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Hello boys andgirls, ladies andgerms.

This is TimFerris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferrisshow, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out thehabits,routines, favoritebooks, and so on that you can apply and test in your ownlives.

This episode is atwo-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th yearanniversary, which is insane to thinkabout, and past 1 billiondownloads.

Tocelebrate, I've curated some of the best of thebest, some of myfavorites, from more than 700 episodes over the lastdecade.

I could not be more excited to give you these super comboepisodes.

And internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you toyes, enjoy the householdnames, the super famousfolks, but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I considerstars.

These are people who have transformed mylife, and I feel like they can do the same for many ofyou.

Perhaps they got lost in a busy newscycle, perhaps you missed anepisode.

Just trust me on thisone, we went to great pains to put these pairingstogether.

And for the bios of allguests, you can find that and more at Tim.log slashcombo.

Andnow, without furtherado, please enjoy and thank you forlistening.

Firstup,povlsatsulin, world-renowned strengthcoach, founder and CEO of StrongFirst, and the trainer who brought the Russian kettlebell to thewest, kickstarting the kettlebellrevolution.

You can learn more aboutpovls' school of strength atstrongfirst.com.

I used to be a BT traininginstructor, physical traininginstructor,force-pets-nas, the service-specialforces, and my education is in sportsscience.

And I did over the years train a number of high-end units in thewest.

I've been a subject matter to the US Marinefloor, to the US SecretService, to US Navy SEALs andothers.

My methods are used officially by some very high-end military and counter-terrorist units in two countries that are made allies of the UnitedStates.

So what I do is I take methods that perform very well in very ruggedenvironments, and I take this methods and I apply to otherenvironments.

So if somebodydecides, I just want to change mylife, I want to getstronger, I want to have a better game oftennis, I want to succeed in a givensports, I take these same methods that have been tested by operators atwar, and I bring these people the samemethods.

If you look at a typicalperson, and how do we get themstronger?

Let's say that you have a four-cylinderengine, what the person would do is they would make that six-cylinderengine.

But before you're firing intwo, now you're firing inthree.

But if instead what you do is you learn to fire in thefour.

So there are ways of training a nervous system to engage your capacity so much morefully.

And if you look at high-level performers at light body weight in somefields, let's say a very high-level martialartist, somebody very skinny breaking a stack ofboards, or very skinny guy like Lamarck and death of taking five times his bodyweight.

So this is so much about the concentration of mentalforce.

And for yourlisteners, I could give a very simple example how you can do that on yourgym.

Let's say that you performed try it with the simplest exercisepossible, try it with a dumbbell curl or a barbellcurl, because I know your sissy's outthere, you'll dothat.

And so let's say that you're going through yourcurls, and things are suddenly started to gettougher.

So when they suddenly start to gettougher, I want you to just crush the dumbbell or the barbell or thekettlebell, whatever it is that should curlit, just white metalpressure.

And what you will see is you're going to definitely going to be able to get several more repetitionsout.

I'm going to give you two more techniques inaddition.

Once you have practicedthat, then on the nextset, in addition to crushing the bar and the wayup, also contract your glutes as tight aspossible.

Like somebody's going to kick you in thebutt,very, verytight, so you're just like crutch-wholenut.

And at the sametime, tighten your abs as if somebody's going to kickyou,which, youknow, somebodymight.

So if you dothat, if you do these threethings, if you contract yourglutes, contract yourabs, contract yourgrip, everything that youdo, absolutely everything is going to be greatlyamplified.

And this is just small example of the skills of strength that I doteach.

They call me the kettlebellguy, they call me the father of thekettlebell, which I appreciate verymuch.

I did introduce together my businesspartner.

I did introduce the kettlebell to thewest.

And rightnow, the kettlebell has becomemainstream.

But what I'm really all about is above theprinciples, the underlining principles of strengthstrength, the underlining principles of powergeneration.

And it doesn't really matter what my dalityis, whether you use thekettlebell, thebarbell, your bodyweight, whether your arm rest andfighting, lifting arocks, it really doesn'tmatter.

So I am not about thekettlebell, I am about the principles and make itstrong.

What I have done is I have reverse engineered the way the strongest people movenaturally.

And I have brought it to thepeople.

I've shown to people how to move in this matter and how to shave off years and if not decades of training to progress to mychildhood.

You once mentioned to me in a casualconversation, I called you for some type of trainingadvisor, might have been viaemail.

And, correct me fromwrongly,said, when indoubt, train your grip in yourcore?

Is thatcorrect? Could you elaborate onthat, because I think it's not advice that many people havereceived?

There is such athing, it's called theirradiation.

So thephenomena,irradiation, what it really means is if you can track themuscle, the tension from that muscle is going to spill over to the neighborhoodmuscles.

So for yourlisteners, I'd like to trythis.

Make afist, probably going to feel tension in yourforearm.

Now make a tightfist. You're going to feel tension in your bicepstriceps.

Now make a white knucklefist.

You're going to find that tension is going to spread into yourshoulder, yourlats, yourback, and soon.

Okayfolks, you may relaxnow.

The same thinghappens, so certain areas of the body have this great overflow oftension.

So the gripping muscles are amongstthem.

Why? In part because they have such a great representation in your nervoussystem, in yourbrain.

And as for the abs and us for theglutes, that has a lot to do with creating your intrepid animalpressure.

So what does this meanexactly?

Visualize your muscles asspeakers.

And visualize your brain as the gadget that plays themusic.

Whatever itis, thisdays,iPad,iPhone,whatever.

And the record player doesn'tmatter.

And the amount of your pressure in yourabdomen, they drop down on thepressure, that's theamplifier, that's the volumecontrol.

So by increasing the pressure in yourabdomen, it's like you're training up thevolume.

And viceversa. So when you're trying tostretch, we're increasing yourflexibility.

If you see somebody there trying to do a split and we'resaying, the person is creating high intrepid animal pressure and that just increases the tension of themuscle.

Instead of what you need todo, you need to complete the release and let go and bring itdown.

So forstrengths, we'll do theopposite.

We have special techniques where you increase that pressure and maximize yourpower.

Those are just a couple of the different ways we can increase thestrength.

And that's what you've seen in mycertification.

FYI, I am no longer with thatorganization.

So my company today is called StrongFirst.

And as ofdesertification, that's that same curriculum that she have learned aboutthem.

Just to touch on twopoints, then we're going to jump into more training and ask about how you'd rank certain aspects of what people would traditionallyconsider, perhapsfitness.

What would you recommend is good methods for developing the grip and core or abdomen for those peoplelistening.

If they wanted to take a simple protocol and perhaps experiment for the next fewweeks, is there any basic approach that you might suggest for those twothings?

It can be done in conjunction with full body training regimen thatuses, let'ssay,kettlebells,climbing, ropes and soon.

But if it isnot, then what I recommend that you do is you get somegrippers.

So the company is called ironmind.com and they carry handgrippers.

One thing you need to understand is these are now those little sissy plastic grippers you get at astore.

These are heavy dutygrippers.

They go up to 365pounds.

There's a couple of people in the world have donethat.

They also do have resources on how to dothat.

But even without reading how I can tell you how totrain.

So get yourself a couple ofgrippers, use theircharge, their recommendations that iron mindoffers.

Start training them in the manner that I refer to as grease togroove.

Grease to groove is a highly simplified training methodology that's been derived from Soviet weightliftingmethodology.

So in anutshell, this is what youdo.

So throughout theday, everyday, whenever you feel fullyrecovered, so you have to have at least 15 minutes of rest betweensets, maybe30, maybe evenmore.

In case you're going to do sets and you're only going to do about half the repetitions that you're capableof.

So forexample, you picked up a particulargripper, you start squeezingit.

You probably could do it 10times, but you only do five when you put itdown.

Let's say you later on pick up a gripper that's a littleheavier.

Maybe you could do three reps ofit, but you do allone.

And in this particularmanner, you accumulate reps and you keep going and going andgoing.

And everybody tellsyou, it doesn't possible to get stronger this particularmanner.

Yet science and experience shows that this makes youstrong.

This makes you strongestfast.

This makes youstrong. The safemanner.

You can apply this particularmethodology.

Again, I call it griest to groove to any strength exercise or any strength enduranceexercise.

Just to give an example of itseffectiveness, myfather-in-law, former Marine at the age of64, started following thisroutine.

He was able to do about 10 blocks at thatpoint.

In severalmonths, he was up to 20 when hetested.

And he could not do that many as a youngjarhead.

So you got a box outthere.

You can definitely get thisdone.

So this is how you guys are going to train your grip with thesegrippers.

Carry through with you throughout theday.

You're not going to getsweaty.

Just whenever you feel likeit, just take an albumsqueeze.

As for training yourabdomen, there are many different methods of training theabdomen, but you have to abide by the followingrules.

You have to keep the repetitions to five and under no more than fivereps.

Anything more than five reps isbodybuilding.

And you need to make a focus andtension, make a focus and contraction as opposed to on reps andfatigue.

Just to give an example of theplank.

The plank is a kind of a fashionable exercise in the core trainingcircles.

And by theway, we don't use the wordcore.

That's thefirst. Why don't we use the wordcore?

Because people who use the wordcore, they do things with all like we don't like itall.

So we just say we just say it'ssection.

So theplank. Sotraditionally, they would put you in the plank and you're supposed to stay in the plank for a couple ofminutes.

And what's happening is you see this poor person who cannot have been assumed the proper posture to startwith.

And then espatique setsin, othermuscles, wrong muscles start kickingin, the back startsarching, the butt starts shootingup.

And what you're doing is what Greg Cook calls putting fitness on top ofdysfunction.

And what we do instead is if we do aplank, we call the hardest don'tplank, we would do a plank for no longer than 10seconds.

And when you do theplank, you try to contract everything absolutelyeverything.

When I showed thateverything, I don't know theshins, yourforearms, yourneck,everything, but your neck andface, everything below yourneck, you're going tocontract.

It's not for folks with high bloodpressure, heartcondition.

And that's true for pretty much any type oftraining.

But for everybody else is an extremely powerfultool.

So you get down in aplank, you makefists,okay?

You contract yourabs, you contract yourglutes, you contract your entirebody, you pretend that somebody's walking in a walk by and kick you in theribs, which again somebodymight, atleast, at mycourse.

And Andy Bolton and other top power lifters do likeTodd, thistechnique, they swear by this because this is the abdominal training forstrength.

This is not just some nonsense that you do cranking outdirects.

So to sum up your abdominaltraining, find whatever abdominal exercises that youlike.

It can be theplank, it can be some kind of asetup, it can be something from your book for ourbody, it can be something from mybook, the heart stillabs, it can be somethingelse.

That's notimportant. As long as it's a good exercise that's been recognized that it doeswork.

And three times a week do three to five sets of three to fivereps.

Okay, folks just rememberthis, three to five sets of three to fivereps, focus incontraption, don't focus onfatigue, don't focus on thereps.

And I promise if you do these two things for severalmonths, you work your grip in thismatter, you work your abs in thismanner, everything that you do today is going to bestronger.

I don't care what itis. It's a biggerdeadlift, it's a tennisserve, it makes thedifference.

You're going to bestronger.

And in the case of themidsection, and we're working with theplank, if people decided they were going to keep it simple just so they can remember it and do three sets of three reps three times aweek.

Let's just sayMonday,Monday,Wednesday.

Well, the plank gloves do just three sets of 10seconds.

Gotit.Okay. So 10seconds, three times aweek.

Yes. And try to contract everything below yourneck.

You have to bestrong. You need to keep your reps at five andunder.

At fivereps, your under is what you're really workingon.

They'll get out of my depth and into yours prettyquickly.

But the sort of neural pathways and the recruitment of motor neurons and sort of firing capabilities and soon.

Or pretty much you're going to have a high level of neuraladaptations.

You're also going to build some muscle aswell.

So you're going to build the high threshold motor units aswell.

But it's not a bodybuildingprotocol.

You'll build somemuscle, but it's not really theend, the end goalitself.

You were trying toalso, you're trying to avoid thefatigue, you're trying to avoid theburn.

Because when I restart experiencing theburn, that's from something called the hydrogen ions that at least see a lot of problems foryou.

So one of the problems is it interferes with the command that your brain is sent to the muscle tocontract.

And another problem that it creates these hydrogenions, literally aredestructive.

So if you leave them around the muscle for toolong, they really start destroying yourmuscle.

So just keep those repsunder.

Five, three tofive. Don't worry about getting bulky or not going to getbulky.

It's not going tohappen.

And approach your training as apractice.

So this is another very important point toyou.

I think this is a super importantpoint.

No, I'm glad you're bringing thisup.

I hate the wordworkouts.

The word workout does not exist in the Russianlanguage.

