optimal minimal at this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hand start shaking can I answer your a personal question now what is see appro time what if I the I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal [Music] endoskeleton this episode is brought to you by headspace more than 80% of the people I have interviewed worldclass perform across the military Entertainment Sports and beyond all have some type of meditative practice I tried for years and years and failed miserably the key is making it simple and you can dramatically improve your life in just 10 minutes a day and Technology can help you this change comes through guided meditation and headspace is by far the most popular app for this purpose more than 4 million users it's meditation Made Simple so what I recommend is that you take this practice meditation which is rooted in thousands of years of tradition supported by thousands of scientific studies and try it for 10 minutes a day for 10 days that's all 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grains no soy no Dairy Etc they are high in protein and flavor and extremely unique and they do not pop your glycemic response up oddly enough and you can look that up online to see some stories on that ferenstein that's the journalist who looked at it on top of all that they are less processed than your all protein bars you'll be able to find this is your chance to see what the hype is about the founders were just on the Forbes 30 under 30 list and they are offering a deep discount to Tim farer show listeners if you go to exoprotein dcom that's exoprotein docomo you can try a sampler pack with all of their most popular flavors for less than 10 bucks that's exoprotein dcom and I would recommend doing it relatively fast and that's not a BS scarcity thing they're startup with limited inventory and they sell out all the time that is what happened last time I mentioned them so check it out exoprotein docomo ladies and germs this is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where each episode it is my job to deconstruct worldclass performers to tease out the lessons routines habits breakfasts favorite books Etc that you can use and borrow from worldclass performers whether they are military strategists chess prodigies athletes actors politicians or anything and everything in between in this episode we have a very exciting guest uh with whom I've been spending a ton of time Christopher summer Christopher summer you can find him on Instagram and Facebook I highly recommend checking it out gymnastic bodies is the account name is the former US national team gymnastics coach he's also the founder of gymnasticbodies.com a training system that I am currently testing the hell out of and I have no affiliation with it in so much as I get no kind of affiliate anything payout whatever I'm just fascinated by body weight training and reached out to coach Sumer to try to finally practice gymnastics as a 38-year-old and I've learned a lot we've been toying around with things for about 6 weeks now as of this recording and we're doing a 90-day custom test so I hope to have some very interesting before and after for you guys so we will be doing a round two follow-up as a world-renowned Olympic coach Sumer is known for building his students into some of the strongest most powerful athletes in the world and you got to check out his Facebook page he features a lot of these athletes it is Bonkers during his extensive 40-year coaching career coach Sumer took meticulous notes on his training techniques his wins failures and so on so that he could translate the best elements into a superior exercise system for both highlevel and beginner athletes his four Decades of careful observation led to the birth of gymnastics strength chain let's try that again gymnastics strength training not vocal strength training so I'm failing in that department otherwise known as GST in this episode we cover a ton of stuff and I think it's going to light up the internets because everybody has a strong opinion these days but coach Sumer is very well qualified to have the opinion so that he hals we talk about the biggest mistakes of self-taught handstands why recreational athletes who try gymnastics get injured most commonly we talk about the three to five exercises everyone should be doing chances are you've never heard of some of them we talk about mental prep for athletes who are going into big competition the questions you should ask a coach before sending your kid to gymnastics uh we get into what is wrong with yoga handstands uh the questions or opinions that he might pose or have related to Kipping pull-ups in Cross and elsewhere and I asked that question because a mutual friend said if you want him to lose his ask about Kipping we have the determination of GST this gymnastic strength training goals if you could only pick one what would it be and why who are the best coaches he's met what characterizes them it just goes on and on and on I mean if you want to build say mass in the biceps how you can utilize straight arm workor and why you must turn your hands out past parallel well when training the Rings why is that important how does it affect muscular development and strength development why do you need to fix the lats to fix the shoulders it goes on and on and on this is a very in-depth conversation we get into the weeds and I would just say be patient there are a lot of gems here and similar to The Dominic de agustino episode on ketosis and the end of cancer and so on and so forth we really get into some nitty-gritty detail and that is why many people listen to this podcast so just just bear with me if you're like what the hell are these guys talking about give it 30 seconds chances are that we'll Zoom back up to 30,000 ft or change topics so stick with it and please enjoy this very wide ranging intense conversation with Coach Christopher summer coach welcome to the show thanks Jim I am excited to finally have you on the show we've had so many conversations in the last month or two and I've been so impressed with the the subtlety and Nuance of the training that you do uh so I've been very eager to have you on the show to explore uh all things gymnastics and gymnastics uh strength training related so thanks for making the time first of all my pleasure looking forward to it and I thought I thought we could we could start with just some definitions so uh what would you or how would you define gymnastics strength training GST H that's a good question uh in a nutshell gymnastic strength training I Define as um highlevel uh body weight strength training so uh none none of the Technical Training that we do for worldclass performance or the acrobatics or technical gymnastics just purely the strength joint prep and Mobility components and one one example of what not to do perhaps or or how gymnastic strength training might differ from the Aesthetics that some people I'm not going to say compromise with but shoes we were talking about doing a pike I guess a pike handstand press or U holding that position and the example and I feel free to correct my recollection but was of how a lot of folks kick their hips way out to counterbalance um instead of doing what what would the gymnastic strength training version of that look like a good example so what we see and this is kind of getting into some handstand some skill training but U handstand done correctly is a reflection of physical preparation that athlete either has or does not have so if they lack strength if they lack Mobility then of course their technical handstand is going to lack refinement so in terms of that Pike handstand if they lack middle trap if they lack lower trap string then they're going to try to counterbalance by really arching the chest out sticking the butt way back behind them uh goodness not even sure how to describe it like a pike and an arch at the same time and for people who out s to interupt coach just for people who I realize I should have probably defined some terms myself so Pike for people who are not familiar with this um the the easiest way to visualize it if you don't have any background with that is imagine you're sitting on the floor it's kind of like PE class legs straight and together uh bending at the waist towards your toes is that bending forward towards your toes uh and so if you were imagine you're sitting down with your legs out in front of you at uh just like hypothetically at a 90° angle and you put your arms up over your head let's just flip you upside down so you're in a handstand position that's effectively what we're talking about exactly what we're talking about and to hold that because Center of mass is way out in front of the body then in order to hold that the traps are what's responsible to keeping the back and the shoulders straight so if you're not strong enough can is it something people say well it's just skill training well everything builds upon everything else so got Olympics coming up people are going to be pumped they're going to see our Olympic team they're going to see the other monsters around the world competing on rings and they're I want to do that and they're going to jump right up you we've got friends who are former SEAL Team Six and the first thing they did is jump up and of course they failed utterly and then they come see us cuz it's it's like anything you know you don't jump right into calculus you learn to count then we learn addition we learn subtraction yada yada yada with enough time and enough layers enough progression then we get to advanced math so Advanced ring strength same deal and we I remember we were talking not too long ago about the importance of pacing when you're dealing with connective tissue tendons and ligaments which is something I I'm not P I'm not particularly well known for in terms of patience and P but I've noticed that but uh the uh the many the guys who say do outdoor bar workouts some of which are are very very impressive physical specimens will jump up on the Rings and they'll be doing I'm not sure what they would even call them they're kind of like what would be uh looked at as like a typewriter on the pull-up bar when you move back and forth from one arm to the other side to side pull side to side pullup and uh you're they were like I I was feeling fine coach and then suddenly my you know I tore my bicep I tore my peack and it was fine until it wasn't uh what are some if you look at at uh the muscles or types of strength that most non- gymnists will not have even if they consider themselves reasonably athletic what would be on that list and we already mentioned one which is say mid and lower traps and of course uh I mean I I would like to think I came to the table with kind of hat in hand because I recognize how hard a lot of this is but the more I practice it the more I'm astounded at how unprepared my body is for these movements I mean as uh as someone who has done a lot of pulling from the floor for instance who has you know decent deadlift I would like to think uh I was just astonished at how weak my midback was it was just it blew my mind it was it was it was completely flabbergasting what other what other muscles or movements do you find uh normals just cannot perform even if they view themselves as athletic uh for the for the lifters the one that always jumps out at us is their lack of shoulder extension so U if I pick my if I'm standing upright and I lift my hands forward that's flexion and I can go all the way up to my arms are overhead if I'm picking my hands up behind me that would be shoulder extension right so just to paint another picture for folks like if you stand up and then interlac your fingers behind your tailbone with your arm straight and then try to lift them up towards the ceiling keeping your back straight uh so the shoulder extension and what we find is you know and a lot of what we'll get sometimes from people is well I don't want to be in the circus I don't want to be an acrobat I'm not interested in skill training I want I want strength and what they don't understand is if you want to achieve worldclass levels of performance technically that comes first from having a solid foundation of physical preparation which means correct range of motion right good Mobility good connective tissue so shoulder extension becomes so for example a lot of people fail they can't do muscle ups cuz they can't do shoulder extension they think in their head that a muscle up is a chin up a little bit of transition that they don't understand and then a dip what really happens is we do a pullup we get our hands to our chin and then the elbows pull back behind the Torso behind them and there's their shoulder extension if they can't do shoulder extension now they're stuck M and they they'll spend all this time working technique and doing rep and doing rep and what they're doing is they're treating the symptom and not actually the problem well I was uh so just as as some background for folks the way that we connected was I at 38 finally decided enough is enough I've been fantasizing about trying to learn gymnastics in a structured way for 20 plus years much like my postponing of getting a dog for 20 years it's just like why why did it take me so long to do this and I was in Venice I'm going to give uh these folks a shout out there's a CrossFit gym there named Paradiso CrossFit and uh just love the folks who run the gym and I would go there to train because they would let me use chalk and do all the things that a lot of gyms will not allow me to do and uh I met a gent who was doing a body weight workout he was the only person doing a body weight only workout and he suggested that I follow uh gymnastic bodies on Instagram and so I started following uh your company on Instagram and saw older uh let's just call it middle aged men sort of My Demo as it stands right now uh who had started from scratch doing impressive things and I had used age as my crutch and excuse for not pulling the trigger in the last few years so I reached out to Rob wolf who is kind kind enough to introduce us and then we've uh collaborated in this experiment that we're currently doing which is uh roughly 90 days with a handful of gold that we'll get to but I want people to understand how we connected so I'm in the middle of training right now and it's uh I have to say I feel better than I felt um with the exception of a little bit of elbow nonsense that is a is not from this specifically it's a recurring thing uh feel better than I have in in years um the that's good to hear just from this little bit already we've done just from the little bit that we've done and uh the so the the followup question of that is uh for instance um when people are training for handstands at home so self-taught what are the biggest mistakes that they make well they won't like the answer and this is a little bit of national team coach attitude coming out people tend to want what they want when they want it and and that's fine if if I'm looking for mediocre to average results if if I'm looking to to really do best effort then I've got I've got to back up and I've got to take care of my business and for most of the adults it's going to be they have severe compromises in their Mobility their shoulders don't work well their hips don't work their knees don't work their elbows are shot their forums are tight from all the desk Patrol their calves are like piano wire from sitting all the time uh we won't even talk about hip flexor their scaps don't move their scapula have no motion they can't protract they can't retract their spine is locked in just a flat or a Kyo so they're hunched over their lower back is continually arched and they're just kind of Frozen in this position and then they want to try to move their body now the common one that we get from people is well these are extreme ranges of motion these are artificial ranges of motion and actually these are your natural range of motion problem is they quit using it and so it just act feed so we're not we're not doing anything special we're just we have to recreate that natural range of motion first uh this we we've been doing gosh I don't know now maybe since 2006 working with the adults and uh the thing that just would keep having my nose rubbed in it over and over and over again every time I think I have it down I find I need to take it further it's just the complete other lack of joint prep and Mobility they come to the table with and if we do even even your your own case is an excellent example we haven't done anything advanced yet we're doing all basic we're doing fundamental stuff and you're already feeling better than in years well I think it's a lot of it has to do with two things if I'm trying to self diagnose the first is absolutely identifying musculature and motor patterns that I simply had not developed properly previously um even even if I had a passing familiarity like the um well let me frame this in the form of a question so how do most people can you define what the hollow position is why it's important and how how do most normals do when they do a say hollow body rock maybe you can explain that too ah so what people they're going to most people when they think of ABS they think lower ab they think upper abs they're not going to think about obliques at all and they're not going to think transverse abdominis at all so lower abs are easy upper AB easy obliques okay they they understand the sideways they don't understand how obliques wrap around into the lats into the lower back okay that's fine but transverse abdominus they're like excuse me this was that English they they don't have a clue and that's what supports the body when it's in a straight body position so you know for for example AB rollers were and we don't use them in our program but just as an example AB rollers were getting a a bad knock that if you do an ab roller you're going to hurt your lower back well yes and no you'll you'll hurt your back if you're doing it wrong if you are arched in your lower back so for definitions if my lower back is arched I'm in anterior pelvic tilt if I'm the opposite movement and I'm kind of my tailbone tucked under and my lower back is flat that's posterior pelvic tilt well when my body's horizontal then my uh back is supported when I'm posterior pelvic tilt if I'm arched it's unsupported by the muscular and I'm hanging by the disc mhm which which is true for a ton of exercises that that we do in terms if I feel it in my lower back almost universally when I send you videos the feedback is more PPT post posterior pelvic it should just be a mantra yeah and for for people who need a way to visualize this because I realize a lot of this vocab is new so and Coach feel free to interrupt at any point but the an easy way to think about and remember anterior pelvic tilt is imagine that your your your weight is the top of a wine glass if you have anterior pelvic tilt to the front you're going to be pouring wine out the front of that glass basically out of your belly button and if you have posterior pelvic tilt you're tucking that tailbone you're going to be pouring wine basically down your sacrum you know down down down the back of your body it's just an easy way for me to to remember that is that is clever I got to say 40 years of national team and I've never heard it described that way it may it may be our go-to definition now well that's uh you know I can't do the gymnastics so I'm going to I'll have to stick on stick with refining my definitions although I I'm making progress with the fundamentals and the yes you are I'd like to talk about the assessment that we did so I flew out to a great gym awaken gymnastics in Colorado and we met up our that's our GB Master affiliate we only have one in the world and uh awaken in Denver is our number one GB affiliate they're they're the best at what they do yeah it's a it's a fantastic gym and we did quite a few hours of various assessments if somebody wanted to try to self assess or videotape themselves to have say someone qualified in gymnastics assess them if you were to do an 8020 analysis like which movements or exercises give you the most data most bang most bang for okay well let's see no so what we went over with you we checked hanging leg lift mhm so hanging leg lift automatically is going to tell me um dynamic range of motion is that right that's like on a stall bar you don't want to be free swinging well could be you know most of them you know whatever they can do it'll to my eye as soon as I see it or our staff's eye they're they're going to know right away whether or not that person has adequate it's going to tell us your core strength and it's going to tell me hamstring flexibility MH that that'll do that in one bridge bridge is a huge one for adults uh that's been one of our we have a Jurassic Bridge core stretch series and that's that's been one of our bestselling products that's what I'm doing this evening yeah yeah notice notice guys that Tim's real happy right now that that'll change in just a few yeah what what characterizes this is a really important question what characterizes a good bridge and for people who thinking of bridge I mean it's imagine you're laying on your back you put your your palms down by your sort of ears let's say feet flat on the ground and then you go up into an arch now uh I was extremely surprised and found it quite hilarious how bad my bridge was I mean terrible uh in the assessment but by your standards yes by what I see on a normal basis yours was yours was medium medium it was like a D+ it was like on the verge of passing uh but I realized despite all of my many years of wrestling where we did tons of bridges almost all of my bridging comes from bending at the low back right so my lumbar is a huge issue yeah so what is a good bridge look little background yeah okay so the lumbar the lower back is not designed to have a ton of movement in it a big arch your thoracic spine your upper and your middle back they're designed to have a lot of movement they're designed to rotate your lower back is not but when most people do their Bridge work they're they're so compromised now okay even back up a little bit more they're they're so comp compromising range of motion their upper body because they've been hitting the weights hard they've been doing just a lot of high-intensity training now to preface that there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong with that at all if you weren't one of God's gifts when you were born you've got to do something to make up the deficit the problem is when they do all that weight training they're not