Fitness Philosophy with Michael Blevins (Part 1)

0:00Barbell training is bad for you. I still kind of like don't think that and also hold that idea almost possible. Like whenever I, you know what I mean? Like both are true. But I know it's like, it's what goes behind training with the barbell. It has a bad objective most of the time, as opposed to like an exploratory objective. It has a false premise of arrival. Like once I do this, I will be good. And instead, it seems like the straightness of the bar and the hardness of the steel is what enables or fortifies like the concept behind training with it. It's rigid and doesn't move. And that's how I find people's minds are when they use it as their main implement. Jesus. That is closer than it used to be. I'm repainting this room. So I moved to this team. Welcome back to another week of mobs and mows here

1:00with Drew and Alex. If Alex didn't cut out that first part, you would have heard me elbow my backdrop. We are recording this end of February. The Olympics just ended. The winter Olympics just ended. And I think Norway dominated everyone. Is that what I saw appropriately? So given the events that are in the winter Olympics, do you know, okay, here's a quiz for you. What sport has the highest recorded VO2 max? In Norway skiing, right? Yeah, but specifically, I mean, they'll check this. It's the like, they were talking about VO2maxes in the 90s and stuff with those guys. Yeah, I think triathlon, cycling, cross-country skiing, cross-country skiing. Thank you. Yeah, 96, 96 was that dude's VO2?

2:02It's crazy. And it kind of supports a theory I've had. And I'm sure somebody's studied this or played around with it. I kind of want to get like a metabolic cart that worked just to mess with it. But it makes sense to me that you achieve higher VO2 max numbers on activities that use a maximum amount of muscle mass. That makes sense. But I would love to like take a person and like put them like test VO2 max running, test VO2 max rolling, test it on like Jacobs ladder, test it on Versa climber, like play around it. Cause like cross-country skiing is a nice combo of like upper body core legs. And that kind of supports my like, it's not very scientific, but in my head, the more muscle mass you get involved in that activity, the more oxygen you should be able to process. Wait a second. This is, I didn't realize this was like current events until we just started talking about it. Team, this was not the plan. Apparently triathlon superstar, I'm gonna pronounce this wrong. Christian Blumenfeld just broke the record.

3:06I think I did see headlines about 101 milliliters per kilogram per minute. But there's some, it's somewhat controversial. What's the line? Um, well, they posted it on Instagram. The first video is sucking air, state of excess distress. Didn't comment on the blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. The internet's blown up. The physiological maths don't add up. They say we're more to follow. Team, I don't want you guys to have to sit while I read this whole article. Didn't realize we were waiting into controversial. Hopefully, well, you've been finding these articles. You've also been thinking about a transition. Yeah, well, I mean, just thinking of like, impressive perspectives on physiology. Who better to talk to? Not bad. Who speak than Michael Blum's. Long time listeners will know that I typically do the bio here.

4:08I'm going to provide a bio here, but Drew will perhaps be able to provide more context on who this guy actually is. Because he's been a fan for years. Like I hadn't really followed his work prior to this. Admittedly, this was my invite. Yeah. But Michael Bevens, our guest today, his journey began with trying to test his own limits in sports like sailing, rock climbing, and skateboarding. He then transitioned into exploring a range of martial arts disciplines, like a lot of different martial arts disciplines, followed by an evolution into endurance sports. Then the fragility he felt from pushing the endurance limits led him to incorporate weightlifting, crossfit, and strongman style training. Across all of this, he's competed in cycling, triathlon, crossfit, weightlifting, jujitsu, and more. And if you think that's a wide variety, professionally, he has been a hairdresser, a makeup artist, a photographer. He has worked in the fashion industry and on the stage. That's right. Yeah, all ultimately developing a skill

5:10for building relationships that led him into coaching. He has coached actors preparing for film roles. He has coached military service members, preparing for selections. He has coached athletes competing at elite levels. Perhaps most notably, he coached Henry Cavill, leading up to Man of Steel, Batman versus Superman, and Justice League. He also coached both actors and stunt crew for 300 rise of an empire, and led a team development camp for the atlanta braves. We mentioned during this conversation the strength manual he published, which he's currently rewriting. So you'll hear a little bit about that. He's also coach of the Unfucked podcast and creator of We Are All In. You'll find some links to those in the show. Is it Cavill or Cavill? Great question. I don't know. He, I mean, I haven't pulled up my computer right now. Great looking, dude. So yes, you mentioned, yeah. So for some context, I have either tangentially or directly followed

6:13Michael's work for years. I might get some of this wrong and he can correct me because he is coming back on the podcast. But he was part of the early Jim Jones ecosystem and for folks that are unaware Jim Jones, Mark Twight founded Jim Jones. He was a famous alpinist. Jim Jones rose to fame because they trained the guys for 300, the original 300. And we've talked on this podcast a couple of times. It's just how like culturally significant that film was in terms of aesthetic fitness, et cetera, et cetera. So that was the origination of, I think, my forays into their work. Mark Twight and Michael Blevins then left Jim Jones after a number of years and some controversies in what have you and started nonprofit N-O-N-P-R-O-P-H-E-T, if I recall.

7:16As a little bit of, because Mark Twight and no disrespect to Mark Twight, I'm a huge fan of his, but somewhat of like a cynical take on fitness, kind of an intentionally cynical take on fitness. And if you listen to his stuff, you'll know what that means. But nonprofit was a very interesting perspective on fitness. Michael Blevins then left that organization and started, we are all in O-L-L-I-N. And from everything I can gather, and he might, again, correct me on this, but this is kind of his project. This is, he has full reign. He runs the show. This is his purest expression of his approach to fitness. And in so doing, he wrote a couple of articles that Alex and I kind of shared back and forth. The Band-Aids over bullet wounds is one that we've talked about a couple of times. And you miss, I know, you get the time wrong. Every time. Band-Aids for bullet wounds. Band-Aids for bullet wounds. But after having followed his stuff for years and years, I think the intersection of where his thoughts were

8:17and where the UNICE conversation was going, kind of finally crossed, and it made sense to bring him on. And I'm very glad we did because what you guys are about to listen to is a really, really interesting conversation. And the first of hopefully several. I will say as someone who's been recently exposed to his work, if you go to the Articles tab, like the blog portion of We Are All In, some really compelling title. I wish I could title articles. He's a phenomenal writer. Is it fair to say he's kind of a fitness philosopher? Is that? For sure. When I think of fitness philosophers, he is kind of at the top of my list. So yeah, like I said, this is the first of at least two because he is coming back on to continue the conversation, but a very different take on fitness, a very, like you said, philosophical take on fitness, hopefully refreshing take on fitness for a lot of folks. And I think you'll enjoy this one. A softball question.

9:17Yeah, okay. All right, so this one's not going to be deep at all, I don't think. What is fitness? Yeah, this might make some people mad. I'm pleased. So I go back and forth obviously trying, always trying to like refine how I think about these things or what they mean to me. And fitness to me, I go back to the old term. So fitness is the traits and behaviors required for survival. And I stick to that, not in the like, you know, run away from a tiger sense necessarily, but to try to understand that there's a similarity between, you know, labeling survival as winning, say a 5K run and survival as, you know, this aspect that we don't know the exact requirements of it until they reveal themselves. And that's like, you know, anything kind of worth surviving,

10:17we're probably not going to know the metrics or the, in the absolute context that it faces us. So instead, we have to look at what we're doing and preparing for as preparing like the most generally. And with that ability of being general, being able to market up or move it up into more specific fashion as quickly as possible. And that that has helped me as opposed to, you know, fitness is, you know, the, you know, the CrossFit would be like, it's these 10 qualities. And you're like, I, okay, so I just train all of them because you can't, you know, there's not enough time in the day. So you really, fitness is such an individual pursuit and that it needs to remain individual. It's an individual question. And that's what keeps me kind of like so interested to be, to be honest is because there is no real answer because fitness is described towards what you were trying to survive or persistent. So full disclosure for a second. I'm like, how our podcast operates a little bit.

