Kelly Starrett and Glen Cordoza break down movement as a survival skill, exposing how 98% of orthopedic injuries stem from preventable biomechanics—like pigeon-toed walking or heel-striking running—rooted in modern training’s neglect of foundational mechanics. Starrett’s "torque dumping" theory reveals how poor posture (e.g., forward head) or rigid foot alignment destabilizes joints, citing Tim Sylvia’s longevity and NFL players’ inefficiencies as proof. Head trauma in combat sports, from Rocky’s grit to Edson Barbosa’s wheel kicks, damages HGH and testosterone, impairing recovery and emotional IQ, while PEDs like TRT merely patch flaws in suboptimal lifestyle habits. Even gluten’s inflammatory risks vary by individual, requiring tailored testing. Their scalable systems—from squatting to waving—redefine health as a blend of nervous system integrity, adaptable mechanics, and systemic accountability, not just strength or supplements. [Automatically generated summary]
I think everyone knows you need to probably put the time in under some weights.
You probably need to breathe really hard.
What we're really talking about is being a skilled human.
Can you do everything that a human being needs to be able to do?
Yes or no.
Can you squat down with your feet together like you're in Thailand having dinner?
Yes or no.
If you can't, you don't have flank or range of motion.
Why not?
That's why you have plantar fasciitis.
That's why you tore your Achilles.
This is why you have back pain.
So the thing is that you should be very, very skilled in your thinking.
Very, very skilled in your...
and cultivate the practice.
350 years ago, Musashi writes the book of the Five Rings.
He says, your combat stance is your everyday stance.
And you're like, whoa, that's so deep.
Where the short sword goes, your belly needs to be firm.
He's talking about your core, you know?
From your feet to your knees, you need to be able to create tension.
He's probably talking about torque and having your feet straight.
So, we're not the first people to take a crack at it, but we are the same people who've made the same mistakes over and over again, and you should be skilled.
We don't teach the skill.
You've been spending your genetics, and then you wake up one day and you're herniated disc, and you're like, what the hell happened?
Well, look, my life's work as a dream as a child was not to lecture adult men about posture.
Like this is not the apex, but it turns out Good standing position in yoga is called Tadasana, right?
You should know how to do that, yes or no.
And it's also the setup position for the deadlift.
The problem is that it's hard to kind of understand what positions you need to be in, what is full range of motion.
Finally, we have a language, and that language is the modern language of strength and conditioning.
If you can press and pull and roll, you know, we, you know, you hear the debunked, thinking about the old strength coaches, say like bench press, it ties the shoulders to the arms, and you're like, what the hell does that mean?
It turns out if you teach kids to create torque off of a fixed object and explain what the purpose of that is, you need to be skilled, well then, it turns out in guard, you can create torque off of any position.
You can grab the shopping cart and Be in a stable shoulder position.
So it turns out that the posture that we adopt day to day, like right now, are you in a good position or a bad position?
Well, we take a systems approach that doesn't include the word stretching because stretching has sort of been co-opted by thinking about lengthening your muscles.
So let's take your neck, for example, right?
One of the things we look at is, you know, is your spine in an optimal position?
Yes or no?
And what we see is that if you're rounded in your thoracic spine, we'll get that little hunch, right?
Which is easy if you're texting or sitting all day long.
Your head ends up a little forward.
For every inch in front of your center of mass your head is, it's plus 10 pounds.
When did everybody sort of come to a consensus on this?
Like when did people really start understanding like real physical training and how do you correct bad posture and issues like what you're talking about?
So look at what's happened with the onset of the internet.
We have literally kind of hit some kind of threshold where for the first time, in real time, we have the best practices, test-retests being shared, platforms, coaches are talking to us, strength coaches talking to nutritionists.
Let's use your own show as a model.
Look at the people you've brought on, right?
Experts in their fields.
Legitimate.
And for the first time we start to kind of tie in these very disparate systems.
You know, suddenly nutrition guys are talking to gymnasts, talking to physios.
And we were able to connect the dots in ways that we wouldn't.
I mean, 2,000 years ago the yogis figured out that putting your arms over your head didn't align the chakras.
It put the shoulder into a stable position, you know?
And so it's not like we haven't taken a crack at the human condition before.
But for the first time, we can sort of integrate the fields.
Well, it turns out that that shoulder position is the same position you should have your shoulder if you're pressing or if you're a young gymnast blocking.
It's the same shoulder.
The motor control technique has been worked out for us because humans are obsessed with performance.
They're obsessed with lifting heavier weights and going faster.
When we start to kind of underlie the physiology and match that up with the principles, now, like, look, if you go into any gym on the planet, people are front squatting and running and Olympic lifting and swinging kettlebells.
I mean, my mom brags about her deadlift PR, right?
People are like, hey, I should probably learn how to fight and rule.
The self-empowerment.
I'm not going to have a pension.
I'm going to have a 401k.
I'm going to manage it myself.
It turns out I'm responsible for my own health care.
The center of responsibility has definitely shifted back to us.
Nutrition information is sort of distilled down and shifted back to us.
You can start making better decisions about your life and realize you have to because everyone else is going to do it for you.
I think we're in a culture of people waking up and for the first time now People are engaged in real strength and conditioning systems.
They are front squatting.
They are working hard.
I mean, I think in Pavel, in one of his first books, there was a Brazilian fighter who did the 10-minute snatch test with a kettlebell and he almost killed him.
And it took him like 10 minutes or something, right?
And he waves about it.
I have like 14-year-old kids who can do that in four minutes.
I think the reason we're having good success with the book and with our video stuff is that I'm going to see you either because you're broken or because you're losing.
And both of those things are the same conversation.
And one of the real problems is that This information has been mired in the injury prevention, you know, do this and you won't get injured, but you're like, I'm not injured now, I feel great and I'm the best in the world, so why should I give a care?
Now we can start to say, hey, by the way, this conversation is about where you're dumping torque, where you can't get into good guard position, where you're bleeding force on the wall, where you're, you know, and then we start having that conversation.
And it turns out that the shoulder is the shoulder.
So if you start to understand the principles of movement, you understand what we're trying to do in the gym, then you can start to translate that stuff instantaneously to whatever sport you're doing.
So the issue is, can you maintain a position Under the duress of cardiorespiratory demand, right?
I heard you say a couple times, you're like, CrossFit, you know, like, give me a fighter.
Because the expression of being able to hold these shapes and fight and wrestle under huge metabolic demand and cardiorespiratory demand is what makes fighting really good.
And people have really done a good job of taking the conditioning off the table now.
These athletes are so conditioned, right?
But if you lose position because you're breathing hard, because you're under metabolic demand or load, right, or you're stressed, then what you see is you see incomplete training.
