Episode 243: Ninja Warrior Fitness Secrets

What do you want to do if you want to become the fittest 50-year-old, or 40-year-old, or 60-year-old, or any-year-old? I don't really care. We're going to find out by someone who's exploring that for herself, but is much more than that on today's episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast where people want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting to speak first to people because you know those things are your foundation. And we break down the propaganda, the mythology, and frankly, the lies that you're often told about what it takes to run or walk or play or to yoga or cross-fit or be an injured warrior and take wink, wink, nudge, nudge, and to do that, enjoy it, lean effectively and efficiently.

And I mentioned, enjoy it, it's a trick question to answer. I know I did because if you're not having fun, you're not going to keep it up anyway, so make sure you're having fun. And I'm Stephen Sashan from zerushus.com, host of the Movement Movement podcast. We call it that because we're creating a movement around natural movement, letting your body do what it's designed to do, not getting in the way.

And the way you can participate, CZ, cheap, in fact, it's free, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Nothing to do to join. There's no secret handshake. There's no, just that's where you're going to find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can interact with us on social media, and all the ways that you can help us by leading a review, getting us a thumbs up, five-star rating in the places you can do that.

If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let us jump in. Jesse Graf. Hey, how are you?

I'm great, but I have a quick question. Could we come up with a secret handshake that is not mandatory? You don't have to do it to get in, but if you're in, anyone who wants to be in gets to learn it. You've got to do this.

But can it be a kicking thing? I'm all for it, as long as it's something that humans can do who are not need to worry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

I'll think about it. We'll work on it in a few weeks. Do you know the District of Palatulis? Yeah, yeah, they're awesome.

Like, Stirksi stuff, right? Well, I mean, it's, I mean, my favorite thing that I say about Palatulis is I don't know which I like better when I watch them perform when I can see the physics of what they're doing or I can't see the physics of what they're doing because what they do is amazing. And we work with them. They just made a video for us.

It's really, really fun. So they'd be great people to come up with a wacky secret handshake too. Well, someday we'll get you and me together with a gang from Palatulis and do some ridiculous things. Ooh, that's amazing.

Where are they based? On the East Coast. And I just remember, like last night when I was going to bed, I was literally imagining something as a 60-year-old not dancer, what I could do that would be contributing to what they do. Because there's some strength things that I can do that are still pretty crazy that, like, you know, human flag kind of thing.

But to do a human flag with a person is very entertaining instead of being on a pole and something. Anyway, we'll work with Palatulis one day. That'll be a hoot. Cool.

No. Hey, Jess, for you and I don't know who you are because there are still some. Why don't you tell people who you are and what you do? Sure.

I've been a stuntwoman for 16 years. I work on a lot of like really fun superhero shows and of course, you know, getting beat up and killed and abused as we do in Stents. But I've also been competing on American and Jew Warrior for, I guess I started like nine years ago or something and I've beaten a lot of records and placed high among the men and Ninja Warrior is like the most fun thing ever. I am so bummed that that didn't exist when I was a little group.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Except I'll ask you this. So one of the reasons that I'm not a total Ninja Warrior kind of person even now to the extent that I could be is so much of the stuff that's in there is grip strength dependent.

And that ain't my thing. And so I'm not originally your thing either. No. No.

I'm not sure if the rock climbers had a huge advantage because they're the ones just that train grip strength time. And yeah, for me, when I started, I saw these guys doing like we call it a cliffhanger. So it's like maybe an inch and a half ledge where you're just going along this way and you just swing into gaps. And initially, like I saw the cliffhanger and was like, people can't do that.

And then they all did it. And I was like, oh, okay, well, that must be easier than it looks. I'm so I got on one and was like, nope, definitely feels impossible. I'm not sure how that's happening.

But if they're humans and they can do it, like I made the same way, I should be able to do it too. And it's just, it's so interesting when you discover a muscle group, even as an athlete, just a muscle group that you haven't activated, that you haven't taught how to fire at high levels. And so, you know, it took at least a year of like really, really training that to be able to start performing at a high level. And then, you know, a long term commitment to building and now I'm trying to be more scientific about it so that I can continue getting gains after so many years of training it.

But yeah, it's, there's, there's so many, I think adults who will try a certain exercise and, and not know how to fire the muscles and think there's something wrong with them that they won't be able to do it. And it's just, it's so empowering to understand that that's normal and that's how that works. And it's just like a kickstart process of having to teach those muscles how to fire and then they can grow dramatically and they'll be able to do things that seem impossible initially. Well, there's another part that I find interesting, this is going to lead into eventually our conversation about becoming the fifth year old woman or person or et cetera, et cetera, which is just the training on some new strength, whether it's something civil as a SWAT or something like cliffhanger, the, I'm trying to think of how to frame this.

I can't think of how to ask the question so I'm going to describe it this way. One of my favorite exercises, and it's a really important one for sprinters is the Nordic hamstring curl. And so for people who don't know it, you're kneeling, you're being held down and you keep your body as straight as possible, barely a little bit of hip end and just lower yourself slowly. So you're just hinging at your knees, lower yourself slowly.

Ideally, at first you'll fall on your face, you'll get to about a 10 degree angle and then fall and eventually you can get down and get back up. And I worked on this for a while doing like three sets of eight reps as best as I could do for like three days a week. And I just wasn't making any progress. And then I went down to doing five sets of five reps once a week and within a month, way, way stronger.

Now some of this is because I'm a 60 year old guy and I think I was doing this about a year or two ago, but when I, but I'm 60 now and it seems like I just need way more recovery after the right amount of stimulation than I thought by doing three, doing three times a week, I just wasn't getting enough time to recover and actually get stronger. So what did you discover for you? Like in the early days when you're doing into warrior stuff and having developed new kinds of strength about what worked for you and how has that changed as you've progressed and gotten older? Let's see.

Well, my, my initial training strategy when I, when I decided I really wanted to start getting strong was based on giving myself a challenge. Like I test myself, let's say pull ups or dead hang, because that's an injury where you're appropriate. So I do as many pull ups as I could. And when I started, it was six and I would hang from a cliffhanger as long as I could.

And I started, that was, you know, a couple seconds, three seconds, maybe. And so I would, I would do sort of like, you know, it takes about 48 hours to recover from like a really good session where you're going to get sore. If you go overboard, it's going to take longer. But like if you find that, that perfect amount of like you really pushed yourself, but not killed yourself, you give it 48 hours, you go again.

