2717: Pain Isn't What You Think w/ Dr. Jordan Shallow

Summary

Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth

Episode 2717: Pain Isn't What You Think (w/ Dr. Jordan Shallow)

Date: October 30, 2025
Guests: Dr. Jordan Shallow
Hosts: Sal Di Stefano, Adam Schafer, Justin Andrews, Doug Egge

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Overview

This episode dives deep into the raw, misunderstood truth about pain—what it really is, how it differs from injury, and the role of perception and movement in pain experience and recovery. Dr. Jordan Shallow, chiropractor, educator, and founder of Pre-Script, joins the hosts for a science-driven yet practical discussion. They explore why pain is a complex, generative perception shaped by sensory input, memories, expectations, and experiences, and discuss how muscle is not just for output, but is a powerful sensory organ crucial to both learning and healing.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Shallow’s Current Work and Teaching Philosophy

• Live, adaptive education: Dr. Shallow continues to run Pre-Script, a live-taught course for trainers and clinicians (04:31). He insists on keeping his practice hands-on with complex, post-op rehab clients to maintain real-world relevance.
• Constant curriculum evolution: Each client or new trend informs updates to his curriculum. "Every semester is different. That’s why we never pre-record anything. Every semester is taught live." (06:05, Dr. Shallow)

2. Understanding What Pain Actually Is

• Pain is not an injury: They distinguish pain from injury, using examples like pain with no injury (a construction worker’s nail through the boot missing the foot but severe pain—10:33) and injury with no pain (asymptomatic MRIs, 09:05).

• Pain as perception:

  • "Pain is ultimately a perception." (09:08, Dr. Shallow)
  • It’s an emotion, sensation, and drive state. Pain is generated by the brain as it interprets incoming sensory data, previous experiences, and normative values—what’s considered "normal" or "dangerous" in society.

3. The Neuroscience of Perception and Pain

• Bayesian inference and perception:

  • "Our brain has way more infrastructure dedicated to generating our reality than to take in our reality." (13:37, Dr. Shallow)
  • Perception is constructed from three sources: raw sensory data, prior experience, and normalized societal values. These determine whether we interpret a stimulus as pain or not (16:28).

• Notable Example: The "gorilla suit" attention test illustrates how perception can be blinded by focus, shaping experience and pain (15:55).

• Normative value: The belief that deadlifts are "dangerous" alters how back soreness is perceived:

  • "If the normative value is high enough, [people] generate the experience of pain." (22:13, Dr. Shallow)

4. How Movement Changes the Experience of Pain

• Muscle as a sense organ:

  • "The one thing that’s really cool about exercise is that muscle is a sensory organ." (36:05, Dr. Shallow)
  • Proprioceptors (muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs) in muscles supply the brain with powerful sensory data, even more so than the skin.

• Predictive processing and learning:

  • Trainers should help clients "minimize prediction error" by improving movement-based sensory input.
  • "When I put this input into the conscious theater, I get this output." (43:48, Dr. Shallow)

• Techniques like foam rolling, massage, cupping, or corrective exercise: These work by enhancing sensory precision—even when the mechanical explanation is weak, the nervous system response is powerful (30:45).

5. Why Pain Relief Can Seem "Instant"

• Addressing a listener’s story about correcting pain with a single mobility movement (07:26–08:19), Dr. Shallow explains:
  • The "high potency" of an exercise or intervention shifts attention, modifies perception, influences prior experience, and can desensitize nociceptors or alter expectation.
  • Confidence and trust in the person guiding the movement (e.g., a trusted coach, supportive feedback) also play a critical role in unlearning pain (25:04).

6. Exercise, Psychedelics, and Meditation—Changing the Mind vs. the World

• Action vs. Mind:

  • Meditation and psychedelics can disrupt or "rinse" old priors and normative values, giving "pure sensory data," but exercise changes both mind and world by updating real sensory feedback (35:47).
  • "You don’t see the world as it is. You see it as you are." (prevalent quote, 35:47)

• Exercise outperforms therapy:

  • "Exercise is one and a half times more effective than therapy…of course, if you pair them together…" (36:39, Sal, Dr. Shallow)

7. Application to Coaching, Rehab, and Performance

• Guardrails in thinking:

  • "My job’s not to be right. My job is to help people. Rather than using research to prove people wrong, use it to understand why they’re right." (51:29, Dr. Shallow)
  • Coaches should avoid being either narrow "only the evidence" or so open-minded that everything is accepted (55:30).

• Specificity vs. Variability:

  • Over-specialization in sports training (e.g., too much "ankle stuff" because of Achilles injuries) risks injury. Instead, variability prepares the body to better distribute force and adapt (68:05).

8. Athletic Brilliance as Sensory Brilliance—Cool Stories

• Athletes as "sixth sense savants":

  • "An athlete can learn motor skills really quickly. That’s my definition of an athlete." (78:28, Dr. Shallow)
  • Stories of elite tennis players and quarterbacks sensing tiny differences in equipment or game flow, demonstrating astonishing sensorimotor sensitivity (79:29–83:20).

• Takeaway:

  • Muscle training isn’t just output – it’s deep sensory input, which rewires perception, reduces chronic pain, and opens higher athletic potential.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On pain perception

  • "Pain is ultimately a perception." – Dr. Jordan Shallow (09:08)
  • "You have to heal an injury, but you have to unlearn pain." – Dr. Shallow (11:33)
  • "You don’t see the world as it is. You see it as you are." (35:47)

• On coaching and evidence

  • "My job’s not to be right, my job is to help people." – Dr. Jordan Shallow (51:29)
  • "Be data-informed at best. You’re here to be of service. And whenever you’re right, you’re just servicing yourself." (52:30)

• On muscle and movement

  • "Muscle has the ability to change your world." – Dr. Jordan Shallow (36:48)
  • "Treat that muscle like a sense organ because sensory input drives motor output." (41:46)

• On training adaptability

  • "Specific injuries don’t require more specific interventions or prophylaxis, they require more variability." (68:56)

• On athletic savants

  • "Athletes, they’re sixth sense savants… There’s a sensitivity to it." (78:44, 81:43)

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Highlighted Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 04:31 | Dr. Shallow’s hands-on work & why he avoids getting "out of touch" with clients | | 08:19 | The challenge: What’s really happening when pain disappears with one movement? | | 09:08 | "Pain is ultimately a perception"; pain vs. injury | | 13:37 | "Perception is generative"; Bayesian brain and building conscious experience | | 16:28 | How raw sensory data, prior experience, and normative value create perception | | 22:13 | "If the normative value is high enough… generate the experience of pain" | | 25:04 | Chronic pain: Success needs support, confidence, and movement-based feedback | | 30:45 | Why foam rolling, cupping, massage, etc., really work (sensory data, not mechanics)| | 35:47 | Meditation, psychedelics, and exercise—changing mind vs. world | | 36:05 | "Muscle is a sensory organ"; proprioceptors and their impact on pain/learning | | 41:46 | "Treat that muscle like a sense organ… sensory input drives motor output" | | 51:29 | "My job’s not to be right. My job is to help people"; evidence and anecdote | | 55:30 | Drawing boundaries: Not "open to everything"—effectiveness matters | | 68:05 | Specific injuries, specificity vs. variability in sports rehab | | 78:28 | Elite athletes as "sixth sense savants"; sensitivity stories | | 81:43 | Athlete story: 5-gram difference in rackets felt instantly | | 83:20 | Hyper-athletic sensitivity vs. regular people; athletic brilliance |

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Conclusion

This episode of Mind Pump offers a radical, science-grounded rethinking of pain, arguing convincingly that it is neither a simple injury signal nor purely a mental state, but a generative brain process shaped by sensory inputs, memory, attention, and social learning. The practical upshot? Smart movement, progressive resistance training, and supportive coaching can profoundly reshape your brain’s perception of pain. For coaches, trainers, and anyone dealing with pain, the takeaway is clear: don’t just chase data or old dogma—serve, adapt, teach variability, and always respect the nervous system.

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Find Dr. Jordan Shallow on Instagram (@hecodoc) and at pre-script.com.

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Transcript

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Pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump Mind Pump with your hosts Sal Destefano, Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews.

[D]

You just found the most downloaded fitness, health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode we have Dr. Jordan Shallow on talking all about pain. What is it? Why is it so complex? How do you avoid it? How do you treat it? How do you work around it? He's the guy to talk about this, by the way. You can find him on Instagram Hecodoc and you can also find him on his website pre-script.com this is certification for trainers and coaches. This episode is brought to you by a sponsor. Element. This is an electrolyte powder you add to your water. It has enough sodium to make a difference. Most electrolyte powders don't even have enough sodium. This one is 1000mg per serving. No artificial sweeteners, no sugar. Go check them out. Go to drinklement.com mindpump if you make a purchase, you'll get a free sample pack of the most popular drink mix flavors. Also, two days left for our 50% off sale. Maps GLP1. This is a workout program with diet supplement and lifestyle advice for people who are using Semaglutide, Tirzepatide, Wegovy, Ozempic. If you're using a GLP1, you want to lose the most amount of fat and keep the muscle. Follow this program, otherwise you run the risk of losing lots of muscle. Go check it out. Go to maps glp1.com, use the code GLP50 for the 50% off discount. All right, real quick.

[C]

If you love us like we love.

[E]

You, why not show it by rocking.

[D]

One of our shirts, hats, mugs or training gear over@my pumpstore.com I'm talking right now.

[E]

Hit pause, head on over tomy pump store.com. that's it.

[C]

Enjoy the rest of the show.

[D]

Jordan, welcome back.

[C]

Hi to the show. Dude, I feel like a perennial co host. Yeah, yeah. Once a year, once every six months.

[E]

No, you're definitely up there with one of our friends. It's probably been the most. There's only a couple people I think that have been more times than you have now on the show and then I always have to do another show afterwards to break down everything that you tell everybody.

[C]

Good for content.

[E]

I know the game get two episodes out.

[D]

You know, we get the high level this way. So what you, what you been up to man since the last time I.

[C]

Funny, I should have listened to our old podcast. I should have done my homework. What if I've been up, I mean prescript spoken and I, I got in real heavy last couple years into the concierge one on one. Like I take on maybe a client a year, sometimes two, usually post op rehab. So that's kind of been my biggest personal focus outside of like business development and what we've been doing with pre script over the last, oh it's been almost nine years now. Nine years. So I like keeping you know, skin in the game. So I've been taking on post op rehab clients.

[D]

What do you mean by that? Skin in the game just keeps you just your finger on the pulse of what's happening.