11:20Often we come to episodes where one of us knows the person or the topic better than the other one. And the other one kind of plays dumb to like, represent the audience a little bit. Okay. Or we're just dumb. I mean, that too. But Drew has brought up your name dozens of times along the time I've known him. I think he's followed your work for a long time. I didn't really know who you were. I had planned to like consume more of your content before today. Had a lot going on for like the first piece of your content I consumed was like two hours ago and it was your video on what is fitness. And that and that was not good court. You struck a court. I mean, it was kind of the moment I knew that I was on board for the conversation. Because a rant I go on all the time is that like when Darwin was talking about survival of the fittest, he was not talking about survival of like the guy who squats the most or runs the fastest mile or I getting that kind of stuff. He was talking about literal like fitting into a niche. And I yes, I think we forget that a lot. And like after consuming will be your stuff

12:21and as I was driving home and thinking about this conversation, I started to worry about like maybe the problem we have with fitness is that we've like engineered all of the demands of the niche we fit in evolutionarily out of our lives. Like I was running on a treadmill earlier, which like in itself says a lot about like I've had to like build a machine to get me to do exercise. That says things about the world we live in now. But I work on a military base and there's a wall of windows and I'm looking at it a bunch of military service members exercising. And my base is mostly Air Force and Space Force now, which is a little less physical than military services I worked with before. And the military has people have seen the news with the current administration. There's this re-emphasis on physicality and withality and things like that. And I'm looking at a group of people who've like essentially ignored physicality for a couple of years and are now being yelled at by somebody at the Pentagon to like re-introduce it into their life.

13:22And it's awkward and it's crappy and they're not sure why they're doing it and they're not sure what the goal is. And as often happens on this podcast, I don't have a question mark at the end of this question. But I was just like thinking about we debate whose definition of fitness is better and we forget that like there was a biological definition of this and then we manufactured a world where we don't have to deal with that reality anymore. If it come up with our own semantic definitions of fitness, I don't know. Yeah, I think you're dead on. I think especially looking historically, you're kind of like the purveyor of the question and the answer to what fitness is is nature, right? Nature provides the scenario and the most adaptable human being survives and the traits that that human being or living being and all actuality, those traits spread, genetic quality or whatever. And I think although that's like a massive kind of window

14:25to look at, fitness and it really is kind of the only way to look at it. And I find this like with most words in the root form or the etymology you really get more understanding for what they were originally used or how that word has evolved and shift to the culture. And I think you're dead on when you're like, men's feels contrived. I'm running inside on this mechanical thing and there's such a disconnect between the purpose and the activity or the effort that this is what unwinds most people. They don't really feel the connection to the effort and it is a mismatch with the possible good outcome. In fact, I'm writing about this right now because this is, you know, what happens when we get the metric wrong? You know, if we're measuring what success is and we measure the wrong thing and we spend all of this time reinforcing and talking about, let's say the importance of having 6% body fat

15:26or the importance of having a double body weight deadlift or something like that. Well, that, you know, the measure becomes the goal. What matters gets measured and what gets measured. Oh, man. You're like, you said the M, you said the M word, you said the M word, which is metrics. So we do go ahead. We just gave a keynote last week for bending about metrics and you mentioned what gets measured gets managed. I'm going to throw this one at you because we've been calling this Hammond's corollary. I don't know if I, in all actuality, I may have stolen it from you at some point. You're best. Sure. What gets measured gets managed and then what I've added on to that is what needs managing isn't always measurable. And the reason I say that is because in all that Alex cook here in a second, I know he's dying to, but metrics in the military so often decide what we pursue and what we're seeing now in kind of this embedded human performance space is that because PT scores are measurable

16:28because injury rates are measurable because, you know, body composition is measured. D's become the highlights, but, and we'll get to this in a couple of questions here. Your article about band-aids for bullet wounds. It's like the things that are actually, the things that we actually need to manage because we can't really measure them in the traditional like military sense. They just go by the wayside. And so are we really solving the problem or are we just painting the picture that we wanted to see in the first place, right? Yeah. It's, you know, one of the problems, I think that you're describing is, you know, there's a very, there's a very big difference between individual pursuit and the kind of institutional pursuit, you know, that they're kind of at odds with each other. The individual, as you know, can change directions and adapt very, very differently. What we're trying to do is we're using individuals that pursued qualities that we find to be successful qualities and they were trying to mirror those

17:29on to an institutional program or an institutional bedrock because again, you know, how much time do we have to, you know, rework the wheel or whatever or relearn as each individual would have to go like learn everything that was required to get those attributes that made those attributes successful. And in that homogenization, we're going to miss a lot because the very general terms first and foremost and they're not causative. So, you know, there's very few times that we could say, man, that, you know, that 500 pound back squat, that saved that man's life. You're like, there's, you know, there's not, there's not that kind of data. And but what there is is like, okay, that person was strong therefore when he got, you know, hit by another Humvee's T-bone, like the musculature was so thick that it didn't break every one of his bones and then the person in the back who was smaller framed or whatever, they're, you know, organ's collapse or whatever the egregious, I want to use that as example

18:32because I think the first person, the first person who explained why strength was important was an eighth grade PE coach. And he was a younger guy and he just said, hey guys, like if you get hit, you don't get hit is hard if you have more tissue, like you need more tissue. It like absorbs impact, not only does it, and that's quite frankly, that was like rudimentary and probably wrong. Like I'm not going to survive a car wreck because I'm jacked, but what's interesting about that aspect is it is true enough that the correlation to having, you know, lean or tissue on you does protect you, especially when we make this, we extend this arc that we're aiming for. And this is probably, I get, I can kind of go off on a couple of different directions but I'll throw this guy's at you and kind of like see what you think of it as like, I think the biggest thing we must, we make a mistake within fitness is we don't look at the right timeline.

19:32And that shortening the timeline to try to be as good as possible as fast as possible changes the arc and the descent of what we consider good. So for instance, you know, since we're in the realm of, we're just talking about fitness in general, I, as a, you know, like many other young men and women were kind of fascinated with getting as strong as possible as fast as possible. And look at it into why that is because there is a, you know, distinct reason to do that. But even if I didn't understand the true purpose behind it, there was enough importance and societal reflection of importance that I wanted to get as fast as possible because I really wanted to establish to society and my in-group or whatever that I am strong. I have these features that society holds in high regard. And by doing it quickly, I, you know, changed the trajectory of outcome. And if anything goes up, it comes down faster. That is, you know, a Newton law of physics. It's just part of this thing.

