Rehabilitating Injuries and Sneaking in 'Veggies'

Yeah, man. And I've got another story from this morning. Same guy, right? So we're looking at his progress pictures or his first initial pictures. Massively overextended in the back, stomach sticking out. Guy's really lean, but looks like he has a gut because he's so jacked up. So forward hip posture. It's what I call Michael Jackson lean. So locked knees and hips are in front of the ankle. So it looks like Michael Jackson's smooth criminal. and then the ribs are posteriorly rotated and they're leaning back from the thorax. So the first thing we're going to do, we want to start working on his core and trying to get his abs stronger to pull the ribs back towards the hips and straighten out the lower back. And the same thing, he can't do deadlifts. We have him testing on deadlifts. He's like, when I deadlift, it just rips my lower back. I'm like, yeah, I can see that from your pictures. So we're going to have to address this. But the guy was also really clear. I like the way I train. I don't want to do anything different. So I'm like, okay, so we can't do the normal stuff. We're going to have to sneak in some things that are bodybuildery type stuff that he'll do until we earn his trust. And once we earn his trust, you give it four to six months, we'll earn his trust that he'll start doing some of the weird shit we need him to do to actually fix it and take it seriously. So, you know, what are we, we're looking at, you know, spinal flexion. What do we need to do? Well, we need to get into spinal flexion. How do we do that. We need to work on the obliques and need to work on the abs to, to crunch. Okay. What's a good bodybuilder movement that he won't know that we're trying to sneak rehab in. He just thinks it's his ab development movement. Let's do a kneeling cable crunch, or let's do a Swiss ball or Bosu ball crunch, something like that and get him to work on it. Cause he does like three sets of abs a week. I'm like, let's pump that up to like training it like a real muscle 10 to 12 sets or so. And then really specifically try to rotate the hips back and rotate the ribs back. So we can sneak some of that in. And then you just sprinkle it, you do what you can, like the guy's not in a massive amount of pain. It's, it's almost all basically when he lifts. So I'm like, okay, right now it's when you lift, if you keep doing this, eventually it's going to be like when you're going to the gym, then it's going to be when you get out of your chair, then it's going to be all the fucking So we'll throw in that. We try to find something that sneaks in some external rotation because he his left shoulder really internally rotated So well this is a type of guy like you not going to see a lot of bodybuilders wanting to do external rotation work So let's work on something like an L-lateral raise to external rotation or a face pull to external rotation. Those are all normal exercises. So we try to sprinkle in things that are very familiar, but then we don't tell them we're trying to fix this stuff until it starts feeling better. when he goes, oh, my left shoulder is actually getting an external rotation. It feels good. Yeah, that's that exercise. Oh, that was a rehab exercise I gave you, but I hid it inside of a bodybuilding exercise. So you just try to, I don't want to say manipulate, but that's kind of what it is. Because we gave him lower trap raises and external. There's no way he's going to fucking do that stuff. So some people will, some people won't. So you just kind of have to hide your veggies inside of a protein shake for them. It's a good analogy there. yeah like um i think like you know when personal trainers are learning maybe more so about like this side of things initially that looks like here like the big the mcgill big tree and like that's like you know just your recipe to give to somebody who has back pain and just tell them to just do that for like maybe 10 days or something like that and then come back in the gym we can get you deadlifting again but like as you said there i guess yeah look looking at number one how they are actually lifting and then as like as you're saying there from like the progress pictures like you know seeing how they're just they're just standing i guess that kind of issue michael jackson criminal physique that's a that's a very that's a very common one like i guess like the more people i've worked with over the years like there's like two big common things i see all the time when people are training is like number one they can't hinge um they just can't hinge effectively they just don't know how to use their hips it's all like lower back movement and then as well like when it comes to if they're squatting like they just have immense trouble hitting depth and so much of that comes from that type of posture where they just they don't know how to control their midsection they don't know how to obviously they've never thought about moving their being pelvis or moving their their rib cage and then once you kind of start to bring this into the equation they're like you know once you get them to learn how to actually kind of keep those those areas stacked a lot of the issues start to resolve and you know i guess it is just like one of those overlooked aspects right because i don't know why it's overlooked to be honest i guess it's it's complicated it requires a little bit more kind of like digging to get into well you get a lot you get a lot of conflicting