#748: Pavel Tsatsouline and Christopher Sommer

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I'm a cyber nanny organism living this show. Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

This episode is a two for one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about and past one billion downloads to celebrate. I've curated some of the best of the best some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes enjoy the household names.

The super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.log slash combo. And now with a further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

First up, povlsatsulin, world renowned strength coach, founder and CEO of strong first and the trainer who brought the Russian kettlebell to the west, kickstarting the kettlebell revolution. You can learn more about povlschool of strength at strongfirst.com. I used to be a BT training instructor, physical training instructor for spets and has the service special forces and my education is in sport science.

And I did over the years train a number of high end units in the west. I've been a subject matter to the US Marine floor, to the US Secret Service, to US Navy Seals and others. My methods are used officially by some very high end military and counter terrorist units into countries that are main allies of the United States. So what I do is I take methods that perform very well in very rugged environments and I take this methods and I apply to other environments.

So if somebody decides I just want to change my life, I want to get stronger, I want to have a better game of tennis, I want to succeed and I give them sports. I take these same methods that have been tested by operators at war and I bring these people the same methods. If you look at a typical person and how do you get them stronger? Let's say that you have a four cylinder engine.

What the person would do is they would make that six cylinder engine. But before you're firing in two, now you're firing in three. But if instead what you do is you learn to fire in the four. So there are ways of training a nervous system to engage your capacity so much more fully.

And if you look at high level performers at light body weight in some fields, let's say a very high level martial artist, somebody very skinny breaking a stack of boards or very skinny guy like Lamarck and death of taking five times his body weight. So this is so much about the concentration of mental force.

And for your listeners, I could give a very simple example how you can do that in your gym. Let's say that you performed try to the simplest exercise possible try to do a dumbbell curl or barbell curl because I know your cities out there, you'll do that. And so let's say that you're going through your curls and things are suddenly started to get tougher.

So when they suddenly start to get tougher, I want you to just crush the dumbbell or the barbell or the kettlebell, whatever it is that should curl. Just whiteknuckle pressure. And what you will see is you're going to definitely going to be able to get several more repetitions out. I'm going to give you two more techniques in addition. Once you have practiced that, then on the next set in addition to crushing the bar and the way up also contract your glutes as tight as possible.

Like somebody's going to kick you in the butt very, very tight. So you're just like crutch will not. And at the same time tighten your abs as if somebody's going to kick you, which you know somebody might. So if you do that, if you do these three things, if you contract your glutes, contract your abs, contract your grip, everything that you do, absolutely everything is going to be greatly amplified. And this is just a small example of the skills of strength that I do teach.

They call me the kettlebell guy. They call me the father of the kettlebell, which I appreciate very much. I did introduce together my business partner. I did introduce the kettlebell to the west. And right now the kettlebell has become mainstream. But what I'm really all about is above the principles, the underlining principles of strength strength, the underlining principles of power generation.

And it doesn't really matter what my dality use, whether you use the kettlebell, the barbell, your body weight, whether your arm rest and fighting lifting a rocks that really doesn't matter. So I am not about the kettlebell. I am about the principles and make it strong. What I have done is I have reverse engineered the way the strongest people move naturally.

And I have brought it to the people. I've shown to people how to move in this matter and how to shave off years and if not decades of training to progress to my childhood. You once mentioned to me in a casual conversation, I called you for some type of training advisor. It might have been via email. And cricket from wrongly said when in doubt, train your grip in your core.

Could you elaborate on that because I think it's not advice that many people have received. There is such a thing you're called the radiation. So the phenomena, your radiation, what it really means is if you contract a muscle, the tension from that muscle is going to spill over to the neighborhood muscles. So for your listeners, I'd like to try this. Make a fist probably going to feel tension in your forearm. Now make a tight fist.

You're going to feel tension in your biceps triceps. Now make a white knuckle fist. You're going to find that tension is going to spread into your shoulder, your lats, your back and so on. Okay folks, you may relax though. The same thing happens. So certain areas of the body have this great overflow of tension. So the gripping muscles are amongst them. Why? In part because they have such a great representation in your brain.

And as for the abs and us for the glutes, that has a lot to do with creating your intra abdominal pressure. So what does this mean exactly visualize your muscles as speakers and visualize your brain as the gadget that plays the music, whatever it is this days, iPad, iPhone, whatever. And the record player doesn't matter. And the amount of your pressure in your abdomen, they drop down on the pressure, that's the amplifier, that's the volume control.

So by increasing the pressure in your abdomen, it's like you're training up the volume and vice versa. So when you're trying to stretch, we're increasing your flexibility. If you see somebody there trying to do a split and we're seeing the person is creating high intra abdominal pressure and that just increases the tension of the muscle instead, which you need to do, you need to complete the release and let go and bring it down.

So for strengths, we do the opposite. We have special techniques where you increase that pressure and maximize your power. Those are just a couple of different ways we're getting increases strengths. And that's what you've seen in my certification. FYI, I am no longer with that organization. So my company today is called strong first and SFD certification. That's that same curriculum that she have learned back then.

Just to touch on two points, then we're going to jump into more training and ask about how you would rank certain aspects of what people would traditionally consider, perhaps fitness. What would you recommend is good methods for developing the grip and core or abdomen for those people listening if they wanted to take a simple protocol and perhaps experiment for the next few weeks.

Is there any basic approach that you might suggest for those two things? It can be done in conjunction with full body training regimen that uses, let's say, kettlebells climbing the roads and so on. But if it is not, then what I recommend that you do is you get some grippers. So the company is called iron mind iron mind.com. And they carry hand grippers.

So I'm seeing you need to understand is these are now those little sissy plastic grippers you get at a store. These are heavy duty grippers. They go up to 365 pounds. There's a couple of people in the world have done that. They also do have resources on how to do that. But even without reading how I can tell you how to train.

So get yourself a couple of grippers. Use their charge, their recommendations that iron mind offers. Start training them in the manner that are referred to as grease the group. The grease the group is a highly simplified training methodology that's been derived from Soviet weightlifting methodology. So in a nutshell, this is what you do.

So all day, every day, whenever you feel fully recovered, so you have to have at least 15 minutes of rest between sets, maybe 30, maybe even more case you're going to do a set. And you're only going to do about half the repetitions that you're capable of. So for example, you picked up a particular gripper, you start squeezing it, you probably could do it 10 times.

But you only do five when you put it down. Let's say you later on pick up a gripper, that's a little heavier. Maybe you could do three reps of it, but you do all one. And in this particular manner, you accumulate reps and you keep going and going and going. And everybody tells you it doesn't possible to get stronger this particular manner. Yet science and experience shows that this makes you strong.

This makes you strong. This makes you strong. The safe manner. You can apply this particular methodology. Again, I call it gris to group to any strength exercise or any strengths and duration exercise. Just to give an example of its effect. It's my father a lot for marine at the age of 64 started following this routine. He was able to do about 10 blocks at that point.

In several months, he was up to 20 when he tested and you could not do that many as a young jarhead. So you got bucks out there, you can definitely get this done. So this is how you guys are going to train your grip with these grippers carry through with you throughout the day. You're not going to get sweaty. Just whenever you feel like it just taking out on the squeeze as for training your abdomen.

There are many different methods of training the abdomen, but you have to abide by the following rules. You have to keep the repetitions to five and under no more than five reps. Anything more than five reps is bodybuilding. And you need to make a focus and tension make a focus and contraction as opposed to on reps and fatigue.

Just to give an example of the plank, you know, the plank is a kind of a fashionable exercise in the core training circles. And by the way, we don't use the word core. That's the first why don't we use the word core because people who use the word core, they do things we don't like. We don't like it all. So we just say we just send it section. So the plank. So traditionally, they would put you in the plank and you're supposed to stay in the spline for a couple of minutes.

And what's happening is you see this poor person who cannot have been assumed the proper posture to start raise. And then espatique sets in other muscles wrong muscle start kicking and the back starts arching the bus start shooting up. And what you're doing is what great cook calls putting fitness on top of dysfunction. And what we do instead is if we do a plank, we call the hardest don't plank.

We would do a plank for no longer than 10 seconds. And when you do the plank, you try to contract everything absolutely everything when I showed that everything. The shins your forms your neck everything but you're neck and face everything below your neck. You're going to contract. It's not for folks with high blood pressure,

condition, and that's true for pretty much any type of training, but for everybody else is an extremely powerful tool. So you get down in a plank, you make fists, okay. You contract your abs. You contract your glutes. You contract your entire body. You pretend that somebody's walking in a walk by and kick you in the ribs, which again somebody might please at my course.

Andy Bolton and other top power loafers do like taught this technique. They swear by this because this is the abdominal training for strength. This is not just some nonsense that you do cranking out directs. So to sum up your abdominal trade find whatever abdominal exercises that you like. It can be the plank. It can be some kind of a setup.

It can be something from your book, the for our body. It can be something from my book, the heart still abs. It can be something else. That's not important. As long as it's a good exercise that's been recognized that it does work. And three times a week do three to five sets of three to five reps. Okay, folks just remember this three to five sets of three to five reps.

Focus and contraction don't focus on fatigue. Don't focus on the wraps. And I promise if you do these two things for several months you work your grip on this matter. You work your abs in the smager. Everything that you do today is going to be stronger. I don't care what it is. It's a bigger deadlift. It's a tennis serve. It makes the difference. You're going to be stronger.

And in the case of the midsection and we're working with the plank. If people decided they were going to keep it simple just so they can remember it and do three sets of three reps three times a week. Let's just say Monday. Well, the plan was to just three sets of 10 seconds. Got it. Three sets of 10 seconds, three times a week. Yes. And try to contract everything below your neck.

You need to keep your reps at five and at five reps. You're really working on. I'll get out of my depth and into yours pretty quickly. But the sort of neural pathways and the recruitment of motor neurons and sort of firing capabilities and so on.

Pretty much you're going to have a high level of neural adaptations. You're also going to build some muscle as well. So you're going to build the high threshold motor units as well. But it's not a bodybuilding protocol. You'll build some muscle but it's not really the end.

And then go itself. You were trying to also you're trying to avoid the fatigue. You're trying to avoid the burn because whenever you start experiencing the burn. That's from something called the hydrogen ions that leads you a lot of problems for you. So one of the problems is it interferes with the command that your brain is sensed to the muscle to contract. And another problem that it creates these hydrogen eyes literally destructive.

So if you leave them around the muscle for too long, they really start destroying your muscle. So just keep those reps under five, three to five. Don't worry about getting bulky. You're not going to get bulky. It's not going to happen. And approach training is a practice. So this is another very important point to. I need to work out super important point. Now I'm glad you're bringing this up.

I hate the word workouts. The word workout does not exist in the Russian language. We talk about a training session or we talk about a lesson. We never talk about a workout. Just think of what does the word working out. What do you envision? Sweating is sweating and grunting and let's see how much I can punish myself and drain myself. So the goal is not to get stronger. The goal is just to get get worn out.

And there are simpler ways of doing that. Drop them out. So no, the idea here is practice. Strength is a skill and a such a big practice. And if you approach it in this matter, not only you're going to get stronger so much faster, but you're going to truly enjoy your training process. Training should be something that should be enjoyed. So when people think of fitness, particularly non-athletes, I think that there tends to be very scattershot approach.

And there's a paradox of choice challenge that they have where they're fed a lot of recommendations from many different people. And they have strength, not necessarily muscle game, but just getting stronger. They have hypertrophy. So increasing their muscular size for lack of a better description, endurance, flexibility. How would you rank these in order of priority and why?

Tim, as long as the person has the required mobility and symmetry, the priority is always in health. The priority is always strength. Strength has to be first. So the first step that you do is you assess your mobility. You find specials who can do that. FMS would be a recommendation of mine, the very Coops FMS, functional movement screen.

Function movement screen is going to find out how mobile you are and also how symmetrically you are. So as long as that is delged in, that is in place, you have to get strong. And strength is the mother quality of all physical qualities. And that's not a statement by me. That's a statement by the father of fertilization, one of the greatest sports scientists ever.

And greater strength increases your performance in absolute everything. So you can see, of course, okay, of course, yeah, being stronger is going to help you and let's say, yeah, punching somebody harder or lifting something. But how is that going to help me if I am a sad triassal needs? How is that going to help me if I am a nurse on the road? It is going to help me in several different ways.

Fun is the perceived level of exertion is going to go down several years ago in our region is that a very interesting study where they put elite endurance athletes, some more bicyclists, some were runners on that pure strength. Regigin does four sets of four reps of heavy squats, so about as pure strength as against. And in the end of this study, not surprisingly, all these guys were stronger. They could jump higher and so on, but they were not impressed with that. They didn't matter to them.

What did impress them is a ran faster. The race times went down because strength just makes enables everything else. If you're trying to, let's say, lose weight, being stronger is going to help you do that because you're going to have a bigger furnace, you're going to train you so much harder on the exercises that are fat loss exercises.

So it really doesn't matter what it is that you're trying to achieve. Strength is the number one attributes you need to address. And that's why my company is called strong first. One of the things that I love about you, Pobbles, that you say what you mean and mean what you say. There's a degree of clarity that I envy. I might include it for people, but when we did our sound check, I asked you to give me an answer so we could test the audio what you had for breakfast and what was your answer?

Coffee. That was it. That was the sound check. I love the simplicity. Now speaking of simplicity and also undoing the confusion that a lot of people suffer from, what are the most counterproductive myths or misconceptions about strength training that come to mind?

Well, the number one to my guess is the idea that you have to go to failure every time you train. I can tell you one thing that the Soviet weightlifters I have done a very thorough analysis of the swim to weightlifting methodology through the 60s through the 80s, the glory days.

And I found that they typically did one third to two third of maximal repetitions per set. So what does it mean? You let's say that you're using a weight that's your 10 rap max 10 is all you could do if you put yourself very hard. And they would do three to six consistent now you probably asked yourself, OK, I'm not a weightlifter and what does this so get stuff from the 80s have to do is today. Well, two things.

Well, even though a person who is not a lifting athlete is not going to train exactly as a weightlifter or a power lifter, nevertheless, the methodology has to be derived from the sports because these are specialist strength sports. So they just have to be adapted to your news. Second of all, this particular Soviet methodology is still superior to this day. This is very interesting, but you're comparing about all this new world records set in the sport of weightlifting.

Well, if you compare the world records of today to the world records of the 80s, you will see that in most cases, the records today are inferior to records in the 80s. How can that be? They accused people of doing drugs and they changed weight classes twice, says that 80s. Of course, it's so wonderful. I'm so happy that today nobody does drugs anymore. It's just to rip.

And so if you look at the lifts performed by Soviet lifter, Yudykov Arbalyan, in 1980 at the Moscow Olympics, this lifts have never been exceeded. These lifts have never been approached. So this particular methodology does work extremely well. It's still the best methodology period. Later on, the Soviet powerlifting team,

adapted this methodology for powerlifting with tremendous success, the dominate. The same particular methodology has been adapted to bodyweight training, kettlebell presses, and so on and so forth. So it's the same thing that can be applied for everybody because it's this principle based training. So the major misconception is that you have to go to failure.

If you just overcome that and if you make it a habit to do one third to two thirded their repetitions, they're possible. And do more sets instead, you're going to make much greater progress. You're going to do much safer. And folks, you can enjoy the training. How does the approach shift if your focus is maximal hypertrophy?

If you're after maximal hypertrophy, it's Molly. So they figured out in the Soviet Union that there's a direct correlation between volume and hypertrophy. So you just pretty much have to do more sets. You're going to have to do more sets in like 60 to 70 percent of max range. And a whole bunch of sets of five and six, just many of them. And your respurance might be compressed a little more.

But that's it. If you do that, do this a couple of times a week. Many sets of five or six. Don't go to worry about how many. Just keep going. Don't kill yourself and enjoy yourself. Eat more. You're going to get bigger. It's unavoidable. It's just a simple that. Would you consider the, and please disagree? This is not the case. But if you had to pick one movement for strength, longevity.

Would the deadlift be that movement? Or is it not possible to choose one movement? How do you try to answer that question? If you were to choose one movement, Tim, yes, I would choose the deadlift or I would choose the kettlebell swing. Obviously the kettlebell swing is not something you can compete in and something you're not. It's not going to give you the same satisfaction, lifting heavy weight. But those are the two main full body exercises.

The full body expressions of power that will go such a long way for you for longevity, strength, just the quality of life. What are the biggest mistakes that people make with the deadlift? Whether that's technically or in programming. What are the biggest mistakes?