And the whole point of the training is to exceed your capacities so that you can maintain the robustness and fluency of your positions so that when it comes time to dance or do what you need to do, you can do those things and you don't end up giving position.
So you're saying that understanding human movement and understanding how to do anything correctly sort of will lead to an improvement in athleticism across the board?
Well, genetic is in his mom walk like that, and his dad walk like that, and he pattern like that.
So, in the NFL, for example, they won't draft you.
Dude, you wear flip-flops, there's a culture of wearing flip-flops.
What happens to your ankle if I take away your capacity to flex your ankle?
You're not going to be able to walk through the ankle.
So what do you do?
You walk around the ankle.
So this is the mechanism for bunion.
If that navicular bone starts to collapse and you see that foot collapse down, then that's a tell.
It's called a pathognomonic tell for ACL injury.
In fact, the NFL scouts look for that fallen navicular drop, the navicular drop, and they Downgrade you because they think you're more likely to tear your ACL. What is it called again?
No kid, every child is born with flat feet, but no kid actually has flat feet.
And what ends up happening is it takes a couple years, arches develop, we see it around two.
But it turns out that your ankle works best When it's straight up and down, walking straight.
So the problem is that when you walk with the foot out, you can still create a ton of torque and the stability.
You can kick people really hard.
You can run really fast.
But as soon as that leg comes behind you, then what's happened is that your hip is in an unstable position.
You've added a little twist into your knee.
Your ankle has collapsed.
And you're starting to dump torque so that that back foot, if you're pushing off that back foot to kick someone or hit someone, you've lost a little force there.
It's a little force bleed, a little force dump.
So imagine that you walk around like That position with your feet turned out and you take 10,000 steps a day because you're an average person.
10,000 steps.
So just do the math on that.
70,000 steps a week.
Quarter million steps a month.
Three million steps.
And suddenly you've practiced this foot turned out position.
The jumping and landing with your feet turned out is not okay.
That's the mechanism for so many of the ACL injuries, all the foot injuries.
So what you're saying is how do I optimize my genetics?
How do I take the best athletes in the world and make them better?
And this is the revolution we're in right now.
It's not just about injury prevention.
I know that if I put you into a better position where you can squat more, jump higher, cut harder, punch harder, kick harder, Chances are that sort of aggregates into better performance, right?
Well, imagine if it's someone jumping down from a wall with a 100-pound pack in Afghanistan.
Do you think that that's a good position or a bad position?
Or if I have to sprawl or get up and change directions for my officers, this is the same deal.
The problem is we don't sort of connect the dots.
Look, Daniel Coyle wrote this great book called The Talent Code.
Have you guys read that?
Well, it turns out skill is a complex biological phenomenon.
That's it.
So, what ends up happening is that when you practice a skill, and we know it takes 10,000 hours, a million reps, right?
A child has to do something six to 10,000 times before it becomes functional, right?
The key to adult learning is repetition.
You've heard all of this before.
Well, it turns out that when Neurons that fire together wire together.
What happens is that Schwann cell, that oligodendrocyte, comes in and myelinates that pathway.
So practice doesn't make perfect.
Practice makes permanent.
So who you are right now is who you're going to be under stress, who you are right now.
So why wouldn't you start cultivating a better position all the time?
Because it's free money, right?
And it starts to show up.
The greatest thing about competition, especially fighting, is that we're going to find out who you are.
We're going to find out what your conditioning level is.
We're going to find out what your skill is.
We're going to find out where you go mentally when it gets tough, right?
That's the point of why we train and why we fight because it helps us self-actualize and see the problems.
When we start turning this all into performance, and it's got to be measurable.
We can measure that.
I was having a call today on the way in with one of my Tour de France cyclists.
Unbelievable, phenomenal athlete, right?
His foot was a little stiff in the ankle and his knee used to wobble.
And you think, oh, that's not good.
Would you imagine if I was walking and my knees wobbled every single time, or I kicked you every single time and your knee would wobble?
And the reason we all have to go after movement first is that the movement often, if we correct your movement patterning, and then the gym is not just about getting stronger or fitter.
It's about perfect practice, like the formal language of movement.
Like, the gym is like the best expression of modern human ballet, right?
The issue is that, one is how do I make the invisible visible?
How do I take a guy like that?
I can see it.
I'm really good.
You can see it.
And pretty soon what's going to happen is, honestly, if you pick up this book, and I'm not trying to pitch this thing, but you can see it.
You start to get the vision, and it's so bad.
You can see how people are moving.
You go to the Olympics, and you just watch the Olympics, and you're like, that guy could go faster.
Why is his knee wobbling?
Why is that shoulder incomplete?
So the first thing we do is we prioritize the movement.
Can you correct the formal language of that?
Because especially in a pattern that I've done a billion times, like let's take my Olympic rowers, right?
These Olympic rowers have pulled 30 or 40 strokes a minute for 200 kilometers a week for as long as they've been rowing.
It's insane.
The patterns.
So how am I going to break that pattern?
Am I going to mess with them?
No, that's your coach's job.
Your coach teaches you technique.
My job as a strength and conditioning coach or as the training partner is to give you a new pattern in this very formal language called front squatting, swinging kettlebells, doing the basic language, finding the problems, Addressing the problems, practicing the movement, and guess what?
Every single time our athletes can put it back into the field more effectively.
So what you're saying essentially for the layman is when you're doing something like rowing, it's a very specific movement, so you essentially provide movement in the opposite direction or like if you're pulling, pushing...
And if we had you do that, we would see that you had a little dead spot in your thoracic spine where it's stiff, right?
We're not getting good rolling.
If I was gonna, you know, swim or block a net, you know, a ball at the net as a volleyball player, we'd see the same thing.
You need to be in that globally flexed and globally extended positions.
Do you have fluid fluency?
Like Ido Portal, great thinker about this stuff.
He's like, what do you mean you can't roll backwards and roll off your back?
Like, that's how you fall a lot, backwards.
So why haven't we taught people this basic tumbling skills?
Oh, that's what gymnastics is.
So your spine only does a couple of very serious things.
You know, and we can make some nuance changes, but that's the basic language.
The shoulders have a couple basic laws, that when your shoulders are in front of your body, right, from your hands up to your head, they have a stable position, and that position is external rotation.
It's trying to break the bar.
You know all these cues.
Screw your feet into the ground is a cue to create torque and stability at the hip.
Well, it turns out, if you understand the movement principles, Then when you're in these shapes, you're climbing, you're in a bad shape, you can always create a stable position or a position where you're going to generate the most force.
Practicing that in the gym and also making it easy to understand because when you're fighting, it's hard to see where you're giving away torque and power.
It's hard to see how your limited hip function, right?
You're missing hip flexion, like bringing your knee to your chest.
You can't do it.
How do we know?
Well, that's the mechanism for hip impingement and torn labrum and all the problems we see.
