Posture to Performance

24,023 words · 21 chapters

CHAPTER 01

Introduction and Guest Background

CHAPTER 02

Personal Development and Fiction Reading

So you don't want to do the regular intro for this. So I'm going to throw the question at you and just start speaking up offline. I recently had Rob McGeary on the podcast talking about development and he was talking about the benefits of no fap. You said before we got into this that you were pro-fat. Now, is there a scientific reasoning behind this, or is this just really weird territory to start the episode on? No, no, this is fine. You know, it's like when I think personal development, I think about going to a seminar and learning how to speak better, or learning how to read faster, or be more organized. I don't understand where your penis comes into this equation. Like, you know what? I decided I wanted to be a better person, so I stop touching my penis like what what I don't get that so uh I'm I'm pro-fap I mean I've that's something I've always done even if I you know I'm married now I still fap so sometimes I fap three times a day even when I'm getting plenty of sex it's just I think that's a common man thing to do and maybe a woman thing to do as well I don't know because I don't have a vagina so I don't know if I don't know how many times girls do that so yeah I mean do you find like you know if you have you done enough research on this yourself to realize that performance benefits from the times where you fat more and fat less like strength ratios like the amount of time no i mean i have i have enough uh enough uh time on my hands looking at nutrition and exercise physiology and all that stuff it's like i wonder what would happen if i stopped jacking off for 30 days maybe i get like 0.3 kilos on my bench yeah not worth it so so we're like if you're going into sort of like the the personal development routes and finding out rather than looking at who Luke was because most people yeah you know you've done this a thousand times going from who Luke's becoming what's your go-to things for like personal development other than just studying a lot of nutrition stuff no no look that's a that's a good question I'll tell you my secret I read a lot of fantasy genre books. I find that fantasy and sci-fi, the nerds and the geeks have this shit all sorted out. So I can always find something about leadership or honor and loyalty and all that stuff. And even like, you know, organization that if you read the books with an open mind, you'll see a lot of philosophy. You'll see a lot of leadership quality stuff. For instance, Dune, if you've ever read Dune, tons of leadership value in that book. If you've ever read one of my favorite Sword of Truth series, there's a lot of philosophy on there. A lot of kind of anti-altruistic, take care of yourself before you take care of other people types of philosophy there. Kind of like your pave your own way type of stuff. So that's the type of stuff that I look for. And I've tried the other books. I don't know if I can... You go to the self-development section and there a bazillion ones by a bunch of losers who have never done anything themselves And now they trying to tell you how to do that shit And I find that they were just worthless and I found everything I needed to in fiction Yeah I mean I I I never been a a big reader It's something I feel like I should do because you see a lot of people going into, there's a common trend of people that's successful in business or anything, whether they're often reading fiction becomes important part of like, just, you know, improving. You mentioned things about proving themselves as a person, but also improve themselves as a storyteller and communication skills and and things like that from it. I mean, like you've often said, like before turning this into a personal therapy session, but the, at your ADHD, do you find it's been a tough ride to get into reading, being able to focus on something like that? Because I'm on the verge of going and finding out I have adult onset ADHD. And one of the things I've always struggled with is reading. So how have you gotten into that considering, you know, like the struggles that may have come from having that diagnosis? You know, I think a lot of the issues with ADD, well, there's some inherent benefits having ADD. When you're passionate about something, you can get ridiculously hyper-focused. Bonds could be going off and you wouldn't even notice. So there's some also negatives. You've got a lot of issues with impulse control. And before I take my medication in the morning, I'm very manic. And my wife can tell when I haven't taken it. She's like, have you taken your meds? I'm like, no, not yet. Oh, let's go do something fun. She's like, take your meds. I'm like, okay. And then two hours later, I'm at my computer, like, okay, I've got focus. I can do this now. Cool. But I think if you, cause I mean, I've got, I'm 43, right? So I've had 43 years to learn how to channel this. And so a lot of it is being able to chant it into something you're passionate about, which happens to be my career path. So it's nothing for me to sit here and do computer work for 12 hours a day or grab a book and study for 12 hours because I can get so focused into it. The problem is I forget to eat. I forget to poop. I forget to pee. I forget to do everything else, but I will just get hard out into that subject. So yeah, it's never been a hard thing for me to do to focus on my studies. It's a hard thing for me to do to stay in my workflow if someone derails me from that so if i get distracted it's a 45 minute kind of desk kind of pathway of getting back to whatever i was doing before so that's the biggest thing is getting getting getting derailed from other with other people do you like do you find i i often find with the you know with my focus is that i can either be as you say it's like you know i could be up at 4am i haven't looked away from my laptop for 16 hours and i've gotten tons of stuff done or i'll sit in front of the most using program design as an example the most basic gbc program which are written for 10 years and just feel this inability like there's a wooden bridge with slats missing like you mentioned like when you get distracted it's difficult to come back into it like

CHAPTER 03

Daily Routine and Client Management

do you have a sort of routine when it comes to your studies that allows you now to stay focused is there certain things you do to make sure you eliminate those distractions that can get into that zone the biggest thing is stay away from people so i don't leave my house i just stay in my area and zoe never bothers me when i'm kind of doing that stuff but yeah that's the thing i it's very difficult to have strategies like that because you literally are like oh there's a square loaf i'll just go over here and do this and then you know two hours later you're like oh shit i was supposed to finish that and then it's like oh cool i've got my rubik's cube here i'm gonna play with that a little bit and then it's like two hours later i'm like oh fuck i haven't even gotten restarted on what I was supposed to. So a lot of it is just trying to stay organized, which is difficult for some of the ADD. You need lists and then you lose your list. So you have like 50 lists and then you have to try to automate it and make them autonomous by putting it in a computer. And then there's all kinds of shit that goes wrong. So a lot of it is just building a lot of habits to turn this into rituals. So when I get up for work, I do the same shit every day. I sit in front of my computer and I bring a chronometer and I go through all of my clients and I look at what they've averaged out over the last 7, 14, 21, 28 days of food. And I look at how their weights average. And then I make notes on who I need to talk to and what I need to say to them. And then I go through my other coaches. So anybody that's kind of a problem client or having problems, I'll go through theirs and see how they're doing. then I can email my coaches second thing I do is go straight into true coach and I look at any videos I need to look at and critique their technique and then I see if there's any messages and then I'm done like I can three or four hours first thing in the morning I'm done with all that and then I can go into now I can study and research and write and do that type of thing

CHAPTER 04

Presentation Style and Authenticity

do you feel like having like having energies helped you be a better a better presenter like that little bit of like, because often going into like, we obviously love it, but you've got people coming in and getting overwhelmed getting you know with the sort of like the deep material And often you been known in the industry for a lot of it being someone that makes all this stuff quite fun when a lot of a lot of educators can be making it very it this this rep scheme it very almost dead pan do you feel like that's helped you have like come like oh yeah out there personality yeah and it does because it gives me a a position where i can be myself and i could be a maniac so So it's funny because when I stand up and I present, there's some people that think, oh, that's an act. Like, he doesn't really act like that. I'm like, no, this is people who know me and talk to me outside of me speaking and lecturing. They go, no, that's how he talks. Like, he cusses that much and he says that much inappropriate shit. Like, that's him. I don't put on any fronts. But that being said, I do always, when I get up to talk, I want it to be entertaining. I want it to feel like a performance. Like I want you to feel like you've come to a show. And I think that's what's missing from a lot of guys. They just don't, they've got the knowledge, but they don't know how to turn it into something fun. Like you would get dressed up to and go have dinner and then hear this person speak. So that if you just come in and hear this sciencey shit and it's super dry, like go to college for that because that's really easy. But if they come into me, I want to make sure that they're getting the most that they can get out of it, which is not just the information, how to apply it, but also having a good fucking time and also being highly offended. Yeah, I think this, you know, maybe not to the same level, but certainly this was my own experience, like training coaches in particular, but even training clients. I feel that the pros and cons of being like this is I've managed to put my foot in my mouth a lot. I've got myself in a lot of trouble, especially where I used to work, because, you know, free speech isn't common. But like, see, just like that. But I've also managed to, I've got this thing where people, and I suppose one of you have the same thing, where people end up trusting you because you're willing just to speak your mind and a little bit of verbal diarrhea. You know when you're having a conversation with someone, they're genuine. And I find there's nothing worse than having a conversation when you know, you can just see the cogs turning. And I'm just like, I don't want to trust you. Do you feel that's helped? Because you've built a very, I would say cult following, although it's getting more mainstream by the day, but like, you know, cult following in the industry as being one of the guys to go to. Do you feel like that helps out a lot? Oh, let's not use that word cult. Let's see it. Let's leave cult and like do shit. I'm using it as a positive for a change. Yeah. Let's just say we've built an interest in what we do. That sounds better, right? Yeah. You know, I think,

CHAPTER 05

Humility and Expertise in Coaching

I think people appreciate when you're genuine and they can, And people are attracted that other people are genuine and aren't trying to hide things. Right. And there's a lot of people in our industry that they do. They're very dogmatic in what they do. Very myopic. They're very black and white, you know, do this, not that. But that's not how this stuff works. And there's not enough people that are standing up there that will harness humility and be genuine. So if someone asks me something, I don't know. I'll just tell them I don't know. I don't know, but I'll try to find out for you. And if I can't, I'll find who can and I'll send them your way. But there's a lot of guys who they want to be this pseudo expert and they'll just answer questions by pulling shit out of their ass. And then you hear this and you go, but that's not correct. That's not even close. But they're so convincing in the way they say it that everyone just follows. And then it gets repeated in the industry and it makes the industry a worse place. I think more people need to just be comfortable saying, look, I don't have all the answers. I don't know. That's outside of my scope of expertise and my scope of knowledge or whatever. But I do know a few guys who might know. Let me ask them and then let me get back to you. And, you know, I suppose those people are thinking that if they don't know the answer to something, they're not as much an expert. I don't know the answer. I think it probably hinders them because like you saying, I don't know, but I'll find out. Now leads you down to meet someone, improve your network or someone that could educate you in helping you have that answer. like I know like part of the reasons why I wanted to do this for so many years is it's just almost being able to chat to really interesting people that are smarter than me in their field and it's that often like your own your own arrogance and pride will actually stop you going because it's that it's the ability to find like you know people like yourself and all the people I've had on this podcast is like I've taught me so much through the years this is not about me you know

CHAPTER 06

The Coach as a Guide

I remember with the one had Andrew Coates on, he was saying that, you know, talk about storytelling. He was like, if this was a Harry Potter movie, the coach's job is to be Dumbledore. Not to be Harry, not to be the star. I love I absolutely love that. Yeah Yeah I like that That good That good And I have to talk to him about that because he needs to explain that to me more because that good Yeah Yeah And you talked like and it it was a really interesting conversation because every story has to going back to the fiction literature, every story is that sort of same thing. There's a guide, there's a hero, and like, you know, and they all go through a very, very similar path. And it's quite interesting when you draw parallels to this. Again, someone else is well-read. This is my wake-up call to start reading more fiction, I think, this episode. Yeah, I think, I mean, you've heard me say this in like program design and foundations and stuff. You have to look at this. If we go back to storytelling, you know, you're hired by the client to help them write a book. So essentially, you're the editor, right? So you're going to lay out the outline of how this needs to go. We need a table of contents. Then we're going to need a chapter one that opens and everything. And then we also need, we need to go look at the end. So how do you write a proper program? Well, you have to look at the end and work your way back to where you're beginning. So it's a lot like that. But ultimately, the client has to actually write the book. They have to actually put the words on the paper. And it's your job to just edit things and correct things and also to guide them towards that end conclusion. Yeah, I think that's a good way of saying it, like help them write a book. Because I think there's a lot of, going back to dogmatic things, when people look at sort programs on with people it's almost very much uh you know it's it's do this do this and like they have this idea in their head of where they want to be and if the client doesn't necessarily agree to that you've i i always reference you with it um where people say like i i want to lose a couple of pounds and just like throw them in the squat rack and make them get on stage you know it's yeah you know like the more i the years i have in this the more conversation in terms of my clients becomes so much more important it's like i'm gonna let you dictate this story and i'll just i'll just go yeah yeah yeah

CHAPTER 07

Evolution of Coaching Philosophy

i mean it's the thing like a client comes to you and and you've heard me say this before when i first started out first started out and a girl walks in she's like oh i just want to lose like you know five pounds and i'm looking at her like okay six months i'll have you on stage bikini show and then it's going to be ifbb we'll do nationals and we're going to go pro like that was going on in my head. And that's not what they were asking me for. They only wanted to legit lose five pounds. And that's all that they cared about. And I, that was back in the day when I'd be like, well, let me explain to you the difference between losing weight and losing fat. And I was just this pompous little shit. Like most guys, when they first come into the training thing before, before they have enough experience to understand that you're saying the wrong things and you got You're focusing on the wrong things and you and your client aren't matching up with what they're actually asking you to do. And, you know, you can only get that with experience. You can't read about that in a book. You can hear someone say it, but ultimately you have to basically go through a dozen clients and be like, okay, why do I keep losing clients? Maybe I'm not listening to them. Maybe I'm telling them too much of where they want to go instead of, you know, finding out actually where they want to go. super common thing for uh coaches to do it's a huge mistake as well but we've all done it you know same with the guys you know yeah and i i also think as well like you you might find some of these people not that you would have necessarily gone and wanted the goals you set for them initially but it was that hardwire approach but a lot of that they're they're often guarded by um insecurities not caught up in the gym you know like not sure what they can achieve and you might find if you like that person who they go to another coach that listens to them that asks questions you know that finds out a little bit more about them and then just thinks okay let's lose that first five pounds they may be 20 pounds down in six months they may be a person who's sure maybe i could do like a stage show like i remember when i first started i was very dogmatic about exercise classes it's like you know what the fuck you're doing in the zumba some of the sack of shit like you know you should be doing hardcore weight training i'm just like this guy's like 140 kilos with bad knees i'm just like come on he maybe just wants to dance like yeah yeah yeah you know um i remember doing aqua aerobics have you ever done aqua aerobics no is that where you're flipping around on silks and shit no no that i know that's aerial yoga i've not done that but yeah aqua aerobics is when you're in the swimming pool oh yeah aqua aqua water okay got it yeah like that that one moment might change my thought about exercise classes in my career those old days just like they blew me out of the water doing aerobic stuff i was i'm not judging any class ever again yeah well look i mean you know you know my you know my background you know who you I've had many mentors, but one of my main mentors, massively anti-aerobic, anti-carb, anti all this stuff. And that that shaped me initially until, you know, until later when I kind of broke out of that and started getting into the textbook.

CHAPTER 08

Shifting Away from Dogmatic Beliefs

so what's like obviously you've mentioned and you know we know about the cardio thing and things like this but what's like Is there any other big dogmatic beliefs that you've held in the industry that you've had massively turned around in the last few years? Man, a lot. Not in the last few years, but probably about 10 years ago, things started to change. And one of them was the low-carb versus high-carb thing. And I was massively low-carb. Not keto, but modified low-carb, that type of thing. paleo-ish, but not really paleo because I feel like that's pretty silly. I'm not dressing up like a caveman and getting my spear and running into the grocery store, like crawling through the floor at Tesco's, coming up to the fucking beef section and spearing some fucking beef and then making a fire in the middle of the grocery store, right? But the type of thing, right? Meat, veg, meat, veg. I was big into that. And I still am for me. But then I got to where I'm like, okay, I need to be giving people what's good for them. And so for some people that might be high carb, low fat, some people that may be high fat, low carb. Um, so I had to change the way I looked at, at diet diet because I was so far into that one, um, one section of it. And, um, I realized that this stuff has to be basically prescribed for lack of a better word for the specific individual for their personal chemistry, but also what they can actually accomplish, you know, what they can actually be compliant on. So that nutrition was a big one for me Yeah A hundred percent but I still eat a very high protein um low to moderate carb and low to moderate fat And I feel that the best for me but that not for everybody But I do find that that works really well for a lot of people But I got people who eat 70 carbs like 20 protein 10 fat and they just kill it, you know? Apologies for the child dying in the background there for during the end of that last question. Don't know what happened out there. Probably was realizing that she could actually eat carbs the first time in, you know, nine years. Probably. So, I mean, yeah, I think that's an interesting one with like nutrition obviously like we all know how well studied you are and like how you're you know learning more and more about what's optimal in terms of dieting for the individual and how to change certain things

CHAPTER 09

Nutrition Strategies and Client Compliance

do you feel that your like your approach nutrition has become more flexible or less flexible as you started to learn more about what you're doing it's i feel like it's gotten more flexible as far as looking at a broad range of diets it has gotten a bit less flexible with what I want my clients to do, at least initially, because after training as many people as I have, especially with nutritional coaching, there's a lot of times where people just don't need a flexible fucking approach. Most people, if you give them a flexible approach, they'll be too flexible. So I personally would rather give them a semi-rigid, semi-static template, at least in the first few weeks. I prefer them to weigh and measure and track just to give them an idea of how many calories are actually food because they have no idea the general population have such low nutritional literacy that they go i don't want to track i don't want to check and this is even coaches too we get all the coaches to track and we had a coach the other day who ate a pizza hut pizza and he goes there's no way that there's that many calories that there's no way there's no there's no way there's that much fat in cars like dude it's a fucking pizza hut pizza it's like a deep dish pizza hut pizza yes there's like 4 000 fucking calories now how are you a coach and you don't know that like i don't understand this but they never know until they actually track things so we get people to track and they're like oh i do it really good monday through friday and then and then there's their booze on the weekend holy shit 4 000 calories of booze you're like yeah so so the reader's digest version it's become flexibly inflexible. So the way I look at it is I look at it from an area of those four levels of competence, right? So I've got subconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and then subconscious competence. And I look at it as a, this is going to sound horrible to anybody who listens. If one of my clients is listening to this, I apologize. It's like training a dog. When you get a puppy, you give it a real fucking short leash, and you got a prong collar on. And anytime it gets out of the way, you're like, pow! And you just fucking snap that prong collar, and it gets the puppy back in line. So in the early stages, you kind of have to be like that with your clients, because they just don't know any better. And then when they move to the next level, now you can take the prong collar off, but you still got a pretty short leash. And now you can just kind of tug them and guide them, and then they get to the next level and you give them a little bit more leash a little bit more leash and eventually you can take the leash off but you have to train clients the same way you would train a puppy like that is that you know they will be the worst what's the thing they'll be their own worst enemies because they just don't have enough information or knowledge to make the right decisions and that's our job to teach them how to do that and create structure there's just so many so many things i i like and we've just said that

