If you want to get in shape or change your life in some way, you're probably going to want to find some sort of coach, some sort of trainer, someone who can help you and you're going to want to communicate your goals with them so they can help you reach them. What if that is the worst idea possible? We're going to chime into that. On today's episode of the movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy strong body.
Usually we talk about things starting feet first because you know those things are your foundation, but you're thinking what your goals are is really kind of a foundation there as well. So we'll be diving into that. This is also the podcast where we break down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes, frankly, the outright lies you've been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, lift, pretty much do whatever you want to do and do it enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. And did I mention enjoyably trick question?
I know I did because look, it's the most important thing. If you're not having fun, do something different until you are otherwise you're not going to keep it up anyway. I'm Stephen Sashan from zero shoes.com, the host of the movement movement podcast and we call it that because we're creating by we mean all of us creating a movement about natural movement letting your body do what it's made to do and how that can be beneficial. And the movement part that involves you is really simple.
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And let's see if we can help more and more people in the world live life. Feet first. Okay, so let us jump in. Griffin, do me a favor.
Tell people who you are and what you're doing here. Yeah, sure thing. So my name is Griffin Coombs. I'm born and raised in the Boston area.
I am now actually living in Tanger, Morocco where I coach movement, breathing and I do wellness consults. So I'm kind of a traditionally trained fitness coach, but I've moved into more biomechanics quality of movement, movement for expression, got into coaching for coaching, breathing for performance and for health. And now I'm still very much a student of kind of integrative health and well-being, but I do do consults in that area as well. I have a professional and academic background over a decade, almost a decade and a half.
Geez, no time flies of a K-12 education. So I'm going to wait till you start saying things like when I was a kid 40 years ago, geez. So having just turned to that, the time of SKU is in really crazy ways. Yeah, I mean, I'm only, you know, I'm in my 30s, but I'm starting to feel it.
Life looks like a lot different than it did in my 20s. So I'm looking forward to the journey. It's a good one. But yeah, my academic background and full-time professional background for many, many years, and I'm still involved, is in K-12 education.
So I've been a teacher of the performing arts and a school administrator as well. So I very much approach coaching as a teacher or an educator would. So you kind of, yeah, you mix all that together and here I am. Well, let's start with the most, I was going to say most interesting thing, you said, but that's not true.
But let me start with the thing that you led with, which is very interesting. Morocco, how'd that happen? Yeah, that happened through the teaching and the education stuff. So I was teaching in public schools in the Boston area and I always had an interest in living abroad, learning in a new culture and kind of immersing myself in a language in a different way of being.
And I found out about international schools, American schools abroad. And so I went on the hunt and long story short, I landed in Tangier about five years ago. Oh my gosh, I splendid. What's the most surprising thing you've discovered from being there?
God, I can't even, well, it's been almost five and a half years. So I can't remember what was surprising, but there are still things that stand out as, I don't know if I'll ever get used to. It's not a very, it's not a very cultural culture. And I don't mean that in an insulting way.
I mean, it's just a very different way, like time is very much a suggestion. And coming from the Northeast in America, I know you're familiar with this paradigm of just like every minute. You have a meeting. Well, it's okay, it's 3.41, so I have four minutes to get a bite to eat to my next meeting.
And it's just so not like that here. I was in Nepal back in, well, here back in 89, I was in Nepal and I remember talking to a guy and he says, well, we can get around one. I said, so one o'clock for real or one o'clock in the poly time? Exactly.
And the poly time means one o'clock on Tuesday could be Thursday. So I just remember this one, I went to this is back when there was not really much phone service, certainly a cell phone service. And they wanted you to confirm any flights that were leaving Nepal like, you know, four Fridays in advance. So I go to the Royal Air Nepal office and I'm here to confirm my Tuesday flight.
They said, yeah, your Tuesday flight is on Friday. I said, why? Because we move it to Friday. Yeah, it's very similar here.
I've never been in Nepal, but it just sounds like echoes of Tangier. It's like, you know, I would like the Spanish tortilla, please, and they'll say, we don't have anymore. Oh, OK, why not? We just don't.
No, here's my favorite version of that is actually from Chinatown in New York. There's a whole area that's just nothing about electrical stuff lighting and whatnot going on. I said, Hey, I like this light. I'm just sitting there.
I said, what do you want to do? I get a kind of another one. Sorry. Wait, what?
He said, I get a kind of another one. I took like five minutes of that to like, OK, regular or kind of elaborate. And by the way, for anyone pardon my impression of this guy. So I figured out, OK, regular kind of what's the difference?
One is a big, more expensive, one is more or less expensive. I said, OK, this one, this one, it'll both be a big, less than long a cost less. So OK, that's a big one. I said, OK, why would that one?
Yeah, we don't have that one. Oh my god. I'm laughing so hard at these because it's just so it's so echoes the life here. But it's a beautiful it's a beautiful life to when you learn to kind of let go.
And it's a Zen teacher in and of itself, this lifestyle. You know, I love when you go somewhere and you finally get the hint that the way they're living makes total logical sense in a certain in a worldview context completely different than what you're doing. And once you drop the American version, once you recognize, Hey, that works here and get on board with it. It's it changes everything.
Absolutely. 100% more. Sorry. Another flashback.