20:33So now we look at it too. The more I amplify an attribute, especially a physical one, the more it will take away from other attributes. Now, there is no such thing as maximum diversity, right? Like the strongest man is not the world, you know, the Tour de France winner or whatever. And that's because at some point, there's not enough time in the day to either train those attributes or recover from the stress required from training those attributes. So we have this like conundrum where physical education is probably the poorest subjects in our modern kind of education system, right? The amount that people learn about their own body and how to maintain it and how to treat it well is almost not, right? You know, aside from like your coach yelling at you when you're in eighth grade telling you to like, you know, run the lap one more time or you know, blowing whistle at you. So there is this like huge disconnection

21:37that I think the, I think that's a major problem. And the question never gets raised to like, well, I think that's great that you're pursuing a 700 pound deadlift but is it better to deadlift 700 pounds, you know, when you're 30 or to deadlift 200 pounds when you're 70? And those sometimes are at odds with each other, I think. So I think that conversation is never really had. It's kind of like gun hoe goes hard into the paint that you can and whatever you're motivated to and therefore like you're describing, you know, a lot of, you know, maybe past athletes, you know, when the sport ends, there's really no purpose behind it. And because they trained through punishment only, they really have no real desire to go through that again, especially because how most people trained doesn't exactly make them feel better, you know, like this is a, this is a very common thing. I woke up one day after, you know, probably the fist I've ever been by definition of all of the major lifts and aerobic capacity.

22:37I was clean and jerking in the, you know, the three 40s. I was snatching close to 300 pounds. I was back squatting 400 pounds, deadlifting 500, 632K row. I could run a 5K in 18 minutes flat. I was fit and also every moment I felt almost broken. You know, a sneeze would take me out for two weeks if I like, you know, tied my shoes wrong or something like that. And you really start to question after all this effort, like, what is happening? Like, what is, what are the attributes that I'm building? If on the other side of those specific attributes, I'm as fragile as porcelain. You know, this is something that, you know, for the past 10 years has really like seeded itself at me. And that's what I've really tried to like come to understand and funny enough, I think, I think I am starting to get a handle on it. And a lot of it has to do with, you know, some, to some degree ignoring cultural pressure,

23:39of, you know, sports institution, military institution, or just, you know, the reflection that girls want, guys with six packs or something like that. Whatever the cultural application is, you really have to like, understand the reason to pursue something and make sure it is in line with what is worthwhile. Now, a six pack could be, you know, a survival trait actually, you know, if you're an influencer or something like that, your ratings are going to go up and that means more money, more fame, more, more opportunity. And therefore, there is a real reason to get lean in our culture today. So you can't really discount it. It's no different than somebody saying, like, I want to make a selection, you know, for this special operations group and they required this runtime and this many push-ups and this many pull-ups. You know, you're go, if you get selected and you go in and you get more opportunity and you're able to, you know, increase your pay, increase your opportunity, realistically, what is the difference? You know, we're surviving and, you know, somebody making money off of their six pack

24:40and somebody, you know, making money by being and, you know, special forces, those are all admirable, actual, distinctive admirable attributes based on maybe something that we consider superficial and something that we hold as, you know, special or something like that. So, like, first I have to say thank you because like that whole talk, you were kind of orbiting around Goodhard's Wall, which is, it has found its way into like our top four principles that we make sure people understand before we have a conversation about what we do. I do have to ask, Drew mentioned the talk we gave about metrics at forebending and after we gave the talk and this is, like, I think like an hour later, there was a chance for like conversation with people in the audience and I got cornered by like two current battalion commanders who had a bunch of questions. And one of the first questions was like, have you read or you guys must have read because it sounds like you took

25:40everything in your presentation from a book called The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller? Have you by any chance heard of that book? I haven't and I'm looking it up right now. Because it's not right yet either. So, that presentation was only a couple of weeks ago, so I'm like halfway through the book right now. Okay. I can't believe I had not read it because so much of it is speaking directly to that problem of like when the measure becomes the goal it stops being a good measure. You break all the correlations that relied on to be useful. Now you're chasing it for its own sake. It's, I don't have like a, I don't know. I'm just hyping this book to everyone who will listen. I'll also say I got in touch with Jerry. I invited him on the podcast. He said, so part of the problem is, like he's a history professor and he just got onto this topic years back because like he detected it in his own profession, chased it for a while, wrote a book, published a book and then got away from it.

26:41So his answer was he hasn't really been like close to that topic area for a while, so he doesn't feel prepared to come on a podcast. So I asked him like who else is the right person to have this conversation? He said nobody, like there's nobody who's the right person on the topic and he went away from it. So I'm just in this like, in this situation to be like sad and not sure who to ask to like chase the issue. He calls it metric fixation. Like we live in this world where we want everything to be quantifiable. We are obsessed with finding ways to measure things, chasing those measurements for their own sake. Like so many good examples. Like one of the classic ones is he uses education because that's the field he works in. We realized that people with bachelor's degrees tend to make more money. So we put bachelor's degree on a pedestal and said everybody should get it. But like creating more winners, devalues winning. Like as soon as everybody has a bachelor's degree, it stops being a useful filter for employers. And I just, like the, it's not written in like a prose way.

27:42I guess not necessarily like a page turner of a book. It's just constant density of useful information. And anybody who like gets kind of interested in this idea of like the thing you're measuring might not actually be telling you what you want it to tell you. I'm pointing everybody towards this book now. Well, it will be here tomorrow by 7 a.m. So I'll have, there you go. I tend to have like an absurd collection of books that immediately when something sounds interesting, I kind of, I actually, hold on, I want to ask you a question off the back of this that I actually had written down, which is because in for context, I always have considered your approach to fitness very philosophical. And I'm always interested in kind of more cerebral coaches. What is one resource that you, that you feel like you coach, you've pulled a lot from from a coaching standpoint that has nothing to do with fitness or coaching? Oh. Man, there's a, there's a,

28:43there's a couple books that come to mind. Some of them maybe I'm maybe too embarrassed to even in say that I've taken from them, but man, what would be, I'm trying to say the hard part with that question is so often like, you know, the book recommendations are really hard for people. Like I almost never recommend books for people because they're so personal, like they're so, they're absolutely so individual. And I mean, not just the person, but the time that they read it. You know, I've gone into books before and been like, it's not for me in this book sucks. I'm kind of like thrown it by the wayside. Only to pick it up 12 or 15 years later, and then like, how did I miss this gem? But it was just the person who is reading it changes and that is such an important aspect about it. But this book probably, actually the book over on my shelf transcendence

29:45is one of them and it's like, you know, it's kind of on evolution and talking about how language developed and how humans kind of formed. And I think that is just like a really good bedrock. There's another book called Sandtop and not a well-known author, but me and Burke, a friend of mine who also writes for the All-In program. We read this book probably like five times back to back and just kept, like I just kept highlighting, like you were saying, it's just like useful information after useful information and the weird tag lot. I mean, it's essentially like what we can learn from indigenous tribes of Australia to understand our own culture and survival. And realistically it opens with you can't because your society is absolutely so separate from nature that it will just destroy itself. And also like, here's how things persist. They have to be in accordance with these like natural laws. And he goes off on, you know,

30:45there's just so many like high quality gems in there that I would recommend that book to anybody. And what I have made a lot of, well, this is kind of an interesting one. There is a book, actually, this one's probably free to find. There was, it wasn't really a published book. Do you know who David Olgavius? Yes. Okay, so for those that don't know, he was like one of the best marketers of all time, copy, he wrote copy. And he's just like a phenomenally good writer. And he had this in-house kind of book. And it was on the topic of divine discontent. Okay, so this is a very short read. You can find it kind of online in PDF forms. I gave it to enough of my clients, one of my clients who's really good at, you know,

31:48AI, he made a website of it. And I like, I'll share a link with you because if you find a PDF, it's kind of hard to like read it. So he put it in a readable format for this website. And with the book is called the, I mean, now the name's escaping. Oh, the, the eternal pursuit of unhappiness. And it's essentially like, you know, an old take on how we use habits to punch out vices or, you know, values to punch out vices kind of deal. And it's, it's a really like, you could read it in 15 minutes. It's really short, but I read that probably four or five times a year. I give it to everybody that are higher in my business as here's how I think about things. If you want to do good work, you have to understand that for most of the time, you're going to be unhappy. And that like satisfaction will never come to you. So you can't look for satisfaction. It's a good metric. I got the top of my head. I got to ask which transcendence was the first one that you said, correct?

