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The mindbodygreen Podcast
606: How to improve mobility & strength for injury prevention | Henry Abbott
00:48:12
Henry Abbott, an award-winning journalist and founder of TrueHoop, joins us today to explain how to prevent injury and improve mobility for all aspects of life.
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the MyBodyGreen podcast. I'm Jason Wakab, founder and co CEO of MyBodyGreen and your host.
- [00:08]
B
Rei Co Op knows when you're up at 4:30am on a Saturday for a long run and you're actually excited. Not everyone gets it, but we do at rei. We're here for people who get outside gear up for your next run in store or@rei.com.
- [00:39]
A
What if we've been thinking about athletic injuries all wrong? Instead of reacting after the fact with ice and stem therapy or surgery, what if we could spot the warning signs before they strike and train our bodies to avoid them altogether? That's the big idea in today's show with Henry Abbott, award winning journalist, founder of True Hoop and author of Ballistic the New Science of Injury Free Athletic Performance. Henry shares what he's learned from Dr. Marcus Elliott and the team at P3 in Santa Barbara who are using biomechanics, AI and millions of data points to predict and prevent injuries in elite athletes all over the world. We explore why foot and hip strength matter more than what you think, how simple tools like jump ropes can rewire movement, and why immobility is the public health crisis. No one's talking about whether you're an athlete or just want to move with less pain or, or avoid injury altogether. You're gonna love this episode. It's one of my favorites. Let's dive in. So let's start by telling us the why behind the book. Specifically immobility and how it's impacting our well being and quality of life as we all age.
- [01:51]
B
It's the fourth leading cause of death according to the World Health Organization. And just being immobile contributes to cancers, bone health, your mental health. The list is, I mean this isn't like me being sticking my neck out here. This is really from like big academic journals. Everybody knows you got to move, right? This is a problem that we don't move nearly enough. And I don't know about you, but I'm 50 and the reason that when I've had periods of immobility, it's because I'm hurt, right? It's because I'm in pain. There's something, you know, I've had issues from pinched nerves to whatever. I have a lower back that's a little tricky, et cetera. And so, you know, I cover the NBA my whole adult life and I adore seeing these athletes when they're at their best. And I'm so sad. In the NBA, elite athletes are out a huge percentage of the time and it just felt like too much. They were getting carted off all the time, and I felt like someone had to know how to handle it better.
- [02:42]
A
Agreed. And I am so thrilled to have you. I love the book. It's called Ballistic. I could talk to you as an ex, very average Division 1 college basketball player. I could talk to you about basketball for two hours. I don't know if our audience would love that, but I do think there's some really powerful takeaways from this book that everyday athletes of all sexes, of all ages can learn. And it starts with, you talk about this incredible place, the peak performance project. P3. Can you and I follow these guys, specifically the. What they're doing for the past couple years. Can you give us a primer on what is P3, what they've, you know, the origins, what and what they've learned about why athletes got get hurt. And we can go into, you know, elevated risks of acl, tears, even heart attacks. Let's just, let's spend some time on P3. It's, I think, a core of the book.
- [03:36]
B
I've spent so much time thinking about this. I think the best way to get across in a simple way what. What's happening there is to talk about heart attacks. So all through history, the history of cardiology is people not understanding the cause of heart attacks. They just arrived as if from outer space or an act of God. And you can find in the cardiology literature, even from like just last century, people thinking that someone had a heart attack because they coveted their neighbor's wife or whatever, right? It was just kind of. We just didn't see it properly. Then they invented the electrocardiogram and later the echocardiogram, which is like a little beeping machine in the hospital scene of every movie. And you could see the movement of the blood through the heart for the first time. And it was like a light bulb went off. Like, this is where you can see the arterial blood flow slows down for a decade or so before the heart attack. And that means you could treat the heart attack before it happens, which is what we do now. It's one of the most successful interventions in medical history. Life expectancy has gone up a decade since they figured that out. And, you know, they give you some diet, exercise, medicine, whatever, before you have it. So this P3 is the place that's trying to bring that same exact kind of thinking to musculoskeletal injuries. And it's sounds really basic. Of course you wanna prevent them, but it's believe it or not. Kind of a new idea. And the founder Marcus Elliott, after tearing his own ACL in high school, was determined to study the body super hard and figure out what the signal was that would come before the ACL tear or similar injuries. And it took years of searching. You know, he, he studied every different. He went to Harvard Medical School, delivered babies and did all this stuff. He studied every field and ended up with motion capture. Putting little sensors on your body, force plates in the floor and having you go through a rigorous prescribed set of movements. You know, these are like one off skeeters where you explode sideways or stepping off a box and jumping up and on and on. This whole series of movements, it creates about a million data points per person. And we can talk more about this, but turns out that data set is the magic. This is where the signal is. This is where you can see the ACL tear before the crisis.
- [05:36]
A
So walk us through what that looks like because I think this is the future. And, and there are the elite athletes have access to this, but us everyday wellness warriors do not. Although I think that may be changed in the near future. So like we're in the lab, we get all the, we're hooked up to all these things and one of the things give us an example of like how they go about this process and what shows up on the screen that's a signal that hey, this is an ACL tear waiting to happen down the road. Even though maybe no symptoms.