But if I ask you to squat, can you get into the bottom position of a pistol, for example?
That basic shape.
It's not an accident that the sazen, the kneeling position, a lot of people can't kneel.
That's a full range of motion of your ankle.
These are the basic shapes.
The formal languages of movement, fighting, gymnastics, all of these things, people have worked this out.
Yoga.
And so you don't need to do yoga if you lift heavy weights and you understand what you're doing.
If you're putting your arms over your head and snatching, you probably are doing muscle snatch or swinging a kettlebell.
Chances are you understand yoga without understanding yoga.
It's beautiful, and there's a spa, and my wife's like, hey, there's a yoga class.
You should take that, you fat guy.
It'll be good for you, and it'll be entertaining for them.
So I show up.
There's like 20 girls already in their yoga costumes, and the woman sees me, and she looks at me just like I look at you, and you're like, fuck, this girl, this guy is huge.
He's going to be inflexible.
He's going to take up all my resources.
But I understand.
What the stable shoulder position is in any sport, in any platform, because it's the same shoulder.
Weird position, but can you express the full physiology?
So there is a good position.
So the issue is, if you're limited range of motion, let's take Forrest, right?
You know he's got a bad wing, right?
He's missing some range of motion on that shoulder, right?
Some things he's been working on for a long time, right?
He got dumped in a bad shape.
The question is, you know, that limits his movement language down to very few.
He has a few ranges he's very effective in and some ranges where he's not very effective in.
Sorry, Forrest, I'm giving away the keys to the castle here.
But it had to be Forrest Griffin in a bar fight.
But the real issue is that if you have...
One of the basic archetypes for the human being is you should be able to put your arms straight up over your head.
Rib cage down, armpit forward.
As if you're holding a dumbbell over your head.
Kettlebell gives you a little bit more breathing room.
But can you hold two 55-pound kettlebells over your head, yes or no?
That's full range of motion, right?
But you need to be able to be stable here and stable here, still overhead, stable here, stable here, stable here.
What happens is if I have full range of motion and I train in these formal ways of creating torque off these objects, right, I'm swinging kettlebells, I'm breaking the bar, I'm bench pressing, I'm pressing, I'm doing push-ups, all the things we do, then that gives me movement possibilities where I can still be in a tenuous position and still generate force.
Well, picking up off the ground, deadlift, right, that's a basic archetype.
Reaching into the crib, grabbing my baby, picking up the keg, you know.
Someone is jumping on you in guard, right?
They wrap their legs around you when you're in standing position.
That's a deadlift, yes or no.
So, can you do that?
Picking something up is kind of this hang position.
This is one of the archetypes of the shoulder, which is, what, Kimura?
I'm not just a crappy fighter, but I get it.
So do I have full range of motion in my shoulder?
And if I don't, in this position, I'll compensate because I'm a human being.
And now my shoulder is forward, and now I'm in a bad position.
So what ends up happening is that I start fighting and organizing, and Jerry DeForest, like Chuck Liddell had that, you know, John Hackleman, he called me up one time, he's like, oh, my shoulder's killing me.
I'm like, well, he can't punch.
With this totally internally rotated crappy position forever and not expect your shoulder to ache, right?
And how did he fix it?
Well, he started restoring his range of motion, cleaning up the movement mechanics in this other formal thing called training, and then that allowed him to express better mechanics.
When you start to see the breakdowns, and it's part of it, like, how do you make the stimulus for adaptation to become a better human being, to be a more effective athlete, to train...
I wrestled in high school as a terrible wrestler, and I had a coach who wrestled at Iowa, and he would get my head against his head, and then I was like, okay, take my lunch money, get my girlfriend.
I was over.
And a guy like Silva figures that out early on as part of his fighting strategy.
Maybe he's conscious of it.
Maybe he's not.
Maybe he has a Zen master who's like control the head, control the world, you know?
So by the time pain is punctured into your consciousness during movement, we have a serious problem.
The brain is like, whoa, bro.
And this is why everyone who knows who's ever exercised, you lay down at night and then you start to relax and downregulate and chill.
And all of a sudden, your knee starts throbbing.
You're like, what's wrong with this bed?
Did I twist my knee when I was brushing my teeth?
What's happened is you're not moving.
If you've been waking up in the middle of the night because your back is killing you, your neck is killing you, what's happened is you've stopped moving, you've stopped flooding the brain with that movement signaling, and all of a sudden you're just getting the pain signal.
You're getting the raw, unattenuated signal in the back of the system.
So, that's one of the problems.
The second problem is that You maniacs have spent your lives practicing being in pain.
So maybe really the best athletes can just suffer worse.
We know, like those athletes who can suffer, like they just, they can work harder than everyone else, they can generate more water than everyone else, they can just They get through fights with broken hands.
Well, and then that's the third piece, that once the adrenaline is going, you are not going to feel it.
So we can't use that pain as a signal that you're in a bad position because you'll always override that every single time.
I mean, who's the Gracie grandfather who's like, I just watched him tear my arm apart.
So it's so bad pain, right, that you can take a shot to the face.
But it's interesting that people go for the liver shot.
Why?
Because it punctures through that little wall, right?
And do people feel pain in the first round, or do they start feeling pain in the sixth or seventh round, or the fifth round, or when they're starting to really break down, starting to get fatigued.
The question is that we know they're going to wear out their knee, they're going to wear out their hip.
It's the same set of problems we see with people who jump and land wrong at speed.
The same people when you see a bad front squat gone wrong, right?
When the knee comes in, the back overextends, the hip impinges.
This is the exercicio, the exercise, the training, is basically the exaggerated reality of what sport is or movement in life.
If you're holding your baby and your shoulder's forward, this feels stable, but this is the position that a lot of my tactical athletes have to spend time in.
They're weapons in this position, shoulders forward.
So it turns out if I'm missing my internal rotation on my shoulder, because I'm designed for survival, my body's got a backup plan for me.
Look, my pec doesn't even work like a pec anymore, right?
It's destabilizing my chest.
I'm living off this front delt.
That's how I tore my biceps tendon.
So what ends up happening is that I get away with it for a while until I can't or until I have catastrophic injury or I start to get stiff in that position.
Then when I go put my arm over my head or do something bad, you know, I get hammered on it.
That's interesting because, you know, in a lot of positions, the correct defensive position puts you in a very awkward place, like the way your body's rotating.
The correct defensive position, especially, you know, for kickboxing, like you're all hunched in and your shoulders are pressed to your chin.
What I'm trying to get at is that there's some techniques, especially martial arts techniques, where they require these crazy movements, like wheel kicks, things along those, axe kicks.
And what we're saying for folks who are listening to this on iTunes, Kelly's just basically showing your hand in your fist sort of sideways in front of you.