32:51Yeah, let me grab it. Because when I googled it, I got transcendence by Shay Savage. It's a popular romance novel about a modern woman, Elizabeth, who is transported back in time and captured by a prehistoric cave man, Ed, who claims her as his mate. I might just let you run with that one, even though I've never read it. Just see like man, he is really out team. This episode of mobs and mobs is brought to you by Train Heroic. Train Heroic is a reliable, well designed platform for programming, tracking and communicating with athletes. If you've been with us for any length of time, you will know that Train Heroic is the platform that we use to power our own training long and strong, which you can find at our website mobs and mobs.com. If you're looking for a solid platform to support your own coaching, whether it's your full time role or a side hustle, Train Heroic is definitely worth checking out. You can use the link in any of our show notes. You can find it in our newsletter or you can head to our website mobs and mobs.com slash training to get your first week for free. But there, yeah, that's that's what this is the transcendence.

33:52Yeah, this is, this is that looks like that guy events. Yeah, that's exactly how humans evolved through fire, language, beauty, time. I, this one just, I think this one was a beautiful book just because it like, it really captured how phenomenal, like the human experiences and language. And I, and I, I'm very obsessed with language and I, I wish I was better at it, but I just have this fascination with language because, because of how we communicate things. And it really is responsible for basically not just how we interact with others, but our own internal dialogue in the words that we learn to use are almost like, you know, hypnotism. You know, like this is such a weird thing, but you're right in kind of like how we described on them on the metrics and the measurement thing is like, we almost become hypnotized by what we think is meaning or purpose. And we kind of, you know, we stopped questioning it and we had solely for this pursuit of an

34:53objective. And I think that can be, you know, to be fair, the first time that I noticed it was we, this is way back in the day, we, I think I was at Jim Jones at the time. And we were preparing quite a few guys for a selection process. They were coming in and out. And one of the things, you know, we, we're looking at at the time is like, oh, you need, you know, this many wraps it to 25 or I think at the time they were testing a one rep max. I want to say it was within like a, a recon group in the, in the Marines or something, but it was like a one rep max and we just started to see like the injury data come back. And it was just like, these guys are like blowing themselves apart. And here's where it got really interesting. We started to raise a question. You're like, well, is a one rep max important? You're like, is that a good measure for something? And you're like, well, inevitably the stronger you are, probably, you know, the more useful you are that strength is a good measure. But what we found is that by having a selection process,

35:58you're essentially inviting people who are admittedly would do themselves harm in order to beat others out of the selection process. You know, they will self annihilate in order to succeed. And so you're selecting for that personality type and then giving them the opportunity to do it, which is a mismatch for kind of what you want. And so we were really thinking hard at the time, like, what is a better metric for strength? You know, like, what, what, what does it even mean? And that obviously, you know, a decade and a half later has led me down this rabbit hole of redefining strength mostly because I think we didn't look at it correctly. You know, we, we look at power lifters like they're strong. And then we look at the activities that they do. And then we copy those activities and the higher or closer we are to those, you know, metrics, the, you know, quote unquote, the stronger we are, but we're not actually looking at what the attribute of strength actually is inside of the nervous system, the musculature, the connective tissue,

36:58the joints, all of that stuff. We're, we're really, we're describing incorrectly and people will look at me sometimes like I'm crazy, but if, um, you know, if I was going to, if you saw somebody that had a big backsquad, you know, you'd go, that guy is strong. And I would probably agree with you, but if you saw, you know, uh, a, a wall, you know, a fortress of some sort, and it was holding back an ocean or an, um, a bombardment, you, you wouldn't describe that as powerful. You wouldn't describe the wall as powerful, right? Right. So strength is not a movement necessarily, right? It's, it's the ability to resist force. And so we describe it incorrectly. Well, we, in describing incorrectly, we're prepared for it incorrectly. So you have a host of people wanting to get strong by back squatting, deadlifting, but those are expressions of power. That's movement. Now what you're missing when you see it is that somebody is holding their spine.

38:01And by holding the spine in a position, they can express power through the legs. So really what we're testing for a back squat is power, you know, that's contingent on having a base of strength, but that is not the test of strength. When somebody does lose the back squat and they lose it because they're spine folds, you're looking at a deficit of strength. But then by increasing the amount that you can press with your legs, the number doesn't necessarily go up because the limitation is in the ability to hold or decelerate the spine. Does that make sense? Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. I think you're upset. I'm saying a lot of strength catches who like, we're doing powerlifting for sure. And not to say that like you don't get it on accident, you know, by, you know, by having somebody set up correctly under a barbell and they stack their breath and they contract their lats and they pull the bar into themselves. They're essentially keeping hold of their upper body so that they can then express strength. But what you then run into when you're really looking at, you know, the limitation of why somebody is not stronger, you really have to understand that definition.

39:04And then it changes the, you know, the procedures of training that way. Because if somebody just is, you know, failing in a back squat, and you don't ask why or what is breaking down, you're going to, you know, you're going to fix the wrong problem. And that's almost worse than not fixing a problem. That's exactly. I'm going to go off on a mild sidebar because you triggered me a little bit in a good way. Sure. Sure. Drew knows this like for the roles we play on this podcast, I'm the like military doctrine nerd. That's not a role. That's not a role to be clear. You'd like some military doctrine. Sure. Um, and, and these days, like, I, I'm not active duty anymore. Most of my time spent around military stuff is around human performance, fitness, stuff like that. Um, and you're, you're mentioning of like the over focus on one rat max fits neatly into our overall conversation about letting the metric become the goal. And that becomes a problem. And, and this will mean almost nothing to 99% of the audience,

40:06but a lot to like a couple specific listeners. Um, unlike most military doctrine, the army's current doctrine on physical fitness was essentially written by one guy. Um, I'm not going to name him. I don't like the guy. Um, I also, like, I think his perspective was limited. He's a physical therapist. You can tell when you read it, um, he and I don't get along in real life. That's probably clear at this point. Um, but I'm just going to read, I'm going to read two quotes that he put in the doctrine that I think are really relevant to what you just said. And this is like the authoritative document that people are supposed to follow for army fitness. There's other bigger problems, but this is what we're talking about. Uh, two quotes. First quote is, in fact, strength training begins with a measurement of one repetition maximum. The maximum amount of weight that a soldier can lift squat, push or pull one time. Uh, and then I found essentially the same quote a little bit later, but it's even more like almost two philosophical. But the code is the development of strength training flows from the one repetition maximum measure.

41:09And like the, the wording of it saying that like training flows from a metric and that that metric is the one repetition maximum. There, it's hard to write like an authoritative book on fitness for an organization as diverse as the military. But like, I feel like this has got to be a clear miss on like philosophy of training and like what the goal is and what drives decisions. Yeah, yeah, I think and he's using a very, you know, a very standard model. In fact, this is a great place to go when we want to talk about why, like, why is that the definition? Why did that get adopted? You know, if we do some history, I will say I can probably answer why and it's that he was a physical therapist trained clinically who arrived at a job that exposed him to like a couple text books from the NSEA. Yeah. And they're like that institution, which I also worked at for a period. Treated those as like gospel, not as like entry level things you should learn as you start your journey.