- [06:06]
B
It's the coolest. It really is. It feels like if I've learned one thing here that I would like bet on is like is what you just said. Every other way we tried to treat these injuries to assess who's at risk was wrong. This is the data set that we need and it's just coming, right? It's just coming and it is coming to all of us because soon you'll be able to get some readings from your phone or from video. So 100% it's coming to all of us. Exactly how I can't tell you today because you know, who knows what technology will bring. But, but so they did a big study. 381 NBA players and they've tracked them for years and basically they look at who ended up with an ACL tear and then go through all the data like what were they doing before? And rather than in academic studies you would start with a theory and say we think it's because of valgus collapse, like your knees going in together. And then you'd follow people who have valgus Collapse. This is different because we're just saying you end with an ACL tear. We have a million data points from you before that. Which. What are the trends? Right. If you have enough players in the data set, you can just see like what, 10, you know, what X tends to lead to this Y. Right. And the number one answer is something that no one's ever known before. Every single NBA player in the study who tore his acl, landed on the outside of his foot and then had his weight roll to the inside. They call it. They named a translation. It didn't have a name because no one's ever thought about it before. It puts your tibia, your shin goes like a windshield wiper through a big motion as you roll like that. And the guess is that it just puts your knee in a very vulnerable position.
- [07:37]
A
And so essentially it's tied to how your foot lands. If you rolled the other way, you.
- [07:41]
B
Roll your ankle, you very well might. Yep.
- [07:43]
A
And so you're rolling the opposite direction.
- [07:46]
B
And so side of the foot to inside. Yeah.
- [07:48]
A
What I go to right away is your arches and what types of footwear you're wearing.
- [07:54]
B
So that's another chapter of the book. Like on a. In a nutshell, it has not been well studied. Footwear might be able to really help with this kind of thing. The research that they do at footwear companies is not focused on injury prevention. There's just not good. They have not. There aren't shoes that reduce injury, so we don't have that yet. We might. They'd love to study and they have footwear clients and they're just kind of convincing them to like, get into doing the right kind of research to figure that out. But what they would prescribe, I mean, you're totally right. There might be a solution there. But I asked one of the main trainers at P3. I asked him like, look what's going on in the lower leg when this happens. You know why? What I thought he would say there was some kind of like, oh, well, it's this muscle. And he's like, eh. It's just kind of sloppy. Like, like basically we don't work out. The muscles from the knee down emerge in PD research as incredibly important in injury prevention for a lot of reasons.
- [08:47]
A
Knee down.
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B
Knee down. So you might think of your calf muscles and that one on the outside is the gastrocnemius. Right. That's the kind of bulbous two muscles you can see. But underneath that are, I think some under recognized heroes. The soleus comes up all the time at P3. It does a tremendous number of things, including pump blood flow back up to your heart, which I think is good. You want the blood going through your feet to like, heal the feet. Right. And, and keep it moving. And then there's. They call it the post tib, the tibialis posterior. These are. There are ways you can look on YouTube and find ways to work those out. But I think that we under. If you strengthen those muscles, then you can land with, instead of this sloppy thing on the outside of your foot, you can land on the ball of your foot with your ankle loaded. You're going to have really strong muscles in your lower leg, and the force will go into your Achilles tendon and then your quads and then your glutes. And when those three joints are flexing together, you can land with a tremendous amount of force without to damaging yourself.
- [09:48]
A
Well, that in and of itself is a huge takeaway for everyone listening, because I think traditionally the. The focus on leg strength has been above the knee, the. The quads and the hamstrings. Not a lot of discussion around below the knee. And I think you're not just touching on the calf, the tibia, but like your toes. Yeah. Your feet.
- [10:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. This has been a big. Like this. They call. It's a section of their findings called ground contacts, which is probably the most important thing they found. And something like nobody else is doing. But they would recommend, you know, straight up strengthening. I've done a lot of stuff that sounds kind of basic, but just like you stand on one leg and you raise and lower very slowly on one foot while you're balancing, maybe you're touching the wall. And you know, if you do 15 reps on each side, you're gonna feel that. Then I. Then the little cycle they gave me, then you go and jump rope. And when you jump rope, you want to feel this. This is like a magic trick. Do this like they get pissed off at the gym. Cause I'm like, jumping rope has become so easy for me. So. So you want to train the neurological function of these muscles so they happen. They quickly communicate. This means you're not going to consciously manage every little step of how you land. You're going to train it and then it's just going to happen. So for me, the big takeaway is you want the force of hitting the ground to be absorbed into your glutes. That's the, that's the thing that's been a weakness for me. That's not a natural for me. So jumping rope is a chance to drill that. And so just, you know, swing the rope, toes up, land on the ball of your foot, but feel the force of landing in your glute. And then you. And it's like a rubber band. It expands and contracts, and you don't have to jump. My leg muscles are, like, almost inert. It's just like a rubber band, like, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
- [11:23]
A
So it feels like, in terms of injury prevention, for everyone listening, you know, of all ages, jump rope.