[C]

Yeah. You know, with growing the business, I I could never be one that just steps away. I have to step into something. So, you know, when we, when we're growing, expanding our team, usually we're growing it because there's stuff that I can't do anymore because I'm taking on these clients in like a really intimate capacity. So I'm taking on, you know, usually pretty severe, complicated post op rehab cases where, you know, I just relocated to San Francisco. I just finished a contract, but with my time then taken up by like, oh, I'm actually doing the thing. Right. There's a lot of like faceless education companies out there, especially in the training space where, I don't know, like, I don't want to name names but like, if you look across in the big certifications, who's developing this curriculum, right. Based off of what, like, what problems are they trying to solve? Right. So for me it's really important as you know, as we develop curriculum and we consistently evolve it, that it's like I can keep forward facing to our, to our trainers and our coaches and our clinicians that we, that we teach, but also like be empathetic to the problems that they have to solve. Right. Like I have to have a proof of concept. I'm not just sitting in my basement, you know, living off the interest. It's like I'm traveling with clients, training rehab every single day in a really high stakes environment. So that when I come down and I teach, whether it's online or whether it's live in person, it's like, oh, okay, no, like this guy, he gets it, he walks it, he talks.

[E]

How often are you changing the education or how often does like a one on one client make you pivot or add to the course? I mean, are you so still learning?

[C]

Oh yeah, yeah. Every, every semester is different. That's why we like, we never pre record anything. Every semester is taught live. So like L1 is 16 weeks. And it's not like you can start whenever it's like. No, no, semester starts this day. We teach it live every week. Four lectures a week, seven labs a week for 16 weeks.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And then, but it's like painting the Golden Gate bridge by the time you get to the other side of us. Yeah. And like things come and I mean, geez, you guys would keep the finger on the pulse better than anyone. Like things come in vogue, right? The, you know, the neuromechanical matching stuff we've had to talk about a lot in the last couple of years where people really about glute training for, you know, Six, eight months, and it was lats, and it was back to glutes. And then it's like. So there's just things like, you have to keep your finger on the pulse of, like, this industry is when you're in it long enough, it's cyclical, and you start to see the same things over and over again. But when people are coming to you, and they're not just coming to you for, like, principles, they're coming for you to learn how to solve problems and as you can help them navigate these things that their clients are asking about every single day, like, what do I do? What do we do with this supplement? Or what do we do with what about this exercise? It's like, for us, it's so important to, like, be able to not only keep our finger on the pulse as our client or as our. As our coaches interact with us, but as I interact with my clients and our other instructors, they're also coaching in the field that we can get ahead of it.

[D]

I would love to ask you this question, because this just happened yesterday. We had a live caller call in. So, you know, on some of our podcasts, those callers will call in, they'll ask us questions. And it was this kid who had done a lot of powerlifting. He was in his twenties. And then he didn't tell us how this happened, but he's like, I started getting all this, like, pain and immobility in my upper back area. My shoulders were tight. He's like, I was super limited. And then I got your Prime Pro program, and I did. I don't remember what movement he did in there. And I don't think it's even important. Scapular pushups, something. It was one of the mobility moves. And he's like. And suddenly the pain went away, and I could move, and I felt good. And so he said, what's happening in situations like that where people are in pain? Then they do something. They work with a correctional exercise specialist, like you or someone else, and it's something they've been dealing with for a couple years, and then the pain is gone. What's happening?

[C]

How many episodes do you want to record after that? But I think. I mean, it's a great question, right? Because pain.

[D]

Pain's super weird and complicated.

[C]

Okay, do we want to do this? Lock the doors. Okay. But let's talk, because we need to differentiate a few things, and I hope by the end of this, we can land this advance. This is a whole episode. What's the timer? Yeah, yeah, I'll Keep eyes on. So what is pain? Let's start here.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Like, what is what? How would you. How would you answer that question?

[D]

Pain is an experience, I think.

[C]

Okay. I like that.

[E]

It's a signal.

[C]

A signal?

[E]

Yeah.

[D]

No, it's just.

[E]

I like to.

[C]

Can I. Can I. Can I call attention to the four jacked men in the room? Not talking about it being an emotion. I just want to shine light on that. Doug's a little bit more. He's with me. We're a little bit more evolved. So it's an emotion. It's a signal.

[E]

I like to experience a lot.

[C]

Okay. Yes, right. Yes, right. It is. It is. Whatever it is. So pain is. It's an emotion, it's a sensation. It's a drive state. Those are like your common ones that you'll see. It's an experience. But pain is the pain. When I look at this, I go, pain is ultimately a perception. So let's put a pin in that. Pain is a perception. We'll come back to that. Now, there's a difference. We got to differentiate pain from sort of two different things. Injury and pain are two different things. We know this, right? We know this. We know this empirically. So, like, if we were to. I mean, I forget the exact numbers, but if we were to look at the data on asymptomatic lumbar spine MRIs, right. How many people just cruising around like, oh, yeah, hey, can we. Can we take a picture of your low back real quick? Sure. I think I should know this as a chiropractor. I think it's 52%. That's a huge percentage. Right. Just like, oh, did you know, like, the jelly out of the donut is poking into your spine? And like, oh, no way. So it's like, okay, so there's a difference between pain and injury. Right. So here we have tissue damage. Right. Which would be, like, more consistent with an injury.

[D]

Sure.

[C]

And we have no experience of pain. There's a really interesting case study in the British Medical Journal about a guy who was at a construction site, fell off a ladder. And a 15 centimeter nail. I don't know, inches that form. I had no idea. To our freedom, friends. A seven inch nail. Let's call it three.

[D]

Bald eagle went through.

[C]

Went through his boots.

[D]

Uncle Sam went through his.

[C]

Was through his boot. Oh, okay. And it's like so much pain, right? Unbelievable pain. They're like, they can't even. They're pumping them full of morphine, Dilaudid, just to get him in the truck, get there get him in the X ray because they don't want to pull the boot off because you don't know what. Yeah.

[D]

What it hit. Yeah.

[C]

Right between his toes.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

So here we had. It's interesting, right, because now we have pain.

[D]

He's never going to live that down at work. Oh, for sure.

[C]

But we have pain with no. With no injury. Right. So we have. You know, you can look at the research on the lumbar spines where you have injury with no pain and you have pain with no injury. So you have, like, this people take. It's about taking this Venn diagram of pain and injury that most people think is in a circle and all of a sudden going like, oh, these are like two completely unique things. So that's. That's one thing we have to look at is, like, we have to heal an injury. We have to unlearn pain.

[D]

Unlearned.

[C]

And that's.

[D]

Look at the data on antidepressants and pain. Suddenly people's low back pain goes away because they're on antidepressant.

[C]

Oh, yeah. It's funny how that works. And you can see how intervention. And this will get back to our topic of conversation around perception, how the perceived severity of an intervention. Right, Len? So let's. If I give you. And there's difference even between giving you, like, a capsule versus a tab versus a liquid gel, like, why do you think Advil has the little liquid in it? It's the same thing, the same bio, but you see it and you go, oh, fat.

[D]

The drugs.

[C]

Yeah. I don't know. But compare that to an injection. Compare that to a sham surgery. So the more severe the perception of the intervention, the better the outcome when it comes to the experience of pain. Right. Now there's a third thing we have to differentiate, because I want to get back to perception, because then that'll take us the rest of the hour. And that's the difference between no susception and pain. Right.

[E]

Explain.

[C]

So no nociceptors. Like, you know, nociceptors are the sensory component of pain.

[D]

Right.

[C]

Which means it's not. It's not. Doesn't mean just because we flick this switch that then the nociceptor is active, that we experience pain. Right. There are people who walk across hot coals. Right. Have you ever seen the ant gloves in the Amazon?

[D]

Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

Wow. Have you ever seen that?

[D]

No.

[C]

Holy ant glove. Yeah.

[D]

Oh, yeah, dude. It's like a test.

[C]

Yeah, that's what it is.

[D]

And there's like, red ants in there.

[E]

But I've Never heard of that. It's.

[C]

Yeah, it's like imagine a bar mitzvah, but rather getting a bear bonds. Your relatives are like in the ant gloves, you go and you have to hold it for. And you see these. And obviously it's distressing, but like, so what we'd be seeing is like whatever, you know, toxin or poison or whatever it is that's causing the pain is, is the, the trigger, the, or the sensitization of these nociceptors which, which signal the sensory experience of pain. But every word in that matters signaled the sensory experience of pain. And this is where we get into perception because ultimately we had all like, it's an emotion, it's a drive state, but it's perception.

[D]

It's also memory, right?

[C]

Oh sure, yeah. And okay, Memory is another podcast. Sorry, I don't know. Memory is super interesting. Like the idea of muscle memory, like one of the things that people don't understand when we talk about muscle memory, as a quick aside, is they actually, it's not that they don't know how muscles work, it's they don't know how memory works. And that's a whole another bag of cats. And. But let's. So perception, perception is generative and that's. It's such a hard thing to grasp because as trainers, as coaches, really, as people, we have no reason to believe that what we're taking in right now doesn't exist, right? It only exists so far as the tools we have to perceive it can generate it, right? Because we think that our eyes and our senses are taking in data from a mind independent reality that our brain takes in a passive imprint like a video camera. That's not how it works at all. Our brain has way more infrastructure dedicated to generating our reality than to take in our reality, right? So when we think about pain as a perception, we have to understand perception and we have to understand how is that we perceive this experience. Like what is going on? How do we generate this conscious theater? Because when we think about like, let's just think about visible light for a second, right? The sp, the electromagnetic spectrum going back to grade 10, I don't know, biology or whatever. Grade 10 science class. Do you know how much. What percentage of visible light that our eyes. What's that?

[D]

Is it like 20%?

[C]

No, that we actually see 0.0000035%. So if we think of the electromagnetic spectrum and we think of how much we are taking in, right? Like we just have these arbitrary evolved tools that are evolved for survival and not Truth. So our eyes are only evolved to see between this frequency and this frequency. And that frequency is the frequency of visible light. Right? Red, orange, yellow, blue, Indigo Island.

[D]

Right.

[C]

Have you guys ever seen the monkey illusion or the monkey business illusion? Okay, so if I explain it, maybe you'll have seen it. Three people wearing white T shirts, three people wearing black T shirts in a small. With a little small stage. And the prompt is follow how many times or count how many times. Right? Okay. Do you remember the first time you saw that?

[D]

Yeah, yeah. I didn't see the girl.