Well, Tim, I think the very big mistake is because they think, okay, I have picked up things from the floor. This looks so simple. It's not an Olympic lift. Therefore, it's very simple. So I'll just start piling on place and start training. The deadlift is a very technical lift. Even if you're just a recreational lifter, you owe it to yourself to learn to deadlift correctly. That's as simple as that.

I say that's a primary mistake and that mistake goes for every exercise that people do out there. I would highly recommend people check out your book with Mr. Bolton. The dynamite. Yeah, really very, very dense. Chifting gears just a little bit. Dense in the best way possible. No fluff. I'd love to shift gears and just ask you a few questions about sort of your philosophies and your thinking not so much the highly specific training questions.

But when you think of, for instance, the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind for you? Tim, I am fortunate enough to know many successful people. And I think that what separates from the rest is the CEO of strong first Eric Frohart. He put it very well. He says balance with priorities. So Eric, yourself and many others are fortunate to know they exemplify success for me. What are the habits that you've observed that allow people to have balance with priorities?

What are the things they do that other people don't do? Or maybe the things they don't do that other people do? Well, I think one is calm. These people are calm because people are hyper. They get so trapped in their reactive modes. They get to trapped in the everyday minutia of their work and their existence. So they just do not pause and they do not think again. Eric has a great quote from a Vietnam era seal, which says calm is contagious calm is contagious.

So when the person is calm, that he or she has the time to meditate, reflect, sub the priorities and sub the balance. That's certainly the holds true from what I've seen. And the opposite, of course, is true. It's hysteria. It's just chasing the tail. Absolutely. Chicken little. This guy's falling. Yes, everything is urgent. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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So you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out. Visit livemomentus.com slash Tim and use Code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's Live Momentus, L-I-V-E, M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash Tim and Code Tim for 20% off. And now Christopher Summer, a former U.S. national team gymnastics coach and the founder of the Gymnastic Bodies Training System known for building devotees into some of the strongest most powerful athletes in the world.

You can find Christopher on Instagram at Christopher S-O-M-M-E-R-1. Coach, welcome to the show. Thanks Tim. I am excited to finally have you on the show. We've had so many conversations in the last month or two and I've been so impressed with the subtlety and nuance of the training that you do. So I've been very eager to have you on the show to explore all things Gymnastics and Gymnastics strength training related. So thanks for making the time.

We could start with just some definitions. So what would you or how would you define Gymnastic Strength Training GST? In a nutshell, Gymnastic Strength Training I define as high level body weight strength training. So none of the training that we do for world class performance with the acrobatics or technical gymnastics just purely the strength joint prep and mobility components.

And one example of what not to do perhaps or how Gymnastics Strength Training might differ from the aesthetics that some people I'm not going to say compromise with but shoes we were talking about doing a pike hands down press or holding that position. And the example feel free to correct my recollection but was of how a lot of folks kick their hips way out to counterbalance instead of doing what what would the Gymnastics Strength Training version of that look like.

Good example. So what we see and this is kind of getting into some handstands some skill training. But handstand done correctly is a reflection of physical preparation that athlete either has or does not have. So if they lack strength if they lack mobility and of course their technical hands in is going to lack refinement. So now in terms of that pike in stand if they lack middle trap if they lack lower trap strength then they're going to try to counterbalance by really arching the chest out.

So I'm sorry to interrupt coach just by people who I realize I should probably define some terms myself so pike for people who are not familiar with this the easiest way to visualize it if you don't have any background with that is imagine you're sitting on the floor it's kind of like PE class legs straight and together bending at the waist towards your toes is that forward bending forward towards your toes.

And so if you were imagine you're sitting down with your legs out in front of you hypothetically to 90 degree angle and you put your arms up of your head let's just flip you upside down so you're in a handstand position that's effectively what we're talking about exactly we're talking about to hold that because center of mass is way out in front of the body then in order to hold that the traps are what's responsible to keeping the back in the shoulders straight so if you're not strong enough.

And is it some people say well it's just skill training well everything builds upon everything else so got Olympics coming up people are going to be pumped they're going to see our Olympic team they're going to see the other monsters around the world competing on rings and they're I want to do that and they're going to jump right up we've got friends who are former seal team six and the first thing they did is jump up and of course they failed utterly and then they come see us because it's like anything you know you don't jump right into calculus you.

Calculus you learn to count and we learned a dish we learned subtraction yada yada yada well enough time enough layers enough progression then we get to advance math so advanced ring strength same deal I remember we were talking not too long ago about. The importance of pacing when you're dealing with connective tissue tendons and ligaments which is something i'm not particularly well known for in terms of patience and pay say.

But I've noticed that but many of the guys who say do outdoor bar workouts some of which are very impressive physical specimens will jump up on the rings and they'll be doing I'm not sure what they would even call them they're kind of like what would be looked at as like a typewriter on the pull up bar when you move back and

from one arm to the other side to side pull up and they're like I was feeling fine coach and then suddenly my you know I tore my bicep right to my pack and it was fine until it wasn't what are some if you look at the muscles or types of strength that most non gymnasts will not have even

if they consider themselves reasonably athletic what would be on that list and we already mentioned one which is say mid in lower traps and of course I would like to think I came to the table with kind of hat and hand because I recognize how hard a lot of this is but the more I practice it the more I'm astounded how unprepared my body is for these movements

as someone who has done a lot of pulling from the floor for instance who has decent deadlift I would like to think I was just astonished at how weak my mid back was is just blew my mind it was completely flabbergassing what other muscles or movements do you find normals just cannot perform even if they view themselves as athletic

for the lifters the one that always jumps out at us is their lack of shoulder extension so if I pick my if I'm standing upright my lift my hands forward that's flexion and I go all the way up to my arms are overhead I'm picking my hands up behind me that would be shoulder extension right so just to paint another picture for folks like if you stand up

and then interlace your fingers behind your tailbone with your arms straight and then try to lift them up towards this you keeping your back straight so the shoulder extension and what we find as you know and a lot of what we'll get sometimes from people as well

I don't want to be in the circus I don't want to be in that for bad I'm at an incidence skill training I want I want strength and what they don't understand is if you want to achieve world class levels of performance technically that comes first from having a solid found

foundation the physical preparation which means correct range of motion good mobility good connective tissue so shoulder extension becomes so for example a lot of people fail they can't do muscle ups because they can't do shoulder extension they think in their head that a muscle up is a chin up a little bit of transition that they don't understand and then a dip what really happens as we do a pull up we get our hands to our chin and then the elbows pull back behind the torso behind them

and there's their shoulder extension if they can't do shoulder extension now they're stuck and they they'll spend all this time working technique and doing rap and doing rap and what they're doing is they're treating the symptom not actually the problem

so just a background for folks the way that we connected was I at 38 finally decided enough is enough I've been fantasizing about trying to learn gymnastics in a structured way for 20 plus years much like my postponing of getting a dog for 20 years is just like why did it take me so long to do this

and I was in Venice I'm going to give these folks a shout out there's a cross gym there named party so crossfit and love the folks who run the gym and I would go to their train so let me use chalk and do all the things that a lot of gyms will not allow me to do

and I met a gent who was doing a body weight workout is the only person doing a body weight only workout and he suggested that I follow gymnastics bodies on Instagram so I started following your company on Instagram and saw older let's just call it middle aged men sort of my demo as it stands right now who had started from scratch doing impressive things and I had used age as my crutch and excuse for not pulling the trigger

in the last few years so I reached out to Rob Wolf who's kind enough to introduce us and then we've collaborated in this experiment that we're currently doing which is roughly 90 days with a handful of goals that we'll get to but I want people to understand how we connected so I'm in the middle of training right now I have to say I feel better than I've felt with the exception of a little bit of elbow nonsense that is not from this specifically it's a recurring thing

feel better than I have in years that's good here just from this little bit already we just from the little bit that we've done and the follow question of that is when people are training for handstands at home so self taught what are the biggest mistakes that they make well they won't like the answer this is a little bit a national team coach attitude coming out people tend to want what they want when they want

to be and that's fine if I'm looking for mediocre to average results if I'm looking to really do best effort I've got a backshadow and I've got to take care of my business and for most of the adults it's going to be in they have severe compromises in their mobility their shoulders don't work well their hips don't work their knees don't work their elbows are shot their forms are tight from all the desk patrol their calves are like piano wire from sitting all the time

we want to talk about hip flexor their scabs don't move their scapula have no motion they can't protract they can't retract their spine is locked in just a flat or a kai foites for their hunched over their lower back is continually arched and they're just going to frozen in this position and then they want to try to move their body

now the common one that we get from people as well these are extreme ranges of motion these are artificial ranges of motion and actually these are your natural range of motion problem is they quit using it and so just after feed or not doing anything special we're just going to we have to recreate that natural range of motion first we've been doing gosh I don't know now maybe since 2006 working with the adults and the thing that just we keep having my nose rubbed in it over and over and over and over and over again

every time I think I have it down I find I need to take it further is just the complete other lack of joint prep and mobility they come to the table with even your own cases an excellent example we haven't done anything advanced yet we're doing all basic we're doing fundamental stuff and you're already feeling better than in years

well I think it's a lot of it has to do with two things if I'm trying to self diagnose the first is to identify musculature and motor patterns that I simply had not developed properly previously even if I had a passing familiarity like let me frame this in the form of a question so can you define what the hollow position is why it's important and how how do most normals do when they do up say hollow body rock maybe can explain that to most people

when they think of abs they think lower ab they think upper abs they're not going to think about obliques at all and they're not going to think transverse abdominis at all so lower abs or easy upper abs E obliques okay they understand the side ways they don't understand how

obliques wrap around into the lats into the lower back okay that's fine but transverse abdominis they're like excuse me was that English they don't have a clue and that's what supports the body when it's in a straight body position so for example ab rollers were we don't use them in our program but this is an example ab rollers were getting a bad knock that if you do an ab roller you're going to hurt your lower back well yes and no you'll hurt your back if you're doing it wrong if you're

arched in your lower back so for definitions if my lower back is arched I'm an anterior pelvic tilt if I'm the opposite movement I'm kind of my tailbone tucked under my lower back is flat that's posture your pelvic till

my body's horizontal then my back is supported when I'm posture your pelvic tilt if I'm arched it's unsupported by the muskos turn I'm hanging by the disc which is true for a ton of exercises that we do if I feel it my lower back almost universally when I send you videos the feedback is more ppt post your pelvic toe it should just be a mantra yeah and for people who need a way to visualize this because I realize a lot of this

vocab is new and coach feel free to interrupt any point but an easy way to think about and remember anterior pelvic tilt is imagine that your waist is the top of a wine glass if you have anterior pelvic tilt to the front you're going to be pouring wine out the front of that glass basically out of your belly button if you have posterior pelvic tilt you're talking that tailbone you're going to be pouring wine basically down your sacrum you know down the back of your

body it's just an easy way for me to to remember that is clout I got to say 40 years of national team and I've never heard it describe that way it may it may be our go to definition from you know I can't do the gymnastics I'll have to stick with refining my definitions although I am making progress with the fundamentals and I like to talk about the assessment that we did so I flew out to a great gym awaken gymnastics in Colorado and we met up that's our GD master

really have one in the world awaken in Denver is our number one GBA affiliate they're the best at what they do yeah it's a fantastic gym and we did quite a few hours of various assessments if somebody wanted to try to self assess or videotape themselves to have say someone qualified in gymnastics assess them if you were to do an 80 20 analysis like which movements or exercises give you the most data

most thing most of the book was the most seen no so what we went over with you we checked hanging leg lift hanging leg lift automatically is going to tell me dynamic range of motion is that right that's like on a stall bar you don't want to be free swinging that could be you know most of them you know whatever they can do it all to my eyes as soon as I see it or our staff side they're they're going to know right away

whether or not that person has adequate it's going to tell us your core strength and it's going to tell me hamstring flexibility that'll do that in one bridge bridges a huge one for adults that's been one of our we have a thoracic bridge core stretch series that's been one of our best selling products that's what I'm doing this evening yeah yeah notice notice guys that teams real happy right now that that'll change in just a few

years yeah what characterizes this is a really important question what characterizes a good bridge and for people who thinking of bridge I mean it's imagine you're laying on your back you put your palms down by your sort of years let's say feet flat on the ground and then you go

up into an arch now I was extremely surprised and found it quite hilarious how bad my bridge was I mean terrible in the assessment of the first standard yes by what I see on a normal basis yours was medium medium it was like a D plus it was like on the verge of passing but I realized despite all of my many years of wrestling where we did tons of bridges almost all of my bridging comes from bending at the low back right so my lumbar which is a huge issue yeah so what is a good bridge

little background so the lumbar the lower back is not designed to have a ton of movement in a big arch your thoracic spine your upper in your middle back they're designed to have a lot of movement they're designed to rotate the lower back is not but when most people do their bridge work they're so compromised now even back up a little bit more they're so compromised and range of motion their upper body because they've been hitting the weights hard they've been doing just a

lot of high intensity training now to preface that there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong with that at all if you weren't one of God's gifts when you were born you've got to do something to make up the deficit the problem is when they do all that weight training they're not doing it in balance and maintaining their mobility if they had they wouldn't have the issues that they ran into so if all you do is string string string string

then you can always tell someone who is there they're the curl king and they're the bench press king they come in and they're hunched over and their elbows don't straighten their arms don't go behind them and on they are like you know my shoulders are killing me most of the time what we found is yeah their shoulders are completely after by agree but their biceps are crazy tight also and that bicep runs up through the front of the shoulder and it's

manifesting itself as a shoulder issue so kind of all these come together long story short to cause them a huge problem being able to go into a proper bridge which should be all upper body no lower back almost at all but people doing the exact opposite they hurt their lower back and these bridges are dangerous now the bridges aren't dangerous doing them half-assed and wrong without vetting your source of information is dangerous

I found it incredibly therapeutic as someone who's had a basically a frozen thoracic for God knows how long 10 years sure we were worried about that I remember we're like wonder what we'll work through this Tim has the upper body mobility of a Lego figure what are we going to do so but just the progression of doing and of course people should look for visual references and I'll point them to a bunch of

and they're on all our courses and that's all point them to a bunch of resources in the show notes but can you walk through the check boxes I know we've done this even recently the concept I don't know why this didn't even occur to me but of helping to take the lower back out of the equation by elevating the feet elevating the feet and elevating them as high as necessary some people are so tight that they basically start in a

hands down and it is what it is right the main thing that we tried always hammer with students is they're always in a hurry I've got to get it right now even our conversation remember way back when we started that way I was like dude if you can handle it we need we need to change gears here we need to go slow now in order to go fast later well you said if you want to be a stud later you have to be a

putt now I think we're your words yeah that that sounds like a smart ass remark that's a good one I wrote that down I've corrupted you all your great podcasts and I've corrupted you so what are the other check boxes so let's just say they get the feel and they're like okay feet elevated to the point where they're feeling dress on the lower back now it'll depend on pressing strength also if they're very weak

in the shoulders then they're gonna have to start from the hands and work their way down but we'll assume they've got feet elevated hip high or higher if necessary doesn't matter a bit then from there we're gonna work on most

people are gonna be up they're gonna have bent elbows so we're gonna work on straightening the arms no matter how close they are they could be wide the wide yeah because gosh I had one special forces guy that came to me years ago tough tough guy first name mark and he had gained 80 pounds of muscle

80 pounds of moxah oh yeah it was just like holy moly any we was he just a beast but he had completely F himself up because all he did was gain strength without mobility and athletically this my sport is just purely lifting unless I'm a power lifter unless I'm an Olympic lifter then

maximal strength is not my sole criteria for being successful in fact usually the strongest athletes in the weight room are not the best athletes on the field of play and in fact I don't know a single exception there may be one there somewhere that someone can share with us and let me know

I've been around the world I won't say as many people as you know but in 40 years of world class gymnastics I've I've met a ton of people I've never seen an exception he couldn't even hang on a bar anymore with his arms straight without hitting his head wow you think your shoulders are tight

pull him out he was like coach what what can you do for me for once I was at a loss for words which is rare for me I think your screw addition it's a what did you do with him in the bridge was he just stuck we he couldn't even that's this was hanging on a bar we we couldn't

even get number it was impossible what we would do with someone like that in mark so you're you're more so guys just to give the audience some some feedback I went into Tim's assessment expecting medium medium and Tim was much more mobile much more athletic much more well prepared

than I had anticipated so I had spent a lot of time putting a custom program together for Tim that because he did so well in his assessment I had to throw the whole damn thing away because basically you he was too advanced for what we had assumed he was coming to the table

with someone who is crazy compromised we're going to have to sneak up on it we're going to have to get in there we're going to have to first do peck minor we got loose not peck minor we got to get in there we got to work on the bicep tendon we got to get the bicep

tendon going we got to work on forms get forms loose we've got to break the scab so there's some motion there we have to do all of that it's not high intensity work but it's got to be done and as you heard Tim say the body thrives on it it's like a tonic for the body the body

feels so much better because it's what the body is supposed to do a lot of people don't care for it because it's not the high intensity sexy work but it's that fundamental work that makes the high intensity sexy work possible later not only possible that's safer that's

a good point because we had I think one of the questions that people asked Tim asked for questions on Twitter you know what would you like me to ask coach summer and some of the people came back with you know I know someone who's a gymnast and they're just beat the

shit and my answer to that is simple they weren't my athlete they weren't my athlete we don't train through pain as a national team coach for a long time physical preparation was always our number one priority we built the physical structure first because if you think

about it it's kind of silly we and we see this a lot with people who are getting into weight lifting their crossfitters they're a link big lifting and they're they're enthusiastic they're trying to build technique with a flawed range of motion which of course gives them