We're in India about 15 years ago for friends wedding and we're staying in a neighborhood where there really weren't any tourists. So there wasn't the same sort of begging scene, but there was definitely some kids who were, you know, hit us up for money. And I said to them on the first day, I said, look, and these guys, first of all, they lived in what we would think of as a shack. But this was their home.
They did not express any ill will resentment or problems with it. Like that was their home. And anyway, I said to these kids, look, if you're going to be here for about a week, if you're going to see me almost every day, because you know where I'm going, you know, where I know where you are, if you're going to ask me for money, I want to be very clear. You're not going to get any money.
But if you want to go somewhere and do something, I'm your guy. So then we just went and explored the city and every now and then I bought the lunch. So it was a blast. I should use that here.
We're off. It's good. It's in five years and I still haven't. I definitely recommend I was thinking this even I do this in weird places.
I was just in Park City, Utah. And I do the same kind of thing there. Like I'll walk up to this Ranger and just say, you know, where should I go? Like, what do you want to do?
You tell me, I'll just go where you tell me. And it leads to some entertaining things. Anyway, yeah. So I was just going to say that just thinking back to the movement stuff and you asked me what's surprising here.
That was actually a big surprise as well. Was that here, it's very much a culture, a fitness culture of kind of 1980s bodybuilding. And so you if you imagine that the kind of exposure and the paradigm and the zeitgeist, if you will, around movement and fitness. Here in Tangier is decades behind where America is or what America's thinking about right now.
So it's kind of like ideas like CrossFit and cross training in general are kind of like hugely progressive brand new things where you're just starting to see it pop up. And so that's been a real challenge because here, you know, I have online clients and also clients in person here, but it's really difficult when you get past the language barrier, it's extra difficult to communicate the nuances of kind of where, not just where the thinking is and what I'm prescribing to a client, but how we arrive to that thinking in the first place because, you know, we've, and I'm sure you've been here too. We've been through the bodybuilding paradigm, the CrossFit paradigm. You know, it's taken a journey experiencing all of those to kind of get to where my philosophy and my approach are right now.
And so you can't just go up to somebody and say, okay, so you want to train with me. Okay, we're not going to do any barbell lifting or whatever. And they're like, well, what do you mean? What do you mean?
What do you mean? What do you mean? What do you mean? Well, do you have three hours?
So you want to go get a coffee and I'll explain why. So it's just like the communication piece about it is, is your set even farther back when you're dealing with these kind of cultural walls. Was there some, and by the way, anyone who can see me on screen knows that I'm still competitive bodybuilder. It's fine.
I actually have a couple friends who are still competing and it's a crazy, crazy lifestyle, but it was there something that led to that that you're aware of and it was a great thing. I can't remember. Was there some some pro bodybuilder coming out of Morocco that inspired everyone or is it just that now now there's a little extra time slash income and that's where people have gone because that's what's available. That's a really good question.
I can't say for sure, but I'm imagining that the access to technology and the access to kind of what's the rest of the world doing. It started in Morocco when bodybuilding was still very much a big thing. And so the other thing about bodybuilding is that it's a sport that is based on aesthetics. And so if you want to look a certain way and you don't have access to all the performance-based resources, but you know that there's a picture of Arnold back in the 80s hanging on your wall and you know that that's how I want to look, and that's how you're going to train.
Got it. Well, so that brings us to the thing that I teased with is that people come into pretty much almost any endeavor, but fitness in particular with certain ideas about what they want to achieve. And after often some failures at making that happen get the idea that they need to find some sort of coach, some sort of trainer, and they walk in and say, here's what I want to do. And the thing that I teased is maybe that's the worst idea ever.
And now I tease that because of conversation you and I had for moments before we started this. So you want to chat about this phenomenon of goals, goal setting, people and people on both sides of that equation. People have these goals and people who are hired to help those people attain those. Yeah.
So yeah, we start with the people who have the goals. I think that we're just, and again, it comes from when fitness first burst on the scene as something that people do recreationally, it was very much the paradigm was kind of cardio or aerobic training and bodybuilding for muscular strength. And so we have conditioned as a society over decades to believe to equate strength training with bodybuilding. And it's expanded a bit as a blade like CrossFit is a familiar that was a huge phenomenon that kind of built community around the performance aspect of fitness and you know, how can I get one more rep that I got last time and I got my CrossFit and everybody's cheering me on as they line up with their own sweats and whatever.
But it's so deep rooted that you know, the first paradigm is still deep seated in us where, well, I need to, you know, I need to do some aerobic training to lose weight and then I need to tone up my muscles by doing these lifts. And it's not just what I need to do, but it's also how I do it. So I think about I need, I want to work this muscle rather than I want to be stronger at this movement. And so I think that people's goals, the way that they set their goals is limited into weight loss, which muscles they want to build or kind of tone up more.
And then again, then you have the outliers who are a bit more progressive for, but I still think we can talk about that separately, but there are goals that are related to performance, but I still don't necessarily think that you actually want that performance goal. You want it because it's the cool thing or was the cool thing and you aren't really familiar with another way of measuring, let's say, strength or power or speed or whatever. But back to the just kind of the I want to lose weight or I want to build muscle people. We know now that there's a fluctuation of healthy weight and that if the weight that you want to lose is what would be called subcutaneous fat, the fat right under the skin versus visceral fat, which is the stuff that's around.
