495: Look. Is Your "Check Engine" Light On? . With Human Performance Specialist, Rob Wilson.

Summary

Podcast Summary: Jocko Podcast Episode 495 – "Look. Is Your 'Check Engine' Light On?" with Rob Wilson

Release Date: June 18, 2025

In Episode 495 of the Jocko Podcast, retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink and Director Echo Charles delve into the critical topics of discipline and leadership as they intersect with health and performance. Their guest, Rob Wilson, a Human Performance Specialist and author of the newly released book "Check Engine Light: Tuning Your Body and Mind for Performance Longevity," shares invaluable insights gained from his extensive experience working with active duty and retired Navy SEALs.

---

1. Introduction and Guest Background

[00:00]
Jocko Willink opens the episode by reminiscing about the phrase "rode hard and put away wet," initially thinking it referred to team and gear durability. Echo Charles clarifies it as a horse racing term, prompting a discussion on the evolution of team dynamics and personal maintenance within the military.

[03:00]
Rob Wilson joins the conversation, providing a comprehensive background. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Rob moved to Virginia Beach where his parents served as police officers. Both his grandfathers were Korean War veterans, instilling a deep sense of military heritage in him.

[04:31]
Rob shares his early interests in surfing, skating, and martial arts, particularly judo and later Jeet Kune Do, inspired by Bruce Lee's philosophy. His competitive spirit led him to become a Virginia State champion in judo before exploring other combat disciplines like Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu.

---

2. Evolution of Human Performance

[02:00 – 03:28]
Jocko reflects on the transition from the "rode hard and put away wet" mindset to a more balanced approach emphasizing maintenance and self-care. Rob Wilson elaborates on how the military incorporated specialists such as athletic trainers and nutrition experts, leading to programs like the Warrior Fitness Program by the Navy SEAL Foundation, which aid in rehabilitating SEALs and enhancing their performance longevity.

---

3. Introducing "Check Engine Light"

[03:28 – 07:28]
Rob Wilson introduces his book, "Check Engine Light," which uses the automotive analogy to illustrate the importance of recognizing and addressing the body's warning signs before they lead to significant dysfunction. The book emphasizes building a Performance Longevity Dashboard comprising key performance indicators (KPIs) across three main categories: Mind, Movement, and Matter.

---

4. Key Concepts from "Check Engine Light"

a. Mind, Movement, Matter (M3) Model

[77:56] Rob explains the M3 Model, which categorizes indicators into:

• Mind: Internal thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.
• Movement: Physical navigation and body mechanics.
• Matter: Biochemical markers and overall physiological health.

This framework helps individuals organize and monitor various aspects of their health systematically.

b. Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

[70:52] – [74:20] Rob distinguishes between:

• Leading Indicators: Predictive measures that signal potential issues before they manifest (e.g., grip strength, sleep quality).
• Lagging Indicators: Outcomes that result after a condition has developed (e.g., decreased performance, injuries).

He emphasizes the importance of focusing on leading indicators to proactively manage health and performance.

c. Performance Longevity Dashboard

[60:01] – [74:20] Rob introduces the concept of a dashboard for health, akin to a vehicle's instrument panel. This dashboard includes KPIs that provide real-time and predictive insights into one's health, enabling timely interventions to maintain performance longevity.

---

5. Tools and Practices for Health and Performance

a. Sleep and Recovery

[125:07] – [140:54] The discussion highlights the critical role of sleep in maintaining health and performance. Rob introduces concepts like sleep latency (the time taken to fall asleep) and its implications on overall sleep quality. Strategies to improve sleep hygiene, such as controlling light exposure and managing technology use before bedtime, are explored.

Notable Quote:
Rob Wilson [125:15]:
"Sleep latency is the time it takes to transition from wakefulness to sleep and is a critical measure of sleep health."
(125:30)

b. Nutrition and Protein Intake

[139:13] – [140:24]
Emphasizing the importance of muscle mass, Rob discusses protein intake guidelines, recommending 1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight, with increased needs for women and individuals over 50. Proper nutrition supports muscle maintenance, joint health, and overall physiological function.

c. Exercise and Movement

[126:59] – [139:21]
Rob advocates for diverse movement practices, including martial arts like Jiu Jitsu, which not only build physical strength but also enhance mental resilience and adaptability. He underscores the necessity of an experimental mindset, encouraging individuals to test and refine their health practices to discover what works best for them personally.

Notable Quote:
Rob Wilson [144:38]:
"Resistance training is essential. Whether it's bodyweight, calisthenics, barbells, kettlebells, Pilates, or Jiu Jitsu, maintaining strong, healthy muscles is crucial for longevity and performance."
(139:40)

d. Breathing and Stress Management

[117:23] – [123:12]
The conversation delves into the significance of breath control and its impact on stress management and athletic performance. Techniques such as breath work and meditation are discussed as tools to regulate the autonomic nervous system, enhancing both mental clarity and physical readiness.

Notable Quote:
Rob Wilson [93:24]:
"Chronic emotional distress has known negative effects on physiology, such as elevated blood pressure and dysregulation of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline."
(92:45)

---

6. Anecdotes and Practical Examples

Throughout the episode, Rob and Jocko share personal stories and practical examples illustrating the principles discussed:

• Rob's Hip Injury and Recovery: Rob recounts how lifestyle changes and disciplined practices helped him recover from a severe hip injury, highlighting the importance of proactive health management.

• Jocko's Overhead Squat Rehabilitation: Jocko describes his experience rebuilding overhead squat capability post-injury, emphasizing humility and consistent effort over attributing limitations to aging or genetics.

• Breath Control Workshops: Rob shares his journey in developing and teaching breath control techniques to military personnel and athletes, demonstrating their effectiveness in managing stress and enhancing performance.

---

7. Conclusion and Recommendations

In the closing segments, Jocko and Rob underscore the necessity of integrating health maintenance into daily routines through systematic monitoring and strategic interventions. They advocate for personal accountability and the establishment of robust, reliable, and repeatable systems to sustain long-term health and performance.

Final Notable Quote: Jocko Willink [167:59]:
"Your body ain't a rental car. It's not on lease. You can't turn it in when it gets old. So pay attention to the dashboard, read the check engine lights, and keep that thing maintained."
(196:26)

---

Key Takeaways

1. Proactive Health Management: Recognize and address warning signs early to prevent cumulative damage.
2. Holistic Approach: Balance mental, physical, and biochemical aspects of health through the M3 Model.
3. Personalized Systems: Develop individualized health systems based on reliable and repeatable indicators.
4. Continuous Learning and Adaptation: Adopt an experimental mindset to refine health practices over time.
5. Integrate Health into Daily Life: Utilize tools like proper nutrition, sleep hygiene, consistent exercise, and breath control to maintain performance longevity.

---

Resources Mentioned

• Rob Wilson's Book: "Check Engine Light: Tuning Your Body and Mind for Performance Longevity."
  Published: June 17, 2025

• Websites:

  • Rob Wilson: wilsonhealthandperformance.com
  • Jocko Fuel: jockeyfuel.com
  • Navy SEAL Foundation: navysealfoundation.org

• Social Media:

  • Rob Wilson: Instagram @checkenginelight
  • Jocko Willink: jocko.com

---

This episode serves as a comprehensive guide for individuals seeking to enhance their health and performance through disciplined, informed, and personalized practices. Rob Wilson's insights, supported by his latest work, provide actionable strategies to monitor and maintain one's physical and mental well-being effectively.

Transcript

[Jocko Willink]

This is Jocko, podcast number 495 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

[Echo Charles]

Good evening.

[Jocko Willink]

So in the teens, back in the day, we had a. We had a saying. The saying was, rode hard and put away wet. Have you ever heard that before? Echo Charles? Is it just. Did you hear it from me? Or is it. Is it something civilians would say, too?

[Echo Charles]

It's a horse racing reference, if I'm not mistaken.

[Jocko Willink]

There you go. You're probably right. Well, I never knew that until you just told me. What I thought it meant was like, as a team guy and as your gear and your equipment and as a human, just rode hard and put away wet.

[Echo Charles]

Makes sense.

[Jocko Willink]

Just go hard. Not worried about the future. We didn't care about anything long term. We didn't care about injuries. We didn't care about diet. We didn't care about downtime. We didn't care about rest or recovery. We didn't take breaks. We didn't stretch. We didn't warm up. We didn't cool down. We definitely didn't sauna an ice bath. We ate burgers and drank beer and we kept going and kept going and getting after it. And that's fine when you're 20, but when you're 20 years old, you're really not that good at being a SEAL because you don't know enough yet. You don't have the experience, you don't have the understanding. You don't have the skills. The prime years, you have to have both brawn and brains, and you can't get broken along the way. And the war helped us figure that out. We couldn't have guys just being broken and getting broken. We had to get smarter about our primary weapon system, which is our bodies. And then incorporated in that primary weapon system is our minds. And so progress was made. And the next generation is taking much better care of themselves and their performance. They're stronger, faster, and smarter than we were. And it was good to see that transition. I saw that, that progression of maintenance and upkeep, upkeep for our military members over the last few decades. And like I said, a lot of it I got to see firsthand. We started to bring in specialists. We got athletic trainers, we got nutrition experts, we got rehab doctors, and we had charities, like, not just from within the military and the government, but we had charities. The Navy SEAL foundation took a bunch of this information that we had learned over the years, and they turned it into the warrior fitness program that take seals who have been rode hard and put away wet For a long time, for decades. And get them back in the game, both active duty and retired, which has just been a great program. I've had a bunch of friends that have gone through that. It's awesome. Well, with a background in human performance, Rob Wilson has helped about 600 of these retired and active duty SEALs heal up and get back in the game. And he just wrote a book, and the book is called Check Engine Light, about his lessons learned from this experience. And it's great to have him with us here tonight to share some of those lessons with us. So, Rob, thanks for coming out, man.

[Rob Wilson]

Thanks for having me.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. Before we jump into the book, because we're going to jump in the book. The book is just knowledge. It's just a bunch of knowledge. And I can, as I would read each part of it, you know, I would. I would thread my own memory of either myself or someone that I knew and how, like I said that that idea of road hard and put away wet is a real thing. And guys used to get out of the teams and. And they were just in really rough shape. And so we're getting better at it thanks to guys like you that have been investing in. In the team guys. But before we jump into the book, let's get some background on you. So. So where'd you grow up? What's the deal?

[Rob Wilson]

Virginia Beach. Virginia? Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

How'd you end up in Virginia Beach? Were your dad Navy or something?

[Rob Wilson]

No, actually, my parents are retired police officers. So I was born in Buffalo, N.Y. so coldest of the cold, there was work opportunities for police officers. My mom, my stepdad at the time, decided to go down to Virginia beach, went through the police academy, became police officers.

[Jocko Willink]

So they were both cops in vb?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay. And then as was there. Was there veterans in your family, like people that had served?

[Rob Wilson]

For sure. Both my grandfathers were Korean War veterans. My mom's dad was an infantry medic in the Army. He went in young. The story from my family is that his home life was pretty terrible. He got a waiver signed and went to Korea when he was 16. Yeah. Yeah. As you might imagine, that changed him forever. I mean, I can remember talking to him about it all the way until he died. And then my dad's dad, who's also passed, was in the infantry in the Army. And then his second deployment to Korea was a Ranger. Two Purple Hearts, one of which is hanging on my wall legit. So.

[Jocko Willink]

And so as you're growing up, what are you into as you're growing up.

[Rob Wilson]

In Virginia beach, surfing, skating, lots of martial arts. Played baseball by force until I was about 13. My mom was like, you need a team sport. You gotta learn how to get along and work with other people. Retrospectively, she was correct. But I didn't. I wasn't my thing. I, like, I respect it, but it's not my. Not my jam. I just wanted to do martial arts and surf. That's really all I want.

[Jocko Willink]

What about Mount Trashmore, Virginia Beach?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. Spent plenty of time there, running up and down stairs and flying an occasional kite, if I'm being honest.

[Jocko Willink]

And so. So you're. What was your surfer. How old were you when you started surfing?

[Rob Wilson]

10 or 11, maybe.

[Jocko Willink]

And how often would you surf in the wintertime?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, until. Probably until the last few years when I. Once I turned 40, I was kind of like, this has got to be real good for me to put on a hood and gloves and boots.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

And Virginia beach, it's not, like, epic either. Like, maybe once a year, bro.

[Jocko Willink]

I was stationed in Virginia beach and I. I was stationed in Virginia Beach. I surf. You know, I've been surfing for a long, long time. I grew up surfing, and I was in Virginia beach for two years, and I did two deployments in the two years. But. So I wasn't around a lot, but I had my boards and everything. I never went surfing one single time. I would, like, go check the waves and. And just be like, no, I think I'm not gonna do this right now. Yeah, but you were just committed as a kid.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, and, yeah, I was committed. The thing about Virginia beach and the surf there is if you want to be a surfer in Virginia beach, you have to be an amateur meteorologist because it's so fickle, because we're right up against the Chesapeake Bay. So the wind changes constantly. So you could wake up in the morning and the report says, like, three to four feet, pretty good. And you're like, great. And then the wind changes and it's basically, like, gone. Just gone. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And then. So what martial arts were you into?

[Rob Wilson]

Judo. Well, first I was like a Chuck Norris Karate Kid. I was in that era.

[Jocko Willink]

The Flex, jeans, whatever. Remember those things?

[Echo Charles]

Yeah. Hell, yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

That was.

[Jocko Willink]

So where. Where did you. Where did your parents take you to for martial arts?

[Rob Wilson]

So there was a Tidewater Judo club, which had, I believe, Mike Storm and Cindy Storm, which. They were a US Judo Federation legit club. Leo White, who was an Olympian, and then Sensei Don, whose name I can't. His last name, I can't remember, but I can see him Clear as day.

[Jocko Willink]

Sensei Don the Legend.

[Rob Wilson]

Sensei Don the Legend. He was a big dude. I remember him just being like, he was the instructor of all the instructors who. That it was. No. Unless you really got it. So he wouldn't, like, placate you with a. Like, a fun fall. He'd be like, no, you don't have it yet.

[Jocko Willink]

So what year. What year was this that you were trained in judo?

[Rob Wilson]

This would have been started probably 88, 89, maybe.

[Jocko Willink]

Good. This is pre UFC. There's no jiu jitsu in America yet. No, barely. No, other than in the garage up in Torrance. But other than that, there's no jiu jitsu. So if you were early in on the judo, then you're early in.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. I still have my US Judo Federation card.

[Jocko Willink]

Did you compete? So did you?

[Rob Wilson]

I did. As a kid, I competed, yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And how'd you do?

[Rob Wilson]

Virginia State champion.

[Jocko Willink]

Heck, yeah. That's freaking legit. And then. And then did you see wrestling and be like, oh, cool?

[Rob Wilson]

I tried to. I tried it for a little bit. I had a. I had trouble with the. With the rule set and also the weight class that I was in, So I would have been in seventh grade when I was wrestling, so just in middle school, junior high. And the guy in my weight class was. I didn't hit puberty yet. He did, but we were in the same weight class, so the strength differential between us was significant. And he used to just kick my ass all the time. That's weird.

[Jocko Willink]

Even though you had all that judo under. Under your.

[Rob Wilson]

I didn't know how to. I didn't know how to transfer it. I really didn't. I really didn't know how to move it over. There was rules that were just different.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

That I just didn't know how to deal with.

[Jocko Willink]

How filled with regret are you now that you didn't wrestle horribly?

[Rob Wilson]

Thanks for bringing it up.

[Jocko Willink]

So. So. And then would you get. Did you get into other things as well? Didn't you say you did Muay Thai and whatnot back then, too?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. So I did judo probably from maybe when I was 7 or 8 until I was 13. And then, by then, I was really obsessed with Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee's philosophy. So I was reading. I don't know how many times I've read the dao of Jeet Kune do at this point in my life. Probably 50 times. I read it through. I was like, man, I want to get exposed to this where there's, like, you just. You figure out what works for you. Did some asking around. There was only one place. I mean, there weren't that many places on the east coast that taught Jeet Kune do at the time, but there was one in Virginia beach, that was Frank Coochie, who was a former seal. His place, which was called Functional Defensive Concepts at the time. Now Lynx Academy offered Jeet kune Do, Kali and Silat and Muay Thai when I first started there. And then.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, he wasn't in Jiu Jitsu yet.

[Rob Wilson]

It wasn't even around. So then 95 maybe. I remember he got his blue belt from Pedro Sour.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

And that was like, whoa.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

Like I'd never even. I didn't even know what was going on. And then.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, when I moved to Virginia Beach, I wouldn't train there. I went and trained. And Frank Gucci's super cool. And so I trained there for. Again, I was gone a bunch when I was in Virginia beach, but I trained there and. And Gustavo Machado as well. But Gustavo Machado showed up while I was. He opened his academy when I was there. But yeah, Frank, there was a bunch of studs at Links to a bunch of really good guys. And this was in 98.

[Rob Wilson]

Okay.

[Jocko Willink]

So I forget what belt Frank Coochie was at that time. I don't really remember. But, you know, he definitely had a lot of good knowledge and stuff like that. So it was a cool place to train. And it was cool because they were training, you know, Muay Thai. They were. They were like early in on mma.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Which was cool.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. I saw. I don't even know how this, how this came to be. At that time in my life, I needed some, like, male figures who were strong, had a little bit of an anger problem. That place had a pecking order that was very clear that I was at the bottom of. But maybe when I was 15, I saw a Valley Tudo event that was at a, like a school gymnasium in Richmond, Virginia. I had no parent there that I remember. My mom let me tag along with the fighters. That was the first time I saw someone get knocked out in person. And that was the moment I realized anybody can get got because the guy who got knocked out was like the toughest human being I knew. And one mistake, one little moment of error, and it was done. And I was like, oh, it might not even matter how good you are. You just might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So that was like a lesson for me, like, self defense wise, like, okay.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, you best not to be running your mouth.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

You know, don't be there. So what, so as are you doing this all through high school?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

This was your focus 100. And what was your plan after high school? Did you want to become a fighter?

[Rob Wilson]

No, actually in high school, me and a good buddy of mine were seriously considering buds, because that's what we're around all the time. One of the guys I. Young guys I trained martial arts with, and we were like literally fighting with each other, swimming, running, lifting all the time. That's all probably until the end of my senior year is what I thought I was gonna do.

[Jocko Willink]

What changed your mind?

[Rob Wilson]

I had like this severe hip. Hippie face and it was like a really hard turn.

[Jocko Willink]

Was it what. What brought you there? Was it music? What was it?

[Rob Wilson]

I don't know. I tend to have kind of. My disposition is somewhat. I wouldn't say I've like a hippie ish disposition, but I definitely am. I have like fluid interests. So it's like once my interests shift, I'm 100 miles an hour in that direction. Some of it was like getting into meditation and more spiritual stuff.

[Jocko Willink]

So did you. I'm trying to figure out your route. Did you go like martial arts? And then all of a sudden you're like, well, meditation is a part of martial arts. And then all of a sudden I'm listening to like the little gong in the background and then I'm doing incense in a room.

[Rob Wilson]

In a matter of words. Yeah, that's. Yes. I mean, so I mean it wasn't quite that severe in real time, but I was always really interested in the psychological side of martial arts. So I was reading know Book of Five Rings and reading about Zen Buddhism. And you know, I had a. I have a book still called the Spiritual dimension of the Martial Arts, which is like on the other side of the warrior path. What is all the spiritual aspects?

[Jocko Willink]

I burned that book. No.

[Rob Wilson]

But I started studying that stuff and I just was in a little bit of a phase of confusion. I really wasn't sure what I was going to pursue. I was being a bit of a bum, to be honest. I was being a little bit of a. Of a bomb. Just kind of. Kind of floating.

[Jocko Willink]

Did you. Did you smoke pot or anything like that?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, yeah, but that was late. That was not quite at that time yet.

[Jocko Willink]

Did. Did music have anything to do with this? Did you like start listening to the Dead or something like that?

[Rob Wilson]

No, I can't stand their grateful really? At all. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Interesting.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. So I was just un. Unsure of my landscape. I was being a bit of a surf mom wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Had a lot of different interests. My mom gave me the boot when I was 18, which was totally necessary and probably one of the best things ever happened to me. She was like, oh, well, your choices are joined the military or go to a university. Like you're not going to just lay around on my watch like you're a grown man, you know, I was 18. She's like, you're a grown man. Like you got to figure your way out in the world. Take a, take a hike.

[Jocko Willink]

So where'd you go?

[Rob Wilson]

I went to my buddy's house down the street. His parents were leaving. I don't know. Like his parents left him in care of their family home and they went and so it was like me and another 19 year old dude with a two story house to ourselves. So needless to say, we took perfect care of it. Never had a party. We were, it was just, it was a mess.

[Jocko Willink]

And did you go to university?