42:13So he, he very like a lot of the book is like just, I just found out about periodization. So I'm going to write a chapter on periodization. Well, that's the interesting thing with, yeah, I mean, the interesting thing with that is like, you know, most people are going to, you know, they, they define strength as like maximal force, right? And they describe power as force is equal to mass times acceleration. So the, the only thing that is different between power and strength and like the clinical field is kind of a time component. But as you know, like whether somebody takes 12 seconds to, you know, 15 seconds to squat, they're one rep max or somebody does it in one second. You're like, what is fast and what is not fast in that in that realm of quote unquote strength? And therefore, like I like proper definitions, I accept that power is force is equal to mass times acceleration. I just contend that strength is probably, you know, you know, forced is equal to mass times deceleration.

43:16You know, the ability to slow something down or hold it and that has, that has helped. So I'm not saying that like people should say that I'm right, how it has changed me, though, is I quit training to like move a back squat very fast. And instead, I started holding one, right, like decelerating eccentric load. And this is what's interesting is in where most people are kind of behind the times. People like Caldeats and, you know, some, some of these other coaches are way ahead of the curve, they looked at, you know, the force curve, the force velocity curve behind eccentric and concentric and, and saw something very revolutionary when they went, oh man, I got two guys. They have an identical one rep max, one of them can turn it around instantaneously. The other one, it looks like he stuck in tar. Now they end up at the same weight. Are they the same strength? And so he started asking this question. The answer is they are by the measurement of the one rep max.

44:18Like if that's our measure, then sure, but shouldn't we measure for potential, like who's the better person there? Right, I want the guy that can turn that thing around much faster if I'm looking for somebody who has ultimately more force production. And so that that's just kind of how he started down this realm and then he came up with the triphasic system, which is a great system. What's interesting about that kind of stuff and about how you mentioning, you know, the clinical approach, most people don't recognize that almost all sports medicine, theory and and strengthen conditioning really comes from the Soviets. No, this is also something that I didn't really understand well other than, you know, I read Virgo Chansky and Medvedev and and Satsuki Orsky. Like these were who was reading when I was 20 because I was trying to figure out how to get as strong as pass as possible as fast as possible. And I was like those are the guys. So I'm just going to look at the rep set scheme and I'm going to like take off with it.

45:20Well, this is what's interesting. So, you know, right now, if you go to a personal trainer or if you're in the military and you go to, you know, your local PT guy that's supposed to share how to stay fit for, you know, selection or whatever. Somebody's going to share with you some sort of scheme that's like five by two backsquat five by five deadlift yada yada yada run this much. All of these charts, AC Prelepin, all of it came out of the Soviet era and that's because they revolutionized sport. They absolutely changed the entire landscape of what we thought of gymnastics about track and field and about strength sports. And so everybody thinks that's well and good. Yeah, of course we should use their system. So they adopt it without any question of hold on what was that system and you start looking at it and you go, do you know what a dispensable proletariat is good for selection methods. So their selection methods was to pull from, you know, a population of anywhere from like 200 to 300 million people.

46:25Find the genetic specimens, put them into the route of sport, the CSGS, I think they call it. It's a master of sport, yeah, yeah, I miss in my surreal look at this point. But yeah, around the, you know, essentially from the 1920s to 1930s, it started to invest a lot of money and time into the development of sport for the, you know, you know, by the time we got to the Helsinki games, you essentially had an empire that dominated almost every strength and explosive sport on the planet. And people were really wondering how they did it. And those methods got devised obviously by Fricko Chanskin, Mevadev, who developed first, you know, the first development from periodization, then into, you know, the college get method, which was Fricko Chanskis in that, that's basically got adopted later by Westside Barbell. And that was, you know, the conjugate method that we know today, all of this Soviet, what's interesting about it is people don't really look at the trajectory or what they're actually doing.

47:31So when they pull stuff like, hey, how did these guys get so strong? They go and look at what the best people in the world were doing. And after, you know, countless metals and I mean, like we're talking thousands of world records and countless metals that were one. And, you know, by the, I think by the time, just in strength sports, it was like something like 390 gold metals in the Olympics alone for strength sports from the Soviet Union. So you're like, okay, these guys know what they're doing. What are they doing? And everybody looks at basically the four years prior to the event, right, the actual peaking method to see what made these guys so strong. And they were, oh, okay, they're doing these reps and sets. That's what AC Prelepet's chart was mining the athletes of the Soviet Union for essentially a long period of time, thousands of athletes at the strongest. And they just looked at, oh, they lifted this frequently and this much weighed. And this is, you know, how they built strength and power and diversified into hypertrophy. And so we took that in the West and we, yeah, that's the secret, but we missed the fact that that selection process was eight years previous to that.

48:40And they spent a massive amount of time actually unwinding the specialization that was required for sport. I would hate to say this, especially because you probably have a lot of, you know, military listeners, but they treated sport like a sacrificial soldier, right, how they selected for athletes is kind of the same way we do for soldiers. Are you willing to die for this cause and the younger the better kind of deal because then we have time to indoctrinate you from the start. Well, the first four year period is what they call GPP that's, that's what we described as CrossFit, but CrossFit is not GPP general physical preparedness is defined by adapting the joints muscular musculature and tissues and neurology to a general theme, a high general theme, but not a specific. CrossFit is just kind of its own specialized sport, you know, it's a sport of sagittal lifting or something like that, but I love that.

49:45But essentially, after they, you know, could conclude that they got, you know, they, they patentiated these young athletes from ages basically six to, you know, 12 and then they say, okay, now we need to apply the sport to see how they respond to it. That's another four years of mostly general training until they go this person has potential, they match all the requirements and another funny one they haven't broken yet. So therefore let's use them and then they throw them into the meat grinder of a four four to eight year peaking period. Now what they had discovered that no most nobody talks about everybody talks about the law specificity, right. Like how you trained specifically has specific adaptation almost nobody talks about accommodation, which was what verko chansky and I think I believe is mevadev. The person who talks about it most is that's your ski actually, but what they saw was that these are two counterbalancing adaptation processes that happen whenever a physical or organism encounter stress on a repetitive basis specificity, right.

50:50The angle, motion, velocity, contraction rate, speed duration, all of that stuff will dictate what kind of, you know, pathways get opened and how those amino acids and neurochemicals fulfill the adaptation process so that the organism doesn't come into similar stress again. Everybody's like great, you know, that translates to if I'm going to prepare for a run event, I should run gotten accommodation, however, says the exact opposite and it is a cohesive force, which says the more I use a stress, the less that stress affects me. Now, you know, that's what led to us not just going off of, you know, my low of crow non, you know, putting a bowl on my shoulder carrying it every day. Thank you for doing that. Right. So like, oh, I can't just train like an idiot because this force gets interrupted by another force that is essentially what we know is efficiency and efficiency is good for sport.

51:56It's good for survival in some cases, but it also starts to break down the system and the opposing force after that. And this is like something that I didn't understand admittedly to fairly recently, which is whatever I adapt to and become good at will eventually be the thing that hurts me because your body will keep pulling resources to continue to adapt to that stressor. And that's where we see, you know, everybody asked how the lifters who won all those great Soviet events over the decades and decades, everybody asked how they did it. Right. They get to retire after that in a crippled mess on the black sea and then I have to worry about anything they served their cause. But is that really the attributes that we're aiming for when we talk about developing fitness within a broad general population. Right. So we're using these methodologies that essentially are known to break athletes at the highest level and at the highest genetic selection process.