[C]

Didn't see it at all. Right. And that's fucking crazy. Yeah. And so for those like, I don't know if you'll pull it up or I'll explain it. So essentially there's six people on this stage. Three are wearing white T shirts, three are wearing black. And the prompt is, okay, how many times does the people in the white shirt pass to the people in the white shirt? Yeah, so they go around. It's maybe 30 seconds and at the 15 second mark, someone in a gorilla costume walks in the middle of the fucking thing, beats their chest a few times and exits stage Right. And I was the same way. Like, you just don't see it. You don't perceive.

[E]

So fascinating.

[C]

It is so fascinating. But this has a lot to do with pain because it's our perception that's sort of like fooling us, right? So think of it this way. There's an equation that allows our brain to develop our perception. It's called the Bayesian equation. Anyone ever take statistics? Bayesian inference. Okay, so I'm not a huge math guy, so I'm not going to bore you with it. But essentially there's three components to the way we develop our perception. There's three data points that come together because clearly one's not enough. The sensory component of just experiencing the pain. Like if I put my hand in the ant glove, I mean, I'm going to. I'm going to cry. All. All mercy, right? Because there's no significance to this, right? There's no. It means nothing to me. I'm not a now a man because I did the Amazonian ant glove trick, right? But you watch these kids, like meditate it away or like for me, one of the favorite examples is Thick Quang Duck, the Vietnamese monk that set himself on fire. It's a Rage Against a Machine album cover, right? The guy sitting down, it's like, you know, like, if my oatmeal's too hot, I'm ruining my fucking day, right? This guy self immolates in front of the Cambodian embassy and he's just sitting there meditating away. So it's clearly just activating that nociceptor switch isn't just this lights on to the experience of pain. It's a data point. So when we look at our perception, and this is true of the experience of pain, it's true of the experience of not seeing the fucking gorilla suit. Because our perception is built up of one sensory data, right? So in the case of the power lifter, there's likely sensory data there. There's a nociceptor that's sensitized. And look, that in itself is a whole field of study. How does inflammation alone drive the sensitization complex as heck? Oh yeah, but what. One of the main things that inflammation could do, and there are a lot of other things that could do this, is increase the sensitization of a nociceptor. So you gotta imagine you have this nociceptor that just has this hairpin trigger, right? That it takes such a little stimulus to feel this pain. You look at conditions like fibromyalgia and things like that, which you have this sensitization of a nociceptor. So raw sensory data. So we'll use the monkey business illusion. Your eyes, when you're looking at these people throwing the basketball around, they're up waiting for the color white. Now why white and black? Because they're on complete other ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, right? So they're up waiting for this, which means they're down waiting for this. So we're getting a different. We're looking for something different, we're generating something different. So we have raw sensory data, right? Like that. That could be as true. That's true of any sort of sensory apparatus that we have. It feeds part of our perceptual engine or perceptual inference machine. Then we have a prior experience, right? Like a prior experience shapes the way we perceive things, right? Like our prior experience of. Say I'm sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco and I hear, you know what sounds like, like, like claws on the tile floor. I'm going to assume dog. My prior experience is that I've seen dogs in coffee shops. So often the peripheral over my laptop, I'm sitting there and I just. My brain actually generates a dog. Cause it generates everything, right? Like there's no sunshine inside my skull, right? It's our. The photons of light that hit our retina stimulate the generation of our experience, right? It's called, it's called active inference. It's the way our whole conscious theater comes to be. It's not like all of this exists because we know there's radio frequencies. We know there's all of these other tools just on the electromagnetic spectrum alone. All of these radio frequencies or all of these frequencies on this spectrum, we just have this weird apparatus that goes, no, no, only this stuff. Only this 0.00000035, right? So it's such a small window. So we use our prior experiences to help generate. Like when dude looked at the boot, right? Dude looked at, looked down on the boot and went, oh, maybe he's had this happen before. Ouch, Ouch. There's pain, right? So the prior experience and the sensory data kind of get we. Like, if I'm in a coffee shop and I spent a lot of time in Colorado this year, I saw a lot of bears. Like an uncomfortable amount of bears. Which is like, one is an uncomfortable amount of bears. Some of the places I was at, you see videos of like bears strolling into coffee shops. It's going to. So it's interesting. Imagine the setting is completely the same. I'm the same distance to the door. I get the same frequency of sound, but I have a prior experience that's different. My attention is going to get drawn to that and generate a bear quicker. Right? Now, what would it take for me to have my brain generate a bear in San Francisco? That fucking thing would be sitting down, eating my croissant. It would have to be that close for my sensory data to upweight my prior experience. So those are two components. We have a prior experience and we have our sensory data and we have what's called a normative value. And the normative values. I think it's really. It speaks a lot to what we do, right? Because the normative value is like, well, like let's say bears versus aliens. It's like, well, we know bears exist and you know, depending on how much tinfoil you have on your head, it's like, well, maybe aliens exist, maybe they don't. So the example I like to use for the normative value is every now and then, and I'm sure this has caught your eye, someone on a big platform comes on and goes, well, deadlifts are bad for you, right? I'm sure you do. You guys contend with this.

[D]

Recently I've seen a couple posts seen.

[C]

Or replied to because I would have loved to have. Could you, Doug, can you pull that up for me? But it's like, but let's Think about this. And I've had to. You know, some of the clients I work with are a little bit older, and they're very influenced by this. And now you have this normative value. So imagine like, we did bicep curls and our biceps got sore and we did deadlifts, and we could somehow equate for, you know, the hydrogen ions that accumulate and the metabolites and the byproduct and the. And the muscle damage and all that, that creates muscle soreness. And we could take that same state and put that in the muscles of the low back, right? Whether it's, you know, your erectors or your, your Ql or even your lats and your glutes or your deep spinal. And you could create that same sensory environment, right? Same sense people would, if the normative value is high enough, generate the experience of pain. Yeah, I hurt myself. It's like, no, your low back is just sore because you're using it because it's a muscle like anything else. But the normative value is so potent, right? So when, you know, I hate to pick on boomers, but like my parents, for example, when they do that and they listen to these other Boomer podcasts, bang on about stuff they don't know about, it's like, no, no, you're, you're fine.

[D]

But.

[C]

And, but what I'm. What I'm able to do is, is I'm able to actually shift their perception because I'm changing the normative value. So when we're dealing with pain, we have to understand these three components, because pain is, it's an emotion, it's a sensation, it's a drive state. But at its core, it's part of our perception. And our perception is generative, right? Our perception is, is. Is fallible, right? It's. It's interpreting different sets of data in different weights to come up with this equation.

[D]

So what?

[C]

It's a bit of a circuitous way around the question, but it could be any one of those things. Maybe if we look at, okay, he's getting mid back tightness. He does a serratus thing. He probably is compressed through the posterior thorax. He's probably on high tone through his spinal erectors. He probably the way that the autonomic nervous system contracts the iliocostalis and longissimus and these true spinal muscles changes the way that gravity interacts, and it changes the demand on those muscles. So they go from high tone to low tone. Just like, oh, hey, your shoulder blades are always pinned together because you're this powerlifter guy, you went through some protraction. You were able to move your ribs around a bit, and you released some of the tone, desensitized the nose, nociceptor. Right. That's probably the likely scenario in his case. You know, I don't. I doubt he has any trauma associated with pinning his shoulder blades together, but there may be. Hey, he really likes you guys. He called in this. Maybe a dedicated person that's listened to and you've helped him before. I have a prior experience of when mind pump tells me to do something.

[D]

It works.

[C]

It works out pretty well. Right. So that does that. That plays a factor right now, I think, you know, with. But it compounds on each other. You have a prior positive experience because you've been able to dig to maybe some mechanical route. But we can never underestimate the potency of these things and the way it alters the perspective.

[D]

That's why I think probably the best success rate for dealing with chronic pain is somebody that understands all those things and works with someone. I think a person working with a person who's helping them through these things, who understands these things. I think they typically have the best success rate. Somebody who understands correctional exercise, but also is there to kind of show support, a little bit of confidence. And then the movement itself gives you some of that feedback. Like, I couldn't move before and now I can. Confidence. I did. It doesn't hurt. It's not going to hurt again. While I feel great. And I got this guy over here that I really like and I really trust, he's making me feel good about this. And I think the success rate is just great when it comes to pain, chronic pain. Working with somebody understands those things.

[C]

Yeah. And I mean, our small end of the wedge that goes into the door is the. Is the exercise, right? For a lot of us, it's because I think, you know, that what I just rambled off in very short order, and it's much more complex than that is. Some Is a cognitive theory called active inference. Right. Predictive processing model. It's. It's sort of like emerging neuroscience in the way that our brains generate reality. Right. Or our reality. Because, like, what would this room look like if we were a bat? Is sort of like the famous sort of philosopher neuroscientist named Thomas Nagel. And he wrote this article called what's it like to be a Bat? Right. It's sort of a. It's sort of like an essay on consciousness. Like, well, think about the spectrum, right? Think about that spectrum. They don't have eyes that are capable of taking in the frequency of photons at that. So it's like, this room looks way different, right? But maybe they're able. Like dogs that smell cancer. What I. I can maybe smell if dinner is ready or something's burning on the stove. Other than that, it's just not a perceptual experience that I have. Right? So many coaches. Not so many, but I see there's a push in the industry of, like, the consciousness of coach. Like, I'm not a shrink, right? Like, I'm like, dude, I've. I'm an idiot, right? Like, I have two shrinks. That's how messed up my head is. But it's like. But my. Your wedge in the door is like, look, we're going to. We're going to live over here in this sort of, like, mechanical. No susceptor. Like, we're really going to get good at this right Now. If in doing this we find, like a progression regression model that allows us to meet a client exactly where they're at, overcome a fear around a movement, introduce some variability, some novelty, right? Is essentially what happens is feeling good in this model is called minimizing prediction error. So prediction error is essentially when you go to teach a new client an exercise, there's a complexity to it, right? We can take this for granted because we've been lifting our whole lives, relatively speaking. You have someone who's in their mid-30s, 40s, whatever, someone who's just started exercising and you're trying to teach them something, they're making a prediction about how that exercise gonna. They watch you do it. Pick anything off the shelf, I don't know, a lunge, a bench press, whatever. Things that you don't even realize are skills and exercise. Like, I. This was. I remember early in my career when I was training someone and I showed them a bicep curl. I did like one rep because it's a bicep curl. You just bend the elbow. And I watch him do it. I'm like, it's funny when you watch somebody mess that up for the first time as a trainer. Did you do that? Because it's a prediction. It's a prediction. They're making a prediction, but they're always making predictions, right? I'm making a prediction right now that no one's going to walk through that door. If that changes and I get enough sensory data to change that, I will attend to it. And that's what your attention does. Your attention goes to minimizing prediction error. Your brain. This model doesn't like surprise. So when I'm teaching someone an exercise, there's this. If I understand these component parts, I understand the goal of learning is to minimize prediction error. So they're getting sensory data that feeds into their. You know, what it is they're doing in real time, and they have a prediction. A lot of times it's like, okay, I've seen people lunge before. Okay, Lunge, Okay. So I have a rough idea. This is a lot to do with, like, you know, the. The idiom, like, oh, it's like riding a bike, right? Like. Like riding a bike is a shorthand for something that you never forget. But why do we?