doing it in balance and maintaining their Mobility if they had they wouldn't have the issues that they ran into so if all you do is strength strength strength strength strength and you can always tell someone who is they they're the curl King and they're the bench press King they come in and they're hunched over and their elbows don't straighten their arms don't go behind them and on they're like you know my shoulders are killing me most of the time what we found is yeah their shoulders are completely effed up I agree but their biceps are crazy tight also and that bicep runs up through the front of the shoulder and it's manifesting itself as a shoulder issue so kind of all these come together long story short to caused them a huge problem being able to get into a proper Bridge which should be all upper body no lower back almost at all but people are doing the exact opposite they hurt their lower back and they say man these these bridges are dangerous no the brid bridges aren't dangerous doing them half ass and wrong without vetting your source of information is dangerous and I I found it uh incredibly therapeutic as someone who's had a basically a frozen thoracic for God knows how long 10 10 years sure we were worried about that I remember we're like hm I wonder how we'll work through this Tim has the upper body mobility of a Lego figure what are we going to do so the but just the progression of doing uh and and of course people should look for visual references and and we I'll Point them to a bunch of all our courses I'll Point them to a bunch of resources uh in the show notes but the can you walk through the check boxes CU I know we've done this even recently uh the the concept I don't know why this didn't even occur to me but of helping to take the lower back out of the equation by elevating the feet elevating the feet yep and elevating them as high as necessary uh some some people are so tight that they basically start in a handstand MH and it it is what it is right the the main thing that we try to always Hammer with students is they're always in a hurry I I've got to get it right now even even our conversation you remember way back when it started that way I was like dude this if you can handle it we need we need to change gears here we need to go slow now in order to go fast later well you said if you want to be a stud later you have to be a PUD now I think were your words yeah that that sounds like a smartass remark I a good that's a that's that's a good one I wrote that down I've corrupted you all your great podcast and I've corrupted you uh and so what are the other check boxes so let's just say they get the feet up and they're like okay feet elevated feet elevated to the point where they're not feeling stress on the lower back then now it'll depend on pressing strength also so if they're if they're very weak in the shoulders then they're going to have to start from the handstand and work their way down but we'll assume they've got feet elevated hip high or higher if necessary doesn't matter a bit then from there we're going to work on most people are going to be up they're going to have bent elbows so we're going to work on straightening the arms no matter how close they are they could be wide could be wide yeah because gosh I had one special forces guy that came to me years ago uh tough tough guy first named Mark and uh he had gained 80 pounds of muscle 80 pounds of muscle oh yeah it was just like holy moly and he he was he just a beast but uh he had completely effed himself up cuz all he did was gain strength Str without mobility and athletically if I'm not unless unless my sport is just purely lifting unless I'm a powerlifter unless I'm an Olympic lifter okay then then maximal strength is not my sole criteria for being successful in fact usually the strongest athletes in the weight room are not the best athletes on the field of play and in fact I I don't know a single exception and there may be one there somewhere that someone can share with us and let me know but I've I've been around the world you I won't say as many people as you know but in 40 Years of World Class Gymnastics i' I've met a ton of people I've never seen an exception uh he couldn't even hang on a bar anymore without with his arm straight without hitting his head wow you think your shoulders are tight Paul margan he was like coach what what can you do for me and for once I was at a loss for words which is rare for me is I you know I I I think you're screwed dude I don't think I can fix this one and so what did you do with him in the bridge was he just stuck we he couldn't even that's this was hanging on a bar we we couldn't even get in a bridge it it was impossible uh what we would do with someone like that in mark So you you're more so guys just just to give the audience some some feedback I I went into Tim's assessment expecting me medium medium and Tim Tim was much more mobile uh much more athletic much more well prepared than I had anticipated so we I had spent a lot of time putting a custom program together for Tim that because he did so well in his assessment I had to throw the whole damn thing away and start over from scratch because basically you he he was too he was too advanced for what we had assumed he was coming to the table with uh someone who is crazy compromised uh we're going to have to sneak up on it we're going we're have to get in there and we're going to have to first do PEC minor we got to loosen up PEC minor we got to get in there and we got to work on the bicep tendon we got to get the bicep tendon going we got to work on forearms get forearms loose we've got to break the scap so there's some motion there we have to do all of that and it's it's not high-intensity work but it's got to be done and as you heard Tim say the body thrives on it it's it's like a tonic for the body the body feels so much better because it's what the body's supposed to do and it's it's it's not what's the word I want it's not a lot of people don't care for it because it's not the high-intensity sexy work but it's that fundamental work that makes the high-intensity sexy work possible later well not only possible but safer uh which that's that's a good point because we had I think one of the questions that people asked you know I I date uh I think one of the Tim asked for questions on on Twitter and um you know what would you like me to ask coach summer and some of the people came back with you know I know someone who's a gymnast and they're just beat the and my my answer to that is simple they weren't my athlete they weren't my athlete uh we don't train through pain uh as a national team coach for a long time uh physical preparation was always our number one priority we built the physical structure first CU if you think about it it's kind of silly we and we see this a lot with people who are getting into weightlifting their crossfitters they're Olympic lifting and they're they're enthusiastic they're excited and they want to get that weight on the bar and they're they're trying to build technique with a flawed range of motion which of course gives them fed up technique and it doesn't work and then they get hurt or you you hear someone oh I changed my shoe and I blew my knee seriously your knee is that tight that because your heel if your new shoe is a fraction of an inch higher or a slightly different Ang angle that your knee blue or in in our training program we call everything you need an optimal Surplus you need an optimal Surplus range of Mobility range of motion you need an optimal surplus of strength you need an optimal surplus of stability you need what you need to perform and a little extra for when things go south not if things go south when things go south and if you're just right in the edge of what you're capable of it's and they hope oh nothing will go wrong I hope nothing will go wrong no it is going to go wrong it's absolutely going to go wrong and so you you prepare the body for that ahead of time so when it does go wrong it's like ah that didn't hurt I didn't get nothing nothing's injured moving on next turn well one of the questions you've asked me multiple times when we've been going over different workouts and I would mention for instance uh I felt it in my bicep like I felt an extreme stretch in my biceps so for instance there's a movement that we've been calling a German hang a lot of people call it skin the cat uh perhaps uh very similar where you would hold on to say a bar or rings in this case and I'm just I'm going to simplify this of course but sure tucking up going back in between the Rings and then hanging down um with my with as little of a uh Pike at the hips as possible Right nice flat back nice straight hips exactly and uh sort of Palms facing towards the ground and I was saying I really felt an incredible stretch in my biceps more than in the shoulders and your question would be and this is applied to different body parts where did you feel it in the bicep this is getting back to the not training through pain comment and can you describe why the well the middle of you're like if it's in the middle I don't really care um and same for like the ABS like we can smash those all day long if it's at the attachment points though then I want to know about it or we're going to dial back yeah so why is that real quick so most people I'm I'm going to sneak around to it so most people when they when they do their training they uh meaning well meaning well and I'm not I'm not slamming anyone by any means and the only reason that we know this and are able to share is because all these years I've been doing this I made the same effing mistakes that they make we just survived my stupidity and learned how to do better it's a story story of my life uh so I think story of all of our lives right I I used to tell my athletes there there are stupid gymnasts and there are old gymnasts but there are no old stupid gymnasts because they're all dead but most people most beginners that they want to base all their training off muscular fatigue which is a problem it's problematic because muscle tissue regenerates about every 90 days about every 90 days you know from from end to end all all the cells everything's done in 90 days okay that's well that's fine but connective tissue takes 200 to 210 days so we have a huge gap so if I get in and I'm just and you know I'm I'm I'm I'm not a big fan of beginners training to failure simply because their structure isn't mature enough yet to handle it safely and by mature I simply mean enough productive well structured hours under their belt so particularly if it's in new range of motion right if they've just particularly if there's joints you know if it's if it's a muscle belly if we're like you said if we're doing core you know I we'll beat your core down all day long and I'm not worried about it a bit because it's just muscular fatigue but as soon as we get joints involved everything changes and it's actually really easy for people to verify because they can think back over all the injuries they've had over their training career you know on their athletic career playing around with the kids in the backyard the vast majority of those injuries are all joint related almost always it's extremely rare for someone to have a muscle belly injury it just it just doesn't happen yet their training especially in the beginning is all skewed just towards muscular develop and not connective tissue development and that's that's where they get into trouble so when they come to us the first thing we like is for them to spend and it's is it going to be boring it is you know 20 210 days we're talking six seven months of dial it back guys dial back yeah it's it's and and I think that the it's important to emphasize too that dialing it back doesn't mean it means that you're not rushing but it doesn't mean that you won't it doesn't mean you won't experience a lot of progress if that's fair to say I mean I think that's crazy fair to say and you you found that yourself yeah but what happens is some of them we we run into this maybe you have also is we we get some people who are addicted addicted to the rush they're they're addicted to the adrenaline rush they're addicted to laying there in a pile of sweat uh you know they want to do the sweat Angels they want to crawl out of the gym and the problem with that is if you're a worldclass athlete you can't do that because I have to be back in the gym the next day and train again I I can't afford to destroy myself or the Special Operations guys we work with you know we we've got to be able to do both they've got to be operational and increase their performance performance through their training but they have to go hand in hand and so it's only in beginners that we see that uh they they think somehow they can cheat time and it it can't be done I mean connective tissue is going to take 200 to 210 days there's no supplement you can't paint yourself blue you can't dance under the moon there's there's nothing you can do to speed that up it's going to take What It Takes and so we work as hard as we can within those parameters if there's joint pain we shut it down it's it's like like your elbow's a good example years ago pushing too hard now that that if we tweak That Elbow a little too much it flares up on you we'll repair it and it's going to take time but it takes much longer to repair it than it does to avoid it in the first place yeah for sure and just a couple of of of notes and then I'm going to swing back to the the Diagnostics you know how people can can assess but another conversation that that uh you know topic that came up I think I'm sure I brought it up in at dinner once was uh the use of anabolics or any type of growth agents and the the point that you made which makes perfect sense is that would just increase the likelihood of having connective tissue problems in gymnasts because uh the muscular strength and growth would outpace the development of and the adaptation of the tissues MH uh yeah it come completely with backfire huge backfire because we like our our a lot of our power come where we like to get where students make their their greatest gains in strength is to be able to do Dynamic plyometric work and straight on ring string th those are your two biggest bangs for the buck and what we have learned the hard way that's different the main difference between working with young developmental athletes and full grown adults is the order in which we need to present the material we have to do as a young a young I I can do all physical components at once I can do plyometric I can do straight arm I can do their Mobility bent arm it doesn't matter a bit I can do it all at one time but an adult who's now fragile from years of making a living right sitting at a desk uh day in day out as they get a little older kids get bigger levels of activities drop drop drop drop drop and they're compromised so we got we have to build these things in a different order we have to first go rebuild Mobility then then we have to rebuild core core I'm talking not just ABS but obliques and lower back uh most adults a lot of their lower back pain isn't lower back related it's oblique related and um we we have to go in and we have to correct that then we can worry about regular strength once those things are done then we can get to the money maker which is their Dynamic strength but with an adult especially a strong adult who's been athletically inactive so they've been doing strength training but not out moving doing sports being active you know outside of their conditioning or let's say for example all they're doing is squats and they're very linear in the path of their knee and there's no meniscus work there's no MCL work there's no ACL work then they go outside they play a little softball here at all the time yeah when I was playing softball I blew my knee going around first base really how how many kids blow a knee running around first base mhm well that's I mean the supplemental knee exercises that look wacky as hell when you first look at them that you've had me do and maybe we can we can show some of this to to people in the show notes um sure even in the span of three or four weeks I've seen a huge difference in KN stability Improvement because I haven't ever done I haven't ever performed these types of targeted movements before and um coming back to the Diagnostics we talked about the bridge we talked about about the hanging leg lifts M uh What uh are there any other movements shoulder extension will be huge so shoulder extension would be sitting on the floor sitting on the floor M sitting in that Pike that you described earlier uh hands touching behind them and then without letting the hands move trying to scoot the butt as far forward away from the hands as they could and so that's immediately just that one movement right there is going to let us see it's going to show me their scapular Health can they protract can they retract it's going to tell me how tight their PEC minor is it's going to tell me how tight their bicep is and it's going to tell me how tight their brachi Alice down by the elbow is oh the brachi Alis yes your favorite my good my good my good friend the brech Alis the and also just and this relates to kind of daily living a lot of people who have back pain uh myself and included quite a few years ago if you're wondering if you have a tight PEC Miner you can just Google PEC Miner and figure out where it is but basically think right under the clavicle get a lacrosse ball and uh you know go on the wall and try to roll out your PEC Miner with a lacrosse ball and if it's if you have back pain you don't always fix that back pain by just focusing on the location of that pain um that's a good point and you start addressing the PEC Miner and a lot of that stuff just alleviate is is is alleviated um and I want to throw one thing out there just for people who might be interested that and and that is I think part of the reason I seemed or was better prepared for the assessment than I would have been otherwise is that I started doing really just one thing one type of new exercise which was compression strength training in that Pike position um okay and did that for just maybe uh two times per week um prior to doing the assessment as I was traveling and for people who are wondering what this is like if you really want to feel humbled uh as I did so I was in I was traveling I was in Columbia a very close friend of mine uh almost got to professional rugby in New Zealand he's a beast I mean athletically extremely strong extremely fast uh I mean he's he's always going to be one of the top performers in the gym when he walks into a wait room and uh he saw me doing Pike pulses and so I'll explain what this is to folks because he was kind of laughing at me and he's like what kind of Jane Fonda are you doing here you know and I love that name and and I said all right I'd like all right big guy you're you're such a tough guy let's see you do these so for those people who are interested so you're sitting in this this seated Pike position we're talking about right so you're sitting on your ass on the floor um the upper body perpendicular with the floor and your legs out straight in front of you and point your toes kind of tense your quads to push the back of your knees into the floor then reach forward and stretch forward as far as you can get your fingers out on either side of your legs as far out as you can and then just try to lift your heels off the ground keeping your legs completely straight and just pulse it up and down uh like I three to four inches maybe if you can manage that and just do try to do 30 of those and my my buddy could not lift his heels off the ground and just fell over laughing he's like yeah okay those are hard but that compression it's if you think about the range of motion that most people train for core uh they're doing sit-ups or maybe they're doing hanging leg lifts up to like an lsit right so their their legs are getting up to kind of parallel height well that last 90 degrees and especially the last like 45 degrees where you're bringing your thighs towards your chest is so hard I mean I had zero strength there uh prior to doing just a few weeks of this stuff which just it just amazed me uh and for those people also we were talking about the transverse abdominis coach feel free to veto this but I think it's also nicknamed the corset muscle if you're trying to think of what they might look like is it wraps around the abdomen so if you if you cough a lot or laugh a lot and get really really sore it's very frequently often or it's engaging that transverse um but let me ask you so you mentioned CrossFit you mentioned a couple of things you know the drenched and sweat doing the snow the not snow angels but uh sweat Angels what are your feelings about uh Kipping movements like Kipping pull-ups ah he had to open that can of worms yeah well I was asking a mutual friend I won't name him and I said what should I talk to coach summer about and he said Kipping pull-ups he'll lose his so I said okay I got to ask so we we started I I was the original gymnastics guy for CrossFit way back in the early 2000s and ended up leaving I was I was there before there was the first CrossFit affiliate when all there was was glassin working out of that little gym in Santa Cruz uh left just because you know to to do GST right like anything you know a dichotomy that that I always find Curious with people especially the crossfitters is they will be so on point with dissecting everything they do in terms of their Olympic lifting you know my pull is here my pull is there my knee was quarter inch this way I mean they they're just methodical and they don't bring and I shouldn't say just just crossfitters but then they other people they don't bring that same degree of attention to detail to their body weight work so one one is supposed to be meticulous and one is somehow just supposed to be thrown together and yet they expect the same quality results so if we if we look back oh back in the day CrossFit you know their lifting was was nothing by national standards now they get people who are qualifying to go to Nationals fast forward all those years in terms of their gymnastic strength training and they're not even remotely close they they don't match a national team they they don't match a state level athlete who let alone a national level let alone an international level they're they're not even in the same ballpark and part of the issue is because the Kipping pull-ups were were a huge big deal it was a money maker you know man I I'll be straight out