53:00And we're telling people that come into lifetime fitness to get fit for summer to try five by five back squats. It's accelerated out. You're like, this is a mismatch of what we say that we want out of fitness. And if, you know, I think the biggest breakdown of this is really looking at it like you inside of our life, we have finite games and infinite games. And finite games are great. That's how we usually learn about sport, you know, soccer. Great. It ends at this time. What are the requirements? I've got to run this fast this far, kick the ball like this. I've got these skills. And then you win. You get to be done with the game. Life is infinite. Not it goes on forever, but it is a game that we don't want to end because once it ends, we're dead. The way you play infinite games is not by ending them, but continuing them. You're trying to continue play. So like I say, and it's a little bit catchy, you know, some people might think it's jargon or whatever.

54:00But I treat training and in fitness more like falling in love than I do like sport, which is I'm not trying to get it done and over. I'm trying to remain in that state. I'm not trying to like, you know, get good at marriage so I don't have to do it again. I'm trying to persist my marriage so that it's an ongoing good relationship that, you know, bears fruit. Whether that's children or better experiences, that's that's the purpose. So training is kind of like a partner for your physical body. You're engaging with this act, not to be done with it. And if you look at how fitness is kind of represented in the mainstream and even even in the military where they're like, hey, 12 weeks to this, you know, bootcamp thing or, you know, get fit fast. You're like, again, trajectory matters. So the faster I do something, probably the less longevity I have in that, you know, nothing. Nothing reflects this better than investment baking or like investment strategy, right? And in Charlie Munger is the goat.

55:07And what does he say about how to get the best return? We're talking about compound interest. Now, if I want compound returns, you invest in smart things that don't break and they, they keep producing good results and you do it for as long as you possibly can. Yeah. Right. It's not, it's not rocket science, right? I can't beat the market and I can't beat biology. Boom. Okay. I got to take a second. I know Drew has stuff he wants to say. I called dibs. So I got a couple of work here. I'm just like racking up questions. But one is, because I, I have messed this up before I've been called out by our audience. And we have to take a second and do a, a mini physics lesson before we continue, because he mentioned, he mentioned power and F equals MA and stuff. So, uh, force equals mass acceleration work is force times distance. Power is either work divided by time or force times velocity, because that's the same thing velocity is distributed by time. I think, I think we turned to that a lot in like textbooks on strength and conditioning, because those are like what the words literally mean in a science way.

56:16But I think there are a few terms that people use around fitness where they don't actually mean the physics definition of the thing. And it's, it's easy to do the math for research purposes using the physics definition of the thing, but we mean something a little different. And you mentioned strength as one of them. I think power is definitely one of them. I think work is definitely one of them. Like, people don't mean work in terms of like, how many pounds was that kettlebell on how many feet did it move? Like, they mean something a tiny bit more abstract than that. And the same thing is true with strength and power. I think about it with functional a lot. There's no real physics definition of functional, but I got into this conversation years ago when I was like brand new to strengthen conditioning. With Jason Ackerman. I don't know if you know who he is. He's across the old four seminar staff guy. He posted something about like what's the most functional exercise. And, and his argument was it's the overhead squat, which I think there could be an argument for like a unique utility to the overhead squat of finding breakdowns and people's movement.

57:18But my, my beef was I had read the cross the oval one handbook. I knew what CrossFit's official definition of functional was. And all it comes back to according to the handbook is like maximum power output maximum work achieved. And if that's the case. Under a physics definition, overhead squats terrible like you're putting yourself in like a specifically non optimal position. I think the most functional exercise is probably like a sled push or something where you can just keep a large quantity of mass moving at a decent velocity for a long period of time. But I think like we use these words and in like nerdy or academic settings, we use physics definitions for them. But that's not what we actually meant when we said it and like people who haven't studied it might have a better idea in their head of what they mean by it than people who have studied it because we ruined it with the math and the physics and all that stuff. That's just a side quest for me. I'm curious. This doesn't actually relate very linearly.

58:22But you were talking about like stress tolerance and adaptation. Have you are you familiar with the concept of hormesis? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I like I have come back to this concept constantly when we talk about fitness because I think it's it's weird that you don't see it in fitness or strengthening textbooks when it's like the foundational thing of we are attempting to dose stress of various kinds at a high enough intensity to elicit a hormetic response, but not so high that we cause harms. It's just it's just on sell you do just give them the on sell you and tell them to walk away. The gas on your stasis and tell them to walk away. Yeah. I mean, you said some stuff about the strength definition. I'll confuse you a little bit more. Power to me. I like in the non physics realm. I consider it agency.

59:23Yeah, and personal agency agent is in the conscious construct of the mind emotional state and physicality. So the reason I started Machiavelli power, not like rip a toe power. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And pal, well, I'm talking about biblical power. Yeah, right. So what when we when we think of like the term all powerful omnipotence, right, we obviously can refer back to Abramatic God. And this is like, this is very useful actually because what's his first act is essentially God spoke and thus the world. And you think about power as the distance between your thought and your action. The smaller that distance is between what you think and what you can do. That is described as power. Now we're human. So like there's latency.

1:00:26But essentially training is about collapsing that latency between what I think and what I can do. So, you know, you see the most powerful athletes on the planet. It almost looks like they float. It almost looks like they disappear. It almost looks like their body doesn't, you know, conform to the natural laws of physics because they're not thinking they're just acting. And that that to me is why they're so powerful you get out of thought and into action. And the reason why that is compelling to me is because also like elusively dangerous because man, if I do or act out all of my thoughts and my thoughts are not controlled, I'm going to have a disaster of a life, you know. And so really it really brings back like kind of the interesting introspective biblical philosophical plight of thinking about how training relates to the real world. And to throw one more at you, I think of strength as sensitivity.

1:01:33So it is the attribute that is developed in the reason being is because it is not the number. It is the knowing, right? I don't care if you can lift 405 for 30 reps. I care that you know that in the moment that is what's possible and you can do it. Not that you actually do it. That would be power. That's agency. Sensitivity is understanding. I feel like this. This is what I can do on the day. Not hey, 12 years ago, I have maxed out of 500 pounds and that's how I hold it in my human brain that likes to be, you know, more ego than, you know, reality. And that's what I find the difference between, you know, in our back to that selection method. I always thought that a good selection for people would be cold. Name your maximum that you can do and then do it. Cold. Now, if you go over or you can pull more or you understate it that either if you're, if you're over or under the score goes down.

1:02:37If you're on it, you're, your score is the highest. And therefore, it's not the number, but your ability to know what your, what is possible in the moment. I think that attribute as a measurement for a team or a athlete. I think that's probably one of the most useful correlates that I would see knowing what is possible. So how do you, and I know I want to be mindful of, of your time, and I wanted to ask you this because one of the things that we often have to come back to in this space, right, is this kind of question of, how do you take a concept like this and how do you industrialize it, right? And what I mean by that is like if, if, if what we're talking about today resonates with somebody who works with athletes, but in our world, the ratio is like one to, you know, a thousand in some cases. Yeah. And so a common bit of feedback we get is like, oh, that's great, but like, like, you know, I can't X or I can't Y because I have to deal with all of this.

1:03:40So like, how do you, in as much as you can, industrialize some of this stuff so that it is applicable at scale, or is it? Man, I, I wish I had like a good answer. But, you know, what's your favorite chart, Michael? Well, I think, honestly, I think it's the answer to that question is that, you know, the quality of industrialization, or what you're talking about scaling, right? If I'm looking at scaling a concept and I can't check for competence, that's, that's going to be really, it's really difficult to manage. Any system that scales, you basically have to make so that it's mindless and this concept just in its inherent quality is a mindful practice. And that is where I think the mismatch is is like, the second somebody says to me, like, man, I don't want to think, just tell me what to do. I go, I think we're done.