- [11:29]
B
Yeah, for sure. Plyometrics of all kinds. That's the base level. Plyometrics. This is a huge P3 thing. As everybody's doing plyometrics, you can look up what those are. There's a whole progression of them. You. You don't want to jump into the big, heavy ones. You don't want to be jumping off big boxes and stuff. You want to progress, right? You want to start with jumping rope. Or they do one of their tests. This is amazing. You take like a broomstick or a dowel and lay it on the ground, and then put both feet parallel next to the stick, and then boom, boom, boom. You're going to jump right and left, right and left across the broomstick.
- [11:59]
A
What's interesting here, too, as an ex basketball player, jumping rope is like, you do it all the time. I could still. I don't jump rope. I could pick it up right now and do it extraordinarily well just because it's just something I did for so long. Yet basketball players right now, both men and women, the rates of injury in terms of acl, in terms of Achilles, it's ridiculous.
- [12:21]
B
So.
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A
So beyond that, like, they're doing, like, what else is. Because you also point out in the book, and this is true, I think everyone would agree, athletes have become measurably bigger, faster, stronger, quicker, everything. But there's decreased longevity in terms of their healthy playing years, for sure. What. What. What else is going on here?
- [12:43]
B
So much. Okay, so now we're going to talk about hips. Hips are, like, the other big place where they have findings. The second leading cause of ACL tear. Again, this is in NBA men.
- [12:56]
A
Women are going through the same thing. Like juju Watkins to our ACL tear. Heartbreaking.
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B
Oh, it's everybody. I mean, I actually, I'm a. I'm a pretty big women's soccer fan. And, like, it's everybody. I mean, it's just every team. Every team in the women's World cup has at least one star out, right? I mean, this is ridiculous. Right? If you dig into all the research that they're applying to those women, like, it's. I think they're missing this movement piece. Right. And I think it, like, this is really good news that, like, there could be a much better way to handle this. But the second leading cause of ACL tear in men. And I don't want to impose this on women, but I think that we should be curious that they might. It might apply. We should study it in limit. Right? Okay. So as if you and I were both to stand next to each other and, like, go into a squat, it might be that we would have, like, our, our shins would be at the same angle, our femurs would be the same angle, our backs be the same angle, but one of us might have a femur that rotates inside your leg. So this is the upper bone of your leg. In some, some cases it rotates, which is. This is a little gross, but it's effectively like twisting the leg off the Thanksgiving turkey. Right. This is how you can tear your ACL is this, this bone rotates very hard to see with the naked eye. I can't see it at all. Like Marcus Elliott of P3. Amazingly, I think can see it, which kind of blows my mind. But. But they train that. And then, you know, there are little notches on your femur. This is like the longest bone in the body. And it's surrounded by muscles at the hip end. Right. The knee end is not quite so stable, but the hip end is where it can be stabilized, has trochanters, is. Are little notches that muscles grab onto. And a whole bunch of NBA players have been through the training they offer there to just strengthen those muscles, to hold it in place so that it no longer rotates as you bend. They fix this all the time. And I think this is the kind of stuff that, you know, I, I, I. My daughter didn't play a lot of sports when she was in high school. She was doing theater. Now she does all kinds of crazy stuff, but if I were the parent of a teenage girl, I would be working on, like, get your hips or either. Okay, sorry. I'm talking a lot about hips. Let me just add one more thing. Every single athlete they've ever assessed needs help with their hips, either because they need more stability or because they need more mobility. You can find out which one you are with some kind of simple home tests. I can walk you through, or you can. There's a picture in the book.
- [15:12]
A
Yeah, let's do it. Walk us through.
- [15:13]
B
Okay. So this isn't like the equivalent of a P3, full on assessment. But Marcus, the founder of P3, was like, I'm pretty confident saying that your hips are stable enough if you can get in a side plank with your body in a big X. So you're gonna point all 10 toes forward, raise your leg, raise your arm. If you can lock that out and hold it for 30 seconds. He's like, I think your hips are stable enough if. And if you can, you know, Standing figure four.
- [15:42]
A
Yeah. So side plane just to walk through. So I got my elbow on the ground, I got my feet on the side, and we can. And then you got full extension. I. I got. I get that. So elbow. Okay.
- [15:53]
B
I could send you a drawing of.
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A
That of both of these.
- [15:55]
B
Okay. And then for hip mobility, the little test that they like is called a standing figure four. So let's say I'm going to stand on my left leg. I'm going to put my right ankle across a. Above my left knee. And then it's kind of like a tree pose, I think is. Yeah, okay, you said do tree pose. And then basically sit down while balancing on that leg. You want to sink into your standing hip. If you can get deep into that, you know, like, maybe. Maybe level. Right. Then this is like a pigeon pose, but you're standing. Basically. If you can sink deep into that and hold it, then Marcus is willing to say your hips are mobile enough. So a good set of hips are mobile and stable. What we tend to do is everybody works on what they're good at. So weightlifters tend to have more stable hips and they keep going and lift more weights. And yogis have very mobile hips and keep going to yoga class. Everyone feels good about what they're doing, but they're missing a key part. Right. So the joke shorthand is that everyone who does yoga should lift weights, and everyone who lift weights should do yoga.
- [16:58]
A
Makes sense. And so. And this, this is a call out for. For women and men, both sexes, but women more specifically have an opportunity here, if I'm understanding correctly. Or is it both sexes?