And so I was on this three days cycle where I would go push day, full day, leg day and pull day was like the big day because that's where I'm training for ninja. So every set I would be going basically to failure because I'm trying to beat last, last sessions record. So like twice a week, I'm going to failure. I was able to improve really quickly that way.

So at the end of that year, I'd gone from six pull ups. I think I was at like 22 pull ups and my dead hang had gone to, well, over a minute, maybe a minute, 30 on this cliffhanger ledge. And at the end of the year, like I had all these amazing games and then, you know, something went wrong and I got hurt. So I had to take some time off and rebuild and was able to rebuild even faster.

So in like two to three months of, okay, now I'm healthy. Now I can rebuild. Getting ready for ninja three months, I was stronger than ever. So building back up from zero up to 25 pull ups and two minutes at hang and competed.

And then at the end of the year, it's something happened again. And I have to time off and I lose all the strength and had to have like a like a stem cell injections and all this stuff. But you know, now crap, I've only got three months to recover and get strong and be ready for next year. So at the end of that, so that season I built back up, I got up to, I think, 38 pull ups that year.

So it was like, I kept getting stronger and I was getting strong so, so fast that I would always get injured at the end of the year. So season 12, it just like exploded, you know, if you think it's bad getting injured at the end of every season, well, this particular season, I tore both shoulders, rotator cuff, rotator cuff plus labor and then period glen. And I had a leg in my cartilage. So that's like everything, not everything.

And my, so, so, so at the end of that year, I needed three surgeries, two shoulder surgeries, one knee surgery. And that's, that's a point where you can't work around it. You can't be like, Oh, I'm gonna let my upper body recover and get really good at like squats and box jumps and everything. It's like, okay, you're just grounded.

You're gonna do something else with your time. And so I, the first certifications I went after were nutrition and corrective exercise, specialization. And the corrective exercise was so amazing. I learned so much about like the type of training I've been doing and how, you know, I'm doing my push days for maintenance to make sure I don't get unbalanced and I'm doing my pull days to max out and be the strongest I've ever been.

Does that sound balanced? Sure. I'm doing the same number of days on each exercise, but on push days, I'm like making sure I keep up with last week on pull days. I'm trying to beat myself every week.

So I could do, you know, 20 push ups, which is maybe average for an athletic woman and 38 pull ups, which is like, which is super, super, super, super, super, super, super, super good for an athletic guy. So it's like, I was obviously unbalanced. My shoulders were like coming way out of alignment. So that means like my pet minor was super tight, your lat, which pulls down, attaches to the front of your arm.

So that's everything's pulling here. Everything pulling back was weak because I wasn't training it. So now my shoulders are here. Now you're super, it comes through like a little tunnel here.

Oh, I'm going to call you raise. Yeah, I'm having, so I had an issue with my dog a couple of weeks ago where another dog tried to attack my dog and I'm trying to keep that dog away. And I had a thought I'd never imagined I would have, which is I'm going to have to kill a dog. While I'm simultaneously, you know, taking my 35 pound bill like a tank dog on his leash and trying to like shove him away.

So super, it's been a very well because I tore the crap out of it. And I'm dealing with all those things that I can't do right now, like all of this external rotation stuff. So here's the interesting thing about the super, so when you think about tearing a tendon, you think about like over stretching it and it rips, right? That's what I always thought.

The super, so it's actually is when you raise your arm overhead, it's getting shorter. So it's not stretched, but because it goes through this little tunnel, it's getting rubbed. So every time you raise your arm, if you're even good alignment, it just flows through that tunnel. If your shoulders are rolled forward, which so many of us are not just from doing too many pullups, but from like typing, your shoulders are raised, your pecs are getting tight, you're texting, you're hunched over.

So now we're out of alignment. So every time you raise your arm, you're getting wear and tear as it like rubs through this little tunnel. Now, if you're rubbing like that and weakening this tendon and then also taking huge impacts like you do on ninja in the wrong alignment, that's where it shears and gets cut. So basically learning about this, learning, it's not just about being in the right alignment when I take those impacts, which is important, but it's about doing all these exercises.

It's not just about doing enough rows to balance my pullups. It's about attacking the rows with the same intensity that I do the pullups. Well, I'm curious because, so I've had, look, I know something else about you, you're a former gymnast as am I. And so just naturally tend to have overdeveloped pecs internally rotated shoulders.

So, you know, so to start saying about that naturally, when I started, one of the things I started playing with, tell my shoulders was doing pullups, but really focusing on just getting that pull part, really getting the back engaged before I did anything with my arms and it really helped my shoulders. So yeah, component two. So I mean, it's kind of funny that you're thinking you have to do rows to compensate for what you're doing with pullups, which is basically just a row from a different angle. And if you do it perspective.

So with the, what was the term you used for what this conditioning was that you were studying nutrition and what you call it? So corrective exercise, if I, um, NASA National Academy of Sports Medicine. So in addition to realize and having that realization about, you know, how you're really attacking pull days when I push days, did you discover anything else about sort of, you know, the hip bone connected to the knee bone connected to the whatever bone? So there was something else that wasn't necessarily your shoulders that impacted your shoulders or something else where, you know, there was kind of a chain of things that you may have discovered that were there some other link in the chain.

Um, yeah, I mean, so many, one interesting one is like, I have some, uh, some bulging discs in my neck, um, from stunts over and over, of course, but the bulge is that I think it's C, C four, five is my worst bulge, I have it at C three, four as well. But the nerve that innovates your diaphragm, which is your breathing muscle, basically, um, was the one that's kind of getting pinched occasionally from my, from my neck injury. Right. And since my diaphragm was sort of atrophy, I was doing most of my breathing with my accessory breathing muscles.

Now, if every breath is like this, now my neck muscles are tightening, which is also pulling my shoulders out of alignment. So a neck injury from 2010 slowly changed my posture, which led to a shoulder injury. Well, I'm going to, I love you said that because the part of what maybe asked that was like, I just got recently that shot the shot. So there's, I did a, I did a podcast with, um, I just like on air, Erin McGuire, Erin, let's definitely Erin, but I'm blanking on her.