1:04:44Because the thinking is what takes the concept that I have and puts it into the person that needs the concept, right? There needs to be a transfer ability. And in order to adopt that transfer ability, there is, there's a, you know, there's a, a limited ratio of learning. Well, maybe that's like, maybe that's one to 20 or maybe it's one to 10 or one to four. Maybe it is one to one. I, in my, in my humble opinion, I think it's one to one. But I think one to four can be useful only because that one to one that gets three other bad examples. I remember hearing you say this, I don't know, you must have posted this recently, like your ideal number of athletes you'd work with was like two, three, four, something to love. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, admittedly, my deficiency, but also the reason why I think that's important is because like we said, training is individual, right? Like we keep trying to homogenize ideas so we can get the collective better.

1:05:49But if the collective will be a byproduct of the best ideas and the best people. So I don't think we, I don't think we should focus on the collective. I think the collective is a byproduct of the best of us. We focus on the best of us and the others will come kicking and screaming. Yeah. No, I mean, that's fair. You know, training, it works like that. Like I, when I'm, you know, training a group of 10 people, I'm like, who's listening? Okay, they get my attention. And then everybody else can see the people who are doing it correctly, and they can either ignore it and do, you know, whatever they're doing in the corner, or they can ask better questions and, and, and arrive. And then into a new kind of place. And then once they make progress, you realize that, oh, they're good to, okay, now I'm focusing on that. So the people who, you know, it's like, how do you teach somebody that doesn't want to learn?

1:06:49That's kind of what, I mean, truthfully, I think that that's kind of what we are finding in this space. There's a lot of, don't want to learners. Well, it's not a lot of, I remember when I first came into the space, I was confused and upset and disturbed by like how different, just the vibe was between like a military training session, like just fitness stuff, like go into the gym with a bunch of military dudes to do a training session. And like the CrossFit gym right off base. Yeah, I couldn't figure that out. And it's not that there's anything different from the coaches. There's nothing different in the workout. There's nothing different. The difference is the people in the CrossFit gym off base decided they wanted to be there enough that they spent their money to be there. And the people at the workout on base were told they had to be there. That's the difference. Yes, the difference between Tony Robbins puts this way, the difference between get to and have to is the difference between rich and poor.

1:07:50Yeah, great. So true. Okay, I want to close, we have closures we throw at folks and to be honest, I've wanted to ask you these questions for a long time. So I'm going to throw these at you. And then I promise we'll get you out of here. The first one, no, no, you're good to you. The first one is a two part or so I guess technically there's three. Something you've changed your mind on and something you've doubled down on. You can go either way first. No pressure. I mean, on the topic, I, I have changed my mind on what strength is in the fact that in, you know, the manual that I wrote five years ago when I went to kind of update it to add some clever ideas in going back through the history, I decided to rewrite the whole thing. And now I'm 56,000 words into a different thing based on the fact that I don't think and I don't think that I was necessarily wrong.

1:08:54Because I think that stuff is true, but it's not true for the reasons that I figured out. For instance, like, you know, I was kind of in the impression that like barbell training is bad for you. I still kind of like don't think that and also hold that idea almost possible like whenever I, you know what I mean, like both are true. But I know it's like, it's what goes behind training with the barbell. It has a bad objective most of the time as opposed to like an exploratory objective. It has a false premise of arrival. Like once I do this, I will be good. And instead, it seems like the straightness of the bar and the hardness of the steel is what enables or fortifies like the concept behind training with it. It's rigid and doesn't move. And that's how I find people's minds are when they use it as their main implement. So although I don't think it's bad, I have changed my mind on it as being a very useful tool to teach certain concepts like rigidity, like how to hold yourself stuff like that.

1:10:00As far as stuff I've doubled down on. Man, this is kind of a, it's kind of a dystopic one, but I've come to find that human nature never fails to disappoint. Fair. That's, I'll leave it at that, you know, there's like an almost every aspect, but yeah, it's hard. There's very few people worth looking up to and I find that discouraging sometimes. I love that. Okay. Second, well, third question. Desert Island. What's one piece of fitness equipment you take with you? We have, we have a worst answer. So I don't know if you can be shake weight. No. We haven't had a shake. Okay. That's a good one.

1:11:01I mean, honestly, a drum. A drum. Like a drum. A music drum. Yeah. Yeah. You have to explain this. Well, because this is a largely overlooked aspect of physicality, which is that almost all movement is rhythm. And almost nobody practices rhythm. Right. Like the sequencing of nerves firing has more to do with your brain's ability to get into a specific state than it does on. A great determination and like how I just like persevere or give 110%. None of that really matters if you can't put yourself into a state of doing what needs to be done. And a drum is the foundational tool through all history that enabled humans to change their state almost instantaneously. So, you know, we, we think of, you know, especially now it's really, you know, popular, especially in like, you know,

1:12:07SF communities and special operations to, you know, use psychedelics and ancient plant medicines and indigenous products to heal themselves. And they go to a shaman and they go to a medicine. That's a great one. I think it's phenomenal that people are opening themselves to experiences outside of the normal culture. But those are really rare throughout history. Those substances are absolutely rare. Now they're old and they're respected. But what is kind of goes over the top of that is the fact that every culture universally, everything that we found almost every single society had a form of medicine connected to a drum. And so you get an old frame drum in Siberian and, you know, even pop into Guinea, like all of these ancient hunter gather tribes, Aboriginal tribes, they all use drumming or rhythm as medicine. And you're like, that's so dumb. And you're like, no, what they figured out very, very quickly in the human evolutionary cycle is that the brain, if put into a transcendental state, could heal itself.

1:13:14And therefore you hear this, you know, boom, boom, boom. Well, that's the healing drum because what happens with the brain is if it gets a repetitive rhythm that is predictable, it can reduce its stress and put itself into a parasympathetic state. And then the cells start to do its thing. It starts to repair muscle tissue. The brain goes into a theta or delta state and then the whole system gets to keep on going, you know, recovery. And then we come to the use of a drum and you can use it in order to focus a human being. So between 12 and 16 hertz of a drum beat, which is too fast to be predictable, a human will start to focus and go into an alpha state. And as you start to notice, you know, the drumming of African tribes is very, very fast for war. So there's a tool called the jembe in African culture. And the jembe is a goat skin over a very hard wood. And it's about 12 to 13 inches. And it's a very fast drumming style.

1:14:15There were a, you know, in Middle East where culture is called the dark buka or a jembe. And so these tones or sounds would shift people immediately into a state of like ferocious ability to produce power on a battlefield. So if you look throughout history, you know, almost drumming where all of these things had to do with getting the most out of human beings, the most recovery and the most output. So when you say what tool is best, I think, you know, getting something that can help you put your brain into a state so that you can get the most out of recovery and the most out of output. So now we had, we had sort of arrived based on popular opinion at the kettlebell, but I think you've the drum. I mean, you make a strong case for the drum. The only problem with the drum is that you need a drummer. Like there has to be at least two people stranded on the desert island before you can re, I mean, you could certainly drum to yourself and activate some things.