The organs is much more detrimental to your health. Like I think a weight loss goal is a noble goal if you have 50 pounds to lose and you're obese and you're totally sedentary. But if you come to me and you say, okay, I want to lose 10 pounds and you're generally active and healthy, then that's where the pushback starts to happen. And I'll say something like, why do you want to lose 10 pounds?
And a lot of people, a common response is, well, because people are very, they're quick to pick up on why you're asking these questions and they don't want to sound vain. And we're all vain to some degree. I'm not judging anybody. Oh, no, what's so funny.
I'm somewhat well known for having no secrets or another way of putting that is the wire between my brain and my mouth is really short. And so if you ask me that question, I say, well, I got two reasons. One, three, one is that I would like to have a better strength weight ratio for sprinting. The second is that I would like to have less to complain about when I look in the mirror.
And the third is that I would like my wife to go, oh, more often. And I have no problem admitting the vanity part of it. Exactly. And it's going to be part of it, I think for everybody.
And so like I definitely, I don't want the vanity to be at the forefront of my clients' goals, but I also, I'm so glad you said that because I want them to be able to shamelessly admit the vanity part of it, the percentage of it that we all have. So I'm certainly not trying to discount that piece of wanting to lose 10 pounds and people will kind of try to dance around it and they'll say something like, well, years ago, when I wait, you know, I'm 160 pounds now when I wait 150 pounds, that was when I liked the way I looked. And if they're afraid of the vanity thing, they'll say that's that's when I like the way I felt. And then I'll say, okay, well, let's say.
That's just terrible. That's true. And it's fine because that's also true. They're not lying.
They're just framing it differently. And so, so then I'll say, okay, let's say that we lost that 10 pounds and you're down to 150, but you look in the mirror and you don't look like you did 10 years ago when you were that way, or let's say your body composition is different. You're at the weight, but your muscle to fat ratio is different, or you don't feel the same. Maybe you don't have as much energy for one reason or another.
Do you still think that's a good goal? Do you still want to lose the 10 pounds? And they'll say, well, no, not really. And so, it's like, would it be reasonable to say that your goal is to increase your energy or to improve your body composition?
And if you want to get into specifics of that, you know, I don't use high tech tracking equipment. I don't measure body composition in a typical client, but I do think that a goal doesn't necessarily have to be super specific to be somewhat specific. But I think that a reasonable goal is to say, I want higher energy levels and you can track that, right? You can track your subjective experience daily and look at it over time and say a month later, okay, typically my energy is a lot higher than it was a month ago.
And so, it's just for me, it's just about reframing the why behind it because that's where you always take somebody back to when it comes to behavior change or when it comes to coaching in general. And so, you want to make sure you know what that is. There's so much that unpacking this. One is I love the idea, even with something like daily energy of however you're tracking that daily, because that's one of those things where I talked to somebody about this just the other day in a different context, where I said, you know, you want to pay attention on an ongoing basis because at a certain point, the change will have occurred, but it happens so gradually you didn't notice unless you have something to look back at and go, oh crap, I didn't realize that I made that kind of progress.
So that's a very interesting opportunity that most people don't avail themselves of. Yeah, and it can become your quote unquote new normal. And you don't even realize you take it for granted. And I've actually been in this position and I've had clients in the same position where you actually don't perceive the change at all and you think you're still exactly where you were months ago, six months ago, just because you have no reference points to compare it to.
Yeah, that's a really interesting one. There's a thing that I've done with people in other contexts, the same idea, and what you described and I'm going to kind of break it down into the world's easiest technique, if you will, which is, I just ask the question, and why do you want to make it happen? And I just keep asking that same question over and over and over until people get to something that's so essential, they just can't find another thing. And to your point, it so often has nothing to do with the thing they walked in with.
And often the thing that they say they want is the least effective way of getting to what they actually want. And there's one, even the vanity thing's kind of funny because there's a lot of it that I've discovered, I don't know if you see the same, where what people are looking for, what they want is, I'm trying to think of how to describe this. They think there's something wrong with them because of whatever the current situation is. But when you really dive in and you find out what they're really looking for, you simultaneously discovered that the seeming problem they have is just a feature of being human, not a problem that they think is a personal problem of theirs.
So something I'm trying to think of, my favorite example, oh man, oh, I know, it was someone I was taking a walk with this young woman and I was a young person at the time, so Santa Crikey went and said it the first way, but we were both young people. So other people might. So we're taking a walk and she says, I'm just trying to listen to my body so I know what to eat. And I literally fell in the ground laughing.
I said, well, I can tell you what your body wants you to eat. She says, oh, what? I said, French fries and ice cream chocolate cake if you can get it. It's like you want calories and you want things to taste good.
That's what your body is looking for. But you have this idea that if you could do this thing called listening to your body and I have no idea what the hell that means, that it would direct you to eat certain foods that would then result in you having a different body that you would then be happy with. And she said, well, yeah, here's the problem. You won't find a human being on the planet who's happy with their body.
You can find the best bodies in the world and I guarantee they're more obsessed about it than you are because humans, we never evolved to look at a glass of water and we're able to see that. And go, hey, there's bacteria in there that I drink this. It's going to screw me up. We evolved to pay exquisite attention to everything going wrong inside of us because that was the only doctor we had.
And now everything's pretty much safe. So we just take that same thinking and apply it to what we say when we look at the mirror. That's an interesting thought. Yeah.