I'll piss some people off but it was a money maker as as advertising for a program they could bring someone in and uh who's never been able to do a pull-up have them hold their chin by the bar and let them fall hit the bottom of that movement bounce back to the top and the person's eyes light up and they're like you know this is the best effing thing ever I've never done a pull-up in my entire life oh my God oh my God and they're pumped and they're pumped what they didn't realize is that this person has compromised basic strength and compromised shoulder Flex they don't they don't have mobility in their shoulder so they're hitting the bottom of that movement with multiples of body weight so they weren't strong enough to do a regular pull-up so now we're going to drop them on connective tissue with multiples of body weight that's got to go somewhere so it's going to force that shoulder to open further than it can handle and I'm going to bounce off that connective tissue like a trampoline back to the top of the B bar and then to make to pour salt on the wound now I'm going to do a shitload of reps at the same time I'm just I'm just going to crank on it and they were getting people who were coming in you know cross there's there's there's no proof there's you know you got you guys can live in a dream world all you want it was it was blowing people up and now the good thing though and to their credit you know it took time there was a denial no it has nothing to do with it but uh now we're seeing a recommendation of you know what guys we got to start getting some big basic strength built first some basic mobility and then at that time Kipping pull-ups yeah AB absolutely there's nothing wrong with it they're healthy they're good to do on a healthy shoulder joint with a good foundation of basic strength but a beginner doing Kipping pull-ups really that's that's Insanity that's that's just pouring gasoline on a fire so Kipping then is the finishing Edition it is not the starting element we we would never you know we were we started working with adults so our first we do seminars all around the world you know we spend we spend a lot of time doing Hands-On and our very first one we did I don't know 2007 or so and we've got all these people we've got all these beasts here and they're strong and I tried to do my entrylevel plyometric work on some floor work with them and the stronger the athlete the faster they went down knees lower back ankles on baby stuff baby stuff I mean we're not talking anything hard we're talking about standing in place and with knees straight being able to Bounce Down the floor using just your calves no way they they're they're tissues couldn't take it they hadn't they hadn't done anything like it or we had 15 minutes on the schedule for example how bad Mobility was we had 15 minutes on the schedule to stretch nothing hard nothing intricate nothing intense just an easy basic stretch get them loosened up for the day that stretch took an hour and a half to complete I was oh my it was an hour and a half Tim it was an hour and a half there were bodies lying everywhere it was like I was in Vietnam or we're filming a war movie and I I turned I turned to my staff I'm like what the am I supposed to do now they failed warm up they failed warm up now now In fairness this stuff is really you you you would look at it and just like my friend who was like what is this Jane Fonda and I'm like hey man why don't you try this for 10 minutes and it is really taxing I mean uh I remember doing one of the stretching routines which I I'll note I think is is might be of interest to people is I'm hitting each once per week so there's one that is front split focused so very hamstring focused there's one that is Bridge focused and another that is uh middle spit adductor middle split focused inside of the thigh and the point that you make is doing this twice a week will not double your progress it will cut it in half so you're only really hitting each of these once per week I mean there are different daily limber protocols but I remember doing at the very beginning of one of these workouts uh I believe it was oh no it was absolutely the uh the front split workout a ton for me a ton of of uh calf raises with like different I remember you moaning about that like different foot placements it's like okay 180 calf phases later of different variations I was like okay and I'm only 3 minutes into this hourong stretch sequence uh but and I know we're bouncing all over the place because I want to give people kind of a buffet sampling of of how this training differs but one of the reasons I respect the programming that you put together and the Nuance that you bring to this is that the observation then is and correct me if I'm or you can elaborate on this if I'm missing something but that a lot of the hamstring flexibility issues or limitations that people perceive are at least in part due to lower leg absolutely issues uh including the huge amount of them yeah including the Achilles so you you in this in this particular progression in the beginning you're hitting you're stretching the you're engorging and then stretching the the insertion point basically around the heel and then again at the knee and working your way up to the hamstrings and um there's a an athlete has been on the podcast Amelia Boon one of the most successful uh obstacle course racers in the world and and she's basically pointed out the same thing and she said yeah you can take someone who's really inflexible in their hamstrings have them roll out their feet with say a lacrosse ball or something like that and all of a sudden they gain 2 in in their descent with the hamstrings uh because it's it's all connected you know we we found by accident so we never intended this and it we just we very meth so part part of what maybe helps people to understand the the layers of complexity that that I approach training with is that for years my my bread and butter was to produce best athletes in the country that that was my job in order to have a job I had to produce some of the best athletes in the world and we we had to do it from scratch and so it becomes an issue of one an injured athlete is no good to the United States right doesn't matter how Talent he is how strong he is if he can't go on the floor with the USA on his chest we we can't win a medal with him so he's got to be healthy and then the second caveat that goes with that is that we we have to I so word I have I have to describe it correctly all right we're trying to find a way to make the best better cuz these these athletes are already the best on the planet and you're going head-to-head with other athletes who are the best so then how do you find a way to make something which is almost already perfect even closer to perfect and if you do what everybody else is doing right without kind of going out into the jungle if you will into Indian country and and learning new things then you can't get a leg up on your competitors the the way knowledge now if we go we have phds who come through and this and that and we we always give them major major because the way people think the world works is that they do their research they write about it they publish it we learn about it and we implement it with our athletes that that is not how the way of the world works the way it really works is you've got highlevel worldclass coaches who are super bright Decades of experience you know just my last senior athlete alone I had 16,000 hours into training Allen 16,000 hour spread over 12 years what is Alan's last name bow bow so yeah you guys got to celebrate he U just uh won national NCA championships again major blowout by the uh largest margin in NCA history wow that was well as of this recording very recently yeah that was just uh this oh goodness the weekend of the uh 15th so I think we're scheduled here to come out sometime in May but yeah very very big deal but uh you know to to go back to the other so we're looking we're looking for an edge and so we don't know why some things work we just know it works and I started getting notes from therapists around the world because the for example therapists are taught that they should have a neutral spine you should have a neutral spine I was getting people from around the world they were writing me but athletically I'm sorry I'll be direct but neutral spine athletically is the biggest load of horeshit I've ever heard in my life it's you can't run with neutral spine you can't throw with neutral spine you can't climb with neutral spine I can't swim I I I can't do anything with a neutral spine except lay in a box dug in a hole and they get ready to bury me I mean that that's that's the only thing I can do it there's nothing athletically I can do with a neutral spine so we know just automatically to produce athletes we're not going to do neutral spine because torso wise there's only two movements I can go from an arch snap to a hollow or I can be Hollow and snap back to extension to the arch those are the only two movements the Torso is capable of athletically everything else is a variation off that we can add rotation with some throws and some this and that but that's that's all there is so we spend a lot of time building power for that and these therapists around the world started taking our really gentle introductory work and they train it on themselves first and like you know just real similar what you said to him you know I feel better than I have in years coach I feel better than years and this is completely different from what I was taught in school well let's I'm sorry to interrupt but maybe maybe we could use an example that we've discussed before which was a new movement for me which is Jefferson curl and uh yeah there's they're having some fun with that so we look at Jefferson C right now so it wasn't that many years ago that if you squat it below parallel you were it was heresy it was heresy if you went if you went below parallel the knees the knees couldn't possibly adapt to it you're just going to blow your knees your your kneecaps were going to just pop off the front right it's going to be shrapnel knee shrapnel and now yeah but everybody accepts now that you know what there is nothing wrong with the body being exposed to its natural range of motion now do you have to build it up gradually yes obviously you do but Jefferson curl falls into that so gosh how do we explain Jefferson Crow you want me to give it a I can give it a shot yeah you'll be better this be this will be a good this would be a good exam review for me anyway so Jefferson curl is a gradually rounded stiff-legged deadlift that's the simplest way to visualize it so if you're looking at an athlete from the side doing a Jefferson curl they will they will most likely be standing on a box uh holding on to an Olympic barbell right in front of their uh hip/ legs so it's just like the very top of a deadlift position but when they start The Descent and it's elevated so that when you have plates on and whatnot there's room for it but when when they come down they're going to tuck their chin and then vertebra by vertebrae round their back down all the way into the bottom position where the objective would be or one of the objectives would be to get basically your wrists to the front of ear Toes or at least in a perfect world if you're Advanced enough yeah in in a perfect world and of course doing this very gradually with supervised uh attention from somebody who knows what they're doing and then reversing that and again going from this sort of uh vertebra by vertebra rounding up until you end up in that top position and then repeating uh is that a fair description Fair description yeah the the easyest just just think of it as a String of Pearls and we're just curling one Pearl at a time we've been we've been having some fun with that one so we we have done Jefferson curls I don't know 12 15 years now uh expected standard is body weight for us uh note note to people listening do not try this with body weight right out of the gate no don't don't so for example one one of our senior students in um in Australia uh in his training physical therapist has his own Clinic doing really well and um he tried it with just the the empty bar you know the 20 kilo bar first trashed him he dropped all the way down to I think a kilo or two right which is completely fine I we'll talk about why in just a sec and then he built up and last time I checked with Mark over the course of I I don't know I'm forgetting there's too many students but around 12 to 18 months he built up to either 3/4 body weight or maybe up to full body weight now and uh back feels better than it ever has but the key there as people got to understand is that this was gradual process over 12 to 18 months it wasn't just go now we we get we've got a a very good I'll throw Quinn out I'm going to butcher Quinn's last name Quinn's a PHD in physical therapy Quin he does some really good work and uh how do you spell his last name oh you're you had to ask me that we can get it for the show n yeah we'll get it for the show uh we we we chat a lot on Facebook and that and uh Quinn likes to um stir the pot if you will you know stir up some and um he's experimenting with Jefferson curl himself for I think going in about three or four years now now and feels wonderful and he'll toss it out and so one of the things that'll always become come up is you know the the mill experiments where they would take uh connective tissue from a pig cadav and put it under such and such amount of strain and if we put it in this position with this much load it snaps okay and everyone runs around and it's the sky is falling the sky is falling oh my God oh my God don't don't bend your spine stay neutral what everyone kind of missed the big elephant in the room was the pig was dead the tissue was dead it it can't adapt it's dead it's no longer living and it wasn't exposed to very gradual loads so that there could be Progressive adaptation which is what our bodies are really good at so they kind of overlooked all that so if I take this completely unprepared tissue and I do this to it it'll break so some very interesting discussions right now and obviously everyone's fine you know we've we've got athletes doing great adults who are doing wonderful and the the physical therapist will come around simply because it's healthy now they've got to understand and other people who are listening should understand also is that our weighted Mobility work needs to be approached with a different mentality a different level of intensity than conditioning work because connective tissue has one tenen the metabolic rate of muscular tissue so it heals it heals slower it adapts slower so you have to kind of come to the table with a very patient attitude or or as I I consider myself like I'm I'm extremely impatient naturally but I've learned in order to get what I want and to go where I want to go I've had to learn to be patiently impatient right if I give into the urge then I get hurt athletes get hurt we fall apart and we you know Nationals and Olympic trials are every four years Nationals are once a year and you don't get another Nationals you don't get another Olympic trials if you blow it you've got to be on point that day so it teaches us and our our environment was actually a blessing because it's very much uh practical it's very much results oriented there there's no room for opinion I think I feel I prefer it's it works it doesn't work it produces results it doesn't produce results you are the best in the country you aren't the best in the country I mean it's very clear it's very clear and it can't be argued with and that that was actually something when we segwayed into uh kind of the fitness world if you will where uh you come out of national team in that and everyone knows who the studs are in the Fitness World though everyone's proclaiming they're the stud everyone's proclaiming they're the national champion and there's there's nothing to support it there's no results there's there's no great athletes there's no great abilities that have been generated there's just the marketing and that that was hard to wrap my head around because a national team that doesn't exist you can't go to the Olympics and the guy who talks the loudest gets the medal didn't work you know I have the loudest voice I'm Champion I think I think that's National politics right now oh wait no never mind different top different podcast I I I did want to ask you how your visit to the White House but I figur we'll save that one we'll save that for another time yeah Tim Tim went to the White House last week guys so I'll pick his brain for you later uh so I I interrupted but yeah you get to the fitness world and I mean another another one of the differences that you pointed out for me which I really liked was that in uh the fitness world it's it's it's exercise and diet whereas in your world it's always been eat and train right eat train yeah eatting eat and train because if what the people are trying to do and we we and I I'll throw a little a little blurb in here we we have an outstanding nutrition program uh the guy who who wrote it former Seal Team 6 when he started buds back in the day he was like 140 145 and then Jeff got all the way up to 220 just shy of 225 solid muscle and his waist was the same size as when he was thin he he looked like two Vikings two two shoulders on top of his body he came walking down I was like what the it' been a couple years what the hell did you do and uh it's these it's these basic nutritional Concepts that we teach but what we try to do with the with adults is they're trying to they're trying to stay ahead of a bad diet through exercise they're trying to outrun a bad diet and it can't be done it can't be done and then what happens is if they somehow find this this crazy combination of uh massive amounts of cardio and they can kind of keep their weight in check a little bit and then they stop that cardio they immediately start gaining weight weight gain weight loss all of that should be separate from your conditioning you know you know you you've got to get your nutrition dialed in if your nutrition is dialed in your body's going to find its natural healthy weight that it's going to operate at now if you're if you want to be the giant muscle guy and that's not your phenotype which is your body type you know what tough deal with it you know it's not going to change you're not going to change your phenotype you're not going to change your body's genetic expression okay that being said right you can maximize what you what your potential is what we Hammer through to our students is you're not responsible for the hand of cards you were dealt you're responsible for maxing out what you were given you know and so who knows what your strengths will be maybe you'll be more endurance maybe you're going to carry easy muscle mass maybe you're a max strength guy maybe you're very skill oriented it doesn't matter maybe you're very explosive but whatever it is you know make the most of it so so on that point uh and then I want to come back to I want to ask you about I think it's I wrote this down during our assessment Tony Fay quote no routines end quote that's all I wrote down so that's a q for story I believe that you told me that we'll come back to does that make any sense or is that just like a cryptic 3: a.m. note that I wrote to myself I don't know but uh the you got to stay away from the wine dude never never uh in vino veritas we'll get back to that but the uh oh I I know I I kind of know what it is I think I I I think I can actually queue it up is that the basics uh yeah well we're going to come back to that in one second the question I want to ask first first is one that came up a lot from listeners of this podcast which was and I'm going to create sort of a a composite of these questions but like if if if someone is 35 years old let's just say former athlete does basic gym work diet is okay not terrible uh they feel reasonably athletic but they're not competing in anything certainly have never done any gymnastics What would what would good goals be for such a person and what would bad goals be maybe at the same time well bad without question bad goal would be for them to jump right into uh kind of full body weight uh straight arm strength for example a back lever which doesn't require a ton of strength but they love to do it because it looks so cool it's kind of like their first thing they can do that you know wow look at me the problem is is that it puts them in extreme load while in shoulder extension so let me can I paint a picture for people so so so back lever just to just to create the image and Coach correct me if I'm wrong imagine you're laying on your stomach on the floor Arms by your sides uh and then you turn your hands Palm down so that your thumbs are pointing out away from your body and then you lift your arms off the ground as high as possible with your arms straight and then place a bar in your hands and then lift your body off the ground I me off the ground and kind of hold yourself there sure body would be horizontal Y and what they don't realize is that when the shoulders are in shoulder extension like that is that the biceps are under maximum stretch so it's not it's not a problem to do with being strong enough uh the bicep is is too loaded and they're going to tear a bicep so we for a young adult not not a problem at all and uh we went through you know we we get some uh and we're lucky you know we we have a lot of people who use our material but some of some of our material you know coach you're you're too conservative coach it's it's a new world coach uh we don't have time I I had someone who was 21 or 23 once coach I don't have time to take my time I'm already 23 and I was like okay all right I think you're misreading this but they want to jump right into their strength training and they do well but they don't do the mobility work so it wasn't the last year I think it was a year before I think maybe the street workout Community five of their top guys around the world snapped biceps and these are crazy strong guys right I mean we've seen them these guys are beasts they're doing one arm chins they're doing this and that and they they all snapped them on back lever stuff because the the mobility wasn't wasn't in line now we all know when you're young you can get away with a lot of stupid because the body heals so fast you know luckily right I I certainly wouldn't have survived being 21 if it wasn't that the case but as an adult right the structure is mature now and I