welcome to the huberman lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life i'm andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at stanford school of medicine my guest today is stuart mcmillan stu mcmillan is one of the world's most sought after coaches for teaching people how to get stronger run faster be more powerful and healthier today we talk about how to do that using what for most people might seem like a rather unconventional set of methods but for any serious track athlete will be very familiar because they do it almost every day and that's skipping and striding you heard right as you'll soon learn skipping what most of us think of as a kid's activity is actually one of the best plyometric activities that we can all do at any age to build more power speed coordination and to improve our muscle fascial and nervous system function stu mcmillan has coached over 70 olympians across nine olympic games and he has coached the players and coaches of every major professional sport he explains how skipping and something called striding are zero-cost activities that we all can and should include in our weekly fitness routine they not only will have you moving better and having better posture in all your activities but they also take minimal time and they can help protect you against injuries and improve your longevity we also talk about the best strides for running at any speed so if you're into jogging or sprinting we talk about all the best ways to do that we talk about the sport of track which both stu and i happen to love and why certain groups of people excel in different sports due to genetic and environmental reasons we also have a very direct and open conversation about the use of performance enhancing tools in the athletic and wellness worlds this is a really special episode because if you like or if you don't like things like running swimming cycling or other activities such as weight training or yoga there's going to be a lot to take away from it that you can apply stew mcmillan is a true savant of coaching how best to move and how to improve your health it was an honor and privilege to host him and to learn from him i'm sure you'll agree before we begin i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost of consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme this episode does include sponsors and now for my discussion with stew mcmillan stew mcmillan welcome thank you great to be here we go back a little ways yeah and you're the guy that they call in to make athletes or pretty much anybody faster stronger healthier and more powerful and who wouldn't want that athletes uh or otherwise let's start by talking about running you know i think for a lot of people they hear running and they're like oh no running hurts running's painful but i think most people when they think about running they think about jogging they think about running a distance longer than a mile but even for some people running a mile is a painful thought let alone a practice how should we think about running and sprinting in particular because when we grow up we learn to crawl walk run and kids naturally want to run fast at some point fast for them what is it about running that for you is such an enchanting thing why do you think that every four years or so depending on when they're scheduling the olympics everyone in this country gets fascinated with who's fastest yeah who's fastest in the world and then they tend to put track and field aside for a bit but people can jump they can swim they can do all these things but running is so fundamental to being human what are your thoughts on running generally and let's break it up into distances why do you love seeing people run fast why have you devoted yourself in part to helping people run faster and faster yeah there's a lot in that first running fast for me is the ultimate human activity like the fastest human on the planet is the fastest human on the planet where potentially maybe like the best football player is probably not the best football player the best soccer player is probably not the best soccer player there might be some someone down in argentina who could be a better nfl linebacker than choose your all pro linebacker right now we're sprinting everybody sprints as you said we all run when we're kids and we figure out or our teachers figure out or our coaches figure out well andrew you're a sprinter so you're going to sprint stew you're a middle distance so you go and do that and over the course of time we kind of figure out whether we're good or not and the sprinters like the truly elite sprinters end up being the truly elite sprinters when they are 20 25 30 years old like that's what you do you don't move into something else if you are a super elite sprinter so i think that's part of it is that for me like it is really truly the tip of the spear in human performance the fastest person on the planet is the fastest person on the planet usain bolt is the world record holder and he is the fastest person who's ever ran there's probably not somebody else who you know in the congo somewhere in jamaica that could have been faster than usain because they would have displayed themselves at some point so for me that is it you know and i you know i started coaching kind of 1984 like i've been coaching for a long long time and i started coaching professional in 1992 and i've coached many sports many activities many tasks and i i enjoy most of them but for me it is that pinnacle that true tip of the spear that interests me the most and that you only get from sprinting if you're an nfl football player most likely you are playing every game at about 80 of your best if you are 80 of your best and you got onto the 100 meter start line forget about it forget about it if you're less than 99.9 of your best forget about it that's why i truly i love the sprinting events so much and zoomed out from that a little bit like guys i started off as a strength and conditioning coach so it was for me it was more about this the power the strength and the speed it was all of that and i coached bobsled for a long time and i really really enjoyed bobsled because you know these guys are massive they're really strong and they're really fast so that for me was really appealing and that was kind of that that fed my obsession about this peak human performance for a long time until i had the opportunity to actually go and work with like super elite sprinters and now i can't do anything other than that i really can't it's it's fascinating to me how do we compare the fastest person in the 100 meters versus the 200 versus the 400 so for you is it coaching the 100 that's the most exciting or the 200 or the 400 yeah that's a good question i i actually prefer coaching the 200 for a couple of reasons there's a little bit of tactics in the 200 or there's more tactics than there are in the 100 in the 100 the fastest person is going to win in the 200 depending on how you tactically set up your race because it's not an all-out sprint you can't run as fast as you can for 20 seconds whereas 100 meters you can run as fast as you can for 10 to 11 seconds it is a it's all out right from the start with the 200 you have to kind of either push out really really hard and then smooth it out and then try to finish strong or you start off a little bit easier and you finish strong or you just go out all out and you're just going to fade and see if you can stay ahead so that tactical element to for that race for me is really interesting so then you're combining the capacity you know the actual ability to run fast and be super incredibly fast you know high high velocities with the tactical component so it's then you're thinking about okay who's in if my athletes in lane six who's in lane seven who's in lane eight how are we going to determine how we run based upon what the other races are going to do so for me it's a 200.

that's not to say i don't love the 100. the 100 for me is the one that i if i'm just a fan that's the one that i'm paying attention to the most and every four years people become obsessed with it that that person is generally the winner is characterized as the fastest person on the planet because like you said it's it's all out yeah and at the same time i think most people can't really conceive in a concrete way what sprinting 100 meters really is about yeah and the world record is held by usain bolt and the record is somewhere 9.58 seconds and yesterday you told me that means it's about 40 strides to cover 100 meters for usain it was 40 steps correct yeah for uh many other elite sprinters it's somewhere between 40 and 45 and the men and somewhere between sort of 47 and 52 for the women i'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor our place our place makes my favorite pots pans and other cookware surprisingly toxic compounds such as pfaces or forever chemicals are still 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50 bonus with a 500 deposit into your first cash account that's wealthfront.com huberman to get started now this has been a paid testimonial of wealthfront wealthfront brokerage isn't a bank the apy is subject to change for more information see the episode description yesterday we were out at the track at malibu high school here teaching my producer rob and i some bounding drills some skipping drills and we'll get back to this because there's such immense value for everybody not just people who seek to be competitive runners but for everybody to i realized this morning it's hop skip and jump we were always going to hop skipping a jump away from but to learn how to move properly at speed to move properly not at speed i mean there's just so much value in in these drills and what we went through and so we'll get back to that but there was an interesting moment yesterday i recall where some of the kids were getting out of school and started running around the track and i had this question in my mind to ask you which was hey can you spot any of those kids as likely to be really excellent sprinters but i didn't even have to ask we watched them go out in a few rows and then you said that kid right there yeah you said that kid right there he's got it what was it about the way he was running kid probably was eighth or ninth grade um took one run away from us and you said that that kid's a sprinter yeah what was it was it his speed was it the the form what was it was first of all it was not the form because most of those kids are you know limbs are going all over the place right it's how they interact with the ground and it's it's this qualitative component that is really hard to define it's if you if you watch a elite boxer hit a heavy bag there's a pop sound to it pop pop pop pop and it's the same with elite sprinters or not even elite sprinters but anybody who's fast and effective and efficient at applying force against an object and you see that as young as as we saw yesterday with what 12 13 14 year olds right some of them are just thudding on the ground and just pushing back and kind of like rob you're your producer um but which by the way folks we're taking a couple of jobs at rob he's he's in the room with us now although off camera rob has run multiple triathlons he's an incredibly impressive athlete and um as an incredibly impressive athlete we can we can jab at him every now and again but this one kid he was just re it was far more efficient on the ground than everyone else it was just pop pop pop pop pop pop pop and you could hear it and i hear it generally i hear it before i see it and that's i think it's actually what i heard first and i looked around and said oh that's that's the kid like he's a sprinter and then you just kind of look at had at his form and it just looks better there's just a quality to that that you don't see with these other kids and even though limbs are going all over the place and head is going from side to side and you know it's his feet are going all over the place and hands are flapping you know like wings there's just a fluidity even with him looking like that he just is doing it much more coordinated and fluid than everyone else who looked like they were trying hard and with him it didn't look like he was trying hard and typically i mean that is by the way the differentiator between all elite and sub-elite athletes regardless of the sport the best athletes are always the ones that make it look the easiest and that kid just made it look easier than everyone else could you send a kid like that out for a 400 meter run and then meet him at the line and say you know what you're meant to run the 200 or you're meant to run the 100 is it possible to tell whether or not somebody is meant for a particular distance based on how they do in a slightly different distance yeah i don't i don't especially not at that age you know at that age you want him to be doing or her to be doing as many different events as possible and let's just trial them all i don't think they should even at that age at 12 13 14 say you're a sprinter you're a sprinter and you're a jumper and maybe we'll do some middle distance and we'll do some relays and then we can do a couple throws as well and see which one that you kind of enjoying the most number one and then number two what are you actually showing some expertise towards and hopefully those two things match and then you can start looking at specializing for the kind of event group a little bit later and you know even and that comes a lot later than many you know people outside of track and field think um even with you know most ncaa division one college programs are pretty elite i mean that's some high performing athletes and many of those sprinters do the one the two the four all the relays and often your best sprinters are also your best jumpers so you might have a you might have your 100 meter specialist also do the long jump and the triple jump and it won't be until maybe the second or the third or fourth year of college or maybe even the first year as a pro where they start actually doing just the one or two events i ran cross country as a senior in high school i've been running consistently since i was 16 three times a week i don't consider myself even a runner i just run for the pleasure of it a long run a medium run and a short run um but perhaps it was the movies about steve prefontaine of which there were two i think one's called uh prefontaine and the other one's called without limits that are quite good that got me excited about track and then i started going up to university of oregon and attending track meets as a fan yeah um but there's this dramatized moment about pre as they called him uh and bowerman the coach up at in eugene where allegedly um purportedly uh pre wants to run the mile because everyone in the country at that time was obsessed with who's the fastest miler but bowerman says to him no you're a 5 000 runner you're gonna run the three mile and he said no one cares about the 5 000 he said you're gonna make them care and it turned out to be the right fit the 5 000 was the right event for him so that was a moment where a coach could identify you could be a great miler but you'll be a spectacular 5 000 runner is that based on sort of times and splits and recovery and all that or is there actually a body type and a gate that um is best because one of my favorite things to find on social media i promise this is not a digression is where they'll set out a race an animated race between like a rabbit a cheetah an elephant a human it's very interesting to see which animals are fastest over which distances they fall out over different distances and most people perhaps are surprised to find that the animal that wins the long long long longest distance and beats all the other species is us yeah the human right so we're not good in the in the sprint compared to the cheetah but we are oh so good at the marathon and ultra marathon compared to the cheetah or any other animal so do you think it's something special about the gate um the personality times in various events i mean what what funnels um somebody's understanding of themselves uh or an athlete to say you know you're meant to you're meant to do this yeah i think you nailed it at the end their understanding of themselves i think is a really important part of it you know we find ourselves through movement and we fall in love with whatever it is because that's what we do and we tend to do it really well so i coached a british sprinter for a long time her name is jody williams i coached her for about a decade starting in 2015 she just retired at the end of last season she went when she was young so between i think the ages of 13 and 17 she won 150 straight races in the 100 and the 200 never lost was the best at every single age group all over the world for five years finally lost and did not really transition into being an elite 100 meter 200 meter sprinter but this was her identity she'd always been the fastest person so when i started coaching her in 2015-16 when she was 22 that was what she did she was 100 200 meter girl but she wasn't elite she wasn't world class and we kept on pushing her towards the 100 and 200 because this was what she saw herself as and me external to that what i saw her as as well and everyone else expected from her because she was the best in the world for so long and it's a funny thing happened sort of five years into that we did a a relay a four by four early season at arizona state university and she ran really fast in this four by four relay and she enjoyed it and she didn't enjoy getting beat in the 100 and the 200 anymore and she said hmm maybe i can do the 400 and then the 2019 world championships in doha she made the british team in the 200 didn't do very well but ran the relay ran the four by four and ran the fastest split of all the countries she ran 49-4 on a four by four split and said okay we're 400 meter runner now so sometimes it's just that sometimes it takes a long time for the athlete to come to the realization that this is what they connect with like this is this is who i am you know what you know what i mean like it's it's really it's not as easy as just saying oh we've got a bunch of tests and you're 100 meter you're 200 you're a 400 for her it took her over a decade to come to terms of the fact that you know i can't do the 100 200 anymore but i could be really good at the 400 and then and two years later at the 2020 olympic games which ended up being obviously in 21 uh she was sixth in the 400 meters in the olympics 49.9 twice so it's uh you know it's um in hindsight we wonder if we moved into the 400 five years earlier three or four years earlier maybe she could have had a medal but yeah it's it's an interesting one like it's we're always using all the different pieces of information that we have at hand some of it's quantitative sometimes some of some of it's qualitative some of it is just a feeling and with with jody specifically it was you know what did i better connect with because you know that's typically that's as i said that's why we get into sport in the first place if we can't connect with that as an individual with why we're doing it then why are we even doing it i feel like this is a great metaphor for life in general for career i mean i've enjoyed different careers and um i'm glad i started in the one i did but that i've ended