So you're dislike of the way you look. This is called human 101. It's what God is here. So you're not.
Yeah, I haven't thought of it that way. But it does make some sense. So let me just make sure that I'm stimulating this correctly. So our paying attention of what might be wrong within us to kind of regulate our health and make sure we don't die is being applied now to what we see in the mirror because that's now what we're looking at all the time.
Yeah. I mean, the short form is there's so many things that we take as a personal and be proof that there's something wrong that if we go around and ask everybody on the planet, they'd have the same thing, which means it's proof that we're just a functioning human. And if you have that, then it's not as big of a deal. Yeah.
So I would agree that to have a sense of self consciousness is certainly healthy because that's, yeah, I agree, that's part of being human. The other side of it is, of course, the sort of social conditioning around, you know, Hollywood and everything that we're told that we should be. And that's a whole other discussion. And I know that million people have had it.
We all are kind of aware of it. Social media exacerbates it in a lot of ways. So we have to be aware of that too. And so the, you know, when people want to lose weight, and again, I just want to stress the difference between somebody who needs to lose weight or to be healthier versus somebody who's weight loss is purely aesthetic.
If you are hung up on a weight loss goal when you are generally active and healthy and fit and you want to get, like, I want to get to under 10% body fat. And it's like the goal has, it has nothing to do with your physical body. It has to do probably with acceptance, with a feeling of self worth. And so this, I'm also a lifelong student, forever student of human psychology and human behavior and, you know, some, I don't know, dancing on the edge of esoteric spiritual linking to all this stuff, just just the, the wellness of the entire human, including your thoughts.
And so it's very much connected to your physical goals. And so it's even connected to a performance goal. You know, if you're kind of obsessing over performance goals, like, well, why do I want to be the best at this? At the end of the day, it doesn't mean we're going to throw your goal in the trash and say, I'm not working with you.
This is a super goal. But it's always trying to at least get them to acknowledge why their goal is framed that way. And if they're not going to get rid of their goal to at least understand its context and kind of supplement it with the underlying stuff behind the goal. So it's just, it's no longer about the 10 pounds.
Like if you really want the 10 pounds, maybe we can do the 10 pounds. But it's also, can you acknowledge that the 10 pounds is not just about the number? Your obsession with the number is something more psychological. And then the stuff behind the number, like the way that you felt and the way that you looked actually might have nothing to do with the number.
I love it. This is, I can only imagine that every now and then you're going to climb it here as you walk in through this goes, yeah, I got to go somewhere else. Oh, yeah. And I totally encourage it.
Because the other side, what did you say at the beginning or near the beginning? Well, essentially, at these goals, we're going to go find someone and a question is like, what has to talk about the person looking for the goals and the person's goals? And the person seemingly attempting to help facilitate that or say something like that? Yeah, yeah.
That's exactly it. Thank you for bringing me back there. So there's, of course, what we're conditioned as people who do fitness, who engage in fitness of what we're supposed to do. But then there's the mainstream personal training, which basically says your job is to help clients meet their goals.
And I mean, when I was doing my certification, it was like they were encouraging us to always harken back to, you know, to motivate a client like, Hey, you want to lose, you want to be able to fit into that red dress for your friends wedding? Like just picture yourself in that red dress. And I think that, okay, if you've got a short term goal like that, again, let's not necessarily throw it at the window, but we get acknowledged it and we have to acknowledge its context. And there's nothing in mainstream personal training that I'm aware of that teachers are a trainer how to get to the root of a client's goal.
Well, you know, an interesting thing. I have a friend who's a big deal psychologist. He's written, I don't know, 30 books or something. And I asked him one day, when you're when there's something you want to teach her, you're writing a book, do you frame it from the context of what they need to know or hear or what they want to know or hear?
And he says, because they're often very different things as we're describing. And he says, Oh, I frame it from what they want to hear. And then I try to pull the rug out from underneath them before they realize that's what happened. And that's what we're talking about.
It's like the elegance of rug pulling so that people can get to something more, you know, more essential and potentially more valuable without losing the long way because it's like, No, I gotta get my pecs to be an inch bigger. Exactly. I love the elegance of rug pulling. That's the fiber, write a book.
That's the title. I'll try it. Don't worry. That's really interesting because there, I mean, I'm kind of a hard headed guy and I've learned how to not be such and I'm sure you as someone who's a contrarian in the fitness industry as well as choosing.
Look, I got to address that. I'm only contrarian because people have forgotten that the modern athletic shoe is the contrarian position. I'm actually just doing what humans have been doing for 40,000 years. The contrarian position is what people are wearing, but it's flip upside down, which is so insane to me that I'm seen as a kind of a creep.
I agree. I mean, yeah, I've been a barefoot athlete for over a decade and I'm in total agreement and that's when people are talking about how do you do that? When I'm an arch support, you know, the arch support thing is that I mean, you've been through all of this, I know, but just it's hard not to. It's hard to approach it meeting somebody where they're at, especially when you've had the conversation so many times and so it takes a lot of patience.
It takes a practicing the skill of talking to people of that elegant rug pulling. It's exactly what it is because I want to dismiss a goal sometimes, especially if I'm in a mood and I've had a busy day and I say, you know, you get a close. I want to, whatever, we'll use the 10 pounds thing or even five or I want to just lose this little pooch here. I just want to kind of tone it up and just like, oh my God, just just focus on your health.