think I think maybe a better way to look at it is people think I'm getting older ligaments are breaking down tendons are breaking down joints are getting brittle and actually that's not the case because if if we go back in time when you were a little guy when I was a little guy when all listeners were a little guy we ran around like Mad Men right it wasn't oh today I'm going to ride my bike 3 miles it was sun was up go jump on my bike and I'm gone all day and I'm running I'm jumping I'm climbing and we're just we're just being crazy little guys then we have so we have this huge Matrix of activity that the body is used to then we hit high school and for most people that's our first exposure to structured athletic training okay and the body does well with it now the mistake is thinking that the body did well solely because of that structured athletic training what they're overlooking is all that activity that Matrix of activity that occurred for those years prior to that then if they're a high enough level athlete structured training might continue into college graduate time to get a job all right I'm still you know I'm young right hormones are pumping I'm going to go to work and then I'm going to go play basketball with the guys in the evenings I'm going to hit the gym this and that that goes good for a couple of years right I'm getting by having fun weekends weekends are full then you meet the Cutie right you meet the love of your life you get married suddenly I can't go play basketball every night now okay so we do this and that and a little at a time our levels of physical activity outside of conditioning are dropping down and they're dropping down a lot then kids come right well there's another huge chunk of time gone then before you know it you're 30 you're 35 you haven't been doing hitting the gym very often there's certainly no time for just play activity or doing sports or this or that on a regular basis for most people right and they spend most of the time hunched over that desk and now the body wants to be healthy it wants to be healthy that's your your prime example we get we feed it the right movements in the right dosages and it blooms it blossoms it's like weeding and watering a garden right the body wants to be healthy but we have to do it in the right dosage and so for example those Street worker guys they hurt themselves because it was the wrong dosage they wanted to go too hard too soon without the mobility so for an adult to come back around and answering that question a long way 35y old very first thing we got to do we got to fix joints we we we've got to repair joints we got to get that range of motion back if you were to look at all of the adults that you've dealt with let's just say 35 year olds are there if you had to pick and of course this does not cover all the bases but if you had to pick say 3 to five movements or exercises or stretches for addressing the most common deficiencies like getting those joints back into play What Would you what would some of your selections be so just just for joint joint I think I think we'd put Jefferson curl at top of the list because Jefferson curl is going to let us it's going to because remember we have we have multiple sections of the spine right we've got the cervical thorasic and Lumbar that's going to come through also into glutes that's going to go down into our hamstrings that's going to hit our calves it's going to hit our Achilles as well so for for one that's a lot of bang for your buck for one exercise MH even if that was all you did right and you just did Jefferson curl a lot of aches and pains are going to go away because of that mhm U next one well that's tough It's always it's always hard to to boil it down boil it down we took care a pike we've got we've got to get extension we got to get some thoracic extension I I'd throw elev bridge in there if arm strength was sufficient to handle it if if not we can scale it down to uh some weighted work with some bars or some some barbells either some dowel with a plate uh we've got to get shoulder extension in there because what happens a lot a lot of the conditioning we're exposed to is all front delt heavy right right it's all it's all anterior delt and the pecs get tight the interior delts are getting tight and we start pulling our own shoulders forward we create our own impingement you know and it doesn't matter you know so I'll do more exercises I'll do more exercises well no you're you're just making it worse what the problem is is there's not balance in the shoulder joint right there's no there's no retraction and it's easy to tell what does their posture look like what do we see with everyone now they've got that what do they even have a term now texting neck is that just uh you just kind of that that Turtle forward distended forward it's like the Wall-E powered down look I guess something and you know the scary thing there and again we we have some pts who use our stuff around the world with a lot of success and they're the ones who come in and then educate us for we'll say you know we've noticed this and they can they tell us they teach us well to the Limit we can right because we're not professionals but to the limits we can they start teaching us the mechanics of what is really going on so we have a very good student Wesley tan runs one of our Affiliates he's a full-time osteopath in the UK runs another one of our GB Affiliates Forma GST and uh Wesley's the one who taught me that you know there there's a point coach where if you abuse the body it's not going to come back and so for example you see some older adults who are extremely hunched forward neck distended forward chin up because they're trying to see where they're going and it's not that they have bad posture and they could fix it it's that they can't fix it because the vertebrae are a rectangle and if you spend after spending years of hunched forward like that it compresses the front edges of that rectangle till it becomes a trapezoid right and that doesn't come back on once that happens it's done it's it's over it's done uh same thing happens with the muscle bellies so people who get frozen shoulder or impingements in this that is if you're not using the muscle belly the body doesn't want to support it because muscle tissue is expensive by expensive the body looks at it it's expensive to feed it's expensive to maintain so you can't your for example your body isn't a painting you can't get to a certain degree of muscle mass Mobility athletic ability endurance whatever you want to say and then just stop and have it continue to exist like a painting you did right the it has to be maintained because if you're not using it it costs too much resources for the body to continue to keep it so it's going to start breaking it down that's why you get a few days right and then you start losing strength you start losing Mobility you start losing wi uh easiest physical attribute to build endurance simple super simple endurance is what endurance is simply strength repeated over and over at a lower load no big deal that's that's a six to an 8we process simple no problems at all Mobility it's going to take some time what's what's the easiest one to fix muscular strength okay no no problem at all so for it's super important then that we we use that muscle mass because if it's not being used you're not only going to lose the size of the muscle mass the body's going to start doing deposits of collagen on it and it's going to start shrinking that muscle belly on the traps for example going back to those older adults we discussed and it's going to it's going to shrink until a lot of it is connective tissue on the edges now what people need to realize and they don't is that when they see an adult who's hurting right they're older they're shuffling they can't pick their knees up their hips are Frozen They're hunched over their necks displaced they weren't that way when they were younger this is all the result of inactivity and poor progressions in their exercises and it didn't have to be and then they need to take the next step of connecting is that if it happened to that guy or that woman it can sure as hell happen to me also if I go down the same road that they went down so returning to the shoulder extension because I noticed in our assessment that I had terrible shoulder extension and I had kind of accepted it and written it off with stupid reasons like well you know I've done too much deadlifting I got too much huge slabs of muscle in my back I can't do shoulder extension just like total horseshit I mean especially notice mus those huge massive slabs of muscle yeah the the imaginary lat syndrome that have and uh I mean that was just blown to Smith Arin when I met uh let me make sure I get his name correct is Paul Watson is that right oh yeah big Paul in New York City who's gigantic and extremely flexible so as soon as I hung out with him I was like okay kind to let people know Paul is what would say six feet 230 I mean and just and for he's about 40 I want to say and just probably walks around at 6% body fat and can do can can do a flat like chest to ground pancake no problem can do dislocates with a weighted dowel or barbell no problem if with all different types of grips which I can't do at all even though I'm making progress uh the the shoulder extension what is your preferred way to work on shoulder extension what is is it the sitting down arms behind you scooting the hips forward is there something else you would add to that mix well we we have to sneak up on that one a little bit so sometimes we we can't even work shoulder extension at first if the elbows are deconditioned so if brachialis just inside the elbow is weak if the insertion of the bicep tendon is weak then when the arm is extended as they stretch there might be some discomfort so if that's the case we have to give that time to adapt so you notice that's one of the questions I ask you how's your break Ys feel how's your bicep feel how's your elbow feel because we we never push through pain I mean you can you can but that's have have you noticed that U the guys who push through pain right they've got a shelf life of somewhere between two and four years and then the body is so beat up and so painful and so chronically injured that it's just easier to be a fat slob sitting on the couch and have at least my pain drop than to try to continue pushing through and being a stud right it's it's so common and it's it's also unnecessary uh for example and I I don't get this one I don't get this one a lot I I'll bring it because where there's a lot of people and don't get me wrong I really like weightlifting I I think the Olympic lifting is sweet uh there's a lot going for it I think the way that it is approached here in the states is not as efficient as it's approached in China for example or in Russia so for example in both of them before there's any weight at it at all they they build complet mobility throughout the body they can straddle their legs chest on the floor sit with legs together Pike they've got Bridge they have all these basic Mobility incredible ankle flexibility and Mobility we talked about this is it related to huge and especially exactly if you watch clo off people should watch this guy check out some videos oh my God he is such a beast but what they also need to do is not just watch the weight he's putting up right they need to watch his warmup in the training Hall and look at how amazingly flexible and mobile he is now what's important to understand is at a world class level right at a world class level resources are limited energy you have for training is limited the amount of time you have for training is limited the amount of time you have for Recovery is limited right you have to maximize these things because you're going it's one thing to be the best stud in the town it's another thing to be best stud in the state another one in region another one in the country completely different animal to be the best in the entire world to be the best at what you do out of billions of people we're talking slivers of difference between the very top guys so with all those restrictions and all those parameters in place if the best in the world are stretching their ass off in order to get strong why aren't you I agreed and not you not you personally damn put me on the spot no now you as in all of us as in all of us right and what'll happen is they people just kind of get blinders on they want to watch technical they want to watch progressions what did you do for this and that and then they'll blow off the mobility work that they do early not realizing that the mobility work was the gold nugget they were looking for they just didn't brush the dirt off in order to see that it was gold underneath they just thought ah it's just another rock who cares no it was the gold that was the sweet and missed it so if we're looking at again this this 35-year-old former athlete maybe never was super competitive but has kept in decent shape maybe does some form of exercise two or three times a week in terms of a understanding that the mobility and working with J curl elevated Bridge shoulder extension Etc is going to be those are going to be ingredients in the recipe in their progression to gymnast of some type what would be not not not even gymnast I would say functional human being functional human being right because if you don't because I'm we we don't train i' like to you know point out people we don't train gymnast we do gymnastic strength training right but there I don't have I just got off the phone with our Olympic coach today Kevin maica right we had a great conversation but guys regardless of how good you are at rope climbs and pl and this and that I wouldn't hold my breath that Kevin's getting ready to give you a call and say please come and be on our team this year you know I I saw your climbs and you are kick ass you are the one for us we we got a uniform waiting here for you we're departing for Rio in July man be ready pack your bag it's not gonna happen guys so corre fun athletes functional human being covers it all so so let me let me just jump to the U the punchline question which is let's so we look at a a if if I wanted to give someone a stretch goal to inspire them to train consistently right so the mobility might not be enough but if I wanted to give them a uh a light at the end of the tunnel so I'm like I know this shoulder extension stuff is going to be very unpleasant maybe not super exciting but this is the objective this is why this is what you might be able to do in 3 6 9 12 months from now right the the back liver we've talked about is not necessarily a good goal because you might think you have the strength and perhaps you do but you don't oh they'll definitely have the strength almost without question right but they don't have the mobility so you know snap goes the bicep there a nasty surprise waiting in that box what would be a good gymnastic strength training goal to have uh or goals like and as just as context for people who are wondering you know the after trying to do my best to survey the landscape and figure out what might not be the stupidest goals I wanted to you know I'm not saying those're the best goals but I decided okay well press strict press handstand which we can Define in a second seems like a good one and it just seems like a sweet thing to be able to do and then front lever and then L Str plch then straddle plch exactly so uh we we can we can talk about what each of those are but would it would the press handstand for instance be something that incorporates the strength the mobility and all these pieces if you had to pick one if you had to pick one that would be the one that'd be the one okay so let's one because it's it's GNA it's going to have all strength all Mobility balance agility everything rolled into one movement how do you want to take a stab at uh at describing what that looks what is what do a what does a perfect press handstand look like in your mind perfect press handstand so I'm just trying to keep it simple right bend over Hands On The Ground by your toes and they can be put your palms on the floor so they're just in front of your toes shoulder width leg straight leg straight okay now if they need it to bend could but we're talking up about perfect world right and then so hands on the floor shoulders directly over the hands and then no jumping using just the middle back just the traps because every everyone thinks traps traps traps they think traps just for shrugging well your traps are a huge muscle they're a huge muscle and they don't just lie in the top of your shoulders they're in the middle of your back and down towards your lower back as well they're giant muscle and they're capable of a huge amount of power and when you fix those right a lot of shoulder pain goes away a lot of lower back pain goes away but to go back to our other hands on the floor shoulders over the hands using that middle back those traps pull the hips up on top of the shoulder maintain that flatback position then we continue on with lower back finishing the legs up to the handstand and so a couple of things that make this particularly challenging uh so one obviously you need to have the flexibility and the hamstrings and everywhere else Mobility have to have the mobility you have to have the compression strength like we were talking about doing those those murderous uh embarrassing Pike pulses which look like they should be easy and they are not um you know bringing your legs basically to your chest in that last like 10 to 12 in range really challenging um and then the I think where you see a lot of people online do this incorrectly at least from the standpoint of having the objective of of gymnastic strength training right because there are all sorts of ways you can cheat with this stuff to make it biomechanically easier but if we're trying to do it strictly um and why why do it maybe this is a nice thing to throw in because people say well it's just a matter it's personal taste coach it's personal taste you do it this way because you prefer this form no we do it a particular way because this is what builds the most strength that's transferable to other activities for example this will I'll continue so who who all have I pissed off so far today I pissed off crossfitters I don't know I'm going I'm gonna piss off yoga I'm gonna piss off yoga right now so I I I once that and I like yoga don't get me wrong but their their approach to hand stand is flawed they want uh to go bone on bone so they want to have their shoulders uh depressed so they're bone on bone they want to have Pip should on that so so by right so shoulders shoulders can ele elate so if I'm if I'm standing upright and I elevate my shoulders that would be like me shrugging my shoulders to my ear mhm and then doing the opposite is the other direction well when we do a handstand it's and if I describe it this way it's going to make sense right I want muscle and connective tissue to be doing the work I don't want bone grinding on bone that's that's not a recipe for longevity it's not going to work okay but the easy one is is they'll say well there's there's a yoga hand stand and there's a gymnastics handstand and my answer to that is well you're almost right there's a gymnastics handstand and there's a up gymnastics handstand those are the only two there are and here here's how we evaluate it a gymnastics handstand right done with nice flat back nice and all all being a smartass aside right we're going to look at it just from a purely practical Viewpoint which one leads somewhere so if I do a yoga type handing with that Arch and the flex shoulders I'm I'm not going any farther than that I can work on duration I can do some other things but I'm not going any further if I do a gymnastics hand sand where it's flat now I have nice range of motion in the shoulders I have strength through the middle back through the traps right I've got good core strength I've got good compression strength now I can move on to good press handstand work why well we want to get stronger that in turn allows me to go on if I'm in the mood and I want to do more I can go into more advanced one arm handstand work petting work work all all those things are out results of a proper nice straight line handstand that you can't do with the flawed approach is it's it's not Aesthetics it's being practical because we we don't do anything in gymnastics right that's just purely Aesthetics why why do we do things a certain way it lets us generate more power why do we want more power lets us get more air lets us do more flips lets us do more twists lets us do harder things on ring which means more points which means more gold medals and let me let me throw out a couple of observations and you can correct me if if this is wrong but like one of them an example of something that people might think is a Aesthetics and it there is an aesthetic appeal but it's a side effect and not the reasoning behind it would be a strong point in the toes right a strong point on the legs see good so you see a lot of people doing handstands and I was guilty of this um certainly and they have kind of uh what I heard what one acrobat call tofu feet they're like they're not fully dorsiflexed like they're not pulling the the toes back to the knees which I think looks terrible also pretty common in yoga but they don't have that and they don't have a strong point and so they're they're they're at the very least their quads and their adductors aren't really fully engaged loose they're loose and so they're they're they're leaking energy in all sorts of directions and it makes I I like that leaking energy a very good destion and it makes I think I probably stole it from pav Tulin but the the's a good buddy Pav's a good friend of mine I like pav Pav's Pav's great and the and there all and when what is the consequence the consequence there are consequences one of which is you're wasting energy so you're not going to be able to train as efficiently number two is you're not going to have the you're not going to develop the proper uh balance and Alignment because you're going to be flopping all over the place and having to correct more so than you should and and um so that just that pointing has a huge impact on your ability to train the handstand like a really strong point and uh the um the other point I wanted to make is because I've I've of course in in the attempt to try to work on this in the past which failed and I've made a ton of progress in the last few months but when doing it solo I would watch videos online and of course