I'm not positive on her last night. I'm having a hard time with names lately. One of the six year old things. Anyway, she makes a little device.

It's a belt. It's called the core 360 belt. So it's basically just a way to cut it right here. I'm going to show it to you.

I have tennis balls in that way. You feel like this is really, I'm going to make this cylinder. Yes. Thank you.

So, you know, here's the belt and the whole idea is giving you some feedback. So when you're breathing in, you're making the cylindrical thing pushing down and what shocked me is I learned how to breathe that way and actually breathe into my back, expand my back. My lower back is doing nothing in between my shoulders was opening up. My shoulders were not rounding forward.

They were doing something where the alignment changed in my shoulders where everything was just hanging better. So I love that you said, you know, this problem with your neck leading to your diaphragm and without doing your breathing because I've been playing with how the way I'm changing my breathing is impacting my shoulders in a way that I never really imagined. Yeah. That was that blew me away.

So that strikes me as a corrective exercise, a kind of thing. Yeah. It's my physical therapist is really into that too. She does dynamic.

She does dynamic neuromuscular stabilization and there's a huge focus on breathing properly. And so it's a cycle too because once you start breathing like this, now my neck muscles are getting tighter. So my scaleings were always out of control. My sternocleidomastoid, this one was super tight.

You could see knots in it. There was like a vein or an artery that you could see that was like bunched up because everything was still bunched up in my neck, which how do you think that felt on my actual neck injury? So I'm like having constant neck pain, which more and more is pulling my shoulders out of with alignment. And so it was so interesting when I started trying to breathe properly, you know, if someone says relax your traps, that's very different from force your traps to stay down.

So I had to strengthen my lower traps and my serratus, serratus anterior and rhomboids, but especially serratus anterior and lower traps because that's what holds your shoulder blades down. So I couldn't even relaxing. Everything was so tight and overactive here that even if I'm relaxing, they're just too short to stay down. So I had to actively pull my shoulder blades down and breathe into my stomach and these muscles, I would get sharp pains on every inhale because they were so tight that they were getting stretched like actively stretched on every inhale unless I allowed my shoulders to come up.

So it was a long process of actively, you know, it's not just relaxing. It's very actively engaged, your lower traps and that's the radius. And it was hard. And I had to think about it all the time.

Well, what will happen is you get into a pattern and then your brain shuts off the awareness to those things that are tight because it's just a loop and you don't need to pay attention and just building that the neural connection. So you'll do that. That's one part of the other part that I love that you're describing. And people misunderstand this quite a bit is the relationship between strength and flexibility where they think flexibility is learning to stretch a muscle rather than one important factor of being strong in the opposing direction.

So they think that doing the splits is about just stretching instead of learning how, I don't know if you ever did this, when I was in gymnast mode, I'd sit on the floor with my legs straddles much like good and just lift my feet off the ground and just, you know, work on basically the quad part of pulling my legs up, which is what allowed me to split. So it wasn't from getting more stretching muscles, it was from getting stronger in the direction that I was trying to go. And people think about that. Yeah, at least on like a split leap.

Like when I worked on switch leaps, I had to work really actively on contracting my hamstring on the back leg because I could like, I could get my front leg up high, but when you're going to like switch switch, like I wasn't hitting a split because my back leg would just drop and so I'd get on the parallel bars and kick my legs and really feel how I'd squeeze my glute and my hamstring super dynamically to like follow the momentum and snap it upward so I could hit that split. I've never thought of this nor have I ever thought to ask anyone about this, but I remember so when I was getting out of gymnastics, I was doing ballet and I stopped doing ballet mostly because after a couple weeks, I couldn't find pants that fit me. My legs just blew up. So it's a little bit better.

It's true pants. Yeah. And I also worked hard on it. Well, I was in North Carolina for this winter.

I remember doing switch leap and there's something so amazingly gratifying about that move. I don't even know how to describe it. There's just something. Oh, yeah.

Yes. It just like snaps. Yeah, there's just, I mean, because it's more than just jumping. You're doing something in the air.

It's like fast and I mean, if you do it well, it looks like you're kind of levitating. I mean, that's a really fun one. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I need to work on this again.

Well, so backing up a giant part to our conversation. So in terms of like getting stronger and the setting those goals and always trying to improve a little bit each time, which is obviously very important. What else have you discovered about and let's just transition into the getting fit being fit, fit your woman? What else have you discovered if anything that's changed over the years about how you train based on either injuries or just things that have changed as you've gotten older?

Okay. Well, there's a couple important things that we might have to. Unpack. We haven't even talked about like knee and ankle and foot stuff because there was just as much discovery there.

So yeah, I think part of the issue I had with having all three of these injuries at once is the shoulders were so much more dramatic that I focused all of my attention and efforts into rehabbing my shoulders. And you know, an ACL surgery on the knee is like a huge reconstruction thing that takes forever to recover. And I've done that before and it went great. It was amazing.

And so this time I was all focused on the shoulders and I don't think I gave my knee the attention that it should have gotten in rehabbing. And so much of that is not just like, I mean, you don't focus that much on the knee when you're rehabbing the knee a lot. They usually focus mostly on like hip and glute activation and teaching your knee not to turn inward but using your glute to turn it outward so that it stays aligned with your second toe. But in this corrective exercise class, I learned so much about the muscles in your foot and ankle and shin and hip that contribute to knee stability.

And like, it's a very simple test, this overhead squat test where you can look at a person while they do squats with their arms straight up by their ears. And based on whether their arms drop or their back arches or their knees turn out, heels come up, any of feet turn out, you can tell pretty quickly which muscles are overdeveloped and which ones are underdeveloped. And so my natural, my feet always want to turn out when I do squats. I know how to force them to stay in line, but by forcing them to stay in line, I now can feel which muscles are tight that are making me want to turn out.

Let's pause on that one because I want to give people this as an assignment to play with. So if somebody wants to try and do this with a little self-diagnostic, which is true of course, but walk people through what they do, the movement and what they want to pay attention to to see if they're going to find something that's over underdeveloped or not functioning properly. Okay, well, I would set up a camera that's going to film you and you're going to do squats straight on. You might as well look up the overhead squat test online so that you can see it more accurately than if you're just listening here, but you'll want to set up the camera first so that you're not just looking at yourself in the mirror as you do these things.