CHAPTER 10

The Importance of Food Tracking

i'm so glad you talked about the the structure things from your plans um because i suppose like coach like the talk about the coach is not tracking it's almost it's more in probably more in denial i always when i look at tracking who dies now i go right is there something i'm i'm very i'm aware whenever i start dieting start tracking stuff of my my habits and the things i want to do whether i do it or not because if i do it i know my clients will do it so like i would things a couple things i would do so i used to have these last i was like these dairy like dairy to um blue cheese triangles like 20 calories a pop and it was just like a couple of them would just get me through the meal i wouldn't track it's 40 calories yeah but it's what a client would do with a cookie oh it's only small yeah and it's 200 300 calories four five six seven times a week and or i remember going to a restaurant once and really wanting the spare ribs and it's my mini diets that always that always show me these things my proper diets like tunnel vision i'm in but if it's like yeah mini diet i've got no goal for it doesn't really matter. This is where I was like, I looked through my fitness pal, like scrolling up, like which spare ribs is the best. I will take an hour of need. It's not the 4,000 calorie, but definitely that 400 calorie. Like no fucking way that that is the case That when I started to notice more things in my food clients food diets Like what a couple couple things I remember was 13 and a half cashew nuts like who breaks a half yeah yeah like precise or they've just gone that's about right you know or they were like yeah one of them was a bit smaller than the others so we just said 0.6 0.7 I don't know um one ounces of steak one ounces of steak who the fuck eats a one ounce steak i don't understand too like living overseas now like i don't understand why people don't use the fucking metric system it drives me insane when i when i go okay so if you're using my fitness pound you know i use chronometer when i go into chronometer and i see one of our clients has put pounds in for their weight i i immediately text them and i go nah put your scale on kilograms get with the rest of the fucking planet stop using it you gotta here's the way i think of it too especially it's the americans right it's the americans and sometimes the people in uk and you never know with the uk what you're gonna get you could get pounds you get kilograms you get fucking stone you could get some other fucking medieval way of fucking counting somebody's weight or height like hands and shit and i used to get so mad because i had british i just got this image of holy grail i'm just seeing an odd way of saying i was a duck yeah i get like i get guys from england and they'd send me this fucking uh yeah today i weighed 10 stone and i'm like fuck now i gotta fucking convert to stone is 14 and then divide by 2.2 for kilograms and it just i'm like can you just fucking put that in his kilograms please the one thing i like to do with the americans i make them especially the women flip their scale to kilograms because then when they gain weight, it's not so scary because if you gain one pound, they lose their fucking minds. But if they gain 400 grams, they're like, oh, it's just that's grams. That's nothing. And I'm like, that's fucking, that's a fucking pound. 454 is a pound, but they don't know that. So it just, it tricks them. So you get away with that for a while. And then they start getting smart and they go, oh, hold on a minute. I've been gain of 454 grams a week. That's a pound and I'm like, yeah, and you haven't freaked out and you look great. Fuck it. But that's not bad. Yeah. The meal, the meal plan things interesting as well, because it's almost it's almost become my catchphrase in last year, because it's almost been trendy for coaches to go. meal plans don't teach you anything. I'm like, what, what you want, like meal plan, your structure, it'll teach you like food prep or teach you habitual habits or teach you so much based off this and how a diet should actually look like them stop big maps. Yeah. And like, it's mad that people think like, I the dog colors are great. And I've always thought it's like learning a language. It's like, the meal plan is like you look you saying I will learn Spanish over here. Here's a Rosetta Stone take the macros approach to go just go to Spain. But I don't need to learn any words first. No, you'll pick it up. Like, hope it makes up you know, it never does. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, when you learn a language, it's like you learn all the conjugations and all that stuff. And that is they give you the conjugations. You got to write down your present, past, future, all that stuff. And that's how you learn it. The way I see it is I don't like giving people static meal plans, but I like working with my clients to create their own meal plan. So what I typically will do is I'll write their macros and I'll write their calories and then I'll go in a chronometer and I'll separate that out into, say, four or five sections for meals. OK, I want you to have around 500, 600 calories per meal to so much protein, carb and fat. Now, let's work on what proteins you'll eat every day and not get that bored. And if you do get bored, we can make an exchange list. But I make my clients write their own diet, but I'm there helping them do it. So I'm like, okay, let's put in some starch. You could have some starch, you could have fruit. So that could be rice, potatoes, sweet potato, whatever. Or you could have grapes or bananas or whatever you want. And they're like, oh, I think I want some potato. Cool, put that in there. and then they see they're like, holy shit, that's a lot of carbs. I'm like, that's okay. We'll just use charisma potatoes, which are 25% less carbs. And they have more carbs or more volume. They're like, oh, that's cool. So we do it as an educational thing and they create their own meal plan. And what I find is they eat that pretty, you know, pretty consistently for three, four, five weeks, they started getting bored, but then they say, holy shit, I've lost five kilos in the last five weeks. I'm like, yeah, look at that. That's what happens. We follow a static plan. that doesn't have any deviations. You've got accuracy, you've got precision and the way it goes. The most successful clients that I see are the people who do that who have structure and eat the same shit every day And they might pop a little of this a little of that out But it pretty much the same stuff every day And we see I telling you we see at least most of them one kilo of weight loss significantly and consistently over time Yeah, I agree with that from the people I've seen. You just eliminate margin for error because regardless whether, even if there's tracking error within it, if it's static, at least you know. like they're eating this if you think it's 1800 is actually 2000 it's still consistently a 2000 and i i often i find that the people that want decadence i always panic a little bit when i get a client asking me for recipes and it's not because i'm against yeah like and it's two reasons one you don't want my recipes they're boring as fuck um and two like when you're looking at like often i find if someone's like resourceful and has a sort of detective mindset i'll go and find the recipes themselves i go hey do these work yeah we're cool here's a few more but it's more this oh i i want everything to taste like gordon ramsey prepared it for me especially on a wednesday between meetings and it's like not every not every meal needs to be it's like that's that's what that's why you look like you do right now because you've been eating gordon ramsey shit all the time and you don't want to look like gordon ramsey shit anymore so let's get lean first and then you go back to eating gordon ramsey shit every once in a while not every meal.

CHAPTER 11

Cooking Habits and Air Fryers

The thing is like, this is what kills me is people don't know how to cook. If you, if people knew how to cook, like I love my meals and I eat the same shit every day. I wake up and I have four eggs almost every morning with a little bit of paprika, smoked paprika, and a little bit of Malden sea salt. Like that's the best fucking salt ever. The Malden fucking crystal flakes, a little bit of cracked pepper. I have that and a, and a cappuccino done lunch. I have, I almost always have chicken thigh. I might have like 300, 250, 300 grams of chicken thigh. And I just, I take it. I can make it taste any way I want to. I can do lemon pepper. I can do butter garlic. I can do hot and spicy. I just use a different, a different blend, a different rub every day. And that's easy. And then I might throw in a salad, chunky salad or something with of cucumber and tomato and red onion and i'm done and if i need starch i can add a little bit of rice so that's super easy but people want to make these goddamn fucking food networks four hour fucking meals where they're putting in you know fucking truffle fucking truffle butter shit that was blessed by a shaman or some bullshit they just they just use a fucking salt and the butter like stop eating so much hyper palatable shit and you won't be begging for hyper palatable shit all the time uh but our job is really hard i don't like i i see people like that like and they often they don't get it like you're you're you know you're you're a lawyer that works 400 hours a week or you're an investment banker that you know until 2am what kind of bills how do you have the time for this food prep but you can't cook and now eight hours of cooking a day like what yeah no man you need good man i can cook my that those eggs i told you the easiest way for me to cook eggs i put i just take butter and i just go over the pan before it's hot i turn it on i crack four eggs in it i put a fucking glass top on it and i cook it real low i go and take a shit i go brush my teeth or do whatever i do i go i can pick up the dog shit the backyard whatever i'm going to do that morning i go by check on it not still going i can go and do everything i want while that's being cooked because it's cooking so slow. And then I'm almost assured it's never going to burn. I hate burnt eggs. I cannot stand the bottom of them being any types of burn. And I need the yolks to be runny. So if you bake it like that, basically steam the eggs, it's almost foolproof unless you're a moron and the eggs come out perfect every time. The lunch I do, I've got an air fryer air fryer cook perfect chicken thighs in 16 minutes and all you have to do is put them in there turn it on flip it over when it's halfway through that's it so like people need to understand you don't you don't need a fucking go to cooking school culinary school to figure out how to do this even even my dinner i always have steak i have a salad with some uh feta cheese and then I might have some rice or I might have a chocolate bar and that's it which is what I had tonight I've been wanting an air fryer for a long time no one here cooks in Hong Kong when we had the COVID case it hit like 180 which is the most we've ever had for one day Carrie Lam closed the restaurants completely we had them closed for dinners for a while but lunch times and because no one cooks there was just tons of people on the street just eating takeout food Like it was worse.

CHAPTER 12

Transition to Movement and Mobility

moving sort of like into into some of the into some of the training stuff and we spoke about jumping on this and talking a little bit about you know you've been known for the least most stuff and improving something you know stress and mental states with regards to training and a lot of fat loss stuff with that but for people that might not know if they're not in the program design course on the back end and see all the good stuff you've done some of the most impressive results you've come out um at the moment is improving people's mobility resting posture getting people out of pain you know and before we go into some of the specifics with that like for people i always say that someone was telling me this yesterday there is when you get to around about your early 30s there's a point where you know just bodybuilding becomes sort of like uh you know you start going into other realms that people start becoming osteos or they start doing bjj and you know they always have an injury story or two that's sent them down this path like what is it for you that got you more into looking at like movement because you've always known as a nutrition guy like how have you become like you know there how's your journey to learning this you know it's it's funny it's funny that i became the nutrition guy uh because people don't realize i was a competitive national level competitive power lifter i was i competed in strong man i competed in bodybuilding and men's bikini and physique like i've i've done a lot i've competed in martial arts stuff like i've done all of this high performance sports stuff and everyone always comes to me to make them lose weight it's like fuck man i could make you an absolute fucking weapon but it's been in the last couple years we've actually got people coming in it's like i want to be a fucking assassin cool i got you bro like there's we've got so much other things right but um with the movement of mobility stuff it kind of came along um when i left polican group and i was like man we're teaching all these people how to train professional athletes and none of them are training professional athletes. And if there's a really hardcore, um, emphasis on maximal strength and man, that's just like maximal strength is important, but it's important as a foundation for other sports development, sports, um, quality, uh, what am I looking for? The development of other sports qualities, like speed and power and, and change of direction and agility and things like that. and I went, man, you know, I'm seeing a lot of the people that I'm dealing with have really horrible movement issues. Like they can't, I'm done level one and level two animal flow. I try to teach a client how to do an animal flow position. They can't even get set up for it, man. This is really fucking bad. You know, like squatting, deadlifting, benching, all that stuff's cool, but fuck man, someone can't even get on and off the ground without having like 800 different points of contact trying to get up. There's something wrong with that. Like we need to start thinking about where we need to put what we need to put first, the horse or the cart. And I just got to the point where I realized strength is cool, but mobility and flexibility and the ability to control yourself in positions is probably the most important thing you can do from a locomotion standpoint. And because strength is stupidly easy. It's stupidly easy to get real fucking strong. You know, when I was a kid and I started trading, I started training when I was like eight years old. That was back in 19. God, that was like a night. What is that? Eight, 1986. That's when I started like actual lifting and like lifting hard out for, for, you know, Texas football. And, uh, it was super easy bench, squat, deadlift, go home, eat a lot, come back, add more weight to the bar, bench, squat, deadlift, like getting really fucking strong is not rocket science, but getting really strong without creating a lot of fucked up shit in your body. That's the, that's the true art of how do I get real fucking strong, but not create an impingement in my shoulder FAI in my hip lower back compression and pain And I think we lost sight of that because a lot of these different a lot of these people who should be talking and exchanging information on methods, they should be agreeing with each other that everyone's right in certain situations and everybody's wrong in certain situations. They've all decided, no, we're just going to tell each other to fuck off and go our separate ways. So you got these, this side of all these powerlifters going, nah, just use less weight and squat with less weight. Find the weight you can squat at that you don't have any pain. Just keep squatting. I'm like, cool. Then you got these guys doing, do all these sissy ass fucking rehab exercises, do a bunch of fucking open cans and fucking clam shells and just do that shit for fucking four years and never feel better. Like somewhere between both of those sides is the truth. So that's where I've kind of headed off about six years ago i went on this journey to find out what's the truth between both of these sides yeah i i had this i was speaking to a topic recently this thing about like warm-ups like people end up getting into these 40 minute warm-ups and you know hardly have any time for their training and you know it's you never ever get any better they never get any closer to you um you know do you feel like when it comes to you obviously going into the strength stuff you you notice a lot of guys were tight, were having a lot of pain.

CHAPTER 13

Causes of Movement Dysfunction

Do you feel like, you know, what do you feel like causes or gets people into these sort of like bad starting positions? Do you feel it's just ego putting too much weight on the bar and just overloading themselves for years? Or is there more to it in terms of what you see? Yeah, I mean, I guess we can think of it as the law of repetition of efforts. The law of repetition of efforts can build a skill in a positive direction or can build a skill in a negative direction. So I think part of it is a lot of it's ego lifting. A lot of it is maxing out all the time on the same shit. And just every time you do that, you shift a little bit further and further outside of your acceptable technique. And then you ingrain that motor pattern and then that affects other things. And then the next thing you do, you wake up and you got chronic pain. And that's now how you squat because you can't, you can't deviate from that. Um, a lot of it is improper, uh, not paying attention to, um, muscular chains and how they affect each other. A lot of it is poor program design where it's just that the emphasis is too much on this one thing or this couple of things and not looking at a global, I hate the word holistic, but it makes sense here. Like a holistic global kind of thing of how these chains work together. um a lot of it is um you know not taking care of your conditioning and your blood pressure not taking care of your sympathetic nervous system not taking care of your electrolyte balance as far as like sodium potassium not taking care of uh resting heart rate and sleep inflammation there's a lot of things here that can contribute to this and all of these things could be a big contribution or they could be a really small contribution but you know what i reckon what i reckon for most people is that your ability to move is going to be dependent on where your joints can go. And if you've done things and pulled a bone outside of its normal position, you've reduced its capacity to move into certain ranges of motion. So then the body responds by limiting those ranges of motion and causing pain. And then that affects other areas. So for instance, when I was growing up in Texas, it was really common, like it is in most countries, that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were international bench press days. So everybody's bench, bench, bench, and biceps, bench, and biceps. So if you look at the shoulder, if I'm benching, benching, benching, benching, that's inherently going to pull the humerus forward. And if I'm doing a lot of biceps, biceps, biceps, biceps, that's going to shorten all this and it's going to pull it forward. So lo and behold, you go in after somebody's been doing this for five years and they look like a fucking watermelon farmer. So they look like they're just walking around with these two watermelons. Right. And then they go, I can't bench anymore because it destroys my shoulder. And by the way, I get this weird fucking hip pain and it's affecting my lower back. You're like, interesting. It's like, yeah, my foot hurts, too. It's like, OK, now it's a chicken or egg thing. It's probably related to something they did here that then worked its way down. but the body's always going to move away from pain and the absence of pain does not mean the absence of dysfunction you could be moving away from pain that you're not cognizant you don't have cognitive awareness of because the brain hasn't told you there's an issue because it's working around it so you're looking at i might be moving away from pain i might be moving away from instability and chasing stability i might be moving towards a position where i'm trying to find more space to move a bone. So there's a lot of different things that can contribute to that. When you're looking at obviously, obviously pain, obviously we have to look at pain in terms of you know someone comes in and pain if you can get someone out of pain I think it it you get a buy that you never get from anything including getting in the six and getting a bit of life and um you know but when when you looking at pain and certainly looking at pain science it very complex like we love it like what's painful to you might not feel painful to me or vice versa very subjective do you use pain other than just other than just like making the client happy and buying some services how much do you use pain as like part of your decision making process or is it something that's sort of there but i look at other stuff like how do you start to look at what's going on here well yeah i mean if they say they're in pain it's like okay have you have you actually seen like physio or have you seen an osteo or something like that what did they say okay um and then i might give them a proper assessment and now i've got to determine where that's coming from so what is the higher order thing that's now trickled down to causing this issue what needs to be rectified to move them away from that pain state. But then you also have to look at it as far as like, there's other things this client has come to me for. So that might be losing weight, that might be putting on muscle. I just have to keep that in mind. Like, cool, I'm going to take you, I'm going to, I'm going to make you try to make you not have pain if you do what I tell you to do. But I have to integrate all of that in with a comprehensive program that's also going to get them really fucking jacked and shredded because that's what they're actually coming to me for. so yeah so i i look at you know where do you feel pain let's figure out what's causing it so we're going to try to find out like if this is moved in this direction what muscles could be contributing to that how's the nervous system playing what are you guarding what's causing apprehension now we got to work up that chain so let's say it's something in the ankle we got to look at the hip i'm looking at the hip i got to look at the low back i look at that i got to look at rotation in the in the upper body there's a lot of stuff i have to look at when we're coming back from that and then finding big exercise that fix a lot of shit and not wasting time on a lot of little dinky ass uh rehab you know traditional rehab or contemporary rehab stuff so i i'm looking at it as far as we got to get moving so we need to look at what big movements 80 of it needs to be big movements and 15 or 20 might be little sissy ass open can clamshell shit bullshit stuff yeah i mean so when it comes to like what we're looking at what's actually possible and i've deliberately thrown this question in there because i know on the forums you mentioned that this annoys you so this is this hopefully will give good content but when you look so we've got when we're looking at movement capabilities now we tend to have two camps you mentioned sort of mentioned the two camps earlier on but we've got the um obviously the the pure strength guys you say it's do less weight or just sort of power through and you know everyone everyone should have squat bench deadlift and then you're on the other side you've got mechanics guys who i don't want to call that mechanics is great and physics is irrefutable but obviously with with any trend there's a lot of people that don't apply it particularly well that talk a lot about moving around dysfunction because they you haven't got an x-ray you can't see what the actual posture is you can't see bone spurs you know like

CHAPTER 14

Quantifying Strength and Nerve Feedback

what is your stance on that view and what you feel is actually possible what what you feel can be changed yeah well look i mean yeah well i might might not be able to look at so much as body, but, but we have pretty recognized degrees of range, uh, passive and active in certain body parts. We can also do some, um, we can do tolerance tests to see if they feel pain. We do certain things. We've got manual muscle testing, um, which I still, I still do manual muscle testing mainly to see if one side versus the other is at a deficiency, but I use a electronic device. It actually tells me how many kilograms of force they're pushing with. So I've now gotten past that point of, well, that feels stronger than that one. Now I can actually quantify it with this device. So that's, that's changed a lot of things with me too. It's also changed a lot of things that I was thinking about with, you know, people saying, well, you know, shoulder position doesn't matter if there's no pain, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, okay, cool. So I took myself and two other people and I used this, um, this muscle testing device, which can act, it's a basically a electronic dynamometer. And I said, okay, let's, let's take a grip and let's just put the arm in neutral position and squeeze and see how much, how many kilograms of force. Cool. Now let's protract the shoulder internally, rotate and do it again. My grip was like 83 or 85 kilograms. And when I protracted it internally, rotated and try to do it again, it dropped by about 30 or 40 kilograms of force. Yeah. So think about, think about how that's going to affect everything because those, those nerves are traveling from the neck into the hand. So if that position is affecting the hand, it's also going to affect effort signal back to the brain. So possibly being in a position of protraction and turn rotation can that affect your lifting Is that going to fuck up your bench your overhead stuff well if it if it cutting down that that feedback back and forth probably so we what else did we do there's one of the big one i did um ah i did one where i did grip here and then i did grip in a slightly flexed position and grip in an extended position and if I went from here 80 if I went from here it dropped down to about 50 if I went down to here it dropped down to around 23 so if you think about it guys who are benching that are allowing their wrist to extend they're fucking up they're possibly fucking up that feedback from the neurons in the hand to the brain giving it that percocet signal and also when do people do this when they're doing dumbbell or biceps curls or when they're doing curls and they're looking down at their arms that's a big one challenge to talk about is don't move look straight ahead don't look down because you're going to actually make yourself weaker when you test it it shows that you actually make yourself weaker doing that and

CHAPTER 15

Head Position and Spinal Health

how many people when deadlifting look up themselves themselves the mirror when they're learning to deadlift yeah and you know that changes lumbar position as well then even not including this stuff with an early system i mean the the big thing with that is just there's not a lot of space in the back of your c-spot so when you go like this and you have a massive weight you're just ramming those facets together um so yeah ali uh gilbert now weingroff her uh her husband charlie weingroff which is one of the top uh doctors of physical therapy in the united states is a fantastic video on this that shows i think it's looking at a scan of someone who's lifting and they have nice neutral head position they're tucked and slid back and it shows what happens when they go into lordosis and extension and it just ramming the back of their uh vertebra together and he's got i'll send it to you it's a it's fucking funny as shit the way the way he could he does the commentary on it is just fucking gold that's that's really interesting and it's interesting personal to me as well because i think a lot of like like i've got a bit of bit of forehead posh and i feel like that gives me a lot of issues and like so i i've done you know looked at this kind of thing a lot and i i for ages i've spoken to you about this on consult so like having this sort of like mid thoracic spine pain underneath my shoulder blade and like for a while i was like i couldn't place what was going on with i tried sorting out a lot of stuff with the hip and that got better and it didn't go away what's going on and as I started in the last few months as my training's picked up again and gone a lot better that I'm starting to realize there's a definite correlation between my head position and I start to feel how I can now it's much more precise of what causes the pain where before it was like random whereas now I'm like if I do this and go into a neutral spine position I just feel that pain go right down the middle of my spine and I think like that has a lot to do with it and like something I've looked at a little bit I want to get your advice on it now you brought it up Like, have you noticed when you're looking at neck position and forehead posture and things like this, having a big effect on something like HR fit for that exact reason of the nervous system coming like through here and, you know, into that position? I don't know because I haven't measured it. But I mean, anytime you're deviated, if you look at all these people who say there's not a perfect posture, cool. I get that. There's not a perfect posture. Like we're not all Vitruvia, man, but there are acceptable and unacceptable deviations from what would be considered perfect posture. So it's like saying there's no good foods and bad foods. Of course, it's good food and bad food. You fucking kidding me? Like you telling me a fucking Twinkie is good compared to a fucking chicken, rice and broccoli? Of course, of course, that's fucking silly. There's not good and bad posture. Of course, there is. You look at somebody who looks like goddamn Quasimodo and you say that their posture is just not it's not bad. It's it's just not as good as yours. It's like, no, it's fucking horrendous and they're going to be in pain and they're going to be 40 years old. How are they going to feel when they're fucking 65? So I would imagine, you know, if you have if you have massive deviations like this, there's going to be a pain response. It's just not to the point where your brain feels that it needs to bother you about it. So mechanoreceptors, they're like, okay, we got an issue here. Maybe there's no space or maybe they're pressing on something. So let's say that every time you lift this up, it's smacking into the supraspinatus. And now the supraspinatus tend to start to thicken up and you're losing subacromial space. And the mechanoreceptors are going to go, hey, there's a problem. They're talking to the brain and the brain's like, yeah, we don't need to let Luke know about this just yet. So what I want you to do is I want you to tighten this here. I want you to tighten this here and then lengthen these two guys. And then this will move forward. We can we can play with that for a while.