information right so you go in the physio world and they go oh don't you don't need to worry about anterior pelvic rotation and back extension all this stuff just learn how to move correctly i'm like well it's not really that helpful like i get what you're saying with this, and I get some of it's neurological and well, most of it's neurological, but there could be things like prior acute injuries or long-term chronic injuries that are locking them into this position. It could be that something's in pain. Like they may have a disc herniation that's creating a movement to get away from that, the side of pain. It could be a lot of stuff, right? Um, but normally when I see those types of issues, you're going to see if If we're going to use like an anterior pelvic tilt or anterior pelvic rotation, you're going to see that from a standing position, they're already in some hip flexion. They just stand in hip flexion a little bit, even like five or 10 degrees, sometimes 15. That's automatically going to destroy their depth because anterior rotation drives internal rotation. If you have internal rotation and you don't have that space, when you go down to the bottom, you're going to run out of room. And so something has to rotate, but you can't rotate where the normal places are. So other things have to rotate. So you have to start to posteriorly rotate the hips early. Then that runs out, and then you have to flex the lower back in order to get posterior rotation to get the hips out of the way of the femurs. So, like, there's a lot of shit going on, but people will argue this and say static posture doesn't matter. And I'm like, of course it does. If you have a fucked up static posture, it's not going to get any better when you get under a bar, right? So if someone can't fully extend the hips and they're locked in some slight hip flexion, putting a bar on your back is not going to reinforce extension. It's probably going to push them forward anteriorly and create more flexion, which is going to fuck up their depth. So we're going to have to massively modify the movement to allow them to get their femurs out of the way. Or we're going to have to add a heel elevation. We're going to have to modify something. Or we can do all that and we can try to fix it. Yeah. but people will argue with this stuff left and right and like i'm telling you because i've seen it a bazillion times you know if you if your static posture is everything else is going to get there's your dynamic posture is going to be too unless you're an athlete because then you athletes are master compensators and they're resilient in compensations but normal people aren yeah it like i guess a lot of people just don have awareness of like what what their resting posture is resting posture is and i guess like some of it is can also be down to you know how people train or or lack of training as well like you know like you know again you're kind of sitting at a desk all day and you're just like betting to your laptop like that like you stay in that position for long enough like you know you will kind of develop a more kind of like a wrestling posture like that because like something that is very familiar to to your body so you know probably just kind of kind of get and get stuck in in that position and think that as well like you know if you're the classic guy who just wants to come into the gym and like you know and get in shape a lot of guys if they don't have like any kind of guidance coming into it what's their kind of first thing they're going to be doing something like this all day and they're like okay i'm going to go in and do chest i'm going to do bench press and they they're just like in this like four position and they don't know how to like retract your shoulder blades or anything like that and all of a sudden they're just like stuck in that position they're training that position they're spending that entire day in the position and all the while their their back muscles are so underdeveloped that's insane and across cross transfers to somebody other uh like exercise too like so if you have that like kind of forward kind of posture i guess like getting under back to squat it's gonna be pretty damn difficult you know you're gonna be you're you're well you're gonna have a hard time hitting that but like that's at least two problems i think yeah like you said even getting under the bar like even grabbing the bar, trying to get an abduction, external rotation, grab the bar. If you're forward, you lose all that. Like if you push your shoulders forward and you try to abduct the shoulder, you're going to feel impingement. If you try to go into shoulder flexion, you're going to feel impingement. So it's like we, if, but your brain is, your brain is really intelligent about this as far as like saving energy. It wants to save as much energy as possible. So the position you're in most of the time, it's going to start creating link tension issues. It's going to create different patterns that hold you in that position because it doesn't want to spend calories holding that. So it creates these resting postures. Then when you try to take that resting posture and make it active, you start losing joint range of range of mobility and you start losing flexibility. And then it gets really difficult to get in the positions you need to get into without heavily modifying something. But, you know, people, it's difficult to get people, at least like I train mostly coaches, like my