You can look at it a few times. So facing the camera, you'll basically just put your arms by your head and do a squat, make sure you get down so that your quads are parallel to the floor and stand back up and do this a few times. And then once you've done it a few times, you turn 90 degrees so you can see it from the side, do it a few times there, go to the other side, do it there and turn it back to the camera a few times there. So you want to look at this and...

Wait, I want to pause. You're doing the squat. I'm thinking there's kind of two ways of doing the squat. You've got your arms over your head.

You can kind of drop straight down and keep your torso pretty vertical or you can really hip hinge and then, you know, this is a different thing. Which should people be thinking about more? So hip hinge for people who don't know, you're going to think about like you're standing in front of your toilet, you're sitting back so your butt is going back before you start going down versus just going sort of straight down like your torso is an elevator. So which one of these or some variation thereof do people want to be thinking about?

You want your torso to stay parallel to your shins. So when you're standing vertical, if this is my torso and these are my shins, which obviously your thighs are in between. As your knees bend, your shins are going to go forward, your knees are going to lean forward, your shins are going to bend and your upper body should relatively lean in proportion. Which means your hips are bending.

So the tricky thing in telling people how to diagnose this is I don't want to tell them perfect form before they do it because you want to see what your natural accidental tendencies are but if you're self-diagnosing, no it's just tricky. If you're self-diagnosing, then you need to know what to look for. So do it a few times first before you start analyzing it and then maybe film it again from all three of those directions thinking specifically about are my feet hip width apart? Are my feet staying perfectly parallel?

Like second toe pointing perfectly forward? Are my knees tracking over my second toe? Am I arching my back? So like if your hips are hinging a ton or if like if your arms are dropping down forward, like you want to be keeping your arms parallel to your torso.

So straight line from your hips to your fingertips. Most people, their arms are going to come forward and that's because of tight lats usually. What else? If your heels are coming off the ground.

So try to keep your heels on the ground and if you try to keep your heels on your ground and you feel your feet wanting to turn out, that's going to be a really tight lateral calf and TFL, which is the muscle attached to the IT band. There's a couple other things. There's so many and I'm like, I'm re-studying this chart. I'm thinking like pick the top three to five things that somebody might notice or be on the lookout for.

So arms dropping on what else? Yeah, especially for focusing on lower body. The big one is are your knees turning in? Yep.

Are your feet turning out? Are your heels coming up? Would be especially considering this podcast focusing on deep. Well, that's okay.

Those are huge ones. Okay, so if your knees start to turn in, your knees start to come forward to each other, what's that indicating that somebody might need to pay attention to? That you need to strengthen your glute medius. Your adductors may be a little too tight.

So like the muscles on the inside of your thighs that would pull your legs together. But weak glutes is a big one there. And pretty common. Very common.

A lot of people do this and it's a strong indicator that you're vulnerable to knee injury. So there was a time I was driving to pepperonchos and friends. There was a woman running down the street who clearly was an accomplished runner. I mean, you can tell that part, except that her knees were practically banging into each other.

It's your step because they turned in so much. And all I can think was, you know, you've figured out a way to run, but you're glutes are out of whack. And I almost wanted to stop and say, how long till your last next injury? I mean, it's undeniable that if you're doing that, if your knees are really coming in that way, when you're walking or running or you're squatting, yeah, you're setting yourself up.

And most people have no idea because they've never seen that. I love it. The opening, your first instruction, get a camera. So many people have not the best proprioceptive skills and where they think their body is as different than where it actually is.

And the only way you discover this is with video and some humility because I remember a guy, he emailed me and he said, there's something wrong with the rubber on your shoes as I wore out the heel. I said, well, you're over striding heel striking because that's putting friction in that spot because I don't do that. Well, I mean, your shoes say otherwise. Yeah, he said send me a video.

So he said to me a video and it took me 20 minutes with him on the Zoom or Skype or whatever. We were using me drawing on the screen until he went, oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, that's over striding and heel striking. And then I swear to God, his next line was, yeah, but I don't do that.

It's like, this is a video of you. You. Yeah. And it was just very palpable, very powerful for me to see that how long it took for him to see that his body was doing something different than what he thought it was doing and that was incompatible with his self image, which was fascinating.

Yeah, that is interesting. The big one I'm focusing on right now that kind of caught me by surprise a couple of weeks ago, I was working on some flips, maybe like a layout step out when I was landing right like first and I was kind of getting a little bit of knee pain. And so I did some hops in the mirror. I had a friend actually point out to me.

She was like, Hey, you're over pronating on your landing whenever you land on one foot. If I'm just like jumping off a one foot box or like jumping really high and I land on one foot and over pronating, which means I'm collapsing my arch or like turning my foot out and collapsing my arch. And so I started doing this more often and testing and over pronating is going to basically cause your knee to turn in and put pressure underneath. So it's, I'm watching this and doing hops in the mirror.

And if I jump, if I hop really high and land on that one foot, it is so hard for me not to collapse my arch. And so even though I'm doing these static exercises, raising my arch and I'm getting pretty strong there, I haven't been doing the dynamic training focusing on that. So I'm doing like kind of like I do with my pullups where I'm, I'll do like my heaviest weighted pullups to see how strong I can get like what's the heaviest single one where I like compromise for a little to do just what's the heaviest I can do. And then I'll do my lighter ones with a cable machine focusing, I do way more reps out by focusing on perfect form, engaging right things.

And so having that stuff in the middle where I'm doing like all the fun flips and stuff, but not paying attention to mechanics of my feet, I've been putting a lot of things at risk. So I'm kind of putting my flips, unless it's like a standing back talk where I'm landing with two feet. And it's like, it's a very controlled environment. I'm going back to just doing hops in the mirror and just only go to the height where I can control it and having to focus so hard on keeping my foot in perfect alignment.

If I keep my arch up, my knee wants to turn in, if I keep my knee out, my foot wants to do like, it's so interesting to see. And so when I force it, I feel a stretch in my lateral path because the type of path is the thing that's causing my body to want to work around that. Your body will find anytime there's pain, it's going to be like, okay, which direction can I go to avoid this pain? And then you're going to have certain muscles that then are going to atrophy.