[Rob Wilson]

I did end up going to Old Dominion University, which is good. Old odu. Went there for a couple years.

[Jocko Willink]

I almost went to ODU because I was in Virginia beach and I needed to go to college, but I. The other school I go to was University of San Diego and the Jiu Jitsu out here at the time was like kind of crazy. So I came back out here to train.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, but I mean, otherwise it would.

[Jocko Willink]

Have been ODU and.

[Rob Wilson]

Oh, well, yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And what did you study?

[Rob Wilson]

I studied psychology, but primarily foreign language. So I was a Russian language student and I took four years of Russian all through high school and two years in college, so. And I had a lot. I still love, love language. When I have the opportunity to speak Russian, I still like to do it. I'm way rusty compared to then.

[Jocko Willink]

But have you thought about going over there to train to Russia?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, not presently.

[Jocko Willink]

Might be a little funky right now, but.

[Rob Wilson]

But I respect the work ethic of the people.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

Oh, there for sure.

[Jocko Willink]

Freaking hard workers. So then what was it? So you go to school? Did you get a degree?

[Rob Wilson]

No.

[Jocko Willink]

So what'd you do? What was the next move?

[Rob Wilson]

Well, the next move was to get my girlfriend at the time pregnant. Check and go. Oh man, I gotta earn a living like right now. And for me, unfortunately, historically, one thing that would have to happen for me to get my shit together when I was a kid was things around me would have to get busy, chaotic pressure and then it would bring all my focus to bear and I would do well. So. And I realized this in, in retrospect. That I would wait until the environment became chaotic and then I actually feel better. Often when things are worse, like, oh, I know exactly what has to be done now.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, yeah, I like that too.

[Rob Wilson]

Not a good long term plan.

[Jocko Willink]

They're like chaotic things.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, it's not a great, it's not a great way to bring stability to your life. But I know this about myself now. So I was like, man, what do I really like to do? And I was brought up in a household where like fitness was paramount, health was like normal. You know, we were eating like chicken breast and broccoli and like we ate really clean in our house. It was, it's not like we didn't have cookies in the cookie jar, but like our household was clean.

[Jocko Willink]

And were you lifting and stuff as a kid?

[Rob Wilson]

Oh, yeah, probably. I mean, I formal exercise of probably like calisthenics and stuff. As soon as I was in martial arts. I mean, we were doing judo push ups like until the cows came.

[Jocko Willink]

And that was an environment that was in your house as well. Your parents were lifting?

[Rob Wilson]

Oh, yeah. My mom earned her pro card and bodybuilding when I was 15.

[Jocko Willink]

And then nothing but chicken and broccoli around these.

[Rob Wilson]

Bone lifting. Oh yeah. She hated competing but love training now she's like, look, my mom still lifts a ton and is like retrospect. She's like a CrossFit. And that kind of stuff was around when I was young. I would have done that. She's like, I hated walking on a stage where she's like, I love lifting.

[Jocko Willink]

Sure.

[Rob Wilson]

So I was around that all the time.

[Jocko Willink]

So you start. So you got a kid on the way.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

You realize you got to make a living. You got to pay for your girlfriend, you got to pay for a kid. What do you do?

[Rob Wilson]

Go to, go to massage therapy school. I was like, how can I get into the health field? Got it in a trade school because I honestly hated academics. I don't much care for being told what to do still. I don't. I love learning. I read a ton. But I like to do it on my own terms again. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. So I went to massage therapy school and I was like, I know this is an inroad to helping people with what I care about. So as long as I can remember, I had, I was like taking my buddies to the gym. Hey, wow, man, I want to, you know, I want to get strong. I want to like look good in a T shirt, whatever. I want to paddle better. I'm like, come to the Gym with me. I was like, man, I want to, I want to get into something with physical fitness and health. Went to massage therapy school, learned a ton about anatomy and physiology. I love learning about anatomy and physiology. So I dove into that, got into pain relief work, myofascial release, like took it really seriously.

[Jocko Willink]

Was it like an athletic type school or a hippie type school?

[Rob Wilson]

It was a hippie type school for sure. But the thing, the great thing about the. So the school I went to is the Casey Riley School of Massage Therapy. So Casey is Edgar Cayce, who is like the very famous psychic from the last century. I can't remember what years he lived, but Pre World War II for sure. And that's. That part of, it's not my jam. But there was a ton of holistic thinkers and health people. And in the spa, the health unit that was there, because that was a big part of his thing. There were all these manual therapists of all kinds who were in that space. And there were some people who had been putting their hands on human beings, athletes, people with chronic disease, people with chronic pain for 20 or 30 years, which is pretty hard to find at that time, early, early 2000s. And I got to be mentored by some really knowledgeable people on how to use your hands to relieve pain, increase range of motion, improve performance. And I chase that down as hard as I could. I read everything I get my hands on. I'd take a mentorship from anybody who would let me talk to them and ask them questions. You know, I hounded my peers and my mentors constantly.

[Jocko Willink]

How long is that school?

[Rob Wilson]

Nine months. Okay, the, yeah, the, the basic, like put your hands on people.

[Jocko Willink]

And then when you got done, what would you do? Like what do you open a shop? Do you start going to people's houses to get work? What do you do?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, you can do that kind of stuff. One of the buy ins at that time when manual therapy wasn't quite as accepted as it is now. Now it's like physical therapists are putting their hands on people way more than, you know, whatever that was 25 years ago, it wasn't as common, especially for men. So you'd be like, well, I'm going to work in a spa environment at least part time and do like people on vacations, massages, which I did. I don't want to say I hated it. I still learned a lot. I tried to take advantage of every opportunity that I had to learn. Even if I didn't totally like what I was doing, I still thought or I tried to think there's something to be learned here. Like, if this is what I have to do right now to make money, what can I do to make this a learning opportunity? All right, so that was kind of a. A mindset that my. My mom especially always was, like, passing. Like, if I'm like, I hate doing this, where's the opportunity?

[Jocko Willink]

Sure.

[Rob Wilson]

Where. Where can you. What can you get from this? So I learned a lot about communicating with people, talking to people about health in ways that still serve me now. Because you're in a massage therapist, I mean, in a spa, for the most part, you're touching people who are naked, and the trust in that situation has to be extremely high. So, okay, how am I going to communicate with this person whose hand I just shook for the first time, that they're going to go in a room with me and it's going to be safe? And so that started to help me understand, okay, how do I communicate with people? Not just with the words I'm saying, but how do I carry myself? How do I introduce myself to a stranger and then maybe have to talk to them about something that's personal and potentially even, like, intimate. Like, I'm gonna see more of their body than anybody else other than maybe their spouse. So if I find some health thing, I have to bring it up. You know, I'm obligated to say something. So learning how to deal with those kind of situations and navigate discomfort and. And speak in. In those scenarios, looking back, that was a really formative time for that, specifically. Now, as far as the tactics of the job itself, there is nothing like putting your hands on another human being to learn how their body works. Right. I mean, jiu jitsu, you find the same thing. Like, you really get a sense of what the body can and cannot do because you're manipulating it. In manual therapy, the intention's just different. So I want to know how can I get the system to change behavior based on how I'm manipulating it? And manual medicine is really, really old. It's probably some of the oldest medicine on earth. So I dove into, like, understanding things like gua sha and bone setting and not that those things.

[Jocko Willink]

What's gua sha? I've never even heard of that.

[Rob Wilson]

Gua sha is a Chinese scraping technique. So they would use, like, jade tools to scrape the skin.

[Jocko Willink]

What's the. What's the grenling?

[Rob Wilson]

Graston.

[Jocko Willink]

Graston.

[Rob Wilson]

That's the modern, so instrument assisted soft tissue manipulation.

[Jocko Willink]

My oldest daughter was a ballerina, and, like, she would. I don't know if you've ever known anyone that was a ballerina, but that is a psycho. Yeah. Endeavor, like, it's crazy. And she had more injuries from ballet than my other daughter had from gymnastics and wrestling. So, like. Yeah, but that's where I. We had these little, like, tools. She would have these tools, and she would just be, like, freaking grinding out her shins and her feet and everything else.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

So that gnarly.

[Rob Wilson]

That Graston stuff is like the modern incarnation. There's a little more science behind it now, and we can be a little bit more specific. And, like, the beveling. The angle of the beveling on the tool is very precise, and the dosage, so the. The tactics of it. I became obsessed with relieving pain, understanding pain, how to restore movement, the psychology behind pain. And then I had the chance to work with everything from guys in the teams at the time all the way to having clients who had, like, Parkinson's and were terminally ill and go into their home on a regular basis almost until they died. And then having that kind of breadth of interaction with human physiology, but direct interaction, not just a book, but to go touch somebody twice a week for three years who has progressive Parkinson's, it's like you really learn what the nervous system is about. So massage therapy, as odd of an introductory point as it was and as unexpected as it was, gave me a lot of insight that is still really valuable, like, to today.

[Jocko Willink]

So when you're heel hooking somebody. Sorry, I couldn't resist, man.

[Rob Wilson]

I mean, when I started jiu jitsu, other than having been exposed to martial arts before, you know, when people are new to jiu jitsu, one of the first barriers is they're not used to touching. Being touched.

[Jocko Willink]

Full on.

[Rob Wilson]

I was really accustomed to touching people. One from martial arts, but I was also doing manual therapy all the time. So, like, being really close to people, I was. I could move right through that and just kind of get to business.

[Jocko Willink]

So how did your career progress? Did you eventually do your own thing, or did you continue to work in, like, a spa scenario and then do stuff on the side?

[Rob Wilson]

Some I continue to do some just because, you know, I did what I needed to do to. To make a living. But one early realization I had was that manual intervention is not enough. You have to change movement behavior. So people have to have something that they can take away and change their behavior. Otherwise, you'd be the best therapist in the world. If you see a client one hour a week, basically they have 167 hours left in the way to screw it up, to screw up what you just did. So if there's no plan, they don't know how to move differently. Then you're just chasing your tail. So I started looking into movement therapeutics and coaching and more serious exercise training. I got a personal training certificate so I could start teaching people. And then I got into the CrossFit world in about 06. And then in Virginia beach, there wasn't even a CrossFit gym yet. In 06, then 07, my now wife, Tommy Gill. Tommy opened up CrossFit Virginia beach with Pat Sherwood, former SEAL.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Rob Wilson]

And I started coaching there. One thing led to another. I started coaching full time at CrossFit Virginia Beach. I moved my therapy practice full time into an office in the gym.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, that's squared away.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. So then I was really early in the therapeutics side of CrossFit. And along with that, you know, if you're in a CrossFit gym coaching and doing manual therapy in Virginia beach in 2007, 8. A lot of your clientele are military, and of that military, lots are seals. Right. Lots of guys were picking up CrossFit at that time. And what ended up happening was you'd have conversations, guys would have a little scratch, little. Little Nick. Little something bothering them. Like, why don't you come in? And I'm outside the wire so we can have fully open conversations about what's actually happening. And there's no one.

[Jocko Willink]

I'm fine.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, exactly. Right. That's the mantra. Right. But there's no one for me to report to. Yeah. And if somebody does want to know, well, I'm. I have. I'm under a medical board, so I have to be brought in by a federal judge.

[Jocko Willink]

Right.

[Rob Wilson]

They have to petition me. So everything's completely closed and protected. So guys could be like, actually, dude, I think my labrum and my hip is torn, but I'm gonna go have a deployment.

[Jocko Willink]

But I am going on.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. And you know what, man? Other than all of the sort of obvious sides of it, like warrior culture, wanting to be with the team, I don't want to be the guy who doesn't do his job. There's also, if I don't go, my next promotion gets delayed, and that's going to affect the financial health of my family. If it was me, I'd do the same. I have to be honest. Like, I. So I get it. If I knew was like, okay, I'm gonna go. I know I can grind through this. And on the other side is a Pay raise that changes my family's life for the next five years. I'd go, yeah. So instead of going in, reporting and having that delay, guys could come to me, find solutions. Now. During all that time coaching CrossFit, started coaching other athletes who were using CrossFit, often improperly, to train for their sport. And so I started deep diving into strength and conditioning more seriously, outside of the realm of CrossFit. But having a CrossFit gym gave me a constant living lab where I could see what worked, try things on lots of different types of athletes. And then probably 08, I wrote a cold email to Kelly Starrett before he was, you know, New York Times bestseller, most famous physical therapist in the world. I read an article he wrote in the CrossFit journal about tight hamstrings called Hamstrung.

[Jocko Willink]

I think I read that article too.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. And he put his email, and I was like, huh, man, this guy knows a lot about moving around and CrossFit and sports and putting his hands on people. Well, that's what I'm doing. Maybe I should connect with this dude. So I sent him an email like, hey, man, I have this client that I'm bumping into a little problem with. What do you think? He just sent me back his phone number and was like, call me. And that was whatever that was, you know, freaking awesome. 17, 16 years ago, something like that. So ever since.

[Jocko Willink]

And so then where did it progress from there? Just to get us up to, like, where you are now.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Next.

[Rob Wilson]

Traveled around teaching breath control for quite a long time. So I got into the breathing side of things again because pika gy, I was working with a lot of guys in very rapid training and deployment cycles. Guys would come home, have a lot of trouble down regulating. Honestly, transitioning in time zones was a major challenge on during training cycles. So I started to look into breath work because I'd studied yoga in college and was like, oh, man, this stuff calms you down. I know about some of the physiology. So I started using that to help guys basically chill out, get to bed more easily, regulate the nervous system. Saw some gaps in how it was being taught in the performance environment. Built a curriculum with Brian McKenzie at that time. So I partnered with Brian McKenzie. I traveled around the world a couple times. Australia, New Zealand, all over Europe, all over the states. Presented at the UFC Performance Institute a couple times. Worked with some pro fighters, people in lots of people in different, different sports, kind of bringing breath control, science and application into modern terminology, and then parted ways with, you know, those guys. That I was working with, doing that, that breath control work. You know, it was just time for me to move to something different and I wanted to zoom out a little bit. That brings me to my current post basically where I'm probably the last three years, who I've worked with most is Naval Special Warfare active duty operators and, and veterans. And that's through Virginia High Performance, which was founded by Alex Oliver, former SEAL and then the Navy SEAL Foundation. So those have been my primary clients for the last three years. Teaching this check engine light.

[Jocko Willink]

Like how. How did Alex Ali get started in it? Like, what was. How did he end up like? Look, I opened a gym too. I actually opened a CrossFit gym in 2007, you know, but what was his, you know, mine was more because we had an MMA gym and I was jiu jitsu junkie. I kind of still am, but. But, you know, that was kind of my. How I ended up with a gym. How did he get. How did he end up with a gym?

[Rob Wilson]

My understanding, and I'm, I'm gonna get this, hopefully get this really right, is that when he was in the teams, he noticed that like, he was beat up, getting broken, his teammates were getting beat up, getting broken. Like we hadn't done 20 years of this intense of conflict, so nobody really knew how much it was going to cost. And he saw, you know, basically in his words, saw his brothers getting, getting smoked, just getting crushed by the demands of the job and help stand up most of the modern practices in Naval Special Warfare human performance. So those changes of bringing people in, a lot of that, if you pull on the thread long enough, you get back to him. So that's why he was active duty. Was starting to work with organizations both within the Department of Defense and professional human performance organizations privately to figure out best practices for guys who are still going downrange and then notice like, man, nobody gets a hard reset. There's never a time when guys can step away but still be among peers and just have a real hard reset of the system. And so he created the continuation program, right. Which is.

[Jocko Willink]

And this is while he was still in.

[Rob Wilson]

Continue missions after. So he got out, I want to say 15 or 16, I couldn't be sure, but got out 15, 16, and then open Virginia High Performance. Soon thereafter, founded Continue Mission with the sole purpose of providing a holistic hard reset to operators. And that facility is about 150 meters from the front door of my house. And they opened in a parking lot where I walk my dogs every day. And I was literally Walking my dog and saw the gym door open, it was like, huh, what's this place? And walked in and shook hands and was like, oh, hey cool, I'm a coach. What do you guys do here? Oh, you're coaching. Sweet. And then at the time I was still.

[Jocko Willink]

So that was just random.

[Rob Wilson]

That was just random.

[Jocko Willink]

Damn, dude.

[Rob Wilson]

Serendipity.

[Jocko Willink]

Very nice.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, some, some would call it fate. Yeah. And yeah, that was probably seven, eight years ago. And then he and I just developed a friendship. I mentored the strength and conditioning staff there for some time. That was a pretty young, the first team there was pretty young strength coaches, not a ton of experience working with guys in the community. Didn't really know how to bridge culture gaps from sport to dealing with guys in the, in the teams. And I kind of helped. I mean we had like a monthly whiteboard probably.

[Jocko Willink]

What's the big difference there? Like if I like when, if I trained some college football team strength and conditioning and I roll in and I'm start working with Seals, what's. What are you telling them to help calibrate them properly?

[Rob Wilson]

Well, first of all, you're always out. You're always on the other side of the fence. So it doesn't matter how many high fives you get, how many good works you get and how many hugs. When they see you guys that have gone through selection together, and especially if they've ward together, love each other in a way that you can't possibly know other than your family. Simple as that you're not in the club. It's okay that you're not in the club. You don't have to be in the club. Don't act like you're in the club, don't dress like you're in the club. Just be you offer what knowledge you have that can help them get better at what they care about and otherwise shut up. And that seems to work out pretty, pretty well. And in addition to that, you'd better look like, at least look like you challenge yourself on a regular basis and even better actually challenge yourself on a regular basis otherwise nobody will be outwardly rude to you. But probably the buy in and the respect you get will be lower and that stuff matters.

[Jocko Willink]

Is there anything specific from like the. And I guess it would depend what, what type of sport athlete you were dealing with, but is there anything specific when you would you start talking somebody that coached strength and conditioning in football or strength and conditioning wrestling or strength and conditioning in what basketball. And now we're doing strength and conditioning for the teams. Is There any major, like glaring. Hey, listen, you treat, you, you, you, you aim for this in the athletic world, but you aim for this. It's a little bit different. Is there anything specific like that from actual exercise that you're going to do?

[Rob Wilson]

Well, the first thing is that most of the guys, if we're talking active duty especially most of the guys are injured, may not even consider their injury an injury and you might not know about it until it presents itself. So it's not like going to the Premier League where. Or the NFL where there's a lot of known. Oh, that's so. And so he's, you know, he's sprained his left ankle four times and we have all the history of it. It'll be like the fourth session with a guy who's been in the teams for 12 years and then you have him do an exercise. He's like, oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, I had a really bad plf and there was a compound fracture of my fibula on that side. And, and I can't flex my last three toes anymore. And you're like, okay, well, that probably would have been good to know before I wrote plyometrics in your workout.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

So the way that you, the, the philosophy or the general framework is like, you can't just throw, throw guys. Oh, we're gonna, I'm gonna write this eight week program that looks perfect on paper and we're just gonna, I'm gonna brush my hands and go, da, da. At the end of it. Um, you, you have to know that there's lots of unknowns under the surface and be really adaptable day to day a lot of times. And that the. Again, we're talking about active duty. The demands of the job are so high, not as reported by the operator, but on paper, the demands of the job are so high that guys don't need you to kick the shit out of them in the gym. It's like I was talking to a coach yesterday and I was like, we were. He's pretty new, a couple of years into working with guys. And I'm like, do you know the force profile of like a hard opening on the spine? And he was like, no. And I'm like, four to 11 GS. That's like no bundle.

[Jocko Willink]

That's just, just standard.

[Rob Wilson]

Just standard. That's 4 to 11 GS. I'm like, do you think this guy needs to back squat? Probably. Probably doesn't like it. Probably doesn't need more stress on his spine. So it's like okay, you get somebody who does a tandem bundles course for eight days. If you don't understand the force profile and the amount of fatigue and the amount of alertness and vigilance that stacks up and then you're like, oh, man, you've been gone 10 days. Let's take it in. Yeah. And then, and what, what's a, what's an operator going to say? Okay, let's go, let's go. Like, not going to back down. All right, fine. Because nobody's going to quit or say they can't do it. So you have to be an advocate. When you're a strength coach and a special operations environment, you have to be an advocate for them. Go. Okay, man. So just so you know, you started that training cycle with, we'll call it $5,000. You've spent $4,600. This workout that you want to do costs a thousand dollars. You don't have a thousand dollars. We need to save money until your bank account is a little more flush and then you get to spend again.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, that's good. Those are the kinds of things I was wondering. And that one, that one actually makes sense because no one, it's almost like being a, you know, fighters before a fight, you won't hear them say like, oh, I got a bad left knee right now. Like, they're not going to say that. Well, as a team guy, you're just not going to say that ever, Ever. You know, like, I'm not just going to advertise this weakness to everyone. It's not happening. So we're just going to gut through it like you said. And yeah, if you, if you have somebody programming some psycho stuff, that's you'll just gut through and get, you know, a worse injury from the whole thing. So at some point you decided. How long ago did you decide you were going to write this book?