not all videos are created equal and you would see people preach the choir on that one you would and you would see people doing a pressed handstand but they would they would planch really hard right so you would in other words you'd see people they put their hands flat on the ground in front of their toes and then they shoot their head really far forward so their shoulders travel if you were to drop a plum line like a string with a weight on the end from their shoulders it would hit the floor say like 8 in in front of their hand 6 eight in in front sure exactly and then they go up into the handstand and they have this arch in the back and maybe their feet are pointing straight up and what does that look like it looks a lot like what was the gold standard in sort of Muscle Beach uh Venice or Santa Monica like 19 circa 1960 1940 1950s that's right 1940s 1950s but that's going to place a lot more structural strain on the spine so then if the what does the proper version look like I mean roughly right your your your ears are roughly in between your shoulder blades your in between your arms yeah in between your arms fully uh shoulders extended up or not extended what am I looking for here pressing pressing down through the ground and keeping the hand the shoulders directly on top of the hands yeah and one and for for people who want to just do a little experiment obviously do it do it safely but I was blown away the first time that someone showed this to me if if you do a normal say kick up to handstand on the wall just the way that everybody does it right so you're you're you're kind of flipping up and you end up looking away from the wall there a million way to do let's say you do that and then instead of doing it the way you've always done it you before you put your hands on the ground you start with your arms overhead in the position that you want to assume on the ground and shrug your shoulders up as high as possible trying to get your deltoids to the sides of your ears maintain that position and then go up and the stability is just a world of difference I mean it's it's night and day it's a completely different movement um the uh all right I I have to ask this because I'm million people asked since we're on a roll here we've already checked off yoga uh that's true and I have to come back guys I like everything else about yoga except your handstand so only a small amount of hate mail for the handstand one uh and uh some of the coaches and doesn't have to be in gymnastics but some of the but it certainly could be some of the coaches who have impressed you the most and I I took down in between like my bouts of hands shaking and like accidentally getting chalk my mouth doing the assessment and like when when I could bend my arms and do something I took these cryptic notes I wrote down one name which was Alexander world champion male and female does that ring any bells so you know I I've been extremely extremely fortunate in my career I have uh just a multitude of friends who are world and Olympic Champions World and Olympic team members uh world and Olympic big coaches and for for a long time you know I just kind because if that's your environment day in day out it just kind of becomes your Norm right and then after a while you kind of stop and think like one day I was I was at a competition and I I was visiting with some friends of mine and I came back and uh my my oldest daughter was maybe around 12 at the time and um she was like oh my god do you know you know who you were talking to Dad and I said well yeah sweetie I know they're my friend friends she says that that was the Olympic champion and that was the world champion say yeah I know babe I know and she's just like oh my good god well Dimitri bowf is a good friend of mine and Dimitri is um one worlds in 83 at 16 years old 16 years old just unbelievable then uh he won again in 87 what what a lot of people don't know is in between there Demetri obviously Russian uh Dimitri had a car accident and uh broke his left lower leg between the knee and the ankle in 42 places oh 42 places uh so B basically you know that's powder it's powder and uh he's you know they put him in he's unconscious he's on the table and he's he's covered up and they're getting ready to remove his his lower leg they're going to you they're taking it off and uh the surgeon pulled P the towel down the sheet down because he's prepped for surgery and he's out and he sees it's Demetri now this is Russia right in the early 80s so you know it's not it's not warm friendly Russia and uh the doctor he the doctor immediately holy I am not cutting this leg off because the surgeon who takes Demitri Bower's leg off is probably going to lose his hands shortly thereafter also right you know national hero so they they save his leg and Demitri comes back from it and uh wins worlds in ' 87 uh goes 88 Olympics does great medal gold medals uh well Dimitri was uh I was lucky enough we're at different training camps and that Dimitri was my roommate and you know Russians are Russians right it takes it takes a long time for them to warm up to you so it took I don't know how many years but we we started getting along real well after some years he start sharing some stuff you I'm like you know Demetri cuz his leg is trashed his leg is trashed 8 pics I said Demitri you know how how the hell dude he say ah only L for a few seconds I I can do anything for a few seconds I said I don't know dude well so it's just great right so he's you know a legend in gymnastics uh if we get together with a room full of world and Olympic Champions who are Russian they will all defer to Demitri he's that big a legend and this isn't a room full of massive egos okay the these yeah there's there's no shortage of confidence here if to me in the room they treat Demitri awesome it's it's a very very cool thing to see well we go forward oh gosh I'm gonna forget my name is it Al not Alexander well Alexander the reason my Alzheimer my Alzheimer's is kicking up anyway we had a a world champion from the Russian on the women's side who won worlds and Demetri's coach Alexander was responsible for training both of them so Alexander is the only one in history who produced a war a male world champion and a female world champion he's the only one and Alexander right now is down coaching the Brazilian team what is Alexander's is that his first or last name it's like I always screw up all the Russian pronunciations all my Russian friends are going to laugh because they're totally used to me butchering this but it's like Alexander alexandrov or or something got one of those Alexander off if I'm with my Russian friends I just say Alexander and everybody knows who I mean so I don't have to embarrass myself what what makes him what do you think allowed him made him makes him him yeah exactly what makes him different U what makes him him is the ability so it starts with depth of knowledge to have enough depth of knowledge that you can look at an athlete and plan what you need to be doing four years from now 8 years from now now and then reverse engineer all of it to today all the training Cycles the strength the D loads uh it was from Dimitri that I so back in 83 Dimitri was the only gymnast I think today probably one of the only ones who every fourth week was a D Lo week why to give the body a chance to recover now there's a lot of people who talk D Lo but way back then right the training if you visit with Demitri right it's always Chris it's it's it's mathematics it's all mathematics we do to them you take these correct pieces which would be like doing the correct numbers that creates your equation if you put the equation together correctly and then you solve it there's your answer and your answer is the physical preparation at the end in a successful competition so Alexander is great great at knowing we're going to just be consistent over this training block so you know an Olympic cycle is four years long so we're getting ready to finish this Olympics right and then the next cycle starts so it could take for example to get someone to 75 80% of their genetic capacity with a good with a good coach a good world class coach is going to take three to four years it's going to take three to four years just to let the body grow adapt do you think that's also true for 30 like training an adult I do okay great all right I do uh now that's a healthy adult that's a healthy adult so if they're severely compromised and so you know to get through our whole our whole curriculum should take three to four years if they're severely compromised and we have to do damage repair we've got to heal some injuries we got some chronic things because what what's a chronic injury a chronic injury is simply an injury that you kept abusing until it became semi-permanent that's all chronic injury is it means you slammed your hand in the door and it hurt okay and your your response to slamming your hand in the door it hurting was to keep slamming your hand in the door you you kept slamming it in the door and you say God my hand really hurts what should I do what should I do I said well quit slamming your hand in the damn door and it will get better but people they don't they don't real they don't think that way they're just like well I but I really really like doing this and we get people coming to us really beat up because we're taught no pain no gain well we flip that around we say no brain no gain now we're not talking about the pain of fatigue the the easy way to know the difference between fatigue and injury is simply the sharpness of the pain so for example and it's some experience also so if you if you're feeling you feeling pain right and maybe it's from a Core workout and you stop you're doing hollow body rocks whatever it doesn't matter what you're doing sit-ups you stop if it's fatigue it's immediately going to start to lessen soon as soon as you stop the pain starts going away if it's an injury and you stop it's immediately going to continue begin increasing that's your old moment that's oh I have screwed myself up right and so you kind you kind of have to ride that we want we want to work to where the body is working but we don't want to work so hard it's like for a long time it was a big thing for people doing Kipping pull-ups to take pictures of their hands being raw and bloody from their ribs and they were looking at it as a badge of honor you know that I worked so hard and in the short term for that for that moment yes yeah they worked really hard now I looked at it differently I looked at it as like you stupid what are you going to do tomorrow now right because there's there's there's no amount of work you can do today that could offset the amount of progress you could have made throughout a properly structured week can't it can't be done you see that you see that with kettle bells a lot too I remember I remember when I was really deep in in kettlebell training it was uh yeah you take yourself out for God knows how long you rip all your calluses off but they mean well they mean well we we we tend to use two terms with our athletes we we have immature athletes and mature athletes and definition and it's it's not an age deal it's it's an attitude deal so an immature athlete is someone who wants what they want right now okay a mature athlete is someone who's willing to do what needs to be done now to get rewarded for it later delayed gratification and it's the mature athlete that in the long run always comes out on top they're always the ones with the greater longevity and the greater success the other ones the immature ones if they're really talented they may stay ahead for a while but eventually you're going to get so dinged and broken and beat up that they have to step aside and the mature guy the mature athlete or woman right they're they're just doing their thing day in day out it's like uh writing a book that has 365 pages in it if I if I ask you tomorrow Tim go home tonight and write me a book with 365 Pages you're like Chris you've lost your mind but if I say Tim I want you to write me a page a single page every day in a year we've got a book with 365 pages and if you picture that that thickness of a novel that it's a lot of pages there but if I look at that thickness of a single page it's it's so thin that it seems negligible that it doesn't even matter it's like why why did I bother well it's it's the consistency that adds up over time that's where you see you see these great athletes got to understand they see you see a worldclass athlete that did not start training yesterday this is a multi-year process well also I think that there's a behavioral modification and a component of this which you know if you wanted to dig in the resource into the research is is supported at this point which is doing each day less than you feel maximally capable of is it's it's a fantastic sort of positive reinforcer and this applies in this applies in sales this is what IBM did way back in the day when their Salesforce was slaughtering the competition they had the lowest quotas in the industry because they wanted their sales people to be unintimidated to pick up the phone so we could substitute intimidated to pick up the phone with intimidated to go to the gym or start a session uh you could also apply it to writing I leave a little in the bank leave a little in the bank I remember uh you there were two examples off hand as it applies to writing a friend of mine uh who's very very consistent prolific writer and he said my key is every day I write less than I feel capable of and you know a guideline that I was given was two crappy pages per day that's all you have to do two crappy pages and sometimes you overshoot that you have a great workout and you're feeling as you put it froggy right you're feeling Fant feel you're feeling fantastic and you just blow through it and set set a bunch of PRS but you didn't go into the workout with the pressure of having to achieve PRS in every exercise and uh you know hemway not maybe not the great the best life model but was prolific writer still still a stud and he would he would end mid sentence he would end still feeling like he had more to say in a specific paragraph or sentence so that he had a place to pick up the next day the uh and so on the point of consistency and actually I want you to finish your last thought because I totally hijacked the conversation but you said it takes three that dude you hijacked my thought so three three to four three to four years to to get them to what percentage of their genetic and this is ballpark 75 to 80 and this this is just an example to people because the body the body will not let you run it 100% won't do it won't do it there's not enough optimal Surplus that we mentioned earlier 3 to four years to get to 75 80% it will take me another 3 to four years another 3 to four years to get to about 90% another 3 to four years and then after that it will take me another 3 to four years to get to about 95% and that's me writing her on them that's my standards right because remember it's easier for me to maintain that a Mac standard because I'm not the one feeling the fatigue right now okay it's much easier it's very difficult for a world class athlete to train themsel right and it doesn't do a good a world class coach any good to have all that knowledge in his head it takes a partnership right it takes both of them working together to create this great athletic animal so but the interesting thing is that another three to four years you get to 95% and as soon as they ease up the body drops back down to that 7580 that's where it likes now to build back up won't take nearly as long as to build it in the first place okay because the structures are already in place nervous systems already developed yada yada yada yada yada but that's where the body's comfortable so as far as adults are concerned okay are they does a 35-year-old need to be able to produce at 90% no they don't do they need it 95% no they're they're not full-time professional athletes they don't they don't have time for that can they produce at 75 80% yes they can and the interesting thing is is will that put you on the Olympic team no absolutely absolutely not are you going to be close to it no but is it will it put you being better than 99 out of 100 people around you absolutely yeah absolutely it will put you there and if we put a percentage on that that means that just by being consistent putting some year consistent years of training and that puts you in the top 1% of the human population in terms of physical ability that is not a bad consolation prize no it's it's not and I want to underscore the consistency point because I've always been an intensity guy right I mean for the most part because that's my easy that's my default mode and uh you know it served me well everybody right yeah it it served me well uh but there's a there's a point where you know the the the sort Cuts both ways and uh you sent me an email recently I'm going to replace the name just unless we decide to I was gonna say or maybe take out the profanity just in case yeah I'll take out the the F bombs dear you lazy bastard no that's not how it starts so so this this I just want to because I want to talk about older students who have picked up gymnastics and okay so there are a lot of people who are rightly I think or naturally skeptical of the ability of say a 3 5 38 40 plus year old to acquire these skills that are associated with people who start when they're 5 6 seven years old so I'm going to replace the name with Frank okay so I was having a hell of a lot of trouble with tuck Hops and to to just explain that and well I I fully plan for everyone listening to put a lot of of video examples in the show notes you'll have visual references for a lot of this but tuck hops it's a great exercise um there are different ways to practice this but tuck handstand is instead of having your body ram rod straight from your your hands all the way to your pointed toes at the very top you're you're basically bringing your knees to your chest or rib cage while you're in the handstand position with your feet still pointed but your heels kind of touching your ass is that a fair fair description I'd agree with that and I was having a lot of trouble with range emotion uh I just couldn't get low enough and so coach sent me an email which was you know Frank is one of my senior students here's a video of him working his tuck handstand compression while it's not exactly the same exercise this does provide a nice visual example now the part that stands out for me is what follows the video because I watched the video and I was like okay that's that's that's pretty solid uh and you said you he started roughly two years ago out of shape weak and rather pudgy on his first workout I believe that he failed three times 12 seconds bent hollow body hold and I mean there there are people on whe chairs that are stronger than that yeah and I I'm prob probably going to get the not going to do this exercise justice but I mean a a bent hollow body hold is effectively like imagine if you're in a in a crunch position on the floor right and then you put your arms yeah just kind of kind of pick your feet up like you were going to do a sit up except don't sit up yeah shoulders up a little off the ground feet off a little ground and then just try to rock back and forth that's it so he failed at 12 couldn't three sets that times 12 seconds couldn't do it not a chance fast forward two years and he's a beast now there there were two points there are two points here that really uh left to mark of me so the first was he's very consistent okay we've talked about that but here here's the part that I really liked so he never rushes through exercise and every time he gets stuck on a progression and is not able to break through that particular Plateau he simply drops all the way back to the first progression and begins working his way up so I want to try to illustrate this because this is a really cuz most people myself included will just bang their heads against a wall with the with the plateau movement right sure so let's let's take the tuck uh not sorry not the tuck but the uh the press handstand which we've been talking about as a great kind of bang for the buck objective because it incorporates so many different elements and attributes that you need to develop okay what would a series of progressions like four or five progressions for that look like and does it literally mean that if if if he couldn't get through movement five that he would drop all the way back to number one or would he go back to number two and number three he he'd go right back to number one okay now he might he might go to he might not start with uh the very week one programming of you know three by one rep he might he might drop back to uh week 11 you know where it's where we provide the programming where it's 5x5 and just demonstrate Mastery then next workout bump but B basically what what he's doing is if he failed on that exercise that means there was a in the armor somewhere there was a hole in the preparation there was a some deficit or super ad adapt a deficit that had been overlooked or some part of the body that had not yet super compensated so by stepping off so basically we want we want people to go through when they're in training to just be super simplistic we want their training to go through a period of overload where whatever they're doing is is kicking their ass okay it's hard it's intense and then without changing reps or sets right we want the body then to go into a period of load where that same amount of work that same load same exercise same rep same sets feels moderately difficult so it's it's feeling easier because the body's gotten stronger and then where people always cut it short where they where they undermine themselves here is they don't go into underload so to be super simplistic underload is Where damn I'm just not feel like I'm working very hard you're moving the same weight you're doing the same reps you're doing the same sets right but you're just you're just cutting it short what what people tend to do is they want to ride that Razor's Edge I did this much today I'm going to do this I'm going to do more next week that typical five pounds on the bar okay well that's that's great you know if that was the case I remember my first weighted pull-up workout I was excited I was excited way back when I was a teenager I came home I did my five pounds I pulled out my calendar did five pounds I'm going to do a pound every week I said holy I'm going to be pulling 1,500 pounds in a year man I'm world