F-Dup technique and it doesn't work and then they get hurt or you hear someone all I changed my shoe and I blew my knee seriously your knee is that tight that because you're heel up your new shoe is a fraction of an inch higher or slightly different angle that you're

knee blue in our training program we need to call everything you need an optimal surplus you need an optimal surplus range of mobility range of motion and you need to be range of motion you need an optimal surplus of strength you need an optimal surplus of

stability you need what you need to perform and a little extra for when things goes out not if things goes out when things go south and if you're just riding the edge of what you're capable of and they hope oh nothing will go wrong I hope nothing will go wrong

oh it is gonna go wrong that's absolutely gonna go wrong and so you prepare the body for that ahead of time so when it does go wrong so that didn't hurt I didn't get nothing's injured moving on next turn well one of the questions you've asked me multiple

times when we've been going over different workouts and I would mention for instance I felt it in my bicep I felt an extreme stretch in my bicep so for instance there's a movement that we've been calling a German hang a lot of people would call it skin the cat perhaps

very similar where you would hold on to say a bar or rings in this case and I'm gonna simplify this of course but sure talking up going back in between the rings and then hanging down with this little of a pike at the hips is possible nice flat back

nice straight hips exactly and sort of palms facing towards the ground and I was saying I really felt an incredible stretch in my biceps more than an shoulder and your question would be and this is applied to different body parts where did you feel it in the bicep

this is getting back to the not training through pain comment and could you describe why you're like if it's in the middle I don't really care in same form like the abs like we can smash those all day long if it's at the attachment points though then I want

to know about it or we're gonna down on now so why is that I'm gonna sneak around to it so most people when they do their training meaning well and I'm not I'm not slamming anyone by any means and the only reason that we know this and are able to share is because all these years I've been doing this I made the same effort mistakes that they make we just survived my stupidity and learned how to do better if the story is my life so I'm story of all our lives right I used to tell my athletes

they're there are stupid gymnasts and they're old gymnasts but they're no old stupid because they're all dead but most people most beginners they want to base all their training off muscular fatigue which is a problem it's problematic because muscle tissue regenerates about every 90 days about every 90 days you know from end to end all the cells everything's done in 90 days okay that's well that's fine but connective tissue takes 200 to 200 turn days so we have a huge gal so if I get in and I'm

just sending I'm I'm I'm not a big fan of beginners training to failure simply because their structure isn't mature enough yet to handle it safely and by mature I simply mean enough productive well structured hours under their belt so you know I have not particularly if it's in new ranges of motion right if they've particularly if there's joints if it's a muscle belly where like you said if we're doing more we'll beat your core down all day long and I'm not worried about it a bit because

it's his muscular fatigue but as soon as we get joints involved everything changes and it's actually really easy for people to verify say and think back over all the injuries they've had over their training career you know on their athletic career playing around with the kids in the backyard the mass majority of those injuries are all joint related almost always it's extremely rare for someone to have a little belly injury it just doesn't happen yet they're training especially in the

beginning is all skewed just towards muscular development not connective tissue development and that's where they get into trouble so when they come to us the first thing we like is for them to spend is it going to be boring it is you know 210 days we're talking six seven months of dial it back guys dial it back and I think that it's important to emphasize to that dialing it back it means that you're not rushing but it doesn't mean you won't experience a lot of progress

if that's fair to say I think that's crazy fair say you found that yourself yeah but what happens is some of them we run into this maybe you have also as we get some people who are addicted to the rush they're addicted to the adrenaline rush they're addicted to laying there in a pile of sweat you know they want to do the sweat angels they want to crawl out of the gym and the problem with that is if you're a world class athlete you can't do that because I have to be back

in the gym the next day in training again I can't afford to destroy myself or the special operations guys we work with we've got to be able to both they've got to be operational and increase their performance through their training but they have to go hand in hand and so it's only in beginners that we see they think somehow they can cheat time it can't be done I mean connective tissues take 200 to 210 days there's no supplement you can't paint yourself blue you can't

dance under the moon there's there's nothing you can do to speed that up it's going to take what it takes and so we work as hard as we can within those parameters if there's joint pain we shut it down you like your elbows a good example years ago pushing too hard now that that out if we tweak that elbow a little too much it flares up on you will repair it and it's going to take time but it takes much longer to repair it than it does to avoid it in the

first place yeah for sure and just a couple of of notes and then I'm going to swing back to the diagnostics you know how people can assess but another conversation you know topic that came up I think I'm sure I brought it up at dinner once was the use of anabolic or any time growth agents and the

the point you made which makes perfect sense is that would just increase the likelihood of having connected tissue problems and gymnasts because the muscular strength and growth would outpace the development of and the adaptation of the tissues completely with backfire here backfire where

students make their their greatest gains and strength is to be able to do dynamic plyometric work and straight on ring strength those are your two banks for the buck and what we have learned the hard way that's different the main difference between working with young developmental athletes and

full grown adults is the order in which we need to present the material as a young a young athlete I I can do all physical components at once I can do plyometric I can do straight arm I can do their mobility bent arm it doesn't matter a bit I can do it all at one time but an adult who's now fragile from years of making a living sit not a desk day in day out they get a little older kids get bigger levels of activities drop drop drop drop and they're compromised

we have to build these things in a different order we have to first go rebuild mobility then we have to rebuild core we call them talking not just abs but obliques lower back most adults a lot of their lower back pain isn't lower back related

it's a bleak related we have to go in we have to correct that then we can worry about regular strength once those things are done then we can get to the money maker which is their dynamic strength but with an adult especially a strong adult who's been athletically inactive so they've been doing

strength training but not out moving doing sports being active you know outside of their conditioning or let's say for example all they're doing is squats and they're very linear in the path of their knee and there's no meniscus work there's no MCL work there's no ACL work then they go outside they play a little softball here at all the time yeah when I was playing softball I blew my knee gone around first base really how many kids blowing knee running around

first base I mean the supplemental knee exercises that look wacky as hell when you first look at them that you've had me do and maybe we can show some of this to people in the show notes even in the span of three or four weeks I've

seen a huge difference in needs stability improvement because I haven't ever performed these types of targeted movements before coming back to the diagnostics we talked about the bridge we talked about the hanging leg lifts are there any other movement shoulder extension will be huge

so shoulder extension would be sitting on the floor so you have the floor sitting in that pike that you described earlier hands touching behind them and then without letting the hands move trying to scoot the butt as far forward away from the hands as they could just that one movement right there is going to let us see show me their scapular health can they protract can they retract it's going to tell me how tight their pec minor is it's going to tell me how tight their

breakie Alice down by the elbow is oh the breakie Alice yes your favorite my good friend the breakie Alice and also just the and this relates to kind of daily living a lot of people who have back pain myself included quite a few

years ago if you're wondering if you have a tight pec minor you can just Google pec minor figure out where it is but basically think right under the clavicle get a lacrosse ball you know go on the wall and try to roll out your pec minor with lacrosse ball and if you have back pain

you don't always fix that back pain by just focusing on the location of that pain once good plant and you start addressing the pec minor a lot of that stuff is alleviated and I want to throw one thing out there just for people who might be interested and that is I think part of the reason I seen or

was better prepared for the assessment than I would have been otherwise is that I started doing really just one thing one thing I would have been just one thing one type of new exercise which was compression strength training in that pike position and did that for just maybe two times per week

prior to doing the assessment as I was traveling and for people who are wondering what this is like if you really want to feel humbled as I did I was traveling I was in Columbia very close friend of mine almost got to professional rugby in New Zealand he's a beast I mean athletically

they are beast extremely strong extremely fast he's always going to be one of the top performers in the gym when he walks into a way room and he saw me doing pike pulses and so I'll explain what this is to folks because he was kind of laughing at me and he's like what kind of Jane fondable should you do in here you know and I love that name and and I said all right I'd like to all right big guy you're so you're just tough guy let's see you do these so

for those people are interested so you're sitting in this this seated pike position we're talking about right so you're sitting on your ass on the floor the upper body perpendicular with the floor and your legs out straight in front point your toes kind of tense your quads to push the back your knees into the floor then reach forward and stretch forward as far as you can get your fingers out on either side of your legs as far out as you can and then just try to lift your

heels off the ground keeping your legs completely straight and just pulse it up on like that three to four inches maybe if you can manage that and just do try to do 30 of those and my my buddy could not lift his heels off the ground and just fell over laughing he's like yeah okay those are hard but that compression it's if you think about the range of motion that most people train for core they're doing sit ups or maybe they're doing hanging leg lifts up to like an

L sit so their legs are getting up to kind of parallel height well that last 90 degrees and especially the last like 45 degrees where you're bringing your thighs towards your chest is so hard I mean I had zero strength there prior to doing just a few weeks of this stuff just amazed me and for those people also were talking about the transverse abdominis coach feel free to veto this but I think it's also nicknamed the corset muscle if you're trying to think of

what they might look like is it wraps around the abdomens if you cough a lot laugh a lot and get really really sore it's very frequently often engaging that transverse but let me ask you so you mentioned crossfit you mentioned

a couple of things you know the drenched in sweat doing sweat angels what are your feelings about keeping movements like keeping pull ups right had to open that can orbs well I was asking a mutual friend I won't name him and I said what should I talk to coach summer about he said hip and pull ups

to lose his shit so I said okay I got it we started I was the original gymnastics guy for crossfit way back in the early 2000s and ended up leaving I was there before there was the first crossfit affiliate when all there was was was glass been working out of that little gym and Santa Cruz left just

because to do GS to write like anything that a dichotomy that I always find curious with people especially the crossfitters is they will be so on point with dissecting everything they do in terms of their Olympic lifting you know

my pull is here my pull is there my knee was the quarter inch this way I mean they they're just methodical and they don't bring and I shouldn't say just crossfitters but then they other people they don't bring that same degree of attention to detail so their body weight work so one is supposed to be

meticulous and one is somehow just supposed to be thrown together yet they expect the same quality results so if we look back in the day crossfit you know their lifting was nothing by national standards now they get people who are qualifying to go to nationals fast forward all those years in terms

of their gym massacred training and they're not even remotely close they they don't match a national team they they don't match a state level athlete let alone a national level let alone an international level there they're not even in the same ballpark and part of the issue is because the

keeping pull ups were a huge big deal was a money maker you know now I'll be straight out of pissing people off but it was a money maker as advertising for a program they could bring someone in who's never been able to pull up have them hold their chin by the bar and let them fall hit the bottom of

that movement bounce back to the top and persons eyes light up and they're like you know this is the best f and thing ever I've never done a pull up my entire life oh my god oh my god and they're and they're pumped what they didn't

realize is that this person has compromise basic strength and compromise shoulder flexion they don't they don't have mobility in their shoulder so they're hitting the bottom of that movement with multiples of body weight so they weren't strong enough to do a regular pull up so now we're going to

drop them on connective tissue with multiples of body weight that's got to go somewhere so it's going to force that shoulder to open further than it can handle and I'm going to bounce off that connective tissue like a trampoline back to the top of the bar and then to make to pour salt on the wound now I'm going to do a shit load of reps at the same time I'm just going to crank on it and they were getting people who were coming in you know cross it well

there's no proof there's out of that you know bullshit bullshit you guys can live in a dream world all you want it was blowing people up and now the good thing though into their credit you know it took time there was a denial know it hasn't on the do with it but now we're seeing a recommendation you

know guys we got to start getting some basic strength built first some basic mobility and then at that time keeping pull ups absolutely there's nothing wrong that they're healthy they're good to do on a healthy shoulder joint

with a good foundation of basic strength but it began or doing keeping pull ups really that's insanity that's just born gasoline on a fire so keeping then is the finishing addition it is not the starting and all of it we started working with adults are first we do seminars all around the

world you know we spend a lot of time doing hands-on and our very first one we did I don't know 2007 or so and we've got all these people we've got all these beasts here in their strong and tried to do my entry level plyometric work on some floor work with them and the stronger the athlete

the faster they went down knees lower back ankles on baby stuff baby something we're not talking anything hard we're talking about standing in place and what needs straight being able to bounce down the floor using the gloves no way they their tissues couldn't take it they hadn't done anything

like it or we had 15 minutes on the schedule for example how bad mobility was we had 15 minutes on the schedule to stretch nothing hard nothing intricate nothing intense just an easy basic stretch get a moose enough for the day that stretch took an hour and a half to complete it was an hour and

a half to it was an hour and a half there were buys lying everywhere it was in Vietnam or a war movie I turned to my staff I'm like what the fuck am I supposed to do now they failed warm up they failed warm up now in fairness this stuff is really you would look at it and just like my

friend is like what is this jane fond of bullshit and I'm like hey man why don't you try this for 10 minutes I think it is really taxing I mean I remember doing one of the stretching routines which I'll note I think is might be of interest to people is I'm hitting each once per week

so there's one that is front split focus it's a very hamstring focus there's one that is bridge focused another that is middle split add doctor or middle split focus inside the thigh and the point that you make is doing this twice a week will not double your progress it will cut it in

half so you're only really hitting each of these once per week I mean there are different daily limber protocols but I remember doing at the very beginning of one of these workouts I believe it was I know is absolutely the the front split workout a shit ton for me a shit ton of calf raises with

a different number you've known about that like different foot placements it's like okay 180 calf raises later of different variations I was like okay and I'm only three minutes into this and our long stretch sequence and I know we're bouncing all over the place because I want to give people

kind of a buffet sampling of how this training differs but one of the reasons I respect the programming that you put together and the nuance that you bring to this is that the observation then is and correct me if I'm or you can elaborate on this if I'm missing something but a lot of

the hamstring flexibility issues or limitations that people perceive are at least in part due to lower leg absolutely issues including you keep a huge amount of yeah including the Achilles so you in this particular progression in the beginning you're engorging and then stretching the

the insertion point basically around the heel and then again at the knee and working your way up to the hamstrings and there's an an athlete has been on the podcast Amelia Boone one of the most successful obstacle course racers in the world and she's basically point out the same

thing and she said yeah you can take someone who's really inflexible in their hamstrings have them roll out their feet with say a lacrosse ball or something like that and all of a sudden they gain two inches in their to set with the hamstrings it's all connected we found my accident so

we never intended this in it we just part of what maybe helps people understand the layers of complexity that that I approach training with is that for years my my bread and butter was to produce best athletes in the country that that was my job or to have a job I had to produce some of

the best athletes in the world and we had to do it from scratch and so that it becomes an issue of one an injured athlete is no good to the United States my don't know how tell me as how strong he is if he can't go out on the floor with the USA on his chest we can't win a metal

with him so he's got to be healthy and then the second caveat that goes with that is that we're trying to find a way to make the best better because he these these athletes are already the best on the planet and you're going head to head with other athletes who are the best so

then how do you find a way to make something which is almost already perfect even closer to perfect and if you do what everybody else is doing right without kind of going out into the jungle if you want to Indian country and learning new things then you can't get a leg up on your

competitors now if we go we have PhDs who come through a nesanad and then we we always give them major shit major shit because the way people think the world works is that they do their research they write about it they publish it we learn about it and we implement it with our

athletes that is not how the way the world works the way it really works is you've got high level world class coaches who are super bright decades of experience you know just my last senior athlete alone I had been doing this for about 15,000 hours into training Alan 16,000 hours

spread over 12 years what is Alan's last name power power so yeah you guys got celebrate Alan he owe you just one national NCA championships again major blowout by the largest margin in NCA history wow that was the ball as of this recording very recently

this oh goodness the weekend of the 15th I think we're scheduled here to come out sometime in May but yeah very very big deal but to go back to the other so we're looking for an edge and so we don't know why some things work we just know it works and I started getting

notes from therapists around the world for example therapists are taught that they should have a neutral spine you should have a neutral spine I can't do anything with a neutral spine except laying a box dug in a hole and they get ready to bury me that's the only thing I can do