So the muscle that should be controlling the movement is getting weaker while something else that's making up for that is getting stronger and pulling everything out of balance. So just going through things slowly in the mirror, now that I'm strong in these static situations, now I have to build up into the smaller dynamic things and strengthen. So that for me, that's a weak posterior tibialis, I think. This is sort of like when people talk about getting ready for barefoot running.

There's a lot of people who tried to make a name for themselves by saying, well, here's what you need to be able to do to be able to run barefoot. And a lot of the people who had those, if you get to these 10 things, you can't run barefoot. I couldn't do six of them. And they were just kind of making something up.

But there are a lot of people who think, oh, if you just walk barefoot for a while, that's going to prepare you for running. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, there's a value in walking that's going to build strength for sure. Research shows as much as doing an exercise program.

But that exercise program, like you said, is not the same as the forces you apply when you're running or when you're jumping or when you're doing something that's more aggressive. And to notice those things that show up under the extreme version of what you're doing, the far end of the bell curve, that's what things are reaching. You remind me, I had Dr. Bill Sands, who was the head of Biomechanics for the US Olympic Committee.

He was given a great human performance facility to use at what's now called Colorado to Mesa University. And he would fill you at 500 frames a second to see what your form is looking like. And I said, why that fast? Because you can't learn anything at anything under 250, which I thought was ridiculous.

But what happened when he was testing me is my right foot just before I hit the ground was turning out. And you only saw it in the last frame. So if you were shooting at anything under 250 frames a second, wouldn't be able to see that. And that was the thing.

He goes, oh, you've got to tight hamstring that at full extension is pulling your foot that way. There's little things in those extreme versions. Five steps for Morris. Yeah, that's cool.

You were interesting. And, you know, what's intriguing to me thinking about this is that there's so few people that you could go see on your own who would know how to diagnose this stuff, let alone what you could do for yourself to diagnose it for yourself. So doing the red swat test is a really interesting one. And at some point, we'll have to see what else we can find it for self diagnosis.

I'm working on, I need to put some notes together because the class explains so well the online course explains so well how to administer the test and then gives like, it means this is tight, this is tight and this is tight. But I always need to see, okay, if you're saying my TFL is tight and that's pulling my feet out, show me how that connects and like I want to see that pulling. And that's like a gap that I have to put the pieces together myself. It's always a great video on Instagram of basically a cadaver leg.

So you can see all the muscles of like just at the knee and as the knee is straightening and bending, you can see the IT band where it connects and how that connects. You can see the hip, but I was having the hardest time understanding how a tight TFL, the muscle that connects the IT band. The point of the thing was like, you can't roll out your IT band because it's tendon. Well, there's a muscle attached to the tendon.

It's just like you don't want to roll the band, you want to roll that muscle. But I was just having a hard time understanding how is this muscle in my hip turning my foot out. And when I saw this, it doesn't connect to your knee, it connects to your fibula. So some of your hamstrings, two of your hamstrings connect to your, the back of your tibia, the biceps for Morris, your other hamstring connects to the other side of your fibula and IT band connects to your fibula.

So a tight biceps for Morris and IT band are pulling on the fibula, which is attached to your ankle and pulls things out. So if you have your two inter hamstrings are weak and your two outer hamstrings are strong, your foot's going to turn out and then you don't have any support that keeps your knee from turning in. And so it like all the pieces came together just seeing this acrobat leg. Yeah, yeah.

Well, and there's the flip side, which is you can effect negatively or positively your hip and your glute medius in particular with what your foot is doing, which you could be doing voluntarily or habitually. So that kind of thing where it goes one end to the other end or, and you can start on either end is really, really intriguing. So like when people talking about having flat feet, it's one of my favorite things to do. Like I'll stand with your feet on the ground and just tighten your butt and don't let your feet move and watch what happens.

And by tightening your butt, it tries to externally rotate everything that goes all the way down your feet and suddenly you have a little bit of arch and it was like, the hell is it? Yeah. Yeah. Your arch issue is a butt issue.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a big part of it usually. It's a new tissue and new t-shirt we need to make your arch issue.

It's very limited run because very few people will care, but I just like the idea of that. Yeah. But you can argue back to like a lot of people are going to misunderstand. Does that also work if you're overarching your back?

That's like a hip flexor issue. More than a cool, well, we could know if your hip flexors are too tight. Yeah, that's going to be a performance. Could be a performance also.

There's a couple of things. If you're arching too much, that's an interesting one. Like that balance between your lower back and things both above it and below it. And then of course the flip side, your abs and how that works.

That's an interesting one for me because I have a, I've got a grade two L5S1 spondy. So I know that means the, my, my lowest lumbar vertebrae is shifted forward 50% from where it's supposed to be. And there's no disconnect between, but the really fun part is the part that would hold that disinplace is not attached or sorry, hold that vertebrae in place. It's not attached to the vertebrae.

So I mean, par is defect for medically inclined people. And so there's nothing I can do to pull that vertebrae back in place. So there's times where a part of my back looks like it's arched simply because I've got a structural issue, but, and I've had all these physical therapists say, oh, you need to work on your ab strength. And I go, yeah, put me on any machine and I'll max it out.

That's not the problem. So, you know, there's all this, there's all the, there's all the, yeah. That's crazy too. But, but the fundamental things, I mean, I like that's like, as you're doing your overhead squat test, look, you're, what you're doing with your lower back.

And it may be for some of these things that just noticing that it's not a non ideal movement pattern. And then just having curiosity to start exploring and seeing what you might need to do to kind of get it into the right position or what you're feeling that feels like it's a little inactive or two active or something. It may be that our little goal of going, oh, when this happens, go look at that, there might be like three or four things you need to take a look at. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, very likely. But I like this diagnostic aspect. Yeah.

And the thing that's so cool about it is there's so much pain you can have in your body that feels like it's just, this is how things are now. Yeah. With like some strengthening and stretching exercises, there are so many things that can be solved like literally fixed or at, at worst, like can still be prevented from getting worse, you know, by strengthening and I think the strengthening one is highly overlooked. I think people are much more attuned to the idea of how to stretch something.

But in my experience, I'm imagining yours as well. The strengthening has a bigger impact. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, there's another part that's sort of an emotional component that is interesting to me lately. I'll share this one. I'll get a little too personal.

So, um, I went and got a massage on Saturday. is often the case, my upper back and neck is a little, you know, is tight. And sometimes my upper back is a little tight because of my lower back issue where my upper back is trying to compensate blah, blah, blah. But I had a, I had an annoying flashback.