champion I'm world champion in the making well L linear doesn't work that way it doesn't work that way so what happens is that you hit you hit that point of where you're maxed out currently and then you got to step off and we got to give the body a chance to accommodate so for example you mentioned you mentioned Rob wolf Rob is a good buddy Rob super sharp for those of you who don't know he's a nutritional Guru check out his stuff yeah RB for people Robb yeah he's got he's got two bees there well you know Rob Rob is a high-intensity guy like you Tim and so I shared with him the year Allen One National so national champ imagine you've defeated the entire country right right there there's one champion and you're it everyone you kick their ass unbelievable Feeling Extreme extremely awesome well that year I didn't change anything on Allen's conditioning the entire year not not a damn thing I didn't change an exercise I didn't change a rep I didn't change a set not for that entire year so so so you mean that there for the for the progress resistance purists out there there there might be another way well but remember he wasn't the beginning and he wasn't a beginner at this point MH you know because a beginner right it it wouldn't do any good if I can do a a wall push-up inclined on the wall I mean Allen was strong he was already doing Hollow back presses you know rope climbs were for maintenance of healthy elbows yada yada yada but for that year I didn't change anything all that changed was work out that took an hour got to the point where it was taking 40 to 45 minutes at which point do your stretch and get out cu the less time you're in the gym the better okay because it's less wear and tear on the body think think of it you know when I hear when you mention you know people who love to be high intensity okay it's cool but the the analogy that comes to mind is someone who wants to be high intensity all the time it's like having a new set of tires and every time you come up to a stop sign you don't gradually break you SL slam those braks hard you skid do a stop every single stop sign how long is that pair of tires going to last it's not it's going to wear out pretty quick and the body now the body is not like tires it can rebuild itself as long as you don't put it too deep into a hole or physically break the structure damage the structure Beyond repair so you know as long as long as you show some degree of care you rebuild yourself but if you keep skidding to that stop every single day matter of time matter of time it's not if it's it's guaranteed so let's let's let's uh throw out a couple of I'll use another Automotive metaphor let's switch gears and I will ask just a couple of questions that I think people would love to hear answers to uh the first is someone's listens to this they're extremely excited to do gymnastics strength training and maybe they go out and they're like sampling different things from all sorts of different places um and you know of course I I have no bu I should say with full disclosure I have no Business Association I'm not getting any kind of affiliate anything from you I just am a am a real fan of how you train so I think people should check out apprciate your your your training programs but what exercises should people not attempt or just remove from consideration for the first say six months of gymnastic strength training probably o such a good question I I would say muscle ups I would say muscle ups um the issue becomes there's nothing wrong with the pull there's nothing wrong with the dip the the shoulders will adapt relatively quickly you know they'll get up on rings at first and they're shaking and that's simply because the stabilizers aren't used to the load but that'll adapt within you know two weeks four weeks they'll be fine the issue they run into is because their shoulder extension is weak they can't get the elbow behind the Torso so instead of doing a dip with body weight now they're trying to do a tricep extension with body weight completely different animal completely different animal that's you know they're kind of have their elbows can't go their elbows are trapped at their side and now their hands are in front of them and they're just trying to press thems up of course they're just trash in their elbow now some people okay we do see it some people have incredible joints that you can just pound and pound and pound and pound and pound nothing happens to them run them over with a car right all you're going to do is hurt your car everyone assumes they're that guy they're that woman the reality is you're not guys you are not that person if you were that person I would see you at training camps right now or you would be a celebrated professional level athlete so accept the fact that you're human and those are not your joints and so you you can't take that approach and have longevity it's not going to happen so okay so muscleups go out MUSC UPS go out now how how do they get around the muscle up how do they get cuz their elbows hurt they can't do a slow we need to build strength we got to do it slow right how how do they get around they do the Kipping muscle up okay well that gets me on top of the Rings but where I get the benefit of muscleups is through that transition as I'm going between the pullup through my chest up above that's where cross is that's where plange is that's where maltz is that's where all advanced ring strength is it's it's that strength when you when you see a gymnast right when you see him this summer at the Olympics right and we're we just as an aside guys we've got we've got some podcasts coming out for gymnastic body sorry Tim competing with you here that's all right and and we're we're going to talk some training right with with some of the Olympic guys and when when you see them right you are U you're going to see this massive musculature and it didn't come from push-ups and it didn't come from dips it it came from that advanced ring strength they do so if you're doing a skipping muscle up and you're going from below the Rings to on top of the Rings and it's gone you just skip the most beneficial part of the muscle up gone you waste it let me ask a related question because of course every four years uh I watch gymnastics I love watching gymnastics as do a lot of people and they go holy if I can get arms that look like that by hanging from a bar for an hour a day I need to start hanging from a bar how much of now we talked about the Rings how much of the musculature in the upper arm biceps specifically comes from straight arm work versus some form of bent arm work excellent excellent question so the majority of the massive biceps they see is going to come from the straight arm work uh we use so for example when the guys would uh at that level of training at that level of strength uh rope climbs for example so my my guys had to do a triple on a 7 meter rope so that's with no all rope climbs are done with no legs okay in GST we we do ropes without legs we get some people say know the Rope is used for transportation as soon as they take out the escalators in them mall and they put ropes in in place of it or they take the elevators out and they put ropes I'll buy that argument that we use a rope for transportation until that happens a rope is used for getting freaking strong that's right that that's the point of having a rope so they would they would in five minutes they would do a triple on a 7 m rope get in the back of the line do a double on a 7 meter get back in the line and do another and that'd be about 5 minutes worth of work okay now for them what we did notice and a lot of people missed this we're going to do two things here at once so for the maximal strength component of it it's the straight arm work Mt work in particular right just blows the body up uh and people listening don't just go into your garage and try a mtis on your rings well you can you can you can totally cuz I don't think malt will hurt you The Malt won't hurt you but you're landing on this concrete on your face underneath the Rings is probably going to hurt multis won't it's the sudden stop at the end that will be uncomfortable but uh now what we found out with the guys though is uh you know we did over the years the the weight vests the weights the heavy the heavy weighted rope climbs pull-ups nothing put better Mass on a bicep secondary from The Ring strength than high volume rope climbs nothing nothing blew them up now the key though is is for everybody listening if you go and you jump right into ropes right now and you haven't built a foundation of rows pull-ups multiplane pulling and then get to rope climbing right you're going to give yourself a raging case of elbow tendonitis yeah your elbows are GNA just yeah burn disintegrate y so like anything else you got to pay your dues but if you go through the proc ER steps and you're prepared to do rope climbs there there is nothing better because the bicep is an endurance muscle that that's its job right it its job isn't to how now it can do this but its primary function is not to how much can I do the heaviest load for one rep its primary function is go out and kill something pick it up and Carri it a long ass way back home that that's its primary job that's its primary job so it just blossoms from high volume work now the key is is that it's got to be high volume with a reasonably High load which on the Rope climbs is body weight but we we've got to build to that so two two things that I'll throw out there just because people might find it interesting so the first is you can build extremely muscular biceps this is not gymnastics related but with purely straight arm heavy heavy pulling in the deadlift uh combined with let's just let's just say you had one day of heavy pulling and by heavy I mean two to three reps like to the knees kind of like the Barry Ross protocol in the 4our body sure I like Barry Ross stuff no Ecentric you know drop it and then let's just say you do that on Mondays and then on Fridays or Thursdays whatever it might be you do higher rep kettle bell swings two armed kettle bell swings you can get really really muscular arms without doing any bent work whatsoever um and uh also when we're talking about and easy enough to switch that High rep kettle bell work to throw rope climb on Friday if you're Advanced enough if your elbows are bulletproof enough which mine are not as as an example for folks like I've done plenty of rowing but my when I have here's the difference though when I have a parallel grip right so if you all if you're like I can pull that I can do bent rose with the barbell with 225 pounds and or whatever and you think that you're the king of pulling if you don't do a lot of parallel grip work or fat bar work and then you go to a thick rope you're in for a surprise uh major surprise uh the maybe we should touch base on the uh difference real quick between the various grips yeah please okay so guys in in terms of GST specific strength if you're doing just pullup work your parallel grip is by far by far going to have the greatest return on investment uh simply because that parallel grip hits the break Alis so hard down in the elbow uh the reason we need that is when you climb a rope you're going to have more of a parallel grip you do that parallel GP pull-up obviously you're developing that when we're on the Rings we're on top of the Rings right because we always every everything is aimed for eventually getting onto the Rings to build strength so when you're on the Rings we need the grip turned out past parallel now back in the day Greg Glassman and I Greg is the you know he's a super bright guy founder of CrossFit but he just didn't understand why we would turn the Rings past parallel he he thought it was just Aesthetics coach it's just Aesthetics well the problem is if I'm on the Rings and I do a dip I do a muscle up I do whatever and I straighten my arms and I don't turn the Rings past parallel now coach I apologize for interrupting just for people to visualize this so let's just say you're on dips you're in between the straps you're do I'm sorry you're up on rings and you're doing dips and you're in between the straps what and correct me if I'm wrong here coach but when you get to the top that means top of the rep arms are straight top of the rep and your arms are straight that your the Rings themselves turn the thumbs out slightly that's right so instead of having the Rings parallel pointing Straight Ahead or turned in which is what most or turned in they would be at say 1000 p.m. and 2 p.m. or something like that exactly and it will vary as as long as they're out now the re the reason is is all streng what's the weak link and straight arm strength is the elbow the weak link is the elbow and what a lot of people will do is we we've had people who were taught well elbow pain is just part of doing ring strength no it's not elbow pain is an indicator that your ring strength is effed up and you need to do better programming M right it hurts for a reason and I I I took you off track though just because I wanted people to to visualize the proper thing so you were saying to Greg that when you get to the top you know the issue is it's not just Aesthetics when you get to the top it's not Aesthetics you've got to turn pass parallel so that the break Alice is activated right there's a reason that after all these years of CrossFit being on rings and doing thousands upon thousands of Kipping pull-ups and dips and all this stuff that there are no iron crosses unless they were a previous gymnast right there's no homegrown crossfitter who has an iron cross there's no Home homegrown crossfitter who has a PL or a malt because right from the beginning on those very basic movements they didn't turn past parallel they didn't didn't turn the Rings out the brachialis wasn't trained the brachialis is what supports the elbow when it's straight mhm so if it never got trained they can never move forward into the money-making exercises so that's why in those parallel those pull-ups if we use a parallel grip and it's easy enough to do some just just do a set right do a nice parallel a nice parallel grip workout and then compare the soreness that you feel on the inside of the elbow from fatigue right compared to regular chin-ups and regular pull-ups it it's night and day then then we would do chins and then pull-ups got it but so the the um other exercises to remove if any so we have muscleups back lever I MUSC love back lever any you would add to that list you know and this this one is is a little unfortunate it's uh and I don't know that it's so much of a removing as as uh deprioritizing yeah a cautionary tail so it takes it takes time to rebuild connective tissue and it's connective tissue right through through the ligaments and the joints that generate power through the body when they're doing plyometric work so there there was a rash of Achilles ruptures when there was a couplet done of H so they were doing Deads I believe with 225 lb s and then that was coupled with box jumps and they were doing that for Rounds okay and there's there's not a problem with either one of those in isolation the problem came when it was in a competitive environment with most of the adults right were in their their later 20s and in their 30s you know the typical people who are working out and because it's a race the box jumps turned into jumping down also which turned into rebounding applying metric off the floor cuz I got to get these done right I'm in a Race So they had pref fatigued the achilles with the deadlift and then went into the ply metric of the box jump nothing wrong with either one of them but in combination took some people out I think that there were like nine ruptures that year which is you know one okay it happens right ionov had had his Achilles he was one of the the leading guys we were looking to from Russia ion ianov former World Champ who he was he was the top guy that was favored to win the gold at the 96 games his Achilles popped walking across the parking lot now is it because walking across a parking lot is a dangerous thing and we should all avoid parking lots no it it just happened to be the last straw and it had been damaged prior to that which a long story short you went back to the front split series that is the very reason that there is that high rep calf work there to promote Achilles health because there is connective tissue can the tendons in that do not have their own blood supply okay so they they get fed they heal they strengthen through the muscles moving around them in gravity that's what flushes the area so if we only do very high high intensity low rep work there's not enough blood flow for them to be healthy and this this isn't mine R A friend of the Bulgarian Olympic coach for um the 70s and80s is a good friend of mine a genius genius at programming R and makes me look like a a tottering idiot who should be sat in the corner and no one talked to me what's his name I can never pronounce Ran's last name you guys can can look them up Bulgarian Olympic coach for the women 70s and 80s uh ran I I want to say our bastardized American spelling is uh r u m i n or M an uh sadly ran had a a really heavy accent so a lot of the American coaches you know they they didn't want to take the time to talk to them but you know I was a linguist in the mil way back when so accents not as good as you Tim but accents don't bother me so I would I would just pin and he was older gentleman I would keep this guy up late so many days in a row he he'd be Chris I I got to go get some that's okay just one more question just just one more question just one more so our our knee series that we do came from ran uh the one that oh no kidding yeah that I've been doing with the ski directly from R inside squads he he saw Allen when he was eight and Allen was incredibly powerful at 8 years old just just unreal and uh he was getting too powerful for his frame at that age you know about eight we're starting to hit a a preliminary growth spurt and uh ran gave me that knee series and it was about a week week and a half you know his knees weren't hurting they were starting to get slightly uncomfortable ran showed us that boom knee issues gone never never never again nothing with knees ever wow so I have uh we we could talk for hours and hours more uh but I I want to be respectful of your time and we can always do around two sometime if uh you have the the uh the willingness and uh if the audience wants wants more but I do have a couple of questions before I get into some of my usual rapid fire that I'd love to ask do you do you still have some time to chat I I'm you you've opened to can of worms I'll talk training all night all right here we here we go then the next question is uh from one of my listeners and it's it's quite simply how do you mentally prep your athletes for big competition uh when when you're down to that you know you go to the Nationals or any any competition but specifically big competitions how do you and by by prep I mean mentally prep like the the day of is there anything in particular that you do it's it's it's very it's very different um it kind of so it starts with repetition so we we talked a little bit about training so in in a nutshell we we'll come back around and we'll fill this out so in the preparation prior right successful repetitions right it takes a certain number of repetitions to lead to competence and it's competence that leads to confidence and that's what leads to a successful competition so as As Americans right we we tend to be in a rush be in a hurry we we don't want to take a lot of reps we want to get something we do it correct a few times and then we want to bump on completely different from the Chinese approach completely different from the Russian approach where they'll literally do hundreds of repetitions before they move on to the next drill and then they're not upset about it because they understand it's a process as Americans we tend to we're always look now it's it's both a good thing and it's a curse one it's a good thing because it forces us to be so creative we're so hard charging we get so many things done physically sometimes it it kind of works against us because we don't give the body and the nervous system a chance to stabilize so if you want to be confident at a competition you have to pay your dues and prep example and that's mentally and and physically for example 72 Olympics okay and these are I was talking about this with Demetri bowera my friend World in Olympic champ so in 72 Olympics Olga Corbett was by all accounts going to crush everyone at the games she was going to crush everyone in training as they went back and the Russians went back and they reviewed all her training she had over a 98% hit rate on her routines that meant she was almost perfect almost perfect when she went to the games she had a major meltdown now the question of course raises how is it possible for someone who was this perfect for this long in training to go to the competition and just fall apart as they dug into it they found out the error was not in physical preparation the error was in mental preparation so as Olo was cranking at home she was the one who decided when to go coaches waited on her judges waited on her everything was structured on her she was very comfortable okay she didn't start till she was ready equipments she's ready for lighting she's ready for Bings familiar everything is good when you get to the worlds and you get to the Olympics judges don't give a if you're ready or not when they raise that flag yeah it's it's brutal it's brutal in fact to give everyone a little taste okay the warm-up gym is not there the warm-up gym might be 10 minutes away or it might be a 10-minute walk a five minute walk down this concrete hallway so you go and you warm up you walk down this hallway right and then your ass Waits there and then the flag goes up and you got to go to 100% within 30 seconds you got 30 seconds to be on the equipment massive head game yeah massive head game so they went back and they found out that Olga's problem was that everything had gone her way she controlled too many variables too many variables and it was they were too easy they were too accommodating and so what they did is the Russians changed their training just to screw with people so if I'm coaching someone right and it's going there's going to be a mental component I'm going to with them right I'm going to tell them and not not in a mean way but all right you're up and then walk away yeah leave them waiting you know let them let them get antsy make them go when they're