it there's nothing athletically I can do with a neutral spine so we know just automatically to produce athletes we're going to do something like that and you can do something like that and then you can do something like that and then you can do

with a neutral spine so we know just automatically to produce athlete we're not going to neutral spine because torso wise there's only two movements I can go from an arch snap to a hollow or I can be hollow and snap back to extension to the arch those are the only two movements

the torso is capable of athletically everything else is a variation off that we can add rotation with some throws and some this and that but that's all there is so we spend a lot of time building power for that and these therapists around the world started taking our

really gentle introductory work and they trained it on themselves first and I'm like you know just real similar what you said to me I feel better and I have a years coach I feel better in years and this is completely different from what I was taught in school maybe we could

use an example that we've discussed before which was a new movement for me which is Jefferson curl yeah there's there having some fun with that so we look at Jefferson curl right now so it wasn't that many years ago that if you squat it below parallel it was heresy it was

heresy if you went below parallel the knees couldn't possibly adapt to you're just going to blow your knees your kneecaps were going to just pop off the front of eyes can be strapped no knee strapped no but everybody accepts now that you know what there is nothing wrong with the

body being exposed to its natural range of motion now do you have to build it up gradually yes obviously you do but Jefferson curl falls into that so gosh how do we explain Jefferson curl I mean to give it a shot yeah you'll be good this would be a good this would be

a good exam review for me anyway so Jefferson curl is a gradually rounded stiff leg and deadlift that's the simplest way to visualize it so if you're looking at an athlete from the side doing a Jefferson curl they will most likely be standing on a box

holding on to an Olympic barbell right in front of their hip slash legs it's just like the very top of a deadlift position but when they start the descent and it's elevated so that when you have plates on and whatnot there's room for it but when they come down they're going to tuck their chin and

then vertebra by vertebra round their back down all the way into the bottom position where the objective would be or one of the objectives would be to get basically your wrists to the front of your toes or at least in a perfect world if you're advanced enough yeah in a perfect world and of course doing this very gradually with supervised attention from somebody who knows what they're doing and then reversing that and again going from this vertebra by vertebra rounding up until you end up in

the top position and then repeating. Was that a fair description? Fair description yeah the easy is just think of it as a string of pearls and we're just curling one pearl at a time we've been having some fun with that one. We have done Jefferson curl so I don't know 12 15 years now expected standard is body weight for us. No to people listening do not try this with body weight right out of the

gate. No I don't. Don't so for example one of our senior students in Australia in his training physical therapist has his own clink doing really well he tried it with just the empty bar you know the 20 kilo bar first trashed him he dropped all the way down to I think a

kilo or two. Right which is completely fine and what we'll talk about wine just a sec and then he built up and last time I checked with Mark over the course of I don't know I'm I'm forgetting there's too many students but around 12 to 18 months he built up to either 3 quarter body weight or maybe up to full body weight now.

And back feels better and it ever has but the key there is people got to understand is that this was a gradual process over 12 to 18 months it wasn't just go we've got a very good I'll throw a Quinn out I'm going to butcher Quinn's last name Quinn's a PhD in physical therapy Quinn he not does some really good work. How do you spell my name? You had to ask me we can get it for the show that's yeah we'll get it for the show huh we chat a lot on Facebook and that Quinn likes to stir the pot if you

will you know stir up some shit. He's experimented with Jefferson Crow himself for think going on about three or four years now and feels wonderful. He'll toss it out and so one of the things that will always become obvious you know the McGill experiments where they would take a connective tissue from a pig get dava and put it under such and such amount of strain and if we put it in this position with this much load it

snaps. Okay and everyone runs around and it's the sky is falling the sky is falling oh my god oh my god don't bend your spine stay neutral. What everyone kind of missed the big elephant in the room was the pig was fucking dead the tissue was dead it can't adapt it's dead it's no way and it wasn't exposed to very gradual load so that there could be progressive adaptation which is what our bodies are really good at they kind of overlooked all that so if I take this completely unprepared tissue

and I do this to it it'll break. So some very interesting discussions right on it obviously everyone's fine you know we've we've got athletes doing great adults who are doing wonderful and the physical therapist will come around simply because it's healthy now they've got to understand

and other people who are less than they should understand also is that our weighted mobility work needs to be approached with a different mentality a different level of intensity than conditioning work because connective tissue has one tenth the metabolic rate of muscular tissue it

heals slower to adapt slower so you have to kind of come to the table with a very patient attitude or or as I consider myself I'm I'm I'm extremely impatient naturally but I've learned in order to get what I want and to go where I want to go I've had to learn to be patiently

impatient and if I get into the urge then I get hurt athletes get hurt we fall apart and we you know nationals are Olympic trials are every four years nationals are once a year and you don't get another nationals you don't get another Olympic trials if you blow it you've got to be on

point that day so it teaches us and our our environment was actually a blessing because it's very much practical it's very much results oriented there's no room for opinion I think I feel I prefer it works it doesn't work it produces results it doesn't produce results you are the best in the

country you aren't the best in the country I mean it's very clear it's very clear it can't be argued with and now that was actually something when we segueed into kind of the fitness world if you will where you can out of national team and then everyone knows who the studs are in the

fitness world though everyone's proclaiming their the stud everyone's proclaiming their the national champion there's nothing to support it there's no results there's no great athletes there's no great abilities have been generated there's just the marketing and that that was hard to wrap my

head around because a national team that doesn't exist you can't go to the Olympics and the guy who talks the loudest gets the metal I have the loudest I'm champion we think that's national politics right now oh wait no never bad I did want to ask you how your visits to the White House but I figure

we'll save that for another time yeah Tim went to the White House last week guys so I'll take his brain for you later so I I interrupted but yeah you get to the fitness world and another one of the differences that you pointed out for me

which I really liked was that in the fitness world it's exercise and diet whereas in your world it's always been eaten train or it's eaten train yeah eating train what the people are trying to do and I'll throw a little a little blurb in here we have an outstanding nutrition program the guy who

who wrote it former seal team six when he started but it's back in the day he was like 141 45 and then Jeff got all the way up to 220 just shy to 25 the loud muscle and his waist was the same size as 20 was thin he looked like two Vikings two shoulders on top of his body came walking as like what

the five had been a couple of years but that held it you do if these basic nutritional concepts that we teach but what we try to do with adults is they're trying to stay ahead of a bad diet through exercise or trying to outrun a bad diet and it can't be done it can't be done and then what

happens is if they somehow find this crazy combination of massive amounts of cardio and they can kind of keep their weight in check a little bit and then they stop that cardio they immediately start gaining weight gain weight loss all of that should be separate from your conditioning you

know you've got to get your nutrition dial in if you're nutrition dialed in your body's going to find its natural healthy weight that it's going to operate at now if you're if you want to be the giant muscle guy and that's not your phenotype which is your body type you know what tough shit deal

with it you know it's not going to change your not going to change your phenotype you're not going to change your body's genetic expression came that being said you can maximize what your potential as well we hammer through to our students as you're not responsible for the hand to cards you were dealt your response will from maxing out what you were given non-so who knows what your strengths will be maybe the more endurance maybe you're going to carry easy

muscle mass maybe you're a max strength guy maybe you're very skill oriented it doesn't matter maybe you're very explosive but whatever it is you know make the most of it sit on that point and then I want to come back to I want to ask you that I think it's I wrote this down during our assessment Tony Faye quote no routines and quote that's all I wrote down so that's a cue for a story I believe you told me that will come back to does that make any sense or is that

just like a cryptic 3 a.m. note that I wrote to myself I don't know but the got to stay away from the wine did never never in Vino Veritas we'll get back to that but oh I know I kind of know what it is I think I can actually cute up at the basics yeah well we're going to come back to that one second the question I want to ask first is one that came up a lot from listeners of this podcast which was and I'm going to create sort of a composite of these questions but like if

someone is 35 years old let's just say former athlete does basic gym work diet is okay not terrible they feel reasonably athletic but they're not competing in anything certainly I have never done any gymnastics what would good goals

be for such a person and what would bad goals be maybe at the same time well that without question bad goal would be for them to jump right into kind of full body weight straight arm strength for example a backlover which doesn't require a ton of strength but they love to do it because it looks so

cool to kind of like their first thing they can do that you know while look at me the problem is is that it puts them in and extreme load while in shoulder extension so let me that can I paint a picture for people so back lever just to create the image and coach Kripe from wrong I imagine you're laying on your stomach on the floor arms by your sides and then you turn your hands palm down so that your thumbs are pointing out away from your body and then you

lift your arms off the ground as high as possible with your arms straight and then place a bar in your hands and then lift your body off the ground I mean off the ground and kind of hold yourself that your body body body would be horizontal

and what they don't realize is that when the shoulders are in shoulder extension like that is that the biceps are under maximum stretch so it's nothing it's not a problem to do it being strong enough the bicep is to load and they're going to tear a bicep for a young adult not a problem at all

and we're lucky you know we we have a lot of people who use our material but some of our material you know coach your your two conservative coach it's a new world coach we don't have time I had someone who was 21 or 23 once coach I don't have time to take my time I'm already 23 okay all

right I think you're miss reading this but they want to jump right into their strength training and they do well but they don't do the mobility work so it wasn't last year I think it was a year before I think maybe the street workout community

five of their top guys around the world snapped biceps these are crazy strong guys I mean we see them these guys are beast they're doing a lot of chins are doing this and that they all snapped them on back lever stuff because they're the mobility was an in line now we all know when you're young

you get away with a lot of stupid shit because the body heals so fast luckily right or I I certainly wouldn't have survived being 21 if it wasn't that the case but as an adult the structure is mature now and I think maybe a better way to look at it as people think I'm getting older

ligaments are breaking down ten ends are breaking down joints are getting brittle and actually that's not the case because if we go back in time when you were a little guy when I was a little guy when all listeners were a little guy we ran around like madman right it wasn't all today I'm going to

ride my bike three miles it was sun was up go jump on my bike and I'm gone all day and I'm running I'm jumping I'm climbing and we're just we're just being crazy little guys so we have this huge matrix of activity that the body is used to then we hit high school and for most people that's our

first exposure to structured athletic training okay and the body does well now the mistake is thinking that the body did well solely because of that structured athletic training what they're overlooking is all that activity that matrix activity that occurred for those years prior to that then if

they're high enough level athlete structured training might continue into college graduate time you get a job all right I'm still you know I'm young right hormones are pumped in I'm going to go to work and then I'm going to go play basketball with the guys in the evening so I hit the gym this and that that goes good for a couple of years right I'm getting by having fun weekends weekends are full then you meet the cutie right you meet the love of your

life get married suddenly I can't go play basketball every night now okay so we do this and that and a little out of time our levels of physical activity outside of conditioning are dropping down and they're dropping down a lot then kids come all right well there's another huge chunk of time gone then before you know it you're 30 you're 35 you haven't been doing hitting the gym very often there's certainly not all time for just playful activity or doing

sports or this or that on a regular basis for most people right and they spend most of the time hunched over that desk now the body wants to be healthy it wants to be healthy that's your your prime example we get we feed at the right movements in the right dosages and it blooms it blossoms it's like

waiting and watering a garden right the body wants to be healthy but we have to do it in the right dosage and so for example those street worker guys they hurt themselves because it was the wrong dosage they wanted to go too hard too soon without the mobility so for an adult to come back around answering that question a long way 35 year old very first thing we got to do we got a fixed joints we've got to repair joints we got to get that range of motion back if

you were to look at all of the adults you've dealt with let's just say 35 year olds if you had to pick and of course this does not cover all the bases but if you had to pick say three to five movements or exercises or stretches for addressing the most common deficiencies like getting those joints

back into play what would some of your selections be such as for joint joint joint joint I think we put Jefferson curl at top of the list because remember we have we have multiple sections of the spine right we've got the cervical

thoracic and lumbar that's going to come through also into glutes that's going to go down into our hamstrings that's going to hit our calves that's going to hit our Achilles as well so for for one that's a lot of bang for your buck for one exercise mm-hmm even if that was all you did right and you

just did Jefferson curl a lot of aches and pains are going to go away because of that next one west tough it's always it's always hard to boil it down boil it down we took care of pike we've got to get extension we've got to get some thoracic extension I throw elevated bridge in there if arms

strength was sufficient to handle it if not we can scale it down to some weighted work with some bars or some some barbells either some dowel with a plate we've got to get shoulder extension in there because what happens a lot a lot of the conditioning works pose to is all front delt heavy right

it's all interior delt and pecs get tight the interior delts are getting tight and we start pulling our own shoulders forward we create our own impingement it doesn't matter you know so I'll do more exercises I'll do more exercises well now you're you're just making it worse what the problem is is

there's not balance in the shoulder joint there's no retraction and it's easy to tell what does their posture look like what do we see with everyone now it got that what do they even have a term now texting neck kind of that turtle forward just extended forward like the wally power down look

yeah you know the scary thing there and again we we have some pts who use our stuff around the world a lot of success and they're the ones who come in and educate us for we'll say you know we've noticed this and they can they tell us they teach us well to the limit we can now because

we're not professionals but to the limits we can they start teaching us the mechanics of what is really going on so we have a very good student now Wesley Tan runs one of our affiliates he's a full-time osteopath in the UK runs another one of our GBA affiliates for ma GST and

Wesley's the one who taught me that there's a point coach where if you abuse the body it's not going to come back and so for example you see some older adults who are extremely hunched forward neck to stand it forward chin up because they're trying to see where they're going and it's not that they have bad posture and they could fix it it's that they can't fix it because the vertebrae are rectangle and if you spend after spending years of hunched

forward like that it compresses the front edges of that rectangle until it becomes a trapezoid and that doesn't come back once once that happens it's done it's over it's done same thing happens with the muscle bellies so people who get frozen shoulder or entingments in this that is if you're not using the muscle belly the body doesn't want to support it because muscle tissues expensive and by expensive the body looks at it is expensive to feed it's expensive

to maintain for example your body isn't a painting you can't get to a certain degree of muscle mass mobility athletic ability endurance whatever you want to say and then just stop and how to continue to exist like a painting you did it has to be maintained because if you're not using it it costs too much resources for the body to continue to keep it so it's going to start breaking it down and that's why you get a few days right and then you start losing strength you

start losing mobility you start losing win easiest physical attribute to build endurance simple super simple endurance is what endurance is simply strength repeated over and over at a lower load no big deal that's a six to an eight

week process simple no problems at all mobility and it takes some time what's the easiest one to fix muscular strength no problem at all so for it's super important then that we we use that muscle mass because if it's not being used you're not only going to lose the size of the muscle mass the

body's going to start doing deposits of collagen on it and it's going to start shrinking that muscle belly on the traps for example of going back to those older adults we discussed it's going to shrink until a lot of it is connective tissue on the edges now what people need to realize and they don't is that when they see an adult who's hurting right they're older they're shuffling they can't pick their knees up their hips are frozen they're hunched over their

next displaced they weren't that way when they were younger this is all the result of inactivity and poor progressions and their exercises and it didn't have to be and then they need to take the next step of connecting is that if

it happened to that guy or that woman it can sure as hell happened to me also if I go down the same road that they went down returning to the shoulder extension because I noticed in our assessment that I had terrible shoulder extension and I kind of accepted it and written it off with stupid reasons

like well you know I've done too much deadlifting at too much huge slabs of muscle in my back I can't do shoulder extensions like total horse shit I mean especially not must those huge massive slabs of muscle yeah the the imaginary lat syndrome that I have and I mean that was just blown to

Smith Reigns when I met let me make sure I get his name correct as Paul Watson is that right oh yeah big Paul in New York City who's gigantic and extremely flexible so soon as I hang out with him I was like okay know that people know Paul as well as a six feet to 30