But your body does this over and over until one day the brain goes, oh, fuck, we have nowhere else to go. Let Luke know there's a problem. So then you wake up one day and you go, what the fuck is that? That wasn't there yesterday. Oh, fuck. And then you can't do anything. And a lot of people, I would say most people I see are moving towards that. And that can be easily rectified if we just take care of it. Like if you're not in pain, that doesn't mean you're not heading that way. You want to take a prophylactic response because it's much easier to do it preventively than it is to do retroactively. Yeah, I totally agree. Looking at my experience, my upper back pain and issues that I've had, a lot of that was like when I first started training, it was like, and I'm not bashing the guy, but it was like old school bodybuilder workouts. what's the foot of men's health i used to do a jamie alderson workout which started with 100 leg extensions and a few sets as possible into four sets of 20 back squats not a hamstring not a glute exercise inside like so my pelvis came in a really bad position this cough and then you know as we know work up into a thoracic spine and now it's like i'm ticking off one problem find another problem that comes and i'm just working my way through the chain and in that the same sense it's like i remember speaking to nick daniel um you know good buddy of both of us he was like do you get back pain like no he's like how surprising and he just walked off yeah it's weird to nick to finish the sentence that quickly but um that is an understatement oh he's not as bad as he used to be in his in his in his mellow years anyway um but like and then you just take up the chin and then eventually you know getting to late 20s early 30s i'm like oh this is starting to sound to her and all my back pain stuff and you get this with clients where it's like they'll go yeah like i'm up i'll bloom a lot back out well what happened i picked up a newspaper that must have been a newspaper you know like yeah it's it's five ten fifteen years of this sort of stuff that causes an issue right yeah yeah it's it look what you're looking at is you're starting to lose space, lose space, lose space, lose space. And then you nick a nerve. You just pop a nerve. It just, it's the slightest little chink and your nerve goes, fuck you. I'm just going to seize up. And then your client's like, oh, oh fuck. And they can't turn. They can't do anything. And then it stops spasming and they're like, okay, cool. I'm good. And then they go do something else. And then all of a sudden it's like, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. And then and there's spas spas spas and then and then it goes down um so there's so many people that are on the verge of that i never had back pain until i had fucking horrendous like fucking horrible nuclear holocaust back pain and it it's i'm not gonna say it came out of nowhere i was avoiding some niggles but they weren't they weren't such a pain in the ass that it was inhibiting me from doing things until I came down on on my foot wrong and then boom I couldn't fucking walk I couldn't crawl I couldn't turn in bed I had a piss in a cup and poured in a bucket like there's so many people that are that close to one wrong move this stuff can be easily avoided if we stop fucking ignoring it just say well you can squat the pain away no you can't squat lighter no fix the fucking problem Yeah, don't put a plaster on it, right? Yeah. So before we go into some of the strategies we can potentially use to start getting people away from the danger zone that we're talking about, obviously you mentioned, we both spoke about yourself, ignoring some niggles that weren't really affecting you. Me, ignoring clear issues in my posture because I wasn't experiencing any pain. Often when you see people speak about this with the mechanics guys, which is yourself, it all comes from this. they did stuff like, you know, carbs, super diet, but I'm going to do straight bar bicep curls anyway because Arnie did them and then their elbows are jacked up. Like, how do you get people, like, committed to improving, for use of a better term, their structural balance? You know, when, like, it's not causing me any issues now, why should I bother doing it? I'd rather do this. Like, how do you get people to value it as important? Well, the first thing is I don't give them a fucking choice. You want to, yeah, you, look, you want to work with me, you're fucked up here you go i'm gonna i'm gonna show you proof of concept go into a split squat awesome that looked like fucking garbage you know i can give them i can give them indicator lifts i can show them and they go okay that's not supposed to like then they try to do it and they're like yeah it didn't look like the way you did it and i'm like that's right so we're gonna work on fucking achieving those things and i look at it as almost like leveling up in a video game i'm a I'm a big World of Warcraft fan. I been playing it since it started And you start off as like know fucking gnome you a little fucking gnome running around gnome mage or warlock and you can do shit like you got a fucking stick and like everything kills you and so you know the whole goal is to do these quests and repeat things until you go to the next step which is the next level where you throw fireballs or whatever the fuck you're doing right so for me they don't get a fucking choice you you're paying me for my expertise. I'm telling you you're fucked up. I'm going to fix your fucked upness, right? At least I'm going to tell you how to fix it and you're going to fix it yourself. And then we're going to move to level two mage and level three mage. And then when you move up those levels, I'll give you different exercises, but you're not getting bigger, crazier exercises until you can be, you can hit the basics and hit the fundamental shit. Another thing I do is I take pictures of them. I'll take pictures and I'll draw plumb lines. I'll draw plumb lines. I'll draw angles and show them like the pelvic tilt. I'll show them a plumb line or where their ear, shoulder, uh, middle of the canter, knee and ankle should be. Um, I'll show them from the front and back, how deviated they are from where they should be. And realistically, the proof's in the pudding. they're going to see that and go cool my the line is here and my head is here there's obviously something fucked up i need to fix or they'll look at from the side and like the line will be here and their head will be over here and they'll look like uh i'll tell them i'm like you look you look like you got the michael jackson lean like you fucking feet are back here and you're fucking leaned way over here like we got to fix that because the further you lean out the more you have to rotate the hips and extend the lower back and then all you're doing is creating a lot of compression and shear that's eventually going to give you debilitating lower back pain if we can get your hips to rotate back and get your spine to move back into alignment that's going to take a lot of that pain away and that's going to fix everything from the hips all the way up and most of the time all the way down so when you actually like looking at but unless someone comes to you with actual pain you have to get mega mega specific do you sort of look at sort of like use a better term almost hiding some of this you mentioned the 80 percent here earlier on like almost hiding some of this pre-step and pre-habby sort of work in exercises like positioning them in certain exercises to elicit that whilst also improving the other goals you mentioned whether that's proving getting jacked arms getting jacked shoulders or do you tend to be like i want something really targeted in lower traps or something like that i'm using that well did you did you ever do picp um not directly i've done like it you know versions of it like andre ben was equivalent yeah and we're used to work i mean they basically run that model right so if you think about it most people who are listening to this that went through any type of polyquin training or were used to work they're already kind of doing that anyways So if you think about it, if I do A1, A2, B1, B2, and let's say that's incline press and then maybe a lean away pull down. And maybe that's a flat press with a seated cable row. So there's your 80 percent. And you might have a C1, C2. Your 20 percent might be external rotation and lower trap raise. So a lot of people are already doing this. But the way I look at it, a lot of people are doing exercises that aren't as effective as they should be because their client isn't in a good position to make those exercises work. So I was actually thinking about this today because I'm going to do a video of how I teach people how to understand internal external rotation. So when you get a client who's doing internal external rotation, a lot of times, though, they don't have the range. So they'll go like this and they'll go, they'll throw the shoulder and throw it back. Okay. When I say internal external rotation, I just want the humerus to move. If your shoulder has to move, you don't own that range. Something we've got to fix. But, um, and the same thing with the hips, you gotta, you gotta be able to teach what is actually internal external rotation. But if they are in a protracted position and they try to internally externally rotate, you're not, you can't be in protracted position and externally rotate. You can't get there. it's not going to happen can't be in a protracted position and do upper rotation or i mean sorry shoulder flexion so if you have somebody who's got massive protraction internal rotation and you're giving them external rotation and lower trap raise what the fuck are they supposed to do with that their shoulder's not in a position where they can actually do it so then you tell them that they need to do this shove that fucking shoulder back shove that scapula back and then do your fucking that would make a really good gift yeah wherever they go but like they you see it all the time people are doing their single arm lower trap and they like like what the fuck are you doing you should that should be there naturally if you can set that there naturally and just lift your arm well what the fuck are you doing it's like getting on a it's getting on a row and doing this like doing that like you do that when you start that you should you should have that figured out later um you keep on working with coaches right where i i i i cannot stand when i watch someone coach a pull down they're literally just like forcing their shoulder blades down so teachers can't have to do that like rather just like literally like pulling them into position holding the truck like you're now just touching the things you don't want work to try and force them in the position where you want to rather than going back what is that supposed to happen here let me build an awareness i'll tell you i'll be a devil i'll be devil's advocate on this um did you go no i'm gonna be devil's advocate i feel like there is a time and place for that but those trainers have no idea about that time or place so um i feel like Sometimes when you have a really imbalanced body, you have to have a really imbalanced training program. So like I'll tell you, like Amanda that you see me post about on the forum where she was a massive guy like that's the Quasimodo look like you couldn't get more excessive kyphosis, forward head posture, forward shoulder position, protracted scapula. You couldn't get worse than her. we might do something where we actually do over accentuate T-spine extension, over, overdo shoulder extension and depression, and then just work the humerus through that position while holding all of that nice metric position. Same thing with a pulldown. We may actually overextend, over depress, over retract, and just do this without moving anything else. but I'm using that for a very very specific reason it's realistically only applicable to someone with her condition but like you said a lot of these coaches make all of their clients train like that whether they know why they're doing that or not and it's not good because that's not how the shoulders are supposed to work I suppose it's bad it's also balancing it out with terms of like in a good program design balancing out these things like if you're putting someone in a position with something else balancing something else out to allow it to move like for case in point a lot of things at the moment is the should should the scapula be locked retract and depressed when you look at things like pressing movements and some people say yes it certainly should some people say no it certainly shouldn't and like the way i've always talked about it's like if i've got if i'm trying to get the strongest bench possible and i've got 120 kilos or plus above you know above my chest i'm if i can get myself as stable as possible by locking down my shoulder blades then that would be pretty advantageous but i'm also not doing every exercise for the exact same thing i will then what else goes in the program to allow the shoulder blade to move how it should to make sure that we don't end up with someone that's just locked down all the time and ended up have nickels like you said i'm not sure what start this podcast or before we get on the answers in the middle yeah it's always the middle you've got you got two sides every story your side my side somewhere in the middle lies the truth and so with the people who say that you don't want to set the scapula like that in a bench i i'll bet most of them have never had a decent bench like i can tell you my best bench was around 218 and that's kilos not pounds so for the americans that's 480 or so right so um you're you that you're getting into us you're getting into a position of inhalation and dissolve a maneuver. The last thing you want to do is go into a position of exhalation and instability with weight that weighs more than most people squat. Like that's a terrible fucking idea. And furthermore, you're not really moving the bar far enough to worry about your scapula anyways, right? Because if you're benching competition, you're going to be trying to posteriorly rotate your thorax as much as you can while trying to get as much T-spine extension and get kind of on your neck. And you're actually trying to get most of your back off the bench. You want to get it as high as you can, even to the point of putting a Coke can underneath your back so that your sternum and your esophagus process is high enough where you don have to move the bar very far So if you think about it if you in this position you not moving the bar far enough to fucking worry about your scapula So who cares that you have your scapula set in depression and retraction? Like that's a stupid fucking argument to me. It's the same thing with elevation and depression and upward and downward rotation. if I'm doing partial range side laterals and I'm down here I'm not even to a position where my scapula involved anyways not till I get right here so who cares if someone wants to lock it down but the minute I come up here I better start moving the scapula because if I don't I'm just going to be ramming at humerus right in the AC joint I think it's a problem like social media becomes certainly in this realm everything becomes sound bites so it's like you know everything has to be this way it's like well if you look at this in context in a program we're looking at what you know like four to eight nine exercises like you can you can do this this way and this because i've got this you know and you know that brings we're going on to sort of the posture myths now and like when we're looking at with that

CHAPTER 16

Breathing and Bracing Myths

what's your view on the on the trend of breath work at the moment because i think there's there's no doubt the impact that the diaphragm has on allowing the the rib cage to move allowing thoracic and again allowing like external rotation doesn't happen if you can't move and extend that but my always my thing with this is that you take so many breaths a day that it's like trying to be a one man pissing in the ocean trying to make it yellow like yeah how much of an impact you feel we can change your breath work how much does this play a part in your decision making process with this almost zero almost zero you want me to teach you out of breathe that's it look i and and i you know look i i'm i'm not opposed to the breathing things i just think they've gotten a little too out of control and they've gone to an extreme um i mean fuck i 10 years ago well not 10 years ago maybe like uh six seven years ago i was into the wim hof stuff and i was into doing um you know apnea breathing and box breathing and i think those things are really important, but they're getting to a point where they're getting out of control. And I was talking to Will Crozier about this and he was at our gym in Brisbane and we were hanging out and he's done a lot of the breathing stuff and went to America, did a lot of breathing stuff. And he goes, look, that stuff works really good from a rehab perspective. When you have a small person that's in pain he goes i'm a big motherfucker and i squat almost 400 kilos that stuff works good until i put 400 fucking kilos on my back and then it doesn't work so good and i'm like i said well i guess instead of you breathing into a balloon you should just breathe into like a hot hot water bottle or some shit like because that's kind of what he was alluding to are the systems where you're breathing into a straw or you're breathing in a balloon you're moving a leg here or an arm here and you're pushing a leg into the wall. I actually like a lot of that stuff, but it works well for gym pop. It works well for people who are weak. It doesn't work that great for people who are strong. So you need, you need other things to do. Um, probably the, the stuff that I will do with breathing. I like the idea of learning how to do a lot of deep bracing breaths where you are like in a quadruped position and then learning how to vacuum and then learning how to expand and then breathing against the expansion. And the, the, what I like about that is when you look into the upper part of the lumbar, a lot of that's attached into the diaphragm. So if we can work on pulling on the diaphragm, it pulls those vertebral segments up, which can decompress the lower spine so we might use it for something like that um because there's a fascial attachment to the psoas as well right so we talk about the force coupling allowing that so as they regain sort of length oh no rather than over length just like use things off on the pelvis so yeah so well so yeah looking at where the the psoas and also the QL come in and attach it to the diaphragm and kind of in those top vertebral segments of the lumbar spine and thinking about breathing so that you cause that expansion that pulls that and it starts to relieve some of the nerves on the lower part of the lumbar spine in L4 and L5, which is where you're going to see a lot of the issues will be somewhere around L3, L4, L5 when you see like lumbar herniations. But

CHAPTER 17

Pelvic Tilt and Muscular Chains

what I find is that working on length tension and working on the brain as far as calming the brain down, utilizing things like PNFs,