- [17:09]
B
Um, I mean, you can end up with a hip replacement either because your hips are not mobile enough or not stable enough. Men are more likely to be not mobile enough, and women are more likely to be not stable enough.
- [17:19]
A
Interesting.
- [17:20]
B
Yeah, so I think it's, you know, like Marcus's first yoga teacher when he moved back to Santa Barbara, was this woman who was, like, unbelievably mobile. And I know. I've always thought that those people were like these superhumans who would Never have joint problems. You know, like, they seem just like. Like a.
- [17:36]
A
A.
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B
A finer class of human than me and my British rigid hips. Um, but. But she needed a joint replacement because her hips weren't stable enough. She should have done. If she'd done some squatting, right. Some, like a few trips to the gym, go to the CrossFit class a little bit, she probably wouldn't have needed hip replacement. Is. Is a suggestion.
- [17:53]
A
Right. And is this the area that was, as you talked about, the explosion of ACL tears and women, specifically women's soccer. Was this the area where they kind of need to work? Like. Cause I. I want to call out women's soccer specifically. Was this the area or was it something else?
- [18:10]
B
There's so much. I feel like this, this movement data set just issues, like, so many suggestions as to what might be better in the future. There's a little interesting thing. So there's a great academic white paper about women's ACL tears in soccer. And basically it says, we know the solution. Why aren't we using it there? Some of the most effective interventions known to humankind are these. Like, there's a few different ones, like, programs that are mostly free, available to women's soccer teams to train their players. It's usually three times a week. It might be 15 to 30 minutes each time to basically learn how to land. And if you do this intervention, then it's some. It depends on which program exactly. But Conservatively, it's a 67% reduction in ACL tears, which is about as successful as medical interventions ever get. Right. And we've known this for 20 years. And so the white paper that I'm referring to is asking the question, why isn't it more broadly applied? We kind of know what to do. And now this big Data set from P3 comes along and says, basically, this training on landing effectively addresses the two leading known risk factors for ACL risk in NBA players. Right. It effectively makes your. It is plyometric. It does get your foot in a good position, landing with, you know, eliminating that number one problem of having weak lower leg muscles. And it also is much more likely to inspire you to land, absorbing the force into your hips and with a strong hip and not having your femur rotate. So it seems like we're onto something here, and it seems like we maybe even already know the bare bones of the solution.
- [19:52]
A
Yeah, it's interesting, and it makes a lot of sense in that I'll use Gigi Watkins, for example, because it's fresh. It just happened recently. The USC basketball star in March. And if you watch it, she wasn't high up in the air. She was running and then lost her balance. And it was this awkward. This awkward landing. Not from afar. Like, she wasn't really that high off the ground. So when I hear you talk about strength and mobility and landing, it's the crux of, like, how can you be flexible and stable at the same time when you're under extreme, unpredicted duress? And like, how do you. How do you prepare for. And this is applicable to someone playing pickleball or playing with their kids. Unexpected duress or. Or unpredictable. An unpredictable movement, in a way, your body. Like how. Like everything we practice in the gym is predictable. Even when we're jumping rope, it's predictable. It's like I got my rhythm doing box jump, you know?
- [20:50]
B
So this is. They. They would like. They would love to talk to you about this. This is what they think about all the time. You're exactly on. Like, this is what the topic is in P3, right?
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A
So, like, the guys like pushing. You know, I remember in basketball practice, they. They get the big cushion thing, you know, and you go up for a layup and they push you from both sides, try to knock you off your ground. Like the. The heavy. I forget what they call it. Do it in football all the time. But. Yeah. Yeah, those big.
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B
It's like a. I've never used those, but it's like a bat on a stick and you're.
- [21:18]
A
Yeah. Throw you off balance. That's the.
- [21:20]
B
So there's a lot going on here. This is. Plyometrics are part of the solution for this because they're trying to just train you in how you put your foot on the ground so that it works. And just to explain a little bit. So if you're. If so your body. 80% of your weight is in your torso, and that's the big force is your body in freefall. It's like the physics class egg drop experiment, you know, where you, like. They give you, like, pipe cleaners and some duct tape. And you're supposed to, like, keep the egg, make a device so that the egg doesn't break. We're trying to not break this egg. And the contraption we have is legs. We have three stack joints, right? Ankles, knees, hips. And they work really well as designed. And the big forces are. It's kind of like an interstate can handle a heavy truck without damage, but that same heavy truck on the little back roads might tear it up a little bit. Right? So your quads your Achilles, your glutes, they. They can handle big forces of landing. And if your foot's in a good position, it directs the big forces to the interstate. Right. So it goes right. You know, this is not. And then juju Watkins landed in a way that put the forces of landing into the back roads. Right. And it doesn't take a ton of force to. To hurt when it's going in the wrong place. So to your point about unpredictability. So there's a section of the book about this volleyball player named Katie Spieler, who's an amazing character. She's like a five five pro pro beach volleyball player. And she tore ACL even though she's tiny and light.
- [22:54]
A
And on the beach too.
- [22:56]
B
And on the beach. But the day she tore ACL was actually on grass, which is slightly different.
- [23:00]
A
But still it's a softer surface. Because there's also, if I think of the highest level generalizations that that I've made in the past is one, you get injured when you're not in great shape. At least my coaches used to say that to me when I got injured. They blame it on my all my fault. You're not in shape. It's your fault.