We talk about a training session or we talk about alesson.

We never talk about aworkout.

Just think of what does the word workingout?

What are youenvisioning?

Sweating and sweating andgrunting.

And let's see how much I can punish myself and drainmyself.

So the goal is not to getstronger.

The goal is just to get get wornout.

And there are simpler ways of doingthat.

Try to up themountain.Okay.

Sono, the idea here ispractice.

Strength is a skill and a such a bigpractice.

And if you approach it in thismatter, not only you're going to get stronger so muchfaster, but you can truly enjoy your trainingprocess.

Training should be something that should beenjoyed.

So when people think offitness, particularlynon-athletes, I think that there tends to be a very scatter shotapproach.

And there's a paradox of choice challenge that they have where they're fed a lot of recommendations from many differentpeople.

And they havestrength, not necessarily musclegame, but just gettingstronger.

They havehypertrophy.

So increasing their muscular size for lack of a betterdescription,endurance,flexibility.

How would you rank these in order of priority andwhy?

Tim, as long as the person has the required mobility andsymmetry, the priority is always inhealth.

The priority is alwaysstrength.

Strength has to befirst.

So the first step that you do is you assess yourmobility.

You find specials who can dothat.

FMS would be a recommendation ofmine.

The very groupsFMS. Functional movementscreen.

Functional movement screen is going to find out how mobile you are and also how symmetrically youare.

So as long as that is delgedin, that is inplace, you have to getstrong.

And strength is the mother quality of all physicalqualities.

And that's not a statement byme.

That's a statement by Pissoma to the father offertilization, one of the greatest sports scientistsever.

And greater strengths increases your performance in absoluteeverything.

So you cansee, ofcourse,okay, ofcourse,yeah, being stronger is going to helpyou.

And let's say punching somebody harder or liftingsomething.

But how is that going to help me if I am a sadtriathlete?

How is that going to help me if I am a nurse on theroad?

It is going to help me in a several differentways.

One is the perceived level of exertion is going to godown.

Several years ago in ourregion, it was a very interesting study where they put elite enduranceathletes, some werebicyclists, some were runners on the pure strengthregimen.

That's four sets of four reps of heavysquats.

It's about as pure strength as itgets.

And in the end of thisstudy, notsurprisingly, all these guys werestronger.

They could jump higher and soon, but they were not impressed withthat.

They didn't matter tothem.

What did impress them is a ranfaster.

Their race times went down because strength just makes enables everythingelse.

If you're tryingto, let'ssay, loseweight, being stronger is going to help you do that because you're going to have a biggerfurnace.

You're going to train yourself much harder and the exercises that are fat lossexercises.

So it really doesn't matter what it is that you're trying toachieve.

Strength is the number one attributes you need toaddress.

And that's why my company's called StrongFirst.

One of the things that I love aboutyou,Pobbles, is that you say what you mean and mean what yousay.

There's a degree of clarity that Ienvy.

I might include it forpeople, but when we did our soundcheck, I asked you to give me an answer so we could test the audio what you had forbreakfast.

And what was youranswer?

Coffee. That wasit. That was the soundcheck.

I love thesimplicity. Now speaking of simplicity and also undoing the confusion that a lot of people sufferfrom, what are the most counterproductive myths or misconceptions about strength training that come tomind?

Well, the number one to my guess is the idea that you have to go to failure every time youtrain.

I can tell you one thing that the Soviet weightlifters I have done a very thorough analysis of the Soviet weightlifting methodology through the 60s through the80s, the glorydays.

And I found that they typically did one third to two-third of maximal repetitions perset.

So what does itmean? You've let's say that you're using a weight that's your 10 repmax.

10 is all you could do if you grip yourself veryhard.

They would do three to sixconsistent.

Now you'd probably askyourself,okay, I'm not a weightlifter and what does this so get stuck from the 80s have to do withtoday?

Well, twothings. First ofall, even though a person who is not a lifting athlete is not going to train exactly as a weightlifter or a powerlifter, nevertheless the methodology has to be derived from the sport because these are specialist strengthsports.

So they just have to be adapted to yourneeds.

Second ofall, this particular Soviet methodology is still superior to thisday.

This is veryinteresting, but you're comparing about all this new world records set in the sport of weightlifting.

Well, if you compare the world records of today to the world records of the80s, you will see that in most cases the records today are inferior to records in the80s.

How can thatbe? They accuse people of doing drugs and they changed weight classes twice since the80s.

Ofcourse, it's sowonderful.

I'm so happy that today nobody does drugsanymore.

It's justtrue. If you look at the lifts performed by Soviet lifter Yudyk Varbanyan in 1980 at the MoscowOlympics, this lifts have never beenexceeded.

These lifts have never beenapproached.

So this particular methodology does work extremelywell.

It's still the best methodologyperiod.

Lateron, the Soviet powerlifting team adapted this methodology for powerlifting with tremendoussuccess, thedominate.

The same particular methodology has been adapted to bodyweighttraining, kettlebellpresses, and so on and soforth.

It's the same thing that can be applied for everybody because it's just principle-basedtraining.

The major misconception is that you have to go tofailure.

If you just overcome that and if you make it a habit to do one-third to do thirded dropadditions, they're possible and do more setsinstead, you're going to make much greaterprogress.

You're going to do much safer and folks you can enjoy thetraining.

How does the approach shift if your focus is maximalhypertrophy?

If you're after maximalhypertrophy, it'sMolly.

They figured out in the Soviet union that there's a direct correlation between volume andhypertrophy.

You just pretty much have to do moresets.

You're going to have to do more sets in like 60 to 70 percent of your maxrange.

A whole bunch of sets of five andsix, just many ofthem.

Your rest periods might be compressed a littlemore, but that'sit.

If you dothat, do this a couple of times aweek.

Many sets of five orsix, don't you going to worry about howmany?

Just keepgoing. Don't kill yourself and enjoyyourself.

Eatmore. You're going to getbigger.

It'sunavoidable. It's just a simplefact.

Would you considerthe, and please disagree if this is not thecase, but if you had to pick one movement forstrength,longevity, would the deadlift be thatmovement?

Or is it not possible to choose onemovement?

How do you try to answer thatquestion?

If you were to choose onemovement,yes, I would choose the deadlift or I would choose the kettlebellswing.

Obviously the kettlebell swing is not something you can compete in and something you'renot.

It's not going to give you the samesatisfaction, lifting heavyweight, but those are the two main full bodyexercises.

The full body expressions of power that will go such a long way for you forlongevity,strength, just the quality oflife.

What are the biggest mistakes that people make with thedeadlift?

Whether that's technically or inprogramming, what are the biggestmistakes?

Well,Tim, I think the very big mistake is because theythink,okay, I have picked up things from thefloor.

This looks sosimple. It's not an Olympiclift.

Therefore, it's verysimple.

So I'll just start piling on place and starttraining.

The deadlift is a very technicallift.

Even if you're just a recreationallifter, you owe it to yourself to learn to deadliftcorrectly.

That's as simple asthat.

So I say that's a primary mistake and that mistake goes for every exercise that people do outthere.

Now I would highly recommend people check out your book withMr.

Bolton. DeadliftDynamite.

Yeah, reallyvery, verydense.

Shifting gears just a littlebit, dense in the best waypossible.

Nofluff. I'd love to shift gears and just ask you a few questions about your philosophies and yourthinking, not so much the highly specific trainingquestions.

But when you thinkof, forinstance, the wordsuccessful, who's the first person who comes to mind foryou?

Tim, I am fortunate enough to know many successfulpeople.

I think that what separates from the rest is the CEO ofSt.

Johnfirst, EricFrohart, he put it verywell.

He says balance withpriorities.

Balance withpriorities.

SoEric,yourself, and many others are fortunate to know they exemplify success forme.

What are the habits that you've observed that allow people to have balance withpriorities?

What are the things they do that other people don'tdo?

Or maybe the things they don't do that other peopledo?

Well, I think one iscalm.

These people are calm because people arehyper.

They get so trapped in their reactivemodes.

They get to trapped in the everyday minutia of their work and theirexistence.

So they just do not pause and they do notthink.

Again, Eric has a great quotefrom, have you notaerosiedle?

Which says calm iscontagious.

Calm iscontagious. So when the person iscalm, that he or she has the time tomeditate,reflect, sub the priorities and sub thebalance.

That's certainly the holds true from what I'veseen.

And theopposite, ofcourse, istrue.

Histeria is just chasing thetail.

Absolutely. Chickenlittle.

This guy'sfalling.Yes, everything isurgent.

Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to theshow.

This episode is brought to you byMomentus.

Momentus offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum ofcategories, including sportsperformance,sleep, cognitivehealth, hormonesupport, andmore.

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Andnow, ChristopherSummer, a former US national team gymnastics coach and the founder of the Gymnastic Body Training System known for building devotees into some of the strongest most powerful athletes in theworld.

You can find Christopher on Instagram at ChristopherSOMMER1.

Coach, welcome to theshow.

Thanks,Tim. I am excited to finally have you on theshow.

We've had so many conversations in the last month or two and I've been so impressed with the subtlety and nuance of the training that youdo.

So I've been very eager to have you on the show to explore all things gymnastics and gymnastics strength trainingrelated.

So thanks for making thetime.

We'll come forward toit.

And I thought we could we could start with just somedefinitions.

So what would you or how would you define gymnastics strength trainingGST?

In anutshell, Gymnastic Strength Training I define as high level body weight strengthtraining.

So none of the training that we do for world class performance with the acrobatics or technical gymnastics just purely the strength joint prep and mobilitycomponents.

And one example of what not to do perhaps or how gymnastics strength training might differ from the aesthetics that some people I'm not going to say compromise with but shoes we were talking about doing a pike handstand press or holding that position and the example feel free to correct my recollection but was of how a lot of folks kick their hips way out to counterbalance instead of doing what what would the Gymnastic Strength Training version of that looklike?

Goodexample. So what we see and this is kind of getting into some handstands some skill training but handstand done correctly is a reflection of physical preparation that athlete either has or does nothave.

So if they lack strength if they lack mobility then of course their technical handstand is going to lackrefinement.

So now in terms of that pike handstand if they lack middle trap if they lack lower trap strength then they're going to try to counterbalance by really arching the chestout, taking the butt way back behindthem.

Goodness not even sure how to describe it like a pike in an arch at the sametime.

Start in trap coach just for people who I realize I should have probably defined some termsmyself.

So pike for people who are not familiar with this the easiest way to visualize it if you don't have any background with that is imagine you're sitting on the floor it's kind of like PE class legs straight and together bending at the waist towards your toes is that forward bending forward towards your toes and so if you were to imagine you're sitting down with your legs out in front of you hypothetically at a 90 degree angle and you put your arms up over your head let's just flip you upside down so you're in a handstand position that's effectively what we're talkingabout.