CHAPTER 18

Tightness vs. Tautness in Muscles

i feel the word tightness is one of the most overused words and people chronically stretching for hours and hours i did it with the um with a few of the guys i'm mentoring at the moment i was like right i'm i'm a prime example because my my matter interior top just slowly sorting out but i've never really been able to touch my toes so i was like i'm gonna do a lot of experiments like i'm not gonna stretch a single hamstring and i just did some hip thrusts i just did some things to like get the hip flexor activated all of a sudden like i found that range um and then then i did that horrible master release to get an extra few inches um but like look at those things like where's he like what's your thoughts on the people coming in with like the word tightness like what you feel is actually going on when people feel a sensation of tight well i mean for me their their body's searching for something right and most of the time it's trying to find a stable place stable safe area because your body is inherently doesn't like pain like pain is really important imagine if you didn't have pain and you stepped on a fucking rusty nail and you didn't know what was in there. And then you got a bacterial infection and you got septic and you fucking died. Right. So, you know, you, you, you, it's not that you don't want to feel pain. It's just, you want to feel the appropriate amount of pain and you want to recognize what that pain means. So when somebody feels a tight muscle the first thing we have to distinguish is okay what is is it tight or is it taunt Because those are two two very different things And if we want to think about that if we think tight is it short or taunt Is it long? Because the, the treatment pattern and what we might do might be completely different. So a lot of people with tight hamstrings, I would say the vast majority of them, they're not tight. They're tight because they're being pulled, taunt, they're being pulled to a long lengthened state and they're having a hard time holding on. So it's going to make it feel like tight, even though that's not exactly what it is. So considering that your hips are rotated anteriorly, that takes your ischial tuberosity and moves it up this direction. Well, that's the origin of your semimembranosus tendinosis in your biceps femoris longhead. and those are attached to biceps, long heads attached to the fibula and the other two are attached to your tibia. So as your hips start to rotate, well, that's going to affect your shin and how it rotates and how your foot rotates and our ankle rotates. But as you rotate and pull the origin away from the insertion, that's pulling that into a state of length, which then gets tight. It's like having a guitar and you're tuning your guitar and you keep tuning, you're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and it breaks. Like you just keep tightening and tightening and tightening. It's not functioning correctly. So in that situation, we think, okay, this needs to be shortened actually, but it's not in a good mechanical position to create force. So what we have to do is how do I put this muscle in a better resting position? Well, I've got to take the ischial tuberosity and bring it back towards its insertion points, which means I have to rotate the hip, which means the hamstring is not a great hip rotator. Um, a better hip rotators, the glute and the obliques. So if I can focus on my glutes and my obliques, I can rotate that back normally and naturally, and I can use my hamstrings to anchor it to the lower, lower limbs. Um, there's a, man, there's a lot of shit going on, right? We may have got to look. So as is the, psoas short or is it tight or taut you know shorter lengthen it what about the rectum you know all these things can can pull um the joints out of position could be sartorius if you look at the psoas back onto a little bit of the diaphragm stuff we're looking at as tight or torn would you look at rib cage position being the determining factor whether the psoas is actually tight or torn the rib cage is flared with that pelvic tilt you probably find this also an overly lengthened state no because i think the ribs follow the hips so and here's the thing um is it the psoas it's pulling everything down or is it something else that's the thing you got to think about what's the best muscle what's the muscle that has the greatest leverage to rotate your hips anteriorly rotate my hips anteriorly probably the right i would have thought right that's a good anchor point that's a good anchor muscle but this one has a more direct potential it's a muscle no one ever gives any love to you're looking at the start oh yes ah because that's a secondary hip flexor yeah so that's what i was thinking iliacus of course yeah yeah i mean because you just think of this iliacus right you think hip flexor everyone says psoas but then you go okay well you've got the psoas satoria secondary hip flexor rec fem is a powerful hip flexor so you go through all of these and no one ever goes what about the iliacus because it's attached to the inside of the hip and no one ever thinks about it right but it attaches in the same place so as does so and it holds on the entire hip so if you see this anteriorly especially anteriorly it's an inflare the best muscle that could be pulling that would be the iliacus because if the psoas was pulling on on anything it's going to be ripping your lower back so that's the one that's going to be ripping the shit out of your lower back but that's not the one that's going to be ripping on your hip that makes a lot of sense because if you look at the way that you know the the fibro orientation the psoas you're probably looking more of a lumbar stabilizer than it really is a hip flexor and that would make much much more sense looking at that yeah interesting well that is its number one job is a lumbar stabilizer and then the secondary jobs is as an extensor and a lumbar and a side flexor um and possibly you might even think a little bit of rotation to or stabilization or rotation but man there's a lot of there's a lot of pretty cool things i've been looking at lately with that type of thing and trying to think outside the box of what's really causing these problems. There's some stuff in the neck. I was looking at some old Paul Chek stuff about like the SCM obviously is a problem and then the SCM is going to affect the left scab you start looking at scalenes then i started looking at the hyoid muscles infra and super hynoid muscles in the as a neck flexors and also as their relation in the tongue and it's like i started looking at that as i think paul chick might have said this at some point of looking at those high-yield muscles as kind of the psoas of the neck. And I started thinking about the occipitates as being the glutes of the skull, right? Because if you have this issue where your head's rotating, let's say you're losing flexion and you're starting to come into like forward head posture, you know, you start thinking about what are the relationships of those small little muscles, the very top of the skull. And also what's the, what about the high wood muscles that are coming through here and attached into the neck as pulling this down and also extending your head back and be able to keep normal position of the head. Now I'm still junkie. I'm still junkie with it because I've only been thinking about this for the last three weeks, but it makes a lot of sense because everything's going to rotate. so and and everything pretty much rotates almost in the same way so the hips rotate very similar to the glen or humeral joints and that rotates very similar to how the head rotates on the axis the atlas that's really interesting if you want if you when you learn some of this stuff if you want to get any pick for that stuff i'm probably the an absolute yeah 100 like it's because because it was you know when certain things you start listening to things okay i'm starting to see some of the issues that I have like for a while um so like I I always find that like every now and again I feel almost like I come almost got like swirling glands and I'm like not ill though there's nothing going on here and I'm just getting worried about it for a while but almost literally like that like it feels like oh that is incredibly tight all of a sudden around here and I also find that like if I again if I rotate back that's where a lot of my upper back pain comes from so I I reckon there's a lot in that that could potentially be a lot of issues around my neck. So that's really interesting. This will blow your mind because I train, I have a lot of clients with Hashimoto's. And I was talking to Amanda, which you've seen me post her online a lot. Hashimoto's, I think she's lost 30 something kilos by now. And we've been straightening her back. But her neck is still there. We're still trying to fix that. It's gotten so much better, but we got a long road. When I was going through this hyoid muscles, which I was basically researching it for her, there's a lot of thyroid muscles or the hyoid muscles in relation to thyroid. And I'm thinking, okay, so when somebody has Hashimoto's and the brain starts sending out more TSH in order to get the thyroid to create more thyroid hormones, what does the thyroid do? Well, it hypertrophies. okay well if it's hypertrophy to the point where a doctor can palpate and tell that it's too big what's that doing to the muscles they cross it is it possible that they're pulling those muscles to a state of length and destabilizing them so i don't know this is the type of shit that keeps me up at night but it makes it makes sense that if that was dysfunctional and pushing on nerves or pushing on muscles and moving them into places they weren't supposed to be or in the lengths they weren't supposed to be that can destabilize them and if those those neck flexors get destabilized the scm has to work harder what does that do shortens position to forward head posture that that's that's that's really interesting yeah i'm i'm you know i'm with you on these things sort of like keep me up i'll i'll be getting my anatomy after we finish this i remember um the one that always blew my mind um i'll speak this about tommy but he came up solution i wonder if you have an idea of it as well that um i went to have you done be activated douglas hill no but i've done rpr which is it's like it's like uh be activated light yeah like incredibly there's a really weird seminar because it was so ridiculously painful like you've got to go i'm so interested i want it to continue but i'm so fed up of being prodded in my diaphragm that i just want to go home um yeah there's this one guy that came in i generally would have thought was a plant um unless unless i saw this marriage and spoke to the guy but he came in he had glass on he was blind in one eye and he got him up and doug's always managed to get people right people up for the right demonstrations he stopped playing around with these serratus interior it's like digging his thumb into his serratus interior and around the rib cage and this room and then he goes every time we go into his blind spot i'd flinch so he just slowly kept working and he got up and he went started to see blurs in my my eye so he kept working kept working and keep working. The next day he came in with his glasses on I just like what You know and like that that fuels like any knowledge i have an anatomy now it almost entirely fueled by that i was just like i want to know eventually i get dr so i'm going to ask him directly what's going on here and see if he knows but like that just like what yeah that's weird i don't know man i mean you gotta wonder if that was a plant or whatever but fuck who knows um i've seen them i've seen some crazy shit um

CHAPTER 19

Charles Poliquin and Chi Energy

i'll tell you i'll tell you a couple of charles stories because the funny thing is like there a lot of the people that didn't know charles um talk a lot of shit about him but the people who knew him and saw the shit would be like i you know honestly if i hadn't seen this in my with my eyes i wouldn't have fucking believed did. So I remember one of the first biosegs that I was an assistant coach on. So this was back in probably 2000, maybe 2009. We were in Arizona. And so Charles was big in, in a muscle testing at that point, not the muscle testing. I teach you guys in, in program design, like not manual muscle testing, but muscle testing, like applied muscle testing, where you put something in the hand and then you test and see if it's you get strong or weak or whatever so it's kind of some hoodoo voodoo shit right and he at one point he brought his testing kit and he tested a girl and said oh you're um you're deficient in zinc right and we're like whatever this is i'm sitting in the back of the class with derek woodskim like that's crock of shit and so he pulls out a vial of zinc and puts it on the Chapman reflex point on her sternum. And he tells her to take her hands and do this with them in front of her chest. Now, okay. It sounds like this. They're really strong. If you internally rotate that, you have no fucking strength. A child could move your hands apart. She does like this and he takes his arm and he puts it underneath their arms and he lifts her off the table and he's just holding her. She's like this, his arms in here. he lifts her off the table no one could hold that position i don't care how fucking strong you are you could be the world's strongest man no way you could hold that position but for some reason he lifted her completely off the table and held her there for four you got three or four seconds and i said okay you need zinc and i was like what the fuck and uh yeah there was one time And I hate that I don't like telling the story much because I always sound like a fucking like one of those guys, a ghost whisperer type of weirdos. Right. So it was me and Charles Andre and the rest of class. And this is in Rhode Island. And Charles Charles is telling a story about how like he's since he was a child, he's been on the pursuit of learning how to harness chi energy. and we're like okay chi energy cool like you know qigong and fucking tai chi shit cool dragon ball z whatever and so he's talking about this and how he's been to different countries finding masters and uh you know it's charles telling a charles story and andre looks at us goes no it's true like he's he's actually learned how to do this you're like okay he's paying andre to just bullshit us so they were telling us they were telling us stories about how like somebody's doing pull-ups and, and they're like struggling and Charles touches them and puts Chi energy into them. All of a sudden they just keep wrapping it out. Right. They're telling us like fantastic stories like this. And we're all thinking they're full of shit. And so Charles goes here, I'll prove it to you. And he brings a guy out that couldn't have been more than maybe 175, 180 pounds. And he goes, all right, stand there and put your arm out. And he gets another guy about my size. this guy's like 225 pounds or so because i want you that i want you to grab his arm and pull it down so of course the guy's like this he's doing a side lateral and the other guy pulls his arm down no problem trust is okay so charles grabs the guy's other wrist and holds on to it he goes pull his arm down now and so the guy goes and he couldn't pull his arm down and charles goes hang from his arm so the guy is great and picks his legs he's hanging 225 pounds he's hanging from the guy's arm charles let's go and they both fall into the ground and i went that's it i'm done it's enough reality it was the weirdest thing i've ever seen and uh at that point i knew that charles said a lot of stuff that he was quite full of shit on but there was a lot of shit he knew that uh no one would ever fucking believe and he was spot on about it. And that sort of stuff is fascinating. It just makes you, like, you ever get bogged down in sort of, like, the stuff that we learn and just about, like, you know,

CHAPTER 20

Travel, Culture, and Tipping

I've only been in Hong Kong one time, and it's not somewhere I could live. I couldn't live there. It's too crazy. It's too loud and too wild. But man, it was a cool place to visit. Like, we'll get to the markets and some of the restaurants there, some of the best food I've ever had, probably some of the best Asian food I've ever had. I went to this, I think it was a three Michelin star place. So what happened was I did a, I did a foundation seminar there and Zoe decided in the middle of us traveling, I miss the dogs. I'm going home. So she changed her ticket and went home. So I was by myself for about a week in Hong Kong and I was like, all right, cool. So I just went to like, like Michelin star restaurants and did all this cool shit. So I was like, all right, that's all right. but uh man i like hong kong um i went to what's the uh what's the electronics place you can get all the really it's like a it's like four or five level place you can go buy like camera shit and electronics real cheap i i don't know the name of it but there's loads of places around causeway bay um yeah yeah because i wanted like i wanted to get a dslr to start doing like photography and they were like you got to go to this place and i went in it's like you get shit so cheap I'm like who'd you rob for that I don't care I don't know I'm here here's 200 bucks give me a fucking can of D80 or whatever it's a mad contrast here as well like I always when I look to I always judge a place certainly in Europe by the price of beer whatever a point is tends to show the tax and shows what it is whereas here the tax is low but it's the rent's so astronomically high that if a place is there it's a restaurant you'll probably get a beer for like three quid if you go to somewhere that serves primarily alcohol it'd be like £10-11 because they've got to make their rent for this sort of stuff you mentioned food it's really interesting, food here it's the most varied you can ever get you'll get swanky Michelin star restaurants you'll get canteens that are Michelin star that just do good steamed pork buns and I'll never forget because I don't think Mr Jordan Shallow will potentially agree with you on that food statement because he came to Hong Kong and he did his um, pre-suit level one with us. And one of, one of, one of my mates loved this tiny little Thai restaurant, little Thai hut. And like, it's probably about the size of my kitchen, which is like, it's like one person width. Right. And he's a, he's a big dude. So the first, the first problem was trying to get this dude into the door, which was a challenge in itself. And they were like, we're going to have a two, two eggs, which the pack repel, like minced beef, a couple of eggs, bit of chili, load of rice. Awesome. But no, he wanted two portions of the um the chicken with uh chicken with rice um he had a glass of water and he still he couldn't he was head you know his mind was blown that the the water was warm and the chicken was cold welcome to hong kong you know like yeah i don't know man i mean i had all the meals out there were great like i here's the thing i love going when i go to a new country I like going to McDonald's because there's always a different menu in every country. And Hong Kong has got some wild ass shit. They got like black buns with crazy shit on their menu. So I had Mickey D's. I think I love pizza express. I fucking British special love pizza express I got one in Hong Kong I ate that place like twice The only thing I don like about Hong Kong is Chinese people are judgy as fuck So I sit there I go to Pizza Express and the lady come out and ask me what I want And I'd order a pizza or some breadsticks or some wine. I'm eating, eating, eating. I get done. She comes back, gives me my bill. I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not done yet. I get another one of those pizzas, more breadsticks, some more wine. And she's like, oh, so much food. are you sure i'm like yeah she's like oh that's lots of calories i'm like yeah i'm a big motherfucker i'm like godzilla bring my fucking bring my goddamn pizza man just maybe but that's the only thing i found like that they don't understand how much like a big white dude can eat yeah um they um i never thought i'd miss british customer service i didn't think that something i'd ever miss but like we it was here we think you people don't look at you the change is throwing you you give them a note they just throw money back at your face you know yeah do you find that in hong kong you find that's the case yeah they're just okay i think it's efficiency i don't think they're trying to be rude they're just trying to serve as many customers as humanly possible so they're just throwing something back go move but i want to where where do you miss uh service from where have you lived that you missed sales i mean well i i tell you what i think i think i think the it's i i don't don't don't say the uk don't say the uk no service there i think i think the uk is a perfect balance between if hong kong's miserable and just trying to get you out the door american people are just like it's seven o'clock in the morning please don't try and make me have the nicest day in the world like this is this wonderful balance of i'm a bit miserable but i'll be polite about it that's that's where my okay but okay all right we got to dissect this okay all right because i'm a world traveler and i know i know these i tell you what because america tipping culture great service most of the time not always most of the time because their paychecks are dependent on it. Fuck in the UK service. What the fuck is that? Australia is even worse. Like you go to Australia, you go to Australia, you walk in, you go to the bar, order your food, you sit down, the server brings your food and that's all they do. Like they don't do anything. They don't refill your fucking cuffs. They don't ask you how your food is like none of that shit. like zoe when we first started dating she didn't understand the whole tipping thing until she came to america and she was like god damn like you finish you finish a diet coke and a server comes up and refills it for free no questions asked you that yeah they put the food down the server comes out and goes how was your meal you're like you know that was fantastic thank you you go you know it wasn't that that great and they're like okay i'll talk to my manager i can give you a free dessert the service that you get in america is so much different because of the tipping uh because the people want you to be happy man you go overseas they don't give a because they're getting minimum wage 25 bucks an hour they don't give a if you like your meal or not oh it drives me crazy i think dubai dubai is is the i read very recently the interesting one was like they're almost halfway to america in that sense that they're trying to but it's all about trip advisor like you go to a restaurant and they're literally full figure writer of you and they're looking over you going make sure you put my name you know i was like whoa okay that that was weird but yeah the service is great you know what i don't think i don't think i've ever had bad service in the middle east and i think it's a cultural thing i think there's a pride in taking care of the people and that type of thing uh and i've heard the same thing about japan like people go to japan they're like man they're a crazy nice here like almost the point risk over the top but i find that though i find the same in the middle east whenever i go to dubai or kuwait um man the service there is ridiculous it's like they just and you're not paying them extra it's not like you're tipping them they just take they just there's just an actual pride in my job like i'm a server i'll be the best motherfucking server in the whole wide world and i'm your server today and i'm like i appreciate that yeah yeah how did you find the uh the taxi drivers here in Hong Kong? I don't think I ever took a taxi. God, I mean, if you're an adrenaline junkie, you know, to tell you what, you're holding on for dear life. The suspension isn't much there, and they're just, they just put their foot down. And half the time, they have no idea where they're going. Okay, so my experience with that is New York. You go to New York, it's the same thing, but they know exactly where they're going. But you're like, holy shit but i like that because i like roller coasters and i like dangerous adrenaline stuff so when i go to new York I almost want to put my hands out the car like a roller coaster I like yeah It's amazing how like, you know, I wonder how some of these people became special and talk about people, people being slightly rude. I do think that taxi drivers will deliberately be a bit ignorant, pretend they don't know where they're going. If you don't speak Cantonese sometimes. Yeah. I was in a, I came out of a bar once and I was like, where I'm meeting Ellie's family at the Peak Lookout restaurant. It's like on the peak, like the biggest tourist attraction really in Hong Kong other than the harbour, right? And so I got in, I was like, can I go to the Peak Lookout restaurant? Huh? Peak Lookout restaurant. Shook his head. I went, Peak Road. Where? On the peak. It's like, you couldn't have a more like a descriptive where to go. And then I started driving off. He hands me a phone with someone who speaks badly better english going driver doesn't understand i went through this whole rigmarole with her he still dropped me a mile down the road and it was just i just think it was just like apparently there's english ways to say the roads there's cantonese way to say the roads and there's like english versions of the cantonese way to say the road all right well again i'm gonna play i'll play devil's advocate

CHAPTER 21

Language Assimilation and Closing

how long have you been there uh two years that's plenty of time for you going to get halfway through learning Cantonese and Mandarin. I'll tell you straight up, like, I firmly believe when you move to another country that you must assimilate into their society. So if I was Mexican, I came to America, I'd be doing my best to learn English. If I'm a Texan moving to Australia, I've learned easy learning curve, their lingo. It's pretty easy. Just drop the end off and add an O to everything and you're pretty sweet. But I've always been of the opinion that if I moved to a country and English is my primary language, it's not theirs, I'm going to probably learn their culture and try to learn their language, right? And I think for me, it's a matter of respect and also easy getting through the community and being able to talk to them correctly in the way they understand. Um, one time when Zoe and I were, we were traveling, I think we were going to, um, we were going to Ireland. Uh, I can't remember where we had been. We, I think we had been in America doing seminars. We were going to the Irish strength Institute, but we ended up going through, I think Norway, I think it was Norway. So we did a night in Norway And I was like, well, if we're going to go at night, let's do like 24 hours. We kind of see a little bit of Norway. So we flew in and they lost my luggage. So I had no fucking clothes. So we had to go into we had to go into the city and buy at least enough clothes, like a couple of outfits before we went to Ireland. I could buy some shit. So we went downtown. It was the weirdest thing ever. We went downtown. There were people everywhere. You could hear a fucking pin drop. and uh i'm talking there were hundreds of people out and you could you you would you'd feel more comfortable whispering to somebody because your voice would carry so so far and whenever i go to a country like that i always read through uh like uh what's the happy planet or whatever the fuck it is one of those you know one of those travel things i want to read about the the culture and what should i do and not do and i don't want to offend anybody that type of shit and one of the things it said about the the scandinavian countries is that if you're loud like me they automatically assume you're drunk and you don't want that so i went to there it's like i'm gonna okay i'm gonna use my own soft voice like my very private private voice and we went downtown and it was like fucking ghost pin drop so we we go into this sports store and i hear this loud motherfucker just like and it's an american accent and zoe goes is that american or canadian i go that's that's californian and sure enough the guy was a guy from california that had moved to norway and so we started talking to him and he was like yeah how's the how's the process of going to this country he goes that's pretty sweet man like i got a job this that he goes you know within the first two years i have to learn how to speak their language because that's probably like the biggest hurdle uh because that language apparently hard as fuck but i think that's the right thing to do right if you're going to immigrate into somebody's country then you need to abide by their laws and you need to abide by their culture and you need to abide by their language i think it's i picked up a little bit it's a very very difficult language to learn you know i think it's one of things that like we deciding what we do over the next few years based off whether we can go home and see family who knows in this year like but if if we extend from the year like i gonna actually like start doing some do some lessons or something where i can actually actually learn it so i'm at home i get i'll get overwhelmed and i just just no i'll get distracted like going back to what was there at the start yeah yeah yeah no look it's a it's a hard it's hard fucking language man because you're one intonation off making somebody agreeable or then wanting to fucking stab you in the throat Right. So I'll tell you, I'll tell you two, two quick stories on that. Like one of my best friends, we've known each other since we were 19. She's Chinese, Chinese American. And I would go over to have dinner with her family. And they were all either, either, you know, born in China or first, first generation Americans. and so we go to dinner and they'd all be sitting there and i'm like the big token white dude and they're all like you know talking chinese and shit and i'm just like yeah cool like i was talking you all motherfuckers all speak english i don't speak uh mandarin so i don't know why you guys speak a manner and it's funny because they would all talk and they'd laugh and they'd look at me to try to include me into it and they'd be like ha ha ha and i'd be like ha ha motherfuckers yeah you laughing at me and then my friend was like no they're just they're trying to include you in a conversation i'm like well you could probably include me if you all spoke english that would be real fucking easy but i decided i was gonna start i was gonna try to learn how to speak chinese so i bought pimsleur which this is 20 something years ago so it was like a little fucking tape you put in your cassette tape you slide it in the thing and i remember i was driving my truck and i was trying to repeat the words and after about 15 minutes i just ejected threw it out the fucking window. I was like, I'm never going to learn this shit. It could happen. But a good friend of mine who he used to own the largest sunglass company in America. So he decided he was a designer and he decided he was going to go to China and he was going to figure out how to get sunglasses made. And so could not speak a lick of Chinese, flew over, got a fucking apartment and started trying to talk to the guys at the factories and he taught himself how to speak Chinese. And at one point, they asked him to speak in front of a high school graduation. And so he was up there and he was speaking Chinese. And apparently at one point, his intonation was just slightly off. And instead of saying something like, may you all be successful, he said something like, go suck your mom's goat ass or something. And some dude walks out of the back, he's like, oh, you can't say that. you cannot say that he's like what he was like look nobody say anything they're speechless he was like no that's not why they're speechless and they had to pull them off stage yes like in cantonese it's even tougher than mandarin it's like nine dialects so the margin for error is huge yeah absolutely they should they should just be like a like uh people who speak english and use like 18 different words that mean the same fucking thing in different contexts like they're there and there and where and where and you know effect and effect and just makes it even even worse yeah but i say like english isn't an easy language either like i don't i'm quite glad that i learned that with all the things that was actually saying like well my my other half is a primary school teacher and she i never get i don't know what they do like in australia or in the u.s but here they're there they teach phonics so they spell out yeah basically and it's great until you have an accent. I remember them, he was talking about these kids, where she had to mark them that they were right, but she was trying to get them to spell fire. But rather than I-R-E, because they're from Birmingham, they spelled it F-I-Y-A, because technically, in phonics, it's right, because it's fire. Okay, well, this is a drawback here. I think phonics must be an American thing, because if you go to the UK, you go to Australia, they don't say fire like they say fire. so it's like technically it does sound like it would be spelt that way yeah i i don't i never used to school it's definitely a relatively new thing since since i since i was in school many years ago um i i've started to um started to speak that way which i'm starting to get lazy r's and yeah the longer the longer i spend over here and i actually went i went back to uh the u.s and somebody, Zoe and I was in a taxi or an Uber and the guy asked me if I was from Australia and I'm like, what the fuck? You know, I get that when I go home. I had, I remember once I was at university and I got speaking to a guy from Warsaw, which is not too far from my neck of the woods. And I'm not, I've never had a particularly thick black and white accent, but I left him at the time because he goes, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm okay.