[Rob Wilson]

You know, it's kind of funny. The book told me that's how I feel. Like I didn't wake up one day and be like, ah. I mean, I've wanted to write a book. I like writing. I really enjoy writing and I've written for some periodicals. But I was teaching this curriculum and then it started to occur to me. I started to have this, like, little nagging feeling like there's a little voice, like, this is a book. And I was like, nah, you know, like the resistance like that, that Steven Pressfield talks about. I was like, nah, this isn't good enough to be a book, you know, and then I was like, this is a book. And it just kind of kept nagging at me. And I was like, all right. So I sat down one day and wrote the first, first chapter almost in its entirety in one, one broad brush. Just like it came out, like vomited out. And I was like, oh, maybe this is a book. So I wrote the first chunk, like the first section of the book in less than a week for sure, almost as it stands now. And then my daughter actually went to college for proof, not proofreading. She's an English major with a technical writing major. So I asked her to proofread. I was like, hey, can you proofread this? I think I'm going to send it out. And she was like, first of all, she called me and she was like, dad, I'm so glad this doesn't suck. Because I was really scared because I haven't really written anything that you've read anything you've written before. I was like, please don't suck, you know, because my daughter's really honest and she would tell me, like, this is bad. Go put this away somewhere. You know. But yeah, I was like, maybe this is a book. So I, I shopped it around and you know, that's a whole, whole thing unto itself, but took two and a half years for it to be. From the time I sat down and wrote the first words to this moment, which the book comes out today.

[Jocko Willink]

Today.

[Rob Wilson]

Two and a half years.

[Jocko Willink]

Well, let's get into the book a little bit. I'm gonna start off with this. I'm gonna start reading a little bit of it and I'm going to read a section from the Ford, which was written by Kelly Starrett, who we already mentioned, who's a great dude and that's just such a cool story that you were just like a random dude that emailed him and he like, yeah, here's my phone number. Give me a call, we'll talk through this issue. So that's the kind of dude he's. He is. I've. I've bumped into him and, and shared stuff with him over the past and he's always been just a super cool guy. And here's what he writes part of the forward here. He says, we're now in the third wave of human performance. Performance. If you're gen. If you're a Gen X kid like me, you remember the first wave defined by Malt Nut power bars and first gen heart rate monitors back when we still believed you could outwork the competition. Spoiler, you can't. The second wave came crashing in with the rise of YouTube fitness. Suddenly you didn't need to buy Olympic lifting shoes out of someone's car like it was a drug deal. Training sophistication exploded. So did fitness, tribalism, tech fetishism, and unfortunately diminishing returns. We leveled up, but got lost in the weeds. The question became, how the hell are we supposed to do all of this? The third wave is about integration, simplification, recalibration. It's the return to context, nuance and, and sustainability. It's the long game game. And Rob Wilson is its poster child. It's a freaking pretty epic intro. I. I would like to. We. We could probably spend a whole show talking about before the first wave. Just go back to Joe Wer's super weight gain formula. Go back to pec deck. MetX metrics.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Was it metrics or MetX?

[Echo Charles]

I think it was metrics.

[Jocko Willink]

I think it was met.

[Rob Wilson]

It was the most disgusting.

[Jocko Willink]

Dude, I had metrics. When it came in two bottles. Like, one was called bass and one was called something else. And you mixed them together, one scoop of each. It was basins. I forget what it was, but you had to. It was like a. You had to combine them.

[Echo Charles]

Like the activated.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, I was like, you know, originally.

[Rob Wilson]

Designed for cancer patients and it tasted like it.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, metrics was. Yeah, I used to put mint oil, like what, What? Mint. Mint extract. Drip mint extract and straight sugar into it.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, straight.

[Jocko Willink]

Just straight sugar. I mean, I was like 20 years old. What? Yeah, sugar ain't gonna kill me, dude. Tastes good.

[Rob Wilson]

Gotta solve that problem.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, problem solved. Mint, mint freaking metrics back in the day. Yeah. You could go through all those things. And the other thing cool thing is if you go back far enough, you go right back to where. Where we are. You know, you still see guys lifting heavy swinging kettlebells back in the day. Like the whole thing. Like you, you could go back far enough where you get back to current time.

[Rob Wilson]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

All right, so getting into this a little bit. Prologue Lessons from high performers In a fascinating study research. And I'm only reading like little sections of the book. In a fascinating study, researchers compared personality differences among non athletes, athletes, professional athletes and champions using the big five personal personality inventory. The Big five is reliable cross cultural statistical analysis that includes five personality domains. Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. An easy way to remember them is the acronym ocean. The highest predictor of championship performance. According to this analysis, low neuroticism. This trait refers to an individual's tendency to have negative emotions. People who score high in trait neuroticism tend to be more emotionally volatile, are more likely to experience anxiety and depression, and have trouble dealing with stress, especially if it's unexpected. The highest performers showed low neuroticism even when compared to other professionals in the same sport who already have lower averages average levels of this trait than the general public. This means the highest performers were the least affected psychologically by negative information from their environment. Or if they were affected, they bounced back rapidly. Being extraordinarily low in trait neuroticism is what allows the best of the best to hit the mark in stressful high stakes situations instead of being ruled by panic and doubt. If it is a super it is a superpower for sure, but not without its downfalls. So I read all that. I was kind of like, oh yeah, hell yeah. And then I got to this line. It is a super power for sure, but it's not without its downfalls. Often lower threshold issues slip under the radar and don't set off any alarm at all. This is great when it comes to saving lives and winning gold medals, but does not alert these individuals to cumulative threats to health and performance longevity. In other words, it's not a single decapitating swipe of the blade that shuts things down down. It's death by a thousand cuts. No community better displays the incredible upsides and downsides of being forward focused than the special warfare group I've had the opportunity to work with over the last few years. No group of people on the planet are tougher and more tenacious. However, there's often a steep price to pay for them on the other side. Many of these men and women have medical rap sheets a mile long. Long career long habits of going till it's broken and then going some more take an indelible toll on the body and mind. And that's exactly what I opened up with like that idea of hey, we're just going to keep going. And actually the really funny thing is medical rap sheets a mile long is a good thing. The bad thing is when I was in and you'd look at someone's medical record after 20 years and it'd be like four pages and, and like just standard medical stuff because they didn't tell anybody about anything. So I think we're getting better about that there. But then, but then this idea of the check engine light, how'd that come to your brain?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, so actually, so because that's the.

[Jocko Willink]

Name of the book.

[Rob Wilson]

That's the name of the book. Yeah. So Check engine light is this. It's a simple analogy that describes in one fell swoop that there's indicators that let you know something requires further investigation. That's it. And I think when I work with guys who are in the special operations community, one of the shortcomings of communicating the idea of self care is that culturally it's completely oppositional to the idea of mission service team. Mission service team. Where's me in there? Me taking care of me first is the opposite of those things. So how do you reconcile the need for self care with those core principles? And that is there are appropriate situations to ignore the check engine light and keep driving. No question about it. But it's not free. And if you don't tend to the things that require maintenance, eventually performance will decline or you will experience catastrophic systems failure.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. Just to give you a like quantifiable fact about what you're saying in the teams, when you get done with like a, a training mission or a mission, you take care of team gear first, then platoon gear, then your personal gear and then you. And if you get caught like we're over here cleaning boats and getting them maintained and Echo's like over there taking a shower, like we will beat the shit out of him. That is a mortal sin. To put yourself and your, your person above the team and the platoon and the mission. That's just the way it is. So you are taught that and it is beaten, beaten into your head. So you're even more right than you know on that one. And then the other, the interesting thing. So I've been, I've been using this analogy of a, of a check engine light for years and where I, I've only used it on the, on the mental health side. And basically what I would say is, listen, when a guy needs a break, it's just like a check engine light. If you're driving down the road and the check engine light comes on and you keep driving, what happens? You destroy the engine. You can't drive that car anymore. If you're driving down the road and the check engine light comes on and you pull over to the side and you get maintenance and you fix the problem, you can get right back out on the road and you're going to have a long term use vehicle. But if you ignore the problem, it's going to be devastating. And this comes from like actual combat trauma of guys that are breaking in the field. And you know, I learned this from, well, I learned it from, from David Hackworth and Dick Winters who was, you know, Dick winters, World War II Band of Brothers and David Hackworth is Korean Vietnam. And I read their books and they both, in different ways explained that if you had a guy that was like going to break. And one of the things is so classic because people say, how do you tell when a guy's going to break? And Dick Winters in one of his books, he says, if I saw a guy with his head in his hands, I knew I needed to get him off the front lines. You know, you see a guy doing this, like, get him off the front lines. And if you get them off the front lines quickly and you give them a couple days back in the rear, you know, hey, we need you to do a logistics run, go back to the rear and pick up our food and spend the night back there and make sure we have everything and then come back out. They'll be good to go. But if you keep them out there, you're going to break them. And then the analogy that David Hackworth used was he said everyone's got a cup that they're filling up with, with stress and different size cups. And some people have bigger cups, but when their cup overfills, if you let it get overfilled, they're done. And so you have to like get them in a situation where they can empty that cup. So I really like the idea of this check engine light that you put into this book. And I think it's, it's something that will awaken people and what they need to pay attention to. You say this in the book. Fast forward a little bit. In my two plus decades of as a health and performance professional, one thing has become exceedingly clear. We are often disconnected from the things that drive our health and performance until they reach critical mass of dysfunction. Just like ignoring the check engine lights. Exactly what I just said. We, we beat up our bodies, neglect them to give them proper attention and maintenance. And then when the system's malfunction, we blame our bad joints, our weak hearts and our unlucky genetics or whatever else comes to mind, rather than our own failure to cure care for ourselves. Boy, I had to put a star by that one because this is, you know, I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership which, which is like, it's my fault. And this is such a perfect example of an echo. And I were talking about this earlier today of like, oh, well, I, you know, I'm, I can't do this move anymore in jiu jitsu because my knee hurts. Well, is that really your knee or is it just that you haven't you know, strengthened the knee. You haven't become more flexible, you haven't drilled that move. So you can, you can get the repetitions in to get the body used to that. Or is it just your knees fault? It's like all day long, man, we blame it. And, and, you know, the classic thing is we're getting old. Like people, people use that. And this is something I've talked about is I've been in situations where I felt. I felt like I might lose a movement. One of them was muscle ups. I moved to a house where I didn't have a big garage, and I just couldn't do muscle ups. Like, I didn't have the headroom to do muscle ups. And I was living there for about 18 months and, you know, I still did a bunch of pull ups, did, still did dips, did ring dips, did ring pull ups, but I couldn't do muscle ups. And I. Then I finally got back to my real house with a big garage and I had my rings up and it was time to do muscle ups. And I was like, oh, I could do like one. And part of my mind was like, well, you know, do well a. Well, you know, you're getting a little older now. No, don't accept that. Or, hey, you know, maybe you're just not strong enough. No, it's just like, you need to do them, and so you just go and start. You got to be humble enough to go, oh, can't do muscle ups right now.

[Rob Wilson]

Cool.

[Jocko Willink]

Need to. Need to bring them back. I had the same thing happen. I had an arm injury, couldn't straighten my arm out, and I couldn't do overhead squats for like a year. And when I went. When I finally my arm got healed up enough, it's time to start doing overhead squats again. PVC pipe was hard, and. And it's like a part of your brain goes, well, you know, how. How important is it really to do overhead squats anyways? I mean, do I really need to have. I've never done one in the field before. I've never done one on the jiu jitsu mats before. Never done an overhead squat. Have you ever done an overhead squat before? Like when you weren't in the gym doing overhead squats? Well, probably not me. Well, so it's really easy to surrender that position, especially when your ego is saying, well, you know, overhead squat is stupid. You know what I mean? Your ego will tell you that instead of being like, no, you're actually just weak at it and you need to rebuild because you haven't been able to do them for a long time. And, and so that the idea that you hit on here, which is we will just make excuses to stop doing what we're supposed to be doing, is ridiculous.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. And I mean, I have really. There are some things that are not within our control. Genetics. We're genetically who we are. If you got long arms, they're probably gonna be long. You got short arms, they're gonna be short. Right.

[Jocko Willink]

And that bench is gonna be fire.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, yeah. You're gonna have pecs for days. It's amazing. Right? Burpees got em right. But. But focusing on the uncontrollables does nothing to help you in any domain. And health is not an exception. So let's say you do have whatever genetic marker. Da da da da da. It's like, okay, well what lever do you have to pull on that will change that? Oh, none. But you can eat vegetables, can you not? Why don't you do that? And what's interesting is, even if that's not the answer, starting on that path helps you gain experience that will minimally let you know what doesn't work. You'll start to learn. You will develop the skill. The skill domain, or developing skill in any domain is actually the doing of the thing. It's not any different in practices that we need for health. You have to do them all. The stuff that works must be done.

[Jocko Willink]

Gotta do the thing. Here's another again. This is just such an important thing for people, to people to understand. Small problems left unattended beget larger problems. If you don't rotate your tires, your tires will wear unevenly. Unevenly. When your tires wear unevenly, your steering starts to pull. As your steering pulls more, your struts, shocks and brakes wear out. Faster compensation moves its way through the whole system. Before you know it, more things seem to be going wrong than right now. It's an additional burden to get to work and pick up the kids from school. What was once a small crack in the ice spreads throughout the whole pond. Of course, not every small problem becomes catastrophic. But the purpose of maintaining your vehicle isn't just to prevent it from breaking down. Staying tuned in to how your vehicle is running also means it'll work if and when you need it to perform. And this is something we've probably all heard a thousand times. Oh, you know, I had a. I sprained my ankle and I didn't get it fixed, but now I was like walking funny and then it spread to my knee and now my left hip is all jacked up. And, and that stuff happens on the regular if you don't pay attention to it.

[Rob Wilson]

Absolutely. And you know, one of the things I, I realized probably mostly in the last, like five or six years is when it comes to health related or performance related things, that there was some tacit understanding that I had from the environment that I grew up in or the environments I was exposed to. What are the things that you should pay attention to? And often, many of the shortcomings around recognizing the indicators wasn't because necessarily people were lazy. Some are. Or it wasn't because they were dumb, although some are. Right. But it was mostly because people never had the opportunity to systematically develop the skill set that helps them look. They just don't even know how to begin looking. And so we're fed lots of data, but do you even know how to look?

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, that's another good point, is another reason why people miss it. And you pointed out in the book, I'm not sure when, but I'm just gonna say it now. But you also have a little bit of a boiling frog scenario where, you know, you got some little nagging thing that you don't really pay attention to it and you just grow accustomed to it instead of going, oh, wait, my shoulder shouldn't feel like this echo, Charles. You get your wings a little bit.

[Echo Charles]

You know, jammed up.

[Jocko Willink]

A little jammed up. Right now we're working through it, though.

[Echo Charles]

We're working through it.

[Jocko Willink]

But there's sometimes people go, oh, well, you know, it's, it's really minor. And so they don't pay attention to it. And then it gets worse. Now when they go to repair it and put in the effort, it's, it might be too late, or at least it's going to take a lot more work. So you got to pay attention to these little things. And, and if you're not aware of what your body's doing, next thing you know, you look up and you're like, wait a second, I can't, you know, lift this over my head anymore.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. Well, you know, one person whose philosophy has had some serious influence on me for sure last 10 years is Jordan Peterson. Right. One thing he says is conflict delayed is conflict multiplied. That's a truism across all domains. So it's the same with your body. If we just try to put it in a shelf somewhere, it doesn't mean it goes away. It just means we're not dealing with it right now. And that thing will fester and probably become worse.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, yeah, yep. Fast forward a Little bit. As we walk down the road toward disease, dysfunction and reduced well being. I'm not sure I love that statement. Kind of factual, though. As we walk down the road toward disease, dysfunction, reduced well being, there are often signs posted all over the place, but we just don't realize it. A tiny, long loss of movement capacity here and a little more breathlessness there doesn't seem like a big deal and probably won't capture our attention. We just get used to it. Just as we can expand our tolerance of stress and discomfort, such as through exercise, we can reduce it through a lack of awareness and exposure. What becomes comfortable and typical for. For us from day to day may not be what's best for us over the long haul. And very often it isn't. Yeah, you're. And I think, Echo, you were talking about this and you address this in the book as well. That and you have a great line. I forget what the line is, but I have it marked out. We'll get to it. But whatever you're doing becomes what you're doing. And if you keep doing dumb or not just dumb things, but if you. If you have this habit, I'm gonna sit there and slouch and look at my screen all day and your head is forward like that is what your body will become. Yeah, that thing.

[Rob Wilson]

That's what it's designed to do. Become what you choose. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And if you choose to stand up straight with your shoulders back and be strong, your body will be strong.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

But you have to. You have to give it the freaking guidance. Yes, it will follow your guidance.

[Rob Wilson]

It will. To bring up Kelly again, he says your body is like an obedient dog. Just go where you tell it.

[Jocko Willink]

Be careful what you're telling it. While the automotive analogy is one that helps you more clearly understand what happens if you fail to address issues, there is a key difference. If you don't take care of your car, you can get a new one. You have but one body. You're stuck with the consequences of your driving for life. It behooves you then to become a better driver of body and mind. You are obligated to know the basics of your own maintenance. Learning to properly tune yourself so that you can fire on all cylinders for as long as possible is potentially the most important skill set that a person can develop. Although health and biology are far more complex than any automobile, caring for them doesn't have to be complicated. In the coming pages, I am going to outline a concise framework that will help you learn to pay attention to your body by showing you how to build a performance longevity dashboard made of key performance indicators. This will help you continually calibrate or calibrate your perception of your internal stare over time so that you can use your indicators to become a better driver. Sorry, your internal state. Over time, you'll learn to build a toolkit as well so that you can address issues when gauges on the dashboard get your attention. Ultimately, you'll gain skills that help you tune your body in mind so that all of the component parts that influence performance longevity can work in harmony to help you feel and perform your best for as long as possible. We had a harmony hippie sneaking out. He's still there.

[Rob Wilson]

Sometimes he's still there. He still is one with the universe.

[Jocko Willink]

And again, I'm not going to read the whole book, but you have this. The way the book is laid out, it's a resource and you actually explained in the book how you could use the resource. But you have questions that you ask at the end of each chapter. Self reflection questions. For instance, here it says, can you think of a time when you were forced to ignore a warning light from your body? What was it? Why did you ignore it? Did you get back to it later? If so, what did you do? So there's a lot of very introspective parts of this book that it, that is asking someone to like, hey, take a look at yourself and ask these questions. And those things are really important. One thing that I do is, you know, I, I log down what I do for a workout every day. But when something's wrong, I just write it down. Like it'll say back tweaked, you know, and that way I can go, or shoulder tweaked or right arm tweaked or whatever. Or like, hey, hurt really bad right arm, you know, So I have those things. Because otherwise you don't know how long you've been injured for. At least. I don't. I'm like, when did that happen? And also I can look at my numbers and be like, dude, what is wrong with me? Like, for instance, I have a little bit of, A little bit of a tweaked back for a little bit. And you know, I can't like all of a sudden like, wait, wait, what? Your squat just dropped off? Like, no, you were injured. Okay, back tweaked. I should take more detailed notes. But forcing yourself to write down what's going on, it allows you to understand better what's happening.

[Rob Wilson]

It helps. For sure, for sure.

[Jocko Willink]

One of the things, one of the words you use is key performance indicators. And you got these two different. So you know, tracking. This is the. I work with a lot of companies, I have a consulting company and you know, KPIs is a huge part of it. Key performance indicators. Two types of KPIs. Lagging indicators and leading indicators. What are those to you?

[Rob Wilson]

Well, lagging indicators come after the fact, leading indicators come before the fact. And so, you know, that's kind of like, you know, in military terminology, right, left of blast, Right of blast. So do we. What are the things that happen before a given event where we can create relationships with the likelihood that this thing will or will not happen? So that's leading indicators. What are the things that come often come before this? So like for you, if you're, if you tweak your back and you have a history of that, then you go, oh man, when we play a lot of closed guard before for two weeks, that's when my back starts to get tight. Then if I couple that with a lot of back squatting, man, that's when my back tends to fry out. Oh, now I have a relationship. So now I know that closed guard heavy closed guard volume. It could be a leading indicator for my back hurting. It doesn't mean don't do either one of those. It could mean now that I know that they're potentially connected, maybe there's some stretches that I do after that training. Maybe there's some additional warmup I do before I back squat. Maybe I change how heavy I go when I do this. It just changes the approach. It doesn't mean do, don't do. It's not zeros and ones. And then lagging indicators after the fact, right of blast, you can use that. Sometimes they're negative. Like, oh man, I didn't know these were connected. My back just hurts. Now that's a lagging indicator. That's a negative example. It can also be I changed something and now was there an impact on the thing I tried to change? That's also a lagging indicator, right in the company. It could be bottom line, it could be keeping personnel. Right. There's lots of different ways lagging indicators can be used. When they become negative is when it's the only relationship we have with the event. It already happened and now I'm in the moment of, oh, something I didn't want happened and I don't even know why.