I want to ask you this before I forget, because I think it's really important.
When you were talking about people with awkward movement, what do you do for someone, like say, that didn't do any athletics as a kid, and then they're 30 years old and they want to try jiu-jitsu, and they really don't know how to move right?
So there's a local MMA school in our neighborhood.
One of my friends is a Sambo fighter and teaches it.
And these kids come in and they're like, this is going to be awesome.
And he's like, oh lord, you can't even absorb force in this position.
So he ends up teaching the fundamentals of movement, which look a lot like, can you squat, yes or no?
Ask kids to get in a good position of wrestling and guard.
What is this position?
What we have to do is give people the context and the language The language cues to be able to express that in that form of fighting.
For example, I can say things like, your shoulder isn't normal unless you can jerk.
For those of you who don't know jerking, in the Olympics everyone knows jerking.
But in the Olympics, when you're putting your arm over your head, you stop because your triceps get weak and you drop down underneath the bar.
So if you were picking up something really heavy, like a log, you would jump it up and then drop underneath it and stand back up.
So that's the jerk in the Olympic lift.
But what I'm teaching you to do is be able to create a stable shoulder and lengthen from both sides at the same time.
The same thing you would do is if you're pushing someone and had to create distance away from them.
So I grab you, I push like in football and I have to create distance.
You have to be able to kind of express this complex movement and the problem is We jump people into sport and hope they do it without having any of the tools to be able to functionally, maybe they might even have the range of motion to do that, and they definitely don't have the motor control to express that.
And kids who figure that out because they, you know, if you ever did a backbend, right, as a kid, that turns out to be a globally arched position, right?
That's what your spine should be able to do.
And it turns out you're teaching kids what the stable front rack position is.
Which is the position where they would Olympic lift or create shoulder position or this protected head position, right, or I'm grabbing you is the same expression as climbing a rope or, you know, doing that back bend back roll.
So people show up now at the little MMA studio and they know a lot about MMA, right?
And they're fit.
And that's because we're starting to see best practices come apart.
People are kind of coming together in In systems approach, right?
The nutrition is dialed.
You know, you talk to the average person who takes care of their body and they're like, yeah, I'm gluten-free and I drink, I put MCT oil in my coffee, what about it?
If you're teaching them a sport, like say if you're teaching them a martial art or something like that, should it almost be required to teach them how to move first?
Let's just say one of my NFL coaches that I know, he's a strength coach, right?
He's like, how much pressing do my guys need to do in the season?
All they do is out there and press.
So we take young gymnasts.
One of our kids at our gym was a former national champion gymnast at UCLA. She is a machine and she understands innately what some of these really good positions are because she's been doing them her whole life.
So now I take that skill set, throw it into a sport, and she's a monster.
So the question is, what's the best way To create these athletes with this ready state where then they can start picking up sports.
Can I remodel people?
You betcha.
I've done it a thousand times.
We take people who are the best and we make them better.
We take people who are not the best and we break them into world record holders.
We take people who are injured and messed up and we set world championships.
The testing ground for this information is at the highest level of sport and performance.
That's how we test it.
Then we take those principles and drills and it has to be able to scale from the injured athlete to the Olympian, from the mom and dad to the kid to the fighter, it's all the same.
So what you're essentially saying is that people who are not fit and not well-rounded in their athleticism are successful, if they're fighters especially, in spite Of their ability, their physical ability.
But enhancing that physical ability and balancing, they would take them to the next level.
So we look at someone, you know, why is that foot flat?
Well, it's because no one ever made them an Olympic lift or practiced jumping and rounding or consciously said, when you jump up from the bottom position, you know, out of guard, jump up, I want you to hit and screw your feet into the ground.
So, the key is, how do I develop these skills?
And I can do it in my laboratory, which is the gym.
Because the gym isn't just about working harder.
When you're working out, it's not about working out.
It's about re-producing the skills.
So let's take some of my tactical guys, right?
The ninjas I get to work with.
They go in and clear a room.
They're taught to have feet straight because they need to sweep from side to side and they need to have movement options, right?
Just watch O-Dark 30. It's legit.
Or Active Valor.
Those guys walk in.
Feet are straight.
They can clear the room side to side.
They can move.
So if I come in and one of my foots turned out, well, I can't turn.
My sweep is off, right?
Where did I sweep my weapon?
If you jump and land, and you sweep from my legs, and when my legs has turned out, I can't move as efficiently than that.
So, how do I develop that practice?
Because, even when I'm cleaning a room with terrorists, or I'm in the middle of a fight, the last thing I'm thinking about, or should be thinking about, is my foot position.
If we teach rotation, for example, we don't spend a lot of time teaching rotation because it happens.
We spend a lot of time training the resisting of rotation.
Yet when it comes time, if the athlete is mobile, they can twist and resist that twist.
So you end up in these bad positions and my goal is to create a movement library With as much capacity in that as I can, so my athletes are positionally strong.
They can be strong and stable and generate a lot of force in those bad positions because you're going to be in bad positions.
If I can make all these conditions, if I have my $150 shoes and my inserts and I run on a soft surface or a treadmill and I can run like this until I can't.
You're designed to be 110 years old when you're designed to be pain free for that 110 years.
That's it.
So, when you start to wear a hole in your kneecap, because you've been heel striking, and that heel comes down, the whole quad loads, knee comes forward, creates a ton of shear, you wear a hole in your kneecap, and you see your doctor, and the doctor's like, uh, you should stop running.
And you say things like, well, you know, you're the worst doctor ever.
You're not allowing me to express myself through my running.
This is BS. Well, and it's the same thing.
Well, the doctor's saying something very reasonable.
Which means I take away your ankle range of motion, and suddenly you start to figure out, oh, I can walk with my feet turned out a little bit.
It makes my ankles more effective with this shortened heel cord position.
If I take that body and I said, okay, here's a stable young kid with a brilliant spine, right, young, we're doing gymnastics, and I just can't the whole thing forward a centimeter and a half from the bottom...
That projects out over the spine of the kid, maybe two centimeters, three centimeters, so the whole kid's center mass is forward.
And because you're a human being, you'll just compensate for it.
So we start to adopt these patterns.
The same patterns that if I'm texting in this crappy position, my upper back is rounded.
That means when I look up, so if I look at like a simple position, like if I just kind of round and text, I pick my head up.
My head's naturally level because my eyes are going to always get to the horizon line.
But if I sit up, look what position my head is in.
So now I'm having this kind of car accident in my cervical spine, my neck, where I get lower cervical flexion, upper cervical extension.
And not only does this wear out discs and cause osteophytes, But it's less effective position when you take a shot to the head or you need to generate force.
Your body prioritizes that nervous system above all other things.
And you know this, when you injured your back, how stoked were you to have wild sex?
You still wanted to have wild sex, but you weren't stoked, right?