Exactly we're talking about to hold that because center of mass is way on front of the body then in order to hold that the traps are what's responsible to keeping the back and the shoulders straight so if you're not strong enough and is it some people say well it's just skill training well everything builds upon everything else so got Olympics coming up people are going to be pumped they're going to see our Olympic team they're going to see the other monsters around the world competing on rings and they're I want to do that and then they're going to jump right up we've got friends who are former seal team six and the first thing that it is jump up and of course they failed utterly and then they come see us because it's like anything you know you don't jump right into calculus you learn to cow and we learned a dish and we learned subtraction yada yada yada well enough time enough layers enough progression then we get to advance math so advance ring strength same deal I remember we were talking not too long ago about the importance of pacing when you're dealing with connective tissue tendons and ligaments which is something I'm not particularly well known for in terms of patience and pay say but I've noticed that but many of the guys who say do outdoor bar workouts some of which are very impressive physical specimens will jump up on the rings and they'll be doing I'm not sure what they would even call them they're kind of like what would be looked at as like a typewriter on the pull up bar when you move back and forth from one arm to the other side to side pull up and they're like I was feeling fine coach and then suddenly my you know I tore my bicep right to my pack and it was fine until it wasn't what are some if you look at the muscles or types of strength that most non gymnasts will not have even if they consider themselves reasonably athletic what would be on that list and we already mentioned one which is say mid and lower traps and of course I would like to think I came to the table with kind of hat and hand because I recognize how hard a lot of this is but the more I practice it the more I'm astounded how unprepared my body is for these movements and me as someone who has done a lot of pulling from the floor for instance who has a decent deadlift I would like to think I was just astonished at how weak my mid back was it was just it blew my mind it was completely flabbergassing what other muscles or movements do you find normals just cannot perform even if they view themselves as athletic for the lifters though on that always jumps out at us is their lack of shoulder extension so if I pick my if I'm standing upright my lift my hands forward that's flexion and I can go all the way up to my arms are overhead by picking my hands up behind me that would be shoulder extension right so just to paint another picture for folks like if you stand up and then interlaced your fingers behind your tailbone with your arms straight and then try to lift them up towards this you keeping your back straight so the shoulder extension and what we find as you know and a lot of what we'll get sometimes from people as well I don't want to be in the circus I don't want to be in that for bad I'm at an incidence skill training I want I want strength and what they don't understand is if you want to achieve world class levels of performance technically that comes first from having a solid foundation the physical preparation which means correct range of motion good mobility good connective tissue so a shoulder extension become so for example a lot of people fail they can't do muscle ups because they can't do shoulder extension they think in their head that a muscle up is a chin up a little bit of transition that they don't understand and then a dip what really happens as we do a pull up we get our hands to our chin and then the elbows pull back behind the torso behind them and there's their shoulder extension if they can't do shoulder extension now they're stuck and they failed spend all this time working technique and doing rap and doing rap and what they're doing is they're treating the symptom not actually the problem so just a some background for folks the way that we connected was I at 38 finally decided enough is enough I've been fantasizing about trying to learn gymnastics in a structured way for 20 plus years much like my postponing of getting a dog for 20 years it's just like why did it take me so long to do this and I was in Venice I'm going to give these folks a shout out there's a cross your gym there named parody so crossfit and love the folks who run the gym and I would go to their train because they'd let me use chalk and do all the things that a lot of gyms will not allow me to do and I met a gent who was doing a body weight workout is the only person doing a body weight only workout and he suggested that I follow gymnastics bodies on Instagram so I started following your company on Instagram and saw older let's just call it middle aged men sort of my demo as it stands right now who had started from scratch doing impressive things and I had used age as my crutch and excuse for not pulling the trigger in the last few years so I reached out to Rob Wolf who was kind enough to introduce us and then we've collaborated in this experiment that we're currently doing which is a roughly 90 days with a handful of goals that we'll get to you but I want people to understand how we connected so I'm in the middle of training right now I have to say I feel better than I've felt with the exception of a little bit of elbow nonsense that is not from this specifically it's a recurring thing feel better than I have in years well that's good there just from this little bit already we just from the little bit that we've done and the follow a question of that is when people are training for handstands at home so self-taught what are the biggest mistakes that they make well they won't like the answer this is a little bit a national team coach attitude coming out people tend to want what they want when they want and that's fine if I'm looking for mediocre to average results if I'm looking to really do best effort I've got a backshed up and I've got to take care of my business and for most of the adults it's going to be they have severe compromises in their mobility their shoulders don't work well their hips don't work their knees don't work their elbows are shot their forearms are tight from all the despotrol their calves are like piano wire from sitting all the time we want you to talk about hip flexor their scabs don't move their scapula have no motion they can't protract they can't retract their spine is locked in just a flat or a kai foites for their hunched over their lower back is continually arched and they're just going to frozen in this position and then they want to try to move their body now the common one that we get from people as well these are extreme ranges of motion these are artificial ranges of motion and actually these are your natural range of motion problem is they quit using it and so just after feet we're not doing anything special we're just going to have to recreate that natural range of motion first we've been doing gosh I don't know now maybe since 2006 working with the adults and the thing that just we keep having my nose rubbed in it over and over and over again every time I think I have it down I find I need to take it further it's just the complete other lack of joint prep and mobility they come to the table with even your your own cases an excellent example we haven't done anything advanced yet we're doing all basic we're doing fundamental stuff and you're already feeling better than in years well I think it's a lot of it has to do with two things if I'm trying to self diagnose the first is simply identifying musculature and motor patterns that I simply had not developed properly previously even if I had a passing familiarity like well let me frame this in the form of a question so can you define what the hollow position is why it's important and how how do most normals do when they do say hollow body rock maybe you can explain that to most people and when they think of abs they think lower ab they think upper abs they're not going to think about obliques at all and they're not going to think transverse abdominis at all so lower abs are easy upper abs easy obliques okay they understand the sideways they don't understand how obliques wrap around into the lats into the lower back okay that's fine but transverse abdominis they're like excuse me was that English they don't have a clue and that's what supports the body when it's in a straight body position so for example ab rollers were we don't use them in our program but this is an example ab rollers were getting a bad knock that if you do an ab roller you're going to hurt your lower back well yes and no you'll hurt your back if you're doing it wrong if you're arched in your lower back so for definitions if my lower back is arched I'm an anterior pelvic tilt if I'm the opposite movement and I'm kind of my tailbone tucked under and my lower back is flat that's posterior pelvic tilt I'll move my body's horizontal then my back is supported when I'm posture your pelvic tilt if I'm arched it's unsupported by the muskos turn I'm hanging by the disc which is true for a ton of exercises that we do if I feel it my lower back almost universally when I send you videos the feedback is more ppt post-bumped posterior pelvic tilt and it should just be a mantra yeah and for people who need a way to visualize this because I realize a lot of this vocab is new and coach feel free to interrupt at any point but an easy way to think about and remember anterior pelvic tilt is imagine that your waist is the top of a wine glass if you have anterior pelvic tilt to the front you're going to be pouring wine out the front of that glass basically out of your belly button if you have posterior pelvic tilt you're talking that tailbone you're going to be pouring wine basically down your sacrum you know down the back of your body it's just an easy way for me to to remember that is clever I got to say 40 years of national team and I've never heard it described that way it may it may be our go-to definition from now you know I can't do the gymnastics I'll have to stick with refining my definitions although I am making progress with the fundamentals and yes you are I'd like to talk about the assessment that we did so I flew out to a great gym awaken gymnastics in Colorado and we met up that's our gb master feel we only have one in the world awakened in Denver is our number one gb affiliate they're the best at what they do yeah it's a fantastic gym and we did quite a few hours of various assessments if somebody wanted to try to self assess or videotape themselves to have say someone qualified in gymnastics assess them if you were to do an 80 20 analysis like which movements or exercises give you the most data most thank you the book lots of pull it to see no so what we went over with you we checked hanging leg lift hanging leg lift automatically is going to tell me um dangling range of motion is that right that's like on a stall bar you don't want to be free swinging well could be you know most of them you know whatever they can do it'll to my eye as soon as I see it or our staff side they're they're going to know right away whether or not that person has adequate it's going to tell us your core strength then it's going to tell me hamstring flexibility that'll do that in one bridge bridge is a huge one for adults that's been one of our we have a thoracic bridge core stretch series that's been one of our best selling products that's what I'm doing this evening yeah yeah notice notice guys that teams are real happy right now that that'll change in just a few yeah what characterizes this is a really important question what characterizes a good bridge and for people who thinking of bridge I mean it's imagine you're laying on your back you put your palms down by your sort of ears let's say feet flat on the ground and then you go up into an arch now I was extremely surprised and found it quite hilarious how bad my bridge was I mean terrible in the assessment but your standards yes by what I see on a normal basis yours was medium medium it was like a D plus it was like on the verge of passing but I realized despite all of my many years of wrestling where we did tons of bridges almost all of my bridging comes from bending at the low back right so my lumbar which is a huge issue yeah so what is a good bridge little background so the lumbar and the lower back is not designed to have a ton of movement in it a big arch your thoracic spine your upper in your middle back they're designed to have a lot of movement they're designed to rotate your lower back is not but when most people do their bridge work they're so compromised now even back up a little bit more they're they're so compromised and range of motion their upper body because they've been hitting the weights hard they've been doing just a lot of high intensity training now to preface that there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong with that at all if you weren't one of God's gifts when you were born you've got to do something to make up the deficit the problem is when they do all that weight training they're not doing it in balance and maintaining their mobility if they had they wouldn't have the issues that they ran into so if all you do is string string string string string string then you can always tell someone who is there they're the curl king and they're the bench press king they come in and they're hunched over and their elbows don't straighten their arms don't go behind them and on they like you know my shoulders are killing me most of the time what we found is yeah their shoulders are completely after by agree but their biceps are crazy tight also and that bicep runs up through the front of the shoulder and it's manifesting itself as a shoulder issue so kind of all these come together long story short to cause them a huge problem being able to get into a proper bridge which should be all upper body no lower back almost at all but people doing the attack opposite they hurt their lower back and say man these these bridges are dangerous now the bridges aren't dangerous doing them half-assed and wrong without vetting your source of information is dangerous I found it incredibly therapeutic as someone who's had a basically a frozen thoracic for god knows how long and ten years sure we were worried about that I remember we're like wonder what we'll work through this Tim has the upper body mobility of a Lego figure what are we going to do so but just the progression of doing and of course people should look for visual references and I'll point them to a bunch of and they're on all our courses and they'll point them to a bunch of resources in the show notes but can you walk through the checkboxes because I know we've done this even recently the concept I don't know why this didn't even occur to me but of helping to take the lower back out of the equation by elevating the feet elevating the feet yep and elevating them as high as necessary some people are so tight that they basically start in a handstand and it is what it is right the main thing that we try to always hammer with students is they're always in a hurry I've got to get it right now even our conversation remember way back when started that way I was like dude if you can handle it we need we need to change gears here we need to go slow now in order to go fast later well you said if you want to be a stud later you have to be a putt now I think we're your words yeah that that sounds like a smartass remark that's a that's a good one I wrote that down I've corrupted you all your great podcasts and I've corrupted you so what are the other checkboxes so let's just say they get the feel and they're like okay feet elevated to the point where they're not feeling dress on the lower back now it'll depend on pressing strength also if they're very weak in the shoulders then they're gonna have start from the hands hand and work their way down but we'll assume they've got feet elevated hip high or higher if necessary doesn't matter a bit then from there we're gonna work on most people are gonna be up they're gonna have bent elbows so we're gonna work on straightening the arms no matter how close they are they could be wide the wide yeah because gosh I had one special forces guy that came to me years ago tough tough guy first name mark and he had gained 80 pounds of muscle 80 pounds of muscle oh yeah it was just like holy moly and he was he just abiced but he had completely effed himself up because all he did was gain strength without mobility and athletically unless my sport is just purely lifting unless I'm a power lifter unless I'm an Olympic lifter then maximal strength is not my sole criteria for being successful in fact usually the strongest athletes in the weight room are not the best athletes on the field to play and in fact I don't know a single exception there may be one there somewhere that someone can share with us and let me know but I've been around the world I won't say as many people as you know but in 40 years of world-class gymnastics I've I've met a ton of people I've never seen an exception he couldn't even hang on a bar anymore with his arms straight without hitting his head wow you think your shoulders are tight pull him out and he was like coach what what can you do for me for once I was at a loss for words which is rare for me I think your screw addition it's what did you do with him in the bridge was he just stuck we he couldn't even that's this was hanging on a bar we couldn't even get in a bridge that it was impossible what we would do with someone like that in mark so you're you're more so guys just to give the audience some some feedback I went into Tim's assessment expecting medium medium and Tim was much more mobile much more athletic much more well prepared than I had anticipated so I had spent a lot of time putting a custom program together for Tim that because he did so well in his assessment I had to throw the whole damn thing away because basically you he was too advanced for what we had assumed he was coming to the table with someone who is crazy compromised we're gonna have to sneak up on it we're gonna have to get in there we're gonna have to first do pec minor we gotta lose not pec minor we gotta get in there we gotta work on the bicep tendon we gotta get the bicep tendon going we gotta work on forearms get forearms loose we've gotta break the scab so there's some motion there we have to do all of that it's not high intensity work but it's gotta be done and as you heard Tim say the body thrives on it it's like a tonic for the body the body feels so much better because it's what the body's supposed to do a lot of people don't care for it because it's not the high intensity sexy work but it's that fundamental work that makes the high intensity sexy work possible later not only possible that's safer that's a good point because we had I think one of the questions that people asked Tim asked for questions on Twitter you know what would you like me to ask coach summer and some of the people came back with you know I know someone who's a gymnast and they're just beat the shit and my answer to that is simple they weren't my athlete they weren't my athlete uh we don't train through pain as a national team coach for a long time physical preparation was always our number one priority we built the physical structure first because if you think about it it's kind of silly and we see this a lot with people who are getting into weightlifting their crossfitters they're Olympic lifting and they're enthusiastic they're excited and they want to get that weight on the bar they're trying to build technique with a flawed range of motion which of course gives them effed up technique and it doesn't work and then they get hurt or you hear someone all I changed my shoe and I blew my knee seriously your knee is that tight that because you're heel up your new shoe is a fraction of an inch higher or a slightly different angle that your knee blew in our training program we need to call everything you need an optimal surplus you need an optimal surplus range of mobility range of motion you need an optimal surplus of strength you need an optimal surplus of stability you need what you need to perform and a little extra for when things goes out not if things goes out when things go south and if you're just riding the edge of what you're capable of and they hope oh nothing will go wrong I hope nothing will go wrong oh it is gonna go wrong that's absolutely gonna go rock and so you prepare the body for that ahead of time so when it does go wrong it's like ah that didn't hurt I didn't get nothing's injured moving on next turn well one of the questions you've asked me multiple times when we've been going over different workouts and I would mention for instance I felt it in my bicep like I felt an extreme stretch in my bicep so for instance there's a movement that we've been calling a German hang a lot of people would call skin the cat perhaps very similar where you would hold on to say a bar or rings in this case and I'm gonna simplify this of course but talking up going back in between the rings and then hanging down with this little of a pike at the hips is possible who nice flat back nice straight hips exactly and sort of palms facing towards the ground and I was saying I really felt an incredible stretch in my biceps more than an shoulder and your question would be and this is applied to different body parts where did you feel it in the bicep this is getting back to the not training through pain comment and could you describe why you're like if it's in the middle I don't really care in same form like the abs like we can smash those all day long if it's at the attachment points though then I want to know about it or we're gonna down on now so why is that I'm gonna sneak around to it so most people when they do their training meaning well now I'm not I'm not slamming anyone by any means and the only reason that we know this and are able to share is because all these years I've been doing this I made the same effing mistakes that they make we just survived my stupidity and learned how to do better if the story is my life so I'm story of all our lives right I used to tell my athletes there there are stupid gymnasts and there are old gymnasts but there are no old stupid gymnasts because they're all dead but most people most beginners they want to base all their training off muscular fatigue which is a problem it's problematic because muscle tissue regenerates about every 90 days about every 90 days you know from end to end all all the cells everything's done in 90 days okay that's well that's fine but connective tissue takes 200 to 200 turn days so we have a huge gap so if I get in and I'm just sending I'm I'm not a big fan of beginners training to failure simply because their structure isn't mature enough yet to handle it safely and by mature I simply mean enough productive well structured hours under their belt so you know I have not particularly if it's in new ranges of motion right if they've just particularly if there's joints if it's a muscle belly for like you said if we're doing core we'll beat your core down all day long and I'm not worried about it a bit because it's this muscular fatigue but as soon as we get joints involved everything changes and it's actually really easy for people to verify say and think back over all the injuries they've had over their training career you know on their athletic career plan around with the kids in the backyard the vast majority of those injuries are all joint related almost always it's extremely rare for someone to have a muscle belly injury it just doesn't happen yet they're training especially in the beginning is all skewed just towards muscular development not connective tissue development and that's where they get into trouble so when they come to us the first thing we like is for them to spend is it going to beboring?