roster is probably 85, 90% coaches and 10% gen pop. It's way easier to get the gen pop people to do the things they need to do than to get the coaches to do it because the coaches want to go in there and smash themselves. And the gym pop people don't know any better. So everything's really hard for them. So like, Oh, this is dinky exercise is really fucking hard. And I just write it in the program and I'm like, cool. And then once we get, once we clear everything, we'll start putting bigger shit in and removing all that stuff but it's training coaches as fuck i went into it thinking it was going to be really easy i can training coaches way harder than training normal people yeah well like i i even i even know myself like anytime i like i usually work i usually work with a coach and i always have to like try to bite my tongue and just try to act as if i don't know anything when i'm following on the following program because you know you get to you get to a certain level where you've been working in the industry for a long time just like spend a decent amount of like money on education you know you know your stuff and then you're like why are you writing it like this why are you putting the rep range like this why why are you structuring like the kind of training sequence like this and like just like just shut up you're paying this person so that they can guide you towards somewhere where you want to go if you just continue to do things the way that you've been doing them or the way that things make sense to you you may not get there because that may be what you've been doing to get where you are right now where you need a coach well look i don't think it's a bad thing to question them because your coach should be able to justify everything they do if i have a client that says why are we doing this i'll give them a full explanation of why now if i give you that explanation and then you start substituting exercises or doing your own thing or you complain about the exercise because i don't feel the muscle working and i'm like this isn't a muscle centric movement this is a fix your fucking shoulder movement right so it's like you should have the you should have the luxury of being able to ask for an explanation but now you have to you have to you have to dig deep and go does that explanation make sense is there something that that this person knows that i don't okay now i'm going to investigate that like oh shit that makes a lot of sense i'll just shut up and try it oh yeah for sure like that thing you have the justification there is important of like you know even when i'm when i'm writing a program and after i finish writing the program i'm like i have to like look back and be like okay i have to like i'll give myself a reason why i'm after right reference like this you know especially like like you know writing a parallelist program like you know it's so specific towards like you know going through like a prep phase where you're going into a peak and stuff like that and it very much has to make sense towards getting on the platform on that day to peak on time but like

I think for me where it occurs for me not like maybe not questioning my coach it's not that I don't question the coach I'm not saying that I'm more so saying uh questioning at the point or at the point of detriment right so like again like you'll be the case where like you're kind of getting the justification but you're like ah well that justification doesn't make sense to me or I've read this so I'm just going to continue doing this and maybe then you don't tell them And I think sometimes like, you know, I coach these coaches too, and you know, sometimes they can be kind of bottlenecks that you kind of run into is like, you know, you learn something new and anytime we learn something new, especially when like, you know, here, here in a podcast, I think a lot of us can fail to recognize that we have very much now a surface level understanding of a topic. And we don't understand how maybe this specific piece of information fits into the whole piece of the puzzle. And that's when it becomes like, okay, we need to know more before we start to implement it versus we implement it now. And then this has a cascading effect across everything else. Yeah. And look, that's the thing. It's like, I like chess. I play chess. I'm not that great. But I watch chess games and I watch people talk about it. And it's like when you look at someone that's a beginner, they go one movement at a time. But then when you get really advanced, you're seeing multiple movements in the cascade of what's going to happen. So program design should be like that, right? So it's like, okay, if I move this piece here, what are the dangers? And then where can I attack or where can I defend? So you're always making these calculations, trying to see four or five steps ahead. So like cases, you might be doing a movement that doesn't make sense right now, but it's going to make sense like six months from now. And you've got to have that trust to be able to go, okay, all right, I see where we're going with this progression and what it's supposed to do. but it can be difficult because you're like well i would have fixed it this other way but we're a lot of times our own worst assessors because somebody else is it definitely doesn't have the blinders on that we see with ourselves and they can be a little bit more honest with a critique of hey this is fucked and you need to do these like 10 things in this