then realize, okay, okay, right now we can establish that that wasn't probably a good idea, you know, and now, but now people are back.

[01:31:23] Mike Boyle: Oh, you know, you got to do more aerobic work, more zone to work more law in there, but then you were trying to swing people away, but don't run, you know, you're going to get hurt, you know, so it's sort of, you're constantly, you know, Kind of chasing two rabbits, I guess, and they say if you chase two, you catch zero, 

[01:31:41] James Breese: right?

[01:31:42] James Breese: Exactly. And that was the thing for us. And I was just like, because I think because we weren't like I, my background is elite military law enforcement. That was hitting where it's again, those guys are beaten, beaten and broken down. That's, that's where it was. That's, that's where their issues were. And it was more case of building them back up.

[01:31:58] James Breese: So I'd never, I never worked in the [01:32:00] pro sports field. So I've always, we've always, me and Josh have always specialized in his aging athletes. I call it, you know, the everyday athlete, 35, 40 plus. But we've always put thought building, you know, to maximize your anaerobic threshold, you need to be strong enough to go deep enough into that.

[01:32:13] James Breese: And you need to, you need to have a basic aerobic capacity. Most pro athletes have that basic aerobic capacity. Anyway, most everyday people don't. Right. And that's the thing we found. And that's, and that's what we, that's what we're trying to get across to people. And they're like, no, no, no. The thing, that's the thing is like, you can't take a pro athlete who spent 20 years doing all these things and building it up like that.

[01:32:31] James Breese: That's well, Joe blogs or whoever it is, who's been sitting on the couch for 20, 30 years. They haven't got any aerobic capacity. They can't walk 60 minutes. They can't walk 20 minutes, let alone 60 minutes. If that makes sense. And we had to build 

[01:32:44] Mike Boyle: one of my clients. I can still remember he was an MIT professor, brilliant guy.

[01:32:49] Mike Boyle: And I mean, I got his heart rate up to one 20 and it was really funny. We were at that time we had a step mill. So I just had him walking on the step mill thinking, okay, this is pretty good. He got up to 120 beats a minute on his [01:33:00] heart rate monitor. And he was like, I have to get off. And I was like, why?

[01:33:06] Mike Boyle: And he literally, I would say he's the only guy to ever use the word swoon in my gym. He was like, and I was like, yeah, and you're the first guy to ever swoon here. I said, I don't think I've ever swooned here before you, but he was dizzy at 120 beats a minute. Yeah. And I was thinking, you know, I was so like at that time I hadn't, I'd done so little general public stuff that I thought 120 beats a minute.

[01:33:28] Mike Boyle: And this guy's like, he's literally, he's feeling faint. And, and that, 

[01:33:33] Josh Kennedy: and that my James said, that's why we're such big fans of, uh, zone two for gen Pop. 

[01:33:37] James Breese: Yeah. And, and that was, and it's like that was the thing for us as well. And it's, it sounds so great. This, this is be, it will finish this off here. Now, max, I'm, I'm, I appreciate you've taking a lot of time to hear us today.

[01:33:47] James Breese: But then we had to dumb it down even more. So we've gone taken aerobic capacity. It's so so hard to follow down to walking. So we introduced a walking test. So like for most of our aging guys and just basically to [01:34:00] build up aerobic capacity. So we said 20 minutes. Try and walk as far as you can in 20 minutes.

[01:34:05] James Breese: The goal is to get one and a half miles. Because we're trying to build up their walking speed reserves, right? Try and build them to walking far, like speed reserve in sprinting, right? So we're trying to build up here now. Most of them couldn't do it. Like most of them are hitting a mile. Like they just physically couldn't get that here.

[01:34:19] James Breese: And you know, everything here along here. So we've gone, right, can you walk? 

[01:34:23] Mike Boyle: Three miles an hour is a 20 minute mile. So the average person walking, you know, again, it goes back to your math thing, right? I mean, Three miles an hour is a pretty decent walk. If you put the treadmill on at three miles an hour and start walking, you're like, yeah, this is a decent walk.

[01:34:36] Mike Boyle: But if you said to somebody, you know, I want to walk, you know, two miles, you got to be clipping at four and a half. You almost have to be running. 

[01:34:44] James Breese: Yeah. Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do. So like we, the study we found was that the, they need to, people need to be walking around four miles an hour and it increases their longevity.

[01:34:53] James Breese: And there was a study of like 30, 000 women in their seventies or something. And that was what they found. And we're like, you know what, we can do this. So that's [01:35:00] what we did. We started creating, my God, we got people walking like crazy now. Like literally it's one of the tests we put everyone through because we're finding not just everyday people.

[01:35:08] James Breese: Some of our pro guys can't walk fast. I 

[01:35:12] Mike Boyle: can't walk fast because I'm broken down, but I can't get my heart rate up enough to make walking even be Zone 2. Like I can't get the Zone 2 range from walking. But I can cycle, like, I mean, I can cycle at the top level for my age. You know, there's very few people that will keep up with me in their sixties, if you said we're going to go and do, you know, any type of cycling test, that's why, you know, I've become huge.

[01:35:42] Mike Boyle: All we have are assault bikes. That's it. Yeah. 

[01:35:45] James Breese: It's pretty brilliant. That's, I wish, I wish that, I wish 

[01:35:48] Mike Boyle: they're more readily available. Arms and legs moving. Yeah. Yeah. Now easily, you know, you easily can elevate your heart rate into any area that you want. Yeah. 

[01:35:58] James Breese: And there's no technique. [01:36:00] No, we love it. We absolutely love it.

[01:36:04] James Breese: go

[01:36:09] James Breese: on, you finish 

[01:36:10] Josh Kennedy: it off. Thank you so much. We will wrap it up there because we've taken up a ton of your time. We'll definitely get you back on because like I said, we barely scratched the surface on things. I think we could go on for hours and hours, but I've got kids to, uh, to bath as well. So, uh, 

[01:36:22] Mike Boyle: it's right.

[01:36:23] Mike Boyle: It's nighttime for you guys. I forgot. Before we go, I was like, I, I can't sit here on the, on the computer. 

[01:36:31] Josh Kennedy: You've got work to do as well. You've got people to train. Before we do go, if people want to find out more about you, follow you on Instagram, Twitter, and potentially TikTok. Can you give out your digits?

[01:36:43] Mike Boyle: Twitter is mboil1959. Instagram is michael underscore boil1959. Those are the, the, the two biggies for us. And, uh, And keep your eye out for TikTok. Amazon UK. [01:37:00] 

[01:37:00] Josh Kennedy: For the book. Yes, absolutely. Get hold of the copy of the book. Yep. It's a, it's fantastic. Um, I highly, highly recommend it, Mike. Uh, thank you so much, James.

[01:37:10] Josh Kennedy: Thank you as well. Thank you guys for listening until next time.