up in the one i'm in now even though i still teach and i'm involved in research in some ways that um there's such an immense pleasure to finding the the thing yeah for oneself yeah but you can't get there first this is what i think is frustrating to young people now because of the internet they think like what's my calling what's what's my event what's my sport what am i built for and then you have all these examples right you've got your um shaquille o'neal's clearly built for basketball and then you have your growing up when i grew up your spud web yeah right much much shorter than most of the professional players in the nba but wins the slam dunk competition and so he's always used as an example that you can bridge these these gaps but i do think that dedicated application to one area is the best lane from which to exit to another freeway yeah you can't just get on to the the uh the audubon so to speak for you you have to sometimes get on you know highway 101 for a while and speed a little bit or or crash you know i'm not being literal here um you said something i think is immensely powerful i'd like to use as a segue which is that we find ourselves through movement i think this is so true um and not just for people who are trying to figure out what athletic or exercise endeavors are best for them but certainly there i'd like to contrast jogging and running yesterday you you mentioned a few things that to me just feel like gems because like i said i'll try and run far-ish for me i go by time about an hour once a week 30 minutes on another day and a what's to say about a 15 minute not all out but close to all out on a separate day i've tried ad nauseam to figure out whether or not it's best to heel strike and roll whether or not it's best to land on the toe whether it's us to lift the knee i mean for the the uninformed um who goes to the internet you can get answers about this all sorts of ways let's start with the slowest movement possible which is just walking let's forget about speed walking for sake of this conversation for a number of reasons race walking race walking excuse me race walking um see i even forgot the name of it no disrespect to race walkers no disrespect to race walkers but most people don't seek to race walk i think um but let's talk about walking yeah when we walk do we we heel to toe roll naturally do we middle of foot to toe roll and then let's proceed to jogging running and then let's step up through the various gear systems yeah yeah um there's probably five separate gait patterns walking is the first one and typically most people will strike on their heel they'll roll over and they'll toe off on their toe and we do that up to about two to 2.2 to 2.3 meters a second until we can no longer do that so we start walking we walk really really slow and if we start increasing our speed you'll find that you'll almost self-organize into the speed that feels really nice for you if you were going going for a walk you would self-organize towards your most efficient or your most stable velocity for that walk and if you don't not thinking about it you will self-organize towards your most efficient mechanical solution as well that it might be flat foot it might be right up high on your heel with massive amount of dorsiflexion it might be a little bit lower on the heel but that's all contingent upon your individual structure how your foot is built how it coordinates with your knee and your hip if you're not thinking about it we typically will self-organize towards what is most efficient most stable for us and then as we get faster and faster and faster you'll feel that that stability and that inefficiency starts to rock a little bit and you can no longer walk and what do we do then to get and to get faster we actually have to transition to a totally different gait pattern we start to jog because we're with just so much instability inefficiency that that pattern just start begins to break down and we start to jog let me back up just a little bit so if you were to walk with let's say your your 80 year old neighbor and you're doing a walk with her that's probably going to be pretty taxing for you pretty uneconomical pretty inefficient because you have to shuffle a little bit you're walking so slow you're probably gonna be bent over a little bit but if the neighbor went in you just continue to walk you would speed up to your most efficient pattern so within all of these gait patterns there is almost like an upside down you where you start off really inefficient unstable as you get faster and faster and faster efficiency increases stability increases and you keep getting faster and faster and faster stability goes down again efficiency goes down again before you have to transition to a different pattern so jogging occurs at somewhere around 20 percent of your maximum sprint speed so you know whether that's 1.8 to 2 to 2.2 meters per second and then we start to jog and eventually we can't jog at that speed anymore so we have to transition to a different gait pattern and we start to run and that's kind of what we were doing yesterday in fact you know we spent some time running now it's important you asked me about kind of heel strike and and where we are within the foot we're thinking about the same thing throughout and that's just to move from here to there as efficiently as we can understanding that we will typically as a sales as i said self-organize towards our most efficient pattern and the only time we actually think about doing something different than that is when somebody outside tells us to do something different and messes up the efficiency most of the time so for me it's uh like the big cueing and we talked about this yesterday right we said flat foot contact and if you think about being flat foot contact and all of the different things that you do all the different gait patterns you do the velocity is what determines where in the foot you actually will contact so if you're walking and you're thinking flat foot you'll actually go heel strike you'll roll over and your toe off and if you're sprinting as fast as you can you're thinking flat foot contact you will actually plantar flex slightly just prior to ground contact and you'll contact the ground more towards your toes than you will if you're just walking or running or jogging we should clarify for people dorsiflexion is when your toes come close up towards your shin correct uh you're you're narrowing that angle between your your foot and your you know front lower part of your lower limb and um plantar flexion is the opposite yes pointing the toe i think uh attempting to go ballerina and point but hopefully unless you're a ballerina you're not getting all the way you know to get to your initial point as well it's like how many of us were taught to sprint up high on our toes when we were kids like we all were right yeah up on your toes keep your not keep your arms at 90 degrees and get really really tall and that's totally opposite to what we should be doing yeah sometimes kids when they run when they're real little you know like three or four like when they're just running around the house barefoot they'll like run on their toes um so what you're basically saying if i understand correctly is the speed should dictate the foot strike correct okay i think that's a very important point for people um who are interested in running or already running the speed should dictate the foot strike yeah that unless there's a problem to resolve yes that a coach has told you you need to resolve and how to do it you shouldn't be thinking about heel striking or toe striking you should be thinking about the speed that you're trying to cover the distance and yeah and if you're thinking about anything just think about being flat just think about being flat and the foot will take care of itself due to the velocity let's talk a little bit more about body position and running mechanics um there may be no hard and fast rules to this but where should my eyes be you know i've heard oh you want to be looking but assuming i'm not in a race against anyone i'm you know heading out for a run doesn't matter which duration um does it matter where i place my my vision um in sprinting a hundred percent i feel like the longer the the distance is the less it probably matters because the velocity is so much slower i feel like when you're if you're going out for a jog and it's 10 minute miles you're probably looking pretty much straight ahead of you you know and if it's a little bit darker and maybe you're on a rocky surface or something or a little bit uneven surface you're looking down a little bit but it doesn't seem to really have a systemic effect on how you move but it does when you sprint because obviously your body is going to follow your eyes so if you're running down the track and you're sprinting as fast you can and your eyes creep up and you start looking up then the chin is going to follow that and you just start this extension pattern in the entirety of the system as soon as you lift your chin up you get into more extension through the rib cage and the spine and then the lumbar and everything gets extended you end up standing up so more arched back a little bit more right posture correct for those aren't familiar with flexion and extension um unless we say otherwise if we talk about flexion we're talking about assuming the dreaded c-shaped position that everyone seems so good at these days collapsed it toward their uh midline uh versus extension where your chin is up and away from the chest and your um right upright posture and if the eyes come up first you're going to end up in what's known as a hyper extended position it's too much extension where really what we want the eyes to do is just come with the rest of the torso so how i the cue that i use for the sprinters is allow your torso to determine when the chin and when the eyes come up not the opposite way around because if the eyes come first the chin follows and then we get this disconnect between the head and the thorax and the pelvis and there's just too much extension we end up kind of just pushing our way down the track rather than bouncing yeah there's a wonderful movement in yoga that's helped me a lot in my weight lifting uh over the years i did a little bit of yoga when i lived in san diego um because they had good yoga classes where you they have you do this kind of ragdoll hanging over at the waist position looks like a jefferson deadlift for the for the gym rats or the olympic lifters rounded lower back and then they have you stand up from that position but you deliberately start at your lower spine and and rap unpeel yourself from that folded over position never letting the head lead but you know so basically like a chain coming up from the spine and then that the head come moves last i mean it's moving the whole time but it uh you're looking straightforward last as opposed to what you're saying where you lift the head first that's been tremendously helpful to me in movements in the gym which i think have helped me a lot like glute ham raises where you you know you're essentially in that position and you come all the way up and then you go into a hamstring curl or a deadlift or any kind of movement where you have where i'm going from torso bent forward to up i remembered it move the torso first and the head last and i'll just say in my own experience the strength increases that come from doing it that way as opposed to moving the head first and trying to then pull the weight up it's remarkable yeah you're we are all so much stronger than we think if we um engage the motor neurons in the proper sequence yeah so i think that's what you're referring to here 100 okay do you um here's a question for you when you were first uh taught how to squat were you told to look at the ceiling or up on the wall yeah i was told um the weight will go where my eyes go right but now i now i where did that come from i still don't understand where that came from i don't know i mean some of the most useful things that have been told to me over the years that made a tremendous difference would be like this um again borrowed from yoga i sort of brought it into the gym then when i talked to proper you know uh people like proper biomechanics folks like yourself or kelly starrett they go yeah of course you have to move your spine and torso before um but one of the most useful things for the squat and for the deadlift um has been because it's very difficult to think about many things at once especially when you're on you're pulling or trying to squat heavy loads is to move uh my chest and my hips at the same time together so that you don't end up doing the the dreaded um uh good morning back raise followed by standing up right um so moving them in unison so thinking about my chest and my hips moving at the same time that's been tremendously helpful and tends to put the head in the right position and the other one is oh right when dead lifting to not think about pulling the weight off the floor but rather pushing my feet into the ground while driving back you know and these little things end up making a huge difference not just in terms of the amount of weight that you can pull or squat but the safety of the movement is just so much more stable to drive the feet into the ground yeah you think why did why was i trying to pull a weight off the ground all i had to do was like push my feet hard into the ground and hold on to this bar and boom you're up that easy it's wild how um we pick up bad habits it's also wild how quickly those bad habits can be resolved so in keeping with that back to running i believe that everyone can and should run most everyone there's certain people who can't run for uh you know various reasons but um but that people who can walk very likely can run and i'm becoming more of a believer with every moment i spend with you that uh sprinting is more valuable than jogging that sprinting is more valuable than any kind of distance run and i'm going to offend a lot of people but i love long distance running so i'm offending myself um yesterday we didn't sprint but we did a lot of skipping let's talk about skipping and yes i'm talking about skip skip skip this okay this thing i'm not gonna sing the rest of that skipping is such a natural movement for people most people and it feels so damn good and it's actually a bit more taxing than people believe and i came out of that workout skipping yesterday from skipping yesterday feeling like my hips were nice and open tons of extension my posture's up i feel like i grew an inch i i was strong in the gym this morning i just feel incredible what is it about skipping and why do you have sprinters skip so much and why is it why aren't more people talking about skipping and yes we will return to to gate stuff but i think we have to talk about skipping yeah uh yeah first of all we skipped a lot because the reality is you could not sprint and that is the reality for almost everybody because we stop sprinting when we're whatever age some people stop sprinting at 15 sometimes some people it's 20 but very few people are actually sprinting through their 20s and next to nobody is sprinting through their 30s so we know that the movement of sprinting or running fast and we kind of know what what this does and why this is good for you right we know that yeah moving our body intensively with intensity is probably something we should be able to do for as long as we possibly can but we can't because typically we've still got pretty good engines into our 30s and 40s and 50s but we don't have the bodies to be able to handle the stresses and the forces that this engine could put into the body so our tissue and our joints just is not able to handle all of these forces if you were to go out and sprint yesterday even if we did you know we ended up warming up for how long an hour and a half warm-up if we did a let's say a real proper warm-up we warmed up for 30 minutes and then i just said andrew i want you to sprint as fast as you possibly can for 50 meters that's not going to end well for most people maybe you could get through it yesterday but for most people that wouldn't end well you end up with a pull or a strain or a couple days of just feeling not well because we just don't do that we don't have the tissue capacity to be able to handle that anymore or the joint capacity you know there's so many people assuming they they have to run really quickly somewhere and they just didn't know that they had to do it or they're playing backyard basketball or football and they tweak a hamstring or tweak a calf or something even worse right it happens all the time we just do not have the tissue capacity anymore to handle those forces so what do we do instead and i i typically recommend two activities one is running up hills there's a lot less stress on the tissue and the joint system by sprinting up a hill than there is on sprinting on a straightaway but second i think more important is actually skipping and i and i i'm i'm with you i don't know why we stopped skipping i think it's associated with uh only childlike behavior but that's like saying jump rope is only associated with childlike behavior and i'm a big believer in skipping rope we'll talk about skipping rope but i think that's it um yeah i mean maybe this conversation or this portion of the conversation could be titled you know um let's normalize skipping yeah for adults absolutely it felt awesome yeah you can cover a lot of ground quickly heart rate gets up but not to an outrageous degree you're not sucking for air but it does feel a little silly if you're not on a track but you've mentioned uh you've what's the longest distance you've ever skipped 10 miles did you get some funny looks i got a few nice and you're a real tall guy you're 6'3 so you can't really uh hide no uh very easily that was in the park so there wasn't a lot of people okay but i skipped for uh 20 minutes every morning on the roads i get a few honks that's okay i mean they could be honks of approval it could well be yeah or something else but you think about it like it's you you're actually taxing the coordination patterns and the tissue and the joints in pretty similar ways as if we were going to sprint we're working on pushing the knee behind the hip getting into this knee behind butt pattern this hip extension pattern which is so important and and i know this is a a topic of conversation that you had with kelly when kelly was on here the importance of getting your knee behind your butt and finding and searching for opportunities to do that more often because we lose that so easily so skipping allows us to do that secondary to that is the coordination aspect between how we coordinate the flexion extension at the ankle the flexion extension at the knee and the flexion extension at the hip and we do that in a very similar way as sprinting where each of them stiffen at this at this time that is um uh considered throughout the entirety of the system where it's just like the spring the leg acts as a spring where if you think about when we jog or when we run we're kind of running on our ankles and knees a little bit we don't feel like we're really using our hips when you're running a 10 minute mile it's all it's a lot of stress through the foot it's a lot of stress through the calves and by the way i'm not anti-running