I was scared you didn't sound like you because I just slipped in without knowing it back until I was like, you're a wee pet, I'm Archer, come on, how you doing? You know, and like, absolutely terrible. Cool. So, I mean, I could chat and rant away with you all night. I'll definitely look at some point, get you on for round two and maybe chat completely non-training stuff. But thank you very much for your time. For anyone who doesn't know where to find Luke, where can people find Luke? um you can find me at three roma oh never mind don't do that um yeah so muscle nerds underscore health on instagram if you like memes um and you won't bother me about business stuff my instagram is luke lehman l-e-a-m-a-n and that's purely a meme account um and then on facebook obviously muscle nerds but uh fuck nobody uses facebook anymore it's too it's too much discussion on facebook now i'm not just scrolling pictures so we don't actually use we don't have a fucking tiktok so don ask i don do stupid crazy dances and shit um yeah that about it i mean if people want to inquire about coaching or education consoles mentorship stuff like that info at muscleners which is also our webpage. So we don't have the best webpage in the world. We're just kind of working on it, but it has enough information to find us and all that shit. I can definitely vouch for the memes are good. You have a big knack of finding good memes every week. That's my next calling. If muscle nurse doesn't work out, I'm going to be, I'm just going to move into the professional meme Lord, uh, category and just do that. Yeah. I, I definitely, definitely, definitely got a calling for it there. And well, and I suppose the last thing, a place where people can find you, they're local to your areas, the gym. Are you guys? Yeah. Yeah. That's the, uh, Institute of Physical Performance and that is in Banyo so B-A-Y-B-A-N-Y-O so yeah awesome awesome again thank you so much for coming on it's been an absolute pleasure chat soon

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# Posture to Performance

**Channel:** Simon Kingsley Dutton - Self Made Podcast
**Published:** 2024-05-14
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=H6Vd1G5S5VA

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Self Made Podcast. In this episode I speak to Luke Lehman. Luke is one of the most interesting people in the industry, not just because of his outstanding and incredible knowledge, but also his personality and how he makes really complicated topics really, really accessible. In this episode we break down a number of things in terms of meal plans and nutrition and how best to approach nutrition as yourself trying to get in shape or as a coach trying to get his clients in shape. Then we delve into the main part of this podcast where we talk about going from poor posture to high performance. We talk about some of the common issues that we see in the game of trying to improve people's mobility and stability, what things that people are doing wrong, and then we just sort of break down a number of dysfunctions and how you can get into a position where you move better, more freely, perform better, and how small things, just like your head position, wrist position, could affect how much output and force you can actually produce and how you could be leaving gains on the table by not addressing this stuff we also go on to many many many tangents talking about things like adhd travel and a whole host of other topics this guy generally is really really interesting and we are looking to do another episode um basically bigger uncensored and uncut where we basically go into a big joe rogan style episode so if you really really enjoy that episode stay tuned for that and if you want to hear more from luke please follow luke at luke lehman that's his meme account and then at muscle nurse health which is his account for his business as well as institute of physical culture his gym in australia as always if you enjoy the podcast episode we'd love to hear from you please drop a share on your socials tagging me and luke and if you want to know any more about myself or anything else i've got planned for the podcast please drop me a message I don't buy and I'm happy to help. I will leave you with myself and Luke Lehman. So you don't want to do the regular intro for this. So I'm going to throw the question at you and just start speaking up offline. I recently had Rob McGeary on the podcast talking about development and he was talking about the benefits of no fap. You said before we got into this that you were pro-fat. Now, is there a scientific reasoning behind this, or is this just really weird territory to start the episode on? No, no, this is fine. You know, it's like when I think personal development, I think about going to a seminar and learning how to speak better, or learning how to read faster, or be more organized. I don't understand where your penis comes into this equation. Like, you know what? I decided I wanted to be a better person, so I stop touching my penis like what what I don't get that so uh I'm I'm pro-fap I mean I've that's something I've always done even if I you know I'm married now I still fap so sometimes I fap three times a day even when I'm getting plenty of sex it's just I think that's a common man thing to do and maybe a woman thing to do as well I don't know because I don't have a vagina so I don't know if I don't know how many times girls do that so yeah I mean do you find like you know if you have you done enough research on this yourself to realize that performance benefits from the times where you fat more and fat less like strength ratios like the amount of time no i mean i have i have enough uh enough uh time on my hands looking at nutrition and exercise physiology and all that stuff it's like i wonder what would happen if i stopped jacking off for 30 days maybe i get like 0.3 kilos on my bench yeah not worth it so so we're like if you're going into sort of like the the personal development routes and finding out rather than looking at who Luke was because most people yeah you know you've done this a thousand times going from who Luke's becoming what's your go-to things for like personal development other than just studying a lot of nutrition stuff no no look that's a that's a good question I'll tell you my secret I read a lot of fantasy genre books. I find that fantasy and sci-fi, the nerds and the geeks have this shit all sorted out. So I can always find something about leadership or honor and loyalty and all that stuff. And even like, you know, organization that if you read the books with an open mind, you'll see a lot of philosophy. You'll see a lot of leadership quality stuff. For instance, Dune, if you've ever read Dune, tons of leadership value in that book. If you've ever read one of my favorite Sword of Truth series, there's a lot of philosophy on there. A lot of kind of anti-altruistic, take care of yourself before you take care of other people types of philosophy there. Kind of like your pave your own way type of stuff. So that's the type of stuff that I look for. And I've tried the other books. I don't know if I can... You go to the self-development section and there a bazillion ones by a bunch of losers who have never done anything themselves And now they trying to tell you how to do that shit And I find that they were just worthless and I found everything I needed to in fiction Yeah I mean I I I never been a a big reader It's something I feel like I should do because you see a lot of people going into, there's a common trend of people that's successful in business or anything, whether they're often reading fiction becomes important part of like, just, you know, improving. You mentioned things about proving themselves as a person, but also improve themselves as a storyteller and communication skills and and things like that from it. I mean, like you've often said, like before turning this into a personal therapy session, but the, at your ADHD, do you find it's been a tough ride to get into reading, being able to focus on something like that? Because I'm on the verge of going and finding out I have adult onset ADHD. And one of the things I've always struggled with is reading. So how have you gotten into that considering, you know, like the struggles that may have come from having that diagnosis? You know, I think a lot of the issues with ADD, well, there's some inherent benefits having ADD. When you're passionate about something, you can get ridiculously hyper-focused. Bonds could be going off and you wouldn't even notice. So there's some also negatives. You've got a lot of issues with impulse control. And before I take my medication in the morning, I'm very manic. And my wife can tell when I haven't taken it. She's like, have you taken your meds? I'm like, no, not yet. Oh, let's go do something fun. She's like, take your meds. I'm like, okay. And then two hours later, I'm at my computer, like, okay, I've got focus. I can do this now. Cool. But I think if you, cause I mean, I've got, I'm 43, right? So I've had 43 years to learn how to channel this. And so a lot of it is being able to chant it into something you're passionate about, which happens to be my career path. So it's nothing for me to sit here and do computer work for 12 hours a day or grab a book and study for 12 hours because I can get so focused into it. The problem is I forget to eat. I forget to poop. I forget to pee. I forget to do everything else, but I will just get hard out into that subject. So yeah, it's never been a hard thing for me to do to focus on my studies. It's a hard thing for me to do to stay in my workflow if someone derails me from that so if i get distracted it's a 45 minute kind of desk kind of pathway of getting back to whatever i was doing before so that's the biggest thing is getting getting getting derailed from other with other people do you like do you find i i often find with the you know with my focus is that i can either be as you say it's like you know i could be up at 4am i haven't looked away from my laptop for 16 hours and i've gotten tons of stuff done or i'll sit in front of the most using program design as an example the most basic gbc program which are written for 10 years and just feel this inability like there's a wooden bridge with slats missing like you mentioned like when you get distracted it's difficult to come back into it like do you have a sort of routine when it comes to your studies that allows you now to stay focused is there certain things you do to make sure you eliminate those distractions that can get into that zone the biggest thing is stay away from people so i don't leave my house i just stay in my area and zoe never bothers me when i'm kind of doing that stuff but yeah that's the thing i it's very difficult to have strategies like that because you literally are like oh there's a square loaf i'll just go over here and do this and then you know two hours later you're like oh shit i was supposed to finish that and then it's like oh cool i've got my rubik's cube here i'm gonna play with that a little bit and then it's like two hours later i'm like oh fuck i haven't even gotten restarted on what I was supposed to. So a lot of it is just trying to stay organized, which is difficult for some of the ADD. You need lists and then you lose your list. So you have like 50 lists and then you have to try to automate it and make them autonomous by putting it in a computer. And then there's all kinds of shit that goes wrong. So a lot of it is just building a lot of habits to turn this into rituals. So when I get up for work, I do the same shit every day. I sit in front of my computer and I bring a chronometer and I go through all of my clients and I look at what they've averaged out over the last 7, 14, 21, 28 days of food. And I look at how their weights average. And then I make notes on who I need to talk to and what I need to say to them. And then I go through my other coaches. So anybody that's kind of a problem client or having problems, I'll go through theirs and see how they're doing. then I can email my coaches second thing I do is go straight into true coach and I look at any videos I need to look at and critique their technique and then I see if there's any messages and then I'm done like I can three or four hours first thing in the morning I'm done with all that and then I can go into now I can study and research and write and do that type of thing do you feel like having like having energies helped you be a better a better presenter like that little bit of like, because often going into like, we obviously love it, but you've got people coming in and getting overwhelmed getting you know with the sort of like the deep material And often you been known in the industry for a lot of it being someone that makes all this stuff quite fun when a lot of a lot of educators can be making it very it this this rep scheme it very almost dead pan do you feel like that's helped you have like come like oh yeah out there personality yeah and it does because it gives me a a position where i can be myself and i could be a maniac so So it's funny because when I stand up and I present, there's some people that think, oh, that's an act. Like, he doesn't really act like that. I'm like, no, this is people who know me and talk to me outside of me speaking and lecturing. They go, no, that's how he talks. Like, he cusses that much and he says that much inappropriate shit. Like, that's him. I don't put on any fronts. But that being said, I do always, when I get up to talk, I want it to be entertaining. I want it to feel like a performance. Like I want you to feel like you've come to a show. And I think that's what's missing from a lot of guys. They just don't, they've got the knowledge, but they don't know how to turn it into something fun. Like you would get dressed up to and go have dinner and then hear this person speak. So that if you just come in and hear this sciencey shit and it's super dry, like go to college for that because that's really easy. But if they come into me, I want to make sure that they're getting the most that they can get out of it, which is not just the information, how to apply it, but also having a good fucking time and also being highly offended. Yeah, I think this, you know, maybe not to the same level, but certainly this was my own experience, like training coaches in particular, but even training clients. I feel that the pros and cons of being like this is I've managed to put my foot in my mouth a lot. I've got myself in a lot of trouble, especially where I used to work, because, you know, free speech isn't common. But like, see, just like that. But I've also managed to, I've got this thing where people, and I suppose one of you have the same thing, where people end up trusting you because you're willing just to speak your mind and a little bit of verbal diarrhea. You know when you're having a conversation with someone, they're genuine. And I find there's nothing worse than having a conversation when you know, you can just see the cogs turning. And I'm just like, I don't want to trust you. Do you feel that's helped? Because you've built a very, I would say cult following, although it's getting more mainstream by the day, but like, you know, cult following in the industry as being one of the guys to go to. Do you feel like that helps out a lot? Oh, let's not use that word cult. Let's see it. Let's leave cult and like do shit. I'm using it as a positive for a change. Yeah. Let's just say we've built an interest in what we do. That sounds better, right? Yeah. You know, I think, I think people appreciate when you're genuine and they can, And people are attracted that other people are genuine and aren't trying to hide things. Right. And there's a lot of people in our industry that they do. They're very dogmatic in what they do. Very myopic. They're very black and white, you know, do this, not that. But that's not how this stuff works. And there's not enough people that are standing up there that will harness humility and be genuine. So if someone asks me something, I don't know. I'll just tell them I don't know. I don't know, but I'll try to find out for you. And if I can't, I'll find who can and I'll send them your way. But there's a lot of guys who they want to be this pseudo expert and they'll just answer questions by pulling shit out of their ass. And then you hear this and you go, but that's not correct. That's not even close. But they're so convincing in the way they say it that everyone just follows. And then it gets repeated in the industry and it makes the industry a worse place. I think more people need to just be comfortable saying, look, I don't have all the answers. I don't know. That's outside of my scope of expertise and my scope of knowledge or whatever. But I do know a few guys who might know. Let me ask them and then let me get back to you. And, you know, I suppose those people are thinking that if they don't know the answer to something, they're not as much an expert. I don't know the answer. I think it probably hinders them because like you saying, I don't know, but I'll find out. Now leads you down to meet someone, improve your network or someone that could educate you in helping you have that answer. like I know like part of the reasons why I wanted to do this for so many years is it's just almost being able to chat to really interesting people that are smarter than me in their field and it's that often like your own your own arrogance and pride will actually stop you going because it's that it's the ability to find like you know people like yourself and all the people I've had on this podcast is like I've taught me so much through the years this is not about me you know I remember with the one had Andrew Coates on, he was saying that, you know, talk about storytelling. He was like, if this was a Harry Potter movie, the coach's job is to be Dumbledore. Not to be Harry, not to be the star. I love I absolutely love that. Yeah Yeah I like that That good That good And I have to talk to him about that because he needs to explain that to me more because that good Yeah Yeah And you talked like and it it was a really interesting conversation because every story has to going back to the fiction literature, every story is that sort of same thing. There's a guide, there's a hero, and like, you know, and they all go through a very, very similar path. And it's quite interesting when you draw parallels to this. Again, someone else is well-read. This is my wake-up call to start reading more fiction, I think, this episode. Yeah, I think, I mean, you've heard me say this in like program design and foundations and stuff. You have to look at this. If we go back to storytelling, you know, you're hired by the client to help them write a book. So essentially, you're the editor, right? So you're going to lay out the outline of how this needs to go. We need a table of contents. Then we're going to need a chapter one that opens and everything. And then we also need, we need to go look at the end. So how do you write a proper program? Well, you have to look at the end and work your way back to where you're beginning. So it's a lot like that. But ultimately, the client has to actually write the book. They have to actually put the words on the paper. And it's your job to just edit things and correct things and also to guide them towards that end conclusion. Yeah, I think that's a good way of saying it, like help them write a book. Because I think there's a lot of, going back to dogmatic things, when people look at sort programs on with people it's almost very much uh you know it's it's do this do this and like they have this idea in their head of where they want to be and if the client doesn't necessarily agree to that you've i i always reference you with it um where people say like i i want to lose a couple of pounds and just like throw them in the squat rack and make them get on stage you know it's yeah you know like the more i the years i have in this the more conversation in terms of my clients becomes so much more important it's like i'm gonna let you dictate this story and i'll just i'll just go yeah yeah yeah i mean it's the thing like a client comes to you and and you've heard me say this before when i first started out first started out and a girl walks in she's like oh i just want to lose like you know five pounds and i'm looking at her like okay six months i'll have you on stage bikini show and then it's going to be ifbb we'll do nationals and we're going to go pro like that was going on in my head. And that's not what they were asking me for. They only wanted to legit lose five pounds. And that's all that they cared about. And I, that was back in the day when I'd be like, well, let me explain to you the difference between losing weight and losing fat. And I was just this pompous little shit. Like most guys, when they first come into the training thing before, before they have enough experience to understand that you're saying the wrong things and you got You're focusing on the wrong things and you and your client aren't matching up with what they're actually asking you to do. And, you know, you can only get that with experience. You can't read about that in a book. You can hear someone say it, but ultimately you have to basically go through a dozen clients and be like, okay, why do I keep losing clients? Maybe I'm not listening to them. Maybe I'm telling them too much of where they want to go instead of, you know, finding out actually where they want to go. super common thing for uh coaches to do it's a huge mistake as well but we've all done it you know same with the guys you know yeah and i i also think as well like you you might find some of these people not that you would have necessarily gone and wanted the goals you set for them initially but it was that hardwire approach but a lot of that they're they're often guarded by um insecurities not caught up in the gym you know like not sure what they can achieve and you might find if you like that person who they go to another coach that listens to them that asks questions you know that finds out a little bit more about them and then just thinks okay let's lose that first five pounds they may be 20 pounds down in six months they may be a person who's sure maybe i could do like a stage show like i remember when i first started i was very dogmatic about exercise classes it's like you know what the fuck you're doing in the zumba some of the sack of shit like you know you should be doing hardcore weight training i'm just like this guy's like 140 kilos with bad knees i'm just like come on he maybe just wants to dance like yeah yeah yeah you know um i remember doing aqua aerobics have you ever done aqua aerobics no is that where you're flipping around on silks and shit no no that i know that's aerial yoga i've not done that but yeah aqua aerobics is when you're in the swimming pool oh yeah aqua aqua water okay got it yeah like that that one moment might change my thought about exercise classes in my career those old days just like they blew me out of the water doing aerobic stuff i was i'm not judging any class ever again yeah well look i mean you know you know my you know my background you know who you I've had many mentors, but one of my main mentors, massively anti-aerobic, anti-carb, anti all this stuff. And that that shaped me initially until, you know, until later when I kind of broke out of that and started getting into the textbook.