It is you know 210 days we're talking six seven months of dialed back guys dialed back and I think that it's important to emphasize too that dialing it back it means that you're not rushing but it doesn't mean you won't experience a lot of progress if that's fair to say I think that's crazy for us and you found that yourself yeah but what happens is some of them we run into this maybe you have also is we get some people who are addicted to the rush they're addicted to the adrenaline rush they're addicted to laying there in a pile of sweat you know they want to do the sweating jolves they want to crawl out of the gym and the problem with that is if you're a world class athlete you can't do that because I have to be back in the gym the next day and train again I can't afford to destroy myself or the special operations guys we work with we've got to be able to both they've got to be operational and increase their performance through their training but they have to go hand in hand and so it's only in beginners that we see they think somehow they can cheat time it can't be done I mean connective tissues gonna take 200 to 210 days there's no supplement you can't paint yourself blue you can't dance under the moon there's there's nothing you can do to speed that up it's gonna take what it takes and so we work as hard as we can within those parameters if there's joint pain we shut it down you like your elbow's a good example years ago pushing too hard now that that out if we tweak that elbow a little too much it flares up on you we'll repair it and it's gonna take time but it takes much longer to repair it than it does to avoid it in the first place yeah for sure and just a couple of of notes and then I'm gonna swing back to the diagnostics you know how people can assess but another conversation you know topic that came up I think I'm sure I brought it up at dinner once was the use of anabolic or any time growth agents and the point that you made which makes perfect sense is that would just increase the likelihood of having connected tissue problems and gymnasts because the muscular strength and growth would outpace the development of and the adaptation of the tissues completely with backfire here backfire where students make their their greatest gains and strength is to be able to do dynamic plyometric work and straight on ring strength those are your two biggest bangs for the buck and what we have learned the hard way that's different the main difference between working with young developmental athletes and full grown adults is the order in which we need to present the material as a young young athlete I I can do all physical components at once I can do plyometric I can do straight arm I can do their mobility bent arm it doesn't matter a bit I can do it all at one time but an adult who's now fragile from years of making a living sitting at a desk day in day out as they get a little older it gets you bigger levels of activities drop drop drop drop and they're compromised we have to build these things in a different order we have to first go rebuild mobility then we have to rebuild core we call them talking not just abs but obliques lower back most adults a lot of their lower back pain isn't lower back related it's still bleak related we have to go in we have to correct that then we can worry about regular strength once those things are done then we can get to the money maker which is their dynamic strength but with an adult especially a strong adult who's been athletically inactive so they've been doing strength training but not out moving doing sports being active you know outside of their conditioning or let's say for example all they're doing is squats and they're very linear in the path of their knee and there's no meniscus work there's no MCL work there's no ACL work then they go outside they play a little softball here at all the time yeah when I was playing softball I blew my knee gone around first base really how many kids blowing knee running around first base I mean the supplemental knee exercises that look wacky as hell when you first look at them that you've had me do and maybe we can show some of this to people in the show notes even in the span of three or four weeks I've seen a huge difference in knee stability improvement because I haven't ever performed these types of targeted movements before coming back to the diagnostics we talked about the bridge we talked about the hanging leg lifts are there any other movement shoulder extension will be huge so shoulder extension would be sitting on the floor sitting on the floor sitting in that pike that you described earlier hands touching behind them and then without letting the hands move trying to scoot the butt as far forward away from the hands as they could just that one movement right there is going to let us see in a show me their scapular health can they protract can they retract it's going to tell me how tight their pec minor is it's going to tell me how tight their bicep is and it's going to tell me how tight their breakie Alice down by the elbow is oh the breakie Alice yes your favorite my good friend the breakie Alice and also just the and this relates to kind of daily living a lot of people who have back pain myself included quite a few years ago if you're wondering if you have a tight pec minor you can just google pec minor figure out where it is but basically think right under the clavicle get a lacrosse ball you know go on the wall and try to roll out your pec minor with lacrosse ball and if you have back pain you don't always fix that back pain by just focusing on the location of that pain once good plant and you start addressing the pec minor and a lot of that stuff is alleviated and I want to throw one thing out there just for people who might be interested and that is I think part of the reason I seemed or was better prepared for the assessment than I would have been otherwise is that I started doing really just one thing one type of new exercise which was compression strength training in that pike position and did that for just maybe two times per week prior to doing the assessment as I was traveling and for people who are wondering what this is like if you really want to feel humbled as I did I was traveling I was in Columbia very close friend of mine almost got to professional rugby in New Zealand he's a beast I mean athletically a AR beast extremely strong extremely fast he's always going to be one of the top performers in the gym when he walks into a weight room and he saw me doing pike pulses and so I'll explain what this is to folks because he was going to laughing at me and he's like what kind of Jane Fonda bullshit are you doing here you know and I love that name and and I said all right I'd like all right big guy you're so you're such a tough guy let's see you do these so for those people who are interested so you're sitting in this this seated pike position we're talking about right so you're sitting on your ass on the floor the upper body perpendicular with the floor and your legs out straight in front you point your toes kind of tense your quads to push the back your knees into the floor then reach forward and stretch forward as far as you can get your fingers out on either side of your legs as far out as you can and then just try to lift your heels off the ground keeping your legs completely straight and just pulse it up and down like got a three to four inches maybe if you can manage that and just do try to do 30 of those and my buddy could not lift his heels off the ground and just fell over laughing he's like yeah okay those are hard but that compression it's if you think about the range of motion that most people train for core they're doing sit ups or maybe they're doing hanging leg lifts up to like an L sit so their legs are getting up to kind of parallel height well that last 90 degrees and especially the last like 45 degrees where you're bringing your thighs towards your chest is so hard I mean I had zero strength there prior to doing just a few weeks of this stuff it's just amazed me and for those people also we were talking about the transverse abdominis coach feel free to veto this but I think it's also nicknamed the corset muscle if you're trying to think of what they might look like is it wraps around the abdomens if you cough a lot or laugh a lot and get really really sore it's very frequently often engaging that transverse but let me ask you so you mentioned crossfit you mentioned a couple of things you know the drenched in sweat doing the sweat angels what are your feelings about kipping movements like kipping pull ups right had to open that can orbs well I was asking a mutual friend I won't name him and I said what should I talk to coach summer about he said if he pull ups he'll lose his shit so I said okay I got it we started I was the original gymnastics guy for crossfit way back in the early 2000s and ended up leaving I was there before there was the first crossfit affiliate when all there was was glass been working out of that little gym and Santa Cruz left just because to do GST right like anything that a dichotomy that I always find curious with people especially the crossfitters is they will be so on point with dissecting everything they do in terms of their Olympic lifting you know my pull is here my pull is there my knee was the quarter inch this way I mean they they're just methodical and they don't bring and I shouldn't say just crossfitters but then they other people they don't bring that same degree of attention to detail so their body weight work so one is supposed to be meticulous and one is somehow just supposed to be thrown together yet they expect the same quality results so if we look back in the day crossfit you know their lifting was nothing by national standards now they get people who are qualifying to go to nationals fast forward all those years in terms of their gym massacred strength training and they're not even remotely close they they don't match a national team they they don't match a state level athlete let alone a national level let alone an international level there they're not even in the same ballpark and part of the issue is because the keeping pull-ups were a huge big deal was a money maker you know now I'll be straight out of pissing people off but it was a money maker as advertising for a program they could bring someone in who's never been able to pull up have them hold their chin by the bar and let them fall hit the bottom of that movement bounce back to the top and persons eyes light up and they're like you know this is the best effing thing ever I've never done a pull-up of my entire life oh my god oh my god and they're and they're pumped what they didn't realize is that this person has compromise basic strength and compromise shoulder flexion they don't they don't have mobility in their shoulder so they're hitting the bottom of that movement with multiples of body weight but they weren't strong enough to do a regular pull-up so now we're going to drop them on connective tissue with multiples of body weight that's guy goes somewhere so it's going to force that shoulder to open further than it can handle and I'm going to bounce off that connective tissue like a trampoline back to the top of the bar and then to make to pour salt on the wound now I'm going to do a shitload of reps at the same time I'm just going to crank on it and they were getting people who were coming in you know cross it well there's no proof there's out of that you know bullshit bullshit you guys you guys can live in a dream world all you want it was blowing people up and now the good thing though into their credit you know it took time there was a denial no it hasn't on the do with it but now we're seeing a recommendation you know guys we got to start getting some basic strength built first some basic mobility and then at that time kipping pull-ups absolutely there's nothing wrong that they're healthy they're good to do on a healthy shoulder joint with a good foundation of basic strength but it began or doing kipping pull-ups really that's insanity that's just pouring gasoline on a fire so kipping then is the finishing edition it is not the starting element we started working with adults our first we do seminars all around the world you know we spend a lot of time doing hands-on and our very first one we did I don't know 2007 or so and we've got all these people we've got all these beasts here in their strong and tried to do my entry level plyometric work on some floorwork with them and the stronger the athlete the faster they went down knees lower back ankles on baby stuff baby stuff maybe we're not talking anything hard we're talking about standing in place and with knees straight being able to bounce down the floor using just your calves no way they're their tissues couldn't take it they hadn't done anything like it or we had 15 minutes on the schedule for example how bad mobility was we had 15 minutes on the schedule to stretch nothing hard nothing intricate nothing intense just an easy basic stretch get a moose enough for the day that stretch took an hour and a half to complete it was an hour and a half to it was an hour and a half there were buys lying everywhere it was like I was in Vietnam or a war movie I turned to my staff I'm like what the fuck am I supposed to do now they failed warm up they failed warm up now in fairness this stuff is really you would look at it and just like my friend is like what is this jane fond of bullshit and I'm like hey man why don't you try this for 10 minutes I think it is really taxing I mean I remember doing one of the stretching routines which I'll note I think is might be of interest to people is I'm hitting each once per week so there's one that is front split focus it's a very hamstring focus there's one that is bridge focused another that is middle split add doctor or middle split focus inside the thigh and the point that you make is doing this twice a week will not double your progress it will cut it in half so you're only really hitting each of these once per week I mean there are different daily limber protocols but I remember doing at the very beginning of one of these workouts I believe it was I know is absolutely the the front split workout a shit ton for me a shit ton of calf raises with a different number you moan in about that like different foot placements it's like okay 180 calf raises later of different variations I was like okay and I'm only three minutes into this and our long stretch sequence and I know we're bouncing all over the place because I want to give people kind of a buffet sampling of how this training differs but one of the reasons I respect the programming that you put together and the nuance that you bring to this is that the observation then is and correct me if I'm or you can elaborate on this if I'm missing something but a lot of the hamstring flexibility issues or limitations that people perceive are at least in part due to lower leg absolute issues including the huge amount of yeah including the Achilles so you in this particular progression in the beginning you're engorging and then stretching the the insertion point basically around the heel and then again at the knee and working your way up to the hamstrings and there's an athlete has been on the podcast Amelia Boone one of the most successful obstacle course racers in the world and she's basically point out the same thing and she said yeah you can take someone who's really inflexible in their hamstrings have them roll out their feet with sail across ball or something like that and all of a sudden they gain two inches in their to set with the hamstrings it's all connected we found by accident so we never intended this and it we just part of what maybe helps people to understand the the layers of complexity that that I approach training with is that for years my my bread and butter was to produce best athletes in the country that that was my job or to have a job I had to produce some of the best athletes in the world and we had to do it from scratch and so that it becomes an issue of one an injured athlete is no good to the United States my don't don't matter how tall he has how strong he is if he can't go out on the floor with the USA on his chest we we can't never win a medal with him so he's got to be healthy and then the second caveat that goes with that is that we're trying to find a way to make the best better because he these these athletes are already the best on the planet and you're going head to head with other athletes who are the best so then how do you find a way to make something which is almost already perfect even closer to perfect and if you do what everybody else is doing right without kind of going out into the jungle if you want to Indian country and and learning new things then you can't get a leg up on your competitors now if we go we have PhDs who come through a nesanand we we always give them major shit major shit because the way people think the world works is that they do their research they write about it they publish it we learn about it and we implement it with our athletes that is not how the way the world works the way it really works is you've got high level world class coaches who are super bright decades of experience you know just my last senior athlete Lona had 16,000 hours into training Alan 16,000 hours spread over 12 years what is Alan's last name power power so yeah you guys got to celebrate Alan he oh you just one national NCA championships again major blowout by the largest margin in NCA history wow that was the ball as of this recording very recently yeah that was just this oh goodness the weekend of the 15th I think we're scheduled here to come out sometime in May but yeah very very big deal but to go back to the other so we're looking for an edge and so we don't know why some things work we just know it works and I started getting notes from therapists around the world for example therapists are taught that they should have a neutral spine you should have a neutral spine I was getting people from around the world they're writing me but athletically I'm sorry I'll be direct but neutral spine athletically as big as load of horse shit I've ever heard of my life it you can't run with neutral spine you can't throw with neutral spine you can't climb with neutral spine I can't swim I can't do anything with a neutral spine except laying a box dug in a hole and they get ready to bury me I mean that's that's the only thing I can do it there's nothing athletically I can do with a neutral spine so we know just automatically to produce athlete we're not going to neutral spine because torso wise there's only two movements I can go from an arch snap to a hollow or I can be hollow and snap back to extension to the arch those are the only two movements the torso is capable of athletically everything else is a variation off that we can add rotation with some throws and some this and that but that's all there is so we spend a lot of time building power for that and these therapists around the world started taking our really gentle introductory work and they trained it on themselves first and I'm like you know just real similar what you said to me know I feel better and I have in years coach I feel better in years and this is completely different from what I was taught in school maybe we could use an example that we've discussed before which was a new movement for me which is Jefferson curl yeah there's they're having some fun with that so we look at Jefferson curl right now so it wasn't that many years ago that if you squat at below parallel it was heresy it was heresy if you went below parallel the knees couldn't possibly adapt to you're just going to blow your knees your kneecaps we're going to just pop off the front rise can be strapped no knee strapped no but everybody accepts now that you know what there is nothing wrong with the body being exposed to its natural range of motion now do you have to build it up gradually yes obviously you do but Jefferson curl falls into that so gosh how do we explain Jefferson curl I'm going to give it a I can give it a shot yeah you'll be there this would be a good this would be a good exam review for me anyway so Jefferson curl is a gradually rounded stiff legged deadlift that's the simplest way to visualize it so if you're looking at an athlete from the side doing a Jefferson curl they will most likely be standing on a box holding onto an Olympic barbell right in front of their hip slash legs so it's just like the very top of a deadlift position but when they start the descent and it's elevated so that when you have plates on and whatnot there's room for it but when they come down they're going to tuck their chin and then vertebra by vertebra round their back down all the way into the bottom position where the objective would be or one of the objectives would be to get basically your wrists to the front of your toes or at least in a perfect world if you're advanced enough yeah in a perfect world and of course doing this very gradually with supervised attention from somebody who knows what they're doing and then reversing that and again going from this vertebra by vertebra rounding up until you end up in that top position and thenrepeating.