And I'm like, no, there's a former competitive pro bodybuilder who I follow online who is pretty much consistently around eight to nine percent body fat. And he did an amazing YouTube episode once or YouTube video once where he said, if you are a guy, your goal should be to be somewhere around 15% body fat. You can maintain that effortlessly. You'll look fine.
No one's going to notice it in either direction. And that's where you should be. And now he's still a, he's not competitive bodybuilder, but the guy's like a competitive cyclist. He's burning calories like there's no tomorrow.
And he's just been an inhabitant of eating and working out in a way that allows him to maintain that eight to nine percent for 20 years to hold it in game. And he's also taking a tiny amount of testosterone. But I know some guys who are my agent beyond who are juicing like there's no tomorrow and their world's going to end if they're not a 7% body fat. It's exactly wild.
And so you've got these now, imagine people who are not competitive or never were competitive and they just believe that they need to be under 10% body fat just to be accepted by whomever. Well, this goes back to something else you said that I find really interesting about what you're experiencing in Morocco, but it made me think of CrossFit as well and just a general thing of this whole competitive aspect, whether it's just you and you're competing against who you are now versus who you think you want to be versus things that are literally built to bring out some competitive part of our nature. Like when I went to a CrossFit gym and they had me do a workout and they're yelling and screaming. I said, yeah, yelling and screaming does not do anything to me because there's not a real competition.
So I can't do fake competitive. And even if I was in a real competition with somebody sitting next to me, I don't really get a crap that guy is because we're, I mean, like the CrossFit games, there's no way I would have any interest in that because the way you win is you've got to be about 510 to 61 and way about 195. And because otherwise we like the same amount of bar, you know, I've got to do the same 300 pounds you do, but I'm 5, 4, 1, 1, 2, 1, and I can do it. But it's not the same thing.
So I don't care. I feel that and I feel, you know, CrossFit, like I think I mentioned earlier, CrossFit did a great thing in that it was kind of one of the first systems to ever build community, real community around fitness. And I think there's a huge value in that. But you mentioned a second ago competing as we are now trying to trying to be who you want to be.
And so then you have to ask yourself if you're an average Joe and you are doing CrossFit wads every single day, is that who you want to be? If you picture your perfect life, do you want to be somebody and that's your workout every day? Or are you doing that because someone told you that high intensity interval training coupled with Olympic lifting and powerlifting and gymnastics and running and swimming and rolling altogether? That makes you fit.
And if I don't do that, then I'm not going to be the fittest I can be. That's the narrative you're telling yourself. No, no, it's a brilliant question. I want to reiterate just because I love it so much.
It's like, are you doing this because that's the way you like to do things or you're doing it to get to some goal that when you get there, you're probably not going to be satisfied. And then what? And this is like back up to my opening line of like, if you're not having fun, do something different until you are, it's if you find it really enjoyable, knock yourself out, keeping in mind that at a certain point, you won't be doing those same lifts and hitting those same numbers because things started going downhill and people don't like to deal with that. And just last week, I had dinner with a guy who was sitting next to me who was a former competitive bodybuilder.
And I said, so, you know, what do you notice now that you're in your 40s? He goes, the legs go, man, there's nothing you can do about it, the legs go. And that's like, and he was simultaneously fully accepting of it, but also like, damn it. And it's something I've seen too.
You see what runners is like, you know, at a certain age, for whatever reason, we lose muscle mass in our legs faster than anywhere. It's crazy to have been annoying as shit. But it's just like, I mean, it's something to look forward to. I was at the senior games when I just turned 50 and there's a bunch of 60 year olds and I was hanging out with them.
They said, you know, if you look at the times for the all American times for the 100 meters or the 50 meters, you see that once you get to 60, they start falling off a cliff. I mean, once you get to 60, your speed drops like a rock and there's a couple 80 year olds standing behind them and they went, you guys have no idea what you're talking about. Just wait. And then you've got the few centenarians, the 100 year olds who are still like, plug it away.
Well, there was a guy who actually just set the world record in the 100 meters for 100 year old plus and it was some like crazy number. I mean, I'm making it up like 40 seconds. I mean, something really that you look at and go, you got to be able to do it faster than that. So, I mean, my goal as a sprinter because I really do like it.
I do hope I get to keep doing it for my whole life is I just want to keep hitting the all American times. I don't care that they keep getting massively slower. If I can just hit those times, that'll make me really happy. I don't need to hit the time from someone 10 years younger than me or 20 years younger than me.
As long as I'm in that range, that's enjoyable. But the competition thing coming back to this, this is really interesting about, I guess the way I'm wondering it is, we don't have normal daily outlets for what seems to be for many people, probably not everybody, some competitive urge. And if we're not doing it in say, CrossFit or some sport, then I imagine this is partly what we're talking about along is that it becomes an internal competition, which my God sounds like a horrible, horrible thing. Yeah.
Wow. You just gave me another thing to think about in a different way, beer two for two. Yeah. So, again, now, let me reframe and process this because this is very, very interesting.
So when we lack competition in a traditional sense, we have to find it somewhere. And so we bring it inside of ourselves. So in other words, it's kind of like our being a fan of a sports team, you know, when you check, you won, or we lost. It's like, you weren't on the field.
You didn't do anything. You just watched beer and watched. So I'm not sure how to either win or losing. Yeah.