Because your back hurt so bad.
You injure your nervous system, my athletes go down, I got, like, it takes me It's gonna take me two days.
If it's just a stupid spinal fault, a little tweak, two days to turn the whole thing around.
I've lost two days of training.
Most time it takes a couple weeks, right?
Before you start feeling like you want to giant force again.
Your body is shutting you down because it's such a primary threat to who you are as a human being.
You have a brain to move you through the environment.
So you can interact with your environment.
That's the whole reason that the nervous system developed in the animal, to just reproduce itself.
You can feed, you can fight, you can run away.
When you trash that nervous system, your body prioritizes it in a big way.
In fact, cognition, all of the higher-order thinking of the human being, it's called the neocortex, has been bootstrapped on top of the movement brain.
So it's not an accident that like, hey, I have a meditation practice and a movement practice, right?
I have to be a really good thinker.
I have to also train hard.
Well, it's because these systems are totally integrated and to disintegrate them, to get away from the movement and just go be a piece of meat on the treadmill or the elliptical machine, does human beings a disservice.
So that's saying essentially that really brilliant people who don't take care of their body are brilliant, again, in spite of the fact that they're not reaching their full potential.
But what about the amount of time that it takes to develop skill as opposed to the amount of time that it takes to spend doing physical training, like teaching someone a martial art, for example?
No, you only have like four days a week to train.
How many days a week would you train this guy or this gal in physical movement and how many days would you let them go to kickboxing class or go to jiu-jitsu class?
But it's not in a lot of positions like rubber guard.
There's triangles.
There's a lot of like weird You know, positions where these are very odd positions with your feet tucked under people's chins and pulling on your foot sideways, you know?
What I'm saying is that the amount of time that it takes to get awesome at that, the amount of time to get that shit laser sharp is repetition in the technique over and over again.
Well, I'm saying that the skills I'm teaching in the strength conditioning, as a side effect I become fit, as a side effect I become stronger, should integrate and support 100% of the training you're doing on the other side.
The problem is we're like, oh, this is my training, this is my conditioning and strength work.
It's the same work.
And then what ends up happening is that you'll have a stronger trunk, you'll be able to generate force from these worst positions, you'll be able to recover more quickly.
It takes a long time to develop.
So what we're asking is, you know, are you skilled?
Where are you going to put your eggs in the basket?
You should probably be skilled in all of your movement and that all of those movement skills translate in.
How many times do you need to...
People definitely get this messed up.
The most important thing to do to get good at a sport is your sport.
If you're going to be a fighter, you better do a lot of fighting.
Then I just need to do enough strength and conditioning to fit in the holes.
If you go fight and wrestle and fight and do other things, your conditioning is pretty stellar.
You probably don't need to do a whole bunch of extra conditioning.
Because you just did that on the ring.
All I have to do is fight a bunch of people once and you understand how conditioned you need to be.
But I do need a systematic way to uncover your limitations and that's why today we're going to deadlift.
And so some of the things we do even three times a week or twice a week is enough to sort of recover Or uncover the positional missing so I can see it.
How do we make the invisible visible?
Well, one thing is that these master coaches can see you fight and be like, that guy's really good.
I don't know what it is.
Let me give you an example.
I have a six-year-old daughter we call Bear.
She is the most legit human being I've ever met.
And she's wired the way I dream about being wired as a kid.
She's just like...
And so there's this old school Olympic lifting coach named Mike Bergner who is the man.
He lives down in San Diego.
He's been Olympic lifting longer than dinosaurs.
He saw Caroline move at an early kid, and he's like, you will send me Caroline.
She will live at my house in the summers.
She is an Olympic champion.
How did he decide that?
Well, she stands forward.
She creates a lot of torque automatically.
She's organized well.
Her head's balanced.
She moves in the same way that your coaches would walk down the hall and be like, hey, you play soccer, kid?
We should play.
Or someone grabbed you because you do these things.
So What I'm saying is we've got to keep developing these skills and uncovering the problems because if you just fight all the time, you're going to end up looking like a fighter and you'll adopt these positions and it's hard to sort of systematically uncover the problems.
So come back to the shoulder.
If you're going to be in a wretched position but you're missing range of motion, you don't have the control and the positioning, you will sacrifice position in that bad position and that's where you start to get injured because you get dumped on your shoulder.
That's where you're generating torque.
That's where the guy breaks your grip.
Because you're in these untenable positions and you're compromised in those untenable positions.
It also teaches you how to keep your shit together when you're falling apart.
When your body's physically falling apart, it teaches you how to at least conserve enough energy and distribute it to know, like, Okay, we can't go full blast right now, but I can go right now at 40%, full clip, and then in 30 seconds I'll be back.
competition so 100% right like you have to be stressed yeah we have to put you if you don't ever compete or fight or perform music like stand-up comedy is the same thing as fighting it's It's the same thing as competing.
So if you're really funny with your friends and someone's like, you should be a comic and you start speaking, you're not really a comic until you stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and do it.
You must put yourself through some stress to figure out what to do when it happens, because otherwise it's an overwhelming amount of stimuli and energy and adrenaline, and it's hard to manage.
I mean, I have met only a couple people who have been what I consider in the 90%.
Like, who are just wiring and not a lot of efficiency left to be gained in the system.
And I'm not talking about skill.
You've still got to train, you've still got to be conditioned, you've still got to show up and perform.
But I'm not saying this is a done deal.
But harping back to our kids thing, how do we create this ready state, or this kid with a set of skills?
So my daughter's swim, right?
It teaches them so much about positioning.
They do gymnastics, they swim, they do a ball sport.
This is the language, but also there's some formal movement training in there.
That's in the gymnastics.
The formal movement training in the swimming.
We have to create a language and archetype so that kids can understand whether they're aware of what the shoulder needs to be doing at age, but they still know how to turn the iPad on and off.
It's hard to undo the BS. So, if you tell me, hey, I have this fighter, this is what he does, he goes to Muay Thai, I mean, I drive past with ice cream, get my ice cream for my kids, drive past that MMA school every single day, people in there, That's probably pretty great all-around healthy fitness, breathing hard, gonna feel great sort of things.
My golfers who turn one direction for a living, the fighters who lead with the left a ton, that shouldn't be a surprise.
I should start looking for more dysfunction on the left side, stiffness on the left side.
The hip doesn't turn as effectively on that right side because I'm punching off it over and over and it gets stiff.
So, if you can understand the positions, you can Program to it and that's the sort of the second half is that sometimes people's biomechanics gets messed up your tissues are just stiff your joint capsule stiff you physically can't get into the good position because you're doing it a lot then what do you do about it and so if we give people the basic tools They can turn it around.
So the formal language of strength conditioning makes things easier to see.