Is that a fairdescription?

Fair description yeah the the easy is just think of it as a string of pearls and we're just curling one pearl at a time we've been having some fun with that one we have done Jefferson curl so I don't know 12 15 years now expected standard is body weight forus.

No two people listening do not try this with body weight right out of thegate.

No Idon't. So for example one of our senior students in Australia in his training physical therapist has his own clinic doing really well he tried it with just the empty bar you know the 20 kilo bar at first trashed him he dropped all the way down to I think a kilo or two right which is completely fine and what we'll talk about wine just a sec and then he built up and last time I checked with Mark over the course of I don't know I'm I'm forgetting there's too many students but around 12 to 18 months he built up to either 3 quarter body weight or maybe up to full body weight now and back feels better and it ever has but the key there is people got understand is that this was a gradual process over 12 to 18 months it wasn't just go we've got a very good I'll throw a Quinn out I'm gonna butcher Quinn's last name Quinn's a PhD in physical therapy Quinn he not does some really good work how do you spell my name you had to ask me we can get it for the show notes yeah we'll get it for the show huh we chat a lot on Facebook and that Quinn likes to stir the pot if you will you know stir up some shit he's experimented with Jefferson Crow himself for think going on about three or four years now and feels wonderful he'll toss it out and so one of the things that'll always become obvious you know the McGill experiments where they would take connective tissue from a pig get dava and put it under such and such amount of strain and if we put it in this position with this much load it snaps okay and everyone runs around and it's the sky is falling the sky is falling oh my god oh my god don't bend your spine stay neutral what everyone kind of missed the big elephant in the room was the pig was fucking dead the tissue was dead it can't adapt it's dead it's no longer living and it wasn't exposed to very gradual load so that there could be progressive adaptation which is what our bodies are really good at they kind of overlooked all that so if I take this completely unprepared tissue and I do this to it'll break so some very interesting discussions right now in it obviously everyone's fine you know we've we've got athletes doing great adults who are doing wonderful and the physical therapist will will come around simply because it's healthy now they've got to understand and other people who are less than they should understand also is that our weighted mobility work needs to be approached with a different mentality a different level of intensity than conditioning work because connective tissue has one tenth the metabolic rate of muscular tissue it heals slower to adapt slower so you have to kind of come to the table with a very patient attitude or or as I consider myself I'm I'm extremely impatient naturally but I've learned in order to get what I want and to go where I want to go I've had to learn to be patiently impatient and if I get into the urge then I get hurt athletes get hurt we fall apart and we you know nationals are Olympic trials are every four years nationals are once a year and you don't get another nationals you don't get another Olympic trials if you blow it you've got to be on point that day so it teaches us in our our environment was actually a blessing because it's very much practical it's very much results oriented there's no room for opinion I think I feel I prefer it works it doesn't work it produces results it doesn't produce results you are the best in the country you aren't the best in the country I mean it's very clear it's very clear it can't be argued with and now that was actually something when we segueed into kind of the fitness world if you will where you come out of national team and then everyone knows who the studs are in the fitness world though everyone's proclaiming they're the stud everyone's proclaiming they're the national champion there's nothing to support it there's no results there's no great athletes there's no great abilities have been generated there's just the marketing and that that was hard to wrap my head around because a national team that doesn't exist you can't go to the Olympics and the guy who talks the loudest gets the metal I have the loudest voice I'm champion I think that's national politics right now oh wait no never mind different pod I did want to ask you how you're visits to the White House but I figured we'll save that one we'll save that for another time yeah Tim went to the White House last week guys so I'll I'll take his brain for you later so I I interrupted but yeah you get to the fitness world and another one of the differences that you pointed out from you which I really liked was that in the fitness world it's exercise and diet whereas through in your world it's always been eating train or it's eating train yeah he even train what the people are trying to do and I'll throw a little a little blurb in here we we have an outstanding nutrition program the guy who who wrote it former seal team six when he started but it's back in the day he was like 141 45 and then Jeff got all the way up to two 20 just shy at 225 the all it muscle and his waist was the same size as 20 was thin he looked like two Vikings two shoulders on top of his body he came walking and I was like what the five had been a couple of years but that held did you do if these basic nutritional concepts that we teach but what we try to do with adults is they're trying to stay ahead of a bad diet through exercise or trying to outrun a bad diet and it can't be done it can't be done and then what happens is if they somehow find this crazy combination of massive amounts of cardio and they can kind of keep their weight in check a little bit and then they stop that cardio they immediately start gaining weight gain weight loss all of that should be separate from your conditioning you know you you've got to get your nutrition dial in if your nutrition is dialed in your body's going to find its natural healthy weight that it's going to operate at now if you're if you want to be the giant muscle guy and that's not your phenotype which is your body type you know what tough shit deal with it you know it's not going to change you're not going to change your phenotype you're not going to change your body's genetic expression came that being said you can maximize what your potential as well we hammer through to our students as you're not responsible for the hand to cards you were Dell your response well for maxing out what you were given non-soc who knows what your strengths will be maybe the more endurance maybe you're going to carry easy muscle mass maybe you're a max strength guy maybe you're very skill oriented it doesn't matter maybe you're very explosive but whatever it is you know make the most of it sit on that point and then I want to come back to I'm going to ask you that I think it's I wrote this down during our assessment Tony Faye quote no routines and quote that's all I wrote down so that's a cue for a story I believe you told me that will come back to does that make any sense or is that just like a cryptic 3a.m.