So I mean, I think that's plausible. I do because I think there are fewer outlets for people to actively compete. And I think we're just, and this might be getting too broad or too kind of philosophical, but I do think that we are just becoming less actively participatory in most things. Yeah.
And so, yeah, we're just, we're kind of passively consuming more and not doing it. And yeah, there's a void there that could very well be like your need to do something like CrossFit, even if it's not totally aligned with who you are, what you want. That might very well be a manifestation of some void competition. I have the idea that it also relates to the growth of certain, I don't want to call them sports, but I can't.
I mean, sports are activities, these in particular, adults playing kickball, adults playing dodgeball, and the fastest growing sport in America, especially for older people, pickleball, which is basically, you know, big table tennis. And these are things that you can get. You can have fun. You can get kind of good at there's a competitive thing, but they're not really, you know, massively challenging.
No. And so your life doesn't have to be built around it if you don't want it to be. Yeah. If you want to compete against the people at your CrossFit gym, sorry CrossFit, I don't mean to demonize you, it's just a really great example.
But if you're trying to compete against somebody there, like you got to show up daily and you got to do grueling workouts to get better, whereas you don't need to do that if you're on an adult kickball team or whatever. And so I just love, listen to several episodes of your podcast and I just love the intro about keeping it enjoyable because that is so oftentimes, if I'm not training people, I love to do wellness consults and that works better for people. And so I mean, I could just sit and talk to somebody about well-being and fitness for hours and hours and I'm like, you paid me for this? This is amazing.
So if they're looking for an exercise regimen, then I'll always tell them you've got to start with something that you enjoy. You just start there and then we'll fill in the gaps. Like whatever your thing, whatever aspect of fitness your thing addresses, great. We'll check that off and then anything that it doesn't, we'll fill in the gaps there with kind of the stuff you need to round out your training.
But let's not go the other way around. Let's not go, oh, I need to do strength training and then I need to do cardio and I need to blah, blah, blah. And then maybe if there's time I'll do the dance class that I love or I'll swim or whatever it is, it's got to be the other way around because that's the thing you're going to stick with. That's the compass you're going to come back to.
And it may be that there's a, how do I want to call it a secondary, not motivation, secondary inspiration. That is the thing that's fun. It may be like you mentioned repeatedly about CrossFit. It may be the community aspect.
It may be the social aspect. As a sprinter, I have a couple of training partners and it's not uncommon that on any given day, one of us will say, I'm so glad that you called me to remind me to do this because otherwise I was going to sit on the couch. And the social thing is hugely important. These are some of my closest friends that I would only see on the track.
And some of them would be socialized with otherwise, but the social component, sorry, this is like flashback city today. When I was in high school, I was a gymnast and we were doing a lot of weightlifting for gymnastics. And a friend of mine and I started writing a book about getting in shape. And the first chapter was Find A Partner.
Find Someone You Want to Hang Out With because this stuff's a pain in the ass. It's not going to be fun often. And you need someone to hang out with. Yeah, I'm a lifelong martial artist and I was training in a place in Boston.
We were training in the Kravmoga in close combat. And we were years and years at this same place and moved up the ranks. And the camaraderie you build when you go through grueling training with somebody is second to none. And then you may socialize with them in other contexts, but when you have this thing that's kind of part of your foundation of your friendship or your bond, it's very, very special.
And then that's where healthy competition comes in because it wasn't about when we were hard sparring. We weren't trying to kill each other, but we were sparring hard. We were sparring hard. I mean, we went at it.
And it was often, you know, I want, it's like that iron sharpens iron saying where it's, I want you to be better for you, but I also want you to be better because you being better is going to make me better. It's going to challenge me more. And it's just this cycle of encouraging yourself through the other and the other through yourself and just getting better and better and better. And I'll tell you, you know, my heart rate can be the same doing a couple rounds in the heavy bag or having a sparring session with somebody.
And it feels like nothing compared to if I'm doing, you know, conditioning workout that I'm not enjoying the same heart rate and I just feel like I'm dying. And yeah, so, so, you know, if you're doing something that you love and it's either you're competing or you're trying to solve a problem. If you are, if you are totally mentally engaged, you're approaching, you know, what psychologists call flow state that also, I mean, the rate of perceived exertion is just insanely different. I also, I practice animal flow and teach that, which is a, you know, ground based movement system, very, very fun.
And the challenge, the challenge and the nervous system to coordinate and it's almost, you know, it's like, I don't know, break dancing meets dynamic yoga meets, I don't even know how to describe it. But it hasn't come up with one. It's Tai Chi for people who fell down. It's perfect.
I mean, it's gonna be their marketing guy. Well, I mean, it is, it's a whole lot of fun, that's for sure. The kind of you give me one of the thought about that spell out of my head. I want to take a total tangent for the fun of it because you mentioned both at the beginning and again, just more recently, this idea of well being coaching and being, can you say more about just what well being coaching is, what that actually means?
And however breathing fits into that, because this, I know that when someone says something about teaching me to breathe, most people go, I'm gonna breathe you in and out in either way, doesn't matter. But I've actually been playing some breathing things lately that are really changing my body. So I'm dying to hear, you know, what you were talking about when you say well being coaching and coaching breathing. For sure.