1:15:19But I feel like it's a communal activity as well. It can be, here's the interesting thing about that and the other instrument that I'll mention is a didgeridoo. These instruments, because you're touching them, the vibration actually goes through your body, not through your ear, most of the time. By playing something on like you play on a jambay or it's between your legs or a didgeridoo is usually like attached your mouth. Obviously, the vibration does two things. It puts tonal reference into you and then the rhythm will actually tune your nervous system for yourself. So after tuning yourself and that that's literally what we call it, right, the ability to pull tension, which is interesting enough, the original definition for the words, which is where we get the root word strength, which has to do with pulling tension, that ability to tune yourself allows you to, you know, be whatever kind of tool that you want. Implement wise, I'd probably agree with you, a kettlebell would be, you know, useful for some form of resistance, but I think, honestly, if you're clever enough gravity in any kind of sense, you can, you can orient yourself with enough ingenuity and creativity.

1:16:32You can get as much force as you want, you know, there's such thing as Manta, Plange, inversions that you could, you know, do without any kind of implement. Yeah, I mean, you've changed the paradigm for us. I don't know. I could be country. I don't know if the question can ever be asked in the same way. Well, hey, we know you got to hard up, but thank you so much for hanging out with us. This has been. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would like, I wish I could spend some more time. Seems like, do we get every topic that you guys wanted to talk about? Not even close. Hard. Not even very close. I mean, that a good way. I mean, that a really good way. Our best episodes are the ones that go completely off the plan. And I promise this one went off the plan. Okay. I figure, you know, I know you, you set over a list of stuff. And I wanted to make sure that we cover at least some of it. But anytime you guys want to do this again. You're coming back. You're coming back. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. You're coming back. Well, cool. We'll let you get out of here, man.

1:17:32But thank you. I appreciate it, guys. Team welcome to the after party. We literally just stopped that recording. The next thing I want to do is hop on Spotify and like find some drum beats. I mean, it got me Google in a little bit. Like in the notes document. I linked an article about like effects of group drumming on neuroendocrine and immune parameters. It has, it has to be a whole thing. I mean, because like he said, it's been going on for. And like music therapy is like a well-established therapeutic modality. I think I do think this comes back to like our original talk about fitness in the episode. But we love to look for like readily quantifiable measurable things that it's doing. And like sometimes that's valuable for like research and mechanistic purposes. But I do think both in fitness and in like health and wellness and in spirituality and whatever category you want to look at.

1:18:34The constant need for us to find like biologically measurable things that it's doing might undermine the actual bigger picture thing it's doing systemically. I think where I'm getting at with this. And I don't know if this is, you know, my own algorithm just creating like a circle jerk. But the more folks we have talked to, like Michael, who I would put into this category of individuals who are like truly taking human beings from point A to point B in like every sense of the word physically, spiritually on a personal of all the things. They're doing things that like modern science, modern medicine, modern, whatever would just completely dismiss because you can't do a peer reviewed research paper on it. And I give Rachel actually a progenic a lot of credit in that because I think she is kind of in that space of trying to trying to put some common scientific language behind some of this stuff.

1:19:39But like you mentioned this in the recording. I've followed for context for folks. I followed Michael stuff for years and years and years and years. And the word I would use to describe it is exploratory. But they are exploring things and they're allowing solutions to or answers to questions emerge from the exploration. They're not pursuing research or referencing a book. I mean, he mentioned he's writing his own book. So I think to kind of bring it back to the conversation we just had. There's probably a lot in there that raised more answers for or raised more questions for folks than provided answers. That's one of the reasons we want to bring him back on. But I think in that there's almost like an interesting consideration, which is that like maybe the whole human performance construct is more about pursuing questions than providing answers. And that might be too existential for some folks. I don't know. I will say. And I mentioned this at the top of the episode.

1:20:40Like I haven't followed his stuff before. Like you mentioned him constantly. I knew you were going to have all this one though. You wanted to send me article. Like I never. Like you talked about his stuff. I never followed through on checking it out really. I tell you. Yes. Like you've convinced me. This was a great conversation. But also just like going to the like we are all in project thing and I scrolling through some of the topics on here. I agree with exploratory and I think it's some pretty cool. Like it's the stuff worth talking about that never makes it because I think we come back to the question you asked, which is. Okay. Now how do we industrialize it? How do we do this at scale? And I think that it sucks that that's a question we have to ask because of like the nature of people getting paid to do this work and how you measure the value of it and stuff. Because I wish we didn't have to like I wish. The exploration piece could be the heart of it like having conversations with people who want to get better at things and.

1:21:40And helping them get into some of these conversations because I think that would be way more interesting and way more helpful. And way more rewarding than like. Designing the exes and those of training programs. It's and I was reflecting on what he said there because when I asked him that question, I mean his answer was basically that you can't. And he gave the example of and because for folks that are like he also runs group classes out of a gym that they have like to put it simply and. Talking to the people that are listening and then creating the dynamic and the environment within that exchange that other other people kind of gravitate towards that and it got me thinking about. The programs like h2f where you know the last several years the whole idea has been how do you spread this peanut butter to everyone how do you change this. How do you morph the brand on an in of one level so that everybody within your area wants to use the thing because that's the metrics that's what drives it.

1:22:44How thinking man like what would happen if you just had the time and you had the freedom to focus on the group that wanted it. And then you create an environment of just like. Effort that others start to gravitate to I don't I don't know how you would do that though if you're beholden to. But that's what I that's the journey we kind of been on with this podcast right like we started this thinking it was going to be a conversation about like educating soldiers on the X's and those of. Strength training and conditioning. And it very quickly became a conversation about culture primarily yeah yeah yeah I think you know to put a close on it I think we're just out here beating our own drum. I can't I cannot. I think I think it's like a just because I hate that as a closer I have to point out.

1:23:44And we we talked to him about this just after we stopped recording. He asked us if we cover all the topics we'd wanted to cover in this conversation we said absolutely absolutely not. And we knew that going into it actually but for for listeners like things we know we're going to come back to because at this point we have to have him back on. We have talked previously about the band aids for bullet wounds thing and the idea of like if you have to engineer a whole bunch of like compensation mechanisms and down regulation routines and all these things to like survive the life you're in. Then like the real question is like what is it about the life you're in that is like so detrimental to health wellness whether physical or psychological. We're going to talk about like military selection processes and whether we're actually assessing the things that are necessary for the job. Drew on my missing for like key topics that we want to talk to him about oh I like the celebrity like the training Henry Cavill stuff like that's pretty cool but we didn't even touch on that a single time.

1:24:49Yeah he has he has a pedigree that I won't say here because I'm sure I will have said it in the introduction already but there's a lot here and I'll say this to because I know we say this every time we have repeat guests on if anything that we talked about. Peak your interest about something like send it our way and we'll work we always try to work community questions into these things so. He's already great to come back on he will be coming back on shoot us what you got let us know and we will see you next time. Hey Alex let's cover our ass real quick all great idea Drew alright guys the views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode before you go please rate and review the pod on the listening platform of your choice you can also visit us. On our website at www.mopsinmose.com that's mobs the letter in mose.com you can check out the library of podcast episodes our latest blog entries any helpful resources and also sign up for our newsletter.

1:26:01Drew nailed it just to underline a couple of things the podcast entries have in depth show notes on the website so if you missed anything or you want to read any of the research we talk about it is all there can at the bottom of the website sign up with your email and receive future updates from us. The blog posts go a little bit more in depth and kind of written form on a couple topics we get questions about all the time but most importantly I just want to ask all you guys our best way the word gets out is absolutely word of mouth so tell your friends tell the people you work with anybody you think would find it useful thanks for spreading the word. If you have any questions or comments feel free to shoot us an email at either drew or Alex at mobsinmose.com or there's a contact form on the website. Thank you.