I mean and just it's about 40 I want to say and just probably watch around at 6% body fat and can do a flat like chest to ground pancake no problem can do dislocates with a weighted dowel or barbell no problem with all different grips which I can't do at all even though making progress the shoulder

extension what is your preferred way to work on shoulder extension is it the sitting down arms behind you scooting the hips forward is there something else you would add to that mix well we we have to sneak up on now on a little bit so sometimes we can't even work shoulder extension at first

if the elbows are deconditioned so breakie Alice just inside the elbows we if the insertion of the bicep tenon is we then when the arm is extended as they stretch there might be some discomfort so if that's the case we have to

give that time to adapt so you know it's that's one of the questions I ask you how's your breakie how's your bicep feel how's your elbow feel as we we never push through pain I mean you can you can but have you noticed that the guys who push through pain they've got a shelf life of somewhere

between two and four years and then the body is so beat up and so painful and so chronically injured that it's just easier to be a fat slob sitting on the couch and at least my pain dropped then to try to continue pushing through and being a stud it's so common and it's also unnecessary for

example and I I don't get this one I don't get this one a lot I'll bring it because where there's a lot of people and don't be wrong I really like weightlifting I think the Olympic lifting is sweet there's a lot going for it I think the way that it is approached here in the States is not as

efficient as it's approached in China for example or in Russia so for example in both of them before there's any weight at it at all they build complete mobility throughout the body they can strut all their legs just on the floor say with legs together pike they've got bridge they have all

these basic mobility and all ankle flexibility and mobility we talked about this is it related to and especially exactly you watch cloak off to be sure you go and people should watch this guy check out some videos God he is such a beast but what they also need to do is not just watch the

weight he's putting up right they need to watch his warm up in the training hall and look at how amazingly flexible and mobile he is now what's important to understand is at a world class level right at a world class level resources are limited energy you have for training is limited

the amount of time you have for training is limited the amount of time you have for recovery is limited right you have to maximize these things who you're going is one thing to be the best stud in the town another thing to be best stud in the state another one in region another one

in the country completely different animal to be the best in the entire world to be the best at what you do how to billions of people what we're talking livers of difference between the very top guys so with all those restrictions and all those parameters in place gift the best in the world

are stretching their ass off in order to get strong why aren't you agreed not you personally now you as in all of us as in all of us right and what will happen is people just kind of get blinders on they want to watch technical they want to watch progress is what he did for this and that

and then they'll blow off the mobility work that they do early not realizing that the mobility work was the gold nugget they were looking for they just didn't brush the dirt off in order to see that it was gold underneath they decided just another rock who cares was the gold that was

the sweet and they missed it so for looking at again this 30 five year old former athlete maybe never was super competitive but has kept in decent shape maybe does some form of exercise two or three times a week in terms of a understanding that the mobility and working with J

curl elevator bridge shoulder extension et cetera is going to be those are going to be ingredients in the recipe in their progression to gymnast of some type not even gymnast I would say functional human being functional human being right because if you don't train unlike to you know point out

people we don't train gymnast we do gymnastics training but I don't have I just got off the phone with our Olympic coach today Kevin Magica right we had a great conversation but guys regardless of how good you are a rope climbs and plans in this and that I wouldn't hold my breath that

Kevin's getting ready to give you a call and say to me he's going to be on our team this year you know I saw your rope climbs and you are kickass you are the one for us where we got a uniform waiting here for you or to pardon for Rio in July man be ready pack your bag it is not going to happen

guys so correct you know functional athletes functional human being covers it all so let me let me just jump to the punchline question which is let's so we look at if I wanted to give someone a stretch goal to inspire them to train consistently right so the mobility might not be

enough but if I wanted to give them a light at the end of the tunnel so I'm like I know this shoulder extension stuff is going to be very unpleasant maybe not super exciting but this is the objective this is what you might be able to do in 369 12 months from now the back lever we've

talked about is not necessarily a good goal because you might think you have the strength and perhaps you do but you know they'll definitely have this right most without question right but they don't have the mobility so you know I have the most sense goes the bicep that nasty surprise

waiting in that box what would be a good gymnastics strength training goal to have or goals just as context for people who are wondering after trying to do my best to survey the landscape and figure out what might not be the stupidest goals

I wanted to you know nothing is the best goals but I decided okay well press strict press handstand which we can define in a second seems like good one and it just seems like a sweet thing to be able to do and then the front lever and then the lever straddle planch and straddle planch

exactly so we can talk about what each of those are but would the press handstand for instance be something that incorporates the strength the mobility and all these pieces if you had to pick one you had to pick one that would be the one

that'd be the one do you want to because it's going to have all strength and mobility balance agility everything roll into one movement do you want to take a stab at what does a perfect press handstand look like in your press handstand so I'm just trying to keep it simple right then

over hands on the ground by your toes and that can be put your palms on the floor so they're just in front of your toes shoulder width leg straight leg straight and now if they need it to bend we could we're talking about perfect world then hands on the floor shoulders directly over the hands

and then no jumping using just the middle back just the traps because everyone thinks trap traps traps anything traps just for shrugging while your traps are a huge muscle or a huge muscle they don't just lie in the top of your shoulders they're in the middle of your back

and down towards your lower back as well they're a giant muscle and they're capable of a huge amount of power and when you fix those a lot of shoulder pain goes away a lot of lower back pain goes away but go back to our other hands on the floor shoulders over the hands

using that middle back those traps pull the hips up on top of the shoulder maintain that flat back position then we continue on with lower back finishing the legs up to the hands down so couple of things that make this particularly challenging so one obviously you need to have

the flexibility and hamstrings and have the mobility you have to have the compression strength like we're talking about doing those murderous embarrassing pike pulses which look like they should be easy and they are not bringing your legs basically to your chest in that last like 10 to 12 inch range

really challenging and then I think where you see a lot of people online do this incorrectly at least from the standpoint of having the objective of gymnastics strength training right so all sorts of ways you can cheat with the stuff to make it biomechanically easier

but if we're trying to do it strictly champion why why do it? maybe this is a nice thing to throw in because people say well it's just a matter it's personal taste coach it's personal taste you do it this way because you prefer this form now we do it a particular way because this is what

builds the most strength that's transferable to other activities for example this all continues so who will who will wall by pissed off so far did I pissed off crossfitters yeah yeah piss off yoga right now so I I once had and I like yoga don't get me wrong

but their approach to handstand is flawed they want to go bone on bone so they want to have their shoulders depressed so they're bone on bone they want to have pipe shoulders so all right so shoulders shoulders can elevate so if I'm if I'm standing upright

and I elevate my shoulders that would be like me shrugging my shoulders to my ear and then doing the opposite is the other direction well when we do a handstand and if I describe it this way it's going to make sense right I want muscle and connective tissue

to be doing the work I don't want bone grinding on bone that's not a recipe for longevity not going to work but the easy one is as they'll say well there's there's a yoga handstand and there's a gymnastics handstand here that as well you're almost right there's a gymnastics handstand

and there's a fucked up gymnastics handstand those are the only two there are here's how we evaluated a gymnastics handstand right done with nice flat back nice head all being a smart ass aside right we're going to look at it just from a purely practical viewpoint which one

leads somewhere so if I do a yoga type dancing with that arch and the flex shoulders I'm not going any farther than I can work under and do some other things but I'm not going any further I do a gymnastics handstand where it's flat now I have nice range of motion in the shoulders

I have strength through the middle back through the traps right I've got good core strength I've got good compression strength now I can move on to good press handstand work why what we want to get stronger that in turn allows me to go on if I'm in the mood I want to do more advanced one arm handstand where wedding work all all those things are how results of a proper nice straight line handstand that you can't do with the flawed approach it's not aesthetics it's being practical

because we don't do anything in gymnastics right that's just purely aesthetics why why do we do things a certain way it lets us generate more power why do we want more power let's us get more air let's us do more flips let's us do more twists let's us do harder things on rings which means more points which means more gold medals and as let me throw out a couple of observations and you can correct me if if this is wrong but like one

of them an example is something that people might think is aesthetics there is an aesthetic appeal but it's a side effect and not the reasoning behind it would be a strong point in the the toes right a strong pull on the legs so you see a lot of people doing handstands and I was going to do this certainly they have kind of what I heard what one acrobat called tofu feet they're not fully dorsiflexed like they're not pulling the toes back to the

knees which I think looks terrible also pretty common in yoga but they don't have that and they don't have a strong point and so they're at the very least their quads and their adductors aren't really fully engaged they're loose

and so they're they're leaking energy in all sorts of directions and it makes I like that leaking energy makes a very good description and it makes I think I probably stole it from povl satsul and but the the always a good buddy I follows a good friend of mine I like povl povl's povl's great and the what is the consequence the consequence there are consequences one of which is your wasting energy so you're not going to be able to train as efficiently number two is you're not going

to develop the proper balance and alignment because you're going to be flopping all over the place and having to correct more so than you should so that just that pointing has a huge impact on your ability to train the handstands like it's really strong human and the other point I wanted to make is because I've of course in the attempt to try to work on this in the past which failed and I've made a ton of progress in the last

few months but when doing it so long watch videos online and of course not all videos are created equal and you would see and you would see people doing a press handstand but they would planch really hard right so you would see in other words you'd see people they put their hands flat on the ground in front of their toes and then they shoot their head really far forward so their shoulders travel if you were to drop a plum line

like a string with a weight in the head from their shoulders it would hit the floor say like eight inches in front of their hands six eight inches in front sure that if and then they go up into the head and then they go up and they have this arch in the back and maybe their feet are pointing straight up and what does that look like?

it looks a lot like what was the gold standard in sort of muscle beach venus or Santa Monica like 19 circa 19 16 14 in 1950s around 1940s 1950s but that's going to place a lot more structural strain on the spine

so then if the what does the proper version look like I mean roughly right your ears are roughly in between your shoulders are roughly in between your shoulder blades your in between your arms yeah in between your arms fully shoulders extended up or not extended what am I looking for here?

pressing pressing down through the ground and keeping the hand the shoulders directly on top of the hands for people who want to just do a little experiment obviously do it's do it safely but I was blown away the first time that someone showed this to me if you do a normal say kick up to handstand on the wall just the way that everybody does it you're kind of flipping up and you end up looking away from the wall

there are a million ways to do let's say you do that and then instead of doing it the way you've always done it before you put your hands on the ground you start with your arms overhead in the position that you want to assume on the ground and stroke your shoulders up as high as possible trying to get your deltoids to the size of your ears maintain that position and then go up and the stability is just a world of difference I mean it's 9-1-1-1

it's a completely different movement all right I have to ask this because a million people asked since we're on a roll here we've already checked off yoga that's true and I have to come back guys I like everything else about yoga except your hands and so only a small amount of hate mail for the hands and some of the coaches and doesn't have to be in gymnastics but they certainly could be some of the coaches who have impressed you the most I took down in between like my bouts of hands shaking

like accidentally getting chalk in my mouth doing the assessment and like when I could bend my arms and do something I took these cryptic notes I wrote down one name which was Alexander World Champion Mail and Female does that uh-huh ring any bells?

yeah you know I've been extremely extremely fortunate in my career I have just a multitude of friends who are world and Olympic champions world and Olympic team members world and Olympic coaches and for a long time you know I just got because if that's your environment day in day out it's just going to be comes your normal right and then after a while you kind of stop and think like one day I was I was at a competition

and I I was busy and with some friends of mine and I came back and my oldest daughter was maybe around 12 at the time she was like oh my god you know who you were talking to dad and I said well yes we did I know they're my friends

she says that was the Olympic champion and that was the world champion see I know babe I know look look she's just like oh my good god well the me tree below is her chef is a good friend of mine and the me tree one world's in 83 at 16 years old 16 years old just unbelievable he won again in 87 what a lot of people don't know is in between their to me tree obviously Russian Demetri had a car accident and broke his left lower leg between the knee and the ankle in 42 places

42 places so basically you know as powder they put him and he's unconscious he's on the table and he's covered up and they're getting ready to remove his lower leg they're going to you know taken it off and the surgeon pulls the towel down the sheet town because he's prepped for surgery and he's out and he sees its Demetri now this is Russia right in the early 80s so you know this is not warm friendly Russia

the doctor me like holy shit I am not cutting this leg off because the surgeon who takes Demetri below her chef's leg off is probably going to lose his hands shortly thereafter also national hero so they save his leg and Demetri comes back from it and wins worlds in 87 goes 88 Olympics does great metal coal medals what Demetri was lucky enough for a different training cancel that Demetri was my roommate and you know Russians or Russians right it takes a long time for them to warm up to you

so took I don't know how many years but we start getting along real well after some years we start sharing some stuff we know I'm like you know Demetri because his leg is trashed the latest trash at eight Olympics that's a Demetri you know how how the hell dude so that only lasts for a few seconds I can do anything for a few seconds I don't know dude well so it's just great right so he's you know legend in gymnastics we get together with a room full of world and Olympic champions who are Russian

they were all deferred to Demetri he's he's that big a legend and this is an a room full of massive egos yeah there's there's no shortage of confidence here and Demetri is in the room they treat Demetri awesome it's a very very cool thing to see well we go forward we had a world champion from the Russian on the women's side who won worlds and Demetri's coach Alexander was responsible for training both of them so Alexander's the only one in history who produced a male world champion

and a female world champion he's the only one and Alexander right now is down coach in the Brazilian team what is Alexander is that his first or last name and I always screw up all the Russian pronunciations all my Russian friends are gonna laugh because they're totally used to me butchering this was like Alexander Alexander and off for or something got one of those and the exam done with my Russian friends I just say Alexander and everybody knows who I mean so I don't have to embarrass myself

what do you think allowed him made him makes him him yeah exactly what makes him different what makes him him is the ability so it starts with depth of knowledge to have enough depth of knowledge that you can look in an athlete and plan what you need to be doing four years from now eight years from now and then reverse engineer all of it to today all the training cycles the strength the delauds it was from Demetri that I for so back in 83 Demetri was the only

gymnast I think today probably one of the only ones who every fourth week was a delaud week why to give the body a chance to recover now there's a lot of people talk delaud but way back then right the training if you visit with Demetri right it's always Chris it's mathematics it's all mathematics we do to them you take these correct pieces would you be like doing the correct numbers that creates your equation if you put the equation together correctly and then you solve

it there's your answer your answer is the physical preparation at the end in a successful competition so Alexander is great great at knowing we're going to just be consistent over this training block so you know an Olympic cycle is four years long so we're getting ready to finish this to Olympics right and then the next cycle starts so it could take for example to get someone to 75 80% of their genetic capacity with a good coach a good world class coach going to take three to

four years it's going to take three to four years just to let the body grow adapt do you think that's also true for 30 like training and adult I do okay great now that's a healthy adult so if they're severely compromised so you know to get through our whole our whole curriculum should take three to four years if they're severely compromised and we have to do damage repair we've got to heal some injuries we got some chronic things because what what's a chronic

injury a chronic injury is simply an injury that you kept abusing until it became semi permanent that's all chronic injury as it means you slammed your hand in the door and it hurt your response to slamming your hand in the door to hurting was to keep slamming your hand in the fucking door you kept slamming in the door and you say God my hand really hurts for what should I do what should I do is a quick slamming your hand in the damn door and it will get

better but people they don't think that way there's like well I but I really like doing this and we get people coming us really beat up because we're taught no pain no gain well we flip that around we say no brain no gain we're not talking about the pain of fatigue they're the easy way to know the

difference between fatigue and injury is simply the sharpness of the pain so for example and it's some experience also if you're feeling pain right and maybe it's from a core workout and you stop you're doing hollow body rocks whatever it doesn't matter what you're doing sit ups you stop if it's fatigue it's immediately going to start to lessen as soon as you stop the pain starts going away if it's an injury and you stop it's immediately going to begin

increasing that's your oh shit all that's I screwed myself up right and so you can't have to ride that we want to work to where the body is working but we don't want to work so hard like for a long time I was a big thing for people doing keeping pull ups to take pictures of their hands being raw and bloody from their rips they were looking at it as a badge of honor you know that I worked so hard and in the short term for that moment yeah they worked really

hard now I looked at it differently I looked at it as like you stupid shit what are you going to do tomorrow now wait there's no amount of work you can do today that could offset the amount of progress you could have made throughout

a properly structured week it can't be done you see that you see that with kettlebells a lot too I remember when I was really deep in kettlebell training it was yeah you take yourself out for God knows how long you rip all your calluses off but they mean well they mean well we tend to use two terms

with our athletes we have immature athletes and mature athletes and it's not an age deal it's an attitude deal so an immature athlete is someone who wants what they want right now okay a mature athlete is someone who's willing to do what needs to be done now to get rewarded for it later delayed

gratification and it's the mature athlete that in the long run always comes out on top there are always the ones with the greater longevity and the greater success the other ones the immature ones they're really talented they may stay

ahead for a while but eventually you're going to get so dinged and broken and beat up that they have to step aside and the mature guy in the mature athlete or woman right they're they're just doing their thing day in day out it's like writing a book that has 365 pages and if I ask you tomorrow Tim

go home tonight and write me a book with 365 pages you like Chris you lost your fucking mind but if I say Tim I want you to write me a page a single page every day in a year we've got a book with 365 pages and if you picture that that thickness of a novel that that's a lot of pages there but if I look at that thickness of a single page it's so thin that it seems negligible it doesn't even matter it's like why did I bother well it's it's the consistency that

adds up over time that's where you see you see these great athletes got a lot of them and they see you see a world class athlete that did not start training yesterday this is a multi-year process also I think that there's a behavioral modification and a component of this which you want to dig in the