There's a guy that I was introduced to about almost 30 years ago who was doing, want to do research on stress. And he figured, let's not do the emotional part, let's just look at physical stress. And so he developed a drug or he modified a drug that he would inject into the muscle spindle fiber, which is the part of the muscle that actually triggers the contraction. And it would, it would deactivate the muscle spindle fiber.

So you couldn't contract the muscles around it. And he was just using this to kind of, I mean, I don't even know if he knew what he was doing at the time. But what he discovered is he decided to inject the people in their upper back and neck or in their traps and upper back because that's where the muscle spindle fibers are the largest. And what he found, much to his problem.

And overactive. Correct. And often very overactive. And what he found is that when he did this with people and made it so they couldn't tense their back, upper back or neck is that they reported feeling lighter emotionally like they were angry about something and now they weren't.

And he came to the conclusion that if you're feeling tension in the spots, you're probably angry about something and the thing you need to do is figure out what that is and address that. So I'm getting this massage and this woman is talking about how tight my back is. And for the first time I went, shit, I wonder what I'm angry about. And I'm gonna start crying thinking about it.

I mean, all I can, the only thing I could think of in addition to this dress, I'm running a business. But it's like, it occurred to me on a daily basis when someone is driving under the speed limit in front of me, I would like to have a weapon. And what I've been doing in the meantime, before I had that realization was anytime someone's driving under the speed limit in front of me, I use that as a cue to remind myself to think of at least three things that I'm genuinely grateful for, which makes my upper back relax. And so my new mission is to figure this thing out as much as I can given the situations I've been.

But you know, the emotional component of that is another piece that is interesting and could give some insight into what's going on. And again, I don't say I don't know if it's one direction or the other, but you know, usually that extra piece of the puzzle is not we don't think about it. I didn't think about it. I've been dealing with this type of life.

Yeah, I don't think about it much either, but I definitely noticed that if I get like stressed or angry or irritated, my neck hurts way more, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, so that's a whole other component. So all right.

So and relax and pull them down and back. So let's back up to the thing that I teased everybody with the beginning. And I teased that and I said that because I think someone told me that this is one of your new goals is so do you want to describe what that is and how you are moving towards it by starting by saying so the goal being this woman at 50? Is that it?

The age is not important. The important thing about the age is that that I qualify as a little old lady. I don't think 50 is going to do it. Like I have like 70 would I be ideal, but I don't think like it's that's very distant still.

Yeah. So I it just it doesn't register as like a goal that I can aim for at the moment, but that's like my ultimate distant like thing on the mountain to strive for. So the thing I realized is that I'm all about goals. I am so motivated by goals.

If you give me a goal that I'm excited about and I latch onto it, like everything like turns on fire and I'm like, I'm gonna do this thing. I'm so excited. Yeah. And I will do like whatever discipline, whatever, whatever steps I have to take to move towards this goal constantly.

And I just thrive on every step of that, even if it's hard. Every goal I've ever had has been, even if it's long term long term being like four years or something, it's always something that's like you have to be the hardest worker, like get there fast. Like it's always every single year in India. It's been like you have three months to get as strong as you possibly can.

You have a couple years to be as strong as the strongest men on this show. It's like reaching an absurd level of strength at the expense of overall balance in my body. Yeah, try to say balance, try to say healthy as you can, but it is worth sacrificing any of those things to be the strongest and the best this year. And that does not encourage healthy habits.

That does not encourage things that will lead to longevity. Now, longevity has never inspired me. It's sort of like, yeah, I'd love to have that, but I'd rather be a world record holder. Do you know the Olympic, I'm sorry, I can't think of how to start it.

I'm just asking this question that someone has asked Olympians for decades. If you could take a drug that would guarantee you won a gold medal, but would also guarantee that you would be dead within five years afterwards, would you take it? So before you answer, guess what percentage of people of Olympians up until very recently said yes. A high percentage?

I don't know. I would have said yes. I think for me, looking at it now, I don't think a gold medal would do it. It would have to be something like have a lasting impact on the world, like inspire people for generations.

Like, enter that. Yeah, would I be willing to do that this year and die next year? If I get that kind of impact? Yeah, but one, I'm not going to do anything this year that's going to have that kind of impact probably not.

Probably not. Right. Two, having that as my goal encourages me to train in a way that is not healthy for me long term. Right.

So I've struggled ever since ever since my three big injuries in 2020, I've struggled to come up with a goal that would motivate me more toward balance. Like, yes, I want to be healthy. No, I don't want to get injured like that again. So I'm trying to focus on balance, but having that vision of what you want, what you want to aim for, like, how could I have a goal that's not like a blaze of glory, but like a long term thing, being able to do this for a long time is still just sort of like, yeah, that'd be cool.

But it doesn't rival that drive to have that first of glory. And so I found the answer just a couple of weeks ago, looking at what my mom is doing, because like, cool, I kept up with the guys on some obstacle courses for a while. But have you ever seen a seven year old woman doing like, with Shays and obstacle courses? Like, if she has a sweater on, you could look at her and be like, Oh, let me help you down the stairs and stuff.

And then she like, takes off her sweatshirt and she shred it and jumps on a bar and does a Lache to a cliffhanger. Like, it's mind blowing, it's shocking, like, just to look at, but it opens up my mind for like, I didn't know you could get stronger after age 60. I didn't know you could build muscle. I didn't know you could accomplish these things.

I didn't know you'd have that freedom of movement at that age. And seeing the way she inspires people who look at her and like, I thought I had like five years left of this at best. I didn't know that you could keep doing this. It's the way it opens up possibilities for everyone who sees her is something that I want to do.

I want to be like that. I want to be that person who's 70 years old blowing minds and inspiring the world. So having that visual image of someone that I want to be, it is in the distant future. But if I want to be able to be that kind of person, it doesn't mean I have to do bigger things now.

It means I have to work really hard to find, to strengthen the areas that I'm weak that are pulling me out of balance, making me more like lead to get injured. If I get hurt, my chances of being a badass 70 year old are going down. And I want to be that little old lady who can do 50 pull-ups. Like, I can't do 50 pull-ups now, but doing 50 pull-ups now isn't going to get me to doing 50 pull-ups then.