note that I wrote to myself I don't know but the you got to stay away from the wine did never never in Vino Veritas we'll get back to that but oh I know I kind of know what it is I think I can actually queue it up at the basics yeah well we're going to come back to that one second the question I want to ask first is one that came up a lot from listeners of this podcast which was and I'm going to create sort of a composite of these questions but like if someone is 35 years old let's just say former athlete does basic gym work diet is okay not terrible they feel reasonably athletic but they're not competing in anything certainly I have never done any gymnastics what would good goals be for such a person and what would bad goals be maybe at the same time well that without question bad goal would be for them to jump right into kind of full body weight straight arm strength for example a back lever which doesn't require a ton of strength but they love to do it because it looks so cool it's kind of like their first thing they can do that you know wow look at me the problem is is that it puts them in an extreme load while in shoulder extension so let me can I paint a picture for people so back lever just to create the image and coach Kripe from wrong I imagine you're laying on your stomach on the floor arms by your sides and then you turn your hands palm down so that your thumbs are pointing out away from your body and then you lift your arms off the ground as high as possible with your arms straight and then place a bar in your hands and then lift your body off the ground off the ground and kind of holds yourself that's sure but that's what the body body would be horizontal yep and what they don't realize is that when the shoulders are in shoulder extension like that is that the biceps are under maximum stretch so it's nothing it's not a problem to do with being strong enough the bicep is too low and they're going to tear a bicep for a young adult not a problem at all and we're lucky you know we we have a lot of people who use our material but some of our material you know coach your your two conservative coach it's a new world coach we don't have time I had someone who was 21 or 23 once coach I don't have time to take my time I'm already 23 okay all right I think you're miss reading this but they want to jump right into their strength training and they do well but they don't do the mobility work so it wasn't last year I think it was the year before I think maybe the street workout community five of their top guys around the world snapped biceps these are crazy strong guys I mean we see them these guys are beast they're doing one arm chins are doing this and that they all snapped them on back lever stuff because their the mobility wasn't in line now we all know when you're young you can get away with a lot of stupid shit because the body heals so fast luckily right or I I certainly wouldn't have survived being 21 if it wasn't that the case but as an adult the structure is mature now and I think maybe a better way to look at it is people think I'm getting older legaments are breaking down tendons are breaking down joints are getting brittle and actually that's not the case because if we go back in time when you were a little guy when I was a little guy when all listeners were a little guy we ran around like madman right it wasn't oh today I'm gonna ride my bike three miles it was sun was up go jump on my bike and I'm gone all day and I'm running I'm jumping I'm climbing and we're just we're just being crazy little guys so we had this huge matrix of activity that the body is used to then we hit high school and for most people that's our first exposure to structured athletic training okay and the body does well with it now the mistake is thinking that the body did well solely because of that structured athletic training what they're overlooking is all that activity that matrix that activity that occurred for those years prior to that then if they're high enough level athlete structured training might continue into college graduate time you get a job all right I'm still you know I'm young right hormones are pumped in I'm gonna go to work and then I'm gonna go play basketball with the guys in the evening I'm gonna hit the gym this and that that goes good for a couple of years right I'm getting by having fun weekends weekends are full then you meet the cutie right you meet the love of your life you get married suddenly I can't go play basketball every night now okay so we do this and that and a little out of time our level is a physical activity outside of conditioning or dropping down and they're dropping down a lot then kids come all right well there's another huge chunk of time gone then before you know it you're 30 you're 35 you haven't been doing hitting the gym very often there's certainly not a time for just playful activity or doing sports or this or that on a regular basis for most people right and they spend most the time punched over that desk now the body wants to be healthy it wants to be healthy that's your your prime example we get we feed at the right movements in the right dosages and it blooms it blossoms it's like waiting and watering a garden right the body wants to be healthy but we have to do it in the right dosage and so for example those street worker guys they hurt themselves because it was the wrong dosage they wanted to go too hard too soon without the mobility so for an adult to come back around answering that question a long way 35 year old very first thing we got to do we got to fix joints we've got to repair joints we got to get that range of motion back if you were to look at all of the adults that you've dealt with let's just say 35 year olds if you had to pick and of course this does not cover all the bases but if you had to pick say three to five movements or exercises or stretches for addressing the most common deficiencies like getting those joints back into play well with some of your selections but just for joint joint I think we'd put Jefferson curl at top of the list because remember we have we have multiple sections of the spine right we've got the cervical thoracic and lumbar that's going to come through also into glutes that's going to go down into our hamstrings that's going to hit our calves that's going to hit our Achilles as well so for for one that's a lot of bang for your buck for one exercise mm-hmm even if that was all you did right and you just did Jefferson curl a lot of aches and pains are going to go away because of that next one west tough it's always it's always hard to boil it down boil it down we took care of pike we've got to get extension we got to get some thoracic extension I throw elevated bridge in there if arms strength was sufficient to handle it if not we can scale it down to some weighted work with some bars or some some barbells either some dowel with a plate we've got to get shoulder extension in there because what happens a lot a lot of the conditioning we're exposed to is all front delt heavy right it's all anterior delt and pecs get tight the interior delts are getting tight and we start pulling our own shoulders forward we create our own impingement it doesn't matter you know so I'll do more exercises I'll do more exercises well now you're you're just making it worse what the problem is is there's not balance in the shoulder joint there's no retraction and it's easy to tell what does their posture look like what do we see with everyone now it's got that what do they even have a terminal texting neck kind of that turtle forward distended forwards like the wally power down look yeah yeah you know the scary thing there and again we we have some pts who use our stuff around the world a lot of success and they're the ones who come in and educate us for we'll say you know we've noticed this and they can they tell us they teach us well to the limit we can because we're not professionals but to the limits we can they start teaching us the mechanics of what is really going on so we have a very good student now Wesley Tan runs one of our affiliates he's full-time osteopath in the UK runs another one of our GBA affiliates forma GST and Wesley's the one who taught me that there's a point coach where if you abuse the body it's not going to come back and so for example you see some older adults who are extremely hunched forward neck to stand it forward chin up because they're trying to see where they're going in it's not that they have bad posture and they could fix it it's that they can't fix it because the vertebrae are rectangle and if you spend after spending years of hunched forward like that it compresses the front edges of that rectangle until it becomes a trapezoid and that doesn't come back once once that happens it's done it's over it's done same thing happens with the muscle bellies so people will get frozen shoulder or impingements in this that is if you're not using the muscle belly the body doesn't want to support it because muscle tissue is expensive by expensive the body looks at it is expensive to feed it's expensive to maintain for example your body isn't a painting you can't get to a certain degree of muscle mass mobility athletic ability endurance whatever you want to say and then just stop and how to continue to exist like a painting you did it has to be maintained because if you're not using it it costs too much resources for the body to continue to keep it so it's going to start breaking it down that's why you get a few days right and then you start losing strength you start losing mobility you start losing win easiest physical attribute to build endurance simple super simple endurance is what endurance is simply strength repeated over and over at a lower load no big deal that's a six to an eight week process simple no problems at all mobility and it takes some time what's the easiest one to fix muscular strength no problem at all so for it's super important then that we we use that muscle mass because if it's not being used you're not only going to lose the size of the muscle mass the body's going to start doing deposits of collagen on it and it's going to start shrinking now muscle belly on the traps for example of going back to those older adults we discussed it's going to shrink until a lot of it is connective tissue on the edges now what people need to realize and they don't is that when they see an adult who's hurting right they're older they're shuffling they can't pick their knees up their hips are frozen they're hunched over their next displaced they weren't that way when they were younger this is all the result of inactivity and poor progressions and their exercises and it didn't have to be and then they need to take the next step of connecting is that if it happened to that guy or that woman it can sure as hell happen to me also if I go down the same road that they went down returning to the shoulder extension because I noticed in our assessment that I had terrible shoulder extension and I had kind of accepted it and written it off with stupid reasons like well you know I've done too much deadlifting I had too much huge slabs of muscle in my back I can't do shoulder extensions like total horseshit I mean especially notemus those huge massive slabs of muscle yeah the the imaginary lat syndrome that I have and I mean that was just blown to Smith-A-Rins when I met let me make sure you get his name correct is Paul Watson is that right oh yeah big Paul in New York City who's gigantic and extremely flexible so as soon as I hang out with him I was like okay if no let people know Paul as well as a six feet 230 I mean and just it's about 40 I want to say and just probably watch around at6% body fat and can do a flat like chest to ground pancake no problem can do dislocates with a weighted dowel or barbell no problem with all different types of grips which I can't do at all even though making progress the shoulder extension what is your preferred way to work on shoulder extension is it the sitting down arms behind you scooting the hips forward is there something else you would add to that mix well we we have to sneak up on now on a little bit so sometimes we can't even work shoulder extension at first if the elbows are deconditioned so if breakie Alice just inside the elbow is weak if the insertion of the bicep 10 in as weak then when the arm is extended as they stretch there might be some discomfort so if that's the case we have to give that time to adapt so you know it's that's one of the questions I ask you how how's your breakie Alice feel how's your bicep feel how's your elbow feel because we we never push through pain I mean you can you can but have you noticed that the guys who push through pain they've got a shelf life of somewhere between two and four years and then the body is so beat up and so painful and so chronically injured that it's just easier to be a fat slot sitting on the couch and at least my pain dropped then to try to continue pushing through and being a stud it's so common and it's also unnecessary for example and I I don't get this one I don't get this one a lot I'll bring it because where there's a lot of people and don't be wrong I really like weightlifting I think the Olympic lifting is sweet there's a lot going for it I think the way that it is approached here in the States is not as efficient as it's approached in China for example or in Russia so for example in both of them before there's any weight at it at all they build complete mobility throughout the body they can strut all their legs just on the floor say with legs together pike they've got bridge they have all these basic mobility and all ankle flexibility and mobility we talked about this is it related to and especially exactly you watch cloak off to be sure to go and people should watch this guy check out some videos oh my god he is such a beast but what they also need to do is not just watch the weight he's putting up right they need to watch his warm up in the training hall and look at how amazingly flexible and mobile he is now what's important to understand is at a world class level right at a world class level resources are limited energy you have for training is limited the amount of time you have for training is limited the amount of time you have for recovery is limited right you have to maximize these things because you're going is one thing to be the best stud in the town another thing to be best stud in the state another one in region another one in the country completely different animal to be the best in the entire world to be the best at what you do how to billions of people what we're talking livers of difference between the very top guys so with all those restrictions and all those parameters in place if the best in the world are stretching their ass off in order to get strong why aren't you you agreed not you personally now you as in all of us as in all of us right and what'll happen is people just kind of get blinders on they want to watch technical they want to watch progress is what he did to do for this and that and then they'll blow off the mobility work that they do early not realizing that the mobility work was the gold nugget they were looking for they just didn't brush the dirt off in order to see that it was gold underneath they decided just another rock who cares now is the gold that was the sweet and they missed it so for looking at again this 35-year-old former athlete maybe never was super competitive but has kept in decent shape maybe does some form of exercise two or three times a week in terms of a understanding that the mobility and working with j curl elevator bridge shoulder extension etc is going to be those are going to be ingredients in the recipe in their progression to gymnast of some type not even gymnast or I would say functional human being functional human being right because if you don't train unlike to you know point out people we don't train gymnast we do gymnastics strength training but I don't have I just got off the phone with our Olympic coach today Kevin Magica right we had a great conversation but guys regardless of how good you are a rope climbs and plunge in this and that I wouldn't hold my breath that Kevin's getting ready to give you a call and say Tony's gonna be on our team this year you know I saw your rope climbs and you are kick ass you are the one for us where we got a uniform waiting here for you or departing for Rio in July man be ready pack your bag it is not going to happen guys so correct you know functional athletes functional human being covers it all so let me let me just jump to the punchline question which is let's so we look at if I wanted to give someone a stretch goal to inspire them to train consistently right so the mobility might not be enough but if I wanted to give them a light at the end of the tunnel so I'm like I know this shoulder extension stuff is gonna be very unpleasant maybe not super exciting but this is the objective this is what you might be able to do in 369 12 months from now the back lever we've talked about is not necessarily a good goal because you might think you have the strength and perhaps you do but you know they'll definitely have the strength most without question right but they don't have the mobility so you know have the mobility snap goes the bicep that nasty surprise waiting in that box what would be a good gymnastic strength training goal to have or goals just as context for people who are wondering after trying to do my best to survey the landscape and figure out what might not be the stupidest goals I wanted to you know nothing is the best goals but I decided okay well press strict press handstand which we can define in a second seems like a good one and it just seems like a sweet thing to be able to do and then front lever and then lever straddle planch and then straddle planch exactly so we can talk about what each of those are but would the press handstand for instance be something that incorporates the strength the mobility and all these pieces if you had to pick one you had to pick one that would be the one that'd be the one do you want to go because it's going to have all strength all mobility balance agility everything roll into one movement do you want to take a stab at what does a perfect press handstand look like in your place press handstand so I'm just trying to keep it simple right then over hands on the ground by your toes and they can be put your palms on the floor so they're just in front of your toes shoulder width leg straight leg straight okay now if they need it to bend we could we're talking about perfect world right and then hands on the floor shoulders directly over the hands and then no jumping using just the middle back just the traps because everyone thinks trap traps traps anything traps just for shrugging while your traps are a huge muscle or a huge muscle they don't just lie in the top of your shoulders they're in the middle of your back and down towards your lower back as well they're giant muscle and they're capable of a huge amount of power and when you fix those right a lot of shoulder pain goes away a lot of lower back pain goes away but go back to our other hands on the floor shoulders over the hands using that middle back those traps pull the hips up on top of the shoulder maintain that flat back position then we continue on with lower back finishing the legs up to the hands down so a couple of things that make this particularly challenging so one obviously you need to have the flexibility in the hamstrings and everywhere else you have the mobility you have to have the compression strength like we're talking about doing those those murderous embarrassing pike pulses which look like they should be easy and they are not you bringing your legs basically to your chest in that last like 10 to 12 inch range really challenging and then I think where you see a lot of people online do this incorrectly at least from the standpoint of having the objective of gymnastics strength training right so all sorts of ways you can cheat with the stuff to make it biomechanically easier but if we're trying to do it strictly can't be and why why do it's maybe this is a nice thing to throw in because people say well it's just a matter it's personal taste coach it's personal taste you do it this way because you prefer this form now we do it a particular way because this is what builds the most strength that's transferable to other activities for example this all continues so who will have I pissed off so far that I pissed off crossfitters yeah you're gonna piss off yoga right now so I I once had and I like yoga don't get me wrong but their approach to handstand is flawed they want to go bone on bone so they want to have their shoulders depressed so they're bone on bone they want to have pipe shoulders so so all right so shoulders shoulders can elevate so if I'm if I'm standing upright and I elevate my shoulders that would be like me shrugging my shoulders to my ear and then doing the opposite is the other direction well when we do a handstand and if I describe it this way it's gonna make sense right I want muscle and connective tissue to be doing the work I don't want bone grinding on bone that's not a recipe for longevity not gonna work but the easy one is as they'll say well there's there's a yoga handstand and there's a gymnastics handstand in my answer to that as well you're almost right there's a gymnastics handstand and there's a fucked up gymnastics handstand those are the only two there are here's how we evaluated a gymnastics handstand right done with nice flat back nice hand all being a smart ass aside right we're gonna look at it just from a purely practical viewpoint which one leads somewhere so if I do a yoga type dancing with that arch and the flex shoulders I'm not going any farther than that I can work under a sh and I can do some other things but I'm not going any further I do a gymnastics handstand where it's flat now I have nice range of motion in the shoulders I have strength through the middle back through the traps right I've got good core strength I've got good compression strength now I can move on to good press handstand work why what we want to get stronger that in turn allows me to go on if I'm in the mood I want to do more going to more advanced one arm handstand where pure wedding work all all those things are out results of a proper nice straight line handstand that you can't do with the flawed approach it's not aesthetics it's being practical because we don't do anything in gymnastics right that's just purely aesthetics why why do we do things a certain way it lets us generate more power why do we want more power let's us get more air let's us do more flips let's us do more twists let's us do harder things on rings which means more points which means more gold medals and let me throw out a couple of observations and you can correct me if if this is wrong but like one of them an example is something that people might think is aesthetics there is an aesthetic appeal but it's a side effect and not the reasoning behind it would be a