[D]

Why do we.

[C]

Why is that? Why is that it?

[D]

Right?

[C]

Why is. It's like riding a bike.

[D]

The.

[C]

A very potent and visceral, universally understood thing that everyone, once they do it, they know how to do it. Why is that we never forget how to ride a bike because we're never not exposed to bike riding. It may not be us on the pedals, but we see people riding bikes all the fucking time.

[D]

Interesting.

[C]

And one of the reasons we don't forget is because we're always exposed to that sensory data. Now, the sensory data is not the physical sensory experience that our muscles and joint capsules and proprioceptors and mechanoreceptors, but that visual insight perception, still there. So, like, my prediction is getting fed with really good sensory data. And I can close these two points down. No prediction error. I never forget. But when you're teaching someone an exercise, there's a way that we can look at this and be like, well, what comprises sensory data when they're performing a movement? So, like, muscles and mechanoreceptors, the neuroscience can get a little bit abstract in the way that it's represented. But why do things like foam rollers consistently work? Because you're increasing the precision of their sensory data. What is a foam roller? What does it do? It applies deep pressure to tissue, right? Why is that useful? It's like, well, we have these things called mechanoreceptors, right? Like the fact that we have this argument, and I don't know where you guys stand on it, but when we look in, like, look, foam rollers work. You know how I know? Because my client goes, I feel better with a foam roller. And I go, okay, I need to figure out why that's true, not sit there and tell them they're dumb and I have all these degrees, right? But when you look at this model, it Makes so much sense. It's like, okay, a foam roller and let's, let's just pick off the big ones. Theraguns, foam rollers, kinesio tape, cupping. All of these.

[D]

Massage.

[C]

Right, Massage. All of these things they trigger. And like to your point earlier about corrective exercise, all of everything we just listed has a neurological correlate. Something in the nervous system that, that flips a switch that tells our brain that this is. That this experience is happening and what it feels like. Right. So foam roller, deep pressure. It's one of our mechanoreceptors. Theragun vibration, one of our mechanoreceptors. So there's pacinian corpuscles, Meissner's corpuscles, Raffini endings, and Merkel's disc. It's like the technical. Don't even have to worry about it. Just know that in the layers of your skin and some in your bone vibration, skin stretch, deep pressure and light touch. Those. Why do people like wearing compression shorts or compression sleeves or whatever, or the spandex, whatever the fuck that is. Why? Because it provides a light touch sensation that increases your precision weighting. So here, if I have sensory data where my body is in space, which muscles can do that? And this is why when we see people using single leg exercises and things like this. Yeah. That will increase the precision weighting. Muscle spindles are really actually the most potent. Right. And then we have a prediction we're trying to make. If I have more precise sensory data and I have a really good understanding of my prediction that I'm going to make, all of a sudden we've learned really, really fast. Right. And that's the goal. Right. So that's how we can kind of use this model to. I mean, in the case of the original question, to unlearn pain really fast.

[D]

Do you think? Because I've made this speculation a few times on our show, more than a few times. Where. And I'll tell you a story. It's the. That I've said a few times on the show. Again, I had this woman that I was training, early trainer. We're doing a tricep press down with the cable. And you know, I'm probably. I've only been a trainer for like four months at this point. And she's doing a press down and she lets go of the cable weight stack. Slams. She's like, ah, what happened? I got hurt. I'm like, you know, I'm freaking out because I'm a new trainer. Okay, where's the pain? And she's like pointing and it's like. And I realized, like, that's your tricep. Like you felt it burn a little bit. But she had never really felt that before and it freaked her out. And then I had this crazy realization that advanced lifters and athletes, they have a different relationship with that kind of pain. You know, an advanced lifter is going to go train and definitely inflict more pain and suffering on themselves than a beginner, but they don't perceive it the same. In fact, oftentimes we love it and we go after it. Do you think exercise changes just broad spectrum relationship to pain?

[C]

Oh, absolutely. So here's. And this is. I'm currently writing a book about this very topic. So thank you for like the awkward point. You guys are softball. This is why you guys are you though, right? When we talk about changing perceptions, what are the. What really rules the airwaves? It's really, right now it's two things. It's meditation and it's psychedelics. In my world, when I look at these problems and I say, okay, who's writing literature about this? Who's writing studies? And there's good studies about, I don't know, maybe no one wants to incriminate themselves on the air. I was gonna get real high before this podcast, but I decided not to. Wow. But look, we're comfortable. I feel like I could come in on Mars and we could probably do this. But like, like, what are they, what are they saying about like mushrooms and ketamine and all these? What does it do? It changes. It changes. Absolutely changes your perception, right? Holy. Yeah. Like, I don't know, go to the, go to the sphere, go see the dead with John Mayer and do it on two hits of lsd. Like your perception, something's gonna happen, something will change, your perception will change. But that's, it's changing your mind, right? When you think about meditation, you look at even from a long term meditator, if you're doing an fmri, like what it does to the gray matter of the brain, it's changing your mind. Action changes your world. So when we think about this equation again, where we have sensory data and then we have these prior experiences and we have these normative values. When we look at practices like meditation and psychedelics, they're sort of playing in these normative values. They're playing in these prior experiences. Like when you. I don't know if anyone's ever sent it on shrooms, but like kind of rinses your priors, it doesn't allow you to because one of my favorite quotes of all time, and it's very like, it's ethereal, but it actually speaks to the deep science of this, is you don't see the world as it is. You see it as you are. Right? And it. It speaks this idea that your prior experience paints your reality. When you take these drugs, essentially what they're doing is they're taking your prior experiences and going, you don't get to draw from these anymore. And then you're like, holy. I'm just getting pure sensory data, right?

[E]

Creating new pathways.

[C]

Creating new pathways. When. When you exercise, it changes the. The sensation, right? And like, the one thing that we have to start respecting. And look, we have to start respecting. What a stupid thing to say. The one thing that I think is really cool about exercise is that muscle is a sensory organ.

[D]

Yeah, right.

[C]

First, like, if we. Look, we talked about mechanoreceptors, we talked about nociceptors. So nociceptors, mechanoreceptors, and proprioceptors. So proprioceptors are almost twice the speed, which means the signal relayed from a muscle to the brain gets there almost twice as fast as those that come from the skin, which are almost twice as fast as those that come from nociceptors. So it's like here, when we have this equation of our perception at large, and it doesn't just change our perception of pain. Like, look at what exercise can do for depression. Oh, yeah, because we're shifting. We're giving this more data.

[D]

You see the latest. The latest study, one and a half times more effective than therapy or.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, and I'm sure if you pair them together, of course, but.

[D]

Of course.

[C]

But why is it. It's because you have a practice that's changing your mind and you have a practice that's changing your world. Right? And that's what movement does, Right. If something doesn't fit, if there is a prediction error, right. It means the sensory data you're getting does not match your prediction of the world. You can do one of two things. You can change your mind or you can change the world. And muscle. And it sounds so weird in a stupid clip, but muscle has the ability to change your world. It has the ability to change your perception of you in the world because it changes the sensory data. Because there's two primary modes of sensory data in the body. One is the eyes, obviously, like, if anyone. You look at the neuroanatomy of the cerebrum, like the big part of the brain, we have an optic lobe that's literally a part of the brain dedicated to one sense. Right. Like, I don't think a bat would have an optic lobe. Right. There's no need for that. It doesn't have eyeballs that work like ours. Now, if you're a peregrine falcon, sure, yeah. You're seeing a mice or a mouse from like a mile up. What is our second most potent sensory data source in our body? It's our muscles.

[D]

I don't know. It was second.

[C]

Oh, yeah. And like, so there's muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, and joint capsules. These are what are classically known as our proprioceptors. It gets a little bit tricky because the word proprioception gets misappropriated a lot. We kind of use it haphazardly to talk about our kinesthetic sixth sense of.

[D]

Awareness, where you know where you are.

[C]

Right. But proprioceptors are. Are a specific group of three free nerve endings which are your joint capsules, your muscle spindles, and your goal tendon organs. And when you're training, you stimulate them. One of the keys to muscle spindles I find interesting is one. I guess there's two really important things that I find interesting. One, they are, of the proprioceptors, the most abundant, Right. So they are the most abundant sensory receptor. And they actually attach to what are called intrafusal muscle fibers. So a muscle fiber has the contractile element, which is what's called extrafusal, which attaches tendons. Tendon. And when it shortens and lengthens, we get sort of concentric eccentric movement at a particular joint. But in between, along for the ride. Like, imagine the space in between my fingers. Those are interfusal. They're not contractile. They don't attach the tendon. They're just kind of like sensing. Where are we going? Oh, where are we going? The muscle spindle wraps around the intrafusal muscle fiber. So that's constantly relaying. And the trick of it is, like, you ever do, like, shoulder press and you kind of see your bicep kind of like flex a little bit as you're pressing, because the bicep has this like. Oh, oh, hold on. The sensory. Yeah, yeah. And that's all. So the, the stuff that's pushing, that's extrafusal. That's, that's, that's. That's divorced from our sensory perception. What we feel in our muscle is this spindle that attaches to these fibers in between what's contracting and they can cause the muscle to contract and relax. This is the neuromuscular physiology of how our spinal muscles keep us upright. Right. Like it's not like flexing our bicep where we can do it voluntarily. All of our positional postural, you know, your erectors, your multifidus, all of the deep spine muscles, they're all autonomic off of this loop.

[D]

Is this why sometimes you could tap on a muscle like your quad and it'll flex a little bit.