sequence to fix this yeah yeah definitely having the objective either to kind of tell you what you need to hear versus just like you know i guess coddling to all your wants and desires um i guess like a question for you here because they want to kind of move on to the cardio stuff is like um what we say are some underrated movements that people could do it incorporating into into the program all right that you don't really see people doing within the gym but maybe have a decent proportion of your clients having done that movement at some point i mean i this is going to sound weird but i get my clients to do a lot of weightlifting movements a lot of olympic weightlifting movements and not that they're going to do the full movements but we do a lot of things like tall muscle snatches a lot of cuban presses cuban rotations um you know clean rotation stuff like that and i find those really helpful i use a lot of gymnastic stuff too like dislocates and various weighted shoulder extension shoulder flexion stuff so but like my demo most of my demographic i don't really train a lot of bodybuilders anymore um because i i'm a problem solver and with bodybuilding there's not really that many problems to solve unless there's like an injury or niggle or something like that because most of it's pretty straightforward like add tension eat eat a lot sleep a lot okay hey, starve yourself, keep lifting, you know, manage your fatigue and tension. But like with Gen Pop, they have so many different issues from being sedentary and messing themselves up or lifting improperly and messing themselves up. So there's a lot more mental masturbation and gymnastics that have to go into play. So I use a lot of stuff that I learned from Coach Christopher Sommer, gymnastic bodies. We use a lot of stretching in the workout, which people tell you is a no-no. But like I said, sometimes that's the way to get people into position. I do Olympic weightlifting, so I have them do some of those. So because I see the difference that makes with things like shoulder function and even like deadlifting, like most people will do conventional deadlift or they'll do what they think is conventional. But it's really like a round back deadlift from the floor. They're doing like a round back Romanian from the floor. but I don't see a lot of people except for Olympic lifters still doing a clean deadlift and a snatch deadlift where it's kind of a lower hip. And I find for a lot of back issues that fixes, if you, if you put your ego to the side, reduce the weight and learn how to clean and snatch deadlift properly, that fixes a lot of fucking back problems. But the issue is a lot of people want to add more weight to the bar, add more weight to the bar, even when it doesn't really make sense for their goals. they just trying to see how much they can lift They end up biasing the hamstrings They don have good strong hips and they end up with FAIs or anterior impingement in their hips They end up with lower back issues. They end up with neck issues and upper back stuff. So like I use a lot of old school shit that you wouldn't really see because a lot of the younger trainers don't study physical culture history. There's a lot of really cool older movements that are really good that, yeah you don't really see anymore yeah that speaks to experience of the game i'm being i'm being a student of the game because i could definitely do a kind of a looking into more of that stuff so i might kind of pick your brain after uh we finish up the call for some resources which i could look into it's it's funny because like there's a lot of movements that people they'll they'll they're doing right now and they'll they'll they'll think that they made up a movement and they'll put their name they'll attach their name to it or whatever and then I'll go pull out like Bill Pearl's Keys to the Inner Universe, which has a massive amount of exercise in it. It's an old school book. And I'll open it up and I'll find the exercise they're doing. I'm like, hey, we've had this exercise for fucking 40 years. Like, I don't know why it's new now. But there's a lot of stuff. That's an excellent book. If any coaches, Bill Pearl's Keys to the Inner Universe. That's an excellent book and has tons of old school exercises in it. Yeah. again it's one of those things when you exist in the bodybuilding world the powerlifting world you don't hear too much about like other kind of ways and like even something you mentioned there like you know the stretching uh being bad for performance or stuff like that like i think like there is a couple of there's a couple of studies god maybe maybe like up to 10 years ago now which they did very much like extreme stretching so like you know you're you're having people stretch for like 60 seconds up to like three minutes and that's just not how most people stretch you know most people stretching are already going to go up to 30 seconds or something like that especially if they're looking to like improve range of motion on an exercise or at a joint so you know naturally enough you hold any type of stretch for like 60 to 60 seconds three minutes you probably will feel as if you can't produce as much and that's the key to back lower structural balance because the purpose is to try to inhibit the muscle so it allows you to get in a better position but then if you want to look at producing power probably not a good idea because in a lot of those studies they did a long stretch on like quads