research is supported at this point which is doing each day less than you feel maximally capable of to fantastic sort of positive reinforcer and this applies what IBM did way back in the day when their sales force was slaughtering the competition did the lowest quotas in the industry because they wanted their sales be able to be unantimidated to pick up the phone so we could substitute intimidate the big up the phone with intimidated to go to the gym or start a

session you could also apply it to writing I leave a little in the bank leave a little in the bank remember there are two examples offhand as it applies to writing friend of mine was very very consistent prolific writer and he said my key is every day I write less than I feel capable of and you know a guideline that I was given was two crappy pages per day that's all you have to do to crappy pages and sometimes you overshoot that you have a great work out and

you're feeling as you put it froggy right you're feeling I feel I feel I feel fantastic and you just blow through and set a much a PR's but you didn't go into the workout with the pressure of having to achieve PR's and every exercise and you know anyway maybe not the best life model but was

prolific writer and still still a stud and he would end mid sentence you would end still feeling like he had more to say in a specific paragraph or sentence that he had a place to pick up the next day so on the point of consistency and actually I want you to finish your last thought because I

totally hijacked the conversation but you said it takes three to that day you hijacked my thoughts three three three to four three to three years to get them to what percentage of their genetic this is ballpark 75 to 80 this is just an example to people because the body will not let you run at 100% won't do it won't go there's not enough optimal surplus that we mentioned earlier three to four years to get to 75 80% it will take me another three to four years

another three to four years to get to about 90% another three to four years and then after that it will take me another three to four years to get to about 95% and that's me writing her done that's my standards right because remember it's easier for me to maintain that immaculate standard because I'm not the one feeling the fatigue right now it's very difficult for world class athlete to train themselves and it doesn't do a world class coach any good

to have all that knowledge and is headed takes a partnership right it takes both of them working to gather to create this great athletic animal but the interesting thing is it another three to four years you get the 95% and as soon as they ease up the body drops back down to that 75 80 that's where it likes now to build back up won't take nearly as long as to build it in the first place because the structures are already in place nervous systems are

develop yada yada yada yada yada but that's where the body's comfortable so as far as adults are concerned there's a 35 year old need to be able to produce at 90% no they don't do they need at 95% no they're not full-time professional athletes they don't they don't have time for that can they produce at 75 80 percent yes they can and the interesting thing is is well that puts you on the Olympic team now absolutely absolutely not are you going to be close to it now

but what it puts you being better than 99 out of 100 people around you absolutely yeah absolutely it will put you there and if we put a percentage on that that means that just by being consistent putting some years consistent years of training and that puts you in the top 1% of the human population in terms of physical ability that is not a bad consolation price no it's not I want to underscore the consistency point because I've always been an intensity

guy right I mean for the most part because that's my default mode and you know it's served me well everybody's right it's served me well but there's a point where the sword cuts both ways you sent me an email recently I'm going

to replace the name just in the less we decide to as you're going to say or maybe take out the profanity just in case yeah take out the f bombs dear you lazy bastard no that's not how it starts because I want to talk about older students who have picked up gymnastics and okay so there are a lot of

people who are rightly I think or naturally skeptical of the ability of say 35 38 40 plus year old to acquire these skills that are associated with people who start when they're 5 6 7 years old so I'm going to replace the name with Frank okay so I was having a hell of a lot of trouble with

tuck hops and to just explain that I fully plan for everyone listening to put a lot of video examples in the show notes you'll have visual references for a lot of this but tuck hops great exercise and there are different ways

to practice this but a tuck handstand is instead of having your body ramrod straight from your hands all the way to your pointed toes at the very top you're basically bringing your knees to your chest or rib cage while you're in the handstand position with your feet still pointed but your

heels kind of touching your ass is that a fair description I agree with that and I was having a lot of trouble with range of motion I just couldn't get low enough and so coach sent me an email which was you know Frank is one of my senior students here's a video of him working his tuck handstand compression while it's not exactly the same exercise is does provide a nice visual example the part that stands out for me is what follows the video so watch the video

and I was like okay that's pretty solid and you said you started roughly two years ago out of shape week and rather Pudgey on his first work out I believe that he failed three times twelve seconds bent hollow body hold and there are people on wheelchairs that are stronger than yeah and I'm

probably going to get the not going to do this exercise justice but I mean a bent hollow body hold is effectively like imagine if you're in a crunch position on the floor right and then you put your arms just kind of pick your feet up like you were going to do a sit up except don't sit up shoulders

up a little off the ground feed off a little ground and then just try to rock back and forth that's it so he failed that couldn't do three sets of that times twice I couldn't do it not chance fast forward two years and he's a beast and that there are two points there are two points here that really left a mark me so the first was he's very consistent okay we've talked about that is the part that I really liked so he never rushes through exercise and every

time he gets stuck on a progression and was not able to break through that particular plateau he simply drops all the way back to the first progression and he's working his way up so I want to try to illustrate this because this is a really because most people myself included will just bang their heads against a wall with the plateau movement let's take the press handstand which we've been talking about as a great kind of bang for the buck objective

to incorporate so many different elements and attributes you need to develop what would a series of progressions like four or five progressions for that look like and does it literally mean that if he couldn't get through movement five that he would drop all the way back to number one

or would he go back to number two and number eight he could he'd go right back to number one okay now he might go to he might not start with the very weak one programming of you know three by one rep he might drop back to a week eleven where we provide the programming was five by five and you

should demonstrate mastery then next workout bump but basically what he's doing is if he failed on that exercise that means there was a chink in the arm or some are there was a hole in the preparation there was a some deficit

that been overlooked or some part of the body that had not yet super compensated so basically we want we want people to go through when they're in training to just be super simplistic we want their training to go through a period of overload where whatever they're doing is kicking their ass

it's hard intense and then without changing reps or sets right we want the body then to go into a period of load where that same amount of work that same load same exercise same rep same sets feels moderately difficult it's feeling easier because the body's gotten stronger and then where people

always cut it short where they undermine themselves here is they don't go into under load so to be super simplistic under load is where damn I'm just not feel like I'm working very hard you're moving the same weight you're doing same reps you're doing the same sets right but you're just you're just cutting it short with what people tend to do is they want to ride that greaser's edge I did this much today I'm going to do more next week of that typical five pounds

on the bar okay well that's great you know if that was the case I remember my first way to pull up workout I was excited I was excited way back when I was a teenager I came home I did my five pounds I pulled out my calendar did five pounds I'm going to do a pound every week holy shit I'd be pulling 1500 pounds in a year man I'm world champion I'm world champion in the making linear doesn't work that way doesn't work that way so what happens is that you hit

that point of where you're maxed out currently and then you got to step off and we got to give the body a chance to accommodate so for example you mentioned Rob wolf Rob is a good buddy Rob super sharp for those of you don't have to do that he's a nutrition guru check out his stuff or a baby for people are a big guy he's got two bees there well Rob is a high intensity guy like you Tim and so I shared with him the year Allen one national son national champ

imagine you've defeated the entire country there's one champion and your it everyone you kick their ass unbelievable feeling extremely awesome well I didn't change anything on Allen's conditioning the entire year not a damn thing I didn't change an exercise I didn't change a rep I didn't change a set not for that entire year see you mean that there are for the progressive resistance purists out there there might be another way but remember he wasn't

a beginner at this point no because a beginner right it wouldn't do any good if a wall push up inclined on the wall I mean Allen was strong he was already doing hollow bag presses you know rope climbs were for maintenance of healthy elbows yada yada yada but for that year I didn't change anything all that changed was workout that took an hour got to the point where was taking 40 to 45 minutes at which point do your stretching get out because the less time you're in the

gym the better okay because this is less wear and tear on the body think of it here what you mentioned you know people who love to be high intensity okay it's cool but the analogy that comes to mind is someone who wants to be high intensity all the time it's like having a new set of tires every time you come up to a stop sign you don't gradually break use slam those breaks hard use get to a stop every single stop sign how long is that pair of tires going to last

it's going to wear out pretty quick and now the body's not like tires it can rebuild itself as long as you don't put it too deep into a hole or physically break the structure damage the structure beyond repair as long as you show some degree of

care you rebuild yourself but if you keep getting to that stop every single day matter times not if it's guaranteed so let's throw out a couple of I'll use another automotive metaphor let's switch gears and I will ask just a couple of questions that I think people would love to hear answers to the

first is someone listens to this extremely excited to do gymnastics strength training and maybe they go out and they're like sampling different things from all sorts of different places and you know of course I have no business I should say with full disclosure I have no business association I'm not getting any kind of affiliate anything from you I just am a real fan of how you train so I think you're trying to check out your training programs but what exercises should

people not attempt or just remove from consideration for the first say six months of gymnastics strength training probably I would say muscle ups the issue becomes it's nothing wrong with the pool there's nothing wrong with the dip the shoulders will adapt relatively quickly you know they'll get up on rings at first on their shaking and that's simply because the stabilizers aren't used to the load that'll adapt within you know two weeks four weeks they'll be

flying the issue they run into is because their shoulder extension is weak they can't get the elbow behind the torso so instead of doing a dip with body weight now they're trying to do a tricep extension with body weight completely different animal their elbows can't go their elbows are trapped at their side and now their hands are in front of them and they're just trying to press themselves up course they're just trash and there are not some people can we

do see it some people have incredible joints that you can just pound and pound and pound and pound and pound and pound nothing happens to them run them over with a car right all you're going to do is hurt your car everyone assumes they're that guy they're that woman the reality is you're not guys you are not that person if you were that person I would see you at training camps right now or you would be a celebrated professional level athlete so accept the fact

that you're human and those are not your joints you can't take that approach and have longevity is not going to happen there's a muscle ups go out muscle ups go out now how do they get around the muscle up how do they get because their elbows hurt they can't do a slow we need to build strength we got to do it slow how do they go around they do the keeping muscle up okay well that gets me on top of the rings but where I get the benefit of muscle ups is through that

transition is I'm going between the pull up through my chest up about that's where crosses that's where planches that's where malteases that's where all advanced rings drink this it's that strength when you see a gymnast right when you see in this summer at the Olympics right and where just

isn't a side guys we've got some podcasts coming out for gymnastics by sorry I'm competing with here that's all right and we're going to talk some training right with some of the Olympic guys and when you see them you are you're going to see this massive musculature and it didn't come from push ups and it didn't come from dips it came from that advanced ring strength they do so if you're doing a keeping muscle up and you're going from below the rings to on top of

the ring and it's gone you just get the most beneficial part of the muscle up and you wasted let me ask a related question because of course every four years I watch gymnastics I love watching gymnastics as do a lot of people and they go holy shit if I can get arms it look like that by hanging from a bar for an hour a day I need to start hanging from a bar how much of I know we talked about the rings how much of the musculature in the upper arms biceps specifically

comes from straight arm work versus some form of bent arm work excellent question so the majority of the massive biceps they see is going to come from the straight arm work so for example when the guys would at that level of training at that level of strength rope climbs for example my guys had to do a triple on a seven meter row all rope climbs are done with no legs okay and GST we do ropes without legs we get some people say I know the rope is used

for transportation as soon as they take out the escalators in a mall and they put ropes in place of it or they take the elevators out and they put ropes I'll buy that argument that we use a rope for transportation until that happens a rope is used for getting for can strong that's right that's the point of having a rope so they would in five minutes they would do a triple on a seven meter rope getting the back of the line do a double on a seven meter get back

in the line and do another and that'd be about five minutes worth of work okay for them what we did notice and a lot of people miss this or into two things here at once so for the maximal strength component of it is the straight arm work multi's work in particular or I just below is the body of the

and people listening don't just go into your garage and try and altize on your rings you can you can totally because I don't think multi's will hurt you multi's won't hurt you but you're landing on this concrete on your face underneath the rings is probably going to hurt multi's

won't it's the sudden stop at the end that will be uncomfortable now what we found out with the guys though is you know we did over the years the weight vest the way the heavy weighted row climbs pull ups nothing put better mass on a biceps secondary from the ring strength then high volume

rope climbs nothing nothing blow them up now the key though is for everybody listening if you go and you jump right into ropes right now and you haven't built a foundation of rose pull ups multi playing pulling then get to rope climbing right you're going to give yourself a

raging case of elbow tendonitis yeah your elbows are going to just just just just disintegrate yeah like anything else you got to pay your dues but if you go through the proper steps and you're prepared to do rope climbs there is nothing because the bicep is an endurance muscle

that's its job now it can do this but its primary function is not to how much can I do that heaviest load for one rep it's primary function is go out and kill something pick it up and carry it a long ass way back home that's its primary job that's his primary job so it just blossoms from high

volume work now the key is is that it's got to be high volume with reasonably high load which on the rope climbs is body weight but we would that a build to that two things that I'll throw out there just because people might find it interesting so the first is you can build extremely

muscular biceps is not gymnastics related but with purely straight arm heavy pulling in the debt lift could find let's just let's just say you had one day of heavy pulling and by heavy I mean two to three reps like to the body is kind of like the very Ross protocol in the for our body

very Rossist no eccentric you know drop it and then let's just say you do that on Mondays and then on Fridays or Thursdays whatever it might be you do high rep kettlebell swings to armed kettlebell swings you can get really really muscular arms without doing any bent work whatsoever

also when we're talking about I'm easy enough to switch that high rep kettlebell work to throw a rope climb on fried if you're advanced enough if your elbows are bulletproof and which mine or not as an example for folks like I've done plenty of rowing but here's the difference though when I have a

parallel grip if you're like I can pull fuck that I can do bent rows of the barbell with 225 pounds and third whatever and you think that you're the king pulling if you don't do a lot of parallel grip work or a sat bar work and then you go to a thick rope you're in for a surprise maybe we

should touch base on the difference real quick between the various grips yeah please okay so guys in terms of GST specific strength if you're doing just pull up work your parallel grip is by far going to have the greatest return on investment simply because that parallel grip hits the

breeky Alice so hard down in the elbow the reason we need that is when you go to a rope you're going to have more of a parallel grip you do that parallel grip pull up obviously you're developing that when we're on the rings we're on hop of the rings right because we always everything is aimed for

eventually getting on to the rings to build strength so when you're on the rings we need the grip turned out past parallel now back in the day Greg last man I Greg is the you know you the super bright guy founder but he just didn't understand why we would turn the rings past parallel he

thought it was just aesthetics coach is aesthetics well the problem is if I'm on the rings and I do a dip I do a muscle up I do whatever and I straighten my arms and I don't turn the rings past parallel now coach I apologize for

interrupting just for people to visualize this so let's just say you're up on rings and you're doing dips and you're in between the straps what incorrect me here coach but when you get to the top that means top of the rep on the top of the rep and your arms is straight that the rings themselves out

slightly that's right so instead of having the rings parallel pointing straight ahead or turned in which is what most returned in they would be at say 10 p.m. and 2 p.m. or something like that exactly then it will vary as long as they're out the reason is is what's the weak link in straight arm strength is the elbow the weak link is the elbow and what a lot of people will do is we've had people who were taught well elbow pain is just part of doing ring

strength no it's not elbow pain is an indicator that your ring strength is effed up and he did you better program me and hurt for a reason I took you off track there just because I wanted people to visualize the proper thing so you're saying to Greg that when you get to the top you know the issue is it's not just aesthetics when you get to the top not aesthetics you've got a turn past parallel so that the breakie Alice is activated right there's a reason that

after all these years of cross that being unreasoned doing thousands upon thousands of keeping pull ups and dips and all this stuff that there are no iron crosses unless they're a previous gymnast there's no homegrown cross fader has an iron cross homegrown cross better to ask land or a malt

because right from the beginning on those very basic movements they didn't turn past parallel they didn't turn the rings out the breakie Alice wasn't trained the breakie Alice is what supports the elbow when it's straight so if it never got trained they can never move forward into the money making

exercises so that's why in those parallel those pull ups if we use a parallel grip and it's easy enough to do some just do a set do a nice parallel grip workout and then compare the soreness that you feel on the inside of the elbow from fatigue compared to regular chin ups and regular pull ups it's

night and day then we would do chins and then pull ups so the other exercises to remove if any so you have muscle ups back lever yeah muscle up back lever and you would add to that list you know him this one is a little unfortunate and I don't know that it's so much of a

removing as deep prioritizing we have a cautionary tail it takes time to rebuild connective tissue and it's connective tissue through the ligaments and the joints that generate power through the body when they're doing plyometric work there was a rash of a kill these ruptures when there was

a couple of done of so they were doing deads I believe with 225 pounds and then that was coupled with box jumps and they were doing that for round there's not a problem with either one of those in isolation the problem came when it was in a competitive environment with most of the

adults right when they're their later 20s and they're 30 and on the typical people who are working out and because it's a race the box jumps turned into jumping down also which turned into rebounding apply the metric off the floor because I got to get these done right I'm in a

race so they had prefatig the Achilles with the dead left and then went into the plyometric of the box jump nothing wrong with either one of them but in combination took some people I think they were like nine ruptures that year which is you know one okay it happens right

Avonkov had it had as Achilles he was one of the leading guys were working to from Russia Avonov on call formal jam he was the top guy that was favored to win the gold at the 96 games as a killways popped walking across the parking lot now is it because walking across the parking lot is a dangerous thing and we should all avoid parking lots.