Doing a balanced set of rows and like engaging my lower traps and doing pull-ups if like, even if they're assisted pull-ups with perfect form, those are the things that are going to get me to badass 70 year old. So now that I have that image of what I want to be, when I'm deciding am I going to do my hard pull-ups sets first and my hard row sets first? Well, I'm more excited about the pull-ups sets, but if I prioritize the pull-ups sets and then I'm too tired to do what the card sets on my row is, I'm not going to take set up towards being a badass 70 year old. So I guess I'll do the rows first.

And so I finally have a goal that inspires healthier behavior all around. And do you find that you need to kind of chunk that down? Because how old are you now? 38.

Okay. So you got quite a while till you're 70. So in my you know, that's so do you have to start thinking about 40, 45, 50? I mean, how do you keep that in your mind?

Or is that 70 year old picture enough that it keeps you going? I think the 70 year old picture is more dynamic. So that's that's the one but I'd love to get a pull-up related world record at 50. Nice.

That would be pretty cool. I looked up some pull-up world records and they're not like outside the realm of possibility, but there's certainly not something that I could do this year. Right. Like I couldn't just try it and be close.

I'm like, okay, this is going to take some hard dedicated specific work. But if I do that and pace myself and don't overdo it and get injured, then I think there's a lot that's possible that I didn't realize was possible. So now that I have this, I've been doing all this extra research and studying and everything. And I think I found the key to why I have been so injury grown.

I don't like that word, but like I've gotten a lot of injuries at the end of each season. So like I told you, I've been able to build strength extremely quickly and lose it and build it again extremely quickly and lose it. And so I was reading about this book called training for climbing by Eric Hurst. And he talks about energy systems, which I think is utilized more often in like, like these words and running.

Yeah, a lot of running stuff. But he talks about it in terms of climbing and percentage of weight on your fingers. So your arms are not as bulky as your legs. You don't have as much space between the muscle fibers for circulation.

And so with running, you're hitting and relaxing. You know, you're like you're flexing with hanging from something. Your muscles are isometrically contracted and clamping off those capillaries. So you're holding more than 50% of your maximum strength.

All of your capillaries are so clamped off that you're getting zero blood flow and you're immediately anaerobic. Immediately. So your aerobic system can do nothing to help you in that situation. You're just accumulating hydrogen ions getting more and more acidic.

And that acid will just kind of sit in your muscles and weaken things. So strengthening this lactic energy system will get you really strong, really fast. You'll see your gains dramatically in, they say like he says two to six weeks, you'll see huge gains. So training hard, I was able to get dramatic gains for two months.

So that's, that's kind of where you max out the system. So I was scientifically like to the book doing exactly what you said there, but I was only training about energy system. I wasn't training. You have to go to very low intensity to train your aerobic system for your grip.

You've got to be at like 15 to 30% of your maximum strength, which for me on a cliffhanger, like, like I can't, yeah, it's very low. For pull ups on a bar, I can do a pull up with an extra 80 pounds. So what is that? Well, I'm doing on a cable machine, I'm basically doing 12 to 15 pounds per arm, just pulling down keeping perfect form.

It's so light, I barely get a burn, but that's how I know that I'm staying in the aerobic system and not because as soon as you fill up with acid, that kind of breaks down like the progress you can make in building new mitochondria. So it's hard to train your aerobic system when everything's super acidic. And if I'm doing everything to maximum burnout, I'm also not training that maximum strength. Everything is a percentage of your maximum strength.

And so if my maximum strength is staying at 80 pounds for a one rep max, my aerobic system can only get up to like, at best, maybe 35% of that. But if I'm not training aerobic system, well, that's still down at like 20%, maybe 25. And so I'm building, I have this huge, this huge range in the lactic system, but it hits this peak. If my max strength isn't increasing, I hit a peak.

So if you work on your aerobic system and your max strength system, and then you build that lactic system, you can have long term gains. So there's a guy named Steve Holman. There's a guy named Steve Holman. He used to be an editor for something in a muscle and fitness kind of magazine.

And he's a couple years older than I think he's 63, maybe. What's he at Tony's parrot on? I don't think so. If I was freaking out of it, if he wasn't, I didn't notice.

But the way he does weight training is your first set is like a set of 20 to 25 reps. And then just right 20 seconds, then you're going to do a second set, this is going to be like 10, 12 tops. And then may you do a third or switch to a better different exercise for the same muscle group. But what's interesting is that first set is literally just what you're saying.

It's really, it's slow twitch. It's it's an aerobic thing that eventually does get your muscles tired. But it's really all about blood flow. And I'm also having a flashback to working with him.

I had one workout with a guy, zero-susere customer, who's a big deal fitness trainer in LA. And his whole thing, he kept saying, it's just all about getting the blood moving. We're not trying to, you know, I made some comment. I said hanging out with him and all of his trainers were having dinner.

And I said, I'm not trying to get bigger. I'm just trying to, you know, get faster. I'm trying to develop the muscles. I need to be faster.

And he looked at all the trainers, he goes, did anyone understand a word of what he just said? Because their whole thing is, it's about getting bigger. It's about hypertrophy. But mostly by just doing things that are getting the blood moving, building additional mitochondria, so you can do more work over time.

And that's going to lead to hypertrophy. And I just had no interest in hypertrophy, which the joke for them is that made no sense because it wouldn't. So and it's not totally true. Because I do have an interest in that, partly for vanity and partly because as I'm getting older, having more muscle mass is helpful.

So there's that. But I love what you described. If you want to help with your bit seven year old goal, and I think to do is go to a master's track, ideally nationals or worlds, because I'm having a flashback to now, there are a couple things. Once these people get over 80 or so, they're not they don't look great, I will admit.

But they look like someone you still want to be. It's like, you know, they're high jumping three feet. You still want to be that guy for that woman. When we were in Finland, there was a guy who was 101.

He used his walker to get out to where he was going to do the shot put at 101. I think the weight of the shot was like, you know, five pounds, whatever. He goes, when it goes like 10 feet, and the audience goes insane, because we need that guy. There was a woman who shut up.

She was 95. She entered one race like before she got there, but then felt pretty good and said, can I just enter everything that I want to do? And they went, yeah, she entered like 10 things, won them all. And everyone wanted to be that woman.