and getting other mentors and figuring out, hmm, maybe we need some aerobics. Maybe we need to have carbs. Maybe we need to have this. Maybe they have that. And so I had a similar experience to your, your aqua aerobic thing. So one of my really good friends teaches body combat, you know, the Les Mills, like they do like the Thai bow shit, you know? And, and I was like, I went to see her and she, we did a charity thing where I trained her for charity and all of her clients got to come and watch and all that. And so I just completely brutalized her. After she goes, well, since I did that with you, come in on Monday and do body combat with me. And I went, nah, man, I'm not gonna do body combat. Like I'm not in that type of shape. Like I'm super out of shape right now. She goes, no, just come in. And I finally went, all right, fuck it. So if Zoe will do it, I'll do it. Zoe and I went and did it. And man, I think it was like a 45 minute class and I'm in the back of the class And I'm doing my punches and my elbows and my knees. I'm super into it, like the first half of it. And I was like, fuck, man, I'm starting to get winded. Shit. And I'm looking around and there's, there are girls who are seriously overweight. I mean, these girls are like 50, 60% body fat and they're just, they're hammering it. They're just, I'm in the back. I'm fucking about to puke. And I'm at the time I was shredded as I was almost single digit body fat. And I thought I was in real good shape. And I'm looking around all these other girls who don't look like they're in shape. They're in massively good shape. And I was in the back going, fuck, okay, it's got to be, it's 45 minutes. I look at the clock, it's been 15 minutes. I'm like, fuck, fuck, I'm never going to make it. And that was one of those things that changed my ideas about that. And I didn't even have solid ideas about no classes at that point. But at that point, I went, okay, maybe this is good for my clients if they want to do this type of shit. I'll fuck it. I'm all for it. as long as we can balance it out with everything else in the program. Yeah, exactly. It's looking at risk reward, I suppose, for these sort of things, right? Like, you know, if someone's coming into you with 20 years of knee pain and it's, you know, it's a big, you know, Les Mills burpee class, then maybe there's a different conversation we had from someone who's coming into the gym for the first time and like, just, they don't really like being there, but maybe a bit of something that might get them started, you know, and get them to go in the right direction. On that same, on that same token, if you get the super hardcore strength trainers, strength coaches, like I used to be, like non-wavering, black and white, bitch, get your ass in the squat right type of guy. I mean, some of those guys that go, well, you shouldn't do aerobics or the aerobics classes because it's bad for your knees. You got a bad knee. But they'll put somebody with a fucking hernia, a bum knee, a peg leg, and a fucking scoliosis, and they'll make them squat 300 kilos, and they don't think there's anything wrong with that. So that's what I don't understand. it's like you don't like that activity because of these things but you'll let everybody squat and maybe like maybe 15 of your clients do you even have the orthopedic profile to even do a deep squat yeah it just blows my mind yeah it's just it's cherry picking stuff but what suits your narrative rather and what doesn't suit your narrative um yeah so what's like obviously you've mentioned and you know we know about the cardio thing and things like this but what's like Is there any other big dogmatic beliefs that you've held in the industry that you've had massively turned around in the last few years? Man, a lot. Not in the last few years, but probably about 10 years ago, things started to change. And one of them was the low-carb versus high-carb thing. And I was massively low-carb. Not keto, but modified low-carb, that type of thing. paleo-ish, but not really paleo because I feel like that's pretty silly. I'm not dressing up like a caveman and getting my spear and running into the grocery store, like crawling through the floor at Tesco's, coming up to the fucking beef section and spearing some fucking beef and then making a fire in the middle of the grocery store, right? But the type of thing, right? Meat, veg, meat, veg. I was big into that. And I still am for me. But then I got to where I'm like, okay, I need to be giving people what's good for them. And so for some people that might be high carb, low fat, some people that may be high fat, low carb. Um, so I had to change the way I looked at, at diet diet because I was so far into that one, um, one section of it. And, um, I realized that this stuff has to be basically prescribed for lack of a better word for the specific individual for their personal chemistry, but also what they can actually accomplish, you know, what they can actually be compliant on. So that nutrition was a big one for me Yeah A hundred percent but I still eat a very high protein um low to moderate carb and low to moderate fat And I feel that the best for me but that not for everybody But I do find that that works really well for a lot of people But I got people who eat 70 carbs like 20 protein 10 fat and they just kill it, you know? Apologies for the child dying in the background there for during the end of that last question. Don't know what happened out there. Probably was realizing that she could actually eat carbs the first time in, you know, nine years. Probably. So, I mean, yeah, I think that's an interesting one with like nutrition obviously like we all know how well studied you are and like how you're you know learning more and more about what's optimal in terms of dieting for the individual and how to change certain things do you feel that your like your approach nutrition has become more flexible or less flexible as you started to learn more about what you're doing it's i feel like it's gotten more flexible as far as looking at a broad range of diets it has gotten a bit less flexible with what I want my clients to do, at least initially, because after training as many people as I have, especially with nutritional coaching, there's a lot of times where people just don't need a flexible fucking approach. Most people, if you give them a flexible approach, they'll be too flexible. So I personally would rather give them a semi-rigid, semi-static template, at least in the first few weeks. I prefer them to weigh and measure and track just to give them an idea of how many calories are actually food because they have no idea the general population have such low nutritional literacy that they go i don't want to track i don't want to check and this is even coaches too we get all the coaches to track and we had a coach the other day who ate a pizza hut pizza and he goes there's no way that there's that many calories that there's no way there's no there's no way there's that much fat in cars like dude it's a fucking pizza hut pizza it's like a deep dish pizza hut pizza yes there's like 4 000 fucking calories now how are you a coach and you don't know that like i don't understand this but they never know until they actually track things so we get people to track and they're like oh i do it really good monday through friday and then and then there's their booze on the weekend holy shit 4 000 calories of booze you're like yeah so so the reader's digest version it's become flexibly inflexible. So the way I look at it is I look at it from an area of those four levels of competence, right? So I've got subconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and then subconscious competence. And I look at it as a, this is going to sound horrible to anybody who listens. If one of my clients is listening to this, I apologize. It's like training a dog. When you get a puppy, you give it a real fucking short leash, and you got a prong collar on. And anytime it gets out of the way, you're like, pow! And you just fucking snap that prong collar, and it gets the puppy back in line. So in the early stages, you kind of have to be like that with your clients, because they just don't know any better. And then when they move to the next level, now you can take the prong collar off, but you still got a pretty short leash. And now you can just kind of tug them and guide them, and then they get to the next level and you give them a little bit more leash a little bit more leash and eventually you can take the leash off but you have to train clients the same way you would train a puppy like that is that you know they will be the worst what's the thing they'll be their own worst enemies because they just don't have enough information or knowledge to make the right decisions and that's our job to teach them how to do that and create structure there's just so many so many things i i like and we've just said that i'm so glad you talked about the the structure things from your plans um because i suppose like coach like the talk about the coach is not tracking it's almost it's more in probably more in denial i always when i look at tracking who dies now i go right is there something i'm i'm very i'm aware whenever i start dieting start tracking stuff of my my habits and the things i want to do whether i do it or not because if i do it i know my clients will do it so like i would things a couple things i would do so i used to have these last i was like these dairy like dairy to um blue cheese triangles like 20 calories a pop and it was just like a couple of them would just get me through the meal i wouldn't track it's 40 calories yeah but it's what a client would do with a cookie oh it's only small yeah and it's 200 300 calories four five six seven times a week and or i remember going to a restaurant once and really wanting the spare ribs and it's my mini diets that always that always show me these things my proper diets like tunnel vision i'm in but if it's like yeah mini diet i've got no goal for it doesn't really matter. This is where I was like, I looked through my fitness pal, like scrolling up, like which spare ribs is the best. I will take an hour of need. It's not the 4,000 calorie, but definitely that 400 calorie. Like no fucking way that that is the case That when I started to notice more things in my food clients food diets Like what a couple couple things I remember was 13 and a half cashew nuts like who breaks a half yeah yeah like precise or they've just gone that's about right you know or they were like yeah one of them was a bit smaller than the others so we just said 0.6 0.7 I don't know um one ounces of steak one ounces of steak who the fuck eats a one ounce steak i don't understand too like living overseas now like i don't understand why people don't use the fucking metric system it drives me insane when i when i go okay so if you're using my fitness pound you know i use chronometer when i go into chronometer and i see one of our clients has put pounds in for their weight i i immediately text them and i go nah put your scale on kilograms get with the rest of the fucking planet stop using it you gotta here's the way i think of it too especially it's the americans right it's the americans and sometimes the people in uk and you never know with the uk what you're gonna get you could get pounds you get kilograms you get fucking stone you could get some other fucking medieval way of fucking counting somebody's weight or height like hands and shit and i used to get so mad because i had british i just got this image of holy grail i'm just seeing an odd way of saying i was a duck yeah i get like i get guys from england and they'd send me this fucking uh yeah today i weighed 10 stone and i'm like fuck now i gotta fucking convert to stone is 14 and then divide by 2.2 for kilograms and it just i'm like can you just fucking put that in his kilograms please the one thing i like to do with the americans i make them especially the women flip their scale to kilograms because then when they gain weight, it's not so scary because if you gain one pound, they lose their fucking minds. But if they gain 400 grams, they're like, oh, it's just that's grams. That's nothing. And I'm like, that's fucking, that's a fucking pound. 454 is a pound, but they don't know that. So it just, it tricks them. So you get away with that for a while. And then they start getting smart and they go, oh, hold on a minute. I've been gain of 454 grams a week. That's a pound and I'm like, yeah, and you haven't freaked out and you look great. Fuck it. But that's not bad. Yeah. The meal, the meal plan things interesting as well, because it's almost it's almost become my catchphrase in last year, because it's almost been trendy for coaches to go. meal plans don't teach you anything. I'm like, what, what you want, like meal plan, your structure, it'll teach you like food prep or teach you habitual habits or teach you so much based off this and how a diet should actually look like them stop big maps. Yeah. And like, it's mad that people think like, I the dog colors are great. And I've always thought it's like learning a language. It's like, the meal plan is like you look you saying I will learn Spanish over here. Here's a Rosetta Stone take the macros approach to go just go to Spain. But I don't need to learn any words first. No, you'll pick it up. Like, hope it makes up you know, it never does. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, when you learn a language, it's like you learn all the conjugations and all that stuff. And that is they give you the conjugations. You got to write down your present, past, future, all that stuff. And that's how you learn it. The way I see it is I don't like giving people static meal plans, but I like working with my clients to create their own meal plan. So what I typically will do is I'll write their macros and I'll write their calories and then I'll go in a chronometer and I'll separate that out into, say, four or five sections for meals. OK, I want you to have around 500, 600 calories per meal to so much protein, carb and fat. Now, let's work on what proteins you'll eat every day and not get that bored. And if you do get bored, we can make an exchange list. But I make my clients write their own diet, but I'm there helping them do it. So I'm like, okay, let's put in some starch. You could have some starch, you could have fruit. So that could be rice, potatoes, sweet potato, whatever. Or you could have grapes or bananas or whatever you want. And they're like, oh, I think I want some potato. Cool, put that in there. and then they see they're like, holy shit, that's a lot of carbs. I'm like, that's okay. We'll just use charisma potatoes, which are 25% less carbs. And they have more carbs or more volume. They're like, oh, that's cool. So we do it as an educational thing and they create their own meal plan. And what I find is they eat that pretty, you know, pretty consistently for three, four, five weeks, they started getting bored, but then they say, holy shit, I've lost five kilos in the last five weeks. I'm like, yeah, look at that. That's what happens. We follow a static plan. that doesn't have any deviations. You've got accuracy, you've got precision and the way it goes. The most successful clients that I see are the people who do that who have structure and eat the same shit every day And they might pop a little of this a little of that out But it pretty much the same stuff every day And we see I telling you we see at least most of them one kilo of weight loss significantly and consistently over time Yeah, I agree with that from the people I've seen. You just eliminate margin for error because regardless whether, even if there's tracking error within it, if it's static, at least you know. like they're eating this if you think it's 1800 is actually 2000 it's still consistently a 2000 and i i often i find that the people that want decadence i always panic a little bit when i get a client asking me for recipes and it's not because i'm against yeah like and it's two reasons one you don't want my recipes they're boring as fuck um and two like when you're looking at like often i find if someone's like resourceful and has a sort of detective mindset i'll go and find the recipes themselves i go hey do these work yeah we're cool here's a few more but it's more this oh i i want everything to taste like gordon ramsey prepared it for me especially on a wednesday between meetings and it's like not every not every meal needs to be it's like that's that's what that's why you look like you do right now because you've been eating gordon ramsey shit all the time and you don't want to look like gordon ramsey shit anymore so let's get lean first and then you go back to eating gordon ramsey shit every once in a while not every meal. The thing is like, this is what kills me is people don't know how to cook. If you, if people knew how to cook, like I love my meals and I eat the same shit every day. I wake up and I have four eggs almost every morning with a little bit of paprika, smoked paprika, and a little bit of Malden sea salt. Like that's the best fucking salt ever. The Malden fucking crystal flakes, a little bit of cracked pepper. I have that and a, and a cappuccino done lunch. I have, I almost always have chicken thigh. I might have like 300, 250, 300 grams of chicken thigh. And I just, I take it. I can make it taste any way I want to. I can do lemon pepper. I can do butter garlic. I can do hot and spicy. I just use a different, a different blend, a different rub every day. And that's easy. And then I might throw in a salad, chunky salad or something with of cucumber and tomato and red onion and i'm done and if i need starch i can add a little bit of rice so that's super easy but people want to make these goddamn fucking food networks four hour fucking meals where they're putting in you know fucking truffle fucking truffle butter shit that was blessed by a shaman or some bullshit they just they just use a fucking salt and the butter like stop eating so much hyper palatable shit and you won't be begging for hyper palatable shit all the time uh but our job is really hard i don't like i i see people like that like and they often they don't get it like you're you're you know you're you're a lawyer that works 400 hours a week or you're an investment banker that you know until 2am what kind of bills how do you have the time for this food prep but you can't cook and now eight hours of cooking a day like what yeah no man you need good man i can cook my that those eggs i told you the easiest way for me to cook eggs i put i just take butter and i just go over the pan before it's hot i turn it on i crack four eggs in it i put a fucking glass top on it and i cook it real low i go and take a shit i go brush my teeth or do whatever i do i go i can pick up the dog shit the backyard whatever i'm going to do that morning i go by check on it not still going i can go and do everything i want while that's being cooked because it's cooking so slow. And then I'm almost assured it's never going to burn. I hate burnt eggs. I cannot stand the bottom of them being any types of burn. And I need the yolks to be runny. So if you bake it like that, basically steam the eggs, it's almost foolproof unless you're a moron and the eggs come out perfect every time. The lunch I do, I've got an air fryer air fryer cook perfect chicken thighs in 16 minutes and all you have to do is put them in there turn it on flip it over when it's halfway through that's it so like people need to understand you don't you don't need a fucking go to cooking school culinary school to figure out how to do this even even my dinner i always have steak i have a salad with some uh feta cheese and then I might have some rice or I might have a chocolate bar and that's it which is what I had tonight I've been wanting an air fryer for a long time no one here cooks in Hong Kong when we had the COVID case it hit like 180 which is the most we've ever had for one day Carrie Lam closed the restaurants completely we had them closed for dinners for a while but lunch times and because no one cooks there was just tons of people on the street just eating takeout food Like it was worse.