or anti-jogging i jog and i run and i still do all that stuff i'm not saying now stop doing all that and just go and skip i'm just saying find some opportunities to also skip because skipping where ashley can tax the system in very similar ways as pretty high intensity sprinting i'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor ag1 ag1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens i've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast the reason i started taking ag1 and the reason i still take ag1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement what that means is that ag1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins minerals and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily health ag1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status your metabolic health your hormone health and much more so i've consistently found that when i take ag1 daily my digestion is improved my immune system is more robust and my mood and mental focus are at their best in fact if i could take just one supplement that supplement would be ag1 if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink ag1.com slash huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin d3 k2 with your order of ag1 again go to drink ag1.com slash huberman to claim this special offer today's episode is also brought to us by helix sleep helix sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs now i've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health physical health and performance when we 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i'm not on my dusk mattress i really miss it when i get home i just find that i sleep so much better because of that mattress if you'd like to try helix you can go to helix sleep.com huberman take that two-minute sleep quiz and helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you right now helix is giving up to 20 off on all mattress orders again that's helix sleep.com huberman to get up to 20 off i want to hover a little bit on knee behind butt so shout out kelly starrett shout out kelly starrett i mean if you think about this folks like knee behind butt means into extension so the hips are opening so to speak i know in yoga they say hip opening means a different thing but hip extension generally means posture is more elevated chin away from chest generally i mean you could get knee behind butt with your chin down but it's tougher just that the sternum comes up um kind of naturally puts us into external rotation so think uh thumbs out to the side like the fawns as opposed to inward and then you think about the the typical sitting standing walking jogging pattern of everybody yeah especially if you're a commuter um doesn't matter if you're on a subway bus um car or otherwise or plane you're you're folded in and so what i'm starting to realize is that knee uh knee behind butt ankle elevated sternum up i mean these are the hallmarks of locomotion yeah and so it's interesting that walking well jogging in particular seems to follow this kind of like forward folded kind of like almost like falling forward kind of thing i'm not trying to beat up on jogging because i also like to jog but i wonder if minute for minute skipping would be a much better activity than jogging for people who want to elevate their heart rate you know all the standard general adaptations that occur with exercise improved insulin regulation etc etc um do you think for the person who has not skipped in a while to go out and skip for a couple minutes is the way to do it or should they skip for a lap and then walk a lap what would be the way to break into this yeah i think i think probably the the worst thing to do is go out for a 10 mile skip don't do that i think we start off with like a 30 second skip 30 second jog 30 second skip 30 second jog or 30 second skip followed by a 30 second walk and the difference is you'll feel this right if you think about when you skip and we talked about this a lot yesterday i was asking you to be expressive express yourself think about what your posture is and how you're holding yourself you don't really feel you don't seem to think about those things when you jog you just jog and as you said you're kind of closed and small and short and you're just trying to get through it right the heart rate gets up to whatever it is and yeah you get some good exercise but skipping here's your opportunity to truly express yourself be big and free and open and bouncy and rhythmical all of these things that were at one point in our lives pretty important to us and we lose and that's what's that is what we get from sprinting right the best sprinters are the ones who can express themselves truly maximally like totally let go and it doesn't have to be like massively powerful like the skips that we were doing yesterday were what we call low amplitude skips where we're just sort of skipping back and forth but you're still asking you to be tall and expressive and swing and be stiff on the ground and i feel like like there's as i said there's so many different benefits to this whether it's just been the plyometric benefit whether it's the fascial benefit whether it be it because this is such a a cross body coordinative aspect there's all sorts of brain benefits to that as you know it's uh i mean it's just it's just there's so much more benefits to skipping than there is to just jogging so the on-ramp for me when i talk to people about the benefits of skipping is just to put it in their jogs so i was talking to one of your photographers yesterday and said how do i do this i usually jog and i'm going like 10 minute mile pace i said well next time you jog just in you know go for your jogs you know go for about a mile or so when you're doing a typical jog and then just go back and forth between skipping and jogging every 30 seconds or so and i guarantee you that you will feel better with every skip that you do every single one because there's this again the self-organizing coordinative aspect to it where you start feeling a little bit more bouncy a little lighter a little bit more coordinated a little bit more rhythmic which feeds your jogging so for me that's probably the best on-ramp is just to work it into your current jogs and then from there start getting a little bit more powerful with it a little bit more expressive with it now we start driving the thigh up and back and get again a little a little bit more hip extension so being you know now we can start talking about skips for distance where you're trying to say okay from here that tree that's 50 meters away how many steps do i need to take to get to that 50 meter away tree so doing things like that yeah i'm fascinated by activities both physical and mental that facilitate the transition into a more difficult activity physical physical or mental i started to think about this when i started working on my book in earnest it's very hard to just jump into writing but i noticed that if i did some drawing listen to a lecture while i was drawing and i do anatomical drawings very easy to transition into writing i enjoy drawing i'm not trying to accomplish much with it but it's a very natural activity for me and just very easy to drop into a deep groove for writing for hours really and then i started talking to a musician friend of mine who he's a songwriter very accomplished songwriter and he does the same and then i saw a post from joanie mitchell that she would paint before she would sing and i think these transition activities that are natural for us that don't feel as constricted by distance over time or you know sometimes i put my drawings on social media but they're really for me their way of kind of thinking about the biology from a circuit standpoint it is very personal and kind of abstract as you talk about skipping it seems a little bit the same where you know skipping we're not necessarily trying to become the fastest skipper in the world or beat our yesterday's skipping time we're just trying to skip with more as you said more expression more enjoyment yeah but perhaps it sounds like indeed it can help transition into a faster gate with what we're doing for jogging or for running or transition us right into into sprinting and i think that these um transition points for physical and mental activities are very important because these days there's so many tools and protocols you know dare i say and people start to feel like oh i have to do all of these things how would i do this right how am i supposed to meditate and get sunlight and do it you know i already exercising a ton now i mean now you want me to skip the way you describe it is completely different it's saying no you're still doing your cardio quote unquote but maybe you do your zone two cardio and you incorporate some skipping which will make your zone two faster for you yeah or your your your high intensity interval training more um you'll feel more pliable more explosive mike that yeah i think that's that's part of it i think step one is incorporating in so you can actually be comfortable skipping and step two is now can we add a little bit more speed force velocity to that skip where it becomes in and of itself a workout where you're skipping as hard as you can for 50 meters and walking back and doing that 10 to 15 times is that would you consider that a solid workout for skipping that would be a great skipping workout skipping 50 meters yeah walking back yeah doing that 10 to 15 times yeah because that's that is safe if you warm up i'm not saying go out and do a maximal effort skip for 50 meters without doing a warm-up do a good warm-up first that includes some low amplitude skips and maybe some jogs and some stretches do that for 10 or 15 minutes and then do some maximal amplitude skips for over 50 meters that's a great workout in and of itself like a lot a lot of really beneficial plyometric work being done there let's talk about concentric and eccentric aspects of running and skipping so folks concentric generally associated with the lifting phase although sometimes it's just the pulling phase if it's a pull up and then eccentric would be the lowering phase of some movement um in running where's the concentric where's the eccentric for the uninformed if you could just tell us uh well in running concentric is pretty important because most of running is pretty concentric dominant you're on the ground for quite a long time and you push behind your center mass for quite a long time in striding and sprinting which are the two faster gates so you've got walking jogging running striding and sprinting striding and sprinting which is upwards of so striding if you think about being 75 to 90 percent or 80 percent to 95 percent of your maximum sprint speed that's called stride that's called striding and then sprinting is anything above that where you actually it's purely truly maximal as we said these are different uh gait patterns entirely um those sprinting and striding is almost entirely eccentric entirely you're breaking it's all breaking it's all breaking forces is how well do you handle those breaking forces if you do not handle those breaking forces well you're not fast it's and and concentric any concentric force ability or concentric force capacity is just not a differentiator at elite elite speed in fact it seems to be reverse so we we did a lot of testing through the 90s when i was up in calgary i was working for the canadian sports center in calgary uh starting in 1994 or so and was there for a long time and we were we had you know because 27 different national teams are based there and all of the university of calgary uh sports teams were also there we could test out the yin yang for hundreds of athletes every single day and one of the things that we tested was was concentric isometric and eccentric force capacities and which ones actually related to being actually good at your sport and almost every single sport the concentric force capacity and you pick the one whether it's peak whether it's rate of force application whether it's time time to peak concentric force capacity just did not at all differentiate between the elite performers in that sport and the sub elite performers in that sport but eccentric did all across the board i'm absolutely struck by this stride comes before sprint thing and and i'm remembering back to to uh to cross country where they say we're going to do a stride workout at the end of a run we get back to the the track at school and they do some strides and um i'm just chuckling to myself because i always would tell myself in subsequent years you know okay i'm going to sprint but i'm going to sprint at you know 50 of my all-out speed yeah so i always think of all-out speed for me as um somebody's chasing me with a a syringe filled with poison okay and i've got to get away okay um that's all out speed i don't want to die so 50 of that 60 70 you know it's subject you know and i'm measuring it subjectively i'm not doing this by heart rates or anything like that and indeed anytime i've done a hundred percent all out like in my mind imagining you know someone trying to try to really take my life and i'm running all out i end up with this lower back thing because of the you know it you get hurt yeah um but striding sounds like something that people could work up to how do you know after doing the skip workout that you described that you're quote unquote ready to stride and start doing a stride workout and i should mention that the these workouts because we did one yesterday um you finish them feeling great this is an aspect of exercise that i think most people don't talk about unfortunately that this leave it all on the mat you know you take every set to failure in the gym or you're you know these long runs where you're just shredded that they're not great for teaching people how to be healthy because people are exhausted afterwards they're tired they over train quickly and then people say there's no such thing as over training it's like yeah if you can sleep all day eat all day and your profession is to do this but there is such a thing as having a stressful life and wanting to be healthy and exercising and trying to incorporate that in a way that feeds the rest of your life yeah and i think these workouts that we did the workout we did yesterday excuse me um left me feeling you know posturally energetically mood wise it's feeling great i slept great last night felt great this morning i had a great workout in the gym as i mentioned earlier so i want to encourage people to give this a try and in doing that i want to give them a road map so a warm-up of 10 to 15 minutes 50 meter or so skip um could they do it on lawn dirt or concrete does it matter no it doesn't great yeah if you've got a really flat grass perfect okay but if you if you don't and do it on concrete no problem okay so basically no cost to this except a little bit of time and attention um 10 to 15 of those you have 50 meters out walk back repeat after and if you need a little bit longer recovery than the probably 90 seconds it takes to walk back take it not a big deal the quality here is a term determining factor as you said you're not trying to get really fatigued from plyometric work this is a plyometric session you want to be kind of fresh going into each one and that's going to take you know for most people doing a maximal skip over the course of 50 50 meters it's 90 seconds is about enough but if you're really explosive and you're a really good skipper it might be three minutes that's fine as you said you want to feel good at the end of that you don't want to be beasted at the end of that now if you can do it where you're if we transition say from the skips and you can stride really well and if you can stride really well maybe you can sprint really well really well that doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't be tired at the end of the session but the quality of the movement has to be the governor there not the capacity no i got to get the work done and i don't care how that work looks or what it looks like i just got to get it done no with high intense work with sprint work your your governor is always the quality of the work what does it look like what does it feel like it's a lot like resistance training in that way 100 always quality so um how does one transition into striding and what what what does that look like this is saying okay i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna sprint but it's not a sprint because i'm gonna hold back a bit but how do you hold back and still have the expressive part because the expressive part it's a little hard to describe in words but yesterday you were encouraging rob and i to get us you know tall with our posture as if we're being pulled up by a string from our heads and it has a profound psychological effect and then you just feel your your body opening up in natural movement you don't have to think about coordinating the hand lift it's just you're in you know like this full bowing out it's really wonderful if we describe the difference between all of the gait patterns just through the amount of space that you take up on the planet so when you when you walk it's a small space and when you jog you're taking up a little bit more space and when you run it's a bit more space when you start to stride it's more space again and then when you sprint you're up here and you're being maximally expressive so just think about it from that perspective the other part is jogging and running typically happens behind your center mass you crash onto the ground and you push back you have this propulsive phase there's not a lot of a break of breaking phase here there's a long propulsive phase that happens with the foot pushing back behind the center mass striding and sprinting happens in front of the center mass there's an actually a longer eccentric phase where you drive a lot of force into the ground it's in front of the center mass and then you propel yourself off and it's a very short propulsive phase so think about it that way so it's a bigger shape and it's primarily more in front and it's also as i said this is important you can't sprint and most of the people that are listening to this cannot sprint are you telling us to not sprint no no i'm what i'm saying is you do not have that strategy available to you most of us like everybody who's listening to this almost everybody will be able to walk and if you can walk as you said you could probably jog and most of the people on the planet can walk jog and maybe they can run most people on the the planet can't stride they can't get any faster than 75 of what their capacity is because they will they just can't do that anymore if you're a kid you can do that you can run you can you can stride along all day but you get to a certain point where our tissues and our joint systems and we just do not have the capacity to run that fast safely and we definitely don't have it when we're sprinting and the difference here is when you're striding it's essentially a pretty simple traditional spring mass system the body acts as a spring just whether it's 50 on the front side 50 on the back side you hit and you bounce off you hit and you bounce off where sprinting is a little bit different this is the work of dr ken clark is a good friend of mine that he he published this in i think in 2018 19.