[C]

It's a reflex. Yeah, so that would be the Golgi tendon organ reflex. Right. So it's, that particular pathway is called the alpha gamma motor neuron reflex. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But it's, but there's this thing where it's like, okay, we can, ours are, we can change our perception by giving our body greater sensory information. Our eyes are one thing. Look, there's research coming out about Alzheimer's and hearing loss. If you lose x percent of hearing, you're 90 something percent more likely to get Alzheimer's. But it's like, oh yeah, sure, because you're dampening the sensory input. Sensory input drives motor output. Right. So when your spine reflexively contracts to a position, it's starting with the sensory input first. So our whole perception, we have our eyes, which yes, are going to give us a lot of sensory data. But our muscles are a wealth spring and we look at them like, you know, they're, they're, they're an output organ. It's good to be strong. When you watch exercise Prescription for the Elderly, it's like, oh, we got it. We're missing the point. We don't need to do four by four back squats. The heaviest we can do for a 55 year old woman. It's like, no, no, we need to treat that muscle like a sense organ because sensory input drives motor output. Right. So when we, to answer your question in hopefully a little bit more of a pointed fashion. Yes, absolutely. Exercise should be and is kind of getting tossed in the mix of like things that improve, you know, depression or PTSD or just general, general health and wellness. But it's, it's technically true. And the reason why is it provides you with way better sensory data.

[D]

Well, we look at the brain and we say, oh, that's the seat of consciousness. This is where your thoughts come from. But we don't, we don't, people don't realize that the extension of the brain is the body.

[C]

Oh great.

[D]

So the body is a part of the brain in essence. I mean, you see this with like phantom limb syndrome. You cut your people, lose an arm, and they feel it there, and it feels painful because the brain hasn't processed. It's gone yet. So it's an extension of the brain. So if the body is unhealthy, you can have physically an unhealthy brain, but the brain also loses that sensory.

[C]

So you bring up. Fuck, man, you guys are the best. So thank you because. So go back to the 19th century, Rene Descartes. Does everyone recognize the name? Yeah, do we remember? So Rene Descartes was like a philosopher, one of these really influential figures. So he came up with the idea of dualism, right? He also, ironically enough, Descartes was also the one that sort of outlines the opposite of what I just talked about. Like, I was like, hey, look, we don't see the world as it is. We generate it in our brain and our brain sort of pops up this conscious experience. Descartes said it was a complete opposite. So Descartes missed a lot because one of, I think, his biggest misses was Cartesian dualism, the separation of mind and mind and body. Now here's what I'm proposing is the real dualism isn't between the mind and the body. It's between the mind and the brain. That's the real dual. We can separate that and what's the difference? And this is where exercise becomes so exciting to me is the difference between the mind and the body and the mind of the brain is. Think of you guys. It's been. You've been a long time since you've been poking around on the back end of mindpump.com or mindpump media dot com. I would imagine there was a time where you guys were probably, you know, WordPress or early days, right? When I met you guys, you were probably like, someone had admin access. It's probably Doug. What up, Doug? Shout out Doug. That's actually a very sore subject right now, bro. We got hacked as we lost it.

[E]

Yes, bro. Our Facebook stuff has been down for two weeks.

[C]

I got a number for who's using name.

[D]

I got.

[C]

We'll talk after. I got a guy, wife's high up, we'll talk. He saved our ass.

[E]

Wow, this could be serendipitous.

[C]

Well, but we get your point. What was the. What was the website? You know, what did we do? It's like, well, we used a backend editor, right? Drag and drop. And now it's way more robust, right? Like, you go on squarespace with AI and all this, like. But none of us would Confidently say, we know how to work websites, right? But we know. I know how to drag and drop shit, right? Like, yeah, okay, so there's a user interface. The brain is complex, right? It's endlessly. It's the most complex thing in the known universe, without a doubt. Like, we, We. We know. We know enough about it to know we don't know anything about it, right? We know more about Alpha Centauri than we do about the. The inner workings of the brain. But the mind, like, we know our conscious experience, we know our theater, right? We know what comes. We know this, like, global workspace that kind of pops up. And the study of consciousness, if you ever, you know, need a rabbit hole to go down, is really interesting, but love it. When I think about movement, I think about movement, like the interface between the mind and the brain where I can just go like, hey, do this. And the brain conjures up the compute and it reformats the aspect ratios and it changes the resolution. All these ones and zeros are high. No fucking. I barely know enough to make this analogy, right? I know less than nothing about the inner workings of a computer, right? But, like, I know enough about the brain to be like, look, the neurological correlates to a lot of this are really complex. I just know when I put this input into the conscious theater, I get this output. So it's like when we understand movement. Movement is the user interface, and it's such a seamless user experience. I'll give you an example just to kind of understand how our body offers up the seamlessness of our reality. Like, if I touch my finger to my nose, those two sensations happen simultaneously. They shouldn't. We know they shouldn't. Right. We know the distance that travel. It takes to travel for you to. But I'm making a prediction and my body just offers up. Like, if I were to put an interesting point. Did you ever make anyone have a concussion? I'm looking. I love how I looked at you. Are you telling me he's. The brain damage? Okay, how did you. How did you manage it?

[E]

Who's the guy?

[C]

How did I manage it? I should ask someone who was around, who was conscious when it happened, but.

[E]

I mean, they just get back on.

[D]

The field back then.

[C]

Oh, so it's football. Okay. Yeah.

[E]

I mean, they sit me out really, all the. The entire protocol, so.

[C]

But the mechanism was football.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

So you got hit. You got hit and lights out, lose consciousness. Yeah.

[D]

By multiple players at the same time. It was pretty bad.

[C]

Okay, so one of the things, if you ever Google Search symptoms of a concussion. Right? So there's a mom out there listening or some plays football or whatever. You're going to see like a laundry list of stuff you'd expect. Yeah, headaches, what's called like photophobia, like a, like an aversion to light or sensitivity to light. At the bottom of the list, on every list, there's something called impaired visual saccades. So visual saccade is like if I were to take, I mean, let's take someone without. Have you ever had a major. Okay, so if we were to take a high speed camera and we were to record your eyes, what we would notice that three to five times a second your eyeballs are darting around. That's, that's a sad. So when you have a concussion, those sads are slow. But like, wait, you're telling me that in a normal brain my eyes are darting around three to five seconds. My conscious experience should be like the Blair fucking Witch Project, right? Think about if this is just a camera doing this and I'm seeing a conscious stream much in a way that if this was a direct representation of reality.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Then I would feel this the same. I would see you guys in this weird, shaky, kind of cracked out. Like again, this is, and you know, not to bring up drugs, but like when you take shrooms, everything starts to get a little bit fuzzy. It's like, oh, we're, we're removing that layer that allows. Right. Because our cameras are darting around all the time. Right. So it's the way we, like how we generate our perceptions are so fast. I, I've gone so far. I feel I actually forget your original.

[E]

Yeah, but the ride's still fun.

[D]

Keep going. You know what I'm saying?

[C]

No, but like, I just, I don't think we, we, we really respect, like we can talk about exercise in a vacuum, but if we don't understand how it fits within our actual consciousness. But I think when we, when we look at it in this framework, things have a place that's right. Right. They have a, they have a. Foam rolling has a home now. Right? Because foam rolling isn't wrong. It's like, well, hold on, what paper towel roll were we looking at? Right and wrong through. Oh, does it break up scar tissue? Like, what year is it? What are we doing? It's 2025. Right. So it's, I mean for me, like exercise as so far as it improves. And this is what, this is where the audience is. Right? Like, do you like taking things?

[D]

Because I feel like you're this kind of guy like, you'll take something and you'll see lots of anecdote, maybe some data, and you're the guy to go. Instead of saying, that's dumb, you're like, let me figure out why this is working. Like acupuncture. Like, why this happens. Why is acupuncture working? Why do some people say it relieves pain? Why do we have some data to support it? Sounds like you did that with foam rolling. Are you like that with different things? Do you look at something and go, okay, obviously lots of people are doing it. What's going on here?

[C]

Yeah, look, I wasn't like when we first met. I think I was. And that may be true of all of us. I think we've all kind of grown up a little bit. You just can't one just. Okay, how do I answer this question? Yes, I really try and dig down to the neuroscience behind it. Right. Like, because when we start looking at, you know, anything I listed off.

[D]

Right.

[C]

I was very anti percussion tool when it first started because the claim seems so ridiculous.

[D]

I think the way they explain it is what gets in their way. That's what I think. Like, you explain to me acupuncture and you say it's chi, and I'm like, whatever. But I had a surgeon that I was training who goes, well, you know, there is referred pain. Like, what? Yeah, sometimes this hurts. And this is actually happening over there. He's like, maybe that's what acupuncture is kind of working with. I'm like, okay. I wish somebody would have said that to me before.

[C]

Yeah. Trying to see things mechanistically, I think is. And really focusing on the nervous system mechanisms behind it. Like the cupping one jumps off the page because it's like, okay, yeah. And I remember we were talking about before, we were talking about dualism, mind and brain. The user interface of movement doesn't really matter. But like, cupping is. It's. So I have a friend, his name's Kyle Rogers. He's a pitching coordinator for the New York Mets. And he has this quote that I love. He goes, it makes sense if you don't think about it. And it's all time. Yeah, cupping is like that because it's like, I don't know, there's a bunch of bruises there.

[D]

Yeah, you get a bunch of hickeys, right?

[C]

Yeah. It's like, it must be all the toxins. It's like, man, like, I know people who do some drugs and even they're like, I live in the tenderloin now. It's like even those people aren't pulling toxins out. But what is. But like, look, it. It works.

[E]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. So after whatever Olympics it was where Phelps was swimming, like a pepperoni pizza, it's like, okay, well how does it work? What is the neurological correlate to it working? Well, when we look at the subcutaneous mechanoreceptors and we see that, hey, skin stretch is a really potent signal, sensory data to the brain. I bet that has something to do with it.

[D]

That's right.

[C]

I think we get stuck in a very analog, mechanical representation of the body that negates the potency of the nervous system.

[D]

You know what you sound like? You sound like someone that's worked with a lot of people.

[C]

Yeah. I think when you.

[D]

No, you know why? That's the truth. Because whenever I talk to scientists or data, you know, people who've never worked with people, they can get very narrow. Then when I talk to really smart people who've also worked with a lot of people, you hear it sounds like what you're saying, which is like, let's figure out what's happening here. Let's explore all the different options. Because I've worked with enough people to know things are interesting. They're much more interesting than we think.

[C]

My job's not to be right. My job is to help people. Right. Like I think we use and. And much. This has been weaponized a lot of things. Social media as cliche it is to talk about is. Is one of the reasons why.

[A]

And.

[C]

Everyone, I think everyone starts this way. It's like they try and figure out. They try and use research to figure out why people are wrong rather than using principles to figure out why they're right. Right. I think that's. That was a fundamental shift for me. Right. Is like, do I want to go down and without. I don't want to cast shade or dispersion. God knows I've done enough of that on this show. But it's like, I don't, I don't want. I don't care, dude. Like, I'm tired right? At the core of it, I'm just, I'm too tired to fight anymore. But it's like what is right in our world, right? Right. Is helping people. Right. So I think going down the road of just regurgitating research, it's like, okay, cool, I have a job to do. Right. I have someone who's paying me to get them better, not paying for them to get them smarter.