and hip flexors and then they would immediately do a vertical jump of course power but what they mainly saw was it reduced power production not really strength so if you did and there's an easy way to get around that anyway. So if you did a, if you did some static stretching or I prefer PNF stretching because you get an immediate, uh, improvement in range of motion. So often I'll blend those two together depending on what I'm doing. So we might do, uh, three to five, uh, PNF stretches to see how far we can get range of motion. We might hold it for a static stretch just to kind of sink it in and then we'll go train. Uh, but you can easily get over that by just following it up with some ballistic or dynamic stretching right so just let's say you stretched out your hip flexors and your quads like a couch stretch and the kneeling hip flexor stretch go do some leg swings it'll ramp your nervous system back up and you're probably not going to see any that any noticeable reduction and most people training aren't strong enough to see a reduction anyways yeah very true you think mary muff mary muffin top's not going to notice a two kilo difference on her fucking squat like it's not gonna happen nor will she really care i guess if you're an elite level powerlifter i wouldn't do a fucking bickram yoga class and then go try to squat and deadlift yeah yeah i think like that probably some of the only people on the planet who probably would give a shit about not being able to lift at the two the extra two and a half kilos are probably powerlifters and they would they would make a 2200 character instagram post after explaining all the reasons why uh they're way down the thing all right so i want to kind of move with the cardio um because again this is you know i think cardio is getting a lot pop more popular now i don't know if high rocks is a thing in australia but it's it's getting there yeah yeah remember i go to europe a lot so i've got i know a lot about high rocks now yeah so like high rocks is like you know getting huge now and i think i i think it obviously has a lower barrier to entry than like crossfit did because like a lot of people just for probably themselves up from doing uh the olympic lifts not being taught correctly how to do them uh whereas obviously hierarchy a lot more kind of like you know just in general cardio it's kind of like a it's kind of like a circuit class that's like you know designed to be pretty like to be a lot harder more advanced but i think as there's a lot more people are getting into cardio uh probably still still the powerlifting world definitely you know that anything over eight reps i guess and then bodybuilding you know bodybuilders i think can be quite good for cardio but you know for for the average person you know like how would they uh start to kind of factor cardio into their week because i think i think as you're kind of keeping on the kind of health and longevity aspect like you know we probably should have a balance of cardiovascular work as well as strength training work because you know we need a heart we need a brain and a heart health and a set of a function like that kind of dictates a lot of the outcomes that we're gonna get from other other kind of endeavors they they always say you know cardio will kill your gains but you know what kills your gains really fast cardiovascular disease that really kills your gain so you that's something to think about and it's really it's all about the dose right dose makes the poison so and if if you're looking at like general health and you're going to prioritize, right? If you have high blood pressure, high resting heart rate, really shitty HRV, shitty blood pressure, you know, it's probably the car, cardio, especially lists and miss is probably your easiest, best low hanging fruit to do. So it's like, maybe you prioritize health first and, you know, reduce your weightlifting down to minimal effective dose, get your four to six sets on each body part per week or each movement, and then hammer the cardio and get your metrics in order. But metrics are usually what we're going to define. Firstly, for general health, it would be metrics. So it would be resting heart rate, blood pressure. I would even use sleep scores because what I noticed when I give people, when I first started prescribing cardio, you know, I come from a Polycom background, so like cardio was a Spanish for no-no. But it's like I tried to get all these guys to do cardio and they wouldn't do it, but they had all these issues like testosterone issues, libido issues, no energy issues, and they were all doing the same thing, three-to-one wave loading and hit sprints twice a week. I'm like, okay, well, that's not really working out for you right now, so why don't we try something different? Why don't we go back to, like, bro bodybuilding stuff and maybe do some cardio and see what happens? And they all had a complete 180 turnaround, and they started becoming a blues. This was over, like, 11 years ago when cardio was still, like, a no-no. But nowadays people are starting to do more, and people are getting the high rocks. But I think people started doing started getting the hybrid athlete type stuff earlier than that, like with like Alex Vieta and some of the other guys who run ultras and run marathons and do cycling. But they also can deadlift 600 pounds, you know. So a lot of these guys show that you can still be really strong and massive and you can still work on cardio as long as