Yeah. Let's, let's take a turn. So, well, so well being coaching or wellness consulting is it's basically anytime somebody has a goal and assuming that, you know, we can confirm that the goal is aligned with their well being and that it's, it's gonna be good for them. Or if they're having a problem or annoyance, that's not, you know, it's not like a need of a medical doctor or whatever it's, it's like the first line of defense for the stuff that, or let me put it a different way.
If there's a spectrum of non kind of medical needs, and on one end of the spectrum would be me and on the other part of the spectrum would be like a doctor of naturopathy or a doctor functional medicine doctor, right? So I'm in no way comparing myself to a doctor. I'm not a doctor, but I am a very foundational level health coach. And so some things that the issues are, you know, if they're like, I think I have a food sensitivity or whatever, I'll say, you know, I can give you some insight, but I don't test for food sensitivity.
So you need to go to kind of a next level health coach or a doc functional medicine doctor. But when it's basically the categories that I tend to address are movement, nutrition, sleep, stress levels, and breathing. And breathing is one of those things that nobody really understands. I shouldn't say nobody.
Most people really don't understand because we've been told, we've been told the wrong stuff. And I know, I think you have Patrick McEwen on here, huge fan of his work. It's the same stuff. It's that taking a deep breath is, you know, that came from when people started to realize that some anxious people would hold their breath.
And they would just forget to breathe. Exactly. And so they would say, okay, let's respond to that by reminding people to breathe fully and breathe deeply through their valley or into the valley. And that might be an okay cue to start somebody who tends to breathe really shallow or hold their breath.
But most of us are over breathing. Most of us are breathing too fast. We're breathing too deep. And we have a low tolerance to carbon dioxide in our blood.
And carbon dioxide is just a byproduct of anything happening. It's just a byproduct of human metabolism. And so the more stuff we do, the more CO2 build up, which is why we breathe heavier when we exercise. Yes, we do need more oxygen, but also we need to get rid of excess CO2.
And so most of us, you know, it's like anything. If you do, if you eat more than you need, then you're going to gain weight and you're not going to feel so great. You know, it's like, if you breathe more than you need, you're going to have inefficient oxygen delivery to muscles. You're going to be over tired, over anxious.
You're not going to feel great. So I coach people. I would do a lot of breath work that is sort of based on I'm not certified through Patrick McEwen's organization, but I do I draw from a lot of his work because I think he's really probably the best, the leading guy for right now. And so we do various stuff that's basically built around down regulating the nervous system and getting out of that perpetual sympathetic drive and bringing back the parasympathetic nervous system, building tolerance to carbon dioxide and just getting your base back to relaxation.
It's interesting. I've been playing with the thing I've been doing that's been very interesting is from someone else that I interviewed recently, I'm Eric Weyer who her thing about belly breathing is not actually about your belly is certainly not just expanding your belly by getting like I'm now doing this thing where when I'm breathing, my back is expanding instead of just my belly going out. And what's been so interesting is when I do this, so I got a mild scolary out of curve because I got a other final problem anyway, bottom line is there's always been a spot in the middle of my back that I feel like I could just crack that thing my whole life would change. And when I breathe this way, I noticed two, three things happening for the fourth one that spot my back starts release in my upper back.
I'm breathing like down instead of expanding my belly. It's just kind of all around my shoulders drop my neck lengthens. Those are the top three and the fourth one is that when I'm done exhaling, it's like five seconds till I start breathing again. So the other thing happening with oxygen and carbon dioxide just for getting sort of those other parts of my body engaged and breathing is really fascinating.
Yeah, if you engage the biomechanics correctly, then the biochemistry will benefit from it to a degree and then you kind of play back and forth between which one of those you address. I'm glad you brought that up though that 360 degree breath is so important and the belly breath is another, the belly breath, the just the belly like without incorporating the back is kind of mixed into again these over corrections with that started as well intentioned corrections. So the other one is linked with the posture correction where you know people are really hunched, pecs are stuck short, the upper back muscles are not engaged, scapular is stuck elevated, and so people will tell you as a general cue now shoulder pull your shoulders down and back. But what happens is people do that too much, the scapular overly retracted, overly depressed, the traps upper traps are stuck long, and then the ribs are flared and tilted backwards like this, which is going to compress that tissue, it's going to stick that tissue short and the racco lumbar junction right below the rib cage.
You can't expand that area and so all of our air just goes into the expansion of the front so we have no less tone in the front and we have we're overtone we're tight and angry in the back and we can't access space with the breath. And then if you learn to do that like you just said the reason it's happening in your upper back or one of the reasons is because you're allowing the back of the rib cage to lift and create space in that racco lumbar junction. And so now the whole rib cage can lift and you get more of what some call special tense equity that tissues ability to keep the bones in place where they're supposed to be, and then all of a sudden it's like oh actually my shoulders, my shoulders are supposed to elevate a little bit, but not because I'm punching them, it's because my ribs are lifted and naturally bring my shoulders into a state of kind of floating but in a firm way. So just that I'm so glad you gave that example because just that example alone is how breath starting from the bottom and you're breathing biomechanics just results in complete postural changes that you might not even been trying to address.
Yeah, yeah, so fun one. Well, and I'm glad we went down that path because that also answers my question about what it means to be doing well, you know, well, as coaching with people and this is clearly a part of it so that was a great example for people so thank you for that. Oh my gosh, look at the time. So what do we left out if anything?