[Jocko Willink]

Is it lagging indicator if I am weaker, is that considered a lagging indicator?

[Rob Wilson]

It could be. It could be. So if you're weaker talking about the specific example.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, like, or, or I'm, you know, I can normally do this many pull ups and I went and worked out and I didn't do as many as I normally do and I'm like oh. Cuz to me I'm like oh you know what, you need some rest bro. Like do you need to take tomorrow and eat some steak and, and you know like do some mobility work or something?

[Rob Wilson]

For sure. It could be. Sometimes the, the type of indicator it is is just where it is in time and what you may or may not want. Right. So lagging indicators aren't necessarily negative by nature. So let's say you made a conscious decision for, to, to use less energy for pull up strength. You're like I'm going to just, I'm going to use this cash for something else. I only have so much time in the gym, I'm going to let my pull up numbers slide a little bit because I'm focused on something else and you get, you get weaker. Quote unquote. Right. This doesn't mean it's bad, it just means the expected outcome occurred. That's it.

[Jocko Willink]

You know, you, you got about a bunch of stuff in here about the, the ability for us now to collect data on ourselves. Whether it's wearable, wearable, wearable, wearable heart rate monitors, whether it's apps about what you know, you can take a picture of your food and it'll give you all the macros that you have and all this stuff and there's of a lot, a lot of data that you can get, which is obviously, you know, part of our KPIs, part, part of our measuring of what's happening in our world. You do say this though, and again I'm fast forwarding through that section. But beware the data trap. More reliable and valid indicators are important for describing the mechanisms underlying aspects of health. Health, the tracking of sleep and heart rate variability are two common examples. On the other hand, too much focus on data can not only cause you to mistake the forest for the trees, but can lead to a kind of performance neurosis, broadly speaking, especially in those who may be more vulnerable. So I had friends that were wearing a whoop strap and that thing would tell them that they were tired in the morning and then they would be tired.

[Rob Wilson]

Interesting.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, I was going to make a whoop strap that just said you're ready to destroy the world.

[Rob Wilson]

Sounds right. The jocko strap, always ready. There's no digital readout, right. It's just like embroidered letters in red. It's Just a red. A black bracelet with red letters.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. It is crazy how, like, you know, that will happen to people. They'll think. They'll be told that they're tired. They'll be told that this whatever, and they will take that on board, and it will impact their performance for sure.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, those, like whoop and aura, those things can be helpful, but they're some of the most misused tools in all of fitness. And it's kind of a bugaboo with me, the way that they get used and sometimes the way that they advertise what it is that they actually do. Like, no whoop or any of that stuff can tell you if you should exercise today or not. There's way too much context.

[Jocko Willink]

I can tell you if you should exercise today or not.

[Rob Wilson]

Yes, you should.

[Jocko Willink]

Good.

[Rob Wilson]

But the question is, in what way? At what intensity, with what tools, for how long? So there's a lot of room for play in the way you exercise, where you still don't get a zero for the day, for sure. And so that concept, which is later in the book, which is this idea of tuning, is about what are the nuances that are in between zeros and ones. But. And this happens a lot with special operations that I work with. Guys will look at their hrv, they'll start looking at their hrv and they'll be like, my HRV is low. Well, I feel awesome. That happens two days in a row. I feel awesome. This says, I'm not ready. Fuck this thing. It doesn't work. And they toss it. Which is a shame, because that data could potentially help them if used correctly. But if you use it to tell you how you feel, that is not the right way to use it at all.

[Jocko Willink]

I determine how I'm gonna feel. How you like that?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Fast forward a little bit. And this is kind of the key idea of the book. The Performance Longevity Dashboard. Organizing indicators. And this is where you get into the M3 model. The purpose of the M3 model is to help you organize the innumerable signals from your body that you have to contend with at any given time into digestible categories. The M3 model has three categories. Mind, Movement, and matter. Let's talk mind, movement, matter.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. So mind, movement and matter are simply buckets from which you can draw indicators to put on the dashboard. Right. So I have this primary way of organizing information, which is the Performance Longevity Dashboard. Right. So performance longevity is being awesome for as long as possible at whatever it is that you care about. That's performance longevity. That sounds way Better to me, by the way, than just being around on earth, existing. I want to do awesome and enjoy life. I want to be able to participate. That's performance longevity. Then a dashboard is, you know, it's an instrument panel, right. It's a instrument cluster. It's an array of gauges and indicators that give you both right now information and what might need attention in the future in order to keep the vessel running. So is there one indicator on a dashboard? Negative, there's a bunch. And you play all of that information against each other in order to get a broad picture of what's happening. Same thing for your mind body system. You don't want to have one like HRV tells me or my heart rate tells me. But what is the big picture that's being painted by all of these? Those valid, reliable, accessible indicators that make up that dashboard are enumerable. There's so many, especially now with all the wearables and all the data we can get. It's a constant state of overwhelm for people. High performers, especially when overwhelmed with information, will by default disregard and focus on task because that's what creates performance. Not because they're dumb or they're meatheads, but because focusing on task outcomes is what wins. So in order to make this palatable and actually relevant, usable, meaningful, you, I categorize these into mind, movement and matter, which are just buckets from which you could draw indicators and. Or tools that would go on your dashboard or your toolkit. I give some examples.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

But the specifics of those depend on the person.

[Jocko Willink]

And that's kind of how the. Well, that is how the book is broken down and the quick definitions you give. Mind is the collection of our internal thoughts, feelings and perceptions. Movement is the navigation of your body, space and time. Matter refers to your biochemistry, your molecular health as measured through biomarkers found in blood work. So those are the three big buckets. And yeah, again, not to go too. That's crazy with the, with the metaphor of dashboard, but it's like you had, you know, three different screens. You could choose from what you were going to look at. And these are the, these are the subject headings that you have. And then of course, once you've got your dashboard and you're getting readings out from your dashboard, you're going to have tools to work on wherever there might be issues. And that's the next section and a couple examples here. Whether it is prayer and meditation, for the mind stretches to keep pain and stuff, stiffness at bay, or a reliable way to Improve your nutrition, upkeep and repair of your body and mind is your responsibility, just like it is with your car. Then you talk about tools and, and what is important about tools? One of the things that you lay out, they have to be robust, reliable and repeatable. Those are the three Rs for your tools explained on those a little bit.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. So that concept, the, that R3, robust, reliable, repeatable, that's originally from my good friend Mickey Shook. So Mickey runs Carry trainer, which is a personal defense course, Right. He teaches pistol rifle to civilians. Right. So the right way to use those items in defense of your, your life. And Mickey uses this to talk about how should, how you should select the tools you carry on your person or the systems that you build around those. And I train and work with Mick a lot and I, the more I was around him and I heard this, I was like, man, this is appliable to health. This is just how you select stuff you work with, right? This is a great way to break this down. And so robustness means things that are hard to break, right? That's what robust means. Like a huli, for example, right? Like impossible. So robustness can refer to the material. And when we think about picking a tool that you're going to use to upkeep your health, often we might go, oh, this scientist really likes this and recommends it. This one is affordable at Walmart. But we don't think about like, will this stand up to my household? Right. I heard that there was a double randomized placebo backflip trial from Harvard about this leg massager 9000. But we don't ask like, will it work in a household with like three dogs and four kids or will it get destroyed on the third day? So that's part of robustness. But robustness also means the system that you use to deploy it. Are the systems that you have in place easy to break down? Like if you have a sleep routine, is it 14 steps long? And then if you travel anywhere, it completely breaks down and you can't sleep for are you precious and fragile? Right. Or do you have a four step sleep routine that you can do at your house, but also anywhere and will produce reliable outcomes? Right? So that's robustness. Reliable means consistency over time. So if I can identify the outcomes that I'm trying to achieve, do I have KPIs in place that let me know, am I actually getting what I want out of this tool? Is it producing for me or am I just doing stuff now when I had a gym and still now When I see people like rolling out on foam rollers and stuff, and I got nothing against foam rollers, but I can tell most people have no idea what it is they're trying to achieve with the time that they're using for that item. In which case they will think foam rollers don't work, which they don't. If you don't know what you're trying to achieve and how to measure it, or it's doing this thing and then suddenly be surprised by sort of not getting the result they want. Right. So reliability, consistency over time and outcomes. Right. So robust, reliable and then repeatability has to do with the user. So do I know how to reproduce, do I have the skill to use this tool that I've selected? Right. If we have tool first and skill second, that's a real problem. Right. So I have to know how to use this thing. So again, The Leg Massager 9000 sounds awesome. It's got a 1 inch thick user manual. What's the likelihood that I'm going to be able to repeat that? You know, I've done some consulting with like tech companies, like health tech companies and they would want to know things like, okay, if we take our this sort of relaxation meditation device into the collegiate setting, is it viable? And one of the things we figured out with a particular device is a 7 minute meditation actually takes about 13 minutes because you have to make sure it's plugged in, you have to get to the app, you have to decide which meditation you're going to do. It explains to you what the meditation will do. You have to make sure your Bluetooth is on. If your Bluetooth is on, you have to make sure not too much other is on at the same time or else it won't connect. So it's all, all these steps, it's not repeatable. So how will you expect a 19 or 20 year old to use this scientifically proven device? Which sounds awesome when you read the study because the studies they produced were like miraculous, but functionally the skill was not repeatable enough to get the outcome. So these are. If you're an expert in a domain, robust, reliable, repeatable is tacit. You will pick things that don't break, you will pick things that get the outcome that you want and you will develop a repeatable skill set. When you're not inside your domain of expertise though, it's easy to fall prey to outsourced information and biases and cognitive fallacies because you don't know where to look. If you have a framework for picking Tools, then you can use it anywhere.

[Jocko Willink]

And another thing that you talk about in here is proximal distal, which is a long way of saying, like, hey, having the tool at close range when you need it. And you know, you have the, like, you know, how many. Speaking of foam rollers, I probably have seven foam rollers. I got one in my office, I got one in my bedroom. I got one in my gym. I got one in the living room. Okay, so that's four. But like, that's the reality because if I'm doing something and my back is feeling weird or my. My legs are freaking domed out, which is highly likely, then you're like, oh, like, like rolling out for 30 seconds or a minute right now is actually gonna feel pretty freaking good. And I'm right here and I have it. Or I have. I have like dumbbells in my bedroom. Why do you have double dumbbells in your bedroom? Well, as we know, you know, sometimes you gotta get that pump, you know, get that little something. Do a couple. Do a couple thrusters with, you know, light dumbbells. I have 25s in my bedroom. They're just there. They're just there.

[Rob Wilson]

I keep a kettle bell in my kitchen.

[Jocko Willink]

There you go. So having these tools that are close.

[Rob Wilson]

By is advisable and proximal to distal or, you know, near to far is. Is also about what tools you're going to decide to rely on the most in your toolkit, right? So proximal tools are the things you're actually going to have access to with enough frequency to make a difference. So if you have the best massage therapist in the world because you need help with your back getting stiff, but you can only see them once a quarter, that's distal. It doesn't mean it doesn't help you. It doesn't mean don't have them. It doesn't mean they're not good. It just means it's far away. So for the other 89 days of the quarter, what's the tool that's close that's going to help you manage that? You better have one. Otherwise you'll go there, get a great massage, and then it will just be a downhill ride until the next time you see them.

[Jocko Willink]

Fast forward. We get into the the bones now. Here, mind not. Not too long ago, I asked my friend and legendary track and field coach D. Damn Faff. Am I saying that right? Path paf what he believes is the greatest limiter of performance on game day. His answer? Emotional challenges, especially those intertwined with family or relationship stress. That's right. It wasn't nutritional imperfection, faulty training sessions, or even injury. It was emotional disruption brought on by relationships. That's tells you the importance of the. The mind.

[Rob Wilson]

I mean, how many good athletes have you seen fall apart because they didn't know how to pick a girlfriend?

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

You know, I mean, I know. I've seen it. I've seen the most talented, freakish people who just couldn't get their shit together inside. And it didn't matter how strong they were, how freakishly talented they were, they couldn't get their mind right.

[Jocko Willink]

Freaking head, case. Yeah, it sucks to watch.

[Rob Wilson]

It does. You just want to shake people like they. Like you're so talented. Stop this.

[Jocko Willink]

You talk about the tri. The triune brain. Am I saying that right?

[Rob Wilson]

Yes, sir. Triune brain.

[Jocko Willink]

And this is the autonomic, emotional, and cognitive layers of the brain.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

The autonomic nervous system is further subdivided into sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. And you gave you gas and brakes, which is a pretty cool way of breaking it down. I've never seen it breaking down that way. And boy, was I appreciative when I saw it. The parasympathetic nervous system is rest, digest, and recover.

[Rob Wilson]

Yes.

[Jocko Willink]

That's your brakes. And these are things that are happening. Right. The other side. The sympathetic nervous system is fight, flight, freeze, and fornicate, which I was not aware of.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, so we're talking about.

[Jocko Willink]

Brief me on that one.

[Rob Wilson]

So what you got to do is have dumbbells. Yeah. So these two aspects of the autonomic nervous system are working all the time. This fight, flight, freeze, we. Everybody probably has heard fight or flight freeze is also there. And then fornicate is there. Because what we're talking about is brain, brainstem. Deep feedback loops in chemistry. We're not talking about what makes you feel good. You know, when you're flipping through the back channels of Instagram. We're talking about actually what's happening on, like, the circulatory level. So that's the autonomic nervous system brainstem. Deep subconscious physiological feedback loops.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, dude, I have a dog. And, like, the dog's just gonna. He's gonna. He's gonna get after it.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Like, as far as the fornicate thing goes, I mean, that's just. But, like, there's no emotions. No, he's not like, wow, she's pretty. He's like, no, that's a girl dog. And I'm going, yeah, you know, this is like.

[Rob Wilson]

And that's what Is meant by physiological arousal is upregulation of the autonomic nervous system into the sympathetic. So sympathetic and parasympathetic aren't like toggle switches, right? We, we tend to use these phrases or these descriptors like rest, digest or fight flight, which are the ends of the spectrum of that behavior. But there's a whole, there's a whole gamut of arousal states that are in between there. So it's not like a toggle. It's more like a dimmer switch that's sliding back and forth. And those, those gas pedal, brake pedal conditions are relative to each other. Like, not every time you push on the gas pedal does it go all the way to the floor floor. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it just eases from nothing to 10 miles an hour Every time you touch the brake pedal, you don't slam on it. You might pump it, you might squeeze it. It'll depend on the conditions, right?

[Jocko Willink]

And then it gets into the, the emotional layer and just throwing this out there. Fear, probably the most powerful emotion there is, helps you avoid bodily injury and death, but can be extrapolated to truly scary things like public speaking. And I never made that connection before of like, hey, like that is the same emotion is fear. Like, it keeps you alive, but it also makes you afraid of things that you shouldn't be afraid of. Well, at least in my opinion, you shouldn't be afraid of them. Right?

[Rob Wilson]

You don't have to be afraid.

[Jocko Willink]

You don't have to be afraid. There's no true threat to your, to your life. And then you say again, fast forward a little bit. Feelings aren't free feelings. They have energetic costs. In the most literal, metabolic, chemical sense of the word. Chronic emotional distress has known negative effects on physiology, such as elevated blood pressure and dysregulation of that stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Anger, for example, is immobilizing emotion. Feelings of anger can drive you to alter something in the environment environment. With swift action, anger hits the gas pedal to get you moving. That can be a powerful asset. If you see something as unfair, unjust, or ethically wrong and use anger in the form of outrage to attempt to change it, it can be detrimental. However, when you smash down the psychological or the physiological gas pedal because the person in front of you is driving slower than you think they should. Anger is necessary and powerful, as is compassion, as is hunger. But when misappropriated, these powerful states cost you dearly. If you can become more aware of how you relate to your internal state and have indicators for when, when things aren't firing in a way that serves you, you can change it. So these things can cause problems like being emotional, freaking 100%.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. Well, I mean, you talk about the idea of detaching, right? And so what is that? That's stepping back from the bubble and going, hold on a second. Is this what I want? Is this necessary? Is this helpful? So anger is real, powerful necessary. There are for sure times in my life where anger, I used it very appropriately to stop something that was harmful to others, right? Where you have like righteous outrage. Like, no, that will not happen in my presence. And I'm already doing something about it, right? That's a good use of anger. It can also be horribly misappropriated. And a story that I tell a lot is this, this, this event. This is a couple years ago, I went to the laundromat. My wife has these like vacuum seal things for the, for like storing blankets over the winter, right? So we can like use them like little filing cabinets. So winter came, she was like, hey, I need you to break these open, take them to the laundromat because I don't want the washer getting all beat up with these comforters. No problem. I'm gonna go with a book and be by myself for three hours at the laundromat. No problem. So I go washing stuff, everything's good to go. I'm on the phone with a buddy, talking jiu jitsu, snapping blankets out, folding stuff. And then I'm on maybe like the last blanket or so, and I snap the blanket open and men's underwear falls out onto the folding table, which is not mine. And I don't know if you've ever felt the heat that comes from in between your shoulder blades. And it immediately came up over my whole face. I couldn't hear my buddy on the phone anymore. Like he might as well have been underwater. And I was basically looking at the whole world through a toilet paper tube. Like, I was just thinking like, whose head am I going to remove today? You know? Luckily I recognized what was happening, took a breath, and this self deprecating thought came, which was, hey, dummy, you're at a laundromat. This is probably the guy who used the dryer before you. Not only were there no other indications that anything unsavory was occurring in my household, my wife is, is the most uncomfortably direct human being I've ever met. So if it was over, there would.

[Jocko Willink]

Have been, you know, about it.

[Rob Wilson]

There was no. It would be no ninja trickery. It would Be like, you now suck. We are done. Have a good life. It would be like a meat cleaver coming down. So I had a good laugh about it. But in that moment, I told myself a story. I had an emotional response to it, which was rage. And all of my physiological capacity came to bear. And probably less than a second, like, I was about to fight a bear, except I was in a laundromat looking at essentially a piece of fabric, some other dude's underwear. And. And that is an example of physiological costs of an emotional experience. Now, not every emotional experience we have is that intense, but imagine if you don't have the gas pedal smashed down to the floor, but if you just have, like, high idle anger for, like, 10 years. Yeah, we know this is not Rob Wilson's opinion, that things like that are directly related to things like high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems. Does it mean if you get angry too much, you're going to die of a heart attack? No, but it means if you do, you make it more likely. So. And you probably don't even know that you act like that until there's a systems failure, like you have a relationship failure, or it turns into a coping mechanism that costs you even more and you're far down the line. And then you go, oh, shit, I gotta start doing something about this. Instead of that, you can have markers in place, right? And some of those are internal markers, right? Things like breath, work and meditation, those kind of things can help. But social markers, right? Like the old joke, like, how do you know if you're in a bad mood? Your wife tells you, like, social markers are important. You start noticing that people react differently towards you. Does it mean that the story they tell themselves about you is true? Not necessarily, but it could be an indication for you to do some introspection and go, how am I? Hold on, detach. How am I actually acting? What do I really feel like? And is this what I want? Right.

[Jocko Willink]

Last but not least, you got the cognitive layer hitched on top of the more primal driving forces. The cognitive layer of the brain. Cognition, technically speaking, is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and senses. It includes functions like attention, language, learning, memory, and perception. Cognition is taking information from the rest of the physiological system and making sense of it. And you get into the executive functions here. Working memory, delayed gratification, inhibitory control, creative cognitive flexibility and problem solving and task switching. So this is like, you know, our brain, that what we think of as our brain.

[Rob Wilson]

Exactly, exactly.

[Jocko Willink]

And then this is a dance of how the layers of the mind interact. No one component of a system network operates independently. There's a vast interconnectivity, overlapping function, and even redundancy. So these things are all freaking playing off of each other too, all the time.

[Rob Wilson]

So not only does bottom up influence, but top down. So there's circular causality. These feedback loops are constantly influencing each other. And that's why habit forming and taking ownership is so important. Because if you become conscious of these types of things and their relationships within you and how they affect your relationships with other people and the environment, then you can change. You can literally change your stress physiology by changing your behavior and what you're thinking all at the same time. But you have to choose it and then you have to act it out. It won't just like magically land on you one day like a fairy. And then life is better. You have to become aware of it, which is part of the cognitive layer, and then take action, which is literally making your body do different stuff in situations.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, a huge one on this. When I teach detachment is like, it's the leading indicators that you really have to become familiar with. Because if you've already lost your temper, like, you don't go mid stride of temper loss and, and pull yourself back in most of the time. Sometimes I guess people could do that. But you really need to pay attention. Attention leading indicators also, because if I lose my temper and freaking stab echo in the neck because I'm mad, well, and then I go, ah, you know what? This is just my temper. Like, that doesn't really help me out.