people like crazy we don't have another no splats don't have another it's the difficult thing here it's like you i've i've i've learned how to be resourceful more here than ever because no one cooks and no one like steps have to be purposeful here like i remember i was outside this uh place landmark and there's this big like queue for taxis and the taxi will come in and the people get in a taxi or drive off and instead of walking down to the second taxi everyone waits for the taxi to arrive at their feet to walk in oh weird yeah and this is when you say to someone could you do 10 000 steps a day or could you just do a whatever a bit of cardio in the week and they're like yeah that's like 12 hours of walking like no it's not you have no concept how long it takes yeah but um moving sort of like into into some of the into some of the training stuff and we spoke about jumping on this and talking a little bit about you know you've been known for the least most stuff and improving something you know stress and mental states with regards to training and a lot of fat loss stuff with that but for people that might not know if they're not in the program design course on the back end and see all the good stuff you've done some of the most impressive results you've come out um at the moment is improving people's mobility resting posture getting people out of pain you know and before we go into some of the specifics with that like for people i always say that someone was telling me this yesterday there is when you get to around about your early 30s there's a point where you know just bodybuilding becomes sort of like uh you know you start going into other realms that people start becoming osteos or they start doing bjj and you know they always have an injury story or two that's sent them down this path like what is it for you that got you more into looking at like movement because you've always known as a nutrition guy like how have you become like you know there how's your journey to learning this you know it's it's funny it's funny that i became the nutrition guy uh because people don't realize i was a competitive national level competitive power lifter i was i competed in strong man i competed in bodybuilding and men's bikini and physique like i've i've done a lot i've competed in martial arts stuff like i've done all of this high performance sports stuff and everyone always comes to me to make them lose weight it's like fuck man i could make you an absolute fucking weapon but it's been in the last couple years we've actually got people coming in it's like i want to be a fucking assassin cool i got you bro like there's we've got so much other things right but um with the movement of mobility stuff it kind of came along um when i left polican group and i was like man we're teaching all these people how to train professional athletes and none of them are training professional athletes. And if there's a really hardcore, um, emphasis on maximal strength and man, that's just like maximal strength is important, but it's important as a foundation for other sports development, sports, um, quality, uh, what am I looking for? The development of other sports qualities, like speed and power and, and change of direction and agility and things like that. and I went, man, you know, I'm seeing a lot of the people that I'm dealing with have really horrible movement issues. Like they can't, I'm done level one and level two animal flow. I try to teach a client how to do an animal flow position. They can't even get set up for it, man. This is really fucking bad. You know, like squatting, deadlifting, benching, all that stuff's cool, but fuck man, someone can't even get on and off the ground without having like 800 different points of contact trying to get up. There's something wrong with that. Like we need to start thinking about where we need to put what we need to put first, the horse or the cart. And I just got to the point where I realized strength is cool, but mobility and flexibility and the ability to control yourself in positions is probably the most important thing you can do from a locomotion standpoint. And because strength is stupidly easy. It's stupidly easy to get real fucking strong. You know, when I was a kid and I started trading, I started training when I was like eight years old. That was back in 19. God, that was like a night. What is that? Eight, 1986. That's when I started like actual lifting and like lifting hard out for, for, you know, Texas football. And, uh, it was super easy bench, squat, deadlift, go home, eat a lot, come back, add more weight to the bar, bench, squat, deadlift, like getting really fucking strong is not rocket science, but getting really strong without creating a lot of fucked up shit in your body. That's the, that's the true art of how do I get real fucking strong, but not create an impingement in my shoulder FAI in my hip lower back compression and pain And I think we lost sight of that because a lot of these different a lot of these people who should be talking and exchanging information on methods, they should be agreeing with each other that everyone's right in certain situations and everybody's wrong in certain situations. They've all decided, no, we're just going to tell each other to fuck off and go our separate ways. So you got these, this side of all these powerlifters going, nah, just use less weight and squat with less weight. Find the weight you can squat at that you don't have any pain. Just keep squatting. I'm like, cool. Then you got these guys doing, do all these sissy ass fucking rehab exercises, do a bunch of fucking open cans and fucking clam shells and just do that shit for fucking four years and never feel better. Like somewhere between both of those sides is the truth. So that's where I've kind of headed off about six years ago i went on this journey to find out what's the truth between both of these sides yeah i i had this i was speaking to a topic recently this thing about like warm-ups like people end up getting into these 40 minute warm-ups and you know hardly have any time for their training and you know it's you never ever get any better they never get any closer to you um you know do you feel like when it comes to you obviously going into the strength stuff you you notice a lot of guys were tight, were having a lot of pain. Do you feel like, you know, what do you feel like causes or gets people into these sort of like bad starting positions? Do you feel it's just ego putting too much weight on the bar and just overloading themselves for years? Or is there more to it in terms of what you see? Yeah, I mean, I guess we can think of it as the law of repetition of efforts. The law of repetition of efforts can build a skill in a positive direction or can build a skill in a negative direction. So I think part of it is a lot of it's ego lifting. A lot of it is maxing out all the time on the same shit. And just every time you do that, you shift a little bit further and further outside of your acceptable technique. And then you ingrain that motor pattern and then that affects other things. And then the next thing you do, you wake up and you got chronic pain. And that's now how you squat because you can't, you can't deviate from that. Um, a lot of it is improper, uh, not paying attention to, um, muscular chains and how they affect each other. A lot of it is poor program design where it's just that the emphasis is too much on this one thing or this couple of things and not looking at a global, I hate the word holistic, but it makes sense here. Like a holistic global kind of thing of how these chains work together. um a lot of it is um you know not taking care of your conditioning and your blood pressure not taking care of your sympathetic nervous system not taking care of your electrolyte balance as far as like sodium potassium not taking care of uh resting heart rate and sleep inflammation there's a lot of things here that can contribute to this and all of these things could be a big contribution or they could be a really small contribution but you know what i reckon what i reckon for most people is that your ability to move is going to be dependent on where your joints can go. And if you've done things and pulled a bone outside of its normal position, you've reduced its capacity to move into certain ranges of motion. So then the body responds by limiting those ranges of motion and causing pain. And then that affects other areas. So for instance, when I was growing up in Texas, it was really common, like it is in most countries, that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were international bench press days. So everybody's bench, bench, bench, and biceps, bench, and biceps. So if you look at the shoulder, if I'm benching, benching, benching, benching, that's inherently going to pull the humerus forward. And if I'm doing a lot of biceps, biceps, biceps, biceps, that's going to shorten all this and it's going to pull it forward. So lo and behold, you go in after somebody's been doing this for five years and they look like a fucking watermelon farmer. So they look like they're just walking around with these two watermelons. Right. And then they go, I can't bench anymore because it destroys my shoulder. And by the way, I get this weird fucking hip pain and it's affecting my lower back. You're like, interesting. It's like, yeah, my foot hurts, too. It's like, OK, now it's a chicken or egg thing. It's probably related to something they did here that then worked its way down. but the body's always going to move away from pain and the absence of pain does not mean the absence of dysfunction you could be moving away from pain that you're not cognizant you don't have cognitive awareness of because the brain hasn't told you there's an issue because it's working around it so you're looking at i might be moving away from pain i might be moving away from instability and chasing stability i might be moving towards a position where i'm trying to find more space to move a bone. So there's a lot of different things that can contribute to that. When you're looking at obviously, obviously pain, obviously we have to look at pain in terms of you know someone comes in and pain if you can get someone out of pain I think it it you get a buy that you never get from anything including getting in the six and getting a bit of life and um you know but when when you looking at pain and certainly looking at pain science it very complex like we love it like what's painful to you might not feel painful to me or vice versa very subjective do you use pain other than just other than just like making the client happy and buying some services how much do you use pain as like part of your decision making process or is it something that's sort of there but i look at other stuff like how do you start to look at what's going on here well yeah i mean if they say they're in pain it's like okay have you have you actually seen like physio or have you seen an osteo or something like that what did they say okay um and then i might give them a proper assessment and now i've got to determine where that's coming from so what is the higher order thing that's now trickled down to causing this issue what needs to be rectified to move them away from that pain state. But then you also have to look at it as far as like, there's other things this client has come to me for. So that might be losing weight, that might be putting on muscle. I just have to keep that in mind. Like, cool, I'm going to take you, I'm going to, I'm going to make you try to make you not have pain if you do what I tell you to do. But I have to integrate all of that in with a comprehensive program that's also going to get them really fucking jacked and shredded because that's what they're actually coming to me for. so yeah so i i look at you know where do you feel pain let's figure out what's causing it so we're going to try to find out like if this is moved in this direction what muscles could be contributing to that how's the nervous system playing what are you guarding what's causing apprehension now we got to work up that chain so let's say it's something in the ankle we got to look at the hip i'm looking at the hip i got to look at the low back i look at that i got to look at rotation in the in the upper body there's a lot of stuff i have to look at when we're coming back from that and then finding big exercise that fix a lot of shit and not wasting time on a lot of little dinky ass uh rehab you know traditional rehab or contemporary rehab stuff so i i'm looking at it as far as we got to get moving so we need to look at what big movements 80 of it needs to be big movements and 15 or 20 might be little sissy ass open can clamshell shit bullshit stuff yeah i mean so when it comes to like what we're looking at what's actually possible and i've deliberately thrown this question in there because i know on the forums you mentioned that this annoys you so this is this hopefully will give good content but when you look so we've got when we're looking at movement capabilities now we tend to have two camps you mentioned sort of mentioned the two camps earlier on but we've got the um obviously the the pure strength guys you say it's do less weight or just sort of power through and you know everyone everyone should have squat bench deadlift and then you're on the other side you've got mechanics guys who i don't want to call that mechanics is great and physics is irrefutable but obviously with with any trend there's a lot of people that don't apply it particularly well that talk a lot about moving around dysfunction because they you haven't got an x-ray you can't see what the actual posture is you can't see bone spurs you know like what is your stance on that view and what you feel is actually possible what what you feel can be changed yeah well look i mean yeah well i might might not be able to look at so much as body, but, but we have pretty recognized degrees of range, uh, passive and active in certain body parts. We can also do some, um, we can do tolerance tests to see if they feel pain. We do certain things. We've got manual muscle testing, um, which I still, I still do manual muscle testing mainly to see if one side versus the other is at a deficiency, but I use a electronic device. It actually tells me how many kilograms of force they're pushing with. So I've now gotten past that point of, well, that feels stronger than that one. Now I can actually quantify it with this device. So that's, that's changed a lot of things with me too. It's also changed a lot of things that I was thinking about with, you know, people saying, well, you know, shoulder position doesn't matter if there's no pain, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, okay, cool. So I took myself and two other people and I used this, um, this muscle testing device, which can act, it's a basically a electronic dynamometer. And I said, okay, let's, let's take a grip and let's just put the arm in neutral position and squeeze and see how much, how many kilograms of force. Cool. Now let's protract the shoulder internally, rotate and do it again. My grip was like 83 or 85 kilograms. And when I protracted it internally, rotated and try to do it again, it dropped by about 30 or 40 kilograms of force. Yeah. So think about, think about how that's going to affect everything because those, those nerves are traveling from the neck into the hand. So if that position is affecting the hand, it's also going to affect effort signal back to the brain. So possibly being in a position of protraction and turn rotation can that affect your lifting Is that going to fuck up your bench your overhead stuff well if it if it cutting down that that feedback back and forth probably so we what else did we do there's one of the big one i did um ah i did one where i did grip here and then i did grip in a slightly flexed position and grip in an extended position and if I went from here 80 if I went from here it dropped down to about 50 if I went down to here it dropped down to around 23 so if you think about it guys who are benching that are allowing their wrist to extend they're fucking up they're possibly fucking up that feedback from the neurons in the hand to the brain giving it that percocet signal and also when do people do this when they're doing dumbbell or biceps curls or when they're doing curls and they're looking down at their arms that's a big one challenge to talk about is don't move look straight ahead don't look down because you're going to actually make yourself weaker when you test it it shows that you actually make yourself weaker doing that and how many people when deadlifting look up themselves themselves the mirror when they're learning to deadlift yeah and you know that changes lumbar position as well then even not including this stuff with an early system i mean the the big thing with that is just there's not a lot of space in the back of your c-spot so when you go like this and you have a massive weight you're just ramming those facets together um so yeah ali uh gilbert now weingroff her uh her husband charlie weingroff which is one of the top uh doctors of physical therapy in the united states is a fantastic video on this that shows i think it's looking at a scan of someone who's lifting and they have nice neutral head position they're tucked and slid back and it shows what happens when they go into lordosis and extension and it just ramming the back of their uh vertebra together and he's got i'll send it to you it's a it's fucking funny as shit the way the way he could he does the commentary on it is just fucking gold that's that's really interesting and it's interesting personal to me as well because i think a lot of like like i've got a bit of bit of forehead posh and i feel like that gives me a lot of issues and like so i i've done you know looked at this kind of thing a lot and i i for ages i've spoken to you about this on consult so like having this sort of like mid thoracic spine pain underneath my shoulder blade and like for a while i was like i couldn't place what was going on with i tried sorting out a lot of stuff with the hip and that got better and it didn't go away what's going on and as I started in the last few months as my training's picked up again and gone a lot better that I'm starting to realize there's a definite correlation between my head position and I start to feel how I can now it's much more precise of what causes the pain where before it was like random whereas now I'm like if I do this and go into a neutral spine position I just feel that pain go right down the middle of my spine and I think like that has a lot to do with it and like something I've looked at a little bit I want to get your advice on it now you brought it up Like, have you noticed when you're looking at neck position and forehead posture and things like this, having a big effect on something like HR fit for that exact reason of the nervous system coming like through here and, you know, into that position? I don't know because I haven't measured it. But I mean, anytime you're deviated, if you look at all these people who say there's not a perfect posture, cool. I get that. There's not a perfect posture. Like we're not all Vitruvia, man, but there are acceptable and unacceptable deviations from what would be considered perfect posture. So it's like saying there's no good foods and bad foods. Of course, it's good food and bad food. You fucking kidding me? Like you telling me a fucking Twinkie is good compared to a fucking chicken, rice and broccoli? Of course, of course, that's fucking silly. There's not good and bad posture. Of course, there is. You look at somebody who looks like goddamn Quasimodo and you say that their posture is just not it's not bad. It's it's just not as good as yours. It's like, no, it's fucking horrendous and they're going to be in pain and they're going to be 40 years old. How are they going to feel when they're fucking 65? So I would imagine, you know, if you have if you have massive deviations like this, there's going to be a pain response. It's just not to the point where your brain feels that it needs to bother you about it. So mechanoreceptors, they're like, okay, we got an issue here. Maybe there's no space or maybe they're pressing on something. So let's say that every time you lift this up, it's smacking into the supraspinatus. And now the supraspinatus tend to start to thicken up and you're losing subacromial space. And the mechanoreceptors are going to go, hey, there's a problem. They're talking to the brain and the brain's like, yeah, we don't need to let Luke know about this just yet. So what I want you to do is I want you to tighten this here. I want you to tighten this here and then lengthen these two guys. And then this will move forward. We can we can play with that for a while.

stretching, hard isometric stretching, isometric end range liftoffs, lengthened range lifts like split squats, pullovers, flies, looking at things like that of how can I reposition where my bone should be. Working on, for most people, posteriorly tilting their pelvis. When I look at, when I, when I get a client's photos in, the first thing I do is put the side pick up and I draw that plum line. And then I've got a protractor app on my Mac. I draw lines from the ASIS to the PSIS, and I make like a little triangle. And then I see what's the degree of variance there. Most of the people I see are like 20 to 30 degrees of fucking anterior pelvic rotation. That should be about five to 10. And so if your, if your hips are rotated that much, it's basically putting you in front of your feet, you're doing this. So what does the spine have to do to counteract that? Well, it's going to have to extend the lower back. So you've got anterior rotation with a really hard extended lower back. Well, now that's pushing your spine that way. So what has to happen? Well, my, my T-spine has to go into kyphosis to counterbalance that. And then what has to happen? Well, my head has to rotate and my neck has to go into more lordosis and forward head posture in order to keep my eyes on the horizon. So this is a whole chain reaction and shit that starts mainly at the hip so if we can get control of the hip we can control a lot of shit yeah i i yeah that's that's something the way i've looked at for years and look to people like you say yourself and hassan and john shire like a lot of that sort of stuff comes in it's like if you can get the hip in a good position that often eases everything up you know certainly up the chain but to a degree down the chain as well like you know i like neat block people with knee pain okay let's sort the hip first then i'll look at the foot and if those two things can sort so yeah you're not sitting in this internally rotated position all the time yeah and there's like uh you think about what's happening when you're sitting you've got a lot of lower lumbar compression and when you start looking at some of these these uh muscular chains i don't want to say fascial chains because people get really irritated when you say that they either go oh yeah fascial change right on they go fascial change fuck that bullshit so i'm gonna say muscular chains where you're causing force coupling between, um, between muscles for locomotion or stability or to create form closure and joints and things like that. So if you look at kind of that deep longitudinal line that runs from your, uh, like your erectors and your traps, and then down through the sacrum and then across through the biceps femoris, a lot of the sitting really fucks that up. So the minute you stand up and you go into interior pelvic rotation, your femurs are going to go into internal rotation, which puts that biceps femoris at a state of length. It can't actually rotate or externally rotate your tibia. So if that happens, you're going to have internal rotation of tibia and collapsing arches. And the next thing you know, every time you squat, your knees cave in. They can't recover. Your fucking back hurts. there's a lot of shit that can happen just from sitting 12 hours a day that for your feet that you wouldn't even think about that so yeah everything can work from the hips up and definitely and probably more importantly hips down i think as well you mentioned that about the bicep more has been a state of length and i think this is where um you can change a lot of people's thinking in terms of like what's actually going on i feel the word tightness is one of the most overused words and people chronically stretching for hours and hours i did it with the um with a few of the guys i'm mentoring at the moment i was like right i'm i'm a prime example because my my matter interior top just slowly sorting out but i've never really been able to touch my toes so i was like i'm gonna do a lot of experiments like i'm not gonna stretch a single hamstring and i just did some hip thrusts i just did some things to like get the hip flexor activated all of a sudden like i found that range um and then then i did that horrible master release to get an extra few inches um but like look at those things like where's he like what's your thoughts on the people coming in with like the word tightness like what you feel is actually going on when people feel a sensation of tight well i mean for me their their body's searching for something right and most of the time it's trying to find a stable place stable safe area because your body is inherently doesn't like pain like pain is really important imagine if you didn't have pain and you stepped on a fucking rusty nail and you didn't know what was in there. And then you got a bacterial infection and you got septic and you fucking died. Right. So, you know, you, you, you, it's not that you don't want to feel pain. It's just, you want to feel the appropriate amount of pain and you want to recognize what that pain means. So when somebody feels a tight muscle the first thing we have to distinguish is okay what is is it tight or is it taunt Because those are two two very different things And if we want to think about that if we think tight is it short or taunt Is it long? Because the, the treatment pattern and what we might do might be completely different. So a lot of people with tight hamstrings, I would say the vast majority of them, they're not tight. They're tight because they're being pulled, taunt, they're being pulled to a long lengthened state and they're having a hard time holding on. So it's going to make it feel like tight, even though that's not exactly what it is. So considering that your hips are rotated anteriorly, that takes your ischial tuberosity and moves it up this direction. Well, that's the origin of your semimembranosus tendinosis in your biceps femoris longhead. and those are attached to biceps, long heads attached to the fibula and the other two are attached to your tibia. So as your hips start to rotate, well, that's going to affect your shin and how it rotates and how your foot rotates and our ankle rotates. But as you rotate and pull the origin away from the insertion, that's pulling that into a state of length, which then gets tight. It's like having a guitar and you're tuning your guitar and you keep tuning, you're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and it breaks. Like you just keep tightening and tightening and tightening. It's not functioning correctly. So in that situation, we think, okay, this needs to be shortened actually, but it's not in a good mechanical position to create force. So what we have to do is how do I put this muscle in a better resting position? Well, I've got to take the ischial tuberosity and bring it back towards its insertion points, which means I have to rotate the hip, which means the hamstring is not a great hip rotator. Um, a better hip rotators, the glute and the obliques. So if I can focus on my glutes and my obliques, I can rotate that back normally and naturally, and I can use my hamstrings to anchor it to the lower, lower limbs. Um, there's a, man, there's a lot of shit going on, right? We may have got to look. So as is the, psoas short or is it tight or taut you know shorter lengthen it what about the rectum you know all these things can can pull um the joints out of position could be sartorius if you look at the psoas back onto a little bit of the diaphragm stuff we're looking at as tight or torn would you look at rib cage position being the determining factor whether the psoas is actually tight or torn the rib cage is flared with that pelvic tilt you probably find this also an overly lengthened state no because i think the ribs follow the hips so and here's the thing um is it the psoas it's pulling everything down or is it something else that's the thing you got to think about what's the best muscle what's the muscle that has the greatest leverage to rotate your hips anteriorly rotate my hips anteriorly probably the right i would have thought right that's a good anchor point that's a good anchor muscle but this one has a more direct potential it's a muscle no one ever gives any love to you're looking at the start oh yes ah because that's a secondary hip flexor yeah so that's what i was thinking iliacus of course yeah yeah i mean because you just think of this iliacus right you think hip flexor everyone says psoas but then you go okay well you've got the psoas satoria secondary hip flexor rec fem is a powerful hip flexor so you go through all of these and no one ever goes what about the iliacus because it's attached to the inside of the hip and no one ever thinks about it right but it attaches in the same place so as does so and it holds on the entire hip so if you see this anteriorly especially anteriorly it's an inflare the best muscle that could be pulling that would be the iliacus because if the psoas was pulling on on anything it's going to be ripping your lower back so that's the one that's going to be ripping the shit out of your lower back but that's not the one that's going to be ripping on your hip that makes a lot of sense because if you look at the way that you know the the fibro orientation the psoas you're probably looking more of a lumbar stabilizer than it really is a hip flexor and that would make much much more sense looking at that yeah interesting well that is its number one job is a lumbar stabilizer and then the secondary jobs is as an extensor and a lumbar and a side flexor um and possibly you might even think a little bit of rotation to or stabilization or rotation but man there's a lot of there's a lot of pretty cool things i've been looking at lately with that type of thing and trying to think outside the box of what's really causing these problems. There's some stuff in the neck. I was looking at some old Paul Chek stuff about like the SCM obviously is a problem and then the SCM is going to affect the left scab you start looking at scalenes then i started looking at the hyoid muscles infra and super hynoid muscles in the as a neck flexors and also as their relation in the tongue and it's like i started looking at that as i think paul chick might have said this at some point of looking at those high-yield muscles as kind of the psoas of the neck. And I started thinking about the occipitates as being the glutes of the skull, right? Because if you have this issue where your head's rotating, let's say you're losing flexion and you're starting to come into like forward head posture, you know, you start thinking about what are the relationships of those small little muscles, the very top of the skull. And also what's the, what about the high wood muscles that are coming through here and attached into the neck as pulling this down and also extending your head back and be able to keep normal position of the head. Now I'm still junkie. I'm still junkie with it because I've only been thinking about this for the last three weeks, but it makes a lot of sense because everything's going to rotate. so and and everything pretty much rotates almost in the same way so the hips rotate very similar to the glen or humeral joints and that rotates very similar to how the head rotates on the axis the atlas that's really interesting if you want if you when you learn some of this stuff if you want to get any pick for that stuff i'm probably the an absolute yeah 100 like it's because because it was you know when certain things you start listening to things okay i'm starting to see some of the issues that I have like for a while um so like I I always find that like every now and again I feel almost like I come almost got like swirling glands and I'm like not ill though there's nothing going on here and I'm just getting worried about it for a while but almost literally like that like it feels like oh that is incredibly tight all of a sudden around here and I also find that like if I again if I rotate back that's where a lot of my upper back pain comes from so I I reckon there's a lot in that that could potentially be a lot of issues around my neck. So that's really interesting. This will blow your mind because I train, I have a lot of clients with Hashimoto's. And I was talking to Amanda, which you've seen me post her online a lot. Hashimoto's, I think she's lost 30 something kilos by now. And we've been straightening her back. But her neck is still there. We're still trying to fix that. It's gotten so much better, but we got a long road. When I was going through this hyoid muscles, which I was basically researching it for her, there's a lot of thyroid muscles or the hyoid muscles in relation to thyroid. And I'm thinking, okay, so when somebody has Hashimoto's and the brain starts sending out more TSH in order to get the thyroid to create more thyroid hormones, what does the thyroid do? Well, it hypertrophies. okay well if it's hypertrophy to the point where a doctor can palpate and tell that it's too big what's that doing to the muscles they cross it is it possible that they're pulling those muscles to a state of length and destabilizing them so i don't know this is the type of shit that keeps me up at night but it makes it makes sense that if that was dysfunctional and pushing on nerves or pushing on muscles and moving them into places they weren't supposed to be or in the lengths they weren't supposed to be that can destabilize them and if those those neck flexors get destabilized the scm has to work harder what does that do shortens position to forward head posture that that's that's that's really interesting yeah i'm i'm you know i'm with you on these things sort of like keep me up i'll i'll be getting my anatomy after we finish this i remember um the one that always blew my mind um i'll speak this about tommy but he came up solution i wonder if you have an idea of it as well that um i went to have you done be activated douglas hill no but i've done rpr which is it's like it's like uh be activated light yeah like incredibly there's a really weird seminar because it was so ridiculously painful like you've got to go i'm so interested i want it to continue but i'm so fed up of being prodded in my diaphragm that i just want to go home um yeah there's this one guy that came in i generally would have thought was a plant um unless unless i saw this marriage and spoke to the guy but he came in he had glass on he was blind in one eye and he got him up and doug's always managed to get people right people up for the right demonstrations he stopped playing around with these serratus interior it's like digging his thumb into his serratus interior and around the rib cage and this room and then he goes every time we go into his blind spot i'd flinch so he just slowly kept working and he got up and he went started to see blurs in my my eye so he kept working kept working and keep working. The next day he came in with his glasses on I just like what You know and like that that fuels like any knowledge i have an anatomy now it almost entirely fueled by that i was just like i want to know eventually i get dr so i'm going to ask him directly what's going on here and see if he knows but like that just like what yeah that's weird i don't know man i mean you gotta wonder if that was a plant or whatever but fuck who knows um i've seen them i've seen some crazy shit um i'll tell you i'll tell you a couple of charles stories because the funny thing is like there a lot of the people that didn't know charles um talk a lot of shit about him but the people who knew him and saw the shit would be like i you know honestly if i hadn't seen this in my with my eyes i wouldn't have fucking believed did. So I remember one of the first biosegs that I was an assistant coach on. So this was back in probably 2000, maybe 2009. We were in Arizona. And so Charles was big in, in a muscle testing at that point, not the muscle testing. I teach you guys in, in program design, like not manual muscle testing, but muscle testing, like applied muscle testing, where you put something in the hand and then you test and see if it's you get strong or weak or whatever so it's kind of some hoodoo voodoo shit right and he at one point he brought his testing kit and he tested a girl and said oh you're um you're deficient in zinc right and we're like whatever this is i'm sitting in the back of the class with derek woodskim like that's crock of shit and so he pulls out a vial of zinc and puts it on the Chapman reflex point on her sternum. And he tells her to take her hands and do this with them in front of her chest. Now, okay. It sounds like this. They're really strong. If you internally rotate that, you have no fucking strength. A child could move your hands apart. She does like this and he takes his arm and he puts it underneath their arms and he lifts her off the table and he's just holding her. She's like this, his arms in here. he lifts her off the table no one could hold that position i don't care how fucking strong you are you could be the world's strongest man no way you could hold that position but for some reason he lifted her completely off the table and held her there for four you got three or four seconds and i said okay you need zinc and i was like what the fuck and uh yeah there was one time And I hate that I don't like telling the story much because I always sound like a fucking like one of those guys, a ghost whisperer type of weirdos. Right. So it was me and Charles Andre and the rest of class. And this is in Rhode Island. And Charles Charles is telling a story about how like he's since he was a child, he's been on the pursuit of learning how to harness chi energy. and we're like okay chi energy cool like you know qigong and fucking tai chi shit cool dragon ball z whatever and so he's talking about this and how he's been to different countries finding masters and uh you know it's charles telling a charles story and andre looks at us goes no it's true like he's he's actually learned how to do this you're like okay he's paying andre to just bullshit us so they were telling us they were telling us stories about how like somebody's doing pull-ups and, and they're like struggling and Charles touches them and puts Chi energy into them. All of a sudden they just keep wrapping it out. Right. They're telling us like fantastic stories like this. And we're all thinking they're full of shit. And so Charles goes here, I'll prove it to you. And he brings a guy out that couldn't have been more than maybe 175, 180 pounds. And he goes, all right, stand there and put your arm out. And he gets another guy about my size. this guy's like 225 pounds or so because i want you that i want you to grab his arm and pull it down so of course the guy's like this he's doing a side lateral and the other guy pulls his arm down no problem trust is okay so charles grabs the guy's other wrist and holds on to it he goes pull his arm down now and so the guy goes and he couldn't pull his arm down and charles goes hang from his arm so the guy is great and picks his legs he's hanging 225 pounds he's hanging from the guy's arm charles let's go and they both fall into the ground and i went that's it i'm done it's enough reality it was the weirdest thing i've ever seen and uh at that point i knew that charles said a lot of stuff that he was quite full of shit on but there was a lot of shit he knew that uh no one would ever fucking believe and he was spot on about it. And that sort of stuff is fascinating. It just makes you, like, you ever get bogged down in sort of, like, the stuff that we learn and just about, like, you know,