[E]

Right.

[C]

Or to be right. Like my day to day like, my practice, when I'm working with basically just one person at a time now, that's my focus, and that's just everyone's focus at the end of the day. And you see the spiteful, resentful, smart trainer, it's like, dude, you gotta reorient what success is. Success is helping people. Success is being of service. Like, it's not like. And I felt this way at a school, like, you know, paid a bunch of money, learned some stuff, wrote a test, passed it, wrote another one, passed it. And I was like, right, so where's all the money? Where's. Is this where I get the money now? And everyone's like, fuck you, nerd. Like, you know, you know, we're shit. And then you kind of have to go through and, you know, you try and be right for long enough, and then you realize, like, well, right, is the. Is results at the end of the day, right? So the science can help inform it. But, like, there's nothing worse than someone who goes, I'm data driven. It's like, oh, God, dude, be data informed at best. But like, you're here to. You're here to be of service. And whenever you're right, you're just servicing yourself. It's like, it's really just a. It's a bad mo.

[D]

Yeah, Yeah, I think. I think I. I love that approach. Not because all things are valid, so I'm not one of those people either. It's like, if it works, it's good. It's like, okay, yeah, okay. You do, you know, energy healing. I don't know if I necessarily. But. But I do think looking at things and saying, okay, there's a lot of anecdote here. It's been around for 100, 200, 5,000 years sometimes, you know, Thousand years. What's happening? And is this something I can use? Is this something I can work with to try? One of my favorite examples of this for me was, you know, when I started dating my wife, she would get these migraines and she had this, like, this little bottle of green oil that she got from. She used to travel Cirque du Soleil.

[C]

I love this for you. I love that he's met with the final boss.

[D]

And it's like this. It's like this, you know, it's like, Ben Gay, but in a bottle, right? And she would put it on her temples and be like, oh, it makes the pain go away. And I'm like, you know what? And I'm like, that oil isn't penetrating and reducing inflammation you would say that. I wanted to. Okay.

[C]

You are smart.

[D]

And I'm like, wait a minute, I know what's happening here. You put it on your skin, it creates this cooling sensation. Your, your body's perceiving the pain differently and so you don't feel it. And so that was a, for me, that was like one of those experiences where I'm like, this is why. Because instead of being like, no, like, why does this work? Why is this working? Why do people do this? And then that helps me be a better coach, helps me be a better trainer.

[C]

And not sleep on the couch.

[D]

And not sleep on the couch. But I, but I, but I think training and working with people, I'm so glad you still do it because I think it keeps you good.

[E]

Do you remember the last, the last thing that you really shifted your opinion on or last like paradigm shattering thing you had?

[C]

Yeah. Getting into cognitive theory, like, getting into, like I need a framework because you made, you brought up something really interesting. Like, and it's a good guard rail to put up for people. It's like, I'm not open to everything.

[E]

Yeah.

[C]

Because. And here's the problem with that. Like I, you know, we, we work in the education space and one of the things that I have to talk a lot of people down from is this idea of being a forever student. If my fucking house is on fire, I don't want a forever student firefighter. You know, every day is an opportunity white belt mentality. Like, you get up that fucking ladder, you go get my shit. Okay, like, get me the fuck out of here. But it's like, but because one of the things you have to realize is that the value in this field is solving more complex problems faster. And I think when you're able to put guardrails on things that are efficacious versus not, you're able to really concentrate and minimize the opportunity cost in your approach. And this is where you end up. Like for me now I'm at a point where I get really complex cases and I take them on. I get one client a year or two clients a year. I will not work with more than one person at once. And because the value I can provide for one person is to solve a really, really complex problem really quickly. Right? And it's. That starts with being able to separate the wheat from the chaff with like, hey, look. Yeah, but we could do 90 minutes in a hyperbarics, but in an hour and a half I think I could probably move the needle a little bit more. Right? 90 minutes, four times a week. Okay. And you have a white. And it's like, okay, no, no, we need. So there is a. There is an experience of professionalism and knowledge base in the empirical that allows you to be very effective. Because I watch people who are too conscientious. It's like at the end of the day, I look up at the, you know, at the wall with all the diplomas. I go, ain't that a bitch? That's my name. That's my name on all those pieces of paper. That's why you're here to see me. And I. And it is a fine line to walk between, hey, the. The green oil thing does this, or the crystals and blah, blah, blah, versus, like, do you want to get better soon? Or, like, whenever you want? Like, you know, because I'm here to do a job.

[D]

Do you. Do you have other people you work with? You're working with these really complex cases. So do you work also with functional medicine practitioners or people that do gut testing for some of these cases? Because I can imagine sometimes some of these problems are multifaceted.

[C]

Yeah. I am lucky that the clients that I'm working with now are taking their. They take their health very seriously. So the networks that I fall into. I am the movement guy. I'm the rehab guy. They already have the other. Yeah, they got all their bases covered now, obviously, different levels, different devils. But, like, yeah, if they don't have it, there are adjacent fields where I'm just going to dish the rock, where it's like, let's get. Let's get blood work. That looks weird. I do nervous system stuff. I do movement stuff. I do exercise stuff. I need you to go here. Hey, this looks off. Okay. I need you to go to a rheumatologist. This looks off. I need you to go to an endocrinologist. This looks functional. You know, it's. It's an interesting. And I do have some people kind of in my network that I trust in that space that's like, well, that's abroad. Yeah.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's. It's. You know, and like, I'm lucky in a sense that I've been able to do this as a chiropractor. Right. Like, people, every time someone introduced me, like, oh, this is so. And so he's working with us. He's doing X, Y and Z. They're like, well, like, what is he, a chiropractor? And they're like. And. But like, they. They don't even get the R out before they're like, already Explaining that. Yeah, yeah. But he came from like so functional, you know, I think there's such a utility and I think the concentration of people who really get the integrated system of systems of the body are found in functional. But man, there's a lot of other stuff. It's wild out there. It's wild.

[D]

I love how you brought up chiropractor because that space too makes me. I've been to chiropractors. You do like lift your arm up and then do you like gluten press it down?

[C]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Survive people. I've come to spread the good word.

[D]

You're such a deep thinker. Do you ever. Do you. Do you think that it could be a problem for you? Do you just think a lot and sometimes think yourself into spins just for yourself?

[C]

No.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

He's the guard, the guardrail for all. Deep thought. Again, it comes down this idea of, well, what is the value of anything? It's to allow you to move quicker, right? So like I. My. Maybe to a fault because I move really fast. Like some physically, quite literally, but to me it's, you know, about any subject. The, the. The. The practice of introspection or deep thought is so that you can move faster, not move slower. Right. So if I run into. Because like you, you. If you don't know enough about a subject for me, you're. I'm gonna have a hard time making a decision. The wrong decision is worse than finding the right decision in too long a time.

[D]

Right?

[C]

Right. So for me, speed is everything, right? Speed actually change. There's something called the Andromeda effect, where speed actually changes your perception. It's a bit of like this. It's this cosmic thing. But my thing is I know that if I'm looking too much into something, if it starts to slow me down, right. So. And whatever that looks like in whatever arena, whether it's my personal life, relationships or business, just make a decision. Right? Because it's the old. Like in what, in 20 years we'll be wrong and in 20 years after that we'll be dead. Right. So for me, time is. Is. Is the learning opportunity. So I'm trying to make sure that. Okay. Is the deep thought slowing me down? If yes, then keep moving. Right.

[D]

So do you still use adjustments on people or is that right?

[C]

Okay, so I, I don't want to like laugh that off. Feet and ankles. Very often I would say feet, ankles, feet, ankles and ribs. Because for me, the things that are really going to. Because the automaticity of ventilation and locomotion yeah, that's going to be where the foot.

[D]

Just articulating those little joints are so hard unless you have somebody and.

[C]

Oh, yeah, for sure. Especially at the level of like the T spine and ribs. Because again, it just comes down to those autonomic loops of like, I can't everyone quick contract their multifidus. It ain't happening, dog. Right. But if I can change relative orientation, I'm changing the tone and perception of those muscles in space. Sure. But if I can do it with movement, I'm doing it with movement. Because the thing that really scales. And you learn this when you look into. We talked earlier about the muscle spindle. The muscle spindle, not to get too neurosciencey, but it's composed of what's called a nuclear chain and a nuclear bag fiber. And these do two things. They. One signals to the brain or the spinal cord, the nervous system, the onset of the change in length, and the second signals the magnitude. Right. And that's where load comes in. Right. So we can actually get like. I remember once there was a powerlifter named Andrei Milanichev and I was at a meet once and he was deadlifting, like eight something, 881, 400 kilos. 881 pounds. But it was actually like 883 and a half pounds because they had loaded like a small change plate on the other side. And how do you know? It's like putting a. It's like putting relative to what's on the bar. It's like putting a potato chip on. And he like, second the weight went down, he goes to the other side, looks. It's like, you know, all in Russian yelling at everyone's like, there's more weight on this side. Like, it makes you sensitive to your environment. Like you can feel the differences in weight. Right. So for me, it's just like, it's. It when you, when you train for a long enough time, you train that sensitivity, that's a. That comes from getting stronger. Right. And that's where a lot of people lose the plot on all this. Like, oh, yeah, instability. You change in muscle length, Bosu balls, the nuclear chain and the nuclear bag fibers. The magnitude of the change in length. If I put someone on a Bosu ball, it's like, well, hold on, what am I perturbing here? There's no progression. But if I put that same split squat now as a Bulgarian split squat with a dumbbell in the opposite hand now, we can continually drive the adaptation of the sensitivity of that muscle spindle because it changes, it responds to magnitude.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And weight can offer you an increased stimulus which then you can continue to adapt to. Right. So that, that's a key feature in this, in this program. And what I where I think resistance training really should take its place as something that can change people's perception. Like meditation, like, you know, like psychedelics, resistance training when it comes to sensory data. Because it's like, well, what about Pilates? It's like, what about Pilates, right? And like, no, no dispersion against that. People do Pilates. But one of the things that I consistently do when people reach out like, oh, my, you know, my girlfriend or my boyfriend or my mom or whatever does Pilates and they still have this, it's like, okay, so. Oh yeah. But they love it. They lost a lot of weight. Great. Now the thing that they use as their resistance is lighter. So they're progressively under loading because they've lost 30 pounds doing Pilates. They're on the box with the springs and the reformer, but there's less of them to move, so they're actually moving further away. Like, you have to start using resistance as not just a means of progressive overload, but a means of progressive over stimulus. Right.