not ready make them do a cold set okay don't don't let any any and everything you can have a crowd of people around them trying to mess with them any and everything and and I will also say it's it's much harder for women than it is for guys simply because women are more caring nurturing them guys a guy goes out to compete and he's worried about one thing he's worried about kicking ass okay the girl goes out there and she's worried about kicking ass also but she's also worried about not wanting to let anybody down are they going to be disappointed with me are they going to like me she has this whole range of other emotional burdens that a guy doesn't give a about they they just don't care I've seen girls who are just amazing in training and get out there and just because they have this other load that they place on themselves that got guys don't have to deal with and the way you handle that in training is we just have to get more reps in right you got to have more reps and do everything you can to put them in a situation to where for example 2004 I was doing uh some of the prep I was doing some of the floor and the and helping with Vault and doing the physical preparation for a girl we had trying out for the Olympics she did not make it she did not make you had to be top six she was ninth okay and Carly fantastic girl great girl they uh their approach though for mental training I thought was flawed they brought someone in and you know I I won't say names I'll just I'll just say that I disagreed and it was it was a very they were trying to be really really positive so you know 30,000 foot gym big giant yes signs everywhere yes you can yes it'll be great yes it'll be wonderful and the reality is it's not going to be wonderful it's going to be stressful it's going to suck when you are in a competition at that level the pressure is is crushing it's it's a physical pressure that you feel on you and you still have to produce performance at a world class level and the only way to handle that is we have to try to replicate that in training right so that the pressure is not going away the error that was done with Carly was trying to downplay the pressure I would say do the exact opposite do the opposite you should go to the training to the competition and hopefully competition is less pressure than what you go through in training now that's not going to be true at Olympics and such but at most things it should be the case should be the case so mentally if you're scared well let's let's say if you're feeling unconfident if you're feeling threatened uneasy your your preparation was flawed well that's it brings up an anecdote that I heard from uh Paul lavesque better known as Triple H the professional wrestler who's also an incredible uh business executive for WWE but he visited uh let me get this right why am I blanking on his name I've I've caught whatever you you you were you were dealing with earlier uh not Roy Jones very famous boxer uh Floyd Mayweather that's it okay and he visited Floyd uh maybe an hour before huge title fight for a championship belt or to retain his belt and at one Point uh Paul said you know I'm I'm going to leave I don't want to interrupt your prep and he goes why would you interrupt my interrupt my prep he goes if I'm not ready now nothing I do between in the next 60 Minutes is going to make me ready he said yeah I love that attitude yeah feel free to hang out he was just walk watching basketball or something and uh you know it also you brought up the uh the Seal Team Six members and so on earlier I mean that's I think a great example of a parallel track right in the sense that they very much want to sweat more more in some cases bleed more in training so that they can avoid dying in real battle so the simulations are extremely brutal uh and intended to be sort of along the lines of and I'm I'm not not really up on my ancient name pronunciation but I think it's archelus uh who said we do not rise the level of our hopes we fall to the level of our training um so perect so making the conditions equivalent yeah my my buddy would tell he they were so well trained no stress now how how in the world you can be in 145 gunfights and not feel stress when you're heading out to another one you just yeah fall asleep on the helicopter get out go do my thing and get back on seriously he's like oh yeah I mean gosh you just just another day in the office holy moly so so on the day on the day of assuming you've done the requisite preparation you've you've you've condition them to perform well under stressful circumstances any type of change change nothing change nothing change nothing where where people fail okay so this this is then this this is an important lesson not just in competing but in everything so a lot of people psych themselves out of doing as well as they could have by prematurely comparing themselves to the people around them in instead of just go out take care of your business do your best and see where it falls right if if you're going up against the best who's ever been born right you're you're not going to beat them there's not going to be a miracle the sky is not going to open God's not going to reach down and bless you with extra athletic ability you know it's it's it's not going to happen so you just you just ignore that you know you go out and you just stay in your own head do your thing now psychologically people handle it differently some people right we have we have the same the same chemistry on Olympic teams some people like to be left alone you know let let me go do my thing you know they'll come together for the team but then when they're prepping for their set you know they got to go off on their themselves there's other guys where they feed off that interaction right they they want people coming around and getting them pumped up and then there's all in between none of them are right and none of them are wrong it just is what it is and it's important to just deal with who you are same in training right there are some people who thrive on multiple training per day right and they they just Blossom they do awesome there's other people who have to train just a few times a week does it doesn't matter there's been Olympic Champions who trained both ways it just depends on what your body does best with if if you were sending a I'm very curious to hear the answer to this this was from a I think it was a it might have been a mother I think it was a father who said uh what question would coach summer ask a gymnastic coach at you know a a nearby facility before sending his own 5 to 10 year-old off to train with them yeah and I I went through that so I did I didn't coach my daughter I didn't coach my daughter I wanted to be dad and uh you know I I didn't get involved were there things I would have done very differently yes but uh her happiness in the process was more important to me than her success and she was state champion but that was more important to me than stepping in and making sure everything was world class level I I didn't want to go there um first thing I would do if I'm reviewing someone because everyone have you noticed that if we look the bell curve is reality right the bell curve shows that there there's a huge majority of people who are average there's a few who are at the top and there a few who are at the bottom but if you talk to someone you've never met anyone who says yeah I'm in the middle of the bell curve every talk to is exceptional every single person right every person is another millionaire in the making they're another they're going to win The Voice they got Academy Award it's coming nobody says yeah I'm average and it's the same thing with gyms so first thing I would do is look at competitive record how have they done and at what level have they been successful so are they successful at a local level at a state level how have they done in terms of regionals how have they done in terms of Nationals uh are they on national team how can consistently have they been on national team is a year in year out was it a onetime deal after I look at that the very next thing I'm going to look at I'm going to look at injury rates you know how how healthy and successful are these athletes how would you find that data or would you just ask them Point Blank oh well they're if if they're if they're a worldclass coach they're always going to be straight with you the only people in my experience who talk are the wannabes yeah that's consistent in everything that I've experiened in everything I I had so 2003 uh yeah it's 2003 I'm at a training camp and Paul ham has just won the World Championships he's just won worlds and Allen is a little guy we're we're at a training camp and Paul's coach Stacy Maloney is there and we're we're at a technical meeting and it's on roundoff it's on roundoff of all things and so Stacy comes and he sits down next to me says Chris what what do you think about this now in my head I'm thinking who gives a would I think about this you just won World Championships I want to know what you think about this but he asked my opinion I don't say I'm not going to be rude Stacy but in my head I'm thinking that so we talk about it for a little bit and then Stacy gets up and he goes around the room visiting with other coaches that he respect and he wants their opinion and then he he makes his own opinion that a he had just one worlds it would been so easy for him to be kind of aloof and snoody and arrogant you know I'm this and that but the the the point is that that's the reason that Casey that Stacy won worlds that he was a coach of that caliber because he was always open to learning more he never said I know everything right and like you said I've never met an exception it's it's the ones who aren't at a high level who think you know I know everything there's nothing left to be learned and it's just not the case so I I would I would check that check around you know talk to people watch the athletes in training you know go go and watch some workouts how does the coach handle it is there a lot of Tears know if it's if it's if it's a guy and there's tears in the workout he's got a broken leg right the first and girl girls you know girls are girls I I live in a I've got two daughters a wife even my dog is female there's there's tears here constantly that's just part of being female so if it's an occasional tear no big deal but if there's a lot of crying all the time there's a problem I I'd move down the road but if if they're happy now healthy doesn't mean a free-for-all healthy and happy doesn't mean indulging you know there should be structure there should be accountability but it should be pleasant you know kids kids or any athlete adult as well we either live up to the standard you set or they will live down to the standard you set so I can just kind of go in and try to try to get a feel you know is this a place where you want is the competition record is good is this an environment M that I'm content with my child being in you know if you get a good feeling okay as an adult if you were assessing a gymnastics coach for yourself and you could observe a workout uh let's just say you could only watch the warmup what would excellent what would you look for to be there or not be there or what would the characteristics be do they do they take the time to warm up the joints or do they jump right into work you know do they actually take time to mobilize are they doing stal bar work are they doing Jefferson curl work are they are they loosening up their wrists and their knees and their ankles you are they loosening their back before they get going are they doing some type of pre- strength are they doing lower level strength elements to get the muscles warm and firing before jumping into the hard work a lot you can tell a lot from how a program warms up no that's what I was asking and I remember great question yeah there's I mean there's a movement that also from an evolutionary standpoint makes a lot of sense just like we were talking about the biceps and high high capacity for volume the ql walks which you introduced me to which if you really want to have people laugh at you this is a this is a this is a great move to do uh although you had mentioned and this doesn't surprise me at all that's that You' you've seen highle powerlifters using doing this that's where that's where I got it from holding on to kettle bells kind of with a goblet squat type of grip so what this looks like folks we've already talked about this this seated Pike position so you're sitting on your ass legs together legs straight so basically keeping your legs completely straight if there are other if there other elements please let me know coach technical points but basically you're like walking your ass cheeks uh across the back and back and forth you look you look like a doing a speed walking sitting down yeah that's actually the that's a great description that's exactly what it looks like and uh you uh ql Rel I say refers to the I screw it up yeah quadrus quad lorum yeah quadrus lorum which is sort of like the Grand Central of all sorts of muscles and fascia in the back and uh it's incredible how much that loosens up my entire lower back and hips um doing this very very simple ql walk but um I'll pick up gosh sometimes 3 four Ines oh yeah just just from loosening up from those first yeah on a pike and the uh you know how long should a proper gymnastics warm-up take and and one more which is warming up the joints are there any specific movements that that hit the shoulders from any angle or or perspective that would see that would indicate a better warm-up for gymnastics strength training than others okay it would depend on duration duration of the workout so if you're if you're in there for an hour yeah I'll preface it say you're in for an hour I would say probably 10 to 15 minutes is reasonable now at the same time if I have significant Mobility deficits then perhaps the majority of the workout needs to be Mobility work so it kind it could kind of shift possibly as high as a half hour if I have a multi-hour training coming up it's it's complicated enough and we we've tried this over the years there there are enough things to address that that should be addressed on a semi-regular basis that you can't really get everything into a single warmup so you're probably going to have two or three variations you know if you're doing advanced work you're probably going to have two or three variations in order to get to everything like for example ring strength before a good hard ring strength it's very nice to do theraband series for the shoulders you know different different shapes and poles and circles and all these things with thean are really great for warming up the interior of the shoulder on other days do I need to do that as much for shoulder no it might be more weighted shoulder work is appropriate for other days is it necessary to do all of them at the same time most of the time no uh we have one senior student really really good uh Matt started training with me in his late 40s uh he's now 52 Beast press handstands ples uh front levers uh at 52 ridiculous shape and um he went through a period where just for shoulders to feel better he did every shoulder prep we had all our integrated Mobility our courses are set up very unusually where for our introductory courses uh the students the adult students come in alternate an exercise with an integrated Mobility because we want them 50/50 so we found if I if I told people how important stretching was they always blew me off but if I required it do a set and before your next set you have to do this stretch then back and forth and we just had great results so Matt's is uh crazy maniac Still Still skateboards still water skis does all does his GST and uh shoulder would get a little finicky so he just did extra mobility and it it just fixed his shoulder right up I was introduced to a an exercise by a master's CrossFit competitor actually that really helped with shoulder I would say warmup more than Mobility but for pressing exercises even in GST including any type of hand balancing or handstand work which you have to have a decent amount of grip strength for this but I I was very skeptical skeptical of this even as is someone who's done a lot with kettle bells I I've never been a huge fan of the bottoms up work with kettle bells meaning ah yeah it's got it flipped up you're gripping it by the handle the Bell on top exactly but this I I was like you know what screw it I'll try it with a lightweight you I started with say whatever it is might be like 15 16 PBS and i' I've I've increased that Ed 35s now but a little bit of chalk goes a long way here but you you would uh you basically swing it up to a clean and then press it overhead and then you just do rotations so I'm doing like side to side rotations and it's incredible how well that activates these smaller muscul destroys the shoulders wonderful isn't it oh it's great we didn't do them with kettle bells we'll do them with uh light dumbbells so basically guys what what Tims is driving is just take take a dumbbell push it up overhead turn turn The thumbs externally rotate it just a bit and then just do outward circles and uh keep a flat back shoulders open no arching and uh do them for time one to two minutes and we'll just good gracious wonderful warmup and then you know something we didn't address and I'll throw it in just real real real quick I know I know we're running out of time but um some people who are experiencing shoulder issues in terms of Mobility has nothing to do with the shoulder or necessarily the bicep but sometimes it's because the lats are so strong and tight and so that's an issue that I have absolutely yeah exactly a lot of because and a lot of the lifters too because those those lats are working all right you guys are moving some serious weight and those lats are of course working and if there's not a corresponding Mobility going with it it's real easy for those lats to kind of get chronically contracted and lose their Mobility so a lot of times you get in there and just stretch the heck out of that lat automatically get relief on the shoulders okay Coach I yeah I am going to do a couple of rapid fire then a couple of closing questions and then maybe uh I mean you and I are talking quite a bit these days so we we consider doing a followup and I'm I definitely want to share the um sort of the results of our experiment with people also so we'll certainly be in constant contact but the the first rapid fire question is and the answer doesn't have to be short but it certainly can be when you think of the word successful who is the first person who comes to mind for you and why wow good question well it's not Obama it's not Obama piss all the people off out there ah you know someone I have admired for years and years is U Tony Robbins so he he would be very high on my list uh I tend to be very eclectic I'm not uh not trapped just in athletics what I found in terms of uh business Arts politics it it's it's all the same when when people get to that level of success they they all have the same attitudes they bring the same tools and attitudes to the table and um I I found it surprising that I I can sit down I can sit down with you Tim and visit I can sit down with special operators and visit and uh I can sit down with uh you know world class ballerinas and dance and artists and that I just did this weekend visit with a world class artist and we all you would think there's no Common Ground there but there is common ground because what's required to achieve success in all of those requires the same skills you got to be consistent you got to master the basics you got to be patient right you got to constantly reinvent yourself look look for a flaw a hole in the preparation fix it move forward you also have to be very observant and I think part of training yourself to be observant is I like that asking questions right so I think that's why and being willing to hear the answer definitely that's why you take a bunch of people who are the best of what they do and you put them in the room generally speaking they're going to get along just fine absolutely uh the now why Tony Robbins I mean I'm a huge fan of Tony Robbins he's he's been on the podcast um and I I've tremendous amount of respect for him but I want to just hear your reasons I like I like that I I firmly believe especially in the US I firmly believe that if if someone isn't as successful in any Arena you toss it out whether it's professionally personally in your life uh financially if you're not as successful as you would like to be or making progress towards that it's our own fault we have we have so many opportunities here that gosh so so much wealth of knowledge that a lot of times so for example when GB got started okay there were two years a year and a half two years in the beginning where I was doing 18h hour days and didn't make a nickel nothing and everyone around me was like what are you doing well you know I've got plans for this and we talk about a little bit and they're like well you know if you need some extra money you could go get a job think about how much further ahead you'd be right now but you kind of you have to have that Vision right and then you once you have the vision you've got to be able to put practical steps to it and then everyone's good at that I outline people outline stuff all the time but then can you stick with it right because when you you know when you run your business Tim when I run my business there's no one telling us what to do right we're the ones who monitor our so this needs to be done I'm going to get it done and it's kind of that difference between letting someone else being in control of your life and you choosing to be in control of your own life now and I and I this I know some people are going to get upset coach you know I'm a single mom it's this it's that I can't I can't do everything I want to do and I get that I get that I've been in there I've gone through that and I'm not I'm certainly not saying there are there are quick fixes cuz these fixes can take years but I think if someone's willing to put the time in that there's so much opportunity and they're willing to do that four years right that you know it's kind of a big giant blank check a lot can change you really have a lot of control and so that that was a message that you know and I I didn't say it nearly as well as Tony Robbins does and I am going to twist your arm so I get an introduction someday to Tony That's How am list yeah well I I threw a little jam session for for the people who are on the