Well it just happened to be the last straw and it had been damaged prior to that which a long story short you went back to the front split series that is the very reason that there is that high rep calf work to promote Achilles health because connected to issue the tendons and

that do not have their own blood supply they get fed they heal they strengthen through the muscles moving around them and gravity that's what flushes the area so if we only do very high high intensity low rep work there's not enough blood flow for them to be healthy this isn't

mine room friend of the Bulgarian Olympic coach for around the 70s and 80s is a good friend of mine and genius genius at programming room and makes me look like a tottering idiot who should be sad in the corner no one talked to me what's his name it can ever

pronounce room and last thing you guys can look him up Bulgarian Olympic coach for the women 70s and 80s our ruling I want to say our bastard eyes to American spelling is are you M I N or N A N sadly room and had a really heavy accent so a lot of the American coaches

you know they they do want to take the time to talk to them but you know I was a linguist in the military way back when so accents not as good as you Tim but accents don't bother me and he was older gentlemen I would keep this guy up late so many days

or I'll he beat Chris I gotta go get some say hi it's okay just one more question just one more question Roman so our knee series that we do came from Roman the one that we know yeah that I've been doing with the skiers correctly from the inside squats he saw Alan when he was eight

on was incredibly powerful and eight years old just just unreal and he was getting too powerful for his frame at that age not about eight were starting to hit a preliminary growth spurt and the room and gave me that knee series and was about a week week and a half you

know as he's weren't hurting they were starting to get slightly uncomfortable room and showed us that blue knee issue is gone never again nothing with me ever well we could talk for hours and hours more but I want to be respectfully retirement and we can always do around to

some time if you have the the willingness and the audience wants more but I do have a couple of questions before I get into some of my usual rapid fire that I'd love to ask up you still have some time to chat you open to can or is I'll talk trading all night all right here we go then the

next question is from one of my listeners and it's quite simply how do you mentally prep your athletes for big competition when you're down to that beauty go to the nationals or any competition but specifically big competitions how do you and by prep I mean mentally prep the day of

is there anything in particular that you do it starts with repetition so we we talked a little bit about training so in a nutshell what will come background will fill this out so in the preparation prior successful repetitions it takes a certain number of repetitions to lead to

competence and its competence that leads to confidence and that's what leads to a successful competition so as Americans we tend to be in a rush being a hurry we don't want to take a lot of reps we want to get something we do it correct a few times and then we want a bomb on completely

different from the Chinese approach completely different from the rushing approach where they'll literally do hundreds of repetitions before they move on to the next drill and then they're not upset about it because I understand it's a process as Americans were always look now it's it's both a good

thing and it's a curse one it's a good thing because it forces us to be so creative we're so hard charging we get so many things done physically sometimes it kind of works against us because we don't give the body and the nervous system a chance to stabilize so if you want to be confident

at a competition you have to pay your dues in prep example and that's mentally and physically for example 72 Olympics okay and these are eyes talking about this with Demetri Bellosirchapp my friend world in Olympic champ so in 72 Olympics Olga Corbett was by all accounts going to

crush everyone at the games she was gonna crush everyone in training as they went back in the Russians went back and they reviewed all her training she had over a 98% hit rate on her routines that meant she was almost perfect almost perfect when she went to the games she had a major meltdown

now the question of course raises I was it possible for someone who was this perfect for this long in training to go to the competition just fall apart as they dug into it they found out the error was not in physical preparation the error was in mental preparation so as Olga was cranking at

her home she was the one who decided when to go coaches waited on her judges waited on her everything was structured on her she was very comfortable she didn't start so she was ready soon equipment she's ready for lighting she's ready for mags familiar everything is good when you get to the

worlds and you get to the Olympics judges don't give a fuck if you're ready or not when they raise that flag yeah it's brutal in fact to give everyone a little taste the warmup gym is not there the warmup gym might be 10 minutes away or it might be a 10 minute walk a 5 minute walk down this

hallways you going you warm up you walk down this hallway right and then you're asked weights there and then the flag goes up and you got to go to 100% within 30 seconds you got 30 seconds to be on the equipment massive hit yeah massive head game so they went back and they found out that Olga's

problem was that everything had gone her way she control too many variables too many variables and it was they were too easy they were too accommodating and so what they did is the Russians changed their training just to screw

with people so if I'm coaching someone right and it's going to be a mental component I'm going to fuck with them right I'm going to tell them not in a mean way but all right you're up and then walk away leave them waiting you know let them get antsy make them go in they're not ready

make them do a cold set okay don't don't let any and everything you can have a crowd of people around I'm trying to mess with them any and everything and I will also say it's much harder for women than it is for guys simply because women are more caring and nurturing than guys and

guy goes out to compete and he's worried about one thing he's worried about kicking ass okay the girl goes out there and she's worried about kicking ass also but she's also worried about not on to let anybody down are they going

to be disappointed with me are they going to like me she has this whole range of other emotional burdens that a guy doesn't get a shit about they just care I've seen girls who are just amazing in training and get out there and just because they have this other load that they play some themselves

that guys don't have to deal with and the way you handle that in training is we just have to get more reps in I got more reps and do everything you can to put them in a situation to where for example 2004 I was doing some of the prep I was doing some of the floor the tramp and helping with vault and doing the preparation for a girl we had trying out for the Olympics she did not make it don't make it be top six she was ninth okay and Carly fantastic girl great

girl they're approach though for mental training I thought was flawed they brought someone in and you know I won't I won't say names I'll just say that I disagreed and it was it was a very they're trying to be really really positive so you know 30,000 square foot gym big giant yes signs everywhere yes you can yes it be great yes it would be wonderful and the reality is it's not going to be wonderful it's going to be stressful it's going to suck when you are in a

competition at that level the pressure is rushing it's a physical pressure that you feel on you and you still have to produce performance at a world class level and the only way to handle that is we have to try to replicate that in training right so that the pressure is not going by the air that was only Carly was trying to downplay the pressure I would say do the exact opposite do the opposite you should go to the training to the competition and hopefully competition is

less pressure than what you go through in training now that's not going to be true at Olympics and such but at most things it should be the case should be the case so mentally now if you're scared all let's let's say if you're feeling uncomfortable if you're feeling threatened uneasy your preparation was flawed it brings up an anecdote that I heard from Paul Levesque better known as Triple H the professional wrestler who's also an incredible business executive for

WWE but he visited Floyd Mayweather and he visited Floyd maybe an hour before a huge title fight for a championship belt or to retain his belt and at one point Paul said you know I'm going to leave I don't want to interrupt your prep and he goes why would you interrupt my prep because if I'm not

ready now nothing idea between in the next 60 minutes is going to make me ready I love that attitude feel free to hang out he was walking watching basketball or something and you know it also you brought up this seal team six members and so on earlier I mean that's I think a great example of a parallel track right in the sense that they very much want to sweat more in some cases bleed more in training so that they can avoid dying in real battles

and the simulations are extremely brutal and intended to be sort of along the lines of I'm not really up on my ancient name pronunciation but I think it's arkelocus who said we do not rise the level of our hopes we fall to the level of our training so making the conditions equivalents my buddy would tell you they're so well trained no stress now how on the world you can be in 145 gun fights and not feel stress when you're heading out to another one

he just yeah fall asleep on the helicopter yeah do my thing and get back on I'm curiously he's like oh yeah I mean gosh you just just another day in the office I hold him only so on the day of assuming you've done the requisite preparation you've condition them to perform well under stressful circumstances change nothing change nothing change nothing where where people fail this an important lesson not just in competing but in everything so a lot of

people psyched themselves out of doing as well as they could of by prematurely comparing themselves to the people around them instead of just go out take care of your business do your best and see where it falls if you're going up against the best who's ever been born you're not going to beat him there's not going to be a miracle this guy's not going to open guys not going to reach down and bless you with extra athletic ability you know it's it's not going to

happen so you just ignore that you know you go out and you just stay in your own head do your thing now psychologically people handle it differently some people we have the same chemistry analytic big teams some people like to be left alone you know let me go do my thing you know they'll come together for the team but then when the prep and for their set you know they got to go off on there's other guys where they feed off that interaction right they want people

come around and get them pumped up then there's all in between none of them right and none of them are wrong it just is what it is and it's important to just deal with who you are same in training there are some people who thrive

on multiple training per day right and they they just blossom they do awesome there's other people who have to train just a few times a week doesn't matter there's been Olympic champions who train both ways it just depends on what your body does best with I'm very curious to hear the answer to this

this was from a I think it was it might have been a mother I think it was a father who said what questions would coach summer ask a gymnastic coach at a nearby facility before sending his own five to ten year old off to train with them yeah and I went through that so I did I didn't

coach my daughter I didn't coach my daughter I wanted to be dad and I didn't get involved with where there are things I would have done very differently yes but her happiness in the process was more important to me than her sixth since you a state champion but that was more important to me than

stepping in and making sure everything was world class love I didn't want to go there first thing I would do if I'm reviewing someone because everyone have you noticed that the bell curve is reality right the bell curve shows that there there's a huge majority of people who are average there's a few

or at the top or a few or at the bottom but if you talk to someone you've never met anyone who says yeah I'm in the middle of the bell curve every fucker you talk to is exceptional every single person right every person is another millionaire in the making there another they're going to win the

voice they got Academy Award it's coming nobody says yeah I'm average and it's the same thing with gyms so the first thing I would do is look at competitive record how have they done and at what level have they been successful so are they successful at a local level at a state level how have

they done in terms of regionals how have they done in terms of nationals are they on national team how consistently have they been on national team is a year in year out was it a one time deal after I look at that the very the very next thing I'm going to look at I'm going to look at injury rates how healthy and successful are these athletes how would you find that data would you just ask them point blank if they're a world class coach they're always

going to be straight with you the only people in my experience who talk shit or the wannabes yeah that's consistent in everything in everything I had so 2003 yeah 2003 I'm at a training camp and Paul Ham has just won the world championships he's just one world's and Alan is a

little guy where we're at a training camp and he calls coach Stacey on he is there and we're at a technical meeting and it's on roundoffs sun roundoffs of all things and so Stacey comes and he sits down next to me says Chris what do you think about this now my head I'm thinking who is a

fuck what I think about this you just one world championships I want to know what you think about this but he asked my opinion I don't say I'm not gonna be R. Stacey but my head I'm thinking that so we talk about it for a little bit and then Stacey gets up and he goes around the room visiting

with other coaches that he respect and he wants their opinion and then he he makes his own opinion that a friend he had just one world so it would be so lazy for him to be kind of a loof and snooty and arrogant you know I'm this

that but the point is that that's the reason that Stacey won worlds that he was a coach of that caliber because he was always open to learning more he never said I know everything right and like you said I've never met an exception it's the ones who aren't at a high level who think you know I know

everything there's nothing left to be learned and it's just not the case so I would check that check around you know talk to people watch the athletes in training you know they'll go and watch some workouts how does the coach handle

it is there a lot of tears if it's a guy and there's tears in the work and he's got a broken leg and girls you know girls are girls I live in a I've got two daughters a wife even my dog is female there's tears here constantly this is part of being female so if it's an occasional tear no big deal

but if there's a lot of crying all the time there's a problem I I'd move down the road but if if they're happy now doesn't healthy doesn't mean a free for all healthy and happy doesn't mean indulging you know there should be structure there should be accountability but it should be pleasant you

know kids or any athlete adults as well will either live up to the standard you set or they will live down to the standard you set I just kind of go and try to get a feeling is this a place where you are is the competition record is good

is this an environment that I'm content with my child being in you know if you get a good feeling okay as an adult if you were assessing a gymnastics coach for yourself and you could observe a workout let's just say you could only watch the warm up that's on what would you look for to be

there or not be there or what would the characteristics be do they take the time to warm up the joints or do they jump right into work do they actually take time to mobilize are they doing stall bar work are they doing Jefferson Crow work are they they loosen up their wrists and their knees and their ankles are they loosen in their back before they get going are they doing some type of pre strength are they doing lower level strength elements to get the

muscles warm and firing before jumping into the hard work you can tell a lot from how a program warms up no that's why I was asking and great question yeah there's I mean there's a movement that also from an evolutionary standpoint makes a lot of sense just like we were talking about the

biceps and high capacity for volume the ql walks which you introduce me to which if you really want to have people laugh at you this is a great move to do although you had mentioned and this doesn't surprise me at all that you've

seen high level powerlifters using doing this that's where that's where I got it yeah holding on to kettlebells kind of with a goblet squat type of grip so what this looks like folks we already talked about this seated pike position so you're sitting on your ass legs together legs straight so

basically keeping your legs completely straight if there are other elements please let me know coach technical points but basically you're like walking your ass cheeks yeah one more cheek at a time doing a speed walking sitting

down yeah that's actually the that's a great description that's exactly what it looks like and ql refers to the quadruple screw up the quadruple quadruple is the bottom yeah quadruple is the bottom which is sort of like the grand central of all sorts of muscles and fascia in the back and it's

incredible how much that loosens up my entire lower back and hips doing this very very simple ql walk I'll pick up guys sometimes three four inches oh yeah just from loosening up from those first yeah how long should a proper gymnastics warm up take and one more which is warming up the joints

other any specific movements that hit the shoulders from any angle more perspective they would indicate a better warm up for gymnastics strength training than others time it would depend on duration duration of the workouts so if you're in there for an hour yeah I'll I'll preface it say you're in for an hour I would say probably 10 to 15 minutes is reasonable now at the same time if I have significant mobility deficits one perhaps the majority

of the workout needs to be mobility work it could kind of shift possibly as high as a half hour if I have a multi hour training coming up it's complicated enough and we've tried this over the years there are enough things to address that should be addressed on a semi regular basis that you can't really get everything in to a single warm up you probably gonna have two or three variations you know if you do an advanced work you're probably gonna have two

or three variations in order to get to everything like for example ring strength before a good harder ring strength it's very nice to do Thera band series for the shoulders different shapes and pulls and circles and all these things with Thera band are really great for warming up the interior of the shoulder on other days do I need to do that as much for shoulder no it might be more weighted shoulder work is appropriate for other days is it necessary to all

of them at the same time most of the time no we have one senior student really really good Matt started training with me in his late 40s he's now 52 beast press handstands planches front levers at 52 ridiculous shape and he went through a period where just for shoulders to feel better he did

every shoulder prep we had all our integrated mobility our courses are set up very unusually where for our introductory courses adult students come in alternate an exercise with an integrated mobility because we want them 50

so we found if I have I told people how important stretching was they always blow me off but if I required it do a set before your next set you have to do this stretch then back and forth we just had great results so Matt's is crazy nanny act still still skateboards still water skis those as GST

and shoulder get a little finicky so he just did extra mobility and it just fixed his shoulder right up I was introduced to an exercise by a master's crossfit competitor actually that really helped with shoulder I would say warm up more than mobility but for pressing exercises even in GST including

any type of hand balancing or handstand work which you have to have a decent amount of grip strength for this but I was very skeptical of this even as someone who is not a lot of kettlebells I have never been a huge fan of the bottoms

up work with kettlebells meaning yeah it's kind of flipped up we're stripping up by the handle the bell on top exactly but I was like you know it's great I'll try it with a lightweight and I started with say whatever it is might be like 15 16 pounds and I've increased that it is 35 now but a

little bit of chalk is a long way here but you you would basically swing it up to a clean and then press it overhead and then you just do rotations some doing yes like side to side rotations and it's incredible how well that activates the smaller must do the choice the shoulders the wonderful

and net oh it's cool you didn't do it with kettlebells we'll do them with light dumbbells so basically guys will what Tim's is trying to just take a dumbbell push it up overhead turn the thumbs externally rotate it just a bit and then

just do how it would circles keep a flat back shoulders open no arching doing for time one to two minutes you know just good gracious wonderful warm up and then you know something we didn't address and I'll throw it in just real real real quick I know I know we're run out of time but some people

who are experiencing shoulder issues in terms of mobility I'm not to do with the shoulder or necessarily the bicep but sometimes it's because the lats are so strong and tight and so I have exactly a lot of and cousin a lot of the lifters to those those lats are working on you guys

are moving some serious weight and those lats are course working and if there's not corresponding mobility going with it it's really easy for those lats to kind of get chronically contracted lose their mobility so a lot of times you get in there and just stretch the heck out of that lat

automatically get relief on the shoulders okay coach I am going to do a couple of rapid fire then a couple of closing questions and then maybe a menu and I are talking quite a bit these days so we'll consider doing a follow up and I definitely want to share to the results of our experiment

with people also so we'll certainly be in constant contact but the first rapid-fire question is and the answer doesn't have to be sure but it certainly can be when you think of the words successful who is the first person who comes to mind for you and why well it's not Obama it's not