If you recognize that left side to right side and try to mobilize that position, right, address all the systems and you're moving correctly, well chances are you can probably fix it without even doing that squatting.
Well, the issue is, is he doing that because that's the only reason, only way he can move?
And boy, if he didn't have full range of motion in his hip, for example, that's the problem.
So as soon as you give...
If you teach athletes, and they're doing their skill, wait, hang on.
If you teach skills, because this messes with people's minds.
If you're a skilled athlete and you're training and doing all the drills and all the things, if I improve your range of motion, you instantaneously use it.
You'll suck it up and use it.
And I did this with some fighter's hips.
They were in guard.
I gave them, showed them how to mobilize, and I mobilized them into better positions in guard.
And literally, they ended up in a stronger position because they used it right away.
So hands in, internally rotates you and puts you into an unstable position.
If he's in a bad lower spine position, then that's the only position he can get his feet if his pelvis is overextended.
So one of the things that we've got to teach people is what do you prioritize first?
We prioritize nervous system for the reasons we talked about.
Which includes the relationship between your pelvis and your spine, which is the best position to kick in.
I was just looking at a great tennis player, and he's just completely straight up and down.
Organized, toes pointed in the net, or he slams the ball.
It's because he figured out that was the most efficient position.
So if we organize the hip, what we see is that if your trunk is disorganized, and people out there have a ton of shoulder pain, If you're rounded through your upper back, you cannot control your shoulders effectively.
You lose power, you lose position, you lose mechanics.
So if you squat or run and you collapse your arches, is that a win?
No, that's a fundamental breakdown.
And patterns that take long time to change.
It takes two years to turn over all the connectivity in your body, all your fascia.
Two years.
So if I screw my foot into the ground, then the mechanics, the fascia, the arch, the bony structures pick up the arch, and the whole system becomes more stable.
So if you take your middle finger, put it over your pointer finger on your right hand, And put it down.
That's your ACL in the front.
Got it?
ACL. So your ACL comes in, that's anterior cruciate ligament, attaches into your tibia.
If I externally rotate that thing, anchor down, no, it becomes stable.
Instead of being up here, like if you have overhooks, that's why when a guy has double underhooks on you and you have overhooks and you still flip them, you must be a bad motherfucker.
There must be a big disparity in the grappling ability.
Depending on where you are, it's the correct technique that's been assumed after You know, hundreds of years or decades or whatever it has been of testing and competition.
Well, you know, I disagree with you, but then in practicing the techniques, now I agree with you, because there's like certain shit, like I was thinking about guillotines, but the choking arm is this arm, and essentially that's exactly where it goes.
It goes into that kind of a position.
I mean, it's an awkward, especially if you do the Denny Propagos.
If you're watching on iTunes, if you're a right-handed choker, Your right palm is facing outward and your left palm is facing inward as you do the choke.
It's a weird, odd position, but what it does is the way it sets the bone up on the neck, it's perfect.
It's like the perfect, but it's odd as fuck.
That's an odd as fuck feeling to have your hands like this in this weird position.
What Kelly is saying is if your shoulder is in a good position, then you're stronger from that position.
So if you've got a guy in a guillotine, right, and your shoulder is forward, your shoulder is rolled forward, you don't have as much squeezing power.
You don't have the same amount of leverage put into that versus If your shoulder's back, and then you get your chest over their head, right, and collapse it, and you're able to get that.
So a person with a comprehensive understanding of how the human body should move like you, when you could actually probably accelerate their ability to pick up skills.
So the reason Rolfing didn't cure squatting knee pain cancer is that it's still incomplete because it doesn't still revolve.
You have to teach people to move first, and you have to take this approach.
When you're on the ball, You're working on the soft tissue, but you're also working on the rib joints.
You're also working on the thoracic joints.
So what happens is that you're stuck stiff because your T-spine gets stiff.
That's what happens.
You start to improve that mechanics.
Your head positioning changes.
The whole system upregulates.
I have been in surgeries where they have literally, like they look at a guy's knee.
And the knee looks like a bloody cave.
Like there are stalagmites and stalactites and there are boulders in there and there's blood and there's no ACL. And the physician is like, what the hell?
They pull out rocks and it pops out and everyone laughs.
Well, it turns out that guy doesn't have knee pain.
So the issue is that you're designed to be ridden hard and put away wet.
You are designed...
When you just get a picture...
I know so many world record holders and so many world champions who have herniated discs that are asymptomatic.
They just don't hurt.
You'll recover that thing.
What you've lost is the right to be in shitty positions.
You've sort of kind of given up that right.
You've used your get-out-of-jail-free card, and now you're going to be more positional sensitive.
As you open up that thoracic spine and heal that disc, one of my friends told you...
They're poorly perfused, which is a reason why you can't be inflamed all the time and run around.
You've got to set up the conditions for healing.
But theoretically, You can't regrow an ACL or a bloody bone, but you're designed to heal until you die.
So the real question is, how are you optimizing that healing situation?
I have this little formula.
Right lifestyle means you're dealing with your stress, you're getting enough sleep, and the people out here know they don't get enough sleep.
Sleep less than six hours a day, you can be 30% immune compromised, and your fasting blood glucose is up, it's elevated, you're pre-diabetic, like you had plus 30 pounds on you instantaneously.
If you have right lifestyle, sleep, nutrition, hydration, you're doing all those things, plus correct movement, you should be pain-free and continue to get better.
So we take that, our athlete Silva, right, who's 30 years old, No, he's a bit older.
Okay, so one of the things that I'm interested in is how do I extend the careers of these great athletes?
Because it takes a long time to become a good fighter.
Young kids in their 20s are genetic monsters.
They're metabolically super fit, freakishly talented and fast.
But by the time you're sort of in your 30s, you have fought a lot, you have a lot of experience, but that's when your body starts to break down.
But you're really good when you're 34. You're really good when you're 35. Why have you been fighting for 25 years?
You're a soldier, you're a Tour de France guy, you're a powerlifter.
How do I extend your career How do I optimize your positions?
Because you can do it until you physically can't do it anymore, right?
Until you decide that I'm too slow or I'm not worth the training versus taking out because my neck hurts or my back hurts.
And we're having this luck.
We're being able to extend guys' careers because we resolve their positions, we get them into these better lifestyles where they're not eating the gluten, they're drinking more water, they're sleeping better, et cetera.
Like that sport is going to accumulate some trauma.
But if I know how to kick correctly, let's just say, then when I kick you, I turn the leg over, one of the things that happens is the hip ends up in a more stable position.
So he's saying, hey, it happened in these high collisions.
What position was his back in when he collided in these other kids?
We teach chest up to tacklers, right?
Yeah, kids can't perform some of these basic squats, and so they overextend in this shape because they don't have this language of keeping the spine straight, and they basically...