it's called a two mass system where it's not the body is not acting as a spring there's a secondary mass of the shank and the foot that's contributing to up to about eight percent of the total force through contact so this elite sprinter is hitting the ground so hard that so there's another mass that's added to the spring and that's what i'm saying that's not available to you because you can't move your limbs fast enough and you don't have the range of motion that's big enough to be able to get that sort of velocity there's a dozen players in the nfl that can do that every elite sprinter is actually a sprinter most every other athlete and most every other sport can't actually sprint they're just they're operating as spring mass they don't have that secondary mass because they can't move their limbs fast enough when dr peter tia was on this podcast and elsewhere he talked about one of the major causes of death mostly in older people is they'll fall they'll be mobile they'll catch some sort of infection um related to contact with the bed or um you know cert post-surgical lack of circulation and that's what takes them out i was shocked to learn this right i mean i thought it'd be heart attack or uh cerebrovascular disease or that instead but that led to this whole notion that i think is gaining more popularity nowadays that part of longevity is maintaining things like grip strength one's ability to jump and land and jumping and landing is eccentric control yeah my mom's turning 80 this year and she's fortunately in very good health my dad's already 80 he was on this podcast and for anyone that saw that he's clearly in very good health but i worry about them and i worry mostly about a step down off a curb a step going down a stairwell that is not controlled and then a slip and then a fall and then the break and then the immobility and then the the sequence that atiyah and others have referred to would skipping be a good activity for people in their 60s 70s or 80s to undertake carefully as a way to learn eccentric control because i'll be honest i've seen some wonderful inspiring videos of people in their 70s and 80s jumping off of boxes doing plyo type work in the gym i don't know many folks in their 70s and 80s who are going to see where we're going to embark on that yeah but you can skip kind of small skips then you can do larger skips you can skip anywhere it's free if you approach it carefully you probably don't even need a trainer there's some videos now of you having us skip and um i you know here i'm like inspired to start a skipping movement uh with you um for all these reasons uh you don't need even need a piece of equipment probably even do it barefoot on grass if you couldn't afford shoes right 100 what are your thoughts on folks who are um in the 16 up club yeah um skipping yeah i think you've nailed it i think that is so important that eccentric control or the eccentric capacity is the one that we really lose the ability to handle ourselves eccentrically is just it's it's we don't do that work anymore everything that we do is concentric in nature and uh it is it's not just elite sport i said before that the differentiator is always in the eccentric force capacities in elite sport also in us in gen pop we have we lose the ability to apply eccentric force whether it's fast or maximal so 100 i think it's so important my dad um was an elite athlete when he was younger and has probably averaged four days a week running for almost his entire life good for him yeah he's 78 in 2019 he ran the new york city marathon ran 502 so he's at at 74 or 73 years old and he doesn't do that anymore but he still runs four days a week and he runs about 20 to 25 miles and two of those days are skipping sessions where he walks 30 seconds he skips for 30 seconds and then he strides as fast as he can as fast as his capacity will allow for 30 seconds and then he walks then he skips and then he strides and he walks and it's it's it's so key it really is like it's it's for me like the ability to express yourself maximally through running and i've already said i don't feel like most people can do this i don't know if there is a better single metric to as a measurement for whatever word you want to use here vitality or health than the ability to safely express maximal speed of that you as you as an individual like you choose vo2 max you choose all of these different things that you might come up with i don't feel like any of them are as good as the ability to just run maximally so let's start with that if we feel like that is important and you can argue whether it whether it's the the most important or the 10th most important we know it's important if we know that's important how do we get there and as you said i think skipping is the way so i'm on board with the skipping movement let's get everybody skipping because it is as i said this is your ability to be plyometric to work on those eccentric force capacities and move in a way in which you can actually express yourself again there's this um peculiarity to um anything related to health and public health in particular uh for instance a colleague of mine at stanford um dr david spiegel he's our uh vice chair of psychiatry and he and his father actually founded this area of psychiatry which is basically hypnosis for the treatment of trauma for pain relief for smoking cessation and there are tremendously good data to support it as a practice it's actually approved by the american psychiatric association one of only four i think behavioral things uh emdr cognitive behavioral therapy hypnosis and i think there's another in any case the problem it's called hypnosis and people hear hypnosis yeah and their mind goes to balking and squawking like a chicken on a stage this is why we refer to deliberate respiration as opposed to breath work in our studies our clinical trials on that which david and i have published and published et cetera and it's it's not euphemism the the issue is the name is a separator often and that's a shame when there's a practice that's very valuable yoga nidra non-sleep deep rest right right yeah i have tremendous respect for yoga nidra and and all of its um early uh creators and but the language is a separator i'm sorry and there's a there's a public health mission that to me is more important than the naming just say that and i'll take the heat for it with no guilt whatsoever skipping unless it's skipping rope has this connotation of of childlike activity let's just be honest and adults doing childlike behavior while not necessarily a problem in its own right i mean look at all these adults with social media accounts acting like children and the children acting like adults different discussion entirely but what if we were to give it a different name not with the intention of pretending it's not skipping yeah but to relieve people's guilt and shame about doing it um is it bounding bounding is a little bit um more nondescript for most people um i'm having this conversation with you openly in public here in front of many many people um to illustrate a couple of points one is that the name often times and people like i'm not gonna skip down the street but there's so much value to this that i think it'd be a real shame to to lose the opportunity to have it um wick out to many many millions of people because it's called skipping yeah it's plyometrics it's plyometrics great love it and it is a like bounding is left to right so you're left right left right left right left bounding is really really difficult extremely challenging skipping is a regression from bounding so if you can't bound if you can bound great go and do some bounding chances are if you can't sprint you can't bound like it's really really hard to do real true you know high quality bounding we can all skip so look at it that way this is plyometrics this is just their your most simple and probably for most people your most effective means of giving your body a plyometric activity how else you know you're jumping onto the box not a plyometric that's all concentric it's basically useless it's a waste of time let's find eccentric things to do and what is your best eccentric or the war the one that is the simplest the one as you said we spent an entire childhood doing it's familiar to us there's something innate in this there really is skipping so just think about it as being a plyometric i'm going to do my plyos today and by the way this isn't something that i've just made up there is not a sprint group on the planet that don't skip every single sprinter skips every single one of them because of the of the importance of this specific gait pattern it's really important i love that thank you um and you also saved me from trying to find a name that uh you know um plyometric i'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors function last year i became a function member after searching for the 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both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification and i should say by taking a second function test that approach worked comprehensive blood testing is vitally important there's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test the problem is blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated in contrast i've been super impressed by function simplicity and at the level of cost it is very affordable as a consequence i decided to join their scientific advisory board and i'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast if you'd like to try function you can go to functionhealth.com slash huberman function currently has a wait list of over 250 000 people but they're offering early access to huberman podcast listeners again that's functionhealth.com slash huberman to get early access to function one thing that people will immediately realize when they go out and and skip when they do their plyometric skipping um that's a little bit hard to understand just from hearing us have this conversation but just trust me on this well the two things that are very surprising and immensely positive at least two things one is this expressive component and the way it reshapes your psychology and your mood i want to set that aside but make sure we return to that the other is the um cross body coordination of movement the fact that one knee is back toward the butt on one side and the opposite arm is raised up just naturally as you skip this is just you know in fact if you're wondering now oh goodness do i actually know how to skip um that occurred to me a couple times yesterday because i had many cameras on me i thought do i still remember how to skip i'd been skipping the night before in preparation i didn't know we were going to skip but i've always worked some skips in if nobody's looking i'm a skip in private kind of guy um until now until now now i skip with pride there you go in public um plyometrics i will plyometric in public that's right but one thing that was interesting i would think okay we'd get back after walking i think okay we're going to skip again how do i do this it's basically i would think about lunging kind of a fast lunge out and then it automatically would put me into that that motion of skipping yeah um but this cross body coordination is incredible for purposes of motor neuron coordination across the body for the fascial component can we talk a little bit more about cross body coordination because i'd like at some point to talk about sprinting a little bit because even if people aren't going to sprint this idea that when we're sprinting we're not just turning over our legs faster of course the arms are pumping but the arms and legs are coordinated in a very interesting way that the forces are actually running like a like an x from uh across from one shoulder down the leg and from the other shoulder which is going to sound very um complicated people but you'll explain it so cross body coordination um when we walk we do this some people don't they're kind of robotic yeah but most people flow their arms as they walk if if we were to put a camera above the earth and look down on everybody you would see this very distinctly at every single gate starting with walking we rotate so the the pelvis rotates up and down and forward and back so it oscillates and undulates and then the shoulders counter oscillate and counter undulate so the shoulders go back forward and backward and up and down just pay attention to this next time you're out for a walk you can feel your hips going backwards and forwards and also going up and down if they didn't go up and down you'd trip yourself every step and the shoulders do the same and then you have a spine which is this column of a bunch of different pieces that connects the shoulder to the pelvis which also rotates side bends and flexes and extends the whole system is this big torsional system this cross body system and some people take maximum utility of this system and you can see it like some of the best movers some of the best sprinters you just watch them and you can you can just see how they wind up and they coil into every single step and they just use this cross body coordination so effectively and as you said some others are just it doesn't seem like there's any rotation going on here at all what looks better to you who looks better it's the ones that are using this effectively that look okay that just looks better i don't know why necessarily but that looks way more athletic well think robot dance versus somebody who really knows how to move their hips and shoulders in coordination we'll talk about dance a little bit later you have an interesting relationship to music that i think is very relevant here we'll get back to that but i'm seeding the conversation but yeah it's um when the shoulders and the hips are moving in unison it's it's like magic it really is yeah it really is and just feel this when you walk like when you're going out for your next walk just try to pay attention to what your shoulders are doing and what your hips are doing and start thinking am i getting my knee behind my butt when i'm walking and what does that feel like at my hip flexor my quad and as i do that what's happening with the opposite shoulder and is that getting wound up and is that coiling properly am i taking advantage of these extremely innate extremely natural movement tendencies that we all have or have i because of the way in which i've lived or some of the things that i've done or maybe even some of the things that somebody's told me tried to be really square and linear with everything i've done because think about it right when we're taught to run when we're younger any excessive movement outside of in a straight line has been told to us oh that's inefficient you're wasting energy you're bleeding all your all your force not understanding the actual biomechanical mechanism of the pelvis the shoulders and the spine that connects them and how we are actually built to rotate into bend you know so it's and that's not to say by the way that more is better everything is a is an inverted u in this world almost you know there's a goalie locks effect to this it's what is right for you some people will use this torsional system extremely effectively and there'll be a lot of it and some will be a little bit less they're a little bit more linear and they'll still be good that's all dependent upon their own individual and unique structure their morphology their genetics how they're built and how they're born what to do what they do with it as they as they age but the bottom line is we are all rotational beings and we need to try to find ways to take advantage of those rotational forces rather than to constrain them it's one of the reasons why i really dislike this anti-rotation um terminology that's come into many of the exercise many of the exercises that we do in the weight room this exercise is about anti-rotation why do you want to be anti-rotation we are rotational beings you're anti-excessive rotation but not anti-rotation so i feel like that just as you were saying before with skipping that's the wrong terminology for me and that's just sending the entirely the wrong message to everybody about the importance of us being a rotational being yeah naming matters it does especially in in exercise and anything related to um uh dare i call it wellness anything mental health physical health and performance the naming matters because it can take people's minds off track from the the major point it can uh be a separator as we mentioned before in the best case it can be uh an aggregator um i have to wonder with people walking around looking at their phones all the time are they losing the cross-body coordination i i um snuck in because i uh to one talk at south by southwest i got a ticket i got a pass i don't mean i snuck in i mean i i went there for just one talk the other day and i was walking through the hallways this is a big meeting tons of people and it was incredible everyone was walking looking at their phone now of course there's a program that's on an app these days so you're saving paper so that's good right but it was remarkable people were like walking and reading at the same time so i don't want to make more of this than we have data for but this can't be good this can't be good i think that's a really good point i haven't i haven't thought about that actually but i think that's a really good point i have a rule when i'm walking that if i if my phone buzzes and i want to pick up my phone i stop i stop i get out of the way of all the other walkers i push myself up against the building and i look to what's on my phone if i feel it's important and then i start walking again i i just despise people who walk and look at the phone at the same time because that's what you see you see this unnatural constrained overly flexed posture and if you spend too much time doing that i don't think you need data you know that's not good it's not good to walk that way that's not the way we're supposed to walk again it's all about coming back to let's express ourselves let's understand what our bodies are supposed to be able to do and find ways to continue to have that ability as we age this isn't it let's talk about expression through movement um and let's use the extremes as a starting point i find that useful in any kind of scientific conversation you take the extreme outcome so um the person who is trying to take up as little space as possible chin toward the chest folded in thumbs toward the midline so-called internal rotation eyes down trying to make themselves small i don't need to spend another five seconds explaining all the psychological phenotypes that's associated with and the way it makes us feel now of course it's possible to curl up in a small ball and think amazing things about the world and oneself but generally that those things are not um happening at the same time let's think about the other extreme and let's talk about him usain bolt this will also be a fun opportunity for people to learn a little bit more about usain let's start there what is so special about usain bolt besides the fact that he's still the fastest man in the world and what about his willingness to express himself do you think contributed to becoming the fastest person in the world not just feeling great that he's the fastest guy in the world and therefore who wouldn't feel great yeah yeah usain is is unique if we look over the history of some of the elite male sprinters there was a time you know when i started getting into the sport the way to be as an elite male sprinter was hyper focused hyper intense if we think about mo green stalking behind his blocks and licking his lips getting ready for this basically he's going to war and it seemed like so many of the sprinters were trying to encapsulate this kind of feeling like sprinting is it's macho it's ego it's i'm i'm coming here to knock you out and then usain came along with the exact opposite and i think you know it's just he's out there having fun he's as i told the story about jody a little bit earlier right she was for a long time she would didn't connect herself with the activity they were two separate beings she was doing something that no she no longer really connected with and usain they're like this like he was really expressing his entire being in his in the way in which he went around about this task of sprinting 100 meters or sprints in 200 meters and i feel like that is such an important piece at all with all sport and probably with on within all things you know if you can connect your entire way of being with the thing that you're spending most of your time doing chances are you're going to be really successful at that thing and if you look at all the other sports right it's it's the ones that you can tell they're just really confident in who they are in what they do how they express themselves and whether and that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be usain bald and playing around at the line and doing things like this and you know jumping around and that's he always like that does anyone know when he was a kid oh no he's yeah he's he's he's a kid he's a big kid he still is he's he's he's just uh you know he brings this this this really childlike intensity to things like he's still intense he's still he wants to kill you but he's you know he'll laugh in your face just before he does it you know like i i love that about him but when but that's not everybody that's not every elite sprinter i coached a guy named uh andre degrasse for for a while who won three olympic medals in 2016 i remember coming right behind usain bolt in that name in that famous 200 meters where they were smiling at each other um andre is very quiet very kind of type b kind of just down here very insular on his phone not really living life kind of lived life down here very closed and that's the way in which he performed that's the way he practiced that's the way he trained that's the way he competed he didn't feel like he had to be up here and bouncing around jumping around because that was not him and if there's one thing