[Rob Wilson]

Too late. Right. Well, and you know, when people are in recovery for addiction, this is one of the things is identifying triggers and then rewinding those triggers sooner and sooner and sooner and sooner until you don't even put, put yourself in the environment where the triggers exist anymore.

[Jocko Willink]

Yep.

[Rob Wilson]

Right.

[Jocko Willink]

So I, that's another thing I talk about is this is the exact same thing. But like, if, if, if I got a problem with Rob. And like every time I talk to Rob, he gets me irritated and he's always bringing up things that we should. That different direction that I want to go. And it's frustrating to me. So when I'm going in to do a meeting with you where we're going to talk about some project that we're working on, I've got to like preemptively say, all right, dude, this is Rob. You know, he's going to say some shit that's out of line. You got to keep it in check. You Know, don't, Don't overreact. I got to go into the meeting with that attitude. So it's the same thing, like paying attention to what situation you're going into.

[Rob Wilson]

You know, what I found interesting is people who have sustained high performance, either in a single domain or across multiple domains, figure that stuff out naturally, right? You look at, like, a really good example, I think, from MMA is gsp, where he's really good at identifying the fear response way early, and then having this conversation with himself, which was, this is what happens. This is. This means I'm getting ready. And he started to change the label of that fear response way before stepping in the cage. And so when you can realize that now you can take. Now you have time to take action on your own behalf, like, ah. And then here's the ritual, here's the routine that I put in place that lets me deal with that.

[Jocko Willink]

Well, I was at ufc, I was coaching someone cornering someone, and. And GSP was fighting and he's cutting weight. So everyone's cutting weight, and everyone's in the same kind of sauna, and the same. We're in a spa of some big hotel, right? And, you know, everyone cutting weight is just completely miserable. And, dude, GSP just look like the most professional champion that was doing his job, that had no emotion about it. That was, you know, I mean, it, you know, it sucks. Like, you know, they're weighing him like, okay, back in the sauna, and no one wants to go back in the sauna. Like, not one single person wants to go back in the sauna. And he's just like, they're like, gotta go back in. They're like eight more minutes. And he just gets up. Like, they just told him, hey, you know, go have another scoop of ice cream. He just walked. You know, no factor comes back out, lays down. Just, he's. That guy was a champion for a reason. The things that you're talking about, and.

[Rob Wilson]

I mean, now you look at him and I don't know him, but he seems like a pretty happy dude. Like, he's on the other side of that life, and for the most part, at least from what you can tell publicly, seems pretty fulfilled and is, like, enjoying life. So pretty awesome.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. Back to the book. No topic is more evident of crosstalk or more relevant to modern life than stress. As biological organisms, human beings are designed to experience and respond to stress ideally. And ideally, be better prepared for it the next time. That can mean muscles getting stronger because you lift weights, or it can be better coping strategies where when a family member dies, the long term cost of stress is referred to as allostatic load. Am I saying that right?

[Rob Wilson]

You got it.

[Jocko Willink]

The accumulation of stressors in the mind and body is not simply a psychological event. Chronic stress perpetuates activation of the hormonal and autonic and autonomic stress physiology and if not given the opportunity to reset, can result in predisposition to illness, increased mortality, and most certainly reduced performance and quality of life. Again, this is just a huge part of this book is this idea of paying attention to your dashboard and seeing what the stress is doing to you.

[Rob Wilson]

Exactly.

[Jocko Willink]

Because some stress is good and too much stress is going to be bad.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, yeah. It's like a bank account.

[Jocko Willink]

Right.

[Rob Wilson]

I mean you got to spend.

[Jocko Willink]

Yep.

[Rob Wilson]

But you got enough cash.

[Jocko Willink]

You go through some of the, some of the indicators, how to pay attention to those indicators. Then you get to the tools. Right. Mindful mindfulness meditations and therapies involve turning attention inward to foster awareness of the thoughts, feelings and behaviors that you maintain and how they may be affecting feeling states of your body. Do you do this? Do you do meditation, breath work?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, I've done tried lots of meditations and.

[Jocko Willink]

But you're not addicted to it. You don't do it every day.

[Rob Wilson]

I use it as needed. Now it's. I have an integrative practice so I'm doing breath work. When I'm working out. It's some, in some way a part of jiu jitsu. It doesn't mean I'm not doing like the hickson, like necessarily while I'm trying to cross collar choke somebody. But it's a, it's something I spent a lot of time studying and teaching and so it's completely integrated into my approach for health. Now with that said, there will be periods of time, whether it's a day or a month, when I have some specific outcome that I'm looking for where I'll sit quietly and do some specific breath work or some specific meditative practice. But currently it's. I don't. Yeah, there's only so much time in a day.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, yeah. A good quote in here. You got rest is not idleness. It turns out that setting aside time to allow your mind to wander can help you reconcile experiences and emotions to make better sense of what the heck is going on in this existential mess called living and breathing. Echo Charles is a big proponent of rest.

[Rob Wilson]

You know, just a quick comment on that. So that rest is not idleness. That's actually a concept Coin by Mary Helen Immardino Yang, who is a neuroscientist. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And you give her the props in here? Yeah, I didn't give her the props. But you did.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. I just want to make sure. And that that idea of taking time away for psychological and physical rest and it not being idleness, I think is important, especially when we talk about high performing people again. And an interesting anecdote that I'll offer is there was a guy I was working with who was going through the program that we talked about earlier through the continued mission program. A lot of trouble with sleep. Couldn't really get a handle on sleep hygiene because he's having trouble negotiating the specifics with his spouse. And I just recommended. Hey, man, he just gotten promoted, so he's active duty. A lot of new stress overseeing a team. And I was like, take your dog for a walk for like half an hour and let your dog lead the charge. Don't make it a work dog and like heal next to you until release. Let your dog smell whatever it wants to smell and you just follow it around. No phone other than family or work can get through. But put it in your back pocket and just walk and do it for the next week. And when I see you again, let me know what happens. And he was like. He pulled me aside and was like, what the is this voodoo? And I was like, dude, your brain just needs some time to organize all the stuff you're trying to reconcile right now. Like, you have a family and you just got promoted and you're active duty and you know, you have all this. This strategic stuff you're thinking about. Like, why don't you just give your brain some time to like, build the spider web, you know, so it's not just a fun adage. It. The actual practice of it will move the needle for sure.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, take that dog for a walk. When I used to train jiu jitsu seven days a week, which I can't really do right now, but because I'm traveling or whatever. But when I used to train all the time, then all of a sudden I'd go on a trip and I'd be gone for like two weeks and I would come back and I'd be better. And I used to say that my mind would gel. Like the ideas, the concepts, whatever I was working on would kind of gel. So the mind needs a little bit of a break sometimes. Echo gives it plenty of time. Plenty chilling beginner's mind. As cliche as it may seem, old dogs learning new tricks keeps those dogs young in Mind exposing yourself to novel situations, especially in environments in which you are unsure of the outcome, forces you to stretch your knowledge, your emotions, and, as it turns out, the physical structure and chemistry of your brain, too. Hearing a lot about this. You got to keep learning stuff.

[Rob Wilson]

You got to keep learning and, you know, of course, my bias here is to Jiu Jitsu. I don't know if there's, like, another single thing a person could decide to do. As long as the training and environment is well looked after, that could hit as many of the high notes for the stuff we're talking about. I don't know if there's another practice that could do it where you always have to be learning. You have to deal with your stress. You have to learn how to emotionally regulate yourself. You have to know when it's time to push the gas pedal and when to hit the brake pedal. You have to be able to organize your body. If there was one thing, I'd be like, go find a good jiu Jitsu school where the instructor is knowledgeable and responsible. Training partners look after each other, because you're gonna make a ton of friends. You're gonna get fit, you're gonna use your brain.

[Jocko Willink]

How long you been training for Jiu Jitsu?

[Rob Wilson]

Eight years.

[Jocko Willink]

Nice. Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. Fully. I'm Fully.

[Jocko Willink]

Was your first day, like. Were you like, what was it? Eureka. I found it. The first day.

[Rob Wilson]

As soon as my feet touched the mat again, I had the feeling, like, when I was a kid, I was like, oh, I didn't realize how much I missed this. I love this. I was like, oh. Because I had a decision point where I had to either pick doing CrossFit or do martial arts. And I was like, well, this is in my early 20s. I was like, well, I did martial arts a lot. Let me try something.

[Jocko Willink]

Wait, why did you have to make that decision?

[Rob Wilson]

Money. Because I was young with a young kid, and I was.

[Jocko Willink]

You could either. Could only afford to do one or the other.

[Rob Wilson]

Afford to do one or the other at the time. And I was like, well, I've done a lot of martial arts. Let me explore this fitness side of things.

[Jocko Willink]

So that's kind of interesting, because I've always found that you can work out. You don't need no money to work out. You know what I mean? You don't need any money. And the other thing about working out is you don't need anybody. You just need you.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Whereas Jiu jitsu, you need.

[Rob Wilson]

You got to have.

[Jocko Willink]

You need a place, and you got to have, like, a training Partner.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. For me, it was about being in the environment. Like, I wanted to be in the training environment because I wanted to train, I wanted to move towards training people. Sometimes I look back and go, man, I should have started that. You know, that would have been 18, 18 years ago. Had another 10 years on the mat. But, yeah, as soon as I stepped on the mat again, I was like, oh, it's home. Like, walking in, I could smell the. The shin guards. Like, the sweaty shin guard smell. And I was like, yes. Like, I. I'm one of the few people probably like, actually, I'm like, okay, I'm comfortable here. Great.

[Jocko Willink]

Here's one of the. The. One of the one things I don't like about Jiu Jitsu. You got a section here. Outdoor activity. Actually, you do need sunny skies. Some studies shows little as 50 minutes of outdoor time per day can improve cognitive function, especially for those who are already vulnerable. There's some times when I'm going to train Jiu Jitsu, and I'm like, damn, it's a nice day outside. And I wish I could just train outside, you know, but you got to get outside in other ways. That's why we run Surf. Surf, absolutely. That's why we surf. But, yeah, being outside.

[Rob Wilson]

My wife actually noted in the last couple years, she was like, man, you're in a really good mood way more often when it's surf season. Like, when. When it's in season and you're surfing a couple times a week. I was like, ooh, maybe I should be going for a walk every day.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, it's a real thing.

[Rob Wilson]

It's a real thing.

[Jocko Willink]

Next chapter is movement. And, you know, clearly movement is pretty obvious, but there's some things that aren't so obvious. Markers. And just to go to the book here, markers like grip strength, foot speed, and the ability to get up and down off the ground. Ground without using your hands. All leading indicators of fall risk are well known. Links to all cause mortality and can be helpful indicators on your movement dashboard. I think those are things that we know. But this was an interesting point that you brought out. Why do we move? Why does any organism move biologically? There are two reasons to move away from threats. Things that are potentially harmful and may limit its chances to produce offspring and to pursue opportunities. Things that keep it alive and improve its chances to produce offspring. That's a pretty, pretty, pretty fundamental breakdown of why we gotta move. When it comes to preservation of movement, many people aim to simply continue to perform to the narrow task demands of the life they are Accustomed to. But it's not ex. It's not the expected and the well practiced that gets us. It's the slow degradation of capacity that makes us vulnerable to challenges we did not anticipate. If you have exactly enough money coming in to pay your bills every month with nothing left over, no savings. Is that financial robustness? Of course not. If your car suddenly needs repairs or you need a, a new washing machine, you will go broke. It works the same way when it comes to managing the movement capacity of your body. Moreover, most people don't have a real sense of how much is in the account until there's no more money. Better to build a reserve of capacity, a savings account. So if you are, if you are called upon for more, whether for emergency or enjoyment, you can meet those demands with vigor. And this is the quote that I was said I had lined out. The human body is an incredible machine, capable of continued adaptation for better or for worse. This is the well trained dog. Your body's a well trained dog. It's going to do what you kind of told it to do.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. And this is a point that comes up a lot with guys on the teams, right? Is if you spend 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years essentially turning your torso into a turret, then guess what? It gets good at being a turret that's not free. Your rib cage is supposed to move quite a bit. And often with guys, they don't even know that it doesn't move because they can still execute the demands of the job well, very well. But then when something unexpected happens, my shoulder doesn't do that anymore. Right. And then you realize like, oh man, I can't put my hand behind my back. And it's like, how are you deploying a parachute? It's like, well, I'm taking my other hand. This is a real story. Taking my other hand, I'm grabbing my wrist and I'm shoving it back there until it gets close. And then I turn and I fling it and I grab. And that's how I'm deploying my shoe. And I was like, check. Okay, well, that's not okay. So let's reel that in. But those narrow task demands, getting good at them could be that kind of example. But it could also be somebody's slow progress towards decrepitude where they can move a little less and a little less and a little less. And even when we do things right, Sisyphus is still pushing the ball up the hill all the time. So know what's happening. That's the theme, right? Know what's happening? And then make sure that you exercise your body in ways that expose you.

[Jocko Willink]

You got a section in here called Check the Rig. When I was first developing the curriculum for my Check Engine light class, I bounced some of the core concepts off my friend and veteran New York City firefighter Felix Manjar. Manjar is. In addition to his regular duties, Felix is the FDNY health and fitness unit instructor and a training coordinator in the Officer professional Development. We were discussing the standard operating procedures for caring for the many pieces of equipment that firefighters use in the course of their job. Helmet, flashlight, portable radio, hand tools, and so on. This gear check or checking the rig ensures that things work how they must, when they must. What I found interesting is that the firefighters check their gear every day but have no system in place for checking in with their own bodies, a fact that Felix and others in the department are working to change. Like most of us, these firefighters have an implicit assumption that their bodies will just work how they think they should until they don't. So, yeah, we don't have our own little maintenance protocol for the body. You don't have anything to weigh to check it.

[Rob Wilson]

We don't. And, you know, when I talk about this particular topic, and that's actually what I'm discussing with the. The guys this week, is I use the example of a function check. Right. A rifle. Right. And it's. That's the basic. Everybody does it. It's on autopilot. So when I ask guys, like, hey, everybody in here knows what a function check is. Right. And I usually get the like, oh, this guy look, you know? And then I'm like, great. What is it? And the guys are like, put it on. Say if you have a bolt to the rear. And I get, like, this, like, eye roll. And I'm like, okay, cool. Everybody knows the steps. I'm like, do you do it when you're already downrange and it's time to go live? Like, guys are like, no, you don't. When do you do it? Oh, beforehand. I'm like, you do? Why? Well, because we want to make sure it works when we're down there. I'm like, h. Do you do that with your spine, your shoulder? No, it's just an assumption that that thing will fire because it's so adaptable. If you develop a function check for your body, it doesn't have to be complicated, but you should have one. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And you go through some of these things that you got shoulder flexion, hip flexion, overhead pressing, squatting.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And. And look, you go, and I'm. I'm breezing through them. But you give kind of points of performance what to watch out for. Kind of you go through the. What these function checks would be for your body. And again, I'm going through, like, the how. It's the book. Can you try new things? The greatest sign of movement literacy and longevity isn't necessarily being good at things in a narrow groove. You're worn, you're into your nervous system. No matter how well you persevered specific capabilities or ranges or capacities. Arranges. It isn't passing a range of motion, balance or agility test either. Perhaps the greatest sign is whether or not you can try and learn new things. And I thought this was just cool. Something that I need to do more often because I'm a creature of habit. And so I just do the same things over and over again. In fact, I've always had that problem, like, with working out. Like, my workouts will just be like, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat for months. And that's not good. I know it's not good. And so I'm trying to now incorporate and. And also to not feel like the goal of today is to be my last workout, because that's kind of a. You got. You just walk into the. You walk in, there's like, one target on the wall. Like, you're gonna shoot at that target. So the last workout is the last target. I'm gonna shoot that target again.

[Rob Wilson]

Classic.

[Jocko Willink]

Classic, right? Like, classic mistake. Instead of being like, like, oh, no, you know what I'm gonna do today, dudes? You know, the most random thing, and we're gonna go for it, and I need to do more of that because I get in the habit, and I follow my own habits.

[Rob Wilson]

And, you know, I do audits. So I'll do, like, where I will try a specific program that's totally new. So for about 18 months, I was doing Greg Walsh's stuff, the Wolf Brigade.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

Like, the mace work. Heavy kettlebells. I did that for about.

[Jocko Willink]

I've got Wolf Brigade maces.

[Rob Wilson]

They're awesome.

[Jocko Willink]

They are.

[Rob Wilson]

They're great.

[Jocko Willink]

And mace work is fun.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, they're. They're. It's. Man, those things, boy.

[Jocko Willink]

Well, those guys, man, those guys, they're like. When you watch him in his videos, like, he moves so mechanically. And I always feel like I. I do not move that mechanically.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, there's some ups and downsides to moving that mechanically. I think it can be right under some circumstances. But really good performing athletes often exhibit high variability. But really consistent outcome so that they get the same outcome over and over and over again. But there's slight changes based on their level of fatigue and the environment and those kind of things. Um, but I did Greg's work for a while cause I wanted to explore that and I got some good results. And then I needed something different and I wanted to change it up. A year is the minimum I'll give to explore a program though I did about 18 months. And then lately I've been doing more like track and field based work. So sprint prep work and med balls and reflexive eccentric work. And some of that's inspired by, you know, friends I have in track and field.

[Jocko Willink]

And so, you know, just Warner Gunther videos, bro. Just watch those and just figure out what you're going to do with your life.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, that dude is a animal. I mean, if you watch javelin, like, if you look at any javelin training, you want to talk about super athletes, Javelin throwers are insane. I felt pretty good about myself. I work with an organization called Altus quite a lot, which is probably the best track and field training organization in North America for sure. It's run by a friend of mine, Stu McMillan. But the first time I went to their facility in Phoenix, I saw some Olympians and some world champion 100 meter, 200 meter, 400 meters long jumpers. And the sound of them on the track is like the only thing I could think was like, I suck at everything. I mean, these guys, they hit, they're punching the track with their feet and punching their feet hard in fractions of a second, over and over, and it's so consistent and smooth. But when you hear their feet, you're like, oh my God. Like you watch it on TV and it just looks all flowing and nice, but you're on the track and it's like, like someone's smacking the track with a paddle or something. It's crazy. But I've been drawing from their work a lot. And in a year and a half I'll probably change it again.

[Jocko Willink]

Some of the tools you talk about, stretching, obviously, you know, that's a huge part of it. And then you get into some of these, like the, the, the formal movement market again. Like these are just people that have programs out there. Yeah, the Feldenkrais Method.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, Feldenkrais. Oh man, Moshe Feldenkrais is somebody who you would really dig. So Moshe was a Israeli Ukrainian engineer, first non Japanese black belt in judo, Jack Stud. He wrote a book that I'm reading rereading right now called Higher judo ground techniques, and it's from early part of the last century. You go in there and you're like, oh, triangle. Pretty old. Scarf hold.

[Jocko Willink]

Old.

[Rob Wilson]

Pretty old, right? Ezekiel choke. That's been around for a minute.

[Jocko Willink]

Well, there's people doing heel hooks in, like, the pancreation times, straight up.

[Rob Wilson]

So, yeah, breaking legs ain't new. But Moshe Feldenkrais was also a rehabilitative expert. So he was. And you find this a lot old school, like strength and conditioning, fixing the body. Combat sports is a trifecta that you see over and over and over again. But Feldenkrais method is one.

[Jocko Willink]

You got Pilates, you got the functional movement screen from Gray Cook, and you got Becoming a Supple Leopard, of course, by Dr. Kelly Starrett, which was a book that I have, and Functional Range Systems by Andrea Star Spina.

[Rob Wilson]

Andrea Spina, Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And then Ido Portal. So you, You. You offer, you know, commentary on these things. Just options that you got and to keep people moving.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Formal movement systems are just standardizations for movement patterns that you can use, too. Organize indicators and create tools.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, there's gotta be some. I think they do a better job now in the teams of, like, how flexible was this guy when he was 20 years old? And, okay, now he's 24, now he's 28, now he's 32. Like, what. What does he need to work on? Because otherwise, you know, like you said, we're just acting like a turret. You're not touching your toes?

[Rob Wilson]

No.

[Jocko Willink]

And we don't want to touch our toes, so we're not going to touch our toes. But then, guess what? At some point, you got to bend down and grab something and you. You hurt your back or you, whatever, blow out your hamstrings. So, all right, last section of the book or the last one of these things that you. The last, last of the dashboard is. Is matter. The third and final category of the M3M model is matter. Deep beneath the surface layers of our bodily experience are biochemical compounds that give the human body form and structure. These chemicals and molecules combine to produce cells, tissues, organs. Organs and structures that produce the symphony of life. The hippie just posted up again the symphony of life, behavior, performance, and disease that we experience. Everybody knows the first step to becoming a professional athlete is to choose the right parents. It's not the only thing that counts. But as big wave surfing legend Laird Hamilton says, there's chickens and there's hawks. You might not be able to turn a chicken into a hawk, but you can make a super chicken accurate from Laird.