Listen, man, you're obviously the expert in this physical movement thing, but I think you've got to take into consideration the physical trauma of the 300-pound guys running at you.
Well, I think this is what he's trying to say, is if you're having that drama in a bad position, then it's going to have higher consequences.
So, So if that same person, say, for example, understands how to squat, understands how to deadlift, understands the proper organization of the spine, and then that motor pattern is ingrained, right?
So that's just a part of their wiring.
And then they go out on the football field and they're hitting in those good positions, their chances of getting injured are a lot lower than, say, if they've developed these bad positional habits, right?
And if I don't teach kids to get stiff and brace against that, the same way we teach our young throwers, we teach them to arch as hard as they can.
Well, the arching harder they can is me cranking on those joints over and over.
This pattern was set up from him in high school, in middle school.
Billions of reps accelerated under big loads with 300 pound guys, accelerated in the ring.
So, could we have extended his career long enough?
And more importantly, I want these fighters to finish their careers and not be disabled.
I want them to finish their careers and have some aches and pains, and hey, they tore their ACL, but they shouldn't be disabled.
The same thing with our firefighters, the same thing with our kids in the Army.
You know, in your 40s, you should still be able to train, you should still be able to pick up your kids, and what we're seeing is that that guy has rung the bell on his back, seriously, because maybe he played pro ball and had some unfavorable things.
How do we maximize his positions?
unidentified
Brian, what the fuck are you putting on the TV? Buffalo penis.
You see that same rules applied in jiu-jitsu or in fighting, right?
So you know when you throw a cross, you, you know, turn your foot into the ground.
Well, that...
All that is is a mechanism of stability, right?
You're just creating stability through the hips so you can transfer that force up through the ground, through your body, out through your hand.
So if you're practicing that in strength and conditioning, right, say we're practicing a split jerk or a squat or whatever it is, we're able to practice those mechanics so then when you go into your sport fighting, whatever it is, it's transferable.
One of the problems that we have with athletes who are...
In a very sympathetic state, right?
You're fighting, training, it's a very high sympathetic state.
So your sympathetic nervous system is up and going.
You're in this fight or flight kind of pounding.
We measure this with heart rate variability in our athletes.
We can put our heart rate monitor on you in the morning.
When you breathe in, your heart rate accelerates.
When you breathe out, it decelerates.
Kids who are not recovering, their heart rate stays the same.
Boom, boom, boom, they're driving.
You lay down at night, you can't turn off.
I know good coaches who've worked with NBA players, the only way that NBA player can come down after the game or from training or practice is to smoke a bowl and roll out on the foam roller.
And that really is about tricking the body into Accessing the parasympathetic nervous system.
It's not an accident.
I think some of those cultures around, physical cultures, have some of these things built in about bringing you out of that sympathetic state and bringing you into that parasympathetic state, which is about adaptation and recovery.
So that's that state where you can...
So, I mean, how weird is that, you know, getting a handjob in a tie place after you fight is really also about...
So if you, if these guys are caught in this sympathetic outflow state, right, they're just, you know, the dirty secret of pro sports is Ambien.
Like, that is such a dirty secret of guys getting on the bus back up from after plan, they take an Ambien, all the soldiers surviving, start sleeping, they take an Ambien, they take two Ambien, they wake up and take another Ambien.
This is how they're trying to sleep again.
So we start measuring all of this stuff, yet we're in bad position.
So if I'm overextended, which is where most of us are living, where most of us are living in this overextended position, not this uber flexed.
Your lower back is overextended, your upper back is slightly flexed.
This is like when you're sitting up in the car, when you're standing with your feet turned out, your pelvis is dumped forward a little bit.
When you are in a bad position of your spine, your body doesn't work very well.
The whole thing, just like in your bad position of the foot, you can't kick as well, you can't move as well.
Well, the same thing happens with the musculature of your trunk, so that if you're in an overextended position, your pelvic floor doesn't turn on, which means you can't create as much intra-abdominal pressure.
This is why you see overextended women exercising and they pee when they jump, right?
In that sense, it's actually very important to never overextend yourself.
It's important, especially during training, to extend yourself to the brink, never overextend yourself, never get yourself in a position where you're using shitty form.
You know, you brought up something that we're starting to see is that culturally there's this shift going on where some of the big corporations Some of the best thinkers are saying, hey, stop blaming the corporations.
And it is also, look, there's nothing wrong with having corporations, even if the corporations are bullshitting people in that way, with advertising, rather, not lying.
But it's also, it's us that are not accepting responsibility for our own diet and getting together and figuring out the same amount of time you spend pursuing your career.
You should spend that amount of time pursuing your diet.
And if you think about all the other shit in your life, like your career and your fucking school and Starcraft, you think about all that shit, but you don't think about your body, you're fucking up.
I cook eggs with one hand in my ear like I'm picking my ears.
It's a terrible combat stance.
Musashi was a bad motherfucker.
I mean, he wrote a lot of amazing things, and one of the most amazing things he wrote was the need for balance, the need for art, the need for philosophy, the need for calligraphy.
This whole conversation and literally the people you're bringing on is saying, what is the optimized self?
How much more capacity do I have?
The metaphor for saying the training, what if I didn't ever fight or express this, but I should still be a skilled human when I pick up my kids or when I'm cooking or when I'm lifting my groceries?
Because he keeps pulling up the horse cock on the TV. You do it again, you fuck it.
If you get out of a chair, you walk three meters, you turn around, you sit back in the chair.
That's the test.
If you can do it fast, you're less likely to fall and kill yourself.
They can measure that.
There's a famous hammer thrower named Litvinov who had a squat workout he did on Mondays.
He would front squat 200 kilos for 7 reps and then run 400 meters.
Those things are scaled.
What we have to do, it's the same thing, getting out of a chair, walking, front squatting, running, same.
Our thinking has to be integrated enough.
This is Buckminster Fuller talking about integrated systems, right?
Mutual economy systems.
It has to scale for my kids.
What you need to eat is the same thing your kids need to eat.
How you take care of your body is while your kids take care of their body.
It has to scale up and down.
I have to be integrated in all those systems, and if I don't, No wonder we see so much wasted effort with all the kind of BS problems we're dealing with.
His right arm, he was talking about it on the podcast, is like his wrist all the way up.
He lost amazing amounts of muscle tissue, massive atrophy.
Pinching of the nerves, and he's had two neck surgeries so far.
And you know what man, for a dude like that, like former UFC heavyweight champion, if a guy's an accountant and his arm turns into a noodle, you know, it freaks him out.
There's certain guys that in the gym, they're the most frightening people on earth, and then something happens to them when they compete and they fall apart.
We're guys that aren't physically talented, but they're just fucking ferocious.
And they find a way to win, and you're like, this motherfucker is fighting above his head, where everybody's fighting 10-20% below their capacity.