- [23:17]
B
That's why you bothered.
- [23:20]
A
I did have some years where I maybe wasn't in the best shape I could be in, so maybe there was something there. And the other thing is like surface related. You think of harder surfaces, more impact. So I'll just pause there. Like grass beach. One would think less, more like because you're talking about ACL tears in soccer. You also think of turf. Turf is harder than grass. So I'm just going to make a point that this still happened on a soft surface to maybe like some people will make a case that surface plays a significant role here.
- [23:51]
B
So it changes the physics for sure. You're right. Um, you know, the. An NBA player landed on the force plates at P3 with 11,000 newtons of force, which is triple the force necessary to fully sever a human spine. Wow. So like the forces are plenty to tear your ligaments. Right. Um, not. You know, Katie Spieler landed with 3,100, which is still would suffer human spine. Right. Like even though she's little. So their forces are massive. Now the change in the surface will bring that down a little. Right. But it's still many times what you would need to tear a ligament. Right. So the trick is, you know, where are those forces going in your body? If they're going where your body's designed to take Them you're okay, and if they're going on the back roads, then you're in trouble. So. And she grew up on the beach. She grew up playing beach volleyball. She still coaches beach volleyball. I, I saw her a couple weeks ago on the beach. She never had to learn how to land, right. Because she could land. You know, basically you jump, you spike, and then you throw a leg out any which way. And you're probably not going to tear an ACL on that surface. But she played on a little bit harder surface and maybe, maybe her, her sand habits didn't work so well on grass, but in her. She then rehabbed at P3 and they put her through this unpredictability training, right? They went. The things I had her do was just stand on one leg and get into a athletic position, like slightly squatted, and then just close your eyes and just balance for a minute. And she was like, oh, this is going to be so easy. But it's not easy because there are different parts of your brain that balance you, right. And one of them is very dependent on visual stimulus and one of them isn't. And so you're just fully betting on the other one, which she didn't have a great one. She was like, she was like, to be honest, like, just standing there for a minute was hard and. But you quickly get better. I've tried this. You just try. It's fun. It's, it's like, it's like what's going to be annoying is someone in your life is going to be perfect at it and someone's going to have a really hard time.
- [25:50]
A
What comes to mind here in terms of the uptick of injuries in professional athletes and for us, trying to mitigate risk? I think about recovery and how important that is, and I'm curious what the data says. And I also think about, for probably the younger generation playing multiple sports and not specializing as you're thinking about, you know, unpredictability. If you're playing the same sport day in and day out and the same movements, like you're losing some of that and your body especially repetitive. I think of volleyball, many of all you're practicing the same. Like if you're a middle blocker and outside, you're, you're the same motion or 10, like the same over and over and over and you're, you're almost training yourself. Even though it's a fluid sport, you.
- [26:41]
B
Move.
- [26:43]
A
There'S probably a burden there. What, what's your take?
- [26:46]
B
Oh, I'm a hundred percent a fan of moving More crazy, playful different ways all the time, right? I. To me, the pinnacle of how you want to move as, as a kid and as an adult is like puppies playing on the beach, right? You want to just like, yeah, sure, but just like that much fun, right? And like whatever crazy fun thing, whatever makes you feel like that. I mean, I've had some of the best moments of my life just like with like kids and nieces and nephews just in the, in the waves and we're kind of like body surfing or chucking each other around. Just like you want to move so freely, right? And Marcus will explain that like we learn motor programs of movement, like we learn language, right? It's very similar part of the brain. And you want to be full immersion Spanish when your brain is super plastic and you're young, right? And so to your point, single sport specializing, which usually comes with sitting on a couch too, right? You go and do your two and a half hours of lacrosse and then you just like are so wiped out, you don't do anything. Like it's, it's way better to ride your bike and go fishing and jump off a bridge and try surfing and. You know, I spent so much of my childhood like being an unsupervised kind of free roaming maniac with my buddy Chris. And they had a hundred acres of orchard in Oregon and we just rode our bikes everywhere and jumped off things and kind of. And swam and just like we just kind of learned a lot of different ways to move. And you bring these little. The language of movement you bring with you into adulthood and you want to apply those lessons, right? Like everything I'm talking about that they would train you to do at P3 is really neurological training. Like, do you know how to put your foot down once you're airborne? Right? Like that's what you want to learn. Ideally you learn it when you're three. And Marcus legitimately has his kids. He has three kids. You know, he gives him a little challenges. Like, you know, can you hop three times on your left leg and then see how far you jump onto your right and just. Or a little. Or can you. He. He'd be working on like a Sunday and he'd set up like some little hurdles or whatever and be like, hey, can you it over these and. And he would, he's super observant, but he would notice like, oh, you know, this kid can't jump as well off that leg or doesn't land well on this foot. And so it's like, oh, you're having A hard time on your left foot. Like, let's just work on that. And by the time they got to teenagerdom, they're all like, unbelievable movers. His son's, like, going to be a D1 soccer player. His daughter's an amazing volleyball player. Like, his youngest is also amazing volleyball player now. So I think, you know, just attention to movement is. Is, I think, agility, essentially.