[D]

Adaptation. Yeah, Progressing the adaptation process.

[C]

Exactly. And you can take it all the way down to like, what is the mechanistic unit of change that's driving this? Right. Until we go all the way down to the level of nervous system, we go, oh, there it is. That little fucker responds to the magnitude of the change in life.

[D]

This is why the best rehab, the form of exercise that tends to be used is some form of resistance training, whether it's with bands or body weight or a person or weights. Yes. Because it allows you to progressively adapt well.

[C]

And because there's an interesting thing. And because body weight is a tricky one because it's a non standard unit of measure.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And you got to think about people's relationship with gravity. It's something that we never really take into consideration because we've always been stronger than the forces of gravity acting on us. Like, I don't know, at my best, I could probably squat a little over three times my body weight. Imagine dealing with someone who can't do a body weight squat. Dude, I'm Neil Armstrong. This world is the moon to me compared to their experience of gravity. Right. Like there's the, the, the autonomic nervous system and the way that we call on these muscles without our say so. Someone has tight calves, tight glutes, tight hamstring. It's like that's the autonomic nervous system reacting to their meat suit in space, not being, not having the strength to be held up. So there's a lot of. I don't want to say. Yeah, there's a lot of nuance in understanding, like how motor learning takes place based off of someone's relationship with gravity. But machines, right? Machines can be a good way because it's like we need to find the integer scale less than their own body weight. If I put a leg press with £30 versus like, oh no, everyone has to learn how to squat. It's like taking someone who's 40 pounds overweight and teaching them to learn how to squat is like giving them a Rubik's cube and then taking a snub nose revolver and putting it in their mouth. Say, go ahead, go ahead, learn how to do the little color square thing while you're, you're in a state of high arousal, right? So it's, it's, you know, just the. Again, it comes down to the nervous system, like, understanding. We're starting to shift our focus away from muscles under a microscope, right? The neuromuscular physiology. When I hear someone talk about actin myosin sliding filaments, like, what are you, what are you doing, man? Like, you're like, you have to see the whole elephant, right? It's sort of that blind man and the elephant parable. And like the nervous system helps compartmentalize and really prioritize how we approach motor learning with every client. Like, what is this person's autonomic nervous system doing? Because if we can't understand that, we're, we're shooting in the dark.

[E]

I have a pro athlete question for you. Have you seen a change in like the types of injuries and things we're seeing since sports is always kind of evolving and I love watching the game, I can just how, how different it is today than 20 years ago. What are you seeing from somebody who's rehabbing, helping people? Are you seeing different types of injuries? Like, or is it the same stuff over and over?

[C]

Like, it's a basketball question.

[E]

I mean, could be basketball, could be hockey, could be.

[C]

I think injuries are, look, it's, I.

[E]

Mean, even like, for example, like there was a time when we wore nothing but high top shoes in basketball and now we have changed because we saw what was going on with ankle injuries. And that would be ridiculous to put your foot or ankle in a cast while you're playing. And so like.

[C]

Yeah, but I mean, how many, what was, how many Achilles stairs do we have last Year.

[E]

Well, so this is why I'm asking. That's exactly my point.

[C]

Injuries. I think injuries usually set people down the road of more specific interventions, which is wrong, in my opinion. Like, when. Because now everyone, everyone, every off season is like foot and ankle. Foot and ankle. It's like variability, because an injury is. An injury is an equation, right? It's applied force greater than tissue tolerance. So when. When we start to notice, you know, whether it's ACLs or hamstrings or, you know, anterior talofibular ligaments or Achilles, people go, oh, this is the site of pain. This is the injury. This is the tissue that's damaged. And so then all of their focus, like baseball, has this hilarious thing called arm care. I have a lot of friends who work in the mlb, of athletes that work in the mlb. And if you talk to any strength and conditioning program in any major league baseball team, they talk about arm care, which is like, they're throwing 100 miles an hour. They're on a shot clock now, and you're doing more arm stuff. They're getting enough. So there's like, it's. It's hard to pull yourself out of it and go. Because one of the things I'm seeing with the emergence of a lot of sports science is that they're. They're getting too hyper specific and they're worried about the tissue tolerance of. We could strength arm care if we could strengthen the ulnar collateral ligament, if we could strengthen the elbow flexors. It's like, why don't we focus on decreasing the amount of force we're applying rather than the tissue tolerance? Right. When I was powerlifting, my knees hurt because powerlifting and some. I remember going into a PT clinic in the bay, and someone puts a knee bar or a band behind my knee and says, yeah, I just want you to, like, kind of lock out your knee. And at this point, I was on the low 700s, mid-700s. And I was like, hold on a second. What's this? They got, like, terminal knee extensions. And I think I was. I was still in school. Maybe I was just out. And I'm like, just a question. Like the green band. Like, you heard me say squat, like 7:30 or whatever, right? Like, how is this doing anything? But the idea is like, oh, we're looking at the injury through the lens of. It wasn't enough tissue tolerance. The tissue was intolerant to the load. Why don't we ask the question of why are we applying so much force to begin with? Yeah, I think the hyper Specificity. When, when we start seeing like a trend line in injuries. Achilles. So what does off season program look like? Foot and ankle stuff. Everyone's walking on ropes and doing foot drills and, you know, gate cycle this and it's like, literally go for a hike, Go. Forget some variability in expression, but not just through your foot and ankle, but in the way your brain and your body have to react to these positions. It's like the answer, in my opinion is it's not specific. Injuries don't require more specific interventions or preparation or prophylaxis requires more variability. Right. So we start to be able to disperse these loads across different positions, across different tissues. But everyone just like, I don't know, like, if you're an owner of a team and your PT or you walk in and your PT is working with Halliburton or whatever and not to throw, you know, obviously injuries happen and we can't really accurately predict and blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, if I'm the, if I'm the strength coach and I'm doing a bunch of like variable movement stuff, someone goes, what the are you doing? We have ankle injuries. Why aren't we doing ankle stuff? It's like, okay, so we're gonna go do seated calf raises now. It's like, ah, God damn it. So there's a pressure and there's a pressure from the athlete. Like, hey, man, I'm real worried about, like, I'm real worried about ankles, man. Like, what are we doing for ankles? It's like, I don't know, man, multi directional stuff. We're gonna throw some balls, we're gonna jump, we're gonna land, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna have variability. But everyone just, they get so tunnel visioned and so like gunshot. Oh. Because if something goes wrong and we didn't do anything into the ankles or if we didn't do our arm care. So a lot of it is, you know, obviously it's fear, but I think at the level of application, it's a tendency to hyper specificity around these regions that are so commonly injured. And that's why injury rates and again, it's the games are faster, the seasons are shorter, there's more international travel, early specificity. Right. Which would speak to this idea of specificity being the opposite of variability. Right. So there's a lot of reasons that compound. But I think what I see in the field and you know, strength coaches at that level, for the most part, I mean, you guys have had a handful of them on schless is the guy. But look at Schles training, right? What does Celeste do with these guys? It's kind of, you know, it's. He does some stuff where you're like, oh, that's unconventional. It's like, yeah, because the conventional stuff leads to all this other shit.

[E]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. So that's where I think there's a siren song to solve a problem. And it, and it hyper fixates the focus onto the tissue tolerance. And it, and it, it really negates the bigger picture of why and how we apply force.

[E]

So do you think it was a dumb idea that we went to, we traded ankle injuries for Achilles? I mean, do you think that's what we did by going high top over to low top shoes?

[C]

And I mean, it's tough to say if that was the catalyst. It's hard to, it's hard for me to imagine that the shoe and I may get some backlash. Has as much to do with it as the, as the rest of the training. Right. Like it really. And it may, may sound ignorant, but they are so strong that those, those shoes, those high tops like I wear, they're not, they're not, they're not stopping or slowing anyone down. I really think it's the big things, like if you were to control the future where we kept high tops going and we had less of a hyper fixation and over specialization on these particular regions, I think the high tops really wouldn't be causing these issues. Right. I really think it's the sports specificity is such a, it's such an, it's such an egregious offender. Right. Because too often people who train people in sports try and make the gym look like the field.

[D]

Emulate it.

[C]

Exactly. It's like, you know, you see the Titleist hooked up to the cable machine and you're like, well, there goes your backswing. Right. Like you're gonna completely up the mechanics or you're, at the very least, you're just gonna overexpose the muscles you need. A lot of training is about variability. It's like, hey, let's find new positions, right? Let's learn. I think that's a big thing. Like when you, when you reorient your focus as a coach from training to teaching, you now have entered in one of the greatest constraints that you can put to load. And that's thinking. Thinking is a great. Because they don't think when they're on the court. That's the whole point. That's why they're good. So I'm going to take them into the gym and I'm going to put them in positions where they need to think and that will constrain load, allow them to recover and learn how to load.

[B]

Nutrition.

[E]

I was going to say, do you, do you end up integrating a lot of these variabilities or, or are you solely mainly focused on the recovery portion or do you get to go through all of it?