It's like his expectations have been lowered so much by his own physicality that he goes in there and says, I don't give a fuck, I'm gonna fucking fight with what I've got.
Whereas everybody else is like, don't fuck up, don't make a mistake.
It's almost like he benefits from being the underdog.
People don't understand that how they squat will have a direct effect on how they punch.
People haven't connected those dots.
What Kelly was trying to say earlier about making the connection between strength and conditioning and fighting, for example, is that if I understand what the athlete needs to do when he's squatting, Then I don't need to be a fighting coach to know that he's going to lose power when he punches.
So I can watch you squat and I can tell already based on how you're squatting.
Say your knee is caving in and your ankle is collapsing and you have a shitty squat, right?
Well, I can tell right away that that's your motor power.
So if you take that movement and you transplant that into a fighter, a guy that's throwing a punch, Well, I can deduce that that's going to be the same motor pattern.
So it's easier to fix that movement pattern when you're squatting.
Like, okay, let's get you to understand the correct mechanics of the body while you're moving in a controlled environment.
And then hopefully over time that becomes ingrained.
And then when you throw a punch, then it's like they start to make the connection.
They're like, oh shit, you know, like.
I tore my ACL because I was squatting with my foot out and my knee was caving in.
That was my brain.
When I needed to be in that position, my brain was like, this is your position.
So if we look at the science of chronic pain, for example, The pain pathway, and this is important for athletes who are in chronic pain, especially people who are engaged in high contact sports, these bad positions get mapped with the movement pathway.
So your brain starts to think, even if the pain stimulus isn't there, your brain starts to think, ah, you're moving this way.
That's been painful for the last six months or the last year.
I know it's going to cause pain.
So if I give you a brand new motor pathway in your brain, boom, I get this clean motor pathway.
I'm able to get athletes out of painful positions.
That's like, I mean, that's check yonder thinking right there.
So if we look at leaky brain and the inflammatory response and the quality of your tissues, how do I optimize those things?
Can I change that?
Can I limit the damage?
You know, one of our friends, his name's John Wellborn, played in the NFL for a bunch of years, part of that big brain study, and they basically went in, looked at his brain, afterwards, and they're like, you played left tackle, you can play in the NFL for 10 years, we can tell by the head trauma that you have.
They took us tests.
And he was like 99th percentile in analytics and he was maybe 10th percentile in emotional IQ because of the brain trauma.
One of our definitions of best athlete is who's the kid who can pick up the new skill the fastest?
How fast can you learn a new skill?
I mean, you probably, you know, you see those kids that, you know, could just be like, you show up, they're like the hobby sport kid, and all of a sudden they're back flipping off the trampoline, and then they're better at you, your sport, you know, that, you know, so how do you create the athleticism?
But also, I think one of the things that we're talking about with the gluten is how do you measure lifestyle?
Can you optimize the healing response from being knocked out?
We have all this amazing supplementary medicine.
A lot of guys go on the gear because they need to go on the gear, should go on the gear in their 40s when they're starting to break down between them and their physician.
Let's say you have a great coach and you're moving right and you're actually eating right and sleeping right and managing these things, then your augmentation choices matter even more.
But we see people covering up bad lifestyle, bad nutrition, and that's the problem.
Some people have very large fists, like George Foreman.
You ever see George Foreman's fists?
They're like hams.
They're like canned hams.
There's also Tommy Hearns had this shoulder width thing.
I think shoulder width has to do with leverage, and it has to do with the amount of extra travel that's going on before your punch lands.
If you have very narrow shoulders, you're not getting as much rotation into your punch, but if you've got some Tommy Hearns type shit going on, by the end of that punch, there's a lot of torque.
They start making decisions and it's serendipitous for some of these guys who kind of find their calling It's interesting because it really always becomes a disproportionate battle because if a guy has perfect genetics and he's intelligent and he's disciplined and he's hardworking,
he's going to beat the guy who's just hardworking.
And has shit slow genes.
We all know dudes.
Especially when it comes to striking.
Striking is when it becomes apparent.
There's something about Jiu Jitsu that allows you to be technical.
And if your positioning knowledge is two or three moves ahead of the other guy, and you roll long enough, it seems like eventually you catch him.
For the most part.
Unless the guy is really defensively minded.
But dudes are helpless when it comes to striking.
When a guy has that fast twitch muscle fiber, and the good conditioning, and the skill set, You're fucked.
I have a friend, Jesse Burdick, who did an elite total at 219 pounds and then six months later went up to 318 and powerlifted there.
And when there's a weight component, when you have this natural weight and all of a sudden you drop a whole bunch of weight, your mechanics and leverage changes.
Your proprioception changes.
The game is different.
I have a friend, Mark Bell, great powerlifter.
His brother Chris Bell did the documentary Bigger, Faster, Stronger.
And if we look at just being dehydrated or just salt, being down, just total salts, you can slow that reaction time coupled with being dehydrated, coupled with challenge to the nervous system, you're not sleeping very well because you're stuck in weight, and then all of your positions change, all your mechanics change.
And I think that it's also there's a reality of the sport itself, the impact that you take over and over and over again just in training where you're going to get the kind of traumatic injuries that almost don't heal naturally.
In MMA specifically, you have so many variables that you have to cover.
So you're constantly pushing to train every single variable all the time.
And it's very difficult, right?
So you're always over-trained.
I think most MMA fighters nowadays are over-trained, and then they look for something like, hey, how can I recover so that I can fit all this fucking wrestling and boxing and Muay Thai and skills into a day session?
Well, I think with fighters, when I say it's impossible to not do it, what I mean is it's impossible to not do it if you're not approaching the whole situation knowledgeably with a heart monitor and someone who knows what the fuck is going on.
And I think that's really what's important about it.
You might be on that one end, like Kelly was just saying, where you can eat it and not feel sweet-fuck-all, but you can be on the other end where you have celiac disease and you eat too much of it.
They'll take a bucket and they whip this bucket through a big cloud of flies and bugs until they get it at the bottom of the bucket and they scrape it into patties and make burgers out of it.
My question, because this is going to end really soon, and thank you very much for doing this.
This has been beautiful.
We've got to do it again for sure.
The issue with gluten, is it just our bodies are not designed for it?
Is it had to do with genetically modifying the actual weed itself, which did happen in the early 1950s or 60s, I believe?
I forget which one, but look it up.
I don't have time to Google.
The people that were making wheat in this country, they sort of engineered it to be a stronger, hardier wheat, and that's when people started having real issues as far as digesting it.
Some people didn't, some people still don't, but for a lot of people, it's a big issue.
So it has a similar effect, maybe not to the same degree, but look, what you have to understand is, are you trying to optimize your life, your function, whatever, whether it be movement, sleep, whatever it is.