- [29:13]
A
Like agility, I think is a core skill kids should develop. And you can. The beauty of agility is you can develop that in a very unstructured format or also structured. Like, I think of soccer, like, soccer is. Would it be safe to say that soccer is probably a great sport for young kids to play in that regard?
- [29:32]
B
I think Marcus would say, like, do everything feel like your body? Our bodies are well designed, right? They're. They can handle a ton. It's a great news, right? Just a little, you know, it's 600 muscles that need to be coordinated by your brain. And sometimes the symphony gets a little out of tune, right? You need a little help. You need to go to someplace, have some masterful person be like, oh, like, like, I see you're doing this weird thing where, like, me personally, I don't load into my hips enough. I have to like, kind of keep drilling this, right? I. When I land, I. Not enough force goes into my hips. Everyone's got something, right? But the idea is if you, if you have the right feedback and you're working on the right stuff, then these issues that arise become speed bumps instead of, you know, you're debilitated for six months.
- [30:12]
A
So for us grownups who are working out, got the memo. It sounds like knee down. Work on strength all the way from the knee to the toes should jump rope. You want strong yet flexible hips. You gave a great exercise. What else should we watch out for in terms of workouts or everyday movements or equipment or gear that probably aren't helping us? Like maybe the elliptical or. You tell me.
- [30:45]
B
Yeah, they're not huge fans of the elliptical. It's not ballistic, right? There's no bounce. You want to have a little bounce in your life, right? And so this is like basically running, but without the part. That's really helpful for your neurological development, right? So you want to be. Not that everybody should run, but everyone should practice being bouncy, right? It's a. It's a big part. You want to be able to. You want to keep training your brain to manage how you land, right? And so elliptical is. Has sucked that out of the game, right?
- [31:14]
A
Just boring Repetitive, like.
- [31:17]
B
And you want to be playful, like, you want to. I do think you want your exercise to be fun enough that you really, genuinely want to keep doing it. Right? So I, you know, Marcus had this funny epiphany. He. He's. He's kind of a, you know, he's an elite athlete. He was a professional triathlete who competed against Lance Armstrong. He was an elite football player in high school, and he deals with, you know, these incredible, you know, Anthony Edwards and Luca Donis people all the time. And so he's a little bit of a athletic snob. So when pickleball came around, I think he was kind of like, oh, and tennis is, like, his great passion. He plays, like, four or five hours of tennis at his. At a clip, and he plays super hard. And pickle ball, he was kind of like, what is this contrived little game with the dinking and the what is standing around? But the fact is, like, he's like, pickle ball is a chance to do something really fun with your friends, and you're going to laugh and you're going to move through three planes, right? And you're going to be landing and moving your body in, like, a fun, playful way. And so he's come around from, you know, he really just. Over the time I was writing the book, he went from, like, I don't understand the appeal to. We talked at a conference in Boston together in March, and the morning of the conference, he went with his son, and they met a college buddy, and they played pickleball for, like, three hours.
- [32:29]
A
You're leading me to my next question. For those who have picked up pickleball, there's been a lot of attention, all the injuries in pickleball. What's your take? If we're playing or want to play, how do we avoid injuries? Just what we said. Jump rope, lower legs? Or is there just. Or is there something specific to pickle ball we should be mindful of?
- [32:47]
B
I think that's the main stuff. I mean, usually it's pretty hard surface, right? I think that you probably want to pay more attention to how you put your foot down. Right? This is probably not while you're playing. I think just play while you're playing. But you should probably have some routine of strengthening those muscles of the lower leg I was talking about and. And practicing, you know, jumping rope and other plyometrics so that you get some routinization of landing on the ball of your foot.
- [33:11]
A
Is there an official pickleball protocol yet from Marcus, the team at P3, you.
- [33:17]
B
Know, I think there was never going to be one, but now maybe they're, you know, it could be in the cards now, I think. Right. Like he's, he's become.
- [33:23]
A
I'd be interested in that. I AM at age 50, I had my fair share of injuries and I've got a couple little nagging ones right now. And I have been very cautious, probably overly cautious about because I'm competitive, also about playing pickleball. Just because I've had little things where I'm like, oh, I can't, you know, do my VO2 max workout and I've set sets me back and I'm just so paranoid. Like, the last thing I want to do is get in a pickleball court and get competitive and like blow out my knee or tear my Achilles and be like, you know, so I'm very interested in this one because I would like to play.
- [33:58]
B
So, you know, good news, bad news, right? I think the full answer is if you were go to Santa Barbara and get assessed.
- [34:06]
A
I'm in. Let's do it.
- [34:09]
B
Yeah, I mean, I feel lucky. I kind of, I got to do that right. As part of writing the book. And like, wow, I feel blessed. So. And they do have a place like, so they P3 is really just for pro athletes, but around the corner they have a place called the lab where regular folks can go and get similar treatment. That's where I've gone. But they would give you, they'd assess everything about how you move and then they'd say, oh, well, your vulnerabilities are these couple things and these are your, like basically three hours a week, three one hour workouts a week that you would add to your routine to keep the wolf from the door, right. To back off, whatever. I guarantee it's going to be like for everyone. It's like, you know, hip instability, you know, hip external rotation, what's going to lead to stress on your knee, your ankle, et cetera. Maybe it's ankle mobility. There's a bunch of different stuff. It might be right. And everybody's got different formula and you do your little homework and then, then you feel like you can go play pickleball, no problem. Right. This is, this is kind of the goal.