And so, you know, and I love what you said personally, because my goal as a sprinter is not to win a world championship, it's not to win nationals. I want to like be in the quarter finals for Worlds, maybe the semifinals for nationals someday. But I just want to hit the All American times. And they get, they get bigger and bigger as you get older.

So when I was 55 to 60 or 50, yeah, 55 to 60, something like that, or 55 to 59, there we go, English, the 60 meter indoor time to All American was 8.5. I was running 8283. I looked yesterday. Now that I'm 60, what's the All American time?

It's 8.9. And I'm going, I can hit that. I'm hoping I can still hit the one from, you know, what I was a year ago. And as long as I can keep doing that, then I feel like I've accomplished something.

My other one is really hard. You'll appreciate this one. I don't know when I'm not going to be able to do a standing back flip. I want to be able to do that as long as humanly possible.

Yeah, what's the, the record for the oldest person to do a standing back flip? Oh man, I have no idea. I got to let that one up. It's worth looking up.

Yeah. Well, then it's going to be you and me competing for it. Yeah. Yep.

Yep. Yep. All right. Do you know about the 96 year old gymnast?

No. You've got to look this lady up. I just, I found her finally on Instagram. I got to, they did like this TV show.

I think it was called The Night Shift. They heard about this real life old lady and then wrote a character based on her and I got to double the character. So I had to look up the videos of this at the time, I think she was 86 years old doing a parallel bar routine. She's wearing a green velvet leotard, 86 years old.

I've seen that. Yeah. Her name's Johanna, I think. Thank you.

But she like, it's not like a men's parallel bar routine. It's like her own unique thing. And so I had to watch and like learn her moves and stuff and do the mon kind of like these physical therapy parallel bars that they use to teach people to walk. And so my mom saw the video of her.

She's still like doing floor routines and she's in her 90s. And it's just so badass. Like, I want to highlight more of these things. I'm realizing that's something I should be using my Instagram for right now.

Find videos of older people doing unbelievable things and be like, I'm going to be like that person. Well, again, back to, you know, me, me, me, me, me. Here's the problem that I have is a sprinter at 60. 60 is an age where no one gets a shit.

So like, if you're, if you're under 30 and you're super fast, everyone cares, if you're over 80 and doesn't matter how fast you are, everyone cares. I'm in the age where they just, as soon as that race starts, everyone just goes against a coffee. They just don't do it. You're training, you're training for lady.

Yeah, I'm training when I'm old enough that people care again, or like, here's the crazy part. Like, if I have, say, you know, if I end up with cancer or I have some injury where I lose a leg or whatever the hell it is, if there's some, you know, dramatic or whatever thing and I have to come back, you know, I want that one too. Basically, no, I'm not hoping for it. I'm just like thinking, I'm preparing for your eventualities.

Basically, I want a someday runner race where they applaud at the end. That's the death of this. And it's, you know, and it's either because I'm old enough and I'm like doing well enough or I've overcome some major thing. I don't care which I mean, I prefer the former, but you know, I just want to run a race where they care when I'm done.

I'm a simple man. Oh, yeah. How can we warm people's hearts and inspire them to? Yeah, no, I think, first of all, I think it's a brilliant question and it's a perfect question to wrap this up on is I mean, I had no idea where we're going to go off my little intro, but I love this idea of thinking out to some future thing.

You know, who do you want to be 20 years from now? What's it going to take to do that? And, you know, what are the things that are going to make it interesting along the way? Because there's definitely, there's definitely those times where you know, you just don't want to get out of bed and go and do that workout.

There's, you know, it's for whatever reason, you know, as we were talking before, we started this, there's times where the cold plunge is right next to your hot tub and you're just not going to get in it, even though you want to or you think it's good for you or whatever it is, there's times where that cold water is just cold water. And for me, I don't know about you, for me, part of it is being okay with that too. I'm just not like, I always say, if you're not having fun, don't do it because you'll stop. So for me, part of the fun is also playing that edge of like, is this the day where I'm going to take off and enjoy myself?

Or is this the day where I feel like I want to take off? But I need to kind of go out and once I get started, I'll be fine. And finding that balance is very interesting for me. That is hard.

Yeah. Well, it's kind of like a variation of that when I got back into sprinting, it took me probably five years, I got back into it when I was 45. It took me five years to learn that when I have the thought, let me just do one more. That's the one to not do.

Yeah. Yeah. I had my best season on end warriors season eight, I committed to myself at the beginning of the year that anytime I felt a tweak, because I have a history of like pushing past, ignoring things and being like, you will be fine. Do all your, you said 10 sets, you'll do 10 sets.

And so I promised myself that anytime I felt a hint of a tweak, I would stop. And I can't tell you how many times I walked home from the track or the gym crying because I was like, you've gotten lazy. Like I don't even know who are anymore. This is you.

But like, you like, I just, it was killing my soul to, to quit early. And that's the year I broke the most records. That's the year I split second among the men at regional finals. Like, it all worked.

And so I've realized that my, however, whatever I perceive as like, this is the appropriate amount to do to reach your full potential. Yeah. The actual appropriate amount is somewhere between like a quarter and a third of that. Did you find yourself reframing that whole thing about, I feel a little tweak, a little twinge of like, it's good news that you know, now's the thing, now's the time, rather than, oh, this is, you know, who I'm the wrong person.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I do, I do kind of miss, there's definitely a point in my life where I identified as the hardest worker. I'm the first one to practice and the last one to leave.

And however much coach says to do, I'm doing double that. And that's who I am. And like, I took great pride in that. And so, um, the thing, one of the things that changed my life was, um, I had a friend who told me what's more important to you.

Do you want to be the hardest worker or do you want to succeed? Because those were so inherently connected for me my whole life. It was like, well, I want to win. But if I don't win, at least I know I'm the hardest worker.

So my perception is that they were assisting each other, but I can always have the hardest worker as consolation prize. When I realized insisting on being the hardest worker was preventing me from succeeding, I had to separate them and shoot. Okay. I want, I want to reach my full potential more than I want to identify as the hardest worker.

And so I still have those moments where I like, I miss my old definition as the hardest worker. Like I don't get to claim that anymore because sometimes I get tired and I stop. Well, wait, I'm going to give this one to you. Your goal is to be the smartest worker.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It is. Yeah. That's, that's my goal now. Yeah.