abs and squats and bicycle girls like realizing the the possibilities in this sort of stuff like it's something that i when i first moved out here i was like i'm gonna find some like really cool interesting people it's people doing tai chi with swords in the park here you know in in in you know us australia uk that would be a felony carrying a sword into victoria yeah here is you know it's your grandma doing this sort of stuff and i was like not never done it not not in the u.s because it's legal to carry a sword around in the us so at least in texas of course of course why am i not surprised yeah like you could you could literally have a katana and two six shooters on your waist walking down the street in texas no one can say a word for you that's that's men we could we could get another we could get another about gun laws in america if you If you ever want to do a round two about something non-fitness related, just say the word. I'll happily do it for hours about that. Oh, fuck yeah. My path has been taking down Joe Rogan. I've got to not do more than just training stuff eventually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. But I still think I'll move out here. I'm going to try and learn some new stuff. I've not really tipped the surface on it. But it's definitely, being in this part of the world, I'm definitely going to learn some of the weird sort of stuff you sort of get with here. Get more foot massages, find more Reiki, that sort of stuff. I thought it was cool, man. I've only been in Hong Kong one time, and it's not somewhere I could live. I couldn't live there. It's too crazy. It's too loud and too wild. But man, it was a cool place to visit. Like, we'll get to the markets and some of the restaurants there, some of the best food I've ever had, probably some of the best Asian food I've ever had. I went to this, I think it was a three Michelin star place. So what happened was I did a, I did a foundation seminar there and Zoe decided in the middle of us traveling, I miss the dogs. I'm going home. So she changed her ticket and went home. So I was by myself for about a week in Hong Kong and I was like, all right, cool. So I just went to like, like Michelin star restaurants and did all this cool shit. So I was like, all right, that's all right. but uh man i like hong kong um i went to what's the uh what's the electronics place you can get all the really it's like a it's like four or five level place you can go buy like camera shit and electronics real cheap i i don't know the name of it but there's loads of places around causeway bay um yeah yeah because i wanted like i wanted to get a dslr to start doing like photography and they were like you got to go to this place and i went in it's like you get shit so cheap I'm like who'd you rob for that I don't care I don't know I'm here here's 200 bucks give me a fucking can of D80 or whatever it's a mad contrast here as well like I always when I look to I always judge a place certainly in Europe by the price of beer whatever a point is tends to show the tax and shows what it is whereas here the tax is low but it's the rent's so astronomically high that if a place is there it's a restaurant you'll probably get a beer for like three quid if you go to somewhere that serves primarily alcohol it'd be like £10-11 because they've got to make their rent for this sort of stuff you mentioned food it's really interesting, food here it's the most varied you can ever get you'll get swanky Michelin star restaurants you'll get canteens that are Michelin star that just do good steamed pork buns and I'll never forget because I don't think Mr Jordan Shallow will potentially agree with you on that food statement because he came to Hong Kong and he did his um, pre-suit level one with us. And one of, one of, one of my mates loved this tiny little Thai restaurant, little Thai hut. And like, it's probably about the size of my kitchen, which is like, it's like one person width. Right. And he's a, he's a big dude. So the first, the first problem was trying to get this dude into the door, which was a challenge in itself. And they were like, we're going to have a two, two eggs, which the pack repel, like minced beef, a couple of eggs, bit of chili, load of rice. Awesome. But no, he wanted two portions of the um the chicken with uh chicken with rice um he had a glass of water and he still he couldn't he was head you know his mind was blown that the the water was warm and the chicken was cold welcome to hong kong you know like yeah i don't know man i mean i had all the meals out there were great like i here's the thing i love going when i go to a new country I like going to McDonald's because there's always a different menu in every country. And Hong Kong has got some wild ass shit. They got like black buns with crazy shit on their menu. So I had Mickey D's. I think I love pizza express. I fucking British special love pizza express I got one in Hong Kong I ate that place like twice The only thing I don like about Hong Kong is Chinese people are judgy as fuck So I sit there I go to Pizza Express and the lady come out and ask me what I want And I'd order a pizza or some breadsticks or some wine. I'm eating, eating, eating. I get done. She comes back, gives me my bill. I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not done yet. I get another one of those pizzas, more breadsticks, some more wine. And she's like, oh, so much food. are you sure i'm like yeah she's like oh that's lots of calories i'm like yeah i'm a big motherfucker i'm like godzilla bring my fucking bring my goddamn pizza man just maybe but that's the only thing i found like that they don't understand how much like a big white dude can eat yeah um they um i never thought i'd miss british customer service i didn't think that something i'd ever miss but like we it was here we think you people don't look at you the change is throwing you you give them a note they just throw money back at your face you know yeah do you find that in hong kong you find that's the case yeah they're just okay i think it's efficiency i don't think they're trying to be rude they're just trying to serve as many customers as humanly possible so they're just throwing something back go move but i want to where where do you miss uh service from where have you lived that you missed sales i mean well i i tell you what i think i think i think the it's i i don't don't don't say the uk don't say the uk no service there i think i think the uk is a perfect balance between if hong kong's miserable and just trying to get you out the door american people are just like it's seven o'clock in the morning please don't try and make me have the nicest day in the world like this is this wonderful balance of i'm a bit miserable but i'll be polite about it that's that's where my okay but okay all right we got to dissect this okay all right because i'm a world traveler and i know i know these i tell you what because america tipping culture great service most of the time not always most of the time because their paychecks are dependent on it. Fuck in the UK service. What the fuck is that? Australia is even worse. Like you go to Australia, you go to Australia, you walk in, you go to the bar, order your food, you sit down, the server brings your food and that's all they do. Like they don't do anything. They don't refill your fucking cuffs. They don't ask you how your food is like none of that shit. like zoe when we first started dating she didn't understand the whole tipping thing until she came to america and she was like god damn like you finish you finish a diet coke and a server comes up and refills it for free no questions asked you that yeah they put the food down the server comes out and goes how was your meal you're like you know that was fantastic thank you you go you know it wasn't that that great and they're like okay i'll talk to my manager i can give you a free dessert the service that you get in america is so much different because of the tipping uh because the people want you to be happy man you go overseas they don't give a because they're getting minimum wage 25 bucks an hour they don't give a if you like your meal or not oh it drives me crazy i think dubai dubai is is the i read very recently the interesting one was like they're almost halfway to america in that sense that they're trying to but it's all about trip advisor like you go to a restaurant and they're literally full figure writer of you and they're looking over you going make sure you put my name you know i was like whoa okay that that was weird but yeah the service is great you know what i don't think i don't think i've ever had bad service in the middle east and i think it's a cultural thing i think there's a pride in taking care of the people and that type of thing uh and i've heard the same thing about japan like people go to japan they're like man they're a crazy nice here like almost the point risk over the top but i find that though i find the same in the middle east whenever i go to dubai or kuwait um man the service there is ridiculous it's like they just and you're not paying them extra it's not like you're tipping them they just take they just there's just an actual pride in my job like i'm a server i'll be the best motherfucking server in the whole wide world and i'm your server today and i'm like i appreciate that yeah yeah how did you find the uh the taxi drivers here in Hong Kong? I don't think I ever took a taxi. God, I mean, if you're an adrenaline junkie, you know, to tell you what, you're holding on for dear life. The suspension isn't much there, and they're just, they just put their foot down. And half the time, they have no idea where they're going. Okay, so my experience with that is New York. You go to New York, it's the same thing, but they know exactly where they're going. But you're like, holy shit but i like that because i like roller coasters and i like dangerous adrenaline stuff so when i go to new York I almost want to put my hands out the car like a roller coaster I like yeah It's amazing how like, you know, I wonder how some of these people became special and talk about people, people being slightly rude. I do think that taxi drivers will deliberately be a bit ignorant, pretend they don't know where they're going. If you don't speak Cantonese sometimes. Yeah. I was in a, I came out of a bar once and I was like, where I'm meeting Ellie's family at the Peak Lookout restaurant. It's like on the peak, like the biggest tourist attraction really in Hong Kong other than the harbour, right? And so I got in, I was like, can I go to the Peak Lookout restaurant? Huh? Peak Lookout restaurant. Shook his head. I went, Peak Road. Where? On the peak. It's like, you couldn't have a more like a descriptive where to go. And then I started driving off. He hands me a phone with someone who speaks badly better english going driver doesn't understand i went through this whole rigmarole with her he still dropped me a mile down the road and it was just i just think it was just like apparently there's english ways to say the roads there's cantonese way to say the roads and there's like english versions of the cantonese way to say the road all right well again i'm gonna play i'll play devil's advocate how long have you been there uh two years that's plenty of time for you going to get halfway through learning Cantonese and Mandarin. I'll tell you straight up, like, I firmly believe when you move to another country that you must assimilate into their society. So if I was Mexican, I came to America, I'd be doing my best to learn English. If I'm a Texan moving to Australia, I've learned easy learning curve, their lingo. It's pretty easy. Just drop the end off and add an O to everything and you're pretty sweet. But I've always been of the opinion that if I moved to a country and English is my primary language, it's not theirs, I'm going to probably learn their culture and try to learn their language, right? And I think for me, it's a matter of respect and also easy getting through the community and being able to talk to them correctly in the way they understand. Um, one time when Zoe and I were, we were traveling, I think we were going to, um, we were going to Ireland. Uh, I can't remember where we had been. We, I think we had been in America doing seminars. We were going to the Irish strength Institute, but we ended up going through, I think Norway, I think it was Norway. So we did a night in Norway And I was like, well, if we're going to go at night, let's do like 24 hours. We kind of see a little bit of Norway. So we flew in and they lost my luggage. So I had no fucking clothes. So we had to go into we had to go into the city and buy at least enough clothes, like a couple of outfits before we went to Ireland. I could buy some shit. So we went downtown. It was the weirdest thing ever. We went downtown. There were people everywhere. You could hear a fucking pin drop. and uh i'm talking there were hundreds of people out and you could you you would you'd feel more comfortable whispering to somebody because your voice would carry so so far and whenever i go to a country like that i always read through uh like uh what's the happy planet or whatever the fuck it is one of those you know one of those travel things i want to read about the the culture and what should i do and not do and i don't want to offend anybody that type of shit and one of the things it said about the the scandinavian countries is that if you're loud like me they automatically assume you're drunk and you don't want that so i went to there it's like i'm gonna okay i'm gonna use my own soft voice like my very private private voice and we went downtown and it was like fucking ghost pin drop so we we go into this sports store and i hear this loud motherfucker just like and it's an american accent and zoe goes is that american or canadian i go that's that's californian and sure enough the guy was a guy from california that had moved to norway and so we started talking to him and he was like yeah how's the how's the process of going to this country he goes that's pretty sweet man like i got a job this that he goes you know within the first two years i have to learn how to speak their language because that's probably like the biggest hurdle uh because that language apparently hard as fuck but i think that's the right thing to do right if you're going to immigrate into somebody's country then you need to abide by their laws and you need to abide by their culture and you need to abide by their language i think it's i picked up a little bit it's a very very difficult language to learn you know i think it's one of things that like we deciding what we do over the next few years based off whether we can go home and see family who knows in this year like but if if we extend from the year like i gonna actually like start doing some do some lessons or something where i can actually actually learn it so i'm at home i get i'll get overwhelmed and i just just no i'll get distracted like going back to what was there at the start yeah yeah yeah no look it's a it's a hard it's hard fucking language man because you're one intonation off making somebody agreeable or then wanting to fucking stab you in the throat Right. So I'll tell you, I'll tell you two, two quick stories on that. Like one of my best friends, we've known each other since we were 19. She's Chinese, Chinese American. And I would go over to have dinner with her family. And they were all either, either, you know, born in China or first, first generation Americans. and so we go to dinner and they'd all be sitting there and i'm like the big token white dude and they're all like you know talking chinese and shit and i'm just like yeah cool like i was talking you all motherfuckers all speak english i don't speak uh mandarin so i don't know why you guys speak a manner and it's funny because they would all talk and they'd laugh and they'd look at me to try to include me into it and they'd be like ha ha ha and i'd be like ha ha motherfuckers yeah you laughing at me and then my friend was like no they're just they're trying to include you in a conversation i'm like well you could probably include me if you all spoke english that would be real fucking easy but i decided i was gonna start i was gonna try to learn how to speak chinese so i bought pimsleur which this is 20 something years ago so it was like a little fucking tape you put in your cassette tape you slide it in the thing and i remember i was driving my truck and i was trying to repeat the words and after about 15 minutes i just ejected threw it out the fucking window. I was like, I'm never going to learn this shit. It could happen. But a good friend of mine who he used to own the largest sunglass company in America. So he decided he was a designer and he decided he was going to go to China and he was going to figure out how to get sunglasses made. And so could not speak a lick of Chinese, flew over, got a fucking apartment and started trying to talk to the guys at the factories and he taught himself how to speak Chinese. And at one point, they asked him to speak in front of a high school graduation. And so he was up there and he was speaking Chinese. And apparently at one point, his intonation was just slightly off. And instead of saying something like, may you all be successful, he said something like, go suck your mom's goat ass or something. And some dude walks out of the back, he's like, oh, you can't say that. you cannot say that he's like what he was like look nobody say anything they're speechless he was like no that's not why they're speechless and they had to pull them off stage yes like in cantonese it's even tougher than mandarin it's like nine dialects so the margin for error is huge yeah absolutely they should they should just be like a like uh people who speak english and use like 18 different words that mean the same fucking thing in different contexts like they're there and there and where and where and you know effect and effect and just makes it even even worse yeah but i say like english isn't an easy language either like i don't i'm quite glad that i learned that with all the things that was actually saying like well my my other half is a primary school teacher and she i never get i don't know what they do like in australia or in the u.s but here they're there they teach phonics so they spell out yeah basically and it's great until you have an accent. I remember them, he was talking about these kids, where she had to mark them that they were right, but she was trying to get them to spell fire. But rather than I-R-E, because they're from Birmingham, they spelled it F-I-Y-A, because technically, in phonics, it's right, because it's fire. Okay, well, this is a drawback here. I think phonics must be an American thing, because if you go to the UK, you go to Australia, they don't say fire like they say fire. so it's like technically it does sound like it would be spelt that way yeah i i don't i never used to school it's definitely a relatively new thing since since i since i was in school many years ago um i i've started to um started to speak that way which i'm starting to get lazy r's and yeah the longer the longer i spend over here and i actually went i went back to uh the u.s and somebody, Zoe and I was in a taxi or an Uber and the guy asked me if I was from Australia and I'm like, what the fuck? You know, I get that when I go home. I had, I remember once I was at university and I got speaking to a guy from Warsaw, which is not too far from my neck of the woods. And I'm not, I've never had a particularly thick black and white accent, but I left him at the time because he goes, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm okay.