[Rob Wilson]

Direct quote.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. So this is really. You start talking about some of the, some of the readings that we're going to get. And this is. You talk about the biomarkers, you talk about getting people's blood drawn. I mean when I joined the Navy in 1990, like getting blood work wasn't even a thing. I don't think. I'd never even heard of it.

[Rob Wilson]

No.

[Jocko Willink]

And now you can get it really easily done.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, it's a lot, it's a lot easier. What gets done and for who and when is still a little tricky. But outside the wire guys go and get deeper looks and some of that stuff's important man because you can catch things early. Like people don't think about in that field get exposed a lot of heavy metals. There's a lot of lead exposure.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

You know, even if didn't even. They're talking about downrange, talking about training like tens of thousands of rounds like sometimes per week.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh yeah, right.

[Rob Wilson]

It's a lot of lead exposure.

[Jocko Willink]

Insane.

[Rob Wilson]

It's insane. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And once you get this blood work, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit to some of these tools that we have. Sleep, the foundation of biological health. We have out past our outpaced our biology with a flood of artificial stimuli. The most obvious being light. It's not that other. It's not that people in the past never stayed up late. Fires in candlelight allowed for nighttime activity. But today we live in perpetual daylight of our own making. One that disrupts the very system designed to regulate our sleep. Meanwhile, the digital world keeps us engaged long past the point of fatigue. I really like that sentence. You're tired but you stay awake. Whether through doom scrolling late night emails or the endless availability of entertainment, we are no longer just ignoring our biological signals. We are actively overriding them. That's pretty scary. And you also go on to say that sleep deprivation is torture. The title of this section is not hyperbole. Prolonged sleep deprivation is so severe that it has been used as an end to interrogation technique. It's difficult to study the long term effects of sleep deprivation because when. Because there are ethical limits on deliberately keeping people awake to observe when their systems begin to fail. Obviously we do like five and a half or six days and this in basic seal training. It's pretty tiring.

[Rob Wilson]

That's the word.

[Jocko Willink]

And different people have like different reactions to it. You know, I was always a person that didn't need a lot of sleep. Very, very lucky. This is probably the Only genetic. You want to talk about like a chicken versus a hawk? Like, I'm chicken all day long. But I was like an owl when it came to not needing sleep, which was a huge advantage because that could kind of make up for some of my other shortfalls. Like, I. I know you were talking earlier about the guy that's now running the, the Virginia High Performance Hell. High Performance, Virginia High Performance. I don't know if we're saying his name, but anyways, I went through buds with him. Dude, that dude was a hawk. Like, he was just this absolute stud at everything. And so the only way I could keep up with guys like that was just like, oh, I just could go to work earlier and work harder. That's kind of what I did. But talking about sleep here you talk about a bunch of things that, that will help people sleep. You also talk about. This was something I'd never heard before. Sleep latency, the time it takes to transition from wakefulness to sleep is a critical but often overlooked measure of sleep health. Ideally, falling asleep should take 10 to 20 minutes, reflecting a well regulated sleep drive and circadian alignment. Extremely fast sleep onset under 5 minutes may indicate chronic sleep deprivation, while prolonged sleep latency over 30 minutes can suggest poor sleep hygiene, stress or circadian misalignment. Understanding sleep latency offers insight into overall sleep efficiency and nervous system regulation, making it useful tool for assessing sleep quality. I've never thought about that before. I never really heard of it.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, I mean, so sleep latency is, you know, like you just said, it's this transitionary period where the brain is going from the state of wakefulness into light sleep first, which there's two. There's light sleep one and light sleep two, and then into the first cycle of deep sleep, which is our longest opportunity for like, tissue healing and basically cleaning the brain. Well, those transitionary phases affect the quality of the sleep architecture in that deep sleep cycle. So sometimes we assume that because we've had loss of consciousness, then everything that comes after that is just golden. And it's not like that at all. That those. The step down, basically dropping the gears in the system is really important for being in the right gear of sleep for the right amount of time and getting contiguous exposure, especially to that first cycle of deep sleep. Now, does it mean if you have like one night of, one or two nights of I was really, really tired, so I fell asleep and my latency was really short, that everything's broken? No, it doesn't mean that. But if you find that you've tracked Your sleep for nine months and no matter what the conditions are, you drop into sleep in two minutes. Something is awry that requires that may require further investigation. Same thing on the other end of the spectrum.

[Jocko Willink]

Got to check that dashboard is what I'm thinking.

[Rob Wilson]

Exactly. Well, and I mean that's, you know, when you have a dashboard and an indicator light is flashing, all it means is look over here. That's it.

[Jocko Willink]

Doing a freaking assessment.

[Rob Wilson]

Exactly. That's all we can surmise. We don't know the whole picture. Just because the check engine light is flashing, it just means it's flashing. So look, then you can decide, is it just a sensor problem, I'm getting a false positive, or do I require further investigation? The only way you can make that distinction is by looking. So that's everything in the book wraps around that idea. Look.

[Jocko Willink]

You got a bunch of sleep, you know, advice on what's going to help you sleep better, whether it's the light that you're exposed to, the temperature, the nutrition, you know, when you're eating the, those kind of things. You got the ups and downs of caffeine, nicotine and alcohol. Do you drink?

[Rob Wilson]

Rarely. Rarely.

[Jocko Willink]

Have you ever drank a lot?

[Rob Wilson]

No, it's not my.

[Jocko Willink]

Wasn't your jam.

[Rob Wilson]

No.

[Jocko Willink]

And, and so just a lot of really good advice on sleep. And then of course, exercise. Exercise does not solve all of life problems, but it sure helps to. But it sure seems to help with most of them, including sleep. Yeah, I, you know, if I don't get to work out for whatever reason, it's like I can always feel like I don't want to sleep as much.

[Rob Wilson]

As I, I got a good training session in this morning before I came here like a 90 minute. I was like, the bike at the hotel had puddles under it and I was like, this is gonna be a good day. Yeah. Like I'm. Everything's gonna go well and I'm gonna sleep well tonight. And I knew, like it, I knew based on how that went. I was like, I'm good now.

[Jocko Willink]

That's what I like to hear, man. Talk a little bit about naps. The classic power nap. I'm a fan of, I'm a fan of the power nap. You, you advise a 30 minute power nap? I've always liked a shorter power nap than that.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, that's just like the average of the data. I like shorter too. 15 for me personally is the sweet spot. It's called a, we call it a puppy nap in my house. And I get harassed and harangued for Puppy naps.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, your wife is like, oh, sleeping again, are you?

[Rob Wilson]

Oh, yeah. What? Doesn't matter. My wife is a. A hilarious person. She could roast anybody you could possibly think of. And so she. She calls it puppy naps because I religiously fall asleep on the couch in the afternoon and my dog is like, alert to all the preconditions. And she's like, you. He's like, I'll watch him.

[Jocko Willink]

He'll be like, oh, the puppy rolls in with you.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, he's gonna come. He sleeps with my feet. Yeah, he's gonna come in and I mean, he's not a puppy anymore. He's like 6. But she was like, he knows.

[Jocko Willink]

So are you going full, like kind of pre planned siesta scenario?

[Rob Wilson]

Sometimes. Sometimes I will. That hasn't always been a realistic part of my life, but I work from home most of the time, unless I'm on travel, so especially if I have like a high psychological workload, I'm working on some IP or developing a contract or something like that. I'll set a timer and. And for 15 minutes and just. And I can shut down. I have a gift. So I could go to sleep during this podcast if I really wanted to. I could sit back and close my eyes with the headphones on and everything. Just call it and just be like, I'm out. And then you be like, yo, you need to leave. Like, we got to get out of here. Yeah. Serves me sometimes.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

Others, not so much.

[Jocko Willink]

I was always. Again, that was another thing, like when I. When I. I can sleep anywhere and like, if I don't have anything to think about, I can be like, boom, shut down and get it done, you know?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Fast forward a little bit. Muscle mass. Stronger people are harder to kill and are just more useful in general. That's coach Rip Rip a toe Starting strength.

[Rob Wilson]

Gotta love him.

[Jocko Willink]

Absolutely. Body composition isn't just. I see Echo's like perking up over. He's all fired up. He's like, wait, what? Oh, we're talking about freaking muscle mass.

[Rob Wilson]

Someone say deadlifts. Did somebody say deadlift?

[Jocko Willink]

Someone say curls? Someone say easy curl bar. Body composition isn't just about maintaining a healthy range of body fat. Equally important is having strong, healthy muscle tissue. Sarcopenia. Am I saying that right? Sarcopenia, or age related muscle loss is a normal part of staying alive for a long time. Doesn't seem like much of a reward for staying alive, does it? Not only does skeletal muscle. Muscle offer the more obvious physical benefits of being able to move around the world with more strength and vigor. But it also yields new and surprising benefits to our biochemistry that are important if we want to feel and perform our best for the long haul. While it is normal to see muscle mass steadily decline with age. Gonna protest that echo, Charles?

[Echo Charles]

Let's just say it's debatable sometimes.

[Rob Wilson]

Check.

[Jocko Willink]

Working hard to keep as much as possible is a Sisyphean burden worth pursuing. You got. Dr. Gabriel Lyon calls calling muscle our health insurance policy. So we're lifting.

[Rob Wilson]

Lifting. Got to do resistance training.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. While lifting weights is the most efficient and effective way to gain strength and muscle, there's a muscle building activity for everybody. Whether it's body weight, calisthenics, barbells, kettle bells, pilates, or Jiu jitsu class, we're in the game.

[Rob Wilson]

Resistance.

[Jocko Willink]

That is resistance. And you go through how each of one of those you know, can be utilized. Whether it's calisthenics, whether it's kettlebells and dumbbells. Barbells. You talk about eating for muscle mass and body composition. Protein intake. The rule of thumb for daily protein intake is 1 gram per kilogram of body weight. Although women and anybody in their 50s or beyond who wants to maintain or build muscle mass may require more.

[Rob Wilson]

That's the word on the streets.

[Jocko Willink]

That's. That's my first time hearing that.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. Yeah. That's from Dr. Lyons. Work.

[Jocko Willink]

So she just said straight up, if you're a little older, you need more protein than these young folks do.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, because he got less testosterone or something.

[Rob Wilson]

That's. To be honest, that the specifics of that biochemistry is outside my wheelhouse.

[Jocko Willink]

But we're just.

[Rob Wilson]

I. Yeah. My best understanding at present is because there is less anabolic activity. So having more, a higher volume of protein come in the system boosts anabolics.

[Jocko Willink]

My understanding of the biochemistry on that particular topic is molk and steak. Yo, let's go.

[Rob Wilson]

I knew steak was gonna come.

[Jocko Willink]

You got aerobic. Aerobic section here on Aerobic Health. You know, energy, the different energy pathways. And then measuring how we're measuring these. Oxygen delivery, resting heart rate, heart rate recovery. And then the tools that we're going to use. Steady state zone 2 training. Zone 2 training is performed by exercising at an intensity that maintains your heart rate at approximately 60 to 75% of its maximum. Now, it says the common recommendation for general population is an hour to an hour and a half or to two hours per week. While aerobically adapted, might need more. What do you think about that? Is that enough? You got Peter T in here. As well.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, I think so. This is my experience or my understanding based on the data that I've seen, the people who know more about it than I do and then my own personal experience experience is the amounts that are given are based on broad generalities in the general population. I think if you really want to know how much you should do, you should measure and you should see where do you stand in the first place and then implement a plan and then remeasure and decide if any more than that is worth the squeeze. So for me, I did a VO2 max test at Old Dominion University. You can pay like 125 bucks or something like that. A lot of exercise fizz labs at universities can do this. You go in, you pay some money, they put you on a metabolic cart, right? So you have a gas exchange monitor going on while you're either cycling or running on a treadmill. You go through usually some kind of ramp test where you're increasing wattage. They look at gas exchange, heart rate, rate of perceived exertion, and then you get a score. And then the score puts you in a percentile for your gender and age group. Mine was good. So mine was 46 and they said 46 for a guy who's six 3,240 pounds to be moving that kind of air is pretty damn good for my age. And I was like, okay, I feel good about that. Now I'm doing a little bit. I'm only doing two days of zone two a week, which is probably 60 minutes. But I'm, I'm trucking, I'm putting work out. Probably in the fall I'll test again. For me to do 180 minutes a.

[Jocko Willink]

Week, the ROI is not there.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, what do I care? Like I'm good. I'm in the like when I'm in 80. Yeah, I'm in 85th percentile for a 44 year old man. There's so much other stuff I would rather do. So for me, with the time I have in my life, it's like, do I want to not train jiu jitsu in the morning to go do, to ride on a bicycle?

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

Hell no.

[Jocko Willink]

You know, you talk about hit training and then you talk about low intensity again. There's so much information in here. Get the book so that you can, so that you can, you can actually understand the stuff rather than just the introduction. I'm giving section three. Tuning the human health is not a state, it's a practice. And that's MC Schle.

[Rob Wilson]

That's right.

[Jocko Willink]

Got One. Right. That's a miracle.

[Rob Wilson]

Nice.

[Jocko Willink]

Tools can be indicators. Indicators can be tools. You may have noticed that some. Some of the items I talked about in section 2 can be used as both indicators and tools. If and when you find one of those things, you've got yourself a keeper. One example could be sun salutation from chapter 5. In the function check section, I talked about how sun salutation can be used as a litmus test for daily movement. You might find that if you practice it with diligence, it will be a way for you to gain access to new ranges of motion, too. I like that idea. And Echo, Charles and I were talking about it before you got here, because I mentioned that you have this sun salutation, which is kind of like a burpee in a way, because I started off by saying we were talking about different, like, getting. Getting down on the floor and getting back up again.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

When you were a kid, you didn't even think twice about it. It was, lay down, get up. Like, lay down, get up. It didn't matter. And then Echo was saying, like, yeah, I know. If there was a pack pen underneath this table, and you were like, hey, can you grab that pen underneath the table? And he knew he was gonna have to, like, get down on his hands and then, like, lay down and reach underneath. There was. You know, it was a thing he had to think about. It was one of those things. And when you're a kid, you just don't care. Like, oh, get that pen. You're there. So I was saying that some of the. I was saying that some of the things that's good, good as. As, like, a life thing to always be doing is getting on the ground and getting back up again, 100%. And so I started with a burpee. I was like, yeah, you know, just doing a burpee. You're getting down on the ground, you're getting back up again. But then I was like, yeah, but if you actually go down there and now you do a couple movements while you're down there to stretch out, and then you come back up, you're basically doing this sun salutation, which is a yoga move.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And. And then you use that not just to say, well, how do I feel when I get down and get back up again? But also I can expand my range of motion because it's a stretch that you're actively doing.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. Well, so two things. One, this is one of the things that. Another thing that I think makes jiu jitsu in particular so valuable is you're Getting up and down from the ground. So much echo.

[Jocko Willink]

And I said the exact same thing. We're like, that's. I said, that's one thing about jiu jitsu. Like, you're. You're on the mat, you get up, you get up, down, up, down, up, down.

[Rob Wilson]

And while you're doing it, you have to manage other stuff, right? It's not at your. It's not at your own pace. It's like something will happen to you if you don't do it. So I think that's really a major benefit of jiu jitsu, being comfortable on the floor. But as far as sun salutation goes, not only are you getting up and down from the ground, but you're dealing with some cardinal shapes of the human body, right? So you're reaching overhead, you're looking up while you reach overhead. So you have full global extension of the body. Then you have to fold forward, you compress yourself, so touch your toes or your knees or whatever, right? But you're folding forward. So can you flex your spine? Can you do a lunge, which is hip extension, which hip extension is like one of the cardinal predictors of low back pain. So hip extension, then you have down dog, right? Which is. Can you support weight with your arms over your head? So down dog is like the top of a dive bomber, push up. Then you have up dog, which is the opposite, the bottom of a dive bomber, right? So your hips are on the floor, and you're extending, extending your hips and your spine. So can you open the front of your body? Then you have a lunge again, so you repeat the other half on the other side of the body, and you combine that with the rhythm of breathing. And not only do you get a sense of those ranges, what you also get is your ability to connect those shapes together smoothly. So when I transition from down dog to up dog, or I transition from a lunge to an up dog, as I change these shapes and I connect them together, how smooth does that happen? Does it feel fluid and graceful, or does it feel like I'm digging through mud? And that might change over time. And it also might change based on what is you're experiencing in life currently. One thing. So for me, this has been a personal practice for probably 25 years. I rarely miss a day of sun salutation. And how many do you do? Two to four.

[Jocko Willink]

And how long do you spend in each, like, stretch position?

[Rob Wilson]

One to five breaths, check. Depends on what I'm feeling going on there. Like, do I need to have a better. Like, do I should. I believe that that thing's protesting. I'm gonna spend two more breaths here and go.

[Jocko Willink]

What's the total time allotted per day for sun salutation in the morning?

[Rob Wilson]

Seven minutes. My general habit is brew coffee while coffee is brewing. I do sun salutation so it's totally accessible. But I found that it's a great monitoring system. So I figured out when I was tracking my sleep for a while that I have a direct connection between the quality of my deep sleep and how stiff my low back is. Regardless of any other input travel type of exercise, hydration, deep sleep for me is directly connected to lower back stiffness.

[Jocko Willink]

You go through a section here spring cleaning challenge as an audit and you talk about using a formal challenge as a sort of spring cleaning for your body and mind can provide you with interesting types of critical feedback. And then you talk about how to come up with a, you know, with a challenge that you're going to do. Decide what the challenge is. Make it an actual challenge. Say it out loud to at least two or three people who care enough about you to hold it you accountable. Plan a time and a date when this challenge will occur. Stick to it. That's actually the part of the challenge.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And then choose what to choose for challenge. What am I avoiding? I really like the the prompt of like, what do you not like doing? And make that part of the challenge. What don't I want to do? What causes internal friction for me? Or where do I really need to grow? That is awesome. So that means, Echo Charles, you're not allowed to do bicep curls for challenges. Oh, and you know I had to read this section. Systems are greater than discipline. All of this dashboard and toolkit stuff sounds nice, but are you supposed to put together but how are you supposed to put together feasible units of action in the real world? If you browse social media or watch YouTube, you may have noticed a trend towards discipline. There's no shortage of characters telling people to tighten up and get disciplined. On one hand, I get it. This is a natural balancing of the scales and wayward behavior that accompanies some perceptions of modern western culture. Instant gratification has not been good for us at large, and personal responsibility must be a core part of the answer. This same philosophy gets misdirected towards failures in health behavior. That is a wholesale misunderstanding of the problem. In my experience, doing it because you're supposed to is the attitude of people who are did it. Discipline, strictly speaking, is obedience to rules, whether those rules were self imposed or administrated. Or administered by an authority. The life cycle of discipline requires mental energy to not break the rules. And that energy is, like all energy used by people, finite. When I talk to, when I talk to individuals who seem disciplined, I usually find two things behind the curtain. First, most. First, the most rigid among them are engineers. They have proclivities that drive them toward higher degrees of conscientiousness. Second, and more important for our broader discussion, they have systems in place. The fittest, healthiest people I know organize their lives so that they are pushed toward habits that create outcomes they want. They wake up in the morning, the running shoes are by the door with the socks they're going to wear already stuck inside them. They don't buy a family sized jar of peanut butter and then stare at it, hoping they don't eat, eat the whole thing. They just don't buy the peanut butter in the first place. Building systems can help you track on. Building systems to help keep you on track works on a micro level, like putting a foam roller near the bed. But it works on a macro level too. Coordinating strategies for mind, movement and matter on a larger scale starts to build a lifestyle of performance longevity. So there you go. There's a lot of these characters out there. I've seen them. Yeah, they're out there talking about discipline.

[Rob Wilson]

So, jocko, it was nice talking to you.