The overly broad, horrible question. Yeah, well, I'm afraid we go down that road. I'm going to go for another hour. So yeah, I would just say that just to recap that it's setting wellness goals for yourself, whether they're fitness or nutrition weight loss or whatever it is or should be an exercise in self development and kind of solo therapy or not solo if you're working with a coach, right?
It's about what am I really after? It's about peeling back those layers and ultimately you'll thank yourself in 20 years when you're doing stuff that you love and you feel great and you're living a lifestyle that feels really aligned with who you are and what you want out of your life. It's going to feel way better than if you're sitting with a back injury because you're like, you know, 15 years ago, I really wanted to be at 5% body fat. And so I was doing Olympic matches for reps and a cross-fit gym and, you know, blew out my back.
So I want to throw in the mild tweet to that, which is along the way and or maybe arguably at the very beginning, it might not feel that freeing because if you keep asking that, you know, why do I want this question, you might get to some thoughts about yourself that you don't like. You might get to some things about, you know, how you feel that you don't there's something wrong with you that you're not that you don't live up to something. It becomes an opportunity to, like you said, that we investigate and do this sort of self or hard-hearted therapeutic thing that will definitely pay off, I would argue. But but if you and again, if you come to one of those things that is how you're constantly comparing yourself to what you imagine people think of you because you have no idea what they actually think.
No, that may be somewhat upsetting. And I'm hoping that people also remember the other part of that's what everybody does. And so if you remember that it's a symptom of being human, not a problem that is unique to you, then maybe, you know, then that can let things loosen up as well. But that's going to be a little bit and to think that that goes away or that you'll never have that if you have that realization, I would argue is probably another one of those unrealistic goals, like losing 10 pounds.
I have a joke that when I roll out of bed, at some point from the moment that I start to roll out of bed to 30 seconds later or whenever it is, and I'm sitting on a toilet, I will check and see, you know, I'll pinch around my abdomen to see what my body fat feels like, as if somehow overnight I drop 5% body fat, which is, it's gotten to the point where it's such a habit that I just find it hysterical. It's like I don't really care that I do it. It doesn't cause me angst. It's just kind of amusing that that's just one of the things that this thing does.
Yeah. And you see it and you acknowledge it and yeah, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to get rid of it. It just happens. I mean, it's the same.
I see people at the gyms here doing a workout and then weighing themselves and like, Oh, look, since I've been so much self revelatory, let's just cut to the chase. After I take my dog for a walk, and I come back and poop, that's when I weigh myself again. Because I want to know how much weight I lost by pooping. There you go, which is technically related to nutrition and weight loss if you want to go that way.
It is, but it's utterly hysterical when I mean, it cracks me up in my own mind that I do it, but like I'll get on the scale and it'll say whatever number I go. But I haven't taken a dump yet. So it's really about a half a pound less than that. I haven't traveled.
So it's been a while. Maybe two. So I mean, it's this whole thing that I thought again, utterly, utterly hysterical. So well, if you can laugh at yourself, then you're, you know, those who can laugh at their self, I think, are on a good track to being the ones who can eventually gracefully pull the rug out from under their themselves, from under their own feet and ask them to sell those questions.
So I love it. I can't wait to see your book pulling elegantly pulling out the rug or whatever we said it. So this has been a total, total pleasure. And if people want to get in touch with you and find out more about what you're up to and how they could have fun with you, how would they do that?
Yeah, for sure. So my website is under new construction. So the best way to reach me is email my brand is moves with Coombs is my last name. So you can find me moves with, make sure you spell it for people.
Yep. So you can get me moves with Coombs at gmail.com Coombs is C O O M B S. And I'm very active on Instagram as well. I really like interacting with people there.
So it's moves with Coombs. There's just underscores under each of the word moves underscore with underscore Coombs. Because we don't know when people are going to listen to this when your site's back up. You know what the URL is?
That'll be northstarfitness.com. Cool. Awesome. I like that.
That's a nice thing of giving you that direction without giving you. Yeah, there we go. Love it. Well, once again, total, total pleasure.
We'll have to do more of this when the time is not quite as constrained. Because I think that we could definitely do this for hours and hours and for everybody else. Thank you for being part of this as well, whether you're listening or watching. And, oh, yeah, yeah, just a reminder, other than checking out Griffin stuff, go to www.join, themovementmovement.com to find previous episodes all the way as you can interact with what we're doing here.
There's a bunch of stuff on there that I think you'll enjoy. And if you have any questions or you have any recommendations, somebody that I should talk to on the show, frankly, especially someone who might think that I have a case of cranial reorientation syndrome, aka having my head at my butt, because that would be a really fun chat. I met a guy on YouTube who assured me that I was a complete moron. And despite the fact that I've been in the footwear business now for 13 plus years, I know nothing about footwear or the industry which I thought was entertaining.
And in fact, I just said, so you think that I haven't learned anything in this time, which he didn't like that. Anyway, I tried to entice him to get on the podcast and he assured me that he has no interest in talking to me or anybody who listens to me, and I thought it was sad. I wanted to reply, what are you scared? But I didn't.
But anyway, bottom line. If you have anything you want to ask me to tell me, just drop me an email, move. M-O-V-E at JoinTheMovementMovementMovement.com. But more importantly, between now and then and whatever the next episode is, just go out and have some fun and live life-y first.