[C]

It depends on what stage. If I'm doing a post op or have someone who, you know, knock on wood, isn't injured. Yeah, I like to use the words, and I don't necessarily love the word novelty. I love specific variability. Let's look at the challenges of your sport. Let's look at how you, how you move, let's figure out what you're not getting and let's give you some of that. So because your body is like, at least your nervous system, it's like lightning, right? It's not. Your body doesn't take straight lines, it takes the path of least resistance. So if I can expose you to certain positions and shapes, demands in the weight room that you don't get exposed to, I'll watch your nervous system use these shapes on the field that you otherwise didn't have access to. Right. So it's really about giving them ultimate variability. So assess the game. What are the demands, what are the limitations? Do they have any issues like from a, from a prior surgery or injury? What are positions they don't get into on the field and how could we give them exposure to those positions so we can learn how to load other tissues? So in a game they're not going to think, their brain is going to be like, hey, I can do this. I can plant my foot way out in front of me. I don't have to have my knee go over my toe like I always do in every exercise you watch. Wide receivers are really egregious offenders of this. They get taught how to run routes and their knees are always over their toes, right. Real quick feet drills and all this stuff and it looks good for the gram. But when you watch someone go to like stop and they go to stop using a forward shin angle, it's like, I mean, again, I don't like the idea of, oh, we know how injuries happen, blah, blah, blah. Go watch. Just, just YouTube search wide receiver ACL injury. And at freeze frame, the very second that the ACL pops and the person springs up into the air, the knee is over the toe because what does the ACL do? It stops the shin from going forward. What if our foot was in front of our knee and our knee was behind our toe, which is like one of the things about, you know, not again, no dispersion. But the knee over toe thing is, you know, it's a useful, it's a former Poliquin derived thing and buddy did really well with it. But in specific instances, I'm not going to do a ton of knees over toes with wide receivers who spent the last 10 years doing knees over toes. I'm gonna get their knee behind the toe. Because if you wanna talk about stopping mechanics, this is a specific variant that you're not exposed to. When you go to stop on the field and your knee is forward, it's like, yeah, that's a lot of anterior tibial translation. But if you, if your knee is behind your foot, like in like a front foot elevated split squat, which no one ever does, it's like, oh, well, now I have some exposure here. Now when I'm playing and someone goes to hit me, I can, I can plant the brakes like a Kaderius. Tony, a couple years ago when the, when the Chiefs beat the, the Eagles in the Super Bow, when he had that 61 yard kickoff return, he had one of the perfect expressions of this mechanic of like someone went to hit him and he just threw his foot out in front of him and then pumped the brakes and literally, I, I don't know who it was, but someone on the Eagles was predicting that he was going to take up this space because everyone in the league stops the same way. And he jumped at him to tackle and he literally went shoom, went right by him and then he keeps on the run up the field. So things like that, where it's like, okay, what positions are you always in? What can the body do? If I gave you this option, would your brain take it on the field? So we train it and you take guys like that and you get them to do a front foot elevated split squat with their knee way behind their toe, they can't do it. So they're not going to figure it out on the field.

[E]

So do you, do you. Okay, you see a play or move like that, does the door, can you automatically go, you want to see who the trainer is that's training him and see.

[D]

Huh?

[C]

No. Yeah. I don't know.

[D]

Good.

[C]

Good for anyone. Yeah, because like the thing about athletes, like I always think Bo Jackson is, you know, all the time what makes an athlete. An athlete can learn motor skills really quickly, period. That's what, like from, that's my definition of an athlete.

[D]

So like when we Go like aesthetic brilliance or genius.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. It's savants. They're sixth sense savants is what they are. Like Kim Peak, Rain man could sit down and read one page of the book with his left eye while his right. Right eye read the other one. He could read a whole two pages in less than three seconds and remember it to 98%.

[E]

Is that real?

[C]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Kim Peek, the guy that made Rain man off of. Oh, yeah.

[E]

I didn't even know that was based off of a real dude.

[C]

Oh, yeah, dude. He's amazing. Kim Peak is. So there's savant syndrome, affects less than 100 people in the world. This is part of my book. This is why I know a lot about savant syndrome. But Kim Peek is a mega savant. A mega savant. So he's a cognitive savant. When you watch Bo Jackson, you know, step up, hit it yard, and then run a 4, 240, you're watching the physical representation of that brilliance, Right? Like, this is a cognitive.

[E]

Such a cool way to put it.

[C]

Yeah, they're. There's. They're six cent savants, right? Like, I worked with a. Like I worked with a tennis player that could turn over 230 kilometer hour serve. Like one day we're in Bahamas.

[E]

Imagine getting hit by that.

[C]

Well, so here's the thing about his house in the Bahamas and his hitting partner didn't show up, and he's like, hey, you're on the baseball. Like, dog, you don't pay me that much. You pay me good. You take care of me. But like, and he. And obviously he can put it anywhere. So he blows it right by me, and I'm just like. And the thing of it is so interesting. We talk about sensitivity and we talk about muscles, the sense organ. When he was younger, we were. We were at Wimbledon, and we're in the locker room and Andy Murray comes up and he grabs my particular client, his racket out of his. His bag. And him. Him and Andy are friends. And Andy looks at it and admires him. Like, I don't get it. Like, why is he admiring your racket? And he's like, oh, they only make it for me. He's a top 10 player at the time. And I was like, okay, but wait, Andy's like one of the top four, right? You know, Djokovic, Andy Murray, Nadal, and Federer. So they won't make it for him. And he goes, no. I'm like, okay, well, what's the deal? He goes, when I was 17, I was sponsored by this company and they sent me my rackets after I got sponsored, and they sent me the wrong rackets. And like, I look over at his agent, the manager, and he goes like, yeah, I was up. I said, what happened? He's like, I don't know. He, like, took a hit with his new. With his new batch of the racket he used and he just smashed it and walked off. He goes, tell him to send me my rackets. And you know, the agent goes and picks up the racket and goes, I don't know. Looks just like the. I don't know what you're talking about. Dog calls the company and goes, hey, he's tripping. Oh, he's always tripping. Like, no, like, he's not playing until he gets his rackets. And the guy goes. And then the agent's like, wait a minute. What you know about this? Look, we couldn't. It was something about like a material or they changed the difference. So the guy flew in from Japan, brought. It was kind of weird. They brought four unmarked rackets and they said, if you can tell us which one is yours, we'll make it for you forever.

[D]

He did.

[C]

You want to know the difference in weight? 5 grams.

[D]

So.

[C]

But this here's, here's to my point of like, sensitivity of a. Of an arm and a shoulder that can feel the difference between 5 grams is the same arm that from a motor output standpoint is painting 230km to the tee.

[E]

Back to your whole point about the.

[C]

Muscle sensory input drives motor output.

[E]

That's so cool.

[C]

But there's. There's savants. There's a sensitivity to it. And I think there's actually. There's a deeper. This idea and this is all cerebellar function stuff, and it'll be for another time. But like, there's a deeper idea to high cognitive output and hypersensitivity or hyposensitivity. I think of the movie the Accountant. You ever seen that movie?

[E]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Oh, you haven't seen it. Oh, great movie. Right. But remember, so you know Ben Affleck plays a.

[E]

Part two just came out, not that long ago.

[C]

Yes, but he plays. He'd be like a high functioning on the spectrum, Asperger's type. He's an accountant.

[D]

Right.

[C]

Which is kind of fits the temperament of the accountants. I know. And when he goes home at the end of the night, he turns on like a strobe light and Ramstein music and he takes a rolling pin to his shins. You remember that?

[E]

Yeah.

[C]

And if anyone knows anyone or has anyone in their family who's on the spectrum. Hyper. Hypersensitivity, like that type of stimulus is palliative. Right? Like, I have friends who take. I have friends who take Adderall to calm them down. What is your brain?

[E]

This explains Justin's death metal at six o' clock in the morning.

[C]

But you get a, the get a cog. There's a cognitive uptick.

[E]

You're on the spectrum. That's why.

[C]

So it's, there's a physical correlation to that. When you look at athletes, like, when you look at, like the steps, when you look at the, you know, the, the, the MJ's, you look at the, the people who aren't just good at their sport. Yeah, right. People that are athletes. People that could be good at anything. You go, oh, you're. That. They're the physical equivalent of that. They can learn motor.

[E]

I love stories like that. Have you seen that other time? I mean, what a cool story to see that, like, unfold right there.

[C]

It was wild. Yeah. Like I sitting in Wimbledon, like in the locker room, Murray, like Djokovic walks in, you walk out. Serena. But it, like, that was like a aha moment of like, you know, because physically, like, dude's not super jacked, right? Yeah. But it's the sensitivity, it's the integration.

[E]

Well, and you have, you have such a level of appreciation for that than the average person be like, oh, that's cool. He could pick the racket, right. It's like you have it on a deeper level, the understanding of like, his ability to do that. I've always, I've always loved, like, I know they've measured like Barry Bond's ability to like, look at a ball as soon how, like how quick he can see. Like the threads in. In the ball coming out of a. It's so wild.

[C]

When Manning broke his cervical spine. There's a couple examples that will just blow you away just how superhuman athletes are. There's. We talked about saccades earlier being being like a diagnostic for concussions, how they slow down. So they'll use these glasses they put on. They look like those Apple Pro glasses. And then on the screen playing in front of the eyes is a dot that goes across the screen and the dot is programmed to move in a particular pattern. And there's high resolution cameras that are following the latency of the eye and following the dot. There's two athletes, one I won't name, but one is Manning. And these cameras have been used on all types of people with concussions. And you start to see as the neurological symptoms of the brain damage improve, that the latency in the eye tracking the dot starts to go away. As you'd imagine, two of the best athletes in the sport, Manning being one and this ice hockey player being another, the researchers were. It was almost as if the eye was telling the dot where to go. There was zero latency.

[B]

What.

[C]

They'd never seen that in anyone without it. So they're testing them, trying to get them back to baseline, and they like all of a sudden have a day where they don't just go back to baseline, which is some sort of latency in the ability to track zero. And this is high speed cameras. It's like. We've never seen anything like it. It's like. It's like the. It's like the retina is attached, the pupil is attached to the dot. There's a 0.000 millisecond latency. But these are why they're the best in the world.

[E]

Oh, yeah. I mean, that totally explains why that guy was just so brilliant at the game, you know what I'm saying? And. And one of the things he was so great, it was changing the play too. Seeing something coming before. And then I'm over to the right side and I'm throwing the ball over there. Like, that's so.

[C]

Yeah, you see that in a clinical setting where he's quite literally seeing a different game.

[E]

You know, this is how I always try and sell this guy on becoming a sports nut is just like. There's so many cool.

[D]

I like the science.

[E]

That's what I tried. There's so much deep, great science with these athletes because it's the. It's the greatest expression of the greatest.

[D]

Humans that have the capability, brilliance in a physical sense. Yeah, just like you look at Elon Musk.

[E]

No, that's why I love that analogy. Exactly right. It's you. We have these savants that are running around on fields and stuff like that. And it's just, it's. I mean, look what Saquon Barkley did last year with that. I mean, that's like the most. One of the most.

[C]

Let me jump backwards over you real quick, real time.

[E]

Like you. Someone's about to destroy you and you have the. The level awareness to shoot up 180 in the air and split over. This is wild.

[D]

Jordan, it's always awesome having you on. Yeah, dude, I really appreciate it. I have to take off, unfortunately. I mean, we could go on forever. And I feel like I just put the quarter in next year, next year.

[C]

No, I appreciate it dude.

[D]

Yeah. Always a pleasure man.

[C]

Appreciate it.

[E]

Appreciate you.

[F]

Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically, improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB super [e-mail] the RGB Super Bundle includes Maps, Anabolic Maps, Performance and Maps Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos. The RGB Super Bundles like having Sal, Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30 day money back guarantee and you can get it now. Plus other valuable free [e-mail] if you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five star rating and review on itunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump.

[B]

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