[Jocko Willink]

No good stuff. And, and you know, clearly peel back the, what do you say? Peel back the curtain on me. And I've already talked about some of this systems that I have in place in my life, which is really, if you really break it down. My whole life is one big system of, you know, making things easy for me to be disciplined. I have a gym in my house, I have mats in my house, I have a gym at my gym, I have, you know, I have mats. I mean, I obviously have a Jiu Jitsu. I have family members that all train Jiu Jitsu. I have an ice bath, I have a sauna, I have a foam roller in every room. I have dumbbell, you know, so I've done all these things that you're talking about. And yes, all those things make discipline almost unavoidable in many cases is almost unavoidable for me. And you know, I was saying this the other day, like, I don't, I like working out, I like doing Jiu Jitsu. Now look, do I feel like going to train every single day? No, I don't feel like training every single day. Of course there's days where you're like, dude, I Do not want to go train today. But I know 100% I will feel better when I'm done. And I have experienced that enough that it compels me to just go, oh, yeah, I don't feel like training right now, but I know in an hour and a half when I'm driving home from Jiu Jitsu, I'm going to be so freaking stoked. Or I know when I get done, like, I'm taking a shower after going surfing, like, I know I'm going to be so stoked that I went surfing. Same thing with working out. Same thing with everything. But, yes, developing systems is a good way to overcome your lack of discipline.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, having systems in place doesn't exclude the necessity of discipline. But starting to think about how to organize your environment, like you were just saying, in a way that moves you towards discipline behavior, it won't even feel like discipline. I think often when people hear discipline, what they think is, like, this rigid fight with myself that I constantly have where there's always internal friction that I must be at odds with When I pursue health. In the health realm, this is how it gets presented often like, you don't want to do this. You got to go for. You know, you better do it. And it's like, to some degree, yes. But also, you know, like, I've been helping my. My sister reclaim some of her health. And it's like, buy a kettlebell, put it in your living room. When you see it, lift it up, lift it up. And then it doesn't have to become a thing with a special time. And before you know it, you're doing 100 swings a day. Now you're doing 200 swings a day. You're doing 500 swings a day. And that kettlebell, it's not even heavy anymore. And then this happened with her over the last year. And then yesterday she texted me. I just went and got a gym membership. Yeah. And it wasn't like she did some. She didn't, like, join a fitness monastery. She. I helped her build systems to make it easy for her to become disciplined. And what are the things that I can manipulate in my environment? And that can be with obvious things like physical exercise, but it can also be, you know, like, when I decided, like, I'm going to write this book, I started to tell people who I knew would expect it from me who, like, were close to me that I would trusted and I cared what they thought. So that when they go, oh, hey, man, how's that book coming? Along. I don't want to look those people in the eye that I respect and go, oh, I haven't really been working on it. I want to go. I wrote another chapter working through this section. I'm doing research on this. So that's the system that I put in place so that every time one of those people would ask me, I had something honest to say. And it would keep me on those. On those really rough times where, like, some days you write and it's like a waterfall and it's just coming. And then some days you type five words and you hate them and you erase them and you do that over and over for about 90 minutes. And then the next day you come and you're not. You're not always sure which one is going to show up, but it doesn't matter.

[Jocko Willink]

You do it.

[Rob Wilson]

You do it. And I put a system in place. Hey, honey, eight o' clock every night, when we're done with dinner for the night, I'm going into my office and I'm going to write for 60 to 90 minutes. And that then it's setting up a system with your family, setting up a system with your work, with your physical environment at home. And then, like you said, it doesn't even feel like discipline because you've staged the relationships, you've staged the gear, then all you have to do is your part, which is to take action.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. Do the manual labor.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

I say that because, like, for me, writing is very. I'm not in some intellectual state when I'm writing. No, I already know the words and I just have to put them on the freaking piece of paper in front of me. It's just typing.

[Rob Wilson]

It's work.

[Jocko Willink]

A typing. Yeah, it's work. And that's the same thing with, like, you know, working out on some days, you know, I'm not. I'm just doing the thing that I'm going through the repetitions, because I am supposed to be in there doing the repetitions. That's not ideal, but that's the way it is sometimes. Sometimes I'm doing jiu jitsu.

[Rob Wilson]

It's like, yeah, labor.

[Jocko Willink]

All right. Hope freaking this dude does. Oh, yeah, here he comes. One of those roles when you peel.

[Rob Wilson]

Back the layers on anything, eventually what shows up is work. Yeah, a good friend of mine, he was. He worked in the Factory. He worked for Andy Warhol in the 80s, so he mixed paint for Andy Warhol. And he told me when he got there, you know, he'd done a bunch of art stuff and wrote some songs. And stuff. And he got there to work in the factory and he was like, oh shit, it's just labor. He said that's the hardest he ever worked in his life was for a painter.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

And that he's like, literally we're just like mixing chemicals and like in, in like full coveralls and boots all day. And he was like, and this is art. It's just work.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

That'S. He must have some freaking wild stories.

[Rob Wilson]

Oh man. He lived in. His name is Robert Waldroup. He was in. Lived in Manhattan in the early 80s when it was. Yeah, like when it was a real cowboy town. And he was like, yeah, you. I'd walk home at night and be like, oh, there's another car fire. Just like normal chaos there.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. When I was a kid I would go to. I grew up in Connecticut and Maine, but I would, I would take the train to New York and it was like total chaos in the 80s, like insanity. And yeah, luckily it's a lot nicer now. I say that some people go, I wish it would have stayed the way it was, but man, it was not that great. It was pretty bad. Now look, is it getting over overly? You know, maybe a little too nice possibly. But yeah, cycles. Yeah, I guess it'll. It'll do something. Chapter 8 Developing a Personal health System and co so we talk about, you know, discipline coming from or be systems being better than discipline. Well, how are we going to put that system in place? Tuning the human it would be nearly. And this is where this is like the kind of what you were getting into raising your eyebrows as you were talking earlier. Tuning the human it would be nearly impossible to count how many times over the course of my career I've been asked questions like these. Which stretches are the best ones for me to do? What breathing technique should I use? What is the best way to put on muscle? To which my answer answer would often be, let's find out together. Fast forward a little bit. Developing an experimental mindset is about having the willingness to try things out and see what happens. And this is going back to the revolution research of MC Schreferl Schraffel and they did an experiment showing that an experimental framework supports user autonomy and competence and that participants develop health practices from the interventions that are still in use long after the intervention is finished. That means an experimental approach to health and performance yielded better long term results than the insertion of a standard protocol. So instead of just being told this is what you're going to do, having this experimental framework was better why? Schreifel found that that more participants took ownership over their own process and developed knowledge, skill, and practices that made them feel capable of interpreting information regarding the exploration of their own health. When we go through the process, process of exploration, we find more meaning in the things we learn. This is true for all of life. So why would performance longevity be any different? So basically, just giving someone a program and saying do this was a lot less effective than saying, all right, let's find out the best way to make this stuff happen. And just like any plan, when you're working with a team and you let the team come up with a plan, they're going to have ownership of that plan and they're going to be more engaged in it. And that's the same thing that happens here.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. And you know, to use jiu jitsu again, let's do it. If. If you just had like the old 1980s, like Kata and jiu jitsu, and you never rolled, you never had to prove what you knew against a live training partner, like, how confident would you think you would be in real life? And what we found out was not very, that if you don't train with live resisting human beings, you don't actually know what you're doing. And that's because you have to figure out what works for you under those conditions. And the only way to do that is to try stuff, reflect on what worked and what didn't. Now, does that mean you can't talk to people who know more than you? Of course not. You can say, hey, what was your experience? And then you integrate that with your own experience, and then what do you do? You try again. And what will happen over time is you will fail smaller and you will fail faster. But there's no not failing with this stuff. I think with health in particular, people want a moment of utopia where they're all of a sudden healthy. I'm healthy now. And there's no more work to be done. Nothing works like that. You have to keep sharpening a knife. If you use it now, if you let it get super dull and deformed, a lot more work has to be done. But if you run it over a strop every day, then once in a while you got to touch a stone. Same thing with skill with health. You have to try things on a regular basis. You have to tinker, you have to see what works for you. You. And then you will take ownership over your own process.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. Just to reiterate what you just said, you know, you say, don't take your Experience or anybody else's as gospel. In fact, a good habit is to look for ways in which your initial impression might be wrong or incomplete. And then I'll close out the book with this. What. What you say in this. In this section here, you say, my hope for you after you engage with the material in this book is that it will become an integrated philosophy for how you think about maintaining your health. That these concepts and ideas become so second nature to you that you nearly forget what they are called. Unless someone wanting to know how you stay so darn consistent with your health practices asks you about them. Don't become too anchored on any one example that we have explored. Ask yourself what. What is under the surface here? If there's a specific indicator or tool that works well for you and continues to do so over time, fantastic. But I do hope you'll keep, as Bruce Lee said, researching your own experience. So that's what we got. Check engine light. And then it goes from there. It goes into a workbook. Now is the book that just came out, because I have a printed copy from a PDF that you sent me, but the book comes out today.

[Rob Wilson]

Today.

[Jocko Willink]

Is the workbook included with the book? Is it a second document? Is it the same document? How is it set up?

[Rob Wilson]

They're bound together.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay, so it's one big.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, so they're bound together. And those are experiments that are specifically anchored to each one of those categories of mind, movement and matter. So there's three experiments for each one. So you can try some specific tools from the book, but more importantly, to learn how to experiment so that if you listen to Andy Galpin or Andrew Huberman or Rhonda Patrick or whoever else, and they recommend a protocol, you can go, how do I figure out if that works for me? What KPIs will I look at? How will I look at trends? Is this really a reliable and consistent method for me in my life? Is this tool robust? And then you might go, well, I do want to work on cardiovascular health, but the way that they recommended it might not work for me under these conditions. What's the next thing I can explore? And now what you're doing is developing skill instead of going, oh, man, she's supposed to be really smart. And I tried it and it didn't work. So. So I don't need to be aerobically fit, which is what happens, right? Oh, I tried this sleep thing that Huberman told me, and it didn't work for me this time. And so not only do I not think that this part of sleep is not important. But he's not as credible to me now, and that's silly, because none of those people, none of us people, know the individuals who are listening, right? And so bring up my friend Stu McMillan again. He says an individual is not the average of individuals. So when we collect data, we're looking at statistical averages and means across time. But you are an individual, and what works for you when it comes to the specifics is going to be different. And the only way to know is to try again. Jiu Jitsu is a good. Other great example. Like maybe you like a certain sweep from closed guard. The exact way that you set it up might be different than me, even if we both like it, because we're not made the same. You're more experienced, we have different limb lengths. So.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, I know. Here's a cool thing to take home from that. In Jiu Jitsu, I always. When I'm trying to explain to people, like a move, and I'll say, there's 10 things that you have to do, right, to make this move work, and I can only teach you five. Now, there's certain moves. I can teach you six of those things. There's some moves I can only teach you three of those things, but the rest of those you gotta figure out on your own. And you gotta figure it out by drilling it, trying it, and then upping the resistance and eventually going live. Because you know that you can't. I can't. The most articulate person in the world. There's some part of a move that they just. No one can explain it. And plus, like you said, it's different for you because you got longer arms than me, and you got less experience with this thing and more experience with that other thing. And you got this weird pain in your thing over here. So there's all these little adjustments that you got to make. And, oh, by the way, you have a whole different series of moves that set something up nicely, which you can use here. And so I can teach you five things, but then you got to work it. You got to experiment with it. And that's what I. I called it in your workbook. I was like, calling it guided experiment Experiments. And then also you have like a. A systematic grading criteria and systematic surveys of how did the experiment. What was the outcome of the experiment? Because it's cool to like, oh, Rhonda Patrick said to sleep like this. And I tried it. I didn't really like it, but I have no idea why. Because then you can't make an adjustment. Because it's probably because. Oh, yeah, well, Rhonda Patrick said to do this at night. Well, you know, she doesn't know that my. My wife is doing the wordle thing at night. So even though I'm like, want to have the screen off? I. You know, my wife's over. Okay, well, I didn't count. Rhonda Patrick didn't know that about my wife. Of course that she did wordle at night. So now I'm going to throw out her whole protocol. No, it's like, oh, oh, my wife does wordle at night, so. Okay, here's the thing I can do. I can ask her. Hey, when you do that, can you. Can you do that on the couch before you come to bed? Oh, okay, cool. Like, what are the things that we can do to make these little adjustments? And that's what the surveys. And the log basically is a logbook that you've got in the workbook that allow people to understand and track what these experiments revealed and then hone and adjust the protocols so that they're functional for you. Because everybody is different. And the. Just like jiu jitsu arm lock for you is different for jiu jitsu. Amlock for me. And the defense is different for you. Different for me. Well, the food that you eat and the zone two training that you do, it's all going to be slightly varied. And we have to experiment to figure out how to modify and modulate our protocols so that they work and are. Are idealized for us as individuals.

[Rob Wilson]

Exactly.

[Jocko Willink]

And this is a damn good place to start with this book called Check engine light. Tuning your body and mind for performance longevity. So what's next? What do you got next? You're already working on the next book?

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, so I have a manuscript that I wrote about breath control.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Rob Wilson]

That's probably two years old now. Actually, when I was stalled on this book, I was. I was stalled for a bit, and then I was like, well, I don't know if anything's gonna happen with this, but I was so in the writing headspace that I just sat down and wrote, started writing this other book out. Probably I'll revisit and change it, but a specific area of expertise that I have is breath control for stress management and for sports performance. And so it's been a long time coming. I've been teaching this probably 10 years in lots of different places, both in special operations communities and. And martial arts communities. And I think that there's a real opportunity in the performance and health environment for a lot of this Very usable information to be made far simpler. There's, even with the most educated people, often too much esoteric language, too much jargon, and it makes it hard for people to begin and then experiment. So another cornerstone of this book will be how to experiment with the things that are suggested for yourself. And that's a core component of my entire philosophy in health and performance is I am not the arbiter of answers for people. My job is to help you make sense of what's happening and then to help ask better questions, to help design better and better experiments. I'm a guide, but I, I don't have a special tablet somewhere that lets me know the best way. I still do strength and conditioning for some athletes, mainly high level professional grapplers. And every program I write is an experiment. Now I'm careful because some of these guys have money, serious money on the line. So I don't do things that, where they will get hurt or at least reduce the likelihood. But this is a biological organism. I don't know what the outcome's gonna be in eight weeks or 12 weeks. We start trying things and then we communicate and change and having flexibility and adaptability and it being about learning is really the goal. For me, the biggest assign sign of success with an athlete I'm working with is they need me less and less. And the problems they come to me with are more and more complex and I'm like, oh, and more specific, More specific. We're going in the right direction. This guy's asking me something that I gotta like, hold on a second. I need to look that up in this textbook I haven't seen for five years.

[Jocko Willink]

You know, what's the, what's like the curve look like for grapplers? Or you want them a certain amount of strength? Is it aerobic capacity? Like what is your focus on?

[Rob Wilson]

So I organize it pretty uniquely. I think, of course foundationally is conditioning. I mean every, I think strength is important, but nobody wants to die tired. And just in terms of confidence, if, when you're talking about MMA or talking about grappling, conditioning is king. You can have like the guy with the best bench press, but if you can weather that storm and he gets tired, smoke.

[Jocko Willink]

Are you breaking conditioning up into like 5 minute rounds type thing or.

[Rob Wilson]

It will depend on the athlete's experience to some degree. If it's an older athlete with a long training, training history and they have a good aerobic base to begin with, I'll only prescribe them enough to maintain what they have. That's pretty rare. Mostly we're looking at zone two, and for us, we actually call that sale. So I, I work with standard Jiu jitsu quite a lot. So that's Greg Souders. He's the most hated man in jiu jitsu right now, but a dear friend.

[Jocko Willink]

Of mine, and he's, he's hated because of the ecological approach.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, he's an, he's an iconoclast.

[Jocko Willink]

So I, I, I'm tracking. No, and I've been, I just was talking about this the other day because my daughter competed at a tournament, or not a tournament, but wno, who's number one on flow grappling, and she's been doing a lot of ecological training. And so they were asking me about it, and, you know, I was, you know, I was, I was saying that.

[Rob Wilson]

This is.

[Jocko Willink]

This is not an entirely new concept by any stretch of the imagination. And we have been doing, what do they call it, constrained learning forever. Echo. Charles and I were doing constraint. Hey, get out of my guard. Hey, if you pass my guard, restart here. Hey, you can only do the arm lock. Hey, you know, we've been doing this stuff for literally decades. For decades we've been doing this. So I, I think, you know, like, anything, it's kind of gotten a little bit, a little bit crazy. And you can take it to an extreme. There's an extreme version of it where I am not going to show you any moves at all. That's like, the extreme version would be, hey, we're just gonna do jiu jitsu, and I'm just gonna, you know, I'm just gonna play this game, and I'm never gonna tell you how to do anything. That's an extreme version. I will tell you that I taught kids for a very long time, and that is a very, it's a fairly effective way to teach kids, hey, you're in between their legs. You got to get out from between their legs. They will experiment and they will try things, and they'll do it very rapidly. And they don't have any eagle. They don't care if they get beat. They don't care if they get swept. So it's no big deal. And they learn very quickly that way. It's. And plus, they don't have the, probably the cognitive capacity to remember. Put your left foot on the hip, turn your spin your right like, like calf towards the their back. Press down on your calf. That's a lot for a little kid to remember where if you're like, grab their arm, put your legs around it, they can do. They'll remember that. Or even better, that, hey, if you can get your legs around just their head and one arm, you're gonna win. Okay, they can try and figure that out. But so I.

[Rob Wilson]

The.

[Jocko Willink]

The ecological approach to learning is not something that is brand new. I'm surprised it's so controversial. I think it's controversial just because people like to argue about things or.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah, for sure. And have you had a chance to talk with. With Greg in person, like at an event or anything?

[Jocko Willink]

I have not.

[Rob Wilson]

He's like the nicest person and loves Jiu Jitsu as much as anybody I've ever met. Like, he loves it.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

We'll talk about it forever. Super generous with his knowledge. Is completely open to be proven wrong. You got to come correct though, because the dude is insanely intelligent and super well read and watches a lot of tape like he knows his shit. But I've been working with his team for the last three years. DeAndre Corby, who just won the Sapatero, has been a strength and conditioning client of mine for five years. Probably certainly one of the most disciplined human beings I've ever met in my life. I mean, he's going to AIGA Worlds in a couple days.

[Jocko Willink]

Nice.

[Rob Wilson]

And I'm like, hey man, how's the travel? What's the travel rundown? And he's like A, B, C, D, like dialed in. He's died. He's super dialed. But when I work with those guys and we look at conditioning, you know, one of the projects that I'm sort of, that's like a side hustle because I don't have enough to work on. I like to have a side project is trying to develop a framework for needs analysis, for grappling. And I think that's something that really hasn't been done for the sport officially yet. I think there's some good strength and conditioning coaches. They're doing a pretty good job. Like, Steven Sahoun is Australian guy who does a really phenomenal job with mixed martial artists, obviously ufc, PI. But when we're talking about Brazilian Jiu jitsu, which is very quickly becoming a real professional sport, I don't see a lot of people in human performance doing a legitimate needs analysis for the athletes and for the sport, and breaking it down to like, what are the demands of the sport really, like posting clinching level changes. How do you communicate those demands to the athlete in the strength and conditioning environment in a way that helps them connect that capacity with their skill? So, like, for us, we use things like Force, flow, sail, squeeze, grind, regenerate. And we'll have blocks of training or days of training where that's the intention of the day. So if it says sail, sails use wind, so you know that's aerobic capacity is coming. And sometimes we have high wind and sometimes we have low wind. And that will express the intention of the session to the athlete. Because whether it's combat sports or combat, the personality types attracted to those things tend to be very similar, which is whatever's in front of me, I will work as hard as possible at this thing and give 100% effort and grind it out every time. Now, personally, I would much rather work with that type of person and then reign it in. I don't want to be the cheerleader who's like, come on, do another rep. I'm not interested in that. But speaking to the athlete about the intention of a block of exercise helps them know where to focus their effort. So when it's like, hey, I really need you to stay in zone two, because that actually gets a specific training adaptation. It's not being, it's not you being a wimp today to keep your heart rate between 145 and 155 beats a minute. It's because this gives us a specific outcome. And so then it's like your job today is sale. If you don't do your job today, then I know you're not doing your best. So your best is staying in this zone. I was like, oh, check. So that's how we break up their training. And then we're also, Greg and I are working together on some case studies and we're doing like, using sports metrics, so bringing in like really, really basic sports science to look at how it can influence skills training for high level grapplers. So how do we use things like HRV and sleep and levels of soreness and mobility. So subjective and objective metrics to inform how you organize practice. And how does that make sense practically? Not just what do the numbers say, but how does a coach who has to stand on the floor and make sure this athlete is ready, how can they use this to influence training decisions? So that's what we're working on right now. And that's like my fun side project is, is sports science and strength and conditioning for grappling? Because I personally love the sport. Like, it's probably the only thing I really watch other than the UFC or, you know, whatever one. And it's a really hard puzzle because it changes all the time.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. And plus, because I trained A lot of grapplers over the years and, like, different. I mean, just like, who. What is that person? Like, there's some people that have the natural cardio, and they'll natural. Or this other person has the natural explosiveness. This other person. And so you got to kind of complement their. Their strengths, focus on their weakness a little bit, but you don't want to abandon their strengths because that's what that's their go to.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

So it's a. It's a different puzzle for each person and. And figuring out what the best way to maximize. And something I've always said is, like, I can't grapple with you hard enough that you're gonna get the benefits beyond just grappling. Like, you could. You're not gonna. You need to do something else.