strong point in the toes right a strong pull on the legs so you see a lot of people doing handstands and I was guilty of this certainly and they have kind of what I heard what one acrobat called tofu feet they're not fully dorsiflexed like they're not pulling the toes back to the knees which I think looks terrible also pretty common in yoga but they don't have that and they don't have a strong point and so they're at the very least their quads and their adductors aren't really fully engaged they're loose and so they're they're leaking energy in all sorts of directions and it makes I like that leaking energy yeah it makes a very good description and it makes I think I probably stole it from povl satsul and but the I always a good buddy I follows a good friend of mine I like povl's povls povls great and the what is the consequence the consequence their consequences one of which is your wasting energy so you're not going to be able to train as efficiently number two is you're not going to develop the proper balance and alignment because you're going to be flopping all over the place and having to correct more so than you should so that just that pointing has a huge impact on your ability to train the handstands like it's really strong and the other point I wanted to make is except of course in the attempt to try to work on this in the past which failed and I've made a ton of progress in the last few months but when doing it so loud watch videos online and of course not all videos are created equal and you would see and I've reached a choir on that and you would and you would see people doing a press handstand but they would planch really hard right so you would see in other words you'd see people they put their hands flat on the ground in front of their toes and then they shoot their head really far forward so their shoulders travel if you were to drop a plum line like a string with a weight in the head from their shoulders it would hit the floor say like eight inches in front of their hands six eight inches in front sure that if and then they go up into the handstand and they have this arch in the back and maybe their feet are pointing straight up and what does that look like it looks a lot like what was the gold standard in sort of muscle beach Venice or Santa Monica like 19 circa 19 16 4 in 1950s around 1940s 1950s but that's going to place a lot more structural strain on the spine so then if the what does the proper version look like I mean roughly right your ears are roughly in between your shoulder blades your in between your arms yeah in between your arms fully shoulders extended up or not extended what am I looking for here pressing pressing down through the ground and keeping the hand the shoulders directly on top of the hands for people who want to just do a little experiment obviously do it's do it safely but I was blown away the first time that someone showed this to me if you do a normal say kick up to handstand on the wall just the way that everybody does it you're kind of flipping up and you end up looking away from the wall there are a million ways to do let's say you do that and then instead of doing it the way you've always done it before you put your hands on the ground you start with your arms overhead in the position that you want to assume on the ground and stroke your shoulders up as high as possible trying to get your deltoids to the size of your ears maintain that position and then go up and the stability is just a world of difference I mean it's it's nine day it's a completely different movement all right I have to ask this because a million people asked since we're on a roll here we've already checked off yoga that's true and I have to come back guys I like everything else about yoga accept your hands and so only a small amount of hate mail for the hands damn much some of the coaches and doesn't have to be in gymnastics but they certainly could be some of the coaches who have impressed you the most I took down in between like my bouts of hands shaking and like accidentally getting chalk in my mouth doing the assessment and like when I could bend my arms and do something I took these cryptic notes I wrote down one name which was Alexander world champion male and female does that uh-huh ring any bells you know I've been extremely extremely fortunate in my career I have just a multitude of friends who are world and Olympic champions world and Olympic team members world and Olympic coaches and for a long time you know I just kind of because if that's your environment day in day out it's going to be comes your normal right and then after while you kind of stop and think like one day I was I was at a competition and I I was busy and with some friends of mine and I came back and my oldest daughter was maybe around 12 at the time she was like oh my god you know who you were talking to dad and I said well yes we did I know they're my friends he says that was the Olympic champion and that was the world champion say I know babe I know look what he's just like oh my good god well the me tree belowzer chef is a good friend of mine and a me tree one world's in 83 at 16 years old 16 years old just unbelievable he won again in 87 what a lot of people don't know is in between their demetry obviously Russian demetry had a car accident and broke his left lower leg between the knee and the ankle in 42 places 42 places so basically you know as powder they put him in he's unconscious he's on the table and he's he's covered up and they're getting ready to remove his lower leg they're gonna you know taking it off and the surgeon pulls the towel down the sheet down because he's prepped for surgery and he's out and he sees its demetry now this is Russia right in the early 80s so it's not warm friendly Russia the doctor me like holy shit I am not cutting this leg off because the surgeon who takes demetry belowzer chef's leg off is probably going to lose his hands shortly thereafter also you're a national hero so they save his leg and demetry comes back from it and wins worlds in 87 goes 88 Olympics does great metal coal metals what demetry was lucky enough we're at different training camps in that demetry was my roommate and you know Russians or Russians right it takes a long time for them to warm up to you so it took I don't know how many years but we we started getting along real well after some years he started sharing some stuff we know unlike you know demetry because of his leg is trashed the latest trash at eight Olympics that's a demetry you know how how the hell dude so that only lasts for a few seconds I can do anything for a few seconds I don't know dude well so it's just great right so he's you know legend in gymnastics we get together with a room full of world and Olympic champions who are Russian they were all deferred to demetry he's he's that big a legend and this is an a room full of massive egos yeah there's there's no shortage of confidence here to me trees in the room they treat demetry awesome it's it's a very very cool thing to see well we go forward we had a world champion from the Russian on the women's side who won worlds and demetries coach Alexander was responsible for training both of them so Alexander's the only one in history who produced a male world champion in a female world champion easy only one and Alexander right now is down coach india brazilian team what is Alexander's is that his first or last name and I always screw up all the Russian pronunciations all my Russian friends are gonna laugh because they're totally used to me butchering this was like Alexander Alexander and offer or something got one of those and like sand enough if I'm in my Russian friends I just say Alexander and everybody knows who I means I don't have to embarrass myself what do you think allowed him made him makes him him yeah exactly what makes him different what makes him him is the ability so it starts with depth of knowledge to have enough depth of knowledge that you can look in an athlete and plan what you need to be doing four years from now eight years from now and then reverse engineer all of it to today all the training cycles the strength the delauds it was from demetry that I for so back in 83 demetry was the only gymnast I think today probably one of the only ones who every fourth week was a delaud week why to give the body a chance to recover now there's a lot of people talk delaud but way back then right the training if you'd visit with demetry right it's always Chris it's mathematics it's all mathematics we do to them you take these correct pieces would you be like doing the correct numbers that creates your equation if you put the equation together correctly and then you solve it there's your answer and your answer is the physical preparation at the end in a successful competition so Alexander is great great at knowing we're going to just be consistent over this training but so you know an Olympic cycle is four years long so we're going to be ready to finish this to Olympics right and then the next cycle starts so it could take for example to get someone to 7580% of their genetic capacity with a good coach a good world class coach going to take three to four years it's going to take three to four years just to let the body grow adapt do you think that's also true for 30 like training and adult I do okay great right now that's a healthy adult so if they're severely compromised so you know to get through our whole our whole curriculum should take three to four years if they're severely compromised and we have to do damage repair we've got to heal some injuries we've got some chronic things because what what's a chronic injury a chronic injury is simply an injury that you kept abusing until it became semi permanent that's all chronic injury as it means you slammed your hand in the door and it hurt your response to slamming your hand in the door to hurting was to keep slamming your hand in the fucking door you kept slamming in the door and you say god my hand really hurts for what should I do what should I do is if I quit slamming your hand in the damn door and it will get better but people they don't think that way there's like well I but I really really like doing this and we get people coming us really beat up because we're taught no pain no gain well we flip that around we say no brain no gain we're not talking about the pain of fatigue they're the easy way to know the difference between fatigue and injury is simply the sharpness of the pain so for example and it's some experience also if you're feeling pain right and maybe it's from a core workout and you stop you're doing hollow body rocks whatever it doesn't matter what you're doing sit ups you stop if it's fatigue it's immediately going to start to lessen as soon as you stop the pain starts going away if it's an injury and you stop it's immediately going to begin increasing that's your oh shit all that's I screwed myself up right and so you can't have to ride that we want to work to where the body is working but we don't want to work so hard it's like for a long time there was a big thing for people doing keeping pull ups to take pictures of their hands being raw and bloody from their ribs they were looking at it as a badge of honor you know that I worked so hard and in the short term for that moment yeah they worked really hard now I looked at it differently I looked at it as like you stupid shit what are you gonna do tomorrow now wait there's no amount of work you can do today that could offset the amount of progress you could have made throughout a properly structured week it can't be done you see that you see that with kettlebells a lot too I remember I remember when I was really deep in kettlebell training it was yeah you take yourself out for God knows how long you rip all your calluses off but they mean well they mean well we tend to use two terms with our athletes we have immature athletes and mature athletes and it's not an age deal it's an attitude deal so an immature athlete is someone who wants what they want right now okay a mature athlete is someone who's willing to do what needs to be done now to get rewarded for it later delayed gratification and it's the mature athlete that in the long run always comes out on top there are always the ones with the greater longevity and the greater success the other ones the immature ones they're really talented they may stay ahead for a while but eventually you're gonna get so dinged and broken and beat up that they have to step aside and the mature guy in the mature athlete or woman right they're they're just doing their thing day in day out it's like writing a book that has 365 pages and if I ask you tomorrow Tim go home tonight and write me a book with 365 pages you like Chris you lost your fucking mind but if I say Tim I want you to write me a page a single page every day in a year we've got a book with 365 pages and if you picture that that thickness of a novel that that's a lot of pages there but if I look at that thickness of a single page it's so thin that it seems negligible it doesn't even matter it's like why did I bother well it's it's the consistency that adds up over time that's where you see you see these great athletes got understand they see you see a world class athlete that did not start training yesterday this is a multi-year process well also I think that there's a behavioral modification and a component of this which you know if you wanted to dig in the research is supported at this point which is doing each day less than you feel maximally capable of to fantastic sort of positive reinforcer and this applies in sales this is what IBM did way back in the day when their sales force was slaughtering the competition did the lowest quotas in the industry because they wanted their sales be able to be unantimidated to pick up the phone so we could substitute intimidated to pick up the phone with intimidated to go to the gym or start a session you could also apply it to writing I leave a little in the bank leave a little in the bank I remember there two examples offhand as it applies to writing a friend of mine was very very consistent prolific writer and he said my key is every day I write less than I feel capable of and you know a guideline that I was given was two crappy pages per day that's all you have to do two crappy pages and sometimes you overshoot that you have a great workout and you're feeling as you put it froggy right you're feeling fantastic and you just blow through and set a much a PRs but you didn't go into the workout with the pressure of having to achieve PRs and every exercise and you know anyway maybe not the best life model but was prolific writer and still still a stud and he would end mid sentence you would end still feeling like he had more to say in a specific paragraph or sentence so that he had a place to pick up the next day so on the point of consistency and actually I want you to finish your last thought because I totally hijacked the conversation but you said it takes three to that to hijack my thoughts three to four three to three years to get them to what percentage of their genetic this is ballpark 75 to 80 this is just an example to people because the body will not let you run at100% won't do it won't go there's not enough optimal surplus that we mentioned earlier three to four years to get to 7580% it will take me another three to four years another three to four years to get to about90% another three to four years and then after that it will take me another three to four years to get to about95% and that's me writing her down that's my standards right because remember it's easier for me to maintain that immaculate standard because I'm not the one feeling the fatigue right now it's very difficult for world class athlete to train themself and it doesn't do a world class coach any good to have all that knowledge and as edit takes a partnership right it takes both of them working to gather to create this great athletic animal but the interesting thing is that another three to four years get the95% and as soon as they ease up the body drops back down to that 75 80 that's where it likes now to build back up won't take nearly as long as to build it in the first place because the structures are already in place nervous systems are develop yada yada yada yada yada but that's where the body's comfortable so as far as adults are concerned there's a 35 year old need to be able to produce at90% no they don't do they need at95% no they're not full-time professional athletes they don't they don't have time for that can they produce at 7580% yes they can and the interesting thing is is will that put you on the Olympic team now absolutely absolutely not are you going to be close to it now but will it put you being better than 99 out of 100 people around you absolutely yeah absolutely it will play you there and if we put a percentage on that that means that just by being consistent putting some years consistent years of training and that puts you in the top1% of the human population in terms of physical ability that is not a bad consolation price no it's not I want to underscore the consistency point because I've always been in intensity guy right I mean for the most part because that's my default mode okay and you know it's served me well everybody's right yeah it's served me well but there's a point where this sword cuts both ways you sent me an email recently I'm going to replace the name just in unless we decide to as you're going to say or maybe take out the profanity just in case yeah I'll take out the f bombs dear you lazy bastard no that's not how it starts because I want to talk about older students who have picked up gymnastics and okay so there are a lot of people who are rightly I think or naturally skeptical of the ability of say 35 38 40 plus year old to acquire these skills that are associated with people who start when they're 5 6 7 years old so I'm going to replace the name with Frank okay so I was having a hell of a lot of trouble with tuck hops and to just explain that I fully plan for everyone listening to put a lot of video examples in the show notes you'll have visual references for a lot of this but tuck hops it's a great exercise on their different ways to practice this but a tuck handstand is instead of having your body ramrod straight from your hands all the way to your pointed toes at the very top you're basically bringing your knees to your chest or ribcage while you're in the handstand position with your feet still pointed but your heels kind of touching your ass is that a fair description I agree with that and I was having a lot of trouble with range of motion I just couldn't get low enough and so coach sent me an email which was you know Frank is one of my senior students here's a video of him working his tuck handstand compression while it's not exactly the same exercise this does provide a nice visual example now the part that stands out for me is what follows the video so watch the video and I was like okay that's pretty solid and you said you started roughly two years ago out of shape week and rather Pudgey on his first workout I believe that he failed three times 12 seconds bent hollow body hold and there are people on wheelchairs that are stronger than yeah and I'm probably going to get the not going to do this exercise justice but I mean a bent hollow body hold is effectively like imagine if you're in a crunch position on the floor right and then you put your arms just kind of pick your feet up like you were going to do a sit up except don't sit up shoulders up a little off the ground feet off a little ground and then just try to rock back and forth that's it so he failed that couldn't do three sets of that times twice I couldn't do it not a chance fast forward two years and he's a beast in that there are two more there are two points here that really left a mark me so the first was he's very consistent okay we've talked about that here's the part that I really liked so he never rushes through exercise and every time he gets stuck on a progression and was not able to break through that particular plateau he simply drops all the way back to the first progression and he gets working his way up so I want to try to illustrate this because this is a really because most people myself included will just bang their heads against a wall with the plateau movement let's take the press handstand which we've been talking about as a great kind of bang for the buck objective because it incorporates so many different elements and attributes you need to develop what would a series of progressions like four or five progressions for that look like and does it literally mean that if he couldn't get through movement five they would drop all the way back to number one or would he go back to number two and number three hey he'd go all right back to number one okay now he might go to he might not start with the very weak one programming uh you know three by one rep he might drop back to a week eleven where we provide the programming where it's five by five and you see demonstrate mastery then next workout bump but basically what he's doing is if he failed on that exercise that means there was a chink in the arm or some are there was a hole in the preparation there was a some deficit that had been overlooked or some part of the body that had not yet super compensated so basically we want we want people to go through when they're in training to just be super simplistic we want their training to go through a period of overload where whatever they're doing is kicking their ass okay it's hard it's intense and then without changing reps or sets right we want the body then to go into a period of load where that same amount of work that same load same exercise same rep same sets feels moderately difficult it's feeling easier because the body's gotten stronger and then where people always cut it short where they undermine themselves here is they don't go into under load so to be super simplistic under load is where damn I'm just not feel like I'm working very hard you're moving the same way you're doing same reps you're doing the same sets right but you're just you're just cutting it short what what people tend to do is they want to ride that razor's edge I did this much today I'm going to do more next week of that typical five pounds on the bar okay well that's great you know if that was the case I remember my first way to pull up workout I was excited I was excited way back when I was a teenager I came home I did my five pounds I pulled out my calendar did five pounds I'm going to pound every week holy shit I'm going to be pulling 1500 pounds in a year man I'm world champion I'm world champion in the making linear doesn't work that way doesn't work that way so what happens is that you hit that point of where you're maxed out currently and then you got to step off we got to give the body a chance to accommodate so for example you mentioned Rob wolf Rob is a good buddy Rob super sharp for those of you don't know he's a nutrition guru check out his stuff R.O.B.B for peopleR.O.B.B.B.B.