that andre is famous for and he's now got seven olympic medals i don't think i don't know how many big races andre has won outside of the olympic games but he's got seven olympic medals he's he he really stands up when it matters because he is connected with who he is he knows who he is and and what he brings out to the performance arena is connected like this with that where others and i mean the biggest example that i know is asafa powell so if anyone knows doesn't know who asafa powell is asafa was usain bolt before usain bolt asafa's ran sub 10 seconds in 100 meters 99 times more than anyone else in history he's by all intents and purposes one of the greatest male sprinters of all time he's a legend he's he's he's had a world record i think he's had set two world records he's an incredible sprinter who's choked at every single major championships has ever been he's always folded and he does that because he feels like he came up in the era of mo green you know this this animal thing this being really really super intense so asafa tried to be that that didn't work for him and then bernard williams who's kind of jumping around and playing around a little bit that's that became a thing for a while so asafa tried that hat on that didn't work either and then usain came and it's saying is usain is playing with the camera and being bringing his personality out so asafa tried that hat on guess what that didn't work either so there's this yeah usain brought this almost um yeah it's okay to j to be to jump around and to dance and have fun but it's not for everybody if that's not who you are and i feel like that was an important thing if i was coaching asafa say man asafa just be you man like you're relaxed you're you're andre degrasse before andre degrasse came along you're just you're just cool and chill just be cool and chill man just be that just bring you to this performance and you'll you'll get a lot more out of yourself but uh you know to get back to your question usain just gave everybody i think the permission to to have fun like that's why we do this thing is to have fun and if you're not having fun then why are we bothering it's so interesting you know and his name comes up so often now and i'm grateful to have him as a close friend but you know i've had hours upon hours of conversations with rick rubin about why certain musical artists just have that thing um and it doesn't matter if you're talking about tom petty joe strummer johnny cash adele it's just you you ask about all these different people and it's the answer is always the same it's they know how to be themselves in that moment yeah and people will say well it's a constructive his rick will be like no this is why he likes to work with artists early on like a lot of the hip-hop artists he worked with a lot of the punk rock music artists he worked with they were just being themselves they had no success prior to their you know like ll cool j sending him a demo tape and so there was no self-awareness or there wasn't enough self-awareness to hinder their expression they were just being them and that's always what explodes people to immense success now there's something to be said for ignorance isn't there there's something to be said for ignorance and there's something of a gravitational pull as an as a spectator or a listener uh to the artist the athlete the musician who's just being themselves and we know we can detect at an unconscious level when it's not real you know there's one of the things i love so much about podcasting or at least i'm very blessed to be in the earlyish cohort of podcasters i wasn't in the first cohort like the dan carlins and the rogan's but i came in early enough that none of us really knew what to do except just be ourselves it's a so now it's changing there's a big flood of commercial um you know uh entities and podcasting and some of those are are good and and most of them are not frankly because they're not real they're more like a new show it's produced it's like it's not real the person on camera and off camera are very different but i can tell you that joe rogan off camera that's rogan yeah um and i was thinking about really expressive people in different domains to compare more or less to this example that you were describing with usain so rogan i threw out the muhammad ali big yeah boisterous personality huge attractor to him it was not a construction he might have honed it as part of his craft but clearly that's who he was he's a fast talker yeah um mike tyson mike tyson very different yeah but that's him right you know right and everyone loves mike tyson because it's very clear that that is mike tyson jean-michel basquiat yeah you know this like even just the size of the paintings and the way he worked and the physicality of it um he was haitian i'm gonna get back to this kind of nationality thing a little bit later and then we had on here the great josh waitskin who was the subject of the movie the search for bobby fisher and um his whole strategy in chess that he learned in washington square park of creating chaos on the chessboard this game that everyone considers very very linear and very very constrained and his he liked to create chaos because washington square park especially in the 80s and 90s chaos you know drug dealers and crime and there's people uh doing it pretty much every activity there um and and and on and on right you know i think that when people are just being themselves this is what you're saying and this is what rick has said over and over you know that that essence piece is so magnificent and um not just to see but it it evolves humankind it really does and um so when you work with an athlete or for the listener who's trying to figure out well like who am i does it work in reverse meaning and i believe that movement can actually teach us who we are in addition to allow us to express who we are and i'm not going to say that skipping is the only way to do that but it was very interesting yesterday to notice the transitions in my state of mind as i got permission from you uh to you know go bigger get bigger stride bigger yeah and we were the adults on the kids playground in my mind behaving like kids but it it is transformative i think to move differently makes you feel different and when those things line up i think is what you're talking about yeah i think it's a brilliant question i really do think it's it's it's everything in sport but i think as you said just when you zoom out it's not just sport it's all everything and i feel like so so often in sport specifically people like me steal the essence away from the athletes because we have our own preconceived ideas of what this that what you should be doing should look like and it's my idea but it's not your essence and it's not your idea and i always feel like we should be coaching towards what the athlete's best solution is not what our best solution is i've got i've got an athlete i'm working with right now who's super gifted she's a two-time olympian she's got olympic gold medal on the relay and she's been coached for a long time to move in a way that does not align with her essence it does not align with what she is good at and what what will that do to you over the course of time it's obviously going to negatively affect your confidence it definitely negatively affects your the way you move because you're in a move you're moving in a way that just doesn't align with you whether that's psychologically emotionally or physically biomechanically so this is a tall elastic expressive sprinter who's been taught to be really small and compact and accelerate with really short choppy steps and she's lost the ability to even understand who she is anymore in this sport so my objective now is try to reintroduce herself to herself what was it that got you into this how did you move why were you really really good at this let's reconnect with that and the challenging piece with that is how do you understand what that is especially years if you've been being taught a certain way that is not in alignment with who you are whether that is sport or anything else it's really difficult to reconnect with it if you don't have a really good guide because so often those guides and it's that's that's whether it's a coach or a music producer will screw them up not not purposefully you know they're coming at this from a very optimistic standpoint a positive standpoint i'm trying to help you andrew this is but this is what i think these are my experiences this is my subjective view this is how i see you doing the thing that you're doing and that's based on my history rather than where it should be and that's based on your history and that's that's the difference between a rick rubin and many other producers and it's the difference between elite coaches and sub elite coaches you always start with the person what is the unique ability that you have what is it that you have that makes you better than everyone else what is it you have that that really that you want to show everyone let's connect with that let's show that let's just let's build all of our training around that let's have all of our conversations around that i'm remembering the example from that documentary last the last dance about michael jordan um some of the description of the chicago bulls coach encouraging dennis rodman who in the 90s was 80s 90s like first of all very few people had that many tattoos who weren't in prison or um in a niche music community right dennis had a ton of tattoos he had earrings he dyed his hair he loved to party he was wild and his coach understood that it was part of his reset mechanism and you you don't put um a bulldog in a race with a bunch of greyhounds and you don't have greyhounds tug a rope with a kettlebell on the end i know this as a bulldog owner who loves all breeds of dogs so he gave dennis permission to party yeah what no professional coach would probably do and it brought out his ability to play brilliant um you know incredible rebounder incredible player all around but you know famous for his rebound uh stats so this thing of of who am i how do i express myself i think the the authenticity piece is so key like if you're a nice person being a jerk in your sport is probably not going to work um but if you enjoy competition and you're a nice person then it seems like there's a place for that and i wonder whether or not a big component of all of this and discovering it for for people that are going to try plyometric skipping and these sorts of things to try and better understand themselves and express themselves which i think would be a wonderful thing to come from this discussion is the trying to shut down the self-conscious part this the the self critic do you think the best sprinters are also not thinking about anyone else they're just enjoying themselves or at least are they feeling the sprint more than they're paying attention to their form as a like how does this look so i'm thinking about it i'm on the track with you i'm gonna i'm gonna run or skip and i can either just feel where it's more expressive or i can try and show you that it's more expressive two different very different things one that's a there's a self-conscious awareness piece the showing you i'm going to show you this as opposed to just doing it for the feel of it yeah is that the distinction yeah that's a really good way to put it um one really good example of this in the sprints world and i think you were there for this is 2022 world championships in oregon yeah i was there and uh noah lyle's won the 200 in an american record 1931.

and that was for me like that's the epitome of just being so lost in what you're doing that you have no idea what you're looking like and he's just maximally expressing his everything that he's got and he he bounds across the line i said man that was beautiful like i've never seen that like it was so beautiful like totally lost in flow and that it doesn't happen as often as many who don't work in sport think it does not every single performance is a flow performance but if you're lucky you'll get one or two of those in your career where you just lose connection with everything that you're doing and you just wow what happened and in fact every time that a sprinter sets a personal best i ask him what was that feeling like i don't know no idea i don't know i don't know how that felt i just ran so all of these things that we we talked about all of these incredible coaching cues that i gave you to think about when you were doing this you forgot them all so i just ran i just ran and almost always that is the answer to that i just ran and i just connected with it and something in the background you know we were able to one of the ways and i'll i'll bring this um home a little bit more maybe practically so we train 20 to 25 hours a week and my goal each day is not to say a lot like i want the athlete to kind of find a way through things and i will encourage them and guide them and sort of facilitate this discovery but often we'll talk about different things and if they're having if they're struggling with something i'll give them a a specific cue and over the course of time we build you know this library of different things that the athlete thinks about or the different cues and then my objective coming into more of a competitive season is to try to align these cues with an emotion what i call what are called mood words so for example when an athlete is accelerating they're on the ground for a little bit longer than when they are upright because they need to actually propel themselves forward they need horizontal force they need the ground to push themselves forward so they push and they push or they drive so cues could be drive it could be push it could be power it could be pull your thighs forward it could be all of these different things that are around power but for me the mood word that really expresses this better than not anything is pressure i want you to feel like you're applying as much pressure through the first half of this race as you possibly can and the second half of the race is the exact opposite of that so we talk about things that we do technically knees up thighs up step off the ground be vertical be be expressive be tall all of these different cues but really what we're trying to get to is freedom or peace so that's what a hundred meter sprint is it's 50 meters of pressure and 50 meters of peace so i try to align these mood words with these coaching instructions and then all the athletes need to think about is this emotion or this mood word and all the instructions come along for the ride that is the goal and that is you know going back to it something we talked about quite a while ago now probably one of the things that i love the most around 100 meters is this dichotomous relationship between pressure and peace or power and fluidity or violence and rhythm all of these things that are the opposing ends of the spectrum that every single elite athlete regardless of the sport can come together perfectly if you can have the power but if you don't have the peace good luck you can have the peace but if you don't have the power good luck no chance it's always both simultaneously so it's um yeah that's that's the that's the massive challenge in in this sport and going back to uh to noah in 2022 that world championship uh final in the 200.

incredible i said that's maybe the best example of that i've ever seen yeah amazing amazing race really was really feel blessed to have been there and by the way folks if you have never been to a track meet it's for for many reasons it's one of the most wonderful things first of all it will give you an example of what real coordination is all about and i'm not talking about physical coordination although that too you'll be watching the pole vault and then you'll shift your eyes to the right and there'll be another event starting right as the pole vault ends and then another one it's a it's a beautifully orchestrated event done properly as they do in eugene and elsewhere the other piece is that um nobody goes to track meets unless they love track although hopefully a few people uh who are not familiar with track will try it and so every the the amount of spirit there is incredible um and there's also i don't know that there's a lot of identification with individuals there that even if you've never seen them run or anything you you pick up on the different um on the different personalities of of the the runners and the jumpers and the throwers and um it's really special check out a track meet if you can you won't be disappointed absolutely you won't be disappointed and i don't work for usa track and you know people are like do you work for big track no actually i don't i buy a ticket like everybody else um this notion of pressure and peace you know it brings me back to this thing about these transition activities like for songwriters even you know who are so skilled joanie mitchell or you know i was referring to earlier you know tim armstrong you know having these transition activities you know trying to um to get into one's craft and and the the pressure and then it kind of opens up into peace and um i feel like anytime rick is talking about working with musicians and i was like how'd it go you know he's in the studio and it's like they work super hard they work extremely hard and then it's always the story i always hear is oh yeah in the last two days it all came together yeah right because they set real deadlines right and i think this is why deadlines are important this is why um writers and artists who have no deadlines oftentimes don't do as well and maybe athletes as well that the pressure piece of getting everything organized around an activity and then the nervous system just kind of takes it yeah the commonalities here are are fascinating uh to me maybe we all could approach our exercise that way too that it's okay to be rigid rigidly attached to to detail at the beginning but the goal is peace in the final minutes of it right yeah i think that's a good way of looking at it yeah i think you know more than that if we zoom out i feel like you know society or the way in which we think about exercise now has become detached from why why we actually started doing the things to begin with movement right we fall in love with finding our way around the world through moving our bodies in space and time doing whatever whether that's hiking or playing a sport or whatever and then we finish school and we get a job and now we don't really move anymore that becomes exercise and we go to the gym and we exercise and i feel like that's so many degrees removed from why we actually do the thing i feel like we don't ask ourselves is this what is really serving me or is this what everyone else is doing so i'm just going to go along with it and for me like i lift weights i go to the weight room i do that four or five days a week i skip every single day i run like three or four days a week i do some boxing i move my body i play i do as many different things i can i can do includes hiking and i feel like that's what we should be doing i'm asking myself what is it that i want to get out of this practice is it i want to go to the gym for 45 45 minutes a day and get as strong as i can or as big as i can whatever and if that if that is it great but i need to ask myself that question i don't feel like many of us are asking that question and for me we've alluded to this a couple times now is you know what's important about moving as we're aging and being connected with that and having the ability to continue to be able to you know express ourselves maximally over the course of our lifetimes that isn't developed in a weight room that's developed by doing those things you know you you might appreciate this like if you were looking if you were looking for good movement would you go to a weight room or a skate park definitely to escape park 100 yeah because the movers are so much better like the movement there is wow this is incredible don't you want to be able to do that rather than do a squat there's some made-up exercise that somebody's told you that is going to be you know do this and this and this for you or do a deadlift or do a bench press all these made-up things and as i said those things can be good can be fun can be interesting can be important but what really is most important is can you still move your body can you express yourself maximally for as long into your lifetime as you possibly can and people i feel like they have to ask the question whether the thing that they're doing is exercise is it actually leading to that and in most cases i think it's not i came up in part through skateboarding that was my main focus in high school up until about mid-high school and i got into other things um skateboarding everything you're saying is especially true the personality matches the way they skateboard uh level of aggression level of technicality personality i mean sometimes there's a mismatch like there's a the every vert skateboarder big ramp skateboarder now will attest i mean everyone from tony hawk because i've heard him say it um uh to everyone i know that there's a there's a kid um named jimmy wilkins um who does everything faster bigger with more technical ability than anybody's ever seen he's a absolutely remarkable um addition to the sport and a super nice kid his mom's a ballerina oh yeah amazing and he's got very um loose hip joints he actually guides the board with his knee back knee like so he can do a lot of things hands with no hands that most people have to grab to do and his dad is uh an orchestra conductor so if you were to like make up a story about a highly technical powerful precise you know athlete it would be jimmy wilkins and it's um he's he's he's won x games he's astonishing um to watch and so much fun to watch so skateboarding it's very apparent um but then i was trying to think of some daily activities that so getting away from sport and exercise for a moment and i was just thinking in my own life like if you wanted to understand um my mom you just