- [34:58]
A
We'll have to offline about that because I'll be in the west coast in July. We'll share about it. And so what else? Is there anything else for us mere mortals that we should incorporate into our everyday routine, like in terms of how we sit, how we walk, how we reach for things.
- [35:19]
B
The one most common thing that, like, I was like, what's the most common biomechanical problem that you guys see just in the grocery store, right? And everybody said the same thing, which is computer back, also known as kyphosis, right? This is where you're like, you know, I'm so even just saying it, right? Everybody's like, oh, God.
- [35:35]
A
Standing up straight, right? Sitting up straight now as you say that. Yeah.
- [35:38]
B
And you know what's funny is I went around asking everybody these questions and they all said that, but it was. I think they said it because they were looking at me and I, I have that. I mean, I'm. I've gotten a lot better. But, but so there are these, like, barbaric solutions for this. Like, where there's a surgery, there's one where you like, lie on this device and like flatten your back down. But they find that they can. They're very cocky about this one. Like, like, we can fix this at any age. And there's a move called the snatch squat press, which is a weightlifting move. There's a picture of it in the book. In a nutshell. You take a start with a broom, put a broom across your shoulders, and then squat, like really squat so that your hips are the level of your knees. You might need to put a rolled up towel on your heels because it's a little bit of a tricky position, especially if you have kyphosis, right? And then stay in that squat and just push the bar straight up over your head. And you're going to keep doing that. And as you do it, if you have kyphosis, it's damn near impossible. It's just going to. You're going to want to fall over. It feels super weird. But what you're doing is you're challenging the brain to bring that. This vertebrae of your upper spine, the muscles are gonna pull them into alignment.
- [36:53]
A
Would a hack be standing against the wall, head straight, elbows against the wall and going up almost? It's like you're forcing similar or. No.
- [37:05]
B
We may have just encountered like a limit of my knowledge because I'm a journalist, not a trainer. You know what I mean? I'm like the guy. Like, I, I was like, I know I learned a lot of stuff. It's like I went to Paris and I watched them cook amazing food. And now it's like, I'm not here as a Cordon Blue chef, you know, I'm here as like a guy who went to Paris.
- [37:24]
A
Fair enough. I. I appreciate you making the distinction because a lot of people, don't they just speak with the same level of confidence on everything? So another interesting thought I had is the future and this idea of genetics and how they play a role in terms of our ability to develop into an elite athlete and also our predisposition for injury. Like how do you think about our genetic abilities and are there people who are almost born injury proof or born to be elite athletes versus someone who may not have the best genetics and may have some disadvantages, but are able to overcome it all because of mindset or work ethic? How do you think about that tension and where the future is going here?
- [38:15]
B
You know, I really think about this project they did at P3 where they took all of the NBA players they've ever assessed and had some giant machine learning project. Right. It took months of like, what are the groupings? What kinds of bodies are there? Right. And they came up with every player in the NBA fits into one of seven groups. Groups, seven types of movers, right? Seven sort of. And I presume I, I mean we, they didn't do genetic testing, but I presume there's a lot of genetics in what these groups are, right? I mean some of them are even just based on size. Right? Like tall people are, some of the groups are only tall people. Etc. But okay, so yeah, you're going to, you know, you're going to land in some of those groups and they don't all have equal chance of success in the mba, right. There are a couple groups where they just tend not to last. But okay, you know, we're all like that. We're all going to end up somewhere. I grew up with like hip, I was born with hip dysplasia. And I was like, I, that's a bummer. You know, it didn't help me. It puts me in at risk for a lot of different stuff. But interestingly, the training, the programming for all of those players is basically the same in the sense that it's. They want to move you towards this group that are called kinematic movers. And they're the ones who have the most deft kind of fluency to the extent that movement is like language. Like they have the best fluency of language. Right? And they're the ones who can jump off 1ft, 2ft, land on right foot, left foot and they can, they're not like super elite at everything, but they're neurologically sound at everything and they can kind of move through life without putting their body in extreme risk. And so that's kind of like we're all, in a way, I feel like, yeah, we're all born with different opportunities, different chances of success, but the. The way you want to move is fluidly. Just like, you know, we're all born with different English skills, but the way you want to talk is fluidly. Right. We can all work on that.
- [39:58]
A
So according to the data, what does the data say about who the best movers are in terms of professional athletes, male and female?