[Rob Wilson]

Well, one of the other things that happens too, in grappling is when you're new, you're inefficient. And so there's a lot of conditioning. But as you get more and more experienced, especially as you widen the gap of skill to most of the people relative to you, this might be different in a professional training room, but often what happens is you get very efficient, you know your game, so you're not going to reach the same physiological thresholds that you will to get a training outcome as sitting on a bike. So being fit and being conditioned are not the same thing. Being conditioned means I can handle the demands of this environment, so I can keep participating. Painting. Most grapplers who grapple often are very well conditioned, but then you put them on a stationary bike and you slowly increase the amount of wattage, and I blow guys up at like, six minutes, and they don't under. They didn't realize, like, oh, man, I wasn't using a very efficient energy source. Right. And so.

[Jocko Willink]

And it's comfort level. My. My buddy Sloan just went to Thailand for, like, a few months to train Muay Thai. And he's like a competitive grappler. And he got over there and he's like, yeah, when I first showed up there, like, I know I'm in awesome. I'm fit, I'm in awesome shape. But you start even hitting mitts or sparring, and it's just like, exhaustion. And then he came back, you know, his first, like, couple days back, he's like, yo, like, you know, he's a great grappler, and he's strong as hell, and he's obviously in condition, but, you know, he's like, oh, I've felt tired because I haven't been Grappling as much as I did. So you get that. You know, what you train in is what you're training in.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

So.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. And, you know, the. The other consideration with combat sports athletes, that's really similar to working with special operations community is the bottom of the pyramid that supports all of that is being healthy. And health is. Health emerges when you're robust enough to keep doing all the other stuff on top of the pyramid. So it's like plenty of athletes are. Are what I've started to call operationally robust but biologically brittle. So, like, I can get in there, shut off all the noise, and do the work, but getting sick a lot. Boy, I sure did get staff again. I got another fungus thing. Having trouble going to sleep. My temper is coming back. My weight's a little volatile. And so underlying that is this fragility. And what does that do? Does it mean you can't go out and win? No, it doesn't mean that. What it means is your opportunities to keep winning are reduced. Right. That's performance longevity.

[Jocko Willink]

There we go. Bring it back to the title of the book. Does that get us up to speed?

[Rob Wilson]

Yes, sir.

[Jocko Willink]

If we're in Virginia beach, where should we get ice cream?

[Rob Wilson]

Oh, be free.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Rob Wilson]

Go to be free.

[Jocko Willink]

Be free. What is it? Craft ice cream.

[Rob Wilson]

Be free. Craft ice cream. Owned by retired Navy SEAL Chris Fetis.

[Jocko Willink]

That's a, like, the best thing I've heard in a long time. You know, like, hey, I'm gonna put. Pursue my dream of making ice cream.

[Rob Wilson]

So Chris and I are jiu jitsu training partners. That's how we know each other. We've been training together for eight years. We walked in almost the same first day. I swear to God. We shook hands and I heard about ice cream immediately. And ever since, he was, like, making ice cream out of his garage, then had a little shop, then had a kitchen. Kitchen, and now has this, like, beautiful storefront. They have an amazing bakery. Like, he's doing really well. He's been doing a lot of, you know, he's talking in public, so probably people who listen to this will be familiar with who he is and what a great dude. And to get out of the teams after all the. The he's done and been through, and then to make ice cream is. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty awesome.

[Jocko Willink]

And people can find you. Wilsonhealthandperformance.com Yep. You're on the Instagram at the. Check engine light. And you got a sub stack. Yeah, check engine light. And then what about. What about Virginia Health and performance.

[Rob Wilson]

Virginia High Performance.

[Jocko Willink]

Virginia High Performance. What's their site?

[Rob Wilson]

Vhpmission.com and.

[Jocko Willink]

But that's not open to the public.

[Rob Wilson]

The gym is not? No.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Rob Wilson]

But if you are an active duty or veteran, special operations from any branch and you're interested, you go to the website and you're interested in the program, you can reach out to Ollie and his team through the website or if you're having trouble and you're from the community, you can reach out to me directly and I will make sure you get in touch with people who can help you.

[Jocko Willink]

Freaking awesome. And. And thanks to the Navy SEAL foundation, man. The Navy SEAL foundation has done all kinds of stuff for me and my friends over the years and they are the driving force behind, you know, making these things happen, I guess, paying for these things to happen.

[Rob Wilson]

So great organization.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. Great, great bunch of people. The Navy SEAL foundation, that's Navy field. Navy Seal Foundation.org all just awesome, awesome to hear about Echo Charles, you got any questions?

[Echo Charles]

Two questions. First one is kind of for both you guys. What is Mount Trashmore?

[Jocko Willink]

Mount Trashmore in Virginia, in Virginia beach, there's a, like a, like a trash dump and they covered it with grass and there's a skateboard half pipe there, which in the 80s was kind of a iconic thing. Mount Trashmore.

[Echo Charles]

But the trash is underneath.

[Jocko Willink]

The trash is underneath.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

This looks like a weird looking mountain.

[Rob Wilson]

Virginia beach, the topography is as flat as this table we're sitting at. There's no, there's nothing. There's no hills. It's the. One of the highest points in the whole city is like a 75 meter hill made out of trash and it's called Mount Trashmore. Little tongue in cheek, but it looks nice still. Yeah, you just. Great park. Lots of families. Yeah. But you know, it's.

[Jocko Willink]

Are people still skating there?

[Rob Wilson]

Oh, yeah. They redid the skate park and it's like really cool. I think they have a pool there, a couple different half pipes. Street skate.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah. My nephew.

[Jocko Willink]

When the. When the future Primitive Bones Brigade video came out and it was at Mount Trashmore, Lance Mountain, tearing it up. It was, you know, very iconic in the 80s.

[Rob Wilson]

That's old school.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, it is.

[Rob Wilson]

You get Lance Mountain at Mount Trashmore. That's about as, that's about as skaties as it gets.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, well, you're talking skaties, kid. Right here. I was over here getting after it.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

What's your second question, Echo Charles, how.

[Echo Charles]

Do you feel about chiropractic in general?

[Rob Wilson]

Depends on the chiropractor.

[Echo Charles]

All right, so.

[Rob Wilson]

So the. I'm sorry.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, so I mean, I guess that's what I'm starting with in general because. Yeah, I think you're right where. Because they. The initial or primary thing that I'm familiar with as far as chiropractic goes, is them cracking your neck and your back and sometimes your shoulders and your hips, maybe your ankles or something like this.

[Jocko Willink]

But then I'll crack them ankles.

[Echo Charles]

Boy, Jocko, the chiropractor. Back to it. And then also then you go into other stuff, like soft tissue, you know, like this, like myofascial release therapy, which I actually really like.

[Rob Wilson]

Yep.

[Echo Charles]

I actually like the back crack stuff too. When I was young, I played football and every once in a while I'd get like a hit and then when I do jumping jacks, I would have to cough because it felt like my spine was like, I don't know, hitting my. Yeah. Heating my lungs or something like this. And then I go to the chiropractor and it helps or it cures it essentially. So I was like a chiropractor pretty good. And then, you know, this is when I was maybe 12 years old. And then, you know, life time goes on or whatever, you look more into it and then certain people are saying, oh yeah, it's nothing. Oh yeah, it helps. And you just don't know.

[Rob Wilson]

So the founder of chiropractic, Andrew Taylor, still was a pretty nefarious character actually. And so some of the foundational ideas of chiropractic, which is vertebral adjustment for central nervous system function, are pretty well debunked. However, there are some skilled manual therapists who go through chiropractic because it allows them to obtain a license to manipulate people. And some of those individuals are extremely skilled. Like, I've met people who were like really, really good at neuromuscular therapy and like truly helped me. And I've also met some people that basically hang out of a drive through window and do like a whack and crack on. Anybody who says, like, you know, I got any little ache, you know, whatever, a house fly landed on the left side of my neck and they're like, oh, vertebra or I have cancer. Let me adjust your vertebra or obesity, oh, it's your sacrum out. Or it's like the answer for everything. I don't care what profession you're in, if the thing you do is the answer for all that ails the world, then I don't trust you as like an immediate point. But chiropractic as a whole, like, the foundational idea is pretty well done. Debunk. But there are practitioners within that umbrella who do have valuable skill sets.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, yeah, I go to a guy named. I haven't been in a while, Chad Wells. He kind of knows all of our people. Yeah, yeah, it's called. I think it's called, like the league chiropractic, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, he's the one who introduced me to, like, real myofascial release stuff. And I went in with my lower back, jammed it up like I was out.

[Jocko Willink]

Wait, this recent?

[Echo Charles]

No, no, this is like the. How do you say? The. The introduction to the. The real deal. See, I'm saying. And this is maybe like 15 years ago. Maybe 10, 15 years ago. Anyway, I was out. I was like, bro, this is like a good six month. Oh, scenario. Oh, yeah, big time. So I went in and he was like, yeah, we'll do a bunch of stuff. He's like, you know, doing the cracks and stuff like that. I'm like, cool. And then he did the mile faster release, and it was like, boom. It was like. I wouldn't say it was uncomfortable, but you could. It was like work. It wasn't like some, right, presto, you're cured. You know, it was like some stuff, some therapy, some deep therapy. So I'm like, all right. He's like, how does it feel now? I was like, oh, dang, it's actually getting better in front of my very eyes, saying. He's like, all right, well, let's do it again. Do it again. It took maybe like, I don't know, 15 minutes or so, which is kind of long for doing that. That stuff. He did both sides. And, bro, he cured it that day.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Echo Charles]

I said, bro, when can I go back to training? He's like, we'll see how it feels tomorrow. I was like, bro, tomorrow. I'm thinking, like, freaking two months from now, you know, after eight more of this. He's like, no, no, no, just see how it feels or whatever. And, bro, that thing was cured.

[Rob Wilson]

Yeah.

[Echo Charles]

I was like, okay, this is like legit. So every time I get injured to the point where I'm like, oh, yeah, this is going to be a long evolution as far as recovery goes. I go to him cured every time.

[Jocko Willink]

I've definitely had good. Well, Dr. Mick, unfortunately, he died. He got cancer, but he was a chiropractor and a jiu jitsu black belt and just a freaking great dude. But he would adjust everyone for free at my gym, like, it was freaking awesome. But he. He would always just hook it up and I would, you know, I'd be like, have some weird neck thing or some weird back thing. And he would. He would handle it. It would always feel good. And then there was another guy. You remember that guy named Robert Garcia, bro? He was early in, and I got my arm straightened out excessively one time. Like, he same thing like before my very eyes was healing it, you know, 70 healed in one session. And he would do. He would do somewhere. He would like, hold here and then like, press it down. I guess it's my old fashioned. Damn, that worked good. And he. He worked for. I want to say it was on Oscar De La Hoya. He was like Oscar De La Hoya's guy. And by the way, like, he was part of that camp and part of that crew, and so, like, he didn't need to do anything else besides take care of that dude. But that's how good he was. He was so good that he could just heal you on the spot. It's pretty awesome.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, yeah, that stuff's good. But right on, man. Good info. Right? And good to meet you.

[Jocko Willink]

Those are. Those are your two questions?

[Echo Charles]

My two questions.

[Jocko Willink]

Cool. Awesome. Rob, any. Any final thoughts, bro?

[Rob Wilson]

No. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Good chat with you guys.

[Jocko Willink]

Right on, man. Well, thanks for coming out. Thanks for. Thanks for writing this book and sharing these lessons with everybody and. And really, most important for me is thanks for all that you do to help out the boys. So really appreciate it, man.

[Rob Wilson]

My pleasure.

[Jocko Willink]

Good talking to you.

[Rob Wilson]

You too.

[Jocko Willink]

And with that, Rob Wilson has left the building, leaving us with some good knowledge. Keep an eye on the dashboard of your longevity, your performance, longevity. Keep your on the dashboard. Make sure you keep your mind right, keep moving and keep the good fuel coming on board. One thing I can recommend really strong when it comes to fuel.

[Echo Charles]

Sure.

[Jocko Willink]

Is Jocko Fuel. Hey, check it out. Jockeyfuel.com. we've got everything that you need. We've got protein. We got ready to drink protein. We got powder protein, we've got. We got new flavors. We got root beer. Just came out. Root beer float. We got coffee and donuts, which, by the way, my wife, Big H. Yeah. She says coffee and donuts is her favorite flavor.

[Echo Charles]

Okay.

[Jocko Willink]

So, you know, we're just saying we got protein, we got energy drinks, we got hydration drinks. We got joint warfare for your joints, we got super krill for your whole damn system. Time war. That's what we're doing. We got everything that you need. Jockey fuel.com check out jockofield.com somebody somebody posted the other day a fake. They had a fake greens. Fake Jocko greens. I know it sounds crazy but there's people making fake Jocko fuel out there. Check out jockey fuel.com get the real goods. Get some deals that we have on jockofuel.com check out subscriptions. You can get like up to 20% off on subscriptions at Jockey. Look and then you don't have to worry about it. You're a type of person. Echo Charles is finger pointing at you. You're a type of person. This has happened to you factually. I've remember it. You run out of this, you run out of freakin joint warfare.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

You run out of krill oil. No reason for that. Why? We got the subscription service. Go subscribe. We got what you need. Jockofield.com also you can get it at Walmart, Wawa Vitamin Shop, GNC Military commissaries, Aphes, Hannaford Dash Doors and Mary Fern in in Maryland. Wakefern Shoprite Heb down in Texas you might see a wall of Jocko fuel down there. Meyer up in the Midwest you might see a wall of Jocko fuel there. Wegmans, you might see a pallet on the floor. Harris Teeter, Publix. You're gonna see a wall. Grab something. Lifetime fitness shields and small gyms everywhere. If you want to bring this amazing product into your facility, email jfsalesjockeyfuel.com and we got you covered. Also we talked about Jiu Jitsu today and like simply put, Rob Wilson said if there's one thing you're going to do in your life, let it be Jiu jitsu. Did he say that? Not exactly, but he hinted at.

[Echo Charles]

That's the message I got.

[Jocko Willink]

The message I got too. So we're training Jiu Jitsu. That means you're going to need a gi. It means you're going to need a rash guard. Means you're going to need some training shorts. Go to OriginUSA.com and get a GI and training shorts and a rash guard that is made with freedom here in the United States of America from 100American made materials. Also you can get jeans, you can get boots, you can get hoodies, T shirts, boots. I already said that. Belts, Belts.

[Echo Charles]

Wallets.

[Jocko Willink]

Wallets.

[Echo Charles]

Those boots are socks.

[Jocko Willink]

Just kind of everything.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, everything. The those Chelsea boots.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Echo Charles]

You gave yours away.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, I gave mine to carry.

[Echo Charles]

Good. Good for him I guess.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. Well now they got black ones. I might have to re engage. There's A black Chelsea black.

[Echo Charles]

Those are.

[Jocko Willink]

Those are really good because, you know, a red or whatever. What.

[Echo Charles]

What.

[Jocko Willink]

What color is that?

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, those.

[Jocko Willink]

Like rust or something?

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, kind of a reddish brownish.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, reddish brownish. That draws a lot of attention. You know what I mean? For me, I'm not used to that kind of attention based on clothing, so that's not really my thing. But now that they have the black Chelsea boots, might be able to hook it up. Originusa.com check it out.

[Echo Charles]

Speaking of freedom, discipline equals freedom. Look, we wearing disciplines equals freedom. We're representing where you can get the shirts and hoodies and socks. A bunch of other stuff is jockostore.com new discipline equals freedom shirt. New one coming out probably another four weeks. I'll give it. Okay, but it's in motion. Also. 4th of July, independence Day shirt. It's coming out being. Or it's coming out in a day or two. Boom. Check that out. Anyway. Jocastore.com also the short locker subscription scenario. We like subscriptions. See what I'm saying?

[Jocko Willink]

We like scenarios.

[Echo Charles]

We love scenarios. New design every month. You can sign up for that on jockostore.com as well.

[Jocko Willink]

Also Colorado craft beef and primalbeef.com. check them out. You need steak. Hear me say that today. Yeah, we need protein. We know that. We got two forms of protein. Steak and mole. Go to jockofuel.com get molk. Go to primalbeef.com or coloradocraftbeef.com and get steak. There you go. You got all the protein you should be drinking. What do you say? You should have 12 grams of protein for every 1 group, 1 gram of body weight you have. That's what we're doing, man. You look, we. We got beef sticks. We got jerky. We got just flank steaks, hamburgers, hot dogs. It's all in there. And it's all freaking awesome. Awesome steaks from awesome people. Primalbeef.com Colorado craft beef.com also subscribe to the podcast. Also check out Jocko Underground, where we can go off the rails a little bit because no one can keep us on the rails there. Yeah, it's true, you know, so it's just there. It's $8.18 a month. If you can't afford that, we still want you to join us in the Underground. Email assistancecounterground.com Also, we have YouTube channels. Also books, obviously. The book of the day. Rob Wilson. It's. It came out today. Today. Which is. What's the date today?

[Echo Charles]

June 17th.

[Jocko Willink]

June 17th. It came out today. June 17th. 2025. Check engine light. Real good guidebook for your health, your mind, your body. So check it out. Check in Engine Light by Rob Wilson. Also, I've written a bunch of books. Hey, Dave Burke has a book coming out.

[Echo Charles]

Good deal.

[Jocko Willink]

Did you pre order it yet?

[Echo Charles]

Okay, well, I'm assuming that he's going to hand deliver it to my house. Signed, by the way, so, you know, I don't have to pre order.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay, I guess that's my assumption. Support our friends. Tell them to drive to our house. Okay. And deliver us the thing that we're, you know, trying to. Trying to get into the world.

[Echo Charles]

You think, you think I'm off base on that one?

[Jocko Willink]

You're way off. Okay.

[Echo Charles]

All right.

[Jocko Willink]

Order a case of them. Good tip for you and your family.

[Echo Charles]

Good tip.

[Jocko Willink]

Need to Lead by Dave Burke. Also, I've written a bunch of books, kids books. By the way, some people are surprised that I've written kids books. Why is that? Because I look like a Neanderthal, maybe? Kind of. Yeah, kinda. I think it's more than kinda. Can a Neanderthal write about children? Well, let's think about it. Technically, Neanderthals had to have children. Yep. CRO Magnon man had to have children. And maybe, just maybe, they had some understanding of how those children could be moved forward in correct way in the world. So maybe if you get the book Way of the Warrior Kid or any of the books from that series, you'll be able to help your kid move forward properly in the world. Check those out. Also, Mikey and the Dragons, a lot of people say it's the best kids book ever written.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, I could see why they would say that for sure.

[Jocko Willink]

I know some people cried when they read it.

[Echo Charles]

Maybe, maybe not. I mean, hey, you know, I could see how that could happen too.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, that again, some people cry easier than other people.

[Echo Charles]

Yes, they do.

[Jocko Willink]

So check out those books if you want. Also, Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. We have the Muster in Orlando, but it's not until December, but these events sell out. So if you want to come to the muster, go to echelonfront.com also if you want to come to Council, if you want to come to Battlefield, if you want to go to the Women's assembly, go to echelonfront.com also if you want to have leadership training inside your organization to help you overcome whatever problems you might have through leadership, go to asanfront.com we will handle it for you. Also, we have an online training academy. It's called the Extreme Ownership Academy to learn the skills of leadership which will help you in every aspect of your life. Go to extremeownership.com for that. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help gold star families, check out Mark Lee's mom Momently. She's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org also check out Micah Fink's organization, heroes and horses.org also Jimmy May's organization beyond the brotherhood.org and also I talked about today, the Navy Seal Foundation. They've done a ton to support me and my brothers over the years and they continue to do that to this day through things like you heard about today. So that is navysealfoundation.org if you want to support them, if you want to connect with us on the interwebs. Rob Wilson, he'[e-mail] He's also got Instagram Eckengine light and he's got a sub stack which is check engine light. And for me, you can check out jocko.com and then on social media, I'm Ocko Willink Echoes at Echo Charles Just be careful because that is a system that has been engineered to steal away your sleep from you. You know, just steal it away. So be careful. Thanks once again to Rob Wilson for joining us tonight. Thanks for sharing your lessons and thanks for caring, taking care of my brothers in the teams. Thanks to all the uniformed personnel out there that sacrifice sometimes their lives, sometimes their limbs. They always sacrifice their time and they often sacrifice their health, health to keep us safe. So thank you to all of our personnel out there in uniform making those sacrifices. Also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service and all other first responders. Thank you for your sacrifices to protect us here at home and everyone else out there. Just listen, your body ain't a rental car. It's not on lease. You can't turn it in with when it gets old. You can't just run up the mileage and upgrade to a new model. Doesn't work that way. You have one. So pay attention to the dashboard. Read the check engine lights and keep that thing maintained. That's all I've got for tonight. And until next time, the Zeko and Jocko out.