yeah he's got two B's there well Rob is a high intensity guy like you Tim and so I shared with him the year Alan one national so national champ imagine you've defeated the entire country there's one champion and you're it everyone you kick their ass umboly wolf feeling extremely awesome well that year I didn't change anything on Alan's conditioning the entire year not a damn thing I didn't change an exercise I didn't change a rep I didn't change a set not for that entire year see you mean that they're for the progressive resistance purists out there there might be another way but remember he wasn't a beginner at this point no because a beginner right it wouldn't do any good if I can do a wall push up incline down the wall I mean Alan was strong he was already doing hollow bag presses you know rope climbs were for maintenance of healthy elbows yada yada yada but for that year I didn't change anything all that changed was workout that took an hour got to the point where it was taken 40 to 45 minutes at which point do your stretching get out because the less time you're in the gym the better okay because this is less wear and tear on the body think of it when I hear what you mentioned you know people who love to be high intensity okay it's cool but the analogy that comes to mind is someone who wants to be high intensity all the time it's like having a new set of tires every time you come up to a stop sign you don't gradually break use slam those breaks hard use get do a stop every single stop sign how long is that pair of tires gonna last it's gonna wear out pretty quick and now the body's not like tires it can rebuild itself as long as you don't put it too deep into a hole or physically break the structure damage the structure beyond repair as long as you show some degree of care you rebuild yourself but if you keep getting to that stop every single day matter times not if it's guaranteed so let's throw out a couple of I'll use another automotive metaphor let's switch gears and I will ask just a couple of questions that I think people would love to hear answers to the first is someone listens to this they're extremely excited to do gymnastics strength training and maybe they go out and they're like sampling different things from all sorts of different places and you know of course I have no business I should say with full disclosure I have no business association I'm not getting any kind of affiliate anything from you I just am a real fan of how you train so I think people should check out your training programs but what exercises should people not attempt or just remove from consideration for the first say six months of gymnast to strength training probably I would say muscle ups the issue becomes it's nothing wrong with the pull there's nothing wrong with the dip the shoulders will adapt relatively quickly you know they'll get on rings at first on their shaking and that's simply because the stabilizers aren't used to the load that'll adapt within you know two weeks four weeks they'll be fine the issue they're on into is because their shoulder extension is weak they can't get the elbow behind the torso so instead of doing a dip with body weight now they're trying to do a tricep extension with body weight completely different animal their elbows can't go their elbows are trapped at their side and now their hands are in front of them and they're just trying to press themselves up of course they're just trash and there are not some people can we do see it some people have incredible joints that you can just pound and pound and pound and pound and pound nothing happens to them run them over with a car right all you're going to do is hurt your car everyone assumes they're that guy they're that woman the reality is you're not guys you are not that person if you were that person I would see you at training camps right now or you would be a celebrated professional level athlete so accept the fact that you're human and those are not your joints you can't take that approach and have longevity is not going to happen there is a muscle ups go out muscle ups go out now how how do they get around the muscle up how do they get because their elbows hurt they can't do a slow we need to build strength we got to do it slow how do they go around they do the keeping muscle up okay well that gets me on top of the rings but where I get the benefit of muscle ups is through that transition as I'm going between the pull up through my chest up about that's where crosses that's where planches that's where malteases that's where all advanced rings drink this it's that strength when you see a gymnast right when you see in this summer at the Olympics right and where just as an aside guys we've got some podcasts coming out for gymnastics by sorry Tim competing with here that's all right and we're going to talk some training right with some of the Olympic guys and when you when you see them you are you're going to see this massive musculature and it didn't come from pushups and it didn't come from dips it came from that advanced ring strength they do so if you're doing a keeping muscle up and you're going from below the rings to on top of the ring and it's gone you just skip the most beneficial part of the muscle up but on you wasted let me ask a related question because of course every four years I watch gymnastics I love watching gymnastics as do a lot of people and they go holy shit if I can get arms it look like that by hanging from a bar for an hour a day I need to start hanging from a bar how much of I know we talked about the rings how much of the musculature in the upper arms biceps specifically comes from straight arm work versus some form of bent arm work excellent question so the majority of the massive biceps they see is going to come from the straight arm work so for example when the guys would at that level of training at that level of strength rope climbs for example my guys had to do a triple on a seven meter row all rope climbs are done with no legs okay and GST we do ropes without legs we get some people say I know the rope is used for transportation as soon as they take out the escalators in a mall and they put ropes in in place of it or they take the elevators out and they put ropes I'll buy that argument that we use a rope for transportation until that happens a rope is used for getting for control right that's the point of having a rope so they would in five minutes they would do a triple on a seven meter rope getting the back of the line do a double on a seven meter get back in the line and do another and that'd be about five minutes worth of work okay now for them what we did notice and a lot of people miss this or into two things here at once so for the maximal strength component of it is the straight arm work multi's work in particular or I just below is the body off uh they're and people listening don't just go into your garage and try and altize on your rings you can you can totally because I don't think multi's will hurt you multi's won't hurt you but you're landing on this concrete on your face underneath the rings is probably going to hurt multi's won't it's the sudden stop at the end that will be uncomfortable now what we found out with the guys though is uh you know we did over the years the weight vest the weight the heavy weighted row climbs pull ups nothing but better mass on a biceps secondary from the ring strength then high volume rope climbs nothing nothing blow them up now the key though is for everybody listening if you go and you jump right into ropes right now and you haven't built a foundation of rows pull ups multi playing pulling then get to rope climbing right you're gonna give yourself a raging case of elbow tendonitis yeah your elbows are gonna just just just disintegrate yep like anything else you gotta pay your dues but if you go through the proper steps and you're prepared to do rope climbs there is nothing better because the bicep is an endurance muscle that's its job now it can do this but its primary function is not to how much can I do that heaviest load for one rep it's primary function is go out and kill something pick it up and carry it a long ass way back home that's its primary job that's its primary job so it just blossoms from high volume work now the key is is that it's gotta be high volume with a reasonably high load which on the rope climbs is body weight boy with that a build to that two things that I'll throw out there just because people might find it interesting so the first is you can build extremely muscular biceps is not gymnastics related but with purely straight arm heavy pulling in the debt lift combined let's just let's just say you had one day of heavy pulling and by heavy I mean two to three reps like to the knees kind of like the berry Ross protocol in the fire body no eccentric you know drop it and then let's just say you do that on Mondays and then on Fridays or Thursdays whatever it might be you do high rep kettlebell swings two armed kettlebell swings you can get really really muscular arms without doing any bent work whatsoever also when we're talking about I'm easy enough to switch that high rep kettlebell work to throw rope climb on fried if you're advanced enough if your elbows are bulletproof enough which mine are not as an example for folks like I've done plenty of rowing but here's the difference though when I have a parallel grip if you're like I can pull fuck that I can do bent rows of the barbell with 225 pounds and third whatever and you think that you're the king pulling if you don't do a lot of parallel grip work or a sat bar work and then you go to a thick rope you're in for a surprise maybe we should touch base on the difference real quick between the various grips yeah please okay so guys and in terms of GST specific strength if you're doing just pull up work your parallel grip is by far going to have the greatest return on investment simply because that parallel grip hits the breeky Alice so hard down in the elbow the reason we need that is when you climb a rope you're gonna have more of a parallel grip you do that parallel grip pull up obviously you're developing that when we're on the rings we're on hop of the rings right because we always everything is aimed for eventually getting onto the rings to build strength so when we're on the rings we need the grip turned out past parallel now back in the day great glassman and I Greg is the you know you the super bright guy founder across fit but he just didn't understand why we would turn the rings past parallel he thought it was just aesthetics coach is just aesthetics well the problem is if I'm on the rings and I do a dip by doing muscle up I do whatever and I straighten my arms and I don't turn the rings past parallel now coach I apologize for interrupting just for people to visualize this so let's just say you're up on rings and you're doing dips and you're in between the straps what incorrect me from wrong here coach but when you get to the top that means top of the rep on the top of the rep in your arms is straight that the rings themselves out slightly that's right so instead of having the rings parallel pointing straight ahead or turned in which is what most returned in they would be at say 10p.m.