- [40:07]
B
Best is a tricky word. They have this category they call specimen, which are, like, just people who are outrageously long and mobile for their position. Right. And so this is like, you know, LeBron and Zion Williamson or whatever, they have these big advantages. But, you know, if you want to be not injured, it might be a little better to be less explosive and basically, you know, a smaller engine and better tires. Right. Like, might be a more useful way to go through life. So they. Even those players, they try to train them a little bit more toward being more kinematic, which is basically like having the forces travel through your body in a way that's harmonious with your body, if that makes sense. But they were. I saw so many amazing athletes there. So there's a woman named Kim, Kim Yon Count, who's like the Michael Jordan of Korean women's volleyball. I think she's 6 4. When you see her, you're just kind of blown away how tall she is. And she'd had so many injuries, and she wanted to make a comeback, I think, at 34. And when she got there, I think it's going to be about seven weeks. The trainer said to her, you're. You're going to deadlift a hundred kilograms. And she'd been a pro athlete for her whole life, and this was an amount of weight she'd never contemplated. But he had been doing this a long time, and he was kind of, like, seeing her progression, and she needed to really stabilize her hips. And this was like a kind of big challenge on a hill to, like, get her seven weeks going in the right direction. And I happened to be there the day that. Her last day, and there's NBA players working out, there's all kinds of people in the gym, and she's literally going to get in the Uber to the airport pretty soon. And he's like, all right, we got to do this 100 kilograms. And she's like, like, you know, we're doing it, like, today. Like, I didn't sleep well. You know, she's all kind of nervous, and. And then they use the trap bar, which is Makes it a little safer to deadlift that much weight. And she's first, she does 90 kg and she does it like fairly smoothly and easily. Then they put on the extra weight and it's just this moment of like she kind of pulls on it and it doesn't move at all. And he's like, oh, stop, stop, stop. Put your hips lower, do this. And then just slower than you could, pulsive as it just goes. She just like, like superwoman, you know, she just stands up with all this weight. So much weight. It's like the weight of a dolphin. I looked up. It's a weight of, it's a small cow. And this is a huge amount of weight. And she does it and then she's just like. And then she puts it down and then everybody, NBA players are running across the gym, high fiving her, hugging her. There's a little moment where she's like hugging the trainer guy. She's like a foot taller than him and, and he's like, are you crying? And they have a relationship that's like half in English, half in Korean. And she's like, no. She's like, women don't cry. And then they basically say goodbye and she's done it. And then she went back and had, I think she was MVP of the league that year. She totally rocked it and landed really well. And it was just a happy story. It's just this kind of stuff that's happening over there.
- [43:03]
A
Incredible. You know, I'm glad it's interesting you brought that up because I think there's also been a movement recently and women need to lift heavy.
- [43:10]
B
Yeah, lifting heavy is a tricky topic because you can definitely hurt yourself doing that.
- [43:13]
A
Gotta do it right.
- [43:14]
B
You gotta do it right. You need to have someone with eyes on your body who can really assess your proper form and need it to build up, you know, over a long time. Right. But yeah, there's this thing I, you know, I, I saw lifting heavy as kind of like this meathead, you know, thing like this is like the. What the dumbest people in the gym do. And it is. But among the many other benefits, one of them is when you lift heavy, it trains your brain to recruit more tissues around there. Right. So she's going to be landing from volleyball jumps all year with those same hips that were a little unstable before this. Right. And now when she lands, instead of just using the limited muscles she used to use, there's like a bigger bunch of them that are recruited to attenuate the force of landing because she recruited them with these heavy lifts.
- [43:58]
A
Do you think that as we think about our own routines, let's say I've got a resistance training routine and I've got my, you know, cardio routine. How should we think about mobility in terms of that routine? Should it be 33% each or. Or incorporated in everything we do? How do you think about that?
- [44:14]
B
I had this funny. I was playing backgammon with Marcus, and he's basically like these, you know, cardio recommendations right now. The. The government's recommendations for exercises that you basically worry about your heart, right. You. It's literally called cardio. Right? Like, that's the only recommendations we have. And he's like, they just got to go. It's just not nearly good enough. Like, we need to have hip mobility, we need to have ply metrics. We need all of these ways that keep us really moving into old age. Right. Integrated into everything. So, you know, I don't think that we're going to get enough mobility and exercise from like, a program. I think you just want to have a playful life. I think you want to say yes. And people say, hey, you want to complete pickleball? Hey, do you want to go for a hike? Hey, you want to go swimming? Like, I think you just want to be a person who says yes to all those different things because you want to speak the whole language. Right. And it's more fun that way too. Right. But yeah, I definitely, you know, one. One thing as a little clue in the book, we illustrated that they have a standard warmup that's they recommend for everyone at P3. I'm turning the book pages right now to see if I look into it. It's 13 steps, 13 different movements. And you'll see it's different than other warmups. Like, there's bouncy parts, there's heel up part, there's stuff that get your hips mobile. You're lying on the floor, like. And I. And it's a little bit of a cult thing that's happening where, um, I compete. Competed in this hyrox last summer. And beforehand I was in this little warmup area. And there were these two women. I don't know what they were, but they were doing that warmup. And I was like, I know what you guys are doing, but I think if you just integrate that as a. As a starting, just a total base layer is just like, get some motion, get some bounce, get some playfulness into how you move, then go into your. Whatever other workout would be like, you're getting a little closer to what you want.
- [45:53]
A
Well, fantastic advice. I hope everyone picks up the book ballistic. If you are working out, you need this book. I loved it. We covered a lot. Anything we didn't cover, which you want to. You want to touch on a ton.
- [46:05]
B
I can talk all day, man. I've been living in this for years. Yeah, I just like talk and talk.
- [46:11]
A
Thank you so much. The book is incredible. Anytime. We'll have you back. Thank you.
- [46:15]
B
So much fun. Thank you.