Obama this all the people off out there you know someone I have admired for years and years is Tony Robbins he would be very high on my list I tend to be very eclectic I'm not trapped just in athletics but what I found in terms of business arts politics it's all the same when when

people get to that level of success they all have the same attitudes they bring the same tools and attitudes to the table and I found it surprising that I I can sit down with you Tim and visit I can sit down special operators and visit I can sit down with you know world class ballerinas and dance

and artists and that I just did this weekend with a world class artist and we all you would think there's no common ground there but there is common ground because what's required to had chief success in all of those requires the same skills you got to be consistent you got to master

the basics you got to be patient you got to constantly reinvent yourself look for a flaw hole in the preparation fix it move forward you also be very observant and I think part of training yourself to be observant is I like that asking questions right so I think that's why

and being willing to hear the answer definitely that's why you take a bunch of people are the best of what they do and you put them in the room generally speaking they're going to get along just fine absolutely now why Tony Robbins I mean I'm a huge fan of Tony Robbins is he's been

on the podcast and I've tremendous better respect for him but I want to just hear your reason I like that I firmly believe especially in the US I firmly believe that if someone isn't as successful in any arena you toss it out whether it's professionally personally in your life financially if

you're not as successful as you would like to be or making progress towards that it's our own fault we have so many opportunities here that so much wealth of knowledge that a lot of times sell for example when GB got started and there were two years year and a half two years in the beginning

where I was doing 18 hour days and didn't make a nickel nothing and everyone around me was like what are you doing well you know I got plans for this and we talked about a little bit and they're like well you know if you need some extra money you could go get a job think about how

much further ahead you'd be right now but you have to have that vision once you have the vision you've got to be able to put practical steps to it and then everyone's good at that I outlines the people outlining stuff all the time but then can you stick with it because you know when you run your

business team when I run my business there's no one telling us what to or the ones to monitor ourself this needs to be done I'm going to get it done and it's kind of that difference between letting someone else being in control of your life and you choosing to be in control of your own

life I know some people are going to get a coach you know I'm a single mom and sis and sad I can't do everything I want to do and I get that I get that I've been there I've gone through that I'm certainly not saying there are there are quick fixes because these fixes can take years but I think if

you're willing to put the time in that there's so much opportunity and they're willing to do that for years it's kind of a big giant blank check a lot can change you really have a lot of control and so that that was a message that

you know and I didn't say it nearly as well as Tony Robbins does and I am gonna twist your arms I get an introduction someday to Tony that's I am I throw a little gem session for the people who are on the podcast so both you will be invited totally awesome a solo can pour that but you know way

when poros could be hadn't made national team coach yet was just getting starting in my coaching career everything that could go wrong went wrong and here's this guy saying you know I just think clear plan ahead and be willing to work that resonate with me you know it's like I just had this discussion with someone this morning you're young it's so challenging it's so difficult to be patient where you're 35 and you're starting to get back in shape again

and the hardest thing they need to do is they they've got to especially they were a good athlete previously you've got to set that attitude of having been a stud before aside because that body you have right now is not that stud's body that you had previously it could be again but it took time to build the first time it's going to take time to rebuild it this time or personally in your life if things are where you want it to be going to take time to build it there

I had this Olympic weightlifting coach I think you guys would hit it off famously especially if if you were both couple drinks in but she's dangerous very very similar approaches he said you have a Ferrari engine in a Toyota Corolla chassis that's not a lot of that said you can't just slam

on the accelerator and expect good things to happen but Tony is very tactical practical and I apologize for you and everybody else can hear metal bowls spun around that's what my dog Molly does when she's trying to tell me that she's hungry she just licks and empty bowl and sends it spinning I'm like yes I get it I know you're hungry in settles yeah being very subtle what book or books have you given the most to other people is gifts whoo it's not so much as I'm a big fan of Robert Heinlein

oh yeah strange they're stranger in a strange land just just all of them I come back to those over and over again the the theme of a self reliance you know as I came from a really really humble modus family background and so I think that instills a hunger in a work ethic

it's a little bit kind of embarrassing and actually it's a little bit of Charles Dickens theme there you know it's a frustration thing things weren't where we wanted him to be or where I wanted him to be and then how big a price how hard you work in order to change it what I'm enjoying right now and I'm just getting into it is the obstacle is the way oh yeah by Ryan Holiday a very close friend of mine you killing me dude I'm just going to hang out in your living room so I can

meet all these people oh yeah yeah now you and Ryan would hit it off oh yeah that's a great book I actually this is a really small world so I actually produced the audiobook for that you kidding me and I you know when you were talking about preparing your athletes for the

stress as opposed to hinting it over with yes you can and positive psychology and really kind of sewing the seeds of their own destruction by doing so I was thinking about stoic philosophy so it doesn't surprise me that you're reading the obstacles the way which has become an extremely popular book among professional sports teams and coaches I mean the Patriots see Hawks if they've all read this someone else that caught my eye who had read it and that led me to it was Schwarzenegger

oh you know yeah yeah who's a gosh I mean comes to the states with no money in his pocket and then becomes world champion in athletics becomes a millionaire in business becomes a movie star and becomes a governor success in four different arenas in life oh yeah good lord oh he said he liked that book and I was like well enough for me yeah our Arnold's is an impressive unit wouldn't it so two things I know we're about to write it with two things that also astonished me when

I interviewed him for the podcast was number one I didn't realize in doing the research until I did the research that he became a millionaire before he ever had his first starring role in real estate yes absolutely that gave him the ability to only audition not out of financial necessity but for the roles that he wanted so you could say no and that his highest grossing film of all time for him personally was twins because no one wanted to make it and so he took a cut

on the upfront payment for the salary per se in exchange for back end points that were abnormally large for the industry at that point yeah fascinating love that do you have any particular morning rituals what is the first

morning rituals I'm supposed to do no the ones you actually have or don't have I tend to find as I've gotten older because I'm in my 50s now early 50s as I've gotten older I find that my by far my most productive times are early morning that's when I'm sharpest I'm clearest I'll tend to get up

you know pretty early before everybody else in the house all does that but I'll get when you get up it varies I'll get up somewhere usually between four and five you know gives me a chance my girls get up in a few hours I give me a chance for that two three hours of just clear thought maybe it's work on a project maybe it's a new manuscript maybe it's just an I indulged some reading the house is quiet I do my best if after that girls said to school and then I get

my work out in if I'm consistent with that then my rest of my day is usually pretty golden yeah you've already you've already won the person he said to me if you win the morning you've won the day still working on it that's work in progress but I definitely agree with that do you drink coffee do you eat breakfast do you drink coffee I went for years and you know you always told I'm not a coffee drinker I'm one of those few I think it just tastes like cough medicine to me

it's not me being virtuous it's just me despising the taste and it's funny because my wife is a big coffee drinker she loves us she's got her gourmet grinder and all this stuff but for me no no way you know I found as I got older that I do best if I don't do breakfast I do best as I used to be heavy heavy protein and then after I got over 50 if I cut and this is me personally would it work for younger athletes who are training I doubt it's bigger engine need

more fuel but for me older it's slowing down I find that not doing breakfast reasonable lunch my my protein sizes are so much smaller now mostly veggies have a good healthy starch usually it's rice or potatoes reasonable little

protein there some batter lunch way do the same at dinner you know I'm done I'm good I'm I was amazed how much I was overeating just from habit oh yeah yeah eating by the clock I mean I've noticed the same thing for myself and I've been amazed how many people I've interviewed for this podcast

or the best of what they do who do not eat breakfast you're kidding really not I thought I was alone in the park of all you know his answer was coffee dim I give it simple you know and then Wim Hof same story you look at former general Stamacrystal same story and it just goes on and on and on I'd say good third of the men specifically not sure if the female body responds as well to it although I'm sure there are intermittent fasting people out there who would say that women respond

in the same way but very high percentage it's a maybe a third of the men I've had on the podcast do not eat breakfast now specifically these are men probably over the age of 45 so I don't know I would imagine their diet has probably changed over time and interestingly enough if you do dig into the literature there is or if I want to be a nerd there are data to suggest that as we get older it is possible that we absorb protein more effectively when we have larger doses of protein

less frequently so having them see that is interesting yeah that is very interesting because I find myself every once in a while getting a big stake yeah you know once a week once every two weeks I'll go and I'll just get this massive thing of protein then I'm good for a while I just marry modest yeah so this like bolus of protein for like older women I think this I saw one particular study could have been an observational and I get now I doubt it if they're trying to standardize the protein

them out but it was some large amount it was like 70 80 grams of protein in a single feeding was absorbed better than that same amount split over several meals in the day really fascinating stuff what would you put on a billboard if you could put a billboard anywhere what it's just what's on just what's on top of my mind right now yeah what's what top of the head doesn't have more not looking for universal truth but just what's I would say probiotic probiotic probiotic

will you win I don't know if it was a history of I had to cut them out you know too much martyritas you know it's kind of funny you know you get older start creeping in more and more and more but I went through a phase where it didn't matter what I ate didn't matter what I ate if I ate fat if I ate low fat if I ate village if I high protein terrible digestion just terrible digestion and I happen to come across something that's that said you if you got that that that that might be a

probiotic issue and so through a good buddy I had a laboratory grade these particular ones were from Claire Labs you kind of you prescription for them but they're a laboratory grade probiotic I want to say it was hey L-A-I-R-E got it if you know I'm not paid by them guys and there are some of a bitch to track down because you get prescription for them yeah and I got get them health provider but hooked me up in 12 hours and so I I was like holy moly because I

had been uncomfortable for months and in 12 hours this took care of it contacted a buddy of mine who was you know great at nutrition he went on so you know coach you should go ahead and probably take you know two four weeks and just really hit these probiotics hard and repopulate the guy you

hear is of too much margaritas too much protein not enough vegetable matter to feed the good bacteria and so on night night and day difference I bet simply because of that drop date pounds yeah I bet I mean I'm currently taking VSL

3 and a few other probiotics but one of the points you made that I think is really worth underscoring is the vegetable matter and prebiotics so providing the food that creates the environment in which bacteria that you want to grow can grow effectively whether that's through foods where I think you

know one of the ways I this biologist tell me at one point you said I think slow carbs going to be vindicated because you know the beans and lentils and so on are vilified by paleo but they provide the perfect vehicle for a rebiotic environment that can foster the development of and growth of

these are his bacteria in the gut and if not that you know if you're if you are paleo purist you can also consume something like phosphine fructoligosaccharides or enulin or any of these other things but wow I had no idea that experience yeah was it was shocking prior to that I would have

said number one supplement was a most of high-advital indeed drops how much were you consuming just a curiosity and of course the amount you take depends on what your levels it depended yeah just just a little background there so I was at our winter nationals seven years ago just kind of the

environment you know national team kids everywhere middle of the winter it's always in a February and I would just get sick really bad kind of bronchitis like sickness once or twice a year for gosh decades and at one of these I was I was half dead my assistant coach is trying to run my athletes he's doing his best but it's it's not going really I'm trying to coach hanging over a railing you can I'm visiting with Rob Wolf later that night I'm just like you know

this this was ridiculous and and Rob's the one who tagged his coach you know it's it's always in the middle of the winter try some vitamin D it started the liquid vitamin D if we don't count food poisoning in Hong Kong I've not been

six cents and that's quite a swing you know once or twice pretty serious per year to nothing for seven and the only thing that changed in that time was the vitamin D so I I mean I'm pretty pretty practical if that was the one variable I changed and that was the result well boom that's the doorstep I

budgeted at do you have a particular brand that you use for that I want to say I looked at it so many years I just can I'll pick it up off the shelf and I want to say was bio test perhaps I can't swear about other ones I just know I've always used that particular one I've done gosh all kinds of

different protocols from one or two drops a day it's like a runny Elmer's glue for those who haven't had it yeah it's the taste isn't you know anything to get upset all my daughters when they were young disagree this house was

worse than it it's it's not bad at all we've done daily a few drops all the way up to once or twice a week with eight to ten drops you know I just mix it up it just seems like you know is always your consistent it almost doesn't matter yes I'm guessing each of those drops is probably an IU and one

internationally about gosh it seems like I'm tied to computer right now I know I'd go grab it for it seemed like the dosage is surprisingly high and each drop and you know I'm a big fan especially as you get older you've got to go get blood work anything else is guessing yeah you need to get blood work period I mean if you get your car checked out more often than you get your blood work done then you need to rearrange your priorities so last question and

this is where I'd like you to certainly among other things point people to where they can learn more about you and gymnastic bodies but what ask or request would you have for my audience for the people listening oh okay I'm very good actually I love that question I would like them to consider two things I would like them to consider where's the fire where's the fire where's the rush where's the rush why are they trying to accomplish everything their

current goals yesterday why not slow down a little bit not saying not to work hard but why don't we just slow down a little bit a little more reasonable pace some more consistency that would be number one ask and then second one is mobility whether it's my material whether it's just the stuff that Tim posts for you whether someone else's material you know it's fine with me guys but we've got to get those bodies moving we've got to get natural range of motion back

again that alone if we did the hierarchy what will increase quality of life the fastest for them is going to be mobility first then core then you know you're more conventional strength your arms your shoulders yada yada yada and where can people find you online on social media etc what would you

recommend as the next step for somebody who's never done gymnastics anything who wants to dip their toe in the water for saying go to jimastic bodies dot com we have a special landing page for your listeners to with a nice discount forum we have a nice introductory program that's just gymnastics bodies g-y-m-n-a-s-t-i-c-b-o-d-i-s dot com slash Tim we got a nice discount there for you for a nice intro program it's about a 24-day program general introduction to

kind of the language we speak get started on some mobility some great follow along videos for them you know kind of hold their hand make sure they get started off on the right foot it's been a tremendous learning experience for me so far and it's only been I mean really a handful of weeks that we've been digging into this deeply all we had some prep time and talking about it prior to that and definitely guys if you are like I'm so busy I'm doing this that

and the other thing take a look at the program but at the very least follow the a gymnastic body is on Instagram and every time you see a video from a student who seems to throw one of your excuses at the window like take a second admire what someone has done from scratch like Matt who you mentioned

you started in his late 40s because like one by one if you just watch that in strut count for a week you'll run out of excuses very very quickly what about else for social media is there anywhere else people can say how do you our Facebook page is jamesi bodies dot com a little more proper there my personal page Christopher summer s o m m e r a little more no rules there and I'm not insane but my my interests are wide ranging so if you come to my page you

you're taking your chances what I'm gonna torture you with that day it might be conditioning or it might be you know what I think such such as kick gas and I like it so you're gonna like it too and you do you do throw up some ridiculous in the best way possible videos of just monsters doing some

absurd absurd stuff I mean the who's the gent you sent me you encouraged me to check this out this guy who was going from you're trying to explain the let me get this right I want to say plate planches that I was doing a while back

which are kind of like a front raise holding onto a plate with the shoulders super super protracted and the massive poster of pelvic tilt oh I sent I sent you that clip of the world champ on rings yeah I think you said user you sent me of one of van Gelder on rings and then you sent me one of this

guy on parallel bars going from a handgelder again okay going from the handstand to the the straight body planch just oh my god we do it with 10 or 25 pounds he was doing it with full body weight oh my god how do you spell van Gelder so it's Yuri van Gelder I think he's from Netherlands if I'm

remembering right former world champ V a N space G E L D E R just a monster oh my god such so just crazy strong and not I mean doesn't look like a small guy either I mean he's a big boy he's got like two people's back he's got a wide back yeah so people should check that out and I'll link to everything in the show notes what coach thank you so much for the time I know it's precious yeah and I think people get a real kick out of this and we crammed a lot into

the top so he did talk a lot it was good so I look forward to chatting again soon which I'm sure we'll do and to everybody listening you can find all of the links to everything that I can track down that my team can track down related to all the topics we covered links to coach everywhere gymnastics bodies everywhere in the show notes that'll just be at four hour workweek.com forward slash podcast all spelled out for our week.com forward slash podcast and as always

and until next time thank you for listening hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send out every

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