have to see her gardening the way she moves about her garden the way she tends to it she loves gardening it's like her greatest i don't know if it's her greatest joy it's one of her great joys and so if you if you could just see her gardening for 10 minutes you would understand her as a person uh completely amazing it's it's amazing and and i think she's a very good gardener but it's not that the garden isn't the point it's how she moves about the garden yep um and i think that's true for certain people how they cook certain people how they dance and i was going to say you know if you want to understand people at a wedding or a party just when the music comes on you get a lot of insight into people's personality and the best is always that like older guy or or gal or couple that look like they're just kind of sitting there like turtles and then they get up and you're like oh my goodness they can really dance yeah or they're just enjoying or just enjoying it completely even if they're not great dancers yeah so let's talk about music and dance for a second i think we can't avoid this any longer um your instagram handle was maybe still is finger mash correct i thought that had something to do with sprinting but i learned right before we sat down that you're you you're a reggae dj uh-huh and you grew up around that yeah and sprinting has a lot of jamaicans in it yeah what's the deal educate us um how much of how you understand athletes and how they move and people generally in the general population how they move um relates to your understanding kind of music and rhythm because this pressure piece right i mean like that's a great song that's a great concert that's a great album so you know i don't think i explicitly truly understood the connection until in hindsight you know because when you're doing it you're just doing it you're just living your life and you're not really thinking about it i'm doing these things they have creative probably similarities but i'm not really understanding those you know i'm not thinking about them you know i started uh i started djing in 1984 so i've been 15 and i stopped djing in 2010 i had a radio show in calgary for 20 years called level the vibes shout out level the vibes it still goes on to this day level of vibes level the vibes level the vibes level the vibes with my old dj partner tulla yeah and uh it's yeah absolutely like it's i was an artist as well so when i was in school everyone figured i would just be the artist like i was an okay athlete but not great i wasn't good enough to go into professional sport and make money it was just art that was it i went to art school and i figured out you know this just isn't serving me anymore but the entire time i'm doing this music thing and i'm doing this sport thing and i think all of these creative outlets are just all coming together i've always been sort of a creative coach and i think like this is how i actually got into sprinting is i was a soccer player most of my most of my friends were sprinters most of them most of those sprinters because i was based in calgary there's a big jamaican population there so most of them were jamaican and i just got into sprinting through that so is uh i feel like as as i said it's it wasn't an explicit connection that i understood at the time but in hindsight i could say okay me being a a dj an understanding rhythm and putting things together and how putting these things together influenced other things less than maybe the people that i'm playing the music for that really served my coaching ability 100 100 as did my art it's really interesting in hindsight to to look at those things and look at those as you say these call them the transition events and these other things the other skills that you know masters in some of the domains have what athletes nowadays um which athletes are you excited about because they seem to have this essence we don't want to make them self-conscious but um that you're like wow like there's really something there yeah yeah who are you excited about in track specifically yeah or well any sport sure it's i mean i honestly i'm not a massive sports fan like i don't watch a lot of team sports in fact i watch no team sports other than soccer and i watch soccer because you know that's the game i played that's the game my father plays your team uh manchester city and so who's the greatest soccer player in the world in your mind for you like the one that not necessarily the one that everyone agrees is the best but oh no messi is the best player and i think most people would agree that leon messi is now playing for inter inter miami is maybe even still at the age of 35 or 36 the best player on the planet because of his expressiveness just the the way in which he plays his game and expresses himself is just perfect and in fact this is a really good uh analogy to to discuss what you're talking about here because there's there's in the goat debate the greatest of all time debate there's two players that come up in soccer cristiano ronaldo and leonel messi maradona is no longer in the next and pelle is no longer in the in the mix it's the it's these two okay ronaldo is 40 and messi i think is 36 and i'd say probably if you took a poll of all of the millions of people that have an opinion on this 45 of them or so would say cristiano ronaldo and 55 it's that close 55 would say messi but both of them are so authentically themselves it's crazy like cristiano ronaldo is perfect like he is the perfect greek god he's 40 years old he's about five percent body fat he's big muscular powerful fast it's always load shot he's shining he shines he literally he gleams he does yeah and he plays that way right and he's he's just got a certain personality that he brings to the field and messi's just like this you know just glides around and just elusive and you can't see him and oh there he's over there and just the things that he can do with his feet and the ball and the interaction between his feet and the ball it's just oh that's incredible and for me i align with more of the messy you know i just love the creativity that's a player like that has or uh or in you know a little bit more um up to date maybe you know uh steph steph curry like change the game of basketball totally be wild or through being authentically himself he's totally changed the league he's changed how everybody plays basketball and how and everybody will play basketball forevermore so it's yeah it's it's i really really appreciate incredibly beautiful and authentic movers i don't like sport but i love the the movement part of it yeah it's the son of an argentine you know my dad's first generation immigrant to the united states i i um i really put myself to shame by not being a huge soccer fan but i've got cousins that you'll listen and watch at the dinner table and you couldn't distract them if an atom bomb went off you know it's and his kids you know um such a such an interesting sport because of the this notion that different teams and different players play it differently right like the brazilians like the rhythm to their game versus the you know argentines are considered a little bit more uh traditionally more rigid among south americans as a culture more rigid and a little bit more aggressive as well more stiff upper lip absolutely yeah yeah absolutely they take them argentines take themselves very seriously i can say that as a half of argentine yeah we're taught to take ourselves seriously as people and um at the same time to enjoy life but to take ourselves seriously yeah i think there's a lesson in that too right brazil has been the most successful national soccer team of all time and you know like you just said you're not a soccer fan but you know how brazil plays soccer everyone knows how brazil plays soccer they dance and they play and it's just this thing you know it's a party it's a party yeah and that's how they play and everyone kind of knows how argentina plays as well you just said that you're not a soccer fan but you know that nobody knows how england plays england haven't won a world cup since 1966 they haven't won a major title since 1966 even though this is where the sport originated from everyone knows how germany plays and how germany has always played there's a way there's a german way of playing football there's a brazilian way of playing football there's an argentinian way of playing football there is no british way anymore so i think there's something in that right like if there's a connection where every single person that comes up from the age of four years old they know that the way in which everybody in this country plays oh okay i get that and we're all on the same team and all contributing to the same system in the same way where in the uk it's so disparate that no one understands it anymore i'm just soaking this in because my mind immediately goes to like like art one of my favorite movies is the movie basquiat by jump about john michelle basquiat not the documentary i mean the cast is like gary oldman david bowie i mean it's in dennis hopper christopher walk and it's just in an unbelievable cast um and the fact that basquiat was part haitian he was in you know new york in a time when new york was pretty gritty and like brought that together in his art it was like one part graffiti modern art and had this kind of tribal component that people made more of than they probably should have and and you could say the same thing about you know um andy warhol or about chuck close or you know when people are just being themselves but they're also taking their ancestry and they're taking their personal history which includes their ancestry and they're putting it into their art or their sport spectacular things happen so along those lines this is a somewhat controversial topic but i'm just gonna go right into it because i think everyone wonders about this i'll say this directly why are there fewer white strength and speed champion athletes in fact if you hang around track and field long enough you'll hear that's the third fastest white woman that's the second fastest white guy um people are using very specific language but we could put it differently get a lot of fast jamaicans um what's the deal is it um genetic contribution to fiber type um let's also talk about calf belly length which turns out to not be about calf belly length at all um what i'm saying there is people with quote unquote small calves tend to be fast runners what's the deal and i realize why this is a controversial topic but it's like so obvious because that it's almost silly to avoid at this point how can you not have the conversation yeah let's have a conversation about it it's it's it's obvious so what's the deal well as in all things when we're having discussions around topics like this it's both nature and nurture sure it's primarily in this case nature if you don't have the genetic capacity to run fast you won't run fast sorry you just don't you don't have enough type 2 fibers whatever it is proportion of type 2 it could be limb length it could be joint structure uh typically faster people have tighter smaller joints typically faster people have longer tendons and smaller muscle bellies typically faster people have more type 2x fibers typically faster people are slightly taller so all of these contributing genetic factors if you do not have those things and then that's not even talking about some of the hormonal factors some of the endocrinological factors some of the neural factors that we may not even understand yet there's all of these genetic determinants that play a part in what you are able to do so first and foremost we have to yes that is a fact that almost every single statistically almost every single human being that's ever ran sub 10 seconds is a black athlete from you know evolutionarily from maybe say west africa let me ask you uh sorry for interrupting but i think has a white person ever broken the 10 second mark in the 100 meters there's been a few so it was first uh christophe lemaitre i believe in either 2017 or 2018 was the first white athlete to break 10 seconds and then there's been uh i feel like it's probably five maybe six asians now who have broken 10 seconds everybody else and that's close to 200 are are black and of course there's the nature component too which is if you come from a country where sprinting yes is a popular sport um or soccer is a popular sport or um you know distance running is a popular sport then there's gonna be a selection bias 100 yeah so we're taking those into that is that i would say that the gen if you don't have the genetics good luck you're not even in the room the genetics will get you in the room once you do in that room whether what that nature is what that upbringing is what that environment is that is going to determine what you know what you do with your genetics so for example a massive percentage and i don't know what this is but it's big a massive percentage of the athletes the male athletes who have ran sub 210 in a marathon come from the same little district in kenya like it's very very high percentage and part of that is not only their genetics but the environment which they're growing up in every single person that they know is a marathoner every single person they know are running in excess of 100 miles a week every single person they know uh you know this these are all of the things that that we need to do to be this right so they're seeing that from the day that they're born so for sure environment really matters what you do with that nature really really matters but if you don't have the genetic capacity to begin with you just as i said you don't have any chance at all and as you said like jamaica sprinting is massive in jamaica like it's really really important if i i would encourage you to do one thing go to champs at one point if you like track meets this is the best track meet in the world champs is the jamaican high school national championships and it's in kingston and it is incredible absolutely incredible the stands are packed so there's 45 50 000 people it's loud it's noisy it's boisterous and kids are just killing themselves trying to beat each other it's just an amazing event over the course of three or four days go to the last couple days of champs and just watch that and you just see ah i understand why jamaicans are so fast this is the environment in which many of them are operating within as they come up and this is like this is you know i i talked to uh so i'm a good friends with donovan bailey donovan bailey was a 1996 olympic champion he was a world record holder in 100 meters for a while he's of jamaican descent uh grew up in jamaica until he was 12.

he moved to canada in 1981 which is the same year that i moved to canada so we've talked about this a lot and he said if you know if you do well at champs you're set you're going to do really well as a professional sprinter because there's nothing that has more pressure in it than actually competing well at jamaican high school national championships so understand what that environment does for the ability for your typical jamaican athlete to succeed at higher levels and all of those pockets you know pockets like this exist all over the world whether it's in in russia or whether it's in kenya whether it's in west africa or whether it's in you know right now we're seeing some interesting things in norway and some of the endurance sports right so it's for sure nurture is really really important genetics gets you in the room what you do in it within that room that's that's up to you and your environment that you create it's so interesting how these different cultures shape the the future of a sport or an endeavor in china kids are highly incentivized to learn a lot and test a lot in the math and sciences and they're really big on neuroscience in china i think these nature nurture questions are super interesting it sounds like jamaica is still churning out a lot of excellent sprinters because of the huge numbers that are fed fed to the sport and and can be you know essentially grow up their nervous systems are shaped around sprinting yeah couple that with any number of different um features and we were talking about you talk about short calf bellies right this is the um this is the fear of every uh uh bodybuilder right they they want long calf bellies but short calf bellies make people faster and better jumpers not because the calf is short but because because the tendon is long okay essentially we've got you know each muscle is really a muscle tendon unit and if you've got a longer tendon relative to your muscle effectively you're a little bit more plyometric you can store and release energy a little bit more effectively than somebody who has a shorter tendon and a longer or bigger fatter thicker muscle so we want really if you want to be fast you want long skinny tendons and small little muscle bellies so you know so what uh serves aesthetics sometimes doesn't necessarily serve the sport and and vice versa so if you had to pick one you'd want to be able to jump and run faster would you sure i mean i don't i don't i'm not yeah i mean i suppose that having very short calves would be weird but who wouldn't want to run faster or jump higher you know uh for all sorts of reasons just be so much fun yeah absolutely yeah i i don't have a lot of hops but um this is actually a time to talk about knees over toes guy ben patrick yeah he um uh fought a lot of adversity to like encourage people um including a lot of exercise physiologists and the people who do rehab from various um aspects that you know putting your knees out over your toes is okay um caught a lot of heat but i think the fact that he's so skilled at jumping and dunking and backbent and landing and backbends and things that sort puts them all to shame frankly i think most people understand now that ben is really on to something with this um one of the things that he's a big proponent of is um a lot of eccentric loading um but also not being afraid to get that knee way out over the toe what what is the deal with uh running form as it were is the idea that if you can get your knee higher you can stride further and then when we talk about um knee back toward butt how far back are we supposed to like kick our own glutes when we when we stride i mean what is a proper running stride or is it going to vary by by structure well that's uh that's a big question yeah like like explain that in five seconds i'm just kidding but you know for those of us who want to run a bit faster do some some um stride work yeah should i be reaching with my front leg and pulling myself forward on the ground 100 percent not please do not do that right and i shouldn't be just quickening my uh my turnover of a jogging stride so that's part of it yeah first of all let's start at the start and understand the way you move is going to be governed by the things that you are moving so how you move is governed by the stuff that you've got so you cannot move in a way in which your body will not allow so if you have a certain structure of your joints or a certain mobility structure or senate or a certain genetic makeup or a certain stiffness or a certain muscle fiber type all of those things come together together they all coalesce to sort of govern your motor strategy so the lat the last thing that i would want you to do andrew is to copy usain bolt's sprinting stride because usain bolt is six foot five 215 pounds he's a little bit more dynamic than you he's probably got slightly longer achilles tendons than you he's probably got tighter smaller joints than you he's probably a lot more elastic than you are he's probably a little bit more coordinated than you are so why would i want you to try to copy that so my job first and foremost is to understand how you should or how you could move based upon the constraints that you have based upon what are known as your action capabilities so your force capacity your mobility capacity all of these things that make up who you are your height your weight your joint length your joint ratios all of these different things your your limb limb ratios so first it's understanding that we are governed by the stuff that we have so it's we should never be trying to copy someone else first and foremost number two is then we should have some sort of understanding of what is the common way to do a thing and we can probably simplify this we kind of know a little bit about how we what a model looks like for a back squat or for a deadlift or for you choose your exercise we kind of have a model for that whether that's a mathematical model or whether that model was based upon the average of a bunch of elite movers we kind of okay we can understand what quote unquote optimal is mathematically but we also have to understand that we are not math we are biological beings that will all move in slightly varying ways depending upon the stuff that we are moving so yes we look at that model but we also look at what we've got and we try to find somewhere in the middle that serves us so in sprinting and in probably in most most activities we try to identify like what are the non-negotiables what are the rules here like in squatting we know what the rules are right we don't want to bend to one side we don't want to overly flex our our spine we don't want to anteriorly rotate our shoulders we don't want to have knee valgus where our knees come in and touch each other we don't want to have super wide feet we don't want to have internally rotated feet when we're when we're squatting all of these things that we know that we don't do they govern the things that we can do so in sprinting we have something similar we don't know as much about sprinting as we do in some of the more uh or maybe the less complex movements more discrete movements like a squat like a deadlift like a power clean the sprinting is coordinative it continues it's rhythmic so it's a little bit harder for us to actually study but we do know that as you said uh one of the things you said was high knees and most of the elite sprinters converge upon similar