podcast so both of you will be invited totally awesome I'm so looking forward to that but you know way back when you know poor as could be uh hadn't been hadn't made national team coach yet was just getting starting in my coaching career uh everything that could go wrong went wrong and uh here here's this guy saying you know what just uh think clear plan ahead and be willing to work and that that resonated with me that resonated with me and uh you know it it's like God I just had this discussion with someone this morning you know they you're young it's uh it's so challenging it's so difficult to be patient or you're 35 and you're starting to get back in shape again and the hardest thing they need to do is they they've got to especially if they were a good athlete previously you've got to set that attitude of having been a stud before aside because that body you have right now is not that studs body that you had previously it it could be again but it took time to build it the first time it's going to take time to rebuild it this time or personally in your life if things aren't where you want them to be it's going to take time to build it there yeah right I had this uh I had this Olympic weightlifting coach uh who uh I think you guys would hit it off famously especially if if you were both a couple drinks in but uh it's Danger very very similar uh approaches and uh he said you have a Ferrari engine in a Toyota Corolla chassis he that's I love that he said you can't just slam on the accelerator and expect good things to happen but uh yeah t Tony's very tactical practical and I apologize if you if you and everybody else can hear uh metal bows being spun around that's what my dog Molly does when she's trying to tell me that she's hungry she just lick an empty empty bowl and sends it spinning I'm like yes I get it I know you're hungry uh but being subtle yeah being very subtle uh what book or books have you given the most to other people as gifts oo I like that one now you know it it's not so much as I'm a big fan of uh Robert heinan oh yeah fic Stranger in a Strange Land and all just just all of them I I come back to those over and over again the uh the theme of uh self-reliance you know CU I I came from a really really humble modest family background and so I think that instills a hunger and a work ethic it's a little bit kind of a kind of embarrassing actually it's a little bit of a Charles Dickens theme there you know it's frustration thing things weren't where we wanted them to be or where I wanted them to be and then you know how big a price how hard are you willing to work in order to change it um one I'm enjoying right now and I'm just getting into it is uh the obstacle is the way oh yeah by Ryan holiday very close friend of mine you're killing me dude you're killing me oh yeah I'm just going to hang out in your living room so I can meet all these people oh yeah yeah no you and Ryan would hit it off oh yeah that's that's a great book I actually this is a really small world so I actually produced the audio book for that are you kidding me wow and I you know when you were talking about preparing your athletes for the stress as opposed to paint you know painting it over with yes you can and positive psychology and really kind of sewing the seeds of their own destruction by doing so I was thinking about stoic philosophy so it it doesn't surprise me that you're reading the obstacles the way which has become this an extremely popular book among professional sports teams and coaches I mean the Patriots Seahawks they they've all read this um some someone else that that caught my eye who had read and that led me to it was Schwarzenegger oh yeah yeah yeah gosh I mean comes comes to the states with no money in his pocket and then and then becomes world champion in athletics becomes a millionaire in business becomes a movie star and becomes a governor success in four different Arenas in life oh yeah good Lord so he said he said he liked that book I was like well good enough for me yeah Arnold's a he's an impressive unit would so two things that I know we're bouncing around here but two things that also astonish me when uh when I interviewed him for the podcast was number one I didn't realize in doing the research um until I did the research that he became a millionaire before he ever had his first starring role in real in real estate yes and absolutely that gave him the ability to only audition not out of financial necessity but for the roles that he wanted so he could say no and uh that his highest grossing film of all time for him personally was twins because no one wanted to make it and so he took a cut on The Upfront payment for the salary per se to in exchange for backend points that were abnormally large for the film for the film industry at that point yeah fascinating guy um love that uh let's see what uh do you have any particular morning rituals what is the first minutes of your day the morning rituals I'm supposed to do no the ones the ones that you actually have or don't have I I tend to find as I've gotten older because I'm in I'm in my 50s now early 50s as as I've gotten older I find that my uh by far my most productive times are early morning that's when I'm I'm sharpest I'm clearest so I'll I'll tend to get up you know pretty early before everybody else in the household is up and I'll get when do you get up uh it it varies I'll get up somewhere usually between 4 and 5 and uh you know it gives me a chance my girls get up in a few hours that gives me a chance for that two three hours of just clear thought you know may maybe it's working on a project maybe it's a new manuscript you know may maybe it's just you know I indulge some reading the house is quiet and then um I do my best if after that girls head to school and then I get my workout in and if I if I'm consistent with that then my rest rest of my day is usually pretty golden yeah you've already you've already won I remember somebody said to me if you win the if you win the morning you've won the day still working on it that's work in progress but I I definitely agree with that uh do you drink coffee do you do you eat breakfast do you drink coffee you know that's that's I I went for years and you know you're always told I'm not a coffee drinker I'm one of those few I think who it just tastes like cough medicine to me and so it's it's not it's not me being virtuous it's just me me despising the taste so my my wife is and it's funny because my wife is a big coffee drinker she loves it so she's got her Gourmet grinder and all this stuff and but for me no no way uh what was the second question Tim breakfast do you drink breakfast or drink breakfast do you eat breakfast you know I I found as I got older that uh I I do best if I don't do breakfast I do best as uh I used to be heavy heavy protein and then uh after I got over 50 if I cut and this is me personally would it work for younger athletes who are training I doubt it it's bigger engine need more fuel but for me older it's slowing down I find that uh not doing breakfast uh reasonable lunch my my protein sizes are so much smaller now mostly vegges have a good healthy starch usually it's rice or potatoes reasonable little protein there some fat at lunch wait do the same at dinner you know and I'm I'm done I'm good I'm I was amazed how much I was overeating just from habit oh yeah yeah eating by the clock I mean I've noticed the same thing for myself and I mean there it's I've been amazed how many people I've interviewed for this podcast who are the best at what they do who do not eat breakfast um you're kidding really I thought I was alone in the pav you know his answer was coffee Tim I keep it simple you know and then Wim Hoff same story uh you look at Stan the general St or former General Stam Crystal same story and it just goes on and on and on I'd say a good third of the men specifically uh not sure if the female body responds as well to it although I'm sure there are intermittent fasting people out there who would who would say that that uh women respond in the same way but um very high percentage I'd say maybe a third of the men I've had on the podcast do not eat breakfast now specifically these are men probably over the age of 45 so I don't know I I would imagine their diet has probably changed over time and interestingly enough if you do dig into the literature there is uh or if I want to be a nerd there are data to suggest that as we get older uh it is possible that we absorb protein more effectively when we have larger doses of protein less frequently so having see that is interesting that is very interesting because I find myself every once in a while getting a big stake yeah you know once a week once every two weeks I'll go and I'll just get this massive thing of protein and then I'm then I'm good for a while with just very modest mhm yeah so this like bolus of protein for like older women I think this I saw one particular study could have been an observational and now I now I doubt it if they were trying to standardize the protein amount but it was some large amount it was like 70 80 grams of protein in a single feeding was absorb better than that same amount split over several meals in the day really fascinating stuff um what would you put on a billboard if you could put a billboard anywhere what would it say just what's on just what's on top of my mind right now yeah what's top of the head doesn't have we're not looking for universal truth but just what's uh I would say probiotic probiotic probiotic we went uh I don't know if it was a history of I had to cut them out you know too much Margaritas uh you know and it's kind of funny you know as you get older it starts creeping in more and more and more but I went through a phase where it didn't matter what I ate didn't matter what I ate if I ate fat if I ate low fat if IE veg if I ate high protein terrible digestion just terrible digestion and I happen to come across something that that said if you have da d d d da might be a probiotic issue and so through a through a good buddy I had a laboratory grade uh these particular ones were from CLA Labs you kind of need a prescription for them but they're laboratory grade probiotic spell CLA I want to say it was k l a i r e got it okay and no I'm not paid by them guys and they're son of a to track down cuz you need a prescription for him and I got to get him a health provider but uh hooked me up in 12 hours and so I uh I was like holy moly cuz i' i' I'd been uncomfortable for months and in 12 hours this this took care of it uh contacted a buddy of mine who uh you know great great at uh nutrition he went over say you know coach you you should go ahead and probably take you know two four weeks and just really hit these prob biotics hard and repopulate the gut you know years of too much Margaritas uh too much protein not enough ve vegetable matter to to feed the good bacteria and S of a gun night night and day difference I I bet simply because of that I dropped 8 pounds yeah I bet I mean uh I I'm currently taking vssl 3 and a few other probiotics but the one of the points you made that I think is really worth underscoring is the vegetable matter and prebiotics so providing the food that creates the environment in which bacteria that you want to grow can grow effectively whether that's through Foods where I think you know one of the ways I had this uh biologist tell me at one point he said I think slow carb is going to be Vindicated because you know the beans and lentils and so on are vilified by paleo but they provide the perfect uh they they provide the perfect vehicle for a a a pre biotic environment that can foster the development of and growth of these various bacteria in the gut and if not that you know if you're if you are a Paleo purist you could also consume something like Foss you know fructooligosaccharides or enin or any of these other things but um wow I had no idea that you had that experience uh yeah it was it was shocking prior to that I would have said Number One supplement was auli vitamin D Drops how much were you consuming just out of curiosity and of course the amount you take depends on what your levels look it depended yeah just just a little background there so I I was at U our winter National 7 years ago and uh just kind of the environment you know national team kids everywhere middle of the winter it's always in a February and I I would just get sick really bad kind of bronchitis like sickness once or twice a year for gosh decades and at one of these I was I was half dead and uh my assistant coach is trying to run my athletes he's doing his best but it's not going real well I'm I'm hanging under I'm trying to coach hanging over a railing and I'm visiting with Rob wolf later that night and I'm just like you know this this is ridiculous and and Rob's the one who tagged you said coach you know it's it's always in the middle of the winter try some try some vitamin D and uh I started the liquid vitamin D I have not been if we don't count food poisoning in Hong Kong I I've not been sick since from yeah and that and that's quite a swing you know once or twice pretty serious per year to nothing for seven and the only thing that changed in that time was the was the vitamin D so I I ABS I'm you know I'm pretty pretty practical if that was the one variable I changed and that was the result well boom that's that's the doorstep I put it at what do you have a particular brand that you use for that I want to say I I've looked at it so many years I just kind of pick it up off the shelf now I want to say it was Biotest perhaps mhm got it and so I can't I can't swear about other ones I just know I've always used that particular one I've done gosh all kinds of different protocols from one or two drops a day it's like it's like a runny Elmer's glue for those who haven't had it uh yeah it's the The Taste isn't you know anything to get upset all my daughters when they were young disagreed they said worst thing in the world it it's it's not bad at all uh we've done uh daily a few drops all the way up to once or twice a week with uh 8 to 10 drops mhm you know and just mix it up it just seems like you know as long as you're consistent it almost doesn't matter yeah so I'm guessing each of those drops is probably an IU and one international ah gosh it seems like um and I'm I'm tired of the computer right now I I'd go grab it for it it seems like the dosage is surprisingly high in each drop and you know I'm I'm a big fan especially as you get older you you got to go get blood work and anything else is guessing yeah you need to get blood work period I mean if you get your if you get your car checked out more often then you get your blood work done then you need to rearrange your priorities uh so last uh last question and this is where I'd like you to certainly uh among other things Point people to where they can learn more about you in gymnastic bodies but uh What uh what ask or request would you have for my audience for the people listening I'm I'm not understanding the question so the question they're actually kind of two separate things so one is outside of gymnastics uh gymnastic bodies and and the work that you're up to and pointing people to that do you have any ask or request for the people listening I mean there are going to be um hundreds of thousands at the very least in the first week maybe millions of people listening to this what would you like them to think on do or consider oh okay very good actually I love that question I I would like them to consider two things I would like them to consider where's the fire where's the fire where where's the rush where's the rush why are they trying to accomplish everything their current goals yesterday why why not slow down a little bit not saying not to work hard but why don't we just slow down a little bit little more reasonable Pace some more consistency so that that that would be number one ask and then second one is mobility whether it's my material whether it's just the stuff that Tim posts for you whether it's someone else's material you know it's it's fine with me guys but we've we've got to get those bodies moving we've got to get natural range of motion back again that that alone if we did the hierarchy what will increase quality of life the fastest for them is going to be Mobility first then core then you know your more conventional strength your arms your shoulders yada yada yada and and where can people find you online on social media Etc what what would you recommend as the next step for somebody who's never done gymnastics anything who wants to dip their toe in the water uh first thing go to gymnasticbodies.com uh now we are we are putting uh we have a special landing page for your for your listeners Tim with a nice discount Forum but we we have a nice introductory program uh that's just gymnastic bodies g y m n a s t c b o d ies.com SL Tim and we got we got a nice discount there for you for a nice intro program uh it's about a 24-day program uh gentle introduction to kind of the language we speak get started on some Mobility some great follow along videos for them you know kind of hold their hand make sure they get started off on the right foot yeah it's a it's been a tremendous learning experience for me so far and it's it's only been I mean really a handful of weeks that we've been digging into this deeply although we had some prep time and talking about it prior to that uh and uh definitely guys if you are like ah you know I'm I'm I'm so busy I'm doing this that and the other thing take a look at the program but at the very least follow gymnastic bodies on Instagram and every time you see a video from a student uh who seems to throw one of your excuses at the window like take a take a second and just admire what someone has done from scratch like Matt who you mentioned who started in his late 40s uh because awesome like one by one if you just watch that Instagram account for a week you will run out of excuses uh very very very very quickly uh what about uh Elsewhere on social media is there anywhere else people can say hi to you our uh Facebook page is gymnasticbodies.com little little more proper there uh my personal page Christopher Summer s o m m r um a little more no rules there and I'm I'm not insane but my my interests are wide ranging so if you come to my page you uh you're taking your chances what I'm going to torture you with that day so it it might be conditioning or it might be you know what I I think such such is kick ass and I like it so you're going to like it too and you you do throw up some some ridiculous uh in the best way possible videos of Just monsters doing some absurd absurd stuff I mean who is the Gent you sent me you encourage me to check this out this guy who was going from you were trying to explain the uh let me get this right uh I want to say plate planches that I was doing a while back which are kind of like a front raise holding onto a plate with the shoulders super super protracted and the massive uh posterior pelvic tilt oh I sent I sent you that clip of the World Champ on rings it was it might have been I think you you sent me of one of Van gelder on rings and then you sent me one of this guy on parallel bars going from again okay going from the handstand to the uh the uh the straight body plch just oh God full body weight instead of 10 we do it we do it with 10 or 25 pounds he was doing it with full body weight oh my God how do you how do you uh spell van gelder Yuri Yuri so it's Yuri uh van gelder I think he's from Netherlands if I'm remembering right former World Champ uh v n space g l d r just monster oh my god oh such so just crazy strong and not I mean doesn't look like a small guy either I mean no he's a big boy he's got like two people's back he has got a wide back yeah so people should check that out and I'll link to everything in the show notes uh well coach thank you so much for the time uh I know it's precious and I I think people will get a real kick out of this and we crammed a lot into the talk so we did talk a lot it was good so I look forward to chatting again soon which I'm sure we will do and to everybody listening uh you can find all of the links to everything that I can track down that my team can track down uh related to all the topics we covered uh links to coach everywhere gymnastic bodies everywhere in the show notes uh that'll just be at 4hourworkweek dcommp podcast uh all spelled out 4work week.com podcast and as always and until next time thank you for listening [Music] hey guys this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is five bullet Friday do you want to get a short email from me would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that I've discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend so if you want to receive that check it out just go to 4hourworkweek domcom that's 4hourworkweek all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one and if you sign up I hope you enjoy it this episode is brought to you by Exo protein it's one of the startups that I work with I love what they do these guys are making protein bars using Cricut protein powder and before you screw your face up and look disgusted I bet they taste better than any protein bar you've ever had before I devour These Bars after lifting sessions I take them with me 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with limited inventory and they sell out all the time that is what happened last time I mentioned them so check it out exoprotein [Music] docomo Entertainment Sports and beyond all have some type of meditative practice I tried for years and years and failed miserably the key is making it simple and you can dramatically improve your life in just 10 minutes a day and Technology can help you this change comes through guided meditation and heads SPAC is by far the most popular app for this purpose more than 4 million users it's meditation Made Simple so what I recommend is that you take this practice meditation which is rooted in thousands of years of tradition supported by thousands of scientific studies and try it for 10 minutes a day for 10 days that's all you need to do you could also check out the founder Andy pom's uh Ted Talk which has more than 5.5 million views his last name is p d d i c o mde e if you want to look that up but otherwise download the free headspace app I have it on my phone and begin their take 10 program for 10 days of guided meditation completely free 10 minutes a day that's all it takes you should give it a shot headspace.com just go to headspace.com and until next time thank you for listening [Applause]