you program it correctly. But when you look at bodybuilding, bodybuilders will generally use it as a caloric funnel. I want to do more cardio so I don't have to starve myself as much. And then some people will actually need cardio to get lean like girls. A lot of girls like small women. There's this how much you're going to cut out of your diet. You can only cut so much out until cardio makes more more sense. Right. Or people that don't want to make a massive deficit, then they can use cardio as part of that deficit. As long as you don't compensate with the food and eat those calories back. and as long as you have the time for it because the problem with cardio is it's a time vampire. But I always prioritize it with our clients when they come in. We'll run them through a VO2 max test. We call it the junkyard dog VO2 max test. It's just a 12-minute cardiac output test, and we do some calculations to get a pretty good theoretical VO2 max. We'll also look at some of the numbers that can give us an idea of whether they're prioritizing more anaerobic or aerobic pathways so then we can dial in the cardio that way because some people don't actually need anaerobic. in order to get the aerobic system up. Most people need to focus on the aerobic stuff first. If we have a massively overweight client, we can't put them in HIIT intervals. Even though HIIT intervals are good, they can barely walk without huffing and puffing and having joint pain. So it's like we have to find the activities. So those are some of the decisions I'm thinking about, the questions I'm thinking about when I give them cardiovascular work. And we're always thinking adaptation first, caloric funnel secondarily to that. We should never just use cardio as a caloric funnel. It should be at least not initially. Initially, it's like, okay, do we need some cardiovascular adaptations? If so, how do we do that? We give them cardiovascular prescription. Later, like, especially for a bodybuilder, we might be ramping up cardio to act as that caloric funnel. But most people just use that as a caloric funnel full stop. And they don't think about the fact that there's all these really cool things that are happening physiologically by getting in better shape and pumping up your VO2 max. I guess I want to circle back to kind of two things there, right? So you talked about the metrics, likes of risk and outrate, blood pressure, sleep scores, HRV. What would be some kind of good targets for people to aim for on those And then the following question after that is like when you talk about cardiovascular adaptations like what what are these adaptations like what's happening that's like maybe like on a cellular level or like you know to your heart brain okay these kind of things all right so first let's talk about like the numbers right so it's pretty generally accepted now 120 over 80 for your blood pressure if you're below that you don't want be massively below that, but that's kind of a good set point. So it's like, I hate to say like the golden number, the golden number, at least based on the research I've seen is, uh, one, one, I think it's one 15 over 75 or something over 70. That's a pretty good, but if you can get below one 20 over 80, you're pretty sweet with that. You don't want to get too low. So like there are people that will come in that have really low blood pressure, especially like women, especially like sedentary women that okay they probably the aerobic might not be great because the blood pressure is always too low so we might actually use something like strong man or strong woman work up front like some type of loaded carries prowler pushes you know pulls and we'll use weight lifting to bring their blood pressure back up to try to normalize that plus nutritional stuff but um 120 over 80 is what you're looking at then with resting heart rate i like it to be in the fifties. If we can get it in the, if we can get at least under 62, I'm pretty happy with that. The literature, the best literature I've found says that optimal heart rate for people in shape is 45. Now that is not an easy number to hit. Um, that takes a tremendous way more work than most normal people are going to want to do. Um, and then the thing is like you're prioritizing most people, the priority probably should be lifting weights with cardio as I got a side health hustle. So to do the amount of cardio and stress reduction or stress management you would need to get your heart rate to 45, it's just not practical, even though that seems to be optimal for longevity, at least for what we know right now. But I've seen usually the best, easiest way, if you can get under 62, preferably in the high 50s, you're doing really well. And man, people sleep better that way. They sleep like champions. They have way less stress. They have more resilience to stress. If they have a stress episode, they don't tend to skyrocket their blood pressure, their heart rate from that. HRV can be finicky because it depends on like what what measuring scoring system and what technology you're using. So I don't really use HRV that much anymore just because you don't know what people are using. You're using an Apple watch, using a lead HRV, using a Garmin Fitbit. It can be all over the place. If people have those, then I'll work with that. But each of those systems have slightly different numbers you're looking at. But the easiest ones to understand is resting heart rate and blood pressure. That's super easy to understand, right?