positions when their knee is super high and that knee gets up to about waist height like just almost belly button height when they're running as fast as they can so we know if we want to be fast we've got to kind of try and bring our knees up and we talked about that before too right the difference between striding and sprinting and sprinting and jogging and running where jogging and running happens behind the center mass and striding and sprinting is in front of the center mass so maybe first and foremost we think about bringing the knee up knees got to be a little bit higher you have to think about being in front we know that for sure every elite sprinter sets up a very stiff spring on the ground by being very very strong and stiff and rigid through the foot ankle complex so you have to be stiff on impact so think about the analogy that i give all the time is if you think about you're a boxer or you're boxing and you're hitting a heavy bag what would you do with your wrists and your fist you'd squeeze it and hold it rigidly because if you didn't it would really hurt and if you're trying to hit it as hard as you can you want it to be you have to be squeezed it's the same thing with sprinting because the forces by the way are pretty similar an elite boxer hits a heavy bag and somewhere in excess of five times their body weight in less than three hundredths of a second it's exactly the same as sprinting and elite sprinting is in excess of five times their body weight in less than three hundredths of a second time to peak force on ground ground contact so knees are up and we're very stiff on the ground and the third thing is if you do not have an effective hip extension pattern you just can't move well never mind run fast you have to have the the ability for your knee to come behind your butt now that's a hard thing to define it's a hard thing to quantify people ask me all the time like what do you mean like what is a good pattern if i talk about the hip extension pattern and the importance of that it's not just range of motion so that's the one that you alluded to is you know how far behind well the further the knee gets behind the center mass the more the range of motion it's not just that because in sprinting when you're upright especially you want to almost limit the amount of time that the knee travels behind the butt because the longer that the knee travels behind the butt the longer you're on the ground the slower you are so range of motion for you or for me or for rob or for anyone listening for running is going to be very different from a noah lyles or an andre degrasse or usain bald but this the qualitative aspect of all of those things is still really important and the way in which i judge the quality of a pattern is kind of five five fold do you have the force capacity to be able to extend your hip are you strong enough can you actually get your knee behind the hip and many people just can't do that because they're not strong enough do you have the velocity capacity can you actually move your limb fast enough to get it behind do you have the range of motion and most team sport athletes you know if i'm going in and talking to to coaches who work in team sports that's the big that's the low-hanging fruit that they just don't have the range so number three is the range number four is the control and if you're a kid if you're a 14 year old you probably don't have the control of that pattern and five is can you do it over and over again can you actually repeat it so when we're looking at the judging of a pattern it's force velocity uh repeatability control and range of motion is those those five things so that's you know that's a long answer to what i could talk about for for literally days is what are the things that we're looking at for sprinting the ability to get the thigh out high the ability to contact the ground really aggressively and the the ability to get the thigh or the knee behind the hip with high quality what are your thoughts on skipping rope yeah i think the ability to coordinate flexion extension at the ankle knee and hip is really important so you're coordinating the movement pattern both the or at the ankle at the knee and the hip and coordinating all of those in space and time and the ability to do that as we've talked about is one of the things that we lose as we age so skipping is one of those things that can quite simply work on that coordinate of aspect what i see too often though is people skipping incorrectly and skipping only through their ankles and not really doing a lot through the knees and the hip and they just sort of plantar flex or dorsiflex plantar flex dorsiflex so they just push up on their toes and they come off where we need to understand that plantar flexion or going up onto your toes is in dynamic movements a reflexive movement it's not a volitional movement it's not a movement that we should be thinking about or trying to control all we should be thinking about is just bouncing as if we're bouncing on a trampoline just bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce and actually keeping our foot as stiff as we can just like skipping for me i just equate it to hitting a heavy bag over and over and over again pop pop pop pop pop pop you can't do that if you're on your toes you want to be on the balls of your feet like right on the base of your of your toes like and just then it's a lot easier to just bounce think about it bouncing so i think it's a great activity from that perspective is sort of just teaching how to coordinate the the uh what's called the amortization of all of the joints of the lower body and then as far as how to do it what to do it i just feel just do it yeah you know what i mean like just do it with heavy ropes do it do the light ropes have fun with it i think there's there's probably too many times that we're constrained by what people like me say to do what is right just have fun man just just just you know find a way in which to express yourself and enjoy the movement if you love jumping rope or hopping rope go do that just make sure that you try to understand what doing it well looks like or feels like so you can do it well i like to put on an album and skip for the album and then somehow just let the the music when i feel moved to skip different faster or high knees or something like that dictate yeah because then there's like this external coach slash rhythm it's something i like i'm not thinking about too much and then next thing i know i've got you know 35 minutes of quote-unquote cardio done um with a piece of plastic i don't know something very satisfying about doing that i don't know why um no i love it it's a yeah i i as you can probably tell i'm getting more and more interested in things that um drawn more aspects of the nervous system mind and body for exercise because i i while i love the gym i think it's it can be too linear and too rigid yeah and i think it leads to rigidity in one's thinking yeah um and that might come as a surprise to a lot of people think oh you know it's all you know all these protocols have to be done you know there's a fundamentally correct way to do most things like get morning sunlight in your eyes but if it's five minutes or seven minutes it depends on how bright it is and that what time of year i mean you know i feel like the biology is flexible yeah um and learning to go by feel can be very very helpful yeah i think we lose that too right we got to remember you know principles are few and methods are many there's many ways to do different things as long as they align with the principles just think about what the principles are and then just be creative in choosing the methods that work for you yeah this is where peer-reviewed science unfortunately can't measure every variable yeah you know people say well like what have there been a study comparing you know 5 10 15 20 minutes or 30 minutes of morning sunlight no yeah because you're lucky if you get 100 subjects you got to pay those subjects you got to get them to come in you're tracking sleep you're you use 10 000 lux in one group and you know you know control light in another i mean you just don't have the option to work through every variable in anything even a dose response study of a drug you can't account for nutrition and the drug and then people go well then how can we trust any of this as a you know standard science as it were a reduction of science is just one lens through these things yeah that doesn't mean that people's experience is necessarily smarter than data it just means that data have to mesh with experience and and experience with data yeah i think data data can inform the decisions we make but they are not the decisions that we make you know we use that data but what's you know it's it's um what's most important is how all of these data points all this information comes together you know it's the it's the relationships and the interactions between the component parts which is more important than the individual component parts themselves so we have to understand what those relationships are that's the thing we need to focus a little bit more on i'd like to talk about weight training what do sprinters do for their weight training and if somebody like me is interested in becoming a faster runner doing maybe even sprinting someday besides just doing skips and strides what are some ways of doing exercises in the gym that can potentially facilitate our ability to move better outside of the gym first let's look at the kinetics of sprinting sprinting is only really truly about four things how much force you apply in the ground how fast can you apply it the direction in which you apply it and how heavy you are and it's just those four things four things how much force how fast which direction what is your mass so we need to yeah force is important we have to be able to apply a certain level of force but there's a threshold to this everyone says there's a big question and has been for a long time how much strength quote unquote is enough in sprinting well enough is it's the same question that we ask we should ask in every task there's a rate of diminishing returns on all of these capacities that we need that we require is spending an extra few years trying to get an extra five kilos to your power clean or an extra 25 pounds to your back squat as effective as a means to get faster than it would be if you say you start skipping maybe do some more explosive work actually start sprinting a little bit more so there's always this um from a programming perspective is understanding where the athlete is what they require what they've got where they are in the rate of diminishing returns on each of those capacities so first we have to understand that um let me zoom out just a little bit i coach andre andre degrasse as we talked about andre when i started coaching him in 2015 could barely squat his body weight eight months later he's three-time olympic medalist eight months later he was one and a half years into his sprinting career he'd sprinted for 18 months he had three olympic medals in the sprints the 100 the 200 and the four by one he could barely squat his body weight he could clean 60 kilos so 135 pounds he definitely couldn't bench a plate and a half he might have had 145 pound plate uh bench yeah maybe super weak but on the other end of the spectrum this is the example that everyone gives you've got ben johnson famously ben johnson did this 600 pound squat a couple of days prior to winning in the tokyo olympics in 1988 running 979 obviously that was thereafter taken away after he tested positive so you've gone on one end of the spectrum somebody like ben johnson who applies incredibly incredible amounts of force and on the other end you've got somebody like andre degrasse who doesn't apply relatively any force but does it really really fast so this gives you like an understanding of the spectrum of capacities and abilities that humans have to do a task in an almost infinite number of ways so to get to your question it depends on who you are and what you're good at and why you're good at it there's not one way when you've got a ben johnson who can apply incredible amounts of forces and that's one of the reasons why he's fast on the other end of the spectrum you've got andre degrasse who's weaker than most high school girls who's incredible fat incredibly fast where does that leave us that just tells us okay there's many different ways to do this which is great it's cool that gives us again some freedom to better ask the questions about what it is that makes you andrew really good like you apply a lot of force okay let's lean into that let's try to improve your speed by try to maximize your force but what are you limited by okay you're having trouble getting off the ground you're not super reactive or reflexive so we have to work some things into your program that's going to make you a little bit more reactive or reflexive so maybe we'll do some jump squats maybe we'll do some hurdle hops maybe we'll do some more skipping maybe maybe we feel like okay you've reached the rate of diminishing returns on your force capacity you don't need to squat four plates if you squat 385.

is going from 385 to 405 going to make you any faster no not at all so let's keep you at 385 and we'll just do some other things so first and foremost it's respecting the individuality of all things and understanding that there's not one way in which i can tell you do this because this is what he did and that's what's going to work for you now there is as i said before there's non-negotiables and there's rules to things so sprinting is how you transmit that force into the track in a really fast period of time in the right direction so the transmission of force is typically more important than the magnitude of the force at least at the elite end at least at the adult end so transmission of force means how the the amount of force that you put into the ground how do you use it to propel yourself forward so what are the types of exercises that maybe what would you think about if i said this is a force transmission exercise rather than say a force magnitude exercise is that something that appeals to you yeah jump squat comes to mind you know um jump squat comes to mind any kind of uh like push clap push-ups yeah um you know the ability to like yep double clap or you know or more um yes that's what comes to mind i think that's pretty accurate olympic lifts is one is one that where a lot of people would say yes olympic lift that's kind of what we're doing with like a clean you're kind of yeah i'm not i don't do olympic lifts but from what i understand i you know that they're they're pushing off the ground to get get the bar up yeah it's it's essentially can we apply high forces fast over a long period of time so that's kind of we do we spend a lot of time looking at those types of exercises sled work uh we don't do any sled work we could get back to that if you know sled work for elite sprinters we don't we do resisted acceleration work so we'll sprint we'll do some specific strength work where we're pulling uh you know probably in excess of 10 to 15 kilos you know so 20 to 30 pounds ish do you use the parachute that was a big thing a few years back remember that yeah like the parachute i used the parachute 20 years ago absolutely we don't know we we uh we actually have a we have a piece of equipment called the power cord we use that i use yes that's really good spring-loaded and the 1080 sprint which is this incredible piece of equipment that we use that we can really dial in the resistance down to like you know a half a kilo that's it's beautiful so we use that but that's for different reasons so the you talked about the weight room in in the in the um the population of athletes i work with maximum strength is at the rate of diminishing returns already we don't spend almost any time working on that at a lower level of population maybe if you're high school kid or if you're in your 20s when you're not super or if you're super weak just by increasing your force capacity so your ability to apply force you will get faster because remember what the calculation is amount of force how fast direction and body mass so it is important it just becomes less and less and less important the faster you get so it's and then it becomes when it's less important when the ability to produce a high magnitude of force isn't important what is important so then we're starting looking at plyometric things and probably most specifically i'm looking at specific isometric stuff in the weight room so let's look at the position in which we're applying in excess of five times our body weight and that's when the foot is directly underneath the center mass the foot is flat on the ground there's about a 15 degree knee bend and there's about a 5 to 10 degree hip bend so can you think of think about that position so we're pushing up against an immovable bar or holding a very very heavy bar on one leg with as heavy as we can or as hard as we can for somewhere between three to five seconds times three to four repetitions and we'll do like three sets of that that's alex notero's work he's one of the the premier researchers in what's called run specific isometric strength training so it's getting strong in really specific positions to the task that you're trying to be come better at so that's that's the primary one for me is that position where the foot is directly underneath the center mass there's a little bit of a knee bend there's a little bit of a hip bend and we do a lot of isometric work right there that's that's and then i and this is my bias i do nothing bilateral at all you mean parallel stance parallel stance nothing except occasionally if it is an issue you know with neural drive or whatever i'll do some uh trap bar deadlifts so some parallel stance trap bar deadlifts because i think it's a great exercise i think that's difficult to do with a staggered stance it's very difficult to do with a a single leg stance but you can load up some pretty good weight on a parallel stance trap bar deadlift and yeah i feel pretty good and you get a good feeling out of that it's not necessarily to be um be able to apply or generate more force it's more about sort of neural drive than it is for anything else everything every single other thing that we do is in a staggered stance heel to toe or kickstand which is kind of the same same sort of thing just a different terminology or split stance or a stance where the front foot is elevated or the rear foot is elevated so we'll do as as we as we've talked about quite a bit now find opportunities to get the knee behind the butt that's a really important position can we get stronger faster more control more repeatability and more range at that position one of the things i learned from you yesterday is um well let's i'll double click first on this um the staggered stance so this is one foot slightly in front of the other um i've been doing this with various lifts in the gym for a long time i would say the exception would be if i'm belt squatting or hack squatting i don't do that but for everything else overhead presses um anything where my feet are in contact with the ground that is uh not on pull-ups and dips of course but um curls tricep extensions and i make sure to vary the stance so one foot is in front for one set one is in front for the other sometimes even in the middle of the set i'll i'll switch them up after um and i found that to be tremendously helpful for building core stability and a number of other things uh and it sounds like it might help running gate as well the other thing that you said yesterday that i think is really important i've not thought of before but now i'm doing is anytime you have a a foot elevated in the gym to get onto the toe front foot can be flat yeah i think the ability to get off your first ray so for the big toe to bend and flex is really important so for me if i if that's important i'm going to search for opportunities to do that as often as i can so if i have an option to either flex the big toe or not then we're going to flex the big toe now if you can't and many athletes cannot you know there's a lot of athletes that just cannot extend to that big toe or some athletes have bunions and just can't get over it and that's okay we can go on to the top of the foot which is not the not the end of the world but i look for opportunities like that like i look for opportunities to extend the hip how can i work hip extension exercises into everything i do how do i look at or do i look for full full chain or full body force transmission exercises as much as i possibly can ideally from the left foot to the right hand and the right foot to the left hand so cross body so i'm looking for these long fascial chains so like ways in which i can bring some function to the work that i'm doing in the weight room some level of transferability between the things that i do in the weight room and the things that we do on the track because frankly most of the things that we do in the weight room don't transfer to the track a squat doesn't really transfer it's a totally different exercise performed a totally different way at a totally different time totally different weights so the transference is very very far it's very it's not very nebulous so i'm looking for ways in which we can find a way to transfer the capacities that we are building in the weight room directly to the track and with respect to stretching i'm thinking again of yoga because this is where the probably the first time i've done this where one would lunge so front foot planted flat rear foot up on the big toe if possible the knee back of that rear foot um or rear leg excuse me back behind the butt and then the opposite arm raised above that's that fascial um sling that cuts across from and you know in anatomy nomenclature contralateral across the midline um and then essentially trying to learn to feel that um line that goes all the way from one's big toe that's planting back across up the leg across the the pelvis up the body and shoulder to the opposite tips of finger 100 and it's it's if uh if i can add to that stretch um this is something that i really love kelly about you know he's he's so much on i need you to be in control of your body there is a way to do this but then it's up to you to find out a better way for you specifically so you've done a great job of outlining what the stretch looks like now what can i do with my body to actually make this better do i rotate to one side do i side bend to one side do i flex the hand as well as as well as doing this so because this will be a better stretch than that so palm parallel to the to the ceiling 100 of the raised hand correct if i push the knee back and try to push the heel on the ground and actually contract if i rotate my pelvis underneath me posteriorly like you know do a a pelvic tilt underneath me well will that increase it so it's always this explore exploratory process there is a right way to do things but you are an individual we're all unique snowflakes right we're all moving different ways and it's up to us to explore all of our uniqueness distant topic from the one that we're on but one that i and i think a number of people are curious about is drugs in sports um performance enhancing drugs there's a new um potentially new sports league track league which is the enhanced games who knows if that will go through um but right now using performance enhancing drugs most performance enhancing drugs is banned in track but because of the ben johnson thing that was 88 olympics where he was like jaundiced at the eyes and you know it turned out he was taking winstraw and he was stripped of his metal um and then the discussion is they're all using it some just get caught this kind of thing or they're using in the off season how common is um people usually say steroid use but androgen enhancement right because performance enhancing drugs could be drugs to lower the heart rate for the biathletes they do that too right keep your heart rate lower you know there's all sorts of drugs that are banned that are not androgen increasing but yeah but things like um testosterone derivatives yeah in the men and women how common is it yeah um uh now not common at all in fact i don't know of any elite sprinter that i could um definitely point to say that person is dirty none it was common 60s and 70s extremely common 80s very very common 90s when testing started becoming a bit better much less common 2000s 2010s and 20s i just don't know how much of it is getting done now or being done across the board there are pockets so we obviously know about russia and what's going on with the eastern block and all of the drugs that they've taken that's been state sponsored all of that is out there we know that for sure if you were an elite russian athlete almost certainly you were taking drugs you didn't have a choice you didn't have a choice no one really knows now because russia has been banned from all sports so you don't see russian athletes almost anywhere um i think there's a few few sports that you do but most of them now you don't see russian athletes but it's so hard like that's a part of the culture and has been part of the culture for you know since the 50s that's what we do because everyone else is cheating so this is what we do so it's a state-sponsored system and i feel like there's you know there's 150 or 160 something like that positive drug cases come out of kenya over the course of the last decade so you think okay there's something going on with in with kenyans is that distance running distance running and there i should say because some people might not be uh familiar with this um with distance running or cycling triathlon it's probably not increasing androgens like testosterone dihydrotestosterone etc it's probably um things that increase red blood cell count right ability to deliver more oxygen and fuel sources to the cells this kind of blood uh epo these and things like that yeah but but and and this one in kenya like i understand it i understand the russian thing as well like if you're a kenyan kid you're 18 years old you've got some talent an agent comes to you and says i'm going to give you fifty thousand dollars and i'm going to support you for the first two years of your career and this is what everyone does anyway and you know we'll take the risk a little bit but we can you know you can actually make something of yourself become a star get a house feed your family do this do that that's a hard calculation for a kid to make as it was in the steroid era in baseball it's almost logical to take drugs at that point right these guys aren't testing me at all so why wouldn't i why wouldn't barry bonds take drugs now that's a different calculation for most of the rest of the world where there isn't these practices going on in kenya with a lot of a lot of shady people to be honest with you and and i honestly i do not see drugs at all in the sport anymore there will be pockets of people like for sure there will be some dirt there'll be a few dirty coaches there'll be a few dirty managers there'll be a few people doing some dirty things but i'm very very confident that the top people in all of the events are doing it clean very confident it's great to hear it and i i would not know the first like i've been in the sport for a long time i would know what to do what to take who to get it from so when i look at you know i look at uh you know choose your athlete i won't name any names and you look at their who they're surrounded by i know those people well how would they do it i had no idea like no one really knows right because i mean the drug testing is pretty stringent now it's really it's hard it's really really hard that's um encouraging to hear um especially for young people who are watching olympics and you know it's a terrible thing that if they were to think oh you know they're all they're all using um and i think one good trend in the last few years is there's a lot more openness now in the kind of fitness world because when i was growing up of course those like veiny bodybuilder people were they were all juiced to the gills and they'd say they weren't but they absolutely were and nowadays you know if people are doing trt or something they say it right you know i've talked about it microdose every other day since i was 45 never before then but i've relied on other things to keep testosterone in range and i take hcg maintain fertility that's all checked out but i'm very clear about exactly how much the internet has it wrong it's 25 milligrams every other day by the way i'm staggered with 600 i use of hcg every other day i said that early on because i was like i'm not a competitive athlete i got nothing to hide right and i'll say that was it trt i'll say not really because my testosterone was in mid-sevens but i was getting fatigued a lot and bumping it up a little bit higher which is what this has done has been great for me but it's the people that lie like the liverking situation where he looked at the camera unfortunately and filmed himself saying i i that he doesn't and then he gets caught it's like blah and then you've got people that are juicing really hard and um and it's tricky in sports because or in movies right like when an actor suddenly is like big and shredded and you're just like oh you know the telltale signs it's probably not testosterone it's probably oxandrolone or something a little bit quote-unquote lighter but there's not nothing light about oxandrolone on your liver or your hairline folks so um but this is a bigger discussion but i think it's important to just be open about it yeah you know because um we want to see people run faster than ever before we want to see people jump higher than ever before we want to see people run marathons faster than ever before and it sucks when we find out that they were enhanced and that was breaking the rules what what sucks more is the reputational damage that those things do for the people who are actually doing this well and clean right the 99.9 percent of the people who are trying to do this the right way that are being colored with the same brush right and that's what really frustrates me it was really frustrated i've coached one athlete in my career who tested positive 2001 olympic trials and bobsled his name was pavly jovanovic he was um at the time the best bobsledder on the planet so tested positive for nandrolone so deca duravolone um later it was shown that it came from his supplement so if you remember this was 2001.

oh yeah you could you could buy ghb late 90s at gnc at that time correct late 90s up until the the early 2000s there were supplement companies purposefully lacing their protein with steroids to try to sell more supplements goodness gracious and there's studies that showed this and they ended up there was a group of athletes that all tested positive that sued this one company that uh and you know the company ended up just you know declaring bankruptcy and nobody got a cent and long story short ruined his career ruined his reputation ended up taking his own life so i've seen and this is you know this is just people from the outside just look at that and say oh just another druggie bobsetter just another druggie football player just another druggie sprinter they're all on drugs and they're not they're not 99.9 of people trying to do this right like they're good people not making any money in this sport especially in track and field it's a different calculation as you said in hollywood or in the nfl or in baseball where the testing is significantly more relaxed than it is in track and field or significantly more relaxed than what it is in almost all amateur sports amateur sports is almost impossible to be dirty these days it really is and if you just think about this trayvon bromell ran 997 as a high school kid he was five foot seven 135 pounds think that kid was taking drugs of course he wasn't so if you can run 997 as a 17 year old at that age why can't you run nine seven six seven eight years later after actually training and being an elite program of course you can yusain bolt ran 1984 when he was 18 years old he ran sub 10 when he was 19 years old world class just a kid just a kid yeah like these these you know you're seeing high school kids now running ridiculously fast times in the mile as well in in every single event right every event across and they're not assisted this is one thing where i hear we're cutting between sport and we're talking about fitness and you know i the reason i mentioned the age when i started trt is that a um never never occurred to me didn't need it i felt like i got great results uh until then um and i think the biggest thing is recovery i think it helps i do think it helps you recover uh better no question actually um but a real shame nowadays is that because of instagram and people showing their bodies and this desire for people to get results more quickly a lot of guys in their teens 20s and 30s are taking testosterone when they don't need it it does shut down sperm production unless they're offsetting that with hcg or something like that and um they may think they don't want kids now but they may want them later and some permanent damage can be done in addition to that i mean puberty is a very protracted thing for a lot of people it's not like oh yeah you know you start puberty at 14 it ends at 16 your brain's still developing so we we don't really understand how all that works not this olympics but prior to that one there was a female athlete who tested positive for deca um the deca burrito she blamed it on a burrito meat and i remember hearing that and i sort of facetiously said and i'll say it again not facetiously like if she got caught for deca i hope she took deca because to knowingly take a banned substance and get caught and then banned from the sport is one thing but to inadvertently take a banned substance as did this bobsledder and then get banned from your sport that's a real tragedy for multiple reasons and that's what happened dreadful it is it's absolutely dreadful she just she just started competing again like last month rob and i were actually talking about this yesterday at the track she's she's made the world indoor team for us atf uh starting next week i think it definitely happens you know we we look at that and there's yeah they're blaming the burrito they're blaming meat or whatever but 100 why would you you run 5k why are you taking deca why are you taking natural it doesn't make sense no it makes zero sense you're not doing that yeah like that is from the meat well i get contacted a lot um probably not as much as other people do uh by athletes at different levels professional amateur etc asking about ways to improve testosterone etc i got great results all through my um mid-30s until mid-40s and and still with like tonga ali freeing some testosterone up my blood charts told me that worked for me may not work for everybody great fedogia things like that things like that subtle effects but meaningful subtle but meaningful um and then athletes will ask me well is it allowed i said you have to check with your organization you just can't take something you have to check with your organization the thing i am well aware of now is all the peptide use right peptides are really really big and they're in use in the general population more and more and it'll be interesting to see how those impact sport i'm not aware of any athletes at least none have come to me saying they take these peptides but um it's gonna be interesting to see how that shapes sport i think people over estimate how much these drugs contribute to success at the elite level yeah i i because i mean what you're talking about with these athletes you work with are just the you know hundreds and hundreds of hours of work to get a one percent improvement in some metric or point one percent point one percent it's just you know i think people really overestimate it sure if people just want to be big with a bunch of acne yeah you can do that big acne sterile like there you know that you can get that in the locker room most any gym nowadays um please don't do it um but to get you know half a second off your time it's no drugs drug is thousands of hours of work right it is sleeping really well it's eating really well it's having a good proper life you know it's there's no shortcut to that there really isn't you've got to get really really fast to be fast and this is even back in the drug era you didn't take drugs to be fast you got fast first and then you took drugs and that made you faster that's how people did it you don't take drugs to get fast you don't go from 10 2 to 10 flat or 10 3 to 10 flat or 10 2 to 9 8 it doesn't happen that way so it's now it's it's for me it's like the most important one for me is are you training well is it organized properly are you sleeping well are you eating well are you taking whatever the the good clean supplements that you can take and we take very very few by the way and do you have a good social life and then all of these things come together and interact in a way that feeds your purpose of running fast you know that's that's it honestly it says as i said with with andre i spoke i started working with andre in 2015.

he could not squat his body weight basically you know three olympic medals 18 months after starting the sport it can be done which shows yeah okay this is being done that's awesome and it it points to the fact that more muscle isn't always the solution no the things that keep coming to mind are the ability to put away uh self-consciousness to use the body to express to find oneself yeah um and it's so interesting because i thought we were gonna sit down and talk about running yeah me too but i think these are much larger and if i may uh more important themes although people should definitely skip and stride and uh dupli metrics i'd be interested to hear your thoughts i asked you this question earlier like do you feel like there is a single metric that is a better determinant for overall health or vitality than the ability to maximally sprint now not be fast but to go out and actually sprint maximally think about all of the things that come along with the ride with that think about vo2 max like vo2 max in and of itself isn't important it's a proxy for all of these other things that are important the ability to sprint maximally isn't necessarily important but it's a proxy for everything else i can't think of anything else and you're talking to somebody who's now working on grip strength uh because i was challenged publicly by paul saladino um the carnivore md who now talks about animal diet and people are starting to take him more seriously by the way because at first it was all meat then it was meat and fruit there's meat fruit and some dairy yeah um i do this and i also eat vegetables the guy has salad in his name for god's sake uh he's a friend i'm friends with him i'm friends with lane i'm friends with the t i i get along with all those guys but some of them don't get along with each other i'll tell you that um but he challenged me to a grip strength contest which actually was not grip strength and he said this is the marker of longevity um and he hello bastard hung from a bar switching hands yeah for 12 plus minutes yeah in the rain now he had someone toweling off the bar but that is a very impressive grip strength slash endurance score sure um as long as we're on this i mean this has become like kind of an online thing people want to um challenge each other with here are my biometrics you asked what are the markers of longevity brian johnson is big on these are my markers those have become controversial lately because it's unclear the markers were all collected at the same date uh you know there's questions about uh for instance um it's weird that testosterone will be elevated but not showing lh means you're probably enhanced and if he is cool but people need to be very open the nice thing about what paul showed is he showed the full length video right you have to show the full length video folks brian i'm calling you out specifically you can't post vo2 max and not show the actual ride and the read off the off the the you have to show video people don't trust it anymore and so the point here is is grip strength is it vo2 max is it your testosterone relative to free testosterone it's all these things like you said if i were to step back and say is there a single physical metric i i think you got me i think that the ability to run fast without blowing a gasket or injuring yourself in some way um run fast for you it would be it and and i did not think about that or and i certainly wouldn't have said that at the beginning of uh this conversation so i think it's a very important insight and that's if nothing else should motivate everybody to get better at it great and they can check out the video that we did what you said earlier has become to me and will remain my goal i think that well-being physical well-being mental well-being is the ability to exert express pressure mentally and physically like sit down like you know to actually generate pressure around doing something hard that's you know takes an organization of mind and body it could be a physical pursuit and then to feel peace from the better expression of that cognitive or physical or creative endeavor i think this um this pressure peace thing is is more than non-trivial i think i think it's the essence of what i've been seeking my whole life the ability to exert pressure and to create things that are meaningful and then the ability to feel peace uh i think is um well it's it's yours you came up with it i'm just yeah but i was applying it to specifically a task a hundred meter sprint test and you've taken it and yeah that makes a lot of sense i love that because you got to sleep at night you gotta train hard 100 you gotta do your if you're me you know formal education and then you gotta also relax and have a good time and can you do them all at the same time that's the that's the key yeah can you structure your days in a way where the first two-thirds is just pure pressure and be okay with that because you know there's peace coming yeah because of some of the things that you pressured upon yourself love it well i love it and it's all it's all yours stu and um i have to say i it's been years i've been wanting to sit down and talk with you for a very long time we run into each other at track meets we do and um it's a real honor and pleasure you've taught us so much and there's much more so i hope you'll come back at some point and we'll um talk about other things as things evolve but talk about sprinting talk about sprinting and um i'll do a dangerous thing uh which is to say if folks want to go to a track meet i'll be at the track meets um and i'll probably be letting people know when i'll be at track meets i go as a fan um i'm not looking for uh attention there i'm actually there to just enjoy the the incredible expression of the athletes both physical and emotional expression it's it's a real it's a real beautiful thing it really is no i appreciate you i appreciate you showing up to those meets and talking about those meets it's important for our our uh possibly dying sport so it's uh it's important that we get more people out to these meets and and support track and field the the foundation of human movement well you're a legend as everyone says in the sport and outside of it too thank you so much for your time it's been it's been a real pleasure and an honor thanks andrew appreciate you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with stew mcmillan to learn more about his work and to find links to resources that stew provides please see the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our youtube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both spotify and apple and on both spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review and you can now leave us comments at both spotify and apple please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout 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